Beware Beware

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  To Matt

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Steph Cha

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  The weekend hovered in full view an hour away, like an island in silhouette gaining color with its steady approach. There was a time when this meant something to me, when the school bell or the desktop clock said it was time to go home, time, at least, for happy hour.

  I sat on the floor with my bare foot flexed under the desk. It was a slow day in the office, and my toenails were about as long and dirty as I’d seen them, and they’d been long and dirty before. There was no sense keeping them pretty from November to March, with my flip-flops put away. It was February now, and my nails chafed against the insides of my shoes. They were starting to hurt.

  A thick rind flew off a big toe with a crisp, clacking sound. It ricocheted off the back of my desk, the panel of cheap wood that hid me from view should a client barge in. As I reached to pick up the crescent, footsteps shuffled behind me and a sneaker pushed into my lower back. I turned my head and looked up at Chaz Lindley, who stood arms crossed and scowling.

  “Song, if Art sees you like this I’m the one who’s got to suffer. You know that, right?”

  A week ago, I’d walked into Chaz’s office and caught him with his shirt up, tweezing nipple hairs with a binder clip. I’d shuffled out the way I’d come in, and neither of us had brought up the incident. I felt the easy comeback on my tongue, and let it go unsaid. Chaz was my boss.

  I met private investigator Charles Lindley under strange circumstances. He got me out of a couple good tangles, and when I was in the clear, he recruited me. I’d always liked the idea of PI work. I spent a lot of lonely years dreaming of Philip Marlowe instead of living my own life. When I crossed paths with Chaz, I was in the thick of my first real case, which I hadn’t asked for in the least. I wasn’t half bad at the work, but it ended disastrously anyway. It scoured me clean of any romantic feelings for the job, but when Chaz offered to hire me, I was grateful. The fact was, I had nothing better to do, and we both knew it.

  I joined Lindley & Flores as a gofer, with the idea that I’d get my own license once I racked up the work experience. He ran his practice out of a small office in Koreatown with a forty-five-year-old ex-cop named Arturo Flores. Chaz said they could use a scrappy errand girl with nothing to lose. His exact words.

  So far I’d done grunt work in the office and three straightforward assignments on cheating spouses. Two pissed-off husbands and one pissed-off wife paid good money to learn things they already knew. It was low-glamour stuff, but I knew that going in. I spent a lot of time in the office, bored out of my mind and always uncomfortably hot. I helmed the receptionist desk, and when Chaz wanted to look good for a client, I played the quiet, efficient office lady as best I could in blue jeans, but mostly I just sat around. Arturo had been out all morning, and it was just me and Chaz passing time. I knew better than to clip my toenails with Arturo around. He was a serious man with a line for a mouth. He thought I was a bit of a joker, who Chaz had hired out of pity. He was probably right.

  I started to get up off the floor when Chaz plunked down in my chair. “You can finish,” he said. “But then I have some actual work for you.”

  I stood up and slipped my feet into my shoes. “What’s up?”

  “I got you a client.” He smiled, broad and goofy, showing his big teeth. “Girl needs someone to check up on her boyfriend. You up for it?”

  Quitting time was around the bend, and I jumped at the chance to postpone it. The week had been slow and I had nothing in the way of weekend plans. “Sure. Cheaters are kind of my specialty.”

  “Yours and everyone else’s.” He pushed a Post-It onto my desk with a phone number scribbled in his incongruously elegant hand. “Name’s Daphne Freamon. Give her a call. I think she needs a woman’s ear.”

  *

  With three divorces under my belt, I was starting to feel a little comfort in the job. Each assignment was quick, simple, and dirty in a way that didn’t compromise me. I cleared them, and with each clearance I increased the distance between me and my past mistakes. I wasn’t delusional enough to think this was good work that might buy my atonement, but it helped to put whatever skills I had to someone else’s bad use.

  My new client had a 917 area code. I dialed, and she answered after three rings.

  “Hello?” She sounded quiet and expectant, like she was speaking into a darkened room—she’d been waiting for my call.

  “Hi, Miss Freamon? This is Juniper Song, with Lindley & Flores. How are you today?”

  “Call me Daphne, Miss Song.” She had the kind of distinctive voice that I knew I could recognize out of context months, maybe years later. It was timid thin-wired high-pitched but a little raspy. I wondered if she was a smoker.

  “Sure, Daphne. Call me Song. It’s what people call me. What can I do for you today?”

  “Well,” she said. “Listen, Song—Mr. Lindley says you’re twenty-seven, unmarried. Is that right?”

  I smirked. “Yeah, that’s right. What else did he say about me?”

  “Oh, no, nothing much. It’s just—we’re the same age. I talked to Mr. Lindley for a bit, but I think he thought I’d rather talk to you.”

  “Would you rather talk to him?” The idea didn’t offend me. Despite his groin-scratching solicitous dad-ness, Chaz was the pro to my peewee league. I’d go straight to him if I wanted shit done.

