Swingin' in the Rain (2 page)

  “I’m positive. I asked Jakes if it was and he said no.” George yelled, running after me and handing me my cell phone. Jennifer was next to join us, giving me the now fairly clean and dry Jimmy Choo shoes.

  “Oh good, you cleaned up your mascara. I was going to do that on set,” Patti said as she caught up to us.

  We were all drenched as we found our way back to the bottom of the hill. Wes was waiting for me, clearly a glutton for punishment. I took off my boots and put on my shoes, adjusted myself as Sandy hollered,

  “Let’s go, everyone. The sun is coming up. This is it! We have one shot at this! Start the rain! Alex, get ready to climb.  And hit your mark!”

  It had already been raining but now it was a monsoon. I could barely see in front of myself when I heard Herbie yell out, “Alex. Your cell phone!” Stupid me. I still had my phone in my hand.

  “Oh Geez!” I quickly glanced down and saw a text from Jakes. It said: “Call me URGENT Randy’s dead.” I stopped in my tracks. Randy? My creepy ex-husband and father to my child, dead? Herbie grabbed the phone from me and jumped out of the way.

   “Action!”

CHAPTER THREE

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Jakes asked.

  The answer was no, I wasn’t. Granted, my ex, Randy, had not been my favorite person. Primarily because he cleaned out our bank accounts and left the country then came back without having to spend a single day in jail. On top of that he recently had the nerve to petition for joint custody of our daughter. But that didn’t mean I wanted to see him dead. Okay, I
had
wished him dead. Many times. Maybe I was feeling more than a little guilty that my wish had come true.

  We were standing in a hallway just outside the autopsy room. The smell of chemicals seemed to ooze from the walls. I guess that was better than the smell of death. I was still freezing from being out all night in the rain but that was nothing compared to the cold that assaulted me when Jakes pushed the door open. A body was lying on a metal table with a white sheet covering it. I gasped.

  “I’m sorry, Alex,” Jakes said, “you’re the closest thing to a relative we have. We need somebody to positively i.d. him—“

  “I know, I know,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. “It’s okay. I can do this.” I grabbed his arm and held tightly as we walked inside.

  The room was large and spacious, but not dimly lit and moody like in the CSI shows. It was blindingly bright and very sterile. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the table just yet so I glanced around the room instead. It was fascinating. Albeit morbidly so. Pretty much empty, except for the body, a large scale hung from the ceiling directly over the table. For organs, I assumed. Ugh. I almost threw up in my mouth at the thought of that one. There were jars and vials on shelves. Cupboards with glass doors held various files and chemicals. I saw another smaller office to the right side. The faint glow of a television could be seen from under the closed door. I thought there was something vaguely familiar about the voice I heard coming from in there. Just when I didn’t think it could get any more surreal a very large man in a white coat came bursting out of the office.

  “Why hello, there. Ms. Peterson! I heard it was you coming in. So happy to meet you.” His voice was booming as if he was doing Shakespeare. Shakespeare in the morgue. He grabbed my hand and pumped it, determined to cause me bodily harm. “I’m Dr. Willis. Or rather, Richard.”

  With the door left open I could see what was playing on the plasma screen behind him. It was me. Yikes.

  “I was just watching you, or rather, Felicia on my TIVO. She’s really losing it, isn’t she? Ha ha.” He took his glasses out of his lab coat pocket and put them on. Stepping back he gave me a once over. “You look much taller on T.V.” He got a little closer to me. He smelled like peppermint. Sucking on the end of his glasses he asked, “Tell me, as an actor, do you find it more rewarding to play the heroine or the villain? I imagine each has its own rewards.”

  I looked to Jakes and gave him a “what the . . .” look.

  “Ms. Peterson has had a very long night. Maybe we could get on with the i.d.?”

  Dr. Willis pursed his lips for a moment, squinted his eyes and looked at me. He abruptly turned to the table with the body on it and picked up a clipboard, suddenly all business.

