Richfield & Rivers Mystery Series 1 - Combust the Sun Read online

  Marathon Studios was obviously in the middle of something that would give the mafia the jitters.

  Chapter Ten

  The phone rang late that afternoon, and I dodged the dancing Elmo to get to it. The voice on the other end of the line belonged to Wade Garner.

  "Got intel on the Anthony murder. Last call Frank Anthony received before he died was from a gal in L.A. named Barrett Silvers. Ever hear of her?" Wade asked.

  "She's a friend of mine!" I said, startled.

  "Well your gal pal's gonna be getting a visit from the FBI," Wade said.

  I thanked him, grabbed my jacket, and told Callie what Wade had just reported. "We need to corner Barrett and get the whole story," I added.

  "The first night I met you, I told you someone who couldn't sleep nights called Frank Anthony just before he died. So it was your friend Barrett!" Callie said, seemingly amazed.

  "Does it surprise you that you're right in your predictions?"

  "Yes, because I just say what I see, or what I feel, at that moment. When it turns out to be true, it sort of validates.. .everything."

  "Validation is good," I said, trying to be supportive.

  I told the guard at the Marathon gate that we'd left something behind during the stockholders' meeting and needed to go back for it. He said the soundstage was locked up.

  "Aaaaarnold!" The guard yelled over the top of the car, nearly deafening us. An older man wearing one-piece zip-up coveralls stopped welding a metal sign at the entrance gate that said Drive Slow and ambled over to us.

  The gate guard gave Callie a seductive wink. "Arnold's got friends in high places. He can get you into every nook and cranny of the place. He'll be glad to unlock the soundstage for you."

  Arnold's scowling face didn't seem to bear that out. He wiped away a tiny trickle of blood running down the crease next to his mouth, as if his skin were so thin it couldn't hold the blood inside his face.

  "The soundstage is open!" Callie leaned across me, waving her cell phone at the guard, as if someone on the line had just told her that.

  The guard waved Arnold off, and us through, as I stared at Callie in amazement.

  "Being blond works. It just does." She shrugged.

  We parked out of sight of the guard shack and walked directly to Barrett Silvers's office. She was meeting with someone, her door was closed, and her male secretary was seated next to a new guy who was obviously her bodyguard, judging from the fact that his forearms were the size of my thighs. Barrett's secretary asked if we had an appointment. I said we didn't, but we'd wait to see her. He assured me that wasn't possible. I suggested he tell Barrett we were outside. He disappeared into her office and was gone about thirty seconds, then returned striking a friendly but defiant pose. "She said she would just love to see you, but she just can't today."

  "Hollywood friendships," I said to Callie and picked up a note pad and scribbled, "The FBI is looking for you." I folded the note in half, handed it to the annoyed secretary, and asked him to deliver it to Barrett while we waited. He disappeared back inside Barrett's office. In thirty seconds Barrett's "meeting" was ejected from her office like spent shell cartridges, and we were ushered in. She asked that we close the door behind us.

  I was in no mood to be pleasant. "The FBI says the last phone call made to Frank Anthony's cell phone before he was murdered was from Barrett Silvers." I waited. I could see the wheels in Barrett's head grinding together like the innards of a three-dollar watch.

  "So what?" she finally said.

  I burst out laughing. "I'm glad you got to audition that ridiculous response on us instead of the feds. How the hell do you know Frank Anthony, Bare?" I asked.

  "Look, after the incident with the snuff films, where I freaked on Isaacs, I called Frank because he was on the Marathon board and I'd met him before."

  So, Frank was on the Marathon board. That's a connection between the stone at Orca 's and the stone etching in Tulsa, I thought.

  "I told him what had happened," Barrett continued. "I was just trying to put a stop to the craziness before I ended up in jail. I didn't want to phone the LAPD and get some cop who was going to sell my story to Hard Copy. That's it. Frank said he'd call a buddy of his at the FBI."

  "Except Frank Anthony is dead," Callie reminded her.

