Sleeping Beauty (23 page)

I bat his arm away. “What person?” I scream. “Tell me right now! Right this fucking second!”

Brendan looks down, resigned. “You, okay? They’re charging me with sexually battering
you
.”

Chapter Seventeen

“What the hell is this?” Alex says, slowing the car to a stop. Police cars are blocking the street in both directions, the blue lights on top spinning a continuous cold glare onto the surrounding buildings.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here in a month. We’ve been staying at Andy’s place.”

Once Andy had spirited Brendan out of the club through the back, I didn’t know what to do. Both Brendan and Andy went radio silent, neither answering their cell phones. Davin’s phone went straight to voicemail, like his battery is dead, or he’s ignoring me (probably the latter based on the few calls he’s returned lately). West is still out on tour with his band, and I’m pretty sure he’s standing on a stage somewhere in Oregon.

I wasn’t entirely sure if anyone had noticed Andy’s sudden departure, or if the paparazzi outside had caught wind of what was happening. With no license, I had no choice but to ask Alex for a ride. “Just take me to my old apartment,” I told her. “It’s closer.”

Closer, maybe, but once we’re within a few blocks it’s obvious the police got here first. I pull the door handle. “Let’s go find out what’s going on.”

Alex grabs my arm. “Wait, Claire! You can’t get out!”

“Why not?”

She twists her mouth, tilting her head in a way that says,
Um, isn’t it obvious?

“Oh, right.” I touch my face. Two hours of off-and-on crying has gone a long way towards washing away the face paint, but now I look like a melting waxwork in a flowered prairie dress. Alex has made drastic reductions in the limb department, and is down to just two, but she’s still as blue as the third circle of an archery target.

“Hold on,” she says, reaching behind her and pulling a snap-top makeup kit from behind the seat. It opens like a toolbox, one of the expanding drawers popping me in the face. “Sorry,” she says, rummaging through a disorganized tangle of makeup brushes, lipstick, and hair extensions. She pulls out a white jar and unscrews the top. “Use this. There’s some tissue in the glove box.”

I smear the cold cream on my face while she finds the bobby pins holding the yarn wig to my head. Finally I can’t take it anymore. “Aren’t you going to ask me?” I say, mopping the red circles from my cheeks.

“Ask what?” The bobby pins drop one by one into the open ash tray.
Plink! Plink!

“What he’s being arrested for?”

“Nope.” She wiggles the wig a little to be sure all of the pins have been removed, then pulls it free from my head. “Plausible deniability. Here,” she says, taking the tissue from me, “let me do this.”

“Plausible what?”

“The less I know the better. When this hits Gawker, I want you to know that the details didn’t get leaked by me.”

“Alex. I know you wouldn’t do that,” I say, closing my eyes as she scrubs my lids.

She snorts. “How do you know? When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you’ll find out that you can’t trust anyone.” She leans away from me, looking to see if my face is clean, and then dives into the backseat to root through piles of clothes. “Besides, whatever it is they think he’s done, I don’t believe it.”

She clambers back into the driver’s seat as I pull the Raggedy Ann dress over my head. She takes it from me, using it as a curtain to cover me while I change into her white t-shirt and black sweatpants–workout clothes for the gym, she explains. They smell faintly of body odor. I tighten the cord on the pants that are several sizes too big; I’m swimming in them. The tennis shoes are too big to even stay on my feet, so I have no choice but to stay in my red and white striped tights and high heel Mary Janes.

It’s a great look.

I reach for the door handle just as my phone starts blinking and pealing like church bells. I snatch it up. “Davin!” On his end of the line I hear the thump of music, and people shouting and laughing.

“Doc sent me a text, said he needed me to call you right away,” he says, sounding slightly annoyed. “What’s the emergency, Claire-Bo?”

I’m so relieved to hear his voice that I start to cry. “Davin, Brendan’s being arrested, and I’m at my apartment, and there are cops everywhere, and I don’t know what the hell is happening!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up the train, gidget. Who’s being arrested?”

He must be walking, because the party sounds fade away. I wipe the tears away with my hand. “Brendan!”

He chuckles. “Brendan? For what? Jaywalking?”

