“Hello? I’m talking to you.”
“Honey, please, just calm down.”
Even Drake cringed; this wasn’t the type of woman you told to ‘calm down’. Not one you referred to as ‘Honey’.
“Don’t you dare,” Lisa said, turning and aiming a finger at Norm. “Don’t you dare tell me to calm down. This night… it’s ruined. And why? Because some asshole decided to prank me? What are the newspapers going to say, Norm? What are they going to write about this? Because you know they will. You know they—”
Drake decided to intervene before Norm took a beating.
“Our focus isn’t on your exhibit,” he said dryly. Lisa turned to look at him and unlike her husband, Drake held the woman’s stare. “It’s on the three women who were on display.”
“Three?” Norm gasped.
Drake’s words had the desired effect on Norm, but Lisa was a much harder nugget to crack. This implied that she was from a different world than her husband.
More than likely, she grew up on Drake’s side of the tracks.
“Yeah, well, I feel bad for them, sure, but I didn’t put them there—I had nothing to do with that. And now that they’re gone, I don’t see why we can’t just let me finish the damn exhibit.”
Drake bit his lip. This was going to be more difficult than he’d expected even considering Yasiv’s warning.
“I mean, it’s too late now, but…” Lisa let her sentence trail off.
She sure knows how to push the right buttons, Drake thought. But he wasn’t her husband, and he wasn’t about to be manipulated by the woman.
Drake found an empty shelf and set the tape recorder down. He did this deliberately to ensure that Lisa and her husband saw exactly what he was doing. Then he pressed record.
“I hate to inconvenience you, but I just want to find out what happened to those girls,” he stated.
Lisa glared at him and pressed her lips together.
“Yes, of course,” she said, her voice devoid of any emotion. “That’s all we want, too.”
“Good.”
Drake opened the door just wide enough to peer out and for Lisa and Norm to see the police officer standing guard. It never hurt to remind the ones you were questioning who was really calling the shots.
“You have those papers?” he asked. The officer produced a clipboard and slid it through the opening.
“Thanks.”
Drake closed the door and addressed Lisa once more.
“I want you to look over this guest list, tell me if anyone is here who shouldn’t be.”
Lisa snatched the clipboard, spent all of thirty seconds scanning the three pages, then offered it back.
“No, everyone on this list was invited. And I know what you’re getting at, but nobody—”
Drake held up his hand and refused to accept the clipboard.
“Hold on a second… how can you be sure?”
“Sure of what?” Lisa snapped.
“Sure that everyone on that list was supposed to be here. You just—”
“Because I invited them. They’re all donors.”
Drake was tempted to ask, donors for what, but didn’t want to give her the satisfaction.
“Right.” He pointed at the pages and gestured for Lisa to turn to the back page. “What about the wait staff? They all supposed to be here, too?”
Lisa’s eyes narrowed.
“How the hell am I supposed to know that?”
“Let me have a look,” Norm offered.
When Norm reached for the clipboard, Lisa turned her back to deny him access. Then she surprised Drake by actually reading the last page.
“Yeah, I think so.” Her tone changed. “I think they’re all here.”
Drake finally took the clipboard back.
“Okay, okay. Thanks.”
Lisa, apparently satisfied now, leaned up against the shelving unit behind her. It wobbled and Drake heard what sounded like broken glass tinkling beneath. As he watched, Lisa used the toe of her shoe to gently nudge some of the tiny shards under the shelf.
“Can we go now?”
“One second.”
Once again, Drake opened the door and addressed the police officer. He would have preferred to give the next task to Yasiv, but the sergeant was preoccupied, his attention fixed on a bald man with a white mustache.
“You think you can do me a favor?”
“Sure.”
“Grab a camera, cell phone, doesn’t matter, and take a picture of each one of the guests.” The officer raised an eyebrow but with Yasiv and the other man approaching quickly, he didn’t have time to explain. “I also want you to take a picture of every member of the wait staff with their ID in the shot.”
“Drake?” Yasiv said.
“Do you understand?”
“Yeah, sure. Pictures of all the guests, pictures of the wait staff.”
“With their ID.”
“Drake!”
“Got it.”
“Thanks.”
Drake watched the officer hurry off then finally addressed Yasiv.
“What’s going on?”
“This is—”
“Burt Lancaster,” the man with the mustache informed him. “And I’m the Fairchild’s attorney.” He pushed himself onto his toes to peer by Drake and into the closet behind him. “This interview, or whatever the hell you call it, well, it’s over. It ends here and now.”
Chapter 10
“Come again?”
“My name is Burt Lancaster, and I’m representing Lisa and Norm Fairchild.” The man walked right by Drake and stood in front of his new clients like some sort of Pitbull guarding his food bowl. “I’m instructing my clients not to speak to you here. This is… unconventional to say the least. They are willing to cooperate, of course, but they’ve been through a traumatic event and I think rest is in order.”
It was obvious that the DA had put Mr. Lancaster up to this but Drake didn’t much care. In fact, he was done with the Fairchilds.
