2 Sisters Detective Agency Page 14
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to see some very important people,” Baby said, plugging her phone into the car’s system. A map appeared on the console. I could see texts pinging silently into a bubble at the bottom of the screen, the number of unopened messages climbing steadily. Again the feeling pulsed through me that I was missing something. No teenager could possibly be so inundated by communication on any regular sort of day, nor would they so happily ignore the onslaught of messages Baby was now receiving. I brushed off my uncertainty, thinking that some news in her social circle must have just broken. Or maybe she was being barraged by texts in a group conversation. I headed for the address on the screen in Downtown Los Angeles as the garage door slid closed behind me.
Chapter 56
Vera pushed the doorbell at 103 Redmark Avenue, Brentwood, and listened to the chimes ringing inside the big house. She straightened her skirt and flipped her hair. Though she was only four blocks from her own home, Vera felt like a different person. She liked taking on new personas. As a kid, desperate for attention, she had worn all kinds of identities with the girls in her pony club and in her swim squad. Once she had been the secret love child of an affair between her mother and Hollywood heartthrob Kurt Russell. Another time she had been fighting seizures caused by a rare and incurable tumor in her brain.
Vera liked provoking reactions in people. Awe. Sympathy. Jealousy. All her life she’d watched her father twist and wring emotions from his men, smile and laugh with them around the dinner table while they shoveled pelmeni dumplings into their mouths, or make them cower in their seats while he raged and sneered in the pool room.
It hadn’t taken much to shake off the identity of Vera Petrov. To ensure she wasn’t being followed by whoever was hunting them, the man who had killed Benzo and taken Ashton for a little joyride, she had set out from home and driven up into the mountains. She blasted her Porsche along old fire trails and down a narrow road behind a property owned by the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre, security cameras following her progress as she went. By the time she was back in Brentwood, she was practicing being her new self, the girl next door just popping round for a quick and friendly favor.
When she heard footsteps on the other side of the door, she painted on a sweet smile and gazed happily at the old woman who answered.
“My name is Annabelle Cetes,” she explained. “I live one street over.” She pointed in the opposite direction of her mother’s mansion on Redmark Avenue. “I’m so sorry to bother you, but my little brother was here in the street earlier playing with his friends, and I think he might have kicked his soccer ball up onto your roof.”
“Oh, all right,” the old lady said. “Come in. We can go and see from the second floor.”
Vera followed the woman into the house, her upper lip stiff as she tried to mask her disgust. The houses of old people always gave her the creeps. The elderly made her think of disease, bodily fluids, dust. There were still people living in Brentwood who had bought their houses before the boom in the seventies, who didn’t belong next to the sprawling ranches of the actors, oil magnates, Saudi princes, and stock-market superstars who owned the rest of the area. They were normies, nestling where they didn’t belong, like parasites, their modest homes overshadowed by their neighbors’ huge walls and trees designed to keep out the paparazzi.
Vera followed the crone to the second floor and an open window. When the old woman’s back was turned, Vera slipped a tiny wireless black camera the size of a garden pea out of the pocket of her skirt and peeled the backing tape off its surface. Vera went to the window and leaned out, made a show of squinting in the afternoon light at the roof of the first floor while she stuck the camera to the outer edge of the windowsill.
“Whoops,” she said brightly when the camera was in place. “I think I might have the wrong house.”
With the device in place, Vera walked out, not bothering to disguise her distaste now for her surroundings. She brushed off her shoulders, straightened her spine, and she was Vera Petrov again. Without bothering to offer the old woman any kind of thanks or good-bye, Vera took a bottle of antibacterial gel out of her handbag as she exited the house and didn’t look back as she sanitized her hands.
Across the street, behind a black wrought-iron gate woven with ivy, a small brown terrier was snapping angrily at her, its barks squeaky and racked with panic.
“See you tonight,” Vera murmured at the animal.
