The Kill Riff

by David J. Schow

  "I'd prefer that everybody just continue with the gentle fantasy that I was on an unspecified, extended leave of absence," he said, "not squirreled away for my own good because a lot of bad publicity and bad events had inspired me to do myself in." He spoke calmly, rationally. Now it was Burt who had to be convinced, won over. He had to see that the topic was not taboo. Discussion would upset no fragile latticework of sanity. There was no insanity here. That was something all the folks in smocks had insisted upon. Even Sara, bless her heart.

  Burt surfaced from his Dos Equis. It had always been his contention that conventional beer bottles were not designed to hold enough. The food came too fast; it always did at Ernie's. The mustachioed waiter bade them to enjoy. Burt's eyes bored into the man's back as he zipped away. The waiter stiffened, as if stung by a bolt of psychic energy, then returned with two more beers.

  "Do I have to be nice to you?"

  Lucas was slightly taken aback by this. "No, Burt, of course not. Fire away."

  "Just between you and me. As buddies and vets and partners. If it was me, my daughter, I'd've blown that fucker away." He dug into a mess of green chile enchiladas and rellenos stuffed with beef as he spoke. His grave delivery had no perceptible influence on his appetite.

  "Those times I did see you, I was afraid to talk about stuff like that. Or mention how the papers seemed to ignore everything that happened. Let some homo actor croak from AIDS, or some director get caught dipping a kindergartner, and it's page one, lots of embarrassing tape on Hollywood Weekend Wrapup. Thirteen kids dead at that concert, and they treat it like a plane crash. One mention, and onward to the happy news." He bolted a vast gulp of beer, to clear his pipes. "Ridiculous. No investigation. No nothing."

  "I heard the band broke up," Lucas said. His voice was very quiet, without irony.

  "Hm. And I repeat-if it'd been me at that courthouse, I'd have blown the fucker away. I don't think I could've controlled myself the way you did."

  A ghost of a smile made a brief visitation on Lucas's face. He sawed into one side of a deep-fried chimichanga, and steam perked out. "What would that have accomplished? It would have made me the heavy. Big bad distraught daddy blows away rock star in fit of passion. Very sordid, Burt. Unclean. I had the effect I wanted, I think."

  He chewed food as his mind chewed memory, and he saw it all happen again: Gabriel Stannard, Whip Hand's top gun, was striding down the steps of the Beverly Hills Courthouse, flanked by his attorneys, gofers, munchkins, and teeny-boppers. He was wearing a severely cut European suit with a plain shirt and tie, all business. But his vest was a metallic LSD paisley, and on his feet were bright red cowboy boots with wiggly gray snakes stitched across the tops. The snakes had emerald eyes.

  The tragedy at the concert of April 18 had translated into a staggering amount of baksheesh to be paid out to local law enforcement. The concert should have been Whip Hand's last, but there was no way the flacks working for the band were going to ignore the drawing power of death. After a respectful hiatus, Whip Hand continued with its American tour. Every show was packed. No festival seating, as there had been at the disastrous L.A. show. No further L.A. dates. The deaths brought out the news media, yes, but their function became that of unwitting publicity. The first concert of the renewed tour recouped most of the cost of getting out of L.A. alive, and the band completed their crosscountry schedule as very rich men. A few token appearances in court amounted to minutiae, a quick and noiseless sweeping up. End of narrative.

  Except for Lucas. Representatives from band management had expressed weighty and meaningless condolences. He remembered the schmuck attorney. Woodberry. Or Washburn. The guy's name was a blur, like his face. Only his bit part mattered. Lucas's inspiration had come at the moment he'd chased Woodburn-or-Washberry out of his office at Kroeger.

  There were fewer cameras in attendance at Beverly Hills than Lucas had expected. More groupies than reporters. It didn't matter. What mattered was the expression on Gabriel Stannard's face when he glanced up and saw Lucas waiting for him on the courthouse steps. There was a hint of familiarity behind the mirrored sunglasses-the heartbeat of time that precedes actual recognition. It was enough.

  Lucas had spoken the band leader's name clearly enough to shut everyone else up for a second. Time took a snapshot. Lucas drew the gun, pointed it at Stannard's face, and said, "Bang. You're dead."

