Fatal Pose

by Barna William Donovan

  Unfortunately, Erika had the willpower of steel. She had the determination to achieve whatever goal she set her mind to. Even becoming an emaciated waif.

  “I was told they could have used me as a piece of live teaching aid for every eating disorder in the books,” Erika had once told Gunnar. “That’s what Dr. Mayfield said after they found me unconscious in a pool of vomit in this New York designer’s house after a party. The glamorous life of a model, right? But that’s exactly what they said—and they were on the money—every single self-destructive, dangerous thing ever documented about eating, dieting, body image issues, I had it. Bingeing, purging, laxatives, chain smoking night and day to keep my metabolism burning fat, diet pills nonstop, the whole thing.”

  In therapy, her counselors had praised Erika’s almost compulsive power of determination. Then they told her she had to start using that determination to live life on her own terms, not according to the irrational whims of others and what strangers thought her body should look like.

  When Erika saw a bodybuilding magazine in a grocery store a block away from the crisis counseling clinic, she knew exactly what she would do to live life on her own terms. She would treat her body not only as she saw fit but as a walking billboard for radical self-determination. Not only did she not care for what the fashion world trendsetters said she had to look like, but now she would turn herself into something those very important trendsetters—the media, the fashion magazines, her mother’s high-toned society world—admonished a woman must never look like.

  Thus, Erika and Gunnar’s paths had crossed. Gunnar certainly never believed a beautiful woman couldn’t be hard, pumped, and buff. He liked the fact that Erika wasn’t one of those bimbo pseudo feminists who usually outnumbered the serious musclewomen in the gyms, even in the muscle-head gyms. She wasn’t one to get top-heavy with basketball-sized breast implants, expensive hairdos and makeup, and play head games with men to feel “empowered, because that like, means feminist if I get what I want.”

  After the muscle pit, Gunnar and Erika had each other, and their lives were perfect.

  For a while.

  CHAPTER 16

  Gunnar leaped over the low-reaching fence while holding a cooler in his left hand. He approached the back entrance to the surveillance apartment Kelly had been paying him to occupy on a detail incurring too many overhead expenses these days. A private investigator paid his bills by investigating, but undertaking a load of more than one case at a time left him overextending his assets when he was called into an ongoing, twenty-four-hour surveillance of four dangerous people. Employing a handful of bodybuilders occupying themselves with various odd jobs outside of their training routines was affordable when needing to tail husbands who developed an affinity to clock a lot of overtime hours late into the night, or when women suspected the guys they had met on a dating app were not who they claimed to be. But when Kelly asked him to watch over a quartet of out-of-towners a client of hers swore were hitmen sent to keep him from finishing his divorce proceedings, Gunnar was forced to keep his motley collection of “Foundry Gym Irregulars” on a permanent payroll of surveillance.

  The room the surveillance group used for their work was on the second floor of an old white wood-paneled duplex in Lomita. An unkempt lawn ran the perimeter around the dwelling, in turn, bordered by the small picket fencing.

  To get to his post, Gunnar scaled a stairway rising outside the building to the second floor. The top of the companionway ended on a small landing where he paused to open the door. Just inside, he stood in a small anteroom leading to the apartment’s main hall.

  Without having to see him clearly as his eyes were adjusting to the interior’s murk, Gunnar realized Tommy Novak was on the job. Gunnar heard the sliding and clanging of his barbells. Entering the apartment, he found his hired lookout pumping out a quick set of alternating dumbbell curls with light weights.

  On the right side of the room, an old lime green davenport sat and absorbed dust. A few feet away from the davenport, a doorway—almost never used—led to the currently unoccupied lower level. Plates from Tommy’s portable weight set crowded the floor, and a table was packed with various plastic food containers. A small fan circulated whatever fresh oxygen permeated the room through the open window.

