by C. J. Thomas
“Come on,” Dan muttered, his hand on my back again. “Let’s see what he has to say for himself.” I heard the grim determination in his voice and knew Detective Dan was on the case. I trusted him to play it cool—he wasn’t a pro for no reason.
“Margo!” I gave her a little hug and she smiled brilliantly.
“Jules, you look fabulous. Turn, turn!” I did a little spin and she managed to pry herself away from Austin’s arm long enough to clap.
“Margo, this is my friend, Dan Pierce.”
“Oh, I know Detective Pierce. Or, should I say, I know of him.” She gave him a knowing grin. “You’re rather infamous, aren’t you, Detective?”
“If you mean I can solve a case with the very snap of my finger, then yes. I am rather infamous.” He grinned, and I was pretty sure I saw her eyelashes flutter. He was a stunningly sexy man, and he knew it. So did she, apparently.
He wasn’t enough to distract her from her arm candy, though. “Detective Pierce, Julia Mabel, this is Austin Haynes.”
“Of course, Mr. Haynes.” I shook his hand. “You’re also rather infamous—or, should I say, famous.” We all laughed.
“Yes, that’s a very important distinction.” He had the sort of perfect white smile that only lots of money could buy. Under any other circumstances, I might have been a little dazzled by him and his sapphire blue eyes.
I looked for a way to open the door so Dan could slide his foot into the crack. “Dan and I connected yesterday over the investigation into Emelia’s death.” His fingers pressed into my back, telling me I did a good job.
Margo’s face fell. “Oh, Emelia. How sad. You never think it will be somebody like her, do you? And after all the people we see every day, in our line of work, doing the same thing to themselves—you’d think we were immune to feeling anything about it.”
“Yes, I felt the same way,” Dan murmured. “I’ve seen so many cases like hers, but something about it touched me. I can’t explain why.”
I looked at Austin. His face was blank, deadpan, his eyes dull. “I was a big fan of hers,” he said, shaking his head. “Very sad.”
“Who wasn’t a fan?” I asked. “I don’t think she ever made a bad picture, and I certainly know I never heard a bad word about her. Did you?” I asked Margo.
“Never. She was as clean as they come. That’s what surprised me the most. But, still waters run deep, as they say.” She squeezed Austin’s arm, barely getting a reaction from him. “Come on, we still have to say hello to a few people. I want to be sure I have enough for my column tomorrow.” She grinned at Dan and me, then steered Austin away.
“What do you think about that?” I asked as Dan and I walked to the other end of the ballroom.
“I think he’s hiding something,” he said. “I mean, he didn’t say a word about the two of them knowing each other.”
“He’s a terrible actor, though,” I pointed out. “He sounded robotic. I was a big fan. I mean, come on. This is Hollywood. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody heard something from their gardener, who heard something from their neighbor, who heard it from their hairdresser.”
“Maybe he’s been burned by gossip in the past and wants to stay out of this,” Dan mused.
“Or maybe he killed her and he’s a lying sonofabitch.” I glared in the general direction in which he and Margo had walked.
“You’re taking this a little personally, aren’t you?” Dan asked. His voice was kind, though.
“No. I mean, not really. I don’t know. It bugs me to think her killer might be drinking champagne right now, mingling with a bunch of famous people, laughing it up. While she’s dead; and for what? Trying to do what was right?”
“You don’t know why they were together. This is all theory on our part, remember?” He searched my face and I felt my heart sink a little as his words registered.
“Right. You’re right. I’m getting carried away—the one thing I should know better than to do. I’m acting like a silly fan,” I admitted.
“You liked her. It’s understandable. You’re only human.” He squeezed my arms, but it did nothing to buck up my spirits. I was suddenly very tired, and even Dan’s nearness did nothing for me.
“I think I’d better go home,” I admitted. This was all too much, suddenly.
I thought he looked disappointed for a second, but the expression flashed across his face so quickly I couldn’t be sure. “Okay. Do you want me to drive you home?”
I shook my head. “I’ll get a taxi, thanks. And thank you for coming with me. I had a good time, really, I did. You look pretty fabulous, hanging out with the rich and famous.” I grinned.
He insisted on walking me outside and hailing a cab. “You’re sure you don’t want a ride?”
Was there something else in his voice? Hope, maybe? Had he wanted the night to end differently?
His face gave nothing away.
“I’m sure. I wouldn’t be very good company.” I kissed his cheek, taking a long, deep breath of his cologne as I did. The sheer masculinity which flowed from him nearly knocked me off my feet. If only we hadn’t seen Margo and Austin.
He helped me into the cab and waved as I sped off. I couldn’t help thinking, as he got smaller and smaller, that I’d missed an opportunity.
130
Dan
I COULDN’T GET her off my mind.
I tapped a pen against a notepad, my thoughts miles away from my work. I kept replaying every detail of the night. The way she looked. The way she smelled. The way her skin warmed to my touch whenever I grazed her back. The way she laughed. The sparkle of her eyes.
Everything.
She was mesmerizing, and I had the feeling she didn’t even know it. That made her even more desirable to me—I never could stand a woman who knew how beautiful she was for very long.
