Looks to Die For

by Janice Kaplan

  “Could be,” I said.

  Gracie nodded slowly. “Here’s something else. My bedroom shares a wall with her living room. The screaming was clear as day. Not as muffled as it might have been if Tasha were a room away, being strangled in her bedroom.”

  “Gracie, what did you do when you heard the screaming?” I asked.

  “I called 911,” Gracie said. “I wasn’t going to go over there myself, you know.”

  “And did you look to see if Dan’s car was still outside?”

  “Not immediately,” Gracie admitted. “I was making the call, pulling on a robe, and trying to figure out what I should do. I was pretty panicked and not exactly thinking clearly.”

  “But you checked again at some point?”

  “When the police arrived, I looked out because I heard the sirens. I was impressed that they’d gotten there so fast.”

  “And you saw Dan running to his car?”

  “I never said that.”

  “Was the car gone?”

  “I think so. I’m pretty sure. Another car was parked in the space.”

  I took a deep breath. “Gracie, how long would you say it took the police to come?”

  She shook her head. “It seemed like forever. Time does slow down when you’re scared, you know? But it was quick. Maybe three or four minutes.”

  “That is quick,” I said.

  Gracie glanced at her soothed and smoothed face in the mirror and ran a finger across her newly soft cheek. Then she gave a little gasp and looked at me like she’d had a sudden revelation from above.

  “I can’t even say that your husband was still in the apartment when I heard the screaming,” she said.

  I nodded, and Gracie got up and started pacing around the room.

  “What if it wasn’t even Tasha who was screaming?” I suggested. “Maybe she’d been killed earlier — which could explain the banging noises you heard. Now the killer was trying to set up Dr. Fields.”

  Gracie grimaced. “My God, do you think the call I got was from the killer? Making sure I was up and paying attention?”

  “Possible. Pretty easy to check if the call came from next door,” I said, an authority on phone records ever since Grant had taught me about them.

  Again, I saw the spark in Gracie’s eye. “Look, I don’t have anything against your husband. I never even met him. I was just telling the police what I’d heard. I don’t mind admitting if I missed something.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. That helps.”

  Gracie looked at me and headed for the door. “Whatever I can do. We should talk again. But next time, let’s eat lunch instead of wearing it, okay?”

  When I got home, Ashley was in the kitchen with Mandy. Open containers of flour, sugar, and baking powder were strewn across the counter, along with a spilled container of Hershey’s cocoa and a half-eaten bag of Ghirardelli semisweet chocolate chips.

  “Baking?” I asked in surprise.

  Mandy turned to Ashley with a big grin. “See? I told you that your mom’s amazing at figuring things out. She’s a good detective.”

  I laughed. “Let’s see, the Mixmaster’s on the counter, the oven is turned to three fifty, and there’s a mess of ingredients. If I were a really good detective, I’d know what you were making and why.”

  “Chocolate chip brownies for the French class bake sale,” said Mandy helpfully. “Madame Pierre said we had to make something très français.”

  “Brownies are français?” I asked.

  “The Champs Élysées has a McDonald’s,” Mandy said firmly.

  Trying to figure that one out, I popped a chip into my mouth. “Help me out. I thought McDonald’s sold Big Macs.”

  Mandy stood a little straighter. “The point is that cultural boundaries don’t exist anymore. You can eat brownies in Paris and sushi in Seattle and croissants at Burger King. We’re making a statement about our global interconnectedness.”

  “Not bad, Mandy,” I said, impressed. The girl was growing up and getting glib. She could probably run for Congress.

  “Yeah, really impressive,” said Ashley. “But the truth is we didn’t know how to make anything else.”

  “Keep that to yourself,” I advised. “People only know what you tell them.”

  “Anyway, back to your detecting,” said Ashley, cracking an egg into a cup. “Mandy thinks you’ll come up with something to get Dad off.”

  “You will,” said Mandy brightly, turning to me. “Remember the black nail polish clue? How you figured out that I’d seen Ashley because I knew what color her nails were? I was really pissed at you that day, but now I think it was pretty cool.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I hadn’t been cool when I was fourteen, so it was nice to have a fourteen-year-old think I was cool now.

