“Did you know the boy?”
I shook my head.
“Do you like boys?”
I wanted to laugh, but I knew better.
“No, I don’t like boys. I don’t like children in general. I don’t have much to do with children and I don’t go out of my way to associate with them.”
“Witnesses place you with the boy.”
“I never saw him before.”
He looked as though he couldn’t decide if I was smart enough to lie intelligently.
“How about I search your bungalow? Do you have a problem with that, or do I need to get a search warrant?”
What did I have in that apartment other than a couple of cookbooks I’d picked up used at the Solvang swap meet and my collection of Penthouses and Playboys?
“I don’t care.”
“What do you think was done to the boy?” he asked me with one eyebrow cocked.
I shrugged, but then I guess my experience as a former junkie and graduate of a diversion program came into play. I itched to talk when I knew I should keep my mouth shut.
“I think somebody overdosed him.”
Graves cocked an eyebrow.
“Why?”
“His feet. Check out his toes. Someone shot him up there. Maybe he did it himself, but you’d have to wonder.”
Now, the sheriff looked uncomfortable. My having a brain and a potentially useful observation changed the dynamic between us.
“Security here showed me your file. You’re on probation?”
I nodded and told him the name of my probation officer.
“I had a problem, but I’ve been clean for over a year.”
Sheriff Graves closed his notebook and stood up and extended his hand.
“Mr. Gibson, you’ll have to stay in the area if we need to contact you for further interviews.”
“Sure. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Good,” he said, and walked me to the door.
MONSTER’S LAIR IS A VAST PIECE of property. Monster is the master of all he surveys, and anything else of interest, he’ll get around to owning that too. If you examine his property holdings on a map, you might suspect he was buying concentric circles of privacy, ending in that moat that isolated the inner mansion, the castle keep of Monster’s Lair. I had to take my hat off to his foresight. His world was besieged with swarming media drones doing their best to break on through, but they couldn’t. He had them beat. Two hours hadn’t passed since we’d discovered the body and they were everywhere; newscasters and cameramen clustered near the guard shack, cut off by gates, fences, and distance, and the narrow road that presented the only access to the main property, a road that seemed to have been chosen with military considerations, was closed. From Monster’s Lair you could see everything approaching, exposed on that three-mile drive straight up. We were unassailable by land.
It was as if he’d known something would happen: A boy’s body would be found in broad daylight on his property, and a media feeding frenzy would commence. And, as Monster intended, those media assholes would splat like bugs against the great windshield of Security.
But the police couldn’t be denied, and more and more of them arrived. That was the first time I saw anyone enter the inner lair of Monster’s Lair through the main entrance. Sheriff Graves, a broad-stepping man in cowboy boots, unintimidated by Monster’s celebrity, strode up to the door and didn’t bother to ring but used a beefy hand to pound a few times before Security opened it. He disappeared inside, and soon the sight of anyone but Monster’s most trusted staff in the inner sanctum of the Lair became less interesting. Within an hour, Graves and his men passed in and out at least a half dozen times.
He was the ranking officer as far as I could see; clutches of officers circled about him, discussing the game plan of the investigation.
I was relieved to seclude myself in the kitchen, but returned outside when I heard the thumping of a helicopter circling relentlessly overhead. In response, powerful hoses appeared, manned by Security and aimed at the low-flying media helicopter, until it retreated to a safer and drier altitude.
The disconcerting thing about living at Monster’s Lair was how quiet it was. At times when I sat outside in the herb garden, catching the afternoon breeze, I could hear blood droning through my head, my heart tapping out a rhythm. I worried that it wasn’t normal, that maybe I was never really relaxed, though I thought I was. Life at Monster’s Lair had me grinding my teeth, waking myself in the middle of the night. Hearing the blood pumping in your head didn’t seem normal or healthy. Then I realized it was the quiet, quiet like somebody killed it. I could hear my pulse anytime I sat down and listened for it. That was just the way it was.
A wet blanket of silence.
No birds or bugs.
Nothing.
Then Manuel explained it to me.
“You don’t hear the birds because of the poison.”
“Poison?”
“Monster has the grounds sprayed twice a week with strong insecticide. Yes, they come and spray the lawns and the trees.”
“Why?”
“He’s allergic to fleas and mosquitoes and spiders. That’s what I was told.”
“Allergic? You’d think he’d get over it living in the middle of nowhere. That’s what’s out here, animals and insects. It’s wilderness once you get off of the property.”
I thought about that as soon as I said it. You had to go some ways to actually get off Monster’s property, and you couldn’t be sure you were until you reached the on-ramp to the 101. Maybe Monster had his own manifest destiny thing going on and intended to own all of Santa Ynez and spray enough insecticide to debug half the Santa Ynez Valley.
Manuel shrugged and turned away.
“I would consider another job if I could find one that paid like this one. Working here is stress-producing. Too much stress-producing is not good for you,” he said.
I remembered that conversation when I heard of Manuel’s arrest on suspicion of murder. My cell phone stopped working after we discovered the dead boy. It was odd, really. The few workers I asked said the same thing had happened to theirs; cell phones couldn’t find a signal until they were off of the mountain.
