Trashed

by Alison Gaylin

  As they started walking toward the hotel, she said, “But, you know . . . don’t expect me to share anything I get in there with you.”

  “Like I need you to share. I’ve been doing this since you were trying out for the cheerleading squad.”

  “I never tried out for the cheerleading squad. And it seems to me, about twenty minutes ago you were begging me to share.”

  “Chrylan leads. That’s all I want from you, and that’s what you’re gonna give me.” He gave her a sidelong glance.

  “Oh, and just FYI, I don’t beg. For anything. Ever.”

  Simone stifled a smile. They crossed the street. At the hotel’s entrance, a curly-haired blond guy was involved in a heated discussion with two uniforms. “I’m telling you,” one cop was saying, “we have no statement at this time.”

  The blond said, “How long is this time gonna last?”

  “Quite a while, sir.”

  “Enquirer reporter,” Walker said, between his teeth. “Annoys the hell out of me.”

  “Walker,” said Simone.

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t trust you.”

  He nodded.

  “But I don’t hate you, either.”

  He stopped walking and gazed at Simone’s profile. “Same,” he said.

  The Enquirer reporter was still arguing with the cops as Simone and Walker approached. They’re never going to let us through. She hesitated a little, trying to think of a plan, but Walker put a hand on her back and urged her past the group, and sure enough, they went right through the door. Behind them, Simone heard the reporter say, “There is such a thing as freedom of information!”

  “Man, that guy is irritating,” said Walker. “One on-the-record with Howard K. Stern and he thinks he’s Wood-ward and Bernstein rolled into one.”

  They were about five feet away from the elevator. “I think we’re actually going to make it,” Simone said.

  “Of course we are,” Walker said. “All you have to do is act like you know where you’re going.”

  He hit the button on the elevator just as a deep voice said, “Wait!”

  Simone turned and saw a large ruddy-faced man with a thick shock of white hair. The man wore a dark suit, a loosened tie. And, as if he needed one, a detective’s badge around his neck. “Wait!” he said again.

  The elevator door opened and Simone jumped in, pulling Walker with her. She hit the CLOSE button, but Walker shoved his hand in front of the electric eye and held the door open for the approaching detective. “What the hell are you doing?” Simone said.

  Walker didn’t have time to answer before the detective was in the elevator with them, breathing hard, saying, “What’s the matter, Neil? You forget how to say hi?”

  Simone’s eyes went big.

  Walker smiled. “Act like you know where you’re going—that is important,” he said. “But it also helps if the lead detective knows you can beat the crap out of him.”

  The detective, whom Walker introduced to Simone as Ed Sandiford from Robbery-Homicide, hit the button for the fifth floor. “He’s obviously trying to impress you,” he said.

  “You mean to tell me I can’t beat the crap out of you?”

  “I mean to tell you it’s irrelevant, considering I have a Glock forty-five.”

  Simone said, “How do you guys know each other?”

  “Neil and I met at a press conference a couple of years ago,” Sandiford said. “We wound up at the same bar later, and I got to telling him about my son. He’s a smart kid, real skinny though, and he was having this bully problem at school. Neil says, ‘I can teach him how to box.’ Turned out he wasn’t lying.”

  Neil turned to Simone. “I generally don’t lie to people carrying Glock forty-fives.”

  “Gotta get me a Glock,” Simone said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Anyway, thanks to this guy, my kid now kicks butt. So, to pay him back, I give him leads every now and again.”

  “You do box,” Simone said to Walker. “You were telling the truth about that.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, are you really from Rhinebeck?”

  Walker shook his head. “San Diego.”

  Unbelievable.

  As the elevator climbed, Walker looked at Sandiford. “Another cut throat, huh?” he said. “Was it suicide?”

  Sandiford’s gaze went from Walker to Simone and back. “Off the record,” he said, “it has been made to look like it. But, deep background, we’re not buying it this time.”

  Simone stared at him. “Why?”

  They reached the fifth floor. The doors opened. “You’ll see,” he said.

