High Life

by Matthew Stokoe

  My first impulse was to touch him. I ran my hand down one side of his torso, over the outside of his thigh. He felt cold and hard. The stitches under his ribs shone like a row of black thorns.

  I looked around the room for the story of his death. The clothes he wore to Apricot Lane were piled on the springs of the couch. The TV was on, its light dappled the floor and walls. On top of the set there was a clear plastic bag with what looked to be about a quarter kilo of brown smack inside. Next to it, a paper bag full of Pepsi and pots of chocolate pudding.

  Overdose, or failure of his remaining kidney? What did it matter? He’d got what he wanted, whatever way it came. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Back when I put him up for the gig I thought it would be. But it wasn’t.

  I knew that if I hadn’t offered him up to Bella he’d probably still be alive, and the knowledge of my part in his death wasn’t pleasant. I should have laid out the risks for him. I shouldn’t have involved him at all. Shit, at one point he was the closest thing I’d had to a friend—he’d shown me a way out of the mainstream, given me that push into making money with my cock, even set me on the path that eventually led to Bella.

  For a long time I studied his face, trying to force some link with the golden boy he used to be, wondering if I was going to cry. But I couldn’t and I didn’t. All I got was a close-up of clogged pores and stubble that grew in odd directions. I stood in the middle of the room wondering if there was anything I should do. Nothing occurred to me. I didn’t want the smack, it was too much weight to be walking around with anyhow. I headed for the door. I was set on going through it, I really was, out into the world, away from that stinking, destroyed room. But it didn’t happen. I was halfway along the hall when I realized I might never get the chance again.

  Back in the lounge I maneuvered him into position. His stiffness might have been a problem in a different situation, but the way he was curled was actually a help. When I pulled him up onto his knees and elbows his ass was angled just right. I wedged him against one end of the couch with the TV and got him set pretty firm. Then I went into the kitchen and found a bottle of cooking oil.

  At Malibu that night there was a guest for dinner.

  Back from Rex’s, I walked into the dining room and found them sitting cozily together over fish and salad at one end of the table—Bella and Lorn. Lorn and her new best friend at the station. For quite a time I just stood there with my head blank. Then things started working again with a jerk and I realized there was a very high probability I was fucked. Added to Bella’s less-than-friendly interaction with me recently, this pairing tonight had to mean she’d found out about my affair with Lorn. I could only imagine what the consequences would be.

  Bella didn’t bother explaining my presence, just waved me to a chair and carried on with whatever conversation they had going. Lorn’s first reaction at seeing me was one of surprise. But that didn’t last long. She might not have been a rocket scientist, but she was smart enough when it came to the hidden currents that drove the media business, and I saw her eyes harden as it dawned on her that I was connected—that all my protestations the night before about just lucking into the review slot were bullshit.

  I helped myself to wine from an almost untouched bottle that stood between them, then sat and watched Bella send lezzie looks across the table at her new pal. Lorn played them for all they were worth, figuring, no doubt, that sexual influence here would translate into bucks and screen time back at Channel 52. At any other time not such a wild assumption, but right then I had the feeling that Bella had arranged this little meeting more for my benefit than to woo Lorn. On the surface, her motives were obvious—retaliation in kind for my infidelity. But it could also have been something a whole lot more dangerous than that. If she’d overheard any of Ryan’s conversation at the postscreening party it could have been a warning not to start poking around. Either way, it was a clear message that I was a long way from irreplaceable.

  After the meal they went up to Bella’s suite. I wasn’t invited. So I got in my car and escaped to Willow Glen. It seemed about as good as any other move I could have made right then.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Next morning I woke early for my meeting with Ryan. I didn’t know what was going to happen between Bella and me—the Lorn thing might blow over, it might not—but if Ryan had found something that could be dangerous to her, as he’d hinted, I wanted to get hold of it as soon as possible.

