Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

  I was starting to think about leaving before undergoing the embarrassment of waiting for my battered Mustang to be brought around front, when there was a commotion of raised voices out on the patio, and I saw someone - a gaunt middle-aged man in a black suit - go into the pool fully dressed. It was difficult to find out what had happened, because everyone was crowding around the water’s edge. All I know is, when they pulled him out of the chlorine a minute later, he was dead. I read in the LA Times next day that he’d twisted his neck hitting the concrete lip as he went in, and had died within seconds. He was granted a brief obituary inVariety because he’d featured in a lame Disney film called Monkeys, Go Home. I remember thinking that the press reports were being uncharacteristically cautious about the death. I guess nobody wanted to risk implying that Dell had been keeping a disorderly house, and there was no suggestion of it being anything other than an unfortunate accident. Dell was a big player in a union town.

  As I drove back to the valley that night, passing above the crystalline grid of the city, I passed one of the beautiful girls walking alone along the side of the road with her shoes in her hand, thumbing a ride, and knew she’d come here from the Midwest, leaving all her friends and family behind just so she could be hired as eye-candy to stand around at parties. I remember thinking how nobody would miss her if she disappeared. I felt sad about it, but I didn’t stop for her. Black men didn’t stop to pick up white girls back then; you didn’t want a situation to develop.

  The work dried up for a couple of months, but on a storm-heavy night in February I was invited to another studio party, this time at a more low-key affair in Silverlake, where single palms crested the orange sky on the brows of hills, and Hispanic families sat in their doorways watching their kids play ball. You can tell poorer neighbourhoods by the amount of cabling they carry above their houses, and this area had plenty. I pulled over by an empty lot and was still map-reading under the street lamp when I heard the dull thump of music start up behind me, and realized the party was being held in a converted brownstone loft - they were pretty much a novelty back then - so I parked and made my way to the top floor of the party.

  The building’s exterior may have been shabby, but the inside was Carrier class. The whole top floor had been stripped back to brickwork and turned into one big space, because the owner was a photographer who used it as his studio. He handled on-set shoots for Paramount, and had coincidentally taken my head-shots a couple of years earlier. It was good to think he hadn’t forgotten me, and this event was a lot friendlier than the last. I recognized a couple of girls I’d auditioned with the month before, and we got to talking, then sharing a joint. The music was Hendrix - Electric Ladyland, I think. Pulmonary gel-colours spun out across the walls, and the conversation was louder, edgier, but it was still a pretty high-end layout.

  It was the photographer’s thirtieth birthday and he’d invited some pretty big names, but it was getting harder to tell the old money from the new, because everyone was dressed down in beads and kaftans. The new producers and actors were sprawled across canary-yellow beanbags in a narcoleptic fug, while the industry seniors stuck to martinis at the bar. I was having a pretty good time with my lady-friends when I saw them again.

  Perhaps because nobody had noticed me at Dell’s house, I noticed everything, and now I recognized the new arrivals as they came in. There were four of them, two girls and two men, all in late-teens to mid-twenties, and I distinctly recalled them from Dell’s Christmas party because they’d stood together in a tight group, as though they didn’t know anyone else. They were laughing together and watching everyone, as though they were in on a private joke no one else could share.

  I admit I was a little stoned and feeling kind of tripped out, but there was something about them I found unsettling. I got the feeling they hadn’t been invited, and were there for some other purpose. They stayed in the corner, watching and whispering, and I wanted to go up to them, to ask what they were doing, but the girls were distracting me and - you know how that goes.

  I left a few minutes after midnight, just as things were starting to heat up. I went with the girls back to their hotel. They needed a ride, and I needed the company. When I woke up the next morning, they had already vacated the room. There was only a lipstick-scrawled message from them on the bathroom mirror, plenty of kisses but no contact numbers. I picked up the industry dailies in the IHOP on Santa Monica, and there on page five found a report of the party I’d attended the night before. Some high-society singer I’d vaguely recalled seeing drunkenly arguing with his girlfriend had fallen down the stairs as he left the party, gone all the way from the apartment door to the landing below. He was expected to recover but might have sustained brain damage. Fans were waiting outside his hospital room with flowers.

  Two parties, two accidents - it happens. There were studio parties all over town every night of the week, but it felt weird that I’d been at both of them. You had to be invited, of course, but there wasn’t the strict door policy that there is now, no security guards with headsets, sometimes not even a checklist. People came and went, and it was hard to tell if anyone was gatecrashing; the hosts generally assumed you wouldn’t dare. They were insulated from the world. I remember attending a shindig in Brentwood where the toilet overflowed through the dining room, and everyone acted like there was nothing wrong because they assumed the maids would clear it up. Hollywood’s like that.

  Maybe you can see a pattern emerging in this story, but at the time I failed to spot it. I was too preoccupied; with auditions, with my career, with having a good time. The town felt different then, footloose and slightly lost, caught between classic old-time movie-making and the rising counterculture. They needed to cater to the new generation of rootless teens who were growing impatient with the world they’d been handed. The producers wanted to make renegade art statements but didn’t know how, and they couldn’t entirely surrender the movies of the past. People forget that Hello Dolly! came out the same year as Easy Rider.

