Death in Eden

by Paul Heald

  “I know just the place.” She walked to her car. “Follow me.”

  Janet led them to a cozy Mexican restaurant in North Hollywood where the menu was full of items unavailable at the typical taco stand, including her favorite goat fajitas and the corn smut tamales. The waiter took their order and brought them a round of beers with some guacamole and homemade chips. She asked Stanley what they were going to do the next day.

  “Okay, here’s a possible plan for tomorrow. In the morning, I’d like to track down William Walker. Then, I’ve got lunch with the head of Chimera Productions. In the afternoon, I need to make some phone calls and start going over the video logs.” He let out a sigh and stabbed at a chunk of avocado in the dip. “I also eventually need to see Don and ask him about Miriam, not to mention talking to McCaffrey about what was missing from Don’s office and the open window. There’s also that business card that needs to be checked out.”

  “What do you want me to do?” A sincere gratitude lit up his face. He really was adorable. If she were the mothering type, she might have been quite turned on, but sincerity and earnestness were traits that she appreciated more in her banker or her brother.

  He hesitated a moment and then replied. “You remember the hotel room where we interviewed you two weeks ago?” She nodded. “I’d like to meet you there early in the morning and show you how to do the actress interviews for the day. I’ve been starting the interviews with questions about Don and Jade and the murder.” He took a long gulp of his beer. “I think talking to women in the industry is key, and I’ve already gotten some leads. It would be super helpful if you could keep the interviews going.”

  That made sense, she supposed. He needed background information, and having her play Oprah would undoubtedly keep his own book project chugging along. He promised to give her a script of questions and asked her to focus on getting information about Jade’s sleazy agent and Milton Barkley, the head of Chimera.

  “Wait a minute.” She reached into her purse for a pen and a piece of paper to take notes. “You think there’s a connection with Barkley?”

  “He really wanted to see Eden fail and was trying to get Jade back to Chimera, maybe with Geary’s help. He paused as the waiter dropped an aromatic plate of food in front of them. “Even more interesting, Stan Matteson told me that Barkley was involved in a conspiracy to freeze Eden out of the national video distribution market. Stan decided not to join, but he thought Barkley might go to extremes to hurt Don.”

  The professor was quite the imaginative little bulldog. Clearly, his theory was to muddy the waters so badly that the jury might entertain some doubt despite the physical evidence. She was impressed. Her feelings about Don were an oscillating, twisted mess, but she did not want to see him executed for a crime that he did not commit. She asked the professor if he had any other suspects.

  “Well, for obvious reasons I’m pretty curious about Miriam.” He looked suspiciously at a plate of blue tinged corn, but nodded in appreciation when he sampled the tasty fungus growing on it. “What does anyone know about her? And before you arrived tonight, I learned something from this Jerry dude who works back in the store room. She’s been paying him cash to fill orders at night. Now, Don has no money. He can’t even pay the security guards anymore. They’ve all been let go, but she’s paying cash to the envelope stuffer.”

  “Do you think she’s ripping Don off?”

  “She could be skimming off the top of the mail order sales or running her own little business while the boss is locked up. Either way, she was pretty hostile the one time I questioned her about the murder. So, anything anyone knows about her would helpful too.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes and savored the meal. If the professor was nervous about having dinner with a porn star, he did not show it. The meal was all business, quite a contrast to her first dinner at the restaurant with Mötley Crüe drummer, Tommy Lee. He was the one who had introduced her to the place, and his agenda had definitely not been professional. When the check came, she slipped two twenties under the bill and told him that he could pay next time.

  They had brought both their cars to the parking lot, and before driving off, they set a time for their meeting the next morning. The night was cool and a soft breeze blew through the valley. Neither was in a hurry to leave and Stanley filled the silence with one more bit of information. “I can show you the forensic reports tomorrow, but in case you’re wondering, according to the Medical Examiner, we’re looking for a lefty, maybe one with blond hair.”

  “Don’s got dark hair,” she replied. “Is he left-handed?”

