Hollywood Ending

by Kellye Garrett

  Once inside the hallowed halls, I turned left and was met by the blonde woman I’d seen backstage at the Conversation Series. So this was Kitt. She seemed happy to see me. “Sorry I couldn’t come get you but we’re expecting Todd Arrington today. Things are always hectic when nominees stop by the office.”

  Todd Arrington, of course, was Hollywood’s action star-du-jour thanks to the Man in Danger series. His second film, Man in Danger 2: Man in More Danger, had had the biggest opening weekend in the past five years last fall and they’d already greenlit the follow-up: Man in Danger 3: Man in Serious Danger.

  “You’ve met him?” Kitt continued. “I’m sure we could arrange an introduction if you wanted.”

  I did not want. Mainly because I had indeed met him during the Haley Joseph investigation. Sienna and I had just so happened to break into his house after a slight misunderstanding involving a perceived break-in-turned-kidnapping-turned-none-of-the-above. As a result, I hoped to never cross paths with Todd again. “Thanks for the offer, but think I’ll pass.”

  Kitt nodded and gave me a tour. For a show known for sometimes unpredictable award winners, their office décor was pretty run-of-the-mill. Lots and lots and lots of beige. The only thing stopping it from being “any old office” was the oversized candid photos of winners’ reactions when their name was announced at past Silver Sphere ceremonies. Kitt said each winner’s name as we passed while I nodded appropriately and feigned interest. It must’ve worked, because she seemed pleased. We made it to Nina/Lyla’s office with no incidents and she turned to me just as she was about to drop me off. “Gus talk to you yet?”

  I shook my head, which she accurately took as her cue to continue. “He put your Conversation Series appearance on his site and it got major hits. I suggested he interview you guys and Dante for his live web show.”

  No way I was doing an interview with Gus the Gossip, not with Geppetto out there thinking he or she had pulled a fast one. I nodded anyway. Better to say yes now and ignore calls later. I’d learned that from my manager. “We’ll see what we can arrange,” I said. “I’ll try to stop by before I go.”

  She smiled, then knocked on the closed door. Lyla’s name was still on it. At least Nina wasn’t tacky enough to remove the nameplate just yet. I’d give her another week.

  “Dayna’s here,” Kitt said.

  I heard a mumble, which we both took to mean it was okay to enter. Kitt gave me a quick hug, then disappeared down the hall. I opened the door and found Nina sitting behind her desk turned Lyla’s desk turned her desk again. She made a point to stare importantly at her computer, which I couldn’t see from my vantage point. She was too busy looking important to say hello, so I took a seat across from her and smiled. “That Facebook post must be really interesting.”

  She jumped ever so slightly, an indication my Spidey senses were indeed correct. “Let me finish this email and then we can chat,” she said.

  I resisted the urge to give her an exaggerated “yeah right, you’re looking at email” wink. Instead I looked around. The Silver Sphere Awards publicist didn’t warrant a corner suite, but the office was nowhere near closet-sized. I had to give Lyla credit. She’d bypassed pretty pictures of pretty people accepting their Silver Sphere Awards. Instead she’d gone for pictures of the actual movies, not just their stars.

  It was the same eclectic mix as in her DVD collection. She had the original poster for one of Todd Arrington’s first big hits: Memorial Day. He was dirty and shirtless and running from a burning building with a kitten in one hand and a baby in the other. I quickly turned away. Even seeing a photo of him gave me retroactive embarrassment. Another wall featured the poster for hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold rom-com Pretty Woman, with a suited Richard Gere leaning precariously back on a young, vibrant, and thigh-high-patent-leather-boot-wearing Julia Roberts.

  Though there were movie posters, there weren’t any actual movies. Not even a bookcase to hold DVDs. Blurg.

  I eyed the computer and wondered if they’d had a chance to wipe it yet. Much like Obi-Wan and Princess Leia, it was my only hope. I just needed to get my hands on it.

  Nina must have liked her daily quota of Facebook status updates because finally she looked at me. “So, you’re here for your check.”

