The Readaholics and the Gothic Gala (13 page)

I
hummed and sang my way through Thursday's corporate off-site, eliciting first Al's puzzlement, and then, by late afternoon, when the off-site broke up, a knowing grin.

“Don't go there,” I warned him when it looked like he was going to comment. I had just responded to a text from Hart saying how much he was looking forward to seeing me this weekend. Al and I were working together in my office to figure out a seating chart for a wedding reception in two weeks. It was greatly complicated by the fact that both bride's and groom's parents had divorced and remarried. That in itself wasn't so bad—I dealt with that all the time—but the bride's father had married the groom's sister, a woman thirty years his junior, and the mother's family, Sicilians from the old country, had all sworn they'd get revenge on him. The groom's parents weren't too happy with him, or their daughter, either. I was seriously thinking about suggesting that the young couple elope.

“Go where, boss?” Al asked innocently. “I'll tell you the one place I'm definitely not going is to this wedding.” He stabbed a finger at one of the crumpled
seating charts we'd discarded. “I think we ought to have a metal detector at the church door.”

“Know where we can get one?” I asked, only half-joking.

When we had done the best we could with the seating chart, Al left to set up for this evening's event, and I turned my attention toward my research assignment for tonight. As busy as I'd been yesterday—and last night, I thought, grinning to myself—I hadn't had time to look into Cosmo Zeller. I started with a basic search and netted more than twenty thousand hits. Whoa. I skipped through several pages of entries and realized that every time one of his movies was reviewed, his name got mentioned. Great. Slogging through all of this to find the kernels would take days. Weeks.

I waded in. Two hours later, my eyes were blurred and I had only a couple of paragraphs of information about Cosmo, starting with the fact that his birth name wasn't Cosmo; it was Phineas. He'd been born in a small town in Illinois and skipped town immediately after high school in search of fame and fortune as a Hollywood actor. There was a gap of several years in his bio, where I suspected he'd spent more time waiting tables or parking cars than in front of the cameras. He reemerged as Cosmo Zeller, with a nose job and capped teeth, in his late twenties, with an assistant producer credit on a forgettable romantic comedy. Two years later, he produced a blockbuster thriller and his fortune was finally made. He acquired a wife, divorced, and remarried, all before hitting thirty-five. He had three children with wife number two, and she had taken him
to the cleaners in a recent divorce, if the tabloid reports were accurate. I whistled when I saw how much the courts seemed to think she and the kids needed on a monthly basis. I could pay off my mortgage for less than one month's alimony and child support.

Cosmo had produced a string of hits in the nineties and the early part of the next decade, earning comparisons with Bruckheimer and that ilk. Lately, though, it seemed to me, he had lost the magic touch. His last three films had been flops, one of them of such epic (and expensive) proportions as to earn it a place on the list of Top Ten Hollywood Box Office Bombs of all time, snuggled up between
Heaven's Gate
and the Johnny Depp
Lone Ranger
. His multimillion-dollar Hollywood Hills home, with its tennis court, indoor and outdoor pools, movie-viewing room, humidor room, and ocean view, was on the market. I wasted half an hour doing the video tour of the house and wondering about how someone cleaned the crystals on the chandelier hung twenty feet above the foyer floor, and how long it had taken to paint the elaborate trompe l'oeil murals of Roman ruins in the pool house.

Bringing my mind back to the task, I jotted a summary of Phineas “Cosmo” Zeller on a three-by-five card.

• self-made millionaire; one of Hollywood's top producers; two Oscars
  
• divorced, father of three, huge child support/alimony payments—financial difficulties?
  
• industry sources say he needs a big hit;
  Barbary Close
  his ticket back to big time?
  

As six o'clock approached, I tucked the card into my purse and headed for home. In the back of my mind, I knew we were running out of time. Once the week was up, the three authors and their families and Cosmo Zeller would scatter, leaving Heaven for their normal lives. Once that happened, I didn't think we had a prayer of figuring out who had killed Trent Van Allen.

