"I only had time to glance at the charge sheet in the car. It says I intentionally lost evidence. I told Captain Calloway how those tapes went missing."

"Unbeknownst to us, the FBI has been running their own surveillance on Harry Venture for half a year and they've got you and his wife on tape," Chief Filosiani said.

What he was referring to was a Homicide Special case, which I had been working for two weeks. Harry Venture's birth name was Aviv Zahavi, but he'd legally changed it when he came to America and went into the film business ten years ago, forming Venture Studios. Harry was a fifty-year-old Israeli national who had made his initial fortune as a black market arms dealer in the Middle East. With the hundreds of millions he'd made in the gun trade, he moved to L. A. and went into the movie business, becoming one of Hollywood's most successful action movie mini-moguls.

Money being the powerful aphrodisiac that it is, Harry soon seduced a budding young actress half his age named Tiffany Roberts, who was starring in low-budget genre movies when he met her. She was beautiful and had a Playmate's body and, as the showbiz saying goes, was willing to do "nude" if it was shot "tastefully." The gossip on the street was that Tiffany instantly saw what Harry could offer and became Mrs. Venture. Big-budget movies and mega-stardom followed. But after she'd done "tasteful" nude scenes with some of Hollywood's hottest leading men, Harry's bedroom seemed to have lost some of its appeal and Tiffany had been quietly hunting around for a hit man to take her pudgy, foreign-born husband off the count. Word of this was quickly leaked to us by a street informant.

Since a murder solicitation by an A-list Hollywood star was an extremely sensitive situation, the squeal ended up going to Homicide Special, which is the elite LAPD homicide squad that typically handles high-profile, media-sensitive investigations.