They looked at each other.
“Well,” Dante said, “let’s give the others the good news.”
Neither of them moved.
TJ said:
“How about you take the stairs, and I’ll take the elevator. Nothing personal.”
IX
When the shotgun blast came, it was indescribably loud.
X
Dustin Walker’s estate did not simply have a pool. No, that would have been far too pedestrian. Instead, it had pools—three—each set on manmade steppes behind the house, each spilling over into the next in gentle waterfalls and draining into the largest pool at the very bottom, a steaming whirlpool jutting out over a sea cliff and surrounded by cabana chairs. The sun had set completely by the time the blast rang out, and the ankle-high lamps lining the paths and steps around the pool burned on.
By the time a witness arrived at the uppermost patio to investigate the gunshot they all had heard, the corpse had already drifted down from the top pool to the second one. It was lying facedown, an amorphous cloud of blood billowing from where its face used to be, trailing up to the highest pool, where bits of bloody bandage and gauze still floated.
Or maybe that wasn’t gauze.
Maybe that was skin.
“Oh, my holy God,” Meredith Ladipo said, emerging from the sliding glass doors leading into the playroom. A narrow concrete causeway jutted into the top pool and stopped at a central octagonal platform appointed with cushions and a fire pit. Meredith walked out to the pit and peered over the edge at the fully clothed figure. “Are you—are you all right?” she called out, rather unnecessarily.
The body drifted over the edge of the waterfall and flipped onto its back. As it dropped to the lowest level, it was obvious that Janet Kahn would never respond to anyone’s query ever again.
That’s Racist
So I want to talk about racism for just a bit.
Wait—no! Don’t leave. Come on back now, hear a brother out. It’s still gonna be funny. I promise. There you go. Thank you, thank you. There will be a ton of dick jokes afterward as a reward. I swear. Come on back now. Okay.
No, race is a funny thing, man. Used to be people would be all like, “Americans don’t like to talk about race. Black and white Americans need to have a conversation on race. We need to talk about race. We got to talk it out. Confront that shit. Don’t leave it repressed. Americans are repressed about race.”
I just don’t feel like that’s true anymore, man. I feel like now people won’t shut the fuck up about it, you know what I’m saying?
Like, are you like me? Do you have white friends that are a million times quicker to accuse other motherfuckers of being racist than you are? Like every day on Twitter is the March on Washington and they’re Dr. King with a melanin deficiency?
White people love to call other white people racist, man. They fucking loooooooove that shit. “How can you make that joke? That’s racist. How can you sing that song? That’s racist. How can you not serve that guy at that lunch counter just because—”
Oh, wait. That is racist. Sorry. My bad.
But it sends a blast of white endorphins through their white brains, man! It gives them little white goose bumps on their white skin. They love it. ‘Cause they know that means they’re okay. They’re one of the good people. Ahhh, yeah. It feels so good.
Only goes to prove one thing.
White people will steal anything.
I’m serious! I mean any goddamn thing! Calling out other people’s racism, we used to have a monopoly on that. And they just swooped right in and straight-up jacked that shit.
The Vikings, Christopher Columbus, Elvis Presley. Land. Culture. Kardashians. If it’s not nailed down and weighed with giant chains, white people will fucking take that shit and say it was theirs all along. And if it didn’t start out being theirs, they’ll say they do it better than you anyway, so you didn’t deserve it in the first place.
How do you think we got enslaved, man? “Say, Chip, what are these Negroes doing, running around Africa like they own it? Well we’ll just put a stop to that…Okay, Cody, bring the boat around! Load ’em up!”
Like what’s her name, Rachel Gazelle? Rachel Dizzy Gillespie? Hell is her name? The Before pictures make her look like Hee-Haw Barbie.
Then she darkens her hair, darkens her skin, marries a brother. Says she “identifies” as black.
I wanna identify my foot with the crack of her ass!
