Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  Because, however blithely dismissive she might like to be about it, it made her paranoid, no question, to know that Laughton’s detective was very likely trailing her. Not to mention whatever Boro might be up to—she was sure he would be contacting her soon.

  When Lisa got home, she found eleven calls on her machine. Too many for her to deal with right away. She’d listen to them later, in an hour or so. She lay on the couch with Caz, drinking a Coke for energy, flicking on the TV with the remote. Lisa watched the news. Before the second commercial, she was becoming sort of curious about who might have called, if any of them could be something good.

  The eleven calls turned out to be—

  Tone. “Payroll? Is this payroll?”

  Then: “This is Paul Bancroft. If you’d like to have coffee or lunch or a drink or something, give me a call. I’d like to talk with you about the script. As far as I can tell, I disagree with Eric’s idea for the end. Or if you’re booked up, let’s just talk on the phone for a few minutes.” He gave his number and hung up.

  “Hi, I’m Marcia Abrahams, for Women in Film. We’re doing a piece about New York versus L.A., East Coast versus West Coast sensibilities, that sort of thing. I’d be interested in talking to you—I’m in New York, but I’m coming out to Los Angeles in ten days. If you think you might be able to spare some time, I’d like to meet you.”

  “Lisa? Christine. Oriole and I are going to a party tomorrow night, and I thought you might want to come along. Call me when you get a chance. Bye.”

  The next call was from Alvin Sender, “just to say hi,” managing to do so in an insinuatuing manner. As always when she heard from him, she was left with a free-floating sense of dread.

  Another writer, this time a male, asking if she could call back right away to comment on an item Confidential Weekly was going to run.

  Adrian: “I was just thinking about you and Caz. I hope you’re adjusting again to L.A.”

  “This is Joey. You remember me, I was living with Zed. I think the one time I met you the bandages were still on—you should see me now, it really worked out great! I don’t know if you’ve known Zed for very long, but if you haven’t heard, he’s in the hospital. I’m running the business, and I’ve got some new samples; if you’re interested, please call.”

  Track: “Lisa, listen, I got a letter here for you from Rio de Janeiro; I’m sending it along with a tape. You should seriously check out the new album by S.M.E.R.S.H. It’s fantastic. Also ‘Inside My Love,’ by Absinthe. Good beat, you can dance to it.”

  Jules Brandenberg: “Lisa, this is Jules, on Friday at four-thirty-five P.M. I’m going to be in Colorado for the weekend, but you can reach me through Amy if anything comes up. I’m going to see Robert Hand for breakfast Monday morning; I’ll wander over to the office by nine or ten. See you.”

  And then, she couldn’t mistake his voice, she felt almost an electric shock—”My friend Lisa … I want to see you tomorrow, just to say hello. Nothing special. The guy from Rio will come by, to show you where to come. Please, we haven’t seen you for so long—wear one of your nice dresses, cheer us up. You have a date, you can leave for it from here. Wait until you see all of my flowers. Until then.”

  He spoke slowly, and whenever he lapsed into a heavier accent, she was sure this was by choice. Boro could do whatever he wanted; he could sound however he liked.

  THIRTEEN

  She found out that her membership to the athletic club had lapsed, for nonpayment of dues. She drove over there in the late morning to take care of that and to use the Olympic-sized pool. Her body needed the exertion. It was a mindless way to clear her head. She always felt better after she swam.

  As she drove home, adjusting her sunglasses, looking in the rearview mirror, she thought she saw Nehi Laughton’s detective, not in a Hawaiian shirt, instead untucked khaki with epaulets, getting into the driver’s side of a gray or faded silver Toyota Corolla, presumably to follow her … what a boring, lonely job. Lisa didn’t care if he stayed on her trail, figuring that she’d wait until it mattered before doing something to throw him off. Still … checking the rearview mirror almost constantly, she didn’t see a gray car of that type, so maybe she’d been wrong.

  Maybe Duane Moyer could have attached a transmitter of some sort to her car. She’d seen it done in movies, of course, so she assumed it could be done in real life.

  Tonight Lisa was to go to the party that Christine had mentioned: It was at the house of newlywed stars Taft Flowers and Heather Malone. Lisa didn’t know what she was going to wear.

  She called Christine when she got home.

