Killing Paparazzi

by Robert M. Eversz

  When I told her my husband had been murdered she was unimpressed. The disposal or transport of the body was my responsibility, she said; I was the widow, not the British government. ‘But I don’t even know his parents,’ I explained. ‘Don’t know where they live or how to contact them.’

  She turned to an area behind the service window not directly in view. I heard a file cabinet rattle and a moment later, the flash and mechanical shuttle of a copy machine. She returned flourishing a document titled Tracing Friends and Relatives. It listed various private agencies that performed searches in the UK.

  ‘Isn’t there anything you –’

  ‘The Consulate do not provide search services.’

  The electronic beep sounded and an agitated man in a turban pressed against the counter, surrounded by four beautiful women in saris, whom I took to be his daughters. The reedy brunette met them with the same implacable efficiency with which she dismissed me.

  The consulate form listed the Salvation Army Family Tracing Service among the institutions that traced relatives in the UK. I knew the Salvation Army. Sure, they dressed in funny uniforms and had a peculiar name but since childhood I’d been giving them my old clothes. The signal buzzed a half-dozen times before a voice creaked, ‘Yes?’ Then, ‘Just a moment, let me find a pen.’ The phone clattered to the table and a short time later, a plaintive bellow followed the sound of something crashing upon the floor. I imagined a little old man in a band uniform, the Cross of Calvary on his epaulettes. ‘That was the spider plant,’ the voice announced. ‘And good riddance to the old thing, I say. Now, shall we begin?’ To a backup chorus of ahems and ahas I related the few official facts I knew about Gabe.

  ‘These things normally take time, but as this is an emer –’ He feebly hacked something from his throat, paused to recover, then continued, ‘– gency I will give it my personal and immediate attention.’

  I thanked him effusively and wrote off the call as a loss. My only break of the day was a parking spot in front of my apartment. I trusted this as a sign that my luck was improving. When I reached the top of the steps I discovered the front door ajar. The lock was forged from cheap metal and a kick to the side of the deadbolt was all it took to splinter the wood at the jamb. I nudged the door open with the back of my hand. My futon curled in a foetal position against the far wall, slit open from head to foot. The fruit crates that had served as my shelves lay splintered over scattered books and clothes. While I dialled the police department I pondered the significance of having my self-help books torn from their bindings. The dispatcher fielding calls said she’d send the next available patrol car to investigate. I picked my way through the ruins to the kitchenette. The bastard even slit the bottom of my box of cornflakes. Nothing had been taken except a crate containing my proof sheets, prints and negatives – the only items I valued and could not replace.

  Two hours later a patrol car pulled into the red zone on the corner and two uniforms climbed the apartment steps to briefly nose around my apartment and then fill out a short form titled Victim Memo Slip. To the LAPD a beach area burglary didn’t rate fingerprinting surfaces or interviewing neighbours who might have witnessed the break-in. It didn’t even rate a report or full sheet of paper. The words memo and slip made it clear where I placed on the list of police priorities.

  I locked up the apartment the best I could and slept out the afternoon on the back seat of the Cadillac with my face buried in Gabe’s pillow. I tried to dream but remembered nothing when I awoke. I swam in the rough December sea just long enough to turn blue, then drove out to Beverly Hills, where I joined Hank Vulkovitch at the counter of Kate Mantilini. For a friendly guy Gabe didn’t have many friends, at least the kind he didn’t sleep with. Until I could locate his family and friends in England, I needed to talk to somebody who’d known him and Vulch was the only male friend he’d mentioned. He wore his trademark black leather jacket and Ray Bans despite the warmth and dim lighting. When I greeted him he stood and embraced me with stiff respect.

  ‘I didn’t know if it was appropriate to contact you through your agency and in the end I decided against it because after all I don’t know you that well,’ he admitted, partly to explain, partly to apologize. ‘But I’m truly sorry about Gabe. Dave Schuman was a son-of-a-bitch and I can’t say I’ll miss him, but Gabe was the brightest new talent to come along since I began in this business. I’ll miss him.’

