The 24th Letter

SEVENTY-EIGHT

Judy Neilson lived in a remote neighborhood on the east side of St. Cloud near Orlando. As O’Brien checked his GPS and followed the coordinates to Neilson’s address, he wondered if the S — T in St. Cloud might prove to be the place that Sam Spelling’s mother lived.

There was one car in the drive. A late model Lexus. Lauren Miles, and her FBI database, had scraped up enough information on Neilson to let O’Brien know that she worked in timeshare sales. Probably worked weekends and had Monday off.

He parked and rang the doorbell. A woman peered from beyond a chain lock.

O’Brien smiled and said, “Judy?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Sean O’Brien. I arrested Charlie Williams in the death of Alexandria Cole.”

“What do you want?”

“May I come in…it’s about Alexandria.”

“Don’t know what this has to do with me. Come in.” She opened the door and led O’Brien into the living room. He could smell stale wine on her breath. She wore a long lavender robe tied at the waist. No shoes. Dark hair pinned up. O’Brien remembered her features from more than a decade ago. She had been a near supermodel in her own right. Now she was turning prematurely gray, darker skin under puffy suspicious eyes, gauntness to her face. Fingernails chewed. Nostrils slightly red.

“Would you like a drink? Coffee or something?” she asked.

“No thanks.”

“It’s my day off-Monday and Tuesday. Damn neighbor’s dog barks like no tomorrow when the trash guys come on Monday. They come at the crack of dawn. I’ve been up for quite a while. So I fixed me a little bloody Mary.”

O’Brien smiled, “Enjoy.”

“As I recall, I told you all I knew about Alex’s murder when it happened.”

“Judy, there have been some things happening recently that have convinced me that Charlie Williams did not kill Alexandria.”

“What things?”

“The murders of a priest and two others who knew that Williams did not kill her.”

“Then who did?”

“I was hoping you might tell me.”

“I’ve told you what I think.”

“Maybe you could refresh my memory of Alex’s relationship with Russo.”

She grinned, stirred her drink with a stick of celery and said, “He was an asshole. I didn’t like him when he managed Alex’s career. He’s the reason she got so heavy into coke. But I never thought he stabbed her like that. Charlie was having awful fights with Alex, trying to take her back to North Carolina, trying to get her away from Russo. I think Charlie got so damn drunk he just went crazy and killed her.” She made a sniffling sound with her nose. “

“I went back and re-read the old statements you gave me eleven years ago. In one of them, you said that Alex started getting phone calls at different times and she had to drop everything and go. You said she hated going…said the ‘guy was creeping her out.’ You said she’d come back from meeting him in a motel and took long showers. You told me you heard her crying, sobbing loudly in the shower one day and you sat her down to talk with her. Friend-to-friend. Alex mentioned she’d been thinking about suicide and then she was killed three days later.”

Judy stared at a spot somewhere on the coffee table. O’Brien could see her eyes moisten. She looked at a photograph on the mantle. She was standing with Alexandria at a zoo. “I remember what I said. Thought about it some since her death.”

“Is there anything you didn’t tell me…anything at all?”

“Alex said she felt so lonely or ‘alone’ was the word she used. So damn violated. I remember she wrapped herself in a big fluffy white towel, sat on the side of the tub, and we talked. I mostly listened and she broke down and told me that her stepfather sexually abused her when she was eleven. And now, this new bastard, the guy calling her, was bringing back the nightmares. She said she felt helpless, like when she was a little girl. Nowhere to run and nobody to run to. I remember just holding her there on the tub, like I was holding a child and she just cried and cried.”

Judy’s fingers gripped the glass in her hand, her knuckles turning white. O’Brien said, “When you originally told me about the calls, I’d believed that it was Russo soliciting her. Part of his narcissist DNA. In the last few days, I’ve come to realize that Russo is on the same scum level as Alexandria’s stepfather.”

Judy walked to the wet bar and said, “How about some tea or something?”

“No thanks.”

She fixed another drink and returned to her seat. “This, in a way, makes what you’re telling me a little easier to stomach.”

“Did Russo, at that time, have someone working for him that might have had a lot of access to Alexandria?” O’Brien asked.

Judy crossed her legs and took a sip. “Not really. Russo was a hands-on kind of manager. I remember Alex telling me in the bathroom that night, if she didn’t cooperate, he’d destroy her career. Now why would Russo want to destroy a career that was making him a shit load of money? Before Alex died, she told me she was using heroin.”

“Heroin?”

“She’d pointed to places between her toes and said that’s where he gave her the drug. Maybe somehow Charlie knew about it and that’s why he went crazy…trying to get her out of that nasty scene. But that’s still no excuse for what he did.”

“I don’t remember you mentioning heroin during my original questioning.”

“Between the coke, pills and crap that came through her life, heroin was just another one to chalk up to being naive, too trusting, and too dumb to care. Alex had told me she was not gonna use it any more, and begged me not to say anything to anybody. You had arrested Charlie for the killing, so it didn’t seem to make any difference because Charlie wasn’t a user and he sure wasn’t giving heroin to Alex.”

“Then who was?”

“I don’t know. She wouldn’t say, but I don’t think it was Russo.”

“Judy, having a girlfriend-to-girlfriend talk with Alexandria, at the moment you describe, would lead me to believe she might have opened up a little more.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were her best friend. It seems like she would have confided in you and told you who she was meeting-who had her hooked on heroin.”

“She was afraid. She said that if I didn’t know much I couldn’t get into trouble.”

“What do you think she meant by trouble?”

“I don’t know. I remember her saying that sometimes you can put your trust in the wrong people…even those people paid to protect you. I thought she meant one of Russo’s security-his body guards-the guys who kept the paparazzi out of her face.”

O’Brien said nothing.

Judy lifted the framed photograph of she and Alexandria off the mantle. She looked at it a moment, smiled, and sipped her drink. She handed the picture to O’Brien. “We were at the Miami Zoo when this was taken. Alex loved going there. Loved the animals and the peace she found. She’s never getting older than that picture. Alex may have been beautiful outside, but she was beautiful on the inside, too. Before she was stabbed in the heart, she was scarred there a long time ago. I hope you find this guy.”