“How’d you get here from work?”
“The production gives me a driver. I had him drop me off at a restaurant a couple blocks from here, told him I was meeting my family for dinner. Then I ducked into a doorway, pulled on the wig, walked the rest of the way.”
She stopped, let out that gurgle of a laugh. “And, you know, hearing myself I’m starting to feel really stupid about all the bullshit. I’m going to talk to Marshall about just coming out with it.”
“Canary Islands?”
Missy Lee’s eyes widened. “And, wow, maybe you’re as good as hyped. Yeah, a family vacay. That’s where she nailed me. At first, I just thought: Well, crap, the gossip queen’s going to hound me when all I want’s a little sun and surf. But the smart move is, cooperate a little, give them some feed, and they’ll leave you be. Except she wasn’t looking for a little of anything.”
“What did she have on you?”
“Me personally? Nothing. My family? A whole bunch of too much. Shit, shit, shit. I’m going to have some really awful wine after all. Give me a second.”
When Missy Lee left the room, Gregory shifted in his seat. “Missy Lee is a fine young woman, a hardworking actress. If you’ve researched her background, as I’m sure you have, you know she’s never been in trouble, gives back not only to her fans but to her community.”
“Did she tell you when Mars approached her?”
He hesitated. “Given the circumstances and Missy Lee’s decision here, I feel I can tell you no, she did not. I regret that, as the circumstances would be markedly different if she had.”
Missy Lee came back in with a juice glass holding a couple thimblefuls of white wine that read yellow.
“Foul,” she said, sitting and taking a wincing sip. “Okay. I’ve been an actor nearly all my life. First gig, I played the baby of a long-suffering character in a daytime drama. I did modeling, toddler gigs, and so on. My parents both supported it. My dad managed me until we all agreed I needed a professional, and someone not so personally attached. But he’s still a big part of my career. My mother isn’t. She’s peripheral.”
Another tiny sip and wince. “My mother has, we’ll say, an issue with a certain illegal substance. She has, after the reboot of rehab, gone for long stretches without a stumble. Then she stumbles. Right now, and for about two years now, she’s been good. It won’t last. I accept that. I accept her. I even love her. She’s my mother.”
Pausing, she took another sip, grimaced. “Every time she reboots, my father absolutely believes it’s the last time, and she’ll never stumble again. Maybe she believes it, too. But the point is: He doesn’t just love her, he adores her, and blindly. He adores his girls, as he calls us. Whatever it’s cost, and it’s cost plenty, we’ve kept her issue private. Not just a financial cost, but in every way.”
“Mars found out, threatened to expose that.”
“That, yes, and more. It’s the more I paid her to lock away because part of me wonders, if my mother’s issue came out, it might help end the cycle, one way or the other. I might have paid, for my father’s sake, but I’m not sure.”
“Whose sake then?”
Missy Lee closed her eyes a moment, then opened them. Clear and direct. “Fourteen years ago, my mother stumbled, badly. Badly enough they separated for several months. I wasn’t a big enough name at that time for it to make any real splash in the gossips and tabs. We were living in New L.A. then, and Mom took off with the slug who was supplying her. She was bad enough she cleaned out one of their accounts, and tapped into the one set up for my education, out of my earnings. Later, when she was back, when she was clean and straight again, she told us they’d gone on a South Sea Island binge. Island-hopped, getting high, and living high on her money. Until the money got thinner and she got a little straighter, and he started knocking her around. So she came running home, and Dad took her back.”
She shrugged with that, showing Eve she’d grown used to—and cynical about—her parents’ pattern.
“A couple weeks later, right after she agreed to another round of rehab, she realized she was pregnant.”
“The supplier’s baby?” Eve asked when Missy Lee fell silent.
Shrugging, she sipped again. “Maybe, probably likely, but not for certain, as my parents had consumated her return. My father was adamant the baby was his, refused to so much as consider a paternity test. My mother, being my mother, was fine with that. I didn’t know any of this at the time, or didn’t fully understand, but kids find things out. Kids figure things out.”