  Vulch had picked the restaurant. We sat beneath a mural of Marvelous Marvin Hagler connecting a left hook to the jaw of Thomas Hit Man Hearns. The thing was huge, took up half the wall. I remembered the fight, watching it with my dad. The painter had caught exactly right the rubber legs and slack torso of Hearns going down. My dad threw excited left jabs and right hooks in front of the television while the fight was going on. He liked to imitate the fighters, how this one would bob and weave and suddenly explode out of a crouch, how another would come straight on, all business to a bloody finish. After Hearns went down dad worked on perfecting my left hook. I was fifteen years old then, didn’t have the heart to hit anybody.

  Vulch asked, ‘Is there anything I can help with? If you want to arrange a memorial service, a wake, whatever, I can call around to the other photographers, get a decent showing.’

  I thanked him for the thought but couldn’t commit until I heard what the family wanted. ‘I knew him less than two weeks,’ I said.

  ‘You’re kidding. The way he talked about you, it seemed like … well, certainly more than that.’

  ‘It was a green card marriage.’

  ‘OK.’ He nodded like that made sense to him. ‘I knew he was having some problems. But he was crazy about you, one look at his face when you walked into the room told me that.’

  I let his opinion pass uncontested and unconfirmed. I couldn’t judge what had been genuine and what false about Gabe’s affections. ‘Did he ever mention his family to you?’

  ‘Something about his father, the royal pretender, and a brother involved in … in…’

  ‘Law.’

  ‘Broadcasting, wasn’t it? On the BBC? I don’t really remember. He didn’t talk much about it.’

  ‘What about coke? Did he ever do it?’

  ‘I don’t really know. Maybe at parties. Doesn’t everybody? If you’re asking whether or not he had a problem with it, not that I noticed. But why ask? Bury the sins with the man.’

  ‘When a man is murdered his sins don’t bury.’

  The counter waitress, a gum-chewing throwback in ponytail and harlequin glasses, hustled over to ask what we wanted. To my surprise meat loaf was on the menu. I ordered it. From the blow-dried look of the diners around me it didn’t seem a meat loaf crowd but when the dish came, tender, moist and lightly seasoned with thyme, I decided Beverly Hills wasn’t such a wasteland after all.

  ‘You’ve been in the business for some time,’ I said.

  ‘Since the first incarnation of Travolta. Twenty years.’

  ‘Was it always so aggressive?’

  ‘The guys I broke in with told me that back in the sixties, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton couldn’t show their face in a window without the photo press hanging off the neighbouring balcony. The business has always been sharp-elbowed. It’s the rules that changed. Used to be the studios ran things. A half-dozen creeps with cameras are hanging around Liz and Dick? Great publicity! When the agents took over the business it was the same thing. No such thing as too much publicity. But these days it’s the actors who decide what gets made and what doesn’t. Nobody has the power to tell them anything. They don’t seem to understand that being a star isn’t nine-to-noon, it’s a full-time job. They take their ten million a picture and tell us to fuck off when we try to do our job, which is to make them even more famous so they can command fifteen million on the next.’

  ‘You sound like Gabe did.’

  ‘I sound like everybody. It used to be different. Sure, sometimes we went too far but when we did the studio threatened to blackball us and we pulled
back. Now it’s strictly adversarial. Stars don’t like us so we try to get them. We no longer celebrate stardom, we tarnish it.’

  ‘I sometimes think Gabe wanted to embarrass people.’

  ‘That’s the Fleet Street style. He hated the star system, distrusted the concept of celebrity. Maybe it had something to do with being English, you know, the class system they have over there. Me, I love celebrity. We argued about that quite a bit. Philosophically, we were opposed, but technically, we admired each other. Gabe could really get the shot.’

  ‘Is that why he was killed? Because he got the shot? The wrong shot?’

