Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (26 page)

I put my hand on his forearm, warm and hard, and I trailed my fingernails over the fabric of his shirt. “Come on, Detective. I’ve been a very good citizen. In one week I’ve found out about two very bad things going on in your city.”
 

“Your city, too,” he said.

I thought about Gary and Randi, and Anne’s fury, and Roberto’s demands. “Probably not for too much longer. So if you’re worried about anyone at the Parks Department getting angry...”

He laughed. “We broke up a week ago.” He leaned forward, and he came so close I wondered if he was going to surprise me with a kiss. But then he whispered in my ear, “You have been nothing but trouble.”

I moved my hand up to his shoulder and whispered, “Would you like to find out how much trouble I can be?”

He pulled back just enough so that our faces were close, very close. I raised my eyebrows at him. “What’s it going to be, Detective?”
 

The waitress took that moment to stand right beside us. “Can I get you anything else?” she trilled.

“No,” Gruen said. He pulled out a twenty and dropped it on the table.
 

That was the best “No” I’d heard in forever.

He pushed the door open and I felt a wave of the late afternoon Los Angeles heat wash over us. Hot asphalt from the streets and hot exhaust from the cars and hot grease from the bar’s kitchen and hot clothes on the girls pushing their way past us and hot desperation from everyone on the make. Everyone was young and hustling and making deals and eager to brag to their friends about the awesome day they’d had. It was all bullshit and hot air and it would be just as much bullshit and hot air tomorrow, but they’d keep up their excitement all the time, every day, right up until they either scored for real or got the hell out of town.
 

What happened to the ones who kept at it, kept pursuing their dreams without ever grabbing the brass ring?

We stood on the small strip of concrete separating the bar from the boulevard. Friday night on the outskirts of Hollywood meant the sidewalks were beginning to fill with people on bar crawls, looking for celebrity hangouts, dressed up for chi-chi cocktail bars. I found myself not paying attention to the people coming and going. I looked at the detective, who was, as he so often was, staring directly at me. Did he look at everyone that way? I wondered. It was intense and disorienting and thrilling all at the same time.
 

And what did he see?

Stevie would accuse me of overthinking things, and my sister and I could safely agree on the truism that in general, I didn’t think enough about things.

“Look, Drusilla—”

“Oh, shut it already.” I grabbed him by the lapels of his shirt and pulled him toward me.
 

His lips were warm and soft and, most importantly, they were finally on mine.
 

That was a nice kiss. I would have smiled, but that would have thrown off our rhythm.

One thing I have learned over the years is that a man’s ability to kiss and his ability to do anything else of interest are directly correlated.
 

As I suspected he might, Detective Gruen was going to have my undivided attention for as long as he wanted it.

I leaned back and looked up at him. Even in five-inch heels I had to look up at him. He was perfect. “Tell me you live near here.”
 

It took a few seconds for Gruen to crack even the tiniest smile at that. “Closer than you do.”

“I’ll follow you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m going to take my own car. Wherever you are in L.A., you should have your car nearby.”

He grinned. “Good point.” He leaned down and tilted his mouth over mine.

In the middle of our second, really fantastic kiss, my phone rang. While I wouldn’t have been surprised at all at Stevie having the amazing timing to block things finally progressing with Detective Gruen, the ringtone wasn’t for my sister. It was for Anne.

Two hours ago, Anne had been screaming bloody murder at me. I didn’t need more of her rage at why I might be keeping secrets that had nothing to do with her. I ignored it and the phone stopped ringing.
 

“What’s your address in case we get separated?” I asked.

He told me. And my phone started ringing again. Once again it was Anne.

“Let me get this and tell her to go take a flying leap off a short pier,” I said.

“Something happen?” he asked, his voice deep. That was a good register for his voice. I could get used to him talking to me like that.

“She’s upset I’m a material witness to just about everything on the planet. And I didn’t share that information.”
 

“You didn’t tell her?”

I shrugged as I answered. “You made yourself clear—”

“Hey, so, we’re supposed to meet up for frozen daiquiris?” Her words were rushed and she sounded excessively festive. Desperately festive, even.
 

“Only if they have
real
whipped cream,” I said.

Gruen narrowed his eyebrows.

“Of course with
real
whipped cream!” she said.

I held up an index finger at him, and mouthed,
Wait
.
 

Anne didn’t stop to take a breath. “Listen, can you come here and pick me up? My car is making this funky noise and I need to take it in.”

She must have thought I was still in the Palisades. But I was in Hollywood, less than three miles from her house. “It’ll take me an hour to get there, depending on traffic.”
 

“Always takes an hour to get anywhere!” Anne said. “Hurry!”

I hung up.
 

Anne was well aware that my definition of frozen daiquiri is “the alcoholic drink for people afraid of alcoholic drinks.” The only way I’d drink one is if someone were holding a gun to my head.

The only reason Anne would ask me to go drink a frozen daiquiri was if someone were holding a gun to hers.
 

And the only likely candidate for that position was Roger Sabo.
 

What had I told her when she came by to scream at me? That Sabo had a much bigger meth business than we’d suspected...and he was an undercover cop. She’d probably decided to spring her sudden knowledge on Sabo. And he’d decided to return the favor.
 

My date with Gruen had just ended. I wondered what the odds were on getting a raincheck from him was. Probably not good.

Did I tell him? I should, I supposed. Except what was the response time going to be? And the second the cops showed up, everything was going to go to hell fast.
 

I shouldn’t have told Anne those things when she was so angry, because angry people do stupid things. I had to see if I could help her.

“I have to go,” I said.

Gruen turned my face up to look at him. “Tell me what’s going on.”
 

