The Perfect Disguise (A Jessie Hunt Psychological Suspense Thriller—Book Ten)

by Blake Pierce

  “Can I help you?” asked a sixty-something woman with a scratchy, cigarette-weakened voice, frizzy gray hair, and thick glasses, who was parked behind an oversized reception desk.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Trembley said, taking the initiative. “We’re with the LAPD. I’m Detective Trembley and this is our criminal consultant, Jessie Hunt. We need to speak to Mr. Reinhold.”

  “And what is this in regard to?” the receptionist asked without missing a beat, as if having police show up at her office was an everyday occurrence.

  Trembley looked at Jessie hesitantly, unsure of how forthcoming he should be. She decided to help him out.

  “We’re investigating the death of one of his former clients,” she said. “He may have useful information.”

  “Give me a moment please,” the woman said and picked up the phone. She didn’t actually say anything, but merely listened to murmured words Jessie couldn’t make out. After a few seconds, the woman hung up and looked sourly at them.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Reinhold isn’t available right now. He’s with a client. Perhaps you’d like to make an appointment?”

  “This isn’t really an appointment situation,” Trembley said, bordering on forceful.

  “How did he know what we were saying?” Jessie demanded. “Does he have listening devices set up in this area?”

  “He has a very full day,” the woman said as if she hadn’t heard them. “I have an opening tomorrow at ten thirty.”

  “What’s your name, ma’am?” Trembley asked.

  “You may call me Mrs. Portis.”

  “Mrs. Portis, this is a pressing situation. We need to see him now.”

  Mrs. Portis’s cell phone buzzed. She glanced at it, then looked back up at them.

  “My apologies, I had inaccurate information. Mr. Reinhold has actually left for the day. So how about penciling you in for tomorrow morning?”

  “He left for the day?” Trembley asked incredulously. “I thought he was with a client.”

  “He’s meeting with a client at a different location. I had forgotten. I’m quite old.”

  Her lips curled upward, approximating a forced smile. Jessie found it unsettling. She had also lost patience with Mrs. Portis. She decided it was time to break out an old Ryan Hernandez standby technique. Hopefully Trembley would pick up on what she was doing.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked suddenly.

  “What?” Trembley wanted to know.

  “I thought I heard a cry for help coming from back there?” Jessie said, pointing down the short hallway to the office door at the end.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” Mrs. Portis assured them.

  “I definitely heard it,” Jessie insisted. “It sounded like someone calling out weakly. I’m sure I heard the words ‘please help me.’ Listen. There it is again. Do you hear it, Trembley?”

  Somewhere in the middle of her charade, he’d picked up on her plan. Stifling a grin, he nodded.

  “I do. It sounds like someone’s in distress.”

  “We should check it out,” Jessie insisted as she started down the hall.

  “You can’t go back there!” Mrs. Portis wheezed.

  “Please stay where you are, ma’am,” Trembley ordered importantly. “I don’t want to cuff you but I will. For all we know, you’ve got your employer bound back there so you can torture him.”

  “What?” Jessie heard Mrs. Portis exclaim as she reached the back office.

  She was tempted to pull out her gun but didn’t want to overdo it. Instead she yelled out “LAPD” and stepped aside for Trembley, who enthusiastically kicked in the door and rushed in.

  Jessie followed right behind, truly enjoying herself for the first time all day. That is, until she saw Reinhold.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  He was not with a client.

  But Phil Reinhold was quite busy. From the looks of it, the man appeared to be trying to destroy a thumb drive lying on his desk by smashing it with the base of some kind of award.

  “Stop!” she shouted.

  Reinhold glanced up at them fleetingly before returning his attention to smashing the thumb drive. Trembley whipped out his gun.

  “Mr. Reinhold, look at me!” he yelled.

  Reinhold looked up and, seeing the gun pointed at him, froze in mid-swing. Trembley went on.

