Zero to the Bone

by Robert Eversz

  But we were on a roll, I thought; everything would work out for us. What was I going to figure out by thinking? Spectrum had called Sean. So what? It didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t have to mean the realization of the worst fears given to my imagination. My brain spun inside its case of bone, all my assumptions reversing at high speed. Logan wasn’t the only cop who worked the same station that Spectrum had—Sean was currently assigned to North Hollywood. I didn’t know if the dates lined up—Spectrum might have resigned before Sean made detective—but Sean was well acquainted with Logan and it made sense he’d also know Spectrum by reputation, if not personally. Given my sudden change in perspective, nothing that happened between us seemed genuine. Little wonder he’d been so eager to get me away for the weekend. He’d known Stewart was to be buried then. He wanted me out of the way. And when we showed up at the funeral Spectrum had spotted us immediately, as if he’d been tipped that we’d be there. Even his seeming hostility toward Logan could have served a different, insidious purpose. Hadn’t his warning that Logan once worked on a film with Jason Starbal proved false? He didn’t want me talking to Logan. He wasn’t trying to protect me. What I knew endangered Spectrum’s clients. He wanted to distance me from Logan because information we were uncovering would change the course of the investigation and lead him directly to the Starbals. Seemingly innocuous things, such as the time he’d pulled up behind my car when I was staking out the Starbal estate, did not now seem so innocent.

  But Sean had been genuinely passionate when we’d made love, and those times he’d angered me his remorse had seemed sincere. He didn’t have to be a two-faced, lying son of a bitch. I couldn’t believe that night in the darkroom had been staged. And later, when he’d appeared at my door and we’d nearly assaulted each other with sexual passion, that had been as real as anything I’d ever experienced. Maybe Spectrum knew that Sean and I were sleeping together and called him from the trunk to guarantee his safety. Of course. The excon had been staking out my apartment the night that Sean appeared at the door. He’d made Sean’s car as a police vehicle. A man with Spectrum’s resources could track the plates to the vehicle sign-out sheet or identify him from the ex-con’s surveillance photos. He’d call Sean from the trunk to beg for help, reasoning that a cop boyfriend would have the power and smarts to restrain me. It hurt to think. I wanted to run. I imagined the sand beneath my feet as I ran to the rhythm of high surf, breathing the sea air deep into my blood.

  The gilded gates to the Starbal estate hung open at the end of a sweeping curve. I swerved into the driveway and stood on the brakes, twisting the steering wheel to the left as the rubber bit into brick. The pickup fishtailed right, the back end spinning out. We rocked to a stop just beyond Spectrum’s BMW, the grille facing the gates, ready to throw the car into gear and speed onto the street once we grabbed Pop. Cassie leapt down from the cab before I jerked the transmission into park. I shouted at her to stop but she raced away, up the golden brick drive and around the gold-plated monument to Starbal’s failed Oscar aspirations. Past the marble colonnades, the double front doors at the top of the steps stood ajar.

  I jumped from the pickup truck and sprinted. Cassie took the steps two at a time, her footwork as awkward as a colt’s. She paused at the door, looking back to hurry me on, then whirled and dashed into the house. I gauged my speed and distance and hurdled the steps. The door came up fast and I clipped it with my shoulder, bouncing into a foyer tiled with gold, Hollywood Walk of Fame–style stars.

  Cassie ran to the end of the hallway, stopped, and turned into a wide, arching doorway to her left, shouting Pop’s name. I’d seen the tiles before, on the floor in the room where Christine had been killed. The air split with a sound like snapping metal—once, twice—then a monstrous roar washed through the hall, the unmistakable sound of a shotgun blast. Cassie screamed Pop’s name and rushed forward. I yelled at her to stop. She didn’t. I caught sight of her heels as I breached the doorway into a room so vast and empty it might have served as a ballroom. She slid into another archway to the right, her scream shredding the air.