Then, once off of the mountain, miraculously the phones worked like they used to. We needed those cell phones because the rooms had no phone lines; the only place to make a call was at the mansion. I was sure my calls were being monitored. Everyone blamed it on Monster because he had the money and the inclination to do something like that.
Monster was an insidious fucker doing his best to overwhelm everyone within his reach, entwine us in a web of confusion and intimidation. What made it embarrassing was that we were being beat down by a caricature of a villain, a gaunt, pale, Saturday-morning-cartoon ghoul.
That’s the genius of unbridled wealth, of unlimited resources.
You punk the world.
Since Manuel’s arrest, Security tightened their grasp. Those sexless, colorless rent-a-cops constantly patrolled the grounds, watching over everything and everyone with inspired intensity, searching for suspects and suspected informants to the media.
A MEMO, DIRECT AND TO THE POINT, arrived in our mailboxes:
Be advised that all contact with media will violate confidentiality agreements. All violations will result in immediate termination and the most vigorous legal action.
—Mr. Franzen
I didn’t know a damn thing about anything.
I didn’t know this Mr. Franzen; though he seemed to run the administrative staff of Monster’s Lair, I had never met him, and no one else I knew had either. Franzen was one more layer between the man we worked for and the gross and teeming world that wanted to get at him, burst through that bubble of mystery surrounding him—and find what? Did they smell encroaching tragedy, a wounded animal that would defend itself with all its remaining strength?
THE MORE I LEARNED of Monster’s Lair, the more I realized I didn’t know a damn thing; maybe a little mor
e than nothing, but not enough to scribble onto the back of a postcard.
Monster’s Lair was a hermetically sealed environment; little got in, and nothing slipped out.
Paid-for silence, deafness, blindness, discretion—silent because there is hardly anyone to talk to, deaf because there is nothing to hear, blind because I don’t want to see. So the hunt was on to bring Monster down. I didn’t know if he’d done it, overdosed the child, or if it was an accident. One thing I was sure of: Manny wasn’t a child killer. That was just obvious bullshit. He had been set up. Unfortunately, I was his alibi, and to tell the truth, that couldn’t have done him much good.
On the way to the kitchen I saw police in bright-yellow Windbreakers taking cardboard boxes out of Manny’s shed, where he kept his tools and things. You would have thought that he owned every pornographic magazine ever published. Stacks of them covered every inch of the gravel path in front of the shed. I leaned over across the yellow tape to get a better look. Many of the magazines had titles like TART or Young and Fine. I shook my head. I was sure Manny was being railroaded, but what did I really know?
From a hard sleep I awoke to the sound of someone knocking lightly at the door.
I refused to respond; instead I searched for the cleaver I’d brought from the kitchen.
“Gibson, it’s me!” a woman said, urgently.
I didn’t know the voice, though I felt I should.
“It’s Rita,” she uttered in a harsh whisper.
Confused, I knocked the chair aside to open the door. Backlit by the bright lights, Rita stood there, arms wrapped about herself.
I pulled her inside. Tears dampened her face as she silently cried.
“You talk?”
She ignored me and continued to cry, but I needed this miracle, or revelation, or whatever it was explained. The sound of her voice was much heavier than I thought it would be; I’d imagined it would be sweet and ethereal, as sheer as the white nightgown she wore, not husky like a smoker’s.
I don’t expect miracles in my life, and this wasn’t a miracle, though it was a miracle of sorts that she had bullshitted all those months she spent teaching me sign language on that bench in the garden and I had bought it.
I thought she had no voice, but she had just chosen not to use it.
“Rita?”
She looked up at me, and I could see that she verged on hysterics.
“I gave the baby up! Monster has my baby. I let him buy my baby.”
Thug was right. Rita was as bought and sold as the rest of us on this strange plantation that grew nothing but grief.
Suddenly, as if under the influence of a tranquilizer, she calmed down. I helped her to the bed, and then I returned to my chair to sit and think my way through this.
Another knock at the door.
Rita stirred; worried that she might awaken, I quickly opened it.
Thug.
“So, how is she?” he asked with his shit-eating grin.
I wanted to hit him in the face with all the strength I had.
“You want her for the night? It’s up to you. Since I know you got a little thing for this girly girl.”
I shook my head, confused.
One of Thug’s massive hands patted me on the shoulder.
“This is what you want, so don’t lie. If you got any designs, you better act on them now. If you don’t, I’ll carry her back with me.”
“She’s not some fucking luggage,” I blurted angrily, but that just made him laugh.
“No, she’s pretty fucking heavy to lug all the way back to the mansion. That’s why I’d just as soon leave her here with your ass.”
I heard this eardrum-shattering cry from behind me.
Rita sat upright in bed, hands over her mouth, wild at the sight of Thug.
I rushed to the bed to calm her, but almost as soon as I did she drifted back into unconsciousness.
“The drugs, man, are fucking good,” Thug said, and stepped into the bungalow and reached into his pocket and handed me a container of blue striped pills.
“When she wakes up, she’ll want these. Give her two and she’ll be good. I’ll be back in the morning.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to say.
