by Nancy Grace
Let’s see, where was he, where was he? Frank LaGrange Hadden III. He met him at a bar a few weeks ago and kept his number. “Photographer to the World” he’d called himself. Translation: He was a photog for every sleazy tabloid in the country and then some. Hadden made it his business to know every waiter, waitress, maître d’, beat cop, emergency dispatcher, and garbage man in town.
“Hadden.” He answered the phone with two flat syllables, nothing more.
“Frank, it’s me, Quinton. You met me at Muley’s the other night.”
There was a pause on the other end.
Quinton went on. “You know, the trash man.”
“Oh, yeah! You work East Hampton, right? What’s up, man?”
“I got something for you. I think it’s big.”
“Everybody thinks it’s big. What is it?”
Not wanting to give away too much before getting a price quote, Quinton hedged. “It’s big all right. If you think a dead body in a star’s pool house tied to a chair is big.”
“Holy shit. Where are you?”
“That’s the million-dollar question. The owners aren’t home. Don’t know when they’ll come back, but I know they weren’t here Tuesday, either. That’s when I was last here. No telling how long she’s been here. May have been here then, I just didn’t smell it until now and man, she reeks!”
“Million-dollar question’s overdoing it a little, maybe a thousand’s more like it.” Hadden cut straight to the chase.
“Bullshit.”
“Okay. If it’s an Alister, I can do five. Who is it?”
“I’m not telling till I get a number, dude.”
“Have they ever won an award? You know . . . an Oscar, Emmy, Daytime soap? Porn awards don’t count. But maybe they do since it’s a dead body. You gotta give me more . . . or unless they’re currently on TV, have a recurring role, have ever been in a movie, or if you’ve ever seen a story about them on ET, Access, or the Insider.”
“Award, Enquirer, ET. Is that enough?”
“You got the five. I’m on my way. What’s the address?”
“It ain’t that easy, buddy. How do I know you won’t get your shot and then leave me high and dry? I’ll meet you a few blocks away and bring you here. Cash money up front. But, hurry, I gotta go or the others will get suspicious. I’ll just tell them I gotta take a dump when you get close . . . But you gotta hurry, man.”
“I’m an hour away. I’ll do my best.”
“Okay. Call me, and after you get here, I’ll give you ten minutes before I call 911.”
“Why do you have to call 911 at all?”
Quinton dug deep. What would Aquinas do? Or Spinoza?
Screw them. Seven years of devoting himself to them and he still had a roommate.
“Maybe I don’t.”
“On the other hand, if you do, then I could snap some long shots of cops arriving and bringing the body out. Coroner’s office, the whole shebang. Hey, tell you what I’ll do . . . You call 911 and I’ll throw in an extra five hundred.”
“A thousand.”
“Seven-fifty.”
“Done. See you in an hour.” Quinton agreed to the price, having no idea a shot like this would be worth a lot more to one of the tabs. Seven hundred fifty dollars bonus money sounded great to him. All he wanted was a flat-screen.
“Forty-five minutes. I’m already in the car and on the highway. Traffic’s light.”
Quinton took one last peek at her. Poor broad. Nice legs, but, still, poor broad.
He crunched around the side of the mansion to the front drive and headed back to the truck.
“What the hell took so long?” They yelled it at him as they lounged against the back of the truck, waiting.
“Nothing, you lard-asses. Just checking the recycles. Empty again.”
“Rat bastards don’t give a crap about the environment.” His trash partner muttered it under his breath, grinding a cigarette butt beneath his work boot there on the drive.
Quinton hopped on the back of the truck, held on, and off they went to the end of the cul-de-sac. The houses were few and far between. He eyed the digital watch on his wrist.
Forty minutes and counting.
Chapter 5
THIS HAD DAMN WELL BETTER BE GOOD. FRANK LAGRANGE HADDEN III DIDN’T like getting out of bed before 10 a.m. He had been out developing “contacts” at a bar last night and didn’t get home until after three in the morning. It was all a little bit of a blur.