  But Tommy quickly placed the weights on the floor upon Gunnar’s entrance, looked at him, and grinned. “Ka-ching! Ka-ching!” he said in a somewhat nasal baritone and raised and lowered his right fist to mimic what might either have been a cash register or a slot machine. “Just rackin’ up those points, Guns! My bank account loves you!”

  Gunnar headed straight for the Nikon D5600 DSLR camera with a zoom lens pointing out the window between the edges of a pair of curtains. The device offered a view inside another small house across the lawn and a narrow alley. Kelly’s targets were staying there, and, as long as the majority of their party was in the house, Gunnar’s team was supposed to sit and watch. Should all of those targets have suddenly decided to leave, or at least a group of three, the surveillance operative behind the telescope had to go and follow. When scheduling conflicts arose over the teams replacing each other at the post, as they had two times already, Gunnar put one of them on bodyguard duty next to Kelly’s client.

  “And what am I getting for my money?” Gunnar asked and looked into the camera. He saw three men through the living room window. Two of them appeared to be watching TV from a pair of easy chairs, while the third reclined on a sofa and read a magazine.

  “My undivided attention,” Tommy said.

  Gunnar didn’t reply. He looked over the floor with amazement at how many pieces of iron his friend was willing to lug out here every day.

  “I said I’m keeping an eye on them,” Tommy said.

  “And Joey?” Gunnar asked. He had three friends from the Foundry doing his surveillance work this time, but he was worried about their ability to handle a situation like this. They had all seen the people next door carrying handguns, and Gunnar either worried about his associates losing their nerve if they had to follow the subjects or losing their cool and getting too fearless.

  Tommy Novak, he had the least worries about since Tommy had the pragmatism and level-headedness of an accountant.

  Operative number two, however, was a bubbly fitness competitor, Amy McCambridge, with a frustratingly quick temper and short patience. Of his employees, Amy seemed to be the most serious about private investigations as a career. Working for Gunnar, she was compiling the four years of experience required to obtain a California private investigator’s license.

  Operative number three, Joey Riegert, on the other hand, feared that any unplanned physical endeavors outside the gym might cause some freak injury that would sideline him from the local competition circuit. Gunnar, most often, overlooked Riegert’s timidity because he was a three-hundred-pound human wall whose scowl could cause a heart attack.

  “Well, Joey’s another story,” Tommy said.

  Gunnar looked at him with eyes narrowing. There was no one else he could recruit for his work other than Tommy, Joey, and Amy, and he didn’t need a mutiny during a delicate case.

  “Hell yeah,” Tommy must have sensed his boss’s apprehension and got dramatic. “You better stay out of his reach, paisan. He’s balls-to-the-wall on the Southern Cal contest, and he says you’ve been an adverse influence on his recovery time.”

  “What recovery time? All he’s gotta do is sit here and look through a camera!”

  “Stress. Those guys across the alley’ve got some serious firepower,” Tommy said and began repacking his food containers into his own cooler.

  “They have a couple of guns. So if he sits on his ass and stays quiet, they won’t know he’s here. Plus, he’s got a gun—”

  But they were interrupted by a wavering, shrill voice resonating from outside. “Hey, Marino!” an old man’s yell traveled up and through the open window. “Where are
you?”

  “Oh, damn it,” Gunnar exclaimed. It was the owner of the duplex, and so far, he had driven out here twice during the past week, upset that he had agreed to rent the upper floor to Kelly indefinitely and insisting that she sign a lease. Nicos Maldonis, though, appeared to have been in some way intimidated by the woman lawyer since he kept reappearing at the house itself and arguing with Gunnar’s crew. These loud cries from below were what infuriated Gunnar the most, as they served to draw attention to the surveillance room.

  “Look, I gotta get out of here, okay?” Tommy said and picked up his cooler and a duffel bag he packed the weights in. “Angela’s gonna be reaming me a new one if you keep me locked away here much longer. I gotta get back to the store. Oh, yeah, and Kelly’s been all over the phone checking who’s sitting in here.”