  “Don’t you have that shiny gold dress, you know the one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wear that,” Christine said. “It’s definitely glam. Have you heard of the band Sucker? Taft’s little brother is the guitar player. I mean, he’s the lead guitar player, excuse me.”

  “I don’t know about them. Are they some kind of metal?”

  “Glitzo-retro metal-techno, something like that. Oriole likes them.”

  “Are they going to play there?”

  “I think so. So wear the sexy gold dress, OK?”

  “Maybe. I’ll see. What are you gonna wear?”

  Christine was happy to tell her all about it: the dress, the necklace, the earrings. The matching shoes. It was soothing to listen to, and it got Lisa more enthused about dressing up. She needed to wash her hair again, to make sure she’d rinsed out all the chlorine.

  She told Christine about the call from Confidential Weekly and the one from Marcia Abrahams for Women in Film. The supermarket tabloid, Lisa said, would print whatever it wanted; it was better not to be tricked into giving them a quote. This was her weakish theory.

  “But aren’t you curious? Even if they’re just making up lies, it means you’re on the map. What do you think it could be?”

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said, unwilling to voice her suspicion. Christine didn’t press, but she could tell Lisa was holding something back.

  The afternoon passed. Lisa spent a long time—with music blasting—on her makeup and earrings, searching for a certain pair of shoes, a certain bracelet, allowing the music to govern her mood. She put the dress on, took it off. Had something to eat.

  At six-thirty someone knocked on her door. She looked through the peephole: It was Ariel Mendoza. The detective. So.

  “Just a minute,” she said. If Boro wanted to see her, she thought she should cooperate, up to a point. She turned off the stereo and put on her dress. Casimir was meowing. She opened the door and let Mendoza come in. Should she regard him as an enemy? He was reserved and polite, his manners more restrained than was typical for Latins, yet she sensed that underneath he had a sympathy for her, a liking … even as, she understood, he was uncomfortable with women, she couldn’t guess what kind of problems he might have had in his life with the issue of sex. He apologized for bothering her; she smiled and said it was OK. She didn’t want to deceive herself, but she did see him as a potential ally, to be wooed as such.

  “I’m going to a party later on,” she said, and then, irrepressibly, “Do you like my dress?”

  “Oh, I do. Very much. It’s very nice. Here, maybe you can use this.” Out of his pocket he handed her a ring.

  “Where does it come from?” Lisa asked, examining it closely. The gold seemed very old and soft, with an intricate design, a piece of jade … She tried it on her left hand, the fourth finger. It fit.

  “It belonged to a princess in Mexico, back before the Aztecs. Since then it’s passed through many hands.” He shrugged.

  Lisa looked at him, trying to read him. She worried that this ring meant something, that it had some sort of magic or power attached to it that might enable Boro to play with her some more. She couldn’t know. She hesitated, then sat down on the couch and put on her shoes.

  “What’s the plan?” she asked, feeling dumb.

  Ariel explained that she would drive him out to Boro’s house, that he woul
d serve as her guide. Afterward she could leave to go on to her party. Lisa agreed to this without asking how he had arrived. She recalled, from the increased weight, that she had the .32 revolver in her purse.

  “There might be some kind of beeper, or a device somewhere on my car. A detective has been following me—I’m not making this up, he introduced himself—and it seems like he can keep in contact with me even when I can’t see him … is this something that’s hard to check?”

  Ariel frowned, yet he seemed interested. His professional pride was engaged.

  “Who employs this detective?” he asked. “Roy Hardway’s agent.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about what happened to Roy Hardway, the movie star.” Outside, Ariel found the bug within five minutes. It was in the right rear tire well, affixed with a magnet.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll jump out, at some point and put it on someone else’s automobile.”

  They got in the car. Lisa started it, and they drove off. Lisa beamed at Ariel, who smiled more modestly back—there was a shared sense of mischief, of play. She drove up Olive to Eleventh Street, went over to Flower and Wilshire, there was a lot of traffic, they were bogged down. Ariel opened his door and dashed out, he pretended for the sake of the guy in the next car to have dropped his pen, absurdly having to rescue it. He quickly got back in Lisa’s car.

  She turned the corner, heading back roughly the way she’d come, through Hollywood to Laurel Canyon Drive. This wasn’t where Boro had lived before.

