D is for Drunk (23 page)

“Thanks, Mr. Stark,” she said. “The agency is always happy to help.”

Aidan rolled his eyes. If they’d been alone, he would have called her an ass-kisser, but he wasn’t going to say anything in front of Brendan, especially when he was in the dog house about the drone. Making sure Brendan couldn’t see, she gave Aidan a saccharine smile and took the empty chair next to Brendan.

“Once we did the time analysis, the drone footage was more exculpatory than indicative of guilt, but we’re not out of the woods yet.” Stark lifted a stack of papers from his desk. Sofia recognized the report she’d written that morning. “Did you uncover anything new?”

She told him about her meeting with Bambi and the timeline she’d proposed.

Brendan looked impressed she’d found Bambi when the police hadn’t.

“Good work,” said Stark. “I think the next step—”

His office door crashed open and Narek burst into the room. A wine-scented cloud rolled in with him. He stumbled forward a step. He’d clearly been dipping too heavily into his inventory.

“You.” He pointed at Sofia. “Milena.”

Sofia sprang to her feet because she didn’t want to face him sitting down. She ran over her last conversation with Milena. Nothing jumped out at her. Why was he mad at her?

Narek turned toward Stark and face planted on the desk. Stark slid his chair back a couple of inches and looked at the back of Narek’s head. He didn’t even seem surprised that he had a client draped over his desk. Maybe it happened all the time.

Narek pushed himself up onto his elbows.

“Lawyer!” he shouted.

Clearly this was ‘shout a random noun’ day. Sofia chained the words together: You. Milena. Lawyer. Then it clicked.

“I told Milena that you have a lawyer?” she guessed.

Brendan had already hauled Narek to his feet, surprisingly gently, considering.

“You did.” Narek’s sour wine-breath made her gag. “She says I’m a killer. Hates me.”

Milena hadn’t been too fond of him before Marcel was murdered, but she didn’t think this was the best time to say that. Sofia thought of apologizing, but she hadn’t done anything wrong.

“I’m sure she doesn’t hate you,” Sofia said soothingly although, frankly, she didn’t like him very much right this minute herself either.

A set of car keys tumbled out of his pocket onto the floor.

“Did you drive here?” Sofia asked.

“Of course!” he said, indignantly. “Didn’t you?”

Aidan scooped up the keys, Brendan poured Narek into his chair, and Stark’s regal secretary arrived with the coffee tray. It had a giant pot, one cup, a large bottle of water, and a plate of toast. Brendan handed Narek the water bottle and Narek set it back on the tray, knocking the coffee all over Stark’s desk. The smell of coffee warred with the sour smell of wine, and lost.

Stark didn’t bat an eye. He moved papers out of the way of the coffee and swept the extra liquid into his wastepaper basket with a stained file folder.

“Sorry.” Narek looked genuinely surprised. He looked over at Sofia. “My wife hates me.”

They’d been over that before.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Sofia said. That was the closest to an apology he was going to get from her.

“Your case is looking stronger every day,” said Stark.

Narek slumped down in the chair.

Sofia walked behind him to stand next to Brendan and Aidan. She didn’t want to be between Narek and the window. Better to have a straight line to the door, even if Stark’s secretary had closed it, probably to keep the party from affecting the rest of the office.

The secretary walked back in with a new wastebasket, as if she’d known Stark would have filled his with coffee and sodden paper, even though she hadn’t even been in the room when that happened. She’d obviously been through this kind of activity before.

She pulled roll of paper towels out of her wastebasket and started mopping up the coffee with quick, graceful movements. Next, she took out a lemon-scented spray bottle and sprayed the desk. In less than ten seconds, she was gone, taking the coffee-logged wastebasket with her and leaving the clean one in its place. She also took the coffee tray. It was as if the spill had never happened. Sofia wanted her to come over the next time Violet and Van visited.

“As I was saying,” said Stark, “you’ve nothing to worry about. Things are looking up.”

As if taking those words literally, Narek looked up. Sofia followed his gaze. Nothing up there but a regular old ceiling and the power of suggestion.

Brendan’s phone buzzed. He read the message, smiled, and handed his phone to Stark.

“What’s it say?” asked Narek.

