Hollywood Ending

by Kellye Garrett

  She smiled then, like she was doing me a favor and hadn’t used false pretenses to get me there for free publicity. I was not a happy camper. “How long are we talking?”

  “Couple days tops. I’ll call you. In the meantime, you can keep that as a memento.”

  And with that she was gone, leaving me and my useless fake check. This was not good. I needed sustenance, preferably covered in chili. Since I was at the green room, I left the check in the hall and went inside. Let it be someone else’s memento.

  Sienna was right. The room was a mishmash of well-known actors, their “people,” and a vast array of snacks. I saw Sienna standing near a movie star trying to covertly take a selfie with him in the background.

  Spoiler alert: the green room, where the stars gather before a show or some other event, is hardly ever green. Someone once told me it got its name because it used to be where money changed hands for a gig. This one was black and featured formations of couches and chairs in what I’m sure the designer called “conversational clusters.” There were also flat screens on two walls showing the live feed of the stage for those interested. I definitely was, but first I needed sustenance.

  I kept one ear on Omari’s live feed as I beelined to the food table. It wasn’t worth the trip. The food choices were about as diverse as the nominees, all stupid healthy stuff that looked like it came straight from Gelson’s. A waste. Tommy’s would have been happy to “sponsor” the green room. Sure, J. Chris and her ilk wouldn’t have touched a single burger but I would have eaten enough for all of us and happily taken the rest home. Instead, I picked up a carrot stick and tried to pretend it was a French fry.

  I was thinking of lodging a formal complaint when something interrupted my train of thought. That something was Gus’s booming voice. Even from a sixty-inch TV screen, he was loud and obnoxious. He asked Omari a question. “Why are you so private about your personal life? You don’t even admit you’re seeing someone.”

  Great question. I expected Omari to give the usual canned response: he kept his personal life private because of blah blah blah.

  “I’m definitely seeing someone,” he said, and I almost choked on my carrot. I’ve had nightmares of dying due to food but it always involved overdosing on chocolate or drowning in melted ice cream. Not this. “My girlfriend is the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. And I don’t talk about her not because I’m private. I don’t talk about her because I’m selfish. I don’t want to share her or what we have with the world.”

  By that point my mouth was wide open, carrot spewing out like hot lava.

  Take that, Nina.

  I headed back to M&Ms that evening to try to catch Regina on her shift. I wanted to let her know about the reward money, and she still wasn’t answering my texts. In a fit of desperation, I’d even called her number—and we all know someone has to be really desperate to actually want to speak to another human being on the phone.

  I had the radio cranked up and was singing along to Kandy Wrapper, but the song went off right when I found my groove. It was replaced with a familiar voice. “This is Gus the Gossip and here’s your daily gossip report. The Silver Sphere Awards are known as the biggest party in Hollywood. Every year the nominees come together beforehand for an intimate Conversation Series, where they share personal details of their busy lives and reveal new projects. This year’s conversation was no exception.”

  The radio cut to another familiar voice—Omari’s. “My girlfriend is the most amazing woman I’ve ever met. And I don’t talk about her not because I’m private. I don’t talk about her because I’m selfish. I don’t want to share her or what we have with the world.”

  When I’d suggested he share a bit of his personal life, I hadn’t expected that. Not that I was complaining. At all. I wanted to roll down the window and ask the person in traffic next to me if she was listening. And if she knew he was talking about me. But I refrained.

  The broadcast cut back to Gus. “That was Silver Sphere Award Best Actor in Television nominee Omari Grant, talking for the first time about his girlfriend …”

  Dayna Anderson!

  “ … Toni Abrams,” Gus said.

  Wait, what?

  “The two have been inseparable the last three months, but this was the first time Grant dished details on his relationship.”

  Tomari had struck again.

  I suddenly lost all interest in the radio.

