Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (58 page)

Piper laughed. That was why she hadn’t mentioned it to Lee. The last thing she wanted to see was her ex-husband rolling in the dirt with her soon-to-be ex-husband.

“Can you leave now?” Piper was eager to take their conversation somewhere less public.

“I’m all yours—for an hour, anyway.” Lee took Piper’s arm and led her across the lobby to the main doors. “What’s the birthday girl feel like eating?”

“Asian?”

“I know just the place.”

Six blocks down on Wilshire at The Dragon, Lee ordered champagne as soon as they were seated. The food came out quickly. Piper ate. Lee nibbled.

Piper captured a shrimp with her chopsticks. “Mick and Belle surprised me with a DVD of Sybil Squire’s last movie,
Judgment Day,
the last film of her career.”

“He had to pull some stings to get an unreleased copy. I’m impressed.” Lee poured champagne into their glasses. “Have you talked to Sybil since the bank encounter?”

“She invited me to coffee this morning.”

“Cool. Did you tell her you’re Nana’s granddaughter?”

“She already knew. She was very nice, Lee. I think we’re going to be good friends.”

Lee stood, pulled a video camera from her bag and backed up to shoot Piper and the birthday cake that a throng of waiters was carrying to their table with candles blazing. “Happy Birthday, Piper!”

After the dishes had been cleared away, Lee paid the check and handed Piper a fortune cookie. “What’s it say, Piper?”

Piper broke it in half, pulled out the strip of paper and read it to herself.
Beware of false icons.

“Read it aloud,” Lee said, posed behind the video camera directed at her.

“It says ‘you will prosper and be happy.’” She crumbled the fortune and slipped it into the pocket of her blouse.

#

Piper turned off the brightly lit Sunset Boulevard and headed upward into the Hollywood hills. She was eager to get home and watch Sybil’s last film.

The farther up the hill she went the more people she noticed on foot, going upward. Some milled around, alone or in small groups along the edge of the street and in the densely landscaped yards of the stately homes. Another block up she saw colored lights strobing over manicured hedges and shrubs with an eerie red-and-blue glow glistening on the shiny pavement. Why was the pavement wet? There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Reflections from the whirling dome lights jumped across houses and cars. Police cars sat at odd angles, blocking the road. Creeping forward, wondering what had happened to bring the local news people and emergency vehicles into these hills, she was stopped when she attempted to enter her street. Static bursts of conversation crackled from their radios.

A uniformed cop leaned down and asked, “What’s your business, miss?”

“I live up the street.”

“You’ll have to park beyond these barriers and walk up.”

“What’s happened?” she asked.

“A house fire at the corner.”

The Vogts lived on the corner.

She quickly locked the Honda and hurried up the hill. A fire engine loomed big in front of the Vogt’s driveway. Was it their beautiful Tudor house or the guesthouse? Had she left a candle burning or something cooking on the stove? An image of Nana Ruth’s house burning to the ground, taking all but one member of her family, sent a chill through her. She began to run. As she got closer, she saw a second fire truck parked around the corner on the street where Sybil Squire lived. Her instant relief quickly turned sour. The fire was not at the Vogts but at the Squire mansion.

Dirty water ran down the gutters and along the cracks in the asphalt under her feet, soaking into her shoes. The acrid smell of smoke hung in the air. A front window of the Mediterranean house was shattered, a partially charred wingback chair lay on its side several feet into the yard. Heavy drapes, what was left of them, lay in a sodden heap beside the chair. A green garden hose snaked over the windowsill and disappeared inside. No sign of fire or smoke. The fire had been extinguished.

An ambulance stood in the driveway, its back doors open. Milling police officers and firefighters blocked her view of the interior. She was certain Sybil was inside that ambulance. It was nine o’clock. Sybil would have been alone in the house. How badly was she injured? Was she dead?

The streetlight at the corner flickered, growing brighter as the night descended. Neighbors stood in knots, talking and gesturing. Firemen were busy rolling up the hoses and checking inside and out for any hot spots. Policemen took reports.

