by David James
The security guards that were hired to protect us finally showed up with bags of hamburgers and fries in their hands. By that time, the police had arrived again, setting up shop with regularity that was almost wearying. Another day, another murder. Everyone had been shooed downstairs. Jerry arrived and escorted me upstairs with him.
“Upstairs she go again, the murderess,” Gilles sniped. Before I got out of eyesight, I turned around for the cameras and stuck out my tongue at Gilles. We headed to Aleksei’s room where Jerry surveyed the scene before going in.
“Everyone seems to think this was unintentional suicide, Jerry.”
“Suicide? Who thinks that?”
“Everyone. Even Aurora.”
“Oh, in that case, I can just pack up and go home now. A celebrity shrink thinks it was suicide.”
“So you don’t think so?” I asked as Jerry made his way carefully into the room.
“No, I know so. Look at the way the tie has been pulled up from behind . . . er, Adam’s . . . ?”
“Aleksei’s.”
“. . . Aleksei’s neck. See the marks on the neck? The abrasions are at the back, with most of them pointing vertically. The tie was pulled way up. In fact, you can see from the marks on the chair’s velvet upholstery, on the arms, that Aleksei was pulled up and struggled with his hands, pushing down to take the tension off his neck. Whoever did this was very tall.”
“That eliminates one person downstairs: Marcus Blade.”
“Mini-Me Hulk downstairs?”
“He can’t be five foot two. Then there’s Aurora, she’s short too.”
“So everyone else is tall?” Jerry asked.
“Everyone. Even Ian and me. Well, Lance Greenly, Ian’s CEO, is about five foot eight.”
“So I assume the pile of drugs here on the dresser is crystal meth?”
“Probably. Aleksei had a problem with it and was here recuperating from it.”
Jerry pulled a folding magnifying glass from his back pocket.
“That is soooo Sherlock Holmes,” I said.
“Elementary, my dear Amanda.”
He bent over Aleksei and looked closely up his nose.
“Trying to see if he snorted any crystal?”
“Yes. Good girl. Yup, there’s some up his nostril, but the medical examiner will tell us if it goes all the way up.”
“Why would it not go all the way up into his nasal passages?”
“Just a hunch, Amanda. Just a hunch.”
“Are there other ways of doing crystal, Jerry?”
“Smoking it. But I don’t see a pipe anywhere.”
“He could have put it away in a drawer, or hidden it,” I suggested.
“If he was deliberately going to get high here in his room—and you said he was an addict—then he knew he would be high for a long time.”
“So what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” I asked.
“What’s the rush in putting a pipe away? Or a needle if he was injecting? There’s plenty of time to put things away. Plus, you never know. Meth is so addictive, the user always knows he’s going to want more eventually.”
“So those are the only ways of getting high on meth?”
“Some use it as an anal suppository, Amanda.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not checking there, if that’s what you’re driving at. But be my guest.”
“No thanks, Jerry. So you don’t think he was high and jerking off doing a little autoerotic asphyxiation?”
Jerry looked at me with all seriousness. “This is not to leave this room.”
I made a sign of crossing my heart.
“No, he might have been jerking off, but I doubt the autoerotic part.”
“Do you think the killer jerked him off after he died? Isn’t that possible? I heard that men can have erections after being hanged.”
Jerry looked at me like I was crazy. “You think someone got him sexually aroused after he was strangled?”
Maybe I was crazy. “No,” I said. “I guess not. I have trouble getting guys aroused when they’re completely awake and alive.”
“You? I can’t imagine it. A sexy woman like you?”
Normally, I would have deflected his compliment and crushed it with a joke, but this time I didn’t. The look in Jerry’s eyes stopped me in my tracks. His eyes were mischievous, teasing, tempting. The look lasted for only a second, but it was there nonetheless. I was being hit on. It stunned me. I wasn’t prepared. But then again, how does one prepare for something like this?
“Jerry, I don’t know what to say.”
“Maybe it’s best if you didn’t say anything,” he replied, looking around the room for perhaps a diversion? “Anyway. . .”