“They’re not under arrest,” Drake said, stepping back from the open door. “They can leave at any time.”
“What?” Lisa made a face. “But you said—”
“Then we’ll be leaving,” Mr. Lancaster chimed in. “Mr. Drake, do you know how much this evening has cost my clients?”
Not as much as the women on display.
Drake shrugged.
“No idea.”
“Eighty-six thousand dollars, that’s how much. And it was all wasted the second you locked them up in this closet. I’m guessing that you won’t be offering to foot the bill for this inconvenience, will you?”
“I don’t have eighty-six thousand dollars,” Drake replied with a shrug. “All I have is a shitty Crown Vic and a mountain of debt. But let me ask you something… what the fuck are you doing here?”
Burt Lancaster, clearly not used to being spoken to in this way, gaped.
“What?”
“Eighty-six thousand dollars, huh?” Drake continued. He turned off the recording and then allowed his gaze to drift to Lisa. “Look, I’ll be the first to admit it, I don’t know much about art. But that’s a hell of a lot of money to pay just to show off some shitty costumes and hand out stale tuna sandwiches, isn’t it?”
Lisa was fuming now.
“You can’t speak to me like that.”
Drake shrugged.
“What are you going to do? Get me fired? Call my boss? Sorry, lady, but I don’t work for anyone.”
“You piece of—”
“As I said,” Mr. Lancaster interjected, once again cutting Lisa off mid-sentence. Drake wasn’t sure what pissed Lisa off more: being interrupted or being insulted. “My clients are willing to help in every way possible, but they need to recuperate after the tragic events that transpired here tonight.”
The man was like an AI programmed to be as politically correct as possible. Drake was determined to try and make the lawyer fry a circuit.
“Recuperate? Really
? A hot bath, a bottle of expensive Pinot, maybe a little lotion afterward to keep the skin smooth and supple?”
Norm inhaled sharply and Lisa’s face continued to redden.
“That is uncalled for, Mr. Drake.”
Indeed, it was. Even Drake knew that his comments had passed over distasteful and bordered on disgusting. He changed tactics.
“Like I said, you are free to leave whenever you want.”
At long last, Yasiv spoke up.
“And the others?”
Drake looked toward the foyer and saw that the officer had already snapped pictures of the guests and was working his way through the wait staff.
“They can go, too.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Drake confirmed. “I’m with Burty over here—I’m tired. Send everyone home. Recuperate.”
Nobody moved; they obviously expected him to rescind this offer as soon as they so much as thought about leaving.
“Go!”
That was enough to break the impasse and finally send them on their way.
Drake watched Burt usher Lisa and Norm down the hallway, the former of which shot daggers at him all the way to the front of the gallery. There was a collective sigh of relief when Burt Lancaster passed the information along. The man didn’t so much as look at the wait staff, however, let alone inform them that they free to leave, as well.
“You really had to stir the pot?” Yasiv asked when they were alone.
“What do you mean?”
The sergeant sighed.
“Push them that hard. Fucking hell… lotion? Really? You know they aren’t going to speak to you tomorrow. Or ever. This was your only chance… catch them off guard, hopefully get them to slip up and say something they’d otherwise keep to themselves.”
“Yeah, well, they were never going to speak to me, anyway.”
“Then what’s with the charade? Why record them like this was some sort of official interview? Why piss them off?”
“I wanted to see if they would break.”
The DA was still standing in the lobby looking at them after all of the guests had left.
“You don’t think that they had anything to do with this, do you?”
They could have meant Lisa and Norm or all of the guests, collectively.
It didn’t matter.
“I have no fucking idea,” Drake answered honestly.
“I thought maybe with your…”
Drake looked at Yasiv, observing the tired circles under his eyes, the minor nicotine stains on his front teeth. It was obvious what the sergeant was going to say: I thought maybe with your experience, you would have some idea who could have done this.
Drake cleared his throat.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know, Yasiv? If you think I had some sort of crystal ball shoved up my ass when you hired me, then you’re sorely mistaken. All I can say, is that someone who has the balls to do something like this? Put a skinsuit on display? Well, it isn’t a one-off. They aren’t just gonna pack up and go back to their marry little lives, eat cereal and hit the treadmill every morning. The only way they’ll stop is if we stop them. So, how about we cease standing here talking like a bunch of assholes and get to work, shall we?”
Chapter 11
“Who are those pricks?” Hanna asked as she entered the gallery. One of the plain-clothed police officers tried to stop her, but immediately backed off when she shot him a look. “Not your typical crowd, Drake.”
“And what would my ‘typical’ crowd be?”
“A bottle of booze and pack of cigarettes.”
Drake chuckled and gave her a quick hug.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Not yet you don’t.”
Leroy joined them in the gallery next, but his entry required more than a sharp glance.
Yasiv indicated to the officer on guard to let him pass.
“You know what?” Leroy said, once inside. “I recognize some of those suits—hey, Drake.”
“Nice to see you, Leroy.”
