by Owen Thomas
“Nothing.”
“Don’t you tell me nothing. I didn’t get the midnight call for fucking nothing. They all know better than to wake me up for nothing. Is that her blood in there? Is it?!”
I hear someone pull him back, telling him that now is not the time, but the someone gets pushed and Chuck is back in my ear.
“Jesus Christ, Dave, it smells like the bowels of Hell in there. There’s puke and blood all over the place. I’ve got a bloody backpack. I’ve got a bloody shattered violin. Did you beat her with it? Is that what happened? Did you beat her with her own …”
“No.”
“What the fuck happened in there?! I’ve got a bunch of bloody slut wear and a bottle of booze. What sort of sick…”
“Chuck.” Another voice. “There’s blood on the window. And on the side of the door. Some on the seat.”
“If you hurt her…”
“It was an accident. I was taking her to the hospital.”
“Where is she?!”
“Gone.”
“Gone? Dead?”
“No.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
“She got out.”
“She got out? You threw her out is what you mean.”
“No.”
“Where?”
“North Broadway. She got in another car. We were going to call you after the hospital. She told me about her brother dying. She didn’t want to upset her mom. I’m not…”
“What brother? What the fuck are you talking about? She doesn’t have a brother. What brother?!”
“…”
“Dave, you are in so much fucking trouble. I swear to God…”
He goes on about just how many shades of dead I am about to look. The neighbors stare daggers into my back and I can feel my father standing in every window. All I can do is smell the richness of the earth beneath me. I take it in like water, like I have been pushed into an ocean of loam, imbibing a great sea of sedimentary history that tells the story of the Ohio Valley and its people. The Algonquian and the Iroquoian and, still deeper, the Illinois and the Erie and the Kickapoo before them, before the great contagions of discovery. Before there ever was a Columbus. Before the world was new and the heroes were new and the truth was new. I am sinking into that same great lost understanding. The grass will grow and the generations will walk upon my back and it will be as though I never existed except in the way they choose to think of me. I hear myself ask for my lawyer, but I do not need a lawyer. I do not need a confessor. I need someone to bear witness. To be there as I go down. Someone to remember who I am.
CHAPTER 50 – Tilly
“I’ve been in three films.” Burton counted on his fingers starting with his ringed pinky and moving in. “Once as a juror. Once as a judge. Once as a lawyer. Strictly bit parts, but all credited. The way I figure it, all I need to do is play a witness and a client,” he finished springing the fingers of his right hand and held it up to me, “and then I’ll have a full house that I can lay down for the next John Grisham blockbuster.”
I waited for the laugh or an elbow to the shoulder. There was none.
Burton Dalrymple was a handsome, barrel-chested black man with a baritone voice that rammed discontentedly at the corner windows of his Century City office. It wanted out, that voice. It wanted to sing, or at least to project. It wanted to swing from the hairs of Burton’s mustache and yodel into the jungle like Tarzan. The legal profession did not often allow for such opportunities. Even in dramatic murder trials, courtrooms tend to be quiet places where people pretended to be calm under great stress. Something told me that when Burton stood and objected to a question, it was a one-word opera.
Blair had paid the retainer and set up the meeting. He had wanted to go with me, but Burton forbade it citing privilege concerns. So Blair had angled for the next best thing; he would drive me to the meeting and wait for me in the car, just in case.
“Just in case what?”
“I don’t know, Tillyjohn. Whatever. In case they arrest you and you need bail.”
“It’s a misunderstanding, Blair. I haven’t done anything. I don’t do drugs.”
There was a pause on the line as he adjusted.
“Then we can go to lunch or something when you’re done.”
“Look, I’m not even back to Palm Springs yet. I’ve got a long way to go. I’ll be lucky to make it on time even without rendezvousing with you and I don’t have any idea how long this will take. If this guy wants to take me to meet the cops today, then lunch is obviously out, right?”
Blair could not dispute the logic, but he did not take the rejection well, wanting to know what in the fuck-all I was doing way out near the Arizona border and then telling me that he might just hang out in Burton Dalrymple’s lobby. He hung up agitatedly after extracting promises that I not get arrested for speeding on the way to meet with my new lawyer and that I call him with any developments.
With no sleep, the early morning drive back from Blythe all the way to Century City was torture. Being arrested for speeding was not my greatest worry. Falling asleep while speeding and plowing into a culvert was the more meaningful menace. I nodded off several times, awaking in a panic and clutching at the wheel with enough adrenaline in my system to keep me awake another ten or fifteen minutes.
As I drove, speeding to meet my very first criminal lawyer, I dreamt. Angus Mann was dead and my mother was grieving. My father had become an astronaut, taken a lover and was going into space, and I was grieving.
I was nearly an hour late meeting Burton Dalrymple, but I was at least pleased to see that Blair was not waiting for me in the lobby. Burton and I met with different agendas. I wanted to impress upon him just how bewildering the news was that the police wanted to talk with me in connection with Zack’s arrest and just how ridiculously innocent I was of anything that anyone would ever consider to be illegal. Burton, on the other hand, wanted to impress upon me that all of his years of representing celebrities behaving badly had allowed him to score some of his own screen time and that he was eagerly looking for his next opportunity.
