Murder at the Academy Awards (R): A Red Carpet Murder Mystery (21 page)

Was the mystery man I heard on Unja’s videotape responsible for drugging her? I replayed that section of the tape over again before leaving for Halsey’s funeral and listened carefully. If I heard that voice again, I’d know it.

A few hours later now, I was standing in front of the Kodak Theatre in line with Drew and the other invited funeral guests. I made small talk and waved at friends, but I was on alert for any man who might be that one guy. And I freely eavesdropped on every conversation I passed by, listening for that man’s voice.

While I had my daughter to myself for a minute, I decided the time was right to tell her what I knew. “Drewie, we’ve got to talk about Burke.”

She looked so beautiful and so vulnerable just then. She didn’t give me her usual joking put-off; instead, she said, “Tell me, Mom. What did you find out when you were at Wonders? Is it…Did Burke have anything to do with Halsey’s death? I don’t want to believe it. I don’t think it’s possible. But then, sometimes at night, I think that maybe he did. Isn’t that awful?”

We had heard early reports the day before that Burke had been arrested for murder, but that turned out to be exaggerated. Burke had been arrested the day before, true, but only on charges of transporting controlled substances into the country illegally, charges that went back several years. It was a federal case, but my genius attorney, Sol, had somehow been able to persuade the feds to set bail. For now, the LAPD was saying that Halsey’s death was an apparent accidental overdose. No one believed it was suicide, as no one could imagine she would commit suicide in such a way and at such a time, and her family was heavily lobbying the coroner to close the files. Since the LAPD had no witnesses or other evidence to show Halsey might have been forced to take the lethal dose, they had to cool their heels for now. But I was certain the police were quietly looking into Burke as a possible suspect in Halsey’s death. After all, he knew her well and had a connection to drugs. Drew turned to me and said, “I can’t listen to Burke’s side anymore. I need you to tell me the truth.”

I blinked. Could this be? This was the moment I’d built up to, the moment I’d been planning for, the moment where I would gently tell my daughter the brutally sad fact that her ex-fiancé was a murderer. Only here the moment was, and based on the facts, I couldn’t.

But there was plenty I could say.

“You know all those times he took you to the resorts in Mexico? He wasn’t just there for the margaritas and guacamole, sweetie. He was buying pharmaceutical drugs in bulk and then smuggling them across the border.”

She blinked at me but didn’t interrupt.

“And if that isn’t bad enough, darling, he was using your car and bringing you with him. If the customs agents or border guards
had ever searched your vehicle, you’d be rotting in a prison right now, and not that half day of photo ops they gave to Nicole.”

“He was using me?” she asked, her eyes searching mine. “To smuggle drugs? Oh my God, Mom, is that really true?”

She hadn’t known. I could tell by the sudden look of pain in her big brown eyes. My baby hadn’t known about the drugs.

“I could kill him,” she said quietly.

“Take a number and stand in line,” I agreed.

“How could I have trusted him?”

“Because you’re an idiot?” I smiled at the sun breaking through my daughter’s two years of clouds.

She looked at me. “Oh, God. I hate this.”

“Having your heart broken?” I asked, worried.

“When you’re right.”

Of course. I smiled. “But you and Burke are history. Over. Finished. He’s out of your life.”

“Right. Right.” She smiled a little and squeezed my hand. And under her breath she said, “I’m over him.”

I squeezed back and enjoyed an unprecedented moment of mother and daughter in total agreement. “Men are scum, darling.”

Then, without warning, I heard a voice that I had never expected to hear right then and there. A deep bass with a darling accent. “Maxine, I say. Wait up.”

Aha! It was my own favorite British invader. I turned to see Sir Ian, dressed in a perfectly understated charcoal Savile Row suit, making charming excuses as he edged past some of the crowd in line behind us and came to my side.

I looked him up and down. “You’re…here.” I knew he couldn’t stay away. I show him one lousy fake weakness, and he
dashes across countries to take care of me. How many times had I invited him to attend celebrity dinners or join me to visit friends? For that, he was too busy. But just have me do a guest spot on Howard Stern and say I felt like I needed a little rest, and Sir Ian is rushing to the rescue.

“You look quite good,” he said, giving me the once-over. “Really, just splendid.”

“As opposed to the way I normally look?” I really hate a fuss. But I was pleased.

Behind his back, Drew mouthed the words,
Men. Scum.

Just then, I heard my name called again. We all turned, and this time Dr. Bob and his gorgeous wife, Sheree, made their apologies as they jostled their way ever so politely closer up the line.

Dr. Bob shook hands with Sir Ian, and Sheree gave Drew a hug as we passed the bandstand outside the Kodak and showed our tickets to the usher at the door. As we entered the foyer, Sheree craned her neck. Although it was hard to be sure exactly what Sheree was saying most of the time because her lips were so plumped, she may have said, “Boy, take a look at all the flowers!”