  When I finally made it to M&M’s I was still in a bit of a mood, so I forced myself to think positive. Solving Haley Joseph’s murder hadn’t been a fluke. And now I’d done it again. Despite what my parents—and, if I was being honest, sometimes myself—had thought, I was good at this. I was even getting compensated for it. Money I planned to share with Regina, who despite her less-than-stellar-quality traits had turned in her boyfriend. It couldn’t have been easy. If she could handle dealing with Junior, I could handle my own the-public-thinks-my-hot-boyfriend-dates-someone-else problems.

  When I finally went inside, the restaurant had a nice crowd. An older waitress still greeted me. “How many, hon?”

  I plastered a smile on my face. “I’m actually here to speak with Regina.”

  “Ain’t here.”

  “I thought she worked evenings.”

  “She did, until she quit Thursday.”

  “I saw her that night. What happened?”

  “You a friend?”

  I nodded. I wanted to be one. Close enough. The woman still looked suspicious. “I’m surprised she didn’t say anything. Left so quick she didn’t even give notice. Rumor is she came into some money.”

  I flashed on Junior and wondered if Regina had been involved after all. “Legally?” I asked.

  The woman relaxed. “You must be a friend because you obviously knew Junior. Carol told me that Regina told her someone gave her a nice chunk of change just to give that fool’s name to some lady.”

  Needless to say, some lady was really surprised to hear that.

  Ten

  “It could very well have been a Good Samaritan, Ms. Anderson. Though I will admit that does not make much sense. The tip line is anonymous. They could have just called themselves.”

  Aubrey was on his futon, looking at printouts of evidence from the case. His studio wasn’t much—the futon, plus a desk and kitchen alcove with a tiny bathroom off it—but it was clean. I had to give him that. After I’d left M&Ms the night before, I’d called to update him on what he’d missed, and we agreed to meet bright and early the next morning. For once I was on time.

  “Maybe someone really hated Junior but didn’t trust the cops,” I said from the corner Aubrey called a kitchen. I grabbed a bottle of Arrowhead from his fridge. “Not even for an anonymous tip. Of course, that doesn’t explain the whole paying Regina thing.”

  “Someone clearly wanted us to turn Junior in,” Aubrey said.

  But who? And why? I moved back into the main room and sat down next to Aubrey. He jumped up and took a seat in the office chair by his desk, where I noticed the envelope with the license application. It wasn’t opened. “Okay, what’s going on Aubrey? You’re acting weird. Well, weirder than normal.”

  He looked surprised. I kept on him. “You’ve avoided my calls. Now you’re acting like you don’t want to even be in the same room as me. If you don’t want to work with me anymore, just say so.”

  “Pardon me, Ms. Anderson?”

  Was he really playing dumb?

  I motioned to the unopened envelope. “You haven’t even opened the license application.”

  “What application, Ms. Anderson?”

  “We talked about this. Making things official, having a real partnership. Don’t you remember?”

  “Yes, but … ” He trailed off. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked embarrassed. “I assumed you were discussing dating each other.”

  I l
et this sink in. “You thought I was hitting on you? So what did you think was in that envelope? Oh my God. You thought I’d written you the world’s longest love letter. Eighteen pages filled with hearts and Dayna Anderson-Adams-Parker in cursive. I have a boyfriend, Aubrey.”

  Men.

  I laughed. Just a bit. Then a lot. He had the nerve to look hurt, like he was offended I’d rejected his rejection of me.

  “I obviously misread your intentions,” he said.

  “Obviously.” I wiped my eye. “Now that we’ve established neither of us wants to date each other, can we get back to the case?”

  He looked relieved. “I suggest we drive by Ms. Jones’s house. Maybe she will be home.”

  “Let’s go.” I still had Regina’s address in my phone from our little outing to Wheelhouse. I wiped the final tear and got up, grabbing the PI application as we left. “I will say this, though. The next time a woman does express her undying true love, maybe handle it better. At least don’t be so obvious you’re avoiding her.”

  “I will definitely keep that in mind, Ms. Anderson.”

