Chapter 23

Hector and I stepped out onto the sidewalk and I shivered after the warmth of the café.

“Where is your coat?” he asked.

“I lived in Los Angeles until last week,” I reminded him.

He gave me a look, then draped his leather jacket over my shoulders. It was possibly the softest thing I’d ever felt. I was warm and cozy for the full fifteen steps across the street to the Palace.

I carried the laptop hugged to my chest. Hector had told me that his cousin Gabriela, who was the “associate” in the wheelchair who had been staking out my theater with him, had a degree in Computer Science from Cal Poly. She would undoubtedly be able to make quick work of Kate’s email password. But, as much as Hector seemed like an ally, and as lovely as his jacket was, I wasn’t letting anybody walk off with Kate’s laptop again. Gabriela could come to the Palace.

Hector hadn’t been thrilled, but he’d understood and had sent Gabriela a text. She’d gone to work, he told me, after their stakeout that morning. She was a software engineer at one of the big tech firms in Silicon Valley.

“Oh.” I was disappointed. I’d had brief visions of Hector’s cousin sporting a dragon tattoo and helping me wreak vengeance on Kate’s killer in a cyber-spectacular way. But probably not.

“There is something I must ask you,” Hector said as we entered the lobby. “This morning when I was in the hallway, following the intruder, I heard you speaking...but you were alone in the room, right?”

Uh oh. I’d probably been talking to Trixie when Hector had glanced in to make sure I was okay. I didn’t think he’d buy the “I was just working on dialog for a screenplay” story that I’d used when Marty had overheard me in similar circumstances.

“Oh, look, Callie’s here,” I said instead.

She was at the top of the balcony stairs. “Soooo, I hear you’ve had a morning.”

“What are you doing here so early?” Unbelievably, it was still only nine o’clock. I willed her to come down to the lobby, if only to distract Hector from his questions about why I’d been talking to myself in the break room.

“I have a new cut of my doc,” she said. “I was going to show it to Marty.” She came down, gravitating toward Hector. “I’m a filmmaker,” she told him, doing a flirty little thing with her fingers in her hair that you can only pull off when you’re gorgeous and in your twenties. Then she said something in what sounded like flawless Spanish. I didn’t understand it, but it sounded sexy.

“How nice,” he replied. Then he turned to me. “You will take care, yes? I’ll return with Gabriela this evening.”

“I’ll be fine,” I assured him.

He placed his hands briefly on my upper arms. It felt strong and reassuring and somehow intimate in a way I didn’t have time to figure out. “Until this evening.” And he was gone, leaving me still hugging the laptop and still wearing his jacket.

“Oh. My. God.” Callie said. “He is so totally hot.”

“Do you think?” I said casually.

“Speaking for all women everywhere, yes,” she said. “And you two are totally vibing.”

“Do you think?” I said again, less casually. Then I came to my senses. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

She raised an eyebrow, but blessedly changed the subject. “Marty told me what happened. Are you, like, okay and everything?”

“I’m fine,” I told her. “But we need to let everyone know that if they see Todd Randall they should call the cops.”

“Cool,” she said. “Um, do you maybe have a picture of him or something?”

Right. That would help. “Let’s see if there’s one on his web site,” I suggested. Callie’s phone was, of course, already in her hand. We moved over to the candy counter as she went to the Real on Reel website. We saw there was a grainy photo of Randall—or whoever he was—which was better than nothing, if barely. Callie sent the photo to the printer upstairs in the break room.

“Thanks,” I said, then I remembered that I was in search of another photo.

“Callie, do you have any decent pictures of Kate? I want to post some flyers around Stowe Lake in case anyone might have seen her.”

Callie’s eyes widened. “Oh. Wow. Kate hated having her picture taken.”

This much I’d figured out on my own. Every single shot of her online—and there weren’t many—was blurred, with her seeming to turn her face away from the camera just as the picture was taken.

“I don’t think she’d ever even taken a selfie.” Callie shook her head in Millennial awe.

My heart sank.

“She had a scar.” Callie gestured to the area along her left jawbone, back toward the ear. “It looked kind of like a crooked Z. She joked about it, said Tyrone Power gave it to her.” She smiled, and so did I. Tyrone Power had played the dashing masked bandit in The Mark of Zorro (1947, Power and Linda Darnell).

“But she totally hated it,” Callie said. “I think that’s why she didn’t like seeing herself in pictures.”

“What was it from?” I asked. “Was she in an accident?”

“I think she had, like, a skin cancer or something removed. But she liked the Zorro story better.”

I would have, too.

