Chapter 36
Luke
We need to figure out what happened to Leonardo once he left the cocktail bar the other night,” Luke told Divya and Sol over breakfast at their hotel the following morning. “What did the waiter tell you again?”
“That Leonardo looked well-rested, tanned, utterly divine, young even. But also somewhat uncomfortable, especially towards his companion,” Divya said.
“His unremarkable companion,” Luke quipped. He was still a bit sore that the two waiters had been so fixated on Leonardo’s beauty they couldn’t even offer a descriptive element of the person who’d been with the actor that night.
Divya rolled her eyes, checking her mobile phone. “His unremarkable companion. Tomàs just texted me.”
“That’s one of the waiters?”
“Uh-huh.” Divya’s eyes were still fixed on her screen.
“He told me Leonardo had scribbled something on a napkin when the unremarkable one was distracted paying the tab, and Leonardo had slipped it to Tomàs. He’d kept it as a memento because it was from Leonardo Pascual and only now realizes he should have reported it. ”
“And he found the note on the napkin?”
“He just sent me a pic, yes.”
“What does it say?” Sol was wearing sunglasses indoors, and sipping her second mug of strong tea. She was very hungover—but she still wanted to know what had happened with Leonardo. It was clear she was feeling the investigative call.
Divya brought her phone closer to her face, blinking several times. “You know what, you try.” She handed the phone to Sol.
“Oh my god! I’m too wrecked for this.” She squinted at the screen. “Cell Baby? Call Baby perhaps? Who the fuck is Baby?” She handed the phone to Luke. “See if you make any sense of it.”
The handwriting was rushed, untidy, and irregular. It showed the actor was probably in a hurry when he scribbled it. “Is that two b’s in Baby?” It hit him then. “Wait, could it say Bobby?”
He handed the phone with the picture of Leonardo’s handwritten note to Sol, then Divya. They both agreed it most probably said: “Call Bobby.”
“See if we got this right. Leonardo is in Mallorca. He was seen two nights ago in a bar on the island but hasn’t been in contact with anyone,” Luke started recapping.
“In fact, we tried his mobile phone this morning without success, and his publicist just sent us an email saying no one on his team, nor his parents, have heard about him. That paired with what Tomàs and the other waiter told Divya yesterday, leads us to believe Leonardo was brought here, perhaps by the unremarkable FadeToBlack, against his will. Yet he gets a moment to slip a note to a waiter and he asks him to call his manager?”
“His lost-marbles manager, let’s not forget,” Divya quipped and it was clear they were both on the same page.
“I was hoping that by now this bloody case would have got a bit less opaque.” Luke groaned.
He wanted to find Leonardo now more than ever.
He feared for the actor’s safety. Luke wanted him located and in one piece.
Only that way would he be able to really focus on whatever was going on between Sol and him.
When they’d finally gone back to the hotel the previous night, she’d just fallen asleep.
That morning there had been no attempt from either of them to go back to the conversation they’d had the night before. “But let’s call Bobby, I suppose.”
“At least he’s nice,” Divya added, and she was already dialing the number on her phone and putting it on speaker in the middle of the table.
“Bobby speaking,” the manager answered after a few tones. His words dragged together.
“Bobby, I hope it’s not too late there,” Divya said, visibly trying to guess what time it was in Los Angeles.
Sol scrunched her nose from across the table and shook her head. She lifted all ten fingers in the air and then the index and middle fingers of her right hand. It was midnight.
“Oh, don’t you worry. I’m a night owl,” the always accommodating Bobby said and Luke almost huffed. The man was too nice to even scream at them for waking him up.
“This is Divya from the agency looking into Leonardo’s disappearance. We were hoping you could help us with something.”
Why couldn’t Divya be that direct and optimal when she was talking with Luke?
“Sure, tell me what you need. But I’m afraid my memory is still not very bright,” Bobby said.
“Don’t worry. We think we found Leonardo, he was seen in a bar in Mallorca two nights ago,” Divya, again, opted for a succinct retelling of the events. So she was able to synthesize when she wanted.
“Mallorca, you say? So he really took off to the beach and left everything?”
“Not exactly, we think someone may have forced him to do it. But then when he got out two nights ago he slipped a note to a waiter, asking to call you. Do you know what that could mean?” Divya was crossing the fingers on both her hands.
There was silence so long Luke thought the call had dropped—or Bobby had hung up on them.
He had reason to. They’d probably just woken him up and Luke wasn’t proud to recognize he’d judged the manager too harshly before.
Same as in Hollywood, investigating also had a cutthroat side and Luke was guilty of falling into it sometimes.
He could get frustrated if he encountered unreliable, less-than-ideal witnesses.
But Bobby could still prove to be a valuable source.
The manager finally said: “I’m his in-case-of-emergency person.”
Divya lifted her eyes from the phone’s screen to Luke’s from across the table. Her eyebrows were knit together. “Do you mean that he could be in danger?”
“Peggy—or is it Pippa?—the publicist,” Bobby said, frustrated, “she’s the one people call if Leonardo has won an award or is wanted for a tribute.
I’m the guy to call if something bad happened, not his parents.
Leonardo drilled that in me, I guess that’s why I remember it so vividly.
He didn’t want his parents to be the first to know if something happened.
To get the cold call in the middle of the night. ”
Divya’s heart had to be beating as fast as his. “What do you mean if something happened?”
Bobby sighed, as if trying to find the words. “Like a car accident—or a kidnapping.”