Page 23 of The Perfect Poise

“Can you take us to her?” Ryan asked.

“Of course,” Frank said before adding unnecessarily, “let’s take the stairs.”

“Is she okay?” Jessie asked as they made their way up to the first floor.

“I think so,” Frank answered. “She was pretty shaken up and got quite distraught when I started asking questions, so the EMTs took her to the ambulance. They gave her some oxygen because she was hyperventilating. She was calmer when I left.”

They reached the top of the stairs and headed over to the back of the ambulance. Sergeant Frank knocked on the door and a young, muscular EMT with longish blond who looked more like a surfer than a medical professional opened it.

“Hey Jaz,” Sergeant Frank said, before looking over at the young woman, who was lying on the stretcher, “I have some investigators who’d like to talk to Ms. Bertoni.”

“Are you up for that?” Jaz asked the woman, as if he could stop them if he wanted.

She nodded and, with his help, slowly eased herself up to a seated position. Jessie studied the woman. Monica Bertoni had dark pixie-cut hair and sharp angular features. Her brown eyes were puffy from crying and her skin had a paleness that Jessie suspected wasn’t typical for her most of the time. She looked to be in her early thirties.

“Hi Monica,” she said, “is it okay if I call you Monica?”

The woman nodded weakly.

“Thanks,” Jessie said, climbing into the ambulance and kneeling by the stretcher. “My name is Jessie, and this is Detective Hernandez.”

“I recognize you,” Monica said hoarsely. “That’s why I’m okay to talk. You’re Jessie Hunt, the one who caught all those killers.”

“With a lot of help,” Jessie said, moving quickly past her celebrity status, “and we want to do the same for Isabella—catch her killer. Can you tell us why she was here seeing you?”

“Yeah,” Monica said, “she was hoping to move beyond modeling by starting her own fashion line. She asked if she could practice pitch me on her presentation to the major designers that she was hoping to generate interest from.”

“How did it go?” Jessie asked, trying to ease the woman into the questioning.

"Pretty well," Monica said, offering a wan smile at the memory. "She was nervous at first but got better. She left the clothes here, and we agreed that she’d run through the whole thing again on Thursday. We were going to tape that go-round to pick it apart. She really wanted it to be perfect. She thought that this could be her way to transition out of modeling altogether.”

“She didn’t like it?” Ryan asked.

“I think she’d outgrown it,” Monica said. “Izzie was really smart, got a BFA in Fashion Design from the Parsons School. But nobody took her seriously, partly because she’s super-hot, and also because of her father being so rich. I mean, she had so much money that she could have just hung out on her yacht and popped bon-bons all day, but she was really ambitious. She wanted to make her mark.”

That description of her wealth matched what Beth had told them on the drive over. Apparently her father was worth billions, and she had a couple of hundred million to her name as well. That would plant her squarely in the same ultra-high-net-worth community as Chloe Baptiste. Jessie couldn’t help but wonder if there was a connection there that might be relevant. Then again, maybe it wasn’t as complicated as that label. In basic terms, these were both super-rich, well-known women. That might be the link all by itself.

“Did she travel in those circles a lot?” she wondered, “you know, the crazy rich, yacht-loving, bon-bon eating crowd?”

Monica shrugged.

“Sure,” she said, “some of the time. But not always. I may have my own boutique and fashion line, but I’m certainly not swimming in that pool, and we were pretty tight. Weirdly, I don’t think she cared about money that much. I guess that can happen when you have so much of it. But she would cut people loose if they were too materialistic. I mean, that’s what she did with Marcus.”

“Who’s Marcus?” Ryan asked.

“Marcus Blackwell,” Monica said. “He’s her ex.”

Jessie recognized the name immediately. Marcus Blackwell was a self-made tech billionaire who had moved to L.A. from the Bay Area a couple of years ago. But he wasn’t just known for owning the mega-company called BEING, whose holdings included multiple hugely popular websites and social media platforms. He was also notorious for his anger management issues, having assaulted a waiter after a few too many drinks at a restaurant and for ramming his Ferrari into the car of an actor who had once called him a scourge on society.

“So ending things was her decision?” Jessie asked.

“Yeah, she dumped him hard,” Monica recalled. “She told me that he looked stunned. No one had talked to him in that way in forever.”

“What exactly did she say?” Ryan asked, as if he was simply interested in the gossip and not fishing for a motive for murder.

“She told him that it wasn’t the fact that he was twice her age that put her off. It was that he judged people like property, assessing their value based on their looks or their income. She told him he was the most shallow man she’d ever met, and considering who she knew, that was saying a lot.”

“Wow,” Jessie said. “How did he take that?”

---