Death by Sudoku (9 page)

“Could you hold on for a moment?” Liza said to Michael. Putting down the phone, she went to the door and took Rusty’s leash. “I’ve got to take this,” she whispered to Kevin.

His eyes showed a momentary flash of—what? Disappointment?

You wish
, Liza told herself.

Then, with a wry grin, Kevin nodded. “Sure. See you.” He walked off without even trying for a kiss.

Going back to the phone, Liza explained, “I was out walking the dog.”

Michael made a noncommittal noise. During their years together, his allergies had kept them from having any pets.

Liza imagined him in his usual pose, sprawled on the couch in their living room, holding the cordless phone to his ear with one hand while brushing back an errant dark curl with the other. Books were the major décor item in their small house (only movie stars, producers, and embezzling energy magnates could afford large houses in Southern California).

Of course, there’d be gaps on the bookshelves now, since Liza had taken most of her books up to Oregon. Except for sudoku volumes, most of her library occupied boxes in the spare room.

They’d had a symbiotic relationship—she was a reader, and Michael was a writer. Mostly, he made a living creating novels for book packagers under various pseudonyms and doing script doctoring for movie producers who specialized in direct-to-video product. Of course, he had several screenplays of his own that he hoped to sell. Up to the point where they’d separated, however, the closest he’d come to doing that was a development stint on a kiddie show.

Rip-Roaring Rocket Rovers
involved cobbling together action sequences from Japanese ninja sci-fi movies (where the Asian stuntmen conveniently wore jet packs and full space suits with helmets) with bridging scenes featuring Caucasian actors. Then the series went into production up in Vancouver, where only Canadian writers could work. The gig had gotten Michael script-doctoring assignments in Poverty Row, but that had made the situation worse. As Liza’s publicity career had advanced, Michael’s work seemed to push him further into the background.

His basically quiet nature hadn’t helped, either. Oh, he’d gotten a bit more waspish, but most of the time he simply seemed to lose himself in the sudoku he usually used for entertainment during dry spells. Then he’d left.

That brought a lot of things to a head. And since the tenant in Mom’s old house in Maiden’s Bay had just left, it seemed more reasonable for Liza to come up here to take a shot at sorting her life out while Michael came back to their Westwood house from the motel where he’d been staying.

Well, Michael was talking now. “I’ve been trying to get hold of you for hours,” he complained. “If I hadn’t recognized your voice on the tape, I’d have thought you changed the number on me. As if I didn’t have enough on my plate, fielding more wacko phone calls than I can count.”

“I wound up on a very long flight back from Santa Barbara and didn’t want to spend it on the phone,” Liza said.

“We were on the ten o’clock news—they ran a clip of us on the red carpet for the Oscars three years ago.” A trace of bitterness welled up in Michael’s voice again. “Apparently, that reminded a bunch of people about me. All of a sudden, newspeople began calling in. Some were legit—the networks and cable news—and then there were the other ones. All the celebrity TV shows wanted me on camera—
Entertainment Evening
,
Showbiz News
,
Hollywood Special Edition
. All the bloodsuckers you made nice to over the years.”

What could Liza say to that? Dealing with those bloodsuckers had indeed been part of her business. She’d never kidded herself that these were her friends. “Yeah, well,” she finally told Michael, “I imagine that would raise your profile.”

“Right,” he snorted. “Just what I’d want. A couple of calls from the print tabloid people showed me exactly what I could expect if they got me on camera. The tabloid guys were connecting you and Derrick Robbins in all kinds of interesting ways.” He waited for a long moment for her to respond to that.

Liza didn’t.

“The smart money figures you did it,” Michael went on, “but Michelle Markson and Alvin Hunzinger will get you off. They tell me old Alvin has been batting .667 so far this year. He got a dismissal for whatshisname—that comedian who drowned his wife, and the judge just talked sternly to Roughhouse Kearns.” Rufus Kearns was a fading action star who’d gotten drunk and fired a shotgun at his yard-man. That was a case that had made the national media as well as the supermarket newspapers.

