Death by Sudoku (19 page)

She turned to Ava. “Looks like we’re down to plan D.”

Plan D was the most difficult of the options they’d come up with—and also the most expensive. The first step involved a detour to Rodeo Drive and the Armani Exchange. Liza’s credit card took a major hit, but after they were done, both she and Ava were arrayed in appropriate power outfits.

“Are you sure about this skirt?” Ava asked with a nervous tug at the hemline.

“Hey, this is L.A., not Portland—much less Maiden’s Bay.” Liza halted at the leather goods area on their way to the exit. “Well take this, too.” She pointed at a portfolio bound in heavy leather.

Soon afterward, Ava carefully made her way through traffic to Hollywood Boulevard.

“The theater is between Highland and La Brea,” Liza directed.

“This place is an absolute madhouse,” Ava said with a glance toward the sidewalk. “Where will we find a place to park?”

“There’s a mall next to the theater—the Highland Center,” Liza said. “It’s got a parking garage.”

That was an easily solved problem. Her mind was already wrestling with the more difficult challenge—getting them inside Grauman’s Chinese.

Ava was not fresh off the turnip truck. She’d held reporting and editorial jobs on several large metropolitan dailies before coming back to Maiden’s Bay. But after parking in the Highland Center, she looked as if she were suffering a bit from sensory overload as they walked out of the mall.

“This place—it looks like the big city in that old silent movie,” she said, staring upward at gleaming white walls with a distinctive ornamental frieze at the top.

“
Intolerance
,” Liza supplied the title. “Yeah, it’s supposed to look like D. W. Griffith’s set for Babylon.”

“Only in Hollywood,” Ava muttered. “Even the shopping centers look like movie sets.”

As they came around to Hollywood Boulevard, Ava peered through the smoggy sunshine toward the crew setting up bleachers on the opposite side of the street. “That’s for the premiere?”

Liza nodded. “They’ll stop traffic along the boulevard between La Brea and Highland—except for the limos, of course. And over there is where they’ll keep most of the fans. They tell me when
The Wizard of Oz
opened, there were ten thousand people filling the street. I don’t think Alden will be gathering that kind of a crowd.”

Ava turned and stopped for a moment to take in the front of Grauman’s Chinese. “I’ve visited La-la Land often enough but never been here. Now we’ve got a movie theater that looks like another movie set—the palace of Fu Manchu.”

Her eyes went to the two red stone pillars flanking the entryway. “Two columns, holding up that bronze roof to the temple,” she said. “Just like in the Samson story. If they came down while people were on the red carpet—” She turned to take in the crowd around them, then did a double take as a guy who looked exactly like Charlie Chaplin walked past, complete with derby, silly mustache, and that odd wobbling gait.

“Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore,” Ava said faintly.

Liza did her best to pull her friend back to the practical world. “Any bomb capable of bringing down those pillars would have to be out in the open where anybody could spot it,” she said. “Whatever is going on, I expect it has to be happening inside.”

They walked across the famous forecourt, decorated with handprints and footprints (and other prints) left in cement by stars over eighty years. Ava slowed down for a second, comparing her shoes to the footprints left by several female screen legends. “Lord, they all seem to have such tiny feet.”

“Don’t go by that,” Liza warned with a grin. “I hear several actresses sweated out cramming their famous tootsies into much smaller shoes so they’d look properly petite.”

They reached the entrance, and Liza crisply said to the ticket taker, “Liza Kelly, Markson Associates. Michelle asked Ava and myself to come down for a quick walk-through before the premiere. Is Ray Joyce around?”

Behind the slightly bored facade she projected, Liza’s heart was thumping. Ray Joyce was the assistant manager of the theater—at least he had been a couple of months ago, before Liza left town. She’d often dealt with him during premieres, so he’d know her and connect her with Markson Associates. Hopefully, however, he wouldn’t be so close that he’d know she was in the process of leaving the company.

The ticket taker beckoned to one of the workers behind the snack bar and dispatched the young woman with a message. A few minutes later, Ray Joyce appeared, his long, thin face lighting up with a smile as he recognized one of his callers. “Liza! Long time no see,” he said, shaking hands.

