I scrunched my forehead up, concentrating on being probing and not charmed. “What were you and Barker working on?” I pressed.
He shook his head. “Sorry, that’s top secret. New show.”
“Okay, what time did you leave?”
“Around ten. And, yes, Chester was alive and well when I left.”
“Anyone able to verify that?”
He shrugged. “We were alone.”
“So you were the last person to see Barker alive?”
“Actually the killer was the last person to see Chester alive,” Alec pointed out. Then flashed that amused grin at me again.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not taking this interrogation very seriously?” I asked.
“I thought it was a interview.” If it was possible, the grin grew wider.
“How well did you know Barker?” I asked, looking down to avoid his Charmorama.
He shrugged again. “As well as anyone, I guess.”
“How long had you been partners?”
“About three years.” He pursed his lips as if trying to remember. “But I worked for him for a few years before that. Chester gave me my first job right out of film school.”
“As a producer?”
He laughed. It was a rich, deep sound that vibrated off the walls of his small office. Despite my detached journalistic integrity, I found myself instantly trying to come up with something witty to say just to hear it again.
“Hardly,” he said. “I’d already hit every office in town, and no one was willing to hire a newbie. Chester took a big chance on me when no one else would. But he wasn’t running a charity. I was green. I had to start at the bottom, just like everyone else. He gave me a position as a PA. Production assistant,” he clarified.
I nodded, motioning him to go on.
“Anyway, I was basically a glorified errand boy that first season. But I learned the ropes and slowly advanced. Pretty soon I was working right alongside him, running the show for him.”
“Running the show?” I asked. “I thought you were partners.”
He nodded. “We were. Chester does the big-picture stuff, secured talent, locations, funding. I oversee the day-to-day stuff.” He paused. “At least, that’s how it was.” For the first time since I’d sat down his jovial manner faltered.
As much as Barker had been known as the king of trash TV, it was clear that at least one person missed him.
“Do you have any idea who might have killed him?” I asked, softening my voice a notch.
Alec took a deep breath, blowing it out though his nose. “Look, Chester was a businessman. He’d be the first to tell you he was no humanitarian. He made enemies.”
“What kind of enemies?”
He shrugged. “You name it.”
“Any of these enemies ever threaten him?”
Alec nodded. “All the time. It was a slow week when he only got ten death threats. Last year he had to take three restraining orders out on former employees. And just last month someone stabbed him.”
I leaned forward. “Stabbed?”
He nodded. “It was at our end-of-season wrap party for Little Love. Someone came up behind him and shoved a paring knife between his ribs.”
I cringed. Ouch. “What happened?”
“One minute he’s sipping champagne, the next he suddenly keels forward, yelling. I looked down, saw the knife, and called nine-one-one on my cell. A few minutes later the place is swarming with paramedics, and he’s whisked to the hospital. He ended up being okay—the blade missed his lungs by half an inch. But he was sore as hell and hired a bodyguard to follow him when he went out in public after that.”
A fat lot of good that had done.
“This bodyguard? Was he with Chester the night he died?”
Alec shook his head in the negative. “Chester figured he was safe enough in his own home.”
Apparently, he’d figured wrong.
“So, back to the stabbing. I take it Chester didn’t see who attacked him, huh?”
Alec shook his head. “No. The party was packed, and the guy came at him from behind.” He paused. “Or girl. By the time anyone even realized what had happened, the attacker had disappeared into the crowd again.”
“Chester didn’t have any suspects then?”
Alec grinned, showing off his dimples again. I had to admit, I was having a harder and harder time picturing him as a killer. “I didn’t say that,” he said. “Chester had a list a mile long. He was a bit paranoid and thought everyone was out to get him.”
“Apparently he’d been right at least once.”
Alec nodded. “It’s ironic how much pleasure he’d take in that.”
“Who topped his list of suspects?” I asked.
“He was sure it was someone he worked with.”
“Why is that?”
“Other than the fact Chester had no personal life? The party was on the studio lot, which means the public couldn’t have gotten in.” He paused, gave me a look. “Well, most of the public.”
I ducked my head, ignoring the comment on my gate crashing. “So who was at the party?”
“Everyone who worked for RL Productions. All the cast and crew of our current shows.”
“Which would be?”
“Well, like I said, we’d just finished shooting the first season of Little Love. We’re getting ready to film the new season of Don & Deb’s Diva Dozen, and Stayin’ Alive will wrap up next month.”
