Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 17

Chapter 17 Strange Fruit

They picked up Shane at Alice's apartment -- Shane's apartment, for the foreseeable future -- and drove to The Planet for lunch. Shane was ready and waiting for them, and reasonably bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Her overnight guest, whose name was Jo or maybe Joan, Joni or Josie, something like that, had left just an hour earlier. Over the years Shane had relaxed her rules against overnighters, although she was still quite selective over who could stay and who had to get dressed and go home. Jo/Joan/Joni/Josie made the cut because she was a Sugar Shack customer who needed all her body hair removed because she was a swimmer at UCLA. That, and she was almost as aquatic as Shane, possessor of the dominant Esther Williams sex gene.

One upside was that Shane didn't need to take a morning shower to get ready for her day. Shower sex is multitasking. And although water is scarce in California, that's no reason to tolerate a cramped shower stall. In West Hollywood and other very gay or very upscale neighborhoods showers stalls were often capacious, capable of washing two, three, even four people at a time under all sorts of rainforest and side-spray features a kiddie's waterpark would envy. A shower stall could be almost as multifunctional as a high school gymnasium. Shane and Jo/Joan/Joni/Josie had spent nearly two hours in the shower stall, during which time a number of orgasms were achieved in several interesting ways. That still left plenty of time for Shane to drink her first cup of morning coffee by herself, naked and water-wrinkled, at her kitchen table, and get dressed at her leisure in time for lunch.

As she sipped her K-cupped Green Mountain Morning Blend she pondered the question of Carmen and Lauren's overnighter to the Central Valley. Shane had not forgotten the time Carmen had gone out-of-town on an overnighter to the edge of the desert, and had a revenge-fuck affair with a girl name Robin, the San Diego school teacher Carmen had continued to be involved with -- sporadically and unhappily, so Carmen claimed -- over the years. If Shane loved to fuck in water, Carmen tended to like to fuck in hot, dry desert air (or, truthfully, anywhere else). This time she was in the company of a woman Shane herself had water-fucked a decade ago, a woman who had only gotten prettier and more assured, and certainly more experienced, since then. It was Alice who could always tell when someone just had sex. Where was Alice now, when Shane could have used her spooky talent? Maybe having prison sex, hopefully consensual. Prison sex was one of the very, very few kinds of girl-girl sex Shane had never had, fingers crossed and knock on wood.

Kit was ringing up a customer's lunch check and credit card at the cash register, and looked up when Carmen, Shane and Lauren came into The Planet. "Oh my lordy, look who's in the house! The hottest, spiciest DJ west of the Rockies!" The restaurant was noisy and crowded, but half the heads in the room heard Kit and turned to stare at the woman Kit rushed to embrace. "Oh, darlin', how long has it been? Two, three years?"

Carmen rarely blushed, but this was one of those times. "It's so good to see you, too, Kit."

"Give your mama a big hug," Kit said, holding Carmen tight and then with one arm reaching out for Shane. "Hey, Shane, long time no see. What's it been, six or seven days, right?"

"Five, I think," Shane said, laughing and allowing herself to be pulled into a group clinch. "Chase and I were in last week --"

"Oh, my girls, my girls, my girls," Kit said, rocking them both and then looking up and seeing Lauren standing near the door, quietly smiling and observing. "Hi, welcome to The Planet. I hear you're with these two?"

"I am, indeed," Lauren said, stepping forward as Kit released Shane so she could shake hands. "I'm Lauren Hancock. I've not only heard a lot about you, I'm a big fan. I still have your Kit Porter's Blues album, on vinyl, it's always been one of my favorites. I get weak in the knees whenever I hear Longing Too Long Tonight."

"That one paid for a lot of vodka tonics over the years," Kit said. "I shoulda put the money into mutual funds, but I drank it up instead. Y'all here for business or pleasure?"

"Both, we want to eat, and we also need to talk to you if you can get free," Carmen said.

"Sugar, the only things we got here for free are hugs and my good advice. Let me see what I can find."

Kit surveyed the room. The lunch rush was coming to an end, but The Planet was still filled to capacity. Every table was taken, and there were four other women by the door waiting for a table, and who had been there when Shane, Carmen and Lauren had come in. "Gonna be a few minutes wait," Kit said. "No, I got a better idea, let's go in the back. Follow me." When she passed by the register, Kit said to one of the waitresses, "Colleen, when you get a second can you bring a couple menus and three set-ups into the back?"

