by Nick Keller
This shoebox.
Groaning, he climbed into the backseat and started shuffling the photos, fliers, playbills and old audition sheets back into the box. A magazine lay flat on its face, its pages thrown open in the commotion. It was called The Wrap. Bernie knew of this magazine. It was a local industry rag which showcased all the new talent flooding into L.A. As soon as they got representation and started making moves through the audition circuit, the magazine marketed them in the Trades section.
He flapped it over and froze at what he saw. A picture of Andi Jones had been published in it, her actress’ headshot. He tilted the page over and stared at it curiously. Her smile was broad, eyes were bright, skin a light shade of Afro-American. She’d been a pretty girl in life.
“What a waste,” he murmured.
The caption under her picture read: Hailing from the University of California, Irvine, this rising star has the face of an angel and the brains to match. And with representation from Frame Studios in West Hollywood, look out! You just might see Andi Jones headlining your next journey to the cinema.
Bernie shook his head, tight-lipped.
Brains to match. Yeah—someone took an aluminum baseball bat to those brains and they ended up all over the…
He gasped audibly. “Holy shit!” He crammed the papers back into the box, put it on the front passenger seat and squealed his tires, headed back to the station.
29
BERNIE ON THE PHONE
The first phone voice he heard said, “You’ve reached The Wrap—the standard in Hollywood reporting. If you know your party’s extension you may dial it at any time. Please listen to the following list for a directory of blah blah blah….”
Bernie sat at his desk in Cold Case with the phone up to his ear bouncing a knee. The directory was long, each listing being given an automated explanation of its role at the magazine. He sighed, waiting. When he heard: “For the editor’s archives, please dial nine…” he jabbed the nine key hearing the system click over a few times. Then it started ringing.
“Hello. E & C’s office. This is Megan. How can I help you?”
“E & C, what is that?” Bernie asked.
“Editor-in-Chief. How can I help you?”
“Oh. I’m Detective Bernie Dobbs with the L.A.P.D. I need to ask a few questions about some past issues of your magazine.”
“Detective?” the voice said, sounding alarmed.
“That’s right. Some years ago, your magazine reported on a…”
“Excuse me, sir, you said past issues?”
“That’s right,” he said, agitated at being interrupted.
“Let me connect you with the right department.” Eager to get rid of him.
“Isn’t this archives?”
“Uh—well, yes, but…”
“Then you’re who I want to talk to.”
“I’m just the receptionist.”
“I thought you said E & C,” Bernie said.
“That’s Terri Sandoval. Let me connect you.”
“Alright,” he said forcing patience.
He heard it click to the next line and start ringing. After several rings, it went: “You’ve reached the desk of Terri Sandoval, Editor-in-Chief of The Wrap. Please leave your—”
He growled, hung up and called back. Not waiting for the automated cycle-through, he pushed nine. “Hello. E & C’s office. This is Megan. How can I help you?”
“We just spoke. This is Detective Bernie Dobbs again,” he punctuated the word detective. “Terri Sandoval didn’t answer. Get her and put her on the phone, now.”
“Uh—okay, let me put you on hold.”
“No!” he yelled. “Don’t put me on hold. Get up from your desk, go down the hall or up the elevator or whatever you got to do and put her on.”
“Uh, um, okay.” He heard the phone go clunk as she put it down on her desk. The line stayed open. After several long moments, he heard…
“This is Terri Sandoval,” smoky and confident, if not a bit curious as to who had demanded she answer the phone.
“Detective Bernie Dobbs, L.A.P.D. I have some questions about some past issues. I need a few minutes of your time.”
“Okay.”
“You do a piece on new actresses, right?”
“We do a highlight piece on new actors, yes. It’s part of our Trades section.” Actors. Actresses. It was all the same thing these PC days. Forcing patience, he said, “Well, I’m going to need some information on some past issues, okay?”
“Detective, we’ve been publishing issues bimonthly since 1995. As the standard in Hollywood reporting, we’ve done thousands of bios. I have no idea what you’re looking for.”
