Sex and Death: The Movie: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 6)

by J. J. Henderson

  By the time they crossed the Brooklyn Bridge her head swam with Harry, and the failed possibilities. How much fun they’d had! In Jamaica, and St. Lucia, and Bombay that time on the press trip from hell, and even here in New York when the crazy diplomat had stalked her. Why had she turned Harry down? He drank too much, and left town too often; and besides, she wanted this, the solo life she led. It had been her decision, her choice, no regrets. Except sometimes alone at night there were regrets. How could there not be? She had not been in love since splitting up with Harry. Since turning him down.

  She guided the driver to her front door, stepped out, and looked up the six story building to her fifth floor windows, where the light stayed lit. She wished Harry would be up there, magically hers again; but those kinds of surprises, Harry back in town from some ridiculous and dangerous southern hemisphere hijinks, sitting in her loft waiting for her with a bottle of wine and a tale to tell, were over now. Now she came home alone to no one waiting. Harry was married, unhappily she’d heard, six months into it. His wife, Katya the Russian model, kept him on a short leash. Even though Lucy had saved Katya’s life and her strung-out ass, she wanted nothing to do with Lucy. Because Katya was no fool and she knew Harry still loved Lucy. Did he? Did she still love Harry? Right now, she thought—paying the Severe Sikh and tipping him too much, then sighing heavily as she glanced around, cautious even in her emotional doldrums after having been surprised in her own house by a murderer not long ago—right now, she did.

  The street was clear, all too clear. She fished out her keys, unlocked the door, and began the upwards trudge. Ninety-two dingy old stairs and a lonesome dog at the top, behind triple-locked doors. She hoped he’d be willing to wait until the morning to pee. She couldn’t face the stairs again. Not tonight, when she needed to fall fast asleep and dream that someone lay beside her, someone who loved her. She and Harry had never needed whips, paddles, or leather to have fun, or to make love.

  Home at last, home again.

  No one had called, no one at all. She readied herself for bed without checking her email. Claud laid down next to her on her low platform bed, and she stroked his head until he fell asleep—about thirty seconds—and then flopped over on her back, closed her eyes, and waited for sleep even though she knew from her own experience that her troubled thoughts, her fear of loneliness, and a head full of creepy images from the Club Fetish would keep her awake into the wee hours. The witching hours.

  Her cell phone jerked her awake with her current ringtone, a line and a lick from The Pretenders’ I’m Special, and then she grabbed for it, simultaneously taking in the time—six-fifteen—and recalling the last time she’d glanced at her digital clock. It had read three thirty seven. Less than three hours of sleep. Damn! She paused for a second, briefly savoring Chrissy Hynde’s impossibly sexy “so special,” while considering the possibilities: telemarketer on speed, friend in another time zone, bearer of bad news.

  Two out of three she had to answer. She opened the phone. “This better be good,” she said, tuning in with a minor flourish of bravado. A telemarketer she would curse unto eternity.

  “Lucy, it’s Paul.” He stopped.

  “Jesus, Paulie, what’s the…hey, it’s six-fifteen a.m.”

  “I know, I know, you think I don’t know what time it is? I’ve been up practically all night.”

  “Well that’s great. Last I saw of you you were about to get what…”

  “Lucy, it’s Christopher. Wadsworth.”

  “What? What about him?” She already knew from his voice. She knew that tone.

  “He’s—dead. He…”

  “What the…what happened?”

  “I don’t know. A neighbor found him on the street in front of his loft on White Street around four o’clock this morning. A couple of hours ago. He called the cops and they called me because I was one of the last three numbers on his cell. He’s…he was strangled.”

  “Strangled. My God.” She couldn’t help but picture Carole Wainwright, pulling hard on that leash. “Where’s Carole? Is Grace…”

  “Grace is fine. I mean we said goodbye to them—Wadsworth and Carole—and just came home at, like, two, and went to bed. We were really tired as you can imagine.” He stopped. She didn’t know what to say, and so said nothing. “And then the phone rang like fifteen minutes later it seemed like. I was still awake I thought, but no, I’d been asleep for three hours or so. The cops called just a little while ago. I have to go downtown in a few minutes and…you know…”

  “Tell them about your night.”

