Maggie and the Empty Noose

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "Lassie would say the boy's tired, and should try again tomorrow," Mr. Tibbets said. "And so should you. Let's go inside."

  Watching Reese blush like a schoolboy when his dad asked if he and Maggie were going to need separate bedrooms was worth the whole trip.

  She smothered a smirk and let the famous sex symbol hem and haw his way through an embarrassed explanation that they weren't, you know, um, well, like that.

  His mom nodded and then showed her to a room at one end of the house, while Reese went upstairs to his old room, where Shane was sleeping. There were bunkbeds, apparently, and Shane had the top bunk.

  It was all so normal and nice that she almost forgot how awful the last few days had been.

  But she had noticed Reese's hand shaking when he was talking to his dad, and then he asked for a glass of water to take his withdrawal medicine, and that brought her back to Earth.

  She undressed and put on pajama pants and a T-shirt to sleep in, then lay on the bed with the dog, and tried to sleep.

  Jasper fussed a bit until she realized she hadn't given him his toy sheeple. She got it out of a pocket of her suitcase and gave it to him. He lay there mouthing it gently for a while, then fell fast asleep.

  She watched him as he started to dream, his legs moving and nose twitching as he imagined something awful. Either the plane ride or the giant cows, she guessed. Or maybe both. She couldn't tell.

  She stroked his side and he eventually lapsed into a more restful sleep.

  An hour later she was still awake. It was close to midnight, and she decided this was as good a time as any to do some research on the crime.

  So she got up and looked around for her laptop, then realized she'd left her carry on bag in the living room.

  She went out to find it.

  It was there, and so was Reese.

  "Can't sleep, either?" he asked softly, and she nodded.

  "I was going to make coffee," he said. "Want some?"

  She said yes, so he went in the kitchen while she got her laptop out of her carry on bag. She sat down at the old pine dining table and watched him shuffle around the homey kitchen, making the coffee.

  He pulled out a battered enamel pot, filled it with water from the sink, and set it on the stove. He turned on the stove and the blue flame from the gas made her think of the haunted expression in his eyes when she'd discovered him with Olivia.

  "How are the bunk beds?" she asked.

  "I don't think my parents realize I'm six-three now," he said. "Hanging half my legs off the end of the bed was cutting off my circulation."

  "Is that why you're still awake?" she asked.

  He gave her a significant look. "Not really. How about you? You couldn't sleep?"

  "Nope," she said. She looked down at the laptop. "I'm thinking I'll fly home tomorrow, now that you're settling in."

  He looked at the coffee pot in front of him. "Please, don't," he whispered.

  "I wanted to get back to the investigation. Do you really need me to stay?"

  "I need you to stay," he whispered. "One more day." He didn't look at her, but he said, still in that soft whisper, "I'm hanging by a thread."

  "Okay. I'm here for you. Don't know what I can do, but I'll stay." She opened up the laptop. "But I'm going to keep working while I'm here."

  "Working? On what?"

  "You think I'm going to stop looking for the killer?"

  "Does it matter anymore?" he said, sounding defeated.

  "Someone tried to poison you."

  He shrugged. "Like I said, does it matter now who did it?"

  She opened up her laptop. "Yes, Reese. It matters."

  Chapter Fourteen

  While she logged into her laptop to begin digging into the sordid past of Olivia Sigworth, alias Olivia Stevens, Reese finished boiling the water and made the instant coffee.

  He set a mug down by her, then went back to his chair opposite. He sat there, drinking awful black coffee out of a Grumpy Cat mug, and staring at his own reflection in the window.

  The wagon wheel chandelier over the table cast odd shadows on her notebook, her phone, her laptop. It cast shadows on the man curled up in the chair opposite her, hugging his knees to his chest.

  She kept searching, hoping to find some insight into who the dead woman had been.

  There were a bunch of articles, going back many years. There were lots of images of Olivia, many with Reese, many without.

