Not So Model Home

CHAPTER 16


The Pocket Gopher Did It

Jerry questioned everyone separately. Just about everyone was up fairly late. Aleksei was busy coloring his newly grown, but very short hair stubble so that it would be ready for the day’s shooting. David was performing fellatio on a nearly comatose Ian, then returned to his room to look through a stack of fashion magazines. Gilles was on his computer watching some of the French fashion shows on YouTube. Aurora was going over notes that she had written up about the men on the show. And Ian, as usual, couldn’t sleep and took an Ambien and crashed until Lance Greenly shook him out of his coma when the sculpture fell down the stairs. Lance was up most of the night working on financial projections for Ian’s company for next year. His story got real interesting when he said he went down to the kitchen at around 1:30 to get a Red Bull and saw Keith coming out of Aleksei’s room with his shirt off. Everyone else said they went to bed by 1 A.M. and didn’t get up and didn’t leave their rooms until the stairway incident.

“It’s amazing how the sculpture fell just about the time I estimate Keith was probably going through his convulsions from the strychnine, isn’t it?” Jerry confided to me.

“So someone knocked over the penis to cover the noise from Keith’s swan song?”

“You got it. I’m sure Keith would have been making a lot of noise thrashing around when the strychnine really hit him.”

“Since you know a scary amount about poisons, Detective Hallander,” I said, “how long would it take from the moment he ingested the poison to the time it really started to hit him?”

“Ten to twenty minutes after ingesting it, more if on a full stomach.”

“So that means he would have taken the strychnine about two A.M. Maybe a little earlier.”

“About that time.”

“Which means he probably came down to the kitchen around one-thirty to one forty-five or two A.M. to get some cranberry juice. Oh shit! It could still be there in the refrigerator!”

“Relax, Amanda. I already had the juice rounded up for the lab. It seems kinda chancy, though, on the killer’s part. Someone else could have drank it.”

“No, not really. Keith wrote his name on the jug of cranberry juice. Everyone in the cast is doing that since they’re all living here like one big happy family.”

“Except that one member of this family is highly dysfunctional.” Jerry snorted.

“And that would be different from any family how?” I replied. “Well, Lance’s trip to the kitchen was convenient too. Just in time to have the opportunity to poison Keith’s juice.”