Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  “But I’m going to mess around, spend my own money … I’m going to be working on something very soon.”

  “Like what?”

  She shook her head. Biting into toast made her see wheat fields somewhere. “I won’t talk about it until I have something,” she said.

  “Well, you kept Manoa a secret … and maybe there are outside factors, sure, but it’s getting attention and doing well.”

  “In New York,” she said, somewhat dismissively. “I can’t imagine people getting off on it down South or in the Midwest.”

  “We’ll see,” Larry said with a little smile, as if he thought she was playing at false modesty. She was all ready to say something about how she hated celebrity art, that kind of motivation for people to go see something, but something knowing in his expression held her back. He was two moves ahead of her, perhaps.

  “I have a message for you,” he said, and gave her a little slip of paper. “I know you’ve got a service, but for some reason this person convinced one of my secretaries you’d know who this is and want the call.”

  The note said, Charles Head. Lets talk again soon. Then in maybe thirty seconds Lisa had figured out a possibility: Chuck Suede.

  On the way out, some guy backed up in front of her, taking photographs, and she didn’t know what to do. “Come on, leave me alone” didn’t seem to have any effect. If she changed direction, he did too, smiling in a creepy way, showing his teeth. She wasn’t a fellow human being, she was prey. He was determined to keep getting her, to stay in her path. Maybe he was actually trying to bait her, to get her to swing at him with her purse. She couldn’t do anything to him, she felt paralyzed.

  Paparazzi. He’d make some money from this, but it was like there was more in it for him than that. Her notoriety made her, in this instance, again, despised. She finally managed to get in her car and drive away, unable to stop herself from giving him the finger as he began cannily shooting another roll of film. He wasn’t human to her, though he probably had a wife and kids. And a screenplay.

  She drove off to the athletic club, where she swam without incident, and then she went to visit Joey and Zed in Cucamonga to buy some necessary hallucinogens.

  SEVEN

  Profit favored nabbing Sender at the airport, but he listened to Dave, who said, “Why alarm him? Besides, let’s see how he lives.”

  So that was the plan. They’d interview him for a while at his home, then take him downtown.

  Alvin Sender had been in Jamaica as the executive producer of some special on swimwear, sponsored by five or six different designers, with twelve models—each different segment with a different swimwear line. Tommy Boy’s new action prints. Their space-age silvers and golds. Estelle’s floral patterns, or classic black and white. Like that. The resultant program would be sold, perhaps to ESPN. A topless or seminude version would be offered via an 800 number at the end of the show.

  One of the models came home with Sender. While they were unpacking, they were visited by Bluestone and Brown. The event seemed to completely blow Sender’s cool, while the girl, if anything, became even more blase.

  “Go in the other room, Cindy OK? Wait for me there. If that’s all right with you guys?”

  “Just a minute,” Brown said. “Cindy, you got a California driver’s license?”

  “Listen, ” Sender said, “she’s with the Sable Agency in New York.”

  “You got a passport? Find it.”

  Brown followed her into the other room. He almost always felt hostility toward these young white bimbo-model-actress-hooker types, and it didn’t give him any satisfaction to think how many of them he’d seen dead in the morgue, their faces rolled down the front of the skull while the coroner’s assistant removed the inconsequential, bitchy, wet pink brain. Cindy, typically, had contempt for him. He was an ordinary-looking forty-five-year-old black man with a mustache and a receding hairline, a second wife and three kids from the first marriage living with another dad, the younger two having changed their name to Pendergraph. Brown hadn’t had sex with his current wife in at least six months. All she wanted to do was go to church, to church socials and picnics, and, as much as possible, drag him along. Right now, at this moment, disconnected from this young bitch, he didn’t care about her—the thought of his life, his inevitable mortality, all the things he’d missed … it made him sad. Then he forgot, turning his attention back to this fucked-up case.

  He checked Cindy’s passport, making a note of her hyphenated last name. The only address she’d give him was in care of the modeling agency in New York. He didn’t think he had sufficient cause to search her luggage, looking for drugs.

