Trashed

by Alison Gaylin

  His voice was calm, so calm . . . and Destiny knew. He would make her sign the wall with her blood, and then he would take that knife and he would kill her. There was no question.

  “Get up. Now.”

  As she struggled onto her side, a tiny voice inside her said, Surprise him. And Destiny’s reflexes took over. She balled her good hand into a fist.

  “If you do not get up now, I will cut you open on the floor like the pig you are.”

  In one motion, she pushed herself to her feet and punched him, square in the throat.

  A sound escaped from him—a kind of voiceless groan, a rush of air. She could have sworn she heard a heavy thud on the floor, but she wouldn’t believe it. She couldn’t believe anything she heard or felt right now, in the middle of this nightmare.

  Welcome to Tomorrowland.

  She thought of nothing but the door in front of her—several feet away and then an arm’s length and then she could touch it. She turned the handle and threw it open and ran out onto the street to where her car was parked.

  Destiny had nothing in her purse but thirty dollars and a maxed-out credit card, but that was enough, more than enough, as she turned the key with her good hand and drove as fast as she could to a place where she knew she could disappear.

  Bedrock was the highest priced and cheesiest looking bar Simone had ever been in, but Keith Furlong owned it, and Destiny loved to hang out in it, so Simone had been drinking here for hours. She was telling everyone she met that her name was Brittany—a carryover from the afternoon—and she had a costume to match: skimpy red halter top, painted-on jeans, fuck-me-now heels, all borrowed from the fathomless closet of Kathy Kinney.

  She felt like a complete idiot.

  Simone had been hoping at least to make contact with Furlong—to ask him flat-out why there would be a pool of blood in Emerald’s sink, because the image nagged at her now, along with that blood-crusted shoe. So much blood around one small woman. . . . But Furlong was nowhere in sight—and neither was his underage stripper lover, whom Simone had assured Nigel she would find.

  Simone had easily spoken to half a dozen regulars, all male, who claimed to be on a first-name basis with Keith or Destiny or both. Each was happy to answer her questions, just so long as she let him buy her drinks with alcohol in them. She didn’t quite understand all the attention she was getting. Bedrock was in West LA, after all, where everyone looked as if they’d been designed via blueprint, carved out of marble and dipped in bronze. She was easily six inches shorter and two cup sizes smaller than any of the other women in the bar. But the men here didn’t seem to mind.

  Maybe it was because she looked refreshingly different. Or approachable. Or drunk. That had to be it.

  For the past fifteen minutes she’d been chatting up the manager, Cole, who claimed to be a “silent partner” in Bedrock, with “an indie film project in the works” and “a sweet BMW Seven Series that you’d look hot climbing out of.”

  Simone was trying to get him to talk about Destiny, but she was running out of steam. During every lull in the conversation—and there were many of them—she found her gaze wandering around the room, encountering new levels of absurdity in Bedrock’s Stone Age decor.

  The bar stools were made of ersatz dinosaur bones, and the walls gleamed with glow-in-the-dark cave paintings. A statue of a brontosaurus stood obtrusively in the middle of the dance floor. Everyone who worked here wore faux animal skins, and some even carried clubs.

  It rubbed her the wrong way, all of it. On top of the dinosaur bones being a sort of fluorescent, acid green, and the cave paintings seeming as if they’d been rendered in spray paint, Bedrock—and this was by far the most irritating thing of all—had its eras mixed up. Everyone knew that cavemen and dinosaurs never coexisted. It reminded Simone of those animated movies in which cows had male voices. Accepted stupidity. She just hated that. Honestly, would it kill them to stick to post-Jurassic animals?

  Maybe she’d been in this place too long, drinking without food, but . . . there was a T. rex head mounted on the wall. As if a caveman would have been capable of killing a dinosaur the size of a parking garage and sawing off its head, when they’d never even shared the same breathing space to begin with!

  “Your eyes are really exotic,” Cole was saying. “What do you call that color?”

  “Huh?” said Simone. “Oh, sorry. Green.”

