Hot house, p.2
Hot House, page 2
“Though you seem like a dog guy, you have two cats, one inside, one outside. I’m rather proud of that little bit of detection I admit.”
“Ever hear of invasion of privacy?”
“There was no intrusion upon your expectation of being alone,” I said, knowing that my smug retort might make him admit to having attended two years of law school and then dropping out. “Besides, you weren’t home at the time,” I added.
“Names?” he shot back, not taking the bait.
“I’m too busy working to focus on trivialities.”
“Ha! Your legal surveillance of an unknown suspect failed.”
A server set down two plates, and for Trevor a smaller, kid-sized plate, into which I deposited a handful of his biscuits. He licked his chops as I set it on the ground under the table near my purse.
“Thank you,” I said to the server, who asked if we wanted anything else. “I’m good, you?” I asked my companion, whose face was wondering what he was doing here. I opened a file folder and slid a 5 x 7 photograph across the table.
He nodded. “The judge,” he said in a lowered tone.
“Conrad McClaren, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
“Appellate judge, that’s an interesting detail,” Derek said with his mouth full. “Sort of brings a whole new twist. And Ninth Circuit, no less.”
“Exactly, and high profile. He’s been receiving regular demands for money via text message for the past three weeks, each time for a hundred thousand dollars, and always from a different mobile number.”
“Threatening what?” he asked.
“We’ll get to that in a minute.”
“Have you traced them?”
I shook my head. “They were throw-away phones, untraceable. You’re asking the wrong question.”
“Did he pay?”
“No way,” I shot back.
Derek tipped his head to the side and wiped a smear of ketchup off his mouth. “Let’s see,” he started, and I knew where he’d take this. “Your man McClaren’s mid-sixties, right? From what I know of men who came of age in the Mad Men generation, their conception of women wasn’t exactly based on equality.” He raised his brows. “Getting warm?”
I blinked back, waiting.
“If my hunch is correct, McClaren, probably fifteen or twenty years ago, had some indiscrete encounter with a female that probably ended badly, is coming back to haunt him, and is something he wants to keep quiet considering his publicly-facing career.”
I took a huge bite of avocado and reminded myself I was eating in public. His evolving theory was holding my attention.
“Now,” he continued, “let’s say the crime was plain old adultery. Then, in that case we probably wouldn’t be sitting here. Let’s assume he had a one-night stand, or a full-on affair, he tried to break it off, and the woman refused to just step away, given the economic potential of his exposure.”
“Is that what you think happened?” I asked, determined to be coy.
Derek shook his head slowly, then leaned forward. “I think he killed her, and his blackmailer saw what he did.”
“You may be right, Detective.” I smiled at the one detail Derek most wanted to hide.
He hung his head. “Okay, okay. I see you’ve done your due diligence…”
“Don’t get excited.” I put up my palms. “I just need to know who I’m getting into bed with, so to speak.”
“It’s a long story.” He stood and tossed down his cloth napkin.
“It always is.” I watched him walk around the corner.
Though it didn’t matter much to me how or why Derek Abernathy left the LAPD so soon after becoming a detective, I liked how he cared what I thought. And it’s not that all I think about is leverage, necessarily. Just that having the upper hand in an invisible negotiation can’t hurt, and I’d obviously struck a nerve.
I walked Trevor around the mall parking lot before driving him home because he needed some light exercise after every meal and because I needed time to think. Derek would be useful. He wasn’t just smart. He was wily, and resourceful, and experienced. Triple punch. But we weren’t at that stage yet. I knew of someone else I needed more right now.
CHAPTER
FOUR
I knew if I entered the gallery through the back door, I’d be more likely to smell nail polish than through the front, which had better ventilation. Sure enough, fresh organic coffee and acetone.
“Morning, Carrie,” I bellowed up the hallway to my gallery assistant and settled into my office knowing she’d been listening to music and painting her nails for the past hour instead of going through the gallery’s emails, responding to customer inquiries, and sorting through the artwork list for the following month.
