The blonde girl in the photograph he’d seen in Willard Keats’s house had seemed familiar for a reason. She wasn’t just “Katie”, the old actor’s niece, but also a younger version of Kat Fontaine. Olly remembered Sandy mentioning that Kat was from an old thespian family—like the Barrymores.
It wasn’t exactly an earthshaking discovery, though. So Willard Keats and Kat Fontaine were related. Big deal. Willard could’ve had a variety of different reasons not to point it out. Although…it was a bit suspicious. Could it have anything to do with the role Kat and Sandy were competing for? Was some sort of scheming afoot? If there was, Willard would surely take the side of family over a friend. And Rich told Willard about the blackmail! Olly started to have an uneasy feeling that their visit might have stirred up trouble for Sandy. Just as their visit to Chester Kane had.
After clocking out, Olly dithered about calling Rich. On the one hand, he had nothing but a handful of improvable suspicions. On the other hand, he thought Rich should know about it before going to the cops. Most of all, he really wanted to talk to Rich—the waiting to hear from the guy was getting on his nerves. Olly dialed, but his call went to voice mail. Doing his best to hide his disappointment, he rattled off a message about his discovery.
Strictly speaking, Kat Fontaine’s house wasn’t on Olly’s way home. Not by a mile. More like a couple of miles off course. Olly lived a few minutes east of FTP, while Kat Fontaine lived above in the Hollywood Hills. The only reason for him to drive that way was to cut across those hills to the Valley, taking the scenic route, like the Star Tours vans. The road snaked up to Mulholland Drive, and from there he could take Cahuenga Boulevard to the other side. And why not? There were all sorts of things in the Valley—like BJ Studios, or even better, Nick and Jem’s place.
Yes, Olly decided, he’d pay them a visit. Jem had clocked out an hour earlier, would be home by now. And Nick might be there too and he might find out more from Nick about the state of the murder investigation. Or not. At any rate, he’d be closer to the Glendale Police Department—just in case he was needed. For whatever reason. Of course, the freeway offered a more direct route, but it would be an unwise choice in the middle of rush hour.
By the time Olly fully convinced himself, the car was already wheezing up the narrow, winding lanes. His plan was to simply drive past, maybe slow down a little, just enough to take a fleeting glimpse at the house. Then he’d drive on to see Jem. It didn’t have to make sense. He knew the house, since it had belonged to Clay Carson, once a rising movie star. Olly had made one FTP delivery there, not long after Carson married Kat Fontaine. He hadn’t met Carson, though, not then. He had later, at an industry party he’d gotten into by a fluke. The same party where he’d met Sandy Baker.
The gate was already in sight when the wailing of sirens forced Olly to pull over into someone’s driveway. A police car zoomed past him first, followed by a fire truck. The road was barely wide enough for the latter.
Olly waited a little, making sure there weren’t more emergency vehicles, and noticed a woman in a blue dress struggling with the gate of Kat’s house—probably the maid. She seemed to be trying to pull it closed but not succeeding. It was the gentlemanly thing to help, and there was just enough space for his car between the driveway he’d pulled into and the Mercedes parked by the curb. Olly maneuvered so close to the Mercedes, their bumpers nearly kissed and made sure his front tires were angled the correct way before turning off the engine.
“May I help?” he asked as he reached the woman.
She all but jumped out of her skin at the sound of his voice, and Olly realized she wasn’t a maid but Kat Fontaine herself. Last time Olly had seen her in person—at that party—she’d been wearing so much makeup she could’ve been any Hollywood blonde. But then and there, with a range of emotions warring on her naked face, she was unquestionably pretty. Her big eyes brimmed with vulnerability in her upturned face—she was small, shorter than Olly. “The gate’s stuck,” she said in a helpless little-girl voice.
It was all Olly needed to jump to her rescue. “Let me look.”
The gate was a heavy iron thing, the kind that rolled sideways—not the most sensible setup with the ten-foot-tall hedge lining the fence from the outside and the unkempt shrubbery growing too close on the inside. Both seemed overdue for trimming. Olly got down on his knees, climbed under and found the culprit: a dead tree branch had gotten wedged between the fence and the bars of the gate. He had to yank hard to pull it free and ended up on his ass. However, the gate immediately began to roll close.