Page 4 of Scripted for Love and Poison (Sol and Luke Mystery #2)
T here was nothing like traveling to remind Luke of everything he abhorred because he was away from London.
He knew he could be perceived as narrow-minded, even limited, but gods did he miss his hometown.
Everything was objectively better there.
For one, they were in the right time zone.
But here he was, eight hours behind his natural biorhythm.
His body just wanted to slumber, yet the sun was shining with an unnatural intensity for January.
What was this place? Sol had assured him their hotel was in a perfectly centric location, yet you’d never have said it just by looking at it.
The Fairmont Century Plaza was a slab of glass and concrete towered by two skyscrapers.
There was no hustle and bustle of pedestrians on the street as one would assume from any central location.
Luke was still unsure whether the hotel was accessible on foot since it was surrounded by a two-lane driveway.
After checking in and having a quick shower, Sol had forbidden him from sleeping.
She’d argued something about the need to adapt to the time change and mitigate jet lag.
It was easy for her to say since she’d taken a seven- or eight-hour nap on the plane.
But he hadn’t slept a wink. He’d never been good at sleeping in public spaces.
Passing out and drooling in front of strangers wasn’t exactly his brand.
Of course, there had been no drooling coming from her while she slept on the plane. The woman had some faults—lack of patience being the worst—but he had yet to catch her in a bad moment. Not even fresh out of bed and hungover did she look disheveled.
But Luke was tired and sore from the long flight, and he was afraid he didn’t look exactly refreshed after the shower.
As if lack of sleep wasn’t bad enough, Sol had taken him on an emergency shopping trip in the mall next to their hotel.
Maybe that was what Sol meant by centric?
The fact that the hotel was flanked by a labyrinth of seamlessly endless small high-end stores and at least three department stores.
After three bags full of garments that would get any normal person dressed for a month and a falsely advertised quick visit to a beauty shop, they had left all the merchandise in their room.
Luke had given the California king-sized bed an appreciative, lusty look, but he hadn’t been permitted to act on his desires.
He was so sleepy that he had stopped by the first random place in search of a much-needed (and craved for) English breakfast tea.
Sol had said something about going someplace different, but it was a simple tea.
It shouldn’t be that hard. Apparently, it was, and it really hit him then that he no longer was in the UK.
He was served hot water in a paper cup. The barista had added a splash of milk on top of it and then they’d opened a wooden box by the register with tea bags so that Luke chose his preferred one and dunked it himself in the now extra-lukewarm milky water.
That thing was never going to be the right strength, color—or flavor.
After the tea calamity, he and Sol sat in traffic inside an Uber, trying to reach Simon Smith’s home across town.
For some reason unbeknownst to Luke, public transportation hadn’t been an option to make their way there, even though he’d been assured the critic’s home was also in a centric location.
He was starting to believe the word meant a completely different thing across the Atlantic Ocean.
“This couldn’t get more LA authentic,” Sol said enthusiastically.
Was she really trying to make the fact that they were stuck in the worst kind of rush-hour traffic sound like the perfect touristic experience?
In her defense, he hadn’t been exactly transparent with her about his lack of knowledge of the Californian city.
Sol was under the impression that Luke had been to Los Angeles and had visited all the landmarks during a work assignment several years before.
And while that had been technically true, the reality was that he’d been too busy and tired to get to know the place or enjoy it.
It had been a full week of endless driving and fast-food consumption, trailing their client’s ex-husband, who’d just moved to Los Angeles from London.
The client had wanted Luke’s agency to find something about his ex, anything that would render him ineligible to get their children’s custody.
Or some story similar to that one—Luke didn’t remember all the particulars.
The case had happened almost ten years before, when he’d just started working in his first agency as a contractor.
He was so junior—and young, merely twenty-three and out of uni—that he’d been employed mostly as the driver and errand person of the senior detective.
Driving in that city had been an absolute bore that occupied most of his days there.
Congestion and bad traffic were such common occurrences that he couldn’t remember going more than 10 mph, on the motorway or the streets.
He still could savor the elation he’d felt when the case had been deemed over and he was able to return to London.
When his flight from Los Angeles to London had touched ground at Heathrow, he’d almost been one of those enthusiastic clapping passengers on planes.
He suspected that trip, and Los Angeles, had instigated his longtime dislike of travel.
But he was with Sol now. If there was someone who could bring the charm up in Los Angeles for Luke, it was her.
“Remind me again, where does this mate we’re looking for live?” he asked, taking Sol’s hand, which had been resting on the car’s seat, and lacing his fingers with hers.
“North of Montana in Santa Monica, quite close to my old place actually,” she said.
“Really? Should we go and visit your old neighborhood after checking on the critic?”
Sol had shared a few details about the decade that she’d spent in Los Angeles after leaving Barcelona in her twenties, but she’d never been forthright about her California era. Luke was curious about the years she’d lived there before her move to London and before meeting him.
“Not sure there’s anything interesting to see there,” she told him, hoping Luke wouldn’t insist.
Sol’s second and least favorite ex-husband still lived in the house they’d both shared in Santa Monica, and the last thing she wanted was to accidentally run into him while strolling through the old neighborhood.
