Looks to Die For (24 page)

“Wow,” she said, “I don’t even know what to think.”

“Neither do I.” I took a deep breath. “And are you ready for something equally bizarre?”

“Probably not,” Molly said. “Another day like that one and you qualify for your own reality show. Ozzie Osbourne was never this interesting.”

I launched into my adventure with Roy Evans. At the part with the dog collar, Molly stood up and started pacing across her glossy bleached-wood floor. By the time I’d finished, her face was red with anger.

“Chaining women in his bedroom. Least I can do for you is get the asshole fired.” She shook her head. “I wonder if he’s been behaving weirdly at work. Someone else must have noticed if he’s…off. I’ll call Tim,” she said, picking up the phone to dial her friend, the producer at
Night Beat
. I suddenly remembered that the last time they’d connected because of me, they’d made a dinner plan.

“How’d your date go with Tim?” I asked as she punched in the number.

“We never managed it. He got busy and then I got too busy.” She shrugged, and instead of lamenting the sorry social life of a career woman in L.A., she slammed down the phone. “And now I’m getting his voice mail. Shit.”

She paced up and down a few more times then, trying to calm herself, opened the switch at her mirror window to watch the casting session. Another would-be surfer boy strolled across the stage into a spotlight. Unlike the other candidates, this one was dark-skinned and dark-haired, with a crinkly smile and Schwarzenegger biceps. Molly looked at him appraisingly, then flicked on an intercom, which rang on the floor. We watched the assistant handling the auditions pick up the receiver.

“Can this one talk?” Molly asked her.

“He’s great,” said the girl, making an obvious effort not to look toward the one-way mirror. “Funny, charming, and he passes the test you taught me — I’d like to sleep with him. I’d also love to give him the part. Too bad he’s not blond.”

“We’re casting a reality show,” Molly barked. “Half the state’s Latino now and if I see one more OC blonde on TV, I’m going to throw up. That’s reality. So hire him.”

The girl giggled and Molly disconnected and turned back to me. “I’m sorry. Just a little distraction while I try to think.” She stood still for a moment, staring at the one-way mirror, then shook her head and grabbed her bag. “Tim works with Roy, so maybe he knows what’s going on. If he doesn’t, I want him to hear your story. And hear it from you. Let’s head over there.”

I might have protested, but Molly in motion was like a tornado — once she was whipped up, she wasn’t going to change course. It was safer to be inside the whirlwind than face it down.

In the gloomy underground parking garage, Molly announced we should take my Lexus to drive over to the network.

“I want to sit in the same seat that Johnny Dangerously did. Maybe I’ll get a clue. I’m pretty good at picking up auras.”

“If you can figure out this one, you should start telling fortunes on Sunset,” I said. But I opened the passenger door for her and whisked away a big box of fabric samples from the Design Center that I’d tossed on the front seat. “Let me put these in the trunk so you have some room.”

Molly slid into the car, and I quickly opened the trunk and dropped in the box. I was just shutting it when something nagged at my brain, an unexpected image penetrating, and I stopped and peered in again. My heart leaped so hard I could hardly breathe.

The entire back half of the trunk was taken up with a bulging black garbage bag, the heavy, oversized kind that gardeners use for leaves. A neat twist sealed the top. I reached out to push my thumb against the thick plastic and feel the contents, but then I drew it back. If this was evidence, I shouldn’t touch it. And I didn’t want to, anyway. I grabbed a couple of the fabric samples from the box and draped them over my fingers — Pierre Deux country check in one hand, Pindler & Pindler pale peach silk in the other. Expensive fabrics definitely had nice give. I untied the twisty without any trouble.

The smell should have told me everything I needed to know. But I peeled back the top of the bag and stared inside. Maybe my mouth dropped open, but I didn’t scream. I was in denial. Or shock. In the dim garage, I had only the vaguest impression of a bloated face staring up at me through a clear plastic bag knotted at the neck, swollen eyes bulging as if the bag still contained a bunch of grapes. I had a vision of tangled hair and a blood-spattered sweatsuit. With all the nice fabrics in the world, she shouldn’t have had to die wearing blue nylon.

“Need any help back there?” Molly called from the front seat. She’d cracked open her door. The car must have been steaming hot.