"Sure thing," Colleen said. "Hey, Shane."

"Hey, Colleen," Shane said.

"You been tantalizing them topless hula girls in Hawaii and Tahiti and Bora Bora, way I been hearing it," Kit said over her shoulder to Carmen as they went into the kitchen.

Carmen laughed. "Oh, yeah, by the dozens," she said. Shane and Lauren -- and Kit, too, truth be told -- had momentary visions of a bare-breasted Carmen in a skimpy grass hula skirt, surrounded by half a dozen naked Polynesian girls, swaying their hips slowly and gracefully as they danced by firelight on a romantic beach somewhere, the twin tattooed heads of Ixchel on Carmen's upper buttocks grinning at each other across her tantalizing spine. Around the front, Carmen's tattooed vines snaked to her hip bones before descending downward into her famous, scantily covered and juicy papaya. Shane bumped into a counter where a line chef was chopping romaine and arugula.

"Uh, sorry, sorry," she said, returning to reality.

At the back of the kitchen. Kit had a cubby for her office, and near it was a small table she and the staff used for their own meals and sometimes as a work area. There were metal fold-up chairs against the wall and Kit pulled them out and set them up. "Sit down, sit down, I'll be back in a minute, go ahead and order."

When Colleen came back with the menus they ordered two Cobb salads and a Caesar salad with chicken for Shane. "This is good," Carmen said. "because we can brief Shane and Kit at the same time."

Between eating and taking turns talking, Kit having to get up and go deal with some restaurant business every now and then, and dozens of questions, it took most of the afternoon to bring Shane and Kit up to speed. They were also able to ask Kit about her recollection of the night Jenny was murdered, and probe the reasons why she was so angry with Jenny.

"Okay, let me start this way. I was never as close to Jenny as you two were, for the obvious reason I never had a thing with her," Kit said, gesturing toward Carmen and Shane, "and I wasn't as close to her as Bette and Tina, because they lived next door and saw her much more often than I did. I liked her well enough, I guess, but maybe my distance from her gave me a little better view, you know? A little distance, if that means anything. And hey, far be it from me to call somebody a diva, or criticize them for being difficult and even fucked up, because I wrote the book on that before Jenny ever got out of kindergarten, and you guys know that. But here it is. Jenny was a strange chick. I'm not saying anything you don't know, right? And I watched her over what, six years or so, as she changed. I can't truly say I watched her grow up, because I'm not sure she ever did. But she sure did change. That was one changeable gal, all right, know what I'm saying?"

"Carmen," Kit said, taking a sip from a glass of iced tea, "back when you and Jenny were a thing, she was still kind of sweet and innocent, at least on the surface. I'm not sure I want to say this out loud, but you know me and my mouth, I'm gonna say what I think. Back then there were days when I thought you were the best thing could have happened to Jenny, to keep her feet on the floor. And then after that went south, there was you and Shane. And again I thought you were the best thing ever happened to Shane. By a country mile."

Shane was looking at the floor. No one would make eye contact.

"Sorry, Shane, that's not a dig at you. But baby, you fucked up, and I know you know you did, and I wouldn't be saying this if I didn't know you already knew it. But anyway, back to Jenny. I often wondered if Carmen and Jenny breaking up started anything, because not too long after she's sitting there cutting her legs the morning Angelica was born, remember? Okay, how could anybody forget? She went off the deep end, goes to that funny farm back in Illinois and comes back with Max. I mean, my precious baby Jesus, she goes from Carmen to Max. That's like me dating Sidney Poitier and ditching him for O. J. Simpson and a drawer full of butcher knives."

"Far as I'm concerned, Max was one box of Saltines away from being a bona fide, garden-variety cracker. I think the only reason she wasn't racist or bigoted or whatever is because she started out lezzie her own self, and then trannie, so she sort of HAD to be liberal and tolerant, you know what I'm saying? But if she'd been born straight, you can't tell me one day Max wouldn't be a member of the KKK women's auxiliary, bashing Muslims, praying for the salvation of queers and faggots in some backwoods church somewhere. I just couldn't ever see Jenny getting together with Moira when they came back from Illinois. I mean, what the fuck was THAT about, you know? I can't think of any two people had less in common, by temperament, or education or, hell, you name it. You know that song by my gal Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit? Well, Jenny and Moira, that was some strange fruit. Then all that transitioning stuff. I mean, on paper, I'm perfectly fine with that. I get it there's people like that born into the world, and they can't help what they are and they gotta do what they gotta do. I get it. But on the other hand.... " She paused

"Yes?" Lauren finally said.

