Celebrity in Death

  “But the two of you went up to the roof,” Eve reminded him.

  “Yeah. We had this plan. We went up earlier, before dinner—just to take a look around, sit down, and talk it through. We decided we’d go up together, confront her, make her threaten us again, talk about the PI and the camera, all that. Marlo had a recorder in her purse. Then we’d tell K.T. if she followed through, we’d take the recording to the cops. Maybe people would get off watching the two of us in bed, but they’d get off big-time when K.T. Harris went to jail for blackmail and accessory to … I don’t know. Marlo had a whole freaking list.”

  “And how did that go over with Harris?”

  “It didn’t, because she was dead when we got up there. Look, I argued with her earlier in the evening. I asked her to forget all this, just grab some sanity and back off before it went too far to handle. And she grabbed my crotch.”

  He tipped his head back, stared at the ceiling. “Jesus. She grabbed my balls, and said, ‘I’ve got you by these, baby, and you’d better remember it.’”

  He took a breath, looked back at Eve. “We should’ve told you. We should’ve told you everything straight out, but it all seemed so … huge. And we didn’t have any proof. After we realized she was dead, after the CPR didn’t work, Marlo looked through K.T.’s purse.” He winced. “I know that sounds cold, but she was dead, and we wanted to … How would you feel?” he demanded. “How would you feel if a bunch of strangers sat around watching you and Roarke in bed, or you and McNab?”

  “I’d probably want to cause harm to the person responsible.”

  “We were going to. Marlo’s way—your way. But there wasn’t any vid or any part of one in her bag. She must’ve been lying all along. I don’t get it. I swear to God, I don’t know why she’d lie. Maybe she thought I’d just cave, then when I didn’t she had to save face. I don’t know.”

  “Or maybe you’d had enough. You got mad, and you pushed. Who’d blame you? After that, it just happened so fast. Impulse and rage. Maybe you didn’t mean to kill her, didn’t mean for her to drown. You just wanted the video, wanted to protect yourselves, your privacy, the project. But then you didn’t get her out in time.”

  “No. No. No. She was in the pool, facedown, when we got up there. We didn’t even think of the video until … I tried. We both tried. Everything happened exactly the way we told you. We left out the blackmail, the threats. But it happened exactly the way we said. I swear to you.”

  “Including Marlo going up with you, with a recorder on her?”

  “Yeah. Like I said, we were going to—” The light seemed to dawn, like a switch flicked. “Jesus Christ, we’re idiots. We’ve been so … We’ve got a recording. Marlo turned it on when we started up. We tested it first. We have a recording.”

  EVE DECIDED TO RESERVE JUDGMENT ON WHETHER Marlo and Matthew qualified as idiots, innocents, or calculators. In the meantime, she kept Matthew cooling his heels in one interview room while Peabody contacted Marlo, requested she come into Central.

  “We’ll take Julian while we’re waiting for her to come in,” Eve told her partner. “When she does, we’ll see what we see—or don’t. And we’ll see if pretend Roarke has any little secrets pretend Peabody sussed out.”

  “I don’t like to think of her as pretend Peabody anymore. The more we find out, the meaner and crazier she gets. It’s like it’s bad enough fake Peabody got murdered, but now fake Peabody is a dead, blackmailing asshole on top of it. It’s depressing.”

  “Yeah, it’s all really too bad for you.”

  “Well, it kind of is. How am I supposed to enjoy the vid now, when I’ll be thinking how behind the scenes I was trying to blackmail McNab into bed, and the whole time he’s in love with you? And that maybe there’s a vid of the two of you all naked and sexy and—”

  “Stop right there before I boot.”

  “Hey! Maybe there’s a vid of fake Peabody and fake Roarke all naked and sexy. That would definitely make up for it. Maybe I can get a copy.”

  “There’s going to be a vid of me tearing strips off your ass then using them to wallpaper my office. I’ll make copies for everybody. Get Marlo down here. I’ll start on Julian.”

  Eve headed to Interview. Inside Julian sat, head in hands. When he lifted his face, he was pale, hollow-eyed, unshaven.

