Corey showed up a few minutes before her set was over, with an armful of flowers and a chagrined look on his face.
After that near breakup, Corey started referring to Chloe as his girlfriend. And about a month later, he asked her to move in with him.
I was thrilled that my first atonement was such a success, but in the back of my mind I did note that Chloe and Corey would probably be the easiest names to cross off my list. Now the real hard work began.
TWENTY-SIX
The week after Corey started calling Chloe his girlfriend, I showed up unannounced outside of Mike Barker’s Beverly Hills mansion.
He answered the gate buzzer himself, his voice coming out of the little speaker box, loud and clear. “Is that you, Davie Jones?” he asked. He sounded like he had been drinking. “What are you doing here?”
“May I come in?” I asked.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again.
“I need to talk to you,” I answered. “About what all I did.”
“That was fucked up what you did. Ratting me out to Celeb Weekly.”
“I know. Can I come in? I want to apologize.”
“You want to apologize?” he slurred through the box. “Yeah, you’re right. You need to apologize to me.”
The ornate black steel gates swung open for me and my beat-up car.
. . .
Mike had managed to hang on to his mansion, but all the furnishings that I had seen in the Architectural Digest spread during the height of his fame were now gone. As were all but one of his sports cars. He had hung on for a few years after the article that I had sourced came out, but eventually the casinos had seen the writing on the wall re his falling star and called in his millions of dollars of debt.
“You ruined my life,” he informed me, standing in the middle of his empty foyer, with a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s clutched tightly in his right fist.
Apparently the only reason Mike had allowed me into his now empty home was to tell me this.
He was dressed in a beautiful smoking jacket and trousers, but he had gained at least thirty pounds since I last saw him. He smelled aggressively tart, like he hadn’t bathed in a few days. A definite sign of depression, I noted. The hair on top of his head was a hot mess, wild and matted, like he hadn’t run a pick through it in weeks—maybe months. He had also grown what Nicky referred to as a “jail beard.” Mike now reminded me of High School Davie, and that about broke my heart.
Still, I let him know: “You’re the one who ruined your life, not me.” I pasted a distasteful look on my face and surveyed his bare walls and the empty sitting room beyond the foyer, as if I actually had the right to look down on his living space. “Now do you want to take the next few steps to the bottom, or do you want to stop this and get your shit back?”
Mike’s eyes flashed with desperate anger. “I thought you came here to apologize.”
I felt bad for him. He had probably liked having me to blame for his downfall after Veronica’s PI visited and let him know everything. I hated to bust his bubble like that, but it had to be done. I asked again in the hardest voice possible: “Do you want to hit bottom or do you want your shit back, little boy? You’ve got to answer me now, because I don’t have all day.”
Pure bluff. I had sworn to give as much time as it took to do right by everyone that I had wronged. But he didn’t know that. And something must have clicked in that addict brain of his, because he said, “I want my shit back,” in a voice so gruff and quiet, I had to depend on the echo of his empty mansion to carry his words to me.
I resisted the urge to smile and said, “I don’t like you. I’ve never liked you. I’ve always thought you were incredibly fake and insecure and I pegged you as a gambling addict from the door.”
Mike looked stricken, which confirmed my suspicions that his priorities were still in the wrong place. “But me not liking you is a good thing,” I said. I took the bottle out of his hand. “Now go take a shower.”