"On the other hand," Kit said. "That Max was one fucked-up chick, and transitioning to a man didn't unfuck her. And put her together with Jenny, well. I just never figured out what the attraction was, either way. Mostly, I just keep my distance and tried to keep my big mouth shut much as I could, given my close personal friend the bottle of gin, and my general open, sweet disposition."

They laughed.

"Tell me about that last week or two," Lauren said. "Jenny and the thing about Bette being unfaithful with Kelly."

"Sheee-it," Kit said, and sighed. "All right. First off, Bette ain't really my half-sister, she's my sister, period, and always has been. And as sisters, we've had plenty of fights over the years. Carmen, you have sisters, you know what that means. Lauren, you have sisters?"

"One. And I have brothers, which is even worse, so I know where you're coming from."

"Right. So bottom line what I'm saying is, Bette's my sister and I love her to death, and Tina's my sister-in-law, and Angelica ... well, that's my family, and you don't hurt my family. You hurt a member of my family, I'm coming after you. Period. End of sentence."

"Understood," Lauren said.

"So one day Jenny starts acting especially weird, even for her, hinting that at this party they had Bette was cheating on Tina. She wanted me to talk to Bette, get her to confess it to Tina. Well, to this day I can't tell you which of those two parts was crazier. Not that Bette might have had an affair or cheated, because we all know over the years Bette had done exactly that. Ain't none of my poor dead father's two girls been saints, you know? But the time we're talking about, I knew Bette and Tina were solid. And what Jenny wanted Bette to do was essentially split that family apart. I don't know what the fuck was in her head, because it made no sense to me whatsoever, asking me to ask Bette to confess to Tina. I mean, what the fuck, you know? Confess? Shit, even if it was true, who the fuck was fucking Jenny Schecter to force Bette to confess to Tina something Jenny had no fucking business with?"

"And then Jenny begins to up the game. Says she's got evidence. 'What fucking evidence,' I ask. She's coy, but says she has it. 'Go fuck yourself,' I think to myself, but I don't say it out loud. Finally, the bitch shows it to me, on her cellphone. Shot from you house, Shane, looking into Bette and Tina's kitchen. Kelly got her back to the camera and the sink, and Bette seems to kneel down, you know, going down on her."

"When was this conversation?" Lauren asked quietly.

"Oh, that night. Night of the party. Jenny and I were exploring the house, you know, Bette and Tina's renovations, the new master bedroom and all. I hadn't really had an opportunity to see them until that night, so we're alone in the master bedroom, her and me. And that's when she starts. 'I have to talk to you, Kit.' Real serious, you know, real intense, like she gets. I didn't believe a word until she showed me the video on her phone."

"Then what did you think?"

Kit sipped her tea and thought about it. "Okay, first thing was kind of shock. Saw it with my own eyes, Bette going down on Kelly right there in the kitchen. I was pretty pissed, thinking Bette had lied to me. So I'm kinda steaming on the inside, you know? But we go back to the media room and watch the farewell tape some more, and then next thing you know Alice comes into the room and starts babbling about Jenny, and then everything happened and I didn't give it any more thought for, like a few days or more. Soon as they got cleared by the police Bette and Tina moved to New York. I wanted to talk to her about it, but face-to-face, I didn't want to do it online with Skype or anything, and anyway it would have to be when Tina wasn't around, and that almost never happened when we Skyped back and forth. First chance I got to talk to Bette was like a year later, when they came back here for a visit and Tina had some studio meetings to go to."

"What happened?" Lauren pressed gently.

Kit shrugged. "I told her what I saw. Jenny showed me the thing on her phone. First we had talked about it Bette was furious, angry. This time she was like, I don't know. Not don't give a shit but maybe resigned, I guess. 'Kit,' she says, 'I'm telling you the god's honest truth. Kelly dropped a champagne glass and I was bending down to clean it up. Yes, I know what it might look like, but it isn't true.' And I just said okay, I'm sorry I brought it up. I apologize. And we never talked about it again."

"Lauren," Carmen said, "can we please fucking tell her?"

"Tell me what?"

