Maggie and the Empty Noose

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "Yes it is," Maggie said. "He has an Orion telescope." She spoke very loudly and clearly to Reese. "Did you take your telescope somewhere? Did you go look at the stars up in the hills?"

  Again Reese ignored her. Didn't even seem to realize what was happening around him. He was talking under his breath so they couldn't hear him for a little while. Then he said, more clearly, "had my orange juice. Stupid wave all noisy."

  "He means the wave sculpture," she offered. "He must have gone out by the pool when he got home."

  "Juice bad. Hands shaking. Dropped glass in water. Splash!" he said, mimicking the sound by making a raspberry.

  Reese stared up at her, glassy-eyed. "Sorry, Maggie. Gotta clean it up."

  "The pool filter is running!" She headed for the pool at a run.

  "Maggie, come back!" Ibarra's voice cut through and she stopped. She came back to him.

  "What do you think you're doing?"

  "He just said he dropped his glass in the pool. I heard the pool filter running. Maybe there's evidence out there."

  "Evidence of what? Him dropping a glass?"

  "He said the juice was bad, Will. What if it was bad—what if there was something in it?"

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know. Drugs. Poison. Something. You should check."

  "You're saying somebody spiked his orange juice and that's why he killed this woman?"

  "No! I don't know." She covered her face with her hands. Then she looked up at Ibarra. "Please, Will. I'm telling you. He didn't—all right, you don't believe me—but just maybe he didn't do this. Something is really off about this whole setup. Please don't assume it's what it appears to be on the surface."

  Ibarra's expression was grim. "What it is, Maggie, is murder."

  The paramedics showed up just then.

  "Who called you?" Ibarra asked.

  "I did," Nora said. She'd finally arrived, and she wasn't alone. Nora knew everyone, and apparently she knew a lawyer who could show up on a few minutes' notice, on a Sunday morning, impeccably attired in an Armani suit, briefcase in hand, and ready for battle.

  The lawyer immediately took charge, silencing Reese's mumblings, ordering Ibarra to stop questioning his client, and demanding that the paramedics evaluate Reese before any further interrogation.

  The police stepped back to let the paramedics work.

  The paramedics moved Reese to the end of the sofa away from where he'd been sick on the floor, and immediately started evaluating him.

  Nora wanted to talk to Maggie, but Maggie waved her off. She didn't want to talk in front of the police, in case she added more fuel to the bonfire of evidence the police were building around Reese.

  So they stood and watched the paramedics. Maggie had assumed that Reese was high on drugs, and needed to just come down, but the paramedics' attitude toward his condition quickly turned serious. She heard the word "toxicity" and then they were moving faster, one holding his hand and trying to insert an IV while the other got out medicine and muttered about dosages.

  Reese figured out what they were doing. "No needles!" he screamed, frantically crawling up the back of the sofa in his attempt to get away from the paramedic. The IV bag broke when he flailed at it, and the saline splashed all over the couch and the floor, making the paramedic lose his footing and slip. He dropped the needle.

  Both Maggie and Nora rushed to Reese and tried to hold him down. He was a strong man, and he gave Nora a black eye and only missed Maggie by inches when she ducked quickly to avoid a flailing arm. But finally they got through to him.

  He collapsed against them, burying his face in Maggie's chest while Nora patted his back.

  "No needle. No needle. No needle," he begged. "No, no, no!"

  "Get the spray," the paramedic said.

  "Sorry," Maggie said to the paramedic. "He's really upset."

  "Is he an ex-addict?" the man asked, and she nodded. "They often freak out about needles," he said. "Try to calm him and we'll do this another way."

  They finally settled him down enough for the medic to give him a nasal spray.

  "Narcan," the paramedic explained. "He's on the verge of ODing here."

  "But he can't be," Maggie said. "He must have taken the drug hours ago."

  "Doesn't matter. It can work like that."

  Suddenly Reese's body tensed against her and she let him go, fearing another arm wrestling match. He shot to his feet, pushing everyone out of his way. "I'm awake!" he shouted.

