Dare You

  “What’s that going to tell us—that he was behind on his cable bill when he died?”

  Detective Martinez dug out another handful and flipped through those, too, ignoring me.

  I reached over and yanked open a second box, ripping right through the tape without the knife. When I opened the flaps, my breath caught.

  Mementos from Dru’s apartment. A sparkling geode, a foot-tall tiki with a fearsome face, a piece of coral—from New Caledonia, he’d told me. I turned the coral in my hands, remembering the feel of Dru’s touch, the smell of his skin. Detective Martinez wasn’t looking, so I stuffed it in my pocket. It had been released to me, after all. It was mine, and I couldn’t explain why, but I wanted a keepsake of Dru.

  I reached into the box and scrambled things around a little. I saw a Post-it pad, You have an interview Monday. GO TO IT!—V written on the top note. I’d seen that note before, in Dru’s office. I blinked away the putrid brown that had dripped over the words like muddy rain. I was looking for evidence; I didn’t have time to be sad.

  I continued pawing through Dru’s things, and a flash of maroon and black seared me back into a memory. Dru, standing in his apartment doorway, dropping something into his pocket. Something I’d found and he’d taken from me. Me, nauseated and short of breath, getting into an elevator. Me, certain for the first time that he was somehow involved in Peyton’s attack. I knew exactly what that flash of maroon and black was. A camera card.

  Frantically, I dug through the box until I saw it again, then picked it up and held it in the light. Was it the same one? Had he died for whatever was on this card?

  “Find something?” Detective Martinez asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably not,” I said. A gust of hot wind fluttered the pages in his hand. I lifted the hair off the back of my neck. “Can we do this another time? It’s hot out here, and I would love to go home and take a shower.”

  He stood, stretching his quads. “Yeah. Good idea. I’ll load the boxes if you want to take the cart back.” He handed me his key card.

  “Sure,” I said, taking the card hesitantly. Not many people trusted me. It was hard to trust someone who kept herself as emotionally locked away as I did. In general, I didn’t mind—after all, I didn’t trust anyone else, either. But there was a feeling I couldn’t describe when he handed me that card. Something between pride and incredulity. And a feeling that I wanted to do things right, even if I knew, in the back of my mind, that I would screw it up somehow anyway. I tucked the card, and the camera card I’d found, into my back pocket, and started to push the empty cart down the sidewalk.

  “Twenty-four,” he said to my back.

  I turned, swiping at the chunk of hair that the wind was blowing across my face. “Huh?”

  “I’m twenty-four,” he said.

  “That’s it? I thought detectives were, like, old.”

  “I’m the youngest detective here. I worked hard and I’m good at it. Got where I am fast. It’s not a big secret or a big mystery.”

  “Okay,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  He picked up a box and carried it to the open car door. “Just thought you’d like to know I’m a regular human.”

  “Noted.” I grinned. “I thought your superhero cape was in the car.”

  He paused. “I left it at home today.”

  “Nice to know, Twenty-Four.” I turned and pushed the cart toward the door.

  9

  BY THE TIME I got home, Dad had already returned from the airport and was sitting in his office sipping coffee and going over a spread of his latest shoot. He’d found a new model—Marisol, her name was—and had taken her down to El Matador to get some full-length shots for her portfolio. They were stunning.

  I was glad to see him doing something other than stressing out about my life. No way could I ever tell him about the predicament I was in. About the police looking seriously at me. He was so worried about losing me the same way he’d lost Mom, so worried that Luna Fairchild would somehow come back and finish what she’d started that night in her backyard, he would never live his own life. He would never let me live mine. Which meant I would never find Rigo and clear myself. If Dad got involved, I might as well tell Blake Willis to put the handcuffs on me herself.

  “Wow,” I said, walking up behind him and picking up a photo of Marisol, covered in fine white sand, disappearing into the shadows of a keyhole. “These are amazing, Dad.”

  He turned, startled, nearly knocking over his coffee. “Hey, you’re home.”

  “Grandparents gone already?”

