Looks to Die For (20 page)

He looked casually over at me. “Not yet,” he said. “You have something to give me. Something of mine. I’d like to get it.”

“I don’t have anything of yours,” I said. I tried the door, but it was bolted, and I fumbled with the locks.

“The package Nora gave you. You didn’t know I knew about that, but I know a lot, Lacy. I know what you’ve been doing.” He was walking toward me, slowly, stepping closer and closer. “Now, the package. A shopping bag, I think she said. I’d like it right now.”

I held on to the door handle. “I don’t have it,” I said.

“Where is it?” His voice had taken on its threatening edge again.

“I threw it out,” I said, going for the bald-faced lie.

The shopping bag. After I’d left Nora yesterday to drive to the beach, I’d been so upset that I’d forgotten all about the bag she’d given me.
Roy’s things,
she’d said. What he’d left behind in the apartment. There’d been some clothes, as I remembered, and his tapes. I was supposed to deliver them to Roy. And I could, since the bag had to be in my car trunk still. I hadn’t thought about it again until this moment.

“I put it out for garbage,” I said, suddenly realizing that if Roy wanted his things this badly, there must be a reason for me to hold on to them. “You know, at home in Pacific Palisades, where I live. They pick up on our street on Tuesdays and Fridays, so it’s gone by now. We have recycling, too, but that’s on Wednesdays — and half the time I forget, anyway.” I’d read once that if you were lying, you should keep the story simple. No elaborations. But I couldn’t stop myself.

“Dan hates it when I don’t separate the plastics and the metals and sometimes he’ll go through the garbage to make sure I didn’t throw out any recyclable newspapers,” I said, ranting on. “But I’m pretty sure he didn’t search this time. He’s stopped. I mean I probably convinced him that one trashed Diet Pepsi bottle isn’t going to cause global warming, you know?”

I’d gotten the bolt unfastened, and now I opened the door. “Sorry about the package,” I said hastily. “I didn’t want it and didn’t think you would. I only took it because Nora insisted.”

And I fled down the hall, following the path that Deanna had taken what seemed like hours ago, and hoping that once again Roy wouldn’t bother to follow.

I drove recklessly up the Pacific Coast Highway, wanting to get far away as fast as I could. My hands shook so violently on the wheel that I knew I should pull over and try to compose myself, but I didn’t bother because I figured it might be months before I could calm down. A few miles up, I saw a sign inland that must have registered on my subconscious the last time I drove by here on the way to Malibu, and I pulled off at the next exit, making my way through unfamiliar streets in a warehouse district. I stopped in front of a long, rectangular cement structure with the huge blue lettering above it that I’d noticed from the highway —
SELF STORAGE
. I drove around a couple of times, not seeing an entrance, but then I spotted an asphalt path and figured there had to be a door at the other end, so I abandoned my car and ran inside. An old Korean man in a tiny front office barely looked up when I asked about the facilities. He pointed to a hand-printed cardboard sign on the peeling wall that outlined storage-room sizes and prices. I picked the smallest and cheapest and handed him cash in exchange for a key.

“Pay each month by third day or items thrown away,” he said in broken English.

“Sure,” I said.

I dashed back to the car to retrieve the shopping bag, and when I walked in again, the Korean was doing a crossword puzzle and never glanced at me. Did he ever wonder what was hidden away in this storage? Stolen diamonds? Dessicated corpses? An ill-gotten Louis XIV chair with matching ottoman? Maybe he kept duplicate keys so he could prowl through when everyone was gone.

Hurrying down the dank cement hallway made me think of the L.A. jailhouse, and I envisioned the circle of hell reserved for designers of jails and storage facilities. The dark, labrynthine corridor was cracked and uneven, and was it my imagination or were there odd, squealing sounds emanating from behind some of the lockers? No, the noises were coming from the ceiling. I looked up and a dark, swooping shadow seemed to lurch down from the rafters. Bats. It had to be bats. I instinctively swung up my arms to protect my face, forgetting that I was still holding the shopping bag, and the hard-edged tapes on the bottom smashed into my rib cage.

“Owww!”

For the second time that day, I uttered a shrill bark of pain, and this time it reverberated in the concrete corridor — “
Ow! Ow! Ow!
” With adrenaline surging, I started to run, the sounds of my own terrified breaths echoing obtusely in my head. The Whole Foods bag had been ignored, lost from both my memory and sight, but now at every step I expected to confront an enemy desperate to grab it away.

