Swimsuit Body (5 page)

CHAPTER SIX

I spend the next fifteen minutes scouring the neighborhood for Mini Me without success. After I've made the circuit of the cul-de-sac twice, I follow the footpath at the end, which leads to the private beach for the gated community. Whenever I'd had a listing in Casa Linda Estates, the beach was a major selling point. Tucked into a cove, it's sheltered from the winds that often whip the shoreline and inaccessible to the public—a steep wooden staircase provides the only access. There's no sign of the missing pooch when I scan the beach below. I descend the staircase and walk the length of the beach. None of the people I stop to speak with has seen a little dog running loose. The only dogs are a Labrador chasing a stick tossed by its owner and a golden retriever snoozing on a blanket. I hope, for my sake as well as his, that Mini Me has been taken in by one of the neighbors and not hit by a car. The last thing I need is another dead body on my watch.

I pass a pair of uniforms on their way down as I'm climbing the staircase, both wearing the intent looks of men on a mission. My thoughts return to Delilah. If she had died of natural causes, her death would seem tragically romantic—the grieving widow reunited with her husband in death. Instead, she'd come to a brutal end. The question is why. Was it an act of revenge? Or was greed the motivation? I recall the obsessed fan who used to show up at her events claiming to be her fiancé. It made headlines when he was sentenced to two years in prison for breaking into her Malibu home. He must be out by now. Did he take her life in the twisted belief that it would make her his? It's a nice theory. But it doesn't fit with what I'd seen: evidence of a cold-blooded execution, not a crime of passion.

I head back to my Explorer, figuring I'll have better luck searching for Mini Me on four wheels than on foot. As I'm nearing the house, I see neighbors gathered out front, others wandering over, their curiosity aroused by the police activity at Casa Blanca. I skirt the marked vehicles in the driveway to get to my SUV, which is parked at the curb. That's when I spot the Yorkie in the arms of a young woman who stands at the foot of the driveway, looking a little lost herself.

I walk up to her. “Brianna?” I only spoke to her over the phone, so I don't know what she looks like, but from the Bluetooth device in her ear and the fact that she's here, it's safe to assume this woman is Delilah's personal assistant.

She starts at the sound of my voice, as if I had crept up from behind and weren't standing right in front of her. “I came to drop this off,” she says, extracting a manila envelope from the Coach bag slung over her shoulder. “Copies of the script changes. They told me …” Her voice trails off, her vacant expression giving way to a frightened look. “Did something happen to her?”

I take her gently by the elbow. “Why don't you come with me.”

She stares at me uncomprehendingly. “Who are you?” She's in her mid to late twenties. Pretty in a girl-next-door sort of way with shoulder-length brown hair, hazel eyes, and lightly freckled cheeks. She wears a camel skirt paired with a tweed jacket over a pale-blue silk shell.

“Tish Ballard. We spoke on the phone.”
Only about eight hundred times.

“Oh. Right. The property manager.”

I reach over to pet Mini Me. “Where did you find him?”

“He was wandering in the street. Thank God I spotted him. He could have been—” She swallows the rest of the sentence, the color draining from her face. I wonder how much the cops told her.

“I know. I was looking for him. I'm glad he's okay.” I haven't relinquished my grip on her arm, and now I give it a gentle tug. “Come. You look like you could use some coffee. I know I could.”

“She's dead, isn't she?” she says when we're en route to the nearest coffee shop, in the upscale shopping center that lies at the heart of the nearby village of La Mar. Her voice is eerily calm.

I grimace in sympathy. “I'm sorry.”

“How did it happen?”

“They didn't tell you?”

She shakes her head, absently stroking Mini Me, who's curled asleep on her lap. “When I came to the door, they told me to wait outside, that someone would be with me in a minute.”

“That would be Detective Breedlove. He's in charge of homicide.”

Her eyes widen and her face grows even paler. “So it was …?”

“I'm afraid so. She was shot in the head.”

“Oh, God.” Brianna makes a moaning sound, then lapses once more into a trancelike state. I try not to think about the fact that I more or less absconded with a person wanted for questioning in a murder investigation. Spence will have a fit. He won't see it as a compassionate gesture.

