I’m about to knock again when the door swings open.
Bobby Beauchamp stares back at me, his eyes thick with sleep. He wears an Oriental silk robe with an embroidered gold dragon on the lapel. The robe hangs open at the waist, revealing a pair of silver-and-black underwear, the Raiders logo over the crotch.
Without a word, he steps into the doorway. The air between us smells like tequila and winter rain.
“You represented Gawain Films against BFD,” I say. “I want to know why.”
Bobby Beauchamp might have a good poker face, but not at this hour. Maybe Dean was right about trusting my gut.
“Gawain Films was Johnny Toxic’s production company,” I continue. “Not the production company he credited on his films, that was a DBA. Gawain was where he parked the money. And Gawain sued BFD, which owns the tubes. He sued whoever owns the tubes for some quick cash, right? Stop me if I’m wrong.”
“Heywood, it’s a little late in the year for April Fool’s,” he says. “Or maybe you’re a little early. What time is it anyway?”
“Johnny told me he was into Arthurian legends,” I say.
“So?” he asks. “Hey, what happened to your arm?”
“I dislocated my shoulder at a gangbang,” I say. “I was trying to get a photo of the guy who killed your client. Or was Johnny your business partner? You were listed as the lawyer in the case against BFD. I can prove that you helped him pull a quick and dirty legal shakedown on the tubes.”
Beauchamp’s face turns a ghostly white. That confirms my bluff, so I decide to go all in.
“Nice dragon,” I say, looking at his robe. “Was it a gift from Johnny, or did you take it from him after Ron went all Green Knight on your favorite pervert?”
“Green Knight?” he says in a confused tone that I believe to be genuine.
I reach into my pocket and hold up my phone.
“It’s amazing what you can learn about Arthurian legends on Wikipedia,” I say. “There are a lot of interpretations, but I think the bit about temptation and chivalry pretty much nails it, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Heywood.”
“Booty told me that you can’t trust anyone when sex and money are on the line.”
“Welcome to porn.”
“Your boy Johnny Toxic fancied himself as a modern-day knight—Sir Fucks A Lot, if you’re into puns.”
Beauchamp doesn’t laugh, and neither do I.
“Johnny talked a pretty good game on the boards,” I continue. “He stood alone against the evil tubes, right? He was kind of like the defender of the realm, assuming the realm is the San Pornando Valley. But when he got the tubes in his sights, he took the payoff and left his peers to fend for themselves.”
“You got all that from Wikipedia?”
“Well, the stuff about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” I say. “I’m taking creative license with the metaphor for Johnny, but I think it fits.”
We stare at each other for a long moment. For the first time, I feel like I can see through the wall of bullshit.
“I’m writing this one up,” I say. “I’ve got a few more questions, unless you want my story to say you declined to comment when I asked you a direct question about a shakedown lawsuit.”
“Can I see that?”
I hold up my phone so Beauchamp can see. But before I can say anything else, porn’s shadiest lawyer snatches the phone from my hand with a quick and fluid motion that dovetails into a Judo toss. In an instant, I am airborne. A moment later, I land hard on the floor of the foyer. My ears register the terrible sound of my shoulder once again popping out of its socket. It hurts, but not as much the second time around. Either I’m getting tougher, or the drugs are getting better.
I look up just in time to see Beauchamp deliver a spinning back-kick to slam the door shut behind us. He assumes a martial arts fighting stance. There’s something comical about my attacker, something that makes me smile through the pain. But my smile infuriates the ass-kicking esquire, who channels his rage into breaking a wooden entry table with a violent karate chop and outsized power yell.
“I didn’t know you knew karate,” I say.
“I don’t,” he says. “Ron is my MMA trainer. And he taught me enough to take care of your punk ass, Heywood.”
Chapter 50: I love the smell of cocaine in the morning
I’ve never imagined what it would be like to walk into a murderer’s trap, but here I am in Bobby Beauchamp’s kitchen—a gun at my back, the smell of toasting strawberry Pop-Tarts in the air.