I wrote the show names down. “So, someone stabs Barker, but only wounds him. A couple weeks later Barker is poisoned. Same person?”
Alec shrugged. “You’re the investigative reporter. You tell me.”
Trust me, I intended to.
“Anything else you can tell me about Barker?” I asked.
“Just that you’ve got your work cut out for you. You didn’t get to be in Chester’s position by making friends.”
I capped my pen, shoving it and the notepad back in my bag. “Well, thank you for the interview,” I said.
“No problem. Just be nice to me in your paper this time, huh?” he asked then winked at me again.
I felt my cheeks go flush. “Sure,” I mumbled, making for the door.
“See you around, Paris,” he called after me, flashing those dimples again.
The way that grin made my skin go warm, I kinda hoped so.
* * *
The first thing I did when I got back to the office was pull up the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) to check out the list of shows Alec had given me. While the names were familiar, I wasn’t exactly a reality TV devotee, and I needed the deets.
IMDB holds a list of every TV show and movie made in Hollywood, complete with the names of every single person who ever worked on it. Very handy if you were fishing for suspects in a very big pond.
Right off the bat, I eliminated the crew members low on the totem pole. Besides the fact that they’d have very little day-to-day contact with Barker, at least according to Alec’s description of his role, crew turnover was so fast in this town that I doubted any of them had had enough time to grow a murderous grudge against the producer.
Which left the cast of his latest reality hits.
I pulled up the name of the first show, Little Love, and read the description.
Little Love was a reality dating show, where one eligible bachelor was put into a house with twenty hot, young single girls. Every week the girls tried to out-flirt each other on group dates to earn a rose at the end of the hour-long show. The last one left standing at the end of the season got a proposal from the bachelor. To be honest, it sounded like any number of dating shows I’d already seen on TV. Except Chester added a twist to his. All the contestants on the show were little people. As in dwarfs.
I scrolled through photos of the little ladies, all dressed in evening gowns and having cocktails with the little bachelor, a guy by the name of Gary Ellstrom.
I looked at his photo. Gary had the typical features and body type associat
ed with achondroplasia dwarfism—an elongated forehead and average-sized torso, coupled with shortened limbs. He had dark hair, dark eyes and wore a sparse mustache on his upper lip.
I wrote the info down on a post-it (pink and shaped like a heart), before moving on to the next show on my list: Don & Deb’s Diva Dozen.
Anyone who hadn’t been living under a rock for the past year knew Don and Deb Davenport. They were the parents of 12 children: two sets of triplets (ages six and ten) and a set of sextuplets (four-year-olds). Which in itself was enough to become reality show royalty, but Don and Deb took their fame one step further—all twelve of their children competed on the Tiny Tot beauty pageant circuit. They were in their fourth season, and the ratings just kept climbing.
Though, in all fairness, some of the recent rating hikes had been due more to Don and Deb’s personal life than their children’s painted faces and fluffy-pink costumes.
Deb’s close-cropped hairdo had been plastered all over the tabloids recently (including our fair paper), ever since Don had been photographed with a string of young co-eds at trendy Hollywood nightclubs. Rumor was he’d had an affair, but no one had ever come forward claiming she was the other woman. At the beginning of last season the couple had announced a trial separation. Deb took the sextuplets, doing the Southern Glitz pageant circuit, and Don took the triplets, doing the West Coast Sunshine pageants. The separation had lasted right up until sweeps week, when the couple announced they were going to give marriage a try again. The season had culminated in an hour-long Don & Deb’s Reunion show where the couple took all twelve children to Vegas for a long weekend, renewing their vows at the MGM Grand.
I wrote down Don and Deb’s names, along with their dozen (Dorri, Diana, Delilah, Dolly, Daria, Donna, Daphne, Deirdre, Destiny, Dominique, Demitra, and Drea), though I doubted we were looking at a Tiny Tot killer.
