Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die

by Richard Sanders

  “We’re speaking to you,” she said, “on behalf of a certain party, a certain individual. He’s a collector, an avid collector.”

  “He’s very, he’s very enthusiastic about his interests.”

  “Yes, and he’s taken an extreme interest—let me emphasize, an EXTREME interest—in Amanda Eston.”

  I got it now. Paloma was an LA equivalent of Arnoud Shuyler.

  “There’s a certain artifact on the market right now, a certain Amanda Eston collectible, that he has a keen desire to buy. We have reason to believe you’re also trying to buy it.”

  “Am I?”

  “We’re talking, obviously, about the video.”

  “The full, the full version of the video. The original.

  I sipped my coffee. “What do you know about the video?”

  “Everybody knows something about the video. It’s a very popular topic.”

  “And what can I do for you?”

  Paloma settled into her pitch. “We assume you’re acting on behalf of Real Story. You’re conducting all these arduous negotiations in their name. We assume your organization sees it as a valuable piece of property.”

  “Assume away.”

  “Let’s say you succeed. Let’s say you finally manage to make the purchase for Real Story. What do you get out of it?”

  “Get out of it?” I shrugged. “Satisfaction of a job well done.”

  She and Marvin smiled at each other.

  “Is that fair? Do you think it is? With all the work you’ve done, with everything you’ve gone through, is it fair that you receive no objective compensation?”

  More coffee for me. “Your question doesn’t answer the question. What am I doing here?”

  Paloma looked at Marvin and angled her head a bit to the right. Marvin nodded.

  “Let me propose an alternative scenario. Let’s say the attempt to acquire the video becomes too complicated, too tricky, and Real Story decides it’s not worth it. Let’s say you tell them that. The difficulties have queered you off the deal. Things have become too volatile, too hairy.”

  Too hairy. As in people trying to jump me almost everywhere I go?

  “They’d take your word for it, wouldn’t they? They’d withdraw their bid.”

  “They might.”

  “Let’s say it happens. Let’s say they drop their interest, only you keep negotiating. But now you’re negotiating on our behalf. On our client’s behalf. And let’s say the deal does get made. We’ll pay you a commission, a finder’s fee. Our client will pay you 10 percent of the final sale price.”

  “What do you… What do you say to that?”

  “I’d say it’s backstabbing. Betrayal.”

  “I’d say it’s preserving one’s own self-interest. You’re doing the same thing you’re doing, but you’re doing it for your own benefit.”

  “You know, there’s a big difference between the words contraceptive and scumbag. They refer to the same object, but they don’t mean the same thing.”

  Paloma gave me a full bright-white smile. “You know what you need to do? You need to dream more elaborate dreams. That’s what you need to do. Let’s say, round numbers, the video goes for 10 million. That’s a million dollars in your pocket. Cash. Tax free. Isn’t that more equitable compensation?”

  “You can, you can do something where we all make out. If you just, you know… If you just… You know?”

  “Absolutely. Marvin’s absolutely right.”

  I finished my coffee. “Then what’s the next step?”

  Paloma: pure joy.

  “That’s a very sensible question. I applaud you for it. Next step, I believe, is meeting with our client, coming to terms. Whatever Real Story’s offering, he’ll top it. Are you agreeable to that?”

  “When?”

  “We’ll call you, we’ll let you know the arrangements.”

  “All the information, all the information you’ll need, will be…will be relayed.”

  “We’ll be in touch. Any questions? Any problems? Good. I think I can say that in just a very short time, we’ll all be wearing our happy, happy shirts.”

  >>>>>>

  Well this was a new approach, a whole new twist in the stream. The let’s-work-together approach. I liked it. I had a feeling I was finally getting to the heart of this crazy crapshoot.

  The streets were still crowded, people bargain hunting, wandering into the barbecue delis for roast goat or suckling pig. The night sky was purple from the street lights.

  I felt like sonar was bouncing off the moon and into my brain.

  As Paloma would say, let’s say this is all part of the same plan, all part of the same too hairy gambit. Let’s say all those run-ins—at Schirmer’s Market, in the parking garage, in Santa Monica, maybe even in Amsterdam—let’s say there were all designed to make me take this deal. They were all designed to drive me into the safe and profitable arms of Paloma Applewhite and Marvin Brackett.

  I’m thinking, if I go along with it, they’ll lead me directly to the core of the maze. They’ll lead me directly to—well, who?

  Robby Walsh?

  His father-in-law, Ken Hagler?

  Or whoever who?

  >>>>>>

  RIGHT OUT FRONT

  It didn’t take me any 40 minutes to find the place this time. Dirt roads, mountains, woods thick enough to make you believe gods were living there. The sun wasn’t as bright today, though. It kept fading in and out, shifting the shafts of light between the trees with laps of yellow and gray.

  As I drove, I noticed my hands kept sticking to the wheel.

