Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

Still talking to somebody on the other end about getting a satellite truck into the alley behind San Pietro’s out in LA, Tony nudged her toward the elevators and up they went. As Tony still worked the phone, trying to arrange wedging a fat satellite truck into a narrow alley behind a restaurant two thousand miles away, Hailey looked up at the two flat-screen TVs flush against the elevator’s wood-paneled walls.

At that precise moment, an ad for The Harry Todd Show flashed across the screen. It showed Harry and Cassie sitting across from each other there at his desk in her last interview before her murder. Then it flashed to her singing at the end of the show, which then dissolved into a video of the alley with her car parked in it, surrounded by police, blue lights swirling atop squad cars, and yellow crime-scene tape across one end of the alleyway.

The elevator doors opened and the two made their way down a maze of hallways to a darkened control room that looked down on the Harry Todd set. The control room was in chaos, in preparation for the live show set to start in just over an hour. The show could be taped, making it an easy job to edit out all of Harry’s snafus. But tonight was live; they couldn’t afford any errors. A show producer was back in Harry’s dressing room at that very moment trying to tutor him on the facts as best he could. If he’d just stick to his cue cards, everything would be fine.

“Hold on just a minute, Hailey, and I’ll take you to your studio. I just need to check the banner.”

“Okay.” Hailey stood back against the wall and watched staffers rushing by, their arms full of stacks of papers, carts of video, and steaming cups of coffee. The volume in the room suddenly lowered and Hailey turned back toward one of the control room’s doors just in time to see Sookie Downs enter, arms crossed over a clipboard full of show notes she held to her chest.

She looked perfect as usual. Makeup, purple stilettos to match a deep burgundy miniskirt paired with a pale lavender silk blouse… it was all impeccable. Her hair, usually blown out long and perfectly trimmed, was pulled back in a sleek ponytail hanging just below her shoulders.

Sookie spotted Hailey and immediately made a path to her. “Hello, dear. How are you? Excited about the live show tonight?” Sookie always put the emphasis on are , as if speaking to someone who had been extremely ill.

Hailey extended a hand and Sookie held out her own. Looking down, Hailey spotted a thin line of dirt under all ten of Sookie’s nails. Sookie Downs… dirt? Did she garden? She loved plants? “Thank you for inviting me on. Sookie… What happened to your nails? They’re always so perfect… Do you garden too?” Hailey nodded toward Sookie’s nails.

Sookie looked down and smiled. “Yes, as a matter of fact I do! I was planting daisies out in back of the house. I love them. Gardening takes my mind off stories like this awful case. Poor Cassie Lake.”

“I know, I feel so bad for her children.” Hailey realized this was the first time the two had discovered a single thing in common. Gardening… plants… the outdoors… maybe Sookie wasn’t the plastic Barbie Hailey had first thought, after all.

“Poor things, they must be devastated.” Sookie’s tone had gone flat… almost bored, and at the same that she spoke, she was scanning the room. “Has anyone seen Noel? Noel Fryer? I’ve turned the building upside down looking for him. He’s always hovering when we go live, so irritating, but the one time you need him…”

Sookie, looking annoyed, didn’t finish the sentence, letting it just hang there. A couple of the producers looked up to shake their heads “no,” then promptly returned to what they were doing.

“Tony, quick, call GNE security. He called from home earlier. I’ll bet you anything he’s locked himself in his condo again. Let’s keep police out of it. He’s becoming a laughingstock. Let GNE security handle it. Tony, get Einst Schlager on the phone. Last I heard, he was in Bahrain installing a new security system in the palace. Good luck. Bye, Hailey, I’ll see you on the show.”

With a quick toothy smile, she turned and left through the same door she had entered. Sookie left a cloud of perfume behind her, hanging there in the control room even after the door was closed. It smelled expensive.

ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE CONTROL ROOM DOOR SWUNG CLOSED, Tony poked his head back through it and motioned to Hailey to follow him. Heading down to her tiny “studio,” he could hardly contain himself.

“Hailey, you just don’t know. Tonight is huge for us. Sookie even showed up! And she’s been AWOL with her boyfriend since the taping yesterday! When she shows up to work, you know it’s big! If we get the numbers I think we will, we may go from daytime talk to a live nightly broadcast! It’ll be huge!”

“I thought you said you were already huge.”

“And it can’t go wrong. With the interview we just did with Cassie yesterday… I mean, the timing!…”

“You told me you were already huge before,” Hailey repeated. “And that you loved daytime.”

“Oh. We are huge. But we can be huge-er. Can you hold this while I unlock the door?” Tony handed her a thick stack of show prep papers arranging satellites, studio times, commercial breaks timed down to the exact second, segment topics, and guests’ names and satellite locations.

He pushed the studio door open. “Here, sit there in front of the Harry Todd background. They’ll be in in just a few minutes to tweak your lights. Remember, Harry just loves it when you fight with him.”

“Right.” Hailey knew better. It was only too clear how much Harry Todd hated being challenged on-air. The only people that loved it when she contradicted the host were Tony and Sookie. They referred to it as “fireworks.”

No one ever came to adjust the lights shining up from the foot of her chair and onto her face, but Hailey heard the show’s theme music start up, and they were live, lights tweaked or not. The music melted into a long video montage of Cassie singing at various locales, then dissolved into a reporter track about the murder, and video of her Mercedes parked there in the restaurant’s back alleyway.

The montage ended with still shots of Snoop ’s front-page story. It had just hit the newsstands in the last hour. How they got the shot so quickly and got it on a cover was a mystery, but it was in full color, a long lens shot from a distance showing police huddled around Cassie’s Mercedes, the EMTs standing by helplessly, and Billy Ryan sitting back against the wall.

Hailey wondered briefly how the heck Snoop got there before the scene was even processed, but before she could finish her thought, Tony came in her ear and told her to smile.

She gave Tony a withering glare in response. There was nothing to smile about. Just at that moment, the camera flashed to her. She saw her own angry face on the camera in front of her, but before she could assume a more neutral expression, the shot of her was over. Todd threw the first question to a reporter, who gave all the details-all the details known by the public, that is.

Hailey listened carefully. She glanced down at her notes in the darkened studio. Instead of her own notes, she saw the words “Dark Chocolate” and “Intense Red Copper Shimmer.” What?

Hailey took a second look. She still had Tony’s notes on top of her stack of research. Rather than her handwritten comments on the facts of the murder, there was a Xerox copy of a drugstore receipt for pantyhose, hand lotion, and hair dye. One look and she realized she was still holding Tony’s notes, now intermingled with her own.