“Yes . . .” I said, like an adulterous wife who narrowly escaped getting caught cheating. And just like that, we went back to our old lives. Respectable. Professional. Uninvolved. Not starting an affair.
“How about a DNA sample?” Jerry asked.
“Excuse me, I’m not that kind of girl.”
“No, Amanda, I’m going to have the crime people take a DNA sample of the sperm here on the floor. I’m suspicious. . . Just a hunch.”
“You have a lot of hunches, Jerry.”
“That’s all my job is, Amanda. Hunches that need to be proved correct.”
“You know, Jerry, I have a few myself. I guess I need to check them out. What I don’t understand is why someone . . . wait a minute! Aleksei really shot his mouth off yesterday at Jean-Michael’s. He probably said something he shouldn’t have.”
“And I assume it was all on film?”
“On tape, if you want to be technical. High-definition videotape. Call it what you want.”
“I think we need to look at that footage as soon as possible. Our answer to this whole mess might just be on there.”
CHAPTER 23
What A Load of Fertilizer
Later that afternoon, I decided to go looking for answers myself. First stop: the potting shed in the backyard. I left Ian’s house and walked the expansive lawn toward the back of the eight-car garage. As I neared the shed, I could have sworn someone was there walking behind me. I stopped and turned around quickly but saw no one. Were all these murders creeping me out? Was my mind playing tricks on me?
I entered the unlocked shed and stood there silently, taking it all in. What was I looking for? I wish I knew. Maybe I’d see something that might spur my mind if I saw it. If I were Hercule Poirot, I would start by thinking about what might have happened; then I would reconstruct the steps of the crime. Okay, I didn’t have a French accent, but I could live with that. Everything had been gone over by the police and was back in its proper place, so I was looking at everything that was there the day of the murder. If what I was looking for was there in the first place. One thing at a time.
I looked at everything in the shed and went through the inventory, item by item, taking them down and examining them, then putting them back exactly where I got them. On the top shelf was the gopher poison and a bottle of Malathion. Spotless bottles of poison. Agatha Christie would have loved this. The next shelf down, Miracle-Gro, bonemeal, and two labeled wooden boxes, one containing three pairs of gardening gloves, the other containing three garden trowels. Again, spotless. The gloves looking like they had never touched dirt. Mine, I had to admit, were never this clean. No dirt on them whatsoever. Drake apparently washed them after every use. Just two shelves. On the main potting table, there were just four pots, all containing succulents presumably ready to go out in the yard now that the days were slowly getting cooler. Also, there was a small, four-drawer cabinet filled with twist ties and a pad of paper with a list of more plants under the heading “To Buy.” I looked at the pad to see if there were impressions on the pages below made by previous notes, but nothing was discernible. Under the table on a shelf below was a dented half-gallon paint can to hold paint while painting, two two-gallon paint cans of latex Ralph Lauren paint (I shook them just to make
sure there was paint in them), a jar of eight different paintbrushes all so clean you’d think they were never dipped in paint, and finally, toward the back, an opened bag of bonemeal. I hauled the heavy bag to the front, took the five perfectly spaced clothespins off the top, and stuck my hand inside, looking for a gun or something dangerous. I felt plastic toward the bottom, grabbed at it, and pulled out a . . . a baggie with hundreds of dollars in it. Followed by another. And another. And another. No, not hundreds. Thousands. I counted one bag and estimated the amount in the others and came up with a figure of $87,000. Had the cops missed all this? In the bottom of the fifth baggie, there was a key that looked like a safe deposit key. (I know, since I carried one on my key ring.) I put the baggies back, burying them down at the bottom of the bag. On the floor . . . I just couldn’t get over the money. Eighty-seven thousand! And probably much more than that in a safety deposit box in a bank somewhere, all of it, no doubt, belonging to Drake. I imagined Drake was planning his escape from Casa de Ian. Or he was embezzling from Ian, skimming money off the top of his estate. Anyway, not my business. Okay, back to work. On the floor, I pulled out three pots filled with gravel, sand, and the last one, Japanese river rocks. All white. I explored deep inside the pots but came up with nothing.