I was going to give him some crap excuse about having forgotten about plans with Anne, but not only was he not stupid, he knew I wasn’t. “I have to go.” I kissed him again. Hard. I had a distinct feeling this was going to be my last opportunity.

“Tell me now,” he said. “You know. Before I happen to run into you again.”

If he got too suspicious, he was going to send someone to check Anne’s house out. Or he would do it himself. I had to get moving.

“You probably won’t believe me,” I said, “but I am really sorry.”
 

What was the best way to buy her time and ensure that she would be alive when I got there?

When I got into my car, alone, I pulled out my cell phone. She answered with a timid, “Hello?”

“Should I bring those files I have? You know, the ones on our meth-dealing friend?”

There was a moment of silence before she said, “Yeah, do that.”

“I’ll call you when I’m almost there,” I said.
 

I changed my shoes before setting off. I was also going to need to change my clothes into something less constricting.
 

I picked up the clothes I was planning on wearing tomorrow and put them on the passenger seat.

I DROVE BY Anne’s house and didn’t even slow down as I passed by.

Her white VW convertible was in the driveway. On the left-hand side, where it normally was. So, if she had run into a problem in her house, it was after she walked in the front door.

The house was dark. She hadn’t turned on the outdoor lighting or the porch light. The drapes on her living-room window were drawn and no light spilled around the edges. No lights seemed to be on upstairs, either.
 

Perhaps she’d come home and fallen asleep while it was still light out, before she’d turned on any lights.

I rather doubted it, however.

Anne’s street started as a left turn off of North Beachwood Drive, twisted and turned through the hill, gave birth to a couple of offshoots, and then some ways up the hill rejoined with North Beachwood. I didn’t drive all the way to the join at the top. I turned onto one of the side streets that wound up a rise in the hill. The backs of the houses on that street overlooked the houses on Anne’s street. More importantly, their properties adjoined.

A charming—meaning “tiny”—light blue French Normandy- style house stood up the hill from Anne’s house. It was a small house, right up against the side of the road, as all the houses up here were. The builders had probably looked at the setback requirements for the area and designed the footprint of the house to exactly fit within those lines.
 

There would be ten feet of land from the back of the house to the edge of the property line.

No one appeared to be home in the cute little cottage—if whistling dwarves returning from the mine had suddenly appeared, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised—so I walked around the side and came to the chain-link gate that closed off the back garden from the front. I could have picked the lock, but I was in a hurry and some of those dwarves might come home from their jobs at the movie studios or financial products firms, and time was of the essence.
 

I climbed up and hurled myself over.
 

Since my landing was rather more noisy than planned, I waited for a moment to see if anyone was home and was going to come out. No one came. I continued to the back.
 

Where a large, bearded man wearing a t-shirt and jeans and holding a cell phone was waiting for me. He’d walked out the back of the cute little French Normandy house, probably having heard something and wanting to know what was going on.

“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
 

I held up my hands to show they were empty. “Would you believe I hit my softball into your yard?”

“No.”

“Well, it was worth a try. Terribly sorry. Didn’t think anyone was home, and I’m in a bit of a rush.”
 

“Get off my property,” he said.

“Will do.” I headed toward the back fence.

At the edge of the bearded man’s property was a waist-high wooden fence, with posts spaced widely apart and an attractive light brown stain on the boards. The fence wasn’t there for protection. It served mostly as a visual cue for people not to go any further, because on the other side of the fence was a steep drop down the hill. One false move and you would be toast on the concrete patio off of Anne’s kitchen.

Most of the side of the hill facing Anne’s house had been replaced by a cement retaining wall, which served the dual purpose of shoring up the hillside, and cutting down on the amount of brush Anne was responsible for clearing every year, in order to keep down the fire hazard.
 

“I’m calling the police.”

“That’s a very good idea at this point.”

“You’ll kill yourself,” the man said to me.
 

“Quite possibly,” I told him. And then I ran. Toward the fence.

Toward the cliff, to be exact.

The distance from the edge, the very edge, of the property of the cute blue French Normandy house to the corner of Anne’s house below would be the setback required ten feet. Generally, the setback from the edge of a property line to the building on that property was supposed to be fifteen feet—especially in the fire-prone Hollywood Hills—but much like the blue Normandy cottage, the builder of Anne’s house had gotten away with the absolute minimum space, which was ten feet.
 

Actually, it turned out to be slightly more than ten feet, because the design of the house included a small balcony off Anne’s bedroom. A tiny, useless, decorative balcony that no one except her neighbor up the hill would ever see. A balcony that jutted out toward the hillside exactly fifteen inches.

So the jump from the edge of the bearded man’s property onto the roof over Anne’s bedroom, right above the tiny, useless balcony was a horizontal jump of approximately one hundred and forty inches onto a sloped surface, followed by a drop of about ten feet onto a tiny fifteen-inch-deep balcony.

And I was going to get one shot at it.

I was about to tell myself I’d done worse, but as I vaulted over the fence and then bounded off the two feet of ground between the fence and the cliff, anything that might qualify as worse didn’t come to mind. The graduated slate roof of Anne’s house came up at me much faster than I imagined. Although I managed to land with my legs taking the brunt of the impact, I still scuffed up the skin on the palm of my left hand. The slope of the roof, however, was steep enough that I had to spread my arms and legs out fast to avoid rolling off and down two stories.

My left side, where Roger had sliced me, got pounded by my collision with the house. I vomited up a mouthful of saliva and stomach acid and watched the liquid roll down the roof.

Then I pushed myself up on my arms and started working backward, toward the drop onto Anne’s balcony. I looked over my shoulder to see how close I was to the edge.

The bearded guy ran to the edge of his property and grabbed onto the fence. “Are you fucking insane?” he said.