You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (23 page)

“He was gorgeous. He was charming. He was witty. Anne, I married him, and I may have bought myself an arrest because I was so taken in by how attractive he could be. You think you were set up? Trust me, I’m way ahead of you.”

Her mouth opened and closed a couple of times. “Why would Penelope do that?”

If Anne didn’t know, she wasn’t going to like it. “If you helped him, she wasn’t involved. You rented his apartment. You got him his cell phone. Your name is on his utilities. With your name on everything, Colin could disappear on the spur of the moment, with not many clues as to where he’d been.” It was a good play. I knew how that trick worked. I’d done it enough times, to other people.

Anne looked as though she might throw up. Time to change the subject. I turned over a picture and covered everything but Penelope’s face. “How old is Penelope here?” I asked.

Anne took a closer look. Then she stood up, putting her hand up to her face as though that could hide what she’d seen. “I’m not sure.”

“Please. Take one little guess.”

She kept her back to me as she fumbled through the cabinet for a mug. She spilled the milk the first time she tried to pour it into her cup. Her fingers couldn’t get a good hold on the carafe. After a few seconds, she stood at the counter, not moving.

I said nothing and waited for her to get herself under control.

When she came back to the table, her cup of milky coffee in hand, I asked her again how old she thought Penelope was there.

Anne took a deep breath. “When we were in high school. Maybe eighth grade. Her hair was shorter then. Blonder. She said blonde hair would help her in auditions.”

Auditions. I’d heard of the casting couch but this was insane. I looked at the expression on Penelope’s face in the photo: complete boredom. Here she was, thirteen or fourteen, and she might have been doing math homework, if you didn’t see what the other person in the picture was doing to her.

I was having sex when I was fourteen. I’d thought it was fun. (Well, not the part with my stepfather Patrick. But I hadn’t thought about him in years.) Of course, I hadn’t understood at the time that an older man like Peter Quaid didn’t feel quite the same way about me as I felt about him. Even so, I couldn’t imagine being bored with sex by that age.

I turned the picture over again. “Dammit.”

Anne’s jaw trembled. Then, surprisingly, she started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Now I know why Penelope always had money in school. Her mom didn’t work much. Penny wasn’t getting any acting jobs and she wasn’t working at Starbucks. She said it was residuals from the TV show. And since her family was limited to her and her mom, how much money would they need, right?” Her face got serious again. “My God, my uncle?”

“Are you close to him?”

“No. But…still.”

“Were you and Penelope good friends in high school?”

Anne shrugged. “I thought we were.”

“This isn’t the kind of thing you can talk about, even with your best friend.” I wondered for a second what best friends did talk about together.

Focus on the problem at hand, Dru.

“Do you have any guess who might have taken these pictures? Where Colin might have gotten them?”

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “He didn’t take them from Penny?”

I shook my head. “In fact, if I understand what Penelope was getting at yesterday—”

“You saw her?”

“Oh, yes. She said you were singing my praises.”

Anne snorted. Not gently, either.

Points to her for honesty. “I thought as much. But that is what she said. She wanted to talk to me about Colin. Then it seemed she wanted to seduce me.”

Anne’s eyes widened. “Really?”

Discussion about Penelope’s many and varied proclivities would have to wait until after I knew Anne a little better. “I’ll tell you about our conversation in a second. When she wasn’t trying to snog me, she told me Colin was supposed to get pictures for her. She thought he’d given them to her, and then discovered she’d been had. I found these yesterday.”

Anne tilted backward in her chair, balancing on the two back legs and making me somewhat nervous. She studied me, her brown eyes seeming to examine every inch of my face. Then she stood, the chair dropping to the floor with a bang. Anne had come to some sort of decision.

“The night he…died, Colin called me. Late at night. Did I tell you that?”

“No, as a matter of fact you didn’t. I told you he called me. You seemed devastated by that news.”

She picked the chair up and righted it. “I was afraid he’d called you to say the same thing he’d said to me. He’d never said it before.”

“Which was?”

“He told me he loved me.”

She had my full attention. “He said what?”

