I'll Kill Her for You

by Steve Richer

  He wanted to make a movie.

  He had hired a director, supervised the rewrites, selected actors, and gotten funding from investors in Saudi Arabia. This led to a nice distribution deal that would triple his investment. And now the backers were walking away?

  “What do you want me to do?” Midori asked.

  Lawson took a deep breath as he understood what was going on, his eyes lingering on the crowd around him. “You call that lawyer back.”

  “I already told him it was a breach of contract, that we would go to court.”

  “Fuck the court. Tell him his clients are staying in and that they’re forfeiting twenty-five percent of their stake. If they’re not happy with that, if they decide to back out, then my next movie will be about these cocksuckers. I’m talking tell-all biopic, everything about their support for terrorism, their shady investments, their drunken parties with trannies, we’ll make it up if we have to. Then I’m gonna sell the movie rights cheap to every TV network from Dubai to Dublin so the world gets to know these assholes intimately.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the line.

  “Uh, I have to say all that, Lawson?”

  “Word for word. The lawyer will get the message and he can choose whatever phrasing he wants for his clients. I’m not letting that project get away. And don’t skimp on the profanities either.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  As soon as he ended the call, the phone chimed with an incoming text. He wondered if it was Midori sending him details about the deal before he realized that tonight’s text messages had been about something else entirely. And it was about that once more.

  This time the text message from the anonymous user read: As agreed, I killed her for you. She’s upstairs.

  Chapter 3

  Another message appeared on the screen: She’s in your old room, Lawson.

  What the fuck? That last word did away with the concept that this was some sort of wrong number. This guy knew his name! But it had to be a prank, it couldn’t be anything else. Yes, he thought. Definitely somebody playing a joke on him.

  But why was the room spinning around him then? Lawson couldn’t see straight. The crowd was talking, laughing, there was muffled holiday music from a string quartet somewhere in the penthouse. There were blinking Christmas lights hanging from the walls and ceiling. It was a giant kaleidoscope, almost a sensory deprivation chamber.

  Lawson was simply dumbstruck.

  It had to be the champagne, he decided. He had drunk too much too fast and he was putting more importance on this than it warranted. Using his name in that last message was a dead giveaway. He would go upstairs, enter his room, and he’d find his buddies laughing their asses off. He wondered if James Franco or Seth Rogen were behind it.

  But still.

  “Lawson!”

  The voice that pulled him out of his reverie was soft and sweet. He found it comforting and immediately recognized it. He turned to his left and found his sister Morgan coming toward him.

  “Hey, stranger,” he said before hugging her. “Sweet Jesus, are you smuggling watermelons? You could’ve asked, I’m sure mom would have given you some.”

  “Stop it!” she said with a good-natured laugh.

  Lawson looked down at her belly which was not unlike a midsize sedan, stretching her gown to the fullest. “Man, I knew you were pregnant but not that pregnant. Quintuplets?”

  “No, no, just the one. A little girl this time, she’s due in a month.”

  Morgan was the oldest sibling and the best person in the family, if Lawson was honest about it. She didn’t believe in the corporate world, she had never been involved in any scandal or embarrassing feat. She was a good mom of three kids – soon to be four – and she devoted what little free time she had to charitable causes.

  “Lawson, so good to see you.” A newcomer handed a glass of juice to Morgan. “Here you go, babe.”

  It was her husband, Joe. He was a great match for her, a mild-mannered architect who was great with kids. They owned a house up in Westchester.

  “How are you, Joe?”

  “Can’t complain. I’m fortunate to be working on this new park in Queens. It’s very exciting, according to my standards anyway. Morgan here is the star of our little family. Did you hear about her fundraiser for St. Jude’s last month? She raised $8 million for the kids.”

  “That’s my big sister.”

  “And what about you, Lawson? What’s going on with you?”

  With that, Lawson forced himself to go back to his prepared script, being nebulous about his movie career and making it seem like his life wasn’t just about going to parties, drinking himself silly every night, and waking up in strange girls’ apartments, which it totally was.

  He droned on, grabbing another glass of champagne from a passing caterer. He drank it in record time and it wasn’t having the desired effect. He was craving something stronger because even though he was chatting as if he didn’t have a care in the world, he kept thinking about the message.

  The dead girl upstairs.

  “Excuse me, please,” Lawson said when he found a convenient break in the conversation.

  He walked away, avoided looking people in the eye for fear they would strike up a conversation, and stopped by the makeshift bar which had been erected just outside the kitchen. He ordered a double bourbon, swallowed everything in one gulp, and he found himself immediately disappointed that he still had his faculties.

  Screw it. He had to know just what the hell was going on.

  Once more, he waded through the crowd and made his way to the grand winding staircase. There were a few people on the steps, just standing and talking, but knowing these people they wouldn’t go up. It wasn’t proper, and if Lawson knew anything about New York society, it was that they only ever did what was deemed proper.

  He climbed up to the second floor and took a left. It had been a long time since he’d been here, at least a year. Sure, he had come to the family apartment since but he hadn’t gone up to his room. For all he knew, his mother had turned his bedroom into a scrapbooking showcase.

