Not Wanted in Hollywood (16 page)

“She called me today looking for you. I told
her you were working a case and she said she wanted to meet me, so
I went to meet her.”

“
Why does she
hate you?” Griffin asked.

This was the part I was not looking forward
to. I sat down on the couch and waited for him to sit next to
me.

“Before I start telling you this, I just want
you to know that I did it with the best of intentions.”

Griffin’s eyes closed briefly. “What did you
do?”

“After the lunch yesterday I was worried
about the reason why she wanted to come back into your life all of
a sudden. I asked Monique to get some information because she knows
everything.”

Griffin rolled his eyes at my blatant hero
worship of all things Monique.

“
Last night
Monique called me to tell me that your grandfather is sick. Seems
there may be some inheritance issues for your mother, so today I
accused her of using you to get back into her father’s good graces.
She didn’t take it too well. She didn’t deny it but she wasn’t too
happy with me. I’m so sorry if you wanted a relationship with her
and I did something that may harm that. I just hated the thought of
her hurting you.” I looked down at my hands twisting in my
lap.

Griffin put a finger under my chin and tilted
my head up until I was looking him in the eyes.

“
Which part
of that did you think I didn’t know?” he asked gently.

I shrugged.

“As soon as Angela Copeland said she wanted
to see me I knew there had to be another angle. The woman has shown
zero interest in me my entire life and she wants me now. I found
out all about her father and her life. I knew what she wanted from
me before I even saw her face the first time.”

I should have known. In my heedless attempt
to protect him I should have remembered that Griffin was a damn
fine cop. There was no way he would go into that situation without
having all the facts.

“
I’m sorry,”
I said. “You just seem to have this problem with mothers. I thought
it was because of your mom and what she did.”

“What are you talking about?” Griffin asked,
a little defensively.

“
Your problem
with moms,” I said. “You don’t seem to be able to cope with my mom
at all. She scared you off for that couple of months when I got
shot on the Eleanor Channing job.” We had never discussed it but it
still bothered me. It had been swept under the carpet in the midst
of all our other dramas.

“
I don’t have
problems with mothers in general,” Griffin said
patiently.

Really, he could have fooled me.

“I have a problem with your mother.”

That wasn’t good. Strangely enough I had
never considered that possibility. I thought everybody adored my
mother.

“
Why would
you have problems with my mother? She’s delightful, everyone knows
that,” I said.

“
She doesn’t
like me,” said Griffin

That was true. She wasn’t overly fond of
Griffin. Unfortunately her first meeting with him had come after
finding out he had blackmailed me into helping him with a murder
investigation by threatening to deport me home to Australia. There
was a possibility those actions may have led to me being shot. All
of those facts contributed to the less than warm feelings my mother
had for Griffin.

“
So you don’t
have a problem with mothers,” I said slowly.

Griffin
shrugged. “No, I just don’t feel particularly comfortable around
your mom. After you got shot I did try to contact you, but your mom
blocked me every time. I knew she blamed me for your being shot and
I could tell how close the two of you are. I wanted to see you and
I figured if I kept away until she left then I would have a better
chance with you.” He grimaced tightly. “I didn’t expect the woman
to stay for two months.”

“Is that why you won’t speak to Mom now?” I
asked curiously.

Griffin
looked a bit sheepish. “Your mom is scary, and there’s that whole
not liking me thing.”

“
I wouldn’t
say she doesn’t like you,” I protested.

Griffin
raised an eyebrow.
Okay
, maybe she
wasn’t
his biggest fan
. But I’m sure,
given time, a lot of time, she would warm to
him
. Or at least stop glaring at him when he accidentally
walked behind me during one of our Skype sessions, as if she wished
she had a voodoo doll and a very big pin.

“So you’re telling me you feel absolutely
nothing about your mother or the fact that she left you when you
were a baby or that she is only back in your life because she wants
to use you to cement her economic future.”

Griffin shook
his head but I’d seen the small flash of pain in his eyes. He may
have been saying the words but there was still a little boy inside
him who resented the fact that his mother left him. Much as Griffin
maintained that his wariness around my mother was based solely on
her
personality
, I could see there was a
bit more to it. Unless he was willing to face that fact though, I
wasn’t going to push him. Instead I wrapped my arms around his
waist and gave him a hug.

“
I’m sorry I
made your mother mad,” I said.

He wrapped
his arms around my shoulders and kissed me on the head. “I’m sorry
your mother doesn’t like me.”

This was
nice. Not the problems we both seemed to have with each other’s
mothers, but the fact we seemed to be getting past our issues of
the last few days.

“
I need you
to come down to the station,” Griffin said.

Moment over. Looked like we were back to
work.

I tilted my head back to look up at him.
“Why?”

“Ramos picked up Jayden Johnson. We need you
to have a look at him.”

“
I didn’t see
anything,” I protested. “My contribution to the day’s events was
basically opening a door, seeing Denise, seeing the gunman and then
lights out.”

Griffin grimaced and his eyes flew back to
the bruising on my cheek.

“Still, you were the one that was
assaulted.”

I could tell
from the way his
jaw tightened as he said
those words that he was really not happy with that part of the
situation.

“
I’ll follow
you in my car.” I resigned myself to another day at the police
station.

Standing in
the police station, the guy who hit me looked a lot less
threatening without the gun and the balaclava.

“Is there anything about him that you find
familiar?” asked Ramos.

I shrugged. “I didn’t see any part of him
except the gun and his eyes and even then it was only for a split
second. The guy reacted fast when I opened the door and I didn’t
react at all.”

“
Happens,”
said Ramos.