  “I don’t feel well,” he began.

  “Don’t look well either. Record on. Dallas, Lieutenant Eve, in Interview with Cross, Julian.” She added the pertinent data, sat.

  “I’m fasting,” he told her.

  “Is that so? Is that a mourning for Harris deal?”

  “A—no. I drank too much. Then the Sober-Up, the blocker, and I took a sleeping pill when I got back to the hotel. It’s all too much for my system. I’m taking nothing but clear liquids today, to flush out the toxins.”

  “That’s one way.”

  “Do I need a lawyer this time?”

  “Do you want one?”

  “I want to go home, go to bed. I want to wake up yesterday before all of this happened. It’s like a dream, a really bad dream.”

  “You argued with K.T.”

  “At dinner.”

  “After dinner. Before the gag reel.”

  “I did?” His eyes, bloodshot and dull, stared into hers. “About what she said at dinner? I was upset, embarrassed. Did I tell you already?”

  “Some of it. How about when she came banging on your trailer door yesterday? What did she want then?”

  “I … don’t remember.”

  “Bullshit, Julian. You weren’t drunk then. I have a witness who saw her banging on your door. And she was angry, insistent.” The timing worked, Eve thought, and she was banking Peabody had heard Harris yelling outside Julian’s trailer.

  “She was always angry about something,” he said with a shrug.

  “She wanted you to claim you and Marlo were having an affair.”

  “That’s just studio hype. It’s—”

  “No, Julian. She wanted you to tell Matthew you and Marlo were screwing around behind his back. Matthew and Marlo are involved. Harris didn’t like it. She wanted you to help her break them up.”

  “I didn’t know Matthew and Marlo were a thing.”

  “Until?”

  “Yesterday. When K.T. started raging about it. They’re really good at keeping it low. I could see it last night, when I looked for it. Up until then, I just thought they were friends. Maybe they had sex—it happens—but I didn’t know they were a thing.”

  “Why would she expect you to do what she wanted, to tell Matthew Marlo cheated on him with you?”

  “Hell if I know. And I wouldn’t. I like Marlo. I like Matthew.” Sincerity shimmered in his voice. “I’m not going to do anything to hurt them like that.”

  “It didn’t bother you that Marlo preferred Matthew to you?”

  “Actually, it was good to find out there was a reason she turned me down.”

  “Not used to getting turned down, are you?”

  “Not much,” he said, without a whiff of pride or shame. “I get a lot of sex. I like it. It’s fun, and after, I’m really relaxed. I’m okay that Marlo wants to be with Matthew. Somebody else will want to be with me, right?”

  Hard to argue, she thought, with someone who seemed to think sex was as simple and available as a fizzy at the corner 24/7. And for him, maybe it was.

  When Peabody walked in, Julian visibly winced, then looked down at the table.

  “Peabody, Detective Delia, entering Interview. Thanks for coming in, Julian,” Peabody continued. “Do you want anything? Something to drink?”

  He shook his head, then glanced at her. “Actually, could I have some water? I’m pushing fluids.”

  “No problem.” Peabody recorded her exit.

  “You didn’t want to let Harris in to your trailer yesterday,” Eve continued. “Why is that?”

  “She was yelling. I didn’t want a confrontation.”

  “What did she have to confront you about???
?

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” He dropped his head in his hands again. “It was always something with her.”

  Peabody came back, set a bottle of water on the table by Julian.

  “What was she holding over your head, Julian? That was another ‘always something’ with her. What did she say she’d do if you refused to lie about Marlo?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Eve glanced at Peabody, nodded slightly.

  “Julian.” Peabody reached out, and when she touched Julian’s hand, he pulled back.

  “Sorry.” He glanced up, looked down again. “It—you—remind me.”

  “But I’m not K.T. I’m not going to yell at you, or threaten you, or say things to make you feel bad. She did that. To you. To a lot of people.”

  “I don’t know why some people can’t just be nice. Be happy.”

