NYPD Red (5 page)

I’VE BEEN HANGING around soundstages ever since I was a kid. My mom was a makeup artist, and there were a couple of years when I decided I was too old to need a babysitter and she decided I was too young to be left home alone, so after school I’d meet her on the set of a commercial, music video, or feature.

Early on she taught me everything I needed to know to understand people in show business. “They think their poo smells like sugar cookies,” she said. “It doesn’t. But it makes them feel good if you pretend it does.”

Working for NYPD Red, I meet a lot of people who are convinced they’re God’s gift to the world. I can smell their shit a mile away, but Mom’s advice helps make my job a lot easier.

Kylie, Bob, and I walked through the stage doors of Studio X, which is about a city block long and almost as wide—no big deal in Hollywood, but pretty impressive by New York standards.

There were about forty people behind the camera, all of whom eyed us carefully as we navigated our way around cables, light stands, and sound carts. We stopped at the edge of the set, a banquet hall, where a semicircle of tables was decked out with fine china, crystal stemware, and exotic flowers. At least that’s what they’d look like on film. In reality they were all plastic. At the center of the main table sat an ornately decorated five-tiered wedding cake, which I knew would be Styrofoam, because buttercream would never hold up under the hot lights.

“Come meet the groom,” Bob said. “He’s on the dance floor.”

About a hundred extras, all in black tie and long gowns, had been talking as we showed up. The chatter died down to a whisper as we slipped on paper booties and trod carefully between the pools of blood.

Ian Stewart was on his back, the final emotion that had surged through his brain frozen on his face. It appeared to be a combination of OMG and WTF, but I might have been reading too much into it. Dead is dead, and Ian was very.

There was a different CSI waiting for us. Maggie Arnold is younger, prettier, and much friendlier than Chuck Dryden. We’d flirted at past crime scenes, and she gave me a big smile when she saw me. I introduced her to Kylie and asked for a top line.

“Top line is pretty much going to be the same as the bottom line,” she said. “He took two nine-millimeter rounds, one to the chest, one to the neck. Bled out fast.”

“The armorer says he loaded the magazine with blanks,” Kylie said.

“I believe him,” Maggie said. “We dusted the gun. The outside is covered with prints, which will probably match up with the prints we get from the armorer and the shooter, Edie Coburn. But the magazine and the rest of the bullets have all been wiped clean. If the armorer was the last one to handle the gun, his prints would be there.”

“So Dave is telling the truth,” Bob said. “Somebody swapped mags.”

“And that somebody could still be here,” I said. “How soon after the shooting did you seal off the studio?”

“Not soon enough,” Bob said. “First there was chaos. Then they called 911. It was nearly ten minutes before I got the call on my walkie and ordered a total lockdown. The guy we’re looking for had plenty of time to slip out.”

“I’m not really sure it makes a difference,” I said. “Whoever switched mags could have left long before the shooting.”

“I doubt it,” Kylie said.

“Why’s that?” I said.

“Look at this,” she said, sweeping her hand around the elaborately decorated room, past the hundred dressed-to-the-teeth extras, finally letting it come to rest with one finger pointing down at the blood-drenched body. “This is classic cinematic drama. It’s too big a spectacle to miss. I’ll bet you five bucks that whoever put real bullets in that gun stayed to watch Ian Stewart die.”

I didn’t take the bet. One thing I learned about betting with Kylie over the years: she almost always wins.

DAVE WEST HAD kind eyes. He was about fifty, an African-American with a thin wisp of a mustache and even less hair on his head. He had a soft, round face that I’m sure lit up when he laughed, and brown eyes that were tinged with sadness and bewilderment. But the kindness came through still.

I offered Kylie a shot at taking the lead, but she passed.

“Not here,” she said. “Not now.”

West was sitting at a table at the rear of the studio, an untouched cup of coffee in front of him.

Kylie and I introduced ourselves, and I sat down across from him. She stood to the side.

“I know you’re upset,” I said. “Can we talk?”

“It’s my fault,” he said. “I screwed up.”

“Dave!” It was Reitzfeld.

I threw him a look. He held up both hands. “Sorry. I just can’t let him incriminate himself.”

“Mr. West,” I said. “Just answer the questions as I ask them. How long have you been an armorer?”

