Celebrity Sudoku (12 page)

“Arlie said it would be easy—show people what I looked like in front of the cameras, maybe get a little TV or movie work, you know what I’m sayin’?”

People have been sayin’ that or some variation of it for about a hundred years now,
Liza thought. Instead she said, semi-truthfully, “I was talking to Ritz Tarleton’s father today. He’s working on the eulogy and trying to get together some recent remembrances from—”

“Yeah, I heard about her. That’s messed up,” Claudio interrupted.

Liza gritted her teeth. “So I was wondering if the people who had been with her during her last appearance might have something to say.”

“Like me?” Claudio sounded really surprised now. “I don’t think she said three words to me on the set that day.”

“Had you met her before the day you taped?” Liza pressed on.

“No.” Claudio paused for a second. “Well, yes. I bumped into her a month or so ago at a fund-raiser. Sports scholarships for poor kids. Frankly, I was a little surprised. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing where you’d see Ritz Tarleton turning up. So we talked, and it was kind of funny—like she was checking me out.”

He gave a quick, nervous laugh. “Not that I was interested or anything. I’ve got a wife—”

And I’m sure she’d be glad to hear all about this,
Liza thought.

“And, you know, Ritz has—had—a bit of a rep,” the football player went on. “Anyway, we talked for maybe five minutes, and that was that. Next time I saw her was at the show, and then she was like, ‘Hi, howyadoin’.’ ” He paused again, a bit put out. “She didn’t even wish me good luck or anything.”

Breathing a silent sigh of relief that Claudio didn’t have anything to add to her fictitious eulogy, Liza thanked the quarterback and disconnected the call.

“So?” Michael asked. “Was there any connection?”

“There was, but not the way Claudio thought,” Liza replied slowly. “He thought she was checking him out.”

Michael’s eyebrows rose. “À la Forty Oz.?”

Liza nodded. “Although Claudio was quick to remind me that he had a wife. But I don’t think that’s what Ritz was checking out. Claudio’s not the sharpest tool in the workshop. I think that once Ritz was sure he wouldn’t be any competition for her on
D-Kodas
, she didn’t even bother with him.”

She sat silent for a moment, gently rubbing her hurt knee and frowning. “One other thing. Ritz arranged to bump into Claudio a month before the taping.”

Michael looked confused.

“Back then, Sukey Tupp was still the official contestant. Whatever Ritz was doing, she was planning it well in advance.”

 

 

Liza caught Samantha Pang at home early in the evening. The mathematician didn’t buy into Liza’s eulogy story at all.

“I know we’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead.” Sam Pang’s voice trembled a little. “But I can’t say I’m sorry about what happened to Ritz Tarleton. Okay, maybe having a house fall on her was a bit much—but then, she acted like a wicked witch to me.”

Liza didn’t even get a chance to ask a question—Sam just sucked in a breath and went on. “I can’t believe how stupid I was, falling for her nice act. It’s bad enough she made me up like a clown; she made a fool of me, too. But that’s not the worst of it—she took pictures, too.”

Liza thought back to the scene in the makeup department. Yes, she’d heard a click behind her, and when she turned around, Ritz had pocketed something.

A cell phone camera,
Liza thought.

“That night, she sent me a picture—I looked like Bozette!” Sam almost wailed. “I think she sent me a dumb sudoku, too—the thing didn’t even work. Then the next morning, she caught me alone and said, ‘I’ll make it clear—either you dial down your game today, or tomorrow your picture will be the lead story on
The Lowdown
.”

“But you got the first of the magic squares in the first puzzle,” Liza said.

“I was so angry, at first I thought, ‘The hell with it,’ ” Samantha said. “But every time I looked at the puzzle, that picture kept coming up in front of me. I got scared. She could have made me a laughingstock, not just to people watching television, but to my students and, worse, my academic peers. Oh, nobody would say anything out loud, but would a clown get tenure, promotions? This could have wrecked my whole career.”

