Killing Paparazzi

by Robert M. Eversz

  The breath still wheezed heavy in his lungs when he passed the corner of the building and saw me munching on a bread stick. He swiped at the sweat on his forehead with the back of his hand, asked, ‘Why were you running so fast?’

  ‘None of your damn business.’ I didn’t mean to be vulgar, just firm.

  ‘That’s the way to answer.’ He turned his shoulder to cough up some lung. ‘Personally, I can’t understand why Californians are so nice all the time, have a nice day this and have a nice day that, I have a hard enough time not slapping the prissy bastards around to remember to be polite.’ He pulled a pack of Winstons from the pocket of his red and black windbreaker. ‘Name’s Frank. From Chicago originally. Smoke?’

  ‘What do you want, Frank?’

  ‘You mean other than a cold case of beer and a hot babe?’ He sucked a cigarette out of the pack and lit it with a silver Zippo. ‘Can’t say I want much of anything. I thought I recognized you in the bar, and now that we’re up close and personal, I’m sure I recognize you. Nina Zero, right? The babe who blew up LAX.’ He pronounced it ‘ellayex’. Los Angeles International Airport.

  ‘Not the whole airport. Just one terminal.’ I turned and walked. The past didn’t interest me.

  ‘Hey, hey, stop a minute,’ he called.

  I didn’t even slow down.

  ‘Why don’t you lemme buy you a hamburger?’ He kept a respectable distance off my elbow, pluming smoke like an old Chevy burning oil. ‘Yeh, a hamburger and fries washed down by a cold beer would taste real good right now. That ritzy joint we just came outta, that’s business to me, I don’t actually eat there.’

  ‘What do you mean, business?’

  He dug into his windbreaker and handed me a card that read staff writer for Scandal Times.

  ‘A tabloid writer.’ I said it like I wanted to spit. The regular papers had been sensational enough but the tabloids went wild at my arrest. One of the scribes had been inspired to pen a poem: Mary had a little gun / Whose sight would take your breath, / Because wherever Mary went / She shot a man to death.

  ‘You’ve got nerve chasing me after all that crap you wrote.’

  ‘I’m from Chicago. People from Chicago got a lot of nerve. But I didn’t cover your story then. I just read about it.’

  ‘The story’s over. Now I just want to live like everybody else.’

  ‘You get hungry like everybody else too. C’mon, lemme buy you a hamburger. If you’ve gone Californian, the same place serves rabbit sprouts on whole wheat bread so damn whole you’ll be picking the husks out of your teeth.’

  My hunger was greater than my pride. I let him lead me across the street to the back table of a restaurant where the smell of frying beef fat was thick enough to clog an artery. He had to be looking for a ‘Whatever happened to…’ kind of story but I didn’t have to tell him anything. Like every other casual dining joint in Santa Monica the menu included a list of salads and sandwiches with Italian-sounding names but most of the customers we passed were there for the red meat. Frank didn’t bother to crack the menu and the waitress didn’t need to listen to his order to know it wouldn’t be the Dolphin Safe Tuna Sandwich. She took the order down by memory and wrote times two when I ordered the same. ‘This is the only honest restaurant for miles around but even here you’ve got to put up with a bunch of crap on the menu,’ Frank complained. ‘Personally, I don’t understand this obsession with dietary health. Don’t these people know when the next big one comes we’re all going to the bottom of the sea? What difference will it make then what your cholesterol level is?’

  I slipped my camera out of its case and looked it over. The colour film had advanced a dozen frames but I couldn’t remember shooting anything. The camera was so hot homey had worn gloves when he’d sold it to me.

  ‘Yeh, yeh, you were some kinda photo nut, weren’t you?’

  ‘Still am.’ I put the viewfinder to my eye and took a good look at the guy across the table from me. His face was pale and fleshy and I would have thought him soft if not for his eyes, which inhabited his flesh like a stranger. The sag to his cheeks and the dull droop of his mouth belied the bright aggression of eyes that did not so much look at something as slash it. The shabby clothing and unfashionable shape were undoubtedly useful to his work. Nobody would pay much attention to him or believe him capable of writing the stories he did. He could hang around at will and if they didn’t get a good look at his eyes they’d probably feel a little sorry for him. Just another fat-boy loser. Then he’d write something sharp enough to cut their throats. When he glanced at me out the corner of his eyes and tipped the beer to his lips I wanted to burn that look into the emulsion but the restaurant was too dark and the film too slow. I needed a fast black-and-white film stock with diamond-sized grain to match the feeling I had about the things I saw through the lens. Colour didn’t express my emotions the way a grey scale did. I opened the camera back and tossed the film.

  ‘That what you’re doing now?’ He tried to sound guy-to-guy casual. ‘Trying to make it as a photographer?’

  I didn’t see any advantage in answering a direct question from a tabloid writer. If I answered one question, he’d just ask another and a day or two later I’d see my name in the newspaper. I capped the lens and dug into the basket of bread the waitress slid onto the table to go with our beers.

  ‘You can make good money with that camera if you’re aggressive enough and know where to use it.’

