I needed some clarification. “Wait a minute. Since when? This is the first I’ve heard of this.”
“That’s because I’ve been too ashamed to tell you. It turns out you were right. I’m too old to make it as an actress. Every audition was a complete failure. I couldn’t even get cast as a mom in a lousy commercial. I mean, there I was dating a producer, and he never had any intention of casting me in anything.”
I tried to inject some much-needed optimism into the conversation. “But you’re a great actress.”
“So are you, and Hollywood chewed you up and spat you out.”
That comment struck a nerve. It was a slippery slope that led to self-pity, so I had to be careful not to go down that road.
Sophie continued. “I was delusional to believe I could beat the odds. The fact is, the odds didn’t want to get beaten.”
I tried to give her some words of comfort, but she didn’t want to hear them. “But Sophie—”
Sophie wasn’t done saying her piece. “Anyway, after one particularly disastrous audition, I gave up on my acting dreams. But, since I’d come all this way, I decided that if I couldn’t make it in front of the camera, maybe I could get a good position behind the scenes. A few months ago, when Paul promoted me to assistant producer, I felt like I was finally getting somewhere. Then, I found out he’d cheated on me with at least a half a dozen women.”
Sophie painted a completely defeatist picture of her acting career. One that was devoid of hope. Suddenly, I realized why she didn’t want to give up on her job. It was the only thing she could hang her hat on. If she gave that up, she really would have to start over. That was a harder thing to do in Hollywood than in most other industries.
I tried to be as sympathetic as possible. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know any of this. Judging from our phone conversations and your social media posts, I thought you were still trying to make it as an actress—”
“All that stuff I post on social media is just to put on a good face. No one wants to post about their dreams dying for the whole world to read.”
“That’s so true.”
It was also so sad. Sophie was in a real bad spot right now, with the true extent of her troubles only being revealed to me one answer at a time. With all the terrible news she had thrown my way, I was still trying to process it all. That being said, a thought popped into my head that seemed to be the antidote to all that ailed her.
“Why don’t you move back home?” I asked.
Sophie didn’t hesitate with her response, immediately shooting down my suggestion. “I can’t go home.”
“Why not? All your friends are there. We’ll do everything we can to get you back on your feet.”
“True, but you guys aren’t the only ones back home. The haters are back there, too. The naysayers. All those people who told me I was too old, that I’d never make it, that it was worthless to even try. If I go home, they’ll just have more fuel for their fire, and I don’t want to give them the satisfaction of knowing they were right.”
If I didn’t already have ample evidence of how much my old friend had changed, her last statement was the clincher.
I tried to pull her out of her funk. “What about the Sophie who didn’t care what other people thought? Who found a bright side in everything?”
I was hoping that would stir up the Sophie of yore. That it would get her to harken back to the woman she used to be.
That did not happen.
“Hope, I know you’re trying to help, but this isn’t just about the haters. It’s about me, too. I can brush off criticism from others, but if I go back home with my tail between my legs, I don’t know if I’ll be able to live with myself,” Sophie said.
“I understand.”
This was a whole different Sophie than I’d ever seen before. The last year had changed her more than I thought, and not for the better. I hardly recognized her now.
Just then, when the conversation seemed to have hit a low point, I realized that it hadn’t truly hit rock bottom yet.
Sophie’s cell phone rang. As she checked the caller I.D. on her touchscreen, I knew it was bad news.
She sighed. “I have to take this.”
Sophie answered the phone. “Yes, Paul?”
Uh-oh. What now?
I only got one side of the conversation, but that was bad enough.
“But, I’m with a friend,” Sophie said into the phone. She listened to her boss’s response, then groaned. “Fine. I’ll be right there.”
As Sophie hung up the phone, I braced myself for whatever was coming next.
“I hate to do this, but I have to get back to work,” Sophie said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Now?”
She nodded. “Unfortunately. Apparently, there having some problems back at the office.”
I was unable to hide my disappointment. “Well, how long is this going to take?”
“It could take minutes…or hours. I don’t know.”
I exhaled. “Well, there goes dinner.”
She gave me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry. But look, I’m off tomorrow and for the entire weekend. I’ll tell you what, we’ll meet up tomorrow morning and spend the whole day together. We can go to the beach and have a great time. What do you say?”
“That sounds good.”
Sophie then gave me a hug and headed back to work while I tried to make sense of how things had gone so wildly different than I had expected.
Chapter Three
Since I was already at the restaurant, I ordered dinner and ate alone. While the tamales were great, I ended up leaving the restaurant an hour later with a bad taste in my mouth over the disturbing discussion I’d had with Sophie. I felt so awful for her. After all that she had been through in her life, she’d moved out to Los Angeles to fulfill her lifelong dream of becoming an actress.
When she left Florida, she was full of optimism. Now, in the span of a year, she seemed completely defeated. For all the success stories that Hollywood produced, it was home to just as many broken dreams. I just never thought my friend would become one of the cautionary tales.
