Back to the great room, which still truly was. “Make yourselves comfortable. I’ll send Sophie in to get whatever you need.” He turned on his heel-which must’ve been rubber, because it squeaked on the highly polished wooden floor-and left us. A mixture of light green and floral smells gave the room a garden-like atmosphere. I didn’t have to look far for the source: there was a gigantic arrangement of white dahlias and lotus flowers on a low table in the far-right corner of the room, and Chinese vases filled with hydrangeas, roses, and calla lilies on glass shelves, coffee tables, and side tables. Maybe it was the size of the room, maybe it was my state of distraction, but I hadn’t noticed the floral display the last time we were here.
I leaned toward Bailey. “Think Sophie would bring us a couple of dry martinis?”
“I think Sophie would bring us a couple of male strippers if we asked her to.”
I considered the idea. “We should probably get some interviews done first.”
Bailey shrugged.
One second later, a slight young woman, no more than five feet one, dressed in a black cotton dress and white apron and looking like she was in her late teens, entered the room. I made the deductive leap that this was Sophie. Sophie asked what she could get us. We said water would be nice. She inquired whether we wanted tap or sparkling; we opted for tap. When she returned with two glasses, I asked in what I hoped was an offhand manner how long she’d been working there.
“Three years.”
“Pretty long time.” Especially for someone who looked no older than twenty. “What are your days?”
“Tuesday through Saturday,” she said.
“So you get Sundays off. That must be nice.”
Sophie shrugged. “Sure.”
I was trying to make this sound conversational so she wouldn’t get scared off, but Sophie was edging away from us. I’d have to get to the point.
“Do you ever work on Mondays?”
“Around the holidays and awards season, or if Frankie calls in sick, or if there’s a party and they need extra help. But then they pay me extra.”
“As they should. Glad to hear it.” And I really was. “Then Frankie usually works Mondays?”
Sophie nodded.
“So you weren’t here last Monday?”
“No. And thank goodness because the twins were home sick and I didn’t have anyone to stay with them.”
That meant she hadn’t been here on the day of the “kidnapping.” Also, she probably wasn’t eighteen. “You have twins?”
“I’m twenty-seven.” She smiled at my stunned expression. “I know, I’m lucky.”
“Good.” I hate it when people with baby faces complain, “I still get carded at bars.” Yeah, that really sucks.
Sophie zipped off to amaze others with her youthful appearance.
“I’m going to go out on a limb and guess Sophie isn’t our guy,” Bailey said.
“Ruthless killers come in all packages, you know.”
Bailey raised an eyebrow.
“She could be the mastermind, and her devoted protégé did the killing.”
“A devoted protégé who also doubles as a babysitter for her twins,” Bailey said. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that?”
24
We were able to eliminate others just as easily-Vera, the cook, who basically only spoke Hungarian, and had been busy in her wing of the house all day and well into the evening; Annabelle, the “interior plant designer”-I kid you not-who maintained the indoor flora on Tuesdays and Fridays; and Dani’s personal trainer/yoga instructor, Shakti, who had taken Monday off to do a spiritual cleansing. Call me a skeptic, I just don’t believe someone whose last name is Schwartz had “Shakti” on her birth certificate.
After about half an hour, I noticed that the Antonoviches took their air-conditioning seriously. It’d crept up on me and I didn’t realize I was cold until I found myself suppressing shivers. So when Eric called during our interview with Annabelle to tell me we had the all clear to go after the major players, I used it as an excuse to step outside. I took an extra five minutes after ending the call to work the bluish tinge out of my fingers.
But now, just twenty minutes later, I was freezing again. I wanted to go out and take another sun break, but Russell chose that moment to show up with his manager, Ian Powers, and their respective assistants, Uma and Sean. The director rolled in with an earpiece in his ear, a cell phone in his hand, and his assistant glued to his side, monitoring the conversation on her own cell while scribbling notes on a small pad. When Russell ended the call and gave us a curt nod, I could see he looked haggard, but he radiated even more nervous energy than I remembered from our last visit. I guessed he was coping by staying busy. Bailey told him why we were there and said we’d start by talking to Uma. He sat down on the nearest couch, leaned back, and folded his arms across his chest. “Okay.”
“Separately,” I said.
Ian, who’d remained standing, examined me coldly, as though I’d just told him I had a screenplay I wanted to send him. “Why’s that?”
I wasn’t obligated to explain it to him, but Ian had been Russell’s manager for over ten years and was used to standing between Russell and all things unpleasant. So I chalked up his attitude to protective habit and told him. “We need to make sure that each witness gives us his or her best memory without being influenced by anyone else’s opinion or recollection.”
Russell’s features tightened, a mixture of confusion and irritation. “But what is there for anyone to remember? I was the one who got all the messages. They won’t know anything.”
Since I had no intention of telling him what we suspected, I breezed by the meat of the question. “We just have to follow procedures and cover all the bases, Russell. If they have nothing to say, we’ll be done pretty quick.”
My tone was polite but unmistakably firm. Russell gave a loud, exasperated sigh. “Fine. But I’ve got sensitive materials for my next film in the study, so you’ll have to use the guest room.”
Oh heavens, no, not the guest room. “That’ll be fine. Uma, can you lead the way?”
She dipped her head and cast a baleful look at Russell, like a chastened pet, and led us down the hallway to a large bedroom decorated in hues of forest green and ecru. It had French doors that opened onto a courtyard featuring a waterfall fountain made of a dark slate-type stone and a black marble Buddha. Very feng shui.
Uma gestured to a corner near the French doors where a love seat faced two wingback chairs. Bailey and I took the chairs, and Uma, who I could now see habitually curved her head and shoulders down, like a walking comma, scurried onto the love seat. Had working for Russell bent her into this obsequious posture, or had she always been this way? Bailey tried to put her at ease, explaining that we didn’t suspect her of anything and just needed to gather information. Uma dipped her head a couple of times. “I get it, not a problem.”
“Can you give me a rundown of what you did on Monday?” Bailey asked.
Uma recounted their day at the studio: meetings and more meetings, phone calls and more phone calls with producers, writers, agents, casting directors. At about six o’clock, they came back to the house.
“Do you always ride home with Russell?”
“Yeah, pretty much. He rolls calls on the way home and he prefers if I’m in the car with him while I listen in.”
“Listen in?” Bailey asked.
Oh, poor naive Bailey, who didn’t know the ways of Hollywood. All assistants listened in on their bosses’ phone calls. Though it was never announced and the uninitiated might never know unless the boss, in the middle of the phone call, told the assistant to make a note of something. The benign reason for this systematic eavesdropping is so the assistant can take notes and keep the “to do” list up to date. The not so benign reason is to protect the boss in case the actor/producer/writer/agent later claimed something was promised that hadn’t been. Uma gave Bailey the former reason. Of course.