I was just getting into my car when the front door opened again. “Mr. Foster!” Vera Merton ran on her tiptoes like a ballerina. “Wait.”
I waited and she stopped short on the other side of the car. If she had been upset inside, she didn’t show it now.
“Mr. Foster,” she said, and then decided that she didn’t like having the Packard between us. She came around to my side, the better to show me her legs. They were lovely legs. She could have been in pictures. Nobody would have complained about paying to look at her. She pulled at her lip and put her eyes in their corners so they weren’t on me. Indecision didn’t look natural on her.
“Am I supposed to guess what you want or are you going to tell me?”
“I just can’t stop thinking about Mandy Ehrhardt,” she said. “Do you have any ideas? About who did it?”
“I haven’t been asked to have any. In fact, quite the opposite.”
“How’d you come to find the—her?” Her eyes darted to my face and then went back to their corners.
“About the same way I found you and your brother yesterday. I just happened along at the wrong moment.”
This time her eyes went right to mine. She tried to cover her nervousness with a smile. “So you weren’t supposed to be, I don’t know, following Mandy, or something?”
“Didn’t you just get finished listening to Mr. Stark talk about how respectful I am of people’s privacy?”
“Yes, but Daddy would want you to tell me. It’s all right.”
“If that’s how he feels about it, he can tell me.”
“Well, what were you doing at the studio yesterday?” she tried.
“I knew then, but I don’t know now.”
She pouted. “You’re making this very difficult.”
I gave her a knowing grin. “Sorry.”
“I know that Daddy hired you yesterday and I know that you found Mandy’s body. I’m just trying to understand.” She paused for a second and decided she needed to add something to that. “It’s all so horrible.”
“Look, Miss Merton. I was hired by Al Knox, the head of security at the studio. If you want to take this up with Al, go ahead, but I’ve got work to do.” To make it convincing, I should have gotten in my car, but I didn’t.
She took a step closer and reached out to play with my tie. “You don’t like me, is that it?”
We both watched her hand toy with the silk.
“You think my family are awful people.”
“Miss Merton, I don’t think of your family at all.”
“Not even now?” She had found more inches to eliminate between us. Her perfume made me think of homemade cookies, which soured both her and the cookies.
“I’m trying harder to forget your family every minute.”
“I just worry about Tommy. And Daddy,” she said. “They need a woman around but all they’ve got is me, which isn’t much of anything.”
“You’re definitely a woman.”
She raised her head the right angle. “I knew you could say nice things.”
“I can say all kinds of things.”
“Why did Daddy hire you? Was it about Tommy? You can tell me.”
“I told you before, your father didn’t hire me, Al Knox did. If you think your father was behind it, you’d better go ask him. Whatever you and your brother do is no concern of mine. Though from what I’ve seen, your brother does altogether too much of whatever it is he does.”
She stepped back then, all of her charm withdrawn. “How come you found Mandy?”
“It was an accident. It had nothing to do with anything.”
“That’s the best you can do?”
“I could do better, but you wouldn’t like it.”
She screwed herself up to say something more, but thought better of it and walked back to the house instead. She was a girl too used to getting what she wanted. Knox had warned me about her and her brother the day before, and now I could appreciate better what he’d meant. Poor Daddy. Running a movie studio wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. You might give people orders, but that didn’t mean your kids wouldn’t run all over town getting into trouble. In fact, it probably ensured it.
I got into my car and rolled down the hill again. This missing person job seemed like only slightly more of a case than protecting Chloë Rose. It must have been my advertising: give me your money, no satisfaction guaranteed.