One of Those Malibu Nights (20 page)

“I’m Mac Reilly’s—” Sunny stopped herself quickly from saying
fiancée
, because of course she wasn’t, and
girlfriend
sounded too cute. “Assistant,” she substituted at the last second.

“I should have known. I asked him to work for me. He turned me down. If he hadn’t, maybe I wouldn’t be in the fix I’m in now,” he added bitterly.

“And exactly what
fix
is that?” Sunny knew she had him nailed. He would tell her everything now.

Instead he summoned the waiter to bring a second mango margarita.

“So, what
really
brings you here?” He gave her that beetling glance.

“Allie Ray,” she said simply.

Perrin stared silently into his glass. “Don’t tell me you’re here to serve me with a subpoena,” he said, suddenly turned to ice.

She shook her head. “And don’t
you
tell me, Ron Perrin, that you don’t know Allie is missing.”

Perrin lifted his eyes. He stared at her, his face suddenly devoid of expression.

“You must know she disappeared from the Cannes Film Festival,” Sunny prompted. “I thought you’d know where she’s gone.”

He seemed to pull himself together. “Why should I know where Allie goes these days? She’s her own woman.”

He was playing it cool but Sunny sensed a thread of despair in the slump of his shoulders, in the suddenly-tired face and the blank eyes that were not willing to show his true feelings. Could he really not know where his wife had gone?

“You care though, don’t you?” she said softly.

He lifted a dismissive shoulder again. If he was shocked by the news of his wife’s disappearance he wasn’t going to talk about it.

“What does it matter? She’s going her way, I’m going mine.” He called for another tequila and sank it down, then poured the Corona down his throat. “Anyhow, you’re not here to talk about caring. You’re here to make some kind of deal.”

“She’s not the only woman missing,” Sunny said. “What about Ruby Pearl?”

He stared at her, obviously surprised. “Ruby was a secretary. She helped me out for a couple of weeks. I don’t know where she went after that.”

“And then there’s Marisa. She’s still in Rome and still waiting to hear from you. She showed us the canary diamond engagement ring you gave her—no small diamond either, my friend. She told us you’d promised to marry her.” She looked hard at him. “She’s worried, Ron.”

Frowning, he ran a hand through his receding brown hair. “I never talked ‘love’ or marriage to Marisa. That ring was a token. She admired it in a shop window so I bought it for her. It gave her pleasure, but it was not an engagement ring. Hey, I’m still a married man,” he added.

“Pity you didn’t think of that before you started an affair.”

Perrin leaned in to her across the table. “Let’s get this straight, Sunny Alvarez,” he said. “Marisa was under no illusions, despite what she said to you about an ‘engagement’ ring. She knew the score and I wasn’t the first rich guy she’d hung out with. Marisa is one savvy chick.”

“She also said you were into S and M sex.”

“She said
what?”
His face was blank with shock. “That’s crap.”

“I thought she was lying. I even thought she might be planning a bit of blackmail. You know the kind of thing—she’d sell her story to the tabloids unless you came through. And anyway, what happened that night in Malibu when Mac heard her scream? She
was
there, even though you denied it.”

“Okay, so she was there. I just didn’t want the world to know about it. Can you blame me? I’m a married man. What happened was, I was at a meeting. She’d gone to the Malibu house to wait for me, said she heard footsteps, got scared. Then Reilly came bursting through the door.”

“So she shot him.”

“Not exactly.”

“She tried.”

He lifted his shoulder in a dismissive shrug. “A strange guy comes through your window at midnight you’d shoot him too.”

“So why were you with Marisa anyway?” Sunny was suddenly curious. There was more to this strange man than met her eyes and she wanted to dig deeper, find out what he was all about beneath that tough-guy layer, stripped of the glamour of power in his ridiculous flowered shorts and old T-shirt.

He gave her a long dark look. “You want the truth?” he said quietly. “It’s love gone wrong. That’s all, Sunny Alvarez.
It’s love gone wrong.”

He slumped over the table and put his head in his hands. “Allie doesn’t love me anymore. That is if she ever did,” he added. “Can I blame her? Of course not. And wouldn’t most men in the world have liked to be Mr. Allie Ray? You bet they would. It was what I wanted more than anything, more than all the money, the houses, the possessions, the power. I wanted Allie and now I’ve lost her. And in answer to your question, Miss Detective, I’m here at my little hangout trying to find my soul again.”

