Number twelve was a guy, but Davidson had to admit the guy was good, without any of the disturbing grotesquerie of guys who did themselves up like Judy Garland and lip-synched to her songs. The guy was done up as Marilyn doing her Black Magic number in Bus Stop, a perfect outfit right down to the runs in the stockings, and his costume had a professional finish which none of the others could match even though the vital stats card said he’d made it himself. The guy’s legs and ass looked great in the tight costume. Davidson felt a little uncomfortable with that last thought, and then figured what the hell, the guy was really good!
The last contestant, number fifteen, made Davidson stop and stare, his voice lost for the moment. Her name was Jeannie Healy and she was twenty-seven years old. If that platinum-blonde is her real hair color, Davidson thought, I’ll eat my underwear, but damn if it didn’t look real. She was wearing blue jeans, black leather boots, and a thin white cotton shirt. One thing she was not wearing was a bra.
She walked down the runway, timid and stunning as Tom Petty’s American Girl roared from the speakers stacked to either side of the stage.
“Jeez,” Davidson whispered, not realizing the microphone picked up his expression of awe. The crowd hooted and hollered and startled Davidson. He looked down and continued reading from the last card, telling the crowd that Ms. Jeannie Healy was dressed as Marilyn in The Misfits.
The crowd went wild again as this last contestant concluded her walk. The judges were preparing to write down her scores on big white cards when the incident occurred.
Don’t freak out, Jeannie thought, don’t freak out, take a deep breath, and remember that this is just for the money. It isn’t gross or sick or anything, I’m just doing it for the money, and if I win I’ll get out of this shitty place.
She had heard about the contest a week ago. It seemed there was always some kind of Marilyn Monroe look-alike shindig happening somewhere in L.A., but Jeannie had been on the run for a while now, moving through the valley and along the coast, working odd jobs where she could find them. Now she was back in L.A., hoping to win the contest, hoping she’d get together enough money for another bus ticket and a deposit on an apartment somewhere, some place far from Los Angeles . . . but not too far. She liked Southern California, even though she was feeling that it was getting more and more dangerous to be here.
Jeannie was sure that every other contestant would be overdone and garish, so she decided to go the simple route.
She had darkened her eyebrows and her lashes, and was wearing coral lipstick. She’d been growing her hair out anyway, tucking it up under a ball cap while waiting for the last traces of a disastrous red dye job to disappear, so all she had to do was trim the ends and leave the rest. She preferred her natural hair color even though it made her stand out in a crowd. Like her straightened nose, perfect teeth and pale skin, it was just one more bit of physical proof that Eicher had tampered with her genes, making her into something Marilyn could never be. She was closer to being Marilyn than Norma Jeane could ever dream. So Jeannie used that to her advantage. The simple look.
Eicher had even removed the natural curls from Marilyn’s hair, her hair, while tampering with the color. No detail had been missed. He had made sure that as Jeannie matured into womanhood and grew to an exact five feet, five and a half inches tall her left leg was a half-inch shorter than the right, which gave her ass an annoying duck-waddle when she walked. Never mind the fact that Marilyn’s legs had been of equal length and the famous Monroe walk was Marilyn’s own creation achieved by cutting an inch off of one shoe heel or the other to leave her ever so slightly off balance. Jeannie’s waddle attracted a lot of male eyes, but she hated it. Mirroring what Marilyn did so long ago Jeannie made sure all of her left shoes had an insert that gave her a little extra lift under the heel to help her walk normally. For the contest, she left the insert out.
She knew that one of the judges had worked with Monroe on a movie up in Canada, the western with Robert Mitchum and the river, and another was someone who had regularly assisted with Marilyn’s hair. Since the majority of judges were men, she decided to let her hair down literally and figuratively, and go braless. It began as a what-the-hell decision that she told herself would be worth it due to the heat of the day and the edge it might give her over the other contestants.
It’s not like I’m wearing a wet t-shirt, she had thought, as she had gathered her courage backstage.
