Unraveling

by Owen Thomas

  “Turn it over.”

  On the back, written in a thin silvery script, was my name. Matilda.

  “Oh my… what are the odds of that?”

  “Pretty good, actually. They had one for every name of every person on the planet. Different stones, shapes materials. But there was Matilda staring me in the face.”

  “It’s really beautiful, Simon.”

  He reached out with both hands and clasped the hand that held the fob.

  “It comes with a message, Tills,” he said and I felt the fear in me returning as quickly as it had receded. “I want this to be symbolic.”

  “Symbolic of what?”

  “I worry about you terribly, Tills. Maybe you guessed that. I know you’re struggling. This business eats people up. I see it all the time. I see piles of bones that were once people. I see empty, soulless vessels that were once genuine. And… and I know you’re having a bit of a rough go. So I want you to think of that little bluish stone in its sea of black as the part of you that is safe. The part of you that none of this life can touch or corrupt or threaten. This is the truth about you, see? The name by which you call yourself and that nobody else knows. So you never forget and wander off.”

  “Simon…”

  Pink bloomed suddenly into his pale cheeks. He withdrew his hands from mine and looked around self-consciously at the neighboring tables. He tried to return to his coffee as though nothing had happened. I gushed over the gift and told him how much I appreciated his friendship and for always trying to buck me up. I assured him that I was going through an anti-social phase but that everything was really okay. Simon pretended to feel reassured, but neither of us believed what I was saying. Even my phone trilled out, calling me a liar.

  I looked at the number and felt that vaguely nauseous sensation that seized me every time I had to contend with news from Burton Dalrymple, the man connected to so many sources of my anxiety: the police and their narcotics investigation, Zack West and his suspicions of perfidy, the underground sex video that misrepresented me as a purveyor of narcissistic smut, and Blair Gaines who, because he loved me or wanted to own me or both, was paying all of Burton’s fees. Simon watched intently as I answered. I could tell from the look on his face that any chance I had of convincing him that I found my life perfectly bearable was suddenly gone.

  “Detective Fuentes wants to meet,” said Burton.

  “About what exactly?”

  “She’s not saying.”

  “Do you think … I mean, do I need to worry that …” I did not finish the question, not wanting to say more in front of Simon. I didn’t need to. Burton understood.

  “There’s no way to be sure, Tilly. We’re just going to have meet with her and find out what’s on her mind. Can you be here in an hour?”

  When I hung up, Simon was perched on his chair, clearly concerned.

  “What’s happened? Is everything … alright? You don’t look so good.”

  “Fine. Yeah. Everything’s fine. I have to meet my lawyer, that’s all. Never especially fun.” I shot him a hopeful glance. “A cigarette would be nice.”

  “Whoa. You’ve been smoke free for, what, ten months? This must be bad.”

  “Thirteen. I’m okay. Just want to turn my brain off.”

  “Want me to go with you? To drive you I mean? I can wait and we could go have a bite some place.”

  “Simon, don’t be silly. I’m fine. Don’t you have, I don’t know, work or something to tend to? Talent to represent? What would Milton say?”

  I stood and gave him a hug and kissed him on his worried cheek.

  “Thanks so much for the gift. You really are a great friend, Simon.”

  He held me out at arms length so he could look me in the eyes.

  “Don’t lose yourself, Tills.”

  * * *

  The lobby of Patterson & Klegg featured a sweeping view of its Century City environs through a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows directly opposite the front door. Between that view and the lobby was a glassed-in conference room with a large rectangular table and ten high-backed leather chairs. It was like a display case sitting out on a ledge or a high-rise fish tank where the sunken pirate ship had been replaced with sleek office furniture and a fully stocked credenza.

