Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die

by Richard Sanders

  …or because the bills hadn’t been paid.

  I was tending toward the latter explanation when I turned the miniature flashlight on the interior of the house. I saw a huge open floor living room, bulky sectionals, aluminum pole lamps, ceramic vases. But everything was going to filthy ruin. Dirty dishes, half eaten sandwiches, teetering piles of junk, garbage left everywhere, the furniture once good and now threadbare, the walnut floors scratched and scuffed, coffee cups crusted with dirt, half full glasses (or, in this case, half empty). And an odor that almost smelled like—yeah, there it was, the pungent kick of urine.

  L.C. had told me he was a successful producer of corporate videos. So why was he living like a crazed animal?

  Some house. All put together outside, all squatter chaos inside.

  I remembered the reviews of his reality series, The Pre-Life, where the cast was supposed to be struggling first year pre-med students. How much of this reality, the critics asked, was really real?

  I took a few steps into the living room. My foot hit something—a spent soup can. It rolled into the wall and echoed through the big empty space.

  Breathe, concentrate.

  I ran the flashlight over the walls. Textured surfaces, Venetian plaster. Glass-framed photos on one wall. All of Amanda. Either her alone or with him. Just below the photos, the wall was smeared with some kind of fudgy residue.

  “What the hell is this?”

  I spun the light around to the voice. L.C., all the way over on the opposite side of the room, standing in the other entrance. He was still wearing the Fleischer-Koch watch on his left wrist. He was holding a small, blue-finish gun in his right hand, a Bersa Thunder 9 mm.

  It was his eyes, though, that really got my attention. They were as black rimmed as a raccoon’s, like he hadn’t slept in months. But his irises were sharp and alert, as sharp as starlight.

  “Is that you?” he said.

  “Is that who?”

  “You. McShane.”

  “It’s me. What’s the matter with you? You look terrible.”

  No answer, just a shake of the head.

  “Are you sick?”

  He closed his eyes for a long moment. “I haven’t felt well in five years.”

  He took exactly one step into the living room. No Gucci now. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a denim shirt with orange-yellow stains—possibly cheese—all down the front.

  This was the real L.C. Martin. The person I’d met for lunch, that was a performance.

  “Nice place,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “Little rundown, though, no?”

  “It’ll do. I don’t need a lot of fancy-schmancy.”

  “Well you need something.”

  He suddenly blew up. “Nobody can tell me what I need! Nobody! You want to start giving me advice, don’t bother. Every word’s going down the bowl and getting flushed away.”

  He closed his eyes again, shook his head, then took a look around the place. It was like he was orienting himself, starting over, trying to figure out where he was. Or who he was.

  “Turn that off.” He pointed the Bersa at the flashlight.

  “Why?”

  “It’s right in my fucking face. You’ve seen enough.”

  “I feel safer this way.”

  “It’s bothering me.”

  I shut the light and immediately put my hand on my Glock. But he didn’t try anything. He didn’t fire. We just stood there on opposite sides of the room, letting our eyes adjust to the moonlit darkness.

  “Nice watch you have there,” I said.

  No response. Then: “Amanda gave it to me. It was a gift.”

  “When’d she give it to you?”

  “When we started going out.”

  “Days of Reckoning, right? Back then?”

  “Right.”

  “Do the voice again.”

  “What voice?”

  “Your voice, from Days of Reckoning.”

  “Why should I? Why bother?”

  “Cause it sounded pretty good on Pear’s voicemail. Sounded like you haven’t missed a beat.”

  I could just make him out in the low light, but I could see him getting twitchy and fidgety. It was just like the lunch, when he’d looked like he was going into a nicotine fit.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, “I might’ve had something to do with that.”

  “I know you did. Question is why?”

  “Pear kind of a, she hit—what do they call it? She hit a raw nerve.”

  “What raw nerve?”

  “She called me, said she’d seen something in the video. Said get your ass over here right now. She said you were going to be there too. The way she said it, sounded like she was going to bust me in front of you.”

  “That watch was gonna get you in trouble.”

  “It made things messy. So I called back couple minutes later. She didn’t pick up, in the bathroom or something. I left a message.”

  “Doing the voice.”

  L.C. shrugged. “I wanted to sound like someone who had a secret to tell. I wanted to add an air of mystery, sound like someone who didn’t want to be exposed.”

  “So the coded message. The ReSouled Shop.”

  “I’d walked with her to the store many times. I knew the way. I knew she’d know.”

  “And you killed her.”

  “Her problem? She never listened. She never listened to me. I’d talk and talk? Was all nah-nah-nah to her. Well it’s too late for nah-nah-nah. It’s too late for all that not-listening shit.”

  “Why too late?”