He chuckled angrily. “Uh-huh…” He ripped his flip pad out of his pocket and flipped through it, searching quickly. “Write this down. I need the pieces you did on Beatrice Harlow, Candy Starr and a Dulce Dios. You can do a database search, right?”
He waited a few seconds for her to write them down, then she said, “Fine, Detective, I’ll have one of my interns get back to you in the next twenty-four hours.”
“That won’t do, Mrs. Sandoval. We either get this done over the phone now, or I come down there and we can do it that way.”
She made a sound very much like hugh. “Look, Detective, I’m very busy, and quite honestly, I don’t like the fact that you seem to feel free to make demands. I’ll get this information to you as soon as I can.”
“Mrs. Sandoval,” Bernie said. “I get push back from people like you all the time. I know you said what you said because you feel obligated to say it, so congratulations. Your point’s been made. But if I don’t have this information in the next ten minutes, I’ll have the state charge The Wrap with impeding an investigation. Then you can forget about being the standard in Hollywood reporting. Is this computing?”
“Not so good with people are you?” she said, taking a personal tone.
“Not my finest point. Got your pen? Write this down. B-Dobbs at LAPD central dot com. That’s me, and I’m waiting. Ten minutes, Mrs. Sandoval.” He hung up.
“That’s how you got to get shit done up in here,” he heard Donna say from her station.
He looked over. “My old man always told me you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, until I hit six-and-a-half feet. Then he said—nope, try vinegar, son.”
She gave her typical, balls-out laughter and said, “Shit, being a black-ass-bitch works for me, shoog.”
He grinned big. “Well, I wasn’t that lucky, babe,” he said.
EVERYTHING MOVED FAST IN L.A. Nothing took ten minutes.
Nothing.
Except traffic jams and, apparently, pissed off local magazine editors. Bernie waited forty-five minutes before his anticipated email dropped into his inbox. He figured it was Terri Sandoval’s fuck you to him. He deserved it. At least he didn’t have to wait twenty-four hours.
Even if she was being untenable, at least she was thorough. She emailed him three complete .pdf issues of The Wrap from the digital archive shelves. It was a huge file and he waited several minutes for the progress bar to complete the download. As he did, he felt himself getting anxious. If his theory was correct, he’d just discovered their killer’s Modus Operandi—his M.O.
The first .pdf was titled Issue 310, June, 2012—Bollywood, the New Import. He scanned the Table of Contents page, found the Trades section and clicked it. The .pdf whisked him to the proper page where he found thumbnails of new talent headshots staring up at him.
There! Beatrice Harlow. He flinched. She was cuttingly gorgeous, with a sweet, sinister grin. It was hard to believe some monster could carve out her heart and stuff it down a toilet bowl.
The caption under her headshot read: “This young new talent might be tiny in stature, but she’s got a heart the size of Manhattan…”
A heart the size of Manhattan—Bernie breathed flame.
Next was Candy Starr. Her picture showed a broad, hopeful smile, great teeth, sparkling, well-placed features. Sh
e was beautiful, until someone turned her into a human tiki torch. Her caption read: “Represented by Starlight Studios in downtown and ready to roll out a national commercial campaign, this young starlet is on fire. We’ll be watching her career with burning eyes—she just might set a flame to Hollywood.”
Flames and burning—Bernie smacked an angry fist onto his desk.
Next was Dolce Dios. Bernie scanned the table of contents. The Trades. The headshot. Found her. Big hair, big eyes, cute Hispanic dimples. “— straight from San Diego, this sweet goddess is flying high…”
…right off a cliff.
Bernie turned off his computer refusing to put a fist through the monitor and sat there trying not to scream or cry or laugh… or all three.
“What is it, shoog?” Donna said, sensing him.