We looked. It was as if half the floats in the Rose Parade had taken a wrong turn on Colorado Boulevard and found themselves suddenly here.

“Is that a pirate?” asked Drew. There was an entire jungle raft, made up of geraniums, and a dozen rain-forest animals made of gerbera daisies and pampas grass.

Sheree, never the subtlest among us, took a peek at the card hanging from the massive depiction of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs made from orchids, mustard seed, and moss. “‘I will love
you forever and ever, Rojo Bernstein.’ Oh! Isn’t he that cute guy with the karate studio?”

I said, “There’s a story there, let me tell you.” All my friends gathered round and heard about Rojo and rehab.

Dr. Bob said, “Rojo Bernstein. Point him out to me. I don’t think I know what the man looks like.” Perhaps a guy who gets kicked in the face for a living sounded like a potential customer.

I had no idea what he looked like, but Drew did, and she searched the crowded foyer but couldn’t see him.

As we turned to enter what we thought was going to be the theatre, we encountered a curtained-off section that had been constructed as a large viewing room. Set up on a small platform, awash in the glow of a spotlight, under a crystal dome like the one Snow White had been sealed in, was the body of Halsey Hamilton, laid out in eerie splendor.

It was a shock. Drew cried out. Ian put his hand on her shoulder. Sheree said she felt suddenly faint, and Dr. Bob grabbed her by the elbow and steered her away toward the seats in the auditorium beyond, mumbling that Sheree had that very morning undergone a tiny cosmetic “procedure” and was perhaps still feeling the effects of the anesthesia.

I was more disturbed than all of them combined. I gasped and looked more closely. It was true. They were going to bury that sweet girl in a $30 knockoff from T.J. Maxx!

A
s I stood there, stunned, looking at Halsey, a woman’s voice commented, “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

Amid the steady stream of funeral guests entering the viewing area, Devon Jones met my eyes.

“Hello, Devon.”

She smiled. “Everything you see here—the Kodak, the entertainment, security, even the minister doing the eulogy—donated. When Jimmy couldn’t get any hot designer to give him a dress for free, he decided to spite the entire fashion world and bury her in that
shmatte
.”

My eyes narrowed. It always pissed me off when someone started using Yiddish expressions around me, as if that made us kin. “Halsey was a beautiful girl, no matter what she’s wearing.”

Devon moved closer and whispered, “But doesn’t it kill you to see her spending eternity in
that
?”

I hated to admit it, but it did.

“Say, Max, I know you were busy with that rehab stunt, but have you been avoiding me?”

I knew what she wanted and had absolutely no interest in doing a segment about Halsey for Devon’s show. I said, “Me?”

She put a hand on her skinny hip. “Maybe your staff is incompetent. Did you ever get any of my messages?”

“This is hardly the place,” I said, standing right in front of the glass-entombed body, for God’s sake, “to do business.”

A middle-aged couple passed by the glass casket, the woman holding a Kleenex up to her nose.

Devon shrugged and gave a little smile. “See you later, then.” She walked out toward the foyer.

I stood there, taking my own moment with Halsey.

How had this happened?
I silently asked her.
Who put you here, honey?
If it wasn’t Burke Norris, and I was now sure it wasn’t, who else could have taken such a promising life? I looked at her again.
How hard you worked to get your life back. And now the whole world thinks of you as a fallen drug addict. That’s not fair. I’ll see this through, Halsey. You deserve a little honor.

People were entering the viewing room, then passing along into the Kodak auditorium, where the funeral service was to start in fifteen minutes. As I spent another silent moment with Halsey, a group approached, and one of the women, a girl in a lime green miniskirt who obviously came from the celebrate-life school of bereavement, asked, “Can you handle this, Rojo?”

The hell with rude. I couldn’t help it—my eyes darted to the young man she was addressing. He was tall and lean and obvi
ously well built and had more piercings than he had tattoos, and he had plenty of tattoos.

Another friend, a short, young guy in a tight black suit, murmured, “It’s okay, Jess. Rojo is medicated, babe.”

So this was Halsey’s latest love, Rojo Bernstein.

Then Rojo said, “I’m in the darkest pit of despair. I’m numb from grief.”

That voice. I actually spun around and stared at the man, dumbstruck.
That voice.
How could this be? This was the voice I’d heard on Unja’s tape, the one talking to Jimmy Hamilton about fixing things so Halsey wouldn’t arrive at the Oscars. The voice had belonged to Rojo Bernstein, Halsey’s secret boyfriend?
How could that be?

“Oh,” said the girl named Jess, alert to my open staring. “Hi. You’re Max Taylor, right?”

Rojo looked at me but didn’t really see me—his eyes were like an ocean. I snapped him out of his fog. “Rojo, we haven’t met,” I said, taking a step toward him. “But you and I, mister, have got to talk.”

