The Hot One

by Carolyn Murnick

  I kept calling the Media Relations Division every few months and mostly just heard about more continuances, and then all of a sudden something bigger was on the horizon: the preliminary hearing, that minitrial without a jury. I wrote the information down in the same notebook I had been keeping things in at my desk and then put it aside. It was the end of winter, my birthday would be a in a few weeks, and soon the icebergs of gray sludge that had become a permanent fixture on the New York sidewalks would slowly start to shrink until one day pretty much overnight it would be back to bike rides and bare legs and the long winter would feel like one of those bad dreams you still sometimes thought about even though the sense memory had long since loosened its grip.

  “June 21. Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, 210 West Temple St, Dept. 108.” The words represented a time and place thousands of miles and dozens of days away. It felt almost as abstract as the idea of my father’s or mother’s death—a sad thing, a true thing, a thing that was an eventual inevitability but that I’d rather not consider too deeply in the present. The time would come when it would come, and I would deal with it then.

  I looked at the notebook on and off for a few weeks, sometimes in the morning, sometimes before I left for the night. I wrote down notes from meetings, telephone messages, and random ink scrawlings of arrows and stars on the same page. I copied the information into an Excel document on my office computer where I had begun compiling relevant names and contacts. There were lawyers and coroners and press secretaries on that list. There were private investigators and sheriff’s detectives, too. I bought a new case for my laptop. It was bright and had handles like a briefcase, and when I carried it I felt as though I were going places. I googled Clara Shortridge Foltz. She had been a famous suffragette and the first female lawyer in California. After her husband had left her and her five children, she’d gone on to become to become the first woman admitted to the California bar and had later run for governor at the age of eighty-one.

  “Everything in retrospect seems weird, phantasmal, and unreal. I peer back across the misty years into that era of prejudice and limitation, when a woman lawyer was a joke . . . but the story of my triumphs will eventually disclose that though the battle has been long and hard-fought it was worthwhile,” she wrote.

  I decided that Clara Shortridge Foltz would be my spirit animal, and after a few more days I booked a flight and found a friend with an extra room to stay with in Hollywood and rented a car and pulled my hair back and practiced the “square breathing” technique I’d once read about—inhale, hold, exhale, hold, over and over and over—while I walked through the door and into the elevator and through the second security check right up to where I was. Inhale, hold, exhale, hold, over and over and over.

  • • •

  As I walked down the hall that first morning, I had no idea that in just a few minutes I would meet three very important people all at once: Detective Small; Jennifer DiSisto, Ashley’s roommate at the time of her death; and Christopher Duran, a stylist who introduced himself as Ashley’s best friend. All I saw was a group sitting on benches lining the walls up ahead, but I wasn’t close enough yet to see their faces. My thoughts pinballed around my brain: Were those her parents? What did they look like these days? What should I say to them? What would they say to me?

  Suddenly I was back in Ashley’s parents’ kitchen in New Jersey, pressing out tiny, misshapen cookies as Ashley mixed up icing next to me. I think of Ashley’s mother’s hair: dark, thick, straight, and shiny. Cynthia Ellerin looked like her daughter, and her daughter looked like her—not like my mother and me. They were a pair, the two of them: brown hair, brown eyes, delicate features, and slender limbs.

  I had written to the Ellerins again a few weeks prior to leaving for this trip. I thought of Ashley all the time, I told them, and I was going to California to attend the preliminary hearing. Would they be there? Could we meet? I’d had no idea how they’d respond, given that they hadn’t replied to any of the notes I had sent in the years following Ashley’s death. I’d never taken it personally. I didn’t fool myself that I had some magic words to say or that hearing from me would make anything better. It had to hurt, that much I understood, but still I wanted them to know that I was remembering her. That felt like something to me that was worth putting out there;whether they acknowledged it or not didn’t matter.

  This time I included my email address and cell phone number, though, two things that hadn’t existed the last time I’d seen them. Maybe that would make it easier? Another old friend of Ashley’s I’d connected with earlier in the year told me that she also hadn’t been in touch with the Ellerins since the murder and that she had heard from others that contact with people from Ashley’s past was too painful for them.

