Authors: Wyborn Senna
Logan stepped into the tiny kitchen area and saw toast crumbs on the counter near the toaster. There were photos on the fridge. One woman repeatedly showed up in shot after shot, and she was a miniature version of Helen, complete down to the blond hair, Bambi eyes, and closed-mouth smile.
Tobias was at his elbow. “This her?”
“Yes,” Helen said, from behind them.
Tobias zeroed in on a photo where Elen was seated on a young man’s lap. They both raised beer bottles to the person taking the picture, their faces touching as they leaned in close. “This the boyfriend?”
“Cody, yes. It’s not that I didn’t like him. It’s just that I—well, I thought Elen could have done better.”
Tobias straightened up and left the kitchen with Helen and Logan trailing after him. After he glanced into the bathroom and the hall closet, he went into Elen’s bedroom, where Elen’s alleged suicide had taken place. Tobias hoped he could ease into addressing Elen’s death gracefully and asked for permission before he sat down on the foot of the bedspreaded queen. Logan took the chair at the desk overlooking the lot behind the building, a view offering nothing more than apartment buildings and trees. He stared out the window intently nonetheless, as though the scenery held clues if he just looked hard enough. Palms upward on his lap in a gesture of supplication, Tobias was silent. He knew Helen would talk when she was ready. After two minutes of listening to crows squabble on nearby rooftops and watching squirrels tightrope across power lines, Logan turned his attention toward Helen as she began to tell her story.
“Elen took this place when she turned eighteen. She loved being on her own, loved the freedom to do what she wanted. She had an agent and landed parts on
Criminal Minds
and
Cold Case
. Don’t know if you’ve seen her on TV.”
Tobias shook his head and Helen continued. “She didn’t want to use the last name Hester, said she didn’t want anyone saying she was getting free entree into the business because she was my daughter. She used her middle name, James, my maiden name, instead. Two—well, no, three months ago, now—she called me and told me she was pregnant. I was mad, of course, because she said Cody was the father, and I knew he’d never be able to support her, let alone a newborn, so I hung up on her.”
Helen’s words came slower now. “I called her a few days later, but she didn’t answer. Then I sent her a few emails. Again, she didn’t answer. So, on the eighth, after a long day on set, I swung by and saw that her new Camry was here. I came up and knocked on her door. She didn’t answer. There was a spare key beneath the air conditioner that juts out near her door. Did you see it?”
“The air conditioner?”
“She kept a key tucked in a groove beneath the unit, so I got it and came in.” Helen’s voice was breaking. “I called her name and came in here. She had a pillowcase over her head and a cord around her neck. I put my head on her chest. There was…nothing.”
Tobias was silent for a moment before he spoke. “What was she wearing?”
“What?”
“How was she dressed?
“She was wearing one of those oversize sleep T-shirts, the kind that go down past your knee. It had a mermaid that looked like a devil on it, and it was orange. I got my cell phone out of my purse and called 911. They were here within fifteen minutes.”
She fell silent and Tobias waited. A trickle of sweat ran down the back of his neck.
The apartment was stuffy, and Logan was suddenly aware of a bleachy scent.
When Helen began again, her voice was stronger, as though she’d resolved herself to recount the facts but not feel their import. “When the cops saw she didn’t have any defensive wounds on her hands or ligature marks on her wrists, they ruled it a suicide. They said she tied the cord to the upper part of the bed.” Helen pointed at one of the posts on the headboard. “And then she laid down and applied pressure to her neck until she asphyxiated.”
Tobias cleared his throat, ready to speak, but thought better of it. He recalled Rick Springfield’s account of a suicide attempt made in his youth. Springfield fashioned a noose and was going to hang himself in the family’s garage. The rope ended up breaking, and Springfield’s desire to end his own life was thwarted. But he did say that in those moments when he was losing consciousness, realization of what he was doing kicked in, and the drive toward self-preservation caused him to reconsider his decision. How in the world could someone lie down and quietly suffocate?
“Was Elen taking drugs?”
Helen shook her head. “No. She’d given up antidepressants once she found out she was expecting. I told her it wasn’t a good idea to go off Prozac cold turkey and that she should at least ask her doctor about it. But why use the pillowcase?”
