Obsession, Deceit and Really Dark Chocolate (22 page)

“If I want to distance myself from her, why am I helping her? I could have left this whole thing to Anatoly.”

“Two reasons. At the moment, Melanie’s too upset about her own life to make you deal with yours, so it’s safe to help her now. The second reason is that she truly appreciates how much you cared about Dad and how much his death affected you and that makes her your friend whether you like it or not. You have never been able to walk away from a friend in need. Oh, and you also want to be around Anatoly—I suppose that’s three reasons.”

“Are you
seeing
a therapist or becoming one?” I asked.

“Really, Sophie, you know I’ve always been very good at figuring out what other people’s problems are. It’s my problems that elude me.”

“Join the club,” I said. “Everything would be so much easier if we could just run one another’s lives instead of our own.”

“Well that’s why I have a therapist. I’m hoping he’ll tell me how to run my life, although he’s done an awful job of it so far. He still hasn’t told me how to find a husband.”

“Maybe you can order one from the Neiman Marcus Christmas catalog.”

Leah smiled and started the car again. “You’re changing the subject again.”

“Yeah, but you let me do it.” I looked out at the dark streets and sighed. “A lot of years have gone by since Dad died.”

“Twelve,” Leah said softly.

“Do you think I’ll ever come to terms with it?”

“Maybe. Melanie helped you with it when you were in college, maybe you could talk to her about it again—after you’ve solved this case, of course.”

I understood that Leah had just given my involvement in this case her approval and oddly enough that meant something to me. I was going to take her advice and start talking to Melanie about Dad again. It was time. But what if Melanie was no longer around to listen?

The fear that I had been trying to distract myself from came back with a new force.

“Sophie, by the time I find parking I’m going to have to leave,” Leah grumbled.

“I know,” I said. “Why don’t you drop me off at my door and you can go home and take care of Jack.”

My visit with Leah hadn’t calmed me. If anything, it had intensified my need to find Melanie. I needed to help her. I needed to talk to her. But most of all, I needed her to be safe.

Once back in my apartment I checked my e-mails in hopes of finding something from Melanie, but of course there was nothing there. I took out a piece of paper and tried to make a list of all the places she might be, but when I couldn’t come up with anything I tore the paper up. At eleven I turned on the television but found that even Jon Stewart didn’t have the power to distract me from my growing trepidation. At eleven-twenty Anatoly called.

“Have you heard from Melanie?” I asked hopefully.

“Not yet.” He didn’t bother asking me if I had heard anything. There were lots of things that Anatoly and I were willing to keep from each other, but not this kind of stuff.

I turned off the TV and adjusted my legs so Mr. Katz could make himself at home on my lap. “Okay, so what’s Anne been up to?”

“Nothing interesting. She was at the campaign headquarters until seven-thirty, then she and a few people from her office went out for pizza and now she’s home with her husband.”

“Scintillating.”

“Mmm…but the night hasn’t been a total waste.”

“How do you figure?”

“Anne may not be doing anything out of the ordinary, but I’m not the only one interested in her. There’s another man who’s been following her.”

“You’re kidding me!” I scooted to the edge of the couch, earning a look of admonishment from my pet.

“No, some guy in an old white Dodge Conversion. I’m watching him right now.”

“A Conversion? I don’t know much about cars, but isn’t that a van?”

“Yep, and from the looks of it I’d say it was a model from the early eighties and hasn’t been washed or serviced since the nineties.”

“Someone is following Anne Brooke in a white dilapidated van? Isn’t that kind of conspicuous?”

“You could say that.”

“Do you think Anne has noticed?”

“Hard to tell, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she has. Unfortunately that means that if she was planning on doing something incriminating, she’s probably changed her mind. On the plus side this guy is making it less likely that she’ll notice
me.
”

“How totally weird.”

“Ah, he’s leaving. I’m going to see where he’s headed. I’ll call if I find out anything important. Otherwise I’ll call tomorrow morning—late morning.”

“Okay. After you’re done chasing Mr. Smog Emissions do you think you could swing by Melanie’s place again?”