  He stood there, staring down at everyone still kneeling over the couch where he'd been sitting a moment ago. "I'm back. I'm back."

  "We know that, Sir," one of the paramedics said. "Sit down."

  "Sit down, Stanley," Nora said firmly. "You're sick. They're trying to help you."

  "The antidote kicked in," the paramedic explained.

  "Apparently," Maggie said dryly.

  "I'm awake now," Reese said.

  "We can all see that," Maggie said. "Sit down."

  He sat.

  Ibarra moved in then. "So if he's awake, we'll continue this at the police station."

  "No," the lawyer said. "We're not going to the police station until I can talk to my client."

  "No," the paramedic said. "You can fight over custody of him later. Right now he's going to the hospital. He's not out of the woods yet."

  There was a lot of arguing, but eventually Reese was led by the paramedics to the waiting ambulance.

  Nora and the attorney went along.

  Ibarra headed there, too, but before he left, he said, "Maggie, you get down to the police station and wait for me there. I'm going to need to get a full statement right away." He glared at her. "And go brush your hair."

  She nodded.

  Once Reese was gone, the house grew quiet. She stood there against the living room wall, surrounded by the investigators quietly going about their jobs. She noticed they had moved out to the patio now, and there were little markers being placed at intervals across the lawn that led to the beach stairs. Then one of the men headed down those stairs and out of her sight.

  Blood trail, she thought, not even able to be excited about that information. It wouldn't clear Reese. Nothing would. Olivia was in his bed. He had been in the bed with her. Nothing would make that okay.

  The gas fireplace was still blazing away, adding an incongruously cheerful ambiance to the room.

  She stared at the sofa where Reese had been. The sickness was still on the floor. The saline from the broken IV bag had spilled all over, too, and she found herself wondering whether she should wipe it up before it damaged the oak floor, or if it would count as evidence or something.

  It didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

  Maggie collapsed against the wall, doing the full slide down to the floor she'd seen so many times in movies but had never personally experienced.

  Reese was going to prison for first degree murder. Nothing mattered anymore.

  Chapter Five

  When Chief Randall arrived, Maggie managed to get her feet back under her. Before he spotted her, she got herself together and went home to her little purple tiny house parked in front of Casablanca.

  The fog had lifted a bit, but not her spirits.

  Casablanca's paved driveway spanned the entire width of the house, typical for homes on The Row, where the houses showed an austere, windowless side to the street, and opened up to the grand ocean view in the back. She had to weave her way through a horde of vehicles clogging her driveway: her own Passion Berry Pearl Honda Fit that always made her smile, but today only made her heart sink as she remembered driving Reese and his son up the coast on a gorgeous summer day; Reese's silver beast of a sports car, as always parked sideways to take up two spaces in the driveway; the coroner's van huddled up against it to bring home the fact that there was a person dead in the house; and the assorted police vehicles squeezed in every which way and poking out into the street, making it impossible for any cars to get by.

  Crime scene tape had been
strung across the driveway, and two officers stood behind it to keep anyone from coming in.

  Two officers.

  Because outside that tape there was already a crowd gathering. Carita was far from LA, so the tabloid stringers hadn't arrived yet, but the local reporters had gotten the word, and they stood behind the line yelling at her the moment she came out the door.

  She kept her head down and went straight to her tiny house at the far end of the driveway, the flash of lights and the shouts of "Did he kill her?" and "Are you a witness?" ringing in her ears.

  Inside, she slammed the door shut and locked it, then went around and closed all the curtains, as if that would shut out the yelling.

  Jasper wasn't barking. He hadn't even gotten up to greet her when she came in. He lay on his pillow bed, flat as he could make himself, as if he wanted to disappear into the floor.

  She sat down on the stool by the bead loom. She patted her knee. Jasper came running, and pushed himself as close as he could to her.

  She bent over and hugged him close, and cried into his fur.

  "What are we going to do?" she said into his ruff.

  He whined sympathetically in reply.