  Still, I continued to write once in a while, and so did my mother, who sent holiday cards to the family regularly. It had been nine years now, and I wondered if maybe something would be different this time. At least if I saw them in the courthouse, I didn’t want it to come as a surprise. But by the time I’d left New York, I hadn’t heard anything.

  So many times had I pictured seeing the Ellerins again, at their house in California or back in New Jersey for some unknown reason or—since Ashley’s been gone—in a huge, sterile government building in Los Angeles. I wondered whether I’d burst into tears or whether they would. I wondered if I’d recognize her mother’s smell when she hugged me. Or maybe she wouldn’t hug me at all. She’d avoid eye contact or glare at me with pain. Maybe they were angry at me for being there, angry that this was happening at all and that people were allowed to come see it. This wasn’t my place. This was a family matter. And why was I here now instead of being there then? Why had she lost her daughter and my mother hadn’t?

  In my more narcissistic fantasies, I wondered if perhaps her parents might look at me as a shadow daughter. I am almost the exact same age as your daughter would have been had she lived. Maybe for her parents looking at me would feel like having a phantom limb—a phantom grown child. For a second, they would almost see their daughter at the age she would have been had she grown up to be the age I am now. I would be the promise she didn’t get to realize. I had made it out of childhood, the teenage years, and even young adulthood. I had been lucky so far, and she had not.

  I’d had a dream a few months earlier that her father had appeared at a neighborhood party back in New Jersey. He’d smiled at me and looked young. We’d caught up about things—my family, his—and it had been okay. He’d treated me as an adult. The truth had been in the background, but we had been facing each other in the present. That wasn’t so bad, I’d thought, and then I’d woken up. In my bedroom in the gray violet early morning light I’d felt comforted and hopeful for a moment. How nice it can be when dreams play pretend.

  • • •

  I walked farther down the hall, and the faces came into focus. They were strangers, only. I felt able to breathe in a new way. I could stay anonymous. I could take out my laptop and pretend to be a paralegal or a reporter. I could fake it, I could keep this going. I could handle this. I sat down on a bench next to three people about my age, a woman and two men.

  Of course I was listening to them and pretending not to. They chatted with familiarity; two of them seemed to be a couple. There was a woman about my age, pretty with brown hair; her boyfriend was a bit more casual with a ponytail. The third, the guy closest to me, was neatly dressed with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair, skinny pants, and a nervous energy. I caught pieces of words, short bursts of distracted laughter. They were catching up. They hadn’t seen each other in quite some time. I thought I heard the name Ashley—or is it Ashton?—but assumed it was a coincidence. A few moments later, the same thing happened.

  It was not a coincidence.

  One of them had heard from Ashton not too long before. “It’s crazy that the press called her his girlfriend,” one was saying. “Ashley used to laugh about that,” the skinny-pants guy said. “I’m not that guy
’s girlfriend,” he said, speaking through Ashley, imitating her tone: deep sarcasm, bored amusement. I was confused, but they were here for her, too, that was certain.

  The realization was thrilling and terrifying all at once. It felt as if I had heard someone speaking English for the first time after months of wandering by myself in the Himalayas. Part of me wanted to call out, to say “Hello, hi—I exist, too! We’re part of the same tribe!” But another part had the inclination to hold back: I’d gotten this far on my own, perhaps it was better to keep it that way. Perhaps I should just keep taking everything in and gathering it up and saving it for later to parse it out in private.

  But then a moment later I felt frustrated with myself—I should be pushing through all this discomfort, all this fear. That’s what Ashley would want. Wouldn’t she? She might not have understood what I was doing here, but of course she would see us all across the room and say, “Oh wow, that’s my friend and those are my friends, and do you all know each other? You should meet.” And then there’d be hugs and introductions and commonalities exchanged and California-style small talk, and new bonds, however fleeting, would be formed. That part seemed clear, even if nothing else did. The story, the scenes, the situations I had sat with in my head alone for years were suddenly bursting out into the land of the living. This was one of those moments that would separate things into a before and after.

