Our final destination was a two-story warehouse that looked ready to crumble at any second. Someone had thoughtfully spray-painted Die in bright red letters at least three feet tall. The door looked like it would take a crowbar to open. I was pretty sure I’d seen it used in a horror flick once. One where the black chick died first.
I had one thought: Don’t think so, boo.
I leaned forward so Jamal could hear every word that came out my mouth. “There’s no way in hell we’re stopping.”
He kept going.
I had Jamal drop me off at the most public place I could think of—a complex called LA Live across the street from the Staples Center. There wasn’t a game or a show at the Microsoft Theater so the place wasn’t crowded. But it was busy enough for my purposes—staying alive. I wanted to talk to Viv. I just didn’t want it to be my last words.
The way I saw it, if Viv really wanted to meet me, he or she would come to me. Of course, I hadn’t told Z of the change of plans. In my defense, I didn’t have his number. So I went to email, leaving a quick note in the Viv account drafts: I’m at LA Live. You have a half hour.
No response, but Z showed up within fifteen minutes. I wasn’t surprised to see him again. I gave him a friendly wave as I palmed my pepper spray in my other hand. At first I thought he’d brought cinnamon pastries, but then I realized it was his cologne.
“Something tells me you don’t trust me, Dayna,” Z said.
“Don’t know what would give you that idea.”
And that was it for the small talk. I busied myself nervously checking Sienna’s Instagram account while Z just stood there. It went on like that for five minutes.
“Is Viv coming or not?” I asked.
“Impatient, aren’t we?” He glanced down. “We can always wait in my car. I know those shoes aren’t comfortable.”
They weren’t, but that was the whole point. They were Pink Panthers, a hot pink stiletto that came with panther spots and a three-and-a-half-inch heel.
“Is that what you do?” I asked. “Drive Viv around?”
He shook his head but didn’t say anything. I took it as a sign that I should continue to probe. “But you do work for Viv?”
“In a sense.”
“Doing … ”
He smiled then. “Problem solving.”
This was LA, which meant only one thing. The problems he solved had nothing to do with math. “You’re a fixer.”
Fixers were the LA equivalent of a unicorn. You knew they existed but it was rare to see one in the wild. They were who big-time celebs called when they had a major problem like a baby on the way from someone who wasn’t their wife, or being caught red-handed in a den of iniquity. In short, they fixed problems and made them go away.
I’d heard rumors about fixers for years but this was my first real sighting. Even with the circumstances, I was a little bit excited. Sienna would freak. Well, she would after she yelled at me for going somewhere with a stranger. Even though I didn’t actually go inside.
“I’m not a fixer,” Z said. “I’m a problem solver.”
I didn’t realize there was a difference. “And I’m a problem?”
He didn’t respond. At first I thought he didn’t have a snappy comeback. I was all set to be disappointed when he glanced at his cell. “Viv’s here.”
I quickly glanced around. All I saw were couples on dates and families heading to the movie theater. Was Viv a soccer dad who wore flip-flops? I hoped not.
Z noticed my pending disappointment. “Not here. Parking lot one. Top floor. Viv is staying for five minutes before leaving.”
I had a choice. Go there or go home. A stranger had approached me on the street and convinced me to go with him to meet another stranger. My mom, Sienna, and Emme would be standing over my casket all arguing over who had last “told me so.”
“What if I want to go home?”
“You don’t. You may think you do. But you don’t.” He paused. Then, “And you can always use that pepper spray you’ve been holding on to for dear life.”
True. All of it. But despite my tough talk earlier, I wanted to talk to Viv. It might be my only chance. It was a parking lot, not an abandoned warehouse. Somebody would be around in case things went left.
The parking lot was across Chick Hearn Way behind the Staples Center. I headed in that direction. It took me about ten feet to realize Z was still where I’d left him. “You’re not coming?” I said, as if I’d known him years instead of minutes.
He shook his head. “I have no doubt you’ll be fine without me.”
“You gonna be here when I come back?”
Instead of answering he recited a string of digits. “Call if you need anything. Like another jump.”
He walked away.
I watched him go, then crossed the street and was at the elevator before I knew it. It took forever to come. When it arrived, it was empty. I hit the button for the top floor. When the doors opened, the parking lot was practically deserted. A few cars, no people. One vehicle stood out, a shiny black Range Rover with pitch black windows taking up two handicapped spots. I couldn’t see inside, which was the point. Besides, I didn’t have to. I know who was in there.
Viv.
I stood in the elevator, not one for covert rendezvous. I hated when they happened in movies and wasn’t really feeling them in real life. I didn’t have to get out, just stay there until the doors closed. Head back downstairs. Head home and watch The First 48 marathon that Sienna saved on the DVR. But I didn’t. Z was right. A key to solving Lyla’s murder was waiting for me behind the car door. I decided I was ready to play Let’s Make a Deal. Mack Christie needed to be behind bars.
I stepped into the garage and walked straight toward the Range Rover about twenty feet away. Slowly at first, then picking up speed, figuring I might as well get it over with. I walked toward the car just as the engine turned on.
