The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries) (15 page)

“His name is Nate, and he’s fourteen.” I pulled out a school portrait of Nate Christianti and passed it across the table to her. She picked it up automatically and studied it, a confused expression still on her face. Her poker face was worse than mine, and I felt a stab of pity for her. This girl would have a hard time as an actress.

“I don’t know who this is.” She put the picture down, turning Nate’s face to the table. She was shaking her head slightly, like she didn’t want Nate or me to be real.

“Miss?” a balding, fiftyish man in a business suit called across the table to Starla, and she looked up, remembering where she was.
 

“Oh, crap,” she said under her breath. She scrabbled to pull a little notepad out of her apron, and wrote something hurriedly on the top page. Holding it out to me, she whispered, “I can’t talk about this right now. This is my home address, I’m done at four. Can you come by?” she asked urgently, “Please?
Please
don’t just disappear?” She looked desperately at me, eyes begging.

 
“Of course,” I said, taking the slip of paper, an address in Hollywood. “I’ll meet you there at four-thirty.”
 

The relief on her face was almost overwhelming as she rose and turned her body reluctantly toward the balding man. “Four-thirty,” she repeated to herself. “Okay.”

Starla turned away then, and I sat alone at the table, newly confused myself. Had Jason Anderson left Starla, the way he’d left Nate and Sarah? Or had something happened to him?
 

I felt a twinge of genuine fear. For Nate’s sake, if nothing else, I hoped he was okay.

18. He Struck Gold

I had time to kill, so I spent a few hours trying to track down Luna, the girlfriend of the pot-smoking cat lover from Jason’s old building. She wasn’t home when I called their apartment, but Tomás directed me to her workplace in Brentwood, where I had to wait for her to get back from a delivery (Luna was a florist’s assistant), and when I finally did get to talk to her, she had no new information for me. She just knew that Starla seemed really nice, they’d spoken a few times, and every time she’d run into Jason he’d seemed like “kind of a douche” who had flirted with her in the laundry room. I thought that sounded about right.
 

Afterward I spent a couple more hours working on the screenplay angle, but if Jason had ever actually finished a script, he hadn’t registered it with the WGA. It looked like Starla was my last lead on finding the guy.

At four I started the trek back across town towards Hollywood. Starla’s apartment building had probably once been majestic and glamorous, but fifty years after its heyday, shabbiness and age had worn away its grandeur. The inside matched the outside, with worn red velvet carpets in the lobby and once-beautiful tarnished brass railings in the elevator.
 

To my surprise, Starla opened her door holding a chubby two-year-old boy with her golden hair – and Nate’s green eyes. Her face was flushed and maybe a little tear-stained, and I noticed the man standing a few feet behind her, looking impatient and angry. He was maybe ten years older than her. Alarm bells went off in my head, and I wished I had my gun. I hadn’t brought the Browning with me on this trip, partly because traveling with a gun is obnoxiously complicated, and partly because this was a fact-finding mission.
 

“Everything okay, Starla?” I asked cautiously.

“What?” she said, and glanced back at the guy behind her. “Oh, yeah!” She gave me a bright smile that said, “this is not what it looks like,” and I relaxed a little. I realized then that the man looked an awful lot like Starla – only with a receding hairline and strong-looking arms that contradicted the little paunch at his waistline. Golf, I was guessing.

“Lena, this is my brother Connie—sorry, Conrad Mills. And Conrad, this is Lena,” she said, stepping back so I could move forward and shake Conrad’s hand.
 

I stepped inside and looked around. Behind Starla on the floor was a little girl the same age as the boy, playing with a giant-size puzzle. My eyes trailed around the toddler paraphernalia strewn about the room, and the spills and stains that decorated the back of the small couch and the carpet. The kids were hers. Well, that explained why she’d been so confused when I’d mentioned being hired by Jason’s son. As far as Starla had known, Jason’s only son was still crayoning the walls.

“Hello,” Conrad said amiably, giving my hand a too-hard squeeze. “Selena, is it?’

“It is, but most people call me Lena.”