“This is Ava Barnes,” Liza did the introductions. “She’s new.”

“Nice to meet you,” Ray said with a smile. “We’ve laid on the standard spectacle.” He glanced at the portfolio Liza carried. “I suppose you know all about the extra flourishes.”

“We’ll try to keep out of your way,” Liza said. “I hope you’ll spread the word to the rest of the staff. I don’t want them being surprised at where we turn up.” She smiled. “This is Ava’s first time in the Chinese, and I want to show her some stuff.”

Ray glanced at his watch. “The show’s letting out in a few minutes. If you like, I could comp you for the back-stage tour.” He turned to Ava. “But then, Liza knows so much about this place, she could probably do a better tour on her own.”

He excused himself, and a few minutes later, the auditorium doors opened and a crowd of people headed for the exits—all except the diehard sightseers who gathered for the tour. “They do this between movie showings,” Liza said to her friend. “It actually costs more than a ticket for the film.”

Ava pushed open the auditorium door and peered into the large room. “Yikes,” she said. “Looks like someone twisted art deco into an oriental fantasy—somebody who really loved red and gold leaf.”

The whole interior represented 1920s film palace décor at its most florid, from the huge electric chandeliers suspended from the ceiling to the bits and pieces of real and faux Chinese artwork embellishing the place. Add in a gift shop, a set of glass cases displaying costumes and other Hollywood artifacts, and the snack concession, and you wound up with a strange conglomeration of tourist destination and museum—which smelled very strangely of roasting popcorn.

“The theater cost two million pre-Depression dollars to build,” Liza told Ava. “And the renovation job a couple of years ago cost seven million. They tried to restore some of the original design while also doing some earthquake safety construction.”

“There’s a nice thought.” Ava shuddered. “Lots of pillars against the wall here, too.”

“And hopefully, the renovation made it harder for them to fall down,” Liza replied. “I still think it’s too public. If we believe the coded message, this is something that had to be set up. It would be too conspicuous out in the open.”

“So what are we going to do? Peek under every seat?” Ava surveyed the auditorium. “There’s a lot of them.”

“About 1,500—or 1,492 to be exact,” Liza said. “That’s down from some 2,200 when the theater was built. I don’t know what that says about the supersizing of American butts, but the seats are a lot more comfortable.”

Ava looked over. “You really do know a lot about this place.”

“It has a history.” Liza shrugged. “And, yeah, I got interested. For instance, in the old days, stars arrived in their limos, but people never saw them leave. There was a secret passage—a tunnel under the street to the Roosevelt Hotel on the other side of Hollywood Boulevard.”

Ava’s head snapped around. “Maybe we should check there.”

“It’s been sealed up. The subway line they put under the boulevard went right through the passageway.”

“Maybe there is such a thing as knowing too much about a subject,” Ava groused.

“Cheer up,” Liza responded. “We won’t be checking under every seat on our hands and knees.” She nodded toward the theater staffers making their way through the theater picking up after the patrons. “Besides, I don’t know if anything that would fit under a seat would bring down much in the way of fire and brimstone.”

Bring down.
Liza turned to look up to what would have been the balcony in any other theater.

“Huh,” Ava said, following her gaze. “Not much seating up there.”

“Originally it just held the projection booth and private boxes—fourteen seats for VIPs,” Liza said. “When widescreen movies came in during the fifties, they moved the projectors downstairs and arranged a hospitality setup for the people upstairs—the Cathay Lounge.”

She laughed. “Now
that
will become part of ‘the good old days.’ In restoring the theater, they moved the projection booth back where it used to be, and there’s much less space for the celebrities. The VIP lounge is in the sixplex they built next door.”

Liza swung the auditorium door open, startling the moviegoers who’d begun lining up outside. She set off across the lobby with Ava trailing behind. “Where are we going?” her friend asked. “The men’s room?”

There was a sign for the facilities, but that wasn’t Liza’s destination. “What we want is over by the manager’s office.” She pointed to the inconspicuous entrance to a staircase.

