The Fox's Choice Page 2

  Chapter Two

  I left Richard’s house in a crappy mood. I am a grown woman and I don’t like being treated like a two year-old. I realized that I had been drinking too much but I could rein myself in all on my own. I didn’t need a lecture about it. What I did need was a nap. I was tired all of a sudden and the last thing I wanted was to get sick. If I took a quick nap, I could get some work done before meeting Jorjana at four.

  My work is a business I built all by myself after the divorce. Besides the house, my ex got the commercial real estate business we built together. Besides the collection of vintage cars, I got a beach house and the friends. I took the friends and turned myself into the gatekeeper to Malibu’s social scene. Not the tawdry nightclub action that attracts celebrities and lesser beings. I have the connections to the inner workings of old Malibu money. So I started providing guidance to those who wished to widen their social circles. For a fee, of course.

  I am good at what I do. And it takes a lot more time than you might think. Organizing the festivities for Jorjana’s party had taken my attention away from my little enterprise. I needed to take stock of what was coming up on the social calendar and make a few calls to see who was healthy and who was not. I was certain that a couple of hours on the phone would be a good start. But first a nap.

  And maybe some cold medicine and some extra Vitamin C just in case. I decided to stop at the store before going home. I took a right at PCH and headed to Ralph’s.

  Malibu is twenty-three or twenty-seven miles long depending on whom you ask. Everyone agrees that it is three miles wide. Located north of Los Angeles it snuggles into a spit of land between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains. It is gloriously beautiful and dangerous as hell to live there. Wildfires have plagued it since the Chumash Indians first fished and camped on its shores. After the fire season the rainy season produces torrential rains that pour down the canyon walls of the mountains. Dirt in the canyons turns into avalanches of mud and take out anything standing in the way. Yet Malibu attracts people like moths to a flame. After thirty years I consider myself a native and I have no intention of ever leaving in spite of fire, flood and mud.

  Ralph’s is a So Cal grocery chain that stocks the basics one needs to get by. For the upscale kale and Acai crowd, Vintage Grocers is a couple of miles up PCH. I tend to avoid that store as it attracts people who are regularly featured on the cover of People magazine. Not my folks at all.

  Ralph’s was busy for a Monday. I grabbed a cart and made my way through the aisles. I started in the dry goods section and tossed a box of non-drowsy Nyquil cold and flu in the cart. Since I was there, I picked up a few other items.

  In the deli, I found my favorite brand of pate. Then crackers. I am fond of an outrageously expensive artisan cracker that has spoiled me for any other brand. Into the cart they went. In produce I picked up some lemons. In the soda aisle, I grabbed diet ginger ale in cans. Then to the spirits where I found gin and Limón cello.

  My favorite drink is something I call The Usual. Yes, I had sworn to lay off drinking but the diet ginger ale settles my stomach and the gin settles my mind and the Limón cello staves off scurvy so The Usual is more medicinal than anything. I added an extra bottle of Limón cello for the Vitamin C.

  Cart loaded, I headed to the check out counter.

  The aisles were packed with people- tourists by the look of them. I felt like I was swimming upstream against a crowd of badly dressed fish. They were all trying hard to look like they weren’t searching for celebrities. I had half a mind to draw a map to Vintage Grocers and sell it on the sidewalk. Assuming I ever got out of the store.

  I broke clear of a backlog of shoppers when the guy in front of me came to a screeching halt. My cart crashed right into him. He turned around to give me a dirty look. He was a young and wore a white T-shirt, jeans and an asymmetrical haircut. Spare me.

  I counted to ten and waited for him to get out of my way. I had to count twice. Just as the kid finally moved, someone crashed into me from behind. I yelped as a sharp pain raced through my backside. What the hell was that?

