Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  TWENTY-FIVE

  On Sunday afternoon Code called. Lisa answered after two rings. Raelyn was gone somewhere.

  Lisa said hello, and Code immediately started leaning on her, saying, “You’ve got to come get me. Nobody’s here right now, but I’ve got to leave. Just take me out to LAX.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “New York. Look, just do me the favor. You’re the only one I trust. It’s gotten really bad. I have to get out.”

  “Code? Why can’t someone else take you? Why me? We haven’t even talked for, like, months.”

  “Just come, OK? Please don’t fuck with me.”

  “If you’re trying to get me over there for some sex thing, I’ll kill you. I swear to God.”

  “Lisa, Jesus … you once said you’d stick by me no matter what. Well, right now is ‘what.’ I’m in over my head. Just come and get me and take me to the airport, OK? I need you to do this for me.”

  “All right. I’ll come as fast as I can. You’ll be ready to go?”

  “Yes. It’s the servants’ day off, so nobody will be around. I’ll be waiting.”

  Lisa felt like saying, I don’t even know you anymore, but that seemed too cruel. She was tired. She had swum earlier, but otherwise it was a lazy, motiveless day. Overcast and humid. Something in Code’s voice had bugged her, but she didn’t see what she could do. She got dressed and at the last moment decided to leave a note for Raelyn.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Nobody answered their knock, the doorbell, taps on the window, calls of “Veronica!” “Steve!”—nothing. Bluestone and Brown looked at each other, looked around at the neighborhood, trying to ascertain if they’d attracted particular attention. It didn’t seem like it. People were yelling around here all the time.

  They could smell burning charcoal briquets.

  “Man, I love that smell,” Profit Brown said.

  “Me too,” Bluestone agreed. “I even love the smell of the starter fluid.”

  A vast laziness descended on them. They didn’t know what to do. It was possible, it wasn’t to be overlooked, that Steve and Veronica might be inside, just not answering, stubbornly waiting for them to go away. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  The day was cloudy, but hot. Somebody was playing salsa music loudly just down the street. All that crazy percussion, that love for trumpets—Profit Brown found himself musing about how gang tattoos looked on brown skin.

  “Why don’t you call her, how about that? Veronica said there’s a phone at the Korean grocery.”

  “Call Lisa?” Bluestone asked.

  “Yeah. You have a better, uh, rapport with the suspect than I do.”

  “I’ll call this number too. And Devoto. Let’s call everybody we know.”

  “Yeah, do that. I’ll stay here.”

  “OK,” and Dave Bluestone was gone around the corner just like that. In a minute Brown could hear the phone ring inside the house, but he didn’t hear anyone stir. In another few minutes Bluestone was back, with two cold Cokes.

  “Nobody’s home,” he said.

  They drank their cold beverages thirstily. They wondered where Lisa was. Who knew? It was a Sunday afternoon. Maybe if they called up Behind the Scenes, some sleazy producer there would know where everybody was. Lisa was now romantically linked with Chuck Suede. The detectives didn’t know what that was all about.

  “Are you curious, Dave?” Brown asked, and Bluestone knew he meant why don’t we go in, take a look. It was the only thing that might relieve their tension for a moment or two.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As she drove, Lisa had the volume up high on the car stereo, it was soothing, but she was hardly listening … her mind wandered, ideas came to her … like maybe spending a few months quietly, anonymously, in Europe, visiting her father in France and then renting an apartment, maybe in Budapest or Prague … maybe Rome. Not Berlin. When she’d been there for the film festival, she’d jaywalked—like she would anywhere, traffic permitting—and some purple-mohawked post-neo-punk had rebuked her in an intimidating fashion, he’d actually scared her … and yet the whole thing had been absurd. A joke.

  Brazil again? Rio? Not now that Tavinho was dead. Where else down there … maybe Buenos Aires would be nice. She didn’t know. She was sure, however, that she would leave Los Angeles for a while. She’d leave the United States. Somebody was following her, even now, some tabloid reporter, she’d seen him hanging around off and on for weeks. If she could control her powers better, she would do something to him, just some relatively harmless mischief, make his car break down … such jackals deserved all the petty misfortunes she could cause.

