Nobody's Damsel

by E. M. Tippetts

  “Yeah, I’ll come with you. It’s worth a try, right? I did have that one strand of hair that’s bleached blond that I told you about. I mean… I know it’s a tenuous connection. Never mind.”

  “Let’s go talk to this woman.”

  Miguel was surprised when I told him what Detective Baca wanted, but he didn’t argue.

  Moments later I was blinking in the bright sunshine as I stepped out the door and crossed over to Detective Baca’s car, which was a plain gray sedan. I slipped into the passenger seat and fastened my seatbelt.

  “I appreciate you doing this, Miss Chloe,” he said. He had his sunglasses back on, which made him more familiar at once.

  “Of course.”

  “How’ve you been otherwise? Settling in all right?”

  “Yeah, I moved into my house yesterday. No more crashing with relatives.”

  “Saw that husband of yours in a movie over the weekend. Well, my nieces were watching it, one of those New Light movies.”

  “Still popular.”

  “I’ll say. Didn’t mention that I knew you.”

  “It’d score points with them.”

  “Eh, you need your own life. Seems like the media follow you everywhere.”

  As if on cue, the white sedan pulled out of a parking lot down the street. Or maybe I was paranoid. There were a lot of white cars in the world. “Fame is weird,” I agreed. “Not sure why people care what I look like walking around town.”

  “You’re an unusual kind of person, Miss Chloe. It’s rare enough to survive a homicide attempt, and it’s rare to tame an internationally famous playboy. Both those traits in one person, that’s something people haven’t seen before.”

  Even Detective Baca knew about Jason’s wild past. Most people seemed to know more about it than I did. I hadn’t tamed Jason; only Jason could do that. His marriage proposal after less than a year of dating had been a surprise to me, and maybe its suddenness should have been a red flag. Now I wondered if it had come too soon. Maybe if he’d waited and reached some final conclusion with Vicki, he wouldn’t be getting his picture taken with his arm around her. I did my best to squelch these thoughts and focus on the case. Jason had answered every question I’d asked and made it clear he was committed to me. He agreed with me that the arm around was a mistake, while not every guy would. I needed to let all this go. Still… today he’d begun his shoot with Vicki and I didn’t feel quite right about it.

  There wasn’t much traffic, so we were soon over on the West Side, pulling into the driveway of an unremarkable house with white siding, a gray asphalt shingle roof, and two spinning windchimes, one on each side of the front door. The rock garden in the front yard had a good crop of weeds pushing their way up between the stones, and a barrel planter sat near the front porch, rotted and gray with some wilted perennials flopped over the rim. The air smelled like dry dust and sun baked asphalt.

  We got out of the car, walked through the too-bright sunshine up to the front door, and rang the bell, which chimed in deep tones inside the house.

  The door opened almost immediately and the woman I’d spoken to on the night of the crime stared at me, surprised. Her home smelled like warm potpourri and she wore a t-shirt and gray sweatpants.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Chloe Vanderholt and-”

  “I remember.”

  “We need to know about your 911 call.”

  “What about it?”

  Just like that? She admitted she’d made it? Hope surged in my chest. I didn’t care how many personal questions she asked if only she’d let us move forward with this case.

  “You said you heard gunshots?”

  She glanced at the detective. “I didn’t actually hear gunshots.”

  “Okay.” Apparently the, “trust me, I’m married to a guy you’ve seen in movies” card worked like a charm.

  “So are you going to arrest me for lying to the police?” she asked.

  “We just want to find the girl,” said Detective Baca. “So we really need to know what you know. That’s it.”

  “I saw a car drive up to the house, park for about five minutes, then drive off way too fast. It just looked wrong, but I didn’t think the police would take that seriously, so I said I heard gunshots.”

  “What did the car look like?” he asked.

  “White pickup truck.”

  “New or old?”

  “New. I guess. No patches of rust or big dents or anything.”

  “Do you know the make or model?”

  “No. I wouldn’t know something like that.”

  “Did you see the plates?”

  “I didn’t copy down the number.”

  “But did it have plates?”

  “Oh…” She put her head to one side. “I don’t know. Its windows were tinted very dark, so it could have had the registration in the window. I wouldn’t know.”

  “What time did this happen?”

  “About half an hour before my first call.”

  “Why did you wait half an hour?”

  “I wasn’t sure whether to say anything or not.”

  “Have you ever seen that truck before?”

  “No. I don’t know. It was just a white pickup truck.” She shrugged.

  “Okay, listen, that is all very important to know. You’ve given us more information in the last five minutes than we’ve had in days. Please come to the station for questioning.”

  She looked sidelong at Detective Baca, then at me. Her demeanor was wary. For once I was grateful for being a five foot six woman with big brown eyes. I knew I didn’t look the least bit intimidating.

  “Listen,” I said, “I was abducted when I was a little girl.”

  The woman nodded. She knew, thanks to the tabloids.

  “And Detective Baca here? He saved my life.”

  That earned him another good, hard look.