  Cole was not in costume, but he definitely had a Neanderthal, drag-you-by-the-hair look and he was dressed in the spirit—Bedrock T-shirt, a necklace made of fake sharks’ teeth. Or maybe they were supposed to be T. rex teeth. Concentrate.

  “So, is Destiny going to show tonight or what?” said Simone. “She told me to meet her here, like . . . a while ago.”

  He rubbed his thick jaw. “Haven’t seen her all night,” he said. “And that’s weird, because after she finishes at Pleasures, she always comes here.”

  “Keith isn’t here either.”

  “Nope.”

  “Hasn’t been here all night.”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You sure he wasn’t here earlier and you missed him?”

  “No way. I’m Keith’s number two. He’s not around, I run the show.” He smiled at her. “Even when he is, if you know what I’m saying. You know that guy they call the president’s brain?”

  “Karl Rove?”

  “That’s me.”

  She looked at him. Yeah, he was being serious. “Wow,” she said. “So . . . you think maybe Keith and Destiny ran away together?”

  “You’re sort of naïve, aren’t you?” Cole said. “I like that. It’s cute.”

  “Why? I mean . . . Keith’s totally into Destiny. She told me—”

  “Baby, if there’s one thing you shouldn’t believe, it’s what chicks tell their chick friends about guys being into them.” He looked her up and down. “No offense.”

  “Excuse me, miss,” said the bartender. “Gentleman over there would like to buy you a drink.”

  The bartender’s bare arm was festooned with tiger-striped fur sweatbands. Simone’s eyes followed the bulky stretch of it to the opposite end of the bar, where she saw the same guy who had thrown her off the Suburban Indiscretions set. He was smiling.

  Oh, now come on. “I’ll be back in a minute, Cole.”

  Simone picked up her drink, walked the circumference of the bar to where he sat, and glared down at him. She wasn’t avoiding him this time. If nothing else, three and a half chardonnays had eased all fear of confrontation. “I never got your name,” she said.

  He turned his face up to her—with that wiseass smile, those gas-flame eyes. “Neil Walker,” he said.

  “Well . . . Walker. You can’t throw me out of here. It’s a free country and I can drink wherever I want, no matter what I do for a living.”

  His smile grew broader. “I’m off duty,” he said. “Really, Brittany. I just wanted to buy you a drink. And to tell you I’m sorry about this morning.”

  Simone blinked a few times. “You’re sorry?”

  “I know you were just doing your job. Unfortunately, doing my job meant I couldn’t let you stay on set.”

  “I . . . I thought you were a director or something.”

  “Nah, I’m not that glamorous,” he said. “I’m in security. Barry Savage—he’s the executive producer—his office contracts my firm to guard the SI set. Believe me, you’re not the first tabloid reporter I’ve caught.”

  Simone examined Walker—the rumpled hair, the intelligent features. He wore the same clothes he’d had on that morning—white, untucked oxford, faded jeans, Nikes. “You don’t look like a security guy,” she said.

  “I don’t?”

  “Not at all. Where’s the crew cut and the bad sports coat?”

  “Hey, we’re the ones who are supposed to be doing the profiling.”

  She smiled. “Listen, can I ask you a question?”

  “Yes, I voted for Schwarzenegger.”

  “That’s not what I was go
ing to ask.”

  “I never served in the military. I have a college degree, but yeah, I do read Tom Clancy from time to time. And I box.”

  “Okay, okay . . .”

  “Just wanted to get the rest of the profiling out of the way for you.” He winked at Simone, took a sip of his scotch.

  “This morning,” she said, “what was it about me that gave me away?”

  He laughed a little. “For future reference?”

  “Yeah. I’m . . . I’m sort of new at this. I need to know these things.”

  His gaze traveled from Simone’s eyes to her mouth, down the borrowed halter top and jeans, all the way to the tips of the heels and back up—a slow and lingering journey that made Simone’s face heat up. “Well, first of all,” he said, “you are so not from Utah.”

  “You wanna know something?” said Walker. “I really like the Asteroid.”

