Free Celebrity Sudoku by Kaye Morgan

no hope of hushing it up. Off I went to restore my chemical balance.”
    And when you went, they needed another body for Celebrity Week on D-Kodas, Liza thought. Surprise, surprise, Ritz Tarleton turned out to be the next female celeb on the list.

6
    While Liza considered other questions to ask, a car finally came to pick up Sukey Tupp. Maybe that was just as well—the singer wasn’t in much of a mood to reminisce more about Ritz Tarleton anyway.
    That suited Liza. Even if Sukey was a fan, the longer Liza spoke with her, the more she seemed to pick up a tone in the woman’s voice, as if someone had stretched a wire almost to the breaking point and kept plucking it.
    Liza remembered watching videos of Sukey onstage—she had an intensity to her performance, an ability to communicate a vibe. The problem was, the vibe was now enough to make Liza quiver, too.
    Methinks Ms. Tupp is not as together as she tries to present herself, Liza thought.
    Watching Sukey’s attempt (and failure) to maintain her facade made Liza wonder if Ritz had been doing the same thing—only more successfully—on the set of D-Kodas .
    Slogging back to Michael’s Honda, she frowned in thought. Liza had gotten a snootful of Ritz Tarleton’s attitude and indolence while trying to teach her in that prison sudoku class. She’d certainly been turned off by the way Ritz behaved—was it really just two days ago? It seemed like a week.
    The point was, Liza had put her efforts into ignoring Ritz rather than paying attention to her. Even with that nasty little trick on Samantha Pang, Liza had been more interested in the victim than the perpetrator.
    What had really been going on behind Ritz Tarleton’s smug-looking little fox face? Who on the set might have had a chance to know?
    When she got back to the car, Liza called Buck Foreman on her cell phone. “I imagine Michelle had you checking backgrounds on the major people involved with the D-Kodas Celebrity Week.”
    “Ever since you agreed to take part,” Buck told her.
    “Did anybody have a history with Ritz Tarleton?”
    Buck laughed. “You figure an old enemy stalked her and used the earthquake as a convenient cover-up for doing away with her?”
    “I’m just trying to get my head around what she was thinking that last day on the set.”
    “Mainly she seemed to be thinking about how to give Darrie Brunswick a stroke.” Buck chuckled again. “What do you figure? Ritz was planning to take her place and be the new hostess?”
    “Unlikely,” Liza said dryly. “But she may have mentioned what her plans were if she had a friend on the set.”
    “I’d say there were two possibilities.” Buck rustled some papers together, looking over his reports. “When Ritz started making the whole celebrity scene, she turned up often with the actor guy—Richard ‘Chard’ Switzer. They were pretty tight, at least to begin with.”
    He paused for a second. “More recently—within the last few months—Ritz turned up at a lot of places with that rapper guy, Forty Oz.”
    “Places?” Liza pressed.
    “Clubs, hotels, parties . . . and his crib, if you can use that term for a mansion up in Coldwater Canyon,” Buck replied. “Papa Tarleton was not happy.”
    Liza had met Ritz’s father. Frederick “Fritz” Tarleton had turned his father’s family travel business into a deluxe tourism empire. He’d made a lot of money and had no problems with using it as a weapon.
    “Old Fritz hired a beat-down on a former boyfriend who did Ritz wrong,” Liza said slowly. “Just how unhappy was he with Forty Oz.?” She thought about the couple of encounters she’d had with the rapper, in makeup and then watching him tape the first game. He had a fast mouth and maybe a temper, not a good combination for dealing with a heavy-handed father.
    On the other hand, she couldn’t remember Ritz or Forty Oz. even talking to each other on the set. “What’s the situation between them now?” Liza asked.
    “It seemed to be