  Gunnar knew that Kelly wasn’t comfortable with the hired help putting more time into surveillance than he did. She had been checking Tommy’s, Amy’s, and Joey’s cell phones to see who was spending the most time in this desolate room.

  “Here,” Tommy went on and reached into the side pocket of the duffel bag. He removed the Beretta 92FS 9mm Gunnar had every person sitting on surveillance keep at their side. “Later, man,” he said and disappeared out the back door.

  “Just get rid of that damned Nicos!” Gunnar yelled after him.

  “Will do,” Tommy’s voice trailed after him.

  Gunnar watched the old man circle around the back of the building, but he never did come up the stairs. Tommy did as he was told.

  He liked Tommy’s style and dependability, and he was amused by the way his legman got that way. Tommy Novak used to be a hard-case punk from Chicago. He was the type everyone remembered from high school, haunting the shop classes with his long hair, heavy-metal T-shirt, and jeans. After he grew tired of his father haranguing him about getting his act together, he packed up and left for the muscle Mecca in Venice Beach. Tommy’s father was an even harder case Polish immigrant who built a respectable furniture business after starting over in the U.S. by hauling garbage. He railed on his son day after day about either using his head in school or his muscles somewhere outside the gym. But in Los Angeles, Tommy gained some bearing the way most tough-guys do. He realized there were plenty of guys out there a lot tougher. He also realized that turning pro as a bodybuilder was a road not only very long but littered with the remains of armies of musclemen. Instead of the professionals running gyms and touting fitness wear in lucrative, six-figure endorsement deals, Tommy met the no-hopers and the never-wills pushing forty, holding down jobs as security guards and bouncers and envisioning a pro career that was more hypothetical fantasy than a plausible dream. All of the elder Novak’s ball-busting about hard work also soon surfaced from Tommy’s subconscious, and they helped him orient his life. He eventually got a job selling scuba equipment, then opened a bicycle shop with his fiancée. He still trained and competed on a rare occasion, but Angela was keeping tight reins on his ambitions this time, making sure he kept reality prioritized.

  After finishing an In-N-Out Double-Double burger and low-carb-shake lunch, Gunnar checked to see if everything was still calm across the alley. He would check in with Kelly, he decided, but first, he needed to talk to Erika.

  CHAPTER 17

  Gunnar felt perplexed by the chaos of thoughts, impressions, and suppositions tumbling through his mind as he waited to be connected to Erika’s extension at Bayside General Hospital. It felt like he was sixteen again, calling a girl from school, asking her if she wanted to go to the movies. No one but Erika Lindstad could do this to him. But again, through all the years since they had broken up, he’d never loved anyone like he had loved Erika.

  The thought depressed him now, and he wasn’t perplexed by the reason at all. It was depressing. He still loved Erika while she had gone on with her life, no doubt finding happiness of her own.

  She had been back in L.A., and she hadn’t even made an effort to contact him, he mused glumly.

  Why should she, stupid? he asked himself. She’s probably married, or at least deeply committed to a long-term, marriage-bound relationship.

  “Gunnar?” Her voice came through the phone at last.

  He felt as if someone was jumping up and down on his chest, his heartbeats shaking his entire body. “Hello, Erika. How have you been?” he said evenly.

  “Hey,” she said, and her husky, sultry voice sounded like she might have been smiling. “I’m good. I’m pretty good.” There was a beat on her end, then she added, “It’s nice hearing from you.”

  “Thanks, same here,” Gunnar said. “It’s really great hearing your voice again.”

  “Thank you,” Erika said. Gunnar was glad to hear that her voice still sounded like it was coming through a smile. “It’s been too long,” she added after another beat.

  Gunnar could have pondered what she meant by that for some time. Instead, he quickly said, “Yes. Just a bit too long. Look, I needed to contact you because there were some things I need to ask you. Some things having to do with a job I’m working on. A case I was just hired for.”