Sunny stared at him, stunned into sympathy. She gulped back the tears that threatened. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

“I’ve never had a woman feel sorry for me before,” Perrin said. “And I don’t know that I like it.” He lumbered to his feet, swaying slightly. “I’m tired,” he said. “That’s why I’m talking too much. I’ve gotta go.”

He thrust his hand in his pocket and gave the waiter a sheaf of pesos. “That’ll take care of it,” he said. And ignoring Sunny, he made for the exit. She followed him out into the street. “How did you get here?”

He searched in his pocket for the car keys. “Drove of course.”

“Hah! Well you’re certainly not driving now. Not with all that tequila in you.”

“Are you implying I’m drunk?” He asked the question with all the pompousness of the inebriated.

“I sure am, Ron Perrin.” Sunny hailed a cruising cab.
She opened the door and pushed him inside. “Take him home,” she told the driver, and she gave him directions.

Slumped in the backseat, Perrin looked at her from under drooping lids. “I’ll bet you’re in love with Mac Reilly,” he said. “A woman like you, you could twist any man round your finger.”

“I wish,” she replied, smiling. Then, “Look, I’m coming over to see you tomorrow morning. We’ll talk some more.”

“What about?”

“Well, you know, like about money laundering,” she said, then immediately wished she hadn’t. “And maybe about love,” she added, softening the blow. She slammed the door shut and stood, watching the cab drive down the side street then turn left at the corner, out of sight.

There was no doubt in her mind that Ron Perrin was still in love with his wife. And no doubt he was in trouble. Tomorrow she would see what she could do to help.

The next morning, Sunny was up early. She took a walk along the beach, enjoying the fresh clean air and the early warmth of the sun, watching pelicans drop like dive-bombers into the sea, emerging with glittering silvery fish in their beaks.

She took her own breakfast on the terrace: deep dark coffee with sweet rolls that this morning tasted as good as any she had ever eaten. Then she ordered a thermos of coffee to go and she drove slowly over to Perrin’s place.

She knocked on the door but there was no reply. She turned the handle and pushed it open. “Hi, it’s me, Sunny,” she called. “I brought you some coffee, thought you might need it.”

Putting the thermos on the table, she glanced around. The room was empty. The terrace was bare. And the Bryan Ferry CD lay broken in two on the table.

Her heart sank. She wasn’t bringing Perrin home in triumph to Mac after all.

It was hot in Cannes and Mac drove with the top down on the rental Peugeot, hoping the slight breeze would blow away the cobwebs of jet travel. He checked in at the Hôtel Martinez and went directly to the concierge to ask about limo services.

Armed with a complete list of those in the area, he went to his room, showered and ordered room service breakfast, even though it was one in the afternoon. He pulled on a pair of shorts and sat on his little terrace enjoying the sea view and thinking about Allie.

He had no doubt she had run away from life as she knew it. She’d had enough of being a movie star, enough of being second woman to her philandering husband, enough of the glamour and the riches of the Hollywood lifestyle.
Basically, she was a simple woman who, as she had confessed to him, had never felt at home in her skin, and never felt part of the scene in which she played such a major role. Allie wanted her privacy back. She wanted to be anonymous.

He’d had Sunny e-mail the last pictures of Allie, taken at the Festival. She looked beautiful and serene, doing her job, posing for the press and waving to the fans. He thought there was nowhere she could go and not be recognized. She would have to have some sort of disguise, somehow change her look.

He drank the freshly squeezed orange juice that tasted like sunshine in a glass and ate the eggs scrambled with wild mushrooms, still thinking about her.

The most obvious thing would be to cut off her hair. He winced at the thought. Allie’s hair was one of her signature features: thick, shiny and naturally blond. Of course then she would need to dye it. She’d go for a simpler look, jeans and T-shirts probably, and she would have to wear glasses. At least if he were in charge of her disguise, that’s what she would do. And even then he wasn’t sure it would work. Most certainly she would have to leave the glitzy parts of the South of France behind, probably head north, into the countryside.

