Who Killed Jenny Schecter? Ch. 23

Chapter 23 Payday

When Niki Stevens came back into the conference room she looked better than when she went out. Calloway trailed behind her, followed by the Briefcase Carrier and the two Valkyrie shield maidens, Lauren and The Bitch. One Valkyrie carried a gun and a badge, had hand-to-hand combat training and a black belt. The dangerous one carried a briefcase.

"Sorry, everybody," Niki said. "This is all very, uh, you know. Sorry I lost my cookies."

"Don't worry about it," Marybeth said. "You okay to continue? Would you like some water or something?" Let the record show that Marybeth was more solicitous than Lauren had ever seen her. Clearly, she was Good Cop, playing Niki.

"That would be good," Niki said. "I don't suppose you have any cucumber water?"

Let the record show that Carmen, Shane, Lauren and Marybeth didn't laugh or roll their eyes.

"I've got a stash of Gatorade," Lauren said, saving the moment. "Let me get you one. You probably need to replace some electrolytes." She left the conference room.

"Anybody else need anything?" Marybeth asked. Carmen and Shane had re-loaded their caffeine supplies and were good to go.

"I'll get you a water, boss," the Briefcase Carrier said, leaving the conference room to go find Lauren. He returned a minute later with three bottles of water and followed by Lauren with two Gatorades.

"Okay," Marybeth said when everyone had settled. "Recording equipment going on." She pushed the relevant start buttons. "Niki, we were talking about the blackmail letter. What did you and Jenny say when she showed it to you?"

"Like I said, she was real upset and had been crying. I was upset and maybe crying, too. I said, What are we going to do? She said something like, I don't know, we'll have to pay it, I guess."

"This was about two weeks or so after the Subaru Ride weekend?"

"Yes, about that."

"Did you know at that time that Adele had stolen a copy of the video you and Jenny made? The one Adele used to get Jenny fired from the director's job?"

"No, we didn't know Adele had stolen it until that meeting when she showed it to William and Aaron at the studio. That was the first time we even knew copies existed. Or even that it had been stolen. I don't know if 'stolen' is even the right word. Adele downloaded it from the camera, right? Is that considered stealing?"

"Yes," Marybeth said. "When Adele showed William and Aaron the video, she said she had twenty-five copies ready to be mailed out to major media people unless Jenny was fired and Adele hired to be the new director."

"Yes."

"So what I'm suggesting is, it appears you and Jenny didn't suspect Adele of being the thumb drive blackmailer, because you didn't know she had downloaded the Subaru video."

"Uh, yes. Right. We didn't know. So no, we didn't think about her then."

"Did you discuss it later, after Jenny got fired?"

"Yes, a couple days later, after Jenny got fired we did. See, we had already made one blackmail payment, and we were expecting to get a text about arrangements for the second one."

"So what did you two say?"

"We were talking about what Adele did, and I said something like, 'That fucking cunt' -- uh, sorry."

"Go ahead. It doesn't matter," Marybeth said.

"I said, 'That fucking cunt not only got your job, she got twenty grand out of us, too.' Jenny says, 'I've been thinking it over. I don't think Adele sent the thumbs drives. I think it's somebody else.' I said why? Jenny says, 'Adele used the Subaru video to get my job, but she was blackmailing the studio, not me and not you, not directly any way. And that was the only video Adele had. But the person blackmailing us had a dozen videos of us and almost as many sound files, but the Subaru video wasn't one of them.' She said she thought Adele and the blackmailer were not the same person, because the videos were pretty different. She said there was nothing on the thumb drive that was shot on the studio lot, when there could have been. Jenny said she thought the blackmailer didn't have access to the studio lot. Adele did, obviously, and if she had been creeping around videotaping or bugging us having sex, she could have done it on the lot, in one of our trailers. Then Jenny says, besides, Adele could have told Aaron and William there were lots of videos of us, but she didn't. Jenny said she was convinced the Subaru video was the only sex tape Adele knew about. In all the studio bullshit that went on, it was only ever the one videotape being talked about."

"So Jenny came to the conclusion there were two independent blackmailers, only one of whom was Adele. The other blackmailer was somebody else. She concluded you were being blackmailed by two separate people over two different sets of sex tapes."

