MYSTERY

Excerpt: Chapter One

As I rushed along the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, the early morning breeze off the ocean filled my nose with the stench of summer seaweed and blew my hair into my eyes. My old pal Shepard had called at somebody-better-be-dead o'clock and begged me to meet him on set down in Jersey. I begged him to let me go back to sleep. When he said it was a matter of life and death, I dragged my body out of bed and headed for the shore. Despite building a career as an actor, he wasn't known for being dramatic.

On the Boardwalk a crowd had gathered behind a line of sawhorses and stood gawking at the film crew beyond, no doubt hoping for a glimpse of someone famous. Heedless of any sort of first-come, first-see rules, I pushed my way to the front, ducked a sawhorse, and walked towards a guy wearing a lanyard heavy with pass-cards. He clenched a clipboard in his hands and juggled a stack of papers and a walkie-talkie.

His eyes popped when he saw me, as though he couldn't believe I'd dare violate the sawhorse barricade. Several papers slipped to the ground, and he stomped his foot on them to stop them from blowing away. “You can't come this way, ma'am,” he said.

Ma'am? I hadn't even hit thirty. “Yes I can.” I pulled my shiny Diamond Security Services badge from the back pocket of my jeans and did my Joe Friday. “Tell me where I can find Shepard Brown.”

His adam's apple rose and fell at the glint of the shield. My good fortune this guy didn't know cop from square badge. “I don't think—”

“Look,” I began. The wind kept blowing my hair into the corners of my mouth and I worried pushing it away would undercut my authority. Joe Friday wouldn't have cared about hair in his mouth, right? “Mr. Brown is expecting me,” I said. “Would you like to be the one who makes me late?”

“Oh, I ....”

“I suggest you make up your mind quickly.” I slipped the tin back into my pocket and glared and tried to ignore my hair.

“The ... uh ... trailers are on the other side.” He pointed his clipboard toward the gleaming white façade of a towering hotel. “Someone up that way will be able to find him for sure.”

I thanked him and left him struggling with his paperwork. On an ordinary day I would have stayed to help. But this wasn't an ordinary day. No day with Shepard Brown in it had a chance of being ordinary.

I'd learned that lesson way back when. During an after-school outing to the skating rink, I had unintentionally freed him from the locker in which he had been trapped. Truth was, the boys' hockey team had folded him into my locker. All I wanted were my mittens. But from that moment on, nothing I said altered Shepard's belief in me as his heroic defender. And I repeated the role time and again on every non-ordinary day, until the scrawny kid he had once been hit puberty - and the weight machines - with a vengeance. No doubt Shepard was part of the reason I was attempting to forge a career in executive protection.

Smoothing my tank top against my belly, I strode toward the hive of activity consuming a 200-foot stretch of the boardwalk. All manner of persons scurried around the area, carrying all variety of equipment. In the heart of the chaos, a cluster of people stood in a tight circle. My razor-sharp, Maxwell Smart–like powers of observation told me the director was the guy in the center of it all, gesticulating madly while the wind and ocean made off with his words. A tiny bit of admiration rushed through me. If I could control a crowd with the skill of a Hollywood director, protecting a dignitary would be a million times simpler.

I drew level with the discount shop, where Holly Bellinger, modern Hollywood glam, lounged against an empty rolling chair and spooned a cup of yogurt into her mouth with remarkable speed. But no one else showed any sign of urgency, or gave any indication things were other than normal. Crewmen wandered in and out of the shot with light meters, measuring tape, and extension cords, but Holly ignored them and focused on her yogurt. Whatever prompted Shepard's panicked phone call appeared unique to him alone.

One of the crewmen caught me gaping and placed himself in my path. “Help you?” he asked. He had faded blond hair, a scraggly beard that likely had sand caught in it, and a warm blue gaze. The gold-stitched name above the studio logo on the breast of his windbreaker read DUTCH.

“Looking for Shepard. He around?”

Dutch took me by the shoulders and turned me forty-five degrees to face the entrance to the Steel Pier. “Skee-Ball,” he said.

Huh. Fifteen million a picture and the guy was playing Skee-Ball.

I nodded my thanks and pounded further along the Boardwalk in search of Shepard.

Several yard shy of the Steel Pier, I spied a lanky figure casting a long shadow between the midway game stalls lining the entrance to the pier. The man of the hour, all in one piece. Relief allowed me the first full breath I'd drawn in hours.

Hands jammed into his pockets, Shepard loped more than walked. The wind pinned a lock of dark brown hair against his forehead and draped it in front of one eye. He pushed the hair away and smiled the smile magazine publishers had fallen in love with.

“Rainny!” he shouted.

I returned his smile and more than tolerated the bear hug he caught me in.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

“No problem.” I stood back to look at him. Same floppy hair, same green eyes, same heartbreaking grin - different general shape. “You put on some weight?” I asked, fulfilling my duties as queen of tact.

