Eats to Die For! (6 page)

Popping up again, I faced the nerdy kid next door.

“Wow, that looked like it really hurt,” Avery Klemmer said.

“Yeah, it hurt,” I assured him through gritted teeth, “but it's all part of the P.I. game.”

“Tell you what,” Avery called back, “why don't you open the front door and I'll in that way.”

I was about to refuse, but then realized that if not for him I wouldn't have gotten this far, so I felt that I owed him something.

“All right.” Stepping inside the darkened apartment, careful not to disturb the ransacked clutter, I first lifted my shirt to make sure I was not bleeding. My stomach was a little red, but miraculously there were no abrasions.

When I opened the front door, Avery was already standing there.

“This is so cool,” he said, grinning like a jack-o-lantern.

“Come on in, but don't touch anything,” I replied. “Technically, we're both trespassing.”

“That's what's so cool. It's like I've made it to the hidden level.”

No one said anything in my head, but I did hear the
Twilight Zone
theme music.

I glanced both ways down the hall to make sure we were not being seen by the sodden manager or anyone else, and once satisfied on that score, I closed the door and turned the lock again, then switched on the lights.

“Wow, what happened here?” Avery asked.

“Someone's gone through the place, in search of something.”

“In search of what?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe that stuff you found earlier.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

I'd actually forgotten about the folder I'd taken, which was probably still in Avery's place. I was pretty sure that wasn't the object of the search, or else it wouldn't have been left behind, but I didn't bother explaining that to him.

Instead I started looking around myself. There were not a lot of things hanging on the walls of Louie Sandoval's apartment, just a large clock, a framed poster from a Leonard Cohen concert, an unseasonal wreath, and a photo of a young man, stripped to the waist, and in a lot better shape than I ever was. A boyfriend? It had to be.

I looked behind each hanging object; the bug had been placed behind the Cohen poster.

“Did you find something?” Avery Klemmer asked.

“Mm-hmm,” I uttered, pulling the bug off the backing and carefully stepping through the mess on the floor to the bathroom, which had also been ransacked. Hair stuff and a few pill bottles were strewn around the counter, including one for birth control pills.

The bare-chested guy in the photo was a lucky dude, and had I known who he was, I'd contact him immediately to see if he had any insight into Louie's disappearance. As for the bug, I didn't bother putting this one in the toilet tank. I simply flushed it down the stool.

Except for the fact that the place was trashed, this had the same M.O. as my break-in, which meant the burglar had probably picked the front lock to gain entry, and while I had no proof that it had been the same person who had broken into my office, it argued so. What's more, the fact that my place was left neat—neater than it had been before, in fact—while Louie's place was a mess, argued that the burglar knew she wouldn't be coming back. Like maybe the burglar was the one responsible for her disappearance.

Not so fast, kid
, Bogart chimed in.
Something doesn't add up.

“What?” I asked aloud.

“What?” Avery responded.

“Oh, I was just thinking out loud. I do that sometimes.”

“Yeah, the people in my games do that, too.”

Swell. I was about to phrase my confusion over Bogie's comment in the form of a mental question when it finally hit me. If the burglar knew Louie was not going to be coming back, why did he bother to plant a bug? Unless the bug had been planted some time earlier, but had yielded no information, so whoever is listening was forced to go to the next level, breaking in and turning the apartment over…and possibly taking Louie.

“Do you know who this is?” Avery was asking, as he stared at the photo of Louie and Mr. America.

“Joe Six-Pack Abs? No, I have no idea. You live here, have you ever seen him?”

“No, but I hate him. He probably hates me, too.”

“If he knew you existed, he might,” I said before I could stop myself, and immediately the voice of Sabu—said:
You must not damage your Karma, master
. I'll try to remember that, Sabu. I'll try to be nicer to those few individuals in the world who are worse off than me. But what do you care anyway? You were Muslim, not Hindu. You didn't know from Karma. Still, the Elephant Boy had a point.

As I moved toward the bedroom, the door of which was hanging open, Avery said: “You're not going to search her bedroom, are you?”

“There might be evidence in there.”

“But that's an invasion of privacy. I mean, it's her bedroom. You can't just go in and search it.”

“I'll leave a chocolate on the pillow when I'm done. That'll make it all better.”

Not bad, kid
, Bogie said in my head.

Switching on the bedroom lights I saw an even bigger, more concentrated mess than existed in the living room. Every bit of clothing from the closet and dresser must have been pulled out and tossed into a variety of piles. Kneeling, I peered under the bed, but found nothing. I'm not sure what I'd been expecting to find, but it was the cleanest under-bed space I'd ever seen. There weren't even any shoes.

If there was some indication as to the disappearance of Louie Sandoval in this room, I wasn't getting the message.

Message
.

That had been my own voice inside my head, clueing me into what a dope I was being. Message. I had called Louie several times and left a message on her phone machine, which had to be here somewhere.

Going back out to the living room, I began searching again.

“What are you looking for now?” Avery asked.

“A telephone with a phone answering machine. I left messages for Louie, so she has to have one.”

“Unless it's the message box in her cell phone,” Avery said. “In that case it wouldn't be here. She'd have it with her.”

He had a point, though not a waterproof one.

“If she has her cell phone with her, why hasn't she used it to call out to anybody?”

He shrugged. “Battery ran down, maybe?”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, smiling at the thought that Jack Daniels would never stoop to including such a thing in one of his novels.

“You know, there's only one way to find out.”

Pulling out my wallet, I retrieved the slip of paper containing Louie's number and used my own cell phone to call. A second later a muffled ringing could be heard in the direction of the kitchen.

