Fatal Pose

by Barna William Donovan

  “And the surf shop last week,” his wife added. “Tells you something, doesn’t it?”

  “Some thieves hate the beach scene?” Gunnar said.

  “Very funny!” Sherry said with a scowl.

  “What’ve you got to worry about?” Gunnar made light of the situation. “You have a full-service detective agency in-house.”

  Before anyone could reply, one of the three male bodybuilders working on some free-weights nearby approached and looked at Gunnar’s gathering with deep-seated disgust.

  “Agency my ass!” he said in slow, measured tones. “It’s gotta take a real dumb son of a bitch to break into a place that’s gotta be loaded with some of the baddest bad-ass mass monsters all of the time!” He then paused with the calculated drama of a Shakespearean performer before bellowing “Southern Cal!” at the top of his lungs and hitting a double biceps pose of his own. “Tell Joey Reigert I’m on the hunt!” Then he paused again and went back to the double biceps display of strength just to make sure nobody missed the point and said, “That’s all you ever need!”

  With the point made, the athlete ambled away with a bowed head.

  “Yeah, and I’m sure that’s all he has!” Amy said after the big lifter was out of earshot.

  “Amy, I gotta talk to you a second,” Gunnar said and started for the stairway to the second floor.

  Amy followed. “Yeah?” she asked.

  “You wanna get out of that rickety attic in Lomita?”

  “What do I gotta do?”

  “You know that Holt accident on Friday?”

  “You never see that in fitness,” she chirped with insolence.

  “All right, all right, let it go!” Gunnar asked.

  Amy cracked the gum she was chewing and grinned at him.

  “I’m on the case—” he started.

  “What case?”

  “Will you let me finish?” Gunnar was getting tired of the sparring and the kidding.

  “What are ya waiting for?”

  “Holt’s sister hired me to take a look at his death. She doesn’t believe the medical examiner’s ruling and thinks someone could have taken Holt out of the competition on purpose. If she’s right, it could make the job dangerous,” Gunnar said and reached into his pocket. He removed a pair of guest passes to Amazon and The Muscle Center gyms.

  “Amazon and Muscle Center?” Amy winced. “These places are for hardcore muscleheads, Marino!”

  “So what? So’s the Foundry. But for now, Amazon and The Muscle Center are free. These are the places the pros train in. You know they like to keep an eye on the competition, so I need someone to ask around the gyms. I want to know where Holt was coming from.”

  “All right,” Amy said at last. “This is interesting. I get to dig some dirt on you muscleheads.”

  “Whatever’s your kink,” Gunnar said as he began scaling the stairs to the second floor.

  Above the left side of the workout area, a balcony spanned the second floor. A door marked GUNNAR MARINO INVESTIGATIONS, with the crosshairs of a sniper rifle drawn over Gunnar, led to his office.

  CHAPTER 20

  “What the hell are you going to Big Bear Lake for?” Tommy asked Gunnar over the phone. “Or maybe I should ask when are you coming back?”

  “I’ll be back this afternoon, relax,” Gunnar said, trying to sound nonchalant. He leaned against the side of his Charger, crossed his legs, and tried scratching with one thumb at the folds of the wrapping plastic on top of the box of five Vegas Corona cigars he’d picked up at the Venice Tinderbox.

  “Look, I’m just saying, Angie’s been giving me a hard time about this constant stakeout. We’ve been having an upswing in business at the store.”

  “Tell her Kelly’s been having an upswing in business too, and she’ll be paying us real good to do these jobs for her. So what’s going on down there, anyway?”

  The previous night Gunnar had returned to the stakeout house in Lomita to find only a match stuck between the post and the gate of the property’s fencing, and Joey gone from the house. If any of the operatives needed to take off before they were relieved by the next shift, they would stick the match into the door and give the next person a ring to let them know they should expect an empty house. In case the match was gone when the following lookout showed, they knew something was amiss. So far, none of them had ever found a fallen match. Last night, Joey wound up trailing all four of Kelly’s targets to a strip joint in West Hollywood. The detachment of gunmen, they had noticed earlier, had a gray Buick LaCrosse and a brown Honda Civic at their disposal.

