The pendant caught my eye while I waited at a traffic light on Melrose. I can’t explain why I saw it just then, the seeming coincidence of timing. Other women might have passed me on the street wearing that same pendant but I had been blind to them, just as I had been blind to the truth about Gabe. The woman must have thought I was crazy when I jumped out of the Cadillac and called out to her. She looked not just startled but frightened. That I asked about fashion reassured her. Fashion was a safe subject. It was acceptable to show irrational interest in another woman’s fashion accessory. She smiled, unaware that the twin to her pendant, which Gabe had told me he found while shooting on assignment in Papua New Guinea, dangled between my breasts. ‘This? I found it at Maya. Do you know it?’ At the shake of my head she whirled to point west. ‘It’s just a couple of blocks that way, on this side of the street.’
Maya had yet to open when I jogged up. I nosed the plate-glass window and spotted movement inside the shop. A retro-hippie in long braids, peasant skirt and fringe of leg hair opened the door a few minutes past the hour. I flashed the pendant on its string around my neck. ‘Do you carry these?’
She jabbed her chin toward the back end of the shop. Past a bin of ten-dollar Javanese wood-puppets and next to a collection of hemp wallets I found twenty hanging on leather strings, each identical to the one around my neck. The hand-lettered ink sign above the row of pins that hung them read, ‘Mayan Love Pendants, Hecho en Mexico’.
I fled the shop, stunned. The immediate neighbourhood looked familiar. Down the avenue I recognized the street that led to Gabe’s apartment. The bastard hadn’t the energy to shop more than a mile from his front door. I couldn’t imagine what he’d been thinking, what kind of man he had really been beneath the lies and false histories. I couldn’t from that moment trust any word, gesture or caress. I couldn’t trust my own memories. The symbol of our relationship was a lie and a joke. What had I expected from a green card marriage? I hurled the pendant against the wall.
The case cracked with a certainty the relationship never had and the pieces – two halves and fragments – clattered to the cement. I swore at him then, called him a liar and a cheat and other things I have the decency not to repeat here. When I ran out of curses I thought of Gabe’s body bled white and heaved upon the shore. I was sorry then that I’d cursed him. He’d been cursed enough.
It shouldn’t have surprised me that Gabe had lied. People lie in love affairs. It defines the form, a sort of trompe l’oeil of the heart. Falling in love is falling for the lies of your partner, and being in love is learning, once the lies are discovered, to live with them. I dropped to my knees to collect the pieces, not pretending I sought to glue them back together – it was too late for that in every sense – but thinking I might at least give them a decent burial, when I noticed that the pendant had contained something other than leather and cheap metal. Between the shattered halves of casing lay a thin magnetic disk wrapped in protective plastic, like a message in a bottle.
22
Frank answered the door looking like a hurricane had just made a pass through his hair. It took him some heavy lifting to blink enough light below his eyelids to see who had rung his bell before noon and stood at the doorway with a cup of Starbucks and a muffin in hand. ‘Late deadline last night,’ he mumbled. Unlike other men I’d known, Frank slept in pyjamas. The set he sported that morning was decorated with baseballs, bats, gloves and the insignia of the Chicago Cubs. He looked like a kid with a hyperactive thyroid. I pressed the coffee into his hand and nudged him out of the doorway. He stumbled into a living room cluttered with books, empty beer bottles and dirty socks, and collapsed on the sofa. ‘I’d like it more if you came just before I went to sleep and not before I woke up. I look better that way and we might have more fun. Where are my cigarettes?’
He groped for a pack of Winstons on the end of the table, sipped at his coffee, took a bite of muffin and lit a cig. Frank was one of those organisms that could draw energy from tin cans, egg shells, old shoes – anything remotely organic. In his past life, he would have been a goat. He gazed at the plume of smoke with contentment. ‘Every morning I wake with this serious doubt that life is worth living, but then, after my first cigarette, I usually conclude it is.’
‘A filthy habit,’ I said.
‘Yes it is, isn’t it?’ Frank grinned, happy he’d offended me.
