by Ben Elton
“Sex and death in America today,” said the reporters, as the ambulances squealed off into the dawn. “It could come straight out of a Bruce Delamitri picture.” An observation which coincidentally segued very nicely into the pre-edited Oscars report.
“I stand here on legs of fire,” said Bruce.
“Why’d the guy have to make such a vacuous speech?” the news editors complained. “My God, if he’d said something about violence and censorship, would we have had him this morning!”
EIGHTEEN
Wayne did not bother turning to Bruce even now. He was more interested in the conversation he’d been having. He put the little pistol he had taken from Bruce’s drawer on Scout’s lap, and strolled casually round the glass table to stand over Brooke. As he passed the severed head, it seemed again for a moment as if it might rotate on its gory plinth in order to follow Wayne’s movements with its bulbous dead eyes. It didn’t.
“You know something?” Wayne said, standing over Brooke, leering at the curiously unnatural semi-circular definition of the top of her breasts. “I’ve always wanted to know what fake-tits feel like. Well, I guess there ain’t a working man in the United States who hasn’t thought the same thing. Like, you know, are they hard? Soft? Can you feel that bag of stuff they put in? Do they move around?”
Wayne’s right hand had been resting casually on the butt of the pistol stuck in his waistband. Now, he let go of the gun and blew on his fingers to warm them, clearly making ready for an inspection. Brooke did not look at him. She brought her knees up to her chest, clasped her arms round them with her shoulders hunched forward, and stared straight ahead, her chin on her knees.
“Don’t you dare fucking touch me.” Her voice was quiet and shaky; she was almost muttering.
“Pardon me, ma’am,” Wayne replied, “but I guess I didn’t hear you right.”
Wayne placed the barrel of one of his guns against Brooke’s forehead and with his free hand ready, fingers outstretched, he slowly bent forward, clearly intent on investigating inside the top of her dress.
Across the room Scout took up her gun. “Wayne, you leave her bosoms alone, now. I don’t want you touching her bosoms none.”
It was a stand-off, Wayne pointing a gun at Brooke, Scout pointing a gun at Wayne, Wayne’s hand hovering above Brooke’s cleavage.
Wayne cracked first. “Jesus, there ain’t nothing more irritating than a jealous woman,” he said, returning to his seat.
Brooke remained hunched up in her defensive position, breathing deeply. “Just hold on,” she said to herself, “just keep it together.”
She knew that the number-one enemy of survival was panic. The moment one gave in to that oxygen-consuming, energy-sapping, adrenalin-pumping surge of blind fear, one was done for. Only the day before, she reminded herself, she had been swimming off Malibu and had got caught in a rip. It had been a sucky one, and without warning Brooke had been pulled under, turned over, filled with water and dragged out to sea about twenty metres.
“You nearly died then,” Brooke told herself concentrating on her breathing. “Only yesterday you were as close to death as you are now, but you made it.”
It was true. Brooke had been in mortal danger, although it would not have been the rip which killed her. Rips don’t kill people. Panic does. The first instinct of the swimmer caught in a rip is to try to head back to shore. This is disastrous: no one can swim against the sea and the mildest undertow will defeat the strongest swimmer. But this suicidal instinct is strong and, although Brooke had been swimming in the Californian waters since girlhood and should have known better, she succumbed momentarily to the desperate desire to get back to beach by the shortest route possible.
Even at the first stroke, as she raised her arm over her shoulder and thrust her fingers into the foam, she could feel her panic rising. She was a very strong swimmer, but her efforts got her nowhere and within seconds she was exhausted. It happens that quickly. A couple of mouthfuls of salt water, a few flailing strokes and suddenly the toughest mind becomes clouded with despair. It is at this point that swimmers either pull themselves together or drown. Brooke had pulled herself together.
She knew the rules. Never head into your trouble. Head out of it, sideways along the shore, or, if necessary, right out to sea. Rips are always relatively confined and once the swimmer is out of them, no matter how far from shore they may be by this time, they have the opportunity to recover their energies, consider their position and calmly make their way to safety. Brooke, like any decent swimmer, was capable of keeping herself afloat for hours and yet panic could have killed her in two minutes.