“I thought it was one of those things people say, so I said, ‘Oh, Colin, I love you, too,’ something stupid like that, and he was quiet for a second, and then he said, ‘No, I love you.’ And then he said the two of us needed to talk, really talk, after he’d dealt with a couple of things.” She pulled the chair out and sat down. “Guess it didn’t go so good.”

I have no idea how long I sat there, unable to speak. I could only stare at her, with her short brown hair and glasses and heart-shaped face and felt something, some knot of a feeling, unravel in my stomach. Was this jealousy? Was I jealous that Colin said that to her? No, I was certain it wasn’t. There were any number of feelings I’d had about Colin, particularly in the last two days, but ownership had never been one of them. Maybe it was shock? That he’d said that?

Then it dawned on me. What I was feeling was sadness. For her. For him. Because right after they’d talked, everything had gone to hell.

I expect things to go to hell. Other people tend to be more resigned to it. But surprisingly, I had one ray of light to offer Anne on this.

“Anne, I’m going to tell you something, and you can believe it or not, it’s up to you. But I knew Colin well enough. He never told anyone he loved them.”

She shrugged. “Who knows why he said it.”

I put my hand over hers and she stared at me, surprised at any sort of physical connection between us. “Anne, I don’t know why he originally talked to you that night at the club, or what kind of plan he and Penelope cooked up between the two of them. But I saw Colin with a lot of women, and he never bothered saying he loved them. Ever. Why he said it to you then, that night, who knows. But it wasn’t something he was in the habit of throwing out there, okay?”

It took a second for her to react, but when she did, it was total. She started crying, the kind of sobs where you can’t breathe in between the waves. She rocked back and forth, keening in a way I’d never heard before. It sounded much more natural and true than the stoic, solemn bravery I had seen so much of. She moved to the floor, no longer worried about balancing on the chair, and she cried. As soon as one wave of sorrow broke, a wave of fury and frustration would build up.

I got down on the floor and put my arms around her. Whatever her relationship with Colin had been like, it had hit her harder than a span of two months would have indicated. Was that possible, to fall in love like that, so hard, so totally? And what did that feel like? It seemed so unlikely. Most people can’t stop lying to themselves that long, let alone another person.

When she’d calmed down enough to cry quietly, I hunted down the nearest box of tissues and brought it back to the kitchen table. She took a few and blew her nose into them. She kept blowing and wiping until I was sure she must have been dehydrated.

When she gathered up the bushel of used tissues, I said, “I thought telling you would make you feel better.”

“Don’t you understand?” Her face still contorted from crying, but she was smiling nonetheless. “It does.”

It took a few minutes more for her to gain control of herself. She washed her face in the kitchen sink and patted it dry with a dishtowel. She washed her glasses and wiped them with the same towel. Then she came back to the kitchen table and plopped down in her chair.

“Anyhow.” Her attempt to change the subject made us both laugh. “The reason I was telling you that was, he called from a number I’d never seen before.” She rattled it off. It had the Las Vegas 702 area code, but I didn’t recognize it. I shrugged and shook my head. “Yesterday, after you came by, I got curious. So I looked at the phone’s records.”

“And how did you do that?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m a journalist. I’m magic.”

To be fair, getting a hold of a phone’s records is one of the easier ways to gather information. I liked Anne.

“And?”

“The phone number’s about eight months old. From last summer.”

“When Penelope met him.”

She licked a few drops of coffee off her lips. “Guess who the phone’s registered to.”

“Not Colin, I’ll guess.”

She shook her head.

After a few seconds, I gave up.

Anne leaned toward me. “You.”

My mouth dropped open. “What?”

“You got a great calling plan on this phone.”

“You’re making this up.”

She shook her head. “Almost all of the calls to or from that number came from one phone number, in Studio City. That is, up until about two months ago.”

I sat back in my chair. “And the phone calls stop when he leaves Vegas.” Anne nodded at me. “Perhaps he didn’t need to call that number so often because he was talking to whoever he’d been calling in person.”

Anne tapped the side of her nose. “Exactly.”

“Who was he calling? Spit it out, Anne, or I’ll throttle you.”

“Guess. All right, fine. Here’s a hint: Studio City.”