As she did, Ray Joyce came out of the office. “I expect you wanted to check the eagle’s nest. We were lucky to find a wireless system, connecting the camera up there with the video projector down in front of the auditorium.” He walked off as Liza led the way upstairs.

“What was that about?” Ava asked.

“Alden wants to make a speech, but he doesn’t want the world to see how short he really is. So he’s going to do it on camera up here—that way he can loom larger than life on the screen down there.”

Reaching the top of the stairs, she pushed open a door to reveal a private box opera lovers could only dream about. The décor was spanking new and Hollywood plush, although most of the seats had been moved aside to make room for a video camera on a tripod.

“If this area came down, it wouldn’t be very good for the people downstairs,” Liza said. “But I suspect the main target would be Alden himself.”

Stepping back as her friend began to pace back and forth, Ava stumbled, then began hopping around, holding one ankle. “Ouch. What idiot left—”

Liza zipped round and knelt by the black plastic toolbox positioned against the wall. She eased the top open and stared.

No tools, just a wrapped package with an LED timer blinking up at her.

A bomb—and it looked as though it was already armed!

Liza recoiled so violently, she almost tumbled across the plush carpeting. “We’ve got to get everybody out of here,” she said, scrambling up.

Ava was already opening the door, but she ended up recoiling, too—after bumping off a broad chest in rumpled coveralls.

“You’ve got to help us!” she began. “There’s a bomb—”

“Shut up!” the stranger growled, pushing her back into the box.

He reminded Liza of a wax figure that had been out in the sun too long, with a balding bullet head poking out of a fringe of hair, sloping shoulders, and a thickening middle where the runoff seemed to have collected.

A little belatedly, she also realized he had a small nickel-plated pistol in one hand. The gun looked like a toy, almost lost in the man’s meaty hand. But as the muzzle wavered from her to Ava and back again, Liza didn’t feel like laughing.

Obviously, the bomb was no news to this guy. “You two come along with me and keep your mouths shut—understand?” The man sounded as if he were reciting dialog from old gangster movies, the late-night variety he’d probably taken in through a half doze on his La-Z-Boy. He was just a big lug people usually wouldn’t notice twice, in a maintenance uniform that was too long for his height and too tight for his circumference. But this was a big lug in over his head. He had prominent, even protuberant eyeballs, and the whites were showing all around as his gaze skittered nervously about.

This can’t be a good sign
, Liza thought.
He doesn’t know what to do with us. He’s even having trouble figuring out where to—

“Come on,” the maintenance guy said, jerking his head. “We’ll go down to the basement and have a talk.”

Right. I’m sure we’re in for a cozy chat once he gets us alone.
Liza tightened her hands on the leather portfolio to keep them from shaking.

There should be people in the lobby
, she told herself. If we ran out the door screaming, what could he do?

He could shoot you before you even got to the door
, a cold voice warned from some shadowy corner of her mind. She had to admit, their captor looked pretty far gone.
Startle him, and he may well start pulling the trigger.

However, doing nothing certainly didn’t seem likely to extend their life expectancy very far. Liza came to a desperate decision halfway down the stairs. She only wished she’d be able to give Ava more warning.

Swinging around, Liza flung her portfolio into the maintenance man’s face, yelling, “Run!”

Ava did her best to comply. But maybe she’d banged her ankle worse than she’d admitted upstairs, maybe her heel caught in the carpeting, or maybe it was simply lousy luck. She only got four more steps before she cried out in pain, her ankle buckling under her.

Liza darted forward, catching her friend before Ava could plummet down the stairway. Instead, she tried to use that momentum to hustle the two of them down the last steps to the landing and out to the lobby.

It wasn’t enough. They were slow—too slow.

Glancing back, Liza saw her world shrink to a pair of bulging, panic-stricken eyes—and the muzzle of a pistol.

It was ridiculous, really. That toy gun could only be a .22 caliber. Yet as it pointed at her, the muzzle looked more like an open manhole.

A sudden
bang!
made Liza flinch, sending both her and Ava toppling down to the landing below. Then a large presence shouldered its way past her, and Liza realized the noise had come from the door behind her flying open.