Chapter 16
I knew I had to keep my cool in front of Detective Samms, or I was going to completely unravel. Laurette. I needed Laurette. She was a master at calming me down, putting things into perspective. But ever since she had met Larry, she had been less and less available, and I would be lying if I didn’t admit that her budding new relationship was stirring up more than just a little bit of jealousy.
After another hour of intense grilling, Samms ordered his chubby-faced partner to drive me back to the Savoy. And as we pulled up to the luxurious front entrance, the squinty-eyed lackey barely slowed the car down enough for me to jump out. The London police were obviously not big fans of my eighties TV show.
As I swept through the lobby towards the bank of elevators, Ian, the young, towering desk clerk, worked hard to avoid eye contact. He just didn’t have the heart to break the news that there had still been no word from Charlie. When I reached my room, I quickly entered, shut and bolted the door behind me, and then sank to the floor and lost it. I cried. Hard. This entire ordeal had taken such a toll on me, and I was tired of burying my emotions and trying to keep a level head. I sat up against the door, my knees to my face, and sobbed uncontrollably for what felt like hours. Finally, as the sun outside slowly slipped away and the room darkened, I crawled to my feet, brushed myself off, and wiped the last tear from my cheek. I had to stay strong. I had to be proactive. I had been trying to keep everybody back home out of this drama—except Laurette, of course, who was my rock—but I was way beyond the point of protecting people anymore. Besides, someone might have some information I did not have. I was going to reach out to everybody for some help, and the best person to start with was my psychic/house sitter, Isis. I scooped up the phone and punched in an overseas call to Los Angeles. It rang a few times before a harried, distracted voice picked up.
“Yes? What?”
“Isis, it’s me, Jarrod.”
“I knew you were going to call me today,” she said, a smugness in her voice. She loved boasting about her premonitions.
“Listen, Isis, this is very important. Have you heard from Charlie?”
“No. Why? Is something the matter?”
Of course I should have asked her if she knew I was going to call, why didn’t she already know Charlie was missing? But I needed her support desperately, and if I called into question her talents as a psychic, she might turn on me.
“He’s vanished. We had a fight.” I said.
“Oh, Jarrod, what did you do now?”
She always sided with Charlie. In fact, everyone in our circle always sided with Charlie. Perhaps it had something to do with me being a high-maintenance actor. The fact is, most times even I sided with Charlie once I thought about it.
“Nothing. It wasn’t a bad fight. But I stormed out and wandered around for a bit like I always do, and once I cooled off and came back to apologize, he was gone. And that was two days ago.”
There was a pause. Isis expected me to tell her Charlie had been missing for only a few hours. Not a couple of days. This was serious.
“Isis?”
“Just a minute,” she said in a grave tone. She was trying to get a visual lock on Charlie’s location. I didn’t say another word. The last thing I wanted was to interrupt her if she was coming up with something useful for me.
“I see soft, sandy beaches and a crystal blue ocean,” she said.
“But we’re in London,” I said.
“No. Charlie’s not in London. It looks like he’s on vacation somewhere.”
This was ludicrous. I couldn’t believe that Charlie had suddenly gotten the urge to go lie around on a beach somewhere and not bothered to tell me.
“Anything else?” I said.
Another long pause. “No, honey, I’m sorry, that’s all I see.” She was disappointed that she couldn’t give me more. “What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. There’s so much going on. The police think I had something to do with Claire Richards’s murder, and this Charlie thing, it’s just so weird. Why would he just take off like that and not even bother to leave me a note?”
I heard a bark in the background and I got a lump in my throat.
“Give Snickers a kiss for me,” I said.
“I will, sweetie,” Isis said. “She misses you both desperately.”
I wanted to ask Isis if she had seen more and just wasn’t telling me. Was she hiding something? Isis could sometimes be selective about her visions in order to protect my feelings.
“Bye,” I said, my voice cracking as I hung up the phone. I just wanted to be home. With Charlie and our dog, all curled up on the couch watching a DVD and eating Indian food. Scratch that. I was done with Indian food. I wanted no more reminders of Akshay Kapoor.
Next on my call list was Susie Chan, Charlie’s ex-wife and a rising medical examiner in Los Angeles. Susie was plugged into the LA crime scene and proved to be an invaluable resource from time to time whenever I got the urge to insert myself into a local murder case. Even though she was thousands of miles away, I was sure she was following the Claire Richards case intently, and she might have some additional insight. But more importantly, she was still on friendly terms with Charlie, and they chatted regularly. There was a slim chance he might have been in contact with her. I called her cell and found her at home. She had been up all night conducting an autopsy and was taking a few hours off to recharge her batteries. But she was in the middle of watching The View, a show she loathed because all of the women, especially that wedding-obsessed Star Jones, bugged the hell out of her. Still, she was drawn to it like a passing motorist glued to a car wreck. She was a bit distant until the show went to a commercial, and then she finally focused on our conversation. My hunch was right. She had been devouring all the details related to the Claire Richards case, especially all the tabloid fodder and insinuations of my involvement.
