Not So Model Home

CHAPTER 22


Here, Let Me Help You Tie Your Tie

Another day of shooting. There were still weeks and weeks of shooting to go. It was exhausting, starting at the crack of dawn and working until late in the evening at times. I had a newfound appreciation for television stars.

As usual, we were sitting in Iffy Central, Ian’s cavernous living room where the bulk of the scenes from the show were filmed. We were made up, meticulously but casually dressed, and ready to go. With one small change in the scene to be shot. Darryn’s presence on the show had caused all the others to “lose their edge,” as Jeremy stated. With the exception of the welcomed debacle of the memorial luncheon the day before, Jeremy was getting pissed off that the drama was ebbing out of the show. He needed more drama, more catfighting, he stressed. He wanted to keep the ratings on their rocket trajectory.

“Jeremy,” David stated. “You want us to be dramatic, but we end up suffering for it since Aurora is grading us on our behavior. This is putting us between a rock and a hard place.”

“The only hard place you have been lately has been Ian’s bedroom,” Gilles snapped.

“There!” Jeremy exclaimed. “That’s the toxic behavior I remember. I want more of that—just wittier lines than that. Okay, guys, let’s get started.”

The cameramen got into position and started. Lights, action, attitude!

“David,” Ian started. Could you go upstairs and see what’s keeping Aleksei?”

“Ian!” he complained. “Every time I go to fetch someone, they end up dead. I’m not doing this again,” he said, putting down his Diet Coke on a priceless end table without a coaster. He got up and plodded upstairs like he had a 1,000-pound weight on his shoulders.

The moment this observation slipped from David’s mouth, you could see that everyone was thinking the same thing: something bad has happened to Aleksei. You saw the concerned faces shooting glances at each other to see if they were thinking the same thing. You saw hands tapping on chair armrests. A nervous cough or two.

“It’s weird. I haven’t seen Aleksei all morning,” Drake mentioned. “I at least get treated to hearing him vomiting before he goes to bed at night, then in the morning after he has a yogurt, coffee, and a cigarette.”

“Breakfast of Champions,” I added. It was a good line, but it had none of the zing of some of my earlier precision strikes. I was getting tired. My lines were getting tired, too, I feared.

Presently, David came back downstairs and flopped himself on the couch, picking up his Diet Coke and fashion magazine.

“Well?” Drake asked.

“Well what?” David replied, clearly not understanding that the mood had shifted tectonically in his absence.

“What did you find out?” Drake asked.

“Oh, there’s a loose tile in the hallway outside my room. I nearly tripped on it for the second time. Ian, could you get Drake to get that fixed? Someone’s going to get really hurt on that tile.”

Drake leaned forward in his armchair and said through gritted teeth, “David, is Aleksei joining us?”

“Aleksei? Joining us? Probably not.”

“Could you tell us why?” Drake continued.

“He’s sitting upstairs with a tie twisted around his neck. A striped rep tie. Can you imagine? I mean, it’s 2012! Like some kinda f*ckin’ Ralph Lauren preppie tie thing . . . sorry, Drake. I know how you like Ralphie, having worked for him a long time ago. Hey, maybe it’s one of your ties!”

“How would you know it’s one of my ties?”

“No one else would wear a rep tie around here but you, Drake.”

Drake and the rest of us went upstairs in what was becoming a regular routine.

“Well, don’t get mad at me, Drake! I hear rep ties are making a comeback for spring!” David added before we were out of earshot.

We gathered at Aleksei’s door like a weary band of tourists, staring but not registering what we were seeing. There in a wing chair with its back to us was Aleksei, sitting naked and upright with a tie twisted tightly around his neck, his face a purple–blue. Since we were all tall, we could see over the top of the back of the chair—all except Marcus, who leaned far into the room to get a good look, holding on to the door molding with veiny, muscular hands.

“Careful, Marcus,” I intoned. “We can’t disturb evidence.”

“I won’t step into the room. I’ve hung on a cross bar like this for forty minutes before,” Marcus said proudly. “Shit,” he said, staring at Aleksei.

Darryn, who stood at the back of the pack, whispered, “This is really freaky. Aren’t you scared?”

