Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (20 page)

The girl did another song, with much the same choreography. There was nothing wrong with Erica Rose that a few more years of polish and study wouldn’t fix, but that was the problem: she wasn’t still learning, she was out there front and center, trying to be a star without doing any of the work.
 

I suddenly thought of Courtney.
 

When she finished her act, Erica Rose signed more autographs and waved and smiled big. She hugged several of the girls in the audience for the cameras. As soon as the camera lights went off, though, the kids in the audience hopped up and disappeared, probably trying to spend the money they’d earned for sitting there.
 

Erica Rose stood on the edge of the stage area. A PA handed her a bottle of water. I zipped to her side.

“Hi, Erica Rose. My name’s Drusilla Thorne.”
 

“Who are you?” She didn’t quite have the Hollywood attitude down. The first clue was that she acknowledged my existence. Her voice was strained, which meant she wasn’t using proper singing technique. And she was shaking. Perhaps vibrating was a better word. Stage fright. She had done her performance and now her nerves had gone wild.

“Your performance was fantastic,” I said.
 

She lighted up like Rockefeller Center, excited to hear those words from a complete stranger. “Did you like it?”

Well. I had Erica Rose figured all wrong. She was trying her best, I believed that. But she had a lot more work to do to be really good at not just the singing or the dancing but the performing, which was the hardest skill of all. Maybe it was even innate. It was one thing to sing, it was another to seduce the crowd into loving you.
 

The shaking told me she knew she wasn’t there yet, and she didn’t know what to do about it.
 

I wanted to tell her that she was only sixteen and she had lots of other choices in life ahead of her. But right now, in this moment, she was miserable.
 

“I need to speak to you about an upcoming performance you have scheduled.”

She tossed her red hair from side to side and grabbed a sweaty bottle of ice-cold water. “Talk to my manager.”
 

“Who are you?” said a man standing nearby. He was in his forties, a little paunchy, male-pattern baldness. He wore a blazer over a t-shirt and jeans, but the jeans were pressed and the t-shirt was high quality, so this was his uniform, not something he’d thrown on this morning.

“Drusilla Thorne,” I said, and we shook hands. “You are?”

“Chris McClanahan,” he said.

“Perfect. We need to talk about the concert you’re doing for the Villiers Literacy Foundation,” I said.

“Listen, I’m sorry, but Erica Rose is coming down with a—”

“Save it.” I leaned toward him. “I’m here from his main financial backer, Roberto Montesinos. You and I are going to talk. When and where’s most convenient?”
 

It was no trouble throwing my stepfather’s name around. After all, Roberto had known perfectly well how this was going to go once I talked to Dr. Villiers: I would play enforcer for his agenda. In case I wasn’t already certain that he had me squeezed between my inheritance and the law, now I was using my unique skills for him. And even with all that, he was still the most reasonable relative I had, and he was a step-relative at that.

Chris wanted to make this issue go away. He shook his head. “Erica Rose’s schedule is really crazy.”

“That’s fine. You simply need to open time in yours.”

“Yeah? I’m kind of busy too. Fuck off.”

“She will stop being busy, Mr. McClanahan.” I smiled. From what I’d just seen, that wasn’t even a threat: this girl was not ready for prime time.
 

“What are you going to do about it?”

“
Yellow and Green
is produced by Ed Rathman Productions. Rathman Productions is part of the Forrester Group. Forrester is owned by Van der Laan Entertainment. Jane van der Laan Montesinos is married to...” I waited for him to finish the sentence for me. “Roberto Montesinos. You talk to me, or Erica Rose’s show ends production and she doesn’t get hired by anyone in the VDL family again.” Given that Stevie had explained how VDL produced most of the shows for KidsTV, I felt confident about making that promise. And if Roberto didn’t want me fully representing him, he should have said something.

McClanahan grunted with frustration, which told me he hadn’t been aware of at least one of the relationships I’d just mentioned. “I can’t talk now,” he said. “Tomorrow? Can we do this tomorrow?”
 

“Now is better.”

