Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery (18 page)

A
t exactly 4:28 a.m., I cracked open my door and peeked out. Positioned at the end of the hall, in front of the door to the patio, was the staff desk where Ingrid had been stationed earlier in the day. The guard ladies took twelve-hour shifts, and from nine at night until nine in the morning, Belle, a retired attorney and former cokehead, was on duty.

At this exact moment, Belle was snoring, her head of short, curly hair resting on her folded arms on the desk. Perfect.

I opened my door more fully and wheeled one of my suitcases into the hall. Very slowly. Very quietly.

Over the next minute, I silently dragged each of my cases out of my room. Then, one by one, I moved them up the hall, away from the sleeping tigress and in front of Cherish’s door. I didn’t
bother tapping. The doors aren’t locked. I simply turned the knob, quietly, and slipped inside.

The desk lamp was on, and Cherish was sitting at the desk flipping through an old copy of
Vogue
.

“So,” I whispered. “Glad I didn’t wake you.”

“I don’t sleep so good anyways.” She stood up and stretched, then took the magazine over to her closet. When she slid the door open, at least a hundred magazines were tossed on her closet floor, rising up about two feet.

“I don’t believe this,” I said. “You steal the scissors. And now you steal all the magazines? What is it? Do you have some gonzo competitive drive to make the best damn personal collage in the wing?”

Cherish shrugged. “I do it to get under their skin. Why not? Somebody needs to teach them all to lighten the fuck up. They are all so earnest; it makes me want to puke. Grown women, weeping over an arts-and-crafts project. Grow up.”

“Not out to win Team Player of the Year Award. Got ya.”

Cherish and I had each dressed in black, befitting our early-morning errand. We both looked chicly severe and Audrey Hepburn thin. She put a finger in front of her mouth and whispered, “Just do what I tell you to do, and we’ll be all right. Stay quiet. Everyone goes to sleep on the night shift. By three o’clock, I can waltz around the place, the kitchen, the maintenance rooms. Do you have any idea what sort of chemicals they keep in the laundry supply room?”

“Oh, Cherish. You don’t. Tell me you don’t ingest any sort of cleaning products.”

She smiled a wicked smile. “No, I don’t. But I could. Security here is a joke.”

“Okay, so we’re going to Deiter’s office?”

“Just follow me.”

Cherish opened her room’s door a crack. “Holy shit! Did you leave all these bags out in the hall? Like that’s not too freaking noticeable?” She opened the door, checked in the direction of sleeping Belle, then dragged my luggage inside her room, trying not to make any noise. “Could you like
be
any more stupid?”

“Hey,” I whispered harshly, “I need to leave right away. No one is going to keep me here against my will.”

“Well, lady, do what you want. But I’m staying, see? I need to stick it out here, or I’m really screwed. So watch it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I asked, “So what do we do if someone on the staff should happen to wake up and see us walking around the grounds at this time of the morning?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan just in case.”

We left my bags piled near her bed, then, checking again to make sure the coast was clear, we both tiptoed out of the room and up the hall, heading straight for Belle.

Sneakers may well be named sneakers, but they are less suitable for sneaking than the name implies. My stunning croc Stuart Weitzman sport shoes have rubber soles that squeak when I walk across tile. Squeaking during the day when one is briskly walking down a hall is one thing. Squeaking during the middle of the night when one is stealthily making one’s escape from the Butterfly Wing is quite another.

Shhh.
Cherish didn’t actually make that sound, but that was the sound her mouth was forming, and she jabbed her forefinger in front of her lips. She wasn’t in a particularly good mood from
the pained expression on her face every time my Weitzmans let out a squeak.

We made it past Belle, who was quite dead to the world, her head still on her arms, which were folded on top of a light yellow sweater she had bunched up on the desk.

Cherish soundlessly flipped a little switch on the desk, then moved to the outside door that led to the patio by the pool. I tiptoed slowly, stopping each time the soles of my shoes squeaked, and finally made it outside.

There were miles of Mexican tiles to go, and Cherish whipped around and pointed to my shoes, mouthing,
Off.

