Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 05

"-there was no party noise, no music. The only way you'd know there was a party-"

"-was if you were watching the houses from the back."

"You guys are freaking me out when you finish each other's sentences," Shane said.

"Sorry," Lauren said.

"Okay, let's think about this. Maybe Niki came to get Jenny's copy of the sex tape. Or make sure it was destroyed."

"Or even just ask her what the situation was with it," Lauren said. "Maybe she hardly even knew it was a key element of Adele's blackmail. At dead minimum Niki would want to know where she stood, and the status of the sex tape, who had it, all that."

"Why didn't Lt. Duffy pick up on this?" Carmen asked.

"I know why," Lauren said. "The confession."

"Huh?"

"Not Alice's confession, Niki's. They were pushing her, and when they did Niki confessed to stealing the movie negatives and planting them in Jenny's attic, she gave it up. She said she hoped nobody would ever find them up there. And if somebody did find them, well, they'd blame Jenny, and it would be paybacks for the way she'd treated Niki." Lauren consulted her notes. "The movie was quote an embarrassment unquote and a quote terrible film unquote. She said she didn't want it released because she didn't want to deal with quote the press and the criticism and the bad reviews unquote. Sean and Marybeth changed their focus to the admission about the negatives, because that was such a major issue. I'm dead certain they would have come back to Niki's statements about why she was there. See, that's how these kinds of interviews work. You take the first statement, and then later on you go back and make the person repeat everything a second time, and you look for inconsistencies. And then a third time, and a fourth, or however many it takes. And Marybeth would have eventually pulled the truth out of Niki except..." She held out her hand, palm up, to Carmen and Shane.

"Alice's confession," Carmen said, "so there never was that second, third and fourth time."

"Just like you guys said. Alice's confession derailed the process. And there's Marybeth, sitting there with not one confession, but two. Niki confesses she stole the negatives. Alice, without knowing about Niki, confesses to Jenny's murder, thinking Shane did it."

"Right!" Carmen said with animation. "But here's something else. One of those confessions was false, namely Alice's, whereas Niki's was true."

"Well, we don't know that for certain, but yes, we'll have to take a look at it. One thing we do know for damn sure, we have to go talk to Niki. We have to get a full, complete explanation of what she was doing there, we have to break it down and check it out every which way, until we get the truth."

"Because she's now a major suspect," Carmen said. "And the sex tape is linked to the stolen negatives. We don't have one movie to worry about, we have two."

"Damn straight," Lauren said.

"Guys, you're giving me a headache, and so's my stomach, because I'm starved. What time is it? I need some lunch."

Lauren looked at her watch. "One-thirty. Yeah, we need a break. Look, there's a place a couple blocks from here, and it'll be clearing out by now. Let's go get something to eat and we can continue the discussion there."

***

They took a booth near the back. Carmen noticed that Lauren was known to the waitresses and said hello to the cashier, by name. It only took a glance to know it was a popular cop place; even the customers in plain clothes were readily identifiable as detectives.

"Hey, Lauren," the waitress said, coming to their table and handing out menus.

"Hey, Pat. What's good today?"

"LA's finest have been scarfing down the chicken pot pie. I think there may be one or two left."

"Sounds good to me. And an iced tea."

"I'll take iced tea and a club sandwich, hold the mayo," Carmen said. "I think Shane's gonna need a few minutes, but you can bring her an iced tea, too."

Shane was annoyed. "She's trying to say that I take a long time to make up my mind."

"Yes, Shane, that's what I was saying, but not in a negative way. I think it's important that Lauren get to know you, and know how you think. A lot of people have mistaken ideas about you, and I've always thought, right from Day One with you and me, that it was important to get a good handle on you. True?"

Shane shrugged, nodded.

