The room didn’t look so much like a gunslinger hideout as a 1920s speakeasy. It had polished mahogany wainscoting, red-flocked wallpaper and a spectacular art deco chandelier.
“Miss Moore asked me to bring you this way because of the reporters.” Miguel said. He obviously saw me staring at the molded glass-and-bronze chandelier. “This part of the hotel was built during the Prohibition, when this was a dude ranch. I guess Hollywood bigshots came up to party all the time. This room is so secret it’s not even in the building plans. Miss Moore doesn’t even show it to most of the guests. You must be special.”
Noise of a key in a lock in a panel opposite suggested that somebody else was special, too. The panel slowly opened and Rick Zukowski stepped inside.
I made a startled noise.
“I hoped you might be in here.” Rick laughed “Gaby sent me out to do a search and rescue. She was afraid you might have been ambushed by the hostiles out there.” He nodded at Miguel and said something in fluent Spanish.
Miguel gave a quick nod and let himself out the panel we came in.
“Impressive, Mr. Zukowski,” I said. “You talk Spanish like a native.”
He gave me that cute grin.
“I am a native. L.A. born and bred. My mom was born in Mexico. Zukowski was a salesman from Ohio, traveling through.” He studied my outfit. “You look fantastic. Wow. Really great.”
He kept staring and grinning. Nice to know I still had it.
“Thank you.” I bestowed a quick kiss on his cheek. “I’ll be a little less nervous knowing I look okay.”
He looked into my eyes for a moment, then gave me a kiss back—long and sweet. Amazing how much I’d wanted him to do that. His body felt strong and safe. I clung to him for just a moment too long, then felt embarrassed.
I covered by telling him about Miguel’s revelation about the rooster story.
“I know it looks bad, but it doesn’t mean Plant is guilty.” I went for a businesslike tone. “The killer didn’t have to be staying at the resort. The cabins are close to the road. Maybe it was a passing driver.”
Rick obviously didn’t buy it.
“Somebody driving a country road in the middle of the night says, ‘I think I’ll stop in here for a minute and use a guest for target practice, then toss away my thousand-dollar gun’?” He scrunched his face as if he were thinking hard.
He ushered me out the wall panel he’d come in. It led to the corridor with the pictures of Will “Sugarfoot” Hutchins and the other old cowboy stars.
Rick seemed to have a thing about the cowboy myth being ripped off from Mexicans. He told me how ranch is short for rancho; and chaps are chaparejos; and “hoosegow” is bad spelling of juzgado.
“And what makes a cowboy a cowboy? His cow? No frickin’ way. It’s his horse. ‘Cowboy’ is just Anglo for caballero. A horseman. The great American cowboy is a Mexican horseman.”
He was probably right. He seemed to be right about most things. Which I found annoying. I didn’t want to let him be right about Plant.
“Silas said Ernesto was self-destructive. Maybe he did commit suicide after all.” I knew how lame that sounded as soon as it came out.
“Silas Ryder said that? How well do you know him?”
There he was, back to being the interrogating policeman again.
“I met him last night in the Longhorn Room, same as you. Later, he came down to the cabins with Gabriella. Plant showed him the body, and Silas called the Sheriff’s Department. He thought it was Toby’s fault, just like Plant did. He was so mad he knocked Zorro off the wall.”
“Silas Ryder is the one who vandalized the Guy Williams photo?” Rick pondered this as if it held some significance. “Did he say anything anti-Latino?”
I didn’t like where this was going.
“Why are you asking me all these questions about Silas? He seems to be the only real friend Ernesto had.”
“People are usually killed by the ones closest to them.”
Was that true? All I could do was shudder. It was obvious Silas knew Plant pretty well. Silas might have known Ernesto was going down to Plant’s cabin. He could have killed Ernesto and then tossed the gun into Plant’s car.
Rick looked at his watch. “We’ll be late. Gaby will kill me.”
He closed the door to the secret room and locked it, hiding the key in a piece of scrollwork near the top that seemed to have been built for the purpose. No one would have known the door was there.
“So you suspect Silas of killing Ernesto—just because they were close?” I followed Rick down the corridor. “Do you have any other reason?”