  "Somebody backstage at the shareholders' meeting was being threatened by Isaacs." I raised my voice, "And that somebody said, 'We're doin' her tomorrow.' Now, call me selfish, but I'd like to know who her is. Just to make sure it's not me!"

  Barrett paused while her blood seemed to roll down into her shoes. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

  "I'm not a detective. I'm just a writer, but you're acting real strange, Barrett, and pretty soon, you're going to have to tell someone what you know."

  I locked eyes with her for just an instant before she turned her head away, saying, "Teague, go get a life, will you? You're acting like a bad Angela Lansbury!"

  "Go fuck yourself!" I said, and on that note, we left.

  Outside on the flower-trimmed walkway, Callie said we might not see Barrett again. When I asked her to elaborate, she got a vague look in her eyes and said something about color shifts around her.

  "I just see her in an altered state," Callie said.

  I didn't pursue the "color shifts," because I had all I could deal with in the real world. Barrett Silvers had turned on me.

  "What's with you and tall, rude women? I'm getting a sense that you have some karmic tie that you might want to think about breaking," Callie offered. I wasn't about to tell her that all the women I'd dated had been tall, and arguably rude, and that the joke among my lesbian friends was whether it's fish or women, throw the small ones back.

  At home that night, I took every precaution: floodlights on, alarm set, blinds shut. My body now protected, it was my soul that ached. I found myself staring at Callie Rivers. I was so close to her all day that I could smell the way her perfume changed with the heat of her skin—from sweet, to potent, to sensually musky—as the day wore on. I knew now what that poor teaser horse at my grandmother's farm felt like every time they brought her in to get the stallion excited and then yanked her out to put the expensive brood mare under him. I was excited out of my skin with no outlet. Callie was loving and sweet and cuddling, but she had stuck to her word about not sleeping with me, the earthquake incident seeming to remind her that we'd ventured too close.

  I propped myself up on the bed and picked up a book about 1930s Hollywood and the stars of that bygone era, determined to immerse myself in other people's lives and forget my own. However, reading that Marlene Dietrich loved women all her life and Tallulah Bankhead once announced that she'd always wanted to get into Marlene's pants didn't exactly chill me out.

  Callie wandered through the room asking me what I was reading.

  "Did you know that all the female megastars in Tinsel Town of old were fucking each other?"

  "You mean loving each other," she corrected.

  "Come look." I held up a photo and, when she walked over, I pulled her down playfully onto the bed. "Let me demonstrate." I kissed her seriously this time, with a convincing fervor that admitted I knew this was our moment.

  She pulled back as she had in her apartment, but then, just as swiftly, gave in and her kisses were strong, and deep and probing. I kept my mouth on hers while I unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it away from her, unsnapping the bra she wore and releasing her huge, firm breasts. I slid her pants down and off her as she whispered, "Take your clothes off." I could not have stripped faster if my clothes had been on fire.

  There is a celestial happening when souls mate. It's as if a Divine Force uses the hips and shoulders of one lover to press into the clay of the other, leaving an imprint that no one fills until those exact shoulders, those buttocks, those legs, that belly, slide into what heaven made, and when that happens, the fit is so tight that nothing can unlock it, no amount of rolling or rubbing or kissing. For Callie and me, it was as if a cos
mic glue made of sweet secretions was holding us together. We were one. So incredible was the fit that I couldn't tell up from down, or right from left, or dark from light. I didn't know which wet, pulsing orifice I was inside of. I couldn't tell if she were in me, or I were in her. The sensual sensation was so intense that I no longer knew if I was even in my body, and I wanted only never, ever to leave this blessed place. I could feel her hips thrusting into me and hear her moaning and I realized she was about to explode with the joy of it, when she pulled away from me abruptly. Pleasure aborted, my senses crashed down out of the stratosphere and onto the bedsheets.

  "What's wrong?" I was breathing like a marathon runner.

  "Nothing. You're wonderful. Nothing."

  "It's something," I said. "Did I hurt you?"

  "No, no, no." She pulled herself up into a sitting position, leaning back against the headboard, and clutched her knees to her chest, encircling them with her arms. "That's why I didn't really want this to happen," she said, and then seeing my crestfallen face, she cupped it in her hand. "I've never completely given myself to anyone...so I can't just turn it on."