Being black ain’t like putting on a Halloween costume! You can’t put on a skin mask like Hannibal Lecter! You can’t steal that shit! What’s wrong with you, woman? Don’t you realize your husband liked you better when you were white?
That is a black man’s worst nightmare. Marry a white bitch, then wake up one morning, turn over in bed and be like, “Aaaaah! What happened? How did I not notice that before? Was I drunk the whole time we was dating?
“She changed races on me after the wedding. That ain’t fair, Your Honor. She took my virtue under false pretenses. That’s false advertising and shit. So I got to ask you to please give me one of them no-fault divorces, or if there’s her-fault divorce, I would rather have one of them because it’s more accurate, Your Honor, sir.”
I mean, you got to hand it to this lady. You just got to. She put on blackface to join the NAACP and go on TV and accuse other white people of being racist. In blackface! That is some next-level shit, man.
When you think about it, Rachel Dolezal is the whitest white person in the history of white people.
Shit. I don’t even know, man. I don’t even know.
I see at least…what? Four…seven white people in the club tonight. What happen, you click on the wrong Yelp directions?
No, no, I’m kidding. I’m glad to see you. When I say that white people are a race of congenital thieves, I don’t mean you; I mean those other white people. The ones who didn’t pay money to come see me. Yeah, the ones you call racist on Twitter. Yeah, no, you guys can stay.
See, the white people here are smiling and nodding. They’re like, no, it’s the other white people who are racist. Not us. We’re the good ones. We own The Wire on BluRay, all five seasons.
We saw that Jackie Robinson documentary on PBS last night, and at the end, when we let him play baseball, we kinda choked up a little.
When Martin Lawrence played that black tomcat in Help! I Married a Cat 4, we all joined in the protest against hacky Dustin Walker.
We felt so proud of America. Fulfilling her promise.
But all the other tables around them—identify the white people, and how close you are to them—and the black people in the tables sitting near them, hold on to your wallets and do not let go of that shit no matter what!
—Dante Dupree
Uptown Comedy Club, Atlanta, GA
November 12, 2015 (third set)
I
People gathered at the top of the pool, but in the twilight gloom no one could make out who arrived when.
“I waited for you!” Dante said when TJ appeared.
TJ’s brow furrowed imperiously. Dante wondered how many hapless 2nite PAs had been on the receiving end of that brow. “Who told you to do that? You’re not my abuela.”
“It was for both of our protection, stupid. I got sick of waiting for you at the top of the stairs.”
“If you were waiting for me, how did you get here first?”
“How did you not get here first?”
“I told you, man, that elevator is really damn slow!”
“Where did you go?” Steve asked Zoe when he saw her gaping on the other side of the top pool.
She couldn’t take her eyes off Janet’s floating body. “I had to take care of a thing.”
“A thing? What thing?”
Finally she looked up at him. “A thing, all right?” she said. “And it’s fine now.”
“Oh, good. I’m so very relieved.”
Ollie Rees said, “I sat down to rest on the sundeck over there. I guess I fe
ll asleep.” He waited for someone to challenge him, or to express any interest whatsoever in his whereabouts. When no one did, he added, “The shot woke me up. I came as soon as I heard it.”
“We all did.” Steve looked at each of the remaining six comics. “Was anyone with Janet? Did anyone see anything?”
They all looked at him and said nothing.
Dante made his way down the steps along the side of the pools. On the bottom level he tried to grab onto the body from the side but couldn’t quite reach. He found a long-handled net mounted along the railing and used it to hook Janet’s left foot, pulling her closer. Zoe and Ruby headed down to join him.
“Was anyone with anyone else at all?” Steve threw up his hands, incredulous. “You guys! That was the whole point of searching in teams!”
Meredith pointed at Ruby. “We split up to look for Ruby! She wandered off by herself! It was her idea, I might add!”
Ruby yelled back, “And I left you with Janet! While she was still alive!”
Everyone looked at Meredith Ladipo.
