The Gray Zone (28 page)

Just as she brought her Perrier to her lips and took a breath, her antennae suddenly clanged a red alert. Bearing down on her, like a killer whale darting toward a seal, was a woman in a cherry-colored Versace suit.

“Honey, I didn’t expect to see you in town today!” the woman drawled unenthusiastically, brushing Kelly’s cheeks with lips the color and texture of dried blood. Kelly paused no more than a fraction of a second, but her mind felt like it was blowing a gasket. Who was this woman? A real friend of Louise Orlean? An opportunist wanting to glean some of Louise’s conferred power and status?

“Last-minute plan,” Kelly murmured softly and smiled minutely. She hoped she hadn’t overdone the accent. Gillis’s training and her own sensitive nature had taught her to respond to the unexpected with tiny gestures, conserving strength and surprise for when they were necessary.

“Join you?” said the woman, and without waiting for a reply she arranged herself in the chair opposite Kelly with a maximum of shifting and fluttering. She draped one skinny leg over the other for the benefit of the two men lunching at the next table—unshaven models or actors, in thin leather jackets, cashmere T-shirts, and expensive jeans. They didn’t look over.

“I swear to God, the traffic in this town,” the woman began. “Takes twenty minutes just to … I was flying out the door and Lupe had to stop me for some long conversation about a week off in June, her family in Guatemala, blah-blah-blah …”

The woman stopped abruptly and looked at Kelly as if really noticing her for the first time. Her eyes registered the surprise that her Botoxed forehead could not.

“Since when do you drink Perrier at lunch?”

Oh, shit.
Kelly inhaled.

“I have a scratchy throat,” said Kelly, barely above a whisper.

“Your voice does sound strange,” the woman said, peering at her. “Something else is different.” Kelly’s heart ticked. The woman looked closer. “Your skin looks
great.
Arabella?”

“Yesterday,” said Kelly, praying Arabella was a facialist.

“Ashley gave me the greatest stuff after my massage yesterday. It’s this powder from Mexico. Supposed to keep you from getting sick all year.”

Kelly shook her head and said hoarsely, “I’ll just stick to my zinc and C.”

Her companion cackled. “You and Dr. Klein. Call it whatever you want, honey. The rest of us know what it really is.” She wriggled pleasantly and flapped the menu in front of her face. “Are we getting the usual?”

Kelly just smiled, waiting for more clues. For the next five minutes, every cell in her brain worked overtime as the woman droned through a monologue about her difficulties with choosing the tile color for her pool house. Kelly kept an eye out for Brigante and tried to appear interested in her companion’s story despite the woman’s distracting movements. She had a way of brushing her reddish, blow-dried hair out of her face with the backs of her thin hands, ending the gesture with a distinct flip of her fingers. Discreetly, Kelly scanned
the room, plotting her escape and hoping the woman didn’t notice her shifting eyes.

After an eternity, the waiter alighted at their table, putting his weight on one hip while Kelly’s lunch date flirted with him. Kelly ordered a shrimp salad. The woman’s eyes sparked with surprise in her otherwise expressionless face.

“Is that also doctor’s orders?” the woman bellowed. “Since when do you eat shrimp? What about cholesterol? Mercury?”

“Change of pace?” Kelly vamped.

The woman pounced. “Are you telling me you’re seeing Antonio again?” she whispered, leaning forward so excitedly that the waiter was unable to extricate her menu. He discreetly faded away.

Kelly slyly looked into the bread basket and dug out a pale-pink biscuit the diameter of a quarter.
To butter or not to butter?
She looked at her companion and saw that she was waiting for Louise to answer her.

“Well, not exactly,” Kelly hedged. She lifted up her knife and moved it toward the butter ramekin. It hovered there for a moment as she watched the woman’s face. Kelly was unsettled by how hard it was to read.

“Spill it, Louise,” said the woman. “Now.” Her tone was jocular but had an edge, the gossip’s dread at being the last to know.

Kelly hooked some butter onto the knife and was about to reply when, over her companion’s shoulder, she saw the impossible. Entering the restaurant in a flurry of manufactured tardiness was Louise Orlean! Her dark hair swung in the identical long bob of Kelly’s wig; the nose and the eyebrows were indistinguishable from Kelly’s artfully crafted ones. In a flash, Kelly dropped the knife into her lap. It hit her lapel on the way and clattered upon hitting the tile floor.