  Strange times. In Vietnam, Lt William Calley’s platoon of US soldiers slaughtered 500 unarmed Vietnamese, mainly women and children, at My Lai. Many of us had buddies over there, and heard stories of old women thrown down wells with grenades tossed in after them. Those who were left behind felt powerless, but there was an anger growing that seeped between the cracks in our daily lives, upsetting the rhythm of the city, the state, and eventually the whole nation. I’d never seen demonstrations on the streets of LA before now, and I’d heard the same thing was happening in Washington, Chicago, even in Denver.

  But nothing affected the Hollywood elite; they hung on, flirting with subversion when really, what they wanted to make was musicals. They still threw parties, though, and the next one was a killer.

  This was the real deal, a ritzy Beverly Hills bash with a sizeable chunk of the A-list present, thrown in order to promote yet another Planet Of The Apes movie. The sequels were losing audiences, so one of the executive producers pulled out the stops and opened up his mansion - I say his, but I think it had been built for Louise Brooks - to Hollywood royalty. This time there were security guards manning the door, checking names against clipboards, questioning everyone except the people who expected to be recognized. Certainly I remember seeing Chuck Heston there, although he didn’t look very happy about it, didn’t drink and didn’t stay long. The beautiful girls had turned out in force, clad in brilliantly jewelled mini-dresses and skimpy tops, slyly scoping the room for producers, directors, anyone who could move them up a career notch. A bunch of heavyweight studio boys were playing pool in the smoke-blue den while their women sat sipping daiquiris and dishing dirt. The talent agents never brought their wives along for fear of becoming exposed. I’d been invited by a hot little lady called Cheyenne who had landed a part in the movie purely because she could ride a horse, although I figured she’d probably ridden the producer.

  So there we were, stranded in this icing-pink stucco villa with matching crescent staircases, dingy
brown wall tapestries and wrought-iron chandeliers. I took Cheyenne’s arm and we headed for the garden, where we chugged sea breezes on a lawn like a carpet of emerald needles. Nearby, a fake-British band playing soft rock in a striped marquee filled with bronze statues and Santa Fe rugs. I was looking for a place to put down my drink when I saw the same uninvited group coming down from the house, and immediately a warning bell started to ring in my head.

  It was a warm night in March, and most people were in the torch-lit garden. The Uninvited - that’s how I had come to think of them - helped themselves to cocktails and headed to the crowded lawn, and we followed.

  “See those people over there?” I said to Cheyenne. “You ever see them before?”

  She had to find her glasses and sneak them on, then shook her glossy black hair at me. “The square-jawed guy on the left looks like an actor. I think I’ve seen him in something. The girls don’t seem like they belong here.”

  “What it is, I’m beginning to think there’s some really harmful karma around them.” I told her about the two earlier parties.

  “That’s nuts,” she laughed. “You think they could just go around picking fights and nobody would notice?”

  “People here don’t notice much, they’re too busy promoting themselves. Besides, I don’t think it’s about picking fights, more like bringing down a bad atmosphere. I don’t know. Let’s get a little closer.”

  We sidled alongside one of the men, who was whispering something to the shorter, younger of the two girls. He was handsome in a dissipated way, she had small feral features, and I tried figuring them first as a couple, then part of a group, but couldn’t get a handle on it. The actor guy was dressed in an expensive blue Rodeo Drive suit, the other was an urban cowboy. The short girl was wearing the kind of cheap cotton sunflower shift they marked down at FedCo, but her taller girlfriend had gold medallions around her throat that must have cost plenty.

  Now that I noticed, they were all wearing chains or medallions. The cowboy guy had a pony tail folded neatly beneath his shirt collar, like he was hiding it. Something about them had really begun to bother me, and I couldn’t place the problem until I noticed their eyes. It was the one thing they all had in common, a shared stillness. Their unreflecting pupils watched without moving, and stayed cold as space even when they laughed. Everyone else was milling slowly around, working the party, except these four, who were watching and waiting for something to happen.

  “You’re telling me you really don’t see anything strange about them?” I asked.

  “Why, what do you think you see?”

  “I don’t know. I think maybe they come to these parties late, uninvited. I think they hate the people here.”

  “Well, I’m not that crazy about our hosts, either,” she said. “We’re here because we have to be.”

  “But they’re not. They just stand around, and cause bad things to happen before moving on,” I told Cheyenne. “I don’t know how or why, they just do.”

  “Do you know how stoned that sounds?” she hissed back at me. “If they weren’t invited, how did they get through security?” She reached on tiptoe and looked into my eyes. “Just as I thought, black baseballs. Smoking dope is making you paranoid. Couldn’t you just try to enjoy yourself?”

  So that’s what I did, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the guest dying in the pool, and the guy who had fallen down the stairs. We stayed around for a couple more hours, and were thinking about going when we found ourselves back with the Uninvited. A crowd had gathered on the deck and were dancing wildly, but there they were, the four of them, dressed so differently I couldn’t imagine they were friends, still sizing things up, still whispering to each other.

