I was particularly jubilant that David wasn’t reaching out to someone else in particular. Someone I’d upgraded to the top of my most-actively-loathed-people list. I just hoped it remained that way. Not my hating of that person, I’m a constant and dependable grudge-holder if anything else, but David’s lack of attempts in trying to contact said person.
But don’t assume I was eavesdropping on all of David’s conversations or non-conversations. I was working too. And by that, I mean that I’d found Dashing Henry’s dumped emails online and I was going through them to see if I could find something else in there.
I wasn’t confident that any of that could be relevant or trusted. First, I had to make sure the emails were actually Henry’s—especially considering the exchange with a fake David. But I found several emails from years before that I had written to the actor when I was still working atLA Misconducts. They were mostly impersonal messages where I would send a new version of the script or explain why we’d changed a specific line of dialogue. I recognized those communications and assumed that at least part of what was online were Henry’s real messages. But rereading those messages wasn’t exactly a pleasant trip into the past. It made me feel itchy.
At least I was relieved to see that, so far, YouReallyDontKnowWhatsOutThere.com seemed to be the only place to have discovered the email dump and to have written about it. I just hoped no one else did.
“I think I found something,” I told David after he finished furiously typing. He had moved on from calls to angry emails.
“Someone else published something about me emailing Dashing Henry?” he asked, his jawdefinitelyon the side of ridiculously chiseled.
“No, don’t worry about that. No one else has picked it up.”
“Yet,” he said.
“Haven’t you just been on the phone for the last two hours making friends with everyone so that they call you before something like this happens?” My tone was just shy of exasperated.
“You can’t really trust a reporter once they’ve got a scoop,” he said.
“Scribe, not sure if it was when people started accusing you of not knowing how to drive or of making way too much noise at night,” I told him, playfully, “but you’re starting to sound like me when it comes to the mistrust in your profession.”
“As I recall, it wasyoumaking most of the noise,” he said, also playfully. At least I had succeeded in getting his mind off things a bit.
“We’ll agree to disagree on that,” I said. “Now, can we temporarily table all this naughty banter and go back to the issue at hand? I think I found something.”
“So you keep saying,” he said, and that really aggravated me. I wasn’t sure if we’d be able to work on this together, to be honest. “Yet you keep burying the lede and not telling me about it.”
As I’ve committed to being transparent with you, I’m going to admit that it had long been established that David and I were the opposite kind of writers. I did commercial fiction on film and TV, and he was a print reporter of facts. But even if we dabbled in different kinds of prose and mediums, we could still both be insecure, self-centered, overly sensitive, and obsessive when it came to our writing.
All qualities that didn’t exactly promise a smooth collaboration. Add that to our convoluted history together—both as an official and nonofficial couple—and we were a surefire disaster waiting to happen.
“You’re the most conceited, arrogant, insufferable person I’ve ever met!” I finally told him. My face wasn’t showing a hint of rage or any other sentiment though. I’d been trained in the art of the poker face by Aurora Valls herself, and the woman was masterful. “I’m willing to put all that behind us and work together. And we both know collaborating is going to be a big challenge, but can we at least try and be civil?”
“We can try,” he conceded, which was as close to an apology as I would get from him since the whole being-written-about affair was making him uncomfortable—and irritable. “Now tell me what you found?”
“When was the last time you wrote about Dashing Henry?” I asked.
“I think when he sued me for libel, we ran something. I didn’t write that personally, but I was involved in some of the reporting.”
“And over the last months, reporting about Henry, have you ever found something about a superfan of his—veering on stalker—called LA Troubelmakr?” I asked him, looking at my screen. “And I need to show you how this dude spells Troubelmakr because I’m not sure whether they’re trying to be funny or if they’re simply an orthography tragedy.”
If David and I could agree on something—other than the correct way of brewing coffee, the superiority of coastal cities with Mediterranean climate, and hownot toparallel park like an asshole—it was on the utmost importance of proper orthography.
“Not sure, the name kind of sounds familiar somehow,” David said, referring to the shameless misspeller.
“They’d been writing to Henry nonstop for at least two or three years it seems. I think they’re some sort of big fan ofLA Misconductsand have mystified Henry’s character in the show. Even if the character, same as the person, was an absolute bastard. Anyway, Henry answered their emails first. You can see that he felt flattered by the attention.”
“The guy was a total narcissist,” David said.
“But then something must have happened, and Henry must have gotten tired of the LA Troubelmakr, who sounds like a high-maintenance, whiny idiot. Henry stopped replying to their emails. That hasn’t stopped the Troubelmakr, who’s been writing to Henry at least twice a day and demanding to meet in person.”
“So Henry had a stalker. How is this relevant?”
“Some of the latest emails, from like only a week ago, sound quite aggressive and confrontational. You can see that the Troubelmakr was quite frustrated about Henry’s silence. And they make it clear that they’ve followed the actor several times and know where he lives. Could it be that they followed him to the Eastern Columbia and confronted him in the parking area?”
“Now you’re speculating a bit too much, no? Ms. Fiction Writer.”
“Perhaps, but you have to admit it’s worth checking it out!”