“
Merde!
Look at that!” She pulled a long face of dismay and brushed at the grease stain darkening the light fabric. The real Louise
Orlean was leaning into the maître d’, who suddenly whirled around. In one controlled yet quick motion, Kelly grabbed her purse and jumped out from behind the table.

“I’ll be right back, sweetheart,” she said to the woman, and hurried toward the back of the restaurant. She passed the women’s powder room and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The prep cooks looked up.

“
Salida?
” she asked, and one of them pointed to a door. Running now, Kelly shot a glance back through the window in the kitchen door and saw the headwaiter arriving at the table with the genuine article in tow. The other woman jumped up, her hands grasping her cheeks in a mask of surprise. Kelly tore off the wig and scrambled out the door. The alley looked empty. She tossed the wig and putty nose into the Dumpster as she ran past, shaking out her blonde hair. Stepping into a doorway, she peeled off her suit jacket and undid her crimson blouse another two buttons. Hidden from view, she turned the waistband of her skirt over a few times to shorten it and untucked the blouse to cover the fix. The restaurant door banged open.

“
Sí, sí,
” said a man’s voice. “This way.”

Kelly pressed herself into the doorway, snaking one hand out behind her to try the knob.

“You go that way.”

Kelly recognized the voice of the maître d’. She heard footsteps, and then he burst around the corner. They stared at each other. Kelly kept her expression blank and tried to keep the fear out of her eyes. The man kept staring, registering recognition at some level, but trying to reconcile the blonde in front of him with the society wife from the restaurant. Kelly held her breath, knowing better than to speak. Did he remember her fifty-dollar tip from thirty minutes before? Would it matter? Her hand found the doorknob just as the maître d’ stepped back toward Spago.

“Nothing down here,” he shouted. “She must have gone the other way.”

Kelly wrenched the doorknob and threw herself inside. She was in the storage area of a children’s shoe store. She heard voices in the front of the store.

“Use your words, Ceylon. You’re unhappy about something.”

Kelly ditched her pantyhose and the suit jacket in a trash can and whipped a tissue out of her purse. She rubbed off the red lipstick and the dark eye shadow on her brows.

“Ceylon, it’s not okay to throw things when you’re angry. It’s okay to
be
angry, but it’s not okay to hit. Ceylon? Ceylon!”

Kelly dropped the fake diamond and the big earrings into her purse. She rolled her sleeves up above her elbows, raked her fingers through her hair, and then emerged into the shop. The salesman looked up from the floor where he was wrestling with a toddler’s foot.

Kelly smiled ingratiatingly and spoke, still using Louise’s accent. “I am trying to get to the valet for the restaurant. I get confused with all the doors in the alley. Is it this way?”

The salesman’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Ceylon’s mother broke into a huge smile.

“That happens to me all the time,” she gushed. “Just go out here and to the right.”

Kelly mouthed
thank you
and blew the woman a kiss. As she hurried out the front door, she heard the salesman ask, “Who was that?”

“The new Estée Lauder face,” replied the mother confidently. “She’s Parisian but has a house in Beverly Park.”

Kelly slipped on a pair of oversized sunglasses as she passed through the door and melted into the streams of shoppers on Cañon Drive. She heard a police siren start up a few blocks away. She was careful not to look around too much. She didn’t see Brigante and
wondered whether he was still looking for Louise Orlean. She continued on for one block, then turned east. Her car was where she had left it, although the meter had run out and a Beverly Hills ticket fluttered on the windshield.

With relief, Kelly slid into the driver’s seat, started the ignition, and pushed the gearshift into drive. At that moment, the passenger’s door jerked open. A man’s left leg came into view, and even before she saw his face, Kelly recognized the shoes. They were black Bruno Maglis.

“Go ahead and drive a little,” smiled Gillis. “This’ll be fun.”

KELLY CHECKED THE REARVIEW MIRROR. SHE SAW another police cruiser heading down Cañon Drive toward Spago.
Can’t go back there,
she thought as she pressed on the accelerator.

