The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (18 page)

Maybe admitting I wanted to be a detective had awakened something. A sensor went off in my head, and I didn’t think it would have gone off if I’d heard this story a week or two earlier. There was something not quite right about Eric Stahl’s suddenly appearance at Dennis’s party. “What
do
you remember? I mean, what was the last thing?”

“Let me see. Okay, Eric showed up, and we walked around some, and then he went off to talk to Dennis. And then I saw you out by the pool—”

“I was by the pool? I must have really been loaded.”

“I think you’d smoked a lot of pot. You said your throat hurt from it. I gave you the rest of my Coke.” She smiled, shook her head. “You know what? That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing I knew, there I was opening my eyes and seeing you there.”

“Why’d you run away?”

“I just panicked. I mean, seeing you there, and having that big piece of my memory missing … and being naked … all I wanted to do was get out of there.”

“Makes sense.”

“Joe?”

“Hmm?”

“You hadn’t told Gina about what happened, had you? The night I came over.”

“Nope.”

“I spilled the beans.”

“They needed to be spilled.”

“Everything okay with you two?”

“It is now. We had a bit of a rough patch.”

“I saw her car was back this morning. So things are better?”

“Yes. Thanks for asking.”

“It was all my fault.”

“No, it was my fault, for trying to hide something from her. Don’t worry about it. It’s all over. Everything’s fine.”

She looked at her watch.“I’d better get going. I’m having coffee with David E. Kelley. He’s got a pilot for next year.”

“So you’re not going back to
The Galahad Sisters
?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. And you know what? I feel okay about that. Whatever happens, happens.”

She cut back across the lawns and reentered her house. I gathered my nuts and my detective kit and went inside to decide what to do about Eric Stahl.

Seeing Ronnie, remembering what I’d done for her and where it had led us, reminded me of Keith Colbert, the kid whose picture and resume I’d taken at the TV station. I dug it out, called Elaine, told her I’d promised him an interview, gave her his info. She said she’d get him in. Then I asked if she knew anything about Eric Stahl. She’d knew the name, knew he worked on
Protect and Serve
, but that was it. If I wanted, she could make some calls.

I told her not yet and got off the phone. Soon as I hung up, it rang. “Hello.”

“It’s me.” Claudia Acuna.

Me
was reserved for Gina. But I let Claudia get away with it. “Hi.”

“Let’s get together,” she said.

“Fine. Burton Chace Park.”

“Perfect.”

“You know where it is?”

“If I didn’t, would I have said ‘perfect’?”

“You’re a smartass, Acuna, you know that?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “That’s what you like about me.”

Burton Chace Park is right on the water in Marina del Rey. There’s lots of grass, plenty of benches, sun and sea and boats. All the seagulls you need. The occasional pelican.

I put money in the meter and walked toward the water, past the building housing the community room. Through the sliding glass doors I saw a group of seniors sitting around a long table, engaged in a crafts project involving pine cones. An energetic young woman flitted about, offering encouragement. Ten, twelve years in the future, that could be me sitting in there. Gina too. We’d have a pair of pine cone projects to hang in our bedroom. Assuming it got built by then.

The young woman bent over the table. One of the men copped a feel. She shot erect, her face shocked. Then it melted into a smile. She looked at the man and waggled a finger at him and moved on to the next oldster.

I walked around the building and found a bench with a good view of the boats going by. The sky was clear, with just a few high white clouds. But way off in the west a new load of darkness hovered over the water.

Claudia showed up ten minutes after I did. She had on a windbreaker and jeans and white canvas tennis shoes. Her hair was back in a ponytail. She was carrying a thin briefcase and a brown Peet’s bag.

She spotted me, sat, looked out at the boats. “Pretty out here,” she said. “I don’t get out here enough.”

“Me neither.”

She smiled like she remembered it was the thing to do. Then she unzipped her jacket halfway. The white top underneath was cut low. I had to drag my eyes away.

She sat, picked up the brown bag, opened it. “I stopped on the way,” she said. “Thought we could use some refreshments.” She withdrew one, then another to-go cup, each with an insulating collar. “Pride of the Port, they call it.” She handed one over.

