Aw, jeez.
Lucy laughed. “You should,” she said to me. “Loosen things up in here. This room has got some seriously ugly knots.”
Danya looked at me and smiled. “Got yourself a live little wire there, don’cha, Mortimer?”
“Mort, and yes I do.”
“She good in bed, too?”
“I don’t know, but she’s great in a Jacuzzi and her name is Lucy and now that we’ve got the introductions and the personal stuff out of the way, let’s see if we can’t stay focused on what’s important here. Which is to try to save a couple of girls’ asses now that Jo-X turned up in an awkward location.”
“Fine,” Danya said. She sank back down on the bed and went cross-legged again, which gave me a panty frontal, not that I noticed, her being a married woman and all. Shanna sat next to her and put an arm around her waist, the other hand on a thigh, not her own.
Danya looked at Shanna. “Did you get into his place?”
“Couldn’t. Cops were totally all over it.”
“Well, hell. It was worth a try, but the guest book’s probably gone by now anyway. That’s gonna totally suck.”
“What guest book?” I asked.
Danya stared at me for a moment. “Why’re you here? I fired you.”
“Couple hours later, your dad hired me.”
She laughed. “You oughta do stand-up.”
“Turns out he wanted a maverick, too. You’d disappeared and Jo-X was in your garage. Your dad said something about the police having to operate with too many rules. He wanted an off-the-books parallel investigation going on. Which is my forte.”
“Sounds like him. When he wasn’t totally pissed at you, I think he kind of admired you.”
Next time I saw him I would have to tell him that, see if he’d kiss me on both cheeks or pull a gun.
“And,” I said, “I don’t think your dad wants our arrangement to become public knowledge, so keep it to yourself.”
“Well, hell. I’ve got CBS and NBC on speed dial.” She gave me a hard stare. “As if I want the public all over this.”
“What guest book?” I asked again.
“At Jo-X’s house in Vegas. He had a party four or five weeks ago. My dumbass sister was there and she said she signed the stupid thing. Her name is Josie, J-O-S-I-E. So now there’s her name, Josie Fairchild, right there in that book, and Jo-X dead, found in my garage—Danya Fairchild’s garage, if the police stumble across that possibility even though my actual name is Fuller. Has been all my life. How long do you think it’ll take the cops to put two and two together, drag my sister into this? And then me, and probably my dad.”
“Two and two? That’s a tough one. Could take up to a year and a half.”
Danya smiled. “Don’t let my dad hear you say that.”
“Given where Xenon was found, you’re already in this up to your neck whether you’re Fuller or Fairchild.”
“Which still doesn’t make sense, him being there. But then if my sister also gets dragged into this because she signed that book at his party, that would be an unbelievable mess.”
“Josie,” I said. “Pronounced the same as Xenon’s Jo-X. Terrific.”
“Yeah. She thought that was so cool, their names sounding the same. Maybe that’s why she started listening to him.”
“How old is she?”
“Seventeen.”
“And she went to a party at Jo-X’s place? In Vegas.”
“Uh-huh. Smart, huh? She went to a concert in Reno at the convention center and got way up front. Some girl came around halfway through the concert and gave her a pass to go backstage. Jo-X was flying out right after the concert, but he told her there was gonna be this party at his Vegas mansion in a few days and she was invited. She told Dad she wanted to go to Vegas, gave him some song and dance about staying with a girlfriend who moved down there, and, of course, he said no way. I think he may have actually said no f-ing way, not that it matters. But Josie’s always been a rebel. She told him she was going to stay the weekend with me, then took off with an equally retarded girlfriend, and they drove down in the girl’s car.” She looked at Lucy, sitting beside me on the other bed. “If you’re older than nineteen, I’ll shit a brick.”
“What a lovely expression,” Lucy said. “I’ll treasure it and the image, but adobe or concrete, either one, that’s gonna hurt.”
“She’s thirty-one,” I said quickly, before things got out of hand again.
Danya stared at Lucy. “Not possible.”