I couldn’t pretend there wasn’t the slightest disappointment that the night ended the way it had. I was sure we would end up at my place. Or maybe we’d head out for a nightcap which would turn into a trip to my place. Either way, I thought I’d be stepping over her dress on the way to the bed by the time the night was over.
Instead, I’d spent another sleepless night wondering what it felt like inside her. I would need to find out soon or I might never sleep again.
Frank’s hearty laughter broke through my thoughts.
“So? How did it go?” I’d been bracing myself all morning for the third degree. I sat up straighter in my desk chair, turning to him, ready to give him the quick-and-dirty report. His face showed all the excitement of a teenage boy asking his best buddy what it was like to feel a girl up. I hated to disappoint him.
“Oh, you know. Drinks and conversation with the most famous people in the country, if not the world. No big deal. Just another day.”
He growled. “Come on, seriously. What was it like? Who did you see? What was she like?” I knew who she was, and I saved her for last. Just to screw with him.
“It was really something else,” I said, smiling sincerely. “You wouldn’t believe how many people I saw there. It’s like, if a bomb dropped on the hotel, most of the film industry would have gone up. Not to mention the music business and much of pro sports.”
“That many stars, huh? I’m tellin’ you, you’re the luckiest sonofabitch I know.” He laughed heartily. “So, let’s get down to the real important stuff.” He leaned toward me. “How was she?”
There it was. I wished I could get him a hooker for his birthday, just to get him to stop fixating on my sex life. “Beautiful. Sexy as hell. Not a woman there who could hold a candle to her. To be honest with you, half of those women don’t look nearly as good as they do when you see pictures of them. Photoshop is magic, let’s just put it that way.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he said, “and you know it. Don’t act like the blushin’ virgin around me, boy. I know you too well. How was she afterward?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I answered, playing it off like a joke. “I put her in a cab an
d sent her on her way.”
“What?” His face fell. “You can’t be serious.” He reminded me of a kid on Christmas morning, finding out the best-looking gift under the tree was just a pack of socks.
“So what? She went home, I went home. What’s the problem with that?” I laughed, teasing him.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t expect somethin’ else. I mean, Jesus Christ, I sure as hell did.”
“You need to talk to your wife about laying you a little more often, pal,” I smirked. “You’ve gotta stop living vicariously.”
“Please, my wife? She’s doin’ me a favor. You have no idea.” He rolled his eyes.
“She was tired, okay?”
He laughed knowingly. “I’ve heard that one before.”
“Believe me, it was over-stimulating with all the glitz and glam. I was a little overtired when I got home, to be honest with you. It might have been for the best. I wouldn’t want her to get the wrong idea about me.” I winked. “But she looked fantastic, though. You should have seen her. None of the so-called stars in the room had anything on her. She was a goddess.”
His eyebrows went up so far they almost left his face. “You sound a little more than turned-on by this broad. You know that, right?”
I tried not to react to the way he called her a broad. It would just give him more ammo against me. “She’s one of the good ones, is all.”
“There are plenty of fish in the sea,” said my philosophical partner. “Fish who put out at the end of the night.”
Sometimes I wondered if he heard the words that came out of his mouth. Like we still lived in the dark ages, when a woman had to put out when a man took her out.
I smirked. “Like you would know. Gimme a break. Besides, she invited me. I didn’t even buy her dinner.” I turned back to my work, then remembered something. “Oh, we did run into Austin Haynes while we were there.” I had told Frank about the pictures on the laptop, even downloading them to show him later on the previous afternoon.
“Really?” He stopped acting like a horny teenager and turned into a detective again.
“Really. I had the chance to speak with him for a minute.”
“About Emelia?”
“You know I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity.”
“You didn’t come right out and ask him about her, did you?”
“Did I just join the force yesterday? Of course not. Julia knew the woman he was with, so I had her introduce us. I mentioned Emelia in passing. Told them Julia and I ran into each other at the crime scene.”
“What did he say?”
“I was a big fan of hers. How sad.” I made my face go blank and waved my hand in front of it. “No emotion. Nothing.”
“Not even interest?” he asked, sitting back in his chair. “He was tryin’ too hard.”
“Exactly. That’s what I thought, too. But, hey. You never know. If they were keeping their relationship a secret, why would he admit now that they were together? The press would be on his ass in a heartbeat, wanting to know why they didn’t tell anybody. Asking stupid questions. I don’t blame the guy if he wants to keep his privacy.”
“Yeah, and if he admits now that they were together, they’ll call him an attention whore,” Frank added. “He can’t win, either way.”
“You got it,” I agreed grimly. “We can’t let ourselves get carried away. Refusal to admit a relationship does not a murderer make.”
“That might not make a murderer, but this might.” Frank slid his chair across the floor to where I sat, a folder in hand. He slapped in on my desk.
“What’s this?” I opened it.
“Toxicology report.”
“So soon?” I skimmed through the paperwork.
“Yeah, well, when the star in question is as big as Emelia Adams . . .”
“I know, I know,” I muttered, reading. “Wait a minute. No opiates?” I stared at Frank.
