Who Illed Jenny Schecter?

Chapter 6 You Broke My Heart

Lauren was halfway through her egg-whites-only Western omelet when Shane arrived at the restaurant and slumped down in the booth, the same one they'd had lunch in the day before.

"Is this booth permanently reserved for you?" Shane asked.

"Good morning," Lauren said. "Didn't get enough sleep, huh? No, this booth isn't mine, it's mainly Marybeth's, but she lets me use it. We cops are very territorial, we like our routines and our turf clearly defined. One time we came in and found a bunch of Feebies camped out and we had to use a table. It ruined Marybeth's whole morning."

"Feebies?" Shane asked.

"FBI," Lauren said. "LA field office." She raised a hand to signal the waitress. "You look like you need coffee, bad."

"I do. I'm not a morning person. I'm barely an afternoon person."

"I remember," Lauren said. It was the first time she'd referred to their one-night stand a decade ago. Shane grunted. "I'm sorry that yesterday was so rough on you."

"It can't be helped," Shane said.

"I'm glad you see that. Doesn't lessen the pain much, though."

The waitress brought a menu but Shane didn't need it. "Lox and bagel, toasted," she said. "And a shmear. The works."

"Plain bagel? We have onion, wheat, sesame, and everything bagel," the waitress said.

"Everything," Shane said. "Do you have V-8?"

"Small or large?"

"Large. And lots of coffee."

"Hard night, huh?" the waitress said, sympathetically. "Coming right up."

"She's used to dealing with cops who've had hard nights," Lauren said, "and she knows how to deal with them."

"What's her secret?"

"Ignore bitchiness and moodiness and grumpiness. And if you give her shit, she gives it back. Cops respect a little push-back, and if you stand up to their crap a little bit, at least if you aren't handcuffed and a suspect."

"Good to know. So what did you want to talk to me about?"

"Couple things. For my general background, tell me about your business. My sources tell me you've been pretty successful."

"Is it relevant?"

"Probably not. But I'm curious, and it helps me get to know you. Like Carmen said, that's important."

The waitress brought Shane's lox and toasted bagel platter, and Lauren watched Shane assemble a sandwich. "Bless you, Harvey, wherever you are," Shane said. "It was Harvey who taught me all about lox and bagels. You remember Harvey?"

"I didn't know him, but I remember the day I had to tell you about his death in that traffic accident. I read his obit afterward."

Shane took a big bite, chewed, closed her eyes in bliss. When she could talk, she said, "Okay, the story of my life, chapter ten. About a month after Jenny died I got a call from a guy named Chase. He owned a skateboard shop in Venice Beach called

Wax

, and back when I was with Carmen he invited me to set up my own hairdressing shop in one of the bays, and he called it

Shane for Wax

. And it took off like crazy, mainly because Chase was such a great business guy. After two or three years the whole place burned down, it was arson, and it took a long time for the insurance company to finally decide Chase and I had nothing to do with it, and they paid up, so I got a sizable share of the settlement, and Chase got a much larger share because he was the majority owner."

"The arson was never solved," Lauren said.

"No, they never got anybody. But I know who did it. I knew from the night it happened."

"You want to say who?"

Shane shrugged. "I still don't

want

to say it, but I will. I think it was a woman I had an affair with, named Paige. Paige Sobel. Our break-up - well, it didn't go well, and she went a little off the deep end. When the arson investigators talked to me, they knew about her just from background checks on me. I didn't outright accuse her, because I had no evidence other than my own gut feeling, and they flat-out asked me, and the best I could tell them was maybe."

"You didn't want to give her up?"

"Not exactly that, no. I mean, if I was absolutely dead sure it was her, and had some evidence, I would have, because I loved that place and I was a great friend of Chase and I sure owed him a lot. But I just didn't have anything, and they knew about her anyway, so there was no point in me just jumping on the bandwagon without any evidence. And they wouldn't have the same faith in my instincts as Carmen does."

"Okay. So after Jenny's murder you got back in touch with Chase."

"No, he got in touch with me, about a month after. I'm glad he did. I was in a lot of trouble. Mentally, I mean. Jenny's ... ." Shane took a minute to get it together. "Her death. I took it hard. She and Harvey and Dana, three people I was close to ... ."

"Everybody says you feel things deeply. And it's not surprising that somebody's passing would affect you deeper than most. Of course, nobody faces the death of someone that close very well, we aren't supposed to take it well. But I hear what you're saying, you took it hard."

