A Star is Dead

by Elaine Viets

  Later, Detective Greiman would be commended for the arrest.

  Mario was freed by dinnertime on the second day. Monty got the drug charges dropped in exchange for Mario’s promise not to sue for false arrest.

  Monty and I met Mario at the jail. Mario came running out. He was thin as a scarecrow, and his black eye was now an evil yellow-green. His dark clothes hung on him. Mario threw his arms around me and kissed me, then said, ‘Your hair is a disaster.’

  ‘All the good stylists were in jail,’ I said.

  He demanded a brush and comb. I forced myself to sit patiently in the backseat of Monty’s car while Mario fixed my hair. I knew it made him happy.

  ‘Where can we take you, Mario?’ Monty asked. ‘Would you like dinner? Do you want to go home?’

  ‘I want to go home and take a long, hot shower,’ Mario said. ‘Tomorrow I want to check on my salon. Thank you, thank you, my friends.’ His voice was husky with emotion. ‘When this settles down, I will hold a big party at my salon to celebrate.’

  We promised to be there.

  After Monty dropped Mario off at his home, he said, ‘Good work, Angela. I’m going home.’

  ‘You did the real work,’ I said.

  On the drive home, I felt strangely empty after my so-called triumph. At home, I was too lazy to fix real food. I scrambled a couple of eggs, warmed up some frozen banana bread and made coffee. I slathered the banana bread with butter, poured more coffee and sat down to think.

  Who killed Becky?

  Will had the best reason, but I believed his blurted denial. At least, I thought I did. Stu and Tawnee had no reason I could think of, now that Will was arrested for Jessica’s murder.

  I’d admired Becky for her toughness. The theater crowd at the Lux had laughed at her, but she didn’t run off the stage. Becky had been bribed and bullied into taking off most of her clothes in front of the audience. Finally, she was shivering with cold and fear on-stage, down to her grimy gray circle-stitch bra and granny panties. Her glittering gold G – her lucky piece – was on a ribbon around her neck. Becky said she never took that necklace off.

  Even though she had been humiliated at the Lux, Becky refused to back down to old Reggie Du Pres when she showed up at his house. She wasn’t going to be hidden in the pool house like Suzy, with promises of a bath and a nap. Becky stalked into his mansion and sat at a table, dirty and defiant. She had guts. That night, she told me she was determined to turn her life around. And she did – for the short time she had left.

  I also remembered finding her body – and the two crisp one-hundred-dollar bills she’d squirreled away under her mattress. Will admitted he’d given her five hundred-dollar bills because he feared the backlash from the #MeToo movement. And yes, he’d written the Beverly Hills phone number on one of them. When I confronted Will at Solange, he’d tried to run me down later in the parking lot.

  My last view of Becky flashed in my mind, and I tried to push it away. I’d seen her on the floor of her hotel room in a pink wool pantsuit. Her arms were flung out, and a pink-and-blue flowered scarf was tied tightly around her neck.

  She’d been strangled by the scarf. I saw the blood-streaked wounds, where she’d clawed her own neck in a hopeless attempt to stop the strangulation. When she’d lived on the streets, Becky told me she’d been raped. There was no way she’d admit strangers to her room. She was killed by someone she knew. And her killer had taken a souvenir. I was sure something was missing from her body.

  Maybe the answer was in her autopsy report.

  I carefully read the list of the clothes Becky had worn: ‘one pair pink wool pants, one three-button pink wool suit jacket, one pink-and-blue-flowered blouse, all with Ellen Tracy labels.’ The flowered scarf was by Calvin Klein. She’d ditched her ugly underwear for a Victoria’s Secret white lace bra and matching panties.

  The report said she’d been strangled with her flowered scarf. The U-shaped hyoid bone in her neck was broken.

  Neck. Wait! Now I knew what was missing. Where was her lucky charm, the sparkly rhinestone G? Becky said she never took it off. Did her killer steal it? Why?

  It wasn’t anywhere in the inventory of the room, either. Neither was the money. Crooked cops were known to help themselves to cash at a crime scene, but I’d watched these officers during the investigation. They were professionals. They wouldn’t take anything. I’d searched the scene, then left it for about ten minutes, when I ran downstairs to the front desk and waited for the police. I couldn’t bear to be alone in that room any more with Becky’s body.

