by A. W. Gray
For a personality of Darla Cowan’s stature to hurry into the lobby alone at that time of night, minus bodyguards, hoopla, and drumroll, surprised Cortez greatly, but she was far too cool for public displays and quickly hid her surprise. She warmly greeted the actress, handed the presidential suite card key over the counter, and snappily clicked her clicker. Uniformed bellhops came from two directions as if their pants were on tire. One of the bellmen reached for the overnight case which dangled from Cowan’s fingers.
“No, thanks,” Darla said firmly. “I won’t be needing these guys, and I won’t be staying long.” Then she turned on her heel and marched beneath a crystal chandelier on her way to the elevators. She passed a gentleman in a tux and a woman with blued hair wearing an evening dress, both of whom did double-takes and stared after Cowan as if they’d just seen the queen.
Cortez nervously shuffled papers as the actress pa raded through the lobby. It was a rigid Mansion policy that no one-but no one, and most certainly not an international sex symbol-was to flit unattended through the hotel without an offer of assistance. Cortez’s predecessor, in fact, had lost her job for letting George Carlin carry his own suitcase from the desk to the elevator.
Keeping the rules in mind, and recalling that the key to survival in the celebrity-pampering business lay in covering one’s ass, Cortez flew into action. She had a quick and pointed conference with the bellhops. All agreed that Darla Cowan bad turned down their offer to help tote her belongings, and further agreed that documentation was imperative in case management should climb their backsides. For assurances’ sake, they signed their names to a written description of the incident which Cortez penned on hotel stationery, squinting at the ornate lobby clock to record the time of Darla’s arrival as she did. It was 12:07 a.m., seven minutes after midnight, in the wee small hours of Saturday morning.
Darla Cowan’s reappearance in the lobby came sometime between twelve-thirty and one a.m., and under the circumstances it wasn’t surprising that not a single witness could pinpoint the time. She stumbled as she came off the elevator, pulling a suitcase on wheels and carrying the same overnight case that she’d taken upstairs. Tears ran down her face, streaking her makeup. Her hair was in wild disarray. One side of her sweater was ripped, exposing a creamy shoulder and half of one breast. There was an ugly red mark, rapidly turning purple, on her left cheek, and her lip was swollen. She dragged her luggage halfway to the exit, where a bellman intercepted her. He offered assistance and, trained to be delicate in such matters, pretended not to notice that Darla looked beat to hell.
“Just leave me alone,” Darla screamed hysterically, causing all heads within earshot to turn in her direction. There were only four people in the lobby: two bellhops; an elderly man who sat on a couch reading a newspaper, and Marian Cortez, who’d closed out the register at half past midnight and was counting the evening’s receipts. Darla tugged the suitcase toward the exit, sobbing, pausing long enough to say to the bellman, “Call me a taxi, will you?” The bellman complied, sprinting over to the concierge desk to use the phone. Marian Cortez made a precise record of the bellman’s offer of assistance, winking at him across the lobby as he dialed for a cab, but somehow failed to note the time.
Darla hauled her belongings out onto the porch to wait, and weathered the stares of passersby and honks of recognition from cruising autos for about fifteen minutes until her taxi arrived. The doorman would remember that as he held the cab’s door open for her, Darla trembled and cried out of control. Her rented Geo Prism was to remain in the hotel drive for several days.
The cab driver was a half Mexican-American, half Cherokee Indian named Stand-in-the-Water Domiguez, who did his best to console Darla on the ride to DFW Airport. His efforts were to no avail. She continued to sob as the cabbie deposited her at the American terminal, where she paid the fare and included a generous tip. The driver waited until Darla’s luggage was loaded onto a cart, then watched as Darla followed the skycap into the terminal.
It was to be a matter of record that Darla Cowan bought a one-way ticket on AA Flight 3062 bound for Los Angeles, and that her suitcase and overnight bag made it safely into the airliner’s luggage compartment. There was only one other first-class passenger on board the 747, a businessman from Atlanta whose ticket included a Dallas stopover. Darla sat as far as possible from the man and ignored his attempts at getting friendly.
