The Best American Crime Reporting 2009 - Jeffrey Toobin [104]
That same week, I received an e-mail from Ash asking me if I wanted to come to his deposition. January 31 and February 1, in Beverly Hills. For the estate case. Ash told me this was my formal invitation, and no RSVP was required. He signed the e-mail, “Hugs, Billy.” I flew back to California.
AN HOUR BEFORE THE DEPOSITION was set to start, Debra Opri’s conference room was being prepped for television. A crew of four vacuumed up debris and installed a stylish new tabletop. An ugly hole in the wall was covered with a blue-sky backdrop. A curtain was removed so that reporters could watch through a glass wall. Ash was dressed in a black suit and white shirt, with a yellow tie. His face was covered in pancake makeup.
Despite Ash’s best efforts, the media turnout was disappointing, just a CNBC crew and me. Every now and then, Opri would get out of her seat for a cup of coffee and wink at me and the CNBC cameraman on the other side of the glass.
Ash worked the phones on his lunch break. “Call ‘Page Six’ and tell them what’s going on,” he told someone on the other end of his cell phone. He clicked off and then told me, “I’m glad to get this over with. This is a fight about money. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I wish she had never told me she killed Seth. I’ve already cried twice today. I didn’t know I’d feel this emotional.”
Phyllis’s lawyers spent much of the first day poking holes in Ash’s story. By the end of the day, Ash looked exhausted as he headed toward a car and driver who would take him back to his Hollywood hotel. “Her lawyers are not nice people,” Ash said. “How many ways can they tell me I’m a fat pimp?”
Once again, Ash’s story continued to evolve. I asked him again when was the last time he had seen Seth. “In Las Vegas, over two years ago,” he answered. When we first talked, he had told me San Diego. I mentioned in passing his role as Phyllis’s online psychic, and he vigorously shook his head. “No, I was never her psychic, I was always their assistant.” I then asked him if he had brought the Krug Champagne bottle as evidence. He just laughed. “Oh no, I re-gifted that and gave it to someone who was very nice to me.”
If he had never met Phyllis in person, I asked him, if he had not seen Seth in the two years prior to his death, why would they confide the intimate details of their life to him? “They knew I had a dark past,” Ash said. “They knew I didn’t want that to come out, so I’d keep their secrets, too.”
The next morning, Ash and Opri got their makeup done together. “God, my hair is so flat,” said Opri. “How can I pouf it up?” Meanwhile, her client crowed over a new rumor. “Did you hear the toxicology report is back?” Ash said. “He had cocaine and Ambien in his system. It proves everything I’ve been saying has been the truth.”
The second-day interrogation was even nastier than the first. Around noon, Ash could be heard shouting “You will respect me” at Gary Dunkel, one of Phyllis’s attorneys. “I don’t respect you,” Dunkel responded. “You’re a liar.” Ash stormed out of the room and summoned me to Opri’s office again. “I am not going to put up with this much longer,” he said. “I’ve learned two important things: One, don’t murder your husband and tell a fat fag with a big mouth. Two, the fat fag shouldn’t talk to the press.”
A WHOLE LOT ABOUT THE TOBIAS case remains unknown. Billy Ash was right about the toxicology report. It showed Tobias had cocaine and a lethal amount of Ambien in his bloodstream. But it reached no conclusions about how the drugs got there. Maybe Seth took the pills himself, in a drunken accidental overdose. Maybe Phyllis secretly fed the pills to him. Maybe Seth took the pills himself, and Phyllis, finding him in the pool in his addled state, took the opportunity to let him drown. Without an eyewitness or some new smoking gun, and given Ash’s—well, given Ash—it’s hard to imagine the truth will ever really be known. Police won’t comment on where their investigation