Trashed

by Alison Gaylin

“I want to see them.”

  “Trust me,” he said, “you don’t.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I do.”

  Quietly, he led her into Keith’s office.

  “By the way,” she told him. “Ed knows I’m here, and expects me back downtown in exactly forty-five minutes. ”

  “Uh, okay.” She could tell he didn’t know what she was talking about. How weird that of all the bad guys she’d encountered, the bulky Neanderthal was the one who wouldn’t think of laying a hand on her. He removed a box from under Keith’s desk, set it down on top. Simone looked inside, at several videotapes, each one with a date on the side and a set of initials.

  “This is probably the one you’re interested in.” He removed a videotape with the initials LC on the side, and the date: 8/24. The date of Emerald Deegan’s murder. Simone looked at him. “What does LC stand for?”

  He winced. “You’ll see.”

  There was an entertainment center at the end of the room. Simone slipped the tape into the VCR. “This is his private collection,” said Cole. “You . . . you’ll see why he doesn’t want any of this getting out, but . . . I couldn’t throw them away.”

  She hit PLAY. There was a date and time in the top corner. August 24, eleven thirty p.m. Within an hour of Emerald’s death. The camera panned down, slowly. Simone’s pulse sped up. She said, “Is this your indie film project?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Keith pays me a lot of money . . . to shoot these. He knows he can trust me,” he added as the image appeared on the screen. An enormous mountain of a woman—naked and holding a giant diapered baby in her lap. “Mama,” said the baby, and began suckling a breast that resembled a king-sized pillow.

  “That’s Leticia Chase,” said Cole.

  “LC.”

  “Yes.”

  The baby was Keith.

  “Destiny introduced Keith to Leticia,” Cole said. “She knew her through some of the Pleasures girls. She’s a specialty performer and . . . Keith just . . . He knew Des was talking to the tabloids, and he didn’t want her talking about this.”

  Simone was absolutely speechless.

  “You see,” said Cole, “why he didn’t want this to get out. It would ruin his rep, his business. But I couldn’t throw it away. It’s his alibi.”

  Finally, Simone got her voice back. “That’s one hell of an alibi,” she said.

  Of all of them, Holly was by far the least perfect. She fought back. She asked questions. She was not shamed, not at all. Sitting in his office, he felt a sting on the back of his neck, a terrible souvenir. He touched that scratch and he heard her voice, like smashed glass in his ears. How dare you?

  In retrospect, he probably should not have chosen Holly. Yes, she had talked. She had shamed men (she had even shamed him!), and, in that respect, she was Project material. But she wasn’t a whore, and that made her different. She was uppity, entitled, less likely to obey. Whores obey. It is part of their job.

  On his plasma screen at home, he had an image cued up. It was from the press conference three days earlier. Originally it had been a close-up of the speakers’ line, but he had manipulated the image, over and over, so the camera cut closer, then closer, then closer still. By now, it was so close that all you could see were a jumble of pixels, peach, waxy beige, pink, brown. When people came to his house, they would look at the screen, think maybe it was abstract art.

  But he knew. It was the faces of two and three. The area around the jawbones, he thought, though he wasn’t sure. What he did know was this: It was Dylan’s skin and Simone’s skin. Dylan’s and Simone’s tainted blood running underneath. Dylan = two. Simone = three.

  He knew this as well: Two and three were whores. They would be much easier.

  Before she left, Simone had Cole call Sandiford, tell him everything. The detective said he was on his way to Bedrock to pick up the tapes, and Cole went whiter than ever, though he received repeated assurances they’d be kept in strictest confidence. “Keith will thank you,” Simone told Cole after he hung up. “No matter what, it’s better than being charged with murder.”

  On her way to the office, she phoned Nigel and told him exactly why Keith Furlong was no longer a suspect in the Emerald and Destiny murders. There was a long stretch of silence on the other end of the phone.

  “Hello, Nigel?”

  “That,” he said, “is brilliant.”

  Simone practically drove off the road. “We’re going to run that story?” she said. “I thought you said we were a family publication.”

