Sunlight forcing its way through cracks between plastic blinds created cage bars of light and shadow on the cement floor. The room was not intimidating. A Formica table and hard plastic chairs dominated the space, which was nondescript save for a drug free America poster. As the smell of burnt coffee wafted in from the open doorway, Tam shifted in her chair, folding and unfolding her hands on the table in front of her. The police had questions. Of course. She was a witness. Or nearly so. She hadn't seen it happen, but it had to have been only minutes before she arrived that Goldie fell to her death.
Tam closed her eyes. No, that couldn't be right. Goldie called her, had to tell her something but didn't want to. Tam went, bracing herself for a firing or a yelling at or worse. But the reality was worse than worse, and Tam wasn't ready to accept it. It couldn't be. She'd dreamt it all, and she was still dreaming.
Denial wasn't the comfort she wished it would be.
She stopped folding her hands long enough to pick at the zipper on her hoodie, running it up and down several times before stopping herself. That was a nervous habit she'd worked to remove from her litany of nervous habits and now she'd regressed.
"Damn it," she said under her breath.
"Damn what?" The detective with the severe ponytail and a beauty mark under her left eye entered the room carrying a clipboard. She plopped it on the table and took a seat across from Tam. Her partner, whose first or last name was Ryan trailed in behind her, closing the door before leaning against it.
"Everything. This whole night." She forced her hands underneath her butt. It was morning now, though. The night—that night—was gone, never to be redone. It wasn't part of an EpiGold that could be reshot so that Goldie could edit out her own death like she'd edited out the argument with her mother in the Maldives.
Goldie had fallen. Goldie was dead. End scene.
"Goldie. Goldie's dead."
Her eyes ached. Her chest felt tight, like she wasn't worthy of a body free of misery. If she would only cry, the tension may break, but her tears stayed put.
The female detective appeared as tightly wound as Tam, dark eyes wild and bloodshot. She had to remember that she wasn't the only one who'd been up all night. The detectives hadn't slept either and they were only doing their jobs. They could speed it along though. There wasn't anything more for Tam to tell them. She'd given them her phone willingly, even though in the back of her head she remembered you should only surrender such things if you were handed a warrant first.
She didn't want to seem suspicious. She answered their questions at the scene last night and again at the station. She tried not to seem riled. She tried not to seem guilty. She was innocent, after all. Of this crime, at least. They weren't investigating all the years of Tam Martin's life and all the mistakes she'd made. They sought only to understand last night and how Goldie had died.
"I need you to walk me through this again," Detective Garcia said. Garcia. That was her name and now Tam remembered it. Not from last night. Last night she'd been in a delirium. She remembered Garcia from that other time in Tam's distant past. If Garcia remembered her, she gave no indication. Probably not. Tam had sported long sea green hair back then. Her nose had been pierced. She was different now and not only in physical appearance. She sat up straighter.
The detectives remained silent until Tam began to sweat, her palms damp between her jeans and the plastic chair. This was the point in a detective show that the person getting questioned would become agitated and exclaim "I've already told you everything I know!"
Tam resisted this. She kept the thought to herself and instead gave a slow nod. "She left a voicemail while I was in the shower. You've already heard what the message said. I gave you access to my phone."
Garcia pulled her clipboard towards her and wrote something down. "She had to do something that she didn't want to do."
"That's right. Then she asked me to come over."
"She told you to come over. It wasn't a request."
"She said 'please.'"
"If I said, "'Hands behind your back, please,' would that be a request?"
Tam blinked. This conversation had taken a surreal turn. Goldie was dead and here they sat debating semantics. "Fine, she told me to come over and so I did."
"How long did it take you to get there?"
"Fifteen, twenty minutes."
"And what did she want you at her place for? What had upset her so much that she was crying on the phone and you and only you were needed?"
Ryan edged forward, the door rattled in its frame from the sudden lack of his weight against it. "Detective?" He'd caught the edge in her voice too then.
Tam could have edge as well. She'd tamped it down, but lack of sleep brought out her sarcastic side. "I'm her assistant, not her psychic. She didn't pick up when I called her on my way to her place and she was already dead when I arrived. I'll never know what she was going to tell me."
Garcia dropped her clipboard and her gaze. "Bullshit."
Ryan swung a chair around and sat on it backwards. It was such a stereotypical cop show move, Tam began to revive the theory that this was all a fantasy. Maybe someone had spiked her drink.