Belle called out to her from a small cluster standing in the middle of the street. Piper joined them.

“What happened?” Piper asked. “Is Sybil okay?”

“We’re not sure. Dr. Oates, the man over there talking to the fire marshal, saw smoke and came to the rescue. He found Sybil unconscious on the living room floor. That’s where the fire started, I’m told. The doctor carried her out of the house and kept the flames under control with the garden hose. They’re working on her now.”

The group around the ambulance moved away. Inside, two paramedics hovered over her, administering oxygen and an IV. Her hand lifted, a weak gesture, and dropped onto her chest. She was alive at least. Then the back doors closed. The ambulance started up and pulled out of the driveway. The group drifted to the other side of the street, moving out of its way. The dome lights flicked on and the siren followed. Then the ambulance screamed down the road and disappeared into the night.

Piper felt sick to her stomach. Tragedy still had a firm grip on Sybil Squire.

CHAPTER FOUR

When
a San Clemente High School drama teacher took in the abused and neglected Dolores Robles, the teenager’s life changed drastically. Abigail Lightfoot saw something more than extraordinary beauty in the white-haired sophomore. She saw sheer magnetism fueled by raw talent. “My mother sold me to Miss Lightfoot,” Dolores Robles told an interviewer early in her career. “She hocked me for a hundred dollars, a broken down automobile, and a smelly fox stole.”

Annamaria would try unsuccessfully to reclaim her daughter through the court a year later when Dolores, now Sybil Squire, had begun to make her mark in show business.

—Excerpt from the biography of
Sybil Squire: The Platinum Widow
by Russell Cassevantes

On the morning after the fire, Piper stood on her deck in her robe, sipping coffee. She watched a stream of vehicles next door come and go, a glazier truck, a janitorial van, the housekeeper’s chartreuse VW bug, and wondered how Sybil was doing. Were her injuries serious? At her age, complications could prove fatal. Piper had no idea which hospital she had been taken to in a city with dozens of private clinics and several general hospitals. The housekeeper, she was sure, was the person to ask. Although she hurried with her shower, by the time she had dressed the green VW was gone.

At midmorning, she waited on the deck for Lee, who had their entire day planned. The first stop was Isadora’s, her favorite salon in Century City. Since leaving Gordon, weekly professional salon care seemed extravagant and time consuming to Piper. As the wife of a successful attorney, she was expected to be well groomed, to look the part. Doing it for Gordon had made it a chore. Today, doing it for herself seemed different, special even. She looked forward to the massage and sauna. The tension in the past week had her muscles knotted and achy.

Activity next door had stopped and all was quiet once again. Everyone gone, or so she thought until minutes later when she spotted someone in a second floor room.

She hurried down the staircase and had just passed the Vogt’s side door when Belle came out. “Piper, where’re you off to in such a rush?”

“There’s someone still inside the house,” she said, slowing. “Someone that might know which hospital Sybil was taken to.”

“Hold up, I’ll walk with you.”

A huge orange tomcat slipped out the bushes and joined them.

“Shoo, go away,” Belle said, pushing the cat away with a slippered foot.

“He looks hungry.”

“He’s the neighborhood scrounger, a stray, going from house to house. Don’t feed him. If you do, he’ll hang around. He makes Doc crazy. Shoo, you cheeky littl’ bugger.” She duck-walked with the cat between her furry feet, herding him down the driveway.

Piper heard Dr. J squawking inside the kitchen.

“This neighborhood’s filthy with cats. So many of them wild,” Belle said. “They live off the rodents in the brush and the unsuspecting birds that use the bird feeders. Half the neighborhood has a cat. The other half has a bird feeder.”

The cats preyed on the birds and rodents, the hawk in turn preyed on the cats. The coyotes preyed on them all. “Circle of life,” Piper said.

“Not if I can help it.”

At the mailbox, Belle collected the daily
Variety
then together they rounded the stone wall and walked up the path to the Squire house.

