Death On the Dlist (2010) (4 page)

He scanned the bedside area. There was a stack of papers by the telephone; he’d love to look through them or better yet, take them in order to track her a little better, but he didn’t have time and they were the kind of thing she’d likely miss.

Just like James Bond, with time running down to the last second, he scored. A red pair of silk thong underwear was lying on the bathroom floor beside the shower. The tiny shred of material was practically still warm.

That had been three years ago.

Ever since then, he’d kept them preserved in a plastic Zip Lock sandwich bag, only taking them out for their date every Friday night.

Standing there, trying to peer onto his front porch through the newspaper punch hole, the thought occurred to him . . . Could Leather have possibly
wanted
him to leave? She could have said something,
anything
to call her bodyguard off. Did she really have feelings for him, as she’d told him through the TV set?

Every time she was on, he set his TiVo to automatically record it just in case somehow he missed it live. She always sent him special, sexy little messages, all in code of course, like touching her necklace or earring or brushing her hair away for her face. It was so the Feds wouldn’t pick up on it. But they were such dumbasses they never would.

Leather was very private that way.

But thinking back on it, he wondered: Had she purposefully allowed him to be brushed off? Humiliated there at the Shutters pool?

Was it part of some game she was playing with his head? He stared hard at the poster of her, smiling in a swimsuit.

Was Leather Stockton . . . .
a bitch
?

WHEN QUINTON HOWARD ROUNDED THE CORNER OF THE POOL
house, the stench hit him like a ton of bricks. He headed for the four giant plastic trash bins he’d emptied for the last eight months. Normally, the city provided curbside pick-up. All the rich people made their maids roll it down just before trash time, but the Saxtons paid a hundred bucks extra a week to the lucky sanitation worker assigned to their street so nobody would have to worry about wheeling it down the driveway.

Incredible.

The bins were just in sight. Quinton turned left, each step digging into crunchy gravel beneath his work boots. They were hidden from the casual eye by a decorative “modern-contemporary” façade to match the stark (bleak) lines of the mansion. They’d probably paid some uptight German architect God only knows what to design their huge monstrosity, all white and plain, with a cute little trash-bin hider to match.

Frank Lloyd Wright would vomit.

All the recycle bins were stacked neatly beside the garbage, something to make the rich people feel good about themselves. Quinton always got a laugh off the $15 bottles of sparkling water from Italy these idiots sprung for, tucked neatly into their recycle bins.

Oh, the dichotomy of the über-wealthy. Quinton graduated with a master’s in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He could tell you anything about the great philosophical thinkers, Thales, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza . . . he could go on.

His all-time favorite was Aquinas, of course, who shifted the focus from Plato to Aristotle in his attempt to fuse Christianity
with
Aristotelianism. Quinton’s impressive, and unfinished, doctoral thesis had been on Aquinas’s
Summa Theologica
. He was still deeply pissed he couldn’t find a job expounding his deep thoughts on countless crops of philosophy majors at some,
any,
college or university. Hell, in the end he’d even have taken a
community
college offer . . .

But screw Plato, what the hell was that stench?

It seemed to emanate from the pool house. Quinton knew better than to look into rich people’s windows, but it looked like they were either gone or sleeping off another late night of partying, although the hot tub wasn’t still on and bubbling, surrounded by steam and booze bottles like it normally was every Tuesday and Thursday he was here.

Cocking his head to the left, he peered into the pool house with his right eye and there it was.

A woman. A dead woman. She was wearing a tight, pale pink miniskirt and heels, sitting in a straight-back chair that matched an uncomfortable-looking, modernistic table nearby.

In fact, she looked pretty hot with those legs, except for the fact half her head was blown off. Her hands seemed to be tied or taped to the chair, and her legs were sprawled at a weird angle out in front of her.

And she stunk. To high Heaven. No telling how long she’d been there.

Quinton pulled out his iPhone to call 911. But just before he hit “send,” he had a thought. Instead of putting the call through to Emergency Dispatch, he scrolled down to “contacts.”

Let’s see, where was he, where was he? Frank LaGrange Hadden III. He met him at a bar a few weeks ago and kept his number. “Photographer to the World” he’d called himself. Translation: He was a photog for every sleazy tabloid in the country and then some. Hadden made it his business to know every waiter, waitress, maître d’, beat cop, emergency dispatcher, and garbage man in town.

“Hadden.” He answered the phone with two flat syllables, nothing more.

“Frank, it’s me, Quinton. You met me at Muley’s the other night.”

