Death on the D-List

by Nancy Grace

  “Yes, how could I forget that? As if the tabs want a shot of him lying on his sofa eating a bag of chips.”

  “Hold on, Sookie, Tony’s dialing in.”

  “No! I can’t take all his slathering this early in the day. Just tell me what he wants.”

  “Okay.” Pressley momentarily put her boss on hold to find out what Tony wanted without increasing Sookie’s frustration. “Hello? Tony?”

  “Pressley, where’s Sookie? I have to talk to her right now.” As usual, Tony Russo was frantic.

  “I have her on the phone right now, she knows it’s you and wants to know what’s up?”

  “It’s about today’s show. Patch me through.”

  “Hold, please.” Manipulating buttons on the phone, she put Russo on hold and went back to Sookie.

  “He needs to talk to you right now about the show. It sounds urgent.”

  “Why can’t he just leave a message?”

  “I already asked.”

  “I’m going to shoot myself. I can’t take it anymore. I’m getting a migraine. Patch him through.” Sookie held the back of her left hand over her forehead and lay back on the pillows of a deep-cushioned sofa there in the changing room.

  Maybe she would take a tiny sip of the tea, after all. Could she put some gin in it?

  Tony’s voice blasted into the cell. He’d never learned the concept of an “inside voice.” Practically everything came out several decibels too loud. As a preemptive maneuver, Sookie had already dialed down the volume on her phone.

  “You have to call Harry. I just booked Dean on the Prentiss Love show. But you know Harry’ll threaten not to host if she’s on.”

  “Can’t you deal with him?”

  “I tried already. Didn’t work. He’s threatening to do the World Series.”

  “Doesn’t that happen, like, a year from now?”

  “Doesn’t matter. He wants to predict who he thinks will make it all the way. Besides the Yankees, of course.”

  “But that’s a year away and there will only be one other team. What’s there to say?”

  “Then he can rail about the Yankee payroll.”

  “Why are we talking about this? Prentiss Love’s body’s still warm. We are not doing a show about the World Series.”

  “I know that, you know that, but Harry doesn’t know it. You have to call him. Tell him we need the numbers.”

  “Harry doesn’t care about the numbers. He doesn’t understand why we all get paid. He thinks viewers tune in for him. He doesn’t get it’s about the guests. And he hates Hailey Dean. She showed him up and made him look like an idiot. At least keep her away from him. Put her in a flash studio with the logo behind her.”

  “Done. I’ll tell her it’s to make her happy. Needless to say, the hatred is mutual.”

  “Okay.” Sookie agreed. “I’ll call him. We can’t miss the Prentiss Love train. She’s only gonna get murdered once. Same as Stockton.”

  “What time do you meet with Fryer? Want me to come?” Russo would give his eyeteeth to be in the same room as the GNE president.

  “Not till he gets out of his bathroom.”

  “Locked in again?”

  “Yes. It’s totally ruined my schedule for today. By the way, where are you?”

  “At the office, of course.”

  “Come meet me for coffee at Bergdorf’s.”

  He knew what that meant. Sookie translation . . . Come buy my lunch plus whatever I spot that I want, and don’t you dare try to expense it. He dreaded meeting her at any major department store, much less a little boutique. Sookie always spotted extremely expensive items and pressured Tony into buying them as gifts to her. He really couldn’t afford it, but she was the boss, and she had the ears of not only Harry Todd, but all the network bigs.

  “Now?” He could only croak out the one syllable. His budget really didn’t include one of Sookie’s “lunches,” aka buying spree.

  “No, idiot. Tomorrow.”

  Russo was already headed toward the elevator to go out and hail a cab. He had to. Sookie picked three of the minis off the floor, and sticking only part of her left hand out through the changing room door, she thrust the clothes into the arms of one of the sales girls.

  “Ring it up.” She said it through the door and the girl trotted off.

  Sookie plopped back down into the soft, deep cushions of one of the massive but delicately flowered chairs. After a few moments of collecting herself, she gathered all her strength to lean forward and zip up her own pair of black, stiletto suede Dior boots. Pulling the zip smoothly up the inside calf, she once again admired her own legs. These Diors would look great with the new red mock-croc mini. It couldn’t be longer than eight inches, top to bottom . . . perfect.