  “Nothing much. I followed them to a Chinese place just before lunch, then a bar on Sunset. I think these people came here with a pocket guide to L.A. or something. All I see are tourists everywhere I follow ‘em.”

  Gunnar chuckled and managed to breach the cigar’s wrapper at last.

  “So what gives at Big Bear Lake?” Tommy asked.

  “I have to start putting together a picture of Holt’s life, business, assets, everything he had in and around L.A. Last night I got some info from Kelly about the various investors who might have been in business with him in those movies he made, and she told me Holt had property out in San Bernardino.”

  “That’s why I gotta compete seriously again,” Tommy said and chuckled. It sounded ironic, Gunnar thought. “Get that pro card, the endorsement deals, and the house in San Bernardino. The mortgage we got now is killing us.”

  “Anyway, Diane not only confirmed this but said the Big Bear Lake house was the place Holt most likely locked himself away in the last weeks before the Sun State contest. She said that was the way he had always trained in the past.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “If someone really had it in for him or wanted something from him, they might have been there. I gotta check it out. So stay on the surveillance routine until you hear from me.”

  “Hey, Marino—”

  “I’ll talk to you this afternoon, okay?” Gunnar didn’t let him say any more before clicking off and pocketing his phone.

  It took him a brisk two hours to get out of the city and wind his way through the San Bernardino mountains past Big Bear Lake Village and to arrive at Holt’s secluded cabin. There, Gunnar found a padlocked gate with a sign proclaiming the area beyond as PRIVATE PROPERTY. The late Brad Holt’s land was demarcated with a simple chain link fence Gunnar scaled. He dropped into some bushes on the other side, reached under his tan linen jacket, and opened the leather strap fastening the Sig Sauer into its holster.

  With that precaution out of the way, he proceeded further onto the property, noting how peaceful and exquisite it looked with its sequestering lot of pines towering on all sides. He was almost tempted to take his phone out and snap some pictures of the area. He could enjoy setting up his easel and paints and doing some landscapes of a place like this. Gunnar had been painting since he was ten, but he found unexpected benefits to both bodybuilding and detective work in the hobby. In the iron sport, the most important thing after lifting and eating was recovery and rest. Joey Reigert had his relaxation apps, and Gunnar found art to be the most soothing relaxant. In detective work, on the other hand, painting helped sharpen the eye to tiny and extremely significant details.

  Walking along the gravelly driveway, he proceeded until he found a Victorian-style lodge. Tommy Novak should indeed look at this house, Gunnar mused, if he wanted motivation to train for that pro card. The house was as exquisite as the surroundings it sat in. When Tommy would later ask about the house, Gunnar would be sure to tell him how great the place looked. But Gunnar would also be enough of a friend to remind Tommy that the fire insurance on the place must have been murder.

  Gunnar climbed the front porch of the house and peered through the window on the left of the front door. He saw a very large living room inside. Nicely furnished.

  “Too bad it�
�s not your style, Diane,” he whispered as he tried the door.

  Locked.

  He expected as much. Last night he’d called Diane from the office for the exact address of the lodge. She could tell him that her brother used to live “somewhere up in some mountainy place, like something called Lake-whatever or something,” but she admitted that she had never been there. Actually, she said, she hadn’t been to L.A. in two years. Her boutique down in Miami had been taking up all her time. She also told him, somewhat apologetically, that when Brad had sent her a picture of the place, it really didn’t do anything for her. “I’m a beach and nightclub girl, you know? I’m not into the mountains and the outdoorsy stuff.”

  The real shame in Diane not taking to the rustic life, Gunnar thought as he reached for the small leather case in his pocket, was the fact that she couldn’t give him a set of keys to the house. Holt’s belongings at the Sun State only seemed to include his car keys and the keys to his L.A. condo.

  “Let’s see if I still have it,” Gunnar muttered and crouched down in front of the door.