  Here we go—the low walled, thatched roof, pine paneled house, a Shinto temple lost in the forest. Grady Alexander answered the door in another one of those Yukata-style kimonos. He raised a finger, pressed it from his moustache to his goatee. Quiet. He had company.

  I followed his lopsided, one-leg-longer stride inside. A girl with long, straight, iron-flat blond hair sat on a bench in front of the 54-inch screen. No squishy, soothing lava lamp images on the big monitor this time. Instead, Wile E. Coyote was consulting a book titled The Art of Road Runner Trapping, the cartoon’s volume turned down to a whisper.

  The girl looked scared. She had her arms wrapped around themselves, rocking backwards and forwards on the bench like a Jew davening to her prayers. She might’ve been 18, but I doubt it.

  “She’s having a tough trip,” Grady low-spoke. “She dropped some AC-8, should be a soft high, more on the abstract side. Really a lovely buzz. But she started getting woozy, hyper, bad things running through her head, ruining through her head.”

  “Glockenspiel,” the girl said. “All the otherworlders, they all know how to play the glockenspiel.”

  Grady leaned close to her. “Remember, everything’s connected by rhythm, by the beat. The whole universe. You find the right rhythm, you ride with it, surf it out. You’ll be all right.”

  He pulled me away and took me across the room. We stood by the ladder leading up to his bird’s nest balcony-bedroom. How was I doing? Getting closer to cleaning up the mess? Much closer—very close. He was glad to hear it.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “I’m gonna ask it right out front. You ever handle pralicin?”

  “Pralicin? No. Why?”

  “That’s what killed Amanda Eston. An overdoes of pralicin.”

  “I don’t flip that shit. It’s like a narcotic, it’s just a numb-er. It’s just a body drug—there’s no head to it.”

  “You never dealt it.”

  “Nah.”

  “Never.”

  “What’d I say?”

  “Not even like five years ago?”

  Grady went bewildered. “Wait. Wait. What’re you asking?”

  “I’m asking.”

  “You think it was me? You think I had something to do with it?”

  “I might be getting a little paranoid,” I conceded.

  “Might be?”

  His ringtone went off. Coiling Middle Eas
tern guitar. Tinariwen, wailing from the Libyan desert.

  He hobble-stepped away to take the call.

  “…yeah, uh-huh, just got a fresh batch in… Same price… No, no, you have something to do, don’t take it all at once… No, from the Indian guy, Durjaya. You know him… Right, brilliant guy, lots of talent… No, that’s not a third eye. That’s a birthmark.”

  Grady returned the cell to his kimono and came back to the ladder. “What the hell’re you talking about with the pralicin?”

  “Sorry, just trying to get some answers.”

  “Is it a good sign when a drug dealer has to tell you you’re paranoid?”

  “Let me rephrase the question. If she killed herself, where would she get enough pralicin for a lethal dose?”

  Grady stared at the sun spread across the floor, streaks turning overcast and then bright again. “Maybe she didn’t have to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He took a seat on one of his short Japanese wooden benches. I sat on one opposite him.

  “I told you the first time, I don’t know much about Amanda Eston. I don’t follow that world. But she had drug problems, right? Drugs and drinking?”

  “She did.”

  “Was she taking any anti-addiction meds? Did she have scrips for any of those ween-off drugs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Cause if she’d gotten drugs like that from her doctor, or even if she had certain kinds of street drugs in her system, it could make all the difference.”

  “Make what difference?”

  “One thing I know about pralicin, it’s a strong interactor. A strong interactor and a strong metabolizer. If she’d taken any of those dependence-blockers during the day, then taken pralicin on top of that, she could’ve created a pharmacological nightmare.”

  “Accidentally killed herself?”

  “Totally. And it wouldn’t take much. Just a little pralicin can produce some nasty interactions with other drugs, especially the addiction drugs. The combination could’ve metabolized to some severely toxic levels. On an autopsy, it might even show up as a ridiculously high amount of pralicin.”

  “Even though she only took a little.”

  “What I’m saying. Could’ve been sheer accident. So all this, this what, controversy over her death? It could mean nothing. Her death was accidental.”

  “There is no death.”

  It was the girl. She was standing next to us now, a dreamy, whacked-out, wonder-struck look on her face.

  “People don’t die,” she said. “Their energy just changes form. Nobody dies. The energy changes and goes back to its source, then comes back as a different vibration.”

  “Feeling a little better?” said Grady.

  “It’s all water,” she said. “All of us are water. We’re water before we’re born. We’re water after we die.”

  Wisdom from the mouths of stoned teen babes.

  >>>>>>

  THE BACK WAY

  As promised, Marvin Brackett called: The client, the client wants to meet tonight. Is that do, is that doable by you?

  “It’s fine. Whereabouts?”

  Go to 919… 919 Sunnyland Street. Just off East…Olympic Boulevard.

  “Just off East Olympic Boulevard.”

  Right. You know where it is?

