Easy Prey (8 page)

“Dope,” Sloan said. “She might not even have known she was dying.”

“Oh, yeah, that's a fourth thing,” the ME said. “That
is
a needle stick on her arm, and there are more between her toes. She was taking a lot of sticks.”

“An addict?”

“Tell you later. None of this is final. I'll have some definitive stuff this afternoon.”

 
 
LUCAS STOPPED AT the chief's office, gave her a quick capsule of what the ME had said. She made a few notes and said, “So it really
could
be drug-related.”

“Yeah. Maybe even
probably.
”

“We got half an hour before the press conference,” she said. “I've promised everybody that you'll drag the killer in and hurl him to the floor in front of the microphones.”

“Or her,” Lucas said.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe.”

The chief turned to her window, squinted out at the empty sidewalk, then shook her head. “Nope. It's a man. A woman didn't kill Alie'e Maison.”

“You're sure?”

“Yup. And seriously, Lucas . . .”

“Mmmm?”

“We'd look really good if we caught this guy quick.”

The chief's secretary stuck her head in. “Lucas, Sloan says a Mr. Plain is here.”

“Gotta go,” Lucas said. “Good luck with the movie people.”

 
 
SLOAN WAS WAITING in the back of the Homicide office, talking with a tall dark-haired man with black eyes, who might have been called slender except that he had a square-shouldered heft that made him too tough for the word; he could have played a dissolute biker in a rock 'n' roll movie. He was wearing a black leather jacket, black slacks, and a plain black T-shirt. Another man, fleshy, brown-haired, freckled, wearing a Star Wars Crew baseball hat and a single silver earring, sat sideways in a hard-back chair a few feet away.

Sloan saw Lucas coming and said, “Chief Davenport, this is Amnon Plain. He was at the party last night and agreed to come to talk with us.”

The dark-haired man nodded at Lucas and the brown-haired man said, “Get a lawyer, dude.”

Plain asked Lucas, “Do I need one? A lawyer?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don't know. Did you kill Alie'e?”

“No.” Nothing more; no explanation of why he wouldn't have, or couldn't have, or a protest at the question.

Lucas said, “If you've got a simple and convincing story, then there shouldn't be a problem. If there are ambiguities to your statement . . . then maybe you ought to get a lawyer.”

Plain looked at the brown-haired man, who said, “Do what the dude says. Get a lawyer.”

Plain looked back at Lucas, then at Sloan, then back to Lucas, and said, “Fuck a lawyer. But I want to make my own tape of the statement. I brought a recorder.”

“No problem,” Lucas said.

Plain asked if the brown-haired man could come along, and Lucas, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. “I'd rather not . . .”

“Get a lawyer,” said the brown-haired man.

“. . . but if he doesn't get involved . . .” Sloan continued.

“Come on along,” Lucas said.

 
 
THEY TOOK THE statement in an interview room, with three tape recorders on the table: two police recorders, backing each other up, and Plain's hand-sized Sony.

Sloan had gone into good-cop mode, and said, pleasantly, “If you'll just tell us where you were and what you did, and who you saw last night.”

Plain dipped into a jacket pocket and took out an orange-covered notebook and flipped it open. “I got to the party a little after ten o'clock—as close as I can put it, about ten minutes after ten. Before that, starting at about eight o'clock, I'd been at the New French Café with friends. The friends were . . .”

He listed the friends. In the next five minutes, he gave a nearly minute-by-minute account of his evening, with each friend he encountered along the way.

What about Sandy Lansing?

Plain shook his head. “I don't know. If I saw a picture of her, maybe I'd recognize her, but I don't recognize the name. The party was open . . . to a particular crowd.”

“What crowd?”

“The art-money hip crowd,” Plain said.

“Any dope around?”

“All over the goddamn place.”

“You use drugs?” Sloan asked it mildly enough, but there was a snake in the question, which everyone could see. Plain did not hesitate.