  Westwood was sleepy in a haze of morning sunshine, the trees along Ryan’s street made pleasant shadows on the road. Kids, dogs, somebody mowing a lawn—a normal place for normal people. Strange that a guy like Ryan should choose it as a place to live.

  His bell made a hollow noise somewhere in the bungalow. I could tell from the way it sounded that all the rooms were empty, but I kept on anyhow. No one answered. So I wandered around the back—nice garden, bougainvillea, jacaranda, pepper trees, an oval pool. Maybe that was what clinched it for him—happy-family surroundings for a man who’d missed out on them and spent his life in the city’s colon instead.

  I looked through windows, but there was no movement. What furnishings I could see were expensive but without taste. The pictures on the walls were arty photos of chicks with big tits.

  I couldn’t get in, the back door was locked and the windows had security grills. Separate from the house, though, pushed against the edge of the property, was a windowless garage—stucco painted white. The rolladoors were down but a wooden access door at the side opened when I tried it. I closed it behind me and waited for my eyes to adjust.

  Smells—dry cement, gasoline, oil. Two cars faded up out of the gloom—the gray Plymouth and the bloated silver Bentley with its top up. Ryan had been driving the Bentley the night he laid his riddle about Karen’s videotape.

  I found the light switches and pressed them, fluoros flickered and caught. And I found Ryan. The driver’s seat in the Bentley was reclined, but his head was still visible through the windshield. I opened the car door and stuck my head in. Dead. Shirt open all the way, pants rucked about his knees, dried spunk crusting his pubic hair and the skin just above. I could see shit in a wet smear under his balls—the car stank of it. There was more on the seat on either side of his ass, like he’d been sliding around in it. His face was swollen and bluish and his eyes were puffy. I felt surreal. Two bodies in twenty-four hours was pushing things.

  All the soft fat on his guts looked hard now, like it had been molded from cold lard. His black hair was mussed and a lot more scalp showed than when it was combed. No sicked-out Bela Lugosi anymore, nothing to be scared of, nothing to chase you through nightmares and threaten you with a murder rap. Just a mound of flesh with a badly colored head on top.

  The first thing I felt was relief. What can I say? The guy had been scaring the shit out of me for the last six months. Even after Powell had taken the fall for Karen, his continued connection with Bella had been a threat to my future. But now that was all over—no more blackmail threats, no more having to share Bella’s cunt. His departure made things a lot simpler.

  Until I saw the vial on the dash.

  Clear glass with blue printing. A top you punctured with the needle of a syringe. Same as Bella had used in the motel with Rudy.

  I pictured it happening. After the party Bella says let’s go to your place instead of the fuck club, Ryan’s only too happy to oblige. They park in the garage, the doors come down and one of them figures it’d be a kick to do it in Ryan’s new car. Sitting on him, riding his cock, him all tangled up with the steering wheel and her arms and legs, it wouldn’t have been hard to stick a needle in his neck, then just hang on while he turned into a jackhammer, until he started squirting shit and his heart exploded. Just like she knew it would.

  I climbed into the passenger side of the car and went through Ryan’s pockets, hoping for a note or something to point me toward what he’d found. No luck: change, a wallet, bits of paper, his pills, a small amount of coke, but nothing that hel
ped me. I sat there for a while breathing his stink, staring at the vial on the dash, hoping closeness to his body would bring inspiration. I put my hand on his bare thigh to see if contact helped. It didn’t. He felt like he looked—unpleasant. And that was all there was to it, no message, no flash of enlightenment, just a fat dead man sitting in his own shit.

  But the time wasn’t altogether wasted. There was something about the vial that bothered me. It didn’t click for a while, and then it did. It was placed too obviously, too close to the edge of the dash. It couldn’t have been there before Ryan died, his jerking would have knocked it off. And besides, Bella must have had the syringe already charged before they got down to it—filling up in front of him would have been a sure way to get asked awkward questions. Why was it there at all? She certainly wasn’t dumb enough to leave a clue like that if she wanted to make it look like a heart attack. Only one answer—she knew I’d go there, she wanted me to find it. It was her way of letting me know what she’d done, of warning me against digging too deeply. Maybe she even expected me to take the evidence away, increasing my complicity, tying myself even more tightly to her.