  “She wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t nice. And she always looked for the bad side. Everybody’s got a bad side, or something they don’t want other people to know. She liked to find out, and then use that to make someone hurt, or to pressure them to do something they didn’t want. What did she find out about you?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it wasn’t my fault.”

  “I believe you.”

  “We were clubbing. I’d just landed the lead in Forgiven. It was mega, a career-maker, so a bunch of us were celebrating. We’d partied pretty hard all night. Drinking, illegals. I don’t do them anymore, but I did. Maybe a little zoner or Hype, something was always right there, like party favors. Women, too. Just there.”

  “Forgiven. That came out about ten years ago. You were really young,” Peabody said in that same understanding tone. “Hardly twenty.”

  “Twenty-three. It was a major break, a lot of money. We were all high from celebrating, and at this sex club. In and out of the privacy rooms, you know how you do.” He shrugged, drank some water.

  “Sure,” Peabody agreed, though she didn’t.

  “Then we went back to my place, and some of the women came so we could party some more. And two of them went back to my room with me. In the morning, they’re still there. We just passed out together after. And this guy’s at the door, and he’s screaming. How he’s going to kill me. One of the girls is his daughter. She’s sixteen. Both of them are fucking sixteen.”

  He covered his face with his hands, rubbed hard before he dropped them. “How was I supposed to know? They shouldn’t have been in the club. They had bogus IDs, and they said they were twenty-one. I didn’t make them have sex with me. I didn’t force them. But I bought them drinks, I gave them illegals, I had sex with them. If I’d known they were only sixteen I wouldn’t have. I swear. They didn’t look sixteen or act sixteen, and they were in a sex club and all over me.

  “He said he was calling the cops, having me arrested for statutory rape. Everybody’s screaming, and he slapped his kid. He really hit her hard, and he jumped me when I tried to stop him from hitting her again. My buddies dragged him off. The girls are hysterical. One of my friends is a lawyer, and he started talking all this legal shit about how the girls were going to end up in juvie, and this guy was going up for assault. It just got worse and worse.”

  “What happened?” Peabody asked when he fell silent.

  “I gave them money. A lot of money to make it stop. To make it go away. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong when I was doing it. But it would’ve ruined me. If I’d gotten charged with rape, I’d have been finished. It could still ruin me.”

  “And K.T. found out.”

  “That’s what she does,” he said, bitterly now. “She finds out. Then she puts the screws to you when it suits her. I never did anything to her, but she said she was going to leak what happened to the media. She even had the names of the guy and his daughter. She said I’d go to jail, and no studio would hire me again. It was almost ten years ago, and she said I’d go to jail.”

  “Unless you played along with her and lied about Marlo?”

  “Yeah. She said I had to tell Matthew we were screwing on the side, and give him details.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I said no. I wasn’t going to do that to friends. And she said they weren’t my friends. Did I think either of them would go to jail for me? She scared me.”

  He took another drink, a long one.

  “What did you do?”

  “I got ahold of my lawyer friend and told him what K.T. said. He said I should stall her, and he’d find out where the girl was now, what she was doing. He said I wouldn’t go to jail because there’s a statute of limitations thing, and I was okay there. But still, I didn’t want all this hashed around in the media. My friend said it was a good bet the girl and her father wouldn’t want all that coming out either, so it would be K.T.’s word against mine. But I should stall her, tell her I had to think about it until he looked into it a little.”

  “Did you talk to her about it last night?” Eve asked him.

  “I tried to stay out of her way. Then she pulled that bullshit at dinner. It was worse because I knew what she wanted me to say, to do. So I just kept drinking so I wouldn’t think about it. She cornered me, started on me again. I told her to just leave me the hell alone. I wasn’t going to talk to her about it with all those people around. I think I said something stupid about my lawyer looking into it.” He rubbed his head. “Or I thought it, and didn’t say it. I don’t know. It’s blurry. I drank too much.”

  He dropped his head into his hands again. “Connie’s right.”

  “About what?” Eve asked.

