Chapter 25

I stared at Monica. “How much money are we talking about?”

“Well…” she said. “It’s a little hard to say, but I think, probably, what was left was…” She hesitated, her voice growing smaller. “Somewhere around seven million dollars.”

That number took a moment to register. Seven million dollars. There was seven million dollars hidden somewhere in the Palace. Seven million dollars that had gotten Kate and Raul killed.

“Where—” My voice squeaked, so I cleared it and tried again. “Where did she hide it?”

Monica shook her head. “I don’t know, but—”

“You don’t know?” I demanded. “It was your money. How—”

“It doesn’t matter!” Monica cut me off. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter where Kate hid it, or what she bought, because somebody must have found out! Somebody must have found out and—” She stopped abruptly, shuddering. “Whoever killed Kate and Raul has it now. That’s the only thing that makes sense.”

I couldn’t sit a minute longer. I got up and started pacing as well as I could, given the size of the room. I thought Monica was probably right, up to a point. But I didn’t think the killer had gotten what he’d come for. Because after everything I’d learned that day I had two candidates for the killer: Todd Randall and Hector Acosta. And both of them were still hanging around the theater. Todd had been looking for something in Kate’s office, and he wouldn’t have been looking if he’d already found it. And just because Raul was going straight didn’t necessarily mean Hector was. I had only Hector’s word that he’d been keeping the theater under observation to find his brother’s killer. Maybe he was his brother’s killer. Maybe he, too, was after the money.

I stopped. Something Monica said had just caught up with me. “What did you mean when you said, ‘what she bought?’”

Monica blinked. “What?”

“Just now, you said Kate hid the money or ‘what she bought.’ What does that mean?”

She blew out a breath. “Nora, do you have any idea how much space seven million dollars in cash would take up?”

I could honestly say I didn’t.

“Think about a bank vault,” she said. “What do you picture? Nice neat stacks of cash? Tidy bundles of hundred-dollar bills? That would be so easy. A ten-thousand-dollar bundle of crisp new hundreds isn’t much bigger than your cell phone. But I don’t take in crisp new hundreds. I mostly take in crumpled tens and twenties, small bills and lots of them. With the kind of bills I take in, seven million dollars, however neatly you bundled it, would be about the size of that desk.”

I looked at the desk. It wasn’t small.

“Wait. Are you saying there’s a safe big enough to hold that hidden somewhere in the Palace?” I asked.

“No. I’m saying that Kate bought something. Something that was much easier to hide.”

Oh. Of course. I was back to the MacGuffin.

  

Monica leaned forward in her chair. “We knew it wasn’t safe or practical to keep that much cash around, so we had to do something with the money until I got the new company together, which was taking a lot longer than either of us thought it would. But Kate figured out something she could buy. She said it was so simple she could have kicked herself for not seeing it earlier. What she bought was easier to store than cash, and she could hide it in plain sight, no gigantic safe required. She said when the time came to sell it we might even make a profit.”

Finally. I was just about ready to jump out of my skin. “What was it?”

“I…” Monica looked to the serene Buddha head on the wall behind where I stood. “I don’t know.”

“What?” I yelled. “How is that possible?”

She shrugged, a bit of her earlier defiance returning. “She said it was safer that way. If I knew what it was, or where it was, I’d look at it differently. I’d draw attention to it every time I walked past, whether I meant to or not. So I just…left it to her.”

I stared at her. “Seriously?”

Monica lifted her chin again. “She was my best friend.”

And now she was dead.

  

What could you buy for seven million dollars in cash, hide in plain sight, and be able to easily sell when the time came? That was the question I asked myself as I walked around the city after leaving Monica.

I had to think, and I’ve always been better at thinking while moving. When I was a TV writer I’d always paced the writers’ room. Robbie had once told me that just watching me work had been exhausting. And when I wrote now it was usually in furious bursts after coming in from a long walk, where I’d already figured out what I wanted to say. So now, with a thousand questions sloshing around in my mind, I walked. And I thought. And I sent the occasional text.

To Hector:

 

Change of plans. Don’t bring Gabriela over. I’ve figured out something else. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

 

What I’d figured out was that he might have killed Kate and his brother. He replied immediately but I didn’t look at it. I’d gotten good at ignoring texts lately, what with all the practice I’d had with my husband and the lawyers. I kept walking.

The October days were short, and it was getting dark and chilly. I had a brief moment of missing Hector’s warm leather jacket, which I’d left in the office, then I stepped into the next open clothing shop I saw and bought the thickest warmest sweater they had. I didn’t need Hector.

