She asked, ‘You got my message?’
‘Last night. But you didn’t leave much of one.’
‘I didn’t want to be dramatic, dear.’ She always knew how to understate things.
‘He hit you, didn’t he?’
She jerked her head aside to keep me from seeing the truth in her eyes. ‘I fell,’ she said.
I don’t know why I was so angry. My dad hit everybody. When I was growing up I just accepted it. Everybody’s dad lost their temper, mine more than most. Every week he hit somebody, every week somebody got their ears boxed or face slapped. Some weeks, it was my mom he hit. She never complained. She never left him. Maybe that was what angered me so much.
‘Why do you lie about it? Just because you pretend he didn’t hit you doesn’t mean he won’t do it again.’
‘I told you, I fell.’ Her voice was solemn, as though belief could convince her the world was flat. ‘It happened coming down the front steps.’
‘Don’t you see that he’s put you in the hospital?’
The woman in the bed by the door stirred beneath her covers.
‘Please, Mary, don’t raise your voice.’
‘I’ll lower my voice when you raise yours. Are you going to suffer in silence for the rest of your life?’
‘We were preparing for bed and I forgot to, to get the mail. It was dark and the corner of the welcome mat was turned up. I was coming down the front steps –’
‘No! He hit you and you fell. He started drinking after work and didn’t stop. Maybe you said something that set him off and maybe he just felt mean, but he hit you, like he’s always hit you, only you’re getting older now, and you can’t take it so well. This time when he knocked you down you broke. The next time he might kill you.’
‘Quiet please!’ The crisp white uniform of a nurse flashed through the door. The expression on her lined face was stern and her tone tolerated no nonsense. The hospital was no place for a family argument, she said. I did my mother no good and disturbed the other patients. I should go. I pulled my arm away when she reached for my elbow.
‘I’ll be quiet,’ I promised.
‘The nurse is right,’ my mother said.
I felt small and bad. I said, ‘I’m sorry, I just think you should defend yourself.’
‘This is not the time or place,’ the nurse insisted, her voice gentler but no less firm.
My mom turned her eyes back to the television set. ‘You’re just like him, Mary Alice, you’re more like him than any of us. That’s why you hate him, and why he hates you. It would be better for all of us if you didn’t come back here for a while.’
27
With its sheer grey walls rising bluntly from Sunset Boulevard as though from a moat, its pitched black roof and central tower, the Chateau Marmont looked like the bastard child of aristocratic castles from the Loire Valley. The hotel had clung to the hillside above Hollywood since the 1920s, pines and eucalyptus shielding from public view the mock-sixteenth century edifice if not the excessive behaviour of its celebrity clientele. Early in its history, following the erotic adventures of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, the Chateau Marmont developed a reputation as being a film-star fuck-pad extraordinaire. Successive generations of actors and recording stars found it a discreet environment for equally outrageous behaviour until a heroin-cocaine speedball blew John Belushi’s brain out the roof of bungalow number three. It took the hotel a decade and a change of ownership to recover from the hangover but as she neared her seventieth birthday the Chateau Marmont had again become a film industry hangout and host to scandalous behaviour to rival that of its famous ghosts.
The woman who came to the door of my suite would have attracted any man or woman above the age of twelve and under the age of dead. It wasn’t just the photogenic contrast of Polynesian black hair and beige skin with high cheekbones and sea-green eyes, or the sinuous obedience of her black mini and tube top, or even the tattoo panther that prowled the wild place between her hip and navel. A sexual energy vibrated from her entire being, halo to heels, an energy so polymorphous-perverse in appeal I half expected the carpet to pull up tacks and wrap her. When I stood back from the door she stepped into the room with an approving smile that warmed me in places I’d rather stay chilled. ‘Love your show,’ she said. ‘Every Tuesday night my nose is glued to the tube, you gotta tell me, is everyone on the show true-to-life or are some of ’em actors?’
