You Know Who I Am (The Drusilla Thorne Mysteries Book 2) (25 page)

“Oh my God,” Anne said.

“Yeah. Colin was extremely good at something called close-up magic, Eileen. Do you know what that is? Close-up magic is when the magician has his hands right in front of your face and you still can’t see him do the trick. He switched the photos on you in front of your eyes.”

Eileen gave a delicate little snort. Clearly she didn’t believe me. Who cared. I was done talking to Eileen Gurevich.

I stood up and grabbed the envelope with the pictures in it. “Why don’t you prove I’m a liar, love? Go to the bank. Find the negatives. Reassure yourself they’re still there.”

Anne grabbed her bag. “We’re done?”

“Do let’s get out of here before we vomit,” I said.

“Wait!” Eileen said. “What are you going to do now?”

I opened the front door for Anne. “Well, of course, we’ll have to give the pictures to that police you’re so eager to call.” I shrugged. “Perhaps they’ll draw the same conclusions I did about who was behind the lens.”

“Oh God. Please don’t.”

I looked at her. If she thought she was suffering now, she had no idea what lay in store for her, no matter who the agent of her destruction was: me, Penelope, or LAPD’s finest. “I’d avoid Penelope. For a while, at least.”

Anne and I left.

Once we were in the car, Anne turned and stared at me. “How can you be so cavalier about this?”

I shook my head. “Because I have little choice in the matter.” When she tilted her head at me in surprise, I added, “It’s better than losing my composure altogether. I like to save that for the big moments.”

She slumped back in the driver’s seat, trying to make the words come out. “How can everything I knew be wrong?”

I started to reassure her, because of course everything she knew wasn’t… Except who was I to say whether it was or wasn’t? She’d had a rough morning: Her best friend from high school had had a whole different life that Anne hadn’t the first clue about. The best friend’s mom was a piece of work on her own. Her boyfriend had been married and had been up to some kind of nefarious dealing with said best friend. And maybe even worst of all, her uncle had been screwing her friend while they were in high school.

The uncle. A man who was involved in all these goings-on. We had pictures, we had nefarious doings—but did we have any blackmail going on?

Maybe Anne needed some rage therapy. And I could get some more answers.

“There’s someone else we could talk to,” I said. “Someone who might be able to explain some of this to us.”

Her teeth were chewing her lower lip, perhaps in an attempt to stave off another round of crying. “Who?”

“Think you can get us in to see your uncle?” I asked.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

YOU’D THINK THAT the president of a major motion pictures studio would be really, really hard to get a hold of. And maybe other days he was, but this day he was in the office.

Anne called his assistant, Peter, to see if we could get fifteen minutes with the prez.

“Is this an interview with
People
magazine?” Peter asked.

“No, this isn’t business. This is family stuff.”

“Is it about your screenplay? Because he hasn’t read it yet.”

Anne assured him it was not about the screenplay.

“He’s very busy today, so if you could arrange to see him on a weekend—”

“Peter? Shut up and pencil me in. We’ll be there in forty-five minutes.” Anne snapped her phone shut.

Anne hadn’t struck me as the kind of person who told other people what to do. She was losing her patience.

“Think that’s going to work?” I asked her.

“It’s the only kind of attitude these guys recognize,” Anne said. Then she shivered, as if she couldn’t believe she’d done that.

Lang was one of the newer, smaller studios. They didn’t have the gigantic lots of Warner Brothers or Paramount. They leased everything as they needed it from Warners and Paramount, instead of sticking themselves with the overhead.

And until the second we drove on to the lot and I saw the actual studio sign—mentioning they were a division of the Hallett Group, Inc.—I hadn’t realized that I was actually connected to Lang, and therefore to Ian Jack Reynolds. What I would give to be able to fire this son of a bitch.

I shook my head. No matter what, HG was never going to be my company. After all, the CEO would rather see me dead than let me inherit.

“Are you okay?” Anne asked.

“Air quality’s crap today,” I said. “Having a bit of an asthmatic thing.”

Anne drove up to the security guard, who motioned for her to roll down her window. “I’m here to see Ian Jack Reynolds.”

The guard checked his list. He shook his head.

Anne put the car into park. “Call Peter Hill-Pender. We have an appointment.”

