by Leonie Gant
Chapter Four
Reggie dropped me off at the front of my apartment. As usual Miss Betsy was working in the gardens. Miss Betsy Peterman owned the entire complex and rented out the various apartments, generally to people that she felt were interesting. She liked to talk, but most of all she liked to listen and hear stories that people from different countries and different walks of life could bring her. After trying to find a reasonably priced place in LA, I’m sure I only landed this one because I launched into a story about the time I got chased by an emu when holidaying in the outback with my family when I was a kid. I wish it hadn’t been true. Despite the fact she owned a very pricey piece of real estate in LA and was raking in the rent, she liked to do the maintenance on the building herself. It was not unusual to see Miss Betsy pottering around the place, her gray hair in a messy bun and with a tool belt around her hips. I always felt guilty when anything in my unit needed to be repaired and generally stayed there to do any of the heavy lifting. That being said, when she fixed something she did it well. She said she had to considering the bum of a husband she had tossed out on his rear years ago.
As I walked through the door to my apartment my cell phone rang insistently. Stupidly I didn’t check caller ID before answering.
“Where are you?” screeched the familiar voice of Miss Eleanor Channing.
“Well, Miss Channing. I have just been dropped off at my home after spending the morning being questioned by the police.”
“Why were they questioning you?” she asked suspiciously.
I looked at the phone and contemplated smacking it against my head. “They required a witness statement regarding the passing of Mr Hendricks earlier today,” I said, wondering if she had actually forgotten.
“I know,” she sighed. “It has been such a trauma for me. I need you to get here right now and take me to the spa so I can deal with everything I have been through.”
“Actually, Miss Channing, I can’t get to you right now. The police have impounded my car as it is considered to be a part of the crime scene. Maybe it would be a good opportunity for you to speak to your therapist and I will be there tomorrow morning to help you.”
See, that’s what you call self-control. Remember, this was still supposed to be my day off. Eleanor needs to be led to the next person to take care of her. She can’t have a moment of the day where someone isn’t holding her hand. Her entourage of managers, lawyers, hangers-on and I generally play a game of pass the starlet. She gets too much for one, we pass her along to the next person in the line.
Once I got Eleanor off the phone, I called her manager immediately. Eleanor at a loose end is a disaster waiting to happen, but for the rest of today she was somebody else’s disaster. Of course there were no queries about how I had done at the police station. To be perfectly honest though, the guy probably didn’t even know my name. I was just minion number one.
Flopping down on the couch I wrapped my arms around one of the cushions and promptly fell asleep. Next thing I heard was pounding on my front door. Not nice, polite knocking, no, this was pounding. Getting up from my couch I threw the cushion down and ripped open the door to find Detective Griffin about to assault it again.
“Not you again,” I groaned. “What do you want now? I told you everything I know and weren’t you supposed to speak to Reggie if you needed anything else?”
“Sorry, Miss Eyre,” he said. “I’m not here with any more questions, I’m just returning your car. We’ve finished with it now and I knew it would be important to you to get it back.” He smiled and I could swear I heard angels sing.
“You’re being nice,” I said, squinting up at him, still not fully awake. “Stop it, it doesn’t suit you.”
“I can be nice,” he said, lowering his voice seductively.
I felt that butterfly feeling in the pit of my stomach, but then I stopped myself and thought this through. Detective Hottie was being pleasant and seductive to me, breathtakingly average me. I saw his partner. If she was his version of normal I had no chance. I know it sounds like I have low self-esteem. I prefer to think of it as a very strong grasp of reality. Detective Griffin and I had known each other for a total of eight hours at most, not nearly enough time for him to be seduced by my stellar personality. Seeing as I wasn’t a big proponent of love at first sight, the whole seductive voice thing was just not working for me.
I reached for the keys that he was dangling in his hand. “Thank you very much.”
He pulled the keys just out of my reach. “Any chance of getting a drink, I’m kind of warm at the moment. The air conditioning in your car doesn’t work very well.”
“The air conditioning works fine. It isn’t my fault if you weren’t able to turn it on,” I said.
He quirked that eyebrow and had an expectant look on his face.
“Fine,” I ground out, years of my mother’s social etiquette indoctrination unable to be repressed. “Come in and you can have a drink.”
I led him to the kitchen, opened the fridge, and tossed him a bottle of water. He looked at the bottle and then at me.
“You want anything else there’s a grocery store around the corner,” I told him, opening my own bottle.
He raised the drink to his lips, took a good couple of swallows and leaned against the kitchen counter. My apartment is a normal size but Detective Griffin managed to make it seem small.
“So, Detective Griffin,” I said. “Why are you really here? Somehow I don’t think returning my car, especially this quickly, is a high priority for the LAPD. Something tells me that there is a little more behind this visit.”
“I’d like you to call me Jake,” he said.
I cocked my head. “I don’t think so, Detective Griffin. You have thirty seconds to tell me what you want or I’m calling Reggie to say you’re harassing me, and believe me that man would like nothing better than making your life difficult. He likes my cookies.”
