Seduced and Betrayed (4 page)

"Oh, come on, Mom. It'll be fun," Cameron coaxed. "Le Dome is one of your favorite restaurants. We can talk about the wedding some more."

"I'd love to, darling—you know that," Ariel said, lying just as graciously as she did everything else. "But I can't today. I have a meeting with the Gavino Cosmetics people this afternoon about renewing my contract for the Ageless Beauty campaign."

"Call them and reschedule it," Zeke suggested.

Ariel ignored him, pretending to herself that he didn't exist. It was a useful skill. One she'd had twenty-five years to perfect. "Why don't you and Susan come over to the house for lunch tomorrow?" she said to her daughter. "I'll have Eleanor make chicken salad sandwiches and iced tea and we can look through the bridal magazines Leslie gave you and try to find a style of bridesmaid's dress you both love." She smiled at her future son-in-law. "Michael can come and look at bridesmaid dresses, too, if he'd like."

"No, thanks." Michael gave a mock shudder. "I think I'll pass on that. Talking about fashion gives me hives."

"Well, if you change your mind, lunch will be served at twelve sharp," she informed him as she turned away to give her daughter a quick hug. "Have a nice lunch, darling. I'll see you tomorrow. You, too, I hope," she said to her daughter's maid of honor. Then, with a gracious smile and a regal little wave, she turned and left—without having either directly spoken to or acknowledged her ex-husband beyond their first few words of greeting.

Which was just like her, Zeke thought, feeling a strange mixture of admiration and irritation. Ariel had always had the maddening ability to ignore anything she didn't want to see, just like a queen stepping over peasants in the street. She'd always had exquisite manners, too, but twenty-five years ago they'd been the rather grave good manners of an extremely well-behaved little girl. Now, she used them like a double-bladed rapier, cutting him cold without drawing a single drop of blood.

* * *

"You're sure the Malibu house is uninhabitable?" Zeke said, speaking to his secretary as he exited the Le Dome parking lot and turned his rented Jag onto Sunset Boulevard. "Hell, Patsy, the contractor's had his crew out there—what? nearly a year now?—and you're telling me it still isn't finished? Just how much damage was there from the quake?"

"It's not the structural repairs that are taking so long, it's the bathrooms," Patsy said drily. "Remember all that imported Italian marble you decided you needed? Well, apparently, the guys who mine it or quarry it or whatever it is one does to marble, are on strike. I've booked you into a suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire but I can find you a house to rent if you think you're going to be in L. A. for a while this time."

"No, don't bother. Cameron's wedding is only six weeks away. I guess I can survive at the Regent for that long."

"It's a tough life," Patsy said drily. "But somebody's gotta live it."

* * *

Zeke was forced to make two detours due to construction crews and road repair, ending up farther west on Wilshire than he wanted to be. To get to the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel, he had to turn around and go back the other way. Grumbling under his breath, he turned right onto a side street, and then right again, into an empty driveway. He glanced into the rearview mirror and pushed in the clutch, ready to shift the Jag into reverse—and then stopped and stared. Something about the three-story apartment building reflected in the rearview mirror looked oddly familiar.

Like so many older buildings in Southern California, this one was primarily Spanish in design, with arched windows and wrought iron railings. The stucco walls were faded, sun-washed pink. The eaves were trimmed in equally faded turquoise blue. There was a turret jutting up on one side of the building, vaguely Moorish in design, and a leafy banana tree in front.

"Well, I'll be damned," Zeke said, finally recognizing the Wilshire Arms apartment building. "It's my past, come back to haunt me."

He'd lived there, once upon a time. He and Ethan Roberts and Eric Shannon and Eric's younger brother... What was his name? Jack, that was it. Jack Shannon. God, they'd had some great times in the old Wilshire Arms. And some terrible ones, too.

He'd made love to Ariel for the very first time one perfect summer afternoon in the small front bedroom of apartment 1-G. And then he'd lost her, less than two months later, in that very same bedroom. Other people had lost things there, too.

