CoverBoys & Curses

by Lala Corriere

  The dismissal that registered in his eyes scared me even more.

  “Did he have a weapon?”

  “His hands were his weapon. That was good enough for me.”

  “And the dog. Did you see where it headed off?”

  “It was no dog, Detective. It was a wolf. Or something,” my voiced trailed and even to me sounded like an old LP on too slow a speed.

  “But your attacker threatened you with this animal, right?”

  “The creature arrived after the man left. Maybe moments. Maybe minutes. I don’t know. It scared the shit out of me, but not for long. I have a way with animals. We’ll be sipping champagne from our water bowls together next week.”

  “Yeah. I can tell that by the dent in that umbrella stand and the spilt blood. You’ll be good friends.

  “Your situation at the house tonight is grave, Ms. Visconti. Your ability to make light of it is actually a clever skill, as long as you keep your wits about you.

  “I suppose most of my superiors would expect me to tell you that right at this moment you’re in big trouble. Some of the guys back at the precinct are probably taking pools to see if I bring you in.”

  The detective paused. Closed his notebook. Stared back into my eyes. “How long have you been in L.A.?”

  “You can count my months here by the CoverBoy issues we’ve run, subtracting two months of test and preview issues. From there you can do all the adding and subtracting you want. The truth is I’ve been here long enough to call it home. And long enough to want to leave.”

  “Okay. Two issues prior to your arrival in California. Those issues originated in Illinois. Is that correct?”

  “Yes. I owned a publishing company there. A travel magazine. It made sense to use my resources in Chicago to launch CoverBoy. A test period, if you will. Given the economic times I found this to be a prudent means of exploration. And one that proved successful.” I couldn’t believe I could actually speak with so matter-of-factly.

  “And did you have any negative ramifications from those two issues?”

  I bit my tongue and saw my world twirling. Then I unleashed that tongue. “You mean, was anybody I profiled in those early articles slaughtered?”

  Wray didn’t play his hand. “More or less.”

  “No.”

  “And what were those early articles?”

  “I’m certain you’ve already pulled them up in our archives. One on drug lords. Stale, but we had some new information and a new angle. And my timing was off on the second issue because everyone had already ripped apart certain corrupt Chicago government officials.”

  “You get a lot of hate mail. You’ve already told me that. Anything else? Any lawsuits?”

  “We keep our legal department plenty busy. But I’ve been assured it isn’t libel if it’s the truth. For the record we win our cases, Detective.”

  “Clever girl. I wonder about that,” he said.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Tit for Tat

  I DIDN’T NEED a roaring fire. I didn’t need a glass of wine. I didn’t need an Eiderdown pillow to float my worries away.

  I’d offered Detective Wray to follow me out to my back deck. Sterling fell behind, pretending to clean my kitchen while assuring me she was within earshot. My kitchen wasn’t dirty and Sterling was no maid.

  “You said you had something to tell me, Detective Wray. Please. What is it? Quid pro quo.”

  “That prominent plastic surgeon you wrote about, The Dr. Scars-Away? Dr. Wrinkles away—and the one that left your lady friend dead on his table after a tummy tuck.”

  “His name is—“

  “Hell, I know his name. You might as well have given out his social security number.”

  “He’s a jerk.”

  “He’s a dead jerk. Slashed to death. Thirty-six times.”

  “So you jump to the conclusion because, again, this upstanding man in our community—his death is somehow related to me?”

  “Numbers are games. Games are numbers. You may not even know you’re playing this game, Ms. Visconti, but you are, indeed. And the numbers out there are starting to add up.

  “You have my attention. But you did tell me that you were no good at math.”

  “First, you promise not to repeat this. If I hear it on the streets or see it anywhere in print I’ll know it came from you. You got that?” he demanded.

  I nodded.

  “There’s a chain of evidence that directly ties these murders together. You are the common denominator.”

  The nebbish man crossed the threshold and yet I was the insulted one. I also realized I was at the top of his list of suspects. I was a strong link in some horrific chain.

  “Lauren, go back with me to one of your first feature articles. The models. In particular, the lovely model that got herself involved in cocaine and god knows what else. We found her passed out and dying in front of a laundromat. We know she was near a known drug dealer and she liked to chase the dragon. You hearing me?”

  “Yes. One of my first articles. Correct.”

  “She wore some fancy bauble on her finger. I’m told it was a five-carat emerald.”

  “I know about the ring. Closer to ten carats.”

  “And we found the ring finger severed. The emerald, gone.”

  “Actually, it was her index finger. The stone was that big.”

  The detective managed an uneasy grin. “I’m going to tell you something, and not because I particularly like you or your magazine.”

  I met his stare. “I thought you liked CoverBoy. And I don’t think I particularly like you either, Detective,” I said.

  “The model’s ring and her finger were gone long before we got to the crime scene. Eyewitnesses placed it on her finger that night. Not hard to imagine someone chopped off her finger to get at it. That stone would have pretty much paid my mortgage for a year. I would have noticed it.

  “Then we have your woman from Afghanistan.” He opened up his notepad again, rifling through the first pages.

  “Her name is—was, Dhurra. Dhurra Sulayman.”