  “No, no, this is much better,” she said. “Song, do you have a boyfriend?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, I called you guys because I’m worried about mine. We’re long distance. I live in New York and he’s in L.A. He got this gig ghostwriting for Joe Tilley about six months back and moved out there for a while. Do you know Joe Tilley?”

  The name sounded familiar, but it was generic enough. “I might. Who is he?”

  “He’s an actor. A pretty big one. He used to be a bit of a heartthrob in his twenties, but he’s turned his career into something pretty serious over the last decade. He was nominated for an Oscar a couple years ago and a lot of people think he was robbed. You’d probably recognize him if you saw him. Late forties, lot of muscle. He kissed pop stars on-screen in the nineties. These days he plays mysterious men with obsessions and dark pasts.”

  I typed the name into Google and the face clicked into place. “Oh, this guy. I know this guy. Nice. He’s a pretty big deal.”

  “Jamie—that’s my boyfriend, Jamie Landon—Jamie says Joe’s been keeping him busy writing this screenplay, but I don’t really know what else he’s been up to. He disappears for days at a time, won’t answer my phone calls, and I’m afraid he’s getting into trouble again.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  There was a lip-biting pause. “He ha
s a coke habit. Had a coke habit. It’s supposed to be past tense, but I’m skeptical. I’d say the odds are good that he’s holed up on a coke binge, who knows who with.”

  “Has he done that before?”

  “Yes.” She hesitated for a second, unsure of how much to share. “He’s been in rehab twice. I gave him an ultimatum. Told him it’s over between us if he falls off the wagon.”

  “You must be pretty serious about it to call me.”

  “You have to understand. Jamie thinks of himself as this nice guy, but as soon as he can blame asshole behavior on anything else, he becomes an asshole. Drugs are an easy scapegoat. It isn’t so much that he blames the coke to my face—it’s that he can tell himself it isn’t him, so he cuts himself tons of slack when he’s high or between highs. I wouldn’t even have to know about it.”

  “Oh,” I said, and waited for her to continue.

  “I’m a painter. My painting—it’s one of the most precious things in the world to me; it’s my life. I had an exhibit a few months ago, a really important one. He knew about it for months, bought plane tickets and everything. I was stressed out and emotionally restless to begin with, and then he disappeared, never got on the plane. I couldn’t reach him for days. You know that feeling? When you want so badly to reach somebody, and you just can’t get them to hear you?”

  I nodded into the phone, mumbled recognition. I knew.

  “My mind always goes to the darkest places. I almost called the police because I was so convinced that he couldn’t do this to me, that he would sooner be dead in a ditch than stand me up on that day. But I thought, how embarrassed will I be if he is, in fact, holed up doing blow, betraying me for a stupid high.” She sighed, one raspy drawn-out note. “So I told myself if I found out he was getting high again, it’d be over. I’ve given him about eight second chances, so I decided to throw some money at it this time around, hire someone and see if maybe that would make this breakup stick.”

  She paused for a while, so I said, “Sure.” It came out more callous than I felt.

  “Sorry. I’ve been going on and on.”

  “No, not at all,” I said quickly. “Can I ask why you’ve put up with him until now?”

  “Good question.” She laughed, a bitter, cornered laugh. “When he’s good, he’s really good, you know? He’s sweet and he’s got this puppy-dog charm. Sometimes I look at him and I just want to take care of him, do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” I said. “Okay. When is the last time you heard from him?”

  “It’s been three days now, and I’ve been calling.” Her voice thinned to a gasp, and I listened to her held breath for half a minute, afraid that it would dissolve into tears. “I’m really worried, Song.”

  “Okay Daphne, so what is it you want me to do for you? You want me to check on him?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  “Today?”

  “Starting today.”

  That caught me off guard. “You want a tail on him, then.”

  “Yes. I guess that’s it.”

  “Can I ask why?”

  “What do you mean?” She sounded defensive.

  “No, it’s just—I thought you just wanted to know if he was alive or coked up or whatever. I could find that out for you in an afternoon.”

  One thing I learned quick about PI work was that the overwhelming majority of it was overwhelmingly boring. Chaz and Arturo didn’t deal in big mysteries, didn’t come across too much of anything that wasn’t straightforward. The job was almost routine, and after all the upsets of the previous year, I kind of liked its plainness. All the same, my heartbeat responded to Daphne’s meaningful silence.

  “There’s more,” I ventured.

  “There might be more. I’m not really sure.”

  “Okay, well, that’s why you called us, isn’t it? But this will work a lot better if I have a vague idea of what to look for.” I rubbed at the hinge in my jaw and kept my voice level. “What are you worried about, Daphne?”

  “I’m worried,” she said. “I’m worried that he’s using, but I’m also worried that he isn’t just using.”

  “You want to know if he’s selling?”

  There was a rustle on the other end of the line, a wordless shake or nod. “Yes,” she said a few seconds later.

  “Do you have any reason to think he is?”