  She had been a real stunner in her younger days. There were pap pics of the two of them leaving Hollywood hot spots, both looking impossibly beautiful and wasted out of their skulls.

  There was one of her with the whole band, mugging at the camera. And then another with her kissing someone else. Frank? She zoomed in on the pic, and sure enough, Olivia was giving Frank a big, sloppy kiss. He had a Jack Daniels bottle in his hand, and he looked like he'd drunk at least half the bottle already.

  She scrolled on through the image results. With a shudder, Maggie swiped past pictures of the car crash, and found some from happier times. She hadn't realized there'd been a Vanity Fair cover of a newborn Shane, with Olivia holding the baby, Reese beaming proudly alongside, capped by the headline, HAPPY FAMILY!

  More recent were stories about Olivia's rumored casting in the Hottest Hollywood Housewives franchise. Each story planted by her publicist emphasized her connection to Movie Star Reese Stevens, and talked up her Son Shane, As Handsome As His Famous Father. No wonder Reese had wanted to strangle her. He was lucky he now had an alibi.

  She found some mentions of Olivia's work with Eddie's charity. All of that reporting was glowingly positive. For once she was doing something noble and good. Maggie didn't believe for one minute her motives were the slightest bit charitable. It was no coincidence that every fluff story about her in the last few years called her a "model, actress, and philanthropist." Olivia had always been in it for herself. Eddie had once described her connection to the charity as a win/win: she got the attention she craved, and the charity got donations and good press.

  On a hunch, Maggie looked up the charity's financials on one of the charity watch sites. Nothing there. Their books had been audited in the last year and they had received an "A" rating.

  "Find anything?" Reese asked.

  She shook her head. "Nope. I thought maybe Olivia was stealing from the charity, but they have an excellent rating. So that's a dead end."

  "Nah," he said. "I'm on the board, and we go over the books regularly. She couldn't get away with anything."

  He got out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one out.

  "Open a window, would you?" she muttered, then typed in another search, narrowing it down. Olivia had been around show business for almost two decades, and there was a lot of stuff to sift through. So she looked for mentions of Olivia only in the last year.

  She clicked through the stories, trying to find more associates of Olivia's. Associates. She couldn't even think of them as friends. Olivia didn't have friends. She had connections. She had co-conspirators in her little schemes. She had enemies.

  Ooh. Cassidy Carter. She looked at another story, and the name came up again. Cassidy Carter was exactly the same "type" as Olivia: a snippy, shallow, aging model/actress with too much Botox, and not enough acting talent to ever hit it big. Sure enough, they were up for a lot of the same parts.

  She spotted something. This was interesting. Cassidy had landed a guest role on a sitcom that Olivia had bragged about last year. Somehow she'd snatched the role away from Olivia at the last minute. That must have really stuck in Olivia's craw.

  So did that work in reverse? Did Cassidy ever lose out on a job to Olivia? Were they in direct competition for anything?

  Yes. Cassidy was also up for a part on Hottest Hollywood Housewives right now. Interesting. The industry story from only two weeks ago listed possible new cast members for the big franchise, and both of their names were on the list. The story said there would be only one new addition to the cast, and the final decision
would be made in a month.

  She wondered if Cassidy's "oh, wow" act in the bead shop a couple of days ago had really been just shock about a murder in their social set—or had it been a fishing expedition to see if her own name had been connected to the case? Maggie picked up her phone to text Ibarra, then noticed it was after 1:00 AM. She'd better wait until morning if she wanted Will to listen to her.

  She ran another search. She scrolled through fluff stories, gossip, award show appearances. Ooh, that was a pretty dress Olivia had worn to the Oscars the first year Reese's acting career took off. She switched to image search and scrolled through lots of pretty pictures of that fantasy world of pretty people and glamorous parties and—

  Maggie gasped, then covered her mouth to silence it.

  Reese hadn't noticed. His head was bent forward as he lit another cigarette with a shiny gold lighter.

  She looked back at the image on the laptop screen. The accident scene photo was in full color.

