“The nail polish bottle—it was open?” The girl had a point. Luci might have gone out with a different bag, but she would not leave in the middle of doing her nails. She would have closed the bottle if she’d finished the last coat.
If anything had happened to the woman, it was my fault. It sounded as if somebody had searched her room. That somebody had to be searching for the letters. My prime suspect would be Marva. I had to tell Rick when he came down from Luci’s room. I knew she wanted those letters enough to break and enter, and she seemed to know all the secret passageways of this place.
Miguel managed to herd most of the people back toward the desk.
“Everything is okay,” he said in a loud, if not entirely convincing voice.
Rick reappeared at the top of the stairs. He spoke with calm authority:
“Luci’s suite looks as if somebody’s been searching in there, but we don’t know she wasn’t doing the searching herself. I don’t see any sign of foul play. She’s probably gone for a walk.” He looked at the crowd below. “Anybody here see Ms. Silverberg after the presentation this evening?”
A couple of people shouted about hearing her tell Alberto that she didn’t want to be disturbed.
“She didn’t go for a damn walk,” Donna said. “She got taken by a ghost. Swear to God. I saw it.”
Rick gave me a quick look, then turned to Donna and asked her to tell the full story.
Obviously relishing the spotlight, Donna stood on the landing and spoke in a strong voice, as if she were on stage.
“Okay, so when I let myself into the suite, I heard someone in the bedroom. I thought it was Luci, and I was pissed off because she’d tossed my manuscript all over the place. I ran in the bedroom to give her a piece of my mind, but she was gone. Instead, I saw this thing: it had on a long coat—and no head. It went behind the curtains and out the window. There’s a balcony, but it would have had to fly, because that room is on the second floor.”
The crowd murmured and gasped.
Donna went on. “And after that—the room was empty. Spooky and empty. And the room was trashed. Totally.”
She looked at Rick’s impassive face with obvious exasperation. “So are you going to call that detective, or what?”
Rick gave her his calm-down-now-ma’am look.
“We can’t waste Detective Fiscalini’s time until we know there’s a problem. He’s the only full time investigating officer in this Valley. He’s got two murders on his hands. A guest leaving a hotel room in a mess isn’t exactly a crime.”
Donna moved toward him, wincing dramatically as she put weight on her ankle.
“Luci’s been taken away by those ghosts everybody talks about,” she said in dramatic tones. “I know what I saw.”
The crowd pushed around us as Rick and I helped Donna down the stairs. I didn’t believe her about the ghosts, but I did have a bad feeling about Luci. If Marva had murdered Ernesto and Toby—and ransacked Luci’s room and taken her somewhere—Luci was in terrible danger.
If she wasn’t dead already.
Chapter 42—Mustang Country
Rick asked Alberto to call an ambulance for Donna.
“No way!” Donna turned to me. “Don’t let him. Do you have any idea what an ambulance costs? I don’t have insurance!”
“Okay, call a cab then.” Rick said.
Alberto shook his head. “Every taxi in the valley is taking people to the airport.”
Donna whimpered as she sat on a couch across from some disapproving memoirists.
I hovered, not sure what to do next. I had to get Rick alone to tell him about Marva. And the letters. He needed to know. So did Detective Fiscalini. Or maybe I should go up and look at the room first. If by any chance the letters were still there, this had nothing to do with Marva and I could relax. A little.
It was creepy the way Santiago kept staring at Donna. I could see Rick had noticed the lovesick stares too. He pulled the boy aside and spoke with him in Spanish. I wondered what the two had to talk about.
“Drive faster!” one of the memoirists said into her phone. “You should see this girl. I think she’s on drugs. She fell down the stairs. She’s all cut up and bleeding.”
“You’d fall too if you saw what I saw.” Donna gave a reproachful look before noticing some Always Wild had spilled on her arm. From a distance it did look like a nasty cut. She tried to scrape it off with her fingernail.
I handed her one of my travel nail polish wipes.
I had to ask, “This ghost you saw—could it have been, um, female—sort of? With blonde hair in a long bob? Who looked kind of like me, only a little bigger in…places?”
