Chapter 18
18
“E lena!”
David’s voice had to be coming from far away since I was lost and alone. Only that, when I checked to see where he was, following the direction of his words, I realized he was literally a few feet in front of me. He extended his arm toward me and I grabbed his hand as if my life depended on it. And it probably did, but I needed to get my shit together nonetheless. Pronto .
We started running again after the confusion but, when the traffic light on Fifth looked like it would force us to stop, we both decided to make a right.
A high-pitched voice called from behind, “I demand to talk to you!”
It was the Troubelmakr.
“Don’t you dare go and talk to him,” I warned David, urging him to keep running. “He’s armed and dangerous. And I need you.”
“Promise me something,” David told me, and he sounded quite breathless himself.
“I’ll promise you anything,” I replied. Why I had decided to talk when I was already so out of breath is something I still don’t understand. It only made my exhaustion worse.
“What did you do to Dashing?” the Troubelmakr yelled, adding to my distress.
“If we ever get out of this: no more fights, no more misunderstandings. Please,” David said as we cut across Pershing Square.
“ If? ” I managed to let out.
“ When we get out of this.” David’s voice and request were the only things keeping me sane in that moment.
“Hotel, hotel!” I screamed and pointed to the Biltmore in front of us on Olive Street. A group of at least a dozen uniformed police officers stood by the hotel’s ornate columned portico and its arched Renaissance Revival entrance.
This time David didn’t argue about my thing for ritzy hotels. We both accelerated toward the one-century-old LA institution.
“Help!” I shouted as we crossed Olive Street with a total disregard for incoming vehicles. “He wants to kill us!” I gestured at the Troubelmakr behind us. You could probably gauge that I had completely lost it by then and was uncharacteristically being an absolute drama queen.
Only after seeking assistance at the top of my lungs and in a state of complete breathlessness and near exhaustion did I notice the reflectors, collapsible diffusers, rigs, and cameras sprinkled over the sidewalk. We were crashing a movie shoot, and those police officers I had addressed weren’t actual cops but actors or extras of some sort. Had I been paying attention and not worried for my life, I would have realized their uniforms and all the police cars parked in front of the hotel looked straight out of the 1950s.
But there’s such a thing as movie magic after all. The uniform-wearing people were, in fact, highly trained stunt actors who’d just endured the whole 300 or Fight Club or Marvel or some other unrealistic workout program. In a matter of a few seconds, David and I stopped running as our helpers chased down the Troubelmakr, overpowered him, forced him to relinquish what he’d been brandishing at us—it ended up being a pair of extremely outmoded sunglasses—and brought the stalker to us in made-for-Hollywood handcuffs.
We soon learned—thanks to the nervous divulging of an overworked production assistant—that we’d interrupted the shot of a noir film, set in an alternate 1952 Los Angeles in which all the West Coast was actually part of Canada and its colonies as our neighbors to the north were ruled by a creed of vicious alien invaders.
That’s when I saw him. I recognized him right away. He was tall, silver haired, and absolutely suave dressed in a three-piece tailored period suit. He was even wearing a fedora. And he was the star of the film we’d just crashed.
Gary Firth was a fifty-something-year-old Hollywood small-time legend who looked at least ten years younger than he actually was—as movie stars tend to do. He’d made a career mainly in TV in the nineties and late aughts, when I had not so platonically fallen in love with him as I watched reruns of his small-town dramedy Fish Out of Water .
He’d been steadily working in indie film and prestige TV since then but had never found another enduring and successful show again. I knew he’d been in conversations for the part that had eventually gone to Dashing Henry in LA Misconducts , but Firth had turned it down as he lived in New York and didn’t want to spend so much time of the year away from his family.
In the end, the actor, who—unlike Henry—was all graciousness and class, had had a five-episode arc in one of the seasons of LA Misconducts when I was also working there, which is how I’d met him.
That morning, when David and I so inelegantly bumped into him at the shooting of his latest movie, he also recognized me. And that’s when I had the idea of asking him a somewhat strange favor.