That was the lesson she reminded herself of now. Rips don’t kill people (breath), panic does (breath).
In his own way Bruce had drawn the same conclusion. By pretending to be in a movie, he had so far avoided being consumed and defeated by the horror of his surroundings. He had avoided panic. Just.
“What’s this guy’s weakness?” he said to himself, no longer in a movie, but in a script conference, reading over Wayne’s character breakdown, which had been prepared for him on Popcorn’s headed notepaper. “Why does he kill?”
“He kills irrationally,” Bruce answered himself.
Inside his head, Bruce leapt to his feet, the cool, decisive producer, waving the studio memo about triumphantly.
“Here’s how it is, right? The guy’s stock in trade is murdering strangers, right? Well then, surely safety lies in forming some kind of relationship with him. Maybe these guys don’t kill people they know.”
All this had been running through Bruce’s head while Wayne was attempting to investigate Brooke’s breasts. In the hiatus that followed the silicone stand-off, Bruce made his pitch.
“I’d like to ask you something if that’s OK, Wayne. May I ask you something?”
“I would be honoured, sir.” Wayne appeared genuinely pleased.
“Well, I guess I’m interested in what it’s like to kill someone.”
“You want to kill someone? Hell, man, do it, it’s easy. Kill Brooke.” Wayne took his pistol from his belt and opened the chamber. He removed all but one of the bullets from the drum and offered the weapon to Bruce. Bruce hesitated. One bullet. Could he achieve anything with that?
Wayne read his thoughts. “Take it, man. You don’t have to kill Brooke. You could kill me, or Scout here — ‘cepting, of course, if you did vengeance would be not be a long time a-comin’.”
“I don’t want to kill anyone, Wayne. I just wanted to know what it’s like.”
Wayne put the gun back in his belt and thought for a moment. This was a tough one. He’d never really thought about it before. It was like asking what’s it like to eat or to make love, it was just stuff you did.
“You might as well ask what it’s like to make a movie, Bruce. It depends. On the circumstances, on the victim. I can tell you what it ain’t like. It ain’t like you show it. For one thing, there ain’t no music playing.”
“No. I imagine not.”
Despite the terror of the situation Bruce felt slightly annoyed at this. People were always pointing out to him that in real life nobody died to a sexy backing track. Like they were saying something really original and astute. It was one of the Moral Majority’s favourite points. They always took particular exception to the rock soundtracks Bruce assembled to accompany the mayhem he depicted. They said it was manipulative. Well of course it was. Bruce put fuck music behind his love scenes too and nobody minded that.
“I’ll tell you another thing,” said Wayne. “It ain’t witty.”
Witty? It seemed a strange word for a truck-stop hick like Wayne to use.
“Like in Ordinary Americans, when the two guys put the little short-order cook’s hand in the food-processor. You remember that scene?”
Of course Bruce remembered it. It had been a triumph of dark, brittle humour. “Film-making for a new generation”, he seemed to remember somebody saying, and if they hadn’t they should have done.
Wayne howled. “Neo-Gothic”, they’d called it, “postmodernist pulp noir”. Wayne just thought it was cool.
“But that was only the start, right? It got better, because we knew that the boss man had told the two heavies to go to some real swank hotel to waste this black dude and they know that there is no way they are going to get into no swank hotel with all blood and pieces of bone and skin on their suits. But if they don’t make the hit, the boss will burn them. So they have to go to the dry cleaners and strip off to their underwear and the dry cleaner guy is this little faggot in tight shorts and he says, “That’s OK fellas, I’m used to shifting stubborn stains from delicate fibres. I have satin sheets,” which is a very funny line in itself, but it’s even funnier because we know that one of the killer guys just hates faggots, he hates them like a fuckin’ religion, so he just digs out this huge Magnum from his underpants and wastes the faggot dry cleaner guy completely, like half his head comes off. But then the other killer guy is real annoyed and says, “Shit, man, how we gonna clean our suits now?” So they have to try to figure out how to work the machine and when they get to the swanky hotel to kill the black dude their suits is all tiny like kids’ suits, because they shrunk. Now that was one classy scene, Bruce. Like I say, witty.”
