Sammy Keyes and the Hollywood Mummy (14 page)

I let out a big sigh, then try to sound desperate. “So she was here? Did she say anything? Anything at all about me or maybe my grandmother?”

He shakes his head. “Sorry, kid.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“Not about anything like that.”

“My poor grandmother. She's so upset! On top of the amnesia and her disappearing, Grams is afraid my mom stole some of her jewelry.” I could see him stiffen up, but there was no stopping now. I held out Claire's picture and said, “See this? This is my grandmother back when she got married, and the jewels she's wearing are family heirlooms. They're, like, centuries old. My grandmother's worried sick that my mother's pawned them for cash.”

Hali had sashayed around to the jewelry counter and was about fifteen feet away from us, leaning over a case, looking very interested.

Ol' Cos puts up a stiff little smile and shakes his head. “I'm sorry. I can't help you there.”

He's edging away, but I tag right along. “You probably can't tell from the picture, but the stones are red. Are you sure she didn't try to get you to buy the necklace or maybe the ring?”

He shakes his head and says, “You might try the Jewelry Connection. It's three blocks down the street. She might've gone there.” He eyes Hali and whispers, “Now if you'll excuse me, I have to attend to my
paying
customers.”

I can tell from the way he's acting that he's lying. He's seen that necklace, or my name's Helen Keller. So I follow him, saying, “But if she didn't try to sell them to you, then why did she come in here? Look, we're not going to call the police or anything, I just want to find her and get my grandmother's jewels back.” I touch his arm and say, “Look, I know you've got them. So why don't you tell me where they are?”

Hali grins at me from across the room. “Hey, school-girls! They're right over here.”

Pinecone-head looks from her to me a couple of times, then says, “What is this?”

Hali smiles, sits right down on one of his velvety stools, and crosses her legs. “It could be a bust if you want to keep on creepin' on. But if you decide to adopt a conscience and hand these baubles over, then we'll be out of here with a quick case of amnesia ourselves.”

I felt like saying, Wait! No! There's a murder involved here, don't promise him that! but before I could figure out what to say, he snaps, “I paid her good money for those. How was I supposed to know they were hot?”

Hali's got no sympathy. “It's your business to know, bucko.”

He whips around to face me. “Your mother's got amnesia … what a con artist!” He moves behind the counter and says to Hali, “If you think I'm just going to hand these over to you…”

Hali smiles at him and says, “Oh, you will. 'Cause you know that the wad you blew buyin' them is a lot smaller than the one you'd pay a lawyer to defend you in a court of law.” She digs through her purse and pulls up a cell phone. “Your destiny's just a nine-one-one away.”

He doesn't budge, so she pushes a button on her phone.
Beep
. “Nine …”

“Now, listen to me!”

She pushes again. “One …”

He lets out a chain of cusswords long enough to circle the block, but he opens the case and throws the jewels
at us. “Get out of here, you hear me? Get out of here!”

We scamper up the street, around the corner, and back to the Bug, and the minute we're safe inside, Hali whoops and puts out her hands for us to slap. “You two were
smooth
! Amnesia … what a trip! I can't believe it—he just handed them over!” She holds the necklace out and whispers, “This thing must be worth a pretty penny.”

I snatch it from her and say, “Don't even think about it. It belongs to Max.”

She scowls and says, “Like he doesn't owe me
some-
thing? What are you going to do? Just hand it back to him on a silver platter?”

“I don't know how or when I'm going to give it back, but I am going to give it back.” I wiggle my hand at her. “Now hand over the ring.”

She says, “Aw, man!” but she digs it out of her purse and gives it to me. “Like I'd want to have anything that was
Claire's
anyway.” She cranks on the motor, muttering, “Poor Mama.”

I hand the jewels over the seat to Marissa and ask, “Because he never married her?”

“Because,” she said, flipping a U-turn, “Mama's lived in Claire's shadow all these years. He told her he could never marry again. Ha!”