When we arrive at the shopping center, which is built in the style of a Tuscan village with lots of stucco and terra-cotta and a fountain splashing in the courtyard, it's bustling with shoppers as it always is at this time of day. I park in front of Java Junction and leave Brianna to go inside. I return a short while later with two coffees and hand her one. “I got you a large. Milk and sugar.”

“I take mine black,” she informs me in a dull voice.

“Think of it as medicinal.”

She smiles wanly and sets her coffee in the cup holder next to her seat.

I glance down at the dog. “He seems none the worse.”

“Prince is a trouper.” She strokes his gold-brown fur, gazing down at him with affection.

“Prince, huh?” I prefer the name Mini Me; it suits him better. “I thought that was only for big dogs.”

“It's short for Prince Harry.”

“Cute.”

“Not hairy with an
I
,” she says, correcting my misassumption that the name was a play on words. “He was named after His Royal Highness. He and Delilah met at the London premiere of her last picture.”

“He must've made quite an impression.”

“Actually, it was the other way around. He was so taken with Delilah he invited her and the others to spend the weekend with him at his country house. When it was over, he gave her the dog so she'd have something to remember him by. Prince comes from a long line of show dogs.”

“An affair to remember,” I comment.

She gives me a sharp look. “It's not what you think. Delilah was in mourning. It was right after Eric died.”

I don't buy her explanation. The thought crosses my mind that His Royal Highness might have arranged to have Delilah bumped off. Maybe she'd had some dirt on him stemming from their fling and was threatening to go public. Though come to think of it, there isn't much about the royal bad boy that isn't already well documented.

“Did she have any enemies? Anyone who'd threatened her?” I get back to the subject at hand: the fact that her employer has been murdered. “You know, like an obsessed fan.”

“She had lots of those. Most were harmless.”

“What about that guy who went to prison? Isn't he out?”

“Yes, but he's in a wheelchair.”

“What? When did that happen?” In the news photos of him at his trial, he'd been able-bodied.

“He was attacked by a fellow prisoner while he was serving his sentence. It left him paralyzed from the waist down. Delilah has fans in prison, too,” she explains, smiling bleakly.

“What about a jilted boyfriend? Or a jealous ex?”

“I don't think I should be talking to you about this.” She darts me an uneasy look.

We're interrupted by the chirping of her phone's ringtone—Beyoncé's “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” Brianna answers, activating the Bluetooth device in her ear. “Hello? Uh-huh. Certainly, Detective. Of course, anything I can do to help. I'll be right over. Are you still at the house or should I meet you at the station?” Gone is the shell-shocked woman of a minute ago. In her place is the buttoned-down personal assistant I recall from our business dealings.

The transformation is so sudden it has me wondering if she was putting on an act before. It occurs to me she's a likely suspect. Maybe she secretly hated her boss and had been pushed over the edge of sanity by her diva ways. Delilah's drinking would have made it that much worse. Though I can't think why Brianna wouldn't have just quit her job if it had become intolerable.

“Do me a favor. When you see him, don't mention you were with me,” I say when she gets off the phone with Spence.

“Why not?” she asks, eyeing me curiously.

“I'm in enough trouble as it is.”

“Are you a suspect?” She says this as if it's a perfectly normal question.

“Me? No, of course not,” I answer, too hastily. “You see, me and Spence—Detective Breedlove, that is—we go way back.” I sigh and sit back, prying the lid from my coffee. “It's complicated.”

Brianna nods in understanding. “I get it. I grew up in a small town myself. Woodstock, Vermont, where the summer tourists outnumber the year-round population. Everybody knows everybody else's business, and you can't turn a corner without running into an old boyfriend.”

“He wasn't my … never mind.” I sip my coffee. “What brought you to L.A.?”

