Scandal Sheet aka Hollywood Scandals

“Thanks.”

Cal pulled a chair to my desk and straddled it backwards, digging into his own sandwich. Something with lots of veggies on whole wheat. Probably lots healthier than my salami with extra mayo. Probably a lot less tasty, too.

“You finish your column?” Cal asked around a bite.

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Good. Now what?”

“Now,” I said, popping a pickle into my mouth, “we go see Pines.”

Chapter Ten

The Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles is the largest correctional facility in the world, housing over five thousand inmates at any given time. Located near the courthouse, its main inhabitants are those awaiting or appealing trial. A big, concrete building with a double layer of chain-link fencing surrounding the grounds, it was nothing special to look at.

Cal parked his truck in the visitor’s lot and cut the engine.

I looked up at the gray building. “Look, I really think I should go in alone this time,” I said.

Cal froze, his hand on the door handle. “No way.”

“It’s a prison. Nothing’s going to happen to me in there. I’ll be perfectly safe. Besides, I just think Pines might talk more readily to me.”

“And why is that?”

“Besides the fact that you look like The Rock and Hulk Hogan’s love child?”

He shot me a look.

“Because you suck at this whole lying thing. And if I’m going to get an exclusive, let alone information about Jake Mullins from this guy, I’m gonna need to bend the truth. A lot.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, chewing the inside of his cheek as he contemplated this. His gaze went up to the gray building. Then back to me. Then narrowed even further.

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“But be careful.”

I nodded. “Scout’s honor,” I promised, hopping out of the car and making my way inside. I felt Cal’s eyes on my back the entire way up to the door. To be honest, it was kind of reassuring.

If the exterior of the building was uninspired, the interior didn’t offer much more in the way of aesthetics. Dirty beige walls, dirty beige floors, gunmetal gray desk where I had to show my ID and be checked into the visitor’s system. Then a guy who looked like he could just as easily be on the locked-down side of the prison bars instructed me to empty my pockets and turn my purse inside out. After ascertaining that I didn’t have any files baked into cakes with me, and after making me remove my shoelaces (the ultimate weapon), he let me into the visiting room, which consisted of two rows of tiny little cubicles with telephones on each side, between a layer of bulletproof glass.

I sat down at the station the guard indicated on the end of the first row. The glass was smudged with something I did not even want to speculate about. Instead, I clasped my hands in front of me, trying hard not to touch anything.

I waited, listing to the muffled sounds of the other conversations in the room. A man telling his brother that Mom was not sending any more gum unless he took his GED course seriously. A woman telling a prisoner that if he didn’t start writing every weekend, she was gonna start seeing Joaquin, and there ain’t nothing he could do about it.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, a figure in an orange jumpsuit approached my window. Hunched over, shuffling, gray skin, pronounced wrinkles, three days past needing a good shave.

Pines.

He sat down slowly, then gave me a long look as if trying to decide if he should know me, before picking up the telephone extension on his side of the glass.

I did the same, listening to his ragged breath on the other end.

“Hiya,” I said, doing a little wave.

He stared at me just long enough to hammer home what a ridiculous greeting that was, then answered back, “Who the hell are you?”

I cleared my suddenly dry throat. “Uh, I’m…Daisy.”

“Daisy what?”

“Moses.”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“Daisy Moses was the granny’s name on The Beverly Hillbillies.”

I was impressed. He knew his classic TV.

“Okay, fine. I’m not Daisy.”

“Obviously.”

“But it’s not important who I am. It’s important what I can do for you.”

He narrowed his eyes. “And that would be?’

“Look, I…have a friend…who works for a major publication here in Los Angeles.”

“Great, a fucking reporter.” He pulled the phone away from his ear and moved to get up.

“Wait!” I shouted, banging on the glass.

“Don’t touch the glass!” the guard behind me boomed, prompting both the gum-less brother and Joaquin’s new lover to glance my way.

“Sorry,” I said, holding both hands up.

But, luckily, it had gotten Pines’s attention, too. He sat back down, putting the receiver to his ear again.

“What.” More of a threat than a question.

I swallowed that dry lump again. “Look, I can help you. At the moment, the public is ready to write you off. Let them hear your story.”

“I could give a shit what the public thinks,” he said. He was surprisingly spunky for a billionaire who had just spent the last week in jail.

“Fine. But the studio heads read the papers, too. You think you’re ever going to get a job in this town again? Let alone work with child actors?”

“I never touched no kids,” he argued.

I wagged a finger at him. “Don’t be naive,” I shot back. “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It matters what people think you’ve done. Guilty until proven innocent. And,” I added, “it’s my job to tell people what to think.”

He paused, seeming to digest this for a moment. “What paper you work for?”

“The Informer.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, recognition slowly setting in. “I know you,” he said, his jaw clenching. “You’re that damned gossip columnist.”

“Uh…”

“I’ll tell you what you can do for me, Tina Bender. Go fuck yourself.” He slammed the receiver into the set.

“No!” I banged on the window again.

“Don’t touch the glass!” The guard’s hand hovered over his firearm.

I threw both hands up in surrender. “Sorry!”

But I was glad to see Pines hadn’t walked away. He stood, his arms crossed over his chest, glaring.

I gestured to the telephone and mouthed the word, “please.”

I attributed it to the fact that waiting back at his cell were hours worth of nothing that he reached for the receiver again.