“I was planning on it.”

“And if she’s home you’ll call me, right?”

Anatoly waited a few moments before speaking. “We will find her, Sophie. I promise you that.”

An unexpected wave of relief washed over me. Anatoly rarely made promises, and when he did he never broke them. When Leah was accused of murder he never said “Everything’s going to be okay” or “She’ll be fine.” It had pissed me off at the time, but now I was grateful for it because it meant that this last promise was valid. He felt confident in his ability to track Melanie down.

“Thank you, Anatoly,” I breathed. “I think I might even be able to sleep now.”

“You’re welcome. Good night, Sophie.”

“Wait!” I should have let him end the call on a good note, but now that he had given me a taste of reassurance I craved more. “You think Melanie’s okay, right? I mean she’s going to be fine.”

“Try to get some sleep, Sophie. I’ll call you tomorrow.” No promises that time. And with that he ended the call, along with any hopes I had of a good night’s rest.

At nine-forty-five the next morning, Anatoly forgot his promised phone call and showed up on my doorstep instead. Nine-forty-five does not fit my definition of “late morning” but I forgave him because he came bearing muffins and Frappuccinos. I polished off my drink and was halfway through my muffin before I worked up the nerve to ask him what he had discovered the night before. Anatoly and I may have our differences, but we both firmly believe in the Jewish rules of life, first and foremost being that every sweet moment must be balanced with a healthy dose of bitterness. And the fact that Anatoly had brought me a breakfast rich in refined sugar was not lost on me.

“I found out the name of the man who was following Anne last night,” Anatoly said after swallowing a mouthful of blueberry pastry. “His name’s Darrell Jenkins and he’s a private detective.”

“What!” I set down my muffin and stared at Anatoly across my dining table. “Are you sure about that?”

“Very sure. After he left Anne’s he went straight home. He didn’t check his mail, which turned out to be an incredibly lucky break, although from the looks of it he only picks up his mail once or twice a week.”

“What was in his mail?”

“Two credit card bills and a notice from the IRS, complete with his full name and social security number. It only took an hour or so on the Internet and a few phone calls earlier this morning to get a fairly complete account of this man’s life.”

“Give me the Cliffs Notes version.”

“He’s a high school dropout born and raised in Gilroy. He tried to join the army but was rejected because he didn’t have a GED.”

“I thought the military had some kind of program these days to help dropouts who want to enlist to
get
their GED,” I said.

“That program isn’t open to everyone and you do still have to pass the GED at some point, and Darrell failed. So when the army turned him away he got a job as a nighttime security guard at the local Pak’nSave but was fired because he was trying to frisk the female customers. That’s when he came up to Contra Costa County. He worked as a bouncer at a nightclub for a long time but eventually he got in a fistfight with one of the owners after that owner reportedly called our president a pussy.”

“Well, in Darrell’s defense the owner was out of line,” I said. “It’s been decades since we’ve had a president sensitive enough to be called a pussy.”

“Yes, well, there’s that,” Anatoly agreed. “Criminal charges were filed, but it was unclear who instigated the physical aspect of the fight and the whole thing was thrown out of court in short order. Soon thereafter Darrell managed to actually pass a test and he got himself a private investigator’s license, courtesy of an online training course.”

“Kind of puts a chink in the exclusivity of your industry, doesn’t it?”

“This from an author of murder mysteries. You don’t have to be Shakespeare to get a book published these days.”

I groaned and fell back in my chair. “I’m so tired of being criticized for not writing like some guy who died four hundred years ago. I bet when Shakespeare wrote his first sonnet the sixteenth-century critics got out their quills and wrote, ‘While the work doest have merit, William doth not compare to the greatness that was Chaucer.’”

Anatoly started to laugh, which was problematic since he had a mouth full of coffee. Once he managed to swallow he said, “Literary greats aside, Darrell Jenkins is not very good at what he does.”

“The white van was probably a bad call.”