“I don’t see any vehicles,” Belle said.

“Well, somebody’s there.”

A sheet of bright new glass sparkled in the window frame. The janitorial service had cleaned up most of the yard, hauling away the burned chair and drapes. Smoke residue on the ochre stucco around the window, a thin layer of soot on everything nearby and puddles of brackish water, were all that remained to indicate the previous night’s fire.

Piper knocked on the wooden door. “Hello. Is anyone here! Hello!”

They waited in the shade of the arched porch. Belle rang the doorbell, a loud bell that went on and on. There was no way anyone inside the house could miss it.

“That’s odd. I saw someone in the upstairs rooms just a few minutes ago.”

“Man or woman?”

“Couldn’t tell. A person moving from room to room.”

“Check the backyard. It’s probably someone from the cleanup service.”

“I don’t know. Should we be wandering around? Someone might call the cops.”

“We’re concerned neighbors. Go. Look. I’ll wait here.” She rang the bell again.

Piper left Belle on the porch and walked along the driveway toward the back, the same route she’d taken yesterday. Something was different. Something was missing.
The canaries
. No sounds of singing. They sang every day as soon as the drapes opened. Canaries were delicate birds, easily traumatized. If last night’s fire and smoke hadn’t gotten to them, the commotion with the firefighters and trucks may have shocked them into silence. Or caused them to drop dead.

She rounded the back of the house to the sunroom. The drapes were closed. They wouldn’t sing in a dark room. It didn’t prove they were all right, but at least it explained their silence. She glanced around the rear yard. No sign of any workers. Turning, she headed back toward the front of the house.

Midway down the driveway, she looked up at the windows on the second story and stopped. The skin at the nape of her neck tightened. Returning was that creepy feeling from the day before, that same eerie sense of being watched. She held her breath and listened. A pair of doves cooed, calling out to one another. A dog barked in a yard beyond the Vogt’s back wall. Normal, everyday sounds, yet the dark feeling pressed down on her. She glanced from window to window. So many windows. Was someone watching her from behind one of them? Her chest felt tight, as if a boa constrictor had wrapped itself around her torso and was squeezing the air out of her. She realized she was holding her breath.

A shadow slid over her from above.

She instinctively ducked, looking up at the same time.

The hawk circled overhead. She sucked in air, filling her lungs, trying to control her pounding heart.

Dammit, she was scaring herself, giving into her own silly fears. No sooner had the beating of her heart begun to slow, when from the front of the house Belle cried out, sending it into overdrive again. She ran to her.

Piper pulled up short when she saw Belle gingerly step over a puddle to peer into the front window. She held her furry slippers in one hand.

“What? What is it … are you okay?” Piper’s voice cracked.

“I can’t believe this. Those are genuine Letecs on that shelf. Q. Letecs.” She motioned for Piper to come closer.

“My god, I thought you were being attacked.”

“Don’t be a ninny. You watch far too many cloak and dagger films. Letecs,” she repeated. “Come look. I wanted to start a collection of his figurines, but they were much too pricey. Way out of my league, not to mention impossible to get these days unless you know a collector. She must have two dozen or more. Oh, I hate her.”

Piper exhaled, relieved. Belle leaped back and pulled Piper toward the window. Piper held onto a branch of an evergreen tree, its sap sticky on her palm, the sharp scent of pine filling her head. She tried to step over the puddle and slid into it. Mud squished between the toes of her sandals. “Damn.” she merely glanced at the figurines, which held little interest for her, and instead scanned the room. Her gaze stopped on the blackened patch of carpet on the other side of the room. “That must be where Dr. Oates found her.” Piper pointed.

“Ummm. Probably. She’s damn lucky he happened to be driving by and saw the smoke,” Belle said. “With the park across the street and the way this house is situated on the corner behind all these trees, this front part is hidden from both neighboring houses. Even if you’d been home, Piper, I doubt you would have spotted the smoke in time.”