July Jill's Justice: A Xara Smith Mystery

July Jill's Justice

A Xara Smith Mystery By Bill McGrath

Copyright 2011 Bill McGrath

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Xara Smith Mysteries By Bill McGrath

Available on Smashwords.com:

January Juggling The Jentons

February At Feldman’s On Fifth

March Of The Mustangs

April At The Antique Alley

May Might Mean Murder

June Jumping the Jaguar

July Jill's Justice

August Avenging Arlene

September Surgeon Shamed

October Octagon Occult

November Naughty Nurse

December Deadly Dolls

CHAPTER-01.

Please forgive me for submitting this report myself. I am not Xara Smith. I am not she who runs Xara Smith Discrete Investigations. I am but her humble employee, business partner, housemate, and best friend; Jill Stepho. I would prefer that Xara herself write and submit this report, but she can not do so. She is currently in a coma in the Intensive Care Unit of Baylor Hospital, which is on Highway 183 in Irving, Texas, just about a mile down from the house we share and use as our offices.

Yesterday, after what we thought was successfully wrapping up a case, we were filming a stunt for a movie, and something went wrong; terribly wrong. Xara and I had been sent in by the producers of the movie to work undercover and protect their investment in the film. They had expected some sabotage trying to prevent them from completing the movie.

There had been several threats during the filming of the movie, but Xara cleverly exposed the bad guy and his lifeless body now rests in the same hospital but three floors beneath the ICU in the morgue. With the bad guy dead, and with just one scene left to film, we thought we were in the clear so decided to go ahead and complete the filming of the movie. We were wrong. I am tempted to say that we were dead wrong but I do not wish to confuse you.

In the final stunt, Xara would be the stunt double for the leading lady in the film, and our good friend, Tony Tornado, would be the stunt double for the leading man. The stunt we were supposed to film was a spectacular event where Tony and Xara were to supposedly drive a Jaguar convertible into an erupting volcano escaping by parachute. I know, it was a cheesy plot for a cheesy movie. Anyway, the movie set provided us with three cars to drive up the man-made ramp to be filmed in. The camera operators would film it three times so that they would make sure we got at least one good shot for the movie. There were three separate cars because the car would actually get wrecked during the stunt.

What was supposed to happen was that as Tony and Xara get to the top of the ramp, they would bail out of the falling car and land off-camera on an air bag. The first take went perfect, and oh how I wish they had quit there. On the second take, the car got half way up the ramp, and before either Xara or Tony could bail out, the car exploded. The saboteur had placed a bomb in the car set to go off when the car reached sixty miles an hour. He had placed it in the driver's door of the car, so Xara Smith was blown out of the car and severely injured, but Tony Tornado, who was driving, was not so lucky. His body landed in several large but separate chunks. So in Xara's case we had been wrong, but in Tony's, it is fair to say that we were dead wrong.

I do so hope that you will forgive my fumbling around here, but I really do not even know how to start this report. I suppose I should tell you a bit about myself first, and then I will give you a full report on the current condition of my friend and employer, Xara Smith.

My name is Jill Stepho. I am twenty-two years old, five-feet and four inches tall, slender, weighing but a hundred and ten pounds. I have reddish brown hair, but in truth, I love Clairol and change the color of my hair quite often. Sometimes it appears very brunette, sometimes quite red, often blond with lots of dark highlights. Of course my hair color is quite unimportant to this report so you will probably figure out here that I am stalling simply because I do not know what to say next, and I have quite a lot to tell you, I just do not yet have it all clear in my head.

Six months ago, in January, I would have to say I was a waitress in a restaurant that my father owns and I had no interests or excitements in my life. Then in February one of the kitchen workers at the restaurant, who spoke only Spanish needed to hire a detective for something that had come up in her personal life. Because I am bilingual I agreed to take the kitchen worker to meet the detective. That is when the kitchen worker and I first met Xara Smith. With my help, Miss Smith solved that mystery and she and I have been good friends ever since. I sort of helped Xara on her next assignment, and have officially been her business partner and employee since March.

The State of Texas does have some laws and regulations that must be followed, so I have just been through the licensing process and now find myself officially a private detective who is employed by Xara Smith Discrete Investigations, but basically I am brand new at this detective stuff. In fact, Xara and I were just recently talking about perhaps me taking on an assignment by myself. I would make all of the decisions, but would, of course, be able to get advice from her as the case went on. I would like to state here clearly though that I have not yet taken that first solo flight. Now I find myself alone to make decisions and quite unable to do so.

Xara, as I said, was blown from a convertible during a stunt. Her life was saved by a simple piece of physics. The driver of the car, Tony Tornado, was directly between the explosion and Xara, so his body caught most of the deadly shrapnel from the bomb. As good as that was for Xara, it was fatal for Tony. At the very instant of the explosion the car was being driven up a ramp so it was about twenty feet above the ground. The explosion blew her sideways where she traveled through the air about sixty feet, landed on a slight hill, rolled up the hill several revolutions, rolled back down the hill a few feet, and came to rest.