  Back in the living room, Bluestone ran a bluff on Sender.

  He said, “We know you knew Candy St. Claire, so don’t waste time trying to deny it. Now, tell me: Did you introduce her to Boro, or did Lauren Devoto?”

  “He met her when he came over one day. She was lying out by the pool. Naked. He knelt down by her and started talking, I couldn’t hear what was said. I went inside to turn the stereo down, and when I came back out she said, ‘Yeah, sure.’ And that was it. I think that was the only time she came over here.”

  Brown had inconspicuously come back into the room. Bluestone gave him a look that said, Don’t break the mood.

  Dave said, “Why was Boro visiting you?”

  “It was something about a piece of furniture he thought I had. A couch. Upholstered with albino jaguar skin. I told him I knew nothing about it. I dealt in antiques and artworks, paintings and sculptures, but that was, like, ten years ago. I still invest in art, but only in stuff that I personally like. I told him to try the Horizon Gallery, they dealt a lot of things from Mexico and Latin America … since Madonna drove up the price on Frida Kahlo, that’s all been hot for a long time now. Yes, I know—the Horizon Gallery was the one run by Veronica, uh, you know … I just read about Lou in the Times, but you might remember that their son destroyed the gallery in some kind of weird publicity stunt….”

  “The same one who’s dead.”

  “Right. But this was a couple months or so before that. I don’t know if Boro went to see Veronica or not. That was the only time I ever saw him in my life.”

  “Who told him you might have this couch?”

  “I have no idea. Really. I didn’t ask. He’s not the kind of person you question about details like that.”

  “What about Candy? How many more times did you see her?”

  “Maybe twice. Just at the office. She got auditions for a couple of films. I wasn’t really interested in her. I told her to get a boob job and come back in a few months. And to eat a healthier diet. All she wanted to eat was tortilla chips and Twinkies, Whoppers and fries.”

  “Were you her agent?”

  “No. I’m not an agent. I’m a facilitator. I put people together, sometimes.”

  “Who was giving her these auditions?”

  “I think it was Javitz Coolbaugh. He makes these ridiculously cheap exploitation films, they’re supposed to be funny vampires and chain saws and naked girls. Sometimes he does a hardcore version, though the hardcore market is shit. I have nothing to do with that kind of thing.”

  “Did you send Candy to meet Lauren Devoto?”

  “Look, I saw Candy at one of Lauren’s parties. I don’t know anything about how she got there.”

  “What was she doing?”

  “She liked to give head. She prided herself on how good she was.”

  “Just to men, or women too?” This from Brown.

  “I don’t know about women. I’m sure she would have put on a show if that was on the menu. She started out real young, thirteen or so, as a groupie, and the favorite thing those guys like to see is two girls going down on each other. That’s entertainment in the back of the tour bus, when there’s nothing to do.”

  “So Boro said something to her, she said, ‘Yeah, sure,’ and you don’t know anything about the two of them beyond that?”

  “Right,” Sen
der answered, tan and fit, somehow more refined and intelligent-seeming than he needed to be. Bluestone thought this might be enough for a first shot. They could always come back and pick him up. He hesitated, then said, “Do you know Lisa Nova?”

  “Mm, very slightly. We’ve met two or three times, at different places.”

  “Where?”

  “Once at Code Parker’s, when he had that place in Hollywood. And once at Lauren Devoto’s, upstairs. There was a party downstairs. We could see it on the monitors. Selwyn Popcorn was there. I think that’s all.”

  Bluestone ran through a few more names connected with the case. Yes, Sender had known Lou. Not very well, but enough to say hi.

  “What about Roy Hardway?”

  “Yes, I know Roy.”

  Something was making him nervous. Sender had told so much so readily, it had seemed like he was scared, but maybe that underestimated him, Bluestone thought.

  “Where do you think Boro is?” Bluestone asked.