“Usually, when someone murders someone they know, they’ll cover their victim’s face so they don’t have to watch what they’re doing. Or they’ll cover the victim’s face later, out of remorse, to hide what they did. You said the rope was
over
the pillowcase?”
“Around its base.”
“So the pillowcase wasn’t put on afterwards.” Tobias couldn’t hold back his opinions any longer. “There’s no reason to use a pillowcase if you’re alone. There aren’t any mirrors in here. Elen couldn’t see herself and likely wouldn’t want to if she could. Someone was with her who didn’t want to watch her die because they cared about her.”
“There’s another thing, too.” Helen pointed at the white ceiling fan near the doorway. “She never turned that on. It rattled and she was afraid it was going to come loose, straight out of the ceiling. It was on the day I found her.”
Tobias got up and went over to the ceiling fan. He tugged on one of the blades and the fan rattled. Screws around the base were loose, and it had been installed off-kilter. “Excuse me a minute,” he told Helen. “Gotta use the facilities, if I may.”
Helen nodded and Tobias left the room. Logan and Helen remained there, silent.
The bathroom was tiny. Standing in the tub, you could touch both the sink and toilet. There was tissue paper at the top of the trash, so Tobias lifted the mesh canister up to the sink and started sifting through the contents. At the bottom, he found a used pregnancy test stick, the plus sign still visible in its tiny window. Elen had been pregnant, and Helen had lost not only a daughter but a grandchild, as well.
If Logan learned a lot by watching Tobias handle Helen’s fragile emotions at the restaurant, he learned even more at Elen’s apartment. Not jealous in the slightest, Logan only admired the reporter and dreamed he might someday do what Tobias did so well. Now, looking at the story and photos and trying to figure out the best way to present them to readers, he realized that since that day at the apartment, Tobias had accomplished the near impossible and taken the story even farther. For starters, Tobias had obtained the photographs taken at the scene of Elen James’s alleged suicide the day her body was found.
Logan used a bold, blocky font for the cover of the issue and typed, “Elen James and Her Unborn Child: Suicide or Murder?” Around the question, he scattered thumbnail photos of Elen, her boyfriend Cody, detectives in charge of the investigation, a photo of the discarded pregnancy test stick, and Helen. The photo inside, which ran flush with the story, showed Elen lying on her bed, dressed in a long shirt, with a pillowcase over her head and a cord around her neck. It was gruesome but effective.
“She’s every bit the Brady Bunch-type matriarch, Helen Hester is,” Tobias wrote, “from her big, Bambi blues to her flawless complexion, but what happens when the ultimate icon of all things maternal loses her own child? What happens when detectives tell America’s most-loved television mom that her daughter killed herself when, in fact, her daughter had everything—including an unborn child—to live for? And what happens when one of the detectives who deemed the daughter’s death a suicide is a mother herself—of the very young man who fathered the woman’s child? Confused yet? You should be as confused as the investigation surrounding this suspicious death itself.
“When rumors surfaced that Elen might be pregnant at the time she took her life, Helen hit a roadblock when she attempted to verify that information with the coroner’s office. She was told that anything concerning the case was privileged information and couldn’t be released, not even to family members, because the death scene was atypical. Elen had called Helen weeks earlier to say she was with child, but Helen wasn’t sure if Elen was positive. Having the coroner share his findings would have meant a lot, but officials declined to be forthcoming.
“Elen’s final neighborhood in West Hollywood remains quiet, shaded by large trees. Parked cars line the roads due to a shortage of off-street parking. It’s a short flight of stairs up to her second-story apartment where, for all the heavy drapery and furnishings, one might guess a Victorian spinster lived. An upright piano sits in one corner, dusty, with Bacharach on the stand. There are still crumbs on the kitchen counter where Elen loved to butter toast. There is a photo on the fridge of Elen and her boyfriend Cody, smiling at the camera. The rest of the place is small—just a bathroom, hall closet, and bedroom. In the room where Elen slept, the bed is queen-size, and the desk and chair are simple. These are the only furnishings here. And this is where Elen died.