Her costume for the stunt was a wedding dress, but that was worn over a safety suit that was supposed to be fireproof. The wedding dress was on fire when she hit the hill, but the couple of revolutions that she rolled pretty much put the flames out.

Emergency crews got to her almost immediately, and within an hour of the explosion she was in the ICU. That was twenty hours ago, and I just left the hospital to take care of some immediate needs.

Currently she is in a coma and quite unconscious. Her lower left leg is broken. Both hips were dislocated, but they have already been snapped back into place. Her right arm is broken just above the wrist, and her left arm has multiple fractures in it. I guess that is not too surprising because her left side was facing Tony and the bomb when it exploded. At least two ribs are cracked or broken. It is too early to determine just what type of internal injuries she has, but the doctors have told me to not be too surprised to find that there are some serious things inside to be dealt with. There were, of course, many small cuts and from them considerable blood loss. Her pretty face is bruised almost beyond recognition, and a good portion of her long beautiful blond hair has burned away. The doctors list her current condition as critical but stabilizing. The coma was natural, and she is on a heavy morphine drip, so they do not make any estimate as to when she may be awake enough to speak with, if ever. She is not out of the woods and only time will tell.

For any that care, the stunt they were filming was the very last scene that needed to be filmed to complete the movie, and the explosion happened on Take-II. Take-I, which went off without any trouble at all, may be good enough to complete the movie. As far as I know a final decision on that has not been made.

Being the business partner and best friend, I have many little tasks now that must be taken care of. Xara's car is still at the movie studio, and I must figure out how to get it home. I was the one to call Xara's girlfriend, Jana Little, and Jana is now at the hospital crying her eyes out. I must get to the office to find Xara's parent's contact information and then make a dreaded phone call to people I have never even met in person. Xara has a basic health plan and I must do some very necessary paperwork for them. Our good friend, Detective Eric Samuels of the Dallas Police Department, wants to talk to me, and I really want to talk with him. Technically Xara had joined SAG(Screen Actor's Guild), which is a union for actors, when she went under cover on the movie set, so I must talk with the SAG representative and do whatever reporting and paper work they need. I haven't eaten in twenty-four hours, and I am not feeling hungry, but I know I need to consume some food. I am tired and want a nap, but I am too wide awake to even consider going to sleep. Oh, and there is one other little task I must now perform that I am not prepared for; I must find the one responsible for this and make sure he pays tenfold.

I must give you just a bit more background so that you will understand my next action. Last month, when we started the undercover assignment to guard the assets of the movie producers, I had noticed Xara taking notes on a steno pad. I fully understood why she was taking notes, but she was supposed to be pretending she was a stunt actor in a movie, and it just seemed to me that taking notes all the time was very out of character for a stunt double. Therefore, I took Xara to an electronics store and purchased for her an electronic voice recorder, and I got a matching model for myself. From a distance, I expected that if you saw a stunt actress speaking into a small electronic device, you would assume she was just on her cell phone, and that is something that would definitely be in character for a person making their living as a stunt double in the movies.

Now I will try to keep it short here, but I must continue for a few more words. There was a bad guy who had been hired to sabotage the movie. His name was Stefan Gruber. Gruber posed as a writer/reporter for movie magazines, which cover gave him ample access to the movie studios and the actors in the movie. As part of his cover, he also happened to use the same voice recorder. As luck would have it, when the bad guy, posing as a reporter, happened to be doing an interview with Xara Smith, who was posing as a stunt actress, the electronic voice recorders got switched. It is how Xara figured out who done it, and it too is why Gruber tried to kill Xara. As I stated earlier though, Gruber, the bad guy, was currently in the morgue simply because he thought getting into a gun fight with Xara Smith was a good idea.

The reason I bring all that up, is that I have not yet spoken to Senior Detective Eric Samuels of the Dallas Police Department, but when I do, he will want me to hand over any evidence we have pertaining to the case, and we still have Gruber's voice recorder locked away in our safe. I will gladly give Detective Samuels the recording device, but I want to be able to listen to the messages on it, and if I do not take care of this now, I may not get to later.

On my own computer in my office which I share with my boss, I have a spreadsheet that is password protected and titled My Life. It is where I keep all of the secrets I would not want the world to know, but without which life would become difficult. For instance, it is where I have recorded my social security number, my bank account number, and the password to my ATM card. These things I know by heart, but there are other, less memorable things in this spreadsheet as well. For instance, the VIN number etched into my current car can be found there, my boss' birthday is in the spreadsheet, and I can look there to find my cell phone contract number if I ever need it. Yes, it is a useful spreadsheet filled with information that may or may not be needed by me at any time. Today I looked in the file for the combination to Xara's safe. I had never opened the safe before, but Xara had given me the combination as soon as she had hired me. I think it makes her feel safer that someone else has the combination and that relieves her of the burden of always remembering the precious digits.

I retrieved Gruber's voice recorder and locked up the safe. When we originally bought the recorders, they had come with a wire to attach them to a computer and a software disc. If you installed the software on your computer, you could copy recordings from the voice recorder to the computer and then listen to then