Looks to Die For

by Janice Kaplan

  Message number one had been about setting up a meeting with Chauncey for tomorrow, and he’d done that. But most likely the assistant in Chauncey’s office had tracked Dan down directly this morning, calling his cell phone or beeper number after she’d called here. If Dan hadn’t heard the messages yet — including the one from the mystery man — I could be there when he listened for the first time. I could watch his face and judge his reaction.

  I pulled out a pan and placed it on the front burner of the Garland cooktop. No, that wasn’t fair. Dan was my husband, for heaven’s sake. We were on the same team. I didn’t have to trick him or track him or sneak around hoping he’d reveal himself. I could be direct.

  “Dan?” I turned full square to face him across the counter island. He had opened a new Sharper Image catalogue and was flipping intently through the pages of robopets, massage recliners, and air purifiers. I’ve never quite figured out why men are mesmerized by air purifiers — and why the same ones who ignore the lingering reek of Montecristo Cuban cigars are absolutely determined to own an Ionic Breeze Quadra.

  “What is it?” he asked, looking up.

  “Um…” I stopped. My husband. Same team. Could ask him anything. I cleared my throat. “Um, honey, would you like the leftover pasta salad from dinner or should I just make you an omelet?”

  “Either.” He closed the catalog, giving up his fantasy of ozone guards and cleaner air. “Whichever’s easier. Thanks for doing this, honey.”

  I cracked three eggs into a bowl, then whisked in chopped onion, red pepper, and chunks of Jarlsberg. “Anything special happen today?” I asked. I was a wimp, no two ways about it.

  “Not really. I saw some patients. Mostly, I worked on that article for the Annals of Plastic Surgery. Almost done.”

  “What’s it on again?”

  “Post-traumatic reconstruction. Giving a patient his face back after an accident. The editor says the work I’ve been doing is unprecedented. Genuine breakthroughs.” He sighed, and despite the compliment he sounded as deflated as the Big Bird balloon a week after the Macy’s parade.

  I poured the eggs into the Calphalon pan and watched the cheese I’d mixed in beginning to melt while the eggs began to harden. That’s what happened when the heat was on. Some of us melted and some turned hard.

  “Anything new with the…” I let the sentence trail off because we didn’t have a way to talk about this yet. Anything new with your murder? Anything new with your life sentence? Anything new with the girl you say you didn’t brutally strangle but someone did?

  Dan didn’t need conversational arrows to follow me. He slumped deeper in his chair. “Nothing,” he said. “We’ll see what Chauncey says tomorrow, I guess.”

  I flipped the omelet, slipped it onto the dish, and decorated the plate with fresh strawberries and blueberries. If interior decorating dried up, I could work at IHOP.

  “That’s pretty,” Dan said when I put it in front of him. “Thanks.”

  “Some toast?”

  “Sure. If you wouldn’t mind.” My, we were being polite with each other.

  I escaped back to the safety of the counter and got busy toasting, buttering, and cutting. Safer to talk when we didn’t have to look at each other.

  “I know this sounds crazy,” I said, “but I was thinking today about whether somebody might have framed you for the murder.”

  “Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know. Because they could. Because they wanted to prove something. I have no idea.”

  Dan continued to stare at his plate, eating slowly. “We’ll see what Chauncey says,” he repeated, without looking up.

  I took the carefully arranged plate of toast over to the table, put it in front of him, and sat down.

  “You must be thinking about this as much as I am,” I said, my face close to his. “You must have thoughts.”

  Dan put down the fork. “Thinking, yes. Thoughts, no. I don’t know what’s going on, Lacy. I really don’t.”

  For the first time in my life, I wondered if my husband was lying to me. Was I being influenced by the message I’d heard, or was this really a wifely intuition?

  I cupped my chin in my hands. “We have to get through this together,” I said softly. “No secrets. I’m not going to turn on you, no matter what you tell me.”

  “No secrets,” Dan said. But he didn’t look at me, and I wasn’t sure what could be so interesting about his empty plate.

  When we got to his office the next morning, Chauncey didn’t have any breakthrough news for us, but he did have six forms for us to sign, which made it seem like we were closing on a house rather than coping with a murder. Then he showed us some of the documents he’d collected — including police reports and a backgrounder on Tasha Barlow.

