“That was my thinking,” I agreed.
“Except maybe somebody would rather you didn’t.”
“You don’t still have drive-bys in Los Angeles, Detective Shea?”
“On that stretch of Hollywood? Sure, it could happen. I’d be surprised, but it could happen. But you factor in how much trouble somebody’s going to over this whole ‘angels in the abbey’ crap—”
“Angel of the Abyss.”
“—it does seem pretty damn coincidental to me, I got to admit.”
I wasn’t arguing. Simply thinking about it got my skin prickling all over again.
“So the way this goes,” Shea went on, absently worrying his necktie, “is that you tell me whatever it is you haven’t told me yet, because there are some awfully big pieces left out of this puzzle, Mr. Woodard.”
Downing the foul dregs of the coffee, I made a tight knot of my eyebrows and locked eyes with Shea. I hadn’t said a word about Jake, though despite my diminishing liking for the guy concurrent with my rapid sobering up, I didn’t think for a second he had anything to do with any of it. My ex-wife, on the other hand, was another matter entirely.
I said, “Helen.”
“Yes,” he said. “The former Mrs. Woodard.”
“I haven’t spoken to her in more than a year.”
“But she got you the job, didn’t she? She recommended you to Ms. Wheeler.”
“That’s what I was told.”
“Are you not on good terms with your ex-wife?”
“I’d say not. She left me for another guy. I didn’t take kindly.”
“Then why would she want to help you out like this?”
“It’s not that I need the help,” I said. “I’m not hurting.”
“She pulled for you.”
“I don’t know if she did. She knows—knew—Ms. Wheeler in some capacity. Dropped my name. Maybe she didn’t even think about it first.”
“Just slipped out.”
“Like that,” I said.
“For a gig a hundred people in Los Angeles could do without traveling.”
“Probably a thousand. And a lot of them better than me.”
“Isn’t that just a little strange?”
“She said she wanted to keep the whole thing under wraps.”
“Leslie Wheeler said that?”
I nodded. “She wanted to maintain control over the project. Over the film. I think she was afraid if L.A. people got involved, it would get out of hand and it wouldn’t be her baby anymore.”
“Wanted all the glory, then?”
“Such as it would be, sure. Far as I know, nobody outside of me and that little knitting club knew a thing about it.”
“Knitting club?”
I grinned. “My nickname for their group.”
“I see,” Shea said.
He tapped the tip of his pencil on the notepad and made a guttural noise in his throat. When he glanced up at me again, his sourpuss had softened to a look of concern, or close to it.
“Do you know where your ex-wife lives, Mr. Woodard?”
“Somewhere around here.”
“In Hollywood?”
“In L.A.,” I said. “I have no idea where, exactly.”
“We had a recent address for her and a Ross Erickson — you know him?”
I frowned. “Yeah. That’s the fu — the guy she ran off with.”
“Well. A couple of officers went to have a word with her this afternoon, after we last talked at Ms. Wheeler’s office.”
“Fantastic.” My hand contracted, splitting the cup.
“She wasn’t there, is the thing. Nobody was.”
The last few drops of room-temperature coffee dribbled down my wrist, but I paid it no attention. “What are you driving at, Detective?”
“Fact is, no one’s seen her or Mr. Erickson for about a week. Far as we can tell, they haven’t been at home at all. Their apartment doesn’t appear to have been tossed like Ms. Wheeler’s office was, and there was jewelry inside. A small amount of cash, too. No robbery, and no planned vacation in all likelihood. Folks don’t usually leave everything behind when they’re planning on going away for a week.”
I mulled this over, unsure how to react. I wondered if they’d found anything approaching drug paraphernalia, and decided Shea wouldn’t tell me if they had. All I could manage to say was, “I don’t talk to her.”
“You don’t seem very upset.”
“I don’t know what I am. Today I’ve found a body, been shot at, and now I’ve just been told my ex-wife is — what, missing?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re suggesting it.”
“Does she do anything with movies? Like you or Ms. Wheeler?”
I moved my jaw without a sound a bit, jarred by the change in topic.
“She — no. She’s in insurance. Or she used to be. She couldn’t care less about something like this.”
“But she knew Leslie Wheeler.”
“Apparently.”
“Seem like strange bedfellows to you?”
“I couldn’t say, as I never met Ms. Wheeler.”
Shea grinned. “You have a point there. You want another coffee?”
“I’d rather drink crude oil,” I complained. “Listen, how long am I going to have to stay in town?”
“You watch too many old movies, Mr. Woodard.”
“It’s what I do.”
“You’re not obligated to remain here. Of course I’ll need to talk to you again as this comes together, but I can’t keep you from going home to Massachusetts. I’d appreciate it, however, if you’ll keep me apprised of your whereabouts.”
Shea didn’t have anything else to drill me about after that. He asked a few pointless questions, small talk about where I grew up and what I’d done when I was in L.A. last, but I sensed it was all devised to let me down gently after informing me that Helen was missing. He gave me his card for the second time in one day and told me they’d posted a couple of guys in an unmarked car in front of the hotel — a security detail, he called it. As he was walking me back to my dour chauffeurs, he patted me on the back in a fatherly way and said, “Don’t worry about your ex, Mr. Woodard. I doubt it has anything to do with this mess.”
I wasn’t nearly as confident as he was, but I didn’t say so. Outside, in the perfect Southern California night, Shea fired up a Parliament and offered me the pack. I accepted, delighting in the slight buzz I got from not chain-smoking all the time and getting used to it. We puffed in silence, waiting for the patrol car to come around, until he cleared his throat and narrowed his eyes.
He said, “Whatever happened to this Grace Baron, anyway?”
“She vanished,” I told him. “She was declared dead less than two years later. Some folks say she ran off with a Communist agitator, or that he killed her. It’s probably just an urban legend born of the McCarthy era.”
“So that’s, what — ninety years ago?”
“Thereabout, yes.”
“Before Black Dahlia,” he mused.
“Yeah,” I said, “but after Virginia Rappe.”
“Good old Tinseltown,” the detective mused. “Cold-case capital of the world.”
“Is that true?”
The patrol car pulled slowly up on Wilcox and idled in front of us. Detective Shea shrugged and dropped his smoke on the sidewalk, grinding it under his heel.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Go on back to your hotel, Mr. Woodard. Try and get some sleep.”
“Too bad the bar’s closed by now,” I said, and I got into the back of the police car.
The conscientious hotel staff had, however, restocked my expensive mini-fridge, so I made myself a fifteen-dollar highball and sat back on the bed. I reflected on how surprised I was that the detective seemed to know who Virginia Rappe was — the aspiring actress whose mysterious death ruined Fatty Arbuckle’s life and career — which led me to think about what a wild time the 1920s really were in Hollywood. Murders, drugs, prostitution, blackmail, organized crime…the modern movie business had nothing on them. Rappe died in ’21, followed by the murder of William Desmond Taylor in ’22 from being stabbed in the back. Plenty of grim tales of the like followed, from Thelma Todd to Elizabeth Short, but in the 21st century were they anything more than lurid stories from a bygone era?