Jack Shannon had lost his older brother.

Eric Shannon had lost his life.

And, yet, for all that, it was the good times Zeke remembered most as he sat in the rented Jag, staring at the legendary old building in his rearview mirror. The hopes and dreams they'd all had. The plans they'd made. The sense of limitless possibilities spread out in front of them like a sumptuous banquet. The innocent belief that the whole world was theirs for the taking. It had been a heady time. Exciting and terrifying. Full of passion and promise.

And it was over.

Finis.

Dead as the proverbial doornail.

Zeke sighed, feeling nostalgic and just a little melancholy as he shifted the Jag into reverse. He backed out of the driveway and shifted into first, checking the side mirror for oncoming traffic. A movement in front of the Wilshire Arms caught his eye. A man was standing at the wrought iron gate that stretched across the entrance to the courtyard, trying to slide a rectangular piece of shiny white signboard into the metal frame affixed to the decorative bars.

Zeke could hardly believe his eyes. "Mueller," he said, instantly recognizing the building superintendent despite the nearly twenty-five years that had passed since the last time he'd seen him. The strange little man had hardly changed a bit. He was still small and wiry, and still as bald as an egg.

He stepped back from the gate as Zeke sat there watching, his shining bald head tilted as he surveyed his handiwork. Zeke had no trouble reading the neatly hand-lettered sign from where he was. Apartment for rent, it said. Inquire Manager's Office.

Zeke decided it was an omen.

And, besides, he'd lied to Patsy. He couldn't stand six weeks in a hotel, after all. Not even the Regent Beverly Wilshire.

* * *

"Current tenants'll be out by the end of the week," Mueller said when Zeke went in to inquire about the apartment. "I gotta get it cleaned, and the faucet in the bathroom sink needs fixing but the place don't need painting. I can have it ready for you by Monday, if you're interested."

"I'd like to see it first," Zeke said, in a belated effort to be practical. "If it wouldn't inconvenience the current tenants."

"Don't see why it should. Ain't nobody home." Mueller opened his apartment door, then stood aside, pointedly waiting for Zeke to precede him into the hall. It wasn't from politeness, Zeke knew, but sprang from a basic distrust of people. Mueller simply didn't want anyone to be alone in his apartment-cum-office, even for a split second.

Zeke obliged him by exiting the apartment, and then, hands stuffed into the pockets of his elegant gunmetal gray Armani slacks, stood aside, waiting as the wiry little man carefully triple-locked his apartment door.

"This way," Mueller said, and headed off down the hallway without a backward glance, as if he didn't particularly care whether his prospective tenant was following him or not.

Zeke gave a mental shrug, more amused than anything else at being treated like a nobody. It wasn't personal, he knew; the Mueller he remembered had treated everyone as if they were nobody.

They made their way out a side door that opened onto the courtyard of the apartment building, obviously heading for the corresponding door which opened into the hallway on the other side of the pebbled concrete patio.

It was exactly the way Zeke remembered it. The luxuriantly overgrown hibiscus and trailing bougainvillea, the faint outline in the concrete patio where the pool had been filled in, the cool shadows cast by the overhanging balconies from the second and third floor apartments. He shivered a bit, feeling a cold finger trace its way up his spine as he stepped over the exact spot where he'd stumbled over Eric Shannon's lifeless body all those years ago.

What an awful night that had been. The screams. The sirens. The blood. He'd never seen so much blood in his life—before or since. He'd been forced to endure the feel of it on his body for what had seemed like hours while the police took their photographs and asked their questions. And the smell; he'd never forget the dead, coppery smell of Eric's blood.

"You want to see that apartment or not?" Mueller demanded, breaking into Zeke's morbid reverie.

Zeke refocused his eyes on the present and saw the superintendent standing with one hand on the open door, a scowl of impatience on his face.
If I had any sense,
Zeke thought suddenly,
I'd say no and get the hell out of here.
It was no good, digging up the past. "Yes, I want to see the apartment," he said.

