She pulls off her headphones and heads across the courtyard, knocking on the door for apartment 2A. It belongs to an old Polish woman called Marika who Hallie sometimes helps with her weekly grocery shop at Ralphs. She suffersfrom arthritis and is an insomniac so, even though it’s after midnight, she’ll be awake.
Hallie tries to act normally when Marika answers, as if there’s nothing wrong.As if I didn’t just let a man choke to death. As if I didn’t just steal the biggest story of the year from him.She asks Marika if she can borrow her station wagon for a couple of hours. Hallie lies again, pretending a friend has been rushed to the ER.
Inside ten seconds, Marika is handing her the keys.
On the way, Hallie stops at a payphone and makes an anonymous call to the cops, telling them she saw an officer called Gilloway attacking and killing someone in an apartment in Echo Park. She gives them the address for Sanchez and hangs up.
It’s not enough, she knows that.
Because nothing will ever be enough now.
She tries not to linger on that last part—even as the guilt burns in her like a fever—and she heads west on the 10 and north on the 405. Traffic is light because it’s late and, when she turns off Sunset and starts winding her way up and into the narrower arteries of Bel-Air, she barely passes any cars at all.
Porter Sloan’s mansion is in a dead-end street with a wide turning circle at its apex. She leaves the car a quarter-mile away and walks the rest.
The night is cooler now.
She’s not playing her Walkman anymore, because she needs to be able to hear if anyone is close by, but in her head she’s replaying the songs on her mixtape.
Anything not to have Jordan Sanchez in there.
On the way up she passes gates, the gates hiding driveways, the driveways hiding houses, but Sloan’s place is the biggest of them all.
There’s a keypad at the front gate.
She removes the single sheet of paper she folded up at her apartment. It’s the code for the gate. Hallie has no idea how the hell Sanchez got hold of it. All she knows is—as the gates clunk open—it works. She slips through the gap and hurries up the driveway. It curves around, up to the front of a sprawling property finished in brick and render.
She keeps to the shadows and heads to the right of the house.
There’s a light on there.
As she approaches the window where the light’s coming from, she slows. She can see a silhouette being cast across the path in front of her, and she can hear a low, repetitive noise. It takes her a second to place it.
It’s someone coughing, over and over again.
She swings her backpack around to the front, still singing songs in her head, still trying to suppress the images and sounds of Sanchez’s apartment with lyrics, and choruses, and outros. She lifts her camera out of her bag, checks it’s ready to go, and then looks to the window again. From her angle now, she can see through it, to a lamp on a nightstand. It’s a bedroom on the second floor.
Porter Sloan is on the edge of the bed.
He’s facing the window, although his head is slightly bowed, and he’s dressed in a gown, pajama pants, and slippers. His grey hair has thinned and looks like gossamer in the light from the lamp next to him. Onscreen he’s always been tall and broad, with a thick sweep of perfectly styled hair. Here, he’s frail and broken, small, diminished, his skin sallow, his bones showing through along his collar. He has one hand covering his mouth, a guttural, phlegmy cough carrying through the glass and out to where Hallie is. The other hand is gripping the metal stand of an IV drip.
After he’s done coughing, he starts to slump, a fragile balloon deflating at the edge of the biggest bed Hallie has ever seen. His top half slowly starts to tip forward, his body bending at the waist, the pain of the movement—ofeverything—registering in his face. He doesn’t even have the strength to hold himself up anymore. And then another torrent of coughing rips through him, and he straightens, and he grimaces, and as he opens his mouth, Hallie sees the white spots on his tongue and the deep red lesions in a crescent around his mouth and chin.
Holy shit, it’s true.
He really does have it.
For a long time, she just watches him—the biggest Hollywood star of the twentieth century, the four-marriage playboy who the press said no lady could tame—as he’s methodically hewn by a disease the world doesn’t understand. It’s almost mesmeric, like seeing something supernatural, something impossible.
And that’s when it hits her.
Even if she takes these pictures, she’s not going to get the byline she dreamed of. She can’t. She’s trespassed on private property. She’s stolen the prep work that brought her to this moment from a man she left to die. She tipped off the cops about Gilloway, and whether he gets arrested or he gets off, he’s going to come looking for answers. If she takes these pictures, no one can know the truth about how she ended up here, or who was behind the camera—it’s too dangerous for her. And that means this story will become the antithesis of everything she’s ever wanted.
This story will be anonymous.
There will be no recognition, no moment of redemption.
But at least the money I make can give me some breathing room, she says to herself. And if I’ve got breathingroom, I can give this a real shot. I can research the kind of pieces that actually matter. I can get my bylines. I can be the best version of myself.