  I flew across the tiled floor, the biting smell of cordite thickening near the archway, fragments of a room that looked like a study flashing to my eye—a desk, bookcases, and a balding, bespectacled man hugging the far wall next to a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the swimming pool. The light from the window spilled across a ponytailed man sprawled guts down on a blue Persian carpet stained with a gush of blood, the revolver just beyond his outflung hand pointed toward my niece, who kneeled, keening in her sudden grief, over the fetus-curled body of my father.

  The man huddling against the wall watched me as I dropped to my knees, his angular, mid-fifties face frightened as a child’s. He risked a few steps away from the wall, toward Spectrum’s corpse. I crawled on my hands and knees to Cassie’s side, wrapped my arm around her shoulder, and stared down at the dead face of my father, his eyes staring forward like they’d been welded open, his mouth gaped in shock. Two ragged blotches of blood, shaped like deformed flowers, stained his shirt at the back, the fabric blown out at the center of each to reveal the meaty core of his wounds. In the clenched hand that curled toward his chest he still gripped the shotgun by its stock, down near the trigger guard.

  “He broke into the house,” the bespectacled man said. “He forced Ray to unlock the gates, he held a shotgun on both of us. This is just terrible, a terrible thing.” He edged away from the desk, toward Spectrum’s heels. “You’re his daughter? The tabloid photographer?”

  “We were right here,” I said. “Why did they have to shoot?”

  “He must have panicked when he heard footsteps in the hall,” he said. “Ray tried to stop him. He was going to kill us both. This is just terrible.”

  The presence of death slows time and dulls the mind, and I didn’t think clearly about what I’d heard. “We had a deal. Why did he shoot? Pop knew we were coming. Did Jagger lie to you? Did that murderous son of a bitch say something that got Pop killed?”

  “No, really, he just went crazy, that’s all.”

  “Do you even know your son is a killer?”

  Starbal pulled his chin back, as though my words offended him.

  “That’s pure nonsense. Beneath comment.”

  “Your son was drugging and raping young women,” I said.

  “Jag wouldn’t do anything like that.” He edged around Spectrum’s legs. “Why, Ray told me you had some wild ideas, and might try to take advantage of our family in our time of grief. I just lost my son Stewart. A terrible loss. And now, both Ray and your father. This is just terrible.”

  I’d heard three shots, two sharp cracks from a revolver before the answering roar of the shotgun. A moment of clarity strobed my image of what happened in that room, just before the triggers were pulled. Starbal was lying. I’d frisked Spectrum in the trunk. He’d been clean. Yet he’d pulled the trigger first. “The gun,” I said. “Where did he get the gun?”

  Starbal glanced back toward the open drawer to his desk and then dived over Spectrum’s body toward the pistol on the carpet. I spun and rolled to block the lunge with my curled back and scooped the gun to my chest. He punched at my face, frantic to get the weapon from me, afraid, I suppose, that I wished to kill him. I trapped his arm beneath my shoulder and rolled again, against the grain of his elbow joint. He screamed in pain, gold-rimmed glasses twisting from one reddened ear. I spun free and stood. I didn’t bother to point the gun at him. I said, “Stand up and step back.”

  He held up his hands and backed into the edge of his desk.

  “I’m not going to shoot you. I should shoot you, but I won’t, not unless you give me more cause than you’ve already given me.” When he cautiously lowered his hands I turned to look again at my father. Cassie had crept around his body to cradle his head, her eyes blood red from crying. I looked back at Starbal, said, “You hired Spectrum, didn’t you?”

  “I’ve already lost one son. I can’t lose another.”r />
  “You knew what Jagger was doing.”

  “He’ll stop,” he said. “I promise.”

  “Bullshit!” Cassie shouted. “He won’t stop!”

  He held his hands out in a gesture of peace.

  “I know this is an emotional moment for you,” he said. “I mean, this is just terrible. It never should have come to this. But we can work something out, right? Ray said he’d already struck a deal with you. We can sweeten it.” He nodded, impressed by the offer in his imagination. “We can sweeten it a helluva lot. My family is precious to me. What just happened, it’s a terrible thing, but we can straighten it all out. There’s no reason you two should suffer because of what’s happened. The compensation, I promise, will, well, I’ll compensate you generously for your loss.”

