A Crime of Passion

by Scott Pratt

  “So you don’t think he was having an affair with Kasey Cartwright?” I said.

  Lana laughed loudly and nearly spit a mouthful of wine across the table.

  “He isn’t capable of having an affair,” she said. “Unless he’s just so repulsed by me that he can’t get it up. Believe me…I’ve tried every trick I know, and I know a lot of them.”

  “Don’t you get lonely?” I said, wishing I could grab the words and stuff them back into my mouth as soon as they escaped.

  She gave me a look that could have melted a glacier and said, “Damned right I get lonely. Get a couple more glasses of this wine in me and you might just find out how lonely on the ride back to Franklin.”

  CHAPTER 11

  By the time we got to Xanadu, Bennett the driver had to practically pour Lana out of the backseat, where she was taken into the arms of four people I hadn’t seen earlier in the day and whisked off inside the house. Bennett dropped me near the front door of the guesthouse, which was a quarter mile from the main house. It was at least fifteen hundred square feet bigger than my home on Boone Lake but less than a quarter of the size of Milius’s mansion. The sky was dark, the temperature freezing, and the wind howling as I got out of the car. Bennett made no effort to get out and open the door for me, and for that I was grateful because having people tend to my every need or whim embarrassed me. The holiday decorations had been turned off for the night, and in the cold darkness, Xanadu seemed as foreboding as an inner-city ghetto. As I made my way up the walk with the sound of Bennett’s car fading behind me, an outside light came on, and the front door opened. A sixty-something man, dark-eyed, gray-haired and slim, smiled at me and half bowed as I walked into the house.

  “Good evening, Mr. Dillard,” he said.

  “Good evening.”

  “I am Rafael Martinez. I will be at your service during your stay with us. May I take your coat?”

  I stopped and looked at him for a long minute.

  “Is something wrong, sir?” he said.

  “Do you live here?” I asked. “I mean here in this house? Because I was here for a couple hours earlier today and you weren’t here.”

  “No, sir. I have a place of my own a few miles away. When you were here earlier, I had not yet been informed by Mr. Payne that I was to be your personal assistant during your stay. Mr. Payne has been away on holiday vacation, and all of this with Mr. Milius has happened very quickly. We’ve all been shocked and caught off guard. I apologize for not having been here to assist you prior to your evening out with Mrs. Milius.”

  “I didn’t need any assistance. Do you realize it’s after midnight…uh…what did you say your name is?”

  “Rafael.”

  “Do you realize it’s after midnight, Rafael?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you have a family?”

  “I do. A wife and three children. The children have grown up and moved out of the house. The wife, unfortunately, remains both a child and at home.”

  “I appreciate you being here, Rafael, and I apologize in advance for what I’m about to say, but I’d really prefer that you leave and go home. I’ve never had a servant or a butler or an assistant or anything even close, and I have to tell you, it makes me uncomfortable. I don’t mean to offend you. I’m sure you’re a nice man, and I’m sure you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I’ve been pretty much self-sufficient all my life, and I’d just as soon keep it that way.”

  “I apologize as well,” Rafael said, “but I cannot go home. I cannot do as you ask. I would be fired first thing in the morning, and I don’t want to be fired.”

  “All I’m going to do is go to bed,” I said. “I’ll wake up in the morning, take a shower, and get ready for the day. What can you possibly do for me?”

  “Anything you want that isn’t illegal or unseemly. I can turn your bed down, get you a beverage—a glass of warm milk or a drink from the bar. A glass of wine. I can get you a fine cigar. I can run you a hot bath, prepare a snack or a meal or run out and pick up take-out from anywhere that is still open. I can sit and visit with you—I can discuss a wide variety of topics intelligently—or I can simply go to my room and leave you to yourself. It’s up to you. I cannot, however, go home and leave you here alone.”

  I shook my head, which was beginning to throb slightly.

  “All right,” I said. “Do you have any aspirin around? I feel a headache coming on.”

  “Certainly. What would you like to drink?’

  “Water.”

  “Bottled or tap?”

  “Tap is fine.”

  “Ice?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He reached toward me. “Your coat, please?”

  I took my coat off and handed it to him.

  “It will be in the closet in your room near the bed,” he said. “Will you be in the den?”

  “Since you’re going to stay anyway, I’d like to talk to you for a little while, if that’s okay with you,” I said.

  “Certainly, sir.”

  I went into the den—a room with a twenty-foot ceiling—which featured a floor-to-ceiling, stone fireplace and a flat-screen television that was at least seventy inches across. I sat down on a plush, black leather couch. It had been a long day and I was exhausted, but there was something about Rafael that made me want to speak with him. It was difficult to put into words, but I’d been forced to deal with so many people in my life who had personal agendas or motives to deceive that I sometimes found myself drawn to people who gave me the sense that were simply honest, and Rafael gave me that sense. I was aware that I could be completely wrong about the assessment, but I decided to take a chance.

  Rafael walked in a few minutes later carrying a glass of water in one hand and three aspirin in a small paper cup in the other. He handed them to me. I thanked him and motioned for him to sit in an overstuffed chair a few feet away.

