"As I said, that and the other deaths have roots that go back a long time. My own involvement began approximately twelve years ago, when I arrested a very famous rock star for possession of heroin. That's right: King David himself."
The wide smile he gave the wrinkly rocker was eclipsed only by the electric return grin. The singer had, Caroline noted, surprisingly good teeth for a heroin addict.
"Fortunately for David, he had a clever lawyer, a clean record, and a malleable judge. Which would have been just another instance of justice for the rich, except for one thing: David actually wanted to rehabilitate. He'd been very close to someone, another member of the band, who'd recently died of an overdose. I see some of you remember this."
They did, even Caroline, who had been barely in her teens at the time and hadn't much cared for King David's kind of music anyway, but who had read the articles about the band's troubles with avid attention, wondering at the mix of the famous and the kinky.
"I went to see him in rehab and made him an offer: He'd pass on any information that came his way about dealers and suppliers, we'd work it into our cases, keep his name out of it, all that. It's the sort of thing we do sometimes, though generally we'll offer to reduce time. In this case, I was pushing the revenge side. Not that I had much hope-his sentence was so light we had no leverage, but a person can only ask, and besides, I thought that during our interview we had connected. Turns out I was right, though not in quite the way I'd thought." Again an exchange of knowing smiles, until the agent pulled himself together.
"Anyway, to my amazement, no sooner had I mentioned the possibility of his turning informant than he started to roar with laughter, as if I'd made an enormous joke. Turns out the director of the rehab center he was staying in had offered him a line of coke while they were filling in the admit papers. I couldn't believe it-we hadn't even suspected the place.
"The center was run by Claudia and Raoul de Vries, and although they got a lot more subtle over the years, their operation grew. And we grew with them. We knew something was coming together these last few months, and that's when I came in undercover."
(The skimpy turquoise thong he'd been wearing when she first saw him flashed through Caroline's mind. That was some disguise-nobody'd think to look for a cop underneath… She blushed again and told herself to behave.)
"Chris Lund and Howard Fondulac were two of her major distributors, Fondulac in Southern California, Lund all over, wherever Ondine had regular jobs. She, I hasten to say, had nothing to do with it." He shot another glance across the room, but this time, Caroline thought, it was aimed not at King David but at Lauren Sullivan beside him. "Howard was getting erratic and had been diagnosed with the early stages of liver cancer. He was pressing Claudia to give him more of the stuff to distribute, at the same time that he was holding back a heavy percentage of the profits-he badly wanted to underwrite one last blockbuster film and was desperate for the cash. In the end, according to her notes, he said he'd given her all he could and threatened to tell all: If he was going to die, he might as well bring the whole operation down with him. So he had to be removed, whether by Raoul de Vries or by Christopher Lund or by another remains to be seen. I imagine that one of them will take our offer of a deal and give evidence on the other. This investigation, I hardly need say, is going to keep a number of agencies busy for a long time.
"I believe we'll find it was Raoul de Vries, rather than Lund, who killed Fondulac. He'd already attacked Phyllis Talmadge, though not very efficiently. He knew that his wife had a safe filled with blackmailing material, but he couldn't get at it because of the continuous presence of the police. When he heard Ms. Talmadge's declaration that the room contained secrets, he thought her statement was based on clear knowledge rather than some vague psychic intuition, and he panicked. Howard Fondulac's death was similarly opportunistic, making use of the exercise machine, but you can be sure that this time his killer was watching, waiting for just such a chance.
"Christopher Lund's problem was that he'd started using more cocaine than he was selling. His death, although the timing is suspicious, may finally prove to be the accident it appears. The crime scene technicians haven't finished in there, so it's far too soon to say anything about it.
"But now we come to Ondine's death, which is the real reason we've brought you here. The precise details of her death are proving hard to pin down." (An unfortunate turn of phrase, Caroline thought, considering the way the poor girl had died. The inappropriateness seemed to occur to Emilio/Jonathan at the same moment. He went on hastily.) "From the position of the body, it is just possible that she came back in the salon, looked into the next room and saw Karen McElroy lying dead in the pedi-bath, and fainted. She was, after all, so severely malnourished that it wouldn't have taken much of a shock." Caroline thought he seemed determined not to look over at the rock star and the actress when he said this, and she wondered why.
"So Ondine could, possibly, have fallen against the shelf unit and had it come down on top of her. It was massive, but most of the weight was in the top, and as a result the piece as a whole was far from stable. The only problem with that theory is that we found two very clear sets of prints on the side of that freshly polished wood. One set up along the back." Here he gripped his right hand over an invisible object at shoulder height. "And another lower down." In illustration, he pulled with his right arm against the imaginary weight, pushing out with his left. The room winced at the silent crash of a shelving unit, laden with nail polish, onto the fragile bones of a prostrate but still breathing model-waif.
"Now, before I tell you about those prints, we need to look at the other skein in this tangle. For that we need to go back even farther than twelve years.
"I believe most of you were aware some time ago that Claudia de Vries was a blackmailer. It should be obvious by now that she was a lot of things; anything that brought in money, she was willing to try. Some criminals stick to a specific area; others are generalists. Claudia was one of the latter.
"The first criminal act we know of was when she was in college and agreed to help a friend arrange an illegal adoption. For payment, naturally, to ensure that the friend's illegitimate baby went to a good, caring, if none too wealthy family. In fact, she dumped the child with a relative and kept the money."
Caroline realized that she was squeezing Douglas's hand until all their fingers were turning white. She eased off, made herself take a deep breath, and then jumped when another voice spoke up.
"That was me." The speaker, Caroline saw with incredulity, was Lauren Sullivan, beautiful and bruised. "My adult looks have taken me a long way, I know, but as a child I was difficult and funny-looking and incredibly shy. My acting career began young, when I constructed a storybook family, loving and stable and infinitely detailed, and imagined myself into their midst." She wasn't about to go into detail here, serving up her life history for these eager strangers to drink in every nuance. It was none of their business that a year ago, when her therapy reached the point that the imaginary parents really had to be dealt with, she simply killed them off in an equally imaginary car wreck, fiery and tragic. Adoring but dead parents were infinitely more comforting than the parents she'd had, and any crutch, even a twisted one, was better than no support at all. She continued with the abbreviated version. "It is a role I play still-to the extent that when he asked me, I gave Detective Toscana that fantasy version of my history automatically, without thinking about it. In actual fact, although I was taken in as an infant by Claudia's older sister, it didn't last long. I was passed from one family member to the next, then into a series of foster homes. Not until I was thirteen did I arrive in a family that actually wanted to adopt me. The week before the papers were finalized, the father came to my room. I had a baby at fifteen."