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Kelly’s jaw dropped. “No shit! How the hell did you find that out?”

“I’ve been taking detective lessons,” Claudia said with a grin. “Don’t worry about how I found out.”

Kelly glanced at her sidelong and went through to the kitchen with her bottle of wine. “I have a feeling there’s a story here.”

“Nah, just a very interesting policeman.”

“Claudia! Don’t tell me you’re joining the ranks again?”

Claudia shrugged it off. “Right now, he’s just investigating what happened to Ivan. And speaking of Ivan, I have a feeling he wanted me to have this piece of evidence because he suspected one of Lindsey’s clients of killing her.”

Or Zebediah.
But Claudia was keeping that bit of speculation to herself, too.

Kelly folded her hands in prayer and turned her eyes heavenward. “Hey, as long as it wasn’t me.”

Claudia huffed a sigh of impatience. “The other night you seriously thought
you
might have killed her. You think
maybe
that blackout you had is a sign?”

“A sign of what?”

“That it’s time to do something about your drinking?”

Kelly hung her head, a mock penitent. “You’re right. I’m a dumbshit. I’ll call my sponsor, first thing next week, promise.”

Claudia gave up, knowing that was one promise her friend had no intention of keeping, and turned her attention to the file boxes. She tapped the box on top of the stack. “One way or another in all this mess, maybe we’ll find proof of what
really
happened to Lindsey. Look for anything with block printing on it.” They shoved the coffee table out of the way, tossed couch pillows on the floor for comfortable seating, and began to dig in.

“I don’t think that woman ever wrote on a clean sheet of paper,” said Kelly, arching her back in a stretch an hour into the search. She scowled at the growing stack of discarded file folders: notes, letters, and business correspondence decorated in Lindsey’s familiar green ink. “I think it was a big
fuck you
aimed at whoever she was writing to. Like she thought you weren’t worth the nickel it might cost to use a new sheet.” She tossed a credit card receipt onto the pile and dug into the file box she was emptying. Claudia reached for a wax-coated carton on the table and spooned a heap of fried rice onto her plate. “She claimed she was saving trees,” she said. “Hey, I’m as environmentally con...” She broke off. Kelly was waving a leather-bound book at her. “What?”

“This could be important!”

“Printed writing?”

“No,” Kelly rolled onto her knees and shoved the book in Claudia’s face. “This is her calendar. Look at the note on the twenty-third. That’s the day she croaked:
Remind Bos
—
Blue Heaven
—
PS.
”

“Bos.” Claudia turned it over in her head. “One of her sex clients was named Bostwick. I wonder if he was who she was expecting when
you
showed up.”

“That has to be it!” Kelly said, getting excited. “Damn it, why didn’t she write the time down?”

Claudia frowned. “I wonder what
Blue Heaven
refers to. And what’s
PS?
”

“Who the hell knows? That movie,
My Blue Heaven?
You know the one, with Steve Martin and... who was that guy in
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
?”

“Rick Moranis.” Claudia got to her feet and carried her plate out to the kitchen, speaking over her shoulder. “Definitely not a Lindsey kind of movie. If you’re through with the won tons, let’s go upstairs and Google it.”

With Kelly hanging over her shoulder, Claudia launched her web browser and typed
“Blue Heaven”
into the Google search engine. Forty-one thousand hits came up.

“How the hell are we supposed to know what she was talking about?” Kelly grumbled as they clicked through the first twenty links. “There’s everything here from a karate studio to that movie.”

Claudia leaned back in her chair and pondered the question of what Lindsey might have wanted to remind Doctor Bostwick. Assuming they were right that the notation,
Bos
was referring to the plastic surgeon. And what about
PS
?

A sudden inspiration pushed her upright in her chair. “Drugs!” she exclaimed, and began rummaging through the stacks of papers that littered her desk until she came to the autopsy report that Dana Jackson had faxed.

The drug toxicology report on the last page yielded the information she was seeking, and she keyed in a new search:
Barbiturates
+
Blue Heaven

“Look, here it is... Amytal. That’s one of the drugs listed in the autopsy report.” Her fingertip left a smudge on the computer monitor where she pointed. “That makes sense. See what it says here:
‘Amytal is called Blue Heaven.”
She scrolled down. “And look here:

Doctors sometimes prescribe barbiturates for people who have anxiety or can’t sleep. Often, people take these powerful medications “for the fun of it,” or when trying to calm down the effects of other drugs, such as cocaine or amphetamines.