  A gate opened for them, closing behind the car as it came in. The house was on the side of a hill. The canyon fell away. Lisa, getting out of the driver’s seat, putting her keys away in her purse, felt overdressed and vulnerable, a bit afraid. Nobody was outside; a door was open to enter the house.

  “It’s all right,” Ariel said.

  Motorcycles, and a Jaguar sedan—it looked to Lisa exactly like Roy’s. Exactly. Jesus. She followed Ariel inside, down a long hallway, turning right and then left, going down two flights of stairs. There were some strangely lifelike statues of Aztec Indians, dressed-up mannequins actually … and then a large high-ceilinged room with hundreds of big potted flowers and exotic plants, an extraordinary arboretum, and in the middle a fire was burning in an area of exposed earth, a hole having been chopped through the succeeding floors up to the sky, chopped raggedly, as if with an axe. Boro sat on what looked to be a piece of human furniture: a zombie, in red velvet, on his hands and knees. Other zombies hung around, and in contrast to when Lisa had seen the collection before, now there were several very pale zombie maidens, in sheer white nightgowns, layers of lace. Brides of the vampire.

  There were other people, past Boro, lounging around on a luxurious, chocolate brown leather couch. A good-looking young Hispanic male, sitting with his elbows on his knees, his hands holding his face, looking up to see who had come in.

  “Miguel Casablanca,” Ariel said, “and Wanda.”

  Wanda was young and sort of pretty, artificially red hair, almost a shade of magenta, heavily tattooed, wearing an uplift bra and a silver-encrusted little jacket, baggy black pants tucked into black boots. She had a ring in her nose—she stared at Lisa with what seemed to be suspicion and dislike. Boro was eating roasted corn on the cob. A couple of chickens were walking around in the dirt, pecking at it occasionally, and a black dog sat waiting to see if he would be offered any corn.

  Boro said, “I’m glad to see you. You look beautiful.”

  Lisa suddenly felt like shooting him. She came forward and said, “The tattoos make me look like a slut. You marked me.”

  “They give you power. And … being marked has taught you things, things you would never have known. The transmission of Manoa could not have occurred without those signs. Here, this is yours.” He reached into a bag, looking in, and then tossed her one of the shrunken heads. She jerked away from it, but it struck her on the thigh before falling to earth.

  “Ah,” Lisa exclaimed, suspecting, then realizing, turning it over with her foot—it was Roy! Ugly, eyes and mouth and nose sewn up, blond hair long, the whole thing a little bigger than a Softball…

  “Put it in your purse. It’s yours, the keepsake of your sacrifice. It’s clean. It smells of copal. You have a responsibility. Come on, it won’t hurt you.”

  Feeling that by doing so she was making herself a willing accessory, wicked, evil, she reached out and picked it up, stuffed it into her purse.

  “Good. Come now. We’ve been saving Lou so he could see you one last time.”

  Boro walked with energy toward a corner of the room, on a path through some of the unusual plants: Venus flytraps, others with oily fuchsia flesh and big thorns, ready to spring. Boro opened a door into a dimly lit room. Flickering candles illuminated a weirdly grim scene.

  “Oh, no,” Lisa moaned, and started to turn, but Ariel turned her back toward the spectacle, murmuring to her, “It’s your vengeance. You must look.”

  Lisa forced herself to open her eyes. The banks of candles revealed a body cut into pieces, the various pieces then nailed or spiked to the wall. Here was Lou’s rib cage, off the other bones. Internal organs, each put up separately, intestines looping dark pink around and around. One leg whole, the other separated into thigh and buttock, calf, and then foot, a naked foot next to the head, the eyes of which now opened—somehow, horribly, horribly, it was still alive. The tongue came out to moisten the lips.

  “Please … just let me die,” he said, his voice hoarse and sepulchral, coming from somewhere beyond, echoing—Lisa waved her hand, gesturing in pain, and the candles went out as her hand passed by across the room, the candles went out and in the same motion Lou’s head burst into flames, burning so hard and fast it began to melt, as if made out of wax, the mouth moved in agony as the lower jaw collapsed into itself. Lisa was weeping; when she turned away this time, nobody stopped her.

