He took two more calls, then hung up and looked at me with an abashed smile. “Sorry. I guess we should have met at five thirty. Sometimes it’s quieter then.”
“Definitely quieter for me,” I said. “The only sound I make then is snoring. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not on this job.” Tim flashed an appealingly lopsided smile. “The geniuses on the East Coast can’t seem to figure out the three-hour time difference. I should have sent them calculators at Christmas. I just flew back from New York, and I swear I’m not even going to reset my watch.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, taking his arm to study the oversized chronographic timepiece on his wrist. “This Concord could probably monitor ten time zones. And I bet it keeps ticking a thousand feet underwater. Long after your heart has stopped.”
He grinned, then climbed onto a True treadmill and set the digital display for a CARDIO-FIT workout. “For now, at least, my heart’s still ticking. Mind if we talk and walk?”
“Sure.” I’d come prepared in Nikes and workout garb, so I got onto the treadmill next to his and glanced at Tim out of the corner of my eye. He was tall and lean, with firm-as-steel calf muscles, dark, curly hair, and small rimless glasses. I knew he was smart as a whip, and he looked more New York intellectual than L.A. producer. No wonder Molly adored him. Maybe I could convince them each to stop working for an hour and go out on a real date.
“So I hear you have Roy Evans’s homemade porn tapes,” Tim said, almost immediately adjusting the speed on his treadmill from warm-up walk to jog. A few drops of sweat popped out appealingly on his gray tee. “Do you want to come over to my office and watch them?”
From the elliptical machine across from us, a studly young guy laughed. “Hey, Tim, is that your pickup line now? Come watch porn with me?”
Tim didn’t bother looking up, he just flipped a finger at his friend.
I cranked up my own speed. “I have the tapes but I haven’t seen them yet.”
“Just one more illicit activity in the pathetic portfolio of Roy Evans,” said Tim.
“I know you’re doing an internal investigation. Have you found much on him?” I asked, panting slightly from exertion. Since the night of Dan’s arrest, I hadn’t been exercising — unless you counted endless spinning on a psychic treadmill.
“I don’t want him back on the air — but I’m trying to be fair,” Tim said. “I feel like one of those special prosecutors, because more and more turns up every day. I guess if you look hard enough, you can sink anybody.”
Is that what was happening to Dan? The police were looking hard and working hard to make sure he sank.
“What’s the word on the body they found by Roy’s car?” I asked, surreptitiously lowering the speed on my treadmill. I’d have to count on anxiety to keep me thin.
“The police ruled it foul play. But off the record, the coroner thought there were some indications of suicide.”
“How could that be?” I asked, remembering the horror in my trunk. “It’d be a pretty good trick to kill yourself, jump into a black garbage bag, and then tie the top from the outside. Even Houdini would have been impressed.”
“True,” said Tim, adjusting the incline on his machine to mimic running uphill. Frankly, I’d go for a downhill button about now. “But the report says the body appears to have been moved several times after death.”
Give the coroner credit for getting that right. Move one: someone had put Nora, dead Nora, in the trunk of my car. Move two: someone else dragged her body from my car into the parking lot of the White Lotus. I still wasn’t sure how Molly had managed that little trick, though it wouldn’t have been too hard for her to get the club attendant to look the other way. Maybe she promised to cast him as an extra on One Tree Hill. Being a casting agent in L.A. was better than being the pope at a nursing home. Everybody was willing to kiss the ring now for a heavenly payoff later.
“For Roy, I’ve got deviant conduct on and off the set. Plus drugs and more drugs. I can’t decide if he’s a manic-depressive, a psychopath, or just a badly behaved addict.”
“All nice choices.”
Tim turned up the treadmill speed again, running so fast now he seemed ready to cross a finish line on the other side of the gym. “I’m going to my office after this,” Tim panted. “Come on by and we’ll watch the tapes. I’ll provide the popcorn.”
I didn’t really want to go back to the storage warehouse myself, but I didn’t see a choice. Molly had done enough. Grant had done too much. Ashley and Jimmy were out of the question and Dan wouldn’t want to know. Chauncey Howell was out of my budget. I didn’t need an escort who charged five hundred bucks an hour.
