A Good-Looking Corpse

by Jeff Klima

  “You’ve heard of Google, yeah?” he asks, annoyed.

  “It’s the two-hundred-dollar question,” I persist.

  Steve, outside the car now, puts his hand out forcefully to momentarily quell the blaring horns. “That’s where I know you from!” he realizes, leaning back in to glance at my face. “You were in his Ferrari last week when he flipped us the bird. Lately he’s running all over town with this bit actor, Bill Amos, but last week it was you in the car.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I say, incredulous. “Mikey Echo is an Indian guy?” The horns start up with more intensity now and cars are starting to cut around me.

  Steve slams the door, shaking his head, now thoroughly confused. And with a parting shot yells, “Yeah, the fucking Indian,” and then runs back to the pack.

  “Fuck,” I exclaim and stomp the gas pedal to blast forward, feeling betrayed, feeling stupid and naive. Driving hard now, I take the first major street that will get me out of Hollywood. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I scream. I should have known. I should have trusted my instincts. But what did it all mean? Why the games? That was a question only Mikey Echo—the real one—could answer.

  I get home just in time to find Don Tart, private investigator, finishing up his sweep of the house, headphones on and a device scanning the walls. Ivy is asleep on the couch; as usual she has stolen one of my T-shirts to sleep in. I head to the bathroom to piss. Two more electronic bugs, much smaller in size, have joined the first receiver in the bathroom sink. “Where?” I ask Don when I return.

  “Living room and kitchen. Those little bastards are SOTA—state of the art—pretty much the best you can get.” He nods, impressed. “They could pick up a moth fart. Someone really wanted to know your business.”

  “So I’m learning.”

  “Mikey Echo?” Don guesses.

  I nod.

  “Well, rest of the house is clear,” he says, putting a handheld scanner into a small leather satchel.

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Ah,” he says, getting a little embarrassed. “No charge. Ivy’s special to me. Just treat her good is all I ask. And maybe give her one for me later—make her call you Don sometime.” He winks.

  “Will do.” I smile, indulging the letch. “Hey, before you go, do you know the name Bill Amos?”

  “No, can’t say as I do,” he says, mulling it over.

  “Worth a shot.” I shrug.

  “Look, Tom. From what I’m seeing tonight, I’d say you’re dead-center in a spider’s web. And with this particular spider, he’s clearly got a hell of an appetite. My advice to you: get the hell out of Hollywood. Or squish the spider.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I promise.

  “This town just has a way of eating good people,” he says softly, betraying that he might have some skeletons of his own.

  “Hey, just so you know,” I tell him quickly, at the door. “So someone knows in case this all goes south; Esteban Morales is dead. They sent him and his car over the side of Mulholland.”

  “The ol’ ‘Mulholland Falls’ treatment, eh? Yeah, there are more than a few unsolved cases in this town that seem to point down that way. Okay, I’ll quietly let the family know they can stop looking,” he says, reaching out to shake my hand. “And Tom? Since you don’t strike me as the running type, get him before he gets you.”

  With the “Mikey Echo” name a dead end on Google, near as I can tell, I instead concentrate on researching “Bill Amos.” Instantly, I strike pay dirt. The man I have been talking to all this time in the guise of Mikey Echo, is instead a bisexual actor working in seemingly low-budget films. His IMDB list of credits reads like a series of titles you might find in a bargain bin at a drugstore.

  Switching over to YouTube, I type his name in there and find several clips of the actor. One of the videos, labeled “Bill Amos Sizzle Reel” and listed on his personal page, seems to be a combination of his appearances. I click on it.

  “Hi, I’m Bill Amos,” the actor announces, leaning up against the back of a sofa and looking confident, but outfitted in far less expensive clothing than I’m accustomed to seeing him in. “I have my SAG-AFTRA card and have done several films, a TV pilot, and some commercials. I can play an age range from sixteen to forty and can sing, dance, and juggle. I can do German, Italian, and Russian accents and some stunt work. Here are a few of my clips, I hope you consider using me in your next project.”