“It’s been verified,” I said. “But if you want, we could cut off an arm or a leg and count rings.”
Lucy chucked me in the ribs with an elbow. It didn’t hurt the way it used to when Jeri did it. But that they both felt compelled to do so on occasion must mean something. Then she sat closer to me and put an arm through mine, hugged it close.
“So your kid sister went to a Jo-X party and your dad didn’t know,” I said to Danya. “That’s about right for a kid these days. Punishment for that is taking away their cell phone for half an hour, give it back right before they go suicidal. How did Xenon notice her? She pretty, too?”
“Pretty? She’s a lot more than just pretty. She’s five-ten and looks like a showgirl. And you should see what she wore to that concert. So, yeah, that evil bastard picked her out of the crowd.”
“Okay. How’d that get you involved? And what’s with this Pahranagai Inn? I found a receipt in Xenon’s wallet. The name on the receipt was Nathan Williams.”
“Never heard of him, but it’s probably Jo-X.” Danya glanced at Lucy, then stared at me. “Can she be trusted? This isn’t . . . this is getting into some really private stuff, Mortimer.”
“Mort. She can,” I said.
“I can,” Lucy echoed. “And his name is Mort in case you hadn’t picked up on that yet.”
Danya gave her a hard look, then turned to me. “Josie woke up here. In this room. She was at the party in Vegas. There were like sixty people there, she remembers that. And she had a few drinks, then . . . nothing after that, until she woke up here, naked, a hundred fifty miles away, and she knew she’d been raped.”
“Rohypnol,” I said. “He roofied her.”
“That’s what I thought, too. Nothing else made sense.”
“What I mean is—they found Rohypnol at Jo-X’s place. The police did when they searched it. Your father told me.”
“Well, shit. That rotten asshole. Jo-X, not my dad.”
“Jo-X—who, let us not forget, ended up in your garage.”
“Which is still one unbelievably weird goddamn mystery I don’t know shit about,” Danya said harshly.
“Or me,” Shanna said, and I felt Lucy’s arm tighten on mine at the lapse in grammar. I bumped her shoulder, indicating that she could keep it to herself, vent later.
“Josie phoned my cell,” Danya said. “I was in Reno. She was crying. She told me where she was and asked me to come get her and bring her some clothes ’cause hers were gone. Jo-X took ’em, the bastard. Don’t know why. All she had were towels and bedsheets from in here so she couldn’t leave the room. And she wanted me to bring her a ‘Plan-B’ pill.”
“Plan-B?”
“A ‘morning after’ pill. Just in case. But if you’re thinking we should’ve gone to the police, Josie said she’d been douched. She didn’t do it, but she could tell. Douched her when she was unconscious? How evil is that? And she’s older than sixteen and he’s famous, which meant everyone would think she was just a dumb groupie, which maybe she was, so the police might figure it was consensual and she was looking for a payoff—and on and on. You know how it goes. Famous rich guys almost never get prosecuted for rape. For them it just goes away and the girl is stuck with everyone knowing or thinking she’d been raped, or that she’s a gold-digging liar. So we handled it.”
Handled it. That sounded familiar. “How’d you do that?”
“Hey, if you’re thinking we killed the fucker, think again. This all happened about a mon
th ago. And stringing him up in our garage would’ve been a super way to cover it up. What we handled, was Josie. Getting her back home, talking to her, not letting Dad find out what had happened ’cause he would’ve gone totally ballistic and done something really stupid.”
“And the retarded girlfriend who drove her down to Vegas didn’t notice the car was empty on the return trip?”
“My dumb sister told her Jo-X said he’d buy her a plane ticket back if she wanted to stay until that next afternoon or the day after. And, of course, she did, and, of course, the girlfriend had to get back or her parents would find out, so she left the party kinda early and went back to their motel.”
Sounded like a couple of typical dumb kids, all right.
The room went quiet for a while.
Okay, who killed Xenon? Danya?
