A Date You Can't Refuse Read online

  “I think your suspenders are history, though,” I said. “Sorry. This was all my fault.”

  “My suspenders, they now recycle. Someone will find who will have need of them.”

  I tried to think if I'd ever seen a homeless person in L.A. in suspenders. A greeting card image popped into my head: CNN's Larry King pushing a shopping cart. I discarded it. “What is it you do, Felix?” I asked.

  “I spread the good word.”

  “Which good word is that?” I asked.

  “Two hundred thirty-seven pounds have left my body.”

  “What? How have you done this?” Zeferina asked.

  “I have not done it. Jesus has done it. ‘By myself I can do nothing.’ John, chapter five, verse thirty. I have written a book on my adventure. It is called Jesus Made Me Skinny.”

  Nadja let out a scream. “You wrote Jesus Made Me Skinny?”

  “Yes. Have you read it?”

  “No. At World Triathlon Cup, the German girl, she reads it. She tells of it. I want to buy for my sister, my sister is fat, but she does not read in German.”

  “I can send her my book in Dutch, Japanese, Serbian, Slovak, or, of course, Russian,” Felix said. “And in August my book is in English.”

  “Yes. She will love,” Nadja said. “Tell me, Jesus can give bigger quadriceps?”

  “Jesus can do that,” Felix said.

  “Oh, Christ,” Stasik said.

  “So that's why you're here, Felix?” I asked. “To promote your book?”

  “Yes, Yuri will help me to say my message for the American audience. Also I will remove some skin.”

  “Skin?” Zeferina asked.

  “From when I lose my weight. I have so much skin now.”

  “Jesus cannot remove this skin?” Nadja asked.

  “Jesus will guide the hand of the plastic surgeon. You cannot imagine all this skin. Under my clothes I am very, very baggy.”

  Conversation ebbed for a moment, as we pondered that. A minute or two later I said, “You're a triathlete, Nadja?”

  “Yes, number sixteen best in the whole world. I go to Olympics.”

  I glanced in the rearview mirror. No extra skin on Nadja. “So you're here to—?”

  “I come to meet Oatees.”

  “Who is Oatees?” Zeferina asked.

  “Is like Wheaties, only not so famous,” Nadja said. “Is possible for number sixteen to be on Oatees box. Wheaties, no. What is the word, Vanya?”

  “Endorsement,” Vanya said.

  “Endorsement. I learn to look happy and promote my sport and country.”

  “That's great,” I said. “Zeferina—uh, Maria—”

  “Zeferina Maria Catalina.”

  “Yes, sorry. What about you?” I asked. “What do you do?”

  “My husband, in my country, has now the important government job. I come to speak better English and not so fat, so I am here.”

  “Wow, interesting,” I said. “How about you, Stasik?”

  “I sing country music.”

  I craned my neck around to look at him, surprised.

  “What country?” Nadja asked.

  “The country I'm from,” Stasik said, “is Belarus. The music I sing is American country and western.”

  “You're kidding,” I said.

  “Why do you think I'm kidding?”

  I hesitated. “You don't seem the type.”

  “What's the type?” Stasik asked, a note of challenge in his voice.

  “Never mind. Stereotypical thinking on my part,” I said. Why not a bitter, sarcastic Belarusian country and western singer?

  “You have a CD, Stasik?” Nadja said. “I can hear you on radio?”

  “I can give you a CD. I'm on the radio, but in Europe, not here. Yet.”

  There was a subtle camaraderie among the trainees that intrigued me. I looked in the rearview mirror. “Do you all know each other? I mean, before today—have you all met?”

  There was silence, and then three or four people said no all at once. This was followed by more silence.

  “The snoring bloke,” Stasik asked after a minute. “Zbiggo. What's he do?”

  “Zbiggo's a boxer.”

  No one took issue with that. After a while, travel fatigue set in and my passengers drifted off to sleep or to commune with their own thoughts. I tried to sort out my own, making mental notes about what I planned to discuss with Bennett Graham (everything, with the possible exception of Felix's underwear) and Yuri (much less, if I wasn't to rat out Alik) and Simon (next to nothing). By the time I left Pacific Coast Highway, turning up Topanga Canyon Boulevard, I thought I was the only one awake. But when I looked in the rearview mirror, I saw Stasik leaning over the seat, talking to Felix. Their voices were low, so I couldn't hear a word, but it was interesting to see them halfway to friendship.