“No, I’ll be right there,” I said. My voice sounded surprisingly normal. I lifted my arms over my head and slammed the trunk door shut. And with the decisive
thunk,
the full horror hit me. It was like that moment after a car crash when the air bag suddenly explodes in your face so you can’t move and you can’t breathe and you’re not sure if you’re still alive. All you know is that something too awful to describe has occurred.

I grabbed my stomach and leaned forward, retching all over the bumper. I wiped my mouth with the peach silk, then retched again.

Molly was on her cell phone and she’d walked away from the car, probably to get better reception. She didn’t know what was happening, and I was suddenly too weak even to call out to her. I pictured us driving over to the network and pulling up at the lot, where the security guard would check my trunk. Maybe I’d get the same kid who’d made the bad joke about finding a dead body. Only it could end up as a good joke. He’d find one.

Molly came back to the Lexus. Her aura-sensing powers must not have been working, because she was looking jubilant. “I reached Tim,” she said cheerfully, tucking her slim Motorola camera phone back into her bag. “He ran into Roy a few nights ago in one of the VIP rooms of the White Lotus. The hottest club in Hollywood and Roy Evans was in the inner sanctum. Where’s the justice in the world?” She laughed. “It turns out Roy was snorting coke and making an ass of himself. Tim’s ready to build a case to get him fired.”

She paused, and I sat there miserably, holding the keys, my hands clenched in my lap.

“Anyway, Tim wants to talk to you,” Molly said finally. “Should we go?”

“No,” I said. I started to cry and put my head against the steering wheel. “I’m feeling kind of sick.”

I flung open the door and started retching again, doubling over as snot and puke and tears puddled at my feet and splashed over my lime green ballet flats.

“In the trunk,” I sputtered, coughing and thinking I might collapse right there, so Molly might as well know. “Nora’s dead. Someone put her in my trunk.”

“My God. No,” said Molly. She reached over to hold my head. “Who do you think? Johnny Dangerously? Someone else? Who?”

“Not Daaaan,” I wailed, the thought rising from nowhere and coming out as more plea than proclamation. My body went limp and Molly grabbed my waist to keep me from falling over into my own vomit. Somehow, she hustled me out of the car and back inside to her office, where I fell on the leopard sofa, keening and crying in grief. Maybe Nora hadn’t been my dearest soul mate, but her murder cut me to the core. How could I believe in goodness and justice when my trunk was crammed with a girl whose only sin was eating too many ice cream sundaes?

After letting me sob for about three minutes, Molly, woman of action, grabbed my hands.

“We need a plan,” she said. “Do we call the police?”

I shook my head. “Reese and Shields already think Dan’s a killer and I’m a crazy woman. What do you think they’re going to do with this? They know I was with her yesterday. I’ll end up in jail.”

Molly shuddered. “Okay, then, how about this. We drive the car to South Central and leave the keys in. It’ll be stolen in an hour. You report it missing, the cops find the car and the body, but you’re off the hook.”

I grimaced. “They won’t buy it. Especially since they already think I made up the whole thing with Johnny DeVito.” I curled up on the sofa, drawing my knees practically to my chest like a scared six-year-old. “But we’re stuck. You’ve watched enough TV shows. It’s not easy to get rid of a body.”

“Nonsense. It’s only a problem if you don’t want the body found,” Molly said. She walked briskly to her desk and seemed to make a decision. “Look, Lacy, you’re sick. You can’t deal with this now. I’ll have my assistant drive you home. Leave me your key. The garage is locked, so your car is safe.”

She gave me a look that said I shouldn’t argue. So I didn’t. Having someone tell me what to do right now was what I needed, anyway.

At home, I avoided Dan all night, and when he fell asleep in the den watching an old movie, I covered him with a light blanket instead of nudging him to bed. Upstairs, I was on pins and needles all night, half expecting the police to show up again at our doorstep. I tossed in bed until almost two, then fell asleep, wracked by nightmares of mangled cars dripping blood, and bloated bodies climbing the stairs and dancing on my bed. I woke up screaming.

And my screaming woke up Jimmy.

“MOOMMMY! MOOOMMY! I’M SCARED!”

Jimmy’s terrified cries jarred me from my dreams and, jolted to consciousness, I raced to his room.