  She almost felt sorry for Keith Furlong until Nigel said, “We aren’t going to run the story, love. We’re going to use it.”

  Two seconds after she hit END, Simone’s cell phone trilled. She looked at the screen. She almost didn’t answer, almost turned the phone off and let voice mail do her dirty work. “Hi, Neil.”

  “Simone, I’m so sor—”

  “I know.” She kept her tone cool, businesslike. “Listen, before I forget, Furlong is no longer a person of interest. ”

  “Simone . . .”

  “Don’t mention it. Professional courtesy. Since you told me what the maid said, it’s only fair. FYI, he has an incredibly disgusting alibi.”

  “Please listen to me.”

  Simone said nothing. She just looked at the road.

  “I’m sorry. I promise. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

  Simone took a breath, willed the emotion out of her voice. “Yes, you will.”

  “No, I . . .”

  “You will, Neil. You can’t help it. It’s the way you are.”

  “Simone . . .”

  “I’d be really awful if I stayed angry at you for it. It’s like being angry at someone for having brown eyes. Dishonesty . . . it’s a part of your nature.”

  “That isn’t fair.”

  “Isn’t it? I know how it is. There’s a lot of my nature that’s not admirable. Hell, I tried to send you to Palm Springs just because my boss told me to.”

  “And I forgave you.”

  “It’s not a matter of forgiving. I forgive you,” she said. “And deep down, I’ll always think you’re the cat’s ass. But I can’t be with somebody and have to sleep with one eye open.”

  He was quiet.

  “You understand?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I just don’t think I’ll ever find another woman who’ll tell me she thinks I’m the cat’s ass.”

  Simone smiled. “Good-bye, Neil.”

  “ ’Bye, Simone.”

  She hung up. And then she let herself cry.

  As Simone walked into the reporters’ room and got situated at her desk, Kathy turned to her and said, “Three words regarding Keith Furlong. Can you guess what they are?”

  Simone pondered for a moment. “Major oral fixation? ”

  She laughed. “True, yes.” She raised an eyebrow. “But not quite newsworthy. Think about that, and I’ll give you another guess.”

  Simone thought. It clicked. “Checked into rehab!”

  “Ding ding ding! Little lady gets the stuffed bear, thank you for playing!”

  Matthew said, “Was that not the fastest rehab check-in ever? I mean . . . by the time the cops got the tape cued up, he was already doing his first support group.”

  “America’s Speediest Twelve-Steppers,” said Elliot.

  “Good sidebar.”

  Simone turned to him. “By sidebar, do you mean there’s going to be an article?”

  Elliot nodded. “On the record: ‘Emerald’s Cheating Boy-Toy: My Secret Battle with Sex Addiction.’ ”

  “With no mention of the . . .”

  “Baby pictures, no. Nigel swung that one pretty easily. Plus, for a later issue, a confessional on discovering Destiny’s body.”

  “That’ll get us tons of press,” said Matthew. “Nigel says New York is thrilled.”

  “Isn’t that funny?” said Kathy. “There’s no one who hates tabloids more than Keith Furlong. And now he’s going to be spending hours
and hours with us.”

  Nigel walked into the room. “You’re back.” He stared at Simone, his eyes cold and hard and as serious as a gun scope, and she thought, He knows I was with Walker last night.

  Simone got ready. “Did I do something wrong?”

  He cleared his throat; his gaze dropped to the floor. “It isn’t you,” he said. “It’s your friend. It’s Holly.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “Dylan. Again.” It was the first time Julie had ever gotten ice from Nathaniel. Sure, he was full of attitude—he teased Randi’s clients constantly. But the ice. The brush-off. That was new. “Randi is still not here.”

  She put a smile in her voice. “Hey, is that any way to talk to your big moneymaker?”

  The ice melted. “Sorry, hon. It’s just, to tell the truth, I don’t know where Randi is any more than you do—and I need the bitch.” Julie could hear him typing e-mails as he spoke. Always the multitasker. “You understand, I use the word ‘bitch’ in only the most affectionate and empowering way.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Oh, hey,” he said. “Long as I have you on, I need you to clear up your afternoons for the next few days. Soon as I get hold of La Randi, I want to schedule another press conference. All of us, plus Chris. Talk about this whole Simone Glass thing. Still can’t believe she was undercover for the Asteroid. You must have been shocked when she told you.”