  He hesitated. “Yeah. And Lucy, they’ll be calling you as well.”

  “Me!? What, because I made the mistake of going out to that godawful place and watching you get your…”

  “Whoa, whoa, Luce. Stop right there. Look, we all have our needs. So spare me the fucking attitude. OK? You’ll just have to tell them what you know.”

  “Fine, no problemo, amigo, after what happened with my friend Patricia I’m practically best friends with several members of the force.”

  “Right. Well, anyways…”

  Not to be a cold-hearted bitch, but right now she was. She needed the work. “What about the movie?”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, it was his money, right? How are you going to pay for your movie?”

  He paused. “The day before yesterday I got Christopher to put my name on the account from which he’s been financing the movie. So I wouldn’t have to keep going to him to get checks for the crew and everybody. Including you. It was just for convenience, really. And the guy trusted me.”

  “So it’s yours to keep using?”

  “I think so. I mean, his family might…I don’t know, try to stop me I suppose. Assuming they even know about this particular account.”

  “How much money are we talking about, Paul?”

  Another pause. “Almost three million dollars.”

  “Oh my God. Paulie.”

  “I know. It is unbelievable. And kind of weird. I think he was letting me know that he was committed to finishing the…”

  “Who knows?” She interrupted him. “About the account I mean? And your access to it?”

  “On his end I have no idea. Obviously the bank, and I would suspect at least a lawyer. His family’s up in Greenwich and he rarely speaks with them. They got him going years back but he really did make most of his money himself, playing the market through the internet bubble when he was still in college. I don’t even think this was a big chunk of his total assets, to tell the truth. I mean he bought his loft last year for four million and paid cash. In any case I guess I’ll find out soon enough who knows what.”

  “What about the cast, crew, all those people?”

  “I don’t think any of them have a clue unless he told Carole.”

  “Why would he tell her?”

  “I don’t know, but she’s missing.”

  “Missing?”

  “Yeah. As of last night. Last I saw of her she was with him, climbing into a cab outside the club. She’s not at home and not at his place.”

  “Jesus Christ, Paul. Do you think she had anything to do with his death?”

  “Carole? Why? I guess anything’s possible. But he wasn’t that bad of a dog, Lucy. Ha. Ha. Ha.” His laugh was bitterly sardonic. “Who the fuck knows? What I know is I have got to figure out how to deal with the cops and the money because what I think right now is that when they see that Christopher just stuck my name on that account the day before yesterday and then last night he gets killed after spending the evening with me and a couple of women at a bondage club, well, even if it was goddamned pocket change to him, what do you think they’re going to have to say to me?”

  “You’re right.” She tried for a light tone. “So did you strangle him for the money, Paul?”

  “Yeah, and for the girl. I’ve got her locked up in my basement right now. Grace and I are going to eat her for dinner. We do cannibalism on Thursdays. Damn, Lucy, I just want
to make my movie and this sucks. I mean I’m sorry that it happened but I did not love the guy and he didn’t really like me much either. We just had some common interests.”

  “Your movie and your weird recreational activities.”

  “That’s right, Lucy. Shit, that’s my other line. Probably the cops, wondering where I am. See you later, Lucy. Call me after you talk to them. And Luce.”

  “Yes, Paul.”

  “You can say whatever you want to, but try not to overplay the club business. I’m not asking you to lie, because there’s no way, but you don’t have to make a big deal out of it, OK?”

  “Whatever, Paulie. There were some weird characters in there, man. Don’t you think someone might have…you know, followed him home?”

  “I guess so. Gotta go. Let’s talk later. And don’t stop working on the script. I’ve got enough money of my own to go another two weeks even if they won’t let me use the account.”

  “Bye, Paul. Break a leg.”

  “Break two, Luce.”

