Nigel had introduced him as “our domestic refuse expert. ” Simone couldn’t place his age; he could’ve been anywhere from twenty-five to fifty under all that hair. But his age didn’t matter. Elliot had that stillness, that steady, calm gaze that said experience. He came armed with two pairs of thick rubber gloves—one for Simone, one for himself.
God help me, thought Simone as she slid behind the wheel of the rented Chevy Malibu, the domestic refuse expert riding shotgun. I’m about to steal someone’s trash.
Twin rivulets of sweat trickled down her ribs, settled somewhere in the waistband of her jeans. It was a cold sweat, like runoff from ice cubes, and it made her heart pound. She craved a beer.
“Isn’t this illegal?” Simone said.
Elliot shrugged.
“That a yes or a no?”
He shrugged again.
She turned the ignition, flipped on the air conditioner, adjusted her seat, and cleared her throat—just to hear a noise that wasn’t mechanical. Does Elliot ever say anything? Was he born without a tongue? Then she pulled out of the parking lot onto the road.
Simone knew the address. She’d looked it up on MapQuest back at the office: 1020 Linda Vista, in the Hollywood Hills. With no traffic, MapQuest had said, the ride should take around twenty minutes. Twenty minutes and she’d be getting out of this car, putting on the gloves, and sifting through the trash can of Emerald Deegan—the youngest, skinniest housewife on the popular nighttime soap Suburban Indiscretions. They were supposed to be looking, Nigel had said, “for evidence of cocaine addiction and/or eating disorder.”
Think of it as investigative reporting. A fact-finding mission. No one will mind. You’re not hurting anyone. . . .
Elliot said, “You like Duran Duran?” and Simone jumped a little. His voice was higher than she’d expected, reedy.
“Ummm . . .”
Elliot slipped a CD into the player, and when the song started, he turned the volume up so high that Simone could feel the thumping bass in her kidneys, her intestine.
“Hungry Like the Wolf.” A song nearly as old as Simone . One minute you’re a baby, the next you’re three thousand miles from home, driving a rental car up Beverly Drive at midnight with a Unabomber look-alike, getting ready to pick through some soap star’s used Kleenex. . . .
She saw a row of green traffic lights in front of her, a path beckoning her all the way up Beverly. She looked down at the rubber gloves bunched up in her lap and tried to think of something to say.
Elliot was harmonizing pretty well. His voice had a sort of woodwind quality. “Do, do, do, do, do, do, do . . .” When Simone turned to look at him, though, he stopped. “Don’t worry,” he said.
“How did you know I was worried?”
“I’m guessing you’ve never driven a getaway car before. ”
“A getaway . . .”
“Sssshhh.” He put a finger to his lips and pointed to the CD player. “My favorite part.” Still watching Simone, he mouthed words about catching the scent of human prey and being lost, then found. . . .
Simone braked at Sunset—a four-way stop on a very busy street, with no traffic lights, just signs. LA had a lot of these, and Simone wondered why. Maybe it was some city planner’s way to force people to pay attention to one another. Stop talking on your cell phone and staring at your reflection and look at your fellow human beings, just for a moment. Take enough interest in them to determine whether they’re stopping or going. It could mean your life.
Whatever, it was annoying.
It seemed Simone always let five or six people cross the intersection before she worked up the guts to do it herself. And tonight, she was even more reticent about it than usual.
Elliot was singing about his mouth being alive with juices like wine. She didn’t want to think about juices in Elliot’s mouth. Okay, deep breath. . . .
Soon, she would take a right on Sunset, head toward Hollywood. She’d pass some of those mansions she’d seen on the Map of the Stars’ Homes she’d bought on her first day here. Excited as only someone who’d never been to LA could be, Simone had sat in the front seat of her Jeep and skimmed through the color-coded name index on the inside flap: Ava Gardner, Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis Jr., Freddie Prinze. . . . Unbelievable. Every star on the map was dead.
Elliot stopped singing and said, “Hey, what’s on your mind?”
“Dead celebrities.”
