Death in Eden

by Paul Heald

  “At Mary Modriani’s apartment?”

  “No,” he replied sarcastically, “at the Dodger’s game.”

  “Alright,” Stanley replied with insufficient energy to acknowledge his antagonist’s wit. “We went to talk to Geary’s alibi witness, but when we knocked on the door, no one answered.” He shrugged his shoulders and sat up a little straighter in his chair. “We could hear music inside and banged on the door again. At that point, the neighbor girl, Lauren something-or-other, comes out and says that the music’s been playing all night. She asked us to turn it off, so we try the door and, lo and behold, it opens. We take a peek in and call out, but we can’t see anyone, so we go in.”

  “Criminal trespassing?”

  “If it is,” he snapped, “then fucking charge us and get us a lawyer because we’re done talking.”

  “Don’t be so touchy,” he smiled. “You thought someone inside might be in trouble; it’s a legal excuse. What next?”

  “We went as far as the bedroom door without touching anything. Then, we saw her lying on the bed and got out of there.”

  “But you went back in right? That’s what Lauren something-or-other said.” He tapped his fingers on his desk, took a sip of coffee and made a face at his cup.

  “Yeah, the music was starting to drive me crazy too, so I went in and grabbed the middle of the electric cord with a tissue and pulled it out. I didn’t touch any other part of the stereo.”

  “Did you touch the victim?”

  “The victim?” Stanley looked up curiously. “I touched her throat to see if she had a pulse, but I didn’t move the body.” Some of the tiredness seemed to lift. “Why do you say victim?”

  “Because the preliminary forensic report speculates that someone else may have injected her. I have my doubts, but that’s what it says. She just looks like another dead junkie to me.” He handed him a copy of the report. “And oh,” the graying detective added nonchalantly, “I got this one too; the report on the hair caught on Jade’s ring the night she died.” He scrutinized the report like he was reading it for the first time and looked at Janet. “It says here that the hair belongs to a Ms. Janet M. Stephens.”

  She could feel the eyes of both the detective and her partner. So, that’s why they took hair samples from everyone at the party. Her hair on Jade’s ring . . . she knew how it must have happened. Jade had slapped her hard on the side of the head and a strand must have caught on the ring. That’s what happens when you call someone a fucking bitch-whore for seducing your man and stealing the lead in the biggest porn movie ever made: you get slapped hard.

  “I brushed past her several times that night,” she explained calmly. “We were friends. It doesn’t surprise me that one of my hairs ended up on her ring.” She gave him a taunting smile. “If you think I did it, why don’t you let Don go?”

  “Don’t tempt me, sweetheart. For all I know, you two are in it together.” If he felt any frustration at failing to get a bigger reaction it showed only in a slight tightness at the corner of his mouth. He seemed uninterested in following up his revelation with any questions and sat quietly waiting for her to say more.

  “We’ve got a question for you.” Janet ignored Stanley’s stare and changed the subject. “Did you find a large stash of methamphetamine in Mary’s room when you searched it?”

  The detective paused for a moment. “So, Lauren told you that story too? We searched the place high and low and couldn’t find any sign that she had recently struck the druggy mother lode. But if she had, anyone could have come through the unlocked door and taken it.”

  “Or maybe her connection came back to retrieve it after he killed her,” she suggested. “Did Lauren tell you that Chance Geary was dealing meth to her?”

  “Yeah, but why would Geary kill his own alibi witness? The guy’s not a Mensa candidate, but he’s not that stupid.” His tone was dismissive. He was sure he had all the answers and her anger flashed.

  “There are a lot of reasons for him to kill her, especially if she was willing to lie to establish his alibi. What if she changed her mind? What if she were blackmailing him? What if she was planning to leave town before testifying? We’re talking about a violent guy with a short fuse.”

  The detective was unimpressed. “We can play the ‘what if’ game all day if you want, but I’d rather rely on hard physical evidence.” He smirked and looked down at the report identifying Janet’s hair.

  “Fuck you, McCaffrey.”

