Beware Beware (20 page)

It was all the welcome I needed.

“I'm trying to find out what happened to Joe. If you can help me at all, I need to talk to you.”

“Little Miss Private Investigator. I knew you'd be a pain in my ass.”

“Is it so painful to help someone find your client's murderer?”

“What do you think I've been doing, picking my goddamn nose? I told the police whatever I could.”

He had a point. I didn't look quite as competent and official as Detective Veronica Sanchez.

“Here's the thing, though,” I pressed on. “The police are hung up on Jamie. If they're on the wrong track, which I think they are, then they're wasting everyone's time.”

“What makes you think it wasn't Jamie?”

“For starters? He and his girlfriend are the ones who hired me. He seems pretty anxious to find the real killer.”

“Sure,” he snorted. “That's what they all say.”

“Do you think it was Jamie?”

He shrugged. “Why not?”

I thought of Jamie's boyish face, his nervous affability. “You think he's capable of killing anyone?”

“As capable as anyone else, yes.”

“Of killing Joe?”

“I don't trust the kid, okay? Never have. He's a coked-up impulsive loser, and I've known enough of them to recognize a danger when I see it.”

“Do you even know him?”

He laughed, and it came out sounding mean. “You women,” he said. “Willow loves him, too. He's the lead suspect in her husband's murder, and she won't shut up defending him.”

I flushed, and though he was making me angry, what I felt most was embarrassment. I should never have let Jamie near me, not in that way.

“He's my
client
,” I said. “He wants me to find out what happened, I'm going to find out what happened. If he's the murderer, then he shouldn't have asked. Can we at least agree that there's a question here?”

He nodded grimly.

“Were you there Thursday night? For the big party?”

“Ha,” he said. “No. Joe didn't invite me to stuff like that.”

“What, social stuff?”

He glared at me. “We were friends, but not drug-party friends. Dinner-party friends. Our wives got along. All five of them.”

He stood up and walked over to a mahogany bookcase, almost empty of books, and picked up a framed photograph. It showed Joe and Willow with Alex and a tall brunette who must have been his current wife. He handed it to me with a gruff “Here.” It was less a friendly gesture than insistent evidence of his close relationship with Joe, which he'd taken me to question.

All at once, I felt a strong pity for the dead man. Nearly everyone he knew—from the kids at the reception desk to Theodore, his only son, and Alex, his personal friend and manager—wanted a piece of him, a scrap from his robe that had nothing to do with love but with ownership only, proof of communion with the star. It was no wonder Theodore and Alex resented Jamie. Tilley, it seemed, had slipped from their possession, and Jamie had him, and he had loved him without avarice or jealousy.

“How long did you know each other?” I asked.

“Twenty years,” he said. “He was just starting to make a name for himself then, and I was working for his manager. We ended up becoming drinking buddies. We were close. Went to each other's weddings and all that. And we worked together his whole career.”

I'd hit a sore spot, so I changed tack. “What exactly does a manager do, anyway?”

“Manage,” he said, without a trace of humor.

I let it go. “And now that he's dead?”

“I still work for him, for his family. Can you imagine what would happen if every celebrity lost his team the minute he died? There would be chaos.”

“So you must be stressed out right now.”

“I'm grieving. I'm busy. I'm not ‘stressed out,'” he said, air quoting with contempt.

“Who do you mean when you say ‘his family'? Do you mean Willow? His kids?”

“I'm looking out for all of them.”

It didn't seem worth the antagonism to ask who was paying him, so I left it at that.

“Look. I know finding his killer isn't part of your job, but maybe you can help me. I'm sure you want to figure out who did this to your friend.”

“Fine.” He gave me a curt nod. I'd cornered him. “What is it you want to know?”

“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted Tilley dead?”

He grunted. “I'll tell you what I told the cops. A lot of people didn't like Joe. He was loud and arrogant and, frankly, kind of a bastard. But I can't think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt him. And that includes his wives.”

“And the son? You know, Thor Tilla?”