Motive, I thought—check. Opportunity was iffy since Jo-X was usually surrounded by fans and various sycophants. Means? A bullet in the chest, another in the head? She could manage that if she could get him alone, which was that opportunity thing again. But string him up in their garage like some sort of a trophy afterward?—no way in hell. In fact, Jo-X in their garage was like being given a get-out-of-jail-free card. They should have stayed in Reno. Running and hiding out like this was stupid.
I looked at Danya. “You said this is the room Josie woke up in?” Quickly I turned to Lucy and said, “I ended that sentence with a preposition. Is that okay?”
She bit my shoulder. “Poophead.”
“Ow,” I said, mostly for show since she didn’t draw blood. I looked at Danya.
“Yes,” she said.
“And here you are.”
“We didn’t stick around very long when we got Josie. We looked around a little, but mostly Shanna and I got her dressed and hustled her out, fast. We had to get back to Reno. I’d told Dad Josie was staying with me. Then, later, things got too hot in Reno after Jo-X turned up—which is the kind of weirdness that makes you believe in ghosts—so we came back here to keep out of sight. And, yes, this is the same room. I was hoping we could learn something by staying here, but it’s been cleaned, obviously, so now it’s just a place where hopefully no one will find us. But Jo-X ended up in our garage, and since we didn’t put him there, something’s goin’ on, maybe in Vegas or maybe around here—something we don’t know anything about—Shanna and me—but we’d like to find out, which, if you’re wondering, is why we’re here and not in some little no-name motel in Idaho or hiding out in Pahrump or Beowawe.”
Nevada postage-stamp towns. Her explanation for being here sounded about half reasonable. What else? Only two other known facts I could think of offhand that didn’t fit their narrative.
I shuttled a look between the two of them. “What about that note demanding a million dollars?”
Danya glanced at Shanna, then back at me. “I found it in the mailbox. That’s all I know about it.”
“Except by then Jo-X was in your garage.”
“I didn’t know that. I mean we didn’t know anything about Jo-X being there, or even being dead. Everyone thought he was just missing, which, of course, he was. The note didn’t make any sense, so we thought it must be kids fooling around.”
“You should go back to Reno, talk to your father. It’s likely that note would get you off the hook for anything having to do with Jo-X.”
Danya’s eyes narrowed. “Think so, huh? Bastard turns up in Danya Fuller’s garage, except her father’s name is Fairchild, and this happens a month after Josie Fairchild signs his guest book? And Danya and Josie are half sisters? Who’s gonna think that’s a coincidence? That note wouldn’t mean I’m innocent. The police might even think I wrote it or had someone write it for me.”
“Why would you do that?”
She stared at me like my hair was on fire. “I didn’t. So how would I know why anyone would think I wrote it, other than cops are suspicious and they want to solve murders.”
That note was nothing but trouble. It meant someone else was in the game. Danya or Shanna could have written it, but that would mean they knew about Jo-X in the garage. But why put him there in the first place? Why not get rid of him? And if Jo-X’s murderer wrote the note, why would he think the girls would pay $1,000,000 instead of calling the police and reporting the body? The note-writer must’ve thought they would pay, or might, but why? No answers to any of that, which brought me to the second thing that didn’t fit the narrative.
“Josie is one thing. She might even be a motive for murder.” I looked at Shanna. “Now tell me why you became Celine.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THERE ARE MOMENTS of dead silence in the world, when you can hear your heartbeat, worms tunneling underground, clouds floating by, a leaky faucet in a neighbor’s house. This was one of those.
Finally Danya said, “You called her Celine at that bank in Reno. Why would you do that? Where did you come up with a mega-bizarro thing like that?”
Mega-bizarro. I filed that away for future use. You never know when you might want to sound twelve years old.
“You look at Celine on TV then at Shanna and their figures and heights are the same.” I wanted to see how that absurdity would play before hitting them with something more concrete.
“Their figures?”
“Boobs, if you want to get technical.”
Danya gave me an incredulous look. “You’re a tit expert?”
“Sort of. Yeah.”
