Death in Eden

by Paul Heald

  Janet shook her head slowly and watched the cars in front of them merge onto the freeway. “Only if you care about what other people think,” she counseled in a steely voice. “Only if you’re afraid to do what you need to do.”

  XXI.

  TANGLED WEBS

  Stanley drove down the freeway for five minutes before he realized that he had no destination and that Janet probably had left her car back in the parking deck. Just when he was starting to feel a little competent in the investigation, he felt reality’s steel-toed boot in his rear end. He had been making progress, or so he thought, but McCaffrey was still playing him for an amateur. He had little doubt who had leaked his presence at the jailhouse to the press.

  He glanced over at his partner, but she seemed unconcerned.

  “Where to now, boss?” The confidence in her voice helped him regain his focus. He needed to check out Geary’s and Walker’s alibis but he couldn’t proceed without making a call to McCaffrey begging for the information. He was not in the mood for another confrontation with the detective, so he decided to pursue the lead that had been sitting in his front pocket for three days. He took out the business card taken from Don’s desk the night of the search and scanned it quickly. “Do you know how to get to UCLA?”

  “Sure. Just take U.S. 10 west back to the 405 and go north. It’s basically in between Sunset and Wilshire. Really nice neighborhood, not like Southern Cal.”

  He asked her if she had gone to school at either place. It was easy to imagine her as a student, either as a serious sociology major wearing blousy sweaters to mute her curves or as blonde bombshell who was the darling of some raucous fraternity. She seemed to appreciate the compliment but shook her head.

  “I’ve talked to student groups at both,” she explained. “The psych departments hold a regular forum on human sexuality.” She laughed and kicked off her heels for the duration of the ride. “It’s kind of fun; they treat me like the ultimate sex authority.”

  He turned to her, arched eyebrows indicating this was a reasonable assumption.

  “I’m an expert in technique, not sex,” she said cryptically. “They should probably be talking to some happily married old couple, not me.”

  “So you’re a closet monogamist?”

  “No, not me,” she laughed. “That boat’s already sailed, left the harbor, and got lost in the Bermuda Triangle.” She looked like she was going to say more but changed the subject. “Who are we going to see at UCLA?”

  He handed her the card and speculated aloud on its likely significance. Law schools often ran free clinics for their students to get practical experience. For some reason, the accused murderer had an appointment the day before the killing to meet with the head of UCLA’s free clinic. Stanley had forgotten to ask about the appointment during his visit to jail earlier in the day and now seemed like a convenient time to learn why Johansson had needed pro bono legal advice.

  Stanley also needed to deal with one more loose end: Janet’s multiple entrances into the Eden Studio lobby the night of the banquet. As nonchalantly as he could, he described what he had seen on the video recording and wondered how she could have entered twice when there was no record of her having left. Unfazed by the question, she reached into her handbag and pulled out a packet of light menthol cigarettes. “Do you mind if I have one?” He shook his head, and she cracked her window so that most of the fumes would be sucked out of the car.

  “In the middle of the party I decided that I wanted a smoke. You remember where we were seated? There’s an emergency exit right behind the back curtain. If you’ve worked at Eden, you know you can light up just outside. The place is littered with butts.” She took a deep drag and blew it out the window. “Anyway, the door slipped shut before I could prop it open, so I got stuck outside and had to walk around the building to the front door.”

  He was tempted to ask whether anyone could verify her story, but she was not a suspect, and keeping her trust was his only chance to complete both the investigation and his book. He glanced quickly over to see if his question had shaken her and resolved to check behind the exit door for cigarettes butts when he got back to Eden. She poked her half-finished smoke out the window, and he changed the subject to her search for Jade Delilah’s sister.

  “Oh shit! I did better than that!” She reached over and touched his arm. “I talked to her.” Her sunglasses slipped and she pushed them deeper into her hair.

  She explained how she had tracked down Rebecca Sharperson in Oxnard. “Well, I suppose the most important thing was that she just assumed that Jade’s husband did it. He was abusive, and when Jade left him he tried to track her down.” She kept talking while signaling with her left hand that he should change lanes to avoid exiting prematurely. “But that was two years ago. She really doesn’t know anything since then. Did you see Walker anywhere on the recording?”

  “No,” he replied, “but he could have come in the window.”

  “Like Geary.”

  “Like anybody.” He checked his rearview mirror before turning his attention back to Janet.

  She recapped her conversation with Jade’s sister and added her insights into stripper psychology. “I mean, it’s no surprise that someone who starts working the clubs at eighteen is not very happy at home. Rebecca didn’t know for sure if Jade had a serious drug problem.”

  “What about the father?” He did not want to add yet another suspect to the list, but anyone who had a serious conflict with Jade needed to be looked at.

  “I don’t know . . . he might have abused her, but Rebecca didn’t say. I don’t think she knew.”

  He looked over at her and shook his head. “I mean can we talk to him?”

  “Oh.” She shook her head and pointed out the upcoming turn. “No. He died last year along with Jade’s mother.”

