Stacy Reeves (née Rabinowitz) was not pleased to find me at her door. I wasn’t expecting a jubilant reception and a plate of freshly baked cookies, but Stacy’s dour expression would have put Droopy Dog to shame.
And it wasn’t like she didn’t know I was coming; I’d called three days before to set up an appointment, to which Stacy had (perhaps reluctantly) agreed. Still, this was my job and dammit, I was going to talk to Stacy about her husband, her husband’s other wife, and anything else I could think of that might make her a good witness – even a character witness – for Robert Reeves’s defense.
‘Come in,’ she said without any evidence of conviction, so I did, and sat when instructed on a tasteful but hardly fashionable sofa in a room dominated by a very large flat-screen TV, and a coffee table upon which a respectable game of rugby could have been played. This was a large room with large furniture, in a normal-sized house that didn’t scream affluence at you, or for that matter even whisper it from the outside. Clearly walls had been removed to make this living room a place where you could invite a friend or fifty in to watch a movie. Maybe a Robert Reeves movie. Because the man was not devoid of ego. In fact, he could have donated some to this wife and his other wife (who didn’t need it) and still had plenty to spare.
‘I’m sure you know why I’m here,’ I began. I was particularly sure since I’d told her on the phone exactly what to expect from our conversation. But it was an opening that Stacy did not comment upon. ‘Now, I’m wondering if you would make a good witness for your husband’s defense and I’d like to explore a few areas to see if I should call you to the stand when we go to trial.’
‘Oh, please don’t,’ Stacy said. To be fair, she’d said that on the phone too, but I was banking on my mystical powers of persuasion to prevail on her husband’s behalf.
‘You don’t have to testify,’ I said. I’d ramp up the mystical powers later. ‘But maybe you can shed some light on a few things for me that I’ll be able to use to help Robert get acquitted.’
‘I hope you can,’ Stacy offered. That was at least a step in the right direction. ‘I really don’t want to testify, though.’ That wasn’t.
‘Well, let’s see.’ I couldn’t have been less committal if I’d started planning it at six this morning, when I was running back and forth to the local convenience store. Does it make sense to run for exercise to a place that sells Snickers bars? ‘First of all, did you know James Drake?’
‘No. Who is James Drake?’
It was possible this was going to take longer than I’d set aside. ‘James Drake is the stunt performer who died on your husband’s film set. So I’m guessing you didn’t know him.’
‘Oh no. I never met any of Robert’s work friends.’
‘But you haven’t heard the name? I mean, your husband is about to go on trial for this man’s murder.’ There’s out of touch and then there’s hermitic.
‘Well, of course I knew about that. I just didn’t know his name. It’s a shame, isn’t it? Did he have children?’
An interesting question. ‘Actually, no. He and his wife were separated and they hadn’t had any children.’ Maybe the mention of separation might spark something.
Maybe it did. Stacy fiddled with the three TV remotes on the coffee table and organized them differently, as if that mattered. Why were there three TV remotes anyway? Why did I care? Another good question. ‘That’s really too bad,’ she said.
I nodded my agreement. ‘Stacy, I need to ask you about some fairly personal things and I hope you don’t think I’m rude for bringing them up. It’s all meant to help your husband once the trial begins.’
Her gaze went from the remote directly into my face and her expression was unreadable. ‘You’re going to ask about Tracy,’ she said.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Stacy said. ‘It’s not like the subject has never come up before.’
‘So you knew about Tracy.’ I mean, she kind of had to, but did she?
‘Of course. Robert explained the whole thing to me. You have to understand, Ms Moss.’
‘Please call me Sandy.’
‘Sandy,’ Stacy seemed to roll my name around in her mouth to see how it tasted. ‘Sandy, my husband is in a very visible, very youth-oriented business. If he’d pretended to have another wife because he wanted to get rid of me, or if he’d just had an affair with some actress, I’d have been very upset, and to tell you the truth I probably would have divorced him. But this was strictly a tactic to maintain his image, and he needs that image to be able to work in his business. I understand that. We actually discussed it before he cast Virginia in the role.’
‘Did Robert ever say anything that would indicate to you he was jealous of Tracy? That she was involved with another man, with the man who died, and that upset your husband?’ What the hell. If she wasn’t going to testify, I could ask questions that might implicate my client. I didn’t think he’d killed James Drake, but I wasn’t a hundred percent certain.
Stacy scrunched up her face into a look of incredulity. ‘Jealous of Tracy? He barely ever saw her when it wasn’t a public event like a red carpet or something. She could have been sleeping with seven men and he wouldn’t have cared. My husband loves me, Sandy.’