There was a pause on the other end.

Quinton went on. “You know, the
trash man.
”

“Oh, yeah! You work East Hampton, right? What’s up, man?”

“I got something for you. I think it’s big.”

“Everybody thinks it’s big. What is it?”

Not wanting to give away too much before getting a price quote, Quinton hedged. “It’s big all right. If you think a dead body in a star’s pool house tied to a chair is big.”

“Holy shit. Where are you?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. The owners aren’t home. Don’t know when they’ll come back, but I know they weren’t here Tuesday, either. That’s when I was last here. No telling how long she’s been here. May have been here then, I just didn’t smell it until now and man, she
reeks
!
”

“Million-dollar question’s overdoing it a little, maybe a thousand’s more like it.” Hadden cut straight to the chase.

“Bullshit.”

“Okay. If it’s an A-lister, I can do five. Who is it?”

“I’m not telling till I get a number, dude.”

“Have they ever won an award? You know . . . an Oscar, Emmy, Daytime soap? Porn awards don’t count. But maybe they do since it’s a dead body. You gotta give me more . . . or unless they’re currently on TV, have a recurring role, have ever been in a movie, or if you’ve ever seen a story about them on
ET
,
Access
, or the
Insider
.”

“Award,
Enquirer
,
ET
. Is that enough?”

“You got the five. I’m on my way. What’s the address?”

“It ain’t that easy, buddy. How do I know you won’t get your shot and then leave me high and dry? I’ll meet you a few blocks away and bring you here. Cash money up front. But, hurry, I gotta go or the others will get suspicious. I’ll just tell them I gotta take a dump when you get close . . . But you gotta
hurry,
man.”

“I’m an hour away. I’ll do my best.”

“Okay. Call me, and after you get here, I’ll give you ten minutes before I call 911.”

“Why do you have to call 911 at all?”

Quinton dug deep. What would Aquinas do? Or Spinoza?

Screw them.
Seven years of devoting himself to them and he still had a roommate.

“Maybe I don’t.”

“On the other hand, if you do, then I could snap some long shots of cops arriving and bringing the body out. Coroner’s office, the whole shebang. Hey, tell you what I’ll do . . . You call 911 and I’ll throw in an extra five hundred.”

“A thousand.”

“Seven-fifty.”

“Done. See you in an hour.” Quinton agreed to the price, having no idea a shot like this would be worth a lot more to one of the tabs. Seven hundred fifty dollars bonus money sounded great to him. All he wanted was a flat-screen.

“Forty-five minutes. I’m already in the car and on the highway. Traffic’s light.”

Quinton took one last peek at her. Poor broad. Nice legs, but, still, poor broad.

He crunched around the side of the mansion to the front drive and headed back to the truck.

“What the hell took so long?” They yelled it at him as they lounged against the back of the truck, waiting.

“Nothing, you lard-asses. Just checking the recycles. Empty again.”

“Rat bastards don’t give a crap about the environment.” His trash partner muttered it under his breath, grinding a cigarette butt beneath his work boot there on the drive.

Quinton hopped on the back of the truck, held on, and off they went to the end of the cul-de-sac. The houses were few and far between. He eyed the digital watch on his wrist.

Forty minutes and counting.

THIS HAD DAMN WELL BETTER BE GOOD. FRANK LAGRANGE HADDEN III DIDN’T
like getting out of bed before 10 a.m. He had been out developing “contacts” at a bar last night and didn’t get home until after three in the morning. It was all a little bit of a blur.

Clutching a large, black coffee from a McDonald’s drive-thru, he floored it, heading up the Long Island Expressway. He didn’t really expect much, but a dead body in an out-of-town celeb’s mansion couldn’t be all bad . . .
Could it?

Oh, hell. It was starting to rain. At least it wasn’t a summer weekend or he’d be stuck in the thousands of city dwellers heading for the Hamptons for forty-eight hours, either to get a breath of sea air or make the scene. And man, what a scene. New Yorkers were convinced, if you didn’t have a place in the Hamptons, you were nothing. They were willing to pay an arm and a leg for a hole in the wall just to say they had a place in the Hamptons. The ones that couldn’t afford to buy or rent just went every weekend to freeload off the ones that sprang for a place.

Whatever. Pretentious boors.

He was just fine with his one-bedroom apartment walk-up two flights above China Fun on First Avenue. It was loud as hell so close to the street and it always smelled like duck, but it was fine. He missed his house back down south in the suburbs, but he lost it in the divorce. He got offered a free place to live with a friend here in the city for a few months, then he just stayed. It was easier.