Gillis’s palm landed on her hand. “Would you look at yourself?” He moved his eyes from her shoes to her hair. “You’re as beautiful as the day we met, Mrs. Gillis. Well, maybe not the
day
we met.” He chuckled.

Kelly turned right onto Crescent.

“About as talkative, too.” The leather made a shushing sound as Gillis lounged back in the seat. They drove in silence for a minute. Kelly’s brain became a MapQuest of routes. Better to stick to commercial districts or head for residential neighborhoods? Get on the freeway or stay on surface streets? Head toward the west side or the rough-and-tumble east side, with its increased public transportation options? Simply circle Beverly Hills, with its orderly grid of streets
smudged by double parkers, pedestrians, diagonal crosswalks, and elderly drivers? Kelly was as alert as a rabbit in an open field, but even so, the encounter had an air of familiarity—and inevitability—to it.

Gillis clasped his hands together. “Don’t you want to know what tipped me off this time?”

Kelly knew well the tone of the third-grade boy in his voice—a combination of wanting to defy and wanting to please. She also knew that her husband required of her a maternal response, stern yet affirming. Too wimpy, and he would become instantly enraged by her weakness; too critical, and he would sulk, erupting into a geyser of payback later on. Kelly had but a split second to choose her words.

“I was afraid you’d outsmart me eventually,” Kelly murmured, slowing at a yellow light. “How’d you find me?”

“Back at the foundation, Louise Orlean turned me on,” crowed Gillis. “And that’s when I knew it was you. No way that old bat could do it for me for real.”

“How interesting,” Kelly said neutrally. But her mind was spinning.
How long has he been just one step behind me?
She felt her fingers tighten around the steering wheel and tried to relax them before the knuckles went white. She could not let Gillis see her getting scared.

He ran a finger down her cheek. “Do you think Michelangelo ever forgot one of his statues?”

Kelly moved the car forward again and didn’t respond.

“You were perfection in there,” he said.

“I had a good teacher,” Kelly replied, still playing kiss-up. She slowed behind a Hummer that was looking for a parking spot and signaled left to move around it. “Where are we going?”

“I have some ideas,” said Gillis. “But first, why don’t we just go for a walk. A normal, friendly husband and wife strolling in Beverly Hills. A promenade.” He stressed the last syllable, rhyming it with
odd,
curling his lips ironically.

Kelly caught her breath. It was the kind of thing Gillis used to say before forcing her into some public humiliation. She made a desperate plunge.

“Todd. Is this about striking a bargain? Because here’s the deal: You lay off the kids, and I”—she smiled at him provocatively—“and I lay off you.” She hesitated for emphasis. “And your banks.”

Gillis just grinned. “Pull over right here.” He flicked his fingers toward a side street, and Kelly turned left off Wilshire and parked in front of one of the residences. “Funny you should mention a bargain.” Letting his words hang in the air, Gillis grabbed her purse and started pawing through it. “What have you stolen from me this time?” he muttered.

Kelly kept herself calm and averted her eyes from the pink rubber puffball dangling from the ignition.

She looked out the window and considered her options. Ahead of her and on either side were long blocks of detached houses: Beverly Hills houses, with their security systems and housekeepers. If she ran for it, would anyone answer the door? What would she say? That she was running away from her abusive husband, the man sitting in the car over there, wearing the four-thousand-dollar suit and the thousand-dollar shoes? The man who looked like the CEO of a Fortune 500 company—which, in fact, he was? Who would believe her? She considered her other options.

After a moment, Gillis laughed and tossed the handbag on the backseat. “What did you take from my office, little Natalie?”

Kelly pressed her lips together and shook her head.

Gillis shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t really matter, because once I turn over what I have to the LVPD, you’re going to be toast anyway.”

Thinking clearly, she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Todd.”

“The knife that went missing from the crime scene. The
knife that has your boyfriend’s blood on it. Or should I say your
ex
- boyfriend? You’ve already found yourself a new one, haven’t you? You always did work fast.”

Kelly tried to play for time. “I’m sure the investigators will be glad to have a murder weapon to close the case.”

Gillis looked her in the eyes with a sincere and concerned expression. “But this knife has some fingerprints on it, too. The fingerprints of someone near and dear to you. In fact, you.”

Kelly shook her head. “I used that knife to cut a lime. I made a drink.”