  After a while she sat up. Her purple bath towel lay on the floor where she'd dropped it.

  "Jasper, Towel," she said softly, and he eagerly looked around for it.

  When he brought it to her, she thanked him with a head scratch, then used the towel to wipe the tears off her face.

  He didn't know the command for hairbrush, so she went and fetched it from the bathroom. She held it out to him to sniff. "Jasper, Hairbrush," she said half-heartedly.

  He grinned, eager to learn something new.

  So she repeated the command, and let him mouth the handle briefly, before taking it back from him and using it to get the tangles out of her hair.

  He pressed against her knees as she sat brushing her hair. Reese was innocent. He had to be. But how could he be? Everything pointed to him: the drugs, the hatred of Olivia, the dead body that someone must have put there. If not him, then who? And why? Why in his bed? Why frame him?

  "It has to be a mistake," she explained to Jasper, who nodded in agreement as if he understood. "I just don't believe it."

  Was she crazy? It was so obvious Reese had committed murder. Why couldn't she accept it? Was it just bias on her part? Did she think because Reese played good guys in the movies he couldn't have done this? Was she just denying the obvious truth because she couldn't face the fact that a friend had committed a monstrous act of violence?

  He was the very stereotype of a hero: handsome and rich, smart and funny, a little bit arrogant but with that touch of vulnerability that made her feel protective toward him. Was it all just too much to resist? Was she just blinded by emotion to the truth that this man she'd trusted was not the hero, but the villain of the story?

  She heard a loud honking and then the beep of a vehicle backing up.

  She went to the window and peeked through the curtains.

  The coroner's van was leaving, presumably with Olivia's body inside. The police were moving the crowd back, and the van had to make a sharp left to back out past Reese's Porsche 918 Spyder. They were being careful, because hitting a half-million dollar car would destroy the department's budget, even if the car belonged to a murderer.

  She let the curtain fall closed again, then resumed brushing her hair.

  Wait a minute.

  She remembered coming home last night. It must have been after ten, when the coffee shop closed and she'd walked home in the dark, thinking about Reese's anger and hurrying to take Jasper out for his evening constitutional.

  And the driveway had been half-empty then, with only her purple tiny house and her little purple car parked there.

  She could picture the empty pavement by Casablanca's front door.

  No Porsche. No sideways, hogging-the-driveway, outrageously overpriced sports car glistening like liquid silver in the fog.

  She dropped the hairbrush and Jasper helpfully picked it up and handed it back to her.

  What time had Olivia died? Exactly what time? That suddenly became critical. If she had been killed before ten that night, then Reese hadn't been home to commit the crime.

  She hugged Jasper, this time enthusiastically, and he licked her face.

  "It's possible!" she told the dog. It was just possible Reese wasn't a killer. And she was going to follow the thread of that possibility and see if she could prove it.

  Chapter Six

  "Don't you see?" Maggie was arguing with Ibarra in his cramped office. "If Reese was off somewhere stargazing late that evening, and didn't get back until after ten at least, then Olivia might have already been dead when he got home."

  Ibarra sat behind his cluttered desk in the sleek new Carita Police Station building on Main Street. She sat in one of the two guest chairs facing him.

  The door to his office was closed, shutting out the noise of the busy station—frantically busy now with a celebrity murder case sucking up all the attention in the little beach town.

  "You don't actually know where he was," Ibarra said. "And his lawyer won't let him talk to us anymore, so I don't see how you think this little tidbit about his car helps his case."

  "Maybe he was driving around when the murder took place," she offered.

  "With no witnesses," Ibarra said. "We all know he always drives alone. So there's no way to verify his location."

  "What about his phone?" she asked. "Couldn't the phone company track his movements?"

  "He turned it off after Olivia texted him twelve times yesterday." He glanced at her. "Maybe because he intended to speak to her in person."

  "You don't know that," she said. She cast around desperately in her mind for some answer. "Maybe he was witnessed getting gas, or, I don't know, buying a hamburger or something."