“It says that the medical examiner’s report is in, and that Mr. Befort’s head injuries were caused by a horse’s hoof.” Stark smiled, too. “You’re in the clear, Narek.”

Narek lurched to his feet, did two steps of a happy dance, then threw up in the clean wastebasket.

“Well,” said Aidan. “That’s one way to celebrate.”

The phone buzzed again, and Brendan read this text aloud. “You’re in the clear about the drone usage, too, son.”

Good news all around. Sofia opened the office door.

“I told you it would be hard to pin on me,” said Aidan. “It was an accident. Not a big deal.”

“It was a big deal.” Brendan quiet voice was scarier than most people’s yells.

For a long second, no one spoke. Sofia clenched her jaw and tried to ignore the smell of vomit. If she didn’t get out of here soon, she was going to have to use the wastebasket herself.

“Sofia,” said Brendan. “You did some solid work on this case. Take the rest of the day off.”

“Thanks, Brendan.”

“And me?” Aidan asked.

“You’ll need to drive Mr. Grigoryan home,” said Brendan. “Use your own car.”

He turned on his heel and left the room. Stark walked next to him, talking in a low voice.

Sofia looked between the vomit-spattered Narek and Aidan. She ought to help him.

“I gotta go,” she said. “I have an appointment.”

“Can I borrow your car?” Aidan asked. “The Lemon Drop is sensitive.”

“I bet.” Sofia grabbed onto her keys and backed out of the office. She wasn’t letting Narek near her car. She hot footed it down the hall, making a mental note to never make Brendan mad.

She got to the elevator before Aidan had even stood Narek up.
Come on!
she told the elevator.
I don’t want to ride with them. Narek might not be done puking.

And she didn’t have to. She was inside the elevator and the doors were closing before Aidan was halfway down the hall. Perfect timing.

“Hold the elevator!” Aidan called.

“Too late,” she answered as the doors slid all the way closed.

Crisis averted, she texted Jaxon asking him out on a date. He texted right back, not waiting for ten minutes like Aidan said he should.
I have a show tonight. Ride tomorrow? 11?

She could wait that long.
Ice cream sundae at the end? Count me in.

She was walking out to her car, feeling pretty good, when her phone rang again. It was her ex-agent, Jeffrey. He’d probably ruin her mood, but it was best to get whatever he wanted over with. He was a terrible pest if she ignored him.

“Sofia,” she said. “But I only have a minute.”

“Why?” he asked. “What are you doing?”

Good question. Heading home to feed Fred, maybe take her mother out to dinner and explain that the Internet was wrong and she wasn’t dating Aidan. Nothing too urgent.

“Stuff,” she said. “The clock’s ticking.”

“Your friend Annabelle Befort called. Are you using me to screen your calls from her? Because I can totally do that if you give me the heads up.”

“I’m not using you for that.” But she didn’t want to give Annabelle her phone number, and she wasn’t sure why, so, technically, she
was
using him for that.

“She wanted to invite you to her husband’s wake, which is kind of grim. It’s a week from tomorrow.”

She didn’t want to go. She’d barely known Marcel, and she hadn’t liked what he’d seen. They could probably fill up the wake with women he’d slept with. She didn’t particularly like Annabelle either, and she wasn’t sure why she was being invited. But she’d been on this train from the beginning. She might as well ride it out to the bitter end.

“Text me the details,” she said.

CHAPTER 38

S
o it was that a week and a day later Sofia was driving up the windy road to the vineyard, hopefully for the last time. As much as she enjoyed the drive, she wasn’t looking forward to what she would find at its end.

“We’ll only stay a little while,” she said. “Express our condolences and move on.”

“Take as long as you need.” That was Jaxon. They’d gone out a couple of times in the intervening week, and when he’d said he wanted to meet the killer horse, she’d brought him along. He looked good in a dark suit and open-necked black shirt, his hair brushing his shoulders. “We don’t have to go at all if you don’t want to.”

He was so reasonable and easy-going. She thought of him as the anti-Aidan. “I want to wrap things up.”

“I thought the case was wrapped up.” He leaned back in his seat and stretched. It was distracting, and she reduced the speed of the car a little to take in that sight.