  But no one had heard him. They were too busy falling all over each other, scrambling to evade the line of fire. Lucas recalled an enormous bald black man, Stannard's watchdog, jumping to shield, with killer's eyes. A girl with purple hair and spangles shrieked and went rolling down the stairs. She was wearing a cartridge belt. It clinked on the concrete.

  Lucas dropped his gun before Stannard's bodyguard could do real damage. It hit the steps and broke. It was plastic, a toy.

  Stannard had hit the deck with too much panic and broken his mirrored shades. A silver sliver protruded from a gash on his forehead, and blood was coursing from burst scalp veins. It was messy but superficial. It accomplished what Lucas had desired.

  Stannard's PR elves and attorneys knew the positive value of not prosecuting Lucas. They did, however, recommend psychiatric treatment, "in his own interest."

  That was when Lucas had gotten a second inspiration.

  "And then there's all that crap about suicide," said Burt around another mouthful. "Jesus, Lucas-you're the last guy in the world who'd try to off himself. A guy like you and suicide don't blend. Sorry. You confront problems. You're the solution man. That's why we interface so well." He gestured with his fork, point making.

  "No, Burt. Grief can overload anybody's circuits. And I didn't actually try to kill myself. But I did think about it, and that scared me. So I checked in at Olive Grove. Even the dummies working for Whip Hand were pleased; they thought they'd done it. I admit it wasn't in character. I never believed in therapy."

  "Hashing over your fuck-ups with somebody who went bananas themselves to snare a sheepskin."

  "Sara used to say it didn't matter what side of the food slot you were on. If you weren't nuts before you went in, you'd certainly be nuts by the time you came out… or your money back."

  Burt chuckled. It was going well. But he did not look at Lucas's eyes when he said, "And were you? Nuts, I mean?"

  "Cory's suicide, then Kristen's death," he said gently. "Yeah, Burt. I guess you could say I was a little bit nuts."

  "Stronger guys have killed themselves over far less. If it was me, and I lost Diana, I might just swerve off an overpass on a whim."

  "She's a terrific lady. Can't wait to get together with her."

  "I'm sure she'd drop everything to see you now," Burt said. "I can give her a call-"

  "Not just yet," Lucas overrode him. "I have plans. We'll get to them in a minute." He saw in his friend the eager need for everything to be okay, to be normal again.

  Burt slid his Dos Equis bottle to the edge of the table. Another dead soldier. His plate was scraped bare. "Tell me about this Sara person."

  "She's the one, Burt. She grabbed my lapels and yanked me up out of that suicidal depression. It's her fault. No group sessions baring my soul to loonies, none of that pro forma psychiatric bullshit like gaming or primal screaming or any of your garden-variety southern California cult craziness. Just understanding. My doctor and my friend."

  "A whole year, though…" Burt clearly disapproved of what he saw as a waste of time.

  "What do you want me to say, Burt? It took a year. It might take more. In sum, not even enough time to pay for a new car. Definitely an investment. I got the rest of my life back." His palms were open in entreaty, the sort of gesture one might use to assure a policeman that one was not packing any artillery. "I have returned. I'm okay. Past that it gets pretty dull."

  "I'm no analyst," said Burt cautiously. "But like you, I was never patient with group anything."

  "All the more reason to seek help when I finally smashed into a problem I couldn't resolve by myself.
Everybody eventually hits one they can't take on alone. Cory did. It ate her alive. And I don't blame myself anymore for what she did. My feelings on that cancel out to zero. She was a very disturbed person. If she could've known somebody like Sara, gotten help… she might still be around." Half his chimichanga grew cold on the plate. It was cheap but good.

  "Do I detect a note of interest in this Sara person? I mean, beyond her professional wonderfulness?"

  "More than a note. More like a whole goddamned symphony. She redeemed me. She didn't have to do it. Now Olive Grove is behind me. We've arranged to get together after a few weeks. In a nonprofessional capacity. And then we'll see if there's anything to exploit."

  "Good for you."

  "Hell, we're already more compatible than Cory and I ever were."

  "You mean she hasn't tried to stave in your head with an ashtray or cut off your balls with a butcher knife?"

