Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “But you don’t have proof?”

  “What I’ve got is this.”

  Wellington walked to what looked like a huge TV set with the name Silicon Graphics stamped on it, then flipped a button to turn it on. When the screen filled, he grabbed a mouse and clicked on some icons. Moments later, the screen darkened. Then the silhouette of a man emerged. Wellington walked to the wall and turned off the lights.

  It was a trip into film noir, black and gray shapes moving through a wet, foggy city to the accompaniment of gloom and shadow and ambiguous doings initially indecipherable, then increasingly sinister. I didn’t know the producer or screenwriter, but the director was Chris Wellington and the star was Gary Richter.

  In the opening scenes, Richter was going leisurely about his business, wandering the Ave, drinking coffee at the Still Life, flirting with women, debating with men, returning to his apartment in Fremont when his evening amusements ran dry. There wasn’t a sound track, and there wasn’t much in the way of dramatic development, either, but as he approached the stairs to his studio, a villain emerged from the sculpture garden next to his home and shot Gary Richter in the back of the head.

  After gunning down his victim, the killer dragged Richter’s body to a car and began to stuff it in the trunk. As he was wrestling with the corpse, the killer’s face was illuminated by the streetlight, almost as though he knew he was being filmed and wanted to steal the scene.

  After the trunk banged shut and the car disappeared around a corner, Wellington turned on the lights.

  “Who the hell was that?” I asked.

  “Jensen Lattimore.”

  “Lattimore shot Richter?”

  “That’s what it says, doesn’t it?”

  “Who shot the film?”

  “I did. Although shot isn’t quite the word. I assembled it, more accurately.”

  I blinked. “You’re saying this is fake.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters.”

  “It depends on the purpose, doesn’t it? If the purpose is to get to Lattimore and distract him while I search for Nina, then it’s as real as it needs to be. Right?”

  “It may be effective, but it’s not real. Do you think Lattimore really killed him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, I don’t think he did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if he had, he would have done something more imaginative with the body than dump it in a canal.”

  Wellington shrugged. “Maybe so. But solving a murder isn’t the issue at this point; getting Nina back safely is. I brought you in on this because I thought that’s what you were trying to do. Now you’re turning soft on me.”

  “The rough stuff only works in B movies,” I said. “Tell me more about Lattimore.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “How’d he get the way he is? Why does he go to such extremes? In my experience, guys with lots of bucks don’t find it hard to get dates.”

  Wellington shook his head. “For one thing, Jensen’s impatient. He wants what he wants right now, he doesn’t want to have to woo someone. For another, he’s unattractive. As you could tell from the video, he’s short and sort of odd-looking. He looks like Telly Savalas with hair, huge head on a pudgy body. And his personality is even worse than his physique—he’s offensive without even meaning to be, and when he wants to be, which is most of the time, he’s insufferable.”

  “How so?”

  “He has no tact, no sophistication, no clue to basic psychology. He’s blunt and gross and obvious; women have avoided him all his life. Worse, they’ve laughed at him. So what he wants is two things—he wants the most beautiful women in the world at his beck and call, and then he wants them humiliated. And he learned early on how to get them to cooperate in their own destruction.”

  “How? Money?”

  He shook his head. “Film. People will do anything to be in the movies. Ever since he was a kid, Jensen was a film nut—he has a video library of more than two thousand titles; some legitimate, lots pornographic. Russ Meyer and D. W. Griffith are his heroes—Griffith because he pushed the technology beyond previous limits; Meyer because he filmed naked women when it was considered immoral to do so. Jensen decided to take that combination to a higher level and he found some men who would pay him to do it.”

  “The special clients.”

  “Right. Victor Krakov steers them his way.”

  “How does Krakov find them?”

  “They’re his customers. Businessmen who sneak away from the office to visit titty bars, lawyers who rent hard-core videos on weekends, doctors who buy rubber aids to spice up their sex lives. Krakov keeps track of every transaction just like Radio Shack keeps track when you buy batteries. Then he gives the names to Jensen and Jensen makes his pitch at the parties.”