Chapter 57
The GPS had led us to Santee Alley, the downtown fashion district. My father’s Maserati was a smooth, humming, luxuriously awful ride compared to my Buick, and for the first time I had a moment to grieve my lost leopard-print lady. I stood by the window of a children’s clothing store, gawking at a pair of eight-hundred-dollar shoes for toddlers as a little girl inside the store gawked at me. Between my pink hair and tattoos and oversize, well, everything, little kids are often fascinated by me.
Baby tapped away on her phone. She stopped to check her reflection in the window of the store, deciding to pull her curls into a puff at the very top of her head. She dropped a hip and pouted at herself as I stifled a laugh.
“We don’t have an appointment,” she said, stepping back to look at the next store over. “We’ll have to beg our way in. So it’s important that you stay out of sight.”
“What is this place?” I looked up. The windows at the front of the other store were blackened. A single gold letter U was bolted above the heavy steel door painted black. “U? What’s that stand for?”
“It’s not U like You.” Baby rolled her eyes. “It’s Ooo—Ooo La La.”
“What does it mean?”
“Nothing.”
“So why does it have to be pronounced that way?”
“Because it’s, like, the most relevant emerging fashion boutique in the world.” She huffed. “And that’s how you say it.”
“I thought you said we were coming to see very important people.”
“We are,” she said. “Sean and Penny Hanley are just…everything.”
“‘Everything’?” I said, mimicking the reverence with which she had said the word. Baby didn’t so much as crack a smile.
“Get out of the way, Rhonda.” She waved me off to the side and pushed a pearl buzzer set in the wall. The beg our way in she had mentioned seemed to happen by ESP while she stood there pouting with her hip dropped. The door clicked as it unlocked, and I had to scramble to follow Baby into the store before the steel door shut on me.
The space inside was elaborate but confused. It seemed the store’s designers hadn’t known if they wanted to go for abandoned warehouse or haunted Edwardian mansion. Candelabras stood by crumbling faux brick walls, and diamond chandeliers hung on worn brown ropes from exposed pipes. There were two racks of clothes in a space that might have accommodated fifty. Behind a huge black marble counter, a young woman with a blond bob was arranging paperwork. In a corner of the room, a young man, who so closely resembled her that they were clearly twins, was slumped in a plush velvet chair, scrolling on his phone. He lifted his eyes from the screen, looked me over, laughed, and went back to his scrolling. The young woman came out from behind the counter with a similar disdain, her step quick and stern, like someone preparing to chase a beggar off their porch.
“You don’t have an appointment,” she said to Baby. “And who are you? I didn’t see you on the security system.”
She made a gesture, and two suited security guards materialized seemingly out of nowhere. My mind was racing with defenses, but Baby spoke over me.
“This is my fashion consultant, Eleanor Wave,” Baby said. “I’m so sorry we didn’t check in earlier. We just arrived from Paris.”
The young woman gave Baby a full-body visual examination, then stood back like she’d been slapped awake. She put a hand to her chest with the kind of drama that made me want to giggle.
“I’m Penny Hanley.” She offered her hand. “Oh, your cheekbones.”
“Matte,” Baby said. “Can we?”
“Please.” Penny gestured to the racks. Baby went and shifted items of clothing along the nearest rail. Some pieces were so thin—mere strips of fabric—I assumed they were men’s ties.
“Who’s Matt?” I whispered, coming alongside her and pretending to sift through the clothes.
“My fashion name. Not Matt, like the man’s name. Matte. With an e at the end. Like the finish.”
“That’s hilarious,” I murmured.
“Don’t touch the clothes. Just the hangers.”
“Where are the prices?”
“There are no prices.” Baby rolled her eyes.
“I didn’t know you were into this kind of stuff,” I said. I gestured to the filthy denim cutoffs Baby wore. “Those shorts look like you got them off a three-year-old hobo.”
