A Not So Model Home Page 18

  Aurora was flabbergasted. “Amanda, this is preposterous! Why would I kill Keith? I have nothing to gain.”

  “That’s what I thought initially when I was searching for who stood to gain the most from Keith’s death. It wasn’t you. So I searched around, but the arrow pointed to all the rest of the cast. What finally clinched it was what Aleksei said in a drunken ramble at Keith’s memorial luncheon.”

  “And what was that?” Aurora asked haughtily.

  “Well, I can’t slur my words as well as Aleksei did, but he said something to the effect that he had hot gossip. He saw two people kissing, and that it not only shocked him, but that it was disgusting. Why would Aleksei think that two people kissing were disgusting in a house full of gay men? Naturally, everyone assumed he was talking about Ian kissing Keith, who was his son. Incest. But it wasn’t. Aleksei was a notorious heterophobe. He hated seeing straight sex, so what he was describing was you, Aurora, kissing Darryn!”

  “This is madness,” Aurora sputtered. “It’s all conjecture.”

  “The answer is actually much simpler. You see, Aurora, you are Ian’s therapist. Some time ago, Ian told you he had incurable pancreatic cancer. You are also Jeremy Collins’s therapist—a fact that you lied about when we talked at the Mexican restaurant. Anyway, this got you thinking. Jeremy was looking for a big idea for a show and you supplied him with it: Things Are a Bit Iffy. You told him about Ian’s cancer, the former boyfriends, and before you knew it, there was a program with a whopper of a premise. You selected the former boyfriends for the program, including your ace card: Darryn Novolo, a complete newbie to Ian and everyone else. You’d let the show start, let the contestants destroy each other and make each other look bad, then introduce Darryn, your lover, and he’d be suave, kind, and likable. It would be so easy, until Keith threw a monkey wrench into the works by saying he was Ian’s son. Well, he had to go. Having a bedroom on the far side of the house gave you the opportunity to move around the house and grounds fairly unnoticed. So you knew that Keith had a glass of cranberry juice before bedtime, and that afternoon you slipped in the potting shed, got the dented pail, and turned it upside down in order to reach the gopher poison on the top shelf. But in standing on the pail, you left two dents from your Christian Louboutin heels in the bottom and you slightly crushed the pail because of your weight. You mixed the poison there and carried it into the house where you put it in Keith’s cranberry juice, knowing that he was the only person in the house to drink it. End of Keith. When Aleksei opened his mouth and said he saw the two of you kissing, he had to go too. But this time, you decided that Darryn would do the job and you would make height a clue that would put you in the clear.”

  I took a long swig from a glass of wine and continued, “When you helped me carry Aleksei upstairs to his room after he passed out at Keith’s memorial luncheon, you knew that we left him in a high-backed wing chair. There was always a chance that he might wake up, so you advised Darryn to come up from behind him and strangle him with a tie that one of you had stolen from Drake’s room. Then Darryn put some crystal meth on the top of the dresser, forced some up Aleksei’s nose to make it look like he had snorted it, and jerked off on the floor to make it look like he was practicing autoerotic asphyxiation. You even suggested as much when you came up to join the rest of us. But you made another fatal mistake with a comment you made.”

  “What comment, Amanda?” she snorted.

  “After you made some sort of remark about ‘who could be doing this,’ you directed our attention to the drugs on the top of the tall dresser.”

  “And what’s so wrong with that? There were drugs there.”

  “Yes, Aurora, there were. But you couldn’t see them because of your height. I wasn’t allowing anyone into the room, and I could barely see them on top of the tall dresser. You only knew they were there because Darryn had just told you where he left them. That’s why both of you were at the back of the group looking into Aleksei’s room—you were going over the details of what to say and do downstairs before you came up and joined us.”

  One more swig of wine. God, you really get dehydrated solving crimes.

  “All it took was one phone call to the right gossip Internet reporter in Hollywood and he told me that you were seen with Darryn when he was in town. The connection was made. The reason Brian Hopper didn’t report the two of you was because he couldn’t believe you were straight, Darryn. He wanted to be sure of his story.”

  Darryn looked up at all of us, then glared at Aurora. “I’m not. I’m gay.”

  Aurora flew across the room, her fists wailing at Darryn while policemen tried to pry her off him. They managed to handcuff her, and as they were leading her away, Darryn lobbed one more Molotov cocktail onto the pyre.

  “I wanted the money, Aurora needed a good-looking model, and I pretended to be straight for her.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess that psychiatrists can be in denial too.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Amanda Becomes the Butt of A Joke

  The dust eventually settled. The final episode aired to huge ratings, Aurora and Darryn were in jail awaiting trial, and the final winner of the competition for Ian’s affections. . . ahem . . . the money . . . was in doubt. Since Aurora’s opinion on who should be the final winner was somewhat tainted, Ian and a team of lawyers from the network and his own personal cadre of attorneys hammered out an agreement and Ian chose David Laurant as his boyfriend to the end. This, of course, led to more publicity, which pleased the network and Jeremy Collins, whose career was on a trajectory that would make a rocket jealous. And life returned to normal, whatever that was.

