Money Shot (Hard Case Crime)

by Christa Faust

  The radio had been on when Malloy killed the ignition and came back on too loudly when he started the car up again. The song was some sappy power ballad that had been popular when I first got into the business. I couldn’t remember the name of the band and couldn’t make myself care. Malloy reached to turn it off.

  “Leave it,” I said. I wanted to hear something that didn’t matter.

  Malloy nodded and put his hand back on the wheel. We didn’t speak. Malloy drove back to the Palmview.

  The sun was coming up as we pulled into the mostly empty lot of the Palmview. We both knew there wasn’t any hope for sleep. I felt cold even though Malloy had given me his jacket again.

  “You want coffee?” Malloy asked.

  “Sure,” I replied.

  We went to a Starbucks down the block. I couldn’t tolerate the clever, market-researched design of the place, so we took our expensive coffee back to the rental car and sat in the parking lot. Neither of us actually said Now what, but that’s what we both were thinking.

  “Roxette,” I finally said. “I guess we need to figure out where the hell she went.”

  Malloy shrugged and sipped his coffee while I called her various numbers again. Again, no answer.

  We wasted a couple of hours hitting all the places where Roxette could have been. Nothing. No one had seen or heard from her since last Friday before the meeting with Celestine.

  “She could have taken the money and fucked off to South America by now,” Malloy said.

  I shook my head.

  “She has money,” I said. “Her folks are loaded and she’s still pulling a huge day rate. She took the briefcase because she was curious, because she takes things. Not because she needed the money. Anyway it’s locked with a combination. She probably hasn’t even tried to open it.”

  “Ok, then where the hell is she?” Malloy asked. “Do you think she might have fallen off the wagon?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Meth was her drug of choice, right?” Malloy asked.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “So if she wanted to get back into it, who would she call? Who would hook her up?”

  I knew exactly who would hook her up, but just thinking his name made me queasy.

  If you spend any amount of time working in the porn industry, you quickly get numb to drug casualties, just like you get numb to prolapsed rectums on set and guys sticking needles in their johnsons and all the other workaday atrocities of the modern smut racket. But I have to admit the sordid downward spiral of Thick Vic Ventura got under my skin. Not just because we had been lovers off camera, but because he had been so smart and funny. So real. So much like me.

  Vic was from the South Side of Chicago, like me. Italian like me. His real name was Joey Pagliuca. He’d gone to high school with my brothers at St. Laurence and dated a girl two grades ahead of me at Queen of Peace. He’d left for Hollywood when I was just a freshman. He’d looked like a rock star, with his tattoos and long black hair—not exactly handsome, but charismatic. He had come to L.A. with ambitions to be a stand-up comedian. He was irreverent, sharp and wickedly sarcastic, but his comedy act had never caught on. In the end, it wasn’t his dirty jokes but his astounding endowment that made him famous and gave him the nickname Thick Vic.

  Like a lot of guys blessed (or cursed) with freakishly enormous dicks, he sometimes had trouble getting it up. It never really got all the way hard and he always joked that if it ever did, he would pass out from lack of blood to his brain. Still, with a good tight grip on the base, he was able to squeeze enough blood into the top nine inches to get the job done.

  That was on camera. Off camera it didn’t much matter to me. So many guys think they won’t be able to cut the mustard with me because they aren’t packing thirteen concrete inches. The truth is, the biggest, hardest dick in the world is useless if you don’t know how to eat pussy; and Vic not only knew how to eat pussy but genuinely enjoyed it. He was one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.

  But unsurprisingly, after a few years in the industry, the rock star lifestyle and hard partying took its toll on him. It got tougher and tougher for him to perform and he started getting a reputation for unreliable wood. A reputation like that is a death sentence for male talent.

