by Paul Heald
A quick look at his watch told him that he needed to get moving. Stanley had not met Milton Barkley on his porn studio tour, and he wondered how he would compare to the other studio heads, Brian Mulkahey and Stan Matteson. It was a short drive to Chimera which he found on a cul-de-sac off Friar Street. It was the most heavily guarded of all the studios. A black-suited man with a silver ear piece stood at the front door, while another guard sat in the lobby. Once his identification was checked, a shapely young receptionist led him to a large modern office where a buffet was set out on a linen tablecloth.
“Mr. Barkley said to make yourself at home. There’s plenty of food.” She accepted his thanks and left him alone in the office. The walls were covered in abstract art, with no sign of movie posters or starlet glamour shots. Framed photos on the credenza behind Barkley’s desk showed him in restaurants or on golf courses with a number of recognizable athletes and rock stars. Resisting the temptation to snoop in Barkley’s desk, Stanley gravitated to a pile of shrimp sitting in a bowl of ice and had just popped one in his mouth when a vaguely familiar face in a tailored Italian suit stepped into the room and introduced himself as the owner of Chimera Productions.
Stanley wiped his hand and swallowed quickly. “Nice to meet you, sir. Thanks for taking the time to speak with me.” He gestured to the table and tried to determine where he had seen his host before. “The food’s great.”
“Thank you,” he replied, “we’ve got the best caterer in the business. In fact, I once had a girl tell me that she’d be willing to screw a horse just for the lunches.” He laughed, and Stanley recognized where he had seen him before. He had accompanied Jade as she arrived at the party on the night she was murdered. “We try to set the standard here at Chimera in every way. Please, serve yourself.”
Stanley fixed himself a crab salad croissant and sat down across from Barkley in a comfortable, overstuffed chair. “As you know,” the professor explained, “I’m helping Don with his investigation. Right now, we’re learning everything we can about Jade to figure out who had a motive to kill her.”
“I don’t know who would want to hurt her,” Barkley replied before he popped a shrimp into his mouth. “She was a charming and beautiful young woman.”
“What about her agent, Chance Geary?”
“Now, why would Chance want to kill Jade? She was his meal ticket.” He shook his head in disbelief.
“It wouldn’t be the first time a jealous man did something stupid, Mr. Barkley.” The producer was altogether too slick and confident. “The people that I’ve talked to tell me he’s a drug dealer with a very nasty reputation.”
“Sure,” he conceded, “Chance is ambitious and rather rough around the edges, but I’m sure that he wanted only the best for Jade.” Taken aback by the nonchalant dismissal of his prime suspect, the professor temporarily lost his train of thought. He took a bite of his sandwich and regrouped.
“What about William Walker?” He watched carefully for any flicker of recognition. “He’s a cop in San Bernardino County who claims to be Jade’s husband. Have you ever met him?”
“William Walker? No, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him. Jade may have mentioned an estranged husband once, but I certainly never met him.” He calmly picked at some calamari, looking more like a partner in a white-shoe law firm than a porn mogul.
“Do you think Don did it then?”
“Of course he did.” Barkley reached over and put his empty plate back on the buffet table. “But not for the reason everyone thinks. You see, the day before the party, I convinced Jade to come back to Chimera. I presume that she made the mistake of telling Don that his hottest property was leaving Eden. Toss in his crush on her and you have a recipe for disaster.” Barkley seemed mildly amused by the whole situation.
“Have you told the police this?”
“Of course. It’s certainly relevant to their investigation, don’t you think?” Stanley envisioned the smug look on the director’s face as he handed the police Don’s motive on a silver platter.
“Do you have any proof that she was leaving Eden?” He tried to regain some momentum and wipe the self-satisfied expression off Barkley’s face. If he had just rehired Jade, he should be more upset by her death. But then again, the benefit of losing Eden as a competitor may have been far greater than the benefit of adding another star to his own stable. “Or is it just your word that Jade was joining you?”
“We hadn’t put anything in writing yet, if that’s what you mean.” He shook his hand dismissively. “This is an industry where handshake deals are still common.”
“Is it also an industry where someone might collude to exclude one of his competitors from a national distribution market?”
“Excuse me?” The producer looked curiously at his interrogator. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t reveal my sources, but I’ve heard that you’ve been conspiring to cut Eden Studio out of the national video distribution chain. If you’re working to destroy Don’s business, it makes me wonder what you might be willing to do to succeed.” For a moment, he thought he had shaken the producer’s calm demeanor, but Barkley brushed him aside like an annoying insect and responded smoothly.
“Professor Hopkins, I have never conspired to cut my good friend Don out of any business, and I find your suggestion that I meant him harm to be quite offensive.” He wiped his mouth on his napkin and stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the set.”
“No problem,” Stanley said as he put down his plate, regretting the fact he had lost control, but realizing he had little to lose in antagonizing Barkley further. “I was watching an interesting piece of video footage from the surveillance cameras in the Eden lobby. I saw that Jade was your date to the party on the night she was murdered.”