Carmen turned to Lauren. "Here's what you need to know about Shane, in a nutshell. She has this thing, some people call it hyperacuity, and it's got some other names. But here it is: Shane takes in tremendous amounts of information, much more than you and me and most people. It can be language, speech, tone of voice, it can be body language, mood, facial expressions, it can be hard data like what's on that menu she's holding. In the two minutes we've been here Shane has looked at maybe 15 people, absorbed data about them. She's noted the smells, she seen, oh, maybe, the platters six or eight people are eating and what looks good and what doesn't. She smelled half a dozen different lunches. So she's processing five or ten times more stuff than you and me, and most of the time she's unaware of it, it's like she has this tremendous computer in the back of her brain sucking up all kinds of information, but there's a cost to this, which is time. Sometimes it takes her a long time to make up her mind, and there's people think Shane is, well, you know, there's not a polite way to say it, but let's just say, sometimes people think she's slow. You know, just not real bright, not real quick. And see, that's just so, so wrong. And it's true, sometimes she isn't quick. But, oh my god, is she thorough. And she knows tons of stuff she doesn't know she knows, it's just stored in that computer in the back of her head, and it takes her time to sort it out and process it because there's just so much of it. And you just have to let her do that. Because she has tremendous insight into people, and she's a terrific listener, she can get people to talk like you wouldn't believe. She has great people skills. You know why? She shuts up. She let's the other person talk, because she's busy absorbing information. And sometimes she's lightning fast. I don't know about you, but I think I have pretty good gaydar. But Shane's gaydar is positively supernatural. It's beyond unreal, it's beyond infallible. I mean, she knows when someone is gay or bi when they still don't know it themselves. But here's the thing. She's like that with other stuff, not just gaydar. She can almost always tell when somebody is telling the truth. She's like a human lie detector, only sometimes it takes her a while to process it."

"Okay, Carmen, you can stop now," Shane said. "I want the chicken pot pie."

Lauren and Carmen laughed.

***

"Okay, the next list we have to make might be uncomfortable for you both, but it's got to be done," Lauren said

"I know what this is going to be," Carmen said quietly.

"Yes," Lauren said. "I'm sorry. A list of lovers, fuck buddies, spouses, anybody Jenny had a sexual or romantic relationship with. You two are at the top of the list. Shane, you're number numero uno, because you were her lover and roommate at the time of her death. Carmen, you're next, even though you have an ironclad alibi, because people tell me you and Shane were the two people who knew her the best and had the longest relationships with her. Would that be correct?"

"Yes, that's probably right," Carmen said. Shane nodded, not looking up. Their investigation into Jenny's murder had barely even gotten started and already it was taking its toll on her spirit.

"Okay, who else. We've got Niki. I understand Jenny and Max had a relationship. Anybody else from the party that night?" Lauren wrote names down on a separate page of her legal tablet, numbering them as she went. Pat, the waitress, came and took away their empty plates and refilled their iced teas.

Carmen glanced at Shane, who shook her head no, none from the party.

Carmen, the list-maker, spoke. "Okay, from the time she first moved to California, in chronological order. Her ex-husband. A woman named Marina Ferrar, she's the one who first introduced Jenny to lesbianism."

"Is she still around somewhere?"

"Not so far as I know, not for four or five years. Do you know any different, Shane?"

Shane shook her head no.

"A woman named Robin, she's been out of the picture for years. A guy who worked at the aquarium, also a one-week romance long ago. Then me, then Max. Then a French woman named - I hope you're sitting down - Claude Mondrian."

"No shit?" Lauren said.

"No shit, that's her name," Carmen said. "She was a travel writer specializing in gay travel. Jenny met her up at Whistler the day before our wedding. We all met her, too, and she was actually there at the wedding that night when ... you know. I kidded Jenny about her, asked her how she was, you know, in bed, because they spent the day together in Claude's hotel room fucking their brains out while Max wandered around trying to find them."

"Was Max pissed? She should have been."

"He. Yes, I think he was upset. Shane?"

"I don't know, I wasn't in the hotel, I didn't see them. But if I had to guess, I'd say yes."

"Who's your source on this?" Lauren asked Carmen.

"Alice. She knows everything about everybody. She not only knows who slept with who, she knows who wants to sleep with who."

"Gaydar?" Lauren asked.

"No, not exactly," Carmen said. "Shane is the world champion at gaydar. What Alice has is ... um ... let me think—"

"Fuckdar," Shane said.

"Right," Carmen said, "Fuckdar is exactly right. Alice knows who just had sex with who, or who is going to have sex with who in, say, the next five minutes. In her own way, she's almost as uncanny as Shane is with gaydar. And it doesn't have to be lesbian sex, either. She knows when straight people or bi people are fucking or just fucked. Gay guys, too."

"All right, as titillating as this is, let's get back on track," Lauren said. "Who else is on Jenny's relationship list? I saw a reference into the file about a divorce and you mentioned an ex-husband. Somebody named Tim Haspel."

Carmen and Shane glanced at each other. "You can tell it better than me," Shane said.

