“Crush. I take my clothes off. I put on sexy shoes with big sharp heels. Then I stomp bugs to death while O’Leo films it.”
“You are shitting me?”
“Not everyone wants vanilla ice cream, Martin. I seem to recall you used to eat... more exotic things.”
“And there’s money in this? That’s what you stole?”
Shushie nodded. “O’Leo does ... other stuff, too. But I only do Crush. And soft Crush only, no hard. I swear.”
“Oh, Jesus, I’m going to regret this. Soft? Hard?”
“Soft Crush is, you know, bugs and stuff. Worms sometimes. I don’t think they’re actually bugs, officially. But soft things only. Hard is ... not so nice.”
“Not so nice.”
“Little animals. Mice, gerbils, parakeets, sometimes rabbits. I think even small dogs and cats.”
“Jesus, Shushie!”
“I know. I’ve never done hard, I told you! I mean bugs are just bugs, right? You kill ants and flies, don’t you? Mosquitoes? Wasps? They’re not, like, furry or anything. Not pets and shit.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Please stop saying that, Martin.”
“What are you, bi and religious now?”
“I have my faith.”
“Which obviously does not preclude you flashing your hoo-hah and stomping things to death on camera.”
“I’m not proud of it, Martin. But a girl has to live.”
“You’re not a girl,” I said again.
We sat in silence for a while. I even forgot my aches and pains while I thought about what she’d told me. I remembered the stains on Leilani’s shoes, and shuddered. I wondered who the Sam Hill would want to watch such stuff? Then again, people claim to like Ryan Seacrest. An odd thought suddenly swam into my head.
“Fish?” I asked.
Shushie just stared at her painted toes. I wondered if the polish met the demands of some specific bug fetishist. Red for fire ants? She didn’t respond.
“Shushie. Did you ever crush a fish? They’re soft. Mostly, I think. Other than, like, lobsters.”
She burst into tears.
“I have,” she shrieked. She was blubbering away. A few seconds later Leilani burst through the door. She looked at me, then at Shushie, then back at me.
“I have crushed fish,” Shushie wailed.
“We’ve all done it, darling,” the tall girl said, bending down to comfort her. She glared reproachfully at me as she gently rubbed Shushie’s back and stroked her head. “We all have to crush something. One way or another.”
See? Everybody has a fucking philosophy.
~ * ~
“I don’t like your car,” Leilani said two days later as we drove north on the 405. She fired up a cigarette.
“Aren’t you going to ask if I mind?” I said, rolling down the Prius’s passenger window four inches.
“No.”
“Fair enough.”
I exited on to Ventura, heading west. There’s that famous line from Sartre about Hell being other people. Clearly he never visited Sherman Oaks or he’d have fixed it in the rewrite.
“Why don’t you like my car?” I asked.
She blew smoke out the window, which I thought was at least decent.
“It’s ...” She paused to take another deep drag off her Dunhill; this time she blew the smoke straight up. “I bet your insurance is cheap.”
“Cheapish,” I admitted. “And that’s a bad thing?”
Leilani shrugged. She had on a chartreuse sundress with spaghetti straps. One of them slipped off her ivory shoulder. The way it dangled over the top of her freckled arm was weirdly sexy.
As was the rest of her. Even knowing about the bugs.
“Safe. Predictable,” she said. Another long drag. “Boring.”
“Boring isn’t your style, is it? Is that why you tied up with Shushie?”
Another shrug. “You live once, you’re dead a long time.”
“I think I read that on a T-shirt in Glendale.”
She tossed the rest of the cigarette out the window. I’ve never understood how smokers feel comfortable doing that. But then smoking is about the only vice I never managed to pick up.
“Don’t take it so personal, Marty. Your car isn’t your cock, you know?”
“I know - the car seats six. It’s also not my ass, so don’t blow smoke up it.”
She laughed. Her other strap slipped and she adjusted them both.
I did kind of like her.
“Listen,” I said.
“I need the money, pure and simple,” Leilani said. Before I could jump in, she added: “Please don’t: you’re not the first to start a sentence at me in that tone. I make no apologies. Ever.”
“Really? Never? I apologize all the time. It’s a lot easier than people make it out to be. Sometimes I even mean it.”
That at least earned a smile.
“Or maybe I just have a lot more to be sorry for,” I muttered.
~ * ~
The address was off Topanga Canyon Boulevard in Woodland Hills. I parked up the road a little and we studied the house for a few minutes. There was barely any activity on the street.
“You know Shushie pretty well?” I asked.
“Sure, we’re tight. Lanie and me.”