As the contest had begun she began getting nervous, hoping to put off the inevitable by swapping places with a pretty teenager who was slated to go last. Besides, the last thing she wanted to be was Number Four.
Yet when she finally got up on the stage in front of all those eyes, sweat making her shirt stick to her back and a headache making her wince in the bright sunlight, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. She shared a lot of things with the woman she thought of as her original, but she sure as hell didn’t have Marilyn’s predilection for exhibitionism. As she started down the runway, all too conscious of the way her breasts were shifting under her shirt and how they had become the focus of attention, she became afraid, and then furious at her own foolishness. As she walked, her smile turned into a frown.
She turned and walked back toward the curtains, a place to hide, and remembered that she had chosen to wear boots without an insert under her left heel. She was walking her regular walk, her ass swaying back and forth like the pendulum in a clock. Hoots and whistles filled her ears, and she cursed, turning quickly, backing the rest of the way off the stage.
Davidson was about to raise his hands to applaud when Jeannie Healy backed right into him. Why the hell she’d been walking backwards was beyond him, and he hadn’t intended anything lecherous but now he was cupping one cheek of her ass in his hand, and was he unable to move his hand because even though he knew he was in the wrong it just felt so damned good!
That last thought was blasted out of his head as Ms. Healy spun on one heel, slapped his face and screamed, “You pig! How dare you!”
She stormed off the stage and Davidson whispered, “I’m not a pig. Honestly.”
The judges went berserk.
The woman who had once helped with Marilyn’s hair was mumbling, “It’s her, my God, it’s her.” She’d seen Marilyn get testy when having her over-treated, brittle hair combed out. The comb had caught in the dry, pale strands and pulled painfully, raising a snarl from a hung-over Monroe.
The young sitcom star stood, gave Jeannie two thumbs up and shouted, “Fuckin hawt rack, man!”
The fat author was shifting uncomfortably in his seat and tweaking the crotch of his stretch pants. His face was as red as a pickled beet.
The former Variety columnist glanced at the fat author and said, “Indeed.”
The old horse wrangler who had worked with Marilyn and had witnessed just such a temperamental explosion from her was astounded. He stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed, convinced that he had seen the real thing. Even her voice was perfect. Not the soft breathless coo every other contestant tried to mimic, but the razor-sharp I’m-gonna-claw-some-balls voice of rage that Marilyn dredged up when she was righteously pissed. And the way her tits bounced when she angrily stomped away, the last sight of her being that luscious ass in clinging denim as she lashed out at the curtain and disappeared behind it, Sweet Mary, Mother of Christ! He had witnessed the same wonderful sight of an enraged Marilyn as a young man decades ago and had used that memory as prime beat-off material for years afterward. And now he had his first erection in perhaps a dozen years.
The old cowboy cried, “Number fifteen! It’s her! It’s Marilyn! My God!” And then a stroke blew open a worn blood vessel in his brain, the fierce jet of blood inside his skull causing death so quickly that he died with an obscene, juicy smile on his lips.
The local columnist from the Daily News was taking it all in and scribbling furiously on a notepad.
The crew from KCBS was absolutely delighted.
An ambulance arrived and carried away
the dead man. People in the crowd were cheering and crying as the scores were totaled. Some of the men were trying to pound the shit out of each other in inexplicable bursts of rage. Jeannie was announced the winner and more fights broke out, the violence spilling out onto the street in a full-blown riot as drunken college students pummeled Midwestern tourists in Hard Rock Café T-Shirts.
Jeannie collected her check and disappeared, dodging leering old locals, star-struck tourists, a man who said he was an agent from Tri-Star and who swore he could get her into the movies, and the reporter with his cameraman in tow.
That evening as Americans across the country celebrated their independence a lone technician in Media Monitoring at Compound West saw Jeannie’s face on the news and made a frantic call to his superiors.