“Duh. How would I know if it was blonde when it had no head? It flew off the balcony. That’s all I can tell you.”
Donna handed me back the dirty wipe, as if I were the maid, and resumed putting her pages in numerical order.
“I’d worry about poor old Mitzi, if I were you. She’s out there somewhere and you know how she likes to hang with those ghosts.”
Alberto called from the desk.
“We must find Mrs. Boggs Bailey. This is more important than Miss Silverberg’s room.”
“Whatever!” said Donna. “You’re all going to be sorry when Luci shows up dead.”
“Have you called the Maverick Saloon to see if Mitzi’s there?” Rick stood by the desk and spoke in a calm voice. His presence seemed to calm people down. “I’ll bet Luci is there, too.”
Miguel responded in a strained voice. “No one answers. I have called three times. There is nothing more I can do.”
“What about Jonathan Kahn?” said Rick. “Does anybody have his cell number? He’s probably drinking with them too.”
“Mr. Kahn has not returned my call, not him or his people,” said Alberto. “Do you want me to ring Mr. Ryder?”
Rick shook his head.
“He’ll be in to San Luis Obispo by now.”
Donna stood up and started toward the desk, clutching her manuscript.
“Did you say Mitzi went to the Saloon with Jonathan Kahn? Miguel, you gotta let me borrow your car to go find her,” she said.
“You are not taking my car to the Maverick Saloon,” Miguel said to Donna in a stern voice. “You are underage, and if you get in trouble, your mother will…”
Donna’s face contorted in pain as her ankle gave way and she fell against a couple of elderly men in cowboy hats.
They helped her back to the couch as she cried, “Oh my god,” over and over. “It’s broken. My ankle must be broken. I guess I need to go to the hospital after all.”
Miguel looked up at me from his calculator.
“Perhaps you can drive Donna to the hospital, Ms. Randall. I’m sorry. You could stop on your way back at the Saloon. I would go myself, but you see—everybody needs their bills…”
An impatient smugster leaned on the desk waving his credit card.
“I’m afraid I don’t have a car,” I said. “I came by…other transportation.” I needed to stay and talk to Rick about Marva and the letters. Somebody else could play chauffeur to Donna.
“What about Vondra DeHaviland or Herb Fry? Or Walker Montgomery? He seems to know the area.”
Miguel shook his head. “Miss DeHaviland and Mr. Fry have been gone all day, and I have not seen Mr. Montgomery since Mr. Smith’s talk in the Ponderosa Lounge. His car is no longer in the parking lot.”
Rick laughed. “Montgomery’s gone? That probably explains where Luci is. That old dude was acting like a stalker with her all day. He seems to have a serious crush on her.” He looked at Alberto. “Do you have Walker’s cell phone number?”
“He is not a guest,” Alberto said with a sniff. “We have no contact information. Mr. Montgomery was Mr. Roarke’s client. This is all I know.”
It was obvious he had no fondness for Mr. Montgomery.
Donna moaned from the couch.
Rick pulled me aside. “You can take my c
ar. It looks as if I should stay here to keep people calmed down. Alberto can’t handle this on his own. And I need to tell Fiscalini about him as soon as the place is cleared. I can’t put off reporting his confession much longer—although I’ve got another theory about Toby’s murder…” He squeezed my hand. “Gaby didn’t do it. I’m gonna find out who did.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper as a group of memoirists walked by, followed by the stoic Santiago, hauling another impossible load of luggage.
Rick pulled a set of keys from his pocket, pulled off a car key and handed it to me. “There’s a hospital in Solvang. You know my Saturn.”
I made one more attempt to stay.
“I’m a New Yorker. I’m not that good at country driving.”
Rick gave my shoulders a squeeze. “I know you’ll do just fine.”
I sighed, gave him what I hoped was a gracious smile, and fastened the key to my own keychain.
I brought the car up to the front door and Santiago and Rick helped the moaning Donna to the car. As I drove off into the darkness, I saw Rick turn away with a smile as if we were going off for a routine errand. Nothing about this felt routine to me.
