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

by J. J. Henderson

  Lucy shrugged. “Movies are expensive, even low-budget indies like this. Maybe Wadsworth got tired of writing checks. I know he had a lot of faith in Paul—and this movie. As do I, by the way,” She added. “Paul is a very talented guy. He’s got a vision.”

  “No doubt. But you have to admit that the timing on the money and Wadsworth dying is pretty strange, don’t you think?”

  “I guess. Hey, what do I know, writers are shit in the movie business. I know I got a check from that very account to start work the other day, and here I am in the police station stuck in the middle of another investigation of another dead body.”

  “You seem to have a talent for turning up at the wrong place at the right time.”

  “Something like that. People tell me I’m curious.”

  “I bet. So what do you think, Miss Lucy Ripken? I’m not going to pretend that you are any kind of suspect here because you’re not. But who is? Certainly your friend Wittgenstein.”

  “Paul? That guy couldn’t hurt the flea that bit him. Maybe he’d hurt himself, at least I have to say it seems that way after last night, but no way anyone else. What about Carole Wainwright? She was the last one seen with Wadsworth.”

  “Like I said, we’re looking for her. By the way Wainwright is not her real last name, we don’t know what her name is yet, so it’s been a slog. But she’ll turn up no doubt.”

  “No doubt.” She considered mentioning the Manny business but decided against it. A jealous, tired old actor, why drag him into this? Besides, she wanted to talk to him first herself, give him the news and see what he says—assuming Paul hadn’t already—and also to get a little bit clearer on how Manny thought this movie “romance” with Carole should go. That was assuming, Lucy realized, that Paul didn’t get arrested on suspicion of murder. Same with his female lead, the drop-dead lovely Carole Who-the-fuck-knows-her-last-name. “So are we done here, Detective Halloran?”

  “Detective Sergeant but you can call me Jake. Yeah. We’re done. I assume you’ll be around should we need to talk again.”

  Lucy stood. “I’ve got a movie to rewrite. I think. So yes, I’m going home and getting to work.”

  “Call me you think of anything else we need to know.”

  “Will do…Jake.” They shook hands, he walked her to the door, where she stopped. “Hey Jake,” she said. “By the way, it’s Christopher Isherwood.”

  “What?”

  “The bank account company name. Istopher Crisherwood. It comes from Christopher Isherwood.” He looked at her, confused. “He’s the guy who wrote the book that they made the movie and play Cabaret from.” He still looked confused. “You know,” she said, and then sang, in her finest frolicking fraulein accent: “Money makes the world go ‘round, the world go ‘round, the world go ‘round.” No light dawned in the eyes of Jake Halloran. Lucy said “Never mind,” then went out and down the hall and down the stairs and out onto the street. Airhorns shrieked and engines rumbled as trucks jockeyed for position, drivers steeled for the plunge into the tunnel. She whipped out her cell and called Paul. Rather than get into it now, they made a plan to meet in an hour at the bistro two blocks east of her building.

  Planted in the street level of a six-story tenement, in what had until recently been a Chinese-run bean sprout distribution center, this was the very latest and trendiest of the new Soho bistros where all the young dudes fresh from their day of Wall Street money-humping loosened their ties and spiked up their hair and made like latter-day Bohemians on their low-to-moderate six-figure salaries, while the PR agency girlfriends minxed about, playing it cool. Give it a French name and a French host, put steak frites and absinthe on the menu. Everybody behave as if on camera, channeling Facebook on YouTube. 17 decent reds by the glass, all overpriced. The new New York, where plain-speaking characters like Lucy Ripken and Paul Wittgenstein, unbeknownst to the people, papers, and blogs that know about such bistros and their clientele, were aliens, strangers in their own land. Where had it gone, the Soho Lucy grew up in?

