“I’m really wondering whom we can trust,” Nancy confided to Bess as they walked. “As far as we know at this point, Cindy had no reason to miss the session this morning, and every reason to be there. That makes it look as if someone prevented her. But who, and why?”
“We have lots of suspects,” Bess said.
“Too many,” Nancy replied. “Everybody seems to want to cast suspicion on everybody else. And frankly, so far I haven’t heard a decent motive for any of them. Take Ms. Bowers’s theory that Cody did it. Can you imagine him abducting Cindy just to keep her from taking a job? She wouldn’t stay his girlfriend for a minute if he pulled a stunt like that. Ridiculous!”
“But what if he got someone else to do it, someone Cindy doesn’t know?” Bess suggested. “They’d only have to keep her out of sight long enough to make the ad agency fire her.”
Nancy looked skeptical. “Kidnapping’s a federal offense, Bess,” she pointed out. “Would a guy like Cody run the risk of having the FBI after him, just to keep his girlfriend from taking a few trips away from Chicago?”
“I guess not,” Bess admitted. “But what if somebody tricked Cindy into going away suddenly? You know, by faking an emergency call from a sick relative in Seattle or something. Then it wouldn’t really be kidnapping, would it?”
“But Cindy would have told someone or left a note that she was going away,” Nancy said. “Unless—what if she did leave a note, and someone intercepted it? Somebody who lives with her—”
“Like Ann Bowers?” Bess completed Nancy’s thought. “Do you really think she’s responsible, as Cody suggested?”
Nancy looked doubtful. “It could be,” she said. “Maybe Cindy was giving her trouble—turning down certain campaigns, as Charmaine said—or maybe she knew Cindy was looking for another agent, like Cody seemed to be saying. Then she might have wanted to steer Cindy’s work to some of her other models. Didn’t Gayle say something about her getting the Healthibits assignment instead of Cindy?”
“That’s true,” Bess agreed. “And Ms. Bowers did seem kind of edgy when we were talking to her. But she just doesn’t seem like a criminal type.”
Nancy gave Bess a sideways grin as they turned into the Film Center building. “Bess, you’ve been on enough cases with me to know that anyone could be ‘the criminal type,’ ” she declared. “But I’ll admit, she doesn’t seem like the most logical suspect.”
Nancy pressed the elevator button to go upstairs. “And then there’s the other angle,” she went on. “That someone may be sabotaging the Healthibits campaign, not just Cindy. That’s what I’d like to look into now.”
The girls fell silent, each lost in her own thoughts as they rode the creaking elevator up to the fourth floor.
As they stepped off on four, Nancy caught a glimpse of something—or someone—moving off to the left. She turned her head, but there was no one in sight.
Had she imagined it, or had someone ducked away when he heard the elevator door opening?
“Excuse me,” someone muttered suddenly from her right.
“Oh, sorry.” Nancy realized that she was blocking the elevator door. She stepped aside to let a man on. He was tall and skinny, with a receding hairline and weak chin. At first he looked to Nancy like a total nerd, until she noticed the chic style of his baggy olive green suit and black T-shirt.
As the elevator doors closed, he gave Nancy and Bess a careful look, as if trying to place them. Nancy wondered if she’d seen him before. She certainly didn’t think so.
Bess rang the buzzer at Studio 4A, and Charmaine came to open the door. Behind her, the door to the soundstage was ajar, but the big room beyond it looked dark and empty. “Carlo decided to send everybody home,” Charmaine explained. “There wasn’t much else he could do without Cindy.”
Nancy heard angry voices from somewhere near the dressing rooms. Glancing at Charmaine, she raised a questioning eyebrow.
“They’ve been going at it like that for an hour,” Charmaine said in an undertone. “It’s giving me a headache.”
Carlo was shouting, “How do I know? Perhaps someone wants me to fail. Perhaps someone wants your cereal to fail. Or perhaps some lunatic hates all people who work in advertising! I am beginning to think that way myself!”
A moment later Carlo came storming out. He noticed Bess and Nancy and stopped, looking ashamed of his outburst. “In my next life I want to be a taxi driver, or a post office clerk,” he told them. “But a filmmaker? Never!”
“Did something else happen?” Bess asked.
“Do we need anything else to happen?” Carlo growled. “Cindy has vanished, someone has deliberately tried to wreck the set, and I have three executives shouting in my ears, trying to tell me how to do my job.”
Nancy asked, “Carlo, have you given any more thought to who might want to sabotage your work?”
He threw up his hands. “All the world is not my friend, you understand,” he declared. “But I didn’t think that I had any real enemies.” He ran his hands through his bushy gray hair, thinking. “Miklos, now—he does not like me because I fired him. But that was after the set fell.”
Nancy asked gently, “Who else might want you to fail on this project?”
Carlo glowered darkly. “Well, there is Paul Norman,” he confessed. “Another filmmaker. I heard that he was very upset when I was given this assignment. He has done many other cereal commercials, and he knows Cindy—she did two or three screen tests for him. Perhaps he could have convinced her to stay away today.”
“Would he be able to get into this studio, to wreck your set?” Nancy asked.
Carlo pursed his lips. “Perhaps,” he said. “His offices are in this building, on the ninth floor, and he has used this same studio himself many times. I suppose he could have kept a key.”
“What does he look like?” asked Bess.
“Tall, a little bald, with small eyes,” Carlo replied. “And no chin.”
“Nancy!” Bess said excitedly. “Doesn’t that sound like the man we just saw outside in the hallway?”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Nancy said. “But if his office is in this building, he no doubt had a good reason to be there. Still, I’d like to ask him some questions. Even if he isn’t involved, he might give us a lead. Charmaine, do you have his phone number?”
“Sure thing,” Charmaine replied. She flicked on one bank of lights in the soundstage and led Bess and Nancy inside, pushing the door shut behind them. Then she took them over to the telephone and gave Nancy the number of Paul Norman’s office.
Nancy dialed, and a man answered. She explained that she wanted to interview Paul Norman for her school paper. The man said that Norman was away from the office but took down Nancy’s name and suggested she try to call again in a couple of hours.
“No luck?” Bess asked as Nancy hung up.
“No, he’s out,” Nancy reported. “I guess he was on his way out when we saw him.”
Just then the telephone rang. Charmaine picked it up and said, “Festa Films, can I help you?”
