Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (16 page)

“Who are you?” Randi asked. “I was told Sir Gareth Macfadyen called and asked for me directly.” Her Texan accent had faded, or she’d worked on reducing it. The faint twang brought back memories of when Stevie and I had briefly lived in Texas. That living arrangement had ended badly.

Remembering Texas made me remember Courtney getting shot. I faltered, forgetting what I was about to say.

“Gary and I live together. I asked him to call.”

She eyed me and took a step back. “Look, I don’t know who you think you are or who you think I am, but I am not interested in any of your games.”

“I needed to speak to you. You’ve heard about what happened to Courtney Cleary, right?”

“Oh, no,” she said, her voice getting very angry. “I’m not talking to you about her.”
 

The contrast between Randi’s voice—which definitely showed her anger—and her complete lack of facial expression was surprising. She was twenty-four or twenty-five and already used Botox. Lots of the younger actresses and models did, in order to keep any forehead wrinkles from forming. In ten years, films and TV would have no actresses able to form facial expressions. But the women would look the same for decades.
 

“I need to talk to you. I had a run-in with Courtney and her boyfriend Roger Sabo.”

“Her boyfriend?” Randi snorted. Loudly.

“Well, they were certainly together when Roger decided to beat me up.” I lifted the sweep of hair to display my cut.
 

“Wow.” She leaned closer to me. “Did Roger kill her? I always thought he might.”
 

Oh, thank you, Zeus above. Randi knew something about Roger, something that might help me immensely with getting that son of a bitch off my back.
 

“Why did you think that?” I asked.

“I could tell you a few things about Courtney and Roger.” She paused, as if trying to remember a particular incident. “And why would I tell you one damn thing about that asshole?” Randi asked.
 

Whenever someone asks you a question, assume they’re not being rhetorical and they’re actually asking for information. The same goes with sarcasm: take the words at face value and respond accordingly. It saves everyone getting into fist fights.

“What would make you tell me anything about Roger, Randi?”

“Am I actually here about a part on this movie or what?”

“No,” I said. “But you have met Ofelia Delasante, and now she knows your name. And you’re on this set. What do you want?”

Her eyes flicked to her right and then back again. It was a quick, involuntary movement.
 

I turned around to see what she was looking at.

The crew were making last-minute adjustments to the lighting and placement of furniture. It seemed amazing that that much gaffer’s tape could be on the floor and that many lighting scrims could be positioned around the room without some of it showing up on screen. Lots of beautiful people wearing cocktail attire stood off to the sides, waiting for the call.
 

The main thing happening to the right side of the scene before us was the sight of Gary listening carefully to everything a wild-haired guy wearing a Mariners ball cap and Metallica t-shirt and ripped jeans had to say. Wild Hair was the director, probably. A man who was maybe thirty and had done some commercials and music videos was telling Gary how to act.
 

Gary’s best acting job on the movie was going to be pretending this kid had anything to tell him about his craft.

Who was dating whom was a popular story in Hollywood.

“You know he’s my boyfriend, right?” I asked.
 

“How serious are you two?” Randi asked.
 

I thought about what Micah Schlegel had said: everybody’s got a story. Randi wasn’t accepting any phone calls—until word got to her that Sir Gareth Macfadyen wanted to talk to her on a movie set. When she figured out there was no role, she hadn’t stormed off. Instead, she stayed to talk to me. Gary’s girlfriend.
 

Randi wanted the Story of the Girl who was Dating a Bona Fide Movie Star. Actually working in movies was not as high on her priority list, it seemed.

“We’re flexible with our arrangement,” I said.
 

“I don’t do three-ways,” she said.

I took a moment to imagine a three-way involving Gary and me and just about anyone else, and it ended much the same as whenever I imagined Gary and me dating for real: my mental movie machine broke down, unable to form the picture.

I also didn’t believe Randi about what she would and wouldn’t do, but that was neither here nor there. “Neither do I. However, I will introduce you to him. Possibly even convince him to have dinner with you.”