  “Where do you come in?”

  “What I thought I was was an artist, working with state-of-the-art computers to create a new form of imagery and even a new aesthetic. What I really was was a front man, making prim little video pieces at DigiArt while behind me, Gary Richter was turning out hard-core smut to pay for my indulgence.”

  “Why did you work for him? What did you need from Lattimore?”

  Wellington reddened and looked away. “Money, naturally. Hardware costs a fortune. The stuff in this building—Indy work stations, editing machines, Keying systems, optical effects printers, scanners, enough memory to digitize Gone with the Wind—cost over two million dollars. Far beyond my ability to raise.” His look turned sheepish. “I have artistic ambitions of my own.”

  I had an urge to jostle his rationale. “How many Mandy Lorenzens are running around out there?”

  He recoiled as though I’d slapped him. “Not that many, if you mean women he destroyed. Most of the daddies paid up, so the obscenities never saw the light of day, and Jensen moved on to other victims. Lattimore kept that part of the bargain, at least. But Mandy was his favorite before Nina, and she wouldn’t play ball so Jensen sent an obscenity to her father.” The words turned brittle and arid. “He obliterated the whole family—the father forsook his kids and got bounced from the bank; the son committed suicide and Mandy might as well have.”

  “What’s Lattimore want from Nina?”

  “Jensen’s got what he needs in terms of financing, so basically we’re talking control and degradation. He’s going to take the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen and make her ashamed of who she is.”

  “Why pick Nina?”

  His smile was paternal. “You don’t know her, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  “If you did, you wouldn’t ask.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “She was born to be a model. She uses her body like a Stradivarius; she’s truly a virtuoso. She literally assaults the camera—usurps it, controls it, dominates it. I’m just a lackey, rushing to keep up with her. She must have studied herself in the mirror for hours, because she knows exactly how to make herself look unique and enchanting, as dazzling and unpredictable as some new lifeform. It’s the best work I’ve ever done,” he added glumly, “and it’s for a perverted purpose. To top it off, I just delivered my model into a den of iniquity.”

  I slapped him on the back. “Then I guess we’d better get her out.”

  I placed a call to Fran and arranged for a midnight delivery of Richter’s Erospace photographs.

  CHAPTER 27

  The lights go out; the world turns upside down. Good has become evil; art is obscenity—in the universe that envelopes her, she has become a slut and slattern. She asked for smut and has gotten it—as filth unfolds around her, she fights the urge to vomit.

  Yet somehow it becomes magnetic. She is displayed in places she has never been—dark, depressing dungeons adrip with instruments of torture and humiliation. She is paired with a succession of strangers, huge men and tiny men, African men and Nordic men, men with organs the size of fists and forearms and men who turn out to
be women when they ultimately disrobe. She is doing things she has never done, is manipulated in ways she has never imagined, is penetrated by objects of peculiar purpose, is debased repeatedly and beyond projection.

  It is so foreign and fantastic, it becomes a philosophical abstraction; she begins to wonder how it was accomplished, and why. It is so horrifying and unnerving, so removed from the world of aesthetics and achievement she has fought so long to occupy, that she begins to laugh. Perhaps this is justice; perhaps nakedness is sinful after all and the film is her punishment, the inevitable embodiment of original sin.

  As her laughter dies, the lights come on and Lattimore slips through an invisible door and stands before her like a pint-sized cyclops. “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” he says, his smile a smarmy misinterpretation of her reaction.

  At least she remembers her pose. “I can’t believe it, Mr. Lattimore. You must be able to make anybody do anything. No one will know what’s real and what isn’t anymore.”

  “It’s all real, Ms. Evans.”

  “But I didn’t do those things.”

  His condescension is repulsive. “Not even in your dreams?”

