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“Theoretically,” “Ryan agreed, “although being away doesn’t preclude him from hiring someone to kill his wife.”
“Right,” Jessie said, “but until he gets back and we question him, I think we should look into other angles: possible business conflicts, dustups with friends, potential illicit romantic interests gone wrong. Let’s hope there’s something here that will offer us some clues.”
“It’s all we have to go on right now,” Ryan noted, “considering the damage to her phone. Until we can access her cloud data, there’s no way to look at look at her calls, texts, or appointments.”
“Well, maybe her assistant can offer us some help on that front,” Jessie suggested as they walked down the path to the front door of the house. Now that they were closer, she could see the place better through the mist. It was a large Tudor-style mansion, common in this part of Brentwood. It was impressive but not ostentatious.
They reached the front door, and Ryan rang the bell. Within seconds, the door was opened by a young woman wearing a floral dress with puffy, tear-stained eyes and curly black hair.
“Detective Hernandez?” she asked meekly.
“Yes,” he confirmed, “and this is Jessie Hunt. Are you Melinda?”
“I am,” she told him, opening the door wide, “please come in.”
Melinda Dupree was Ava Martell’s administrative assistant at her production company. Ryan had gotten hold of her when calling the woman’s office. He was the one who had to break the news of Ava’s death to her. After several emotional minutes, the assistant had agreed to meet them at Ava’s house.
“The production office is only five minutes away from here,” Melinda, who couldn’t have been more than a year or two out of college, said. "So, I got here a while ago. I’ve been collating all the info you asked for on her recent meetings. But I only used my records. As you requested, I didn’t go into any interior areas of the house. I’ve been sitting here in the foyer until you arrived. Do you want me to take you to her home office?”
“That would be good,” Ryan said.
They followed her down a long hallway that ran along the front of the house, past a dining room, a formal living room, and a billiard room, before it ended at a closed door.
“This is Ava’s office,” she said, opening the door to reveal a giant, wood-paneled space with two large desks.
“Does she share it with her husband?” Jessie wondered.
“No,” Melinda replied. “Mr. Buhner’s office is at the other end of the hall. They used to share this one, but Ava told me that her husband could get…vocal in phone meetings and that it was too distracting. So they converted the small sitting room into a second office. He doesn’t use it much anyway.”
“Did Ava use hers a lot?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah,” Melinda told her. “I’d say she worked from here a good three-quarters of the time. She mostly used the official office for taking meetings. But this is where she did the majority of the real work. When we were really hunkered down on a project, we’d settle in here. I’d use the extra desk.”
“Let’s go back to something you mentioned earlier,” Jessie said. “You said that Mr. Buhner could be ‘vocal’ on the phone. What did you mean by that?”
Melinda shrugged uncertainly.
“Just that when he was on business calls, he could sometimes get really boisterous. I wouldn’t say he had the best sense of personal volume control. It could be distracting.”
“Is that what it was—distracting?” Jessie wondered. “Or could it sometime be more than that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did his boisterousness ever slip into aggression?” Jessie clarified.
“Oh, I see,” Melinda said, looking slightly embarrassed that she hadn't picked up on the subtext until now. "I can't speak to what happened when I wasn't around, of course, but not that I know of. He never raised his voice to Ava in my presence. And I never saw anything that made me think he might be violent. He was just loud, which Ava found annoying when she was trying to talk to someone about a project. Hearing some guy shouting in the background kind of messed up the collaborative vibe, you know?”
“Sure,” Jessie told her. “Speaking of projects, did anything she was working on recently cause conflicts that you’re aware of? Any creative differences that got heated? Any deals that fell apart and left ill will, that sort of thing?”
Melinda smiled with a hint of condescension.
“There were heated arguments about creative issues all the time,” she said. “It’s par for the course in this industry. But it was always about the material. I don’t recall it ever being personal. In fact, it was the people that Ava mixed it up with the most who she did her best work with. Looking back, I’d say the least volatile collaborations usually resulted in far less compelling films. But like I said, every argument was about making the material better. There were never any hard feelings after the fact.”
“Okay,” Jessie said, “what about her being the child of television stars who were fabulously wealthy? Any resentment over that?”
Melinda smiled again, but this time without the condescension. Her expression was filled with wistful warmth.
“You know, I never heard her bring up her family history once on her own,” she said. “In fact, I had no idea who she was until I’d been working for her for six months. There was an issue with the guest bathroom, so she told me to use the one in her bedroom. I just happened to see a photo of her with her parents on the bedroom dresser from the set of their show. I had to ask her what it was all about because I was just a baby when the series was on. She told me but made it seem like no big deal. It was only when I looked up the show later that I realized how big a hit it was. She was like that with everyone. Unless someone mentioned it, she never referenced the show or her parents involvement with it. And as to her wealth, I’m not sure many people knew about that either. Since she made small, independent pictures, most people didn’t make the connection to her family history. She never flaunted anything. Her other office isn’t anything extravagant. She didn’t stick out, especially not in this town.”