  Cops and criminologists spilled out of the crime scene into the hallway. Two uniforms began moving toward Sandiford. He turned to Walker and Simone. “Make yourselves as invisible as you can,” he said quietly. “And whatever you do, do not ask questions.”

  They stood behind Sandiford, following him past a group of crime scene photographers and into the room. The room Destiny had died in. The walls were yellow and cracked, and the carpet was so stained you couldn’t determine the actual color. But what hit Simone worst was the smell—like the smell in Emerald’s room, only stronger, so much stronger. . . . Her stomach seized up. She put a hand over her nose and mouth, tried to focus on sounds—the pop of cameras, the rustle of polyester uniforms, the murmur of voices . . . Age of victim, seventeen and a half . . . Fully clothed . . . Cause of death appears to be a severed jugular . . . left index fingertip has been severed as well, right index finger severely infected, as the result of an older injury . . . contusions to the . . .

  “You okay?” said Walker.

  She made herself say, “Yes.”

  In front of them, the group shifted as Sandiford and the two uniforms moved to the back of the room, giving them a clear view. Simone turned away for just a few seconds. Okay. Ready, set . . .

  She turned back. She looked at the bed. Her breath died inside her.

  It was lying on the bed—the thing that used to be a seventeen-year-old girl, arms and legs akimbo. The throat was deeply slashed, blood clinging to the neck, the face, the shoulders, fanning out from beneath the head like a dark halo. The face was so bruised it was impossible to tell her natural skin color, so contorted it was impossible to tell her age. It was impossible to tell what she had looked like at all in life, except for the strawberry blond hair now crusted with blood, and the eyes, gaping open in permanent terror. They were light green, her eyes, flat and cloudy, like sea glass. And her mouth . . . what was that jammed into her mouth? Some kind of gag, now drenched in blood.

  “Are you all right?” said Walker. “Should we . . .”

  Simone looked closer at the gag, at the thin, stacked edges, some of them green. . . . It was a wad of money. “Eight thousand dollars.”

  “What?”

  One of her hands gripped a knife—thin, serrated, with a wooden hilt. As a criminologist moved toward the hand to photograph it, Simone thought of that raw steak as she said the words, “Steak knife.”

  She remembered the bracelet in her purse. “Where’s Detective Sandiford?” She needed to talk to him, to give him the bracelet, but most important she needed to get out of that room, away from that smell, that destroyed body . . . that hate.

  “I think he’s in the hall,” said Walker, and then Simone was out, Walker following her, saying in a low voice, a voice that wasn’t his, “What do you think that meant?”

  Simone didn’t need to ask what he was talking about. She knew. He was talking about the two words written in blood on the wall over the bed.

  Snow White.

  SIXTEEN

  In the hallway, Simone gave Sandiford the bracelet and told him it had been found in Destiny’s trash. She also told him some of what Holly had said but, since Walker was standing next to her, she left out the more print-worthy details. Sandiford listened to her intently, wrote everything down on a steno pad.

  Then she told him about the Cinder
ella slipper, and Walker’s voice came back to her: “You found Nia Lawson’s shoe in Emerald Deegan’s garbage?”

  Sandiford said, “Where is the shoe now?”

  “My boss made me throw it out.”

  “Figures,” Walker said.

  “Regardless,” said Sandiford, “I’m going to suggest we open up those other two suicides, start looking into the possibility of serial murder.” He glared at Simone and Walker. “And that is not for publication under penalty of death.”

  Simone said, “But—”

  “I’d like you to run the bracelet story, though. Might bring him out of the woodwork. I mean . . . if there is a him. Or a her, or an anyone. It still could be three suicides. ”

  “Not three suicides,” Walker said. “How could Destiny have . . .”

  “She did,” Sandiford said.

  “Huh?”

  “The writing on the wall. Snow White. That’s what you’re talking about?”

  Walker nodded.

  “I don’t know who cut the tip of her finger off, or if anyone forced her to do it. But there were paint flecks from that wall inside the wound,” he said. “ ‘Snow White’ was written by her, with the blood from that finger.”