He blew air through his lips in disgust. “Theodore? He had as much reason to as anyone else alive, but no. I doubt it. He's too much of a pussy to do something like that.”

“I met him yesterday,” I said. “We talked for a while. I feel bad for the kid.”

Alex, apparently, did not. “I hope you didn't tell him anything he could tell to the tabloids.”

“Why's that?”

“That kid's a fucking thorn in my side.” He scowled. “No pun intended.”

“But you look out for his interests, right?”

“Only as far as Joe's concerned, and only as far as his interests are in line with Joe's. Beyond that, the prick's on his own.”

“I gathered he talks to the press when they'll let him.”

“Ha. ‘When they'll let him.' Like the tabloids have standards. They'll print anything that comes out of that little snake's mouth. Do you ever read
Star
?
Us Weekly
?”

“Not really.”

“Don't. It's fucking garbage. This is what it's like being famous, okay? You take a shit, and there's a story with pictures the next day, shouting, ‘Stars, they shit their brains out just like us.' And then there's the idiotic write-up, something like, ‘Bart Fuckface had some mean Mexican for dinner, says a source.'”

“And Theodore, he's ‘a source,' I take it?”

“Yeah, a fucking gold mine. You should've seen all the trash about Joe's family life. That kid fed everything he could to the press, and when he didn't know shit, he made it up.”

“Doesn't it sound like he hated his dad? I mean they even fought the night of the murder.”

“It's an interesting theory,” he said, his face growing dark. I could tell he was visualizing headlines and he didn't seem to like what he saw. “But I don't have anything else to say on that front.”

“Alright,” I said, moving on. “What about his drug habit? Did he get on the wrong side of anyone dangerous?”

“Like I said, I don't know a lot about that. He tried to keep me in the dark about the illegal stuff, as much as he thought he could.”

I paused. “You must have seen most of the stuff he got into, over the years.”

“More than anyone else alive. I'm sure of it.”

I had one more line of questioning, one I hesitated before setting into motion. “Did Tilley ever mention Jamie's girlfriend? Daphne Freamon?”

“No. Why would he have?”

“Because he knew her, though maybe he didn't know it. She went by a different name then,” I said, holding his eyes. “Lanya Waters.”

His face tightened, subtly, in a way that suggested a much larger underlying reaction, like the earth moving beneath a fault line. Her name meant something to him, something bigger than I'd thought.

“You know her, then,” I said.

He tilted his chin up to mimic thought, then said, “The name sounds familiar.”

“I'll bet it does. I can't imagine he didn't ask you for advice about her. I'd be surprised if you never met her, really. The artist? The cocktail waitress?”

“Right,” he said, leaning back in his chair. The effort was gone from his face now, submerged and no longer visible. “I know exactly who you're talking about. She's African-American, right?” He said “African-American” carefully, stretching it to the full length of its seven syllables.

“What can you tell me about her and Joe?”

“They knew each other briefly,” he said. “She sold him an oil painting.”

“For a lot of money.”

“Yeah, it was a lot of money. But Joe was extravagant, a patron of the arts.”

I shot back, “He didn't buy it because he slept with her?”

Alex scratched at his forehead, his face unreadable, but when he spoke again his tone was relaxed. I hadn't noticed, until then, that it had been tense. “If you already know the answers, why do you bother asking?”

That was it. I'd dropped the wrong name, asked the wrong questions, and the interview was over—I was locked out at the gate. Within a minute, Alex made it clear that I was overstaying my welcome, and I excused myself gracefully against my own will. I left the freezing office a little dazed and dissatisfied, but there was also a knot in my stomach, a precursor to a hunch.

*   *   *

It was two o'clock when I left Apex Management. The sun was out, spilling its gentle bounty on the pedestrians of Beverly Hills. I lit a cigarette and joined the crowd, walking past Midwestern families in cargo shorts, Asian men carrying shopping bags for their wives. The scene was cheerful, commercial, and the air held the calm buzz of happy people behaving themselves. It was boring, too, for anyone who'd seen it once before, and soothing, in that way. It gave me room to think.

