Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (28 page)

As I slowly rose to my feet in front of him, I whispered, “Don’t even breathe hard.”

The front door shook with violent banging.
 

The cavalry was here.
 

I wondered if Gruen was with them.

“Please don’t shoot!” I yelled, with as much waver in my voice as I could manage. “Oh God, please don’t shoot!”
 

Sabo was staring at me, his mouth open.

“Was that good?” I whispered. “Was I believable? Don’t fucking move.”

I threw the gun into Anne’s living room and then opened the door to two uniformed police officers who had their guns drawn. I put up my hands, bloody palms out, showing they were empty. I ducked, submissive, and crouched away from the one coming through first.
 

“Oh, thank God you’re here!” I yelled. “He’s there, he’s there!”
 

“This bitch is crazy!” Sabo yelled.

I looked at him and raised one eyebrow. Then I painted on a look of terror when I turned back to the cop. “He tried to kill us! His gun’s in there!” I waggled my arm at the living room—and suddenly it was everything I had to keep my arm in the air. Every muscle hurt. At the moment I wasn’t quite sure how I was standing, let alone pointing things out.
 
“I threw it in there! He was going to kill us.”
 

“Who else is here?” one of the cops asked.

“Anne. Her name’s Anne. This is her house. She’s upstairs. Check on her! Check on her, please!”
 

The cop put his hand on the stair railing and then looked up. “Is that her?”

Anne was leaning over the railing by her bedroom and looking down at us.
 

No.
 

She was staring at me.
 

Like she’d never seen me before.

“Yes, that’s her,” I said.

*
 
*
 
*

Nathaniel Ross didn’t talk to me. He didn’t even look at me. And I knew the drill: don’t talk to anyone.
 

From the moment he showed up and assured the officer in charge that any questions would have to be directed toward his office and not toward his client, any time he appeared to be looking at me, he was in fact focused on a spot over my shoulder. I put my hand out toward him and he shook me off. Even the lieutenant in charge of the operation seemed to notice Nathaniel’s hostility.
 

But he kept me out of police custody anyhow, despite what he clearly wanted to do. He seemed to be calculating how hard it was to kill someone and dump their body in the desert.

While Nathaniel did legal-fu on various officers, I tried to talk to Anne, who was holed up in the master bedroom upstairs. Every time I asked to visit her, the police came between us. To be more exact, they didn’t intervene so much as provide a convenient excuse for Anne not to talk to me. While Nathaniel shot me glares, Anne refused to meet my gaze at all. Every time I approached her she turned her back and huddled away from me.
 

I stayed downstairs, in the living room.

Nathaniel talked to the lieutenant in charge. He had to do that an awful lot whenever I was involved in things, it seemed. When the lieutenant left to take a call, I sidled up to Nathaniel.

“Where’s Anne going?” I asked.

“Her parents’ house,” he told me.

Anne’s parents were rich. She wasn’t very close to them, despite letting them help her buy this house. This lovely house that I’d put a bullet into. No wonder she wasn’t meeting my eyes.
 

“I thought maybe she’d come with me.”

“Yeah. That’s not in the plans.”

I nodded. Anne was avoiding me as hard as she could. “Let’s go.”
 

“Where’s your car?” Nathaniel asked.

I began to lift my arm to point to the general vicinity of the blue French Normandy house that loomed over Anne’s backyard, but my arm seemed strangely loath to cooperate. I shook my head. “A couple of streets away.”

The most unfortunate thing about Anne’s property was that there was only one way out of it: from the front and onto the street.
 

Nathaniel peered out through the living-room curtains to the cameras that had been set up on the street outside. “Let’s see if we can get out of here without getting on TV.”

“Isn’t your raison d’être to be on TV?” I joked.