  His heart was beating fast as he walked down the long corridor. The mixture of alcohol and stress made him feel like he had just run a marathon. His hands were moist, his lips were dry.

  But why was he so nervous anyway? This was a joke, a prank. It couldn’t be anything else. Fucking James Franco. The guys would make fun of him for years because of that.

  Then again, what if…

  He had to continue, he had to find out. He wiped his hands on his pants and loosened his bowtie before undoing the top button of his shirt. He went around his father’s study where he remembered stealing cigarettes as a kid, not to mention sampling the single malt the old man kept in fancy decanters.

  He turned the corner and made out his bedroom door. He had spent the better part of eighteen years there. It had been his sanctuary even though at the time he couldn’t wait to be set free. One of his friends had told him once that it wasn’t really a bedroom, it was more like an apartment.

  There were couches and armchairs, a computer desk, a wall unit for the TV, sound system and video games. His old baseball bat was propped up in the corner.

  Lawson worked on his breathing as he came to a halt in front of the door. This was it. This was where he’d find out how much of an idiot he was for being spooked by text messages.

  “It’s just a prank,” he whispered with a chuckle.

  He opened the door and pushed it in. Strangely, one of the bedside lamps was on so he could see the entire room. It was just as he had left it. The same TV, the same PlayStation, even the same burgundy bedspread. But there was something else that made his stomach turn.

  Right below the large window which opened on the Midtown skyline was a loveseat cast in shadows. There was someone on it.

  “The prank is over, okay?” he called out. “I played along, I came up, you got what you wanted. Now please stop screwing with me.”

/>   There was no response.

  “This shit’s not funny, you know.” There was no response. “Hello?”

  Again, no reaction from the person on the couch.

  Intending to end things once and for all, Lawson came further into the room, heading to the window. That’s when he saw that the person was a woman.

  She was slumped on the couch, her knees together, her feet apart. He recognized what she was wearing. It was the uniform style his mother preferred for the maid staff.

  “Hey, are you passed out drunk?”

  Lawson came closer still. He saw her face. She was ambiguously Hispanic, in her early twenties. He didn’t know her but she fit the description of the family employees. Yet there was something stranger. Her mouth was agape, her eyes were open.

  “Oh fuck!”

  She was most definitely dead.

  Chapter 4

  The champagne and whiskey rose in Lawson’s throat but he swallowed before it came up further.

  “Oh shit… Oh Jesus…”

  In a moment like this, what to do next was an easy decision. He reached inside his pants and produced his phone. He dialed 911. Just as he was about to hit the Send button, he stopped.

  He had to think about this. Calling the police would change absolutely everything. There would be no going back. He had to make sure it was the right decision.

  He forced himself to look at the corpse. The arms were limp, her eyes were empty. She was dead beyond a shadow of a doubt so it wasn’t like he was losing time getting her medical assistance.

  But still, wasn’t it the right thing to do to call the cops? It would be if it wasn’t for the fact that Lawson started believing this was some sort of trap.

  All evening he’d been getting messages hinting at this. He scrolled through his phone and read them again.

  Who do you want me to kill for you? I’ll kill her for you.

  Good choice, I’ll kill her for you.

  As agreed, I killed her for you. She’s upstairs.

  She’s in your old room, Lawson.

  It was like this was some sort of direct way to implicate him in… in whatever this was. The sick killer hadn’t just called a wrong number, he had used his name. The body was in his bedroom, in his family’s home. And then he noticed something else.

  His eyes were drawn down her body, along her bare legs, all the way to her feet. Her panties had been yanked around her ankles. She also had the top two buttons of her dark gray uniform undone.

  It looked like some sort of sexual assault gone wrong.

  He felt the urge to vomit and call the police in equal measures again. Calling it in was the rational thing to do. That’s what everybody was conditioned to do from childhood. You witness a crime, you report it. You tell the truth and the good guys win.

  But being around a family as prominent as his all of his life, he had learned something extra: rumors are a bitch.

  Just the whiff of a scandal was enough to destroy a person’s life. If he called the cops, it was a foregone conclusion that the press would learn about it. Hell, it would be on Twitter before the first responding officer got here. And then what?

  The story wouldn’t be: Young man alerts authorities after finding corpse. No, it would be: Billionaire heir implicated in murder. It would be: Dead girl found in movie producer’s room.

  Maybe even: Lawson Winslow questioned in rape and murder case.

  Having lived in Hollywood for a few years, he knew that lies spread much faster than the truth. Even if his name was cleared – as it should be – there would always be whispers about this event. It would follow him for the rest of his life. Was Winslow truly involved? What had really happened that night with that billionaire clown?

  He would never escape it.

  Because of that, Lawson decided he couldn’t be directly involved. Without thinking about it further, he went into his phone settings and deleted all the text messages which had been sent to him from that unknown user. Aside from that, there was no evidence that he had anything to do with this. He hadn’t touched the girl. He didn’t even know her.

