Chapter 30
30
D avid was talking to his editor on the phone and I realized—I guess I actually reiterated my realization—that metro editors and writers seem to work all hours of the day and night. Who answers their phone after 11 p.m. on a Friday? Not me. Hell, if it’s a Friday I won’t reply to any call or email received after 11 a.m. , in case said form of communication has anything to do with a work assignment and you’re about to ruin my lazy weekend plans.
But I digress. While David was on the phone, I kept going over what he’d just said, and it started making a bit more sense.
We didn’t have a lot of details about Henry’s personal life. Maybe he was sick, maybe even terminally ill, and he’d decided to die in a dramatic way, taking David with him in the process. David was, after all, the man who’d precipitated the end of his kingdom in LA Misconducts . Maybe Henry had money problems of some kind: gaming debts, too many vacation-home loans to pay now that he was going to be without a steady job, a balloon mortgage to cover the cost of his private jet. Who knew what was going on with him?
What if he had finally had a revelation and realized his days as a two-time Emmy winner and star of LA Misconducts were over for good? He was now a has-been, a canceled actor who’d never be hired again—not even in a cough-suppressant syrup commercial. Not after Archie Eisenberg made sure all his peers in Hollywood knew what kind of a depraved sexual bully Henry was.
But even if he was struggling with his mental health, even if he was contemplating suicide, that still didn’t explain how he died. The whole story was so convoluted. Did he write a series of accusatory emails against David, go to his place, drink a bunch of Fernet, and then pay someone else to run him over at our building?
That’s it! I thought. It had to have been an accident. He’d probably paid someone to follow him and hit him with the car, just to break a leg or something and pretend it had been David, but in the end the ruse had been fatal.
“I think I know what happened to Henry,” I told David as he wrapped up the call with his editor.
“You can tell me about it when we start drafting this. It may fit into the story,” David said.
“Got the assignment, then?” I asked.
“Sure did!” He looked happy. He always did when he had a new journalistic assignment. It was only after he’d been working on a story for many many hours, had sent revisions to his editor at least twice, argued with said editor about a specific paragraph, and then argued some more about what the nut graph of the article really was, that he looked ready to quit.
“Wait, this is not for the Voice , right?” I asked. After those damning Gloria Fucking Kingsley articles, I didn’t want to hear anything about them.
“This will run on the Gazette ,” David explained.
“The bastards at the Voice don’t deserve you,” I said, and I meant it.
“I’m also not sure they would want anything to do with me. I told the editor at the Gazette that I’d been working with you and would like to give you attribution in the article, and he saw no problem. With the Voice , it would have been a whole issue,” he said. He seemed slightly flustered.
“They don’t like two people working on a story together or what?” I asked. His profession was so bizarre. In mine, as a rule of thumb and unless you were Taylor Sheridan, the more writers the merrier.
“They don’t like you , specifically,” David said, and he was being a bit weird.
“Because I’m not that kind of writer and dabble in fiction more than fact?” I asked in the most oblivious way possible. Why did I have a bad feeling all of a sudden?
“Because of your link to city hall,” he said, and it suddenly all clicked. Victor’s warning about a job offer for David tentative on his ability to remain independent. My mother’s own mention of said job offer. And my astounding capacity to ignore both of them until that very moment.
“I have a link to city hall that makes me partial, not neutral. Does it also taint you?” I asked him, bitterly.
“It doesn’t taint me!” he protested.
“The Voice thinks it does,” I said. “Was it them who offered you a job?”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Because I for sure am fucking tainted,” I said. Actually, if I’m being precise, I yelled it. My bad feeling had officially turned into anger against my fucking ex. Who, by the way, should have remained an ex, and nothing but that, but I had somehow managed to upgrade to an ex-with-many-benefits-and-relationship-prospects because I’m an idiot.
“Nothing escapes the network of spies at city hall, I guess,” David said.
“I mean, you’re making it sound as if my mother was the smart bald character in Game of Thrones , but basically yes, nothing escapes it.” The fact that I could be joking about a TV show at the moment should give you a lot of information regarding the kind of person I am. I was still beside myself. “Did the Voice make you a job offer?”
He drew in a long breath. “They did, on Wednesday.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I needed to know the reasons behind his treacherous behavior.
“I specifically remember us not being on talking terms then,” he said.
“And I specifically remember us starting to talk at some point the following day, which was also yesterday. You’ve had plenty of occasions since then,” I said.
“I tried talking to you and then a murder happened!”
“No, no, no.” I held up a finger. “Don’t twist reality on me. A murder happened, and that trauma led us to talk again.”
“Could you please stop breaking down our lives as if they were the scenes in one of your scripts?” He had the gall to tell me.
“And could you stop stalling? Why didn’t you tell me that the newspaper of your dreams, the place you’ve been wanting to work at since you were a kid, was offering you a staff position? Not a contractor one but one with silly perks, health insurance, and a good salary.”
“Decent salary,” he corrected.
“But health insurance?” I needed to double-check.
“Health insurance,” he confirmed.
“So why didn’t you share the good news?” My bad feeling was starting to morph and causing me to go from anger to fear. He didn’t share the news because he was going to leave me.
“Because it wasn’t actually good news,” he finally said. And when he did, I could almost see the relief on his face.
“You’re going to have to keep talking because I’m not getting it,” I said. I needed to hear him saying it.
“I was told in so many words that the only reason a position was now being offered to me was the fact that I had been separated from you for an extended period of time.”
“Because I’m tainted,” I said.
“Because of your link to city hall,” he explained. “A metro reporter can’t be entangled with city hall.”
“That’s ridiculous. Lots of journalists have conflicts of interest. That’s what author pages are for. You disclose all the reasons why you shouldn’t be objective and write about what you’re writing about nonetheless. Didn’t you tell them that?”
“I didn’t because when the offer was extended to me, you and I weren’t technically having a”—I could see him thinking and measuring each one of his words—“common relationship.”
“Are you kidding me? We were fucking on a daily or bi-daily basis.” I fumed. “It doesn’t get more common than that.”
“You weren’t talking to me, and you were seeing someone else in an official capacity.”
I could hear my heart beating so hard, I was sure it would burst from my chest.
“So what, you were going to break up with me? Are you breaking up with me?”
“Elena, I don’t know what I was going to do,” he said. “I couldn’t break up with you because we were nothing. I couldn’t even have a conversation about it with you. You’d made sure of that. But I also didn’t want to give up whatever crumbs of a connection we had.”
“But you thought about it,” I said. “Oh my god! I’ve been so stupid. All this time, I thought you were as mad at the Voice as I was because they published that awful article. But it wasn’t that. You couldn’t care less about what they were saying about me, about you, even. You were mad because you realized they’d found out about us, and they would no longer want you in their ranks!”
“You’re making it sound very calculating on my part. I’m not as obsessed with my career.” I probably gave him the vilest of looks. “Don’t get mad at me because I love my job. You do too!”
“But no one at my job tells me who I can and cannot fuck!”
“Elena, conflict of interest policies are common at all workplaces. You just don’t have to observe one because you don’t have a job,” he said, and he only realized the blow he’d just dealt me after he saw my face.
The man I had adored, and who I somehow had allowed back in my life, also believed that I was nothing but a silly, jobless nepo baby. One who deluded herself into thinking she was a screenwriter even when everyone else knew that, at present, she was simply a professional procrastinator.
I recall him trying to apologize. I just didn’t pay him any more attention. He even followed me around the place and probably tried dissuading me from leaving, but I grabbed my cell phone, got out, jumped in the car, and headed home.