“Umm...the case. Yes. It is.” She pulled it together. “Narek is no longer under suspicion, so we don’t have to worry about that part of it, but it still feels wrong to me.”

“Wrong how?” He turned those sexy hazel eyes on her and she regretted, again, the decision they’d made to take this slow. She seriously considered jumping him right there in the car.

“Would a horse really rear up like that and kill someone? I thought horses were fairly mellow,” she said.

Jaxon laughed. He had a great laugh—deep and infectious. “Some are mellow, some are high-strung. Just like people. It’s rare for a horse to kill someone like that, especially in a wide open area, but it could happen. Horses spook. Maybe she saw something that scared her.”

“Like what?” Sofia asked.

“Hard to say. Could have been something totally innocuous, like an empty plastic bag blowing by. Or a deer. Or a coyote. Do you guys have coyotes around here?”

“We do. A couple of cats and small dogs have disappeared at Nirvana Cove, and Tex said coyotes are probably responsible. She sees them sometimes when she’s running in the early morning.”

“A coyote could panic a horse. She might have seen it, smelled it, even heard it. That’ll set a horse right off.” Jaxon braced as they went into a curve. He never complained that she was driving too fast. It was another thing that made him an anti-Aidan.

“Maybe when you see the horse, you’ll be able to tell something. You’re a horse whisperer, right?” Sofia felt dumb the second the words left her mouth.

Jaxon chucked. “I’m not a horse mind reader. It doesn’t work like that. I can read body language, sure, but a lot of what I do with horses is about time and training.”

“Like whistling to make a horse pee?” She was glad Aidan wasn’t here to make a crack in front of Jaxon.

“Like that, for instance. Horses are very sensitive to sounds and touch. If you treat them right, they’ll do most anything they can for you.”

“But Annabelle’s horse doesn’t pee when you whistle. She comes like a dog,” Sofia said.

“Same stimulus, different response,” Jaxon said.

“I think Annabelle can only get one response, because she once told me that she can only whistle the one note.” Sofia remembered when Annabelle had taught it to her.

“Then I guess she needs to learn another whistle to teach the horse another trick,” Jason said.

“You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.” It was Sofia’s best Lauren Bacall impersonation.

“To Have and Have Not!” Jaxon said immediately.

It was a game they’d invented where one of them would do an impersonation from a movie, and the other one would guess the movie. Jaxon had seen a lot of old movies up there on his ranch, but not a lot of recent stuff. She liked that, too.

“Got it in one,” she said.

She slowed as they went through the gates and up to the vineyard. The parking lot was full, and she had to park the Tesla off to the side in the dirt. She eased it in as slowly as she could. The car had a low center of gravity, and she didn’t want to damage the bottom.

Jaxon gaped. “These folks have money.”

“Or they look like they do,” Sofia said. “Southern California’s like that. Lots of people seem rich, but they’re really in debt up to their eyeballs. From what Aidan told me when we were researching, the vineyard’s actually doing pretty badly. She might even have to sell it.”

Jaxon opened his door, then came around to open hers. It was old-fashioned and gentlemanly, and she loved it.

“What’ll happen to the horse if she has to sell this place?” he asked.

“She’ll probably have to board her somewhere. Or sell her, too.” That thought made her feel bad for Annabelle. She loved that horse.

Jaxon offered her his arm and she climbed out. The ground was uneven, and she was glad for the support. She’d worn her black Jimmy Choos—shoes she could easily afford when she was acting, but ones she couldn’t so easily replace now. She’d wanted to look nice for the wake, but maybe the shoes had been a bad idea.

She recognized a few people by sight—the man who’d been wearing the purple suit at the key party; a few of the women from the party, all dressed in black; the lead singer from the French heavy metal band—but she didn’t know any names.

She didn’t see Annabelle.

“Let’s go to the stable first,” she said. “Before we get waylaid.”

Jaxon had seen her get waylaid by fans before, although it didn’t seem to bug him like it did Aidan. “OK.”

She led the way to the stable, not letting go of his arm.

“That’s the outside trough,” she said quietly as they passed it. “Where Marcel died.”

Jaxon looked at the metal rectangle and dusty ground with interest, but there wasn’t really anything to see there.