  After we studied them for a while, he took them back, put them neatly into piles on his desk, and folded his hands.

  “We need to talk legal strategy,” Chauncey said, leaning toward us. “It’s still early, but I want you to understand some of the options.”

  And he laid them out. Plea bargains. Pretrial deals. Judicial decrees. I tried to follow, but it all seemed beside the point, and after a while, I got impatient.

  “Shouldn’t we be trying to find the real killer instead of going through all this?” I asked.

  “That’s never a solid legal strategy,” Chauncey said. “It can backfire in a dozen ways.”

  “So someone gets away with murder while we strategize?” I was seething and trying not to show it, but Chauncey had dealt with upset clients before.

  “My focus is getting the best advantage for Dan,” he said.

  “Which would be what?”

  “Too early to say. But we have to be realistic. For example, we might be able to plea bargain to manslaughter, with a sentence of ten to fifteen years. Dan could be up for parole in as little as three years. I think the DA would listen to an approach from us.”

  “Dan’s not guilty. Why would he plea bargain?”

  “Because the alternatives are grim, Lacy. If he’s convicted of murder it’s a mandatory twenty-five years to life. Don’t forget that.”

  “But he’s not guilty.”

  “I understand that.”

  I stood up and took a step closer to Chauncey, my voice getting louder. “No, you don’t understand that. If you understood, you wouldn’t be telling Dan to go to jail just for the fun of it.”

  “You can know he’s innocent and I can know it,” Chauncey said gently. “But once a case goes to a jury, there are no guarantees.”

  “But he’s not guilty,” I repeated again. I wanted to jump up and down to make him listen. Instead, I banged my fist hard against his desk. “Not guilty, okay? Do you hear me? Not guilty. That’s where we start.”

  “Of course.”

  I turned around and looked at Dan, who had slunk down into the sofa and wasn’t getting involved in my tirade. I took a deep breath and went and sat down next to him. Chauncey looked at me sympathetically.

  “I’m sorry, Lacy.”

  I took another deep breath. I wasn’t going to cry. “No, I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be difficult, I just want this to go away. And I keep thinking there’s a link to someone else that we’re missing. Some piece that Dan hasn’t connected.”

  “Well, let’s start connecting,” Chauncey said.

  We were all silent for a moment.

  And then it occurred to me that facts were important, but so was getting to the essential truth about Dan.

  “Okay,” I said finally. “Here’s what I’d like you to connect. A tank of gasoline.”

  “Gasoline?” Chauncey opened a folder as if expecting to find some mention of fuel — diesel, premium, or regular — in the police report.

  “I’m always rushing in the mornings, and one day a few years ago I came downstairs to drive the kids to school, and I noticed my gas tank had mysteriously gone from almost empty to full.”

  I looked over at Dan, who gave a little smi
le, despite himself.

  “Dan had filled it for me early in the morning, before he went to the hospital,” I explained. “I’m not much on taking care of cars, so he’d done it as a little surprise to cheer my day. He didn’t want any credit. It just made him happy to know he’d done something nice for me.”

  Chauncey took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. I could tell he wasn’t following, though for what we were paying, he’d let me rant about trains, planes, and automobiles if I wanted.

  “Men don’t always say things straight out,” I said, trying to make my point. “They forget to bring flowers on your birthday. They don’t know that Valentine’s Day is in February. But they have different ways of expressing themselves. If you want a good marriage, you have to hear what your husband’s really telling you. With Dan, a tank of gas can say “I love you” better than any bauble from Buccellati.”

  Chauncey glanced over at Dan, who looked slightly embarrassed.

  “Lacy and I do things for each other. No big deal,” he said.

  I sat back. It was a big deal. Any husband could call 1-800-Flowers. How many would drive to a Shell station at 6:00 A.M.? Chauncey needed to understand what Dan was really like. He needed to listen better. And so did I.

