Trophy Widow (19 page)

I nodded, trying to fit what I'd learned into the pattern that was emerging.

“This is really troubling,” I said.

“What part?”

“All parts.” I leaned back in my chair with a frown. “Angela Green met Billy Woodward for a drink on the night of the murder. She doesn't remember what happened after that. They found traces of Rohypnol in the blood samples of hers from the scene of crime.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He leaned back in his chair. “Do you think Billy was having sex with her?”

“I don't know what Billy was doing with her.”

Harry shook his head. “Christ Almighty.”

We sat in silence for a few moments.

Finally, I asked, “What do you know about Billy's connection to Samantha Cummings?”

“They worked together. They were lovers for a while. Billy was devastated when they broke up. He kept trying to convince her to come back to him. I lost track of both of them after I fired Billy.”

“Here's the suicide note he left,” I said, handing it to him.

“‘No more waiting for Woody,'” he read. “‘Sayonara.'” He looked up. “That's definitely him. Woody was his nickname. In fact, one of his screen names was Woodrow Woodpecker. Turned out to be a nightmare name for him, because once he started having performance problems, the crew got a kick out of saying they were ‘waiting for Woody.' His nickname became a joke. He hated it. The ‘sayonara' part is Billy, too. That's how he always said goodbye.” Silver shook his head sadly. “Poor kid.”

“You say they once worked together?”

“Right.”

“Was that before Billy started working for you?”

“Oh, no. They worked together here.”

“Here?”

“Right.”

“In front of the camera?”

Silver smiled. “You didn't know that?”

“I don't think anyone does.”

“Sam was young then. She worked under a stage name.” He paused, searching his memory. “Sammi, no—Staci. Staci Cummer. Staci with an
i
and Cummer with a
u
. Sam was actually a student of mine during my last year at Washington U. She was a freshman. Art history major, I believe. She dropped out of school her junior year. When she found out about my new career, she approached me for work.” He smiled wistfully. “Beautiful girl. She was actually quite good, too. Could have been a contract girl if she wanted, but she left the business after just a year or two. Like most who go straight, I'm sure she'd prefer to leave this part of her life behind her. That's certainly her prerogative, and I respect it. One of the local weather girls on TV got her start with me. She did some nasty, kinky scenes, too, including one with a German shepherd. But she has a new life now—standing in front of the weather map and talking about cold fronts. I have no interest in publicizing her role in those films, or Samantha's role in her films. I make plenty of money as it is.” He gave me a wink. “Even we pornographers have our limits.”

“Films?” I asked, accentuating the plural. “How many was Samantha in?”

“Maybe half a dozen. She and Billy were in most of them together.”

“This is, well—surprising.”

“Let me see if I can get you one of their videos to watch,” he said, standing up. “We must still have a few in storage.”

As I got up, I leaned toward the abstract painting. Sure enough, in the lower right corner was a familiar signature.

I followed Harry Silver downstairs and back toward the storage area. I watched as he opened the drawer in one of the large filing cabinets and started sorting through the videocassettes. “Here we go.”

“You have a painting by Sebastian Curry,” I said.

He turned to me with a bemused expression, a videocassette in his hand. “Do you actually know his work?”

“I've seen some of his paintings. When did you buy yours?”

“About eight or nine years ago.”

“From who?”

“From him.”

“Do you like his stuff?”

He pondered the question. “Not at all. I bought it more as a favor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sebastian was your classic struggling artist. Emphasis on the struggling part. I didn't think he'd ever make it, but I liked him and thought it might give him a boost if he could actually sell one of his paintings. How do you know about him?”

“When Samantha Cummings had an art gallery, she sold a lot of his works. In fact, she sold them for way above their market value.”

He laughed. “Good for her. Good for both of them. He must have been in heaven over that.”

He looked back in the drawer and sorted through the titles. Eventually, he found what he was looking for and exchanged it for the cassette he'd been holding. “Let's try this one instead.”

The name of the movie was
All That Jizz
. Despite the title, it had a relatively classy box cover showing two chorus girls shot from behind, their hips canted in a classic Bob Fosse pose. Each was wearing a thong spandex leotard, black stockings, and black spiked heels. Each had on a top hat tilted jauntily to the side. There were two box-cover girls, or at least two actresses identified by name on the box cover. Neither was Staci Cummer.