  “Drinking doesn’t make problems go away. Just because you can’t remember them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

  To keep it rolling, Eve shifted straight to Marlo, and wondered if she should tell her fictional counterpart she was currently showing too many nerves for a cop. Instead, she read the data into record, dropped down at the table.

  “You got here fast.”

  “I was … already downtown.”

  “Waiting for Matthew to finish up. Let’s save more time. We’re aware you and Matthew are involved, and hoped to keep the relationship private. We’re aware K.T. clued in, found the loft you and Matthew are using, and of her attempt to blackmail you with a recording of the two of you in an intimate situation.”

  “You’re aware of quite a bit. I hope you’re aware that Matthew didn’t hurt her. We weren’t going to take her blackmail, bullying, and bullshit anymore, but we didn’t kill her.”

  “She told you she’d hired a PI to break into your place, to plant a camera, to subsequently break in again to retrieve same. But you didn’t bring this information to the police.”

  “No. It was private. Do you know how precious private is when you have so little of it? Besides, we didn’t know who she’d hired. If we’d gone to the police with the story, she’d have just denied it. How could we prove it? We decided that was how to handle the whole ugly mess. Prove it.”

  “How?”

  “Matthew agreed to meet her on the roof, but we were both going—with a recorder I had in my bag. We’d get her to talk about the break-in, the blackmail. Then we’d tell her to shove it. We’d have something to bargain with, you see? If she went public with what she had, we’d not only go public with her admission, we’d file charges.”

  She nodded briskly, righteously. “Criminal trespass, extortion, sexual harassment. But when we got up there, she was in the water. She was already dead. Matthew—listen to me—he didn’t even hesitate. He went in after her. Despite what she’d done, what she threatened to do, he tried to save her. He tried so hard.”

  Tears shimmered now along with the urgency in her voice. “He’d have saved her life if he could have. But we were too late. And now, we didn’t tell you all of this because we didn’t want the suspicion, the media nightmare, the fallout. We didn’t deserve it. We haven’t done anything but fall
in love.”

  “That’s nice for you, but you’ve also obstructed justice by withholding relevant information.”

  “Fine.” She sat back, shrugged in a jerk. “Arrest me. We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Where’s the recording K.T. had on you?”

  “I don’t know.” Marlo all but spat it out. “Maybe it was all a lie, all of it. A bluff. She said she’d show Matthew a preview, so if she had it, she should have had it with her. But …”

  “You looked for it.”

  “All right, yes. Maybe that was cold and self-serving, but she was dead. We couldn’t do anything about that. And if you found the recording, who would you look at for her murder? And the recording would find its way to the damn media, you can count on it. So I looked in her bag, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t on her, or in the bag, or anywhere I could find up there. So I guess you can add attempted theft and compromising a crime scene to my list of sins.”

  “It’s a bad time to cop an attitude, Marlo,” Eve said mildly. “Where’s your recording?”

  “I just told you, she didn’t have any recording.”

  “Not hers. Yours.”

  “My …” Her face froze. The hand she lifted to shove at her hair dropped to the table. “My recorder. It was on. God, it was on the whole time. I got so focused on hers, I forgot. It’s in my bag. It’s still in my evening bag. Everything was so crazy and complicated and awful. It’s still in my bag, at the loft. I’ll go get it.” She shoved to her feet. “I’ll go get it, and you’ll see what happened. You’ll see we didn’t kill her.”

  “I’m going to have two officers escort you back to the loft. They’ll bring the recording in. Just an aside, Marlo. We have an excellent EDD here. If it’s been tampered with, edited, screwed around with, we’ll know.”

  “Good.” She squared her jaw, her shoulders. “Because it hasn’t been, so you’ll know that, too. I hated her. She was a sick, bitter bully. A manipulator who would have been happy to ruin my life. But I didn’t want her dead. I wanted her to know, and to live with the fact that I was smarter, stronger, and just better than she was. I wanted her to live with the fact that when the project was complete, I was going to show the recording I’d made to Roundtree, to the producers, and her life would be ruined. She’d have been lucky to get a part playing a housewife on an ad blimp. That’s what I wanted.”