“I’m touched. Go on with the kidneys”
“She jumped at the chance. I paid her well. Thirty thousand dollars.”
“And?”
“And nothing. After the operation she stayed here for two weeks, then she said she had to visit home. I didn’t want to let her go, but she promised she’d come back. There was nothing I could do to make her stay. I never saw her again.”
“Didn’t she have stitches or something? Wouldn’t they need to be removed?”
“They dissolve by themselves. She should have been monitored, of course, but …”
“And you didn’t see her again? Not even once?”
“No. I remember the day she went. She’d hocked all her jewelry sometime before—for drugs, I suppose—and I gave her an antique gold bracelet. She liked it very much. Do you remember if she was wearing it when she was found?”
“What I remember is the hole where her guts should have been.”
“I only took a kidney.”
“Then who took the rest?”
“My father.”
“Now there’s a surprise. Jackie’s been trying to sell me the same deal. Where is this Powell guy, anyhow? He’s got rooms here, but he’s never around.”
“He’s unhappy about my relationship with Jack. He has an apartment downtown.”
“You mean he doesn’t drop around for the odd fuck when I’m not here?”
Bella looked sharply at me, but Ryan carried on before I had to say anything.
“Jackie showed me your video collection. Don’t blame him, though, he thought it’d help you.”
“Then you’ll understand why Powell might have an objection to me taking a lover. You know about his mutilation of dogs, you know he used to be a surgeon. Can’t you make the connection? My relationship with Karen was significant. Doesn’t it seem at least plausible to you that a man who has an erotic fixation with me might snap and commit murder to remove someone he sees as a rival?”
“Yeah, but it could just as easily have been you had a lover’s spat with Karen and butchered her yourself. I’m not saying it was one way or the other, but if you want me to believe it was your father, you’re going to have to show me more than your spread pussy in a Jacuzzi. Speaking of which, you got any more videos of Karen getting all sexy?”
“You’ve seen everything in my video suite?”
“Everything in that cute hidden cupboard.”
“That’s all I have. Karen felt uncomfortable being filmed. The only segment I ever took of her is the one you’ve already seen.”
After that nobody said anything for a while, the water bubbled, and Ryan and I had another drink. Then Bella spoke again.
“I have a question for you, Ryan.”
“You only gotta ask.”
“Why did you never mention you knew Jack?”
A question like that could only mean she wasn’t entirely certain I’d been telling her the truth about my connection with Ryan, maybe even about my connection with Karen. And asking it in front of me meant she wanted me to know it. Ryan stayed silent for a moment like he was considering his answer, doing it to make me sweat, no doubt.
“We’re dealing with a murder. To anyone who knew anything about it, Jackie plus me equals Karen. I would have been stupid to give that away so early in the game.”
Bella looked unconvinced. But under the circumstances it was the best I could hope for.
She kissed me on the cheek, got out of the spa, and walked nude into the house.
“Saved your butt there Jackie boy.”
We stayed in the water while the afternoon decayed. There wasn’t much else to do, so I drank enough Southern Comfort to get mildly drunk.
That night, for the first time, Ryan got to sleep with Bella. Not just a fuck, but the whole eight hours, dusk to dawn, lover style. I looked in on them once, but the sight of that fat animal nuzzling into her armpit like a gigantic baby was just too obscene. I took some pills and passed out in another room.
Ryan slept late the next morning so Bella and I got to have breakfast alone together. She was waspish and impatient.
“He doesn’t seem particularly interested in Powell.”
“Is that why you let him sleep with you?”
“It was a logical step.”
“Really?”
“I don’t want to go to jail. And you don’t want to lose your TV-time. We’ve got to take care of this thing, Jack. You’ve got to see the big picture.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Good. He needs something concrete to persuade him, talk isn’t working.”
“Like what? We’ve been through Powell’s rooms.”
“Here.”
Bella handed me a key ring. There were three keys on it.
“Building, elevator, apartment door. Powell phoned earlier—he’s found another donor. We’ll be operating this evening, his apartment downtown will be empty. Take Ryan and search it.”
Around midday Ryan surfaced in fine spirits, in fact he was almost bouncing. I figured he was so unused to love that the pseudo emotion Bella had dished out through the night must have made him think someone cared about him. He wanted to go shopping and he wanted me for company.
Only it wasn’t your usual department-store shopping. It took a couple of hours trekking from showroom to showroom, but at the end of it Ryan was the owner of a late-model, slightly used convertible Bentley turbo coupe. I didn’t see what he paid for it, but it must have been a significant chunk of the million he got from Bella. It made me wonder how soon he’d be asking for another installment.
We went cruising and the car turned heads. It felt good to know people were thinking I was someone important.
A little after three we parked outside a high school on Fairfax Avenue. The sidewalk was busy with kids heading home. Ryan was in predator mode.
“Always wanted to do this, how about you? Sure you have. What guy hasn’t, huh? What we gotta look for is two together so they feel safe. Slutty types, you know? The class bitches. Nothing over fifteen, though.”
