Chapter 12 Griffin
Griffin
As Lana and Griffin got out of the car outside the deli, a horn beeped insistently.
Griffin pulled his cap lower. “Ignore it.”
“Hey!” a woman yelled.
He groaned. “Maybe I should stay in the car. I’ll just be a distraction.”
“Hey!” she called again as they crossed the lot. “Are you Lana? Lana Fleming?”
They halted. The woman sat in a white sedan, the driver’s door open. Lana cautiously approached, Griffin following. She was wearing a tracksuit and eating a sandwich. She was enormously pregnant.
“Are you…?” Lana began.
“Detective Keisha Graham.” The woman gestured at her hip.
“Oh heck, you can’t see that, can you?” She unclipped something and held it up.
Her badge. She squinted at Griffin. “You know, you can cover your eyes and your hair, but they’re the least recognizable parts of you, Griffin Hart.
” She jerked her head to the passenger seat.
“Step into my office, before someone sees you and I have to call out the riot squad.” Lana opened the rear door.
“Not the back seat, not both of you. I can’t turn that far. ”
Griffin indicated that Lana should take the front, and he got in the back, moving aside a pile of newspapers and magazines.
“Excuse the mess—wasn’t expecting a VIP.
I call them up and get them to deliver to my car,” she said, indicating her sandwich.
“It’s a pain in the uterus to get in and out all the time.
” She adjusted the driver’s mirror so she could see Griffin.
“Now, Griffin Hart. Tell me what the hell you’re doing in my car. ”
“You … asked us to get in?”
“Yeah, but what’s your connection to this?”
“Does it matter?”
“Only that I want to be able to…” She winced, rubbed her belly, and continued in a strangled tone. “Tell the girls in my mothers’ group. They’ll think this is wild.”
“Lana is a friend—colleague. I’m helping her out.”
“Okay,” the detective squeaked. She started panting.
“Are you in labor?” Lana said.
“I wish. No, I have an ‘irritable uterus.’ Like, no shit. Four miscarriages, five rounds of IVF, and now a freaking bowling ball in there.” The detective tapped her belly.
“See? Rock hard. Like Braxton Hicks on steroids. Still another three weeks of this, they say. Anyway, you honestly don’t wanna know about my uterus. You wanna know about your sister.”
“You know something?”
“All I know, she came in with some crazy ideas. Pass my bag from back there, Griffin Hart? The gray backpack?” He did, and she heaved it onto what was left of her lap.
She riffled through several notebooks and pulled one out, its pages marked with colored flags.
She passed the bag back and relaxed, exhaling heavily.
“Honestly, the smallest task.” She flipped to a yellow tab.
“So crazy I didn’t take proper notes, I’m afraid.
” She tipped the pad up so they could see.
There were a few lines of writing, but mostly doodles.
“I referred her to mental health services, but I checked last week after I got a call from Officer Sheng in Fitch, and she never showed up for the appointment. To be honest, I thought she was a…”
“Flake?” Lana said, without enthusiasm.
“That’s the word. An antsy one. I take it you haven’t located her?”
“Not a trace, but some other stuff has happened. We got chased by some people on the set of Gods and Mortals overnight. They were looking for her. And then they were following us just now, in a different car.”
“I heard something happened up there. They say what they wanted with her?”
“No. We had just found Vivien’s phone and switched it on, so we’re thinking whoever was after her came after us. Which suggests it wasn’t all in her head, wouldn’t you say?”
“That does sound strange. Did you get into the phone? Find anything?”
“She’d deleted everything—almost everything.” Lana filled her in on the last text, the pocket dial, and her brief conversation with the man on the other end. “All I know is that she told her ex-boyfriend she had a secret that could tear lives apart, but I have no idea what that is.”
“Where’s this phone now? I can see what our techs can find.”
“We ditched it. I can give you the man’s number though.” Lana pulled it up on her phone and the detective scribbled it in a corner of her notebook.
“So, these people who chased you—did they get anything? You tell them anything?”
“What could I tell them? I don’t know anything. You went to her house, right? Did you find her laptop?”
“I found nothing that would explain her disappearance. I concluded she’d up and left.” The detective seemed reluctant to meet Lana’s eye.
Griffin leaned forward to get a better view of the woman’s face. There was something she wasn’t sharing. “Why did you go to her house, detective—if you’d written her off as a flake?”
Wincing, the detective pressed a palm to the underside of her belly, puffing out several breaths.
