A Job to Kill For

by Janice Kaplan

  “Given all the news coverage on Cassie, you must be getting a lot of alerts,” I said.

  “Yeah, but I get through the junk pretty fast, and I never would have found this necklace otherwise. Cassie’s name wasn’t in the Christie’s catalogue or anything, just in the fine print online that discloses provenance and stuff like that.”

  “Good for you,” I said. Then, trying to figure it out, I added, “So Cassie put the necklace up for auction before she died?”

  “Exactly what I wondered,” said Grant. “So I called Christie’s and asked about the whole history of the necklace—you know, blood diamond, conflict diamond, all that. Said I needed to know because I was interested in bidding.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Very resourceful, but you shouldn’t lie.”

  “I didn’t lie. I would be interested in bidding if I had the money. True fact.”

  I tried to look stern but felt the corners of my mouth twitching. “Okay, so what happened?”

  He shrugged. “It took a while, but they connected me to some expert appraiser who traced the diamond back to 1904 in Canada. Before he hung up, I said I wanted to ask a hypothetical question. If I ran a hedge fund and my fiancée had psychic powers, could I buy her this diamond?”

  “A fiancée with psychic powers?” I shook my head. “I didn’t even know you were dating.”

  “I said it was hypothetical,” Grant said indignantly. “If he thought I meant me, well, that’s his problem, right?”

  I couldn’t argue. Actually, I could, but why bother?

  “So what did you learn?”

  “He said I didn’t have to worry about a blood diamond in the people-being-killed-in-South-Africa way, but there might be some bad vibes because the second-to-last owner had died. Cassie Crawford.”

  “Second-to-last?”

  “Apparently Cassie had given it to some guy who contacted Christie’s and put it up for sale. They verified the diamond’s authenticity. No record of theft.”

  “Who was the guy?” I asked, not able to resist.

  “Somebody named Billy Mann.”

  “Billy Mann?” I tried to keep my voice even, but as usual, my face gave me away.

  “Wow, Mom, you know him, right? I can tell,” Grant said, immediately reading my expression. Forget the World Series of Poker, I’d be out in the first round of gin rummy.

  “I met him briefly,” I said, deciding not to mention the ride on his motorbike and my little dip into the ocean.

  “What do you think? Is he a suspect? I say Billy Mann stole the necklace and killed Cassie before she could report it.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she gave it to him as a gift. They were friends.”

  “Some good friend. Jake’s my friend—and he just gave me a used hard drive he found at the dump,” Grant said.

  “Maybe Cassie and Billy were more than friends,” I amended, incapable of using the word lover in front of my son. But he immediately understood.

  “Then it’s easy,” Grant said, already envisioning their romping. “Billy snagged the necklace after they had sex, and he killed Cassie before she could take it back.”

  “No way,” I said, shaking my head. “Cassie must have gotten the necklace as a gift from Roger. So she would have been married by the time she had it. She wouldn’t be having sex with Billy.”

  “Mom, haven’t you ever heard of extramarital affairs?” Grant asked, with just a trace of condescension. “This is LA. Everyone does it.”

  Uh-oh. I didn’t have a good answer for this one. I could get on my moral high horse and lecture Grant about love and honor. But my son was old enough to drive a car, go to R-rated movies, and join the Marines. He had surging testosterone and a subscription to Maxim. We could talk honestly.

  “Let me just clarify that everyone doesn’t do it,” I said, hitting a middle ground. “If I’m having sex, it’s with your dad.”

  Grant flushed. No kid wants to think about his parents in bed. Sunday school lessons about the Virgin Birth make perfect sense because we all figure it’s how we got here, too.

  “Fair enough, but all I’m saying is that it happens,” Grant said, with more sophistication than he probably felt. “For all we know, Cassie and Billy Mann could have slept together the night before she died.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want Grant involved, but at this point, I couldn’t turn him away, either. He liked puzzles, and since he could solve a Rubik’s cube in under three minutes and got bored with Sudoku, this was his next challenge.