  ‘How’s that?’ My mouth was full of bread. The words came out gummed together, like ‘howzat’.

  ‘Take the publication I work for, it pays good money for certain kinds of pictures.’

  ‘You mean like the ones taken of me when I was arrested?’

  ‘Yeh, but someone like you only comes around once a year. Celebrities, that’s the bread-and-butter work. Preferably drunk or stoned or humping the maid in the back of a convertible, but that’s just the bias of our publication. The star can be picking his nose if he’s hot enough.’

  ‘Lack of aggression isn’t one of my problems,’ I said.

  ‘Yeh, but you gotta know where, that’s the key. Like tonight, a tip came in that Spielberg had a table at that place down the street. Turned out it was Sidney Spielburg, the Marina Del Rey orthodontist, but you get the point. Contacts are vital to the business. It’s important to know people.’

  The way he was looking at me, he meant to be one of those people important for me to know. I had thought he wanted to write about me but his eyes suggested I was date material. I didn’t want to tell him I was married to somebody in the business. Right then, Gabe was the last person I’d contact for a favour. But his advice got me to thinking about people I did know who might help set me up. Then the cheeseburgers arrived accompanied by a golden nest of fries and I didn’t think about anything else except the taste of the food going down.

  Frank was one of those guys who could take a bite at the beginning of a sentence, chew through the middle and lunge for another bite without so much as a comma to separate mouthfuls. He said he’d moved out to the West Coast six years earlier and after a short stint with a local alternative paper moved on to the tabloid press, which he thought contained the most radical writing in America. The alternative newspapers had sold out to a radical chic consumerism as bourgeois as mainstream culture but the tabloid press he thought a great medium for ridiculing the American obsessions with wealth and fame. Sure, nobody took the tabloids seriously but that was the point; no matter how many magazines and newspapers representing the so-called ‘serious’ press ran elevated profiles of this or that snot-nosed actor or brat musician the tabloids drove them back to the gutter by exposing how trivial and ugly their lives really were. Being from Chicago gave him an edge in the business because the culture there was clear-eyed and tough. People from Chicago had a lot of attitude. If Chicago ever declared war on Los Angeles it would be like a battle between hog butchers and beauticians. A meat cleaver versus a blow dryer. Wholesale slaughter.

 
; ‘Got a pen?’ I asked.

  He’d been talking so long my voice startled him. He unclipped the ball-point from the neck ring of his T-shirt. On a clean napkin I wrote ‘IOU $20’, signed and shot it across the table.

  ‘Hey, you don’t have to pay me back for dinner, my treat.’ He flicked the note back to me.

  ‘I hadn’t planned to. That’s for the twenty bucks you’re going to loan me.’ I folded the napkin and pinned the corner beneath his bottle of Rolling Rock. ‘I’m good for it. And I wouldn’t ask you except I’m a little short of friends right now.’

  ‘Yeh, OK, I understand.’ He dipped his fingers into a dun-coloured wallet and gave me this piece-of-pie-left-out-on-the-counter-so-he - might-as-well-grab-it-while-no-one-was-looking look. He asked, ‘You available?’

  ‘You mean for work?’

  ‘I mean for dating.’

  ‘You don’t need the trouble. Trust me.’

  I thought that might create some bad feelings between us but just the opposite, when we said goodbye on the street he said the way I acted I could be from Chicago, which I think was his idea of a compliment.

  8

  When I first met Cass she was making a documentary about alien abduction conspiracies from an artist’s loft in downtown LA. During the brief interval between the incident at the airport and my arrest, I’d gone underground in the centre of the city’s thriving arts community. Cass had been my roommate. She chain-smoked then and experimented with various pharmaceuticals which she claimed put her on the same wavelength as the aliens, though, to her disappointment, never in direct contact. They hovered just at the corner of her vision but the moment she turned her head they vanished. She went everywhere with a video camera grafted to her eye in the hope of capturing one on tape but they always eluded her. When she met me she shot a short documentary of my scrape with the law which went to the Sundance Film Festival and from there she hit the big time with a concept for a reality-based television programme based on the activities of the County Coroner, titled Meat Wagon.

  Since then Cass had moved to a suite of offices around the corner from 20th Century Fox Studios. The building was typical of the Taco Bell-ranch house school of Southern California architecture: the same single-storey wood-frame style of construction housed most of the city’s fast-food franchises and strip malls as well as production companies. The name on the office door – Alpha Centauri Productions – was the same as the one that had graced the door to her loft, though the plaque had changed from hand-lettered cardboard to embossed bronze.

  ‘Ms Mitchel thought you’d like to see an episode of our current show,’ the receptionist said when I told her I had an appointment. She led me to a screening-room, pulled a video tape off a rack next to the big screen television and fed it into the VCR. The thirty-second promo before the episode announced Meat Wagon as a show with maximum visceral impact. Visceral impact was right. Viscera was all over the screen. The opening sequence faded up from black to the red and blue lights of a police cruiser flashing over gunshot victims on a street in South Central. Cops spooled out crime scene tape to hold back bystanders and voyeurs. No narration or music disturbed the documentary images and natural sound. The screen cut to a guy driving his car and talking about the rigours of his job as a forensic pathologist. A couple of shots later he was knee-deep in dead bodies, joking with homicide detectives while he probed massive gunshot wounds.