  That was an efficient, friendly segue, he thought. But his mind was racing, analyzing Erika’s words, interpreting her voice, trying to picture her smile. Why did she think it was too long since they had spoken? Was she thinking about their breakup? Was she regretting it too…?

  “What kind of case?” Erika’s voice snapped Gunnar back to attention. “What are you working on?”

  “Brad Holt.”

  “Wow,” Erika said, sounding truly taken aback. “He died at a contest four days ago. I was asked to consult on his examination by the coroner’s office.”

  “I know. That’s what I needed to talk to you about. I heard they called you in to make the final decision because you know what’s normal and what isn’t about a competitive bodybuilder’s system at the time of a contest.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What kind of questions did the medical examiner have about Holt’s death? What was he unsure about?”

  “About everything. And I went over his report and concurred with his opinion. The shape Holt was in, we should have ruled him a suicide. That man starved and dehydrated himself into oblivion. But what’s this all about? What have you been hired to do?”

  “I’ll tell you in a second. What about the specifics of his condition?”

  “Well,” Erika said, slower, sounding like she was trying to recall all the details of the examination. Knowing her perfectionism, Gunnar could see her wanting to recall the exact points of the report. “Holt had gone into a coma when the paramedics picked him up from the contest, and they could see the obvious signs of dehydration. They tried to put fluids into him as they had done previously. According to their report—”

  “Right, he passed out before.”

  “Look, that’s just it. We didn’t do a full autopsy of the body because it didn’t fall within regulations. But there was one thing that bothered the M. E., and he called me in to take a look at the body.”

  “What?”

  “There were needle tracks that made Holt’s rear look like a pincushion. It was obvious that he was heavily on steroids, but the juice shouldn’t have killed him. Anyway, there were no fresh needle marks.”

  “Right,” Gunnar mumbled.

  “As we both know, if someone’s on the juice before a contest, they’ll still stop using a good ten to twelve days before the event.”

  “Sure,” Gunnar said slowly. Steroids caused water retention and prevented a contestant from achieving the shredded, striated look judges were looking for. He quickly accepted the fact that steroid injections couldn’t have killed Holt, and he remembered his own competition days. He used the juice the way most bodybuilders did when he first moved to California—the way Erika had and the way they had shot each other up for contest-prep workouts—just like all competitors used the drugs a
nd got away with it because contest promoters’ pledges for a drug-free sport were nothing more than P.R.

  “Anyway,” Erika said, “this was a completely plausible accident. I don’t think we could be faulted for not doing a full autopsy.”

  “I see.”

  “Besides, no one could locate any direct family members at the time. But I haven’t been involved with the case since then, and I really don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Right….”

  “Gunnar,” Erika said, sternly this time. “What’s happening?”

  “Well, I’ve found a direct family member. Rather, she found me and hired me. It’s Holt’s sister, and she has questions about his condition.”

  “I see.”

  “She wants me to find out if Holt could have been murdered.”

  There was a pause on Erika’s side, just like Gunnar suspected there would be. “Why does she think that?” she asked at length.

  “That part’s not clear yet. She just talked to me this morning. But what do you think? Could this be murder?”

  “Well, he was at a contest,” Erika said cautiously, obviously trying to work on the logic of Gunnar’s questions. “He was fully active. He did the preliminaries, took the stage for the pose off—”

  “I know,” Gunnar cut in. “I was there. I saw the whole thing. But what if he didn’t know he was being killed? Could he have been poisoned?”

  “Theoretically, I suppose. Anything might have been possible.”

  “How about this? I saw the first time he went down. He passed out backstage before the contest. Then they got some liquids into him, revived him enough to get up and start the show. I mean, he posed through the prelims, did well enough to qualify for the finals, then walked around during intermission, and he died in the middle of the final pose off. He seemed fine for such a long time. I’m assuming he had been drinking his liquids through all this time. So why does he die so late after his first collapse?”