  Pulling into the open gateway of the Devoto place, going up the long driveway to the turnaround in front of the house, Lisa felt a certain uneasiness mingled with dispassionate irritation at Code. Why had he ever come out here? How could he have been able to make himself spend so much time with that woman? He must have really despaired of the future, hated himself even, under it all.

  Could you make a comeback once you’d hit that all-time low? She hoped so, but she didn’t know. Code might be just fucked.

  She pulled up to the front entrance, by the stone steps, and sat there, the Trans Am in neutral, waiting for some sign of life. She didn’t know if she’d shaken the tail or not. Code had said he would be ready Goddamn him. She honked the horn.

  Not a sound.

  OK. Fuck. Honked again. Turned off the ignition and, taking her time, hesitant, got out of the car. Shit.

  Lisa was wearing a short slip dress, pale rose pink, almost beigeish, slightly iridescent, a silver chain around her neck with a triangular sacred Zoroastrian seal hanging down, something like that, sunglasses, midankle biker boots—there had been some thought in her mind, as she had dressed, since Code was an ex-boyfriend, of showing him what he had been missing.

  When she’d come here before, with Selwyn Popcorn, the night of that party, there had been so many people … it was a little eerie now to have the place deserted. She went up to the front door. It was just barely ajar; you wouldn’t notice until you were up close. Lisa opened it wide.

  “Code?”

  Maybe he had come down, gone outside, then realized he’d forgotten some tape or something just as crucial, and run back upstairs.

  “Code?” she asked again, stepping in, taking off her sunglasses, now also with her keys in her hand. This place was huge. Blondish hardwood floors. So bare. What was going on? Lisa spun around at a noise partially behind her, but it was nothing….

  There was some—there was something—up ahead, to her right.

  “Lisa …” It was Code. Now Lisa saw him. Code stood on a chair in the middle of an immense empty room with a noose around his neck—a noose on a new rope attached to a beam high overhead. Wrists cuffed behind him? She wasn’t sure.

  On the wall, spray-painted in big, thick blood-red letters: I did it

  “Lisa, I’m sorry,” he said—and then a woman dressed all in black— of course Lisa had seen her but she hadn’t really registered, it was Veronica, Lou’s widow—kicked the chair out from under Code, and his legs splayed out, it wasn’t a joke. The noise he made.

  There was someone behind Lisa. She turned just as a handsome, tanned, muscular guy, in a shining white T-shirt and blue jeans, sleeves torn off to show his swollen biceps, grabbed her, giving her no chance, smiling at her, hands hard on her arms, his fingers hurt her … he pulled her, half pushed her, out of the scene, away from the evidently hanging-to-death Code.

  Was this real?

  Veronica was in a black shiny plastic catsuit, like Catwoman or Diana Rigg in The Avengers.

  “Let go of me, you fuck,” Lisa said, dropping her sunglasses and her keys. He kicked them away from her as she started to bend over.

  “My name is Steve,” he said with a curve to his mouth, showing by his smile his contempt for her, his relish of the role he played.

  Veronica had a gun in her hand and was pointing it somewhat casual
ly at Lisa, indicating she should continue. Code passed out of sight, legs kicking out.

  “What are you doing?” Lisa asked, hating the fear that came up into her voice. It showed that she immediately thought or semi-intuited that they’d killed Alvin Sender, etcetera….

  “Don’t play dumb,” Veronica said. “You fucked Lou, and when he couldn’t pay your little whore’s ass in the way you’d planned, you put a curse on our whole family.”

  Lisa had nothing to say in her defense. She couldn’t struggle for the moment. She was in shock. Maybe she deserved this….

  They proceeded down a short hall to an elevator. Steve pushed her in, and Veronica followed, punched B. The elevator moved, descended.

  “But… why Code?” Lisa got out.