Kids were checking the car. Young males whistled, the older ones wanted to trash it. Two girls passed by wearing tight T-shirts and lycra shorts. They looked like maybe they just got out of gym class. Both of them were smoking and wearing makeup. Best friends for sure, the kind that shared adventures. Definitely not virgins.
They saw the car, our clothes, our wrist watches, and there was a subtle change in attitude, in the way they held themselves, the way their walk became exaggerated and their tits stuck out. Ryan slipped into drive and kept pace with them.
“You girls wanna lift?”
They giggled and kept walking.
“No, come on, I’m serious. Look at the car. You think we’re maniacs or something?”
Ryan was half leaning across me, speaking in a light friendly voice I’d never heard before. The girls whispered to each other and stopped. Ryan nudged me.
“We just come in from outta town. We got plenty of money. Wouldn’t mind spending some of it on a couple of girls as good-looking as you two. You know how to have a good time?”
“How much money?”
“Hey, whatever it takes.”
They whispered together. Getting into a car with a couple of men wasn’t a problem, it just had to be priced right.
“Five hundred,” one of them said, like maybe she was asking for too much.
“Each? Sure. But what do we get for that?”
“Anything, but we gotta be home by six.”
Into a motel on the edge of Hollywood where no one gave a shit about questions of age difference. Coke, booze—the chicks got wild and naked. Their bodies were smooth and slim, the hair on their cunts was silky. Ryan was right, every guy wants to.
We fucked one each. Mine had long blond hair and a few zits on her chin. She looked good, though. She looked like she spent a lot of time at the beach. I couldn’t believe how firm her body felt.
Afterward, Ryan wanted entertainment. The girls we
re coy, but he named figures until they agreed to take a dump on the bathroom floor. We jerked off over them while they were straining. My come was thick this time around and stuck to the back of the other one, a little way up from her ass.
“Jesus, I feel loose.”
The girls were in a cab somewhere, counting their money, and we were in Ryan’s obscene car gliding downtown to Powell’s apartment.
“Don’t you worry about doing stuff like that? I mean, they were pretty young.”
“Shit, Jackie, you oughta spend more time in the real world. Another birthday or two, they’ll be standing on street corners. Ungrateful fucks.”
“What?”
“Forget it.”
I glanced at Ryan. He had a bitter look on his face that didn’t make sense after the fun we just had back at the motel. He stayed silent a while, concentrating on driving. Left off of Fairfax, then Wilshire all the way. Somewhere around La Fayette Park he took a heart pill and started speaking again.
“Kids think they know everything. They see how they think something should be, and they never forgive you if you can’t make it that way for them. No point trying to explain life ain’t simple like it is on TV, they won’t listen. Those two cunts are probably the happiest they’ve ever been right now—two grand between them and laughing about how pathetic it is some old fart gets off watching them shit. But give ’em a few years and a social worker, they’ll be moaning how being whores is all Daddy’s fault, like they woulda been nurses or something if he loved them better.”
“What’s this, your PhD in child psychology coming out?”
“I had a kid once.”
“Bullshit.”
He stared through the windshield at the evening traffic, but he wasn’t seeing it.
“Whatever you say, Jackie.”
Only someone as rabid as Ryan would drive a convertible downtown after dark. Even so, he parked in the basement rather than on the street. I’d handed over the keys Bella gave me and he used one of them on the elevator. We stood in the middle of it and watched the numbers change.
“Beauty seems quite gung ho for this idea of Powell being the killer.”
“What do you expect, that she should take the fall herself?”
“Not if she didn’t do it. But there’s usually a bit of reluctance between family members.”
“If they like each other in the first place. They don’t. He’s hung up on her cunt, and she hates his guts. It’s not what you’d call a happy-family scenario. Plus, she blames him for her mother’s death.”
“There better be more to this than some payback kick for Mommy getting scrunched.”
The apartment was empty and quiet, its décor an exact copy of Powell’s suite at Malibu. I followed Ryan around while he tossed the place, praying for a miracle. It came in two doses.
In the drawer of a writing cabinet we found a Polaroid—a dog cut open, a dick dropping seed into the bleeding split, held by a hand that looked old enough to be Powell’s.
“See? Exactly how it happened to Karen. She was cut open and someone—”
“I don’t need it explained, Jackie.”
Ryan looked at the pic for a moment then held it out to me.
“You like this kinda thing. You want it? No?”
He smirked and put it in his pocket.
A room with a big-screen TV gave us the clincher. A selection of videos—a duplicate collection of the ones we’d already seen in Powell’s Malibu suite and Bella’s video room. Plus one more. A tape that was new to both of us. It showed Karen nude on her side, a back view, one leg pulled up, ramming a dildo in and out. In front of her on the wall there was a mirror that reflected occasional glimpses of the front of her body as her movements rolled her in and out of it’s range. The angle of the shot was tight, but there was enough wood paneling and olive carpet around her to make the location of the scene unmistakably the apartment in which we now stood.
The plastic cock looked slippery and her hand moved fast. Sometimes the crack of her ass pulled open and showed her hole. It was obvious she was into what she was doing. It was also obvious from her glances over her shoulder that she was performing to turn someone on. But I found myself incapable of reacting sexually to this scene of my dead wife having a wank. Karen had changed from something human to a counter in a game, a piece of a puzzle, the solving of which would determine my future. Her image on the screen held about as much interest as a documentary on animals in Africa. Until something on her wrist shifted and caught the light. I almost yelped.