"We've got good news for you. We had our forensics people look at that video. They blow it up, slow it down, measure angles and stuff like that. Turns out Bette was telling the truth. Yes, she was bending down, but the forensics people say Bette's face had to be at least a foot or more away from Kelly's crotch. There's no way she was going down on her."

Kit leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. They gave her a minute. Finally she sat back. "How come nobody told me?"

"Report only came back a few days ago."

"A few days ago? You mean, they didn't look at it way back then?"

"No."

"No? What do you mean, no? Does Bette know?"

"No, not yet. We're going to tell her when we talk to her."

Kit looked from Lauren to Shane to Carmen, perplexed.

Carmen took the lead. "Kit, here's what happened. Nobody looked at it because the entire investigation got put on hold when Alice confessed. If that hadn't happened, then probably somewhere along the line somebody might have looked at it and cleared Bette of Jenny's accusation. But even if they had, it wouldn't have cleared Bette of the suspicion she was the one who killed Jenny. If Jenny believed the video to be true, it wouldn't have mattered that Bette knew herself to be innocent. Jenny was essentially blackmailing her to confess something to Tina that would have broken up their family. It wouldn't have mattered if it was false. So absolving Bette of the original accusation of cheating was irrelevant, it was still a motive for murder whether it was true or false. But see, proving it was false never came up."

Kit shook her head slowly. "This is a lot of stuff I gotta think about."

"It is," Carmen said. "And there's more, if you're ready for it. The good news is it doesn't have anything to do with you, Bette or Tina."

"Oh, thank Christ," Kit said. "Okay, I guess you better give it to me."

"You know the stolen tapes of the movie Lez Girls they found in Jenny and Shane's attic? The one everybody thought Jenny stole?"

"Yeah, the missing movie. What about it?"

"Jenny didn't steal it. Niki Stevens did."

Kit looked at her blankly, then at Shane and Lauren. "Now you're just fucking with me."

Carmen laughed. "Yeah, well, guess what. I know, I know, I spent a couple years thinking she stole them, too. So did Shane, and just about everybody else, with a few key exceptions."

"What exceptions?"

"I'll take this part, Carmen," Lauren said. "Here's how it went. You remember that night, they had everybody come to the station and give statements. You were one of them."

"Sure, how can I forget?"

"I know. So anyway, when Marybeth and Sean interviewed Niki Stevens, at first she played innocent, but eventually confessed she was the one stole the movie. In defense of Marybeth, you have to remember, they were in the first twenty-four hours of a major murder investigation. The general procedure is the detectives keep the information they get under wraps until things start getting sorted out. In other words, the very last thing Marybeth was gonna do was run around to each interview room and tell all you suspects that Niki stole the movie, not Jenny. But what DID happen was Alice confessed to pushing Jenny off the deck and pushing her into the pool. And after that, everything else pretty much stopped."

"What that meant was, the stolen movie negatives therefore had nothing to do with Jenny's murder. You follow? So it became secondary. Marybeth talked to Aaron Kornbluth at the studio, that was the correct next step, since the negs were his property, or anyway the studio's property as well as their problem now. Now, I'll give you exactly one guess what the studio wanted to do."

"Oh, fuck, sure, I can guess. Tina and Bette and everybody were pissed at them anyway, for changing the ending and being chickenshit about the theme. So let me guess: The studio wanted to bury the whole thing. Jenny, Adele, Tina, the movie, and most of all their precious star, Niki Stevens.'

"Kit, I'm not even gonna give you the bronze medal for that one. Not even tin."

Kit sighed. "So the studio wanted everything hushed up. And the biggest part of it was telling the whole world that Niki Stevens stole them, and Jenny was innocent."

Lauren nodded.

"I'm a little disappointed Marybeth went along with it," Kit said.

"Okay, let me say this. In defense of Marybeth, who has gotten some flak for this clusterfuck, Marybeth didn't fuck up. Yes, her case got fucked up, but there wasn't much she could do about it. Alice confessed, that was the first thing that fucked it up, and then procedurally, the case got turned over to the DA's office for processing. The studio not only didn't want to press charges against Niki, it was never openly acknowledged the negatives were ever missing in the first place. What was Marybeth supposed to do, hold a press conference and tell everyone that the negatives for a bad, out-of-control movie director by a prima donna novice got stolen but were now returned? Cops don't hold press conferences saying there was no crime and no one's being changed with anything."