The Homicide Hustle (15 page)

Said
I got? Grrr. My graceful walk turned to stomping and I resolved to fax him the note
the moment I got home so it would be waiting for him when he arrived in the morning.
I occupied myself on the taxi ride home with composing a few scathing lines to accompany
the note.

It wasn’t until I was in bed half an hour later, note already faxed to Detective Lissy,
in that relaxed state halfway between waking and sleeping, that my brain spit out
a number it must have been working on since I saw Calista’s birth certificate at the
apartment. I sat up. Given the year on the certificate, Calista Marques was no dewy,
seventeen-year-old ingénue—she was twenty-three.

Chapter 21

Twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty-three. The number bounced in my head Tuesday morning.
I’d mulled it over last night and realized Calista must have lied about her age to
get the Disney role that shot her to fame. Being sub-twenty was her ticket to playing
Lisa for a couple more years. I found it somewhat ironic that Zane was doing all he
could to convince directors to give him meaty adult roles while Calista was apparently
doing the opposite. Hollywood: a topsy-turvy place. Did Calista know Tessa was in
on her secret? Could she have killed to protect her secret and her Disney career?
Only one way to find out.

I knew Calista started each day with a run along the Potomac. She’d mentioned it when
Vitaly commented on how fit she was. Today, she was getting a running partner whether
she wanted one or not. Jogging wasn’t really my thing—it’s hard on my knees, which
get enough abuse from dancing—but I dug out my Nikes and headed toward the river shortly
before six. I was by no means the only exerciser out and about this early and I exchanged
greetings with a handful of runners, dog walkers, and Rollerbladers before reaching
the river.

Mist hung over the water even though the day was clear. A sense of peace settled on
me as I looked over the Potomac. It stretched like a sheet of gray-green glass today,
seemingly frozen, although I knew currents surged beneath the surface. I marched in
place, letting the river work its magic, unknot muscles still tight from the break-in
and visit to the police department. I should get down here more often. Twenty or more
walkers and joggers passed me before I spotted a woman running with a high knee action,
landing on her toes. Sunglasses covered her eyes and she had her dark hair pulled
back in a ponytail that swished from beneath a baseball cap. A shapeless gray T-shirt
drooped to midthigh, hiding most of her figure. I didn’t recognize Calista Marques
until she had passed me; not the most dedicated paparazzo would have IDed her in that
getup.

I fell in beside her, soon realizing that her pace was deceptively fast. “Hey, Calista,”
I said.

She turned her head, startled. “Oh. Hi, Stacy. I didn’t know you were a runner.” She
didn’t sound thrilled to have a running buddy, but she didn’t tell me to get lost
either.

“Since high school,” I said. If she took that to mean I was on the cross-country team,
that was fine by me. In reality, I’d run only one semester as a sophomore, in a required
PE class, where Coach Zelvetore had insisted we run a sub-thirteen-minute mile to
get a passing grade. “What about you? Did you run track in high school?”

“I was homeschooled,” she said, foiling my plan to ask what year she graduated. “The
show, you know.”

The sun was beginning to make itself felt and perspiration beaded under my jogging
bra. A soaring osprey suddenly dove toward the river and fought for altitude again
with his talons sunk into a fish. The sight made me yearn for breakfast; I wanted
to get this over with. “So, I happened to see a copy of your birth certificate,” I
said, eschewing subtle for point-blank, “and it says you’re twenty-three, not seventeen.”

She turned her head to face me and her brows rose above the rim of her sunglasses.
“You
happened
to see? You mean Tessa told you.”

Bam. Just like that—the information I was looking for. I felt like letting out a big
“Yeah!” but I didn’t have enough breath for it. “So . . . you knew Tessa . . . had
your birth certificate?” My words came out in gasps.

“Of course. Who do you think gave it to her?”

I stared at her, and tripped over a lone shoe on the path because I wasn’t watching
where I was going. I didn’t fall, but it took me a moment to regain my stride and
I had to sprint to catch up with Calista again. “Color me skeptical, but why would
you give something like that to Tessa King?”

“It’s so not your business,” she said, “but I gave it to her to prove my age.” She
stopped abruptly and swiped the hem of her shirt across her barely damp face. “Look,
I don’t want to play a dingbat teen for the rest of my life. ‘Oh, Daddy, it’s
so
not fair. You can’t take away my phone just because I got a D,��” she trilled, dropping
instantly into character. “Yeah, I’m grateful for the chance Disney gave me, but I’m
ready to move on. Unfortunately, my contract runs another two and a half years. And
my paycheck is pathetic.”

