Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 05

Chapter 5 The Usual Suspects

Lauren stood up, left the room, and came back a minute later with a bottle of water she sat down on the table in front of Shane. Shane looked up at her. "Thanks," she mumbled.

"You okay?"

Shane nodded. "She didn't do it."

"No, she didn't."

"Niki confessed?"

"Yep."

"Nobody told me."

"No."

"We all thought-"

"You thought what Niki wanted you and everyone else to think. Everybody seems to think Niki's not smart enough to tie her own shoelaces, and maybe she isn't. But she's a cunning little bitch, completely amoral, and she always has this posse she surrounds herself with. Who knows, maybe one of them is the brain who puts ideas in Niki's head. And she confessed to something else, too, that you need to know about. After the negatives were stolen, somebody e-mailed a ransom demand to the studio to get the negs back, and that e-mail was traced back to Tina's office laptop. So for a while that made the studio think Tina stole the negatives. I don't know if Tina ever told you about that part."

Carmen shook her head no. "I heard there was some kind of ransom thing," Shane said. "I didn't know details. I wrote it off as just bullshit. Gossip."

"Well, that was Niki, too. And sure, maybe one of her posse thought it up and told her how to do it, or did it for her. Niki never expected the studio to pay the money, she just wanted to stir up more trouble, and maybe get people to think Jenny and Tina were in collusion stealing the negatives. Maybe the studio would go to the police, the police would get search warrants on Tina's and Jenny's houses, and bingo, what would they find in Jenny's attic? The film canisters. Checkmate."

Carmen broke in. "I assume we're talking about standard 35-millimeter canisters, right? Size of a dinner plate, inch thick, those kind?"

Lauren flipped through pages in her folder, found what she was looking for. "Film canisters, 12. Ten point five inches diameter, one point five inches deep. Canisters had white tape around the sides, sealing them shut, and on the tape written in black magic marker, DEV NEG quote LEZ GIRLS unquote and numbered one to twelve. Dusted for prints by blah blah da da, let's see, Outside of most canisters free of prints. Wiped clean, in other words. Two canisters with Shane's and Tina's prints. Just two finger-tips from Tina, actually. Apparently she never actually held one in her hand. Niki wore gloves and was careful about handling them. Couple of fingerprints inside the canisters, all belonging to film techs and camera people, exactly as one would expect, and means nothing except that Niki never opened them or at least never touched the reels. No surprise there."

"And no help."

"Nope."

"So how'd they get in Jenny and Shane's attic?"

"That's easy. It wasn't hard for Niki to know when you guys weren't home and when you were at the studio, working. And she knew you kept a key to the back door inside one of those hollowed-out fake rock things in a flower pot on the back porch—"

"Oh, fuck," Carmen said quietly.

"What?" Lauren asked.

"I bought that rock. That was a long time ago. Remember, Shane? Way back when. Tim had moved out and you had just moved in with Jenny and then Jenny and I began our affair, and I was coming and going pretty often, but I didn't want my own key, not until later, so we bought that rock and put a backdoor key in it. Remember? Has it been there ever since?"

Shane nodded.

"How many people knew about it?" Lauren asked.

"Shit," Shane said. "Uh. Me, Jenny, Carmen, Alice, Tina, Dana before she died, Bette, Max, Kit, Helena, Mangus, Mollie, Tasha, Adele, Paige—"

"Okay, got it," Lauren said. "About half of southern California."

"More or less," Shane admitted.

"And of course Niki, who had an affair with Jenny and was pissed at her. She said Jenny made her spend the night having sex and the next morning kicked her out on her ass. So Niki went in one day in broad daylight while you guys were out, went to the closet, pulled down the steps, put the canisters in the attic, and poof, she was gone. The perfect crime."

"How'd she even know there was an attic or pull-down stairs?" Carmen asked.

"Ah! Marybeth thought of that, too," Lauren said, grinning proudly, "and asked her. Seems Niki had been in that very closet a couple times before. Lying on her back. Looking up. Right up at the pull-down ladder in the ceiling."

Shane put her forehead down on the table.

"While she was fucking," Carmen said.

"While she was fucking," Lauren nodded.

"My fault." Shane whispered, not lifting her head. "That's my fault."

"Actually, Shane, worst case, it's only half your fault, and more likely none at all," Lauren said. "Seems Niki and Jenny fucked in that closet, too. More than once, so she said. That must have been a popular closet. Lesbians and closets. Ironic, huh?"