  She forced herself to face it. To really see it, the way you would look at a loved one's broken leg to try to understand the pain they were going through. This was what the drugs had done to the four innocent boys from Deep Creek. This was what Reese was so afraid of now, why he'd begged her to stay and help him beat the addiction. This was what he feared would happen to Shane.

  The angle of the photograph was perfect. If someone had wanted to capture the essence of Hollywood debauchery in one photograph, this would be it.

  The photo had been taken facing in through the open driver's door.

  Through the windshield, the hood of the car could be seen, a sleek curve of glossy red.

  The interior was white leather. Amazingly, the center cup holders still held a whiskey bottle, a vodka bottle, and a paper cup filled with cigarette butts: a still life of self-destruction unmarred by the accident.

  She glanced up at Reese, who was still looking out the now-open window. The wisp of smoke rose from his cigarette, and he absently tapped the ash into a little plate in front of him.

  She looked back at the screen, schooling her face to neutrality so he wouldn't realize what she was looking at.

  The back of the car was where the damage was. The leather wasn't white there. It was as red as the car itself. One of the ubiquitous Southern California palm trees had landed there, crushing what was beneath.

  She didn't look closer at what else was in the back seat.

  But the photo was, in its own way, a thing of striking beauty: the red clear coat of the car's finish, the stark white of the leather, the perfect blue sky visible beyond, the bright green palm frond resting lightly on the back seat to make a shroud for the thing beneath it.

  And in the center of the picture was a spark of light that caught the eye and brought it all into focus. The keys were still in the ignition, and the key chain was a gold lightning bolt glowing in the reflected sunlight.

  All that decadence and destruction, and a spark in the center that would fade to nothing when the sun moved on to something new.

  Maggie remembered he used to sign his name like that: REESE~STEVENS, with a lightning bolt between the first and last name. With a gold pen, no less. The kind of signature a teenage boy would have made up, thinking he was hot stuff.

  The lightning bolt, made of pure gold, reflected in the sun in the photo, mocking everything Deep Creek had been. Gaudy, shallow, reckless. Fame and drugs and death, all rolled up in that one image of the smashed car and the dead guitar player and the shiny key ring.

  Reese pulled out yet another cigarette, his third in the last hour. Lit it with clumsy fingers from a gold lighter emblazoned with that same lightning bolt. "Frank gave it to me," he said when he noticed her staring. "Just today. I asked him for a light, and he…." He stopped. "It had been mine. Guess he had it in his jacket when he came home all those years ago."

  Came home. Left Los Angeles as soon as he'd sobered up. Ran away, in a desperate attempt to escape from the horror of the car accident that destroyed the band. But he carried that little lighter in his pocket. And now had returned it to Reese, who sat there, looking out the window, and smoking with jerky, uncoordinated movements that made him look like….

  Like a junkie coming down from a high.

  "What are you looking up?" he asked, the tiniest shred of hope in his voice.

  She shut the laptop with a bang. "Nothing. Nothing that can help. I thought maybe I could learn more about Olivia. About why someone would want to kill her."

  "Everyone who knew her wanted to kill her," he said. "That's easy."

  "No. That's hard. She made enemies everywhere she went. So how do we figure out the person who hated her the most?"

  "I hated her the most."

  "Obviously not," Maggie said. "You didn't kill her. So it had to be someone else. Remember, she had to be dead before you got home. So someone set you up. Why? Who would want to hurt you?"

  "Lots of fanatics want to hurt celebrities. We aren't real people to them. We're just symbols of something in their own lives that they love or hate or long for."

  He waved his hand to dismiss the laptop, her notes, all the stuff scattered across the table. "There are top detectives looking into all this. What are you going to see that they haven't?"

  "I don't know. But I'm not going to just sit here. We need to find out what happened."

  He took a drag on the cigarette. "Yeah. Good luck with that."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The next morning, Maggie took Jasper out to the edge of the pasture where the baby calves were.

  The closer they got to the fence, the slower his pace got.

