Gold Medal Murder (6 page)

Joe jumped into the backseat between Bess and George. I took the front, next to Nancy. In a moment, we were off.

“It's good to see you!” I said, and smiled. She was just about the only girl in the world who didn't make me feel like my tongue was three times too big for my mouth.

“You too.” She put her right arm around me in a quick hug.

“Nancy!” yelled Bess from the backseat.

“I see the truck! I was just saying hi to Frank. It's all good. Where are we headed?”

“We're going to take a left at the next light, get on the 405, and I'll tell you when to exit. We're heading to Moonbeam, a diner I read about on
Digg
. It's supposed to be the dive where all the Hollywood insiders go for their low-key brunches and midnight breakfasts.”

“Yes!” squealed Bess. “I want to see how the stars dress on their days off!”

Once we were on the highway with the top down it was too hard to hear a word anyone said. Instead, I just stared out as the city flew by. It was nothing like Bayport. It stretched on for miles and miles. It felt like a hundred little cities, all strung together by the highway—like Christmas lights. I was happy to see Bess, George, and especially Nancy again. They were great, and always useful to have on a case. Although I was slightly worried—things seemed to get more complicated whenever they were around, and every time we had hung out, one or the other of us had nearly died.

Finally, we got to the restaurant. George was right when she called it a dive. It looked like it had seen better days… sometime in the 1950s. It had a giant, old-school sign that said
MOONBEAM
in big blinking letters. Actually, it said
MOO AM
, because a lot of the bulbs had burned out. But inside, it was all shiny chrome and red leather, with pictures of every celebrity to grace the silver screen in the last hundred years. There were also photos of people I didn't recognize, mostly men, who were clearly rich and important, with starlets hanging off their arms—gangsters or studio executives, it was hard to tell.

“Hi there!” said a breathy waitress as we sat down at our table. She looked like Marilyn Monroe—if Marilyn had cornrows and a septum piercing. “I'm Sugar, and I'll be your server today.”

She handed us menus and sashayed back to the counter.

“Yeah,” said Joe. “This place is great. Ouch!”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Bess with a smile. “Did I kick you? My bad.”

Once we ordered our food, we got down to business.

“So what are you doing here?” I asked Nancy.

“Uhhh… watching the Olympics?” she said with a smile.

Joe laughed. “You're a worse liar than Frank!” he said.

“All right,” said Nancy. “But if I tell you why we're here, you tell us why you're here. Deal?”

I looked at Joe and nodded. It was only fair. Besides, Nancy had proven herself useful on a case more than once. And it sounded like she might already be involved in something.

Nancy pulled something out of her purse and pushed it across the table.

“Our friend Lexi Adams is one of the Olympic fencers. Her boyfriend, the swimmer Scott Trevor, has been getting death threats. And now she's started to get them too. We told her we'd come and look out for her.”

“Lexi is being threatened, too? Interesting,” I said.

“What do you mean, too?” asked Nancy.

“You guys are working on the Scott Trevor case, aren't you!” said George.

I nodded. “Yes—but I'm in deep cover. Even Scott doesn't know I'm with ATAC.”

We gave the three of them the rundown of what ATAC had told us, and what had happened since we arrived. Our food came, and we all spent a few minutes in silence, shoveling it in.

“This is good. Really good,” said Bess. She had ordered migas, which were scrambled eggs on a tortilla with salsa and a bunch of other stuff. Even just the smell was delicious.

“Good find, George,” said Joe.

George smiled as she scooped up the last of her waffles.

“So, it seems like the big question is: Are Scott and Lexi the only two people being threatened, or—”

“Is it the entire American team?” I finished Nancy's sentence. “That was exactly what I was wondering.”

“It seems impossible that ATAC wouldn't know the entire team was receiving death threats,” said Joe.

“True—but they didn't know about the threats against Lexi, and she's Scott's girlfriend,” said George.

“Right. We need someone to make some inquiries among the other American athletes. They might be afraid to come forward, so we'll have to be discreet about it,” I said.