Rick shrugged. “Silas Ryder was also the last person to see Mitzi Boggs Bailey.”
I wondered if I’d heard right. “What do you mean, the last one—what’s happened to her?” The poor old woman. She’d been so terrified of those ghosts.
Rick stopped and looked at me.
“Hasn’t anybody told you? Mitzi Boggs Bailey disappeared from her cabin last night. The old girl’s gone missing.”
Chapter 15—Maverick Jesus
While we hurried to the dining room, Rick told me what he knew about Mrs. Boggs Bailey’s disappearance. Apparently after Plant was taken to Santa Maria, Silas found Mitzi in the parking lot, harassing the investigators about the noise. Silas offered to walk her back to the cabin to wait until they could get a room ready for her at the Hacienda.
That didn’t sound very suspicious to me. I know Rick was trained to think in terms of statistics, but I didn’t want see Silas as a murderer. Plant obviously liked and trusted him.
“That must have been why they moved me out of room fourteen,” I said. “They were getting it ready for Mitzi.”
“Could be. Anyway, when Miguel sent a cart down to get her, Mitzi was gone. So was Silas. But the old girl has gone missing before. There’s a search and rescue team looking for her now.”
I offered a few encouraging words, but all I could think was that if Ernesto had been murdered, a killer was out there wandering those hills. And because it was pretty unlikely that Silas or Plant had killed Ernesto, Mrs. Boggs Bailey was in awful danger. She might very well have seen the killer when she was wandering around talking to her “ghosts.” I wished Rick seemed more worried.
“Jeez,” he said when we finally got to the Fiesta Hall dining room. “I can’t believe they didn’t save you a seat.” He nodded at the big, round head table.
It certainly looked crowded. In fact, the short wiry man who called himself, “Herb Frye the Sci-Fi guy” had squeezed in an extra chair, wedging himself between voluptuous Vondra DeHaviland, the romance novelist, and a greeting card verse expert from Fresno who looked as if she’d rather be enduring a tax audit. Beside Toby sat the pretty Latina girl from the workshop—overdressed in a Donna Karan cocktail dress from a few seasons ago, with her eyes ringed in enough black eyeliner to make a raccoon jealous.
On Toby’s other side, the amazingly stoic Gaby soldiered on, wearing the mask of gracious hostess.
Vondra waved Rick over to where his entrée sat waiting.
“Go,” I said. “I’ll be fine at another table. I’ll see you at my talk. I hope you can be there?”
He gave me a quick kiss. Not much more than brotherly, but there, in front of everybody, it felt like a declaration of affection. He countered the intensity of the moment with a laugh.
“Of course. How could I face my mother-in-law if I missed it?”
The Miss Manners fan waved at me and pointed to an empty chair next at a table of memoir-writing senior citizens. But several of her companions gave me icy looks that indicated they’d probably heard the late night “zombie sex” jokes.
As I looked around for another spot, the red-faced Englishman from the workshop rose from a table nearby and accosted me.
“These waiters don’t seem to speak a word of English. Could you tell that young man that I require tea, not coffee, and that I’d like my beef cooked—not pract
ically alive and mooing?” He pointed at one of the waiters bringing out trays of tri-tip barbeque and beans. “I thought I was coming to America, not Mexico. Will you tell me why the towns, the food, the language, everything here is all bloody Mexican?”
“I suppose it’s because the Mexicans were here first.” I tried to ignore his implied racism. “But I’m afraid I don’t speak much Spanish either. I had the same trouble with my taxi driver on the way here.”
The man had that angry-tourist look that hovered between anguish and rage. I looked around for a way to escape him.
I spotted a free chair at a table with the smug twenty-somethings from Cowboy Critique. They must be the “obnoxious TV writers” Miguel mentioned. One was wearing a much laundered T-shirt with a Vampire Diaries logo and another had a baseball cap from Criminal Minds.
As I sat down, they stopped their animated conversation about how New York agents scorned Hollywood screenwriting credentials. The Vampire Diaries woman nudged Criminal Minds as he used his sourdough toast to scoop beans and salsa from his plate.
She handed him a fork.