“Why?”

“You tell me whatever you know about Roger Sabo and Courtney Cleary. Especially Roger. In as much detail as you can manage.”

Something akin to glee flitted across Randi’s face. “More than happy to talk after dinner.”

I smiled, no glee whatsoever. “You need to make this worth my while to even broach the topic with my...beloved.”

Every single fiber in Randi’s body radiated annoyance. “Okay. So Roger was a producer on the show—”

“Mostly because of his drug-dealing skills. Well ahead of you there. What else?”

She clicked her tongue a couple of times. “Do you know Greg Hitchcock?”

“The construction bloke? You and Courtney worked for him, right?”

“Still do, sometimes. You want to know a few things about Greg?” Her drawl got lazier by the syllable.

Hm, interesting. But not germane to the topic under discussion. “Not unless it has something to do with Roger Sabo.”

“Well, this certainly did. The second I heard Courtney got murdered, I immediately thought of Roger and Greg. Both of them might be kind of angry at her. Roger had quite the temper on him to begin with.” She pointed at my hairline. “I’m guessing you know that.”

“What about them, Randi?”

“I never did understand why Courtney came back to Los Angeles,” she said. “Not when she was making such good money from both Roger and Greg staying put in Oklahoma. But of course she wanted to be here.”

“Are you telling me both of them were paying her off?” I asked.

“You didn’t know that, huh? I’ll tell you the rest. Tomorrow.” She smiled.

If the Hollywood actress thing didn’t work out, perhaps she had a career in writing suspense.

Well. Time to put up. I consoled myself that in this situation everyone won: I would get my information, Randi would get her moment having dinner with a famous man, and Gary might get laid, which normally put him in a good mood.

Stevie would be disappointed that I had done it, though. But she had her methods and I had mine.

As I approached him, Gary didn’t even stop the conversation he was in with one of the gaffers to wrap his hand around my waist and let his fingers rest on my ass. Then he looked at me and said, “You’ll need to leave the set soon, darling.”
 

The gaffer moved away to give us a modicum of privacy, in the middle of the chaos of a film shoot.

I put my hand up to his face but was careful not to make contact with his skin, lest I mess up his makeup. We leaned toward one another simultaneously, as though having an intimate moment. Since nearly everyone working on the movie was standing in the room at that moment, everyone saw us in action. Gary could sell our fake relationship so hard that sometimes I wondered if he was actually coming on to me. He was, after all, a professional.

“Randi wants a date with you,” I said quietly.
 

“A date?”
 

“You know. Dinner. Chitchat. Possible pap photos.”
 

“Possible?”

Randi wasn’t going to be the Girl Who Dated Important People if there wasn’t photographic evidence. “Okay, yes. Definitely photos. Think of it this way. You’ll be the stud cheating on his twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend with someone even younger.”

He groaned. “Anything else?”

“That part I leave up to you, tiger.”
 

The guy with a different ball cap on wandered by and said, “We need to clear the set.”

“Five minutes,” Gary told him. To me he said, “Is this important?”

Was this important? Most likely, anything Randi had to say I could find out some other way, but getting her to tell me directly would simply be faster.
 

I crossed my fingers over my heart. “You don’t have to do anything except have dinner with her. Enjoy.”

He made a moue, leaving no doubts of his feelings about this setup. “The thing about women half my age is they don’t know anything, so they’re really dull. Not counting Stevie, she knows a lot of things, she’s extremely interesting. But most of them...” He shook his head.
 

I interlaced my fingers with his. “They can have their upsides, darling.”
 

“You’ll save me if things go wrong, won’t you?”

“That’s what I’m here for, Gary. You light up the bat signal, I come running.”
 

Thankfully, that had only happened once, with a woman who had turned out to be a crazy stalker. It was nice, proving my usefulness to him with a bare minimum of effort.

He kissed me on the cheek, his lips barely making contact with my skin. “Fabulous.”