  She decides to simply smile.

  He pushes the rhetoric further. “If you didn’t do those things, who did?”

  “You did them. You and your machines.”

  “Then that makes them real, does it not? As real as automobiles? As real as shoes?”

  Lattimore gives her what he thinks is time to admire his sophistry, but she uses it to reassemble her intentions. As he whistles a toneless tune, she slides her hand to his thigh. “Those movies got me hot. I want to pose for you.”

  “Good.”

  “Is there a place we can go?”

  He hesitates. “Of course.”

  He helps her to her feet and leads her out of the spooky chamber and down the hall to a room designed for just one purpose. It is an adolescent’s vision of heaven—ceiling mirrors and satin sheets and lighting in the pink palette of a bordello—but the effect is more suffocating than sensual. The air is too falsely fragrant, the floor too thickly carpeted, the bedding too slickly scarlet, the theme too eager and unalloyed. It is so pathetic, she feels a sense of sympathy, but only momentarily. At the push of a button, the screens on the walls leap to life with nudes, women cavorting around the bed like participants in an erotic Olympics.

  When he starts to unbutton her blouse, she grasps his hands to stop him. “You first.”

  He reddens, as if it is the first time the issue has presented itself. “Maybe I should slip into something more comfortable.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  After he disappears into an anteroom, she places her purse on the bed and extracts her accessories. When he emerges minutes later, looking like a doll-sized gladiator in red silk jock and satin slippers, she picks up her camera and aims it.

  The flash is blinding. His hands go to his eyes and he swears at her. Sightless, he staggers toward the wall and gropes for a switch. The ceiling lights go off, to be replaced by a dozen others, multicolored strobes that animate and enliven the room. The music goes from soft to hard, a throbbing threnody of rock and roll that seems to mimic rutting.

  “No more cameras, goddammit—I’ll take care of the pyrotechnics.”

  As he squints into the light that shields her, she returns the camera to her purse and picks up her pistol and shoots him.

  He is on the ground, rolling and moaning and clutching himself, as she rushes from the room. When there is one last door in the way of her freedom, the beefy guard steps from behind a post and grabs her and lifts her off the ground.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that,” he says, with what she sees is relish. “I told him when we saw you dogging Richter that you were trouble. I told him when we got the stuff you stashed with your skinny buddy that he’d better put a muzzle on you. I guess now I got to do it myself.”

  The arm around her throat squeezes until she gags.

  It was an hour before midnight when we turned off the freeway and snaked through the foothills of Issaquah. The evening mist dampened the windshield with a rash of tiny blisters until the wipers swept it clear in a minor miracle of healing.

  The rental car was quiet; Chris Wellington was intent on driving; I could easily have fallen asleep. “Where do you think he’s got her?” I asked after we’d cleared the commercial cluster of the village.

  “Pool house, probably. It’s detached from the main building and it’s got lots of little rooms to stick her in.”

  “So I go to the big house and you head for the pool.”

  “Right.”

  “Are you sure he’ll see me?”

  “I told him you have something on that disk that he absolutely has to be aware of.”

  I took the shiny CD-ROM out of my pocket and looked at it like an aborigine encountering a wristwatch. “What does he think this is?”

  “Porn, probably. That’s mostly what he does out here. The legitimate stuff goes on in the city.”

  “The disk comes from me? Not you?”

  “Right. I made you sound like this big, tough guy from out of town who’s the front man for an extortion scam.”

  “What do you think he’ll do when he sees what it is?”

  “Well, he’ll know it’s a fake, obviously, and he’ll wonder who made it and why.”

  “Won’t he know it came from you?”

  “No. I dumbed down the technology so it’s way short of leading edge. And even if he does figure it was me, it shouldn’t matter at that point. This has to be in and out fast. Right?”

  “Right. Will he be worried enough to distract him even though he knows it’s fake?”

