He was still lying there five hours later, when Mac the bartender gave up knocking, fished the keys out of Lydia’s purse, bludgeoned the door open, hauled in her comatose body, and found himself calling an ambulance for two.
Chapter 3
"Fuck him. He’s nothing special."
For the third time in an hour Sheri sighed, "Come on, Rudy, give it a rest."
The unlikely pair sat at the front corner of the crowded long bar in Malloy’s, drinking away Rudy’s humiliation at the hands of the old bastard photographer. Rudy gulped at his fourth Tequila Sunrise, a gaudy anachronism that, along with his bizarre fashion sense, had drawn Sheri to him three years earlier. But after four of the strange, sweet concoctions, Rudy tended to get mean. They never made it past five without him hitting someone, usually her.
Sheri took a sip of the soda water and lime she had asked the bartender to dress up like a gin and tonic so Rudy wouldn’t think he was drinking alone. She ran her hand reassuringly between her boyfriend’s thighs. "I’m the only one inspecting your equipment, baby, and it works just fine for me."
Rudy flung away her hand. "Are you provoking me?"
"What? Of course not!"
Sheri suppressed a sigh and glanced down at the car keys next to Rudy’s drink. All she had to do was pocket the keys, and she could be packed and gone by the time Rudy talked a taxi driver into hauling a purple drunk around town. But Rudy only got this way when he drank. The rest of the time, Sheri figured him for a genius, even if she couldn't exactly say how. Once in a while these days, she still remembered what she used to see in him, but not tonight.
"Let’s go home," she tried. "I’ll show you a Pulitzer or two."
"Fuck, Sheri! How many times I gotta tell you? It had nothing to do with sex!"
"All right, all right, Picasso! I get it. You’re an artist of the bedroom."
Rudy gave her the look. Had she gone too far? She sucked it up and made a face of drunk-and-dumb girlfriend sincerity. If he pulled anything in here, she would kill him. From the end of the bar, the giant of a bartender raised his head and glanced at them. Sheri tried a hunch over into anonymity, but with Rudy’s purple fedora and shirt, there was only so far she could hide. And then Rudy’s inebriated attention span met its match anyway. He settled back and grinned a vague nod of appreciation at no compliment she could remember. "Damn right. Fuck him."
Sheri rolled her eyes and gazed along the bar at the bartender again. "Hey... Isn’t that her?"
"What? Who?" Rudy turned awkwardly without falling off his stool and focused. He would never admit it, but absent the glasses he refused to wear, he couldn’t see shit through the alcoholic haze.
"The old lady from the photographer's studio. She’s talking to the bartender."
Rudy slid off his stool. "Just a minute." He peered through the crowds and lurched off.
"Hey, wait!" Sheri tossed Rudy’s money and keys into her purse and followed.
The woman at the end of the long walnut bar sat staring at a bottle of Bourbon and a shot glass in front of her. Her chipped and painted fingernails scraped at the tan and gold label. "You’ll never forgive yourself," the bartender was saying.
"That’s what you think." The fingernails dug in, and a long strip of official warnings came off the bottle.
Rudy barged right in. "Forgive yourself for what?"
"Can I help you with something?" the bartender asked.
"Who the hell are you?" the woman said to Rudy.
"Your boss really pissed me off today."
My boss," the woman snorted. She emptied her glass and waited while the bartender refilled it. Just then, Sheri arrived, and the two women exchanged a glance of recognition and not a little pity. "He pisses everybody off," the woman said. "Maybe it was the purple."
Sheri suppressed a snicker, but Rudy took offense. "You people think a fucking Pulitzer gives you the right to blow off anybody, don’t you? I brought him a terrific idea today—"
"Can I help you with something?" the bartender interrupted. He who intimidated drunks for a living intended to earn his keep.
"Was I talking to you?"
"You weren’t talking to me," the woman said. She turned away, and for a second, Sheri thought Rudy was going to hit her. Instead, he lurched against the bar and jabbed a finger into her shoulder. "You—"
But it was as far as Rudy got. Thirty-eight seconds later, he was pulling himself up off the sidewalk outside and fending off Sheri’s embarrassed ministrations. "What the fuck!" Rudy screamed back at the bartender standing in the entrance.