  Julie’s stomach flopped over. “Do we really have to—”

  “Trust me, it’ll make you look awesome,” he said. “Poor, sweet girl from a small town stabbed in the back by her best friend. You know how attention spans are. By the time Devil’s Road opens, no one will even remember Dirty Dylan anymore. You’ll be the victim.”

  “Nathaniel,” she said, “I don’t . . . I don’t want to be the victim.”

  “Sure you do. Victims rock. Victims get sit-downs with Barbara Walters and People’s Choice Awards.”

  “But—”

  “Gotta run. Important call coming in. Talk soon.” Click.

  As she hung up the phone, Julie flashed on a call she’d received from Simone, a week before the beginning of senior year.

  Did you forget or something? I’ve been waiting for half an hour. The movie already started and . . .

  Oh, shit. I did forget. Todd came over and . . .

  Long pause. Oh. Okay.

  I am so sorry, Simone.

  Don’t be sorry. It’s Todd McKenna. I’d do the same thing.

  The movie had been Night at the Opera. A perfectly restored print. One night only at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck. Simone had been talking about it for weeks.

  So weird, but with everything that had happened in the past eight years, with all the ways she’d aged and changed and compromised, with all the lines she’d crossed, the things she’d done that would look so wrong on paper, blowing off Simone for Todd was one of the things she still felt worst about.

  Julie had never wanted to be the girl who forgot her best friend when she fell in love, and that’s what she became, and when she saw Simone at the Beverlido party, looking exactly the same except for the uniform and the hair, she had thought: Here’s my chance. I can make it up to her. I can be a good friend.

  What were the odds that Simone would be a cater-waiter at Julie’s first promotional event? Maybe, she had thought at the time, everything does happen for a reason.

  So much for that. Julie collapsed on her bed, stared up at the ceiling. At least I gave her some good scoop. And the funny part is, she doesn’t even know the half of it. Her vision was blurry, but for some reason Julie didn’t realize she was crying. Not until she felt the tears, hot on her face.

  Julie’s phone rang. Chris. She grabbed some Kleenex out of the dispenser on her bedstand, mopped up her cheeks, took a deep breath. “Hi, honey.”

  “Dyl, I’m sor—”

  “I know. You’re sorry for doubting me. You know now I can keep a secret.” She got out of bed, wandered over to her giant gold mirror.

  Chris said, “I . . . just can’t say it enough.”

  Julie made herself smile. “It means a lot.” She looked at the prom picture stuck in the corner of her mirror and felt the tears coming again. She bit them back. “Listen, Chris? Can you maybe come over or something? I . . . I don’t really feel like being alone right now.”

  “Later, sure,” he said. “Listen, though. I want to talk to you about something. I have this idea. Kind of a project.”

  Minutes after Nigel told Simone that Holly had been found with her throat slit and the advance layout of the Asteroid that Simone had sent her shoved in her mouth, seconds after he said she was on life support in Cedars-Sinai ICU, Simone received a call from Ed Sandiford, who told her the same thing, verbatim. Still, she couldn’t get it to sink in.

  Then Ed told her about the picture of a four-year-old girl and Snow White in Holly’s trash, a girl who turned out to be Destiny, and Simone collapsed in her chair and put her head down and the room actually started to spin. The air around her crushed into Simone’s ears, her face, so loud that it drowned out Matthew and Elliot asking, “What’s wrong?” and Kathy saying, “Glass of water?”

  “You there, Simone?” Sandiford was saying now.

  She took a breath. Gradually, everything shifted back into focus. “I should have gone to Holly’s earlier. She didn’t call me back and I felt like something was wrong. But I just . . .”

  “I know you did,” said Sandiford. “We got all your phone messages. Listen to me, Simone. Every time you called her, she was there. She was fine. She wasn’t attacked until this morning, and she was still alive when she was found.”

