The ambulance had taken me to Los Angeles County USC Medical Center. Equidistant from the killing fields of South Central and East Los Angeles, no better hospital exists for gunshot and knife wound victims. When my parole officer heard I’d been stabbed she kept a vigil in the lobby until I came out of anesthesia. Hers was the first face I saw.
‘Do you want me to call your family?’ she asked.
‘Nobody to call,’ I said.
She felt guilty about what happened. Harker had found a homing device behind the rear axle of my car. Release me under tight surveillance, he suggested, and three homicides might be cleared. They had a suspect. My release might draw him out. I’d be safe enough. I was an ex-con. If the killer couldn’t go after me he’d just change targets. I was an ex-con, he repeated. Would she rather see someone innocent murdered? So she copped me.
Four more years in prison or a knife in the chest, I’d take a knife in the chest every time. When I told my parole officer she did the right thing by releasing me she replied that considering my criminal record I wasn’t the best judge of moral decisions. She didn’t mean the remark to be funny but I took it that way.
Harker came to take my statement the next morning, gripping a bouquet of yellow daisies in his fist like a reluctant suitor. I asked him to put the flowers on the table between me and the next woman over. Her arm was broken, her eardrum ruptured, her skull fractured and her jaw dislocated. She was one of five other women in the room. We were all without insurance and indigent.
Harker dropped the flowers into a plastic water pitcher and wiped his hands with a handkerchief from his breast pocket. ‘You either have a lot of guts or you’re a borderline psychotic,’ he said. ‘You would have beat that guy to death if I hadn’t stopped you.’
‘Sorry to hear I didn’t,’ I said.
‘Don’t be. You have enough troubles without a coroner’s inquest.’
‘You charge him yet?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘He’s still in a coma.’
That made up for my disappointment at not killing him.
‘We’ll hold him on attempted murder – yours – and work back from there. Skin and blood particles were found beneath the nails of Liliana Tutuila and if we get a DNA match he’ll fall on that one first, even if she doesn’t fit the profile of his first two victims.’
‘Why not?’
There was patience in his look, and a little pity, as though it might be the pain medication and not a small brain making me so stupid. ‘She wasn’t paparazzi.’
‘Didn’t have to be. She figured out before I did that somebody else was involved in blackmailing Burke. She said as much to me on the phone. Scanlon was listening in on my frequency. It got her killed.’ My call to Madame Alex led him straight to Piña. Once he knew her identity, he posed as a journalist and gained her confidence with a bribe. Maybe she figured out then who he was. Maybe she just talked too much. ‘It’s my fault, her death. I got her involved.’
‘That wasn’t her face I saw on the disk?’
He asked the question so innocently I nearly answered him straight. ‘I take it that means you’ve actually looked at it.’
‘The one in your car? The one that wasn’t blank?’ He tried to keep the line of his mouth parallel to the ground but the corners lifted away from him. ‘That was my first indication that you might only be half crazy. And save your mea culpa. Tutuila was a working girl. She involved herself. The second victim, Dave Schuman, I figure was a case of wrong place wrong time.’
‘Schuman was a scavenger.’
‘Excuse me for asking, but aren’t you all?’
‘Then he was the tick in our side. He had a reputation for stealing exclusives, even followed Gabe to Las Vegas the day we got married, so I thought he’d tailed him the night the photographs were taken. Why not? It didn’t seem like such a stupid conclusion, not then.’
‘You thought Schuman was trying to blackmail Damian Burke?’
‘Up until the moment Scanlon attacked me. But I didn’t think it through, picked the wrong night for him to be watching. Schuman was blackmailing Barry Scanlon, not Burke.’
He laughed at the idea and opened his mouth to say something funny about it but then his eyes locked and he stared straight over my head, thinking it through. ‘You’re saying he saw the murder.’
‘Sure he did. He knew Gabe was working on something. He followed him the night of the murder to see what it was. He watched Burke and his bodyguard drag him out of the house and drive him down the hill. I don’t know whether Gabe was part of the blackmail scheme or not but Scanlon followed Burke down the hill and when he found Gabe by the lake he…’ I didn’t want to finish the sentence and Harker didn’t need to hear it but something in me had to say it, to finish it. ‘He killed him. He stabbed my husband to death. Then he filled his pockets with rocks and rolled him into the lake. Schuman saw it and when he tried to make Scanlon pay was killed for it.’