  Ryan’s carcass didn’t hold the remotest sexual attraction for me so I left without touching his cock or trying to put mine inside him. I wiped my prints, put the vial in my pocket, and closed the car door. Then I turned off the garage lights and stepped out into a bright soft morning which I suppose was autumn in some other part of the world. The sun dazzled my eyes and I kept them shut as much as I could on the walk back to the Mustang. Same way I tried as much as I could not to think about what it meant that Bella was a killer.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  From Westwood I beelined to an art-house cinema near the university where something trendy was previewing. It was my first review assignment and Lorn was supposed to come along and hold my hand. But it didn’t surprise me that she wasn’t waiting where we’d arranged. I was glad to be alone; having to deal with the shit she’d certainly dish would have been too much right then.

  When the picture finished I hit a café and attempted to make some notes, but I couldn’t remember anything about the film. I couldn’t even concentrate long enough to make up something.

  Instead, I smoked a lot and gazed out the window. On the other side of the glass kids walked by, all totally cool with beatnik beards and a lot of facial piercing. I couldn’t help wondering what it would have been like to go to college, to get a good job and a wife and move in professional circles. The best I could imagine was that you felt clean. You didn’t have to fuck men in cars or puke on rich middle-aged women. You didn’t have to help kill someone simply because it was financially more advantageous than going to the police. I thought about the things I’d done. I saw Rex playing doggy on the floor, Ryan’s cock in his ass. I saw myself fucking him in the mouth. I saw him dead, like he was when I found him the day before, those black stitches knitted into his side …

  And that was it. That was what made those brain switches complete the necessary circuit. I threw money on the table and pushed the Mustang back to Willow Glen as fast as I could through the traffic.

  In front of the TV, holding the remote, running the tape. I was certain of what I’d find. And I did.

  I moved frame by frame through Karen sliding the dildo into herself until I got to a part where the mirror in front of her gave a clear shot of her belly. I froze the tape. She was wearing the bracelet Bella had said she’d given her the day she left Malibu, after recovering from the removal of her kidney. But her abdomen was smooth, there were no stitches. She hadn’t been operated on.

  The scene wouldn’t have revealed much to anyone else, but it did to me. It made me feel everything around me—the ground under my feet, the walls of my house, the fabric of my life in this city—had suddenly become unstable. Even my ability to think, to draw conclusions, to understand events and actions seemed now to be built on fault lines at least as treacherous as those that ran beneath L.A.

  Ryan and I had figured the bracelet proved the tape had been shot after the operation. And because Bella said she’d never seen Karen again after she gave it to her, we’d convinced ourselves it must have been Powell who filmed the dildo performance. That led to his DNA check, and that led, a very short time later, to his death.

  But what I realized now, and what Ryan had obviously seen too, was that Bella had been lying. The absence of stitches meant she had to have given Karen the bracelet sometime before the operation. So the tape could have been shot anytime. In fact, now it seemed likely to me that Bella had shot it herself—just as Powell had said during Ryan’s interrogation. It would have been simple enough for her to take Karen to his apartment some day while he was out, then add the tape to her collection and wait for him to sneak a copy like he did with all her others. After that, the only thing necessary to make it look like her father alone had any postoperative contact with Karen, was to erase the original.

  And the only reason she’d do that was if she’d been involved in the murder and wanted an out if things got sticky. She could have killed Karen by herself, or she could have done a double act with Daddy. Whatever, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that she’d manipulated Ryan and me into getting rid of an old man she hated, and at the same time diverted any threat to herself that might have arisen from Karen’s murder.

