A Star is Dead

by Elaine Viets

  ‘He should be OK. If they try to use it against him, I’ll get it thrown out.’

  Should, could, may – those terms were not reassuring. But there was nothing I could do right now.

  I glanced at the Kit-Cat clock on the kitchen wall – two-thirty. ‘I’ll get a couple of hours’ sleep,’ I said. ‘See you about eight.’

  Katie’s guest room was upstairs at the end of the hall, a narrow room with a sloping ceiling. The pale blue walls and patchwork quilt were soothing, but I couldn’t sleep. I tossed and turned and … and woke up with the sun in my eyes. What time was it? The little alarm clock by the bed said 9:32. I put on my clothes, stumbled out of bed to the bathroom down the hall, where I washed my face, combed my hair, and brushed my teeth with an extra toothbrush Katie had thoughtfully left for me. By the time I walked downstairs, I was almost awake.

  Monty was sitting at the kitchen table, a nearly empty coffee cup by his laptop. He was dressed for the office in a fresh blue shirt and gray suit, his jacket on the chair back. He was running his fingers through his thick brown hair, a sure sign he was worried.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘The cops refused my request for a second search,’ he said. ‘I’m filing a two-part emergency petition with the court asking that the limo be first, preserved, and second, that the cops be ordered to allow us, as the defense, to examine the limo.’

  ‘Will you do the search yourself?’

  ‘I’ve lined up Duncan to do it, and I’m lucky he’s available on short notice.’

  I knew Duncan da Silva was a PI Monty sometimes hired. I wished I could do the search, but it wasn’t a good idea to be seen working this case at the cop shop. Greiman would haul me in on charges of interfering with an investigation.

  ‘I’m faxing the petition now,’ Monty said. ‘We should hear back in about an hour. Come have coffee. Katie has eggs if you want. Help yourself.’

  I was too nervous to eat. I sipped coffee and picked the pecans off a piece of coffee cake while Monty talked on the phone to his office manager, the ever-efficient Jinny Gender. He issued orders and suggestions while he ran his fingers through his hair, making it wilder at each pass.

  I paced the kitchen until Monty begged me to stop. Then I sat in a kitchen chair and fidgeted for another fifteen minutes until his computer pinged. He read the message and quit tormenting his hair. He even smiled as he said, ‘Well, well, the judge granted our request. The examination has to be videoed, which is fine with me. Duncan has to consent to a search to refute any claim that he planted any evidence, but he’ll do that.’

  ‘When is he going to do the search?’

  ‘As soon as I call him, which is right now. This search will take another hour or so. Do you want to wait?’

  Of course I did. My life was on hold until I knew if we could prove Mario’s innocence. This time, I went for a walk down the country road, admiring the trees and flowers that were starting to bud into life. This happened often during a stretch of unseasonably warm weather – the springlike temperatures would bring out the trees and flowers, and then an unexpected ice storm would turn the display into dead brown mush. I hoped it wouldn’t happen this year.

  I felt better after the walk, and went back to the kitchen to whip up some eggs. Monty didn’t want any food, but two scrambled eggs settled my stomach. I’d finished cleaning up when the call came from Duncan.

  The disappointment in Monty’s voice told me all I wanted to know. ‘You searched everywhere and found what? A locket?’ he said. There was a long pause, then, ‘It’s inscribed “To my darling Tawnee” and has a photo of a woman with an old-fashioned hairdo. Send it to me, will you? I have an idea who that belongs to. Nothing else? I guess that’s it. OK, thanks for trying. Send me a bill.’

  He rang off and said, ‘You heard that?’

  I nodded. I was too upset to speak.

  ‘This is just a small setback,’ Monty said. ‘We’ll get Mario out.’

  I didn’t share his confidence. I managed a nod, but something about Mario’s video nagged at me. I opened my iPad and looked at the video again, studying Mario’s sweep of the interior, before Jessica’s death: the long leather seat, the bar crystal glittering like diamonds, the huge TV and the sound system. Why did that remind me of something? It niggled in my mind. Maybe if I saw the limo in person, it would jar the memory loose.

  ‘Where’s the limo now?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s being towed to the limo company, even as we speak. They want to start the repairs so they can rent it again.’

  ‘What if we looked at it at the limo company?’ I asked. ‘Could we search it there? Could I search it there?’

