I kept my own rarely-used gun in the safe, and it took me a vital moment to retrieve it. By the time I reached the hallway there was only the echo of the stairwell door closing. The door to Santillo’s office was standing open and I saw him on the floor, bleeding. He may have seen me, and he lifted one arm in a futile gesture. Then the life went out of him. Both bullets had caught him in the chest. I stepped to the phone and dialed 911.
The uniformed cops arrived first, followed by Sergeant Ramous, a homicide detective I’d known for years. “What happened here?” he asked me.
I told him what little I knew. “You might want to check the stairwell door for prints. I think the killer left that way.”
“You got a weapon, Al?”
“It’s back on my desk. I grabbed it when I heard the shots.”
He walked back with me while his men set to work on the crime scene. He picked up the.38 revolver and sniffed the barrel, then opened the cylinder and spun it to see that it was fully loaded. “I didn’t think anyone still carried these things. You should get yourself a Glock or one of the other nine-millimeter automatics.”
“I’d hate to tell you the last time I fired a gun. Mike has a nine-millimeter and I borrow it once in a while, but this’ll do me nicely. I’m getting too old for gunplay.”
“You came close tonight.”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about the victim.”
“Not much to tell. Name’s Rich Santillo. He rented the office about six months ago but he wasn’t around much. Came in at night sometimes, like tonight. He has one employee, a young woman named Stacy Cline, who’s there during office hours.”
“Know her address?”
“No idea. It might be in the desk somewhere, in an address book.”
“Did you hear any voices, sounds of an argument?”
“I heard him open the door, but that was all. There may have been voices. I wasn’t paying attention until I heard the shots.”
“You didn’t chase after the killer?”
“It seemed more important to tend to Santillo. He died within seconds, but by then it was too late to go after anyone. Our building doesn’t have any lobby security.”
“And he said nothing?”
“Not a word.”
I tried reaching Mike at home but Marla said he’d gone to the Lily Lake concert. By the time he arrived at the office the next morning he knew all about the murder from the TV news. I told him what had happened, what little I knew.
“You might have been killed,” he told me.
“The killer probably didn’t realize there was anyone else on the floor.”
“Has Stacy been in yet?”
I shook my head. “There’s no job for her anyway. Didn’t you see the crime-scene tape across the door?”
But she did show up, just after ten. “I was down at police headquarters making a statement,” she said, settling into her favorite chair. “How about some coffee?”
“So you’re out of a job,” Mike said, pouring her a cup. “We might be able to use you part-time.”
“Mike—” I began.
“We’ll talk about it,” he said, backtracking a bit. “It wouldn’t be much. Leave us your cell-phone number.”
“Thanks, I might need the job.” She jotted down the number on our notepad.
“How long did you work for Santillo?” I asked.
“Since he opened the office here. Six, seven months? He was always an odd sort of guy, never around much. Sometimes I suspected the office was a front for something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I told that to Sergeant Ramous, but he seems to think I know more than I’m telling.”
“Whatever happened last night, it’s a good thing you weren’t here,” Mike said. “The killer might have shot you, too.”
“Were you here?”
“Just Al. I was over at the Lily Lake concert. It started at eight, just about the time of the killing.”
Stacy nodded. “She’s great. I’d like to catch tonight’s performance if I can get a ticket.”
I was a bit old to be a fan of Lily Lake, the latest teen queen who’d come out of nowhere to captivate TV and the music business two years earlier. Mike Trapper was a bit old, for that matter, but his interest was strictly business. Lily Lake was hot stuff in the tabloids, especially now that she’d apparently hooked up with Sly Morgan. “I’ve got an extra you can have,” Mike told her. “I bought them for both nights in case I couldn’t get to last night’s concert.”
“Wow! Thanks, but let me pay you for it.”
He handed her the ticket and waved away the offer of money. “It’s on me. You need cheering up after what happened.”
“My boss was even a Lily Lake fan, can you believe that? He had a whole file drawer full of her clippings and stuff.”
“Did she have a policy with him?” I asked.
“No. I asked him once and he said he was just a fan. It wasn’t only her. He had clippings on other celebs, too.” She took a sip of coffee and remembered something else. “When I first started working for him he took me to dinner once with some guy from one of those tabloid papers.”
Mike Trapper perked up at her words. “He did? Do you remember the man’s name?”
“Vance something.”
“Vance Oberline?”
“That’s him.”
Mike was trying not to show it, but I could see the news upset him. After Stacy Cline finished her coffee and went on her way, I asked what was up. “I don’t know, Al, but I intend to find out. Oberline’s a stringer for a couple of the big tabloids, and a couple of times lately he turned down items from me because he already had them. Now I find that he’s friendly with the guy in the next office. That’s too big a coincidence.”
“It sure is.” I walked over to the wall that separated the two offices. “Let’s move this filing cabinet out a few inches.”
We found it almost at once. A tiny hole had been drilled through the wall to accommodate a cord and miniature microphone. “He could hear everything we said in this office,” Mike said, his anger building.