  When the episode ended the receptionist led me back to the lobby. Cass sat on the corner of the reception desk, swinging her left Prado pump an inch above the carpet while she spoke on the phone. ‘What did you think of the show?’ she whispered, hand cupped over the speaking part.

  ‘Great television,’ I answered.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said, speaking both to me and the person on the other end of the line. Thankfully she didn’t get the oxymoron. She dressed stylishly down in jeans, satin windbreaker and a baseball cap that read girl-power, but even dressing down was a big step up from the Cass I’d known. Beneath the baseball cap her hair was styled in a Dutch-boy bob and her lips were sticked scarlet. At thirty-something Cass had discovered make-up. Skin formerly bumped and ridged by blemishes, wrinkles and the activities of thought were brushed smooth of imperfections and character. No matter how artfully applied, cosmetics couldn’t conceal the natural bulge of her eyes. Cass was a thin woman, all sharp-angled bone, but her eyes belonged to someone twice her size. The expression of her face at rest was that of a cartoon character with its paw under a steamroller.

  While she spoke on the land-line her cell phone rang and with the expert timing of a trapeze artist she let go of one conversation to grab the other. With a kick of her pump she scooted off the corner of the desk, pantomimed to the receptionist her intention to eat and curled a finger to indicate I should follow. She spoke into the phone about Nielson ratings and audience shares while she led me out of the building and down the street to a courtyard cafe with sunlit tables shaded by huge canvas umbrellas. Meat Wagon was almost a hit, she told the caller, ranking second in its time slot. The Nielson ratings weren’t astronomical but they were getting great audience share numbers. ‘My accountant,’ she confided.

  When the hostess came up to seat us Cass’s cell phone rang again with the production manager telling her that the camera package they had reserved for that night had developed colour balance problems. Cass talked over the problem of fixing it or finding another while we looked at the menu and when the waiter came over she pointed to what she wanted. The waiter nodded like he was used to taking orders that way. After she disconnected I started to say something but she glanced at her watch and held up her right index finger. The cell phone rang again.

  ‘One of the top producers in the business,’ she whispered. While she talked she plucked a sterling silver box the size of a pack of cigarettes from her purse and spilled onto the table a dozen vitamins, minerals and immunity enhancers of various shapes and colours which she swallowed, one by one, between sentences. I gathered from Cass’s half of the conversation that she and this producer had pitched a couple of studio suits an idea for a feature film and now speculated how it had gone. The food came mid-conversation and Cass cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear so she could better cut her poached chicken to eat and talk at the same time. After that call ended Cass said she was sorry it was impossible, she knew, but she had to make one phone call, just one, and then I’d have her undivided attention. That was a follow-up call to a development exec. She stroked him so thoroughly it sounded like phone sex.

  I thought Cass might ask me something personal about the rough course of my life and what it was like to be free again but she was so happy to share the details of her success that she never quite got around to asking how I was. The production was going on call that night, which meant the crew would be assembled and waiting for news about any homicides appropriate for a national television audience. An upper-class death on the Westside of LA would be good, she said, particularly if the death was from mysterious or violent causes. This was not to say she would ignore a really juicy gang killing, like some little kid getting AK-47ed in gang crossfire, but mostly she wanted to move the show through the different ethnic groups and socio-economic classes to demonstrate that death was the great leveller. Meat Wagon had a higher philosophical purpose than to titillate audiences with blood and guts, despite what some critics alleged.

  I guess I looked like the kind of person who needed lunch bought for her because the waiter discreetly slid the bill next to Cass’s elbow. She handed him a platinum coloured credit card without bothering to check the addition. ‘Wonderful to spend time with you again,’ she said. ‘I can’t get over how you really haven’t changed a bit!’

  ‘I’ve spent the last five years in prison, of course I’ve changed.’

  Cass looked at me then and not just in my general direction. When not obsessed with herself she had a remarkable capacity to observe others and intuit what she called their ‘personal issues’. ‘You’
re bitter,’ she said.

  ‘I’m an ex-con without a job, I’m not only bitter, I’m desperate.’

  ‘I really wish I had a spot for you on the production staff but I’d have to fire somebody else to get you on.’

  ‘I’m not asking you for a job.’

  ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’

  ‘I’m not looking for advice either.’

  The waiter brushed by in a flash of white to leave the bill folder on the edge of the table. Although I couldn’t say Cass had ever been completely present during our lunch now she wanted only to be gone. She signed the slip and scooted her chair back in one motion.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a favour, though.’

  ‘Anything I can do.’

  ‘Let me take photographs at your next crime scene.’

  ‘Can’t do that. Can’t betray the trust the police and coroner place in me. Could put the whole show in danger. Wouldn’t be fair to the people working for me.’

  ‘I thought we were friends. Have you sold out completely?’