‘Your husband wasn’t part of it, Scanlon’s extortion attempt.’
I thought he wished to let my dead rest in peace but I was beyond the point where the kindness of a lie gave me any solace. I asked, ‘Then how did Scanlon get a proof sheet to send to Burke?’
‘Scanlon was his agent. After the night of the party he brought the proof sheet to the agency to talk about publication. Scanlon was the one who proposed blackmailing Burke. Only he refused to call it blackmail. How could it be blackmail if Burke would volunteer to pay to recover the negatives? He’d blackmailed celebrities like this before. The Englishman decided to play along with it but write a story, an exposé. Bad idea. Scanlon found out. That’s why he betrayed him. That’s why he killed him.’
‘Nice theory but I don’t believe it.’
‘We found handwritten notes in Scanlon’s office. The handwriting matches the Englishman’s.’
It didn’t take me long to put it together. ‘He ransacked Gabe’s apartment, didn’t get the negatives but found the notes.’
‘Maybe Scanlon flew into a rage, maybe he planned it out. Either way he had to kill him or be exposed.’
‘If he never comes out of the coma we’ll never know, will we?’
‘You’re happy about that, aren’t you?’
‘That he might lie on a prison hospital bed the next thirty years, a tube down his nose and a catheter jammed up his willy? Yes, I’m very happy about that.’
He shook his head, said, ‘You’re meaner than some cops I know and I know some mean cops.’ He pulled a white envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat and tossed it on my lap.
I folded back the flap, spilled out what was left of the negatives. The package was a half-dozen frames short of complete. I held the plastic sleeves up to the bedside light. As near as I could tell without a loop, every frame in which Supervisor Danavitch’s face appeared had been snipped out. I didn’t have to say anything; Harker spoke up after one look.
‘I don’t want to do this without your consent.’
I slipped the negatives back into the envelope and set it on the bedside table. ‘Looks like you already have.’
‘He didn’t pay for sex. Technically, he didn’t break the law.’
‘No crime against watching, that right?’
‘The actor set him up and you know it.’
‘And he’s a friend of the department.’
‘I’m not asking you for any favours.’
‘People who take generally don’t. They just take.’
Harker lifted another envelope from the same inside pocket and shook out the enclosed document. Like all court papers this one crammed legal language to the margins. The most important words were prominent enough to read at first glance: Warrant for the arrest of …
‘Can you read the charges?’ Harker held the form up to my face. ‘Kidnapping and assault with a deadly weapon. I talked to Mark Finley about the night you spent together on the mountain. I’m sure I can dig up more if I put a little eff
ort into it.’
The warrant was enough to send me back to jail until I reached menopause. At the bottom where the issuing judge’s signature was supposed to be affixed the line was blank.
‘I didn’t make that crack about you being borderline psycho out of nowhere. You scared Finley so much he quit his job, plans to move to Idaho. I’m afraid to think what might have happened to the actor if you decided to take revenge. Instead of three squares a day in the comfort of a hospital bed you’d be back in the Twin Towers, facing conviction on murder one.’
I took the deal.
‘You think I’m your enemy but I’m not,’ Harker said before he left. ‘I understand loss. I know what it is to feel so bad you just want to go out and hurt something, make it hurt as much as you do. I wish I could give you some sage advice about how to deal with it. I can’t.’
It took me some time to fully appreciate what a good friend Frank had been. Had he not kept a copy of the disk I’d still be in jail. He complained bitterly about the deal I’d been forced to make with Harker but agreed not to make the disk public. I told him most of what I knew to compensate him for his loss. He published his story the day the photographs hit the newsstands. Libel concerns compelled him to keep the supervisor’s name out of it but Burke was an international star. Newspapers from Novosibirsk to Santiago ran the story and the less explicit images. For one week, the talk-shows chattered about nothing else. Burke left the country for an extended vacation in France, where they understand these things. Two weeks later, few people remembered what had happened.