Sam Pang gulped for air. “So I
did
dial it back, and Ritz won the game. If that earthquake hadn’t hit . . . What the hell did she
want
?”

“I’m wondering if we’ll ever know,” Liza said soberly.

“I just want to forget it.” Sam’s voice came tightly over the line. “But I keep thinking that picture of me is still out there somewhere. Do you think if I asked the police, they might erase it from her phone?”

I think if you asked the wrong cop, you might wind up on
The Lowdown
anyway,
Liza thought.

“Maybe you’d want to wait until Ritz’s personal effects come back to her father,” Liza advised. “Mr. Tarleton is a reasonable man. If you want, I’ll talk to him.”

“Thank you,” Sam said. “I’ll take any help I can get. This is killing me, Ms. Kelly.”

They ended the phone call, and Liza told Michael about the photograph.

“So we have one warning and two attempts at blackmail.”

“And one contestant too dumb to bother with,” Liza finished for him.

“Or maybe not so dumb,” Michael argued. “Chard Switzer, Forty Oz., and Sam Pang were pretty up-front about Ritz twisting their arms, admitting to motives to murder her.”

“The cops aren’t publicly talking about murder yet,” Liza pointed out.

Michael nodded. “So they don’t see any problem with coming clean about it. The only one who’d deny having any motive would be someone who knows a murder was committed—because he was the murderer.”

Liza stared at him. “So, by that logic, you’re saying that Claudio Day ...”

“He plays pro football, where even the quarterbacks are big, strong guys.” Michael made a violent pushing motion. “He’d have the muscle to send Ritz flying. That’s means. I guess we’ll have to look into opportunity while Buck digs into motive.”

Michael sat down beside Liza on the couch, reaching for the TV remote. “That seems to be all we can do right now.
The Lowdown
is coming on now. Let’s see if Sam Pang’s picture turns up on this edition.”

The lead story didn’t feature Sam. Instead, Liza saw Forty Oz. and his entourage coming out of Café Tabú—and then her own angry face telling the cameraman that she wasn’t the rapper’s grandmother.

The image froze, and Don Lowe appeared with his signature clipboard. “She may not be a household name, but Liza Kelly has a certain amount of celebrity for writing about puzzles—and solving murders.”

His face filled the screen as he looked straight into the camera. “What a coincidence that she seems to be following one of the last people who saw Ritz Tarleton alive—especially since we hear that LAPD investigators are now treating her death as a murder.”

The next five minutes of
The Lowdown
presented a video eulogy for Ritz Tarleton. Liza watched bikini clips from Ritz’s beach-bunny days doing her father’s travel show. Then came a series of glamour scenes of Ritz attending Hollywood premieres with A-list types.

There were no mug shots, however—Don Lowe and company had decided to gloss over her follies—although they did show Ritz smirking in the background as one of her friends did a reenactment of the Marilyn Monroe subway-grating pose—this time without any underwear.

Liza just sat through the whole sequence in shock until Michael handed her the phone—she hadn’t even realized it was ringing.

“Well, I suppose I should be glad you didn’t give that paparazzo the finger,” Michelle Markson told her crisply. “Though why I should be repeating to you of all people the basic rule about keeping a low profile while cameras are around—”

She broke off, abruptly changing gears. “Usually I’d say any publicity is good publicity. I’m not sure, though, if it’s helpful for a discreet investigation to be plastered across the airwaves on a celebrity gossip show.”

“It won’t please the people I’ve spoken with,” Liza admitted. “Nor will it please the cops to have their investigation leaked onto national syndication.”

“Not to mention the fact that you’re competing with them.” Michelle’s voice was interrupted by a call-waiting beep. “I’ll get off, trusting my point has been made. If that interruption turns out to be a press inquiry, perhaps you’d be better off referring them to me.”

“I’m not answering it,” Liza assured her partner. But as soon as she hung up the receiver, the phone began to ring.

