Eleventh Hour

Belinda laughed, continued to wipe sweat off herself. She suddenly pulled off her sweatshirt. Underneath it she was wearing only a little workout bra.

The men in the room nearly expired on the spot. Nick laughed. “That was very well done. I’ll bet you Detective Flynn has already forgotten the handcuffs.”

Belinda just smiled. “Frank, why don’t you get us all a soda?”

When everyone was seated on the stark white leather chairs, love seats, and huge long sofa, facing a fireplace Nick couldn’t ever imagine using in LA, Sherlock said, “Belinda, please tell us why you met Weldon DeLoach two and a half weeks ago at the Gameland Bowling Alley, why you were dressed like a man, and where you went.”

Frank Pauley jumped to his feet and walked fast to a huge set of floor-to-ceiling glass windows. Actually, since the entire living room that faced out toward the ocean was glass, he had no place else to go.

Belinda drank down her soda and said after a moment, “Isn’t it strange how easily you can get tripped up?”

“Yeah, but that’s how we make our living,” Delion said. “What were you doing meeting Weldon DeLoach? Why were you dressed like the perfect description of our murderer?”

Frank whirled around. “I knew it, I just knew it. Weldon is crazy about you, wants to make you a star and—”

Four wives, Nick thought, getting a glimmer of reality in the glass house.

Belinda smiled toward her husband, who looked ready to break into small pieces he was standing so rigid. She didn’t seem at all perturbed. “Actually, sweetie, he’s not. Weldon isn’t my type, you are. Now, Weldon and I had arranged to meet that night, at the bowling alley, and I was to pick him up. We went to La Pomme in Westwood, sat at a booth and brainstormed story ideas. He wanted my role in The Consultant to be bigger.” She shrugged. “Yes, I was dressed like a man. Weldon asked me to, told me what to wear, what disguise to use. Of course, now that’s academic since Weldon is nowhere to be found and the show’s been yanked.”

Sherlock said, “Weldon wanted to change your role to a man’s? This doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, Belinda.”

“He was thinking about another idea, a woman who was a spy and had the international community believing she was a man. He wanted to see if I was a good enough actress to fool people into believing I was a man. Nothing more than that. I think I did well. Nobody gave me a second look. Weldon laughed and laughed, he was so tickled. You know, Frank, how he acts when he’s excited.”

“How did you carry it off?” Sherlock said. “You’re beautiful and you’ve got lots of hair.”

“Well, you see, I used to do makeup back in the bad old days, and I’m really good at it. That disguise wasn’t much of a challenge.”

Nick felt her heart crash to the floor. It sounded so reasonable the way Belinda, the actress, told it, even the wretched disguise. Thing was, Nick believed her.

“She’s a hell of an actress,” Flynn said to the group as he walked to his car in the large circular driveway. “We can’t forget that. God, she’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”

TWENTY-TWO

CHICAGO

Nicola arrived home with a bad headache after a two-hour, very contentious staff meeting at the university. At least she no longer felt like she’d been starved and kicked around. It had been three days since the food poisoning. A week since she’d begun to see everything in a different light.

She dropped her mail on the small table in her entrance hall, went to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of diet tonic water, and got three aspirins from the medicine cabinet.

When at last she sorted through her mail, she found a single letter without a return address. Her name was written in bold cursive. The handwriting looked vaguely familiar.

Nicola picked up her two-hundred-year-old Chinese dragon letter opener that John had given her for Christmas and slit the envelope open. She pulled out three sheets of closely written pages. She read:

Dear Nicola, I bet you’re surprised to hear from me.

Me who? Nicola skipped to the last page of the letter and read the clean-cut, crisp signature: Cleo Rothman. No, it was impossible. Why would Cleo write to her after three years of silence?

There’s no easy way to say this, Nicola, but since I was always very fond of you, I’ll just come out with it. Don’t marry John or you’ll be very sorry. He isn’t what he seems. You believe, like everyone else, that I skipped town with Tod Gambol, don’t you? I didn’t. I have no idea where Tod Gambol is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was dead. I ran, Nicola, I ran. John was going to kill me. You want to know why? Because he believed that I was sleeping with Elliott Benson, that longtime crony of the mayor’s and friend of John’s. Are they really friends? I don’t know.