Niki wouldn't look up from her hands, embarrassed and humiliated.

"What else did Jenny say?"

"She said she thought Adele's blackmail thing was all over, because she had been fired and Adele was directing the movie. She said we had to worry about the other blackmailer."

"Did she have any idea who that might be?"

"No. Not at first. We talked about it, who it could be, but we didn't have any good ideas. She asked me if it could be somebody in my posse, you know, the people I hang around with. I said no way. I mean, they hang around all the time, and um... this is difficult to talk about. Let's just say, they've seen worse than what's on that thumb drive, and not just me, but other celebrities, too, doing stuff. So if it was one of them, it wouldn't be me and Jenny, it would be me and some other people whose names I don't want to say. And anyway, there's three girls from my posse in the one party video, but it wasn't shot from inside the room, it was somebody outside at the window. If it was one of my group they wouldn't need to do that. They'd just walk into the room and start taping."

"Did that ever happen?" Marybeth asked.

Niki wouldn't look up. "Sometimes."

"So there's more sex tapes out there somewhere?"

"Look, you guys need to understand something," Niki said. "I've been photographed and videotaped ever since I was seven years old. Modeling, kiddy beauty pageants, TV ads, you name it. I'm so used to being taped and videoed I hardly even notice it anymore."

"So there's video of you out there?"

"Yes and no."

"What the hell does that mean?" Marybeth asked with some attitude.

"Marybeth," Calloway said quietly.

"It means there's stuff, but not with my face on it."

"Can you elaborate?"

Niki sighed. "When I was a teenager, there was this guy. We did ... you know. He liked to take photos. A couple times he made videos. But I never let him shot anything with my face, and anyway he didn't care. About my face. He just wanted ... you know. And anyway, I wasn't famous back then."

"How do you know your face wasn't in anything he shot?"

"Oh, I looked at it. The photos, you know? He let me see them. He... we... liked that. I saw the videos, too. He just wanted ... you know. Down there. So to answer your question, he couldn't blackmail me, and anyway I haven't seen him in years."

"How old were you?"

"Wait a minute, Niki, don't answer that," Callow jumped in. "Marybeth, we all know the answer, and it's not relevant to why we're here. I hope you'll agree we're all better off concentrating on the present murder case, not, ah, something that might have happened X number of years ago."

"Cal, I'm already bending over so far backward I need to look up to see my own ass."

"I know. And I'm sorry about that. But you know I can't let my client go down that road. Let's work on solving these murders."

Marybeth looked at Calloway.

"It's Chinatown, Marybeth," Calloway said.

Shane looked at Carmen.

"Shush," Carmen barely breathed. "It's that movie quote. I'll explain later."

"Yeah," Marybeth said. "Chinatown." She turned to Niki. "Are there any porn films of you out there with your face? Anything from the last few years, since you turned 18?"

"Not now, no," Niki said. "Right after Jenny got killed, I told everybody we have to destroy any videos you guys shot. I didn't tell them about me being blackmailed, I told them I was worried about the police getting warrants if anybody got busted for something." Coke, Ecstasy, Special K, Mollie, rohypnol, meth, some new shit a Walter White type might come up with. Drunk driving, Drugged driving. Snorting in a school zone. Indecent exposure while peeing on a rival's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Fellatio at a charity auction. It was Hollywood, anything could happen.

Marybeth was about to speak when she saw the look on Calloway's face. The both knew what the other was going to say. Marybeth was going to tell Niki she had asked her posse to destroy evidence relevant to a murder investigation. Obstruction of justice. Calloway looked at her, nodded and closed his eyes as if to say, yes, I know. My client is dumber than a redwood tree. But he was also saying, I have my reasons for letting her tell you this stuff, so relax, it won't matter.

So Marybeth said nothing.

"So I guess the answer is no, as far as I know there's no more sex tape stuff out there. There shouldn't be, anyway. If there is, I don't know about it."

"After you got the blackmail envelope, did you have sex with Jenny again?"

Niki nodded.

"Weren't you worried about being videotaped?"