  Simone and Walker rode the elevator down together in silence. As the doors opened, Simone glimpsed his profile, so pale, his jaw tense, and she knew he was thinking the same way she was, those same images stuck in his mind. That horror. It was not so much the thing on the bed, the inanimate body, but what the girl had to do in order to become that thing. I don’t know who cut the tip of her finger off, or if anyone forced her . . . Simone thought of those pale green eyes, wrenched open forever, and she knew. Someone had forced her. . . .

  They walked through the lobby without saying a word, passed the blond Enquirer reporter, who was no longer complaining to anybody. They moved beyond a few paparazzi standing outside, one of whom shouted out, “Hi, Neil!”

  He didn’t reply.

  He walked Simone to her car, and for a second she thought he would just leave her there, as if they had never met at all. But instead he said, “I hope you don’t mind this.” And he took her in his arms, and the two of them held each other, saying nothing, for a very long time.

  Simone felt like she might break down, or maybe he would . . . break down and cry for all that blood, all that hate, for that poor, torn, seventeen-year-old girl. But neither of them did. The silence, the warmth—they were enough.

  Finally, Simone pulled away.

  Walker said, “If you tell anyone about this, I will deny it.”

  “Who am I going to tell?”

  “Good point. Anyway, truce is over. I’m stealing that bracelet story.”

  “You can’t do that! Emerald’s assistant gave me an exclus—”

  “Kidding.” He smiled at her—a small, sad smile. “It’s all yours.”

  “Really?”

  “But starting tomorrow I’m officially back on your ass. And you’re giving me those Chrylan leads.”

  “Don’t hold your breath.” As she put the key in her door, her hand trembled a little.

  “Simone?” Walker said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  She looked into his eyes and decided to be honest. “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither.”

  She nodded. “Good night, Neil.”

  “ ’Night.”

  As she drove home, Simone turned on the radio. Ludacris was bragging that he could “stay harder than a cinder block,” and normally the line would have made her smile. Thank you for that valuable information, Ludacris. It is

  duly noted. But she couldn’t listen, couldn’t think about anything other than what she’d seen on that bed. She turned the radio off.

  She remembered three days ago, when Nigel had given Elliot those camera phone photos of Destiny and ordered him to show them to Emerald.

  Simone wished she had seen those photos, if only to have another image to remember her by—this girl, this torn, broken teenage girl.

  Had Keith Furlong done that to her? Had he stood behind her as she faced the wall, shaking and bleeding? Had he forced her to write those words? Was he capable?

  Simone heard a sound in her car, the whistle of a dropping bomb, a mechanical explosion. It was her cell phone, the ringtone she had chosen for text messages. Who was text messaging her after midnight? Simone’s skin froze as she recalled Holly telling her about the call she’d received from Emerald’s killer . . . the laughing.

  At the time, Simone had thought Holly was delusional, thought it was the Xanax talking—Xanax and sleeplessness and grief. But now, now . . .

  Someone had made her write “Snow White” in her blood.

  She grabbed her phone out of her purse, flipped to text messages, and looked at the screen. It was from Greta. Simone exhaled and opened the message:

  Saw u at press conf! How do u know Dylan? Call me.

  Simone hadn’t felt close to her sister for years—but now, it was as if they lived on separate planets. She turned her gaze back to the road, and she knew she couldn’t go home, not now. She couldn’t pull out her bed, couldn’t change her clothes, couldn’t brush her teeth and lie down and sleep. She couldn’t say to herself, I’ll work on the story tomorrow. Not now, with awful questions burning in her mind. She needed to talk to someone, anyone, who knew Destiny alive.

  She looked at the time: 12:20 a.m. Not too late, she thought. She hit END, tapped in 411, and asked for the address of Pleasures, in Hollywood.

  Years earlier, Simone had read an article in Cosmo titled “Strippers’ Sexy Trade Secrets,” which stated, “Purple or red lights make cellulite disappear!” Pleasures obviously subscribed to this theory. The place was awash in purple light and mirrors. As she walked in, Simone looked down at her hands, which were glowing violet, and felt as if she’d stepped into someone else’s strange dream.