Like many high-class hookers Piña Noir wanted to be an actress and thought this was the way to meet the people who could make her one. I doubted she had watched more than one episode of Meat Wagon but as I’d borrowed Cass’s identity when calling to ask for her services I didn’t question her enthusiasm. Madame Alex wouldn’t send one of her girls on a blind date. That wasn’t the way the system worked. She had to know who I was. I’d flashed Cass’s credit card to check into the hotel then insisted on paying cash for the room. I didn’t want to leave a record, I said. They knew what I meant. Entertainment types used the hotel as a trysting place. Discretion was included in the room price. When Madame Alex returned my call, the front desk connected her to the woman registered as Cass Mitchel. She knew Cass’s name from LA 411, the directory of everybody in the business. If the hotel accepted me as Cass, I was Cass. A cop couldn’t use the name of a Hollywood player to sting a working girl. ‘They’re all real,’ I said. ‘The last thing anybody wants to be is on my show.’
Piña leaned against the counter between the living-room and mini-kitchen and snapped open her purselett. ‘I always like getting the financial arrangements out of the way first – do you mind?’
‘The envelope on the counter there belongs to you.’ I spoke as light-heartedly as I could considering the envelope contained five one-hundred dollar bills.
Piña confirmed the amount and slipped the envelope into her purse. ‘You know I don’t do guys, don’t you? I mean, I perform in front of ’em, but I don’t do ’em. In case you’re worried.’ She slid her hands beneath her hair to cradle the back of her neck and stretched, bringing dramatic focus on to the thrust of her breasts and down to her dark radiance. She said, ‘You’re very attractive, you know that? I really go for that bad-girl look of yours.’
‘It’s not just a look, I really am a bad girl.’
‘How bad?’
‘Worse than you can imagine.’
‘Yum. How do you like to be bad?’
I didn’t think I should tell her that, at least, not yet. ‘Please, make yourself comfortable.’
‘How comfortable do you want me to get?’
I didn’t believe she wanted to get comfortable at all. She wanted to get down to business and get out. ‘No rush. Shall we have a drink first?’ I brought out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, carried a couple of glasses and a bucket of ice to the coffee table. ‘Sorry, guess I should have brought champagne, right? You look like a champagne kind of girl.’
She didn’t know if that was a compliment or not but nodded like I had it right. ‘It’s OK, I’ll drink whatever you’re having.’ She perched on the edge of the green-velveteen couch which, like the coffee table, the stuffed chair and everything else in the room, looked like it had been salvaged from a Beverly Hills flea market.
‘I’m not bad like you,’ I explained. ‘I’m not bad because I use my sexuality to get things, or because I enjoy types of sex society disapproves. Sure, sometimes I do those things, but that’s not why I’m bad. I’m bad because I hurt people.’
A woman like Piña, she’d experienced a lot in her twenty-two years, though of such a narrow range that she nodded like she understood exactly what I was saying even though she had no idea. ‘As long as it’s controlled an’ nobody gets hurt a little pain is exciting. But I didn’t know that was what you wanted, I didn’t bring anything special.’
‘I’m not talking about S & M. I’m talking about putting people in the hospital, I’m talking about putting people in the grave.’
Even though she still didn’t understand what I w
as getting at, her black heels shifted on the carpet for secure footing and her red nails gripped the bourbon tight enough to crack a thinner glass. It was occurring to her that something about me wasn’t right.
‘Do you know why I asked for you? Who recommended you specifically?’
‘Alex said one of your girlfriends knew me.’
‘I lied.’
She cocked her head, all sensual burn reduced to cold ash. ‘Then who?’
‘Gabriel Burns.’
She set the drink down on the coffee table and snapped up from the couch. ‘I have to go.’
I shoved her back down hard and kicked her heels out. With my hand at her throat I said, ‘This is a wild hotel, people have a lot of parties here, screaming and yelling at all hours of the night. If you try to leave, I’ll hurt you bad enough to make you stay. You scream everybody’s just going to think we’re having a really good time.’
Her crescent eyes stretched to oval with more than just fear, as though the threat of violence fascinated as much as frightened her. Her head dropped slowly and came up again. Almost uncontrollably, I wanted to kiss her. Like a lot of my desires, that was someplace I didn’t want to go. I backed off to sit on the edge of the chair between her and the front door.