Bernie looked over through red, bull’s eyes and said with a sneer…
30
THE REAL WILLIAM ERTER
“…Fucker’s got an M.O.!” Bernie yelled and held up a print out of The Wrap as William opened his front door. The magazine showed Dulce Dios’s headshot and Trades bio. “He’s hunting them down and killing them in the same way they’re being described in The Wrap. Look! This sweet goddess is flying high… He tossed her off a goddamn cliff! And this one, burn down the town… he lit her on fire, Will.”
William stood at the door, rubbed his eyes, squinted at the papers. Bernie grunted. It looked like William had just woken up. His eyes twitched back and forth reading the paper the way a vulture searched for prey from the sky, and he stunk like day old farts trapped in a vacuum pack.
William snatched the paper from Bernie’s hand and held it close to his face, locked into the words.
Bernie frowned realizing William’s bloodshot eyes, the mussy hair, the clammy skin wasn’t from an abundance of sleep, but a lack of it. He’d been up all night, at least twenty-four hours.
“You okay, buddy?”
“Huh—yeah. I’m fine, why?” William said.
“Uh…”
“This is excellent!” William said, turning into his admittance hallway. Bernie followed him quickly. William sifted ravenously through the .pdfs as he walked, staring at them. When they entered his apartment, Bernie stopped cold, staring forward with a concerned look drawing on his face. He muttered, “Jeez…”
William had slathered writing all over the main wall of his living room and around the corner across half the adjoining wall, all in Sharpe black pen. It was as if he’d slashed into a man made of numbers and symbols, splattering them across the brick in strings of numeric integers mixed with alpha-numeric variables, all of them running down the walls at different lengths in hand-scribed columns, like a mural-matrix, categorized, classified, arranged and rearranged.
“Ho-lee shit,” Bernie said.
William ignored him, still studying the printed articles. He spun around. “We can catch him,” he muttered. “Flying High? Heh—so smart.”
Bernie flinched. “Uh—what’s going through that head of yours, Will?”
“This!” he rattled the papers in his hand. “You’ve discovered S.”
“What the hell is S?”
“The formula, the formula. S is a variable. It equals how they’re being murdered.” Bernie shook his head, looked at him blank. William continued, “We’ll be able to predict how he’s going to do it. It’s like a pre-echo—something we can see before we hear the scream. Yes… all we have to know now are the other variables. And this—oh my God, Bernie, you’re beautiful, man—fucking beautiful—this will help us fill them in!”
Bernie looks at him sideways. William hardly ever cursed. Something wasn’t right. “Will…”
William shot a finger in the air and went to a mathematical formula scribbled on the wall at a central point, as if all the other chaotic configurations had spun out of it:
Q + S + T + Y = X
“This is it, right here. This is the whole case. All the chaos and all the order is depicted in this formula: Q represents who, or the victim. S determines how they’re being murdered. You figured that one out yourself. T is when. And Y equals where. Yes! All this equals the X variable—the killer. Who, plus how, plus when, plus where. We objectively discover these elements and we’ll discover X. The killer. It’s a quadrangular function. It had four variables. But with this,” he waved the magazine papers at Bernie violently, “…now, it’s only a trinary. Sweet goddess is flying high—hahaha!”
He pointed out a section of the numbers and letters dripping off the wall. “Let’s start with how. Bernie, why didn’t I see it? You found it. Goddammit, you’re beautiful, man. These victims haven’t been killed by—” and he counted on his fingers, “bludgeoning, evisceration, burning, plummeting or mutilation. Those were just vehicles for his bloodlust. In reality, they’ve been getting murdered by how The Trades have been marketing them! That’s the S variable—my God. You’ve completed a device of Mutual Association. Look, don’t you see? Now we can merely plug in the variable.”
Bernie squinted at him, felt his defenses begin to rise, mildly. He murmured, “Uh, sure.”
William searched out a block of numbers on the wall several feet by several feet large and ran his hands across the numbers. “All this is where, okay?”