“We'll do it!” Bess grabbed George's hand and raised it up in the air with hers.

“We will?” said George.

“Yes. And we'll start with those gymnastics twins—John and Jim Ryan!”

“Ugh,” said George, groaning. “She's obsessed!”

“It'll be fun. Besides, we'll get to meet a lot of famous athletes. You'll like it.”

“Fine, fine.”

“I want to go check in with Vijay. We should have him take a look at the CD Joe got at the arena. With all of his techie stuff, he should be able to figure out if it's real or not. Plus, I want to see if the cameras I planted in Scott's house are all up and running.”

“Too bad we didn't have any in the arena,” said Joe. “Or we might have gotten whoever made this CD on film!”

“Ohh,” said George. “I want to go! I want to see what kind of computers ATAC has for its operatives.”

“But who's going to interview the athletes with me?” asked Bess.

“I'll do it,” said Nancy. “That way I can be in the arena and keep an eye on Lexi—and Scott.”

“Great,” said Joe. “If you guys are going to be there, I'm going to take the chance to go and talk to Scott's former manager, Elisa von Meter. Since I'm his ‘personal assistant,' it makes sense that I'd be the one to go and talk to her about this tell-all book she's writing. Maybe she's trying to add a little spice to the book by threatening Scott's life.”

The check arrived, and I scooped it up.

“One of the perks of working for ATAC,” I said. “They pay for all the food.”

On her way back to the Olympic Arena, Nancy dropped George, Joe, and me at the hotel where Vijay was staying. Joe grabbed a cab, while George and I took in Vijay's fancy digs. The hotel was one of those huge ultramodern buildings, all glass and chrome. It rose like a shiny steel needle up above the city, higher than any of the surrounding buildings.

“Yes?” said the clerk, in that way that was perfectly polite, yet still somehow managed to convey that he felt that we two
children
should not be here unescorted.

“Frank Hardy here to see Vijay Patel,” I told him.

“Oh, yes,” he smiled, his manner suddenly changing. “Allow me to call Mr. Patel.”

There was a quiet phone exchange, and then he turned back to us.

“Go right up. The last elevator on the left goes directly to the penthouse suite.”

As we walked away, George whispered to me.

“Did he say ‘penthouse'? What gives?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I hadn't seen Vijay's hotel room yet.

The last elevator turned out to be a clear glass box finished in brass that went up the outside of the
hotel, giving us an incredible view of the city.

“Wow!” was all George or I could say.

The elevator opened up directly into his apartment. It was like a giant greenhouse floating above LA. It felt like you were outside, only without the wind or smog or rain. Plus, there were some real comfortable couches and a ton of audio equipment, computer monitors, and televisions.

“How come you got the sweet digs?” I asked. “This place is off the hook!”

“Necessary,” Vijay said. “With all the smog in this city, I need a line of sight on both the Olympic Arena and Scott's house if the transmissions are going to come through clear. This is the only place in all of LA that met my requirements. Oh, and you should check out the private garden up above. It's suh-weet!”

“This setup is incredible!” George was looking at the computers. “You've got live feeds coming in from nine different cameras. And is that a gait recognition set up?”

“Yup. So it can alert me whenever Scott is onscreen, or whenever a new person it hasn't seen before is in Scott's house.”

“What's gait recognition?” I asked. It was a rare moment when I was the least geeky person in the room.

“It's software that tries to recognize people by how they walk,” said Vijay.

“I heard it's pretty easy to throw off,” said George.

“Yeah—you can't depend on it, but it can be helpful.”

Vijay had got a pretty good view of almost every room in Scott's house. Ditto the arena, though there were a few blind spots there—the place was just too big to blanket it with recorders. And some areas we couldn't get into, like the women's lockers rooms. Otherwise, we totally could have seen who slipped the note into Lexi's locker.

“What's with the static?” I asked. A few of the screens were fuzzy, or had lines running through them.

“There's a little signal interference—buildings or smog or television transmissions, I don't know. This was the best I could get. Anyway. You didn't just come here to check out my sweet pad, so whatcha got for me?”