  “Are y’all going to room 108?” I mumbled tentatively.

  What the fuck. Why did I say y’all? I was from New Jersey. And it had taken me a long time to come up with that one.

  They answered right away. They were kind and seemed weary. The woman said they were there to testify, and she asked what my story was. I said I was a childhood friend of Ashley’s from New York. I spoke to the woman in particular but moved to make eye contact with them all.

  “Did they fly you out here?” she asked.

  “I came on my own,” I said, confused, and then I realized that they thought I was here to testify as well. For a moment I wished I were testifying; then at least I’d have a clear and easily digestible answer to the question of what I was doing there, even if it was just a way to pass.

  “Oh wow,” she said. “Why?”

  Before I could think too much about it, the simple line tumbled out, no southern affectations this time: “I want to know what happened.” It felt like one of the truest things I’d said in a while.

  • • •

  A man with a badge appears, and greets the woman warmly. I learn that her name is Jen. She’s the one who found Ashley’s body, says the skinny-pants guy to me as an aside. His name is Chris. He calls himself Ashley’s best friend and says they hung out every single day, and he explains that he introduced Jen to Ashley when she needed a new roommate. He introduces me to the man with the badge, whose name is Detective Small. He is kind to me, chatting about where I’m from and my job back home.

  I sit on the bench in the hallway outside the courtroom next to the detective, fluorescent lights turning everything sallow. He’s a nice-looking man, tall and stocky with a gray mustache and a neatly pressed suit. He wears a chunky braided wedding band, and he looks a bit like the fifth-grade teacher Ashley and I had for social studies, Mr. Reilly. He’d be right at home coaching a kids’ Little League game or flipping burgers on the backyard grill, Bud Light in one hand, spatula in the other.

  It’s hard to reconcile that he’s also someone who has the sights and sounds of violence, chaos, and danger burned into his brain. I assume that he’s fired a gun, been at crime scenes, broken through doors. He’s seen a dead body, lots of them probably. He saw Ashley’s, twisted and inanimate, splayed across her living room floor nine years ago. In fact, he’s never seen her any other way.

  Back on the hallway bench, Chris still seems nervous; he’s breathing quickly while crossing and uncrossing his legs and checking his phone and adjusting his pants. I can relate, even though I don’t have to go on the stand in a few minutes and speak the truth (my truth?) in front of a judge and lawyers and a handcuffed, jumpsuited accused murderer. Both Chris and Jen are wondering when someone named Justin is going to show up; neither one of them has spoken to him in quite a while.

  As I take them in for a few more minutes, I’m realizing it’s actually hard to tell if Chris and Jen are actually friends anymore. There’s a stiffness to their interactions, and I’m wondering if perhaps the familiarity they’re sharing now is really just a relic.

  Later, Chris would tell me that he and Jen had been very close for a time before Ashley’s death but that the murder had broken everything—and everyone—up. Emotions had run high, and rumors had flown around about who had said what to whom, and it had gotten to be easier for everyone to just keep their distance.

  I would learn that this actually was the first time they were seeing each other in many years, and eventually they’d find their way back to what had brought them together in the first place. In between talking to detectives and press and appearing in hearings and eventually the trial, they’d travel to Italy together, drink at the Standard, and remember Ashley long into the night.

  The guy next to Jen is her boyfriend, and he is there for moral support. He’s laid back, not dressed for court. Jen clutches his hand tightly as Detective Small chats with her about what will happen in the courtroom. He has a binder with him, and he asks if she’d like to look over her statement again, flipping through it to find the right page. I’m guessing that the binder is the murder book, a thing my crime reporter friend at the office told me about. From my understanding, it’s like a big case file investigators use to keep everything together related to a murder: photos, diagrams, witness interviews, forensic reports. It’s just the facts, ma’am, but all the facts from all the ma’ams. It’s everything they know in one place. I wish so much that I could look through it! I imagine it to be a plethora of information: names, dates, people and places and dark secrets of Ashley’s life that I’m only just beginning to scratch at the edges of.

