Chapter 24
“If you want to find Ulysses Karydes,” Delphina said as she sipped her cosmopolitan, “you can find him at the Music Café down at Mykonos port. He has lunch there with his bodyguards every day.”
By the time Laurette and I made it back to the Andromeda Residence, Delphina and a handful of guests were already aware of Akshay Kapoor’s death and were gathered around the pool for the hotel’s nightly sunset cocktail hour and buzzing about the news. Mykonos saw little crime, least of all murder, so by now it was already the talk of the island. Delphina offered us a couple of her famous cosmos, and we gratefully accepted. We were somewhat worried that Delphina might report to the police that we had been inquiring about Akshay upon our arrival, but she gave no hint of turning us over to the local authorities. In fact, she simply said she was sorry for the loss of our treasured acting hero and left it at that. Laurette and I knew that the police would be showing up soon to canvass Akshay’s room for any clues to the identity of his murderer and didn’t want to be around for a reunion.
Delphina never asked why we needed to locate him or why we weren’t more shaken up by the death of our favorite actor. She probably figured that if we were somehow mixed up in it all, it was the police’s business, not hers.
After downing our cosmos, thanking Delphina for her hospitality, and nodding good night to the other guests, Laurette and I retreated to our room with the intention of keeping a much-needed low profile.
The police did show up at the Residence to question a few guests. Laurette peeked through the blinds to see several officers trudging toward Akshay’s room, but after a couple of hours, they vacated the premises and all was quiet again.
“Do you think the police already know it was Ulysses Karydes who had Akshay killed and are just going through the motions so no one can accuse them of being in his pocket?” I said, allowing my conspiracy-theorist tendencies to once again fight their way to the surface.
Laurette shrugged. “Beats me. I just hope we’re not getting in over our heads.”
“Well, we have no choice but to keep plowing ahead if we ever want to find Charlie.”
Laurette nodded. She knew I was right even if she didn’t like it. She opened the burlap sack we had taken from the murder scene and pulled out Claire Richards’s Academy Award. “What do we do with this?”
“I’ll have Delphina keep it for us in the hotel safe until we figure out how it fits in to all of this. And tomorrow, we’ll have lunch at the Music Café.”
Now that we had witnessed a murder, the reality of what we were involved in was dawning on Laurette, and she was scared. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t. But I am an actor and better at hiding my abject fear. At least if we were going to go down (either tossed in jail for Akshay’s murder or drowned at sea by a corrupt Greek shipping tycoon) we would be together, best friends to the end.
Although word of Akshay’s murder spread fast across the island, the startling news did nothing to dissuade vacationers from hitting the shops and beaches on the gloriously sunny day that followed. When Laurette and I had showered and dressed and made our way down the cobblestone steps into Mykonos town, two cruise ships had already docked in the harbor. Hundreds of passengers had disembarked to soak up the ambiance of the picturesque port and slap their credit cards down at all the quaint shops along the winding, narrow streets.
When we reached the port and located the Music Café, there was a rush of activity in the far left corner. Several waiters, all in white, hovered over a table shaded from the sun by a white and red umbrella. They were doting on someone, and we instantly knew who it was. Laurette and I sat down at a table across from an overweight American couple talking in a twangy, thick Southern accent. They were trying to decipher the menu.
“It’s all Greek to me,” the man chortled as his wife dutifully giggled at his lame joke. Laurette offered them a polite smile, and that was all they needed to strike up a conversation.
“Are you American?” the wife said.
“Yes,” Laurette answered, already regretting ever making eye contact.
“We’re from outside Little Rock, Arkansas. What about you two?” the husband said.
“Los Angeles.” Laurette smiled.
There was a slight pause from the couple, and their plastered-on smiles melted just a tiny bit, but they quickly recovered.
I kept my eyes trained on the corner table. The waiters finally dispersed to fetch some food and drink, and I saw Ulysses Karydes for the first time. He was a bear of a man, with a barrel chest and thick, tree-trunk legs. He wore a yellow short-sleeve shirt that clung to his dark, olive skin and tight white slacks that looked as if they were going to rip apart at any moment. His face was round, but hard, and he had a big, fleshy, pockmarked nose. Three muscular young men sat at the table with him. Two of them were Apollo and Neptune from the day before. The third was even younger, with shoulder-length dark hair and a beautiful, angular face with thick, enviable eyelashes and a soft mouth. In ancient times, he might have been a model for one of the famous Greek statues.
“LA, huh?” the husband at the next table said. “We don’t have occasion to meet people from the land of fruits and nuts.”
He meant it just as he said it. In his small mind, we were all gays and crazy. And maybe there was a grain of truth to that. At least in my world.
I didn’t mind them insulting us as long as they didn’t draw attention to us. The last thing Laurette and I needed was for Ulysses Karydes to be aware of our presence. My current plan was to let Karydes finish lunch and then follow him home so we could scout out his property and hopefully unearth more clues that might point us in the direction of Charlie.