  ‘I can call – but why?’

  ‘I have an idea. I’ll know it when I see it. Call Duncan. He can meet us there. And tell him to bring his camcorder.’

  Monty looked puzzled, but he humored me. He made a couple of calls and said, ‘The limo company agreed, if we go now. Duncan will meet us there. I’ll let you take a look inside. See if anything jogs your memory. Then Duncan can go in and search. I can’t be on tape and neither can you.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Angela,’ he said. ‘I’ve called Harper Jackson, the Chouteau County prosecutor, to be there, in case we find something. Harper will preserve the chain of custody. I had to call in a major favor to get him there.’

  Harper Jackson, known to his (many) enemies as Harper Jackass, was a by-the-book type. Whatever I thought of him – which wasn’t much – he wouldn’t tolerate any slipshod behavior.

  The limo company was near the St Louis airport, and huge passenger planes roared overhead. Duncan was waiting for us near the entrance. The PI was almost scarily anonymous. A round face with not a single distinguishing feature, brownish – or was it blond? – hair, average height. He could blend into almost any crowd.

  Harper Jackson showed up in a dark gray three-piece suit. The prosecutor was skinny as a fence post and had about as much personality, but we needed him. I knew there would be law and order when Jackson was there.

  The limo was parked in the back of the lot. It had lost its shine and was spattered with white bird lime. We were escorted by Earl, a skinny guy with jailhouse tats who cleaned the limos. He stayed well away from Jackson, as if he expected the prosecuting attorney to nab him.

  ‘Glad it’s you and not me going into that thing again,’ Earl said. ‘I’m lucky I don’t have to clean it.’

  ‘Better wear a mask, Angela,’ Duncan said.

  I don’t wear masks, smear Vicks under my nose, or use anything to block even the worst decomposition odors. After the first few wretched breaths, my nose shorted out and I didn’t smell anything. Like when you go to a movie theater – at first all you smell is the popcorn. Then you don’t notice it. Well, sort of.

  I didn’t say anything to Duncan, but the PI was going back inside that limo. He had to officially find that bottle. As soon as my memory was jogged and I figured out where the spray bottle was.

  I gloved up, and Earl opened the driver’s door with a flourish. I sat in the driver’s seat and surveyed the chaos behind me. The stink was horrific – vomit and feces had simmered in the hot sun. The interior was a shambles: Long slashes of vomit on the leather seats and carpet, the shattered TV screen, tiny flecks of a broken crystal glass on the floor, after the police had removed the broken glass. I tried to ignore the horrors and concentrate. What did this remind me of?

  I stared at the long back seat, and remembered the driver playing the haunting music of Johnny Grimes, Jessica’s long-lost lover. Gossip said he’d died a rock god’s death, collapsing in a fog of alcohol and drugs. Pain pills. That was it! Where had I seen pain pills recently? At Tom Murphy’s bloody death scene. His wife, Tara, had showed us where he’d supposedly hidden them.

  ‘The speaker!’ I cried. ‘It’s in the speaker in the far corner of the limo!’

  I emerged gratefully into the fresh air. Monty said, ‘Duncan, you have to search the spe
aker at the end of the seat. Pop the speaker’s cover and see if the bottle is in there.’

  ‘Me?’ Duncan did not look happy.

  ‘I can’t do it and neither can Angela. I’ll ask Jackson to pat you down and then Earl will tape you finding it.’

  ‘Whoa,’ Earl said. ‘That’s not my job.’

  I found my purse, pulled out a twenty and put it on his palm. Earl looked at it like it was a used Kleenex. Monty added another twenty. Earl brightened slightly. Two more twenties, and we had ourselves a videographer.

  Monty pulled Duncan aside and said, ‘I need you to make another search.’

  ‘It’s foul in there,’ Duncan said.

  ‘I know. There will be a bonus. If you go right to the speaker and find the evidence, it might raise questions. Search the limo thoroughly.’

  Earl was ready to begin. Duncan pulled his pants’ pockets inside out to show there was nothing in them, and Harper Jackson briskly patted him down while Earl videoed them.

  Finally, Duncan put on a face mask and a pair of latex gloves, and crawled into the back of the limo. He searched the seats, checked the carpet, and looked in the now-empty bar. Finally, he popped the speaker top with a house key. Nestled inside was a blue plastic spray bottle.

