Killing Paparazzi

by Robert M. Eversz

  ‘Film,’ Sean said.

  ‘But it had no pictures on it, like the stuff in the film cartridge before it gets developed.’

  ‘It looked like somebody stuffed a roll of film down his throat.’

  ‘That’s exactly what it looked like,’ Randy agreed.

  ‘Did you see any ligature marks?’ I asked.

  ‘Huh?’ Sean blinked.

  ‘She means from ropes,’ Randy explained.

  ‘You mean, like, he’d been tied up?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything. He was wearing this Hawaiian shirt, you know, short sleeves.’

  ‘Ugly too.’

  Sean gulped the air in a sudden yawn. Randy fought it, but a second later, he too let out a yelp. The boys sat quietly for a moment, blinking. Frank scribbled on a notepad propped on the front seat.

  ‘You won’t write that bit about me, like, throwing up in the gutter?’ Sean asked with an intense concern for his reputation.

  ‘I think I can leave that detail out and keep the integrity of the story intact.’ Frank reached into his pocket and handed two twenties across the seat. ‘Once we get the photograph you can go home and read all about yourselves in tomorrow’s Scandal Times.’

  In the east, light blue ink seeped above the black outline of hills. I used the Caddy to double as the trunk in which the body was found and took some hokey shots of the boys ‘discovering’ the body, the kind of thing the editor and readers of Scandal Times lapped up. The boys left happily dreaming of fame. The nightmares would strike later, when they realized the body in the trunk one day could just as easily be them.

  ‘How you coping?’ Frank leaned against the fender of the Caddy as I rewound the film.

  I tossed him the canister, shrugged. ‘What do you think of this?’

  ‘Not exactly the way the last one, your friend – what do I call him, anyway?’

  ‘My husband,’ I said, without thinking.

  Frank looked to see if I was being ironic and seemed surprised when he saw I’d said it straight. ‘Not exactly the way your husband caught it, but close enough.’

  ‘The knife wounds sound the same. But Gabe was tied up before he was killed, and this guy wasn’t.’

  ‘I see what you’re saying. If it was a serial killing, you’d expect the details to line up, right?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m saying.’ I had no doubt that Gabe’s and the scalp collector’s killer were one and the same but other than their line of work I couldn’t see the connection. The scalp collector couldn’t have been collaborating on the story. Gabe hated him. Maybe he had been murdered not for what he had been doing, but because of who he was. Like the scalp collector, I could be murdered by the same criteria. ‘Why do you think it was him and not me or any one of a dozen other paparazzi?’

  Frank thought it over while he shook out a Winston and lit it. ‘You hear things. You don’t know if they’re true or not but it’s weird that you even hear them.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘He was pulling blackmail schemes. Strictly small-time hustles. Five or ten grand here or there for shots that might embarrass somebody with the money to pay him off. More than the photos would be worth to the tabloids.’

  ‘Maybe he was somehow connected to this story Gabe was working on and the killer is cleaning up loose ends.’

  ‘What story?’

  ‘He never told me.’

  ‘Yeah, well, anything is possible,’ he said, like it wasn’t. ‘You wanna go get a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Something else I gotta do.’

  ‘Sure. Guess I should write this up while it’s fresh.’

  We tapped fists goodbye, then I kicked away from the Cadillac to approach the patrolman sipping coffee by his cruiser. ‘No press allowed,’ he volunteered, in a tone no different from how he’d say screw off.

  ‘I need you to call down one of the detectives,’

  He didn’t want to do it, thought I was trying to trick him into a photo-op, but ducked his head into the car to call it up. Somebody had to go get somebody to get the guy I wanted but when the response bleated from the radio the patrolman was surprised. ‘Hang around,’ he instructed. ‘He’ll be down when he can.’

  I hadn’t expected priority treatment and didn’t get it. By the time Harker’s partner strolled down the hill a couple reporters had arrived to mill in front of the patrol car. A bearded redhead with eyes like an angry dog’s recognized him and shouted out a question. Detective James Douglas ignored it. ‘You,’ the patrolman commanded, pointing at me.

  Douglas watched me lean under the police tape and walk up the hill to meet him. Another late night, a second murder in the same area with the same general modus operandi and I figured I might see tension or even simple fatigue crease his forehead but no readable expression marred the dull brown mask of his face.

