“Come on, Hope. Famous or not, how could I ever forget about you?” Sophie replied.
“You know, I think you might end up being the most level-headed famous person in history,” I joked.
“Fingers crossed,” Sophie said. “About the fame. I think when it comes to life, I’ll always be level-headed, considering my history.”
Sophie tried to not mention her mother by name anymore. Despite her positivity, that was the one thing subject sent her into a tailspin. It was funny when her mom was alive, she had always held strong. Ever since her mother’s passing, when it came to the topic of her mom, Sophie’s emotions were just too raw.
Sophie had spent many months crying her eyes out over the situation. Now, she didn’t seem to want to shed another tear. It wasn’t my place to tell her how to grieve. Whatever got her through the day.
One thing was clear—we both knew what she’d gone through, what a trooper she was, and how much she’d lost.
“No one deserves for their dreams to come true like you,” I said.
I really wanted this to work out for her. Not just because she was my friend, but because she had genuine talent. Back in high school, she always got the leads in all the plays that were put on. More recently, I had seen her perform in a few community theater productions. She was still just as talented as ever.
“You’re so sweet,” Sophie replied.
“So, are you nervous?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. Nervous isn’t the word. More than anything, I’m just excited. I’ve waited so long for this moment. I’ve dreamt about. And it’s finally here. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for me.”
Chapter Two
One Day Ago
It felt so weird being back in Los Angeles after so much time away. When I left California a year and a half ago, I thought I wouldn’t ever come back. Ultimately, it took reuniting with an old friend to get me to return to the Golden State. As I sat in the back seat of a taxi cab and looked out at the city, I realized that the place had changed in a number of superficial ways, but that deep down, it was the same old Tinseltown.
For example, the billboards could change all they wanted, but traffic would always be a beast. If anything, it seemed like the traffic had gotten even worse since I had left. That part, I didn’t miss. For that matter, I still hadn’t plenty of ill-will for the smog that had given me an unsavory greeting the moment I stepped outside of the airport.
As I spotted a long line coming out of a casting office that stretched around the block, I realized that Los Angeles was the same old shark tank and that I was just a different fish. The further the cab driver went into the city, the happier I was that I had traded Hollywood, California, for Hollywood, Florida. Other than their names and their proximity to beaches, the two cities had little else in common, and that was fine by me.
I wasn’t back in California to reminisce about Hollywood. I was here to reconnect with my old friend. The cab driver dropped me off in front of the Mexican restaurant that Sophie was meeting me at.
When I went inside, the scent of fresh tamales hung in the air, permeating my nostrils while waking up my taste buds. A host with a thick accent led me to a cushy chair at a table while mariachi music played in the background. I was the first to arrive, which was fine, as this time alone gave me my first real chance to settle down since arriving in Los Angeles. Even though I had just been a passenger in the taxi cab, with the brutality of L.A. traffic, every traffic light was an adventure.
Two mariachi songs later, I realized that my old friend was running late. I couldn’t wait to see Sophie. The tides had turned in my life since the last time I’d seen her in person. Back then, I was in the doldrums, struggling to recover from a broken heart. Now, I had a wonderful boyfriend who I loved dearly. Not only that, but my animal shelter was doing very well. In a little over a year, my staff and I had found forever homes for over sixty animals.
Things were really coming together for me. Conversely, Sophie’s life was more of a mixed bag, at least from what I read on her social media feed. I was eager to get the real scoop from her in person.
It was an unusually chilly day in Los Angeles, so much so that when I spotted Sophie wearing a pair of leather gloves as she walked into the restaurant, I wished that I had a pair of my own to wear. As I gave her a hug, my thoughts soon turned to more important matters. Namely, the look of discouragement that was all over Sophie’s face.
Her demeanor was completely different than the last time we had spoken. Back then, she was all smiles and was as positive as could be. Right then, she looked completely defeated.
I wanted to get down to the bottom of why she looked so dour.
“Sorry for being late. I’m having a dreadful day,” Sophie said.
Her face was overloaded with stress. She looked like she could explode. I hadn’t seen her like this since her mother had died.
My heart immediately went out to her.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
She deflected. “You didn’t come all this way to hear me complain about my life.”
I wasn’t going to let her throw me off topic that quickly. “Sophie, you’re one of my oldest friends. You know I’m not going to let you deflect like that, so don’t even try.”
The complaints began spilling out of her. “All right. It’s my boss. He’s the worst. The man is a complete slime ball.
The slime ball she was referring to was Paul Franklin, a noted movie producer in town. He had produced a slew of films, including Days Of Unstoppable Heartbreak, Grand Fiasco, and The Dagger Of Justice. The last one was so dear to him that he kept the dagger of justice prop from the movie on his mantle at home.
I was confused. “Wait a minute. I thought you two were dating.”
“We were,” Sophie replied.
Uh-oh. Clearly, their relationship didn’t have a happy Hollywood ending. The question became, how contentious of a breakup did they have?
“So, what happened?”
