Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die

by Richard Sanders

  TELL NO LIE, WE WATCHED HER DIE

  Richard Sanders

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright 2009 Richard Sanders

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The Mongol suit of armor featured mirrors over the heart, in the belief that mirrors could deflect and even destroy evil forces, such as enemy spears, simply by reflecting them.

  —Laurence Bergreen, Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu

  CHAPTER 1

  DARKNESS ALL AROUND

  THE LAST TIME SHE’LL BE SEEN ALIVE

  It started like any other piece of home-shot video. Blurry, patchy, grainy, underlit. TV on in the background, its transmission lines rippling with static. Bright blotches of jewelry scattered on the counter next to the TV. For the first few seconds the television audio is the clearest thing about the image: It’s the 6 p.m. newscast from KTTV, the Fox affiliate in Los Angeles.

  Then the fleshy smudges in the foreground take on definition and shape. The lens is adjusting to the low light. There’s movement, moaning. You see a man’s body lying on a bed. A woman, a brunette, is going down on him, her bobbing head positioned in the center of the frame. Okay, so what’s the deal? It’s just somebody’s amateur porn.

  Why was this forwarded to me?

  But 12, 13 seconds into it, the woman raises her head. She looks up at her partner and smiles at him, checking his reaction. That’s when you realize this isn’t simply some random tape. There are the pouty, heart-curved lips, famously kept plump with Blistex balm. There’s the brown mole just above the left side of her upper lip. There are the eyes—large, almond-shaped and somehow, despite her life, peaceful. There’s the mermaid tattoo on her right shoulder, the tattoo they tried to hide with body makeup for her nude scenes in I’m Still Waiting but finally had to digitally conceal.

  No mistake: It’s Amanda Eston. It’s the Disney darling who turned tween and teen queendom into a film career filled with sweaty-palmed reviews and movies that routinely grossed $100 million plus. It’s the actress who managed to hold onto her sweetheart fanbase despite emotional breakdowns, mood swings, episodes of depression, drunken displays, drug overdoses, emergency hospital visits and prolonged rehab stays.

  The man’s face is never seen. All you can catch are snatches of his chest, hips, thighs. His one claim to video fame: A large, wine-colored, football-shaped birthmark on the side of his average size cock. Otherwise he’s anonymous. The fixed camera is angled to showcase Amanda Eston’s performance. The focus stays on her, in porn as in life.

  She goes back to work, providing more lip service. All right—this is mildly, if grimly, interesting. It’s high-wattage erotica and you watch it with a kind of breathless voyeurism, though what you’re seeing is oddly tranquil for sex.

  Then there’s a moment when it all turns.

  It comes from the sound on the TV. In the course of reporting a story, one of the newscasters mentions the day’s date and year. And if you know anything about Amanda Eston, you know that her body will be found hours later. In this same room. In this same bed.

  If you know anything about Amanda Eston, you know this is the last time she’ll be seen alive.

  She was discovered in her bedroom five years ago at 11:47 p.m., on the same day this tape was made. Large amounts of a rare drug called pralicin were found in her system. According to the ME, she died of acute pralicin poisoning. Her death was ruled to be an accidental overdose, though listed as a possible suicide.

  But in the lab of public opinion the story didn’t end there. The weeks that followed her death brought darker talk, tales of suspicious behavior, strange silences, gaps and inconsistencies in the police reports, disputed autopsy findings, secret phone calls, missing records, mysterious visitors. More than one media outlet ran features asking Who Killed Amanda Eston?

  Much of the suspicion centered on a flamboyant and conspicuously married politician named Robby Walsh, then governor of Nevada. Walsh and Amanda were loudly rumored to be having an affair, at the same time he was under investigation for fraud and conspiracy. Six months after her death, Robby Walsh was convicted on RICO racketeering charges and served three years as a guest of the federal government. He now worked as a lobbyist.

  It was Amanda’s ex, the actor L.C. Martin, who led the attack on Walsh. Briefly married to the actress (they barely lasted a year), Martin went all over the media, claiming that Amanda knew something about Walsh’s illegal activities, she knew too much, she might’ve known about even bigger things he was involved in, and that’s why he’d had her killed. Her death, Martin openly said, was a murder staged to look like a drug overdose.

  And now you’re looking at the prelude to her death, the foreshadowing of her end. Everything about the video—the grain, the blurs—has been touched by what’s going to happen.

  This isn’t porn anymore. Porn keeps you out, keeps you watching the performers as objects. But this thing, this pulls you in. This draws you into itself. This makes you feel connected to what you’re seeing, as if hidden messages are being carried through the bytes and bandwidth and are entering your body through your eyes.

  Which explains why this one minute and 18 second video is on your screen. Which explains why it was posted on a small, obscure site in Amsterdam and picked up worldwide in a record 30 minutes.

  It’s infused with dream-spun danger, with night and terror. You know what’s coming. You know what’s going to happen. You know that death is rushing through every frame.