“With all these people around, no. Plus, they’re not after me. They’re after you guys.”

“Thanks a lot. You’ve made me feel a whole lot better,” Darryn replied. “I am not sleeping in this house.”

Just then, a voice spoke up from behind all of us. “Now, if you skyscrapers would step out of the way, a short person would like to get a look-see,” Aurora said.

The boys parted for Aurora, who stood in the doorway.

“Jesus Christ! Who is doing this?” she asked, shaking her head. “Wait a minute.... Hey, look over there on the dresser. Drugs!”

She was right. From my vantage point, I could see the pile of whitish crystals on the top of Aleksei’s tall dresser.

Aurora continued, “It looks like autoerotic asphyxiation. He snorted some crystal, wanted to jerk off because he was on a high, and he got the tie too tight and fainted before he passed out. I have a lot of male patients who are into it. But I can’t tell you who. Patient–therapist confidentiality.”

I decided to play detective.

“It seems coincidental, people. We have one murder, and now another person just happens to die in the house, but this time it’s self-induced? It’s all too coincidental. No, this is another murder.”

“I don’t know, Amanda,” Drake said. “Look at the floor in front of Aleksei. He’s sprayed his chowder all over the place. He was cumming just as he passed out from the tie. Happens all the time.”

I looked around to be certain there was a camera on me; there was.

“My question is,” I said like a great detective, “where Aleksei got the tie. He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who would wear a tie, especially a rep tie. As David said downstairs, those are the kinds of ties that you wear, Drake. Would you care to shed a little light on this development?”

David joined our little group of survivors. He brightened up when he looked at Aleksei again. “I saw an episode of Six Feet Under where a guy was doing the same thing, but you’re supposed to suck on a lemon, so if you start to pass out from the lack of oxygen to the brain, you bite down on the lemon and the shock of the tartness wakes you up before you strangle yourself.”

David’s theory sounded plausible . . . if it had come from someone else.

“All we need to do is look around and see if there’s a lemon wedge somewhere in the room. Mystery solved,” David said.

“No one is going anywhere into the room.”

“Or,” David said casually, “Drake was strangling Aleksei erotically and things got out of hand.”

Dead silence. Drake, who normally could frighten the others with a looks-that-could-kill sideways glance, looked more like a trapped animal.

David attempted to enter the room again as I grabbed him by the shoulder and restrained him.

“We’ve got to keep the place clear,” I said sternly.

“Zo who makes you the Hercule Poirot?” Gilles said from behind.

“Nobody, but it’s just good police procedure,” I added.

“You zeem to know a lot about ze police,” Gilles continued. “Maybe you know a lot about murder also. Keeling people!” he said, making a slashing motion with his hand holding an imaginary knife.

“Gilles, as usual, you are being overly dramatic.”

“You . . .” he said, pointing at me with his perfect finger. “You, I get zee restraining order on you. You slap me, now you want to murder me.”

“Gilles, if you’re talking about the number of people waiting to murder you, the line starts somewhere back near the Louvre.”

Finally, a great zinger of a response and the cameramen got it. I was back on top. Since Jerry warned them not to photograph crime scenes or even approach them, the cameramen stayed their distance. But a zoom lens solved that problem. I only worried that because this scene might compromise a murder investigation, the police might not allow it to air. As they say in the theater, the best scene might end up being played off stage.

The security guards that were hired to protect us finally showed up with bags of hamburgers and fries in their hands. By that time, the police had arrived again, setting up shop with regularity that was almost wearying. Another day, another murder. Everyone had been shooed downstairs. Jerry arrived and escorted me upstairs with him.

“Upstairs she go again, the murderess,” Gilles sniped. Before I got out of eyesight, I turned around for the cameras and stuck out my tongue at Gilles. We headed to Aleksei’s room where Jerry surveyed the scene before going in.

“Everyone seems to think this was unintentional suicide, Jerry.”

“Suicide? Who thinks that?”

“Everyone. Even Aurora.”

“Oh, in that case, I can just pack up and go home now. A celebrity shrink thinks it was suicide.”

“So you don’t think so?” I asked as Jerry made his way carefully into the room.

