Murder With Sarcastic Intent Page 5

  “You were great, Dad,” Jason said. “I thought my line about the stirring in my pants was cool too.”

  “It was a little over the top,” Kurt said to Jason. “But I’ll give you points for trying.”

  “Over the top?” Mary said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Uncle Kurt, I thought your performances were really subtle too. Highly nuanced.”

  “You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?” Kurt said. He narrowed his eyes.

  “You guys were supposed to keep your mouths shut and let me do the talking,” Mary said. “You both sounded absolutely ridiculous. I especially liked the ‘beer and chocolate’ request. That was highly inspired.”

  “Oh, get the giant corncob out your butt, Mary,” Kurt said. “That was perfect! These big-time directors like Steven Spielsburger always make requests. You know, M&Ms of one color, hookers without STDs. And they get ‘em, by God! Anything they want!”

  Mary unlocked her car and gestured for them to get inside. She fired it up and pulled out onto Ocean.

  “They get those things because they’re actually directors,” she said. “Not Ralph’s grocery baggers pretending to be directors.”

  “Wow, I wanna direct,” Jason said.

  “Quit being so high-strung,” Kurt said to Mary. “That guy didn’t know anything anyway. Christ, he looked like his Dad brought him into his office so he could print off his grade-school paper.”

  “Where do you want me to drop you?” Mary said.

  “Back at Ralph’s,” Kurt said. “I’ve got a big day in the produce section. You should hear some of those old biddies bitch. Christ, they tell me the cantaloupe are overripe, I tell ‘em to get a fucking mirror.”

  Jason snickered in the backseat.

  Sixteen

  The crew was on lunch break. A little food van serving mostly tacos, arrived at the set every day around noon.

  Jake Cornell watched the little tyrant director, Morrison, skip ahead in line and place a special order.

  He had to stand on his tiptoes to see over the counter.

  Jake snickered.

  “Out of the way, Drag Ass,” someone said behind him. It was Paolo, the guard from Venice Security.

  The big man strutted past Jake, and he had a vague notion to punch him in the back of the head. Ever since the midget director had labeled Jake with his new moniker, Paolo had taken great pleasure in using it.

  It was the opportunity Jake had been waiting for. He’d studied Paolo’s routine, and the man loved nothing more than long lunches, going back for seconds, sometimes thirds, as well as dessert.

  He also loved to flirt with the makeup girl, who Jake was convinced couldn’t stand the big security guard.

  Jake slipped back into the warehouse and went to the locked door.

  So far, his undercover mission had turned up very little. LAPD had gotten a tip that Morrison’s production company was using underage girls for its pornographic films. The tip had been passed down to Vice, and in turn passed down to the low man on the totem pole to go undercover.

  Hence, Jacob Cornell, fresh from a disgraceful conduct review and thrown under the bus by Lieutenant Davies, was given the assignment.

  Jake glanced back over his shoulder. The crew was busy with the taco truck.

  He went to the door that was always locked and usually guarded by Paolo, although the man had adopted a strolling security tour and disappeared for half-hour intervals to chat up the makeup girl.

  Jake had taken the time to study the door and knew it could be picked with a simple jimmy, which he now had in his hand.

  He slipped the slender implement inside the lock, pinched and twisted until the lock popped.

  Jake ducked inside and shut the door behind him. If Paolo stuck to his schedule, he had at least fifteen minutes.

  The light switch was just inside the door, and Jake turned it on.

  It was an office, with a simple desk and computer, as well as a file cabinet.

  What was a bit unusual was the glass window at the rear of the office. Jake walked forward past the desk and peered around the window, where there was another room.

  There was a small bed, a camera on a tripod and a few lights.

  Jake saw a separate door to the right of this hidden stage and—

  He registered a whisper of movement behind him and then searing pain that ran down his neck and back. His body went numb, and then his mind went black.

  Seventeen

  Mary drove back to her condo, parked in her assigned spot, and climbed the stairs to her place.

  The building had been built in the early ‘90s on Ocean Avenue, but far enough away from the tourist hotels to occasionally enjoy some peace and quiet.

  Mary had toyed with moving out, finding a house somewhere, but she’d grown attached to the neighborhood, sort of halfway between Santa Monica and Venice.

  She hated climbing the stairs to the condo, but vowed not to ride the elevators to her fourth-floor home. She rationalized that if she climbed the stairs a few times a day it would negate the need for an actual workout.

  Yeah, she didn’t buy it either.

  She unlocked the door, threw her keys on the kitchen table, opened the fridge, and pulled out a bottle of chardonnay. She plucked off the stopper and poured herself a glass.

  The mail. Mary scooped up the stack and took it into the living room, placed the pile on the table in front of the couch. She went to the sliding glass doors that opened up onto her little balcony and took a long look at the Pacific. During the day, she rarely looked at the ocean, but usually when she was home, she would look out at its vastness and inevitably think of her parents.

  They died when she was quite young, on their sailboat during a freak storm. The police eventually found the boat, or more accurately, the thousand pieces that would have represented what the boat used to be, but they never found the bodies.

