The Trials of Max Q, page 13
“Are you enjoying yourself?” Shep awakens me.
I say nothing, remaining fixated on Laney’s words.
“Guys are gross,” she says with a shake of the head.
Chapter 32
“So did you enjoy your reading?” Shep asks me again, after we park the car in an overpriced Manhattan garage.
I detect a trap. “It’s an interesting read. Kind of an erotic-thriller version of My Fair Lady. A rag to riches story. Triumph and tragedy.”
“I’m sure it’s a classic. What did you learn—that she was a greedy tramp who got herself killed?”
“I told you, it’s important to get to know the victim.”
“And now I’m sure you know her quite intimately.”
She looks at her watch. “Eleven-fifteen, we can still make it,” she says with urgency.
After hailing a cab, I cause her further despair when I change our plans. I instruct the driver to drop us on 18th Avenue in Gramercy Park.
“Are you going to let me in on what’s going on, Jack? We had an eleven-thirty meeting with Lansdale—you know, the guy with the website that had the victim on a hit list. The guy who happened to be present the night before she was killed.”
I don’t want Lansdale to be overly comfortable, so I’m not worried about missing our appointment. What I am worried about is the rain that is pounding down. I open an umbrella and attempt to hold it over both our heads. Shep raises her own umbrella in defiance.
Our dueling umbrellas don’t allow us to stand side by side, so I take the lead in trudging single-file up 18th Avenue.
“Where are we going, Jack?” Shep demands again, as she splashes through puddles in her pricey heels.
“You’ll see,” I say. Tense silence grows between us.
Just as I begin to get used to the refreshing background noise of gridlocked traffic, Shep ends her speaking boycott. She points to a large modern skyscraper. “I interned there one summer in college. The top floor is Evans, Kramer, Gordon & Associates.”
I’m well aware of who they are—one of the top law firms in Manhattan. They are known throughout the industry as EKG, which is ironic because the firm is known as being heartless.
“I was going to be back on top there one day as a partner. Now I’ll be lucky to not be a punch-line.”
I look up at the top floor that houses EKG, feeling small. I look back at Shep. I can see the fire in her eyes, but also an underlying hurt.
“I don’t know exactly what you are looking for, but I know you’re not going to find it on the top floor of a skyscraper.”
“Is this another one of your self-righteous lectures?”
“Whatever mechanical rabbit you’re chasing, it sure hasn’t brought you happiness.”
“I have no idea what a rabbit has to do with this, but better chasing that than a ghost.”
She hits my weak spot. “Leave Reyanne out of this! At least I didn’t marry someone because I thought they could take me up the ladder of success.”
“That’s not why I married him, and what would you know about the ladder of success? You were born choking on a big fat silver spoon. Or was it gold?”
This part I don’t understand. Shep claims to come from a well-to-do family outside of Boston, and her car sure didn’t come from her Otsego County salary. So either she’s a hypocrite or something is off here.
But she’s right on one point—my job is built on not prejudging, yet I’m currently the worst offender.
“Because I fell in love with the idea of a new life. I could get rid of the old Jessica and start over,” Shep says.
“And the question was?”
“Then why did I marry him? It’s what you wanted to ask me.”
I expect her to reattach her force field, but instead she opens up.
“My former in-laws were the rich ones from Boston. My family was a domestic disaster from Rome, New York. My father’s three big hobbies were drinking, gambling, and leaving. My mother didn’t care about me, except to put me down whenever she could. I put myself through college and law school, working up to four jobs at a time. Brad was the knight in shining armor who was going to take me away. It wasn’t ever about the money, it was about a new life, getting to start over from scratch.”
Shep pulls on her watch and says, “Totally fake. My car is the one thing I got from my marriage, after selling my engagement ring. I wear knock-offs of Louis Vuitton. I got my purse and diamond earrings at the Sloan-Kettering thrift shop. Why do you think I never let anyone from the office see my closet-size apartment in Albany?”
She doesn’t go into the details of the marriage, and how it ended in an annulment. I don’t push. It hits me that Shep and Laney Bang had more in common than I thought—both looking for that new life to erase their past. On the downside, they both tended to sway from the truth to achieve this new life.
We walk past stout trees that date back centuries, until we arrive at a five-story townhouse that sits between 17th and 18th Street.
“The owner is Laney Bang,” I inform.
Shep’s mouth gapes open.
I continue, “It’s supposedly a house for runaway girls called DK House, but when our investigator began digging, he found that the hidden owner, deep under layers of shell corporations, was none other than Laney Bang.”
“Purposely hidden—as in the ‘secret spot’ in New York, just as Amber claimed.”
“Exactly—the police missed it, but our investigator didn’t.”
“Another home run for the Babe!” she exclaims with an actual smile. I think she had been holding that new life stuff in for a long time and feels reinvigorated.
The location is low profile. Gramercy Park was once a collection of 19th-century homes surrounded by a private park. In recent years it has become an urban mixture of commercial high-rises and trendy apartment buildings, but it’s still a lot more Lawson than Bang. And the last place you’d expect to find the world’s biggest attention queen. Which was probably her plan.
