Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (7 page)

“Roberto, I’m never going to be much of a reader.”

“No. But you can be functional. Next.”
 

Functional
. Fuck you, Roberto.

“You need to buckle down and find someone to help your sister process past events. This should be your full-time job. You need to put everything else aside.” He smiled. Maybe it was a smile. Debatable. “Including motorcycle rides from men named ‘Raven.’ Or this other adventure, last week, a visit to an imprisonment camp for Cambodian illegal immigrants? Did I read that correctly?”

He knew about Anne and me going to Baldwin Park. Was he following Anne’s career? He must be.

Whether he was or he wasn’t, I was absolutely certain now that Roberto knew the motorcycle story was bullshit. And it wouldn’t be long before he found out what had happened.

“Visiting doctors is expensive, Roberto.”
 

He nodded. “That’s why you’re going to start working for me, Drusilla.”
 

“Amongst the things that are
never
happening—”

He sighed. “It’s money. Of course you’re going to do it.”
 

On the one hand, I clearly needed money. Unlike most people, I admit freely that money is a great motivator in my life. Money, after all, was the main reason I’d gone with Anne to interview Courtney at a crappy motel in Koreatown. On the other hand, working for Roberto was a very bad, terrible, awful avenue to take toward even greater financial dependence on him. Money is control. Always has been, always will be.

“I want to help you out, Tru—Drusilla. You know this to be true. The sooner you can figure out a stable situation for your sister, the sooner you will return home to where you belong. And the real work can begin.”

I stared directly into the tiny black hole that marked the computer’s built-in camera.
 

He was right, of course: either I figured out how to set Stevie up to become stable and happy on her own, or Roberto would get tired of waiting and take over the problem for me. Stevie would vanish off my radar forever. He was being generous in allowing me to give it the old college try.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Nothing immoral or illegal,” he said.

I shrugged. My definitions of acceptable morality and legality are adjacent but not identical to the widely accepted ones.

“Or even difficult,” he continued. “This doesn’t even involve falling off the back of anything.”

I waved my hand in the air. “Stop telling me what it’s not and start telling me what it is.”
 

“A friend of mine—”

My face may have betrayed my doubt in that description, because Roberto nodded.

“A gentleman of my acquaintance, who I’ve had the pleasure to get know, is setting up a charity venture in Los Angeles. He has asked for my help. I am sending him two things: money and you.”

A million possibilities ran through my head: Perhaps Roberto had a mistress. (No. My stepfather had issues, but despite being Spanish he despised men who cheated on their wives. I wouldn’t believe he had a mistress if he showed me pictures of her himself.) Or maybe Roberto had a drug dealer. (Who he kept stashed away with the mistress. Not a chance.) Gambling, corporate espionage, corporate sabotage, international political spying, jewel thievery, or high-seas piracy, perhaps. Came up with a “No” on all of them.

I was all the way to the possibility of “Nazi art theft” when Roberto said, “Oh good Lord. The look on your face right now.”

“Be a lot more specific about how I fit into this,” I said.

“He is having trouble working out the details of a function. A party. You are good at partying. I believe you can help him work out the problems he’s having. And he might be able to help you with a few problems you have.”

“Let me make certain I understand. I set up a party, and you’re going to pay me for this?”

My stepfather showed me a real smile. “And you’re going to earn every penny. And by the way, Drusilla? Many happy returns.”

“It’s March, not New Year’s, Roberto.”

“March thirty-first, in fact. Happy birthday.”

My surprise must have shown. “It’s not—” Oh Hera. It was. I was turning twenty-eight years old tomorrow. That much closer to thirty. “Instead of this stupid job you want me to do, you could send me a birthday check and make up for all the years you and Mama missed.”

“No,” he said, and he switched off his camera.

STEVIE HAD NEVER been to Anne’s house in the Beachwood Canyon area before. For one thing, we lived near the Pacific Ocean, and Anne lived near the Cahuenga Pass, east of Hollywood, off the 101 freeway. In Los Angeles, this was like us living in separate states.
 

