“You sure you’re up to this, chef dear?” Lee asked as she stopped her gleaming black Lexus in a passenger loading zone in front of Gin McCauley’s building.
“It’s better she find out from me than see it on the news.”
But we were too late.
Gin opened her apartment door, red-eyed, sniffling, and in her nightgown. The sweet-stale odor of whiskey floated on the air. A large TV monitor had taken over the living room since my dinner there just weeks ago. Filling its screen was footage of Ted Parkhurst in the Middle East chatting with soldiers, accompanied by voice-over biography.
Gin staggered back to the couch where she’d been watching her late fiancé’s life being picked to pieces by whatever gleeful talking heads the news channels had been able to round up during the dinner hours.
She muted the narration but continued to stare glassy-eyed at the roughly edited film clips. “What the hell, Billy?” she said. “They’re callin’ it a heart attack. Ted didn’t have any kind of heart trouble. And as for the other stuff, this talk about him tryin’ to kill somebody, where the hell is that comin’ from, anyway? It’s gotta be some kinda horrible mistake, right?”
“You have anything here to help you relax besides the booze?” I asked her.
“You mean drugs?” she said. “No. Ted got rid of mah stash. Called it mah pharmaco … pharma …”
“Pharmacopoeia,” I said.
“That,” she said, her eyes tearing. “Ted’s very anti-drug. Was very anti-drug. It’s all a mistake, Billy. The cops made a mistake. They arrested him by mistake and they did somethin’, you know, like, they overreacted and … did something that … caused him to …”
She shook her head. Then she grabbed a glass half-full of a very dark brown liquid and tried to down it in a gulp. I sat beside her and stopped her from inhaling the whole thing by twisting the glass from her grasp. Globs of whiskey hopped from the glass and spilled down her face and neck, staining her gown.
She didn’t seem to notice. “Why would he try to kill a friend?” she asked me.
“A friend?”
“He said the phone call was from a friend,” Gin said.
“What phone call? You didn’t mention a phone call when we talked earlier.”
“When we talked earl—Oh, yeah, we did talk. You asked about his middle name. That was a weird question, Billy.” The whiskey was slowing her down, sending those neurons on to the big sleep.
“About the phone call Ted got?” I prompted.
“Uh-huh. We’d just gone to bed when his phone rang. Ah was kinda groggy, only caught a little of what Ted was sayin’. Somethin’ like, ‘Why can’t you handle it by yourself?’ And then he was out of bed and gettin’ dressed.
“Ah asked him where he was goin’, and he said a friend needed help an’ he’d be back in an hour if not soonah.”
“You have any idea who the caller was?” Lee asked.
“A friend was what he said.” She started crying again. “Ah don’t even know who his friends are. Maybe ah didn’t even know him.”
Gin was in a bad place and was going to be there for a while. Once Bettina awoke, Hawkline or some other investigator would probably put together the full story of the kidnapping and Gin would become the main course in a media feeding frenzy, until the next hot story broke.
“Is there some place you can go to … rest for a while?” I asked.
“Go? Ah can’t go anywhere, long as Ted needs me …”
With that, she slumped against the couch. The whiskey had done its job.
“Well, what now, chef?” Lee asked.
“We put her to bed,” I said. “And I look for her cellular.”
The latter required no effort. It was on her bedside table. I pressed the number she’d designated as “Hildy.”
Gin’s manager, Hildegard Fonsica, arrived at the apartment within twenty minutes. She seemed curious about Lee and how she fit into the picture, but she didn’t let that get in the way of her concern for her client.
She leaned over Gin’s now-snoring body, sniffed the air, then wrinkled her nose. “This was just booze?” she asked. “No pills?”
“She said no. She’d thrown them all away.”
“Good. Booze is bad enough. Thank God you called, Billy. I’ve had the goddamned TV off, plowing through some crappy scripts. Missed the whole mishegoss about Ted. Caught some of it on the cab over. Tell me all.”
I told her if not all then at least most, including the kidnapping and the part Ted played in it.
“That friggin’ buttlick,” she growled. “I never liked that smart-mouth prick.”
Note to self: Hildy not standing by to give Ted’s eulogy.
I told her why I thought Gin should drop out of sight for a while. Hildy took only a few moments to ponder the problem. “I got a client with a fully staffed getaway home in Bermuda,” she said. “She’s stuck in L.A. filming the world’s unfunniest sitcom. A hit, naturally. Which means the place is just sitting there. Leave it to me. I’ll get Ginger on her feet and out of here.”
“The police will want to talk to her,” Lee said.
“They’ll have to find us first.” Hildy looked down at Gin. “Just leave everything to Mama.”
Gin was lucky to have someone like Hildy in her corner. I sighed and decided the next time I saw Mr. Wally “pay me to watch you on TV” Wing, I’d kick him in his karmic ass.