14
Let’s Make Love
Will didn’t have a watch, but his inner sense of time was good. He was lying on the bed thinking it was around five o’clock and wishing he could see the sunset when the door opened.
Jeannie took a hesitant step forward as if unsure what to expect in the room. She saw Will standing up with a look of surprise on his face. Before the door lock engaged with a muted thump she had thrown herself into his arms, and then she pulled back as if embarrassed or uneasy.
“How did you get here?” Will looked like a kid on Christmas morning.
“A chubby guy brought me here with some guards,” she said. “Is it okay?”
He laughed. “It’s great.” He told her that they were together because of Dr. Tupper. “He may not be as bad a bad guy as most of the bad guys here.”
Will realized that she was trembling. He stepped back and took a look at her face. She had a wide, ugly bruise on her forehead, and another one forming on the left side of her face.
“Shit,” he whispered. “How’d the other kid come out?”
“I kicked her ass,” Jeannie said, smiling and a little scared at the same time.
Her eyes were so big, so blue and so beautiful. Will had to force himself to look away. “Come over here.” He sat on the bed and waited for her to sit beside him. He could feel her tension. “Hey, it’s okay now.”
Was it? She wondered. She was remembering what Stella had said about him being a killer.
She wouldn’t look at him. He studied the curve of her neck, her ears, and that crazy hair, black with white roots.
“Are you really a clone?” Will asked.
Jeannie ignored him, asking her own question. “Are you a killer?” Will was surprised by her question. “Somebody told me you used to kill people. For money.”
Will shrugged like a kid. “Yeah. But I’m retired. I quit, years ago. But I used to.”
“Why?” Jeannie asked.
She hated violence. The thought of what she had done today sickened her. She felt something for Will, there was no doubt about that, though exactly what her feelings were and where they had come from in such a short time she couldn’t say. People said you could fall in love at first sight. She remembered the way he looked at her when he first came into In the Shade and took a seat at the counter. He’d tried to be discreet, but she’d caught him looking at her a few times. Knowing his eyes were on her legs and her butt and her boobs, which she thought were too short, too big, and near perfect, made her feel weird. Tingly. Was that what it was like to feel pretty? She couldn’t say. All her life men and some women, even before Stella, had looked at her body and her face with a hunger that scared her. Will didn’t scare her in that way. His ability to kill and shrug off the act as if it were nothing did scare her, and she wanted that fear to be gone. She wanted to know how and why he did what he did. Doing it for money made it seem even worse. As long as the rent was paid and there was food in the fridge, she was content. She didn’t really care about money. She just wanted things to be . . . wonderful.
Will’s glibness disappeared. “I grew up in the Compound. From what I understand, I was originally part of a series of experiments in cryogenics, you know, freezing—”
“I know what it means.”
“—but something happened. The old guy running the show, Edmund Stern, got attached to me. Growing up, he was the closest thing to a parent I ever had. And I’ve come to believe that watching me grow up had an effect on him too. I think he finally realized that all of his experiments were more than just numbered bundles of cells and impulses to be studied with a cold, impartial eye. They became living beings just like him. As I grew older he grew more distant from the mindset and objectives of the Compound and from Doctor Eicher, and became more of a father. That old man . . . he was one of the only good things I knew.”
Jeannie’s eyes left Will for a moment, as he mentioned the man who had raised her.
“Eicher wanted me dead from the start. He said I was an aberration, a flawed work that had no purpose, a mistake that was ruining their research and Stern’s objectivity. No one else at the Compound had feelings that strong, but they had no concern for me either. After Stern died, I was completely alone. I was just a tool, a weapon that would be discarded if it could not be put to good use.”