  “Billy lives on a fancy boat at Marina del Rey,” I said, deciding to share some information. “It’s too complicated to explain, but I think Cassie might have visited him there recently.”

  “Maybe a final fling,” Grant said.

  I nodded thoughtfully, envisioning the scene. Worried about losing Roger, Cassie came in her yellow gown and glorious jewels to end her affair with Billy. He took the news well but didn’t like it. Somehow he got the diamond from her and then concocted a plan. Normally, you didn’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg, but if it threatened to be the last egg you ever got, why not?

  “I don’t want to jump to conclusions,” I said, thinking about the night the cops had come to the house. As I’d told them regarding orchids, don’t pick a favorite until you’ve seen ’em all.

  Grant nodded. “Well, Billy Mann must have some story about how he got Cassie’s twenty-carat rock. You could ask him.” Then, suddenly concerned for my safety, he added, “Or maybe you should ask the police to ask him.”

  I took back the printout of the necklace, folded the page, and tucked it in my bag. “The police have enough on their hands,” I said.

  “Be careful, Mom. You have to admit that a million-dollar diamond is a pretty good motive for murder.”

  Dawn Rose, Andy Daniels’s assistant at Genius Productions, called to say Andy needed to talk to me. Could we meet the next morning?

  “How late will he be?” I asked, remembering our last meeting.

  “Right on time,” she promised. “He has something to share.”

  “Sharing” used to be reserved for kindergarten classes and AA meetings, but now it meant anything and everything. I didn’t know if Andy wanted to share his deepest thoughts or a deep-dish pizza.

  “Should I come to your office?”

  “No, a different place. I’ll e-mail you directions.”

  The next morning, I drove across the Santa Monica Mountains, then followed the directions I’d printed out. After about thirty minutes, the houses got sparser and sparser and gave way to horse farms and open rolling lands. This wasn’t the parched, ragged countryside I remembered from growing up in rural Ohio. Irrigation sprinklers spread a gentle rain, and the grazing fields that extended as far as the eye could see appeared as perfect as the gardener-tended lawns of Beverly Hills. There was more green here than in a studio executive’s wallet.

  Though I hadn’t traveled all that far from LA, my Lexus seemed to be one of the few cars on the road. I felt a moment of trepidation. Should I be venturing into unknown territory to encounter someone I’d met because of a murder? A silver-haired man driving a vintage Bentley passed me in the opposite direction, and I felt a little better. Oh, for heaven’s sakes, Andy Daniels wasn’t exactly a suspect. Just because he once knew Cassie didn’t mean he’d poisoned her.

  I turned up a long winding driveway lined with palm trees. The asphalt quickly gave way to gravel, then to a short dirt path surrounded by more of the tall, leafy plants. Funny how palms, a tree indigenous to the tropics, had become a symbol of Hollywood.

  I pulled into a clearing, got out of the car, and walked slowly toward the low-slung white building in front of me. A rehab center? Spa? Buddhist retreat? I couldn’t tell.

  This time, I didn’t have to wait for Andy. As soon as I walked in the door, he strolled toward me, wearing a white terry bathrobe and sandals. His curly hair jumped out from his head, wild and uncontrolled, but otherwise he looked calmer than last time. Somehow,
he’d contained the hyperactive energy in his small, slim frame.

  “You were my inspiration,” he said when he saw me. “So you have to hear about my new show.”

  “Oh,” I said, taken aback. Like last time, he hadn’t bothered with “hello.” But I’d come all this way to talk television?

  “Right after you came to my office, I had a breakthrough. You wanted to talk about Cassie, so it suddenly hit me. How could I have missed it? Doo-do DOO-do, Doo-do DOO-doo…” He let his voice rise and fall in the singsong theme of The Twilight Zone.

  “Weird, right?” he continued. “Cassie works on World’s Worst Ways to Die, and then she dies. She’s an assistant on How to Bed a Billionaire and she marries a billionaire. Something’s going on. Must be energy fields.”

  “Or coincidence,” I suggested.

  “No such thing,” Andy said. “Come on outside.”

  I followed him through the room—empty except for a skylight and highly polished wood floors—to a back door.