  “Could you please come over to the table, Ms. Peterson? What, or rather, who do we have here? I understand this poor soul could be your ex-husband? A Mr. Randall Moore?”

  I made my way over next to the table. Jakes stood behind me, as if preparing to hold me up.

  “Ready?” Jakes asked as he held my hand tightly. “This could be rough.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.” How bad could it be, right? I had seen dead people before, after all.

  Dr. Willis pulled the sheet down to mid-chest and my stomach dropped. Randy’s face was slightly distorted but strangely, even in death, He was still handsome. I felt a sudden rush of affection for him. There he was, my daughter’s father. I had loved him once.

  I couldn’t stop looking at him. I heard the doctor clear his throat. “Sorry, that is, umm, that’s Randy,” I said.

  “Okay,” Jakes said to Dr Willis, but didn’t even wait for him to cover Randy again. He hustled me out of there and onto a chair in the hall. Dr. Willis followed.

  “Ms. Peterson, are you okay? Would you like some water?”

  “I’m fine, thank you, Doctor,” I managed to say.

  “Well, it was a pleasure to meet you.” He looked at me for a moment longer. Oh God, was he actually going to ask for an autograph? He must have thought better of it because he turned and quickly went back into the room, closing the door behind him.

  “
Would
you like some water?” Jakes asked wrapping me in his arms and gently kissing me on the forehead.

  “What I want is a good stiff drink.”

  “Really?” He glanced at his watch. “It’s only ten in the morning.”

  “Really.”

  He obliged.

CHAPTER FOUR

  Jakes took me to a nearby bar. He rarely took me to cop hangouts, but it was obvious as we walked to a back booth that this was a favorite. Even at 10 in the A.M. police types were everywhere.

  We took off our raincoats and hung them up. I knew I looked like a drowned rat, especially after the night’s shooting, but it didn’t matter much at the moment. A waitress came over and I ordered a Maker’s Mark, neat with a chaser of French fries. Jakes just ordered coffee.

  I put my head in my hands, my elbows on the table. I couldn’t bring myself to ask how Randy had died. So I asked about our daughter, instead.

  “What am I going to tell Sarah?”

  Jakes had volunteered to watch Sarah for me when I found out I had to pull an all nighter for the show. Even though he was supposed to be off duty, we knew that that could change in an instant. Thankfully, I alerted my neighbor, Tonja, that we might need her in case of an emergency. My mom lives with us and is my “nanny” but she was visiting our relatives back home in the Midwest.

  “Sometimes it takes a village. Seriously. Thank God for Tonja,” I said.

  Jakes picked up a napkin and wiped some mud from the side of my face. “I called her earlier. She said she got Sarah off to school.”

  I kissed him gently on the lips. It felt so good to be close to a warm, and living, being. “Thank God for you.”

  “Yeah. What a night.”

  “You haven’t heard the least of it!”

  The waitress brought our drinks and a basket of fries. I started in on my breakfast of champions and began to tell about the night from hell. The freezing rain and anal retentive director. How we had managed to get the last scene, even after the ”Randy’s dead” text, and thankfully, before the sun came up.

  Jakes looked at me and nodded. He knew I had been avoiding the question.

   “Okay,” I said, now that I had the drink in my hand and had taken a good, healthy swallow, “what happened?”

  “All we know,” Jakes said, “is that he was found at the bottom of a mud slide.”

  “A mud slide. How random is that?” I shook my head. I couldn’t believe I was actually having this conversation. “Was he already dead?”

  “Very.”

  “Mud slide where?”

  “At the house he was renting in The Palisades. It was situated at the top of a hill. We’re just assuming at this point, that he’d been washed down the hill.”

  “Did the house slide down with Randy in it?” It sounded very strange, I know, but this happened many more times in rain ravaged Southern California than you would imagine.

  “No. Just him. We don’t know for sure what killed him, though,” Jakes said. “It could have been the fall, he could have suffocated in the mud. There’s still going to have to be an autopsy.”