I dropped the disk into his hands and explained the situation.

“Intriguing,” Vijay said. “Maybe Scott isn't the good little athlete he seems like?”

“I think someone faked the recording, but I can't be sure.”

“Let's check it out!”

Vijay popped the CD into one of his computers. Scott's voice began booming through the apartment. It was so loud it was almost painful.

“Sorry!” Vijay said, as he hurried to turn the sound down. “I was listening to some ragga earlier—it always helps me when I'm coding.”

He listened to Scott's voice for a second.

“Sounds legit,” he said. “But let's find out.”

Vijay pulled up a new program that broke the sound file into waves.

“Total fake,” he said.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“See here?” Vijay pointed to the screen. “This wave represents Scott's voice. See how it's all broken up and choppy, not smooth? That means it was pieced together from a whole bunch of other recordings. Someone created this sentence, using words Scott had actually spoken, but stitching them together to make a whole new sentence.”

George let out a low whistle. “Whoever did this has some pretty sophisticated tech!”

Vijay nodded. “This is not your hobbyist's setup. This is the real deal.

“I wonder… ,” said Vijay. He hopped up and started rummaging through a pile of discs. He selected one and popped it into another laptop.

“Yep!” he said, triumphantly.

“What?” asked George, excited.

“This CD is a threatening video that was sent to Scott. It's all footage of him in various places.”

“Right,” I said. “Joe told us about that.”

“Well, if you compare the files, it looks like these discs were made using the same computer programs. I think Scott's angered some geek, somewhere.”

“That would go along with the robotic snakes,” I murmured. Now we were getting somewhere!

George's phone gave a quick beep, the sound of a text message coming in. She fished it out of her pocket.

“Oh no!” she yelled.

“What?” I asked.

“Look!”

George passed the phone to me. The screen read:

@ hospital w/ Lexi.

After Nancy dropped me off, I went to flag down a taxi. But after Nancy's sweet ride, the idea of being stuck in a smelly, dirty taxi seemed horrible. Luckily, right at that moment one of the big double-decker tourist buses swung by. I'd always wanted to ride on the top of one, and I figured it would help me learn the layout of the city, which could be useful if, like, we ended up in a car chase or something. You never know what might happen when you're a superspy.

“LA History and Mystery Tour! Get on in,” said the driver.

“Are you going to—”

“We go everywhere there is to go in this city. City of Angels, City of Demons. You don't want to miss this, kid.”

I got in. I figured I could use the GPS on my phone to tell me when we were close to Elisa's house, and I could hop out then. Besides, I was only going to be in LA once, so I needed to make the most of it! And since Frank was getting to hang out with George, I deserved to have some fun too.

Looking out over the city, it was easy to see why so many people were drawn to LA. There were models everywhere! Or at least, people who looked like models. In a city full of stars and wannabe stars, it was hard to tell the difference. But despite the smog and the dirt, LA did seem to have a feeling of excitement and money and adventure. Anyone, it seemed, could be the next big thing, even the guy on the corner selling gyros and schwarma from a cart.

The driver talked like a ringleader at a circus, a real showman. He rattled off stories and facts left and right. Maybe
he
would be the next big thing.

“And right here, folks, right here on this very street, right outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, is the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Here we have the footprints, handprints, and sometimes cigar prints of some of Hollywood's biggest legends, from Groucho Marx and Joan Crawford to Jim Carrey and Emma Watson. They say you don't know a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes—well, here you can walk a mile in the footprints of the stars!”

I was only half-listening to him, however. I spent most of the time doing some research on my phone. Elisa, it turns out, had been a PR professional before she had become Scott's manager. She'd actually started her own high-profile celebrity agency, which she'd closed to work for Scott. It was her work that had made Scott the household name that he'd become. And a little more than a year later, he'd fired her. No wonder she was PO'd. And boy, did she show it. The tabloids from the time were filled with screaming matches between the two of them. She'd threatened him repeatedly—and even slashed his tires one night!