  Outside, we walked along a dirt hiking trail, then passed through a locked fence that opened when Andy punched in a digital code. On the other side, the scenery changed, the dirt path taking on a reddish glow and the vegetation becoming low scrub and cactus. We went up an incline, steep enough that I started breathing heavily, which then flattened out to a large, smooth surface, probably fifty feet in diameter.

  Andy walked to the center and turned to face a free-form red-rock sculpture that towered over us. He lifted his chin so the sun shone down on his face, closed his eyes, and spread his arms to the side. I thought I heard a gentle humming from him.

  Something about the area seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “Where are we?” I asked Andy, not concerned about interrupting his meditation.

  He dropped his pose and came back to me. “The Vortex,” he said. “Can you feel the energy?”

  “What energy?”

  “From the Spirit Woman.” He waved in the direction of the rock, and I remembered a trip Dan and I had taken a few years ago to the red-rock country of Sedona. While enjoying the brilliant scenery, we heard about the New Age locals who scoped out areas—the “vortex sites”—where special magnetic fields could provide spiritual energy. In search of one, we hiked to a popular area dominated by a rock dubbed Kachina Woman. About a dozen people stood in front of the spirit, meditating in that same head-tilted, arms-outstretched pose Andy had just assumed. I’d tried it and started giggling so uncontrollably that Dan grabbed my hand and pulled me behind the rock. Out of sight of the spiritualists, Dan put his arms around me and kissed me. “I’ll show you what will really please Spirit Woman,” he’d said, as we lay down on the red rocks.

  “The only time I heard about a vortex was at a place just like this in Sedona,” I said now to Andy.

  “Exactly! I used to fly there on weekends when I needed inspiration. But my wife got tired of all the trips, so I had our own vortex built here.”

  I looked around, stunned. “You built this?” I asked.

  “Not just me,” he said modestly. “A few of us got together. Mostly other TV execs. Once I explained that all my show ideas came from the energy of the vortex, they wanted in.”

  “So this is…” I waved my hands, taking in the hiking trails, the red rocks, the towering sculpture.

  “A spot to stimulate the brainwaves,” Andy said, finishing my sentence.

  The place must have cost a small fortune to build. But given the odds against having a success on TV, looking for encouragement from a fake rock didn’t seem that strange. Every TV season brought thousands of pitches, hundreds of pilots, and maybe one or two that scored big. What other business gave you a bonus for a .010 batting average? Given the money that spewed from a hit, I could see why anxious execs would try anything. A few seasons of Cheers and you could have all the Kachina women you wanted. Produce another Seinfeld and you should sacrifice Prada-and-pearls to the statues every night.

  “It’s lovely here,” I said looking around. “But if I remember from Sedona, you have a vortex at a spot where the earth’s energy is increased.”

  “Right. Everything we created here increases the earth’s energy.” He spun around, as if being pulled by that very energy. Who was I to say it couldn’t be transported? Some of the souvenir shops in Sedona sold containers labeled VORTEX IN A CAN.

  Now Andy walked to the other side of the clearing and motioned to me to join him. I noticed that six glass tea cups, each half-filled, had been lined up on a rock.

  “I’ll give you a demonstration of the new show I created with the help of the energy fields,” Andy said. He picked up one of the cups and held it out to me. “To start, drink up. Chamomile tea with Ginkgo biloba. Very good for you.”

  I took a sip. The liquid was warm from the sun, slightly sweet and very pleasant. I drank a little more.

  “Imagine you’re a contestant on a game show,” he said. “The more you drink, the more money you win. Drain five glasses, and it’s a million bucks. But here’s the rub. One of the cups is poisoned.”

  My mouth had started burning. I dropped the cup and watched it smash against the rock.

  Andy grinned. “Arsenic. Cyanide. Diethylene glycol. All sorts of possibilities. I finally figured out the problem with most game shows. You don’t really have anything to lose.”

  He reached down for another cup and handed it to me. I stepped back.

  “You didn’t really poison one of them,” I said, with more certainty than I felt.

