Celebrity Sudoku (21 page)

“That’s an
I
.”

“Then comes a two in the third space of the next grid. I’m starting to get the hang of this—it’s an
E
, right?”

“Right,” Michael agreed.

“And finally, a two in the sixth space of the last grid—moved over to keep the same clue from appearing in one column, and yielding an
N
.”

“Which gives us U-R-N-A-L-I-E-N, which sounds like some sort of synthetic fabric.” Michael sounded triumphant. “Or do you think Ritz is warning Lolly about tax problems and saying she should ‘earn a lien’? ”

Liza looked at the letters for a long moment, then began to smile. “I think there’s some more texting shorthand going on here. Sound out the first three letters.”

Shrugging, Michael read, “U-R-N . . .” He looked at the rest. “You are an alien?”

Michael burst into laughter, patting Liza on the shoulder. “Brilliant wordplay, but what the hell does that have to do with Lolly Popovic?”

“There’s one more,” Liza said. “Let’s just do it, okay?”

Michael said, “Okay,” but his tone left no doubt that he was humoring her.

Liza started going through the final puzzle. “First subgrid, a one in the second space—that’s an
A
.”

“Keep this up, and you won’t need me at all,” he said with a smile.

“Second subgrid, seventh space, a four—we haven’t had one of those before.”

Michael had to look at the phone for that one. “That’s an
S
,” he reported.

“Next grid, we’ve got a two in the fifth space.”

He had to consult the keypad again. “That’s a
K
.”

She looked at him. “Should I point out now that we have ‘ask’?”

“As you said, let’s keep going.”

Liza went back to scanning the puzzle. “Fourth subgrid, a three in the last space.”

“Third letter under nine.” Michael peered at the key. “That’s a
Y
. And maybe I should get one of those big-button phones in here.”

“Or reading glasses,” Liza needled him. “Moving to the next grid, we have a three in the seventh space. That’s an
R
?”

“Right you are,” Michael agreed.

“Then in the sixth subgrid, there’s a one in the sixth space.”

“That gives you an
M
,” Michael reported after a glance at the phone.

In the seventh subgrid, the sixth space has a three. A one there meant
M
, so a three is
O
?”

“You got it,” Michael said.

The next and last clue was in the eighth subgrid. “A one in the sixth space—that’s an
M
again,” Liza said.

She and Michael looked in silence at the line of letters, which seemed to break naturally into “ASK YR MOM.”

“ ‘Ask your mom.’ Well, that’s weird,” Michael finally said. “Not necessarily convincing, but definitely weird.”

“Four puzzles yielding four messages?” Liza asked.

“If you define ‘message’ as a group of words created by arbitrarily twisting a collection of letters,” he replied.

“ ‘Nice face’ and ‘my phone’ pretty well fit in with what happened to Samantha Pang,” Liza argued.

“But ‘you’re an alien’ and ‘ask your mom’ don’t seem to fit anything that happened to Lolly,” Michael shot back. “Unless you figure Ritz intended to drug Lolly and make her up as a Klingon.”

“Then there’s the pattern in the way the puzzles were delivered,” Liza pressed on. “The first seems reasonable enough, if a little cluttered—it looks as if Ritz is trying to help. But the next one has an obvious error—a deliberate error.”

She pointed to the sudoku in question. “She didn’t have to put the LOL in the message. It forces her to put three threes in a row across the bottom of the puzzle. And the ‘ask your mom’ puzzle—there was plenty of room left to arrange the last two letter-bearing clues so that they didn’t conflict. Instead, she deliberately put the
O
in ‘mom’ under the
Y
in ‘YR’—two threes in the same column.”

“Two occurrences do not necessarily make a pattern.”

“I’d say two occurrences are the minimum necessary for a pattern,” Liza retorted.

“I might be willing to concede that it’s a bit too much for coincidence that the puzzles for Sam Pang mention her face and a phone.” Michael shrugged and then shook his head.

“But even granting that the words we dug out of Lolly’s puzzles are a message, what do they mean? Lolly should ask her mom about being an alien? Her mom was abducted by aliens and impregnated with their probes?” He laughed. “I’m sure the tabloids would have had a field day if Rikki had even hinted at that.”

Liza laughed, too—but at him. “Sometimes you are such a science-fiction nerd. Rikki
is
an alien—a resident alien with a green card.”

“Well, yeah, but—”

But Liza wasn’t listening any longer. She dug out her wallet, looking through the pockets for a card she’d been given.

“What are you doing?” Michael asked as she scooted back over to the phone.

“Calling Fritz Tarleton.” She cut off the rest of her reply because someone picked up the phone on the tour tycoon’s private line.

“Tarleton here.” Fritz Tarleton’s voice was unmistakable.

“I sort of expected to get a secretary,” Liza said into the phone. “Oh, sorry. This is—”

“Ms. Kelly,” Tarleton finished for her. “I’m not sure whether I should be glad or worried that you’ve called.”

“I’m trying to track down some information from when you tried to get Ritz interested in the family business. When she was working for you, did she have an office and a telephone?”

“Of course,” he replied.

“Could you check the long-distance records? I need to know if she was talking to anyone in Mexico.”

“I’d be surprised if she didn’t,” Tarleton said. “We have a lot of contacts down there. When we were doing the show, Ritz did a string of episodes about Cabo San Lucas.”

He promised to get on it right away. Liza thanked him and hung up—to find Michael looming over her.