  "What do you mean?"

  "When I was twenty, a psychic told me that I wouldn't meet the love of my life until I was in my early forties. I remember thinking, 'in another twenty years, what will I have left to give that special someone that I haven't shared with someone else?' I decided to save that one thing for the person I knew I would finally meet."

  "That one thing," I repeated flatly, staring at her. "You have never allowed yourself to climax?"

  "That's unbelievable to you, isn't it?" she said softly.

  "No, absolutely not," I lied, all the while thinking, Omigod, Callie Rivers is a Lamborghini up on blocks! I put my arms around her. "So you've been with other women and you've never—?"

  "I never wanted to."

  "But you were with these women for—?"

  "A while, yes."

  "And didn't your partners ever.. .notice?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "Women can fake it so that even women can't tell," she reminded me.

  I stared into her beautiful, sincere eyes. So maybe she’ll just fake it with me, or maybe she's faking everything right now.

  "So you were with other people, Tee. Did you always climax?" Callie asked. Somehow that question coming from Callie, in light of what she'd just told me, made what I thought was a normal physical reaction to pleasure seem abnormal, selfish, even depraved!

  "You did, of course," Callie answered her own question, and then laughed softly.

  I kissed her neck thinking, Only some berry-eating monk could maintain twenty years of self-control. "But it should have happened, shouldn't it? We were wild for each other. Okay, so now I'm having performance anxiety. Maybe I should have—"

  "Not everything is about you, Teague," she said gently. "This one is about me. I'm just used to pulling back. It'll take time. It'll be fine. Don't focus on it, and just give me time," she said.

  Callie curled up in a ball, her buttocks pressed into my belly. I wrapped around her and snuggled closer. Her scent was overwhelming, intoxicating. I wanted her, and I didn't know how many unfulfilled nights I could take without cracking down the middle like a piece of parched earth.

  I should have told her I was honored that she'd saved herself for me. I should have said it humbled me to think I was the one she'd chosen, but instead, like some cop interrogating a suspect, I got bogged down in the details. Why did Callie deprive herself of pleasure, and why does that deprivation mean so much to her?

  As if reading my mind, Callie said softly, "I just never met anyone before who made me want to let go."

  I held her tighter.

  Chapter Eleven

  Callie awakened early. I could hear her pacing in the living room, the floorboards creaking with every nervous footstep. She'd had nightmares all night about Rita Smith, and she thought we should go over there today. I explained that stars live behind iron gates, in heavily guarded compounds, and we had no chance of ever getting within a thousand yards of Rita Smith. But Callie was so agitated, she wasn't listening. I got dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt, put my morning coffee in a thermos cup, and told Callie we should get this visit over with so I could get some work done today. Callie told me her dream on the way over.

  "Two gigantic black tarantulas around a fire, and we startled them. They bit us, and we were with Rita Smith, and she died of the bite," Callie said. I told her I liked her showgirls and fifty grand dream better.

  I held her hand in mine as we drove up into the Encino hills and turned in at the driveway of an iron-gated mansion. I pointed out the closed gates and the security box, telling Callie this was as far as I could take her. She hopped out of the car, walked to the gate, and lifted the latch. I waited for an intercom to come on with a reprimanding voice, or a guard to demand our identity, or for a bell to go off. Nothing happened. Callie got back in the car. Amazed at the lack of security, I drove up the driveway and parked at the foot of a long, sloping flagstone pathway leading up to the house.

  Up above us, Rita Smith, her carrot-red hair flashing in the sunlight, battled the stiff Santa Ana winds, holding the door to her canary yellow Mercedes open with her hip as she tried to lift out two sacks of groceries and the dry-cleaning. I guess she could have let the servants do it, but by the time she told them what to do, it was probably easier to do it herself. Maybe it took her mind off where Eddie might be on these mornings when he wasn't taping a show or shooting on the movie lot. Maybe he told her he was at the club playing golf. Maybe she didn't care. From the looks of things, they had a great life. Why question a good thing? She might ruin it.

