The Best American Mystery Stories 2018

Paul D. Marks WINDWARD ^{from Coast to Coast}

Petrichor. That fresh smell of drying grass—or in my case wet pavement after the rain. You didn’t know there was a word for it, did you? The rain had just cleared out. Everyone’s been cooped inside, pent-up energy building, seething. Bad guys couldn’t do their thing. The rain stops, they come out to play. Shards of sun streak through a buttermilk sky. People in L.A. can’t deal with rain anyway.

Petrichor. There’s a word for everything. The word for my life at that moment was hell.

I was finishing up the job from hell, putting together the final bill on the Rence case. Identity theft. If you ever want your life to turn to shit, get your identity stolen. Not only did it turn Rence’s life to hell, but mine too. I’d spent three months on it, mostly barricaded inside, chasing leads on the dark web from the hole, my office. Three months of pure hell till I caught the bad actors—but Rence will spend five years trying to get her name back. I like what I do for a living, though lately, with computers and the Internet, it can get a little boring and tedious—they make it too easy to track people down. Not that it wasn’t boring before, sitting on stakeouts or gumshoeing it, but at least then I was out in the world, among the living, even if it meant sweltering inside a parked car or hiding behind bushes, getting sunburned and having an excuse for all the crappy food.

A man opened the office door, the little bell on it rang. It’s a concession to the old days that makes people feel comfortable, something they don’t often feel when they have to hire a private investigator. It also makes a chime on my computer ring. I looked up, saw him enter on the video monitor. There wasn’t an inch of my office, inside or out, that wasn’t covered in a crossfire of cameras. I even had a camera on the restaurant across the street, shooting the front of my building. I’d done a little work for Lou Hernandez, the owner, and instead of taking money from her I asked if I could put a camera on her place. She agreed. I liked watching my little storefront PI shop on Windward Avenue in Venice. I particularly liked watching it from the hole.

I opened the door to the small front office, covered in pix of Venice from the old days. The piers and amusement parks, people in old-fashioned bathing suits on the beach. The canals and oil wells. And a young surfer dude standing next to his stick, stabbed in the sand. Originally a color photo, I’d printed it in sepia so it would match the others. It reminded me of who I used to be—I didn’t get much surfing in these days. Actually, I hadn’t surfed in years. I thought about it a lot though.

I’m talking about Venice, California. Los Angeles. Hey, the other one in Italy has canals and grand thoroughfares with colonnaded arches. We have grand canals and streets with grand colonnaded arches. Okay, so we don’t have such grand canals these days, most of them have been filled in, including the Grand Canal. And Venice didn’t quite cut it as the cultural paradise-by-the-sea that Abbot Kinney, its founder, had envisioned. Today it was an ever-changing kaleidoscope of people, dudes dancing on skates, musicians, artists. Maybe a few pickpockets here or there. But it was home. And I liked it here.

“Jack Lassen?” the familiar-looking man said from behind expensive shades, entering my place. Tan, very tan. Maybe the kind you pay for, maybe the kind you get from sitting by the pool, sipping mojitos, or whatever the in drink was these days. Loafers without socks—that told me a lot about him. Pastel shirt, Rolex. Definitely not a walk-in off the beach looking for a handout.

I smiled. He didn’t return it.

“You’re a licensed private investigator in the state of California?”

“Want me to show you my photostat?” Of course we don’t have photostats anymore, but he was playing with me, I played back.

“Funny.”

“What can I do for you, Mr… .”

“Lambert, Patrick Lambert.”

I knew the name. As in “A Patrick Lambert Production.” Hey, this is L.A. Everyone aspires to a credit like that or “A Film By.” Few get there. Lambert had been there for twenty years with no signs of coming down. Back in the day he’d been a leading man of the George Clooney variety. Good-looking, athletic. Heartthrob. And richer than God’s Uncle Larry. He’d drifted from acting to producing and become an even bigger player, if that was possible.

“Have a seat,” I started to say. But he was already making himself comfortable, leaning back in one of the guest chairs like he owned the place.

My office was neat as a pin, clean as a whistle—what other clichés can I come up with to describe it? I wanted customers to feel confident in me. On the other hand, sometimes I worried they’d think I had no business if there weren’t a lot of papers strewn here and there, piles of manila folders and the like.

“My wife, Emily, is missing. The cops aren’t moving fast enough.”

“You want me to find her?”

“You’re good.” He stretched.

“Am I boring you?”

“You sure you’ve done this before?”

“Just making small talk.”

“I don’t need small talk. I need someone to find my wife.”

“Did you lose her?” I knew I’d better stop.

He got up, turned for the door. Most people have trouble getting to the point, so I do a little friendly jousting with them. Not him, he was all business, or should I say biz? Unlike all those down-and-out PIs in the movies, my business was doing okay and I didn’t need the money. But I didn’t like the guy—wasn’t sure why, sometimes you just don’t. That didn’t mean I wanted to let business just walk out the door—his money would buy me a meal or two at El Coyote as well as anybody’s. Besides, I needed a break after the Rence case. You think it might have been that Hollywood swagger that put me off?

