Desert Lost (9781615952229) (16 page)

After I'd hung up, Angel said, “Otto would never pull something like that.”

“Don't you want to be sure?”

“He'd give his life for me.”

True. He loved Angel, which was precisely the problem. “I notice that you're not going out of your way to defend any of the others.”

She stared at me for a moment, as if trying to figure out what to feel, then said, “Have some chamomile tea, Lena. Your hands are shaking.”

“Otto's a scary guy.”

“That's why I need him around.”

I took the cup of tea that she handed me and sipped it. “Nice.”

“And good for your nerves.”

A couple of hours later, the Black Monk had recovered from his funk, and hadn't yet killed me. Jimmy hadn't called me back, and I'd decided that another day—at least—in Los Angeles was in order. Otto, Angel and I sat on the balcony watching a pink sunset streak across rain-freshened sky while she called the front desk and arranged for a suite one floor below.

“I don't need an entire suite, for God's sake,” I said, aghast. Oh, the money. Oh, the horror.

“This is the Beverly Wilshire, not Motel 6.”

Within minutes, a bellman arrived and escorted me to my suite. It wasn't quite as luxurious as Angel's, but the silk walls, mahogany woodwork and wheat-colored sofas still made me twitchy. This wasn't how P.I.'s were supposed to live.

After I'd tipped the bellman enough money to shop at Frugal Foods for a week, he exited. And I finally did what I'd been putting off.

I called Warren.

The conversation began pleasantly enough, considering the circumstances. “It's always nice to hear your voice, Lena, but don't you think we should have our ‘relationship' conversation face to face?”

“This call isn't about us. It's about Angel. And the twins.”

“Oh?”

Not mincing words, I told him. “So my question is, Warren, do you want custody of the twins badly enough to make Angel miserable like that?”

Silence.

Somehow I stopped myself from pleading,
Please don't hate me, I'm just doing my job.

When he finally answered, his tone was flat. “The answer is no. And I'm deeply hurt, not to mention offended, that you needed to ask. So it looks like we don't need to have that ‘relationship' conversation after all, do we? Time for both of us to move on. I'll always wish you well, Lena, and I want you to have a good life, but at this point I'm throwing in the towel. I'm just too emotionally exhausted to continue what's obviously a losing battle.”

With that, he hung up.

An hour later I was grief-eating my way through the hotel's complementary fruit bowl, when my cell phone rang.

“Got the info you wanted.” Jimmy.

“That was fast.”

“What's wrong with your voice? You sound hoarse.”

“Just a cold.”

“You didn't have a cold when you left here this morning.”

“It's raining and I got my feet wet. Can we hurry this up?”

“You sure you're all right? I mean…”

“Jesus, Jimmy, get on with it!”

“Since you put it that way, there's a
Twilight Zone
marathon on the tube and they're airing episodes I've never seen, so yeah, I'll get on with it. Stuart Jenks, Angel's new producer? He's in the deep brown stuff with one of the Vegas casinos, owes close to a half-million. Plus, one of the network execs has a brand new wife, an actress, of course, and she's been leaning on hubby to make her Angel's replacement. Word is he's been putting pressure on Jenks.”

Not good. Not good at all. If Jenks was financially wobbly, he might cave to network demands. “What else?”

“Bradley Speerstra, the guy Jenks replaced? Angel's right. He's been in an Idaho rehab facility for the past sixty-five days, same one as Carl Overstreet, Angel's ex, so you can forget about the both of them.”

I tsk-tsked. “At least they're getting help.”

“Her other ex, Rudy Monroe, he's been out of the country for six weeks, which makes him a non-contender, too. As for Otto Beasley, the guy calls himself The Black Monk, I struck pay dirt there. Otto's had several assault charges lodged against him.”

“Convictions?”

“All charges dropped.”

“How long ago? Couple of years?”

“Try last month. Some guy got snotty with him at a bar. Otto walked him out to the curb and broke his jaw.”

“And the charges were dropped? That's at least one count of aggravated assault, Jimmy. A felony!”