“Morning.” Carrie poked her head around the corner. “I was just finishing the inventory…a day early,” she said with a wink.
“Great, it was due yesterday.” Such a bullshitter. Always the back-door braggart, finding ways to self-aggrandize her nonexistent accomplishments.
I settled in and booted up my laptop, sliding my feet out of the new pair of kitten heels, quickly burrowing them into the Mukluks I kept under my desk. Ah, much better. How I hated dressing like a grownup.
“Some guy came in showing pronounced interest in the David Korty.”
“Pronounced interest. Was he drooling or something?”
“He spent twenty minutes looking at it. And no, I didn’t get his contact information, but he said his name is Abe.”
I loved David Korty’s work and had sort of earmarked that piece for myself. “Great. Thank you, Carrie. Can you find Duga for me? I need him today.”
Carrie had been with me two months and I knew she’d be frantically scanning my gallery contacts right now. I waited another five seconds, then, “Oooh, the Tibetan fellow who takes care of Trevor?”
I loved how Duga’s voicemail message said simply, “Do it,” which I’d always thought aptly summarized his personal style and view of the world. In his tradition of brevity, I’d get a text in the next few minutes with his present location and a question about which of his many services I needed this week. My phone buzzed. Duga.
In Simi Valley till Sunday but can come down if you need me. Trevor okay?
I need you tomorrow if possible…and not for Trevor.
Can be there by 3. Do you need your windows cleaned?
‘Windows cleaned’ was our code for surveillance. I started typing back a response, secretly pleased with our secret language, when I heard the metal scrape of the front door and a man’s voice. Carrie would no doubt be touching up her lipstick and hiking down her too-short skirt, all the while forgetting that her job was to talk about the actual paintings hanging on the walls.
I heard her talking. “I’m sorry she’s not. Did you have an appointment?”
At least she got that part right. I heard the clomp of her heavy shoes on the wood floors. Was it possible I hadn’t alienated my seven a.m. buyer after all, and they came by the gallery to buy the Lisa Pressman painting that still reminded me of a Diebenkorn? I pictured my new silk blouse in a heap on my bathroom floor. Ruined.
Carrie’s voice echoed down the hallway. “Miss Ellwyn, there’s someone asking for you.”
“Who is it?”
“He said—”
“It’s all right I’m coming.” I shoved my feet into my big girl shoes, then froze halfway down the hall at an unlikely face.
“Marissa Ellwyn Gallery. You’re Marissa Ellwyn?” Derek said with a raised brow and parted lips, the space between his teeth showing. Already, I knew that look. Shit.
“Mr. Abernathy, what a surprise. I didn’t know you liked fine art,” I said, emphasis on the fine.
Carrie watched us awkwardly, then retreated to the reception area.
“What are you doing here?” I smiled and grabbed his outstretched hand, digging my nails into his flesh.
“I’m an investigator, Ms. Ellwyn,” he mocked. “It’s my job to know things about the people I work with.”
Lord, just kill me. I folded my arms and leaned on one hip, thinking how my dress matched the Mark Rothko lithograph behind me and would have made a good promo shot. Another day maybe.
“So I have two jobs, what’s the big deal? A girl’s gotta make a living, right?”
“Jobs? More like lives,” he hissed back, pointing outside toward the parking lot. “Mari E, as you call yourself, drives a 15-year-old dented Honda and wears a weathered hoodie artificially inseminated with the smell of cigarette smoke and vanilla cologne. Mar-ISSA, on the other hand, drives a freaking Porsche and buys her eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamo shoes in Beverly Hills, which she wears to her Culver City art gallery!” Still whispering, barely. “Now, you’re gonna tell me what’s really going on here or I’m out right now. I have no time for games like this.”
“Oh get off your high horse,” I shot back. “I didn’t tell you anything untrue the other night. Okay, I didn’t tell you the whole story, and we’d just met for God’s sake. Calm down, Detective.”
