Death in Eden

by Paul Heald

  She frowned at him for a minute before finally relenting. “Okay, but it’s got to be French. No cheap Mexican stuff.”

  McCaffrey got up without another word, nodded his assent to his ex-wife, and went off to reconnoiter Susan Jenkins’ house with a lighter heart than he had felt in years.

  XXXII.

  A FORCEFUL CLIMAX

  It took Stanley fifteen minutes on his cell phone to convince Janet that she should let him come over and discuss what he had seen on the video. After the third time he apologized for sneaking into her closet, she finally asked him about the recording and let out a shriek when she learned that Susan’s image had been captured entering the studio but not leaving it. When he arrived at her condo, she made him explain again exactly what he had seen.

  “I knew there was something not right about her.” She hugged him hard and kissed him on the cheek. “Are you going to ask McCaffrey to get a search warrant for her house? Of course, if she has any brains, she threw the sweater out a long time ago.”

  “McCaffrey doesn’t think there’s enough evidence for a warrant,” he said with disgust. “The video is black and white and there’s no way to tell whether the sweater she’s wearing is purple or some other dark color.”

  “What should we do?”

  He got up and started to pace around her living room, the heels of his black leather shoes tapping out an impatient rhythm on the tile floors. “That’s the question, isn’t it? We need to be sure about her, because we still have Chance and Miriam to think about. We shouldn’t cross a murderer and an arsonist off the list just because of the video, but we definitely have to deal with Susan first. She’s our best shot, especially considering that Don’s plea is coming up tomorrow.”

  “Why don’t you let me talk to Susan again? She lied to me once before. Maybe I can get her to say something else incriminating.” She looked up at Stanley as he passed by the couch. “And stop pacing. You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Sorry.” He sat down and pulled up McCaffrey’s number on his speed dial, but decided against making a call. “What would you say to her?”

  “Well, I could play concerned friend. She invited me to her victim’s support group, after all.” She gave her partner a brief summary of the meeting with Susan. “I could tell her that the cops know about her entrance into the building the afternoon before the party. Then, we could check out her explanation. I could also tell her that the police are targeting her as a suspect and see how she reacts.”

  He nodded his head. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “I don’t think that’d be a good idea. I think she’ll be more likely to let her guard down if it’s just me playing the repentant whore.” She got up and picked her cell phone off a coffee table. “I’ll suggest that we meet for coffee close to her house. I don’t want to show up there again unannounced.”

  He thought about her plan. It had no immediate role for him, so he tried to decide how to spend the afternoon while he waited. Talking to the studio heads again and bringing them up to date might be interesting, but he had no time to track them down, much less follow up on anything.

  While Janet set up her meeting, he decided to write up a list of suspects and what had been learned about them. As he outlined the report in his head, he realized that it could have value beyond organizing his thoughts. He could submit it to McCaffrey and show it to Don. By demonstrating in black and white just how weak the case against his friend really was, he might achieve the dual goals of getting the detective to delay the impending hearing and getting his friend to reconsider his plea. Shortly after Janet left, he sat down at the computer in the back office and began typing up a sort of legal brief, a more interesting and compelling document than any he had ever produced in his former job.

  * * *

  As Janet emerged from her condominium and drove off in her Mini Cooper, Angela was squeezing her thighs tightly together, having suffered through several hours of surveillance without a bathroom break. As the adorable little car drove off without her husband, she decided to take a chance and sped to the nearest gas station. As long as Stanley was waiting for the starlet to return, she figured it was safe to briefly leave her post. When she got back to the condo, she saw that her gamble had paid off. Stanley’s car had not moved.