“Nice, Professor,” he said with disdain as he opened the door to let his guest out of the room. “Jade called me and asked for a ride to the party, and I was happy to accommodate her. Make of that what you will. Detective McCaffrey did not seem particularly impressed by the revelation. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got work to do.” He led Stanley to the lobby and nodded at the security guard before striding back down the hall. Stanley watched him for a moment, trying to measure whether Barkley’s brusqueness was evidence of arrogance or guilt or both, but then he felt the pressure of a hand on his back and was guided gently to the exit.
When Stanley got back to Eden, he sat down in front of the video monitor and continued to watch the parade of characters who had attended the party, but his mind kept drifting back to his talk with the head of Chimera. It had been an amateur performance at best and reminded him of other interviews with executives that he had botched. He could coax great information out of everyday workers, but guys in suits sometimes flustered him. He was going to have put on his big boy pants if he wanted to get anything useful out of people like Barkley.
He watched Janet arrive unattended at the banquet in her shirtless tuxedo and saw Don greeting the guests crowding into the lobby. Then, he saw Angela light up the screen, to his mind every bit as sexy as the stars who preceded her. He hit the pause button and thought about calling her, but the chill in her voice that morning deterred him, and he decided to send her a bouquet of flowers instead. He pressed play again and the crowd in the lobby thinned out until only the guards remained. Toward the end of the recording, two or three figures he did not recognize exited the building and then one entered. To his surprise, he recognized the one who entered late. She paused as she took a puff of a cigarette before extinguishing it in an ashtray and walking back to the party. He checked the time imprint on the recording—her appearance was within the time frame when the murder would have occurred.
How could Janet have entered twice when he had not seen her leave? He worked back through the DVD and found no sign of her ever having left the building. He forwarded to the end and saw no one else leave the building until the video log showed a commotion among the g
uards and then the police rushing in several minutes later. The screen went blank and he reached for the telephone.
“McCaffrey here.” The detective’s voice was even more brusque than usual.
“It’s Stanley Hopkins. Do you have a second?”
“No.”
“Could we meet tomorrow? I’ve got some questions.”
“How about eleven tomorrow morning, at the jail? I need to check in on your friend, and I’ll squeeze you in.” Stanley thanked him and got around to the real reason for his call.
“And could you check and see whether the officers on the scene noticed whether the back window to Don’s office was open when they arrived? It was open yesterday.”
“Did you go into the office?” McCaffrey demanded immediately.
“No!” Stanley improvised, “you could see from the back parking lot that it was cracked open.”
“Don’t bullshit me.” To his surprise, the detective laughed. “But it doesn’t matter; we’re done in there. Poke around all you want. Just don’t take anything.”
“Don’t you think it’s important that the window may have been open the night of the murder?”
“No,” he laughed again, “but I’ll ask the team. We’re dotting all of our i’s and crossing all of our t’s on this one. ‘Til tomorrow, Sherlock.” With that, he hung up, and Stanley wondered what to do next.
He poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot located in a small alcove and decided to reread the crime scene forensic report one more time. It did not reference the open window, but the section on fibers listed a purple tuft that had been taken from the window frame. His planned to request a test of the fibers found at the scene against the clothing worn by all of the guests at the party and guessed the police would not greet the idea with much enthusiasm.
As he was finishing with the report, he heard a rap on his door, and Janet walked in and sat down. She looked excited, and he delayed asking about her mysterious double entrance the night of the party.
“How did it go?”
“Really well, I think. Veronica and Vanessa each went the full two hours. Aja had to leave a little early but we got through all your questions.” She smiled. “It was fun. I just pretended I was a talk show host. Veronica even admitted that she doesn’t have twenty-seven orgasms every time she does a scene.”
“Great!” He hoped Janet could provide an innocent explanation for her double entrance at the party. Without her, he could not help Don and finish the book interviews at the same time. “Did you find out anything relevant to the investigation?”
“I think so. It’s a great way to start the interviews, by the way. Everybody wants to talk about the murder. It really gets ‘em going.” She pulled her notes out of a small black purse. “Well, first of all, it turns out that Aja was pretty close to Jade. They weren’t super tight, but they’ve got the ethnic thing in common.” Janet was confident and professional; maybe she’d do better with suspects like Milton Barkley. “Anyway, Jade told her that she was going to drop Geary as her agent when she went back to Chimera.” Stanley imagined the mechanics fury at losing his girlfriend and prime source of income at the same time.
“Had she told him yet?”
“I don’t know, but Jade was afraid of what he might do when he found out.”
He leaned back in his chair and processed the information. It dovetailed nicely with what he had learned earlier from the head of Chimera.
“There’s more, too.” She flipped a page in her notebook and added excitedly, “Vanessa hooked up with Chance before Jade did.”
“Are you kidding me? The guy’s a weasel. What do these women see in him?” His exasperation was genuine and personal. He still had vivid memories of the swaggering louts in his high school who inevitably dated the most attractive girls.
“Well, with Vanessa, it was definitely the crank. He was her meth connection until she got into rehab, and she was probably his connection to the business. Anyway, according to Vanessa, while they were together he threatened to kill her at least twice.”