As I drove the slow curves down the road from the Hacienda, Donna seemed to perk up. She pulled out a lighted compact and started redo-ing her elaborate make-up, complete with Amy Winehouse black eye-wings.
We’d reached the cabin area and the gate that led to the main road. I realized I had no idea where to go.
“Do you know how to get to the hospital?”
“Just turn left and we’ll be fine.”
“Turn left? Are you sure?” I thought I remembered coming from the other direction when Rick had retrieved me from the custody of D. Sorengaard.
“I’m sure.” Donna gave a laugh as her pink hobo bag began playing her phone’s Sex and the City theme. She fished the phone from her bag
“Work.” She shrugged. “My supervisor probably wants me to work for somebody tomorrow. Like I could just run back to Santa Barbara when I haven’t even had one nibble on my book. I am sooo going to love telling her to piss off when I get an agent. I told Luci I’m looking for at least a hundred thou for my advance.” Donna tossed her phone back in her bag. “That would, like, pay off my cards and give me spending money until I get a movie deal.”
So. She’d quoted a figure to Luci. No doubt Luci had thought it was for the letters. What would Luci’s next move be—rounding up victims? A moneyed partner maybe? I wish I knew if Luci had really left on her own.
I turned to Donna. “Why were you so sure Luci was taken away? Was it anything besides the bag and the nail polish?”
“Well, duh, her phone. Who smashes their own cell, I’d like to know?”
My neck went cold. I slowed the car to a crawl.
“A smashed phone? There was a smashed phone in Luci’s room? Did it look stomped-on or hit with a hammer?”
“Yeah. And it was definitely Luci’s—a silver iPhone.”
My head roared. A stomped-on cell phone, just like Ernesto’s: signature of Captain Road Rage.
What if the killer was Rick?
He could have killed them both. Or all three, if Luci was dead. Rick certainly had been angry with Luci. Could he have killed her and disposed of the body between Plant’s talk and when he found me in the broom closet? I had no idea how much time elapsed there—a half hour at most. But Luci was tiny. Her body wouldn’t be so hard to hide. And Rick had a gun.
But there was the problem of Donna’s ghost. Rick had been down in the lobby with me when Donna saw whatever she thought she saw.
Of course, it could be Rick had gangbanger accomplices—which would work with my earlier theory about a ghost-impersonating gang. No wonder he didn’t want to “bother” Detective Fiscalini. And here I was driving down a dark, winding mountain road in Rick’s car. Probably aiding and abetting.
I was actually glad of the bright headlights that followed close behind. Normally I would have thought such closeness more than a bit rude, but now company seemed to help. I didn’t know what was out there, but none of it felt friendly.
I was relieved when we finally saw the lights of a small town ahead. After I got Donna to the hospital, maybe I should find that sheriff’s substation and talk to D. Sorengaard and company. If Rick really was a rage-aholic killer, everybody left at the Rancho could be in danger.
“Turn left,” said Donna.
The car behind turned, too. With a chill I realized I’d seen it before.
“Is that an old Mustang following us? That big old 1970’s battleship?” I might be imagining things, but it looked a lot like the one that sped away from my cabin last night: Mrs. Boggs Bailey’s orange Mustang.
“Yeah. Probably Walker Montgomery.”
“Walker Montgomery drives a vintage Mustang? Is it orange?”
“Duh, it’s red. It’s the car from his old TV show. But it can’t, like, swim and stuff. That was all special effects. So cheesy in those days. Turn right. Here!”
I made a quick right while my brain processed this information. A red car could very well have looked orange under those security lights. I didn’t know for sure the Mustang was related to anything, but it had been around when both murders happened. Walker Montgomery could very well be involved. He had threatened Toby. I’d heard that with my own ears.
I recognized the cowboy-kitch streets of the village of Santa Ynez. I was surprised when Donna ordered me to park in a small dirt-covered lot to our left.
We seemed to be in the parking lot of the Maverick Saloon.
“Where’s the hospital?”
“Duh. It’s like, in Solvang.” Donna made another quick check in her mirror.