Apparently she’d regained her composure by the time she landed at LAX because—the media in Los Angeles being on a twenty-four-hour celebrity watch—a photographer from the Times, at the airport to pick up his cousin, snapped her picture as she boarded a limousine. In the photo which appeared in the following day’s arts section, her hair was perfectly fixed. She’d changed into a fresh blouse, and she displayed her most dazzling, knock-’em-dead smile. The shadows and the angle of the picture hid her bruises, and her swollen lip lent a pouty effect to her grin.
6
When David Spencer was a no-show for the Saturday morning taping of Good Morning, Texas on Channel 8, the Dallas ABC affiliate, the Mansion’s switchboard lit up like Mission Control First the station called, then the ABC coordinator from New York, and finally Curtis Nussbaum, Spencer’s agent from out in L.A. “Look, sweetheart,” he told the desk clerk, “I got no time to dally. You go upstairs and raise that boy from his hangover, and tell him Nussbaum’s on the line. You don’t want heat from your boss, you get a move on.”
The Mansion’s daytime desk clerk was named Anna Dorn, a willowy, thirty-fivish woman who was every bit as snooty as Marian Cortez on the graveyard shift. She listened nervously. Threats to go over one’s head were sticky wickets, because she never knew how much stroke the threatener might have. She put Nussbaum on hold while she called her supervisor at home to learn that, yes, Curtis Nussbaum was David Spencer’s agent, and that, yes, Curtis Nussbaum bad mucho clout with the Mansion’s corporate offices. Dom then clicked back on to tell Nussbaum that she’d take his number and have Spencer return the call. Nussbaum responded that if he didn’t hear from the actor in twenty minutes, there’d be hell to pay.
Dom then rang up housekeeping and told one of the cleaning people to check David Spencer’s room. “No, missy,” the Hispanic maid told her, “bustin’ in on somebody got a Do Not Disturb sign on they door ain’t in my job description. Never know what the guys got goin’, all them womens pantin’ for his underwear.” There was a click and the line went dead.
Dorn fretted, then decided to take matters into her own hands. She ran a blank card key through the magnetized slot, creating a spare for the presidential suite, had her assistant relieve her at the desk, and went up on the elevator.
The presidential suite was half a hallway removed from its neighboring rooms, and overlooked the patio and rose garden. Anna Dorn timidly knocked, then waited five full minutes before she knocked a bit louder, but still got no response. She then slid the card key through the slot, listened to the tumblers hum, opened the door, and went inside.
The room was in darkness, the thick drapes drawn over the windows. Dorn reached inside the bathroom and flicked on the light, casting dim illumination over the canopied four-poster king-size, the French provincial rose-patterned sofa and chairs. She squinted at the bed; there was indeed a human form huddled beneath the covers.
The situation was weird; Anna Dorn was about to walk into a darkened hotel suite to awaken Hollywood’s sexiest male star. She wondered what thousands of women would give to be in her place. Her spit dried and her knees trembled. She firmed her resolve and walked slowly ahead. Halfway through the foyer her foot slipped. She took another step and slipped again.
Dorn fished in the waist pocket of her uniform for a tiny flashlight and clicked the switch, and shined the light around her on brown Mexican tile. She stood in a pool of red liquid, which looked for all the world like blood.
Dallas homicide detective Stan Green thought that day duty was a piece of cake
after three months on the graveyard shift. Jesus, on the night shift he’d seen women raped and stabbed, convenience store clerks with half their heads blown away, and one Jamaican drug dealer with his ears cut off and a crack pipe shoved up his rectum. Daylight duty generally consisted of investigative work: interviewing witnesses, reading lab reports, cleaning up details after the night crews had viewed all the corpses in person. Not only was the day shift safer, investigation required a lot of time away from the office, tracking leads, which gave a man plenty of opportunity to catch up on his fucking off. Fucking off, in fact, was what Green liked best about his job.
When the shift lieutenant ordered him to proceed to the Mansion on Turtle Creek, Green thought that someone must be joking. Though he’d lived in Dallas all of his life, he had never so much as set foot inside the Mansion lobby. He’d heard that a man could get soaked twenty bucks for a bowl of soup in the place, Jesus, eight dollars for a whiskey neat, water back, which a homicide cop could mooch for free in one of the Ross Avenue Mexican joints, seven nights a week.