And those were the contents of the shed. Not much to go on, unless you thought that keeping close to $100,000 in a bag of bonemeal was suspicious. I exited the shed and closed the door behind me. I still swear someone was watching me, eyes peering from somewhere unknown, but after scanning the ficus hedges, the Mediterranean fan palm groves, and the visible upper stories of the various windows that looked down on this part of the yard, I concluded that it was just the heebie-jeebies caused by the fact that a murderer was still stalking around, maybe waiting to strike again. It was natural to feel this way, I told myself.
CHAPTER 24
Maybe You Should Talk To A Psychiatrist About That
Since I was on a roll, I felt like I needed to talk with someone who wasn’t an obvious suspect. That ruled out the entire crew, Ian, Jeremy, and his assistant, Tony. Even though Darryn wasn’t even in town when Keith was bumped off, I ruled him out as too much of an outsider and not in the know about what was going on at Ian’s estate. I sat down next to Aurora, itching to get started. If anyone could shed some light on this whole mess, it would be her.
I wanted to meet Aurora on neutral territory, so we met at a dark Mexican restaurant that no one ever went to. I didn’t want anyone from the cast coming in and seeing me with Aurora. A lot of the guys in the tribe weren’t too smart, but they would know enough if they walked in and saw me talking to Aurora.
Aurora stilted into the restaurant on towering heels, dressed in her usual black. (I wondered what she would look like in pastels.). She sat down and folded her long hands on the table in front of me, her black nails clacking loudly before they came to a silent rest.
“So what was so urgent and secret that you had to meet me here . . . and that I couldn’t tell anyone about?” she asked.
I leaned forward, not to keep my conversation volume low, but because I was becoming quite the actress. I wanted to add some drama.
“I want you to tell me everything you know about everyone.”
“Amanda!” Aurora replied incredulously. “That would take forever. Plus, remember, what I know about Ian is held in the strictest confidence.”
“But you can tell me about the rest of the cast, can’t you? And Jeremy and Tony and Lance?”
“Of course. I’m not treating them.”
“Great! Let’s start with the non-cast members.”
“Amanda, you’re trying to figure out who killed Keith, aren’t you? You didn’t invite me here because you want to get something over the other cast members, did you?”
“Aurora, I have nothing to gain by learning the other guys’ dirty secrets . . . but wait . . . have other guys from the show approached you for that purpose?”
“All of them! Look, we all know these guys aren’t going to write a discourse on the meaning of the Arab Spring to Western democracies, but they know how to defend their turf and play dirty and fight back when they need to.”
“So let’s start. Jeremy and his little sycophant, what’s-his-name? How did you get to know him?”
“What do you mean, Amanda?”
“I mean that you obviously had to know him somehow. How did he come up with the idea for the show?”
Aurora thought for a moment. “I think he knew Ian somehow. Or maybe he went to Ian to get his hair styled. I can’t remember exactly. Do you want their entire history, or just how you think they might be involved in Keith’s murder?”
“Through the filter of your psychological insight.”
“This won’t go outside this room?”
“You have my word, Aurora.”
“Okay. Do I think Jeremy could have killed Keith? For ratings? Sure. He’s driven, maniacal. Plus, he’s a producer. They’re bloodthirsty people who are only as good as their last movie or series. The money is part of it, but it’s really the ego that has to be fed. They live in L.A., so they’re constantly surrounded by stars, agents, studio execs . . . all of whom they think are judging them. And, to be honest, they are being judged. In Hollywood, the reality is a big, paranoid, cultish, collective bunch that is so skewed from the rest of the planet. Jeremy’s is a slowly rising star. He’s had some real failures, so those are still chasing him. But he’s had a few mild successes, which no one remembers. But this show? Whew. He knows that Keith’s murder is going to shoot this show into the heavens. I mean, even before the murder, the premise was outrageous: A dying multimillionaire who’s going to give away a lot of his fortune to a guy based on a contest? It blows American Idol and America’s Got Talent completely away. Now we’ve got a murdered contestant. You’d have to be insane not to want to watch something like this. Plus, he has an assistant.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It’s easier to carry out a murder if you don’t have to do it all by yourself. Two are easier than one.”