A different Korean sat at the front desk this time, and he simply nodded when I waved my key in his direction. The corridors seemed better lit than before and no bats flew down at me. I wandered uneasily toward my cubicle, realizing that I’d half suspected the first time I was here that I was hiding porn tapes. Maybe I’d never wanted to see them.
I found the shopping bag in the storage space just where I’d left it and I pawed through, tossing Roy’s suit and shoes and shirts back in the cubby. If I forgot to pay by the third of next month, the Korean would be slightly better dressed.
I arrived back at Tim’s office and found him huddled with two other producers, trying to put together the final cut on the night’s show. He took one look at my overflowing bag of tapes and shook his head.
“All from Roy?” he asked.
“Yes, but not all ofthem are…well, you know. Some are just his show segments. Tapes of interviews he’d done. All the things he liked to watch in bed.”
One of the producers in the room, a youngish woman with form-fitting jeans and bright-orange Pumas, giggled.
“My boyfriend watches golf in bed,” she said. “Not a great aphrodisiac.”
“Unless someone scores a hole in one,” offered the guy next to her.
Tim shook his head, then got up and led me down the hall to a cluster of high-tech digital edit suites. He poked his head into one after another, but all of them were full.
“Find me a plain old VCR and I’ll look at them by myself,” I said.
“It’ll take you forever,” Tim said. “You’ve got more hours of film there than in Doctor Zhivago. Talk about slogging through.”
He made a call to another part of the building, and when he hung up, he said, “Good news. One of the best editors we have is free for a couple of hours. Corey. He’s quick — and he won’t blab, either.”
Ten minutes later, I paced around the back of Corey’s editing room while he fast-forwarded through the first tape, the start-to-finish recording of an endless interview Roy had done with some third-rate Survivor contestant.
“Raw footage,” Corey said, popping the tape out. “But not the kind of raw we’re looking for.”
The second tape was boring but aboveboard, as was the third. The fourth and fifth were segments that had aired on Night Beat, and the sixth was Roy’s favorite — himself on Celebrity Jeopardy! Corey moved quickly but carefully through the tapes, scanning half a dozen more.
“If this is what he watched with Tasha, I’d guess he murdered the poor girl with monotony,” Corey said finally.
“We have more,” I said, looking into the bag, which was beginning to feel bottomless.
“Hand ’em over,” said Corey wearily. “Though if the union hears that I had to screen this Roy Evans film festival, I’ll qualify for hardship pay.”
I laughed. But eight tapes later, the bag was empty, and the dirtiest trick we’d seen involved Roy pushing aside a reporter from Entertainment Tonight to interview Usher at a press conference.
“I don’t get it,” I said, bewildered. The tapes were all as harmless as a network-censored night at the Bellagio.
Corey started piling the tapes back into the bag and I sat back thoroughly befuddled, staring at the bank of now blank monitors. Somehow, the day had disappeared and the clock in the windowless edit
bay pointed to 6:05 P.M.
“So what did you find?” asked an excited voice behind us.
I turned around to see Molly and Tim striding into the edit room. Tim must have finished his show and sent it via satellite for the prime-time airing on the East Coast. That was the good side of L.A.’s functioning on New York time — not much sleep, but everybody got dinner.
“Nothing interesting,” I reported. “Nada, naught, zero, zilch. Closest we got to sex was Roy leering at Beyoncé’s booty.”
“Don’t forget when he got on his knees in front of Lindsay Lohan,” said Corey. “Though that didn’t turn pornographic until he explained he was bowing before acting greatness.”
Molly laughed and grabbed a snack-sized Snickers bar from the well-stocked candy bowl on the table. The best part of television was the unending supply of junk food in every edit bay. Or maybe that was the worst part. Tim reached into the dish and filched a single cinnamon Altoid. Given his running this morning, he could go crazy and take two.