“Uh-huh, yeah. Look, are you okay, Will?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. I told you that, Jesus! Here, let me show you—so, this field represents where. Where have the murders been taking place, which,” with his finger in the air again, “will lead us to where they will take place. It’s a linear relationship to the variable Q, or who. But, there’s a falsehood in the formulation, see? He takes most of the victims to a place of his choosing, right? But not this one. Beatrice Harlow—murdered in her own home. It’s an unknown… until now. Now we know. The location of his choosing is dictated by how he chooses to kill them, which in turn, as a functionary chain of nonrandom sources, is dictated by The Trades. You see—we’re just plugging in variables!” He ran his fingers through his hair bugging out his eyes, grinning wildly.
“Look, it’s Relational Causality, two variables in comparison. We don’t have a complete rendering, yet. There’s still a variable missing, but we know parts. For instance, they were actresses. They were just getting their start. Andi, Beatrice, Candy, Dulce—A, B, C, D. And that means—” he spun around so quick Bernie twitched. “E, F, G! Have you found E, F, G, Bernie?” Before Bernie could answer, William continued, “Dead girls—heinously murdered. Cases we’re not aware of. But I’ll wager we’ll find three murdered women between 2013 and 2017, all actresses, each with bios advertised through some industry periodical, each murdered in the fashion they were described.” William pressed his thumb to his lips. “But how are they being determined? Dammit.”
Bernie pulled back, getting concerned.
“Then, this one—Harlie,” William said. “Letter H. She was the last, murdered just days ago. She ended the function. Do you know what that means? For God’s sakes, Bernie, do you know what that means?”
“What?”
“The variable I is next in the string.”
“I’ll be damned…”
“But who is I? Look—” William rifled through a collection of magazine Trades sections, including The Wrap, and pointed out highlighted listings of actresses names, “Irene Haden, Ingrid Mann, Illeana Tucci, Isha, India, Isla—Christ, there’s even an Ittoku Sakiyaga, some Japanese actress. There’s a hundred and twenty-one of them listed in various trade magazines. They’re all represented. And they’re all here. They’re all in town. One of them is going to be next, Bernie. She’s going to die and there’s so much we haven’t settled yet! Which one will it be? And when? We know her name will begin with the letter I, but we need, we need so much more!”
Bernie rubbed his fingers through his hair under his fedora knocking the hat sideways on his head. “If we knew which one….”
“We’d know the other variables. Shit—shit, shit, shit. Which one?” William stared at the wall
with his chest moving in and out rapidly, like a sprinter. He wiped sweat off his brow and lunged at his desk. He rifled through a stack of reference books shoving them out of the way before looking up, eyes wide and darting around. Pausing for a second, he leapt to a section of numbers on the wall and ran a finger across them mouthing inaudibly—factoids, ruminations, guesses. His face drew into a snarl and he slapped the wall, then went back to the desk, looking for something he knew he wouldn’t find. Everything stopped. He just breathed like a mad animal.
“William…” Bernie said.
As if triggered by his own name, William swiped his desk clean exploding books and papers and trinkets off onto the floor, bellowing the sound of insanity, loud and prolonged, falling to his knees. His world was scattered all around him. Discombobulated. Confusing. It was a wreck.
He was a wreck.
He whispered something so low Bernie had to lean forward to hear. Through the breathless, clipped noises—I can’t see it. I can’t. Why not? Why can’t I see it? Suddenly he froze with his gaze locked onto something before him. He squinted at it, tilted his head. Crawling forward knocking bits of debris out of his way, he reached into a pile and pulled back a small piece of paper. A page out of a notepad. A grin crossed his face. Then a chuckle. It turned to low, hysterical laughter.
“What is it, buddy?” Bernie said.
William showed him the paper:
Starlet Murders:
Andi Jones
Beatrice Harlow
Candy Starr
Dulce Dios
Harlie Davison
“A parallel dichotomy,” William whispered. “It’s a parallel di-cho-to-meee!” He screamed the word and got to his feet. “Oh my God, why—why didn’t I see it? Stupid, stupid—”