“Really,” said Griffin with a smirk on his face.
“I mean he likes the cookies I make, chocolate chip with pecans. They’re really good and I make them for him. In fact that’s what I should be doing now, so get out so I can start.”
I’d lost control. I knew it and Griffin knew it.
“Look I’m sorry,” said Griffin. “This isn’t normally my thing but we’re getting stonewalled by Ryan Hendricks’s people and Eleanor Channing’s people. The lieutenant’s a fan so he’s not backing us up. I was hoping that you would have more information, maybe with your attorney not being around. None of what you say to me at the moment is admissible in court. We just need to get a handle on it.”
“What is it you want to know?” I asked.
I was starting to feel a bit sorry for him. I could understand the frustration. My uncle is a cop back home in Australia so I kind of have a soft spot for the police. It’s a thankless job, made more difficult by lawyers and people who don’t believe the same rules apply to them that apply to the rest of us. Griffin ran his hand through his hair, frustration evident in the tense way he was holding himself.
“Is there anything else you can tell us? None of this can be used in court so rumors, information about the people involved, anything. You’re involved in that world in a way we can’t be. Surely there are things you’ve heard or seen that can help.”
“Okay,” I said. “Ask me what you want and I’ll give you what I can.”
“You are Eleanor Channing’s personal assistant. What does that mean and what access does that give you?” he asked.
“Technically I work for Monique Petit. Eleanor Channing’s management have contracted Monique’s firm to provide a personal assistant. This gives me more freedom than most personal assistants have because I do not work for Eleanor. I can make choices on situations without being pressured by the client. Monique allocates me to clients who have had staffing issues previously.”
“I’m guessing they have staffing issues because they are unpleasant to work fo
r,” Griffin put in.
“Got it in one, Detective.” I saluted him with my water bottle.
“You would need to have a certain type of personality to cope with that kind of job,” Griffin said. “I’ve dealt with some of the more difficult celebrities. I couldn’t do that for longer than a few minutes at a time before doing some damage. How did you get the job?”
“I was recruited by Monique,” I said.
“How?” asked Griffin.
“I was working in London as a nanny, short term jobs mostly. I was given a job for a musician who had his three year old daughter with him in a fancy hotel suite. Turned up and the guy was present but not completely accounted for, if you know what I mean. The regular nanny, who was also the personal assistant, had walked out on him, due to having to share the suite with him, the child and several groupies. The place was a mess and the kid was really unhappy. It was just a bad situation. I tried to sort out a small area for the daughter to be safe and then started cleaning. I contacted Monique, whose number I had found, as she was the assistant’s boss. Monique turned up at the same time as the musician’s wife. She was some strung out model, who went crazy when she found him in bed with the groupies. To complete the disaster his manager and the band mates arrived. Chaos was going on around me and I’m in a small play area I made with the little girl having a tea party. I remember singing to her, trying desperately to ignore the disaster that was this child’s life. When it was finished, the little girl was packed off to her grandmother and I was making my escape. Monique approached me and offered a job. When I asked her why, she said I provided a place of calm that protected the child. She believed another person would have caved. I started working for Monique with a couple of clients in Europe and then I moved over here to take some jobs. After a couple of months I ended up with Eleanor. I’m not just her PA. I’m also supposed to keep her safe and grounded when everyone else in the world is telling her she isn’t answerable to anyone. Sometimes I’m successful. Other times not so much.”
“That sounds like more than a full time job,” Griffin noted.
“It is. I’ve worked for Eleanor for four months now and today was supposed to be my first day off.”
Griffin grinned.
“It’s the reason I usually take short term jobs. This one has gone a bit longer than it was supposed to.”
“What is Eleanor Channing like?” Griffin asked.
“Miss Channing is a woman of her environment,” I said. “She makes money for everyone around her so they are not going to do anything that upsets her. Imagine if everyone around you told you that you were wonderful all the time, that you were beautiful all the time and that anyone who said anything against you was just being jealous. You’d get a pretty skewed view of the world wouldn’t you?”
“I guess so,” he replied.
“Well that’s Eleanor Channing.”
“You sound like you feel sorry for her,” Griffin said.
“I do, kind of. It’s hard to get past the fact that she’s gorgeous and talented and rude and drives me crazy sometimes, but she’s also really alone. If she questioned the motives of all the people around her and why they claim to be friends with her, I think she’d find herself in a really dark place. I guess it’s easier to be outrageous and demanding,” I reflected.
Looking up, I saw Griffin’s face had softened.
“What?” I asked.
“You sound like a nice person,” he said, only mildly surprised. “Not many people are that forgiving or understanding.”
“Oh don’t get me wrong,” I replied. “I bitch and moan about her all the time because she does, on occasion, make my life into a living hell. I am seriously looking forward to the last day I see her and on principle, I will never shell out my hard earned money to watch her on the screen. That being said, I don’t hate her or anything.”