“But we can go to the beach after this. I think we’re here,” she said, checking her cell phone and making sure their driver had reached their destination.
They thanked their driver and got out of the car in front of a new-construction, courtyard-style apartment building.
Sol was trying to figure out how to get access to the building if Simon was indeed not there—or not answering the door—when she saw the police cars and uniformed officers crowding the sidewalk by the building’s entrance.
“Is everything okay?” she asked one of the closest officers, who looked to be in charge and was in plain clothes.
“Afternoon, ma’am, everything is hunky dory,” the officer said. He was around her height and looked to be in his forties. Sol just wanted people to stop calling her ma’am . “How can I help you?”
“We’re here to see a friend of a friend and were wondering if we could get inside the building,” Sol started, and she realized she had no clue where Luke had gone. He’d gotten out of the car with her, but he was nowhere in sight now.
“Afraid the building is off-limits right now unless you’re a neighbor. Do you happen to live here?” The officer had an extremely musical Southern Californian accent.
“No, I don’t.”
“Then I can’t let you in, ma’am,” the officer said with the most fastidious smile.
“But see, my friend really wants me to check on her friend who lives here. I’ve come all the way from London.”
“You flew from London for a house visit?”
“What? Of course not. But since we were already in Los Angeles?—”
“Then I’m sure you’ll be able to come back at a less inconvenient time,” the officer went on with his best smile .
Sol was going to protest despite the futility of it, but she saw Luke coming her way.
“Want to go to the beach now, cara?” he asked her, and she would have tried to persuade him to stay and help her convince the officer to let them in the building, but she recognized the hint of mischief in Luke’s eyes.
···
“Are you going to tell me what you were doing when you disappeared?” Sol asked as she and Luke made their way to the Santa Monica beach from Simon Smith’s building.
“Curious, are we?” Luke asked her, smirking.
“Please, you hardly need to be a sophisticated detective such as yourself to know I’m dying with curiosity,” Sol said as they strolled side by side.
“Sophisticated, huh?”
“You know you are. But can we cut to the chase? What were you doing?”
The hint of a smile tugged at one side of Luke’s lips. “While you were chatting with Officer Hunky Dory, I went around the building and pretended to be a neighbor looking for a lost kitten. And I managed to find some sympathetic tattlers.”
“Really? You? Looking for a lost kitten? I can hardly see how anyone could resist it.”
He couldn’t suppress the smirk. Even if he wasn’t vain, she could still describe him as occasionally cocky, and she knew he liked it when she acknowledged that he was pretty much irresistible.
It was hardly a secret that he was. He basically embodied the beauty canon.
He was tall, strong jawed, lean, muscular, and fetching.
They had stopped walking, waiting for a traffic light on Montana Avenue to turn green, and Sol returned Luke’s flirty smile.
For a moment it was as if everything else had ceased to exist or stopped having any relevance.
It was just the two of them, together and hungry for each other.
He’d made her forget about everything else going on in her life: the chance of running into a much-despised ex-husband, the novel she’d finished writing that still hadn’t landed a literary agent, the journalistic career that continued dwindling by the day, the lost suitcase, and the missing critic she couldn’t care less about, even if she probably should.
The vicious honk of a car waiting to make a left turn at the traffic light jolted Sol and sent her straight back to reality.
“You were telling me you just pretended to have lost a cat to get some intel,” Sol prompted Luke.
“I talked with a couple of neighbors and a copper who were gossiping about Simon Smith. The door to his apartment was fully open this afternoon, apparently. His flat had been completely ransacked, but he was nowhere to be found. They still haven’t been able to locate him, and no one seems to have seen him.
And there were big blood stains all over the place. ”
“Blood?” asked Sol, horrified. The mention of someone else’s blood made her feel queasy.
“Why did Julie suspect he’d be dead?” asked Luke, suddenly more interested in that story than ever.
“Because he hadn’t liked a movie since 1999,” answered Sol.
When she saw Luke’s face, she realized that, once again and like when they first met, she’d have to be a bit clearer while giving him background about her professional environment.
“Because he’s ruined more than one movie—and their filmmakers’ and actors’ careers in the process—with his penchant for vitriol. ”
“Still think it’s a big jump to go from ‘I can’t reach my friend’ to ‘I think he’s dead.’” Luke was thinking out loud.
“She’s always had a flair for the dramatic. I don’t think she actually believed Simon was dead.”
“It doesn’t look good for this Simon bloke, but we don’t know he’s dead,” Luke said.
“You just told me there was blood at his place, and he was nowhere to be found!”
“Precisely, no body. But I still think you should call Julie. I can see how this thing is going to leak soon. I’m sure I won’t be the only one to lure my way into the confidence of a couple of friendly elderly neighbors and a junior police officer.”
“Don’t underestimate your charm abilities,” Sol said, and she was ready to forget about that whole unfortunate, bloody business until the following day. It was too late to call Julie in London, so she decided to savor the magic-hour lighting while watching the sunset with Luke on the beach.
Sunsets on the Pacific had a bewitching quality to them, and Sol wanted to simply enjoy the moment with him. But as they took their shoes off and made their way to the ocean through the expanse of the Santa Monica beach, Sol’s cell phone started buzzing. It was Julie McQueen.