“I got my BFA license twenty-three years ago last month.”

“BFA?”

“Blank Fire Adapted,” he said. “There’s prop guns and real guns. The props are harmless, but not too authentic. So most directors like to use a real gun that fires blanks.”

“And you supply the guns?”

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But I have total control over all BFA guns on the set, and I have the absolute final say on whether a gun is safe to use in a scene or not.”

“And what happened today?”

“It was a nine-millimeter SIG Pro. The movie takes place in the forties, and I needed a period piece. The gun’s got some years on it, but it’s in mint condition. I cleaned it and loaded the magazine with blanks.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said, “but you’re sure they were blanks.”

A hint of a sad smile. “Yeah. Like I said, I’ve been a gun wrangler for twenty-three years. It’s hard to confuse blank cartridges with real bullets. You’re a cop. You ought to know. Blanks have no lead at the tip. The ones I used had a red cotton wad inside the casing. Totally harmless, unless you fire the gun at extremely close range, but I met with the director, and I knew Edie would be a good ten feet away.”

“What time did you put the blanks in the magazine?” I said.

“I guess about nine, nine fifteen. We were supposed to shoot at nine thirty, but something happened with Edie and we wound up sitting around for a couple of hours.”

“And where was the gun during that time?”

He hesitated. “There’s a lockbox.”

“Did you lock it up?”

His bottom lip trembled and his eyes watered up. “I set it down on the prop table. I kept thinking we were going to roll camera any minute.”

“Could somebody have come in here and tampered with the gun?”

He nodded. “Look at this place,” he said. “They call it the prop room, but it’s not a room. There are no walls, no doors—it’s all open, and it’s twenty feet from the craft table. Anybody could walk over and tamper with anything, but I was sitting right—” He stopped, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why.

“Was the gun ever out of your sight?” I said.

“Two, three…maybe five minutes.”

“How long would it take to switch the magazines?”

“Five seconds. But why would anybody do that?”

“Let’s say somebody did,” I said. “How would they know in advance to have the right magazine—one that fits the gun you were using.”

“Production notes,” he said. “Everything we do is documented on paper and distributed all over the place. The SIG Pro was on the prop list since way back in preproduction. Anybody could’ve seen it.”

“At what point did you give Edie Coburn the gun?” I asked.

“Eleven thirty, I think.”

“Did you check to see that it was the right gun?”

“Yeah. I looked at the serial number, and then I took out the magazine and checked that too, but—”

He picked up the cold coffee from the table in front of him and took a sip.

“But what?” I asked.

“This mag for the SIG Pro—you can only see the top two cartridges. I looked in and saw two red tips. How was I supposed to know the rest would be live? But I was stupid. I was too trusting.”

“When Ms. Coburn fired the gun, what happened?”

“She took two shots at Devon Whitaker, the bride,” he said. “That’s what was in the script. Bang, bang. So Devon got the blanks. Her blood squibs go off and down she went. Then Edie fired two more at Ian. Soon as I heard it, I knew. Blanks don’t reverb like that. I froze in my seat. Luckily, Alan, the special effects guy, ran over and wrestled the gun from Edie’s hand, but by then…” He buried his face in his palms and his body shook as he wept quietly.

One thing was clear. Dave West wasn’t a killer. He was a patsy and he was about to take the fall for a sadistic killer. Reitzfeld had said that Dave’s wife was sick. But not once did he whine about her or use her illness as an excuse. He had taken his mind off his life-or-death job, and he was willing to own his mistake and suffer the consequences.

He stopped sobbing and looked me square in the eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said and put both hands behind his back. “It’s your job.”

“Dave West, you’re under arrest for negligent homicide in the death of Ian Stewart,” I said.

I read him his Miranda rights while Kylie and Bob Reitzfeld looked on.

I’ve never felt so bad about arresting anyone. And then something happened that made it even worse. It hit me in the pit of my stomach. Kylie was right. The shooting of Ian Stewart was too big a spectacle to walk out on. And whoever switched the harmless blanks for deadly bullets was in this room right now, silently watching me slap a pair of handcuffs on an innocent man.

YOU MIGHT THINK that a wide-eyed, superalert, extremely talkative person would be an ideal witness to interview. Not when all that hyperactivity is induced by cocaine.