Last on my list was the show that had put Chester’s name on the map in the first place—Stayin’ Alive. Currently in its ninth season, Stayin’ Alive was the granddaddy of all reality shows, pitting fifteen strangers against each other to fight for the title of Last Survivor Alive. Each season, Chester dropped the contestants in the middle of nowhere, the only location requirements being a beach (where the female contestants could wear their teeny tiny bikinis), torrential rains (that wetted said bikinis suggestively), and lots of big, hungry mosquitoes (just for kicks). This season was Stayin’ Alive: Tonga, and each week all fifteen contestants would brave both the elements and each other, fighting it out in reward and immunity challenges. Anyone who did not win immunity was forced to go to the tribal staging area, where someone was sent home each week. However, they weren’t voted out on their survival skills. Instead, the contestant participated in a dance-off, where a panel of judges voted out the contestant with the worst ballroom skills. We were three weeks from the end of the season, which meant the contestants still had to dance the cha-cha, the tango and, the grand finale, the Venetian waltz.
While I figured none of the contestants likely had much contact with Barker—being that he was killed here and not in Tonga—the three judges had been with him since the beginning of the show, giving them plenty of time to build up a grudge. Damon Crow, a record producer from Detroit, was the first, a big guy who tended to phrase his critiques of the contestants with so much slang they needed urban dictionaries to decipher his meaning. Mitzy Reed was second, an 80’s pop icon just this side of being labeled washed-up. And just this side of sober most of the time. She had a reputation for being able to find something nice to say about even the worst dancer. Which nicely balanced out judge number three, Lowel Simonson, an Australian-born choreographer whose favorite word was “dreadful,” followed closely by “horrendous” and “no-talent hack.” Needles to say, America loved to hate Lowel.
After I wrote all three names down, I sat back and looked at my list of suspects. Twelve beauty pageant contestants, two on-again-off-again parents, twenty-one dwarves, and three reality show judges.
Oh boy. Alec was right. I seriously had my work cut out for me.
Chapter Five
I chewed on the end of my sparkly pen, doing an eenie-meenie-minie-mo over which suspect I was going to tackle first. I was just about to catch a tiger by the toe when a head popped up over the fabric partition of my cube.
“Hey, Allie,” a six-foot-tall blonde said. “Watcha working on?”
Cameron Dakota, our resident photographer. She leaned over my shoulder, glancing at my pad of paper.
I quickly covered it. “Nothing.”
“I heard you were on Barker,” she pressed. “Any hot leads?”
While her tone was friendly, her motives were suspect. Cam had been friends with Tina long before I’d arrived on the scene, meaning if she had to pick, her allegiance lay with Tina every time. And she did have to pick. Every time.
I glanced across the newsroom at Tina’s desk. She was engrossed in something on her computer screen. Maybe a little too engrossed.
I turned to Cam. “Tina sent you over her to spy, didn’t she?”
Cam blew air out through her lips in a pfft sound and rolled her eyes. “No!”
I gave her a get-real look.
She bit her lip. “Okay, fine, yes.” She looked over her shoulder once, presumably to make sure Tina hadn’t caught her spilling the beans, then collapsed into the plastic chair beside my desk. “God, I hate being in the middle of you two.”
Cam twisted a lock of hair between her fingers. Clearly she was not cut out to be a spy. Cam was a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, typical California surfer girl. A natural beauty, she rarely did the make-up or hairspray thing, going more for ponytails and lip balm if anything. The irony was, she’d recently started dating one of Hollywood’s hottest movie stars, making every surgically enhanced wanna-be starlet in Hollywood cry “no fair”. Honestly, I was happy for Cam. While she was often roped into being Tina’s henchwoman, she wasn’t really all that bad on her own.
In fact, when I first came on board, the tension between Tina and I had been immediate and fierce, drawing a clear line in the sand between us. Of course, me being New Girl, everyone on staff had fallen on Tina’s side of the line. Which was fine. I mean, it would have been nice to have someone show me the ropes—or at least where the ladies’ restroom was—but I didn’t need any special favors. I knew I could get the stories all on my own.
But those first few weeks Tina might as well have been handing out T-shirts that read Team Tina, because no one would give me the time of day.
Cam had been the only person in the entire newsroom who’d even talked to me. Granted, she also wasn’t vying for page space with me, but it had been nice not to be treated like a total leper. Since then we’d worked together on a couple stories, actually making a pretty good team. I wouldn’t go so far as to say we were BFFs, but I generally trusted her.
Generally, that is, when Tina wasn’t thrown into the mix.
“Sorry,” Cam said. “She kinda roped me into coming to check on you before I could say no.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay. In Tina’s place, I would have done the same thing.”
“You know, I’m always amazed you guys aren’t better friends. You’re so much alike.”
“Okay, now I hate you.”
Cam grinned. “So, how are things coming with Barker?”
Hollywood Confessions Page 5