“How is it with Blair?” he asked. “As a director, I mean?”
“Good director,” I said. “The best. Meticulous. It’s all about the detail with him. Nothing is ever good enough.”
“Man. That’s got to be true. Obsidian Iris about blew my socks off. Some film.”
“Yes,” I agreed, torn between the impulse to scream at him and the impulse to let my head drop backwards and to fall asleep in his plush suede chair. He must have sensed something inhospitable in the brevity of my response.
“Okay, down to business then. I can see you are concerned. I don’t know if there is anything to worry about here or not, Tilly. We’ll never know for sure until we talk to the police and we find out what has them worked up. But I think if they really wanted you in handcuffs, they probably would have gone about this differently. I’ve talked to the detective who has been asking around – a lady named Karen Fuentes – and all she would tell me is that they have a few questions.”
“About?”
“Don’t know. Zack and drugs I presume.”
“But definitely not me, right? I mean…”
“I don’t know that. I asked if you were a target or person of interest and she wouldn’t confirm or deny. So it does have something to do with you, or at least they think it might or they want you to believe it does. My guess? They want you to help them tighten up their case against Zack and if they can add some incentive by making you think you’re in jeopardy, then they’ll do that.”
“I’m not helping them tighten up anything against Zack. He’s my friend. I care for him.”
“Are you still…” he trailed off, twisting the gold band around his pinky, sparing the unnecessary words.
“No. I kind of hate him right now. But I’m not going to stick a knife in his back.”
Burton nodded.
“And if they have something on you?
”
“They don’t.”
“Now’s the time to tell me, Tilly. It stays in the room, but I need to know.”
“I said there’s nothing.”
He leaned forward, rolling a pencil back and forth on the wood, thinking about whether to believe me.
“Okay. Well, here is all I know. Zack was in an accident.”
“An accident? When? Is he okay? Was he hurt?”
“He’s okay. Treated and released to police custody. Cuts and bruises. He slammed his Escalade into a light pole at Sunset and San Vicente. I understand Whiskey A Go Go needs a new front door. He must have been really hauling. He blew a one-point-six on the breathalyzer so he qualifies for the enhanced penalty. That’s going to hurt all by itself. But if they really have him on possession with intent? That’s the big leagues.”
“Possession of what, exactly?”
Burton made his face into a shrug.
“Fuentes wouldn’t tell me, but I know some people in the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Office so I called around. Turns out it was trail mix. A lot of it.”
I knew what trail mix was, but I also knew a test when I heard one. Burton let the slang sit there on the desk between us. I picked it up and played dumb.
“Trail mix? Since when is trail mix …”
“Trail mix is slang for a combination of recreational designer drugs, usually Sildenafil and MDMA.”
He was still testing me.
“I still don’t know…”
“You know Viagra, right?”
“That I know.”
“And Ecstasy?”
“Okay.”
He interlaced his fingers.
“Just put ‘em together. Ecstasy makes you want it like nobody’s business but hurts your performance. That’s where the Viagra comes in. Now you can go all night. They also found poppers.”
“Which are …”
“Amyl nitrate. You inhale it. Relaxes all of the smooth muscles, dilates the blood vessels, gives you a rush that makes the big O a really big O. I won’t sugar coat it. If this mess belonged to Zack, then he has a major league problem. They take the street pharms seriously. He may as well be dealing heroine.”
“Zack’s not a dealer of anything,” I said. “Why would he? He’s … he’s Zack fucking West. He makes a hundred grand just falling out of bed.”
“Look, don’t ask me. I’ve never met the man. Overrated as an actor, but that puts him in excellent company and he seems to be a decent enough guy …” he pondered his pencil again. “Current scandals notwithstanding.”
“That’s got nothing to do with this,” I snapped, cutting off the embarrassment before it got any oxygen. Burton smiled.
“Not saying it does. And I’m not saying it doesn’t. We won’t know anything until we talk to Detective Fuentes. She may not care two cents about your sex video. Or…”
“It’s not my sex video. Alright? I had nothing to do with it.”
“His sex video, then. The sex video. Is that better?”
I nodded.
“Okay. So she may not care about the sex video, or, she may suspect that there is some connection between that scandal and this scandal.”
“Please stop saying scandal.”
“Sorry.”
“What connection?”
“Don’t know. But listen,” Burton’s voice took on a harder, disciplinarian edge. “I get that the video thing is still very raw for you, as it should be. I understand that. But it will not do you any good to be biting off the detective’s head any time she asks you questions about what is already in the newspapers. Understand?”
I nodded, but did not look at him. The sun was splashing off the blue, sheet glass waterfall of the building across the street. On the desk was a photograph of Burton, a woman who must have been his wife, and a girl, late teens, who must have been his daughter. My baby girl would never do such a thing I could hear him thinking. That’s why she’s on my side of the desk.
Burton was quiet, waiting.
“Okay,” I said, chastened.
