Five Quickies For Roger And Suzanne (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 7)

by Jerold Last

  “I think we can rule out Voluptia as a suspect pretty conclusively. There were three of us watching her pretty carefully all night, including what must have been the time of the murder. All three of us will swear that she didn’t go upstairs at any time during the evening, so she has a perfect alibi. On top of that, did you see her dress? There was no way she could have a 9mm pistol hidden under it. The dress was just too tight to conceal a gun that big.”

  “Doesn’t Raymond's relationship with Voluptia give Inge a strong motive too?” asked Suzanne, looking over at our client.

  “No, we had an open marriage. Raymond may have screwed around on the set but he loved me and came home every night. I didn’t begrudge him his casual flings, just as he didn’t begrudge me mine.”

  I thought for a moment. "How about you, Willard? Do you have any suspects to suggest?"

  His brow furrowed. He looked deep in thought. "No, I don't think so. But I think I'd look closely at the guest list and see if you can figure out which people Raymond personally invited to the party and start there. He had a sadistic streak, and he could very easily have invited someone here to publically embarrass them as the night's big entertainment event."

  "Do you have a guest list and can you try to figure out who invited whom and add that information to the list?"

  "Sure, but there are going to be a lot of question marks on the list."

  "That's better than nothing, and I can use a starting point, even if it's totally speculative and partially incomplete."

  Off Willard went, returning in less than 5 minutes with a Xerox copy of a typed list.

  "Here you go," he said as he handed the list to me. "I've color coded it for who invited each guest and put question marks where I didn't know. I would guess that I assigned an inviter to about 75% of the names, which was more than I expected. Can you figure out any way to eliminate the catering staff and the other folks who put on the party from the suspect list?"

  "That's the sort of thing the police do very well. I think we should leave that task to them. They have the resources and data bases to do that job properly."

  Brunch ended and off we went. Suzanne returned home to take care of Robert and I drove to my office to compare notes with Vincent. I had met Vincent Romero, originally from Wisconsin, during the previous year while we were chasing a serial killer through Peru and Chile. He had retired from his job with the CIA and moved with his family to Los Angeles where he now worked for my growing detective agency. His background as a spy made him quite well trained in almost all of the things a detective should do, so he was a great asset to the business. I told him about our new client and what I had learned from the police.

  If Vincent had a weakness as a detective, it was his tendency to "shoot from the hip". He didn't really analyze the data but tended to go with his first impressions and snap judgments. On the other hand, his instincts were good, so he was right at least as often as he was wrong.

  "Murder cases are usually pretty simple. People usually kill for profit or for passion, at least the sane murderers do. So who profits or where's the woman scorned or the frustrated would-be lover?"

  "That's our job to find out. If we're lucky, the name is on this list I got from Willard Butler. Do you have any suggestions about how we should split it up and look for the answers?"

  "How about you take the men and I'll take the women? We can waste the afternoon Googling all of them and see what comes up."

  So that's exactly what we did.

  By the time we started thinking about dinner we had everyone on the list in one of three categories: Yes, No, and Maybe. When we cross-matched the Yeses and maybes against the invitations by Raymond, we had a short list of eight suspects to work on. Despite all of the horrendous assumptions we had to make, it was a place to start.

  "OK Vincent, we’ll split things up a little differently this time. You take the crime of passion and I'll take the profit motive. That should be a fair distribution as far as workload is concerned. Go interview anyone you can find who knows any of the eight suspects. Start with people associated with the movie. Tell them you're a freelance writer doing a story for a magazine. See what you can find out about anyone on your list, personally and professionally, and the names of the people they went to the party with.

  "Interview the escorts, male and female, and find out whether any of our suspects had a chance to sneak upstairs at the right time and what they wore---whether it was loose enough to hide a large pistol under or in. See if you can pick up any juicy gossip about who is in bed with whom, or wants to be.

  "I'll take a long hard look at the paperwork related to the movie and at whatever I can get my hands on concerning Butler’s other financial interests. Tomorrow is soon enough to begin."

  A quick phone call to Suzanne was all it took to recruit her talents to our team. I asked her to set up a meeting the next morning with Inge, who she had met earlier today at brunch, to find out whatever she could about the relationships between Inge, Raymond, Willard, and the eight people whose names were on our list. With her knack for getting women to talk to her about topics they would never share with me, this seemed our best strategy to figure out whether one of the surviving Butlers did it.

  Chapter IV.Day three

  A brief phone call from me to Inge was all it took to set up an appointment for after lunch to go through whatever remained of Raymond’s paperwork at home that hadn’t been confiscated by the police detectives, and for her to get me cleared to do the same thing in his office at the studio. My search for a paper trail started with the studio office.