“Hey, Mr. Lambert, you come to a Venice PI, you get a Venice vibe. Did you come to me specifically or was I just the closest one to you?”

“You’re not the closest. You have a good rep, though I’m beginning to wonder why.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

He seemed to collapse in on himself, lowered his voice. “My wife Emily’s been missing for about a week now. I think she’s been kidnapped.”

“You’re rich.”

His face startled. Hollywood folks, the successful ones, are very wealthy and like to pretend they’re “of the people” while sitting in their modest 20,000-square-foot houses and their $150,000 Teslas.

“I’m just trying to figure out why someone would kidnap your wife. Motive and all that.”

“We’re comfortable. And to answer your next question, no, there’s no ransom demand. Yet.”

Comfortable, the old saw people said when they were way more than comfortable.

“I came home from work on Friday. Drawers dumped out. Whole house ransacked.”

“Forcible entry?”

“The police said it looked like someone jimmied the sliding door open, but they think it was staged. They’ve lost interest. In fact, they think she ran off. That she faked the crime scene to make it look like she was kidnapped.”

“Why would she do that?”

“She wouldn’t.” He sounded very sure of himself. Guys like that always sounded sure of themselves. They were, after all, God’s gift to women and everyone else. Why would anyone ever want to ditch out on them?

“When I came home her car was gone. I think the kidnappers took her in it.”

“Have the cops found the car?”

He shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Alarm? Surveillance cameras?”

“Neither was on. We don’t always have them on when we’re home, especially during the day.”

“Help? Servants?”

“Off that day.”

Naturally.

He handed me a stiff piece of semiglossy paper with photos on it. Blond hair, full lips. Overly made up. Pretty in that typical SoCal IWannaBeAnActress way—and if you did want to be an actress, why not marry Patrick Lambert, one of the hottest producers around? Yeah, she was an actress. Hell, what he’d given me was a six-by-nine composite card, the kind that actors hand out to casting directors. It had the standard studio head shot, plus action shots, bikini at the beach, climbing a tree. I’m not kidding. The best for last, steely-eyed holding a Goncz GA-9 pistol—cool-looking high-tech gun, the kind Hollywood loves—dressed in a leather bustier and six-inch stilettos. I hoped that gun didn’t have much recoil.

“Anything better? Normal, y’know, snapshots.”

He slid a wallet-sized photo across the desk. Without makeup she really was pretty. “There’s a ton of pictures of her on her Facebook page.” He wrote down the password to her account. I wondered why he knew it.

I followed him to his comfortable Pacific Palisades house, er, mansion on an acre and a half overlooking the ocean. The house was small by Saudi prince standards but was definitely comfortable. He showed me where the break-in occurred. Sliding door off a pool patio, a slight dent in the doorframe.

“These are the official police photos.” He showed me a dozen police pix from the crime scene. “I have some clout with the PD.”

I bet you do.

The broken door. Ransacked dressers and closets. It was a little too perfect, everything just a little too perfectly out of place, strewn here, strewn there—like on a movie set maybe. But that didn’t really mean anything. Bad guys don’t always do everything according to Hoyle.

He said he’d wire me the money within the hour and gave me the names and numbers of Emily’s besties and sister. He wanted her back, bad. I could see it in his eyes, or maybe he was just afraid what they would say in the tabloids?

I called Laurence Lautrec, a Detective II in the West L.A. station, from my cell. He was my department go-to. We’d worked together when I was on the force. Claimed he was related to Toulouse. The fact that Laurence was black and six feet tall and Toulouse white and barely five foot didn’t seem to bother him. And who knows, down the ancestral line anything might happen.

Every once in a while we’d get together to go shooting or just shoot the breeze, sometimes with guns.

“It’s not my case,” he said. “But from what I hear, some-a the guys think she mighta pulled a Gone Girl and—”

“What, faked her own kidnapping? Why? She’s an actress wannabe married to a player. Rich. Good-looking. Powerful. Nobody skips out on that.”

He gave me a “who are you kidding” look, said he had to get back to work. He also said he’d send whatever he could regarding the case my way.

I hit Tito’s Tacos on the way home. A little out of the way, but worth it, and I sure as hell didn’t want any of those too-hip hipster joints. With my taco fix satisfied, I parked behind my building, went in, slid down the ladder back into the hole—a 1950s bomb shelter built by some previous owner of this little building during the Cold War, when trust was low and paranoia high. He was going to hide down here and be safe if the Big One came. Of course what he’d come up to when he opened the hatch might not have been much fun. The next owner had used this space for storage. The hatch door was solid steel, four inches thick. If I was down in the hole I could lock it so it couldn’t be opened from the outside. I felt safe and snug down here, from bill collectors, home invaders and burglars, angry husbands and nukes. There was recirculating air and filters, electricity from batteries, generator, and solar, and enough food and water for one person for a month. Well, it might not have been the best food, but it would do—MREs. Plenty of books and DVDs. A link to the Internet. I could be happy here forever if I didn’t have to earn a living. And it was bigger than you might think, taking up the entire square footage of the building… and then some. The biggest problem was getting things down the hatch, but I managed. I also added running water, a shower and toilet, and a great galley kitchen that HGTV would be proud of. Even had a chemical toilet in case the shit ever really did hit the fan topside and the regular one stopped working. All the comforts of home, including a million-dollar view of the Venice boardwalk from the Venice Beach live cam, spread out on a sixty-inch flatscreen. But it was quiet and that made up for a lot. And I didn’t tell anyone except a handful of really good friends that it was here or where I lived.