Finally reaching my three-by-five cubicle, I fumbled with the key until the door creaked open, then shoved the parcel inside. Safe. Bitter saliva filled my mouth, like I might throw up, and I leaned my forehead against the cold concrete, trying to calm down. I rubbed a tentative finger on my rib cage. Sore but not broken. Without my hysterical sounds, the corridor was quiet, and no bag-snatching specters lunged from the shadows. Emboldened, I unlocked the storage safe again and pawed through the bag. Unlikely that Roy had risked his reputation this morning to get back a pair of Cole Haan shoes and a couple of suits — even if they offered pretty good evidence that he’d spent a lot of time at Tasha’s. Most of the tapes and DVDs were neatly marked with the date and the name of a segment from
Night Beat —
presumably one featuring Roy. But anything could have been taped over. And at least three of the tapes had had their labels ripped off and looked a little more beaten up than the others.

Then something chewed at the back of my mind. Nora had said that Roy liked to watch videos of himself. Liked to watch them in bed with Tasha. But maybe all the tapes he screened weren’t network quality. I thought of Deanna, who paraded out this morning looking like a porn queen. Is that how Roy Evans chose his women? Could it be that he made his own hardcore videos? And what if one of his home movies costarred Roy Evans with Tasha Barlow?

I considered lugging the tapes back home so I could watch, but there was no way — not right now, with my promise to Dan. And not with the kids around. Roy’s secret — if he had one — would have to stay in this cubicle for now, protected by a flimsy key that I dropped in my Fendi wallet and by a Korean who couldn’t care less.

Chapter Eight

W
hen I got home,
all I wanted was a hot bath. I felt chilled to the bone. The sleek brass Brookstone barometer-thermometerhygrometer by the front door reported that the temperature was sixty-two degrees — nippy for L.A., but probably not an explanation for why I was trembling like a six-year-old in a spelling bee.

Grant clambered down the stairs to the front hall when he heard me come in, then paused a few steps from the bottom.

“You okay, Mom?” he asked, looking at me, concerned.

I tried to stand up straight and not sway like a flag in Dodger Stadium — even though my eyes were red, my face was white, and my mood was blue. All I managed was a little nod.

“You sure?” he asked. He’d started to hold out a paper to me, then pulled it back, probably figuring I didn’t have the strength to take it.

“I’m fine,” I said firmly. If I didn’t have kids, I’d probably have collapsed into a mewling heap about now, but in front of my son, I couldn’t/shouldn’t/wouldn’t fall apart. No way I’d make Grant face a weeping woman when he needed a mature mom.

I gestured toward the paper. “What have you got there?”

Grant took a moment, seemed to decide I must be fine, then jumped down to the landing with a thud. “I found the guy you wanted,” he said.

I hadn’t put down my keys yet, but I took the picture he held out for me and looked at it. Nothing too striking — just the blurry image of a man walking out of a courthouse, holding a sweater at an odd angle in front of him. Then I realized it was draped over his wrists, probably to hide handcuffs.

“Johnny DeVito?” I asked.

“Johnny DeVito,” Grant confirmed.

I looked again. So there he was — the ex-con lover boy. The man Nora claimed had loved Tasha — and who had definitely bought her some darn nice bedroom furniture. He had his head cocked down, but I could see the outline of his face, which seemed puffy and slightly distorted. Not ugly, the way Nora had said, but not quite right, either.

“Found it online, and I blew it up so you could see him better,” Grant said. “It was a really distant shot. Sorry about the bad quality.”

The picture was fuzzy, the features slightly blurred. Grant’s sophisticated laser printer could definitely spit out a better image than that — I knew because I’d paid for a lot of pixels — so the problem had to lie with the original source. Probably a newspaper, which meant that at some point, Johnny DeVito had made news.

I held the picture up to the light. “I wish I could make out more,” I admitted. “Looks like someone whitewashed his face.”

Grant shrugged. “I know, kind of strange, isn’t it. But it was the only picture I could find of him anywhere. And I spent a long time looking.”

“I didn’t mean for you to do that,” I said, suddenly back in suburban mother mode. “You have so much else to do that’s important. Your SATs. Your math test…” I let my voice trail off because I couldn’t get up my usual anxiety about Grant’s calculus grades.

“I’d be glad to
flunk
math if it would get Dad cleared,” Grant said, with more emotion in his voice than usual.

“An F won’t help anything,” I said, but then I let it drop. School might have been important on a planet long ago and far away, but since the murder investigation, we’d all been transported to another galaxy, where the old rules didn’t apply.