  >>>>>>

  A PINHOLE SPHINCTER

  I found my boss, Louisa Collins, sitting in one of the armchairs in her office, a can of Diet Coke in her hand, staring at the gray Hudson River outside her windows. The big woman was in a pensive mood.

  “You okay?”

  Slow, slow nod. “I’m just pondering some of the deeper questions. Like why does Coke foam up but Sprite doesn’t? Things like that.”

  “I’m trying to remember what Wittgenstein said about it.”

  She took a heavy breath and turned away from the view. “You find a contact?”

  “His name’s Arnoud Shuyler, based in Amsterdam. He says the full video’s 11 minutes. Lotta material.”

  “He’s the owner?”

  “No, a go-between. He’s conducting the auction.”

  “We know anything about him?”

  “Not a whole lot. He seems to traffic in some of the more outlying markets. There was a couple of pieces of stolen art recovered—he was the middleman. He also apparently deals in twisty film clips, pieces of video. Stuff that doesn’t get widely seen.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “It’s never been proved.”

  Louisa looked like a migraine had suddenly infected her skull. “I don’t want to get in bed with this guy, but I don’t see another choice. We need the video. We have to have it.”

  She spoke with a constricted throat and zero enthusiasm, and I understood why. The Real Story franchise—the magazine and website—was doing well, but ad sales were still hurting and the lack affected almost every decision. We used to work in an intense but loose atmosphere. Then it became more tight ass. Now it was like a pinhole sphincter.

  “Eleven minutes,” said Louisa. “We could chop it up, fuzz out the naughty bits, package it in dozens of ways. We could make a lot of m
oney with it.”

  “It’s in-person bidding only, at least for the opening round. Show of commitment. I can get the London bureau chief there in a couple hours.”

  “No.” On a note of finality. “No, I want you to do it.”

  She outlined her reasons. As usual, they were sound. I’d worked as a licensed investigator in a previous career incarnation—that might make me better qualified to deal with somebody like Arnoud Shuyler. I was also a recovering alcoholic and crystal meth addict—that might make me qualified to deal with any friends or family of Amanda Eston, should they get involved. Both qualifications, in fact, were intertwined. I’d lost my license by getting so fucked up on booze and meth I’d killed a guy one long-ago night, ended up doing time for manslaughter and took a chance at redemption by writing and eventually editing for Real Story.

  “What’re the parameters?” I said.

  “Start at 10 million. Take it up to 20 if you have to. Call me if it goes higher.”

  And that, as they say, was that. It felt right to me, no question. She was right about my background. My feet knew this path.

  >>>>>>

  THE MOMENT

  Arnoud Shuyler lived just a few blocks from the Rembrantplein. Would’ve been a simple cab ride from the hotel, but no. He insisted I drive there myself. He didn’t want involvement from any traceable third parties like taxi drivers. That was part of the deal. So I had to rent a car and negotiate strange streets, concentric canals and the two-wheeled jungle of this city of inveterate bicycle riders. Plus pay a parking fee that cost about as much as I’d probably pay for the video.

  His building was four stories of solid stone, neo-baroque style, decorated to the high heavens with pre-kitsch ornamentation. You don’t see a lot of this in Hell’s Kitchen.

  Arnoud answered the door himself. He was a balding white-haired man with a body so rotund his arms could never fall below a 45-degree angle. He was wearing a satin gold Nehru jacket. Striking.

  Facially, he looked like a big blissful baby who’d just finished his bottle. Hard to tell his real age. He’d had work done around the eyes and chin.

  In accented English he told me how happy he was to have a reputable operation like Real Story in the mix, and as he led me inside he speculated on the Irish origins of my name, Quinn McShane.

  Arnoud took me into the ornate, double-doored drawing room of the house, a space about as large as the master stateroom on Commodore Vanderbilt’s yacht. High ceiling, tall windows lined with velour drapes, polished mahogany paneled walls hung with Flemish and French tapestries, heavy carpeting, Victorian furniture covered in Protestant velvet. Very Dutch plush.

  He offered me an afternoon cognac. I passed. He poured himself a snifter and waddled over to a small table with carved wooden geese suspended between its legs. A laptop, the room’s single bow to modernity, sat on the top. He called up the Amanda Eston video he’d posted early yesterday, the sex shot seen ‘round the world.

  “Clever marketing gimmick,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought it would be effective, draw attention. There is, as you can imagine, a great deal of demand.”

  “I can imagine that.”

  He sipped his brandy and chuckled. “So strange, you know, the value we put on things. Let me ask. How much would you pay for a square foot of asbestos?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot.”

  “And yet, centuries ago, asbestos was worth its equal in gold. It was considered a precious material, valuable enough to be woven into the burial shrouds of the Eastern kings. Time changes everything.”

  Arnoud played the video. There it was again, the room, the shadows, the TV in the background, the vertical movement of Amanda’s head. This must’ve been the 18th time I’d seen it.

  “What’s the provenance?” I said.