“And ElronD?”
“He’s a good kid.”
“Kid. You can’t be that much older than he is.”
“That’s sweet, but I’m strictly MILF material these days.”
I didn’t like to think what that made me.
“Don’t worry about it, you’ll like him when you meet him,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“I hope so. It’s a little hard to get used to the idea of him, though.”
“I bet. But he means everything to Lainie.”
“Does he really?”
“Of course. They do so much together. That’s how he got into this mess. They look after each other - almost like a married couple, I swear. I even met them together.”
“Really.”
“Mmm. At an after-hours club off Sunset. I thought it was sweet that mommy and son partied together.”
“Real sweet,” I said, thinking.
“You’re not going all Prius on me again.”
“No, no. This is not really a Prius moment.”
“Good. Should we go in then?”
“Yeah, let’s do it,” I said, and I patted her muscular thigh.
She smiled at me and started to open her door. I squeezed her leg admiringly and said: “Wow, that bug-crushing sure keeps you in good shape. Or is it the Zumba?”
“I don’t do Zumba,” she said, frowning. She got out. “Zumba’s for suckers.”
Indeed.
~ * ~
On our fourth day of wedded life - my shooting schedule exhausted - I borrowed a production car and Shushie and I sped down the highway to Acapulco, equipped with a case of tequila, a baggy-ful of peyote and songs of love in our hearts. The crew had done a generous whip-round just before we left, and Huston himself - in full Mariachi regalia - stuffed a fistful of Mexican notes down what little there was of Shushie’s dress. (He also French kissed the bride.)
We checked into the swankiest beachfront hotel that would take us - we’d broken open both the case and the baggy on the drive - and staked out a Honeymoon Suite. We proceeded to do the stuff that honeymooners do - and I don’t mean pal around with Art Carney - aided and abetted by twenty-four-hour room service and our quickly dwindling stash of abusable substances. At some point Shushie produced a marital aid of a type unencountered by me before or since and which I still do not entirely grasp. It sure grasped me, though.
We came up for air about four in the morning on the second day. I had a vague sense that we’d exhausted the money - and a certainty about exhausting my vas deferens - but I’d never felt as thrilled or alive. For the first time since falling from the heights of child s
tardom, I espied a path I imagined might take me back to a happy life. Maybe even without the peyote.
Shushie led us up to the roof of the hotel - naked as a pair of newlyweds - to see in the fresh day. Someone had conveniently left an inflatable pool float up there and Shushie demanded that we christen it as a rooftop bed. Just before it - and I - punctured, Shushie spotted a large shipping container at the rooftop edge. In a haze, she wandered over.
The crate was filled with large, mirrored disco balls. What the hell they were doing there - or why even an Acapulco hotel would need a whole shipping crate of them - I never did know. Maybe the Bee Gees and Donna Summer were coming for summer vacation. Whatever, Shushie was entranced. She pulled one out and, with a cackle, flung it at me. I somehow caught it and we started tossing it back and forth like a beachball, laughing madly as the quicksilver facets caught the first, fresh beams of morning sun.
It was a Mexican mescaline idyll.
Then I missed an errant throw and the ball bounced off the concrete edge of the roof and exploded into bits before tumbling twelve floors to the earth below. It was sheer magic for a moment as that myriad of glinty glass created a rainbow mosaic of light. The sound was pure music.
The crash from the ground was more sobering.
We both dashed to the edge to peer over. Bits of glass littered the path in front of the hotel. No one, incredibly, had noticed. It was just dawn.
I expelled a deep breath and turned to offer Shushie a look of relief.
She was back at the crate fishing out another ball. Before I could call her name, she’d run back to the edge and heaved it over. I remember still the look of exultation, of crazed delight, on her face. We followed the trajectory of the swirling globe all the way down to the explosion at ground zero.
Shushie cheered as it shattered. I felt something cold at the base of my spine.
She got another. Then another. She laughed like a maniac with every potentially fatal lob.
“Shushie, stop,” I told her, reaching for her arm.
She wheeled out of my grasp, screeching like a mad thing. A mad naked thing: some chaos-driven sylph on an unholy spree.
I could hear voices coming from below now and cautiously glanced over the edge. Even as I did so, another silver ball hurtled over my head and another crazed laugh issued from my betrothed.
I ran over and physically tackled her. She tore at my face with her nails and screeched at me until I could think of nothing else to do but slap her.
The shock of it broke the spell.
“They’re coming, Shush. We’ve got to split.”
She half-nodded at me and we got up. Blood trickling down my face, I reached out to take her elbow, but she pulled away from me.