  Anything approaching real “dating” in the porn industry is challenging at best. When one partner is on the way up and the other on the way down, emotional disaster is pretty much a forgone conclusion. A Porn Star Is Born. When Vic stopped getting calls, he started getting clingy and jealous. He threw macho Italian temper tantrums in public places and we started having more screaming fights than screaming orgasms. His drinking and drug use got more and more out of control. It would have only been a matter of time before he pulled a Cal Jammer and blew his brains out in my driveway, so I put the relationship out of its misery. I don’t think I personally sent him over the edge, since he was already well on his way before I kicked him to the curb, but I’m sure he’d tell you different. The last I heard of Thick Vic, he had failed his third attempt at rehab and was making ends meet by dealing methamphetamines to girls in the business.

  When I’d first met Roxette, she had laughingly admitted that she used to party with Thick Vic before her drug-induced heart attack. She told me that he was still hung up on me after all these years and when the meth psychosis got really bad, he often thought she was Angel Dare.

  I didn’t tell any of this to Malloy. I just told him I thought I knew a guy who might know where Roxette had gone to ground.

  Finding Thick Vic wasn’t hard. A couple three phone calls and we discovered he was currently mooching off has-been plastic surgery casualty Taylor Simone.

  Taylor was big around the same time that I was. Pretty in that standard blonde California way that everybody was back then. We did a few scenes together but all I remember about her was the fact that she ate pussy like a dog playing tug-of-war and left me raw for days. She lived out in Valley Village, near the freeway. Her sad little house was a disaster of strewn lingerie and chihuahuas and vodka bottles. She came to the door dressed only in little kid’s Batman boxer shorts and a tan. She looked worse than I could have imagined.

  I was amazed that someone so thin was able to stand up without assistance, let alone counterbalance the fifty pound pair of silicone beach balls shrink-wrapped to the front of her box-kite ribcage. Under her frazzled blonde weave, her face was a cheap doll’s face, flash frozen and nerve-dead from too much surgery. Her nails were crooked pink sloth-hooks and her bony, nervous hands made clutching, Nosferatu shadows across her concave belly. She had drenched herself in cloying, sugary perfume that smelled like the kind of cheap vanilla frosting that comes in a can.

  I have never understood this new trend where girls who don’t eat anything but lettuce and ice cubes want to smell like cupcakes. On Taylor, the childish scent was made far worse by its inability to mask the toxic booze-breath and the underlying corruption of her slowly dying flesh. She made no attempt to cover her freakshow tits as she stood in the doorway glaring at us.

  “Are you here to get that girl?” she asked.

  Malloy and I exchanged puzzled looks.

  “We’re looking for Vic,” Malloy said.

  “He went to find someone to help get that fucking psycho bitch out of my bathroom,” Taylor said. She gestured down a dim, cluttered hallway to her right. “If he doesn’t get back soon, I’m gonna call the cops and let them know they can take him too for all I care. You see if I don’t.”

  “Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?” a hoarse voice shouted. “Do you? You don’t know who I am!”

  It was Roxette.

  Suddenly, Taylor was crying. Her frozen face struggled to crumple into something like a human expression but all she could really do was open and close her bloated lips, like a dying fish.

  “I told him not to bring girls here anymore,” Taylor said, leaning heavily into the doorframe. “What he does on his own time is his business, but this is my hou
se. It’s my house.”

  “That’s terrible,” Malloy said, taking her by the shoulder and gently moving her out of the doorway so we could enter. “You let him live under your roof, the least he could do is treat you with some respect.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Taylor said, looking up at Malloy. “I’m not the jealous type. I don’t want to run his life, I just want respect in my own house. Is that so much to ask?”

  “Of course not,” Malloy said, motioning for me to shut the door. When it was closed, he caught my eye over the top of her head, gestured toward the bathroom door with his chin.

  I left Malloy with Taylor and headed down the hallway toward the bathroom where I had heard Roxette’s voice.

  “Roxette,” I said, knocking tentatively on the door.

  “I know what you’re trying to do,” Roxette replied. “I’m not stupid.”

  “I don’t think you’re stupid, Roxette,” I said. “Why don’t you open the door and we can talk about it?”