Griffin nodded. “Since you spend so much time with her I would think that you attend events and parties.”
“All the time,” I replied, taking a sip of water.
“Must be fun,” Griffin commented.
“My own little circle of hell,” I replied.
“Really,” he remarked. “Any reason why?”
“You need to understand, none of these people are my friends, none of them like me and if you asked the next day, none of them would be able to place me. My job is to be unmemorable. I am there to make sure nothing happens that can embarrass Eleanor or, more importantly, damage the brand. If anyone remembers me then I have done something that takes attention away from her and in my world that is a bad thing. One of my biggest strengths in this business is I am so unmemorable. I do not take attention away from the beautiful people.”
“You seem pretty memorable to me,” Griffin said.
I looked at him sourly. “I’m already helping, you don’t need to lay it on so thick.”
“Don’t take a compliment well do you,” he commented. “What about Ryan Hendricks? Was this hookup something recent?”
“You really cannot be that clueless,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
It was times like these that I wondered about people who lived normal lives, where the minutiae of celebrity lives weren’t as accessible as breathing.
“I am going to tell you what I know, but this is all before I started working for Eleanor, so it comes from tabloid magazines and gossip columns. About a year ago Eleanor and Ryan were pretty hot and heavy together. They were the big couple around town, seen at all the parties, premieres, everywhere. Then something happened. Rumor was Ryan cheated on her and they broke up. About six months ago Ryan started seeing Emily Saunders who is the daughter of Henry Saunders.”
At Griffin’s clueless expression I knew I needed to fill him in further. “Henry Saunders is head of one of the big movie production companies. He is very, and I mean very, powerful in this town. Ryan and his daughter were engaged which gives Ryan’s career a boost. Makes Ryan pretty much untouchable.”
“So if Ryan is engaged, what was he doing with Eleanor Channing?” Griffin asked.
“I wasn’t there,” I said, slowly and directly, “but I am assuming that Eleanor got a booty call. I left her at her home around ten last night. She and Ryan must have hooked up at some point after that. He would most likely have picked her up, because screwing around on Henry Saunders’ daughter is not something you want to advertise. Limo drivers talk and Eleanor does not drive herself anywhere. She finds it too stressful and stress ages you.”
“Would cheating on his fiancée be something that Ryan would do only once, or would it be more of a permanent character flaw?” Griffin asked.
“For that man it was something that came as naturally as breathing. In the last four months I have walked in on Ryan Hendricks many times having sex with any number of women, sometimes multiple women.”
“Any reason that you keep walking in on him, or would it just be a stalker issue?”
“Oh you think you are funny don’t you?” I said humorlessly.
Griffin smiled at me. He had a really nice smile when it wasn’t that horrible smirk thing he did. I mentally slapped myself. No falling for the gorgeous cop who is just using you for inside information.
“When I started working with Eleanor it was made clear to me that her hooking up with Ryan Hendricks would be very bad for her career. It was also made clear to me that she may not be completely over Ryan and so may be vulnerable to some seduction on his part. Part of my job was to try to prevent this from happening. They party in the same circles and sometimes I have needed to track down one or the other when they have slipped away from the party. That is why I knew where Ryan Hendricks’s bedroom was. He holds a lot of parties there and if I lose track of Eleanor I have accidentally wandered into his bedroom pretending to be lost, to make sure the woman with him hasn’t been Eleanor. I have also wandered into toilets, out in the garden, in closets and pretty much everywhere else in that house. I hav
e seen a lot of actors and actresses in many varied sexual positions. Ryan Hendricks has figured prominently in these situations.”
“So he hasn’t been faithful to Emily Saunders,” Griffin confirmed.
“Ryan Hendricks and faithful aren’t anywhere close to being in the same time zone,” I nodded.
“And yet you are saying that you have never had sex with Ryan Hendricks,” Griffin said.
Okay, I was getting annoyed. “Seriously, you’re going to start that again. Ryan Hendricks only needed to look in a woman’s direction and she dropped her panties. I saw it again and again and we are talking about beautiful women who are unattainable to most of the male population.”
“But he never looked in your direction?”
“No he didn’t.”
“Did that upset you in any way?"
“No it didn’t. I never expected Ryan Hendricks’s attention and I never received it. Most of the times I saw him he was in various stages of undress with other women. He treated women like disposable objects and I would hope that my self-esteem was not so low that I would have been one of those women. And thanks to that line of questioning, your time is now up. Please leave my home.”
Something in my demeanor obviously convinced Detective Griffin that I was serious and he straightened up to leave.
As we got to the door he turned. “Thank you for talking to me, Trudie. I do appreciate it. I have one more question though. Do you think Eleanor Channing could have killed Ryan Hendricks?”
“I personally don’t think so,” I replied, “but I really don't know.”
With that I closed the door. How did I end up helping the cops anyway? I really needed to learn how to say no.