Naked Came the Phoenix Page 15

  “Honey …”

  “Don’t you honey me!”

  “But I can explain.”

  “Okay. So explain this. Eight-by-ten glossies. Dates, times, and places.”

  Douglas’s jaw dropped. “You hired a private investigator?”

  “I didn’t, Mommie Dearest did.” Dante’s strong arm steadied her as she slid off the table and hopped to the floor.

  “Where are the photos now?” Douglas asked.

  “They were in my room …″

  “Thank goodness! Then no one …″

  “Depends on what you mean by no one.” She gave him a tight-lipped smile. “I had them hidden, but somebody searched my room yesterday. Somebody found them.“She watched her husband’s face as the news sunk in.”Detective Toscana saw them when he searched our cabin, but when I got back to my room later, they were gone.”

  For an instant, Douglas wore that little-boy-lost look and Caroline felt her heart soften. But just as instantly, the look was gone, masked by what she had come to recognize as his press conference face.

  “That’s right. You’d better get on the phone to the damage control team.” With one arm, she shoved her husband aside and disappeared through the door that led into the sanctuary of the women’s sauna. “But tell those spin doctors not to waste any time working on me!”

  From her post at reception, Ginger Finnegan was accustomed to hearing the occasional scream coming from behind the massage room doors. As she noted Mrs. Blessing’s departure time in the proper column of the appointment book, she wondered, not for the first time, why anybody’d want to put herself through all that poking, prodding, and manipulating. With that new guy, Dante, there seemed to be more screaming than usual, but when the clients emerged, they seemed to be all smiles, so go figure. You know what they say. No pain, no gain.

  With a few clicks of a mouse, she transferred information on the late afternoon schedule from the appointment book into the computer, thinking she had the most boring job in the world. Dr. de Vries had promised to give her a raise, but that had been before yesterday, before that wife of his had died and that other woman put herself in charge. Now all bets were off. Raoul had always been the voice of reason around the place. Didn’t he put a stop to that foolishness when Claudia had wanted to call the spa attendants “guides” and the treatments they provided “journeys″?

  Ginger nibbled at her thumbnail, scraping off the violet polish with her lower front teeth. She made up her mind to talk to de Vries about her future when he came through on his rounds at four-thirty. She looked around and, feeling guilty and a bit reckless, crossed to a console on the wall and turned a dial that silenced the singing whales. Enya, rain forests, and all that inner child crap. She just didn’t get it.

  She thought about the issue of People magazine that waited for her in the top drawer of her desk. Mel Gibson, now that was a subject she understood. But reading magazines on the job was a big no-no. Nevertheless, she had already slid the drawer half open when Howard Fondulac breezed into the room, a cell phone clamped to his ear.

  “Can I … ?” she began, but he held up an index finger to silence her.

  “We have a deal, buster, and don’t you forget it!” His head bobbed vigorously. “Yeah, sure, sure. You do that.” Fondulac punched the End button, then tucked the cell phone into the pocket of his exercise pants.

  With a casualness born of long practice, Ginger slid the drawer shut over her People magazine. Honestly! First that congressman bursting in with his thugs, and now this jerk. “Cell phones aren’t in the spirit of the spa,” she reminded him sweetly.

  Fondulac leaned over the counter and grinned at her. “I know that, sweetheart. But now that the old witch has cashed in her chips, who’s gonna stop me?” He reached out and tapped the name tag pinned to the breast pocket of her uniform. “You?”

  Ginger slapped his hand away and scowled. Fondulac was definitely not her type. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “I just work here.” She stood, making herself as tall as possible in her sensible flat shoes, until her eyes were level with his. “How can I help you, sir?″

  He pointed to his name in the appointment book. “It’s Fondulac. I’m supposed to meet Gustav in the weight room.”

  With a slight nod, Ginger indicated the door on her right. “This is the bathhouse, sir. The exercise center is just through there, down the path a little ways and to the left. If you get to the lake, you’ve gone too far.” Suddenly remembering that Fondulac had once worked with Mel—her Mel—she aimed a thousand-watt smile in his direction. “Gustav will be waiting for you.”