“You can bet it doesn’t stop here. He may have tapped our phone lines and even bugged your computer.”
“What for? Just to sell a few items to the tabloids?”
“Maybe, or to find out what you were working on.”
“We’d better tell Ramous about this.”
I hesitated. “We tell the police and it gives you a motive for killing him.”
“What? You think I shot him?”
“Calm down, Mike. I’m just suggesting we wait awhile before telling Sergeant Ramous anything. Meanwhile, you might want to speak with your friend Vance Oberline about all this.”
“Yeah. My friend!”
As it happened he didn’t have to go searching for Oberline. The man showed up at our office before noon, expressing shock at Rich Santillo’s murder. “I didn’t realize he had the office next to yours,” he said without much conviction. Then, as if noticing my presence for the first time, he asked, “This your partner?”
“I’m Al Darlan,” I told him. “I’m the one who tries to keep us honest around here.”
He gave me a smirk, which went well with the rest of his dried-up face. “And he’s the one who makes the money, right?”
“I’m not making much when you undercut me by buying items from Santillo,” Mike told him, his anger brimming over.
“Forget Santillo. That’s a dead issue.”
“In more ways than one. You know why he rented the office next to ours? So he could eavesdrop on me and steal items for your tabloids.”
Oberline’s smirk turned into a sneer and I decided I was liking the man less every minute. “He was after bigger game than that. He told me he was on the verge of the story of the century, one that would sell five million extra copies.”
“What was that about?”
“I don’t know, but he wanted to make sure you didn’t get it first.”
I remembered Santillo�
��s night visits, when he was probably in there listening to audiotapes and seeing what he could get off our computers. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mike told him, “but if I thought you had anything to do with bugging this office I’d kick your ass through that window! Now get out of here. You and I are finished.”
“We’re not finished if you have a story to sell. Find out what Santillo was working on and it’ll bring big bucks.”
“You heard the man,” I said. “Get out of this office and don’t come back.”
He retreated, perhaps deciding at last that we really meant it. When we were alone, Mike said, “We’ve got to get into that office, Al.”
“With crime-scene tape on the door?”
“Stacy must have a key. She was there alone most of the time.”
“I don’t know if we should involve her,” I said, but he was already dialing the number she’d left us. He told her to come by after six, when the other tenants would have closed their offices for the day.
She appeared right on schedule, as chipper as ever. “Hi, guys. What are we going to do tonight?”
“Break into your office. Did you bring the key?”
“Hey, are you serious?”
“I’m afraid he is,” I told her. “Let’s get it over with.”
I sliced carefully through the crime-scene tape so we could stick it back together and with luck avoid discovery. Then Stacy unlocked the office door and we slipped inside. “If anyone’s watching, the light will show from outside,” she warned.
“We’ll have to chance it,” Mike decided. “Shining a flashlight around would be even more suspicious.”
She directed us to one of the filing cabinets along the wall. Mike was interested in finding the sound-activated tape recorder that was eavesdropping on our office, but I was more interested in the thick files on Lily Lake and several others. “There’s lots in here,” I said, “but nothing startling.” Lake had come out of nowhere two years earlier, at age seventeen, to win first prize in one of those reality talent shows on TV. Her parents were dead and she was pretty much on her own. She hailed from Cedar Rapids and Santillo’s file even included a copy of her birth certificate under her real name of Lily Lafferty. I had to admit Lily Lake looked better on the marquees. Looking further, I found a photo of Lake with Sly Morgan, the reputed boyfriend. He was a good decade older than she was, with bare arms that showed off a couple of his spectacular tattoos.
“Here are two more tickets for tonight’s show,” Stacy said, pulling them out of the file folder. “He must have been planning to attend.”
“Maybe he was going to take you,” I suggested. “I think at this point we should all go to that concert.”
The Melrose Concert Center was located across from the County Court Building in a part of downtown that hummed with activity during the day but usually dozed off after six o’clock. It was only two blocks from our office so we walked over, wearing raincoats against the misty drizzle that filled the night sky. This way we avoided the parking problem that always occurred when shows with the reigning pop stars came to town. I sent Stacy and Mike in to claim the seats from Santillo’s file drawer while I kept Mike’s ticket and headed backstage. A burly security guard didn’t let me get far. I showed my ID and asked to see Lily’s business manager.
About ten minutes before the start of the concert he appeared, a short bald man named Art Brunner. “The guard said a detective needed to see me. What about?”
“I’m private,” I told him, showing my ID again. “It’s about the killing of a man named Santillo last night.”
“I don’t know a thing about it.”
“He was gathering information on Lily Lake.”
“So are half the people in the country. She’s already a big star and she’s going to be huge.” His smile of pleasure revealed a row of yellow, crooked teeth. I hoped he’d make enough off Lily’s concerts to get them fixed.
“Could I speak with her?”
“Not a chance before the concert. She rests up and doesn’t see anyone before.”
“How about after?”
