A Crime of Passion

by Scott Pratt

  “I would have noticed you.”

  “Please, have a seat,” Charlie said. “Can I get you a bottle of water? It’s all I have to offer.”

  “I’m fine,” Milius said as he sat down. “I don’t have a lot of time. Things are pretty crazy at work right now.”

  “I imagine they are,” Charlie said.

  “I’m spending most of my time trying to convince people that I’m not a murderer, and that I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in a prison cell. This has been terrible for business so far, and I’m afraid it’s just getting started. God, you have beautiful eyes. I just had to say it.”

  “Thank you,” Charlie said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get down to business.”

  “Ah, I see. All business. Okay, then, what would you like to talk about?”

  “Women.”

  “One of my favorite subjects.”

  “I’m sure. I want to talk about Kasey Cartwright, and I want to talk about your wife, maybe some other things. I’m going to have to ask you some difficult questions, Mr. Milius, so I apologize in advance if I hurt your feelings or insult you.”

  Milius crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows. He leaned forward a bit in the chair.

  “So you’re going to interrogate me,” he said.

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re going to ask about intimate details. My sex life.”

  “That could happen.”

  “Sounds delicious.”

  “How did you first meet Kasey Cartwright?”

  “Kasey? Well, it’s actually an interesting little story. I was in downtown Nashville at a fundraiser. It was one of those who’s who events, everybody sucking up to one another. After I’d been there about an hour, this state senator from Jonesborough walks up to me and introduces himself. Name’s Russell Poe, friendly enough guy. So after we talk for a minute, he says to me, ‘Mr. Milius, I’m sure you probably get this kind of thing all the time and I’m actually a little embarrassed to ask, but would you mind taking a look at a short video I have on my phone?’ I wanted to tell him to piss off, but I was polite and I told him I’d take a look.

  “So he turns on the video and it’s this beautiful young girl singing in a talent show at the Appalachian Fair in Washington County, and I can tell right away she’s got it. A lot of people have talent, but very, very few of them have it. It’s hard to explain, but she had a package, a combination of things that made her special. She was beautiful, she was genuine and humble, she had a subtle sexuality that made men yearn for her even though she was only fifteen at the time, her voice had a smooth, almost ethereal tone to it, and the instruments she played became a part of her. I recognized all of those things in that little two-minute clip he showed me on his phone. She was one in a million. So I asked him her name, got her contact information, and called her about a week later. I arranged to watch her do a set at a show in Newport, and then I made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.”

  “Which was?” Charlie asked.

  “A million dollars and the opportunity to work with and be developed by the best and fastest-growing record company in Nashville. We have the best songwriters, the best producers, the best sound engineers, the best studios, the best marketing people. You name it, we’re the best at it. I talked to her and her grandparents about their concerns—things like her finishing high school where she was, things like her not touring too much until she graduated and whether she wanted to move on to college and whether we could work that in and make it happen. In the end, we decided to go slowly on the front end, but she decided she’d commit full-time to her music career as soon as she graduated from high school and worry about college down the road.”

  “I’ve been told that the million you say you gave her was a loan,” Charlie said. “I’ve been told that musicians who get upfront money like that have to pay it back.”

  “It’s advance money, standard operating procedure in the industry,” Milius said. “They pay it back out of the royalties they earn. You have to understand that studio time and musicians and video productions and engineers and songwriters, all of those things are expensive.”

  “What if their record doesn’t sell enough copies to pay back the million? Do they still have to pay it back?”

  “It depends. Why are we talking about this? What does it have to do with Kasey’s death?”

  “Were there any financial disagreements between the two of you? Any disputes over royalties or earnings or contracts or anything else?”

  “Zero. Nada. Kasey’s music was selling. We were making money hand-over-fist. It was win-win for everybody.”

  “So there were no problems between you and her?”

  “None.”

  “Then why did she toss a drink in your face backstage at the CMT show?”

  “So you heard about that…? She went off script during the broadcast, did a song she wasn’t supposed to do. I confronted her about it. She said she wasn’t going to sing party songs, wasn’t going to sing about boys and trucks and drinking and bonfires. I told her that’s the kind of thing that sells. She told me to get up there and sing it myself. I called her childish, and she tossed the tea in my face.”

  “What were you doing at her hotel room at two in the morning, after the after-party?”

  “I just went up there to try and make up with her. To tell her I was sorry.”

  “Did you intend to have sex with her?”

  “What? Are you kidding? She was eighteen. I’m married.”

  “So you had no interest in having a sexual relationship with her? You weren’t having an affair with her?”

  “You’re starting to piss me off.”

  “If you weren’t planning, or hoping, to stay, then why did you send your driver home? Why not just have him wait?”

  “He’d been waiting all night. I didn’t know exactly how long I’d be in her room, to tell you the truth. I just figured I’d call a cab. I wasn’t there for sex, okay?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Like I said, you’re starting to piss me off.”