Missy Lee frowned down at the thimbleful of wine still in her glass, and for a moment or two—just a moment or two—her voice was young and wistful.
“We had a good run after that. She stayed clean during the pregnancy, ate healthy, stayed healthy. We all probably glowed like suns. I was working pretty steady—I always loved the work—my dad was still managing me. My mother did the domestic thing, decorated, gave parties, ran the house. And that held until Jenny was three. Just a little stumble that time, just a quick adjustment. Another stretch, another stumble. Blah-blah.”
Any trace of the wistful dried up into the cool and flat.
“She’s been clean for almost three years now, so you take the good when you get it. Jenny’s the good. The star, the shine, the everything. I love my mother as much as I can. I’d throw her to the wolves without a second thought to spare Jenny a minute’s grief or shame. She’s my sister, she’s my joy. She’s the world to me.”
“You paid Mars to protect your sister.”
“My family. Jenny first—first, last, and always. My father next—but he’s a big boy. I’d throw him to the wolves, but I’d have a second or third thought first. Jenny? Whatever it takes to keep her safe and happy. Jenny’s a sweet, uncomplicatied, loving kid. She’s beautiful, in and out. Smart, funny, kind.”
A smile flickered on, quick and charming. “When she hit puberty, her head spun around a couple of times, she cried and screamed for about five minutes, then it was finished. I love her more than anything or anyone in the world.”
Now she took a shaky breath. “I can be a hard-assed bitch when I need to be, and there are times you need to be. I know how to protect me and mine from the parasites, the hangers-on, and the leeches. I know how to play the game. Killing this leech, and that’s what Mars was, just didn’t occur to me. I guess my brain doesn’t work that way. If it had, I might have tried to figure out how to do it.”
“Missy Lee.”
Almost indulgently, she patted Gregory’s arm. “I’m being honest here, and it feels, well, fucking righteous. I recognize another hard-assed bitch when she’s looking at me so I’m talking hard-ass to hard-ass. Got me?”
“I do,” Eve said, and felt simple respect.
“I might’ve tried to figure a way, but I didn’t. I paid. It’s just money, and I can make more. I’ve made it all my life, and intend to keep on making it. As long as I paid, she didn’t have a reason to go public. I hated her—and hate’s a weak word for it—but I’m pretty smart. Hell.”
She gestured with the glass and its little skim of yellow wine. “I’m being honest, so I’ll say I’m really pretty damn smart. If my brain had worked around to, hey, rip that damn leech off and stomp her dead, it would’ve worked around to she’s probably more dangerous dead. You’re here, and I’m talking about this, because she’s dead.”
Though Eve didn’t respond, she thought: Yeah, you’re smart, and you’re right.
“Dead,” Missy Lee continued, “somebody’s going to find her dirty data, and then, well. Boom.
“Jenny’s my sister. She’s my father’s daughter in every way but, possibly, DNA. He loves her, she loves him. It would break her heart to find out she might have come from someone else. Someone like that fucktoid my mother went off with. Paying to make sure she didn’t have to face that? It was nothing.”
“How did you pay her?”
“Cash. She’d set the amount. Seven, eight, nine thousand, dependin
g, I don’t know, on her mood maybe. I’d meet her at a bistro downtown or she’d tell me to just bring it to that night’s event if we were both attending one. I’ve never been in the bar where she was whiffed. Not legal.” She lifted her glass, smiled. “Can’t buy a drink yet, and drinking’s bad for the image. Anyway, I’m no wild child. I’m a working actor, and I intend to stay one.”
She set down the glass, looked straight into Eve’s eyes. “Don’t screw with my sister.”
“I don’t intend to. Did your father know you were paying?”