  “I know the area.”

  Just south of the 101…Santa Ana Freeway.

  “Okay.”

  Just east, just east of the railroad tracks.

  “What time?”

  The client suggests 11:40. Tonight.

  “Kind of early for you, isn’t it?”

  Marvin didn’t get my little joke.

  Can you be there?

  “Yes.”

  Come in, come in through the back way.

  >>>>>>

  Tasha didn’t know how to take the accidental-overdose theory. Surprise, sadness, skepticism. Three parts equal. She sat at the kitchen table, trying the explanation out in her mind, always coming up confused. If it’s true, where does that leave everything?

  Sometimes,” she said, “I feel like I’m watching my life through a window.”

  But she did know how to take the news about the 11:40 meeting. She didn’t like it.

  “That’s not a great neighborhood at night. Very isolated. Why does it have to be there?”

  “I don’t know. Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  “There’s no way it sounds good.”

  “Who knows. It might even be fun.”

  “Fun?”

  “If I live through it, I’ll give you a definitive word.”

  >>>>>>

  A MIRROR OVER MY HEART

  Twenty minutes to midnight the air was sweating with heat. A cyclone fence surrounded 919 Sunnyland Street—just a warehouse in a row of many others. The fence’s gate had been left open, although there were no cars or trucks in the parking lot. Neither in the front nor, as I drove around the building, in the back. Just an uninviting series of loading bay doors.

  I pulled in front of the third door. A waxing half moon hung in the sky above. It looked like it had been plastered up there by the City of Los Angeles.

  Per Marvin’s instructions, I honked three long times, followed by two shorter blasts. Eight seconds later the bay door rose up like a curtain on a stage.

  Only one area inside the warehouse was lit by overhead lamps. The dark rest of it was crammed with steel shipping containers and stackable crates, lit only by small, wire-meshed bulbs running along the walls. No sounds except for the whirring drones of electrical generators.

  The lone lit area showed two cars already parked, a few crates scattered around, a concrete floor rich with trash—poles, steel cable, rectangles of cardboard. A battered old metal desk had been dragged into the middle of the space. Had to be for this meeting—there was no other reason for it to be where it was.

  Four people were waiting. Marvin Brackett was standing by the desk, wearing the same suit from last night. Paloma Applewhite was next to him, smiling against a beige suit.

  Sitting at the desk was a man who strongly resembled a big fat contented baby, one who was used to getting his milk supply whenever he wanted. He wore a brown linen suit, a checked dress shirt and a bowtie, plus a pocket handkerchief AND a carnation in his lapel. Old World overdose.

  His name, I learned after I parked my car next to the others, was Hugo Brock. Yes, he was the collector.

  Hunched at the desk on a small chair next to him was a guy with scarred knuckles, a leather jacket and a very attractive boil on his face. Quinton Foster, introduced as Mr. B’s assistant, though he looked a lot more like a bodyguard.

  Quinton was eating cherries out of a ripped plastic bag on the desk, spitting the pits and stems on the floor. He ate in a manic hurry, like finishing the bag was something he had to accomplish before he died.

  Strange scene, these four people dwarfed by the cavernous space around them. There was something about the weirdness of it that was almost holy.

  Hugo Brock spoke in a smooth, velvety calm voice. He sincerely hoped, he said, that we could engage in a fruitful conversation.

  “I sit before you, Mr. McShane, with a mirror over my heart.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Eight hundred years ago, Genghis Kahn outfitted his warriors with mirrors over their hearts. It was an essential part of their armor. The Mongols were convinced that a heart-mirror was capable of turning away enemy powers, even enemy weapons. Or so Marco Polo tells us. In any case, I sit before you with my own mirror over my heart. My mirror is my love for Amanda Eston. My mirror, my protection, is my deep and abiding love for Amanda Eston.”

  “He’s the perfect, the perfect buyer,” said Marvin

  “I have a wonderful feeling about this,” said Paloma. “Nothing is going to schmutz it up.”

  Quinton kept working his way through the cherries.

  I leaned against one of the crates. “So you’re a big fan.”

  “Fan,” s
aid Hugo, “would be putting it mildly.”

  “What was her first professional job?”

  Hugo laughed. “You’re giving me a test?”

  Marvin and Paloma weren’t wearing their happy, happy shirts.

  “That’s not really, really necessary.”

  “You’re kind of walking the line here.”

  “It’s fine,” said Hugo. “She performed her first professional job when she was quite young. It was a commercial, a television spot for St. Joseph’s Aspirin. She played a child with a terrible fever.”

  “She had a tattoo of a mermaid. It was on her right shoulder.”

  “Of course.”

  “It had to be digitally removed for a movie. Which one?”

  “I’m Still Waiting. A very successful comedy, a very liberal interpretation of Sandra Dee’s If A Man Answers. Though I don’t think Sandra Dee had to do any nude scenes.”

  “What was the name of Amanda’s aunt?”