I took them off, and although the air outdoors was chilly in California in February, I padded barefoot on the pavers down the path. The flowerbeds near the pool were lit with small downcast garden lights, while the pool itself glowed pure aqua from underwater lights.

Past the pool house, we entered the main building and, so far, had not encountered any locked doors. Excellent.

Inside the door and quickly down the main hall, we arrived in front of a closed door that bore a bronze plaque with the name
DR. EDWARD DEITER.
Here we were. I slipped my sneakers back on and breathed a big sigh of relief.

But it was one sigh one second too soon.

“Hello,” came the man’s voice. “Can I help you two?”

I looked behind me. A man in jeans and a yellow wind jacket stood a few feet away. His name tag said
KEITH.

Cherish reached her hand out and grabbed the back of my neck, then pulled me up tight toward her and planted her lips on my mouth. The kiss did not stop.

So this was her big plan. Oh, joy.

“Okay, sorry, ladies. I’m heading out of here. Don’t want to intrude.” Keith turned nonchalantly, then, using his staff key, exited out the front door, leaving us alone.

That was it? I guess any kind of private behavior was tolerated at Wonders, as long as it didn’t include exotic substances.

I broke free from Cherish’s grasp.

“You okay?” she asked, holding back a grin.

“Yes. Sure.” I couldn’t help it: I put my hand immediately up to my mouth and wiped. Cherish started to laugh. I said, “It was a nice kiss, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I have a boyfriend. A jealous boyfriend. He’s British.”

“Put yourself inside the mind of the enemy. What are we doing skulking around in a deserted building in the dark? We’re looking for a little romance. See? Just give the man an answer he can understand, and you’re home free. They don’t really care what you do as long as you aren’t snorting Drano or something.”

Cherish pulled a key from her pocket, and before I could register just how amazing it was that she had such a key, she’d slipped it into the lock and opened Dr. Deiter’s door.

Inside, I turned on a small desk lamp and hoped we’d be out of there before anyone noticed the light or heard any activity in the office.

I turned to Cherish. “That key?”

“I lifted it off of Jonnie the first day I checked in. That was one hundred and forty-seven days ago, Max. Not that I’m counting.”

Leave it to a girl who had been in and out of rehab for the better part of her life to know how to scam her way around the system.

I walked up to a locked file cabinet. “I bet this is where he
keeps our personal belongings. Damn. You don’t happen to have the key to the files, do you?”

Cherish reached into the back pocket of her Juicy Couture Jeans and pulled out her key ring again.

“You do have the key?”

“Well, we’ll see.” She flipped through several small keys on her ring. “This looks like about the right size. I got this one off of the minibar at the Wynn Hotel in Vegas. You know they’re all the same, don’t you?”

“They are? All the minibar keys?”

“Mostly, yeah. They come from the same parts manufacturer. These guys use the exact same key for jukeboxes, office furniture, you name it. I had a boyfriend once who knew all about it.”

I could only imagine.

She put the key up to the file-cabinet lock, then slipped it in. “Oh, yeah.”

I’d clearly paid the right reprobate a thousand bucks. Bingo again.

In the top drawer were cardboard boxes with the names of patients written in Sharpie on the outside. The top drawer held names beginning with
A
–
F.
I closed that drawer and went straight to the bottom one, and before long I’d found the box marked
MAX TAYLOR.

Cherish said, “Hey, you found it.”

Inside the box were all my things. My BlackBerry was there. Halsey’s expensive jewel-encrusted Prada phone was there. All my Madeline Bean mysteries and, of course, Unja’s Sony Handycam. I’d take the entire box with me. I was done. I could leave.

Cherish was now seated at Deiter’s desk, having fiddled her key in the lock on his personal file drawer.

I checked my phone reception and was in BlackBerry heaven, dialing Malulu, feeling the joy of getting my little gizmo back—and wondered if any of us were truly addiction-free. As I waited for Malulu to wake up and answer the phone, I watched Cherish pull some files out of Deiter’s desk. “Say, do you think that’s such a good idea?”

She smirked. “Sure. Hey, I found my personal file.”