  “That’s it. Good girl. Well, the first real evidence was that one of a kind emerald ring—the one someone so eagerly carved off your model. It turned up in Dr. Sulayman’s throat. Inserted after she was stabbed to death.”

  I gasped. I felt dizzy in my stomach. The thoughts of the model and of my dear Dhurra. The thought of the wolf-dog. It would have gone after my throat. His mouth hung open with rabid-looking foam drooling down both sides. All he had to do was pounce and snap his powerful jaw closed on my throat.

  I only then noticed that I’d kicked off my Prada’s and was curled up in a tiny ball, again. This time I was on the back deck. With an armed detective. The fear felt the same.

  “I’m afraid it gets worse,” Wray said. “Do you want to hear it?”

  Immediately I regained my posture. My legs went to the floor. For support? My back straightened and again I looked directly into his coal eyes.

  “Dhurra Soyl—”

  “Sulayman,” I said.

  “Right. Well, she sustained more injuries than the external slashes.”

  I fidgeted. He watched me as I tried to be invincible. I hoped he couldn’t hear my hammering heart. I sat on my hands to steady the shaking. “Go on,” I said.

  “Her attacker carved off her, uh, her labia.”

  I sat up so that my hands could go now go to my forehead. My head sank back between my legs which were already poised back under my body where my hands had been.

  “We found the doctor’s privates in your notorious plastic surgeon’s throat.”

  A violent shudder seized me from my hair to my toenails. Shockwaves pulsed through my bones as if they were dense and powerful electrodes.

  The detective’s relentless words continued, “You see, now. The murders are directly related to one another. And we’ve known for some time that they are directly related to you.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Next Vict
im, Please

  STERLING BROUGHT ME a Bailey’s on the rocks. I asked her to stay. Detective Wray’s scowl insisted that he speak with me alone.

  He told me the time had come for me to discuss Tucson and Payton Doukas, but first he warned me again not to repeat the information he had shared with me on the chain of evidence that linked several murders together. He knotted that chain around both my mouth and my heart.

  I told him all that I knew, which wasn’t much but I found it alarmingly easy to be candid. I had nothing to lose this late in the game.

  I explained my frustration, more certain than ever that something was very wrong and it started in Tucson. After Payton’s death grief came swiftly. Then the anger. The whys of it all with no reasonable answers. Anger is a much more painless emotion than grief, but when it reaches the precipice of rage the toll is far worse. I was reaching that edge.

  And no one was going to threaten me. I wouldn’t scare away.

  “So this threat tonight, and others before. You think they are about your friend in Tucson?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you feature her in your magazine?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Was she stabbed?”

  “Gunshot.”

  Detective Wray listened to me with care, making a few notes and more than a few scowls. Finally when I had nothing more to say he dropped his notebook into his pocket.

  He asked me to show him to the door. His eyes told Sterling not to follow and she behaved.

  “I understand you are upset. But from what you’ve told me, there is no connection between your friend in Tucson and what I have here on my hands.”

  He thinks they’re on his hands?

  “You have someone in another state dead by gunshot. You happen to be questioning an entire authority that has ruled the incident—the death, a suicide.

  “Now here I am dealing with a slew of stabbings. Multiple stabbings and those, Ms. Visconti, are murders. They’re acts of rage. We call them overkill. And those are connected to you.”

  My hands began to tremble. Nothing made sense to me but that the Lauren Visconti Curse continued. “Are you saying I’m a suspect, detective?”

  “I am saying you’re involved, whether you like it or not. And that makes you a person of interest. Why don’t you give me a heads up? What’s your next great story to hit the stands and when?”

  I laced my hands behind my back to hide my nerves. Why was I so nervous? I couldn’t think straight, let alone speak. My dry mouth felt coated in volcanic ash.

  “Ms. Visconti?”

  “It’s about Catholic priests. And it will start hitting mailboxes tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, great,” he said. “I’m gonna need the names of your next victims.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Cat Fight

  DETECTIVE WRAY DIDN’T leave until I printed out the entire article.

  He scanned it, shook his head, stood, shook my hand, and left saying only, “I’ll be seeing you.”

  “Shit. It is pretty explicit,” Sterling said, after perusing the contents of the new CoverBoy issue on my computer monitor.

  Sterling stayed with me through the wee hours of the night. She wanted to know more about why a man had attacked me at my door. I told her the truth, for even Detective Wray said it had nothing to do with the stabbings. A warning to stay away from Tucson. That’s all.

  Sterling gasped, “What do you mean, that’s all? We only just decided to go back there. Who the hell would know about that?”

  “I don’t know, Sterling. Why don’t we start with who you told?”

  Sterling’s steel gray eyes flashed with anger. “No one!”

  “You’re lying! Fuck that. This is serious.”

  She shifted in her too tight dress, “Well—my dad. I mean, You think I’m some bimbo princess that will be heir to the entire company but he still makes me put in my hours. I had to tell him I was planning on taking a few days off. He knew we were going to Tucson but I didn’t even tell him why.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “No, Lauren. No!”

  “What about Brock Townsend?”