  Maybe Suzy knew if someone had been preying on homeless people around the Lux. I’d visit her again at the Hoffstedder.

  I was surprised that toothless Suzy had become an entrepreneur, trading her bottle of Rosie O’Grady for bottled water. Better yet, she was doing so well peddling water to the rush-hour crowd that she’d moved into a fifth-floor suite.

  About nine that morning, I bought a gooey butter coffee cake at the Chouteau Forest Bakery. Gooey butter was a local specialty that lived up to its name – one small coffee cake had at least a stick of butter and a whole box of confectioners’ sugar. It should be easy for Suzy to eat.

  It was nearly ten o’clock by the time I knocked on the door of her suite. Once again, Suzy was well-dressed. She wore a blue pantsuit with a pink-and-blue checked scarf.

  She greeted me with a toothless smile. I admired the newest improvements she’d made to her hotel suite. ‘Beautiful orchid on your coffee table.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ve never had a live plant before.’ Her pride was childlike.

  On the dinette table, a delicate glass-covered cake stand protected half a chocolate cake. I’d guessed right that she loved sweets.

  Suzy spotted my bakery box and said, ‘Oh, you brought me something from the fancy bakery.’

  Opening the box, she said, ‘Gooey butter! My favorite! I have coffee made. Have some cake with me.’

  I was hoping she’d say that.

  I sat at the white metal dinette set with the two basket chairs, while Suzy buzzed around, playing hostess. She served us two generous pieces of cake on new blue plates, and poured coffee into matching mugs. She took the chair closest to the wall, and sat down to enjoy her treat. As Suzy spooned sugar into her coffee she said, ‘Now that I’m going to the AA meetings, I live on coffee.’

  She ate her cake in small, precise bites while she talked about her water-selling business – ‘One man gave me five dollars and told me to keep the change.’

  I mentally added up the price of the suite’s improvements, including the new bedspread, the new rug, the dishes, books and flowers. She had to be spending more than she could possibly make – even if everyone gave her four-dollar tips. She must have had a stake to start redecorating this room. As I calculated the price of these luxuries, I thought of the two crisp bills stashed under Becky’s mattress. I also recognized the blue-and-pink checked scarf that Suzy had on. Becky had worn one like it at the hospital.

  It was time to end the pleasant chitchat. ‘Do you know if there’s going to be a funeral for Becky?’

  ‘Uh, I don’t know.’ Suzy looked uncomfortable. Her eyes shifted away from me. ‘That would depend on whether her ex-husband claims her body. She doesn’t have anyone else.’ Suzy pulled at her scarf, as if it were choking her. It slid off and I saw the ribbon around her neck. Suzy was wearing Becky’s sparkly G.

  ‘Where did you get Becky’s necklace?’

  Suzy looked frightened. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said, scooting back in her seat. She tried to get up, but I pushed the dinette set against the wall, trapping her. Coffee slopped out of her mug and Suzy mopped it absently with her scarf.

  ‘My scarf!’ she said. ‘Look what you made me do!’

  ‘That isn’t your scarf, Suzy. You stole it from Becky. Just like you took her necklace.’

  ‘She gave it to me!’

  ‘No, she’d never do that. She told me she never took it o
ff. It was her lucky piece.’

  ‘She changed her mind.’

  ‘Why did you kill her, Suzy? She was your friend. You stole her money, too.’

  ‘She didn’t need it anymore,’ Suzy said.

  ‘Then you did kill her.’

  Suzy pushed at the table, but I pushed harder. The table tipped and the cake holder slid to the floor with a crash.

  Suzy wailed as it smashed to pieces. ‘You broke it! You broke it!’ She crouched over the remains, rocking back and forth in grief.

  ‘You killed your friend.’

  ‘She wouldn’t share,’ Suzy said. ‘When she got all that money, I asked if I could sleep in her room, and she said no, she wanted to be alone. I asked for enough money for one night. One lousy night out of the cold. She still said no. She laughed at me. It was bad enough when all those people laughed at me at the theater, but when Becky did it, I’d had enough. I grabbed the ends of her designer scarf and …’

  With that, Suzy stood up, a long dagger of glass in her hand, and swiped it at me. I ducked, picked up a chair, and pinned her against the wall with the legs. Suzy screamed and struggled. A lamp shattered. I was having a hard time holding her there when I heard pounding on the door.