  This she pondered on the two block walk, along with a more pressing concern: though she’d loosely covered Paul’s very exposed rear end in her little chat with the cop Halloran, for the last hour she’d been mulling the wisdom of that coverage. After all, until the night before, had she even remotely imagined Paul in the position she’d seen him in at the Fetish, face down, exposed butt red from a good semi-public beating by a wife wielding a black leather whip? No. Not ever, not even when Angel had pushed along his gossipy rumors about Paul and Grace in the BDSM spanking line. It hadn’t seemed possible that mild-mannered Paul could be capable of such antics. And if her basic sense of who he was had been that wrong, then obviously he was also capable of springing some other surprises on her. Like, say, strangling his producer after a night on the S and M town and then dumping the body in front of the guy’s own house, in order to get his hands on that two point something million bucks. Or maybe Paul didn’t do it for the money, maybe he just didn’t like the way Wadsworth wore his black velvet diapers.

  She knew how Paul worked and she felt fairly certain he could finish this movie for a hell of a lot less than two-and-a-half million. So why would Paul remove the very vulnerable Wadsworth, that barking fool of a dogboy millionaire, and liberate the money? For personal use? Because he could? Those three kids, those school bills, those fancy-pants babysitters added up. Who couldn’t use a spare two or three million? Come to think of it, Paul had mentioned three million and hadn’t the cop said two point three? Bit of a discrepancy there.

  Her relationship with Paul was such that she should be able to ask these questions of him right to his face, in an interrogation laced with a pleasant dose of irony. But maybe presuming their relationship was that simpatico was just plain foolish on her part. After all, murder for big money set a much higher ironic bar than did, say, chronic masturbation, serial adultery, the abuse of hard drugs, or BDSM. She had discussed with him all of the above, at one time or another, but she couldn’t very well say, Yo Paulie, what’s with this strangling business?

  Dodging past a pair of twenty-three year old girls importantly yakking into cell phones and shivering in skimpy shirts while smoking on the sidewalk, she opened the brass, glass, and dark red wooden door of Zola, the bistro, and slipped in.

  At this early hour only a few of the newly-minted next generation Soho night crowd hung at the shiny brass and copper, retro fin-de-siecle style bar—at the see-and-be-seen end closest to the door. At the other end, wearing a black turtleneck, a world-weary expression, and dark circles under his dark eyes, Paul hunched over a glass of red wine. He caught her eye, she went over. “Hey.”

  “Hey Luce. How goes it?”

  She shrugged. “You tell me.” She decided to go with the script first. “I’m still trying to sort out the Manny/Carole business. In the screenplay I mean. I can’t see it working, to tell the truth. You can’t just erase that father-daughter vibe with a few lines or even a few scenes, no matter how brilliant I make them. There’s the lingering scent of incest.” She paused, sat down, waved at the bartender, and said, “I’ll have a glass of Washington State Merlot, if you have one. Otherwise some sort of house red is fine.” Back to Paul. “And it stinks. I just read that eastern Washington is the new hotbed of Merlot. What are you drinking?”

  He shrugged. “Blood.” He smiled thinly as the bartender set up Lucy’s glass and poured.

  “Thanks.” She sipped. “Mmm. That’s good. What is it?”

  “Columbiana,” the guy said, turning the bottle to show her the label. “From somewhere near a place called Yakima. It’s our best seller right now.”

  “Really nice. Kinda perky but mellow. Good call.” She took another sip then turned back to Paul. “So aside from the Manny/Carole problem where are we with the movie, anyways?”

  “This movie is moving forward regardless of what those fuckers think. By fuckers I mean both the cops and Wadsworth’s family, who’ve not surprisingly gotten wind of the whole thing
and have some midtown attack dog lawyer on my case. This guy—their fancy-suited family mouthpiece—is implying that even if I don’t get criminally charged with redrum of one sort or another they’ll file a civil suit, a la the Goldman family in the OJ fiasco, and tie the money in five year knots. Morons. And the cops seem to think I might even be guilty. Jesus Christ, I’m suddenly a killer?” In an abrupt gesture he snatched up his glass and drained it, then waved it at the bar guy. “I’ll try what she’s drinking this time. God damn, Lucy, what did you tell them? The cops I mean.”

  “What did I tell them? You’re not putting this on me are you? I told them what I knew of you, Paul. That you wouldn’t hurt a flea, which I know for a fact.” She stopped. “But Halloran pressed so I did tell him what was going on in the club, which you apparently did not do.”