  “He’s ambidextrous. I remember that from playing softball with him in college. I don’t know if Detective McCaffrey knows, but I’m not about to tell him.”

  She rewarded him with a conspiratorial smile and a squeeze of his right bicep. “Thanks for letting me help.” She kissed his cheek, slid into her bright red Mini Cooper and drove away.

  XVIII.

  A DAY OF PROBING

  Stanley groaned in bed, unable and unwilling to object to the hands and tongues running over his body. Temptation had arrived moments earlier, when Janet and her friend Mia had come into his hotel room, arms around each other’s bare waists, smiling lasciviously.

  “This is the guy I told you about,” Janet said to the voluptuous redhead at her side. “Isn’t he a cutie?”

  “Oooh, yeah,” Mia purred as she crouched next the naked young professor and traced a finger down his stomach. Her green eyes beckoned as she licked her glistening red lips and reached down to touch him. “Mmm, a real cutie.”

  He moaned and watched with increasing excitement as Janet kissed her friend deeply, tongue slowly flicking from lip back to tongue. He could feel Mia’s fingers tighten around him as she too fell under her friend’s sway. Janet then moved her face closer to his and whispered seductively in his ear, “What do you want, baby? We’ll do anything you want.” Mia’s ministrations rendered him incapable of verbal response, but Janet kept repeating the question in a smoky voice. She kissed him on the mouth for the first time and he arched his back. Mia gave a throaty laugh.

  “Do you want her?” she whispered in his ear. He nodded his head and moaned again. “You gotta say it. Do you want her, Stanley?”

  “Yes.” She propped herself up on her elbow and gave him a commanding look. “Yes,” he said desperately, “I want her.” Janet lowered her face to his and kissed him as he felt Mia lower herself on to him. She moved slowly up and down, purring her pleasure and then squealing, “oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god,” as she writhed on top of him. Stanley held on for a moment, but it was too much. He arched his back and screamed. With a final shudder, he lay back and received one last tender kiss from Janet. When his lips reluctantly left hers, he lay amidst a ruinous tangle of sheets.

  Stanley shifted in bed and felt the sheets stick unexpectedly to his stomach. No way, he thought, not since high school. He gingerly lifted the top sheet, wiped himself off with disgust, and pushed it to the foot of the bed. By the time he made it to the shower, the details of the dream were already fading, but he recognized the scenario from the movie he had watched in the hotel room with Angela. As he scrubbed away the guilt of unconsciously cheating on his wife, he filed away a fact from the fantasy that he should have noticed earlier. Janet, like many other people, had short, blond hair.

  When he got out of the shower, he went straight to the phone and dialed his home telephone number. The answering machine, once again. Angela had left a brief message the night before, asking that he not call too late. He had gotten back from his dinner with Janet after midnight Pacific Time, so he had waited. Now, it was more phone tag. That may not be a bad thing, he thought. She’ll have more time to calm down, and he’d have more time to show that he was not on a wild goose chase.

  He got dressed, grabbed a surprisingly fresh hotel donut, and arrived at the interview motel five minutes early. Janet was already waiting, parked in the space closest to the stairwell
leading up to the room. She smiled when she saw him and stepped out of her car.

  She wore a conservative twill skirt and matching jacket. Her tan silk blouse was buttoned all the way up to her neck and closed off at the top with a small cameo brooch. She asked him if her attire was appropriate for an interviewer.

  “Absolutely.” He pushed images from his dream out of his mind. “You look lovely.” They walked side-by-side toward the building and he could not resist asking, “You mean this isn’t your normal workday attire?”

  “Not usually,” she laughed and then grinned wickedly. “Although I did play a very naughty secretary in this outfit once.” Knowing the penchant in porn titles for juvenile puns and double entendre, he wondered whether the movie she referred to had the word dickation in the title. As if reading his mind, she gave him a mischievous look as they arrived on the landing. “It was a parody of Nine to Five, so you can probably guess the title . . .”

  Stanley unlocked the door and thought for a moment. “Oh no, not Sixty-Nine to Five?”

