Fatal Pose

by Barna William Donovan

  “Well, that’s something interesting,” Gunnar said under his breath and immediately hit the save button. He would more than need to save Mitzy’s air-headed whining session on the machine, he also decided. He would need to hang on to the entire phone.

  “Mitzy Starr.” Gunnar read her name off the caller ID and winced. She must have changed her name to Starr when she, like, totally came to L.A. because she knew she would one day be like, a really, really big star. Her phone number had a San Diego area code.

  But, indeed, Mitzy’s message was interesting. Would the WBBF go into a partnership with producers as seamy as Brad’s fleshpot company? And would it not look questionable to plan business ventures with someone who was about to take part in a WBBF contest? Gunnar wondered.

  These would be perfect questions to ask Laura Preston, he decided. He would be at the Fisher Gallery tomorrow the moment she showed up. Another question he was curious about was how a rumored arch feminist like Laura Preston could be coaxed into something like WBBF Beauties Caught in the Buff. Maybe if the bodybuilding beauties were caught in the buff, Laura might be game, Gunnar guessed. Muscle Quest magazine, after all, ran a semi-regular centerfold spread of nude female bodybuilders. At one point, the spread was prefaced by an essay by Laura herself on how “hegemonic images of female sexuality can be reconstructed.”

  And those “hegemonic” images were reconstructed quite nicely, too, Gunnar always felt. Those centerfolds always made him think of Erika.

  Before heading back to L.A., Gunnar decided he would need to take more of Brad Holt’s possessions than just his phone. That two-drawer filing cabinet was worth hoisting into the back of his car for later examination.

  But not before raiding Holt’s kitchen.

  It was close to noon, and Gunnar was famished. With thoughts of Diane’s poisoning theory at the forefront of his mind, he headed into Holt’s kitchen and straight for the cupboards. Packaged, sealed energy bars were bound to be in stock somewhere. Even if Holt might have been in the diet phase of the contest prep, obviously avoiding the sugars and carbs of energy bars, he was bound to have them in the kitchen. Every bodybuilder had them stocked away in their home, year-round. It was like an unwritten WBBF rule.

  That poisoning scenario brings up another issue, don’t it? a voice in Gunnar’s head queried.

  And the poisoning scenario certainly did, he concluded. If someone did poison Holt, they had to have done it at, or close to, the time of the contest.

  “The answers are at the hotel,” he thought aloud as he went through Holt’s kitchen cabinets.

  Energy Max power bars! Apple flavored! Gunnar’s favorite.

  He greedily snatched one of the bars from an open twenty-piece box and tore its plastic wrapper open. He realized how time had gotten away from him on the long trip up from L.A. and the search through the house. An energy bar had probably never tasted this good. He decided to take a second one, then slipped a third bar into his pocket for the road home.

  Gunnar swore he would put in at least forty minutes on the treadmill tonight as he checked for the trash can. The energy bars provided just that, energy in the form of carbohydrates. Unless he burned them off with some cardio or lifting, the bars were very fattening.

  Then his artist’s eye for detail made him freeze before tossing the empty wrapper into the trash can.

  A speck of red on all that field of white.

  He took a close look at the contents of the half-empty trash can. Those were probably the last things Holt threw out before going off to his ill-fated appointment at the Sun State.

  There were reams upon reams of clean white paper towels in there. Then, among the folds of all that white paper, he saw a bright red candy wrapper of some sort. He was sure he saw the word “energy” upon its folds and wrinkles.

  Nothing as useful to an investigator as a trash can, indeed.

  Gunnar reached in and carefully removed the wrapper using the very tips of two fingers.

  Ultra Fuel energy bar, the wrapper said.

  “Now, what might you be doing in there?” Gunnar whispered.

  For a bodybuilder going into a competition, eliminating all carbs from his diet during the final days before the contest, energy bars like this were poison. Gunnar knew a competitor of Holt’s caliber would have been disciplined enough not to splurge.