Ron sprinkles cocaine on a Pop-Tart and eats it in three quick bites. Apparently, I’m giving him a perplexed look because he tells me that the coke counteracts the complex carbs. He says this with a casual certainty, like a personal trainer telling you to eat protein after lifting, or to stretch before jogging. But the scene in the kitchen is just a detour.
“Nose candy,” Beauchamp says to Ron, who obliges him with a quick bump, served at the end of a silver butter knife.
Beauchamp shakes his head and stomps his foot on the floor. Evidently, this is good cocaine. But what would a stoner know about that?
“We’ve got some business to take care of,” Beauchamp says to Ron. “Keep an eye out.”
“For what?” Ron asks.
“For everything.”
Beauchamp tugs at my elbow, causing a current of pain to surge through my shoulder.
“Ouch.”
“Grow up,” he says.
Ron smirks and then helps himself to another bump.
Beauchamp leads me out of the kitchen. We pass through the living room, and out of the corner of my eye I glimpse several women passed out on the floor. Two are topless; two are bottomless.
“Coke orgies really take it out of you,” I say. “More exhausting than soccer.”
“Maybe you should shut the fuck up and mind your own business.”
“I get that a lot.”
“You ever listen?”
“Not yet.”
We walk down a narrow hallway with enough sports memorabilia to make a killing on eBay. We stop near a signed Bo Jackson poster—the one with the shoulder pads and baseball bat.
“Bo knows,” I say.
“No shit,” he says.
Beauchamp points his gun toward a room at the end of the hallway.
“After you,” I say.
Bobby levels the gun at my head. I really shouldn’t say a word, but apparently the sight of a gun makes me chatty.
“Maybe we should get some blankets for the women in your living room. It’s kind of chilly this time of year.”
“Isn’t that sweet?” Beauchamp snickers. “And here I thought chivalry was a fantasy.”
“If you think that’s what passes for chivalry...”
“We have different standards in this industry,” Beauchamp says. “Did you ever see Cum A Lot? It was Johnny’s masterpiece—a period porn where all the Knights of the Round Table gangbang Guinevere. PND called it a ‘tour de fuck.’ Personally, I thought it was a little weird. I mean who wants to see a guy in a knight’s helmet get his lance polished, am I right?”
Beauchamp pushes me into the room and closes the door behind me.
“You could’ve gotten so laid, if you had just played ball,” Beauchamp says. “But you had to ask questions.”
I turn to face him.
“It’s what I do. I’m a reporter.”
Beauchamp roars with laughter, which stings my pride a little more than it should, considering the source.
“A reporter. You got a ticket to live the dream, and that’s the dream you picked. What a waste. I can tell you’ve never had the porn star experience.”
He punches my shoulder like a meathead jock would after making a crude sexual comment. But it’s my bad shoulder and the punch sends me to my knees with a scream I hope will alert the neighbors.
“Heywood,” he says, getting so close to my face that I can taste last night’s party on his b
reath. “You can’t scream like that. This is the suburbs. What will the neighbors think?”
I press my hand against my shoulder, mostly to reassure myself that it’s still there. The pain is excruciating, worse than anything I’ve ever felt before.
He yanks me up by my sling and I scream again.
“I asked you to be quiet,” he says. “Now will you please have a seat, brother?”
Chapter 51: Life imitates bad art
Bobby Beauchamp has a villain fetish. That’s my professional opinion after he cuffs me to the chair and tells me that he’s still going to get away with it, despite my meddling. He actually uses the word “meddling,” like this is some kind of Scooby-Doo episode that never aired because Fred had a ménage à trois with Velma and Daphne, while Shaggy hot-boxed Scooby in the Mystery Machine.
The handcuffs—probably a prop from one of Johnny’s movies—pinch my wrists. But the fact that they’re cuffed behind my back is the real source of my agony because the position forces my shoulder forward and down so it looks like the socket is coming out of my armpit. Or at least that’s how it feels.
