Page 1 of Love, Lines, and Alibis
PROLOGUE
When I finally made it home that February evening, I was freezing. I was tired. I was hungry. And I probably smelled—and by that, I don’t mean that I could still sense my lover’s fragrance on my skin, but an actual unpleasant odor caused by too many days of unwashed frenzied activity. I sweat when I’m nervous.
I went straight to the shower, turned on the faucet, waited patiently, then remembered what had happened a few days previously—right before all this mess had started—and made a turn for the kitchen. I filled every big pot I could find with water and set them to boil. And, since a watched pot does indeednotboil, I rummaged through the refrigerator and the cabinets for something that could appease my stomach rumbles. I settled for a jar of hearts of palm dipped in almond butter. It wasn’t slices of avocado on cassava flour crackers—that would be my actual favorite snack but I was out of both valuable ingredients, since I hadn’t exactly been able to shop for groceries or anything else—but it did calm my hunger momentarily. I was still craving a lentil burger with sweet potato fries though.
I chugged two big glasses of water and realized I had been parched only after I drank. I couldn’t remember the last time I had paid attention to my proper hydration, and it had been one of my mantras since the move to California. That’s what you learn when you are a Los Angeles transplant: use sunscreen daily, keep a tatty cardigan in the car all year round, and carry a reusable bottle of filtered water everywhere.
Some of the water on the stove started boiling then and I transferred it to the bathroom, carefully. I’ve read all the statistics about fatal accidents caused by silly home mishaps. It would have been extremely unfortunate to have endured—and survived—the previous seventy-two hours only to burn myself when it was finally all over.
I poured the hot water into the black-tiled bathtub and added some cold water so as not to scald myself. I slipped out of the satin strappy dress and dipped my whole body in the warm water. That had to have been fated. I had rented a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment with a big bathtub I’d always considered ridiculously disproportionate for the space, and it had to have been for the purpose of living that moment. I finally relaxed. I submerged my head fully in the water, having a very cinematic experience. I was the flawed and tired hero having made their Odyssean way home and finally been able to rest. I half smiled, reached out of the bathtub for a nearby notebook—I keep them scattered all around the place as you would expect for someone in my line of work—and started scribbling.
I guess if I’m going to tell you the story of how I found myself inside a hot bathtub after days of unwashed undertaking and with a broken water heater—and after one dead body and two failed murder attempts against me—I should go back to the morning it all started.
1
Two days before, Thursday, February 22nd
Iwas still in bed and had been snoozing the alarm on my cell phone diligently for what probably was a good hour and a half.
Don’t judge me.
I’m not necessarily lazy—if ever the procrastinator. But procrastinating is almost a duty when you call yourself a writer. And I’m that. More specifically, at the time of this tale, an in-between-gigs television screenwriter.
I was repeatedly snoozing my alarm in part because I was technically unoccupied and with nowhere to go until the 1 p.m. lunch meeting I had with my agent that day. She’d assured me she had good news and an offer. I was disinclined to believe that whatever the offer was could be considered good news. I don’t know how many times I had to tell her that I wasnotgoing to take a job as a writer on another broadcast network police procedural with no room for character development or relationship building.
I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. My overall deal wouldn’t expire for three more months, and I was keeping my fingers crossed for a renewal. I still had some money left from the latest residual check from the two seasons I’d been working in an actual broadcast network police procedural with no room for character development or relationship building. The best-paid job of my career. I was working on my spec script—perhaps not while I overslept, but still pretty consistently typing. And even if at thirty-four I wasn’t proud to admit that I was a bit of a disappointment to my parents, I knew they’d still help me if things were tight.
The reason I was in no shape to wake up that unseasonably chilly Thursday of February was that I had gone to bed quite late the night before. But that’s irrelevant to the story right now. I may have to come back to it. I’ll do it only once it’s necessary.
