Everybody Takes The Money (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries) (5 page)

“Anne self-medicated last night. She’s sleeping it off.”
 

“Did she get hurt?”

I shook my head.

“I’d like to talk to her after she wakes up. What about you?”

“I don’t have a hangover. Well, Vicodin gives me a minor headache, but if I keep taking it the headache goes away, plus my mood improves.”

“Drusilla. Tell me what happened yesterday.”

“And then we’re even?”

He nodded.
 

“If anyone ever asks, you and I never spoke. Particularly if the person asking is my lawyer, all right? If anyone asks why you were here at eight a.m., it wasn’t about work.”
 

He smiled. “I can do that.”
 

I bet he could.
 

I gave him the background of going to the interview with Anne. Gruen hadn’t heard of
Girls Becoming Stars
either. Honestly, was he trying to be my Mr. Perfect?

“Why did she ask you to go with her?”

“The bloke she’d been dealing with setting up the interview made her nervous. For good reason, it turned out. She thought if things went badly, I could help.”
 

He nodded. He had seen some of my handiwork with aggressive types. He’d stopped me from killing someone with my bare hands. It would have been self-defense that time, too, I might add. I try to avoid conflicts, but I can hold my own. “How did the fight start?” he asked.

“While Anne talked to Courtney, I chatted with Sabo. He offered me drugs, I said no.”

“You sure about that?”

“That he offered me drugs or that I said no? I’m quite certain of both. He didn’t make a great salesperson for his own product.”

“You thought he was high?”

“I had no doubts about him being high. He was twitchy and abusive and I told Anne we needed to leave. Roger pushed up against me, I pushed back, we started fighting, Courtney tried to get in the middle of it, and he tossed her across the room like a used tissue. Then he and I fought some more.”
 

“I saw the pictures. You’re good.”
 

I wasn’t going to deny it. I am good. “Anne said she saw he had a gun. However, I didn’t see it. So that I can’t confirm or deny or tell you what kind it was.”
 

Gruen rubbed his forehead for a moment. “Did you see the drugs?”
 

I shook my head. “But he was high. Tough to fake that level of twitch.”

He tapped his fingers on the table in a regular rhythm. Made me wonder if he’d been a drummer.

Gruen wasn’t interested in the assault or what I’d done. His curiosity was about Sabo. To find out what he was up to. Why would he be so interested in a lowlife like Sabo? Obviously Sabo had been around the criminal block once or twice, but Gruen didn’t work Narcotics. And it would be comforting to think that if Sabo were doing bad things all the time, he would have been arrested. That he hadn’t been told me two things: he was either an exceptionally talented criminal, or he was valuable to the police. A confidential informant, perhaps?

Whatever he was, it was important enough to get Gruen to knock on my front door.

“Did you know Sabo’s filing assault charges against Anne and me?”

Gruen swore. He hadn’t been expecting that. Sabo was definitely important to the PD somehow.
 

“Which is further evidence he was high, because it wasn’t my fault. I was fine with leaving.” I lifted the edge of the t-shirt I was wearing to show him the bandage over the knife wound. “Roger Sabo had other ideas.”
 

His gaze flicked down to my stomach. He reached out and then drew his hand back before making contact.
 

The anticipation of feeling his skin against mine completely upset my thought processes. Zeus in a sidecar, I needed to find someone to date, and soon. Perhaps later, when my skin wasn’t purple and green and covered in bandages.

“Why is this important to you?” I asked.

He shifted backward on the stone wall, moving away from me. Moving away from temptation, perhaps. “Something about the police report read wrong to me,” he said.

His voice cracked on the word “report.”
 

Liar, liar, pants on fire
, I thought, and then I took a moment to enjoy the mental image of Detective Gruen removing burnt trousers.

“Is this about the drugs?” I asked. “I don’t know what kind he had.”

“I don’t work Narcotics.”

I nodded. “Is Sabo a CI?”

Gruen’s gaze flicked up to me damn quick. I was on to something there. “Why do you say that?”