  All Mary had left were some faded photographs, newspaper clippings, and some of her father’s papers. He had been an entertainment attorney in Los Angeles, her mother had been an actor and a comedienne, as well as one of his clients.

  There were still a lot of questions in Mary’s mind about them, their deaths, and even the last few years of their lives. But for now, Mary had set those issues aside until the day when she had time to go back.

  That day always seemed just around the corner.

  Closure was not something Mary had ever enjoyed in abundance.

  She went to the couch, sipped from her wine and picked up the mail. Flipping through bills and offers from her cable company, she got to a flyer from Ralph’s and set the bundle back on the table.

  Seeing the Ralph’s flyer made her think of Kurt, and thinking of Kurt and Jason, two questionable representatives of their gender, made her think of Jake.

  She missed him.

  It had taken her quite awhile to get here. When Jake had slept with his boss, Mary had taken it personally, even though technically they had broken up. He claimed it happened once and only because he was drunker than a Kennedy on vacation.

  Vulnerability had simply never been her strong suit. And the fact that she had allowed Jake in, and then he had hurt her—unintentionally though it was—made her even more guarded.

  She drank the rest of her wine. What the hell was she doing? Preparing to go on Dr. Phil?

  Wilshire Entertainment.

  That was the name of one of the files on Trey Williams’s desk. Why did it sound so familiar to her? Mary went to her computer in the spare bedroom and logged on. She launched Google and typed in Wilshire Entertainment. There were virtually no hits for the company.

  Google was good for public information, but for the classified stuff, she launched a search engine provided to her by one of her happy clients.

  This time, Wilshire Entertainment appeared at the top of the list. She clicked on the attached link and was brought to a spreadsheet. Mary groaned. Spreadsheets. Why not take a rusty razor to her armpits?

  She went and got a fres
h glass of wine, then returned to the document, took a long drink, and focused.

  It came in a flash.

  She dug out the production booklet she’d lifted from Vince Buslipp’s production office.

  On the first page, the name of the production company was listed.

  Wilshire Entertainment.

  She went back to the computer and tracked Wilshire Entertainment through its spreadsheets and other corporate filings.

  It appeared to be simply a shell company. The name was buried in a list of other seemingly innocous names plastered across a ridiculous flow chart.

  Ugh. Flow charts. Even worse than spreadsheets.

  She worked her way up the pyramid. The name at the top was interesting.

  The Buslipp Group.

  The only name she could find was Vince Buslipp.

  But “The Buslipp Group” certainly implied more than one partner.

  For the first time, Mary felt like she was on the right track.

  Eighteen

  Mary was one never to follow rules. She considered all traffic laws merely suggestions that she was free to interpret depending on her situation at the time.

  One rule she did follow somewhat often was quite simple. Whenever she saw a curve ball in her current investigation, her rule of thumb was to go back to her client for more information. Typically, she had discovered new information from the last meeting and knew better, or simply different, questions to ask.

  In this case, she had pursued the boyfriends, the porn connection, Nina’s social media outlets, and while she had discovered some key information, she still had nothing tangible that could lead to the girl’s whereabouts.

  Which prompted Mary’s decision to once again contact Elyse Ramirez.

  She dialed the number, but it went straight to voicemail. She left a message asking for a return call, but feeling unsatisfied, she came up with an idea. Mary remembered Elyse mentioning her husband, a prominent businessman.

  It was time to interview the husband, who could possibly provide new and different information than the mother. Also, Mary had been doing this long enough to know that nine times out of ten, a family member was somehow involved in an individual’s disappearance.

  That thought pushed a discussion with the father to the top of the list.

  Mary looked at the sheet of paper Elyse Ramirez had given her. There was a phone number for the husband, and she dialed it.

  A recording notified her that the number had been disconnected.

  Mary felt the cold touch of intuition placing its hand on the case.

  She wheeled her chair back to her desk and logged onto her database. She typed in the name provided her by Elyse Martinez along with the bogus phone number.

  Two pages of entries spat out.

  Mary read the list of names, locations, ages, social security numbers, and other particulars.

  None of the names fit with a prominent businessman married to a woman named Elyse and with a daughter named Nina.

  Mary was suddenly forced to confront the notion that the prominent businessman may not exist at all.

  And if that was the case, Elyse Martinez was most likely not who she said she was.

  It was time to put away the cell phone and the computer and get back to the real investigative work.

  It was time to get some boots on the ground.

  Or, in her case, it was time to get some fashionable, stylish, and affordably priced footwear on the ground.

  Time was wasting.

  Nineteen

  The address Elyse had given her was located in West Hollywood.

  Mary took Santa Monica Boulevard through Beverly Hills and then veered into the funkiness that was West Hollywood.

  She made her way through the offbeat eclecticism of the infamous community, to the more traditional residential blocks, the few that existed in the area.

  The house that bore Elyse’s address was a ranch-style bungalow with a weird front porch that looked more like a repurposed wheelchair ramp than any kind of actual structure.

