Chapter 5
5
“W ho’s your source?” David asked George, and I sent the most glacial stare my ex’s way. He just couldn’t help himself.
“My source?” George hesitated.
“Now, now, David Ramos. Are you really going to harass a neighbor for information?” Victor said.
“No, you’re definitely more my style,” David replied with a wink.
If it wasn’t for the shock I was still in after having heard Dashing Henry’s name, I’d have been enjoying all the professional foreplay between those two. But I couldn’t. I was frozen. I had a headache that was morphing into a migraine, and I needed to get home. So I left.
I didn’t care if the police were still inside the building, if there was a body, or if the building was off-limits to residents. For the first time in the year-plus since my mother had become Los Angeles’s top honcho, I was willing to name drop and employ the daughter-of tactic.
I was stopped before I could cross the building’s threshold. Two uniformed officers stood in front of it with unfriendly frowns. I was about to tell them who I was and why I needed to be let inside when I heard the two men at my heels.
“Elena,” David and Victor called in unison. One of them did it with a perfect Spanish accent, and the other did his best after having practiced the pronunciation for weeks in front of a mirror. Don’t ask me how I know that detail.
I sighed and turned their way. Most times, it was annoying enough having to deal with one man. I was faced with two at present when I most needed to be alone.
“??Qué!?” I said.
Even if I had technically been living for a little longer in the US than I had in Spain, Spanish still came more naturally to me, especially if I was upset. I wanted to believe it was because Los Angeles is the kind of city where you can mostly communicate in Spanish peppered with a word of English here and there. But I wasn’t sure if it was that or if everyone had been right in their warnings to my parents and they should have moved here when I was younger.
I guess both David and Victor knew me well enough to recognize the irritability in my tone. Neither of them uttered a single word after my answer. Fucking annoying cowards, the two of them. I breathed deeply, tried to regain my composure, and did my best at a smile as I turned again, ready to talk to the cops. But I didn’t get the chance.
The press made their loud appearance in the form of two vans from competing TV stations and a helicopter.
“The press? Who tipped them?” I said more to myself than anyone else, but I thought I saw it all written over David’s face. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you? Not even in your own home!”
“Are you implying that I warned the competition?” David replied, his brows drawing together. But I didn’t give a fuck if I had offended him. We were both aware that one of the reasons our relationship had floundered was my inability to believe him on work-related topics. It’s not that I’m mistrustful or paranoid. He lies.
Victor took himself out of my proximity, heading in the direction of the television reporters with his best and most practiced grin. I expected David to follow him and get whatever statement Victor was about to divulge, but David didn’t move. Even if my ex’s eyes followed my current boyfriend’s every move.
“What are you still doing here? Go chase the story,” I told David. I was okay, he didn’t need to babysit me. With David, the job always came first. Plus, it wasn’t like he had any responsibility to me and my wellbeing.
“I’d rather talk to you first,” he told me. His dark-brown eyes locked on me and I felt a whirlwind in my belly. How was it possible that I couldn’t still think clearly with him in front of me? We’d broken up two years before. But it was kind of strange seeing and talking with him in broad daylight. Awfully obfuscating too. “Can we go somewhere more private?” he added. George from apartment 10B was lurking closely.
“There’s nothing else to be said, and the last thing I want right now is to go anywhere with you.” Even if that was exactly the opposite of what my body was telling me. But our breakup hadn’t exactly been friendly, and we hadn’t learned how to talk to one another afterward. “I just need to get home.”
“Let me find out if they’ve reopened the building,” David said.
“?No necesito que preguntes nada! I can ask myself.” I told him I didn’t need him in a harsher tone than I’d anticipated.
He looked at me again and his eyes caught me completely off guard. There wasn’t offense or anger but real concern. It was as if he was worried about me, so fuckingly worried that I was pretty much sure he was neglecting his work.
I was considering telling David I was sorry when I heard, “Elena.”
I was getting tired of hearing my name. I turned and saw Victor coming my way. He was the one who’d called me. “The police want to talk to you.”
“I’ve already talked to them,” I snapped. I didn’t need a second man trying to organize everything around me. It had been annoying enough seeing David asking questions and handing out bottled water all morning.
“The detectives in charge of the investigation want to talk to everyone again,” Victor said. “But especially you—and David. Given your relationship to Dashing Henry.”
“I guess they want me to tell them again that I was home alone all night,” David said, directing his gaze to me one last time. My breath caught in my throat. Then he made his way inside the Eastern Columbia and approached one of the police detectives.
···
“Name?” the police detective, a tall Black man in his fifties, asked me as we took a seat in two of the low-profile midcentury modern chairs of the Eastern Columbia’s main vestibule.
He’d introduced himself as LAPD Detective Alex Rooney. Or it could have been Clooney or Phooney. I think it’s been previously established: I’m bad with faces and worse with names.
“Elena Freire Valls,” I answered.
“Valls as in Aurora Valls?” I could see the curiosity in his face as he tried to find some physical resemblance between my mother and me.
“The mayor is my mother, yes.” It was better not to play coy once people had already figured it out.
“You look nothing like her,” the officer went on, and I could only take that as a slight.
My mother is a gorgeous sixty-four-year-old. Think Tilda Swinton or Kristin Scott Thomas kind of arresting and enviably well preserved. She’d taken LA by storm almost two decades before. She was tall where I was shortish, she was skinny where I had hips. Her hair was a perfect white bob that was regularly maintained. I hadn’t seen my stylist in months and was at present sporting a messy bun of brown and not necessarily clean hair. She was always impeccably dressed in Balenciaga and Ralph Lauren pantsuits with the occasional Chanel classic tweed skirt suit thrown in. Even if I’d had time to change out of my pajama pants that morning, it wouldn’t have been a huge improvement. It’s not that I’m a fashion agnostic—I can almost always tell what people are wearing. But most of the time I don’t care enough to make an effort.