“Where in the name of Zeus is Studio City?”

“Oh. It’s on the other side of the hill. In the Valley? Lots of TV people live there.”

“Penelope lives in Venice.” Although she had just moved, hadn’t she? Her big move out of the house.

She smiled. “But you’re close. The number belongs to Eileen Gurevich.”

“Penelope’s…”

“Mother.” Anne leaned back in her chair again. “Who, if you read magazines such as
People
, isn’t getting along with her famous daughter so well at the moment.”

There weren’t many scenarios that would make this all better, but the one she was hinting at was awful. “He wasn’t calling Penelope? Colin was helping Eileen blackmail her own daughter?”

Anne didn’t like that idea any more than I did. “It might explain where those photos came from.”

The mother having the pictures made sense. I mentally slapped myself for even thinking that, but it was true. Someone had had to take the pictures and then hold on to them for insurance. Or whatever they planned to do with them. Since Penelope only had her mother growing up, Eileen was the logical candidate.

Parents can do awful things sometimes.

“Maybe I should have a little chat with Eileen. And tell her I have the pictures. Find out what she knows.”

“When?”

“No time like the present.”

Anne stood up. “I’ll go with you. For one thing, she’s known me since I was in eighth grade. She’s far more likely to talk to me than to you. And for another…” She looked at me. “I don’t believe he’d do something like that. That he’d start blackmailing someone.”

She must not have known anyone is capable of anything, if you push them hard enough. She’d learn.

That was not a fun line of thought to follow. So as I do with all unpleasant thoughts, I forced myself to think about other things. I stared at the crockery lining the counter under the glassware cabinet.

She picked up her phone and called that number in Studio City. After a few rings, she said, “Eileen? Hi, it’s Anne da Silva…Hey, listen, would you mind doing a quickie interview with me?…Great. Is today good?…I’ll be there at ten.” She hung up. She shook her head. “Publicity gets them every time.”

“But Penelope’s mother isn’t famous.”

“Everyone’s convinced they’re really the famous ones. Have you hired your PR person yet?” Anne laughed. Then she looked thoughtful. “Do you really think Eileen knows something?”

I nodded. “How do we get there?”

“Take the 101 north.”

“What is that? Everyone says ‘the’ 101.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just how we do it in LA. Maybe saying ‘the’ alerts everyone that the conversation has turned to driving.”

“As far as I can tell, most conversations in LA are about driving.”

She nodded. “True enough. Whose car?”

So I ended up driving over to the Valley with my husband’s girlfriend to find out if a TV star’s mother had murdered him and maybe knew anything about the blackmail-worthy photos of her own daughter. I fit in so well with the vibe around here I began to wonder if I’d been an Angeleno in a previous life.

C
HAPTER
N
INETEEN

WE HEADED “OVER the hill” to the San Fernando Valley. Anne told me about how Los Angeles was divided up: movie people lived in the Basin, on the West Side (Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Westwood, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades), and TV people, who had less prestige than movie people, lived on the other side of the Mulholland ridge, in Studio City or Sherman Oaks or Encino.

Growing up, Anne’s family had been movie people and lived in Westwood. Penelope was TV and lived in Sherman Oaks. The girls had attended the same school, the exclusive and expensive Hargreaves Prep. The kind of school that would mold the girls into high-achieving, well-educated members of society.

I attended schools like that. Didn’t help develop me into a better person than I was turning out to be anyway. I doubt it did with any of the other girls, either.

Penelope’s mother Eileen now lived in Studio City, in a ranch-style house south of Ventura Boulevard. That was the cushier area, so Eileen was doing well. On the Basin side of town, the important address was “north of Sunset Boulevard.” Everything I heard about this place told me living in Los Angeles seemed to be all about 1) where you lived and 2) what you drove.

The house wasn’t anything fancy. Every house on the block looked almost exactly like it, except for the new McMansion at the end of the block, rising from the ashes of a previous ranch house. Eileen’s house was a pale yellow, with giant rocks forming the exterior shell of the fireplace. The front lawn was neatly mowed, and there were fences marking each side of the property, as there were between every two houses on the block.