  “Miss Chloe’s being too kind,” he said. “I was one of the officers on the scene.”

  “For Esperanza’s sake, talk to the police. We’re all on the same side here, right?” I said.

  “Do you need me right now?”

  “Would another time be better?” Detective Baca asked.

  “I suppose I could come now.”

  “Do you know anyone else who saw anything?”

  She bit her lip. “Leah, next door. She saw. We talked about it before I called the police. You want me to get her too?”

  “If you could, yes. Anyone else?”

  “Maria kind of knew the lady across the street. None of us knew her well. She wasn’t sociable. But Maria will be at work.”

  “Had you ever been in that house? Where the shooting occurred?”

  “No. Never.”

  I wanted to feel certain that she was lying, just so I could feel certain about something, but that hair I’d found on the floor of the crime scene might not have been hers. Or, if it had been hers, it could have been carried in on someone’s clothing, a mutual acquaintance, for example. “You’re a lifesaver,” is what I chose to say instead. “Literally. Anything you can tell the police, we’d really appreciate.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why’d you make your husband quit his latest movie?”

  “I’m sorry? He hasn’t quit-”

  “The news just broke fifteen minutes ago. He quit the movie. The one with Vicki Hanson.”

  “Oh… I guess it fell apart. They were trying-”

  “Did you really go to LA over the weekend and lay down an ultimatum?”

  I shook my head and willed my face to be impassive, only, I couldn’t seem to make it obey. “No, that’s just made up by the tabloids. The film was having some difficulties. My guess is that they couldn’t agree on new contracts.”

  She didn’t look the least bit convinced. And this was all so irrelevant to the matter at hand.

  “Will you come with the detective now?”

  “Yeah. But just so you know, if you force Jason to choo
se between you and Vicki, you’ll lose.”

  “Noted.”

  “She doesn’t push him around. You’re just asking for a divorce.”

  I glanced at Detective Baca who just shook his head but held his peace. After a few more barbed comments at me, she gathered her things and called her friends.

  The moment I got out of Detective Baca’s sedan outside the crime lab, I called Jason. The sun beat down so fiercely that even in the shade of the building, I had to squint.

  “Yeah, I know what you’re calling about.”

  “Everything all right?”

  “I’ll be home in an hour or two.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’ll talk about it tonight. Suffice it to say, they fired Vicki, and I told them that if they did that, I’d quit, so they did and I did.”

  “So you really did quit?” This was not the Jason I knew. My Jason was obsessed with being professional and staying bankable. He did not storm out on a project on the first day of shooting.

  “We’ll talk tonight, okay?”

  Kyra called me at work just before five, while I was dusting a drinking glass for prints. “Can you go to the movies with me or something?”

  “Not tonight, but tomorrow, sure.”

  “Okay…”

  “What’s up?”

  “Nothing new. Not really…”

  “You need to talk?” I moved over by the window so I’d get better reception.

  “Maybe…”

  I wished I could drop everything and go see her, but I’d already promised the evening to Jason. “Listen, I’ll call you later on tonight, okay? You’ll be all right until then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Love you.”

  “Thanks.” There was a note of surprise in her voice.

  I suppose that was the first time I’d said that to her. Nobody at the lab glared at me for talking on the phone. They didn’t even seem to notice. Only days had passed since I began work here, yet everyone was getting used to me already. That was something to feel good about.

  Five minutes later, Detective Baca called my office line. “Listen, I want to thank you for coming to help,” he said.

  “Are you done questioning them all?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. All we got from them was the white pickup truck, which the father does drive.”

  I resisted the urge to pound my head against the desk. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. Just gotta think of the next move to make here, and that’s progress, even if it’s not the kind we want.”

  “I guess.”

  “You have a good evening, Miss Chloe.”

  “You too.”

  That evening I drove home to the new house, which was a sprawling mansion in the Sandia foothills, not too far from Jen’s place. Jason had chosen the property because it was hidden from the road by said foothills, undulations of rock with beads of juniper bush dotting them. The front gate was decorated with handmade posters and some flowers. Jason’s fans had already figured out where we lived, though there weren’t any to be seen right now. I drove on through, glanced at my rearview mirror, and frowned at the sight of the white sedan pulling over on the other side of the road. Honestly, did this guy not have a life at all?

  The house itself was twelve bedrooms and had an indoor theater, swimming pool, and gym. The living room had a six foot television screen and state of the art surround sound system and views out the picture windows of the jagged, Sandia Mountains (where Jason and I had had our first date-that-wasn’t-a-date) and the city sprawled across the plain. It felt more than a little ridiculous to own such a house.

  Jason hollered from some distance when I came in the back door and I couldn’t really guess where in the house he was, but a short time later he came jogging up the steps from the living room. He was way more relaxed than he’d been on Saturday and even grinned as he came over to sweep me into a kiss. “How was work?”

  “Kind of weird, but let’s talk about you first.”

  “How many paps followed you home?”