"What Detective Garcia is trying to say, Ms. Martin," Ryan said, "is that we believe you were aware of why Goldie called you to her house."
"I wish I did." This wasn't a dishonest answer. There were several possible reasons and Tam couldn't settle on one over the others. "Goldie has a lot going on. Had a lot." She looked away, towards the bars of morning sunshine that did precious little to brighten the space or lighten the mood within it. "If you want me to guess, I can. Maybe there was a problem with her makeup line. Or she was reading comments again on Twitter—that's always a bad idea and she knows it but sometimes she will anyways. People can be nasty, even fans. Or maybe especially fans. They can be more toxic than anyone. Maybe—"
"Maybe," Garcia leaned in, "she was going to fire you. Maybe that made you mad."
Tam could see where this was going but the implication still made her hands tingle and her heart race. "I've been fired before. Twice. And both times, my bosses didn't end up dead, so if you believe I'd murder her over a job, you're never going to figure out what really happened to her."
Garcia sat back again. "We will figure out what happened. I can promise you that."
"Well then, we all want the same thing. And for the record, I have no reason to believe she was going to fire me. She took me on a vacation. She gave me a role in an EpiGold. I helped keep her organized, and believe me, she needed that help. We had a solid working relationship."
"A working relationship. Is that all?" She scribbled something more onto her clipboard.
"What do you mean?"
"What about her brother, Jasper DeAngelis?" Ryan asked. "What sort of relationship did you have with him?"
This was new. They hadn't asked about Jasper before, but she supposed it was to be expected. "If you've figured out what our relationship, if you can call it that, was like from the Maldives EpiGold, think again. It was entirely staged."
"It didn't look staged to me," Ryan said.
"Goldie directs reality and Jasper edits it. In reality—the real reality, not what they want you to see—he didn't like me, and I didn't like him, so we stayed out of each other's way as much as possible. What does that matter?"
"And what was he like with Goldie?" Garcia took the reins back. "How would you characterize his demeanor with her?"
"His demeanor with Goldie?" Jasper was across town on a date when Goldie fell. Tam may not like him, but he hadn't killed his stepsister. "Despite the fact that he's a complete douche, out of everyone in her family, she liked him the best. And Jasper? He loved her."
"Loved her?" Garcia's taught cheeks pulled inward like she was sucking on a sour candy.
"They've known each other since they were kids. Their parents are married. What the hell does this have to do with anything?"
"So, they weren't fighting at the time of her death?" Ryan asked.
"No. Any disagreements I ever saw them have were squabbles. Nothing major. She gave him a big hug when he left her place earlier that day."
"What time was that?"
"About five o'clock. I left right after he did."
"What about with others. Friends, family, business acquaintances."
"Goldie is—was easy going. She was clever when it came to business, but she let a lot of things go. Said it was better for her karma if she didn't cling to the negative actions of others."
"Was she depressed?"
"Depressed?" Goldie, sequestered in her tropical villa, Goldie, unable to get out of bed. "No. I wouldn't say that. She became exhausted at times. She had a lot on her mind."
"And it weighed on her," the male detective said. "Enough to contact you after ten at night and ask you to come back to work."
"I told you I'm not a psychic, or a therapist. I can't give you her psychological profile. I'm just saying, in general, she tried to be upbeat. It was part of her image."
"Image isn't reality."
Tam kept her hands clamped under her. Goldie made her reality. She forged it carefully and deliberately. "What are you implying? That I killed her? That Jasper did something to her? That she was distraught and threw herself over her balcony? The only image that isn't reality here is the one you're trying to create."
"So, what's your version of reality?" He asked. "What do you believe happened?"
"She didn't kill herself. That's all I can say. Can't your forensics people tell that? Trajectories and the angle she fell at or whatever?" She was sure she'd seen that more than once on television shows. "If she jumped, you'd know that, right? And there'd be a suicide note. You didn't find one, did you?"
"Not everyone leaves a note."
"No, especially those that are murdered." The ache behind Tam's eyes grew. Pretty soon, the flood gates would open, and it would take a Herculean effort to close them again.
"Tam," Ryan scooted his chair closer to the table. "We're only seeking to understand the situation. Goldie's frame of mind may come into play because someone may have been threatening her or aggravating her somehow. Can you understand that?"
"Her life was just beginning. She was on the verge of something great and I got to be part of it. I didn't come from that world. Goldie's world. This job saved me. Goldie saved me. And now..." She turned away again. "What's going to happen to me?"