“Does anybody see the gun?” Dante called to the others as he dragged Janet toward the submerged pool steps. “Look for the gun!”
He grabbed Janet’s body by the wrist to pull it out of the pool and grimaced. She was cold—so very cold, made especially notable by the whirlpool’s heated water.
The others paced up and down the stairs in the dim ankle-level light, looking in bushes. Zoe and Ruby pulled Janet’s body out of Dante’s hands as well as the water. They lay her on the bordering tile without looking at what was once her face, which now had the appearance of a corned beef brisket that had been backed over several times by an SUV.
Once Janet was lying on her back, bloody water puddling around her, Dante reached out again with the net to snag a pool chair floating in the deep end. It was light as a feather, and he was able to pick it up with one hand.
“Found it!” Meredith called. She stood up among some ferns beside the uppermost pool and held up a shotgun by its twin barrels.
“Great,” said TJ, who was up there with her. He stepped toward her, beckoning. “Give it here.”
“Oh no, you get the hell away from me, you spank!” She turned the gun in his direction.
TJ raised his hands and stepped back. “Yeah, that’s making you look so much less guilty.”
“Exactly my point! None of you trusts me! One of you has already attacked me! You obviously won’t believe me, no matter what I say, so I’m going to take proper steps to defend myself!”
“Oh my God,” Steve said suddenly. His eyes widened, but he wasn’t looking at anything particular. “Wait—wait!”
“Nobody move!” Meredith turned the gun on him. “Everyone just calm—”
Steve turned and sprinted into the house without another word.
Meredith stamped a foot. “I have the gun! That means you have to listen to me!”
Steve emerged again, ashen-faced.
“What the hell was that about?” TJ said.
“It’s gone,” Steve said.
“What’s gone?”
“Janet’s photo. It’s not on the wall anymore. Somebody took it. After killing the Shotgun with a shotgun. There’s seven pictures left.”
No one had any idea what to say to that.
II
Oliver Rees was scared of dead things, but he was more scared of getting yelled at for not pulling his weight. So when Dante Dupree asked for help wrapping Janet’s body in a blue tarp he’d found in a plastic trunk by the bottom pool, Ollie volunteered first, followed by Ruby Ng.
Janet reminded him of his mother, in the sense that she was a woman and old, so he knew she should be treated with dignity. He tried not to get his hands anywhere near her HBO parts when they rolled her up.
He tried not to think about how stiff she was, rigor mortis making her limbs unyielding and aquiver whenever you tried to move them, like leafless branches on a rotting tree.
He tried not to notice the bruising on her already gray skin, gravity dragging the blood toward the lower extremities as soon as her heart had stopped beating. He didn’t want to think that this implied the whole universe was ready and waiting for you to die. That your existence was a mistake the natural order was eager to rectify as soon as was allowable.
And he most definitely did not look at the red snarl on the front of her head where her face used to be.
Fortunately they wrapped her quickly and she weighed very little, so he and Dante were able to carry her up the stairs with ease. Soon she was lying on the floor of the writers’ room, next to William Griffith. Dante left as soon as possible, muttering something about washing his hands, which struck Ollie as a pretty good idea.
As he was leaving, however, something on the table caught his eye: the Orange Baby Man Theatre binder he had found in his bedroom and forgotten in the writers’ room, after the whole weekend turned way murderier than the original invitation had led him to expect.
He took the binder and went into the kitchen. He turned on a light and flipped through its pages, looking for comfort in the familiar. But although it was formatted exactly like one of the handbooks he distributed to his satellite franchises, the contents were completely different.
And what he found surprised him.
III
Zoe Schwartz broke into tears when Ollie and Dante walked past her on the top patio bearing Janet Kahn, a legend and even a hero of hers who deserved way, way better than to end her story wrapped up in a blue pool tarp like a frigging human burrito.
Hell, they all did.