“I take to my dad,” I said, putting the officer out of his doubts.
“I see,” he said. “And you live in apartment 10A.”
“Yes.”
“What time did you get home yesterday?” He opened his top-bound pocket notepad.
“Around nineish?” I answered, trying to remember. “I went to this Q&A session with Shonda Rhimes at the Television Academy—I mean, I didn’t go with her, I went to see her and listen to her talk. I grabbed a bite with a couple of colleagues at Sugarfish after that.” I didn’t add that I like their cucumber roll and their seaweed and kikurage salad, but it’s still hard to go there if the rest of your party is going hard on the raw fish. Sugarfish is not a destination for vegan sushi like Shojin, after all.
“Which Sugarfish?”
“The one on Ventura Boulevard? Both my colleagues live in the Valley and that one is close to the Academy. Is that relevant?” The detective didn’t reply and kept taking notes.
“What did you do when you got home?”
Detective Clooney’s question was rather impertinent. I sure wasn’t going to tell him that when I arrived home, I had an edible, undressed, and proceeded to power on one of my favorite toys before I got an unexpected—but thoroughly welcome—surprise.
“I brushed my teeth and did a bit of reading before going to bed,” I said.
“What are you reading?”
“ Get Shorty ,” I answered. I had recently reread a paperback copy of Elmore Leonard’s Hollywood-set dark comedy, although I hadn’t done any reading the previous night. But there would be no digital trace of my doing it—or not—like there would have been if I said I had been watching Netflix or writing on my computer. Two years as a screenwriter in a procedural show, and I thought I had become an expert at duping the cops.
“That book any good?” he asked as if testing me.
“I’m doing some research on gangster tales.”
“Is that for something you’re writing? We know you’re a screenwriter,” he added.
I hadn’t told the other police officer anything about my profession, so I assumed they had checked all the residents of the building. Or at least, they’d done it with me and Detective Clooney had clearly been playing the fool when he pretended he didn’t know that my mother was the mayor of Los Angeles.
“I’m working on a spec script,” I told him, preferring to leave it as vague as possible. I wasn’t going to volunteer any information unless it was demanded. Also, as any other decent writer in town, I got awkward and cagey the moment people asked the dreadful question, What’s your script about?
“Is it going to be anything like LA Misconducts ? Never been much of a fan of the show,” he continued, and I wasn’t surprised. The LAPD wasn’t exactly thrilled with the image of endless police corruption represented in the show.
“Nothing to do with that,” I said.
“You worked on LA Misconducts for two years?”
“Seasons twelve and thirteen.”
“Why did you leave?”
That was even more impertinent than when he’d asked about my nightly activities.
“Screenwriting is a transient profession, and my dream while pursuing it wasn’t to make a whole career writing about LA cops,” I said. I hoped I sounded as sharp as I had intended. I wasn’t liking Detective Clooney one bit.
“So you voluntarily left a well-paying job for the possibility of writing a spec script?”
“Correct,” I said with my perfected California smile. I wasn’t going to give him the victory. “That and I got an overall deal, of course.”
Don’t call me cocky or obnoxious, but I do love bringing up my overall deal in conversation often. In my defense, it’s a rare thing for a minor screenwriter to have a studio willing to pay them just so they get first dibs in whatever they write, even if they don’t like any of it.
“What was your relationship with Dashing Henry?” the cop asked then, and I almost choked at the sound of that name and the word relationship in the same sentence.
“So George was right and you found his body then?”
“George?”
“The tenant in apartment 10B. He has a way of finding stuff out. Lucky us, because George has been the only one keeping the residents informed. We’ve been freezing on the street for more than an hour and still haven’t heard an official word from the police or the city about what is going on.”
“I guess you can air your complaints about the city with your mother,” Clooney said, chuckling. But he soon realized his comment hadn’t exactly landed. “I can’t divulge anything except that when the firefighters came to the building this morning, they found the body of actor Dashing Henry.”
“Was he killed?”
“What makes you say so?”
“I can’t imagine all this secrecy and need to investigate if he died of a heart attack,” I said, and I started to wonder if my lawyer should have been present. He would not be happy when I told him I had been having that conversation without him in the room.
“So what was your relationship with the deceased?” the detective asked. Somehow, the lack of the deceased’s name made it possible for me to answer this time.
“None, as such. Of course, I’d known him during my tenure at LA Misconducts , but I haven’t talked to him or seen him since I left the show.”
“Why so?”
“I’ve kept in touch with several of the screenwriters at the show and the showrunner, but I don’t necessarily connect with actors that much unless we have something in common.”
“Like Amelia Sanchez?” he said, referring to one of the former stars of the show. Amelia had left LA Misconducts around the same time as I had and had found enough success both in indie films and prestige TV after that for her to be repeatedly photographed on the red carpet. Her good looks may have played a part besides her undeniable talent as a performer. I’d been her plus one on more than one occasion, and it was no secret that we’d become fast friends after meeting on LA Misconducts. She’d even talked about it in interviews sometimes.
“Amelia is a woman, an immigrant, a fellow Spanish speaker, and roughly a year older than me. So yes, we found ourselves connecting over a few subjects and have kept in touch since I left.”
“Of course,” he said. “You’ve told one of our officers that you were home alone all night.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And you don’t recall anything out of the ordinary?”
“Not until this morning when the fire alarm threw us onto the streets.”
Detective Clooney took a few final notes without meeting my gaze or giving any hint that I could leave.