“What a shame. Selena is such a lovely name.” His voice had a snide suggestion in it, as if to say that while
Selena
was lovely, Lena was common and trashy. “Anyway,” he continued, “I’m just on my way out. You’ll think about what we discussed?” he asked Starla, raising her eyebrows. She promised she would, and with a nod to me Conrad edged around to the doorway and sauntered out.

“He wants me to stop looking for Jason,” Starla explained, after the door was fully closed behind her brother. She looked exhausted, but she kept pausing to kiss the top of the toddler’s head. She sat down on the couch and motioned to me to take the ratty armchair across from it. I stepped gingerly over the puzzle and sat, clutching my bag on my lap. “Connie’s just convinced that Jason ran off with another woman and won’t be coming back.”
 

I wasn’t entirely sure I didn’t think the same thing, but it didn’t seem like a good time to say that. The boy in Starla’s arms fussed a little, and she said, “Oh! Sorry, this is Tristan.” She gestured toward the boy in her arms, who was determinedly reaching for her ponytail, “and that’s Antigone. Annie.”
 

Personally, I thought those were stupidly pretentious names for toddlers, but then again I’m named for a comic book character, so I don’t really get to throw stones from my glass house. Hearing her name, the little girl looked up from her large-size puzzle, squinched her nose at me, and went back to work. Unable to voice the question delicately, I said, “Um, Starla, are these children...” My fingers twitched helplessly.

She blinked rapidly. “What?”

“You know...uh, is Jason their father?” The classical names definitely sounded like Jason’s doing.
 

“Oh!” Starla nodded matter-of-factly, not offended. “Twins run in my family. Conrad actually had a twin sister, but she died before I was born.” She absently rose and crossed the room to place Tristan on the floor next to his sister, and he picked up a plastic truck to run over the puzzle. Annie ignored all of us. Starla stood over them for a moment, looking wistful.

“Starla,” I said gently, “You were saying that Jason is missing?”

I could see tears well in her eyes. She motioned me to follow her and fled through a chaotic little kitchen into the hallway beyond. We leaned against the wall, with Starla running one shaky finger under each eye the way that women do to keep their mascara on. “I don’t want them to see me upset,” she whispered, and then tears started coursing freely down her cheeks and into her white work blouse. I wished I had a handkerchief, like in old movies. Instead I backtracked a few feet in the kitchen and found a roll of paper towels. I handed her a wad, and Starla shot me a grateful look. “I don’t know where he is,” she sniffed, dabbing at her face. “I was hoping that’s why you came to see me; that you had found him somehow.”
 

She looked so young and lost, with strands of blond hair sticking to her damp cheeks, that I couldn’t help but reach out and pat her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Starla,” I said softly. “I need to find Jason for a different reason. But the good news is, it won’t really matter
who
finds him, so long as someone does, right?”

She nodded, not comforted, and I pressed on.

“When did you last see him?”

“Almost two weeks ago,” she whispered, “he left me this note that said, ‘Gotta research, back soon.’ That was it. But that was so
long
ago; he’s never been gone this long without calling.” Her eyes flicked through the kitchen doorway into the living room, where Annie’s face had scrunched up with anger. The little girl was sucking in breath to scream. “Tristan, if you don’t stop running your truck over Annie’s puzzle, you’re going to get a time out,” she called. I was always impressed with the sixth-sense that mothers seemed to have about their kids misbehaving – or being in danger.

“Did you file a missing persons report?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I did. But when I went to the police station with the kids, they just looked at me, like, ‘who
wouldn’t
leave this girl?’ They said the note proved he was fine.” There was only a trace of bitterness to her voice. “I mean, I know lots of people thought he was too good for me, or whatever, but we were making it work. He loves me.” Her eyes shone, pleading for me to believe her.

“I’m sure he does.” I patted her shoulder again. It’s good to stick with your best moves. “I know you’re working at the restaurant – what was Jason doing for work?”

She straightened her shoulders proudly. “He’s a writer. He was working on a new screenplay.”

“Really?” I thought for a moment. “Was it already, um...sold to someone?”

