"Stacy must have a key. She was there alone most of the time."
"I don't know if we should involve her,” I said, but he was already dialing the number she'd left us. He told her to come by after six, when the other tenants would have closed their offices for the day.
She appeared right on schedule, as chipper as ever. “Hi, guys. What are we going to do tonight?"
"Break into your office. Did you bring the key?"
"Hey, are you serious?"
"I'm afraid he is,” I told her. “Let's get it over with."
I sliced carefully through the crime-scene tape so we could stick it back together and with luck avoid discovery. Then Stacy unlocked the office door and we slipped inside. “If anyone's watching, the light will show from outside,” she warned.
"We'll have to chance it,” Mike decided. “Shining a flashlight around would be even more suspicious."
She directed us to one of the filing cabinets along the wall. Mike was interested in finding the sound-activated tape recorder that was eavesdropping on our office, but I was more interested in the thick files on Lily Lake and several others. “There's lots in here,” I said, “but nothing startling.” Lake had come out of nowhere two years earlier, at age seventeen, to win first prize in one of those reality talent shows on TV. Her parents were dead and she was pretty much on her own. She hailed from Cedar Rapids and Santillo's file even included a copy of her birth certificate under her real name of Lily Lafferty. I had to admit Lily Lake looked better on the marquees. Looking further, I found a photo of Lake with Sly Morgan, the reputed boyfriend. He was a good decade older than she was, with bare arms that showed off a couple of his spectacular tattoos.
"Here are two more tickets for tonight's show,” Stacy said, pulling them out of the file folder. “He must have been planning to attend."
"Maybe he was going to take you,” I suggested. “I think at this point we should all go to that concert."
* * * *
The Melrose Concert Center was located across from the County Court Building in a part of downtown that hummed with activity during the day but usually dozed off after six o'clock. It was only two blocks from our office so we walked over, wearing raincoats against the misty drizzle that filled the night sky. This way we avoided the parking problem that always occurred when shows with the reigning pop stars came to town. I sent Stacy and Mike in to claim the seats from Santillo's file drawer while I kept Mike's ticket and headed backstage. A burly security guard didn't let me get far. I showed my ID and asked to see Lily's business manager.
About ten minutes before the start of the concert he appeared, a short bald man named Art Brunner. “The guard said a detective needed to see me. What about?"
"I'm private,” I told him, showing my ID again. “It's about the killing of a man named Santillo last night."
"I don't know a thing about it."
"He was gathering information on Lily Lake."
"So are half the people in the country. She's already a big star and she's going to be huge.” His smile of pleasure revealed a row of yellow, crooked teeth. I hoped he'd make enough off Lily's concerts to get them fixed.
"Could I speak with her?"
"Not a chance before the concert. She rests up and doesn't see anyone before."
"How about after?"
"I'll ask her. She might give you five minutes. She's a star, you know?"
"Is Sly Morgan in with her now?"
His face hardened. “What're you, from the tabloids? Her personal life is personal. She doesn't like people asking about it.” He turned away and the conversation was over.
I found my seat over on the right side of the auditorium just as the curtain went up on the opening act, a hard-rock trio that blasted my eardrums. They played for a numbing forty-five minutes and then there was a brief intermission before Lily Lake took the stage, backed by her own group. The young crowd went wild when she appeared center stage wearing low-slung white jeans and a fringed top that left her navel and midsection exposed. It was the proper costume for a teen rock star and they wouldn't have expected anything else. Lily Lake was short and slim, appearing almost tiny on that big stage, but she whirled like a dervish, clutching her wireless mike as she belted out an anthem to infidelity, about high school romance and the next guy who comes along. It wasn't my sort of music, even if it was a notch up from the hard rock.
Lily sang and cavorted for a full hour before she called it quits, and then came back for a double encore. It was about ten-twenty by the time she finished, to the screaming delight of her fans. I looked around for Mike and Stacy but couldn't find them in the crowd. Instead I made my way backstage once more. This time Art Brunner was nowhere in sight and the place was filled with teenage girls trying any scheme to get closer to their idol. I finally spotted Brunner with two security guards trying to clear the backstage area. Avoiding them, I was heading toward the star's dressing room when a hand grabbed me from behind by my coat collar. “Where you goin', old man?” a raspy voice asked.
I twisted around enough to see the tattooed arm and knew I was in the grip of Sly Morgan. “I wanted to speak with Lily Lake, but you'll do for now."
"Lily's resting after her performance, and she's not likely to see you anyway. Who are you?"
"Al Darlan, Darlan and Trapper Investigations. I'm looking into the murder of a man named Rich Santillo last night."
He loosened his grip on my collar and shoved me into an alcove beneath a spiral staircase to the upstairs dressing rooms. “We don't keep up with the local news. When you're touring like Lily one city's the same as another."
"Santillo was a stringer for the tabloids. He had a hot story, too hot for somebody."
"How does it involve Lily?"
"He had lots of information on her, and he was killed while she was in town. Where were you around eight last night?"
"Watching her performance, same as tonight. I fly in to some of her tour stops when I get the chance."
