Royce Rolls Read online

  “All of the above.”

  “That’s what a real man does, hey, Bach?”

  Bach sighed. “Let me lay it out for you. Whitey was the douche bag who was ruining my family. I had to do something. I guess I just did the wrong thing.”

  “Because of your sister, you mean?”

  For a second, the kid looked genuinely terrified. “I had no idea Bentley was in the car, and that’s the honest truth. She was collateral damage in all of this. Maybe she always was.”

  “Collateral damage?”

  “Sure. The middle child. The peacemaker. The one who sucks it up. Whatever it is that the shrinks like to say.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, Bach? What the shrinks say?”

  “My mother’s a narcissist. My older sister is her clone. I was the spoiled baby, and the only boy. Bentley, well, she got whatever was left over from all of that. Let’s just say it’s no accident that she was the one who got stuck in the car with the drunk loser she happened to hate, even more than the rest of us did.”

  “How do you know?”

  “What?”

  “That she hated him?”

  “I just do. Everyone hated him. It wasn’t exactly a secret.”

  “But you just said she hated him most of all. I wrote it down, see?” Harry held up his pad.

  Bach’s eyes were red, and he looked exhausted, but he wasn’t done. Not yet.

  Harry knew something was about to go down.

  Something big.

  You could usually see it in their faces, if you looked closely enough.

  “I know lots of things about my sister and Whitey that nobody else knows. That’s why I decided to kill him.”

  MAYBACH ROYCE CONFESSES TO ROYCE-WHITE KILLINGS; ROYCE COLLATERAL DAMAGE, WHITE WAS TARGET

  AP: Beverly Hills, California

  Via Celebcity.com

  DEVELOPING: Maybach Royce, the youngest son in the Royce television dynasty, and brother of the missing Mulholland crash victim Bentley Royce, has reportedly confessed to involvement in the alleged murder of his sister and T. Wilson White, his future brother-in-law.

  The third member of the Royce family to visit LAPD’s Rampart Station this week, Maybach has not been seen leaving the facility since his arrival earlier in the day.

  The streets immediately surrounding the precinct have been closed to traffic due to media congestion. The sound of news choppers overhead has been deafening, and more than one area resident has been arrested for firing at the sky in frustration.

  Mercedes and Porsche Royce have not made themselves available for comment.

  The Lifespan Network is also not commenting at this time.

  The hundreds of journalists and television crews camped outside the police precinct have been waiting for some sort of official confirmation of the day’s surprising developments, but news from inside Rampart has been slow in coming.

  More to come as the story develops.

  (Disclosure: Celebcity is a fully owned subsidiary of the Lifespan Network, which is itself a fully owned subsidiary of DiosGlobale.)

  Follow @celebcity for breaking details, or www.celebcity.com.

  Twenty-One

  WHAT THE DETECTIVE HEARS (BACH MAKES A CALL)

  May 2018

  Rampart Division, Homicide Special Section, LAPD

  (110 North to West Sixth Street, DTLA)

  It wasn’t until the next afternoon that Harry had Bach brought into the interrogation room again. This time, he threw a newspaper at the boy before he could say a word.

  “Son, what are you doing?”

  “Trying to confess to a murder, Harry.”

  “Stop messing around, will you? Be straight with me.”

  “I am.”

  “The case is about to close, Bach.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Not because of you. Because of nothing, and nobody.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “There are no bodies, Bach. No genetic material whatsoever found in the wreckage. No bodies, no murder. There’s nothing left to investigate, except for maybe destruction of private property.”

  “What about missing persons?!” Bach looked genuinely confused.

  “Get out of here.” Harry unlocked the door and yanked it open. “Go on. Get. Before someone changes their mind.”

  Bach shook his head. He didn’t even stand up. “Harry, come on. Be reasonable.”

  “I just opened the door and invited you to walk away. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. And it goes without saying, we don’t make that offer all too often around here, friend.”

  Bach was getting redder and redder. “You don’t understand. I need to confess. It needs to be in the papers.”

  “It was in the papers. And now, the fact that it was all a stinking pile of horse manure is also going to be in the papers—with both of our names on it.”

  Bach looked miserable. “Then that’s it. We’re screwed. We’re never going to find her. A trial was the only way to get her to come back. At least, the surest way.”

  “Come again?”

  “She would have come back for me. She wouldn’t let me go to jail for something she did. My sister’s just not like that. She’s not capable of that.”

  “I see. It only works the other way around?”

  Bach sat up. “Exactly. And that’s why I have to do it. I have to show her I’m not that jerk anymore. I wouldn’t let her take the rap for me, not anymore. I know how to stand up, and someone in my family has to start acting that way.”

  “Someone?”

  Bach’s eyes began to water, and he rubbed at them with the back of one hand. “Someone besides Bent.”

  “Sorry, kid.”

  “Don’t give up on the case, Harry. I swear, it’s for real. I’m not sure what the exact crimes are, but I promise you almost everyone involved is kind of a criminal.”

  “Too late. The paperwork is filed. This goose is cooked. Or should I say, this duck has hit the deck.”

