Celebrity Sudoku (9 page)

The juice bar was more like a miniature Starbucks, located behind the health club’s reception area.

Michael took an appreciative sniff of brewing coffee mixed with the scent of cinnamon. “Doesn’t quite have the bouquet associated with most of the gyms I’ve encountered.”

“Movie-star sweat isn’t all that different from the kind that drips off regular folks.” Liza carefully settled herself in a chair and sighed. “Although a place this pricey probably has the last word in air recycling, filters, or whatever.”

“Or maybe they just squeeze the celebrity sweat right out of the air and bottle it for the more kinky fans,” Michael suggested. He left her laughing as he went to the counter and got two cups of tea. “Earl Grey okay? They mostly had herbal stuff.”

“I don’t think a little caffeine would hurt.” She let the tea brew for a while and then added sugar and milk.

By the time she was finally ready to take a sip, Chard Switzer appeared in the entrance. He came straight toward their table.

Liza pulled the walker a little farther in beside her chair.
Of course, this would give him a good landmark, even if he hadn’t met me briefly on the set.

“You wanted to see me, Ms. Kelly?” Chard asked.

Michael got to his feet and shook hands. “Michael Langley,” he identified himself.

Liza decided to get right down to business. “We hoped you’d have a little time to talk about Ritz Tarleton.” Either Switzer would open up, or he’d run.

Chard Switzer sat down. “Poor Ritz. She was a piece of work.”

That wasn’t a response Liza had expected. “I thought you were friends.”

“We were,” Chard said. “But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t a piece of work. Ritz gave me my name, you know, even if it was a joke. We were hanging out with the same crowd, both pretty much on the outside, trying to get in.”

He shrugged. “I was doing some modeling at the time—jeans, swimwear, beach stuff.”

The athletic shirt under his warm-up jacket stretched over a six-pack and impressive pecs.

Michael sat a little straighter, sucking in his gut. He had a lanky frame that developed a bit of a potbelly if he didn’t watch himself.

“So, although we both wanted to hang with the cool kids, Ritz and I had different ways. I was eye candy—and arm candy—for the girls. Ritz was always ready to pick up the tab for everybody.”

“You managed to earn your way in, getting into the Business,” Michael said.

Chard shrugged wide shoulders. “I managed to book a couple of bit parts, enough to earn waivers to get into the union. That’s when I discovered there were already actors named Richard Switzer, Rick Switzer, Rich Switzer . . . What was left? These days, Dick has become kind of a joke name.”

“Except for controversial Republican politicians,” Michael offered with a smile.

“Ritz suggested that I just cut the front off my name,” Chard went on, “like Drea de Matteo and Topher Grace.” He ducked his head in embarrassment. “It was only after I did it that I found out about the vegetable thing.”

“Swiss chard?” Michael said in a faint voice.

Chard nodded. “That was Ritz, making a joke.”

“How did you feel about that?” Michael asked.

Chard shrugged again. “Too late to worry about it. And right after I officially joined the union, I got booked for the pilot of
Whack Jobs
. I’ve been working for seven seasons, so I guess you can say it worked out okay.”

Liza frowned. “I’m a little surprised. That doesn’t sound like the Ritz I knew.”

“Pulling a prank on somebody?” Michael gave her a “What are you talking about?” look. “Compared to what Ritz did to Sam Pang, this name thing seems downright benign.”

“It comes across a lot more . . . intellectual than something I’d connect with Ritz Tarleton.”

“I’ve spent years wondering about that.” Chard’s features, just a squidge off classically handsome, contracted into an almost comical look of perplexity. “It might be like what I do when I play my goofball character.”

Liza had seen maybe an episode and a half of
Whack Jobs
, an almost infamously brainless comedy. Chard played Botzu, an immigrant whose most carefully crafted facet was an accent that didn’t hook up with any actual locality. It could be but wasn’t Spanish, Middle European, Hindustani, or Middle Eastern. He was the eternally clueless, nerdy outsider with inappropriate, outsized reactions to normal American life.