  “Oh yes! You’ve got a future in the business, Professor.” She looked around the room, taking inventory of the equipment. “God, especially with this setup here . . . if you knew how many rooms like this I’ve worked in.” She sat down on the bed next to camera, her expression inscrutable. “Well, show me what to do.”

  He gave her a rundown of the equipment, and she grasped the technology easily. She slipped the notes she had taken at dinner into the yellow pad of Stanley’s interview questions and asked to see the day’s schedule. “Veronica, Aja, and Vanessa. This shouldn’t be too bad. I’ve worked with two, and I’ve met Aja. Veronica might know something about the situation at Chimera. She’s done most of her work there, I think.”

  While they finished setting up, he asked her about the banquet and her relationship with Jade. She had not seen anything of interest at the party and readily admitted that she did not have a good relationship with Eden Studio’s hottest property.

  Before he could explore her opinion of Jade, his cell phone rang, and a quick glance at the number told him it was his wife. He waved and left the room to take the call outside. It was a short conversation and ended before he could finish a single round of pacing across the parking lot. She wanted to know when he was coming home. He didn’t know. Had he talked to Max? No. Would he reconsider his decision? Not yet. When he sensed she was about to hang up, he blurted out that he loved her. But the overture was met with a disapproving humming noise and a curt goodbye. So much for the cooling off theory, he thought as he tossed the phone into the car.

  The problem was that they were both legitimately entrenched in their opinions. They both thought that they were absolutely correct, but unlike most marital disputes, the validity of their positions would soon be empirically verifiable. If Stanley wrote a book and caught a killer, then he would win. If he stained his reputation and lost his job, Angela would be proven right. He needed to find a way out of the win-lose scenario before the shit really hit the fan.

  He crawled slowly into his car and with some effort managed to turn his mind to the first item on his day’s agenda. Talking to William Walker better be more productive than dealing with Angela.

  The address at the bottom of Jade’s proof of age sheet took him just over the line from Los Angeles into San Bernardino County. California Bell directory assistance had no record of a William Walker at the address, so he entertained no great hope of meeting the man face to face, but he hoped neighbors might be able to provide a clue to his whereabouts. And if Jade had grown up in the neighborhood, then he might learn something about her too. He drove along Route 66 and easily found the cross street he was looking for. He continued along a busy commercial thoroughfare, noting an increasing number of liquor stores, strip clubs, and shabby hotels. If Jade had grown up here, he felt sorry for her. Small brick houses baked in the sun, their weed-choked lawns conveying a message of neglect and resignation.

  One more turn and he slowed down to read house numbers. Many were obscured or simply not posted. He finally spotted two small houses marked Twenty-two fifteen and Twenty-two nineteen. Number Twenty-two seventeen, the address he was looking for, was presumably the one in between. He pulled into the driveway but a chain link gate prevented him from getting his car completely out of the street. There was no traffic and only eighteen inches of the bumper stuck out, so he parked. He walked a couple of paces down the sidewalk to the front gate, trying to determine whether the house, like both of its neighbors, was guarded by a dog. A Pontiac parked inside the fence was so battered that it only minimally signaled someone might be at home, so he shook the fence and coughed loudly. When no guard dog came leaping out, he opened the gate slowly and walked tentatively to the front door, ready to hightail it back over the fence at the first hint of a growl.

  He stood on the cracked concrete porch and looked around at the cinderblock bunkers that passed for houses. Being a door-to-door salesman in this neighborhood would totally suck. The doorbell did not work, so he rapped hard with his knuckles. Two dogs immediately began barking and scratching the inside the door. A moment later, he heard a voice scolding them, and a man in his early thirties looked out warily. “Yeah?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Stanley began, “but I’m looking for a William Walker. He used to live at this address.”

  “I’m William Walker.” He was a muscular and attractive man whose appearance was marred by a Neolithic forehead and a sullen look. “And I still live here, as far as I know.” He made no move to invite Stanley into the house.

  “Nice to meet you!” He replied with feigned enthusiasm. “Directory assistance had no phone number for you at this address, so I thought you must have moved.”