"Right, thank you. Exactly. That's what I'm no good saying, stuff like that. So yes, I was pretty fucked up. And one day out of the blue Chase calls me up and says 'Hey, I've got a business proposition for you. You know how you specialized in sugaring instead of bikini waxing?' And I said yes, what about it? See, Carmen was the one who taught me about it. Sugaring. And Chase says, 'Let's start a salon specializing in sugaring, with you out front as the spokesperson and main operator. We'll call it

Shane's Sugar Shack

.' And he says he's had some contacts with people out in the valley, you know, where there's lots of porn film studios and stuff, and porn actresses, and he says there's a billion bucks to be made sugaring all that twat-"

Lauren laughed and Shane grinned.

"Yeah, that's how he said it. He says, 'All the rich people out here have gardeners, right? Well, there's a fortune to be made trimming the bushes,' he says. 'Like

Shane for Wax

,' he says, 'I'll set it up, get the lease on a place, get you a shop set up. It'll be a full-service salon, you'll do hairdressing, too, but mainly you'll do the sugaring and teach some assistants to do it, too. And who knows, if it takes off like I think it will, we'll franchise, set up other salons around the region. Hollywood's not much different than the valley where hairless pussy is concerned,' he says - and keep in mind, this is a gay guy speaking, who has no interest whatsoever in pussy, shaved, hairy, trimmed or whatever. And you know how I am, I have to think things over a lot, like Carmen says - and he delivers the kicker. 'Shane,' he says, 'don't do this for the money, don't do it for me. Do it for yourself. Do it because you need it. You have to get your head out of your ass and immerse yourself in a project. This is that project, and we both know you'll be great at it. Shane,' he says, 'I can hire a thousand hairdressers and waxers and sugarpies and nail girls and whatever, but I can't hire a stand-in for Shane McCutcheon. Only Shane McCutcheon can commit to this. So think it over and get back to me. Hey, good talking to you, and I'm really sorry about Jenny. So pull your head out of your sorry butt and let's do something great together.' And he hangs up."

"Sugarpies, I love that," Lauren said. "Those are what you call your girls who do the sugaring."

"Right. Chase's idea, of course. It means both the girls who do the work as well as the sugared twats they work on. So anyway, despite what everybody says about me taking forever to process stuff, my gut, my instinct, right from the first moment was yes, go for it. But I dick around for an hour, waiting for some objection to pop up, and there's nothing, so I call him back and I say, let's go, when do I show up for work? And bang, it's like a whirlwind. We go out to the valley and scout locations and look at a dozen places, we pick one, we do the lease and all that stuff. We agree on a 60-40 split, him the 60 and me the 40 because without him even asking, I put up my arson settlement money and my inheritance from Harvey and I become what he calls a fiduciary partner, so I'm not an employee, I'm a part owner, an investor. And we rent a lot of equipment, which ironically a lot of came from Jaffe-Samchuk and Associates, the real estate tycoons in the valley porn business, which is funny because those were two guys from my ancient history, and I once had a thing with Steve Jaffe's wife. Maybe you've heard of her, she goes by Cheri Peroni now after the divorce-"

"Yes, I think I do know her, slightly, anyway. I think I once went on a disturbance call at their house, there was a wild party, too much noise. We took a guy out in handcuffs for drunk and disorderly. Cheri's a big shot in town, and her daughter has been busted a couple of times. A messed-up rich kid with absentee parents, not exactly an unusual story in LA."

"That's Cleo. Yeah."

Lauren didn't say anything but arched an eyebrow.

"No, we didn't," Shane said quietly. "She wanted to. And then she told her parents we did, but we didn't it, was a lie." She sighed. "It was a mess. I see her around once in a while, in a club or someplace. As far as I'm concerned, she radioactive, she's Kryptonite. We nod, we say hello, but there's no fucking way. Sometimes when we get older we get smarter, you know? Not a lot smarter, but just a wee little bit. And she's my wee little bit of stay away, stay far fucking away."

"Learning curve," Lauren said. They'd long finished eating and were on their second cup of coffee.

"Yeah. My curve probably isn't near as curvy as it ought to be, but it does curve a little, it bends. It's not a real good curve, kind of a squiggle with maybe some corkscrewing. Maybe a kink, here and there. But at least it's not flat-lined."

"Good to know. Back to

Shane's Sugar Shack

."