  Mary parked and went to the front door. She rang the bell, waited, then rang the bell again. Finally, she tried the door, but it was locked.

  There was a small picture window in the center of the house, but the porch didn’t extend far enough for Mary to get a good look inside the place.

  She walked to the back of the house, knocked on the door, tried to open it, but it was locked. She stood with her hands on her hips, wondering what to do.

  Maybe Elyse just wasn’t home.

  Maybe Elyse wasn’t really Elyse.

  Mary glanced down at two potted flowers flanking the small back stoop. The flowers were dead. Clearly no one paid much attention to landscaping. The grass was long. Shrubs overgrown.

  The potted flowers intrigued Mary. She reached out with her left foot and knocked one over.

  Nothing.

  She gave the one on the right a little nudge and it tipped over, revealing a stained house key and a few grub-like bugs.

  Relatives of Lieutenant Davies, Mary thought.

  She picked up the key, turned it inside the back door lock, and stepped inside.

  Breaking and entering, yes. But she’d come to visit her client, smelled smoke, and thought someone might be inside. Yeah, maybe she would set something on fire just to make her story better.

  Smoke would certainly smell better than the current aroma assailing her nostrils.

  The smell of death was unmistakable. Every time she passed by Aunt Alice’s laundry hamper she was reminded of this.

  The back door led directly into a kitchen. Vinyl floor, laminate counter peeling in places, and kitchen cabinets painted white but wearing years of grease that had turned them a faint yellow.

  Mary walked quickly through the kitchen into the living room, where she found her client in no position to pay the final balance of her bill.

  Elyse Ramirez was face down on a horrible, dark-green carpet, featuring a large semicircle of blood. Her knees were beneath her, arms at her side, in the class of pose the newspapers loved to refer to as execution-style.

  Mary patted the woman’s pockets, looking for a cell phone, anything. But there was nothing: no purse, no keys, no sign the woman had been here with anything of a personal nature.

  The question for Mary was, to whom did the house belong? She highly doubted it was Elyse’s, so who had managed to lure her here?

  Mary had a bad feeling, the kind that zaps you like a static shock. Or the kind of cattle prod she had sometimes imagined using on Jake.

  The jolt pushed Mary into action. She raced through the rest of the house, finding no signs of human life. Empty closets, empty rooms, no sign of a telephone anywhere.

  On her way back through the kitchen, Mary spotted a small section of kitchen counter that was lower than the rest. Probably a desk, where people could sit and pay bills. She opened the drawer, but it was empty. Mary was about to shut it when she caught a quick flash of color. She pulled the drawer all the way out and found a card stuck in the back crack of the drawer, wedged deeply into the space.

  Mary pulled it out.

  Sol Landscaping Company.

  She put it into her purse, backed out of the house, and got into her car.

  Next stop: a pay phone and an anonymous tip for LAPD’s finest.

  Twenty

  Mary made the call to LAPD, using her Bea Arthur voice. Not very sexy really. Kind of like a bull dyke with a cold and a killer hangover. She told the dispatcher she’d heard a scream and a gunshot. Mary gave them the address too and then hung up before they could ask any more questions.

  Sol Landscaping.

  Mary looked at the card again. It was decent quality, but not super slick, like the kind produced by a huge landscaping conglomerate. The card had a little bit more of a mom-and-pop-type-operation impression to it.

  She debated about just calling the number on the card. But according to the address, it was only a ten-minute drive.

  Mary
gunned the Accord, anxious to put some distance between herself and her former client.

  The sight of a dead body always unsettled her. Sure, Mary could function, think straight (like making sure she didn’t leave any fingerprints anywhere in the house) but there was always a delayed reaction.

  Elyse Ramirez, even if that had not been her real name, had been a beautiful woman. Vital, with intelligence and poise. She had struck Mary as the kind of woman who had plenty of plans and the means to make them come true.

  But not anymore.

  It took Mary less than ten minutes to find the address attributed to Sol Landscaping without a problem. It was down a side street off Wilshire, then down another long dirt alley that opened up to reveal an industrial yard with a few sheds, open grounds featuring piles of dirt, gravel, and what looked like trashed landscaping materials.

  Mary parked in front of an aluminum-clad building that was more of a shack.

  She went to the front door but found it locked. Through the door’s dust-covered window, she could see a makeshift office with two steel folding chairs, a printer, and a coffeemaker tipped on its side.

  The sound of a high-pitched motor coming to life sounded to Mary like it was coming from behind the building. She thumbed the auto-lock on her car then walked around the aluminum shack.

  “Can I help you?” a man’s voice said.

  Mary turned to see a short, stocky, Hispanic man in green coveralls, tan boots, and a black baseball cap. He had a weedwhacker in his hand. There was a gas can and a small bottle of oil on the picnic table next to him.

  “This is Sol Landscaping?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, a slight accent to his voice.

  “Oh great, I’m looking for a good landscaper and you come highly recommended,” Mary said, “by my friend, Elyse Ramirez.”

  The man peeked at her from beneath his ball cap. His eyes were black, and there were dark smudges on his face.