  Stanley took the first exit for the massive UCLA campus and drove aimlessly for a few minutes before he realized a casual drive-by sighting of the law school was unlikely. When he saw a security guard, he stopped and got directions to the northeast corner of the university complex. After fifteen minutes of missed turns, he finally saw the handsome red brick law building and found a place to park. Janet slipped her heels back on and they made their way across a green commons to the law school’s front entrance. For Stanley, the walk among the stately buildings of the university gave him a weird sense of déjà vu. By summer’s end, he would be back at his job and Los Angeles would seem a million miles away.

  The receptionist in the lobby told him where he could find the law clinic, and the professor and the porn star were soon walking down a long hallway sparsely populated by students attending summer school. They soon found a door stenciled “UCLA Law School Civil Clinic” and asked a student where Deborah Spellerburg’s office was. They found her in a small, windowless space in the back of the clinic. Stanley knocked on the open door and introduced himself and his companion.

  “What can I do for you Professor Hopkins?” The attorney was a chunky brunette whose serious demeanor was rendered even more severe by a pair of rectangular black glasses.

  “I’m the chief investigator for Donald Johansson who, as you may know, is currently under arrest for the murder of Jade Delilah.” He saw the attorney nod. She would have to be under a total media blackout not to know the names of the players in the murder case. He took the business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I found this in Mr. Johansson’s office and was hoping that you could tell us something about your meeting with him.”

  “Mr. Johansson came in twice, once briefly to set up an appointment, and then again, on the day before the murder.” She pushed her glasses back against the bridge of her nose. “But I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Attorney-client privilege?” He expected this unwillingness to talk and had formulated a plan in the car. His least favorite professor’s course on legal ethics would finally prove not to be a waste of time. He nodded understandingly and scanned the books lining the sh
elves in her office. Virtually all in some way were concerned with family violence and domestic abuse. He asked her what she did at the clinic.

  “I run our protective order program. Our clients are primarily woman seeking to escape an abusive relationship. We find them shelter and help them navigate the system to get a protective order. We’ve helped over four hundred women in the five years since the project started.” Stanley nodded his appreciation.

  “And you supervise law students involved in the process so they can get hands-on legal experience?” Luckily, his own law school practicum had been in the criminal law clinic.

  “That’s exactly right,” she beamed.

  “What’s odd,” he said, furrowing his brow, “is that I can’t imagine someone abusing Don. He’s a powerful guy.” He gave the attorney his best look of puzzlement. “Do you get a lot of male clients in here?”

  “Oh, Mr. Johansson wasn’t a client,” she readily clarified. “He came on behalf of someone else.”

  “So he wasn’t a client.” He paused for a moment, as if to digest the new information. “Then, there shouldn’t be any attorney-client issues, should there?” Before she could object, he added. “And my guess is that the person whom he was trying to protect is now dead and no longer covered by any privilege.”

  “He didn’t give me a name.” She was wary but made no attempt to shoot down his theory. He had interviewed subjects like her before. People whose initial instinct was always to say nothing, but who then quickly opened up to a non-threatening questioner who seemed to understand their predicament. He told Angela about a carnival worker that he had interviewed: “He put the confide back in confidential.”

  “Ms. Spellerburg, one of my client’s employees was living with her agent, a violent methamphetamine dealer named Chance Geary. He is associated with a biker gang and was known to have beaten her on several occasions. That actress’s name was Jade Delilah.”

  “She was also my best friend,” Janet added, her small voice cracking ever so slightly. Stanley gave her a quick look, but managed to hide his surprise at the blatant, but helpful, lie. The attorney, however, accepted the emotional statement at face value. Friends of domestic abuse victims were probably frequent visitors to her office.

  “Since Don was not your client,” he pleaded, “and Jade is now dead, we were hoping you might be able to tell us about your meeting with him.”

  “I guess I can,” she said as she shuffled through a stack of files on her desk. “But why don’t you ask Mr. Johansson? You did say you’re working for him, right?” She pulled a file from the stack and held it in her hands while she waited for his answer. Stanley panicked for a moment, but he had spent years improvising with an astounding variety of interviewees.

  “More precisely,” he explained, “we are working with Mr. Johansson’s attorney. In the course of preparing his defense, we need to check out everything Mr. Johansson has told his lawyer. As I’m sure you know, not all defendants are completely forthcoming, and it’s our job to prevent any nasty surprises at trial. So, we’d like to compare his version of the story with yours.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Well, our meeting was not terribly long. Without using Ms. Delilah’s name, he told me basically the same story you did about the abusive meth dealer. I told him that we needed to talk to her directly, but that if she came by and asked for emergency shelter, we could probably arrange it. Then, we could help her obtain a protective order to keep her abuser away. We’re very proud of how rapidly we respond to crisis situations. If you don’t act quickly, the consequences can be horrible.” Janet sniffled at the attorney’s last statement, and the sturdy brunette handed her a tissue. “Mr. Johansson said that he would bring her here on . . .” —she looked at the file— “. . . June 25th.”

  “The day after the party,” he said.

  “And two days after he spoke with me,” the attorney added. “I even penciled in a slot on my schedule.”