  “Cause it has to happen now. We’ve all been waiting too long—right now. Somebody around here needs to tell the truth. Somebody needs to start telling the truth and it needs to start right fucking now!”

  I saw him raise the Bersa in this direction. Better not wait to see what would happen.

  I dove in back of the nearest sectional, heard three ear-paralyzing explosions and I swear I could feel the force of the bullets as they flashed over my head and smashed into something behind me. Glass shattered and crashed to the floor. Amanda’s photos.

  I took the Glock out.

  “You weren’t listening to me!” he yelled.

  His voice was coming from a different place now, closer to the ground. He’d ducked behind the sectional directly across the room from mine.

  “When we met,” L.C. said, “the whole time we talked, you were never listening to me!”

  “I was.”

  “Weren’t!”

  Two more Bersa shots from him. You could hear them echo through the house.

  Heat waves were rising up the back of my skull, where sweat forms in stress-time.

  Another sectional was in front of me, at a right angle to mine. If I could make it over there, I’d be closer to him, get a better shot.

  I fired, jumped out, ran while I kept firing and belly-flopped behind the other sectional. L.C. threw three more loud-to-terrifying shots. Ceramic vases shattered and fell all around me.

  My strategy, as they say, was evolving.

  “You don’t understand how big this is,” he said, “how wide. I told you before, you can’t see the dimensions of this thing.”

  “You sure?”

  “You have no idea. You have no fucking idea how far the scope of this thing goes.”

  “You ever listen to yourself?”

  “All the time.”

  “Listen harder.”

  L.C. replied with two shots that thudded into the sectional and knocked it back by a foot.

  I needed to get even closer, get a better angle on him. Another sectional sat six feet away, with an aluminum pole lamp by its side. I slipped out from my cover and set off another shitstorm of gunfire while I ran.

  He won’t get fooled again.

  L.C. fired three times. Two of the bullets slammed into the wall behind me. I didn’t hear the third—it went into my thigh with a dull silence.

  For a moment I was more s
urprised than anything else. I just stood there. Then the pain set in. It felt like a 10-inch nail had been driven into my leg. I lost everything. All my weight fell to my feet. The Glock dropped out of my hand. I stumbled into the pole lamp, toppled over with it and went down flat on my back.

  I heard L.C. moving. The Glock was three feet away, on the other side of the lamp. I stretched for the gun but I couldn’t reach it. Too much pain, too much stun. I couldn’t get my hand past the lamp.

  L.C. was standing in front of me.

  “You’re scaring me,” he said. “It scares me to think that the whole time we talked that time, you were never paying attention to anything I said.”

  “I paid attention.”

  “If you had paid attention, you wouldn’t be here right now.”

  He aimed the Bersa. I couldn’t get much leverage on my back, but I swung the lamp with everything I had. The pole caught him on the side of his head and spun him around. Two shots hit the floor as he staggered to stay on his feet.

  I pushed through the pain and grabbed the Glock, swung around as he came back. Only one shot open from this dust-level angle. I couldn’t get it up, so I put the bullet in his kneecap.

  His scream sounded like a car trying to brake at 140 mph.

  >>>>>>

  Our blood was all over the floor. We were both sitting in it, propped up with our backs against the sectionals. I had the Glock on him. His face was pinched with pain, eyes wasting away. He looked like a brain scan come to life.

  He was gasping for breath, but it didn’t stop him from carrying on. “I can’t believe people. It’s like they’re lost in this haze, this mental smog. And you try to pull them out, and I’ve tried, I’ve pushed my efforts to the fucking edge, they still keep walking around blind. And you know what? You know something? I think I’m gonna pass out.”

  “Stay with me.”

  “Stay with you. Look at this knee. It hurts! You wouldn’t believe how much it hurts!”

  “I’d believe it. Look at my leg.”

  “Your leg? Fuck your leg. It’s my fucking knee!”

  He kinda had a point. My thigh wound wasn’t as bad. I could barely move it, but at least the pain wasn’t so knifey anymore. Adrenaline is a great painkiller.

  L.C. picked something off the floor. An empty cereal box, one of those mini Cheerios boxes from a Valu-Pak. He stared at it like he’d never seen one before.

  “I don’t know if things necessarily pertain to me anymore.”

  I pointed the Glock at him. “This pertains to you. Talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “About Amanda, what do you think?”

  “There’s no profit in that.” He put the box down and carefully touched the area around his knee. Then he wiped his hand on his shirt, smearing more blood into the leftover cheese stains. “There’s no profit in that whatsoever.”

  “I want to know who killed her.”

  “You know who killed her.”

  “That’s right. I do. I want to know why.”

  “Then fucking ask him. Fucking ask that out of control jerk-off.”

  “Robby?”

  “Who the fuck else?”

  “Boo. Hiss.”

  “Problem?”

  “There’s no blood left in that stone. Pardon the expression.”

