“It’s still early to tell,” Victor told him, his PR smile fully at play.
“Nonsense,” David countered. “The city wouldn’t have sent the whole PR squad if it wasn’t someone important. But I can’t think of anyone you would deem notable enough who lives in the building.”
Did he seriously know all the residents at the Eastern Columbia? I barely managed to recognize the faces of the dude in apartment 10B and one-half of the couple who lived in 10C. The wife was a remarkable redhead who reminded me of Amy Adams. The only thing I knew about apartment 10D was that their tenant—or tenants—had impeccable taste in music and favored jazz and blues. As for the rest of the place, I would not be able to recognize them if I ran into them on the street or at the checkout line at Whole Foods. It’s not that I’m face blind or anything like that, I’m just a social calamity.
Back to the daytime drama unfolding on Broadway Street. Victor wasn’t answering David’s question, and the journalist wasn’t finding new ways of challenging the PR expert. Verbally, at least. The two of them were engaged in some sort of staring contest. They knew each other well through work and openly disliked one another. The connection they shared with me had always been ignored and unmentioned by the two of them though. They maintained that their mutual disdain came from the fact that they worked on opposite and irreconcilable sides of the municipal knowledge-gathering-and-divulging business.
Allow me to try and paint the image for you. I’m a screenwriter, after all, and I write in images. Victor and David stood one in front of the other in all their tall, athletic, mid-thirties magnificence. You may think I have a type, and I may, but their similarities ended in their indisputable handsomeness and face symmetry. David was wearing thrifted but nonetheless well-fitting jeans and a T-shirt. His black hair and several-day stubble gave him the air of the perfectly disheveled yet sexy rebel-with-many-causes that he was. Victor was in a $5,000 navy suit—minus the jacket, which he’d so generously but uncharacteristically given to me—flawlessly shaved, and sporting his dark-blond hair styled in a precisely coiffed pompadour.
I was perhaps enjoying gazing back and forth from one gorgeous man to another too much when the guy from apartment 10B decided to talk again.
“It’s Dashing Henry!” he proclaimed in his perfectly pitched bass voice. “There’s a body in the building, and it’s Dashing Henry!”
“What?” I couldn’t avoid saying. All the high from shamelessly staring at the two men I was romantically intertwined with suddenly came to a brutal crash after hearing that name. An uneasy tightness gripped my chest.
I hate doing this because I can’t stand nonlinear narration, but I’m going to have to interrupt myselfagainto explain something.
I knew Dashing Henry.
Hell, in the universe my story takes place, the whole country knows the two-time Emmy winner. He’d been the lead actor for fifteen seasons ofLA Misconducts, where he played a seasoned and corrupt police commissioner charged with covering new political and corporate scandals every week.
I also happened to have worked as a staff writer inLA Misconducts—the previously mentioned police procedural whose residuals were still paying for my bills—and had known the deceased personally.
And so had David.
5
“Who’s your source?” David asked George, and I sent the most glacial stare my ex’s way. He just couldn’t help himself.
“My source?” George hesitated.
“Now, now, David Ramos. Are you really going to harass a neighbor for information?” Victor said.
“No, you’re definitely more my style,” David replied with a wink.
If it wasn’t for the shock I was still in after having heard Dashing Henry’s name, I’d have been enjoying all the professional foreplay between those two. But I couldn’t. I was frozen. I had a headache that was morphing into a migraine, and I needed to get home. So I left.
I didn’t care if the police were still inside the building, if there was a body, or if the building was off-limits to residents. For the first time in the year-plus since my mother had become Los Angeles’s top honcho, I was willing to name drop and employ the daughter-of tactic.
I was stopped before I could cross the building’s threshold. Two uniformed officers stood in front of it with unfriendly frowns. I was about to tell them who I was and why I needed to be let inside when I heard the two men at my heels.
“Elena,” David and Victor called in unison. One of them did it with a perfect Spanish accent, and the other did his best after having practiced the pronunciation for weeks in front of a mirror. Don’t ask me how I know that detail.
I sighed and turned their way. Most times, it was annoying enough having to deal with one man. I was faced with two at present when I most needed to be alone.
“¿¡Qué!?” I said.
Even if I had technically been living for a little longer in the US than I had in Spain, Spanish still came more naturally to me, especially if I was upset. I wanted to believe it was because Los Angeles is the kind of city where you can mostly communicate in Spanish peppered with a word of English here and there. But I wasn’t sure if it was that or if everyone had been right in their warnings to my parents and they should have moved here when I was younger.
I guess both David and Victor knew me well enough to recognize the irritability in my tone. Neither of them uttered a single word after my answer. Fucking annoying cowards, the two of them. I breathed deeply, tried to regain my composure, and did my best at a smile as I turned again, ready to talk to the cops. But I didn’t get the chance.
The press made their loud appearance in the form of two vans from competing TV stations and a helicopter.
“The press? Who tipped them?” I said more to myself than anyone else, but I thought I saw it all written over David’s face. “You couldn’t help yourself, could you? Not even in your own home!”
“Are you implying that I warned the competition?” David replied, his brows drawing together. But I didn’t give a fuck if I had offended him. We were both aware that one of the reasons our relationship had floundered was my inability to believe him on work-related topics. It’s not that I’m mistrustful or paranoid. He lies.
Victor took himself out of my proximity, heading in the direction of the television reporters with his best and most practiced grin. I expected David to follow him and get whatever statement Victor was about to divulge, but David didn’t move. Even if my ex’s eyes followed my current boyfriend’s every move.