  ‘I got a witness,’ I said.

  Something sparked deep inside his eyes. This to him was a big reaction. I let him hang there for a moment, wondering what I meant.

  ‘Somebody coming out of the photocopy shop down the street saw your partner push my face in the curb.’ It was a lie but so what? It was their game, their rules. ‘I could file a complaint.’

  ‘These charges come up all the time. Believe me, they go nowhere,’ he said, his voice slow with caution.

  ‘That says a lot about the LAPD doesn’t it?’

  He didn’t get defensive. He didn’t get angry. He didn’t get anything. ‘You wouldn’t be coming to see me if you were going to file a complaint,’ he observed, again cautiously, a man walking the plank of deduction.

  ‘Doesn’t it scare you that he can lose control like that?’

  He didn’t answer. He just looked at me and waited. He knew I was going to offer a trade. His deliberate pace wasn’t a prop of stupidity but its opposite.

  ‘I need to find my husband’s relatives. No matter what you think of me, they deserve to be told.’

  His chin dipped to his chest and returned to level. He was still with me.

  ‘Did you find an address book in the apartment? Any letters?’

  ‘No letters from family, no. But we did get an address book.’

  ‘Did you check it? His brother’s name is Nigel.’

  ‘We checked. Why, specifically, do you think he had family?’

  ‘He told me about them.’

  ‘We didn’t find anybody named Burns. I don’t remember a Nigel either. The name is odd enough to stick out.’

  Not everybody writes down the names and numbers of their immediate family. His parents probably had lived in the same house with the same telephone number for decades. His brother might not have moved in years. Lots of people know the address and telephone number of their parents by heart. Right?

  19

  The receptionist at Crash Foto Agency flaunted nails and lipstick a shade of purple so dark as to be equal to black in all but the brightest sunlight and her scoop-neck blouse, miniskirt, stockings and combat boots were blacker than fresh asphalt. Her hair glowed so blindingly blonde I suspected it came not out of a bottle but a barrel. A rhinestone stud sparkled in her right nostril and a gold ring glittered at the corner of her right eyebrow. When she answered the phone her tongue clicked out a response pierced by a silver stud. Most receptionists are babes and this one was no exception, though her hipster style was too extreme for all but the most extreme of companies. In a culture of suntans and fitness-club figures she was strobe-light pale and amphetamine slim. Crash represented the most aggressive paparazzi in the city, including Gabe. The outlaw image began at the front desk.

  ‘Did it hurt?’ I asked, and when her glance struck mine I pointed to my tongue. During my time in prison piercing and tattoos had become as common as mascara and nail polish to the fashion demi-monde.

  ‘I was too tranked out to feel a thing. Who you looking for?’

  ‘Information about someone who works here, or did, anyway. Gabriel Burns.’

  ‘What kind of info
rmation?’

  ‘Telephone numbers, mostly. People who knew him.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to give that out.’ She checked my outfit, Keds to black leather jacket. ‘You don’t look like a cop. You some kinda reporter?’

  ‘I’m his wife. Make that widow.’ I slipped a photocopy out of the front pocket of my duffel. ‘I didn’t expect you’d just hand his employment records over, so I brought a copy of my marriage certificate. Here, you see the name on my driver licence matches.’

  She put her nose to the documents then squinted to match the picture to my face. Something like sadness altered her expression. Not sadness itself, just something like it. ‘Wow. I mean, wow. It was such a shock. Everybody here is really bummed about, you know, what happened.’

  ‘I’m trying to locate his family, maybe somebody who knew him in England.’

  When her platinum head bobbed I thought she’d help but that wasn’t her intent at all. ‘I’m sure someone will want to cooperate with you but nobody’s in right now and I have very strict orders not to give out any personal information about our photographers.’

  ‘You always follow orders?’

  I knew a lot of people who looked like rebels but it was just that, a look. She knew I meant the question to provoke her but chose to let the insult stick. ‘A job’s a job.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘So what’s so important about this one?’

  She considered my question like she would a knife between her ribs. ‘Wait here. If I get fired I’m sleeping on your couch.’ When I thanked her she just said ‘right’ and pushed through a door to the side of the reception desk.