"Okay. Yes, she was married once, for about a day, literally, just a day, or actually just one night, it was over the next morning. She met Tim in college, in her sophomore year back in Illinois and they fell in love and dated for three years, lived together, and when Tim got a job at Cal U after graduation Jenny followed him out here, that's how she came to Los Angeles. They rented the house where we lived, next to Bette and Tina's house."

"So then what happened?" Lauren asked.

"Short version or long version?" Carmen asked.

"Medium-long," Lauren said.

"Got it. So Tim and Jenny are living next to Bette and Tina, and they meet as next-door neighbors, and Jenny starts hanging around The Planet, which at the time was a coffee bar—"

"I know it," Lauren said. "On Santa Monica Boulevard. It's a lesbian nightclub now."

"Right, Kit owns it, she's Bette's sister—"

"Sister? I thought half-sister."

"Well, yes, technically half, but nobody worries about the half stuff," Carmen said.

"Got it. Just keeping the record straight."

"So anyway, the woman who owned The Planet before Kit was this woman Marina Ferrar, we just talked about her, who turned out to be a married Italian countess, although nobody knew it, partly because she was a pretty hardcore lesbian, and who was also in a lesbian relationship, although nobody knew that right away, either. But I'll get to that in a minute. Anyway, Marina was the woman who first seduced Jenny, right there inside The Planet while Tim was sitting at a table eating a veggie burger. It got hot and heavy, and one day Tim walked in on Marina going down on Jenny in the studio behind their house. Marina leaves, Tim and Jenny argue, Jenny pleads for forgiveness and swears to end the relationship with Marina, and Tim makes her go tell Marina face-to-face while he watches that it's over. Then they drive to Lake Tahoe and get married and the next morning Tim realizes it was all a terrible mistake, and walks out on her, leaves before she wakes up. So there she was, newly married, in a wedding mill motel in Lake Tahoe, no money, no car, no husband. Pretty bleak."

"She was too proud and too humiliated to call Marina," Carmen said, "so she called Alice."

"Alice? Really?" Lauren asked.

"She called me first, but I wasn't answering my phone," Shane said quietly. What she didn't have to say was, "because I was off fucking somebody."

"One last thing," Lauren said, anxious to change the subject. "I think I need to talk to each of you by yourselves."

Shane and Carmen looked at each other and Lauren could see each reading the other's reactions. Already, in the little time she'd seen them together, Lauren was impressed at how their minds clicked, how each knew what the other was thinking or going to say. And even though they were completely different personalities in so many ways, they were like identical twins who could finish each other's sentences. No, not identical twins, but two halves of some sort of thing, some entity comprised of their two halves. Like an old, long-married couple, if that made any sense.

"Uh, okay, I guess," Carmen said, turning back to Lauren. "Is there a special reason?"

"Yes and no," Lauren said. "On the one hand, it is standard interrogation procedure. I can see you don't like the word 'interrogation,' and I understand that. It's just another way of saying 'discuss' or 'ask questions.' But it is an incontrovertible fact that the way people answer questions and even think about things is very different if they are alone versus with someone else in the room. Look, it doesn't mean anything, so please don't try to read anything into it. So that's the 'no' part."

"What's the 'yes' part?"

"The 'yes' part is that I have some things I want to ask each of you that would be considered fairly confidential. Mainly, I want to ask you guys stuff about each other, but also stuff about yourselves as well as your friends, and you might start filtering your answers. Look, this isn't rocket science, and I'll spell it out for you. Shane, I want to talk to you about your relationship with Jenny, who was your lover, and I doubt any of the three of us wants Carmen in the room for that. Carmen, I need to talk to you about Shane, plain and simple. And some about Jenny."

"Shane didn't kill Jenny," Carmen said adamantly. Carmen and Shane looked at each other, Shane a bit embarrassed at how fiercely Carmen had defended her, but secretly pleased, too.

"That's beside the point," Lauren said. "I simply don't want you in the room when I ask Shane about her sex life with Jenny. I don't want you there when she and I talk about both of them fucking Niki Stevens, who IS an active suspect."

They both spoke at once. "We never had a threesome!" Shane protested angrily. "Who told you that?"

"You fucked Niki Stevens?" Carmen asked simultaneously, surprised and somewhat shocked. "You cheated on Jenny?"