He traced the darkening welt on Jeannie’s cheek with a fingertip. “That day we first met when we were kids? I don’t know if you remember, but I was just a mess of bruises. I was always covered in bruises and cuts, or wearing a cast. I’ve broken more bones than Evel Knievel. That was my education. The Compound likes to protect its interests. Whenever they sense a threat to their own security, however indirect or obscure, they arrange an accident or a murder. For a time I was one of the guys doing that dirty work. It took years of training, and a lot of brainwashing. They convinced me that Stern really didn’t love me, that it was all an act, that Stern had been trying to ruin the Compound, which was my real home and family. And on and on. I was confused. It’s no excuse, but . . . I traveled around. Did some jobs. Earned some money. But in the end I always went back to the Compound. It was stupid. They did a good number on me. One day I broke into their archives and found a print of an old picture of Stern and me. I came to the conclusion that his feelings for me were real. I was just a baby in the photo and the way he was holding me and the look on his face, I knew it was the real thing and that the Compound was full of shit. So I started working on a way out. Killing only assholes that deserved it, taking the Compound’s money and stashing it all over the country. I escaped a couple of times as a kid, once for over a year ...”
Will paused and touched his forehead.
“I can’t really remember much about that time. I was out West. I saw some terrible things. I got hurt, pretty bad, and I was returned to the Compound. I always went back eventually, but one day I just left the Compound for good. They caught me and brought me back a few more times, once here to Compound West, but I slipped away again. I haven’t been back since. I hadn’t really worried about them until the last few years when their goons started following me.”
Jeannie spoke hesitantly. “Just what sort of asshole do you think deserved to be killed?”
Will smiled. “I’ll give you an example. In eighty-three, they wanted me to kill a researcher working at UC Berkeley. She was doing some human genome mapping that was pretty impressive and would eventually make her a bundle of money if she sold her techniques to the highest bidder. At the same time, researchers at the Compound were working on exactly the same thing, and the Compound has always made money selling off the fruits of its labors to government agencies, the military, or private industry. They wanted the researcher dead because she was threatening their potential income. I refused the job. Almost a year later, they wanted me to hit another researcher at Berkeley. This guy was doing experiments on the nature of visual perception, color vision, the limits of spectral sensitivity, things like that. Of course our friends here were working on the same things. This guy I did kill. I made it look like a traffic accident. It was quick. He didn’t suffer. He should have, but he didn’t.”
“And the difference between the two?” Jeannie asked.
&nbs
p; “The woman worked with animal cells to perfect her techniques, and later human cells. A drop of blood. A speck of tissue. The guy at Berkeley used cats. He got them from pound seizures or just off the street. He planted wires in their brains, removed their eyes and sewed their eyelids shut, cut into their brains while they were awake and aware, it was pretty fucking sick. The animals were in constant pain and when their usefulness ended he killed and dissected them. He was easy to kill, cause to me he was a killer.”
“What happened to the woman? Is she okay?”
Will shook his head. “No. A few months after I turned down the job she developed a cancer that ate her up in about six weeks. Christ. I never could figure that one out.”
“And you don’t kill any more?”
“Nope. Well,” he added, “Only when I have to. You’d be surprised what you’re capable of when you’re faced with no choice.”
Jeannie’s reply was hushed. “No, I don’t think I would be surprised.”
Will didn’t say anything as she stood uneasily and began pacing from wall to wall.
“That day when we first met,” she said. “When we were small . . .”
Part of him wanted to watch the way her body moved even in this agitated state. He forced himself to concentrate on her eyes, even though she was avoiding his.
“Yeah. The sandbox.”
“Do you remember Doctor Eicher very well?”
“Do I? Hell, Jeannie, he hated me from the moment I was ... thawed? Defrosted? I was a thorn in his side before you were born.”
Jeannie stopped pacing, her hair hiding her face. Her voice was soft. “He raped me.”
“He’s dead,” Will said in a matter-of-fact tone. “When I get out of here I’ll find that old motherfucker and—”
“I already did.”
“The woman who brought you in, she said you killed a guy. Was it Eicher?”
“Yes,” Jeannie whispered. “I killed him. It was twenty years ago, but sometimes all I have to do is close my eyes and see what I did.”
Made in the U.S.A.: The 10th Anniversary Edition Page 26