  Then I saw Stasik hand something over the seat to Felix. It was a quick movement and the sun was setting over the ocean behind us, so the light was fading, but I saw a glint of metal. What passed between them looked very much like a knife.

  THIRTEEN

  Thunk. Thunk.

  The sounds entered my dream, in which I was driving a forty-foot truck, and then pulled me into consciousness. I opened my eyes.

  I held my breath in the darkness, not knowing where I was. It took time to remember being escorted to House of Blue the night before, shown to my room, and falling into bed, into a deep sleep. Now I was wide awake, half curious and three-quarters scared. Thunk.

  Someone was throwing rocks at my balcony.

  I fumbled for the bedside lamp. The room lit up. The rock throwing stopped. I turned off the light.

  Thunk.

  I turned on the lamp again, got out of bed, and moved to the sliding glass doors that led to the second-story deck. It had to be Simon. It was such a Romeo and Juliet thing to do, finding my bedroom. I was too groggy to figure out how he did it. I just wanted to be with him. Wrap my arms around him. My legs too.

  “Simon?” I whispered, leaning over the balcony. He was a dark blob beneath me.

  “Catch,” he whispered back. “Climb down.”

  Something hit my arm and I grabbed it. It was a heavy rope, knotted on one end. I reeled it in; on the other end was a rope ladder. The ladder had big hooks I was able to attach to the railing, and I set about climbing down, the moon lighting up the night sky just enough to help. The things I do for this guy, I thought, and stumbled on the last step. He took my arm to steady me. I turned and stifled a gasp.

  I was face-to-face with a total stranger.

  “Sssh.” He was tall, very skinny, and young, and had some gadget on his forehead.

  “God in heaven, who are you?” I asked, shaking off his arm.

  “I gotta talk to you,” he whispered. “We gotta be quiet. C'mon. This way.”

  “Are you nuts? I'm not going anywhere. It's freezing. It's the middle of the night. Who are you?”

  “Okay, just duck down, then. Here.” He took off his hoodie sweatshirt and put it over my shoulders. He readjusted the gadget on his head. It was a flashlight, I saw, like a miner might wear. “Please. If we're standing up, they can see us from the main house. Please.”

  I sank into a squat. He was too polite to be sinister, and he was trying to grow a beard, with mixed results, which made him look vulnerable. “Tell me who you are,” I whispered.

  “Crispin Harris,” he said. “I tried to see you earlier, but they wouldn't let me in.”

  “Are you—Bob?”

  He nodded. “Then I tried to follow you, but I lost you.”

  “In the red car? You scared me. Okay, so you found me. What's this about?”

  “Chai. Her and I were gonna get married.”

  “You're Chai's—fiancé?” I pulled his sweatshirt on over my head, glad I was in pajamas, at least. And socks. Calabasas nights were freezing, even in May.

  “Well, we sorta broke up, but we would've got back together. You're Wollie Shelley. I found about you from their web
site. There's a whole thing about you already. They gave you her job.” His head whipped around suddenly. “What was that?”

  I turned. I couldn't see anything in the darkness, but then I heard a yelp and a series of howls from the canyon side of the property. Not far away from the sound of it.

  “Animals,” I said.

  “Coyotes. Probably killing a cat. Here—” He pulled a blanket out of a backpack and put it in my lap. “I knew you'd be cold. Chai always was cold.”

  I spread the blanket around me gratefully. “But why are you here?”

  “These MediasRex guys. They did something to Chai. They got rid of her.”

  I started shivering all over again. “Wh-what do you mean, got rid of her?”

  “Murdered her.”

  I knew it. I'd known it for a day and a half. “Wh-why?”

  His eyes narrowed. “You don't have any idea? You don't know about the scam?”

  “What scam?”

  He looked around, then leaned in. “Okay, that's what I figured. I figured you didn't know. Chai found out about a scam going down. She wouldn't tell me what. A week before she died we talked about it. Me and her met like this a bunch of times.”