  ‘You’re a genius!’ Monty said. He warned Duncan to handle the bottle carefully. The camera rolled while they gingerly put the bottle in a plastic evidence bag and Jackson watched.

  ‘I’ll take this bottle and have it printed,’ Jackson said.

  ‘Better hurry,’ I said. ‘It’s noon – and Will and Stu leave at six tonight for California.’

  ‘They won’t get away,’ Monty promised.

  But they had so far.

  THIRTY

  Mario wasn’t freed by breakfast – or lunch, for that matter. Monty and Harper Jackson decided to wait until the prosecuting attorney had the fingerprints on the spray bottle. ‘I’ll take custody of it,’ Jackson said. ‘That way, the chain of custody is secure.’

  Monty made sure the prosecuting attorney had access to Mario’s prints and we waited tensely for the verdict. Was the solution inside the bottle harmless, or did it contain deadly nicotine? Were there any prints? If so, who did they belong to? Was Stu or Will the killer?

  The spray bottle was ready at two-fifteen, which was amazingly fast. But the prosecuting attorney wanted this case out of his hair – and a hair turned out to be an important find. He announced that he’d found a short piece of hair wound around the cap.

  ‘We found a two-inch red hair on the inside of the cap,’ he said.

  ‘That means it’s Will,’ I said.

  Both men ignored me. Jackson continued, ‘We’re having the hair tested for DNA. The solution in the bottle contains a lethal amount of nicotine. We also found a fingerprint inside the bottle, as if someone had grasped the open bottle by the top. The prints are not Mario Garcia’s.’ Monty and I cheered.

  ‘The three sets of prints belong to Ms Gray and Ms Tawnee Simms, which would be consistent with Ms Simms’ account. The third set belongs to Mr William London.’

  Definitely Will! So the red bottle had held a harmless throat spray. The lethal mixture was in the blue one. Now Becky’s jingle made sense: It’s not the red – it’s the blue.

  The two of them went straight to see Detective Ray Greiman at the Chouteau County Police Department. I tagged along in my car, inventing an excuse to be at the cop shop. I stayed well in the background.

  As they entered, Monty looked cool and ready for a fight – his blue shirt was crisp and his gray suit unwrinkled. Jackson’s suit pants had knife-edge creases.

  Greiman met the two men in the lobby, angry and defensive. His black Hugo Boss shirt and pants could have used a pressing. I knew he was rattled before Monty even said a word.

  ‘You’ve arrested the wrong man for Jessica Gray’s murder,’ Monty said.

  The detective sputtered like an old car. ‘That faggot hairdresser killed Ms Gray.’ Greiman crossed his arms over his chest, prepared to stonewall.

  ‘Then why aren’t his prints on the murder weapon?’ Jackson asked. ‘And what’s someone else’s hair doing on the bottle? Red hair, I should add.’

  He showed Greiman the bagged, tagged and fingerprinted bottle and Monty gave him a private viewing of the limo video. Greiman still hesitated, and Jackson threatened to take the case away. He knew that Greiman was territorial and the murder of Jessica Gray, an international celebrity, was a once-in-lifetime prize.

  That’s when Officer Christopher Ferretti, Chouteau County’s new hire, burst into the CHPD and announced, ‘I found an abandoned rental car registered to Will London of Los Angeles.’

  ‘That’s Jessica’s make-up artist,’ Monty said. I edged myself around the corner of the waiting room for a better view. Will was looking more like our killer every minute.

  ‘A rental car under his name was left in a ditch a quarter-mile from the Forest Inn,’ Ferretti said.

  ‘Then Will could have dumped the car and walked to the Forest Inn,’ Monty said.

  ‘Staggered, is more like it,’ Officer Ferretti said, ‘if he was as drunk as the witnesses say.’

  ‘Was that the car in the parking lot collision?’ Monty asked.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Ferretti said, then slipped into officialese. ‘The 2018 silver Chevy Malibu appeared to have been in a collision before it was abandoned. I photographed the vehicle and determined that the damaged front end had traces of gold paint on it. That’s when I called CSI’s Sarah Byrne to see if the gold paint was a match for Mrs Holly Barteau’s 1997 Mercury, which was damaged in the Solange parking lot by a hit-and-run driver.’