I slipped the magnetic disk on to the table out of immediate spill range. ‘When you’re ready.’
He jabbed the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and leaned over the table for a closer look. ‘What is it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘I don’t like intelligence tests. Am I allowed to ask where it came from?’
‘It was Gabe’s. Something I didn’t know I had until this morning.’
Eyes squinted against the smoke, he moved the disk to the nearest corner, where he could keep a better watch on it. ‘The guys at the paper are making a book that a serial killer is on the loose, murdering paparazzi. The problem is, nobody knows anything for sure because our sources have all gone to Death Valley.’
‘What’s in Death Valley?’
‘A thousand square miles of desert. When a source doesn’t want to talk to you, he’s gone to Death Valley – dried up, evaporated. You hear anything?’
‘The killer ransacks his victims’ apartments before or after he kills them. I guess you’d call it his MO.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because my apartment was torn up night before last and half the law in LA came to check it out.’
Frank dropped his cigarette into a beer bottle and swished it out. ‘Jesus.’ He set the bottle down on the table and said nothing for a minute, just looked at me like he didn’t know what to do. ‘You want to stay here? I can clear the beer bottles and socks off the couch. Hell, I’ll even leave the toilet seat down.’
‘I feel better on the move. But thanks.’
Frank picked up a couple of bottles and a corpse-ridden ashtray and legged awkwardly over the coffee table. I heard him clanking glass in the kitchen, saw a blur of Cubs pyjamas push through a door at the end of the hall. I thought about straightening the living-room while he was gone and just as quickly forgot about it. From what I saw cleaning up would be like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
‘I kind of liked the pyjamas,’ I said when he came back in jeans and a Bulls T-shirt.
‘You wanna see the show lady, you gotta pay admission.’ He blew a residue of ash and crumbs off the table, laid out a clean towel, flat-head screwdriver, needle-nose pliers and a 1.44 megabyte floppy disk. He worked the tip of the screwdriver under the floppy disk’s metal slide, popped the catch and then pulled it free with the needle-nose pliers, revealing a rectangular opening in the plastic casing, and within that a dark magnetic material. The tip of the screwdriver wedged into the casing seam and cracked it apart at each of the four corners. The floppy split into two halves and a magnetic disk popped free. He laid it next to the disk I’d brought. The only difference between the two was the plastic wrapped around the one from Gabe. ‘This what you were thinking?’
‘That’s what I was thinking.’
He slid Gabe’s disk on to the towel and, careful not to touch the magnetic coating, positioned it on to the metal hub that held it to spin free within the casing, then snapped the halves together again. ‘So far so good, eh? ‘Course I can’t promise anything. Floppy disks are not the most stable things. Whatever was on here could be wiped clean as chalk from a board.’ He walked the disk into the kitchen and booted up a notebook computer on the kitchen table. A dictionary, thesaurus, note pad and coffee cup bristling with pens took up the rest of the dining space. In place of food, the kitchen counters were stacked with magazines, folders and reams of loose paper. The door to one of the cupboards leaned open to rows of books. ‘Hey Frank, what do you eat, paper?’
‘Look in the refrigerator.’
I swung open the refrigerator to three floors o
f bottled beer, a carton of milk, box of cornflakes and bag of Oreo cookies.
‘When I want variety I order out for pizza.’ His index finger traced the surface of the screen to a folder titled ‘Party Animals’, containing something he called JPEG files. I didn’t know what he meant until he clicked on a file and the screen transformed into a night shot of an estate that, viewed from the side, looked like it had been designed by people who built Las Vegas casinos for a living. White marble pathways laced through a landscape of evergreens sculpted into the shapes of animals and wild women, leading to an immense fountain in which stood the statue of a bearded hunk gripping a trident. On the fountain’s rim sat a bruiser in slacks, turtleneck and loose-fitting sport coat. Security. Behind the fountain loomed a mansion with a triangular marble pediment, stepped podium and Corinthian colonnade façade that could have been transported block by block from the Rome of Claudius.
