Bad Karma

by Dave Zeltserman

  “No coffee this morning, huh?” Eli asked, smiling.

  “I think I got all that out of my system.” Shannon stopped to take a sip of his juice, then told Eli that his apartment had been broken into the other day and his neighbor attacked when she tried to investigate.

  “Emily?”

  Shannon nodded.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Eli said. “I like that girl. Very spunky. I hope she’s okay.”

  “I think she will be. She regained consciousness last night and outside of a fractured skull it doesn’t seem as if there was any significant damage. Susan had me give her a homeopathic remedy when I found her. I think it helped.”

  “And you suspect the True Light cult is behind the break-in?”

  “I’m pretty sure of it. I went there yesterday afternoon to talk to Melissa Cousins. They kept me waiting, and I think they used the time to send their Russian goons to my place.”

  “What do the police think?”

  Shannon took another drink of his juice. “Not worth talking about,” he said.

  Eli nodded, his long face somber. “Before we get too far off subject, I’ve been thinking more about your lucid dream slash out-of-body experience the other day. You mentioned something about that girl responding with gibberish when you asked who killed her. By any chance do you remember what she actually said?”

  Shannon consulted his notepad and found what he had scribbled down after he had woken up from his dream. He read the words to Eli.

  “I’m not sure that’s gibberish,” Eli said.

  “After reading it out loud, I’m not sure either. I guess it could be Swedish? Maybe some words I picked up subconsciously from a movie?”

  “It’s German,” a thin man with a goatee said. He was sitting at a neighboring table and drinking an espresso. “Mit vergnugen means ‘with pleasure’.” He smiled at Shannon and Eli, then turned back to his New York Times.

  “That’s odd,” Eli said. “Why would she answer with pleasure when you asked who killed her?”

  Shannon was staring at his notepad. “She actually said that when I asked her if she could give me a clue about the murders. But why would she speak German…”

  He stopped cold as the answer hit him.

  “What?” Eli asked.

  “I know what it means,” Shannon muttered, distracted as he thought about what he was going to do next, “I don’t have time to explain now, but I’ll give you a call later.”

  “Jesus, Bill, you can’t leave me hanging like this,” Eli sputtered, his long face growing beet red. Shannon stumbled out of his seat, barely aware of his friend’s protestations. He waved to him weakly at the door, then left the coffee shop and headed back to his apartment to pick up his car.

  Chapter 15

  As Shannon drove to the dead students’ apartment he kept thinking about Linda Gibson. The image of her from his dream had crystallized in his mind, and he could picture vividly the amused little smile that had cracked her face when she spoke those German words to him. At some point he must’ve heard the phrase in a movie and filed it away in his subconscious. Except—and the thought stopped him cold—for it to be something like that he would’ve had to’ve had that dream after he’d been in the apartment. Otherwise how would he have known what type of stereo speakers they had, if any at all? But he had that dream before he ever set foot in there. Maybe one of the newspapers had shown a picture of the inside of their bedroom. Maybe he had filed it away in his subconscious also…

  Or maybe Eli was right.

  Whichever it was, he decided he had more important things to focus on at that moment.

  He still had the keys to the students’ apartment on him. When he arrived at the townhouse he slipped on a pair of latex gloves he took from his trunk, then unlocked the police padlock and the deadbolt and went to the bedroom. There he looked at the speakers mounted on both sides of the flat panel TV. German brand speakers. He removed the front of one of them. It came off easily. The guts had been removed, and sitting inside the empty casing was a stack of hundred dollar bills. He counted thirteen thousand two hundred dollars, then put the money back and slid the front cover back on. He was only mildly surprised when he slid off the front of the other speaker and found a video camera inside of it pointing towards the bed. A tape was still in the camera. He took it out and plugged it into a VCR by the TV.