  “Well there’s plenty of shit left. And whatever shit that offensive piece of vermin was involved in, that’s a private matter between him and his asshole.”

  “You know he’s a real human being, right? He actually exists? He’s not some fantasy in your head? Some abstraction?”

  “Whatever he is, it’s his fault.”

  “How?”

  L.C. lapsed into more of those twitchy fidgets, but weaker now, sicklier, like a junkie who’d only tasted a small dose of what he needed.

  “You saw the video,” he said. “He was there that night. That’s why it’s his fault. He was there with her.”

  “So they were seeing each other. Public knowledge.”

  “So I was staying there at the time. I was living there. Had to go out for a few hours, and the minute I’m gone he’s in there fucking his head off.”

  “That’s what your watch was doing there, in the bedroom.”

  “With my watch in there they’re doing it! With my fucking watch in the same room they’re, they’re making smoochies or whatever, I don’t know.”

  “How’d you know he was there?”

  “Cause I’m a fucking mind reader. She told me. She admitted it when I got back. She said he’d just been there. She’d just been with him.” He shook his head like the thing was beyond comprehension. “She said she’d decided we shouldn’t be getting back together. She’d made up her mind. She said she didn’t want to get married again.”

  I could hear his heart pounding from over here.

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then what? You know what it’s like when something you think shouldn’t be real turns out to be the only thing that’s real?”

  “Actually I do.”

  “Then listen to me. If you listen to only one thing I have to say, listen to this. I needed her. I was crushed down by how much I needed her. I was worth nothing without her. I was, I mean look at me—I am worth nothing without her. Even as an actor, shit, even as an actor, I was only good with her.”

  “Days of Reckoning.”

  He nodded, glanced at his knee. “This thing is killing me. I think I’m gonna faint.”

  “Finish talking. What happened that night?”

  “That night. I went out again that night. She went to bed. I drove around. I got pissed. I got so pissed. I had these things in my head they were splitting my brain apart. I had these things in my head I didn’t know what to do about them. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. All my prayers were gone, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “When did you decide to kill her?”

  “Not sure I ever did. Not sure I ever worked it out to where I could use those words, where I could say those words to myself.”

  I believed it. His voice was becoming soft and almost incredulous, like he couldn’t believe the things that were coming out of his own mouth.

  “I drove to a guy I used to know, from the old days, from my club days. He used to sell pralicin as a cheap fuck drug.”

  “You knew what it could do?”

  “My father was a pharmacist. I knew. My father, that’s how I got cast in The Pre-Life. Remember that show?”

  “I remember.”

  “I got home, she was asleep. Just laying there. I shot her up. I’d bought a tiny butterfly syringe from the guy too. You skin pop it, it hardly leaves a mark. I shot her up, I packed my stuff, I left. She’d turned me into nothing. I did the same for her.”

  I could’ve killed him. I could’ve easily shot him right there, just like I’d shot that junkie bastard years ago. Wouldn’t even have to move the Glock. Just pull the trigger.

  But I couldn’t do it. Looking at him propped up there, looking at the reality of his life, the dirt, the garbage, the haunted mess, I couldn’t do it. He was just too pathetic.

  “I’m not mad at her anymore,” he said. “Was for a while, but not anymore. You look at it in retrospect, what happened that night, it was almost like—what’s the word? There’s a word for when things like this happen. You know what it is. It’s a word—it’s not coming to me.”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s a common word. People use it all the time. It’s almost like fate. It’s—wait, it is fate. That’s what it is, it’s fate. It’s fate except, except when you think about it, what is fate? You know? When you actually look at it, what the fuck is fate?”

  Talking to him was like trying to wrap madness in a rubber band.

  He touched his leg again, wiped blood on his shirt. “I have to tell you something. I’m feeling really bad. This thing’s really hurting. I’m starting to fade out.”

  “Go ahead. Close your eyes. Let yourself g
o.”

  He pulled the cheese and blood stained shirt up to his chin. It was like he was trying to crawl inside his clothes.

  “I don’t know what happened to her,” he said. “I’ve tried to understand, I owe her that much, but I can’t. We were so happy. She was so happy. But she couldn’t seem to stay that way. Like she was allergic to it. Something just ate away at her, something devoured her, and everything just turned to shit.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “Give into it,” I said. “Take a rest. Just let it go.”

  >>>>>>

  It was a strange thing to see. Eventually L.C. passed out, but he still had tears falling down his face. A flood of large, painful tears. He was unconscious, but he was involuntarily crying. The flood was almost Shakespearean—Lear’s tears, they scald like molten lead.

  I checked my cell. Everything he’d told me was on tape.

  I rewound, went back. Everything Robby Walsh had told me was on tape.

  That’s when I finally called the police.

  >>>>>>