  “You think that creep needed details? Well, he didn’t. It has absolutely nothing to do with what happened to Wadsworth, Lucy. God, I never thought you’d be such a prude.”

  “A prude? You don’t know what has to do with what, Paul. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that your behavior was…is…kind of weird? That S and M or whatever you call it is not what your everyday mom and pop do on their night out? That it puts you into another category of character entirely?”

  “Hey, it beats bowling, bitch.” He managed a small smile, and drank from his newly- arrived second glass of red wine. “Mmm. You’re right. This is fine shit.”

  “Listen to me, sucker: Why you and Grace do what you do, and whatever you get out of it is fine, I don’t care, but your contrived innocent decadence doesn’t mean Wadsworth didn’t maybe, you know, get into something a little more kinky last night, and end up, you know…”

  “Dead from a trip to Club Fetish?” He scoffed. “No way, he left when I did, but that place is totally lightweight anyway. Look, between you and me, Luce—and I haven’t talked to the cops about this yet and I’m not sure I want to unless I have to, so keep that in mind—Chris had made some pretty dicey moves with his money in recent years—that’s what he told me, anyways—and he more than once suggested to me that he was ‘in over his head.’”

  “In over his head? What is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know. All I’m saying is there are things going on here that you don’t know about, and that…”

  “You do?”

  “Not necessarily, but…”

  “Spare me, man. You’re just…look, this ‘investigation’ is going to go where it goes. That’s no sweat off my back but I’m in the middle of working on your script and…shit.” She stopped. This wasn’t what she wanted to happen here, even if Paul did like to get beaten. “Look, amigo, I’m worried about you. I don’t think for a second that you had anything to do with this guy’s dying but damn, Paul, seeing you in that position at the club—literally I mean—and then to have all this stuff coming down around the movie, with that fat wad of money sitting there. I figure getting this movie done must be a major struggle for you, with all your financial and family obligations, and now with a corpse right in the middle of everything it is like seven truckloads of complicated bullshit, friend. What are you…”

  “Hey, grace under pressure, Luce.” He smiled. “Courage. That’s what keeps us going. We’ve got a movie in the works, I’ve still got a budget, and though I’m really sorry that Wadsworth bit it, it ain’t my fault and it ain’t my responsibility. The movie is. So if I can fend off the cops and the lawyers for a couple of weeks—fortunately I can use this money to hire my own lawyers at the moment, and I’ve already done so—we can get it done. I’m producer slash director until someone else signs up for the job. So let’s sashay past the personal trash for a moment and talk screenplay some more.” He took a copious gulp of the merlot, and put it down. “Aaah, that’s more like it. Now what’s your solution to the Conrad/Delia love conundrum?”

  “God, segue city,” Lucy said, quickly switching gears. “I haven’t actually done any further writing but I keep turning it over in my mind and I keep coming up against it. You know the problem. Manny and Carole as dad and daughter are sweet. Manny and Carole as former dad and daughter, now December-May romance, with the dad and daughter thing lurking in the background, are about as sweet as a pickle from one of those barrels in the shop next to your restaurant set. You know that, I know that, King Tut knows that, so the problem is not how to write it but how to…”

  “Convince Manny it can’t be written.”

  “Not by me it can’t.”

  “I’m not going to fire you, Lucy, don’t worry.”

  “I wasn’t. Not since I already cashed your first check. But you’re not going to fire Manny either so…”

  His cell rang a salsa tone. “Sorry,” he said to Lucy, then flipped it open. “Yeah?” His face fell, then brightened. “I see. So when do we find out?” He gave Lucy a look, and shrugged. “OK. Talk to you tomorrow.” He closed the phone. “The lawyer. He says he stopped them from stealing my money at least for the moment. So can I write you another check for a few more grand?”

  “Is this a bribe?”