  She exhaled loudly for emphasis, as if someone were listening. Sookie always imagined she had an audience.

  What she did for The Harry Todd Show.

  Chapter 18

  IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY ON THE LINKS. THE SUN WAS SHINING, THE BREEZE was cold but gentle, and the smell of the ocean carried from the shore all the way to the greens. Scott Anderson strode purposefully across some of the most beautiful grass the great state of New York had ever seen.

  The greens and the “rough” as well were manicured to perfection by a fleet of horticulturists, landscape designers, and groundskeepers, and they all would have burst into tears to see Anderson digging his golf cleats into the tender shoots of grass as he headed uphill toward the driving range. Oblivious, Anderson continued off the hand-built path to his next lesson. He didn’t want to be late.

  Anderson was finally starting lessons with Fallon Malone. Her personal assistant had been trying for months to schedule times with him, and they had actually had a few lessons planned, written in stone, but for one reason or another, Fallon always canceled or no-showed.

  Normally, Scott Anderson would have refused to reschedule a lesson after a no-show, but how often did a golf pro like himself get to teach the game to a movie icon like Fallon Malone? I mean, was there anybody left in America who hadn’t seen her in the car wash scene?

  She was a star. And he was going to be her golf guru. And hopefully, more than that. His good looks combined with the manners he’d picked up along the way had served him well. It was no secret Anderson loved the ladies.

  It wasn’t hard. The women who took lessons from Anderson wouldn’t leave him alone. The way he saw it, he was doing them a favor.

  At the top of the hill, Scott spotted a black limo outside the club house. It had to be Fallon. As soon as he got about thirty feet from the car, a burly, uniformed driver jumped out of the limo and briskly approached him.

  “Can I help you, sir?” He stood, nonchalantly but menacingly between Scott and the limo.

  “Hello.” Scott beamed his best and friendliest smile, known to disarm cats, dogs, and women alike. It didn’t seem to be working on the driver. He continued. “I’m the club’s golf pro, Scott Anderson. You may have heard of me, twenty-fifth at Pebble Beach three years ago? You a golfer?”

  “No, sir. I am not. But I am the driver for Ms. Malone. She’s here for her lesson.” Without another word, he turned on his heel and went back to the limo, opened the back passenger side door, and out she stepped.

  Long legs, just like in the movies, swung out of the back seat. The rest of her followed. She took off dark sunglasses and held her left hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. Even without the stage makeup, she was a looker.

  “Hello, Mr. Anderson. I hear you’re quite the pro! I’ve simply got to learn to play some semblance of the game for a role I’ve got my eye on. But let me warn you, I’ve never swung anything but a water hose!”

  “And I saw that! When you washed the Vette and you swung the hose around like a lasso at the end! You were tremendous! Obviously, I’m a big fan. I still say you were robbed at the Oscars!”

  Did he say she was robbed at the Oscars? Those were the magic words to Fallon Malone’s heart. He loved her acting. She be
amed up at him and tossed her dark hair back behind her shoulders.

  The limo driver rolled his eyes after he turned away from the two and headed back to the car. Here she goes again. He grimaced. He knew where this was headed. Another affair with practically a complete stranger . . . and in his limo. If he didn’t get paid so much to cart Malone around, he’d demand she and Anderson go to a hotel.

  And as it turned out, the driver was right. The mutual attraction was consummated immediately following Fallon’s “coach-led analysis” to better understand her swing and reach her “full yardage potential.” The two never made it to the personal club fitting so Anderson could precisely match Fallon’s clubs to her swing. In fact, they never made it past the pro quarters adjacent to the men’s locker room.

  That afternoon led to rendezvous everywhere, from Fallon’s apartment in Manhattan to Fallon’s limo to the back of the local IHOP a few miles from the club. All the meetings were surreptitious, as Anderson was not allowed to “date” anyone he instructed at the club.