“Two are also more likely to leave clues. Twice as many mistakes to make.”
“Interesting observation, Amanda. Next?”
“Let’s go through the cast. Let’s start with Drake.”
“Okay. Drake’s smart. Reserved.”
“A leather dominant,” I said.
“Yes, he is. Ian likes to be dominated by him.”
“That’s so weird. Ian likes to dominate Drake during the day. But by night . . . ?”
“Amanda, sexual domination is a common thing.”
“It is?”
“I treat hundreds of powerful men who love it. Well, treat is not the right word. It’s a matter of getting people to accept it and use it to release inner desires. I get dozens of Hollywood execs who have to make huge decisions involving millions of dollars every day. Greenlighting movies, dealing with childish stars, producers, and writer prima donnas. At the end of the day, these men want nothing more than to have a big man or woman shove a ball gag into their mouth, hood them, and tell them to shut up. They get to give up being in control all the time. Same with Ian. Very common. Hey, that would be a good idea to try in therapy!” she said, taking out her smartphone and making a note of it.
“All I know is that Drake’s really strong.”
“You don’t have to be strong to poison someone, Amanda.”
“Good point, Aurora. But you do have to have some muscles to strangle a person.”
“Not if he’s on drugs.”
“Sure . . . And Aleksei blurted out that he and Drake have done autoerotic asphyxiation before.”
“And that means what, Amanda?”
“I. . . ,” I replied, stumbling. “It means that Aleksei thought they were doing a sexual thing and he let Drake do it willingly, not knowing it was going to be permanent. It would have been easy.”
“So what’s Drake’s psychological motivation for icing both Aleksei and Keith?”
Aurora didn’t seem impressed with my theory.
I added more: “Anger. Rage.”
“At Ian?” she asked.
“It’s misplaced, indirect, but yes. Ian, because he could ruin everything by leaving the money to an undiscovered heir. Rage at Keith for clogging everything up.”
“But then every contestant could have killed Keith—and Aleksei—for the same reason: for getting in the way. Maybe we should stick to the psychological reasons, motivations from the psyche, so to speak. That’s why you asked me here.”
“True, true.”
“Now, to recap with Drake, his motivation is perhaps that he has spent so much time running Ian’s estate and life here. Not the money part, but the house, the grounds, the cars. Plus, I think he has a strong resentment for the other men since they are on the prissy side. I think Drake only respects men who ooze masculinity.”
“Then why tolerate Ian, Aurora? He’s not exactly macho.”
“Money. Why else?”
“Correctamundo!”
“That’s why most of the guys are here.”
“Big surprise, Aurora.”
“No, but Amanda, you have to understand why. Or at least, why the drive is so powerful.”
“What’s to understand? Money is alluring.” I decided not to mention the thousands of dollars Drake had stored in the potting shed.
“But get inside the heads of these models. If they’re successful like these guys are—or were—they live a very charmed life, despite the crazy lives they live. If we take out the long hours, the constant travel, the constant need to monitor their bodies and looks, we see that they wear expensive clothes, are surrounded by nice things, celebrities, fashion stars . . . it’s an unrealistic life. But they know their careers are really short in modeling. That it can—and will—go away in an instant. So the money is a powerful cushion. Why do you think these guys are missing some of the big fashion shows in Europe? The spring/summer shows for next year are going on right now. They chose to be here because they have the onetime chance to have a very soft landing when it eventually comes. And for guys like Drake, whose modeling time has passed, and for Aleksei, whose career is teetering fast, this opportunity is as good as it gets. Yes, Ian’s paunchy, obnoxious, and self-centered. But he won’t be forever. See the attraction, Amanda? The desperation? The easy way out?”