  “You said earlier that Mr. Payne sent you here to the house,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who is Mr. Payne?”

  “Oliver Payne. He is Mr. and Mrs. Milius’s estate manager.”

  “Estate manager? What’s that?”

  “He manages the household affairs, the grounds, the aircraft and runway, the horses, pretty much everything. He hires and manages the staff, and by ‘the staff’ I mean the housekeepers and the cooks and the servers and the people who do the laundry and the drivers and the flight attendant and pilot. All of those things.”

  “So he’s a glorified butler or major domo,” I said.

  “Mr. Payne is a highly educated man,” Rafael said. “He has an MBA from one of the Ivy League schools and an undergraduate degree in finance and accounting. Mr. Milius has other real estate—a home in Palm Beach and another in Connecticut—and Mr. Payne manages those properties as well. My understanding is that he and Mr. Milius—and Mrs. Milius, of course—develop a budget each year and then Mr. Payne operates the properties within the confines of the budget. I’ve heard Mr. Payne describe it as a corporate approach to personal asset management. If Mr. Payne comes in under budget, the staff gets a bonus, which encourages all of us not to be wasteful.”

  I thought about the irony of that comment for a moment. Paul and Lana Milius consumed more in terms of energy in one day than my entire family did in a month. They were hardly frugal.

  “So is Mr. Payne well paid?” I said.

  “I don’t know the exact figure, but yes, I suspect he is well paid. I’ve heard Mrs. Milius complain about it on a couple occasions when she was a bit tipsy.”

  “What about you and the rest of the staff? Slave wages or fair wages?”

  “Very fair,” Rafael said. “Everyone who works for Mr. Milius receives a good salary and full benefits. I make more than six figures and have health coverage and an IRA, for instance. I get three weeks of paid vacation each year.”

  “How many people work for Mr. Milius here at the estate?”

  “It varies. People come
and go, but I would guess the average is fifteen to sixteen.”

  “Any one of those fifteen or sixteen have a problem with Mr. Milius? A serious problem? Maybe a former employee?”

  “Not that I know of. Mr. Milius actually has very little contact with the staff outside, say, meals he eats here on the weekends. During the week, he leaves early in the morning and returns late at night, and he is often gone on the weekends. He takes most of his meals with business associates. So as far as anyone having a problem with him to the extent that they would do something to harm him or do something like killing Kasey Cartwright and making it appear that Mr. Milius did it, which is what you seem to be implying, well, I think those things would be rather unlikely.”

  A thought struck me and I sat up.

  “Rafael, tell me something,” I said. “You’ve been assigned to be my personal assistant, and I’m only here for a couple days. Lana has a personal assistant, Lisa Trent. I met her as soon as I got here this morning. But nobody has mentioned Paul having a personal assistant. I’ve met his driver, David, but David doesn’t strike me as personal-assistant material. He’s a little rough around the edges. Am I missing something?”

  Up until that moment, Rafael had been relaxed and friendly, but as soon as I asked about the personal assistant, his face tightened and he stood.

  “If there is nothing else, then, I suppose I will see you in the morning,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Good night, Mr. Dillard,” Rafael said, and he turned and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER 12

  As it turned out, there were fifteen people working for Paul and Lana at the estate: Lana’s personal assistant, Lisa; the two drivers, David and Bennett; Oliver Payne, the estate manager, who was away on vacation and wouldn’t return for two and a half weeks; Rafael, who was a sort of utility servant and second-in-command beneath Payne; Michael, the grumpy chef; three assistant chefs; four housekeepers and two groundskeepers that doubled as handymen. There was also a fairly extensive list of outside contractors who came to the house when they were needed and another group of people who took care of the horses, but I decided not to interview them unless something came up that indicated I really needed to.

  I had planned to interview the employees at the guesthouse, but early on the morning after my conversation with Rafael, I found a disturbing note pinned to the inside pocket of my jacket when I was putting it on. Rafael had insisted on laying out my clothes for the day, so he must have left the note. It said, in a slanted scrawl, “Be careful. There are cameras and microphones all over the house.” Once I read that, I decided to use Charlie Story’s office for the interviews and called Lana immediately.

  “I know I said I’d like to interview everyone at the guesthouse,” I said when she answered in a thick, hungover voice, “but I’ve decided to do it at the office I’ll be using in Nashville. It’s more professional, and I think the employees will be more willing to be open with me if the interviews are done at a neutral location.”

  “What? You want to go all the way to Nashville?” she said.

  “It isn’t far. You can send them individually or in groups, however you want to do it. Just make sure I get at least one per hour for the next two days. Have the first one there at nine o’clock.”

  She started to protest, but I told her I had another call and cut her off.

  During the first day, I learned that all the employees were hired through a staffing agency in Nashville that catered to the wealthy. I learned that all of them were thoroughly vetted before they were hired. I was also astounded at the salaries. The housekeepers and the drivers made $75,000 a year, as did the groundskeepers. The chefs made closer to $100,000, and Michael made $120,000. As for Paul Milius, not a single one of the employees had a bad word to say about him, and none of them said they had ever seen him display anger, let alone engage in any sort of violent behavior. Lana, they said, was extremely intelligent, somewhat aloof, and frequently intoxicated. Not much of a surprise there.

