Celebrity Sudoku (14 page)

“From the looks of you, is much of that set standing anymore?” Liza tried to joke.

Rikki took her seriously. “The brick front on one of the buildings peeled off—a falling piece clipped Lolly. If she’d been just a step or two over—”

Lolly shuddered. “I’d be dead, too.”

Michael’s face got an intent look as he glanced between mother and daughter. “Do they know when the building fell?”

Sure,
Liza thought.
If those bricks fell during the first tremor, that would place Lolly away from Ritz—give her an alibi.

Rikki saw where he was going and shook her head. “Nothing was shooting in the area, so no one was there. Nobody knows.”

Liza frowned, trying to remember her studio geography. The Boots Bungalow was part of the small-town America area—and wasn’t all that far from the fake big-city downtown.

If Lolly ran that way after pushing Ritz into the collapsing bungalow during the first tremor, she could have reached the city set just in time to get conked on the head by the second quake.
Liza tried to keep her face neutral as she considered that scenario.

She looked into Lolly’s eyes, seeing the confusion and terror there.

I’ve spent years in show business, with more actors than I can count trying to blow smoke up my butt,
she thought.
If Lolly is faking this . . .

Well, Lolly had been portraying different roles since early childhood. It would take supreme acting ability to play the part of an innocent.

Liza looked at the young woman again. She seemed genuinely mystified. That and the fear flickering in the backs of Lolly’s eyes convinced Liza that the amnesia story was for real.

If that were so, then not even Lolly knew what happened in the Boots Bungalow. That meant it was possible that she had indeed killed Ritz—for a reason she now couldn’t remember.

Okay, then. The job was to find out what Lolly did remember, and see how it fit with what Liza and Michael had found out so far.

Liza decided to try to circle in slowly for what she needed. “Ritz didn’t try to make herself very popular on the set. In fact, she seemed determined to go in pretty much the opposite direction.”

Lolly nodded. “She got into a fight with Darrie Brunswick.” She looked at her mother. “Didn’t you tell me that?”

“You were there,” Liza said gently. “Darrie got so worked up, the producer decided to call an early lunch to give her some time to try and calm down.”

Rikki pounced on the possibility. “So there’s one person that Quigley man should be looking at.”

“One of many.” Liza chose her words carefully, not wanting to give away any of the secrets people had entrusted her with. “Ritz had information that could have embarrassed Forty Oz. and Samantha Pang, and let them know about that. She also put some personal pressure on Chard Switzer. All of them said she was up to something, but none of them knew exactly what that might be.”

She took a deep breath. “So I have to ask you, Lolly. How was Ritz with you? Did she say anything?”

Lolly could only shake her head helplessly. “She was . . . I don’t know, kind of weird. When they heard I’d be on the show with her, friends warned me that Ritz had a bizarre sense of humor—like the way she got Chard Switzer to change his name.”

“He told us about that,” Michael said.

“But she never did anything and barely said anything to me.” Lolly gave an uncomfortable shrug. “But every once in a while, I’d catch her looking at me, and she’d have this really creepy smile.”

“You never told me about that.” Rikki Popovic’s voice was sharp.

“Mom, it’s like I said. She never did anything. When we talked she was all business, concentrating on the show. She even gave me some puzzles to practice on.”

Lolly glanced over at Liza. “She said she’d taken a class with you and could even make up her own sudoku.”

Looks as if Ritz didn’t mention
where
she took the class,
Liza thought. “I wouldn’t say she was my smartest student,” she said.

“I guess not,” Lolly agreed. “When I tried to work out one of them, I couldn’t get anywhere. It was all messed up.”

Liza found herself intrigued. “Do you still have them?”

Lolly nodded. “Sure. We had the same Solv-a-Doku app on our phones.”

“Oh.” Liza had helped to work on the original Solv-a-Doku program, but she hadn’t heard about this latest development. “I don’t think my phone—”

“I’ve got it on mine,” Michael said. He gave Lolly his number. She dug out her cell phone and started transferring the puzzles.

Rikki gave them both a skeptical look. “You think those puzzles mean something?”