“Baby, don’t even go there!” the wife suddenly squealed, loud enough for everyone wandering along Mykonos port to hear.
It was my damn catchphrase again. The one that made me famous. The one printed on T-shirts in the eighties. And the one that has hounded me for almost twenty years. My sitcom, Go to Your Room, was a big deal at one time. And apparently it was well known in the outlying communities around Little Rock, Arkansas. At Heathrow Airport, the phrase had helped Laurette and me get through security in a timely fashion. Here it was about to blow our whole plan.
“I thought that was you!” the wife chirped before fishing in her purse for a pen. “I kept saying to myself, ‘It can’t be him. He’s way too old,’ but then I thought, hell, Virginia, the show’s been over for years. People lose hair and get wrinkles. They don’t stay a cute little boy forever.”
I wanted to kill myself.
She slapped her fountain pen down on the table and then picked up the napkin underneath her bottled water. “Could I get your autograph? My kids will never believe I ran into you. In Greece, of all places!”
I snatched the pen and the napkin and quickly scribbled my name. Mr. Arkansas was still in a state of confusion. He undoubtedly never watched situation-comedy repeats. I pegged him for an NFL and Fox News kind of guy. I wasn’t being traded to the Dolphins, nor was I right-wing commentator Sean Hannity, so he had no reference for my celebrity.
I forced a smile as I handed the napkin back to her. I glanced over to see Ulysses Karydes staring over at us. Our little eruption had caught his interest. This was not good. So much for incognito.
Laurette leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Should we just make a run for it?”
I sat frozen in place, not really knowing what to do. Ulysses spoke to the young, waiflike man with the long hair, and he was up on his feet in an instant and marching over to us. Laurette and I held our breath, half expecting him to pull a gun out of his back pocket and shoot us dead on the spot.
Instead he offered us a sweet smile and said in a sexy Greek accent, “My name is Philander. I work for Mr. Karydes, who is over there. He lives on the island and is—”
“Oh, we know who he is,” Laurette said.
Philander nodded. His warm smile was intoxicating. “Of course. Well, Mr. Karydes wanted me to ask you if you would care to join him for lunch.”
Lunch? This was not the plan. Our mission was to be covert. Not to break bread and share stories with the guy we were supposedly staking out. But Laurette was already pushing her chair back, looking for any excuse to ditch the chatty tourists from outside Little Rock.
“We’d love to,” she said, before turning back to the Arkansas couple. “Enjoy the rest of your vacation.” The husband was just as glad to be rid of two West Coast show-business radicals as we were to be rid of him. His wife had already secured an autographed napkin to show off back home, so she didn’t care one way or the other. They offered us polite nods and went back to trying to figure out the Greek equivalent of hamburger on their menus.
Laurette and I cautiously followed Philander over to Mr. Karydes’s table. Apollo and Neptune stood as we approached. Each one pulled out a chair for us. I glanced at both of them, wondering if they recognized either of us from the incident at Super Paradise beach the day before, but if they did, neither one was giving anything away.
Philander took a seat next to me. Apollo and Neptune remained standing.
“Thank you for agreeing to join me,” Ulysses Karydes said in a deep, commanding voice. “I’m Ulysses. You have already met Philander, my assistant. These are my bodyguards, Leandro and Khristos.”
The muscle boys nodded to us, but never cracked a smile.
Ulysses then turned to me. “I am a huge admirer of your work.”
This took me by complete surprise. A billionaire Greek shipping tycoon spent his time watching a forgettable sitcom about a precocious kid who was forever trying to pull the wool over the eyes of his parents? Come on. This had to be some kind of a joke.
Laurette raised an eyebrow. She was thinking the same thing as me.
“You must understand,” Ulysses said. “I am a businessman through and through, but I have an insatiable appetite for popular American culture. I see every TV show, read every book, buy every movie on DVD. I have an enormous collection of memorabilia. In fact, I own an original shooting script of your show from 1985, signed by you.”
“How on earth did you get that?” I said.
“Ebay. Where else?”
Laurette and I sat there, our mouths opened, still stunned by this disconcerting revelation.
“I also own a ‘Baby, don’t even go there’ T-shirt, the actual pup tent used in the classic two-part camping episode, and the limited-edition Go to Your Room board game by Mattel.”
Ulysses smiled proudly.
“You’re that big a fan of my show?”
Philander touched my arm with his hand and added, “Not just your show. Mr. Karydes has devoted an entire wing of his home to film and television memorabilia. He has JR Ewing’s Stetson, the Terminator’s sunglasses, and his most prized possession, the original ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Laurette said, letting it just slip out without thinking.
There was an awkward moment. I gently kicked Laurette under the table. This man may have been a loon, but he was a rich and powerful loon who could probably do with us what he wished.
As outlandish as this all sounded, pieces of the puzzle were slowly starting to fall into place. If Karydes was such a huge collector of TV and movie artifacts, then it made total sense that he would want to get his hands on Claire Richards’s Oscar.
