Shirley found an ATM and took out a sheaf of bills, slipped them into my hand. “Here. I owed it to Lottie but she never collected.”
I didn’t argue. I put them in my wallet and texted Mauricio.
Estoy en problemas. Muy serio.
Mi casa. Veinte minutos.
I left my Audi at the mall and threw my good cell phone out the window on the way, into the wastes before Highway 111. She took her time driving to Mauricio’s house, watching her mirrors, staying to sixty. She pulled up in front of his sweet suburban ranchito. I remembered when he lived in a shit RV in Desert Hot Springs. He’d done well for himself.
The vintage maroon Thunderbird drew admiring glances as we sat waiting. Her voice was huskier than ever. “Send me a postcard when you get where you’re going, doll.”
I hugged her, her brittle little bones.
I could still see Jack there in the desert, looking up from the dirt, laughing.
She waited with me until Mauricio’s truck turned into the drive, XTerra Gardens—Ecological, Beautiful, Sustainable. My cell number. He was going to have to change that.
* * *
I left at sunset, in a rattling ladderback truck driven by silent Juanito, the oldest of Mauricio’s crew. Sunset washed the valley in soft blues and rosy golds—the farther from the mountain we drove the more magnificent it became. The wind turbines let out their unearthly groans. Behind us, Palm Springs revealed itself only as a little cluster of lights at the foot of immense, solemn Mount San Jacinto, indigo against the oranges and purples.
Up ahead, night was coming. In the desert, night doesn’t fall, it rises. The moon, great and smooth-edged, appeared, eyeing the desert, casting its magic over mean little cities—Indio, Thermal, Mecca—bathing them in a light that would never burn.
I turned on the radio, tried to find something not ranchero. The Voice of the Desert came in, crisp. Frank. Come fly with me … Always Frank.
THE GUEST
BY ERIC BEETNER
Historic Tennis Club
“We have a situation.”
Randall had been renting out the pool house at his place in Palm Springs for about a year and had expected the occasional phone call like this. Grayson, his friend who watched the house while Randall worked in LA, kept the calls to a minimum so Randall knew something serious had happened. Just not plumbing. Please don’t let it be plumbing.
“Can it wait till the weekend?” Randall said. “I’m coming out Friday night.”
It was Wednesday, the worst day of the week. All the Monday haters could shut up—midweek was the worst.
“Um … no. I don’t think so.”
“What is it?”
“I’d rather not say over the phone.” Grayson sounded odd. Hollowed out and monotone, which was unlike his usual flamboyant self.
“Can you take care of it?”
“I kind of need you to come out here.”
“Tonight?” Randall asked.
“Please?”
He’d been only half paying attention until then, but Randall took his hand off the computer mouse and focused on the phone, the strange dull flatness to Grayson’s voice.
“Jesus, you’re scaring me. Did something happen?”
“Just please come out. Tonight. Right now.”
“Okay.” Randall looked around his desk, set designs that had a firm deadline before cameras rolled in three weeks. Still, if Grayson was this freaked out … “I’m leaving now.”
The house was a Mediterranean style in the Historic Tennis Club neighborhood of Palm Springs. Almost fifteen years ago in a market lull, he’d acquired it for cheap in the highly desirable district. He loved the neighborhood and counted the days until he could retire there full time instead of only weekends and breaks between work, of which there had been more and more lately, putting off a permanent move further into the future.
The house was modest and a dated wreck when he bought it, but Randall had a designer’s eye and no family or kids so all his extra money went into it. His neighbors were boutique hotels, homes on the historic registry and, to the west, the San Jacinto Mountains. And of course, the Tennis Club where he had yet to play in more than a decade and a half.
He’d repaired the crack in the pool and had it refilled, then remodeled and turned the pool shack into a livable six-hundred-square-foot guest space. Once the idea of Airbnb came around, it was a natural fit. He paid Grayson, his on-site caretaker, by giving him a free place to live.