I was reminding myself for the kajillionth time I didn’t have to do this when the back passenger window rolled down, bringing me face to face with Viv.
Or, should I say, Mack Christie himself.
Twenty
It was my third encounter with Mack Christie. I wouldn’t describe it as a charm. He didn’t get out of the car. I stayed put too, hugging the wall like a sixth grader at his first coed party. We just stared at each other for almost a minute. I counted.
Finally, Mack must’ve realized I was just as wary of him as he was of me because he suddenly smiled, one of those megawatt numbers normally reserved for an arena stuffed full of fans paying over $100 just for the cheap seats. I half expected him to break out in song.
But the only singing I wanted Mack to do was like a canary. None of it made any sense. Z had made it clear he was taking me to see Viv3000. If Mack was Lyla’s source, then he’d snitched on himself. I didn’t get it. I’d read enough blind items to know Lyla hadn’t exactly been kind to the Christies. Maybe he knew that she knew about his lip-syncing and pretended to be a source in order to out her before she outed him.
But what if that wasn’t it? If he truly wanted the lip-syncing revealed, there were much easier ways to do it. Send a tweet. Post on Instagram. Do Facebook Live. Or just do an interview with Gus the Gossip or one of the national morning shows.
Much like Lucy, he had some ’splaining to do. I just didn’t want him to do it too closely. We continued our standoff to see who would talk first. For the first time ever, I won.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I sent my driver for a walk. No one else is here.”
That’s what I was scared of. “No tour bus today?”
He shook his head. “I hate that thing, but it’s good for the brand. Makes me recognizable. Relatable. So they tell me.”
“So everything about you is a lie.”
“Not quite. I don’t drive. That part is true. How do you want t
o do this?”
“You tell me. You brought me here.”
“You asked me to. I got your message. The one accusing me of being a murderer.”
He sounded more amused than offended, like this was all one big misunderstanding that could be cleared up over a plate of nachos and red Kool-Aid. Except I wasn’t quite ready to drink. Not just yet. “How do I know you’re not?”
A valid question. At least in my mind. He clearly didn’t think so because he leaned back in his seat as if the weight of the world was pushing him down. “I wouldn’t kill anyone.”
“Right, because you’re a moral, upstanding citizen who never lies.”
“It didn’t start off as a lie.” I wasn’t in the mood for the audio version of his autobiography. I got it anyway. “I can sing. Could sing. That first album? All me. Second one too. And I sang live on both world tours, which turned out to be the problem. I noticed the issue when recording album three. I wasn’t sounding right. My manager, Ben, took me to a doctor who told me I have muscle tension dysphonia—a fancy way of saying I overused my vocal chords. Ironically, I should’ve been lip-syncing more back then. We tried therapy. Vocal rest. Everything. None of it worked. It was gone.”
He paused and I found myself feeling sorry for him, at least until he opened his mouth again. “A couple of years ago, Ben says he has a guy who can do some stuff, make me sound like I used to. I get to the studio, record a few tracks. Few days later, someone leaks one of the songs to get folks excited my third album’s finally coming out. It gets something like a million hits the first day. Critics rave it’s my best work in years. Except when I hear it, I know it’s not me. I never had that range. I called Ben out on it too. But we owed the studio one more album. Ben said it would be a quick fix. I promised myself just that one time. Then the album went triple platinum. The record company literally threw money at me to sign one more contract.”
“You had to know it was bound to come out somehow,” I said.
“I did and I thought about that every day. Just didn’t expect it to come out like that. You have the video. You saw the beginning. It was supposed to be a closed rehearsal.”
“You didn’t notice the camera?”
“Sure. There were cameras around but there’s always cameras around. I didn’t expect them to be on. We had the snafu with the backing track but it was taken care of. The actual performance was fine. And then we get a message a few days later.”
“From?”
“Gus.”
“The Gossip?” I asked, more so because I was so shocked. I flashed on a sliver of a memory of Mack and his wife performing at last year’s Silver Sphere Awards. It would certainly explain how and why Lyla had gotten her hands on the video so quickly. I walked over so we were finally face to face. “What did he want?”
“At first? To be ‘helpful.’” Mack went as far as to make quotation marks with his hands. “His exact words. Right after how sorry he was and how he didn’t know the camera was recording. And right before how he understood how potentially embarrassing it could be. He promised to make sure it was destroyed.”
“The video is almost a year old,” I said. “If Gus was going to release it, why wait so long? Why not do an exclusive on his blog right away?”
“Because I paid a lot of money for him not to.”
He let that one hang, waiting for me to catch the meaning.
“He blackmailed you?” I asked.
As the nickname indicated, Gus made his living off gossip. But was this really how he got paid? Not from what he knew but from what he knew and didn’t tell? And had Lyla with her Anani Miss blind item threatened to ruin it all?
“You think it’s a coincidence we’re hosting the Silver Sphere Awards this year?” Mack asked. “Another Gus suggestion on top of what we were giving him each month to keep quiet. Made me realize Gus Ortiz would bleed me until I was dry.”
“So you contacted Anani? Or was it vice versa?”