  “Just the one. Blond guy, white sedan. I think he’s from here.” I dropped my purse on the counter and took off my jacket. I was wearing my APD Crime Lab polo for the first time. Miguel hadn’t breathed a word about me buying extras for our coworkers, just doled out each person’s towards the end of the day and left it at that. We’d all changed into them as soon as we got them, as per the Chief’s request, even though we’d only had an hour of work left to go.

  Dinner was already laid out in the solarium, with its 180 degree views of the Sandias, the rolling foothills, and a small slice of Albuquerque that included the airport with its planes landing and taking off, small as toys from where we sat.

  “Okay, sorry, I’m curious,” said Jason as we sat down. “What was weird about your day?”

  “We couldn’t get any witnesses to talk about the Esperanza Dominguez case until I went over to ask about it.” I shrugged. “Makes no sense.”

  “Happens all the time. People who see you a lot feel like they know you, even if they don’t.”

  “Well, it worked to our advantage today.” If turning up three lukewarm witnesses and one new fact days after the incident counted as an advantage. “So what happened with your movie?”

  “Ye-ah…”

  I paused, my fork hovering inches from my mouth.

  He began to dish more salad onto my plate. He was Jen’s sibling through and through and always fed me when we ate together. “Vicki had some ideas for how to change the movie, and the producers wouldn’t go along with them.”

  “She was already under contract for the movie as it was, wasn’t she? Which means she’d agreed to how it was as it was, right?”

  “I need to talk to the producers, maybe cough up some money. I really don’t want them to resort to claiming my bond.”

  As Jason once explained it to me, all actors had to have a sort of insurance when they did their movies, a third party who would pay up if the actor failed to perform. One way to crater a career was to back out of or ruin projects. The studios would claim damages from your insurance – or bond, as it was called – which would then be more expensive the next time around. Or you could get a reputation for ruining projects, which would also increase the cost of your bond, even if no one had yet made a claim. If it became too expensive, you were unbankable.

  “Jason…” Spending money didn’t bother me. I still thought of it as his money. He’d earned it, and I didn’t have expensive tastes, so being less of a multi-multi-millionaire didn’t impact my quality of life at all. It was how out of character this all was that had me confused.

  He munched his salad, stabbing leaves with more ferocity than was strictly necessary. “I kind of had an argument with Angie, who is still mad at me.” Angie was his agent. “The thing was, Vicki’s right.”

  “About?”

  “I’m thirty years old, still playing the same, shallow character I played on the Disney channel. I’ve never done a film that makes any kind of difference.”

  “Define difference?”

  “It’s all the same kind of cheesy, formulaic garbage.”

  “What were you guys going to change about the film?”

  He stopped chewing and drank his water, then looked over at me. “We wanted to bump the rating up, from PG-13 to R.”

  “With more violence?”

  “More swearing, a little bit of nudity. Not together. Just Vicki.”

  “Why would she push for changes that make the project fall apart if she’s so concerned about her career?”

  “Because a successful career requires making the right choices, and she felt these were the right choices. We’ve been talking a lot about the craft and film and… she knows her stuff, all right?”

  “And I’m not an actress,” I admitted, “but it seems like part of the job of an actress is to know the business, like when to push for changes and when to work with what you’ve got and be grateful. I mean, you might call wh
at you do ‘formulaic garbage’, but you’re getting work, which seems like the first step to making a difference.”

  He looked across at me. “I just don’t know if I can do it anymore.”

  “Acting?” I asked.

  “Yeah, acting. I’m not sure I can do it anymore.”

  “Well, it’s your life and your career. I won’t boss you around. What do you want from me?”

  “It wouldn’t bother you if I quit?” He had his hackles up. I’d said the wrong thing, apparently.

  I took a moment to compose my answer. “Are you seriously talking about quitting or are you hoping for some kind of specific reaction from me?”

  He made a face like he’d just bitten down on something bitter, which meant I’d hit near the mark. “It’s hard to keep working when you don’t believe in what you’re doing anymore.”

  “You’re very good at what you do. If you quit, the world will miss out.”

  “On what?”

  This felt like a test. If I gave the wrong answer, “entertainment” instead of “meaningful cinematic experiences”, for example, he’d get even more upset. The thing was, I wasn’t an artistic person. I’d had to lean heavily on my English major best friend to get through college. If it couldn’t be boiled down to an equation or depicted in a diagram, I was lost. “What you do matters.”

  “Why, because people need their dreams?”

  This was something I’d said to him the night before we got engaged, when I tried to share with him how his movies had affected me. It stung to have it thrown back at me like this. “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t want to just make people escape into la-la land.”

  “Listen… let’s make a deal. I let you be the expert in your career, and you let me be the expert in mine, and let’s not do this to each other.”

  “When have I ever bossed you around in your career?”

  “Jas… how many times did I say I wanted to put off starting this job?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Now I couldn’t meet his gaze. “I told you I didn’t want to start my job right now. I told you I wanted to take a few months off… you know what? Never mind. This is off topic.”

  “Just… no. Explain.”

  “A lot’s happened in my life in the last six months.”