  My skin tingles as I watch him in clip after clip, embodying a lawyer, a teacher, a Russian cop, a space renegade. The role of Mikey Echo is by far his best, and it will probably never make the Sizzle Reel. Then again, with a powerful Hollywood buddy like Mikey Echo backing him, he likely doesn’t have much auditioning to worry about anymore.

  I debate whether or not to let Ramen know the game is up. “Ramen.” I don’t even know what to call him now. Ultimately, I decide to keep quiet and go from there. For once, I might just have the upper hand.

  Chapter 20

  I awaken to my cellphone ringing early the next morning—Sunday. The day after Halloween. The Day of the Dead. Día de los Muertos, the Mexicans call it. I wonder if somewhere the Sureño Lowriders are celebrating. “Tom,” I say into the receiver.

  “Hello, sir,” the androgynous voice of a call-service rep says, bland. “We have a call for you. Single-victim incident. Female suicide. West Hills. Will you take the call?”

  I brush a run of saliva from the crack of my mouth and look around. I’d fallen asleep at the dining room table, my face pressed into the keys of my laptop. “Yeah,” I say without thinking.

  “The address is 22100 Michale Street. The informing officer is on the other line. He wants to know what time to expect you.”

  “What time to expect me?” I mumble, still not fully awake. “What? Does he got a hot date?”

  “I will ask him, sir,” the voice says, no comprehension of sarcasm whatsoever.

  “No,” I say, standing and walking into the living room where Ivy is still curled up on the couch, asleep. “Tell him I’ll be there in an hour and a half.”

  I drive down to the garage and get the truck, un-showered and listless. With this Mikey Echo business looming, normal crime scene cleaning feels almost counterproductive. I want to investigate more, form an angle and play it, not scrub suicide guts out of some suburban hovel. While the whole situation has shifted dramatically in the last few hours, the basics are the same: the actor kid is dead, Morales is dead, and Mikey had in one form or another threatened me. What I really needed to do was corner Bill Amos and confront him. If I could recruit him, some news outlet had to want this story, had to be willing to take down the Echo name. And once the public knew what was up, they wouldn’t sit back, they’d demand justice for Alan Van. Somehow, some way I can bring Mikey Echo down without violence. I just need to beat him at his own media game. I get excited by the idea and pull out my phone to redial the service, tell ’em to cancel the call. I stop myself though—the cop, I told him I’d be coming. Standing him up would leave a sour taste in his mouth with regards to calling Trauma-Gone in the future. Maybe ruin the whole West Hills region of the LAPD for my business if he really made a stink about it. Michale Street was north of Roscoe Boulevard so it might well cost me the entire Topanga Division. I’m not a regular up there, I caught a break that they even chose Trauma-Gone at all. Goddamn professionalism.

  The drive out to West Hills, on the far side of L.A. County is an easy one to make on a Sunday. Any other day of the week would be a headache of cars and hampered by road construction. But today it is easy enough. Plus, a single female suicide—that can’t be too much of a mess.

  I reach the address on Michale Street. Nondescript little one-story corner house, nothing too fancy. Gate is open, but no car in the driveway to give me a gauge on how much to stick this one to the LAPD. If there is a nice car, they tend to feel more comfortable signing an expensive invoice because they know there’s a good chance the department can recoup the investment from
the property or vehicle sale. God help me if there’s no car and the suicide is renting the place, I think, backing the truck into the open driveway.

  Climbing out, I note the neighborhood seems decent enough. Quiet. And then it hits me: no cop car. I glance at my cell—I’m within my time frame . . . early even. Maybe he ditched, figuring he could get a Mickey D’s breakfast sandwich and coffee and be back before I arrived? Certainly he wouldn’t be the first cop to pull that one on me. I go up to the front door, figuring I can at least survey the scene and work out some numbers. Odd that this broad would off herself on a weekend. No one commits suicide on a weekend—it’s always Monday. There also isn’t a coroner’s seal on the door, which is slightly ajar. The address, written in cheap iron lettering beside the door tells me I’m at the right house. Did the service get it wrong? That would be a first. I decide to ring the bell. No answer.