Henry Muhlenberg, the young hotshot director, was useless. Even if we’d missed the dilated pupils and the runny nose, all it took was one question to realize he was too coked up to help.

The question was “Can you tell us what happened?”

“What happened was somebody put real bullets in the gun,” he said, talking at race-car speed. “Bang. Edie shoots Ian. He’s dead. I’m dead. You know what I mean when I say I’m dead? She might as well have pointed the gun at me, because I’m finished. Over. Kaput.”

We couldn’t shut him up, so we sat him down and walked out of earshot.

“He wasn’t nearly this whacked-out when I first got here,” Reitzfeld told us. “He probably decided to get rid of whatever blow he had on him before the cops showed up, and why waste it by flushing it down the toilet?”

“Forget about him,” Kylie said. “Here comes the real boss.”

Shelley Trager strode through the doors of Studio X. He’s that rare breed of producer who’s made it big in New York. A scrappy Jewish kid who used his fists growing up in the rough-and-tumble Irish neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen and his brains navigating the ego-driven world of show business.

“The only difference,” he’s fond of saying, “is that in Hell’s Kitchen, they stab you in the front.”

He was strikingly handsome in his prime, but now, closing in on sixty, he’s fighting a losing battle with both his waistline and his hairline. But time has only improved his reputation. He’s one of the acknowledged good guys in the entertainment business, and his company, Noo Yawk Films, has provided jobs for tens of thousands of actors, writers, and production people who would otherwise be waiting on tables.

A longtime friend of the mayor, Trager is one of the biggest supporters of bringing more of LA’s film business to the city. And since he owns a piece of Silvercup Studios, what’s good for New York is good for Shelley.

“Zach,” he said when he saw me.

I met him a year ago when I put away a wacko who was stalking one of his young stars. It came as no surprise that he remembered exactly who I was.

Kylie, of course, knows him personally, but there were no hugs, no air kisses—just a brief exchange of head tilts, and Trager got right down to business.

“How can I help?” he said.

“The armorer says somebody got to the gun and switched the blanks for live ammo,” I said. “For starters, we’ll need the names of everyone on the set. And I know they’re on the clock, but I’ll have to ask you not to release anybody till we get statements from every one of them.”

“Done,” he said immediately. “What else?”

“We’re told the shooting was all caught on film,” Kylie said. “We need to see it.”

He took a little longer on this one. Finally, he said, “Under one condition. NYPD and nobody else. When you’re done, I want the footage locked up. God forbid it should show up on YouTube.”

“Thank you,” Kylie said.

“I heard you arrested Dave West,” Shelley said. “Is it really necessary? The poor guy’s got a sick wife.”

“We had to,” I said. “I doubt if the DA will be tough on him, but it would help if he had a lawyer.”

“I’ve already hired one,” Shelley said. “Perry Keziah—you know him?”

I nodded. Everybody knew Perry Keziah. He wasn’t just a lawyer; he was the best of the best. Dave would be home in time for dinner.

“Excuse me,” Trager said.

He walked onto the set and stood over Ian Stewart’s body. Everything else stopped. Nobody on the stage moved. Nobody talked. All eyes were on him.

He lowered his head and mouthed a silent prayer.

Then he walked back and stood face-to-face with Kylie and me.

“This is a tragedy,” he said. “But if what they’re saying about the death of Sid Roth is true…” He paused, as if speaking the words out loud would make them real. “If what they’re saying about the death of Sid Roth is true,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper, “then it’s a conspiracy.”

KYLIE AND I stood there and let Trager’s words sink in. A major producer is found dead in the morning—probable homicide. An above-the-title actor is shot a few hours later—probable homicide. It’s a pretty big coincidence, and homicide detectives don’t believe in coincidences.

“I hit a hot button, didn’t I?” Trager said.

Kylie stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“You’re both lousy poker players. I can tell by looking at the two of you that Sid Roth, who was ten years younger and in ten times better shape than I am, did not suddenly keel over and die of a heart attack on the first day of Hollywood on the Hudson. The rumors are true. He was poisoned, wasn’t he?”

“Shelley, you know we can’t answer that,” Kylie said.

