Born To Be Wild

FIFTY-ONE

“Daniel,” Breaker Barney shouted out, “any good news for us? You find any bodies in Paulie Thomas’s closet? You’ve been to where he lives, right?”

Here he was, Daniel thought, fraternizing with a smalltime hood. At least this one was smart enough to stay away from petty crimes. “Sorry, guys, I didn’t find a single finger,” Daniel said easily, and took another big bite of pizza.

“No dinner, Daniel?” Lou Lou asked him.

He shook his head and smiled at Lou Lou as he chewed. Someone stuck a beer in his hand, which he regretfully handed back. When he finished his pizza slice, he raised his hand. “Here’s the deal, people. I’m still working right now, and I need to speak to Mary Lisa alone.”

There was no empty spot in the house except in Mary Lisa’s bedroom. Still, they had to wait for a teenage girl to leave the bathroom, pausing to hug Mary Lisa on her way out. When Mary Lisa pulled the door shut, she saw that Daniel was looking very serious. She flipped the lock on the door. Her heart speeded up. She grabbed his arm, shook it. “What’s wrong, Daniel?”

“Paulie Thomas just died. I wanted to tell you privately.”

She stumbled back, fell onto her bed. He sat down beside her. “He never woke up, Mary Lisa, barely got through surgery. They said his heart stopped, simply stopped. They managed to revive him once, but when his heart stopped again, they couldn’t bring him back.”

She stared at him, still unable to take it in. Paulie Thomas, dead. He’d been alive this afternoon, and now he was dead. She felt numb. “How old was he?”

“Thirty-two.”

“That’s around Jack Wolf ’s age. How old are you, Daniel?”

He smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve called me by my first name. I’m thirty-one.”

“He was thirty-two and everyone still called him Paulie, not Paul. That isn’t right, Daniel. That means everyone knew he wasn’t right.”

“Yes, I know. Can I get you something, Mary Lisa?”

She shook her head. “No, just give me a moment to take this all in. How is Paulie’s mother? His uncle?”

“They’re both very upset.”

She nodded. “Did his mother have any explanation for why he tried to kill me?”

“She was too upset for me to get much out of her. She said only that Paulie seemed pretty hyper yesterday. He kept going on about seeing Margie McCormick crying on the set-something about her character, Susan Cavendish, having less of a role to play on Born to Be Wild. Paulie’s uncle Tom finally said Paulie told him that Margie blamed you because of the new plotline you’d worked out with Bernie.”

“There is some truth to that, you know.”

“Don’t be a fool. It doesn’t matter. From what I could glean, Paulie had never managed a relationship, he was a loner, but he was very attached to Ms. McCormick. His mother hadn’t made much of it until this happened.

“The thing is, Mary Lisa, when we got to his apartment with a search warrant, we didn’t know what we’d find.” He sighed. “Fact is, we found a huge motive-his bedroom was filled with press clippings about Margie McCormick, and photos of her plastered on all the walls. On the wall facing his bed was a huge poster-sized photo of her in a bikini.”

“So you think Paulie was trying to kill me because of Margie? He thought I was hurting her?”

Daniel drew a deep breath, took both her hands in his. “Mary Lisa, whatever drove him to do this, he snapped and acted. I think this was a onetime thing for Paulie. Your stalker is someone else.”

She stared at him, suddenly so cold she felt frozen. “Not the stalker?”

He shook his head.

“But Paulie tried to run me down on his motorcycle. A gazillion people saw him try.”

Daniel nodded. “Yes, I know. But stay with me a moment, okay? The decision about the plotline-and Ms. McCormick being unhappy about it and complaining aloud-I realized that didn’t happen until after that car hit you here in Malibu. More importantly, you had already mentioned Paulie to us, and we checked out where he was both on the day of the auto accident and at the time of the shooting on the beach. He had strong alibis on both days-he was with family and friends, and this afternoon we checked them again, got independent verification. It couldn’t have been Paulie, either time.