  Before the front door closed behind me, I could see that three of the seats inside the aquarium were occupied. I took it as a bad sign that Detective Fuentes, wearing a peach blazer over a cream blouse like some sort of fruit cobbler, had brought with her a broad-shouldered, darkly uniformed police officer. I stared at their unseeing backs, feeling such a surge of loathing and anxiety that I wanted to push the entire room off its perch, sending it tumbling down into the view. Burton Dalrymple, his back to that view, caught my eye and waived me in like he was inviting a traffic merge. I nodded to the receptionist, gripping Simon’s key fob like it was a rope.

  “Ms. Johns,” Karen Fuentes said formally as I sat down next to Burton. “Nice to see you. This is Officer Dunkirk.”

  He was a bag of muscle and bone shaped like a person. He nodded politely.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “They just sat down,” said Burton, patting my forearm.

  “I know we didn’t give you much advance notice.”

  “So, what is this about?”

  Karen looked at Officer Dunkirk, sending some telepathic instruction. He stood to his full and impressive height, creaking of leather belts and holsters as he unfolded himself. He slipped two fingers inside his shirt pocket and extracted a square of paper. His radio belched static, inducing temporary arrhythmia. I felt myself jolt at the sound. Dunkirk looked at the square of paper, preparing, I thought, to read from it. He leaned across the table and handed it to me. Then he sat, re-creaking on his way back down into his chair. It was a photograph.

  “Do you recognize this man?” Asked Karen.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s Tiki. Tiki Emmanuel.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “Friend of Zack’s. He was around long before I showed up.”

  “You saw him a lot with Zack West?”

  “Like I said.”

  “Have you ever known Mr. Emmanuel to possess illegal narcotics?”

  The question slapped down in front of me on the table. I stared at it a moment before answering. There was no doubt as to the answer. The question was whether I was willing to cooperate and where that cooperation would lead. I had no particular allegiance to Tiki. We had nothing much in common other than Zack himself and a shared betrayal in the tryst between Zack and Maria, a subject we had never discussed. Tiki had always looked at me as the Yoko Ono interloper of the clique. I was the one who was always taking Zack away; pulling him out of the secret huddle because I was ready to leave the party. I was always the excuse on Zack’s lips for why Tiki would have to wait. Tiki had always been polite enough, ever the well-dressed, fine-mannered secret agent, but I could always tell that he would be glad whenever I chose to move on.

  So the idea of dishing on Tiki was easy enough. But I was wary that knowing anything, cooperating even a little, was a step closer to the same slippery slope I had tried to avoid when they had first asked me questions about Zack. I was not willing to be an instrument of his prosecution.

  Or was I? I looked at the question anew. What was I to make of Zack’s declaration at the hospital that the police should turn their attention to me because I know everything? It was because of Zack that my house had been searched and my name was in the news not only for having made a sex video but also for having a possible connection to the use and distribution of illegal narcotics. What was I to make of the ease with which Zack concluded – or concocted – that I had planted drugs in his Escalade out of revenge for the video? Why was I protecting someone who, by all appearances, was trying to make me the scapegoat?

  And yet, I still hesitated. Karen read the silence like a pro.

  “It’s important that you help us here, Tilly,” she said. “I’m not askin
g you about Zack. I’m asking you about Mr. Emmanuel. And you’re not the only one we’re talking to. If they cooperate and you don’t, I have to start wondering why that is.”

  I looked at Burton. He nodded.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tiki was often in possession of drugs. Don’t ask me what kind or amounts. I don’t know. I just know… he always had a little something. He was always taking something out of his pocket. He worked whatever it was into his handshakes, like he was so sly and no one could tell. Tiki spent time at big parties in small, personal conversations off in some corner. You could tell what he was doing.”

  “Did he have any of those sorts of conversations with Zack?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Zack.”

  Karen sighed.

  “Okay. Can you tell me if, in any of these conversations you are remembering, these conversations in which, as you say, you could tell what was going on, was any money changing hands?”

  “Not that I saw. I never thought of Tiki as a dealer or anything. Just that he had a supply of … of something and, you know, he shared it.”