  “Get used to it. The prosecutor will be a lot worse than I am if you wind up taking the witness stand at trial.”

  “Kasey was too young,” Milius said.

  “You must not have thought the same thing about your wife when you started having sex with her. She was eighteen, wasn’t she? Eleven years younger than you? Maybe you got tired of Lana and dreamed of the good old days. Thought you could relive the glory years.”

  “I married Lana, for God’s sake. And I’m still married to her, in case you haven’t noticed.”

  “How is it?” Charlie asked.

  “How’s what?”

  “The marriage. How are you and Lana doing?”

  “We’re doing fine.”

  “Sex life good?”

  “You are one coldhearted bitch, you know that? You should get into divorce law.”

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Charlie said. “How’s your sex life?”

  “Do you want times, places, length of encounter? Would you like to see my junk?”

  “Yes to the times and places, no to the genitalia.”

  “Lana and I get together whenever we can, which is less often than I’d like,” Milius said. “She’s still hotter than a firecracker, but I’m busy. I work a lot of twelve-, fourteen-hour days, a lot of nights, a lot of weekends. And she drinks too much sometimes. But I still like to get in her pants every chance I get.”

  “Lana mentioned to Joe that there was some tension that night between you and her as well. What was going on?”

  “She and I weren’t getting along.”

  “Why not?”

  “Same old same old. She was complaining about me spending so much time at work, and I was complaining about her spending so much time in a wine bottle. But when it comes down to it, I think Lana was probably feeling a little jealous, a little frustrated. Those big shows are hard on her ego. She used to be the di
va, you know? She used to be the one up on stage getting all the attention and admiration. Now that she can’t sing anymore, she just drinks. And she takes it all out on me.”

  “The nodes on the vocal chords?” Charlie said. “Must be tough for her.”

  “Yeah, it’s been tough. She makes ten million a year sitting on her hands. I feel real sorry for her.”

  “Does she blame you?”

  “Probably. She blames me for everything else that’s bad in her life. Not that anything should be bad in her life. I mean, look how she lives. She has everything a woman could ever want.”

  “And you made all that possible.”

  “Damn right I did. Listen, I need to get going.”

  “But I’m not finished,” Charlie said. “You haven’t told me about the other women in your life, about your illegitimate children.”

  “That’s none of your business,” Milius said. “It has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to Kasey, has absolutely nothing to do with anything.”

  “But there have been other women, and there are illegitimate children,” Charlie said. “That’s relevant to us, Mr. Milius, because if we paint you as a loving and faithful husband who could not possibly have been in that room with adultery on his mind in front of the jury and then we put you on the witness stand, the prosecution is going to hand you your head on a platter. You understand that, don’t you?”

  “I understand that you’re as mean a bitch as my wife.”

  “Don’t be naïve, Mr. Milius. The press is all over this. Do you think for one second that they aren’t going to find out about your affairs and broadcast them to the world? They will, you know. You’re already a public figure, but the minute you were charged with murder, your life went straight under a microscope. If you have secrets, they’ll soon be common knowledge. So how about dropping the act and being honest with me? It’ll benefit you far more than it will hurt you.”

  Milius’s shoulders slumped, and he seemed to melt a little, to get smaller. “What do you want to know?” he said.

  “How many women have there been?” Charlie asked.

  “Dozens. Too many to count. I’m sure I don’t even remember all of them.”

  “How many children?”

  “Four.”

  “Do you pay for them?”

  “I have confidential agreements in place with all the mothers.”

  “Do you pay for them?”

  Milius nodded his head slowly.

  “How much?” Charlie asked.

  “About $100,000 a month.”

  “And this is done through the court?”

  “No,” Milius said. “My lawyers handle it.”

  “So again, that night, did you intend to have sex with Kasey Cartwright?”

  “I wouldn’t say I intended to, but I wouldn’t have run away if she’d been willing.”

  “You got up to her room sometime around two fifteen. Did you have a key?”

  “No.”

  “So you knocked and Kasey let you in?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How long were you in the room?”

  “Five minutes, maybe less.”

  “And during that five minutes or less, you slapped Kasey across the mouth.”

  Milius nodded again.

  “Why? Why did you slap her?”

  “Because she said something that made me angry.”

  “What was it?”

  “None of your business.”

  “What did she say, Mr. Milius? It could be important.”

  Milius stood up and started walking toward the door. Just before he opened it, he turned back and faced Charlie.

  “I’m not going to tell you or anybody else what she said. What I will tell you is this—what Kasey said to me had absolutely nothing to do with her death. She was alive when I walked out of that room.”

  CHAPTER 20

  It took me a couple days and a dozen phone calls to get what I thought was a good line on Ricky Church. He was eighteen years old and had been arrested twice for assault as a juvenile. He was still on probation for the last arrest, which involved him hitting a fellow band member between the shoulder blades with an electric guitar. He wasn’t working, but he was attending a junior college during the day and playing music, alternating between the few goth bars in the Tri-Cities.