  He glared at her for a moment and then turned to Stanley, “Oh, by the way, we don’t have any results yet on the purple fuzz that you collected from Janet’s closet. So, we don’t know if we have matches for the fibers caught on Johansson’s window sill.”

  Janet’s stoic facade crumbled. Stanley had not been in her closet fantasizing about cross-dressing. He had been collecting fiber samples trying to prove that she was the killer. She glanced over at him, but he ignored her and glared furiously at McCaffrey who sat immobile behind his desk watching with amusement the effect of his revelation on the defense team.

  “Was I not supposed to say anything, Professor?” He grinned. “I thought maybe you were trying to prove her innocence or something.”

  “Go to hell,” he responded and slumped back in his chair.

  With a tremendous effort, she collected herself. “Am I free to leave, Detective?” Out of the corner of her eye she could see Stanley glancing at her.

  “For now.”

  She slipped past the tower of papers separating herself from her former partner and paused at the door. Stanley remained seated, head pressed back against the chair. She almost felt sorry for him. “You’re on your own now,” she said, then shut the door and left.

  Her heels clicked unevenly down the marble hall to the elevator. She pressed the down button and waited for the old-fashioned brass doors to open. For the first time, she felt like a target of the investigation. Even McCaffrey’s obsession with pinning the crime on Don would not prevent him from looking hard at her motives and whereabouts. She fought back a tear of rage, and as the elevator traveled down to the lobby, she determined to fight back. I’m not the only suspect, she thought as she ran her fingers through her hair and touched up her lipstick in the shiny reflection of the elevator’s glass covered walls. Maybe the cops could be pointed back in the direction of Chance Geary or Sheila Easy.

  * * *

  Stanley looked at the detective with as much contempt as he could muster, but he had no comment clever enough to cut him down to size. He finally stood up in disgust and brushed against the pile of files on the floor. “You should watch her carefully,” McCaffrey suggested with one eye on the wobbly paper tower.

  “Now how the fuck am I supposed to do that? She’s not going to let me anywhere near her.” The detective had cost him both a helpful partner and the chance to monitor a prime suspect. He looked down at the mountain of files, gave it a gentle push with his knee, and watched hundreds of papers cascade over the stained linoleum floor and under McCaffrey’s desk. “Oops,” he said to the red-faced detective as he turned smartly and strode out the room.

  XXX.

  SEPARATION ANXIETY

  Stanley’s disastrous call home the previous night put him in the perfect mood to confront Chance Geary. Angela was the only woman he had ever loved, and her betrayal left him with nothing more to lose on his nightmare trip to Southern California. He had dated a couple of girls in high school, none of them for long, and none of them had graced him with anything more than a goodnight kiss. His two relationships in college prior to Angela had been tepid affairs on every level, but when she fell into his lap, everything changed. He had never ceased to wonder why someone so lovely and intelligent had become interested in a studious young boy who had stimulated no positive response in the first thousand women he had met. Now his ultimate fear had been realized and as a result, a skinny, drug dealing, woman-hating, white-boy Rasta shithead was going to get a lot tougher questioning than he expected.


  He drove down the freeway toward Chance Geary’s bike shop grinding his teeth and cursing the traffic that made a mockery of the posted speed limit. He flipped on the radio to divert his attention from the emotion churning in his gut, but when he tried to find a station, the sound system went into channel-surf mode, and he spent the rest of the drive listening to rotating snippets from every station on the dial. The audio chaos fit his mood. After a half hour of inching forward and stopping, he finally exited onto the broad boulevard that led to the motorcycle shop. When he got there, he suppressed the desire to rush in and strangle its owner. Instead, he sat and waited for ten minutes until the last customer had left and he knew his quarry was alone.

  When he walked in the front door and saw Geary lying on the floor working on a big Harley, he knew instinctively what he had to do. Rushing over to the bike before Geary knew he was there, he pulled it down on the mechanic’s chest. As the meth dealer gasped for breath, he kicked a large wrench out of his hand, walked calmly to the door, locked it, and turned off the lights so that passers by could not see in.

  “Get . . . this . . . off . . . of . . . me,” Geary pleaded as his assailant stood over him, arms crossed on his chest.

