L.A. Rotten

by Jeff Klima

  “What the fuck?” she snaps as the fantasy cracks open and reality filters in.

  “I don’t want it anymore,” I say, turning to leave.

  “Asshole,” she yelps, and calls for Zeus, who’s through the curtain in an instant. She slides her dress back down and points at me. “Get him the fuck out of here.” Zeus is in bouncer mode and striding toward me. I’ve never had a beef with him before, but as he moves in to grab me, I channel the day’s rage and kick him in the kneecap as hard as I can. He goes down in pain; I’ve probably shattered his patella, and I step over him, striding for the exit.

  “So soon?” Royal asks as I depart, but I’m already gone. In a more perfect world, he’s the one with the busted leg.

  —

  I take the elevator when I get back to my apartment building, no longer worried about Ms. Park-Hallsley’s threats. I can hear the TV still running through her closed door, still pitching her shit that she’ll never have the chance to buy. My apartment is undisturbed when I walk in, and I put my new heroin in the cigar box, lie down, and wait for cops to come. Maybe this is what that bullshit psychic meant when he said I wasn’t long for this earth.

  Chapter 11

  I stumble up in the morning to the sound of aggressive knocking at my front door. I’m still wearing the previous night’s clothes, and there is a familiar unmarked envelope on the ground, which I kick aside before answering.

  The plainclothes dick from the City Hall job, the one who tried to shoo me off till I stoked his ego, stands in the hallway with a uniformed officer, looking all business. “Hi,” I say, holding the door open just wide enough to stick my face out.

  “You? The crime scene guy…you’re Thomas Tanner?” he asks, momentarily incredulous.

  “Yeah,” I say, and my throat is dry. They wouldn’t send a detective on an assault charge, even for a probie violation.

  “We got a hang-up caller that says your landlady isn’t answering the door anymore. This guy comes down here”—he jerks his thumb in the direction of the uniform——“he finds she’s killed herself, so I come down to take a look. Seems legit, but I poke around and there’s a pegboard in her spare bedroom that has all the keys to all the apartments. Excepting one is missing—yours. Naturally, I check who’s living in that apartment and I find out that it is a parolee. So I figure I’d come up and have a chat. Whaddya say?”

  I open the door wider and the detective’s instinct compels him to glance in around my person, but I keep my arms in plain sight hanging on to the door and the jamb. “When did she do it?”

  “You mind if I come in?” he asks, stepping forward into my space, knowing that he can whether I want him to or not. “It’s goddamn stuffy in this hallway.”

  I move aside, and he enters then turns back to the waiting officer. “Tap on the surrounding doors, ask if they know anything.” The uniformed man gives the dick a nasty look when the detective turns back toward me.

  I leave the door open and move to lean against my kitchen counter. “You cover Van Nuys and Central? Broad reach.”

  “I ask the questions.”

  His gruffness is a tactic and I don’t take it personally. “You said my landlady killed herself?”

  “I said I ask the questions. You hear or see anything?”

  “Nah, I keep to myself, mostly. I just put a rent check in her mailbox on the first of every month.”

  “Where the fuck is all your furniture?”

  “I don’t have any; I don’t know anyone well enough to help me lug a couch upstairs.”

  “I don’t envy your lifestyle. Why isn’t your key on that pegboard?”

  “I couldn’t say, Detective.”

  “Those are the little oddities I tend to notice, even at so-called suicides. You sure you didn’t slit her throat and then use your little janitor skills to mop up the blood?” The detective paces the front room and kitchen areas of my apartment as he talks, and at one point, steps on the sealed envelope lying beside the trashcan. Noticing it beneath his foot, he gives it a small kick and it goes slipping out from beneath his tread.

