Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery (19 page)

Cherish didn’t argue. At the door she turned and said, “You know, Max, I never liked your show on the red carpet.”

“You are not the first to tell me that, my dear, so don’t get excited.”

“But, I mean, in person…you’re okay.”

After she left, I stuffed a few papers back into her file and moved it to one side of Deiter’s desk. I heard Cherish come back, and I turned around, saying, “And if you don’t like me on the red carpet, I can only—”

But it wasn’t Cherish Goodwater standing in the doorway. It was a man I could only guess was the owner of the clinic and the office that I had just basically ransacked, Dr. Edward Deiter.

G
rab her,” said the compact, tanned doctor in the doorway.

A second man, dressed in a pale yellow Wonders wind jacket and name badge, rushed in, and before I knew it, he had me from behind, his viciously strong arms pressing tightly against my chest. On any other night, it might have been fun. But not now.

I croaked out, “Stop! Stop this. Don’t you dare—”

“Maxine Taylor. I’m Dr. Deiter. You are in my office,” said the man at the door. “You may be used to people in your life doing everything you ask them to do but that life has ended.” He shut the door quietly.

I gulped. I mean, okay, I had broken into the guy’s office and
gone through his files. That couldn’t look great. But I had a very good reason. “I was simply getting my belongings. My own. Look. You’ve got eyes. That box? It’s got my name on it.” As my arms were pinned to my sides in the giant’s strong grip, I gestured with my chin toward the cardboard box on his desk.

“Peter, hold on to her,” Dr. Deiter said in a cold voice, flipping on the office light switch. The Pasadena sky was still inky black as the office suddenly brightened by about a thousand extra watts. In the glare, I got my first good look at the man who ran Wonders, a guy whose thick, silver hair was cut bristly short and framed a narrow, intelligent face. Round, wire-rimmed glasses gave Dr. Deiter that professorial look I tend to go for in a man, that is, when I’m not being forcibly restrained by one of his henchmen. I like kinky, in theory. But in reality, it just leaves bruises.

As a trained fashionista, I couldn’t help but observe that, over his Polo jeans, the doc wore a pale, suede Ralph Lauren jacket, and I could just see the Rolex at the cuff. Taste and money.

Despite the awkwardness of being held by a huge gorilla, I smiled at the man in charge. “Dr. Deiter. How nice to meet you finally.” I used my lowest and sultriest voice, tapping into the last dregs of Max Taylor charm, and let me tell you, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. It is for just such a reason I always wear really good earrings. Gives that extra zing of glamour that will boost a girl through any sort of jam. I had, after all, just been caught red-handed inside the doctor’s locked private chambers. I pulled an arm free from the hulking Peter’s grasp, gently touched one of my large Van Cleef & Arpels ebony-and-diamond button clips that screamed both wealth and breeding, and quickly figured my odds. Would he have a celebrity arrested?

The doc quickly locked the office door with a key and walked
across the room. He spied the mess on his desk and touched Cherish’s open file. I was so busted.

“Just getting your own things?” he asked. Then he nodded to the gorilla in the yellow jacket. “Search her. See what she’s taken.”

Oh, no. No. The man holding me shifted his grip to pat me down. I slapped at him, suddenly worried. “Stop that,” I squawked. “Don’t you dare.” I batted at the large moron when he let go his grasp. “Wait just a damn minute.”

“Our patient is getting agitated,” said Dr. Deiter. “We had better sedate her.”

My eyes flapped open even wider. From out of his briefcase, Dr. Deiter had pulled a syringe. In one efficient motion, he tore open its new plastic wrapper, then produced a small vial filled with clear liquid from a locked case behind the desk.

“Look,” I said, starting to panic. “There has been a mistake. I am not really, in fact, supposed to be in rehab at all. If you want to know the truth, I have no addictions. None. I just needed a day or two to figure out a few things. I was simply getting my own belongings and leaving.”

One eyebrow lifted behind Deiter’s wire-rims, producing a small crease in his tanned forehead. “I’m sure you’ve heard the psychological term
denial,
right?”

“Yes, of course. But I’m not in denial. It’s true.”

Deiter looked up at me, the syringe almost filled with the medicine from the vial. “You have tangled with the wrong rehab clinic, Max. We know just how to deal with angry, abusive stars. We knock addicts down, and then, when you are really hitting bottom, we help you up. It’s for your own good. Now just stay still.”

This wasn’t happening. The big guy’s arms felt like three-
hundred-pound iron bars. I couldn’t budge when he held me tightly, as he was now doing.