  She closed the phone, wide awake. Unbelievable. Goddamn! She dressed and hustled out the door with Claud, anxious to get some air before getting sucked into this latest bit of New York murder and madness.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE USUAL SUSPECTS

  The station faced north from a street on the southern edge of the Manhattan end of the Holland Tunnel, offering a view across the tangled lowrise wasteland where all the trucks and cars congealed in a honking, horrible stew, Western Civ and human evolution at its finest, six thousand people in five thousand vehicles jammed up to squeeze through a grimy white tube en route to New Jersey, where they would be spat out into a similar if less dense configuration. Lucy sat upstairs in the cop shop, looking out through a dirty grated window for a moment while waiting. She tried to find some kind of poetry or at least a meaningful random pattern in the dismal streetscape of concrete, utility poles, barricades, traffic lights, sagging wires, herds of cars, and beyond the foreground mess, the multitude of buildings that stretched up Manhattan Island, her home sweet home, but there was little to be found. Police stations did that to you, got the existential angst cranked up and humming. A guy who looked not at all like Jimmy Smits or even Dennis Franz soon would join her. This was not NYPD Blue. They had already grilled Paul and Grace here at the station, and seven denizens and employees of the Club Fetish had been questioned on location, and now at three-fifteen in the afternoon of the same day Lucy’s number had come up at last. They’d called at two and said come at three and now kept her waiting. Icing her? Why? According to Paul he had told them everything they wanted to know, had not lied or obscured anything. They had not asked about the money or the bank account. Grace the same. With nothing to hide, Lucy wondered why she felt such nerves. Carole still had not turned up.

  “So.” The guy walked in, circled her and the desk, then stood between the desk and the window, a file in one hand and a coffee cup in the other. He had red thinning hair. “Want some coffee? Like the view?”

  “No thanks. As for that,” she waved at the window, “I’ve lived on Broome Street for ten years so it’s not like I don’t see similar shit every day.”

  “Right.” With the cheap suit, stained tie, pink skin and watery blue eyes over mottled jowly cheeks, he looked more like the stumpy red-haired NYPD Blue guy, if she had to compare him to anyone. Irish, she guessed. Probably from a long line of NYPD cops, and not a movie star among them. “So you’re Lucy Ripken.”

  “Yeah. And you’re…”

  “Jake Halloran. Detective Sergeant.” He offered a hand. He appeared benign, more or less. She shook it, then looked squarely at him. She had nothing to hide but didn’t trust cops on principle, in spite of having a former boyfriend who served as an undercover DEA agent, a pal on the force uptown, and no arrest record in her life. “You’re a friend of Bernie Sanderson?”

  “I know him. Yeah, we’re sorta friendly.” She hesitated. “He investigated the death of a friend of mine and it got really complicated.”

  “Right right,” said Halloran. “Now I remember. The high society dope thing with that junkie diplomat.”

  “Who disappeared after some idiot judge let him bail out.”

  “Right right. A stupid move.”

  “No kidding. There was a dirty cop too you might recall. I changed my locks and still didn’t sleep for three months. But then I heard the diplomat got knocked off in a shoot-out after landing two hundred and sixty machine guns and half a ton of cocaine in the Caymans. The cop’s in jail and the diplomat’s dead so I guess I’m safe. From those two anyways.”

  “Well, I went through the academy with Bernie so we go way back. I know Riles too. What a shithead. But Bernie said I could believe anything you told me.” He gave her his version of a reassuring glance. “Coming from Bernie that’s good enough for me.”

  Lucy crossed her arms. “Cool. So I’m here about the…”

  “Wadsworth.” He finally sat, across from her. “Christopher Wadsworth. This month’s important dead guy.” He tried a smirk. Lucy deadpanned him. “You were out with him last night, right?”

  “No. Yes and no,” she quickly corrected herself. “I met him through a mutual friend, Paul Wittgenstein, to whom you already spoke. We had drinks at the Sayulita Café, this new place over on Suffolk. I left them there. Then later I met them at this club in Brooklyn which I know you already know about so I’ll skip the details. This was the first time I’d ever been to this place, and unless I’m taken there at gunpoint it was my last. I was there as Paul’s guest, you might say, although I did have to pay twenty bucks of my own hard-earned cash to get in the door.