He ground his teeth. “I have a meeting I can’t miss today.”
 

“The only excuse I’ll accept is a meeting with your parole officer.”

McClanahan stared at me. “Fuck,” he muttered.

“Name and phone number. Not that I don’t trust you, but I don’t trust you.”

He gave me the parole officer’s name and phone number, which I memorized. Then I asked for a specific time the next day when we would meet.
 
“And if you stall me again, Mr. McClanahan, Erica Rose shouldn’t show up for work on Monday.”

“We’ll be in Westwood tomorrow afternoon,” he said.
 

At least Westwood wasn’t the San Fernando Valley, I thought. I did not like driving into the Valley.
 

Which probably qualified me for official status as an Angeleno.

DESPITE HOW EXHAUSTED I was after my failure with the McClanahans, I headed west once again to Tarzana. I picked my spot in the parking lot across the street from the building where Hitchcock Commercial First Construction had its offices, where I could watch every car that came out of the subterranean parking lot. Even as the sun headed down in the west and I had to contend with a flash of orange across the windshield as the car poked out from the side of the building, I could still see everyone’s face. Sometimes having extremely good eyesight is incredibly useful. I didn’t even need to use binoculars.

This exercise got trickier as it got darker. I wasn’t expecting I would have to wait until after sunset.
 

Greg Hitchcock left in a black Cadillac SUV. It had a dent in the rear door on the driver’s side. I took a moment to memorize his car, in case I ever saw it again.

The receptionist, Mary, left shortly after him. After her blue sedan left, a few other cars left, but I didn’t recognize any of the drivers. After ten minutes of no cars whatsoever, I thought maybe she’d been the last one to leave and had locked the place up after the boss.

Finally, though, twenty minutes after that, my patience paid off, and one more car left the parking. A Prius, of course. Tan-colored and very sensible.

While Jonathan Ricciardi waited for his moment to join the traffic on Ventura Boulevard, I memorized details of the car. Tan Priuses were kind of thick on the ground in Los Angeles and I’d hate to end up following the wrong one.
 

Jonathan drove twenty minutes up Tampa Avenue to Northridge, which I had only heard of because of the 1994 earthquake. It was relatively easy to follow him from a distance, even with the turns through his neighborhood, following the bounce of his red rear lights off the nearby houses. When I turned the last corner, he had parked on the street in front of a small house with a fence around the yard. He pulled a big cardboard box out of the back of the car and kicked the door shut behind him.
 

The front door opened. Alison, the teacher from the preschool, had Hailey, the little girl, in her arms. Jonathan leaned over to give both of his girls a kiss as he waddled through the door with his box. The picture of suburban happiness.

My visit was really going to ruin their dinner.

I rang the doorbell and Alison answered it. She opened the door with a welcoming smile, but it dimmed. Vanished, actually. It would be fair to say seeing me made her downright unhappy.

“Hi, Alison. I need to speak to Jonathan.”
 

“You can’t just come to our house,” she said. Did she remember me from a few brief seconds outside the preschool? She must have.

Jonathan came out of the kitchen, his shirt sleeves rolled up. “Hi, what can… Hi,” he said.
 

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

He sighed, like he was giving in after a long struggle. “Yeah,” he said.

“What’s this about?” Alison said.
 

“We can’t have this conversation in your office,” I told him.

Jonathan took his wife’s hand. “Honey, why don’t you give Hailey her bath?”

“I want you out of my house in ten minutes,” Alison told me. Then she stalked off through the kitchen, presumably to wherever Hailey was currently planted.

Jonathan stood there, waiting. As soon as Alison vanished into one of the rooms, I pointed at the living room. “Can we sit down?”

He looked startled. “Oh. Sure. Come on in.”

The living room was small but exceptionally neat and clean. Two small sofas flanked the small square fireplace, with a coffee table between them. No TV. No toys. Every house I’ve been in with a toddler usually looks like a war zone, so I was duly impressed.
 