“Are you kidding?” She let out an easy laugh, an indulgent one, like an adult about a child’s antics. “No way. I’m in charge of my own money, and my own life, and my own choices. I love him, okay, but he has weak spots. You can’t deal with someone like Larinda Mars when you have weak spots. He’d tell my mother—he couldn’t stop himself—and she’d use that as an excuse to find a new supplier.”
Missy Lee circled her finger in the air. “And around and around we go.”
“You didn’t tell anyone.”
“I’ve been with Marsh for almost a year now. I know how to keep secrets.”
“Did she ever ask you to meet her anywhere private? Her place, or another?”
“No.” Her lips pursed in thought. “Weird, right? Always a public place. Maybe she got off knowing it was just a little humiliating that way. Or maybe she figured it kept me from punching her. Not just me,” Missy Lee said. “I wasn’t the only one, was I?”
Eve rose. “I know how to keep secrets, too.”
“That’s the perfect answer.” Missy Lee got to her feet, held out a hand. “I’m trusting you. I’m pretty good at figuring out who I can trust, and haven’t been burned yet.” Now she held out a hand to Roarke. “I’m trusting you.”
“I imagine your sister loves you very much,” Roarke said.
“She does. And I’m never going to let her down.”
16
On the way down to the lobby, Eve pulled out her PPC.
“You don’t suspect her,” Roarke said.
“I think the money didn’t matter to her—as it’s not going to have mattered to most of the marks. The threat, the invasion of privacy would have mattered more as time went by. But as time went by, I think she’d have had a sit-down with her sister. A few years down the line, then she’d have told Mars to stick it.”
As she spoke Eve scanned the screen on her handheld. “And I think she was telling us the truth. As she knows it.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah, so…” She let that settle as they stepped out of the elevator, moved outside. Picked it up again as they got into the car. “She believes her parents and her boyfriend don’t know anything about it. But her believing it doesn’t necessarily make it so.”
“Who are you running first?”
“The father. He’d be the most likely. If she gave us a clear picture of him, and it seemed to fit, he’s a protect-the-women sort. And he’s weak.”
“Those factors seem to contradict.”
“Only a man would think that straight off. He’s weak because he continues to take the wife back knowing she’s going to cycle again, put his kids—and it seems clear the younger sister is his kid in everything but, possibly, biology—through upheaval. He wants the wife, and puts that ahead of the welfare of his daughters. That’s weak.”
“It is, isn’t it? Love can make you so.”
With a cynicism Missy Lee would have understood, and respected, Eve shook her head. “He loves an illusion, leans on the illusion instead of shoring up the foundation for his children. To preserve the illusion, to convince himself he has to protect his family, he eliminates a threat.”
“And the weak kill as often as the strong.”
“More. Missy Lee loves him, but doesn’t respect him—he forfeited her respect for the illusion. She doesn’t think he knows, and she may be right, but she believes that first and foremost because she doesn’t respect him. He wouldn’t have to scratch too far under the surface to figure out something was up. Scratch a little deeper, find out what it is.”
“It makes more sense to you that someone connected to one of the marks did the deed than the mark.”
“We don’t know all her marks yet, and there are bound to be some where the money did matter, where the risk of exposure was too much to risk. But the pattern so far? Yeah, a connection strikes me as more likely.”
“And the mother?”
She glanced up, then over at him. “What do you think?”
“I think the mother has connections to dealers, and for some dealers, murder is simply part of business. But the method isn’t business as usual, is it? Setting up a kill in a public place, in a space with only one way in and out isn’t professional.”
Eve gave it a minute. “You’ll be happier if I say you think like a criminal rather than like a cop.”
“There is considerable overlap, after all.”
“Yeah.” She tapped her finger on her knee as he drove through the gates toward home. “And she’s an addict, one who slides back into that behavior. Most likely if she’d gotten wind of this, she’d have grabbed for her drug of choice. I’m going to look at her, but the father’s more probable. Then there’s the boyfriend.”
“Seriously?”
“She, by her own statement, lives with him half the time. She works with him. He may know a lot more than she thinks. But.”