  The zombies advanced, activated by the prospect of fresh meat. Lisa turned back to Boro and said, “It was a trick, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded, pleased that she understood.

  “But… that’s how he ended up. He couldn’t be preserved.”

  “What are they eating, then?”

  “Oh, the parts are real. If you hadn’t set the head on fire, you would never have known.” He looked back to the room. “They need their flesh.”

  “I didn’t mean for you to destroy him like that.” She said this, but she wasn’t able to say it with total conviction—she had the feeling she’d given him license to do just about anything he wanted to do.

  “Don’t lie to yourself,” Boro said, walking past her. “You can’t lie to me, you know, not now. You are mine.”

  “I’ll help you fix up your makeup,” Wanda said, and Lisa sniffed but docilely went with her, into a big en suite bathroom down another hall.

  “Your eye makeup is smeared. Are you OK now? I guess that was a surprise.”

  “I’m OK.”

  “Just sit here. I used to do makeup for the stars.”

  “What is your … how did you meet Boro?”

  “Don’t talk. I met him at a santería shop in East L.A. I was playing around with becoming a witch. Boro’s taught me a lot. You’re lucky that you look like his old girlfriend, he has a soft spot for you. Close your eyes now for a while. Relax. Boro’s given you a lot of power, and it doesn’t seem like you’ve tried to do much with it. You should study … there’s a ritual, for instance, that Mayan princesses used to do. Boro was talking about you one day, that film, and he said if you did the tongue ritual while under the influence of ayahuasca, you could record your visions again, on film, like before. You might not even need ayahuasca; almost any good, organic hallucinogenic might do. You’d need to do the ritual, though, and it’s hard. It’s unbelievably painful ” she said, almost as if in some way she desired to dare Lisa into trying it out, just to have the pleasure of her pain.

  Lisa opened her eyes finally and gazed into the mirror. She didn’t trust Wanda at all. Exc
ept maybe to do her eyes. When they came back out to the others, Boro said, “Next time you and I will talk some more, by ourselves.” He caressed her bare shoulder, her arm.

  “OK,” Lisa said, looking around at the others, having regained most of her outward composure by this time. She saw Wanda smile at her, and she frowned, in competition somehow, not knowing the rules. Miguel gazed at her unhappily. She smiled, trying to put him at ease. Another one of the damned.

  FOURTEEN

  Oriole, in the car, had told Christine about some young actress who had been eating a peach and exclaimed, “Wow, this tastes just like peach Jell-O!”

  At the terribly expensive house recently purchased by Taft Flowers and Heather Malone, a house once lived in by Sonny and Cher, Darryl F. Zanuck, and other big stars back into the prehistory before Technicolor, Christine had a couple of quick glasses of champagne after Oriole left her, as always looking for contacts to help his career. Christine wondered if Lisa was really coming, as she’d said.

  Meanwhile, next to her, Larry Planet, the producer, was talking to Kimberly Chase, former Miss Universe, about some situation from a script—or at least, since she didn’t follow the news, that’s what Christine assumed.

  “This war’s been going on between Sweden and Denmark for a year or two, and it’s starting to get really ugly.”

  Planet took another sip of his drink, dipped another vegetable in aioli. Kimberly had a glazed, professional smile that nevertheless seemed to express real empathy to every eye she met. She wore a sleeveless top made of aluminum rings, an emerald green loinclothlike miniskirt… she was taller than Christine, and much taller than Larry Planet, who continued with his story, chewing, swallowing, describing a helicopter that looked like a big sleek red wasp.

  Christine, in her early Joseph Stella-style shattered-mirror-print green-black-azalea-pink shirt unbuttoned almost to her tan navel,

  with black linen pants, mock old-fashioned burgundy lace-ups, blond hair brushed up into a new, forward-looking, somewhat Futurist or Constructivist cut, silver geometric necklace and conspicuous dangling faceted pyramid earring on the left side—Christine saw Christian Manitoba, Trish Featherstone, Peter Ferrari the director, Vienna Free, Pierre Wella Balsam, Joseph Venezuela with one of several wised-up, designer-clad development sluts, agents, studio execs, fashion designers, and restaurateurs, a beautiful blond model she knew only as Freak, wearing some kind of leather harness with metal rings, mostly naked, false eyelashes, next to a New York rock star whose name she thought was Shake.