“This is ridiculous,” I said, trying to keep the fear out of my voice. “Look, your man here is hurting me.”

Deiter flicked the liquid in the syringe and looked at me, his tranquil face not betraying a hint of emotion. “How did you get in here?”

“The door was unlocked.”

He shook his head, dismissing my lie. “Why have you been looking at the private records of my patients?”

“It was…an accident?”

He held up a hand. “I have read the reports of your counselors. No other client has ever gone through check-in at Wonders, let alone small group, without confessing to what specific substance they are addicted. Even the doctor who wrote up your diagnosis, even your interventionist, didn’t mention your drug of choice. And now you think you can just leave? After you break into my office and read our patients’ private files? I think we have an awful lot of work to do here, Max. And thirty days, well, that’s just not enough time to get to the bottom of all your pain.”

Whoa! What? Was he threatening to keep me here? I kept my eye on the syringe in his hand, and suddenly I was so full of rage. “Right this minute, my ‘pain’ is you. What’s your big plan? Drug me, then get me to sign on for a ninety-day term at Wonders? It’s the ‘gold standard,’ isn’t that how you sell it? You’re a creep! You take all these poor suffering people and sit them down and tell them they’re still failures. Oh, yeah, and please write another check for seventy grand. Nice. Now let me go!” I desperately tried to shake the big guy off me. But despite my mighty heaving and struggling, he barely budged.

“Any more resistance,” said Dr. Deiter coolly, “and we will have to sedate you, Max.” He was holding the syringe with the long needle pointing up. “You will be kept in our detox center for a week, strongly secured to your cot, fed by IV, peeing into a catheter, until we see fit to allow you to leave. And the beauty of this particular drug here is that the patient has very little memory of what happened to her. I doubt you’ll even be able to recall this conversation. If necessary, you can stay in that pleasant semi-sleep for days. Weeks. Do you understand?”

I nodded. With such power, a man like Deiter could do anything he wanted to the patients here. Who would be any wiser? I stopped fighting.

“Good,” he said to me. Then to the gorilla: “You can let her go now, Peter. The door is locked. If she tries anything more of a physical nature, you know what to do.”

Deiter motioned to the chair near his desk. “You’ll behave?”

I took a seat in the chair. “You always threaten your patients?”

“I didn’t threaten you. I just tried to calm you down. We love our patients here at Wonders.” He said it without a trace of irony.

I always say, make the best of the cards you’ve been dealt. I forced a weak smile, hoping in the scuffle my lipstick hadn’t been smeared. I was finally talking to the man who knew Halsey’s medical condition. “Deiter,” I said. “Please. I’m here because I’ve got to find out what really happened to Halsey Hamilton.” I had to ask. Why else had I risked my life and freedom if not to find out everything I could about her time at Wonders?

Dr. Deiter stopped dead still. His eyes, behind the wire-
rimmed frames, glistened. “You were with Halsey the night she died, yes?”

“Of course. We were on the air.”

“Did you poison her?” Deiter asked, his breath shallow.

“What? Me? I beg your pardon!”

“Halsey was a very special patient,” the doctor said, his voice low. “She would never have taken a drink or used drugs so soon after leaving us. She was very aware of the dangers. We’d had a week of private sessions.”

I sat still and thought it through. All this time I thought Burke had been partying with Halsey before the Academy Awards. He’d probably poured her a few shots. Or maybe offered her some pills. Or, in another version, he’d left them behind, and in her nervous state before the Oscars, and having had a fight with her father, perhaps Halsey had taken a few pills out of spite and then spiraled out of control, taking more than she could handle. But maybe what Dr. Deiter and the women at Wonders were saying was true.

Halsey never knowingly took any dangerous substances. And if that was so, it meant she had deliberately been poisoned. This wasn’t a case of accidental overdose, helped along by drug-pushing pals. It was, if I was to believe the MD who now was threatening me with a syringe filled with sedatives, a case of murder.

And since the doctors at Cedars had found no needle marks on Halsey’s body, how had a fatal dose of drugs been administered to a healthy and drug-avoiding young woman?

I was forced to rethink just who might have done such a thing. Not the boy-most-likely-to, Burke Norris. He may have been stupid enough to get wrapped up in drug smuggling and a life of
nonstop partying, but he didn’t have the focus or even the prowess to be a cold-blooded killer. Even I, who thought all the bad things in the world about him, would never believe him capable of such cunning.