‘You’re Nina, aren’t ’cha?’ Piña swung her heels back to the floor, reached for her glass and drained it in one smooth line of movement.
I took the bourbon from the table, poured her a refill, set the bottle on the floor by my side so she wouldn’t feel tempted to use it on my head.
‘Gabe talked ’bout you. He talked ’bout you so much I shoulda been offended, ’cept what he said made me just more interested.’ She took down half the refill in one gulp and smiled at me with sexual bravado intact. ‘He described you as a Tootsie Pop: hard on the outside, soft an’ chewy on the inside. He was definitely right about the outside, makes me even more curious about the soft an’ chewy part.’
‘That soft part isn’t soft anymore,’ I said. ‘And the hard part isn’t sweet.’
She glanced slyly from beneath her lowered head like a child walking the edge of a fence. ‘This act, pretending you like girls, it’s not just an act, is it?’
I poured myself a shot, threw it down, chased it with half a glass of water. ‘The way you talk about Gabe, seems to me you knew him pretty well. Were you sleeping with him?’
‘You should give him credit for knowing the difference between his joystick an’ his thumper.’
‘So you slept with him.’
She had courage, I had to admit that. She stopped fidgeting with the glass and threw down a dead-on stare with as much invitation in it as confession. ‘It’s one of the things I do.’
‘I thought you said you didn’t do men.’
‘Professionally, I don’t.’
‘Gabe was, what? Recreational?’
She stared at her hands and turned them palms up to cup her face like a surgical mask. ‘Gabe was a friend.’ She fought it briefly and lost badly, her eyes going bright red and swelling furiously until the tears burst and streaked mascara-black down her cheeks. Piña was a pretty girl but she cried ugly.
The display moved me to pity but not any closer to my own personal grief. I wasn’t jealous of her relationship with Gabe. In a strange way, I felt closer to her because she had known him, had enjoyed his friendship and his body. Her relationship didn’t threaten mine, make it any less real or unreal than it was or was not. That we had both known him made me feel less alone. What brought up feelings of jealousy and envy was the way she could cry about losing him. Some have a facility for tears but for others to cry means complete emotional destruction. I hadn’t cried for five years. When I said I had turned to stone I meant it. I worried that somewhere along the way, at Gabe’s death or before, I had done mortal injury to my soul. I wasn’t even sure I still had a soul.
I stroked her hair and when I cupped the side of her face in my palm she nestled into it like something lost. ‘You were his friend, so you’ll help me, right? You’ll help me do what I gotta do so we can bury him, sleep eight hours in peace?’
She nuzzled into the palm of my hand, eyes clenched, teeth nipping the inside of her lower lip. Sometimes simply opening one’s eyes can be an act of vulnerability. When Piña opened hers I saw in the wide black iris a figure huddled as though left naked on a rock in a vast sea, exposed and afraid. The way she looked at me, I was not unaware that she would then slip her face from my palm and seek my lips. I was not unaware that when she did so I would not turn my face away.
When I stopped wanting it to go further than that one kiss I pulled back and smiled to let her know it was OK but I was not ready for anything more than just that. She wiped beneath her eyes with the back of her forefinger, noticed the smudges of black mascara and showed them to me, laughing. ‘I prob’ly look like the La Brea Tar Pits. You got any tissues?’
‘In the bathroom,’ I answered, and went to get them.
When I stepped back into the living-room the front door was open and she was gone.
28
Beyond the balcony of my suite a billboard of the Marlboro Man loomed like a giant cartoon ready to break his posts and rampage through the city, roping cars and six-gunning skyscrapers. I wondered which of the cars streaming brake-light red below was Piña’s running back to ground. Further down Sunset, Madonna strained against her plywood frame with breasts big enough to crush small cars, Nathan Lane mugged with a mouse the size of a killer whale and the thirty-foot-tall sunglassed face of Jack Nicholson howled at the moon. One Halloween or Oscar night they might come alive, leap free of the plywood, paint and paper that bound them, and with bodies to match the size of their stardom trample Hollywood to dust.
