Celebrity in Death (In Death #34)(44)

“Forgiven. That came out about ten years ago. You were really young,” Peabody said in that same understanding tone. “Hardly twenty.”

“Twenty-three. It was a major break, a lot of money. We were all high from celebrating, and at this sex club. In and out of the privacy rooms, you know how you do.” He shrugged, drank some water.

“Sure,” Peabody agreed, though she didn’t.

“Then we went back to my place, and some of the women came so we could party some more. And two of them went back to my room with me. In the morning, they’re still there. We just passed out together after. And this guy’s at the door, and he’s screaming. How he’s going to kill me. One of the girls is his daughter. She’s sixteen. Both of them are f**king sixteen.”

He covered his face with his hands, rubbed hard before he dropped them. “How was I supposed to know? They shouldn’t have been in the club. They had bogus IDs, and they said they were twenty-one. I didn’t make them have sex with me. I didn’t force them. But I bought them drinks, I gave them illegals, I had sex with them. If I’d known they were only sixteen I wouldn’t have. I swear. They didn’t look sixteen or act sixteen, and they were in a sex club and all over me.

“He said he was calling the cops, having me arrested for statutory rape. Everybody’s screaming, and he slapped his kid. He really hit her hard, and he jumped me when I tried to stop him from hitting her again. My buddies dragged him off. The girls are hysterical. One of my friends is a lawyer, and he started talking all this legal shit about how the girls were going to end up in juvie, and this guy was going up for assault. It just got worse and worse.”

“What happened?” Peabody asked when he fell silent.

“I gave them money. A lot of money to make it stop. To make it go away. It was a long time ago, and I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong when I was doing it. But it would’ve ruined me. If I’d gotten charged with rape, I’d have been finished. It could still ruin me.”

“And K.T. found out.”

“That’s what she does,” he said, bitterly now. “She finds out. Then she puts the screws to you when it suits her. I never did anything to her, but she said she was going to leak what happened to the media. She even had the names of the guy and his daughter. She said I’d go to jail, and no studio would hire me again. It was almost ten years ago, and she said I’d go to jail.”

“Unless you played along with her and lied about Marlo?”

“Yeah. She said I had to tell Matthew we were screwing on the side, and give him details.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I said no. I wasn’t going to do that to friends. And she said they weren’t my friends. Did I think either of them would go to jail for me? She scared me.”

He took another drink, a long one.

“What did you do?”

“I got ahold of my lawyer friend and told him what K.T. said. He said I should stall her, and he’d find out where the girl was now, what she was doing. He said I wouldn’t go to jail because there’s a statute of limitations thing, and I was okay there. But still, I didn’t want all this hashed around in the media. My friend said it was a good bet the girl and her father wouldn’t want all that coming out either, so it would be K.T.’s word against mine. But I should stall her, tell her I had to think about it until he looked into it a little.”

“Did you talk to her about it last night?” Eve asked him.

“I tried to stay out of her way. Then she pulled that bullshit at dinner. It was worse because I knew what she wanted me to say, to do. So I just kept drinking so I wouldn’t think about it. She cornered me, started on me again. I told her to just leave me the hell alone. I wasn’t going to talk to her about it with all those people around. I think I said something stupid about my lawyer looking into it.” He rubbed his head. “Or I thought it, and didn’t say it. I don’t know. It’s blurry. I drank too much.”

He dropped his head into his hands again. “Connie’s right.”

“About what?” Eve asked.

“Drinking doesn’t make problems go away. Just because you can’t remember them doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

To keep it rolling, Eve shifted straight to Marlo, and wondered if she should tell her fictional counterpart she was currently showing too many nerves for a cop. Instead, she read the data into record, dropped down at the table.

“You got here fast.”

“I was … already downtown.”

“Waiting for Matthew to finish up. Let’s save more time. We’re aware you and Matthew are involved, and hoped to keep the relationship private. We’re aware K.T. clued in, found the loft you and Matthew are using, and of her attempt to blackmail you with a recording of the two of you in an intimate situation.”

“You’re aware of quite a bit. I hope you’re aware that Matthew didn’t hurt her. We weren’t going to take her blackmail, bullying, and bullshit anymore, but we didn’t kill her.”

“She told you she’d hired a PI to break into your place, to plant a camera, to subsequently break in again to retrieve same. But you didn’t bring this information to the police.”

“No. It was private. Do you know how precious private is when you have so little of it? Besides, we didn’t know who she’d hired. If we’d gone to the police with the story, she’d have just denied it. How could we prove it? We decided that was how to handle the whole ugly mess. Prove it.”