  “I do make an obvious suspect—because of the ex-con thing. I get that,” I know to say as I meet his gaze, not paying attention to the envelope or his treatment of it. Little verbal tics and cues are the things detectives are taught to seek out; the name they give it is intuition. If I say or do the wrong thing, he’ll bend over backwards to get me to confess to something. I can’t even correct him to tell him that her throat wasn’t slit—it’s exactly what he’s looking for. Fortunately, I know that he is using his intuition and it is too easy for me to feed him the unconscious body language and words of a man who has absolutely nothing to hide. “Should I be worried?”

  “Always,” he admonishes me, ignoring my slack language pattern. He hands me a business card from his jacket pocket. “I’m going to do some more poking around. Just make sure you stay out of trouble.” I set the card down on the counter and will myself to not look in the direction of the envelope, which seems painfully obvious on the otherwise clean floor.

  He moves to the door and I stand up politely, still keeping my hands discreetly visible. “Who’s your PO?” he asks from the doorway.

  “Duane Caruzzi.”

  “That racist prick is still allowed near a badge? Good-fucking-night.” He walks out without elaborating, but I guess I already know what he means.

  “Anything?” I hear him ask the uniformed officer down the hall.

  “Nada.”

  “Probably nothing…but let’s keep watch on that scumbag—his eyes give me the creeps.”

  Looking down at the business card, I see “Detective Marcus Stack” and a phone number printed beside the LAPD logo. Asshole. I wait another long second and close the door softly. Through the walls, I hear the chugging of the elevator.

  The new letter, also printed on Ms. Park-Hallsley’s letterhead, as if I might otherwise not believe it is from the same guy, reads:

  Me again.

  I think you are like one of those mice in the laboratory experiments and I cannot stop watching. I am fascinated—you were correct that I was watching through the window, and I dig that you are not scared of me. I admit I had to call the police on Mrs. Landlady because you did not! Again! You’re sick, my boy. Did you catch on to the lipstick? Like that lady out in Santa Clarita? I bet you did. I respect that, but you don’t work for the coroner’s office, do you? You don’t seem to keep any sort of regular schedule in fact, so I am still wondering who you are and what it is you do. I have not put that much effort into finding these things out, because for the time being, I like the mystery. There is darkness in you. There is darkness in me too, so don’t take that as anything but the compliment it is. Some days, I’m just a guy who enjoys killing people more than he enjoys making them laugh. What is your story?

  I’m just sitting here writing, working on stuff, bored. I get so goddamn lonely sometimes; I think that is what gets me into trouble. Please don’t ever bore me…

  I know! We should have an experiment, you and I.

  There is a liquor store on the corner of Pico and Stewart in Santa Monica. It is a shitty little place and the heeb who works there needs a good scare. I want you to rob it. Do it tomorrow night at 8 p.m., no matter what. You can keep the money and everything or return it, whatever. By the time you read this, I will have placed a bag of tools for you in the basement of your building. It will be in a brown bag inside the only locker down there without a lock on it. I cannot emphasize enough that this is a non-negotiable experiment. The life you save might be yours.

  8 p.m. Tomorrow. American Liquor. Corner of Pico and Stewart.

  Sincerely,

  A. Guy

  P.S. I know I don’t need to tell you, but leave the police out of this.

  I set the letter, refolded, on the counter next to Detective Stack’s business card. A. Guy. My new admirer has given himself a name, albeit a horrible, punny name. He is right about liking killing more than making peo
ple laugh.

  Taking the stairs, I walk all the way down to the basement, which is little more than a storage area for the part-time maintenance crew Ms. Park-Hallsley had employed. I’ve never been down here, in the poorly lit room that has clearly once housed a furnace. Though the big heating contraption has long since been removed and replaced by shitty in-room heating boxes that feed from electrical outlets, the taped-off pipes and vents for the furnace still extend from the far side of the ceiling at jagged, imperfect angles, like bad teeth. In its place now lie reams of carpeting and five-gallon buckets of paint, both identifiable to the various surfaces of the building. Hanging on one wall is a pegboard for the numerous tools of the handyman trade, and where each piece should be, someone had taken the time to stencil in the outline of the tool. Evidently the pegboard system is a failure, for most of the tools are missing.