  Crash wasn’t a back door operation like Lester’s; it occupied a suite of offices in a Westwood mid-rise fit for an advertising agency. The reception desk was smoked glass and burnished ash. A gallery of poster-sized photographs devoted to the Hollywood celebritocracy hung on walls lit by track lighting. The leather sofa and end chairs were in showroom condition and the carpet smelled like it was replaced monthly or whenever it lost that new carpet scent, whichever came first. Until then I hadn’t realized how much money could be made in the business by its brokers.

  ‘I can’t actually let you keep this, OK?’

  The receptionist laid a double-sided photocopy on the corner of the table. The form read Foreign Artist Employment Record and listed Gabe’s residency permit and work visa numbers, his address, the name of the publication in England that sponsored his work visa, and in the space reserved for emergency notification, the name Charlotte Dixon. The telephone number appended to that name bore a 310 long-distance code, which would place her residence about seven thousand miles west of England. I turned the photocopy to face the receptionist and pinned the name with my forefinger. ‘Do you have any idea who this Charlotte person is?’

  She craned her neck to read the name in full and nodded like it meant something to her. ‘Well, it’s me,’ she said.

  ‘Why did he…’ I didn’t need to complete the sentence. Of course Gabe had a sex life before he’d met me; I just hadn’t expected to discover it so posthumously.

  ‘I was his first contact here at Crash. He was new in town, you know, didn’t know anybody.’

  ‘So. You were, ahhhh?’

  She nodded emphatically, purple nails scrambling to underline the date on the marriage certificate. ‘But don’t worry, we were over months ago, certainly before you two did the Vegas thing.’

  The door behind me squeezed open to a puffy-eyed hipster with a flush of black stubble at his jaw and the tortured gait of an eighty-year-old arthritis victim. Despite the cosmopolitan elegance of his black slacks and grey herringbone sport coat, the man looked like he’d spent the night wrestling with pharmaceuticals and wild women and been brutally pinned by both. The only thing still erect about him was his pony tail, an absurd little organ of hair that stood above his head like an exclamation point.

  ‘G’morn Char, I feel like death in a deep freeze. Do me a fave and get me a cup of something hot and black, ‘kay?’

  Charlotte did her best imitation of a bunny rabbit in headlights. I stepped forward to introduce myself. His puffed eyes dilated just enough to take me in. ‘The new girl,’ he guessed. His right hand cocked back like a cowboy six-shooter and shot an index finger at my chest. ‘The Death Row pix. Nuclear work. How’d you know to be there, anyway?’

  ‘Just got lucky.’

  ‘If that’s true, we’ll never hear from you again. But something I see in the woman standing before me says it wasn’t luck at all.’

  Charlotte regained enough consciousness to announce that the man standing before me was Barry Scanlon, the owner of Crash Foto. He dipped his head and brought it back to level to confirm this information was essentially correct. ‘You looking for representation?’

  ‘Nina here is married to Gabe. Sorry. Was married.’

  The brain vacated Scanlon’s body for several mindless blinks of his eyes. I waited for some reaction but though his gaze remained fixed in the vicinity of my face the man behind the gaze just disappeared.

  ‘Gabriel Burns,’ Charlotte prompted. ‘You know, the pho –’

  ‘I know who he is,’ he snapped. ‘I just hadn’t realized he’d gotten married.’

  ‘Less than two weeks ago.’ I didn’t know if the news disturbed him or he’d just blanked. ‘You mind if we talk?’

  ‘Noooooo, ‘course not.’ He led me through the door into an open work area staffed by two young men who handled 35 mm negatives over a light table. Both men had tousled green hair and square black glasses. You could tell them apart by the different names stencilled on their white lab coats. The two glanced up from their work.

  ‘Hi,’ said Fred.

  ‘Yeah. Hi,’ said Barney.

  ‘Our film techs,’ Scanlon mumbled. ‘Develop film for us, keep the archives in shape.’

  ‘Gabe developed his film here?’

  ‘Sure. We liked Gabe.’

  ‘Yeah. He was funny.’

  ‘Did he bring anything unusual to you in the past month or so?’

  ‘The lack of production was the funny thing.’