  Bach cringed. “Wait. You know about that?”

  Harry shrugged. “I’m the show’s consultant, remember? Why do you think I got assigned to this task force in the first place, my good looks?”

  “Not really.” Bach stared at him. “Are you any good, Harry? As a detective?”

  “Sometimes. I have my moments.”

  “Okay then. We move to plan B. We find her ourselves.”

  “Hold on, pal. I’ve seen the evidence. It’s not looking good. Whatever else her talents may be, your sister was thorough. She’d have a good career, if she was at all interested in a life of crime.”

  “It’s not just her alone, though. She was working with someone. More than one person.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Let’s go get my backpack. I can explain everything.”

  Harry shot him a look. “Nothing in your locker, right?”

  Bach sighed, annoyed. “I promise, there’s nothing incriminating inside. I’m clean as a whistle, I swear. Mother Teresa here.”

  “If I had a dime for every guy who sat in that chair and fed me that line . . .”

  “Yeah? Really? Because the ‘if I had a dime’ line is so original?”

  “Yeah, yeah. You know, you remind me a lot of someone we both know.” Harry grinned. He had to admit, he was starting to like the kid. He had the mother’s spunk and the kid sister’s mouth. “Shut up and follow me.”

  When Harry handed him his backpack, Bach pulled out a dark object wrapped in a plastic bag. “Here. I was holding on to it, in case Bent ever got herself into trouble and this would help.”

  “Not here,” Harry said, looking around the hallway outside the evidence room. “Let’s go get a burger.”

  Bach smiled.

  There was something satisfying about studying a cell phone that had been lost at a fancy exercise class while chowing down on cheeseburgers and fries and chocolate shakes.

  Harry stared at the dead phone in front of him. “So you’re telling me s
he ditched her own phone and then reported it stolen?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Because there’s something on this phone she couldn’t risk anyone seeing?”

  “That’s what I’m guessing, right? I mean, none of it had uploaded to the cloud or whatever. They had to wipe the whole phone.”

  “Wiped, huh?”

  “Yeah, that’s the thing. She had Pam, our producer, kill the phone remotely. But you’re the LAPD, right? You have to be able to do something with a wiped phone, right? Even if a regular person couldn’t?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. It might take a while, though. Or involve another federal agency. And then again, this case was declared dead the moment the labs could prove that there were never any bodies in the car. All we can do now is open a missing persons investigation.”

  Harry shrugged. It wasn’t going to be easy, even if he could get it done. He didn’t want to give the kid false hopes.

  He picked up a battered leather notebook. “You found this in her locker?”

  “That’s right. After she left. I thought”—now the kid looked embarrassed—“I thought she might have left me a note or a clue or something.”

  “You thought she wanted you to find her?”

  “Something like that.” Bach sighed. “There’s another part.”

  “Part of what?”

  “Of the story.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not just about where she lost it, the phone. It’s also about what I saw on it before it was wiped. There was one number in the phone. I didn’t recognize it until later—but I have a thing for numbers.”

  “Yeah, so I hear. Face cards too.”

  “It was Whitey’s number. I’m sure of it. And if you can un-wipe that phone, I bet you’ll find out whatever they were talking about.”

  Harry didn’t look too surprised. “So your sister called her future brother-in-law. That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “You don’t get it. She lost the phone before we’d even met Whitey. Before Porsche even said a word about it to us.”

  Harry took a moment to let this sink in.

  “Yeah.” Harry looked at Bach. “You might have led with that.”

  “They were in on this thing, whatever it was. They must have faked it. Whitey and my sister.” Bach shook his head. “The whole time.”

  “Ho-ly crap.” Harry rubbed the grease off his hands and onto his pants. “Well, if the phone story holds up, you could be right—believe it or not.”

  “Why would they do that?” Bach frowned.

  “Maybe they had a thing?” Harry looked at the kid. He felt bad for him, but someone had to say it. “I mean, there was that whole canoodling incident.”

  “No way. She couldn’t stand the guy.”

  “A canoodle’s a canoodle. But your sister and your mother said the same thing. Why?”

  “I have no idea. She thought he was even faker than we did. It just got worse and worse, after a while.”

  Harry nodded. “So something about their deal was changing. Whatever it was. Someone has to know.”

  “She didn’t exactly have a lot of close friends, my sister. It’s sort of a family trait. Or, you could say, curse.”

  Harry snapped his fingers—almost upsetting his shake, or what was left of it. “What about that boy who was so stuck on her? The skater kid?”

  “Skater kid? What are you talking about?”

  “You know, the kid from the library. Kind of street-looking. Not a bad-looking kid, if you could get past the rough edges. The one with the hoodie, and the dark curly hair. You know the one I’m talking about. They were close. Like, real close.”

  “My sister? Close?” Bach looked at Harry. “I know Bent hung out at the library, but she never mentioned any skater dude.”

  Harry nodded. “Ah, see? The kid brother doesn’t know everything.”

  Bach looked frustrated. “I mean, I know there were some homeless guys. But I think they were, like, old veteran types. Army vets, she said. She felt bad for them, for whatever had happened to them.”