“But,” Roarke agreed as he stopped in front of the house. “The young and in love, or at least in cheerful lust, would most likely want to talk about it. He’d have told her he found out, and if she told us the truth as she knows it, she’d have told us that as well, and wouldn’t have asked him to leave.”
“That’s how I see it.” She got out, gathered her file bag. “I’ll look at him, too, but he’s low on my current list. I’ve got others ahead of him.”
“Let’s take a bit of time.” He slid an arm around her as they walked to the door. “Have a meal before you dive straight into it. You can tell me about those others.”
Summerset and Galahad waited, the long and the bony, the short and the chubby. It struck her that for all the flaws and faults she could pin on Summerset—don’t get her started—he and the cat were, and always had been, completely in tune.
“You made it home before the storm.”
The words stopped Eve cold. One day left—because today and departure day didn’t count—until she had a Summerset-free house for three glorious weeks.
“What storm?”
“The one currently sweeping down from New England.” His face cracked into what might have been a smile as Galahad busied himself rubbing his pudgy body against her legs and Roarke’s in turn. “Only some sleet expected in the city tonight, along with high winds. Possibly worse on the way in a day or so. A good night to be inside, with a fire.”
“A cozy night then.” Roarke handed over his coat.
“You might enjoy it with some cocido.”
“Sounds just the thing. You’ll be glad to get out of the winter for a while.”
“I will. A few details to see to tomorrow. I’ll speak to you about some of them in the morning.”
“Watch your step.” Eve tossed her coat over the newel post as Summerset lifted his eyebrows. “No tripping over the cat,” she said as she started upstairs.
Roarke gave her a poke in the ribs as he walked up with her.
“Well, it happened,” she reminded him. “What the hell is cocido, and why would we enjoy it?”
“A hearty Spanish stew, which he likely made himself, and would have taken considerable time and trouble. So it wouldn’t hurt you to be nice.”
“I didn’t insult him, did I? I could’ve said stuff about just letting those high winds blow him away or how I thought vampires didn’t feel the cold anyway. But I didn’t.”
“Your restraint is heroic.”
“See?” She turned toward her office. He steered her toward the bedroom. “What?”
&nb
sp; “Cozy night suggests we get out of work clothes.”
She was a suspicious woman by both nature and training. “Is that just some sly way of getting me naked?”
“It could be, but I was of the mind to enjoy some wine and that cocido in something besides a suit.”
“I figured you liked suits, since you own five or six thousand of them.”
“Like or not, it’ll be pleasant to enjoy wine and stew and a fire on a winter’s night with my wife in something less businesslike.”
She felt a little tug of guilt. “We don’t have to eat in my office.”
“We don’t, no.” As they moved into the bedroom, he unknotted his tie. “But we have a lovely setup there now, don’t we? It works quite well all around.”
Because he’d pushed for it, she remembered. She tugged off his tie herself, tossed it aside before cupping his face for a kiss.
His lips curved. “And is this your sly way of getting me naked?”
“It could be.” She brushed a hand through his hair before she stepped back. “Let’s consider it a preview.”
“Then I’ll look forward to the feature.”
She chose cotton pants, warm and soft as a hug, a years-old NYPSD sweatshirt, and house skids. Roarke chose black, managing to look both dangerous and elegant despite the casual wear.
“Let’s have that wine and dinner before you update your board.”
She could give him that, she thought as they walked to her office. But …
“I just want to check on something. It hit me when we were talking about connections. Question for you: You excel at keeping the private private, but how much could either Caro or Summerset dig out if they wanted?”
“I can’t think of anything, offhand, Summerset would need to dig for. And Caro? While I trust her, and rely on her, she wouldn’t be able to get through anything I didn’t want her to get through.”
“Yeah, but that’s you.”
“It’s me you asked,” he said as he walked over to choose a wine.
“Right. I’m thinking more admins and PAs and like that in general. Summerset would throw himself into any breech before he’d let anyone get through.”