  After another hour, she decided to stretch her legs. Her husband had entered a unit, presumably Janet’s, in the far back corner of the complex, so no one would spot her taking a short stroll along the street. As she walked, she checked to see if there was any access to the townhouse from its back side. Janet’s car had emerged from a narrow driveway on the side of complex, so she walked down the alley and found the garage door that led into the unit where her husband was waiting. It was shut tight, and there was no other exterior door. The only accessible window looked past some lace curtains into a small bathroom. She felt perversely relieved at the privacy offered by the townhouse; she would not have the option of peeping at her husband in bed after the slutty video legend returned.

  * * *

  While Janet was talking with Susan Jenkins in a quiet Malibu coffee shop and Stanley was drafting a formal report of his investigation, Stuart McCaffrey was jimmying open the patio doors of Jenkins’s beach house. He had parked at a surf shop several hundred yards south of her home and walked barefoot across the sand until he found the stairs leading to her back deck. As he sat on the bottom step and brushed the sand from his feet, he scanned the beach for anyone who might have seen him approach. The neighborhood was quiet and no one saw the man in the gray suit jiggling the lock on her door.

  It took him less than three minutes to open it and slide the door aside. He took a quick backward look at the empty beach and then walked into the house and looked around. In some ways, it was a typical beach house, rattan sofa, floral pillows and cushions, tile floors, and glass-topped tables, but the motif was disrupted by a cheap cherry entertainment unit with connecting bookshelves. Suburbia meets the beach would not make the next issue of Home and Garden. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, the detective made his way through the living room and into the hallway that led to the front of the house. Assuming that the biggest bedroom was hers, he moved quickly inside and found a small closet next to the master bathroom. He jerked open a set of bi-fold doors and looked at his watch. He had been there for two minutes. It took only another minute to find a purple sweater hanging amid a modest collection of blouses and slacks.

  McCaffrey squeezed off a thumbful of fibers from the garment and sealed them in a small plastic lunch bag which he took out of his pocket. Then, he rifled through the clothes on either side of the sweater, checking to see if anything else was worth sampling. Finding nothing, he strode across the room to inspect a large bureau next to the bed. He worked quickly through the remaining drawers, but found nothing more noteworthy than a small pistol. He picked it up and saw that it was a fourth-generation Glock 26, one of the most powerful concealable side arms ever made. As he put it back in the drawer, he heard the distinctive crunch of car tires on gravel and broken sea shells as someone pulled into the driveway.

  The detective turned to sprint out of the bedroom but saw that he had left the closet doors wide open. He slid the left bi-fold quickly shut, but the right one stuck and when he yanked it toward its mate, the flimsy panel came off its rails completely and hung awkwardly to the side. A hurried adjustment just made matters worse and the detective was forced to make his escape with the door hanging askew, a screaming confession that the closet had been tampered with. Uttering a curse under his breath, he fled into the living room and toward the back patio as someone entered the house. As he burst through the doors, he realized that unless Susan Jenkins were blind, he would be seen racing across her deck and down to the beach.

  * * *

  When Susan entered the house, she saw a blur of motion at the end of the shotgun hallway that led from her front door to the living room. Her initial impulse was to pursue, but she checked herself and made a detour in
to the bedroom where she retrieved her trusty Glock. As she held the pistol up and switched off the safety, she noticed one of her closet doors hanging cock-eyed revealing half of her small wardrobe. Whomever she had seen had definitely been in her room. She turned toward the door, listening carefully for the intruder before she inched her way out into the hall.

  She could hear the surf crashing loudly and as she walked with the gun extended into the living room, she found the patio doors wide open. Seeing the room was empty, she lowered the pistol and relaxed a little. The adrenaline rush subsided and she took a quick look down to the beach. The intruder had made a clean getaway. She shut and locked the patio doors and made a quick inventory of her possessions. Nothing of value had been taken in the living room, including a brand new laptop that sat on a stool near the doors. Her digital camera still sat perched on top of the television set. After going through the entire house, she concluded that nothing had been disturbed, except her closet.