  “It’s a setup, baby,” Steve said, his face close to hers. “You saw it. T did it.’ He confessed.”

  “And then committed suicide out of remorse. We’ll take off the Velcro cuffs, and his wrists will be unmarked. He killed you and then himself. No loose ends,” Veronica said, her eyes spacy but clear, unreadable, intelligent and somewhat excited, wet and cruel. She looked attractive in the catsuit, her hair and makeup done with care. Had she had a facelift? She didn’t look that old.

  They came out of the elevator into a darkish space. There were various doors down here, to the left and right. The ones to the right seemed to be bathrooms … or storerooms of some sort… it was the area to the left they were going to enter, and Lisa recalled watching S&M and other sex games going on, seen on the screens of Lauren Devoto’s household monitors, Popcorn had been playing with the switches, stoned … they’d never come down here.

  “You remember Tomorrowland? Well, this will be slightly different, but it’ll still get you that kind of coverage, it’ll be the crime of the century, considering who you are by now,” Veronica continued, opening the middle door. “Oh, did you know Code was cooperating with a writer, dictating a tell-all?” she said as Steve pushed Lisa, hard, into the room, which was lit with creepy emerald green light… the light colored everything, it made everything glow green.

  Lisa collided with someone sitting in a chair, but the flesh was so cold, now the person began slipping, waxy-stiff, sideways to the floor. Short dark hair, eyes open, a bullet hole in her forehead….

  “Meet your biographer,” Veronica said, as Steve laughed with her, and Lisa made a noise—fear, she couldn’t help it, in the green source-less light she turned back to them and said, “Veronica, I’m sorry for everything that happened, you’ve got to believe me. I—I didn’t ask for all that shit to come down. Boro just did whatever he wanted to do. Look at me, look at the tattoosl He put them on me, he decorated me like his pet!”

  “You’re not sorry! Don’t lie to me!” and Veronica rapped Lisa with the hard barrel of the gun, instantly bloodying her nose. Veronica had on black gloves. “Wanda told me all about it, and I saw you with Boro. I saw how you two were. You’re not sorry for any of it.”

  Lisa wiped at her bleeding nose with her bare hand, tears from the shock of fresh pain in her eyes. She was powerless. She backed up; the green room had things in it, but she didn’t even see them, she didn’t know what they were.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she said, a moment of cowardice, weakness, and this probably encouraged them: Fear was the designed response.

  Backing up, Lisa opened the door to the next room—red light poured in, it overwhelmed the green, Lisa turned and went in, there was gymnastic equipment, or no, it was meant for sadomasochism, and someone was hanging upside down.

  It was Lauren Devoto, in a corset, wrists handcuffed behind her back, dark shadows, stockings … everything in this room was either red or darkest brownish red to black … oh, she had a penis … still erect, in a series of black cock-rings … electrodes attached to her nipples, a smell of ozone, singed flesh, she was dead, upside down, grotesque … in jewel-like, glowing red.

  Lisa ran to the next door, and Steve ran too, he caught her, he had a knife or a razor, he cut her on the shoulder blade, twice, diagonally, ripping the thin dress, then coming up close, hugging her for an instant, she could feel his strength, how weak she was in his arms— he cut her throat, just a little, a shallow, tiny, playful laceration, to terrorize her … and it did.

  The next room was blue, luminescent blue, and it was full of dummies. Mannequins, all naked and vacant and blank, bluish, were in her way, and Lisa fought through them desperately.

  The mannequins were like a forest of plaster. They were heavy, inanimate, she had to knock them over to make her way, as one fell it tangled with another and started complications, Lisa was tripped but instantly scrambled back up, it was as if she could feel new sharp cuts on her back, phantom razor slashes in the cool blue, an otherworldly blue like on another planet, these hard neutral-faced bald female dummies mocking her, they were alive, their posed hands clawed at her as she pushed through. She knew Steve and Veronica were controlling all this, it was a scenario they’d planned, but there was nothing else she could do, they had her where they wanted her.