  “It looks suspiciously like you’re trying to destroy evidence, sir. That is a crime. I need you to place that…item down and carefully step away from your desk with your hands up.”

  Jessie thought the whole gun thing was excessive. But it seemed to work, so she kept her opinion to herself. Instead, as Reinhold stepped back, she was able to properly take him in for the first time.

  Phil Reinhold looked like a man who was just holding on. What little hair he had left was combed over the top of his head so that it looked like alfalfa sprouts on top of a muffin. His face was craggy and paunchy at the same time and he had deep indentations on the bridge of his nose where Jessie imagined his glasses usually sat. He was heavy for his size. She guessed he was approaching 250 pounds. His suit, which he apparently didn’t have the resources to replace, was shabby and ill-fitting. His tie appeared to have a mustard stain on it.

  As he stepped back, Jessie approached the desk, put on gloves, and slid the thumb drive into an evidence bag. She had no way of knowing if it was salvageable. That was a question for tech.

  “Whatcha doin’, Phil?” she asked, glancing at his computer monitor, which was open to an empty file titled, “Break Glass.”

  “You need a warrant!” he declared plaintively, speaking for the first time. He didn’t seem to Jessie like the kind of man who would strike fear in the hearts of movie producers and executives.

  “Plain view rule, Phil,” she said nonchalantly. “Look it up. It seems that you were so busy trying to destroy the thumb drive here that you forgot to exit the screen of the file you just deleted with the provocative name. I guess we know what file to tell our tech team to look for.”

  Reinhold scowled at her but said nothing. She pressed on.

  “Care to tell us what was so damaging that you felt the need to crush it with…” she looked at the description on the thing he’d been using as a hammer, “your 1996 Entertainment Agent Award?”

  “Isn’t this the time where I ask for a lawyer?’ Reinhold asked.

  “It can be,” Trembley said. “That also means it’s the time when we arrest you, handcuff you, and take you down to the station.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Reinhold asked haughtily. “I’m drinking buddies with the BHPD assistant police chief. I’m not sure he’d be happy about you treating me so poorly.”

  “Mr. Reinhold,” Jessie corrected, “you seem to be under a misapprehension. We aren’t taking you to the Beverly Hills station. We’re LAPD. You’ll be visiting Central Station downtown. We’re located just off Skid Row. You may be used to scotch with the assistant chief but I suggest you prepare yourself for sharing a urine-stained holding cell with our buddy Maurice. He’s the guy who gets picked up a few times a week for starting a fight with a park bench.”

  “He really hates that bench,” Trembley added.

  “Maybe he’ll explain why,” Jessie offered. “Maurice likes to explain things.”

  While Jessie called the tech team to come and collect Reinhold’s computer, Trembley cuffed the agent and escorted him to an adjacent conference room, then left him to stew for a while. Jessie thought she heard the man whimpering.

  Though she knew Reinhold was her priority, she was also itching to break the guy so she could visit Ryan at the hospital and see Hannah for dinner. Thankfully, it only took about twenty minutes for Reinhold to change his tune. Once he learned that Jessie and Trembley wanted to talk to him about Corinne Weatherly’s murder, he backed off on his demand to speak to a lawyer.

  “What’s on the thumb drive, Phil?” Jessie asked as she sat down at the table across from perhaps the most pathetic-looking suspect she’d ever
encountered. He was hunched over and his multiple chins cascaded down to his chest. His eyes seemed to almost sag out of his skull.

  “What does that have to do with Corinne?” he protested feebly.

  “We don’t know yet,” she replied. “But we’re going to find out at some point. Our tech folks are working on retrieving the ‘Break Glass’ data as we speak. And I can assure you that banging it a few times with a chintzy award isn’t going to keep it hidden. Your best bet is to come clean before we discover what’s on there, establish some goodwill. That’s your strongest play, Phil.”

  “Do I get immunity for what I tell you?”

  Jessie hoped he was better at getting deals for his clients than himself.