“I don’t get it,” Tim said, sucking thoughtfully on the mint. “From what Molly said, Roy admitted that he’d made porno tapes with Tasha.”
I nodded. “Yup. And he was sure I had them.”
“So if you don’t have them, who does?” asked Molly.
“Question of the day,” I admitted.
Molly scanned the room, her eyes finally resting on Corey. “Are you sure you didn’t miss something on one of the tapes? I mean, you could have skipped right over a bad blow job without even realizing it.”
“Wrong and wrong,” said Corey, rocking back in his swiveling seat. “First, you can’t have a bad blow job. Second, I’d never skip one.” He grinned. “Nope, we screened every single tape and didn’t miss a thing. I’d bet my last Emmy on it.”
“Corey’s won three Emmys,” Tim said, as if that settled it.
Molly plopped down in the chair next to me, and Tim leaned against the table, his long, outstretched legs brushing against Molly’s.
“Let’s try to figure this out,” Tim said, pulling out a yellow legal pad. He made a couple of notes with his Sharpie pen, then raised a finger. “Point one. We know Roy made S-and-M tapes featuring himself and Tasha. Point two” — two fingers up now — “we also know he was so desperate to get them back that he tied up Lacy in his apartment and then threatened her with a gun in the desert.” Tim made a couple of arrows on his pad, and then he looked from Molly to me. “Add points one and two and you get to point three. Which is that given what we know about Roy, it’s just possible he recorded more than bad sex. I’m willing to consider whether the missing tape shows the S and M gone wrong — and Tasha dying.”
Molly reached over and rubbed her hand against Tim’s knee. “Darling, you’re the most brilliant man I know. You got to that one fast.”
She looked at me and I nodded. We’d come up with that theory in the diner, over bad meatloaf and omeletes. But now that I’d rolled it around for a while, I saw a problem.
“If Roy were rolling tape while he accidentally killed Tasha, don’t you think he would have taken the evidence with him?” I asked.
“Unless he panicked and forgot about it,” said Tim.
“In which case he would have left the incriminating tape in the video camera and just run out,” I said. “I’ve read the police reports and seen the crime-scene photos. No video camera that I can remember.”
“If he took the camera, he took the tape, too,” Molly said, coming quickly to my point of view.
“Fair enough.” Tim ripped the top sheet off the pad, crumpled it up, and threw it away. “So you’re thinking the tape’s not a smoking gun — just a smoky one. If a girl’s been strangled, you don’t want the cops to know you once liked tying her up.”
“I’ll buy that,” said Molly. Her hand was still on Tim’s knee.
I fished around in the candy bowl and pulled out a silver-wrapped chocolate Kiss.
“So where are Roy’s porn flicks?” I asked.
“That’s the question,” said Tim, picking up his Sharpie to scrawl a four-sided form on the new sheet of paper. “We’re right back to square one.”
“The tapes must have been in the apartment somewhere, which is why Roy thinks I have them,” I explained. “Nora had told him that she gave me all his stuff.”
“Maybe they’re still there,” suggested Molly.
“Or maybe the police took the tapes at the very beginning. And buried them as evidence because they’re only looking to make a case against Dan,” I offered.
Tim raised his eyebrows. “Corrupt cops? I guess this is L.A.”
“Corrupt’s one thing, but clever’s something else,” said Corey, suddenly entering the conversation again. “You’re giving the cops way too much credit.” He flung the contents of the now ragged Whole Foods bag back onto the floor. “Look at all these tape boxes. They’re mismarked and badly labeled and they were probably scattered all around the apartment. It took us hours to scan through them. So how the hell would the police have known which ones to seize? You can bet Roy didn’t plaster the pornos with triple-X stickers.”
I put my head into my hands. I wanted everything to be the cops’ fault, but Corey had a point. There had to be a different explanation. I just didn’t know what it was.
Tim glanced at his watch, checking the time in whatever world zone he’d settled on using. “Anybody want to go to dinner?” he asked. “We can continue this over some food.”
Corey quickly declined and I said I had to get home. We both stood up to leave.