  “What about him?” She shuffled her feet and ruffled her strands of long blond tresses. Diamonds on her fingers reflected the glow of moonlight, reminding me of the brass umbrella stand I’d just slammed into my visitor wolf-dog’s face.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Lauren, it’s not like that between Brock and me. You have the wrong idea. We hang out sometimes, but we don’t talk.”

  Yeah. I bet they don’t talk. I said nothing.

  “For god’s sake, Lauren, Brock never unplugged my pipes. Get it? We never did it! I don’t even know why you would care, the way you treat him. He’s only got eyes for you but you treat him like shit. And besides, what would it matter? Are you suggesting Brock would try and stop you from going to Tucson? Stop us from learning what really happened down there?”

  The wind, bellowing off the ocean surf, caught my red hair and strands splayed across my face and molded against my glossy lipstick. I pulled the gooey strands away and shook my head. “I don’t know what to think. I can’t think. I’m sorry.”

  Sterling told me Brock only had eyes for me. She was trying to spare my desperate feelings while attacking my own behavior. And I couldn’t think.

  “With all this shit coming down, I don’t think we should go to Tucson now,” I muttered.

  “Good. I don’t ever want to go back.”

  “No. You misunderstand. I can’t go now. I have to deal with CoverBoy and any fallout to come. But I am going back, Sterling, with or without you. I’m not wimping out. In fact, the asshole that greeted me at my door tonight has just dug my feet down deeper than a pauper’s grave.” And I’d only just learned how deep ant stacked that could be thanks to Jack Helms.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Veins of Gold

  MOON BLADE HAD SOME serious thinking to do. What the hell better should be done with a cut-off clit but to cram it into the surgeon’s throat? That came pretty easily. Now, what to do with a cut out heart? Could it be preserved? And for how long? While there was no clear plan for another slaying the act would be mandatory, inevitable and deliciously fun.

  COAL PLANNED ON ENJOYING a sizable income from his books and speaking engagements and the multitude of retainer fees that promised his hand-holding of patients once a month or so. He’d milk them until they were well enough. Of course, they were never well enough.

  The farm turned out to be a bigger problem. Too much maintenance, yet full of boys. Wonderful young boys.

  He had to admit he didn’t plan on the extended financial gains that fell into his lap, for some of his patients would gladly pay him next Tuesday for their hamburger today. Who would have believed in L.A. so many successful social climbers were suffering hard times?

  The solution was simple. And brilliant. Coal began selling his time for a portion of their businesses, no matter what those businesses might be. He’d already collected significant shares of everything from retail to service to industrial and those stocks became the bottom level of his earnings matrix. After the savings accounts were emptied, stocks and company shares were turned over along with any trust accounts and the ample Social Security checks.

  In little time he found lost souls that had no home, even if they owned mansions in the city of angels. He seized those souls and carefully evaluated each one. He farmed most of the younger ones out to his acreage. As for the others, only after turning over the deeds to those awful mansions that haunted them with the binding of such earthly trappings, he kept them on a retainer. Of sorts.

  He stood on the forty-second floor of another ‘inherited’ office suite. Stiff black leather covered the sofas, chairs, and ottomans. Structurally worthless architectural beams, harsh lighting, and polished stainless steel tables overwhelmed the space with glare, ostentatiously reflected in a multitude of mirrored walls. The abstract nude paintings cost the owner
a tidy sum of three million. For Coal, their price was about twenty hours of therapy. Well invested, Coal thought, but only because of the inherent value. He’d have to research how to divest of them at top dollar. To him, the art looked like the endeavors of a defiant five year old that had just seen his mommy naked for the first time.

  The stainless steel and black slate reception area was empty. No receptionist. No phones to ring. No business.

  The air conditioning sat at precisely sixty-six degrees.

  Coal lit up a Cuban cigar and poured himself a Glenlivet, neat, in celebration. He scored another big one today. Not as big as when he hooked up the Carly Posh woman. Just like any horny teenage girl lined up at a Justin Beiber concert without knowing what horny meant, so it was with Carly Posh and her friends lined up like prey in Harlan Coal’s hands.

  Coal flashed back to the two cock-sucking boy hookers he picked up the night before. He reveled that he could buy them, and a dozen more like them, every night. But it wasn’t every night he was focused on. It was all their years he wanted.

  He loved little boys. He loved their high voices and their itsy soft pubic hairs, and their easily excited but beyond-control penises that had never gone deep within uncharted territories.

  He fancied himself in the mirror juxtaposed to his unused executive desk, admiring his own bulging erection, when he saw Armand in the reflection.

  “Damn it, Armand, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “You changed the locks, remember? You refused to let the building janitors have access. You gave me the fucking keys so that I can come by and clean up after you.”

  Coal stormed out to the balcony, calling behind, “Bring me my drink.”

  Armand followed Coal outside with the drink in hand. “I’ve been to the farm, like you said. We need to talk.”

  “I’m not in the mood for any of your problems, Armand.”

  “You’re never in the mood for my problems. I think these rank up there as your problems.

  “The little boys you keep insisting upon. They’re the ones causing all the trouble. Now that you won’t allow them at The Centre they’re rebelling. Our cells are full.”