  “You think I don’t know about the transmitter?” she whispered. “I know all about the transmitter.”

  I shook my head. This was going to be really bad. I took a deep breath and took a gamble.

  “Roxette,” I said again. “Roxette, it’s Angel.”

  “Angel?” Roxette’s voice sounded suddenly anxious and childlike.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  “How do I know it’s really you?” Roxette asked, voice suddenly closer as if she had just pressed up against the other side of the door. “What shoes was I wearing on the day we met?”

  I rolled my eyes. That was nearly a year ago. I couldn’t even remember what shoes I had been wearing that day. I tried to focus on recalling Roxette’s feet. It had been the middle of a hot San Fernando summer and I seemed to remember her painted toenails so the shoes must have been open toed. Sandals of some kind, but that was the best I could do. I was drawing a blank.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

  A jagged sob sounded behind the door.

  “I can’t remember either,” Roxette said, bawling like her heart had just been broken. I heard a rhythmic thumping and was pretty sure she was hitting her head against the door.

  “Please, Roxette,” I said. “Just open the door a little ways. I won’t try to come in if you don’t want me to, okay?”

  The thumping stopped.

  “Okay,” she said suddenly, like it had never been any big deal.

  I heard the lock disengage and then a sweaty slice of Roxette’s face appeared in a narrow crack, a single pinhole-pupiled eye staring out at me like the eye of a trapped animal.

  “Oh my god,” Roxette said. “They cut your hair!”

  A hot, skinny hand reached out and pulled me into the bathroom.

  Taylor’s bathroom looked like it had been designed for a life-sized Barbie. Pink on pink with pink trim, pink carpet, even a pink toilet. The added splashes of irregular crimson clashed violently with the girly bubblegum color scheme.

  Roxette was naked and icy pale. It was nothing most of America hadn’t seen before, but there was a new addition. She had a hole in the top of her right thigh. In her hand she clutched a pink toothbrush, its bristles clogged with blood. There were bandages all over the floor and I could see a flat, pancaked bullet in the bottom of the pink toilet. It wasn’t a stretch to figure she had dug that bullet out of her leg with the toothbrush. I was horrified when she turned away from me and went back to work on the hole with the bloody bristles.

  “I’m pretty sure I got most of the transmitter out,” she told me, not looking up from her task. “But they make them so they can rebuild themselves if even one tiny piece is left so you just can’t be too careful.”

  “Who did this to you?” I asked. “Who shot you, Roxette?”

  “It was those guys my dad sent to spy on me,” she told me. “They have cameras in their eyes that transmit back to his office by satellite. You think that’s just in the movies, but you’re wrong. My dad owns the company that invented the technology for eye cameras. If you don’t believe me, just watch the Discovery Channel. See, as soon as my dad found out I had the briefcase, he told them to shoot me with a transmitter bullet so they could track me. They thought I didn’t know about the transmitter but ha ha because I showed them, didn’t I? I got away and showed them.”

  “You sure did,” I said, trying not to look at what she was doing to her leg. “What happened to the briefcase, Roxette?”

  She gestured at a sopping pile of towels in the bathtub. “I covered it with wet towels to block the signal. Now I need to get to Vancouver before 3AM tonight or else.”

  She looked up, suddenly confused.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “It’s me, Angel,” I said.

  “How do I know it’s really you?” she asked.

  I was losing ground.

  “They poisoned my cat,” she told me. “I found his head in my purse.”

  She went back to her scrubbing.

  I figured Vukasin must have been the one who shot her. Either him or one of Ridgeway’s other errand boys. Whoever stole the security tape from my building had probably just methodically gone down the list of every single recognizable person who had visited my office that day. Roxette is pretty recognizable. She would have been easy to find. I couldn’t imagine how she’d managed to get away from whoever shot her without losing the briefcase, but whatever had happened it had clearly sent her over the edge. Instead of going to the cops, she’d gone to Thick Vic Ventura.

