Dead File (6 page)
Hmmm. Was she turning into a prude? She’d have to look at that later, she thought as she pulled up in front of the pair of massive wrought-iron gates, each decorated with a giant gilt metal rose leaning toward the center.
The gates parted before she could ring the bell. A security camera, she saw, was mounted above and aimed directly at her, its red light aglow. She gave it a broad, exaggerated smile. She was used to cameras.
Rose himself came to the door. “I have a visitor,” he informed her in low tones.
“Oh?” Maxi said. “No problem. We can catch up later.”
She turned to leave and he took her elbow. “No, come in,” he said. “You should meet this guy.”
Curious, Maxi stepped inside the high-ceilinged foyer and followed Carter Rose under an archway and across the huge living room, its focus a towering, brightly lit Christmas tree decorated in silver and gold. They walked through a second pair of carved cherrywood doors into a well-appointed library. A slight man in a dark suit was seated at the far end of the room, by the warmth of a low-burning fireplace.
“This is Maxi Poole,” Rose said to him, ignoring protocol dictating that one should introduce a man to a woman first, then the woman to the man. This subtle deference to his visitor signaled to Maxi that the powerful Carter Rose might be somewhat intimidated by this man, whoever he was.
For his part, the guest stood and extended a hand to her. “Goodman Penthe,” he said.
Maxi recognized the name at once: founder and principal shareholder of the Penthe Group, an East Coast–based conglomerate made up of pharmaceutical companies, food makers, even a tire manufacturer, Maxi remembered. She nodded, and approached to shake his hand.
A woman materialized beside her and asked if she’d like a drink. Maxi asked for a cup of tea, then seated herself on one of the oversized leather club chairs in the book-lined library. Penthe resumed his seat on a matching chair, and Rose settled himself on a couch opposite the two.
“Goodman wants to buy my company,” Rose directed at Maxi. “Whether I want to sell it or not,” he added, letting out an awkward little giggle.
Maxi studied him for a moment. Could he be tipsy? Good-man Penthe, she noted, was cold sober.
G
uess who I just had a drink with,” Maxi tossed at Wendy, who’d been tapped to produce the Eleven tonight.
“Umm … Hugh Grant and Divine Brown,” Wendy dead-panned, not missing a click on her computer.
“Nope. I don’t think they’re a couple anymore.”
It was quarter to midnight, the Eleven O’clock News was off the air, and the lights had gone out on the newsroom Christmas tree. At exactly 11:35 P.M., when the broadcast news day was over and viewers would no longer be seeing the Christmas tree on live shots from the newsroom, a timer shut off the holiday lights, one of the sillier management cost-cutting measures that the staff derided. Ebenezer must have hired on in Accounting. Sorry, no Christmas for the overnight shift.
The newsroom was quiet now, reduced to a skeleton crew, and Wendy was archiving the Eleven O’clock News show. Maxi was sitting at the computer next to her, sipping a Diet Coke and idly perusing the wires.
“So who’d you have a drink with?” Wendy asked.
“Goodman Penthe.”
Without looking away from her computer terminal, Wendy’s eyebrows shot up. “Of the Penthe Group?”
“The same.”
“Wow! Because … ?”
“Because he was at Carter Rose’s house.”
“What the hell were you doing at Carter Rose’s house?”
“Like I said, I was having a drink. Tea, actually.”
“Maxi,” Wendy said, looking over at her now, “you’re off the Gillian Rose story. The truth: Why were you at Carter Rose’s house?”
“Because I have a crush on him.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Well, if I did have a crush on him, I’d have been there on my own time, not company time, right?”
“First of all, you’re too professional to get involved with the controversial subject of a news story. And second, as you well know, Capra would freak if he found out you went to Carter Rose’s house.”
“That’s why we’re not telling him,” Maxi said with a twinkle.
“So what’s up with Mr. Mysterious at Rose International?”
“I don’t know. But something. Something weird’s going on there, and I’d love to know what. I still think there’s a helluva story buried deep beneath the tumbled marble facade of the Rose building.”
“And where does Goodman Penthe fit in?”