I was pretty
sure it didn’t happen to her. To hear Griffin tell it, Ramos was a
one woman demolition team. On the plus side it made me feel more
comfortable about his job knowing he had Ramos watching his back.
On the other hand it brought home all my inadequacies whenever I
spoke to her.

“I only saw his eyes for a split second. He
looked shocked.”

“
That’s
okay,” Ramos said, sounding disinterested.

“Why am I actually here?” I asked. “I’m no
good as a witness.”

“
You’re right
there,” said Ramos. “Anyway we’ve got some of your DNA on the gun
from where it hit you.”

Lovely. That still didn’t answer my question.
Then I saw Brandi and Susan being brought in. I smiled at them as
they walked past.

“
I don’t
believe you did that,” I hissed at Ramos.

“What?” she said.

“The only reason I’m standing here is so that
Brandi would see me before making a statement and her sense of
guilt over my injury might encourage her to give you all the
information.”

Ramos looked at me speculatively. “You know,
you really are smarter than you look.”

“
I’m
leaving,” I said.

“
I’ll let
Griffin know,” said Ramos.

“Don’t bother. Next time you people want to
play your cop mind games, at least do me the courtesy of letting me
know what is going on.”

As I got in
my car Griffin came jogging up. “Heard you were mad,” he
said.

I sighed. “I’m not mad, it just would have
been good if you’d told me the real reason you wanted me here.”

“
I was really
hoping you might be able to identify the guy, but Brandi was kind
of on the fence about what he’d done, especially when we started to
question her about the possibility that her boyfriend may have
killed Hammy Pollard. We figured seeing you and the damage he’d
done to you, might encourage her not to back down.”

“
Okay,” I
said.

Griffin
looked perplexed. “What does that mean? Does it mean okay you
understand what we did, or does it mean okay I never want to see
you again?”

I shrugged. “It means okay. I understand you
have a job to do and it isn’t like it’s the first time I’ve got
caught in the middle of one of your cases.

Griffin cupped the side of my face. “I’m not
using you. He hurt you and I just want to make sure he never gets a
chance to do that again. I need to be able to put him away for as
long a time as possible. Can you understand that?”

A part of me
melted. At his soul Griffin was a protector. The ugly bruise on my
cheek was probably hurting him as much as it did me. “I really am
okay,” I said. “I think I’ll just go home, do some work and rest
for a bit.”

Griffin lightly brushed his lips against
mine. “I think that would be a good idea.”

When I got
home, I set up the laptop and started going through the audio files
that I had downloaded from Alistair’s recorder the night before. I
turned up the volume on my laptop. It sounded like Alistair had
left the recorder sitting somewhere, or he was somewhere quiet and
not talking to anyone. That had happened before, many times, and
since it was sound activated it had at times recorded other people
talking. Being uncomfortable with the situation, I had learned very
quickly to only transcribe that information that I could definitely
attribute to Alistair and his interviews or the rambling monologues
that doubled as his notes. I could hear muffled voices as if a
discussion was happening further away, but then Hammy’s voice came
through the recorder quite clearly. He was angry with someone and
it didn’t sound like the normal Hammy annoyed with one of the
girls. This argument sounded different.

“She is not going to get a cent out of this
place. I worked for everything and she doesn’t deserve a bit of
it.”

My forehead
furrowed
as I concentrated trying to pick
up the voice of the person he was talking to, but the voice was
muffled as if whoever it was stood further away from the recorder
than Hammy.

Hammy
laughed. “Go back to wherever you crawled out of. You have no place
here,” he sneered.

I jumped when I heard a bang like someone
dropping heavily to the floor and then all I could hear was a
wheezing noise and scrabbling against a hard surface. I checked the
time stamp on the recording. It had been recorded at the moment
that Hammy had died. I blindly grabbed my cell and punched in
Griffin’s number.

“
Trudie,” he
said and instantly I felt calmer.

“
I need you
to come to my place now,” I said.

Griffin obviously heard the distress in my
voice. “I’ll be right there.”

I sat quietly waiting for Griffin to arrive.
It was one thing to know that Hammy was dead. It was another to
actually hear the death throes as the man died. From what I’d heard
it hadn’t been an easy death and he had fought for his life.
Griffin let himself into the apartment and as he walked into my
living room I could see all his senses were alert.

“What’s going on Trudie?” he said quietly as
he sat down next to me.

I swallowed.
“Alistair carries this small digital voice recorder everywhere he
goes. He talks into the thing constantly and he uses it for
interviews. It’s shaped like a USB flash drive so nobody really
pays any attention to it. It’s sound activated so it starts
recording anytime somebody talks around it. Every few days he’ll
give it to me to transcribe everything on it. I download the audio
files to my laptop and then go through
them
, typing out the part of them that are relevant and not
just background noise. Sometimes I use some software to clean up
the noise on it.”

Griffin nodded but he still looked
confused.

“This is an audio file that I just started
working on. It was taped on the night Hammy died.”

I started playing the file.

Griffin’s eyes widened. “Is that what I think
it is?”

I nodded.

Griffin leaned closer. “I can’t make out who
the other person is. Maybe Brandi’s boyfriend tried a more direct
route the other night.”

“
I don’t
know,” I said. “Whoever it is, they’re too far away from the
recorder to register their voice properly. I thought maybe you’d be
able to get someone from the department to work on the file. They
might be able to get something.”

Griffin
nodded as I downloaded a copy to a flash drive and passed it to
him.

“
Thanks for
this, I’ll let you know if it gets us anywhere,” he said as he gave
me a quick kiss and left, his mind already on the possibilities the
file gave him.