  “His probation officer says he’s playing at this place called The Shrunken Head in Kingsport,” I said to Caroline as we sat at the dinner table. “I think I’ll head over there and talk to him.”

  “The Shrunken Head?” she said, holding a fork with a piece of chicken dangling from a tine. “What kind of place is that?”

  “Goth, I think.”

  “I don’t want you going anywhere near a goth bar,” she said. “Don’t you remember what those goths did to that family out in the county a few years ago?”

  She was referring to the first case I handled when I became an assistant district attorney. Three young goths, who also happened to be dabbling in Satan worship, had shot a family of four to death on a desolate county road, basically just for the hell of it.

  “They aren’t all like that,” I said. “Most of them are artists, or wannabe artists. They just express themselves a little differently than the rest of us.”

  “When did you become such an expert?”

  “I did a lot of research back then,” I said, “and I looked into it a little more today. I haven’t found anything that tells me this Ricky Church kid is a devil worshipper.”

  “Why don’t you just go to his house? During the day? Like a normal person would?”

  “Why are you being so surly? Are you hurting?”

  Caroline took a lot of pain medication because the cancerous tumors had wrapped around her bones. She’d even had fractures in her spine and ribs by the time the metastasis was discovered. Her medicine cabinet looked like a junkie’s wet dream, but she never seemed to be addled or confused or intoxicated. She did, however, get grouchy when the pain meds weren’t quite doing the trick.

  “I just don’t want you going off to some freak show,” she said.

  “That’s a little judgmental, don’t you think? I’ve seen and known some pretty strange dancers over the years.”

  “What time would you have to go?” she said, ignoring my comment.

  “Probably leave around midnight.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “They don’t get going until midnight, Caroline. Midnight is early for them. And it’s Friday.”

  “You’re not going to go traipsing off to Kingsport to a goth bar at midnight,” she said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “It isn’t dangerous. It’s just a bunch of kids listening to music and drinking and having a good time. And I wasn’t planning to traipse. I thought I might drive.”

  She dropped her fork on her plate and looked at me like she wanted to choke me.

  “You are…so…freaking…frustrating sometimes. You’re half-crazy half the time, do you know that? You’ll probably wind up in a fistfight. You’ve done that plenty of times, you know.”

  “And you’re a fine human being, a perfect wife and mother, 120 percent of the time. Let’s not argue, okay? I need to talk to this kid, and I want to do it in an environment where he feels and acts normal, even if it isn’t normal to us. Let’s just go on about our usual routine, you head on to bed around eleven, and when you wake up tomorrow morning, I’ll be here safe and sound.”

  “Fine,” she said, picking up her plate and carrying it to the sink, where she dropped it loudly. “But don’t bother calling me when one of those ghouls starts eating your liver.”

  I had to give it to him—Ricky Church had that goth thing going on. I stood at the bar and drank a beer while he and his band played their first set. He was wearing combat boots and bondage pants with straps swinging everywhere, a black leather jacket with studs all over it and “Alien Sex Fiend” emblazoned across the back, a black T-shirt and black leather cuffs. His eyes were encircled by
heavy, black eyeliner, and he had safety pins in both his eyebrows. His fingernails were all pained black, and he had shiny hoops in his ears. I had to give him something else, too—the boy could play the guitar. I wasn’t a fan of the genre, which seemed to me to be a hybrid of punk and electric pop and heavy metal, but I knew the difference between a guitar player and a chord strummer. Ricky was all over those strings.

  When the set was over, he unplugged from his amp, set his guitar on a stand, and stepped off the low stage. I walked up and stood in front of him. I wasn’t dressed formally—just jeans and a pullover and a gray pea coat—but I felt as though I looked like the pope standing in the middle of a group of Hassidic Jews.

  “Ricky Church?” I said to him.

  “Yeah. Who are you?”

  “Name’s Dillard. I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”

  “About what?”

  “Kasey Cartwright, mostly.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Piss off” is a phrase that has always pissed me off, and it did the trick again. I took a step toward Ricky, leaned in, and said, “I know Tom Kitchens real well. We’re old friends.” That was a lie. Tom Kitchens was Ricky’s probation officer, and I didn’t know him well at all. “Come over and talk to me now, or I’m going to call Tom first thing in the morning and tell him I saw you snorting cocaine in the bathroom.”

  “You can’t—”

  I grabbed his upper arm and pulled him toward me, and we walked out a side door into the chilly night. He fumbled for a cigarette and lit it while I looked him up and down. Beneath all that white foundation and black costume was a pretty good-looking kid. He was around five feet ten inches tall and had sharp, angular features. His eyes were light green.

  “Are you a cop?” he said after he’d lit the cigarette.

  “Lawyer.”

  “That’s even worse.”

  “So they say.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know where you were on the night of December tenth.”

  “The night Kasey was killed?”

  “Right.”

  “You think I killed her?”

  “Where were you?”

  “You’re crazier than hell, man.”