A stiff at the Mansion has to be a put-on, Green thought, someone from the night shift calling from home to pull the lieutenant’s leg. David Spencer? Sure, and Marlon fucking Brando, too. Green’s partner had gone to lunch in their assigned vehicle, so Green fired up an unmarked Ford Taurus from the motor pool and headed for the Mansion alone.
He arrived in the parking lot at a few minutes after noon in sixty-degree weather, with a strong fall breeze stripping red and yellow leaves from branches all along Turtle Creek Boulevard. The leaves rose and fell in the wind like flushed birds. A gray CSU truck sat off to one side, and Green decided that if this was a joke, there were a lot of people in on it. He parked and walked toward the hotel entry, tilted against the wind, his pants molded around his legs, his tie standing out like a flag at the Ballpark in Arlington.
Ten minutes later, Green followed the hotel manager down the corridor outside the presidential suite. The manager was around forty, the hand-wringing type, and Green responded to the man’s questions with a series of noncommittal grunts. Could the media be kept out of this? How the hell would Green know? Could the police keep from alarming the other guests? Green supposed they could, as long as questioning the shit out of them didn’t scare anybody. The manager frowned as he ushered the detective into the suite. Green crossed the threshold, stepped over a pool of blood, and looked around.
The lab techs had it in gear, dusting for prints, vacuuming, dumping the contents of the cleaner bags into plastic evidence containers. A wiry Oriental was down on his haunches, soaking up blood with a cotton swab. The soaked cotton he carefully placed in a Ziploc baggie, then folded the baggie into an envelope for transmission to the DNA people. There’s plenty of blood, Green thought, Jesus, red smears on the walls and across the mirrors, puddles in the foyer, pools soaked into the carpets. The assistant M.E. in charge was named Tupelow, a gray-haired man with a bald spot at his crown, wearing a knee-length white coat. Topelow stood near the bed, looking down at a corpse face up on the mattress. A plastic sheet covered the body from the neck down. Green went up and tapped the AME on the shoulder.
Tupelow looked around. Shaggy eyebrows moved closer together as he peered beyond the detective toward the exit. “What, you’re flying solo?” Tupelow said.
“Partner’s grabbing a bite.” Green looked at the body. “I saw his latest.”
“And his lastest. I don’t know, my teenage daughter thinks this one might rise like Jesus.”
The famous face was slack in death. There was a small entry wound in David Spencer’s temple, with blood and brain matter smeared on the pillow. Green looked around the room. “Lot of blood, huh?”
Tupelow shook his head, at the same time drawing a thermometer from his breast pocket. He wore surgical gloves. “Evidently the bullet was insurance. Stab wounds all over the chest and abdomen, penetrated bboth the heart and lungs. No need to shoot this guy to put his lights out. Gimme a hand rolling him over, will you?” He yanked the sheet and grinned at the corpse. “Excuse me, Mr. Matinee Idol Super Cockhound, sir,” the M.E. said, “but I gotta take your temperature. Your tongue don’t look in good shape, so I’m gonna shove this up your butt. You mind? Won’t hurt a bit, okay?”
7
Sharon Hays whooped it up as her law school alma mater played Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. She bounced around on the sofa, stuffing popcorn, giving the hook ‘em horns sign over and over as the Longhorns drove steadily forward. Sheila Winston sat in a recliner reading a novel. On the tube, an orange tight end snared one over his shoulder, held on as a defensive back practically cut him in half, and rolled to a stop at the Sooner four-yard line. Sharon growled in bloodlust. Sheila yawned and turned a page.
“Go, Horns,” Sharon yelled. “Stuff it down their throats.”
“Could you lower the volume?” Sheila said. “You’re going to wake up the dusk-till-dawn crowd.”
The women had turned in at one in the morning, leaving Trish and Melanie still going strong. Sharon got up around seven o’clock and went in to fix coffee. She’d gone to the VCR and hit the Rewind button, but the Fatal Instinct tape had been missing from its slot. Sharon had repossessed the erotic murder flick from the sleeping teenagers, mentally kicking herself for her failure to lock up the videocassette to begin with. Now it was after two in the afternoon, and she’d yet to hear a peep out of the girls. Commander was curled up in the comer of the living room, snoring away, and Sharon wondered if multiple showings of Darla Cowan in the nude had done the shepherd in. The Texas team broke the huddle and trotted up to the line; Sharon sat intensely forward as the quarterback barked the signals. Eight years removed from her U of Texas days, tremors still raced up her backbone whenever the Longhorn band played “The Eyes of Texas.” The sight of the orange and white team racing onto the field, fists pumping, drove her into a frenzy.