  “Is . . . is she seeing visitors?” Simone closed her eyes. She’s not seeing anything. “I mean, can I go to her?”

  “Not right now,” he said. “They’re only allowing family into ICU. But her parents are there, and her brother and his wife.”

  She has a family. That’s good.

  “What I’d like you to do, though, is stop by the crime scene, answer a few questions.”

  “Randi is a madam?” said Simone, who was asking a lot more questions than she was answering. She was in Holly’s living room with Ed Sandiford, the beautiful green couch coated in fingerprint dust, personal photos— everything personal—having been removed from the premises. When Simone had first arrived, Sandiford had asked her to walk around, see if the furniture all seemed to be in the same place.

  It was. But still she felt as if she were in a different house than the one she’d interviewed Holly in, a house that held another reality.

  Emerald was Desire. Simone still couldn’t believe it. Years before she was Suburban Indiscretions’ youngest, skinniest housewife, Emerald Deegan was one of Hollywood’s most-sought-after call girls. That was how she’d bought her father that house. Servicing televangelists. Wearing ball gags. Playing dead for Blake Moss.

  And Randi was her madam.

  “She isn’t exclusively a madam,” Sandiford said. “Not anymore. What happened was, years ago she set up this brothel, only she called herself a manager, and the girls were her clients. She hired all gorgeous wannabe actresses, and then they started getting real acting jobs and she became their manager for real. Before long, she started getting up-and-up clients and her business became legit in spite of itself. It’s like, you’re running numbers out the back of a candy store, and all of a sudden everybody wants the candy.”

  Simone thought of the rooms at Randi’s house, the locked doors. “I think,” she said, “she’s still running a few numbers.”

  Sandiford nodded. His gaze traveled to the floor. “I’d like to tell you something. Deep background. And I’m only telling you because Neil says you’ve spent time with Randi and you might be able to help.”

  “I’m not spending time with Randi anymore . . . or Neil either,” she said. “But I’d love to help.”

  “We’d thought the killer had something against the press. That still might be true. But I’m thinking the
se murders might have more to do with Randi DuMonde.” His eyes went back to Simone’s face. “The numbers part of her business.”

  “You mean . . .”

  “Randi signed Nia Lawson a month before her suicide. Told me she was planning a big comeback for her, was working on getting her auditions. But her bookings file looks exactly like Destiny’s. Lots and lots of ‘blind dates.’ ”

  “You think the killer is going after Randi’s prostitutes. ”

  He nodded. “Possibly.”

  “But what about Holly?”

  “The assault on her was different than the others. It was messier, faster. He put the picture in her wastebasket— it wasn’t in the trash outside, meaning he probably brought it with him at the time of the killing, rather than days before. There was no note, no writing on the wall,” he said. “And he left without completing the job. He saw she’d talked to the Asteroid, the bracelet article. I think that just . . . set him off. He wanted her gone.”

  Simone’s stomach clenched up. “If I had never talked to Holly, then she’d . . .”

  He waved her off. “She was calling every media outlet in town. If it wasn’t the Asteroid, it would have been somebody’s damn Web site,” he said. “What I want to know from you is, have you come in contact with anybody who may have it in for Randi . . . for the numbers part of her business?”

  She shook her head.

  “Anybody who seemed a little strange?”

  She looked at him. “Blake Moss.”

  “The movie star?” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, he’s strange all right. Just reread that Vanity Fair article.”

  “No, he . . . he found out I worked for the Asteroid and he . . . he tried to . . . cut a deal with me,” Simone said. “He was threatening.”

  Sandiford nodded. “I’ll look into him,” he said. “Just so you know, though, we don’t think the killer is sexually motivated. The victims are always clothed, there’s never any DNA. We don’t even know if it’s a man who’s doing this.” He looked at her. “Plus, I’d think if the killer were a famous movie star, somebody would have spotted him at one of the crime scenes.”

  “Good point.”

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said. “Anyway, you’ve got my number. Call if anything comes to mind.”