Hector. Suppose he was still the head of a crime family. What if he’d tolerated his brother trying to go straight, but when Raul had mentioned the lengths his future customers went to in order to process their earnings, Hector had gotten an idea. What if he’d wanted in on the money laundering scheme at the Palace? Could he have gone to the theater that night? Maybe lied to Raul, telling him that he’d decided to go straight too? That he wanted to meet Kate? And then what? Had there been a fight? Maybe Raul had resisted, maybe Kate had tried to run? Maybe, maybe, maybe.

I sent a text to Detective Jackson:

 

Have you verified Hector Acosta’s whereabouts on the day of the murders?

 

I doubted the detective would tell me, but it was worth a shot. And I’d never used the word “whereabouts” before in my life, but I used it deliberately here. I hoped it would sound official and police-like. Maybe Jackson got so many texts that he’d answer without realizing it was me that asked. Maybe.

If Hector was still in Columbia when Raul and Kate were murdered I could eliminate him as a suspect. Although crime lords were well-known for having henchmen, weren’t they? Think of Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon. Think of Sydney Greenstreet in just about anything.

But back to the point: Hector had found out that I was at my lawyer’s office on the day of the murders. I could try to find out where he was, too.

Oh. Wait a minute. Hector had found out where I was. That meant he was investigating the murders. Why would he be investigating the murders if he’d committed them?

This thought made my head hurt. I stopped on the sidewalk, not having any idea where I was. In the past week I’d only gone a few blocks in either direction from the Palace. Now I was on a bustling street of shops and restaurants, patronized by a hipster-looking clientele. A check of a street sign told me I was on Fillmore, but that meant nothing to me. I turned uphill and kept walking.

Okay, putting Hector aside for a moment, what about Todd Randall? He’d been lying about who he was and why he’d been in contact with Kate. And he’d broken into the office in search of something.

But all that still left me with the question of how he fit in. Why had he really been in contact with Kate? Because it certainly wasn’t for a film festival. How could he have found out what was going on between the Potent Flower and the Palace? How could he have known about the money? If Monica, Kate, and Raul were the only people who knew, where did Todd Randall come in?

This would all be a lot easier if I knew who he actually was. I thought about texting Detective Jackson again, but decided that might be pushing my luck. Instead I tried Monica.

 

Did Kate ever mention Todd Randall to you? Do you have any idea how she knew him?

 

There was so little I knew about Kate herself. When I’d originally looked her up online I’d been surprised by how little information about her I’d found. Even Albert, who’d known her the longest, didn’t know anything about her life before the Palace. At one point I’d wondered if she might have been fleeing from some sort of criminal past or might even be in the witness protection program. Now all those thoughts combined to present another possibility. What if Todd was someone from Kate’s past? Could he have tracked her down somehow? Had he been blackmailing her over some secret?

I shook my head, worried that I was just being a screenwriter and spinning out increasingly fantastic scenarios. What I needed were facts.

I also needed a hot meal and a warm, safe space to keep thinking. I thought about summoning a ride share car to take me back to Robbie’s guest house, but with as much as Hector seemed to know about me, I was pretty sure he’d have found out that I was staying in an isolated house made largely of glass. Until I heard back from Detective Jackson I had no desire to see Hector again. Particularly alone, where nobody could hear me scream.

Okay, now I was just freaking myself out. Nevertheless, I refused to be Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number (1948, Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster) trapped and waiting for my killer to come find me. Instead I pulled out my phone and saw that I was five blocks away from a hotel with decent ratings. It was five blocks back in the direction of the Palace, so I turned left at the next street and set off toward comfort. And safety.

I spent those five blocks thinking about the MacGuffin. Something valuable that could be hidden in plain sight. And Monica had said Kate didn’t want her looking at it differently every time she went past it. So it was in plain sight in a commonly used area.

What small thing would I buy with seven million dollars? First I thought about jewels, and then I thought about gold. In its heyday, the interior of the Palace had been dripping with gold leaf. Not much remained, but there were still glints and glimmers in the carved woodwork, holdovers from past restorations, if not from the original grandeur. What if Kate had bought something like gold coins and just stuck them around here and there, high in the crown moldings or along the proscenium arch? Would they have blended right in? Would anyone have noticed?

That hit all the criteria. Small, check. Valuable, check. Hidden in plain sight, check. And they might even be worth more by the time Kate sold them. Of course, they might also be worth less, but still.

I started walking faster as I became more and more convinced I was on the right track. I’d grown to appreciate the way Kate’s mind had worked, the way she’d put movies together and the quirky tableaus she’d created in the theater to celebrate them. Did that mean I’d come to understand the way she’d thought? Had I tuned into her personality enough to figure out how she’d hidden the money? I asked myself whether decorating the theater with genuine gold would have appealed to her sensibilities, and the answer was a strong yes. I ran up the steps to the hotel when I got there.

I couldn’t wait to talk to Robbie.