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We hate to get all Bloodhound Gang on you, but we need to solve this mystery by the end of the second commercial break (we would've dropped the Encyclopedia Brown reference, but were afraid you'd accuse us of going too highbrow):

Yesterday at about 3:30pm I was leaving my office building on San Vicente in Brentwood. Nicky Hilton, sporting dark hair, sunglasses, expensive purse and blue tie-dyed tunic was conversing/scheming with an a non-bold named girl, similarly sunglassed, expensive pursed, etc. They saw me coming and started walking down the sidewalk. By the time I got to the street level, I saw Nicky in the store Gaia looking at some clothes in the window and her companion inconspicuously taking her picture through the window with a disposable camera.

The ersatz photographer then wandered around outside other stores smoking a cigarette and when I passed by the store after my Starbucks run, Nicky was nowhere in sight. Pseudo-paparazza was still around the store. This was curious to witness, indeed. Was this "shocker" a staged paparazzi shot?? Is Nicky selling her own pictures to tabloids? Or was it just daily ego stroking/entertainment for this wannabe handbag designer/socialite/less slutty sister of Paris?

While our first reaction is to dismiss the mystery by remarking that even the attention-starved younger siblings of one-woman celebutante-slut industries like to pick up a little tabloid cash on the side to pay for the evening's blow, we're always partial to the crackpot theory. Here's one: Nicky and her pal had just come from tossing Nicole Richie's body into Runyon Canyon after an OD and needed to quickly establish an alibi for their whereabouts, and what better way than the indisputable photographic record of the "paparazzi"? But since Richie's bones are likely to turn up in the pages of US Weekly before an LAPD bodybag, let's just guess that Hilton likes to diddle herself to voyeuristic 4x6's of herself shopping. What a sicky.