Killing Paparazzi
Page 14
Grimes nodded, following me so far.
‘You know what I did to this boyfriend?’
He shook his head. He didn’t have a clue I was Pandora’s Box and he’d just opened me.
‘I shot him. Then the guys he ripped off came after me, because they thought I was part of the deal, see? And you know what I did to them?’
He stared wide-eyed, too afraid to guess.
‘I shot them too. And last of all, the honcho who employed the guys I shot decided to try the job himself, and you know what I did to him?’
He was nodding now. He got it. ‘You shot him?’
‘That’s right. And if you don’t give me truthful answers here, you know what I’m going to do with you?’
‘I got people who know where I am.’
I laughed at that one. ‘I don’t see anybody here but lizards. They your friends? I don’t think so.’ I pointed the tip of the crowbar down one end of the gully, then up the other end. ‘Take a look around. Nobody’s going to know what happens out here. Nobody’s going to find your body. If you tell me the truth, you’ll live. If you lie, you die.’
A struggle waged in his mind between his preconceptions of the gentler sex and the sight of the gun in my hand. Not many women are capable of shooting a man who hasn’t beaten and abused her for years. But I hadn’t been particularly gentle and that and the pain in his knee decided him. ‘OK, I’ll tell you what I know.’
‘Good boy.’ I smiled at him. I wasn’t unfriendly. Even if I had to kill him, I didn’t want him to think badly of me. ‘Let’s start with Vegas. Why did you come after us?’
‘I was supposed to collect enough dirt on the Englishman to force him out of the country, you know, get him in trouble with immigration, get his work visa pulled. After he married you I thought I’d try to scare him out. Might’ve done it too, except you bitchwhacked me. Didn’t expect that.’
‘This all your idea or you on payroll?’ I didn’t take offence at the bitchwhacked part, thought it amusing.
‘You took my ID, you know what I do for a living. Personally, I got nothing against you except a broken leg.’
‘Who’s the client then?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
I didn’t mean to hit him. I meant the shot to go wide, but it had been a while since I’d shot a gun and I’d never been that good in the first place. A pistol isn’t a surgical instrument; it’s designed for blasting away up close in the hopes of doing general damage. I didn’t think it would do my street cred any good to admit I’d just wanted to scare him, so I pretended his size twelve Nike was what I’d been aiming at all along. He screamed and clutched his foot like I’d just murdered his baby. I hadn’t even hit it flush, just winged off a toe or two. I repeated, ‘The client?’
He gasped, nodded, gave me a pleading look.
‘If you don’t talk a little faster, you’ll bleed to death.’
‘I deal with a guy named Mark Finster.’ He clenched his teeth so hard the words came out with bite marks. ‘But he’s just a yuppie who tells me what to do and I don’t even know if that’s his real name. Uses a dead-letter drop to pay cash, always in blank envelopes. I call in on a direct line, leave a message on a machine, and he calls me back from a pay phone. I get the feeling there are legal issues to this that he’s not comfortable with.’
‘A murder charge would make anybody uncomfortable.’
‘Nobody’s killed anybody.’ Grimes put enough scoff into his voice to sound half-convincing.
‘Somebody’s killed two people, one of them my husband, and I’m looking for a reason not to kill you. Want to help out here, give me one?’
‘Because I didn’t do it!’
‘You can do better than that. Who does Finster work for?’
‘Are you gonna shoot me again if I tell you I don’t know?’
‘I might.’
‘He told me the Englishman had taken some photographs, was trying to extort some friends of his. That was why I was supposed to use all means of persuasion, because it was already a criminal situation. Except the negatives disappeared when the Englishman died and he got worried, thought you had them.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Great, I’ll tell him it’s all a misunderstanding.’
‘So who does Finster work for?’
‘Lady, please don’t shoot me again. He didn’t tell me and I had no other way of knowing except the pictures and I never found those.’
‘What kind of wheels does he drive?’
The question caught him off guard. ‘A Toyota Land Cruiser – why?’
