Chapter 4
4
M y toes were almost completely frozen—flip-flops are not advisable all year round in California regardless of what you may have heard or seen—when the city’s media team arrived in another black SUV. Something big had to be going on.
Victor hopped out of a city-hall-owned vehicle. “Elena, you look chilled to the bone!” I wasn’t surprised to see him there.
He came to me, forgot about his PDA-avoidance rule, and kissed me. On the forehead, mind you. He took off his tailored Tom Ford blazer and covered my shoulders with it. Even if it wasn’t a heavy-duty puffer jacket, the woolen garment was still warm from his body, and I welcomed any heat I could get just then.
“You’re here on official business?” I asked.
“Yes.” Victor looked around, his expression unreadable.
“What happened?” I insisted, but he could be tight-lipped when dealing with matters pertaining to his job as Public Relations Specialist II at the City of Los Angeles. “Someone said there’s a body.” One of his eyebrows twitched up, briefly unsettling his otherwise composed features.
“We believe there’s been a death in the building, yes,” he said. Why was he so fucking secretive?
As you may have gathered, the nature of my and Victor’s relationship was more than simple acquaintances since we had in fact been dating for almost a year. But the whole thing was still in its early stages—or its late ones—which was why he wasn’t sharing with me something another boyfriend would have no qualms explaining. Before you judge me, and since I know most readers have a deep aversion for the cheating trope, no one had cheated on anyone. I’ll fill you in on the particulars later.
Fortunately, I wasn’t the only Eastern Columbia resident vying for Victor’s attention. My neighbors gathered around him, one extremely competent city reporter among them.
“Who died?” asked David, his journalist hat on.
“It’s still early to tell,” Victor told him, his PR smile fully at play.
“Nonsense,” David countered. “The city wouldn’t have sent the whole PR squad if it wasn’t someone important. But I can’t think of anyone you would deem notable enough who lives in the building.”
Did he seriously know all the residents at the Eastern Columbia? I barely managed to recognize the faces of the dude in apartment 10B and one-half of the couple who lived in 10C. The wife was a remarkable redhead who reminded me of Amy Adams. The only thing I knew about apartment 10D was that their tenant—or tenants—had impeccable taste in music and favored jazz and blues. As for the rest of the place, I would not be able to recognize them if I ran into them on the street or at the checkout line at Whole Foods. It’s not that I’m face blind or anything like that, I’m just a social calamity.
Back to the daytime drama unfolding on Broadway Street. Victor wasn’t answering David’s question, and the journalist wasn’t finding new ways of challenging the PR expert. Verbally, at least. The two of them were engaged in some sort of staring contest. They knew each other well through work and openly disliked one another. The connection they shared with me had always been ignored and unmentioned by the two of them though. They maintained that their mutual disdain came from the fact that they worked on opposite and irreconcilable sides of the municipal knowledge-gathering-and-divulging business.
Allow me to try and paint the image for you. I’m a screenwriter, after all, and I write in images. Victor and David stood one in front of the other in all their tall, athletic, mid-thirties magnificence. You may think I have a type, and I may, but their similarities ended in their indisputable handsomeness and face symmetry. David was wearing thrifted but nonetheless well-fitting jeans and a T-shirt. His black hair and several-day stubble gave him the air of the perfectly disheveled yet sexy rebel-with-many-causes that he was. Victor was in a $5,000 navy suit—minus the jacket, which he’d so generously but uncharacteristically given to me—flawlessly shaved, and sporting his dark-blond hair styled in a precisely coiffed pompadour.
I was perhaps enjoying gazing back and forth from one gorgeous man to another too much when the guy from apartment 10B decided to talk again.
“It’s Dashing Henry!” he proclaimed in his perfectly pitched bass voice. “There’s a body in the building, and it’s Dashing Henry!”
“What?” I couldn’t avoid saying. All the high from shamelessly staring at the two men I was romantically intertwined with suddenly came to a brutal crash after hearing that name. An uneasy tightness gripped my chest.
I hate doing this because I can’t stand nonlinear narration, but I’m going to have to interrupt myself again to explain something.
I knew Dashing Henry.
Hell, in the universe my story takes place, the whole country knows the two-time Emmy winner. He’d been the lead actor for fifteen seasons of LA Misconducts , where he played a seasoned and corrupt police commissioner charged with covering new political and corporate scandals every week.
I also happened to have worked as a staff writer in LA Misconducts —the previously mentioned police procedural whose residuals were still paying for my bills—and had known the deceased personally.
And so had David.