I guess I should tell you now that I always aim for the truth. I’m not a so-called unreliable narrator, and none of my stories have ever employed one. If I lie to you, it’ll be because I’m also lying to myself. So you don’t need to mistrust me.
When I finally stopped my alarm that Thursday morning, I rose from bed, put the moka pot on the stovetop to get the coffee going, and went to the bathroom to take a shower. I was wearing my favorite plaid flannel pajama pants and a two-or-three-sizes-too-big UCLA T-shirt I didn’t recall having ever bought—and I had purchased my fair amount of merchandise from the university where I earned two degrees. I took the T-shirt off and couldn’t help myself. I smelled it.
See, I told you I wouldn’t do it, and I just did. I’m lying.
I didn’t just smell it. Iinhaledits scent. I would have probably buried my face in it had the coffee pot at the stove not started boiling, alerting me that my dose of single-origin caffeine for the morning was almost ready.
I poured the coffee into a mug and allowed it to wake me up. Inside the fridge, I found a slice of the vegan Margherita pizza I’d gotten at Pizzanista a couple of nights before. I was patient enough to microwave it for a total of eleven seconds then devoured the lukewarm pizza with my hot coffee. I made my way back to the bathroom, still having breakfast. I was hoping for the water in the shower to finally be at the right temperature. Only it was still freezing.
I realized the water heater was probably broken, and at some point I’d have to call the company that managed the building so someone would fix it. I would normally shrug it off and get dressed, but I thought about the meeting with my agent where I would need to look mildly presentable. I was even thinking of forgoing my staple combination of sweatpants and flannel shirts and maybe stuffing myself into a pair of high-waisted flare jeans and a cropped T-shirt that Marta had gotten for me. Sure, I needed to shower before that. Even if it was a cold shower.
I cursed the day I had decided to lease an apartment in a 1930 Art Deco building. It had lots of charms but sometimes seemed to lack the amenities of the twenty-first century, running hot water being one of them at the moment. But it was too late to keep wondering if I should have taken a cookie-cutter, synthetic-carpeted unit in one of the many new apartment buildings that had popped up in DTLA over the past few years. I was here now, and I hated moving. Plus, I had other reasons to stay at the Eastern Columbia even if I didn’t want those to be acknowledged.
I was saved from the cold shower just then, as the fire alarm started blazing and fully roused me into wakefulness—something the strong espresso hadn’t managed.
2
The last thing I needed that cold gray Thursday morning—other than the fucking water heater being broken and having to contemplate the possibility of (maybe) taking a cold shower—was for the fire alarm to go off. I didn’t have the energy to deal with it. I hadn’t planned on leaving my place until twenty minutes before my lunch meeting.
I opened my front door slightly and peeked outside. My neighbors were making their way downstairs. I found it bizarre because my experience living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles was that people didn’t take seriously things like sirens, drills, or even the actual earth shaking if it was below 5.5 points on the magnitude scale. But they were somehow not ignoring this alarm.
Still wearing my pajama pants, I put on my blue Writers Guild of America West hoodie, donned a pair of flip-flops and, before descending to the street, grabbed my keys, cell phone, and laptop and stuffed them inside a LACMA tote bag. I have separation anxiety issues if I am far from either of those two electronic devices for any extended amount of time.
I lived on the tenth floor and knew enough about fire alarms—because of a brief stint on a TV show about sexy firefighters—to be aware that I shouldn’t take the elevator. So I made my descent to the street slowly and almost alone. I might have been one of the last residents to exit the building.
The stairway felt eerie. The fire alarm was still blasting but there was not a single person in sight. It didn’t feel safe. I wasn’t scared of the possibility of getting trapped by fire in the building; I couldn’t even smell smoke. It was something else. A creepy feeling made me accelerate until I reached the exit.
I’m not one to recognize many of my neighbors—I’m terrible with faces and use my cell phone as a conversation-avoiding tool when in the elevator or other public areas—but I guessed the throngs of people garbed in different informal styles crowding Broadway Street by the building’s main entrance must all live there.
