Precinct found Gillian’s door locked—dead-bolted.
It was one of those locks where the dead bolt could be engaged by a thumb switch from the inside but needed a key to be locked
from the outside. Gillian Stone’s house keys had been found in her purse.
“Who, to your knowledge, might have a key to this place?” Gregory said.
“Trey Winters, of course.”
“The squad interviewed him in the precinct this morning. Anybody else?”
“Maybe her sister, only other one I can think of.”
“Faye Boudreau,” Gregory said. “One hundred eighty-five East Sixty-fourth Street, apartment three-K.”
“Gillian’s old apartment. I’ve been in that one.”
“Faye surrendered a key to detectives at the morgue this morning. What’s your take on the sister? Little wifty, isn’t she?”
“I met her three or four times,” Danny said, wondering what “wifty” meant. “Hardly opened her mouth. Hello, goodbye.”
“This morning at Bellevue,” Gregory said, “she came off as a bit of a space cadet. Wouldn’t even set foot in the viewing room.
Now we have to wait for the parents to fly in from Arizona to make the official ID.”
That’s one for my book on cops, Danny Eumont thought. The fact that Joe Gregory found it strange that Faye Boudreau was unable
to look at the body of her sister. It was another piece of irrefutable evidence that cops, like the rich, were different from
the rest of the world.
“I gotta tell ya,” Gregory said. “The thing that bothers me about all this is
you
. Why call
you?
You say your relationship ended six months ago. Now she’s involved with someone else. But… out of the blue, when she’s upset,
she calls you.”
“I’ve been trying to explain that. The reason she called me… and why she was so upset… was that she was afraid she might be
getting dropped from the show. Her producer, Trey Winters, trumped up this phony rumor that she had a substance abuse problem.”
“So she calls you for a shoulder to cry on.”
“She couldn’t exactly cry on Trey Winters’s shoulder, could she?”
My bombshell, Danny thought, and Joe Gregory didn’t even look up. As if he’d heard it all before. He continued to pick his
way through her underwear, nonchalantly, enjoying it.
“Still seems strange,” Gregory said, “she calls
you
. Seems to me she’d have to have a damn good reason to call a boyfriend she dumped six months ago. You think maybe it was
because you’re a magazine writer, and she’s thinking—”
“
She
didn’t bring that up.
I
asked
her
if she wanted me to write a story.”
“Are you writing this story? Let’s get that out on the table right now.”
“No, I’m not writing this story,” Danny said. “But you’re missing the point. The point is that there was no drug problem in
the first place.”
“Winters made it all up.”
“Exactly. That’s what needs to be looked at. Not what happened six months ago.”
Gregory’s Charlie Chan style of questioning was beginning to get on Danny’s nerves. His uncle had told him that interrogation
was becoming a lost art. He said that some detectives got so used to easy cases, or “ground balls,” that they forgot that
sometimes they actually had to solve one.
“According to Winters,” Gregory said, “Gillian’s drug problem has been an ongoing issue for over a month. If so, what set
her off last night?”
“Winters did. He called her last night and insisted she had to be tested by a lab of his choosing.”
Gregory changed the focus of the questioning to Gillian’s family. Danny told him the little he knew. Gillian was Arizona born
and raised. Gillian’s mother, Lynnette, was active in theater groups around their home in Scottsdale. Her father, Evan, was
a high-profile investor and developer, known mostly for extravagant shopping malls in the Southwest. On the dresser was a
picture of a smiling Evan Stone arm in arm with Barry Goldwater, both wearing cowboy hats