No hugs were exchanged between them.
“What do you mean?” Hanna demanded, her gaze following the crowd of people who were all trying to convince the valet to bring their car out first. “From where?”
“Shit, I’m not doing this again,” Leroy warned, shaking his head.
“Doing what?” Hanna asked, a smirk forming on her lips. She ran a hand through her dark hair, which nearly came to her shoulders now. Drake remembered a time when it had been much shorter and shaved on one side.
“You’re trying to troll me, and I won’t bite.”
“Whatever. I just wanna know where you could have possibly seen them before. Rich white people.”
Drake knew he should step in and stop them, but he also knew that they had a long night ahead and it would do them some good to get this out of their system now. A little levity before he told them exactly why they were here wouldn’t hurt. And, as predicted, Leroy did exactly what he said he wasn’t going to do: fall for Hanna’s ploy.
“Oh, because I’m black means I can’t hang out with those people? Is that it?”
Hanna laughed.
“No, it’s because they’re rich, dumb dumb. And you ain’t.”
Leroy’s face turned red.
“Whatever.”
“Wait, wait,” Drake interjected when he realized that Leroy was serious. “Have you really seen them before? Where?”
“At the… what’s it called… the Loomis Estate,” Leroy answered.
That sucked all the humor out of the room. Even Hanna’s smile vanished and she brought a hand to her chin and massaged the small scar beneath it.
“You sure?” Drake asked.
Leroy started to nod and then changed his mind halfway, causing his head to move in a quasi-circular motion.
“I think so… I mean, they all kinda look the same to me.”
Neither Drake nor Hanna so much as grinned.
“Rich people,” Leroy clarified. “Rich people all look the same. Fancy clothes, Wall Street, whatever.”
Drake wasn’t sure he agreed, but in his experience, most rich people acted the same, especially when it came to a tragedy that inconvenience them: they got annoyed.
Maybe I should have kept them here a little while longer.
But it had felt like the right decision at the time, and Drake wasn’t about to start second-guessing himself. He figured he was going to get enough of that from Yasiv and the DA.
“Where’s Screech?” he asked, changing the subject.
“He’s talking to Dunbar,” Hanna replied. “You going to tell us what’s going on, Drake? Why we’re here in the middle of the night? You know I already got the painting I wanted.”
Drake pictured the red dot in the center of the white canvas hanging in DSLH Investigations. He understood the allure of that painting near as much as Lisa Fairchild’s La Nuit des Femmes exhibit.
And couldn’t comprehend the price tag of either.
“Somebody decided to crash the party,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, Dunbar told us about the fucked-up mannequin.” Drake raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth to speak, but Hanna wasn’t done yet. “But what I’m asking is why are we here? I thought the NYPD and DSLH didn’t play nice together.”
Maybe it’s not just the rich who are annoyed by other people’s tragedies, he thought.
“They called and asked for my help, Hanna,” Drake offered, hoping that this explanation was sufficient.
It wasn’t.
“What about when you needed their help, Drake? What about when you were rotting away in jail and you needed Officer Kramer to drop the charges? Where were they—”
Drake shook his head. His hangover, which had decided to take a little nap during his interrogation of the Fairchilds, suddenly woke up. And it was grumpy.
He massaged his temples as he spoke.
“It’s not about me, Hanna, or us.”
“Oh, sure, it never is th
ough, is it, Drake? Well, what about payment, then? How much are they going to pay us for this job? Because we never got a cent for bringing down that psycho Tobin Tomlin. The only money we made was a little cheddar for finding Mrs. Schmidt’s cat.” Hanna applied air quotes to the word ‘finding’.
Drake was confused by this sudden outburst. Hanna had always been outspoken, brash, abrasive, you name it. She was also strange and something of a chameleon. But it wasn’t like her to be so… bitter.
“I’ll make sure we’re taken care of,” Drake said. He blamed the hangover for his condescending tone.
“Drake, I’ve got the pictures you asked for,” Sergeant Yasiv said as he stepped back into the gallery. He was holding a cell phone in one hand and a coffee in the other.
“Send them to me… no, you know what? Send them to Screech.”
“Will do. He’s the one who gave me the coffee, by the way. He’s outside.”
“Hopefully, he brought one for me, too.”
“Okay, listen, guys, I’m all for this fluff fest, but can we talk about the actual crime?” Hanna asked, her brow knitted. “If that’s okay with you, of course.”
Yasiv gave Drake a look but knowing that Hanna would call them out for this silent exchange, he offered nothing in return. Something that Lisa Fairchild had said repeatedly was stuck in his head and bothering him.
It’s just a prank.
Wishful thinking on her part, no doubt, but also a valid possibility. As if everyone else were privy to his thoughts, Drake said, “The coroner confirmed that they’re real skin… real human skin belonging to at least three women.”
“Women? How does he know they’re from women?” Hanna asked.
Drake couldn’t help picture the deflated breasts and the tuft of hair between the mannequin’s legs. He shuddered.
Straw Man Page 5