  “Winging their way to Arizona as we speak.” He examined a photo. “I think I went too dark on some of these. What do you think?”

  I picked up another. Marisol, back turned, a demure silken dress blowing across her body, like a princess being lured into a dark, evil cave. “No way, they’re perfect. How old is she?”

  He gave me a look. “I know what you’re thinking, and too young.”

  I’d been bugging Dad to start seeing someone for years now. Not to replace Mom, but to fill some of the loneliness in his life. Until he moved on, I felt like I never would be able to; at least not guilt free. I would always have that feeling of having abandoned him. It wasn’t fair. Plus, he was good-looking and bored and hanging out on a beach in Southern California with a beautiful model. There was no reason for him to be alone. And the more I could get him involved with someone else, the less time he would have for worrying about me.

  I dropped the photos back on the table and held my palms up, innocent. “I wasn’t thinking anything. Just . . . she looks a little older than your usual models, is all. Maybe early thirties, even.”

  He gathered the photos into a stack. “Well, she’s not.” He set them aside and gave me an appraising look. “You look terrible. But maybe not quite as hungover as I thought you might be.”

  I smacked him on the shoulder. “Thanks? I think?”

  “So clearly you didn’t get into too much trouble last night, then. No phone calls from the hospital or the police.”

  He was joking, but the laughter dried up in my throat. No phone calls from the police, because I didn’t want him called. Because Detective Martinez bailed me out . . . once again.

  Looking at his expectant face, his searching eyes behind the totally out-of-date glasses he wore when he wasn’t wearing his contacts, I decided my first instinct was right. I couldn’t tell him about last night. About Luna. About Peyton and Mom. About anything. He’d been so freaked out about everything that had happened with the Hollises, and how that had brought up all kinds of old fears that had to do with Mom, and he’d been so happy about my graduation—at dinner cracking jokes and bragging to everyone that I was now a graduate—there was no way I could break his heart with the truth. As far as he knew, Mom was devoted to him only. Why mess with that now?

  I hated having so many secrets from him, but that was the way it had to be. For now. I would find a way to make it up to him later.

  Besides, if Detective Martinez’s plan worked out, we could find Rigo and clear my name before any formal charges were ever made. Before I went in front of a judge—or, dear God, a jury—to decide if I should live free or be locked up for what “I” did to Peyton Hollis.

  God, would the tabloids get hold of this?

  “So were the parties epic, dude?” he asked in his goofy “teen voice.”

  I laughed, wandered over to the other side of his office, where his old portfolios were stored. When I was a kid, I used to pull them out and leaf through the pages—choosing favorites, making up stories for the models. I hadn’t looked through them in a long time, and they’d multiplied. It had happened so gradually. I hadn’t really noticed, but Dad had thrown himself into his work since Mom died. I pulled a book off the shelf and opened it. It was from the late 1990s, maybe early 2000s—I could tell by the outfits on the models.

  “I only went to one,” I said, trying to sound distracted. Trying not to give away any
of what had actually happened last night. “Mostly just people saying good-bye. You remember Jones?”

  Dad made a smoochie face. “How could I forget? He’s so dreamy.”

  “Stop.” I flipped the page and looked at some more photos, then shut the book and slid it back onto the shelf.

  Dad straightened up, trying—and failing—to look serious. “Sorry. Yes. I remember Mr. Muscles.”

  “Well, he was there last night. We kind of . . . got back together. Sort of.”

  Dad nodded appreciatively. “Kind of and sort of. Sounds like true love.”

  “Hardly.” I pulled open a file cabinet, ancient film canisters rolling around inside, bumping up against random pens and pencils, old rolls of gaffer tape, battery grips and a gutted flash meter. The parts and pieces of Dad’s job that I’d always found fascinating when I was a kid but had lost their luster as I’d gotten older. I rifled through it to make myself look busy. “More like just a way to pass the time.”

  “Until?”