  “No,” he said as he put his foot down on the bike and stomped.

  A wheezy rattle sputtered from Geary’s lungs. “You fucker,” he whispered as he struggled to lift the bike with his unpinned arm.

  “I may be a fucker,” Stanley hissed, “but you’re just plain fucked.” He crouched down next to the biker and stepped on the wrist of his free arm. “I need to ask you some questions, and if I like the answers, we’ll see about getting this bike off of you. Understand?” Geary replied by trying to spit in Stanley’s face, but he missed and was rewarded with the weight of a heel grinding down hard on his wrist.

  “I know you killed Mary Modriani,” he said quietly. Geary shook his head, and Stanley responded by picking the wrench off the floor and hitting the biker viciously on the elbow. The crushed mechanic made little noise; the rigid tendons in his neck spoke for him. “No lying now, my friend. Just listen to me. I know that you killed her. I just want you to confirm why. She didn’t buy any meth from you the night of Jade’s murder, did she?” He was rewarded with a barely perceptible nod. “So, she promised to lie in return for a nice big stash of your shit, right?” Another nod. “And then she got uncooperative didn’t she? She tried to blackmail you or threatened not to testify or something stupid like that, didn’t she?” Another weak nod. Geary was on the verge of passing out, so Stanley slapped his face.

  “Very good. See how nice talking about our problems can be?” He walked across the shop, picked up a small crowbar, and put it under the bike. “Now, we need to talk about Jade for a little bit.” He lifted the bike up an inch and the prone figure took a series of gasping breaths. The color in his face gradually faded from purple to red. “If I like your answers, then we’ll keep things just like this. If I don’t . . .” He relaxed the crowbar and Geary grimaced.

  “Okay,” he said, lifting the bike up again slightly, “tell me about how you got into Don’s office and killed Jade.”

  “I didn’t.” He lowered the bike. “I swear,” he gasped. “I didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did?”

  “I don’t know!” Blood-tinged spittle appeared on his lips as he choked out his denial. “Johansson probably. He was crazy about her.” Stanley scrutinized him closely, but could not tell whether he was lying.

  “Where were you the night she was killed?”

  “I got an alibi . . .” Stanley lowered the bike, partly in response to the lie, and partly as payback for Mary Modriani’s death. “Not Mary . . . Miriam . . . Wilhoit.”

  “Don’s secretary? What the fuck do you have to do with her?” He adjusted the crowbar so Geary could speak more freely. “How is she your alibi?”

  “She came here the night of the party. I was here all night, like I told the cops.”

  “Why would she come to see you?”

  The shop owner took several raspy breaths. “She’s been ripping off Eden, making copies of movies and filling orders without entering them on the books.” He wheezed his story in a halting voice barely above a whisper. “Me and Jade knew the kid she hired, and we figured out her racket . . . since Jade starred in half the videos she sold, we told her we deserved a piece of the action . . . the old bitch was afraid that we’d rat her out, so she agreed. She came here that night to deliver our cut.” The story had the ring of truth to it, or at least part of the truth.

  “Why didn’t she tell the police she was here with you?”

  “Are you kidding? Why would a middle-aged slag drive to a bike shop alone in the middle of the night?” Stanley studied the writhing biker. “Besides, I can’t find her. She’s disappeared.”

  The initial adrenalin rush of the attack had subsided and the professor was losing his stomach for interrogation. He doubted there was much more information to extract, so he grabbed the Harley underneath the seat and with a grunt slid it off the crushed body. The biker tried to roll onto his side, but his cracked ribs made it too painful. He lay on his back like a flipped turtle, panting a series of shallow breaths.

  He looked up with luminous yellow eyes. “You’re dead, motherfucker. You’re fuckin’ dead.”