  “You know what the Fetish is about so I don’t need to explain. It just isn’t my scene. So I saw those guys—Paul and Grace and Christopher—for just a few minutes.”

  “Wasn’t someone else with them?”

  “Yes, sorry. An actress named Carole Wainwright.”

  “Right right. We’ve been trying to locate the lady. And what time was this?”

  “I got there between ten and eleven, closer to eleven, and then left after about fifteen minutes. I had a cab waiting because going in I figured I wouldn’t be there very long.”

  “So this was a courtesy call?”

  She eyed him. “You could call it that I guess. I was a little curious, I have to admit, never having been to one of those places. And also Paul is directing a movie and Christopher Wadsworth is…was…the producer so it behooved me, since they had just hired me to help them rewrite the screenplay, to be nice to them.”

  “I see. So you went in, and…”

  “The place smelled bad and I didn’t particularly like seeing my friends doing what they were doing in there.”

  “What was that?”

  “Didn’t Paul tell you?”

  “Well, yes, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I guess I just wanted to hear it from you.”

  She shrugged. “Paddles, whips, chains, boots, leather, naked bodies, bad odors, dark corners, eighties music, the usual suspects. It was supposed to be sexy I guess, but these people weren’t sexy at all.”

  “Pardon me but you sound rather knowledgeable.”

  “Come on, Halloran. Everybody’s seen TV shows about S and M, or websites. There are comic books about this stuff. There were no surprises in this club.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But what about Wadsworth and, you know, your friends, specifically. What exactly were they up to? When I talked to them they were kind of evasive. Embarrassed? I know I would be. But since one of them ended up dead I’m obliged to enquire.”

  “No shit. Well, this is what I saw, down in The Dungeon which as you probably have discovered is on the lower level at the Fetish Club: my good friend Paul naked and spread-eagled face down on a table, wearing a dog collar attached to a leash held by his wife, Grace, dressed in black leather and lace. She was hitting him intermittently with a short black whip. When he disobeyed her, which appa
rently he did by talking to me, she’d whack him.” The scene had been bizarre, but Paul and his posse were so utterly matter-of-fact about it that Lucy at the time hadn’t registered the fundamental weirdness. Now describing it to this cop, the weirdness surfaced. And she liked telling the story. “As I was checking them out, Wadsworth on all fours came bounding out of the darkness barking like a dog. He was wearing black velvet—well, diapers is what I thought when I saw the get-up. Also he was collared and leashed, and Carole Wainwright held the leash. She was naked but for a corset and boots and a weird Nazi hat and some other fascist-looking stuff. She and Grace were shall we say dominating the boys. Men. Paul and Wadsworth. They offered—Carole, I mean—offered me a chance to hold Wadsworth’s leash, but I turned her down. When Wadsworth began licking my boots I got out of there.” She stopped. “End of story.”

  “Sweet,” he said. “How very sweet. And they have a kid?” He shook his head. “It’s a weird world, ain’t it, Lucy Ripken?”

  “I’m a writer, in this case a screenwriter. Or screen-rewriter, anyway. When the producer of the movie I’m supposed to be rewriting is on the floor of a nightclub basement, wearing black velvet diapers and licking my shoe, I would have to agree with you. Yes, it is a weird world.”

  “And now he’s dead, your producer.” He sighed, shaking his head, then leaned into it. “Did they—Wittgenstein or Wadsworth, that is—tell you about the money?”

  Her stomach dropped but she held his gaze, and felt like she’d pulled off a successful non-reaction. “What money?” How did he know? Paul had said they hadn’t said a thing.

  “Two point three five million dollars, in an account in the name of Istopher Crisherwood LLC. Whoever or whatever that is. We found some statements when we went through his place this afternoon. This account was controlled by Christopher Wadsworth until two days ago when he added the name of Paul Wittgenstein, and signed off so Wittgenstein would have free access to the funds.”