“Take it home and watch it,” Silver told me. “I guarantee that you will find it quite enlightening.”

Chapter Nineteen

From Pinnacle Productions I drove to the Jewish Federation, where I had a lunch meeting for a committee of Jewish professional women that I served on. The topic was a fund-raiser for one of our scholarship projects. Talk about cultural dissonance—from a money shot on the East Side to a money drive in West County.

I didn't get to my office until almost three o'clock, by which time I had nineteen phone messages, including two urgent ones from Benny.

“He wants a full report on Pinnacle Productions,” Jacki said.

“I'll bet he does.”

“Did you find out much?”

“Too much. I'm not sure what to make of it all. Especially this.” I took the videocassette out of my briefcase.

“
All That Jizz
?” Jacki said, examining the cover. “Are you kidding me?”

“You think that's bad? How ‘bout
Jurassic Pussy
?”

Jacki giggled and covered her mouth. “Oh, no.”

“Their target audience must have the sense of humor of a seventh-grade boy.”

“Is the guy who killed himself on this video?”

“Yep, and so is Samantha Cummings.”

Jacki's jaw dropped. “Oh, my God.”

“I can't believe it, either. In fact, I won't until I see it.” I flipped through the stack of phone messages. “I'm going to return some of these and then we can watch the video. If Benny calls while I'm on the phone, tell him I'm not back yet.”

“Really? You know he'd die to see this.”

“Sure I do, but you know Benny. He'd turn the whole thing into a comic monologue. I'm not ready for that.” I gestured toward the videocassette in her hand. “The stuff I learned today is really troubling. I want to see what's on this tape and figure out my next move without having to deal with his wisecracks.”

I returned only those phone calls that sounded like they needed returning—just eight of the nineteen. Even so, by the time I finished with number eight, almost two hours had elapsed and the list of messages had grown by six, including another from Benny saying that he'd be over right after his antitrust seminar. That gave us barely an hour.

I called out, “It's show time, Jacki.”

I turned on the TV, put the cassette in the VCR, and fast-forwarded through the previews for a trio of movies that I hadn't recalled seeing on anyone's list of the top ten movies of the year.

“Fasten your seat belts,” I told her as the title words appeared on the screen to the accompaniment of generic lounge music.

The “plot”—such as it was—unfolded quickly. The protagonist was supposed to be a legendary director of Broadway musicals named Rob Rosse. His part was played by a middle-aged, potbellied actor who wasted no time in exposing his principal qualification for his role in the film. It was, to say the least, a daunting piece of equipment—an appendage that would have looked more in scale dangling between the hind legs of a Clydesdale. I suppose it made him the envy of the locker room crowd, but I couldn't imagine any woman reacting to its unveiling with anything but alarm.

The scene opened in his office, where he was in the process of casting the female lead for his next musical. Specifically, the scene opened in that segment of the audition where the young actress was kneeling in front of Rob Rosse and demonstrating an oral skill unrelated to singing but apparently pertinent to the casting process. Although she was a blonde, she didn't resemble my photos of Samantha Cummings. I also had the police file photo of Billy Woodward with me to make sure that we could identify him.

The opening sex scene progressed to intercourse and moved through a sequence that, after my morning's education, I could recite like a pro: Cowgirl, Doggie, Missionary, money shot onto her face.

“Oh, gross,” Jacki said.

The money shot triggered the main plot twist: moments after ejaculating, Rob Rosse went into cardiac arrest. The paramedics arrived, put him on a stretcher, and loaded him into the back of the ambulance. The remainder of the movie was a series of flashbacks during the ride to the hospital—flashbacks to the leading ladies of Rosse's career, all of whom he'd had sex with and several of whom he'd observed having sex with others. We played the video at regular speed long enough at the beginning of each flashback to confirm that neither Samantha nor Billy was in the scene, and then we fast-forwarded to the next flashback. Sexual intercourse viewed at high speed becomes a weird cross between a human electrocution and a high school driver's ed film on the role of pistons in an internal combustion engine.

“Whoa, that's her,” Jacki said.

I hit the pause button and compared my photos to the woman on screen. “You're right.”

With her long blond hair parted in the middle and her hiphugger jeans, Samantha Cummings, aka Staci Cummer, seemed barely out of high school. The scene opened with Rosse spotting her playing a guitar and singing a folk song on a park bench. Struck by her beauty, he was about to approach her when a young man came up and gave her a kiss.