  The tape showed Linda Gibson and Taylor Carver having sex with Nirvana blasting away in the background. About ten minutes into the tape, a bang could be heard over the music. Carver and Gibson stopped what they were doing, both of them looking surprised as they craned their necks sideways to face the bedroom door. There was another bang, this one louder. Shannon guessed that the first one came from the front door of the apartment being kicked in, the second from the bedroom door being swung hard into the wall. Carver jumped off the bed then, clearly agitated. At that point he had moved outside the frame of the camera. Someone, probably Carver, yelled “what the fuck”, and that was followed by two thuds. They occurred almost simultaneously—the second one louder than the first. Linda screamed then, and scrambled off the bed. Before she was outside of the video frame, the barrel of an aluminum baseball bat caught her on the side of the face and she fell out of view. For thirty seconds the only sound was Nirvana blasting away. Then more soft thuds could be heard over the music. Many more. Some of them accompanied by blood spraying onto the bed and across the video frame. Then the thuds stopped. The music stopped also. After that nothing but silence, maybe for a minute, maybe two, then a loud crack—the sound of a baseball being hit out of the park. Shannon knew it wasn’t a baseball that had found the sweet spot on the bat.

  His cell phone rang, jolting him back to the present. He stopped the video and saw that it was Susan calling him from the Boulderado.

  “Hi darling,” she said. “I was surprised to see you gone when I woke up.”

  “Yeah, I took off last night. I knew if I hung around I’d end up waking you.”

  “What’s wrong, hon? You sound strange.”

  “Nothing’s wrong, at least not what you think.” Shannon paused, then told her about finding a videotape showing Carver and Gibson being murdered.”

  “They actually videotaped themselves killing those two students?”

  “Not exactly. Carver and Gibson had a camera hidden in their bedroom. They were filming themselves having sex when the murders happened. The killings were for the most part off camera, and my guess, whoever did it had no idea the camera was there. Unfortunately, due to dumb plain luck the killer never made an appearance on the videotape.”

  “Why would they use a hidden camera to videotape themselves?” Susan asked.

  “Maybe only one of them knew the camera was there,” he said, but as he thought about the way both Carver and Linda acted while they were having sex and the way both of them played to the camera, he didn’t think that was true. So it was a good question, one that Shannon was beginning to have a hunch about. Something that could explain the money sitting in the empty speaker.

  “Susie,” he told her. “I think I’m going to be busy most of the day. I probably won’t be able to see you until dinner.”

  “Take your time. I’m going to visit Emily this morning, and I have some other things I’d like to do later. Hon, whether or not that videotape leads to the murderers, you should be proud of yourself for finding it. I’ll be looking forward all day to seeing you later.”

  After they hung up, he rewound the tape to where Linda was hit across the face with the bat, then played it frame by frame to see if he could spot a reflection in the surface of the bat. He couldn’t find any. He fast forwarded the tape to the end and placed it back in the camera.

  He pulled his latex gloves off, then called Daniels’ cell phone number and left a message suggesting where Daniels should look in the dead students’ apartment.

  When he stepped out of the apartment, Maguire was waiting in the vestibule, his face unnaturally pale and his mouth not quite
right. His voice sounded somewhat strangled when he told Shannon he thought he heard a woman scream in the neighboring condo.

  Shannon put the padlock back in place, then made a decision as he reached for his car keys. “I need to go to Denver,” he told Maguire. “If you want to tag along, I’ll tell you about it.”

  Maguire nodded. “Okay, sure.”

  Shannon tossed him his keys. “You mind driving? I’ve got some calls to make along the way.”

  ***

  They sat in a diner, Shannon with a plate of blueberry pancakes in front of him, Maguire still waiting for the corned beef hash and eggs that he had ordered. During the ride to Denver, Shannon squeezed in telling Maguire about the videotape he had found in between calls he needed to make and Daniels calling him back wanting to know how Shannon knew about the speakers. Shannon simply told the lieutenant he had a hunch about them and asked whether Daniels had found anything inside of them, at which point Daniels hung up. Now as he ate his pancakes, he checked his watch and saw it was only twenty-five past ten. He still had a half hour to kill.

  Maguire’s hash and eggs were brought over. He played around with his food, then asked Shannon again about the videotape. “I still can’t get over that you found that tape,” he said. “When I heard that scream I almost called the police. You scared the shit out of me.”