“Cool.” To their left was the Beverly Hills Hotel. Its garden lights illuminated Elliot’s eyes. They were white blue, like a malamute’s. They scared her a little.
Emerald Deegan lived somewhere behind a wrought-iron gate, out of which glinted the beady red eye of a surveillance camera. “Big Brother’s watching,” Elliot hissed when Simone climbed Linda Vista and pulled up to the curb, just in front of Emerald’s garbage cans.
“Oh, shit. Sorry.”
He opened the glove compartment and took out a map. “Pretend you’re reading this, count to eight, then pull away from the curb and drive thirty more feet.”
By no mistake did Linda Vista mean “pretty view” in Spanish. The street ran straight up a mountain, on a near ninety-degree angle. Thirty more feet, and Linda Vista ended in a cul-de-sac, easily a mile up in the air. This city was all heights and depths—a testing ground for emergency brakes. As Simone parked, she yawned to stop her ears from clicking.
Elliot said, “I think you’re better off staying in the car.”
“I’m not sleepy,” said Simone. “Just getting used to the alt—”
“I know.”
She looked at him. “So . . . I’m not good enough to steal garbage?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Keep the car running.”
At least he trusts you to drive the getaway car. Simone sighed, raked her fingers through her short, spiky hair.
Doing this, touching her own hair, felt as strange as anything else did tonight. Her whole life she’d worn it blunt-cut at the shoulders. Shiny, medium brown—wholesome, as her mother liked to say. But she’d lopped it off and poured henna all over it before driving across the country.
Back then, Simone thought the hairstyle added a few years to her face, made her less approachable. After she’d washed the dye out and fixed it a little, she’d looked at herself in her bathroom mirror and whispered, “Intimidating. ” She’d pictured a layout in the New York Times Magazine—Simone leaning against a brick wall, unsmiling in her favorite black tank top, THE NEW FACE OF INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING hovering over her head in a bold red font that brought out the maroon in her hair. That night, Greta had dropped by her apartment, taken one look at Simone, and said, “Well, it’s a good thing you want to go into print.”
Simone closed her eyes and felt the silence thickening. What was Elliot doing out there, anyway?
She turned around. At first she saw nothing but the olive green plastic garbage cans outside Emerald’s gate. Then she noticed the lids were open. Finally, she saw Elliot—the black-clad shadow that was Elliot—replacing the lids and trotting up the steep sidewalk with a shocking grace. Swift despite the heat and the three overstuffed bags he’d slung over his narrow shoulders. A trash ninja—that’s what he is. What an incredibly weird thing to be skilled at.
Simone popped the trunk as Elliot opened the back door. “No trunks, man,” he said.
The smell of the garbage was overpowering. She gritted her teeth. “Are you kidding me?”
“I don’t trust trunks. Gotta be able to see the take.”
He slammed the trunk closed and leapt into the passenger’s seat. Gotta be able to see the take? What is that supposed to mean? Simone winced and turned the air conditioner up full blast.
As she hung a U-turn she glanced at the three garbage bags, side by side in the backseat like fat, stinking school-children.
“I forgot the recycling,” said Elliot.
“Do you want me to—”
“Nah, screw it. Nothing newsworthy in the recycling bins. She’s not in AA.”
“We’d get arrested if we stuck around that long.”
“So this is illegal.”
“No, it’s not. Once the trash hits the can, it’s public property.”
“Then what—”
“Trespassing, impersonating sanitation workers. . . . Emerald’s people would trump something up, and with those fucking stalker laws, it’d probably stick.” Elliot’s hand shot in front of Simone’s eyes, a small pot of goo clasped between his thumb and index finger. “Rose salve,” he said. “Wipe a little under your nose.”
Now the car smelled like sewage and roses.
“It’s the great equalizer, you know,” said Elliot.
“Rose salve?”
“Trash,” he said. “You see what Emerald Deegan wore to the Emmys?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s just say the earrings alone could keep me in hookers and Courvoisier for at least five years.”
“Okay. . . .”
“But lo and behold, her trash stinks just as much as mine.”
