I shook my head. “I won’t say anything unless the detectives make it an issue. And that doesn’t seem likely.”
“You’re a good egg, Billy,” he said, relieved. “I better get out of here with this stuff.”
He headed toward the rear of the building.
“Hold up,” I said. “Where are you going?”
“To the alley exit,” he said. “I sure as hell ain’t gonna carry this past a line of coppers.”
He started walking again, and I was walking with him. It felt like the thing to do. The other direction seemed a little crowded.
“What makes you think there won’t be police in the alley?” I asked the big man.
“ ’Cause I just came in that way. Nary a one.”
He was right. The alley was clear, except for his Hummer, parked with the engine running. As he was about to get in, he asked, “You headed out to Malibu?”
“No. I’m staying in town.”
“Need a lift, then?”
“Thanks, Fitz. I’m okay,” I said. The way the night was going, I didn’t want to risk riding in a pea-green Hummer with a scofflaw Irishman behind the wheel and a bag full of illegal drugs resting between us.
“Later, then,” Fitz said, and rolled away down the alley, heading east. I walked off, heading west.
Chapter
TWENTY-TWO
I followed the alley to Cahuenga Boulevard and headed south to Fountain to see for myself how bad things were in front of the theater.
It was worse than I’d imagined. A great clog of humanity and noise and bright lights, featuring police and parked patrol cars, emergency vehicles, paramedics and EMTs, media and TV news vans, a bomb squad transport, pedestrian gawkers, and street people. A bumper-to-bumper traffic line crept by until it reached Cahuenga, where, faced with nothing more to see but several blocks of dark industrial buildings and a black man standing on the corner with an overnight bag, the vehicles drifted off into the night.
I spied my lovely leased Lexus—try saying that five times in a row—sitting nearly alone in the lot. Most of the others had been removed before the drivers of a Channel 12 news van and an LAPD patrol car decided that they needed a parking space more than we unlucky few would be needing an exit for our cars.
Considering Brueghel’s warning, maybe lucky was more accurate in my case. Any bomber expert enough to demolish only one single victim on a small, moderately populated stage could probably wire a device to a car in jig time.
I considered and then decided against bumming a ride in a patrol car. Going back to the theater would mean risking a meet-up with Carmen and Whisper or, worse, the FBI. It wasn’t that far a walk to Sunset, where, if there were no cabs, I’d at least find a restaurant or bar where I could drink or eat or, better, drink and eat, then call a cab.
I was about a quarter of a block away when I heard a car behind me. Moving slowly along Cahuenga. I quickly scanned the buildings to my right, searching for a nice narrow pathway to race down on my sprained ankle.
The car stopped. Its driver tapped the horn.
I didn’t turn to look. Instead, I walked faster. Limped, actually. Limped faster.
The car started up again, engine roaring. It was a pale blue Mercedes-Benz with a black convertible top. Not new. Probably not worth more than sixty grand. It cut into the driveway in front of me.
I was about to do a bolt when I saw Vida behind the wheel. She bent across the seat to pop open the passenger door. “Get in, Billy. This isn’t Manhattan. People don’t walk here. Definitely not at night.”
I tossed the bag behind the seat and got in, giving her a grateful grin. My ankle was grateful, too, temporarily rid of all that weight. But my butt was telling me that I was sitting on something other than Mercedes leather.
Vida watched me with a raised eyebrow as I groped between my legs. When my hand emerged with an iPhone, I hoped still in one piece, she said, “Sorry, I’ll take that.”
She put the instrument in a little black beaded bag, saying, “What a horror show that was. The explosion was bad enough, but the panic. People screaming and crawling over one another. Hitting and kicking. A woman I respected, a VP at Sony, was smashing people with the spiked heel of her Roberto Cavalli.”
She stared at my face. “A detective told us you were okay. But I see cuts.”
“Scratches. I’m okay.”
She continued to study my face. “Don’t you have a car?”
“In the lot next to the theater, trapped.”