Alex Caldwell was hiding something. The name of Lanya Waters ran through him like an electrical shock. I watched it happen, and I watched his body absorb the effect. I'd played my knowledge of the affair like a trump card, and instead of jolting him again, it stabilized him.

I thought about reentering Alex's office, of putting my finger in his face and demanding information. But I wasn't a police officer—I wasn't even a friend.

He was protecting Joe Tilley. That was what I had to go on. Alex had made a career out of being Tilley's friend, of cleaning up his messes and clearing all paths to continued success. Even now, he would continue to guard Tilley's name—he felt ownership toward it, like a sculptor who'd spent years on a single work. That name, then, was under threat.

It occurred to me, too, that if he was hiding something, there was something else to know. Maybe Daphne hadn't been as plain as she'd let on.

She told me about the illicit affair, the blackmail, the buy-off, the change in identity. What, then, was the ineffable thing?

 

Twelve

I needed to talk to someone who might have information on Joe and Daphne. As far as I knew, that universe of people was small. Then I remembered how Jamie got hired. Joe Tilley, like many with enough money to do away with the administrative headaches of life, had a personal assistant. Unless someone was lying—a contingency that was all too possible—this personal assistant was an old friend of Daphne's. It occurred to me now that Daphne had very few people she would call old friends. This one knew her when she was Lanya the waitress, and she presumably lived in L.A.

It didn't make sense to ask Daphne, so I called Jamie again. He didn't ask questions, just gave me a name and a number. Rory Buckner. An area code from the middle of the country.

I was surprised when she picked up after two rings, and then I realized that while Alex was busier than ever, Rory might have been out of a job. Tilley's mess needed cleaning, his reputation tending, but the man himself was dead, and all his smaller needs and demands extinguished with his exit.

“Hello?” she asked, her voice a little eager.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Juniper Song. I'm a friend of Jamie Landon's. Can you talk?”

“What's this about?”

“Jamie's girlfriend, actually.” I saw no point in appending the “ex.” “Daphne Freamon. Your friend Lanya Waters.”

She was quiet for a contemplative second, and I waited with the strained patience of a fisherman with a tug on the line. “What about her?” she asked.

“Her and Joe Tilley—what was the deal with them? I know they had a thing, but it doesn't quite add up.”

She went silent now, and I thought she might hang up on me. Instead, she asked, “Where are you now?”

She asked me to meet her at her apartment in Santa Monica, on Sixth Street about a two-minute jog from the beach. It was a glittery part of town where even the homeless were better off than their counterparts in L.A. proper. Rory's building was brand-new, with white siding and a perfect lawn. She rang me in through a glass door that opened with a soft buzz.

I took a silent elevator to her apartment on the fourth floor. The first thing I noticed when she opened her door was a powerful scent of lavender—perfume or air freshener that stormed into my nostrils like an uninvited guest. Her body came second. She wore a slate gray sports bra and matching yoga shorts that amounted to a bikini's worth of fabric. She took care of herself, that much was evident. Her arms and legs were toned, almost muscular, and her belly curved in where most curved out. Her skin was the color of a roasted almond, and I couldn't tell if it was sprayed on or achieved in a UV-radiating coffin.

“Were you about to work out?” I asked.

She shrugged. She'd been expecting me for over half an hour, and I had to wonder if she was just showing off. I knew, with sudden certainty, that she was the kind of person who posted sexy mirror pictures on the Internet.

She had an attractive face, in full makeup, with a thin nose and a high arch to her brow. I couldn't determine her age—she could have been twenty-five or forty, and neither would have surprised me. Straw blond hair sprouted out of duller blond roots that looked wild and untamed in the context of Rory Buckner.

“Come in,” she said, and I followed her into a small apartment with pink walls and a bookcase full of magazines. The lavender smell was even stronger inside, and I wondered if she'd knocked over a bottle of perfume until I caught the competing odors, a garish muddle of rosewater, strawberry, and jasmine.