The guard called, and then he waved us onto the lot, such as it was. It was more like an industrial park, several buildings grouped around a common area. We parked and walked toward the newest-looking two-story building.

Peter Hill-Pender was an officious looking twenty-five-year old, all bespoke suit and natty haircut. Anne had told me during the drive that he was a JD/MBA from Northwestern who’d fought to get this low-paying job over a whole rodeo of other overqualified, over-lettered applicants. Everyone had to start somewhere, and Ian Jack Reynolds himself had gotten his first job in Hollywood as a producer’s receptionist.

Peter steered us toward the leather director’s chairs in the waiting area. “He’s busy.” When Anne flashed him a look of complete disbelief, Peter held up his hands in surrender. “Seriously. He’s on a phone call with two of the producers of an action movie. He’ll be with you as soon as it’s done.”

Anne nodded. “Stars or budget?”

“What?”

“What’s the problem? The stars or the budget?”

Peter stared at her for a moment. Then he shrugged. “You can replace actors.”

I was reminded of Gary’s comment about Liam Bishop the night we’d met.
No matter how big you get, it ends
. You had to throw the tantrums while you could, because one day no one is going to give a damn. I picked up the
Variety
sitting on the table and started flipping through it. Even if I could read some quickly, I had the feeling it was boring.

Twenty minutes later, Ian Jack Reynolds opened the door to his office and gave a curt wave to Anne.
Come in
. A plain, unassuming guy with good threads and gold cufflinks. He wore a beige phone headset, the kind with the microphone arm lining his cheek. He was behind his desk by the time Anne got to her feet. As I followed her in, I took my time to get a good look at this man. A man who had a thing for underage former TV stars. He seemed like the kind of energetic, fast-paced business type who was so busy talking on his phone he wouldn’t have time for anything so mundane as touching another person.

He pushed one cuff back past his flashy gold watch as he sat behind his wide but empty desk. Empty except for that phone. “What is it, Annie? Who’s this?”

I introduced myself. “My husband was murdered Monday night.”

“I’m sorry to hear that—”

“His name was Colin Abbott.”

He scrunched up his eyebrows like he was thinking hard, but he didn’t need to bother with answering. He’d already done so physically. When I said Colin’s name, Reynolds’ left hand—he was right-handed, so like most people he didn’t have as much control over the non-dominant hand—jerked. Maybe a fraction of an inch.

Damn it. That was not the answer I wanted to that question. There were few reasons Reynolds would have heard Colin’s name, none of them good.

He gave me a perfunctory apologetic smile. “Sorry to hear about your husband.” He pulled himself toward his desk, ready to get back to his day. We didn’t move, and he looked at us with annoyance. He asked Anne, “Is that it? C’mon.”

Anne’s face was mixture of deference and anger. She might not be able to do this, but I was more than willing.

“No, that is not it.” I pulled one of the photos out of the yellow envelope and slammed it down on the desk in front of him. “Look familiar, Ian?”

“What the hell is this—” And then, none too soon, the answer dawned on him. The left hand twitched again and his mouth opened. He was trying to come up with some kind of response, some way to attack his way out of this.

Been there, done that, not interested.

“Don’t worry, Ian.” I slapped three more pictures in front of him. “There’s lots of different angles.”

He looked up at me. Not at Anne. He didn’t want to face her. “What’s this about?”

“Besides your taste in sex partners?”

“Who in the hell do you think you are?”

I started to circle his desk. There would be no hiding from me, not back there. “Colin had these photos. He stole them and hid them. Awfully nice of him. How did you know him?”

“I don’t know—”

“Yes. You did. You knew him, or you knew his name. How?”

He looked at Anne, pleading for help. “I swear I have no idea what you mean.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t a joke.
Any
of it.”

A long row of thigh-height cabinets lined the wall behind Reynolds’s desk, and one of the few decorations on them was a crystal vase with three blooming orchids in it. I picked up the vase in one hand and threw it at the opposite wall. It hit high and splintered with a beautiful ringing tone. Crystal rained all over the carpeting by that wall.

Reynolds was out of his chair and backing away from me.

I put my hand on his phone. “This goes next. Somebody murdered my husband. I think they murdered him over these photos.”