  “Why not? Russian roulette is the greatest game of all time, and it’s never been on TV. We’d have an antidote ready for contestants who cooperated.” He looked at me steadily. “Get it?”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked in a scratchy voice. My tongue seemed to be swelling in my mouth and my throat felt ripped raw. Was it poison or sheer terror?

  “How are you feeling?” he asked, looking at me carefully.

  “Not good,” I admitted. My whole head burned, and I put a hand up to my throat. No, it wasn’t psychosomatic. Something other than sugar had been in that cup. If only I’d read the tea leaves.

  “Wouldn’t that be something if I accidentally gave you the bad cup,” he said, tightening the belt on his terry robe. “What are the odds? Just one in six, but you never know.”

  “Odds are one hundred percent,” I said. “You filled the cups and put them out.”

  “Well, as I said, an antidote.” He took a vial out of his pocket and held it in his hand.

  I sat down, barely noticing as the red earth imported from Arizona stained my Tracy Burch white pants. Right now, I didn’t care about clothes, Cassie, or Kachina. I just wanted to keep from fainting. I put my head between my knees.

  “Tell me what you want from me,” I said, feeling beads of perspiration popping out on my forehead.

  Andy sat down next to me and folded his legs under him. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, you’re going to be fine. I just needed to get your attention. It’s like the start of a show. Grab ’em and you’ve got ’em.”

  “Okay, you’ve got me.”

  “So here’s what I want you to understand,” he said, tossing the vial from one hand to the other. “You came to my office and asked a lot of questions about Cassie. But she worked for me years ago. She left years ago. And what happened then has nothing to do with…anything.”

  It suddenly came back to me how uncomfortable Andy had been at the very end of our conversation last time, when I asked why Cassie had left Genius Productions—just got up and left her perfect job. I hadn’t thought to investigate any further, but he didn’t know that.

  “The whole scandal about Cassie leaving your company got nicely covered up,” I said, taking a stab. How far off could I be? In LA, scandals ranged from a drug-driven orgy in the private room of a celebrity club to losing so much weight that the size 0 Versace didn’t fit.

  Andy flushed. “Maybe it would have been a scandal if we worked at Goldman S
achs, but this is television. The entertainment business. Late nights, close contact, a lot of adrenaline. Sex happens.”

  “You and Cassie,” I said, catching on and trying to picture the two of them.

  “I’m in love with my wife!” Andy said, springing up from his seated position to a crouch. He rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Really. I swear. Nobody loves his wife more than me.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said.

  Andy plopped down again and stared at me with his big blue eyes. “Everybody’s entitled to one stupid mistake, but I don’t want it coming out during a murder investigation.”

  “Your wife doesn’t know?”

  “Of course not. It had nothing to do with her.”

  “But you slept with Cassie.” Was Grant right that everyone in LA behaved badly?

  “More like we fell into bed together very late one night when we were out on a shoot. The next day we both regretted it.”

  “You regretted it because you felt guilty. What about Cassie?”

  “Come to think of it, maybe she didn’t regret it. I’m pretty good in the sack.”

  More than I wanted to know. “Anyway, you fired her.”

  “Never. I wouldn’t have done that. Cassie decided she didn’t want to put me in a bad position. She quit at the end of the week.” Andy looked at me, concerned. “How you feeling now?”

  “Lousy.” I licked my bottom lip and felt blisters forming on my tongue. Is that what happened just before you died?

  Andy stood up. “Everybody had forgotten about my dumb fling. But then you came to my office asking about Cassie and why she left.” He shook his head and rubbed his sandal into the red sand. “After you left, I talked to one of the honchos at the network to get some advice. My shows make them so damned much money, he didn’t want any scandal.”

  “So he told you to poison me?”

  “He told me to do whatever it takes to make sure the story doesn’t come out.”

  I wiped the back of my hand across my damp forehead.

  “Only reason I’ll spill your story is if I find some other connection between you and Cassie,” I said. “Otherwise, your secret’s safe. I’m glad you’ve got a guilty conscience, but that’s between you and Spirit Woman.”