“I have no idea, but I can tell you the man is strange. He looks like he died last month and nobody told him. Dyed black hair and not much of it, chalk-white face, grim black suit, emaciated, dour expression, and little wire-rimmed spectacles that pinch his nose so it looks like they hurt. He was drinking a glass of something sort of musty yellow, and he said no more than two words at a time.” Maxi paused for a moment, then added, “And Carter Rose was acting like he was scared of him.”
“I’d be scared of him too. He sounds like one of the grave dancers in Michael Jackson’s
Thriller.
”
“Well, something’s going on with him and Rose International—Carter Rose made a joke that Penthe wants to buy his company.”
Wendy picked up one of the containers of dietary supplements lined up on her desk and twisted off the cap. “Speaking of Rose,” she said, “want some chewable vitamin C? A little immune-system boost?” She poured out a couple of big orange tablets and popped them in her mouth, then offered some to Maxi.
“No, thanks. But wait a minute—let me see that,” Maxi said, taking the white plastic container bearing the familiar red rose out of Wendy’s hand.
Maxi put on her glasses and studied the label. In fine print at the bottom were the words:
ROSE INTERNATIONAL LABORATORIES, LOS ANGELES, CA.
Then a zip code, a date, and a U.S. patent number.
“What?” Wendy demanded, still putting the Eleven O’clock show to bed on computer.
“They patent this stuff. Did you know that? Come to think of it, there must be hundreds of companies putting out different variations of vitamin C.”
“Must be something patentable in Rose’s vitamin C,” Wendy offered.
“Yeah, like something in the citrus flavor, or the coloring, or the chewable component—I guess it could be anything that makes
this
vitamin C uniquely
Rose’s
vitamin C.”
“It’s not that hard to get a patent,” Wendy said.
“No, but it has to be expensive developing products for patents.”
“Okay, so getting a patent isn’t hard, but it’s expensive. Where are you going with this?”
“Nowhere yet—but as we know in this business, usually the best way to find out something is to keep your eyes on the money trail.”
“Hey, on the subject of money, I could actually be making some,” Wendy said with a big smile. “I finished
Don’t Be Dumpy.
”
“Whoa! That’s great!” Maxi trumpeted, leaning out of her chair to grab Wendy in an enthusiastic hug.
Diminutive Wendy Harris, who was obsessed with diet and exercise in order to stay that way, had been working for the past year on a how-to book targeted at short women like herself. The average height of the American woman is five-foot-four, which means half the women in this country are five-four or under, and those, Wendy reasoned, were her potential readers.
Maxi had helped with the book, offering suggestions and cheering her on from the day Wendy got the idea. Its message was that, although women see “tall” on the runways, although they see “tall” in magazines and television commercials, they don’t have to
be
tall to look fabulous. Proportion is the key. Superstar Madonna, five-foot-four, plays tall. Actress Sarah Jessica Parker, five-three, plays tall. Paula Abdul is five-foot-two, Jada Pinkett Smith is an even five feet, and “this year’s blonde,” sexy Reese Witherspoon, looks tall on the big screen but is just five-foot-two. It’s all about proportion.
“So now,” Wendy said, putting the final keystrokes on her archiving and saving out, “I have to get myself a literary agent.”
“What about the agent Sylvie put you on to?” Sylvie Tran was a Channel Six weekend anchor who wrote children’s books.
“I’m all over it. It’s a woman who specializes in self-help books, and I got the manuscript off to her today.”
“You go, girl!” Maxi said, and she gave Wendy five.
Wendy responded with a whoop. “So now we just wait and see what happens,” she said.
“Oh, it’s going to happen,” Maxi reassured her. “Your book is too good not to happen. When you get an agent, it’ll be on the glide path. And we’ll have a party.”
Impromptu celebratory parties in the newsroom usually consisted of a couple of bottles of cheap red and a bag of pretzels.
“Can’t wait! And let’s put in a requisition to keep the Christmas lights on after the Eleven,” Wendy quipped.
I
t was almost midnight. Sandie Schaeffer noiselessly approached her office on the penthouse floor of the Rose International building. Using her key, she quickly slipped inside the suite, then closed and locked the door behind her. As always, she’d left the reading lamp on her desk lit when she left work earlier this evening, and everything looked to be as she’d left it.