  “You weren’t alone, were you?” Gunnar whispered. “There was somebody else here.”

  Then something else occurred to him. He quickly placed the wrapper on the counter and went through the cupboards again.

  He was right. There were no other Ultra Fuel bars anywhere in the kitchen. Someone had brought this one Ultra Fuel bar with him when visiting Holt, ate it, then threw it away. An energy-bar-consumer. An athlete? Not necessarily, Gunnar reasoned. Everyone ate energy bars. But whoever brought the bar was certainly not dieting for an imminent contest.

  The next thing Gunnar needed to do was to go through the house and look for signs of cohabitation. He had to look in places like the bathroom or the bedroom, maybe the guest bedroom, for signs of a houseguest Holt might have been hosting.

  He couldn’t find any.

  CHAPTER 21

  BITCH.

  YOU CAN’T AFFORD ME.

  The words, stretching across two pairs of unrealistically round breasts underneath skin-tight T-shirts, mocked Laura Preston as she delivered her lecture on the history of restrictive definitions of femininity. The sad thing, however, was how the two girls standing a few feet away from her seemed to think they were kindred spirits in Laura’s social agendas.

  Decades of struggling for equality, for empowerment, and this is what it has come down to, Laura mused. She wanted to spin around on her heels, march out of the Fisher Gallery, and just disappear, just give up on trying to be a bulwark against the degeneration of a culture.

  “So if standards of appearance, standards of attractiveness are just that, standards….” Laura plowed ahead in her speech, casting glances at the oversized black and white photos of female WBBF athletes with outrageously jagged, hypertrophied musculatures, hoping to draw strength from the images as the witless masses bore down on her. “If they have been arbitrarily constructed by a male-dominated system, women’s bodybuilding has been trying to claim this power of construction. We have been striving to redefine femininity on our own terms, with the goal of strength and empowerment. A way of fighting historical subjugation that came in the form of narrowly-constructed ideals of attractiveness.”

  She paused to read the crowd for reactions. Some twenty-five female college undergraduates stared back at her with vacant, uncomprehending eyes. It was time to simplify the speech even more.

  “So,” Laura tried a new approach, “say, rather than your boyfriend pressuring you to be a certain dress size or look a certain way, what if you decided who you were going to be, how you were going to look, and he had to accept it on your own terms?”

  What the hell has higher education come to, she wondered, if these people can’t understand a simple concept like this without me having to take out the crayons to draw a picture?

  The girl with the You Can’t Afford Me T-shirt cast a skeptical glance at one of the bodybuilder photos in The Amazon in the 21st Century exhibit, then back at Laura. Aside from the distant, disinterested look in her eyes, Laura was annoyed by a weird, perpetually slack-jawed expression on the college student’s face. Her lower lip appeared to be hanging limp throughout the entire lecture, giving her a hopelessly stupid look. From certain angles, Laura noticed, you could see a wad of bright pink chewing gum nestled between her bottom row of teeth and her lip, almost imitating a hick’s wad of chaw stuffed into the cheeks.

  “Yeah,” the girl said after what might have been a protracted moment of profound contemplation, “but guys don’t like this look. I mean, can you see what I’m saying?”

  A round of nods came
from the group of students brought here by their professor for a Women in Popular Culture class.

  “Yeah,” another voice fluttered from the crowd. “If these women like, want to do this to themselves and stuff, it’s great and everything. They should do whatever they want.”

  “But,” said the girl who was beyond the means of any guy reading her T-shirt, “most guys, I’m sure, will think this look is gross. I’m not gonna lie, okay? What I’m saying is that I’m just speaking my mind, so don’t take it the wrong way. And the thing is that it’s just a turn-off, so what have you gained?”

  “Right,” opined the girl in the Bitch shirt. “‘Cause if you look like one of the Vogue or Elle or whatever girls, you like control a man, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah,” the expensive girl agreed vigorously. “So you’re empowered, right? You’re using what you’ve got to get what you want. That’s like doing feminism, right?”