Sophie’s career failure made me reflect on how bitterly things had ended for me in Los Angeles. I could feel the desire to wallow starting to swell inside me. Part of me wanted to go straight from the Mexican restaurant to a bar to drink off my sorrows. I told myself it would just be a little nightcap to take the edge off the day.
I resisted, partially because jet lag had suddenly decided to set in, but also because I had the feeling that I wouldn’t be able to stop myself at just one drink. At that moment, deep down, I knew that sleep would be far more beneficial to me.
Not only would it help with the jet lag, but it would also mean I’d avoid waking up with a nasty hangover in the morning. After talking some sense into myself, I just went back to my hotel and conked out.
I would have stayed at Sophie’s apartment, but she was renting a small and cramped one bedroom. There was barely enough room for Sophie and her stuff in there, no less me. Besides, I had reached a point in my life where I never wanted to sleep on another pull-out sofa again.
After I had plopped myself down on the memory foam mattress at the hotel, I knew I had made the right decision. Before I knew it, I was asleep. And boy did I sleep like a rock.
Morning came quicker than I expected. I was in no hurry to wake up. As a matter of fact, I would have slept in even longer if it was not for the early-morning phone call that I received.
I rolled over and looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table. Seven-thirty? Wow, how the time had flown by. At the same time, at that early hour, I knew it couldn’t be a telemarketer calling.
But, who was it? I answered my cell phone, as groggy as could be. Initially, I thought it might have been my boyfriend Daniel calling from Florida to wish me good morning. He did that sometimes, calling me to tell me that he just wanted to hear my voice. My boyfriend was a sweetheart like that. At the same time, being three time zones ahea
d of me back in Florida, he may have forgotten that it was still early morning here in California.
Unfortunately, it was not Daniel on the phone. Instead, it was Sophie on the line, with awful news. She was frantic as she spoke. When she told me where she was calling from, I understood why. It turned out she was at the police station. Even worse, she revealed that she had been arrested. That news sent me reeling. Had I heard that right? No, it couldn’t be. It had to be a mistake, didn’t it? Only, it wasn’t.
***
How could this have happened? My old friend, in jail? I had trouble wrapping my head around it all. My mind was already racing, but my body soon caught up with it.
I threw my clothes on as quickly as I could and rushed out of the hotel. The taxi ride over to the police station was the most anxiety-riddled ten minutes of my entire life. It didn’t help that the cab driver kept trying to make small talk, treating me like a tourist, mouthing off about all the glitzy sites in town that I should visit.
Most of the cab drivers I had met in years past had been on the quiet side. It was a stroke of awful luck to get a motor mouth this time.
Cab driver aside, the reality of the situation really sunk in for when I entered the police station. It was a cold, depressing place that gave me shivers the moment I entered. With a brother on the police force back home, this was far from the first time I had ever been in a police station. Only this time, I walked into the station under far different circumstances.
The Hollywood, Florida, police station was far less intimidating. Not just because my brother’s friendly smile greeted me back home. This Los Angeles precinct was cavernous, grimy, and drab.
Of course, the drug addict yelling nonsense as an officer dragged him into the back of the station didn’t help calm my nerves at all. I approached the front window of the precinct and talked to an officer who was sitting behind a pane of bulletproof glass.
After checking in, a deputy led me back to the cell block. Luckily, the drug addict was not there. Maybe he was being interrogated. Between the disturbing environment, the distraction of the drug addict, and the general uneasiness of knowing my old friend was in jail, my mind was being torn in so many different directions.
All the tangential matters instantly faded into the background when I saw Sophie behind bars. My focus was squarely on her.
Sophie’s head was sunk low as she sat in her cell. My eyes meanwhile were wide with disbelief. She was out of place there. All the other cells were filled with heavily tattooed men and women that I would be afraid to run into in a dark alley.
Sophie looked like she had been put there by mistake. I saw her trembling. The poor thing was terrified. The sight of this new ghastly reality was striking.
I stood there for a second, in complete shock. At first, I don’t think she noticed me. Sophie seemed to be trying to avoid eye contact. I tried to pull her out of her stupor.
“What happened?” I asked.
That was a dumb question. That words had just dribbled out of my mouth. She had been arrested, obviously. I had meant that in a more general sense—as in what had happened to cause her to be arrested? My verbal follies aside, Sophie was just glad to hear the sound of my voice. Her head darted up.
That’s when I saw a look in her eyes that I’d never seen before.
“This is all a big mistake,” she replied.
She said the words, but all I really saw was the fear in her eyes. I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. This station was depressing enough, and I was on the other side of the bars. It must have been a soul-crushing experience to be locked in a cell.
So many words came to my mind, but the only ones that made it to the tip of my tongue were the simple variety. “I can’t believe this.”
“How do you think I feel?”