“Rock ‘em. Go.” Sharon tensed in anticipation as the center snapped the ball. Visible in the comer of her eye, Sheila put down her book and stuck her fingers in her ears. Well, pooh, Sharon thought, what does a Yalie know?
The quarterback rolled to his right behind a wall of blockers, and streaked for the comer of the end zone.
Sharon leaped from the couch, yelling. They’re going to score, she thought, sweet hallelujah and Daryl Royal, they’re going to…
The screen went blank. A male announcer cut in, saying, “We interrupt this program for a CNN News bulletin.”
The wind whooshed out of Sharon’s sails in a gust. Her body sagged. “What are they…?” She turned in bewilderment. “Sheila, did you see…”
Sheila picked up her book. “Probably just some insignificant Middle East crisis. Nothing as important as the Big Orange, right?”
“Big Orange is a drink.” Sharon took a step toward the television. “They interrupted right in the middle of…”
Sheila testily rustled pages. “Oh, for God’s sake. You’re only talking a minute or two. Relax.” She glanced past Sharon toward the set, started to look away, then stared wide-eyed at the screen. “Sharon,” she said softly.
Sharon turned her attention back to the TV. At first the scene didn’t register, the wide steps, the ornate white pillars, paramedics rolling a gurney to a waiting ambulance. There was a shrouded body strapped to the gurney. The scene changed instantly to a longdistance shot, the same porch and pillars with stately elms and sycamores towering on all sides. Sharon sank down on the sofa. As she watched, an athletic-looking man in a cheap suit walked toward the ambulance, moving in an arrogant slouch, his arms swinging. God, Sharon thought, Stan Green. “It’s the Mansion,” she murmured. She grabbed the remote and boosted the volume a couple of notches. Sheila laid her book aside and straightened the recliner to its upright position.
The announcer droned, “The body has been positively identified as that of David Spencer. The actor was in Texas for a Planet Hollywood opening. Authoritie
s have declined comment as to the cause of death. “Spencer, star of the recent hit Spring of the Comanche, was traveling in the company of his girlfriend, actress Darla Cowan. There’s no word at present of the actress’s condition or whereabouts. More on the national news at five. For now, back to your network programming.”
The scene changed again, accompanied by a surge of crowd noise, as the Texas Longhorns celebrated a touchdown in the end zone. Players jumped up and down, hugging each other, patting rumps and slapping helmets. The point-after unit streamed onto the field. “Damn,” Sharon said, grabbing the remote. “God damn them, interrupting with this silly football.” She pointed the remote and grabbed the TV Guide from the end table. “What’s the twenty-four-hour news channel, Sheil?”
The story was on every network and cable station. Sharon spent the rest of the afternoon flipping channels while Sheila watched with her book open across her lap. When the girls bounced in around three o’clock, clamoring for food, their mothers responded in unison by hissing, “Shh!” Trish and Melanie buttoned their lips and sat on the floor, silent for the only time in recent memory. Commander, his bladder filled to the bursting point, got up around four o’clock to scratch and whine at the back door. Trish let the shepherd out and returned at once to her viewing station.
The networks played one-up, scrambling for ratings, airing anything which even hinted at news of the killing, the result being total confusion as to what had actually occurred. The first reports hinted that both David Spencer and Darla Cowan were dead, with a later revelation that Darla had been only wounded. Then the reporters rescinded that incorrect bit of information and replaced it with another untruth, that Darla was missing. This error produced a heated telephone call to the network from Darla’s agent, Aaron Levy, who stated that the actress was at home in LA. The talking heads then did another about-face, reporting that Darla hadn’t been in Texas at all. A witness—a man in a Dallas Cowboys sideline jacket and Texas Rangers batting helmet, carrying a Dallas Stars hockey puck-shot down that theory by swearing he’d seen Darla in the flesh outside Planet Hollywood, and that Spencer “‘as gonna beat the … he ‘as gonna rough her up ‘fore this chick come around an’ lowered the boom on his…” At which point the interview terminated with the sports enthusiast gaping helplessly at the camera.