  “Did he ever give you anything?”

  “I’m instructing my client not to answer that question,” said Burton.

  “And I’m ignoring my attorney’s advice. The…

  “Tilly…”

  “The answer is no. Never. Not once has Tiki Emmanuel ever given me anything like that. We were part of the same circle, but we were never really friends.”

  “Have you ever been to Tiki Emmanuel’s home?”

  “Once. He and Maria threw a party.”

  “This is Maria Beckwith?”

  “Yes. Zack and I went together. It was big and loud. I ended up leaving early.”

  “You left Zack there?”

  “The whole pack was there. When he hooks up with that group, sometimes he just…look I really don’t want to talk about Zack.”

  “Was this party by any chance last New Year’s Eve?”

  I nodded uneasily. Karen exchanged looks with Dunkirk.

  “Okay. I need you to tell me everyone that you remember seeing at that party.”

  “Jesus. It’s the phonebook.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. We need to do it. Let’s start here.”

  She turned to Dunkirk and held out her hand. He fished another photo out of his shirt pocket and handed it to her. She put it on the table.

  “Do you remember seeing this man?”

  He was lean and slightly Asian with bleached hair.

  “Yeah. He was there.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No. I’ve seen him before. And he was there that night. I remember him dancing.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever spoken with him?”

  “No.”

  “Does the name Paul Lee mean anything?”

  “No.”

  “How about PK Lee?”

  “Pee-Kay?”

  “Does that sound familiar?”

  “Maybe. I think so, yes. I don’t remember where though.”

  Karen Fuentes pulled a small notepad from the pocket of her peach blazer and opened it. She patted herself down for a pen. Dunkirk handed her his.

  “Thanks. Okay. Let’s get your best memory of who was at this party.”

  I was able to remember a couple dozen people. Some of them had full names – like my own friends, and the members of the Zack Pack and the A-list celebrities who were there. Others had only first names or name fragments, while still others had only descriptions and associations. Veronica something who had the boyfriend, Mark or Matt, with the soul patch and the Bloody Mary stain on his sleeve. Karen scribbled as I talked, her face inscrutable.

  “Okay,” she said when I was done, clicking the pen and handing it back to Dunkirk. “That will do for now I think.” It was the first time in the conversation that I felt certain I was not going to be arrested and led out to a squad car in handcuffs for a compulsory photo op. “We will likely be back in touch as the investigation develops.”

  Burton spoke up. “Can you tell us anything about where this is headed?”

  Karen smiled. I caught a glimpse of someone’s mother. Someone’s aunt.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Is my client a target? A person of interest?”

  “I … at this point, counselor, your client is not a target or a person of interest. I needn’t tell you how quickly that can change. But, as of right now, no.”

  Dunkirk leaned over and whispered something in her ear and then returned to his chair. Detective Fuentes thought about whatever he had told her for a second. Then she looked at me.

  “I can probably tell you something that you will find of interest and that you will learn about soon enough anyway. As a show of good faith for our future discussions, I will share with you this bit of news if you do me the courtesy of not acting on it until you hear it officially through the District Attorney’s office.”

  Burton nodded. “Let’s have it.”

  “We recently conducted a search of Mr. Emmanuel’s home. Among the things we found was a small surveillance camera made to look like a fountain pen. We confiscated the computers in the home and examined them and on one of those computers we found an unnamed file that turned out to be a video of which you are already well aware.”

  She paused, letting the information seep in. I looked at Burton and back to Karen. She took that as her cue.

  “We also found a list of phone numbers among his papers. The numbers are of media organizations in town, several of which have reported receiving inquiries about purchasing the video.”

  It felt like something had detonated in my head.

  “It was Tiki? Holy … It was Tiki. It wasn’t Zack at all. It was Tiki. Oh my God.”

  “That is not my investigation. Not yet anyway. I will probably have some role in it unless it goes to computer crimes or it goes federal. I know they’re going to open a whole separate file on that, so save your questions for whoever get assigned. In the meantime, I thought you might want to know.”

