The Red Files

by Lee Winter

  The Red Files

  Copyright © 2015 by Lee Winter. All rights reserved.

  First Smashwords Edition: September 2015

  Edited by Cheri Fuller & Sheri Milburn

  Proofread by Blythe Rippon

  Cover Design by Streetlight Graphics

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  The Red Files

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  About Lee Winter

  Other Books from Ylva Publishing

  Coming from Ylva Publishing in 2016

  Acknowledgements

  This book is for the love of my life. Her patience has been remarkable and her warmth sustains me.

  Thanks go to the enthusiastic and fabulous Astrid at Ylva Publishing for taking a chance on an untried Aussie writer, and to Cheri, Bonnie, and Sheri, who helped me whip my scribblings into shape. My book would be a lesser offering without you all.

  Thank you.

  CHAPTER 1

  I’ll Show You My Goats

  Los Angeles, Saturday

  Lauren King rolled over, coughed miserably, and buried her face in her pillow. She swallowed hard and winced. Her swollen tongue tasted like glitter, feathers, and faux fur.

  Nothing like waking up to a full-blown head cold with a side of pink boa.

  Her cell phone gave a faint beep from somewhere on her hardwood floor. She groaned and twisted only to get a face full of her own hair, which reeked of assorted socialites’ perfumes and industrial-strength hair sprays. Not surprising. All that air-kissing invariably had a downside. Not quite the worst part of her job, but way up there.

  Her phone beeped again. And then again. Lauren frowned.

  She turned to look at her clock radio—some incessantly cheerful red thing—and squinted until the numbers came into view—7:33 a.m.

  She scowled. Only people with a death wish would harass an entertainment reporter before ten on a weekend. Everyone knew it. It was one of those immutable commandments of journalism for god’s sake.

  With a sour grunt, she contemplated turning her cell off and catching more shut-eye. That thought lasted approximately three seconds before curiosity won out. She sighed and leaned out of bed to grope around for the beeping phone.

  She felt its shape bulging inside her jeans. She pulled the denim onto the bed, yanked the cell out of the pocket, and flung her jeans back to the floor again.

  Seventeen new messages? Okay, no one in her game was that popular before breakfast unless a sex tape had leaked. And her own lengthy bedroom dry spell meant at least it couldn’t be hers.

  Her eyes focused on the first of her texts. It contained only one word. Goats?

  Goats? She blinked. Had some A-lister with a zoological fetish been caught doing the unthinkable? Well, it probably wouldn’t be the first time.

  She peered at the screen. Oh. The text was from one of her five brothers. All were beefy, strapping mechanics—just like their dad—who worked at King & Sons Car Repairs in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And all were experts in the art of teasing their kid sister, no matter how far away she was. She scrolled to the next message.

  Goats, King? Oh and thanks for the scoop. Whatever do you do for an encore?

  Lauren narrowed her eyes. She didn’t have to even look to know the author of that goading text. Her mind swirled. What scoop? And what’s with the goats?

  She clicked through to the Daily Sentinel’s website on her smartphone as she struggled to recall the previous night’s finer points. Her blurry recollection only confirmed that she shouldn’t have mixed cold meds with alcohol.

  A vision of Estella Flores-Vicario swam into her mind. The ambitious, former maid had married one of her clients—who just happened to be Hollywood’s second most insanely wealthy and elusive film producer.

  Estella was also entirely mad.

  Catch her on a good day, as Lauren had three weeks ago when she’d exclusively profiled her for her VIP events and parties pages, and she was your best friend, declaring “You must write my biography, darling; only you I trust.”

  The fact that she’d uttered this phrase to dozens of journalists over the years pretty much took the novelty out of the offer. Still, she was generally harmless in an eccentric, “Look, darling, I store my high heels in my spare fridge!” sort of way.

  Catch her on a bad day, though… Lauren’s head throbbed at her vague memories of Estella on a tear the previous night. Something about a glass-shattering crash, an orange silky confection of hissing socialite shooting by on her ass and swearing at Lauren in several languages as she slid through a foamy sea of pink punch and startled VIPs.

  Lauren gasped. Right. So that was absolutely not her fault. At least she hoped not.

  Her phone’s screen finally loaded up the familiar Daily Sentinel’s entertainment webpage.

  Beneath her colleague and arch rival’s popular column, Ayers and Graces, was a prominent video clip headlined “Divas of the Ball Square Off!”

  Underneath that screamer was the breakout teaser.

  “I’ll show you my goats,” declares our own Daily Sentinel entertainment reporter Lauren King in a bizarre smackdown with producer’s eccentric wife. Catherine Ayers was on the scene and dishes all the dirt for readers. Click here to watch that punchbowl fly…

  Heart thudding, she clicked Play. Four minutes, forty-two seconds, and one goat mystery solved later, she had a sick feeling in her churning guts that had nothing to do with whatever she had imbibed the previous night. She slid her gaze down to the hits counter on the video.