My flesh seemed to contract when I first dived into the surf. The rip was so strong I could barely hold my feet to the sand. I dived again and let it take me. The brackish current flowed out to sea swift as a river. The urge to suicide didn’t move me. Far from it. I just didn’t care. The rage that had sustained me through the years burned me hollow and cold. I had always believed my life would truly begin when I got through the next big thing before me, whatever that thing was. First, the thing was to get through high school and get out of the house, then to get a job, get married, get ahead. In prison, I believed life would begin when I got out. My rage drove me forward, always the engine of my actions. In my youth those who thought they knew me believed I was a good girl; I wasn’t. I was full of anger and fear. I drank because I was angry and afraid. I worked hard because I was angry that I’d never been gifted and afraid I never would be. Fury wrenched apart relationships – mother, father, boyfriends – and fear lashed them together again. I hurt people because inside I raged and clung to those same people because I feared being alone. The fear had left me at Gabe’s death and the rage at my revenge. Without my rage, I was empty. Nothing filled me up. I bobbed along the surface, an empty bottle.
The palisade as it receded glowed in the golden light of the setting sun and beyond a fringe of palm trees the towers of the city glinted beneath a lavender sky. I kicked a quarter circle to the north to watch the coast mountains split the sea at the Channel Islands and pitch to shore at the tip of the long blue scythe of bay. After the winter rains the mountain flanks rippled fluorescent green and a deep shade of purple.
A foot above the water a flock of pelicans skimmed single file. The inverted angle of their necks balanced enormous beaks. At the edge of the rip they circled and the lead bird rose into the sunset sky with a great flapping of his wings. At the arc of the climb he tucked his wings and the angle of his neck flattened and his beak pierced the water like the tip of an arrow. His tail-feathers disappeared beneath the waves and then a few feet distant his beak popped up, shaking furiously until the caught fish made a lump in his throat going down. One by one the pelicans lanced into the water, shook and swallowed and hurled themselves again at the sky. The sea beneath me was a living thing and so was the sky and I was not apart from it I was a part of it.
Perhaps that was enough.
I turned my body sideways to the shore, the only angle possible to escape a riptide, and began to swim.
Acknowledgements
Many friends and strangers aided my efforts in the writing of this book, and to all of those who helped, named and unnamed, thanks. Christine Toombs, parole officer with California Department of Corrections, patiently explained parole procedures and the nature of the relationship between parole officer and parolee. Anthony Erba, a private lawyer practising in Philadelphia, helped me to understand legal issues and procedures. Beatrice Smith and Bob Sebald provided information about the Department of Corrections and prison regulations. Alex McGregor, Stephen Oxenbury, Pete Dadds and Rupert shared details about their lives as foreign journalists and photographers working in Los Angeles. Others unnamed educated me about life in prison. I’m much indebted to all. Any errors in the text are purely mine.
Also by Robert M. Eversz
Shooting Elvis
Gypsy Hearts
Praise for Shooting Elvis
‘Eversz’s novel reads like The Catcher in the Rye with high explosives’
Daily Telegraph
‘A thriller with complex characterization, a streak of misanthropic wit, a bleak world-weariness, and no easy answers … Shooting Elvis is that rare creature, a Generation X novel that skips the lifestyle accessories and goes to the heart of the malaise’
Scotsman
‘Good fun’
The Times
‘Pulp fiction run amok’
Time Out
‘A groovy little debut, and no mistake’
Melody Maker
‘Best Humorous Crime Novel, 1996: Wild, wicked and off the wall … Fast, frightening and very, very funny’
Val McDermid
‘It’s amazing what a new writer can do with the old routines. In his first work of crime fiction, Shooting Elvis, Robert M. Eversz took the hard-boiled formula for a terrorist-on-the-lam thriller and worked it into a feverishly hip satire of the Hollywood zeitgeist … With his slick style and cheeky cynicism, he is already an expert at setting heads to spinning’
New York Times
KILLING PAPARAZZI. Copyright © 2001 by Robert M. Eversz. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
ISBN 0-312-28902-2
First published in Great Britain by Macmillan
An imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd
First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: January 2002
eISBN 9781466863330
First eBook edition: January 2014
Killing Paparazzi Page 26