"So the tabloids are right about you two. Why keep it a secret?"
He grinned. “She's a bit young for me. You know how people are."
"Not anymore, I don't. If Santillo uncovered a secret about Lily, might you or her manager have killed him to keep it a secret?"
Sly Morgan snorted. “What's a secret worth these days? Certainly not murder! Anything they could write about Lily would only increase her sales. The teenagers would eat it up."
"Anything?"
"You name it. Did she make a sex video? Did she snort cocaine? Is she really a lesbian? Hell, she probably could have killed her mother and it wouldn't hurt her popularity. We're in the 21st century!"
"Did she?"
"What?"
"Kill her mother?"
"Both her parents died in an auto accident when she was three. You didn't read through all those clippings you said Santillo had."
"Maybe it's something else. Maybe she's a guy."
He snickered at that. “Lily's no guy, believe me."
"Can I see her? I'd like to talk to her, ask her a couple of questions."
"Will that satisfy you?"
"I hope so."
"Wait here,” he said, and went off toward her dressing room.
I lingered backstage among the musicians and dancers for nearly ten minutes before he returned for me. “I really had to talk her into it. Follow me, and keep it short."
Lily Lake was wearing a dressing gown that made her look smaller than she was. She had a winning smile when she used it, but after her first greeting to me she was all business. “What's this about?” she asked. “Who is this man who got killed? I know nothing about him."
"Rich Santillo. When pop stars like you played here he sold the tabloids gossip items. I have a partner who does some of that too."
"You're a great crowd!"
I shrugged. “You lose some privacy when you become a star."
"They want to know about Sly and me. That's all they're interested in."
"You
know how teenage girls are."
"I should. They're my public. They come to my performances, buy my albums."
"Could Sly or your business manager, Art Brunner, have had a motive for shutting Santillo up?
"You mean kill him? My God, I think you people are all crazy around here! If he was in the gossip business he might have had any number of enemies."
"He had a file of clippings about you. And you're in town. He might have tried to contact you."
"He didn't. I never heard of the man before. You're the one who had the office next to him, not me."
Sly Morgan moved in then. “Your time is up, Mr. Darlan. Say goodbye."
On my way out Lily Lake asked, “Would you like my autograph?"
"Next time."
* * * *
I couldn't find Mike and Stacy anywhere, and the next morning I asked him where they'd gone. “Stopped for a drink and then I took her home,” he said. “We didn't see you."
"I went backstage to interview Lily Lake. That lasted about five minutes."
"Find out anything?"
"Just that she has a business manager and a boyfriend who are very protective of her. But I suppose that's not surprising. She's only nineteen, with lots of crazy fans."
"You think one of them killed Santillo?"
"It's possible. Both claim they were at the Concert Center watching Lily's performance, but either one could easily have slipped away. We're only two blocks from there."
"I have to go out,” Mike told me a bit later. “I'm meeting Vance Oberline for lunch."
"I thought you were through with him."
"He says it's important."
I went back to my computer and found a phone number for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. When I reached them I identified myself and told them I was searching for news of a fatal auto accident involving a family named Lafferty, some sixteen years ago. The clerk kept me on the line for a few minutes while he searched, then came back with the information. “Here it is, on March twenty-seventh of that year. There'd been a late winter storm and the roads were slippery. Roland and Sally Lafferty were both killed instantly and their three-year-old daughter Lily was injured."
"She was in the car with them?"
"That's right."
"Thanks. You've been a big help."
I hung up and thought about it. I was still thinking fifteen minutes later when Stacy Cline showed up at the office. “Hi. Is Mike around?” she asked.
"He had a lunch date."
"Too bad. I was going to buy him lunch in return for the ticket last night and taking me home after."
"I'm his partner. You can take me to lunch if you'd like."
The phone rang and I excused myself to answer it. “This is the Cedar Rapids Gazette. You phoned us for some information about an accident earlier."
"That's right."
"I followed up on reports of the accident for the next several days. I thought you might want to know that the little girl died too, three days later."
* * * *
"Did you know about this?” I asked Stacy when I'd relayed the news to her.
"I—no, he didn't tell me everything. I was just a file clerk, to make the office look legit."
"But you knew he collected information on Lily Lake, among others. You knew he had a copy of her birth certificate, under her original name."
"I knew that, yes,” she admitted.
"But you didn't know the real Lily died at age three?"
"I—” She was interrupted by a new arrival, Sergeant Ramous.
He walked in the door behind her and said, “Just the two people I'm looking for. We're finished with Santillo's office, Miss Cline, if you want to retrieve any belongings from it. I took the tape off the door."
"Thank you, Sergeant."
"Now about you, Al. Trapper tells me he's discovered the dead man was bugging your office. That true?"
"It seems to be. Mike's been selling some celebrity news items to the tabloids and I guess Santillo was trying to hijack them."
"That must have made Trapper pretty angry."
I shook my head. “You're barking up the wrong tree. He didn't discover it till after the murder."
"Who's this fellow Vance Oberline? We checked on Santillo's phone calls and there were several to and from Oberline."