  “Absolutely not,” she said firmly. “We can’t agree to anything without knowing what we’re talking about. What I can promise is that if you reveal illegality to us and it involves people who have committed worse crimes than you, it could go a long way to helping your cause with the prosecutor. But it’s getting late in the day and I have plans tonight. So the longer you drag this out, the worse it will go for you.”

  Reinhold nibbled at his lower lip as he pondered the offer. It took all of five seconds for him to cave.

  “Okay, that drive has a list of past and present clients—mostly past, mostly male—who engaged in what I’ll describe as…indiscretions. There was a time where I would help these clients procure companionship. That file is a database of specific preferences and providers.”

  Jessie wished she could have been surprised by the revelation, but with all she’d seen in her job, it somehow felt almost inevitable to her. Glancing over at Trembley, she saw that he felt much the same way.

  “Are we talking prostitution?” Trembley asked matter-of-factly.

  Reinhold shook his head vehemently.

  “No,” he insisted. “Well, not in most cases. Maybe a few escorts now and then. But usually it was younger, aspiring actresses who wanted to get the attention of a well-known actor or director, sometimes producers. Back in my CTA days, I had access to a massive Rolodex of girls like that. We represented hundreds of actresses and had contingency deals with thousands more. All I had to do was punch specific attributes into the system to get possible contenders.”

  “Contenders?” Jessie repeated, feeling the bile rise in her throat.

  He nodded as if what he was describing was the most normal thing in the world.

  “The database tracked all that stuff—age, ethnicity, height, weight, hair and eye color, waist and bust size, special skills. It was invaluable for casting calls. But it was also perfect for me. When a single—or married—actor said he was interested in spending time with a busty Latina in her mid-twenties with long, dark, curly hair who knew yoga, finding a bevy of options was easy. And more often than not, at least a couple were willing to go that extra mile to get noticed.”

  “I’m guessing this whole thing fell apart at some point?” Trembley said.

  “Not really. The senior partners at the agency were aware, but no one ever called me out for it. It dried up eventually, but that was because most of those clients died or aged out of this sort of thing. The younger generation seemed to have their own ways to connect with potential liaisons, usually via the internet. Suddenly I wasn’t so valuable to the firm. So they moved on. I think they set up their own ‘database’ independent of me. But I still get a payment from CTA every year.”

  “You were blackmailing them?” Trembley asked.

  “No! I didn’t have to. It was sort of an informal confidentially agreement. I go quietly and keep my mouth shut and I keep getting a check every year.”

  “How much?” Jessie asked.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” he replied ruefully. “I got a ‘bonus’ of a hundred thousand the year I left, then fifty grand the next. It keeps going down every year. Last December the check was for twenty-five thousand. Another few years and we’ll probably be talking four figures.”

  “There aren’t going to be any more checks, Phil,” Jessie reminded him.

  “Right. I forgot.”

  “So some of these names are big?” she asked.

  “The actors? Sure. We’re talking a few Oscar winners even.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m guessing those guys are older than dirt now. I mean the agents, the ones who looked the other way, the ones who are still doing it without your help. Fingering those guys is what’s going to get you a good deal, Phil.”

  “They’re not all guys,” he noted.

  For the moment, Jessie set aside the idea of female agents pimping out their clients. There would be time later for mentally processing that.

  “So,” she said, getting to the question she’d been working up to the whole time. “You clearly heard us tell Mrs. Portis we were looking into the death of a former client. Word travels fast in this town. You had to know who we were talking about. So what about Corinne Weatherly’s death made you suddenly start hammering at thumb drives?”

  “I panicked,” he said unhelpfully.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” Trembley said, leaning in so that he was hovering directly over Reinhold.

  The sad, beaten man hunched even deeper into himself. Jessie heard a sigh emanate from somewhere so deep she wondered if it was his soul escaping his body.