  He ran his finger along the ridge of his prodigious nose and stared at me in a way that made me think he wondered if I knew something he didn’t. Like a lot of guys who have been around for ever, he prided himself on knowing. ‘I was afraid some crazy actor had him killed before this second murder. There are people around town who know how to get something like that done and actors certainly have enough money to hire a hit. But then Schuman caught it the same way and those two had nothing to do with each other. So it’s probably a lunatic.’

  ‘You think somebody picked Gabe’s name off a photo credit.’

  ‘Think about it. We’re princess killers. The stars complain we’re ruining their lives. Sooner or later somebody was bound to go off his nut and pop a few paparazzi. That makes us all targets.’

  ‘He was writing some kind of a story, an exposé maybe. Did he mention that to you?’

  ‘He mentioned it, but didn’t tell me specifically what. And he shouldn’t have. No matter how much you trust a colleague, in our business you never divulge the details. He tells me, I tell somebody else and soon the whole damn town knows.’

  ‘Did that happen? Did you tell somebody else?’

  Vulch polished off his beer and stared at the glass. ‘Shit, I’d like a cigarette. What an idiotic town, can’t smoke in restaurants, can’t smoke in bars. People are so afraid of dying here they forget how to live. We’re surrounded by forty-watt light bulbs in a klieg light culture. Has everyone forgotten that candles that burn the hottest give off the most light? The stars once knew that. They set the tone for this town. Now everybody wants to live forever.’ He swept his arm across the crowd. ‘They’ll all die, but they don’t get it. Even forty-watt light bulbs pop. Nobody understands that until it’s too late.’

  21

  I returned to Venice Beach to find half the neighbourhood on the sidewalk watching the law invade my apartment. Police cruisers double parked up and down the block, rooftop lights spraying beams of red and blue into the night. It gave the more stoned residents something other than television to watch. My first impulse was to gun the engine, afraid someone had spotted my plates the night I’d broken into Gabe’s apartment, but a common break-in, even one that violated a crime scene, wouldn’t rate so much law. I parked in the red zone and told the patrolman guarding the stairs I wanted to get into my apartment. A moment after he shouted my name up the steps Harker and Douglas hurried down. With a flanking manoeuvre they hustled me toward a cruiser. Douglas guided my head below the frame then slid next to me into the prisoner’s compartment. I thought I was being arrested. Harker twisted around from behind the wheel. ‘Who else has been in that apartment besides you?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t have many friends.’

  ‘Think,’ he said with enough sarcasm to suggest I didn’t do that so well.

  ‘The landlord, my parole officer, that’s about it.’

  ‘Did you touch anything?’

  ‘I kicked at a few things, then got out.’

  ‘You left the apartment, when? Exact time.’

  ‘You mean before the break-in or after?’

  He looked at me like I was stupid. ‘Before.’

  They had whisked me into the back seat so fast I hadn’t a moment to consider why. That was what they wanted. They didn’t want me to compose. They wanted me to react. ‘It’s the scalp collector, isn’t it?’

  Harker glanced at his partner, not having a clue what I meant. ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Dave Schuman. His apartment was broken into, wasn’t it? Just like Gabe’s. And torn to pieces, just like mine. You think I’m on the list for number three.’

  Harker stared at me, angry, not giving away anything. I glanced over to Douglas. He blinked a very tired yes.

  They advised me to visit relatives outside the city, and if that wasn’t possible, to find a hotel room as far away as I could drive in a night without violating the terms of my parole. I stayed in my car instead. I didn’t have anywhere else to go except around. After midnight, the population of Los Angeles County dwindles from nine million to a few thousand. Lone cars straggle through an immense grid of empty asphalt, lost or looking for trouble or just to get home. During daylight hours the sidewalks look merely empty. At night, they look neutron bombed. Humanity diminishes to dash-lit faces framed by automobile glass, and the ragged figures of the homeless racking up shopping cart miles. The city for six hours simulates a post-apocalyptic time when all but a few have fled or perished. This was the city I liked best, a city emptied of humanity, a city of traffic lights regulating an absence of cars, of brightly lit store interiors peopled by mannequins, a city where the few survivors gathered at gas stations like frightened animals to drink their fill and vanish back into the night.

