Bobbie was a gossip columnist, the queen of prime-time celebrity news, and the ex-wife of some Wall Streeter back east. She was sitting out on her deck, tall drink in her hand, feet up on the railing. She wore an open shirt over her hot-pink bikini, a white visor in her blond curls, dark glasses, and a Bluetooth cuddling her left ear.
She was talking and watching the waves.
I called to her and she took down her feet, sat upright.
“Bobbie-can I come up? I need to speak to you.”
“I’ll come down,” she said. “Call ya later,” she told whoever she was talking to. “I gotta go.”
She set her drink on the deck and came down the short flight of wooden steps, holding on tight to the handrail.
I thought about my history with Bobbie. It had happened after my first breakup with Justine, way before Colleen. I thought it had ended okay-no-fault incompatibility. But when I found the envelope at my back door without a note, my key inside, it was a crystal-clear “Screw you.”
Bobbie was combustible, and I didn’t like that about her. I’m sure there were a few things she didn’t like about me. But we’d been neighborly since our split.
Now, as she crossed the beach and came toward me, seabirds flew up from the sand. And I saw from her expression that we weren’t friends.
She put her hands on her hips and said, “If you want to know if I told the police I saw you last night, the answer is yeah, Jack, I damn well did.”
CHAPTER 32
“I wasn’t on the beach last night,” I told Bobbie Newton. She had taken off her glasses, and I was looking into her little bloodshot eyes. She drank early and often. Another thing I hadn’t liked about Bobbie.
“I wasn’t hallucinating,” she said. “You were on your phone. I heard it ring. I ran by and called out to you, ‘Hey, Jack.’ You pointed to your phone, like, ‘I’m talking.’ And then you waved. That signature wave of yours.”
“What? You’re saying I have some kind of…wave?”
“Like this.”
She lifted her right arm, cocked her hand back, fingers spread like she was holding a football.
I used to play college ball. Tommy didn’t.
“Nobody ever told me I have a unique wave.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling you. I’ve seen you wave, what? A hundred thousand times?”
“It was past six o’clock, Bobbie. That’s what you told the police.”
“So?”
“The sun was going down. Maybe you thought it was me because you expected to see me. It wasn’t me, Bobbie.”
“Tell it to the judge,” she said.
Bobbie raised her hand above her head, cocked it in a football hold, and trotted up the beach.
I stared after her. What the hell was she talking about?
I hadn’t been on the beach the night I found Colleen’s body in my bed. But Bobbie was unshakable. And as a gossip reporter, she was well-connected. She had to be the one who’d set the Internet wildfire naming me as the number one suspect in Colleen’s murder.
I hiked back up the beach, twenty yards behind Bobbie, wondering if she’d actually seen Tommy, thinking he was me. Or had she seen no one?
Had she made this story up to show me payback is a bitch?
I walked from the beach to my driveway and got into my car. I took off, south on PCH toward Santa Monica. I wanted to see Colleen’s closest friend. Through her, he’d become a friend of mine. I had to be with someone who knew her, felt what I felt, who would understand my grief.
My mind churned, and the next time I checked, I was on the 10 going east, not knowing if I was driving the Lambo or it was driving me.
But I knew exactly where to find Mike Donahue. I pictured him as I had last seen him, standing behind the bar.
CHAPTER 33
Mike Donahue’s tavern was an Irish pub with a restaurant that could have been transported from Galway or Cork and simply planted in Los Feliz.
When Colleen first came to Los Angeles, she was determined to get her citizenship. In the hours between quitting time at Private and going home to study, she stopped at Donahue’s. It was where everyone knew your name, and nearly everyone in front of the bar and behind it had relatives in Ireland.
Mike Donahue came from a town only a few country miles from where Colleen grew up. He had gone to school with Colleen’s father, and when they met, Donahue became an uncle to her in the City of Angels.
I was outside Donahue’s Tavern, the red-painted, gold-lettered sign hanging above the doorway, patrons spilling out to the curb.
Inside, the place was throbbing with loud music and the shouts of customers trying to be heard. The horseshoe bar was packed three deep all the way around. There was a raucous dart game going on in the back.
Mike was at the taps, serving up the suds. He was a heavyset man with a thick beard and deep lines around his eyes and across his forehead, grooves that came from smoke and sun and laughter.
But when he lifted his eyes and recognized me in the doorway, I saw terrible sorrow there.
He threw a cloth down on the bar and came out from behind it. I lost sight of him as he worked his way through the crowd, then he broke through a knot of drinkers and approached me.
I never saw the punch coming.
I was taken down by a fist like a two-by-four. The pain in my jaw seemed to shoot to all points: my nose, neck, shoulder, out to my fingertips. When I opened my eyes I was staring up into a circle of angry faces. Mike’s was one of them.
I wasn’t welcome here.
I’d gotten it all wrong. And so had Donahue.
I was enraged-with everything and everybody. I wanted to strike, fast and hard. I could take Donahue. I thought I could take the three bruisers standing around him too. And if I couldn’t, it might even feel good to take a beating.
Turn the emotional pain into the physical kind.
I struggled to my feet, and Donahue put his hand on my chest and pushed me into the wall. He said, “You shouldn’t have come here, Jack. I’m mad enough to do bloody murder in front of God and witnesses.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. “Mike. I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”
“Is that your story, then?”
“Story? I was crazy about Colleen. Why would I want to kill her?”
“Maybe she was cramping your style, Jack.”
“Listen to me.”
I felt desperate for him to believe me. I grabbed both his biceps and shook him, shouted into his face. “ I didn’t do it. But I promise, I will find out who killed Colleen. And I will hurt him.”
CHAPTER 34