The next photo abruptly changed scene and historical era. Four women wearing miniskirts up to their navels stepped out of a limousine. Each woman sported rock-video hair, photo-shoot make-up and a sculpted-for-sex body. ‘This is starting to look like the Playboy Channel,’ Frank said, not unhappily. I pointed to something hidden in the shadows near the hood of the limo that struck me as oddly incongruous, a German shepherd leashed by a plain strawberry blonde in a short house dress. ‘Looks like the guard dog,’ Frank guessed.
The next JPEG returned to a side view of the villa. Framed by a ground-floor window, two women nude from the waist up stripped each other for an audience of two women and two men. ‘The obligatory lesbian scene,’ Frank commented, like an expert too familiar with the routine. He positioned the arrow and clicked open the next file, titled ‘Piña Noir’, a close-up of one of the two strippers, a raven-tressed beauty with honey-coloured skin and a sultry stare. ‘Yummy,’ Frank opined and clicked again. That image focused on the heads of the two men, turned away from the camera to kiss their consorts. One of the men had long black hair pulled back into a ponytail and the other short brown hair parted to the side. ‘Our mysterious hosts, I presume. The next shot should tell us who.’
But the JPEG he opened recorded an abrupt shift in action and character; the strawberry blonde in the house dress sat with her arms around the German shepherd, only she didn’t seem to be wearing the house dress anymore. ‘Oh my God,’ Frank whispered, then he laughed like what he saw wasn’t funny so much as too strange to believe.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
Frank answered by clicking the next JPEG. The focal length pulled back to show more of the room. An audience of four women and two men watched the strawberry blonde and German shepherd perform an act I never believed to be more than a vile myth. The faces of the men were too distant to identify in detail. The next shot brought them closer. The man on the left, still in his coat and tie if missing his pants, was a darkly handsome longhair with a granite jaw, known to millions as the action movie star, Damian Burke. The guy on the right with the plain-wrap haircut and glazed eyes was a politico I recognized from newspapers and billboards, Pete Danavitch.
‘This is pure anthrax,’ Frank exulted. ‘We could wipe out half the political infrastructure of LA with these shots.’
I could hear a giant flushing sound for a couple of careers but didn’t see how it could extend beyond that. ‘How so?’
Frank ran a fingernail beneath the throat of the politico. ‘As a county supervisor, Danavitch is the most powerful politician on the Westside. He talks like a liberal but acts like a conservative, which makes him popular with people who want to seem compassionate without having to pay for it. One of his pet political stands, appropriately enough, is animal rights.’
‘Does that include bestiality?’
‘No reporter has ever asked him. Until now.’
I didn’t like the way he said that, like he planned to ambush Danavitch with the question the next chance he got. I said, ‘This is not your story, not yet.’
He tossed up his hands in a palms out gesture of backing off. ‘Just thinking aloud. The photographs are yours and no story without the photographs, right? Nothing the lawyers would let me publish, anyway.’
Even the tabloids had journalistic scruples, or at the very least legal departments worried about libel suits. ‘Can you copy those photographs on to another disk, one I can give to the police?’
‘Sure. I can also take rat poison but I’d rather not.’
‘It’s evidence in a murder investigation.’
‘It’s proof of a political scandal is what it is. If the cops see this the investigation will be dropped. Nobody cares about justice for a blackmailer.’
‘You think he was trying to blackmail somebody?’
‘Why else would he delay publishing the pics?’
‘He claimed he was writing a story,’ I blurted. I didn’t know why the idea should shock me. I didn’t know anything about the man, just what two people share in a few nights of passion, and that’s nothing at all.
‘Maybe he was but I don’t see any proof of it on the disk. And if you give this to the cops they’ll find a way to confiscate the original and nobody will ever write the story.’
‘That’s what you want to do, write the story?’
‘Sure. When do we start?’
Sometimes people who seem interested in your welfare are mostly looking to help themselves. ‘Just copy the disk like I asked you.’