The townhouse was built in 1892 from brick and carved limestone. Only a glass atrium on the roof reeks of glamour. No awning or doorman. I had expected shooting fountains and neon signs. But it seems to never be the obvious when it comes to Laney Bang.
We walk up the brick steps to the front entrance. Shep jiggles the door handle, and in doing so, makes a discovery. “Jack, the door is unlocked.”
Before I can protest, she enters the home and I follow. I immediately begin to second-guess our decision, visualizing Kerri getting the case tossed out on an illegal search. But it’s too late.
“Hello—is anybody in here?” I yell out. With every step, I become even more cognizant of what a bad idea this is.
“Hello ... hello,” Shep shouts, her voice echoing.
Nobody is home, but obviously somebody had recently been here—why else would the door be unlocked? My first thought is that Kerri’s investigators must have beaten us to it, but LB&G only hires the best, and the sloppy work of leaving the front door open doesn’t match their sophistication. I next wonder about Amber and Maxon, who might have felt they had some loose ends to tie up after talking to us yesterday.
Shep and I do a sweep of the downstairs. I expected a cheesy motif with mirrors on the roof and stripper poles in the living room. Instead, it’s a place my family would be proud of—elegant dining room with a grand crystal chandelier. A comfortable living room with leather couches, glass tables, and a baby grand piano. Picassos and Monets line the walls like a miniature art gallery.
We move upstairs and split up. I wander in to what looks like a young girl’s bedroom—as pink as cotton candy and a bed full of stuffed animals. It is the exact opposite of Amber’s depiction of a tawdry hideout for Laney’s trysts with married men. In fact, it’s as if Laney had created this “secret site” to escape her Laney Bang character. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence it was hidden under the guise of a home for troubled girls—Darby was the troubled girl.
When I’m done playing amateur psychologist, I seek out Shep. I find her in a professional looking office going through Laney’s files and computer.
Shep informs me that she hasn’t had any luck with the computer, and jokes that it’s so clean that it doesn’t even contain any porn. At least I think she’s joking. It’s hard to tell sometimes with her.
While the computer is a dead end, the file cabinet does bear some fruit. I learn that Laney might be as anal retentive as Shep—all of her files are listed in alphabetical order with meticulously labeled subsections. So it didn’t take Shep long to find a file marked Anderson, Drew. It was her largest file.
“She definitely has been tracking Anderson for some time,” she says and hands me numerous folders
There is no proof of a blackmail scheme, but it does contain assorted information related to Anderson, ranging all the way back to his college football days. All the contents could be easily explained away as a businesswoman doing her due diligence on a man she was contemplating entering into a partnership with.
I instruct Shep to call Gifford and get a warrant for the townhouse. Maybe the science guys can find a Drew Anderson fingerprint, or other DNA related items, that would help confirm what Amber told us. And they can haul the computer and files to our offices in Cooperstown, where we can do a full analysis.
I browse through the file cabinet. As I sort through the folders, something strange hits me. “Do you find it odd that she has an extensive file on Anderson, but nothing on James Lansdale? He would be involved in this supposed business venture, and he was the one who was trying to destroy her.”
“Maybe if we would have kept our schedule, we could have asked him. Now can we go talk to him before it’s too late?”
“Not just yet. There’s one more place we need to go first.”
Chapter 33
It’s a quarter past two. We are almost three hours late, and now James Lansdale is making us wait.
After we left Laney’s townhouse, we made an unannounced visit to MaddoXXX Video, which is located in a swanky palace on Madison Avenue. My intent was to meet with its founder and CEO, Tyler Maddox—the guy who discovered Laney Bang in an Atlanta area strip club. That little discovery made Tyler Maddox and his company into the benchmark for success in the multi-billion dollar adult entertainment industry. Most interesting to me is that MaddoXXX Video was embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with Laney Bang at the time of her death.
Upon walking into the modern high-rise building, the first thing that struck me was how normal it looked. An office filled with cubicles and bustling men in suits. It could have easily been the corporate offices of a typical Fortune-500 company.
The well-groomed Tyler Maddox looked as if he just appeared off the cover of GQ. Gone was the long hair and goatee that Laney described in her book. He downplayed the lawsuit—the dispute was over whether Laney broke her contract with Maddox when she left to start a competing production company. He claimed their personal relationship was as good as ever. To make his point, he showed us a photo of his family with Laney after his daughter’s dance recital in suburban Westport, Connecticut, just a week before the murder. With genuine emotion in his voice, he described how hard it was for him to explain her death to his children, as she was their godmother. The picture he painted was so mainstream suburban that I almost nodded off.
Tyler also explained how Laney was one of the few girls in the business that he’d seen beat the dark temptations. Numerous tales of how she took in the weary, tired, and poor like some sort of Lady Liberty of porn.
Relevant to our investigation, he tossed cold water on Amber’s blackmail theory—aka our motive. “I would take what Amber Jazz says with a grain of salt,” he told us.