  I listen intently to the detective, as though the stuff he’s saying applies to me even though I know it does not. I’m not quite one of them. Am I jealous? Just a minute ago, part of me wished I were there to testify so I’d have a more justifiable reason to be appearing in court, and now I am realizing that testifying would carry other significance as well: It would mean I was necessary. It would mean that I would go on record connected to Ashley, that something I knew or the things I could say and the way I’d say them could help her somehow. Find justice? Be remembered? Bring closure? I imagined the words I’d use, whom I’d make eye contact with. Whether my voice would crack. Chris and Jen had suffered a loss, a trauma, but by testifying the two of them had a chance to make something of all of that and carry it forward. I want that, too.

  Chris tells me he was there when she met “him”—Michael. I nod in acknowledgment, but inside my brain is exploding and I’m struggling to keep up. Michael told them he repaired furnaces and air-conditioning, and he was in her house a few times. Wait, what? They’re referring to “him” as if he were definitely the guy, no question? And they all knew one another? This is terrifying in a brand-new way. The dizzying information is coming hard and fast. The friends, the body, Ashton, all of it. I’m working hard to synthesize this with everything that came before and everything I made assumptions about these past nine years. There’s so much more I want to ask, but part of me feels like I need to play it cool, at least for now.

  • • •

  After a few more minutes on the bench, Detective Small goes in to check on something, and when he comes out he tells Chris and Jen they’ll probably be up soon, but they need to wait in the hall until they’re called. I don’t. Witnesses are not allowed to hear others’ testimony before they present their own, but me? I can breeze right in and listen to whatever I want. There are no special circumstances or restrictions applied to me. Lucky me.

  I look at Jen and Chris and give them a quick shrug. I’m standing to go in when suddenly
a floppy-haired, pinstripe-suited burst of California cool breezes down the hall and into our space. For once I don’t have to guess at what’s going on: Justin has arrived.

  • • •

  Lots of people seem to have some sort of real or self-generated celebrity quality out here; most places you go in LA, it’s hard to tell who’s famous and who’s not. Homeless people are shirtless with six-pack abs. Cool supporting actors from the latest Scorsese movie are eating egg white omelets at grungy diners. If you haven’t seen them in a movie you at least feel like you have, and in that way it’s like a great equalizer.

  Justin is handsome, and that “Is he actually a celebrity?” game starts playing in my head almost unconsciously. Didn’t I see him in a Lifetime movie a few weeks ago? Or was it a Wendy’s commercial last night? “Hey, guys,” he says affably, shuffling from side to side in his Vans slip-ons and doing an uptick nod at the detective. Chris and Jen stay sitting, and it feels as if a beat or two go by before anyone reacts.

  Justin has the frenetic energy of a hippie forced to put on a monkey suit for some pitch meeting or family event. The fabric is straining at the seams and his pants are a bit short, exposing his tapered ankles and his brightly colored socks. I’m guessing he surfs. He’s almost like comic relief at this point: tall, tan, undeterred, and operating in a completely different emotional ecosystem than the rest of us ordinary folks. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear him say something like, “What’s up? Just thought I’d swing through on my way out to Malibu—the waves are supposed to be gnarly right now. Y’all ready to nail this testimony deal? So stoked.”

  Chris introduces me quickly, and I learn Justin works in the highway billboard business. Who does that? I’m not even sure I know what that means. It sounds absurd. It sounds like a job someone would have in some LA noir story, a pulp paperback. Like private detective or gun moll. Everyone here feels like an invented character, myself included. Chris is a hairstylist, Jen is in the art world, I’m a magazine editor from the East Coast, and preposterously we’re all connected by our dead friend—a stripper with a heart of gold—and an alleged serial killer. What would this movie be called? Or would it be a web series or a Showtime original? Would it be a dark buddy comedy or a thriller or an epic journey of self-discovery? The loglines practically wrote themselves.