Ben leans back in his chair and shrugs off his jacket. “Then before we do anything else,” he says, “maybe you ought to turn the phone off, just in case.”
I’d worried that I sounded paranoid. Now I wonder if I was paranoid enough.
Ben and Amelia ask questions and take copious notes. They’re so incredibly assured and thorough that I begin to hope they can actually get me out of this mess. But Ben says he needs to see my contracts and all that hope whistles straight back out of me.
Every contract is in the possession of Davis or other people Davis hired. I know of no way to get Ben a thing without alerting them all.
I tell them this, feeling like an idiot. “I was twenty when I got signed,” I explain, “and I was dead broke. I was just thrilled someone was willing to take charge and handle all the details, and anytime I need something, Davis has always just offered to take care of it.”
“Yeah,” Ben says. “I bet he did.” I hear in his sigh the words he kept to himself. Of course he offered to take care of it—he wanted to make sure no one was checking up on him. For a girl who insists she can’t lean on anyone, it strikes me that I allowed myself to just lie flat where Davis is concerned.
“As far as those contracts go,” he continues, “how do you feel about pretending to buy a house?”
I laugh. “What?”
“You’re going to decide to buy a house. An amazing, very expensive house somewhere in LA.” He turns to Amelia and she nods and pulls out her phone, already researching. “And I’m going to approach your accountant and whoever else for copies of those contracts, because obviously any bank would want to see them before they give you a loan.”
Amelia holds up her phone. “This one’s nice,” she says, showing us a twenty-two-million-dollar mansion with multiple pools overlooking the lights of the city.
I laugh. “I live in a one-bedroom right now. That’s quite the upgrade.”
Ben’s smile is brief. “Great. But I’ve got to warn you—there’s a strong possibility he’s been mismanaging things.”
My stomach sinks. “Mismanaging them…how?”
He frowns. “Drew, even decent people are seduced by power, by someone else’s money. Even decent people rationalize skimming off the top. And Davis doesn’t sound like he was ever a decent person.”
“So you think he’s been taking my money,” I whisper. I’m sure I sound impossibly naïve to him right now, since I’ve clearly painted Davis as an asshole. But there’s a vast divide between an asshole and a thief.
“I’d stake my life on the fact that he’s been taking your money,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how much money, and how many other people have been helping themselves alongside him. He’s gone to great lengths to keep you out of the loop, and there’s probably a reason for it.”
“Are you really going to be able to figure all this out, though?” I ask, feeling winded. Sure, I have money. I have a lot of money. But most of my revenue from the last tour and the most recent album is still “out there” somewhere, theoretically being held until venues and the crew and a thousand other entities have gotten their cut. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to separate out the truth from the excuses.
“With some help, yes,” he says. I like that he’s so sure of himself—one of us needs to be. “But if my suspicions are correct, he’s going to fight you tooth and nail to hang on to control, and you’re really going to need a backbone when it happens. He’s going to try to convince you to let him handle everything with the house, and he’ll go out of his way to make you back down.”
I want Ben to be wrong about all this, but what he’s describing sounds exactly like what Davis has done all along.
“Why the fuck are you buying a twenty-two-million-dollar house?” Davis demands when I arrive on set the next day.
I shouldn’t be surprised but somehow I am. Ben contacted my accountant, and my accountant ran straight to Davis. That, to me, is the first nail in the coffin for them both.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I reply. “I can afford it, right?”
I see the way frustration twists inside him. There’s a momentary flare of his nostrils, a curl of his lip. “You’re famous,” he says after a second’s pause. “You don’t need to go through a bank for a loan like you’re Bob and Betty Sue of Buttfuck, Nowhere, hoping to qualify for a new condo. We’ve got people who can take care of all that for you.”
“I don’t want it taken care of for me, though,” I tell him. “I’m twenty-six and buying my first place. I want to do it myself like any other adult would.”
“Normal adults do things themselves. The benefit of being a celebrity is that you don’t have to. I need you focused on your job—you know, the one you haven’t exactly been crushing of late.”
My chest is growing tighter and tighter the longer this conversation goes on. Exactly how much does he have to hide?
“Except I’ve already handled it,” I reply. “You’re the one wasting my time arguing. And why would my accountant be calling you?”
He’s flustered then. I’m sure he anticipated I’d hand this over as readily as I have everything else. “He was just concerned. He didn’t understand why you’d be dealing with a stranger for all this.”
“Everyone I deal with is a stranger,” I reply.
He sighs heavily, as if I’m being childish. “A stranger to me. You should only be going with people I’ve vetted. I’ll find you someone else.”
“No,” I reply. “Just tell the firm to give Ben whatever he needs.”
“I’m very uncomfortable with bringing in outsiders,” he says.
Yes, I think. I bet you are.
Beth and I chat on the phone the day after my meeting with Ben. I don’t reference her cancer, since I’m not supposed to know, but I do ask how she’s doing and she dismisses the question, wanting instead to know how I am. I stammer through a conversation about the tour, about the sitcom I’m filming. It’s hard when the most exciting thing in my life—the only exciting thing in my life—is my relationship with her son.
We make plans to get together when I’m back in LA, which is when she asks if I’m going to see my mother before I leave.
I blink in surprise. Beth and I have never really discussed my family before. “I hadn’t planned on it,” I reply, gazing at Central Park through the hotel room window. It’s March, but still fully winter here. There are lots of things about New York I don’t miss, and the weather is high on the list—but not first. “We don’t really get along all that well.”
“How could any mother not get along with you?” she asks. “You’re an angel.”
My throat swells. Obviously, I have to take what Beth says with a grain of salt—she’d say the same of Six, I’m sure—but the simple fact that she still likes me, even after I broke up with her son, feels like a gift I can never repay. “I’m not really an angel,” I say quietly. “I’m frequently kind of a jerk.”