In came Carrie’s shoes again during the standoff. She was carrying a tray of two demitasse cups. “Espresso?” she asked with a perfect hostess smile.
Never ask the universe questions like, “How much weirder can this day get?” As I grabbed my Louis Vuitton off the side chair in my office, I heard Carrie-the-manicurist talking up a Janet Lippincott and sounding surprisingly intelligent. Derek, true to form, was swigging espresso like it was a shot of Jim Beam. Give me strength.
CHAPTER
FIVE
We agreed to meet after work, where I would apparently be giving him a more thorough explanation than earlier in the gallery. He met me in the gallery parking lot. I said I’d drive to a spot where we could talk. Now, towering over me, he glared down into my car.
“Afraid you won’t fit?”
“Um…your steering wheel’s on the wrong side of your dash.” He struggled to maneuver his body into the cramped bucket seat. The door was pushed open all the way and the seat as far back as it would allow. He managed it with his knees crammed against the glove box.
“You need some help?” I snickered.
“I’m taller than you,” he whined.
“I bought this car when I was visiting London a few years ago. I fell in love with it.”
We drove in silence on the twenty-minute ride to Venice Beach, which I knew would be crowded enough for us to be virtually invisible. Completely by accident, I’d managed to time it so we’d be facing the horizon when I pulled up and miraculously found an empty spot facing the beach. The sky was blood orange and darkening quickly. Ah, LA sunsets, killing me again.
After a momentary silent vigil, uninterrupted by a caravan of skateboarders, my companion unclasped his seat belt and turned slightly left.
“You’ve got a lot to hide, Miss E.”
“Mari.”
“Is that what you’re called in your other life, too?”
“Okay.” I removed my sunglasses and sighed. “Okay. Yes, my legal name is Marissa Ellwyn. So what?”
“The same Ellwyn family who settled in southern California in the 1930s, and your father’s uncle was freaking William Randolph Hearst?”
So this meant he’d not only researched me but he had other means at his disposal.
“That’s my family, yes. I’m on the fringes of family acceptance…”
“…and all the money. Okay, I’m starting to get it now. Your family doesn’t know you’re a private investigator and they think you’re a successful gallery owner. Why would they care? Criminal justice doesn’t quite have the cache of fine art I suppose.”
I nodded. “That’s part of it. PI work is a reminder to them. I used to work in…” I paused and checked his face to see if he was going to finish my sentence. He didn’t know. “Intelligence.”
“As in CIA?” His mouth puckered.
“I investigated a case that got me shot and almost killed. Some small-time marijuana grower was also a courier for a much bigger operation running roofies and ketamine from Texas to an offshore oil rig and back. You can imagine the complexity of the operation and investigation. Big Oil, Navy, Coastguard,” I explained. It was partly true anyway.
“…and the Coast Guard’s under Homeland Security. Right?”
“Right,” I confirmed, “bringing another entity into the picture, which meant more red tape and barriers to potentially tear it all down.”
“You got to the top of the food chain, so to speak?”
“Yep, and now I’ve got a bullet embedded halfway into a bone in my shoulder. They’d have to break two bones to get it out, followed by a bone graft, steroid injections, and a five-month recovery. No thanks.”
He kept his eyes pinned to my right shoulder. “I bet that still hurts.”
“You sort of get used to it.”
When Derek’s head wasn’t turned by the topless roller-skater gliding past us, I knew he was even more of a broken stereotype than I’d thought.
“My father went after the guy who shot me: a European organized crime boss, Jacques Martel. He and my father haven’t been seen since.” I turned and caught the last orange glimmer in the gray sky. It hurt just saying it out loud. “Hence, my off-hours job in a bad neighborhood. It gives me time and privacy to dig up everything I can find on where he might be without being interrupted.”
“When did this happen?” he asked.