“She’s the Manners Doctor, dickhead; don’t act like some brain-eating zombie”
There was a snort from the leather-jacketed alpha male of the group, and his cohorts joined in. More fans of late-night TV.
I armored myself with a Manners Doctor smile.
“Please go on with your conversation, and enjoy your meal. The Manners Doctor is just a character I use when I write—a voice. Besides, the Doctor says good manners are about respecting other people, not judging them.”
But the smugsters ate in silence. I wondered if they were intimidated by my Manners Doctor persona or busy picturing me in some kinky sex act. I kept looking over at Rick, adorably goofy as he laughed at the Sci-Fi guy’s jokes.
Finally one of the smugsters spoke. He had a remarkable number of piercings in his nose and eyebrows.
“I’d watch myself around Captain Road Rage, Doctor. He may have got himself a fancy agent, but he’s still a menace to society.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” I helped myself to more salsa. “And who is Captain Road Rage?”
“Captain Maverick Jesus Zukowski.” Vampire Diaries gave a sarcastic laugh. “Of the L.A.P.D.”
Maverick Jesus—M. J. Zukowski. What a name to live with. I steeled myself for whatever snark the smugsters were planning to hurl at him.
“How come that creep hasn’t been fired?” said Pierced Nose.
“I read they keep him twiddling his thumbs behind a desk or something. Maybe that’s why he’s written a novel,” said Criminal Minds.
I had to ask. “Why do you call him Captain Road Rage?”
The alpha smugster gave a knowing laugh.
“I know it’s hard to keep the L.A.P.D. horror stories straight, Doctor—but this guy was a division captain—a big honcho in the department, and one day last summer he went postal: started chasing a black guy down the 405, siren blaring—and when he caught up with him, he hauled the man out of the car, roughed him up and cuffed him—screaming at the poor guy for texting in his car. Stomped the phone to bits—a brand new iPhone.”
“But another driver got it all recorded on video and sent it to KTLA—busted!” said Criminal Minds.
The smugsters laughed happily as I tried to swallow. I remembered seeing that blurry bit of video myself, on some evening news program. Horrifying. I looked over at Rick, now smiling kindly at Vondra. Could he really be the same man?
Toby Roarke stood and clinked his glass.
“We’ve had a terrible tragedy in our literary family,” he said in ponderous tones. “We shall all miss Ernesto Cervantes, who came to us last year as a scholarship student and was showing so much improvement in his writing—”
I wondered if Ernesto’s “improvement” was the result of stealing Miguel’s work.
“I would like to ask for a moment of silence, while we all remember Ernesto’s beautiful spirit.”
As everyone’s head bowed, I did think about Ernesto—as well as Plantagenet in his jail cell. I also thought of Mitzi Boggs Bailey, lost in the hills, with darkness coming on. And Rick. Could he really be that terrible person? How could I be such an awful judge of character? The moment of silence went on and on. I sneaked a glance at the room and was startled to see Toby Roarke’s gnarled hand creep around the tiny waist of the Donna Karan girl and slide down to her knit-encased bottom.
I couldn’t stand it. I had to get away from Toby and his morbid farce, as well as Rick Zukowski a.k.a. Captain Road Rage. I’d go find a rest room and run through my speech one more time.
I dashed out the door and ran down the corridor to the lobby.
But I’d forgotten what would be out there, lying in wait.
Chapter 16—Squirrel Murderer
Apparently the only reason we’d been allowed to eat in relative peace was that Gabriella had posted guards at the end of the corridor to keep the reporters at bay—well, not actual guards, but a couple of kitchen staff, including Santiago, the “dorky” bowing Guatemalan.
He looked fierce and professional as he gave a sharp warning glance at a young man with blond dreadlocks.
The young man wore a T-shirt that read “STOMP OUT GRAPES.”
He must be one of D. Sorengaard’s anti-grape crazies.
Gabriella’s plan seemed to be that the reporters were to stay herded into the lobby and the vineyard protesters were to be kept outside in the parking lot, but of course the protesters were infiltrating, hoping for publicity.
And now I was walking straight into three videocams and God knew how many still cameras. Not to mention the grape-stompers.
