Page 23 of Love, Lines, and Alibis
“Dashing Henry’s email account was hacked, its contents leaked online, and someone has already had time to go over more than twenty years of correspondence,” David explained.
“Is there any link to a possible reckless driver in those emails?” I asked.
“Yes, if you count me as that.”
“What?” David could be described as many things—exasperatingly detailed-oriented, organized to the extreme, quippy, and a bit egocentric—but he was a responsible, careful driver. And he was incapable of murder.
“Apparently there are some emails from an account with my name on it sent to Henry. The fake David Ramos arranged to see Dashing Henry at the Eastern Columbia the night of the murder.”
“What?” I repeated.
“Henry’s emails were hacked and leaked online. Someone using my name asked him to come to the Eastern Columbia on Wednesday night. That same someone told him I wanted to discuss the upcoming libel trial. Someone else found all the emails and has written about it.”
“Fuck!” I managed to say. I took a sip of coffee to appease my nerves after that bombshell, but I could see my hand trembling as it approached my lips.
“Elena, the messages in my name are fake. I never reached out to Henry.” For a moment, I thought I saw him gritting his teeth.
“I know, Scribe,” I said, feeling the need to comfort him but preventing myself from reaching out. The man had rejected me two nights in a row. I was wearing his T-shirt and I had called him the one word he knew I only used with him. I wanted him to know I knew he was innocent and I’d be there for him, but I also needed to protect myself from the situation and stop showing how much I still cared about him.
“Who wrote this second article?” I finally managed to ask.
“I don’t know them,” David said, and that sounded weird to me. He’d been a city reporter even at his high school newspaper in Inglewood and then during college. He knew pretty much every other LA-based metro journalist either by name, reputation, or even friendship.
“Who published it?”
“YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com,” he said.
“What? Some random website? How did you even find this?” I asked.
“I have a Google alert with my name,” he said sheepishly.
“Of course you do.” I tried to suppress my smirk.
“Elena, please be considerate. I’ve been fucking accused of murder,” he said. “And you know you also have a Google alert set up with your name in case something flattering gets published about you.”
“Of course I do!” I relented. “Listen, I get it. We’re writers, we’re a bit self-absorbed. But should you really be worrying about what some random person says about you? Should you be calling whatever they published anarticle? I thought you had a limited definition of journalism and blogs weren’t part of it.”
“I’ve never been such a snob!” he protested.
“You have whenever you’ve defended the essence and purity of news writing, Mr. Two-Time Finalist of the New America Award in public service journalism.”
“Okay, but it won’t take long for an actual journalist to find this garbage piece of writing and publish it in a bigger outlet.”
“Your reasoning is extremely flawed. If they’re an actual journalist, they shouldn’t echo anything without reporting it first and reaching out to you for a comment,” I said.
He looked at me, defeated. But I understood why he was worried. I’d be too.
···
We’d been working at my place for a good two hours. David kept making calls to colleagues and former editors. He wanted to see if there were more stories about him about to hit the virtual presses and I realized that, even when he was talking to some of his friends, he didn’t mention anything about the so-called article at YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com. He obviously didn’t want to be the one pointing anyone in that direction.
He was also trying to find an outlet for the piece he was working on with me. The article where he’d explain that it wasn’t him who ran over Dashing Henry and that plenty of people would have reason to want to do that. A piece that would read even better if we managed to find out who the terrible—or very intentional—driver was.
He was making all his calls from my living room table. You may think I would be annoyed by so much babbling. But he’d been so secretive and cagey in the past when it came to his work that I was almost thrilled with the present and constant chatter and the fact that he no longer felt the need to hide any aspects of his professional life from me.
Even if I was using my noise-canceling headphones on and off to block his voice at times and be able to focus on my own task, I was almost certain of something: David hadn’t called and wasn’t calling Michael Townsend, his editor at theLos Angeles Voiceand the one person ultimately responsible for having approved and published the damning article that got me thrown out of bed that morning. It didn’t look like David was going to try to publish at theVoiceanytime soon, and it didn’t surprise me after the frontpage article where me and my job status were also mentioned. Well, and where he was blatantly accused of murder.
Despite the fact that David no longer worked there, John Diaz of theGazettehad avoided the story planted by my mother. But Townsend hadn’t been able to resist the sensationalism of the tantalizing possibility that his reporter ran over Henry and was in bed with the mayor’s daughter, even if it wasn’t true. Not all of it, anyway.