The bartender said to Sheri, "Get him home before I kill him." But Rudy had already lurched off down the sidewalk. Sheri grabbed the purple fedora out of the gutter and followed for a half-block, then gave up.
"I’m going home," she called after him.
"Sure you are. I’m going swimming."
This wasn’t as bad as it sounded. If Rudy didn’t break his neck stumbling down the bluffs, the icy waters of the Pacific would either drown or wake him up. It was better than ditching him and dealing with it tomorrow, or fighting him for the car keys already hidden in her purse. Sheri followed, but let Rudy get far enough ahead that she wouldn’t have to listen to his babble. She'd heard more than her share of the misunderstood hoodlum-artiste routine. But then he surprised her by stopping in a distant doorway and glancing warily out at the street.
"Shit!" Sheri swore to herself. She closed the distance between them and caught his arm. "What are you doing? No way!"
Rudy fumbled at the ancient glass and wood frame door of the photography studio. "What the fuck. We’ll make our own pictures."
"Come on, Rudy! I’m tired!" In response, Rudy backed up, kicked the door in, and toppled to the sidewalk.
Sheri ran out to the street. No one in sight either way, no alarm on the door. She fingered the cell phone in her pocket. She was so tempted to call the police and be done with him. The door hung open off its broken hinges. She glanced around, looking for Rudy, until a crash from inside the studio brought her running.
The office and darkroom doors were closed, the desk at the front entrance cleared. Garish white light spilled out of a doorway down the hall. Inside, Sheri found Rudy lying on the floor in a pile of lights, stanchions, and black umbrellas. The cramped studio was a forest of equipment-laden tripods arranged in a horseshoe around a stool and a gray backdrop. The old bastard never threw anything away. Half of the tripods had collapsed like dominoes, one on top of the other.
"What happened?" Sheri asked.
"What does it look like? I fell!"
Sheri helped Rudy to his feet. "Come on, let’s get out of here."
"Fuck that. Go take off your clothes."
Without waiting, Rudy stumbled across to the shelves that lined one of the walls. Cameras with brand names like Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, and Hasselblad. Lenses, meters, lights, ancient darkroom junk—all manner of professional whatsits and thingamajigs—clogged the racks. All the way from old and decrepit to just decrepit. Rudy grimaced and took down a boxy prehistoric Leica. His fingers ran over the dials, but he couldn’t find the switch to turn it on.
"Maybe it’s not electric," Sheri tried. At least she knew a camera from a hole in her head, but Rudy didn't know shit. He ignored her, tossed the Leica over his shoulder, and picked out another. This one sported a switch, but the battery was dead. Another boasted a bullet hole shot clear through the film magazine. Why would anyone keep trash like that? Apparently, it all looked like trash to Rudy. By the time he found a camera with a battery that worked, the floor was littered with jagged piles of metal and plastic.
Sheri resigned herself to playing along. She found the stool in front of the gray backdrop and sat down. Rudy faced her with the battered black Nikon, still puzzling drunkenly over the controls. He peered into the viewfinder—all blank, apparently.
Sheri pointed at the lens cap. "You wanna take off the front, maybe?"
"Will you shut the fuck up?"
&
nbsp; But she was so done listening to his shit. "What are you, a moron? Why don’t you go to the drugstore and buy a disposable?"
"Fuck you!"
Sheri leapt off the stool to dodge the camera he threw at her. "Maybe the old bastard was right," she shouted. "Maybe your shriveled dick is too small to show up in a photograph!"
Rudy went after her. She reached to her right and brought down a massive light on a tripod. Rudy dodged drunkenly, lost his balance, fell backward, and brought the rest of the tripods crashing down. Sheri crossed to the shelves and grabbed a pair of heavy telephoto lenses. She missed with one after the other. Rudy crossed after her and tripped over the piles of equipment. Without looking, Sheri swept the barrel of a darkroom enlarger off the shelves and backhanded it down onto his head.