“I think it's here,” Avery said, pointing to a pile of dish towels that had been torn from a drawer and tossed into chaos atop a counter that separated the kitchenette from the living room. We both heard her recorded voice leave the same message I'd heard the other day.

I began removing the towels, fully revealing the phone right at the point the recording announced what telemarketers could do with their heads, the description of which made Avery gasp.

I cut off the call after hearing the beep.

“Jeezo-peet,” he whispered, “I'm glad I'm not a telemarketer.”

The message light was blinking and the read-out announced that there were seven new messages. Using a corner of one of the towels to prevent leaving fingerprints, I punched the playback button and heard the most recent message I had left for her, earlier today, after which came one from Zareh Zarian, asking where the hell she was.

Zarian and I alternated the next seven calls, until we had backed up to Tuesday, the last day I had seen her.

Then came a call that chilled me.

At first I thought it was a telemarketer who hadn't gotten the memo, because at first there was nothing but empty air, but then a man's voice said: “You should know better than to fuck with us,” before the call cut off.

Avery Klemmer was staring at me with wide, frightened eyes, and was breathing heavy. “We should call the police.”

“Yeah, I think you're right,” I said, trying to coax the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck to be nice and lay back down again.

I had just pulled my cell phone out to call the cops when I became aware of the sound of footsteps in the hallway, footsteps that stopped right outside the apartment door. Then came the sound of a key being inserted into the lock.

CHAPTER SIX

“Hey, she's back!” Avery cried.

“Shhh!” I commanded, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him out to the balcony.

“Jump!” I whispered, pointing at his adjoining balcony.

“What? I can't!”

“Yes, you can!”

I practically lifted him up onto the balcony wall and then shoved, and he soared over the distance like a paper airplane, catching himself with his hands and then swinging his feet around like an experienced practitioner of the parallel bars.

I followed a second later, making the leap and landing far more gracefully than I did the first time, which means I only banged my knee on the side of the balcony wall instead of doing a full belly-flop on top.

“Inside!” I ordered, and limped back into Avery's apartment.

“What was that all about?” he asked, panting.

“Think for a minute! What if it isn't her?”

“Whoever it was had a key.”

“Right. But we don't know who might have a key. Maybe it's the guy in the picture, or maybe it was whoever had broken in the first time and trashed the place.”

Then a thought hit me: what if they were the same person?

“I think you're wrong,” Avery said. “It has to be her.”

“Okay, fine, it's her,” I sighed. “How do you think she would react if she came home and found her place tossed and the two of us standing in the middle of it all? She'd be the one calling the police, and we'd be the ones trying to convince them not to arrest us. Even if it is her, we had to get out of Dodge.”

“I hadn't thought of that.”

“Now we can simply stroll over next door and knock on the door and talk to her, and she never knows we were invading her privacy.”

“And if it's somebody else?”

“Well, if it's somebody else, they're not supposed to be there either, which means they probably won't answer the door. In that case, we call the police.”

“You're pretty smart, you know that?” Avery Klemmer said, though inside my head Robert Mitchum made a rude sound.

“Thanks. Let's go over and see who's there.”

The two of us slipped through his door and into the hall. The door to Louie's apartment was hanging open and Avery rapped on it.

“Hello,” he called. “Someone here?” It was casual enough.

A man yanked the door fully open so quickly it startled both of us. It was the fellow from the photograph, only this time fully clothed and looking much bigger.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Avery Klemmer, I live next door.” The mooncalf held out his hand, but the man didn't take it. “I, uh, heard some noise and wondered if everything was okay.”

“How about you?” the man asked, turning to me.

“My name is Dave Beauchamp and I'm here at the request of Louie's editor at the
Independent Journal
,” I said. “He hasn't heard from her in a few days, and he's getting concerned.”

“Aren't we all.”

“Are you a friend of Louie's?”

“I'm her brother, Ricardo Sandoval.”

“Her brother!” Avery all but squealed.

“What, she can't have a brother? You guys know what the hell has happened here?”

I shook my head.

“All I know is I came by to pick up some paperwork from her and she didn't answer the door. Did something else happen?”

“See for yourself,” he said, stepping inside and allowing us in.

My performance at seeing the ransacked place for the “first time” was more convincing than Avery's, who badly overplayed it, but Ricardo Sandoval did not seem to notice.

“You said you were here to pick something up from her about a story?”

“That's right. We're on deadline.”

“Is it an important story?”

“I can't really reveal what it's about before it appears in print,” I said.

“Hmm. The reason I'm asking is because Louie called me a few days ago and said she wanted to see me to discuss something, and I think it was about her assignment, which is unusual.”

“How so?”

“Luisa was the brains of the family,” he said. “She was always into politics and news reporting and everything. I work security at a nightclub. So it's rare our paths cross except on family occasions. I couldn't even tell you who the hell the mayor of Los Angeles is, but she probably knows him personally. I don't have a clue why she would have wanted to talk to me about one of her stories, but I said fine, hell yeah, let's get together and talk. I'd be happy to offer whatever I could.”

“Do you think she might have wanted to ask about securing protection?” I ventured.

“Protection…you mean like a bodyguard?”

“Possibly.”

“You think she's in trouble?”

“I wish I could answer that.”

“Play the phone message!” Avery blurted out, and both Bogie and myself thought in unison,
Smooth move, junior
.

“What phone message?”

“What he means,” I began, turning to shoot as murderous a look at Avery as I could muster, “is that he heard the phone ringing several times over the last few days through the walls, and going unanswered. So he assumed that somebody must have left a message. At least that's what he told me.”

“Well, I tried calling her several times,” Ricardo said, “but I never left a message. I figured there was no point if she wasn't there to hear it.”