  “It was recently found by an American collector, found among a vagrant’s possessions. The belongings were unclaimed, as I understand, and were being auctioned by a storage warehouse.”

  “Who’s the collector?”

  “I can’t give you the name, I’m, afraid. Not at liberty.”

  Despite all the carpeting and drapes and velvet and tapestries in the room, you could still hear an echo trailing our voices.

  The show ran its minute and 18 seconds and reached the end.

  “No need to mention the great historical value here,” said Arnoud, refilling his snifter. “Anyone curious about her life, and her death, will find this of interest.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And so we arrive at it, the moment. What do I hear?”

  “Ten million.”

  He was staring at the computer screen. “I would describe the bidding at this stage as extraordinary. It’s even desperate—I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable saying that.”

  “Twelve million.”

  “I must tell you, the interest in this goes beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I would go so far as to call it paranormal—I believe that’s the word.”

  “Fifteen million.”

  Arnoud nodded and turned away from the laptop. “We’re off to a good start. Very nice. Yes, very nice.”

  “You’re happy with 15.”

  “At this point, quite so. At this point the first round comes to a close. I’ll keep you up to date of course on the progress of the competing bids. Feel free to return to New York.”

  “What else is on the tape? For 15 I’d like to get a little better idea.”

  “I suppose so. Yes, 15 should buy you a little extra peek. I can show you two more minutes.”

  He clicked another icon. This segment picked up where the other one left off. Amanda, dining time over, climbs up on the bed, straddles the man and begins rocking herself on his cock. His face still can’t be seen. It’s all her.

  “Such a sad fate she had,” said Arnoud. He finished off the second snifter. “So much darkness in the world these days, you know? Darkness all around, Mr. McShane. All around. So much darkness these days that some people can’t even see it. So much darkness they think they’re still looking at the light.”

  >>>>>>

  GO FUCKING YOURSELF

  Sun going down, street lights coming down. I drove past bars, restaurants, café terraces, bicyclists, bike racks, alleyways, neo-gothic buildings that looked like miniature fortresses, doors and windows built in weird shapes.

  Stopping at a light, I took out my cell and checked the tape I’d made of Arnoud’s conversation. It wasn’t a question of trusting him—I didn’t. I just wanted a record of what was and wasn’t said.

  It was all there, including his darkness these days soliloquy.

  I wasn’t so sure about the darkness. People are always thinking that things were better in the past, but how can that be? How about the time when people stopped hunting and started growing food from the ground? They were ending a tradition that had gone on for tens of thousands of years and swapped it for something that no living creature had ever done before. You don’t think that was culture shock? You don’t think people sat around talking about darkness these days? They were saying, oh life was so much better when the men took their spears into the forest and the women stayed home and cooked the meat. People knew their places back then and we didn’t have all this confusion.

  I think I’m going to ying-yang it: There’s always been the same amount of darkness and light in the world, the two forces dancing with each other in equal balance.

  I’d stopped at another light when I saw the car again. A sky blue Audi TT, coming out of the twilight two cars in back of me. This was the third time I’d noticed it since leaving Arnoud’s, always maintaining a discreet distance behind.

  Test it out. I made a turn and drove through a series of small out of the way streets. The view: stone walls, people smoking and staring into space, a bar with patrons loudly singing inside. A boxspring and mattress had been left out on the curb of one street. A homeless guy was sleeping on it, no one paying any attention to him.

  The Audi TT was still behin
d me.

  I went back to a main road, slowed for a red light. Three cars pulled into my lane. I saw the Audi turn a corner and make an approach toward the last car.

  The light was still red. No oncoming traffic. I shifted into reverse, swung my wheel around and gunned the gas, lurching into the oncoming lane. I shot backward past the three cars, cut my wheel again and slammed to a stop sideways in the lane, just inches away from the Audi’s front grill and blocking its path. Horns went off. Bikers scattered.

  I jumped out and went for the Audi. The driver, a fish faced guy with a black leather skull cap, was sitting in a muddled daze, not moving.

  But talking.

  “What’s the matter with you you fucking crazy!”

  His English was much more accented than Arnoud’s. But how did he know I spoke English? We all look alike?

  “You mind telling me what’s going on?” I said. “I’d just like to know.”

  “You motherfucker! You should drive more careful.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want? I don’t want nothing. I’m not bothering you, no problem.”

  “You’re following me, you’re bothering me.”

  “I beg your pardon? Excuse me? I’m not following nobody.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Go fucking yourself.”

  “What’re you up to?”

  By now two other cars had quietly slipped behind the Audi. Then a tire-squealing BMW pulled up fast into the lane and braked to a stop. Its driver, a guy with an overcoat and a gaunt Storm Trooper’s face, bolted out of the door. He smiled at me and waved.

  “Hallo!” he said. “You like to talk the sports?”

  Not in this situation, not particularly, but before I could say anything he reached inside his coat and pulled something out. I could see the gun like he was standing next to me.