  They both knew how violent and unstable Cory had been toward the end. No apology needed to be made for Cory. Lucas tried anyway. "She changed, Burt. After she had Kristen, she changed. I really think motherhood doomed her. She watched herself get old while Kristen got young, and it was too much for her." She'd watched herself right up until the end. Her last sight had been herself in the hotel room mirror, dying.

  Burt cleared his throat.

  "So," Lucas said, to break away from the topic.

  "So what?"

  "So do I still have a job at Kroeger, or what?"

  "Oh." Burt jerked abruptly as though hit. "Oh! Of course! Jesus, Lucas, I thought that was a given." He looked em'oarrassedly before him and saw no plate, no beer, and nothing to fiddle with. He immediately signaled the waiter again.

  "Nothing is as it seems," said Lucas. "Venerable old ad-pub rule. And you're still looking at me as though you vaguely suspect I might suck babies' blood or something." His smile stole any sting his words might have imparted.

  Burt sent the grin right back. "Fuck you very much."

  The waiter looked nervously from man to man until Burt pointed at his empty Dos Equis bottle. Then he fled.

  "Thanks." Lucas nodded. "Now we move on."

  "As we get older," Burt grumbled. He pawed around in a coat pocket until he fished up a nicotine-colored prescription vial. It took him half the ice water in his glass to get the tiny pill down.

  "What the hell is that?" Lucas said. His eyes went stark at the thought of information not shared between friends.

  "Nothing. Blood pressure's too goddamned high, so the jerks at Cedars Sinai informed me. They cited studies on stress, as if those would change the way I do things. So here I am-not even fifty and putting down pills. Shit."

  Lucas's eyes stayed on the vial until it was stashed. The pills Cory was full of when she died were fat Seconals. Different pills, similar container. Autopsy noted she'd swallowed at least seventy-five of them.

  "I don't like the idea of taking any kind of medication," he said. "At least God created alcohol to wash it down with. These chalky little things remind me what pigeon shit must taste like." He put away a huge draft of the newly arrived beer, settled back, and eased out a belch. Except for two other couples, they were the only people left in the restaurant. The hazy color set above the bar burbled sports trivia.

  "What do I need to know?"

  "Hm. Well, I've converted your office into the executive powder room…" Burt laughed at his own joke. "Nah-it's just as you left it, dusty and encased in plastic until your return."

  "Divine," Lucas hummed. The beer was making him stupid. Beer wasn't on the menu at Olive Grove. He'd never exactly been a beer fan, just an occasional glassful of something dark and thick and imported. Now he had developed a positive lust for the taste. It was delicious. What the hell, his imp of conscience told him. If he wasn't entitled to get a bit saturated now, then when?

  Burt picked up the threads of update quickly. "Emma, the princess of the switchboard, you met. She's been in Monica's berth since… well, she was pregnant when you left, right?"

  "I swear, Burt, we were just good friends."

  "Not to worry. She had twins, and neither of them is as ugly as you. Then her husband got a job working on the space shuttle. Engineering. Trying to find a way to keep the damned thing from blowing up." Lucas watched a dozen space shuttle jokes of the gallows-humor variety flash through Burt's memory, behind his eyes. "But you know," he said, suddenly thoughtful, "if they gave me a chance to go up in the thing and do stuff in space, and told me it would blow up on the way back to Earth… who knows? I'd probably go anyway."

  Lucas did not ask him what that meant.

  "We overhauled the drafting section. Figured you wouldn't mind."

  "I'm tangentially interested. Like to keep a hand in." Bingo-another bottle of beer was gone in no time. His newfound thirst was definitely intriguing.

  "Tower and Barrington are designing shopping malls now. The wave of the future. You know they're calling it 'Southern Californiaization'? Fuckheads. May they be crushed in the elevator shafts in the malls those two'll design for the video drones."

  Barry Tower and Stanley Barrington had amicably parted company with Kroeger Concepts just over a year back. Lucas scanned backward for a second. "How's Sean?"

  "He's not here, either. He's off discovering Europe on a budget, and to hell with the terrorists, he says. Probably becoming sexually notorious throughout Scandinavia while you and I sit warming this booth and getting smashed."

  "That's good. Sean Markesson was the worst workaholic I've ever seen. What stopped him?"