  “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

  Half an hour later, Simone had switched to Coke and was feeling a little less fuzzy-headed, yet she still hadn’t mentioned Destiny’s name. She’d thought Walker might be a good source, Hollywood security job and all, but she told herself she had to be careful about it—get to know him first so he wouldn’t think she was only trying to yank information out of him. She couldn’t just blurt out, “Do you know what happened to that stripper Destiny?”

  That would be like shooting off with no foreplay.

  Besides, Walker was so easy to talk to. She’d told him about going to Columbia, about the LA Edge folding, about the financial desperation that forced her into tabloid journalism. The thing was, he seemed more interested in what Simone had to say than her state of intoxication—which was, at the very least, a nice change of pace for tonight.

  “I’m serious,” Walker said. “The Asteroid is my favorite of those rags.”

  “Well . . . they placed a nicely worded classified ad for the job. I’ll give them that.”

  “So . . . where are you from originally?”

  “You’ve never heard of it.”

  “Try me.”

  Simone gave him a long look. “Wappingers Falls.” “No way. I’m from Rhinebeck.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I am! Astor Road. My folks still live there. I took a girl from Wappingers Falls to senior prom.”

  “We grew up twenty minutes away from each other?”

  “I’m older than you, though. You don’t have a big brother or sis—”

  Simone swallowed hard. “No.”

  “Only child, huh? Me too . . . kind of. My brother is fifteen years older than me.”

  “Really?”

  He nodded. “I was what you call unexpected.”

  She grinned at him. “You still are.”

  “I’m going to take that as a compliment, Brittany.”

  “Simone.” “Right. I keep forgetting. The thing is, you look like a Brittany.”

  “I do?”

  “No.”

  Simone finished the rest of her Coke. On the other side of Walker—in lieu of an ashtray—was a huge nest marked with the words “Pterodactyl eggs.” “I hate this place,” she said.

  He snorted. “As if cavemen hung out alongside T. rexes. Would it kill them to stick to one prehistoric era?”

  “Oh, my God, yes! Exactly!”

  For a long moment, Walker said nothing, just gazed into her eyes. “You know what I miss most about Rhinebeck?”

  “What?”

  “Christmastime, when they put all those little white lights in the trees outside the Beekman Arms.”

  Simone smiled.

  “Thing is, I didn’t think about those lights at all when I was living there. Christmas was fucking cold and I was always the one who had to shovel the driveway, put the fake reindeer on the roof ’cause my dad was too old to climb up there. It was a pain in the ass. . . . But now, I think of those white lights and it makes me . . . well up a little. Something so real about it, you know? White lights on bare trees. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Simone said. “And bugs in the summer. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great not having mosquitoes, but it also makes me feel like they know something we don’t.”

  “Ah, yes. Mosquito conspiracy theory.”

  “I’m telling you, there’s something there.”

  Walker’s hand brushed against hers and his expression went serious. “What the hell are you doing in this ridiculous dive, anyway? I mean, I live right around the corner and I have terrible insomnia. What’s your excuse?”

  Now. Now she could ask him. The sentence formed: Do you know a stripper named Destiny? But then it popped into her mind again, the blood in Emerald’s sink . . . the shoe in her trash. Matthew had said he’d never had a chance to ask Emerald about that shoe. Emerald had stormed out in disgust after Elliot told her about Destiny and the steak. . . . “I found Nia Lawson’s other shoe.”

  Walker peered at her. “That actress who . . .”

  “Mack Calloway. Yes. The Cinderella slipper.”

  “Are you sure it’s hers?”

  “Almost positive.”

  “That . . . that is incredibly weird.”

  “Isn’t it? I can’t believe my boss made me throw it out. He’s got something against Nia Lawson. But here’s the thing.” She leaned in close, lowered her voice. “You’re not going to believe where I found it.”

  Walker’s eyes widened, but before Simone could say anything more, her cell phone chimed. She glanced at the caller ID, even though there was only one person who could be calling at this hour. “Nigel?”

  “Are you speaking to someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to leave the bar, go out to your car, and call me back within the next ten minutes for instructions. ”

  “Okay,” she said. “But why?”