“I moved there when I got the job working for Delilah. My dream job,” she says with irony. I wonder again what, if anything, she's not telling me and the dark horror of what I saw earlier falls over me like a shadow while outside, the sun is shining and suburbanites in expensive threads stroll by carrying glossy shopping bags. “To answer your question, no, she didn't have any enemies. None that I'm aware of, anyway. She wasn't a saint by any means, but she wasn't a bad person. Not … not bad enough for someone to want to kill her,” she adds in a shaky voice.

“Usually people are murdered for one of two reasons: love or money.”

“We can rule out money.” Brianna explains that Delilah had bequeathed everything she owned to the charitable organization Full Bucket, which she had established in the memory of her late husband, Eric Nyland. The mission of which, I know from having looked it up online, is to provide impoverished villages in third-world countries with a source of clean water.

“Insurance payout?”

“She was only insured for the movie. Standard practice,” she explains. “So the studio is covered in case one of the leads gets killed or injured in the middle of filming. It happens. A few years ago, a stunt went wrong on the set of a movie my uncle was directing, and one of the actors was killed.”

“Your uncle is a director?”

She nods. “That's how I ended up working for Delilah. They're good friends.
Were
,” she corrects herself, her face resuming its somber cast. “He was so excited to be making a picture with her.”

“Don't tell me you're related to—”

“Karol Bartosz.” She finishes the sentence for me. The famous director, a contemporary and compatriot of Roman Polanski, is best known for his outsize personality. He must go to all the A-list parties, because it seems there's a photo of him, looking impresario-like with his flourish of snow-white hair and the cravats he seems to favor, on the Caught in the Act page in every issue of
People
. At the Oscars each year, he shows up with a different blonde, and they all look like they're half his age, twice his height, with boobs that could act as flotation devices.

“You came by it honestly at least,” I comment.

She gives a short laugh. “So much for my Princeton degree. I majored in English lit, which doesn't exactly make me a hot commodity on the job market. When Uncle Karol told me Delilah was looking for a personal assistant, I was on a plane to L.A. the next day. I had a student loan to pay off, and I was getting desperate. When I met with Delilah, she seemed nice and the salary was generous. I didn't bother to find out why her last assistant quit,” she adds on a dry note.

“How long were you with her?”

“Two years, but it seems longer.” Her face goes blank again, and she stares out the window. She doesn't seem to notice that she's tightened her grasp on Prince, enough to have him squirming on her lap.

“Brianna. Let go. You're hurting him.”

She snaps out of her trance and releases the dog with a cry of dismay. “Oh! I didn't mean—” Prince leaps from her lap onto mine, narrowly missing the coffee she placed in the cup holder and bumping the one in my hand, causing me to spill some of it down the front of my brother's red Stanford hoodie. The excited Yorkie plants his paws on my chest and starts to lick my face. Brianna bursts into tears. “I-I spoke to her not more than an hour ago. S-she was in a good mood. Excited about the movie. She thought this could be the one. You know, that it might get her an Oscar nomination. And now she's … Oh, God. I never thought it would happen like this.”

“As opposed to drunk driving or a drug overdose, you mean?” Brianna gives a small, sorrowful nod. I hand her a napkin to wipe her eyes with, and I use another one to dab at the coffee stain on Arthur's sweatshirt, turning my head to keep from being French kissed by Prince as he licks my face. “Yeah, I know a little something about that.” Brianna gives me a questioning look, at which I add, “Four years clean. I was luckier than most. I got sober and stayed sober.”

“I wish …” She trails off, biting her lip.

I pry the lid from her coffee and hand it to her with a wry smile. “Bottoms up.”

“I should get back,” she says when we've finished our coffees. “I don't want to keep the detective waiting.”

I start the engine. Ten minutes later, we pull up in front of Casa Blanca in my Explorer. She climbs out and starts toward the house. “Hold on. Aren't you forgetting something?” I call after her.

“What?” She turns to look at me.

I gesture toward Prince, standing on his back legs in the backseat, peering out the window.

“Oh, no. I couldn't possibly,” she says and starts to back away. As if I'd asked a favor of her. Any sympathy I had toward her fades and I remember why I'd found her so irritating to begin with. She seems to have forgotten that her boss is dead and that I'm no longer at her disposal.