“According to West Hollywood Police Department records, she tied the cord to the upper part of the bed and laid down, applying pressure to her neck until she asphyxiated. The problem with this assumption is that her body would have rebelled in those final moments when the drive to survive kicked in. There is no evidence Elen was impaired, either by drugs or alcohol. She had been excited by the prospect of becoming a mother. She was in love with the baby’s father. She had a promising career. Why would she be driven to despair?
“As it turns out, Helen never needed the coroner to confirm her late daughter’s pregnancy. At the bottom of the wastebasket in the bathroom, beneath crumpled tissue, there was a used pregnancy test stick investigators overlooked.
“It was positive, as positive as Helen Hester is that her daughter was murdered and that the son of a certain West Hollywood detective may be guilty of homicide.”
The layout was done. Logan hit the print button and thought about making coffee. Then his phone buzzed. It was 5:01 a.m., which meant it could only be Nancy.
It took a week for Ryan to get two responses, one from an Elvis impersonator in Vegas and one from a lawyer in Colorado. Both were willing to fly to Los Angeles to meet him. Seth insisted on joining Ryan the night of the arranged get-together, so they settled into a C-shaped booth at Boa Steakhouse on Sunset and ordered a pitcher of margaritas while they waited.
The lawyer from Colorado was the first of the two men to arrive. Will Mesmer looked enough like Elvis to be Ryan’s dad, but seemed too slender and his complexion too ruddy to be a completely solid physical match. He was in his fifties, his hair was dark blond, fading to gray at the temples, and he wore a suit Gene Wyatt would have loved to add to his collection—a gray wool Dolce & Gabbana with a white dress shirt and striped tie. A criminal defense attorney for more than twenty years, Will told Ryan and Seth he was born and raised in Vegas and often made donations to the fertility clinic with his buddies to pick up spare drinking money.
Seth’s eyes were bugging out more than usual. “Really? You didn’t have money to drink?”
“This was before my parents convinced me to go to law school. I was always floating between jobs. The one that lasted the longest was a telemarketing gig I picked up. Kept that one four months. Since my first day in court as a defense attorney, I’ve only taken three vacations, and those were because my wife told me if I didn’t, she was going to leave me. Guess I’ve become a workaholic. Hated to take a break to come out here, but how many chances do you get to find out you have a son? Got three girls at home, and damn it, I’d love to have a son, even if you didn’t take my name.” Will took a sip of his margarita and looked around for the restroom. When he spotted it, he told them he’d be right back.
Just as the door to the men’s room swung shut, “Diamond Dave” Diamond strolled into Boa and scanned the room. It took him less than ten seconds to spot Ryan and Seth, and as he jangled his way across the room, heads turned. He was wearing a red Elvis jumpsuit covered with bangles, beads, and brocade, unbuttoned to the waist.
“Boys!” he hollered, sliding into the booth beside Ryan, giving him a sideways hug, glancing at the pitcher of margaritas. “What are those? Sissy drinks?”
Seth cringed and looked like he wanted to slide under the table.
Ryan moved toward the center of the booth so he could get a better look at Diamond Dave, who seemed to be pushing sixty. He looked enough like Elvis, but his eyes seemed set too far apart, and his hair appeared hopelessly thin.
Dave noticed his gaze and felt the top of his head. “Used to have more. Not like you or Elvis, but enough. Thirty years doing this is enough to make any guy bald.”
Will made it back from the restroom and introduced himself to Diamond Dave. They ordered forty-day, dry-aged New York strip steaks and baked potatoes, and Dave had a bottle of bourbon brought to the table along with four shot glasses.
“A real man’s drink,” he proclaimed, clinking glasses so hard Seth’s nearly spilled.
Diamond Dave was a frequent donor at the clinic throughout the seventies and eighties. “Keep churning out the good stuff even now. Clinic closed down, though. Some workout joint is there now.”
“I know,” Ryan told him. “I went there with my friends, hoping to meet Dr. Johns.”
“Great guy,” Diamond Dave said. “I wonder what he’s doing now.” He didn’t allow anyone any conjecture and answered the question himself. “Getting a well-deserved rest, I’m sure. Come to think of it, don’t know how many years I have left in me. Do you know how hard it is to shake, rattle, and roll once your hips and knees start to revolt?”
Ryan and Seth laughed.
“So,” Will said. “What next?”