"You better believe it," Niki said. "We were fucking paranoid after that. No more cars. Nothing at Jenny's house. We went to hotels, where there were no windows unless it was, like, a tenth floor suite with a balcony and nobody on it. Where there was no way we could be videotaped, and no bugs or listening devices because nobody would know where we were going. We closed the drapes. And Jenny knew some tech guy at the studio, and she bought this gizmo from him that detected if you were being recorded. You see them in spy movies. So she had one of them, and we would turn it on and make sure there were no bugs."

"Jenny knew about that stuff?"

"No, not much at first. She said she had seen spy movies, and all, but she went out and educated herself about spying and bugging, and talked to people about it. She told them she was a writer and director, which was true, and she was researching stuff for a movie. She said everybody believed her, and why shouldn't they? There's hundreds of writers running all over Hollywood researching and writing spy movies and cop shows. There's stores right in town you can walk into and buy almost any kind of spy video and bugging stuff you can imagine. Anyway, all the sound and camera people on movie sets know how to do all that stuff, too. But Jenny didn't think it was any of them, because there was nothing from us at the studio. And she said the blackmail stuff looked amateurish. I thought that, too. The movie people I know, they'd be ashamed to do that unprofessional kind of work. The web site mock-up was okay, but the videos, they were worse than porn web cam shit."

"Did Jenny have anything else to say?" Marybeth asked.

"One thing. She said she didn't like the idea of the blackmailer sending stuff out to the media too much, although that would be bad enough. I said, why not? She said there would be stories all over the media but the vast majority would only report on it, and they couldn't show too much of the videos, they couldn't really show the hardcore parts without pixelating it and putting on black boxes over our private parts, or whatever. As awful as that was, there was something worse. I said what? She said it would be the porn site, of her and me having sex. They might match up the sound files to the videos, too, so you could watch us and hear us talking and stuff. She just didn't want to be the co-star of a porn web site. I said there's already porn sites of celebrities, where they PhotoShop somebody's head on some porno actress's body, but everybody knows those are fakes. She said yes, but ours wouldn't be fakes, they'd be real, and people could tell that. I said what about getting a lawyer, suing and getting an injunction to shut the site down. So Jenny says, by the time we got the injunction, if we could even find the fucking web site and somebody to sue, the stuff would be copied to other web sites all over the Internet, it could be on some Russian or Hungarian web site somewhere. She said once it was out, it would be out there forever and nothing we could do about it. So she says, that's why I'm going to pay the blackmail, and you have to do it, too. She said if we didn't and the videos got posted, neither one of us would ever work again, not in anything legitimate. Then she says, you don't want to become a porn star, do you? Because that's all I could do. And she didn't want to become a porn director or writer, and certainly not a performer. She said she had once done something like that she regretted, worked in a strip club, and she would swallow poison before she ever did that again. So that's when we decided we had to pay the blackmail."

"How did you make the payments after you got the cash out of the bank? You said you got text messages."

"Yes. We got the cash out first thing in the morning, and then we sweated bullets all day. It was a work day, and we were on the set. We each had almost ten thousand in cash and we didn't know what to do with it, we couldn't walk around all day with it in our pants pockets. Jenny sent a production assistant out to the store to buy the brown paper lunch bags."

"Did the production assistant ask why she needed them?"

Niki gave Marybeth a funny look. "You don't know much about movies and directors. Even sane directors."

Carmen cut in before Niki dug herself too much deeper. "What she means is, when the director gives you a chore to do or an errand to run, the PA just goes and does it. If Jenny had said go find me fifty pounds of whale shit and bring it back wrapped in a pink polka dot ribbon, the PA would have come back an hour later dripping wet with fifty pounds of whale sit, a ribbon, and a receipt."

"Okay, got it. Jenny says go get me some lunch bags, period, no questions asked."

"Right. So anyway, we were in her trailer and wondering what to do with the cash all day, so we lifted up the bed mattress and under it, you know, there's this storage trap door, so we both put our cash in there. The trailer was a rental, and even if people came and went in and out all day, even when Jenny wasn't in it, nobody was going to lift up the mattress and look in there. So anyway, we worked all day, and about six o'clock both our cellphones pinged with the same text message. It said I was to take the money in the paper bag and drive to Griffith Park, and go up to that astronomy observatory at the top. It's the one that's been in lots of movies. This was at about 10 p.m., after it got dark. I was supposed to park then walk to the main doors. At the left of the doors there was a trash can, and I was supposed to drop the bag into it. Then I was supposed to pretend I wanted to go in. I would walk to the door and somebody would tell me it was closing if it wasn't already closed and locked. So then I was supposed to go back to the car and drive away. So that's what I did."

