Chapter 11 #3
We got our hands stamped by the bouncer and wandered through the bar into the concert space, winding our way to the stage.
I felt a sudden burst of pride for Gabe.
I knew how hard he worked, how important this was to him.
I’d seen him perform before, solo at bars, but since we’d started dating, he hadn’t done anything big with the band.
This was a part of his life that I would finally be let in on.
An equipment guy was testing something on the drum kit, and when he saw me, he sent us backstage.
“You made it!” The band sat lounging on the greenroom couch. The other guys were drinking beers, but Gabe seemed sober. I could tell he was anxious, those fingers jittering a mile a minute. This was a big venue for him, not necessarily in size but in prestige.
“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Opener’s on in five,” a frazzled stage manager yelled at us through the door.
“Go get a drink,” Gabe said. “I’ll find you after.”
“Yes, sir.” I kissed him, and he grinned at me, and I thought about how weird it was that my boyfriend was about to sing love songs to a room full of strangers.
The opening act was something of a downer, and Celia and I’d each made it through two vodka sodas by the time they announced their last song.
“Thank god,” she said under her breath. “I was about to fall asleep.” We were surrounded by people about our own age, likely early to mid-twenties, most of whom were dressed in jeans and bedazzled tops, wearing heels, sipping booze out of stirrer straws.
The lights came up so the crew could change out instruments, and an avalanche descended on the bar.
This was the scene I had been missing, all those long hours on set in Calabasas, when instead of mingling, I’d been spreadsheeting with Dan and replacing Maggie’s light bulbs.
Celia pulled me out of the crowd, and we found a relatively roomy spot on the balcony, where we could see the stage well and avoid the press of people.
When Gabe came out in his slouchy black tee and black jacket, his hair gelled up and rope bracelets artfully stacked on his wrist, it took a minute to square rock star Gabe with the guy who made me pancakes in pajama pants and glasses.
“He is so hot,” Celia whispered.
“You take it back that he’s not cool enough to cheat on me now, don’t you?
” I said. Because no matter how much of a dork he was in real life, when Gabe started to play, he was coolness personified.
Confidence and vulnerability, his voice raspy but strong, no sign of the gawky kid he’d been on The Tiger Crew.
When he leaned into the microphone, it felt like he was telling me a secret, and the grin he gave the crowd might have been for me alone.
He’d occasionally look over to where Celia and I stood up top, meeting my eyes.
“Nah,” said Celia. “He’s so into you, it’s gross.”
Gabe and the band did their set, and by the end, I was too many drinks in to hold on to any dignity. I pulled Celia down through the crowd to try and intercept him when he went offstage.
“You can’t be back here, ma’am.” Of course there was security, the beefy respectful type who’d call me ma’am, though I was wearing an outfit that screamed broke and in my twenties.
“But I can be,” I said. “I was earlier.” Luckily Gabe appeared before we were dismissed.
“She’s with me.” He grabbed my hand and pulled me through. “They both are.”
I didn’t want to let go of him to let him back onstage to do the encore.
What more did these people need? He’d already given them a full hour and a half.
It was my turn to take him home and make him Easy Mac and share his shower and lie naked in his bed.
But alas, this was the price I had to pay in agreeing to date him.
Other people wanted my boyfriend, and that was why he made money—if this gig did, in fact, make money; I still didn’t have a good handle on Gabe’s finances.
Celia and I stood at the side of the stage and watched the band give their encore, and Gabe smiled that pleased, bashful smile and tossed his guitar pick out into the audience.
I finished the beer I was holding. It was already almost midnight, and I realized that I was not going to pick Gabe’s brain about the new security footage and Sally Ann and Lauren.
I was going to wait for him to get through signing people’s tickets and posing for their digital cameras, and then I was going to get in his car and try not to fall asleep on the drive back to his condo.
The thought made me unequivocally happy.
We ate leftovers out of his fridge and also microwaved some pizza rolls, and I borrowed a T-shirt to sleep in.
Around five in the morning, I woke up for a glass of water, and he woke up as I was getting back in bed.
He kissed my neck, and I got on top of him, and we had sweet, silent sex and then fell back asleep.
Gabe was still sleeping when I left for work at eight.
Because of my late night and our early-morning workout, I didn’t bother to go home.
I showered at Gabe’s and put on yesterday’s jeans and one of his smaller Gabriel Leighton shirts tucked artfully in, as if I wanted to be party on the bottom and merch slinger on top.
If it was gauche to wear my boyfriend’s face plastered across my chest—his blue eyes pensive and his name written graffiti-style in embarrassingly large purple letters—it was even worse to opt for last night’s spangled halter.
Luckily it didn’t really matter, because the only person who saw me was Monica at the front desk, who gave a little wave before focusing back on whoever was on the phone.
After popping into the kitchen for sustenance, I readied myself for another day with the new footage.
It was mentally exhausting and morally—even legally—questionable.
Despite the waivers they’d signed before coming on set, these people didn’t think that anyone could see them.
Imagining someone watching me in my most intimate moments sent a shiver down my spine, and I felt every stiff mixed-cotton fiber of Gabe’s T-shirt.
But then I remembered that someone had watched me.
Maggie had watched me. Maggie had done exactly what I was doing now.
I pictured her sitting down to the security camera footage, wondering, I supposed, what had been happening in Calabasas while she was in Mexico.