I took a seat on the blue sofa, near the front window. Jonathan sat across from me. His palms were plastered together but he kept twisting them, rubbing his fingers against one another. Nervous as hell about something.
 

“You’re probably wondering why I’ve interrupted your evening,” I said.
 

“I have a few guesses,” he said.

“My concern is Roger Sabo.”

Jonathan’s unhappy grin—mirthless, rueful, and resigned—as his shoulders slumped was not what I would have expected. So he clearly knew Roger Sabo. And he knew something bad about him.
 

“I have a few questions and then I’ll vanish into the night.”

“Don’t you have to show me some kind of identification first?” he said.

“That’s something cops have to do,” I said.

“Actually, my guess was you’re FBI, but now I’m thinking DEA,” he said.
 

He had made such a gigantic mistake about my identity or my motivations that I laughed. “Not going to throw in the IRS for good measure?”

He shook his head. “I know all those guys already.”
 

What did that mean?
I wondered, but then one answer popped to mind: Jonathan knew the fieldwork IRS agents, not just the desk jockeys. I wondered what was in that box he’d brought home.
 

“You’re talking to the IRS already,” I said. “So you don’t need me to tell you what’s going on at the financial counseling office then?”
 

He shook his head. “No, you do not. I had nothing to do with what that’s become.”

“You know what Hitchcock is doing with those women?”

He squinted. “What do you mean?”

“He has money. He’s dealing with women who need money. Forget it. Not my problem. I’m going to level with you, Jonathan, I’m not any kind of law enforcement person, for any agency with lots of letters in its name. I’m here because I need your help.” I had shown my injuries to several people that week, but I suspected Jonathan was the wrong person to flash the side of my stomach at. I lifted my hair and pointed to the steristrips at my hairline. “Roger Sabo assaulted me.”

Jonathan reached out, like he was going to comfort me. Or touch the cut. “How did this happen?”

“He has a temper and I have a bad habit of fighting back. I think he murdered Courtney. I can’t prove that and frankly it’s not my job to prove it. What I want is for Sabo to leave me alone. Maybe your boss can help me make that happen, and maybe you know something that I can use to pressure Hitchcock to help me.”

“What makes you think I know anything?”

“Because you’re the quiet, studious guy in the corner who sees everything and knows what’s really going on.”

Jonathan looked off into the distance for a couple of seconds at that. Then he gave me a wan, mirthless smile. “Okay. Then what makes you think I’d help you?”
 

“Because after what I saw at the financial counseling office today, you’re in very deep shit. You helped set that place up. If you’re already talking to the IRS, you know exactly what’s...”

What, exactly, did he know?

Jonathan was the man who handled the money. The men who know the dollars and cents are always the ones who know what’s truly going on.

He had mentioned the FBI and the DEA. He’d started with the IRS because, duh, he was a CPA and those were people he could talk to in their own language. Hitchcock getting sexual favors or Sabo doing a little drug dealing on the side at Hitchcock’s construction sites—both terrible, both morally reprehensible, but in this day and age you quit your job to avoid being associated with those people, you don’t run to the Feds. You talk to the Feds if you know something much, much bigger.

Money. Despite the economy having done terribly in the last few years, Hitchcock Construction was doing exceptionally good business. Except...what if it wasn’t? It could be doing okay—better than okay, even —
 
but Hitchcock had money going out the side, through the financial counseling office. A steady leak of cold, hard cash. Which had to come from somewhere.
 

Hitchcock. Sabo. Ricciardi. One of these men was not like the others.
 

“Your boss needs a steady supply of money coming in under the table. Sabo has money he can’t keep in the banks.” I leaned forward. “You move money around. You’re laundering money for Sabo.”
 

Jonathan deflated from the top of his head through his shoulders, slumping forward. Dammit. Sometimes I hate being right.

No, really. The only thing I ever want to be right about is who’s sleeping with whom.

I waited until he looked up at me. If it’s possible to gauge from appearances when a person is defeated, Jonathan was down for the count. “You didn’t go to the IRS about the financial center. You went about whatever Hitchcock is doing with the construction business.”