Susie and I had always had a strained relationship, but we did share a love of gossip and scandal, and she did know me enough to assume I wasn’t the vicious monster the papers seemed to be making me out to be.
“I knew it was all a bunch of crap the minute they tried to make you out to be bisexual and sleeping with Claire,” Susie said. “I mean, come on, we all know you’ve got everything but a rainbow flag tattooed to your ass.”
I asked if Susie had heard from Charlie, and she said no. She dropped by the house to check on him a few weeks ago, but that was the last time they had spoken. She quickly jumped back onto the topic that interested her more. Claire’s murder.
“What do the police think?”
“They think I did it.”
“No, really.”
“I’m serious.”
Susie laughed. She had seen me use a newspaper to usher a spider out the front door as opposed to just squashing it with the heel of my shoe.
“That’s preposterous,” she said.
“Susie, I’m really worried.”
“Oh, don’t be. They’ll wisen up soon enough. Tell you what. I had this fling with a studly British doctor at a medical convention in Paris last year. He’s well connected in London. Let me call him up and see if he’ll e-mail me a copy of Claire’s medical report. If there’s anything they’re missing, I’ll be sure to spot it,” she said.
“Thank you, Susie, but I meant I’m worried about Charlie.”
“Oh, just give him some time. He’s probably off sulking somewhere. He’ll be back.”
I hadn’t told her he’d been gone for two days and that Isis saw him on a beach somewhere. I just thanked her and hung up. These calls weren’t helping one bit. They were just making me even more distressed. But Susie had given me an idea. I hadn’t checked my e-mail in days.
I fired up the laptop that I had brought with me and waited for it to boot up. After quickly typing in my screen name and password, which was Snickers in a fitting tribute to my adoring pet (plus it was easy to remember), I logged on and downloaded my mail.
I scanned the long list and was disheartened to see it was mostly spam mail promising nude photos of Britney Spears and life-changing penis enlargements. I began deleting them and had almost cleaned out the entire box when my finger stopped just short of erasing an e-mail from a Hotmail account called Bollywood Bad Boy. Under the subject line was typed “From Charlie.” What was this? I took a deep breath and then opened up the file and read it.
Jarrod, this is very hard for me to say because I care about you and I don’t want to see you hurt, but I’ve fallen in love with Akshay. There’s no other way to say it except to come right out with it. I know this must be a shock to you. I certainly know it is to me. I don’t know how this happened but it did, and though I care for you, I can’t deny myself this chance at happiness. I hope you understand and I’m sorry if this causes you some pain. Love, Charlie.
I sat there in a state of shock, nauseous, my entire body shaking. I just kept replaying the imagined scene of Charlie lying next to Akshay on a beach somewhere, feeling guilty about ditching me without explanation, and Akshay graciously offering to let him send me a Dear John letter from his e-mail account. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
The phone jarred me out of my trance and I picked it up, hoping to hear Charlie’s deep, comforting voice chuckle and say “April Fool’s” even though it was June.
“Jarrod, I’m so sorry I haven’t returned your call until now, but Larry and I chartered a boat and went scuba diving for a couple of days and I left my cell phone behind at the hotel. Can you believe I got certified to go deep-sea diving? I get nervous when the water in my bathtub gets too close to those tiny chrome drainage holes.”
Laurette. Thank God. It was Laurette. I had waited so long for her to call me back, and I was frozen, not saying a word, too consumed by trauma and despair to even speak. She immediately picked up on it.
“Honey, what’s wrong? What happened?”
And I let loose with everything, blabbering on and on, filling her in on the most minute details. And as a dutiful best friend, she listened to every word, patiently interjecting only once at the point where I told her Charlie had sent me a breakup letter from Akshay’s e-mail address. “Bastard!”
When I was finished, she said the words I had been waiting to hear.
“Just hold on, sweetie. I’ll be there tomorrow.”
She was half a world away spending time with a man she cared deeply for but was willing to drop everything and rush to my side. I loved her so much. When we hung up, I knew she was already on the Orbitz travel Web site checking fares from Hawaii to the United Kingdom.
I hated ruining her long-overdue vacation. But my life had suddenly veered off into a surreal and unfathomable direction, and I needed moral support from the strongest, most loyal person I knew. Because deep down in my gut, I knew things were only going to get worse.