“I’d love to know what other famous pieces of history you have or would like to get,” I said.
“It’s like an obsession. Once you start, you can never stop,” he said. “There is always something else I want to get my hands on, some valuable prop or piece of clothing. It never ends.”
“What about an Academy Award?”
Karydes sat back and gave me a considered look. But he wasn’t about to play his hand just yet. “I suppose it depends on who it once belonged to. Katharine Hepburn? Yes. Meryl Streep? Yes. Tatum O’Neal? Not a big priority.” He laughed heartily.
“What about Claire Richards?” I said, going for it.
I could feel the tension fill the air. Leandro and Khristos bristled. Philander froze in place. Laurette gasped.
Ulysses remained calm and unshaken. “That would be a great acquisition. But how would I ever come to possess such a rare piece of history?”
“I might know of someone who may know how to get it,” I said.
“Akshay Kapoor?” Ulysses said, his steely eyes locking onto mine.
“Akshay died yesterday. He was shot.” I wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know. “Did you know him?”
“As a matter of fact, I did,” Ulysses said.
Philander made a move to interject, to stop his boss before he said too much, but Karydes waved him away.
Laurette watched the scene as if caught up in the latest episode of her favorite soap opera, One Life to Live.
“He was a liar and a cheat and the world is a better place without him,” Ulysses said, almost spitting out the words.
“Come on, Mr. Karydes, what did you really think of him?” I said.
Karydes laughed. “You must not have been that big of an admirer of Kapoor’s if you’re willing to make jokes so soon after his unfortunate demise.”
“We weren’t exactly close,” I said.
“Mr. Kapoor owed me a lot of money. Tens of thousands, in fact. He knew I loved the world of show business and suckered me into investing in a wide range of ill-fated film projects.”
“You didn’t have to bankroll him.”
“No. I knew the risks. But he never used the money to make movies. He gambled it away recklessly. And our agreement firmly stated that if he used the funds for any endeavor outside of making films, then he would have to pay it back with interest. Which he never did.”
“Sure sounds like a motive to knock him off,” I said.
Laurette’s eyes bulged. She didn’t like me confronting Karydes because both of us could wind up just like Akshay, plugged with a couple of bullets.
“I may not be mourning his death. But I didn’t kill him.”
“Then why were your guys Leandro and Khristos meeting him at Super Paradise Beach yesterday just before he was killed?”
Philander gently placed a hand on my knee and squeezed it as a warning to stop while I was ahead. But I had gone too far down the road to turn back. I had a lot of questions that needed to be answered. And the first one was why was Philander leaving his hand on my knee?
Karydes chuckled. I was more of a sparring partner than he expected, and he was rather enjoying our exchange. He had no idea I was scared out of my mind but channeling a brash, young, reckless private eye I played in a Rockford Files reunion movie.
“Akshay came to Mykonos to pay back what he owed me,” Karydes said. “I sent my boys to meet him. Before they even had a chance to retrieve what was rightfully mine, someone shot him.”
“Was he paying you back in cash or something else?”
Karydes studied me. He turned to Laurette, whose eyes screamed, “It’s him! Not me! He’s the one pissing you off! Don’t look at me!” But she kept her mouth shut and stayed by my side.
Philander, meanwhile, finally removed his hand.
Karydes’ eyes shifted back to mine. “You were obviously there watching. You tell me. Did Akshay have anything of interest on him? And the bigger question is do you now have it?”
“Maybe. But I didn’t come here to steal off a dead man. I came here looking for someone,” I said.
“And who might that be?”
“A man.”
“We have many men on Mykonos, all of them able and willing. Feel free to indulge all you want.”
“I’m looking for a specific man. His name is Charlie. He might have been here with Akshay.”
“Why would I know anything about one of Akshay’s tricks?” Ulysses scoffed.
“He’s not a trick,” I said, anger rising in my voice. “He’s special. And I need to find him.”
Ulysses appeared to be debating with himself. There was no formal offer of a trade on the table. If he did indeed know where Charlie was, he wasn’t going to tell me just yet.
He casually shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I don’t know who this Charlie is.”
“Then I guess we’re done here,” I said, standing up. Leandro and Khristos made a move to block my exit, but Ulysses waved them off.
“Are you sure you won’t stay and have some lunch?” Ulysses said, ever the consummate host.
“I’m afraid we’re just not hungry,” I said, glancing at Philander, who surreptitiously eyed me up and down.
I took Laurette’s hand and led her away. She reached down and scooped up a piece of bread from the basket as we walked away.
“Speak for yourself,” she growled. She popped the bread into her mouth and through her chewing said, “What do we do now?”
“We have to find out if Karydes has Charlie stashed away somewhere.”
“And what if he does? How are we going to get him back?”
“Karydes obviously is drooling over Claire’s Oscar. He’s dying to get his hands on it. So we offer a trade.”
“God, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.