  Now I’m tense. I scan the neighborhood again, searching to see if I’m being watched. Everything seems quiet; no movement anywhere. I still don’t like it—things seem too off-kilter, too non-formulaic for my taste. I move back toward the truck, deciding I’m better off leaving. But nobody stops me on my way to the truck either. No surprises and still no movement. Goddamnit. What the fuck is this? I start the engine. And then kill it. “If something was gonna happen, it would have happened by now,” I reason. “Okay, talk it out—are you just spooking yourself?” I run through the list of oddities—no cops or evidence of a scene. Sunday suicide. House left open. No family or friends on-site. The word glares large in my brain: Trap. I pull out my cellphone and hit redial. The service was the last one to call me, if I can find out who in the call center fielded the initial service call, I can maybe get some more information. I put the phone to my ear listening for the ring. When it comes through, it sounds twice in succession—one loud in my ear and then again, faint. I take the phone away from my head and listen. This time the one in my phone sounds faint and another sounds louder . . . from inside the house. I let it ring once more to ascertain I’m not crazy. I then look at the number I’m dialing—it’s a Hollywood area code, definitely not the call center. The call goes to voicemail and I put the phone back to my ear to listen.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Bill Amos, I’m not able to take your call right—” I kill the call slowly, my finger dropping down onto the end button on my touch screen. It wasn’t the call center, my mind processes the realization over and over. But what the fuck is this?

  Climbing out of the truck, I walk back toward the house, light on my heels, tensed like a spooked cat. I take a pair of black latex gloves from my pocket, sliding them on while keeping my gaze leveled firmly at the house. If there is ever a time I wanted a gun, this is it. “Bill?” I call out slowly. “Mikey?”

  At the door, I hesitate, knowing I don’t want to know, but knowing I can’t back out now, my curiosity too insatiable. If I didn’t want to know what was through this door now, I wouldn’t have gone to that first party at Mikey’s house, I admit to myself and push the door open wide.

  I can’t see anything from the entryway with its wood-tiled floor that extends out into a living room partially obscured by a wall. I pause and swipe my gloved finger across the top of the doorbell, eliminating my previous print. Taking a step inside, I see a shoe connected to a foot and then up into the leg of a pair of sweatpants with the Armani name stitched into them. Rounding the corner, I find the rest of the body, one leg splayed out away from the other, laid out on its back. A makeshift blade, the butt of which is wrapped in black electrical tape, extends from the heart, the blood soaked through his matched Armani sweatshirt and out into a surrounding puddle. I don’t need to pull the blade to know it is a potato peeler that has been rejiggered into a prison-style shiv. The recognition of the face is instantaneous: Bill Amos.

  “What the fuck?” I gasp aloud, staring down at the corpse. “How could they have known?” There’s no mistaking the message. Crozier did this and he wanted me to know it was him. It didn’t even need a note—the scene was the note: “This time I didn’t miss.”

  On the floor beside Amos is the phone—his actual phone. Someone had stood here and called me pretending to be the service. But how would they know about the service? The voice was perfect—flat, ambiguous, and impartial. And then I remember Ramen’s eagerness to record the call. Had he been planning this all along or had he seized on an opportunity?

  A glance around from where I stand tells me the house belongs to Amos. An assortment of pictures hangs on the walls, all of them prominently featuring him, set off by movie posters for B movies, the titles of which I recognize from my research. On a little round table to my right, set up against the wall, a framed headshot of Bill is propped up with an autograph and a message he evidently wrote to himself: To my biggest fan. Evidently it was the last thing he would see when he left his house every day.

  The sound of cars, several of them, moving quickly on the street and screeching to a stop outside jerks my attention off the dead body and pulses through my blood. No sirens. They didn’t want to warn me they were coming.

  “Fuck!” I yelp, noticing my gloves and how complicit they make me look. I’ll bet there are no prints on the shiv either. I move toward the back of the house, but officers are already streaming through the rear gate, surrounding me. “What the fuck is this?”