  I knew he was looking at me. I knew he was waiting for me to give him some kind of answer, a hint at what I planned to do now that I was out of high school. But I still didn’t have one. Sometimes it felt like I never would. And especially not now, given what had happened. How could I plan a future with possible prison time looming in front of me? I kept my eyes firmly planted in the drawer, picking up and dropping erasers and paper clips and long-forgotten filters. I shrugged. “Until summer’s over, I guess. He’ll probably go away to college or something anyway.”

  I slid the drawer shut and opened another. Just stacks of unusable photos. Nothing to fidget with there. I quickly flipped through them and placed them back in, then pulled open an overhead cabinet.

  “You really need to clean out your office,” I said, running my fingers along the spines of photography books.

  “Ah. So this is where I’m supposed to let the subject be,” he said. I could hear him unzip his camera bag, so I knew his eyes were no longer driving into my back.

  “Yep.”

  “And when do you think we can have the ‘what’s next for Nikki’ discussion?” he asked.

  I closed the cabinet and opened the one next to it. “I don’t know. Never?”

  He chuckled. “That’s my little go-getter.” I heard another zipper loosen. “Listen, I know you don’t want to think about your future. And there’s a part of me that can’t really blame you. You’ve been through a lot. I get it. School hasn’t been easy for you, and maybe you want a little break, and that’s fine. And there was the stuff with—”

  He continued talking, but I tuned him out, my attention grabbed instead by a box tucked away behind Irving Penn: Platinum Prints. It was a white box, what looked like a large dress box or maybe a coat box. Old. Yellowed on one corner, like it had sat in a spill of some sort. The words Carrie’s Films were scrawled on the side, my mom’s name coming across, as it always did, in lavender. I touched her name and my fingers came away dusted with rusty peach and spearmint. A sherbet of nostalgia and curiosity. Why had I never noticed this box before?

  “What is this?” I asked, interrupting him.

  “Huh? Oh, that. Just some old films your mom made back when she was working at Angry Elephant. She was trying to learn. Wanted to work her way up, produce something of her own someday, I think. Mostly they’re experiments. I haven’t watched them all.”

  “Can I?” I started to pull the box down from the cabinet. It was heavier than I expected, and I almost dropped it. “I’ve never seen any of her work.”

  Dad rushed over and helped me push it back up onto the shelf. “Maybe when I clean out my office, we’ll pop some popcorn and see what’s there,” he said. “It’ll be good motivation to spruce up the place, don’t you think? I’d . . . like to watch them with you, if that’s okay.”

  There was something about the way he was looking at me—helpless and hopeful and so trusting, despite everything that had happened, holding Mom between us in that box. I was more certain than ever before that I couldn’t tell him about Peyton’s letter and my involvement in her case. Even if that felt like a huge lie and I knew he’d be so disappointed to find out that I’d hidden it from him, I just couldn’t do it.

  Which meant I had to make the problem go away.

  Which meant I had to find Arrigo Basile and get proof that the Hollises were behind Peyton’s death.

  Dad had turned back to his photos of Marisol, and I headed upstairs to shower the beach party and jail cell grime off myself. Afterward, I slipped into some comfortable shorts and an old Go Sailor tee. I hadn’t thought about it until after Peyton had been attacked and I’d watched all those videos of her band, trying to find dirt on Gibson Talley, but something about Viral Fanfare reminded me of Go Sailor’s sound, and I spent a solid two months aching that I hadn’t gone to see any of Peyton’s shows. Maybe I would take Vee up on her invitation. It would be hard to listen to one of Luna’s ridiculous cronies singing in Peyton’s place, but it would still somehow make me feel closer to Peyton if I went. Maybe Future Nikki was a different Nikki. One who got out there and did things, who had a life that didn’t revolve around anyone else’s death. Maybe Future Nikki was a devoted sister.

  I was tired—so tired—but also restless. I had told Detective Martinez I would wait to hear from him before doing anything, but that didn’t mean I had to actually do it. He knew me—surely he didn’t expect me to just sit back and let him take the lead. I sat at my desk and pulled up my laptop.

  I had promised not to approach Rigo without him, but I could definitely look for dirt about him online.