  “Other than that it would be so in character for him to start doing something stupid for easy money?” She chuckled, a little trickle of sadness. “I don’t have anything solid. He mentioned once that he had a friend who was slinging, and it stuck with me. If he’s really back to using all the time, I know that’s how dealers get started.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll follow him around for a few days. Where can I find him?”

  “His place is in West Hollywood, but his roommates say he hasn’t been home either. I’d start at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. That’s where he told them he was going to party, apparently. He didn’t bother to tell me, and that was on Wednesday.”

  “Okay, let me get his address anyway.”

  She gave me an address near Santa Monica and Crescent Heights, on Havenhurst Drive. “Just find him for me, please. I need to know what he’s been up to.”

  “I’ll report to you tonight. What time do you go to bed?”

  “Call anytime. I’ll pick up.”

  *

  The Roosevelt was an old, historic hotel on the loudest stretch of Hollywood Boulevard. Marilyn Monroe called it home for two years, and in 1929, it provided the venue for the first Academy Awards. It fit right into the glitzy story of tourist Hollywood.

  I had little use for this part of town, a dingy neighborhood dressed up with buzzing neon lights and the dull trodden stars of the Walk of Fame. Grown men dressed as Spider-Man and SpongeBob SquarePants showed up day after day and suffered startling heat during most of the year to make lousy livelihoods posing for photographs in front of the Chinese Theater. They might have looked lively to a passing bus of tourists, but I saw them whenever I drove by, and I knew the sight was a picture of desolation, of crushed dreams dressed in grimy fourth-hand garments.

  I circled the hotel for a good ten minutes before giving up on street parking. I pulled into the valet station and made a note to expense the fee. It was guaranteed to be costly.

  It was five in the afternoon and the lobby buzzed with people. It was a nice space with a Rat Pack vibe, with heavy drapes and tall floor lamps built to look like wrought-iron torches. Small pillars met small arches, and a Spanish-looking fountain grew waterless from the center of a burgundy tiled floor. A man in a gray pinstriped suit paced with a cell phone clamped to his ear; a young couple held each other’s knees on a long, low sofa upholstered in tufted tobacco leather. I never figured out who stayed at the hotel. I’d been inside a few times to eat and drink, and the place seemed constantly busy, spilling at each entrance with skinny blond women and men in shiny shirts, every night of the week. The clientele fit a type, but it wasn’t native Hollywood. Maybe Jamie Landon would give me the answer.

  I took a seat on an armchair and opened a book, my heart jumping more than I liked. Stakeouts were boring, but they kept me skittish. I always brought a book that I could never quite enjoy. I looked up after every paragraph with whatever stealth I could manage. It was like fishing—I hated almost all of it, but there was a small joy in reeling in the fish.

  I studied the picture Daphne sent me on my phone. Jamie Landon, twenty-nine years old. He had a good-looking face, as far as I could tell, that looked vaguely familiar. The shadow of some celebrity, or a cluster of white male schoolmates who shared his features. He was supposed to be five-foot ten, around a hundred and fifty pounds. He favored plaid shirts and hoodies, slim designer jeans. He could be easy to spot or impossible.

  After a quiet half hour, I walked across the floor to the cocktail bar. I ordered a bloody mary and carried it back into the lobby, where I repositioned myself on one of the sofas in reach of a coffee table. br />
  I was halfway through my second drink when Jamie Landon hurried out of an elevator, eyes washing over the ground ahead of him as if he were wielding an invisible vacuum cleaner. He was easy to spot, as it turned out, though his jittery walk was at least half the picture. The other half was pleasant enough. His hair was a mess, but a good-looking mess, bedhead, thick and brown with the kind of beachy, loose curl I could never quite coax into my sheet-straight hair. I knew he was almost thirty, but he looked impossibly young.

  Behind him was a middle-aged man in a tight graphic T-shirt and faded blue jeans with artful tears at the knees. He wore sunglasses and a tweedy fedora, but it took me only a couple seconds to recognize him as Joe Tilley.

  I swallowed my drink and made a quick exit to the valet stand while the two men settled up at the front desk. I was still waiting for my car when they came out the door after me.

  There were about a dozen people within view of the front entrance to the hotel, and a strange hush came over them all when Joe Tilley appeared. No one looked at him with anything amounting to pointed interest, but there wasn’t a person with eyes who didn’t know he was there. The man had star power—that was clear enough.

  I ventured a closer look. Despite the stupid hat, he was a pretty sight. His face was almost generically good-looking, well angled and masculine with a strong, broad jaw. He was shorter than he looked on-screen, about five-foot-nine on the generous end. His T-shirt had a paper-thin, overwashed look, and it stretched translucent against his chest, showing the meaty outline of his pecs, the textured points of his nipples. I wondered if he was shooting a movie, or if he worked out every day of the year.

  Jamie stood in front of him, somehow shrinking himself in the foreground as he handed the valet his ticket. My car came first.

  I tipped the valet and sat in the driver’s seat playing with my phone while Jamie waited for his car.