Looks to Die For

by Janice Kaplan

  I tossed a few of the files back in the box but didn’t bother putting them neatly away. Resolutely, I marched up the stairs, fingering the phone lists that I’d shoved into the pocket of my robe. Time to stop pretending.

  I heard the shower running and slipped into the bathroom, which was thick with steam.

  “Honey?” I called out.

  No answer. Dan couldn’t hear me over the rushing water.

  I waited for a moment, then untied my Hanro wrap robe and let it drop to the floor. I didn’t need an interrogation room to talk to my own husband. I pulled open the beveled frosted-glass door and stepped inside the shower.

  Dan looked up, startled.

  “Hi,” he said, uncertainly.

  “Hi.”

  I tried to smile. “Um, want me to wash your back?” I asked. Wasn’t this cozy. Husband and wife lathering up together. Well, maybe not cozy, since the shower stall was about the size of a standard room at the Hilton.

  Dan looked at me like I was crazy, but I took the washcloth from its hook, rubbed it over the thick cake of L’Occitane verbena soap, and stepped around so I was standing behind him. I stroked the washcloth in firm, wide circles around the ropy muscles in his broad, tensed shoulders.

  “Feels good,” Dan said, rolling his head as if trying to ease a crick in his neck.

  “It’s supposed to,” I said. It was going to be easier to unsnarl the knot in his neck than the knot in my stomach. I put down the washcloth and used both hands to massage his back, pivoting my thumbs along his spine and spreading my fingers over his trapezius muscles. Or maybe those were the latissimus dorsi. Good thing he was the doctor, not me, since I could never remember anatomy.

  But I knew enough about body parts to realize that with the warm water beating down, Dan was getting heated up. That hadn’t been the point, but if his excitement was rising, maybe his defensive instincts would start dropping.

  “I have a question for you,” I said, still ministering to his firm flexors.

  “Shoot,” Dan said.

  “What do you know about Johnny DeVito?”

  The name landed like a shot of cold water — the ultimate anti-Viagra. From my position behind, I couldn’t see Dan’s face, but his back stiffened and he pulled away from me.

  “Why do you care?” he asked.

  “Because something’s going on with you and Johnny DeVito,” I said, “and because I’m afraid of him. He left a menacing message at our house. He threatened me with a knife — a long story that I’ll tell you later. He might have killed Tasha Barlow. He might have killed her roommate. If he’s a friend of yours, I don’t think he’s a good influence.”

  Dan took a few steps over to the granite ledge that ringed the shower and sat down.

  “He’s not a friend,” Dan said, looking stricken. “I met Johnny DeVito many, many years ago. It was ancient history. Then he called me out of the blue.”

  Dan stopped.

  “Why did he call?” I asked.

  Dan shook his head and rubbed the back of his hand against the morning stubble on his chin. “Lacy, I know things are tough but talking about this isn’t going to help. Forget about Johnny DeVito. Let’s just try to preserve our relationship, okay?”

  I flipped my now wet hair back from my face. “You can try to preserve it, but if we don’t talk, it’s a little late. Sort of like trying to save the Parthenon. Haven’t you noticed? It’s already crumbled.”

  Dan gave a wry smile.

  I came over and sat next to him on the ledge, thigh to naked thigh. In other circumstances, it might have seemed sexy, but right now we were both stripped bare of anything but fear and uncertainty. Maybe there was something intimate about that, too.

  “A lot of people are risking their lives for you,” I said bluntly. “Molly dragged a dead body out of my car. Grant and Jake hacked into two Pac Bell accounts. I’ve been tied up twice. All that, and you can’t risk telling me what happened with Johnny DeVito?”

  Dan blinked his eyes as if I were spouting Swahili, but instead of asking what I was talking about, he said, “It was many, many years ago.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  Dan pursed his lips together, and then he seemed to make a decision. “Okay, here goes.” He took a deep breath. “Johnny DeVito showed up at my office very late one night, maybe fifteen years ago. I didn’t know who he was, but his face was a bloody pulp. Chunks of skin were hanging down, his nose was practically cut off, and his scalp was ripped away from his forehead. I told him to go to a hospital, but he wanted me to sew him up. He figured the police would be checking hospitals.”