“Jesus,” he muttered. Then he yanked me by the arm—which hurt—and pushed me into the tiny powder room, which was characterized by floral everything: sunflowers on the wallpaper, flowers in the vase on the toilet tank cover, a series of flowers lacquered on wooden plaques that lined the wall by the light switch. The mirror on the medicine cabinet revealed what everyone else had been looking at: I looked like shit. The cut at my hairline had opened. I had a scrape on my temple. I probably had a few bruises working their way to the surface on my throat and shoulders.
 

He wadded up a handful of tissue and ran it under the faucet. He lightly dabbed my forehead. I winced. He opened the medicine cabinet. It was empty. “Okay, let’s see if you’re bleeding anywhere else.”
 

“I always knew you wanted to get my clothes off.” I gripped the hem of my shirt and tried to pull up, but my back muscles spasmed. I couldn’t lift my hands more than an inch.

“Relax,” he said, and he pushed my hands down to my sides. Then he slowly pulled my shirt up to my breasts before turning me around. Checking me on all sides. An awkward activity made worse because of how small the powder room was. Every time I brushed up against him I winced.

He gently lowered the hem of my shirt. “You have to go to a doctor,” he said.

“All they’re going to do is give me Vicodin,” I said. “And while I appreciate that sentiment mightily, I already have some at home.”

“You could have internal—”

“I probably would have lost consciousness already. I’m also certain I didn’t break or fracture anything.”

“You can barely move right now.”

I shrugged. “Because the adrenaline’s worn off.”
 

He turned my head from side to side, checking me over again. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“Anne was in danger.”
 

“And your first move is to break into her house and confront the guy? A guy with a gun?”

“I didn’t know for certain there was a problem.”

His grin didn’t indicate much amusement. “This is me, Drusilla. Come on. You knew better than to use the front door.”

“I’m very observant.”
 

He stared at me. He gave me that vibe I sometimes get from Stevie, where she’s computing the 4096 possible responses and needs to pick from amongst the two or three best ones. “Next time, call the police and walk away.”

“She would have been dead by the time they got here.”

“You could have got yourself killed. You could have got her killed. Or you could have killed him. Are you fucking stupid or something?” He slammed his hand against the wall and the entire series of lacquered flowers lifted and dropped in unison. “You have a death wish.”
 

I thought about that.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’ll save you the sob story about my poor unhappy childhood and point out that not only did I save Anne’s life, I kicked that son of a bitch’s ass. He gets no more Get Out of Jail Free cards.”
 

Nathaniel leaned toward me. “Courtney’s still dead, and nothing you can do will change that.”

“This wasn’t about her! It was about Anne!”

“Everyone’s best guess is Sabo killed Courtney. And no matter what you do or you don’t do, she’s still dead.”

I suddenly realized I was crying. When had that started? “He didn’t. He didn’t kill her. I don’t know who did, but he didn’t.”
 

“Okay, he didn’t do it. Who cares? It’s none of your concern. Do you get that? None of your business. Sabo isn’t suing you for assault anymore. You don’t need to worry about him or Courtney or any of these people, not now, not tomorrow, not ever.”

We finally left the powder room and Nathaniel took me into the living room. Through the windows we could see a couple of cameramen. Usually that sight has Angelenos come running.

“We’ll wait,” he said.

I shrugged.
 

The police handcuffed Sabo and took him out. When he left, some of the TV cameras did.
 

Then a couple of police officers walked Anne down the stairs and out the front of her house. She seemed very small and frail as she walked by, her eyes locked on a point straight ahead of her. She didn’t look into the living room. Most of the rest of the cameras followed her as well.
 

Nathaniel dropped the curtain. “Come on.”

We walked out of Anne’s house and no one paid any attention to us. I followed his lead and looked as professional as someone in a t-shirt, jeans, and rubber-soled shoes could next to a man in a five-thousand-dollar suit.

AFTER NATHANIEL DROPPED me off at my car and I managed to get away from the police cars clogging up Anne’s neighborhood, I took city streets instead of the freeway and I drove over the hill to Studio City.

When I drove by Micah Schlegel’s production office, I saw the lights were on and the door was propped open with a giant fan. Micah was hard at work on a Saturday. No time to sleep in this town. If you took a day off, someone else might get ahead of you.
 