  “My guess is that he’s down in Yucatan or Guatemala and that he’ll never be found. That’s just my intuition. I don’t think he’d hang around here.”

  Profit asked, after a few seconds had passed, “Why did Roy leave town the way he did? Supposedly he had this date with Lisa Nova, and they met some whores at a motel, and that’s all anyone knows until he turned up in this film down in Brazil. Could he have flipped out and be back here in town?”

  Sender said, shaking his head, “I’ve never understood what happened to Roy.”

  The detectives glanced at each other, shrugged, and then left on that note.

  EIGHT

  Lisa set the wooden kitchen chair backward in front of the three-paneled standing mirror in the room she thought of as her studio, because all of the filmmaking equipment was in here. She had taken the TVC15 an hour ago, then went for a swim, knowing from previous experience it would take a while to come on.

  Now she sat in front of the three-sided mirror in her swimsuit, leaning on the back of the wooden chair. Bare feet on the wooden floor. She took a deep breath. Raelyn was gone to Redondo Beach or somewhere. It was a sunny clear day. Lisa wore the mirror earrings. She recalled the pain of being tattooed and wondered if standing that pain then would make it any easier to withstand this ordeal. She thought vaguely about what she’d dreamed last night, trying to call it to mind.

  She lost track of time. There were—it felt like she was asleep—there were fascinating things to look at in the mirrors. If she tried to really memorize them, they faded or blinked away; the trick was to just let it happen, flow into focus and out … a different sense of time. She was seeing what had happened in these mirrors, mostly women studying themselves, turning … this kind of thing was accessible to her, she saw it, it was there.

  Deeply entranced now, she overcame the inertia of the heavy air, the molecules taking on color and weight and sheen, iridescent shimmers everywhere, even in the skin of the chair. She was interested in the pores of her own skin, she looked at her arm and then down at her tensed thigh, a half hour could go by or a single minute stretch out to some impossible lifetime of a dust mote, a subatomic particle smashing into a flamy gold interior sea. She licked her lips. What beautiful lips she had. Lisa wondered at herself.

  It would be best if she did it quickly. She arranged the bowl in the most likely place. In the mirror, just glancing up, she caught a swift flash of the princess in her feathered garment, imagination or memory, but it gave Lisa strength. She had decided that without a forceps, she would have a hard time preventing the muscle from its natural urge to retract.

  Left hand holding the Pennington forceps, she clamped her tongue and held it, pulled it a bit out, over the top curve of the wood. The stingray spine, with tape wrapped around it to effect a handle … she touched it to the pink, sensitive tongue flesh, watching in the mirror—then she really stabbed it, and she almost dropped the forceps, her eyes shut, tears welled out of her eyes uncontrollably, the pain was unbelievable, primitive, much worse than she could bear— but she did it, she was strong and she fucking jammed it, like the creation of the world, lava flowing and mountains falling and coming back up, burning rivers and creatures crawling from the swamp onto land, the soft ones eaten and ripped, the soft pretty ones torn apart, she pierced her tongue with the razorlike jagged spine, she made sure it was all the way through. Something big loomed in the mirror and she sensed it was the jaguar though she didn’t see her, she waited before extracting the spine and then immediately groaned, she couldn’t stand it, she stood up and staggered back, eyes closed … as the camera, on its own, began to run. It was quiet, but she knew that it was on. This calmed her a bit, though the hallucinogen made it hard to think, to understand.

  She had taped over the eyepiece and left the lens cap on, so there was no possibility of any … the fucking blood in the bowl began to smoke, it fizzed, red smoke billowed up as Lisa felt an incredible wave of happiness and heightened pain. Her tortured tongue was huge, beating red-orange with every heartbeat, beating, filling her head. Everyone was her ancestor, she knew. Everyone in the ground and in the air. She would have cried out, but she was mute. Lisa screamed inside her mind. Animal wisdom, animal now, the jaguar shaman loves the captured flying bird of bleeding thought. The tattoos tingled like they possessed an electric charge. She could have danced on broken glass.