“No, I know so. Look at the way the tie has been pulled up from behind . . . er, Adam’s . . . ?”

“Aleksei’s.”

“. . . Aleksei’s neck. See the marks on the neck? The abrasions are at the back, with most of them pointing vertically. The tie was pulled way up. In fact, you can see from the marks on the chair’s velvet upholstery, on the arms, that Aleksei was pulled up and struggled with his hands, pushing down to take the tension off his neck. Whoever did this was very tall.”

“That eliminates one person downstairs: Marcus Blade.”

“Mini-Me Hulk downstairs?”

“He can’t be five foot two. Then there’s Aurora, she’s short too.”

“So everyone else is tall?” Jerry asked.

“Everyone. Even Ian and me. Well, Lance Greenly, Ian’s CEO, is about five foot eight.”

“So I assume the pile of drugs here on the dresser is crystal meth?”

“Probably. Aleksei had a problem with it and was here recuperating from it.”

Jerry pulled a folding magnifying glass from his back pocket.

“That is soooo Sherlock Holmes,” I said.

“Elementary, my dear Amanda.”

He bent over Aleksei and looked closely up his nose.

“Trying to see if he snorted any crystal?”

“Yes. Good girl. Yup, there’s some up his nostril, but the medical examiner will tell us if it goes all the way up.”

“Why would it not go all the way up into his nasal passages?”

“Just a hunch, Amanda. Just a hunch.”

“Are there other ways of doing crystal, Jerry?”

“Smoking it. But I don’t see a pipe anywhere.”

“He could have put it away in a drawer, or hidden it,” I suggested.

“If he was deliberately going to get high here in his room—and you said he was an addict—then he knew he would be high for a long time.”

“So what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” I asked.

“What’s the rush in putting a pipe away? Or a needle if he was injecting? There’s plenty of time to put things away. Plus, you never know. Meth is so addictive, the user always knows he’s going to want more eventually.”

“So those are the only ways of getting high on meth?”

“Some use it as an anal suppository, Amanda.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not checking there, if that’s what you’re driving at. But be my guest.”

“No thanks, Jerry. So you don’t think he was high and jerking off doing a little autoerotic asphyxiation?”

Jerry looked at me with all seriousness. “This is not to leave this room.”

I made a sign of crossing my heart.

“No, he might have been jerking off, but I doubt the autoerotic part.”

“Do you think the killer jerked him off after he died? Isn’t that possible? I heard that men can have erections after being hanged.”

Jerry looked at me like I was crazy. “You think someone got him sexually aroused after he was strangled?”

Maybe I was crazy. “No,” I said. “I guess not. I have trouble getting guys aroused when they’re completely awake and alive.”

“You? I can’t imagine it. A sexy woman like you?”

Normally, I would have deflected his compliment and crushed it with a joke, but this time I didn’t. The look in Jerry’s eyes stopped me in my tracks. His eyes were mischievous, teasing, tempting. The look lasted for only a second, but it was there nonetheless. I was being hit on. It stunned me. I wasn’t prepared. But then again, how does one prepare for something like this?

“Jerry, I don’t know what to say.”

“Maybe it’s best if you didn’t say anything,” he replied, looking around the room for perhaps a diversion? “Anyway. . .”

“Yes . . .” I said, like an adulterous wife who narrowly escaped getting caught cheating. And just like that, we went back to our old lives. Respectable. Professional. Uninvolved. Not starting an affair.

“How about a DNA sample?” Jerry asked.

“Excuse me, I’m not that kind of girl.”

“No, Amanda, I’m going to have the crime people take a DNA sample of the sperm here on the floor. I’m suspicious. . . Just a hunch.”

“You have a lot of hunches, Jerry.”

“That’s all my job is, Amanda. Hunches that need to be proved correct.”

“You know, Jerry, I have a few myself. I guess I need to check them out. What I don’t understand is why someone . . . wait a minute! Aleksei really shot his mouth off yesterday at Jean-Michael’s. He probably said something he shouldn’t have.”

“And I assume it was all on film?”

“On tape, if you want to be technical. High-definition videotape. Call it what you want.”

“I think we need to look at that footage as soon as possible. Our answer to this whole mess might just be on there.”