“Yes, particularly when you consider that Anne lives in Lafayette, a town in which most of the cars have German or Italian names and cost about the same as a two-bedroom condo in Arkansas. But his incompetence doesn’t stop there.”

“No?”

“He advertises in the Yellow Pages.”

“
You
advertise in the Yellow Pages.”

“Yes, but my ad doesn’t feature a five-by-six color photograph of myself. Do you see the problem with exposing your identity to the world when your job requires a degree of anonymity?”

“Yes,” I agreed between muffin bites, “that was unwise. Who’s he working for?”

“I don’t have the answer to that yet, but I will soon.”

I nodded and let my gaze fall to my cat, who was rubbing himself up against the table leg. “I think we need to get to the subject we’re both avoiding.”

Anatoly sighed. “I rode by her house at 2:00 a.m. and she wasn’t home and she didn’t answer the phone when I called earlier this morning. I’m going to drive over there again today, and if she’s not around I think we should file a missing-person report.”

“Shit.”

“Unless of course you can think of some place where she might have gone to. Did she have any close friends or special places that she liked to escape to?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know those things. We haven’t spent a lot of time together over the past few years.” I considered telling him Leah’s theories about why that was but I stopped myself. The details of my relationship with Melanie were too emotionally complicated to share with a man who wasn’t even my boyfriend. But there was one thing that I did need to share with him. I twiddled with the plastic top of my empty cup and tried to figure out how to broach the subject. “Listen, there’s something that I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I was going to tell you yesterday, but then I got distracted by our search for Melanie. But well, um…someone’s been kind of threatening me.”

“What?” Anatoly yelled.

“Yeah. I’m not sure who. They left one message on my answering machine, one anonymous note on my door and called my cell once. The cell call came right after the Rotunda lunch while you were waiting for me in the car. I don’t know if the caller is a man or a woman because they’re using a voice synthesizer that makes them sound a little like Darth Vader.”

“Sophie,” Anatoly growled, “we are investigating a murder. You have to
tell me
when you get death threats.”

“But that’s the thing. They’re not death threats, I don’t think. They’re more like…funny threats.”

“Funny threats,” Anatoly repeated.

I nodded and walked over to my answering machine to play the message for him. While he listened I pulled out the Pink Panther note and handed it over.

For a few minutes Anatoly simply stared silently at the note. “I have to admit,” he finally said, “I don’t know what to make of this.”

“In the last call he told me that he liked to dress up as a koala bear.”

“You’re serious?”

“I don’t think I could make that up.”

Anatoly looked at the note again. Finally, he handed it back to me. “I’ll think about this. In the meantime I should get over to Melanie’s.”

“I’m going with you.”

“That’s not necessary.”

“It will be necessary if you need to file a missing-person report. I may not know who Melanie hangs out with when I’m not around, but I will be able to give the cops a lot more information about her than you will. Besides, if you talk to the police you might do something stupid like tell them the truth.”

“I don’t think I want to know where this is going.”

“We can’t tell them that Melanie hired us to investigate Eugene’s death.”

“Sophie, we can’t
not
tell them. It may be the reason she’s disappeared.”

“I promised her I’d keep my mouth shut about that and I’m not going to break that promise just because she’s been MIA for a couple of days.”

“Sophie…”

“If after a little snooping we find a concrete reason for the police to know about everything, then we’ll tell them. Not necessarily that we’ve been investigating anything, but that Melanie was worried that Eugene’s murder might have been premeditated. But if we break Melanie’s confidence straight away it could seriously damage my relationship with her, and I don’t want it to come to that.”

Anatoly met my eyes, his expression somber with a touch of empathy. “Sophie, there’s a chance that Melanie is no longer in the position to end her relationship with you or anyone else.”

I didn’t flinch or even acknowledge the fact that I’d heard him. There were some things I just couldn’t deal with. Instead I looked down at the cotton bleach-stained pants that I had pulled on under my nightshirt when Anatoly buzzed my apartment. “Give me twenty minutes to get myself together.”

“You’re insisting on this, aren’t you?”

“Trust me, Anatoly, telling the cops the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is rarely a good strategy.”