  “I should’ve given you a heads-up.”

  Maguire took a small bite of his food, but seemed barely aware of it. “I still can’t get over a camera being hidden there.”

  “Yeah, caught me a little by surprise too.”

  “And it didn’t pick up a single shot of the killer? What a lucky sonofabitch.”

  “It probably didn’t. It’s possible the FBI can process it and find a reflection somewhere. I don’t think they will, but it’s possible.”

  Maguire pulled at his lower lip as he thought about it. “The whole thing’s unbelievable,” he said. “I guess we’ll be seeing some of that tape on the news, huh?”

  Shannon shrugged. Even though it had been almost twenty-four hours since he had eaten anything solid, he didn’t have much of an appetite. He forced himself to finish off the pancakes knowing it was going to be a long day. Maguire appeared to have even less of an appetite, for the most part pushing his food from one part of the plate to the other, all the while shaking his head as if he still couldn’t believe a video camera had captured the murders—even if only partially.

  ***

  Rude stood at the corner of East Colfax and Nineteenth Street where Shannon expected to find him. There was no mistaking him given the description Shannon had. Late fifties, bald, with a thick gray mustache, and hard rubbery flesh which hung loosely from his body the way it does when someone has lost muscle mass in a short time. A number of bluish-green tattoos showed on his skin, all of which gave the appearance of being deflated. Like tires that had the air taken out. The man stared blindly off into the distance smoking a cigarette.

  Shannon drove up to him and got out of his car. Maguire stayed seated. “Rude?”

  The man’s eyes shifted to meet Shannon’s. Before he could answer he broke into a violent coughing fit and hacked up something red that could’ve been a small piece of his lung. He wiped pinkish spittle off his chin with the back of his hand. Looking past Shannon, he asked in a weak, raspy voice, “Who wants to know?”

  Shannon introduced himself. “A friend of yours, Max Roth, thought you might be able to help me.”

  “Let’s see some ID.”

  Shannon showed Rude his PI license. Rude’s eyes remained vacant as he glanced at it. He lowered his gaze to Shannon’s damaged hand. “How’d you lose those fingers?”

  “Line of duty. I used to be a cop.”

  “Yeah, thought I smelled cop on you. Who’s the boy scout in the car?”

  “An intern I’m training.”

  Rude accepted that. “He’s no cop. That’s for fucking sure.” He took a long drag on his cigarette and flicked what was left of it onto the sidewalk. He lit up a fresh one, nodding towards Shannon. “Max Roth, huh? Denver’s most famous PI thanks to that crap newspaper column, “The Roth Report”. I end up doing his dirty work and never get a fucking mention. Just like with the asshole before him, Johnny Lane. Ever hear of Lane?”

  For the first time some life flickered in Rude’s eyes. Shannon nodded. “Yeah, I read about him.”

  “Rotten sonofabitch,” Rude said, his eyes glazing over. “I hope they’re toasting his balls right now wherever he ended up.” He started making a wheezing sound, and Shannon realized the guy was laughing. The wheezing turned into another coughing fit and more pinkish stuff being spat out. Rude’s eyes shone as he looked at Shannon. “I got the big C,” he said. “In the lungs. According to the doctors I should be dead now. Bad enough I went through chemo, fuck if I’m going to live out my last days in a hospital bed. Not after spending three years in the jungles of Cambodia. So what the fuck you want with me?”

  “I’m trying to find someone who sells porn tapes. The kind where one of the parties doesn’t know they’re being filmed.”

  Rude sucked hard on his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs before directing it out his nostrils. “Those are illegal. You could go to jail selling those.”

  “That’s why I thought I could use your help.”

  “Why you looking for them? You a perv?”

  “I’m trying to figure out a double-murder that happened in Boulder.”

  “The two college kids killed?” Amusement shone in his eyes. “They were making these types of videos?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  Rude considered it, nodded. “Sure, I’ll help you. Two hundred bucks. Something else too.” He looked away, took another drag on his cigarette. “If you solve these murders and give a story to reporters, I want you mentioning I helped you. If your name goes in the paper, I want my name there too.”