“No. I don't use any chemicals. I did, for two years, when I was a teenager. I used cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, LSD, peyote, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, and a couple of other things. Hypnotics. Quaaludes. I found out that each and every one of them made me stupider than I already was, and I decided I couldn't afford that. So, eleven years ago, I stopped.”

“Aspirin?” Lucas asked. A little sarcasm.

“I still use aspirin and ibuprofen. I'm not a moron.” His tone of voice showed no reaction to the sarcasm, and somehow left Lucas feeling that the sarcasm had been juvenile. Plain was ahead on points.

“So what happened next?” Sloan asked.

At about midnight, Plain said, he left the party at Sallance Hanson's and went back to his studio in St. Paul's Lowertown with a friend, Sandy Smith, where they met an employee, James Graf, to look at scanned negatives from that morning's photo shoot. After half an hour of looking at the negs, Smith left for his home while Plain and Graf continued to work with the negatives.

“What were the pictures of?” Lucas asked.

Plain tilted his head. “You don't know?”

“No.”

“Some investigation,” he said to the brown-haired man. Then: “I spent all yesterday morning and the early part of the afternoon doing a fashion shoot with Alie'e.”

“Did you have a personal relationship with Alie'e?” Sloan asked.

“What do you mean, personal? You mean, was I fucking her?”

“Or anything else,” Lucas said.

“No. I wasn't fucking her. I wasn't interested in her. She was a dummy. She was like a toy that you plugged your dick into. Or, if you were a woman, that you stuck your tongue into. She was interested in feeling good, and that was about it,” he said.

“Your sister was involved with her?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah. They were gobbling each other, or whatever women do. Sticking heroin in their arms, putting coke up their noses.”

Sloan said, “Hmph,” and Lucas asked, “I was talking to some woman who was at the party, and she said you were so jealous of the relationship between Alie'e and your sister that you might kill Jael if you had the chance. Which suggests that Alie'e was more to you than just another model.”

Plain tipped his head, regarding Lucas with some curiosity, and said, “You're lying. Nobody told you that. But that's interesting. You apparently got hold of something, somewhere, and you don't know quite what it is.”

“Get a lawyer,” his friend said from the corner.

Lucas grinned involuntarily. He'd been caught—and that made
him
curious. “Tell me why you think I'm lying.”

“Because you got it just backwards,” Plain said.

“What?”

“I wasn't jealous because my sister took Alie'e away from me. I'm a little jealous—I admit it—because Alie'e took
Jael
away from me.”

In the immediate silence, the brown-haired friend said, “Oh shit,” and Lucas and Sloan looked at each other, trying to figure out what Plain had just said. Plain, picking on Sloan because he was the straighter-looking of the two cops, leaned toward him and said, “Yup. I was fucking my sister.”

 
 
“NOW,
THAT
WAS an interview and a half,” Sloan said when they'd finished and Plain and his friend had gone. They had an hour of tape.

Lucas rubbed his forehead. “I was feeling almost sympathetic there, toward the end. Two arty parents, rich dipshits, get divorced. Each one takes a kid. The kids don't see or speak to each other for fifteen years, then they run into each other, virtual strangers, good-looking, one is a model and the other one is working in photography, both running with the same crowd. If they hadn't been brother and sister, you'd
expect
them to fall in bed.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

Lucas nodded. “Then there's the other thing.”

“What's that?”

“He says his sister quit modeling and now is a professional potter, big in the art world. I've met a couple of potters.”

“I wouldn't doubt it,” Sloan said. He had an exaggerated idea of Lucas's love life.

“I'll tell you one thing about potters,” Lucas continued. “They pick up this clay, and they throw it around, and they beat it and twist it and turn it. . . . a few years of that, and they've got arms and hands like wrestlers.”

“Alie'e was strangled,” Sloan said. “Be interesting to talk to the sister.”