"Jesus Christ," Carmen whispered, and reached over for Shane's bottle of water, uncapped it, and took a swallow. "I painted that closet. I painted that bedroom."

Lauren looked at her.

"I know what you're thinking," Carmen said. "Yes. Yes, I did. I fucked in that closet, too. It was a nice, big walk-in, carpeted and everything, very cozy. First with Jenny, then when it became my room, with Shane. To be perfectly honest with you, there's hardly a square inch of that house that somebody didn't have a healthy, juicy orgasm in. Bedrooms, closets, hallway, bathroom floor, toilet, shower, studio, kitchen floor, kitchen counter, kitchen table, living room floor, coffee table. And then there's the studio-"

"Carmen," Shane said quietly.

Carmen stopped. "Sorry." She took another drink of water. "Lauren, tell me this: If Niki stole the negatives, why isn't she in jail?"

"Long story short, the studio declined to press charges. Marybeth told Tina she could tell the studio the canisters had been found, and a day or two later there was a big meeting in the largest conference room Marybeth could commandeer, with her team, a bunch of studio suits, more lawyers than are in Hell. Shane, were you in that meeting, too?"

"No. Marybeth told me there was going to be one, and asked if I wanted to come, since I was the one who actually found them. But ... I couldn't. I didn't care about the negatives, or even the movie itself."

"So what happened?" Carmen asked.

Lauren shrugged. "Best as I can reconstruct it from what Marybeth said, a lot of yelling, screaming, finger-pointing. Tina was hugely pissed that the studio had changed the ending—"

"What do you mean?" Carmen asked.

Shane lifted her head from the table. "The studio guys got chicken-shit cold feet. They wanted Jenny to change the ending, so that Jesse, the main character, instead of staying a lesbian, goes back to her old boyfriend Jim. Then they changed the name, from Lez Girls, L-E-Z, to The Girls, T-H-E. They said the movie was too lezzie."

"Too lezzie? Wasn't it all about lesbians?" Lauren asked. "A bunch of lesbian friends, based on you guys and your lesbian friends, lovers, relationships, all that hot, steamy-"

"Thank you. Exactly," Shane said. She turned to Carmen. "You should be grateful you weren't a PA on that shoot. I don't have anywhere near your experience or Tina's in the movie industry, but that shoot had to be the most fucked up from beginning to end in the history of Hollywood."

"I bet Tina was even more pissed when she heard about the extortion thing, and getting blamed for it," Carmen said.

"She was," Shane said. "She was furious."

"Yes. But as far as I can tell from the files, nobody has yet told Tina it was Niki. Marybeth told the studio the negatives were recovered, and they knew who took them, and did the studio want to press charges? I think she told what's-his-name, Aaron, the studio head, but I don't think she told anyone else. Tina knows there was an extortion attempt, and she was blamed. But I can't see anywhere in the paperwork that she learned that was Niki, too. And of course she never got an apology from anybody. She and Bette moved to New York right after Jenny's funeral."

"I was at sea when they were shooting and when I got back Alice told me a few stories, but I never heard why Jenny got fired off the set. Tina said it was the worst production she'd ever been involved in, but she was too stressed to talk much, and then the baby started crying so she had to go deal with it. Alice didn't know and Jenny wouldn't tell me anything. She said it was just studio politics."

Shane snorted. "Shit."

"What?" Lauren asked.

Shane sighed. "Okay, let me start by saying that movie was the worst thing that ever happened to Jenny. It completely sent her off the deep end into this ... I don't know, 'ego trip' doesn't begin to explain it. She's always been a little, you know..." she paused, handicapped, as always, but her own inarticulateness.

"A diva," Carmen said. "And manipulative."

"Yeah. So anyway, what happened was, Jenny and Niki were getting it on. And I'm about the last person on earth who should be criticizing somebody for fucking somebody they shouldn't. But ... this wasn't so much 'wrong,' you know, and I don't mean immoral or illegal. Maybe what I mean is just stupid and ... "

"Counterproductive?" Carmen asked.

"Yeah. Counterproductive, and more than a little weird."

"How so?" Lauren asked.

"Well, like you said, the book was based on Jenny herself, and all of us, her friends, but she wasn't also just the author, she was the director, even though she had no experience directing. The power trip was something fierce. And Niki was playing Jesse, Jenny's character. Which was horrible casting, but that's beside the point. It wasn't that Jenny was fucking an actress, or even the director fucking the leading lady. That's been done about a billion times in Hollywood. When Jenny was fucking Niki, it was like Jenny was fucking herself. She was fucking herself. The person playing the character of herself."