  I made myself stay quiet, even though I was stunned.

  “I kept saying I wouldn’t help him,” Dan continued, “but he threatened me with a gun. And then he waved a huge wad of cash at me. Back in those days, all that money meant something, Lacy. My parents weren’t giving us anything. You were pregnant and I was just starting out in my practice. I took it and did the best I could.”

  “That doesn’t sound so awful,” I said in a small voice. “Maybe you wouldn’t do it now, but it was a tough situation.” Aristotle again.

  “I shouldn’t have done it then, either,” Dan said. “I figured out pretty fast that Johnny DeVito had been in a knife fight. You know the old joke about someone leaving a bar brawl with a black eye and saying, ‘Yeah, but you should see the other guy’? Well, in this case, the other guy was dead.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Some drug dealer. They were both high and who knows what they fought about. I told Johnny to come back in a few days so I could change the dressings, but he never did. A week later, he called to say that one side of his face was dripping pus. No big surprise that it was infected. He needed massive doses of antibiotics.” Dan slammed his right fist into his cupped left hand. “I could have done something if he’d come in. I told him it was going to scar.”

  Dan seemed more upset about the surgery taking a bad turn than anything else.

  “Keep going,” I urged.

  “Not much more,” Dan said. “I wanted to call the police at that point, but I’d have been arrested as an accomplice. Eventually, the whole thing faded away. Johnny went to jail on some other drug charge years later. Frankly, when I heard about that, I felt better. But then he got out. We’d never had any contact until he called me. He wanted his money back from the surgery.”

  Despite myself, I laughed. “Had you given a lifetime guarantee? I thought only L.L. Bean did that.”

  Dan looked down, his face a study in misery. I stood up and turned off the water, then got a soft Turkish towel for each of us. Dan draped his across his knees, and I tucked the fluffy fabric around my waist.

  Dan shrugged. “What was I going to do, Lacy? Johnny DeVito’s a skank, but a smart skank. He knew how far my career had come. Knew about my reputation. And I was worried that he wanted to destroy all of it. I couldn’t prove that he’d killed someone, but he was ready to spread the story that I’d ruined his face.”

  “You had an explanation.”

  “Which wasn’t going to play out very well in this town. Not with my clients.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “I arranged to give him back his thirty thou,” Dan continued. “All cash. He didn’t position it as blackmail — just that he wanted to go straight and it was tough getting work the way he looked. He said this was cheaper for me in every way than a malpractice suit. I should have known better, because instead of going away, he just ratcheted up the pressure.”

  “To do what?”

  “Give him more money. After the first time, he started sending emails telling me where and when to show up with cash. I went twice more. God, Lacy, I should have told you. Or called the police. Or someone. I think I would have, but then this wild murder charge came up. I didn’t think that announcing I was paying off an ex-con was going to help anything.”

  I thoughtfully raked my fingers through my wet hair, tucking a clump behind my
ears.

  “Where did you meet Johnny? For those drop-offs?” I asked.

  “His place,” Dan said.

  “A fancy house with a Mediterranean patio?” I asked.

  Dan shook his head. “More like a dive of an apartment in West L.A. One of those standard cheap rentals you despise.”

  “Brown tweed carpet and ratty brown sofa with bright orange pillows,” I said. “Bamboo TV stand and a chipped Formica table.”

  “Good description. I guess those places all look alike,” Dan said with a small smile.

  “They do look alike,” I said, feeling my heart pounding. “But this particular one — any chance it was apartment 4C in a building that figured that number belonged on the third floor?”

  Dan looked at me in surprise. “Exactly.”

  I put my arms around my husband. My eyes were filling with tears, and I buried my face in the crook of his shoulder. Ironic that Dan had done his best to avoid a minor scandal — and ended up with a major one. “This explains everything, honey — including all the evidence in the murder case about how you were at the victim’s place more than once. Now I get it. Don’t you see? You were meeting Johnny in Tasha Barlow’s apartment. She was his girlfriend.”