In the year since the pool house became an Airbnb, this was the first time Grayson had summoned him to the desert midweek.
He crossed over Palm Canyon Drive and into the placid tree-lined streets with expensive landscaping trying to fool people and keep them from realizing they were in the desert. When he parked at the house, Grayson was there to meet him at the front door, chewing his nails. Grayson was nothing if not a vain man, always worried about his looks and whether men found him attractive, so biting his fingers was a bad sign.
“What in the world is going on?” Randall said.
“Follow me.”
Grayson led him through the house to the backyard. The palm trees were uplit and the pool cast a lazy movement of blue light over the yard and back of the house from the underwater lights. A shadow moved across the patterns of rippling water. Randall looked down into the pool.
A body floated facedown.
When he turned back to Grayson, there was a smear of blood across his lip where he’d chewed his nails until they bled.
Randall tried to keep his voice even and calm, despite the sheer panic going on inside him. “What happened?”
Grayson spoke in a voice that was half whine, half pleading for his life. “He was staying here. He was fun. And nice.”
Randall’s pulse quickened until it made his chest ache.
“We were having fun,” Grayson went on. “He liked me.”
“Grayson, what happened?”
“We were drinking and then we did some poppers …”
“Poppers? Jesus, what is this, the nineties?”
“I fell asleep. When I woke up … he was like this.”
Randall turned back to the pool and looked at the floating body. He was young, early twenties. His shirt floated open around him, like delicate wings catching a breeze. Beneath the fabric Randall could see he was slim and broad shouldered, like a swimmer. Someone who should never have drowned.
“It was an accident.” Randall said the words out loud like maybe he was trying to make them come true. “Yes, it was an accident. He must have had a heart attack, or passed out, or maybe hit his head or something.”
“Did you try to revive him?”
“It had already been hours when I woke up.”
Randall crouched down, sitting back on his heels and staring at the water. “What do we do?”
A single cricket chirped from the planter bed and the sound bore into Randall’s ears like a needle. For all the romanticism around a chorus of crickets at night, a solo insect could drive a person to insanity.
He pictured police. Publicity. Questions. Unwanted scandal and attention.
“We need to get rid of him,” Randall said, not knowing exactly what that even meant. All he knew was that he wasn’t about to deal with police and the investigation into his life this would bring. He’d be a pariah in the neighborhood. The people in this enclave took their status seriously. The Tennis Club neighborhood was where you wanted to be in Palm Springs. And they didn’t have bodies floating in their pools.
And his past wasn’t entirely clean. There’d been a boyfriend back east and it had ended badly. A restraining order against Randall. An order he broke on more than one occasion. There’d been violence, a thirty-day stay in jail. Court-ordered anger management. Randall wasn’t proud of it, but it was in his past—both miles and years away. And he intended to keep it there.
He didn’t like the police, knew what they thought about someone with a record.
He could avoid bring
ing up his past again, avoid threatening his relationship with his neighbors, his coworkers. If they moved fast, he could hide this.
“You fish him out,” Randall said. “I’ll go pack up his stuff.”
“What? Why me?” Grayson asked.
“Because he died on your watch.”
“It was a little bit of X and a few poppers and some alcohol.”
Randall aimed a finger at him as he walked around the pool, the blue light playing across his skin. “Exactly why I don’t want the cops coming here.”
Inside the pool house Randall found a single suitcase open on the floor. Some dirty socks and underwear next to it. A few T-shirts and shorts in one drawer of the chest. He packed up the toothbrush and comb and electric shaver from the bathroom. It was quick, easy work to rid the place of any evidence of the dead man’s stay.
On the nightstand was a cell phone. They couldn’t hide that he was there. With the way the room was rented out on Airbnb, there’d be a record. They had to show him leaving.
Everything went into the suitcase except for the cell phone. When Randall arrived back in the yard, cell phone in hand, Grayson had hooked the pool skimming net over the young man’s head and was trying to drag him to the side of the pool.