By the time I got back to the hole, the material from Lautrec was already there. I downloaded it and perused the reports. Nothing jumped out at me.

I turned to Emily’s Facebook page. A ton of pix. Nothing really out of the ordinary, no incriminating pictures. I printed a couple to show around along with the composite card should the need arise.

I made sure Lambert’s payment cleared before I really dug into the job. Just because he’s a big Hollywood muck doesn’t mean he’ll keep his word. I’ve been doing this gig for seven years on my own. Before that I had a partner for two. He preferred the safety of a steady paycheck—his wife’s—and became a stay-at-home dad. Before that I was a cop for nine years, until I got shot in the hip, a nice euphemism for ass. I could have stayed on in the department, but I like my ass. It gives me something to sit on.

I scanned the monitors to make sure everything was good. Nothing unusual happening on the Venice Beach live cam either, where the unusual is usual. I then looked at the outer office. The pictures on the walls. A clean, well-lighted place. My board. Even though I was just yards off the beach, I never seemed to get around to surfing anymore. I don’t know why. I guess sometimes you just have to grow up, do grown-up things. Little games are for little boys, as the song says. On top of that, I just didn’t have the time I had when I was younger. Every day it seems to evaporate like the fog snuffed out by the sun. So I kept that board, leaning on the wall, to remind me of younger days, better days. Glory days—like the high school football star who made the game-winning touchdown, then didn’t do much with his life after that.

Turning back to the computer, I checked all the usual resources on Emily Lambert, Spokeo and Intellius, DMV and military records. She’d led a pretty ordinary life except for marrying Lambert. And was wife number three for him.

Lambert called, wanting to know what I’d done. It’d been about three hours since I left his house, and already he’s bugging me. Hollywood Power Player thinking he owns me or Guilty Guy protesting too much?

I pulled up to Emily’s sister’s place in the Spaulding Square neighborhood of Hollywood at 9 a.m. the next morning. Nice little Spanish-style houses built in the 1920s, around thirteen hundred square feet—on postage stamp lots of pure L.A. bliss going for a mil and a half—hell, my bomb shelter was bigger than that. Walking to the front door, I noticed she had torn out the front grass and put in an ugly xeriscape. Some xeriscapes are attractive. Not this one. It looked like the Iraqi desert after a brigade of American tanks had rolled over it two or three times. Erin Beckham, Emily’s sister, answered the door. I intro’d myself, got the prelims out of the way.

She invited me in. The house was cozy. Offered me a cup of tea, which I declined. I took in everything about the room that I could, the decor, family photos, artwork. Several of the pix showed her with a man I assumed to be her husband. Buff and tough, like they’re all trying to be today. Dirty-blond hair in a too-slick do. Another of him clowning, posing like the muscle men on Muscle Beach.

“Your brother-in-law, Patrick Lambert, is concerned that the police aren’t doing enough to find your sister.”

Her puckered lips, like she’d just tasted a sour lemon, gave away her feelings for her brother-in-law, even if she didn’t say anything. “He’s got a whole force of studio cops, but he hires you.”

“I’m not chopped liver, you know. I have a pretty good rep, if I say so myself.”

“I didn’t mean to put you down. Just that the LAPD sort of shills for the studios. But either way, I don’t know anything.”

“She have any run-ins with anyone?”

“No.”

“How does she get along with her husband?”

This time a raised eyebrow. “As far as I know they get along fine. I mean, they fight like everyone does. He might be a little controlling, but nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Maybe I can talk to your husband?”

She glanced over at the photos on the mantel. “He’s too busy and he doesn’t know any more than I do, probably less.”

“What about other siblings, friends?”

“No siblings, just us. And she didn’t have a lot of friends lately.”

I asked if I could use the head. I didn’t really have to; I wanted to see more of the house. I satisfied myself that Emily wasn’t there. I stayed another ten minutes or so thrusting and parrying with her, getting nowhere. Maybe she didn’t really know anything, but it’s my nature—and my job—to be suspicious of everyone and everything.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you,” she said, eyeing the door. A not-so-subtle hint.

“Are you?”

I wanted to slam the car door—but didn’t want to show emotion. And she sure as hell wasn’t showing any, hardly seemed concerned about her missing sister. People do worry in different ways, but I knew she was full of shit. Problem was, I didn’t exactly know what she was full of shit about. Something didn’t seem right.

“Strike one,” I said, driving off, heading back toward the beach. Made some stops on the way to talk with some of Emily’s coworkers, then hit Pink’s on La Brea, hot dogs to the stars. Pink’s is nothing more than a ramshackle shack. But an L.A. institution. I’d rather eat at places like that or Tito’s any day of the week than those new cooler-than-cool places that last a year or three, then spontaneously combust.