It wouldn’t have been Dr. Deiter, either, although he had the cool determination and clearly had access to all the drugs in the pantry. Deiter’s gig was “recovery,” and what with his professional acumen and his talent for coercing patients into staying for ever-longer sentences, he was making a fortune in the wellness business. The last thing he’d want is for his highest-profile celebrity client to publicly crash and burn.

I looked up to see Deiter assessing me. “I just figured something out,” I said. “Halsey must have been poisoned. I need to talk to the police.”

“Nice try.”

“Look here,” I said, fed up. “Don’t you get it? I’m Max Taylor, not some frustrated second wife from Brentwood. I am investigating Halsey’s death. Her murder, in fact. So you’ll just have to—”

Dr. Deiter interrupted sharply. “Have to? I’m not the one who has to do anything. Do you know where you are? We are the cold splash of reality, Max. You may be America’s darling, a famous and talented star, when you are out in your world of overindulgence, but, to us here in this recovery war zone, you are no better than the crack whore off the street.”

Nice image.

“The thing is,” I said, now that we were talking fairly quietly, “a young girl who stayed here was just murdered. I’m sure of it now.”

“And that’s why you broke into my private office and looked
through my private papers?” His voice was raised. “Looking for what? And what exactly did you find?”

“Well, now that you ask,” I said, raising my voice. The best defense is a good offense, right? “What right do you have forcing your patients to—”

Peter, the behemoth who was standing by, must have caught a secret signal from Deiter because he suddenly swooped down on me again, grabbed me with his two great arms, and lifted me right out of the chair I’d been sitting in.

I screamed. But, with no one working in the early-morning hours in this quiet wing of the main building, no one would hear the faint sound. And even if someone did, would anyone come running? I was locked inside the office of the director of the clinic. I began to panic again. I started swearing. And yelling insults.

“You cheat!” I yelled. “You low-life quack! You’ve got some scheme going here—bilking your clients and extorting them to stay here longer. You’re no doctor! You couldn’t even tell I have absolutely
no addiction.
”

Dr. Deiter said to Peter, “Hold her steady. She’s obviously on something, and she’s delusional.”

I screamed louder as I saw Deiter approach me from around the desk, holding the syringe.

“No! Don’t. Please.” I kicked out. With Peter holding me from behind in a big bear-hug grip, I was able to swing both legs up off the ground. Peter didn’t even sway. He was probably lifting weights heavier than me before breakfast.

I started yelling, “Rape! Fire! Murder!”

Deiter kept his distance from my swinging feet and told Peter, “Bend her down over the desk. Pull up one of her sleeves. Hurry.”

Before I knew what was happening, I was slammed down on the desk, my face pushed into the scattered paperwork that spilled from Cherish’s open file.

I screamed, “I am going to sue you for every penny. I will own this stupid clinic. And I’ll tear it down. I’ll…” With my threats for distraction, I wiggled my pinned hand and grabbed the long slender object crushed beneath me on the desk.

Peter leaned the weight of his massive body down on my back, smashing my chest into the desk. As he let go of me with one hand to find my wrist and push my sleeve up my arm, I twisted the free arm away from his grip and slashed out with what turned out to be Deiter’s sterling silver letter opener.

A cry came from Peter’s lips as his warm blood spurted out over my hand. He let go of my body to grab his wounded wrist, and I yanked myself away from the desk.

“Grab her!” Dr. Deiter ordered, alarmed.

Bleeding from the wrist, Peter nonetheless took a few steps, gripped my arms, and jerked me back to the desk, then bent me back down onto the surface and pinned me there. The bloodstains on my beautiful knit sweater would never come out.

I kept up my screaming, even louder now. “I’ll have your license. Your clinic will be dead in Hollywood. I’ll tell all your horrible secrets to Oprah!”

From my pinned position, I saw Dr. Deiter’s tanned fingers, holding the needle aloft, coming closer.

“Hold her steady,” ordered the doctor, and Peter complied.

Deiter pulled my sleeve up. The needle pricked my skin. I howled.

Then voices filled the room.

A scuffle ensued.

A lamp flew off the side table near the sofa.

A large woman in a lavender pantsuit took a fierce Limalama pose and faced the room with a threatening South Seas roar.

In an instant, Dr. Bob was at my side. “Stop that!” he shouted. “I’m Doctor Robert Hopeman, Ms. Taylor’s personal physician. I forbid it.” His voice contained a note I’d never heard before—sharp, in command, outraged. “Let her go now!”