Piña was in the suite for close to an hour and all I discovered was that she’d slept with Gabe. I didn’t learn what had happened the night the photographs were taken, how he had known about the party or where he’d waited with his camera. Cursing myself comes more naturally than cursing others. When I ran out of things to call myself I reached Frank on his cell phone, asked him what he knew about Stone, Fell and Hughes Development Corporation.
‘One of the top ten land development companies in So Cal.’ Tyres hummed beneath his voice. He was on the road, prowling for a story. ‘Not as big as Irvine Ranch Company, which owns half of Orange County, but you see their signs on some of the top end housing projects on the Westside.’
‘What do you mean, land development?’
‘It’s an oxymoron. They don’t develop land, they bulldoze it and drop a couple hundred designer tract homes over rolling oak hills or pristine desert. You drive the ridge of the Santa Monica Mountains on Mulholland, you’ll see one of their projects. Guard house out front, earth-coloured antitank wall and more electronic security gear than the Korean DMZ.’
‘Do they have some Hollywood connection you think? Some side business in the movies?’
‘The information highway is a two-way street. You want to invite me over for a drink, we’ll talk about it?’
I hesitated long enough that he got offended. ‘I’m not going to try to bone you, just have a drink.’
He whistled when I told him I was staying at the Chateau Marmont. At $300 a night business must be pretty good, he said. I didn’t tell him about Piña. I was supposed to be a hardened con. The ease of her escape embarrassed me. I was guilty of naivete or stupidity and maybe both. What was it my parole officer said? Criminals are screw-ups.
During my five years in stir I’d lived in a society of criminals. Most were not bad people. We had a few killers but the cold-blooded ones were kept away from the rest. The majority served time on drug or prostitution charges. They never hurt anybody except themselves. A few had the inner strength and determination to change once they were released but most just went back to the same life that got them arrested, only older and more desperate. Prison might have taught them new ways to break old laws but it didn’t make them any smarter. They were like dolls spinning at
op a music box; when wound and released they danced to one tune only and every time in the same direction. The tune I danced to was no more complex nor the movement of my feet less predictable.
The confidence that I could discover who had killed Gabe struck me then as another example of how I’d screwed up my life. I’d already broken into an apartment, assaulted a kid in a bar and held a man at gunpoint, acts which could send me back to prison. When I did uncover something I couldn’t trust the cops to do anything about it. I wasn’t a professional investigator or even a talented amateur. My greatest asset was desperation. Frank was right to call me a fool, and not just for giving a copy of the disk to Harker. When I heard the knock on the door I decided to confess to just that. Only it wasn’t Frank waiting for me at the door, black heels slung over her shoulder, tattoo puma on the prowl and a bottle of Moët & Chandon in hand.
‘You were right. I am a champagne girl.’ Piña stepped lightly inside and when I shut the door she backed me against the wall with a kiss that just about burned a hole through me. Life is full of surprises. I let the kiss flame out on its own, said, ‘I appreciate the effort but this isn’t what I want.’
‘Sure it is. Sure you want it.’
She handed me the bottle and two glasses. I eased out the cork while she settled into a suggestively prone position on the couch and giggled like a bad little girl. ‘I went down to the bar.’
All this time I’d been thinking of Piña as a grown woman. Few women had her sexual energy or experience but in other ways she wasn’t more than a child. Maybe the child-woman duality was part of the appeal. I handed her a glass of champagne and sat across the coffee table. She was a little drunk and it took her a moment of pouting to determine I wasn’t getting on to the couch with her. ‘I had to prove to myself I could get away, y’know?’ She put her feet to the floor and her knees together and rifled me a look equal parts anger and invitation. ‘The way you were acting, talking ’bout putting people in the hospital, it was pretty scary. Sure, I’m sometimes attracted to danger an’ I didn’t get any vibe you were evil. But what if it was some Aliens scenario, y’know, when a monster busts out of someone’s gut? People are walking ‘round out there an’ they look like you an’ me, they look normal, but they’re not. They’re aliens. You get alone with one, in the wrong situation, an’ you pray you pull a Ripley, you pray you find a way out.’
Killing Paparazzi Page 15