She put the Mercedes in reverse and backed out into the street, then roared forward toward Sunset. “You have to tell me where we’re going,” she said.
“You wouldn’t be hungry, by any chance?”
She smiled. “Oh, wouldn’t I?”
Her suggestion was Meals by Genet, a small establishment with an exterior resembling an unassuming French café. But before you leap to any conclusions about the menu, as I did, I should add that this Genet is a local chef and caterer, and not the late French existentialist and ex-con playwright. And the restaurant is located on a block of South Fairfax Avenue known as Little Ethiopia, or as some purists would have it, Little Addis Ababa. Tucked between an eclectic home-furnishings shop and an adult day-care facility, it shares the neighborhood with other restaurants, markets, coffeehouses, and stores selling various products, predominantly imported from the horn of Africa.
The restaurant’s dining room is elegant, softly lit, and, when you’re lucky enough to be accompanied by a smart, beautiful woman, extremely romantic. And the food? Well, the first bites were so delicious they almost made me forget that I was accompanied by a smart, beautiful woman. But not even manna from heaven could pull that off.
I watched Vida glide past the other late diners as she returned from the powder room. She was quite a vision in her aqua dress, and I told her so. “You are an instant reminder that there is still romance in the world,” I said. “Especially in that dress.”
“This little Versace?”
“It’s a knockout,” I said. “But it’s gilding the lily.”
“My goodness, Billy. That kind of talk, combined with food and wine, can lead to … almost anything.”
“I like this version of you,” I said. “During all the days we worked together, you seemed a little …” I was searching for a word.
“Distant,” she said. “Cold. Unapproachable. Bitchy. Stop me before I begin to hate myself.”
“ ‘Businesslike’ is how I’d put it,” I said. “But ‘unapproachable’ works, too.”
“ ‘Businesslike’ is a good one, Billy. These days, I live by a specific set of rules. One of them is: When I work, I work. When I play …”
“As I recall, I asked you out to play once or twice.”
“As I recall, I said I was busy. Which I was. You gave up pretty quickly.”
“I didn’t want to be a bore.”
“That should be the least of your worries.” She took a sip of wine and changed the subject. “Now, does this or does this not meet your restaurant criteria?”
I had asked for a place where the food was tasty and the décor tasteful. And possibly more important, one that was off the TMZ grid, where we wouldn’t be bothered by young geeks in baggy pants and backward baseball caps, sticking cameras in our faces and shouting, “Tell us about the big blowout, dudes.”
“You know damn well you knocked it out of the park,” I said.
She smiled. “This is very naughty of us. Carmen wanted desperately to talk to you about the show tomorrow night.”
“The show? How can there be a show without a star? Excuse me for going all Monty Python on you, but the show is dead. Kaput. Finito. It’s an ex-show.”
She shook her head. “This parrot is alive. New York has decided that the show must go on. They’re doing the Craig Kilborn thing. Remember when he pulled the plug on The Late Late Show? CBS held several weeklong on-the-air tryouts for the host slot, and Craig Ferguson got the nod. That’s worked out very well.”
“They got lucky,” I said. “Ferguson’s a natural. And the name, The Late Late Show, stayed the same. WBC won’t even have that much continuity. It’ll mean starting from scratch. New name. New host. Probably new theater. New everything.”
“That’s what Carmen wants to talk to you about,” Vida said.
“Me? They’re not thinking about me hosting the show?”
“Not host. Just to continue as announcer until a host is found.”
“That could take forever,” I said, trying not to panic.
“There are a lot of very funny people who’d jump at the chance,” she said. “It shouldn’t take that long.”
“I’ve got too much going on back in New York.”
Some of my desperation must have surfaced, because she said, “Okay. My bad. I didn’t mean to spoil the moment by mentioning the show. Erase. Rewind. Beep. We’re back to being just a couple on a first date, checking each other out and enjoying an excellent meal.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, lifting my wineglass and trying to subdue my apprehension. The “first date” concept intrigued me. It suggested more to come. Even more dates. And as I already mentioned, the meal was splendid, too much so to be soured by thoughts of late-night television. Or murder.
