The Interview
It was early morning when another female officer called my name and unlocked the door.
It squeaked open and clanged, echoing eerily in the relatively silent precinct.
She closed it behind me after I walked out, locking it quickly, and then grabbed my arm and escorted me toward the front of the building.
The precinct was almost deserted. The heels of the shoes I’d traded for with the hooker resounded loudly in the corridors, and I felt taller, more confident, even if repulsed by remembering how badly they smelled.
She opened the door and led me into another interview room, this one identical to the one I’d visited yesterday.
Two men sat at a small metallic table. One was the detective who’d arrested me, Stanek.
The other, seated on the other side of the table, was a young man I’d never met before.
A thick file lay open on the table, probably the same one I’d seen in the cop’s hands yesterday.
Both men had steaming paper cups filled with coffee in front of them.
My mouth watered, craving the bitter liquid.
“Good morning,” I said as calmly as I could, though my insides were twisting in fear.
The detective shot me a clouded look. “This is Palmer Clayborne from Legal Aid.” I shook the young man’s limp, clammy hand.
“Now that you have a lawyer present, we have some questions.” He gestured toward the third chair, and I pulled it from the table.
Its legs grated unpleasantly against the floor.
“All right,” I replied, then sat. I thought of asking for some coffee, or at least some water, but decided it was better to use that request later, if I felt cornered and needed a break.
Detective Stanek looked at me, his gaze piercing, scrutinizing. And hostile. I could feel he wasn’t unbiased. In his mind, I was guilty: I’d killed Winston, and he was as sure of it as if he’d witnessed it himself.
After a long moment, he lowered his eyes and flipped through the photos and reports stacked inside the case file.
“Your fingerprints came back clean,” he said, speaking softly. I breathed relief out slowly, careful not to give myself away. “But the search warrant executed at your house found a few interesting things.” He pulled a small evidence pouch from underneath the case file.
I cringed, recognizing my passport and my real driver’s license.
“Hattie Lou Walker,” he said, speaking slowly, as if savoring the words as they left his lips.
I looked briefly at the legal aid attorney, and he nodded. “I used to be,” I replied.
“And you’re Olivia Taylor now?” Stanek asked, but I didn’t rush to reply. “How was this done?”
Another steadying breath. “You’d have to ask my attorney—the one I had when I was living in Texas. He helped me get it changed.”
“Why change it?” He looked at me with a smile that didn’t fool me for a moment. “Are you hiding something?”
A crooked smile played on my lips. “How would you like to go through life being called Hattie, Detective?” His stare turned ice cold. “No? Neither did I. It’s a ridiculous name, and I had it legally changed. I never got to changing my passport because I rarely travel abroad. End of story.”
He pushed the evidence pouch holding my passport and old driver’s license aside, in a sign that he’d bought my argument, at least for the moment. “Why did you kill Winston Donovan?”
I stared at him, then at the lawyer, expecting him to step in, to stop me from talking, to tell the detective that the interview was now over, but he did nothing of the kind. He was busy examining a torn cuticle on his left index finger.
I didn’t have an attorney. Palmer Clayborne’s level of competency was helping the detective, not me.
I turned my attention back to Stanek. “I didn’t kill him!
” My passionate reply fell on deaf ears.
I could tell he didn’t believe me. “I swear I didn’t.
” Despair snuck up on me and raised the pitch of my voice.
“I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t kill Winston.
I—I loved him.” My voice wavered, the weight of those words pressing against my chest.
I exhaled sharply, gripping the edge of the dented table as I stood. My hands felt bare—too bare. A flicker of panic hit before I remembered. The ring was gone, taken from me during booking, locked away with the rest of my things.
“I was going to marry him,” I added, my voice trembling with fear, with grief, and with the risk I was taking, betting everything on Claire not telling the cops about our deal. “You know that. You confiscated my engagement ring.”
“Sit down,” the detective said.
I slowly obeyed, not wanting to aggravate him more. “I had no reason to kill him.” I touched my barren ring finger, missing the ring, as if my last connection to Winston had been severed when I’d forced it off my finger. “He proposed to me the day before yesterday. We were happy.”
“Really?” he asked, and the chill in his voice filled me with dread.
He stared at me through eyes narrowed into slits.
Slowly, he flipped through several pages and photos in his case file, then extracted one and put it in front of me.
I gasped. “You don’t look particularly happy here, driving your car into the Cosmopolitan hotel parking lot at 4:27 p.m., that same day. ”
It was an image extracted from the parking garage’s surveillance system. The blurry, magnified image was clear enough to show tears streaming down my face and despair in my eyes. My left hand was on the wheel of my red Beemer, my right hand covering my gaping mouth.
“What happened, huh? Lovers’ quarrel? Some kind of trouble in paradise? Or had you just found out he was already married, and that his proposal was a little, um, premature?”