*   *   *

Just before seven o'clock, I surveyed my sunroom with satisfaction. It was a small rectangular space furnished with wicker chairs upholstered in bright floral cotton. Celadon-colored ceramic tile covered the floor. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out to the front, side, and rear yards. I had the wooden blinds closed now that it was night, which made the room feel a bit smaller, but also cozier. Plants, hand-selected by Lola as her housewarming gift to me, dangled from baskets and sprouted from ceramic pots. It was my favorite room in the bungalow that was 99.9 percent the bank's and 0.1 percent mine. Feeling a little chilly, I dashed to the den to grab the afghan off the chair in there and bring it into the sunroom.

The doorbell rang, and I let in Brooke, still glowing with the joy of impending motherhood. Her glossy hair bobbed from a high ponytail and she seemed to dance as she walked. We went into the galley kitchen, where she helped herself to some Pinot Grigio from the box I'd bought on my way home. She was babbling about a conversation with Kay, her baby's birth mother, when she stopped midsentence and eyed me narrowly.

“Something's different about you,” she said.

I opened the fridge door and hid behind it, pretending to search for a lemon in case someone wanted iced tea. “I don't have any. Lemons,” I said, closing the refrigerator.

“Lemons, shlemons,” she said, waving them away.

“Lola might want—”

Her eyes widened. “You and Hart didn't—”

I turned away and grabbed a sponge to wipe down the clean counter, but not before she caught sight of my telltale blush. Sometimes pale skin was a curse.

“You did,” she breathed. “When? You didn't tell me! I want to know everything.”

Even though Brooke and I had historically shared many details of our love lives, I felt shy about discussing what had happened between me and Hart. It was too new. Too . . . special. I was saved by the bell as the doorbell rang. I sprinted to open it and let in Lola, Kerry, and Maud. Misty trotted in with Lola, and I stooped to pat her. When I'd rescued her off the street, I'd thought about keeping her, but my schedule didn't mesh with a pet's needs. I'd given her to Lola, but it made me smile to see her back in my house. There was a flurry of greetings and drinks-getting, and Kerry busied herself, slicing the zucchini bread and handing it out on napkins. Brooke caught my eye as we all trooped into the sunroom, though, and her look promised that we would resume our conversation later.

Lola sat beside me on the love seat with Kerry in the chair to Lola's left and Brooke on my right. Maud sat on an ottoman across from me, and Misty leaped onto the low, deep windowsill and batted the blinds cord. We
had barely seated ourselves when Kerry announced, “I'll go first.”

“Wait,” I said. “Something happened yesterday. I got a call from Trent Van Allen's girlfriend. She filled me in on a few things.” I recounted as much of my conversation with Sharla as I could remember. “She ran off before I could ask her any questions, really,” I finished, “but we should all keep a lookout for a tan station wagon. If we find it, and the package is still there, well, it will probably point to the killer.”

Maud rubbed her hands together. “A modern-day treasure hunt,” she said. “I'm in.”

“I'll keep an eye out while I'm making deliveries tomorrow,” Lola said.

“If anyone finds it, though,” I cautioned, “you've got to call the police. I promised Hart.”

Kerry gave a brisk nod, and said, “Can I report on Francesca Bugle now?” She slid her cheaters from the top of her head to the bridge of her nose and peered at a printed page. “I researched Francesca Bugle, and I'm here to tell you there's no such person.” She gave us all a meaningful look over the top of her glasses.

“Pen name,” Maud said dismissively, just as I had earlier. “There's no such person as Carolyn Keene, either. Actually, she was several people, at least one of them a man. Fact.” She leaned forward with her forearms on her knees. “When you think about it, the whole writer-for-hire thing is a conspiracy of sorts, with publishers and agents and writers conspiring to convince the reading public that—”

Kerry interrupted her ruthlessly. “I don't think there's
any conspiracy related to Francesca Bugle. I do think she's got something to hide.” She sat back and flipped her notebook closed.

“Maybe she just likes her privacy,” Lola said. “I can understand that.”

“Let me tell you what I learned about Cosmo Zeller,” I said, sensing that the Bugle conversation wasn't going to go anyplace useful. “He is definitely not the shy and retiring type. There are more articles about him online than there are about global warming.” I saw Maud's eyes light up and hurried on before she could launch into her spiel about the global warming conspiracy. I told the group what I'd learned about Cosmo, finishing with, “So, he may be having financial problems. Or not. Just because he's selling his house doesn't mean he's on the verge of bankruptcy.”