  She was so afraid the next door wouldn’t open, but it did, into perfect blackness. She hesitated for just a moment, maybe there was some horrible trap she’d run into like a driven animal, but they were coming, they were saying, “Li-sa … Tomorrowland …”

  So she went into the darkness, but turned right and stayed next to the wall, which was covered with vast thick drapes, she moved quickly, trying to feel for obstructions ahead of her, but there was nothing … she couldn’t see anything, anything at all….

  She kept going, feeling her way, hearing only her breathing, slowing it, trying to be collected, to think. What could she do? How could she get out?

  Suddenly, just like that, lights were flicked on, normal yellowish, bright lighting—and then the drapes pulled back, one two three four … to reveal a room of mirrored walls, mirrored ceiling, tiled floor in an intricate pattern of Islamic blue and purest white and black.

  Lisa turned to the mirrors, so quickly hoping for strength, for her powers to manifest themselves, hoping for something … and maybe Veronica read her, she had her suspicions, because Lisa had no sooner seen herself, bleeding, wet red from her neck and some from her nose staining her all down the front, her eyes dilating, glimpsing beyond that all of the teeming repetitive sex acts, the nudity in these mirrors, trying to summon something beyond that, sensing rather than seeing that something was way back there, so far—than Veronica began shooting her gun, and Lisa screamed as the mirrors shattered, Veronica shot each one, and they all burst out into shards as Lisa went down holding her ears, down to one knee, eyes closed, until all the reflections were gone but for those in random unstable crooked panes shining here and there.

  “You thought you could do something with the mirrors, didn’t you?” Veronica said as Lisa scanned the room, looking for anything, a weapon, a door …

  Then, in a few moments, Lisa looked back over at Veronica. She had hopes that all the bullets might have been fired from the gun. And Steve wasn’t yet here.

  “No,” Veronica said, smiling, reading her gaze. “These new ones hold quite a few. Get ready for Tomorrowland. It’s going to hurt. But don’t worry. There’s a secret exit out of here, and we’ll tip the press as soon as we get away. You’ll be the most famous whore of all time.”

  “Just kill me, then,” Lisa said. “Don’t torture me.” Where was Steve?

  Veronica shook her head. “It has to be done a certain way,” she said. “Just shooting you wouldn’t be nearly as good. You’ll see.”

  And then Lisa did see. Steve came in, entering from the blue chamber—which flickered sometimes, in some way—and he had put on a clear plastic raincoat, hood pulled up, and goggles, and rubber gloves. He had put on big rubber boots. Ready for wet work.

  Steve had a chainsaw in his hands. He glanced at Veronica, nodded, and pulled the cord. Lisa screamed, she couldn’t help it now, and all her cries were drowned out by the chainsaw revving up. She fled to t
he farthest corner, she saw her face reflected in a little shard of mirror and knew utter terror, there was no way out, she was trapped.

  The pain, the unspeakable pain of it, those teeth ripping into your tender flesh, merciless, atrocious … it was so much worse than a simple bullet in the head. She would be mutilated, cut apart. She looked at the inhuman goggles approaching, the insane saw, and, cornered, gave way to absolute horror. She screamed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  They were concerned when they saw the shrine to Lisa that Veronica had constructed. They also found a quantity of videos in the closet, in a black plastic trash bag, which might well be the ones missing from the murdered Alvin Sender’s home. This too was cause for concern.

  When they called Lisa Nova’s number again, the machine answered, but when Bluestone spoke this time, saying it was important, Lisa’s assistant, Raelyn, picked it up, and said that Lisa had left her a note saying she’d gone to the Devoto estate to pick up Code.

  When they arrived at Devoto’s, they saw Lisa’s car parked in the turnaround. The front door was open. They discovered the body of Code, a hanged man swaying in the breeze, I did it in red paint on the wall.

  “Did what?” Profit Brown said. Bluestone remembered the control room, the console with the monitors of every room and much of the outside estate.

  As soon as they saw the brightly lit room with Lisa in it, Veronica with a gun, they ran to the elevator.