Also, Stevie had little need to visit Anne. She was my friend, not my sister’s.

I drove up Beachwood Drive on autopilot, doing this for the forty-first hundredth time. It took me a while to notice that my sister had launched forward in her seat and was staring rapturously out the windshield.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

She pointed before turning to me, the sweetest smile on her face. “The Hollywood sign,” she said.

“Yeah, Anne lives right near it.”

She giggled nervously. “There it is.” Her voice was breathy.
 

At that moment I realized we’d been living in Los Angeles for two months and I hadn’t yet taken her to see the Hollywood sign. My sister loves television and movies to an unholy degree. Over the past decade watching TV and movies has been her main way of dealing with humanity. And yet here we were, in the center of the galaxy for TV and movies, and I’d never taken her to see the archetypal symbol for the entire industry.

I also hadn’t taken her on any studio tours, to any of the theme parks, or to an actual film set.

On the plus side, however, I had gotten us free room and board with an Oscar-winning film star who was enraptured by Stevie’s cooking. That had to score me some points in her book.

Eventually it would. After all, anything was possible.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s just a stupid sign.”

“And it’s there. It really looks like that.”
 

I grunted. “Oh, all right. We can drive up closer.”

She shook her head. “I can see it from here.” Her face was blissful.

I reminded myself that once I had my inheritance back, I was going to own a significant portion of one of those theme parks and Stevie could go any time she felt like it. Provided I played my cards right and was allowed to keep in contact with her.

Which meant getting Roger Sabo’s crap under control. And fulfilling Roberto’s little task.
 

Anne’s house sat up one of the many winding, shady side streets that branched off of Beachwood Drive toward the top. It was a tiny, whitewashed, two-story, two-bedroom house that had no garden to speak of but did have a garage, so it was the kind of house that had everything the modern Angeleno needed. Her parents (who, like everyone else in town, worked in film and television production) had helped her buy it a few years before.
 

I parked on the driveway, on the right side. Her white VW convertible, as always, was parked on the left side. She never parked in the garage, because she had already filled her garage with too much junk to ever open the door again.

One upside of being itinerant was that Stevie and I had trained ourselves to carry the bare minimum with us, which often meant one box that had papers in it and nothing else.

We knocked on the front door and after a couple of seconds I turned the handle and went in. Eventually Anne was going to learn basic home safety, although keeping her doors locked hadn’t kept me out of her house in the past.
 

“It’s your neighborhood burglary squad,” I called.

“Only steal the bad stuff! I’m upstairs,” Anne yelled.

Stevie looked around inside. There was a small entrance foyer that led off to the living room on one side, the kitchen on the other, and the stairs up to the bedrooms. The kitchen had a breakfast nook, a sliding glass door to the side patio, and a small bathroom. It was tiny and fussy, with mirrors on the walls to make the place seem bigger and a tiny Oriental rug over the tile floor in the foyer and a standing Tiffany lamp stuck awkwardly by the coat closet that held three coats.
 

But Anne had the entire place to herself. Lucky woman. I could only fantasize about what living by myself would be like. After years of living with Stevie in close quarters, I indulged those fantasies a lot.

Stevie’s attention was caught by something in the living room—over the fireplace hung the framed poster from Colin’s magic show in Las Vegas. I had given the poster to Anne on our first meeting, a sort of “Surprise, your murdered boyfriend turns out to be married, but don’t worry, the marriage wasn’t for real!” kind of peace offering.
 

After the wild ride Colin’s murder sent us on together, I was amazed she kept the poster.

She’d put it in a better frame than I had, in fact. Quality.

Anne came bouncing down the stairs, her short brown hair wet and her face freshly scrubbed. She looked a lot perkier than she had this morning. I guess she hadn’t met with any lawyers or gotten any familial ultimatums in the meantime. Lucky girl.

“Hey, you guys!”
 

“You’re always so friendly,” Stevie said.

Anne blinked in surprise. “Thanks, Stevie. I think. And now for something you’ve probably been waiting for.” She reached into the pocket of her denim shorts and pulled out several bills folded together. “Here you go.”