Hm. I suspected her definition of “pathetic” and mine were galaxies apart.

She jogged in place. “I was a virtual unknown—I’d only had two small parts in movies
that went straight to video—and they locked me into a long-term contract worth peanuts
when they signed me for
It’s a Double Life
. I can’t get out of it without a huge legal battle that would cost me millions, not
to mention the hit to my reputation. But . . . they’ll dump me in a hurry when the
public finds out my true age.” Her lips curving upward, she added, “My tweenage fans
won’t be able to ‘relate’ to me anymore. So sad.” She gave a mock pout.

“Tessa was going to publicize your actual age?”

Bending at the waist to stretch, she said, “Brilliant, isn’t it?
Blisters
will get a huge ratings bump, I’ll get ‘fired,’ and the show will be the perfect
platform for me to show viewers that I’m not a kid anymore.” She straightened and
did a mini bump and grind, looking very adult, indeed. A passing jogger whistled.
We both gave him “drop dead” looks. “Tessa—Nigel, now, I guess—is going to ‘confront’
me with the information next week when I’m scheduled to dance the rumba, and I’m going
to dance the hottest, sexiest rumba the FCC censors have ever seen. Pure brilliance.”

If she was telling the truth, she didn’t seem to have a motive to kill Tessa. Hands
on my hips, I surveyed her for a moment, wondering if a woman who had lived a lie
for the last ten years was capable of being truthful. Her openness niggled at me.
I asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

She shrugged. “Now that Vitaly and I are partners, you’ll see us rehearsing our dirty
dancing rumba, and it’s next week anyway. Just don’t tell anyone else before then,
okay?”

“What if you get kicked off Saturday night?”

With a secretive smile, she said, “Not going to happen. In fact, I’d say Graysin Motion’s
chances of winning
Blisters
went up about a thousand percent when I joined your team.”

Was she hinting that the fix was in, or was she so conceited that she assumed she’d
win the Crystal Slipper? That spurred my competitive instincts and I vowed Zane and
I would give her a run for her money. “Whose idea was it to ‘out’ you on
Blisters
, yours or Tessa’s?”

“My agent’s, actually.” Calista laughed. “She and Tessa shared an apartment when they
first came to Hollywood. She knew Tessa would go for it.” Glancing at her platinum
watch, she said, “Speaking of my agent, I’m having breakfast with her in thirty, so
I’ve got to dash. See you in the studio later.”

She ran back the way we’d come and I followed more slowly. Kicking at a pebble, I
watched it bounce erratically down the path. I’d come here expecting denials and fear
from Calista, but she’d completely turned the tables on me. I felt disgruntled at
having my theory so completely blown up. If Calista was telling the truth, she had
no reason to murder Tessa. If she wasn’t . . . that thought made me wonder where Calista
had been the Tuesday night Tessa got killed, and I kicked myself mentally for not
asking. It was a good thing I made my living as a dancer and not an investigator.

* * *

An hour later, I had to face Zane in the ballroom. Knowing he’d been out with Danielle
the night before, and wondering if they’d spent the night together, I found it impossible
to behave as usual. I adopted a brisk, no-nonsense teaching method and knew I was
criticizing his dancing more than usual. Midway through the morning, he shook his
hair off his face, took a pull from his water bottle, and asked quietly, “Is something
wrong, Stacy?”

“Of course not.” I brushed past him to get a bottled water from the mini fridge in
the bathroom. Returning to the ballroom, I didn’t meet his eyes, but pretended to
fuss with the CDs atop the stereo cabinet.

“What’s got you so tense?”

Without my hearing him, he’d come up behind me and when I turned I found him mere
inches away. His nearness flustered me. I leaned back as far as I could, trapped between
his broad chest and the stereo. “Tell you later,” I said, giving a tiny nod toward
Larry. “Let’s get back to work.”

After a moment of scrutinizing my face, he backed away and we resumed our hustle practice.
Since the hustle had originated in the Hispanic communities of New York and Florida,
and was a mishmash of mambo, salsa, and swing steps, I’d tried to evoke a Latin feel
with my choreography so it wasn’t quite the
Saturday Night Fever
vibe many would be expecting. Zane had no trouble with the rock step, but he kept
losing contact with me on the side break. We ran through it several times and couldn’t
help but think about performing it at Club Nitro. I thought it was a little creepy,
and definitely in poor taste, to be filming the second show at the last spot anyone
saw Tessa alive. It felt a little like dancing on her grave, but all of that only
made Nigel more keen on the idea.