“Don’t stop me, Martin. Don’t ever try to stop me.”
We made for the stairwell, but she whirled around again and dug a finger into my chest.
“If you can’t keep up, you get left behind.”
Five weeks of wedded bliss later that’s exactly what happened.
~ * ~
“Should I take the bag?” Leilani asked.
“No offence, but I think I’ll hold on to it.”
“Cool,” she said.
The Dodgers tote bag held $25,000 in cash.
That’s how much Shushie said she needed to get ElronD out of trouble. O’Leo and his pals, whom Shushie and Son had grifted, agreed to drop the matter - and ElronD - for a price. Shushie had been a bit vague about the nature of the swindle she’d tried to pull, but swore that they’d “only” stolen $15,000. The extra ten was interest required to buy ElronD out of the mess and avoid other, more physical penalties. The house in Woodland Hills was the drop. We were to leave the money in a storage bin in the backyard. O’Leo had specified that Shushie was not to come along, and that ElronD would be freed once the money was safely in his hands.
“I don’t like the smell of that,” I’d said. “Why doesn’t he want you there?”
“He said he’d beat me with a chainsaw if he ever saw my ... face again,” Shushie told me.
“You don’t usually beat people with chainsaws,” I noted.
“You don’t know O’Leo.”
I considered the whupping he gave me with his walking stick. I knew him well enough.
“Twenty-five grand isn’t a lot of money,” I said.
“Maybe not to you,” Shushie said, sharply.
“No, not to anyone in this kind of trade. It’s not lulling money.”
“I told you: you don’t know O’Leo. He’s crazy.”
“Takes one to know one. But this deal still doesn’t sit right. And if he really is that crazy, there’s no telling what he’ll do. What if...?”
“I’ll go with you,” Leilani said.
“What? Why?”
“O’Leo likes me. I’m money in the bank to him.”
“If I remember correctly, he referred to you as cunt, gash and bitch. All in one sentence I think.”
“See?” she said. “He’s clever.”
Who could argue with logic like that?
Which is what led us to the front gate of the neat little bungalow on the quiet street in the Valley. We walked on through and, as per Shushie’s instructions, saw a neatly tended cobbled path leading around to the back of the house. Leilani started to follow it, but I held her back with a touch on the arm.
“Leilani,” I said.
“What?”
“Your name.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“It’s been driving me crazy. Forgive me for judging a book by its cover - I know that really doesn’t work in the age of Kindles -but you don’t look remotely Hawaiian.”
“I’m not.”
“Leilani?” I said again.
“It means ‘heavenly lei’,” she said. And smiled.
“Right,” I said. “Of course.”
We followed the Yellow Brick Road.
~ * ~
“There it is,” Leilani said, with the kind of wonderment I imagine Columbus’s navigator employed yelling “New World, ho!”
She pointed at a grey plastic, all-weather storage box sitting in the middle of the back patio. The patio led on to a set of French doors, but the curtains were tightly drawn and I couldn’t see inside. A second, proper door, further along the path, led into a kitchen. I could see in that window, but there was nothing to note other than some dull Kenmore appliances and an open pack of Chips Ahoy on the counter.
“Anything?” Leilani asked.
“They can’t be too dangerous,” I said. “They like chocolate chip cookies.”
“I once dated a guy who beat me with leather dildos. He ate Fig Newtons.”
“Fig Newtons are pervy,” I said.
“There’s a note,” she observed.
I strolled over. Sure enough, someone had scrawled the words PLACE MONEY HERE on a sheet of Justin Bieber notepaper and taped it to the top of the box. They’d drawn a little arrow below the words pointing down at the latch. I felt sure if any of those words had contained an “i” it would have been dotted with a little heart.
“Jesus wept,” I muttered.
I lifted the lid. Nothing inside but mould, a crushed cigarette pack and a few dead spiders. I closed it again.
“Aren’t you going to leave the bag?” Leilani said. She looked worried.
“I don’t think so.”
“What? Why not? What about ElronD!”
“I got this on Tote Bag Night,” I said, patting the rucksack. “The Dodgers one-hit the Giants that game and I ate three - count ‘em - three Dodger Dogs. It means a very lot to me.”
“What? What are you doing, Marty?”
I glanced around the yard and saw just what I needed: a folded patio umbrella stuck in a weighted stand. I slung the tote bag over my shoulder and yanked the umbrella out. I grabbed the stand by the pole and hefted it - it was pretty heavy so I rolled it over to the French doors.
Psychomania: Killer Stories Page 26