  I'd once read an article about Rita Smith that said she was raised on a farm in Iowa. She met Eddie when they were both in college in Des Moines. The article quoted her as saying, "Who would have known that the boy all my friends said was nuts would turn out to be one of the rich and famous in Hollywood? But we love each other, and we're just ordinary people really." Not too ordinary, I thought as I caught a glimpse of sunlight bouncing off what had to be a quarter of a million dollar diamond on her left hand, and probably a fifty thousand dollar tennis bracelet on her left ankle. She could call anyone, anytime, and get them to deliver whatever it was she wanted, and oddly enough, what she wanted this morning was to pick it up herself.

  She backed away from the car, then turned and shut the door with her hip and headed up the steps that ran along the outside of the mansion leading to a landing and a door that opened onto an upstairs entryway.

  Callie and I were twenty yards from her, but still out of her line of sight, when Barrett Silvers stepped out from under the exterior staircase, surprising Rita and us as well. Rita dropped her packages, and they tumbled over the railing. She screamed and Barrett quickly put her fingers to her own lips, warning her to be silent. I grabbed Callie's arm and pulled her aside into the shade of a large tree. I could see Barrett trying to quiet Rita down and convince her not to go inside.

  Rita Smith was incensed that Barrett trespassed the compound. She threatened her loudly with the police and the possible arrival of her husband and the idea that there were servants upstairs who would blow her brains out.

  "It's too late," Callie whispered, severely upset.

  "What's she doing?" I asked her.

  Barrett gripped Rita's skirt, trying to keep her from scaling the steps as she continued to try to shut her up, but Rita was petrified, and the adrenaline and her superior position three steps above Barrett allowed her to kick and claw her way to the side door as Barrett clung to her.

  Rita yanked herself free and pulled the door open at the top of the landing, where a man in a ski mask was waiting, and he backhanded her as one would a housefly. The force of his stroke sent her head smashing up against the doorjamb, and Rita sank to the floor, blood slowly dripping from the door handle. Barrett's eyes went wide. She hesitated only a moment in her assessment that there w
as nothing more she could do for Rita Smith, and in a desperate act of self-preservation, she jumped over the side of the exterior staircase, landing on the ground below. Callie and I hovered out of sight, paralyzed at what we'd stumbled on.

  Barrett's endorphins must have kicked in, because she scrambled over the grounds in an attempt to escape, but two men were on level ground now—dressed ominously in black, from their black combat boots to their black ribbed sweaters and black knit ski masks—and on her like hunting dogs on a crippled rabbit. Before Callie could stop me, I darted out into the clearing to help Barrett, not wanting the guilt of having been too cowardly to at least divert them from her. I shouted for them to leave her alone, and one of the men turned and rushed me. Callie screamed as he dove on me, pinning me to the ground.

  We rolled over and over trying to get leverage on one another. I caught only pieces of his face under the hood as we struggled—Anglo, older, thin—before he let out a dull moan and collapsed on top of me. Callie had liberated one of the large flat rocks that lined the elegantly manicured flowerbeds along the driveway and used it like a hammer on his head. Grateful for Callie's help, I scrambled to my feet, and we both turned our attention to Barrett.

  If Barrett Silvers saw us, she couldn't have focused long enough to know who we were, because she was fighting for her life fifty yards away from us. We both headed in her direction, but it was too late. The man was pointing something at Barrett. Then came the blast, flames attacking her from all directions, engulfing her in searing, skin-scorching fire. Callie screamed for the man to stop, I screamed for Barrett to run, Barrett screamed for the pain to end.

  I could smell her flesh burning, imagine her expensive gold cuff links searing into her body like a branding iron, coming to rest on her wrist bones. The pain had to be unbearable. She rolled on the ground. He shot more fire at her. She was screaming still.

  My wrestling partner was already waking up. "Get those two!" he shouted, pointing his gun at us and firing bullets at our heads. We dashed through the gate in our best track time and slammed it shut behind us. We were inside the car and out of the driveway in seconds.