‘One last thing. Is Robert handy around the house? Does he repair things when they break? Does he have a tool shed or anything so he can do renovations?’ Maybe he was the one who’d knocked down the walls. Maybe he’d learned how to sever steel cables.
Stacy actually laughed. ‘Oh Sandy, that made my day. When we were married, the hinge on the front door was squeaky and Robert hired a man to come and spray it with WD-40. He told me, “I don’t fix things, Stacy. I write checks.”’
I thanked her, didn’t ask her to testify, despite the fact that she might have been of some small help, picked up Judy at the door and drove to Marta Drake’s house. It was Talk-to-the-Wives Day.
Marta, whom I’d also warned of my impending visit, was sitting on her front porch drinking what appeared to be iced tea. It was a very nice, if unremarkable, house on a suburban block in Mission Viejo. Get rid of the mountains in the distance and the waterfront within viewing distance and it could have been any one of thirty towns I knew in New Jersey. So what if it cost twice as much to live here?
Clearly not pretending to play the grieving widow, Marta had her feet up on a pillowed footrest and wore a straw hat with a teal band around it. The lower half of her equally teal one-piece bathing suit was covered by a white skirt with a floral pattern, loose enough to be comfortable but still show off the figure Marta had not neglected. It was probably unsweetened iced tea, so I declined her offer of a glass.
‘Jim and I were separated when he died,’ she said. ‘I was in the process of filing for divorce and I can give you my lawyer’s info if you’d like.’
‘I would appreciate that, but it can wait until I’m back in my office,’ I said. It was getting warmer today and, even though the porch had a roof, the sun was doing its best to find me. ‘Maybe I’ll rethink that iced tea,’ I said.
Marta, a lovely woman with dark hair to her jawline, smiled and poured me a glass with extra ice, which I downed (unsweetened though it was) in three gulps. ‘I didn’t think it was that warm a day,’ she said with a laugh.
‘I’m still from New Jersey,’ I said. ‘It’s not supposed to be this hot until July. But if you don’t mind me asking …’
‘Why was I filing for divorce?’ The smile faded and I nodded; yes, that was what I had been trying to ask. ‘A lot of reasons, and some of them were even over thirty years old.’
‘Your husband cheated?’ There’s no diplomatic way of asking that. I’d been a divorce lawyer for close to two years. If you can think of a less upsetting way to broach the subject, please email me at smoss@seatontaylor.com and pass it along.
‘He would have said no,’ Marta answered. ‘Jim would have said it wasn’t cheating; it was a hazard of the profession and that he’d warned me about it before we were married and he would have been right. But when you’re twenty-two you think you can change the guy.’ She looked up. ‘You can’t change the guy.’
‘No, you can’t,’ I agreed. I didn’t even know if I wanted to change the guy.
‘Anyway, we were going to get a divorce. Jim wasn’t happy but he understood.’ Marta took another swig of iced tea. I knew it wasn’t spiked because I’d had some myself, but she was definitely – let’s call it – relaxed. ‘So if you’re asking, no, I didn’t have any reason to kill him. I was going to get the house and half of the savings account anyway. Try and get insurance for a stuntman some time. There wasn’t a ton of money there.’
‘You knew about the rumors that your husband was having an affair with the director’s wife?’ I asked.
Marta chuckled. ‘The director’s wife. The director’s wife’s stunt double, if you want to know the truth. She shows up for the photo ops and the real wife lives in the suburbs somewhere.’ She looked around at her porch. ‘A nicer suburb than this, I bet.’
‘So that wasn’t a secret?’ I thought the whole idea was that Tracy stood in for Stacy because she looked younger and therefore … well, you know the theory.
‘Oh hell no,’ Marta said, even more relaxed than before. I wondered if she’d been using anything else to calm her down, but I didn’t smell anything in the air. ‘Everybody knew about it. It was kind of a universal joke, but hey, the girl’s got to make a living somehow.’ She smirked. ‘She can’t act, I hear.’
‘Did you ever see them together?’ I braced myself for the answer because when I’d asked it of other wives involved in divorces, I had gotten some very graphic stories.
Not this time. ‘Yeah. I ran into them once in a restaurant that Jim and I used to go to. He thought it was OK to bring her there. I think that’s the only time I’ve ever seen her. Personally, I think Reeves could have done better, if you’re asking.’ I wasn’t. ‘She liked chicken with pesto.’
Something else I hadn’t known. ‘Marta, who do you think killed your husband?’
She sat back and lost the smile. She seemed to closely examine the ceiling of her front porch. And she sighed the way a woman does when she loved a man who was not the man she should have loved and now he was dead, when she should have been indifferent but couldn’t bring herself not to feel anything.
‘Honestly, it could have been any one of a hundred girls,’ she said, ‘but it was probably that son of a bitch Bob Reeves.’