Chapter 13
13
A fter telephonically braving first my mother and then my agent, I just wanted to go back to sleep. Maybe even take a long hot relaxing bath and doze off in the bathtub. But that Friday morning would not be the day to do it. It wasn’t even seven thirty yet. I’d barely had any coffee. I needed a proper breakfast, a long shower, and some naproxen to help alleviate the hangover.
I drank two full glasses of water and made my way to the shower when I heard my phone buzzing. I went back to my bed, looking for it, and saw Victor’s name on the screen. I let the call go straight to voicemail. I guessed he’d also read the news. But I couldn’t have another conversation about that damned article that morning. Especially not with him.
I was again heading for the shower when the doorbell rang. I didn’t have time to swear under my breath or even think about pretending I wasn’t home.
“I brought vegan donuts from Donut Friend and almond milk macchiatos from Verve,” David yelled from the other side of my locked front door. I stopped in my tracks and went straight to open it.
I don’t know how he’d done it, but David had somehow learned that I’d gone vegan since we quit living together and had chosen the surprise breakfast accordingly. Also, for the record, that’s exactly how you should aim to wake someone up: with fried sugary dough and hot comforting beverages.
I opened the door, only partly aware that I was wearing a two-or-three-sizes-too-big UCLA T-shirt and not much else. I didn’t even think about how it looked that I was dressed in his favorite college garment, or whether I was showing too much leg. When you’re five foot three, you can hardly be described as leggy.
He gave me a stare that at the time I interpreted as knowing—he was conscious that I had his T-shirt and was glad to have found it even if it wasn’t clear that I would give it back—but I now think his look was more on the side of appreciative. I may not be leggy per se, but I sure am sexy. Did I mention I wasn’t wearing a bra?
“I have a plain glazed, one covered in passion fruit, one covered in matcha, their version of Boston cream, and some donut holes for good measure,” he said, not acknowledging my state of dress—or rather undress—while I was still standing at the door. He held a black donut box and a to-go tray of coffees in one hand, clutching his laptop with the other.
How could someone look so good scorchingly hot at 7:33 in the morning and after having way too many drinks the night before?
He wore faded jeans and a dark knit sweater. His hair was still wet from a shower. He smelled of soap, recently applied deodorant, donuts—and him. I felt hungry and realized it had nothing to do with my need for food but my need for him.
Céntrate, compórtate , I ordered myself to focus and behave. He’s not here for a morning fuck and breakfast. He’s here to work on the case, and he’s brought food because he knows you’re the worst and the only thing you keep in your refrigerator is wine and expired mustard.
I let him in. He went straight to my round dining room table and started making room for the food and his computer, setting some of my stacks of badly organized scripts, notebooks, and books on neat piles on the floor.
“Relax, I’ve seen the articles,” he told me then, sitting at the table and keeping his perpetually collected and cool facade.
I breathed a bit more easily. I didn’t want to be the one to break it to him that his name was splattered across the front page of the newspaper he was supposed to be working for.
I allowed my tense shoulders to go back to a resting position and sat at the table, as far away from him and his intoxicating and pheromone-laden smell as I could while still having full access to the donuts. I bit into one of the holes, had a long sip of coffee, and allowed myself to savor the bliss. Only then did it hit me.
“Articles?” I asked. “ Plural .”
“Articles,” he said, the hint of a smile still on his lips. Was he clenching his jaw at all or had it always been so sexily sharp?
“Okay, my mother woke me up this morning and forced me to read the one on the Voice with your name all over it.”
“Your name is also there,” he said.
“Fucking George. I never liked him.”
“He wasn’t lying.” He sent my way one of the most mischievous, lust-filled stares in our history together.
“He wasn’t,” I admitted, doing my best at an equally nonchalant but sexually charged stare.
Not only had we been loud on Wednesday night, I’d texted David after that and asked him to make me scream like that night again. But he still hadn’t obliged. And it didn’t look like that was going to happen any time soon—if ever again—considering we had bigger preoccupations and he seemed to be the main suspect in a murder investigation.