  “Just indulge me this one time, okay?” I told Cheyenne. “Check them out, see if you can see anything weird about them.”

  She sighed and turned me around so that she could peer over my shoulder. “Well, the square-jawed guy is wearing something around his neck. Actually, they all are. I’ve seen his medallion before, kind of a double-headed axe? It means God Have Mercy. There are silver beads on either side of it, take a look. Can you see how many there are?”

  I checked him out. The dude was so deep in conversation with the short girl that he didn’t notice me. “There are six on each side. No, wait - seven and six. Does that mean something?”

  “Sure, coupled with the double axe, it represents rebellion via the thirteen steps of depravity, ultimately leading to the new world order, the Novus Or dor Seclorum. It’s a satanic symbol. My brother told me all about this stuff. He read a lot about witchcraft for a while, thought he could influence the outcome of events, but then my mother made him get a job.” She pointed discreetly. “The girl he’s talking to is wearing an ankh, the silver cross with the loop on top? It’s the Egyptian symbol for sexual union. They’re pretty common, you get them in most head shops. Oh, wait a minute.” She craned over my shoulder, trying to see. “The other couple? She’s wearing a gold squiggle, like a sideways eight with three lines above it. That’s something to do with alchemy, the sign for black mercury maybe. But the guy, the cowboy, he’s wearing the most potent icon. Check it out.”

  I looked, and saw a small golden five lying on his bare tanned chest. Except it wasn’t a five; there was a crossed line above it. “What is that?”

  “The Cross of Confusion, the symbol of Saturn. Also known as the Greater Malefic, the Bringer of Sorrows. Saturn takes twenty-nine years to orbit the sun, and as a human life can be measured as just two or three orbits, it’s mostly associated with the grim reaper’s collection of the human soul, the acknowledgment that we have a fixed time before we die, the orbit of life. However, we can alter that orbit, cut a life short in other words. It’s a satanic death symbol, very powerful.”

  I got a weird feeling then, a prickle that started on the back of my neck and crept down my arms. I was still staring at the cowboy when he looked up and locked eyes with me, and I saw the roaring, infinite emptiness inside him. I never thought I was susceptible to this kind of stuff, but suddenly, in that one look, I was converted.

  We were still locked into each other when Cheyenne nudged me hard. “Quit staring at him, do you want to cause trouble?”

  “No,” I told her, “but there’s something going down here, can’t you feel it? Something really scary.”

  “Maybe they just don’t like black dudes, Julius. Or maybe they’re aliens. I really think we should go.”

  Just then, the Uninvited turned as one and walked slowly to the other side of the dancing crowd until I could no longer see them properly. A few moments later I heard the fight start, two raised male voices. I’d been half-expecting it to happen, but when it did the shock still caught me.

  He was in his late fifties, balding but shaggy-haired, dressed in a yellow Keep On Truckin’ T-shirt designed for someone a third his age. I saw him throw a drink and swing a fat arm, fist clenched, missing by a mile. Maybe he was pushed, maybe not, but I saw him lose his balance and go over onto the table as if the whole things was being filmed in slow motion. The kidney-shaped sheet of glass that exploded and split into three sections beneath him sliced through his T-shirt as neatly as a scalpel, and everyone jumped back. God forbid the guests might ruin their shoes on shards of glass.

  He was lying as helpless as a baby, unable to rise. A couple of girls squealed in revulsion. When he tried to lift himself onto his elbows, a wide, dark line blossomed through the cut T-shirt. He flopped and squirmed, calling for help as petals of blood spread across his shirt. The music died and I heard his boot heels hammering on the floor, then the retreating crowd obscured my view. Nobody had rushed to his aid; they looked like they were waiting for the Mexican maids to appear and draw a discreet cloth over the scene so that they could return to partying.

  Why didn’t I help? I have no answer to that question. Maybe I was more like the others back then, afraid of being the first to break out of the line. I feel differently now.

  Cheyenne was
pulling at my sleeve, trying to get me to leave, but I was looking for the Uninvited. If they were still there, I couldn’t see them. They’d brought misfortune to the gathering once more and disappeared into the despairing confusion of the Los Angeles night.

  As I had twice before, I found myself searching the papers next morning for mention of the drama, but any potential scandal had been hastily hushed up. I lost touch with Cheyenne for a while, even began to think I’d imagined the whole thing, because the next month my career took off and I stopped smoking dope. I’d landed the lead role in a new movie about a street-smart black P.I. called Dynamite Jones, and I needed to keep my head straight, because the night schedule was punishing and I couldn’t afford to screw up.

  We wrapped the picture in record time, without any serious hitches, although my white love interest was replaced with a black girl two days in, and our big love scene was cut to make sure we didn’t upset the heartland audiences. Perry Sapirstein held the wrap party at his house on Mulholland because they were striking the set and we could keep the studio space. I figured it was a good time to hook up with Cheyenne again -she’d been in Chicago appearing in an anti-war show that had tanked, and wanted to get a little more serious with me while she was waiting for another break out West.