“I broke up with him.”
It wasn’t like Sophie to be so stingy with her words. Typically, she was very open about her emotions. This time, she was really making me work to get the truth.
“Because?” I asked.
Sophie sighed. “I found out he was cheating on me.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No. What’s terrible is how many women he cheated on me with. Apparently, he’s never met an aspiring actress that he hasn’t wanted to go to bed with.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“I just feel so used. I mean, I gave him my heart, and he just stomped all over it.”
“That’s so awful. I can’t believe this happened to you.”
“I can’t believe how shamelessly unapologetic he’s been. I mean, he’s the one who cheated on me, yet he walks around the office acting like I’m at fault for what happened.”
“That’s some twisted stuff. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. A breakup is hard enough to deal with, but to have to work with your ex-boyfriend, yikes,” I said.
Sophie groaned. “Yeah. Let’s just say I know why they say never to mix business with pleasure.”
“That must be so awkward for you to have to go in there every day and try to do your job with the specter of his actions hanging over your workplace.”
“The worst part is, he seems to be trying to make it so awkward for me that I’ll quit. He keeps piling the work on and singling me out for extra tasks as much as possible.”
I winced. “Ouch. That’s terrible.”
She nodded. “It’s insufferable.”
I had a different take on the situation. “Then why not stop the suffering?”
She scrunched her nose at me. “Huh?”
“If you hate your job so much, why don’t you quit?”
Sophie hated my idea. “And let him know he won?” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Besides, I’m not starting over from
the ground floor after it’s taken me so long to get this far.”
Those were some strong words. What really struck me was how bitter her tone was. Everyone had bad days, but this seemed like a tectonic shift in Sophie’s entire mind frame. She seemed to have adopted a scorned earth attitude.
It was a side of Sophie that I’d never seen before. Her optimism was completely gone. So was her ability to look on the bright side. This was a Sophie I didn’t recognize. I missed my old friend.
At the same time, I wasn’t sure if these changes in her personality were permanent, or just a temporary shift that had been brought on by her awful work environment.
That’s why I had a suggestion for her. “I understand it is hard starting over, but maybe it’s time you leave this job because you came out to L.A. to be a star. You have a whole acting career ahead of you. Why be tied down to some office job?”
A tone of hopelessness was in her voice as she answered. “Come on. We both know I’m never going to be a star.”
I furrowed my brow. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m too old to become a star. It’s too late. The fact is, my acting career was over before it even began.”
I couldn’t believe how jaded Sophie looked. Also, all of this seemed to be coming out of left field.
I needed some clarification. “Wait a minute. Since when? This is the first I’ve heard of this.”
“That’s because I’ve been too ashamed to tell you. It turns out you were right. I’m too old to make it as an actress. Every audition was a complete failure. I couldn’t even get cast as a mom in a lousy commercial. I mean, there I was dating a producer, and he never had any intention of casting me in anything.”
I tried to inject some much-needed optimism into the conversation. “But you’re a great actress.”
“So are you, and Hollywood chewed you up and spat you out.”
That comment struck a nerve. It was a slippery slope that led to self-pity, so I had to be careful not to go down that road.
Sophie continued. “I was delusional to believe I could beat the odds. The fact is, the odds didn’t want to get beaten.”
I tried to give her some words of comfort, but she didn’t want to hear them. “But Sophie—”
Sophie wasn’t done saying her piece. “Anyway, after one particularly disastrous audition, I gave up on my acting dreams. But, since I’d come all this way, I decided that if I couldn’t make it in front of the camera, maybe I could get a good position behind the scenes. A few months ago, when Paul promoted me to assistant producer, I felt like I was finally getting somewhere. Then, I found out he’d cheated on me with at least a half a dozen women.”
Sophie painted a completely defeatist picture of her acting career. One that was devoid of hope. Suddenly, I realized why she didn’t want to give up on her job. It was the only thing she could hang her hat on. If she gave that up, she really would have to start over. That was a harder thing to do in Hollywood than in most other industries.
I tried to be as sympathetic as possible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know any of this. Judging from our phone conversations and your social media posts, I thought you were still trying to make it as an actress—”
“All that stuff I post on social media is just to put on a good face. No one wants to post about their dreams dying for the whole world to read.”
“That’s so true.”
It was also so sad. Sophie was in a real bad spot right now, with the true extent of her troubles only being revealed to me one answer at a time. With all the terrible news she had thrown my way, I was still trying to process it all. That being said, a thought popped into my head that seemed to be the antidote to all that ailed her.
“Why don’t you move back home?” I asked.
Sophie didn’t hesitate with her response, immediately shooting down my suggestion. “I can’t go home.”
“Why not? All your friends are there. We’ll do everything we can to get you back on your feet.”
“True, but you guys aren’t the only ones back home. The haters are back there, too. The naysayers. All those people who told me I was too old, that I’d never make it, that it was worthless to even try. If I go home, they’ll just have more fuel for their fire, and I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they were right.”