  Aubrey was quiet our entire drive over, busying himself completing the application. Regina’s neighborhood was quiet and well tended, featuring small one-story houses with ample green grass between the front door and street. When we pulled up in front of her place, a lone older woman picked up trash a few houses up. All the action seemed centered a few doors down, where a jumble of cars were concentrated around one house.

  Aubrey looked up just as another car joined the pack. A woman got out looking somber and holding a casserole dish. “Someone must have passed away,” Aubrey said.

  “Must be Junior’s grandmother’s house. Regina mentioned she lived on the same block.”

  “Perhaps we should stop by if we cannot reach Ms. Jones.”

  I’d kept a running tab of places I’d never take Aubrey. The movies. The strip club. Into the general vicinity of my parents. I mentally added “home of a grieving family” to that list.

  “Perhaps … ” I said.

  Regina’s driveway didn’t have a car in it but then I wasn’t expecting one. Not so much because I didn’t expect her to be there—more because it was probably impounded as a crime scene since Junior took it from Palm Springs. I parked, blocking her driveway, and we both got out.

  We walked up the stairs, opened the black metal screen door, rang the bell, and waited. When that didn’t work, we knocked. Both garnered the same result. Nothing. The door remained closed. Aubrey watched as I went to a window, got on my tippy-toes, and pressed my face against it to double check.

  “She’s long gone. She knows better than to come back here,” a voice called out.

  I recognized it—the voice of that one woman in every neighborhood who has too much time on her hands and therefore knows everyone’s business. Back home, that woman was my mother. Thanks to her, news in my Augusta neighborhood traveled faster than a video compilation of cute dogs.

  I turned and smiled. Nosy Neighbor’s black-don’t-crack age put her at around fifty-five, which meant in actual years she was at least seventy-two. The only giveaway was the crown of gray-black hair pulled in a bun at the nape of her neck. She was skinny, probably from all the walking, with smooth brown skin the color of cardboard. If she were to be cast in a movie, she … wouldn’t be cast at all because, hello, she was black and a woman over fifty.

  She held one of those mechanical grabbers in her left hand and a trash bag in her right. Having two decades of up-close experience with the neighborhood gossip, I knew exactly how to play the situation. I sure wasn’t going to pretend like I was a friend. Nosy Neighbor would know that she’d never seen my car.

  “Hi! We’re actually investigators and believe Regina might have some information that might help us. I’m Dayna, but everyone calls me Day.”

  “Ruth Reid. Everyone calls me Mama Ruth.”

  The last name was the same as Junior’s. Could it be? I decided to assume, regardless of what it made of you and me. “I’m so sorry to hear about your grandson, Javon.”

  Mama Ruth nodded her thanks. She must have slipped out her house for a walk.

  “It’s all that girl’s fault,” she said, waving her trash bag in the general direction of Regina’s place. “I’ve been calling the police. They won’t call me back. I know that girl called the cops on my grandson. There’s a special place in you-know-where for those who helped get him killed. Regina and all the rest.”

  I just nodded. No need to mention we were part of “all the rest.”

  Aubrey, however, spoke up. “Ms. Ruth, I am Aubrey S. Adams-Parker. We have reason to believe that Mr. Reid—”

  It took everything not to cover his mouth with my hand. I interrupted with a quickness, throwing him a look. “We have reason to believe that Javon got a bad rap. In fact, that’s why we came by. We wanted to ask Regina some follow-up questions because her story didn’t check out.”

  Mama Ruth nodded. “I can’t believe people would think Javon could so something like this …” She paused and I was ready to dismiss it as classic Grandma-in-denial-her-grandson-is-a-sociopath. Then she continued on. “Something like this on his own. Someone put him up to this. Probably Regina.”

  Someone put Junior up to this? I tested out the theory. It felt good in my hands, especially when you factored in the “Good Samaritan” who’d wanted Junior out of the way.