  ‘It was like he took a vacation.’

  ‘Or something.’

  ‘Yeah. Or something.’

  ‘Do you mind if I look at the proof sheets?’

  Fred and Barney fell into a state of suspended animation. I turned to Scanlon, who stared into the distance over my shoulder as though he hadn’t a clue I’d just asked for something.

  ‘I’d like to see what he was working on at the time of his murder,’ I explained.

  Charlotte poked her head and a steaming mug of coffee through the door. Scanlon held it beneath his nose for several deep breaths. ‘Sure. No harm in looking.’

  Barney slid open the top drawer of a horizontal file cabinet and Fred, moving like a second pair of hands controlled by the same brain, pulled out a half-dozen proof sheets wrapped in clear plastic sleeves. ‘As you can see, he didn’t bring us much.’

  ‘This is like, a typical week for Gabe. Not a month.’

  Each plastic sleeve was tabbed with Gabe’s name and the date the negatives had been developed. The most recent date was from the previous week. The proof sheet inside that sleeve contained images from the film premiere, including a few of me he’d taken without my knowledge. The five other proof sheets from that same month were typical of the business: famous faces screened by the arm of a bodyguard or the doorframe of a waiting limo and candids of the half-famous coyly poised as though unaware of the camera lens. The photographs Gabe had taken on our Vegas trip were conspicuously absent. Either they had been removed from the files, or Gabe didn’t bring all his film to be developed at Crash.

  ‘Any idea why he shot so little?’

  ‘Love,’ guessed Barney.

  ‘No, he was just burned out,’ Fred said.

  ‘No problems? No big project?’ I pressed.

  The two techs bounced glances off each other, and again, it was like somebody
hit their pause button.

  ‘Somebody reported him to the INS,’ Scanlon admitted. ‘I got a call from a government alien chaser a couple weeks ago. But his work papers were in perfect order. Personally, I thought he was being harassed. It happens in our business.’

  ‘Any idea who reported him?’

  ‘Any one of a dozen pissed-off movie stars. He had a talent for the unflattering shot.’

  ‘Gabe was the best,’ Fred pronounced.

  ‘Yeah, he was,’ agreed Barney.

  Charlotte reclined with a copy of the National Enquirer spread on her lap, a felt-tip marker in her teeth, a stack of periodicals at her elbow and combat boots propped on the corner of the smoked glass. ‘This is what I do most mornings, when it’s slow,’ she explained. ‘Go through the media and mark agency photographs.’

  ‘You knew Gabe pretty well –’

  ‘Not that well, really. We were together only about a month.’

  Three weeks more than I had. For a brief flush, I was jealous, not of their sex, but of their time. ‘I’m trying to reach his family. Did he ever talk to you about them?’

  ‘His royal father, you mean? Sure. All the time. His brother can’t be hard to find.’

  ‘Nigel? How?’

  ‘Plays soccer for some English team. West Ham, isn’t it? I remember it sounded like something you’d eat for breakfast.’

  20

  The London newspaper that sponsored Gabe’s work visa was a men’s rag more famous for its sports section and page three breasts than editorial integrity. The photo editor was helpful enough over the phone, but the problem, as he explained to me, was that he knew almost nothing about the journalists and photographers the paper sponsored overseas. Gabe only occasionally carried out an assignment for him, most often involving a British national of special interest to the local reading public. The paper sponsored his visa because it was handy having someone in town should a need arise, but Gabe wasn’t on staff and they knew precious little about him. He suggested I try the regional British authorities.

  At the British Consulate I grabbed a numbered slip from a red plastic dispenser attached to the wall and with a rainbow of ex-colonials from India, China and other remnants of the Empire waited for one of the five service counters to beep me. It could have been a harmless prank, Gabe’s lie to Charlotte, his way of having fun. The idea that his brother sported the rayon shorts of a professional footballer struck me as absurd. You might tell a casual fling just about anything that strikes your fancy, but not someone you genuinely cared about. One by one the numbers clipped past until the electric counter matched the slip I held between thumb and forefinger. Before I reached the open window, a reedy brunette sized up my nationality and slipped a form on to the counter: ‘Welcome to the United Kingdom: Facts for Visitors’.