This coffee was good. He didn’t care what Dunkin’ said. McDonald’s was the best. And the cheapest.

He’d been on the road for over an hour now and, without much traffic, was just about to pull into East Hampton. Feeling around in his pants pockets, he fished out his cell phone and hit “redial.”

“Hello?” Quinton Howard asked it tentatively.

“It’s me, Hadden. I think I’m just a few blocks from you. Wanna give me the location now?”

“Hey, man. You’re late! Do you have the cash?”

“Of course I do. Do you have the dead body?”

“Shut up, man. It’s not
my
dead body. I saw it. I wanna get this thing over with.”

“All right, all right. Calm down. Where are you?”

“Hurry. I’ll be at 43 East Shore Lane in five minutes. It’s right on the water.”

“Of course it is. You’re a piece of crap if you’re not on the water. Then they gotta have a pool.”

“Yeah. Whatever, man. I’ll be out back by the pool house.”

“Whose place did you say it was?”

“I didn’t. You’ll see when you get here.”

“Oh. Okay. Mr. Secret Agent Man. I’ll find out when I get there. See you in five.”

Hadden was pretty sure he knew how to find Shore Lane. The ritzy side was East Shore, which led down to the water. The “cheap” side was West Shore, which was not on the water but within walking distance. It was the supreme humiliation for the West Shore people to be caught walking through the crosswalk that divided the two, dressed in swimsuits and carrying beach gear. It identified them as the have-nots. Poor schmucks. They had to walk the quarter-mile to the dunes while the haves just looked right out the kitchen window and over their pools to the waves.

Winding through lane after lane of multimillion-dollar mansions, Hadden turned right onto East Shore. The tiny lane could barely handle two cars passing, but luckily, fewer people were around this time of year.

“Let’s see, 37, 39 . . .” Hadden muttered to himself as he edged along, hunching forward over the steering wheel making out numbers on the mailboxes.

“41 . . .
Bingo!
43.”

He checked his rearview. Nobody there. Nobody ahead, either. Driving forward about eighty feet or so, he parked on the side of the street on grass that seemed unattached to any of the mansions.

Last thing he needed was to get towed out of somebody’s driveway or reported by Neighborhood Watch. This bunch probably didn’t have a Neighborhood Watch. Probably sprung for private security patrol. He better move it.

Walking casually, as if he belonged there, Hadden crossed the eighty feet and walked up the side of 43. Spotting a walkway on the side of the house, he slipped under an arched trellis and headed down the shelled walk out back. Walking the length of the house, front to back, he looked in several of the windows. It was empty, all right.

Wait a minute. He backed up and looked into a side window. They must have had their lights on timers. There, under a spotlight installed flush with the twenty-foot-high ceiling, carefully centered in the middle of a shelf with nothing else around it, sat an Oscar.

There was no mistaking it. The little statuette gleamed out at Hadden standing there on the sidewalk staring in.

Whose house was this anyway? He felt like he’d seen it before. He stepped forward a few steps and looked through another window. Gracefully arranged on the lid of a shiny black Steinway grand piano were a dozen or so family photos, all encased in similar sterling silver frames. There was the star, smiling out from inside a frame. It was Eric Saxton.

Holy shit.
Pay dirt!

Eric Saxton!
Yeah, way past his prime and all patched together with hair implants, lipo, and a full-on face-lift, but still a star. And so was the new Mrs. Saxton, Lisa. She was an actress and had to be twenty years younger than him even if she was lying about her age by, say, seven or eight years.

They’d met on a movie set. As soon as the affair took off, he dumped his wife, leaving her and his four kids, to move in with the actress.

He glanced at the photos again. Even though they were set up to look like candids, on vacations and such, they all looked like glamour shots from the mall. They had to be professionally touched up . . . or were people actually this beautiful?

He thought for a second about all the stars he’d caught without makeup and sold the shots to the tabs. The ones on the grand piano were touched up, no doubt about it.

Hadden felt a tingle in his gut. He was on the verge of a huge paycheck, but this was dangerous. Skulking around an old Hollywood star’s place was a suicide mission.

And they were pretty freaky about that out here because of squatters, people from the city who came out here off-season and took up in empty mansions until they were busted. Sometimes they made it a whole season, living the high life, eating the food out of inlaid Sub-Zero fridges, watching TV in fancy home theaters, sleeping on the thousand-count Egyptian-cotton bedsheets, until somebody recognized they were out of place.

