Only a Hollywood Detective Could #2
Sam turned back to Logan. “I’m sorry about your wife, I really am.
But you need to get out your phone and call your lawyer to help her while my brother drives you to the closest police station to tell your story.
If you don’t have a lawyer for your wife, tell Fergus to call mine and get him on retainer. ”
“I can do that,” Fergus said. His voice came from right beside her. Sam hadn’t realized he’d left the truck. He’d probably come to back her up as soon as Logan got in her car.
Ready to jump in the rapids for her and hers.
“Fergus, I’m sending you the recording I just made of Logan’s conversation with Sam,” Bex said. “Sometimes you need more than your notebook.”
Fergus raised his eyebrows at Logan. “Okay?”
The young man let out a shaky breath. “I’ll call on the way. We have an immigration lawyer. I can’t lose her.”
His face broke, and Fergus nodded. “Come on. We need to go.” He leaned close to Sam. “You be careful. I mean it.”
“I know. I will.”
“Is Vic okay?” Bex looked toward Fergus’s truck. “Does she need anything?”
Fergus smiled as Logan appeared beside him. “She’s focused on being command central. She has both of you on location tracking. She has a group chat with the army. She’s missing nothing. Where are you two headed?”
They had to find the why of all this. If they didn’t, Chad, Sloan, and the studio would all be pointing fingers at each other. They couldn’t count on Ramona being able to tell her story. Even if she was okay, she might not know why they’d shot her. Trauma could obscure her memory of what happened.
“Encino,” Sam said. “Let’s go talk to Archie.”
Sam and Bex stood on the wide porch of Archie Blasingame’s mission-style home.
The rain had broken, but wind had taken its place, and his leafy street was filled with shadows that projected onto the pale stucco of his house.
Just as Bex lifted her hand to push the brass button set into a flower of Spanish tiles, the door opened.
“What are you doing here?” Archie was in sweatpants and a battered Howard University T-shirt. The sleep attire made him no less intimidating than the blazer he’d worn the last time they spoke to him at the Gymboree.
Sam put her shoulders back. “Search and rescue found Ramona. She’s alive but in rough shape. She’d been shot and left for dead. We don’t know who pulled the trigger, but we have a witness saying Sloan had a gun on him, and Chad knew and helped cover it up.”
Archie slumped against the doorframe. “My God.” He took off his heavy glasses and ran a hand over his eyes, then opened the door wider. “Come in out of the weather.”
They followed him through a formal sitting room to the kitchen, where there was a large booth. A tall woman in a full-coverage robe and a red silk bonnet came through a doorway at the back of the kitchen. “Archie?”
“It’s Bexley Simon and Sam Farmer. About Ramona.” He gestured toward her for Bex and Sam’s benefit. “This is my wife, Jasmine.”
“What happened to Ramona?” She turned on another light in the kitchen and leaned against the counter.
“Those assholes shot Ramona and left her for dead.” Archie’s gruff, precise London accent made it difficult to read his mood. He looked at Bex. “Go through it. Efficiently.”
She already had her notebook out, with a freshly bulleted list she’d made on the drive to Encino.
“Here’s what we know,” she said. “Macie told us Ramona feels responsible for Juliette’s death.
You’re strongly associated with that era of Ramona’s life.
You’ve been seen with her on set lately and went looking for her at home the first morning anyone noticed she was gone.
You sent us to Kessler, and he told us you’re working on a release of the Ice documentary, which Colin Worth told us Ramona was involved with.
Given how much the Ice Crew’s past is tangled up with the present, we’re wondering if you might know anything about Ramona’s state of mind leading up to Friday, and especially about anything she might have said or done to, let’s say, activate Chad or Sloan. Or both of them.”
“Mercy,” Jasmine breathed. She stood for several seconds with her hand to her chest, thinking. Then her jawline firmed. “I’m going to make some coffee. Warm up some sweet rolls.”
“Thank you.” Sam realized how little she’d slept, taken the time to eat, anything, since they’d started on this case.
“You’re after motive,” Arthur said.
“We are looking for motive,” Bex replied.
“For any reason at all that Chad and Sloan would have to hurt Ramona. And we want to find out what that reason is before either one of them has time to get a counternarrative in place, which really only gives us tonight. Very few people know yet that she was on the mountain, but that circle is already getting bigger. She’s going to be recognized by anyone who so much as sees her name on an IV bag at the hospital.