“None at all.”
“This can’t be right.” I looked back at the report. “I mean, the table was full of painkillers. Percocet, right? Oxycodone.”
Frank shrugged. “Yeah, well, it don’t matter. They were just decoration. She didn’t take a single one. Nothin’ in her stomach, either.”
“Holy shit.” I kept reading. “Wait. What’s this?” I pointed to a single word.
“Hemlock,” Frank said, his voice smug.
I sighed. “I know what it says. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t hallucinating. She had hemlock in her system?” I closed my eyes, going over what I knew the drug was used for. “That’s just for people with anxiety, isn’t it?”
“And a few other things—but doctors aren’t exactly going around prescribing it. It’s too dangerous, and there’s no proof it works. Believe me, I’ve already read up on it.”
Sometimes my partner actually did his job. “So the cause of death wasn’t opioid intoxication.”
“No,” he confirmed. “It was respiratory failure. Somebody gave her enough hemlock to kill her.”
I could hardly believe it. Julia’s hunch was right. “It was murder, after all.”
“And to think,” Frank said, “we were all ready to put it to bed.”
I looked down at the report and thought about the smiling girl in those pictures. And the man in the pictures with her.
“Austin, what the hell did you do?” I murmured.
131
Julia
I LEANED BACK in my desk chair, staring at the ceiling. The office was a beehive of activity, as always. I heard snide laughter coming from one of the cubicles outside my door, telling me some tawdry story or another was being dissected by our crack team of writers. That sort of laughter flowed heavily in my line of work—there were times when the only alternative was to cry.
Getting emotionally involved was a major no-no. Thinking too much about the stories you covered was a sure trip to madness.
It was also the way to a dead-end career, since there was a degree of cool detachedness necessary to write compelling copy. You couldn’t care how the person attached to the name you were dragging through the mud would feel when they saw your story.
I could look down at it all from my perch. I’d started as one of the hungry, desperate reporters beating down leads, chasing the big story that would get my name recognized. It had been a brutal uphill climb, but as I sat in my private office and thought about Austin Haynes, I was at a place in my career where I didn’t have to slander or use paper-thin conjecture to write a good story.
The stories came to me.
Austin had been on my mind since the moment I saw him at the party. Not just him, but his relationship with Emelia. I couldn’t help but remember the smiles on their faces in the pictures Dan had shown me.
I wondered if he would do me a professional courtesy after the way I dropped him the night before. I’d sensed disappointment from him—naturally. I was disappointed, too. I hadn’t gotten so emotionally invested in a case since my early days.
Madness, I reminded myself. Only, somebody needed to speak up for the victim. She couldn’t speak up for herself.
With that thought bolstering me, I fired off a quick email to Dan: Any chance I could get some of the photos from yesterday?
Just enough information for him to know what I meant. After that, I got back to the business of getting my impressions from the party onto paper—virtual paper, anyway. It wasn’t easy, since so much of what stood out most to me had to do with Dan. I didn’t think my readers would care to hear about the way his hand on my back sent shivers racing throughout my body.
I didn’t have to wait long to hear back from him. Was wondering when you would ask for them. My original guess was three hours, so if I had bet money, I’d be screwed. Attached to the email was a file which, on opening, I saw contained a half-dozen of the photos from Emelia’s computer. I didn’t need more than that.
I glanced through them, my heart aching a little. God, she looked so happy. I hated to admit it to myself, but so did he. He w
as the one who should have won the Oscar, with a performance like the one he gave.
A second email followed his first. Thanks for a memorable evening. What do you think—should I reach out to the ladies who seemed interested? Or were they only playing with my young, naïve heart?
I glowered. It was just like him to rub it in my face that he’d gotten those numbers. I decided not to take the bait. Wow, you mean you haven’t called them yet? There goes my guess, too. He replied with a smiley face.
Always had to have the last word, that one.
As much as I would have loved to spend the day bantering with him, there was business to take care of. First, Margo. I chewed my bottom lip, going through the photos again and thinking of the smile on her face and the way her arm had so firmly linked through Austin’s. It looked like she was crazy about him, and treated him like her pet. I’d never seen her like that with another man, and we’d run into each other countless times at similar events. She never treated her other dates that way—then again, none of her other dates were Austin Haynes.
My heart went out to her almost as much as it went out to Emelia as I studied the photo on my screen; Emelia’s head on Austin’s shoulder, a tender smile on her face.
Austin’s face wore a similar smile as he rested his head against hers. I noticed something—Austin was the one taking the selfie. Somehow, that added new dimension to their relationship. She didn’t beg him to get into a photo with her.
He took it.
He wanted to document them.
But, at the same time, he wanted to keep it a secret.
Margo needed to know. I cared too much about her to let her go around in the dark. If the relationship between him and Emelia was secret, and if they were as close as they appeared in the photos, he’d be on the rebound.
Not a safe place for Margo’s heart, if she was attached to him.
I called her up, reminding myself to sound casual. Meanwhile, my free hand was clenched into a fist. I hated being sneaky, which was in direct contrast to my chosen career.