I sniffed it through the drinking slot in the cap. “How’d you know I was a tea drinker?”

“Wild guess.”

She put the other cup on the bench, produced a couple of blueberry scones. She gave me one, reached into the bag once more, distributed napkins. We ate and drank in silence, enjoying the cool air, the warm sun, the sounds of children at play. A seagull landed on the sidewalk and, ever so casually, came closer, soliciting a treat. I tossed it a bit of scone. The bird snapped it up and flew off. Another took its place and got its own snack. Then a pigeon showed up. It got a fragment too. I said, “That’s it, guys.” I guess the birds understood, because they didn’t come back.

When we finished our scones Claudia gathered up the napkins and bags, took them to a trash can, sat back down.“I quit my job,” she said.

I wanted to kiss her. Not enough to do anything about it. But enough to scare me. Gina and I were back on the right track. I was supposed to be a one-trick pony again.

I found a way to scoot a few inches farther from her. “That was sudden,” I said.

“Not so.” She smiled, and it was a different smile than I’d ever seen on her before. Relaxed. Contented. Genuine. “I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.”

“How long?”

She watched a boatload of fishermen go by. “Eighteen years,” she said. “The usual story. Idealistic young journalism student works for peanuts on an alternative paper. She’s lured by the glamour of television news. She gets further and further from anything worthwhile.” She turned to me.“I was all, I’m over forty, it’s tough for female reporters over forty, I have to do whatever it takes to keep my job.”

She pulled the zipper on her jacket back up a couple of inches. The sun was low, and to the west the dark clouds were closing in. “How do you feel about epiphanies?”

“Since I’m guessing you had one, I think they’re just fine.”

“I finally saw that, no matter how good I was, how much I tried to stand above the crowd, when you got to the bottom of it I was just another bimbo doing on-the-scene reports.”

“Walking and pointing and putting on the concerned look.”

“Yes. And I realized that there was a reason women my age shouldn’t be doing that anymore.”

“That reason being?”

“That they can be doing better things with their life. Oh, it sounds so, so …”

“Airy-fairy?”

“Yes. Airy-fairy. This magical realization that, gee folks, what I’ve been doing most of my whole adult life just isn’t cutting it anymore.”

It must have been going around. The only difference was, what I’d been doing my entire adult life was nothing. “So you went in to your boss and quit.”

“Pretty much. Except my boss is out of town, so I went to her boss.”

“And the reaction was?”

“‘Maybe you should take a few days off.’”

“Maybe he was really concerned.”

“This is my life crisis. Don’t go shooting holes in it.”

It was eerily similar to a conversation I’d had with Gina a while back, in the middle of my own midlife crisis. Or maybe it was hers. One of us had told the other to stop shooting holes. It only bothered me a little that I couldn’t remember who was the shooter and who the shootee.“I’ll be quiet.”

“He tried halfheartedly to talk me out of it and said he’d be sorry to see me go and told me to put it in writing and go see human resources. He won’t be sorry to see me go. He’ll replace me with someone younger. Maybe fill one of his minority quotas too.”

“Right. There’s always a couple of black reporters, a Latino or two, and one Asian who looks just like Terry Takamura. But isn’t Acuna a Hispanic name?”

“I’m only a quarter. Not enough to fill the quota.”

“Got it.”

“Anyway, that’s my story. So I’m unemployed. And, so far, I like it.” She stood, walked halfway to the water, whirled around with her arms spread. “Unemployment. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Stop that. You look like Mary Tyler Moore.”

She spun once more, caught her breath, returned to her seat.“Now, let me give you the rest of this material and I can be done with it.” She opened the briefcase, took out a manila folder, handed it over.

I said, “You stole this from the station?”

“Why, no, Mr. Portugal, sir. That would be illegal. Not to mention morally reprehensible.”

“Not to mention.”

“I made copies before I quit and stashed them in my car.”

“The morality of which is unquestioned.”

“Exactly,” she said.

“Why?”