  “Like the rescue cats. And the dead rabbit. Your sister had a real thing for strays.”

  Bach shook his head. “So you’ve been doing your homework, I guess.”

  “You gotta remember, I was on your family’s case even before there was a case.”

  “Because of Lifespan.” Bach nodded. “I forgot.”

  “The kid from the library, though—he wasn’t a Lifespan problem. He’s on the persons of interest list, seems he was a kind of secret friend of Bentley’s. Which is funny, right? Seeing as he seems to have slipped under everyone’s radar, even yours?”

  “I guess,” said Bach.

  Harry kept thinking. “What was his name? It was Huntington. Manhattan—Venice. That was it. The kid went by the name Venice.”

  “My sister liked a boy named Venice who hung out at the library?”

  Harry hit his head. “God, I am such an idiot. Not just a kid named Venice. A kid named whatever name is on that check.”

  “What check?”

  “The one he used to pay her bail when she got locked up. The day she bawled Jeff Grunburg into sending you on an all-expenses-paid Italian vacation.”87

  He was on his phone before he finished the sentence—

  Reaching for a napkin—

  Searching his pockets for a pen—

  Covering his other ear so he could hear in the crowded burger joint—

  Until there it was.

  Bach stared as he wrote it out.

  A S A

  “Asa? I remember that guy. She only met him once. At a party, at the Chateau Marmont.”

  “I see. Thanks. Appreciate it.”

  Harry clicked off, looking like he’d just solved the entire New York Times Sunday crossword.

  “Venice is a kid named Asa. And not just any kid named Asa.” He sat back in his creaking chair. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m pretty certain I know where Bentley is. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To pick up your sister and your mom. And to maybe pack some sunscreen.”

  “Sunscreen?”

  “We’re going on a little trip.”

  * * *

  87 Jeff feels “bawled” may be an overstatement here. Soften? —D

  Eleven Months Earlier

  Twenty-Two

  BENTLEY PHONES A FRIEND

  June 2017

  Trousdale Park Gated Community, Beverly Hills

  (North of Sunset, off Benedict Canyon)

  Bent was still furious about not being allowed into the room. It had been one day since the season six green-light meeting, and she knew she was running out of time. The network decision would come at any minute.

  It was now or never.

  Bent made the call from her bedroom, the one place where she knew Mercedes would never find her. Mercedes avoided all three of her children’s bedrooms like the plague; she said it was because she was a Cool Mom, and she didn’t want to see all the incriminating evidence, but in reality Bentley suspected the rooms were just too personal for her. As in, they just didn’t have that intimate of a relationship, the kind where you could just walk into a room that had dirty underwear on the floor.

  That was a different sort of Cool Mom, Bent told herself. In other words: she’s just not that into you.

  She turned the worn paper rectangle over in her hand.

  It doesn’t matter. They’re your family. You have to do whatever you can to help them, or you have to live with knowing that you walked away. And if you play this right, you might just get everything you want too. A college education could be in your future after all.

  It was no longer a decision.

  It was time to call Yoda.

  It was a United States cell phone number, but when the person on the other end of the line answered, he answered in Spanish. “Hola?”

  Bent froze. She wanted to hang up, but she didn’t. Come on. You said you’d do
anything. Now do it. So she took a breath. “Is this, um . . . is this Senor . . . Senor . . .” She was tongue-tied, embarrassed.

  The voice paused. “I’m a senior, yes? Who wants to know?”

  What do I say to that? She almost hung up right then—but the man on the other end of the line started laughing. “I’m sorry, so sorry. I’m just joking with you.”

  “Oh, right. Hilarious.” Bent tried to laugh.

  “But really, could you speak up? I can’t hear you very well.”

  It sounded like the old man she’d met in the lobby, but she couldn’t be sure. Judging by the noise around him, the person on the other end of the line now was in some kind of dive bar. Wherever he was, there was lots of cheering and shouting.

  Whatever.

  It didn’t matter if he was in a bar or a church. She didn’t have a whole lot of options. It was now or never.

  “This is Bentley Royce,” she began again, this time practically shouting. “I don’t know if you remember me. You met my brother and me in the lobby of the Lifespan building yesterday?”

  “I did?” Mr. S. sounded confused.

  Her heart sank. “Yes.”

  A pause. “In San Diego?”

  She sighed. “Beverly Hills.”

  Another pause. “Dark hair?”

  Another sigh. “Blond. Rainbow on the tips.”

  When Bent mentioned the hair, the voice began to laugh on the other end of the line. “Ah, yes! The Troubled One! Por Que, Bentley, Por Que?!”

  “That’s right. I mean, that’s not right, but that’s me.”

  “I remember. The ax.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s sort of what I was calling about.” As she spoke, there was more cheering in the background, and then a blast of music that drowned out her last few words. “Is this a bad time?” Bent asked.

  “Of course it is,” he answered.

  “Do you want me to call back?”

  “No, no. There is no good time. Old men must be happy with whatever time we have.” He paused melodramatically, and she couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. She decided not to laugh, just in case.