“I can stop here on the way back to look for Mrs. Boggs Bailey. But first we have to get you to the hospital.”
Donna looked at me as if I had dementia, too.
“Look, I have to connect with Jonathan Kahn and show him this manuscript. Do you know how much my outfits for this conference cost me? And I haven’t made one important contact.” She opened the car door with a healthy shove. “When I heard you say Jonathan was down here, I figured faking the ankle thing was the easiest way to get you to bring me. Miguel is such a Nazi about me going to a bar when I’m under age. It’s not like I don’t have a fake ID.”
She jumped out of the car headed toward the buildings without a hint of a limp.
“Look for Mrs. Boggs Bailey!” I shouted at the devious little creature, but knew it was futile. I’d have to go look for the old woman myself. But I dreaded dealing with whatever might be inside: a drunken Jonathan, Luci, Marva, and/or my former biker chauffeur.
I especially didn’t want to run into Marva. If Rick hadn’t committed those murders in fits of rage, I was pretty sure Marva was the killer.
An awful thought came to me: What if Marva didn’t realize Luci got those letters from me? What if she believed they were Donna’s the way Luci did? And she thought Donna had more? The silly girl could be walking into something pretty icky.
I locked up the car and took a breath for courage. Up on the road, I saw the Mustang, stopped on the shoulder—and the tall, thin figure of Walker Montgomery, silhouetted in the moonlight. I even sort of recognized the car now—it did look like the one from his old TV show. He was doing something with the trunk. I wondered if he was having car trouble. Should I offer to help? I waved.
He hesitated a moment, then waved back—a “don’t worry, I’m fine” kind of wave. I was glad I didn’t have to deal with him.
Something about the man gave me the creepy-crawlies.
Chapter 43—Cowboy Poet
I saw no sign of Marva in the dim light of the Maverick Saloon. Jonathan, either. I tried not to look as paranoid as I felt, although it was hard with the awful suspicions of Rick bouncing around in my brain.
The inside of the place was almost too wild-west to be true. Entering its scruffy, pine-paneled barroom felt like walking into
an old movie. But I could see that the cowboys at the bar were the real thing—as real as the whiff of stable-droppings coming from the boots of the red-faced cowboy zeroing in on Donna.
I could see why Jonathan might be attracted to the place. Besides authentic western charm, and of course, the booze, its ceiling was pasted all over with money—mostly dollar bills, but also British pounds, Japanese yen, and obsolete European currency. What fastened them to the old wooden ceiling was something I probably did not want to know.
“I can’t see Jonathan in the bar,” Donna said, abandoning her odiferous admirer. “But he might be in the dance hall.” She pointed at a glass-windowed door which led to a bigger room, where patrons sat at small tables around a dance floor. “There’s a cover. You got money? I left my bag in the car.”
I sighed and reached for my wallet.
When I handed a five dollar bill to the burly man at the door to the bigger room, he eyed both of us suspiciously.
“Doctor, I got no quarrel with you, but we eighty-sixed your party tonight for a reason. You gotta take your L.A. friends somewheres else. Those people run our staff into the ground and they don’t tip diddly squat.”
“You are such a liar!” Donna turned on me with fury. “You got thrown out of this dump, like, tonight? And you pretended you didn’t know how to get here!”
I didn’t have time to explain the existence of my doppelganger. But I was interested to hear that Marva had been here tonight—and with company. Was it Luci?
I beamed a Manners Doctor smile at the burly man.
“We’re looking for Mitzi Boggs Bailey. Is she here?”
“Sure is,” The man relaxed a little “She’s getting ready to do her number right now.”
“Her number?” Donna rolled her eyes. “Please tell me Mitzi’s not going to sing?”
“Not singin’. It’s cowboy poetry night.” The man put my bill in a cash box and took out a rubber stamp. He tried to grab Donna’s hand, but she resisted.
“No way,” she said. “You have to get, like, dermabrasion to clean that stuff off. We’re just looking for our friends.” She turned to me. “Do you see Jonathan in there?”
“Can’t get back in without the stamp,” the man said. “And you can’t buy drinks in there. Gotta get them from the bar.”