  Chapter Six

  I didn’t know I was heading to Tasha’s place until I was almost there. After I left Chauncey’s office, I drove around aimlessly for a few minutes, then discovered I was on Pico Boulevard, heading west. The address I’d seen on the police report Chauncey showed us had stuck in my head. Living near the ocean seemed pretty swanky as the first stop for a girl from Twin Falls, Idaho, and I wondered how she’d afforded it. When I was a couple of blocks away, I stopped at a red light and looked around — a Jack’s 99 Cent Store, a 7 Eleven, a couple of bodegas selling fruit, and a tiny sign saying PUBLIC BEACH: 2 MILES. So that was it. No oceanside mansions here. Tasha might have liked telling her friends that she lived on the water, but the only whiff of ocean she’d get was from the fish market next door.

  I parked in the open lot next to her building and noticed shreds of yellow police tape hanging limply from the wire mesh fence. Another damp remnant inscribed POLICE LINE DO NOT CR was flapping on a telephone pole nearby. The police had come and gone, apparently figuring their investigation was over.

  At the front door of the building, I studied the name cards next to the buzzers. Number 4C said BARLOW/WILSON. Without thinking, I pushed the buzzer. Nothing happened, and just when I was about to leave, I heard a scratchy, “Who’s there?”

  “Hi, I’m Lacy,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about Tasha.”

  “What about her?”

  Well, that was a good question.

  “Um, I’m a friend of Roy Evans.”

  The intercom went silent. And then a moment later, a buzzer sounded to let me in.

  I gathered my courage, pushed open the door, and made my way down a dark, dingy hallway. Ahead was another door, and as I passed through it, the grim tenement feel of the building suddenly dissolved and I stepped into an outdoor courtyard, complete with a large swimming pool. The water was murky and most of the lounge chairs on the cement deck seemed broken, but streams of sunlight flooded the courtyard and brightened the scene. I had to laugh. After growing up in flat, rural Ohio, I always found that even the tackiest apartment buildings in L.A. weren’t bad. The five-story complex formed an L shape around the pool, with a staircase at the middle point. Not seeing any other way to get upstairs, I started climbing, stopping after four flights to walk along the outdoor corridor.

  But 4C didn’t exist.

  What was going on? The numbers in the corridor went from 3D to 4D to 5D.

  I paused and then headed back down a floor. Sure enough, even the numbering system in Hollywood had to be creative: 1C, 2C, 3C…At the next door, I knocked.

  The woman who opened the door was probably in her mid-twenties, but she was fat — no polite way to say it — with stringy black hair that needed to be washed. Her bulging stomach made ripples in her white T-shirt, and pale, flabby legs stuck out beneath her black shorts.

  “So?” she asked. “Roy has something to tell me?”

  I must have been too slow formulating an answer because the woman glared at me and then shook her head impatiently.

  “I’ve packed up his tapes,” she said. “Come on in. You can take them to him. I don’t want to see him again.”

  The sunlight that filled the courtyard didn’t make its way to the apartment, and it took my eyes a minute to adjust to the gloom. Then I had to adjust to the gloomy decor. A ratty brown sofa adorned with glittery red-and-orange throw pillows teetered on a standard-issue tweed carpet that must have come with the rent. A matching brown love seat was oddly angled away from the wall, probably in an effort to hide a dark, ominous stain creeping along the carpet. A rickety bamboo stand from Pier 1 held a small television, and some random lamps and a chipped Formica table finished the scene. Nobody had painted in a long time, and the dull beige walls were cracked and peeling.

  “The tapes are in Tasha’s bedroom,” my guide said, continuing on.

  She pushed open the closed bedroom door — and I unwittingly gasped. The sense of going from Hades to heaven was even more startling than in the courtyard downstairs. Tasha’s private sanctum was a glowing palace, shimmering in shades of white and gold. Center stage was a king-sized brass bed, covered with a gold moire duvet and a pile of intricate, expensive, silk-tasseled European squares. A thick, plush white carpet was the background for a delicate Persian rug, and the walls were draped in a subtle silk-patterned wallpaper. A wafting, diaphanous fabric — I’d swear it was Scalamandré — fluttered gracefully from the windows. I could have done without the six-foot-long plasma-screen television and the heavy brass Medeco lock on the door, but even that couldn’t distract from the overall opulence.