“There she is!” somebody said. “Dr. Manners!”
Microphones poked at my face. People crowded into a blur. I tried to push the microphones out of my way, but more kept coming.
One hit me on the nose.
“Did you witness the murder of Ernesto Cervantes? Why did Plantagenet Smith murder his lover?”
I touched my wounded nose, hoping it wouldn’t bleed on my Chanel suit. I turned back, trying to make my way back to the dining room. Even watching Toby Roarke play cowboy with his new pet student would be better than this.
But now the way was blocked. Reporters pushed around me. Panic tightened my chest.
“Have you told the police everything you know about the murder, Dr. Manners?” said somebody with a bigger microphone than the rest.
“I’ll be happy to talk to the Sheriff’s people again, if they ask me, but I didn’t see any murder!”
The room went quiet and reporters crowded in. Now I was going to have to elaborate.
“It didn’t look like a murder. It looked like suicide. And after the way he was treated…”
I caught sight of Gabriella, pushing through the crowd toward me. She’d been through so much, with her sister-in-law missing, her conference in shambles, and who-knows-what happening in her vineyards. I certainly didn’t need to add to it by saying angry things about Toby.
“I have to go,” I said, trying to protect my nose from further microphone assault. “I have nothing more to say at this time. Come hear my presentation tonight. In the Ponderosa Lounge at seven-thirty. I don’t know what time the doors will open.” I looked questioningly at Gabriella.
“All public talks have been canceled!” Gabriella’s voice sounded as big and loud as it had herding cattle on Big Mountain. Some of the microphones rushed toward her. “Ms. Randall’s talk tonight has been rescheduled for a later date. For enrolled attendees only. Full refunds will be mailed to all single-event ticket holders. I repeat: all public events have been canceled until further notice.”
Finally, enough reporters migrated toward Gabriella that I was able to push my way back toward the dining room.
“Hey Doc, what were you going to say?” It was the dreadlocked man with the “Stomp out Grapes” T-shirt. “You said the dead kid was mistreated. Care to elaborate on that
?”
I tried to escape. “No I don’t. I…misspoke.”
He gripped my elbow.
“Cut the crap, Doctor. I think you know what a fascist that guy really is. You know how old those oak trees were that he cut down? Four, maybe five hundred years old. And you know what happens when they plow deep enough to plant vineyards? Everything dies—owls, foxes, squirrels. He’s murdering them. Like he murdered this gay dude.”
“Your police escort is here, Ms. Randall,” said a Joe-Friday voice. A strong hand grabbed my other elbow.
I turned and saw that cute grin. Captain Road Rage’s grin. I stiffened.
“Oh, man, the pigs are here?” Grapes said.
“Oink,” said Rick, pulling out his badge.
The blond dreadlocks disappeared into the crowd.
“Alberto has a golf cart for you out back, but not enough staff to drive it,” Rick said. “Most of his employees are illegals, so they evaporate when law enforcement shows up. Okay if I play chauffeur?”
I nodded, although I avoided meeting his eyes, not sure if I wanted him to know I’d found out he was the road rage cop. Maybe he’d flipped out because of his wife’s death. He did say she was killed by a cell phone-using driver. I so hoped he wasn’t the racist the alpha smugster implied. People who hate are so dangerous to everybody.
Rick led me to the Hole in the Wall shortcut. I had a moment of panic as he led me into the room—realizing I really didn’t know a thing about this man. I was alone with Captain Road Rage in a secret, hidden room.
But he led me quickly through the staff quarters and out to the golf cart.
He seemed to sense my fear, but not the reason. He gave my shoulder a pat.
“Gaby said you were stressing.”
He let down the vinyl windscreen to keep the photographers from getting a clear shot, although a few trailed behind once they spotted us.
“Are you upset that Gaby and Toby rescheduled your talk again? The decision wasn’t just theirs. The Sheriff’s department wants to keep the public away as much as possible, with the investigation going on. Not to mention the complications provided by the protesters. Those folks might have heckled you off the stage. You don’t need ‘squirrel murderer’ and ‘tree assassin’ added to the bogus accusations against you.”