“You can say that again.” Simone tried opening a window, but that only made it worse, the hot Santa Anas rushing into the car, sucking the sour, decaying smell out of the tightly closed bags and swirling it straight up Simone’s nostrils.
“You know whose garbage really reeks? That chick who used to sleep with . . . George Clooney, I think. Or maybe Nic Cage. No, wait a minute, I think she was nailin’ that guy from the reality show who ate the live rats. . . .” Elliot kept talking, barely taking a breath between words. He went from zero to one hundred, this guy. Quiet as a gravestone ’til he stole a few trash bags and turned into Chatty Cathy. Simone could tell he was on some kind of professional high, and that perplexed her as much as anything else.
On the most practical level, she couldn’t figure out how he could even open his mouth, what with that stench. Santa Anas or not, there was something else in there besides food scraps and . . . what was it they were supposed to be looking for? Razors edged with white dust? Empty boxes of Ex-Lax?
No, this was earthier, more clinging.
“Elizabeth Taylor,” Elliot was saying now. “She’d put a little jasmine oil in her Heftys, sometimes a clove potpourri, just to make our job easier. Now that’s a star. They don’t make ’em like that anymore. . . .”
“Elliot,” Simone said, “do you have any idea what that smell could be?”
“If I give you my professional opinion, you have to promise you won’t freak out.”
“Try me.”
Elliot aimed his eyes at Simone’s tense profile. “It’s death.”
TWO
“Do I just . . .”
“Dig in,” said Elliot.
They were on the floor of the reporters’ room with Nigel pacing behind them and Emerald Deegan’s refuse in front of them, atop a spread-out tarp. They’d been planning on going through the garbage in the alleyway next to the building, but Nigel had called Elliot’s cell with at least four Red Bulls coursing through his veins, shouting, “I cannot be expected to wait any longer!”
So they’d done as told, with Elliot hauling all three bags into the elevator and Simone holding three empties and the tarp, which Elliot had stashed in the rental car’s trunk. The idea: Sort out the trash, place irrelevant items in the new bags, and bring them downstairs to the building’s Dumpsters as quickly as possible, before the smell had time to sink in. Newsworthy garbage would be brought into Nigel’s office.
The reporters’ room’s windows didn’t open, and even though the air conditioner was turned up to its highest level, Simone knew that, no matter how fast they went, the stink would linger well into the following day. The death stink. It sickened her, yes, but it disturbed her more—and Elliot’s sense of humor didn’t help. Throughout the car ride back to the office he’d offered up speculations as to what could be rotting in the bags—from Emerald’s movie career to the severed head of someone who tried to offer her a donut.
“If you find, uh, anything in there that used to be attached to her cheating boyfriend, don’t show it to me, okay?” he was saying now. “Some things even I can’t look at.”
“That reminds me,” said Nigel. “I’ve heard Emerald had her tubes tied, so used condoms are considered newsworthy. ”
Simone shuddered.
Elliot said, “Hey, that’s why we’ve got the gloves.”
Simone held her breath as she untied the knot.
Elliot had opened his bag long before. Quickly, efficiently, he was pulling out items and placing them in an empty bag, categorizing them in a quiet monotone: “One rotten bunch of carrots. Six plastic-wrapped Zone meals, uneaten. One twenty-three-hundred-dollar receipt from . . . a clothing store called . . . the People’s Republic.” He stopped for a moment, looked at Simone. “Don’t think about what you’re doing. Just do it.”
Simone’s eyes watered. She reached her hand into her bag, grateful for the gloves and even for the sticky rose salve under her nose, but wishing, deeply, for one of those white hazmat suits. Don’t think about the death stink. Don’t think about the death stink. . . .
Something soft and limblike brushed the back of her glove. “Oh. . . .” Her throat tightened. She pushed the bag away.
“What?” said Nigel.
Elliot came up behind her. “This what you’re ohing about?” He pulled out a good-sized spoiled zucchini.
Simone said, “A little spooked, I guess. You know . . . the death smell.”