  “I know the boy ain’t a saint,” she continued. “Doesn’t mean I loved him any less. He stayed with me sometimes, had this hiding spot he thought I didn’t know about in the shed. I went out to check it and that’s where I found the money and the phone.”

  “Did you give this information to the police?” Aubrey asked. I was too surprised to talk.

  “I tried. None of them want to call me back, like I said. I’m about to throw the lot of it away.”

  “We’d be happy to take a look at it.” I glanced over at Aubrey, who nodded.

  She left her tools on the sidewalk and we followed her back to her house. We could hear the voices inside. I noted she ignored the front door like an email from a Nigerian prince and walked directly to the back. The shed wasn’t much to look at but at that moment it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Within seconds, Mama Ruth had opened Junior’s hiding place—a makeshift hole below a broken piece of tile on the floor.

  There was indeed a cell phone and a wad of cash, all hundreds, at least two inches thick. There was also a Black Tail magazine, showing a back shot of a woman squatting in nothing more than heels and a headband. I ignored it, too focused on wondering if the phone still had any prints. Aubrey, however, did not. I hadn’t pegged him for a dirty magazine type of guy.

  “Is this Junior’s phone?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. He hadn’t seemed the type to have a pink flower phone case, and the police had made it clear that he’d stolen Lyla’s personal cell phone.

  “Don’t think so. Doubt the money is his either.” Mama Ruth grabbed the phone. It was dirty as all get-out. She wiped it off on her T-shirt.

  Bye-bye prints.

  I was about to say something when Aubrey handed the magazine to me without a word. Inside was a piece of paper and on it someone—I guessed Junior—had written a date, time, address, and the word “anonymous.”

  I’d been eating, sleeping, and drinking Lyla Davis’s murder investigation for almost two weeks. I knew the details better than I knew my social security number. It was the day, time, and location of Lyla’s death.

  “Mama Ruth, can we take this?”

  She just nodded.

  Once back in the car, we each threw out theories like yesterday’s trash. “So someone tells Lyla to meet them at the ATM, where they send someone to kill her,” I said. “And that same person uses us to ensure that the guy is apprehended.”

  “How did they know Mr. Reid would not turn
on them?” Aubrey asked.

  “Junior was adamant he wasn’t going back to jail. He told Regina. Even tweeted it right before he died. Maybe the person knew the same thing. Figured Javon would get killed. Or, in this case, kill himself. The only thing I don’t understand is why would someone put a hit on someone as well-loved as Lyla? Even J. Chris liked her.”

  “All types of people have secret lives, Ms. Anderson.”

  “What about the ‘anonymous’? You think they wanted it to look like a botched robbery? Which it did.” I pulled up outside of Emme’s building.

  “This is not the police station,” Aubrey said.

  “Correct. It’s Emme’s. You’ve been here before.”

  “I thought we were taking the evidence to the police.”

  “We will. I just want Emme to look at the phone first.” It was clear from Aubrey’s look that he didn’t approve. At all.

  Emme ran out her door as I continued my plea to Aubrey. “Just give us the time it takes to drive to the police station. Once we give the phone to them we’ll never see it again. If someone’s out there thinking they got away with murder, partly because of us, I want to know who it is. The phone might be the key to finding them.”

  Call me old-fashioned, but I preferred my “accessories” to be necklaces, not to murder. I also felt silly that I’d been proud of myself, thinking I might actually be good at this, when someone had been pulling my strings like a puppet. Maybe my mama was right. I’d been lucky with the Haley Joseph case.

  “I will give you and Ms. Abrams five minutes,” Aubrey said. “It will begin now.”

  Yay! “I’d make a joke about kissing you but you’d think I was in love with you again.”

  He didn’t laugh, just stared at me as Emme jumped in the backseat. I’d texted her the details when we left Mama Ruth’s house so she was prepared. Looking solemn, she glanced at Aubrey as she put on her seat belt. “This is a horrible idea, IMO.” In my opinion.