Lily Lake was wearing a dressing gown that made her look smaller than she was. She had a winning smile when she used it, but after her first greeting to me she was all business. “What’s this about?” she asked. “Who is this man who got killed? I know nothing about him.”
“Rich Santillo. When pop stars like you played here he sold the tabloids gossip items. I have a partner who does some of that too.”
“You’re a great crowd!”
I shrugged. “You lose some privacy when you become a star.”
“They want to know about Sly and me. That’s all they’re interested in.”
“You know how teenage girls are.”
“I should. They’re my public. They come to my performances, buy my albums.”
“Could Sly or your business manager, Art Brunner, have had a motive for shutting Santillo up?
“You mean kill him? My God, I think you people are all crazy around here! If he was in the gossip business he might have had any number of enemies.”
“He had a file of clippings about you. And you’re in town. He might have tried to contact you.”
“He didn’t. I never heard of the man before. You’re the one who had the office next to him, not me.”
Sly Morgan moved in then. “Your time is up, Mr. Darlan. Say goodbye.”
On my way out Lily Lake asked, “Would you like my autograph?”
“Next time.”
I couldn’t find Mike and Stacy anywhere, and the next morning I asked him where they’d gone. “Stopped for a drink and then I took her home,” he said. “We didn’t see you.”
“I went backstage to interview Lily Lake. That lasted about five minutes.”
“Find out anything?”
“Just that she has a business manager and a boyfriend who are very protective of her. But I suppose that’s not surprising. She’s only nineteen, with lots of crazy fans.”
“You think one of them killed Santillo?”
“It’s possible. Both claim they were at the Concert Center watching Lily’s performance, but either one could easily have slipped away. We’re only two blocks from there.”
“I have to go out,” Mike told me a bit later. “I’m meeting Vance Oberline for lunch.”
“I thought you were through with him.”
“He says it’s important.”
I went back to my computer and found a phone number for the Cedar Rapids Gazette. When I reached them I identified myself and told them I was searching for news of a fatal auto accident involving a family named Lafferty, some sixteen years ago. The clerk kept me on the line for a few minutes while he searched, then came back with the information. “Here it is, on March twenty-seventh of that year. There’d been a late winter storm and the roads were slippery. Roland and Sally Lafferty were both killed instantly and their three-year-old daughter Lily was injured.”
“She was in the car with them?”
“That’s right.”
“Thanks. You’ve been a big help.”
I hung up and thought about it. I was still thinking fifteen minutes later when Stacy Cline showed up at the office. “Hi. Is Mike around?” she asked.
“He had a lunch date.”
“Too bad. I was going to buy him lunch in return for the ticket last night and taking me home after.”
“I’m his partner. You can take me to lunch if you’d like.”
The phone rang and I excused myself to answer it. “This is the Cedar Rapids Gazette. You phoned us for some information about an accident earlier.”
“That’s right.”
“I followed up on reports of the accident for the next several days. I thought you might want to know that the little girl died too, three days later.”
“Did you know about this?” I asked Stacy when I’d relayed the news to her.
“I — no, he didn’t tell me everything. I was just a file clerk, to make the office look legit.”
“But you knew he collected information on Lily Lake, among others. You knew he had a copy of her birth certificate, under her original name.”
“I knew that, yes,” she admitted.
“But you didn’t know the real Lily died at age three?”
“I—” She was interrupted by a new arrival, Sergeant Ramous.
He walked in the door behind her and said, “Just the two people I’m looking for. We’re finished with Santillo’s office, Miss Cline, if you want to retrieve any belongings from it. I took the tape off the door.”
“Thank you, Sergeant.”
“Now about you, Al. Trapper tells me he’s discovered the dead man was bugging your office. That true?”
“It seems to be. Mike’s been selling some celebrity news items to the tabloids and I guess Santillo was trying to hijack them.”
“That must have made Trapper pretty angry.”
I shook my head. “You’re barking up the wrong tree. He didn’t discover it till after the murder.”
“Who’s this fellow Vance Oberline? We checked on Santillo’s phone calls and there were several to and from Oberline.”
“A tabloid stringer. He was Mike’s contact, and I suppose he might have been Santillo’s, too.”
“Would he have had any motive for killing the man?”
“Not that I know of. I think the killing might have had something to do with Lily Lake’s concerts here this week, though. Maybe there was something about her past that would have harmed her popularity. Information that might have been reason enough for Sly Morgan or her business manager, Brunner, to have visited Santillo two nights ago.”
“You might know more than you’re telling,” Ramous said.
“Talk to them. Ask them about it.”
Sergeant Ramous was noncommittal, but as he left I knew I’d planted the seed in his mind. After he’d gone, Stacy asked, “Why’d you want to do that? If the killer thinks you know something damaging, he might come after you like he did Santillo.”
“That’s what I’m hoping for. I’ll be sitting here tonight about the same time and see what happens. Meanwhile I’ll be going over every scrap of paper about Lily Lake in Santillo’s files. If she’s not Lily Lafferty, or Lake, who is she?”
Later that afternoon I told Mike what I’d done. “You’re asking for trouble, Al. Oberline says Santillo had a really big story. He’ll pay big if I can get it to him before the national press gets hold of it.”
“I want you at the concert hall tonight. Try to keep an eye on Brunner and Sly Morgan. If either of them leaves, follow him.”
He didn’t like that. “You got your gun?”
“In the safe.”
“Get it out, Al.”
I promised I would, and then sent downstairs for a sandwich and beer. I wanted to finish going through Santillo’s files before I had any visitors. Lily Lake’s file was first, and that was easy. The real Lily was long dead. He had another file labeled Identity Theft and I turned to that next. I knew all the tricks about forging a false identity — taking a name off a tombstone, procuring a birth certificate for the person, and then using it to obtain a social-security card. That might have been what Lily Lake had done, but why would that be shocking enough to cause a murder? As Sly had pointed out, this was the twenty-first century, when virtually anything goes, especially when it comes to a young, attractive rock star.
I’d finished my sandwich and beer and was near the end of the file when I found what I was looking for. I didn’t know how Santillo had come across it in the first place, when all the tabloids missed it, but then I remembered they’d missed the real Lily’s death too, probably because they’d never followed up on the auto accident that killed her parents. It was just after eight o’clock and I heard the outer office door quietly open.