Dark Days – The second book in the Deann Dark series, written by Blaine DeLano and featuring ex-police detective Deann Dark, now a private investigator.
The first murder in the book was of Amelia Benson, a young actress who held a series of jobs, as her acting income didn’t pay the rent. She had ambitions, some talent, and considerable energy. Every week she went to a classic vid to study, as she hoped, one day, to be a star of stage and screen. One rainy Wednesday, in a nearly empty theater while she watched Grace Kelly thwart an attempt on her life in Dial M for Murder, Amelia’s ended with an ice pick through the base of the skull. Her body was found when they brought the houselights up after the credits. The killer, of course, had long since left the building.
The killer, a failing screenwriter, was paid to kill Benson by the lover of an actress up for the same part in exchange for backing his script - a friend of the lover was a producer who agreed to produce the manuscript once the actress was killed. The screenwriter/killer had no connection to the actress/victim, had never met her, but the screenwriter and the producer had a falling out when the producer went low budget and ended up killing the screenwriter. The producer set it up to look like suicide - he got the screenwriter drunk and hanged him, typing a note on the computer.
However, Dark was already looking at the producer as the murderer, and the screenwriter had left the outline of a new script on the same computer as the fake suicide note, which mirrored the deal that was made and the killing.[1]
Chanel Rylan, an actress with at least one other job (waiter at Broadway Babies) was killed during the shower scene at a showing of a different Hitchcock film, Psycho, at the Vid Galaxy, with an ice pick to the base of her neck.[2] DeLano recognized the similarities and had already pegged an earlier murder as similar to the one in the first Deann Dark book, Dark Falls, so she came into Central to tell Eve.[3]
Amelia Benson had talked about going to the vid in her dance class, in the workshop she was part of, and on her social media. She admired Grace Kelly particularly, and had never seen the vid. She had a friend planning to attend with her but the friend received a text minutes before the show start, purportedly from the restaurant where she worked as a line cook, citing a staff emergency and instructing her to come in and cover. Meanwhile, the killer skipped from one theater to the other and after the killing, back into the first theater, where he left with the crowd exiting the other theater.
In the book, Benson’s mother had hired Dark because she believed her daughter’s former lover did the deed, despite being cleared by the police, Hightower specifically, as he had a solid alibi for the time in question.[4]
The killer was Justin Werth in the book. Ann Elizabeth Smith felt that DeLano skimmed over the details, and Smith didn’t - she designed the reversible coat and left the theater before the end, blending with the crowd from another theater as they left. Justin Werth didn’t kill only from desperation, a desperate need to see his work produced. In Smith’s character, there was also greed, a stronger motivator. In her version he wasn’t hired or bribed to kill - she blended him into a stronger, slyer man by merging two inferior characters (the screenwriter and the boyfriend). In Smith’s version, the part his lover and Amelia Benson competed for was a star-maker - it would make her not only famous but rich, and he’d benefit, so she imbued him with glee when he killed Benson. She enjoyed writing the part about the injured dog, imagining it to be a young German shepherd mix named Prince.[5]
References:
- ↑ Dark in Death, Chapter 5
- ↑ Dark in Death, Chapter 1
- ↑ Dark in Death, Chapter 4
- ↑ Dark in Death, Chapter 9
- ↑ Dark in Death, Chapter 22