I didn’t know enough about computers to know how he did it but after some swapping files around he handed me two disks, one carefully marked as the original. If the photographs had led to Gabe’s death, either through a story gone awry or a failed blackmail scheme, I knew where to begin looking. Most paparazzi plugged into an informer network. Gabe had a reputation for getting shots no one else had a clue existed and that meant original sources of information. An exclusive is almost always the result of good information and rarely luck. I’d seen for myself how easily he charmed women. The name given to one of the files, ‘Piña Noir’, wasn’t a misspelled wine but a call girl.
23
The episode of Meat Wagon came on while I waited for Vulch in a 1940s joint on Fairfax named Tom Bergin’s, an Irish bar with a dark wood interior that hadn’t changed in fifty years. Neither had the bartender. I didn’t notice the show was on – nobody watches television in bars except losers who can’t keep a drink company – until the booth behind me rocked with barely legals hooting and retching at the screen. I moved my Jack Daniel’s to the back end of the bar.
‘Hey, that’s her isn’t it?’ someone in the booth shouted. ‘Sure it is! Look, she’s even wearing the same jacket!’ The heads in the booth went into a football huddle and one guy forearmed a tabletop beer in jumping free. When he walked over to check me out I could see he wasn’t mean, just somebody who confused television with reality. Under different circumstances I might have thought him funny. But he was approaching me under a completely different set of different circumstances and was too drunk or too dim to sense how little I wanted him in my face. ‘It is her!’ he shouted back to his buddies and one of those buddies yelled back, ‘It’s all fake, isn’t it? Ask her if it’s all fake.’
He plonked his elbows on the bar to scrutinize me through wobbly eyes. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Up there on the box.’
‘That’s right, it’s me.’
That coaxed a smile from him. ‘It’s totally fake, right? I mean, like, you’re really an actress, and the whole thing’s a hoax, right?’
‘No, it’s real.’
He wouldn’t let me fool him, like most people in the city he considered himself media wise. ‘You gotta say that, because, like, it’s in your contract.’
I stared straight ahead and sipped at my Jack Daniel’s, giving him the chance to go away and knowing he wouldn’t. He fumbled for a napkin along the inside edge of the bar and drew a pen from his pocket. ‘What’d she say?’ one of his buddies shouted. ‘Ask her over for a drink!’ suggested another and then somebody else joked, �
��No, ask her for a date!’ Everybody in the booth thought that was pretty funny. He pushed the pen and napkin next to my whiskey. ‘Could you, like, give me your autograph?’ He giggled like he was holding back a bigger laugh. ‘And make it out to Dan?’
‘You want my autograph?’
He nodded, legs crossed, elbows propped on the bar, face hanging over the wood. Easy.
‘You sure you want my autograph?’
He nodded, grinned. He was sure.
I cut his elbows from under him with a swipe of my left arm and with my right backhanded his skull. His face took a very short flight and thwacked on to the bar top, making an impression as indelible as spilled beer. I flipped him over, took a last sip of Jack and signed my name on the vacant space of his forehead.
Zero, like his IQ.
Zero, like my tolerance for assholes.
Then I went out to wait for Vulch in the parking lot. Nobody said a word. The bartender had probably seen variations of the same thing a hundred times before. Once the adrenalin subsided I regretted what I’d done. He was just a dumb kid. He didn’t deserve the knockout drop, and even if he did, I shouldn’t have given it to him. If I felt that way after one autograph hound, how must a movie star feel after a thousand? I was lucky nobody had a camera, wanted to put my face in the tabloids.
The headlights to Vulkovitch’s Mercedes caught me sleeping behind the wheel. Since Gabe’s murder I hadn’t slept more than a couple hours at a time. When I stopped moving, sleep swept over me like a sand dune. I stumbled out of the car, stretched, asked Vulch, ‘What are the high-class hooker agencies in town, you know, the ones movie stars use.’
‘Whatever do you want to know that for?’ He lifted an aluminium case out of the trunk of the Mercedes and took a ticket from the attendant.
Killing Paparazzi Page 12