“I really miss her,” Callie’s expression, normally so studiously bored, softened. “I still expect to see her every time I’m here. Or to hear her, you know, yelling something down from upstairs?”

“I know,” I said. I had still expected Ted to call “That you, babe?” every time I went into our house after he left. Which was an excellent reason never to go back to that house.

“She was learning Italian,” Callie said. “For the last six months everything was grazi mille, and come stai? and fa bene, fa bene, fa bene.”

“Was she planning a trip to Italy?” I asked.

“She talked about it, but I don’t think she actually, like, planned anything.”

“Marty said her favorite movie was Summertime.” Set in Venice.

Callie nodded. “She said she wanted to be able to watch all of Sophia Loren’s movies without subtitles.” She swallowed. “I wish she’d been able to.”

“I do, too.”

I went upstairs to make copies of Randall’s picture and to call a locksmith for the back door. I couldn’t send Kate on a trip to Italy, but I could do whatever it took to protect her theater.

I could and I would.

  

I sent a text to Robbie, letting her know about the break-in. She called immediately, and I’d just gotten off the phone with her when Detective Jackson called. So I went over it all again, even though I got the feeling he was reading along from the statement I’d already given the police. He drilled for details in a couple places, and then seemed ready to hang up without telling me a single thing.

“Hey, wait a minute,” I said. “What have you found out? Who is Todd Randall? What did he have to do with Kate or Raul Acosta?”

There was a pause for a moment and I thought I’d lost him. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a soft drink can being popped open. The detective gulped before answering.

“Your man’s a ghost,” he told me.

“He’s not my man,” I said. Privately, I felt that calling Todd Randall a ghost was an insult to ghosts everywhere, but I didn’t pursue that with the detective.

“The strongest lead we have is that website,” he went on. “We’ve filed for court orders to get the hosting company to cough up any information they have on him.”

“Like a credit card?”

“Exactly. He must have paid for that site somehow, and that information may get us to his real name.”

“How long will that take?”

“I hope we’ll get it today or tomorrow,” he said. What he didn’t say is that Todd Randall could be long gone by then.

But I didn’t think he would be. He still didn’t have what he’d come looking for.

And I still didn’t know what that was.

  

Marty found me sweeping out the balcony after the first show. “2812,” he announced.

“And a 1924 to you,” I replied, having no idea what he was talking about.

“It’s the new alarm code,” he explained. “I called the security company and set it up. And I’m only telling you and Albert and Callie.”

“Got it,” I said. We’d agreed that only the senior staff should have the new code. None of the other employees should really need it since they shouldn’t be at the theater unless one of us was. “Why 2812?”

“Because of the Lumière brothers, of course.” He leaned against a column and crossed his arms, his smug expression indicating that he intended this exchange to be some sort of pop quiz on cinematic history. The Lumière brothers had been French filmmakers—the first ‘real’ filmmakers, by most accounts. At least the first to make any money at it.

Okay, I was up for a quiz. “So why not 1895?”

He looked surprised but recovered quickly. “You mean because they showed the first set of films in 1895?”

I shrugged, as if to say any simpleton knew that.

“They showed them on December twenty-eighth,” he said. And he really enjoyed saying it.

“And they were French,” I realized. “So they wouldn’t say 12/28. They’d say—”

“2812,” Marty finished. “You’re welcome.”

“And you’re hilarious,” I told him. Then I handed him the broom and told him not to skip the back row.

  

I closed the office door for the call with Robbie and Naveen. I also closed the blinds, waving goodbye to Hector, or at least to the window of the room above the café across the street. If he was there, and thwarted in his observations, he had only himself to blame. He was the one who’d told me to be careful.

And on that subject, I took extra care with the laptop. Up until that point I’d always just left it on the desk in the unlocked office, but now, in the absence of a wall safe or a better idea, I tucked it behind the couch. It wasn’t exactly a genius hiding place, but at least it wasn’t in plain sight.

Once Robbie and Naveen and I had chatted for a while in that meaningless Hollywood way that establishes all sorts of territorial nonsense, Naveen got down to telling us what he’d figured out about the Palace’s finances. And he put it in terms even I could understand.

“Your theater is taking in way too much money.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out how it all added up.”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “To bring in the kind of revenue on these books, you’d have to be playing to packed houses on multiple screens, pretty much twenty-four hours a day.”

I thought of the handful of elderly regulars who were currently settling in for the 2:15 showing of The Mad Ghoul. “Yeah, that’s not what’s happening.”

“So what does that mean?” Robbie asked. “It doesn’t sound like Kate was stealing. If anything she was doing the opposite.”

