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.”
Chapter 6
WHERE THE HELL WERE THE COPS? EVEN AN AMBULANCE WOULD DO. It had been nearly thirty minutes and they were all no-shows. He himself had heard Quinton give the exact location, street address included. Where was this bunch of hayseeds?
Hadden had gone from crouching behind a hedge about fifty feet back from the pool house, poised to start snapping long shots with his Nikon, to sitting flat on his rear on a pile of pine straw, peering through some azalea bushes. He wasn’t too worried about these nincompoops spotting him; they apparently couldn’t even find Saxton’s house.