The door opened and Peter the Flunkie came running in. “What’s going on?”

“Call the police!” Reynolds barked.

Once again, the magical invocation of the police. I smiled at Peter. “Please do.” I gave the same recitation of Detective Gruen’s phone number I’d given Eileen Gurevich. And I reached for the photos on the desk.

What a dilemma he had: a crazy woman in his office versus those photos. Reynolds’s sense of self-preservation showed up at last. “Wait.”

Peter stopped in the doorway. “What?”

“Give me a second to talk to her.”

“Ian, you can’t stay—”

Anne stepped in front of him. “Get out until we call you, okay?”

This new assertiveness of hers was refreshing. “Sit down, Ian. We aren’t done talking.”

Peter waited to get the okay from Reynolds, who nodded. “I’m leaving the door open.”

I didn’t have to say anything to Anne. She shut the door as soon as Peter was gone.

Reynolds sat. Not behind his desk. That was too close to me. No, he sat on the lovely butter-yellow butter-smooth leather sofa by the as-yet-unmarked wall. “What do you want?”

“How did you hear Colin’s name? Did he contact you?”

Reynolds shook his head.

I wrapped my hands around the phone, preparing to yank it out of the wall.

“I overheard his name. That was it.”

“You never talked to him, he never called you?”

The left hand remained silent. “No.”

“Penelope came to you about this.”

“No.” That was a lie. Darling Penelope.

“What does she want, Ian? She wants something from you. Money? Better parts?”

“You can take this crazy shit somewhere else. Because I’ve had enough.”

“Really? One teenager was enough for you, is that it?”

He moved in, index finger pointed at me, trying to physically intimidate me. “What do you want? I don’t have it. That bitch is taking everything.”

Maybe physical intimidation works on people who are afraid to push back. The first time someone hit me I was nine years old and I didn’t know how to defend myself. I learned.

I elbowed him in the stomach, which knocked the wind out of him. Then I wrenched his arm up behind him and pushed him face-down on his desk. Must have hurt, his cheek up against the mahogany veneer like that. “You’re a very bad man, Mr. Reynolds. That means you don’t get to make judgments about other people.”

He grunted once or twice as I pushed upwards before Anne laid a hand on my arm. “Stop,” she said.

Until she touched me, I hadn’t realized how hard I was trembling. With rage. I was about twenty seconds from hurting this guy in a way that couldn’t be dealt with or explained. I sent the message to my fingers:
Let go
. It took a few seconds to release my grip on his wrist and the back of his neck. I backed up.

Ian sprang off the desk and whirled around as though he were going to take me on. Anne stepped in front of him, calm and unthreatening. She put a hand on his chest, lightly, barely touching, enough to serve as a barrier. “Don’t. Leave it. You’re in the wrong here, Uncle Ian. No matter what happened to Colin or what he did, you’ve done something terrible.”

“You have no idea!” Ian shouted.

I pulled the door open. “Let’s go, Anne. This man wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit his arse.”

She shook her head and followed me through the doorway.

“You got bad friends, Annie,” he said.

She gazed at him for a second, and then shook her head.

We left.

#

As we walked back to the car, we stepped lively and said nothing to each other. Anne got behind the wheel and I put on my seatbelt. We sat there, both of us staring off into our own worlds. She had her hands on the steering wheel, and then dropped them into her lap. “What happened?” Anne asked.

That made me smile. “What, did you miss all that then? Penelope’s blackmailing your uncle. That’s why she needs those photos. As proof.”

She shook her head. “No. To you. What happened to you?”

“I apologize. I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly. My temper can be frightening.”

“I don’t care about him. He can drive into a tree for all I care. What happened to you to make you react that way?”

“Aren’t you furious to find out what he did?”

“As a child, Dru? What happened to you as a child?”

A million deflections sprang to mind, but that display of rage couldn’t be so easily dismissed. “Nothing happened to me.” Which was true, or mostly true, depending on how you looked at it. Some people might even say it was completely false, but it wasn’t, not really. Anything that happened to me I signed up for. Sure, I might not have realized what I was signing up for, with my father’s furious approval, but I hadn’t been starry eyed at the time. I shook my head, but I had to give her something. “People who abuse children make me furious.”