  At the rail of Griffith Park Observatory I watched sunrise wash out the carnival sprawl of lights from downtown Los Angeles to the sea. The call from England came when the sun had burned from red to blinding yellow and the first bus-load of tourists crowded the rail.

  ‘We have some information for you,’ the old voice announced. ‘Regrettably incomplete, but on such short notice, it was the best we could do.’

  I scrambled through my bag for a pen and pad, shocked to hear from him so soon. ‘OK, shoot.’

  ‘Shall we begin with the brother?’

  ‘Nigel.’

  ‘Yes. Nigel. We found a certificate of birth for Nigel Burns, son of Ethan and Sophie Burns, dated February 12, 1965, but curiously, we could find nothing extant in current records. We did, however, after some looking, discover a notice of his death, actually, dated November 22, 1974, the cause listed as accidental.’

  I wrote down the dates as I would the symbols of an unknown alphabet: completely without understanding. ‘Could there be some error? Two sets of Burns? A mix-up of records?’

  ‘Two Gabriel Burns, both with a brother named Nigel? We did check, but with only one day to research, we might have missed something.’

  I said, ‘I see.’

  ‘Shall we go on to the father?’ The tone of apology in his voice frightened me. ‘We did find record of a current address for Ethan Burns, though an unusual one: Brixton Prison.’

  ‘Brixton Prison?’ I grasped at an idea to make sense of the address. ‘Is he a warden there?’

  ‘I’m afraid madam – and I’m sorry if this is contrary to what your dear late husband informed you – that he is currently incarcerated as an inmate of that institution.’

  ‘I see.’ For once that idiomatic phrase reflected something of the truth. I was beginning to see aspects of Gabe that formerly had been hidden beneath a shroud of lies. With his sense of irony, he might have considered an ex-con the perfect choice in a green card wife. ‘And the mother?’

  ‘Deceased,’ he said, as flat and uninformative as the word itself.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ah, well, I don’t know what good it would do to go into that.’

  ‘How!’ I shouted. He was a nice man. He didn’t deserve to be shouted at. But he knew, and was too nice to tell me, not understanding that I was not like him; I was not nice.

  ‘I did check a bit of the background. But I warn you, the story clipping I found could be upsetting.’

  ‘The truth,’ I said, ‘usually is.’

  He read awkwardly, perhaps from embarrassment, or merely due to poor eyesight. ‘“After hearing a complaint of no
ise from neighbours, police constables in Islington yesterday afternoon visited the terraced house registered to Mr Ethan Burns, actor, and Sophie Burns, his wife. When confronted by the neighbours’ complaints and asked to explain the cause of the noise, Mr Burns led the constables to the body of his wife. He was taken to station, where, under direct questioning, he confessed to strangling her to death in a fit of jealous rage. Neighbours were shocked –” We can skip that part, I should think,’ the old voice interjected. ‘Ah, here’s something – “Away at school at the time of the incident was a son, Gabriel, aged twelve. In the absence of other relatives, the child has been taken charge of by Social Services.” That would be your husband, if I’m not mistaken? And here at the end, one more bit – “A matinee idol in his youth and at one time no stranger to the London stage, Mr Burns has not performed publicly for three years. Readers will remember him for his portrayal of King Richard the Third…” Well, we needn’t go into that. A very sad affair, caused quite a sensation at the time. Mr Burns the elder quite lost his wits if I remember correctly, and most probably still misses them.’ He cleared his throat with a great hacking sound. ‘I’m terribly sorry to be the bearer of such news, Mrs Burns. Please accept my apologies and condolences.’

  I don’t remember driving down the hill. A merciful delirium settled over me in which I thought about nothing. The automobile can be a form of meditation for those with nowhere to go and no time to be there. The mind rests but the senses react to the flow of asphalt like a movie in which nothing happens except the illusion of something eternally about to happen. To drive a car nowhere is to chase freedom inside your head.