High Life

by Matthew Stokoe

  “We have cleaners and a cook, even a chauffeur. But none of them lives on the property. And when they are here I don’t allow them to show themselves.”

  We ate in silence for a while. Bella shot glances at me like she was waiting for something to happen. Powell pretended I wasn’t in the room. I just sat there and wondered what the fuck was going on.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  Bella had stopped eating and was looking at me incredulously. “About what?”

  “About Powell.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure …”

  “If I was part of it? I am. What do you think of our … social conscience?”

  “I don’t have much to go on, do I?”

  “I’m sorry about the spray but it’s a necessary security measure. Gratitude can turn to greed so easily. And we didn’t treat you because it wouldn’t have been ethical working on someone I was interested in. Besides, you aren’t homeless.”

  “You’re a doctor?”

  “Powell has more experience.”

  “Why didn’t you just let me wake up and send me home?”

  “I wasn’t sure I knew you well enough. I didn’t know how you’d react.”

  Powell looked up from his plate.

  “You know him well enough now?”

  He’d cut the food on his plate into small pieces, but he hadn’t eaten more than a couple of mouthfuls. I checked his eyes and realized why they’d seemed so unresponsive when I saw him on the drag—they were pinned. The guy was smacked. Bella ignored him.

  “We’re somewhat jealous of our privacy.”

  “Leaving me in an alley was the only alternative?”

  “An alley?”

  “I woke up with a couple of tramps trying to take my pants off.”

  Powell chuckled softly. Bella turned on him.

  “I told you to be careful with him.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I certainly would not have left him in an alley.” Then, to me, “Whereabouts?”

  “Hollywood.”

  “Hollywood! For Christ’s sake, Powell, what were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking about our security.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Meaning?”

  There was a calculated blandness to Powell’s expression that made me feel I’d missed something. Bella changed the subject.

  “Would you call us philanthropic, Jack?”

  “There really is a free healthcare thing?”

  “Of course. It isn’t anything particularly exhaustive—a checkup, some medication, some money—but I think it makes a difference.”

  “I thought you didn’t like people.”

  Powell made a short barking noise which I guessed was laughter. Bella looked viciously at him.

  “Certain people. The people we help have so little impact on the world it isn’t worth judging them.”

  “As you see, my daughter is completely selfless.”

  Bella gave him a false smile.

  “But you give so much to the project, Father, don’t you do it out of a sense of selflessness too?”

  “You know why I do it.”

  “Yes, I do.” The bitterness in Bella’s voice was unmistakable. She caught herself and looked apologetically at me.

  “You’ll have to excuse us, we’ve been working very hard.”

  Later. Upstairs in her bed. She fucked madly, clawing at my skin, sweating into my eyes. It felt like something was trying to fight its way out of her body and fuse with my heart.

  In the dark, afterwards, I smoked and stared at the slug-trails of my come caught in the moonlight on her legs.

  “Why did Powell act like a messenger boy when he picked me up? He didn’t say anything about being a doctor.”

  “He thinks it separates him from what we do. A precaution in case anyone recognizes him.”

  “He doesn’t like me.”

  “He hates you. He’s hated every lover I’ve ever had.”

  “Have there been many?”

  “Would it worry you?”

  “I’m just wondering how long I’ll last.”

  “You’ll last as long as you want.”

  “It’s my choice?”

  “Everything is your choice. It’s the same for all of us. Self-determination—it’s what makes us human.”

  “If you’ve got enough money.”

  “If you’ve got the strength to decide what you really want and then to act on that desire and make it a reality.”

  “Sounds simple.”

  “Only the weak allow themselves to be thwarted, Jack.”

  “What did you mean outside the Bradbury building, when you asked me about love?”

  “I was asking you to make a choice.”

  “About us?”

  “About what you want for yourself. I can offer you everything you dream of. But there are things about me you might find unusual.”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, one step at a time, I think.”

  Bella smiled and swung her legs out of the bed.

  “I have to confess something, Jack. I’ve been less than frank with you.”

  “What about?”

  I held my breath, wondering if she was going to make some kidney revelation.

  “How I found you after the party in Bel Air.”

  “You spoke to my trick.”

  “I don’t think he was in a mood to do you any favors.”

  “Yeah. How, then?”

  “When Powell picked you up you had a card in your wallet—your escort service.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you remember anything from that night?”

  “Between getting sprayed and waking up? No.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Well …”

  “Come with me.”

  In the video suite she pressed part of the wall, it slid back to reveal a shelf of video cassettes. She took one, slotted it into the editing machine, and fired it up. I saw myself unconscious on a gurney. Clinical surroundings—green walls, green surgical fabric. My pants were around my knees and Bella had my dick in her mouth. When I came she let it spurt over her lips.

  She killed the tape.

  “The drug we use allows certain physical responses. That’s one of them.”

  “I thought it was a dream.”

  “Does it bother you?”