  Against the wall beneath the stairwell is a panel of four old metal lockers that look to have been taken straight out of a high school. Three of the lockers are fixed closed with combination locks, but the door to the fourth, as the letter said it would be, is bare. I reach inside, and find, again as the letter said I would, a brown paper bag. Its logo declares it is from a Gelson’s supermarket. As I unfurl the rolled-shut top, I find myself hoping against hope that the bag will be full of well-used paintbrushes, but I know this is not likely.

  From within the confines of the chic brown bag, I produce a wadded-up pair of tan pantyhose that, in spite of the absence of packaging, appear to be brand new. Lucky me. Also inside, latex gloves (as if I didn’t have thousands of these at my disposal), a cloth sack with a large cartoony dollar sign drawn on it, and lastly, a clear plastic water pistol, loaded. “You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I say, holding up the gun in disbelief, and recheck to ensure the Gelson’s bag is really empty. It is.

  —

  Ivy meets me at the base of the wheelchair ramp leading into the L.A. Zoo. She is dolled up like a rockabilly chick, with her blonde hair held up by a bandanna, and wearing heels, but the meeting place is her idea—both because it is wide open and because she is nuts about animals. “Plus,” she claims, “if that bastard wants to eavesdrop on us, he’s gonna have to pay to do it.” I don’t have to add that there are also probably less thug types here.

  She buys our tickets and we are in, sharing the pathways with schoolchildren on class trips, tourists, and au pairs pushing strollers. This time, there is no heroin purchase to conceal the fact that I’m actually on some sort of date. I brief her on the latest news and she doesn’t seem surprised.

  “He’s a real fucker, isn’t he?” she decides, stopping at the alligators, which she claims are her favorite. “I didn’t call the cops myself, because I thought, ‘If Tom doesn’t want the cops called, he obviously has good reason.’ So that sucks that now you’re on their radar.”

  “I was always gonna be on their radar in some capacity, I suppose. But yes, I do have a reason to keep them out of it.”

  “Does it have to do with your jail stuff?”

  “Can’t we just look at the alligators?”

  She sighs briefly and then digs a quarter from her purse and flicks it so it lands on the alligator’s back, tails up. “Make a wish.”

  “I wish you hadn’t just done that. You’re like a goddamn child. I can’t take you anywhere.”

  She sticks out her tongue at me, grins, and then asks, “So the question is, are you going to do it?”

  “What? Rob a liquor store with a water gun? No.”

  She sobers. “But he’s going to kill someone if you don’t…and you know that he’s serious about it.”

  “One of two things would happen here. I’d end up back in jail or I’d end up getting shot by a real gun. Or both. And there isn’t a person on this planet who I think is worth that.”

  Ivy seems to stiffen up at that and insists we move ahead to the gorilla exhibit. “The gorillas are probably my favorite,” she says quietly, apparently forgetting all about alligators.

  She doesn’t pipe up again until we are passing the giraffe enclosure and I prod her.

  “Don’t you wanna stop and watch the giraffes? Aren’t they your favorites too?”

  “Fuck giraffes. At the end of the day, they aren’t really useful, they just eat and shit and make more giraffes. They aren’t worth it.”

  “Ahh.” I pull her to a stop and rest up against the railing where the giraffes behind me are, aptly, eating and shitting. “You don’t like that I don’t like people.”

  “I think it sucks that this jerkoff is going to kill someone and you’re fine with that. You won’t even try to stop it.”

  “You wanna know why I don’t care about people? You wanna know why I don’t like the police?” I can feel a tingle through my body and I realize I am being honest, but I am past the point of concern.