  Things that had seemed without importance now became significant—Bella’s instruction that Ryan and I search Powell’s apartment, the lack of camera equipment there, the fact that Powell, a sixty-year-old junkie, sexually fixated on his daughter, would probably not have had either the energy or the desire to pursue Karen—things that should have been obvious to us.

  What it came down to was that neither Ryan nor I had wanted her to be involved. We’d had Powell’s thing with the dogs and his DNA, and stacked against Bella’s money and cunt, that had been enough for us. We didn’t look any further because we didn’t want to find anything else.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I woke with a feeling of doom, certain that something bad was going to happen. Just after nine it did, nice and early. Two motorcycle messengers on my doorstep. I could hear them doing the fellow warrior thing as I walked along the hall. When I opened the door they gave me mock salutes and bits of paper to sign. Two guys in one-piece leather suits and alien helmets, logos every place you could stick them. I got an envelope off one and a small package off the other. They said dude to each other a couple of times then climbed back on their bikes and tore off down the canyon, no doubt completely unaware of the severe fucking they’d just delivered.

  I sat on my front steps and opened my presents. First the package. From Bella. A videotape, unused, still in its cellophane wrapper, and a small fold of paper containing blonde pubic hair. Clever messages that said I KNOW EVERYTHING. The hair was Lorn’s, the tape a reference to Ryan’s discovery. And next, what else but the only thing that could follow such a statement. A letter from Burns informing me I’d been chucked from the show.

  I couldn’t hear the birds, I couldn’t see the white houses with red roofs that made holes in the foliage of the hills. I sat very still and tried to assimilate. Tried to swallow the fact that this was the end of my time in dreamland, the end of my one unheard-of chance at some sort of justification for living. No more screen time, no more parties and premieres, no possibility of ever becoming as good as everyone else. Desolation didn’t cover it. And I’d brought it on myself.

  For a long time I was incapable of movement, but eventually I got up and went inside to call Bella. The phone rang for a long time but no one answered.

  I went to bed and wanked my dick raw over my photos, trying to pump out the terror I felt at no longer being a person. But squirting seed didn’t work. I couldn’t empty myself of the cold burning terror that crawled through my guts.

  Grasping at straws, I called my agent in Century City. If a miracle happened and I got the men’s grooming gig, I’d be independent and Bella could go fuck herself. The res
ponse was encouraging. My tests were with the agency running the campaign and they liked them a lot. I was riding high on the shortlist. But those decisions had to be made cautiously, and beg as I might, I couldn’t get anything firmer than supportive advice to be patient. Not much use on a day when it felt like I was sinking in a sea of shit.

  I smoked and drank a bottle of Coke. I thought about Powell’s last words. The freezer … If there was a freezer anywhere with something useful in it, it would be at Apricot Lane for sure. I could have driven over there and done a little checking. But I didn’t. I told myself that this might all be a test, that Bella might only want to see if she could trust me and that if I kept my head down and kept cool, it was possible that everything could still be fixed. Silence and nonaction might make her see she had nothing to fear from me.

  I scanned a few mags—Brooke Shields had had a bridal shower in New York. Drew Carey had received a bid of four million for a proposed book about life. Gary Oldman was slated to suck up part of a ninety-million-dollar budget playing Dr. Smith in a big-screen Lost in Space and Brad Pitt now owned five houses on the same block.

  But these reports from heaven couldn’t kill the anxiety that twisted me. I needed a stronger distraction to shield me from images of a disintegrating future. I needed something that would tear me out of myself for a while.

  So I went down to the drag before dark and asked indiscreet questions about snuff movies. I spent a while looking, but the closest I came was a guy selling cassettes from the trunk of his car in a side street. I checked the product on a Watchman he had wired to a VCR, but I was disappointed. It was just road accident footage he’d spliced into straight hard-core. I gave up and checked an ATM. The monthly payment from Bella had gone into my account. It gave me hope that things hadn’t bottomed out yet. But I couldn’t really be sure. She might just have not gotten around to canceling the auto payment yet.