  The door, still open behind me, is filled with officers now, SWAT, guns leveled. Any sudden move I make gives them reason to fire. I promised myself I wouldn’t go back to prison—told myself time and time again that if it came down to it, I’d die before going back inside. And all those times I said it, I meant it absolutely. But something has changed . . . a lot, actually.

  Slowly, I raise my gloved hands to surrender.

  Chapter 21

  The arrest and ride down to the Topanga station house is a blur. Handcuffed, my gloves stripped from me for evidence, I am driven down into a secure unloading dock and a metal door rattles down before I am removed from the backseat of the police car, giving me no chance to make a run for it. The officers, a black guy and a Latino, march me through the corridors within the station and thrust me into a cage for processing, taking no chances with their prisoner. A murderer caught in the act is a big event for them. Beyond my little steel enclosure is an office, a gray-haired sergeant sits at a computer, ready to process me into their system. Rolling his chair over toward my cage, he lifts his legs, enjoying the short ride.

  “Place your hands through the grate,” he instructs, no trace of whimsy now. I turn and put my hands through a small opening as demanded, and he unlocks the cuffs. Twin lines of reddened skin have been traced around my wrists where the cuffs hugged too tight.

  He has me remove my wallet, keys, and phone and inventories them in front of me, having me sign off that they have been counted entirely. I was too drunk to remember this the first time it happened, so now every step in the process feels new. The cops return for me and I am lead to a machine for fingerprinting. “You already have my prints,” I insist, but they insist too and I am cataloged, photographed, and placed in a cell. “Please can I make a phone call?” I ask, courteous, hoping that these two will remember how polite I am when this all gets sorted. And maybe that they’ll call Trauma-Gone for future cleanups. This has to get sorted. The cops promise me I’ll get my chance to make a call.

  When Detective Stack thought I’d killed Holly Kelly’s dad, he’d taken me right to a conference room to get a statement. Evidently, they did things a little differently around here. They would want a statement from me soon enough though. A detective at the scene had tried to elicit a response from me, asking my motivations, but I’d kept quiet. “Call Detective Marcus Stack,” I’d told him as the other officers tucked me into a waiting cop car. The SWAT guys were just hanging around at that point, grousing about the fact that I’d gone so quietly.

  I take a seat on the cement block that was supposed to serve as my bed and collect my thoughts. This would be Stack’s favor, I think.
If he can get me out of this, we will be squared up forever. In the meantime, what are the ways I can prove my innocence? Ramen—Mikey—had been clever to call me from Bill Amos’s phone on scene. That way it would look like Bill had called me out, we’d maybe gotten into an altercation, and I’d jammed a blade in him. The cops had me at the scene, they wouldn’t need too many more answers than that. I could demand that they check the time of death against my location when the calls were made, but that was banking on the idea that Bill was dead before they called me. They could have waited until the last minute, baiting the unsuspecting actor along and then jammed him shortly before I arrived. Crozier and I were both right-handed, but even if we weren’t, that wouldn’t work in my favor. Even suggesting the idea would make it appear like I switched hands because I thought I was being clever. Height differentials wouldn’t work either. Crozier is three inches taller than me, but aiming for the heart took away any notions I had about impact trajectory. It didn’t matter what direction the blade came from because the target was planned. Downward slashes from a tall person, upward slashes from a short one, it made no difference with the blade sticking out of the heart like that. There has to be something though—no way can I go down on this. It seems pretty damning though, I have to admit—me with my gloves on, caught in the living room with no discernible reason to be there. When you claim you were set up, the burden is on you to prove it, rather than the lead investigator to prove you weren’t. And with my background, forget it. My best bet is Stack showing up as a character witness. Or maybe private investigator Don Tart—if he will even go up against Mikey Echo. He could just as easily say nothing and then spend my prison days trying to worm his way into Ivy’s panties. Don’t think like that, I tell myself, pacing the cell. Concentrate on a solution to get yourself out of this, don’t hope for a miracle. Think, goddamnit!