I parked behind my building in the secure private lot. Made a pit stop at Lou Hernandez’s restaurant for a beer and headed toward the boardwalk a few yards away instead of to the office. I popped the lid on a Lagunitas IPA and thought on it awhile.

Emily’s coworkers, mostly actors and some below-the-line people, didn’t have a lot to say. I figured they didn’t want to get on Lambert’s bad side and be blackballed. But they did turn me on to one of his exes—right in my own backyard. I looked her up on IMDb on my phone. She’d had a few small roles but was mostly an appendage to Lambert.

Since the pea soup of winter laid a cold, heavy hand on the waterfront, I didn’t know if she’d be on the boardwalk at all. I walked down there, passing a man in a Speedo playing a grand piano, just a little the worse for wear from the weather. I still haven’t figured out what they do with that piano at night. Some detective, huh? I passed the Sidewalk Café and Small World Books, and of course the ubiquitous tourists. Venice is the number one tourist destination in L.A., though for the life of me I can’t figure out why. I guess they come to see the freaks. And since I lived here, I was one of them—my people.

After talking with several denizens—I like that word, don’t you?—of the walk, Ja-ron, the fire eater, steered me to Haley Garrick Lambert. I’d seen her around but never paid any attention. She was younger than I’d expected, early thirties maybe. But still probably past her prime for Lambert. Short shorts and sandals—hey, it’s an L.A. winter. Baubles and beads on bracelets and necklaces. A headscarf wrapped around long golden-brown hair that hung down below her shoulders. And two or three different-colored tank tops layered one over the other. Yeah, she belonged in Venice. She worked selling handmade jewelry from a stand on the side of the walk.

I told her who I was, who I was working for. Asked the usual opening questions.

“I’d help you if I could,” she said. That’s more than Emily’s sister had said. And why wasn’t Erin worried? That worried me.

The sun cracked the clouds, glinting off Haley’s dangly earrings, which sported a distinctive dolphin design.

“You’re looking at my earrings.”

“They’re unusual.”

“Yeah, and solid platinum. Patrick’s very magnanimous. He gives all his exes earrings, ’cause he’s sure stingy on the alimony.” She squinted in the glaring sun. I could taste the sarcasm.

“How many does he have?”

“I’m the second. I guess Emily is the third now…”

“Can I ask you something?”

“That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”

“What’re you doing hawking this shit out here in Venice?”

“Oh, you think because I’m the great Patrick Lambert’s ex that I should have my own alimony mansion in Bev Hills, right? I’ll tell you, I signed a prenup. I get a little, and when I say a little—”

“You mean a little.”

“Very little.”

“So there’s no love lost.”

She hesitated. “I don’t hate him, if that’s what you mean. I started out wanting to be a star like every other halfway decent-looking girl in L.A. I thought Patrick was my ticket. We used each other. I didn’t expect much on the back end. Just like in the movies, nobody gets their back-end money. Almost nobody.”

“He do that to you?” I pointed to a pink scar on her leg.

“Oh hell, no. But it did happen on one of his locations in the Angeles National Forest. He finally gave me a bit in one his flicks, The Atom Boys.”

“Don’t know it.”

“You’re not missing anything, though it did make a lot of money. Anyway, I got hit by a falling light. You should have seen it right after. Searing red.”

“I’ll bet. So he didn’t hit you, but maybe he was controlling?” I said, remembering Erin’s comment and playing off my own hunch about Lambert.

“Everything from soup to nuts, as my grandmother would say. He’s a control freakazoid.” The venom gushed now. “I’d say that’s why I left him, but he left me. Probably for Emily—probably had her waiting in the wings. But I don’t care, I’m happy, I got the sun in the morning and the beach all day long. I’m not mad at him or her.”

“You think he—”

“Well, yeah, sure. He could have taken Emily out. Well, not Patrick. He pays people to do his dirty work.”

“Like me.”

“Yeah, like you.”

I went away knowing a little more than I had when the sun woke up this morning. Erin was closemouthed. Haley was friendlier. Maybe bitter about the breakup, about Emily taking her place. Motive to kill or kidnap her? Sure. She claimed not to hate Emily or her ex-husband. Nobody knew anything. Nothing they would cop to, anyway. And I was suspicious of them all.

My phone buzzed. Lautrec wanted a meet. We hooked up at the Sidewalk Café, not too far from Haley’s stand. I knew something was up as soon as he walked in. Tense, unsmiling. Shoulders tight.

“Hey.”

We took a table, shot the breeze—how’s your wife, how’s the bunker, that kind of thing. But something was wrong. The conversation stiff, avoiding the subject at hand until…

He leaned in. “We’re definitely liking Lambert for it now.”

That came out of the blue. “You think he’s the doer?”

“New thinking is he killed her and staged the break-in to explain her disappearance.” He downed a slug of Sam Adams. “This is under your hat.”

I tipped an imaginary hat. “So why would he hire me if he killed her? You think he’s trying to set me up?”

“Makes him look like he’s doing something.”

I toyed with my beer. “So what’s wrong, that’s not why you wanted a meet. I see it in your face.”

“Every day it gets back-burnered a little more.”

“That makes sense—much as anything, I guess. You think he’s the doer and somebody’s warning you off it.”