  “Why would it?”

  “Taking advantage of an unconscious person might be considered an abuse of power.”

  “But only the weak allow themselves to be thwarted, right?”

  She laughed.

  “It wasn’t an opportunity I could pass up.”

  She led me back into the bedroom and began brushing her hair.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I have work to take care of.”

  “What work? It’s almost twelve.”

  “Some results I need to check before tomorrow. I’ll be gone a few hours, don’t wait up.”

  She showered quickly and left the suite.

  It wasn’t what I’d expected on my first night in her house, but then she hadn’t known I was coming. I lit a cigarette and lay in the dark thinking.

  Both Bella and Powell were involved in the homeless medical care thing. Neither of them had said anything about kidneys, but if the operations were for real it seemed a fair guess that they would both be involved in those too.

  A doctor who took out kidneys and who was also one of the clients Karen spent extended time with …

  Joey had said he’d been examined by a woman, but after the anesthetic came down he wouldn’t have known who did the actual cutting—Powell’s messenger-boy act would have fooled him the same as it did me. So who had Karen been fucking? Powell? Certainly his age and general creepiness wouldn’t have stopped her if there was money to be had. But then I couldn’t rule out Bella either—she didn’t strike me as a woman who placed limits on her sexual menu. And to Karen, cock and cunt were all
the same as long as they were equally financed.

  What clinched it for me was the tattoo. Karen’s had first appeared when she came home from some stay-over fuck job. Bella said she’d had hers done with a friend. Identical designs. It had to be more than coincidence. And you don’t go out with someone and get the exact same picture unless you have a pretty strong attachment to them.

  If that made Bella the sex partner, did it also mean she was involved in the killing? Lovers waste each other all the time, but I couldn’t see what reason Bella would have for murdering Karen. She’d already got her kidney, after all. And even if Karen came back and started hassling her about the operation, maybe trying to blackmail extra cash, one glance was all it would have taken to know there was no way she’d make good on any threat of going to the police—she just wasn’t that kind of person. Still, there could be a whole load of shit I didn’t know anything about.

  In the absence of knowing any of that shit, however, two things made Powell a better bet as killer. He could produce spunk and, for some reason, he hated Bella’s lovers. Which meant the jism they found in Karen’s guts could have been his, and that maybe he had a motive for the killing.

  Of course it could have been a double act—daddy and daughter cooperating in an operation that went a bit too far—but from the vibe between them I didn’t think that was likely. There was too much antagonism there, too much vicious jousting to figure cooperation was a word they used very often.

  I ran my head in circles for an hour trying to figure it out, but I didn’t have enough info to feel conclusive about anything. All I got was a panic attack over the thought that, if Bella did turn out to be the killer, things might go terribly wrong before I had a chance to benefit from my association with her.

  Chapter Twenty

  Morning light woke me. The windows were open and let in a breeze that carried a taste of the sea. Bella stood next to the bed, she was fully dressed and looked too fresh to have spent all night working.

  “I was hoping you’d wake up before I left.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I own a clinic in Brentwood.”

  “The place Powell took me?”

  “No. This one is more orthodox.”

  “You work full-time?”

  “Just the odd day here and there. It keeps me current.”

  “Even though you don’t have to?”

  “It has its compensations.” Bella smiled suggestively. “Will you stay here until I get back?”

  “Sure. Can I use the pool?”

  “Of course. And call Welks.”

  She handed me a business card.

  “What time did you come to bed?”

  “Late.”

  An hour or so later I dragged my ass out of bed, had a shower and wandered through the ground floor until I found a room with open French windows and a table laid with breakfast. Cereal, fruit, pastries, and coffee for one. The trappings of wealth around me made me feel a little slovenly at being the last to rise.

  I ate the pastries and drank the coffee and smoked a couple of cigarettes. There was no TV in the room and after a while I got bored, so I took the French windows and went out to look at the grounds. I was at one side of the house and the garden there was just fifty yards of deep grass bordered by woodland. Thick ferns grew at the edge of the trees. I kicked my way into them, wondering if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s estate was anything like this. I’d seen Leibovitz’s photos of him on a white horse and had always figured his home life must be set against some transplanted Bavarian forest.

  The sun had burned the dew off the tops of the ferns, but underneath they were shaded and my shoes came away wet as I shuffled through them. It was a childish thing to do, like running through autumn leaves, but who was there to see me? I hadn’t seen one servant yet, and Powell was probably occupied mixing up his morning shot. Besides, I liked the sound it made.

  And then my right foot got stuck in a dead dog.

  I dragged it out onto an open patch of lawn and twisted my shoe clear of the soggy mess of flesh and bone that had been its rib cage. Once, when I was a kid, I found the carcass of a drowned dog floating in a creek. Someone had gotten to it before me and jammed a piece of wood up its ass and the skin there was torn and fluttered in the current like tissue paper. It had given me a hard-on because I knew whoever had done it must have been turned on too. But this dog looked different. It looked like it had died in pain. The skin of its muzzle was desiccated and drawn back and its eyes had been eaten out. It must have been in the undergrowth some time.