"What I hear," Garcia wrapped her knuckles against the table, "is that you had everything to lose if Goldie fired you. So, we've circled back to that. Goldie found out you were skimming off her, stealing the silverware, or maybe you were incompetent, and so she called you over to hand you your coffee cup and laptop in a cardboard box and you? Well, you couldn't take the disgrace, so you exploded."
"None of that happened!"
Her ponytail swayed back and forth as she shook her head. "You haven't given us another road to go down, Ms. Martin."
"What other road? Why don't you go buy yourself a goddamn map and find it yourself!" Her heart pounded. Her cheeks heated, but she wasn't going to stop now. "Why don't you go talk to the person she was secretly dating and ask them what fucking road to take. Jesus, you're acting like I'm the only one she had contact with."
Ryan's forehead creased. "What secret person? Is this about who she was with when she went AWOL at the resort on the last EpiGold?"
She wondered if Ryan had watched that EpiGold for research into this case or if we was an actual fan. "Goldie preferred to keep her personal relationships personal. Off the internet and out of the camera frame. I don't know who, but she was seeing someone, I'm positive."
"How can you be sure?"
"Aside from the fact that she went off somewhere for a whole day and wouldn't tell anyone about it? There were other times too. Blocked out sections of her calendar that she told me to mark as NOYB. She'd leave during those times and not return for hours."
"We're going to need to see that calendar."
"It's on my phone. And my laptop. So, see away. I'm sure a quick scroll through her phone will give you more answers about that than I have."
"We'll secure records of her texts eventually, but as for her phone, it seems to have mysteriously vanished even though she had it to place a call to you mere minutes before she died." Garcia squinted at her as she spoke. "You don't happen to know where it went, do you?"
Tam blinked. "Are you serious? Her phone must be in her apartment somewhere. Or maybe it fell off the balcony too."
"Or maybe," Garcia said, "the murderer took it because it contained incriminating evidence."
Tam leaned her weight against the back of her chair. "I don't have her phone."
"Right. Let's circle back again. You're sure you can't tell us the identity of this person she was dating?" Garcia asked.
"For someone who makes her living being visible, Goldie's pretty good at hiding."
"So, that's a no." She clicked her pen. "What about Jasper?"
Tam shrugged. "Have you asked him?"
"We will."
"Well then, you don't need me to guess. And you also don't need me to tell you that the number one killer of women is their domestic partner, not their employees." She sat forward again and removed her hands from underneath her for the first time since the detectives had begun questioning her. "Looks like I gave you another road to go down after all."
Garcia stood, pen flicking across the room. She slammed her hands against the table. "I have this feeling. And it tells me this road is going to wind its way back to you." She took her clipboard and exited the room, leaving Tam with Detective Ryan, who stood as well.
"We'll be in touch."
"Is this the part where you tell me I'm free to go, but don't leave town?"
"This is the part," Ryan said, "where you to ask yourself if there's something more than secret romances you could be telling us about. Half-truths aren't going to cut it, going forward. Especially for someone like you."
He walked over the door and held it open. "And yes, you're free to go."
She inched around him. Avoiding the glares of every cop in the precinct, Tam came to a halt right outside the station.
Someone like you.
Someone who didn't deserve to work for Goldie or be a part of that world, who only understood glitz and glamour as something to be admired from the pages of a glossy magazine. Someone with a shitty past. Someone who would exit a police station and find herself in front of a dozen cameras. She pulled her hoodie over her head and ducked down, using her purse as a shield to hide her face. The questions began then, and they were far less subtle than the detectives.'
Were you the last person to see Goldie Finch alive?
Were you mad at Goldie?
Did you do it?
She forced her way through the reporters and rando internet fans. A young woman with hair styled almost identically to Goldie's stepped into her path.
"Did you kill her?" This woman's eyes reminded her of a coyote's. Wild, intense, fearsome. She seemed ready to do her own murdering. Tam dodged to the side and began to run down the street, the pent-up tears finally spilling.
If the police found cause to make her a person of interest, the keyboard warriors surely wouldn't be interested in facts or truth. She would be condemned before Goldie's body grew cold.
____
How would you deal if the police were questioning you about a murder after you'd discovered the body and then been up all night long? I would be a complete wreck--much more so than Tam.
The next installation will be from the POV of a character we've not yet heard from, though they've been in a couple of chapters already. Can you guess who it will be?
Stay tuned, and as always... thank you for sticking with this story! XOXOXO