“I can’t believe Alvin had the nerve to play the race card in that case—saying that Roughhouse saw a dark face and acted instinctively to protect his house.”

Liza grimaced at the hypocrisy. Most of upper-crust L.A. had people with dark faces tending their gardens, their pools, their cars, and carrying trays at their parties.

“And your producer pal whose pregnant girlfriend went off Mulholland Drive in his Maserati only got nailed in the civil suit,” Michael concluded, his voice sounding a little slurred on the last words.

Has he been drinking?
Liza wondered but didn’t want to ask.

“Don’t worry, I didn’t have anything to say to those news creeps. Figured that’s the way you would want it, even if you weren’t around to talk to.”

Michael’s voice got a little more blurry—some complaint that Liza couldn’t catch. “What I did was refer them to Michelle. She probably ground them up.”

“So what is the dumb money saying?” Liza asked, hoping to keep things light.

Unfortunately, Michael took her literally. “I’d say they’re evenly split between you and Jenny Robbins. Some people just aren’t buying the whole ‘niece’ thing. The fact that she’s disappeared doesn’t look good.”

He laughed a little too loudly, a sure sign he had been drinking. “I’ll tell you the theory the guy from the
National Yell
ran past me. He’s going with the idea of a three-way relationship between you, Derrick, and Jenny. Asked me to comment on the suggestion that you killed Jenny out of jealousy, and then turned against Derrick. He expects that Jenny will turn up farther down the mountain because she’s lighter—you could throw her farther out from the terrace. It’s just bad luck that Derrick got caught in a tree.”

His boozy lightheartedness suddenly evaporated. “I hung up on the bastard.”

Michael took a long, steadying breath. “What happened down there, Liza?”

She gave him the whole story—meeting Derrick at a sudoku tournament, going up to Santa Barbara to see the screen test, her dinner with Derrick and Jenny. But when she started to tell Michael about Derrick’s suspicions of secret messages in the Seattle paper’s sudoku, he snorted in disbelief.

“Oh, come on, Liza. I guess it’s just as well this conspiracy theory stuff didn’t get out. It would make Derrick look like a Looney Toon.” He paused for a second. “And you, too.”

“Thanks a lot,” Liza responded. She paused. “You sound more sober now.”

“Well, I guess what you had to say shocked me sober,” Michael told her.

But Liza wasn’t about to laugh this off. “Michael, that’s what Derrick told me.”

“I don’t doubt it. What surprises me is that you sound like you believe it. Hey, this stuff makes the lamebrained plot twists in the scripts I doctor sound calm and rational. You said yourself this guy has had a lot of time on his hands since his series went off. All of a sudden, he’s finding Bible messages in sudoku? Maybe he found God talking to him in his crossword, so he jumped.”

“That’s not funny, Michael,” Liza choked out. “You weren’t out on that terrace. There was a fight—and Derrick was thrown off.”

“Okay, okay,” Michael said. “But it could have been a home invasion—something with no connection to anything else.”

“Don’t you think that’s stretching a coincidence?” Liza objected.

“But having him killed over a conspiracy theory isn’t.” Michael laughed. “You’d think people would have finally gotten over
The Da Vinci Code
by now.”

Liza stood in silence with the phone to her ear. She didn’t like the way this whole discussion had gone, but was it worth an argument to bring it up again?

“Look, I just got in touch to make sure you were all right and see if there’s any help you need.” That surly tone crept back into Michael’s voice. “Although I suppose with Michelle and the lawyer from hell on your side, I probably wasted a call.”

“Michael—” Liza began, then sighed. “I’ll just say thanks, all right?”

She hung up, shaking her head. Talking to Kevin tonight, after having him appear out of nowhere, it was as if he’d never gone out of her life. Michael’s call, after a couple months of separation, left her wondering if she’d ever known him at all.

“One thing is certain,” she told Rusty. “If I’m going to make any sense out of what happened, it looks like I’ll have to solve the damn thing myself.”

Liza’s lips quirked in a smile as Rusty cocked his head and looked up at her. “Right,” she said. “It sounds good, but how do I make it happen?”

