He wanted to keep the circle of information small. No one else knew Paul was here, although Nancy clearly suspected something was up. She was the one who suggested the mold cleanup idea when he’d told her the residence needed to be cordoned off for several days. She pointedly hadn’t asked any questions.
He knocked on the door and waited. Sometimes Paul made him wait a while before answering. Jasper found it increasingly irritating that he was a kind of servant in his own home. Luckily, this time Paul answered quickly and ushered him in. He was dressed in blue jeans, sneakers, and an untucked button-down dress shirt.
The guy didn’t look great. Normally the actor was the picture of virility. At forty, his close-cropped brown hair was just starting to show flecks of gray. In the last three days, the flecks seemed to have multiplied exponentially. His usually ruddy skin was pallid. His brown eyes were bleary and had dark shadows under them. He still cut a strapping figure but it was undermined by his hunched shoulders and defensive slouch.
“I’ve got lunch,” Jasper said, trying to buoy his friend.
“Thanks,” Paul said. “But I’m not that hungry.”
“You’ve got to eat something,” Jasper insisted as he sat down in a chair in the dining room before addressing the real reason he was here. “And we have to get you out of here.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Paul snapped. “I wanted to leave that night but all those frickin’ people made it impossible to get out without being seen. I’m supposed to be on set in New Mexico tomorrow morning. If I’m not there, the questions start and I don’t have answers.”
Jasper nodded supportively.
“Good, then we’re on the same page. Let me call for a car. We’ll find a way to sneak you out and get you to the airport.”
“Fine,” Paul said. “We’ll do it tonight when it’s dark.”
“I don’t think we should wait that long,” Jasper said. “Like I told you, we’ve got a stay in place preventing the police from searching the estate. But LAPD is fighting it. If they get it overturned, I guarantee they’ll raid the place within minutes.”
Paul seemed to consider the idea.
“What about all the cameras? If I leave in the day, won’t they be able to look at the footage later and see me sneaking out?”
Jasper shook his head. He’d already told Paul this, but apparently with everything on his mind, he’d forgotten.
“No. Remember? The cameras in this wing aren’t operational. Neither are the ones in the hedge maze out back. That’s why I brought the gardener uniform by yesterday. You can put that on and you can leave through the West House back door. It’s a straight shot to the maze. I’ll give you a key and you can exit via the back gate. I’ll have a car meet you there. It can take you to your house to get your clothes and you can go on to the airport. There will be no physical evidence that you were ever here. You can say you spent the whole time that you were in L.A. in your house.”
Jasper could tell from Paul’s expression that this was the first time he’d really registered the idea fully. He seemed to like it.
“Okay,” he said. “That sounds good. I just need a little time to decompress before we do it.”
“That’s fine,” Jasper said. “And if you need a little chemical assistance to decompress, I have something upstairs that I can grab—drinks or something heavier.”
“That’s okay,” Paul said. “Because of all the training for the movie, I haven’t touched a thing in six months. I have shirtless scenes. Got to look respectable, right?”
“Right,” Jasper said, though his brain had suddenly fixated on something other than the kind of shape Paul was in.
He flashed back to their phone conversation the night Milly Estrada had died. Paul had said he’d taken something to amp up the moment and that he’d gotten too excited as a result. That was how he inadvertently broke her neck.
But if he hadn’t taken any kind of drug in six months, then he’d been lying about being high on Saturday night. And if he wasn’t high, that meant he’d killed her while he was completely sober. That suggested that it wasn’t an accident at all, that he’d done it intentionally.
Jasper couldn’t imagine why his friend would do such a thing, although he had mentioned something about Milly being his lawyer when he got