“Okay, so my team deals with…” She paused for a puff.
“Among other things…” Puff. “Way too many other things, high-profiles—celebrities. Someone—I can’t tell you who—put out a restraining order on her, though it’s since been rescinded. ”
“Someone famous?” Lana said.
“Like I say, can’t tell you who—privacy, you understand.
There are certain confidences that aren’t mine to break.
Kinda stuff we deal with every day, but when she walked in, the restraining order flagged in the system and I got a call, so I went down to check her out.
After she went missing, I popped in for a welfare check—all my calls were going straight to voicemail, though now we know why, if she ditched her phone. ”
“How did you know her address?” Griffin said.
“Routine to get someone’s details, when they come in like that.”
“These ‘crazy ideas.’ Is this related to the restraining order?”
“I can’t say without breaching privacy.” The detective gripped her belly. “Oh, lordy, here we go again.”
“You sure you want to do this now?” Lana said.
“All part of the service. Hon, I know you’re worried, and I wish I could tell you more, but I got the sense that the only person who was a danger to your sister was herself.
She’s not coming up in the system as having been hospitalized or sectioned.
My feeling is that she left town of her own accord.
She told me she needed to clear her head—which I fully agreed with. ”
“If she’s not in danger, why are people chasing us, looking for her?”
“That’s a good question. Maybe she owes them money?”
“It’s a lot of effort and expense to go to, to collect on a debt from someone with no money,” Griffin said. “They wrote off two cars to avoid getting identified.”
“Let me look into it. I agree that it doesn’t add up.
” The detective brushed crumbs off the top of her bump.
She started reaching for the glove compartment and then thought better of it.
“Could you…?” She indicated that Lana should open it.
“Fresh notebook.” Lana found it and handed it to her.
“Second thought.” She grimaced, shoving the notebook at Lana. “You write it.”
“What should I write?”
“Anything that could identify these guys chasing you. Description, vehicle, plates, the route they followed you along… We might be able to pull footage.”
Lana scribbled some notes, and then showed the pad to Griffin. “Anything else?”
“That about does it,” he said flatly.
“Look, I gotta get on,” the detective said.
“Leave it with me, okay? In the meantime, do me a favor and lie low. Don’t go getting any more involved.
Last thing I need is to be responsible for something happening to a Hollywood star.
And let me know if you think of anything else, or anything else happens, no matter how small. ”
As they got out, the detective began panting. Lana leaned back in. “You want us to drop you somewhere—like, a hospital?”
“They’ll just send me home and tell me to go on bed rest.”
“You don’t think that might be a good idea?”
“I need work to keep me distracted. Besides, hubby’s working the weekend too, so at least at work there’s people around to catch the baby if it finally figures out a way out of this iron womb.” She waved them away. “Promise me you’ll sit tight!”
They were almost at Darnell’s car when Lana halted. “I forgot to mention the pregnancy! You’d think that’d be the first thing on my mind. I’ll go tell her.”
Griffin grabbed her hand. “Maybe don’t.”
“Why not?” She looked up, surprised. “Everything okay, Griffin? You were quiet in there.”
“There was something she wasn’t telling us.”
“She said she couldn’t—privacy and stuff. Wouldn’t it make sense if the police knew everything we did?”
“It felt like more than that. I think there’s something bigger going on, something more sensitive.”
“The only vibe I picked up was that she should be in a hospital.”
They watched her drive away. Griffin noticed movement behind Lana. He swore, releasing her hand. “Let’s get out of here.” She started to look behind. “Don’t look, just get in the car. We’re being filmed.”
He exited the lot quickly, heading for Santa Monica Boulevard. “They’re not following,” he said, checking the mirror.
“Who was it?”
“Just some randoms, far as I can tell. Not paps. We’ll know for sure when it turns up on Where-Is-Griffin-Hart-dot-com.”
“You really have trust issues, don’t you? I mean, I can understand—stalkers, paparazzi, Big Bird…”
Griffin’s mouth tightened. She didn’t know half of it. She didn’t know a tenth of it. “I’m just a guy who tries to keep his head down.”
“While being super-famous.”
“You see my basic problem.”
“Yeah, trust issues. Wait—is that your Achilles heel?”
“You know Achilles’ heel killed him in the end? Season three plot spoiler. It wasn’t paranoia. His mom dipped him in the River Styx as a baby so he’d be invincible, but—”
“But she held him by the heel, so she missed that part.”