“I’d love to come,” Molly told Tim with a big smile. Then she leaned over to the candy dish and rifled through.
“What are you looking for?” Tim asked.
“A chocolate Kiss like Lacy took. I’m starved.”
Tim grabbed her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, you can do better than that. How about if I promise you a kiss after dinner?”
“Chocolate?” Molly asked coyly.
“Nope,” said Tim. “It’ll be fewer calories. And much tastier.”
When I got home, Ashley met me at the door and announced that the police were in the living room, asking questions about the murder of Nora Wilson.
“Shit,” I said.
Ashley’s mouth twitched and she tried to keep herself from smiling. “Since when do you use language like that, Mom?” she asked with faux disapproval.
“Since today. Sorry. Who’s with them?”
“Daddy. And Chauncey Howell.”
So Dan had called Chauncey. That was a relief, anyway. “Have they been here long?”
“Yup. And you’re right, Mom — it’s shit. Bullshit and double bullshit. I can’t stand this place. Why don’t we just all get on a plane and get out of here? Move to Australia.”
“New Zealand might be better. We could pretend we’re in Lord of the Rings.”
“I’m serious,” Ashley said, furrowing her brow. “Daddy’s being persecuted. We have to leave. Just like that scene in The Sound of Music where the family climbs into the mountains together to escape the Nazis.”
“That was Austria, not Australia.”
“Who cares? As long as we’re together, we can go anyplace.” She looked at me with blazing eyes, thoroughly serious about her plan. She wanted to protect her dad, whatever it took.
I put my arms around her. “You’re right. A family’s pretty strong. Our family’s strong.” I hugged her. “For now, we’ll keep fighting for Daddy right here. But if it doesn’t work, we’ll consider every option. I’m perfectly willing to be Julie Andrews.”
“Or Frodo,” said Ashley.
She went upstairs, and I contemplated joining the crowd in the living room, then decided there wasn’t any point. I slid open the double-glass doors to the patio and went outside. Darkness was settling in, and the early-evening stars peeked across the sky. I lay down on the padded chaise lounge and stared straight up, spotting a shooting star. I closed my eyes and made a virtuous wish upon a shooting
star that involved Dan being cleared and his anguish being over. Then I threw in a little fillip for the whole family. Somehow, this bad time had been bringing us together, and I hoped the connections would continue in good times, too. Not too much to ask of a fireball in the firmament, was it? I opened my eyes, and the glowing point was still moving across the sky. Damn, that meant my star was really a satellite. Well, who said you couldn’t wish on an orbiting space station?
I untied the sweater from my shoulders, but didn’t move from the chaise. The evening air felt warmer than it had been lately, signaling spring coming soon. I sensed a vague tingle of anticipation at the thought of the lilacs blooming and the roses opening. I was ready for rebirth, a new start, life leaping forward again.
A few minutes later, Dan opened the glass doors and came outside to join me, holding a bottle of wine, opener, and two long-stemmed glasses.
“Are they gone?” I asked.
“Gone,” he said. He carefully lowered himself to the edge of my lounge chair, and I slid my legs over to give him more room.
“So what now?” I asked.
“Now I’m going to get drunk.” He pulled the foil off his 1993 California Cabernet, then popped out the cork with the Rabbit wine bottle opener I’d bought him years ago as a Valentine’s gift. Hmm. Valentine’s Day had come and gone this year and I’d forgotten all about it.
“You never get drunk,” I said.
“I’ve decided to make an exception.” He poured the wine into the two glasses and handed me one. “Maybe all the coffee I drink is causing blackouts. That would explain how I killed one girl I’d never heard of. And now, apparently, I killed another one I never knew existed.”
“Are you really a suspect again?” I asked, horrified.
“No, probably not.” He took a large gulp of the wine. “Chauncey says they had to question me since she was the other girl’s roommate. You kill one, you kill them all, I guess.”
A little black humor to go with his black mood. I swirled the wine and took a small sip. If he planned to get smashed, excellent idea to do it drinking a Simi Reserve at a hundred bucks a bottle.
Looks to Die For Page 24