She told me to call her if I needed anything and closed the door. I didn’t need her and I didn’t want her. I wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner and never go outside again. I was sweating and all the moving around had made my head start to pound. I made the mistake of bending down to untie my shoes. My stomach roared. The good thing was that I hadn’t let go of my trusty plastic bag and was able to catch the jet of steaming gut acid before it spoiled the decor. The bad thing was that the redhead came in while I still had my face in the bag. And when I lifted my head to attempt a food-poisoning excuse I could feel I had something stuck around the outside of my mouth. She backed out and I didn’t see her again till I settled the bill.
I chose a dark, three-button silk number. It fit pretty well, but the trousers were a little long. One of the assistants offered to have them taken up if I’d wait twenty minutes, but that was an absurd suggestion. So I took the suit as it was, laid down most of Bella’s money, and split to the street and the cab I’d kept waiting.
I had the dry heaves most of the way through Beverly Hills and I knew I wasn’t going to make it through the coming evening without some sort of chemical prop. I had the driver detour through the side streets around the drag. When he sussed what I was doing he started to get shitty, but I told him I’d give him a cut of the deal and he got flexible quickly enough.
Eight-thirty saw me downtown, standing out front of the Bradbury Building. The area is a dump at the best of times, but afterhours, when the drones have gone home, it turns into a creepy wasteland best avoided if you aren’t carrying a gun. I was safe enough, though. They’d rigged up an entrance awning with a lot of bright lights, and there were enough uniformed guys running to park cars and manning the door to scare away the human shit that would ordinarily have been heaped on the sidewalk.
I felt better than I had earlier that day, the puking had stopped and the pain in my head had fallen to a low-level throb. But between all the DFs I’d dropped and the coke I’d snorted while dressing for this third connection with Bella, I was pretty spaced. I hadn’t realized there would be valet parking, so I’d come by cab rather than risk leaving the Prelude on the streets, and now I had nowhere to wait until she showed with the invites. So I stood and watched the cars arrive.
Black limos, white limos, a few two-door exotics. The people getting out of them glowed with wealth. The women wore pearls and diamonds around their throats, their bodies were toned and supple, they moved with an erect grace, aware of their own importance. The men strode with these women on their arms like sated beasts of prey, sleek with the knowledge that they could have anything in the world they desired. They were a tailored and massaged and personally exercised golden race who had reduced amounts of money that would make an ordinary man choke to nothing more than points in a game they played among themselves.
An auto horn blipped discreetly. I turned to see Bella climbing from a stretch, a chauffeur holding the door for her. She was wearing a short dark skirt and as she scissored her legs out onto the sidewalk I caught a flash of white briefs fringed, between her thighs, with black cunt hair.
“Hello, Jack. I’ve missed you.”
She kissed me. I felt the heat of her breasts through my suit coat.
The Bradbury Building is one of the most beautiful in L.A. Five or six stories high, it was built a hundred and fifty years ago out of some kind of brown stone and it looks pretty much Art Nouveau. Inside, things are laid out around a central atrium that rises clear to the top of the building. At each floor there is an exposed walkway and off these doors lead to the offices of lawyers and accountants. Dark wood, wrought iron, and a set of cage elevators you can watch going up and down. Ridley Scott shot the end sequence of Blade Runner there.
Tonight the offices were closed, but the ground floor and the first two walkways were open and decorated in an Alice in Wonderland theme. Polystyrene grandfather clocks had been wedged into odd corners, a four-foot automated caterpillar puffed smoke from a water pipe on top of a mushroom, bottles labeled “Drink Me” were scattered around on small tables. Behind the buffet, the catering staff were dressed in character. I thought it looked cool, but Bella didn’t seem impressed.
“Do you drink? I don’t. Get one if you like, this isn’t a sit-down thing.”
I scored a couple of vodkas from a waiter dressed like a fat English schoolboy, tipped them into one glass, and followed Bella up some stairs to the second of the walkways. Up that high, we were almost alone.
“We don’t mingle?”
“With those people?”
On the ground floor men and women chatted in groups, helped themselves to food, drank drinks, laughed, and had a good time.
“They look okay to me. What’s it for?”
“Profile raising for a cable station. Don’t you think they look like pigs at a trough?”
“You really think they’re that bad?”
“You don’t know them. With all their money not one of them has the courage to look at themselves. They take cocaine, perhaps have sex with more than one person, and they think they know what it is to test the limits of their morality.”
We looked down on the people for a while, then Bella asked me if I wanted another drink. I wasn’t too bothered about more alcohol, the vodka had burned my stomach and I didn’t want to start puking again, but I said yes because it meant we’d be back in the action.
We made the ground floor and headed for the bar. I ordered coke.
“If you don’t like these people, why did we come?”
“For you. Do you know what these people do? The ones that do anything?”
“I recognize a couple of actors.”
“Mostly management and major stockholders. You said you wanted to present a movie show, I thought it might be useful for you to have some contact with the people involved.”
“Jesus, I was only dreaming.”
“How difficult can it be, talking to a camera?”
Bella scanned.