“Right,” Naveen said. “It looks to me like she’s been padding the accounts by grossly overstating the income from cash ticket sales and cash concession sales. And she’d also been selling off some assets.”

“Like the espresso machine,” I said. “And the printer.”

“Right.” Naveen said. “She’d been selling large items fairly regularly. I don’t see receipts for the purchases, but when she sold them she logged the proceeds.”

“What are we talking about here?” Robbie asked. “If Kate was cooking the books, she was doing it in our favor, but where was the money actually coming from?”

“And where did it all go?” I asked.

Naveen gave us the answer as if he thought it was glaringly obvious.

“Your theater has been laundering money,” he said. “That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“How?” I asked, at the same time Robbie said “What?”

“Look,” Naveen said patiently. “It’s simple. Somebody has dirty money. They run a card room or deal drugs or whatever. They can’t take that income to the bank without answering a lot of questions about where it came from. So they buy another business—a legit business—one that does a lot of cash transactions, like a cupcake shop or a nail salon. That business takes in the dirty money and pads their books to show a lot more cash income than they actually make selling cupcakes or doing nails. Nice clean income.”

“You’re saying I’m invested in a front for the mob?” Robbie’s voice went up about an octave.

“Hold on, don’t panic yet,” Naveen said. “Nobody said ‘mob.’ And the scenario I just laid out would mean that you or one of the other owners was the criminal mastermind behind the money laundering.” He took a breath. “What’s more likely is that Kate was pressured, or even threatened, into doing it by some third party who then—”

“You think someone was threatening Kate?” Robbie sounded horrified. “Some drug dealer or—”

“We don’t know,” Naveen cautioned her. “That’s just one possibility. But trust me when I tell you that you don’t want to mess around with this. We should absolutely take a look at the other owners. And we might want to go to the Feds, if only to establish your—”

“The Feds?” Robbie sounded like she might be hyperventilating.

“That’s just a possibility,” Naveen said soothingly, but Robbie was clearly beyond soothing. I was, too. Because I’d just realized, with all Naveen’s talk about money laundering and drug dealers, that I’d believed everything Hector had told me without questioning it. I’d taken the word of a self-confessed criminal that he and his brother were reformed. How stupid did that make me?

“Okay, okay, what about the other owners?” Robbie asked, as if reaching for a lifeline. “Mitch is the only one I really know. He asked if I wanted in when one of the others wanted to sell, and it sounded like fun. Fun!” she now wailed.

Mitch was Mitchell Black, a sitcom director I’d met a few times. “Who are the other owners?” I asked.

“I barely know them,” Robbie said. “One made a fortune selling some sort of travel app. I’ve met him once or twice, but just briefly. The other is the newest investor. She owns a business up there. I haven’t even met her. Shit, shit, shit! I’m such an idiot!”

That made two of us.

“Now, let’s just keep our heads,” Naveen said. I could hear him shuffling papers. “The tech guy is Charlie Zee. He lives in Palo Alto.” He paused, presumably reading something. “Oh, I love that app. The last time I was in New York—”

“Who’s the other owner?” I cut him off.

“Uh…Here it is. M. Chen. It looks like she owns a florist shop. The Potent Flower. Is that anywhere near the theater, Nora?”

I couldn’t speak. Everything was suddenly blindingly clear. M. Chen. M for Monica. Monica was a part owner of the Palace. Monica, who owned the Potent Flower and was definitely not a florist. She owned a cannabis shop that probably brought in a huge amount of cash. Cash that, even though it was legally earned, couldn’t be deposited in a bank until it was laundered. This I knew, because Hector had explained it to me.

“Nora?” Robbie said, probably not for the first time. “Are you still there?”

Everything suddenly made sense. Everything about the weird look that flashed across Monica’s face every time I saw her. The look, I now realized, was fear. Fear that I’d take a look at the books and realize Kate had been laundering money for her? Maybe fear of something more.

“Nora?”

It even might explain what Raul Acosta had been doing at the theater. What if he hadn’t actually retired from the family business? What if everything Hector had told me about their going legit was a lie? Raul could have found out what Kate was doing for Monica and tried to force her into laundering the Acosta family money as well.

“Nora!”

“I’ll call you back,” I said. “I need to check on something.” I hung up to yells of protest from Robbie and Naveen.

I had to find Monica. I had to ask her if I was right about Raul. About all of it. Because if I was right, and Kate had refused Raul, it could have gotten violent. He might have attacked Kate. She might have killed him in self-defense.

And who had then killed Kate?

I glanced at the darkened window, feeling Hector watching me from the room across the street.

Who indeed?