The words are branded into my brain, still glowing hot and red. My voice is wooden. “Felony sexual battery of a medically incapacitated person.”

“Sexual battery, huh?” he says, his tone acidic. “Who the hell does Doc have time to sexually batter besides you?”

Silence slips in and settles in for the long haul. I pick up the Raggedy Ann apron and wipe my nose with it, waiting for him to get it.

“I
knew
it!” he yells. “Where is that son of a bitch? I’m going to fucking kill him.” I hear a car door slam shut and keys in an ignition. “Where is he?”

“Andy Gordon took him to see an attorney so he can turn himself in,” I say between wracking sobs. Alex pats my back.

“You still at your apartment?” I hear the bleet of a car horn through the phone. Without waiting for an answer he says, “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t talk to anyone.” The line goes dead.

Those four words of parting advice turn out to be more easily spoken than put into action. I’m stopped five times between Alex’s car and the entrance to my building, allowed to pass only when I repeat “I live here!”over and over, so it takes me about twenty minutes to get to the entrance steps. Every door in the building has a head peeping out, eyeing the goings-on. Nearly every hand holds a camera or a cell phone.

I stop in my tracks at the sight of my open front door, a cop standing guard. Next to him is the building superintendant holding a giant ring of keys. I jump in front of the cop, holding the cord of my waistband so the sweatpants don’t fall down. “Hey! What are you doing in my house? That’s my stuff!”

He looks me up and down, like he’s trying to reconcile the weeping, disheveled person before him with whatever he’s seen of me on TV. “Are you Claire Beau?”

“What’s going on, officer?” says a male voice.

I spin around, so relieved to hear Davin’s voice that I don’t even care that he’s dressed like a firefighter, complete with a battered, burn-scarred yellow helmet, and a filthy greenish-gray coat with reflective lettering on it–which probably allowed him to breeze past all the checkpoints I got caught by. I throw myself into his open arms, but I’m caught off-guard by the fact that he smells like he’s been standing over a smoky campfire.

“Why do you–” I start to say before I’m distracted by a stranger walking casually through my front door into the living room and down the hallway into my bedroom. “Hey!” I say, pushing away from Davin. “Who told them they could do this? I want them out!” I’m marching forward, ready to go in and tear off someone’s head.

The cop grabs my arm, spinning me around to face him.

“Hey, hey, hey!” Davin yells at him. “Take it easy. It’s her apartment.”

“You can’t go in there until they’re done.”

“Done with
what
?”

The cop holds up a piece of paper. “Search warrant.”

Davin snatches it out of his hands and reads it. Thoroughly. Like, several times.

Inside, I see a uniformed officer open my refrigerator, like he’s got the munchies and is preparing to make himself a snack. He picks up one of the nutrition bars I kept handy during filming, takes a quick look around him, and slips it into his pocket.

“Hey!” I take another shot at jumping through my apartment door before the officer grabs me again. “He just stole my food!”

The guy in the kitchen starts rummaging through the cabinets. A plain-clothes officer walks out of my apartment, holding a box. I see the top of Andy Gordon’s “Get Well” chicken card peeping from the top, and a half dozen back issues of
The Hollywood Reporter
. A sleeve of one of my sweatshirts is dangling over the side, and if I didn’t know better I’m sure I see–

“You have a search warrant for my
underwear
? What the hell is this?”

“Claire!” says Davin, grabbing my hand. “Let’s go.”

“I’m not leaving! They’re trashing my house! They’re
stealing
stuff!”

Davin puts his arm around my shoulder and drags me down the hall. “They have a search warrant, okay?” he hisses between clenched teeth. “You can’t do anything about it, and you’re making a scene. Don’t make this shit worse than it already is.”

I see his point. I’ve never exchanged much more than “hellos” with my neighbors, but they’re lining the hallway, capturing the whole incident on their cell phones. My brain and body are numb. I let him shepherd me out of the building, stumbling as we shove our way through a gauntlet of photographers and gawkers. They follow us all the way back to Davin’s van, so many of them yelling at the same time that I can’t understand a single word.

