Nancy Grace: Death on the D-List

She was a vision, dressed in a beaded, white halter top that looked great against her tan skin and blonde hair, and tight, white pants. He didn’t dare move an inch, crouched there on the wet dirt beneath him, watching her walk away from the cabana. The man from earlier at the pool appeared out of nowhere and walked along beside her. So he wasn’t a boyfriend, he was a bodyguard or else he’d have been inside with her. She was single. In his heart, he’d already known it.

But what about security? They could kiss his ass. Even with the best hotel security, Francis found a way. He waited till the coast was clear and jimmied the lock on a secluded window behind a group of three thick palm trees.

Once inside, he looked around. Leather’s clothes were tossed casually across the bed and one of the chairs, and a hair dryer was lying on a counter next to a tall, silver can of hairspray. A bottle of vodka was beside the bed, with a glass of melting rocks. So she was a drinker after all. Probably out of sheer loneliness.

There were the jeans she’d had on earlier at the pool. They were on the floor, as if she’d just stepped out of them. Shoes were everywhere. Who cared if she wasn’t a neatnik? She could learn to be a good wife. He would be patient.

He couldn’t help but stop to just breathe it in. Her perfume was delicious. He couldn’t stop himself. He had to pick up the jeans and rub his face in them. The heady sensation sent tingles up and down his whole body. The touch of her jeans against his face… It was so much more than he could ever have imagined. He was overcome with love.

He stopped the sniffing and rubbing when, from beneath lowered lids, he spotted her bed pillow. This was the pillow where Leather Stockton had laid her beautiful face and luxurious hair. There was no other word to describe Leather’s hair than simply luxurious.

The sight of her pillow caused him to take several deep gulps of air. He stared down at it intently and walked toward it carefully, as if it might jump off the bed and run away frightened. Kneeling down on one knee at the top corner of the bed, he leaned in closer to the mattress, looking intently for a strand or two of Leather’s silky hair, but didn’t see any.

He scanned the bedside area. There was a stack of papers by the telephone; he’d love to look through them or better yet, take them in order to track her a little better, but he didn’t have time and they were the kind of thing she’d likely miss.

Just like James Bond, with time running down to the last second, he scored. A red pair of silk thong underwear was lying on the bathroom floor beside the shower. The tiny shred of material was practically still warm.

That had been three years ago.

Ever since then, he’d kept them preserved in a plastic Zip Lock sandwich bag, only taking them out for their date every Friday night.

Standing there, trying to peer onto his front porch through the newspaper punch hole, the thought occurred to him… Could Leather have possibly wanted him to leave? She could have said something, anything to call her bodyguard off. Did she really have feelings for him, as she’d told him through the TV set?

Every time she was on, he set his TiVo to automatically record it just in case somehow he missed it live. She always sent him special, sexy little messages, all in code of course, like touching her necklace or earring or brushing her hair away for her face. It was so the Feds wouldn’t pick up on it. But they were such dumbasses they never would.

Leather was very private that way.

But thinking back on it, he wondered: Had she purposefully allowed him to be brushed off? Humiliated there at the Shutters pool?

Was it part of some game she was playing with his head? He stared hard at the poster of her, smiling in a swimsuit.

Was Leather Stockton… a bitch ?

WHEN QUINTON HOWARD ROUNDED THE CORNER OF THE POOL house, the stench hit him like a ton of bricks. He headed for the four giant plastic trash bins he’d emptied for the last eight months. Normally, the city provided curbside pick-up. All the rich people made their maids roll it down just before trash time, but the Saxtons paid a hundred bucks extra a week to the lucky sanitation worker assigned to their street so nobody would have to worry about wheeling it down the driveway.

Incredible.

The bins were just in sight. Quinton turned left, each step digging into crunchy gravel beneath his work boots. They were hidden from the casual eye by a decorative “modern-contemporary” façade to match the stark (bleak) lines of the mansion. They’d probably paid some uptight German architect God only knows what to design their huge monstrosity, all white and plain, with a cute little trash-bin hider to match.

Frank Lloyd Wright would vomit.

All the recycle bins were stacked neatly beside the garbage, something to make the rich people feel good about themselves. Quinton always got a laugh off the $15 bottles of sparkling water from Italy these idiots sprung for, tucked neatly into their recycle bins.

Oh, the dichotomy of the über-wealthy. Quinton graduated with a master’s in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He could tell you anything about the great philosophical thinkers, Thales, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, Nietzsche, Spinoza… he could go on.

His all-time favorite was Aquinas, of course, who shifted the focus from Plato to Aristotle in his attempt to fuse Christianity with Aristotelianism. Quinton’s impressive, and unfinished, doctoral thesis had been on Aquinas’s Summa Theologica . He was still deeply pissed he couldn’t find a job expounding his deep thoughts on countless crops of philosophy majors at some, any, college or university. Hell, in the end he’d even have taken a community college offer…

But screw Plato, what the hell was that stench?

It seemed to emanate from the pool house. Quinton knew better than to look into rich people’s windows, but it looked like they were either gone or sleeping off another late night of partying, although the hot tub wasn’t still on and bubbling, surrounded by steam and booze bottles like it normally was every Tuesday and Thursday he was here.

Cocking his head to the left, he peered into the pool house with his right eye and there it was.

A woman. A dead woman. She was wearing a tight, pale pink miniskirt and heels, sitting in a straight-back chair that matched an uncomfortable-looking, modernistic table nearby.

In fact, she looked pretty hot with those legs, except for the fact half her head was blown off. Her hands seemed to be tied or taped to the chair, and her legs were sprawled at a weird angle out in front of her.

And she stunk. To high Heaven. No telling how long she’d been there.

Quinton pulled out his iPhone to call 911. But just before he hit “send,” he had a thought. Instead of putting the call through to Emergency Dispatch, he scrolled down to “contacts.”

Let’s see, where was he, where was he? Frank LaGrange Hadden III. He met him at a bar a few weeks ago and kept his number. “Photographer to the World” he’d called himself. Translation: He was a photog for every sleazy tabloid in the country and then some. Hadden made it his business to know every waiter, waitress, maître d’, beat cop, emergency dispatcher, and garbage man in town.

“Hadden.” He answered the phone with two flat syllables, nothing more.

“Frank, it’s me, Quinton. You met me at Muley’s the other night.”

There was a pause on the other end.

Quinton went on. “You know, the trash man. ”

“Oh, yeah! You work East Hampton, right? What’s up, man?”