Not that Beauchamp notices the pain on my face. He’s too busy blabbering on about his plan to take the money and run to someplace with “warm weather, hot women, and no taxes.”
I’m wondering why he’s telling me all this when it occurs to me that he plans on killing me, or quite possibly outsourcing that task to Ron, who appears to be the muscle in this coked-out operation.
“You know I’m going to write all of this,” I say.
“That’s funny,” he says without laughing.
“Why?”
“Well, for a couple reasons. First, you’re not going to live long enough to write this.”
I take that as confirmation that Beauchamp is going to kill me, so I decide to play for time because it’s really my only move.
“OK, that’s one reason,” I say. “You promised a couple of reasons.”
“Where would you write it? Your shit-rag won’t publish this story.”
“I don’t get it,” I say. “You and Johnny must’ve hit BFD for a pretty nice payday. Why mess that up with murder?”
“Ask Johnny.”
“I can’t. Someone put a medieval battle-ax through his chest.”
“That was unfortunate, wasn’t it?”
“So let me guess, the shakedown money splits better two ways than three?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “Ron is just a hired hand. He doesn’t have the head for all this business stuff.”
“Winner take all?”
“It’s the American way,” Beauchamp says with a smile.
“So you had Ron kill Johnny so you could keep the money?”
There’s no answer, so I press on.
“How much is a man’s life worth? How much did you get for snuffing out your friend? You know, that legendary pervert you loved so much.”
“We’ll see,” he says. “Actually, I’ll see.”
“What do you mean?”
“You really have a low opinion of me, don’t you, Heywood?”
Standing there in an open Oriental robe and Raiders underwear, it’s hard not to smile at that question, so I do. But my smile turns to pain as quickly as Beauchamp’s fist connects with my jaw.
I taste blood in my mouth, but I’m comforted by the fact that the punch also hurt my captor.
“Shit, fuck, piss,” he says, shaking his hand in the air.
“I’m tougher than I look,” I say. “I got bullied a lot in school.”
“Fuck you, asshole!”
“Tell me about the money, or punch me in the face again,” I say. “I’m getting tired of this dance.”
My words are false courage—the only thing I have left. My knees are shaking and my stomach feels like an empty pit that swallowed my soul. Truth is, I’m scared shitless and throwing out all the bad movie lines I can think of, because bad movies really are my only experience with this kind of situation. You can roll your eyes at the cinema of violence, but when you find yourself in the proverbial shit, you either talk like a Tarantino character in need of a rewrite, or you crap your pants. Such is the nature of living with a wannabe screenwriter who smokes too much pot and writes too few pages.
“We didn’t settle for cash,” he says. “We settled for a share of the future, Heywood.”
“We?”
“Johnny would’ve owned a piece,” he says. “But he just couldn’t shut the fuck up about the end of porn as we know it. Boo-fucking-hoo.”
Beauchamp rubs his thumb and finger together like he’s playing the world’s smallest violin for Johnny.
“Cry me a river,” he says. “Nobody really cares about the talent—they’re just meat puppets who fuck and suck.”
“Is that what you say to all your clients?”
Beauchamp nods at the wall. There’s a poster of Mary Jane from one of her movies. It’s old because Mary Jane looks young and vibrant, a perky vessel unaware of the industry’s toll.
“She had tits for days,” Beauchamp says. “She could’ve been one of the greats, with a little guidance from yours truly.”
Beauchamp traces his hand across the image of Mary Jane’s breasts, his eyes hungry with lust. Then, without warning, he lets out a strange, primordial growl.
“Some chicks you just gotta devour. Yum.”
Beauchamp reminds me of something you’d see on the Discovery Channel—more animal than man, conflating sex and food like some kind of horny cannibal. Or maybe he’s just the target audience for those Carl’s Jr. ads hawking a combo meal of gluttony and lust. But for all the crossed wires in Bobby Beauchamp’s brain, I’m certain that greed is the default setting in his operating system. So I bring it back to the green.