  “I will tell you, but you mustn’t react in any way; you mustn’t change your facial expression. If you are capable of doing this, please reply simply, ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  There was a slight pause. Walker mouthed the words “Are you okay?” And Simone nodded, keeping her face as blank as she could as Nigel’s voice raced into her ear.

  “I’ve just heard from my police source,” he said. “Emerald Deegan is dead.”

  FIVE

  Simone didn’t play tennis, but she was wearing tennis whites. She was walking a dog that didn’t belong to her in a neighborhood she didn’t live in, getting ready to act surprised by the one thing she already knew: Emerald Deegan had died of an apparent suicide late the previous night.

  Two suicides, one month apart, the first suicide’s shoe in the second suicide’s garbage. . . .

  Simone tried to focus on the world around her, but it was hard. The sunrise bled a kind of gaudy, MAX Factor coral into the lavender sky, and there was that same pasty-sweet smell that melted through Simone’s open windows every morning—that mixture of sage and wet driveway and residual, night-blooming jasmine. That, combined with lack of sleep and a blossoming hangover, the tennis garb and this unfamiliar dog—which jerked at its leash so hard it kept gagging—made Simone feel as if she were asleep at her apartment, in the midst of some fever dream.

  The facts, as Simone knew them, only added to the feeling. What connection could there be? Back at the Asteroid, she’d done a few quick Internet searches on Emerald and Nia. Far as she could tell, they’d never acted in anything together, weren’t involved in the same charities, didn’t go to the same parties or hang out with any of the same people. They didn’t share an agent, a manager, a publicist. . . . Plus, Emerald was on a hit show, while Nia hadn’t worked in years. They had absolutely no reason to have ever met. Yet Emerald had that shoe—Nia’s bloody suicide shoe—in her possession.

  And now they’re both dead.

  “Cccccccchhhhh,” said the dog.

  “Heel.”

  The dog, a fluffy white cockapoo named Madison, paid no attention to the command. “Cccccccccccchhh,” it said again, its limpid black eyes po
pping a little. Then it reared up on its tiny hind legs, yanked harder, and made a different sound, like wax paper crumpling.

  “Breathe!”

  The dog emitted a deep growl, but at least its vocal cords were in use.

  Both Madison and the tennis whites had been donated by Kathy, who’d sped over to the Asteroid’s office an hour and a half earlier at Nigel’s request.

  “Will you be coming with me?” Simone had said at the time, trying hard to keep the Please, I’ll do anything out of her voice. If there was any place on the entire spinning planet Simone would less rather be than the Asteroid’s reporters’ room at four thirty in the morning with a chardonnay hangover, it was the scene of Emerald Deegan’s death, alone.

  “Sorry,” Kathy had said. “The Hollywood Division cops know me from when I pretended to be Phil Spec-tor’s maid.”

  Simone had searched Kathy’s face. Ever since her fellow reporter had arrived at work, she had been doing this, hunting for the faintest hint of emotion within those princess eyes, that placid mouth. Finally, she said, “I can’t believe this, Kathy. Can you? I mean, we were just in her trailer, borrowing clothes—”

  “All actresses are weird,” Kathy said.

  “But—”

  “Listen, anybody who wants to be famous is nuts. You actually go so far as to achieve it—to become so famous you’re trapped in your own home because you can’t walk from your front door to your car without a bunch of ass-holes taking your picture. . . . Then you’re out-and-out psychotic. And psychotic people do things like kill themselves. ”

  Simone looked at her. “Like Nia Lawson.”

  “Yes, honey.” Kathy cast a quick glance at Nigel, then spoke a little louder. “Now remember, you’re a neighbor walking your dog before your morning tennis lesson, and you just happened on all these cars outside the house of that sweet girl, Emerald.”

  Simone said, “But I won’t be able to get any on-the-record quotes if I don’t identify myself as a reporter. ”

  That’s when Nigel had interrupted. “You are not a reporter . You are an insider. As in According to an insider, coke-addicted starlet Emerald Deegan died of a lethal mix of autoerotic asphyxiation and speedballs after finding a secret sex tape of her cheating boyfriend Keith Furlong and seventeen Laker Girls. Am I clear?!”