“You’ll have to do better than that,” Trembley said, leaning in so that he was hovering directly over Reinhold.
The sad, beaten man hunched even deeper into himself. Jessie heard a sigh emanate from somewhere so deep she wondered if it was his soul escaping his body.
“Okay,” he finally said. “I heard Corinne died on the set of Marauder. But I didn’t know how. There was some mention of her being murdered, strangled. But I started to wonder if they got it wrong. I thought maybe she’d hanged herself, maybe because her career was in the dump. Who knows? When you two showed up, it reinforced that suspicion and I started to worry that maybe she’d written some kind of suicide note, coming clean or something.”
“Coming clean about what, Phil?” Jessie asked slowly.
He didn’t speak.
“Phil?” she repeated in a warning tone.
“About the list, okay. She knew about the list. I thought maybe she was absolving herself of guilt for knowing about it and never having said anything.”
Jessie and Trembley exchanged surprised looks. She nodded for the detective to take the lead.
“How did she know about the list?” Trembley asked.
Phil Reinhold looked at him like he was dense.
“She was on it?” Jessie guessed.
“No,” he said softly. “But not for a lack of effort on my part. When she was starting out, before she got Petals and Petulance, there was an actor who took an interest in her specifically. I brought the offer to her. She rejected it out of hand, got really mad. Somehow she bullied the truth out of me. I don’t know how but I ended up spilling the whole thing to her.”
“And she didn’t fire you or say anything?” Jessie asked.
“No. In fact, the next time we met in my office, very late in the day, she said she’d reconsidered. She asked me to pull up the list of guys to see if there was anyone she’d be open to spending time with. God, I was such an idiot.”
“What do you mean?” Trembley wanted to know.
“She was playing me, Detective,” he said, his voice rising wildly. “She was a devious one. She said she wanted to make sure we had privacy to discuss the matter and asked me to make sure the office was empty. So I went around, checking to make certain everyone had left for the day. What I didn’t know at the time was that while I did that, she was copying the file.”
“When did you find out?” Jessie asked.
“Not until two years later. She’d already made Petals and the first Marauder movie. But the producers were playing hardball with her on the salary for the sequel, insisting she get the rate in the original contract. That’s when she told me I should remind one of the producers that he was on the naughty list and that if he wanted to keep it quiet, he should meet her preferred rate.”
“What happened?” Trembley asked, a little too curiously for Jessie’s taste.
“They bumped up her rate, ten percent higher than what she wanted actually.”
“So she used this database to pinch vulnerable producers from then on?” Jessie asked.
“Only occasionally, when she thought she was getting hosed,” Reinhold said. “I don’t recall her ever using it to get a part, just to get paid what she felt she deserved. In a weird way, there was something honorable about the way she went about it. She always wanted her acting to be judged on its own merits. Everything else was fair game.”
“Did the producers know she was the one squeezing them?” Jessie asked.
“I don’t think so. She always did it through me, so the producers had no idea she was behind the tactic unless someone else told them. I never did and she had no reason to. But it was always out there, you know, hanging over my head, that she could rat me out if I didn’t go to bat for her.”
“So you must be glad that she’s gone,” Jessie jabbed. “She can’t wield that against you anymore.”
Reinhold looked at her with weary disdain.
“Ms. Hunt. I may be an over-the-hill scumbag of an agent, but I haven’t fallen that far. Yes, I resented Corinne lording that list over me. Yes, I was angry at her for dropping me as her agent without a word of warning after ten years of getting her steady work. It especially stung because she left me for some hotshot punk with slicked back hair who