Mueller grunted and let go of the door.

Zeke caught it before it swung closed and hurried to follow Mueller down the second narrow hallway. He almost bumped into the superintendent when he stopped, abruptly and unexpectedly, in front of apartment 1-G.

"I don't believe it," Zeke murmured under his breath.

"Changed your mind?" Mueller asked, almost as if he'd been expecting that reaction. As if, in fact, he were waiting for it.

Zeke gave him a searching look but could see no sign of recognition in the other man's pale gray eyes. "No. I haven't changed my mind."
At least, not yet.
"Let's see it."

Mueller yanked at the chain running from his belt loop to the pocket of his baggy chinos, pulling a jangling ring of keys out of the deep front pocket. With no fumbling, he found the proper key and inserted it into the lock.

The door to Zeke's past opened on well-oiled hinges.

Mueller stepped back and waved him in. "After you," he invited with the first show of real civility Zeke had ever seen him display.

Brushing by him with barely a glance, Zeke stepped over the threshold and walked back into his past. Nothing happened. No deafening thunderclaps, no flashes of lightning warning him not to proceed further. There was no particular feeling of dread or elation, either. It was just an apartment, a place he had once lived. Breathing a small sigh of relief and, yet, feeling strangely, vaguely disappointed—didn't what had happened here deserve some sort of divine recognition?—Zeke started down the narrow hallway to the living room.

The apartment was nicer than he'd remembered, even with the neatly stacked piles of boxes and the packing materials scattered on the floor. It was light and airy, with an elegant old world charm he'd been too young and stupid to appreciate the first time around. Of course, he thought, it probably hadn't helped that the decorating style of the time had dictated psychedelic colors, beanbag chairs, cheap beaded curtains, and black light posters on the walls.

The walls were painted a soft, creamy white, now. The high, arched windows overlooking the courtyard were flanked by slatted wooden shutters. The floors were hardwood, polished to a glossy sheen. Zeke moved through the rooms of the apartment slowly, his hands stuffed deep in his pants pockets, taking it all in, observing, remembering. A wide graceful archway opened off the living room onto the dining room, with a small efficiency kitchen beyond that which, in turn, led back into the living room. He walked down a short hall to the two small bedrooms and a surprisingly large bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed tub and pale aqua tile running halfway up the walls. It was all eerily the same, he thought, right down to the massive old mirror on the living room wall.

It was a ridiculous piece of expensive Victorian frippery, at least four feet wide by five feet tall, framed in pewter that had been elaborately cast with dozens of roses and ribbonlike scrolls. There had been some legend connected with the mirror, Zeke recalled. Some curse. He couldn't quite remember what it entailed, except that it had had something to do with a young starlet who was rumored to have drowned in the pool that had once graced the courtyard. He'd always thought that particular story had been dreamed up by someone who'd taken one too many drug-induced trips.

"Did you ever see her?" Mueller asked.

Zeke shifted his gaze from the mirror to the building super. "Did I ever see who?"

"The woman in the mirror." Mueller lifted his chin at the mirror. "Some say it's the ghost of the girl who drowned in the pool that used to be down there in the courtyard. That's why it was filled in, you know. Nobody knows whether it was an accident, or if she drowned herself on purpose, or if somebody held her under 'til she stopped breathing. She's supposed to live in that mirror there, and she only shows herself when somebody's life is about to change somehow."

"Really?" Zeke murmured, trying not to encourage the superintendent. He wasn't the least bit interested in ghost stories.

"Sometimes the change is for the better and the person who sees her gets their dream. But mostly it's a change for the worse," Mueller said with relish. "There was a girl saw her the night of the party you guys had. Your old roommate saw her, too. That one who's running for Congress now? He saw her the day before he got the part in that soap opera he was in. The one that started his career." Mueller's gray eyes glittered. "Told me all about it one night."