“We do?” he said. “Right now?”

The people in his group started moving off, the other guy muttering, “It’s Max Taylor, dude. Show some respect.”

Who said the younger generation had lost their manners?

I took Rojo by the cuff and led him farther away from the casket, where we could talk in private. “Look, guy, I know we haven’t met before, but I was close to Halsey and so were you.”

“I loved her, man.” As I listened to him, I was even surer that this was the voice I’d heard on Unja’s tape.

“I know you did,” I said, soothing him, then added, “Please don’t call me
man
.”

“Sorry.”

“This is very important, Rojo. Do you know how Halsey died?”

Rojo, looking stoned himself, said, “Drugs? Like an overdose?”

“She was murdered. Someone wanted her out of the way. Do you know who that someone was?”

“What? That’s not right, man. I don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Rojo.” I stared straight into his blue eyes. Maybe I’d have to talk in his language to get through to him. I gave him the rapper hand gesture, making an upside-down number three with the three fingers pointing down, and patting my right shoulder. “Keeping it real, bro. Feel me?”

“For real,” he said in shock. “How would I know about any of that shit? I loved her, man. She and I had a connection.”

I was getting nowhere. “Did her father approve of your relationship?” I asked, trying to make sense of what I’d heard on the tape and what he was telling me now. Ingrid, the staffer in rehab, said that Halsey and Rojo had fought about it. That she didn’t want her dad to even know that they were a couple. I waited to see if he would tell me the truth.

“It was complicated,” he said, twisting the fabric of his black cummerbund. Or wait? Had my eyes deceived me or was Rojo Bernstein wearing his karate belt as a fashion accessory? “We couldn’t tell Jimmy yet. It was delicate, man…” I gave him a little tilt of the head on that last word, and he corrected it. “…Max. Her dad, Jimmy, was a business partner. He was investing some big coin in my studio.”

“Movie studio?” I was surprised.

“No. My karate studio. Well, studios. Rojo Bernstein’s Kick-Ass. The last two
s
’s are like dollar signs. I designed the logo myself. We’re franchising all over the map. It’s a sweet deal. We’ll have two hundred storefronts open by 2012.”

“So, let me get this straight: you were going into business with Halsey’s father, and yet the biggest control freak in America didn’t know about your affair with his daughter?”

“Yeah, right. It was fucked, Max.”

“But what happened on the night of the Oscars? I heard you, Rojo. On a tape my hairdresser made. You and Jimmy were talking on the red carpet about keeping Halsey away.”

“Oh, that.” He shook his head. “That’s just Jimmy. He has to run everything. He was ticked off because he’d made some deal and got paid a lot of money and Halsey wouldn’t go along with it. Some big media deal. Anyway, I told him I’d take care of Halsey because then he’d leave it alone.”

“So you never intended to stop her?” Could that be true? What had I heard, exactly? Just some guy telling the blowhard Jimmy Hamilton he would make sure Halsey didn’t show up. Not really a threat.

Rojo took a deep breath, then let it out in a shaky stream under pressure, the sort of thing a guy does to maybe keep the tears from flowing. “Look, Max,” he said, his voice tight. “I wouldn’t have stopped Halsey from…” He looked again at the beautiful body in the casket. “I’d never stop her from doing anything she ever wanted. I was just in love with that little girl, okay?”

Rojo mumbled some sort of kung fu/DJ rap blessing over Halsey’s body and moved off into the auditorium, and I had to rethink. If Jimmy thought that Rojo was “handling” Halsey, and
Rojo had never intended to stop her, then who gave Halsey the overdose of pills that ended her life?

My moments of deep reflection were constantly interrupted by the ebb and flow of mourners shuffling into the chamber and then out again on their way to find a seat in the auditorium. Many of them were people I knew or had worked with in the past, and we gave discreet waves as they passed by. But now, I looked up and made eye contact with Will Beckerman, Glam-TV’s most incompetent director. He was dressed, for once, in a nice suit and tie, and that wasn’t the only thing different about Will on this day. His face was red and wet from tears. Tears?

“Hello, Will,” I said. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Hi, Max,” he said, wiping his face. “Yeah, you wanted to rip me a new one for cutting out on your last interview. I meant to call you back, but then I heard you were going to rehab…”

“I went; I’m home. So what the hell happened that night? We had gold, Will. And you threw it away.”

“Max,” he said, cringing. “Shhh. I mean, she’s right here.”

I looked around, then I realized Will was shushing me in front of Halsey. I suddenly put two and two and two together: the tears. The insane decision to stop recording Halsey as she collapsed. And now, the shushing. Had Will Beckerman been in love with Halsey Hamilton too?

“You and Halsey?”

“I wish,” said Will, a fresh torrent of tears washing over his face. “I mean we went out. Twice. But she never…I mean we never…but I loved her. That much is true.”

