Zero to the Bone

by Robert Eversz

  “I should feel lucky he didn’t beat me with a rubber hose,” I said.

  Dougan laughed and stabbed a finger at the elevator call button, as pleased as I’d ever seen him. “Don’t think that won’t happen if you continue to get in his way. You’re a helluva lot of trouble, but personally I think you’re good people. You’ve always played things straight with me and I like your dog. I’m one of the last guys who wants to violate your First Amendment rights.” He laughed again and shook his head. The elevator door whooshed open and he ushered me inside. “So please don’t treat me to a speech on the Constitution when I suggest that if you have any vacation time coming up, now’s a good time to take it.”

  23

  ON THE MORNING Stewart Starbal died, Dr. James Rakaan was arraigned in Los Angeles Superior Court and formally charged with second-degree murder in the death of Christine Myers. Though precious little information is divulged by either side during an arraignment hearing, Frank heard from sources in the coroner’s office that the severity of damage done to the victim’s trachea, combined with the graphic video evidence, convinced prosecutors that a charge higher than manslaughter was both justified and winnable. The judge sided with the prosecution during the arraignment, and citing the defendant’s financial resources, set bail at one million dollars, off the top end of the scale for second-degree murder. It could have gone far worse for Rakaan. The district attorney could have filed charges of first-degree murder, presenting the video as evidence that he’d tortured his victim before her death. Torture is murder with special circumstance, a crime that eliminates the possibility of bail and qualifies a defendant for the death penalty.

  Hollywood relishes the fall of the rich, famous, or powerful—if only because it makes for more room on the ladder—but after a decent interval has passed they’re more than likely to welcome the offender’s return, because even more than a fall-from-grace drama, the town loves a good comeback story. You can be disgraced and loathed, but infamy is still fame, and once you’re famous you’re famous. Like death, fame allows no regress.

  Rakaan could have called any number of former friends, clients, and supporters upon posting bail. A few even might have answered his call. But his voice was the last one I expected to hear when I answered the cell phone as I walked toward my car, parked on the hill behind Chateau Marmont.

  “We need to meet, off the record,” he said.

  “Why would I want to meet you if it’s off the record?”

  “Because I didn’t kill Christine.”

  “Right,” I said, meaning wrong.

  “I need to know more about the video,” he said. “You’re the only one who’s seen it. I need to know why they think I killed her.”

  “Maybe it’s because you were tying, strangling, and screwing her for fun and profit.”

  “Please,” he said, his voice cracking. “I need help.”

  “Try consulting another past-life regressionist,” I suggested. “Maybe you got away with murder in a previous life and it’s catching up to you now.” I severed the connection with a sense of satisfaction that soon deflated to regret. I didn’t need his photograph for Scandal Times and I sincerely doubted he’d tell me anything that would lead to a major story, not when he insisted that our conversation be off the record, but he might let slip something that I could throw to the cops or into the paper. I definitely wanted to question him about his relationship to Stewart Starbal. Maybe Rakaan already knew Stewart had talked to me and the meeting was no more than an elaborate ruse intended to trick out what he’d revealed to me before his death.

  I wouldn’t learn anything by avoiding him.

  When the phone rang again I answered it.

  “I didn’t kill Christine,” he said, no beg in his voice this time.

  “Next thing, you’re going to tell me you really loved her.”

  “No, I won’t tell you that. I was obsessed with her, yes, and in a not completely healthy way. She was my personal demon. And my relationship with her has not only very nearly destroyed everything I hold dear but soon will put me on trial for my personal and professional life.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic,” I said, getting angry at him again. “Christine is dead. You’re not. Count your blessings. At the worst, you can plea bargain down to voluntary manslaughter, do your time, and get your freedom back in five years.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “As a matter of fact, it is.” Ahead of me, something pink fluttered against the windshield of my Cadillac. “Okay, we’ll do the meet. But if I hear any more of this self-pitying bullshit, we won’t talk for long.”