Bruce did not reply. Normally when people enthusiastically repeated his work back to him, as they often did, he would say, “Thank you, that’s very kind,” at the earliest opportunity to try and shut them up. But this time he said nothing. There was an awful fascination in just how well this terrible man knew his work.
“I don’t know how many times Wayne watched that movie,” said Scout.
“A shit load of times, let me tell you,” Wayne added. “It said on the poster that the New York Times reckoned it was ironic and subversive. I just thought it was classic the way everybody got wasted. It was so witty.”
Bruce was getting nowhere. He had been attempting to get to know his persecutor, to get inside his head. All he got was his own imagination quoted back at him.
For a moment Bruce remembered something from before. Mirrors. Something about mirrors. Then that thought, too, was interrupted.
Buzzzzz…Buzzzzz.
They all jumped, even Wayne. After all it was only seven a.m.
Buzzzzz. The entryphone intercom on the wall was not going to shut up.
“Now who’s that coming calling, Bruce?” Wayne took up his gun. “It’s Oscars morning. Everybody knows you’re liable to have a head sorer than a hog’s ass on a country farm. You ain’t pushed no alarm button or nothing, have you, Bruce? Because if you have, I’ll kill you inside’a one single breath.”
“No, Christ, no!” Bruce said quickly. “I think it’s my wife, my ex. We have a settlement to discuss. Christ, she’s an hour and a half early.”
Scout squealed with excitement. First Brooke Daniels, now Farrah Delamitri. It was like being in her very own edition of Entertainment Tonight. “Farrah Delamitri! My God, I’d love to meet her. Didn’t I read somewhere you wished she was dead?”
“It’s a figure of speech,” Bruce replied, “I was quoted out of context.”
The buzzer sounded again, more insistently this time.
Bruce turned to Wayne. “So I leave it, right?”
There was very little love lost between Bruce and his nearly ex-wife, and on occasion he had wished many horrid things upon her, but inviting her in to visit with the Mall Murderers went beyond any desire for revenge he might have had. Unfortunately the decision wasn’t up to him.
“You’ve made an appointment, you keep it,” Wayne said. “I guess she can see your big old Italian Lambor-fuckin’—homosexual parked out in the drive. She knows you’re here and I don’t want her getting suspicious about nothing.”
Again the buzzer.
“Look, surely we don’t need to bring anybody else into this. I mean…”
Wayne was trying to be patient. “Ain’t going to drag nobody into nothing, Bruce. You just have her come on up here, do your business like you would anyhow, and then she can go.”
With great reluctance Bruce crossed again to the wall intercom and picked it up. There was a harsh New York voice on the other end.
“For Christ’s sake, Karl,” said Bruce, “have you any idea what the time is?” He put his hand over the receiver and turned to Wayne. “It’s not my wife, it’s my agent, a guy called Karl Brezner. He says he has to see me right now. It’s urgent.”
“Now if me ‘n’ Scout wasn’t here, Bruce, and it was just you and Brooke here, would you let him up?”
“I…” Bruce knew he had hesitated too long to lie. “I guess I would, if he said it was urgent.”
“Tell him you’re sending someone down,” said Wayne.
Wayne put all the bigger guns behind the sofa cushions where Scout was sitting. He put one handgun in his pocket and Scout kept one ready under a cushion on her lap. “I’m going to go down to the gate and let Karl in so we can visit with him for a while. Now he don’t have to see no guns or nothing but Scout and me are going to be ready, and anybody who tries to mess around with us is going to get very dead, d’ya hear? So you all just sit tight till I get back. Like I say, this guy don’t need to see nothing suspicious.”