Schlegel was alone in the office. He sat at his desk, back to the doorway. His t-shirt was wrinkled. Also sweat-stained, but given the heat in the room, that wasn’t surprising. The wrinkles, though, that was an interesting twist. How on Earth could a person wrinkle a t-shirt?
 

He was probably putting in some marathon hours hustling his producing projects. Because that’s what he did. He hustled.
 

Was Courtney’s death a hindrance or a door opener for him? Like that was even a debate. If he could capitalize on her death for anything involving his projects, like the
Girls Becoming Stars
reunion, he’d do it.

I knocked on the open door. “Hey, Micah.” I leaned across the entrance because my legs were having a hell of a time keeping me upright.

He looked up and his startled reaction was so over the top I wondered how deep in concentration he’d been. Then I realized what his visitor must look like to him, with my clothes messed up and my hair in a tangled, messy ponytail and bruises and scrapes I hadn’t had last time and probably bruises that hadn’t bloomed until I’d left Anne’s house. I’d just been in a fight, and now I was looming in his doorway. He probably thought I was there to mug him.

“What do you want?” he said. Nervous. One hand reached for his cell phone.
 

“Need to ask you something else about Courtney.” I took a step over the giant fan.

“Sorry about the AC. The whole building’s out. Goddamn landlord.” He grabbed the phone, his hand shaking.

I reached over and took it out of his hand.
 
“Micah, let’s not do this.”
 

“You don’t look so good. I can call somebody.”

“I feel fairly awful to boot, thanks. I need some answers and then I’m going to leave and you can sit here doing whatever it is you’re doing until the cowboys come back to Studio City. Whatever.” I pulled a chair from one of the other desks across the room over to Micah’s desk. “Neither of us wants to be here right now. You want to go home and shower or maybe you don’t, and I just got into yet another fight with Roger Sabo.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. We got into an even bigger fight this time. His name isn’t really Roger Sabo, by the way. It’s Broderick Tennyson. He’s an undercover cop. Or he was. Did you know that?”

His eyes widened. “Oh, God. He is?”

I held up my hand. “We’re not going to talk about Roger. Just thought you might want to know, that’s all. No, I need to know about the reunion show. Is that still happening?”
 

“Yeah.” He bowed his head instead of looking excited, the way I would have guessed. “Yeah, we got the order. They want it bad. They want it fast.”
 

“Because of Courtney’s death.”
 

He nodded.
 

“Are you going to be at the memorial service tomorrow?”
 

He licked his lips and nodded again. “Yeah, that’s going to be a big part of the show. That’s really powerful visuals.”

“Are all the girls going to be there?”
 

“As many as can be in Los Angeles in time, you know?”
 

Anyone who could get their ass to that memorial service had guaranteed air time. “When you were originally putting the reunion show together, you didn’t have enough space to feature every girl, right?”

“Yeah. Only got eighty-four minutes, you know.”

Out of one hundred and twenty. Ah, the joys of commercials. “Was Courtney going to be one of the girls in the show?”
 

“Yeah, absolutely.”

“
Originally
, Micah. When you originally put this idea together, was Courtney going to be one of them?”

“Oh. No. We were going to go with Randi. You know, she’s not the greatest or anything.”

“But she’s done some work in movies. And she and Courtney were both the nice girls with accents, so...”

“We didn’t need two.” Micah shrugged, as though he were talking about chess pieces, not actual women.
 

“What changed your mind?” I said.
 

“Well, Courtney called me this week. Maybe it was last week. Anyhow, right after she came back to L.A.”

“And she had a new story.”
 

“Yeah. It was something she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about before, but—”

“But if it would get her on the show, she’d talk about it. She’d let you in on it in great detail.”
 

Micah nodded. “Surprised the hell out of me, let me tell you.”

I had no doubt about that. “Courtney called to tell you the reason she went home to Oklahoma two years ago was she’d had a baby.”