  I drove up to the studio gate where a rent-a-cop with a clipboard gestured me to stop. He checked my ID against his list, smiled and saluted me, handed me a map, and pushed a button that opened the gate to allow me to drive through the lot to my destination. The map was the layout of the facility, with a convenient green line tracing my route to Raymond Butler’s office and a blue line delineating the return route. I put the map on the dashboard and followed the green line directions. The route led me past some low brick buildings, a bunch of trailers, and a familiar movie set of a 1-block long western street with the usual general store, jail, miscellaneous stores, and a newspaper office fronting on a raised wooden sidewalk with a couple of horse troughs and hitching rails in the street. What made this set different was all of the buildings looked authentic from the street, but there was absolutely nothing behind them except slanted posts to hold up the false fronts. I made a couple of turns past more buildings and another back lot, this time presenting a street scene from a big eastern city that looked a lot like Gotham City in the last Batman movie we went to. There were people scurrying around everywhere I looked, on bicycles, on foot, and in golf carts. There were even two western types on horses who trotted side by side from the western street lot to the office complex.

  Finally I reached my destination, a modern building with well-marked parking spaces in front. I drove into an empty space labeled “Visitors”, and parked my car. As I walked to the front door an attractive, casually dressed woman greeted me by name, introduced herself as Leslie, and told me to follow her. She led me to an office with Raymond Butler’s name inscribed on the glass door in bold black letters. We went on in. Leslie explained that she was here to give me whatever help she could. She also was responsible for making sure that I didn’t take anything out of the office except copies she would prepare for me of anything I told her that we needed to be copied.

  For the first time I was pleased that Detective Murphy was the lead investigator on this case. He was too lazy, or too stupid, to have searched Butler’s office, so it was a treasure trove of mostly meaningless paper. I made two piles, a large one of stuff that looked useless for my investigation and a smaller one that was worth reading carefully to see if there were any clues to be found. The smaller stack, which was still a lot of paper, was carefully Xeroxed for me by the charming and surprisingly helpful Leslie, who turned out to be a bored secretary with nothing to do
with her boss dead. She had been assigned to watch me carefully so I didn’t steal any studio property, and was quite happy to help me within the parameters of her assignment.

  Leslie offered to walk me over to the movie set and introduce me to some of the staff. It was easy to say yes; this could be a once in a lifetime opportunity to find out whether any of our suspects had done anything to arouse suspicions before the murder. We walked about 75 yards from Raymond’s office building to a studio building in the opposite direction from the way I’d driven in from the gate. The large red light over the door wasn’t on, so Leslie indicated we could just walk right on into the studio itself. Inside was a set made up to look like a couple of rooms in a house, with several craftsmen remodeling the existing features in the room on the left of the set.

  My escort led me to a tall good looking man of about my age wearing carpenter’s overalls over a dirty and slightly ripped T-shirt. She introduced him as Howard Trelawney, the Best Boy on this movie. I’d lived in Los Angeles around the movie industry long enough to know that the Best Boy is the Key Grip’s or Gaffer’s first assistant. The Key Grip is the technician who works with the Director and Cinematographer to make sure the lighting and position of things on the set is what the Director wants the camera to see in the final version of the movie. The Gaffer is the head of the electrical workers, and is responsible for everything to do with getting the right amount and kind of light for the best film exposures possible. Howard was the Key Grip’s Best Boy, and was overseeing the construction crew on the set.

  We talked about the movie being made, and what scenes in the film would use the current set as a backdrop. All of this work and energy would result in a single scene lasting less than two minutes in the final film if everything went according to plan. I steered the conversation into personalities. Howard seemed to enjoy gossiping and jumped right in.

  “Our star, Voluptia Vasquez, was a hot item with Raymond Butler. She spent plenty of long lunch hours in his office, if you get my drift. It drove Richard Curtis, the Director, crazy when she wasn’t here and he was ready to shoot a scene. You should have heard Curtis and Voluptia yelling at each other. I’ve heard a lot of screaming between Mr. Butler and his wife too. She’s the Set Decorator on this movie, you know. That’s the way creative artists are. There’s lots of emotion and lots of screaming. But there’s a great deal of creative energy there, too.

  “Mr. Butler’s brother Willard is a lot calmer then Mr. and Mrs. Butler. We don’t see much of him, but when we do he’s always got a good word for all of us. I’ve never seen him get into a fight or an argument.

  “This has been a really creative crew on the movie and they've worked very well together for the most part. Of course, some of them have worked together before.”

  Leslie walked us over to a much older man, casually dressed, short, with a big unlit cigar in his mouth. She introduced me as a detective investigating the murder of his Producer to Richard Curtis, the Director of the movie. After a few generalities about the movie, Curtis demonstrated that Trelawney wasn’t the only man on the set who enjoyed gossiping.

  “Fortunately for all of us, the financing on this movie is solid and Ray Butler’s death isn’t going to affect our schedule. All of the expensive scenes on location have already been filmed. We just have to finish about three more weeks of interior scenes and we can call it a wrap. The only thing we still need a producer for is hiring the post-production crew to turn all of the film we’ve shot into a movie. Willard can handle that part. He would have anyway, even if Ray were still alive. Ray was scheduled to start producing his next film in less than a month. That’s why someone like Willard is so important to have as an assistant producer, so he can pick up all of the loose ends and leave the creative financial stuff to the producers who can make miracles happen with film financing.