  “I bet there’s a clue just like that in this case,” she said.

  “I’m looking,” I said wearily.

  The girls went back to baking and I went upstairs to my study. I didn’t even bother to turn on the computer. I just stared at the blank screen and strummed my fingers on the desk. Mandy was right. I should be able to figure this out. Unfortunately, nobody had shown up yet in punk nail polish to give the story away.

  But Gracie Adler had given me a new perspective.

  From the way I figured the timetable now, the killer had been in the apartment when Dan was there. My earlier theory that Tasha had buzzed in Dan didn’t work because what Gracie saw and heard made sense under one condition: Tasha was already dead.

  I suddenly remembered the Medeco lock I’d noticed on Tasha’s bedroom door. Strange touch for an inside room, but it made sense if she’d been making porn flicks and wanted to make sure she wasn’t disturbed. Now the killer used the lock to make sure Dan didn’t wander into the bedroom and find the dead body.

  Once Dan was in the apartment, the stage was set. Wandering around the living room for twenty minutes, Dan would almost certainly leave fingerprints and DNA tracks. Not to mention the envelope of money. The only trick was making sure the police thought of him.

  Which was where the screaming came in.

  The killer waited until Dan was gone, then acted out the scene, repeating the words “Dr. Fields” and “Dan.” Smart. Dan wasn’t known in the building, so the killer was safe on that score. It wasn’t likely that another tenant would tell the police that the panicked shouts had occurred after Dan himself had already left.

  Maybe the killer was just lucky. He’d murdered in a moment of passion, then found someone handy who could take the fall. Or maybe the killer knew Dan was coming — and he’d cleverly planned the murder around him.

  A cunning killer pointed to Johnny DeVito. Murder wasn’t beyond him. He’d slashed someone before and gotten away with it. He was blackmailing Dan and probably didn’t have any scruples. On the other hand, I couldn’t really picture him as the person Gracie Adler heard screaming. The problem wasn’t that he was a man. Any guy could pull off a pretty authentic falsetto, especially when the sounds were being distorted by the apartment walls. But Johnny was the silent, skulking type. Yelling into the night didn’t fit his personality.

  Roy Evans? He was on television, so faking a voice wasn’t much of a stretch. But I’d already been over this ground with Molly and Tim. It didn’t add up that he was the killer.

  My mind whirred. Julie Boden? She was involved with Roy Evans, and probably in love with him at some point. She’d hired Johnny DeVito — for reasons that I still didn’t know — and given him an alibi. But what if Johnny was providing her with the alibi? She’d slipped out of the Honey Twists shoot that night and driven to Tasha’s apartment, getting back before anyone noticed. Not likely. An executive producer was always making decisions. She couldn’t risk a director or writer complaining that she’d been available only by cell phone that night.

  But say she’d pulled it off. She’d been fortunate enough to pick a night when Dan showed up. The timing was auspicious. Miraculously, she found out his name and decided to risk scr
eaming it. That didn’t explain how she knew to phone Grace or position herself in the living room. And most of all, it didn’t explain a motive. Had Julie killed for love? Oh, please. Roy should be so lucky. She just wasn’t that into him. Besides, Julie had seemed stunned when I mentioned Tasha Barlow’s name the first time we met. She might have suspected Roy was screwing around, but she didn’t know he was with Tasha.

  I was so frustrated that I slammed my fist onto the desk. God-damn, it shouldn’t be this hard. Every Law & Order episode got settled in under an hour.

  The sweet smell of baking chocolate wafted up from the kitchen. Eating might help. I rifled through my top drawer and found a Healthy & Natural caramel fudge granola bar. I ripped into it happily. More calories than a bag of almond M&Ms, but at least it sounded virtuous.

  With the caramel trickling down my throat, I relaxed a little and thought about my mini-detecting with Mandy. Someone knowing something that she shouldn’t.

  Yes!

  I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding. The answer was as obvious as a fistful of black nail polish. Whether it was the stress-free moment or the shot of sugar, suddenly I knew.