So, very much against my primal needs, I asked him about those preoccupations.
“What’s the other article? Or is it also articles ?”
“Singular this time,” he said.
“Menos mal,” I said, relieved.
“No te creas, the article in question is quite damning in itself.”
“Fucking press!” David looked offended, but I didn’t care.
“Dashing Henry’s email account was hacked, its contents leaked online, and someone has already had time to go over more than twenty years of correspondence,” David explained.
“Is there any link to a possible reckless driver in those emails?” I asked.
“Yes, if you count me as that.”
“What?” David could be described as many things—exasperatingly detailed-oriented, organized to the extreme, quippy, and a bit egocentric—but he was a responsible, careful driver. And he was incapable of murder.
“Apparently there are some emails from an account with my name on it sent to Henry. The fake David Ramos arranged to see Dashing Henry at the Eastern Columbia the night of the murder.”
“What?” I repeated.
“Henry’s emails were hacked and leaked online. Someone using my name asked him to come to the Eastern Columbia on Wednesday night. That same someone told him I wanted to discuss the upcoming libel trial. Someone else found all the emails and has written about it.”
“Fuck!” I managed to say. I took a sip of coffee to appease my nerves after that bombshell, but I could see my hand trembling as it approached my lips.
“Elena, the messages in my name are fake. I never reached out to Henry.” For a moment, I thought I saw him gritting his teeth.
“I know, Scribe,” I said, feeling the need to comfort him but preventing myself from reaching out. The man had rejected me two nights in a row. I was wearing his T-shirt and I had called him the one word he knew I only used with him. I wanted him to know I knew he was innocent and I’d be there for him, but I also needed to protect myself from the situation and stop showing how much I still cared about him.
“Who wrote this second article?” I finally managed to ask.
“I don’t know them,” David said, and that sounded weird to me. He’d been a city reporter even at his high school newspaper in Inglewood and then during college. He knew pretty much every other LA-based metro journalist either by name, reputation, or even friendship.
“Who published it?”
“YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com,” he said.
“What? Some random website? How did you even find this?” I asked.
“I have a Google alert with my name,” he said sheepishly.
“Of course you do.” I tried to suppress my smirk.
“Elena, please be considerate. I’ve been fucking accused of murder,” he said. “And you know you also have a Google alert set up with your name in case something flattering gets published about you.”
“Of course I do!” I relented. “Listen, I get it. We’re writers, we’re a bit self-absorbed. But should you really be worrying about what some random person says about you? Should you be calling whatever they published an article ? I thought you had a limited definition of journalism and blogs weren’t part of it.”
“I’ve never been such a snob!” he protested.
“You have whenever you’ve defended the essence and purity of news writing, Mr. Two-Time Finalist of the New America Award in public service journalism.”
“Okay, but it won’t take long for an actual journalist to find this garbage piece of writing and publish it in a bigger outlet.”
“Your reasoning is extremely flawed. If they’re an actual journalist, they shouldn’t echo anything without reporting it first and reaching out to you for a comment,” I said.
He looked at me, defeated. But I understood why he was worried. I’d be too.
···
We’d been working at my place for a good two hours. David kept making calls to colleagues and former editors. He wanted to see if there were more stories about him about to hit the virtual presses and I realized that, even when he was talking to some of his friends, he didn’t mention anything about the so-called article at YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com. He obviously didn’t want to be the one pointing anyone in that direction.
He was also trying to find an outlet for the piece he was working on with me. The article where he’d explain that it wasn’t him who ran over Dashing Henry and that plenty of people would have reason to want to do that. A piece that would read even better if we managed to find out who the terrible—or very intentional—driver was.
He was making all his calls from my living room table. You may think I would be annoyed by so much babbling. But he’d been so secretive and cagey in the past when it came to his work that I was almost thrilled with the present and constant chatter and the fact that he no longer felt the need to hide any aspects of his professional life from me.