  884.

  She stabbed refresh.

  927.

  Crap. She had to fix this. She reached for a white T-shirt in her laundry heap on the floor and punched refresh again.

  982.

  Goddamnit. She ripped off her tank top, threw on the T-shirt, pulled her jeans over her white boy-shorts, and ran for the door. She paused only to hop from foot to foot as she slid on an old pair of boots. She winced as one bare heel rubbed against an unforgiving seam.

  Figures, she scowled to herself and grabbed her car keys.

  * * *

  The roar of her 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle filled Lauren’s ears as she relaxed against the leather seat. The sky-blue classic machine vibrated its impressive 480 horsepower through her bones.

  She glanced in her rearview mirror and watched as her tiny white apartment building on North Mansfield Ave. grew smaller. It had only two redeeming features—a garage for her beloved car and a rent she could just afford while still leaving enough for foo
d, second-hand designer gowns for work, and occasional barhopping and karaoke nights.

  Her gaze caught her wild, shoulder-length, brown, bed hair in the mirror, and she realized she hadn’t even brushed it in her furious scramble to get to work. Lauren raked her fingers through it then reached over to the passenger seat, grabbed a cap, and rammed it on her head.

  Another glance in the rearview mirror. Her green eyes blinked back at her.

  Well, maybe it was marginally better. She slid on her sunglasses. Anyway it wasn’t like she’d bump into any colleagues at this time of day to give her grief. Right now the paper’s vast open-plan editorial floor would only be populated by a skeleton crew of online news updaters. Most of the print news staff wouldn’t even think of crawling in until a much more reasonable hour. That gave her a handy window in which to threaten a certain asshole videographer. Without witnesses. She’d just politely explain how he’d be walking real funny unless he agreed to take it down.

  She changed up to third gear and gave the gas pedal a stomp. It was a minor miracle being able to get out of second given the usual LA gridlock, but it was early enough on the weekend that the pretty young things and powerful old things were still too busy with each other to be going anywhere.

  She sat up straighter, and her T-shirt rode up her pale stomach. She glanced down and winced at the reminder. She should probably get out in the sun once in a while and maybe squeeze in an extra jog or two. Hard to believe she once had the toned build of a hotshot college softball pitcher. But it was so easy to let things slide in a party town—especially one filled with schmoozers all trying to get her liquored up and malleable enough to mention them in her pages.

  When she’d first started the VIP parties beat, she’d learned the hard way to stay on top of her health. Her job entailed a hell of a lot more enforced booze and exotic canapé consumption than was good for any human being.

  While most casual social butterflies might attend one or two events a week, she regularly had to hit about six to ten, some weeks as many as fifteen when she included all the charity breakfasts, brunches, and A-list luncheons.

  This was not what she’d left Iowa for, of course. She had big plans, and a political beat was the Holy Grail for her. This mind-numbing tap dance through Tinseltown was just a minor detour, she reminded herself grimly.

  At first, she’d balked at the job, but she’d pretty much drained her savings when all the other doors were slammed in her face. And if getting a foot in the door of newspapers in LA meant strapping on five-inch heels and hoping the news boss would be too distracted by her cleavage to declare her non-existent socialite résumé acceptable, so be it.

  News Managing Editor Frank Beltram had, however, seemed indifferent to both her décolletage and her fuck-me heels. And he didn’t give a rat’s ass about her University of Iowa journalism degree or lofty GPA or that award-winning series she’d written on rural teachers for the Cedar Rapids Register.

  “Can you count?” he’d asked her instead.

  At her astonished expression, he pinned her with a deadly serious look. “’Cause that’s exactly one half of this job. Don’t be fooled by the fancy title. We’re being too kind calling this ‘entertainment reporting’. It’s parties, plain and simple. Who, what, where, and how many attended a shindig. Get good at doing estimates because publicists will lie their skeezy asses off and tell you they had a thousand VIPs packing a room that you know only holds, say, six hundred max. You have to know shit like that, right?”

  Lauren had nodded.

  “You also need to know how to spell. ’Cause that’s the other half of the job.”

  Lauren forced herself not to roll her eyes.

  “You think I’m telling you how to chew gum; that journalists should all know how to spell?” Frank fixed her with a knowing look.

  “I’ve fired two writers on the entertainment beat in a year who kept spelling names wrong. It makes us look like illiterate idiots. If in doubt, you ask these prize pricks and prancing poodles themselves, got it? Don’t rely on their crew.

  “You think that sounds easy? Well remember you may have to march up to some half-drunk, wannabe big shot with an ego bigger than his pimped out truck who will be insulted you don’t know who he is and will threaten to end your career with one phone call. He may even be right.