  I turned to see a woman juggling a ridiculously cheap handbag. The bag was made of plastic and had corners as sharp as a knife. She stuffed something into the bag like she was trying to lift goods out of the store. She was dressed in cheap clothes to match the awful bag. She had to be a tourist. No self-respecting Malibuite would be seen dead in that outfit. She gave me a half-hearted apology and turned away. I wondered if I should alert the store security. That bag was big enough to stash a twelve pack of the cheap beer she likely favored.

  I decided I couldn’t be bothered.

  By the time I made it to the cashier, my head was splitting. Silently, I cursed Richard. I just knew I caught his damn cold.

  I paid the bill, gathered my purchases and headed to the door. All I wanted in the whole wide world was a bucket of Nyquil and a nap in my comfy bed. Couldn’t happen soon enough.

  Chapter Three

  When I woke from my nap, my head was still pounding and I was nauseous to boot. I immediately closed my eyes and took stock of my well-being.

  I felt like hell. Great. Just great.

  I was in no mood to make the ten million phone calls needed to organize my work but if I fell any far behind it would be Christmas before I caught up. I considered just prioritizing the most urgent and leaving the others until later. All I really wanted to do was to roll over and sleep.

  Then I remembered Jorjana’s cocktail party. Regardless of how bad I felt, I still had to dress and get myself over to the York Estate to help her pick out something to wear. Then beg out of the festivities. I felt so awful I didn’t even want to drink. My neck was stiff. My hip ached. My throat was dry like I had been snoring. How much Nyquil did I take?

  I turned on my side and opened my eyes. I was surprised to see my handbag lying on the bed next to me. That was odd. Why didn’t I leave it downstairs on the hall table like I always did?

  I wondered what time it was. I reached into my bag and found my phone. It was off. That was odd too. I turned the phone on and closed my eyes until the phone came to life.

  I felt awful. Just awful. Damn Richard. I could just kill him and his stupid cold.

  The phone rang. My eyes flew open. Speak of the devil. It was Richard.

  I answered it anyway.

  I didn’t get a chance to say hello.

  “Alana! Where the hell are you?” Richard sounded frantic.

  “What do you mean?”

  I turned onto my back and felt my head spin. Not because of nausea. I was disoriented because the ceiling above me was not vaulted with dark wood beams and a Murano glass chandelier as it was in my lovely bedroom. This ceiling was covered with that awful cottage cheese finish.

  “Richard, where am I?”

  “How the hell would I know? Your phone has been off since yesterday!”

  “Yesterday? No, that can’t be.”

  I sat up. Bad move. Nausea overtook me. The awful room spun.

  “We’re putting a trace on your phone,” Richard said. “Look around. Does anything look familiar?”

  I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask who ‘we’ was. I managed to pull myself up and swing my legs over the side of the bed. It took a minute but the room finally stopped spinning.

  Wood paneling. Brown shag carpet. Horrible orange plaid curtains that were closed but sun shone through holes in the fabric. The door to the ugly room opened to a hallway. A larger room appeared to lie at the end. I doubted the interior design was any better in there.

  “OK, we’ve got your location. You’re in Van Nuys. The cops will be there in two minutes. Are you alone?”

  “I don’t hear anyone else.”

  “Be careful. Keep me on the phone.”

  I stood up and tiptoed to the door. I stopped to listen. Not a sound. I ventured down the hallway and into a large room that was a combined kitchen and living area.

  The ugliness theme continue
d. More brown shag carpet. Brown tiled counters in the kitchen. Brown and yellow linoleum floors. There was a breakfast nook with a table and chairs. An assortment of computers and cables crowded the table. One of the chairs was pushed away from the table. I stepped closer to see why.

  “Richard, there’s a guy here.”

  On the floor was the kid with the asymmetrical haircut who bumped into me in Ralph’s. His white t-shirt was now stained red. The stain was likely due to the large hole in his chest.

  “I’m pretty sure he is dead.”

  Chapter Four

  “Don’t touch anything, Alana!”

  Richard shouted like I’d never stumbled on a dead body before.