  Ginger watched thoughtfully until the swinging door had closed over Fondulac’s narrow backside, hoping that Gustav would teach that arrogant SOB a thing or two. Gustav had come to Phoenix Spa after a twelve-year gig with the Russian weight-lifting team. She smiled. Gustav, now he was someone she could get cozy with. Or that hunky Detective Toscana who was out on the meadow just then dealing with that delicious congressman’s helicopter. She liked her men older. Road tested.

  When Ginger first came to Phoenix Spa, all the girls had been goo-goo-gah-gah over Emilio Constanza, but what a waste of time that had turned out to be. She’d actually engineered a date with Emilio, until Jean-Claude, the dietitian, had taken her aside, raised one artfully plucked, bleached-blond eyebrow, and drawled, “Honey, you may be standing on the platform, but that train is not coming in for you.” Back then her competition had been Steve, the pool man, but lately Emilio had been hanging out with the assistant pastry chef, a short, hairy-chested creep named Geoff. Ginger pulled her magazine out of the drawer and balanced it carefully on her knees where it would be hidden by the desk. Mel, she read, had a wife and seven children. Tried-andtrue. She rested her case.

  It could have been minutes or hours later when somebody screamed. Ginger dismissed it, assuming that Dante must really be giving his four o’clock client the business. But then the screams came again and again, long and shrill, like somebody twisting a cat’s tail, and Ginger realized they were emanating from the exercise center, not from Dante’s cubicle.

  She deserted her post—another no-no-and followed the sound, flying out the door and down the path, straight-arming her way through a set of swinging double doors and bursting into the weight room. It was that skinny model, Ondine, who was screaming, tugging with scrawny arms on the long, leather straps of the Pilates machine, her narrow face flushed and tearstained. “Oh, help! Help!”

  Ginger puffed air out through her lips. Jeez! What with all that screeching you’d think she’d caught a boob in the contraption or something. Except the poor girl didn’t have any boobs. Maybe she’d mashed a finger. Wondering where Gustav had gotten to, Ginger rushed forward to assist the model.

  Ginger knew all about the Pilates machine. Claudia de Vries had demonstrated it to her when she first came to work at Phoenix Spa. Mrs. de Vries had read about Pilates—pronounced puh-LAH-tease, if you please—in the Washington Post and had decided, right away, that her spa should have one. This model was called “The Reformer,” which Ginger thought perfectly appropriate for an exercise device that looked like a cross between a hospital cot and an autoerotic rowing machine. It came equipped with straps, stirrups, springs and bars, a brace for the neck and shoulders, and a sliding pad to support the torso.

  Howard Fondulac’s torso was being supported just fine and so was his head, but someone had fully extended the leather straps, wrapped them around the producer’s neck like dog leashes, and tied them off in a macabre bow. When Ginger got close enough to see Fondulac’s face, she took hold of Ondine’s shoulders and pulled her gently away. “I think we need to call Detective Toscana,” Ginger soothed. She folded the sobbing woman into her arms and began rubbing her back vigorously, right where Ondine’s shoulder blades stuck out like marble wings.

  But Ginger knew by the way the straps bit tightly into Fondulac’s neck, by his contorted face, and by his eyes, wide and bulging as if astonished by something written
on the ceiling, that there was not much Detective Toscana or anybody else could do. They might have been able to revive that psychic lady yesterday, Ginger thought, but Howard Fondulac, Hollywood producer, was tee-totally dead.

  10

  DETECTIVE TOSCANA FELT AS IF HE were in a nightmare. Here he was staring down at another corpse, and he had not the faintest idea who had killed him or why. Howard Fondulac was as dead as Claudia de Vries had been, if not quite as spectacularly, and it was unfortunately just as obviously murder.

  How he wished it could have been suicide! That would have tied it all up nice and neat and he could have left this artificial place and these artificial people, and especially their itsy-bitsy food, and gone home to a sane woman who knew how to cook and was handsome and fun and wasn’t obsessive about her appearance.