  NINE

  Kicking her feet and whimpering, Veronica was having a nightmare that evil children were coming up the alley to break in and rape her and kill her; she couldn’t tell which window or door they were going to come in—she couldn’t remember where the door was in the dark, and she was freaking out…. When she finally woke up and turned on the light, she saw that the door was in a completely different place than the configuration in her dream, and she wondered what that noise had been, it had sounded so real… probably a cat.

  Steve Zen slept on his back and occasionally snored, the sleep of the beautiful, the dumb. He took more drugs than she would ever dare, but then he also took a lot of vitamins and protein supplements; he used to take steroids when he was into body sculpting to try to be Mr. Universe or whatever Arnold Schwarzenegger had been, but he said his sex organ had started to shrink and he’d feared it might be permanent, so he’d stopped the steroids and went on a program to exercise it all he could to stretch it back to its former bulk.

  This corresponded to Veronica’s needs in that, ever since a certain time, she’d needed a lot of sexual stimulation. Steve liked to at least eat her even when he was worn out from work.

  Wanda, who had worked as a topless dancer, stripper, live-sex-show star, live nude dancer—always in demand, getting top dollar because of her shamelessness and, more than that, her total body tattoos—had taught Veronica self-hypnosis, and it worked. Veronica was able to get in touch with the power within and become a universe unto herself. She could block out everything else. She had been told that Lisa Nova had had a curse put on Lou and their family; it should have been obvious to her, but someone had had to tell her this, she had been that naive and inexperienced at her age.

  Veronica went to the refrigerator, completely indifferent to the roaches that came out and patrolled the kitchen at night, and she opened the refrigerator door so that the light came on, she leaned on it… and then drank some of Steve’s almond-flavored protein shake. She needed all the energy she could get. Her stomach felt queasy. Her asshole hurt, just one sharp twinge. She went to the backgammon box and found the Percodan bottle. Someone else’s prescription, someone who had scratched and clawed at the label to keep from leaving their name. Steve had scored this off a John. It was sort of too bad to take a Percodan just to go back to sleep, but she didn’t want any more bad dreams. That was too creepy. She didn’t need that. Not when the curse remained. What a fucking thing to have done. How evil. She shuddered and lay down next to Steve, who said, in his sleep, distinctly, “It’s all Greek, man. It’s all Greek.”

  TEN

  Raelyn came home to find
that Lisa had written her a note: Can’t talk. Bit my tongue. The author of this was on the couch, watching TV, sucking on pieces of ice.

  On the way back from her new lover’s, Rae had stopped in at the law offices of Watson Random—all the crank mail and love letters and fan mail were being routed there. The law clerk, Shelley, said that they were still getting twenty-some weird calls a day. A lot of this attempted communication had some religious angle, from old ladies praying to save Lisa’s soul to satanists or pseudosatanists congratulating her

  on having evidently made a sale. There was also, naturally, a lot of sex stuff: nasty threats of rape with a Coke bottle, proposals of marriage from San Quentin, photos, Xeroxes of material—it was Raelyn’s job to screen all this stuff, and she liked doing it. It was interesting, and since the weird feelings weren’t directed toward her, she could view it mostly without alarm. Anything too specifically threatening was to be turned over to the police.

  The whole process—seeing the fantasies people had, aimed at Lisa—made Rae feel very protective, as if Lisa were a fragile flower. She never showed her anything unless it was obviously funny … most of it was not. Whore of Babylon, prepare to fry in Everlasting Hell, or Dear Cunt, or Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

  Headlines in the tabloids were things like “How Many Did She Kill?” and “Is Starlet Really a Killer Voodoo Queen?” As long as it was in the form of a question, it wasn’t actionable. The answer could be none, or no. The less information actually offered in these stories, the better they worked. Next to a photo of Lisa, the interrogative headline read “Kill-Crazed Witch?”

  “Are you OK?” Raelyn asked. “Can I see?”