"A tabloid stringer. He was Mike's contact, and I suppose he might have been Santillo's, too."
"Would he have had any motive for killing the man?"
"Not that I know of. I think the killing might have had something to do with Lily Lake's concerts here this week, though. Maybe there was something about her past that would have harmed her popularity. Information that might have been reason enough for Sly Morgan or her business manager, Brunner, to have visited Santillo two nights ago."
"You might know more than you're telling,” Ramous said.
"Talk to them. Ask them about it."
Sergeant Ramous was noncommittal, but as he left I knew I'd planted the seed in his mind. After he'd gone, Stacy asked, “Why'd you want to do that? If the killer thinks you know something damaging, he might come after you like he did Santillo."
"That's what I'm hoping for. I'll be sitting here tonight about the same time and see what happens. Meanwhile I'll be going over every scrap of paper about Lily Lake in Santillo's files. If she's not Lily Lafferty, or Lake, who is she?"
Later that afternoon I told Mike what I'd done. “You're asking for trouble, Al. Oberline says Santillo had a really big story. He'll pay big if I can get it to him before the national press gets hold of it."
"I want you at the concert hall tonight. Try to keep an eye on Brunner and Sly Morgan. If either of them leaves, follow him."
He didn't like that. “You got your gun?"
"In the safe."
"Get it out, Al."
I promised I would, and then sent downstairs for a sandwich and beer. I wanted to finish going through Santillo's files before I had any visitors. Lily Lake's file was first, and that was easy. The real Lily was long dead. He had another file labeled Identity Theft and I turned to that next. I knew all the tricks about forging a false identity—taking a name off a tombstone, procuring a birth certificate for the person, and then using it to obtain a social-security card. That might have been what Lily Lake had done, but why would that be shocking enough to cause a murder? As Sly had pointed out, this was the twenty-first century, when virtually anything goes, especially when it comes to a young, attractive rock star.
I'd finished my sandwich and beer and was near the end of the file when I found what I was looking for. I didn't know how Santillo had come across it in the first place, when all the tabloids missed it, but then I remembered they'd missed the real Lily's death too, probably because they'd never followed up on the auto accident that killed her parents. It was just after eight o'clock and I heard the outer office door quietly open.
"Come in,” I called out. “I've been expecting you, Lily."
"Have you?” she asked. She was wearing a black hooded raincoat that did a perfect job of concealing her identity.
"I thought it would have to be Sly or Art Brunner, because your show started at eight. But then I remembered you have a forty-five-minute opening act and an intermission before you take the stage, and Sly told me you like to be absolutely alone before each performance. It wouldn't have been too difficult leaving by the stage door and walking the two blocks to this office to shoot Rich Santillo."
"You don't know a thing,” she told me.
"I know you mentioned Santillo's office was right next to mine, even though you claimed never to have heard of him.” I opened the file on my desk. “And I finally figured out who you really are, with a little help from Santillo's research. I know why you had to kill him.” I saw her hand move inside the raincoat pocket. “Don't shoot me through the pocket. The powder burn might be noticed when you hurry back to the Melrose for your concert."
Her hand came out, holding the little pistol. “I'm sorry about this
,” she said as she raised the weapon. “I didn't want to kill him but he would have ruined my career, everything I'd worked for."
"There'll be somebody else after me. You can't kill them all to hide your secret."
"I can try,” she said, and that was when Stacy Cline came up behind her and hit her with a bookend.
* * * *
"We may have to hire you after all,” I told Stacy later, when Lily Lake had been taken under guard to the hospital and Sergeant Ramous was waiting for an explanation.
"We've got the pistol,” he said, “and it's probably the murder weapon. But we still need a motive."
I glanced over at Mike Trapper. “I'm sorry, Mike. This story might have made tabloid history, but every paper in the country will have it by morning.” I spread out the clippings and documents from Santillo's file. “She had no time to search for these, especially when she realized I was in the next office. You see, she stole the identity of a dead child to become a seventeen-year-old entrant on a TV reality show. She did better than she could have dreamed, winning first prize and going on to concert tours and gold records."
"You really think an identity theft would have ruined her career?” Mike asked.
"Not that alone, but Santillo was able to trace her real identity. Her name was Naomi Crawford and she'd been living in New Zealand for several years. No one in America knew her. She was without a past, except for the one she invented."
"And?"
"And what would her millions of teenage fans have done when they discovered their nineteen-year-old idol was a thirty-one-year-old woman?"
Copyright (c) 2007 by Edward D. Hoch
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CRASH TACKLE by Keith Miles
Keith Miles worked in theater, radio, and television while pursuing his career as a novelist and short-story writer. The prolific author has some forty crime novels in print; the latest one in the U.S., under his popular pseudonym Edward Marston, is The Princess of Denmark: An Elizabethan Theater Mystery Featuring Nicholas Bracewell. (St. Martin's Press; 8/06).
The crime did not come to light until Tuesday evening when they arrived for the training session. As soon as they stepped inside the clubhouse, they were met by an overwhelming stink of beer.
EQMM, March-April 2007 Page 29