From the look on her face, she thought they were all wasting valuable time.

“I just wanted to see how Ritz was using what I taught her,” Liza answered. “Who knows? Maybe there’s even a column in it.”

“That’s right.” Rikki’s voice got a bit colder. “You’re a journalist now.” The way she said it, “journalist” and “enemy” were about the same thing in her dictionary.

Liza sighed. She’d seen this reaction before. “I write about sudoku,” she told Rikki. “There’s very little breaking news in that field.”

But apparently even the thought of journalists made Rikki nervous. “We’ve been staying at a motel not too far from here,” she said. “Maybe we should be moving.”

Lolly laughed. “Mom makes sure we have our bags packed whenever we leave the room.”

“Not such a bad idea.”
If you’re on the run,
Liza added silently.
Michael’s right. Rikki knows a lot about the going-into-seclusion thing.

“Would you mind giving us a lift?” Lolly’s mom asked Michael. “I left our car, and we’ve been using cabs. It would make things easier.”

It could also be construed as aiding and abetting a fugitive,
Liza thought.

Michael evidently had the same idea. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asked. “I don’t know if Detective Quigley—”

“The detective told us not to leave town, and we haven’t,” Rikki said. “He has our cell phone numbers. If he wants us, he can call us. We’ll come in.” From the look on her face, that last idea didn’t go down very comfortably.

Michael still tried to dodge. “It’s not a big car, and with Liza’s walker—”

“Liza and I could stay here while you get our stuff from the motel,” Lolly volunteered. “We could go and have a burger in the same place where you and I had breakfast, Mom.”

“Maybe that would be a good idea,” Liza spoke up, surprising Michael and definitely not pleasing Rikki, who seemed determined to monitor everything her daughter said. “We’ll just relax for a little and let you guys do the heavy lifting.”

Rikki gave in with ill grace. Liza leaned against her walker as Michael and Lolly’s mom set off back to dry land.

“So where’s this burger place?” she asked.

Lolly led the way to a pleasant-looking little café on a side street. She declined a table on the outdoor patio for a booth inside.

Liza nodded in appreciation. Somewhere along the line, Lolly had picked up some basic anti-paparazzi training.

They sat down, and Lolly enthusiastically ordered the Swiss cheeseburger platter and an iced tea. Liza followed suit, adding a Diet Coke instead.

“Like that’s going to help,” she said wryly, making Lolly laugh.

“I know. I’m going way off my usual diet here,” the young actress said after the waitress left. “Mom would kill me.”

“We’ll tell her we had the health salad,” Liza promised. Lolly had definitely relaxed after Rikki left. With her mother around, Liza noticed that Lolly had barely gotten a word in edgewise.

Their orders arrived, and Lolly began making serious inroads on her burger and fries.

“Most folks outside the Business wouldn’t think twice about ordering this.” Liza took a bite from her own cheeseburger and held it up.

“Yeah, they see somebody like Forty Oz. partying at Café Tabú and figure that must be the life.” Lolly took a sip of her tea. “They don’t see the careful eating, or getting to bed at nine so you can be on the set at some ungodly hour for makeup call.”

“Or kids taking classes during the downtime between filming scenes,” Liza said. “That must have been like having two jobs at once.”

Lolly nodded. “I spent a lot of time at boarding schools while Mom went abroad to make movies.” She nibbled meditatively on the end of a French fry. “I think some of them she was kind of embarrassed over. No place to take a kid. When I started working, she insisted I only take U.S. projects. ‘That’s where you’re going to make your career,’ she’d say. I still don’t have a passport.”

“That’s what happens sometimes with people who lead exciting lives,” Liza said with a smile. “They know too well what can happen to their kids.”

“It’s always been Mom and me against the world.” Lolly poured a little pond of catsup onto her plate for dipping her fries. “My dad died before I was born, you know.”

“That’s right.” Hazy headlines about Lukas Popovic’s death rose up in Liza’s memory. “He was lost at sea.”

“Mom says he always loved his sailboat.” Lolly’s fry consumption slowed down. “It was how he’d decompress after a project—climb aboard and go wherever the wind took him.”

