Personally, I blame Nancy Grace. Sure, she's the go-to gal when your kid turns up missing -- provided you're not shacking up with some drifter who's got nasty teeth and a checkered past. Me, I had no use at all for her two favorite guests these days, Zach and Zoey Armbruster, the morbidly obese yet freakishly telegenic brother-sister criminal defense team representing the charming young doctor caught in the act of dismembering my roommate.
"The police investigation stinks, Nancy!" Zach barked. "It's a big smelly wheel of contaminated cheese!" Zoey yelped. "There's no evidence of any homicide," said he. "It's is a minor case of corpse abuse," clucked she. "Minimum five." "Maximum ten." "Boom, all she wrote."There's something seriously sketchy about getting double-teamed by a set of fraternal twins. Demanding that "false" "premature" and "salacious" murder charges against UCLA surgical resident Dr. J.D. Hollister be dropped, they flew around the courtroom like one of those sibling ice skating duos spending a tad too much time with their hands in each others' crotches.
"I deeply loved and respected hashtag Strawberry Margarita," the accused tweeted at reporter Josh Mankiewicz hashtag DatelineNBC, over the repeated objections of the plus-sized twinset mounting his novel defense."I know that sounds crazy but it's true.
"Let's you and I sit down and talk about the hashtag deadhollywoodstripper," the unflappably congenial true crime icon tweeted back. Network sweeps period during the beautiful month of May here in Hollywood is no time to go and get all judgy on your friendly neighborhood necrophiliac.
Even crack FBI profiler Dr. Allison Knowles -- married to the popular, camera-friendly police captain who'd overseen Hollister's arrest -- had to acknowledge some remote plausibility to the suspect's story. "He prefers the company of dead women," was her favored juicy soundbyte. "He's not particularly interested in how they got that way.""Somebody killed her before I got to her window that night," the serial peeping tom told Mankiewicz over the phone from his private cell at Parker Center. "My first instinct was to get her out of there." This exclusive interview required the services of a translator, as Hollister was a deaf-mute who'd bucked big odds to become a top surgeon. "I can't explain exactly what happened from there," he signed, pressing a hand against the glass to meet that of his tearful fiancee's. A former Miss USA and dot com millionairess funding the most expensive defense in the history of jurisprudence, the nutty little media whore performed like a champ. "Obviously I have certain dark impulses I'm committed to confronting in therapy," Hollister signed with balletic grace. "It's really a private matter between me and my future wife."
"Oh pah-leez," drawled a disgusted Nancy grace, re-playing the footage until everyone's ears bled. "Somebody get me a tissue so I don't spew a big old honkin' noseful of my own mucous into camera one."The captain hadn't squired me inside his Baja hideaway more than ten minutes before the evening cable news cycle began to poke multiple holes in the increasingly twisted case. The victim, a failed actress, all-nude dancer and cast-off Hollywood call girl, had allegedly flirted with suicide -- with rumored involvement in drug trafficking, racketeering and internet porn. "Does any of that have even the slightest ring of truth?" the captain asked me. "Not a word," I lied. I was starting to get really good at that, considering I wasn't exactly fluent in legalese. "She had a few issues, but Rita was no racketeer. Sheesh."
Growling her catch phrase, "This! Just! In!," Jane Velez-Mitchell tracked down the boozy excuse for a trailer trash mother Rita had neither seen nor spoken to since shortly after exiting her vagina. "I think I'll pass on that guacamole," I told the captain, suddenly feeling queasy. If there was any thought of forbidden romance lingering between us after our windswept road trip south of the border -- the mood buzzed right out of his pants with a frantic series of pages. "I have to go," he said, heading for the door."What? You can't just leave me here!"
"You'll be alright. I'll be back in a couple of days."
I mean, for real? Not a half hour earlier, the guy had practically been feeling me up in his wife's car with the flimsy excuse that "it's complicated," and now he was gone with out a word? Guess I wasn't the only one telling little white lies.
The real kicker would be my learning of the suspiciously coincidental mob hit on Rita's landlord -- which the captain had run off to investigate -- only after Internal Affairs brought me in for questioning. Yet to be outed as the leggy "LAPDitz" behind the rumored cover-up of Hollister's botched arrest, I took a step back and considered my next move. Could it really be true that someone other than Hollister had killed Rita? Whether or not I could trust the captain to clear anybody's name but his own around the mess we were making together, I'd have to figure out exactly who and what I was running from to stay alive through November sweeps.
