Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

and then shoot them both. They leave him dead where he is on the chair, and take her body away with them.”

I was leaning on the bathroom doorjamb listening to her. “Doesn’t make a lot of sense. We need to know why she went to New York.”

“Maybe she got a gig there and that’s how she met Stephen…” But even as she said it, she was looking unconvinced. “He doesn’t strike me as the theater-going type. I think they met here.”

There was something nagging at the back of my mind. “Didn’t the file say Stephen had been living in San Francisco?”

She nodded. “Yeah, for a couple of years. Then went back east in 2014. They could have met here.”

“So maybe she went back for some kind of reconciliation.”

“Why suddenly? What happened to make her suddenly want to go out east and meet up with him?”

“We need to talk to her agent.”

Four

The Philip Shaw Agency was on Pine Street in the Nob Hill district. We found a parking space just outside the Intercontinental Hotel and walked the short distance through the gentle sunshine to the agency. It was on the top floor of an elegant, early–twentieth-century, three-story building. There was no reception area and no elevator. So we climbed the blue-carpeted stairs to the top floor, knocked, and went in without waiting for a reply.

There was a bright, efficient-looking woman of fifty with permed hair sitting behind a desk. She smiled at us as though she really was pleased to see us. Maybe it was a San Francisco thing.

“Hello,” she said, without affectation.

I smiled back and said, “We’d like to see Mr. Shaw. We haven’t got an appointment, but it is urgent.” I showed her my badge. “I am Detective Stone, and this is Detective Dehan.”

She looked at the badges with interest. “New York…”

She got up and went through a door into what was obviously Shaw’s office. She came out a moment later and said, “Mr. Shaw will see you now, Detectives.”

I don’t know what I expected, but he wasn’t it. He was very tall, maybe six three or four, and shaped roughly like an inverted S, with his knees slightly bent and his back slightly hunched, as though his body was too long for his muscles to hold him upright. His feet were huge and so were his hands, one of which he held out now as he strode toward us, while he used the other to sweep a mop of unkempt hair out of his face. Maybe that was a San Francisco thing too.

“Detectives, I have very little time.” He said it with a big smile, as if he’d meant to say, “What a pleasure to meet you,” but got his lines mixed up. “You’re a long way from home. What can I do for you?”

I smiled. “Yeah, the local PD know we’re here, and they’re cooperating with us. We are just looking into some background, and we wanted to ask you about a client of yours from about two years back.”

He gestured me to a chair and pulled up another for Dehan. Then he kind of folded himself up into his own on the other side of the desk, frowning as though he really was interested.

“Two years back?”

“Tammy Gunthersen.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Tammy? What has she got herself into? Gorgeous girl! Gorgeous! Adorable personality. Could have been a big star. But a bit too wild in the wrong ways, and too eager for the quick solution. Talented, very talented. Lovely girl. But I haven’t seen her for… well… yes, two years would be about right.”

Dehan was watching him with a small frown on her face. “Can you think of any reason why she would have gone to New York?”

He looked blank and shook his head. “None whatsoever. One day she just stopped calling, stopped answering my messages, and I never heard from her again.”

I scratched my chin. “She doesn’t seem to have been short of money. Did she get plenty of work?”

Shaw nodded and spread his hands, like he was about to explain a difficult lesson to a class. “In many ways, Tammy was the perfect client. She was always willing to work. She’d take the good jobs with the bad jobs and always put in one hundred percent. Plus, she was gorgeous and had a charming personality, so people always wanted her back. But of course that meant doing all kinds of work, from small ads for local channels, to local theater groups and…” He made a reluctant face. “…‘gigs,’ what we call ‘gigs.’”

Dehan scowled. “What are gigs?”

“Gigs come in all shapes and sizes, and believe me, I will not touch the more unsavory ones! But often they can be lifesavers for young actors, the difference between paying the rent and being out on the streets.” He hunched his shoulders and nodded several times. “So, it can be some kind of living theater: a guy is having a big party, and he wants some gangsters to break in with guns and he single-handedly defeats them. Then it is all revealed as a play. Or a fight breaks out between two female guests and they start fighting, but using spectacular, choreographed kung fu. You get the kind of thing. That’s at the high end.”

“And at the low end?” I asked.

“Mainly guys acting out their fantasies. They go to a bar, and a gorgeous girl comes in and picks them up. Where it goes from there is up to the girl. I am not a pimp. A visiting businessman wants a beautiful woman on his arm, but he’d rather a talented actress who can hold a conversation than some bimbo whose whole repertoire is giggle and fuck.”

Dehan asked, “And Tammy did a lot of gigs?”

He made a “so-so” face. “She had pretty regular work at the