“I’ll ask her. She might give you five minutes. She’s a star, you know?”
“Is Sly Morgan in with her now?”
His face hardened. “What’re you, from the tabloids? Her personal life is personal. She doesn’t like people asking about it.” He turned away and the conversation was over.
I found my seat over on the right side of the auditorium just as the curtain went up on the opening act, a hard-rock trio that blasted my eardrums. They played for a numbing forty-five minutes and then there was a brief intermission before Lily Lake took the stage, backed by her own group. The young crowd went wild when she appeared center stage wearing low-slung white jeans and a fringed top that left her navel and midsection exposed. It was the proper costume for a teen rock star and they wouldn’t have expected anything else. Lily Lake was short and slim, appearing almost tiny on that big stage, but she whirled like a dervish, clutching her wireless mike as she belted out an anthem to infidelity, about high school romance and the next guy who comes along. It wasn’t my sort of music, even if it was a notch up from the hard rock.
Lily sang and cavorted for a full hour before she called it quits, and then came back for a double encore. It was about ten-twenty by the time she finished, to the screaming delight of her fans. I looked around for Mike and Stacy but couldn’t find them in the crowd. Instead I made my way backstage once more. This time Art Brunner was nowhere in sight and the place was filled with teenage girls trying any scheme to get closer to their idol. I finally spotted Brunner with two security guards trying to clear the backstage area. Avoiding them, I was heading toward the star’s dressing room when a hand grabbed me from behind by my coat collar. “Where you goin’, old man?” a raspy voice asked.
I twisted around enough to see the tattooed arm and knew I was in the grip of Sly Morgan. “I wanted to speak with Lily Lake, but you’ll do for now.”
“Lily’s resting after her performance, and she’s not likely to see you anyway. Who are you?”
“Al Darlan, Darlan and Trapper Investigations. I’m looking into the murder of a man named Rich Santillo last night.”
He loosened his grip on my collar and shoved me into an alcove beneath a spiral staircase to the upstairs dressing rooms. “We don’t keep up with the local news. When you’re touring like Lily one city’s the same as another.”
“Santillo was a stringer for the tabloids. He had a hot story, too hot for somebody.”
“How does it involve Lily?”
“He had lots of information on her, and he was killed while she was in town. Where were you around eight last night?”
“Watching her performance, same as tonight. I fly in to some of her tour stops when I get the chance.”
“So the tabloids are right about you two. Why keep it a secret?”
He grinned. “She’s a bit young for me. You know how people are.”
“Not anymore, I don’t. If Santillo uncovered a secret about Lily, might you or her manager have killed him to keep it a secret?”
Sly Morgan snorted. “What’s a secret worth these days? Certainly not murder! Anything they could write about Lily would only increase her sales. The teenagers would eat it up.”
“Anything?”
“You name it. Did she make a sex video? Did she snort cocaine? Is she really a lesbian? Hell, she probably could have killed her mother and it wouldn’t hurt her popularity. We’re in the 21st century!”
“Did she?”
“What?”
“Kill her mother?”
“Both her parents died in an auto accident when she was three. You didn’t read through all those clippings you said Santillo had.”
“Maybe it’s something else. Maybe she’s a guy.”
He snickered at that. “Lily’s no guy, believe me.”
“Can I see her? I’d like to talk to her, ask her a couple of questions.”
&
nbsp; “Will that satisfy you?”
“I hope so.”
“Wait here,” he said, and went off toward her dressing room.
I lingered backstage among the musicians and dancers for nearly ten minutes before he returned for me. “I really had to talk her into it. Follow me, and keep it short.”
Lily Lake was wearing a dressing gown that made her look smaller than she was. She had a winning smile when she used it, but after her first greeting to me she was all business. “What’s this about?” she asked. “Who is this man who got killed? I know nothing about him.”
“Rich Santillo. When pop stars like you played here he sold the tabloids gossip items. I have a partner who does some of that too.”
“You’re a great crowd!”
I shrugged. “You lose some privacy when you become a star.”
“They want to know about Sly and me. That’s all they’re interested in.”
“You know how teenage girls are.”
“I should. They’re my public. They come to my performances, buy my albums.”
“Could Sly or your business manager, Art Brunner, have had a motive for shutting Santillo up?
“You mean kill him? My God, I think you people are all crazy around here! If he was in the gossip business he might have had any number of enemies.”
“He had a file of clippings about you. And you’re in town. He might have tried to contact you.”
“He didn’t. I never heard of the man before. You’re the one who had the office next to him, not me.”
Sly Morgan moved in then. “Your time is up, Mr. Darlan. Say goodbye.”
On my way out Lily Lake asked, “Would you like my autograph?”
“Next time.”
I couldn’t find Mike and Stacy anywhere, and the next morning I asked him where they’d gone. “Stopped for a drink and then I took her home,” he said. “We didn’t see you.”
“I went backstage to interview Lily Lake. That lasted about five minutes.”
“Find out anything?”
Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 787 & 788, March/April 2007 Page 29