by Jeff Lindsay
Kathy had been a nonentity, almost a nonperson. I meant no disrespect for the dead, even though they couldn’t stop me if I did. But my short sweet time at the pinnacle of showbiz had taught me that a personal assistant was not even as high in the pecking order as the valet parking attendant, who might, after all, be an actor on the rise.
Kathy, though, had been a full-time professional gofer, and she could not possibly have the kind of high-octane enemies who would choose to kill her, especially not coldly, premeditatedly, and in such a vividly visceral way. But somebody had, in fact, killed her—and then taken her phone. Where she kept all Jackie’s appointments, phone numbers, contacts, etc. That implied—at least to me—that Kathy’s death was connected to something on the phone.
Even in Hollywood, very few people will kill to get an address or phone number—except, perhaps, the number of a really good agent. But in this case, that seemed unlikely; I was quite sure the phone had not been taken for any contact information. That left appointments, and that thought brought a small, dry rustle of interest from the Dark Detective nestled in his inner lair.
All right: The phone had been taken to hide one of the appointments. That meant that either one of Jackie’s upcoming appointments was worth killing to hide—or the appointment was not Jackie’s. It was Kathy’s phone, after all. Why shouldn’t she keep personal things on it, too? And if somebody made a date to meet her in her room at the hotel, and had gone there specifically to kill her, it made sense that he would take the phone away to hide the record of the date.
But wait: That made sense only if the killer knew Kathy kept all those things on her phone. And that meant it was somebody who knew her, and knew the way she did her job—and that meant it was either somebody from her past who flew in from L.A. just to kill her … Or much more likely, it was somebody here, now, involved in making this pilot. Somebody with a very strong motive for keeping Kathy from—what? Going somewhere, doing something, saying something …
A tiny little video clip popped onto the screen in Dexter’s personal viewing room: a few days ago at wardrobe, and Kathy slapping Renny, storming away from him, yelling something like, “Next time I’ll tell everybody!”
Another little clip: Renny staring at me as a dark and leathery shadow of a Something flaps its wings behind his eyes.
And another: Renny looking out at the audience at his special with that same look, a look I knew so well because it was a killer’s look, and I practiced every day to hide mine with convincingly meek fake smiles.
And Renny going after the heckler with an aggressive attack that could only be called lethal, flashing his true killer colors for all to see.
Renny.
It all added up: He had a motive, whatever the details were, and I knew he had that special thing inside that would make killing a simple and viable option. And so to hide this something, it didn’t matter what, he had killed Kathy—and then thrown up, according to Vince, when he saw the mess he’d made? But still killed Jackie, too, in spite of this revulsion, which he should not feel if he actually had a Dark Passenger?
The roaring freight train of Dexter’s Deduction slammed to a halt. It didn’t make sense. Nobody capable of routine murder could possibly throw up at the sight of what he’d done. And anyway, how did that connect to the most important fact, Jackie’s death?
All right, maybe it wasn’t Renny. But I still had two bodies, and I was sure they were connected. So I put Renny aside for a moment and tried to get the train back on the tracks.
Somebody, possibly not Renny, killed Kathy and took her phone to keep something from getting out. And then in spite of not enjoying it, which seemed a waste, they had killed Jackie. For the same reason? But they already had the phone, so why bother?
Anderson stomped by me and out the door of the trailer, and I looked over to where Angel was calmly, methodically combing through the area around Jackie’s body, directly in front of the big box of Kathy’s stuff. Somewhere a small brass coin dropped into a slot with a soft chiming sound, and I blinked.
I went over to Angel. He looked up briefly, then back to a chunk of carpet he was putting into an evidence bag. “Go away,” he said. “You are bad juju.”
“I need to see something,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Anderson might shoot me.”
“It will only take a second,” I said. “It’s very important.”
Angel rocked back onto his heels and looked up at me, clearly deciding whether I was worth the risk. “What?” he said at last.
I nodded at the big cardboard box behind him. “The computer,” I said. “Is it still in the case?”
He looked at me a moment longer, and then sighed heavily. He leaned over to the box, where the black nylon computer case perched on the top of the pile. With one rubber-gloved finger he flipped the case open. “No,” he said. “No computer.” He took away his finger and the case flopped shut. “Should it be there?”
“It was there this morning,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “Well, I didn’t take it.”
“No,” I said. “But somebody did.”
Angel sighed heavily, clearly unhappy that a computer might be missing when he had forensic lead. “Is it important?” he said.
“I think so,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s an Apple,” I said.
Angel shook his head. “Dexter, coño, come on.”
“Thanks, Angel.”
He sighed again and returned to his hands and knees. “I don’t think I like you anymore,” he said.
I went back to my post by the refrigerator, rather pleased with myself. Now I knew why Jackie had been killed. Because if you have an Apple smartphone and an Apple computer, you synch them, so all the data on the phone goes onto the computer. And Jackie had turned on the computer, seen the appointment, and been killed for it.