  The air was thick with perfume and baby oil, Fergie’s “London Bridge” blaring over the speaker system. Three women, naked and shaved, writhed on the horseshoe-shaped stage, clinging to polls, then slipping to all fours, playing to the men at the tables below. Fergie’s voice moaned, “Make you go down,” and other women slinked through the crowd in flimsy negligees, beaming at customers, mingling. Since California state law prohibited alcoholic beverages in topless /bottomless strip clubs, there was a juice bar at the back of the room. For some reason, Simone found this more perverse than anything else: fully dressed men sipping orange juice and vitamin water while talking to women wearing nothing but see-through swaths of fabric. If the men had been getting sloppy, make-an-ass-of-yourself drunk, at least, humiliation-wise, it would have made for a more even playing field.

  Simone walked up to the bar, Destiny’s dead green eyes in her mind. She ordered a glass of seltzer, well aware of how the bartender looked at her, a woman alone, wearing jeans and sneakers in a strip bar. “Is Pellegrino okay, ma’am?” he said, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

  Simone nodded, her gaze scanning the room for a girl to talk to. A few seats down, a very tall, voluptuous redhead in a filmy black slip was talking to two middle-aged conventioneers in suit coats, one with a terrible comb-over, the other still wearing his “Hello my name is” sticker. Simone took her bubbly water and moved closer.

  The conventioneers may not have been drinking at Pleasures, but they’d certainly had a few earlier, and it showed all over their sweaty pink faces, advertised itself in their slurred speech. “If you give my friend a lap dance and I, uh, watch,” Comb-over was saying, “then I don’t have to pay, right?”

  “Sorry, sweetie, private dances are private.” The redhead stared him down hungrily. “I wish I didn’t make the rules. I’d take you both. For free.”

  His friend grinned at her. “My name is Frank,” he said, the silliness of that comment amplified by the sticker on his coat. Must be really proud of his name.

  The redhead winked at him. “Charity.”

  Simone
said, “You can say that again.”

  “Huh?” said Frank.

  Simone asked her, “Can I talk to you, in private?”

  Charity turned, stared Simone in the eye. “I love girls,” she said. “Does your boyfriend want to watch?”

  “No boyfriend.”

  Charity gave her the exact same wanton look she’d just bestowed on Comb-over. “Thirty dollars for fifteen minutes.”

  Comb-over said, “Can I watch? Please?”

  Simone leaned close to Charity. “I don’t want a lap dance,” she said. “I want to talk to you about Destiny.”

  Instantly, the hungry glint evaporated. “Are you a cop?”

  “No,” said Simone. “I’m . . .” A reporter? Friend? Pilates partner? “I’m worried.”

  Charity stared at her, saying nothing for what could have been a full minute. Then she grabbed Simone’s hand and said to the conventioneers, “Sorry, boys. This is going to be one on one.”

  Charity took Simone into one of the back rooms, a small space with a velvet banquette, one hard chair, and a wall full of mirrors. If it weren’t for the red lights, you could hold dance classes in here. And in a way, that was appropriate—pure theatrics.

  Charity closed the door, urged Simone into the chair, and kneeled in front of her—all for the benefit of the surveillance camera. Then she said, “I’m worried too.”

  “Do you know what—”

  “Some cops were here a little while ago. Told us what happened. Suicide. Yeah, right.”

  Simone looked at her. “So, you don’t think she killed herself either.”

  “No way,” she said. “There was nobody happier than Destiny, especially in the last week. She had some deal going on, said she was going to be famous.”

  The image flashed in Simone’s head, the wad of blood-drenched bills shoved in Destiny’s mouth. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Four days ago.” She gave Simone a long, steady look. “How about you?”

  “Huh?”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Well . . .”

  “You didn’t know her, did you?” said Charity. “You are a cop.”

  She shook her head. “Reporter.”