  The top five entries for “Arrigo Basile” were all about a major bust in the Basile family five years before. From the looks of things, some of Rigo’s brothers, Lucca and Abramo, were imprisoned for running an illegal offshore gambling ring, along with a range of other Basile family members—Edmondo “Eddie Mon,” Savio, Gulio “Jewels,” and Sal. Why, I wondered, had Rigo been spared their fate? Or had he already been to prison and back out again? Had the Hollises helped him stay out or get out of trouble? It seemed likely, given what I now knew about their reach.

  I found a smallish article buried amid all the scandalous ones. It was on a local blog called KnowLA. It featured various small businesses and local hangouts throughout the city. Their April 2010 feature was a downtown antique art store called Tesori Antico. It happened to be owned by one Zanobi Basile, the patriarch of the Basile family.

  I knew the area. I closed my eyes and concentrated until I could “see” the store in my mind. When I opened them again, Tesori Antico jumped off my computer screen in dancing green—the color all foreign language words came to me. I had definitely seen this store before. I could picture the white, melon, and black adhered to the wall under the awning. 570. An address. And I knew exactly where it was.

  10

  IT TOOK A lot less time to find Tesori Antico than I’d thought it might. My instinct took me down only two wrong streets before my color memory brought me to it. As soon as I pulled up to the curb, the dancing green and the white, melon, black address clicked home just like I thought they would. I parked the car and looked around. The only other car was a van, parked in the tiny lot alongside the shop.

  Inside, Tesori Antico was crammed with a captivating mixture of art, antiques, knickknacks, and plain old junk: menacing statues and old chairs, paintings of saints coming to their untimely, gruesome ends, gold filigree everything, and half-cracked vases that looked like they might hold the remains of distant kings. Rusty peach, tainted by putrid brown, hovered over me—a heavy blanket of color that threatened to steal my breath away.

  I could see a glass case with a cash register on top of it, and hear the voice of a woman behind it, but there were about a zillion depressing and dusty and horror-filled things between me and her. Depressing and horror-filled things that I had to at least act like I was interested in owning.

  I wove through the crammed aisles, afraid to touch anything, sure
that my elbow would snag a grimacing gargoyle and the whole place would domino into a pile of broken shards. Still, at the same time, I was fascinated by the treasures, which seemed to have been artfully stuffed into every nook and cranny. Not artfully in a carefully considered way, but artfully in a carefully balanced way. Overhead, a violin-and-accordion instrumental softly whined, giving the whole place the feel of having stepped back into an old world. My footsteps felt loud in the empty store.

  Empty store.

  Rich L.A. women loved antique shit—why weren’t there any of them shopping here? It was an unsettling emptiness, and I had to swallow against a lump in my throat, suddenly wishing I’d waited and come here with Detective Martinez instead of just by myself.

  As I plowed through the store, the woman’s voice became clearer—obviously the one-sidedness of a phone conversation.

  “And they’ll have it?” she said. A pause. “You’ve made sure?” Another pause. “No, no, as long as it’s been found, we can take care of it. Okay, we will send someone.” Pause. “One of the boys, yes, yes. Maybe I will go myself, just to make sure it doesn’t get lost again. No, I’m writing it down now. Thank you for letting me know.” She said her good-byes and set the phone on the counter.

  I tore my attention away from the snarling lion statue at my knee. One of the boys. Was Rigo one of the boys? The woman looked up at me and I quickly turned my attention back to the shelf, picking up a glass paperweight that was filled with a mesmerizing pattern of shapes and colors.

  “It’s from the Rubloff collection,” the woman said, making me jump. She did not smile or even try to look friendly. Her demeanor was more watchdog than salesman. “Very rare. A good price for a good find.”

  I nodded and turned over the paperweight. The sticker on the bottom read Baccarat 1848 $3,000. I nearly dropped the weight. Three thousand dollars? For a paperweight? Did people even use paperweights anymore? I set it back on the shelf. Even if I had three grand to blow on a ball of glass, I wouldn’t have. And I didn’t anyway, so it was a moot point.