There were many Italian dishes on the menu (supposedly a nod to Italy’s short rule of Ethiopia in the thirties), and I’m sure each of them was excellent, but I could get my pasta fix almost anywhere. It wasn’t often I had the chance to glut myself on yebere siga tibs, a mound of tender steak chunks sautéed in Ethiopian butter, onions, green chilies, and several unidentifiable but heady spices and served on a pancake-like bread called injera. At Genet, it’s accompanied by a pot of awaze, a hot chili purée that will leave you with tears in your eyes and a smile on your face.
I should mention that in lieu of eating utensils, you’re provided with extra injera. You tear off a piece and use it to scoop up the food. It may sound messy, but it isn’t. On the other hand, it adds a certain sensuality to the meal. Especially when you’ve moved on to a second bottle of Picket Fence pinot noir and your tablemate suggests you sample each other’s dishes.
I waited for Vida to remove a few cubes of my steak, then watched her close her eyes as she savored their taste. We both took a drink of wine, and I tried some of her dorowot, a sort of chicken stew with a sauce of … what the hell was it? Maybe ginger, clove, and a few other things, none of them obvious and all mingling to form something beyond description.
I grinned at Vida. She grinned at me. We took another sip of wine.
Chapter
TWENTY-THREE
We closed the place down.
Sitting beside Vida in her Mercedes, parked behind the building, I realized I was more than slightly wine woozy. I suggested to her that since things seemed to be going so well, perhaps we should leave the car and call a cab to make sure the evening stayed in the positive column.
Her reply was to lean in to me for a surprising passionate kiss.
“Positive enough?” she asked when we finally came up for air.
“I meant—”
“I know what you meant, Billy. So I ask you: Was that the kiss of someone who was too fried to drive?”
“I’m not the best judge of that,” I said. “Maybe one more test?”
Her reply was to start the car. She did it efficiently and without a moment’s falter, a further demonstration of her sobriety. “I had a total of two glasses of wine tonight,” she said, steering us onto Fairfax. “I keep track of these things. For example, I clocked you at a bottle and a half.”
“Point taken.” Forcing myself to stop staring at her lovely profile, I saw that we were driving north toward Sunset Boulevard. Heading where? I wondered. Definitely away from where she knew my car was parked.
Crossing Wilshire Boulevard, we passed the classic building that was once the city’s most famous May Company location. It appeared to have been taken over by the County Museum. From the corner of my eye, I saw Vida glance at the digital time readout on the dash.
She increased our speed.
“In a hurry?” I asked.
She smiled. “Why waste the night on the road,” she said, “when we could be sitting on my deck in the hills, having a cup of coffee and enjoying the city lights below?”
I didn’t think I’d ever been asked a more rhetorical question.
Her home was a Spanish bi-level with a red tile roof on one of those bewilderingly meandering little streets high above Sunset. Vida gave me a mini-tour through a smartly appointed living room, small enough to be considered cozy, a tiny formal dining room, and a modern kitchen, where she got the coffee started.
The deck she’d mentioned was off the living room, a solid redwood structure with a gas barbecue and redwood chaises that offered a breathtaking view of the city lights below. So she lost a point for going gas rather than charcoal but scored highly in all other categories.
The night was chilly, however, and it took only a few minutes for comfort to trump aesthetics. Back inside the house, she led me up a short flight of stairs to a visually oriented den/office that I guessed was where she spent most of her home time.
She parked me on a soft, white U-shaped sofa that faced a humongous television screen and, promising a swift return, wandered off to what I guessed was the bedroom area. With coffee mug in hand and visions of Vida slipping into something comfortable in mind, I took a walk about the room, noting several awards—a news Emmy among them—resting on a stone mantel above a wood-burning fireplace that looked like it had never been used. Two bookshelves, recessed into a wall, held back issues of Time, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and Emmy, neatly stacked.
