“It’s not my garage—I mean, our garage. It belongs to that lady we rent the place from, Mrs. Johnson.”
“You could explain that to the police. I’m sure they would understand. This is all a great big misunderstanding.”
Silence. Shifty eyes.
Okay, enough. “I guess Lucy and I will have to go back to that diner and have a talk with the waitress, maybe show her the video, see what she has to say about it.”
“Don’t,” Danya said quickly.
“Why not?”
“Just . . . don’t.”
“That mean you’ve got something more to add to the saga of Shanna and Celine and Jo-X?” I asked.
Danya slid off the bed and took Shanna’s hand. “Excuse us for a moment.” She led Shanna into the bathroom, shut the door.
“Might be a back window,” Lucy said, first thing she’d said since calling me a poophead, a term of endearment I would treasure in memory as much as my first Lionel train set.
“I’ll tell you a funny back-window bathroom story later. Right now, how about you hustle around back and have a look? Fast.”
“That’s redundant. Hustle means fast. And you think they’d go out the window in panties?”
“You never know. They’ve also got towels in there. Go.”
She went soundlessly out the door. I got up and stood close to the bathroom door. I could hear voices in there, so maybe they weren’t headed for Canada in attire that might draw stares. Or they were having trouble getting the window open.
They came out two minutes later. A few seconds later, Lucy came back inside. We all settled into our customary places.
“Got your story straight?” I asked the two girls.
“There’s nothing to get ‘straight’, ” Danya said. “It is what it is, but we had to decide how much of it to tell you.”
“Why not tell us all of it?”
She ignored that. “All of this is sort of my fault. After we got Josie home, I drove back to Vegas and spoke to Jo-X. Well, I screamed at him, if you want to know. I wasn’t thinking clearly. I didn’t know what I thought he’d do, but he raped my little sister. I went to his house and his bodyguards or servants or whatever they are, one of them called him on a little radio thing.”
“So they can identify you,” I said. “Great.”
“Maybe not. I wore a blond wig and sunglasses and some other stuff. Anyway, they let me in, probably because Jo-X likes girls, good-looking young women, and when I saw him I just screamed at him, which I know was dumb but I couldn’t help it. He laughed at me. Just laughed. Told me I was crazy and had two guys drag me off the property, back out to the street. And that was that. I figured I couldn’t get close to him again after that.”
“Then,” Shanna said, “I did. He’s always got a girl on his arm. If you check the archives you’ll see that the girls change every few months. It’s what he does, like part of his act. They’re mostly white, but sometimes black. He’d had two white girls in a row so I figured he’d be ready for a black girl. So—you’ve seen Celine on TV—I was really dark, which was a good disguise, always wearing a wild red wig, dark glasses, a little bit of stuff in my cheeks to round out my face, bright red lipstick, and—well—wearing outrageous dresses to show off my . . . my . . .”
“Got it,” I said.
“I didn’t want her to do it,” Danya said. “Except . . .”
“Except that you did.”
“I wanted him. I wanted him in prison. I wanted him to get raped in prison, hoped that would happen anyway.”
“How about where he is now?”
“In hell? That’s perfect, too. Maybe he’ll get raped there.”
Nice.
“So,” Shanna broke in, “I got close to him. I was dressed in a typical Celine outfit. It was at a concert in Phoenix. I had on body paint, turned myself into a very dark black girl. I bribed a security guy two hundred dollars to let me go backstage. Soon as I saw Jo-X, I hooked an arm around his neck and pulled his face two inches from mine, and said something like, ‘Know what you need to take your act to the next level? Me. White as you are, black as I am. We make a statement, not like you with that Snow White Krissy bitch.’ And he totally snapped it up, the boldness of it, what I was wearing. And, yes, breasts were a big part of it, if you want to know. Perfect for his raunchy act.”
“And you did all that in order to . . . ?”
“Get close to him, of course. Like I said. Go to parties. Keep a close eye on him. Wait for him to roofie someone. Catch him in the act, if at all possible. What I really wanted was to get a video of him raping some unconscious girl, shut his life down.”
“And sex?”
She laughed. “Sex was not an option. I was arm candy. I made that clear up front. I was career enhancement—I was for show only. I told him he could have any girl he wanted, no problem, all I wanted was money, which gave me credibility. I told him he’d make a lot more with me than with Krissy. His fan base was mostly young teen girls. I could pull in the boys. I told him I’d wear any outfit he asked me to, no matter how revealing. I figured that would hook him. I was onstage with him, visible in restaurants, limos, hotels, everywhere he went. I was mysterious and unknown, instantly famous. I made him a lot of money. I was Celine for a few weeks, and now I’m not.”
Then she gave me a cold-steel look. “So what?”
So what? Suddenly I didn’t know. I found that I hadn’t put a lot of thought into the question of what it might mean if Shanna or Danya really was Celine, where that might