  He listed a Los Feliz address, not far from where Nephthys lived. I supposed that he hoped to dodge the news cameras by avoiding his Hollywood Hills home. I glanced up as I pocketed the phone and identified the fluttering pink on my windshield as a parking ticket, my punishment for being taken to Parker Center for questioning and exceeding the two-hour limit. As anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows, parking tickets have been added to death and taxes as the only certainties in life. I stuffed it into the glove box and drove down the hill.

  The address Rakaan listed connected to the top floor of a duplex built in Spanish Colonial style, the red tile roof and beige plaster walls shadowed by the gracefully splayed fronds of fifty-foot palm trees, and closer to the ground, the red-and-yellow beaks of birds-of-paradise poked from their green sheaths as though watching me climb the stairs to the front door. Rakaan answered my knock so quickly that I suspected he’d been hovering at the peephole. Lack of sleep bruised his eyes to swollen slits, and he stood with less than the square-shouldered certainty I’d seen on first meeting him. Jail does that to people. He wore the suit he’d been arraigned in, a slick gray model with a creased, slept-in look, top shirt button undone and the tie gone. He stepped back from the door as though aware he carried the stain of murder and that I might want to keep my distance from him. I carried my camera bag slung over my right shoulder, the top conveniently unzipped to allow easy access to the crowbar I’d stashed inside. As a rule, I try not to let my curiosity make me too stupid, and meeting a man accused of murder, alone, was a risk that approached stupidity, if it didn’t embrace it.

  Rakaan walked toward the couch in the living room. The late-afternoon sun filtered through gauzy white drapes, casting a soft light onto the hardwood floors and beige leather furniture, a spray of yellow roses reflecting from the glass-topped coffee table. I followed him into the room, and when I first spotted the framed candids of Christine on the fireplace mantel I guessed the apartment might have been their love pad, until I noticed that photographs of Tammy held equal pride of place. I realized then that I stood in Christine’s apartment. I asked him what he was doing there.

  “You didn’t recognize the address?” He settled so heavily into the couch it looked like he was falling backward into water. “I thought you’d know it when I gave it to you.”

  “She’s never been here,” a voice called from the kitchen.

  I backed toward the fireplace, surprised in a not particularly pleasant way. Tamara carried a lacquered tray loaded with pastries into the room and set it on the coffee table.

  “At least, Christine never told me you visited, but still, I thought you’d know the address or recognize the number when Jim called you.”

  It took me a moment to realize she was referring to Rakaan by his first name. She excused herself and slipped back into the kitchen to attend to a whistling tea kettle. I thought back to my brunch with Tammy, earlier that week, and remembered how she’d fled the table when I’d mentioned details of Christine’s relationship with Rakaan.

  “Now I understand why you claimed you never loved Christine.” I moved to a leather chair backed toward the window. “Was Tammy in the room when you called me?”

  “I suppose I should expect a tabloid reporter to be cynical.” His tar-dark eyes were no less opaque for being sheened in soft, draped light. He watched me carefully as I sat, his glance seeking out m
ine with a fixed willfulness that soothed as it sought to overpower, like a shot of cognac—or heroin. “Tamara was the one who convinced me to call you. She tells me that you’re more interested in the truth than in making sensational headlines, not that I believe it.”

  “If Tammy is interested in the truth, what is she doing with a huckster like you? She didn’t even know about your involvement with Christine. And I think you’re far less interested in the truth than in worming your way out of a murder conviction.”

  He found it difficult to catch and hold my gaze in the shadows the light from the window cast across my face and he sighed, frustrated. “Yes, I acted unethically, but I didn’t hurt her, not ever, and I certainly didn’t…” He shuddered so convincingly I couldn’t tell whether it was a trick of theater or came naturally. “I didn’t strangle her to death.”

  “You slept with her,” I said, just to get him to admit to facts.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And you engaged in, what would you call it, acts of sadomasochism?”