  “You told me to stop by.”

  “I also told you I’d call you to tell you when to stop by.”

  I nodded, because she had in fact done just that. I decided to go for flattery. “I figured I’d save you a phone call. I know how busy you are … chasing after your two clients.”

  Make that kind of flattery. Her eyes narrowed. “We’re still in the process of raising the funds. We should have the final donations in a couple more days.”

  She turned back to her desktop. I’d been dismissed, when I wanted to dismiss her. I needed a way to get her out the office, stat. Short of pulling a fire alarm, I wasn’t sure what to do. I pretended to grab something from my bag to buy myself some time. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the photo of Todd Arrington. It gave me an idea.

  “Cool. I’ll just stop by Gus’s office. He wanted to talk to me about a possible interview but someone was in with him when Kitt gave me the tour. It kind of looked like Todd Arrington.”

  I was lying but Nina took the bait. I saw her glance at her watch, apparently cursing her luck that Todd Arrington was the one Hollywood celebrity actually on time. “If that’s all?” she asked.

  “Well actually, I wanted to see if we could get Omari on the phone and discuss his mom—”

  “We can discuss that later.”

  “You sure? I want to make sure Miss Erica has everything set for the awards.”

  I said a silent apology for bringing my boyfriend’s mother into my trail of lies, but I knew she would understand. Miss Erica was cool like that. Nina stood up. “I’ve got it all handled.”

  I reluctantly followed her out. At least to the door. Nina was so set on Todd that she didn’t look back to see if I was behind her. She walked down the hall and disappeared into an office, then shut the door. I waited a few more seconds and then did a 180 and went back inside. No one even noticed.

  She hadn’t closed the door behind her when she left but I took care of that. I even locked it for good measure. Luckily she was so pressed to see Todd she hadn’t even locked her computer.

  Her Facebook page was still up. I resisted the urge to update her status. I had a video to find and two minutes tops to find it. Never one to discount the obvious, I checked the videos folder on her PC first. It was empty. I wasn’t surprised. I’m not that lucky.

  I had to go more in depth. Having asked Emme how to search a PC for videos, I’d come prepared. She’d texted me detailed instructions and they actually didn’t seem that complicated. Maybe I was that lucky.

  I opened up File Explorer, making sure the current directory was on This PC. Then I typed “kind:=video” in the search bar. Emme had promised me that this simple request would bring up all the video formats on the computer.

  It yielded nothing. Like I said. Not that lucky.

  I exited out of everything and got out of there to go visit Emme, who was downright chipper when I stopped by. At least chipper for her, which meant she made actual eye contact when she said hello. I was glad one of us was in a good mood. I plopped on her couch and filled my mouth with the remnants of a Snickers bar I’d found abandoned in my backseat. Thank God for small favors.

  “Operation Office was a flop!” I sounded a tad too dramatic but I made no apologies.

  I expected Emme to share some insight I didn’t want to hear because it was true—like maybe that I was at a dead end. Instead, I got, “She probably has it on the cloud somewhere. I just need to figure out the account. We’ll find it. Don’t worry.”

  She turned to me and smiled. The eye contact. The smiling. The lack of acronyms in her speech. Something was definitely up. “There a
new video game unexpectedly out?” I asked.

  Emme shook her head. Another glance in my direction. Another smile from her. Another frown from me. For a second, I thought maybe she was her twin Toni and they were playing some sick joke. My only hesitation was I’d seen them impersonate each other and they could be spot on. This was not spot on. This was highly suspicious.

  “You win a lot of money playing online poker?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “Have a good nap in that life emulation game you love so much?”

  She shook her again. Still, I was a bit creeped out. We went on like this for a few more minutes, me throwing up what amounted to Emme’s bucket list, all of which could coincidentally be completed from the comfort of her own home, and her cheerfully rejecting each suggestion. Finally, I gave up. Maybe she was just in a really good mood for no reason at all. It had happened to me once in college.