  Why would someone break into her house to look at her clothes? There was nothing valuable inside. And what a coincidence that she happened to be called off to coffee by that time-wasting cunt Layla while the break-in occurred. She was usually home in the mid-afternoon. She stared at the hanging door and eventually put two and two together. While Layla was asking questions about Jade’s murder, her professor friend had been ransacking her closet.

  * * *

  “Well, tell me what she said.” Stanley walked into the living room eager to get a summary of the meeting as Janet kicked off her shoes.

  “She denied everything.” The weary actress plopped down on a cream-colored leather sofa and propped her feet up on the coffee table.

  “Even the video?” He was incredulous. “We’ve got her on film for chrissakes!”

  “She says it couldn’t be her. She claims she hasn’t set foot in Eden Studio for three years. I was so flabbergasted that I told her I knew that she was lying about watching Survivor.” She shook her head in frustration.

  “How suspicious is she?”

  “Pretty damn suspicious now. She wouldn’t talk about anything having to do with the murder.” Janet rubbed the bottom of her left foot with the big toe of her right foot. “I’m afraid we might have to send you in to raid her closet.” She looked up at him. “I hear you have some experience with that kind of operation.”

  * * *

  Susan sat on her bed, fingering the Glock and staring at her closet. Layla had said that she and her partner had spotted her entering Eden Studio the night of the murder. The starlet might be great at faking an orgasm but she was lousy at hiding her suspicion about who had really rid the world of Jade Delilah. But why the hell had they lured her from her house so that the professor could poke around in her stuff? What did they expect to find, a signed confession? A diary entry describing how Jade seemed to crumple to the floor in slow motion? But there was no sign that any likely hiding place in her house had been searched. The professor had gone straight to the closet.

  She stood up and walked over to her clothes and a smile creased her face for the first time that day. Fibers. They must be looking for fibers matching whatever had been found in Don’s office by the cops. She fingered a blue blouse and then ran her hand down a pair of cream colored slacks. What had she worn to Eden? For the first time she felt a hint of panic tighten her throat. What had she worn? She flipped through her wardrobe trying to jog her memory, but each outfit looked as likely as the next and her attempts to concentrate and pull up the details of that night stuck in the tar pit of her memory.

  No worries, she thought as the smile returned to her face. She deserved a whole new wardrobe anyway. She threw the Glock on the bed and grabbed a large garbage bag from the kitchen. Within minutes, she had every piece of clothing and every pair of shoes from the closet stuffed in the bag and closed up tight. She could eliminate whatever evidence Layla had been searching for and then figure out a way to eliminate the slut herself and her plodding lap dog partner.

  Susan drove several miles toward Los Angeles before she found a supermarket with a solitary dumpster parked next to its back delivery entrance. She tossed in the bag of clothes and continued toward the city, trying to formulate a plan to deal with her pursuers. She had been to Janet’s condo several times before she had escaped the porn business, and she headed in that direction. As she exited the freeway and into Layla’s neighborhood, an idea was forming in her head and by the time she pulled up in front of the condo complex, she knew exactly how she wanted to confront the two main threats to her freedom.

  She pulled into an open space a dozen yards from the entrance gate and pulled the gun from the glove compartment. When she had purchased the weapon, her agent had taken her out into the desert and taught her how to use the compact 9 mm. She held it in her right hand and clicked the safety off and on twice. The pistol fit neatly in her purse, and Janet wouldn’t have a clue she was carrying it. The nosy whore would want to talk to her friend Susan when she dangled valuable clues about who murdered Jade Delilah in front of her pretty nose. She smiled and pressed the buzzer next to the gate.

  “It’s Susan.” She paused dramatically. “I need to talk to you about Jade.”

  An excited voice crackled over the loudspeaker. “Susan! Of course, come on in.”

  The buzzer sounded and the gate opened with a metallic click. She pushed her way in, shut the gate behind her, and walked across the courtyard to the corner townhouse. The excited woman stood in the doorway to greet her. Susan entered first and was pleased to see the young professor stand up to take her hand when she entered the living room. He seemed happy to see her too. This was an unexpected blessing. There would be no need to coerce Janet to lure him to her home for a final interview session, a clear sign that her plan was righteous.