A second later, another ringtone chimed in from the cell phone in Liza’s bag. Then Michael’s cell began to bleat.

“What are we going to do?” Liza asked.

“Switch them all to silent mode and let voice mail deal with the idiots.” Michael was already fiddling with his cell phone’s keypad. Then he turned off the ringer on the landline, dug out Liza’s phone for her to reset, rejoined her on the couch, and picked up the remote. “In the meantime, let’s see if we can find a nice, safe, old sitcom we can watch instead of the news.”

 

 

Liza ignored the phone through the evening and the early morning by immersing herself in sudoku, manually creating new puzzles. After all, her cushion—the stockpile of columns already in the hands of her editor—wouldn’t last forever.

She had just finished a fairly tough sudoku when their privacy bubble was popped by an official house call from Detective Hal Quigley.

At least there aren’t any film crews lurking outside to catch this,
Liza consoled herself as she stacked the puzzles beside her on the sofa.

Quigley didn’t even bother to maintain a cop’s usual impassive expression as he sat down beside Liza. He brushed a finger over her sudoku efforts, his anchormanly features twisted in a frown.

“It’s sudoku,” she said, gathering up the pages. “It’s my business.”

“Then I wish you’d mind your own instead of pushing your nose into mine,” he told her gruffly. “Do I have to remind you that impeding a police investigation is a crime?”

“I’m not impeding anything,” Liza replied. “Before she died, Ritz Tarleton did hurtful things to several people—including friends of mine. I was just trying to find out why—”

“And considering your experience with the other murder cases you’ve interfered in, you didn’t think Ms. Tarleton’s actions might, just possibly, contribute to a motive for her death?”

Liza phrased her answer carefully. She wasn’t supposed to know for sure that Quigley and his squad were treating Ritz’s death as a murder. But she couldn’t be sure that Quigley hadn’t already questioned Buck Foreman. “The people I spoke with seemed pretty forthcoming about their relationships with Ritz. I had no expectation that they’d say anything different to you.”

Quigley’s lips made a tight line as he looked at her. “So what, exactly, did they say?”

Liza recounted the stories that Chard, Forty Oz., Samantha Pang, and Claudio Day had told her. When she finished, she asked, “Did they say anything different to you?”

“Not in the end,” Quigley conceded. “Ms. Pang, for one, was more evasive when I questioned her.”

“Several of them faced severe embarrassment because of Ritz,” Liza offered.

“That’s an interesting way to characterize attempted extortion,” Quigley said bluntly. He leaned forward, his faded blue eyes concentrating on Liza’s face. “And one of the people I spoke with can’t even account for her whereabouts at the time of the fatal attack.”

Please let it be Darrie Brunswick,
Liza silently prayed.

“Who might that be?” Michael asked, his voice as tight as Liza’s insides felt.

Quigley looked over at him. “That’s right—you’re a friend of Rikki Popovic’s. And the two of you had dinner the other evening with her and her daughter, Lolly.”

Liza went with the honest answer to his unasked question. “She asked me for some career advice.”

“Well, now she may be looking for some legal advice.” Quigley’s eyebrows rose as he looked back and forth between Michael and Liza. “You didn’t know about that? How odd. Asking all those questions of virtual strangers—I wonder why you didn’t ask your friends about Ritz Tarleton.”

He rose to his feet. “Since that idiot on TV leaked the information that we’re investigating a murder, I don’t suppose it will be long before news of a person of interest comes out.” He shook his head in polite disbelief. “Lolly Popovic claims she doesn’t know what happened during the earthquake. If you believe her, she has amnesia.”

Quigley walked out before either Liza or Michael got over their shock. When the door swung shut, Michael finally moved to the window. “He’s gone,” he reported, “not hanging around to eavesdrop.”

He turned from the window, standing silent for a moment. Liza recognized the expression—the writer was trying to find the words. “I appreciate that you respected my friendship with Rikki—that you didn’t start right in asking questions about Lolly.”