  “The police are on their way,” he said. “Just stay put.”

  Where was I going to go? I was in Van Nuys for crying out loud. It wasn’t like there was anything interesting to do. But Richard stayed on the phone and kept rambling on. I let him ramble and took stock of my situation.

  I looked at the guy on the floor again just in case he was breathing.

  He wasn’t. The blood on his T-shirt wasn’t dry so he couldn’t have been dead long. I wondered why I didn’t hear a struggle. Or a gunshot. My head spun again. I needed to sit down.

  The chair that was pulled away from the table was too close to the dead guy for my comfort. I ignored Richard’s command to not touch anything and pulled a chair out and sat down. I felt a tiny bit better but my hip stung like I had run into a bee instead of a cheap handbag.

  I kept my gaze away from the guy as I looked around the room. The kitchen was ugly but immaculate. No empty pizza boxes. No beer bottles. A slight scent of Lysol.

  I looked at my hands. I couldn’t see any residue on them. I smelled them. Nope, it didn’t smell like I had handled a gun in the last few hours. But then, does gunpowder have a smell? Somehow I felt I should know that or not. I knew better than to ask Richard who was now saying something about how my house needed better security. I leaned back in the chair and mumbled affirmative noises into my phone.

  The kitchen table had a bunch of laptop computers crowded on its top. The cords from each one ran down to the floor. The screen in front of me was open to some sort of financial statement. So was the one next to it. The computers were of different sizes and models. I wondered why computers came in so many sizes and shapes. Some small, some big. Even different colors. The one closest to the dead guy had the same red cover as my laptop at home. I felt the room spin again. The red laptop also had the same sticker as mine- a white oval with “MALIBU” printed on it.

  I ignored my queasiness and walked over to the dead guy and to get a better look at the screen. Another sticker below the keyboard read “It’s five o’clock somewhere”.

  It was definitely my laptop. And it was opened to my bank’s website. In the upper right hand corner of the page I saw that AFox was logged in.

  I used my fingernail to go to the page with my account balance.

  $5.32.

  I felt the air go out of my lungs like someone had punched me in the chest.

  Over twelve million dollars was missing from the account of AFox.

  “Richard,” I caught my breath somehow. “My laptop is here and all the money is gone from my bank account.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Richard said again.

  Then a long pause. Long enough to scare the hell out of me and that’s saying a lot considering how my day had played out.

  “I’ve sent a message to a guy,” Richard said. “I’ll explain when I pick you up. I’m on my way.”

  Richard had a guy.

  Of course he did.

  Chapter Five

  The cops arrived with full sirens. Followed by an ambulance, two fire trucks and then more cops. There’s nothing like a dead guy on the floor with a gunshot wound to bring in every uniform within ten miles. Someone ushered me outside. The front lawn was as crowded as Happy Hour on St. Patrick’s Day.

  A cop was assigned to me to make sure I didn’t run for it. I was fairly certain that I hadn’t killed anyone so I agreed to let him swipe my hands for gunpowder. I answered truthfully when he asked if I knew who the guy was. I did not know who he was. I also did not know how I got there. I made sure to point that out. Repeatedly.

  They didn’t ask if I had seen the guy before.

  I knew enough to wait for Richard to arrive before making a formal statement. Eventually I was escorted to the ambulance. Nothing was broken. I had a few bruises including one over my hip that still felt like a bee sting. I remembered nothing since leaving Ralph’s, which seemed like it happened just minutes ago. But apparently it was eight o’clock the next morning.

  There was a whispered conversation outside the ambulance between the EMT’s and the fire fighters. One of them walked over to a police cruiser and returned with a female cop. She climbed into the ambulance and sat next to me.

  “Mrs. Fox, we are going to take you to the ER,” she said.

  “Why? I’m OK.”

  She leaned in close and lowered her voice.

  “Since you don’t remember what happened, you need to be checked out for sexual assault.”

  It took me a second to understand what she was telling me.

