You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (29 page)
Read You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) Online
Authors: Diane Patterson
Tags: #Mystery, #Hollywood, #blackmail, #Film
I looked at the limo, taking my own sweet time, and then back at Roberto. “Because we’re missing a player. There’s you, and there’s me, and there’s…” I pointed to the empty chair.
It took him a mite longer to figure out what I was hinting at than I expected. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head, confused. “Jane’s waiting for you in New York.”
“No, she isn’t. I mean, yes, she is, but she doesn’t know she’s waiting for me, does she? If she knew, she would have been here with you. Or flown out the next day. But she’s not here. She hasn’t called. Not once. You’ve been here for almost a week and she’s back there. How on earth have you explained to her what you’re doing here? Work? Hm. Well, I’m sure I could come up with a way to explain it to her.”
The dawning realization of where I was going with this bloomed on Roberto’s face and I almost laughed right then. “My God, Trudy—”
“Drusilla,” I reminded him. “It’s Drusilla, until such time as, well, it isn’t. What do you think Mumsy is going to say when I tell her you found me about a week ago? And you never mentioned a word to her? I think she’s not going to like that.”
He was disgusted with me, and he didn’t bother to hide it. “You would tell her such a lie.”
“Oh, no. No no. I would tell her the truth. I would tell her what had happened. Thing is, Roberto, I’m very, very good at making the truth sound like a lie. And I’ve had problems with stepfathers and other men in the past. She’d hear the story of how and when you found me from you, and then she’d hear it from me, and my story would be just this much different.” I squeezed my thumb and index fingers together. “And your marriage will be over so fast you won’t believe it.”
“You would do that to your mother?”
“To protect Stevie? Absolutely. I have done worse, after all. Speaking of whom. You need to find out what my father is up to. I don’t fancy waking up dead any time soon. If I have another problem with him, I’ll go public. With everything. Ask me if Mama is going to survive some of those revelations.”
We sat there for a few moments in silence. I sipped my coffee while Roberto stared at me in shock.
“You’re playing with fire.”
“It’s my favorite form of exercise.”
“You belong back in New York,” he said, repeating himself.
That quaver in his voice was a wonderful thing to hear. I’d won.
“Now’s not a good time, but—” I glanced down at my watch. “—I can make it in, oh, two and a half years. In court, if necessary. Or any time before then. Your call.”
He sat back, his head hitting the exterior of the guesthouse, and we sat there in silence together for a few moments. “You will stay in Los Angeles.”
“Maybe I like moving every two months or so.”
He glared at me. “Find something you like about this place and stay put.”
His real message wasn’t very subtle. I knew what he was telling me. He had a handle on where I was and I wouldn’t be off his radar screen ever again. So if Los Angeles was all right, I might as well get comfortable.
“You’ll remain here? With that actor?”
I glanced up at the window again. Gary was gone. “He’s not my boyfriend, Roberto. As long as he’ll put up with us, I’m perfectly fine. He seems quite fond of Stevie. And she’s—” I wanted to say
happy
or
secure
or
steady
, but please: I was hopeful, not deluded. “She seems to like Los Angeles as much as anywhere.”
Roberto seemed like he had a million things he wanted to tell me, or dictate to me, but instead he shot his cuffs and stared out the window for a minute. “Well. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave? At least let me give you some money.”
I shook my head. “You have stringy money. I’ve held out for eleven years. A few more is not a long time at this point. Then we’ll have a real talk, all of us. And Roberto?”
“What?”
“Look into how you’re going to raise me from the dead, would you? I have an awful lot of money coming my way on my thirtieth. I plan on getting it.”
“Drusilla, listen—”
“We do things my way, or we do them the hard way. Your choice.”
He left. I watched him go with something approaching sadness. I actually liked Roberto, as much as I liked anyone. He saved me once, he did, I am happy to say that. Now I need to save myself and not rely on anyone.
Most people would take the easy road. Most people go along to get along, and live a life of quiet desperation, and all that crap. Most people don’t go out of their way to make their lives that much harder.
And if I’d learned nothing else from the past few months, it was that most people don’t really have the stomach to use blackmail to get what they want.
I, on the other hand, have no such qualms.
#
About The Author
Diane Patterson has an MFA in Film from the University of Southern California and a BA in Linguistics from Stanford University. She’s been a shill in a magic act, a production assistant on a science-fiction TV show, and a tech writer at Apple. She lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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IF YOU ENJOYED
You Know Who I Am
, here’s a peek at the sequel,
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“The things I do for money,” Anne da Silva said as we drove into the parking lot of Mason’s Motel. Mason’s was a cheap but clean-looking two-story motel on 6
th
Street near Los Angeles’s Koreatown district. Mid-century, featureless architecture, with a sea of asphalt outside the downstairs doors. The exterior was painted this weird mix of beige and orange. There was no glass in the parking lot, all of the cars there were in fine condition, and the exterior of the motel was well maintained. It might have been low budget, but it was well taken care of.
She parked by a small row of bushes and then looked at me. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done for money?”
I shrugged. “I know I wouldn’t kill anyone,” I said.
She blinked at me through her blue cat’s-eye glasses. “Drusilla? Seriously? That’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
Mentally I slapped myself. Anne’s only exposure to murder had been the death that had introduced us to one another, when my husband Colin was murdered two months ago. In the course of figuring out who killed him, I’d met his girlfriend, Anne.
They were a much better couple together than he and I ever had been. I was truly sorry for her loss.
Anne’s response reminded me that, to many people, murder is a simple conversational gambit. I have a much greater familiarity with homicide than she does. Than most people do, to be honest, and that fact can freak them out if I’m not careful. One more thing to hide.
