“A regular dude? It was dark, I didn’t see much,” Marky said, and I could see David’s exasperation.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“I kept hanging around because I was curious to see if the mayor would show up to visit you,” he said, pointing to me. He had a clear case of Celebrity Worship Syndrome if I’ve ever seen one.
“My mother doesn’t do call visits,” I told him. If Aurora Valls wanted to see me, she summoned me.
“So anyway, Dashing hits me up all upset because he’s been knocking on the reporter’s door and the guy isn’t there. I told him I saw him go into the building and I didn’t see him come out.”
David and I looked at each other. We both knew why Dashing Henry hadn’t found David at his place that night. He was already with me.
“Why did he want to see me?” David asked.
“Dunno, to beat your ass probably.” Marky/Troubelmakr laughed, and I was getting tired of him. And the idea of what could have happened to David if he hadn’t been at my place that night made me uneasy. What did Henry want with him?
“Did you see anything else? Did Henry’s car leave or the Prius that went behind it?” David asked.
“Nah, I left. Chris Evans was going to be on Kimmel that night, and I needed to take the Metro to Hollywood and Highland to see if I could catch him and ask for a selfie when he left. They shoot at El Capitan,” Marky/Troubelmakr said, as if the whereabouts of Jimmy Kimmel’s production company were a big secret.
Before our minor stalker could grab his cell phone and produce the pictures he’d taken with Captain America himself, I gestured at David that we should leave. Fortunately, we’d been perfecting the art of communicating without words for the last half a year.
20
“We agree, right?” I asked David once we were out of the Biltmore and had bid our goodbyes to the film crew. Marky had decided to stay at the hotel and harass Gary and the rest of the cast of the movie for a while, but I managed to scare him enough that he’d promised me he’d leave within an hour.
David raised an eyebrow. “Probably. Care to specify what we agree on, though?”
“Better to leave the police out of this. They can find Marky themselves,” I said.
“Definitely. Let’s stay as far from them as possible.”
“Even if a chat with Marky could help them realize you really didn’t lure Henry to the Eastern Columbia the night he died but the other way around?” We had to cover all the angles.
“I don’t know about that. I still feel there’s a way of using Fitzsimmons’s testimony against me,” David reasoned, which sounded plausible to me. “Plus, they specifically warned us to stay away from this. I don’t want them more pissed off at us than they already are.”
“And we’re always on time to let them know if we change our mind,” I said.
David made a humming noise. “You never replied to my ask, by the way.”
“What ask?” I was tired, still shaken, and hungry. It was noon and I wasdrunk. I couldn’t remember what he was talking about.
“No more fights, no more misunderstandings,” he said, recalling the words he’d said to me when we were both running from Marky—zee, ess, and two ems—Fitzsimmons.
“When has there been a misunderstanding?” I asked.
“Apparently when you left me because you thought I wasseeingsomeone else.”
“I didn’t leave you because of that!” I protested. “I didn’t leave you.Wecame to an agreement.”
“Really? And what would that agreement be?”
“That it was better to part ways considering I was going through some stuff, and being the girlfriend of LA’s hottest investigative journalist wasn’t exactly helping me overcome my insecurity issues.”
“Since when have you been insecure?” David asked me, baffled. And he was right. I’d always been blindly self-assured, until I wasn’t. And he still hadn’t realized why that had changed.
As I didn’t want to have that conversation—our two-hour relationship conversation that had been interrupted by a celebrity-adoring man-child—I picked up the pace, making my way to my car on Broadway. I had a slight premonition.
“The reprobate, revenue-hungry beasts!” I yelled when we finally made it to my car. The meter had run out exactly two minutes before, and I’d already been ticketed.