While I talked to Malulu, instructing her to please come and pick me up this very minute, Cherish tossed her file on the desk and was going through other files in the drawer. When I had disconnected my call, she told me, “Being in here, you know what I miss the most?”

The drugs? The booze? I waited to hear what it would be.

“It’s Austin. My little boy. He’s five.”

So Cherish had a little boy. That put her in a totally new light. “That’s a great age.”

“Is it?” she asked. “I guess I wouldn’t know. I’ve been in here so long I missed his birthday. They say when I get out of here, they’ll let me see him, though.”

Oh my goodness. Had she lost her son?

She looked over at me and said, her voice filled with disgust, “Don’t you feel sorry for me, you hear?”

“But…” I couldn’t help the way I felt. “I do, Cherish. I just do.”

She sat in the desk chair and pulled her long, black hair back from her face. “You want me to be nice to all those stupid women on our floor, don’t you? You want Cherish to be sweet. But what the hell have I got to be all nice about? They all look down their noses at me, like I ain’t as good as them. Well, maybe I ain’t. But let them rot before I’m gonna help ’em any. They cry, and they
moan. But they got families to go home to. They got jobs and boyfriends and everything goes back to normal for them. They’ve got lives waiting. They stay here for four weeks. Or maybe two months. Shit, Max. I’ve been here almost five months already this time. Five months. I’ve seen the ladies come and go. But I’m still here. And they ain’t anything to me.”

“I can tell you’ve had it rougher than most of them. But don’t you see? You all have more in common with each other. Under the surface. Problems are universal, Cherish. That’s what the group session is supposed to be about. To see how you are all alike.”

“Yeah? Well, you’re not like us, are you, Max?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She smiled a knowing smile. “You don’t belong at Wonders. So what the hell are you doing here?”

“Me? Well, I had a little problem…”

She laughed. “Oh, really? Well, not with any addiction. I’ve been living in rehab for like centuries now, Max. I know what an addict looks like. I know what an addict smells like. You have been bullshitting everyone from the moment you got here.”

“Oh, I…” Cherish had left her own file open on the desk, and on top was a letter on Wonders stationery addressed to her tribe, dated last week. I looked at it and stopped in mid-sentence. “Wait,” I said, interrupting myself and reading further down the letter. “This is horrible.”

“What’s that?” she asked, looking down.

The letter was addressed to the tribal leaders and said, in essence, that Cherish was not making progress in her treatment and was not a good candidate for release after six months. She still showed signs of antisocial behavior, with a list of specific details.

“Shit!” Cherish said, sitting up in the chair and bristling. “Shit. They’re gonna ruin everything. They even wrote how I been stealing all the magazines, for Christ’s sake.”

With growing alarm, we both read on. In conclusion, the letter from Dr. Deiter strongly urged the tribe to recommit Cherish Goodwater. With another six months of rehab at Wonders, the doctor hoped to see her have a chance at a true recovery.

Her eyes flew around the darkened office. “What’ll I do? I’ll go crazy inside this place. I’ll go nuts. And Austin. I won’t ever see my baby while he’s still five years old.”

“Easy,” I said. “Let’s think.” The problems inside Wonders were not like the ones I was used to in the world of make-believe. Here people lost their freedom, lost their children, even lost their lives. “I’m going to tell you the truth now, Cherish. Can you take the chip off your shoulder for a minute and listen to me?”

Shocked at her sorry prospects, she nodded.

“Good. It’s time for straight talk. You aren’t better. You just aren’t. All your hate and anger. You have to learn a better way to deal with it. Got me?”

She nodded.

“You laugh at the other women in the group. You insult them. But they are just as scared and angry as you are. No one gets a free pass from pain. No one. So lighten up on them, okay? And let the counselors help you. You have this incredible chance. So get well. Get well for Austin, your lovely boy. Use the money I gave you and buy him a birthday gift. A child is worth everything, Cherish. What wouldn’t a mother do for her child?”

She looked at me but didn’t reply. Did I get through to her? Who knows?

She said, “We can’t stay here any longer. The morning kitchen workers get here at six.”

“I’ll close up in here,” I said, looking at the boxes and papers we’d left lying around. “You go back to your room. I’ll come back and pick up my bags.”