The smart thing would have been to shoot him through the head and bury him in the desert. I couldn’t take him to the cops, not with a bullet punching his shoe and a four-hour gap between smacking the BMW and turning him in to explain. The way I looked at it, the cops would arrest us both and he’d be released on bail about the time they bussed me back to the Institute. Releasing him presented other problems. He knew where I lived. If I let him go he could terminate me simple as a drive-by shooting. But no matter what my reputation, I’m not a killer even if it’s the smart thing to do.
We struck a deal. He’d tell his client I knew nothing about the photographs. I’d drive him back to his car. Neither of us would mention to the law what happened. If asked we’d maintain he hadn’t tried to kidnap me and his injuries had resulted from an automobile accident. Grimes might have thought anything negotiated with a gun to his head was less a deal than a survival strategy so on the drive back he stayed in the trunk.
His set of wheels was a white Pontiac Grand Am parked in front of the RTD bus lot on Main Street, a couple of blocks from my apartment. Venice is not the cleanest city in America and you don’t want to be crawling around the street an hour before sunrise but it took me a few tries before I positioned the Mag Mount where I thought it would hold. I drove to an all-nighter on Lincoln Boulevard to pick up doughnuts and two coffees to go and looped back to the Grand Am. The tyre iron stayed in my hand when I opened the trunk. Grimes squirmed out fast enough when he saw I’d stayed true to my word. In the limping scramble to his car I handed him a cup of coffee and a doughnut. He didn’t bother to thank me.
The Caddy’s big dash fit the tracking receiver behind the steering wheel like a natural part of the instrument panel. I chased the data north and then east until the footage to target compressed to zero at St John’s Hospital. Behind the emergency entrance sign a red-vested parking valet leaned over the Grand Am’s hood to wedge a claim ticket between windshield and wiper – first time I’d ever seen an emergency room you had to valet park to get to. I parked on a one-way street with clear sight lines and watched the valet nose the Grand Am on to Santa Monica Boulevard.
A Toyota Land Cruiser wheeled up to the emergency room an hour later. A young suit snatched a valet ticket and trotted toward the entrance. He moved too fast for a detailed look but the age and car matched. When the parking valet popped behind the wheel and swung on to Santa Monica, I followed. He turned right at the next block, then right again, circling to a parking lot on the opposite end of the hospital.
Spending that much money on a car must have scared Finster. By the just-out-of-the-box look of his Land Cruiser the nearest he’d come to off-road was his driveway. Like a lot of people in Los Angeles he wanted that off-road image but wasn’t an off-road guy. Because he wasn’t an off-road guy I didn’t have to worry the Mag Mount I attached to his undercarriage would jar loose.
For the next hour I fed quarters into a meter across the street at fifteen minutes a pop. The city had more meter maids than cops. The moment the meter went red a helmeted enforcer was sure to bicycle past and slap a ticket on the windshield. When I was down to my last quarter Grimes crutched out of the emergency room entrance with a head wrap that made him look like a refugee from a budget mummy flick. His client kept pace next to him, his mouth jawing away and his arms flapping like an angry bird. He was a tall, pin-striped man with gelled black hair that curled
so perfectly the distinct odour of a beautician’s permanent wafted on the wind. Grimes slapped at him with his crutch like he would a pigeon. I couldn’t tell what they were arguing about but both looked plenty mad and if Grimes actually connected with one of those swings he’d have one less client.
Finster took advantage of the delivery of his wheels to break off the argument, slam his $45,000 door and chirp the tyres on his way out of the drive. Grimes stood on the sidewalk giving him the finger until the Land Cruiser disappeared down the street and still he stood there middle finger raised like some statue of obscenity. When he turned his back to toss his crutches into the Grand Am I slid away from the curb.
I lost Finster beneath a Westwood high rise when he split off to monthly parking and I was routed to the visitor slots. At the ground floor I approached the security guard, a silver-haired black man with solemn almond eyes and asked, ‘Excuse me sir, did you see a young suit come by here a minute ago, tall, black hair gelled back, glasses, drives a Toyota Land Cruiser?’
