I was tired and hot and responded accordingly. That bastard! Was he just not answering the door? How does he expect me to help him, for God’s sake?
Then, calming down, I realized that Craig couldn’t know I had good news for him about Lost Legacy. He’d probably spotted me out here and thought I’d come to nag him about the three-thousand-dollar advance I’d loaned him against his next potential check from Bronson & Bronson.
Or he was just being typically hermit-like. Some writers develop agoraphobia while writing a book and never even go out to the store for food. They’d starve rather than leave the house and the book for even a moment. Many never answer their telephones or collect their mail for weeks, unless they think a check will be in the box.
Craig Dinsmore hadn’t been like that in recent months, however. He was more the kind who needed to gab about his work, and as Nia had confirmed, he’d been out this week to the bars, doing just that. So if he was inside now, writing, and just didn’t want to answer the door, I should feel relieved. That meant he was working hard on the next book, a follow-up to Lost Legacy, and if that was the case, his money troubles were over. And so, thankfully, were mine.
Still, where writers are concerned, I’d learned never to take anything for granted. No deal is a deal until it’s signed.
I went back up onto the rickety little porch and banged on the window. “Craig, I know you’re in there! Open up! I’ve had a new offer from Whit-more, and it’s big. We need to talk!”
I listened intently and heard a sound like a bump inside.
“Craig, this is your life we’re talking about!”
I shook the door handle, hoping it might be unlocked. It wasn’t.
Resolutely, I trudged back to the lobby and pretended that Tinkerbell wasn’t there, poised on her haunches to spring. The inside of the lobby was dusty and smelled of mold, making me sneeze.
“I need the key to number twenty-six,” I said, dabbing at my nose with a Kleenex. “My friend isn’t answering, and I’m afraid he’s had another heart attack.”
“He’s got a bad heart?” the old man said nervously.
“Yes,” I lied. “And if he dies here, the cops will be milling about forever. They’ll want to go through your room, too—your office, your books, everything.”
I had guessed right that this would not be a good thing. The old man’s toughened hand quickly scrabbled along a board with hooks and came up with a key that had “26” on it.
Back at Craig’s room, I slid the key into the lock and pushed in fast, before he could know what I was doing and push me right back out.
“Listen, Craig! I’ve been negotiating my ass off to get you a good deal—”
I stopped in my tracks. He wasn’t here. There was only the one room, with a door to what must be a bathroom in back. Was he in the bathroom, then?
I walked closer to the door and called out, “Craig? It’s Mary Beth. Are you in there?”
No answer.
Then who had moved that curtain? Was it just the wind, coming through that plastic-covered window?
But there hadn’t been any wind that I had noticed. Not enough to have caused even a ripple.
On a round table in front of the window was a laptop computer that seemed fairly new. I wondered if Craig had bought it with money from the sale of his car. To the left were several used foam cups with dregs that must have been coffee, as well as the last crumbs of some sort of pastry. There was also an inexpensive, drugstore-variety answering machine that held nineteen unanswered calls, according to the blinking green light. A small portable printer was attached to the laptop and next to it were sheets of manuscript paper, about an inch high. An El Segundo library card was propped up against a lamp, and on the floor around the table were odd crumpled sheets that Craig had obviously tossed away as not right.
So he had been working. That was good. I started to turn back to the front door, but couldn’t resist a peek first at the finished sheets of manuscript. They were upside down, so I turned the entire stack over and saw the title: Under Covers.
Odd. Did he mean Undercover? A spy novel? That didn’t sound like Craig. He was more into investigative nonfiction like Lost Legacy, where real-life mafia slugs were found under upturned rocks.
A look at the next few pages revealed that the title was a play on words, and the book seemed to be a fictional account of the Hollywood scene “between the sheets.” He’d written about old Hollywood in the 1940s, accounts of wild exploits of high-level directors with young female stars, sexual harassment, and the fact that actors were forced to cover up their homosexuality to make them more of a heartthrob to female viewers. Names of stars, though, had been changed to protect the noninnocent.
I’d had no idea Craig was writing a book like this, and I couldn’t see Paul Whitmore paying the same thing for this book as he was offering for Lost Legacy. While its mafia-don story had been told before, Craig had added a psychological edge to it that had made Whitmore take notice. This book, though it seemed well written, was as stale as yesterday’s news. The casting-couch angle had been done before, over and over. In fact, some of it seemed familiar, as if I’d read it somewhere before.
What the hell was going on?
I’d taken a speed-reading course years before, so it didn’t take me long to read the first few chapters. Confused and concerned, though, I stopped reading at page thirty-four. Setting the page down, I did something I’d never done before. Pushing the “on” button on Craig’s computer, I sat on his chair and tried to bring up the Under Covers document. I was pretty good with computers, but there was something odd about this one: there were no documents on the hard drive. None at all. No letters, no memos, no books. If anything had ever been on the hard drive, it had obviously been wiped clean. Puzzled, I opened the CD-Rom drive and the floppy disk drive, but both were empty.
Before I had time to think it through, I heard a slight noise that seemed to be coming from behind the motel. A thud? Someone hitting the wall back there? Images of O.J. and Kato Kaelin came to mind—someone running into an air conditioner with blood on his hands.
Then I realized the sound must have come from the bathroom. Without thinking, I strode over there and threw the bathroom door open, determined to confront Craig about why he hadn’t been answering his calls and why the hell he was hiding from me. It was his own fault, I thought, if I caught him on the john.
But Craig wasn’t hiding at all. He was right there on the floor, blood all over his forehead that was slowly seeping onto the old, grubby tiles.
In shock, I could barely move. I looked at the window, which was open. Cheap plastic curtains in a gaudy flower pattern were blowing in a light salty breeze that came off the ocean from this side of the motel. There were marks on the sill that seemed to be blood, marks that might have come from a killer, possibly escaping that way.
I knelt down beside Craig, feeling for a pulse. I couldn’t find one anywhere. I touched his cheek. Still warm. He hadn’t been dead long.
Stroking his forehead, I couldn’t hold back tears. The poor guy never got the chance to get out of the hole he’d dug himself into. And we were so close to getting what he wanted.
Then, as if in a nightmare, I saw that the blood had originated at a large gash on Craig’s forehead, and that lying by his side was a bloody Chinese dildo—made of ivory, and intricately carved to please, I supposed, in all the right places. It looked very much like the one in Tony’s apartment the night before.
I knelt there for a long moment, so staggered I wasn’t able to stand. I guess I noticed the draft, finally, that slammed the front door shut. Grasping the bathroom sink, I pulled myself up slowly and realized there was blood on my skirt and my knees.
I was still standing over Craig’s body, blood all over me, when the police banged on the front door