“You cool with this, right?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled.
“Monster appreciates your help.”
I ignored that, though it did give me some sense of relief and spontaneous self-loathing.
“He wants to invite you up to the mansion to sound you out.”
“Sound me out? What the fuck does that mean?”
Thug must have enjoyed pissing me off because he laughed very hard.
“Tell you the truth I don’t know what that means. He just says things like that and I repeat them, but I bet it’s good.”
I turned away to shut the door, but Thug’s big hand grabbed it.
“Listen, don’t get all high on your horse. It’s about opportunity. Monster can give you that. You want the cash to start over, have another restaurant? It’s all good with Monster. Ain’t that what’s it about, opportunity?”
“What’s this she’s said about losing her baby to Monster?”
“What, black? You got to expect that. When you pay top dollar, you want the goods delivered. Right? It’s only fair.”
I shut the door, this time pulling it hard enough that if he wanted his fingers, he’d get them out of the way.
“Go for what you know, bro” was the last thing I heard Thug say before the door slammed shut.
“Gibson? Come here, I need you near me.”
Rita, awake again, tried to swing her legs to the edge of the bed, but she twisted herself up in the sheets and fell to the floor. I hurried to lift her up onto the bed, but before I could retreat, she wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Rita, I don’t understand any of this. I don’t understand and I need to understand. You have to help me.”
She sighed and slipped down in the bed, cover pulled high.
“What do you want to know? I can’t explain it. With him I don’t have a choice. He’s always had me. That’s the way it is.”
“Why can’t you explain it? Why the sign language bullshit?”
She shrugged. “You want to know? After we were married, Monster said he didn’t like the sound of my voice, it annoyed him. He didn’t ask me to stop talking, but I did. I wanted to stay with him, I wanted what he had to offer me, and so I stopped talking. I tried writing notes, but I realized he wasn’t really reading them. He’d just leave them around unopened. He hired a woman to teach me to sign, but he didn’t bother to learn it.”
“Why did you put up with that? Nobody can do that to you.”
“I had no choice.”
“You had a choice.”
Rita mumbled something and pulled the covers high over her head.
I ripped the covers away.
“What did you say?”
Her eyes flashed.
“You had a choice with cocaine. Did you stop?”
“I was an addict.”
“But you could have stopped. You said it ruined your marriage, cost you your career. You had options, what did you do?”
“You know what I did.”
“See, don’t be hypocritical. I’m weak. I admit that. You’re weak too.”
She reached for my hand and squeezed it and looked at me for a long minute. Then she reached behind her head to untie the knot to free her nightgown. Her fingers fumbled but couldn’t undo the knot.
“Help me,” she said. “Don’t you want to?”
“Yes,” I managed to say, and pointed in the direction of the mansion. “How do you know Monster’s not watching?”
She laughed. “I hope Monster is watching. I want him to watch.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I don’t want that.”
“I’m joking,” she replied. “You worry too much.”
The nightgown fell.
“Rub my shoulders,” she said, stretching out ont
o the bed.
I started, but my hands quickly found her perfect breasts. I wanted to drink her up, to taste and touch every inch of her, not to go up for air.
I couldn’t wait to slip inside, to feel her heat around me. I hadn’t been with a woman in so long, I could barely hold back.
But before it happened, right on the precipice of coming, I lost it. I didn’t know a damn thing about Rita except that she was crazy, crazy like everyone else here at Monster’s Lair.
“Why’d you stop?”
I sat at the edge of the bed, nuts aching, trying to bring myself to ask a question that would make me sound like a total shithead.
“Why did Monster send you here?”
Rita turned onto her side, ignoring me, but I couldn’t ignore the curve of her hips, the smoothness of her back.
“Monster didn’t send me here, I walked out on him. Thug followed me to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. But you don’t believe me. You think I’m a liar.”
“I don’t think you’re anything.”
“You’re being mean. Don’t be mean to me.”
I had to laugh. I did want to trust her, at least at that moment of suspended lust.
“It’s over for me with Monster, he doesn’t love me, he never loved me. He wanted me to have his baby. You know he never touched me. He said he doesn’t believe in sex.”
I raised an eyebrow but tried to keep my mouth shut.
“Did you believe him?”
“I wanted to. I truly did want to believe him because I wanted what he offered.”
“What? What was that?”
She shook her head.
“You know I’m not going to tell you. Why do you want numbers? It makes me feel like a prostitute, and you know how Monster feels about numbers.”
“I won’t ask you again.”
“Oh, you don’t know how embarrassing it was, having a stupid nurse inseminate me, with Monster too busy in the recording studio to be there. It was all just another lie. Then, when my baby was born, I looked at him and he doesn’t look a bit like Monster. He’s a blond and blue-eyed, Nordic-looking baby. I’m not a natural blond, as you probably noticed.”
She ran her hand between her legs, stroking black pubic hair.
“My family is Sicilian. And whatever Monster is, it’s not his baby at all. Could you believe that, that he’d pay for sperm from someone else to impregnate me? And now he wants me to leave so he can have the baby all to himself.”
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