  "Come on, kid," she said. "You're almost as big as they are. There's nothing to be afraid of."

  She rested her elbows on top of the fence and wrapped Jasper's leash around her wrist.

  Jasper pulled to the far end of the leash, trying to stay away from the monsters in the field.

  "Relax," she told him. "This is where ice cream comes from."

  Her phone rang. She checked the number and saw the call was from Lieutenant Ibarra. She picked it up just before it went to voicemail.

  "You were right," he said after they exchanged greetings. "Cassidy Carter was at O'Riley's a few hours before the murder. She was also seen on The Row that morning."

  A cinnamon-colored calf with doe eyes sauntered over to the fence to say hello.

  "That's a clue," Maggie said to Ibarra.

  "Maybe. But it's not proof. The Row is a public street, whether the snobs accept that or not. She could have a million reasons for being there."

  Jasper looked skeptically at the calf when it stuck its wet, black nose through the boards to sniff him.

  "So what was Cassidy's reason for being on The Row that morning?" she asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Well, did you ask her?"

  "Of course I asked her, Maggie. She hasn't offered any alibi for the time of the murder."

  The calf stuck out a gigantic pink tongue and Jasper jumped back about a foot.

  "That doesn't prove she's guilty," Maggie pointed out.

  "Nope. But she's refusing to even offer an alibi until she has her lawyer present, so that's enough for me to do a bit more digging."

  The calf, undaunted by Jasper's baleful expression, tried to lick him again.

  "Cassidy Carter has the right to remain silent and all that," Maggie said.

  "Sure," Ibarra said. "Officially. But Chief Randall's getting antsy and wants this case wrapped up, so we're grabbing at anything at this point. And why are you trying to talk me out of this? It was your idea to look into Cassidy."

  "I know. I suppose she could be connected to the drug angle."

  "Possible," Ibarra said.

  "But I'd feel better if there was more proof than her being in town—or even on the same street. After all, it's not just about killing Olivia. She'd have to have some motive to drug Reese and frame him, too. Unless he was just an innocent bystander who got randomly caught up in the mu
rder. I hadn't really thought about that," she added. "Maybe Reese was just caught in the crossfire, so to speak."

  Jasper leaned toward the calf's wet nose to sniff it.

  "He slept with her," Ibarra said.

  "Who?" she asked watching the dog inch closer to that big nose.

  "Charm Boy. Reese Stevens. He slept with Cassidy Carter. About five years ago. You didn't know that, did you?"

  "Nope. I didn't think to ask him."

  "You thought we hick cops couldn't investigate as well as you, didn't you?"

  "I never thought that." Well, she had thought that, but, "no, Lieutenant," she said. "I never thought that. Anyway, even if she slept with him, that doesn't mean she'd want to frame him. He's slept with everybody. And as far as I know, nobody else wanted to kill him for it."

  The dog's long, skinny nose and the calf's wet, fat nose were less than a foot apart.

  "Did he sleep with you?"

  "What?! No. Of course not."

  "Just asking," he said mildly. "You're pretty deeply invested in getting him off the hook for this murder."

  "Don't be ridiculous. I am not deeply invested." Well, maybe she was just a bit invested. "And he is off the hook for this murder. Unlike Cassidy, he has an airtight alibi."

  "Sure," he said, totally deadpan.

  "The only thing I'm invested in is justice, Lieutenant."

  "You don't need to get huffy."

  "I'm not huffy. I'm focused. So do you have anything other than a lack of alibi to go on?"

  She let out one loop on the dog's leash so he could get closer. Jasper and the calf nuzzled each other. Then, each stuck out his pink tongue at the same time, and their tongues touched. Their eyes widened and they each backed away, shaking their heads.

  "Do you think this Cassidy Carter thing might lead to something?" she asked.

  "You know I can't tell you that."

  "I see. I give you my best clues, and you keep me out of the loop."

  "That's how it goes," he said.

  "Fine," she said. "I'll use my own sources. I'll know everything you've got within an hour."