“You see that girl there? In the white skirt? They found her in a pie store. Now she does what you want to do.”
The girl Bella pointed out was Lorn from 28 FPS. White mini, white crop top, punky hair. In the flesh she still looked good, but real life removed some of the definition from her features. Where Bella had a sharp dark radiance, Lorn’s attractiveness veered more toward the kind of Californian tomboyishness Heather Locklear had in Dynasty, before she bitched up for Melrose.
“Hey, I watch her all the time. Do you know her?”
“Vaguely. I have money in the channel.”
Bella looked at her watch.
“It’s getting late. There’s someone we need to talk to.”
“It’s only ten o’clock.”
“I have to get back to Malibu.”
“Not Beverly Hills?”
“The only people who live in Beverly Hills are those who can’t afford to leave, and those who don’t have the taste to know any better.”
Bella beckoned to a thickset man with curly gray hair who was talking to what looked like a group of subordinates. He immediately slapped a few upper arms, worked his way out of the huddle, and came over to us.
“Bella, this is a surprise.”
He had a fleshy voice that made me think of cigars. He didn’t do the usual cheek-kissing thing.
“Hello, Howard.”
“What do you think of the decoration? We went all out.”
“I couldn’t imagine anything less original. How’s the channel?”
“Going from strength to strength, baby. Increasing audience points weekly.”
“Good. Howard, this is Jack. He’s interested in working on a movie news show.”
Howard shook my hand and glanced at the cuffs of my trousers.
“Good to meet ya, Jack. It’s a hard racket to crack. Lot of young people want in on it. Had any experience?”
“Well, I’ve done a tele—“
Bella cut in and nodded across the room toward Lorn.
“Sure. 28 FPS. Great ratings, lot of interest. We might syndicate next year.”
“She’s attractive, but do you really think she’s right for it? She doesn’t look particularly … cerebral.”
“This is TV, who wants cerebral? She’s young, she’s got great tits, she can talk. It’s enough already.”
“I wonder what she really brings to the table, though.”
“Hey, indulge me.” And here Howard winked at me. “I’ve been doing this all my life. I think I can pick people. Gorgeous, lovely people like you provide the bankroll, for which I’m eternally grateful. But running the channel, well, that’s what I know best. That’s, what do you call it? My forte.”
Bella went on as if she hadn’t heard him.
“It’s my feeling, Howard, that she would benefit from a little assistance. Perhaps a partner on the show.”
“You mean Jack here?”
“You should consider it.”
“Bella. Bella, darling, the girl’s doing fine as she is. If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. You know what I’m saying?”
“Letting you know my thoughts, Howard. I hope you’ll take them on board.”
A reasonable tone, but the threat was there. I could see its impact in the tightening of his smile, and it made me wonder exactly how rich Bella was that she could use such thinly disguised blackmail against someone who obviously played a large part in channel control.
“Bella, your thoughts are pearls to me. Give me some time with them, I’ll bounce them around. We’ll talk again soon, baby, huh? Real soon.”
And with that he was off, weaving his way through groups of people, escaping.
“Wow. I don’t think he liked that. Who was he?”
“Howard Welks, top man at the channel. I have to leave. Walk me to the car, will you?”
“We’re not leaving together?”
“I’m sorry, Jack. Not tonight, my father’s at home.”
“What? He’s visiting or something?”
“Some nights he spends at the house, some at his apartment downtown. Tonight he’s at the house.”
“And you can’t bring anyone home? We could go to my place.”
“It’s complicated, Jack.”
At the entrance to the building Bella took a slim mobile from her handbag and told the limo to come around. It looked very much like I wasn’t going to lay pipe that night. My disappointment must have shown because she kissed me and squeezed my arm.
“Are you terribly annoyed?”
“Well, I just thought …”
The limo arrived, The driver stood patiently holding the door open. Bella glanced at the interior, then at me.
“Come and sit with me for a few minutes.”
We climbed in and the car moved out onto the road. Bella told the chauffeur to drive down the street a little way and park, then she slid up the partition. The cabin light threw gold across tan leather and the black glass windows held infinite concertina reflections of ourselves.
Bella took her jacket and skirt off. I held her tits for a while, and then she had me suck them. The seat made a soft crunching noise as she lay back and pulled off her briefs. The seam of her cunt glistened. She ran her hands over the insides of her thighs, then opened it up.
“Watch.”
She started slowly, drawing her fingers through her labia, making lazy circles over her clit. My dick was painful against my trousers and I undid my fly and took it out. Bella’s hand moved faster between her legs. After a while she arched her back and slid a finger into her asshole. She moaned and shuddered. Her hand went lazy again, over her belly and breasts. The muscles in her legs relaxed, she sat up and kissed me.
“Maybe I should kick you out of the car now.”
“You’re kidding.”