"So anyway, the place is booked solid and I'm working sixty, seventy hours a week, I'm coming home at ten, eleven at night and collapsing into bed with my clothes on. And here's where Chase is a genius. I mean he is a pure, grade-A genius. He says, 'I want to restrict you to about 15 hours a week doing sugaring on actual clients, and we may even dial it back further to ten hours. Mainly you'll teach and mentor and help manage, be available on site to meet-and-greet and schmooze, and there will be a lot of off-site promotion, visiting studio people, telling them about our services. When you do a sugar job, we'll charge a premium for your personal services, so we can bill your actual sugaring sessions sky-high because you'll be very hard to schedule an appointment with.'"

"What's 'sky-high' mean? Just curious."

Shane grinned. "I'm glad you're sitting down. I almost feel bad about what I charge. I get seven hundred bucks a session. That's seven hundred an hour, more or less."

"Jesus Christ."

"Yeah. I've got a handful of personal clients, some very famous names in the porn industry and a couple from Hollywood, names you'd know, but client confidentiality, et cetera. Chase is very big on us being discreet. And those women, they don't give a shit what I charge, because it's a business expense, just like hairdressing or anything else they do that's work-related, and it's somebody's tax write-off, the studio's, or whoever. I mean, when my session is done they don't even pay me or pay up at the register or anything, we do their billing separately, they can walk in the door without a dime in their pockets, so they really don't give a shit, and somebody in the office bills them. I think there's one or two clients who don't even know what we charge. That was all Chase, too. I'd have never come up with that strategy in a hundred years. And Chase says, 'Here's another thing about keeping you hard-to-get. If you work too much, like you've been doing up to now, and if you do too many people, if you're humping your ass off working forty, fifty hours a week, which you easily could be, you'll burn out. You'll go four, six months, and you'll never want to look at another pussy ever again.' Then he laughs and says, "Okay, maybe not you, but you'd never want to look at another pot of sugar mix or a sugar spatula, right? So we want you in this for the long haul. We need to keep you fresh.'"

"You're right," Lauren said. "He sounds like one sharp guy."

"He is. And here's another thing he did that takes my breath away. Even though I personally charge so much money, he tries really hard to keep the prices for all the other sugarpies down pretty reasonable. He did a ton of work getting competitive prices on waxing and other services, so we'd know what women were paying. And I said, so we undercut the price of waxing by five bucks, right? And he says no. He says we charge ten bucks more, just enough to keep us in the game, and we stress that we're worth the extra five bucks because we're way less painful, and five bucks more because we're all-natural, we're organic, but we're still affordable. Not that a porn actress with silicon tits cares about all-natural, but a lot of the Hollywood women do. Or say they do. I mean, you stick the word organic on something, anything, you know? We even have a joke, maybe we should advertise as being gluten-free. But organic, that's all sugar and lemon are, right? So Chase says, 'I don't want a single customer to think about making a choice between us or a waxer and deciding on the waxer because it's cheaper. I want them to decide on us because for the extra ten bucks they won't be screaming in pain, they won't walk away with a hot, irritated, raw, red pussy.' And then he said two other things that were genius."

"I'm all ears."

"He says, 'We're not going to promote

Shane's Sugar Shack

as being mainly for porn stars. We aren't even going to mention porn stars, even though they'll be our bread-and-butter at first. We're going to promote ourselves as being the shop for the average girl, the average woman, the girl on roller skates on Venice Beach boardwalk, the mainline Hollywood people and all the thousands of Hollywood wannabes working as waitresses and script girls and paralegals and whatever else they do while they're waiting to become famous. Working girls waiting to be discovered, girls on a tight budget but who know they need the trim. That's partly why we'll charge reasonable, affordable prices.' And he says, 'And here's the last thing. Women have hair lots of places, not just their pussies. And so we are going to learn how to do the best job we can with hair removal other places, arms, legs, armpits, eyebrows, women with those little moustaches they can't get rid of, anyplace hair's a problem. We are going to explore the outer boundaries of sugaring, see how far we can go with it. I don't want us to get into laser removal, because that's a whole different ballgame, but I want us to do the best we can, and if we can't help a woman out, then we should be happy to refer them to lasering or whatever. But we want them to come to us first, we want to be the first place they think if they have a problem.' So that was what he called our business model."

"Wow," Lauren said. "No wonder you're so successful."

"Yep. And that's all Chase, one hundred percent. We opened a second shop at the other end of the valley, and then one in the heart of the Hollywood studios, one in Burbank, one in Venice. He's looking at a couple other sites, even thinking about San Francisco and San Diego. So I spend a lot of time on the road, traveling from one shop to another, doing training and PR and stuff. And you know what Chase did? You ever see that movie,

The Lincoln Lawyer

, the one about the criminal lawyer who does all his work from a car?"

"Sure. There was an actress in it looks a little bit like you."