  “She didn't tell the cops about this scam?”

  “No.” He looked over his shoulder. “I told her to, but she wanted to work it.”

  “You mean blackmail?”

  “Uh-uh. She didn't want money. She wanted to be in movies. These people could do that for her, they got connections. That was gonna be the trade-off. They'd get her into movies and she'd keep her mouth shut about what she'd found out. I thought it was a bad idea. We had a big fight over it.”

  “So you're saying they murdered her instead?” I asked.

  Crispin nodded.

  I gulped. “How?”

  “See, that's exactly what the cops said. ‘How?’ Like I'm supposed to figure it all out for them. Hello, that's their job.”

  I took a deep breath. “So you don't actually know for sure that—”

  “And her mom, she goes, ‘Crispin, don't you think the cops would know if it was a murder?’ Everybody's like, yeah, right, Crispin, you watch too much TV But you know how many murders happen every day in America?”

  “No.”

  “Forty-six. Every single day. Forty-six people get whacked, why not her?”

  “Good point,” I said. “Okay, back up. So Chai wanted to be an actress, and—”

  “Actress and model. She was good, she just didn't have the connections. It's all about connections. It's not what you know, it's who you know. That's how it works in Hollywood.”

  I knew that wasn't quite how it worked, but I let it go. “Was there any kind of investigation?” I asked. “The cops must've looked into it, at least.”

  “Yeah, CHP or whatever. Said it was a car accident. There was an autopsy, too, what was left of her. They said it didn't show it was murder. But here's the thing: it didn't show it wasn't murder, right? It couldn't prove that, right?”

  I felt ill. “How long ago did she die?”

  “Three weeks, two days ago. I'd been leaving messages on her cell and she wasn't calling me back and I called her mom and her mom goes, ‘Cheryl's dead. She crashed the car that she drove at her work.’ And then her mom had her cremated. Can you believe that? Who cremates their kid?”

  A lot of people. But I felt his frustration. Cremation. Game over. Case closed. “I'm so sorry,” I said, reaching to touch his shoulder. He was shivering. Then he began to cry. I pulled the blanket off me and put it around him.

  He grabbed my hand and gripped it. “I just—I saw your name on the website and it said you'd been on TV, so I checked out a clip they had on YouTube, so that's how come I knew I had to come see you. You got connections, right? You know TV people, so you could get on the news, get them to pay attention to this.”

  “I don't, really. I'm not in that world. Chai was lots more famous than I am.”

  “Then how come nobody's talking about her?”

  Good question. I wanted to tell Crispin that publicity wouldn't ease his grief, it could prolong it, that he had a sweet face and from what I'd heard of Chai, dumping him was the kindest thing she'd done. But he couldn't hear any of that. “Crispin, I'd like to help, but no one's going to listen to me. I wasn't here. I didn't know Chai.” Feeling bad vibes while wearing her clothes didn't count.

  “You think you're safe, working for these criminals?” he asked. “You're not safe. She said she lost her diary. Yeah, right. They stole it. I guarantee you. People spied on her. If you think you got friends here, you don't. Don't trust any of them.”

  This was exactly what I didn't need to hear.

  A squeal from the shrubbery set my teeth on edge. It sounded like some little creature being tortured. This was followed by the yelps of coyotes. And then, from inside the Big House, a bark. Crispin started.

  “Olive Oyl,” I whispered.

  “She'll come out the dog door. This happened before. I gotta make a run for it.”

  “How'd you get in past the guard?” I asked.

  “I didn't. I came through the canyon.” He stood, turning on his headlamp.

  “I thought they had some major security system here.”

  “The main house, yeah. Not this one, except for the first-floor doors and windows.” He was poised to run.

  “Wait.” I grabbed his arm. “Was it you shooting at the house yesterday?”

  He looked over his shoulder and talked fast. “I wish. I'd like to shoot them all. Murderers. Thinking they can just get away with it. They will, too. If you don't say anything, then it's just me, I'm the wacko, I'm just the loser she dumped.”

  “Crispin—wait.” I was feeling desperate. “The thing is, they need evidence. Do you have any proof at all? Anything you can point to and—?”