  “Okay,” he finally said. “I heard Corinne died on the set of Marauder. But I didn’t know how. There was some mention of her being murdered, strangled. But I started to wonder if they got it wrong. I thought maybe she’d hanged herself, maybe because her career was in the dump. Who knows? When you two showed up, it reinforced that suspicion and I started to worry that maybe she’d written some kind of suicide note, coming clean or something.”

  “Coming clean about what, Phil?” Jessie asked slowly.

  He didn’t speak.

  “Phil?” she repeated in a warning tone.

  “About the list, okay. She knew about the list. I thought maybe she was absolving herself of guilt for knowing about it and never having said anything.”

  Jessie and Trembley exchanged surprised looks. She nodded for the detective to take the lead.

  “How did she know about the list?” Trembley asked.

  Phil Reinhold looked at him like he was dense.

  “She was on it?” Jessie guessed.

  “No,” he said softly. “But not for a lack of effort on my part. When she was starting out, before she got Petals and Petulance, there was an actor who took an interest in her specifically. I brought the offer to her. She rejected it out of hand, got really mad. Somehow she bullied the truth out of me. I don’t know how but I ended up spilling the whole thing to her.”

  “And she didn’t fire you or say anything?” Jessie asked.

  “No. In fact, the next time we met in my office, very late in the day, she said she’d reconsidered. She asked me to pull up the list of guys to see if there was anyone she’d be open to spending time with. God, I was such an idiot.”

  “What do you mean?” Trembley wanted to know.

  “She was playing me, Detective,” he said, his voice rising wildly. “She was a devious one. She said she wanted to make sure we had privacy to discuss the matter and asked me to make sure the office was empty. So I went around, checking to make certain everyone had left for the day. What I didn’t know at the time was that while I did that, she was copying the file.”

  “When did you find out?” Jessie asked.

  “Not until two years later. She’d already made Petals and the first Marauder movie. But the producers were playing hardball with her on the salary for the sequel, insisting she get the rate in the original contract. That’s when she told me I should remind one of the producers that he was on the naughty list and that if he wanted to keep it quiet, he should meet her preferred rate.”

  “What happened?” Trembley asked, a little too curiously for Jessie’s taste.

  “They bumped up her rate, ten percent higher than what she wanted actually.�
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  “So she used this database to pinch vulnerable producers from then on?” Jessie asked.

  “Only occasionally, when she thought she was getting hosed,” Reinhold said. “I don’t recall her ever using it to get a part, just to get paid what she felt she deserved. In a weird way, there was something honorable about the way she went about it. She always wanted her acting to be judged on its own merits. Everything else was fair game.”

  “Did the producers know she was the one squeezing them?” Jessie asked.

  “I don’t think so. She always did it through me, so the producers had no idea she was behind the tactic unless someone else told them. I never did and she had no reason to. But it was always out there, you know, hanging over my head, that she could rat me out if I didn’t go to bat for her.”

  “So you must be glad that she’s gone,” Jessie jabbed. “She can’t wield that against you anymore.”

  Reinhold looked at her with weary disdain.

  “Ms. Hunt. I may be an over-the-hill scumbag of an agent, but I haven’t fallen that far. Yes, I resented Corinne lording that list over me. Yes, I was angry at her for dropping me as her agent without a word of warning after ten years of getting her steady work. It especially stung because she left me for some hotshot punk with slicked back hair who I mentored at CTA. But did I want her dead? Of course not. I turned that girl into a star.”

  “That wasn’t her doing?” Jessie wondered.

  “Without question. But I played a role in it. And I’m ashamed to admit that part of me hoped this film would tank so that she’d leave CTA and come back to me with her tail between her legs.”

  “She doesn’t strike me as the type to do that,” Jessie noted.

  “No,” Reinhold conceded. “It was only wishful thinking. Over the years, Corinne became so arrogant and demanding, I’m not sure she knew any other way to be anymore. Even as the quality of the jobs she got declined, she continued to act as if she was the same star she’d been a decade ago. To be honest, there were times when I thought about firing her, if only—”