CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Armed with the photo of Tony Postagino, I make a few phone calls and ascertain that Magnolia is in the hotel’s babysitting center. Trixie and I head in that direction.
“What could she be doing there?” Trixie asks me.
“I don’t know.” I pull open the center’s glass door and wave Trixie in ahead of me. “I just hope the kids survive her.”
Truer words were never spoken, I realize, as Trixie and I stop dead in the foyer. In front of us stands Magnolia, dressed in her usual supertight shorts and tee shirt, wearing a dazed expression and splotches of paint all up and down her arms and legs. Around her toddle about twenty kids, none of them older than three. Five of them are crying, at least that many are screaming, and some of them are taking a stab at finger-painting. One boy is standing by the floor-to-ceiling window swinging a toy truck in a wide arc. I suspect he’s plotting to break the glass and escape.
I stop one little girl from shoving her paint brush up her nose while Trixie breaks up a fight between a couple of boys. The one who nearly got beat up sets up a wail even though he’s just been rescued. Trixie scoops him up in her arms.
“Magnolia?” I move toward her. She doesn’t even register me. “Magnolia!” This time I shout.
Slowly her head turns in my direction. “Yeah?”
I’m not even sure she recognizes me. “What are you doing here?”
She thinks a moment. Then, “Babysitting.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see two little girls carefully upend a jar of water that had been holding used brushes. They giggle and watch with delight as the murky water puddles on the floor.
Trixie approaches, still holding the sobbing boy. “What’s wrong with you, Magnolia?” She raises her voice and snaps her fingers in front of Magnolia’s face. “Snap out of it!”
Magnolia yawns, not bothering to cover her mouth. “I’m exhausted.”
“You’re catatonic,” I say. “Why are you even here?”
“Cantwell sent me. He’s punishing me, obviously. He told the hotel I’d help out.”
Trixie looks around her in shock. “Bad idea. These parents would sue in a heartbeat if they got a whiff of what was going on in here.”
I sense activity at knee level and bend down just in time to remove a tray of paint colors from a little boy’s hands. “We don’t lick those, honey,” I tell him. I straighten and face Magnolia. “So what happened to the regular babysitter?”
Her eyes, done up as usual with her Nefertiti-style eyeliner, drift toward the door. “Beats me. I lost track of her. I’ve been here since like 6 AM. I’m so zonked I can’t see straight anymore.”
Trixie shakes her head in disgust, then her eyes widen. She races toward the floor-to-ceiling window where the little boy is swinging a toy truck and grabs it just before it smashes into the glass.
“Okay, Magnolia,” I say. “I’ll see if I can get you some help in here, but before I do, I want you to answer me a question. Where is that B&B where you videotaped Misty and Dirk?”
“B&B?” she repeats.
“Yes. The one you said was half an hour from here. What’s the name of it?”
She blinks. “I said there was a B&B?”
I take a deep breath. “Magnolia, you videotaped Misty and Dirk at a bed and breakfast that Dirk’s sister owns. Remember?”
She shakes her head. “Damned if I can remember my own name right now,” she says, then steps away from me.
I grab her arm but she pulls away. “Magnolia, come on,” I call but am forced to watch as she droops to the side of the room and slumps into a tiny plastic chair. Her head lolls back against the wall and I swear in two seconds she’s asleep.
“It’s no use,” Trixie calls to me from the window. She’s made progress, I see. The sobbing and the swinging boys are now sitting calmly on the floor putting paint on paper. “You’re not going to get anything out of her. You’re going to have to ask Dirk.”
I sigh. “You’re right. He would certainly know.” Though it may be challenging to pry the information out of him. He’s not exactly Mr. Talkative.
“I’m staying here,” Trixie says. “I can’t leave these kids.”
“You want me to stay with you?”
“No, you go. Hey!” she shouts at the bully boy who started the earlier fight and is about to incite another. “You lay one finger on that girl, you got me to answer to!”
The boy pulls his hands back from the little girl as if he’s just been caught in the headlights of a cop car.
“I’ve got it under control here,” Trixie says, which I can plainly see. “You go do what you have to do and then come tell me what you find out.”
I cannot believe it given the racket but Magnolia is indeed sleeping when I turn to go. Maybe Deepak Chopra is right with his whole synchrodestiny thing, because otherwise I don’t know what trick of fate sent Trixie and me to that babysitting center. All I know is I’m glad it did. For the kids’ sake.
I grab my breakfast drink from the café and head for the hotel’s courtesy shuttle, which zooms around Waikiki all day and all night dropping off and retrieving us Royal Hibiscans. This particular bus is standing room only. I drop my drink in my new white drawstring leather tote and clutch a pole for the ride’s duration.
I note when I arrive at Ventura Aerial Tours’ location that a chopper is returning to the helipad. I stand behind the Cyclone fence and watch it land. It’s noisy and generates a lot of wind and blowing dirt. A minute after it touches down, a handful of tourists tumble from its open door and in various groupings pose for pictures below the slowing rotary blades. Dirk Ventura himself emerges and is petitioned to pose as well. He doesn’t look happy about it. His aviator sunglasses stay on and I don’t see much of a smile on his lips.