“I contacted her. I’ve been living this lie for four years now. I’m sick of pretending. I wanted to retire but I knew Janet wasn’t having that. Gus hated that Anani blog. Heard him say it himself. Felt like ‘her type’ made it tough for ‘real journalists like him.’ I don’t think she even knew it was me. I certainly didn’t know who she was when I emailed her, told her I had some info on Mack Christie. She suggested the Gmail account. When I told her about the video, I was surprised she was able to get her hands on it. I’ve never seen it myself. But I guess now it makes sense.”
“Was she going to implicate Gus?”
“That was our agreement,” Mack said. “She didn’t like Gus any more than I did, though she never said why. She had me convinced Gus put the camera there on purpose. Like maybe he’d heard about the lip-syncing and just needed proof.”
Of course, if Lyla outed Gus, she also outed herself out of a job. A job she’d just gotten when Nina left to open her own agency. A job Nina claimed Lyla desperately wanted when she’d been her assistant. Gus would have definitely gotten fired by the SSO board. Even if no one figured out Lyla was Anani, I doubted any SSO president who replaced Gus would have kept Lyla—or any of his staff—around.
“Gus had to have seen Anani’s blind item,” I said. “You talk to him about it?”
Mack nodded, taking the time to rub his hands through his $500 haircut. It was worth every penny, too, because every strand immediately fell back in place. “He was pissed but still playing Mr. Nice Guy. He didn’t know I was Anani’s source. Just kept apologizing that the video leaked. Promised he’d take care of it.”
By it, did he mean the situation or Anani herself? “He ever mention a Javon Reid or Junior to you?”
Mack shook his head, then closed his eyes and sat still for so long I was tempted to check if he was still breathing. “I just wanted out,” he finally said. “To see Gus get his comeuppance. I didn’t want anyone to die.”
But someone had. If Gus was involved, the police needed to know. It would help if Mack had proof to go along with his accusations. “How’d you pay him?” I asked.
“Always multiple money orders in small amounts so not to arouse suspicion. Always in Gus’s name. Always sent directly to the SSO office each month.”
Money orders were better than cash, but not as good as a personal check. “You keep any receipts?”
It was a long shot, but they would have Gus’s name on them at least. Mack shrugged. “There might be some at home. I didn’t plan to give them to our accountant or anything.”
“Can you look? It’ll help when you go to the police. Along with any correspondence you guys had. Texts. Emails. DMs. Anything.”
He hesitated and I sighed. “You have no plans to go to the police with this?” I asked. “Even if there’s a chance Gus killed Lyla to keep your secret? And his money?”
“I don’t want Janet—or Gus, for that matter—to know I’m involved in revealing it.”
That explained our covert meeting in a deserted parking lot. “We’re beyond being able to keep any more secrets,” I said.
“I figured you’d say that. I’ll look for the receipts. See what else I have. I’m not the only person he’s doing this to.”
“You have names?”
“A few, but I’d rather keep them out of it if possible. I’ll get you the stuff you need.”
“Once you do, I’ll call the tip line and get them to the police.”
Sienna was on the couch when I finally made it home after getting someone to jump my battery. We spoke at the same time.
“I’ve got news,” she said.
“You’ll never guess where I was,” I said.
We both abruptly shut up. It was the polite thing to do, after all—let the other person go first. Then we realized we both were letting the other go first. Which led to the second-most polite thing—follow the other person’s wishes. We spoke
at the same time. Again.
“So,” she said.
The same time, I said, “Like I—”
Again, we went the polite route. “You go,” I said.
“I did my interview with Gus in his Airstream today. You know I don’t trust that Nina’s actually going to issue any Tomari statement so I kinda, maybe, somehow let it slip you and Omari are a couple. Completely accidentally, of course.”
She gave me an exaggerated wink.
I nodded. “About that. Gus may be Geppetto.”
It was Sienna’s turn to nod solemnly. “Well … maybe he’ll run an item about you and Omari before he’s arrested.”
That was my Sienna. Always glass half full.
“Let me get Emme on FaceTime and I’ll update you guys on that and the case,” I said.
I did just that. Both were pretty quiet—minus double-teaming me about going somewhere with a complete stranger. Apparently, I “kept doing things like this” and they wanted me to stop putting myself in “potentially dangerous” situations. They brought up past incidents where I may have chased a potential suspect down an abandoned street in stilettos, and sat outside another suspect’s house and confronted him when he got home. Sienna was there for that one. A fact they both conveniently forgot.
I just nodded, maybe made a joke about how I’d come out alive, injury-free, and with a new murder suspect to boot. They pretended not to be impressed, but I knew better. After I wrapped up, we discussed next steps. Emme would start a background check on Gus and Sienna would call her gossip ring to see what they knew about Gus’s extracurricular blackmail activities. If he was doing it to others, someone out there had to know.
We got off the phone with Emme. I left a message for Aubrey, then checked the SSO website. It was silver and white with lots of moving parts—all virtually screaming, “We spent a buttload on this website designer and we’re getting our money’s worth.” I clicked on the About Us section. It didn’t take long to find Gus’s bio. One tap of the “page down” button and there he was smiling at me.
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