"No one told me you had a threesome," Lauren said, ignoring Carmen, "and I didn't mean to suggest it, Shane, although I'm glad we got it out of the way. No, the point is you both had active sexual relationships with Niki, nearly at the same time, and I need to know every relevant detail, because it directly bears on Niki's actions. And Carmen's reaction shows why we need to have this conversation by ourselves. No offense, Carmen."

"None taken," Carmen said, and then muttered, mostly to herself, "I can't believe you cheated on Jenny."

"Carmen, please," Shane said. "Let it go. It wasn't like that. I didn't cheat on her."

"Well, what was it like, then?"

Lauren wanted to break this up. "Guys, do we really need to do this? Can it wait for some other time?"

Carmen blew her breath out. "I'm sorry, Lauren. It's been a tough day so far, I know for me, and I suspect Shane, too." Shane looked at her hands, but they could read agreement there. "Can we pick this up tomorrow?"

"Sure," Lauren said. "I've been pressing you two pretty hard. Tell you what, I should go back to my office and check messages and see what's up. How about we start again in the morning? Do you want to meet for breakfast or meet at the office?"

"I've got a family commitment for breakfast," Carmen said. "My mom invited my sisters over since I'm in town."

"Okay, what about you, Shane? It'll give us a chance to talk."

Shane, slouched down in the booth, shrugged. "Sure, I guess. When and where?"

"What time's good for you?"

"I'm a night owl, so noon would be good. So anything earlier is going to have to be okay. What kind of hours do you usually keep?"

"We have roll call at 7:30, so I'm good by 8. How about this, I'll do some office work and meet you here at 9 for breakfast? I'll be ravenous by then, and you'll be half awake and craving coffee."

"Sounds like a plan," Shane said.

"Good. I'll see you guys tomorrow."

"I'll stop by here when I can," Carmen said, "and if you're here, that's great, and if not I'll pick up some coffee and come over to your office."

"Great," Lauren said, putting some money on the table. "This will cover my share. See you tomorrow." She walked out of the restaurant, waving at the waitress and the cashier.

Shane and Carmen sat quietly across from each other, thinking about the day so far.

Finally Carmen broke. "I'm sorry. I know this is tough on you."

Shane nodded. "I brought it on myself."

"I wasn't going to say that, but yes, you did. You started this process. And as difficult as it is, for what it's worth, I think you did the right thing. We have to do this."

"You really think that?"

"Yes."

"Lauren thinks I did it. Killed Jenny. Duffy thinks so, too."

"They don't know you like I do."

"Thanks."

Shane had a frown on her face, and Carmen could read it. "What?"

"Huh?"

"There's something else. Spit it out."

Shane took a sip of iced tea, and moved things around inside her head. "I didn't cheat on Jenny."

"That's what's bothering you?"

"It was the way you said it, like ... like ... "

"Like the time you cheated on me."

"Yes. Like that. Only I didn't."

"Okay."

"What happened was, Jenny and Niki broke up a week earlier. Jenny told me all about it, swore that Niki was dead to her."

"I remember you saying that."

"Well, Jenny really meant it. There was no question about it, or about her being serious. She didn't want anything more to do with Niki, even though it was Jenny who was treating Niki like shit. Jenny even bragged about it, she said she made Niki fuck her all night long and then Jenny kicked her out of bed in the morning, telling her it was over, she was just using Niki for sex."

"Pretty harsh. No wonder Niki was pissed."

"Yes, and of course Jenny put her spin on it, that Niki deserved it, blah blah, but she was rationalizing like crazy. Anyway, my point is, it was over. So, basically—"

"-Niki was fair game."

"Right! Exactly. It happened a week later, there was this testimonial thing to honor Jenny, some bullshit thing to appease her, I guess, I don't know. Anyway, Niki was coming on to me, and hell, why not, you know? So anyway, she and I were out on a balcony and Jenny was inside somewhere giving her speech, and you know, one thing led to another-"

"—And you went down on her."

"Well ... yeah."

"Kinda like you went down on me the first time we met."

Shane had nothing, and just flipped her hands.

"I'm sorry, I guess that sounded mean. I didn't mean it that way. Well, I did and I didn't."

"Look, think what you want, but I didn't cheat, okay?"

"Okay, I accept that."

"So anyway, yes, I was going down on her, and Jenny came out on the balcony and discovered us. And she was pissed, for no good reason, as far as I'm concerned. Then she said something weird."