I leaned toward him. “’Cause there’s a lot of things I would have done for that favor and you called it in on something stupid like this.”

We didn’t say anything for a few moments. The morning light made Gruen’s tan skin glow and I focused on my enjoyment of observing him, rather than think about why he’d actually come here.
 

“You think Anne’s going to wake up anytime soon?” he asked.

“Let me give her a shake and stick some coffee in her. What time do you have to be at the office?”
 

“I’m flexible.”

Did Gruen have any idea what kind of images that sentence evoked? Now he was just being mean, making my imagination work overtime. “I’ll go see about that coffee.”
 

Anne woke up slowly and stupidly and with much blinking. She went upstairs to shower and dress. When she returned I stuck two cups of coffee in her hand and sent her out to chat with Gruen for a while. She returned really quickly, the detective right behind her.
 

“Have everything you need?” I took his cup from him. “Lovely to see you again, Detective. Don’t let so much time go by before our next meeting.”

“Stop getting into trouble.”

“Seems to be the only way I can get your attention.”

“You have my attention.”

I leaned forward and whispered, “I was hoping to get a different sort.”
 

When the door closed, Anne rounded toward me. “Well, that was interesting. He mostly asked me about you. You two are going to make great-looking babies.”

“I have to get him horizontal first. Or vertical. Whichever. I’m not picky, but apparently he is. Tell me what you talked about.”

Anne giggled. “He wanted to know who started the fight. Why you were there. What you said afterward. I’m almost totally sure our stories match up.”

“Given that I didn’t lie and you’re terrible at it, they were the same story.”

She glanced at her phone. “Oh my God. Guess who called me.” She held up her phone in my face.
 

If I were made Queen of the Universe, my first decree would be to outlaw the practice of shoving a cell phone in someone else’s face, as though what it’s showing you is important. Or at the right focal length for your vision. Or something you can read. I used my usual trick of moving the phone back and forth, as if trying to find the proper distance, while hiding the text under my thumb and then revealing it letter by letter.
C - O - U - R
“Courtney called you?”
 

Anne nodded. “Yes, she did.” She tapped a few buttons and the voicemail message started playing on the phone’s speaker.
 

“Hi. This is Courtney. I...I really need to talk to your friend Priscilla.”

“She probably means Drusilla,” Anne said.

My gaze met Stevie’s and we both struggled to avoid smiling. I actually had been a Priscilla once. Priscilla, Drusilla. Whatever. “What a remarkable guess. Shhh.”

Anne batted me on the shoulder. It actually hurt, which was unexpected.

“I’d like to talk to her about...you know, what happened. This is all crazy.” Courtney rattled off her phone number and hung up.

“What do you think she wants?” Anne asked. “Maybe she’s had time to consider that Roger is a bad guy?”

I shook my head. “She’s delusional. Like I would spend any time talking to her.”

My cell phone rang in the kitchen. Anne and I looked at one another.
 

“Perhaps she’s also very determined,” I said.
 

Stevie came running out with the phone. “Mr. Ross,” she whispered.

I took it back into the kitchen, out of earshot of Anne and Stevie.
 

“How are you feeling today?” Nathaniel said.
 

“I’m still alive.”
 

“Great. We’re still on for one o’clock today. Actually, make it a quarter to.”
 

Goodness, was it Monday morning already? Time for my regularly scheduled transcontinental phone call.

When I returned to the living room, Anne asked, “Everything okay?”

“Forms and paperwork. I have to go to Century City at one.”
 

“I have to go get the money I said I’d pay you....” Anne’s voice trailed off, like maybe I was going to contradict her and say it was okay, she didn’t need to pay me.
 

To hell with that. I needed it even more now.
 

“Let’s get together and talk later today,” I said.

The door to the guest house opened and Gary, our esteemed landlord, walked in. He looked like a middle-aged man wandering around in search of a golf course, with a slightly puzzled but still happy aura. He’d gotten into the habit of walking into the guest house at all hours of the day, probably because Stevie and I enjoyed the run of his house and he felt entitled to return the favor. He was dressed casually and seemed fairly aware of his surroundings, so today might be a good day.