  “I’ll keep searching her accounts and let you know if I find the video,” she said.

  I gave her a quick hug and bounced, closing the door behind me. I got halfway down the hall before I realized what was up. I ran back and knocked like I was the police.

  She opened the door as alarmed as she should have been.

  “Who told you?” I gave her my best serious private investigator stare-down. The one I may or may not have spent weeks perfecting in the mirror.

  I obviously still needed to work on it because she said, “IDK what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t play dumb. We just had a ten-minute conversation and you never once brought up Focals. So who told you?”

  The jig was up. Emme knew it too. She plopped into her computer chair. “You logged into the Anani accounts from Samy’s.”

  “You can tell when someone logs into the account? And from where?”

  Turning back to her computer, Emme signed on to the Viv3000 account via her web browser and pulled up something called “devices and activity.” “Gmail lists all the sign-ins. A lot of the time it’s a mobile phone. But if you use WiFi, it lists the IP. And I just happen to know the IP for Samy’s. Don’t ask.” I had no plans to. She continued on. “But it lists everything. See, you logged on last night too, when you were out and about.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  We both looked at each other. “Sienna,” I said. “You gave her the password?”

  “No! You’re the one who lives with her.”

  True, but I hadn’t given it to her either. Of course, I didn’t put it past Sienna to figure it out. There was only one way to settle this. I FaceTimed her. This was not something that could be done over text. I wanted to look into her eyes, even if they were on a small four-inch touchscreen.

  “Hello!” Sienna was as chipper as Emme had been, but she was always chipper so this was nothing out the ordinary.

  I was tempted to butter her up but decided to just get into it. “How’d you get the password to the Viv3000 account?”

  There was a pause. I’d have to give it to her, she looked genuinely confused. “I didn’t.”

  I glanced at the list again. There were a variety of IP addresses. “So you haven’t been logging in like every hour the past two days while you were running errands?”

  “Nope. If I was going to steal a password, it would be the Anani account,” she said. I didn’t mention that the passwords were one in the same, just let her continue. “Not some random account that she probably used for her porn subscriptions.”

  “And Netflix trials,” I said. Then, “If not you, then who? The only other person who had access to the account was Lyla.”

  “Unless you’re wrong,” Sienna said. “Someone else clearly has access to it.”

  “But who?” I was genuinely confused and, if I was being honest, scared.

  Emme hit a few buttons on her laptop. “Someone at the Coffee Bean on Platt Avenue.”

  “Great. We don’t know who it is but at least we know what coffeehouse they prefer. Can you check the account?”

  She did. I was hoping against hope that perhaps just maybe there was an email waiting for us. Or at least one sent out. But there wasn’t. It looked exactly the same as it did this morning. Nothing in the inbox. Nothing in the sent message folder. Just the lone unsent draft.

  “Would Aubrey have access?” Sienna asked.

  I shook my head but then remembered something. “Wait! Aubrey deleted the draft from my phone this morning.”

  Emme’s eyes narrowed. “Either we have a phantom message or someone left Lyla a note.”

  Huh?

  Emme clicked on the Drafts folder, then on the draft itself. The message was simple and to the point.

  Why are you ignoring me?

  Fifteen

  Emme’s expression was one of true love. A smile so bright I swore I saw her wisdom teeth finally erupting. I half expected her to drop to one knee and propose. And if Gmail had a pulse and a Netflix account, she probably would have.

  “Brilliant. Just. Plain. Brilliant.”

  “Exactly,” I said, even though it was clear she wasn’t speaking to me. Or to Sienna for that matter, since we’d already gotten off the phone with her. “Just remind me why.”

  “Google is the Internet equivalent of God. All knowing. All seeing. All keeping. You send an email, it’s in the ether. Even if permanently deleted, it’s out there somewhere.”

  “Like in a galaxy far, far away.”

  She ignored my pitiful attempt at humor. “Only thing Gmail doesn’t keep are drafts. It saves just the latest version. Delete one without sending. Poof. It’s gone. You’re SOL if you want to get it back.”