“Because of the drug use?” Shep followed up.
“That has always been a problem with Amber. But a bigger problem is that she had an insane jealousy of Laney. She wanted to be the number one star in the world and thought Laney was standing in her way. Amber could be vindictive.”
The rest of the questioning was uneventful, at least until Shep decided to pick a fight. She challenged Maddox as to whether he felt remorse for the lives he harmed by the so-called “dorm porn.” Did he ever lose sleep over the kid who thought he was going to have a night of college fun and then either got kicked out of school or branded for life, and couldn’t get a job because of one bad decision? “You basically lit the crack pipe and put it in front of these kids. Film is forever, Mr. Maddox,” she fired away.
Maddox made a spirited counter that their monitored parties were much safer than the drunken and reckless sex that took place in the dormitories, or the typical college parties that often resulted in deadly drinking and driving. “If you’re old enough to make a decision on who should be the president, then surely you are mature enough to make this decision. I sleep well at night.”
They both stood and I really think she wanted to get in a fistfight with him. After her recent admission about her background, I view her in a different light, and understand why she’s such a fighter. I got her out of there as expeditiously as I could, before she did something to harm her career. Besides, Lansdale had waited long enough and we needed to save some of that vim and vigor for him.
Sitting across from Lansdale’s desk, I look at Shep and she smiles nervously back at me. We are the most united we’ve been since the case started. I view the room, finding it similar to the office of Tyler Maddox, including the breathtaking view of the Manhattan skyline. I see the irony of the porn producer and the anti-porn crusader ending up in similar palaces.
James Lansdale arrogantly marches in, announcing, “You’re late.”
“Sorry, our helicopter got stuck in traffic,” I sass back at him. I don’t think he killed Laney Bang, but I certainly don’t like him.
“Don’t waste my time, Mr. Lawson,” he responds in his usual condescending tone, taking a peek at his watch to further his point.
“Where were you between the hours of two and six-thirty a.m. this past Monday morning?” I ask.
“If you haven’t already checked the flight records, then you are as incompetent as the media claims. Do you want me to bore you with details about the rest of my journey—what time I was seen checking in to the Four Seasons and such?”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“How did you feel when you heard of Laney Bang’s unexpected death?” Shep asks.
“It wasn’t unexpected,” Lansdale says flatly.
“It wasn’t?” I ask, intrigued.
“She lived a life of sin, so it’s logical that such a harsh judgment was cast on her. She also made a lot of enemies.”
“Including yourself. I believe that Ms. Bang was number one most wanted on your Smut Cleanser website.”
Lansdale shoots me an angry look. “That wasn’t to be taken literally.”
“Isn’t it possible that someone who’s a little less grounded than yourself may have gotten the wrong idea from the website, and believed he or she was doing God’s work by eliminating Ms. Bang?”
“On the record, Mr. Lawson, the website in no way promotes violence, calls for the death or injury of anyone, or provides any incentive to those who might take it upon themselves to misinterpret our intent. The only thing the website asks is a boycott of these people’s products or services.” Lansdale now flaunts a smile. “But off the record, I would like to shake the hand of the person who did it.”
“If you were to shake the hand of the man who killed Laney Bang, would it be Drew Anderson’s hand that you shake?” I ask.
“I won’t even dignify your question with an answer. The idea that Drew killed that piece of trash is absurd. He is a good and decent family man who has done nothing but heal people, not harm them.”
“Absurd?” I ask with a puzzled look. “They found a woman murdered in his house, and nobody else was present at the time of the death. It really sounds absurd to you that he might have killed her?”
“You have no evidence, and lack a motive. And from my discussion with his lawyer, it seems he has witnesses to his alibi.”
“What did you discuss in the meeting that night?” Shep asks.
“I’m not at liberty to divulge specifics, but the general mission statement, from our side, was that Drew sought to tap into her platform to enhance his campaign. In turn, she wanted my group to back off the sponsor boycott of her show.”
“And you went along?” I ask with skepticism.
“I didn’t agree with any type of business relationship with Laney Bang, but Drew is a good friend, and when he puts his mind to it he can be very persuasive. And no, it didn’t escape my thoughts that if he became governor it would be quite a coup for myself, along with the long-term interests of those I represent. Sometimes you have to lose the battle to win the war.”
“Did you consider the meeting a success?” I ask.
“The end result obviously was quite a positive.”
I want to toss him out his window down onto Madison Avenue. And just because he’s pissing me off, I ask him about the helicopter trip the next morning to pick up his married “girlfriend.”
He looks like he wants to crush me like a bug. Shep doesn’t look thrilled that I brought up the subject, and in doing so, turned the interview personal.
Lansdale stands, signaling the end of the questioning.
“Due to your tardiness, I am late for a lunch engagement,” he announces. “You have no evidence against Drew, and you will be laughed out of court. But if you are foolish enough to attempt to prosecute him, I will use every ounce of my money and influence to ensure his full exoneration.”