  Nora.

  She’d given herself away by the slip — or the slit — of a tongue.

  I felt a swift surge of excitement. Like the thrill you get when you finally unscramble 5 Down on the crossword puzzle and realize the answer for “Sex and the City network” isn’t HBO — it’s TBS. Suddenly everything else fits.

  According to Roy, Tasha had pierced her tongue the day she died. He’d taken her himself and enjoyed her screams of pain. But Nora had described the gold stud to me, and she couldn’t have done that unless she’d been with Tasha before the murder. So why had Nora lied and told everyone that she arrived back the next day? Maybe it was like Mandy’s dissembling, which had been to protect her friend. But no, Nora’s duplicity was different. Her double-dealing served to protect only one person — herself.

  I turned on my computer, waited for it to boot up, then quickly went to MapQuest.com. Directions from Twin Falls to Tasha’s came up in seconds, reporting the distance as 932 miles with an estimated driving time of just over fourteen hours. Bill Wilson had said that Nora left the day before the murder. Even in a poky old Jetta, she could have gotten back long before Tasha was strangled.

  I knew the setup. Nora had been in Twin Falls and told her parents and her priest about Tasha. They agreed that the devil was in Tasha and saintly Nora had to save her. But Tasha didn’t want to be saved. She didn’t even want Nora to come back. Nora, on a mission, returned anyway.

  I tried to picture the scene. Nora arriving unexpectedly, finding Tasha making a porn tape. Tasha prancing around in a marabou nightie. Flashing her newly pierced tongue so she could give better blow jobs. They’d had a fight and Nora tried to shake the devil out of her — but shook a little too hard.

  My heart was beating hard, and I stood up and started pacing around the room. Nora knew about Dan because he’d been up to the apartment before. So she buzzed him in, locked herself in the bedroom with her dead roommate, and waited. The rest was a cinch. Calling Gracie Adler, who’d told her before about spotting the BESTDOC coming to visit. Yelling as if she were Tasha, so Gracie would know who was attacking. Then all Nora had to do was get out before the police came. All these apartment buildings had fire exits, usually a back staircase with a door from the kitchen. So she went down and into the night. Maybe she hid away in a cheap hotel for the night. Or more likely she drove back toward Twin Falls so she could turn around and arrive the next day in the guise of innocent and anguished friend.

  “Mom?”

  I spun around and saw Grant at the door with his friend Jake. I opened my mouth to blurt out my breakthrough, but Grant’s face was a mask of worry, so I just asked, “What’s up, guys?”

  “Dad told us about the court date,” Grant said tensely. “We’ve been trying to get more information on Johnny DeVito before then. Didn’t get that much.”

  Jake nodded. “I went into some online chat rooms and found someone who knew him in high school. Apparently his dad was a thug and so was he, but he had a smart sister. They lived in the Valley, by the way, if that helps.”

  “Everything helps, but I think we’re going to be okay.” I leaned back with a smile and they looked at me, mystified, since until now I’d been as edgy as a Todd Oldham table.

  “I’m pretty sure we were focused in the wrong place,” I continued calmly. “Johnny DeVito blackmailed Dad, but he didn’t have anything to do with the murder. He didn’t kill Tasha. Now I know who did.”

  Jake’s cell phone rang. He took the call and walked out of the room, not riveted enough by my coming revelation to stay around. I had to remember that this case wasn’t the center of everybody’s world. Just mine.

  And maybe Grant’s. “You know who killed her?” he asked, his laser focus on me.

  “Yes, I do.” I smiled at him triumphantly. “Are you ready? It’s kind of a surprise.” I paused for effect and then said, “Her roommate Nora.”

  Grant’s jaw dropped. Literally. He stared at me open-mouthed.

  “Didn’t she end up dead, too?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Then it doesn’t make sense,” said Grant. “If Nora killed Tasha, who killed Nora?”

  I hadn’t gotten that far yet. “Maybe she killed herself,” I said, warming to the idea. “After she strangled Tasha, she didn’t want to live anymore. Her own father killed himself when she was little. So she had a family history of suicide.”