Clutching a large, black coffee from a McDonald’s drive-thru, he floored it, heading up the Long Island Expressway. He didn’t really expect much, but a dead body in an out-of-town celeb’s mansion couldn’t be all bad . . . Could it?
Oh, hell. It was starting to rain. At least it wasn’t a summer weekend or he’d be stuck in the thousands of city dwellers heading for the Hamptons for forty-eight hours, either to get a breath of sea air or make the scene. And man, what a scene. New Yorkers were convinced, if you didn’t have a place in the Hamptons, you were nothing. They were willing to pay an arm and a leg for a hole in the wall just to say they had a place in the Hamptons. The ones that couldn’t afford to buy or rent just went every weekend to freeload off the ones that sprang for a place.
Whatever. Pretentious boors.
He was just fine with his one-bedroom apartment walk-up two flights above China Fun on First Avenue. It was loud as hell so close to the street and it always smelled like duck, but it was fine. He missed his house back down south in the suburbs, but he lost it in the divorce. He got offered a free place to live with a friend here in the city for a few months, then he just stayed. It was easier.
This coffee was good. He didn’t care what Dunkin’ said. McDonald’s was the best. And the cheapest.
He’d been on the road for over an hour now and, without much traffic, was just about to pull into East Hampton. Feeling around in his pants pockets, he fished out his cell phone and hit “redial.”
“Hello?” Quinton Howard asked it tentatively.
“It’s me, Hadden. I think I’m just a few blocks from you. Wanna give me the location now?”
“Hey, man. You’re late! Do you have the cash?”
“Of course I do. Do you have the dead body?”
“Shut up, man. It’s not my dead body. I saw it. I wanna get this thing over with.”
“All right, all right. Calm down. Where are you?”
“Hurry. I’ll be at 43 East Shore Lane in five minutes. It’s right on the water.”
“Of course it is. You’re a piece of crap if you’re not on the water. Then they gotta have a pool.”
“Yeah. Whatever, man. I’ll be out back by the pool house.”
“Whose place did you say it was?”
“I didn’t. You’ll see when you get here.”
“Oh. Okay. Mr. Secret Agent Man. I’ll find out when I get there. See you in five.”
Hadden was pretty sure he knew how to find Shore Lane. The ritzy side was East Shore, which led down to the water. The “cheap” side was West Shore, which was not on the water but within walking distance. It was the supreme humiliation for the West Shore people to be caught walking through the crosswalk that divided the two, dressed in swimsuits and carrying beach gear. It identified them as the have-nots. Poor schmucks. They had to walk the quarter-mile to the dunes while the haves just looked right out the kitchen window and over their pools to the waves.
Winding through lane after lane of multimillion-dollar mansions, Hadden turned right onto East Shore. The tiny lane could barely handle two cars passing, but luckily, fewer people were around this time of year.
“Let’s see, 37, 39 . . .” Hadden muttered to himself as he edged along, hunching forward over the steering wheel making out numbers on the mailboxes.
“41 . . . Bingo! 43.”
He checked his rearview. Nobody there. Nobody ahead, either. Driving forward about eighty feet or so, he parked on the side of the street on grass that seemed unattached to any of the
mansions.
Last thing he needed was to get towed out of somebody’s driveway or reported by Neighborhood Watch. This bunch probably didn’t have a Neighborhood Watch. Probably sprung for private security patrol. He better move it.
Walking casually, as if he belonged there, Hadden crossed the eighty feet and walked up the side of 43. Spotting a walkway on the side of the house, he slipped under an arched trellis and headed down the shelled walk out back. Walking the length of the house, front to back, he looked in several of the windows. It was empty, all right.
Wait a minute. He backed up and looked into a side window. They must have had their lights on timers. There, under a spotlight installed flush with the twenty-foot-high ceiling, carefully centered in the middle of a shelf with nothing else around it, sat an Oscar.
There was no mistaking it. The little statuette gleamed out at Hadden standing there on the sidewalk staring in.