“Why did she keep working for him?”

Hali squealed onto the street. “Get this—because she
loves
him. Can you believe that? Says she always has. She thought one day he'd do the right thing.”

After Hali had merged into traffic I said, “You know, I wasn't really expecting to get the jewels back. I just
wanted to find out if Opal really stole them, before I went and talked to her.”

“To Opal? How you gonna do that?”

I gave her an apologetic smile. “We were hoping that maybe the Tinsel Town Taxi would be running that way?”

She scowled at me so long I thought she was going to rear-end the car in front of us. “And where might ‘that way’ be?”

I tried to make it sound light and fun. “Ever heard of the Peppermint Peacock?”

One look at her face and I knew that she had.

The Peppermint Peacock made the Heavenly Hotel look like a charming little bed-and-breakfast.

Hali tucked the Bug into a loading zone across the street while Marissa and I gawked at the dirty brick building with GIRLS-GIRLS-GIRLS slashed in lavender and pink across it.

The building is solid brick, so there are no windows to go snooping in, and you can't even see the front door because it's set way back from the sidewalk. The brick walls curve into a kind of tunnel that leads under a turquoise
PEPPERMINT PEACOCK
awning straight into darkness.

Hali lets the car idle and says, “No action there this time of day.”

It did look dead, but I didn't want to give up yet. “Tammy made it sound like Opal
lives
here.”

“Really? Maybe in one of those rooms upstairs?” Hali shakes her head and mutters, “She could've done better than that.”

I lean clear across Hali to see what she's talking about. Sure enough, planted on the building like a top hat on a red rhinoceros are two floors finished in stucco. Dirty white stucco with streaks of rust running from the corners
of the windows. And the windows are all cloudy. Like the glass has been washed with acid.

Marissa whispers, “I think we're in a little deep here, Sammy.”

No kidding.

But I felt a little braver for having Hali around, so I said, “You want to cruise around back? There's got to be some other way in and out.”

Hali grinds into gear, then cuts through traffic. “I'm game if you are.”

There was another way in. Actually, two. We putted along an alley lined with garbage cans on one side and a graffitied cinder-block wall on the other, and when we got to the red brick of the Peppermint Peacock we saw a set of oily cement steps going down into a basement and a zigzag of rickety fire-escape stairs leading up to the floors above.

There's no place to park without blocking the alley, so Hali winds up going onto the side street, saying, “We could come back after they open if you want to.”

Marissa says, “Why don't we just call?”

I didn't want to do either of those things. I wanted to see Opal. Now. “You guys can wait here. I'll just go knock on that basement door and see if anyone answers. Then maybe I'll try around front.”

Hali rolls her eyes. “Right, Burdock. Like I'm gonna let you do that.”

“Look, I just want to find out if she's here or not.”

Marissa mutters, “And you can't do that by calling?”

We sat there in limbo for a minute, then finally Hali
pops up a low curb, drives along the sidewalk for a few yards, and squeezes the Bug onto a patch of dirt next to a dilapidated fence. She sighs and says, “Okay. Let's go knock.”

I smile at her and say, “Thanks!” and even though Marissa does grumble something about the glitz and glamour of Garbage Boulevard, she gets out of the car and follows us down the alley.

When we're about thirty feet from the building, we see a man's head, then his shoulders, then the rest of him bob up the basement steps. His skin's dark like Hali's, and he's wearing a white apron loosely tied over a T-shirt and black jeans, and in each hand is a Hefty sack, heavy with garbage.

He swings the sacks into a garbage can, and as we get closer I can see that his hair is woven with gray and that his eyes look cloudy. Like the windows overhead.

He completely ignores us. And for a minute I thought maybe his eyes were so bad that he couldn't really see us. But as he heads back down the steps, Hali says, “Excuse me?” and he stops, turns, and stares at us. And that's when it hits me—these aren't eyes that can't see. They're eyes that don't
want
to see.