“Why am I not surprised?” He layered on the sarcasm. “Did she say why?”
“He thought she was stepping out on him. She said he was insanely jealous. She was totally terrified of him. I think that was part of her going into rehab, to get away from him.” She put her notes back in her purse and crossed her legs.
He told her about the fibers that had been found by the window and wished he could run an analysis on Geary’s clothes. But if the agent had paid a visit to the Eden office, then how had he have known that Don and Jade would be there? He thought for a moment and ran a scenario past Janet. “Let’s say that Chance knows he’s not welcome at the party, so he prowls around trying to find a way in. He finds the window cracked, or maybe he jimmies it open, and then waits in the dark. He can’t be sure that Don will come in, but maybe he’s looking for something in the office or maybe he’s just planning to trash the place.”
“Or maybe he’s waiting for the right moment to pop out and crash the party.”
“Sure,” Stanley acknowledged and continued. “He didn’t bring a weapon, so he wasn’t planning to kill anyone that night.” He closed his eyes briefly and envisioned the scene. “So, he’s sitting waiting and much to his surprise, Don stumbles in and passes out on the couch. What do you do when your nemesis falls right into your lap? It throws him off guard for a while. He waits and wonders what he should do, but before he can decide, his woman comes in, clearly anticipating a private rendezvous with the other man. He loses his temper and goes nuts. Somehow, he has enough presence of mind after killing her to wipe the handle of the fraternity paddle for fingerprints and slip it into Don’s hand.”
She nodded her head. “That story makes as much sense as Don killing her, but we’ve got nothing to place Geary at the scene.”
Unlike you, he thought. He debated once again whether to raise the issue of her double entrance, but decided again to wait. Instead, he abruptly stood up, “I’m totally starving. Why don’t we hash through this over dinner?”
XIX.
JADED
At six o’clock the following morning, Janet congratulated herself for ordering only a small tuna salad the night before. Her workout would go slightly easier having avoided the thick steak and Belgian fries that she had really wanted. She leaned against an outside wall at her gym and took a deep drag on a cigarette. Exercising would go smoother still if she stopped smoking, and she told herself, as she automatically did with every cigarette, that she’d quit in two years, max—once she was done with the business. Even so, smoking was better on the hips and thighs than the chocolate sundae she’d rather be sucking on. But in a couple of years, hell with it; she’d just let the thighs and hips go. But not quite yet, not for a couple years more.
She heard the annoying clank and squeal of a garbage truck working its way down the street, and absentmindedly rubbed her temple where a headache was just starting to tap. As the smoke curled up around her, her eye caught the flouncing, sashaying approach of two teenage girls leaving the all-night diner next door to the gym, carelessly strolling arm in arm. As she watched their approach, she remembered being seventeen herself, beautiful and knowing it, reveling in the exhilarating realization of the effect her body and her looks had on men. Hell, on all people, really. The girls were so young and effortlessly gorgeous that it never occurred to them that some women actually had to work at it, that their own older selves would have to work like mad if they wanted to keep the magic alive.
As the girls passed the garbage truck, the middle-aged man swinging the cans allowed his eyes, and then his entire head to follow their every step as they approached and then passed. Once he’d seen both the front presentation and their tight little asses swaying in unison, he glanced up at the driver with a smile and a rueful, appreciative shake of the head. The girls giggled, added a little extra bounce to their walk, but carried on without breaking stride. Janet watched them and reflexively evaluated their attribute
s and flaws. The short one was cute, with great hair and eyes, but her hips and thighs were already beginning to saddlebag. This was the best she was ever going to look. Better grab a boy now, darlin’ and hopefully one that will be pushing a pen behind a desk rather than some garbage worker a year before his back goes ZAP and he’s stuck on the couch yelling at his wife to bring him more PBRs and another oxycodone and to keep them damn kids quiet for chrissakes. If she didn’t start working on those thighs soon, or snag the smart guy, she’d be in trouble, because she sure didn’t look smart enough to catch ‘em with her amazing wit and intelligence. The taller one, though, she had a cunning look about her that made her the alpha for sure. Good legs, small boobs, but they’re round and firm . . . she’s definitely more aware. Would she be interested in doing a few photos?
As her eyes followed the girls’ movements, she absently ran her hands down her own hip and outer thigh and decided she needed to kick up her regimen on the Stairmaster, maybe another fifteen minutes twice a week. Only for another two or three years, though, then that particular torture-fucking-machine would be the first thing to go, right before the smokes. She envisioned physically lifting the hated beast up in her bare hands and smashing it through the gym’s plate glass window, and watching it crash and tumble down the manicured embankment, maybe taking out a couple of Porsches or Beemers in its wake. She shook her head and snuffed out the cigarette. Even though there were a dozen trodden butts littering the landing, she reflexively looked around for the skinny phallic ash can. She would no more throw a used butt on the ground than wear black granny panties under a pair of white skinny jeans. Discipline, old damn habit, was a constant companion and the only way to survive on top, no matter what the business was.