  Ken had successfully gotten his mother back on her feet and returned to Palm Springs just in time for summer. He and I cooked a wonderful dinner and as we sat in my dining room, Knucklehead asleep at my feet, he asked the question that I was dreading, because once he asked it, I wasn’t quite sure how to answer. Should I be completely honest about my dating, even though I never gave away any more than a passionate kiss? Should I stretch the truth just a bit, or should I be a conniving, thieving liar?

  “So, besides the show, the celebrity, and two murders, did you do anything exciting while I was gone?” he asked with complete and total innocence.

  “Naw, nothing much. Just the same old stuff,” I replied, hoping that the acting skills I had honed while on Things Are a Bit Iffy would help me cover my guilt. And while I expected the long arm of the law to come down from the sky and reprimand me (or at least point a finger at me accusingly), Ken cut another slice from his filet and ate it without a hint of doubt of my story crossing his face. And that was it. Had I carried off the perfect crime? Ken was a very good detective, and I was sure he heard things about me while he was gone. But his face, his emotions, and his questions signaled that he was willing to accept my answer completely and without reservations. I felt like a louse for a while but justified my behavior by saying it was the fame that made me do it.

  While I had escaped being made accountable for my actions with Ken, I had to face a much tougher adversary: Alex.

  He wanted to deliver a gift to celebrate my stint on television, so I invited him over for dinner at my place. I had since toned down my wardrobe, no longer needing to be noticed all the time. Just like beauty, fame is fleeting. So I greeted Alex at the door in Levi 511’s, a white button-down oxford-cloth shirt—and a pair of zebra-print Maud Frizon loafers. Hey, I might have come down from my once-lofty pedestal, but I was going to wear nice shoes after the descent.

  He showed up carrying a huge rectangular object covered in wrapping paper with a huge red ribbon and bow perched on the corner of the object. It was a painting or photograph judging from the shape as he ferried it into my living room and set it gently on the floor.

  “Open it,” he said, grinning from ear to ear.

  I tore the paper off and took a look at the enormous photo. It was a picture of an asshole. A human asshole.

  “Do you like it?”
he asked eagerly.

  “What’s not to like? It’s a four-by-four-foot picture of an anus.”

  “Five-by-five,” Alex corrected me.

  “Even better. There’s nothing better for filling up empty wall space.”

  “But do you like it? It’s the one that our ex-client Vicktor Teller sent us on our cell phones.”

  “Oh, I remember. It made me lose my shit on national television. Alex, it really is beautiful. What did you do? Photo-manipulate it?”

  “Photoshopped it myself, and had it enlarged and retouched. Then I added special effects and false colorization, removed the hair, etcetera,” he said proudly.

  I had to admit it, the photo really was beautiful. It didn’t actually look like an asshole. It looked like a beautiful red–orange crater. But there was a much bigger question that formed in my head: Was this just a piece of art for my home, or was it a message from Alex to remind me of what I almost turned into? Neither me nor Lady Gaga could see through his poker face, so I resigned myself that it would always be both: art with a message.

  “I’m going to hang it right there near the entrance,” I said, pointing toward my front door.

  “Great idea. I was going to suggest that. Perfect location.”

  I got up and carried the photo over to its new home and set it down on the floor. Alex and I stood there for a moment, not a word passing between us, but volumes of unspoken words being exchanged. He then walked over and gave me a big hug—a hug I really needed right now since I was on the verge of tears.

  “Welcome back,” he said.

  We sat down to eat and we had a wonderful, wonderful meal. And I had never felt more real.

  Epilogue

  Eleven months after the final episode of Things Are a Bit Iffy aired to a huge viewership, Ian Forbes died peacefully in his sleep at a hospital in Los Angeles with David Laurant at his side. David sold Ian’s huge estate in Palm Springs with Amanda Thorne and Alexander Thorne as listing agents. Because of the controversy surrounding the winner of the wildly popular Things Are a Bit Iffy, David Laurant gave $2 million each to Drake Whittemore, Marcus Blade, and Gilles Moreau. David Laurant eventually moved to Paris where he lives to this day. And the paternity tests conducted on Keith MacGregor proved conclusively that Keith could not have been Ian Forbes’s son. Evidence showed that while Keith was Ena Forbes’s son, genetically he could not have been fathered by Ian Forbes. The results of this test were made available to Ian at around the time he chose David Laurant as his companion and heir from the television show that made them both very famous. For a short time.

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  Copyright © 2012 by David Stukas

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012941702

  ISBN: 978-0-7582-7876-0