Page 63 of Scripted for Love and Poison
“I already knew that,” Sol said.
“Well, I didn’t. Or at least I wasn’t sure, and I’m so relieved to finally have that sorted out. Let me ask you something. What would you have felt if I was the one getting mystery messages from a possible murderer?”
“I’d be terrified,” Sol said, and Luke could almost hear her thinking on the other side of the phone. “And I may have asked you to ditch whatever case you were investigating—Shit!”
“I’m not sounding like such a total arse all of a sudden, eh?” Luke said.
“Shush! You’re still not off the hook and have plenty of sweet-talking to do,” Sol protested.
“And I’ll gladly do it. Sweet-talking you is one of my favorite pastimes.” His tone was honeyed. “But I guess I managed to make myself look a little bit more charmingnow that you understand better the reason behind my misguided actions?”
“You’ve always been charming,” she said. “Now go and call Claudia. And Luca?—”
“Yes?”
“Don’t be late tonight. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
And with that promise, he hung up and couldn’t suppress a smile. Was it possible that, for the first time since landing in that car-centric, hostile-to-pedestrians, obsessed-with-seasonal-vegetables, Hollywood-fascinated, beauty-venerating metropolis, he was happy? Why shouldn’t he be? They’d just cracked part of the case, the client should be satisfied, they would get paid, and—most importantly—he and Sol were flirting on the phone again.
He went back to the car, still smiling. He found Divya already inside. She was most definitely turning into a total Californian and doing some frantic typing on her phone while drinking a giant iced coffee with a straw.
They called Claudia from the car, but Luke took care of the conversation since he’d been the one to talk to her from the beginning—and Divya had expressed her desire not to have to deal with the snappy editor.
“Luke, I’m terribly busy,” the editor answered her phone with a too-important-to-deal-with-you-right-now tone, and Luke finally understood why Sol was so adamant about not wanting to work with her as a manager again. She wasn’t exactly the nicest person, even if she pretended otherwise. He also understood why Divya was happy letting him take care of that conversation.
“You requested results, and we are ready to deliver,” he said.
“Finally! Hold on a second,” she told him and thenproceeded talking to someone else. “No, not there! Over there! Careful. Careful! Those are some Heath Ceramics vases, and I don’t want them smashed!Sorry about that, a package is being delivered, and of courseIneed to take care of everything. Tell me about the case. My bosses will be thrilled.”
“We know what happened to Simon Smith,” Luke said, feeling bad for whoever had delivered that package and had just been yelled at.
“An overzealous fan ofHaughty Horizonsand Victor Lago’s filmography kidnapped Simon and is asking for a retraction of his review or they’ll start cutting his fingers off one by one so that he’s never able to write again,” Claudia said.
Luke wasn’t sure if the editor was joking or if that had been her hypothesis all along.
“I’m afraid it wasn’t that,” Luke said.
“Don’t tell me he did something foolish!” said Claudia.
“Depends on what you mean byfoolish,” Luke said. “My colleague and I just talked to him twenty minutes ago. He’s perfectly fine. No one kidnapped him. All his fingers seemed intact—not that missing a few would stop him from writing. He basically faked his own disappearance?—”
“Oh my god! This is genius!” Claudia interrupted him, laughing.
“Do you want to know why he did it?” Luke asked while he and Divya exchanged a look of incredulity.
“Oh, but I know why he did it!” Claudia said, and the laughing evolved into some sort of cackling. “Fame, of course!”
“He told us he faked the whole thing with the hopes of getting some articles written about his, and I quote,mystifyingenfant terrible personaand that it would result in the publication of his book.”
“Genius!” Claudia continued, and she was certainly not having the reaction either Luke or Divya had anticipated.
“But with the poisoning of Travis Wise and then the death of Jason Zit, the headlines have been elsewhere,” Luke continued explaining. “And Simon felt left behind. He didn’t like the article you published yesterday with my quote in it and absolutely no mention of him. So he decided to be proactive and sent anonymous notes to Sol.”
“What does Sol have to do with this story?” Claudia sounded surprised for the first time in the whole conversation.
“She managed to get her hands on a copy of Simon’s unpublished manuscript,” said Luke. And why did he feel weirdly proud about his partner—not his professional one but his romantic one—for being extremely resourceful in the resolution of a case? “There’s a riddle written in the book that Simon left with the hopes of readers suspecting that he wasn’t actually deaddead. And Sol found it.”
“So he’s sour at Travis for being poisoned and Jason for being dead and decides to accelerate the process and make the announcement that he’s not actually disappeared by sending notes to Sol. I love it!”