Sheri caught her breath in the sudden silence. A groan told her Rudy was still alive, not that she gave a damn—she was so done with him. How could she have ever thought she actually loved this boor? The mere sight of him made her retch. She stumbled out to the studio reception and flipped off the light switch. A glance out the front window revealed no one about on the street. She straightened her hair and blouse, eased out the broken front door, opened her cell phone, and dialed nine-one-one.
Rudy Spavik could go to jail or hell, whichever came first. Nobody treated Sheri Ballin like that and got away with it.
Chapter 4
Sam awoke to find a young and earnest patrolman standing over his bed in the Little Company of Mary surgical wing. The hospital had kept him three excruciating days. Every morning started off with a visit from Gastro Dude, insisting that Sam at least consent to an exploratory scalpel or two. The nurses disapproved of their ungrateful patient with all of the snootiness of the waiters at La Belle Époque demanding to know why he had sent back their signature canned foie gras. Sam hadn’t heard from Lydia since the first morning, when she glanced into his room on her way out and disappeared.
"Mister Spaulding?" the young and earnest patrolman asked. Sam was tempted to feign sleep, but what the hell. He was beginning to wonder if he would make it through the next hour until they were due to dishonorably discharge him.
"What’s up?" he finally answered.
"Mister Spaulding, I need to get a statement from you."
"They sent a beat cop?"
"Yes sir, it’s not standard procedure, but I got special permission." Sam groaned, the patrolman persisted, "You’ve been a hero of mine ever since the Bosnian thing."
Sam winced at the reference—the boy must have been all of five years old in 1993. "They already told me about the studio," Sam said.
"Yes sir, but before you bring charges—"
"Who said anything about charges?"
The patrolman didn’t know what to say. Sam eased his back up slowly, pulled aside the blanket, and dropped his feet to the frigid floor. In an effort to hold back the decay of human flesh, the hospital ran its air-conditioning just this side of Antarctica.
"Mister Spaulding—"
"If you call me that one more time, I’m going to brain you." The patrolman blushed. Sam felt sorry for him and patted him on the arm. "The only name I answer to is Sam. And you are?"
"Peters." Peters caught Sam’s reversion to a snarl and switched to, "Marcus."
"Okay, Marcus, let’s get out of here. You’re giving me a ride."
"That isn’t strictly...," Marcus started, but then hero worship trumped professional caution. "Where do you want to go?"
"The studio. But first we have to pick up Rudy Spavik."
"Spavik! I can’t—"
"Shoot him? Then I guess we’ll have to talk to him, but you’re not getting a thing out of me until we do."
Marcus chattered nervously into the cruiser’s radio for the twenty neurotic minutes it took to reach South Redondo. Sam’s name still carried enough weight to cadge a ride and arrange the meeting, but not enough to enlist the forces of law and order in a revenge killing. In the end, he was forced to consent to a supervised encounter at the studio. By the time they arrived, the street had been blocked off. A lieutenant and a detective waited outside the boarded-up frame door.
"This is Redondo, not Hollywood," the lieutenant advised him sonorously. "We don't tolerate celebrity murders."
"And Rudy is no celebrity. I just want five minutes with the condemned man before you inject him."
Sam’s sense of humor failed to thrill. "What's this about dropping charges," the detective demanded. "We've been after this punk for years."
"Sorry," Sam shrugged.
Without Sam's statement, the angry policemen explained, all they had was an anonymous phone call, a broken lock, and a thug knocked out on a studio floor. Where was Sam's social conscience? His thirst for revenge? Another half-hour of demands and negotiations ensued before the lieutenant led Sam inside to his office.
Rudy was already waiting with his attorney in the worn leather guest chairs. In the middle of the desk blotter sat the Pentax LX K-Mount with the bullet hole through the film magazine. Sam sighed. The neat office and the lone crippled camera answered all his questions about Lydia.
Rudy disappointed Sam—in a black tie, white shirt, and ill-fitting jacket, he looked out of his element, awkward and bland. A gash on his forehead above the black eye had been stitched and bandaged.
"My client—" the attorney started, but Sam waved him aside.
"Give me two dollars," he told the insolent young perp.
"Give you what?"