Chard must have seen something in her expression, because he launched into an explanation. “Hey, this isn’t a show that works on subtlety. And a lot of jokes about my character—well, if he were female, we’d have the sexism police all over us. It’s all, ‘Why, Botzu, without your glasses, you’re quite attractive—and without your shirt, you’re downright beautiful!’”

“That gender-reversal stuff gets a lot of hooting and hollering from the studio audience,” Michael said.

He caught Liza’s look and said, “I watch this stuff for research.”

Liza turned to Chard. “So you think Ritz spent a lot of time playing dumb?”

“I think there’s a certain amount of camouflage involved, that she had more going on than she let people see.” Chard spread his hands, shaking his head. “I knew her better than most people, but that’s not saying that I really
knew
her.”

“Did you hook up with her?” Michael asked.

Chard almost scowled. “I wasn’t going to get sucked into that. It was hard enough being her friend. And even though she put the moves on me sometimes, I don’t think her heart was really in it. Maybe she knew that screwing would screw the friendship.” He shrugged. “Or maybe it was another one of her jokes.”

Liza decided to put her question plainly. “Do you think she was joking around on the
D-Kodas
set? It seemed as though she went out of her way to make enemies there.”

“And now she’s dead,” Michael added.

“Ritz seemed more hyper than usual,” Chard said. “She used to be a lot more laid-back.”

“I hear she was worried about her career.” Liza shrugged. “Which may have been a problem, because she didn’t actually seem to have a clear-cut career. You sort of said it—Ritz bought her way into becoming famous.”

“And now, well, it reminds me of a book I just read, an autobiography of somebody who grew up as well as worked in the Business,” Michael added. “What did she say? ‘Celebrity is just obscurity waiting in the wings.’ ”

“I can relate to that,” Chard said. “They’re saying this will probably be the last season of
Whack Jobs
—right now, I’m kind of figuring out what to do when I grow up.”

Michael and Liza exchanged glances. “After seven years, you’ve got to be worried about typecasting.”

“Oh, yeah,” Chard told them. “I turned down a lot of movies during the summer break because most of the scripts I got just reinforced the sort of idiot character I was playing on TV.” His face took on a little color. “To tell you the truth, I spent my downtime taking acting classes. I might not end up doing Shakespeare, but I hope I’ll be able to tackle a better role than Botzu the Bozo.”

“So that’s why you wanted to do the
D-Kodas
gig,” Michael said, “to show you had something more between the ears than your character.”

“That, and I hoped to make a connection with Lolly Popovic.” Chard shot Liza another defensive look. “Not like that. I’ve heard her name mentioned in connection with a couple of big deals. She’s going places. And if she were willing to put in a good word for me, even for a small part, I could be heading in the same direction.”

Michael looked at him for a long moment. “Well, that’s pretty ambitious.”

Chard’s big shoulders jerked in another shrug. “I thought it was worth a try. But Ritz said not to do it. She told me she was working on something, and if it turned out right, she’d be in a position to make some things happen for me.”

Liza leaned forward on the table, ignoring a little throb of pain that came from her injured knee. “Did she give any details about what this ‘something’ was?”

Chard leaned forward, too. “She clammed up. I was hoping to catch her alone between tapings and maybe find out what she had in mind. But then the earthquake came. Now I guess we’ll never know.”

“Yeah,” Michael said. “Let’s just hope it wasn’t another of her little jokes.”

That was all Chard Switzer could tell them. Liza and Michael thanked him, then went outside the health club to wait for their car.

“A gym with valet parking,” Michael muttered as they stood outside. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

“What would you know about Kansas?” Liza asked with a laugh. “You grew up only a couple of hundred miles north of here.”

“More like five hundred,” Michael corrected her. “And you grew up about seven hundred and fifty, but I thought it was nicer to avoid saying, ‘We’re not in Maiden’s Bay anymore.’ ”

Liza’s cell phone rang before this could degenerate to the squabble level. Resting one hand on her walker, she dug out her phone and flipped it open. “Buck Foreman,” she reported, bringing it to her ear. “Have you gotten a line on Forty Oz.?”

“Still working on that,” Buck told her. “But I did catch some police gossip. They finished sifting through the collapsed bungalow at the studio. Looks as if Hal Quigley may have guessed right. There’s some evidence that Ritz Tarleton’s death wasn’t quite an accident.”