“Under ordinary circumstances, yes. But the witnesses who appeared at his preliminary hearing swore that Mr. Broke Jaw brandished a knife, making it a clear case of self-defense. Technically, Beasley's record is squeaky clean.” When he paused, I heard a soft chuckle. “But that's not true of our lovely Nadine Nedon.”

“Let me have it.” Hollywood was beginning to look rougher than a prison yard.

His chuckle made me feel better. Not a lot, but some. “Over the years, Nadine Nedon, real name Josephine Gowland, born in Red Horse, Oklahoma, five years earlier than she admits, has been charged four times with shoplifting; twice for assault; once for forgery; and once for grand theft auto when she got drunk at a party, hot-wired somebody's Corvette, and wrecked it on Mulholland Drive. She was also charged with bigamy when she married her fifth husband without bothering to divorce her fourth.”

“Seriously?” I couldn't believe that I was able to continue this conversation despite the huge lump in my throat.

“Seriously. The only reason she never served time is because the studio made everything go away. Of course, that was back in the good old days, when a star's naughty behavior was routinely hushed up. Today, she'd be left to dangle slowly in the wind.”

By my estimation, Nadine Nedon was now at least eighty, too old to get in trouble. When I voiced that thought to Jimmy, he laughed outright.

“Oh, please. Currently, Nedon's being sued by her maid for hitting her so hard with a telephone that the maid lost a tooth. This supposedly happened last December, when the Christmas goose wasn't cooked to Madam's exacting specifications. Similar incidents happened with her last two pool boys, but neither of them brought charges against her. They just accepted payoffs and moved on to other pools.”

I'd been so awed by Nedon's impressive list of misdemeanors and felonies that I'd almost let one go, the one that might matter most. “Give me the details on the forgery case.”

“Back in the Dark Ages, when Ms. Nedon was seventeen…”

“Wait a minute. Juvenile records are sealed.”

“You are such an innocent. No record is truly sealed when you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who lived in the same small town. As I was saying, Ms. Nedon was seventeen and still living at home with mama when she forged her father's will, making herself the beneficiary instead of Mommy Dearest, the rightful heir. Not that there was all that much to get excited over, just a small farm, a ramshackle house, and a beat-up tractor. Mommy Dearest was less forgiving than your enlightened Hollywood brethren, so little Nadine was shipped off to Juvie until she turned eighteen, when she split for Hollywood.”

And now this elderly spawn of Satan was pissed at Angel.

***

After the day I'd endured, I needed a lift, so before I slid in between the high thread count sheets, I called Madeline on my cell.

“Sweetie, you sound so down.”

“I'm fine.”

“We're back to that again, are we? Is it your job? Your boyfriend?”

“Both,” I admitted. “But mainly Warren.”

“I thought so. Those packing cartons in your living room are as empty as they were the day I got here.”

“The boxes are the least of my problems now. I think…I think…” I couldn't finish. The lump in my throat had grown too big. Just because you know endings are inevitable doesn't mean they don't hurt when they finally happen.

“Lena, you weren't ready. Some day you will be.”

Thinking about the future depressed me even further, so I said, “Can we change the subject?”

“To what?”

“Anything. Just as long as the subject isn't my love life. Or lack thereof.”

“Will do. Stop me when you get bored.” With that, she described her day, beginning with her first gallery appointment, ending with the last. “I'm back in the game,” she said, a well-earned note of pride in her voice. “Odd, isn't it, that Arizona galleries like my gloomy stuff.”

I thought about the gaudy landscapes found in so many Scottsdale art galleries, the romanticized portraits of Caucasian-appearing Indians. Every now and then, though, the galleries were willing to showcase true talent. “They're not blind. But other than collecting oohs and aahs, did any of them offer you a show?”

“Tomorrow's appointment will be the second with Shadow Mountain Gallery. They're ready to talk dates.”

