built of drab brick and entombed in razor wire. The area looked like Fallujah. But a music teacher invited neighborhood children to play instruments, and they took up scales instead of trouble. I heard those kids play a blast of Duke Ellington bright enough to light up the block. Anyone who heard it had no choice but to smile. Jazz is everywhere in Cape Town, even in theâhood. I wondered if the bar was still there, if the band still played its sweet, silky songs.
âWe only have a couple days here,â I said. âWhenâs she going?â
âTomorrow.â
âWhoâs the actress?â
âSofia . . . Maitlin?â April said casually, as if sheâd never heard of last yearâs Oscar-winning best supporting actress. âMrs. Kunene gave me a number for her assistant, or whatever.â
April was downplaying it. For some reason she didnât want me to take the job. When I held out my hand, April reluctantly pulled a slip of paper out of her purse. The name
Rachel Wentz
was written on the scrap she gave me, with the number for the Twelve Apostles Hotel.
Definitely legit. Rachel Wentz was Maitlinâs
manager,
not her assistant. A manager is a professional who hobnobs with the upper echelons of Hollywood to manage your careerâan assistant gets your coffee. Big difference. Having a license to call Sofia Maitlinâs manager was reason enough to take the job. Iâm an actor first, and access is everything. After being fired from my series, I was out of circulation.
But Iâm no fool. âI came to Cape Town to spend time with you,â I said, slipping the paper in my back pocket. âI didnât come to work.â
âI told her you probably couldnât do it,â April said, relieved. But her face brooded, suddenly dangerous. âYou get hurt so much, Ten. Like youâre . . . punishing yourself.â
Here it comes,
I thought. April didnât mention Serenaâs name, but her ghost was suddenly at our table. I first met April after a friend of mine was murdered, and we had recently passed the one-year anniversary of Serenaâs death. I clamped back the rage and sadness always simmering near the surface; I wanted my thoughts clear for the new tragedy unfolding.
Slowly, April continued, âThe lengths you go to when youâre on these cases feels . . . self-destructiveâlike you
want
to hurt yourself. That scares me, Ten. When you took the T. D. Jackson case, I started to think youâre chasing something else. That maybe youâre looking for something you canât fix by finding the bad guys. Forgiveness, maybe.â
The suspicion that April might be right only made me angrier. âOr, maybe Iâm just good at solving fucking cases.â
âI know youâre good at itâyouâre
great
at itâbut I think itâs aboutmore than that for you. You put yourself in reckless situations, and then you have trouble moving past them. I see these patterns in your history, Ten.â
April sounded like she had just finished a course on me, with charts and graphs. The phrase
your history
hurt. âHavenât I shown you that Iâm not that man anymore?â I said softly.
April was my first monogamous relationship, my first true girlfriend. I literally donât know how many women Iâve had sex withâI stopped counting long ago, when I passed three hundred. In my twenties and early thirties, when acting work was dry, I spent years as a professional âescort,â servicing wealthy women in Hollywood and overseas. I racked up a big body count.
Not long before I took April to Cape Town, my past mistakes caught up with me. A powerful female studio executive tricked me into a meeting and started taking off her clothes, offering me money for sex. Lynda Jewell knew about my history, and found me through my agent when my face started showing up on TV. Sheâd offered me a lot of zeroes to
Ann Voss Peterson, J.A. Konrath