  “I got proof.” He stopped to look me in the eye. “The newspaper. It came out a week ago, after I'd already been to the cops. I told them, I left messages, they said okay, we'll get back to you, but they never got back to me. To them it's not proof, it's nothing.”

  “What'd the paper say?”

  “That she drove off the road in a Corvette.” He gathered up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. Olive Oyl, still inside the house, was in a frenzy. “She couldn't've.”

  “Why not?”

  “Chai in a 'Vette? I'm the one taught her to drive, in high school. It took six months. She flunked driver's ed. Chai wouldn't touch a stick shift, not in a million years. At night? Alone? In the dark? Not in a million years.”

  Just like me.

  My heart was pounding, watching him disappear into the night. I was sold. I believed him. His “proof” might look weak to the cops, but not to me. I was certain, right down to my socks, that somewhere on this property, a murderer slept.

  I wanted Simon.

  I climbed up Crispin's rope ladder to my room. Chai's room. And, still in Crispin's sweatshirt, crawled into Chai's bed. And lay there shivering, alone in the dark.

  FOURTEEN

  I awoke hours later disoriented. Light poured in my window, brighter than the bedside lamp I'd kept on all night. I sat up.

  My brain was on the same loop I'd fallen asleep to: I gotta get outta here. Chai's dead, and I'm the new Chai. She knew too much and I know too much. I want Simon.

  But now, in sunlight, a new voice entered the mix: Call Bennett Graham. Get instructions. Do it now.

  I looked at my bedside clock. Nine-fifteen. Why was it so quiet? Of course: I was in House of Blue and the trainees were in an English seminar in Big House.

  I got out of bed and went rummaging around in my suitcase for some sweats. Then I did another quick check of the room. Behind the bed was a phone jack but no phone anywhere. Strange, but no stranger than the bedroom itself, done in strong reds, blues, and purples, a sophisticated look, but not especially restful. It was, in fact, suggestive of nightmares. I could almost believe I'd dreamed Crispin's moonlight visitation, if not for the rop
e ladder and hoodie sweatshirt draped over an acrylic armchair. I stuffed them in the back of a closet. Had Crispin ever come in this room? I imagined him climbing up that ladder, having frenzied sex with Chai in the fuchsia four-poster, wrapped in sapphire silk sheets under the magenta ceiling. Thinking of sex led back to Simon and the weeks since we'd done it ourselves. It had been even longer since we'd done it in a bed.

  Be careful, he'd said in his phone message. Why hadn't he called back? Oh. No cell signal. Right.

  Time to find a regular phone.

  I stepped out into a hallway that was mind-bogglingly blue—blue tile floor and deep blue walls—and headed to the left, toward the wing I assumed to house the bedrooms.

  The first door I came to was wide open. Interesting. My room could be locked from the outside with a key—Grusha had given me one the night before. I'd stuck it in my pocket, thinking, Who locks bedroom doors with keys, outside of Jane Eyre? Now a more sinister thought occurred to me: Could someone lock me in? Better hang on to that rope ladder.

  I glanced back down the hallway, then entered the room. I couldn't find a phone. But as long as you're here, said the voice in my head, you might as well spy.

  I glanced around. Unmade bed, suitcases on the floor, clothes spilling out. So who was the slob? I went through my mental list of the trainees I'd met last night, with my mnemonic devices: Felix, Formerly Fat. (Until Jesus Made Him Skinny.) Nadja Triathlete. Zbiggo-the-Boxer. Stasik Banjo. Zeferina Maria Someone or Other. Uncle Vanya.

  The clothes on the floor were male. I moved around dirty-looking boxer shorts, gently, with my sock-clad toe. The taboo of going through someone else's stuff was strong.

  Spies, said the voice in my head, can't afford taboos. Okay. I read the luggage tag. Zbigniew Shpek. Since I'd already been through Zbiggo's pockets, this was no big deal. But aside from several pill bottles, I found nothing of interest. I moved on.

  The next room was Felix's. I recognized his body-bag suitcase, now empty. Felix had not only unpacked, he'd made his bed and affixed a crucifix above it with a pushpin. I nosed around but didn't find the knife/knifelike object I'd seen Stasik hand to him in the Suburban, or a passport, or anything suspicious. Nor did I find a phone.