 
 
ALIE'E'S BOYFRIEND, A guy who insisted his only name was Jax, came through Homicide's front door a few steps before Jael Corbeau came in with her lawyer. Lucas had to decide which interview to watch, and he went with Corbeau.

Sloan took the statement, with Lucas and Swanson sitting in; Lucas tried not to stare, but Jael Corbeau was somebody to stare at. Not immediately—not a flash thing—but after a minute or so, he found it hard to stop looking at her. She had the same angular face as her brother, but was blond. And she had tracks on her face, scars; they did something unnatural: made it hard to breathe.

After the preliminaries—Sloan read her the Miranda warning, and the lawyer said that he might ask his client not to reply to certain questions, and that was not to be taken as an indication of guilt—Sloan said, “Tell us about your relationship with Alie'e Maison.”

Jael looked at her lawyer, who nodded, and she said, “Well, I didn't kill her. Or the other woman.”

“I'm happy to hear that,” Sloan said, smiling at her. “Do you have any idea who might have?”

“No. Really. I've been going over and over it in my head, and I can't figure out who would.” Her eyes drifted away from Sloan and stopped at Lucas. “Nobody disliked her enough. I mean, I don't know about the other woman, but Alie'e—some people probably disliked her, but not enough to hurt her.”

“How about in New York? Anybody there?” Sloan asked.

“No.” She was talking to Lucas now. “Of the top ten or fifteen models that you hear about, you know, the supermodels, she's like number seven or eight. She was very close to the top—maybe she would have become number one, she had the look for it—but there are other people who really are bigger. Who would be more likely to attract a crazy person, if that's what you're thinking.”

“We don't know quite what to think yet,” Sloan said. “So you don't--”

Jael leaned forward, interrupting: “But you know, she had a big following on the Internet. A lot of the . . . you know, engineer-type people were interested in her. They put up Internet pages, or whatever you call them, Websites, with her pictures. Some of them grafted porno pictures on her, so you'd see a woman fucking somebody, and the face would be Alie'e's. . . . There are quite a few of those.”

“Hmm. Interesting,” Sloan said. He looked at Lucas, then back at Jael, and asked, “Did she ever do any porn?”

“No. Of course not. Aside from everything else, she couldn't afford to. If she'd done any porn, the big courtiers would have dropped her like a hot rock.”

“Okay. . . . How about Lansing? Was she a friend of yours?” Sloan asked.

“No. I knew her—she came to parties—but she really wasn't part of the . . . I don't know what you'd call it. The art scene? That sounds pretentious and stupid at the same time.”

“So she wasn't a friend, but you sort of knew her,” Lucas said.

“Yes. She was some kind of hotel executive.”

Sloan nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you about your personal relationship with Miz Maison. You were . . . what?”

He let the question hang there, unfinished. Corbeau hesitated for a moment, then said, “We had both a friendship and a sexual relationship. I originally met her in New York. We were both working as models—this was before she became as famous as she is . . . was. We were both from Minnesota—that brought us together, and we became friends.”

“The relationship continued even after you moved back here? I understand you live here now.”

“Yes, although I go to New York every few weeks, to talk with dealers. I represent both myself and several other potters to the New York galleries. I'd usually stay at Alie'e's apartment.”

“Not always?”

“Not always. We both continued to have other relationships—with men as well as women.” She was looking at Lucas again. “Neither one of us thought of ourselves as primarily lesbian; we were just very good friends and our friendship had a physical component to it. If she had a man over, then I would stay someplace else. Usually up on Central Park South, so I could walk to the galleries on Fifty-seventh Street and over on Madison Avenue.”

“Did you have a sexual encounter with Miz Maison last night at the party?” Sloan asked.

Another quick glance at the lawyer. “Yes.”

“You were alone with her?”

“No. There were three of us. The other woman is Catherine Kinsley, who I believe is up north at her cabin with her husband. I haven't been able to reach her.” She flushed for the first time. “This is not heavy duty masculine-style sexuality. This is more like . . . cuddling, kissing, talking with each other.”