“Fine. The mayor can. I’m the guy who helped him deliver a thousand Hollywood big hitters to New York. I’m the first guy he’ll call if he thinks the other nine hundred and ninety-eight are at risk.” He took out his cell phone.

“Put it away,” Kylie said. “We’re waiting for the lab results, but it looks like Sid Roth was poisoned.”

“Son of a bitch,” Trager said. “Are we talking about a serial killer?”

“Not yet,” I said. “There’s no pattern. Except for the fact that both men were in show business, there’s no link between the two of them. We have to investigate each case separately.”

“Which means we have to talk to Edie Coburn,” Kylie said.

“Give her a break,” Shelley said. “She’s in shock.”

“That’s what happens to people who witness a murder,” Kylie said. “We know how to talk to her.”

“She’s in her trailer,” Trager said. “I’ll take you there.”

Edie Coburn was in a lot less shock than advertised. She was smoking a cigarette and sipping clear liquid out of a tall water tumbler. I doubted it was Evian. Shelley introduced us as Detectives Jordan and MacDonald from NYPD, but he left out the part about his connection to Kylie through Spence Harrington. He told her we had a few questions about the “unfortunate accident.”

“I didn’t know the gun was loaded,” she said. Actually, she didn’t just say it. She delivered it. It was like she’d rehearsed the line all afternoon, and the camera started rolling as soon as the cops walked in.

“You know that’s a line from a song,” Trager said.

She smiled. Of course she knew.

“We’re sorry for your loss, Ms. Coburn,” I said. “Can you talk about what happened on the set?”

“Let’s not pretend,” she said. “I was a naughty girl. I held up production all morning because I was furious at Ian. He’s a serial adulterer. I ought to know—the first time I slept with him he was married to someone else. So I married him with my eyes wide open. He cheats; I look the other way. But this one was too much. Did he really have to fuck the girl the two of us would be doing a scene with? And worse than that, the bitch told everybody. All proud of herself, like it was some sort of big conquest, like Ian was the Holy Grail.”

She took a swig from the tumbler. “I knew how important this scene was to Ian, so I went into my diva act and refused to come out. I decided to let him sweat for a while.”

“What motivated you to finally do the scene?” Kylie said.

“Oh, you’re cute,” Edie said. “You wouldn’t ask that question if you didn’t already know the answer. The director came to my trailer. Let’s just say he’s very persuasive. He convinced me.” Another gulp from the glass. “Convinced the hell out of me.”

“And when you got to the stage, were you still angry at your husband?” Kylie said.

“What do you think?”

“And were you uncomfortable with the fact that a lot of people on the set knew he was having an affair with Devon Whitaker?”

“No, sweetie. I’m uncomfortable when my panty hose ride up. When I walked out on that stage in front of all those gossiping extras, I was mortified. But how I felt and what I did are two different things. The prop guy gave me the gun. I didn’t know there were any real bullets in it. If I did, I would have fired the two blanks at Ian and put the entire clip into Devon Whitaker. She’s the one who told the cast and crew that she was screwing my husband.”

“Thank you for talking with us,” I said. “Again, we’re sorry for your loss.”

“I called Ian’s brother Sebastian in London,” she said. “They agreed to let us have a memorial service in New York for his fans. Then they want his body sent back home as soon as possible.”

“The medical examiner should be finished with the autopsy by tomorrow or Wednesday,” I said. “The family can claim his remains after that.”

“Thank you,” she said, draining what was left in her glass. “Shelley, would you mind staying after the detectives leave.”

Kylie and I took our cue and exited the trailer.

“If we’re looking for someone with a motive,” I said, “she’s got one with a capital M.”

“She’s a bitch,” Kylie said, “but she’s innocent. Ian Stewart was a world-class skirt chaser, and Edie knew it. He’d cheated on her before, and she figured he’d cheat on her again. I’m sure she wanted payback, but more on the order of a nice little bauble in a robin’s-egg blue Tiffany box, not a dead husband. She didn’t do it. She didn’t set it up.”

“You sure?” I said. “Whatever happened to ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?”

“It doesn’t apply here,” Kylie said. “A lot of these people sleep around, but in show business, adultery isn’t a motive for murder; it’s a lifestyle.”