He was better known to the public at large as Sir Gareth Macfadyen, star of stage and screen, as royalty-crazed Americans and entertainment shows liked to refer to him. He hated the name Gareth, hated anyone using it, definitely hated using the title he’d been granted by the Queen. But depending on the day, his mood, or the alignment of the stars, he might also hate owning furniture, being famous for doing something as silly as acting, or most varieties of cheese. He had two Oscars for Best Actor and was so convinced no one liked him he’d developed a bad habit of taking inappropriate women home with him, mostly in the hopes that they’d do something terrible to him.

Which was where I had entered his life. I decided I was going to be the last one of those inappropriate women. As things worked out, we didn’t hook up and become lovers; we worked out a much better interdependent state. I stood between him and the trouble he could get himself into, and he let me live rent -free at his house and monitor his moods and keep him out of trouble. He got to tell people—women, mainly—that he had a live-in girlfriend, which stopped them from getting too clingy, and his pretend girlfriend was perfectly happy for him to date other women in the meantime.

The arrangement worked out swimmingly for both of us.

“Gary, how fabulous, you’re awake, come join us,” I said.
 

“Hm?” His eyebrows knit together, as though he were startled to find himself in our house at all. Which he very well might.
 

“Stevie made a Bundt cake.”

“Oh, that’s terrible news,” he said. “Is there any left?”

Stevie popped her head out of the kitchen. “I’ll make you a cup of tea to go with it,” she said. She also had his medications ready to go, which was probably half the reason he was at our house anyhow. My sister and I managed a number of tasks for the famous actor, some minor and some more important.
 

For one thing, since Stevie and I had taken over his care and feeding, he’d had an uninterrupted string of days on his meds. Which was probably worth more than any rent we might pay him.

He humphed and headed toward the kitchen but stopped when he was about to walk past me. He stared at my face, his famous green eyes focusing on the cut at my hairline. “This is why the police detective was here this morning, wasn’t it? You certainly do like to live on the edge.”

“No worse than a rollerblading accident on the boardwalk.” Perhaps if boardwalks fought back, with knives.
 

“The police were here. I want to hear the full story. Particularly before your dead body washes up somewhere.”

“After you have some tea, Sir Gary.”
 

He nodded and headed off to the kitchen.
 

Anne leaned in. “It’s so cool you live with him.”

“Technically, we live adjacent to him.”

She poked at my shoulder and I turned away to avoid contact, in case it hurt. Anne had lived her whole life in and around the movie industry, and if there’s one thing Angelenos are jaded by, it’s famous people. That Anne still thought our proximity to Gary was marvelous was a testament to the aura around the man.

“Let’s go have cake,” I said.

STEVIE AND I arrived at Nathaniel’s office ten minutes before one. This was not because of my usual passive-aggressive behavior, but because I once again underestimated Los Angeles traffic. Eventually I was going to remember to add forty-five minutes to my expected drive time instead of a simple half an hour.

Carmela came out to the reception area with a tray holding a small pot of English breakfast tea and a small bear claw. Stevie nestled into her favorite spot by the window, ready to read a five-hundred-page Portuguese epic about a fisherman. Then Carmela led me into the law offices, stopping at the door of Nathaniel’s office. He sat facing a mountain of paperwork. Sometimes Nathaniel worked for other people as well, but I did my best at keeping him completely busy on my behalf. He waved me over to one of his ludicrously comfortable overstuffed armchairs while he finished up whatever he was doing. I did my usual casual survey of his office, to see if there was anything that would tell me something about Nathaniel’s personal life, other than his college degrees on the wall (one was from Harvard and one was from Yale, and I could never keep straight which was the JD). No shellacked newspaper articles about him and famous clients. No pictures of a wife or girlfriend or kids or anything. The only thing I was sure about Nathaniel was that he wasn’t gay. At least, he liked women enough to check me out when he thought I wasn’t looking, at least on days when I could wear something shorter and tighter than these horrible, formless sweats.