  ‘What’s going on in there?’ a man’s voice demanded.

  ‘Help!’ I cried. ‘Call the police. I’ve caught a killer.’

  THIRTY-ONE

  When the city detectives hustled Suzy out of her suite, she wailed like a mother ripped from her child. Fat tears fell like raindrops, spattering her new carpet, and Suzy couldn’t wipe them away. Her hands were cuffed.

  Was Suzy crying for her lost friend or her lost luxury? I didn’t know, but I suspected those tears were for her new suite-life.

  I stayed there several hours longer, downplaying my part in this drama, claiming it was an accident that I asked Suzy about Becky’s funeral. ‘I thought they were old friends,’ I said. ‘I had no idea it would trigger such a backlash.’

  I made sure the homicide detectives gave themselves credit for finding Becky’s killer. ‘It must be difficult to solve the murder of a woman who until recently was homeless,’ I said. They agreed, and happily claimed the shopworn glory for this arrest.

  The detectives, meanwhile, found things in Suzy’s suite that connected her to Becky. In addition to Becky’s checked scarf, Suzy had also helped herself to Becky’s blue Crocs, though she didn’t wipe off the coffee stain. The Crocs would be tested for Becky’s DNA. They also found a crisp hundred-dollar bill hidden in the medicine cabinet. It turned out to have Becky’s fingerprints on it. I told them Suzy may have spent the other stolen hundreds on her new luxuries.

  If Suzy got a good lawyer, he could argue that Becky had given her those things, but I suspected she’d wind up with an overworked court-appointed attorney.

  After about three hours, I signed a statement that was mostly true, and fled back to the Forest, where I went to see my old friend, Katie, at SOS. It was four o’clock and her day was nearly done. She greeted me with, ‘You look like recycled shit,’ and I instantly felt better.

  ‘I found Becky’s killer,’ I said, perching on the edge of her desk. ‘She tried to kill me.’

  ‘You always know how to grab my attention,’ Katie said. ‘Let me ditch this lab coat and we can get some coffee at the hospital’s new café. Their coffee is several cuts above the dishwater they serve in the cafeteria.’

  The To Your Health café was in an alcove that was the former staff smoking lounge. SOS had been declared a smoke-free campus, and the smokers had to sneak into the dumpster enclosures now, where they risked their lives even further for a cigarette.

  The hospital café was made to resemble a French sidewalk café with metal bistro chairs and small marble-top tables. Most of the tables were taken by doctors in surgical scrubs, but Katie found a table near the cash register.

  She bought two coffees and two pain au chocolat. The buttery chocolate croissants were just what I needed, and the coffee was strong as an amazon. The sugar and caffeine revived me and I told Katie the whole story. ‘It was so touching when Suzy told me she’d never had a “real plant” before.’

  ‘And how touching was it when she strangled Becky?’ Katie said, fury in her eyes. ‘It took at least two or three minutes for that woman to die. That’s an eternity. Becky was ripping at her own neck with her nails, trying to breathe. Strangling is a long, ugly death.’

  ‘Personally, I blame Jessica Gray for Becky’s murder,’ I said.

  ‘Hard to do. She was dead, sliced and diced by then,’ Katie said, sipping her coffee.

  I took another bite of my croissant. ‘But her brutality lived on,’ I said. ‘I watched what she did to those homeless women on-stage, to my everlasting shame. I should have walked out. They were totally exposed up there – naked in front of that fat, fed audience. All three women were humiliated, and in Suzy’s case, the experience unhinged her.’

  ‘What about the other one, with the grocery cart?’ Katie said.

  ‘Denise. That poor woman was already over the edge, so it’s hard to measure the damage Jessica did to her. But Suzy struck me as more fragile than Becky, and she’d been easily bullied by Jessica and Reggie Du Pres. Suzy felt entitled to some of Becky’s money after what she suffered. When Becky refused to give it to her, Suzy snapped and killed her.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Katie said. ‘But don’t forget that Becky was denied her second chance at a new life, thanks to Suzy.’ Katie finished her croissant and delicately patted her lips with a paper napkin. ‘Well, Jessica is answering for her evil deeds now, wherever she is.’