Usually they just ended up paying a fine. Owners didn’t want to be bothered with prosecuting. Just wanted their maids to change the sheets.

Hadden better hurry. And Quinton better be out back and he damn well better have a dead body with him. Turning the corner, Hadden spotted him standing at the door of the pool house, guarding his find.

“Hey, man. Show me the cash.”

“Not one for small talk, huh? Okay. Here, here’s half. Show me the body and I’ll give you the rest.”

Hadden took a fat roll of cash out of his right pocket and peeled off three grand. With no fanfare, he thrust it into Quinton’s right hand.

“Where’s the other two?”

“Right here in my pocket and it’ll be in yours the minute I see the body.”

Quinton stalled for a moment, thinking over his options, but other than tackle Hadden right then and there, take the money and run, his only real choice was to hope Hadden would come through.

“Okay. Follow me.”

He led Hadden through a set of carefully manicured wisteria bushes, trained to wrap themselves around a lattice arch.

And sure enough, there she was.

“What a set of legs. It’s a shame.” It was all Quinton could think to say as Hadden stared through the glass door to the pool house.

For a moment Hadden said nothing, and suddenly, Quinton was afraid he wouldn’t get the remaining two grand. “Hey, man. You said five grand if it was in a celeb’s house. And it is. You don’t get a whole lot bigger than Eric Saxton. Plus, there’s the wife. She’s a star, too.”

“Shut up, Quinton. You’ll get the money. I’m just trying to place that tattoo she’s got on her ankle. I know I’ve seen it somewhere before.”

Quinton squinted again through the glass. He was right. Guess a photographer’s eye caught it. There was a series of small, delicate, Chinese-looking characters down the inside of the girl’s left ankle.

“What the hell? Who cares about a tattoo? She’s got her head blown off in Eric Saxton’s pool house!” Quinton didn’t feel like getting philosophical about the woman’s tattoo. He wanted to get his money, then get the hell out of here.

“Yeah. Here’s the money.” Hadden got out his money ball again and counted out two thousand.

Handing it to Quinton, he started to quickly assemble his Nikon, attaching a long lens to one end. “Now, it’ll only take me a minute to get some up-close shots . . . Call 911. Pronto.”

“What’s my excuse for being back up here?”

“Tell ’em you’re checking the recycle bins.”

“But I already told the crew that!”

“Whatever! Tell ’em you missed one! Just call!”

Hadden didn’t look over his shoulder as Quinton whipped open his cell and punched in the numbers.

“Wait a minute. Where’s my seven-fifty if I call the police?”

“Right here, my man, right here.” Hadden gave him the rest of the money and, without missing a beat, hopped up on a retainer wall beside the door and started getting shots through a window.

“Listen, Quinton, make the call. I gotta get these shots and get behind those bushes before the ambulance gets here.”

Quinton chose the speaker-phone feature on his cell so Hadden could hear the whole thing, just to make sure he got the extra seven hundred fifty dollars. After punching 911, he pushed the “send” button.

The phone rang several times, followed by an automated message warning callers not to dial 911 if they didn’t have a real emergency, and redirecting them. That way the cops could avoid, say, a mouse in the kitchen or a cat stuck up a tree.

“911 Emergency Dispatch. What’s your emergency?” It was a female voice, crisp and cool.

Quinton Howard paused. Was it right to make money off a dead woman? Obviously murdered? Her face was nothing but a mushy pile of pulp on one side. From the glass door, he couldn’t see the other side, but it probably didn’t fare much better. It hit him, standing there:
What had he become? What had happened to his ethics, his values?

He had a choice . . . he could hang up right now, give the money back, and walk away. Screw Frank LaGrange Hadden III and his filthy blood money. This wasn’t right, morally, religiously, or philosophically.

Quinton pondered. It was the age-old problem first encountered in the Garden of Eden. Good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, evil vs. sublime. Eve was seduced by a talking snake, the magician Faust sold his soul for knowledge and power, and Tab Hunter, aka Joe Hardy, sold out in
Damn Yankees
to transform himself from a middle-aged baseball fan to a young long-ball hitter who could beat the Yankees in the World Series.

They were all a string of bad ideas. For once, Quinton Howard could learn from the mistakes of others.

But then . . . There
was
the flat-screen he wanted for his apartment.

“Repeat . . . 911 Emergency Dispatch. What’s your emergency?”

Quinton dug down deep. For once in his life, he had to be strong.

“Hello? I need help. The cops need to come in a hurry. I think I see a dead girl. Her head’s blown off.”