There was a desk, actually a slab of soft yellow Formica anchored atop a pale wood filing cabinet on each end. On the desk were a closed MacBook, a cordless phone, an iPad, several large mugs filled with pens and pencils, clippings from the L.A. Times—one about a child mauled by a formerly harmless border collie, the other listing the names of reporters fired from a local television station—and a plastic jewel box containing an audiobook version of one of Eric Jerome Dickey’s sexy thrillers.
“Let me see,” Vida said, walking into the room.
She was not talking to me. She had a cellphone pressed to her ear. She had not slipped into anything more comfortable than her little Versace.
“Okay, I’m trying it.”
She picked up the TV remote and brought up a silent HD picture of a guy in a newsroom, wearing a starched shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Just a sec,” Vida said.
She did a little surfing before settling on a clear but not HD image of a woman sitting at a desk with a phone to her ear. I knew her. I had, in fact, been in love with her once. Gretchen Di Voss.
“Good,” Vida said. “Let me turn up the sound.”
On the giant TV Gretchen cradled her phone and said, “I see you, Billy, but you’re almost offscreen. Would you mind sitting on the sofa?”
I gave Vida a woeful look and mumbled, “Traitor.” Then I sat on the sofa.
“Am I coming through clear, Billy?”
“Loud and clear.” I looked for and found the small camera eye perched on top of the giant screen. “What’s the deal on this two-way TV, Gretch? Is there a Di Voss interoffice channel no one told me about?”
“It’s simple, everyday Skype,” Vida said, “transferred to the big screen.”
“It’s late, Billy,” Gretchen said, “and—”
“Wow, you’re right. It must be after four in Manhattan.”
“What it is is crunch time. So let’s not screw around. What happened is a tragedy. Our star was murdered. Other employees were injured. As far as I can tell, the investigation into the bomber’s motives is at a standstill. There’s a rumor, true or false, that the mayor may have been the real target.”
I wondered where that came from. Was Brueghel trying to make Roger think he was safe? Safe enough for him to screw up when he came fo
r me again? That led to another question: Was Brueghel keeping me in L.A. to lure Roger into making that second try?
I was distracted from that disquieting thought by Gretchen asking Vida if there had been any more news from the LAPD.
“I … I haven’t had a chance to—” Vida started to reply.
“Billy, are those cuts on your face?” Gretch asked.
“Scratches. I’m all right.”
“No trauma? The company will provide you with whatever care is necessary.”
“I think I’m okay on the trauma score, too.”
“The effects don’t always show up right away. But you’ll have to be the judge of that. The reason for this call is that I need you to stay with the show. Not forever. Probably not longer than a few weeks.”
“Gretch, this is—”
“Let me finish, Billy. Then you can have your say. WBC is committed, contractually, to our affiliates and to our participating advertisers, to provide a show in that time slot. That advertiser commitment includes a specific number of viewers. If we were to discontinue the show, or if we fail to attract that minimum viewership, we will forfeit a great deal of money. That could have a devastating effect on our whole operation.”
“So put on your show,” I said. “Why do I have to be a part of it?”
“Because right now you and Fitzpatrick form the still-beating heart of O’Day at Night. I … we are convinced that you both will put eyeballs on the show.”
“Great. We can wear ‘I Survived the O’Day at Night Bombing’ T-shirts,” I said.
“If you want to, I’ll have some printed up,” she said. “I reached Fitzpatrick, and he has agreed to remain. With most of his band.”
“Won’t that be enough of a beating heart?”
“The thing is, viewers like you, Billy. They find you friendly and sympathetic. They’ll be tuning in to see you. Which means they’ll also be sampling the guest hosts. We’ll get a much better idea of who to anoint. I don’t understand your reticence.”
“Hello? I’ve got a restaurant to run. Not to mention Wake Up. And the cable show.”
Al Roker Page 12