“And now I’m warning you off,” he said. “Fair warning.”

“I get it, the studios are comin’ down on you. L.A.’s a factory town and Hollywood’s the factory. Wanna make sure one of theirs is protected.”

“Get outta here.”

I walked home, looking at the colonnades along Windward, echoes from another time, and feeling uneasy about my meal with Lautrec as I entered the office. As soon as I did I saw something on one of the monitors that pissed me off. A green minivan blocking the gate to my little parking lot in back. I have to police that area, because people will park there and go to the beach, even at night. Then I have to call a tow. It’s a royal pain. I could see there were still people in the van; they didn’t look like they were going anywhere. I went out back to tell them to move on. I walked by the van. Two men jumped out from behind a low wall, slapping something down over my head. Everything went black. They yanked the hood’s drawstring tight, shoved me into the back of the van. I didn’t think it was a random kidnapping. My first inclination was to laugh, crooks with a minivan. My second was, how the hell do I get out of here? Third, I left the damn door to my place unlocked. Shit.

Zip ties tore into my wrists as they lashed me to a cargo cleat in the back. I could smell the fear-sweat coming off them. The whole van was steamy and stunk up, like a gym on a humid night.

I tried to figure out where we were going, but it was hard to tell. My senses said we were heading north, up the coast somewhere. Nobody was talking. I tried to discern how many people there were from their movements. The two men who’d grabbed me were in back with me and a driver up front.

“You want to tell me what this is about?”

“Shut up.”

The van bumped over rough gravel, probably a semipaved beach parking lot somewhere up the coast. It had to be around 6:30 p.m., probably not anyone out at this hour. They cut the zip ties, yanked me out, threw me on the ground. Rip—the skin on my forearm shredding. Fuck them. I owe you now. I could hear the waves crashing a few yards away.

Damn! A kick in the ribs.

“Stay the fuck away from Emily Lambert. Hear me?”

“I hear ya.” I felt him too. The kick wasn’t hard, but it hit the right spot to give me a blast of pain.

“Or we’ll be back.”

“Did anyone tell you boys that kidnapping is against the law?” I loosened the drawstring on the hood. A drift of fresh air blew in through the gap.

Light from the open van door sliced across one of the men’s faces as he bent over me. Familiar face—one I’d seen in a photo. Dirty-blond hair and nicely cut gym rat muscles, the kind you’d find at Muscle Beach. Erin’s husband, maybe, from what I could tell through the gap in the hood. Another kick. Wasn’t very sharp. These weren’t hard guys. They wanted to scare me off—why? They piled in the van. I threw a rock at the taillight, shattering it. They hit PCH heading south. I tried to figure out where I was. Maybe Will Rogers Beach. I had a good walk ahead of me.

I tucked the hood in my pocket, walked PCH back to Windward. Got home at seven bells on the dog watch. I didn’t always think in those terms anymore, but I always liked dog watch. And I was dog-tired. I slid down into the hole, sealed the hatch, salved my scraped arm. Put a couple of tortillas on the open-flame burner, spread butter on them and then hot sauce. And that was dinner. I set the alarm clock, lay down on my bed, and drifted into some kind of dreamland where all the freaks on Venice Beach came out one at a time and kicked me in the shins, like in some demented Fellini movie. The alarm went off at midnight sharp. I jumped in the shower, dressed, and climbed up the ladder.

An eerie, cold, wet wind blew in off the ocean. I pointed the car east and drove, blasting Brigitte Handley and the Dark Shadows on fairly empty, fairly quiet weeknight streets. The part of Hollywood I was headed to wasn’t quite as romantic as the one people imagine when they think of Hollywood. It was the part where people lived and played, changed diapers and had sex, though maybe not in that order.

I parked a block away from my destination and walked that block like I owned it. A Nora Jones song filtered down the street from an open window somewhere. At 0130 not even a TV flickered through a window in the quiet house. I let my eyes adjust to the darkness, padded down the driveway toward the back of the house, looking for the outcroppings of a security system. Found it, disabled it.

Breaking in was easy-peasy. I crept through the house on my steel-toed Doc Martins till I came to the master bedroom. I pushed the door open, quietly took a seat on the rocker by the foot of the bed, and rocked slowly.

“W-what’s going on?” Erin jumped up in bed. Her husband lurched up beside her. I shined the sun-bright LED flashlight at the end of my 9-million-volt stun gun in his eyes. He shielded them with a hand.

“Did you really think I couldn’t figure out who you were?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Don’t play fucking games.” I hit the trigger on the stunner. Zzzzzzzzz, it crackled. “You want this upside your neck?”

“What do you want?”

I enjoyed watching them squirm. “I think you know more than you’re telling. You want to keep me out of the loop—fine. But stay the fuck away from me. You’re in a league you’re not equipped for.” I held up a piece of taillight from the van. “Fuck with me again, I’ll turn you in. This piece of taillight belongs to your van, the one in your driveway. The one with the broken taillight I just snapped a picture of.”

“Not legal,” Erin said.

“Neither is kidnapping. Let’s call it even and forget about it. When you decide to stop playing games, you know where to find me.”

The hole seemed particularly reassuring that night. Next morning I wrote up a report for Lambert. Jammed by his house.

