by Paul Heald
“You didn’t want to get in bed with them and Barkley,” Stanley concluded with an understanding nod of his head.
“Exactly. These are the last guys in the world I want to owe a favor.” He ran his fingers through his hair and smiled. “I do watch The Sopranos, you know.”
Stanley laughed, asked a few more questions, and learned that Barkley had approached Matteson a few weeks before the announcement that Babes in Toyland would be shown in mainstream theaters.
“One last question. Did Barkley mention that Chance Geary was involved in his plan in any way?”
“Nah, but it wouldn’t surprise me. They knew each other and that little fuck is so dirty I wouldn’t wipe my feet on him.”
Stanley laughed again and gave the director his card in case he thought of anything else that might be relevant to Don’s case. He said goodbye and made his way out of the studio and back to the car. Talking with Milton Barkley had suddenly risen to the top of his to-do list, and he hoped that Miriam had managed to arrange an interview. As he drove past the endless strip malls back to Eden, another thought entered his head: Why not have a look around the murder scene? McCaffrey thought the forensic team had completed its job, and he had the pass key to the office building. If he waited until later in the day when everyone at Eden was gone, he might dare to slip past the crime scene tape.
Stanley pulled in to Eden Studio after grabbing a quick sandwich and found that Don’s sullen secretary had already left, but on the walk back to his temporary office he discovered that he was not entirely alone. In the room next to him, an acne-scarred teenager was busy stuffing oversized envelopes with DVD’s. When the professor waved a greeting, the young man pulled off his ear phones and introduced himself as Jerry. He asked Stanley if he had locked the front door. The kid warned him about the neighborhood and informed him that the security guards had abandoned their posts when they found out that no more paychecks were coming.
“What about you?” Stanley asked. “Aren’t you worried about getting paid?”
“Nah, Miriam pays me cash every night before she goes. It’s a pretty sweet gig. I sit here all night filling orders.” He pointed to a storeroom full of DVD’s and promotional goods as he spoke. “And then get paid the next morning.” He winked. “But don’t tell the tax man.”
“I won’t,” Stanley promised. But I will tell your boss, he thought. Don might question how his secretary got the cash to pay the kid for his nightly duties. Once the clerk left, Stanley sat down and sorted through the notes left on his desk. A pink form told him that McCaffrey had called, and a yellow sticky set the time for a lunch appointment with Milton Barkley the next day. The last message was to call Janet Stephens. He wracked his brain for a moment, and then remembered that Layla DiBona had introduced herself by that name before their interview several days earlier.
He called McCaffrey first and found him at his desk finishing up the day’s paperwork. The detective told him that hair samples would be taken from everyone who attended the party on the night of murder. He also mentioned that no one had asked to pick up the victim’s body for burial. This was uncommon, he explained, even in cases of indigent deaths, but it was almost unheard of with well-off and well-connected victims. Stanley pondered the information. Don had no money to take care of Jade’s burial expenses, and Chance Geary was unlikely to be charitable. But where was Jade’s family? He had not asked a single question about the victim’s family, and the foolishness of the error reminded him that he was still a rank amateur in the detection business.
As he considered his omission, he heard a faint tapping on the front door and looked up to see if Jerry would answer it. Seeing no sign of the kid, he walked into the lobby and saw a smartly dressed blonde standing at the door.
Janet Stephens, aka Layla Dibona, followed him down the hall to his office and sat down with a smile. The middle-aged actress was dressed conservatively in jeans and a blouse, similar to the ensemble she had worn the first time they met, but she had added a turquoise choker to her long tan neck, and a more generous swell of bosom now peeked through the v-shaped opening of her silk top. “I dropped in this morning to collect my mail and Miriam complained that Don had given you an office here. I’ve been trying to get a hold of you.”
“How did you know that I was here this evening?”
“I was driving by on the way home, so I pulled in to check. I saw the rental car and figured it might be you.” She fingered the stone in the choker and smiled again. “I want to help with the investigation.”
Her expression was serious and her body language confident. Of all the people he had interviewed, she had struck him as the most intelligent and self-aware. He had seen one of her films too; she was a surprisingly good actress. He pushed away the steamy memory of a pool boy bending her over a deck chair and asked why she wanted to help.
“Because Don’s my friend.” She folded her hands in her lap and stared down at them while she spoke. “Everyone’s decided he’s the killer, but he’s the most decent person in this business, and I can’t stand seeing him slandered by every news show in the country. His reputation is destroyed and so is his business.” When she looked up, he could see tears glistening in the corner of her eyes. “You’re the only one standing by him and I want to help.”
She quickly regained her composure and ran through a laundry list of reasons why her former employer was incapable of murder. Her arguments were consistent with Stanley’ own personal experience, as long as he conveniently forgot about the fingerprints on the murder weapon and the stories of Don’s temper.