"Two dollars."
"My client—" the attorney persisted.
Rudy cut him off with, "Shut the fuck up." Then to Sam, "What do you want with two dollars?"
"I’m getting out and selling you the business."
"Why would I—"
"Shut up and listen. The business is incorporated, so you can collect the insurance and replace everything you wrecked. I know it sounds upside-down, but technically the insurance company owes the business as it existed at the time of the break-in. Doesn't matter if it's changed hands since." Sam glanced at the attorney. "Isn't that right?"
"I suppose—"
Sam turned back to Rudy. "There’s no debt. You’ll probably screw it up, but if you don't, you'll have three years to find the start switch on a camera."
"But why—"
"Because you want it—you've made that pretty damn obvious. Because at the moment, I can't think of a better way to screw up your life than to sign it over to you. And because the place nearly belongs to you anyway."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"You can thank your junkie mother Vera. It’s a long story, but something happened with her and me. Your uncle Mischa felt bad about it." Rudy started to ask, but Sam waved him off. He wasn't about to stroll down memory lane with an immature petty hoodlum. "None of your business. Mischa bought the studio and signed it over to me for a dollar. Neither of us had any kids, so at a hundred percent profit, I'm pretty much raping you." Sam took out a handwritten, signed sheet of paper and handed it to the attorney. "Doesn't this cover it?"
"Yes, I suppose, but—"
"Then give me my two dollars, and we’re done here."
Sam picked up the camera off the desk and snapped the two dollars out of Rudy’s hand. The attorney raised a finger, determined to bring order to the chaos of his dwindling fee. "That camera belongs to—"
Rudy shouted at him, "Get the fuck out of my office!"
Sam grinned reluctantly to himself and walked out past the exasperated forces of law and order. He might have unleashed an ocean of crude and tacky on the unsuspecting brides and mothers of Redondo, but at least he would be spared another minute of this inverted negative of a life.
A morning breeze eased in off the Pacific, wet and chilly. The marine layer had yet to evaporate, and the incarcerated sun cast no shadows. Sam had expected a sense of relief, but the euphoria that swept over him now came as a surprise. Forty-five years of creative hell and ugly memories washed away, and all in a two-dollar transac
tion. Nevertheless, the exhilaration quickly faded. In the five minutes it took him to reach Malloy’s, his stomach knotted up all over again. The bar was still closed in late morning, but the door opened to his shaky touch.
"Where’d she go, Mac?" he asked the bartender.
Mac put down the glass and polishing rag and gazed at Sam a good long time before answering. They had never had much to say to each other, even less now. "She went home."
"Lydia's home is five blocks from here. Where'd she go?"
"You know perfectly well. Her mother’s place in Louisville."
Sam resisted the temptation to put on a show of remorse for a man who had poured barrels of whiskey down Lydia's willing throat. He let himself out the door, but couldn't face the empty apartment. A few minutes of aimless wandering, and he found himself limping along the bluffs above the Pacific. He sat on a stone bench and watched a trio of young, bikini-clad girls glide by on bicycles. Just ten years earlier, they would have eyed him, sideways and wary, but now the old geezer blended into the landscape. The girls dismounted and awkwardly guided their bikes down the steep path to the beach where Sam had photographed his brother Henry and the gang.
Trying to kill himself with the booze was a truly stupid idea. Something about fighting weak with weaker. He had never given into pain before. He had never run away from it either—not from the physical kind that went with bullet wounds and a bum knee, and not from the mental kind that colored the photographer's unflinching stare into other peoples' misery. Sam had always been a hard-ass, distant and detached. Now, all he owned to show for it were an empty apartment and a bullet-ridden camera.
Lydia was right—Sam had never climbed out onto an emotional limb for anyone. Except maybe in the stupid, naïve loss of his innocence at the hands of Rudy's mother Vera. Deep in the ravages of her heroin-addled mind, that careless lover brought a pair of junkies home with her one afternoon while Sam was away. By the time he returned, even the furniture was gone. Henry told him to suck it up, stop being such a pussy, and kill her. But that was Henry's solution for everything.
Exposure Page 2