“Oh, Will.” Why did these young men fall in love with the least appropriate women they could possibly pick? “She was…”

Will nodded, wiping his face with a large hand. “Not in my league? Or in my universe? I know.”

“I’m so sorry.” So that was it. Will had, against every instinct he had honed at USC film school, in some insane twenty-first-century gesture of chivalry, decided to spare his lady love the public humiliation to which another fall from grace would expose her. In other words, he pulled the plug on the most important red carpet interview in history to spare Halsey Hamilton such a disgrace. I didn’t know whether to hug him or slap him.

I shook my head. “You couldn’t have given me two more minutes?”

“Sorry, Max. I cracked. I couldn’t believe we even got her, you know? I’d been in negotiations with Jimmy Hamilton for a week to get that exclusive interview with Halsey at the Oscars.”

“Wait.” I put up a hand and had to take that bit of news in. “You knew in advance that she’d be there?”

He nodded. “Do you know how much her dad was asking? A hundred and fifty grand. For like five minutes. And that was for the preshow, before we’d even know if she won the Oscar. Glam couldn’t afford it. They passed.”

I shook my head at all the wheeling and plotting. Jimmy Hamilton and his big plans.

A cell phone rumbling on vibrate interrupted our talk. Will apologized and pulled out an iPhone with Halsey’s press photo as its preset image. Oh, Will. And then I saw the number on the display: 310-555-2520.

Will looked down. “That’s okay. I can take this one later.”

I grabbed his hand and stared at the number. “Will. Whose number is that?”

“Nobody big.” He shrugged. “Devon Jones. She’s been call
ing me to set up a meeting. She’s pitching some specials for Glam. Guess the rumors are true. She won’t be with
Entertainment Tonight
for much longer.”

I turned and rushed away in the direction I’d seen her heading ten minutes earlier, out toward the foyer.

“Max,” Will called to me, startled, “I think the funeral is just starting.”

“Take notes,” I yelled back. “Is Devon still outside? Call her back. Tell her I need to talk to her.”

The foyer of the Kodak Theatre was almost empty now, with a few late stragglers arriving as I pushed open the big glass door and walked past them to get outside. A handful of camera crews and network announcers were wrapping up live, remote funeral-day reports to America. Across the plaza, dressed in her hooker red, I saw Devon Jones standing with her crew, her blond hair almost white in the afternoon California sunlight.

“Hi, Max,” she said as I approached her. “Too bad you waited so long to get back to me. That footage of Halsey and her collapse? That’s yesterday’s news by now. Not sure I could even get my show to pay fifty bucks for it now, no matter what she was saying to you when she went down. Now, had you made the deal right after the Oscars, when I called you several times? That would have been the time to strike, yes?” She smiled a dazzlingly insincere smile.

“I’m not interested in selling my videotape,” I said, my voice quiet. “I’ve got a huge network deal for that.”

If possible, she got even colder. “Well, this isn’t the best timing for a social chat, either. We’ve got to move our setup to the cemetery.” After the funeral and memorial concert at the theatre, a helicopter was set to move Halsey’s body to the Hollywood For
ever Cemetery, where Wolfgang Puck had kindly donated an amazing dinner to be served there alfresco among the headstones. The guests would be eating, in a way, with Rudolph Valentino and Estelle Getty. A lavish celebration would follow. Only those stations with really deep pockets could afford Jimmy Hamilton’s fees to shoot it.

“Lucky girl,” I said. “Your show is one of the very few to get inside with cameras. I hear
Extra
refused to pay Jimmy’s mandatory bribe.”

“I know,” said Devon, showing all her superwhite teeth in a big Hollywood smile. “Our numbers will go through the roof with this coverage.”

I looked at her. “And do you think maybe this ratings bonanza you are reaping off of Halsey’s dead bones will let you hang on to your pathetic job for one more season, Devon?”

She looked at me, startled. “What did you say?”

“Hey, I have an idea. Just us girls. Just for fun.”

“What?” She looked peeved.

“Where’s your producer, Shirl?”

“She’s already gone to the cemetery. Why?”

I turned to Devon’s crew. “Hey, fellas, kick up the lights for Devon, could you?” I waved at the camera guy. “You still have a tape reel loaded? Can you shoot us now?”

The floodlights were switched on, and the cameraman, now standing behind the camera, called out the warning words, “In three…two…one…,” and the camera’s signal light suddenly glowed red.

“What are you doing?” Devon squeaked. “I said I didn’t need you anymore.” Then realizing all of this was indeed being taped,
she smiled her trademark smile and tried to sting me with the gibe “You’re old news, Maxine Taylor.”

Ignoring that, I smiled into her camera too. “I’d be happy to add any insights I have about the tragic death of Halsey, Devon. Perhaps the people at home would finally like to hear what Halsey really said just before she died.”