  Fallon’s driver predicted it. Same thing all over again . . . the gin bottles and the pantyhose in the back seat again. Gin bottles and pantyhose.

  Chapter 19

  FRANCIS WAS REELING. HE PUSHED HIS DARK HAIR AWAY FROM HIS forehead with both hands, holding them tight against either side of his head. He couldn’t take it in . . . Prentiss Love . . . dead?

  His chest pounded and his mouth went dry. He didn’t even try to fight back the tears.

  The cable news networks were wall to wall with funeral plans. He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He hated them. They were totally whoring out the memory of a beautiful, delicate woman that had been one of his great loves. They were dredging up everything, harping especially on her alleged problems with drugs and alcohol, which Francis was convinced were false. Old boyfriends were dragged on and off the screen like it was a parade. Harry Todd especially liked to delve into her romantic past.

  But all Prentiss’s so-called “boyfriends” turning up on TV were idiots. They didn’t know her like Francis did. If Todd had a clue, he’d contact Francis. But Francis wouldn’t talk. Not even to Harry Todd. Francis was a gentleman and always would be. He’d rather die than kiss and tell.

  Sitting there in the early morning darkness of his mother’s living room, he looked down at his own two hands, stretched out over the expanse of his two knees. They sat there, seemingly innocent. They were hands more befitting a surgeon or a poet . . . maybe a musician, possibly piano or strings.

  These hands could never kill Prentiss Love . . . Could they?

  True, the last week had been a big blur. He’d had “dates” with both Leather and Prentiss. The overpowering smell of the incense and candles he burned on those special nights still hung in the air. Then after that, he remembered the Jehovah’s Witnesses skulking around on the front porch. He remembered being angry at Prentiss . . . But then it all seemed to fade away.

  When he headed out to Dunkin’ Donuts this morning, he found the gas tank of his mom’s car completely empty, but he had absolutely no recollection of where he’d been. The Post had compared the two. Prentiss shot in Manhattan, Leather out in the Hamptons.

  Could he? It was Tuesday morning. GNE said so and he had no reason to believe the network was part of the government’s plan to eradicate him and others like him, those who believed in true and unfettered freedom.

  If the cable network was to be believed, over two weeks had passed since his last clear recollection. Francis clicked the remote and changed channels to the TV Guide station.

  He sat and thought, his head in his hands. Yes, he had to be honest, at least with himself . . . He’d had dreams of killing them . . . powerful dreams. When he’d thought Prentiss had had an affair with a guy on her show, he was devastated and yes, he’d thought of circling her beautiful neck with his hands and squeezing the life out of her. He’d had similar dreams about Leather as well . . . and other women, too. They’d often coincided with nights he’d argued with his mother. That she-devil from hell.

  This was all her fault . . . if she hadn’t harangued him over the years about everything from his meds to his haircut to getting a job, he wouldn’t have had those murderous dreams or ever acted them out.

  He still couldn’t take it in. How could he go through with it? True, in the dreams he’d actually enjoyed strangling the women . . . but in real life? No way.

  Francis had an idea. Rousing himself out of his chair, he checked the front porch to ensure neither the Jehovah’s Witnesses nor the Amway reps were lurking, then went out to his mother’s car. He always kept meticulous records of mileage, oil changes, you name it. In fact, he’d kept every gas receipt along with every tune-up and oil change record for the last twelve years. Same for the tires.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. Nearly two thousand additional miles were logged on the odometer. It could only mean one thing. Francis did it. He drove from here, Marksville, Louisiana, to New York and back. Obviously in a murderous haze.

  Had he been drugged? He felt groggy. Maybe the government had drugged him up for some reason. S.O.B.’s. But no way he’d let the government get the best of him . . . They weren’t going to drug him up, make him commit murders, and then frame him.

  No way. Francis Merle McGinnis could certainly outthink the U.S. government. He had to think, and doing so, he became convinced his fingerprints would turn up on the crime scenes. The government probably knew he collected guns . . . and both Prentiss and Fallon were shot to death.