Her cry lasted only a minute, and once she rubbed the tears from her eyes, TJ Martinez was in front of her, beckoning her close.
Snorting back snot she said, “What the hell do you want?”
Looking around to make sure everyone else’s attention was focused on the impromptu pallbearers and their damp, crinkling cargo, TJ hissed:
“You and me? I think we should form an alliance.”
IV
“All of you! Stay where I can see you!”
The gaping barrel of the shotgun bobbed in Steve Gordon’s direction as Meredith Ladipo backed through the patio entrance into the playroom. “So, what is your theory, Meredith? That one of us is working with Dustin to enact his judgment on our hackiness from beyond the grave?”
“I don’t have any theory,” Meredith said. “I’m just saying two people have been murdered on this island and I’m looking at the only people who could have bloody murdered them because we are the only bloody people on this bloody island!”
“Well, except you,” Ollie said.
“Except I know I didn’t do it!” Meredith said.
Ollie said, “No, I meant you’re not looking at yourself, and you’re also one of the only people on the island—”
“Shut the fuck up, Ollie,” said Meredith and Steve at the exact same time.
“You guys are mean,” Ollie said.
“Look, I know I didn’t do it, either,” Steve said, “but my saying it doesn’t make you believe me any more, does it? Just like you declaring you’re innocent doesn’t get you off the hook.”
“That’s your problem, not mine,” Meredith said.
“I also know I’m the last person on Earth who would help Dustin Walker do anything criminal, period, much less murder a bunch of total strangers. Which is a lot less than I can say about you, since he was helping you with your career and all.”
“She didn’t do it,” Ruby said.
“How do you know?” Ollie said.
“I just do,” Ruby said.
“Thank you,” Meredith said, “but I don’t know where you were when Janet was shot, so that doesn’t let you off the duff either.”
“I get it,” Ruby said. “Just stating facts.”
Ruby knew Meredith couldn’t have killed Janet because she received the texts from her mystery correspondent while Meredith and Janet were busy bickering over the panic room door. And there was no doubt in Ruby’s
mind that he (and of course it was going to turn out to be a he, I mean really) and Janet’s killer were the same person.
But she hoped there was doubt in the killer’s mind that she knew this, so she didn’t say it out loud. She had narrowed down the suspects to a group she could count on one hand, but she couldn’t put a name or a face to the perpetrator. She was confident she could get him to reveal himself, but she needed to buy time until she figured out what form that unmasking might take.
“There’s another possibility,” said a voice from outside the door, and everyone jumped.
Dante Dupree stepped in from the darkness of the patio. The first thing he saw was Meredith’s shotgun swiveling at him, so he jumped back, too.
“Goddamn, girl, point that thing somewhere else, huh? I’m trying to exonerate your ass.”
He held up a shattered jumble of wood clinging to rusty wire.
“What is that?” Meredith asked, still pointing the gun at him. “What have you got there?”
“It was in the flower beds over by where you found the gun,” Dante said. “Some kind of trip wire.”
Ruby groaned. “Oh, you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“Yeah,” Dante said. “One of those bar tables on the patio is all scratched up. And there was a patio chair in the pool with her.”
Steve’s forehead creased. “And that means…”
“Janet walks across the patio, all innocent as can be, then sits in the chair to take a load off. That triggers the wire; the gun fires remotely. The shot knocks her and the chair into the pool, while the kickback blows the gun and the doodad into the bushes.”
“Wow,” Steve said.
“Crazy-ass Dustin Walker could have poisoned Billy’s—William’s—beer weeks ago. He could have booby-trapped this whole island before he went off to meet with Lenny and Richard and Carlin.”
“Wait,” Meredith said. “What are you saying?”
“That Walker turned this whole damn island into a death trap while you were in L.A., killed himself, and then dumped us all here to die. Either we go batshit and kill each other off, or we starve to death because we don’t know whether or not the food is poisoned, or we end up on the receiving end of one of the fun little party favors he left for us.”
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