  By midafternoon, Dan and I were plopped on the couch in Chauncey Howell’s office, holding hands and smiling secretly at each other. Finally an explanation that made sense. Confession was good for the soul, and it had also been good for loving sex on the shower floor.

  But Chauncey wasn’t nearly as excited.

  “Interesting story, but I’m not sure what it gets us,” Chauncey said. “Do you have any proof Johnny DeVito was blackmailing you?”

  “He didn’t give me any receipts,” Dan said briskly. “But let’s see. I made some transfers from my account and then took it out in cash. I guess that should do it.”

  “You took out cash?” Chauncey asked scornfully. “All that proves is your wife was buying big-ticket antiques again and trying to avoid the sales tax.”

  “I haven’t bought anything in months,” I protested. “Or weeks, anyway.” At least days. Was he counting the 1940s Dresden dessert dishes I’d bought on eBay? They hadn’t even been shipped yet.

  “I’m just giving you a sample of what a prosecutor might say,” Chauncey explained.

  “I have the emails telling me where to go and how much to bring,” Dan reminded him.

  Chauncey grimaced. “Emails telling you to bring money to Tasha Barlow’s apartment, including the night she died. The DA could say it was the price you were paying for the night.”

  “But that’s not true,” Dan said.

  Chauncey shrugged and I rolled my eyes in frustration. To me, it all added up as neatly as Bill Gates’s checkbook. But Chauncey was seeing holes bigger than the Bush deficit.

  “Thirty thousand is a lot for a tryst,” I said, finding a flaw in Chauncey’s objection.

  “There was only five thousand in the envelope the police found,” Chauncey said, consulting his notes again. In Dan’s Hollywood circle, five thousand was what a producer might spend at Spago for a night of truffled pasta and vintage Dom Perignon with a few friends. And the fee wouldn’t be out of the question for a night of wild but discreet sex.

  Dan nodded. “Five thousand’s all he’d asked for. The previous two times were the same.”

  Chauncey drummed his fingers on his desk. “I can understand why you might have kept the blackmail quiet at first — hoping it would just go away. But why didn’t you tell the police about it the night you were arrested?” Now Chauncey wasn’t pretending to be the prosecutor — he really wanted to know.

  “Because the connection didn’t occur to me.” Dan covered his eyes briefly with his hand, then rubbed the bridge of his nose in chagrin. “I’d brought cash to Johnny DeVito in a scuzzy apartment in West Los Angeles. A young actress died in a place near the ocean. It didn’t click until Lacy realized it was the same place.”

  Chauncey nodded and then, softening his tone slightly, said, “Look, I’m not saying this can’t help. The case against you is circumstantial. And given your blackmail story, we can at least suggest different circumstances. Let’s go through it one more time.”

  Dan grimaced but plunged in. At the first payoff, Johnny DeVito had met him in the apartment and counted the envelope of cash before letting Dan go. He’d promised Dan they were even now. But then came the demands by email. Dan was instructed that someone would buzz him into the building, and he should come up to apartment 4C. The door would be open, and he should leave the envelope of cash on a table in the front hall. At the last drop-off, he found a note on the table when he got there, asking him to wait for about twenty minutes. He should have something to drink while he waited and make himself comfortable. If nobody came, he could leave. Dan paced around the apartment and flipped through a newspaper. He got a glass of water and blew his nose a couple of times. After about thirty minutes, he left, figuring Johnny would just come by later to get it.

  “So Johnny was in Tasha’s apartment that night, too,” I said to Chauncey, in case he hadn’t thought of that.

  “Or else he wasn’t,” Chauncey said, frowning. “The envelope was still there when the body was found.”

  “My God, Chauncey, isn’t this obvious?” I was practically shrieking. Why didn’t he get this? “Johnny was blackmailing Dan. He knew Dan would be at the apartment that night for the payoff. So he killed his girlfriend — for whatever reason — and framed Dan. It’s obvious. End of story.”