Whose house was this anyway? He felt like he’d seen it before. He stepped forward a few steps and looked through another window. Gracefully arranged on the lid of a shiny black Steinway grand piano were a dozen or so family photos, all encased in similar sterling silver frames. There was the star, smiling out from inside a frame. It was Eric Saxton.
Holy shit. Pay dirt!
Eric Saxton! Yeah, way past his prime and all patched together with hair implants, lipo, and a full-on face-lift, but still a star. And so was the new Mrs. Saxton, Lisa. She was an actress and had to be twenty years younger than him even if she was lying about her age by, say, seven or eight years.
They’d met on a movie set. As soon as the affair took off, he dumped his wife, leaving her and his four kids, to move in with the actress.
He glanced at the photos again. Even though they were set up to look like candids, on vacations and such, they all looked like glamour shots from the mall. They had to be professionally touched up . . . or were people actually this beautiful?
He thought for a second about all the stars he’d caught without makeup and sold the shots to the tabs. The ones on the grand piano were touched up, no doubt about it.
Hadden felt a tingle in his gut. He was on the verge of a huge paycheck, but this was dangerous. Skulking around an old Hollywood star’s place was a suicide mission.
And they were pretty freaky about that out here because of squatters, people from the city who came out here off-season and took up in empty mansions until they were busted. Sometimes they made it a whole season, living the high life, eating the food out of inlaid Sub-Zero fridges, watching TV in fancy home theaters, sleeping on the thousand-count Egyptian-cotton bedsheets, until somebody recognized they were out of place.
Usually they just ended up paying a fine. Owners didn’t want to be bothered with prosecuting. Just wanted their maids to change the sheets.
Hadden better hurry. And Quinton better be out back and he damn well better have a dead body with him. Turning the corner, Hadden spotted him standing at the door of the pool house, guarding his find.
“Hey, man. Show me the cash.”
“Not one for small talk, huh? Okay. Here, here’s half. Show me the body and I’ll give you the rest.”
Hadden took a fat roll of cash out of his right pocket and peeled off three grand. With no fanfare, he thrust it into Quinton’s right hand.
“Where’s the other two?”
“Right here in my pocket and it’ll be in yours the minute I see the body.”
Quinton stalled for a moment, thinking over his options, but other than tackle Hadden right then and there, take the money and run, his only real choice was to hope Hadden would come through.
“Okay. Follow me.”
He led Hadden through a set of carefully manicured wisteria bushes, trained to wrap themselves around a lattice arch.
And sure enough, there she was.
“What a set of legs. It’s a shame.” It was all Quinton could think to say as Hadden stared through the glass door to the pool house.
For a moment Hadden said nothing, and suddenly, Quinton was afraid he wouldn’t get the remaining two grand. “Hey, man. You said five grand if it was in a celeb’s house. And it is. You don’t get a whole lot bigger than Eric Saxton. Plus, there’s the wife. She’s a star, too.”
“Shut up, Quinton. You’ll get the money. I’m just trying to place that tattoo she’s got on her ankle. I know I’ve seen it somewhere before.”
Quinton squinted again through the glass. He was right. Guess a photographer’s eye caught it. There was a series of small, delicate, Chinese-looking characters down the inside of the girl’s left ankle.
“What the hell? Who cares about a tattoo? She’s got her head blown off in Eric Saxton’s pool house!” Quinton didn’t feel like getting philosophical about the woman’s tattoo. He wanted to get his money, then get the hell out of here.
“Yeah. Here’s the money.” Hadden got out his money ball again and counted out two thousand.
Handing it to Quinton, he started to quickly assemble his Nikon, attaching a long lens to one end. “Now, it’ll only take me a minute to get some up-close shots . . . Call 911. Pronto.”
“What’s my excuse for being back up here?”
“Tell ’em you’re checking the recycle bins.”
“But I already told the crew that!”
“Whatever! Tell ’em you missed one! Just call!”
Hadden didn’t look over his shoulder as Quinton whipped open his cell and punched in the numbers.
“Wait a minute. Where’s my seven-fifty if I call the police?”