“You’re not making much progress.”

“I’ve only been working the case a couple of days.” I didn’t tell him about my being kidnapped or my field trip to Erin’s house in the middle of the night. “You sure you don’t know what might have happened to Emily?”

“Are you accusing me—”

“No, just that you might know about someone who could have been angry with her—or you.”

“I wish I did. I really want to find her.” He sounded sincere, but what did that mean? Like Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” Maybe he was a player in more ways than one—and maybe he was playing me. Driving back to the office, I tried to figure out my next step.

I looked through the photos again. A woman approached on one of the monitors. She glanced up and down the street, as if she was embarrassed going into a PI’s office. I was up and out of the hole by the time the little bell over the door rang.

“Mr. Lassen.”

“Erin. I’m surprised to see you here.” I guess my late-night visit with the stun baton had worked.

“I’m sorry about what happened. We were just trying to protect Emily.”

“Protect her?”

“She’s been kidnapped.” She sank into one of the chairs.

“Have you heard from someone? Has there been a ransom demand?”

“No, but I think someone wants to get to her husband.”

“How does your kidnapping me help Emily?”

“Well, if she was kidnapped and you’re nosing around, they might hurt her.” She squirmed. “I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to tell you everything. I’d been getting texts from Emily every day saying she’s okay. But I haven’t heard anything now in three days.”

“Texts?”

“Yes, but not from her phone, from a number I don’t know. I guess whoever kidnapped her is making her do it so we know she’s okay.”

“Anyone can send a text. No phone calls?”

She shook her head.

“How do you know it’s really her?”

“She always signs off ‘Lee-Lee,’ what we called her as a kid. No one else would know that, but these are signed that way.”

She showed me the messages. Short, terse. No cops or they kill me. Lee-Lee.

“We can’t go to the police. Don’t you see? And that’s why we did what we did last night. We wanted to scare you off.”

“I get it.” I thought I did, but my suspicious nature made me wonder if she was telling me the whole truth and nothing but. “Does Lambert know about these?”

“No.”

I understood her reluctance to share the info with Lambert at this stage. She showed me the last text message. It said something about curtains.

“Curtains?”

“It’s our code. For where we used to go camping with our family in the Angeles National Forest. There was a wall of trees like a huge curtain.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I think they might be holding her there.”

She told me how to get to the place.

I hit Highway 2 in La Cañada Flintridge, drove up into the forest, looking for the turnoff that Erin had described. She couldn’t remember exactly how to get there. The Angeles National Forest is known as L.A.’s body dump, and I was looking for a body, hoping not to find one, at least not a dead one.

Driving in circles for an hour, waiting for the GPS to come back online, I wondered if Erin had sent me on a wild-goose chase. Then I saw it. Rabbit Run Road. Not much to the little dirt road. It ended in a small campground. I parked, walked into the site. Deserted. A sliver of red flashed through the patchwork of leaves, glinting in the sun. Red Mercedes SL Roadster, behind a curtain of trees. Covered with dust and leaves, it looked abandoned. Hadn’t been broken into… yet, but unlocked. Both of which surprised me. I guess it was so far off the beaten path, and especially in the cold of winter, nobody had found it.

I slipped on latex gloves, pulled out my little point-and-shoot—I liked it better than my phone for things like this. Snapped pictures of every inch of the car and surrounding area. The car was empty. No purse. No personal items. No dead body. Nothing. Looked like it had already been cleaned out. Maybe whoever took Emily Lambert had sanitized it to get rid of any incriminating fingerprints or DNA evidence they might have left behind.

I did a three-sixty around the car, then walked in successively larger concentric circles, trying hard not to disturb the land, hoping I wouldn’t find Emily’s body in a shallow grave. No footprints or breadcrumbs or anything. Someone had tossed her purse in a pile of leaves a few yards from the car. Emily’s wallet remained, but her cash and credit cards were missing. Driver’s license was where it should be.

Heading back to the car, something caught my eye. Two-inch-wide dark tape wrapped around a tree branch, one end flapping in the breeze. Duct tape? Had they held her here? I walked over. No, gaffer’s tape, similar to duct tape but used on movie sets, and I’d been on enough of them to know the difference. Walked back to my car, found a spot where my phone would work, called the cops. And waited, and thought. Gaffer’s tape, movie sets. Lambert made movies. Was there a connection?

Something else caught my eye, shiny and sparkly, half covered by dirt. I picked up an earring. A familiar-looking earring.

I played Stratego on my phone till a black-and-white sheriff’s SUV came trolling up the road.

“Jack Lassen?” Deputy Cantwell said. I knew his name from the badge on his shirt.

“Yes.”

He made sure I wasn’t armed. Luckily, I’d left my Beretta Nano in the car.

“Where’s the car?”

I pointed.

“Stay here.”

The deputy walked to Emily’s car. Made sure there were no dead bodies in the passenger compartment. Popped the trunk. Clean. Scanned the immediate area around the car. Said something into his shoulder mic. Came back to me.

“You sure you didn’t check out the car?”

“Me?” Mr. Innocent.

“How did you come to find the car?”