  “We didn’t whip each other, no, but we did explore the, ahh, boundaries of sexuality and cruelty.” He wiped at his mouth with the palm of his hand while his gaze sank inward. “Christine and I were too attracted to each other’s dark places. You know how, in the early stages of a relationship, two lovers circle each other, looking for advantage? Ours quickly became a spiral and it sucked the both of us down. What started out as therapy became madness, a mutually assured destruction of the self. At first I thought I could help her. But I didn’t realize that our dark places were so powerful, not until we’d already fallen in, and by then, I didn’t care.” He leaned forward and shoved one of the pastries around the tray. “Our roles quickly reversed. She began dominating me as part of her regression therapy, the idea being that she needed to work out her fear and anger at having been murdered in her past life. Some of the things we were doing, she could have killed me, and I wouldn’t have objected—in fact, I placed myself completely in her hands. She always seemed to know just how far she could take me out before bringing me back. I’ll tell you this, though. Whoever killed her either did it intentionally or knew nothing about erotic strangulation.”

  Tammy carried another tray from the kitchen, balancing a Chinese teapot and three delicate, bowl-shaped teacups. Herbal tea, she announced, a special blend compounded to promote flows of soothing energy and enhance feelings of harmony.

  “And the worst thing is…” Rakaan scooted aside and placed his palm on the couch, inviting Tammy to sit next to him. “I hid my relationship with Christine from the one I really do love, the one who is proving to me what love is really about by standing with me now.”

  Tammy blushed over the teapot as she poured the golden-colored liquid into each cup. It seemed to me she was a girl easily fooled by love, but then, so many of us are. I felt a sudden impulse to dump a pot of scalding tea on Rakaan’s private parts. I resisted. “Why do you say the person either meant to murder her or didn’t know what he was doing?” I asked.

  “My lawyer told me that a ligature was used.” He coughed once, uncomfortable, and calmed himself with a sip of tea. “That enough force was applied to damage her larynx and trachea. Ligatures really have no place in erotic strangulation because they can damage cartilage, and they hurt. The idea isn’t to cut off someone’s air, it’s to reduce the flow of blood to the brain.” He pressed the fingers of one hand against the side of his throat, just below the jaw line. “You do that by pressing here, against the carotid artery, not full force, not to close it off completely, but to slow the blood, just enough to get high on the lack of oxygen and make the sex more intense.”

  “Don’t try it on me, please,” Tammy said.

  “If somebody was using a ligature, they weren’t trying to make the sex better for her, I can guarantee you that.” He dropped his hand gently on Tammy’s thigh. “He wanted to enhance his own feelings of domination and control and he didn’t care if he had to hurt her to do it. Tell me, what did the video show?”

  Never in my young life had I imagined I might one day hold a conversation about erotic strangulation over herbal tea with a past-life regression therapist. As a paparazza working for the tabloids, I suppose I should have been inured or at least accustomed to such things. I wasn’t.

  “The video showed she was strangled with a strap, from behind,” I said, giving him a fraction of the information he wanted. “How did you first meet Stewart Starbal?”

  “Who?”

  I couldn’t tell whether his ignorance was genuine or faked. I repeated the name. He said he’d never met him, never even heard of him.

  “Jason Starbal, then,” I said.

  Rakaan glanced at Tammy and asked, “Isn’t he the producer of those intergalactic vampire films, the ones that star Milla Jovavich now?” He received a confirming nod and turned a shrug toward me. “I’ve heard of him, and certainly I’ve seen a few of his films, but we’ve never met.”

  “Then what were you doing at his house in Trousdale Estates?”

  “What house?”

  “The one with the statue of Oscar in a fountain in the front yard.”

  He laughed, relieved, and grabbed Tammy’s hand.

  “I think I’d remember that,” he said. “I was never there.”

  “Christine’s diary says you were.”

  “You mean the thing she kept on that semipornographic website?”

  “She wrote that she accompanied you to Starbal’s estate, where you had a session with Jason Starbal while she met his kids.”

  His face shot through with blood, and he tossed Tammy’s hand aside to sweep his palm across his long, black hair. “That bitch was not supposed to use my name on that site. That was our agreement.”