“There’s no ruddy death smell,” said Nigel.
Elliot said, “Maybe it’s just cat turds.”
Investigative reporting, investigative reporting, investigative. . . Simone removed three rotting tomatoes, a wasted head of broccoli, a mangled butternut squash. “Emerald Deegan does not eat her vegetables.”
“Next week’s headline,” Nigel snapped. “Keep working. We don’t have all night.”
Elliot was already on the third bag. “You know what’s weird to me? Deegan is a PETA spokesperson.”
“So?” said Simone.
“I always figured animal rights activists would have better-smelling trash.”
Nigel said, “Anyone find a condom yet?”
Simone reached back into her bag, felt a slender, sharp object, and started to pluck it out. But when Elliot said, “Found something!” she dropped it.
Nigel said, “What have you found?”
“Four dead bodies.”
“Oh, my God,” Simone breathed. “Wait. How could there possibly be four . . .”
“Well, for one thing,” he said, “they’re not human.”
They were birds. Four parakeets in various stages of decomposition, tossed into garbage bags without the benefit of a shoe box.
“Just this past week, Emerald told People she’d never eat anything with a face.” Nigel looked at the ruined little bodies, laid out on a paper towel that he’d spread across his desk. “Eating these poor dears would have been far more kind.”
Wearing Elliot’s gloves, Nigel picked up the most intact between his thumb and forefinger. Around six inches in length, its feathers were a sort of glowing, caution-light yellow. He glanced at Elliot. “Unusual.”
“I’m on it.”
The bureau chief’s thin lips barely contained a grin. He was thrilled, that was for sure, but Simone couldn’t figure out why. “Can I ask a question?” she said.
Nigel peered at her, as if he’d only just become aware of her existence in the universe.
“I . . . I was just wondering about the birds.” She shot a look at Elliot, who was sitting cross-legged on the office floor, frantically typing into a laptop. “I mean, it’s horrible the way they were thrown out like that. But . . .”
“But what?” Nigel said.
“It doesn’t seem like an Asteroid story. Emerald Deegan doesn’t give a proper burial to her pet birds.
It’s not what you’d call . . . juicy.”
“Oh, we’re not going to run it,” said Nigel. “We’re going to use it.”
“Bingo-fucking-roonie,” said Elliot.
“Speak to me.”
“I think you’re best off seeing this yourself.”
Elliot brought the laptop to Nigel’s desk and set it down in front of him with a maitre d’s flourish. “Dinner is served,” he said.
One minute later, Nigel was shouting into his cell phone. “Muzzy! Muzzy Schindler?”
Simone looked at Elliot.
“Emerald’s flack,” he said.
“It’s one thirty in the morning,” said Simone.
“Scandal never sleeps.”
“Muzzy,” Nigel was saying, “I wouldn’t hang up on me if I were you. . . . Why? For one thing, I have some very disturbing information about your girl Emerald. . . . Oh, but I do.” He paused for several seconds, the grin spreading across his gaunt face like butter melting on a grill.
Elliot whispered, “Wait for it. . . . Here it comes. . . .”
“Do the words ‘illegal poaching’ mean anything to you?”
“Yesss!”
As Simone listened, the bureau chief explained to Muzzy that her prized client, PETA poster girl Emerald Deegan, had in her possession four rare golden parakeets, poached from the Brazilian rain forest. An endangered species, illegal to keep as pets, they’d received the most horrific treatment after death. And . . . well . . . Nigel wasn’t absolutely certain, but he’d be willing to wager that during their all-too-brief lives, the birds had been undernourished. Possibly even abused. “PETA Princess Pummels Puny Poached Parakeets! ” He practically sang it. “You know, it’s just as shocking as it is alliterative. Care to confirm? Deny? Comment at all?”
Simone watched Nigel say all of this, every word, without interruption. He could take his time now. No one was hanging up on him. Elliot winked at Simone, because he too was aware of Muzzy Schindler’s sudden, staggering respect for a man whom two minutes ago she’d viewed as tabloid scum, an irritating noise on the other end of the phone.
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