“You’ve got to keep this under your hat, Liza,” Buck warned. “I only heard it because an old buddy of mine was on the crime-scene team going over the ruins of the Boots Bungalow.”

“Great,” Liza said as Michael jerked them along through stop-and-start traffic. “So you’re saying this is hot locker-room gossip?”

“It’s based on a heads-up on the down-low,” Buck replied in annoyance.

“I don’t even know if that’s anatomically possible,” Liza teased.

Buck’s voice took on his patented tough-cop tone. “Hal Quigley is taking it seriously—and he’s keeping it away from the media.”

“So what exactly is it?” Liza asked.

Buck was definitely not in a kidding mood. “When they found the body, it was missing a shoe.”

“Okay,” Liza said. “Is that necessarily a surprise after an earthquake? I mean, the first shock flung me down.” She shuddered in memory.
And the second nearly cut my leg off.

“The rescue attempt revealed Ritz Tarleton’s body in the middle of the living room. But the crime-scene people turned up the missing shoe in the doorway,” Buck reported. “In fact, part of the shoe was caught on the lower door hinge.”

Liza remembered the silly footwear that Ritz had been showing off. What had she called them? Her sudoku shoes? Yeah, it wouldn’t have been hard for one of those crisscrossing straps to get caught—

She broke off in midthought. Ritz had grown up in Los Angeles, and certainly knew the basic rule about earthquakes and doorways. In fact, the caught shoe demonstrated that she’d
been
in the doorway. So how did she end up halfway back across the room? Could the earthquake really have shifted her that far?

Liza tried to rerun the moment of the temblor through her head. It cast her to the floor and must have loosened the bracing beam that fell on her leg. But could it have really sent Ritz that far from the safety of the doorway? Could she have caught a leather strap on the hinge and still have covered all that distance?

“Judging from your sudden and prolonged silence, you’re figuring that it would have to be a much bigger earthquake than we felt to break that shoe and send Ritz flying that far,” Buck said grimly. “The only way she could have landed where she did was if Ritz had help—if you could call it that.”

Liza sounded just as grim when she spoke. “Ritz made it to the doorway and safety—except someone pushed her back into the house.”

“A really serious push,” Buck agreed. “Serious enough to break her shoe and send her across the room before the second shock brought the house down on her.”

The silence after that exchange stretched long enough to make Michael turn from behind the wheel of the car. “What’s he telling you? Something interesting?”

At the same time, Buck asked, “So does that mean we’re giving up on this? Leaving it to Quigley?”

“No—Yes.” Liza looked over at Michael. “The ‘yes’ was for you. From what Buck is saying, it looks as if the cops have solid proof that Ritz didn’t die by accident.”

“I figured the ‘yes’ was for me,” Buck said. “I know you didn’t like the Tarleton kid—hell, she wasn’t a kid anymore, was she?”

“No, she wasn’t,” Liza said into the phone. “Although a lot of people thought she was acting like one. But now I don’t think so. She was up to something, and I’d like to find out what.”

“You think it may have gotten her killed?” Buck asked.

“We don’t know enough even to start guessing,” Liza replied. “We’ll have to ask some questions, and the first person to talk to seems to be Forty Oz. Are you getting any closer to tracking him down to someplace where we can get at him?”

“He likes to make a splash,” Buck said. “I’ve got some of Michelle’s connections working to get a line on him. Catching face time with the guy—that could be a problem, though. The kinds of clubs where he hangs out leave a lot of people stuck outside the velvet ropes.”

“I’ll talk to Michelle about using some of her connections to take care of that, too,” Liza told him.

They ended the phone call. Liza sat in silence as Michael got onto the freeway.

He shot her a questioning glance. “So we’re going to penetrate the secret underworld of hip-hop?”

Liza laughed. “You make it sound like the lair of Fu Manchu.”

“I’m not expecting any sinister secret-society types with those wavy daggers,” Michael said. “Although we may find some guy from South Central with a beef and a handgun.”

“Sounds as if you’ve been writing too much hard-boiled dialogue,” Liza warned him with a laugh. “Keep making cracks like that, and the powers that be will yank your poetic license.”