Even if I was using my noise-canceling headphones on and off to block his voice at times and be able to focus on my own task, I was almost certain of something: David hadn’t called and wasn’t calling Michael Townsend, his editor at the Los Angeles Voice and the one person ultimately responsible for having approved and published the damning article that got me thrown out of bed that morning. It didn’t look like David was going to try to publish at the Voice anytime soon, and it didn’t surprise me after the frontpage article where me and my job status were also mentioned. Well, and where he was blatantly accused of murder.
Despite the fact that David no longer worked there, John Diaz of the Gazette had avoided the story planted by my mother. But Townsend hadn’t been able to resist the sensationalism of the tantalizing possibility that his reporter ran over Henry and was in bed with the mayor’s daughter, even if it wasn’t true. Not all of it, anyway.
I was particularly jubilant that David wasn’t reaching out to someone else in particular. Someone I’d upgraded to the top of my most-actively-loathed-people list. I just hoped it remained that way. Not my hating of that person, I’m a constant and dependable grudge-holder if anything else, but David’s lack of attempts in trying to contact said person.
But don’t assume I was eavesdropping on all of David’s conversations or non-conversations. I was working too. And by that, I mean that I’d found Dashing Henry’s dumped emails online and I was going through them to see if I could find something else in there.
I wasn’t confident that any of that could be relevant or trusted. First, I had to make sure the emails were actually Henry’s—especially considering the exchange with a fake David. But I found several emails from years before that I had written to the actor when I was still working at LA Misconducts . They were mostly impersonal messages where I would send a new version of the script or explain why we’d changed a specific line of dialogue. I recognized those communications and assumed that at least part of what was online were Henry’s real messages. But rereading those messages wasn’t exactly a pleasant trip into the past. It made me feel itchy.
At least I was relieved to see that, so far, YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com seemed to be the only place to have discovered the email dump and to have written about it. I just hoped no one else did.
“I think I found something,” I told David after he finished furiously typing. He had moved on from calls to angry emails.
“Someone else published something about me emailing Dashing Henry?” he asked, his jaw definitely on the side of ridiculously chiseled.
“No, don’t worry about that. No one else has picked it up.”
“Yet,” he said.
“Haven’t you just been on the phone for the last two hours making friends with everyone so that they call you before something like this happens?” My tone was just shy of exasperated.
“You can’t really trust a reporter once they’ve got a scoop,” he said.
“Scribe, not sure if it was when people started accusing you of not knowing how to drive or of making way too much noise at night,” I told him, playfully, “but you’re starting to sound like me when it comes to the mistrust in your profession.”
“As I recall, it was you making most of the noise,” he said, also playfully. At least I had succeeded in getting his mind off things a bit.
“We’ll agree to disagree on that,” I said. “Now, can we temporarily table all this naughty banter and go back to the issue at hand? I think I found something.”
“So you keep saying,” he said, and that really aggravated me. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to work on this together, to be honest. “Yet you keep burying the lede and not telling me about it.”
As I’ve committed to being transparent with you, I’m going to admit that it had long been established that David and I were the opposite kind of writers. I did commercial fiction on film and TV, and he was a print reporter of facts. But even if we dabbled in different kinds of prose and mediums, we could still both be insecure, self-centered, overly sensitive, and obsessive when it came to our writing.
All qualities that didn’t exactly promise a smooth collaboration. Add that to our convoluted history together—both as an official and nonofficial couple—and we were a surefire disaster waiting to happen.
“You’re the most conceited, arrogant, insufferable person I’ve ever met!” I finally told him. My face wasn’t showing a hint of rage or any other sentiment though. I’d been trained in the art of the poker face by Aurora Valls herself, and the woman was masterful. “I’m willing to put all that behind us and work together. And we both know collaborating is going to be a big challenge, but can we at least try and be civil?”
“We can try,” he conceded, which was as close to an apology as I would get from him since the whole being-written-about affair was making him uncomfortable—and irritable. “Now tell me what you found?”
“When was the last time you wrote about Dashing Henry?” I asked.
“I think when he sued me for libel, we ran something. I didn’t write that personally, but I was involved in some of the reporting.”