She had a good point. While I could empathize with her, luckily, I had no firsthand experience being behind bars. I could have spent more time in a state of disbelief, but I wanted to get to the bottom of this. “What did they arrest you for?”
“Murder.”
I went dead quiet. Murder? What? Was she for real? If her situation wasn’t hard enough to believe before, it had reached absurd heights. I could not make heads nor tails of this.
Part of me didn’t want to repeat the word out loud. The sound of them being uttered out loud was too terrifying.
A shock reverberated in my voice. “Murder? You?”
Sophie reluctantly nodded.
None of this made sense to me. I tried to piece it together one question at a time. “But, who was the victim?”
“My boss.”
That answer made me shudder. It hit a little close to home for me. At the same time, despite, Sophie and Paul’s recent spats, could things really have devolved into murder?
I delved deeper. “Why would they think that?”
Sophie was slow to answer. I couldn’t figure out why until the words came out of her mouth.
“Because…they found me at the scene.”
That sent me into a tailspin. The revelations were coming fast and furiously now, each more shocking than the last. Until then, my disbelief had been directed at the police’s actions in arresting her. Now, I had questions specifically for Sophie.
“What? What were you doing there?”
“I wanted to talk some sense into him after he fired me.”
“Wait a minute. He fired you?”
She nodded.
“When did this happen?” I asked.
“After I returned from the restaurant.”
“On what grounds did he fire you?”
“He said it just wasn’t working out and that letting me go was the best move for the company.”
I could read between the lines. “So basically he fired you because you broke up with him?”
“As far as I can tell. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get over it. So, a few hours later I went over to his house to tell him that he couldn’t get away with firing me. That what he’d done was grounds for a wrongful termination lawsuit.”
Instinctually, I stepped back. “You went to his place after he fired you?”
She looked ashamed as she replied. “I know it wasn’t the best idea—”
I interrupted her. “You’re right. That was a terrible idea.”
“I fully admit that it wasn’t the best decision on my part, but I just wanted my job back. Unfortunately, I didn’t even get to say my piece to him.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was dead when I got there.”
“Did you tell that to the police?” I asked.
She nodded. “I did.”
“Yet you’re behind bars.”
“That’s because they showed up at his house a few minutes after I did.”
There was so much information being thrown at me all at once. I had to take a moment to myself just to process it all.
While I let all the recent revelations sink in, Sophie’s level of panic ratcheted up.
“I didn’t do this. You have to believe me.”
I was still trying to process all of the information she’d given me when Sophie’s patience grew thin. Apparently, my response came too slowly for Sophie’s tastes.
“You do believe me, don’t you?” she asked.
“I want to.”
I had spoken the truth. The problem was, those weren’t the words she wanted to hear.
Sophie kept peppering me with a new variation of the same question. “You want to? So, you’re not convinced of my innocence?”
I didn’t like how she was coming at me. She’d had a lot of time to think about all this in her cell. To me, this was all new information. Not to mention there was so much of it. There was so much to process in such a short time.
With everything that I was trying juggle all at once, my deepest thoughts, the ones I tried to keep at the back of my mind, ended up slipping out of my mouth by mistake. “I don’t know what to think. So much has happened. When we met up for dinner
last night, you were much different than I’d ever seen you before. Then, this morning, I find out that you’ve been arrested for murder.”
I wished that I’d kept that to myself. My statement only served to push her further to the brink.
“Hope, you know me. We’ve been friends for years. We’ve seen so much together—we’ve been through so much together. Do you really think I’d kill someone?” Sophie asked.
The evidence was stacked against her, but it didn’t speak to one thing—the fact that I had known her for decades. That we had a history. True, she had changed, but she was still Sophie Paulson.
I looked deep into her eyes. For the first time since I had arrived in Los Angeles, I saw a semblance of the old Sophie staring back at me. She looked like a scared child needing her mom. What she didn’t look like, was a killer.
I answered from the bottom of my heart. “No.”
She breathed a sigh of relief.
It didn’t last long. That proved to only be a temporary respite. Shortly after, she began pleading about a new topic.
“Good, because I really need your help here,” Sophie said.
I had a feeling where she was going with this, but I was going to let her say the words.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I know you’ve solved a slew of murder cases in the past. I’m asking you to solve one more. I really need your help here.”
Given the fact that she was one of my oldest friends and that I still had so many questions bouncing around in my head, I didn’t see how I couldn’t take this case. To not investigate this matter further meant letting my friend rot behind bars. That wasn’t something I was prepared to do.
“I’ll do my best,” I said.
Relief came to Sophie’s face. “Good. You’re my only hope.”
She wasn’t wrong. The police had already been clear about what they thought had happened. They wouldn’t have arrested her otherwise. With no police to turn to, if I was to find out the truth, there was no other choice but to do it myself.
“I promise I’ll do everything I can to find out the truth,” I said.
Hope Hadley Eight Book Cozy Mystery Set Page 41