Before I could gush my congratulations, she added, “Ah, something else is new on the horizon, too. Seems Jimmy has a cousin who owns ranch land just below Florence Junction. A couple of winters ago, a new arroyo formed on the southwest corner of his property, cutting off a triangular piece of land that measures out to about three acres. He can't do anything with it, and Jimmy says he might be willing to sell to the right party. We're driving down there tomorrow afternoon to take a look. Think you'll be back by then?”

Suddenly I felt a whole lot better. The thought that Madeline was serious about re-establishing her Arizona roots almost had me babbling. “Oh, I wish I could, but things are happening so fast over here it's doubtful I'll get back in time. You two go check it out, then call and let me know what's happening. If I don't pick up, leave a message.”

Despite the roaming rates, we talked for almost an hour, and by the time we rang off, I'd regained my equilibrium. Madeline! A short drive away!

I was so happy that for a while I even forgot about Warren.

***

Celeste lay on the ground, surrounded by a circle of people. Some I recognized—such as Warren—some I didn't.

“Is she dead?” I asked the big man who'd finally stopped pistol-whipping her.

“Not yet,” said Prophet Hiram Shupe, holding the gun out to me. “Finish her off and prove your loyalty.”

“Why shoot her if she's already going to die?”

A tall woman who looked just like me but wasn't, left the circle to whisper in my ear. “It's just a game, to trick Abraham. Now close your eyes. Everything will be all right, I promise. ” She stepped in front of me to take the Prophet's gun.

“But he's not Abraham,” I protested.

“Yes he is. They all are.”

I looked again at the circle of people surrounding the dying woman and saw that she was right. The man I'd mistaken for Warren had shape-shifted into Abraham. So had everyone else, with one exception.

“I don't understand.”

“You will,” my mother told me. “Isn't that right, Madeline?”

Madeline, whose face had remained her own, said, “Eventually.”

My mother handed me the gun. “Shoot Celeste now, Lena, so that she might live.”

“But none of it makes any sense!” I screamed…

…as I woke up.

***

In the morning, Angel, Otto, and I shared a tense breakfast in Angel's suite.

“You're quiet, Lena,” Angel said. “Anything wrong?”

“I'm fine.”

“If you say so.”

The Black Monk snorted. “If that's fine, I don't want to ever see her not fine.”

When I returned to my room, I shook off the memory of last night's dream, and called Stuart Jenks' office. His secretary, who sounded a hundred years old, told me that
Desert Eagle
's producer was taking a meeting.

“Of course he is,” I told her. “But tell Mr. Jenks that the script consultant Angel brought on board is a real-life private eye, not some scriptwriter's creation. Tell him he's been implicated in those so-called stalking letters she's been receiving. And then tell him that the real-life private eye will notify the police today if he doesn't…”

“Oh, my, the meeting's over already. I'll put you through to Mr. Jenks now.”

Although I'd only sat through one meeting with Jenks, he'd impressed me as a smart man, if a bit on the weasely side, so I wasn't surprised when he listened carefully to what I had to say.

“That it?” he asked when I finished.

“If the letters stop, I'll forget the whole thing. If they continue, I'm going to the cops and I'll name names. Chief among them will be yours.”

He didn't say anything for a moment, and when he did, his words were not unexpected. “I'll take what you've said into consideration, Ms. Jones. In the meantime, you're fired.”

“Nice talking to you, too.” Since Angel had insisted that my services be included in her new contract, I wasn't all that worried. If she won, I won. If she didn't, well, I'd be out of a job anyway, wouldn't I?

My next conversation needed to be face-to-face, so soon I was back in my rental, tooling down Wilshire Boulevard in haze-diffused sunshine toward Angel's house. Or rather, Angel's neighbor's house.

Nadine Nedon had built her thirty-two-room mansion decades before Beverly Hills land values soared into the stratosphere, but she hadn't kept up repairs on the pink monstrosity. On the side nearest Angel's property much of the stucco had crumbled, leaving uneven patches of dirty white. Most of the clashing green shutters were missing louvers, giving the wall an abandoned appearance. The front elevation wasn't much better, although someone had at one time attempted to match the original pink in a sloppy patch-up job, so now the house looked polka-dotted.