“Did she seem stoned when you saw her?”

“She was always stoned when she wasn’t working.”

Not that Kelly had been so lucid herself that night. She probably wasn’t the most reliable historian. And she was too eager to grasp an easy explanation that would get her off the hook.

Claudia glanced through the autopsy report again, then back at the monitor. “Barbiturates combined with alcohol contributed to her death by drowning. See what it says here. These drugs make you sleepy and relaxed, slow down the reflexes. By the time she got into the hot tub, she wouldn’t have been able to get out, even if she’d wanted to.” The realization weighed on her. “Or if someone pushed her in... if she didn’t write the note, she
was
murdered.”

“As long as it wasn’t me,” Kelly said. She lay down on the floor and stretched out, bending her knees, then flexing them one at a time, pointing her toes.

Claudia still wasn’t satisfied. “What about the note?
‘It was fun while it lasted
.’?”

“If
she
didn’t write it, it had to be one of her clients,” Kelly speculated, rolling onto her stomach and continuing her calisthenics.

“Any number of people might have wanted her dead... other publicists, agents, CEOs, producers, directors. You said it yourself.”

“Yeah, well,
I
certainly didn’t write the damn note, and right now, that’s all I care about.”

Claudia pushed away from the desk and did a couple of stretches of her own. “I haven’t got good enough exemplars to know for sure whether Lindsey wrote it or not. Everything I’ve found is cursive writing, which doesn’t help at all. The only printing was on the backs of some photos her horrible brother gave me, and that was too long ago to be useful.” She got up and switched on some lamps, still mulling over the possibilities.

“If this Bostwick character was there after you left her apartment, they could have partied together, with him supplying the drugs. Maybe he gave her an overdose by mistake. Or, she could have been blackmailing him about the sex stuff and he killed her. He was into donkeys. Or was it Labrador retrievers? Damn, that’s disgusting!”

Kelly rolled onto her knees and jumped up with the energy of a five-year-old. “Well, he
sounds
like an ass, but that’s what he gets for hanging out with Lindsey. If you lie down with dogs, you can expect to get bitten.”

“You’re mixing metaphors,” Claudia pointed out as they went back downstairs. “It’s, if you lie down with dogs, you’ll get up with fleas.”

Kelly gave her the skinny eyes. “You’re such a freaking know-it-all.” She picked up Lindsey’s calendar and began flipping through it again. “This is mostly notes about meetings and parties. Big red circle around Halloween. It says ‘Grainger.’”

“That’s the party planner she used. As it happens, I have an appointment with Lillian Grainger tomorrow.”

“You know her?”

“Met her at the reception the other day.”

“What reception? Oh, the thing after the funeral? You think this Lillian Grainger might know something?”

“No, she has some handwriting she wants me to look at.”

“Hey, wasn’t she that itty-bitty woman with the jolly green giant?”

“Yeah, the
clumsy
jolly green giant who nearly crushed my foot.”

“Well, you know what they say about the size of a man’s feet,” Kelly said with a wicked grin. “If that’s true, his schlong must be...” She held her hands up, two feet apart.

They giggled like schoolgirls for a couple of minutes. After the stress of the past forty-eight hours, it felt good to laugh again.

“I thought Lillian was pretty tacky,” Claudia said, slipping back into adult mode. “Talking business right after the funeral.”

Kelly speared bits of cold sweet-and-sour chicken from one of the containers. “You should expect Lindsey’s friends to be tacky,” she said, mumbling around the chicken. “Not us, of course. We were smart enough to get out.”

“But we let her back in.”

“Temporarily, grasshopper, just temporarily. Hey, speaking of tacky, what about that little tart in the Frederick’s of Hollywood getup?”

“At the cemetery? I don’t know about her, but her friend was at Lindsey’s. Remember the woman with those gorgeous beads.” Claudia reached for an almond cookie and took a bite. “It didn’t sound like she believed the suicide theory any more than Ivan did.”