···
“What did you do to Dashing?” The Troubelmakr had been repeating the same question for the last twenty minutes.
After the initial confusion, the team of the movie relocated David, me, and a highly shackled Troubelmakr to the hotel’s famous Gallery Bar and Cognac Room.
Even if it was barely 11 a.m. and the bar was still very much closed, the crew lent us a stand-in bartender who mixed me and David cucumber mango Cosmopolitans because we were both in desperate need of day drinking.
We were supposed to be trying to make the Troubelmakr confess about his involvement in the demise of Dashing Henry, but the stalker proved immune to all our lines of questioning and kept asking over and over what we had done to Henry.
I was starting to believe he was only an overzealous stalker and nothing else when the key element of my latest brilliant plan finally made an arrival. Gary Firth granted my favor and stepped in, not seeking attention but catching it anyway.
“Elena, you’re swooning,” David whispered in my ear as Gary Firth entered the bar.
For clarity’s sake, let me tell you that I may have been swooning about my teenage TV crush, but it was David’s breath on my neck that caused all kinds of interferences in my confused brain.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I snapped at David. “Gary, thanks so much for taking the time.” I donned my best, most affable smile. And somehow, I managed to remember yet again that I hadn’t showered or washed my hair that morning—or the previous one.
“Anything for a colleague,” Firth said. And I believed him. Or perhaps his facial features were way too masculine and symmetrical for me to ever assume him capable of anything ungenerous.
The actor took one of the tall chairs from the bar and seated himself close to the Troubelmakr.
“Hi, I’m Gary Firth. Pleasure to meet you,” the actor told the stalker.
“I’m Marky Fitzsimmons,” the Troubelmakr said, visibly starstruck. It looked like I wasn’t the only one who had a thing for Gary Firth.
“How do you spell Fitzsimmons? Zee, ess, and two ems?” interrupted David. At some point, he’d managed to produce a pen and a reporter notebook, and he was already taking notes.
“Er, yes,” Fitzsimmons said.
“Marky, you were chasing down my friends Elena and David,” said Firth. He nailed the pronunciation for both mine and David’s names like not many people manage to do.
Okay, perhaps I was mildly swooning, but can you blame me? I was still in shock, and a nice person was taking care of me and David. It was probably that last element that made me realize the reason I was so smitten with Firth wasn’t (only) because he was beautiful but because he was helping me help David. I suddenly understood that I’d been quite distraught about my ex and his alleged involvement in the murder of a deplorable human being. But I preferred to ignore that realization and bury it under all the other things taking place.
“I want to know what they did to Dashing Henry!” Marky/Troubelmakr answered. I kept being stunned at his insistence that we had done something to Henry. Also, he seemed to genuinely like the late actor, and that was a sentiment I would never be able to share or understand.
“Why do you think they’ve done anything to him? Did you read this morning’s article on the Voice ?” Firth asked, and Marky nodded.
I did feel a bit self-conscious then when I realized that absolutely everyone had read about mine and David’s dalliance and our propensity to express ourselves loudly while making love.
“The article said Ramos ran over Henry and the jobless girlfriend helped him!” Marky/Troubelmakr said.
“It didn’t say that! It was preposterous and poorly written, and I’m not even jobless. I have an overall deal!” I protested. I refused to be reduced to the role of the jobless girlfriend. I was neither one nor the other.
“Don’t worry Elena, I got this,” said Gary, and I was starting to get a little annoyed. Why was he being so nice when the Marky/Troubelmakr dude was a total ass and a possible murderer?
“Why do you think they had something to do with Henry’s death? The police also have a subscription to the Voice and could have apprehended them,” the actor continued.
“She’s the mayor’s daughter!” Marky/Troubelmakr pointed at me.
And there it was. The one thing even more inescapable than my ten seconds of micro-fame as an idle screenwriter with a great sex life: my identity as a nepo baby.