  “Probably not for long. He’s skated away from some sticky stuff over the years, including charges of fraud and extortion by women who haven’t wanted to play his games. The complaints all evaporated once they got to city hall.”

  “He won’t react at all?”

  “Oh, he’ll react. He’ll be pissed that you thought you could fleece him.”

  “That I turned the tables, in other words.”

  “Right. And he’ll want to punish you for it.”

  “What kind of security does he have out here?”

  “Lots of weapons; just two men.”

  “Are they trained or just beefcake?”

  “One’s ex-FBI—a little Latino who got bounced for sexual harassment of a female agent a couple of years back. The other’s a former Tacoma cop—he left the force to make money.”

  Wellington turned a corner and stopped the car. The light of a lonely streetlamp performed an alchemy by making the mist a spritz of gold.

  “That’s Lattimore’s place down there,” Wellington pointed. “We’ll be under camera surveillance the minute we enter the gate. There’s one thing you should be ready for,” he added after a moment.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s got this room. The Reality Room, he calls it. It’s basically an isolation chamber in which everything you see and hear and smell comes from Lattimore’s command and control consoles. He takes charge of your senses and turns them against you. The experience can be pretty mind-boggling.”

  “You’ve gone through it?”

  “No, but I’ve seen people who have. They look like they’ve seen Satan, sometimes.”

  “Maybe they have,” I said, remembering the hell that Mandy Lorenzen had descended to, remembering the shove that had put her there.

  I looked around to make sure we were alone. “I guess this is where you get in the trunk.”

  Wellington nodded and climbed out of the car. A button on the key ring opened the lid. He gave me back the ignition key and took the rest of the ring into the trunk with him, to use to make his exit. As I closed the lid on his fetal curl, he wasn’t as scared as he should have been. That’s one of the virtues of amateurism.

  I drove through the gate and followed the asphalt lane toward the house. Lattimore called the place “La
ttitudes,” the plaque on the gatepost told me; I wondered again at the origins and effects of a raging ego.

  The house was more subtle than I expected, a dark log laid casually across the wooded landscape, a young boy’s fort writ large. As I came to a stop under the portico, the massive door opened immediately. The man who came out to intercept me was huge and hostile and hyper-alert, so much so that I worried that this was some kind of trap, that Wellington remained in cahoots with Lattimore and had set me up for a fall.

  He held the door as I got out of the car. His brows were as bristly as ropes and his hands as big as saucepans; his greeting lacked words of welcome. The quick once-over didn’t include the trunk but it encompassed everything in sight including me. When I gave him my name and said I had an appointment, he was as interested as if I’d told him I was a Presbyterian.

  When I was inside the house, he put out a hand to halt my progress so he could frisk me both manually and electronically. “What’s that?” he asked about the object in my left hand.

  “CD-ROM.”

  “For him?”

  “Right.”

  “He knows what it is?”

  “Only generically.”

  “Generically. Yeah. That’s a good word for it.” His disgust seemed directed at his boss’ predilections more than at me and my slender alm.

  “You’re the ex-cop, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Know anyone on the Frisco force?”

  He shook his head. “Why would I?”

  “No reason. Just making conversation.”

  “Well, make it go away.”

  He motioned for me to follow and I trailed him down a hall that seemed as long as the supercollider. When he stopped by an open door he pointed toward the innards of the room. “Wait there.”

  “How long will it be?”

  “However long he wants it to be. Had a guy wait three days once. Slept in a chair; pissed in a plant. Never did do any business.” He laughed and lumbered back the way we’d come.

  I entered the designated holding cell and sat in a club chair to wait. The room was busy but impersonal, with nothing to suggest the mind of its owner. Lattimore had probably learned long ago to keep his mind out of sight of his guests. I wondered if Chris Wellington had managed to slip out of the car and into the pool house. The more I thought about it, the more I doubted that anything good could happen in the next hour. When I looked for a way out, I didn’t see anything but the way in.