  The leather case was something he had from his CID gig at the Marine Corps. It was a set of lock picks a captain really shouldn’t have given him and something he really shouldn’t have had with him when off duty.

  “Outstanding,” he said and chuckled, popping the lock open within seconds.

  What he found inside was a bizarre duality, but not entirely unexpected. Even before the glitz and gloss of the WBBF, he knew Brad Holt was not all that he appeared to be. The T&A back room, the room with the posters blown up from Girls Caught in the Buff videos, was a peculiarly Victorian touch to all the country charm everywhere else on the Holt property; a dark underbelly of all the propriety, manners and morals on the surface.

  But aside from the smut on the walls, the entire room looked flawlessly clean. Brad hadn’t been doing anything in here before the contest. He must have been up here for the exact reason he gave Diane and everyone else who knew his routine. He was here to train and do nothing else, worry about nothing else.

  Gunnar needed to understand the logic of every implication of this scene, though. Diane had told him that withdrawing to the mountain retreat was Brad’s usual pre-contest routine. It was all about psychology, Diane had quoted her brother. He liked to disappear up here and keep everyone guessing as to what kind of a shape he would show up in on the day of the contest. Or at least that was what he had been doing during the old days of competition. They had written scores of stories about his training routines in the WBBF publications years ago. Now, with his highly-touted comeback contest, the information was rehashed in the magazines yet again.

  “If he was afraid for his life, he would be making himself vulnerable up here,” Gunnar said under his breath, then went about studying every detail of the soft-core porn room.

  Aside from the leather smoking chairs, the humidor, the pictures, hunting trophies, and guns on the walls, Holt kept a two-drawer file cabinet in a corner and a computer on a large oak desk. Along with whatever help Kelly could provide, if he wanted to start getting an inkling of who it was that had Holt on edge, Gunnar knew he would need to sift through Holt’s records and business-related correspondence.

  “But not just yet,” Gunnar whispered and looked around the base of the desk.

  There was nothing as useful to an investigator as a trash can. Gunnar had often found it a smart thing to start a case by sifting through the refuse. He leaned over the little container—polished brass, expensive-looking—and got an idea for how many clues he might come up with as to whether or not Brad Holt was murdered: not much. The waste paper basket was empty.

  Gunnar scanned the top of the desk next and found a lone manila folder in a set of paper and envelope trays. He opened it and found that the top item among several sheets of paper was a glossy piece of advertisement. Something that might have been torn out of a magazine—The Amazon in the 21st Century in bold black letters across the top of the sheet. Underneath the copy lay a provocative photograph of a woman bodybuilder, almost naked but for a tattered leather loincloth, her oversized arms loaded with thick, blocky loaves of veiny muscles clutching a spear at just the right angles to keep most of her sinuous chest covered. “The USC Summer Art Exhibit Series,” the copy continued below the photo. “Only at the Fisher Gallery.”

  Now it clicked in Gunnar’s head. He had read about this before. The WBBF was sponsoring a photography exhibit devoted to female bodybuilders in the organization’s gung-ho attempt to bolster the popularity of their women athletes. After the USC exhibit, the show was set to go on the road, appearing at a lot of university art galleries. Those would be schools with leading women’s studies programs.

  “And what did Brad have to do with any of it?” Gunnar wondered aloud. His eyes scanned the room again. The decorations here, Holt’s entire film-producing career, was an antithesis of The Amazon in the 21st Century.

  Gunnar looked at the flier again. There was one thing he missed on his first examination. The bottom of the page informed that on August 10, 11, and 12, a special narration to the exhibit would be provided by Laura Preston, the President of Operations of the World BodyBuilding Federation.

  And today was the eleventh.

  Gunnar palmed his cell phone, got the central phone line to USC from their web page, and negotiated the school’s phone system until learning what he already suspected. He was out of time. For today at least. Laura Preston was due to leave the exhibit in about ten minutes.