  ‘What about Stu Milano’s car?’ Monty asked.

  ‘It was in the Forest Inn’s lot. The security cameras showed he arrived back at the inn at 7:41 p.m. last night, and the car wasn’t removed until 8:15 this morning.’

  ‘I bet that’s when he went to Jessica’s nine o’clock cremation service,’ I said.

  ‘I haven’t confirmed that yet,’ Ferretti said. ‘But Tawnee Simms and Will London drove off with him in the car.’

  Ferretti’s cell phone rang – it was Nitpicker, confirming that the paint on Will’s abandoned car was from Holly Barteau’s beloved bashed Mercury.

  ‘We’ve got the hit-and-run driver,’ the young officer said. ‘It’s Will London.’

  ‘He’s staying at the Forest Inn,’ Monty said. ‘Better arrest him now, before he leaves for the airport. He’s flying home to California at six tonight.’

  ‘I’m on my way to the inn now,’ the officer said.

  Ferretti nabbed Will while the make-up artist was waiting at the inn for his Uber ride to the airport. Will tried to claim that his silver rental car had been stolen and he was too shaken (i.e., drunk) to call the police, but there was no evidence to support that. Only Will’s prints were found in and on the abandoned Chevy, and he still had the keys in his pocket. The car had not been tampered with.

  Ferretti brought Will back to the station with his hands cuffed behind his back – the most uncomfortable position. Will could have used his own cosmetic artistry – his eyes were bloodshot, his red hair was flat and greasy, and his skin had a greenish-gray tinge. He must have had the mother of all hangovers.

  Ferretti charged Will with everything he could think of, including leaving the scene of an accident and a hit-and-run with property damage. Ferretti saw me in the waiting room and said, ‘I can press charges for attempted vehicular homicide.’

  ‘Do you have enough to hold Will until he can be arrested for Jessica’s murder?’ I asked.

  ‘You bet,’ Ferretti said. I liked his enthusiasm.

  ‘I can’t swear I saw Will behind the wheel last night, and I’m afraid my scabbed knee won’t impress a jury.’

  By now, I’d figured out that the crafty Detective Greiman knew which way the wind was blowing. I could see he was eager to nail Will for Jessica’s murder. He knew it was a good career move. If Greiman could pro
ve the beloved celebrity wasn’t killed by a local – even a Cuban-American transplant – but an outsider from Los Angeles, the Forest’s shame would be erased. Mario’s arrest would be quickly forgotten.

  Ferretti let Monty, Jackson, and me into the observation room connected to the interrogation room. Through the mirror, I watched Greiman grilling Will relentlessly. When he showed him the video with the switched spray bottles, Will looked like an animated corpse. The final touch was the bagged and tagged blue spray bottle, retrieved from the limo, and the red hair. The detective told Will that his fingerprints were on the bottle and there was a lethal amount of doctored spray in it.

  Will barely managed to say: ‘I want a lawyer. A real one from LA.’ He endeared himself to all of us by saying, ‘I don’t want some local hick.’ It must have cost Will a fortune to fly defense attorney Ethan Heller to Missouri first class from Los Angeles.

  The hit-and-run charges were enough to keep Will in jail overnight. Ethan Heller arrived at six the next morning, after a night on the red-eye flight from LAX, and once again, I got to observe Will’s questioning. The high-powered attorney showed up at the Chouteau County jail. His suit was as shiny as a mobster’s, and his hair was gelled. Ethan was one slick lawyer. He looked around at his surroundings as if a tornado had dropped him in a pigsty.

  During Greiman’s grilling that morning, Ethan constantly cautioned his client with, ‘Don’t answer that!’

  Will obeyed. Except one time. When Greiman asked if Will had murdered Rebecca Barens – Becky, the homeless woman – the make-up artist blurted, ‘I didn’t shoot her!’

  Where did he get that idea? Becky wasn’t shot – she was strangled. The news of her death had been buried in the local papers, and never made the TV news. Maybe, since he was from LA, he assumed all murders were shootings. That outburst helped convince me that Will didn’t kill Becky, even though her death would be convenient for him. In my experience, people under pressure gave themselves away in little blurts like that.

  Will’s expensive attorney was no more effective than a local yokel. The make-up artist was arrested and charged with the first-degree murder of Jessica Gray, and the Forest still wanted the death penalty.