Beware Beware (33 page)

“And?”

“He got busted for sexual assault. If you can call that slap on the wrist getting busted.”

“Sexual assault? How?”

“I tracked down the girl. She was happy to talk to me. She says he raped her at a party. He either slipped her something or picked her up when she was black-out drunk.”

“And she went to the administration?”

“Yeah, for all the good it did her.”

I closed my eyes. Jamie was twenty-nine. He got hit with that disciplinary action at nineteen. How many women had he violated in his long career?

And then my attention shifted. Chaz was getting at something. He was pointing toward the truth.

“What does this have to do with anything, though, Chaz?”

“I have this theory. It's kind of out there, but hear me out.”

I nodded for him to go on.

“Maybe Jamie didn't kill Tilley. What was his motive, after all? If he was a frat-house rapist, I wonder if he would even have called what happened between Daphne and Tilley rape.” He cleared his throat and continued. “Maybe Jamie raped Daphne, and she killed Tilley and framed Jamie to get rid of both of them.”

I was so stunned by his unerring aim that I laughed more or less naturally. “What? That's quite a theory. She wasn't even in town until after Tilley was killed.”

“Contract killers must be easy enough to find. Once you set your mind to something like that, anyway.”

“No,” I said. I chose my words carefully, and followed this lie with something like truth. “I know Daphne, Chaz, and she's no cold-blooded killer.”

He sighed. “Ultimately, it's up to the police. This is just a theory, and like I said, it's kind of out there. She'd have to be a crazy bitch for it to work.”

“And trust me,” I said with conviction. “Daphne is not a crazy bitch.”

“This is your case, Song. If you're satisfied, I'm satisfied and we'll leave it at that. Are you satisfied?”

He folded his hands in front of him and gave me such a loving, compassionate look that I knew at once I didn't fool him. This was my chance to come clean, to affirm that I was the person he expected me to be.

“I'm satisfied,” I said, forcing a smile. I looked at the wall just past his eyes.

 

Epilogue

The L.A.P.D. dropped the case of the movie star's murder, content, apparently, with the explanation in hand. The media took a little longer to lose interest. Joe Tilley's murder, the grand theory of rape and revenge, capped, in the end, by the antihero's death, was the most scandalous feast of gossip that had hit Hollywood in years. Both Willow Hemingway and Abby Hart had their time in the spotlight, and after running the TV circuit, they inked competing books. Thor Tilla had his fifteen minutes, with high YouTube traffic and murmurs of a record deal. Anyone who'd ever met with Tilley or Jamie had a snippet of memoir, posted and reposted all over the Internet. The tabloids ran anything that could pass as a story. Nothing new spilled out, but the words still managed to multiply.

Daphne's career was in a good place before the murder, but it took off when she went back to New York. She was a tragic media sweetheart, and she had enough beauty and talent to hold on to the spotlight without much effort. Even her hidden identity didn't hurt her—it only added to her air of living myth. Some blogger called her “Lady Lazarus,” and the nickname stuck. I kept tabs on her over the Internet. I couldn't help myself. A part of me despised her, and another wanted the world for her, but there was no part that was indifferent. I thought about her every day.

Three months passed in a monotone of guilt and depression. I did the bare minimum at work, and I skulked around the apartment when I wasn't in the office. Chaz and Lori were supportive, but there was water between us now. Chaz knew I was hiding something and while he never brought it up, I could tell that he held me at a subtly greater distance than he'd allowed before. Even Lori acted different. No one else would even come near me.

I tried seeing a therapist, but I was so much a sinner I couldn't even tell her what ailed me. I started taking long solitary walks, often with a book in hand. This became my primary hobby, my main mollifying source of comfort. I walked to Los Feliz, and I walked downtown, but most days I just looped Echo Park Lake, treading the cracked strip of pavement around the tarp-hooded fence.

Then, one Saturday in June, I left the apartment and saw a fountain spraying white against the skyline. The chain-link fence, the black tarp, the everyday ugliness of my view had vanished. The park was there, shining like brand-new skin with the gauze stripped away.

I went back in the apartment and told Lori to come out. She put on shoes and scurried out behind me.

“Look,” I said. “We live by a lake.”

“Wow,
unni
. It's beautiful.”

We walked down Santa Ynez and crossed the bare pavement that had been my footpath these past months. The park beyond the old covered perimeter was a dazzling revelation. A stone walkway curved around the lake, flanked on both sides by fresh plots of greenery. Black ducks swam among lotuses and lily pads, and a row of honking geese waddled onto a playground. There were people everywhere, old couples, teenagers, families with dogs.

“This is wonderful,” Lori said. “I almost forgot there was a lake here. How long was it closed?”

“Two years, I think.”

“Was it like this before?”

“No, I don't think it was this nice.”

“Didn't Jack Nicholson come here in that
Chinatown
movie?”

I smiled. I'd made Lori watch
Chinatown
with me when we'd moved in together. I'd forgotten about the scene in Echo Park, and she'd been excited about it. “Yeah, he rode on a rowboat.”

“What is that?” Lori pointed at a sign posted in the ground. It prohibited swimming and diving in the lake, and on the white space, someone had scribbled the letters RBG.

I shook my head. “It's a gang tag. Jesus Christ, that was fast.”

“It's a territory thing?”

“Yeah. Like dogs with urine.”

“But look at this place,” she said. “It isn't gangster territory,
unni
. Who cares if they Sharpied a No-Diving sign?”

She smiled at me and the smile was brilliant. In the sky and the water and the flash of her teeth, I saw the dim light of my future calling me forward.

 

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my agent, Ethan Bassoff, for your indispensable insight, diligence, and encouragement. I expect any children you may have fathered in the last year will grow up loved and happy.

Thanks to my editor, Anne Brewer, for taking me through draft after draft of this novel. Your hard work has been one of my greatest assets over the last few years.

Thanks, too, to Karyn Marcus, Justin Vellela, Shailyn Tavella, and the rest of the people at St. Martin's Press who have helped me along the way.

Thanks to Katie McClain and Andrew Renzi, for letting me borrow a thing or two. You guys are the best. (And congratulations on your impending marriage, which will be awesome.)

Thanks to Tristan Clark, Heidi Onion, and belatedly, the Jorges Camacho, Jr. and Sr., for helping an amateur out with some research.

Thanks to my parents, my brothers Andrew and Peter, and to the rest of my family for all your love and support.

Thanks to my husband, Matt Barbabella, for marrying me between drafts of yet another novel full of dead men.

No thanks to Duke Charbabella, who is a basset hound, but I do love him very much.

 

ALSO BY STEPH CHA

Follow Her Home

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

STEPH CHA is the author of
Follow Her Home
. Her writing has appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books,
and
Trop
magazine. A graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School, she lives in her native city of Los Angeles.
Beware Beware
is her second novel.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

An imprint of St. Martin's Publishing Group.

BEWARE BEWARE
. Copyright © 2014 by Stephanie Cha. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.minotaurbooks.com

Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

Cover photographs: woman ©
Shutterstock.com
; mirror © Getty Images

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Cha, Steph.

Beware, beware: a Juniper Song mystery / Steph Cha—First edition.

     pages  cm

ISBN 978-1-250-04901-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-5015-6 (e-book)

  1.  Women private investigators—Fiction.   2.  Screenwriters—Crimes against—Fiction   3.  Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3603.H27B49 2014

813'.6—dc23

2014014366

eISBN 9781250049018

First Edition: August 2014