  “I was raped?”

  “We don’t know and we want to rule it out.”

  It’s scary how quickly your life can flip upside down. One minute you are heading home for a nap and then next minute you wake up in a strange house and don’t know how you got there. Or if you had been raped.

  “Mrs. Fox, are you OK?”

  The female cop held both my hands in hers. I sensed this was not the first time that she had imparted news like this to someone. I’d dated a cop until very recently and I remembered him talking about special training to deal with victims of crimes. I was always interested in hearing that there was support for victims. Then I wondered how I came to be a victim myself.

  “I know your attorney is on the way,” the female cop said. “If you let the EMTs take you to the ER he can meet you there. It will be faster. You know how traffic is in the Valley in the morning.”

  I did. I agreed to go if the cop stayed with me and I could call Jorjana on the way.

  We were on the road within a minute.

  “When was the last time you had sexual intercourse, Alana?”

  The nurse in the ER was nothing if not professional. Professional to the point of rudeness. There was no mistaking her for the female cop.

  The EMTs delivered me to the ER and stayed long enough to fill out paperwork. The female cop had to leave with them. I was taken to an examining room by the professional nurse and told to strip down while standing on a white sheet of paper. My clothes went into a bag. It was unclear to me if the clothes were staying or if I would get them back.

  The nurse left me alone. I lay on a hard bed and shivered under a thin blanket. The funny thing was, I wasn’t cold.

  “Alana, when was the last time you had sexual intercourse?” The nurse repeated. Louder this time, just in case the entire ER hadn’t heard.

  I had to think about it. My head pounded and my mind felt like it was swimming through mud. I closed my eyes and counted to ten and tried like hell to focus. The cop I was dating and I had broken up weeks ago but Stan Sanchez and I had been on the outs for a while before calling it quits.

  “I guess a couple of months ago,” I said.

  “That’s good to know. Slide your butt down and spread your knees. This will be a lot like a Pap smear.”

  It wasn’t.

  Chapter Six

  An hour later a hospital administrator showed up with a stack of papers in her hands. She was a young thing and had that I’m-new-on-the-job look about her.

  “I need your signatures on these papers and then you are free to go home.”

  “Naked?” I asked. Just to clarify.

  “Excuse me?”

  “My clothes were taken away with blood samples, my pubic hair and what was left of my dignity. I’m n
ot signing anything without a change of clothes.”

  This rendered the girl speechless.

  “I have no clothes,” I said as clearly as I could. “Surely there is a protocol in these situations. An extra set of scrubs, perhaps?”

  She looked panicked. Obviously this situation had not been covered in the orientation meeting.

  “Not to worry, darling! I have arrived with your wardrobe!”

  David Currie swept into the exam room with a smile and armful of clothes. He dropped the clothes on the bed and pulled me up into a hug that made me feel warm and safe for the first time in hours.

  “Come back in fifteen, missy,” David dismissed the kid. “Mrs. Fox will be dressed then.”

  The kid skedaddled away faster than you could say “I quit.”

  “Richard sent me to fetch you, darling,” David said. “There is something important that he has to do and he swore to me that you would understand?”

  It wasn’t a question. David had other things on his mind. And all of them had to do with my welfare.

  “Oh Darling, we were so worried about you!” David took step back and stared hard at me.

  “Let me take a look at you. How are you? Tell me the truth, now.”

  How was I? Well, I had intended to take a nap and then go to a cocktail party. Instead I woke up in a strange house with a dead guy and didn’t know if I had been raped. I told David as much as he helped me dress- which he managed to do without any more of my dignity falling away.

  “Darling, Dr. Coshow is waiting for you at Jorjana’s,” David said, referring to my private physician. “Jorjana and Richard and I have taken car of everything.”

  And that is why Jorjana, David and Richard are the top three numbers on speed dial.

  “Now grab your bag and let’s get out of here. I can’t bear to look at these awful green walls for another minute.”