She flushed. “Thought you might … appreciate it. Let’s see. We’d pretty much finished up on you and all the women, so that leaves Sean McKay.”

“So what did you dig up on Seanie?”

“He produced three class-Z movies. Two of them went straight to video. “

“He said Dennis stole his script.”

“Right.” She dug around in the folder, pulled out a few sheets clipped together, handed it over. The first was a cover page for something called
Rushing to Nowhere
. It was
A Screenplay by Sean David McKay
. There was contact and copyright info and what may have been—it was hard to tell through who knew how many generations of photocopying—a coffee stain.

We open on a dark alley
, said the script, proceeding to tell us what happened in said alley. There were two characters, Jenkins the cop and Whiskey Boy, a stool pigeon. There was a conversation about some criminal enterprise about to go down. Whiskey Boy told Jenkins he was dead meat if somebody named Rubber Man found out what he was doing. Then there was a flashlight beam and a voice said, “Got you, you fuckin’ stoolie,” and that was the end of what I had.

I looked up. “This sounds like every other cops-and-robbers movie I’ve ever seen.”

“It sound a
lot
like one Dennis had in development.”

“Dennis was doing movies too?”

“New worlds to conquer.”

I glanced at the script again. “So he did steal this from Sean?”

“It’s pretty damned similar. The two guys in the alley are shot down, Jenkins’s sister goes on a quest to find out who did it, she hooks up with a ninja master, they—”

“Not a ninja master.”

“And not just any ninja master. A time-traveling ninja master. They go back, undo the shooting, screw up the world. One of those things, you go back to the dinosaur age, step on a butterfly, that one thing creates ripples in time, you come back and find the Nazis won World War Two.”

“But she only goes back, what, a few months?”

“A year and a half. So what happens is that she appears in the alley and ninjas the bad guy into submission. And there’s a cat in the alley, which originally ran off in one direction, but it runs off in another. And the cat has an encounter with a dog which it didn’t have before, which changes the dog’s plans and … well, suffice it to say that the president ends up dead and the government is taken over by right-wing fanatics.”

“Just like real life.”

A smile, and she caught my eyes. We sat that way, face to face, maybe moving imperceptibly closer, maybe not, for several seconds longer than we should have. Her scent passed through me, working its magic.

Finally—because I had to do something—I looked down at the file. “Didn’t Sean register his script with the Writers Guild?” I turned to her again. The moment had passed. Thank God.

“He did. The script Dennis is using changes the ninja to a white witch, and changes the dog-cat-president thing, and changes the right-wing takeover to a religious fanatic one. There are enough changes that you couldn’t be certain he based the whole thing on McKay’s version.”

“But he did,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“Because everyone he called up there that night was someone he’d screwed over.”

I popped the top off my tea. There was half an inch of liquid in there, with leaf dust swirling around the bottom. I dumped it on the grass behind the bench, took the cups to the trash can, stood by the railing, watching the charcoal clouds soaring quickly to shore. The sun was barely over the horizon now. It was appreciably colder than when I’d gotten there. Most of the people had disappeared.

I returned to the bench but remained on my feet. “That guy Eric Stahl that Ronnie’s dating?”

“What about him?”

“You know anything else about him?”

“Not that I remember. Why? You think he’s involved in this?”

“I think he’s involved in something.”

“I’m not doing any more research.”

“No one’s asking you to. Look, thanks for all the info. It’s a big help.”

“You’re welcome. If you have any questions, call me next week, when I get back from New York.”

“What’s in New York?”

“There’s a man there … we’ve been having a long-distance thing for a couple of years. I think it’s time to see if it’s going to lead anywhere.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

She was standing now too, facing me, too close for polite conversation. Somehow the jacket had gotten unzipped again, held together by only an inch of YKK’s best way down at the bottom. “You sound like you don’t mean it.”

I forced my eyes not to drop. “I mean it.”

“You’re feeling it too.”

“Feeling what?”

“An attraction.”

I looked away. Back at her, and now her face was even closer. “Yes, and it’s making me really unhappy.”

“Why?”

“Because I love my wife.”