  As he spoke, his eyes tracked with the movement of something in the room behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The light from the window reflected from the tiles onto a black-jacketed man advancing through the archway, the silver barrel of the pistol he pointed at my back glinting as his face breached the shadows. I whispered his name, balanced between disbelief and hope, the name of the man whose baby swam the prenatal ocean of my womb, realizing he didn’t know that I was pregnant and knowing that even if he did, it wouldn’t deflect his aim if he intended to shoot, even if by killing me he killed a part of himself.

  “She’s got a gun!” Starbal shouted. “Shoot!”

  I glanced down to the pistol in my hand and flung it to the right as I dove to the left, my body spinning with the force of a .38-caliber kick to the back of my ribs, the sound of the shot ricocheting from the marble-plated walls. My body hit the rug and rolled onto the tiles, stunned by the bullet into a blunted, stupefied pain.

  Sean shuffled across the room, the barrel of his pistol pointed at my chest. I clutched below my ribs where the bullet had blown out, the blood trickling through my fingers, and raised my head to look at him, uncomprehending up to the moment of my death how it could have come to this. I expected a smile or wink of recognition when he peered at me over the top of his gun sight but instead I saw no more than a detached curiosity as he examined the seriousness of my wound. I tried to speak and couldn’t. Recognition sparked his eyes back to life, as though he just then realized that he’d shot someone he pretended to love, and he took the Lord’s name not in vain, but in despair. The clack of metal on metal turned his head to the right and his lips compressed with the shock of an expected blow just before the shotgun fired and the pellet spread blasted him off his feet.

  Across the floor Cassie knelt on the Persian carpet, the shotgun at her hip. She slid her hand along the walnut forestock, her fingers thin and pale against the darker wood, and pumped another round into the chamber. She shouted at Starbal to call 911, and when he blinked instead, failing to comprehend what he’d just witnessed, she stood and pointed the shotgun at his head.

  The pain rushed in with suffocating speed and I tried to take a deep breath to push it away but the air bubbled in my lungs and I gasped, drowning in my own blood. Had the light reflecting off the tiles blinded Sean to the identity of his target? Did he not realize he’d shot me until that last moment before the shotgun blast knocked him down? I pulled the soles of my feet flat on the floor and kicked out, leaving a red smear as I slid across the tile toward the sound of moaning. When my shoulders brushed against a leg I rolled onto my side, grabbed the pocket of Sean’s leather jacket, and pulled myself up his body. His pistol lay just beyond his feet. I kicked it away and raised my head. The lead shot had ripped through his right arm just below the shoulder, shattered bone jutting through the red-and-black scramble of shredded muscle and leather. He tried to smile when he saw me looking down at him, recognizing me in a primal way that failed him when he’d pulled the trigger. I wanted to hit and kiss him both. I fought to pull the air deep enough into my lungs to ask, “Why?”

  His eyes glassed over for a moment, but he blinked and clarity returned. “Something you said about me, once,” he whispered.

  I pulled myself higher, asked, “What?”

  “My left hand, it doesn’t know what the right is doing.”

  I laid my head on his chest and waited for the ambulance.

  34

  THE TEMPERATURE ROSE into the mid-80s the morning they held Pop’s funeral service, the sky above the San Gabriel Mountains bleaching white with early summer heat as they interred the plain brass urn containing his ashes into a concrete niche, next to the blue porcelain urn that held the ashes of my mother. Not many mourners showed for the ceremony, just my brother and his family and a few coworkers from the machine shop where Pop worked. The publicity surrounding his death might have scared away a few who otherwise might have attended, but Pop hadn’t made a lot of friends in his lifetime, and I doubt the crowd would have topped a dozen had he died a normal death. As the oldest remaining member of our dwindling family, Ray bore the responsibility of placing his ashes into the niche. Given the opportunity to say a few words about Pop and what he’d meant to us, he declined.