The producer came bouncing into the ballroom as Zane and I were wrapping up, papers
clutched in his hand. “Saturday night’s ratings were our best ever for a kick-off
show—we got a thirty-two percent share—and the Google and blog traffic are off the
charts.” He smiled his sharky smile. “The news this morning has the blogosphere going
wild. I was gobsmacked. I knew casting Hazzard was a brilliant move the minute Tessa
suggested it.”

Zane’s brow wrinkled and he wiped the sweat off it with a hand towel. “What news?
Did something happen to Mickey?”

“The prat got arrested for breaking into Tessa’s apartment last night,” Nigel crowed.

He was so wound up I was convinced he’d have been skipping around the ballroom if
we weren’t there.

“He
what
?”

I pretended to towel my face, hoping my expression didn’t betray anything, and praying
that Nigel’s source, whatever it was, hadn’t mentioned me or Vitaly.

“Yeah. There was a paragraph on some news site about him getting taken up by the coppers.
My assistant caught it through Google alerts and texted it to me.”

“Does this mean he’s off the show?” A teensy part of me was prepared to rejoice if
Solange lost her partner.

Nigel looked at me as if I were insane. “Are you insane? Off the show? This’ll drive
millions of viewers to our next broadcast. As long as the coppers don’t keep him locked
up, he and Solange will close Saturday’s show.”

“I should have known,” I muttered under my breath as Nigel bustled out to do something
important and producery. I tried to slip away in his wake, but Zane caught my arm.

“So, tell me what’s eating you.”

He clearly wasn’t going to let me duck his question, so I slumped down against the
ballroom wall, and he joined me. We had the place to ourselves now that Nigel and
the crew had moved on to one of the other studios. Vitaly and Calista weren’t due
for another hour. “Vitaly and I were there last night,” I said.

“There?”

“At Tessa’s. We caught Mickey Hazzard.”

“You what? What were you doing at Tessa’s?” He inched away from me along the baseboard.

I fed him the lie about me and Vitaly going to see Phoebe and seeing Tessa’s door
open.

“Phoebe’s apartment isn’t even on that floor,” he said.

Oops. “We were confused.” To distract him, I said, “So we ended our evening at the
police station. How was your dinner with the director?”

“Great.” Zane’s face lit up. “Darren invited me to audition for his next picture,
said he thinks I’d do well for the part of the assassin.”

“That’s a compliment?”

He laughed. “That’s a potential paycheck. Your sister was great, by the way. Charmed
the socks off Darren and his wife.”

“You didn’t mention Danielle was going with you.” I bent over my extended legs to
stretch my hamstrings, hiding my face in my knees.

“I figured she would tell you.”

I sat up, a bit embarrassed by my cowardice. “It would have been nice to hear it from
you,” I said, gazing at him straightly.

He stood and pulled me to my feet. “Stacy, I got the call from Darren after the show
Saturday night, when Danielle and I were out together. I was excited about meeting
with him and mentioned it to Danielle. She said it sounded like fun, that she loved
Darren’s movies, and I invited her to go with me. There was no more to it than that.
It wasn’t like I deliberately invited her instead of you; it just fell out that way.
Right place, right time. C’mere.” He tugged me into his arms and kissed my forehead.
“I like Danielle, but I . . .
really
like you.”

I let him kiss me, still not totally convinced, but coming around. A scritch of sound
by the door made me pull away and look over Zane’s shoulder. No one was there, but
after a moment I thought I heard the door leading to the outside stairs close.

“What?”

I didn’t answer. “Vitaly? Maurice?” I walked to the door and looked down the hall.
No one. I wondered if a prospective student had come in . . . sometimes we got walk-ins.
I had an itchy feeling between my shoulder blades.

“What?” Zane asked again, catching up with me.

“I thought I heard someone,” I said. “Tessa’s death, the warning note, the police
station last night . . . it’s all making me paranoid.”

“Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” Zane said.

I socked his shoulder. “I’m going to hit the shower.”

He nuzzled my neck. “Is that an invitation?”

“Not hardly.” I wriggled free, still feeling a bit uncomfortable about his dating
both Danielle and me, despite his explanation. “I’ve got students this afternoon,
and you need to run through our hustle routine about a hundred times until you’ve
got the choreography down cold.”