“What.” More of a threat than a question.

I swallowed that dry lump again. “Look, I can help you. At the moment, the public is ready to write you off. Let them hear your story.”

“I could give a shit what the public thinks,” he said. He was surprisingly spunky for a billionaire who had just spent the last week in jail.

“Fine. But the studio heads read the papers, too. You think you’re ever going to get a job in this town again? Let alone work with child actors?”

“I never touched no kids,” he argued.

I wagged a finger at him. “Don’t be naïve,” I shot back. “You know as well as I do that it doesn’t matter what you’ve done. It matters what people think you’ve done. Guilty until proven innocent. And,” I added, “it’s my job to tell people what to think.”

He paused, seeming to digest this for a moment. “What paper you work for?”

“The Informer.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, recognition slowly setting in. “I know you,” he said, his jaw clenching. “You’re that damned gossip columnist.”

“Uh…”

“I’ll tell you what you can do for me, Tina Bender. Go fuck yourself.” He slammed the receiver into the set.

“No!” I banged on the window again.

“Don’t touch the glass!” The guard’s hand hovered over his firearm.

I threw both hands up in surrender. “Sorry!”

But I was glad to see Pines hadn’t walked away. He stood, his arms crossed over his chest, glaring.

I gestured to the telephone and mouthed the word, “please.”

I attributed it to the fact that waiting back at his cell were hours worth of nothing that he reached for the receiver again.

“You have some nerve coming here,” Pines growled into the phone. “You’ve been crucifying me since day one.”

“I never printed anything that wasn’t true.”

“You wouldn’t know the truth if it bit you in the ass, girl. You print rumors.”

I cocked my head to the side. “So, tell me a rumor, Pines.”

He shook his head back and forth, a big, creepy smile spreading across his unshaven face. “You know how many reporters, legitimate reporters, would give their left nut to get an exclusive with me? You think I’m just gonna give it to you?”

I took a deep breath. It was now or never. “Jake Mullins.”

“Who?”

“He was in your last film. Played the dad. OD’ed on sleep medication a couple of months ago.”

Pines paused. Then nodded as if reluctant to admit any connection. “Yeah. I remember. What about him?”

“I heard you two were pretty chummy.”

“We worked together.”

“But you knew he took sleeping pills?”

Pines narrowed his eyes. “So what if I did? The guy took one too many. It was an accident.”

“He took one handful too many. Where were you the night he died?”