LAPD will have deployed a lot of people, some of whom talk to paparazzi.
I have news alerts set up, and so far, I’ve only seen stories that say search and rescue was dispatched to Baldy, not for who, and of course about Sam and I being seen around town together, but those are just speculating about our relationship, not what we’re up to. ”
“I’m sure that’s going to change fast, too,” Sam said.
“We found out Chad and Sloan have been leaking damaging information about Ramona to the media for years. Once they hear she’s been found, if they haven’t already, there’s no telling what they’ll do or say.
We’ve enlisted Christian Stanstedt’s help to keep them occupied tonight.
We’re hoping they stay in one place and are distracted, but you can see how we only have a few more hours, if that, to gather evidence that helps Ramona and can be used to hold the right person accountable for doing this to her. Or the right people.”
Archie stroked his chin. Jasmine was shaking her head. The coffee machine dripped and hissed. Otherwise, the kitchen was silent for long enough that nothing felt quite real, and Sam’s thoughts began to soften and drift.
She was tired.
Archie cleared his throat. “I got a call. First thing Friday morning.”
“Who called you?”
“Some bellend who represents Chad. Says he was giving me a ‘courtesy call’ to tell me I’d be served cease-and-desist papers shortly.
I wasn’t to distribute, to anyone in any form, any footage I might have of Ramona Watts describing the night Juliette Draper died.
I wasn’t to give verbal confirmation of the existence of such footage.
I wasn’t to share any evidence Ramona may have provided to me that Chad and Sloan had slandered her in the media, contributing to her reputation with the public as an unstable, unreliable, and unwell actress who is difficult to work with.
I wrote this down as soon as I got off the phone.
I can give you the direct quotes. I was told if I didn’t comply with this so-called courtesy, this attorney would proceed with defamation suits and ask for damages that, frankly, exceed what either one of these knob-heads could expect to make in five of their careers. ”
“This happened first thing Friday morning,” Sam repeated. “What time?”
“Few minutes after eight. Soon as I finished making notes, I went direct to the studio to see Ramona, but she wasn’t there. They’d gone out on a location shoot. I waited here for the courier to turn up with the cease-and-desist papers so I could hand them over to my attorney. Never happened.”
“It was an empty threat?” Bex asked. “Chad was trying to scare you off?”
Archie shook his head. “That man damn near bankrupted me to keep Ice from being released. There was no good reason for him to do that, mind, since what happened to the film was out of my hands. Cineline had the distribution. But Chad sued me personally, and it took six years and everything in my savings to settle up. If he had his legal people phoning to tell me papers were coming, I believed they would come.”
“But they didn’t,” Sam said. “Something changed in between when you got that call and when the papers were supposed to be sent over.” She thought about it.
“This was the same day Chad was on Mount Baldy and someone shot Ramona. He either did it or watched it happen. Afterward, he couldn’t afford any kind of scrutiny, including from a lawsuit.
He had to be cautious. He called off his legal dogs.
But something had happened that prompted him to come after you, something earlier in the week that resulted in a Friday morning phone call. What do you think it was?”
“That fucking documentary,” Archie said.
“Cursed from the start, wasn’t it? I thought it was going to make my career.
I spent every waking moment with these people.
The Ice Crew. Six movie stars everyone wanted a piece of, or to be them, and there I was, looking around, wondering, Where’s the adult?
I was barely five years older than these guys, and following them around for twenty-two months gave me panic attacks, insomnia, problems with my stomach.
Then Juliette died. I didn’t want anything to do with it, not ever again. ”
“They broke his heart,” Jasmine said. She put a hand on his shoulder. Archie covered it with his own.
“The best thing to come out of it was Ramona,” he said. “She’s been a friend to us both ever since. But even still, when she came to me asking if I would pick the project back up, I said no. Until she told me why.”
“Juliette,” Sam breathed. It had to be. Ramona’s feelings of guilt and regret about Juliette were what had set this in motion.
“Yeah. Juliette. Ramona wanted me to take my raw footage and edit it again. She asked me to peel back the glamor and show they were barely older than children, drowning in their own celebrity. And she wanted to sit down for an on-camera interview where she finally talked about what happened that night in the harbor.”