  If Gunnar wanted to understand Holt’s life, his routine, or his new association with the WBBF, at least, he should have been trying to make contact with someone as high up in the Federation as possible. After Robert Holbrook, Laura Preston was the most important power player in that organization.

  Gunnar folded the art exhibit advertisement and slipped it inside his jacket as a runaway thought occurred to him. Could Holt have been afraid of the WBBF?

  He gnawed on that one for a while, but it didn’t seem to make sense. He should have been quite valuable to the organization, returning to competition as he did. It sold a lot of magazines.

  Gunnar thumbed through the rest of what lay inside the manila folder. It looked like a set of comparison photos. They were all of female physique athletes but in two distinct categories. A handful of pictures were of women bodybuilders from the nineteen-nineties. Another set showed current fitness contestants. The most obvious point of comparison for anyone versed in the bodybuilding vs. fitness issue was the way some fitness women today were as muscular as some of the bodybuilders in the nineties.

  Now, this captured Gunnar’s imagination. He definitely needed to be at the Fisher Gallery on the USC campus tomorrow and meet Laura Preston. Any faithful reader of Muscle Quest and Body and Power, or any of the WBBF’s websites, knew Preston was a committed champion of women’s bodybuilding. On more than one occasion, controversy had been spurred when rumors surfaced to the effect that Laura Preston was unfriendly towards fitness. And now, for some reason, Brad Holt had somehow concerned himself with the WBBF’s female athletes while sequestered at this lodge for the last crucial moments of contest preparation.

  Looking around the office, Gunnar noted something else about Brad Holt. It was, perhaps, a confirmation of some of the worst things said about bodybuilders. It might also have been a personal confirmation of some of the worst impressions Gunnar had about Holt.

  “Self-obsessed, pathological narcissism,” he whispered as he scanned a bookshelf behind the desk.

  Among the pictures decorating the room, there was nothing that hinted at any of Brad’s personal relationships. There were his pinups on the walls, sure, models with all of whom he was reputed to have slept, but no snapshots of Brad alone with any one girlfriend. There was nothing indicating a family, not even a picture of Diane anywhere. On the bookshelf, in front of a line of books on weightlifting and rehabilitative medicine, Gunnar found
three framed pictures of Holt. Two of them showed Holt flexing back in competition days. The third was a much older picture of Holt. His face looked fresher, boyish, not like the lean, granite countenance and tired eyes of the bodybuilder forged through ultra human workout sessions, pain, steroids, then alternating forced feedings and starvation. This was a Brad Holt without muscles, standing quite lean and outfitted in the standard camouflage battle dress uniform of the marines. The picture must have been taken on some Marine Corps base because Gunnar spotted a Quonset hut in the background, past a line of chain link fencing displaying half the crest of some installation.

  Then movement caught Gunnar’s eye, a flash of color.

  “A message,” he said to himself, noticing a red number one flashing on a sleek black telephone. “Now, who might you be?” Gunnar said and pressed the playback button.

  “Hey, Brad, it’s Mitzy,” a girl’s voice came through the speaker. Her fast, somewhat squeaky voice prompted Gunnar to quickly raise the answering machine’s volume. “Just want to wish you luck and everything. You know, if you win and you’ll be like, in a good mood and stuff, I wanna see you right away. You know, sorry again that I can’t be there at the, uh, you know, contest, but I’ll be like, really pulling for you and praying and looking forward to your win. I know you can do it, just like you said. But….” She paused for like really serious-sounding effect. “You know I’m working out, too. You know what I’m talking about. Now that your contest is gonna be over, we can go ahead with the auditions for the WBBF Fitness Beauties Caught in the Buff, right? I mean, this is like, gonna work, right? You said you can get me in a contest, and then I can qualify, right? Look, you know I don’t like, wanna be a bitch or anything about it, but I’m just getting really nervous about it. I really want to do this. This could really make some stuff happen for me, and I’m just really looking forward to it. But anyway, get back to me, okay? And good luck and all the best, and I’m really pulling for you, and I just know you can do it, okay, sweetie? I love you, babe.”