"Was the observatory closed?"

"Not when I got there. I was a few minutes early. But people were coming out, and somebody told me they were closing. I waited a few minutes until everybody was gone, then put the bag in the trash can, and left."

"I know the answer, but I have to ask it anyway. Did you see anyone hanging around? Especially as you were leaving?"

"No. I kind of looked around, but there was nobody."

"Nobody recognized you?"

"Oh, no. I had on sunglasses and this big floppy hat. Grungy clothes."

"Okay, the next drop."

"We got a text about six, same as before. This time I was supposed to go to the museum at the Hollywood Bowl. There was this trash can. I was supposed to pretend I wanted to go in. Even though there was a concert at the Bowl, the museum was a short distance away, and closed at five o'clock. I learned that when I went there and there was a sign, off-season winter hours, ten a.m. to five p.m. I dropped the lunch bag in the trash can and left."

"The next one?"

"That was December, right? We were worried because we discovered the sixth was a Saturday. But I think it was Tuesday before we got a text message that said get the money on Monday the eighth, and that night I was to go back to the Griffith Park Observatory again, same thing, ten o'clock, put the bag in the trash can."

"The next one?"

"Same thing, but back to the Hollywood Bowl Museum. There was no concert that night so it was pretty deserted. But I didn't see anybody."

"And the February drop?"

"Back to the observatory."

"So he was mixing up the two sites."

"Yes."

"And then something happened, because there was no drop in March. So what happened?"

Niki frowned. "Jenny started getting... I don't know what the word is. Difficult? More than she usually was, I mean. And we had an argument. Right after the drop in February, she said one day she'd been thinking. She said so far we had paid nearly a hundred thousand, and enough was enough. She said she wanted to hire a private detective to find out who was blackmailing us. I told her she was crazy. She said this was Hollywood, and there were lots of really good private detective agencies who handled celebrity problems all the time, and that they were discreet and careful. She said for, like, eighty or ninety years, ever since Hollywood began, there were sex scandals and lots of bad stuff, and some of it was never ever reported because the celebrities or the studios or the press agents hired private detectives to deal with it. She said she'd rather we each paid the next ten thousand to a detective agency, if it even came to that much money, rather than to the blackmailer." She paused to take a drink of water. The room was silent.

"So anyway, we started arguing. I said it was a terrible idea, and I didn't want some detective running around talking to all my friends and stuff. Jenny asked me if I had told anybody we were being blackmailed. I said no, but she didn't seem to believe me, and we argued some more about that, was I sure I hadn't gotten drunk or stoned and blabbed to somebody. I said no, of course not. And I said I sure as hell didn't want any damn private detective to see the sex tapes or the porn web site mock-up. She agreed with that part, that she wouldn't give the detective the thumb drive."

"When did this discussion take place?" Marybeth asked.

Niki shrugged. "After Christmas. I mean, it wasn't just one conversation. We talked about it a couple times."

"Over a week? A month?"

Niki thought about it. "A couple weeks, I guess, or maybe a month. January, I guess. Then one day Jenny says, 'Okay, you're right. We'll forget about the private detective. But I'm getting tired paying, enough is enough. We have to figure out how to do a final payoff and get him to destroy the tapes, or give them back to us.'"

"And did you figure out a way?"

"No," Niki said. "Anyway, not that I know of. We talked a little bit about it, but we didn't come up with anything."

"And then you made the February payment."

"Yes."

"Anything unusual about it? Same procedure as before?"

"Yes. We got the cash, waited for the text instructions, I drove to the observatory, like before. I made the drop, and went home."

"And now we come to the March payment, or lack of one, when something changed. What happened?"

"That's the thing. I don't know. But about a week or ten days before the date we were supposed to make the next payment, Jenny calls me and says we don't have to do it, she's working on something, and she'll let me know the next step."

"What else did she say?"

"Well, about the blackmail, not much. Nothing I can think of."