"Okay, that is a little weird," Lauren said.

"You don't know Jenny," Carmen said.

"That's what I'm finding out," Lauren said. "So then what happened, Shane?"

"The Subaru people sponsored this 200-mile marathon bicycle fundraising thing for breast cancer awareness—"

"Sure. The Subaru Pink Ride, I think they called it. I was thinking about going myself, but something came up at work and I couldn't go."

"You know our friend Dana Fairbanks died of breast cancer, right? So that has a lot of special meaning for us, so we all put together a team called Team Dana. It was a two-day thing, and everybody brought along tents and camping stuff, and everybody, hundreds of us, camped out over night. It was supposed to be fun—"

"Lezzies roasting hot dogs and S'Mores over an open fire, singing Kumbaya-"

"Right, all that, although it wasn't an all-lesbian thing, there were lots of straight women there, too. Anyway, I went to Costco and got this small pup tent. Niki was on the team and Jenny was in her Marie Antoinette phase, she had this administrative assistant named Adele Channing, who also came along. Adele was this secret sociopath climber and to suck up to Jenny she got them this huge tent, it looked like it stolen out of the prop room for the road show of Camelot. It was huge. The rest of us, we're in regular tents, the kind you'd buy in a sporting goods store or find at a Boy Scouts jamboree, and she's in a Ringling Brothers upgrade. Anyway, that night Jenny and Niki are in the tent, and they decided to make a sex tape-"

"Oh, Christ, no!" Carmen murmured.

"-fucking their brains out taking turns with a strap-on-"

"This is like that cliché about watching a train wreck," Lauren said. "You see disaster coming down the tracks and you can't do anything to stop it."

"Hollywood celebrities making a secret lesbo sex tape," Carmen said. "What could possibly go wrong?"

"Yeah. So somehow Adele made a copy of the tape. What you probably also don't know is at the start of shooting the studio was worried about Niki's reputation and orientation, and they made her go to some public events with some hunky guy for a beard, to convince everybody she was straight, just playing a role in this lesbian movie, but she wasn't really a lesbian herself, blah blah blah. So anyway, the Monday morning everybody got back from the Pink Ride, Adele goes to the studio suits and says there's a big problem they need to know about their supposedly non-lesbian, straight-arrow girl star being joyfully fucked by their very lesbian director. So in a New York minute there's this emergency meeting, they call in Tina, they call in Jenny, there's lawyers and executives, and the star of the show is Adele. Aaron, the head of the studio says, 'Okay, Adele, why are we here?' and Adele starts showing them the sex tape—"

"Have you seen it?"

"No, but Tina told me about it. What I'm telling you is what she told me. So they are all watching this sex tape, Jenny on her back in the tent, calling out to Niki, 'Fuck me, fuck me with your big cock, and there's Niki, wearing this strap-on Jenny made her put on, and she starts fucking Jenny—"

Carmen closed her eyes and put her head down on the table.

"Tina, God bless her, says turn it off, turn it off, and Adele stops it, and tells them she's got 25 CD copies of it in envelopes addressed to the networks and cable TV entertainment and gossip shows and Perez Hilton and God knows who else. She's flat-out blackmailing the studio. Aaron says, well, what do you want? And Adele tells them she wants Jenny fired, and she wants to take over as director, starting, like, five minutes ago, for the good of the project and in the best interests of the studio, blah blah. And Aaron snaps his fingers and bingo, Jenny's out. That's all the part I didn't know anything about until later, the sex tape and the blackmail. So next thing, Jenny comes out of the meeting and goes to the set, and I'm there, everybody's there, all the actors, you know, Begoñia, Isabella, Marci and Gretchen, Cammi, Niki, she's there, the cinematographer, the camera guys, the sound guys, the lighting guys, the grips, the makeup people, wardrobe, PAs, craft services. I mean, fucking everybody. Car, you've been on film sets-"

"Sure, could be thirty, forty people, not counting the actors. Maybe even more."