  Stanley picked up the wrench and swung it at Geary’s crotch, stopping just before he emasculated him. Then, he grabbed the biker by the throat and pushed his head hard against the floor. A simple threat would ensure his safety and dig at McCaffrey at the same time. “Listen to me, you little fuck face. You think I came here on my own? The LAPD sent me here to do their dirty work. If you or any of your friends come anywhere near me, Detective McCaffrey will personally show up and stick his night stick so far up your ass that people will think you’re smoking a wooden cigar.” With that, Stanley slammed Geary’s head against the floor, stood up, brushed his pants off and walked to the door. As he unlocked it, he saw Geary clutching his arm. He waved with mocking smile, wished the groaning man a nice day, then left the shop, walked over to his car, and retched in the parking space next to it.

  * * *

  Janet sat in the car and drummed her nails against the lacquered surface of the burled walnut steering wheel. The more she thought about the recently concluded interview with McCaffrey and Stanley, the more pissed off she got. Had the veteran cop just been trying to bust up a team that was shaking his preconceptions, or did he really fancy her as suspect? Was he working on some theory to snag her and Don in his sticky little web, or was he just bluffing? To make matters worse, Stanley’s betrayal hurt more than she wanted to admit. There was nothing sexual about her attraction to him, but that made it worse. She had enjoyed talking to him, being treated as an equal by a real intellectual. He wasn’t a bad actor either when he needed to be. Damn the devious little prick and his purple fuzz.

  But now what? She could not just sit still. She did not want to just let McCaffrey take control and keep grinding down his narrow road. And that meant keeping on the job, pushing on Geary’s alibi, finding out more about William Walker, and maybe figuring out how to turn Sheila Easy into another viable suspect for the cops to chew on. She pulled out her smart phone and reading glasses and decided to pursue whomever she could locate first. After fifteen minutes of googling and about a dozen phone calls, she was stymied on Geary and Walker but she had managed to track down Susan Jenkins, aka Sheila Easy.

  She was surprised to learn that the ex-porn queen turned anti-porn crusader was still in the same small Malibu beach house she had occupied during her years as a video star. It should have been filled with some pretty disturbing memories for someone seeking to forget her past. Janet herself had done several scenes there, one in which she played a photographer filming Susan being doubly penetrated by two guys playing lifeguards while she sucked off one of their friends. If those walls could talk, Janet thought, the professor would have to put an entirely new chapter in his book.

  She cru
ised up the coastal highway west of Los Angeles, trying to figure out what to say to Sheila, barely aware of the sun-drenched countryside rolling past. Ultimately, this whole fucked up scene was Jade’s fault. Without her siren-song, without her raw ambition, the world would look completely different. Don’s weaknesses would never have been exposed, and maybe they would even be together. And instead of stumbling about in people’s closets looking for a killer’s sweater, the young professor from Illinois would be happily interviewing porn stars with his wife.

  And where would you be, she wondered, pulling out a cigarette and screwing it into her mouth. Certainly not seeking an audience with a lying nut job. She contemplated pushing down on the accelerator and riding Highway 1 all the way to Washington State. It would be easy to disappear, empty her accounts and live off-line in Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic, but as the turn off to her Malibu destination approached, she knew she was no more able to escape southern California than to quit smoking or to wear an outfit from the Martha Stewart collection at Wal-Mart.

  Janet pulled in front of a two-bedroom redwood bungalow whose entryway was level with the gravel drive, but whose beachside end needed the support of long cantilevered timbers to keep from sliding down to the ocean. A new Toyota was parked in the sun, but when she pushed the door bell, there was no answer. She used a side walkway to access the back deck, but could not see Susan through the sliding glass doors that led into her living room. She scanned the beach for her former colleague. Several solitary women were walking in the distance in both directions, so she sat patiently on top of the steps that led to the sand, wondering how to elicit the sort of information that would interest a hard-boiled cop like Stuart McCaffrey.

  Half an hour later, a middle-aged woman in a paisley sun dress made her way slowly up from the beach. Susan was not recognizable until she got to the base of the stairs. Janet had seen her recently in the interview made by Stanley and his wife, but the ex-star must have spent hours on makeup and her hair. Without primping for the camera, she looked dowdy and shapeless, with a mousy tangle of wind-blown hair framing a blotchy face. She reached the base of the stairs and looked up.