Grayson winced and squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” He put down the suitcase and stuffed the cell phone in his pocket. He took the handle of the net from Grayson and towed the body in by its neck to the steps in the shallow end. “Help me,” he said.
Grayson didn’t move.
“Damnit, Grayson, get over here and help me get him out. I don’t like this any more than you do.”
Grayson looked like he was going to be sick, but he joined Randall. The cricket kept sawing away and the sound pushed the needle deeper into Randall’s spine.
They dragged the body out onto the pool deck where it seemed to deflate as the water seeped from his lungs. Now, on his back, Randall could see the young man had been hot—when he was alive.
“How many of my guests have you slept with?” he asked Grayson.
“Jesus, Randy. Not now.”
“How many?”
Grayson turned away from the body. “One or two, okay? Happy?”
Randall often wondered why he and Grayson had never hooked up. He always told himself it was because Grayson was too immature. This kind of behavior proved it. He wanted to kick him out, but they’d be forever bonded by this night.
He removed the phone from his pocket. “We have to open this.” He looked at Grayson. “What was his name?”
“Mickey.”
Randall felt a weird pang of guilt that he hadn’t thought to ask his name before, and now he regretted that he had. It gave the dead man an identity. But the body in front of him wasn’t a person. It was a problem to be hidden away. It wasn’t a human being, just some debris in his pool he needed to get rid of. It was the only way he could do it.
Randall woke up the phone and it asked for a password. No way he could ever guess it right in a million years. “Maybe it has that face recognition.” He pointed the phone at Mickey’s face. It forced Randall to look closely. The skin was blue-gray in the light from the pool. His lips parted slightly, and his tongue swollen and purple. His eyes were clouded over.
Not a person, just an object.
The phone didn’t react. Randall straightened. “Shit.” He tapped the home screen a few more times, uselessly. “Let’s try his fingerprints. Give me a hand.”
Grayson had stepped away and kept his back to the body. “What?”
“I cannot hold the phone and his hand at the same time. Just come over here.”
Grayson hugged himself and shrank away. “I can’t.”
Randall stalked the space between them and got in Grayson’s face. “You can and you will. Right fucking now. We need to fix this and do it quick, so get your ass over here and help me with his finger.”
Randall spun and marched back toward the body. Halfway there he turned toward the sound of the cricket in the planter, stomping his feet as he went. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
The cricket went quiet. When he turned, Grayson was standing next to the body.
Randall held the phone and Grayson shut his eyes and lifted Mickey’s hand while Randall guided the dead man’s index finger to the small button on the bottom of the phone. Nothing happened.
“He’s too bloated and pruned,” Grayson said. “It’s like he’s been in a bathtub for too long.”
“Try another finger.”
Grayson pressed each finger of his right hand to the phone and nothing happened.
“Try the other hand.”
Grayson shivered and leaned away. “I don’t want to touch him again.”
“You have to.”
Randall saw a thought flash over his face.
“Wait,” said Grayson. “He was left-handed. Yes. He used his left hand when he—”Grayson stopped himself and could have been blushing but it was hard for Randall to tell in the dim light. Grayson got the left index finger on the pad and the phone came to life.
Randall found the Airbnb app, opened it, and entered a five-star review for his own guest house. He left a comment: Great stay. Perfect location. Sad to leave, but I’ll be back!
Randall powered off the phone, wiped it free of his own fingerprints, then tossed it on top of the suitcase. He let out a deep sigh, feeling as close to safe as he had since he’d arrived. “Okay,” he said, “let’s go bury him.”
The San Jacinto Mountains loomed. The hills where the sun disappeared each night as it sank toward the other side of the world rose in front of them now like the entrance to a dark and foreboding stadium. At each step Randall thought, No going back now. But really there was. There always was. The steeper the road climbed into the hills, though, the more turning back seemed impossible.