Starla shook her head. “No, but that’s just it. He’s written so many that never got anywhere, so this one was going to be special.”

“Special how?”

Her face clouded over with confusion. “Well, I’m not really sure, except that he had to go out a lot and do research and stuff. He was like, trying to get the inside scoop, I guess.”
 

“Inside scoop on what? What kind of a movie was he writing?”

She shrugged. “He wouldn’t say. He just said it was an action movie, and you know how those can make so much money.” She nodded knowingly at me, as if I had the slightest clue about how movies were made. I just nodded knowingly right back. “He kept saying it was better for me not to know. Like, he was protecting me or something.” She rolled her eyes a little. “I always thought he was being kind of dramatic, like, he’s a writer, for crying out loud. Not a spy. But he seemed so...convinced. Like in old movies where the miners find gold? And they’re all obsessed and protective?”

I understood. “He struck gold?”

She nodded her head emphatically. “Yeah. I think he really did.”

Starla led me into the twins’ bedroom, which also served as Jason Anderson’s writing office. She explained that Jason wrote at coffee shops and parks during the day, and would type in here at night after the twins were asleep. There was no sign of a laptop, but Starla assured me that he never went anywhere without it, so it would be wherever he was.

While Starla left to check on the twins, I sat down at the cheap IKEA desk and began opening drawers. I found office supplies, blank paper, pens...but nothing of any consequence. There was an entire drawer of yellow writing pads with strange phrases scribbled on them, like “man who doesn’t know he’s a parrot” and “Children’s book author – priest?” I tried to make sense of them for awhile, then gave up and opened another drawer. This one was full of blank computer paper, though I flipped through the stack just in case there were clues hidden between the pages. No luck.
 

I leaned back in the little office chair and thought about it. If Jason Anderson was convinced he was onto something, and he really believed that knowing about it could be dangerous, then he’d hide anything significant. And this was a drama-loving, movie guy...I squatted down on the floor and pulled out all the drawers again. Sure enough, there was an envelope taped under the front right drawer.
 

Sighing at his lack of creativity, I pulled Jason’s notes off and sat back down to open them. There were two sheets of paper, stapled together, and it looked like some kind of outline for a story. I scanned it quickly, groaning to myself. The title was: “Gun for Hire: a True Story.”
 

Shit.

I knew of one professional killer case that was working during my time with the cops, and most of us barely took it seriously at first. There’s just something kind of funny about the idea of a professional hitman—or hitwoman—in the twenty-first century. You see it a thousand times in movies, and it always seems so over-the-top. It’s like meeting someone who’s a professional circus acrobat – sure, I guess they exist, but come on.
 

But hired killers happen, more often than you’d expect. It’s almost never like in the movies or on TV, with some sexy, sadistic killer in a $3,000 suit, or the swarthy Italian mobster with no remorse. The average hit man is a low-level thug, a drug dealer or mugger who agrees to branch out for some extra cash. They’re rarely brilliant criminal masterminds, and like any other bad guy, they either figure out how to get good at what they do, or they get caught.

At any rate, murder is a serious charge, and a cornered killer is a very dangerous thing. If Jason Anderson had actually managed to find a professional killer (which is even harder than finding a professional circus acrobat), and he’d asked too many questions, well...that could be very bad news for Nate. And Starla.

It was almost six by the time I got on the highway, but Cristina would still be at work. I drove straight to her station, a little nervous. We hadn’t actually spoken since the restaurant, except for a few texts to let her know that I was okay. But we’d both had time to cool down, and I couldn’t avoid her forever. Who says I can’t be mature?

Cristina’s office at the LAPD doesn’t look anything like the station in the
Lethal Weapon
movies, much to my disgust. It looks a lot more like the setting of
Office Space
, if you want to be honest. Cristina had long since graduated from the center cubicles, and taken over a tiny, neatly organized side office. It smelled like Cristina, complete with the hint of fresh blood, and I wondered for the millionth time how that happens. I could always ask her if she butchers her own meat on the weekends or something, but part of me enjoyed the mystery.

I knocked hesitantly on her open door frame. Cristina looked up from her computer.