Thursday, March 3, 2011

The Tragic Deaths of Young Celebrities - 8

He also wasn’t worried, which actually did concern him a little. He didn’t figure it was likely that the cigarettes could be traced back to him. He’d been mildly disguised when he bought them, wore gloves when he was prepping them and he had zero criminal record anyway, so there was minimal exposure.

But the fact was, the police weren’t complete idiots, and this would definitely be recognized as foul play, and with a case this public, they would be looking hard. It was stupid to not be worried, and yet, he wasn’t. He knew that was dumb, and he knew that was the sort of shit that got people caught.

Johnny didn’t stop doing the paparazzi thing, either. Partly because he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by a sudden disappearance, and partly because it made him feel like he was part of the whole scene. All the others paps were talking about the Stralet’s death, and knowing what he knew about it, knowing that he had done it and they didn’t know anything.

Her tragic death was pretty much all that was discussed the week she died, which was impressive when you considered that at least half of the countries in the middle east were actually developing democracy and half the states in the mid west were losing it. But no, a former child star who hadn’t had anything vaguely resembling a hit movie in at least five years and hadn’t been anything but a public joke for two or three was big news. Maybe Johnny needed to get into the revolution business.

It was bad enough when it looked like she’d just managed to OD, although there were rumors the next day that her death was foul play, but shit went batshit crazy when the toxicology report confirmed that somebody had rat poisoned her. Johnny had vague memories of the original OJ trial and how it was everywhere and you couldn’t avoid hearing about it even if you wanted to.

But nobody ever linked it back to Johnny. The truth about crimes, despite what CSI would have you believe, was that most crimes were either obvious, committed by the deeply stupid, or were solved by somebody ratting the culprit out. All that forensic stuff, where they were able to track you down because you left a crumb of croissant two blocks away from the crime.

What Johnny did, a crime where the victim had no obvious connection to the person who killed them, that was tough to solve. Johnny wasn’t a stalker, he didn’t send her letters, and he had no obvious contact with her.

One thing that did surprise him was that cigarette shop actually did have a security camera. Now, given that the shop was at least in part a front for a drug dealer, he expected that they wouldn’t want to have that kind of thing on camera. What he heard from one of the photographers who had a police connection was that it was because insurance demanded it. This still sound nuts to Johnny, and it meant that they had him on tape.

No comments:

Post a Comment