  But before he could go anywhere, or have a square meal rather than a flat one, he had to find out who killed Claudia de Vries and Howard Fondulac, and please heaven before anyone else turned up strangled, drowned, or otherwise terminated with extreme prejudice.

  The wraithlike Ondine had been shepherded away by Christopher Lund, an irritating cross between a nursemaid and a guard. His relationship with the girl was an interesting example of codependency. Toscana wondered just how much they needed each other as opposed to how much they thought they did. Ondine was unique, at least until someone else became the model du jour. But Lund could be replaced by any other ambitious young man with an eye for a golden chance when he saw it.

  Who made the money, both of them, or only she?

  And what was Ondine really doing at Phoenix Spa? Trying to put a few curves onto her bones, so she looked a bit more like a woman? Not on the scraps of rabbit food they fed people here! He didn’t know how anyone kept body and soul together. If it had been starvation that killed the two victims, he would not have been surprised, but Howard Fondulac had most definitely had his throat crushed by the leather straps of this infernal machine. It even looked like a contraption designed to torture or kill, invented by the Spanish Inquisition. It was a pity he couldn’t use it to get the truth out of someone.

  The medical examiner and the crime scene technicians were on their way, but unless there were fingerprints, there was nothing they could tell him that he couldn’t see for himself. Since the machine was part of the spa equipment, all the guests could reasonably say they had used it and justify their prints being found on the handles and adjustable parts, so that avenue of evidence seemed closed.

  Detective Toscana turned away with a sigh. It was back to interviewing everyone and asking all the same old questions, of comparing the answers to try and spot a lie or, better still, a meaning! A meaning would be good! Lies were a dime a dozen with this bunch.

  Caroline Blessing was about the only one who seemed like a real person. She was quite decent, and she looked so wounded. Hardly surprising, considering the death of Claudia de Vries and the discovery of her body, not to mention the shock of learning the truth about her husband. She was a nice little thing who could use a bit of comfort about now. But he would wager a meatball and pepperoni pizza she’d get damn little warmth from her mother!

  Ondine stared at Toscana with watery eyes. The poor girl looked like something you put on charity posters to make people give donations. “This could happen to you, too!” sort of thing.

  “Why did you go into the gym?” he asked her again. Her frailty made it highly unlikely that she meant to use one of the machines herself. “I’m waiting, Miss, uh, Ondine!”

  She lowered her gaze, staring down at her hands on her lap, like a sulky child. ″I was looking for Emilio Constanza,” she replied.

  “What made you think he’d be in the gym?”

  “Nothing! It just seemed a good place to look.”

  “When did you see him last? Had you agreed to meet him someplace?”

  “I can’t remember when I saw him,” she said crossly.”Yesterday or the day before. And no, I hadn’t agreed to meet him anywhere.”

  “Why were you looking for him then?”

  She looked up at him with disgust. “Do you really need me to spell it out for you, Detective?” She was waiting, one perfect eyebrow arched enquiringly.

  “Humor me,” he said. “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be twenty, and I never knew what it was to be a world-famous model.”

  She stared at him and gulped air.

  He waited.

  The expressions crossed her face one after the other: anger, humiliation, fear, confusion, anger again. She settled for self-pity. “No,” she agreed soulfully, “and you probably don’t have any idea what it’s like to be lonely! People want you only because it boosts their egos to be seen with you, or because you can make even the most shapeless clothes look good, or because you can bust your butt selling their lousy rags that people wouldn’t touch otherwise! I needed to speak to someone who wasn’t looking for what he could get out of me!” She leaned toward him. “I knew Emilio. Well, let’s just say he wouldn’t want to date me—or any woman.”

  Toscana thought her words had a ring of truth. “Do you do that often, Miss Ondine, confide your loneliness to the hired help?”

  She blushed scarlet, the color rising in a deep wave up her pallid face. She stood up sharply, tipping her chair and almost sending it over.

  “Sit down!” he ordered.

  She remained standing, but she did not leave.