  “Wow,” I said. Then, guessing, “Gifts from Roy?”

  She snorted. “No way. Your Mr. Roy pretends he’s generous — big tipper and stuff — but he has a cheap heart. And you can tell him I said so.” Her eyes welled over with tears. “Terry knew it, too.”

  Going over to the closet, her thighs trembling, she pulled out a Whole Foods shopping bag and thrust it at me. Some clothes and a jumble of tapes and DVDs were crammed inside — some in neatly labeled boxes and some just jammed in.

  “Give these to him,” she said. “Tell him they’re from Nora. And tell him they all suck.”

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “Him,” she said. “On the air. He liked to watch himself on TV when he was in bed with Terry. Disgusting, huh? Terry thought it was funny, but I thought it was sick. I told Terry, ‘Why does he need you when he gets off on himself?’”

  She looked at me for a reaction, and when I didn’t have one, she said, “Celebrity Jeopardy! was his favorite. Know the show? He’d been on once and won nine thousand dollars. Big deal.” She dropped her voice an octave, offering a good imitation of host Alex Trebek’s monotonous singsong. “Final Jeopardy category: Rock Bands. Answer: ‘It gathers no moss.’” She slipped back to her own voice again. “Whoo, whoo. ‘What’s a Rolling Stone?’ He got it. So would my great-grandmother. But he made Terry and me watch it so many times you’d think he’d won the Nobel prize.”

  I snickered. Lying in bed watching tapes of himself. Even in Hollywood, that scored pretty high on the narcissism meter. An easy bet said that the interview with Jennifer Lopez had landed in the bag, too. Roy Evans was definitely more fascinated by himself than by anything else on the planet.

  But Nora had veered from fascinated. “Tell your friend Roy that I think he’s a sleazebag,” she said, blinking back tears. “And he’s just lucky they pinned the murder on that other guy.”

  I took a second to register that the other guy — the one they’d pinned the murder on — was Dan.

  Nora marched back into the living room, and when I followed her, I noticed a half-packed suitcase shoved into a corner.
<
br />   “Are you moving?” I asked.

  “Not right now.” She followed my gaze. “You mean the suitcase? I haven’t managed to unpack yet. I was away when…” She hesitated because, like me, she didn’t have a way of talking about the murder yet. “When…it happened, I was visiting my parents in Twin Falls. I’d seen Theresa’s parents, too. They gave me her Idaho Potato Queen crown to bring back.” The tears welled again. “When Terry got famous, I’d be her posse. Protect her. But I couldn’t even protect her now.”

  I was getting the picture. Theresa, the prettiest girl in Twin Falls, Idaho, had gathered her money and courage and escaped her small town, moving to Hollywood to try her luck. Nora, her loyal hometown best friend, had come along for support.

  “Do you think the police got the right guy?” I asked.

  “You mean do I think Roy did it?” She looked at me, almost for the first time. “Are you his new girlfriend?”

  “Um, no. Not really.”

  “Well, watch out. He starts out all sweet, but he’s a perv if you ask me. Always trying weird stuff. Made her wear high heels to bed. Said he liked women in killer heels. Brought over dirty magazines and triple-X videos and liked to tie her up and stuff. Plus watching the tapes of himself. Theresa said it was all compensation because he had a little dick. Really little.”

  We were getting out of my league.

  “When I first heard about…” Nora gulped. “About…what happened, I didn’t think it was Roy. My thought was, ‘Johnny. Oh my God. Johnny got violent again.’” She shrugged. “Pretty ironic. Theresa gets involved with a weirdo and an ex-con, and then it’s a doctor who did it. And he did. He was the one who was here that night.”

  I felt my chest tighten.

  “Was she involved with the doctor, too?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant and probably failing.

  “I don’t know.” She sniffled loudly and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “She was involved with too many people. This is a mean town. It makes girls do bad things. But Johnny was the one she loved, you know? And Johnny loved her. Roy was just using her. I’d always say, ‘Terry, he’s using you for sex.’ And she’d say, ‘Yeah, but I’m using him, too.’ She figured he’d help her with her career. But he wouldn’t. I knew he wouldn’t. All he cared about was himself.”