  "Me. He was embarrassing us all, making us look bad." Burt often exercised his prerogative as a self-made success to ignore all the rules of bossdom. Now he and Lucas shared the laugh. It was partly the beer, partly the release of pressure. Lucas was reassuming his place in the order of things. So far, the fit was smooth.

  "When Sean first moved to L.A., he was the most self-effacing man you'd ever meet," said Lucas. "A really nice guy. Then he hit Hollywood and bam! He became a slavering monster. Mister Tinseltown. Whoo."

  Burt continued laughing. "Yeah, he got wound pretty tight. Much longer, and we might've had to book him a bed next to yours in the-" The happiness on his face curdled. He actually winced. "Ah-sorry?"

  "Stop being so goddamn careful. Funny-farm jokes are okay by me. My sanity is not an egg in a paint mixer. I'm not going to fracture and rape the barmaid before your disbelieving eyeballs. Trust me."

  Burt cast a glance toward the bar. "He's not your type, anyhow." He let go a beery sigh. "Just let me acclimate. You can scare up a lot of misconceptions about mental health, even in a short time."

  "Stop apologizing. You're a friend, you don't need to apologize to me. Now get up off your knees and tell me what's become of our ad pool."

  The ad pool was the profit nucleus of Kroeger Concepts, the conceptual salad bowl where budgets and brainstorms were combined to yield profits and please the bankbook honchos of Hollywood. When the department was first formed, Burt and Lucas were two-fifths of the combine.

  "Charisse and Evelyn are as you remember them. Only better. Evelyn had herself a showdown with a muckety-muck at Universal over violent sexist advertising."

  "For or against?"

  "Against. But it wasn't what you think-not that censorship rap, not the bible belt's definition of pornography. The VP she had it out with was Derek Windhover."

  "Oh, jesus…" Lucas recalled an earlier run-in with the estimable Mr. Windhover, an executive infamous for forcing oral sex on demand from actresses who came in to read for bit parts. Mr. Windhover was history, Universal was blameless, but the stench of memory lingered. "What a guy. Winner of Mister Congeniality, three years running."

  "Evelyn shouted him down. Oh, boy, it was embarrassing. We lost the account. We got it back after Windhover left. Guess who marched into Universal and sold it?"

  "Here's to Evelyn. The sprite with the sword." They clinked mostly empty glasses. Evelyn stood five five in extreme heels. She had always be
en painfully polite to Lucas and everyone in the office, as though straining not to offend. She was the facet of the ad pool that never understood Burt's grotesque jokes. But it seemed she had found a cause and erupted from her chrysalis. Good old Evelyn, at the advanced age of thirty-three, had finally loosened up.

  "Charisse concocted the campaigns for The Nam and The Interloper."

  "I saw the papers," affirmed Lucas. "Yes, indeed."

  The Nam was a surrealistic film about the Vietnam War-not the real war, but the fantasy version presented to the American viewing public throughout the 1960s and 1970s on television. It walked off with a wagonload of Oscars. The Interloper had been a science-fiction thrill ride about a horny alien trapped aboard an interstellar freighter. The creature spent ninety percent of the film's running time raping the female crew members and eating the males. The kicker was that once the ship was completely subjugated, it charted a course for Earth, piloted by a new crew of insectile alien monsters… and the final woman survivor turned hunter and bumped off the aliens, ten-little-Indians style. What made The Interloper notable was, largely, the promotion cooked up by Charisse Hope. The film grossed $3 million every two days during its first three weeks of release and secured a prime position on Variety's "Top Ten Moneymakers for the Year."

  The fifth member of the pool was Gustavo de la Luces. Gustavo of the Lights, as he often signed his name-an energetic and volatile man Burt had signed on after incorporating as Kroeger Concepts, Ltd. Lucas had expected him to burst forth at the office, with his dark, twinkling eyes and generous, fraternal smile. Burt was obviously holding the news on Gustavo back for last. He and Lucas had been close co-workers and fair social buddies… before.

  "Gustavo's out there in the smogscape, ramrodding with the Randell and Kochner boys."

  Lucas whistled. "The billboard mafia?" Randell and Kochner owned half the billboard space in Los Angeles County. Kroeger Concepts dealt with them not through choice, but through necessity. "I take it from your tone that Gustavo is not absent from this party because he is dickering over cost per foot on ad space."