  ‘Some place hot,’ I said, ‘and I’m not talking about Florida.’

  From there, the conversation shifted to Monty and his slick move to free Mario. Katie was always happy to praise her lover, and so was I.

  We ended our conversation on a serious note. ‘Now listen here, Angela,’ Katie said. ‘You got lucky this time. Greiman’s been so busy taking credit for arresting Jessica’s killer that he didn’t complain about you interfering with his case. But you’re not always going to have that luck.’

  ‘I know that,’ I said, using my fork to scrape up the last smears of chocolate on my plate.

  ‘Promise me you won’t do it again,’ Katie said.

  ‘I promise I won’t try to solve any more murders,’ I said, and solemnly raised my right hand.

  I did have one more mystery to solve. It didn’t involve murder. In the Forest, it was a fate far worse than that.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Clare Rappaport still blamed her children for trying to kill her. She was determined to disinherit them. I had to stop this. Not for the kids’ sake – I was barely a blip on their radar – but for Clare’s. She needed her family. Most of all, she needed to know that her son and daughter hadn’t tried to poison her. My last task was to prove Trey and Jemima were innocent: I knew they wouldn’t give their hyper-allergic mother a killer cake laced with peanuts. Now I had to prove it.

  The lab report on the cake was in my email. Translated into plain English, the test results showed no poisons, and no whole or chopped peanuts in the Bavarian cream cake. However, the tests did find ‘peanut particles about the size of a grain of sand and microscopic traces’ of peanuts in the cake.

  I still had the pink cake box from the Chouteau Forest Bakery. The label described the contents as a ‘Bavarian whipped cream 8-layer cake.’ The store’s slogan, in curly white script, proclaimed the bakery as ‘The Sweetest Place in the Forest.’ The cake’s ingredients were listed, and I read them all. No nuts. And no label warning that the cake was ‘made in a facility that processes peanuts, ground nuts and tree nuts.’

  Clare said she couldn’t even ride on a plane where people had been eating peanuts without risking an allergic attack. Maybe the problem had started at the Chouteau Bakery.

  I remembered Katie’s warning: ‘Don’t get involved with this fight to disinherit her kids. It’s the law of the third dog. You don�
�t want to come between a mother and her children.’

  But what if I wanted to bring the family together? I was willing to risk a few barks and nips if I could help reunite Clare with her children. I had no interest in Clare’s money and didn’t belong to her social circle. She’d been kind to my mother when Mom was dying and I was grateful for that.

  Mom had worked for Reggie Du Pres for years, but when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, the old man acted as if cancer was catching. He’d docked her pay on those days when chemo left her too weak to work. Many a morning, Mom dragged herself to his house, nearly too sick to stand up.

  On the morning after Mario was freed, I finished my toast and coffee about ten o’clock and drove to the Chouteau Forest Bakery. The weather was starting to turn cold again – low, dirty-gray clouds frowned over the Forest – and I wore a winter coat for the first time in days.

  The bakery’s green-and-white striped awnings – Forest green, of course – were a local landmark. In the big plate-glass window, fancy iced cakes were displayed on silver stands like fine jewelry, and cost almost as much.

  I saw signs celebrating Valentine’s Day, and tried to avoid them. Now that my husband Donegan was dead, I couldn’t bear the holiday. I averted my eyes. The brass bell on the door jingled cheerily, announcing my entrance. I inhaled the sweet scents of sugar and butter.

  Amy, a fresh-faced young woman in a pink uniform, was behind the sparkling counter. She greeted me cheerfully, and looked concerned when I told her what had happened to Clare. ‘I’m so sorry Mrs Rappaport had a problem. She’s a nice lady and a good customer. But we never put peanuts in our Bavarian cream cake. That cake has no nuts in it at all.’

  ‘Do you still have her order?’ I asked.

  ‘We should have it in the back. The slips aren’t processed until the end of the month.’

  Thank goodness the bakery hadn’t entered the computer age. Amy disappeared into the back room and came back several minutes later with a handwritten order to show me. ‘See,’ she said. ‘This notation means that her daughter, Jemima, called in the order and this one means that her son, Trey, picked up the cake and paid for it in cash.