  “Would you like a drink?” Janet asked. “I’ve got some wine and also some tea and organic apple cider.”

  “No. I’m fine.” This is almost fun, she thought. She could feel an unexpected strength coursing through her body. These two have no clue that they’re not in control. They assume they’re directing this scene. They don’t realize they’re just bit players.

  “What did you come over to talk about?” Janet was literally sitting on the edge of her seat on a plump leather couch. The man sat next to her, legs crossed, feigning cool. Susan sat down across from them on an overstuffed ottoman, unzipped purse balanced on her knees.

  “I wanted to tell you what happened the night of Jade Delilah’s murder.” The expression of surprise on their faces was gratifying. Were they sleeping together? Probably. He was a handsome, clean-cut guy, just the kind that Layla would like to seduce and devour. “I went to Eden Studio about three o’clock that day to speak with Don. I thought he might be able to see reason about Toys in Babeland.”

  “To see reason about what?” Janet interrupted.

  “About canceling the national distribution deal. The movie was going to change everything. It was going to bring back porn to theaters in every town in America. And nobody was trying to stop it.” She deliberately took a moment to polish her glasses. “Instead of exposing Don for what he was, the media was playing into his hands and giving him free publicity. CNN treated the movie like a comedy. And then Leno invited him to talk about it on his show! This was all leading to another so-called ‘golden age’ of porn.” She paused for a moment and waited for them to acknowledge the logic of her concern.

  “What did you say to him?”

  She shook her head in disgust. “That bitch secretary of his asked me if I had an appointment and then claimed that he wasn’t there, so I sat for a while and waited until she left her desk. Then, I walked into his office to talk to him.”

  “But he wasn’t here,” Stanley interjected.

  She nodded and continued. “No, he wasn’t. So, I sat down and waited. I knew about the party and figured he’d come back before it started, but he didn’t. I sat there and listened to the party noise in the hallway, trapped in the middle of Sodom
and Gomorrah with the voices of the damned on all sides. No way was I going to leave and show my face to that crowd.”

  “Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt,” the young professor offered.

  “She did,” Susan said. “I sat quietly behind the desk in his big leather chair, just listening.” She smiled. “It was like hearing the buzzing of flies in the deepest pit of hell, but I was not afraid. I sat in the dark and prayed for my deliverance.”

  Her gaze shifted back and forth from Janet to Stanley. They still have no clue, she thought. The children of Babylon have no clue about their world. She continued her story. “After a couple of hours, the door opened and he walked in. I was ready to confront him, ready to give him a chance to repent and undo the evil that he was planning, but he didn’t even turn on the lights. He just stumbled over to the couch and passed out. I sat there wondering what to do next when the door opened again. I spun the chair around to hide before the lights switched on.”

  Stanley and Janet sat motionless, as though any movement might prevent the revelation of the mystery they had been trying to solve. It was like a movie with everyone waiting for the climax. “I could hear Jade shake him and wake him up. He was groggy but he managed to get something out about an attorney for some problem she was having. She lost her temper and told him that she was leaving the studio.”

  As much as she wanted to see the expression on their faces when they heard the truth, she stopped short of explaining how Jade had pushed Don back down on the sofa as if he were a rag doll. That’s when Susan had turned around in the chair and revealed herself to the quarreling couple. Don was lying back in a stupor and Jade turned her attention to the new presence in the room. Susan had stood up and tried to enlist Jade in her cause, but received only ridicule and scorn in return. The whore blasphemed, called her conversion fake, accusing her of leaving porn because her body had started to sag. The paddle almost seemed to float off the coffee table into her hands as Jade turned to leave the room. A racist epithet had sufficed to spin her around one last time, surprise registering in her eyes a moment before the wood smashed into her slutty painted face.