“They’re supposed to look like that.” Baby huffed. She turned and strolled over to Penny and her brother with one of the men’s ties. Some kind of approval was given, and Baby slipped off her T-shirt, exposing her tiny upturned breasts to the entire room. There was no dressing area to speak of. Once she had it on, it appeared that the garment was not a men’s tie but a strip of black fabric meant to cover her breasts horizontally like the censorship bar in a nude photograph. Baby pouted at herself in a mirror along the wall, posing in the top. Penny seemed to be on the edge of bursting out with words, holding herself back with difficulty. Finally, she gave in.
“I have to ask. Who are you repped by?”
“I’m independent,” Baby said.
“Oh.” Penny fanned herself like a Southern belle. “Wow. Wow. Sean? She’s independent.”
Sean looked up again, squinted at Baby, sighed and shuffled in his chair, tapping on his phone again.
He seemed to think for a moment, then gave a bored sigh. “Hire a time machine, because you’re at least a year too old.”
Chapter 58
“Well, those were just about the worst people I’ve ever met,” I said when we were outside again. “But I think she clocked you, if that helps.”
“That was Sean and Penny Hanley,” Baby said.
“Yes, you said.” I tried to keep up as she all but jogged away from the store. “They own the fashion label, do they?”
“No, they just work there,” Baby said.
“They’re store clerks?” I said. “Where do they get off having that kind of attitude?”
“They have very influential opinions in the fashion sphere,” Baby said. “They only work at the store because their parents have, like, ideas about them holding real jobs for a while, I guess. That’s what I heard. I don’t know. Their dad’s Michael Hanley, the lawyer.”
“So they don’t even have a background in fashion?” I dragged her to a stop.
“Why do you hate them so much?” Baby said. “Penny is beautiful, isn’t she? Much more beautiful than she is online.”
“They were a couple of stuck-up idiots,” I said. “And I don’t hate them. I don’t even know them. But I hate this side of you. They looked at me like I was a walking ball of bacteria, yet here you are talking about them like they’re royalty. They couldn’t have been eighteen years old. You don’t need to listen to people like that even if they are very important in the fashion world.” My fists were clenched. I couldn’t grasp what was making me so angry about Baby and her fawning over the Hanley twins. “Is that what you’re into? Fashion? You want to be a model?”
“Obviously,” she said. “And those two are royalty. They’ve made people’s careers with a single Instagram post. Penny took a selfie with some girl she met in an elevator in London. Said she was cute. That girl is with IMG in New York now. If Sean says I look too old, believe me: it’s a problem.”
“Baby.” I drew a long breath. “If you want to be a model, fine. That’s great. But it’s obvious to me that you have a talent for criminal investigation. You’re observant and smart. You know how to act, how to plan. You’d make a crack private investigator or a lawyer or a cop or—”
“Oh, come on.” She flipped her sunglasses down, the wall coming between us again. “You don’t even know me.”
“That moron in there didn’t know you!” I gestured back to the store.
“He knows what he’s talking about.”
“And I don’t?” I rubbed my eyes. “Urgh. This is so stupid. Why did you even subject me to that whole miserable experience?”
“Because Sean and Penny are another link between Ashton Willisee and Derek Benstein.” She showed me her phone. I looked at pictures of the kids together. “The Hanleys used to check in regularly with Derek and Ashton all over town. Them and Vera Petrov.”
“That’s the girl from the school?” I pointed to a picture. “Miss Go Fuck Yourself? The one who has some dirt on you that you won’t tell me about.”
“That’s her,” Baby said cautiously.
“Okay. So the Hanley twins are friends with our guys,” I said. “And?”
“So two days ago, right after the murder, they scrubbed their social media of any ties to Derek,” she said. “They weren’t just friends, they’re now hiding the fact that they were friends. There’s a tribute page to Derek Benstein on Popple, and they’re nowhere near it. Ashton didn’t want us to know he was friends with Derek. Now the Hanleys don’t either.”
“How did you get all these pictures of them together, then?”
“Because I’ve screenshotted and saved, like, everything Penny has ever done online. I went back and checked my archive.”
“Why were you saving all the stuff related to that pathetic little brat?”
“Because she’s my hero. I want to be just like her.”