‘About thirty people in this building fit that description,’ he said. ‘The latest one I saw went up to the 23rd floor.’
The elevator doors on the 23rd floor opened to a big-haired blonde receptionist sitting guard at a desk and switchboard. The gold-plated lettering on the oak veneer panelling behind her spray of hair read STONE, FELL AND HUGHES DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION. The office behind it took up the entire floor. I walked up and leaned palms down on her desk. ‘Did a guy just come in here, tall, glasses, black hair gelled back?’
She smiled so pleasantly I figured pleasantness was part of her job description. ‘That would be Mike Finley. Would you like me to ring him?’
Most people pick an alias close to the original and Mike Finley was a kissing cousin to Mark Finster. They had to be the same guy. ‘No thanks, I mean, not yet. I just thought he was kinda cute, you know? Wondered what he was like.’
Her pleasant smile grew even more pleasant and her eyes sparkled. ‘He’s a real asshole,’ she said. ‘Believe me, you don’t want to have anything to do with him.’
26
Ever since I went as a kid with my dad hunting for parts to fit his ’62 Chevy pick-up I’ve loved junkyards. The smell of oil-soaked dirt and rusting engines, the unexpected beauty of scripted chrome, thrusting tail-fins, bug-eyed headlights and gap-toothed grilles, the very heat that sang from so many packed carcasses bleaching in rows of steel, glass and rubber thrilled me like an archaeologist exploring ancient ruins. I could roam for hours wondering who drove that rusting shell of a ’48 Lincoln, sky blue ’62 Ford Galaxy, or sun-faded yellow ’64 Chevy Impala. What children or dreams were conceived on those now torn canvas seats, and which crumpled fender and spidered windshield turned the wheel to coffin? The pleasure I got out of a good junkyard was not much different than other people might find wandering through a cemetery, except most graveyard visitors don’t get the side benefit of shopping for body parts.
Sandwiched between a Ford Thunderbird and a Chrysler Imperial I found what I was looking for, a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado with a showroom-condition right fender, even if the rest of the car looked like it had collided with a freight train. Armed with socket and crescent wrenches, a rubber mallet and a can of WD 40 lubricating solvent I popped the hood and went to work. Even properly equipped I just about tore a rotator cuff trying to torque loose the lug nuts bonding the fender to the wheel-well and frame. An hour of sweat pulled the fender unscratched, a baby blue I liked so much I thought I’d paint the whole car that colour. I prised loose the old fender and bolted on the new one right there at the junkyard, attached a new set of headlights and gave the grease monkey who ran the place the scrap. I drove out of the yard feeling about as proud of what I’d accomplished as I’d ever felt about anything.
The Little Chapel of the Dawn rested on a street corner in Santa Monica, a mock-Tudor-style mortuary fronted by trimmed hedges and a flower box appropriately pushing up daisies. The junkyard celebrated death; the mortuary buried or burned it. I preferred jet noise, clanging metal and the crunching of safety glass underfoot to piped church music and solemn whispers from men with the demeanour of professional grief. Despite my preferences, I didn’t think the authorities would let me bury Gabe in a junkyard. I parked in front of a stone walkway that cut invitingly through the lawn to a welcome sign on the closed front door. The door had one of those old-fashioned brass front latches, friendlier than a doorknob, where you press on a thumb-sized flange inside a projecting brass ‘s’ and the thing springs open. A rustic wood sitting group, padded by plaid cushions, welcomed me to a country cottage front parlour with warm wood-panelled walls and latticed windows. On the far wall hung a painting of big-eyed dogs frolicking on the grounds of an English estate. I wondered if I hadn’t stumbled into a pet mortuary by mistake but the sixty-something receptionist didn’t flinch when I informed her I’d come to make arrangements for my husband. Gabe would have howled with laughter. The Little Chapel of the Dawn perfectly complemented the Special Memory Wedding Chapel™ in Las Vegas; I married him in kitsch and I’d bury him in kitsch.
