“How so?”
“She was getting older. The guys in the clubs in Hollywood, West Hollywood, they’re all younger or looking for younger.”
“Right. Did you tell the police about her preferring the Valley?”
“Yeah.”
I had met Tina in a restaurant bar on Ventura. I was beginning to understand Mattson and Sakai’s interest in me.
“She lived near the Sunset Strip, right?” I asked.
“Yes,” Hill said. “Just up the hill. Near the old Spago’s.”
“So would she drive over the hill to the Valley?”
“No, never. She got a DUI a while back and she stopped driving when she went out. She used Uber and Lyft.”
I assumed that Mattson and Sakai had gotten Tina’s Uber and Lyft records. They would help identify the bars she frequented and determine her other movements.
“And so, getting back to the stalking thing,” I said. “She just went to the club on her own and met this guy, or was it prearranged like through a dating app or something?”
“No, she was doing her thing,” Hill said. “She just went there to get a buzz on and hear music, maybe meet a guy. Then she sort of bumped into this guy at the bar. From her standpoint it was random, or it was supposed to be.”
It seemed that what had happened between Tina and me wasn’t a one-off. Tina had a habit of going alone to bars to maybe meet a guy. I held no old-fashioned beliefs about women. They were free to go wherever and do whatever they wanted, and I did not believe that a victim was responsible for what happens to her. But along with the DUI and prior drug possession, I did have an angle on Tina now as a risk-taker. Going to bars where men were less pushy was not enough of a safety edge. Not by a long shot.
“Okay, so they meet at the place and start talking and having drinks at the bar,” I said. “And she had never seen him before?”
“Exactly,” Hill said.
“And did she tell you what he specifically said that creeped her out?”
“Not really. She just said, ‘He knew me. He knew me.’ It was like he somehow let something slip and it wasn’t random at all.”
“Did she say whether he was already there when she got to the club or came in after?”
“She didn’t say. Hold on, I have another call.”
She didn’t wait for my response. She clicked over to the other call and I waited, thinking about the incident in the club. When Hill came back on the line her tone and words were completely different. She was harsh and angry.
“You motherfucker. You scumbag. You’re the guy.”
“What? What are you—”
“That was Detective Mattson. I emailed him. He said you’re not working a story and I should stay away from you. You knew her. You knew Tina and now you’re a suspect. You fucking asshole.”
“No, wait. I’m not a suspect and I am working on a story. Yes, I met Tina once but I’m not the guy from the—”
“Don’t fucking come near me!”
She disconnected the call.
“Shit!”
I felt like I had been punched in the gut, and my face burned with humiliation over the subterfuge I had used. I had lied to Lisa Hill. I wasn’t even sure why, or what I was doing. The visit from the detectives had tipped me into a rabbit hole and I wasn’t sure of my motives. Was it about Christina Portrero and me, or was it about the case and the story I might write about it?
Christina and I were one and done. That night she had ordered a car and left. I had asked for another date and she had said no.
“I think you’re too straight for me,” she said.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“That it wouldn’t work.”
“Why?”
“Nothing personal. I just don’t think you’re my type. Tonight was great, but for the long haul, I mean.”
“Well, then, what is your type?”
It was such a lame response. She just smiled and said her car was arriving. She went out the door and I never saw her again.
Now she was dead and I couldn’t leave it alone. My life had somehow changed since the moment the two detectives had approached me in the garage. I was down the rabbit hole now and I sensed that what was ahead of me in this place was only darkness and trouble. But I also sensed that it was a story. A good story. My kind of story.
Four years ago I had lost everything because of a story. My job and the woman I loved. I had blown it. I had not taken care of the most precious thing I had. I had put myself and the story ahead of everything else. True, I had come through dark waters. I had killed a man once and nearly been killed. I had ended up in jail because of a commitment to my job and its principles, and because deep down I knew the woman would sacrifice herself to save me. When it all fell apart, my self-imposed penance was to leave everything behind and turn myself in a different direction. For a long time before, I had said death was my beat. Now, with Christina Portrero, I knew it still was.
4
Myron was waiting for me when I came into the office the next morning. The newsroom where we worked followed an egalitarian open-floor design — individual cubicles in a cluster. Everybody from editor in chief to most recent hire (me) had the same amount of work space. Up-lighting bounced off the ceiling tiles and came down gently on each of our spaces. Our desktop computers had silent-touch keyboards. Some days the place was as silent as a church on Monday, unless somebody was working the phones, and even then they might move into the conference room at the back of the office so as not to disturb anyone. It was nothing like the newsrooms I had worked in earlier in my career, where the cacophony of clacking keyboards alone could make you lose focus on what you were doing.
The conference room, with a window looking out at the newsroom, was also used for walk-in interviews and employee conferences. That was where Myron took me, closing the door behind him after we entered. We took seats across an oval table from each other. Myron had a printout of what I assumed was my “King of Con Artists” story that he put down on the table. He was old school. He edited with a red pen on paper, then he had our office assistant, Tally Galvin, enter the changes digitally in the story.
“So, you didn’t like my headline,” I said.
“No, the headline has to be about what the story means to the consumer, not the personality — good or bad, tragic or inspirational — that you tell the story through,” Myron said. “But that’s not what I want to talk about here.”
“Then what, you didn’t like the story either?”
“The story’s fine. It’s more than fine. Some of your best work. But what I want to talk about is an email I got last night. A complaint.”
I laughed uneasily. I instinctively knew what this was about but I played innocent.
“A complaint about what?”
“This woman — Lisa Hill — says you misrepresented yourself in an interview about a murder that you are a suspect in. Now normally I would have deleted this or put it up on the wall with the rest of the crazies.”
There was a corkboard in the break room where people posted printouts of the most outrageous and bizarre responses to stories we publish. Often they came from the companies and people who were behind the consumer dangers in our stories. We called the board the wall of shame.
“But then,” Myron said, “I got a call first thing this morning from the LAPD that backs this woman’s email and now we have an LAPD complaint as well.”
“That’s complete bullshit,” I said.
“Well, tell me what’s going on because the cop who called wasn’t friendly.”
“Was his name Mattson?”
Myron looked down at the printout and some of the notations he had made by hand on it. He nodded.
“That’s him.”