A pair of LAPD detectives had come by that afternoon, had taken a cursory look around, and had removed the yellow crime-scene tape from Gillian’s office door. With the coroner’s report that his office had found no evidence of foul play, the suite was no longer being treated as a crime scene, one of them said. The cause of death would be specified in the pending autopsy report, and initial indications pointed to natural causes.
Sandie walked quietly past her own desk to Gillian’s inner office and unlocked the second door. Inside, she flipped on a bank of lights, then quickly depressed the dimmer switch to take the brightness down.
Sandie hadn’t been in this room since the afternoon she’d found Gillian’s body on the floor. Taking a slow look around, she kept her eyes averted from that particular area on the carpet.
The formula was probably somewhere here in Gillian’s office, she figured. Her father’s formula.
Dropping her purse on Gillian’s desk, she decided to begin her search with the bank of file cabinets set beneath the broad, black slate countertop that lined the back wall of the office. These were Gillian’s personal files. Business files were kept elsewhere throughout the company’s nine floors in the Rose building.
On the expanse of countertop were pictures framed in silver: Gillian and Carter Rose on horseback; Gillian and Carter cutting the ribbon when the Rose International building opened; Gillian and Carter with Governor Davis; Gillian and Carter on the beach in the Caribbean, and dozens more. The Roses had no children.
Sandie was very familiar with Gillian’s file system; she had set it up. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t find the formula filed away in a marked folder. But she was also certain that her boss would not have kept it at the Roses’ home, a fully staffed villa on the prestigious Westside. Where, then? A safety-deposit box? Then there had to be a key somewhere. If the key was here, she’d find it. Getting down on her knees, Sandie started with “A.”
Over the next two hours, she came upon personal items that painted a picture of the business, social, and even secret life of the prominent and stunningly attractive Mrs. Carter Rose. A faded red rose pressed inside a file folder labeled
BROSNAN
, with a card attached that read …
a rose is a rose, but none so beautiful as you.
A Music Center playbill from
Phantom of the Opera
signed by Michael Crawford, and a phone number scribbled under the actor’s name. A photograph taken in the foyer of the downtown Museum of Contemporary Art of the mayor of Los Angeles and a smiling Gillian Rose in a slim, black-sequined evening gown. A letter from the director of People Assisting the Homeless thanking Gillian Rose for dedicating the health center at their facility. A man’s white silk handkerchief with the monogram DJB, tucked down between the “B” and the “C” files.
A noise sounded in the stillness, the creak of a door, or the floor, perhaps. Who would be on the penthouse level after two in the morning? Not cleaning people; after 9/11, Rose International had changed its cleaning policy for security reasons. As in most of L.A.’s high-rise buildings, cleaning crews were now allowed on the premises only during regular business hours, and company personnel had to put up with the drone of a vacuum cleaner drowning out telephone conversations at times. Other than credentialed employees, the only people allowed in the building outside of business hours were the guard on the lobby floor and the team of four night watchmen making rounds.
Did she hear it again? Could be her imagination, Sandie thought. After-midnight jitters.
Having finished searching the files, she tried Gillian’s desk drawers, still making a conscious effort to keep her eyes away from the spot where she’d found Gillian’s body.
Inadvertently, her mind flashed back to that day, Gillian limp and crumpled on the floor, but still it had seemed impossible to Sandie that Gillian Rose was really dead. Even after the paramedics had arrived and pronounced her so, she’d found it hard to grasp. Not Gillian. Gillian Rose never lost control. Of anything. Certainly not her life. Looking long at the woman’s lifeless body on the carpet that day, Sandie fully expected her boss to open her eyes, pull herself to her feet, and chastise her for wasting time standing and staring.
No sign of the formula inside any of the desk drawers; from the disarray she could see that the police had searched through them before her. Sandie had seen the formula—at least the outsized envelope it had come in, marked PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL—when it was hand-delivered to Gillian by messenger from an outside lab. At the time Sandie had known exactly what it was, but she’d said nothing—just went inside and handed it to Gillian. Now she felt certain that it was still somewhere in this office.
She examined each desk drawer again, this time gingerly feeling underneath and around the back of each one. Her hand came upon something taped to the outside back panel of the lower left-side drawer. It felt like a large envelope.
