Chapter 12 #4
The manager led the lieutenant and Patricia Scott into the hotel after that.
They had taken Mickie to a suite, and a police officer was handing her a glass of ginger ale to get some sugar into her.
She looked very pale, and was still covered in blood.
The officer retreated into the background when the lieutenant appeared, and Dan Kelly sat down across from Mickie.
“You’ve had a rough morning, Ms. Banks,” he said sympathetically. “I’m sorry. I’m Lieutenant Kelly.”
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes, he is. Do you remember what happened?”
“I was waiting for an Uber, to come and see you. I spent the night here with Alex after he was arraigned. He walked me out. We walked into the driveway. There was a white car waiting with two men in it. I thought it was my Uber, but there were two men in the car. We were just standing there, and one man got out and shot Alex a bunch of times, maybe three or four. He jumped back in the car, and I don’t remember, I was feeling kind of sick, I think they drove away. ”
“That sounds like a very accurate description. It’s what my men said too, and what the doorman reported. Did you recognize the men?”
“No. They just looked like regular men in a white car.”
“Do you remember what they were wearing?” She thought about it, and seemed to calm down while she talked to him and sipped the ginger ale. Patricia Scott sat quietly, listening carefully.
“I didn’t really see the driver. The one who shot Alex was wearing like a black baseball jacket, you know, zip up, maybe a black shirt and black pants. And he had a face mask on, like people wore during Covid.”
“Short hair? Long hair?”
“Short.”
“Anything else?”
“He had a gun. I think he had on blue or black running shoes.” He sounded like a million other people on any street.
“Do you think you could talk a little about Alex now, and I can spare you a trip to my office?” She nodded. “Did he ever tell you or hint that he wasn’t really a doctor?”
“Never. He told stories about his residency at Mass General, and med school at Harvard. And he acted like a doctor.”
“Did he ever do treatments on you?”
“No, he said I was too young. He loved being a doctor. And he loved his patients.” There was no expression on her face as she said it. Her face was still smeared with Alex’s blood.
“Did he describe the treatments he did on them?”
“Not in any detail. Sometimes he’d say so-and-so is here for her Botox shot.
But he never described the treatments, and I wasn’t there when he gave treatments, only once or twice for easy stuff, like when they were waiting for the numbing cream to take effect for their Botox shots.
He liked it when I talked to the patients in the waiting room to relax them and be friendly.
He wanted me to go to parties with him, red carpet and that kind of thing.
He said I was his ‘ambassador,’ but that’s all I had to do. ”
“Did he pay you?”
“A little in the beginning. After that, he paid things for me. He paid me for the modeling at first, and a fee to be his ambassador. But eventually he just paid for my clothes.”
“How did you meet him?”
“He hired me through my modeling agency to be in his ads when he was opening his center. He liked the way I looked so he used me as the face of Bellissima.”
“Did you do a brochure for him too?” he asked her casually.
“I think so. I don’t know. I never saw it.”
He pulled it out of his suit jacket and handed it to her. “Have you seen that before?” She shook her head. He had grabbed it off his desk before leaving his office. He pointed to the before and after pictures. “Have you seen those two photos before? Can you describe them to me?”
“I’ve seen those photographs when we took them, but not together like that.
The normal one he said was for the brochure.
The other one was a joke, the photographer took it to show me what I’d look like when I’m old.
He did it on his computer. I thought it was funny.
I didn’t think he would use it. It’s really ugly.
” Dan Kelly and Patricia Scott exchanged a smile.
Mickie’s definitions of “really old” and “really ugly” were definitely a youthful point of view.
“Did he tell people you were older than you are?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Did he tell you why?”
“He said he didn’t want people to know he was dating someone my age. I was nineteen.” Mickie knew exactly where she was going. It no longer mattered. Alex was dead. She was alive.
“When did you start dating him?”
“On the last day of the shoot for the brochure and ads. He wanted to take me out to celebrate how well it went. I went home, and he showed up at the apartment I shared with my sister. She graduated from college in May, and she came out here to be with me. She moved in with me. He came to the apartment and waited outside in his car. He really wanted me to go to dinner with him, so I did. I didn’t want to be rude or hurt his feelings.
He’d been really nice during the shoot and paid me a lot.
It took five days. We had dinner and he said he could really help with my career and introduce me to people, and movie producers, if I would go to parties with him and be seen with him, like a date.
I’d been modeling here for a year, and waiting on tables since I finished high school.
His was the best job I ever had. He paid me twenty thousand dollars for five days, through my agency.
We had a lot of champagne at dinner and I got a little drunk, and he took me back to his place after dinner, instead of my apartment.
And I think we had more champagne, I can’t remember.
I don’t know what happened after that. He wanted to have sex with me, and I did.
I think I passed out from the champagne, and he wanted me to do it again the next morning before he took me home.
So I did.” She looked momentarily embarrassed, as the lieutenant watched her closely.
“I went home, and he came to our apartment again. He wanted me to go out with him.
“He invited me to a big movie premiere, and he kept saying he could help me, and I wouldn’t have to wait on tables anymore, which sounded pretty good.
I liked him. He was nice to me. At first, it was like we were dating, and then he wanted to have sex all the time, and he would tell me to go shopping and buy whatever I wanted.
He liked me in sexy clothes. He wanted to have sex a lot, more and more, like five or six times a day, and he wanted me around so he could do that.
He asked me to move in with him in October, and my sister had a boyfriend by then, and they were dating, so I wound up staying with Alex a lot, and it was easier just moving in with him.
But once I moved in, he wanted to have sex all the time.
He would come upstairs sometimes between patients and tell me to hurry up, or he would want to have sex with me all night long.
Once I was living there, he wanted me to do weird kinky stuff, like tie him up, or hurt him, or put weird things up me, and I didn’t know how to get out of it by then.
He kind of made me his sex slave. It was embarrassing.
He would tell me I could go shopping at Chanel if I let him do weird stuff to me.
” She hung her head in shame. “So I did. I never had clothes like that before and he let me buy whatever I wanted. Or he’d make me walk around naked all the time, or he’d come on my face, sorry .
. .” She hung her head again. “He needed it all the time.”
“Did he actually get you parts in a film or modeling jobs, like he promised?” Kelly asked her.
“No, he never did. He liked being in the press with me a lot, though, as long as I didn’t tell people how old I was.
I told him I wanted to go to college, and he paid me a hundred thousand dollars not to, so I could just be at the apartment, available to him.
My sister was really freaked out about my being with him, but I didn’t know how to get out of it, and I liked all the clothes I got. I never told her about all the sex.”
“Where’s your family, Michaela?” he asked her.
“My mother died six years ago, when I was fourteen. And my father is . . . well, he hasn’t been okay since my mom died.
He drinks all the time. I grew up in Iowa, we have a dairy farm.
I left after high school. My mom was dead and my sister was away in college, and my dad was drunk all the time at night, so I left and came here to act and model.
I did a lot of trade shows and waitressing.
And then I met Alex. Before that, I had to do a lot of waitressing when I didn’t make enough modeling.
It was better when my sister moved out here last May after she graduated, so we could split the rent.
I had two roommates before, but they left. ”
“Where did your sister graduate from?” He was just curious.
“MIT. She works at Cedars-Sinai. Her boyfriend is a reporter at the L.A. Times.” And then it clicked for Dan Kelly that this was Jason Bell’s girlfriend’s sister he had referred to. It all made sense now.
“Do you remember meeting any Asian people with Alex, people who might have invested in his center?”