Blake blew out a breath. “Oh, he tapped me, and I paid. But I’m not happy to hear he had no intention of carrying through.” He seemed genuinely disturbed.
“How much?” Roz asked in a soft voice that would’ve had Alden confessing everything.
Blake picked at the label on his bottle. “Not that much to start with, though I said I’d give him more.”
Roz just sat there looking at him, lips pursed around the straw in her tall glass, sipping. Waiting.
Blake tipped his head from side to side. “In the ballpark of a quarter million.”
Not that much? Alden wanted to scream. Why did he get into journalism again? Oh, right. Because he wanted to change the world and leave the family fortune behind. Even if he had a chunk of it set aside for rainy days.
“Any chance you’ll get your investment back now that Wayne is gone?” Roz asked Blake.
Blake shrugged, but the set of his jaw suggested he wasn’t as nonchalant as he wanted to appear. “My lawyer is looking into it. We had a contract.”
“Well, I hope you get it back.” Alden took another sip of his glass of beer and set it on the bar, half full. They had a long day ahead of them, and they had to get going. He plucked cash out of his now-dry wallet—cash was old-fashioned, but when he was fishing for gossip, it was useful—and laid it on the bar to pay for the drinks. “I’d like to check in with you again if we find out more. Would that be OK?”
“I’d like to know more,” Blake said evenly. “Have a good day.”
“Thank you.” Roz slipped off her stool and shook Blake’s hand.
Alden did likewise, and they headed out of the bar and into the parking lot.
“Holy crap,” she said once they got into her car.
“No kidding,” Alden replied. “One of Wayne’s stable of writers was allegedly working on a script about sabotaging a plane? Who?”
“A ‘she,’ according to what Blake told us.”
“They were all ‘shes,’” Alden said.
“He made deals with men, too, but they weren’t writers.” Roz started up the car. “We still don’t know how many scribes he had on the hook. But we do know about Sheryl. Enolia. And then there’s the one who’s married to the pilot whose plane went down.”
Alden buckled up, in more ways than one. “I guess it’s time to talk to Nicole Esquivel.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“I want to see if Sebastian is at home before we go.” Roz picked up her phone and cranked the car’s AC while they sat in the golf club parking lot. “I’d like to talk to Nicole and Sebastian together if possible.”
“For safety?” Alden asked.
“Just to—I mean, it’s not my business whether they talk to each other or not, but if they clear the air in front of us, it helps us, too.” She typed out a text.
“You mean if he confesses he got into the movie studio deal to further her career?”
“Right, because I don’t think she knows about that. And maybe she’ll tell us more about Wayne.”
A moment later, she got a text back from Sebastian. “He’s on a work site, unfortunately. I think we’ll have to face Nicole on her own. Possibly with small children.”
“I’m fine with killer mommy. It’s the kids that scare me.”
Roz laughed. Was Alden speaking in code? Was he scared of kids—of having kids? Oh, hell, she wasn’t too keen on the idea yet either. But never say never.
They reached the Esquivels’ Saturn Shores neighborhood within fifteen minutes. Construction was in progress next to the old gatehouse.
“I believe they’re rebuilding the guest gates,” she said. “I knew the HOA approved it, but there was nothing here yesterday.”
“Gates aren’t much help if you live with your killer,” Alden observed.