  Grant crossed his arms and rocked back and forth on his Nikes. “Proof?” he asked finally.

  I turned back to my computer and quickly Googled “family” and “suicide.”

  “According to a Swedish study, people are twice as likely to kill themselves if there’s a family history,” I said, scrolling down the screen. “And an American study says it’s three times.”

  “I mean real proof,” said Grant, dismissing the sociological studies as being as scientific as Tarot cards. “Wouldn’t the autopsy show if it was suicide?”

  I nodded. “Apparently there were some indications. But the body had been moved a couple of times, so the medical examiner ruled foul play.”

  “Then how are you going to make your theory stick?” Grant asked.

  “I have a feeling it’s going to stick like flypaper,” I said with a smile.

  He looked at me through furrowed eyebrows, and I realized the kid had probably never heard of flypaper. Probably thought it was something to replace the button fly on Levi’s 501s. Didn’t matter. One way or another, I was going to zip up this case.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “So then Nora destroyed the porn tapes to preserve her friend’s good name,” Molly said early the next morning, when I called her at home with my theory. “Or whatever was left of it.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “She would have known about the tapes and known where they were. You can bet she wasn’t giving them back to Roy.”

  “Well, that part adds up,” Molly said slowly. “And so does the rest of it, frankly. The killer definitely knew her way around that apartment. And knew that Dan was coming.”

  Molly didn’t answer, and I realized she’d covered the phone and was chatting to someone on her end. A moment later, her companion grabbed the receiver.

  “Lacy?” asked a man’s voice.

  I was confused. “Um, yeah. Who’s this?”

  “It’s Tim. I’m lying next to Molly, so I heard everything you said. And I think you might be off base.”

  Off base? I could have been in the outfield for all I cared. “You’re lying next to Molly?” I asked, focusing on the more important point. “You mean like in bed?”

  “No, on her divan. We never quite made it to the bedroom.”

  Did I want to hear this? Of course I did — even in the middle of a murder case.

  I could hear Molly giggling and snatching the phone back.

  “Lacy, dear, we
have you to thank for hooking us up,” Molly said. “Remember when you called me that first time and I checked with Tim to see what he knew? Turns out he knows everything. Anyway, we finally managed to go out for dinner, and once we started talking, we connected in a big way.”

  “Very big,” Tim bragged in the background.

  Molly snorted and ignored him. “What can I tell you? If you spend a lot of time talking about porn tapes together, you get ideas.”

  “On the divan?”

  “It was divine,” chirped Molly.

  The sound on the phone changed as Tim hit the SPEAKER button to turn our call into a conference. Oh, great. Now Molly and Tim could have their hands free — or not free — while we talked.

  “Back to your solution for the case,” Tim said. “I think it’s too pat. If I were on Dan’s jury, I’d think you were just trying to make a scapegoat of the dead woman.”

  I swallowed hard. Dan’s jury? If I could help it, nobody was ever going to be sitting in judgment of my husband.

  “And bereaved friend as the killer?” asked Tim, continuing. “I don’t know. The image is all wrong.”

  “I don’t mind Nora as killer,” said Molly spiritedly. “I’d easily cast her for the part. She fits that whole against-type look that I like.”

  “Except this is one of those rare jobs you’re not casting,” teased Tim. “It’s reality.”

  “I love reality,” countered Molly. “I cast it all the time. Much more surprising than anything from Jerry Bruckheimer.”

  “Nice woman turns killer bitch?”

  “Happens more than you’d think,” said Molly.

  “Then I better get out of here,” joked Tim.

  “Come back!” called Molly in a sweet squeal, halting his faux exit from the divine divan. Whatever Tim did next — I guess he found a place for his hands — Molly gave a yelp and broke into a tinkling laugh.

  I hung up quickly. They could finish their bedroom scene without me. Tough-minded Molly seemed to have morphed into a giggling girl overnight, but she’d be okay. Tim seemed like a good guy and it was time my friend found someone special. Especially someone who knew his way around a casting couch.