"Yeah, people tell me that. I don't see it, but what the hell. Anyway, Chase has a car and a driver, and he operates like that, too, because he's traveling around so much, pretty often with me, and we use all that down time in the car to make calls, have meetings, go over the books and schedules and shit like that. We both work out of his car when we're not on site. I don't even have an office, and he has one but he's almost never in it."

"What's he say about you taking all this time for the investigation?"

"Oh, he's cool with it. He knows what I'm doing and why, and he even knows and likes Alice. He says I've been working my ass off and I need some down time, away from the job, and so, if I'm gone a little while,

Shane's Sugar Shacks

and the sugarpies keep on clicking."

"Well, good. And I'm glad your business has taken off so well."

"Thanks. I wonder what's keeping Carmen? She's Miss Punctuality."

"I texted her this morning and asked her to give us a little more time together. I'm going to call her when we're done to set up the rest of our day."

"Oh. Okay."

"So let's talk about the other thing I wanted to know about."

"Me and Jenny."

"Yes."

Shane sighed, playing with her fingers.

"Need more coffee?" Lauren asked.

"No. Maybe some iced tea."

Lauren held up her hand to signal the waitress, and they sat quietly until after it arrived.

"Jenny," Shane said.

"Jenny," Lauren said. "And you."

"What do you want to know?"

"Let's start with the basics. How long did you know her?"

"Mmm, six years, I guess. Since almost immediately after she and Tim moved out here. After they split I became her roommate. I lived with her about five years. There was a period of seven or eight months when she went back to Illinois. She became my best friend, she and Alice."

"How long were you lovers?"

"Just the last month or two. There was nothing all that time before that. Never crossed my mind, frankly. I don't think it ever crossed hers, either."

"Until one day it did. Was that you or her?"

"Her. I never saw it coming. I ... ."

"Yes?"

Shane slowly shook her head, still playing with her fingers. "It was weird, that last month or two. It's like ... I don't know. This will sound crazy. It's like I was hypnotized, or something. Like I had lost my willpower. I should never have started ... you know. Sleeping with her. For one thing, it ruined a great friendship, and it's not like I didn't know that would happen. Ask anybody: For years I had, like, a motto, a mantra, that I don't fuck my roommates. All our friends, I know they think I lost my mind, Alice more than anybody, and you know, they were right, of course. I did lose my mind, I guess, but I can't tell you why. I have no idea what happened. In my head, I mean. Or hers. Although I can tell you this much, Jenny kinda went slowly batshit crazy over the last year or two herself."

"How so?"

"Well, I'm the last person who should be talking about psychology and stuff, because I don't know anything about it—"

"I think Carmen and some other people would disagree. Go ahead, sorry I interrupted."

"What I was going to say was, it's been my experience most people are pretty stable, you know? They don't change much. Sometimes that's a problem, like with me. But most of the time it seems to be okay. Alice hasn't changed one iota, she still the same old Alice she always was, and I love her to death, even though she seems all over the map. And she's been through some tough losses, too, with partners. But the point is, she's still the same woman I've known for a decade. Sure, high drama and high maintenance, but that's not the same as unstable, you know? Bette and Tina. They've been through a lot of shit, too, and maybe you could argue Tina drifts back and forth into bisexuality, but she's been that way forever, always will be. Carmen is pretty much the same, straight ahead, steady as a rock, what you see is what you get. And I mean that as compliments."

"Sure. But Jenny."

"Yes. But Jenny." Shane thought a moment. "She started off as this meek, clueless, innocent type, Tim's girlfriend, straight as an arrow. Alice called her the Country Mouse, whatever that means, it's from a book, I think. But Jenny said she wanted to be a writer and she had all these demons, that's what she called them. I don't know if you know this, but she was raped, or sexually assaulted, back in Illinois when she was about ten or eleven years old. Carmen says that messed her up pretty good, and she never got any help or therapy, and I can't disagree it messed her up, and shit, no, it's not her fault. So anyway, turns out she has this real manipulative streak, and she was never innocent in spite of the image she projected. She sucked a lot of cock in high school and college, it turns out, despite this goody two-shoes image she had. And she could be sneaky, devious. And mean. Not to me, but to other people. Well, I guess to me, too, once. Finally one day she had this mental breakdown, Carmen and I found her in the bathroom, cutting her legs with a razor blade. That's when we took her to the hospital and they put her in the psych ward for a couple days then she went back to Illinois for seven or eight months for treatment, she was in some kind of sanitarium or whatever they call them. Mental hospital, that's what it was."