  Around ten o’clock in the morning on the second day, Michael Pillston, the chef, walked in. He was wearing black trousers and loafers and a powder-blue pullover shirt.

  “When you said, ‘Welcome to Xanadu, Mr. Dillard. I hope it isn’t your downfall,’ what did you mean?” I said after we exchanged greetings and he got settled in.

  “Nothing, really. I was just being facetious.”

  “Have you been with Paul and Lana for a long time?”

  “Six and a half years.”

  “So you know them pretty well?”

  “Not really. I’m a slave. They’re the masters. How well does one really get to know his master?”

  “But you live in the house, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I do. I live there because Lana wants a cook at her beck and call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Not that she eats all that much. But if she wants something, she wants it immediately, and she wants it done right. I do it right.”

  “What about Paul? Is he demanding?”

  “I rarely see him, so I suppose the answer is no.”

  “You seem like a fairly straightforward person to me,” I said, “so I’m just going to go ahead and ask you a direct question. Nobody else seems to want to talk about this, but maybe you will. What happened to Paul and Lana’s personal assistants?”

  “Lana has a personal assistant.”

  “Right, but she’s only been around for a month. Her assistant prior to that was her first cousin, a woman named Tilly Hart. She’s a year younger than Lana, and they grew up together in McNairy County. She was Lana’s assistant for fifteen years. Paul’s assistant was a thirty-year-old named Alex Pappas. He was around for three years before he left, apparently after stealing a bunch of money by using a credit card Paul had given him. They both fell off the face of the earth on Thanksgiving and haven’t been heard from since. I’ve been able to get that much, but it’s been like pulling teeth.”

  Michael folded his arms and tilted his head. “You asked me what happened to them,” he said. “The answer is I have no idea.”

  “What do you think might have happened to them?”

  “I think perhaps they ran away together.”

  “And why would they do that?”

  “Why does anyone run away? My guess is that something, or someone, scared them.”

  “Paul?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Lana?”

  “That would be a more reasonable conclusion.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Lana can be unstable. She’s bitter and she drinks too much. I think she may be bipolar, even psychotic sometimes. I think Lana may have attempted to leverage the feelings Alex and Tilly had developed for each other. I think she may have tried to force one or the other of them to do something they didn’t want to do and maybe threatened the other in the process.”

  “You said she may have tried to force one or the other of them to do something they didn’t want to do. What didn’t they want to do?”

  “Something terrible, I would think.”

  “Something violent?”

  “Neither of them would ever engage in violence, but she might have forced them to facilitate an act of violence.”

  “Facilitate? Are you telling me that Kasey Cartwright might have been killed by a contractor? Is that what you’re telling me? And that Lana Raines forced either Tilly or Alex or both to help set it up?”

  “I didn’t say any of those things,” Michael said.

  “Do you have any direct knowledge of any of those things? Have you heard or seen anything?”

  He looked at me strangely for several seconds. His eyes seemed like they were smiling.

  “I will not testify,” he said. “My official answers to those questions are no and no.”

  “What are your unofficial answers?”

  “I like living in that house, Mr. Dillard. I’m overpaid and underworked. Lana drinks most of her meals, and Paul rarely eats at h
ome. They hardly ever entertain, and when they do, they hire caterers. The surroundings are luxurious, and the perks are generous. I’d be a fool to throw it away.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d stop being cavalier, Michael,” I said. “Have you heard or seen anything that would be relevant to the guilt or innocence of Paul Milius?”

  Michael looked to my right and nodded toward a small stack of legal pads.

  “May I?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  He picked up a legal pad and a pen that was lying next to it. Then he wrote something on the pad and slid it toward me. It said, “Carl Browning, Attorney at Law.” Michael then pulled a set of keys from his pocket and pointed at one them. He pointed to the paper, then to the key, to the paper, to the key.

  “Have a nice day, Mr. Dillard,” he said, and he got up and started toward the door.

  “Wait, please,” I said, and he stopped.

  “Were you close to Alex or Tilly?” I asked.

  “Tilly and I had become close,” he said. “Alex and Tilly started dating each other nearly a year ago and had fallen head over heels in love. And then one day they were here, and the next day they were gone. They didn’t say a word to anyone. They apparently took only what they could fit in a suitcase.”

  “Why didn’t anyone call the police, especially since they supposedly stole a bunch of money?”

  “Good question. You should ask Lana and Paul about that.”

  “I will. Please give some thought to telling me everything you know and testifying in court if the need arises,” I said.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said, “but I doubt very seriously that I’ll change my mind.”

  “Why?” I said. “If you know the truth, why would you not want it to come out?”

  “That’s simple, Mr. Dillard. I have no desire to wind up like young Kasey.” And then he whispered, “Check out the lawyer.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Rafael came in near the end of the second day, the next-to-last person I interviewed. He seemed nervous as he sat in a chair across from me. He kept tapping his index fingers together and involuntarily pursing his lips. He was casually dressed in a tan button-down and khaki pants and was perfectly groomed. He hadn’t been at the house the previous evening when I arrived and hadn’t showed up later that night.