I had already vowed that if we got off the mountain, I was going to learn how to do everything possible on the BlackBerry. I turned on the TV instead.
It must have been a slow night in Palm Springs; our rescue made the news, though they used only stock footage and never showed us. They interviewed a ranger who repeated what Adele had said about people getting lost up there about once a month and getting in trouble because they didn’t understand how much colder it was up there. I shuddered when he talked about the bones picked clean they’d found in the past.
I had just started on my cherry cobbler a la mode when there was a knock at the door.
“Mason,” I said in surprise when I opened it. His face went from tense and worried to a grin in a split second, and he hugged me tight. Adele called out a greeting from inside.
“I started driving as soon as I got in touch with search and rescue,” he said. He’d kept calling me and had gotten voice mail. “I remembered the tickets included a room. I was hoping you were here.” He hugged me again, saying how relieved he was to find us.
“What happened with your BlackBerry now?” he said.
“Dead and nothing to charge it with.” I invited him in.
“I’m getting you a bunch of cords. You can keep them everywhere,” he said as I shut the door.
I shared my dessert with him as I told him the whole story down to how D. J. had turned the tables on us and made it look like we’d lost him, along with how he’d made the media card disappear. “I’m sure whatever is on it implicates D. J., not that it matters anymore.”
“Maybe not, Pink,” Adele said from across the room. She stood up and did a little cocky strut. “Who’s the detective now? Maybe I’ll change my name to Adele Poirot.”
CHAPTER 37
ADELE AND I SAT DOWN IN THE FIRST ROW WITH Dinah. It felt like deja vu, at least sort of. It had been barely a month ago when we’d sat in almost the same seats when all of this began. This time CeeCee was in the audience, along with Nell. Rhoda, Elise, Eduardo and Sheila were in the row behind. The booing started and Barbara Olive Overton came out and greeted the audience.
In the week since the golf tournament, I’d had to pull every string and get help from Mason, Detective Heather and even my talent-agent son, Peter, to make this happen. Adele had talked me into wearing the black Chanel-style suit jacket she’d embellished. I had to admit it: The red trim she’d crocheted on the sleeves and down the front had added some pizzazz, and it looked much better paired with the black jeans I was wearing than the skirt it came with. Over the top as usual, Adele was taking way too much pride in my wearing it, and along with pointing out her work to everyone, was acting like a wardrobe mistress. More than once, she’d adjusted the jacket so it hung just right, even pushing the tissue I’d stuck in the pocket out of sight.
“Our guest today is D. J. Florian, author of
Adele nudged me and made a harrumph sound. I knew she was itching to pull out a hook, but for once, Adele behaved.
A video piece began to play on a large screen behind Barbara and D. J. The first scene showed D. J. walking down Cahuenga Boulevard and talking to the camera. He pointed out the Hollywood Hills dotted with houses and the TV- and movie-production-related businesses he was passing and explained his frustration at working as a clerk in an electronic store instead of being part of the entertainment business. He’d always expected better things for himself. So to escape his disappointment, he’d gotten into drugs. Just recreational, at first, with the guys he worked with. Then he had moved over to heroin and everything changed.
The background scene changed to night. “And then I began to lose pieces of my life,” he said. “My friends, my apartment and my job all got lost as the sole focus in my life became getting that next fix.” The scene faded into a dark downtown street. The stores were closed and mostly covered by pull-down metal doors. The only light came from a small store with a tiny bar-covered window. “I started living on the street. Thanks to a kind guy at a convenience store who let me use his laptop, I was able to keep on with my blog.”
Here the scene changed again to a freeway underpass and a motley encampment. D. J. pointed to the upslope under the concrete bridge and said that was where he’d kept his sleeping bag and described in graphic detail about the rain, rodents and outbursts from the other denizens. The picture cut to a downtown street near a sports arena. A blind musician with no shoes was playing a bluesy piece on a guitar. Next to him, a guitar case sat open with some money in it. D. J. stood back from the scene as some well-dressed people passed by and dropped some money in the case. D. J.’s voice faltered. “This was where I hit bottom. It was New Year ’s Eve of 2008 and just a few minutes before the clock was going to strike midnight. Jerome had collected a nice stash from the people coming from a concert. As I was bending over to steal it, I knew I had hit bottom, but I didn’t care. And then it was as if a hand reached out and tapped me on the shoulder. I heard a voice in my head tell me not to give up, that there was hope. From that moment on, my life started to change.”
Suddenly the picture cut to a close-up of the still photo of Robyn and Ty wearing silver top hats that said “Happy 2009.” They were hugging and both pointing to her watch. It said five minutes to midnight. The view moved back so that the whole picture came into view. There were some people in the background, and one of them came into focus. He was wearing a tuxedo with the tie pulled loose and holding a champagne glass as he tipped his party hat. It was D. J. Florian.
The picture froze on the back screen and the lights came on in the studio. Barbara looked at D. J. and glanced down at the paper in her hand. “What do you have to say about that?”
A hush of anticipation went through the audience. D. J. was still looking at the back screen. I imagined he was in shock. He was so sure he’d gotten rid of the media card with this photograph. Adele nudged me and gave me a knowing smile. She was taking all the credit, though it had really been my mistake. I’d grabbed the doll and the media card in her hand at the golf tournament without looking at them. In all the confusion, I’d taken the media card with Adele’s own photos. At the time, Robyn’s card from the doll was still in Adele’s camera.
The media card had only appeared empty because Adele’s camera couldn’t read the program it was in. When we’d put it into a computer with the proper program, we’d been able to see everything Robyn had left.
When D. J. turned back toward the audience, he appeared calm. “Somebody faked the picture,” he said. He said it must have been taken the year before. He even walked back to the screen and pointed at the nine in the year and claimed it had been altered from an eight. He started to go off on people who might want to derail his career, but Barbara interrupted.
From the audience, I could see the beads of perspiration on her nose. The talk show host was used to nonconfrontational interviews. This was a first for her, and she was nervous.
The photo on the screen changed to a bunch of photos of the party, with D. J. similarly dressed in the background. “Are you going to try to claim that all of these photographs were altered?” Barbara was finding her sea legs at being a push-the-envelope interviewer. “So, instead of wandering the streets of skid row that New Year’s Eve, you were actually at a party in a tuxedo, weren’t you?” She waited for him to answer, but he said nothing.
Barbara picked up a sheet of paper and explained to the audience who Robyn was and what had happened to her. She said that in addition to the photos, Robyn had left notes for a script she’d planned to add as a voice-over to the photographs. “I’d like to read it in her place,” the talk show host said. D. J. swallowed so loud, I was pretty sure the people in the last row heard it.
“‘I asked D. J. to speak to my brother, Miles, who has been valiantly fighting an addiction to drugs and winning for the past year. I thought it would encourage Miles to see how D. J. had turned his life around. But Miles seemed uneasy after he met D. J. My brother said addicts had antennas that pointed up a fake, and that was how