“Good. And here’s the other thing. If I tell you to stop talking, then stop talking. If they just want information about Zack, then it’s in your best interests to cooperate and we are there to cooperate…”
I opened my mouth to reiterate that I was not interested in helping the police skewer Zack, but Burton cut me off with a finger.
“But… if it starts to look to me like they’re looking at you, then I’m pulling the plug and I don’t want another syllable out of your mouth. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
“If they arrest you, just sit tight and I’ll get you bailed out. Your benefactor, Mr. Gaines, has already given me what I need in that eventuality. But … do not …”
“Okay.”
“Say anything…”
“Okay.”
“To anybody. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Okay,” Burton looked at his watch. “Let’s go find out what they want.”
* * *
The interrogation room at the West Hollywood Station looked the same as every cramped, windowless, fluorescent-lit, metal-table-equipped police interrogation room I have ever seen in my life. Which is to say that the movies and television have done a good job in set design. It was my first actual experience being in a police interrogation room, and yet I felt as though I had been through the drill a hundred thousand times. Electronic media is the Mother Mind. Option menus scrolled in my head offering behavioral templates with submenus that covered vocal tones, posture, facial expressions, interactivity and cooperativeness that all changed depending on whether I was guilty or innocent or scared or naïve or angry or injured or bored or privileged or oppressed. Nothing is new to the collective consciousness stored in the Mother Mind.
The experience was also clearly not new to Burton Dalrymple, who sat next to me at the table with his hands behind his head like he was waiting for a ball game to start. His crisp blue coat sleeves rode up, revealing starched white shirt cuffs and an expensive gold watch. It was the first time I had wondered how much Blair was paying him.
In front of him on the table was a single legal pad and a pen. The pad was clean except for the name Det. Karen Fuentes and her phone number and, beneath that, the words poss. w/ int. and trail mix.
Burton hummed to himself as we waited for her; something vaguely resembling The Ballad of Sweeney Todd. As irritating as I found his contrived display – Template 236, (Attorney, confident in case), Submenu EE (fingers interlaced behind head, shoulders open, weight back in chair), Sub-submenu EE7 (humming or whistling to self as police enter interrogation room) – it was an improvement over his monologue on the ride over about a screenplay he was shopping. He said it was think piece about a crooked judge who gets sent to prison and must face a makeshift jury of people he has convicted over the years, one of whom yet clings to an ideal of fairness and is the judge’s only hope of living through his sentence. He said he was calling it Twelve Angry Convicts. He had, of course, already fully mapped out the casting, down to the prison guards, a subject that consumed most of the rest of the trip to the West Hollywood Police Station.
Blair had called en route, desperate for an update. He sounded genuinely distressed, but it was all I could do to manage my own roiling emotions. I told him I did not know anything yet and implied that he was interrupting the interview. I hung up on him, feeling terrible about it but not having any real choice.
Presumably so that his carefully staged air of confidence would not be lost in the opening and closing of the door, Burton continued his insouciant humming until Karen Fuentes was at the table and pulling out her chair.
“Detective,” Burton said genially with a bit of mock surprise, as though his next words were going to be I didn’t see you come in.
Fuentes was a medium sized, perfect rectangle of a woman with a flatly featured face and short brown bob that stopped at the collar of her terracotta blazer. I would have guessed real estate
or insurance before law enforcement. She ignored Burton’s charade and dropped a manila folder and a pad on the table, then jutted out her hand.
“I’m Detective Fuentes,” she said. “You must be Tilly Johns.”
“I must be,” I said, shaking her hand.
She looked at me intensely as we shook. It was not a close-contact-with-celebrity stare. Those sorts of appraisals had been in plentiful supply outside the interrogation room, in the waiting area of the station, where every cop in the building seemed to slow down as they strolled passed, sizing me up with eyes that not only acknowledged my celebrity but that also imagined my face in contortions of ecstasy. The girl from the movies, the eyes said. The girl from the video.
But not Fuentes. She was taking deeper measure. She let go of my hand and glanced sideways at Burton.
“Thanks for coming down.”
“Sure,” said Burton. “But first things first. Are you arresting my client? We are here to cooperate, but if you are looking to shoehorn her into this nonsense with Mr. West, then we’re not interested.”
“Counsel, like I said, at this time, I just have some questions. If we had wanted to arrest her we would have done so already. But I’m making no promises. May I?”
Burton looked at me and then nodded. “We’ll take it one question at a time.”
“Good. I’ll try to make your visit as brief as possible.” She sat across from me and scooted in her chair. “May I call you Tilly?”
“Everyone else does,” I said, trying to borrow some of Burton’s casual air.
“Can you tell me the status of your relationship with Zack West?”
“Depends on what tabloid you read.”
She smiled perfunctorily and waited.
“We are not together.”
“You were but are not any more.”
“Correct.”
“When did you break up?”
“April.”
“Did you live with Zack when you were together?”
“No. I mean… I stayed over plenty. But his home was not my home.”
“And by home I guess I should clarify – Malibu. Playa De Los Leones.”