“Oh, wow,” I said. I resisted another tirade only by reminding myself that Baby was less than half my age. She clearly had a lot to learn about the world and who should be considered a hero.
“It gets better. The Hanleys have also gone dark,” she said. “They haven’t posted on any of their accounts for the last forty-eight hours. That’s a record. Armani just announced a show in Melbourne, Australia, and they haven’t commented to say whether they’re going. That’s weird. Something is happening here. Sean and Penny are involved with whatever’s going on.”
“I’m not entirely convinced,” I said. “All this social media stuff—I don’t understand it. It’s useful, but it’s not concrete enough for me.”
“That’s because you’re old and weird.” She shrugged. The coldness was coming over her again. “I don’t care. It’s your stupid case.”
“You’re right. This is good work, Baby,” I said. “Let’s follow them. See what they do when they get off work. If you could possibly call it that.”
Chapter 59
Jacob walked into Yellow Bar ten minutes after Vera and requested a seat at the counter, where he could watch the violent little princess in the mirror behind the rows of bottles along the bar. He ordered a vodka neat and perused the flavored oxygen canisters wasting space beside a shelf of expensive bourbons. At first he had smirked at the idea of purchasing air, but then he remembered a yacht broker in Rome he’d strangled who would probably have paid everything he had for a tiny sip of oxygen right at the end.
Vera Petrov was a girl after his own heart, he had decided. The only real predator among the children calling themselves the Midnight Crew. Though his background check on her hadn’t revealed any suspicious deaths around her, Jacob could tell it was only a matter of time before she killed for the first time. She had the instinct. It was a biological thing. Vera’s was a brain that was always assessing others, measuring threats, looking for opportunities for herself. She’d probably inherited it from her gangster father but trimmed off the kind of cowardice that had made him run when his criminal life got too complicated.
Vera had spied an opportunity, Jacob could tell. She had bullied and intimidated all the waitresses in her s
ection of the establishment into fawning over and circling around her anxiously, but now she was waving them away, growling when they came close, her chin resting thoughtfully on her palm.
Jacob could see the object of her fancy. At an adjacent table, a party of middle-aged men were huddled together over a battered notebook, running through scribbled lines. Probably rappers, from the bling and the custom Nikes. On the corner of the table, a pair of leopard-print sunglasses rested unattended. Vera wanted them. He witnessed her desire in a single glance, the half second that her eyes lingered on the glasses, her refusal to look again.
Jacob guessed Vera had been stealing all her life, her first little childhood thrill. He knew she liked trophies. One of his watches had gone missing the night his family was attacked. She probably had a stash of little items at her home, tucked away safely in a box. Personal things—photographs, jewelry, handmade gifts. When Jacob had first started killing, he’d been a trophy taker. He’d liked to take driver’s licenses. Eventually the collection had become too dangerous to tote around the world with him. He could’ve explained a couple of stray ID cards in his possession, but not fifty.
Jacob watched as Vera paid her tab in cash, dropped her handbag by the edge of the rappers’ table, then scooped the sunglasses into the pocket of her jacket on her way back up from bending to retrieve it. It was an artful move. She would probably wear the sunglasses for a while and then dump them, Jacob guessed. This kind of petty theft was not where her heart lay. It was just sport.
He was in the parking lot only seconds behind her, observing the valet bringing her Porsche up from the garage as he slid into his own car. At the traffic lights they were side by side, Vera completely unaware of him as she disinfected her stolen glasses with an alcohol wipe and tried them on. She checked her reflection in the rearview mirror, smiled icily. Jacob looked at the pistol lying on the passenger seat beside him, a .45 ACP he habitually took out of the glove box and lay beside him every time he drove nowadays. He imagined himself opening his car door, leaning over, and popping Vera a few times through her window, bullets ripping through her petite frame and into the hand-stitched leather in the Porsche’s driver’s seat. She’d be dead before he closed the car door again. In the noise and bustle of Little Tokyo, no one would notice until she failed to drive off when the light turned green.