The roads didn’t travel into the hills, rather they snaked around them. The dry, brown San Jacintos were too steep to be developed, not pretty enough for anyone to level the earth and make it habitable. Perfect for hiding a dead body. Not easy to get to, though.
Randall had fallen victim to a salesman when he bought his Range Rover. He hadn’t needed an all-terrain vehicle. He now silently praised that pushy guy in his ill-fitting suit.
With each switchback turn they made, Mickey’s body slid from one side of the back to the other, clunking against the side walls. The confines of the car felt tight around them and Randall could see each sound making Grayson wince as if he’d been touched by a lit match. Around another turn and Randall couldn’t take it anymore. He steered them off-road and wound away from prying eyes into a suitably remote area.
They couldn’t have gotten more than a hundred feet from the road. They weren’t even a third of the way up the hills. It seemed like a terrible place to hide anything, and yet in the darkness he felt as if they could be a thousand miles from civilization.
Randall had been surprised by how malleable and rubbery the body had been as they tried to lift it into the back hatch. Grayson had moaned and made little squeaks at every turn.
“Okay, let’s go quick,” Randall said.
This was really it. No going back. Last chance. As he lifted the shovel from behind the body, Randall knew this was either the best or worst decision of his life. The one that would save him from humiliation and scorn or would make him an accomplice to a very serious crime.
He was exactly that, though, whether he got caught or not. But it was always better not to get caught.
“Do we need to dig a hole?” Grayson asked. “Can’t we just dump him and get going?” He bit at his already bloody fingers.
“We don’t want anyone to find him.”
“Yeah, but if they did, they can’t link him to us. You did the thing with the phone and we cleaned up.”
“How do you explain a guy in the woods who drowned?”
Grayson’s anxiety turned angry. “Just come on, let’s get it done.”
They took turns diggi
ng. After twenty minutes and sore palms, they had the shallowest of shallow graves.
“That’s good enough,” Grayson said.
“No, it isn’t.”
“Randy, come on. I can’t do this anymore.”
Randall knew Grayson wanted to get home, get drunk, maybe high, and forget this ever happened. He wasn’t fool enough to think Grayson had fallen for the houseguest. Not in the two days he’d been there. It was sexual, and that’s all. Grayson was the hookup king of the desert. How the guy stayed disease-free was beyond him.
Randall dragged the body, still soggy and flexible to the point that it seemed like the bones had vanished, and rolled it into the hole. It would just be deep enough to cover him and probably leave a small mound. Good enough. Randall wanted this to be done too. He needed his own drink, or three.
He let Grayson weep quietly against the hood of the car while he covered the body in loose, sandy soil.
They drove down the mountain without speaking. Grayson broke the silence with a single sob that made Randall turn to him. Grayson’s head leaned against the cool glass of the window but his eyes were shut tight to the lights of Palm Springs at night as they returned to the neighborhood.
It was too late for Randall to drive back to LA, plus he was exhausted beyond anything he could remember. He and Grayson said good night, then retreated to their bedrooms. For Randall, sleep was as hard to hold onto as water from the pool.
Back in LA, a week of fitful sleep went by. Randall called Grayson to find out if anyone had been around asking about Mickey. Each time he called he could tell Grayson was drunk, or otherwise impaired. He felt a little jealous. He could have done with a week of being numb himself but work beckoned.
He went to the desert the following weekend. He and Grayson barely spoke. The pool house loomed in the backyard like a monument to their crime. Randall couldn’t look at the pool.
“Did the guy come and clean it?” he asked.
“Not until next week,” Grayson said. The smell of weed followed him around like a cologne.
“Call him. Have him come tomorrow or Monday.”
Randall saw the floating body whenever he glanced at the water. He understood how the myth of ghosts came to be. He couldn’t stop seeing the dead man whenever he closed his eyes and if that wasn’t a haunting, he didn’t know what was.
Palm Springs Noir Page 4