“And finally, Mary Lisa, we found Puker Hodges a couple of hours ago, claimed he’d been on assignment in Santa Barbara and just gotten back. We took him over to the hospital.” Daniel sighed. “Puker said Paulie Thomas wasn’t Jamie Ramos, the man we’ve been looking for. He said he’d seen Paulie Thomas only once before and that was when he broke onto the set of Born to Be Wild and took that photo of you and Bernie.”

Mary Lisa couldn’t believe this. She didn’t want to believe it, much less hear it. She turned on him, angry now because he’d told her the truth and she couldn’t bear it.

Daniel handed her a glass of water from the table beside her bed.

She drank it down, clutched the glass between her hands, and said slowly, “Then-what? You think Paulie did this as a copycat?”

“Maybe.”

“Then Jamie Ramos is still out there?”

He said nothing, he didn’t need to.

She looked at him for a very long time, looked down at her bare feet, at the three chipped French toenails, and whispered, “Well, shit.”

IT was midnight. Jack was angry and scared for her, pissed that he hadn’t been there, even more pissed that he couldn’t come down. She made him swear he wouldn’t tell her father, at least not yet.

When Mary Lisa disconnected, she was exhausted, but her brain was squirreling around so madly she began to pace her living room, unable to keep still. Only Elizabeth and Lou Lou were here now, Lou Lou sprawled on one of the living room rugs, her legs up on a chair, bare toes in the air. Elizabeth, elegant in her TV clothes, sat on a love seat, a cup of coffee in her hand.

“We will get through this,” she said to Mary Lisa. “We will.”

Mary Lisa was wearing her favorite pea green T-shirt she’d bought that fateful Saturday and a pair of banged-up low-cut jeans. She nodded toward Elizabeth, and went out to her back deck to lookup at the star-strewn heavens. “So many interesting shapes up there. I don’t see a single motorcycle.”

Lou Lou walked out behind her, yawning. “No, I don’t either. Now, Daniel is as upset as we are, mostly with himself because everything is dead-ended again. When he’s upset, he paces around like you, he’s not focusing on anything but you. Do you know I’ve even told him the name of your third-grade teacher?”

“You don’t know the name of my third-grade teacher.” Mary Lisa paused, turned to rest her elbows on the deck railing. “Do you know I don’t remember it either?”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t want to disappoint him so I told him her name was Mrs. Pilsner, how’s that? I think I was drinking a beer at the time. Damn, Mary Lisa, this is getting old. I’m ready for an ending, you know? A happy ending.”

Mary Lisa watched Elizabeth stroll out on the deck. She’d taken off her stilt heels and came to stand at the railing beside Mary Lisa, dangling her shoes by their straps over the side. She’d taken off her panty hose and her bright crimson-painted toes sparkled in the dim light.

Mary Lisa said, “I’m going to spend six hours with Chico tomorrow, then I’m going to the firing range for another six hours. Then I’m going to call Irene at the studio and tell her I want the studio to hire me around-the-clock bodyguards, about a dozen of them.”

“And the studio’ll do it in a flash,” Elizabeth said. “They’re not stupid.”

“About that six hours with Chico…” Lou Lou began.

Mary Lisa held up her hand, eyes narrowed. “What? You think that’s not enough?”

“Maybe I’m thinking it’s too much the other way.”

“Elizabeth, you agree with Lou Lou?”

“Six straight sessions with Chico and you’d be a cripple, if not dead. Yeah, cut that down to three sessions.”

Mary Lisa sighed. “Okay, I need you guys to tell me if I’ve gone over the edge.”

“You have,” Lou Lou said. “A long time ago. It’s okay.”

The three women stood side by side beneath the beautiful black sky, a quarter moon bright above their heads, a warm breeze against their faces, hearing conversations from people walking on the beach. None of them said anything.

Finally, Mary Lisa whispered, “Okay, three straight lessons. I can do that.”