“The owner’s husband hired me to find her. She’d been missing.”

“And how did you end up here?”

“Look, I don’t want to tell the story eighty-six times. I’ll just wait till the detectives get here.”

He shot me a pissed-off, don’t-fuck-with-me look but basically left me alone. He looked around, mostly just waiting for the detectives and criminalists to show. They took their sweet time. And when they did they gave me the third degree. I gave them most of what I had and they let me go down the mountain.

Halfway down, I pulled into a turnout. Figured I was far enough away from the scene of the crime that they wouldn’t notice. Pulled out the earring. Familiar. I’d seen it before. On Haley at the beach. She’d had two. I wondered if now she only had one. Ex-wife, jealous of new, arm candy wife. Thrown to the wolves with a prenup that gave her virtually nothing. Maybe she’d hatched a kidnapping plan with a new boyfriend to make up for being shorted on alimony? It’d been done before.

Haley was holding down the fort at the little stand on the boardwalk. A chill wind slashed in off the ocean, biting my cheeks.

She saw me coming, had nowhere to go.

“Remember me?”

The scorn in her eyes said she did. She was wearing a pair of pearl stud earrings.

“How ’bout this, remember this? I think you lost it.” I dangled the earring in front of her face.

She glared at me. “I didn’t kidnap her. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Then what was this doing where I found her car?”

“How would I know?”

“And that part of the forest is an interesting place. Not only did I find the earring. I also found gaffer’s tape. You know, like they use on movie sets. Like Patrick Lambert’s movie The Atom Boys, which was shot in the Angeles National Forest and which you were in, according to IMDb and yourself.”

“Get out of here. I don’t have to talk to you.”

“No, but you’ll have to talk to the cops. You were there. Emily’s car is there. I think there’s a connection.” I thought that was a good tagline, spun on my heel, walked off.

I could tell she was panicked. And she was definitely involved. She lost track of me in the crowd, crammed her phone to her ear. I ducked into an empty tattoo parlor, watching her from behind the window, like Bogart watched Geiger’s bookstore from another shop across the street. Only I didn’t have Dorothy Malone to keep me company. Haley closed up her little stand, double-timed up the boardwalk. I fell in behind her. She got into a Passat—I guess that was the ex-wife ride—and took off in a swirl of dust. I ran to my car. Beach traffic and red lights, the bane of L.A., slowed her down. I didn’t have any trouble catching up to her. She drove PCH north, I drove PCH north, all the way to Santa Barbara. I could tell she was talking on the phone—I wished I knew to whom.

Santa Barbara. Nice place to be kidnapped, if there is such a thing.

She parked outside of a small real estate office—Josie Tremaine Realty—on State Street, the main drag. I went in the front door.

“Josie. Josie Tremaine.” No sign of anyone. But I’d heard noises in the back when I first entered.

A woman came out. Pretty, not Hollywood-sexy, or should I say sexed-up? Dark hair, just a hint of makeup.

“I’m Josie.”

I just looked at her, didn’t have to say anything. She knew I wasn’t here to buy a house. And I knew her name wasn’t Josie. Her façade crumbled.

“You don’t look any the worse for wear… Emily.”

“Did my husband send you?” Emily said. “You’re the PI, right?”

“I’m the PI. Your sister tell you about me?”

She sat, or maybe collapsed, in a chair. Game over. “I don’t know why I thought I could get away with it.”

“What’re you trying to get away with? You wanna get some ransom money from your husband since you got screwed in the prenup like Haley?”

“Can’t you just leave me alone? Pretend you never found me.”

“I have a rep to protect.” I was being flip. I don’t think it worked. “Your husband’s worried about you.”

She stared past me. Through me. “I’m not going back. If you take me, it’ll be kidnapping.”

“Like your sister and her husband did to me. I think we’re at a Mexican standoff here.”

“Why do you care if I go back to my husband?”

I didn’t have a good answer to that. “I don’t. But he hired me to do a job.”

“And you always get your man—or woman.”

“Something like that.”

“I’ll pay you twice what he’s paying you.”

“Why are you so desperate to get away from him?”

She sat closed-mouthed. “What kind of man are you?”

“Huh?” Nobody’d ever asked me that before, not so directly. I hadn’t given it much thought. But I guess like most people I thought I was a pretty good guy—wasn’t I?

“What kind of man are you? Honest? Trustworthy? Or a bum?”

“I’m as honest as the next guy, maybe more so. I like to think I’m a pretty decent person, try to do the right thing.”

“Then do the right thing now.”

“What’s that?”

“Let me be.”

I ignored her comment. “So why’d your sister turn me on to your car up there in the forest?” I said it loud enough for the people in back to hear. I’d seen Erin’s van next to Haley’s Passat. “You can come out now.”

“We thought you’d find it, tell the police, and they’d think that someone took her, murdered her. But that no one would ever find the body,” Erin said as she and Haley warily emerged from the back room.

“And she’d just disappear,” Haley said.

“But you didn’t plan to lose an earring, a very distinctive earring.” I looked at Haley. “There was no kidnapping.”

“No,” Emily said.