  “So you have to work out a way to ask in such a way to make him feel grateful you checked, even if it’s in front of his friends or bosses or that smoking-hot actress who used to be in porn that he’s trying so hard to lay.

  “So, King, that’s the job. Spelling and counting. All the rest is window dressing. But if you screw it up, and I get publicists blasting me down the line for getting their oh-so-shit-hot, famous client’s details wrong, I’ll be a most unhappy boss.”

  Lauren blinked at him and wondered what the hell she’d gotten herself into.

  Frank studied her and gave a short bark of laughter. “I see those wheels turning, kid,” he said and twirled a finger in the direction of her head. “Yeah, yeah. You think you’re better than this. Truth is your earnest little résumé doesn’t amount to jack in the real world.

  “I know this job isn’t rocket science, but it counts as journalism if you squint real hard. And, like all journalism, it needs to be done right. Okay? Got it?”

  Lauren gave him a tight nod.

  Frank regarded her thoughtfully, and his face brightened.

  “All right, King, you’re in. You start on Friday night. I’ll pair you up with Ayers for a week. That’s our columnist who does all the high-end, big-ticket events—mainly the stuffed shirts and superstars. She knows everything and everyone, so pay attention to what she says. She has half this town shit-scared about what she’ll write next, especially since she’s always bang-on accurate and never minces her words.”

  “So she’s the gossip columnist?” Lauren asked.

  Frank snorted. “A word of advice, kid? Never call her a gossip columnist to her face. That’s my little occupational health and safety warning for you. Will not end well if you do. Now as for your job—you’ll be expected to attend everything, from crap events to grand openings, and crank out enough content to fill all of our celebrity-spotting back pages, plus keep the online team happy, too, with entertainment fillers. Right—any questions? No? Good. Just remember—do not fuck up the names.”

  And so she’d become a glorified parties reporter, with a business card that looked considerably more glamorous than the job itself. She was now adept at getting quotes—and double checking names—from various stars while taking note of who was on whose arm, what they were wearing, and who was new to this vapid circuit of the damned. Then she’d efficiently move on to the next party-ball-launch-fundraiser-gala-premiere and rinse and repeat.

  At the end of the night, she’d drag her exhausted body home, peel off her dress, file her story by email while sitting in her underwear in bed, and then barely crawl under the covers before she was asleep.

  It had been a year, and Lauren was done with it. She’d been slipping hard-hitting story ideas to Frank for over a month. The news boss hadn’t bitten on any of them yet, but it was only a matter of time ’til he folded. It was just about persistence. At least she hoped so.

  But now there was this debacle involving Estella giving her an earful. How the hell could she convince her boss she could handle the big stuff when she couldn’t even handle the most basic reporting gig without making a spectacle of herself and being ranted at on video by the craziest socialite of them all?

  And if this thing went viral… She shuddered.

  Lauren drummed her fingers on the wide steering wheel. She could see her workplace. The seven-story, grand beaux arts building was much more impressive than the product it put out. While the Daily Sentinel broke its fair share of solid, quality stories, the change in publisher six months before she joined was starting to show in the content. After all, why be earnest and dedicated when you can be slick and gossipy and generate clicks on the site
?

  Lauren pulled into her workplace and was about to turn into her reserved parking spot when she saw a familiar silver Saab straddling the line beside it. It wasn’t enough to prevent most cars squeezing in, but then her vehicle’s broad line wasn’t typical of most cars—as the maddening owner of the Saab well knew.

  Goddamn, Ayers. Her rival was intent on ruining her day in every way, it seemed. With an irritated glare, she pulled back out onto the street and found a parking spot.

  She marched inside the building and spotted her favorite drinking buddy, Maxine aka Max, manning the ground floor. Lauren liked the no-nonsense security guard a lot. They mixed in a hell of a lot of similar circles when off duty. Well, okay, same clubs, same sports bars, and they had a shared secret shame for eighties music.

  “Hey,” Lauren greeted her as she shoved her sunglasses on her head.

  “Lauren? Hey, girl, why are you here so early? And on a Saturday? You doing Ayers’s hours now?” Max’s broad face split into a grin as she stepped out from behind the security desk.

  Lauren offered her best faux glare to her friend who looked like her regimen of donuts and beer was paying ample dividends.

  “There’s just something I need taken off the website, and you know Wolfman never answers his damn cell. I won’t be in long.”

  Max’s grin widened, and she folded her arms as she rocked back on her thick-soled boots. The brown uniform tightened across her powerful fleshy biceps. She gave a low guffaw.

  “Oh god! You’ve seen it.” Lauren groaned.

  Max smirked, plucked a cell phone out of her breast pocket, and swivelled it to face Lauren. “Not bad—1830 hits. You could even make the TV news tonight at this rate. Or TMZ? Who knows!” She chuckled and squeezed the phone back into her pocket.