He doesn't say a word. He just stands there, two steps down, his gaze fixed on Hali.

Hali hesitates, then says, “We're here to see our friend Opal. She up?”

His head jerks enough to mean Follow me, then down he goes, through the basement door.

We hurry after him, and the minute we're inside, he
clangs the door closed and rotates a metal latch, locking the door. The ceiling is low, with ductwork and plumbing running on the brick walls and overhead, and there's only one bare bulb for lighting. Straight ahead are wooden stairs leading up to a doorway. He goes up, and so do we.

Now, when Tammy had mentioned the Peppermint Peacock, I'd thought that it was a funny name. A colorful name. Bright. Snappy. Kind of, I don't know,
tangy
. But stepping through the doorway at the top of the stairs and into the main room of the Peppermint Peacock, I saw there was nothing bright or snappy about it. It was a cave with black booths and grimy maroon carpet, and the air was damp and sour with stagnant smoke and body odor and beer. It felt suffocating. Like being caught in the grip of a giant sweaty armpit.

Hali says, “There she is,” and nods across the room at Opal, sitting alone at the bar, cupping a mug of coffee in her hands. Her hair's clipped back in a tangle of ratty curls, and she's staring off into space. “I suppose you want me to hang back?”

“No, you can come. That's probably better. But can you let me tell her about LeBrandi?”

She shrugs. “Sure.”

The three of us approach the bar, and I can see Opal snap out of her thoughts and start watching us in the reflection of a giant mirror on the other side of the bar. And you can tell that when she recognizes Hali, she can't quite believe it's her. First she blinks into the mirror, then she turns on her stool and almost smiles. “Hali?”

“In the flesh, girl.”

“But …” She eyes us and says, “You taken up babysitting?”

“Don't be frosty, now. We just got here.”

Opal looks around and says, “This ain't exactly a place to take kids.”

“You got it backward, snowflake. They're the ones escorting me.”

Opal blinks at her a minute, then looks at us. “Is that so?”

I nod at her, and she smiles at me. Like I'm some dumb little kitten who's come to the counter for milk. She slaps the stool next to her and says, “Well, tell me what's brought you to this fine establishment. Auntie Opal's all ears.”

I sit down and watch her face very carefully as I say, “Actually, we're here on account of LeBrandi.”

Her eyebrows go way up. “LeBrandi?
She
told you to look me up? For what?”

She didn't fidget. Or look away. She just stared at me, waiting for an answer.

Very quietly I said, “We're here because LeBrandi's dead.”

Her face fell. Just bottomed out. Then her eyes got wider and wider, and she looked from Hali to Marissa and then back to me. “
Dead?
How can that be?”

“She was murdered.”

“
Murdered?
When? By who?”

I kept my eyes right on her. “We figured by you.”

That popped her to her feet. She pointed to herself and cried, “By
me
?” Then she shakes her head and says, “What are you
talking
about?”

Now, either she's a much better actress than my mother gave her credit for, or she doesn't know a thing about LeBrandi. So I decide to find out what she looks like when she
is
lying. “Why don't you tell us about the jewels?”

“The …” Her face clams up. Presto! It's calm and flat. Colorless. Like a pancake that's been cooked on a cooling griddle. “What jewels?”

I motion to Marissa, who pulls them out of her jeans and hands them to her, saying, “These jewels.”

Opal doesn't take them, and even though she knows the jig is up, she tries, “Whose are those?”

I shrug and say, “Well, Cosmo thought they were
his
, but we set him straight.”

Her pancake pose finally cracks. “Who
are
you? Shouldn't you be giving me the right to remain silent and all of that?”

Hali says, “They're kids, Opal, not cops.”

Opal squints at us and sits back down. “Well, they're sure acting like cops. Who
are
they?”

Hali shrugs. “Just a couple of kids with a vested interest.” She waits for Opal to respond, and when she doesn't, Hali says, “So…?”