“And it’s definitely time for me to get an actual assignment.”
30
David was talking to his editor on the phone and I realized—I guess I actually reiterated my realization—that metro editors and writers seem to work all hours of the day and night. Who answers their phone after 11 p.m. on a Friday? Not me. Hell, if it’s a Friday I won’t reply to any call or email received after 11a.m., in case said form of communication has anything to do with a work assignment and you’re about to ruin my lazy weekend plans.
But I digress. While David was on the phone, I kept going over what he’d just said, and it started making a bit more sense.
We didn’t have a lot of details about Henry’s personal life. Maybe he was sick, maybe even terminally ill, and he’d decided to die in a dramatic way, taking David with him in the process. David was, after all, the man who’d precipitated the end of his kingdom inLA Misconducts. Maybe Henry had money problems of some kind: gaming debts, too many vacation-home loans to pay now that he was going to be without a steady job, a balloon mortgage to cover the cost of his private jet. Who knew what was going on with him?
What if he had finally had a revelation and realized his days as a two-time Emmy winner and star ofLA Misconductswere over for good? He was now a has-been, a canceled actor who’d never be hired again—not even in a cough-suppressant syrup commercial. Not after Archie Eisenberg made sure all his peers in Hollywood knew what kind of a depraved sexual bully Henry was.
But even if he was struggling with his mental health, even if he was contemplating suicide, that still didn’t explain how he died. The whole story was so convoluted. Did he write a series of accusatory emails against David, go to his place, drink a bunch of Fernet, and then pay someone else to run him over at our building?
That’s it!I thought. It had to have been an accident. He’d probably paid someone to follow him and hit him with the car, just to break a leg or something and pretend it had been David, but in the end the ruse had been fatal.
“I think I know what happened to Henry,” I told David as he wrapped up the call with his editor.
“You can tell me about it when we start drafting this. It may fit into the story,” David said.
“Got the assignment, then?” I asked.
“Sure did!” He looked happy. He always did when he had a new journalistic assignment. It was only after he’d been working on a story for manymanyhours, had sent revisions to his editor at least twice, argued with said editor about a specific paragraph, and then argued some more about what the nut graph of the article really was, that he looked ready to quit.
“Wait, this is not for theVoice, right?” I asked. After those damning Gloria Fucking Kingsley articles, I didn’t want to hear anything about them.
“This will run on theGazette,” David explained.
“The bastards at theVoicedon’t deserve you,” I said, and I meant it.
“I’m also not sure they would want anything to do with me. I told the editor at theGazettethat I’d been working with you and would like to give you attribution in the article, and he saw no problem. With theVoice, it would have been a whole issue,” he said. He seemed slightly flustered.
“They don’t like two people working on a story together or what?” I asked. His profession was so bizarre. In mine, as a rule of thumb and unless you were Taylor Sheridan, the more writers the merrier.
“They don’t likeyou, specifically,” David said, and he was being a bit weird.
“Because I’m not that kind of writer and dabble in fiction more than fact?” I asked in the most oblivious way possible. Why did I have a bad feeling all of a sudden?
“Because of your link to city hall,” he said, and it suddenly all clicked. Victor’s warning about a job offer for David tentative on his ability to remain independent. My mother’s own mention of said job offer. And my astounding capacity to ignore both of them until that very moment.
“I have a link to city hall that makes me partial, not neutral. Does it also taint you?” I asked him, bitterly.
“It doesn’t taint me!” he protested.
“TheVoicethinks it does,” I said. “Was it them who offered you a job?”
“How do you know?” he asked.
“Because I for sure am fucking tainted,” I said. Actually, if I’m being precise, I yelled it. My bad feeling had officially turned into anger against my fucking ex. Who, by the way, should have remained an ex, and nothing but that, but I had somehow managed to upgrade to an ex-with-many-benefits-and-relationship-prospects because I’m an idiot.
“Nothing escapes the network of spies at city hall, I guess,” David said.
“I mean, you’re making it sound as if my mother was the smart bald character inGame of Thrones, but basically yes, nothing escapes it.” The fact that I could be joking about a TV show at the moment should give you a lot of information regarding the kind of person I am. I was still beside myself. “Did theVoicemake you a job offer?”
He drew in a long breath. “They did, on Wednesday.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I needed to know the reasons behind his treacherous behavior.
“I specifically remember us not being on talking terms then,” he said.