The possibility of taking on a partner was tempting. After his wife’s defection, he needed help badly, and Janet was a true insider with a wealth of knowledge about every facet of the industry. “I’m not sure.” He sent up a trial balloon. “Maybe we can start with a question that’s been buggin me. Tell me what you know about Jade Delilah’s background.”
She dabbed her eyes with a tissue and considered the question. “Nothing at all, I’m afraid, but I have a pretty good idea how to find out.”
XVII.
SEARCH AND SEIZURE
“We just need to break into Don’s office,” Janet explained to the surprised young professor. Don’s door was insubstantial and a quick flick of her credit card might suffice to open it up for inspection. A look at Jade’s personnel file would give him all the information he wanted about the dead porn star. Hell, Don had probably filed away his love letters to her.
Her new partner looked doubtful about the plan. Although he was handsome, and maybe even had some sex appeal underneath his god-awful choice of ‘professor chic’ apparel, his goggling at her plan made him look more like Don Knotts than Magnum P.I. She placed her hands on her hips and stared him into submission. With a sheepish look on his face, he produced a key to the office in an upraised palm.
“Come on,” she urged, “don’t you want to see the room where it happened?” He eventually nodded his head and then went down the hall to make sure the Eden envelope stuffer was still distracted by the death metal noise rumbling in his ear phones. She watched him and nodded her approval. He had a nice butt which the worn corduroys showed off nicely. With that kind of raw material to work with and a no-limit credit card, it would only take a couple of hours at the Armani boutique in Beverly Hills to make him presentable in the LA circles that counted.
He returned with a conspiratorial nod of his head and together they padded down the blue carpet into the lobby. The door to Don’s office was immediately on their right, crossed by a large X of crime scene tape. He stuck the master key into the lock, turned it without touching the doorknob with his fingers, and pushed the door open with his elbow. After he flipped the light switch on with a tissue, they ducked underneath the tape and found themselves just five feet away from the blood stained-carpet where Jade had been found. Well, well, she thought, they really do use white chalk to draw around dead bodies.
He edged his way farther into the room and motioned for
her to follow. She held her hand over her mouth and nose. “That’s a lot of blood.”
“Christ! It stinks,” he replied. “I’m gonna open up a window.” He walked behind Don’s big wooden desk, turned the window handle to the right and pushed outward. Nothing happened. It was locked tight. He turned the handle back to its original position, and the window pushed out easily and let in a blast of warm dry air from the back parking lot.
“Fuck me!” He muttered. “The window was open.” She knew immediately what he was thinking: Even if security were perfect at every door on the night of the murder, someone could still have snuck in through the unlocked window. “Come here,” he waved her over. “Do you think it’s big enough for someone to crawl through?”
She put her hand on the small of his back and leaned over his shoulder. “As long as they’re not a Sumo wrestler.”
Stanley pushed the drapes back and looked into the parking lot, trying to imagine it as the killer’s entry point. She made a quick check for fibers that might have caught on the window sash but saw nothing. She wondered aloud if the window was open the night of the murder.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “I don’t remember the report saying anything about it.” He promised to ask McCaffrey if the forensic team had found the window locked or unlocked and then turned his attention to two wooden filing cabinets standing against the wall to the left of the desk.
After fumbling with two small keys, he finally opened the drawer marked “personnel.” The files were ordered alphabetically by first name, beginning with Abby Lane and ending with Zephyr Breeze. “I saw this on porn websites too; it’s always by first name.”
“It’s not like the phone book,” Janet responded.
“I suppose,” he speculated as he leafed through the files, “that actresses are treated like girls because children do as they are told. If you call someone Ms. Jameson instead of just Jenna, she’s not as likely to jump into bed with three ugly dudes.”
She hesitated to credit his academic speculation, but experience told her that he was probably right.
“Here it is,” he exclaimed, “Jade Delilah (Lily Walker).” He pulled the hanging file folder out, swore and then turned it inside out to show it was empty. “McCaffrey must have taken it. He has to let me see it eventually, but I wanted to talk to her family before he did. I wonder what else is gone.” He looked around the room.
While he was trying to guess what had been taken, she took a closer look at the file drawers and saw one labeled 18 U.S.C. ‘ 2257. Here was a chance to prove her usefulness. She bent over, well aware of the impression her tight jeans were likely making on him, and explained the law that required legal documentation of the age of everyone who appeared in an adult film. Don would have to keep proof of age for all his actresses, including Jade, and it was highly likely that the cops had not bothered to cross-check.
She pulled the drawer out and stepped back to let him have the satisfaction of plucking out the file if it were still there. “Jade’s label said Lily Walker, right?”
While he searched for the right file, she took another quick look into the personnel drawer. Just as she feared, her own folder was empty. The police had decided that her file was worth taking too.
“Here it is,” the professor announced. He opened the file and found a single sheet of paper containing a photocopy of Jade’s driver’s license with a handwritten name and address scrawled underneath listing “William Walker” as Jade’s emergency contact. He scrutinized her license photo before handing it to Janet. “Damn. The DMV can make even a porn star look like a terrorist.”