Obviously, she’d need help, somebody who knew as much about codes as Liza knew about sudoku. Liza made a little pumping motion with her fist as she realized she might know just the person—Uncle Jim!

Like Liza’s mother, Uncle Jim Watanabe was Japanese American, born and raised in the States. Unlike Mom, however, Uncle Jim had lived in Japan for most of the last thirty years, working in the American embassy. Liza hadn’t really thought about it, even during the months she’d spent in Japan after college. But would the State Department really give someone a posting that lasted for decades?

Uncle Jim had been the one to introduce Liza to sudoku. The number puzzles had been a lifesaver for a girl with a very shaky grasp of the Japanese language and an even shakier knowledge of the country’s underlying culture. But numbers and logic are universal, and Liza’s knack for sudoku—she even created puzzles—had helped to build a bridge to her Japanese relatives.

Nowadays, reading about the finally declassified Cold War exploits of U.S. Navy submarines sneaking through the Sea of Japan to tap underwater Soviet cables for information, Liza wondered more about what exactly her uncle had gotten up to in the embassy. He’d always been extremely closedmouthed about his work . . .

Whatever it was, it definitely wasn’t a nine-to-five job. Liza got on her computer, intending to go online and leave an e-mail for her relative. Even though it had to be 4 a.m. over there, Uncle Jim responded with an instant message.

What are you doing up at such an ungodly hour?
Liza typed.

Working late.
A quick answer, but as usual with Uncle Jim, it didn’t tell much.

I guess the news hasn’t hit over there yet
, she began, giving a brief version of Derrick’s death—and his suspicions.
I tried to tell the police
, she finished.
They pretty much blew me off.

The IM box on her screen remained empty for long moments, then came the sign that Uncle Jim was typing.
Codes in sudoku? Possible.

After another pause, more words appeared.
Could be a book code.

What’s that?
Liza immediately typed back.

It would look like a string of numbers.
Uncle Jim replied.
But it actually breaks down to a series of directions to find a word in a line, the line on the page, and the page number where you’re supposed to look.

A string of numbers—that could describe any row or column in a sudoku puzzle. But the rules of the game meant that no numbers could be repeated. The keyboard rattled under Liza’s fingers as she raised this objection.

Given a fat enough book, you could find enough words to
send messages and still fall under sudoku constraints.
Uncle Jim responded.

Derrick mentioned the Bible.
Liza typed.

Depending on the edition, could run 1,000-1,500 pages or more.
Uncle Jim’s reply quickly appeared on the screen.
Fat enough, IMO.

Liza couldn’t help her curiosity.
How do you know so much about codes?

Like your friend, I read a lot of books.
Came the bland but uninformative response. She could just imagine Uncle Jim saying that, a polite smile on an otherwise poker face.

Any puzzle will give you 18 number strings, 36 if you read them backward.
Her uncle warned.
None will make sense unless you have the correct edition.

Got that, I think.
Liza replied.
Ill chek out an let you know.
Her typing always went downhill when she was excited, and right now she wanted to start checking on Gideon Bibles. Uncle Jim wished her good luck, she thanked him, and then Liza began Googling for Gideon Bibles.

When she got to the Gideons’ website, however, she hit a major snag. Instead of having one Bible for nationwide distribution, regional groups bought different publishers’ editions of the Good Book for delivery to local hotels, motels, and prisons.

Liza frowned, trying to dredge up memories of Derrick talking about his past. His family had come from somewhere in Indiana to settle in St. Louis, she recalled. And his dad’s sales territory was in the rural South—she remembered some funny stories about that.

Derrick’s father must have gotten that Gideon Bible somewhere down South a good thirty years ago. So how could a guy on the West Coast wind up with the exact same Bible to send secret messages in a book code?

Another bright idea bites the dust
, she thought. Then she brightened as she thought of another way to attack the problem.

Liza turned to her phone, resolutely ignoring the balefully blinking red light on her answering machine.
Those I can deal with tomorrow
, she thought. Most of them were probably people she didn’t even want to deal with, anyway. Right now, there were only two people she wanted to speak with, and she began dialing one of them.