  Chauncey looked at me solemnly. “I hear you, Lacy, I do. And I wish it were that easy. But we’ve checked out Johnny DeVito very carefully. He has an alibi for that night. He wasn’t even in town.”

  I looked down and smoothed my softly pleated Zac Posen skirt. It might have been a little young, so just to be safe, I’d paired the pastel print with a sophisticated white Celine jacket. But right now I wouldn’t have felt protected in a snowsuit.

  “Dan, let me point out something else,” Chauncey continued, tapping his fingers on the desk. “If the prosecutor buys your story of the pay-offs, his scenario goes something like this: You got to the apartment and Johnny DeVito wasn’t there but his girlfriend was — waiting in a skimpy peignoir. You were angry at Johnny and wanted to send a message, so you killed her.”

  Dan and I looked at each other, but this time neither of us was smiling.

  “Whose side are you on?” I asked Chauncey.

  “Yours,” he said. “Unequivocally. But a defense has to explain the evidence. All of it. Dan’s story gives him a reason for being at Tasha’s apartment, but if he continues to claim he never saw the woman, we’re stuck. For example, how do we explain the neighbor who heard Tasha scream, ‘Stop it, Dr. Fields, stop it!’”

  I felt my spirits sinking faster than a Chicago Cubs fan before the World Series. I stood up. My head was hurting and I’d had enough. “By the way,” I said to Chauncey, putting my Fendi bag over my shoulder, “if Johnny DeVito has an alibi for that night, where was he?”

  “Working,” Chauncey said. He glanced through a thick file of papers, then closed it and pulled out another one. Finally he found what he wanted. “Since he got out of jail, your Johnny’s been picking up jobs as a stagehand. Or a grip, I guess it’s called these days. This was a commercial for Honey Twists cereal and they were on location in a small town in Nevada for most of the day and night. Plenty of people can confirm. Including a hotshot producer named Julie Boden.”

  Chapter Eleven

  When I called Sammie, she said her boss wouldn’t be in all week — she was out in Rainbow Basin, just north of Barstow, producing another Mars-lander Buick commercial.

  “Julie’s a genius,” Sammie raved. “She got Jessica Simpson as the talent this time.”

  Calling Simpson “talent” seemed like a stretch to me, but then Sammie was young.

  “How about Roy Evans?” I asked. “Is he doing this one?”

  “No. Julie fired him.” Sammie hesitated t
hen cleared her throat. “Did you know the police identified the body that was on Roy’s car? It’s really strange, Lacy. She’d been roommates with that other girl who died. The one you asked Julie about. How weird is that?”

  “Odd,” I said, not adding that the whole situation had become even odder than Sammie knew.

  “But the police say someone dumped the body there while Roy was in the club,” said Sammie. “Julie triple-checked that. Roy’s off the hook.”

  “Except for the little matter of the drug charge.”

  “Oh, that.” Sammie sighed. Then, parroting what she’d no doubt heard from Julie, she said, “It was just an ounce and this is Hollywood. Everyone does it. Roy’s famous — or semifamous — and he has a good lawyer. He’ll get off.” Good thing Sammie came to California, because she’d never have learned all that at Vassar.

  “So have you and Julie been busy with a lot of shoots?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “You bet,” said Sammie enthusiastically. She reeled off the names of three products they were promoting, including Honey Twists, and I asked when they’d shot the commercial for that one. She gave me two dates — one of them the day Tasha had died.

  “I heard that was a long day of shooting,” I said carefully.

  “Day and night and part of the next day,” said Sammie brightly. “Can you imagine trying to get six five-year-olds to say ‘Twists are my favorite tweat!’ without spitting up their cereal? I’m surprised the whole crew’s not still there.”

  “Do you know if a guy named Johnny DeVito was working as a grip?” I asked.

  “I haven’t heard of him, but I’ll check.”

  I heard her clacking on her computer, and in a moment she said, “The director didn’t have his name on the crew list. But Julie must have hired him separately, because she put him on the credit sheet.”

  That was a new one — an executive producer handpicking her grips. I thanked Sammie for her help, then hung up and called Molly.