  “The only real difficulty I expect to have finishing this movie on time and within budget with Ray gone is with our little harlot starlet. Voluptia isn’t what I’d call a natural actress and she’s pretty hard to coax a good performance out of. She’s in just about every scene we still have to shoot, and each scene is going to need several takes to get the acting that I want out of her. It’s probably a great example of type casting that almost all of her scenes are in the bedroom, not outdoors on location. I’m amazed that Ray put up with her this long, but I assume he had his reasons. I’ve heard a few rumors that he was thinking of dumping her, but you know how people gossip."

  The knowing smirk on the Director's face left no doubt what kind of reasons he had in mind.

  Leslie and I said our good-byes and started to walk off the set. She stopped abruptly and led me to another older gentleman, this time well dressed. She introduced me to Michael Meeghan, the Production Designer and Inge’s boss. The Production Designer is responsible for everything to do with creating the final visual appearance of the movie, and supervises much of the creative talent that makes film magic happen. He was another talker.

  “Inge is one of my best people. We got a joint Academy Award we shared a couple of years ago for the Art Direction on the movie ‘Last Woman Standing’. Come to think of it, Ray Butler produced that epic action film too. She and Ray are one of the best examples of a stable long-term marriage we have in Hollywood. They’ve been together now for at least twenty years, maybe longer.

  “This movie will do real well at the box office. With all the media attention around Ray’s murder, it’s bound to be a hit. We should sell a million tickets in the first week just because of people’s morbid curiosity. Who knows? Maybe Inge and I will win our second Oscar. Wouldn’t that be a kick?”

  On that ghoulish note, we exited, stage left.

  I left a little more than an hour after arriving with a briefcase full of paper to read before lunch, and drove back home to do this chore.

  The most interesting things I found in the stack may not have had anything to do with the murder, but had a lot to do with Hollywood pop culture. I read all of the contracts for everybody involved in the movie. The amounts people were paid varied widely, but even the least of them seemed to have made a ton of money for a few pounds of work. Willard Butler was carried on the books as an Associate Producer, whatever that meant, and was paid a flat fee of hundreds of thousands of dollars to be Raymond’s “go for”, that is, a glorified errand boy. Nice work if you can get it! Raymond was “The Producer”, which seemed to mean the person who found the sources of money for the production. He got a percentage of the gross revenues earned by the movie for his efforts. Inge was the “Set Decorator”, who supervised a large crew of craftsmen (and women) who made the magic of the movie possible by creating all of the rooms, buildings, and furniture we saw in the finished product.

  Most of the actors and actresses were paid a fixed amount, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, for their performances. Vera’s contract was different because she was not a U.S. citizen and because she was the star of the film with no previous track record in the Hollywood system. The studio clearly was hedging its bets in case she got too temperamental or decided to quit and go home. All of her expenses to come to Hollywood from Buenos Aires, to live in luxury at the hotel, and any other reasonable charges (clothing, food, entertainment, etc.) were either directly paid for by the studio or reimbursed on a weekly basis. She would be paid $500,000 additional salary upon satisfactory completion of the movie. The studio had an option on her services for two future movies on the same financial basis.

  I skimmed the rest of the paperwork in the pile. Neat stuff for gossip, but this wasn’t solving the murder.

  My next stop was the Butler house, where Inge herself answered the door.

  “Come in. Everything is waiting for you in the den, there to the left. Is there anything I can get you?”

  “A cup of coffee would be nice.” I went to the den, turned on the lights, and sat on a comfortable chair behind the big desk, which was covered with file folders and stacks of papers.

  I
nge showed up with a cup of coffee, cream, sugar, some nice pastries, and a thermos with more coffee if I wanted any later.

  “Don’t worry. You won’t be interrupted. Take as long as you need. I won’t bother you. Just let me know when you leave, please.”

  I spent two hours plowing through the paperwork. Most of it duplicated what I’d already seen in Raymond’s office that morning. The rest of it was the typical random clutter and copies of bills and receipts we all tend to collect over time if we own a home. Raymond seemed to be well organized, with everything filed logically.

  I left at 4 PM, carefully saying good-bye to Inge on the way out. Back at the office I found Vincent, carefully transcribing the content of dozens of interviews for our files, and Suzanne, who I had called and asked to meet us as I was leaving Inge's house.

  "Suzanne, you go first. What can you tell us about the Butlers?"

  “Let’s start with Inge. She was very forthcoming with me. She and Raymond had an open marriage, like she told us before, but they also had an agreement that casual sex on the job was OK, but nothing more than that was allowed. She was certain that Raymond had exercised his option, in Hollywood parlance, with Voluptia, probably a lot more than once, but that it didn’t mean much of anything to either of them. There didn’t seem to be any passion there, so there almost certainly didn’t seem to be a motive for murder. Her relationship with Willard is platonic, and always has been, at least from her perspective. She herself is completely straight, and had no sexual relationship of any kind with Voluptia. In fact, she had no sexual interactions with anyone on the set of this movie, even though she thinks the Grip's Best Boy is ‘kind of cute’.