  “All right, suit yourself,” he said, sliding back in his own seat. “When did you last see Mr. Fondulac alive?”

  She thought about it for so long he was almost certain she was concocting a lie, judging what she could get away with.

  “I can’t remember,” she said at last, looking him straight in the eye. “Maybe breakfast, or I might be confusing it with another day.”

  He leaned forward suddenly. “Tell me exactly what you saw as you went to the gym. Start from when you left your room. Who did you see, where, and when? Who were they with and what were they doing?”

  She started slowly, obediently, like a child reciting a lesson. “Christopher and I had been talking … actually he had been talking, I just listened, or pretended to. He doesn’t know the difference. I left him in my cottage and walked down to the edge of the lake. Then I saw that psychic, and I thought I’d quite like to talk to her.” She shrugged. “You never know, she might be for real. But actually she was a terrible bore. All she talked about was herself, although how she could do that for fifteen minutes without actually saying a thing, I’ll never know.”

  “You were with her for fifteen minutes?”

  “About that. It seemed like longer.” She pulled an expression of disgust. “I saw King David going up toward the gym.” She was watching his face quite carefully. “Then he came out again within a minute or two …”

  “Be more exact! How many minutes?” he demanded. “Two—five—ten?”

  She smiled, that slow, dreamy smile with wide eyes that she used for the cameras when she was advertising an exorbitantly expensive perfume that was supposed to have men hurling themselves at your feet. “I’m not any good at time,” she said sweetly.

  “Try!” He meant to keep his voice level, and failed.

  “I can’t. It matters too much,” she protested. “You’re asking me to say something that might cost a man his liberty, even his life!”

  An idea flashed across his mind with sudden illumination. “You went to see Howard Fondulac because you’re fed up with being a clotheshorse, and you want to be an actress! Howard Fondulac’s comeback, and Ondine’s first movie!” He grunted. “You’d be good at it.”

  “Do you think so?” she was very obviously pleased.

  “Sure!” he said. “You know how to play all the tunes, and you wouldn’t know truth from fantasy if it rose up and bit you!”

  She drew in her breath slowly, then let it out again without speaking.

  Toscana did not speak either. Did he really think Ondine might have killed Fondulac? Why should she? He needed he
r far more than she needed him. Unless, of course … Another idea struck him. What if Fondulac had managed to persuade Lauren Sullivan to commit herself to working with him? Then he might have rebuffed Ondine.

  “That’s all,” he dismissed her. “For now.”

  Lauren Sullivan greeted his question with laughter, full-throated, easy hilarity, as if it were the one truly funny thing she had heard in all this miserable affair.

  “Good heavens, Detective,” she said, controlling her mirth at last. “I’m sure you don’t mean to be insulting, but I assure you, I have no need whatsoever of descending to work with a man like that. I’ll pretend you didn’t ask and tell you frankly that I was vaguely sorry for him, but even he had more sense than to imagine I would agree, and more dignity, even when he was drunk, than to ask me.”

  There was something about her luminous beauty that enthralled Toscana even though he kept telling himself she was a suspect. Sitting here talking to her, hearing that wonderful voice, he felt as if he were part of someone else’s story, and they would all live happily ever after, however unlikely it now seemed. She may look guilty, circumstantial evidence might pile up against her, but in the end it would all unravel and it would be someone else who was the killer.

  “When did you last see Mr. Fondulac?” he said aloud.

  “About ten minutes before that awful scream,” she replied. “I was in the shower just through the passage from the gym.”

  “Did anybody see you?” he asked.

  Her eyebrows shot up and she gave a sudden, delicious laugh. “No! I’m an actress, Detective, and I accept that I court the public eye a good deal, but there are some things I do not perform for viewing, and taking a shower is one of them!”

  He felt the heat rise in his face and could have kicked himself for his clumsiness. He started to explain, to apologize, then stopped abruptly. It was time he reexerted his authority.

  “This is a double murder investigation, Miss Sullivan. I need to know the truth so I can arrest whoever is responsible before it becomes a triple murder, or worse.”