  “She didn’t use your name. She wrote in code.”

  “She lied,” he said.

  Maybe blood and sweat rushed to his skin because he was having an allergic reaction to the tea, or maybe he realized how deeply her diary incriminated him, or maybe he just lied badly. I didn’t care enough to stay and get the definitive answer, not if it required hearing Christine slandered. I thought I already knew. I had enough problems controlling my temper. If I stayed, I’d be tempted to straighten his teeth with a crowbar brace. I thanked Tammy for the tea and walked out the door, Rakaan’s protests chasing me down the steps. I planned to call her later to describe the video’s brutal contents, let her know what to expect by trying to show Rakaan what true love was really about.

  24

  I SPOTTED HIM when the Rott and I left the apartment that evening for a run on the beach, a man reading a newspaper in the passenger seat of a dingy white Toyota Tercel, parked on the side street opposite my apartment building. The way he held the paper to his face, he could have been studying the results of the previous day’s running at Santa Anita, looking no more suspicious than any of the other idlers who frequented the neighborhood. I tried to enjoy the run, the Rott racing after seagulls as though he thought he had a real chance of catching one this time. One thing I’d learned from the Rott, the familiar amusements are often the best. He never tired of chasing after seagulls, no matter how often they eluded him, just as I continued to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, no matter how often they eluded me. In the distance, a violet haze shimmered above the curved blue line of the Pacific, the last remnants of a day that had extinguished itself an hour earlier. Then I realized why the man reading the newspaper had bothered me. It was too dark to read a newspaper.

  I’m accustomed to watching others, not to being watched myself, and the feeling creeped me out more than frightened me. We ran the back streets home, the Rott leashed at my side, and approached the Tercel from behind. A tattooed hand dangled out the passenger window, smoke wafting from a cigarette clipped between two fingers. Twin lightning bolts arced across the webbing of his thumb. I jogged up the steps and opened the door to the apartment without glancing back.

  While I laid out my camera gear on the kitchen table, I co
nsidered the probability that the man lingering outside my apartment had chosen a spot next to me on the beach that morning for reasons other than chance. I threaded Tri-X film into the Nikon’s spools and sealed the back, then picked up the 500-millimeter lens. The lightning-bolt tattoo was a variation of the Nazi SS symbol, used by white power groups in prison to signify the carrier has done violence to a minority. I’d crossed the color line while serving time, making friends with like-minded women whose skin tones shaded darker than mine, but I didn’t think he’d come to exact revenge for betraying my so-called race. I left on the kitchen light and moved the camera and tripod to the draped window in the darkened living room, knowing from experience that the eye is naturally drawn to light. I loosened the telescoping legs on the tripod and raised the camera to window height, then nudged the lens past the corner of the drapes.

  The world in extreme telephoto is a disorienting place, and staring through a 500-millimeter lens is like seeing one piece to a jigsaw puzzle. I made out a roofline and part of a wall, then tilted the lens until the sidewalk across the street came into view, close enough to read the number written on the curb. I nudged the camera up and to the side until the Toyota appeared, the ex-con still in the passenger seat, his eyes tracing a line to the kitchen window while smoke drifted from the lit cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. I ran off a couple of shots to capture the Tercel’s license plate, aware that his face, barely discernable through the lens, would be lost in shadow no matter how fast the film. I dragged a stool from the kitchen counter into the living room and sat with my eye near enough to the viewfinder to see when he moved, and then I waited.

  Ten minutes after he’d stabbed out his previous smoke the inevitable collision between time and nicotine happened again, the flick of a lighter illuminating his face while he lit another cigarette. I pressed the shutter and held it down. The camera went into overdrive, clicking off three images a second for two seconds. The flick of the lighter probably wouldn’t make for a flattering portrait, but it would illuminate the face of the smoker enough to identify him. I made sure the security chain was engaged and braced the stool beneath the door handle as an extra precaution, then stripped down to shower off the run.