  I took another sip, felt it burn its way down my throat and popped a handful of greasy fries in my mouth. The thought of telling Sarah that her daddy was dead was upsetting me more than Randy actually being dead. I hate to sound crass but, realistically speaking, him being gone solved a lot of problems for me.

  “When will the autopsy results be in?” I asked.

  “Probably tomorrow morning.”

  “Do you have any idea when this happened?” I asked. “How long he was lying there?”

  “I went to the scene,” he said. “It must have happened in the middle of last night, around one or two. The neighbor below him heard the slide as it was happening and called nine-one-one. Fire trucks and a couple of squad cars responded.  One of the cops saw a leg sticking out of the mud. Pulled the poor guy out. Luckily, he hadn’t fallen all the way to PCH. Not that it would have mattered. Dead is dead. That’s when they called me.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why did they call you? You’re a homicide detective. This wasn’t a homicide—was it?”

  “The cop who pulled Randy out of the mud was the same cop I used a couple of years ago to follow him. Remember we thought he was stalking you?” I nodded. “He kept a picture of Randy on hand for months. When he turned him over and saw his face last night he immediately recognized him. He called me right away.”

  I tossed a few more fries in my mouth and rubbed my hands together. “I’m still so cold. I can’t get my hands warm.”

  He took both my hands in his. They were warm and comforting. We sat like that for quite a while.

CHAPTER FIVE

  Jakes wanted to follow me home in his car.

  “You’re upset, and you’ve had a drink,” was his reasoning.

  “I really only had two sips. Whiskey in the morning doesn’t do it for me. At least we know I’m not an alcoholic, right?” I was trying to be glib, but Jakes saw right through me. “I’ll be okay. I just really want to get out of these wet clothes, and have a talk with Sarah.”

  “Are you sure you shouldn’t wait until you have more facts?”

  “The only fact that Sarah will be concerned with,” I started tearing up, “is that she’s never going to see her daddy again. She just spent last Saturday with him, and she came home so happy.”

  How could I have done that to her? Randy had convinced me it was the best thing, to let her get to know her father again. Even after everything he had done to us, I knew he loved his little girl and I wanted that for her. I had relented and was okay with her seeing him on occasion. But not joint custody. Even now I became incensed at the thought of him filing and a judge even considering it. Now I was kicking myself for ever allowing him even one day with her.

  How was I going tell her she’d lost her father? Again?

  Jakes and I walked to my car, sharing an umbrella and gingerly avoiding puddles.

  “You be careful on the roads, okay? There’s a lot of sigalerts out there.” He opened the door for me and I got in. The rain was starting to really come down now and I felt like I had to shout to be heard.

  “I will. You, too. What time will you be over?”

  “I’ll call you. Drive slowly!” He kissed me, closed the umbrella and tossed it in the back of the car and ran off in the direction of his car.

  I looked out the window at the sheets of relentless rain. I had gotten my way and began to drive home without an escort. Probably not the smartest move considering the condition of the freeway. Traffic was stop and go as people tried to avoid flooded patches all the way down the 10. Cars were skidding out. Stalled cars littered the side of the freeway. It was like being in a video game.

  It took over two hours to drive through that mess. It usually takes 30 minutes. I felt like I’d been through a war and was so relieved to get home. I ran into my 1920’s Craftsman style house, stripping off my wet and dirty clothes. In the laundry room, looking out the back window, I could see the canal had risen and was starting to flood over our dock. Oh great. Even the ducks, usually floating serenely by, had paddled for cover. This was just what I needed. Noah’s ark.

  The weather fit my mood and I sat down on my sofa and cried. Not because I would miss Randy. He was a pain in the ass. But we had been married, we loved each other at one time, and  most importantly, he was Sarah’s father.

  I still had two hours before I had to get Sarah so I took a much needed hot shower. I must have washed my face ten times so my extraordinarily astute seven year old daughter wouldn’t ask me what I had been crying about. I threw on some sweats and was heading out the door when the phone rang. It was my neighbor, Tonja.