  He looked at her like she was insane. "I thought you said he was stargazing all alone up on a mountain."

  "I don't know where he went. That's just a guess. But, well, maybe he stopped somewhere on the way out of town."

  "We'll find out," Ibarra said. He looked down at the papers on his desk. "But don't get your hopes up."

  "Will?" she asked. "Come on, you can see I'm right that he might have an alibi. Can't you? What time did she die? Was it before ten?"

  "It was around midnight," he said, then pressed his lips together as if wishing he hadn't spoken.

  "Okay," she said, regrouping. "I didn't hear him come home, and that car makes a racket like a rocket engine. Maybe I was already asleep before he got back. We need to find out how late he did get home—maybe it was after midnight. When he's looking at the stars he can stay out for hours."

  "Sure," Ibarra said sarcastically. "He's a Boy Scout with a telescope. Not a drugged out movie star."

  "He's a person, Will. And there are tons of other possible suspects." She cast around in her mind to find one. "I mean," she said desperately, "there are fifty houses on The Row. It could have been anyone."

  "There are forty-three houses on The Row, and we are checking everyone's alibis. You'll be happy to know most of them were in bed asleep last night." He rubbed the stubble on his chin. "Like we all wish we were."

  "That's no alibi," she said. "It could have been any one of them."

  "Any one of them didn't wake up with a dead body in their bed." Ibarra set down the pen he'd been holding and clasped his hands together. He spoke clearly, as if talking to a small child: "You are here to give a statement, Maggie. Not to tell me how to do my job. I know you have trouble telling the difference, but I'm sitting on this side of the desk, and you're on that side. Let's keep it that way."

  He unclasped his hands and picked up his pen again.

  "Now take a deep breath and we'll start over." He glanced at the camera in the upper corner of the room that was recording the interview.

  "Resuming interview at 2:33 PM," he said formally. "Ms. McJasper, you stated that you called Mr. Stevens at 8:14 AM."


  "I don't know what time I called him exactly."

  "We found Mr. Stevens' phone in his bed, and it shows he called you three times, and then you returned his final call a minute later."

  "Oh," she said, getting excited. "So did he call anyone else? Does his phone show where he was last night?"

  "Ms. McJasper," Ibarra said, his voice taking on a bearlike growl, "please answer my questions without embellishing." He looked down, then cleared his throat. "So you called him at 8:14 AM, and then you called the police about twenty minutes later. What took so long?"

  "I was in the shower when he called me. So I returned his call. And when he sounded sick, I got dressed and went to Casablanca—"

  "—to the main house."

  "Yes. And it took me a few minutes to find him."

  "Why?"

  "Because he was upstairs, and I first searched downstairs."

  "He was in his bedroom with the dead body of Olivia Sigworth."

  She grimaced. "Yes. In the master bedroom upstairs, and he was sick, so I helped him downstairs."

  "And that took twenty minutes? Was there any reason for the delay in reporting the murder?"

  "His son Shane came to the door and I sent him to a friend's house. I didn't want him to witness anything. That took a few minutes."

  "Anything else?"

  "I called Reese's manager and told her to get him a lawyer."

  "And that's all? You didn't touch anything else or remove anything from the scene."

  "Of course not."

  He nodded. "All right. I think we've covered that part of your statement."

  "Then we're done?" she asked, resisting the urge to grill him more about the phone records. She had other sources if he was going to be so closed-mouthed.

  "No, Ms. McJasper, we are not done. We are just getting started."

  She made a face at him, and he gave her a warning glare.

  "How long have you known Ms. Olivia Sigworth, commonly known as Olivia Stevens?"

  "I don't know how long I've known her exactly," she answered. "Years and years. Back when I was married to a movie executive, we would run into each other at industry events. She was a C-list model and actress, and of course I knew her through Reese as well. But we didn't know each other very well. We didn't have any interests in common." To put it mildly. Olivia was a gold digger. She was ambitious, scheming, and pretty much everything Maggie had wanted to leave behind when she escaped LA for the little beach town of Carita.