“Oh? And what do you have to be sorry for, miss? Something that you and I should talk about privately in a confessional?”
Her head jerked up and she squinted over his shoulder down the hall. When she saw me she moved away from Father Lou, and away from her sad drooping. “Who is that?”
“That’s a detective, Magdalena,” the priest said. “She’s private, but she’s got some questions about Lucy you would do well to answer.”
Lacey turned toward the door, but Father Lou grabbed her left wrist in a businesslike grip and pulled her forward. “Your old playmate, and I have to call you to get you to come talk to me about him. That tells its own tale, Magdalena.”
“Isn’t this rather melodramatic?” Lacey said. “Midnight meetings in the church?”
“Why not?” I put in. “The whole of the last two weeks has been B–grade garbage. Did you talk to Alex Fisher about coming here? Is hers going to be the next knock on the door?”
“Alex doesn’t know I’m here. She’s making me nervous these days.”
“This something that came on you suddenly after you saw the news about Frenada?” I demanded.
“Girls—ladies, I mean. Let’s go sit down. More light, less heat.”
Father Lou put a muscular arm around each of us and propelled us back to his study. He came up to about my nose, but I wouldn’t like to test the strength in those arms. He poured cold tea into three cups and set the pot down with a firm smack on the tray.
“Now, Magdalena, you’d better tell me everything you know about Lucy’s death.” He spoke with an old authority over her.
“I don’t know anything about his death. But—oh, I don’t even know where to begin. I’m so confused.”
She blinked tears away from her large blue eyes, but I didn’t feel moved to pity, and Father Lou apparently didn’t either. He fixed her with a hard stare and told her to save her dramatics for her movies. She flushed and bit her lip.
“What about the cocaine,” Father Lou said. “Do you know anything about the drugs that were planted in his shop?”
“Planted? That isn’t what happened.” She shook her head. “I was shocked. I’d talked to Lucy at my hotel, oh, weeks ago, and he never breathed a word about it. Of course he wouldn’t necessarily, but—but—it was unexpected, anyway.”
“How do you know they weren’t planted?” I asked. “Is that what Alex told you? After I wrote you that Global was doing the broadcast tonight?”
“How do you know—she didn’t—” Lacey stammered.
“Alex?” Father Lou said. “Oh, the girl from Hollywood. Don’t lie about this, Magdalena. If she talked to you about it, I want to know.”
Lacey’s wide mouth contracted into a sulky pout. “When I read this Warshawski woman’s note, I called Alex. Don’t bite me: I know her, and I don’t know Warshawski from a pit bull. Someone like me gets a million people a day saying they have special news or they can protect me from some weird shit or other. I thought Warshawski wanted to scare me into hiring her detective services.”
“That isn’t implausible,” I said. “But it doesn’t explain why it rattled you so badly you had to call Alex about it. I wrote Ms. Dowell that Global was going to smear Frenada on television,” I added to the priest. “I wanted to talk to Ms. Dowell about it. Since I couldn’t get a phone call in to her, I wrote her and waited in the lobby in case she wanted to talk to me. Half an hour later Global’s Doberman showed up, very agitated.”
“What did she tell you, Magdalena?” Father Lou demanded.
“She—Alex—she came to the Trianon and told me it was true, she even showed me a photograph they had of a kilo of cocaine inside a fabric bolt Lucy brought in from Mexico.” Lacey looked pleadingly at the priest. “If you think I wouldn’t come here because I’m coldhearted, you’re so wrong. I didn’t want to have to talk about Lucy with you if he was dealing drugs. You never could hear one bad word about Lucy. Not even when he was a lookout for the Lions when he was eleven. If you want to believe it was a plant, go ahead, but Alex warned me, warned me that Warshawski would try to get me caught in a smear campaign. And she warned me not to talk about it. It’s one thing for Hugh Grant or some other male star to get in trouble with sex and drugs, but when a woman does it, especially one getting to be my age, she looks like slime. Alex said it could kill me if it got around.” Lacey looked at me. “I suppose you were hiding behind the potted palm in the lobby.”
“You took her word for it without asking anyone else?” Father Lou said. “Your old comrade, who saved you from getting beat up, and you didn’t even question what a television show was going to say about him? Did you see what they did to him tonight, that boy who worked day and night to keep a roof over his sister’s head after her husband was killed?”
“Alex had a photo,” Lacey said, but she looked at her hands.
“That’s true, Ms. Dowell,” I said. “That’s very true.”