She smiled. “Do you think William Walker is her father?”
“Maybe. It’ll certainly give me one more person to talk to who knew Jade.” He handed the folder back. “Why don’t you thumb through the rest of the files? I’ll see if I can find anything interesting in the desk and credenza.”
“What are we looking for?” She asked as she copied the information and refiled the paper.
“Hell if I know,” he admitted. “The cops have already done all the fingerprinting and fiber collection, so I guess we’re looking for anything that tells us something about Jade or Don or their love lives or whatever.” He shrugged. “A signed confession from Chance Geary would be nice.”
They spent the next two hours combing through the office. He started with the credenza and discovered that it was used as a general repository for DVD’s, adult film awards, framed pictures, and obsolete software. Apart from the fact that most of the videos starred Jade Delilah, he found nothing remarkable. Neither did he find anything that looked like evidence in the small refrigerator next to it. The desk was somewhat more promising, if only because of the enormous number of papers stashed in its drawers. He never would have guessed that Don could be so disorganized. In the left side drawer he found receipts from lunches and dinners, sometimes with the names of his fellow diners scribbled on them. He put those from the most recent three weeks together in a small pile on top of the desk. In the middle drawer, he found an assortment of office supplies, a map of Los Angeles County, a stick of deodorant, a set of keys, and a collection of business cards. He flipped through the cards, which consisted mostly of equipment vendors, agents, and production people. He was about to put them back when the card on the top caught his eye. It was from a lawyer, but not someone practicing entertainment law or some other specialty that might be relevant to the owner of an adult film studio. The card listed the name and address of Deborah Spellerburg, Women’s Justice Project, UCLA School of Law. On the back was written the time and date of the Tuesday immediately before the party.
He gazed down at it for a moment and then put it with the receipts he had saved. “Did you find something?” Janet asked from her station at the file cabinets.
“I don’t know. A card that might be worth following up on.” He looked over as she slowly picked her way through the files. With Jade’s file gone, he doubted that she would find anything interesting, but the job needed to be done. He watched her move gracefully about the room, then looked away and vowed to think of her in the same chaste way that Inspector Thomas Lynley thought about Sergeant Barbara Havers.
“Did you find anything interesting in the files?”
“Plenty,” she said, “but nothing relevant. I feel like a peeping tom. He’s got everyone’s STD records in here, but nothing has anything to do with Jade. It’s just personnel files, tax records, and business contracts, jammed in with some stock photos and stuff related to various ads and trade shows.”
Stanley tackled the final drawer and found little more of interest. If there were anything relevant, the police had taken it. They were undoubtedly focused on proving premeditation, so anything bearing on Don and Jade’s relationship was gone. He would have to contact McCaffrey and arrange for a time to sift through whatever had been collected. As Stanley helped Janet finish with the files, they heard a car pull up outside the open window.
“Shit!” the professor whispered and touched the porn star’s arm. “Shut that drawer and let’s get out of here.” They rushed toward the door, and she reached out to turn off the light. “No! Whoever it is will see it go off and know we’re here. Just get to my office.” They ducked under the tape, shut the door, and sprinted down the hall. He barely had time to close the door before someone entered the lobby.
“What do we do?” she whispered in his ear.
“Stay here ’til we know who it is.” He forced himself to be still, and she pressed her cheek to his shoulder, holding him tightly. A moment later they heard faint footsteps and the jangle of keys coming down the hall. The intruder passed their hiding place and continued to the storage room.
“Was it just the stock boy?” Before he could answer, he heard voices coming from the room and he cracked the door slightly.
“It’s Miriam!”
“What’s she doing back here?” The actress held her lips close to his ear as she spoke. Her breath was warm and cigarette tinged.
“Are you crazy? She’ll see us!”
“Not if we leave while she’s still in Don’s office. Let’s go!” He led her quickly down the hall, through the lobby and out the front door. After a quick look around to see if there was any convenient cover, he jogged over to the dumpster in the parking lot. “We can watch from here.”
Stanley poked his head around the corner of the rusted metal bin. Janet stood behind him with her hand over her nose, trying to minimize the stench from the garbage. He saw Miriam emerge from the building carrying a flat object in her left hand. She walked around the corner and got in her car without so much as a suspicious glance at her surroundings.
“Now that was interesting.”
“What did you see?”
“I think she was carrying a file folder.”
They stayed hidden until the car pulled out of the parking lot and sped away to the east. They waited a moment, then made their way back across the blacktop. By the time they reached Stanley’s car, he had a short-term plan in mind. “Do you still want to help me out?”
“Absolutely,” she exclaimed, “I haven’t had this much excitement in years.”
This was something he had never expected to hear from a porn star. “Then let’s get something to eat.” He looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight and I’m starving. We can talk and make a plan for tomorrow.”