“Yeah, it's for the part.” He draped his arm around my shoulders and turned me away from the pier. We did the small talk thing as we walked across the Boardwalk and down the ramp to street level. A string of trailers hummed curbside along the closed road, looking like a parking lot at an RV enthusiasts' convention.

“You wanna tell me why I'm here?” I asked, following him to his trailer.

“I got a problem,” he said. “Come inside.”

He opened the door and gestured me past, and I preceded him up the portable steel steps into the body of the trailer.

The entry dumped me into the road version of the dining room - all blue and wood and once-white - and I blinked at the unexpected sight of a young man gathering bound scripts from the table and talking to himself.

“I inherited it from a man who was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either. No, that's not it. The man I was not who - ” He froze, arms full of screenwriters' children, eyes on the door. Evidently he'd caught sight of Shepard entering behind me. “Morning, Mr. Brown,” he said.

“That's my assistant, Matthew,” Shepard said. “Matthew, this is Lorraine.”

Matthew lowered the stack of scripts to the table and squared their corners. “Can I get you something, sir? Anything I can do for you?”

Shepard sighed as though greatly put upon. “Coffee. Large. Half decaf. Toffee-flavored cream with some cinnamon sprinkled on top. And none of that white sugar. Get me the brown, unrefined stuff.”

His housekeeper, personal assistant, and paid slave nodded several times and scurried past us out the door.

I scowled at Shepard. “Are you a bigger jerk than the tabloids give you credit for?”

Not that I read tabloids, mind you. But my best pal, Barb, read them religiously and persisted in calling me at work to regale me with the latest gossip. It meant she forgave me for never introducing her to Shepard, so I listened and maintained the truce.

He peered out the narrow window beside the door, head turning as he tracked some movement — likely Matthew — outside the trailer. “I had to get rid of him. He might be in on it.”

Safe behind Shepard's back, I rolled my eyes. “Anyone who misquotes The Princess Bride probably isn't in on much. And I know I'm going to regret this but I came all the way down here to hear it, so, in on what?”

He turned to me and his brow creased with concern. “I think someone's trying to kill me.”

As a bodyguard and private investigator I was trained to take that sort of thing seriously, but I still had trouble keeping back the giggles. I mean, come on. This was Shepard Brown. Who would go to the trouble of killing him? “Why?” I asked. “Have you contracted to do a Michael Moore–type exposé  on greed and corruption at Hollywood studios?”

His lips pressed white and his green eyes burned. “This is serious,” he said. “Come look at this.”

He took hold of my arm and dragged me into the kitchen.

“It's not a big place, Brown. I saw the kitchen from the dining room.”

“In here,” he said. He yanked open the refrigerator and pulled out a pizza box. He dropped it on the counter, and I read the logo upside-down. If you believe what you read, he'd bought the best pizza this side of Sicily.

“You're right,” I said. “Pizza's serious business.”

With a theatrical sigh, he turned to face me. “You know, I called you because I thought you'd be the one person in the world who would take me seriously.”

Eesh. Guilt and the after-burn of strong coffee rolled through my stomach. "Oh. Thanks, I guess. And ... sorry.”

“Fuhgettaboutit,” he said. And he nailed the accent. Really nailed it.

Guess the guy could act after all.

“So what's up with the 'za?” I asked.

He flipped open the lid and pointed.

No slices were missing from the pie, but the bulk of the cheese had migrated to the southern hemisphere.

“Wow,” I said, eyeing the cheese. “That is criminal.”

His exhale could be measured in whole-number decibels. “Under the cheese, Sherlock.”

I did a quick scan of the kitchen, grabbed a slotted spoon from its peg above the stove, and used it to lift some cheese. Firm red lumps appeared to be embedded in the dough beneath.

“Odd,” I said. “What are the lumpy things?”

“Peanuts,” Shepard said.

“Gross. Who puts peanuts on pizza?”

I swear I heard his eyes roll. “Someone who's trying to kill me. I'm allergic to peanuts. If I eat a peanut, I could go into anaphylactic shock and die.”

Sixteen thousand wisecracks rolled through my brain. I refrained from voicing any of them. At the end of the day, Shepard was an old friend and a potential client. And peanuts might be a lame attempt at murder but they didn't get into the dough by accident. The queasy feeling curling the edges of my stomach had more to do with gut instinct than revulsion at the nuts in tomato sauce.

“Have you spoken to the police?” I asked. I brought it up because Diamond Security requires its agents to, not because anyone really wanted the police nosing around too soon.

“Please. The police would be less tolerant than you are,” he said, and guilt overwhelmed my belly again. “They'd laugh their badges off and call The Star National and it would really suck to have to die to prove to everyone I was right.”

I took a deep breath and flipped the lid on the box closed. “Okay,” I said. “Give it to me from the beginning.”

© 2012 Jennifer McAndrews