If I didn’t already have ample evidence of how much my old friend had changed, her last statement was the clincher.
I tried to pull her out of her funk. “What about the Sophie who didn’t care what other people thought? Who found a bright side in everything?”
I was hoping that would stir up the Sophie of yore. That it would get her to harken back to the woman she used to be.
That did not happen.
“Hope, I know you’re trying to help, but this isn’t just about the haters. It’s about me, too. I can brush off criticism from others, but if I go back home with my tail between my legs, I don’t know if I’ll be able to live with myself,” Sophie said.
“I understand.”
This was a whole different Sophie than I’d ever seen before. The last year had changed her more than I thought, and not for the better. I hardly recognized her now.
Just then, when the conversation seemed to have hit a low point, I realized that it hadn’t truly hit rock bottom yet.
Sophie’s cell phone rang. As she checked the caller I.D. on her touchscreen, I knew it was bad news.
She sighed. “I have to take this.”
Sophie answered the phone. “Yes, Paul?”
Uh-oh. What now?
I only got one side of the conversation, but that was bad enough.
“But, I’m with a friend,” Sophie said into the phone. She listened to her boss’s response, then groaned. “Fine. I’ll be right there.”
As Sophie hung up the phone, I braced myself for whatever was coming next.
“I hate to do this, but I have to get back to work,” Sophie said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Now?”
She nodded. “Unfortunately. Apparently, there having some problems back at the office.”
I was unable to hide my disappointment. “Well, how long is this going to take?”
“It could take minutes…or hours. I don’t know.”
I exhaled. “Well, there goes dinner.”
She gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. But look, I’m off tomorrow and for the entire weekend. I’ll tell you what, we’ll meet up tomorrow morning and spend the whole day together. We can go to the beach and have a great time. What do you say?”
“That sounds good.”
Sophie then gave me a hug and headed back to work while I tried to make sense of how things had gone so wildly different than I had expected.
Chapter Three
Since I was already at the restaurant, I ordered dinner and ate alone. While the tamales were great, I ended up leaving the restaurant an hour later with a bad taste in my mouth over the disturbing discussion I’d had with Sophie. I felt so awful for her. After all that she had been through in her life, she’d moved out to Los Angeles to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming an actress.
When she left Florida, she was full of optimism. Now, in the span of a year, she seemed completely defeated. For all the success stories that Hollywood produced, it was home to just as many broken dreams. I just never thought my friend would become one of the cautionary tales.
Sophie’s career failure made me reflect on how bitterly things had ended for me in Los Angeles. I could feel the desire to wallow starting to swell inside me. Part of me wanted to go straight from the Mexican restaurant to a bar to drink off my sorrows. I told myself it would just be a little nightcap to take the edge off the day.
I resisted, partially because jet lag had suddenly decided to set in, but also because I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself at just one drink. At that moment, deep down, I knew that sleep would be far more beneficial to me.
Not only would it help with
the jet lag, but it would also mean I’d avoid waking up with a nasty hangover in the morning. After talking some sense into myself, I just went back to my hotel and conked out.
I would have stayed at Sophie’s apartment, but she was renting a small and cramped one bedroom. There was barely enough room for Sophie and her stuff in there, no less me. Besides, I had reached a point in my life where I never wanted to sleep on another pull-out sofa again.
After I had plopped myself down on the memory foam mattress at the hotel, I knew I had made the right decision. Before I knew it, I was asleep. And boy did I sleep like a rock.
Morning came quicker than I expected. I was in no hurry to wake up. As a matter of fact, I would have slept in even longer if it was not for the early-morning phone call that I received.
I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Seven-thirty? Wow, how the time had flown by. At the same time, at that early hour, I knew it couldn’t be a telemarketer calling.
But, who was it? I answered my cell phone, as groggy as could be. Initially, I thought it might have been my boyfriend Daniel calling from Florida to wish me good morning. He did that sometimes, calling me to tell me that he just wanted to hear my voice. My boyfriend was a sweetheart like that. At the same time, being three time zones ahead of me back in Florida, he may have forgotten that it was still early morning here in California.
Unfortunately, it was not Daniel on the phone. Instead, it was Sophie on the line, with awful news. She was frantic as she spoke. When she told me where she was calling from, I understood why. It turned out she was at the police station. Even worse, she revealed that she had been arrested. That news sent me reeling. Had I heard that right? No, it couldn’t be. It had to be a mistake, didn’t it? Only, it wasn’t.
***
How could this have happened? My old friend, in jail? I had trouble wrapping my head around it all. My mind was already racing, but my body soon caught up with it.
I threw my clothes on as quickly as I could and rushed out of the hotel. The taxi ride over to the police station was the most anxiety-riddled ten minutes of my entire life. It didn’t help that the cab driver kept trying to make small talk, treating me like a tourist, mouthing off about all the glitzy sites in town that I should visit.
Sweets, Suspects, and Women Sleuths Cozy Mystery Set Page 40