But if Kathy had kept up with her updates, all that data would have been copied into the cloud, too, which meant that it should still be up there, incriminating appointment and all. But Kathy’s cloud account couldn’t be accessed by anybody else, not without her password. And by taking away the laptop, the killer had made sure that the information was out of reach.
I did not quite pat myself on the back, but I was very pleased. I had figured out almost everything—except, of course, the one tiny, unimportant detail of who the killer was.
I tried to make Renny fit again, and he really did, almost. But finally, I could not believe that anybody with a Passenger could throw up after the simple, relaxing, and often pleasant act of killing somebody.
On the other hand, if I eliminated Renny, who did that leave? Maybe Renny had thrown up because he’d eaten some bad oysters. It had to be Renny—there was nobody else who fit at all. In any case, I certainly had to poke around into his immediate past and see whether he fit. Maybe get Deborah to check into it, and …
Deborah. Apparently she was still not speaking to me, for the most part, and she would not be any easier to approach now, with Anderson leading his clown parade all over everything and flinging her out the door. It seemed unlikely that her ejection from the scene had softened her up so she was ready to forgive and forget.
Still, I had a lead she could use, and she was a cop down to the very marrow of her bones. She wanted to solve this thing—even more since it was Anderson’s case. And it was at least possible that she would want to shove Anderson’s face in the mud more than she wanted to avoid me. It was worth a try.
Of course, I could not try as long as I was standing here beside the refrigerator waiting for Anderson to come back and intimidate me. I needed to be out and about, and so I thought about my curious new position as a Person of Interest. Nobody had actually told me to stay put, don’t leave town, retain an attorney. I had simply stayed around out of the reflexive urge to be useful somehow. Clearly, that was not going to happen—unless giving Anderson something to glare at is considered useful. So I looked around to see if anybody w
as watching me; nobody was, and I slipped nonchalantly out the door of the trailer.
Deborah was pacing back and forth outside, and she paused to watch me come down the three steps. For a moment I thought she was going to say something, and maybe she did, too. But she didn’t speak. She just shook her head and turned away to resume her pacing.
“Deborah,” I said to her back.
She stopped walking and her shoulders hunched up toward her ears. Then she turned and looked at me with a much more convincing version of the hostile look Anderson had attempted. “What,” she said.
“I think I know who killed Jackie,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Go tell Anderson,” she said.
“I’d rather tell you,” I said. “So maybe some good will come of it.”
She looked at me with her head tilted to one side. “You’re not going to bribe me into some goddamn forgive-and-forget Kodak moment, Dexter. You fucked up big-time, and now because of you Jackie is dead and Rita is—what?” she said, and her words got hotter as she spoke. “Did you kill her yet, Dexter? Because that would make sense to you, wouldn’t it?”
“Deborah, for Christ’s sake—”
“It makes more sense than walking away and leaving her alive to fuck things up later, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t kill—”
“And if you didn’t, now what? You still leave Rita and your three kids, now that you shit all over your brand-new bed? Or do you crawl back and try to pretend it never happened? Because she may take you back—but I don’t know if I will.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go tell Anderson.” And because I can play the game, too, I added, “And he will fuck it up, and a killer will get away because you’re too busy having a hissy fit to do anything about it.”
I was very glad to be ten feet away from her, because judging by the look on her face, if I had been close enough, she would have committed a felonious assault on my person, possibly resulting in serious injury. Even from ten feet away I could hear her teeth grinding together.
“Spill it,” she said at last, her teeth still locked tight.
I told her about the phone, and about the computer, and how that meant the same person killed both Jackie and Kathy, and she listened. She didn’t suddenly burst into bright smiles and embrace me, but she listened. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Okay. So who did it?”
“Renny Boudreaux,” I said. “He had some kind of altercation with Kathy, and she yelled that she would tell everybody next time.”
Deborah looked at me, and then she sneered. I mean, really, an actual sneer, the kind you give somebody pathetic who is beneath your contempt but for whom you feel contempt anyway. “Renny Boudreaux is in New York,” she said. “Doing the morning shows to promote his special. He left yesterday.”
“What?” I said, and I admit I was at least partially stunned.
“New York,” she said. “Everybody on set knows it, and you’d know it, too, if you had read the production schedule instead of spending all your time humping Jackie.”
It seemed like a very low blow, but she wasn’t finished with me yet. “And in the meantime,” she said, moving effortlessly from the sneer back to a very good snarl, “while you dick around and waste my time with stupid bullshit, you still haven’t found Astor.”
I did not actually reel in shock, but her body shots definitely left me a bit wobbly and uncertain. “Well,” I said feebly, “but—”
“Find your girl, asshole,” she said. “Leave this alone. You’ve done enough damage.” And she turned away and stalked toward the far end of the trailer. I stood and watched her, but she paced by me without a glance, as if I was some kind of common and rather dull plant life. I didn’t want to leave this alone. I wanted to grab Deborah by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her it wasn’t my fault; Patrick was dead, and somebody else had killed Jackie and ruined the only shot I’d ever had to climb out of the ooze and into the genuine gold-plated sunshine. And then I wanted to find Jackie’s killer and tape him snugly under my knife and give him a very long time to reflect on what he had done. And I would; I would not leave this alone, forgotten and fumbled away by Anderson’s stone-brained incompetence and Deborah’s bureaucratic indifference.