She laughed and put her head in my lap. And it was weird. Every woman sucks in a different way and a lover’s blow job is as distinctive as her voice or the smell of her hair. Bella hadn’t gone down on me before in either of our two previous connections, but somehow the movement and the feel of her mouth were familiar to me. It was a dim recognition, one I couldn’t link to any particular time or place, but it was there nevertheless. Right then, though, I had too much input coming from elsewhere to worry about memories, so I put it down to some sort of sexual déjà vu and concentrated on stuffing myself into her mouth. When I came she swallowed some of it and let the rest run down the outside of my cock. I had to wipe myself with the tail of my shirt.
While her back had been bent I’d seen more clearly the scarab at the base of her spine.
“I like your tattoo.”
“Oh, that … I had it done with a friend, one of those silly, spur of the moment things. Pull up your pants, I have to go.”
I stood on the sidewalk. As she pulled away, Bella wound down her window and called to me:
“What do you think about love, Jack? Do you think it can happen this quickly?”
Then she was just a pair of taillights getting smaller on a wide city road. I watched them fade until a gray sedan took the same line and obstructed my view.
Emmett Terrace. Home. A room hissing with late-night isolation. I ran gossip on the vid until the examination of better lives than mine became too much for me and I had to kill the screen. Darkness swallowed the room, followed a minute later, as my eyes adjusted, by the orange glow that seeped through the fabric of the blind. It caught the edges of things, made ochre cross-hatchings of pieces of furniture and the corners of walls. I drifted, exhausted. Thoughts chased themselves through my head.
Bella’s blow job … Bella’s blow job … The way she took the whole of my cock and pushed it all the way back so I’d ended up fucking the soft tissue at the top of her throat. Why was it familiar? As I slipped into semiconsciousness the feel of my cock in her neck haunted me. I floated with the sensation, trying to focus on it in the hope of finding some explanation, but I couldn’t stop other images creeping in—a car door shutting, flashes of Hollywood through a window, a head of silver hair, gravel against my cheek … When two tramps made an appearance I came awake with a start. I knew where the memory of her mouth came from—Bella’s blow job matched the inexplicable memory of oral sex I’d woken with in the alley after my abortive attempt to locate Doctor Kidney.
Bizarre, to say the least. So bizarre, in fact, it made a couple of other things seem odd. Her tattoo, for instance. Of course, tattooists work from patterns and in the city there might be hundreds of people sporting the same design. But it was strange that both my wife and the first nontrade fuck I’d had after her death should wear identical marks. Then there was the fact that she’d turned up at my apartment so soon after I’d been drugged and dumped in the alley …
I caught myself. A day spent hungover was obviously taking its toll. I was allowing coincidence to become paranoia. And, at what I hoped was the beginning of a relationship with a woman who could make my life very much better than it was, I didn’t need to be having that kind of brain function.
To channel my thoughts in a different direction I pictured how she’d looked fingering herself in the back of the limo. But that dredged up a wave of despondency. Maybe it was irrational after only two fuck sessions and a blow job, but I’d expected to be taken back to her house after the Bradbury thing. And she’d put me off with some shit about her father.
It didn’t take too many synaptic firings to realize that if I was ever going to get anything beyond money for a suit I needed to strengthen my connection with her. That meant I’d have to push myself into her world, instead of letting her just dip into mine.
I woke thinking about Daryl Hannah, about how her mornings must be. How she’d lie on a king-size bed in a pure white room the size of a tennis court with sunlight cutting swaths across the carpet. And just a short distance beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a matter of yards perhaps, the sea would roll under blue sky and fat white clouds. The maid would come in with a light breakfast of co
ffee and croissants and the aroma of the freshly roasted beans and the delicate pastry would mix with the clean salt air and just that, just those three simple smells and the ocean breeze against your skin would remind you that you were a god.
I got out of bed, drank a can of Pepsi, and found Ryan’s number in a dirty pair of jeans that lay with all my other clothes in a greasy pile on the floor. I hesitated. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, making deliberate contact with Mr. Frightening. But I wanted my mornings to be like Daryl Hannah’s and there was no other way to get Bella’s address.
I arranged a meet for that afternoon. I didn’t say what I wanted. Ryan sounded smug on the phone, thinking, no doubt, I was ready to spill some Karen-related info.
At night, darkness and neon dazzle threw a deceitful caul over the drag, hiding the patina of blood, semen, and shit that layered the sidewalks and the buildings and glued the whole place together. Daytime, though, it was a wound laid bare. Drifts of trash sloped against walls like dunes on a beach. Pools of drying vomit mixed their stink with the acrid burn of piss that drifted from every ground-level recess and alley entrance. What little glamour the place managed to disguise itself with through the prime-time hours was mercilessly stripped away the instant the sun rose.
The whores were thinner on the ground when it was light, but they were still there—the more determined or the more desperate—hanging out for the midday trade of office drones who prefered a fast fuck in a wardrobe-size cubicle to eating salad in the company lunch room.
I had souvlaki and coffee at a counter and watched them parade listlessly along the street, wondering what type I’d need to hook Ryan. A simple fuck wouldn’t cut it. He’d get freebies for the asking—flash the badge and any girl would spread herself open to avoid the hassle of a trip to the station and a night’s loss of earnings. No, to get Bella’s address out of a guy who watched girls do it with jackhammers I’d need something more toxic.
High Life Page 17