"Right. And it's Monday, it's a work day, and they're getting ready to shoot scenes, you know, sound checks and lighting checks and all that, waiting for the director to get back from the meeting. So Jenny comes in and gathers everybody, she makes a big speech about what assholes the studio guys are and she's walking out immediately, and who's coming with her? And see, I have no idea what's going on, nobody does, but they aren't gonna walk out just on Jenny's say-so, and it's not like anybody is surprised to learn that studio bigwigs are dicks, I mean, it's Hollywood, you know? Of course they're dicks, what else is new? So long story short, nobody walks out except me, and I go because, you know, it's Jenny, and I've gotta support her no matter what, and anyway, I don't give a shit about that particular job, I'm only a bottom-of-the-totem-pole hairdresser. So Jenny and I walk off the set. And after we leave, I ask her, Jenny, what the fuck's going on? And she says it's bullshit, studio politics, Adele's a scheming bitch, betrayed her, blah blah, she tells me everything except that there's a sex tape of her and Niki that was the cause of her being fired."

"So how'd you find out?"

"A couple days later I saw Tina next door and I was worried about her job, was she likely to get fired, too, so we talked, and she gave me the inside scoop."

"Did she have the sex tape?"

"No, she said the studio destroyed it. When they made the deal with Adele, she turned over the twenty-five copies she had-"

"She wasn't bluffing?" Lauren asked.

"Shit, no. You don't know Adele, she doesn't bluff. So anyway, Tina said Adele turned over the copies and her copy of Jenny's original. That was key to the deal."

"What happened to Jenny's original?"

"Tina said she asked her, and Jenny claimed she destroyed it because Niki had asked her to. I should add that Jenny and Niki broke up later, and Jenny told me Niki was dead to her."

"Those were the words she used, dead to her," Lauren asked.

"Yes, exactly. She's dead to me."

"And all the copies of the tape are destroyed."

"Absolutely," Carmen put in, interjecting for the first time. "Every copy, except for the secret copy Adele kept, and the secret copy the studio kept, and the secret copy Jenny kept."

"That's what I was thinking, too," Lauren said.

"You think Jenny kept a copy?" Shane asked. "You think she lied?"

"I hardly know her at all," Lauren said, "except from the file and the stories you guys tell me. But yes, I'd bet money on it. Having said that, I'd value what you two say. Did she keep a copy? Carmen?"

"Absolutely. One hundred percent certain. I have not a shred of evidence, but I'm one hundred percent certain."

"Shane?"

"I ..." She stopped.

"I think Shane's having a problem dealing with Jenny lying to her," Carmen said quietly.

Shane looked glumly from one to the other. "Sometimes I feel like an idiot."

"No, Shane," Carmen said. "You're not an idiot. You're the most trusting person I know, that's all, and you defend your friends down to the very last second, and then beyond. You say you feel like an idiot, but one of your very best qualities is your complete, total loyalty to your friends. It always was."

Shane turned red, embarrassed. "Can we change the subject? I think we're wasting a lot of time on this."

""Respectfully, Shane, I disagree," Lauren said. "First, I'm learning a lot about Jenny and what was going on in the last few weeks of her life, and I need to get up to speed. Second, the three of us don't all have access to the same information. You didn't know about Niki's confession, and who actually stole the negatives. Carmen and I didn't know there was a sex tape that got Jenny fired."

"I still don't see what it has to do with anything," Shane said.

Carmen put her hand up before Lauren could talk. "Shane, Lauren's right. What you don't see yet is that it's a possible motive for Jenny's murder. Lauren, why was Niki hiding in the bushes that night? What did she say?"

"She said she wanted to talk to Jenny."

"About what?"

Lauren opened her file and consulted her notes. "It's not clear. Something about their relationship, getting back together, if you can believe it, which I can't. And then she saw there was a party going on, people at Tina and Beth's house, and thought her timing was bad. So she walked around the block to think things out, and when she came back there were sirens and police cars and EMTs, so she hid out in the bushes to see what was going on."

There was silence. "So what do we think?" Lauren asked.

"Weak," Carmen said.

"Lame," Shane said.

"Bullshit? Can we agree on bullshit?"

"I'm in," Carmen said.

"Me, too," Shane said.

Lauren looked at Carmen. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I bet I am." Carmen said.

"Hey, guys, let me in here, would you?" Shane said, irritated.

"Everybody was thinking there might be a connection to those stolen movie negatives-" Carmen began.

"—but it's not," Lauren picked up, "it's about the sex tape-"

"Right. Niki lied."

"But not about everything," Lauren said. "Just the reason she wanted to talk to Jenny. The reason why she was there."

"And about hiding in the bushes. Who takes a walk around the block anymore to think? Why sneak around the back of the house? If she came over to talk to Jenny-"

"—she'd have come to the front door-"

"—and she wouldn't have known there was a party going on next door, because everybody was at Bette and Tina's, sitting under the pergola in their back yard-"