I took the money from her and spread it out. Five fifty-dollar bills. “That’s more than we agreed on.”

“What happened yesterday was a little more than we agreed on, too. It’s my way of saying thanks.”
 

I never turn down extra money, especially if I didn’t have to do anything extra to earn it. “You’re most definitely welcome.”

My accountant plucked the bills out of my hand.

“Stevie, give that back.”

The beautiful green paper disappeared somewhere into her voluminous ankle-length skirt. “You’ll only spend it.”

I made the “gimme” gesture. “That’s generally how one uses money, yes.”

Anne watched us like a tennis match.

“We’re not usually like this,” I said to her.

“What? It’s exactly like you guys. Now, let’s get started with today’s meeting. What’s the news?”

I eyed my sister, wondering how to frisk her and find the money. “Sabo’s still charging us with assault. And there’s a little extra cherry on top: Courtney’s siding with him. She’s signed an affidavit saying we started it.”
 

“Oh my God,” Anne said.

Stevie stared at me. At which point it dawned on me that I had forgotten to share that tidbit with her. “She’s signed it already? But...didn’t you say he hit her, too?”

“Psychology is a strange and terrible thing.”

Anne pushed her glasses up her nose. “I was going to offer coffee, but maybe it’s time to move straight to the bourbon.”

“Keep the bourbon on hold for me until I’m allowed to drink.”

“Do you have any tea?” Stevie asked.

Anne had a box of Lipton tea in the cupboard, which Stevie sniffed at and decided she could accept the suffering it entailed. While my sister puttered around the kitchen in an attempt to brew something palatable with less than optimal ingredients, Anne and I sat at the kitchen table with our two glasses of non-alcoholic lemonade and her laptop, the little white apple on the back glowing at me.

“What are we going to do?” Her hand gripped the glass so tightly the blood drained out of her fingers. “This is really scaring the shit out of me. No one’s going to hire me if people accuse me of assaulting them.”
 

I nodded. “Let’s remain hopeful that reason will prevail, but in the meantime Nathaniel is working on it.”

“Nathaniel?”

“My lawyer.”

“Oh, right.” She finished her drink. “How do you afford that guy anyhow?” she muttered.

Anne was staring off into the distance as she said that, so maybe she didn’t even hear her own words. But I did. And Stevie did. My sister glanced at me from her position at the stove and I could tell we were thinking the same thing: Damn. Or however Stevie might phrase it.
Oh, botheration
, perhaps, seeing as how
bugger
was too obscene for her. Anne had noticed Nathaniel Ross was a little out of my financial league. That wasn’t good. Curious journalists tended to cause problems for people who had things they wanted to hide. Time to move the conversation to less dangerous topics.
 

“There’s something decidedly odd about this entire situation. Roger Sabo keeps getting into trouble and then he keeps getting right out of it.”
 

“You said you think he’s a CI.”

“Do you have anyone at the PD who can find out whether he is or not?”

She raised her eyebrows. “I was kinda hoping you could get Samuel to tell you.”

“Samuel?”
 

That was enough to shake Anne out of her doldrums and smirk at me. “Detective Gruen? Isn’t his name Samuel?”

Oh, right. I never thought of him as being a Samuel. In the heat of passion I’d probably still call him Detective. I spent a few seconds imagining that situation, decided I really needed to find out for sure, the sooner the better. Then I shook my head. “He doesn’t want to tell me anything. Not surprisingly. “
 

Stevie joined us at the table and dragged one of the coasters over to put under her mug of tea. On a table made of Formica or vinyl or something that couldn’t hold a mark if you wanted it to. “Explain to me about these charges.”

“We have to convince Roger and Courtney to drop them.”

My sister nodded slowly. “And do you have a specific plan yet?”

Anne laughed. “Are you kidding? How are we going to do that?”

I had the feeling Anne wasn’t going to like my idea. I also had a sneaking suspicion I wasn’t going to let her feelings interfere with what I chose to do. “We have to make their lives difficult in order to convince them they’re better off dropping them.”