Not So Model Home - By David James Page 0,71
was something strange about it: It was crunched on the side. So I asked myself, why would that be? It was used by a painter to hold paint when painting a wall, or touching up here and there. So why the dent on the side? Then I noticed something even stranger: two small, round dents on the bottom. Were the two related? They were. It came to me when we were praying last week in our little mini-memorial service for Aleksei. I was looking down at the soft pine floors in Ian’s house. There, in the shiny polyurethane finish were small dents. Dents caused by high heels. Shoes worn by Aurora Cleft!”
Aurora was flabbergasted. “Amanda, this is preposterous! Why would I kill Keith? I have nothing to gain.”
“That’s what I thought initially when I was searching for who stood to gain the most from Keith’s death. It wasn’t you. So I searched around, but the arrow pointed to all the rest of the cast. What finally clinched it was what Aleksei said in a drunken ramble at Keith’s memorial luncheon.”
“And what was that?” Aurora asked haughtily.
“Well, I can’t slur my words as well as Aleksei did, but he said something to the effect that he had hot gossip. He saw two people kissing, and that it not only shocked him, but that it was disgusting. Why would Aleksei think that two people kissing were disgusting in a house full of gay men? Naturally, everyone assumed he was talking about Ian kissing Keith, who was his son. Incest. But it wasn’t. Aleksei was a notorious heterophobe. He hated seeing straight sex, so what he was describing was you, Aurora, kissing Darryn!”
“This is madness,” Aurora sputtered. “It’s all conjecture.”
“The answer is actually much simpler. You see, Aurora, you are Ian’s therapist. Some time ago, Ian told you he had incurable pancreatic cancer. You are also Jeremy Collins’s therapist—a fact that you lied about when we talked at the Mexican restaurant. Anyway, this got you thinking. Jeremy was looking for a big idea for a show and you supplied him with it: Things Are a Bit Iffy. You told him about Ian’s cancer, the former boyfriends, and before you knew it, there was a program with a whopper of a premise. You selected the former boyfriends for the program, including your ace card: Darryn Novolo, a complete newbie to Ian and everyone else. You’d let the show start, let the contestants destroy each other and make each other look bad, then introduce Darryn, your lover, and he’d be suave, kind, and likable. It would be so easy, until Keith threw a monkey wrench into the works by saying he was Ian’s son. Well, he had to go. Having a bedroom on the far side of the house gave you the opportunity to move around the house and grounds fairly unnoticed. So you knew that Keith had a glass of cranberry juice before bedtime, and that afternoon you slipped in the potting shed, got the dented pail, and turned it upside down in order to reach the gopher poison on the top shelf. But in standing on the pail, you left two dents from your Christian Louboutin heels in the bottom and you slightly crushed the pail because of your weight. You mixed the poison there and carried it into the house where you put it in Keith’s cranberry juice, knowing that he was the only person in the house to drink it. End of Keith. When Aleksei opened his mouth and said he saw the two of you kissing, he had to go too. But this time, you decided that Darryn would do the job and you would make height a clue that would put you in the clear.”
I took a long swig from a glass of wine and continued, “When you helped me carry Aleksei upstairs to his room after he passed out at Keith’s memorial luncheon, you knew that we left him in a high-backed wing chair. There was always a chance that he might wake up, so you advised Darryn to come up from behind him and strangle him with a tie that one of you had stolen from Drake’s room. Then Darryn put some crystal meth on the top of the dresser, forced some up Aleksei’s nose to make it look like he had snorted it, and jerked off on the floor to make it look like he was practicing autoerotic asphyxiation. You even suggested as much when you