  The animal corpse worried me. There were feral dogs in the hills all around L.A. and one of them could easily have picked this place to jump off from for doggie heaven. But I didn’t think that was the case here. This dog was a domestic animal and it hadn’t chosen anything. Someone had cut it open from groin to chest and pulled its guts out into the air.

  I kicked it back into the brush and walked round to the back of the house. Powell was on the far side of the pool, dressed in a dark, conservatively cut suit, staring at some clouds moving across the sky. I called out good morning, but he didn’t respond, just fish-eyed me for a few seconds then turned his head back to the sky. I couldn’t be bothered with that kind of shit so early in the morning so I sat in a chair near one of the pillars that ringed the pool, pointed myself toward the sun, and closed my eyes.

  A couple of minutes later a shadow fell across me. Powell, of course, standing there like he was contemplating sticking something sharp into me.

  “Come with me, I want to show you something.”

  In some room on the ground floor, sitting on opposite sides of a low table, a photo album between us, closed.

  Powell touched the book like it was a treasure he took pride in owning. He had long slim fingers.

  “You expect your relationship with Bella to last?”

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  “Look at these.”

  He opened the album and turned pages, holding them so I could see. The pictures were all of Bella. They started off with a run of mid-teen shots. She wore tight jeans and bathing suits. They weren’t the type of photos you’d expect a father to take of his daughter. Some things were too obvious—young labia separated by a crotch seam, bending rear shots, a hint of pubic hair around a bikini, nipples visible through a thin T-shirt. But Bella seemed natural enough, as though she were unaware of the focus of the camera.

  In the next set she was a few years older, naked and posed—a series of glamour-mag copyings in which she either flaunted her body with full-frontal pride, or looked bored.

  “I took them all myself. Look further.”

  He pushed the book across the table to me and I flipped pages into porn territory—legs spread, cunt held open, ass exposed, fingers and other objects inside both holes. From her early twenties to the present. And in all of them Bella looked like she was brandishing a weapon, controlling whatever dynamic existed between her and Powell when the camera came out.

  Powell took the book back and closed it.

  “Do they shock you?”

  “Nothing there I haven’t already seen.”

  His jaw muscles tightened.

  “But you find it strange, do you not, that I should take such pictures?”

  “I wouldn’t call it exactly normal.”

  “Bella was a willing participant in all but the earliest of them. This estate, my friend, is not the place to look for normality. It is a world within a world, a private universe, and in it we have lived lives outside the rules that govern yours. If you think Bella is just another woman to bed, someone who behaves in an essentially similar manner to the trash you are used to, then you are very much mistaken.”

  “You’re trying to frighten me, right?”

  “It will be interesting to see how long you maintain that bravado.” Powell stood. “I am going to the city. Shall I leave the photographs with you?”

  I looked up at him, at the poisoned hardness of his junked eyes
, and I knew Bella had been right when she said he hated me.

  After he’d gone I pulled Howard Welks’s card out and found a phone. But I hesitated—the thought of calling the boss of a TV station for a job made me nervous. I punched Rex’s number instead.

  “Guess where I’m calling from.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Jack.”

  “Oh.”

  Rex sounded like there was nothing left inside him. He also sounded more than a little stoned.

  “I’m in Malibu, man. At that woman’s house. Jesus, you should see the place.”

  “What woman?”

  “The one I got dumped out of the agency for. I tracked her down.”

  “Jack, is this, like, a joke?”

  “A joke? Shit no, it’s real. What do you mean?”

  “You don’t think it’s kind of inappropriate, considering the situation.”

  “Fuck, man, it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I still killed him.”

  “Yeah, I know. And no one’s saying it wasn’t an awful thing to have happened. To you and to him.”

  “But I bet you don’t think about it much.”

  “What do you want me to say, for Christsake? I’m not going to make it the central fact of my life.”

  “Well, it’s the central fucking fact of mine.”

  “Maybe you should talk about it with your doctor. You know, get some counseling.”

  “That won’t bring him back to fucking life, will it?”

  “What are you going to do, then? I mean, it sounds like you need to do something, man.”

  “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have another hit, then I’m going to take a page out of your book, Jack. I’m just going to pretend it never fucking happened. How’s that?”

  He broke the connection before I could think of a comeback.

  The next phone call I made went a little better.

  Howard Welks was in a meeting, but he’d left word with his secretary and she routed the call through to some guy named Larry Burns who turned out to be head of production. Burns wasn’t overjoyed about having to make space for a new presenter, particularly one with zero experience, and he worked hard at finding a reason to kill things before they got started. But I’d been following the lives of the stars too long to fuck up on any of his questions, and in the end he told me to come in the next day for a dry run in front of the camera.