Grant shoved his hands into the pockets of his cargo pants. “So can you find out more about this guy?” he asked. “Prove he did it?”

“I wish,” I said with a sigh that came out louder than I’d intended. “I have some pretty good information, but Daddy’s mad that I’m playing detective and he wants me to stop. I think he’s wrong, but you know Daddy. He can be pretty stubborn.”

Grant looked down and shuffled his feet, and I realized I shouldn’t have said that. The family needed a united front. Dissing his dad wasn’t part of the game.

“Does Dad know this DeVito guy?” Grant asked.

“I doubt it,” I said, but then I paused and added, “You should ask Daddy.” But we both knew he wouldn’t.

Towering above me, Grant leaned over my shoulder to study the picture again. “You’ve gotten taller again,” I said, turning around to eye him. “Did you shoot up another inch in your sleep last night?” I smiled and Grant just shrugged, briefly embarrassed. How disorienting to be a teenage boy, your life changing so fast you couldn’t keep up with yourself. I could relate.

“I’m tall enough to beat up your Johnny if I find him,” Grant said, flexing his arm, lean and muscular under his Fila tennis shirt. Facing DeVito across a net, Grant definitely had an edge. But all bets were off if the weapons were more powerful than Prince rackets.

“So tell me about the stuff you’ve gotten,” Grant said, taking a step back and folding his arms. “The evidence that will help Dad.”

Was there ever stuff I could tell. And wouldn’t that be nice. I could reel off all the bizarre details of my detecting escapades, starting with Roy’s dog collar, and get my intelligent son’s perspective. With his scientific mind — he did get a 98 in physics, after all — he could analyze all the details and maybe come up with theory and proof. But for once, I stopped myself. Grant was already more tangled in this mess than he should be.

“The evidence is clear that Daddy’s innocent,” I said, going for the bottom line.

Grant sighed and rolled his eyes. “Lame, Mom.”

Yup. Lame mother-talk. “But we’re on the verge of a breakthrough,” I said, trying to stay optimistic. “I have a good feeling.”

“Last time you had a good feeling, I got hypothermia,” Grant grumbled. “Remember that day at Bear Mountain? You told me I could leave my Polartec in the car and ski in a T-shirt. Only it snowed.”

“This is different,” I assured him. “Clear skies coming up.”

Grant looked at me dubiously and I didn’t blame him.

“By the way, a guy from FedEx delivered a couple of boxes for Dad. They’re in the garage. I told him to put them there in case they were bombs or something and shouldn’t be in the house.”

He glared at me, daring me to challenge him, but I didn’t. Given the way things had been going lately, who was to say they
weren’t
bombs? Couldn’t blame Grant for trying to keep one more thing from exploding in our faces.

Grant’s friend Jake pulled into the driveway in his new blue Subaru Outback — finally, an L.A. kid with an appropriate car — and when the two of them left, I wandered out to the garage. Three cardboard boxes were piled in a corner, with a return address from Dan’s office. I peeled the packing tape away from one of them and peeked inside. Dusty manila covers and stacks of scrawled papers gave them away as old patient files. Grant had clearly been watching too many late-night movies. Nothing here that was going to detonate.

I went back inside and escaped to the bathroom, finally able to wash away my morning with Roy Evans. I filled the deep Jacuzzi tub and poured in a few drops of Jo Malone French lime blossom bath oil, then lit the Fresh Yuzu candles I had around the ledge, fragrant with Japanese grapefruit and Sicilian lemons. It was like taking a bath at the United Nations.

By the time I got out, I smelled like a fruit salad and had managed to forget that my situation stank. Maybe that bath oil really was worth a hundred bucks. At six o’clock, I decided to give a family dinner a try. I’d always been convinced we could save civilization if every family sat together once a day, eating a meal and talking. That I didn’t feel like eating and definitely wouldn’t be talking wasn’t going to stop me. Not up for cooking, I called Pacific Hunan and ordered a dozen dishes of Pan-Chinese food. When the delivery came, I dragged the bags to the family room and plopped the food into cheerful Fiestaware red bowls, which I arranged on the palazzo-stone table (expensive but indestructible, as I always explained to clients). I set out big linen napkins and brightly colored twisted-glass chopsticks at each place, then checked the logs in the fireplace and flipped the switch so the gas ignited and the fire came to life. Not bad. I dragged three oversized kilim pillows out of the closet, arranging them in front of the fireplace, then stepped back and took in the scene. Low-key and cozy. Very
Elle Decor.