  Putting the phone in his pocket again, he gingerly backed away and left the room. It felt wrong but if someone else discovered the body then they wouldn’t have anything to hold against him.

  He walked down the hallway, turned the corner, and stopped in his tracks. There was a couple in front of him, just by his father’s study. They were laughing drunkenly and kissing, the man pinning the girl against the wall. He vaguely recognized the man as an executive from Winslow World Group and the woman was too young to be his wife.

  For a moment, they all stared at one another.

  It was kind of a standoff, all parties ashamed of being caught where they weren’t supposed to be.

  But instead of walking away, Lawson squinted and recognized who the woman was. Addie Burgess. She worked at WWG as well, she was in Noel’s department – Branding Synergy, which as far as Lawson knew was a fancy term for marketing. He had slept with her once upon a time and it had ended badly.

  In hindsight, he shouldn’t have called her a psycho bitch.

  They continued to size each other up, neither party willing to back down. In truth, nobody knew what to do. Nobody could pretend they hadn’t seen anything, not now.

  “Evening, Addie,” Lawson said, doing his best to sound cool in spite of how he actually felt.

  “Lawson, it’s been too long.”

  He searched for a clever retort but couldn’t come up with one. “Yeah. Don’t mind me, I’m going back down. I think the billiard room is empty if you want to, you know…”

  Addie’s face hardened at that, as if being accused of exactly what she was in the process of doing offended her. Then again, Lawson remembered this was her style. She was a control freak with ice in her veins.

  He didn’t give her a chance to reply and walked past them, returning downstairs. He was seething. It was a tragedy that he’d been spotted on the second floor. If it hadn’t been for the couple, nobody would’ve known that he’d been up. With the text messages gone, he would’ve been in the clear.

  Now he wasn’t sure he was.

  “Hey, son! I didn’t know you were here.”

  Lawson turned to his left and found his father looking at him, genuinely surprised. He even seemed happy to see him. He went to him even though he really wanted to go to the bar instead.

  “Hi, dad. What’s shaking?”

  Lawson David Winslow Jr. – who went by simply David – was the chairman of the board. He was taller than everyone by half a head and his stature mirrored his power within the company.

  “You remember our CEO, Walter Olsen?” he said, indicating the man he’d been talking with.

  “Of course. How are you, Walter?”

  “Wonderful,” the 60-year-old man said as he shook his hand. “How’s the movie business?”

  “Awesome. Any day now I’ll call you to take my company public.”

  They all shared a polite laugh. This was the sort of light banter Lawson knew was expected at these parties. He had learned this back in kindergarten.

  His father snorted. “Don’t tease me like that, son. I only had one heart attack, I don’t need another.”

  “Cut the boy some slack, David. Don’t you remember being that age?”

  “Of course I remember. I was working eighty hours a week, doing my best to make my own father proud and…” He stopped talking, took a deep breath, and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. I’m beginning to sound like your mother.”

  Lawson and his father nodded to each other as if declaring a truce. For years the man had tried to get him interested in the family business but he had eventually given up, understanding that it would never work out. He had accepted that Lawson was the black sheep, that he would never change.

  Olsen had an enigmatic scowl, as if he didn’t approve. On the other hand, he was probably happy not to be saddled by the wayward son at the company.

  “W
ill you excuse me, please?” Lawson said. “I keep forgetting my drink everywhere.”

  He didn’t give either of them time to reply and headed for the bar. He was waiting for his turn when an ear-piercing shriek rose louder than the music.

  At once, the band stopped playing and everyone spun toward the scream’s origin. There were murmurs, people clearly wondering what was happening, and then Lawson’s worst nightmare came true.

  Addie appeared at the top of the stairs. “There’s a dead woman!”

  Chapter 5

  Lawson had been wondering what would happen if the corpse was discovered and what ensued defied his imagination. There was no mass panic, no one was running around, arms flailing madly. Instead, the announcement was first met with stunned silence followed by a few chuckles because this was so obviously a joke.

  But as murmurs grew through the crowd, it was as if the hive mind decided that nobody would be stupid enough to do this sort of prank. Certainly not at the Winslow residence. So it had to be real.

  Noel, ever ready to prove himself worthy of being the next family patriarch, headed up the stairs and the chief of surgery at Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital was hot on his heels to lend assistance. They returned less than a minute later. Lawson found that his brother looked like a corpse himself as he sluggishly walked down the steps.

  “It’s true,” he said. “There’s a woman… She’s dead. A maid.”

  The chatter picked up again, the partygoers in disbelief. Shock eventually gave way to amusement. These people were part of New York high society and as much as they were initially repulsed at the idea of being in the same vicinity as a mysterious dead body, they morbidly relished the excitement.

  Dr. Steckle came back down and Lawson saw his mother go to him. She was not amused. She had a deep-seated aversion to scandals and this one would likely not go away lightly.

  Even though he wanted to distance himself from this, Lawson couldn’t resist and went to them. He had to know what was going on, anything to clear his name and put his mind at ease.

  “And?” his mother asked the stocky surgeon.