But as much as it nettled to admit it, Deborah was right about one thing: I did have to find Astor, and that was a more immediate problem than my revenge.
All right: Where should I start? Robert’s trailer was the obvious place, but I had already looked there. Still, that had been almost an hour ago. It was at least possible that they had returned, and if only to carry out my due diligence, I should check it again.
Deborah stalked by one more time without looking at me, and while she was still at the far end of her neurotic sentry march, I crossed over her path and headed toward Robert’s trailer.
THIRTY-THREE
ROBERT’S TRAILER WAS STILL UNLOCKED, AND AS I PUSHED the door open I saw that it was still dim inside, too. Once again I paused just outside and peered both ways, and once again I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. I stepped through the door and looked around; still nobody home. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I looked in all the corners and closets anyway, because thoroughness is a virtue every bit as important as neatness, and I found exactly the same amount of Nothing as I’d found earlier.
And now what? Astor was still missing, Deborah was still not speaking to me, and Jackie was still dead. The world was not at all the happy place it had seemed to be so recently, and for just a moment there no longer seemed any point to pretending. All the purpose, all the anger and resolve and need to Do Something drained out of me, and I collapsed onto the edge of the couch in Robert’s living area. It had all looked so bright and beautiful this morning, and now the world had snapped back into its true form, gray and pointless and mean-spirited, and even though that was certainly a better fit for Dismal Dexter, I didn’t like it. I wanted things back the way they were. Like a little boy trapped in a dark and dreary adventure, I wanted to go home.
But I was not a little boy, and even worse, I was home. This was it, this dismal, painful, senseless trudging through sludge. This was where I lived; back in ugly old reality again. And there was nothing I could do about it, nothing at all, except to find Astor and drag her back home and start up the same old shadow show.
Home: back to dirty socks on the floor and screeching at all hours and Rita’s endless, pointless, disjointed monologues. Rita: the one person still talking to me, and I didn’t really want to talk to her and couldn’t understand what she said. And thinking of Rita, I remembered that my phone had bleated at me while I was being grilled by Anderson. It had to be her; nobody else was left.
And so with a heavy sigh and a sense of returning to painful duty, I dragged out my phone and looked at the screen. Yup: Rita. She’d left a message, naturally—why pass up an opportunity to blather? I went to voice mail and listened.
“Dexter,” she said. “I know you must be looking for her. For Astor? Because it’s been a long time now and you didn’t— And anyway, I thought of something, and I was going to— I know you said she might come home, and I thought, that’s right, she might, but maybe not—and so anyway, I’ll just be gone for twenty minutes. Oh. And I’ll call you when I get back, in case.” I heard her take a breath, as if she was going to go on, but instead she disconnected.
I glanced at the time. The call had come in fifty-eight minutes ago. I had been to college, so I knew that fifty-eight minutes was more than twenty minutes, but she hadn’t called back.
I called her number, but it rang and rang until it went to voice mail. I disconnected. I couldn’t believe Rita had left the house, and it was even harder to believe she’d gone somewhere without her phone. But apparently she had, and I would just have to wait until she got back.
In the meantime, Astor was not in any danger; she was with Robert, and she was quite probabl
y someplace nearby, learning makeup tips. She would not want to be found, which would make things harder, but Robert would be much easier to locate. If he wasn’t hovering nearby at the edge of the excitement, somebody would know where he was—Victor, the director, would be a great place to start.
I found Victor in his trailer, just two doors away. I could tell he was in there because as I started to walk past, Martha, the assistant director, came rushing out of the trailer as if she was pursued by killer bees. Before I could even frame a question to her, she sprinted past me, muttering, “Shit shit shit shit shit,” and then vanished around the end of Trailer Row.
I went up the steps and knocked. There was no answer, but I could hear a voice inside, raised in passionate agony, so I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
Victor sat at the table, white-knuckled hand pressing his phone against his face. A large glass of water stood in front of him. He was listening to someone on the other end, shaking his head and whining, “No. No. No, impossible, fuck, no,” and as I stood there watching he picked up the glass and drained the water.
And then he reached behind him for a large blue bottle, which I recognized as a popular brand of vodka, refilled the glass, and took another healthy drink. I didn’t think he had filled the vodka bottle with water. He looked up at me without seeing me, and suddenly exploded in rage at whomever he was talking to on the phone.
“Well, goddamn it, what would you do? We got half a pilot in the can and a dead star, and the network is all over my fucking ass to fucking do something, and I can’t do shit without her and I can’t fucking raise the fucking dead!” He listened briefly—very briefly—and then snarled into the phone, “Well, then, call me back when you do know something.” He slapped the phone to disconnect and then slammed it onto the table.
“Rewrite,” he muttered angrily. “Fucking rewrite around a dead woman … Asshole …” Victor reached for his glass of “water” again, and then appeared to notice me for the first time. “What,” he said, and he did not sound like he was going to invite me to join him for a drink.