“He could be off-loading it because of the divorce,” Brooke suggested. She sipped her wine. “It could contain too many memories, or he might not want such a big place now that it's just him.”

“I looked at a video of it online,” I confessed. “He's probably dumping it to avoid the maintenance bills. It must cost a fortune in cleaning teams, pool boys, heating and cooling—you name it. Anyway, all the pundits seem to think this movie,
Barbary Close
, will be a huge hit and put him back on top.”

We tossed around ideas about where Cosmo and Trent Van Allen might have crossed paths, but other than the fact that they had both lived in Illinois once upon a time, nothing popped. We realized we didn't know enough about Van Allen to determine where his
path might have intersected with that of any of the suspects, and I made a note to ask Hart if he could share some details from Van Allen's file. “Hart mentioned Van Allen was a marine,” I said. “Did any of our suspects spend any time in the military?”

Everyone shook their heads no. “Of course,” I pointed out, “the murderer doesn't have to have known Van Allen personally. Van Allen could have come across something the murderer wanted, or evidence of wrongdoing the murderer wouldn't want revealed, and approached the killer with it. I mean, all of these people are public figures, to some extent. It wouldn't be hard to track any of them down.”

The others let that sink in for a moment, and then Lola pushed her glasses up her nose and pulled up a document on her notebook computer. “I've got a report on Eloise Hufnagle. She's really a very interesting woman. As you know already, she's from the Atlanta area. She grew up in a middle-class neighborhood. Her mom was a teacher—she died of breast cancer eight years ago. Her dad works for the post office.”

“Bad genes there,” Maud quipped.

“Eloise won a full scholarship to Emory University, where she got a PhD in biochemistry with an emphasis on pathogen transmission. She wrote her dissertation on environmental factors in aerosolized transmission of pathogens in commercial airplanes. I managed to find a couple of her papers online. They were quite interesting. She works for the CDC now, the Centers for Disease Control.”

Of course Lola, with her master's in chemistry, would find the scientific angle appealing.

“I couldn't find as much about her fiction writing, but from newspaper reports about the court case, I gathered that she's been working on publishing a novel for some time. Years. Apparently, the manuscript she was working on has a story line and characters a lot like those in Mary Stewart's novel
Blood Will Out
. Eloise called hers ‘Marked by Blood.' She was part of a writers' critique group and suspects that one of her feedback partners knows Mary Stewart and gave her a copy of the manuscript.” Lola stopped, a look of concern on her face. I could tell she sympathized with Eloise Hufnagle.

“Which Mary Stewart categorically denies,” Brooke put in, waving a sheaf of papers she had pulled from her purse. “Stewart says that any similarities are coincidence, a case of spontaneous ideas arising simultaneously. At least, that's what her lawyer says. Stewart doesn't talk about the case. Anyway”—she twiddled the ends of her ponytail—“Mary Stewart has been a writer from the get-go. She grew up in Boise—”

“Wait a minute.” I straightened. “That's where Van Allen was from. I think.” I screwed my eyes shut, trying to remember what Hart had said. “Yes, I'm sure Hart said he was from Idaho originally, although he didn't mention Boise specifically.”

“Worth looking into,” Lola said.

“Lots of people are from Idaho,” Kerry said.

“Anyway,” Brooke continued, “Mary was into
writing from middle school on, winning all sorts of contests and awards. She left Idaho to go to college at the University of Virginia, where she was active in Pi Beta Phi. She's one of my sorority sisters.” Brooke smiled. She'd been social chairperson of her sorority chapter at Colorado State University. “She was briefly engaged to a fellow student, Jonathan Logan, but broke it off a week before the wedding. Cold feet, I guess.”

“She doesn't strike me as the type that would return either the ring or the wedding presents,” Kerry said.

I looked a question at her and she shrugged. “Gut feeling. There's something cold about that woman. Calculating. I had a Realtor like her in my office once—could sell the proverbial fridge to an Eskimo—but I caught her colluding with a listing agent to jack up the price one of our clients would have to pay for a house, so I canned her. She moved to Montrose and I hear she's been agent of the year in the Re/Max office there three years running.” She flared her nostrils.