Taking out the Michelin map he’d picked up at Nice airport, he studied the main routes. One led to Provence and the Luberon, an area filled with movie people, writers and
vacationing socialites. The others led toward Toulouse and the west, or north via Agen. Sighing, he folded up the map. France was even bigger than he had thought.

Taking out his list of limo services he began systematically to call each one, trying to locate the service assigned to take Allie to the Festival. He got lucky on the fourth try. Telling the limo company manager he would be right over, Mac threw on a shirt and sandals and drove to the outskirts of Cannes.

The manager was suspicious. “We have already been hounded by too many reporters, monsieur,” he said coldly. “We never talk to them about our clientele.”

“I work for Madame Ray, I am involved with her security.” Mac showed him his card. “I would like to speak to the driver who took her to the airport.”

As it happened the man was about to show up for work, and Mac waited under the manager’s frowning gaze for him to arrive. When he did, Mac stood up and greeted him warmly, shaking his hand and calling him
“mon ami.”
It didn’t go down too well. The driver was definitely not his “friend;” he was standoffish, worried that he might be in some kind of trouble. He was a short man with a big nose and beady eyes that stared sullenly at Mac.

“All I need to know is where you dropped Madame Ray, and what she did next,” Mac said.

The driver, whose name was Claude, said he had no authority to talk to anyone about Madame Ray and had not
said a word to any reporters. Mac had to go through his spiel all over again and though still reluctant the driver finally spoke.

“Madame Ray is not a missing person,” he said nervously. “There has been no report to the police of her being ‘missing.’ The cops are not involved.”

“True,” Mac agreed, knowing he was probably the only person now who might raise questions about Allie’s whereabouts. But he still thought she was a runaway and he didn’t want the police on her trail.

“I dropped her at Departures,” Claude said. “She was dressed up for the Festival, but when she got out she had on a sweater and a hat pulled over her hair. She wore dark glasses. She didn’t even let me get her bag—just one small valise. She took it herself. She gave me a good tip, thanked me …” He shrugged. “And that, monsieur, was that.”

“Did you watch her go?”

“For a minute, yes. She went straight inside, heading I supposed for check-in. I don’t know where she was going, monsieur. That’s all I know.”

Mac sighed. It had not gotten him much further. All he had was Allie in place, in semi-disguise, at Nice airport on the night she disappeared. She might have done anything after leaving the limo, taken a taxi to the train station for instance, or rented a car.

Thanking Claude, he drove from Cannes back to the airport in Nice, where he found all the flights that had left
late that night and their destinations. Next he went to Arrivals and checked out the rental car agencies. None of them had any record of Allie Ray renting a car.

Stymied, and knowing he had wasted his time, he drove back to the hotel. There was an e-mail from Sunny. “Off on a little trip of my own,” it said. “I’ll call you when I get back.”

Of course he called her right away. There was no reply. Mac sighed. The women in his life were giving him trouble. He wondered what Sunny had been up to now.

Allie circumnavigated Toulouse, panicked by the spaghetti junction of motorways with signs reading
BARCELONA, BORDEAUX, PARIS
. She didn’t want to go to any of those places.

Sandwiched between cars whose confident French drivers were mostly on the phone, she honked at them furiously, then slid the baby blue car between them, putting her foot down and scattering them honking behind her.

The road sign now said
AGEN
so she guessed that’s where she was going. It took longer than she had thought and she was weary of driving. She wanted somewhere rural with fields and trees and maybe even little bubbling streams, the tourist’s dream of the French countryside.

The dog snuffled gently in his sleep as she headed north toward Bergerac, through the small town of Castillonnès,
where she stopped for a cup of coffee and to walk the dog, and also to ask directions to the scenic route.

Back in the car, she drifted farther into the countryside. Soon emerald green fields rolled away on either side, with caramel-colored cows browsing in the shade of ancient chestnut trees. A small river slid lazily through, making eventually for the big splashy Dordogne. Rocky paths led into hills topped with mysterious turreted castles. Horses grazed in verdant paddocks and long white avenues lined with fluttering poplars led to small peaceful châteaux, while farms with slatted wooden barns looked as though they had been there for centuries.