He was about to leave when Scout stopped him. “Wayne, honey, what about the head?”
He laughed. Turning back, he plucked the head from its stand on the lava lamp and dropped it into a wastepaper basket.
NINETEEN
Did you see that movie Ordinary Americans?” the detective, whose name was Crawford, enquired through a cloud of blueberry-muffin crumbs.
“Please close your mouth when you’re eating,” his partner, Detective Jay, replied. “It makes me sick to my stomach.”
“You make me laugh, Frank. Most days you get to see the insides of some poor fuckin’ dead guy or a smackhead drowned in his own puke and yet still my spit offends you.”
“Just because we work in a pigsty doesn’t mean we gotta act like pigs.”
“So did you see the movie?” Another deposit of muffin crumbs.
“Yeah, I saw the movie.”
“And?”
“And when they finally blow me away, I hope I look half as good. Look, I don’t care about any movie right now. I’m thinking, OK? Working. Remember work? Or maybe the city pays you to redistribute food.”
“Oh my God, that’s funny. I can’t wait to have grandchildren so I can tell them how funny you are.”
Detective Jay ignored his partner. “These two psychos, they’re in LA, you know that?” He was looking at the map he had made of Wayne and Scout’s most recent atrocities, plotting their course. “Look, they were heading straight down the interstate. Sure they left it after they did the motel murders, but if you plot a path between the caravan park and the 7-11, they are clearly heading for town.”
“Maybe they turned around.”
“Sure they did. They’re in LA, I’m telling you.”
“Like we didn’t have enough psychos in LA already, for Christ’s sake,” Crawford said. “You think they’re looking to go to ground?”
“I doubt it. These wackos are attention-seekers. Serial show-offs. I mean, for Christ’s sake, making out against a Slurpy Pup in front of a bunch of bullet-riddled shoppers! They think they’re some kind of twenty-first-century Bonnie and Clyde. I don’t see them wanting to lose themselves in a big city.”
“Maybe they’re visiting relatives.”
Detective Jay looked again at the crime report on Wayne’s attempted murder of the old storekeeper.
“Bourbon, smokes, pretzels…and a guide to the movie people’s home
s.”
On the desk in front of him was a copy of the LA Times, the front page cover of which carried a picture of Bruce holding his Oscar, alongside a picture of a corpse-strewn 7-11 and the obligatory piece on violence influencing kids and copycat killings.
“Movie people’s homes,” Detective Jay repeated. “Hey Joe, that picture, Ordinary Americans. Who were the stars?”
“Kurt Kidman and Suzanne Schaefer, although there were a lot of cameos. Anyhow, I thought you didn’t care about no movies.”
“Yeah, well, I changed my mind.”
TWENTY
How much time did Bruce have? His was a very big house and the drive was a long one. If Wayne intended to go all the way down to the gates, he would be gone perhaps ten minutes. If he let Karl come up the drive, and met him at the front door, the whole thing would take no more than five. Either way, not really long enough for much delicate negotiation.
“All right, young lady,” Bruce barked, trying to summon up the voice with which he cowed cinematographers and hordes of extras, “this has gone far enough. If you hand over your gun now, it is just possible that I may be able to speak on your behalf at your trial.”
Scout did not look at Bruce but she slid the cushion from her lap, revealing her gun. “I don’t want to have to kill you but I will.” She said it quietly, almost sadly, but she clearly meant it: both that she didn’t want to kill him and that she would.
Bruce was at a loss to know how to proceed. He hadn’t really hoped that schoolmasterly authority would bear much fruit, but it was the only idea he had.
Brooke had completed her programme of breathing. She was centred now, in control and ready to attempt a different approach. She stared at Scout. Her face wore a strange expression; she looked interested but slightly perplexed. She tilted her head one way, then the other, all the time looking at Scout as if trying to get a better angle, trying to work her out. Scout knew she was being studied, and reddened. She stared down at the cushion, which she had now put back in her lap to cover the gun.