Flop Dead Gorgeous by David Rosenfelt

Author:David Rosenfelt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

At this stage of a case, I approach everything with two things in mind.

One of them is obvious; I want to know what really happened, how things went down in the real world. But the other aspect can be equally important; I have to think in terms of what I can tell the jury.

In a perfect world those things would overlap; I could tell the jury the truth, they would lap it up with a spoon, and we could go home happy. That still could be the case this time, but it’s so far down the road that it’s not even in sight.

We aren’t close to learning the truth, and we have very little to tell a jury. That has to change, or Jenny is going to be far and away the most famous inmate in state prison.

I obviously don’t know who the real killer is, but I suspect it involves money. Griffin had a lot of it, but he took a lot more from other people. They seem to have been investments, but whatever returns they got, whether in money or something else, might have been unsatisfactory.

But unless I can come up with something totally solid, that’s the kind of thing that will go over jurors’ heads; it just feels vague and disconnected from the world that they will know. I would need far more information, concrete stuff, that I could hit them with before they would buy in.

The other area of Griffin’s life that could have exposed him to danger was his drug use. Juries understand that; they instinctively know that’s a dangerous world, run by people very capable of murder.

The problem is that I don’t think for a minute that Griffin’s death had anything to do with drugs. For one thing, drug dealers have no incentive to hurt or kill their customers unless they don’t pay for the product, and I don’t see anything that would have prevented Griffin from paying.

First of all, he obviously had the money. Second, it’s the nature of drug users that they don’t want to cut off their supplier … it sort of defeats the purpose.

Other things argue against this having to do with drugs. People in that world don’t commit a murder and then elaborately set up someone else. They don’t take the time to put two place settings down with cake crumbs on them. They put a bullet in someone’s head and leave his body in the park.

And the break-in of the bungalow also makes the drug connection unlikely. It’s just not how they operate; it’s not the way they would scare me. Way too subtle.

When Laurie and I get home, Linda Ivers is there helping Jenny with some business stuff, but getting ready to leave. I ask her to stay for a minute, since I want to ask the same question of both of them.

“Have either of you ever heard of a guy named Sergey Bondar?” Jenny is more likely to know the name, since she spent far more time with Griffin, but if Linda spent time around the set, it can’t hurt to ask her as well.

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