“It’s okay, honey,” I told him, stroking my little boy’s sweaty forehead and hugging him tightly. “It’s just a nightmare. You’re okay.”

I lay down next to him, rocking him like I did when he was a baby. The closeness calmed both of us. Jimmy whimpered for a while, then fell asleep with his head tucked into my chest, clutching the duck-decorated blue blanket he’d had since he was born. He’d given up his security blankie months ago, but after the night with Reese and Shields brandishing their guns, he’d begged for it back. My poor baby. Would he ever feel safe again? Would I?

When the telephone rang two hours later, I tiptoed out of Jimmy’s room, too drained to face another middle-of-the-night emergency. But I steeled myself for bad news. Could someone have broken into my car? Maybe it was just Mandy calling with gossip for Ashley that couldn’t wait for daybreak.

I gave a shaky “hello” and a familiar voice whispered, “Darling, it’s me, Molly. Sorry if I woke you, but you have to hear this. The police found a dead body outside the White Lotus. Draped over Roy Evans’s car.”

I let the news sink in. “Molly, how did you —”

“Always assume your phone is tapped,” Molly said quickly. “Isn’t that what you told me?”

I fell silent for a minute, and then Molly said, “I’m going to run. I’ll talk to you in the morning. Actually, the afternoon, because I won’t be in before then. But look outside your house before you go back to sleep. And if you want to know, I did all of this to impress Tim, not you.”

She hung up and I anxiously peeked through the pleated shade in my bedroom. Nothing interesting out front, so I went to the side window that looked over the circular driveway. Grant’s car was there because he never liked to put it in the garage, and Jimmy had left his bicycle — the new one with the training wheels — leaning against a tree. And farther down the dark driveway, I could just make out the hulking shadow of my Lexus. Now emptied, I had to assume, of its previous cargo.

By now, I couldn’t have gone back to sleep even if I wanted to. At 6:00
A.M
., I turned on my computer and checked one of L.A.’s entertainment bloggers — ClubGirl.com, whom everyone read because she was out all night, every night, getting the scoop. And boy, did she have one. Police had been waiting outside the White Lotus to question Roy Evans about an unidentified body. But Evans came out of the club with an ounce of coke in his pocket and turned violent at being confronted by the police. He was held overnight on drug charges. According to network executive Tim Riley, Roy Evans was being suspended from his on-air job, pending an investigation.

Chapter Ten

A
t breakfast, Grant began
quoting philosophy to me, a welcome change from his trying to make me understand quantum physics.

“We’re studying Aristotle in my world civ class,” he said, between gulps of grapefruit juice. “You know, the dude who said ethics is all a matter of context. What’s wrong in one situation might be right in another.”

I took a sip of coffee. In college, I’d had a crush on the professor in my senior philosophy seminar. The good side of that was I’d done all the reading. The bad side was that my mind tended to wander in class.

“Aristotle’s the one who said being virtuous is more important than specific actions, isn’t he?” I asked, trying to remember something other than the exact shade of the professor’s eyes. “Not like Kant, who believed in the categorical imperative. Absolute behavior with no exceptions. None of that ends-justifies-the-means stuff.”

Grant squirmed in his chair. “So which guy do you believe?”

I considered the circumstances — something Kant wouldn’t have done — and realized Grant had some ulterior motive for raising the subject in the first place.

“Both have their merits, I guess,” I said. I poured some more juice into his glass. “If you’ve done something that feels shady, I guess Aristotle gives you a better excuse.”

“Not shady given the situation,” Grant said. He pulled a thick sheaf of papers out of his backpack, looked at them briefly, and then handed them to me. “Jake and I had been talking about what we could try that might help Dad. Anyway, this was Jake’s idea. He did it, not me.”

“What’d you guys do?” I asked. Since Jake was his best friend, I was guessing Grant had some part in the plan.

Grant leaned down and scratched the back of his head. Either he hadn’t washed his hair this morning or he didn’t want to look at me. “We got Tasha Barlow’s cell phone records. It wasn’t so hard. Jake found this awesome program that lets you steal a user name and password. So he was able to hack into her Pac Bell account.” Now he did look at me. “Jake’s taking AP computer science and he’s getting an A,” he added, as if that explained it. “Maybe an A-plus.”

“Was hacking on the midterm?”