  I don’t know more about the ceremony than these few basic facts, because the California penal system doesn’t allow funeral leave for prisoners. I’m not sure what I would have said had I been there, whether I would have shown the courage to speak the uncomfortable truth about a man most everybody hated and feared until the last few months of his life, or whether I would have mouthed the usual platitudes. If I’d been granted the privilege to attend the funeral, I would have tried to speak truthfully about his end. He’d tried to subdue the demons that drove him, expressed remorse for how he’d lived his life, and shown genuine love for his daughter and granddaughter. He’d scarred our lives with fits of self-serving rage and violence. He’d wanted to turn that rage at the end to the service of others. That his action did far more harm than good to the ones he’d been learning how to love shouldn’t be held against him.

  The walls and bars of a prison begin to look alike after just a few days. That’s one of the things that makes it a prison. Some days I feel as though I never left, my two brief years on the outside a single night’s dream. My current cellmate is a recovering meth addict serving a five-year sentence on burglary charges. She suffers from nightmares. She’d been housed with the general prison population until her screams so unnerved everybody they decided to confine her away with me. I don’t mind her so much. She talks a fast and meaningless patter, words like raindrops on a tin roof, then she conks out until two in the morning, when the screams start. The other girls used to beat her when she screamed. I’ve found it works better to drop down from the top bunk and hold her until the nightmares fade to black. She strikes out at me in her terrified sleep, but I’m stronger than she is and generally avoid much more than a scratch or two. Looks like we’ll be together for a while, so I try to make the best of it.

  One of my deepest regrets is my lack of contact with Cassie, who remains in the custody of the Los Angeles County Juvenile Justice System. I pass letters to her through my lawyer, Charles Belinsky, who represents us both. He assures me that she’s doing as well as can be expected for a teenage girl held in custody at Central Juvenile Hall and facing adjudication on charges of aggravated assault and possibly attempted murder of a police officer. The prosecutor tasked with her case would like to try her as an adult and put her in prison for the next fifteen years, minimum, but Belinsky isn’t going to let him get away with that and, oddly enough, neither will Logan.

  The deputies charged with Cassie’s processing into juvenile detention sealed the tape they fished from her pants with the rest of her belongings, not having a clue to the tape’s importance. Belinsky claimed possession of the tape, made copies, and passed one to Logan, who didn’t care about Jason and Jagger Starbal any more than the cops in Southern California have cared about O. J. Simpson, Phil Spector, or Robert Blake. Logan interviewed Cassie extensively and matched architectural details from the video recording of Christine’s killing to the pool room on Starbal’s estate. He didn’t
gloat at seeing me strapped to a bed in the Los Angeles County–USC Medical Center Jail Ward, even said it was kind of a shame it worked out that way. He needs my testimony—and more importantly, Cassie’s—if any case comes to trial, so I’m not convinced the sympathy he expresses is genuine.

  Sean hasn’t contacted me, not that I expect or want him to come calling. The department conducted no more than a cursory review of his conduct during the shooting and found his actions fully justified by the situation. He’d entered the house after hearing gunfire and saw the suspect holding a pistol. I hadn’t given him time to issue a warning, he reported. He didn’t see me drop the weapon when I made a sudden movement. He discharged his weapon in full accordance with his training, fearing not only for his own life, but for the lives of the others in the room.

  Belinsky’s ability to charm the reason out of prosecutors and juries doesn’t extend to parole judges. The videocassette retrieved from Spectrum’s pocket unambiguously displayed a fight between two attack dogs that resulted in one owner, a paroled felon, assaulting the other owner, an ex-con, with a baseball bat. My parole officer spoke up for me at the hearing, attesting to my good character and history of exemplary behavior while on parole, both untrue but nonetheless appreciated. The judge said he might sympathize with the mitigating circumstances but they didn’t blind him to the clear parole violation he’d just witnessed. “I don’t think the State has a dog in this fight,” he joked, and then denied continuation on parole.