“And over the last months, reporting about Henry, have you ever found something about a superfan of his—veering on stalker—called LA Troubelmakr?” I asked him, looking at my screen. “And I need to show you how this dude spells Troubelmakr because I’m not sure whether they’re trying to be funny or if they’re simply an orthography tragedy.”
If David and I could agree on something—other than the correct way of brewing coffee, the superiority of coastal cities with Mediterranean climate, and how not to parallel park like an asshole—it was on the utmost importance of proper orthography.
“Not sure, the name kind of sounds familiar somehow,” David said, referring to the shameless misspeller.
“They’d been writing to Henry nonstop for at least two or three years it seems. I think they’re some sort of big fan of LA Misconducts and have mystified Henry’s character in the show. Even if the character, same as the person, was an absolute bastard. Anyway, Henry answered their emails first. You can see that he felt flattered by the attention.”
“The guy was a total narcissist,” David said.
“But then something must have happened, and Henry must have gotten tired of the LA Troubelmakr, who sounds like a high-maintenance, whiny idiot. Henry stopped replying to their emails. That hasn’t stopped the Troubelmakr, who’s been writing to Henry at least twice a day and demanding to meet in person.”
“So Henry had a stalker. How is this relevant?”
“Some of the latest emails, from like only a week ago, sound quite aggressive and confrontational. You can see that the Troubelmakr was quite frustrated about Henry’s silence. And they make it clear that they’ve followed the actor several times and know where he lives. Could it be that they followed him to the Eastern Columbia and confronted him in the parking area?”
“Now you’re speculating a bit too much, no? Ms. Fiction Writer.”
“Perhaps, but you have to admit it’s worth checking it out!”
“I do.”
“You do?” I said, almost surprised. Had I actually been good at this investigating stuff?
“But let me check something first, because that ridiculous name does sound familiar,” he said as he searched his email. “Here. He wrote to me when my first Dashing Henry story was published. He was upset and called me all sorts of colorful things.”
“ Spinless nincumpoop, snowfleek server of the cancellled culture, hater of all things matcho... ” I read on David’s computer screen from one of Troubelmakr’s emails. “He has a flair for the dramatic. If only he could spell. And I guess we can assume it’s a man.”
“We can assume, yes. I can show you even more colorful stuff. He kept emailing me for a couple of weeks. In the end, I talked with the security team at the newspaper, and I don’t know exactly what happened. I guess they reported him to the police and sent him some lawyery letter, but he stopped emailing me.”
“And that was before they fired you?”
“Yes. But whatever legalese they threatened him with must have been scary enough because he didn’t make contact again even after I was fired.”
“What if it was him who pretended to be you and lured Henry here with those emails in your name?”
“Why would he do that?” David tried protesting.
“I don’t know! To make sure Henry finally showed up. He must have known he’d sued you.”
“You haven’t convinced me, but we need to keep looking into this Troubelmakr.”
“So, what do we do now? Try to find him and make him confess?”
If that were a screenplay I was writing, this would be the perfect time to insert a chat between the sexy, pining-for-each-other investigators and their first suspect. But I assumed in real life things tended to be a bit different and most certainly slower—and happened in a more boring fashion.
“We can see what’s out there,” David said, and what he did next astounded me a little. I hadn’t anticipated a seasoned, award-winning—perhaps only award-finalist, but still—investigative journalist like him doing something so basic and mundane, but he did. He went to Google, typed “LA Troubelmakr,” and browsed through the results.
“You need to start somewhere,” he told me when he saw my disbelieving expression. “Or do you have any better ideas?”
I didn’t, but he didn’t need to know that. Up until that moment, I’d been convinced he’d have some secret investigative method known only to his profession. Like some ultra restricted browser with which to find the geographical location of every possible source or person of interest, or some other made-for-TV nonsense like that.
“Why does this guy look familiar?” he asked me then. David was reviewing the Google search results and had found a couple of images of someone responding to the name LA Troubelmakr. He looked like a man in his thirties, of medium build, and wearing an LA Misconducts white hoodie. He had short bleached-blond hair and the kind of creepy smile you hope never to see up close in person.
I shuddered uneasily because the fact was, I had seen him in person.