“What’s the worst thing
you’ve
ever done for money?” I asked.
“I asked you first.” She wiped her glasses on her blouse. “C’mon. Tell me the worst thing.”
The motel’s exterior had looked deserted when we arrived, but it turned out there was a guy loitering in the shadows, standing between the Coke machine and a bush. He seemed kind of gangly and highly strung, shifting his balance back and forth as he looked at us. First he stared at us, then he watched cars going by, and then he checked us out again. His attention skipped here and there. He wore one of those unkempt beards that young men who don’t have office jobs seem to like. If he’d been wearing a wool cap I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.
“Take a gander at that bloke,” I said.
Anne leaned forward and studied him. “That’s who we’re here to meet.”
“Are you joking?”
“You didn’t bring any shuriken or anything with you, did you?”
“Forgot to pack them before I left the house this morning. Are you certain you want to continue? This fellow seems rather sketchy.”
“He’s waiting for us.”
I stared at her. “Again I ask: are you joking?”
She shook her head. “Are you okay with doing this?”
This? This was much easier than our adventures in Baldwin Park had been. Still, wouldn’t do to seem too eager. “Are you still paying me?”
Anne was shorter, rounder, and less athletic than I was. I was taller and more physical, without appearing especially aggressive. I made a good companion on these sorts of trips. She knew my talents at self-defense and liked having me around when she was going to do anything remotely scary. Which made sense for the trips we’d taken for her articles over the past two weeks: a religious commune in Ojai led by a charismatic and definitely creepy punk who liked to quote Buddhist philosophy and use the women as his harem, a hellish brothel in Baldwin Park staffed by unwilling, undocumented Cambodian immigrants, and a meth bust in a small nothing town north of San Diego. The drive there and back had been pleasant, at least.
This day’s assignment had disappointed her: back on the fake, fluffy entertainment beat. She had told me this assignment was a minor affair involving a reality show starlet I’d never heard of. She wondered if she’d done something to disappoint her editors; I wondered if an assignment involving a celebrity meant there would be cocktails at the W or something. Instead we were here at this motel in Koreatown. Made sense why she’d need me along with her to feel secure.
These days I had so few reasons of my own to meet sketchy men in motels. I always looked forward to Anne’s phone calls.
She nodded. “Yes, of course I’m paying you.”
“Good. Here are the rules. It’s a short list, one rule. If I say we leave, we leave. Do you need to write any part of that down to remember it?”
She nodded as she slung her camera over her shoulder. “Understood.”
The fellow’s name was Roger Sabo and he was Anne’s contact for her story. She wanted to do a “Where are they now?” article on some of the figures from reality shows that had been popular for fifteen seconds and then disappeared, taking all of their newly minted “celebrities” with them. There wasn’t much of a market for the actual celebrities themselves, mind you, but stories about whatever had happened to them after their fame had flitted by were wildly popular.
Anne, a celebrity journalist, liked working on popular stories, as getting published kept her employed.
Roger had been a producer or production assistant or something on
Girls Becoming Stars
, a reality program about young women who moved to L.A. to become (what else) celebrities. Not my sort of thing, but Anne told me the show had been a train-wreck success, a guilty pleasure watched and torn apart by millions every Tuesday night on Twitter. Clothes, morals, and friendships had been cast off easily and frequently. The girls had competed with one another, on camera and off, to get the most attention from anyone calling himself a producer.
In Los Angeles, everyone’s a producer. Everyone has business cards and their CV at the ready. The print shop is everyone’s first stop after crossing the county line.
I shook my head. “You said we were here to talk to that girl.”
“Yeah. Courtney. Roger is Courtney’s boyfriend and she wants him here.”
“And Courtney is...?”
“She was one of the stars of
Girls Becoming Stars
. The cute Oklahoma girl with a down-home drawl and Daisy Duke shorts.”
“Wait. Let me guess. Turned out that, in fact, she couldn’t act worth a damn.”
Anne made a clicking noise with her tongue. “A common and usually fatal ailment among wannabe movie stars.”
“But now she’s back.”
“They’re doing a reunion show. You know. For the nostalgia.”
“A reunion show? How long was this show on the air?”
“Four seasons. But reality show seasons are different. They did two seasons per year, so really it only lasted about two years.”
“How long has it been off the air?”
She glanced at her notes. “Two years.”
Los Angeles and the entertainment industry gave me a headache twenty-four-seven. “Mother of Apollo. This show that was on the air for two years—”
Anne smiled. “—on a cable network you’ve never heard of—”
“—gets a reunion show and this is what passes for
nostalgia
?”
She nodded.
My family owns a lot of media and entertainment companies. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find out that someone in my immediate family tree owned
Girls Becoming Stars
. Early on, my family taught me the joy and beauty of taking money from people who keep waving it at you.
I gave the nervous Nellie in the shadows a once-over. “Everyone in this town has a posse.”
She nodded. “And you’re mine, cutie. We want to talk to Courtney, we go through Roger.”
“There were other girls on the show, right? Ones who don’t hang out in motels with sketchy blokes?”
“I drew the Courtney straw. As soon as I heard where we were meeting, I called you.” She poked me in the shoulder.
We got out of the car and Roger scowled at us until he recognized Anne. At least, he switched to a less flagrant method of doing it. “Hey. She’s waiting.”
As we walked toward him, something bothered me enough to make me put my hand on Anne’s arm to stop her. While at times in my life I have accepted money for psychic readings, I have never actually been psychic, so when my internal alarms go off I immediately figure out what’s set them off.