  Should he hide all of them now? Was one of them the murder weapon? He could bury them in the backyard tonight. Wrap them in sheets and bury them. That’s what he would do. Bury his guns.

  Was this part of their plan to frame him?

  Think . . . Think!!! He commanded his brain to work.

  He was in agony. Had two of his beautiful ladies died at his own hands? The pain was almost too much for him to bear.

  Tears rolled down his face. Did he himself do it? True, he’d had dreams of killing Stockton after being rebuffed, but those were just dreams, weren’t they? Plus, in his dreams he never shot her; he’d dreamed he strangled her pretty white neck, not put a bullet through her brain.

  He’d never disfigure a great beauty like that.

  And then, there were the flowers he’d sent Prentiss. He’d gotten a form response. She didn’t even bother to thank him herself. Was it too much effort for her to pick up a pen? And he’d paid plenty for those flowers, too.

  But he didn’t really expect Prentiss to blow their secret. Their love transcended the prying minds of her assistants, agents, and all the flunkies surrounding her, much less the general public itself.

  He didn’t need a handwritten thank-you. She spoke to him that night on the airwaves and thanked him from the heart. Her eyes, which appeared to be looking into the camera but were really looking at him, had melted his soul.

  He would never hurt her. Not intentionally, anyway . . . the dreams were just that, dreams. No matter how vivid . . . how lifelike . . . right?

  But just in case, Francis got up and headed to the kitchen. Leaning back against the kitchen sink, he studied the kitchen table. His worst fears were realized. The table was a few inches out of place, he could tell, because the table’s legs were not sitting squarely inside the four indentations they made over time into the linoleum floor beneath it. Somebody had moved the table.

  Dragging the kitchen dinette from the center of the floor, he turned back to where it had sat, knelt down on the floor, and placed his right hand between two of the linoleum squares. Lifting a four-by-five-foot block of linoleum upward revealed a crawlspace dug beneath the kitchen floor.

  Francis crawled down into the space and pulled the dinette back over himself and the hole in the kitchen floor. He army-crawled the five feet or so to his cache of weapons and HCBs, to get rid of potential evidence.

  There were over a hundred weapons down here and he’d lost count of the amount of ammunition he’d stockpiled
over the years. Then of course, there were the Homemade Chemical Bombs.

  Francis took great time and care creating them and when talking to friends online, he referred to them as his “babies.” He loved them all equally, he swore when asked, but his personal favorites were the ones he’d made of toilet bowl cleaner mixed with Drano and tinfoil, poured into a screw-top Coke bottle for just the right amount of pressure. He had at least twenty-five of them already prepared, but he still wasn’t sure he was sufficiently armed for the inevitable showdown to come.

  After all, look at what had happened at Waco and David Koresh. Koresh thought he was ready too, until ATF blasted up in there.

  Francis pulled the thin chain attached to a single lightbulb over his head. The bulb was wired into a series of two-by-fours running from underneath the kitchen stove above to the center of the dug-out room beneath the kitchen floor.

  Although everything looked untouched, just as he’d left it the last time he was down here, looking around, Francis could sense a government intruder had been in his lair. Several of the long guns were laid out, just as he’d left them, on a wooden work table he’d brought down piece by piece and assembled by the light of the single bulb overhead. Before the murders, he’d always loved coming down here at all hours of the day and night, cleaning them, keeping them all on the ready.

  Between his blackout the weeks of the murders, the vivid dreams about strangling his beloveds, the odometer reading, and the obvious tampering with his gun cache, Francis knew the truth. The papers were vague about the calibers. He hardly knew where to start. Could he leave all the guns here? Would it be safe? And more important . . . Which one was the murder weapon?

  What he did for love.

  Chapter 20

  EMORY DAVIS, MD, WAS ON DUTY THAT NIGHT WORKING THE GRAVEYARD shift. He was the newest medical examiner on the roster, and obsessed with dead bodies since childhood. It didn’t win him many friends in school, but it did land him the chief intern spot, and then a full-time position at one of the busiest morgues in the country. At this hour of the night, all his youthful fantasies were fulfilled.