My lawyer didn’t say anything. He just nodded at me, encouraging me to answer a question I had no business answering. He’d clearly sold me off.
My throat went dry. “Could I have some water? Or perhaps a cup of coffee?”
Groaning, the detective stood with difficulty, holding on to the table’s edge for support, then left the room. The door closed behind him on its own, pushed by a spring.
“Are you going to help me at all?” I asked the lawyer. He didn’t answer; he seemed rattled, his cheeks flushing red. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”
“Ms. Taylor, it’s not like that. I’m on your side here. But there are questions—”
The door swung open, and Stanek slammed a bottle of water down in front of me. “There.”
Ignoring his hostility, I unscrewed the cap and took two slow and measured swigs, giving my fraught nerves time to settle before I put it down and capped it. “Thank you.”
Stanek sat, groaning again, his hand gripping his hip as if he was nursing some pain coiled in there. “So, what happened? Let’s see . . . Winston Donovan proposed to you, and, based on that oversize ring in our evidence locker, you said yes?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Then how do you explain this?” He tapped a clubbed fingernail against the picture’s glossy surface.
I didn’t even try. I couldn’t explain it without making my situation even worse.
I remembered I had the right to stay silent, and used it for a moment, thinking hard on what to say and wondering whether he was telling me everything he knew.
Had Claire given him the photos I’d left with her?
Had she told him about the deal she and I had made?
About the money she’d paid as ransom for her husband?
Stanek sighed and interlaced his fingers over his bulging abdomen.
“I’ll tell you what happened here,” he said with a quick head movement toward the surveillance photo.
“I think you found out he was married and realized you’d been had.
He was never going to divorce his wife and lose half his fortune.
For what? For . . . you?” He cackled harshly, derisively.
“Honey, hate to break it to you, but this is Vegas. Girls like you are a dime a dozen here.”
The contempt in his voice was searing, but I sat still, my face carved in stone, taking it without flinching. Why didn’t he have the photos I’d given Claire?
“I knew he was married.” I took a deep, calming breath.
“The day I met him, his wife was on his arm, at the Illuminate the Future Gala. I have a witness—or, better said, two hundred or so—who can attest to that.” He pressed his lips together, visibly frustrated.
“His lawyers were handling the divorce, and there was a prenup. He wasn’t losing much. ”
“And still . . . this!” He tapped the picture again. “Then,” he added and paused, sifting through his case file until he found another glossy print he pushed in front of me, “this.”
It was another magnified, blurry image extracted from surveillance video.
It showed a blond woman with wavy, long hair, wearing sunglasses and dressed in a breezy, sleeveless white dress, knocking on a hotel door.
The angle was narrow, but I could still make out the room number, 5003.
A diamond ring sparkled on the woman’s left hand.
She wore high-heeled, strappy white sandals just like I’d worn yesterday.
A wide-brimmed, floppy sun hat conveniently hid her face from the cameras.
It was time coded 4:32 p.m., a few minutes after I had entered the hotel’s parking lot.
The walls started spinning, and I had to grab the edges of the table to keep my balance. That was why Winston had stopped calling and texting me. Not because he’d given up on us. But because he’d been killed. And I was staring at the murderer’s picture.
“That’s not me,” I said, my voice trembling, choked.
Realization had hit me like an iron fist, sucking the air out of my lungs.
I remembered Claire’s thorough look at me before I’d left her place.
How weird that had seemed, how unusual and unexplainable for her to check me out the way she had.
But now I understood why. She’d studied what I had on, committing every tiny little detail to memory, and had probably already been thinking what she could wear to pass as me, at least on surveillance video.
“Yeah . . . really?” the detective asked, laughing ostentatiously. “You’re wearing that same dress now. The same ring. The same hairdo.”
For a long moment, I was at a loss for words.
What could I possibly say for myself and hope that he’d believe?
How could I begin to tell him I’d styled my hair like Claire’s on purpose, even before landing in Las Vegas?
And the same ring? Had Winston given her one just like mine?
The thought was unnerving. But the surveillance photo was grainy, the ring on Claire’s hand nothing but a blur.
The rest was in the detective’s imagination.
“I never went upstairs,” I eventually said, as calmly and as convincingly as I could speak. “I drove into the garage, stayed there for about twenty minutes or so, and then went home. Check your surveillance tapes. I never went upstairs.”
“Oh, but you did,” he said, extracting more stills taken from various surveillance videos, showing the woman in the white dress crossing the lobby, taking the elevator, and walking through the long corridors with that hat on and sunglasses on her face.
But my eyes had landed on the next page in the case file. It was the autopsy report. It had the word Preliminary stamped in red ink across the top of the title page.
Choking on my tears, I asked, “How did he die?”