  No, that’s not like doing feminism, you stupid, imbecilic little whore! Laura wanted to scream. She wanted to punch that dimwitted, moronic bimbo in her gaping mouth, then storm out of this place. This gallery, this school, had just wasted three days of her life, forcing her to come here and speak to one collection of halfwits after another.

  She had just gotten a crash course in how rapidly American society was crumbling into oblivion. Students in good colleges seemed to care about nothing more than coordinating lip-gloss and nail polish and “using what they got to get what they want.”

  How about that, you brain-dead floozy? something wanted to explode out of Laura. Why don’t you wear a T-shirt that says Cheap Tramp all over it? Or Dirty Little Whore?

  Laura felt the eyes of the students on her. But she couldn’t quite gather her thoughts yet into a sensible response.

  She hated this place with every fiber, every atom of her being. These cretinous, breast-implant-feminists were just the icing on the cake. They might have been the worst of the bunch here, but certainly not the only ones. If it wasn’t people like these, incapable of comprehending how empowerment could mean more than wringing money out of someone through seduction, the tease, and sex, then she was criticized by the more “sensitive” and “progressive” of the student body. “Did these photos and these unrealistically muscular women not damage the self-esteem of vulnerable young girls and put more pressure on them? Did these pictures not tell them to change their bodies, just like any fashion magazine and Madison Avenue ad that gave them unrealistic standards to live up to?”

  So telling people that they were always perfect as they were, that they had no reason to change and better themselves, and that they had a God-given, inalienable right to have the world provide for them and take care of them was the new face of American culture. With all the money these schools wrung out of their students, the least the administration, all of their professors, could do was keep these kids happy, unchallenged customers, lest the little darlings had anxiety attacks and needed to run off and hug a puppy in some “safe space” for a few months.

  Laura stunned herself with these thoughts. Maybe she wasn’t really a feminist anymore after all. Maybe she had become as conservative as an Orange County Republican.

  At last, Laura could affect an easy, friendly chuckle and reply. “Well, no, not exactly. You see, doing feminism does not at all mean looking like some teenage boy’s wet dream to get men to take care of you.”

  There was a look of sullen incomprehension on the girl’s face. Laura might as well have been talking about quantum physics.

  “The point of this exhibit, of women’s bodybuilding, is to have the individual choice to live on your own terms, to define your femininity on your own terms, regardless of what anyone else might think of you.”

  Then Laura saw someone across the hall, yet slowly approaching this group, who just further seemed to stoke her ire. A hot, expanding liquid fire of combativeness roiled within her as she saw the big guy in the summer linen jacket and the Hawaiian shirt very obviously showing interest in Laura and her audience.

  No, he’s not interested in me or the lecture. She took a guess she would have been willing to bet a massive pile of money on. The guy was probably scoping out the students.

  He was very thickly built, Laura could tell, despite his loose-fitting shirt and jacket. A bodybuilder. He was probably a recreational lifter, not a competitor. He looked to be in his late thirties at the very least. Probably older. He lifted regularly, no doubt, to go prowling for girls half his age. Now he saw the collection of teenage and early twenty-something babes, and he slowly approached, looking for a way to make a move.

  An outrage built inside Laura like a volcano ready to blow. She could picture a sick, retrograde symbiotic relationship between this aging macho man and Ms. Bitch or Ms. You Can’t Afford Me.

  Laura was guessing he would eventually make his move by cracking a lame joke about the sexuality of the women displayed in the art exhibit. Then he’d say something equally charming about how he could have straightened any one of them out.