  “Ten years ago, I murdered a little girl. Her name was Holly Ann Kelly. I was driving drunk—blackout drunk—and I hit her with my car. She died instantly.” I take a seat on a nearby bench. “Apparently, I would have driven away except my car hit a utility pole. No witnesses, but I don’t doubt I did it. There was blood and hair in the grille of my car, both hers. A real mess of a scene.” Ivy looks aghast and sits down next to me, but not exactly close. “I was at a frat party at USC—I was there going to med school at the time. I got shitty drunk and passed out. I remember waking, finding my car keys and some money. I told everyone I was going to get thirty tacos from Taco Bell. The last thing I remember is getting in my car. Then I woke up in jail. I have no memory of Holly Kelly the person, only the pictures and video they played of her during the trial. Her parents said she was a really sweet kid, and she was smart too. She wanted to grow up and be a veterinarian.” Ivy props up her fist beneath her chin, listening.

  “I served eight years on a manslaughter charge because the prosecutor got Holly’s parents to agree to a plea deal—they were worried about some technicality. My own parents told me they never wanted to see me again, med school went away, and I spent most of my time in special lockdown with child molesters because some spook put a shiv in my rib cage.” I touch the area of my chest where the scar burns beneath my shirt. “The guards on duty were paid off, they physically turned their backs right before it happened. I remember, I thought it was odd that the guards would do that, and then bam! I should have died, but he missed my heart by about a millimeter. The police didn’t care, of course, and why should they? I was no better than those kiddie poachers I was locked in with. Plus, at the time, Holly’s dad, Hank Kelly, was an LAPD lieutenant. One of his brothers in blue had promised the Kellys I would die in there. When I finally got out, I got a job as a cook in a cafe and they—the Kellys, found out. They protested and got me fired. I got another job…at Home Depot…they got me fired from that too. Now they’ve found out that I work crime scene cleanup, and they’re trying to get me fired from that. They want to ruin my life because I ruined theirs. The whole goddamn thing, all of it, is really, really fucked up. But after all of that, you know what the worst thing is?”

  “What?” she asks, really horrified.

  “I haven’t been able to have Taco Bell since.”

  “You bastard,” she says, leaping up. “You sick son of a bitch,” she yelps, but grins, and tries to slap at me.

  “You see?” I say, standing and becoming serious. “That’s why I don’t like people, and that’s why I don’t like police. It’s my story but it could easily have happened to anyone on the planet. But because of some bad luck, it happened to me, and Holly, and her parents. Life sucks, you know? And cleaning up crime scenes for the last year and change has only served to reinforce that notion. We can all die at any time for no good reason at all—‘perfectly kind’ people have wiped lots of other ‘perfectly kind’ people off the face of the earth for the silliest reasons. Sure, there have been some nutjobs in there as well, but nobody is crazy all the time. Even the worst fuckers in lockup had these moments of humanity when they thought no one
else was looking. Nobody, not even little Holly Kelly, is as good or as bad as anyone thinks they are. You know what she was doing out in the street alone at midnight that night? She was running away from home. She’d left her parents a note saying she hated them. Of course, that was all inadmissible in court, but it was true.”

  “She doesn’t sound that sweet or that smart.”

  “But that’s just it—she probably was both, but she was also an obnoxious little kid and an idiot sometimes, and that wound up getting her killed. I went to USC to become a doctor and to help people. That plus several boneheaded decisions got me locked up for eight years. In the end, what does it matter? The world isn’t any different, better or worse, for not having Holly the veterinarian or Tom the doctor in it.”

  “She wasn’t going to be a veterinarian,” Ivy decides.

  “I agree completely, but what does it matter?”

  “Let me get this straight, though—you’re not going to rob the liquor store because…fuck people?”

  “That’s an oversimplification, but yes.”

  “Well, I’m going to have to stop this guy then, because between the two of you, the world is gonna run out of people and eventually someone’s gonna kill me.”

  I grab her hand, not sure of what I am doing entirely, and pull her toward me. “If it will quiet you down, I’m happy you’re alive.”

  “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “I pick my words carefully, so you know that I mean them.”

  “I like it when you hold my hand.”

  I realize I still have her hand in mine and release it, but she stays close anyway, looking up at me, her pupils wide and liquid. Neither of us wants to look away.