Page 6 of Scripted for Love and Poison
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“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 onMontana 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.
5
“You found Simon?” Julie blurted the moment Sol picked up her phone.
“Julie, isn’t it like one in the morning there? What are you still doing up?”
“Waiting for your call, hon,” Julie deadpanned.
“I thought you’d be sleeping. I was going to call you tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m obviously not sleeping. You found Simon?”
Sol and Luke were in front of the ocean, and the sun was almost completely hidden under the horizon line. Tones of pink and indigo painted the sky. The bustling Santa Monica Pier was to their right, buzzing with laughs and movement in the distance. Sol looked for her lover’s eyes at that moment, not knowing what to tell her editor and friend. She wasn’t necessarily good at delivering empathetic messages.