  “So you have the computer. I mean…”

  “The computer is not going anywhere. The file was copied and logged. So far we haven’t found anything else like that, so it may just be the one file. We haven’t found any evidence of distribution except for the computer log that indicates the file was copied once. Probably to a flash drive or something.”

  “Fox 11 got a flash drive,” said Burton.

  “So maybe that’s it,” said Karen standing. “Hard to tell. We’ll keep looking.”

  “Has Tiki been arrested?” I asked.

  “Mr. Emmanuel has been arrested on charges of possession stemming from items found incident to the search. Not for anything having to do with what we found in the Escalade or the video matter. Not yet anyway. That’s about all I can tell you right now. Thanks for your time.” She reached her hand across the table as Officer Dunkirk stood. I shook it. “We’ll be in touch.”

  * * *

  Burton and I talked for an hour after they left, trying to put things together. Burton surmised that the drugs found in Zack’s Escalade had to belong to Tiki Emmanuel. Neither of us knew the names Paul Lee or PK Lee, but we agreed that Detective Fuentes seemed to suspect him as Tiki’s supplier. Burton thought that Tiki must have been exercising some serious anger at Zack for his roll in the sheets with Maria. It seemed plausible to Burton that the anonymous tip to the police about Zack handing out designer party favors at the beach house had come from Tiki; although ironic since that was actually Tiki’s role at the parties I had attended. Burton said he was sure that Fuentes was already looking into Tiki’s phone records for a call to the police but that he would call her anyway and suggest the obvious. Burton concluded that Zack’s high-speed collision with Whiskey A Go Go must have been an unexpected gift to a plan otherwise requiring any number of risky machinations to draw law enforcement attention to a drug-packed Escalade.

 
He acknowledged that other explanations were theoretically possible. It could have been that someone other than Tiki Emmanuel was responsible for the drugs. It might even have been that someone – Tiki or any number of other people who have had access to that Escalade – stored the drugs without intending Zack to ever be caught or blamed. Or the drugs might actually have belonged to Zack, who knowingly carried them around town stashed under the back seat of his car, making Tiki’s penchant for slinging designer pills at parties simply a coincidence. Burton entertained such theories perfunctorily, as empty exercises. The fly in the ointment was the anonymous call to the police. He thought it was clear enough that someone was looking to hurt Zack.

  It was all plausible enough to me with one exception: I would not have thought Tiki Emmanuel capable of holding in his head a single damning thought or harboring a single harmful intention for Zack West. In my mind, Tiki worshipped Zack, even if he went to great lengths to conceal it. Tiki’s natural stoicism was his greatest asset in that effort. Tiki was as cool as the proverbial cucumber and never openly enthused about anything. Tiki did not need you; you needed Tiki. But if that shtick fooled everyone else, it had never fooled me. Tiki was a cleaner fish. He was the five-ounce bird dining atop the shoulder of a two thousand pound water buffalo. Professionally, socially, personally – and there is no difference between those facets of the self in Hollywood – Zack West was everything to Tiki Emmanuel.

  I would not have thought Tiki capable of betraying Zack, not even upon learning about Maria Beckwith. I was wrong, as it turned out, albeit wrong in an odd way. My mistake was not in over-estimating Tiki’s love for Zack. My mistake was just the opposite. I had underestimated the lengths to which Tiki was willing to go to purge Zack’s circle of all romantic competition. It was not unforgivable to Tiki that Zack would sleep with Tiki’s girlfriend. It was unforgivable that Tiki’s girlfriend would sleep with Zack. It is my understanding from many sources, including several from within the old Zack Pack, that after zoom lenses revealed the affair, Tiki’s relationship with Zack turned temporarily rocky but quickly regained its footing. Tiki’s love for Maria, on the other hand, almost instantly vaporized. She was effectively excommunicated from the group.