One crook of my fingers at Randi and she came running over to us. I left them to discuss where they’d be having dinner that night.

MY STEPFATHER ROBERTO had asked me to talk to Dr. Anson Villiers about the nonprofit foundation Villiers was setting up to help at-risk youth in Los Angeles. Roberto was going to lend his company’s name and donate money. I made a call to Villiers’s phone number, which turned out to be in Beverly Hills, to set up an appointment to see him later that day. Then I asked Stevie to find out who this fellow was.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I need to go talk to him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s starting a nonprofit charity thing that I’m going to help with.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why?”

“Could we do the Socratic method another time? Do your keyboard tippy-tapping thing and tell me who this person is.”

Anson Villiers turned out to be a psychiatrist who worked in Beverly Hills. I wasn’t sure which part surprised me the most: that Roberto was acquainted with a psychiatrist, that said psychiatrist would be in Beverly Hills instead of on the Upper East Side, or that Anson Villiers was black.

Damn. My prejudices and expectations were intact, it seemed.

Stevie read to me what her web search had turned up. “He publishes a lot of work on the long-term effects of learning disabilities on at-risk youth, particularly minorities.”

In addition to being a corporate good deed, Roberto undoubtedly saw the irony in asking me to help out. “Let me guess. The long-term effects are...bad.”

“You needn’t be so cynical. If his office is in Beverly Hills, he could spend his days doing nothing but listening to the problems of extremely rich people, without doing any of this.”
 

“Extremely rich people have problems, too,” I said.

“They tend to have more resources, though.”

After a half minute of silence, I said, “Oh...shut up.”

“Why are you meeting with him? Is he a possibility for...”
 

“I didn’t even know he was a therapist until twenty seconds ago. I wasn’t planning on talking to him about referrals, but that’s a good idea. He might have some recommendations for us. Don’t burn down the house while I’m gone.”
 

Silly advice, really. Of the two of us, I was far more likely to do that.

Villiers’s office was in a medical building on Roxbury Drive, a stone building built during the sixties with a tiny, slightly scary elevator. Four flights of stairs was almost no work and I felt as though I’d been sitting in a car for most of my natural life recently.

When I got to the top of the four flights, I remembered that I had recently been in a fight that had landed me in the hospital, and perhaps the athletic heroics could wait for a while.

The waiting room for Office 421 was a tiny square parked between two internal doors: one to Villiers’s and one to another office. I ran my fingers over the nameplate on each door to be sure which one I should wait for to open.
 

Villiers opened the door to the waiting room at three after the hour. He was a middle-aged black man, with light brown skin and prominent freckles across his nose and cheeks, and a slight graying of his hair. He wore a polo shirt and khakis and looked like he’d be at home on the patio at a country club. “Drusilla?” he asked, his hand out. We shook. “Come on in. Sorry to keep you waiting, got a crisis phone call from a client.”
 

His office was tiny but still fit a three-seat sofa, an armchair facing the sofa, two side tables (each with a box of tissues on it), two bookcases, and a desk with a computer on it. There wasn’t a lot of room between any two objects. There was a second door by one of the bookcases.

“What’s that?” I said.

“How patients leave. So they don’t run into their friends and neighbors walking out.”

Smart. “Like I said on the phone, I’m here to discuss a nonprofit you’re setting up.”

He hitched up the knees of his trousers before sitting in the armchair. “What do you know about it?”

“That you’re setting up a nonprofit.”
 

That made the doctor laugh. Always start by making people laugh. It relaxes them.

“Rob—Mr. Montesinos said you were having a problem with one aspect of it and maybe I could help. He wasn’t any more specific about it than that. So I have no idea what I’m doing here.”
 

Dr. Villiers laughed again. He had a very deep laugh. He probably didn’t laugh a lot during sessions in this room. “Yes, I am setting up a foundation that works with children of disadvantaged groups in Los Angeles on issues of literacy and learning disorders. Montesinos Investment Bank is donating money as well as having some employees volunteering time, for which I’m very grateful.”