It was a fair and straightforward question. I felt my face change, my shoulders roll forward, and my body tighten all over. I guess I just didn’t want to talk about how long the hole in my heart had been there, and how it started. “A year next Monday.”
He turned all the way to face me. “You’ve got a past. So do I. It’s okay. How do I fit into this tangled web?”
I sighed and unclasped my seat belt. “Judge McClaren’s blackmailer, if we find him, could be used as a bargaining chip.”
Derek slid his sunglasses to the top of his head and widened his eyes against the striped vista. “You think McClaren knows where your father is? Why?”
“He might have been the last person to see him before he disappeared.”
“Is that a theory or do you have good intel?”
I shrugged. “Theory, so far. But I’m hoping.”
“How do you know,” he paused, “sorry to ask this. But how do you know he’s…not dead?”
“I don’t,” I said, in what I knew would be one of many lies I told my future partner. It was a lie because I did know he was still alive. I felt it, in my heart, in my body.
“I’d like to see the whole case file.”
“There’s a file box on the back desk in my office. There’s not a lot in there yet but I left it out for you. Bobby Bishop in the office next door will let you in, he works in the mornings.”
“You’ve got it all figured out then,” he mumbled as I took the onramp to Highway 10 back toward Culver City, an orange smudge over the water behind us. “I still don’t know what you need me for though.”
“I told you…”
“I remember what you told me. You said you needed backup.”
“I do. I mean, I will. Soon.”
CHAPTER
SIX
What I hadn’t told my new partner is that the file box with the judge’s case file was a decoy, made up of 1990’s era customer files from my friend Bobby Bishop, the crooked travel agent next door to my office.
I also knew I would be followed, so I’d smartened up in the past two days and would be, if all went as planned, following my pursuer—the infamous gray van. Change the balance of power and you can change everything.
For the second time, I was watching Derek Abernathy through binoculars, this time crammed inside Bobby Bishop’s vintage Ford Bronco in the lot outside our dingy office trailers. The man moved carefully up the walkway, like he expected to get jumped on the way in. Bobby, who unlocked the office for him, turned on the overhead, and left Derek to himself. Staring at the coffee maker, crossing his arms, moving towards my desk—go ahead there’s nothing in it, I thought, half amused at his curiosity about me. Finally, he walked to the back desk, leaned over it to finger the files and then hoisted up the whole box and headed for the door. He turned back, exchanging some words with Bobby while I crouched completely under the seat knowing he probably suspected I’d be here somewhere nearby. Bobby texted me as soon as he left.
He’s done. Should I lock up?
Sure, I typed back.
Seems like a nice guy.
Don’t start, it’s early
LOL…he asked about your relationship status
You told him I’m celibate?
Nymphomaniac
Very sweet of you, okay if I stay here another few minutes?
Im not leaving for an hour, take your time, call if you need backup
Still trying to take care of me?
Always xo
I watched Derek put the file box in his trunk, eyes peeled left and right as he snaked his smart-looking Land Rover down the dirt road. I stayed, crouching my six feet of flesh and bone uncomfortably on the floor beneath Bobby Bishop’s glove box…listening. From this vantage point I couldn’t risk sitting up to look through the windows, but I knew whoever had been sending me index card “STOP” messages was no doubt watching me and my new partner, not to mention the gallery. I waited twenty minutes and still there was no sign of the gray van. Time to call in an expert.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Friday morning, six a.m. and I was wide-eyed staring out the sliding glass doors to the balcony I helped build with Duga last summer. I hadn’t yet made coffee, my coveted ritual, and didn’t really need it today. Something else had shaken my mind and heart; maybe the retelling of the Martel saga, or the compassionate expression on Derek’s weathered face. Or maybe the idea of feeling targeted. The floor quaked and Trevor jumped to attention on the kitchen floor. I knew what earthquakes felt like, but this would be Duga, who always arrived before the sun came up. I swear Trevor could smell Duga’s special doggie cookies three blocks away.