A dark-suited, sombre-lipped gentleman in his early sixties stepped into the parlour to ask, ‘May I help you, madame?’ like he didn’t know what I was doing there. He didn’t get many widows my age in Santa Monica. The morticians in South Central, Watts, the barrios of East Los Angeles, they handled young meat all the time, but Santa Monica was too white and too safe for brutally premature death. When I presented him with the coroner’s release form he led me to the conference room, where he propped his elbows on a black-lacquer table, steepled his fingers beneath his chin and asked, ‘Have you given any thought regarding how you wish to treat the remains of your loved one?’
‘I want to burn him,’ I said.
He blinked once, heavily. ‘Cremation, you mean?’
‘My husband was beaten, stabbed, strangled and drowned. I’ve seen road kill look better. Burning is the only way to give him back his dignity.’
He nodded once, solemn and dignified, to indicate he agreed that my decision made perfect sense. In a black leather notebook he jotted down the preference and said, ‘To begin: we need some basic information about your husband, for example, his full name, the date and place of birth, that sort of thing.’
I dug our marriage certificate and Gabe’s employment record from my duffel and did my best to answer the questions. I didn’t know where he had been schooled, his educational degrees or professional associations, if any. Each field left blank testified how little I knew him.
‘Maybe we had better move on to the arrangements themselves,’ he suggested. ‘How would you like to contain the cremains of your dear departed?’
‘Cremains?’
‘Forgive me, an industry term. The body is not reduced to ash as some believe, but to skeletal fragments, which we grind into a fine powder and call the cremated remains, or cremains.’ He laid a four-colour brochure on the edge of the table, folded open to the first page. ‘We carry a wide selection of funerary urns, from this engraved sterling silver designer model to classic bronze – or for those on a budget, a cardboard box.’
The business of death chilled me. I left the Little Chapel of the Dawn needing to talk to somebody. In a city of fleeting affairs and transient friendships everybody needs one or two people they can depend on in a crisis. Though I counted Big Brenda as a friend I had not known her long or well. Frank might have done me a favour but not without expecting something in return; I didn’t know him at all. If friendships were the measure of a woman I was pretty damn small. That left only family.
Though the people who worked the cash registers and stocked the shelves at K-Mart would be friendly enough I didn’t think it right to walk into the store unannounced and ask for my mom. I didn’t want to embarrass her. Every family has its dirty linen but nobody wants it walking into their place of work. I cruised the parking slots outside the store but didn’t see her Ford Escort. She had probably car-pooled with a co-worker, may
be the younger woman I’d seen in her company on my last visit. I parked the Cadillac on the blacktop and waited for the change of shift. When she walked out I’d tell her that I was returning in person her call of the day before. Even if our talk lasted less than ten minutes the drive would have been worth it.
I recognized the co-worker when she came alone out of the employee entrance behind the store. With her home-permanent hairstyle and owlish glasses, she looked like my mother’s true daughter. She jumped back and put her hand to her breast when I stepped out of my car and called to her. What tales she must have been told to appear so frightened.
‘Sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for –’
She barricaded herself behind the wing of her car door. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Heard what?’
My mother had been admitted into Henry Mayo Memorial Hospital with a broken hip and a laceration above her left eye. My brother Ray had called the shift manager two days earlier to report it. Her co-workers had sent flowers and a get well card. An accident in the home, they all thought. I knew my father well enough to picture what happened. Some accident.
The Mayo was a modern community hospital built to serve the needs of an affluent commuter suburb that had paved over the oak and grass hills near my old home town. I jogged down a pink-tiled hall beyond the nursing station and poked my head into a bright and cheerful room with two beds and a window looking out to the central courtyard. My mom lay in the bed by the window, her eyes directed to the television set attached to the wall. I crept up to her bed and placed on her lap a golden yellow teddy bear that had caught my eye in the gift shop. A tag around the bear’s neck read, I Love You.
‘You shouldn’t have,’ my mom said when I bent to kiss her cheek. The bandage above her eye didn’t conceal the bruising beneath it. She looked frail and broken in that room. I tried to smile. I failed.