“She’s wearing a bracelet.”
“So?”
“It’s the same one she had last time I saw her. It has to be the one Bella told us about.”
“The goodbye present.”
“Bella said she gave it to her when she left Malibu, the last time they were together. But she’s wearing it now, in a video that was shot in this apartment. The only way that could be is if this show happened after the operation.”
“Maybe she wanted to give Beauty something to remember her by.”
“But that’s it! Bella doesn’t have a copy of this tape; if she did, we would have found it with her others.”
“Who says?”
“You saw the stuff she had—me fucking her, Powell fucking her, even her goddamn donors fucking her. If she was going to hide anything, she would have hidden all of that as well. She was in love with Karen. This would be top of her playlist, for fucksake.”
“So after she got her kidney cut out, Karen just dropped around to give the old guy a thrill?”
“She would have spread her legs as soon as he opened his wallet. You know she would. Maybe it wasn’t the first time, maybe they had history. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this tape shows there was some connection between her and Powell after the operation.”
“It ain’t conclusive.”
“Look at the way she’s fucking herself. She’s got to be pretty well recovered, and that doesn’t leave a whole lot of time between when this was shot and when she was killed. I think she had the operation, got well enough to leave Malibu and come back to see me—we had an argument and sometime later, whether she had anything going with him before or not, she connected with Powell. After that there’s two ways it can go. Either she tried to put the bite on him and his solution to blackmail was to kill her. Or, what I think’s more likely, he figured as long as she was on the scene his access to Bella was going to be threatened—she was always going to be taking his daughter away from him. Either reason works.”
“If Powell shot this tape, why is there no camera here?”
“Jesus fuck, Ryan, it could be in his car, it could be somewhere at Malibu, he could have thrown it away. Does it matter? You said before, if there was something to connect Powell with Karen then it’s possible he could have killed her. What do you call this? It’s a fucking connection, for Christsake.”
“Calm down, Jackie.”
Ryan rewound the tape and played it again. He watched it silently and I held my breath.
“Something about this bugs me.”
“What?”
“I don’t know, but something feels wrong.”
He rewound and played it a couple more times, searching the screen for whatever it was he thought he ought to see.
“Can you imagine how grateful she’s going to be, Ryan, if you make all this murder hassle go away?”
“You’d love it to be him, wouldn’t you?”
“And you wouldn’t?”
Ryan stared at the TV for a little while longer then killed the set.
“Okay, we’ll see what the old fuck’s got to say for himself.”
“You agree it could be him, then?”
“The only way we’re gonna know is if we DNA him against the spunk in Karen.”
Back at Malibu I split from Ryan. He was waiting like an expectant schoolboy for Bella to come home so he could get a bit of action in, but I knew with a donor she wouldn’t be back for ages. I fired up th
e Mustang and headed for Lorn’s place.
I felt good on the drive over. The tape we’d found at Powell’s was better than anything I could have hoped for. It was going to make all my problems go away. Ryan would have his killer and wouldn’t be able to lay the murder jive on me or Bella anymore. And with Powell out of the picture I’d be free to mine his daughter for all she was worth. The only remaining hassle, of course, would be Ryan’s presence at Malibu. But, same as I knew Powell’s spunk would match what they found in Karen, I had a feeling that this situation would resolve itself too.
Lorn was in the lounge watching tapes of herself when I got there. She was a little distant at first, still low-level pissed at me for saying she couldn’t sleep over at Willow Glen. But after a while I managed to smooth the evening out. We talked about work and movie stars then fucked on the floor. Later we watched Pumping Iron and lost ourselves in a firestorm of envy at Schwarzenegger’s rise.
Chapter Thirty-Four
It was a nasty scene, four of us in a room full of books and leather furniture out at Malibu—me, Ryan, Bella, and Powell. Three ganging up on one. I hadn’t bothered with this room before, there was no TV and the books weren’t about Hollywood, but right then it seemed perfect for the job at hand: closed and quiet and waiting for shit to happen. It was raining outside, nighttime. Our only light was an open fire. Shadows moved around the walls like birds of prey.
Bella’s donor must have been recovering without complications because she’d come home before dawn. Daddy, after a phone call from her, followed in the late afternoon. There had been arguments in Bella’s suite through the rest of the day, the horrible sound of Powell begging for a physical comfort his daughter would no longer give. Now he sat slumped in a large chair gazing malevolently at the fire. He’d been gone from the house so long he looked out of place, a superfluous individual that nobody wanted around anymore. He knew something was coming. He’d been told who Ryan was and how he’d been augmenting his cop salary recently, and only a retard would have figured the evening’s gathering to be without purpose.
Ryan and I had drinks. I listened to the fire and to the rain and waited for the beginning of Powell’s end. Ryan stared silently at him for a long time, but the old junkie was too dosed to squirm like a clean man would. After a while my favorite policeman got pissed off with the game and prodded him with the toe of his shoe. Powell’s head swiveled slowly around.
High Life Page 31