  Didn’t guys like this realize how their type of machismo had gone out of style over forty years ago? Laura marveled. Her most extravagant fantasy was about seeing the male division of the WBBF go out of business one day while the women bodybuilders thrived and prospered. If one thought about it, outrageously overbuilt muscularity could only carry rebellious significance on a woman. Traditional, male-dominated society expected a man to be strong, to be muscular and big and bad. A male rebel did not defy social conventions by lifting weights. Bodybuilding only had cultural significance for women. The age of strong masculinity was long dead. Today, the guy with the pumped pecs and the tank top was the equivalent of the platinum blonde bimbo with the D-cups. The muscle man was the twenty-first century equivalent of Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. But women no longer wanted to be either Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe. For this over-pumped, over-the-hill lothario to be strutting around and flexing his pecs and biceps was akin to wearing a sign that said, “I have no brain. Don’t take me seriously.”

  Or maybe he could be useful for some amusement, a malicious thought slithered through Laura’s mind.

  She watched the big guy approach, missing a question by one of the girls. It sounded like something inane about women bodybuilders having breast implants. “Well, ladies, it looks like we have someone joining us,” Laura said at length as the Hawaiian-shirted man got closer still.

  Most of the girls turned to look at the guy. He, no doubt, appreciates the attention, Laura thought. She would have to do something about that.

  “Perhaps we wandered into the wrong part of the museum?” she asked the big guy.

  “Oh, don’t mind me, just go ahead with the lecture,” the stranger said.

  “You’re quite welcome here, actually. We were just discussing the gendered social constructions of muscularity,” Laura said and smiled pleasantly.

  The guy lifted his eyebrows at that recitation of verbose, somewhat pointlessly complicated jargon. So, does he wish he had a dictionary in his pocket? Laura mused. The big guy might have been looking a tad uncomfortable now, too. Hopefully, he was catching on to the fact that he was being made a fool of.

  “I mean,” Laura continued, “you look like a man who works out a lot.”

  The stranger shrugged. “Well, yeah, recreationally, you know. Not like bodybuilding contests or anything.”

  “And you don’t have any training partners either, who happen to be women and doing bodybuilding contests, or am I wrong?”

  The guy seemed to chuckle and shake his head.

  “Well, something like that is what we’ve been talking about,” Laura said. “Is female muscularity an upsetting of the ruling order of normalcy in the hegemonic male gym culture?”

  The big guy laughed again and waved at Laura. “Look, don’t let me get in the middle of anything important here. You just continue your lecture.” />
  “Oh, it’s not a lecture. It’s a discussion.”

  “You go ahead with your discussion then,” the guy said and took a slight, embarrassed step backward.

  “I do hypothesize that might be the case,” Laura said, not really aiming her words at the guy but not talking solely to the girls either. “I am familiar with the gym culture to a degree myself. And that, ladies, is the whole point of what this exhibit is trying to accomplish. To let you feel the power you can have when defying social conventions. Male-oriented social conventions that is. The power of rebellion, if you will. Only a woman can truly rebel by cultivating her strength and power and her muscular body.”

  “What about guys then?” a squeaky young girl’s voice sneaked out of the crowd.

  Laura, none too subtly, flicked a glance toward the guy in the Hawaiian shirt. “Perhaps for them, it’s a compulsion to prove their masculinity to the world…or overcompensate for their inadequacies.”

  There was laughter all around now.

  CHAPTER 22

  “Very funny,” Gunnar said under his breath and watched Laura Preston’s art appreciation group dispersing. He hoped to steal some of her time before she left the USC campus. The students were still giggling at her closing comments.

  Approaching the WBBF bigwig, he slipped his phone from his pocket and checked yet again if Alexandra Rinaldi might have texted him. Alex was updating him on some incoming information about Mitzy Starr. It looked like Amy McCambridge had located Mitzy, and Holt’s former lover was quite adamant that she had been promised a shot at the WBBF Fitness Beauties in the Buff video.

  “Excuse me! Ms. Preston? Laura Preston?” Gunnar called as he made his way through the scattering crowd of college girls.

  Laura watched him approach. There might have been a slight, bemused arch to her right eyebrow. Was she surprised that he wanted to talk to her?

  “Believe me,” Laura said emphatically, but still with a sly smirk in one corner of her mouth, “there was nothing personal in what I said.”