  Stanley needed time to think. He asked her if she could remember any details of her conversation, but she had little more to offer. He thanked her for her help and wrote out his contact information, asking her to call if she remembered anything else. Stanley and Janet were soon walking quickly down the law school corridors and back to the car. They did not speak until the doors of the school closed behind them.

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that she never mentioned calling the police?” Janet asked as they walked down the sidewalk away from the building. “I mean, I got the distinct impression that she hadn’t. I was wondering why you didn’t ask her about that.”

  “Goddammit!” He slapped his forehead. “Because I’m a moron.”

  “We could go back and ask her,” she suggested as they stopped in the middle of the law school courtyard.

  He considered heading back to her office but then turned and walked to the car. He would talk to the attorney again after he had asked his client why he had failed to mention the meeting. The day before Jade’s murder, Johansson was out trying to protect her, not plotting to kill her. The evidence was clearly exculpatory, so why hadn’t he said anything about it?

  * * *

  When Angela arrived home after a fruitless afternoon of showing a new BFU administrator several unsatisfactory homes, she popped a frozen bagel into the microwave and sat down with a glass of sparkling water. The Hopkins’s house sat in a large neighborhood south of the university. The subdivision had once been farmland, but it had been thirty years since the last ear of corn had been harvested there, and now Ash and Poplar trees raised their branches well over the rooftops. The house was a brick split-level ranch with an unfinished basement that could be converted into two additional bedrooms and a bathroom when the need arose. The microwave dinged and she brought her snack to the leafy patio behind the house, but the mosquitoes were out in full force and she settled for eating in front of the television. When the news hour began, she got up and went down to the basement. In the middle of the floor stood an arc-flex exercise machine where she worked out whenever she got too depressed by the throngs of fit young things that strode around the BFU campus and made any woman over thirty feel dumpy.

  As she puffed through her work out, she remodeled the basement in her mind’s eye, picturing what could be done to make it an inviting and cozy place for kids. She was the fourth of seven children raised in a middle-class suburb of Chicago and had shared a bedroom with her older sister, Valerie, and then later with her younger sister, Hannah. It was a raucous, joyful, messy house, and sometimes the solitude and orderliness of life with a routine-loving academic nearly drove her bonkers. Having children would change that for the better, but it would be the final disaster for her figure. Nobody’s stomach ever really survived pregnancy, but she didn’t care. Swapping the arc-flex machine for playpens and train sets and noisy ping pong and foosball tables was a more attractive fantasy than flexing perfect abs in a quiet house.

  Back upstairs, she sat through several commercials and was then confronted with a reporter who stood on the steps of the Los Angeles County jail and announced that Stanley Hopkins, Professor of Sociology at BFU and chief defense investigator for Donald Johansson, had just finished introducing his new assistant, porn star Layla DiBona, to the media. Angela watched her husband on the screen, standing with his arm around the sexy blonde. When he was asked about his relationship with the infamous porn star, her glass of water went splashing to the carpet. Stanley’s face turned crimson as sputtered out an answer: “Ms. Stephens is aiding me in the investigation. No one knows the adult film industry as well as she does, and her help is invaluable in tracking down leads.”

  She had called him two nights earlier at a very late hour and had gotten no answer. Her stomach folded itself into a nauseating ball. Stanley might not actively pursue a sexy porn star, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be seduced by one. He was easy-going by nature, a pleaser, someone who might have a hard time insulting a beautiful woman by saying “no.” She was fairly certain that he had n
ever cheated on her, and lord knows how many opportunities he must have had with his students, but could a young co-ed turn on the charm with the same intensity as a veteran of dozens of adult films? Angela turned off the television and got a towel to blot up the spilled water. As she entered the kitchen, she noticed the phone laying next to Stanley’s flowers in the middle of the table and impulsively dialed his cell phone number. It rang ten times, but no one picked up.

  * * *

  “Where to next?” Janet had slipped her shoes off again and leaned back in the passenger seat. Her skirt rode up to the middle of her tanned thighs, and she tugged it down as she turned toward him. He looked at her and inadvertently caught a glimpse of some scenic cleavage. He wondered if any scholar had ever had a research assistant like this one.

  He focused back on the highway and went through his mental punch list. He needed to track down the alibis and there was still an evening interview he wanted Janet to do. “Let’s stop at Eden on the way back to your car,” he suggested. “Maybe you’ll see something on the surveillance recording that I missed.”

  “Back to Eden?” she said. “That’s easier said than done.”

  He groaned and remembered the quote from Genesis that he had seen in Don’s office, “And Adam and Eve saw that they were naked and were ashamed.”

  “Typical Donald,” she sighed. “He thought his style of porn would melt away America’s puritan sense of shame. He really believed that if people no longer thought sex was dirty, we’d all live together in harmony.”

  She did not sound like she bought into his fairy tale version of porn, but then why did she continue? She was intelligent, hard working, and funny. Clearly, she could be successful at any number of different careers. He had not asked her any questions about work since the formal interview in the hotel room, and he wondered whether she might open up now that they were companions in the same hopeless enterprise.