  I suddenly got it. Emme was right. It was brilliant. Just. Plain. Brilliant. “So Lyla and her source opened a joint Gmail account because it was the only way they could talk without anyone finding out.”

  Emme looked at me, all proud-like. And I was about to make her even prouder. “And the source doesn’t know Anani is dead. No one does. So they’ve been waiting to hear from her for like two weeks.”

  I could use that to my advantage. In fact, I would use that to my advantage. “They’re gonna log in again, aren’t they?”

  Emme nodded. “I’ll create an alert for anytime someone logs in to the account. We’ll know when they respond and we’ll ping the IP. Find their location.”

  Worked for me.

  I had expected to hear from Viv3000 the next day. I just hadn’t expected to hear from them right after my manicurist—Alice, according to the nametag—had wrapped acetone-soaked pads covered in foil on the digits of my left hand. I was in desperate need of a mani-pedi. But when I heard the ding indicating I’d gotten an alert, I quickly snatched my hand away. Someone had logged into the Viv3000 account. Yes! The sooner we found their location, the sooner we could find them.

  The plan wasn’t to roll up on them for a confrontation, per se. I just wanted to know who they were, you know, just in case. I was about to text Emme but she beat me to it. The IP was another Coffee Bean. This one in Los Feliz. It would take me an hour to get there but Aubrey lived within spitting—or should I say, biking—distance. He could get there.

  I put up one foil-clad finger to Alice, then dialed Aubrey. She sighed loudly. When he picked up, I quickly explained the situation. “So how soon can you get to the Coffee Bean?”

  “I am not home but I am not far. I would estimate it would take me thirty minutes.”

  That could be enough time. “They might still be there,” I said.

  “You can always stall them, Ms. Anderson, until I can get there. You say you have some high technology way to communicate with them, do you not?”

  I did, though those weren’t my exact words. Thank God. “I suppose I could pretend to be Anani. Message them long enough for you to get there.” Pre-Tomari-gate, I’d visited Anani’s blog almost as much as I visited the bathroom. If
there was anyone I could emulate, it was Anani. “But what should I say? I can’t press too hard. I’m not sure how honest Lyla and her source were in their convos. Honestly, we’re assuming Piper is J. Chris, but what if she’s not? What if Lyla actually referred to Piper by her real name?”

  “You are overthinking this, Ms. Anderson. One thing I learned from my time with the sheriff’s department is that as long as you act like you know what you are talking about, the other person will assume you do. I suggest you keep it vague and let them fill in the blanks for you.”

  “I could do that.” We hung up, though I wasn’t ready to give up completely on my mani. I smiled at Alice. “I’ll just let this soak off. You can start someone else.”

  She was already motioning the bottle blonde standing at the front desk to come over. I took a seat at the empty station next to her and pulled up the Viv300 account with my right hand. My left was still covered in foil.

  Please let them stay at the coffee shop.

  I checked the draft. The message from yesterday was still there. Why are you ignoring me?

  Deleting it, I wrote, I’m not. Can you chat for a few?

  I tapped the refresh icon five times before Viv responded. Luckily, I wasn’t expecting a college essay of a response because I would have been disappointed. It was one line. Thought you’d changed your mind.

  They were still there. Good. Of course, that meant I actually had to talk. What did I need from them? I thought it over. First step was to confirm Viv3000 even had anything to do with Piper. Second was to finagle Piper’s true identity—J. Chris or not. Third was to convince Viv3000 to stop hiding behind an email account and go talk to the police. I wrote: We only have a couple weeks to the reveal. Definitely still going through with it.

  Viv3000 wrote back almost instantly. She might know. She mentioned Piper to me. She’ll kill us if she knew we were talking.

  And that was all I needed. I had to get to Los Feliz to talk to Viv face to face. Hopefully Aubrey would make sure Viv didn’t leave before I got there. I ripped the foil off my left hand, paid full price for my half manicure, generously tipped Alice, and went to my car, where I reread the message.