  “I just have a cell.” His eyes narrowed and one of the dogs behind him emitted a low growl. “So, what do you want?”

  He cleared his throat. “I’m an investigator working on the murder of Jade Delilah, and your name is listed as the emergency contact on her paperwork at Eden Studio.” The scowl on Walker’s face deepened, but Stanley plowed ahead. “We’re looking for leads in the case and I wanted to talk to you about her.”

  “Who’s we?” The dogs started barking again, and Walker cuffed a Rottweiler/Doberman mix hard on the back of the head and told it to shut up. Its glare suggested that it would definitely enjoy making an early lunch of its master’s visitor. When Stanley made eye contact with the mongrel, the bad tempered rumble in its chest deepened. The professor forced a smile and focused his attention on Walker.

  “I’m the chief investigator for Don Johansson, Ms. Delilah’s employer who is currently being held in connection with her murder.” He tried to keep his tone conversational and engaging. “We’ve been having trouble tracking down Jade’s family. In fact, her body is still lying unclaimed at the county morgue.”

  “A private investigator? That figures.” Walker gave a sarcastic laugh. “The fucking lazy-ass LAPD haven’t been out here yet, but a civilian has no problem finding me.” He shook his head and snorted. “I wouldn’t work with those LA clowns again if they doubled my salary.”

  “You’re a police officer?”

  “San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office.” That explained the barrel chest and massive forearms, but it did not explain his relationship to Jade. “What do you want to know?” The cop demanded. “Make it quick. I’ve got a shift starting soon.”

  “Well, first of all. How did you know the victim?” Afraid that the door might shut at any moment, he went directly to the heart of the matter. “What can you tell me about her background?”

  Several emotions crossed the police officer’s face in a flash, but he settled on anger. He spoke in a measured, menacing monotone. “I’m her husband. That’s how I know her. And there aren’t any relatives to talk to. Her parents are both dead. She’s got a sister somewhere in Oxnard, but I haven’t seen her for years. You want to know about her history? Well, join the fucking club.” He snorted and shook his head. “She sai
d she had a turd for a dad and never said much about her mother or her sister.”

  “What was her maiden name?”

  “Lily Sharperson, but she wasn’t much for telling the truth. I met her at one of the strip clubs on the highway.”

  “Mr. Walker, when did you two separate?”

  The officer looked at him like the answer was obvious. “When she became a whore.” Stanley was stunned by the vehemence of the reply. The estranged husband grew impatient waiting for another question and reached for the door knob.

  “Wait!” Stanley exclaimed, “Are you going to claim the body?”

  “No, bury her yourself,” he spat and then slammed the door shut. The erstwhile investigator was left standing on the porch wishing he could get more out of the angry cop, but the dogs started barking madly and he hurried back to the car.

  On the drive back to Van Nuys, he considered Walker as a possible suspect in the killing and realized once again that he needed to examine the video logs of the Eden Studio lobby as soon as possible. If Chance Geary or William Walker’s face were on the recordings, then he could narrow his focus. As it was, the suspects were proliferating at an alarming rate. He had no desire to add a bitter cop husband to a list that already included a sleazy drug dealing manager, a do-gooder porn director and all his unscrupulous competitors. He looked at his watch. There was just time to stop at the studio for an hour before meeting Milton Barkley for lunch.

  Stanley went straight to his office with only a passing wave at Miriam who was busy at the photocopy machine behind her desk. A policeman had delivered copies of the lobby surveillance recordings the previous afternoon, and he plugged in a television and found a DVD labeled 17:00-22:00 on the date of the murder. The DVD should contain the faces of all who entered the building during that time, except for someone who may have entered through the window in Don’s office. He watched for forty-five minutes, fast-forwarding much of the beginning, but he saw no sign of either Geary or Walker. Then, as he watched large numbers of people arriving for the dinner, he caught a glimpse of Jade Delilah entering the building on the arm of a distinguished looking middle-aged man. He froze the screen and studied Jade’s companion, but he didn’t recognize him. Another player unaccounted for, he winced. Perhaps Janet could make an identification.