Things We Do in the Dark(61)
“How many have you had?” Paris asked, curious despite herself.
“Kid, I’m from Los Angeles. I’ve had at least two dozen. But the worst instructor ever was this guy named Rafael. The guy was always sweaty. He had zero body hair, and he always wore these little red Baywatch shorts. Anyway, one day he was helping me raise my leg, and I fell on him. We were like two wet, salty seals sliding over each other…”
Paris laughed. And continued to laugh for the next hour, until it was time to head back to the studio.
Over the next few months, coffees led to lunches, which led to dinners. He took her to a couple of outdoor concerts at the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery, where they saw Barenaked Ladies (one of her favorite bands growing up) and Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons (Jimmy knew Frankie personally). After the second concert, she kissed him. It felt like the most natural thing in the world, despite the twenty-nine-year age gap.
“Do you think he’s too old for me?” Paris asked Henry the next morning. “Be honest. Does it look bad?”
“Honey, he’s Jimmy Peralta.” Henry rolled his eyes. “The fact that he makes you laugh makes him a keeper, and retired or not, he’s still got it.”
“Got what?”
“It. That thing that makes him special.” Henry saw the confusion on Paris’s face and laughed. “You’ve been happier than I’ve ever seen you, P. Don’t self-sabotage by overthinking it. You deserve good things. You deserve him.”
It was easier said than done. She wasn’t used to good things, to things being easy, to people being kind. When she was thirteen, Deborah had told her that some people were just born into hard lives, and their job was to claw their way out.
Or, Paris has since learned, you could simply become someone else.
She tosses the magazine into the recycling bin. She doesn’t need it—she lived with the man. And the photo People used is framed on their mantel at home, anyway.
* * *
In the five days she’s been at the Emerald, she hasn’t heard a peep from her lawyer. Assuming Elsie still is her lawyer. It’s Hazel who calls to tell Paris that the police have finished with her house and that she can finally go back home.
The smug hotel manager is happy to see her go. He even calls her a car service, and there’s a black Lincoln Town Car waiting at the same back entrance where she was dropped off. The driver takes a good look at her ankle monitor, but politely says nothing about it until they turn down her street, where they see a huge swarm of people with cameras milling around.
Thankfully, the Town Car’s windows are tinted dark. If anything, the crowd is even bigger than it was the morning of her arrest. At least the yellow crime scene tape she saw on the news is gone. From the outside of the house, you’d never know anything happened. She has no idea what the inside is going to look like.
“Someone needs to tell them that the view is the other way,” the driver says, looking at her in the rearview mirror. “So. How would you like to do this? I’m assuming you don’t want them to get a shot of you with that ankle monitor on. If you want, I can pull straight into your garage, assuming you have a door that connects to the inside of the house.”
It’s clear he knows exactly who she is, but if it bothers him, it doesn’t show.
“That would be great,” Paris says. “I can open the doors from my phone.”
He pulls into the driveway and idles while Paris taps on her new iPhone, connecting to the home Wi-Fi. She spent the last two days at the hotel trying to set up her new phone like her old one, which the police still have. But the app doesn’t seem to be working. She’s logged in, but the actual hardware inside the house appears to be off-line. The police must have disabled the system.
“I can’t get the app to work,” Paris says, frustrated. “I’m sorry, but would you mind getting out and entering the code directly into the keypad? I promise I’ll give you a massive tip.”
“What’s the code?” he asks, turning around. She tells him the four digit number, and he gives her a wink. “I’d have done it for you anyway, but I got kids, so I won’t say no to the tip.”
As soon as he gets out of the car, cameras flash. She can hear her name being shouted. Paris! Paris! How does it feel to be home? Did you kill Jimmy for the money? The driver punches the code in quickly, and when he gets back in the car, he seems freaked out.
“Wow. Now I know how those Kardashians feel.”
It’s the second reference someone’s made to the Kardashians, and while Paris doesn’t appreciate the comparison, she’s pretty sure the Kardashians wouldn’t, either.
He pulls into the garage, parking between Jimmy’s Cadillac and her Tesla, then shuts the engine off. Without prompting, he gets out and presses the button on the wall. Slowly, the garage door closes, shutting out the noise along with the daylight. Paris exhales. The driver helps her bring everything inside the house. Since the hotel paid for the car service, she Venmos him a hundred bucks.
He grins and hands her his business card. “Call me if you ever need a personal driver. The way things are going, I’m thinking you will.”
She enters the house through the connecting door. Sticking only her hand out, she presses the button again to open the garage to let him out. When the garage door closes again, she lets out a long sigh of relief.