  “Deal.” Shannon counted out two hundred dollars and handed it to Rude. Rude rolled the bills into a wad and stuck it in his pants pocket without bothering to count it. He stopped to fill up his lungs with cigarette smoke, then made a call on his cell phone and talked briefly, giving Shannon’s name. He told Shannon, “Go to Sex Emporium on Colfax and Fourteenth. Look for a punk with long greasy hair named Starks. Likes to think he should be a movie star, but he’s nothing but a perv. Every voyeur tape he’s got he’s seen. If you’ve got pictures of those two college kids, he’ll know if they’ve made any.”

  Rude looked away then, his eyes focusing on something too far off into the distance for Shannon or anyone else to see.

  ***

  It wasn’t difficult picking out Starks. Aside from some old men and a couple of large farm boys walking around the sex shop, the place was empty except for a guy in his late thirties standing behind the counter who fit Rude’s description. He had a medium build, brown hair that fell inches past his shoulders and reasonably good looks that were ruined by dark, hollowed-out eyes. No matter how much he might want to look like a movie star, those eyes would be his downfall. Shannon approached him and asked, “Are you Starks?”

  Something close to amusement flickered in the dark hollows of the man’s eyes. He smiled amiably at Shannon, “You the PI Rude sent over?”

  Shannon nodded, showed him his license. Starks seemed satisfied with it. He nodded towards Maguire. “What about him—your friend along for the giggles?”

  “I’m training him in the business.”

  “Yeah, well, you and Junior PI follow me.”

  Starks got out from behind the counter and led them to a backroom. “Okay, friend,” he said to Shannon. “Let me see who you’re interested in.”

  Shannon handed him pictures of Carver and Gibson. Starks smiled pleasantly at them. “Oh, these two honeys,” he said. “Yeah, they’re very active in the types of films you’re asking about. I’m a big fan of their work. I should be able to get you a complete collection.”

  Starks went through sev
eral boxes against the wall. It took him a while, but when he was done he raked his fingers through his hair to straighten it and handed Shannon a stack of DVDs. Shannon counted seven of them. “A hundred and seventy-five bucks a piece,” Starks said. “And worth every penny of it. All the chicks in these are absolutely gorgeous. Nothing but honeys.”

  There were no titles on them, but each DVD cover showed pictures of either Linda with another woman or a threesome with Carver joining in. Shannon could feel his palms sweat when he recognized Melissa Cousins in one of the pictures. Another showed the same woman who had confronted him at True Light’s compound. Others looked familiar.

  “Any idea how much money someone can make producing these?” Shannon asked.

  “Not my expertise. I’m only the little guy in the chain who sells them. But there’s big bucks involved. A large market for these puppies, and for good reason. They’re more raw, more alive than X-rated productions. And as you can see, much more expensive. But after a while you get bored with the studio releases, so what are you going to do?”

  Shannon nodded towards a monitor and DVD player in the room. “I’d like to look at them first before buying.”

  Starks’ eyes glazed. He smiled at Shannon. “Yeah, sure, friend, if that’s what you’d like. I’d have to ask for a small rental fee. Thirty bucks per DVD. Cash only.”

  Shannon was tapped out at a hundred and fifty cash. Maguire came up with the rest. Starks took the cash and gave both men an oily smile. “Knock yourself out, boys,” he said before leaving.

  There were a couple of chairs by the monitor and DVD player. Shannon and Maguire both elected to stand. Shannon went through each DVD as quickly as he could, fast-forwarding through most of it and stopping only to try to recognize the women involved. They all started off the same, with Linda taking one of the cult members to the bed, the two women undressing, engaging in different sex acts, then later Carver joining in. Through all of it either heavy metal or grunge music blasted in the background. Nirvana and Metallica were used a lot. A few times instead of Carver, an ugly skinny kid with tattoos took his place. After a couple of times coming across this same kid, Shannon realized he was Carver’s brother, Randall.