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“Not much,” he said, without a whiff of pride or shame. “I get a lot of sex. I like it. It’s fun, and after, I’m really relaxed. I’m okay that Marlo wants to be with Matthew. Somebody else will want to be with me, right?”
Hard to argue, she thought, with someone who seemed to think sex was as simple and available as a fizzy at the corner 24/7. And for him, maybe it was.
When Peabody walked in, Julian visibly winced, then looked down at the table.
“Peabody, Detective Delia, entering Interview. Thanks for coming in, Julian,” Peabody continued. “Do you want anything? Something to drink?”
He shook his head, then glanced at her. “Actually, could I have some water? I’m pushing fluids.”
“No problem.” Peabody recorded her exit.
“You didn’t want to let Harris into your trailer yesterday,” Eve continued. “Why is that?”
“She was yelling. I didn’t want a confrontation.”
“What did she have to confront you about?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” He dropped his head in his hands again. “It was always something with her.”
Peabody came back, set a bottle of water on the table by Julian.
“What was she holding over your head, Julian? That was another always something with her. What did she say she’d do if you refused to lie about Marlo?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Eve glanced at Peabody, nodded slightly.
“Julian.” Peabody reached out, and when she touched Julian’s hand, he pulled back.
“Sorry.” He glanced up, looked down again. “It—you—remind me.”
“But I’m not K.T. I’m not going to yell at you, or threaten you, or say things to make you feel bad. She did that. To you. To a lot of people.”
“I don’t know why some people can’t just be nice. Be happy.”
“She wasn’t happy, and she wasn’t nice. And she always looked for the bad side. Everybody’s got a bad side, or something they don’t want other people to know. She liked to find out, and then use that to make someone hurt, or to pressure them to do something they didn’t want. What did she find out about you?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Okay.”
“And it wasn’t my fault.”
“I believe you.”
“We were clubbing. I’d just landed the lead in Forgiven. It was mega, a career-maker, so a bunch of us were celebrating. We’d partied pretty hard all night. Drinking, illegals. I don’t do them anymore, but I did. Maybe a little zoner or Hype, something was always right there, like party favors. Women, too. Just there.”
“Forgiven. That came out about ten years ago. You were really young,” Peabody said in that same understanding tone. “Hardly twenty.”
“Twenty-three. It was a major break, a lot of money. We were all high from celebrating, and at this sex club. In and out of the privacy rooms, you know how you do.” He shrugged, drank some water.
“Sure,” Peabody agreed, though she didn’t.
“Then we went back to my place, and some of the women came so we could party some more. And two of them went back to my room with me. In the morning, they’re still there. We just passed out together after. And this guy’s at the door, and he’s screaming. How he’s going to kill me. One of the girls is his daughter. She’s sixteen. Both of them are fucking sixteen.”
He covered his face with his hands, rubbed hard before he dropped them. “How was I supposed to know? They shouldn’t have been in the club. They had bogus IDs, and they said they were twenty-one. I didn’t make them have sex with me. I didn’t force them. But I bought them drinks, I gave them illegals, I had sex with them. If I’d known they were only sixteen I wouldn’t have. I swear. They didn’t look sixteen or act sixteen, and they were in a sex club and all over me.
“He said he was calling the cops, having me arrested for statutory rape. Everybody’s screaming, and he slapped his kid. He really hit her hard, and he jumped me when I tried to stop him from hitting her again. My buddies dragged him off. The girls are hysterical. One of my friends is a lawyer, and he started talking all this legal shit about how the girls were going to end up in juvie, and this guy was going up for assault. It just got worse and worse.”