“Right here, my man, right here.” Hadden gave him the rest of the money and, without missing a beat, hopped up on a retainer wall beside the door and started getting shots through a window.
“Listen, Quinton, make the call. I gotta get these shots and get behind those bushes before the ambulance gets here.”
Quinton chose the speaker-phone feature on his cell so Hadden could hear the whole thing, just to make sure he got the extra seven hundred fifty dollars. After punching 911, he pushed the “send” button.
The phone rang several times, followed by an automated message warning callers not to dial 911 if they didn’t have a real emergency, and redirecting them. That way the cops could avoid, say, a mouse in the kitchen or a cat stuck up a tree.
“911 Emergency Dispatch. What’s your emergency?” It was a female voice, crisp and cool.
Quinton Howard paused. Was it right to make money off a dead woman? Obviously murdered? Her face was nothing but a mushy pile of pulp on one side. From the glass door, he couldn’t see the other side, but it probably didn’t fare much better. It hit him, standing there: What had he become? What had happened to his ethics, his values?
He had a choice . . . he could hang up right now, give the money back, and walk away. Screw Frank LaGrange Hadden III and his filthy blood money. This wasn’t right, morally, religiously, or philosophically.
Quinton pondered. It was the age-old problem first encountered in the Garden of Eden. Good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, evil vs. sublime. Eve was seduced by a talking snake, the magician Faust sold his soul for knowledge and power, and Tab Hunter, aka Joe Hardy, sold out in Damn Yankees to transform himself from a middle-aged baseball fan to a young long-ball hitter who could beat the Yankees in the World Series.
They were all a string of bad ideas. For once, Quinton Howard could learn from the mistakes of others.
But then . . . There was the flat-screen he wanted for his apartment.
“Repeat . . . 911 Emergency Dispatch. What’s your emergency?”
Quinton dug down deep. For once in his life, he had to be strong.
“Hello? I need help. The cops need to come in a hurry. I think I see a dead girl. Her head’s blown off.”
Chapter 6
WHERE THE HELL WERE THE COPS? EVEN AN AMBULANCE WOULD DO. It had been nearly thirty minutes and they were all no-shows. He himself had heard Quinton give the exact location, street address included. Where was this bunch of
hayseeds?
Hadden had gone from crouching behind a hedge about fifty feet back from the pool house, poised to start snapping long shots with his Nikon, to sitting flat on his rear on a pile of pine straw, peering through some azalea bushes. He wasn’t too worried about these nincompoops spotting him; they apparently couldn’t even find Saxton’s house.
Just as he whipped out his cell to check his messages, he heard voices. Hmm. So they hadn’t used the sirens. Probably didn’t want to cause a ruckus in a neighborhood like this one.
Hadden stuck his nose back in the azaleas. There they were. Two uniformed Hamptons cops, coming up the same walk he had. He could hear every word. Quinton was walking along with them and was explaining how he’d been picking up the trash, but was interrupted pretty quickly by the short cop. He had his back to Hadden, but Frank could still hear him clearly.
“But why were you back here? Don’t you pick it up out front?”
“Oh, yeah. But I do this as a favor for the Saxtons when they’re out of town, you know, so burglars won’t see the trash cans on the road for days on end and come loot the place. You know, just to be safe . . . right?”
The cops just looked at him and started taking notes on little pads they both had. They walked up to the glass door and looked in. The tall one took one look and puked right onto a bush beside the walkway. It sounded like he was vomiting all the way up from the soles of his feet.
What an embarrassment. Hadden started laughing to himself, then it turned into a coughing fit. Damn cigarettes. He could hardly laugh without coughing like a wild dingo.
Hadden stifled it. Didn’t want to explain to cops why he was sitting out back on a freaking pine cone.
After the tall, young one quit with the puking, the other cop just looked at him. The contempt for his weakness was barely concealed.
The short one held his hand to a shoulder police-band radio, barked a series of numbers into it, began asking the routine questions. What time did Quinton get there, was it his usual route, blah, blah blah.
Quinton was holding up pretty well. It was easy . . . So far he was just telling the truth. Not hard, or so you’d think.