“He’s probably the one who put the idea in their heads.” Kelly yawned and patted her lips with a paper napkin. “I don’t want to deal with Lindsey’s shit anymore tonight. You can stay up all night and think about it if you want to, but honeybunches, I’m over it.”

“No, thanks. I’ve had enough, too.”

They shoveled Lindsey’s papers back into the file boxes and cleared away the food debris. Claudia stood on the balcony and watched Kelly wheel the Mustang into a U-turn and accelerate away. As she turned to go inside, she heard a second engine crank over and watched a dark van parked across the road pull out behind Kelly.

Only a half-dozen or so homes stood on Claudia’s side of the street, with a sheer drop to the highway on the other. She knew her neighbors’ vehicles by sight and the van didn’t belong to any of them. Chances were, the driver had been visiting one of the neighbors, but too many strange things had been happening lately to brush it aside.

Kelly turned left at the corner. The van turned, too. Claudia ran into the house and dialed Kelly’s mobile number. “I don’t want to spook you, but do you see a van behind you?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I think he may be following you.”

“Hey, you’re really getting into this cloak and dagger stuff, aren’t you?” Kelly snickered. “Tell you what, if he’s still behind me when I get to the police station on Little Culver, I’ll pull right over and walk in, okay,
Mom
?”

Claudia pictured the lonely stretch of wetlands between Playa Del Reina and the police station. “Just watch your back.”

Ten minutes later, Kelly called back. “He turned in at the Mobil station. Quit worrying, he just needed gas.”

Her words did little to allay Claudia’s uneasiness. It wouldn’t be difficult for the van driver to catch up with Kelly. She told herself she was being paranoid. It didn’t help. “At least put the top up on your car, would you? And keep an eye on the rear-view mirror.”

“Maybe I’ll pull
him
over and see if he’s a hottie.”

Claudia made an exasperated
tch
. “That kind of attitude is what gets you in trouble.”

Silvery morning mist cloaked the coastline, turning the occasional cyclist into a wraith on wheels. After another night of fitful sleep, Claudia indulged in a run on the beach, which lifted her spirits the way no amount of caffeine could. Damp sand crunched on the cement path as she jogged behind Flare. The German Shepherd’s tongue dangled happily from her massive jaws and she erupted into a joyful bark at the discovery of a crab burrowing in the sand.

They ran past three Mexican fishermen lounging against the railing of the concrete pier, their lures bobbing in choppy green water; past walkers taking it easy.

Claudia covered the distance down to El Porto and back in under an hour. Her lungs were burning from the exertion by the time she returned Flare to Marcia’s backyard. Feeling good about the morning’s workout, she arrived back in her kitchen just as the phone rang.

Detective Jovanic, at last.

“He was awake for awhile,” he said. “But I didn’t get much out of him. He’d just come out of surgery and was still pretty doped up, not making sense.”

“So he wasn’t able to tell you anything?” Claudia felt a sharp pang of disappointment. She had hoped that Ivan had been able to identify his attacker; at least given
some
clue.

Jovanic’s voice was raspy with fatigue. “He kept trying to say something, but he couldn’t get the words out right. It sounded like he was saying
‘take’
or
‘tape.’
”

“Probably tape. He had some tapes he wanted me to hold for him while he was away.”

“Did he tell you why he wanted you to hold them? What was on them?”

“No, I have no idea.” Claudia thought back to her last conversation with Ivan. He’d indicated that the tapes were too sensitive to leave lying around. Which suggested to her that he had expected someone to come looking for them.

“Could I see him?” she asked impulsively.

“Sure, why not. Maybe you can figure out what he’s saying. When can you get here?” She named a time and he gave her his cell phone number. “The doc says full recovery is pretty iffy. Maybe permanent brain damage.”
Brain damage.
Only a couple of days earlier, Ivan had been strutting around like a little bandy rooster, handing out orders in that bossy way of his. Claudia pictured him struggling to relearn the basics of life—walking, talking, eating. The image left her depressed.

“I hope I can be of some help,” she said. “By the way, I checked out Lindsey’s calendar last night. There was an entry on the day she died that I think might refer to someone on her spreadsheet... doctor Charles Bostwick. He’s the guy I mentioned on the infomercials.”