I sat down, burned out. I’d been running on fumes since the Rence case. I was tired of all the assjacks I had to deal with every day. Assjacks I made my living off, but still… “You’re all in it together? The ex-wives club.”

“And ex-sister-in-law,” Erin said, cracking the slightest smile.

“Have you told the cops yet?” Emily asked.

“Not yet.”

“And maybe you won’t.”

“Tell me about it.”

She pulled a manila envelope out of a locked desk drawer. Handed it to me. Several photos of her, black and blue and purple. Bruised up and down her body. “He did that to me.”

“How do I know it’s real? Not a Hollywood makeup job.”

“That’s why I wanted to leave. He gets off on beating me and he was getting more violent every time. He would’ve killed me eventually. I know he would have. I’ve been planning this over a year. Squirreling money away, a little here, a lot there. He never missed it. I’d tell him I was doing spa days with the girls. But come up here, work in another real estate office, till I founded this place. I got my real estate license, set up this office. Changed my name.”

“And that’s why you left your driver’s license behind. Just to make sure everyone knew it was you, would figure you’d been kidnapped or worse.”

She nodded.

I couldn’t figure yet if she was being straight with me. “There’s no reports of your being abused. And you were married to Mr. Wonderful, the dream guy for every woman in America. Mr. Perfect.”

“Mr. Perfect has good PR and makes lots of money for the studios…” She fidgeted with the buttons on her blouse. “It’s not makeup.” She lifted the blouse, exposing a purple-going-to-yellow bruise that spread like a Rorschach blot over her left kidney. “He thought he could buy me with money and promises of making me a star. I don’t want the money—except what I took. And I don’t want to be an actor anymore. He was never serious about that.” She looked to Haley, who nodded. “It was just something to keep me hanging in. And I don’t want him. He’ll kill me if I go back. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. He’s narcissistic. He doesn’t know love.”

I turned to Haley. “You too?”

“Yes. He beat me too.” She showed me the scar that she’d earlier told me was from a falling light. “Then, if I wanted anything at all, I had to sign a confidentiality agreement as part of the divorce settlement so I couldn’t go to the press or tell anyone what a bastard he was. So Emily and I hooked up. I also got my real estate license. I’m planning to move up here too.”

“And you?”

“I’m just the enabler,” Erin said.

“You won’t tell him, will you?” Emily reached for my hand.

“I don’t know.” But I did know. “You know, it’s pretty easy to be found these days with the Internet and all. Even changing your name. If I could find you, others will too. And Santa Barbara’s pretty close to L.A., too close. One of his Hollywood friends’ll see you around town or even come in here. If you really want to disappear, I’d move farther away, much farther, and someplace more off the beaten path.”

I turned for the door.

“Thanks. I’ll take your advice.”

“Get a new Social Security number, if you haven’t already. Both of you.”

Emily nodded.

“If you don’t know where to get one—”

“Down on Alameda.”

“Yeah, but if you want a better one, give me a call.”

She smiled. The door closed behind me.

On the way home I stopped at the Malibu pier. Walked to the end, listening to the waves crash, watching them roll in and out. The endless ocean. I reached in my pocket, pulled out Haley’s dolphin earring, gave it one last look, and tossed it as far off the pier as I could. It barely made a splash in the roiling water.

Dark clouds blew in off the Pacific. Storm warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning. How often did that hold true? Funny what you think of at times. A sting of salty ocean spray slapped me in the face, snapping me back to the moment.

Everyone’s running from something. Emily was running from Lambert. More than that, she was running from the Hollywood thing, the phoniness. What they used to call the rat race. She just wanted a normal life now.

What was I running from?

I hit Lambert’s house. The housekeeper told me he was on location in Colorado. Really broken up about his missing wife. I drove home, clambered down into the hole, and gave him a call on his cell. Filled him in, made the case sound colder than it was.

“What do you mean you can’t find her? You found her car, the sheriff’s office told me.”

“She’s in the wind—or dead. Trail’s cold. Yeah, I found the car, but after that it’s dead ends everywhere I turn.”

“You’re one fucking lousy PI. Give me my money back.”

I enjoyed hearing the rage in his voice. “It’s not like the movies, Mr. Lambert. Everything can’t be solved in two hours. The money is for my time. Results are incidental. Read your contract.”

“I’ll destroy you. You’ll—”

“What, I’ll never work in this town again?” I laughed.

“Fuck you!” He clicked off. I’m sure he missed the days when you could slam a phone down and really show the person on the other end how pissed you were. He didn’t seem to miss his wife much—maybe he suspected what really happened. He probably already had a new starlet on the hook, and I didn’t feel guilty about letting his wife get away or taking his money. He might be able to hurt my rep a little, but what would it be without integrity anyway? On the other hand, maybe it would help once I got the truth out. Besides, my purpose in life isn’t to prop up the Patrick Lamberts of the world.

I scanned the monitors, nothing exciting. Then I saw it, leaning against the wall in the outer office. My stick. The one I hadn’t used in what seemed like a lifetime. I climbed out of the hole, walked down Windward toward the beach, board under my arm, the wind pounding in from the ocean. I guess like all those people cooped up inside, with their nervous energy building, I didn’t want to be cooped up anymore either.

Went surfing.