“Now that you’re off the phone, can you explain what’s going on here? What’s this stuff about Ritz talking to people in Mexico?”

She nodded—not happily. “It has to do with a romantic story Lolly told me over hamburgers.”

“When did you—Oh, right, when I was ferrying Rikki around after we met on the pier.” He sat down beside her on the couch. “So, romance and hamburgers?”

“While we ate, Lolly told me how her mother and father were married on Lukas Popovic’s boat—while they were sailing around the Sea of Cortez.”

“Also known as the Gulf of California,” Michael said.

“Mr. Tarleton just told me that Ritz spent some time taping episodes of their tour show at Cabo San Lucas.”

“Which is in Baja California.” Michael nodded his comprehension. “But I still don’t see—”

Before he could say more, the ringing phone interrupted him. Liza picked it up.

“Ms. Kelly? Fritz Tarleton here.”

Liza had to keep herself from looking at the phone in awe. “I didn’t expect—”

“One nice thing about being the boss. When you ask, things get done quickly,” Tarleton said. “The records show that Ritz called a lot of friends in Europe, South America, and even Japan.” He sighed. “I suspect there was a lot of money wasted on those bills. But she also called Mike—Miguel—Obregon in Mexico.”

“Do you know this Obregon?” Liza asked.

“We used to call him the Mayor of Baja,” Tarleton said reminiscently. “He was a local fixer who freelanced doing . . . I guess you’d call them lucrative favors for well-off tourists. I was the first to see how useful it would be to have him working in our organization.”

No time for war stories,
Liza thought. “So you and Ritz both knew him?” she asked.

“He set up most of our shooting down in Cabo,” Tarleton replied. “That was some years ago. He’s pretty much retired now.”

“But Ritz still had his number,” Liza said. “Could I get that, please?”

Tarleton gave her a number with a 52 country code in front. “I’m not sure how this could tie in to what happened to Ritz.” A bit of his tycoon-to-subordinate persona came over the line.

“I’m not sure if it does,” Liza told him. “But I hope to know after I talk with Mr. Obregon.”

They hung up again, and Liza punched in the number she’d copied down.

“Bueno,”
a male voice answered on the other end.

“Um, Mr.—uh, Señor Obregon? My name is Liza Kelly—”

“Then this must be about what happened to poor Ritz.” The voice switched over to fluent English.

“Yes, it is,” Liza said slowly. “Did Mr. Tarleton just call you?”

“No, but I keep seeing your name and picture next to her every time I watch
The Lowdown
,” Obregon replied.

“I didn’t know that they’d penetrated the Mexican market.”

“I get it on my satellite dish,” the Mexican said dryly. “So how can I help you? Ritz was a friend.”

“Her father gave me this number after I asked him to check if she’d been speaking with anyone in Mexico.”

“It was some months ago,” Obregon told her. “She was supposed to be working in Fritz’s office, and I thought she was just bored. She asked about a story I told her years ago when they were shooting down at Cabo.”

“And what was that story, Mr. Obregon?”

“Mike,” he corrected her. “It goes back even more years past, when people were just beginning to discover Baja. This rich American came to me, saying he needed a wedding—or something like it—as soon as possible.”

“So you arranged the wedding?”

“Something like it,” Obregon obliquely replied. “The Church requires banns to be announced and so on, and even the
alcalde
’s office would have held things up with paperwork. But I had a friend—a bartender—who did amateur theatricals and had a monk’s robe, and I found a nice parchment with impressive-looking seals. It might have been a deed; it’s so long ago now I don’t really remember. I put on my good suit and pretended to be the mayor, and my bartender friend officiated over the vows on the American’s yacht.”

“A sailboat?” Liza asked.

“Yes,” Obregon said. “He was very generous in his thanks. I sometimes wondered what happened to them. That’s probably why I mentioned it to Ritz.”

I think I know what happened,
Liza thought uncomfortably. “One more question, even though you may find it silly. Do you have a big black mustache?”

Mike Obregon laughed heartily. “No.”

But as Liza let go a sigh of relief, he said, “I’m afraid it’s all gone white now.”

Liza returned the telephone handset to the receiver with a sick feeling.

Just keep it inside—don’t let on,
she told herself.
There’s no need to get Michael upset.

But he was right beside her, looking at her closely. “I don’t know what any of that was about,” he told her. “But from the look on your face, it has to be bad news.”

So much for that hope.

“I was talking with Mike Obregon, a guy who worked for Tarleton Tours down in Baja. Before that, he was sort of a freelance arranger, providing expensive services for foreign tourists.”

“So?” Michael said a little impatiently.

“He helped set things up when Tarleton’s tourism show shot some episodes down in Cabo. And apparently he told Ritz an old war story that she connected with Lolly Popovic. It’s sort of the flip side to Lolly’s romantic wedding tale.” Liza took a breath. “The dark side.”

“Liza, you’re trying so hard to soften the blow that you’re confusing me,” Michael told her. “Just spit it out, okay?”

“Lukas Popovic hired Obregon to arrange a phony wedding for Rikki,” Liza said. “It wasn’t legally sanctioned in Mexico, and it wasn’t even officiated by a real priest. She wound up with a fancy parchment in Spanish that he thinks was a property deed.”

Michael sat in silence for a moment, shaking his head. “Back in the day, Lukas Popovic was known to have a pretty strange sense of humor.”