What had she been looking for? Whatever the answer, Gabe and I were what she’d found.
On the monitor, the sun moved full force into the position that, for twenty minutes a day, cast the hidden area between the garage and pool in light.
Maggie hadn’t gone public with what she’d seen of me and Gabe, and despite my conviction the night before, I wouldn’t immediately go public with my new discoveries either. I would channel her and Lauren, the two poles of our show.
Be smart, Cassidy. Be patient. Be ruthless.
I played the footage at 10x. For three full days, not even a lizard or bird appeared on-screen. I was humming one of Gabe’s songs and massacring my thumbnail when things finally got interesting.
Sally Ann and Jason again, but without their usual zippiness.
She tugged him in front of the camera, standing with her back to me, and his whole face in view.
They didn’t touch one another, but from Jason’s expression, I could tell Sally Ann was talking.
With the computer volume all the way up, I could hear what she said.
“You know that it takes two of us to keep everything quiet.” That desperation in her voice was so familiar, the same make-me-a-star longing she’d displayed every time she came on set, now stretched like Silly Putty until the holes were showing through.
Jason rolled his eyes. “She’s not going to leave me over—” He gestured to the small space between them. “She’s smarter than you think.”
“Not her,” Sally Ann whispered. I leaned into the screen, as if moving closer would give me a better read on Jason’s blurred expression—a flash of, perhaps, panic, but I couldn’t be sure. “I wouldn’t tell Maggie.”
“You wouldn’t take this to the tabloids.
That shit never ends well for the girl.” He was right, of course.
How many times had I seen the nanny or the personal assistant on the cover of the magazine, a hand up to hide her face, the headline something like Yes .
. . He Was My Lover or Mistress Tells All?
Then two weeks later, the backlash; the nightly talk show hosts casting doubt, the paparazzi asking how it felt to break up a family, the watercooler conversations, the eternal relegation to the punchline of the joke.
A decade ago, maybe Sally Ann would have thought to build a career on going public about sleeping with Jason, but that scenario had played out before, and he was right.
It never ended well for the girl. She might have a moment selling belts on QVC or get a sit-down interview on a morning show, but aside from the initial payout, there were no real perks to that type of notoriety.
Sally Ann said something in response, her voice so quiet that I only knew she spoke because of the sudden change in Jason’s face.
Even with fuzzy image quality, I could see the shift come over him, a stillness that had not been there before.
I rewound, scooted my swivel chair closer.
Unplugged and replugged my headphones. It took me three tries before I figured out what she was whispering.
“I’d share what you told me that night in Reseda. Not just this.”
I rewound to watch Jason’s face fall three more times before I followed the tape further, to the moment when he punched the garage siding. My volume was still turned to the maximum level, and my eardrums rang with the strength of his “Fuck.”
I checked the date. December 8. Season One had wrapped, and I had been at my mother’s house in Pennsylvania.
Jason left the monitor first, clutching the hand that I assumed he had not broken.
He’d been so irritable after the first-season press tour.
He’d had that paparazzi altercation, the one that reinjured his shoulder.
Everyone assumed it was because the photographers had done that wild chase with Maggie. But maybe everyone had been wrong.
Jason had been angry enough at Sally Ann to punch an outdoor wall. Angry enough to walk away mid-conversation. Angry enough, I wondered suddenly, to get rid of her?
Sally Ann’s death was an accident. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was somehow planned? My heart sped up. What were the chances that Sally Ann would suddenly die before revealing whatever it was Jason seemed desperate to keep quiet? The coincidence was just too much.
Could Jason have taken the lunches from me knowing Sally Ann couldn’t have peanuts? Had he switched Maggie’s kung pao chicken with Sally Ann’s nut-free stir fry? He’d been poking through the bag. He’d encouraged me to go back to the laundry room while he passed out the food.
Was Jason Dean—Philadelphia-hero, jovial, have-a-beer-with, Disney-prince, Ricky Ricardo 2.0 Jason Dean—a murderer?
The tape kept playing, but I slid my chair back to the opposite wall. My headphones yanked from the jack, their cord dangling.
I’d thought my jackpot was footage of my colleagues’ private vices. A forbidden cigarette. A hidden hangover. A blow job for the boss.
But Sally Ann was dead. Jason had wanted her quiet. Lauren and Dan knew about her allergy, and they both had a secret to hide too.
In watching Maggie zone out on the couch, Jason hang photographs and water the lawn, I had assumed that I knew them.
I’d spent up to twelve-hour shifts with Lauren, knew the moles on her arms and the bleached scent of her newly dyed hair.
I’d thought I saw through Dan’s facade of congeniality.
But even Vinnie had flat out lied to my face about the cigarettes.
The remains of whatever I’d eaten last night—those empanadas, too much beer—churned in my stomach. The Honeymoon Stage set was a huge pit of snakes, and I was Indiana Jones down in the thick of them.
I had to call Gabe. He’d put this whole thing in perspective.
Gabe was pragmatic. He was smart. He could help me.
Jen would tell me to go to the cops, and Celia would catastrophize, and my mother would buy me a plane ticket east, but Gabe would keep a level head.
Pulling the headphones down around my neck, I grabbed my cell phone and fumbled for his number.
Then my arms fell to my sides. The phone slipped from my hand.
Because there, on the monitor that I had been neglecting, stood a fuzzy Gabriel Leighton in an intimate embrace with none other than Maggie McKee.