“That's him,” I said, hitting the pause button again. I handed Jacki the picture from the police file. Woodward's hair was cut longer in the movie, and he was dressed disco-style, right down to the ankle-high boots.

“You're right,” Jacki said.

I hit play.

Billy and Samantha headed off toward his apartment hand in hand, followed in the distance by Rosse. The apartment was on the first floor, which enabled Rosse to spy on them through a window. At the beginning of the scene—the kissing part—there was a tenderness between Samantha and Billy that seemed genuine. But once the sequence began, you could almost sense the cameramen and film crew hovering around the edges of the bed. No place for tenderness there.

The performance problems that would soon afflict Woodward were nowhere evident in the remainder of the scene, which ran Missionary, Cowgirl, Doggie, money shot.

“Oh, not in her hair,” Jacki squealed in disgust as one of Billy's spurts arced over her back and onto her hair.

Samantha had a second sex scene, this time with the Rosse character. Moments into the scene they were joined by another young woman. A pair of B-girls with the male talent, I thought as I glumly watched the scene play out. Although the sex was explicit and astonishingly vivid, the erotic effect was by now virtually nil. It was more like watching a medical procedure under klieg lights. Jacki and I had giggled through the movie's opening scene on the casting couch, but neither us said a thing now. It was just too depressing. As I watched Samantha finish off Rosse by hand, his semen splattering her neck and breasts, I couldn't even begin to imagine the lure of such a job. Even stripping in a crowded, noisy topless club seemed more appealing than this, although not by much.

The final flashback faded as Rosse's ambulance reached the hospital. Two nurses rolled him quickly down the hall toward the operating room. As they burst through the swinging doors, the scene shifted into fantasy mode and we were in an ethereal white operating room filled with undulating white fog. Rosse, dressed in a white hospital gown, was strapped on a gurney, an oxygen mask over his mouth. One of the box-cover girls appeared out of the fog, dressed in a silky white nightgown that reached to the floor. She had a pair of small white wings on her back. I had to concede that it was a visually powerful scene, totally unexpected in this cheesy video.

The white angel spoke to Rosse, telling him that she'd been the true object of his lifelong desire, but that he'd been too caught up in his ego and ambition to understand that.

“I could have been yours,” she told him in a husky whisper as she slowly lifted the hem of the long white gown. “With me you could have known heaven on earth.”

He watched, the mask strapped over his mouth, his eyes widening with desire, or maybe anguish.

“But instead,” she continued, “you're condemned to that gurney for all time. All you can do is watch.”

She slipped off the shoulder straps and let the gown slide down her body, the silk gathering in folds at her feet. She took a step forward, now wearing nothing but white pumps.

“She's gorgeous,” Jacki said with a sigh.

Behind her, the swirling fog now had taken on a reddish tint. She turned toward the fog and paused to look back over her shoulder at Rosse. She gave him a wistful smile and turned away. She crooked her finger toward the swirling fog and made a beckoning motion. In a husky voice, she whispered, “Come here, you big devil.”

Emerging from the fog was a tall lean black man wearing a red mask over his eyes and a pair of curved red devil's horns sprouting from his forehead. He was naked beneath his floor-length red cape. As he stepped forward, his enormous uncircumcised penis swayed heavily against his muscular thighs.

“Oh, my God,” Jacki gasped. “It's him.”

I sat there stunned. Despite the mask, the man's identity was unmistakable. I was staring at Sebastian Curry.

In silence, we sat through the final scene and then the credits. Sebastian Curry acted under the name “Ronnie Mandingo.” Billy Woodward was “Woodrow Woodpecker.”

***

The answering machine picked up after the third ring. “Yo, what's up? Sebastian here. Sorry I can't get your call. Just leave me your name and number and I'll be back at you soon as I'm able. If you're calling to come see my work, be sure to leave a few possible dates and times. Bye for now.”

I waited for the beep.

“Sebastian, this is Rachel Gold. We met yesterday at my office. I need to come over to ask you a few questions. I'm in court on a motion tomorrow morning. I should be done by ten. If it's okay with you, I'll drop by your place after court. Call me if that's a problem.”

I left him my home and work phone numbers.