  I struggled to come up with some way to get her to give me the briefcase, some clever ruse that would dovetail into her ever-shifting psychosis, but I just couldn’t think of a thing. In the end, I didn’t have to. She made me take it.

  “Oh my God!” she said suddenly, whirling around and gripping my arm way harder than you’d think a skinny little thing like her could. “God fucking god, I need you to do me this really huge favor.”

  “Okay,” I said warily, trying to extract myself from her grip and failing.

  “You need to take the transmitters to the Channel 7 news.”

  “Sure,” I said, trying to keep a neutral expression as she pressed her hot face closer to mine. Her eyes were both vacant and terrifying.

  “You have to swear on your own grave,” she said. “Swear or you’ll die seven times.”

  “I swear on my own grave,” I said, trying not to cringe away.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly breaking away and circling in a tight zoo animal orbit. “Okay okay okay. We’ll need a towel.”

  I got one of the sopping wet towels out of the bathtub while she fished the bullet out of the toilet. I held the towel out to her and she deposited the flattened bullet on the towel’s sagging center. Then she wrapped the bullet up in another towel and handed the bundle back to me.

  “Take this too,” she said, scooping up the briefcase and pressing it into my arms. “And the cat head.”

  She picked up a pink net bath poof and spoke gently to it before setting it carefully on top of my dripping burden.

  “Hurry,” Roxette said. “You have to make the seven o’clock news on Channel 7. Remember you swore on your own grave, Charlie.”

  I had no idea who Charlie was, but at that point all I cared about was getting the hell out of there.

  “I swear,” I said.

  She hustled me out the door and swiftly locked it behind me. As soon as I reached the end of the hallway, I ditched the wet towels, the bullet and the bath poof and set the briefcase down on the carpet. It took me a second of staring at the little brass line-up of three numbered wheels to remember the combination I had seen Lia use in my office that day. 666. The number of the beast.

  Maybe Roxette’s meth-induced madness was catching or maybe it was just my own sleep-deprived state of mind, but as I popped open the latches I had a sudden irrational fear that the case would contain not money but something awful. It took everything I had to m
ake my hands push open that case.

  It was full of money, just like Ridgeway had said. There was no time to count, but it looked like a lot. Brick upon brick of banded hundreds, along with Lia’s original handwritten note. I closed the case. I’d count the money later.

  When I got back into the living room, I found Malloy grimly battling to maintain his virtue and keep Taylor’s fingers out of his fly. A fat white chihuahua was furiously humping his leg.

  “Come on, baby,” Taylor was saying. “Don’t be shy.”

  “Christ,” Malloy said. “What took you so long?”

  He extricated himself from Taylor’s boozy affections and looked down at the briefcase, eyes widening. As he pried himself loose, Taylor burst into braying sobs.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said. “Before—”

  Of course, that was the moment Thick Vic picked to show back up with the cavalry that was supposed to help get Roxette out of the bathroom.

  His assistants were a couple of aging bikers, a hamburger and hotdog pair with matching leather vests and matching scars. The burger was short and barrel-shaped with more white hair on his chinless face than on his large shiny head. The hotdog was tall and scrawny with his long black hair bound into two braids like that Indian who used to cry about pollution on TV. Turned out that guy wasn’t really Native American after all. I didn’t think this guy was either.

  Seeing Vic again after nearly ten years probably would have been a lot tougher if the girl who used to care about him hadn’t been buried out in the desert along with Jesse Black. Standing there in Taylor Simone’s living room holding a briefcase full of stolen cash, I just sized Vic up along with his two buddies and decided they posed no threat.

  Vic’s long dark hair was mostly gone and what was left had been scraped back into a frizzy little ponytail. His fragile, skeletal physique made the desk clerk at the Palmview look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and his face and arms were pocked with scars and scabs from needles and endless picking at imaginary crank bugs. If you slugged him, he would probably fall into a heap of dust on the piss-stained carpet.