“That’s beyond ridiculous. Kind of nasty, too. And Celine is black, Shanna is white.”
“No argument with any of that, including my being nasty.”
“Shanna isn’t Celine. That’s totally ludicrous.”
“Would be, if it weren’t true. But luckily there’s more.” I pulled out my cell phone. I’d uploaded the two videos from the flash drive. I got a video going and held it out to the girls.
The video was silent. Danya and Shanna stared at it in shock as someone approached Shanna in a roadside diner and handed her a menu. Shanna was wearing shorts and a yellow halter top.
The video lasted less than ten seconds. When it ended, I said, “Want to see it again?”
“It was that bitch waitress,” Shanna said. Danya put an arm around Shanna’s shoulders.
I let that tender moment run for a moment, let them consider the implications of what they’d just seen. Then I said, “Okay, there’s no sound so how about you narrate this one for me.” I played the first video, the one with Shanna in that same yellow halter walking toward the helicopter with a guy in a flight suit.
“Well, shit,” Shanna said when the clip ended. She dropped her head and her shoulders sagged. Then she sort of shook herself and said, “Wait. How does any of that mean I’m Celine?”
“‘Celine’ was written on the flash drive.”
“Yeah? So?”
Yeah, Mort. So?
“What if the flash drive belonged to Celine?” Danya said. “She might’ve written her name on it.”
I looked at Shanna. “That doesn’t explain why you’re in the video, or the droopy, defeated look you had when you saw it just now.”
“I’m tired. I get all droopy when I’m tired.”
“That’s unfortunate. Now guess where I found that video.”
“In a box of Wheaties.”
“Close, but wrong. It was in Jo-X’s pocket when I found him in your garage.”
They both stared at me.
“Consider the myriad implications,” I said to Shanna. “Dead, disgusting rapper in your garage, video of you in his pocket, the name Celine on the flash drive, helicopter pilot who can probably be identified as Jo-X by experts. Guy had to get a pilot’s license somewhere. You are in this up to your eyeballs. Or would be if the police got hold of this. And you can thank me later for having removed it.”
“It’s not my garage—I mean, our garage. It belongs to that lady we rent the place from, Mrs. Johnson.”
“You could explain that to the police. I’m sure they would under
stand. This is all a great big misunderstanding.”
Silence. Shifty eyes.
Okay, enough. “I guess Lucy and I will have to go back to that diner and have a talk with the waitress, maybe show her the video, see what she has to say about it.”
“Don’t,” Danya said quickly.
“Why not?”
“Just . . . don’t.”
“That mean you’ve got something more to add to the saga of Shanna and Celine and Jo-X?” I asked.
Danya slid off the bed and took Shanna’s hand. “Excuse us for a moment.” She led Shanna into the bathroom, shut the door.
“Might be a back window,” Lucy said, first thing she’d said since calling me a poophead, a term of endearment I would treasure in memory as much as my first Lionel train set.
“I’ll tell you a funny back-window bathroom story later. Right now, how about you hustle around back and have a look? Fast.”
“That’s redundant. Hustle means fast. And you think they’d go out the window in panties?”
“You never know. They’ve also got towels in there. Go.”
She went soundlessly out the door. I got up and stood close to the bathroom door. I could hear voices in there, so maybe they weren’t headed for Canada in attire that might draw stares. Or they were having trouble getting the window open.
They came out two minutes later. A few seconds later, Lucy came back inside. We all settled into our customary places.
“Got your story straight?” I asked the two girls.
“There’s nothing to get ‘straight’, ” Danya said. “It is what it is, but we had to decide how much of it to tell you.”
“Why not tell us all of it?”
She ignored that. “All of this is sort of my fault. After we got Josie home, I drove back to Vegas and spoke to Jo-X. Well, I screamed at him, if you want to know. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t know what I thought he’d do, but he raped my little sister. I went to his house and his bodyguards or servants or whatever they are, one of them called him on a little radio thing.”
“So they can identify you,” I said. “Great.”
Gumshoe on the Loose Page 17