2 Sisters Detective Agency(27)

Chapter 33



Morning came too soon. At the Denny’s on West El Segundo, I ordered the Grand Slam with extra pancakes and sat making phone calls, one after another, dealing with my suddenly abandoned life back in Colorado and the present situation in Los Angeles. Baby ordered black coffee. She sat sipping it while I smothered my pancakes with maple syrup.

“You eat this kind of thing every day?” she asked when I was off the phone, her eyes wandering over the spread in front of me.

“Only when I’ve just had a 120-pound orphan dumped on me.”

“Excuse me?” She scoffed and looked around in case someone had heard my overestimation of her weight. Baby turned her phone camera toward her face and touched a hand to the fashionable headscarf that dangled over her shoulder.

“I’m adjusting to my life as a mother,” I continued, ignoring her. “I need the energy.”

“You’re not my mother,” Baby said.

“I’ve got a piece of paper that basically says otherwise.”

“If you skipped breakfast a few days a week you’d lose weight,” she said. “Intermittent fasting. Google it.”

“Did you body-shame Dad too, or am I just lucky?” I asked.

“That’s different,” Baby said. “It’s okay for guys to be fat.”

“Excuse me,” I said to the server as she topped up my coffee. “Could you please tell me what year it is? My daughter here thinks it’s 1959.”

The two of us shared an eye roll.

“I’m not your daughter,” Baby said after the server left.

“Look at this,” I said, pushing a newspaper toward her. The Los Angeles Daily News had a little more on the murder of Derek Benstein than we had heard on the radio the night before. The eighteen-year-old, pictured beside a huge yacht, had been shot dead in his home while two female “acquaintances” were outside. The women had discovered the body and raised the alarm with police. Witnesses mentioned seeing an out-of-place white van without plates parked two blocks from Benstein’s house.

“Whoa.” Baby sighed. “I knew that guy.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“Not well. We were at school together. Never shared a class or anything.”

“Could the ‘acquaintances’ have been people you knew?” I asked.

“No. Hookers,” Baby said, perusing the article. “They always say ‘acquaintances’ when it’s hookers.”

“How do you know that?”

“One time Dad went night swimming down the beach after a big party at the house. He was really drunk. Five female acquaintances left over from the party had to go in and pull him out of the surf.” Baby slid the paper back to me. “It made the news.”

“What eighteen-year-old has hookers over to his mansion on a Thursday night?” I asked.

“Benstein and Miller are, like, the biggest film agents in LA,” Baby said.

“When I was eighteen, I was going to slumber parties at my friends’ houses and watching horror movies in my pajamas,” I said.

“That one hundred percent doesn’t surprise me,” Baby said dismissively. “What were you doing at fifteen? Playing with dolls?”

I went quiet. At fifteen I’d been a huge professional wrestling fan and had used my birthday money to buy action figures of all my favorite wrestlers.

“Oh, my God,” Baby yelped when I didn’t answer.

“They weren’t dolls, they were collectible figurines.” I huffed. “Try to focus. We’ve got two eighteen-year-old rich kids targeted in the same week. White van at both incidents.”

“Hmm.”

“Do me a favor.” I pointed to her phone on the edge of the table. “Find out if Derek Benstein and Ashton Willisee are friends on Facebook or Instagram or whatever the hell.”

Baby fished around on her phone while I gripped the edge of the table, waiting for her answer. It was clear now that my curiosity was piqued over what had happened to the kid I had seen in my father’s office. Why had he lied to protect someone who had apparently tried to abduct him? Was it the criminal investigator in me, my propensity to want to learn the truth and see justice done whenever I could manage it? Or was it just that I sensed this investigation was something Baby and I could do together, a project we could share that might bring us closer?

“Bingo,” Baby said, showing me her phone screen.

I saw Ashton Willisee’s picture beside an image of the brawny and taut-faced Derek Benstein.



In the parking lot, Baby stopped by my Buick, still playing on her phone.

“So thanks for the free breakfast and all, but I’ve got to roll,” she said, tapping away. “Places to go, people to see—you know how it is.”

“First of all, that wasn’t breakfast,” I said. “You consumed exactly zero calories in there. We’ve still got Dad’s funeral to organize, and I need your help with—”

“Black carriage with horses,” she said. A purple chrome Subaru WRX was pulling into a space behind her. “He always said he wanted a black carriage pulled by six black horses for his funeral. That’s all I know.”

Of course Dad had told Baby about his funeral plans. It was one of a million conversations he’d chosen to have with her and not with me over the last decade and a half. A spark of anger flared.