A man swings a camera into my shoulder, nearly knocking me to the ground. Davin yanks the camera out of the man’s hand. It makes a cracking sound as it hits the pavement. When we reach the van, Davin pushes me into the passenger seat before forcing his way through the cameras and reporters to the driver’s side.

He guns the engine and throws the van into gear. His arm is locked straight at the elbow, palm crushing the horn, every muscle between his fingers and triceps bulging. I scream as Davin barrels through the crowd, missing some of the people by inches.

“Are you stupid or something?” he shouts.

The question, his anger, both catch me off-guard. “I–I thought–I figured–“

“You didn’t think, Claire-Bo. You didn’t think at all! Why the hell did you come here?”

“Why are you screaming at me? I don’t know what’s going on! What was I supposed to do? Where was I supposed to go?”

I see him breathing deliberately, trying to calm down. “You need an attorney. I’ll call Rev.” He fishes his cell phone out of his pocket, the car swerving out of our lane as he scrolls through his contact list.

“Why do I need an attorney? I didn’t do anything!”

“To protect you from yourself! Or is that my job now too?”

I’m stung speechless. I try to make my mind blank, washing everything out so I don’t start mewling like an abandoned kitten. I take a deep breath and try to bring the volume down. “This isn’t about me. It’s about Brendan. They’re arresting
Brendan
. I don’t know why, I don’t know if they read something in a tabloid, but they think he hurt me somehow, so I need to–”

“Jesus, you don’t get it, do you?”

“Get what?” He veers around cars, running barely-yellow lights, breaking two or three traffic laws every second as he speeds through the dark streets. I grip the door handle until my fingers ache.

“Doc is in some deep trouble, that’s what. And whether you like it or not, you’re the victim.”

“Victim,” I scoff. “He’s my boyfriend!”

“Yeah? Well it sounds like the police think your boyfriend had a pretty strange idea of courtship, don’t they?”

“They’re charging him with felony sexual battery!” I sputter, enraged. “It’s a little bit of a jump from a relationship to a sex crime, don’t you think?”

“Listen, I don’t know what they have on him, but no district attorney in their right mind is going to charge someone as high-profile as he is–not to mention making someone as high-profile as
you
out to be the victim–without something pretty convincing.”

I shake my head. “I can’t believe what you’re saying. You think when I–that he–he hurt me?”

He merges onto the highway, constantly checking his mirrors to see if we’re being followed. “I have no idea,” he says coldly.

“You don’t have to. Since when did law enforcement join your crew?”

“I’m just thinking it through from their side, Claire. They must have proof.”

“Or someone else told them,” I point out.

“No way,” he says, seeing where I’m going with this. “I don’t know nothin’. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” He goes quiet. “But it doesn’t matter what I know ‘cause
they
already know.” He starts to mutter to himself, his voice so low that I can barely hear him. “They already know. But how? And why would it matter?”

“I’m pregnant.” I keep my eyes on the road, staring at the broken white lines separating the lanes until my vision blurs. I count two green mile markers before Davin speaks.

“Pregnant.” He pulls the seatbelt strap away from his chest and lets it go. “They prescribe antibiotics for that now?”

“It was a prescription for prenatal vitamins,” I say.

“Were you planning on spilling? Or were you just going to show up with a little grom one day?”

I sigh. “It’s complicated.”

“You got that right. This is getting better all the time.”

“It was complicated even before today.” He surprises me by turning at the next light. “Wait, why are you taking the four-oh-five? I thought you were taking me to the beach house…I can’t go to my apartment while they’re digging it apart.”

He reaches for the search warrant on the dashboard and waves it in my face. “Think, gidget. Why would they search
your
apartment, and not search the place you guys have lived together for the last two months?” He drops the papers into my lap. “Doc’s apartment is on there too.”

“But
why
? What’re they looking for?”

“That’s the part I don’t get.”

“Then where are we going…your place?”

“The marina.”

“Great, once everyone figures out where we are, we’ll be trapped inside your boat.”

“We’re not staying in the marina.”

“Then where are we going?”

“Somewhere else.”

“‘Somewhere else? Where?”

“Look, just shut up and let me think, okay?”