Page 16 of Love, Lines, and Alibis
“It’s Marta,” I told him before picking up the call.
“I recognize the ringtone,” he said, and it dawned on me that we had so much history together, even if I wanted to keep pretending we didn’t.
“Hola,” I answered the call. Most of the conversations between me and my sister happen in the best kind of Spanglish. We always understand one another and never find strange the need to keep mixing languages.
“Oh, dios mío. ¡Hola!” she said. “Are you okay? I saw there was a murder in your building!”
“News travels fast, but yes,” I said. “Estoy entera.”
“Oye, I don’t actually have time to talk right now,” she said. “I’m driving and my copyright law class starts in less than twenty minutes. ¡Llego muy tarde!”
She’d come home from Berkeley the previous summer—to the relief of the whole family; we never understood the Northern California allure—to follow in my dad’s steps and study the same branch of law as him after a stint as a theater fellow at Berkeley Rep. She’d beentemporarilyliving at my parents’ property since her return, and no one seemed to be pretending any longer that she wanted to find her own place and move out of their guest house.
I can’t blame her. My parents’ cabañita de la piscina is a 1,500 square feet bungalow outfitted with its own kitchen and full bathroom. It has a separate entrance, full access to the swimming pool and the main house’s cooking services—a.k.a. breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included and delicious—and is regularly cleaned and maintained.
If it wasn’t because I have this thing going with one of the residents at the Eastern Columbia—and I’m a mess to live with anyway, and my sister has expressed her desire never to share a house with me again—I’d probably move in with Marta.
“I’m calling because I overheard Mamá having a sneaky conversation when I went to the house to grab my merienda,” Marta continued, referring to her afternoon snack. She was twenty-four, had a Bachelor of Arts in Theater and Performing Studies, had been an exchange intern for a year at Teatre Lliure in Barcelona, and was currently enrolled in the law program at UCLA. But she could still sound like a little girl sometimes. “Mamá was meeting Victor and the whole PR crew over Zoom. Ha sido todo muy raro.”
“What do you mean raro?” I asked her.
“They’re having issues with the rogue councilmen again,” she said, referring to the two council members, with the same party affiliation as my mother, who’d been recently accused of having made sexist comments about one of their female colleagues from the opposite party. “There’s a new insensitive text message from one of them or something like that.”
“Okay, are you calling me to gossip about the latest city council telenovela occurrence?” I said, confused.
“Of course not, tonta.” I could hear her honking viciously. Marta was one hundred percent Californian mellow vibes in all but one thing: her driving instincts. She was all Mediterranean intensity when it came to her skills behind the wheel. “The PR peeps and Mamá don’t want any more headlines about dysfunctionality at city hall. They’re gonna leak to theLA Gazettethe fact that the police are working under the assumption that David is Dashing Henry’s killer. They’re building a case against him.”
“What?” I yelled.
“David doesn’t have many friends at city hall. Everyone is still mad at him because of the article he wrote six months ago uncovering Henry just when they’d hired the actor to promote the city’s image,” Marta said. Just as David’s article was published, the whole of Los Angeles had been covered in billboards with Henry’s creepy face on them paired with the Los Angeles city logo. No wonder no one at city hall had a soft spot for my ex.
“They can’t throw David under the bus!” I protested. David looked at me and raised a questioning eyebrow. Did he reallyneedto look so sexy while doing it?
“You know they don’t have many qualms when it comes to distracting the press. They hope that by giving them David’s story, they won’t give that much space or attention to the one about the council’s sexist members,” she said.
Even if I didn’t want to admit it, being the daughter of a politician, I understood the bizarre logic behind that way of acting.
“I need to go now,” my sister said.
“Okay. Talk later?”
“Yes. Will you do me a favor?” she asked. “Will you let David know about all this? He still has friends at theGazetteand maybe he can talk to them and get this stalled.”
“Why not let him know yourself?” I asked, even if David was currently in front of me and watching me with interrogating eyes. I was very aware that my sister still had David’s number memorized among her favorite contacts, and they kept in touch regularly. But I knew she’d called me and not him because she was looking for not-so-subtle ways of forcing me to get in touch with him.
“You do it,” she said.
As I hung up and looked at David, I was reminded of another moment in our past. A very different one. Probably the opposite circumstance to the one we presently found ourselves in.
It had been four years before. I had just gotten my job as a staff writer atLA Misconducts. He’d been offered a contractor position at theLA Gazettewith the option of becoming a permanent staffer. It looked as if things had started working our way and we’d finally managed to figure out our careers. But, of course, that moment was actually the beginning of the end of our story together.
11
After the chat with my sister, we went downstairs for a coffee to talk things over—not things aboutus, but everything each of us knew about the case—and I informed David about my mother’s intentions toward him. Marta was right about David still having friends at theGazette, something that would have never crossed my mind. David made a call to John Diaz, his former editor there,and seemed unfazed at the prospect of his name being in tomorrow’s newspaper not as a byline but as a headline. Perhaps Diaz was a nice guy after all, even if I’d never liked him.
Debrief coffee at ilcaffè morphed into the need for something stronger, and I managed to drag David all the way up Bunker Hill to the Conrad Hotel with the excuse of getting drinks at their rooftop restaurant, Agua Viva.
He grumbled and protested about the bougieness of the place but in the end was content when we were seated at an outdoor table with views of city hall and he tasted his Fernet-Branca cocktail. As for me, I move with ease through luxury hotels (even unshowered), had been a regular at the place since it opened a couple of years before, and had a suspicion that David would love the spot too if he ever gave it a chance.