  “Of course it’s a bribe, Lucy. Hey, I want to get away with murder, I obviously need to throw some money around.” He smiled at her, the picture of innocence. “Look, all he’s done is put off a hearing. The hearing will determine who gets—or controls—the money. Either I do, his family does, or some accountant does; if it’s the accountant the schmuck will be doling out money for the movie as needed. A nightmare for me, having to plead for funding from a midtown money monkey. But even he’s a better option than Christopher’s awful Mom and Dad getting hold of it. That happens we’re dead in the water. Movie over. So keep your fingers crossed, Lucy. Meanwhile I can’t exactly drain the account today, it would look too weird, but I can certainly write a few checks.” He pulled out a check book, opened it, wrote a check, tore it off, and handed it to her.

  “Ten grand? You’re advancing me ten thousand dollars!?”

  “You have a lot of work to do, and it isn’t that much money in the current scheme of things.”

  “No, I guess not, Mr. Millionaire.”

  “I know,” he said flatly. “How strange. I’m rich.” He looked at his watch. “And I’ve got to get home before my wife decides its time to discipline the kid instead of me.”

  “A spanking from your wife I wouldn’t wish on anyone,” she said.

  “Wisenheimer,” he said, then laughed thinly. “Trust me. She saves the hard hits for me. The kid gets the kid glove treatment at all times.” He stood. “Oh, and Lucy, I would get that check cashed ASAP. Who knows what these Wadsworths will try next.”

  “Since it’s the same bank as mine that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Cool. So listen. Barring further complications like they throw me in jail or Manny drops dead of a heart attack we’re going to start shooting again day after tomorrow. There’s a bunch of stuff we can do without Carole. Meanwhile what I’d really like you to do is meet with Manny.”

  “Me? What am I going to tell him?”

  “Listen, I know he was posturing like a tough guy but I think you’ll be able to sway him—change his mind about this whole onscreen relationship—if I’m not there. He’s a pussycat with pretty girls and that is what you are, baby. Your job should be made easier since it appears unlikely, at least for the moment, that Carole will be around to remind him of his awesome Viagra-stoked virility and how it needs to be expressed on screen.”

  “Where is that girl?”

  “Good question. I never did find out where she’s actually from but I suspect from the voice and vibe that it is somewhere within shouting distance of Queens Boulevard. And I don’t even know her real last name. I think she grabbed Wainwright off the credit card she happened to be processing in Trash and Vaudeville the day I walked in there and told her she was going to be a movie star.”

  “Now she’s not only a movie star but also a suspect in a murder investigation.”

  “You’ve got to be kiddi
ng, Lucy. You don’t really think that bimbette could have strangled Christopher Wadsworth!”

  “Hey, she wore that Nazi hat and wielded her weapons very convincingly. And if she’s not guilty why’s she gone?”

  “Scared maybe? Wouldn’t you be scared? Jesus, Luce, get off your Club Fetish thing, will you? That place is nothing but fun and games. Hey, I gotta go.”

  “Whatever.” For her, fun and games did not include sexualized violence, or violent sex. “See you, Paul.” She watched him out the door, and watched him pause and chat with the two vixens outside; within thirty seconds he’d handed cards to both of them, and written down numbers. He’d been doing it for years. “You want to model for me? Can I shoot you? Put you in my next book?” He shows them his first book, the one about the lost old time bay men of eastern Long Island, and talks up the next book he’s doing, on the New New York, or the Girls of Downtown, or whatever title he can come up with at that moment, and pretty soon he’s got another passel of babes headed for his studio. That’s how he’d met Angwine, fifteen or so years back, and that’s how he’d met half the women he’d screwed while still married to Angwine. But Lucy thought Grace had cured him of serial adultery. Grace and her whip. Lucy could not believe he was still at it. Seemingly Paul was full of surprises.

  He went away and she wondered, too, if he could have murdered Wadsworth. With his name on that joint account he was so ripe a suspect it was hard to imagine him doing it, even with the discrepancy in the money numbers. Too obvious to get away with. But this bullshit about Wadsworth having warned him about being in over his head was just that, bullshit. Why did Paul feel compelled to throw that at her?

  Carole so-called Wainwright on the other hand was definitely worth tracking down. But the cops already knew that. And it was their job not Lucy’s. Except that she wanted to keep her job, her current movie writing job, and Carole was part of that. Besides, the dead guy intrigued her. Dead guys she knew, even marginally, did that.