I watch him. For all that I detest what I have learned about Dirk Ventura’s behavior toward women—female tourists in particular—I do recognize he has a compelling aura. There’s the tall, dark, handsome bit, sure; but there’s also the man of few words, masterful-chopper-pilot thing going on. I can see why Misty found him attractive.
I find him a little scary, too. He seems mysterious, somehow, hard to read. None of this is inconsistent with how I think of murderers, I must say. But unless Dirk Ventura fell totally in love with Misty and so killed Tiffany in order to improve Misty’s chances of taking the Ms. America title, I don’t see a motive for murder. Plus there’s no way he could have snuck around backstage and remained unseen.
Unless, of course, Dirk and Misty were in cahoots. He might have handled some phase of the operation—like getting the poison—while Misty laced Tiffany’s lipstick while she was backstage. Again, that presupposes a serious love affair between the two, which had to have developed very quickly.
I wonder what’s happened to it since?
Eventually the tourists file through the gate in the fence and return to their rental cars. Ventura perches half in and half out of the chopper scanning paperwork. I call him a few times from the gate but either he can’t hear me or doesn’t choose to, as he doesn’t acknowledge me in the slightest. Eventually I ignore the DO NOT ENTER: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign and approach the chopper.
He doesn’t raise his head to look at me until I’m about ten yards away. Then, I note, his eyes travel nowhere else.
I do look kind of cute, I will tell you, in my True Religion stretch denim cuffed shorts—which I’m amazed I can still cram myself into given my dietary habits of late—and lapis-colored jersey halter top with beaded pintucks. The chunky stacked sandals don’t hurt, either, I bet. They have four inch heels and a one-inch platform so I’m tall and leggy if nothing else.
“Hi, Dirk,” I yell when I’m within earshot. Even with the chopper’s blades no longer rotating, the wind in this area is so relentless it’s impossible to hear.
He leans out of the chopper. “You’re in the mood to break the rules today, I see.”
“Oh.” For a moment I’m flummoxed. Then, “Oh, you mean the sign?”
He nods. His eyes never leave my face.
“Sorry about that. I just wanted to ask you a question.”
He cups his ear as if he can’t hear me.
“I just wanted to ask you a question,” I shout.
He gives me a once-over. From my long blown-dry brunette hair to my bright orange toenails and back again. “What’ll you give me if I answer?” he asks.
I put my hand on my hip. “Dirk Ventura, are you flirting with me?”
I watch a smile form on his lips. That’s an achievement by itself. He exits the chopper, walks around to the other side, gets in there, and gestures to me to take the seat he’s just cleared.
I stand there like a moron. “You want me to get in?”
“It’ll be easier to talk,” he tells me.
Probably so, but I’m not convinced that’s the reason Dirk Ventura issued the invitation. I suspect he considers himself a more skilled practitioner of the seducer’s art when he’s in his chopper’s pilot seat. I hoist myself up and assume the position Misty was in when it all began between her and Dirk. There I have an even stronger feeling that Misty’s and mine are only two in a long line of female butts to have ridden shotgun with Dirk Ventura.
But I have to conclude this is a positive development. After all, I want information out of him. I’m more likely to get it if he’s thinking he might get something out of me.
He shuts both chopper doors and immediately it gets quieter.
I scan his face, then bat my eyes. “You don’t look any the worse for wear after that punch you took from Misty Delgado’s husband,” I tell him.
He shrugs and looks out the chopper’s front window. “I guess he had to get it out of his system. Especially after
—
” He stops.
“After what?”
It takes him a while to answer. Then, “After he got wind of what I told the cops.”
“You spoke with them?” I ask breathlessly. I’m embarrassingly good at Brunette Bimbo. “What did you tell them?”
He turns back to me. “That Misty Delgado isn’t worth killing somebody over.”
“Oh my God!” I give him my best Valley Girl. “Are you telling me the cops asked you flat out if you killed Tiffany Amber?”
“They did. And I told them they were out of their minds if they thought I’d commit homicide for Misty Delgado.”
I slap him playfully on the arm. “That’s not a very nice thing to say about the woman you’re supposed to be in love with.” I follow the line with a giggle.
He looks at me. Since he’s still wearing his reflective aviator sunglasses I can’t see his eyes. But again I have the funniest feeling that he’s regarding me with, shall we say, heightened interest. “Let’s just say that what I felt for Misty can be described with a different four-letter word than love.”
I pretend to be shocked. “Do you mean … lust?”
He gives me a piercing stare, as piercing as it can be through polycarbonate. “Over time, I’ve come to see that Misty isn’t all I first thought her to be.”
I guess his opinion was higher when all he knew of her was that she’d cheat on her husband in a heartbeat.
“For example,” he goes on, “I don’t like what she did to you last night.”