She gave Liza a bittersweet smile. “He and Mom got married on the boat. Dad pulled into some port in Mexico and got the local priest to hitch them. He was a monk in one of those brown robes with a hood. The mayor was this guy with a big black mustache. They just came aboard and did the ceremony. Sailing back to L.A. was their honeymoon, and then I came along. Mom was carrying me when Dad finished his next picture, and she didn’t want to go sailing in her condition. Dad went anyway . . . and you know the rest.”

Lolly looked silently at her plate for a moment. “Maybe having adventures isn’t such a great thing.”

They finished their meals in silence, lingering over their drinks after Liza had the waitress remove their plates. “Disposing of the evidence,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.

But the word “evidence” obviously got Lolly thinking about her plight. “Do you believe me about the amnesia?” she asked abruptly, leaning across the table, her voice going low. “That detective obviously doesn’t, and I can’t talk to Mom about this.”

“I do believe you.” Lolly would have to be either the clone of Meryl Streep or a psychopath to carry off a deception of this magnitude. “And I know that head injuries can do strange things,” she went on. “That can be taken to ridiculous extremes on TV and in the movies—”

“Soap operas,” Lolly agreed with a wan smile.

“But it does happen.” Liza dug out her cell phone. “I’m going to get on to my partner and see if her connections can come up with a good neurologist for you. Someone who might be able to explain the memory situation to you better”—she nodded toward the bandages hidden under Lolly’s hat—“and who can look at those stitches for you. You won’t be going back to the celebrity health care of Bel Air, will you?”

“I guess not.” Lolly reached across the table to take Liza’s hand before she could begin dialing. “And thanks for listening. You don’t know how it feels, not being able to remember anything . . . especially when that means anything
could
have happened.”

She looked at Liza, her eyes haunted. “How can I know?”

“Maybe the doctor can help,” Liza said gently. “I understand that sometimes when the brain takes a shock, memories can come back in time on their own.”

She gave Lolly’s hand a gentle squeeze. “Until that happens—”

“Unless,” Lolly said miserably.

“You can’t know,” Liza went on. “The only way you can deal with the uncertainty is to hope for the best. You have your mom on your side, and you have Michael and me, too.”

Lolly’s face took on the same expression Liza had seen a thousand times before—the gratitude of someone in trouble being bailed out.

This time, at least we’re helping a fairly decent person, not some spoiled brat,
Liza thought grimly.
I only hope we can make good on what I just promised.

The cell phone lying disregarded in Liza’s hand began to bleat. The caller ID showed Michelle Markson’s name, so Liza made the connection. “I was just about to call you,” she began.

“We need to meet.” Michelle cut right over Liza’s words. “I take it you’re not in Michael’s house, because my call there went to his answering system. How soon can you get here?”

“We’re in Santa Monica, but Michael isn’t with me right now.”

“At least you’re close enough to Century City. Please get here as soon as possible.” Coming from Michelle, that meant “the day before yesterday.”

Before her partner could hang up, Liza said, “There was a reason I was going to call you.” In a low voice, she explained Lolly’s problem.

“Amnesia?” Michelle’s voice dripped with cynical disbelief. “And you believe her?”

“I’m having lunch with her,” Liza diplomatically replied. “So you can’t answer my question in front of her face,” Michelle said.

“No, I can do that,” Liza said into her phone. “And the answer would be yes.”

That left her with a brief silence from Michelle. “You always had this tendency toward kindheartedness,” her partner finally said. “It made you popular with clients, but it can be a drawback in our business—makes it hard to read people.”

“There is that,” Liza said. “I guess we can discuss it when I see you.”

“By which time I should probably have the name of someone to treat your friend.” With her sources of information, Michelle would probably dig up a neurologist long before Liza and Michael made it to her office.

Liza thanked Michelle, who, as usual, clicked off in the middle.

“I’ll be seeing Michelle later, so I should have a name for you afterward.”

“Thanks.” Lolly raised a careful hand to rub at the bandage under her hat. “This is getting kind of itchy.”