“So you’re BFD,” I say.
“I am a big fucking deal,” he says with a wicked smile. “Well, I’m a shareholder in BFD, to be precise.”
“So this whole thing is about going corporate?”
“God you’re such a knee-jerk pussy, Heywood. I bet you voted for Obama, just like the rest of your boo-hoo generation. You millennials aren’t worth the spooge your daddies pumped into your mommies’ cooters. You know that? You think you’re entitled to everything, but you don’t want to know how the world really works, or God forbid, get your hands dirty.”
I find myself squinting. It could be the pain in my shoulder, which feels like a chicken bone bent backward and ripped from the socket, or it could be to get a better look at Beauchamp, who I never took for a right-winger because, frankly, I never thought a sex-addict, cokehead lawyer would think much about politics, or intergenerational strife.
“Tell me how the world works,” I prompt.
“Corporations are people,” he says, emphasizing the verb as if that makes him correct. “I am a corporation, Heywood.”
“OK.”
“What you call corporate, I call business.”
“All right,” I say. “So this whole thing is about business?”
“You’re damned right it’s about business,” he says. “It’s not called show friends, is it?”
“No,” I say. “It’s called show business.”
“That was a rhetorical question, asshole!”
“Oh.”
“You should probably work on those last words, Heywood. But at least, you’ll die with a decent view, which is more than I can say for Johnny.”
I look at Mary Jane’s poster. She was pretty once, before she became a one-dimensional sex commodity. But that was a lifetime ago. Now, she’s silicone, three orifices, and a name. Sadly, that’s more than it’ll probably say in my obituary at The Daily Pornographer, assuming the hack they find to replace me bothers to write an obituary at all.
Beauchamp studies me and I get the feeling that he’s improvising something wicked.
“Wardrobe,” he says.
From the pocket of his robe, Beauchamp removes a lacy thong. He places it on my head.
“Hot, Hey
wood. Very hot. Now...places!”
Beauchamp positions my chair directly in front of Mary Jane’s poster.
“Isn’t she to die for?” Beauchamp chuckles.
Then he unbuttons my pants.
“If this is how you kill people, I’d hate to see how you fuck them.”
“That’s good,” he says. “But I’m not going to kill you. That’s Ron’s job.”
“OK, but can’t I die with my pants on?”
“Afraid not.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Well, when I leave this room I’m going to have a talk with Ron about his motivation.”
Beauchamp nods to Mary Jane, and a moment later I put it together.
“There was never anything between me and her.”
“Yeah—Ron’s not exactly a fact-checking kind of guy. But when he hears what I have to say and sees you yanking your crank with a thong on your head to her picture... well, Ron is a lot of things, but a master of self-control isn’t one of them. Who knows? You might get lucky. There’s a chance Ron might fuck you then kill you.”
I gulp, thinking about that horrible end.
“Of course, there’s a chance he might kill you then fuck you. He’s complicated, Heywood.”
Even with a thong pulled snug over my face, my eyes widen in horror at the mention of necrophilia. I’ve seen and heard some disturbing shit in my brief tenure as a porn journalist, but the idea of fucking a corpse charts new territory. And for the first time, I regret not mentioning my aversion to necrophilia during my interview with the soon-to-be-fired publisher of The Daily Pornographer.
“Yeah, Ron is that kind of psycho,” Beauchamp says. “Pretty handy for a greed-head like me to have around, huh?”
“So the semen in his ranch dressing was just a red herring?”
“You catch on quick for a guy who wears thongs on his head,” he says. “But we can do better, I think.”
He tries to pull my pants down, but my butt holds them in place against the chair.
“Stand up,” he says.
I look at him like that’s impossible. Beauchamp puts his gun into the waistband of his underwear and lifts me up by my collar, which rips a little under my weight. Beauchamp pulls down my pants and tells me that I have a small cock, which seems like overkill considering the fact that he’s setting up my murder.
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