Frank pushed away from the table and stood. “You would have taken the shot you wanted and kicked the hell out of anybody trying to stop you.” He tossed his crumpled napkin to the table and pushed out the glass doors into the mini-mall parking lot, firing up a cigarette with a silver Zippo the instant his face crested the threshold. When I caught up to him on the sidewalk he said, “I thought we’d drive to an address in Hollywood, interview someone from the Raelians.”
“You mean the cloners? That’s not a story. It’s a joke.”
“A joke that sells newspapers.” Frank blew smoke through his smile. The Cadillac was parked in a metered spot down the block. He walked slowly, pacing himself to the length of his smoke. “It wasn’t easy finding this guy. The sect is based in Canada. But this being Los Angeles, I knew I’d find a representative sooner or later. We got all the wacko fringe groups here. New Age, Old Age, and In-Between Age.”
“You can’t seriously believe the Raelians are behind this,” I said, vaguely angry but unsure why.
“Seriously? No.”
“Then why are we wasting time on them?”
“Because it makes great copy.”
“My sister just got murdered and you’re treating the investigation like a joke?”
Frank gave me a look like I’d just confirmed his suspicions. “I thought you didn’t care,” he said.
“I care about the truth.”
Frank’s lips formed an ironic O. “You want to find your sister’s killer?”
“Yes,” I said, with more conviction than I’d thought I felt.
“You want to find your sister’s killer, talk to the police. You want to sell newspapers, talk to me.”
“You’re right,” I said.
“Good to hear you admit it.”
“About my wanting to back out of the story.”
Frank nodded as though he’d expected to hear as much, said, “It’s not the first time we’ve disagreed about a story.”
“I can’t play the game this time,” I said. “It’s too personal.”
“No problem. You’ll drop me at my car?”
I told him I would and stepped off the curb.
He puffed his cigarette down to the filter, watching me across the top of the ragtop. “Hey, aren’t you getting kicked out of your place at the end of the month?”
I nodded, keying the door.
“And your sister stole all your money, is that right?”
“Not all,” I said. “She left me about three hundred dollars.”
“What with first, last, and a security deposit, that should get you a couple of days in a skid-row flophouse.” He cackled like a startled rooster and flicked the cigarette to the curb.
I drove him to Hollywood.
The Raelian who greeted us was a tall, tanned, and bearded man whose white jumpsuit with reflective silver trim made him look like a refugee from a 1960s sci-fi flick. He introduced himself as Rood Cirelius, Regional Director of Media Relations, and with polite excitement ushered us into his one-room office in a crumbling courtyard complex off Hollywood Boulevard. Sometime before, the office had been decorated entirely in white, but the wear of years had grimed the carpet, scuffed the walls, and chipped the furniture, and so rather than the shimmering image of modernity the design intended the office now looked merely tawdry. Rood bounded with energy as he directed us to white-leather wing chairs positioned before his desk. Either he was overdosing on health stimulants or despite his title he didn’t have many opportunities to meet actual members of the media.
Frank gave him free rein, asking general questions about the Raelians and their interest in cloning. Rood tilted back in his chair as he spoke, looking over steepled fingers to the ceiling as though channeling his responses directly from the extraterrestrials. I observed him through the viewfinder of the Nikon as he spoke, framing the shot around the books prominently displayed on his desk. The titles running along the spines—The Message Given by Extra-Terrestrials, Let’s Welcome Our Fathers from Space, and Sensual Meditation—told me all I really wanted to know about the Raelians. Rood was more than happy to raise my consciousness whether I wanted it raised or not. The movement began in 1973, he explained, when visitors from another planet contacted French journalist Claude Vorilhon while he walked through the woods. Many years before, the space visitors had created the human race from the DNA in their own tissues. The time had come, they told the journalist, whom they dubbed Rael, to establish an embassy, preferably in Jerusalem, and begin official interplanetary contacts. Claiming fifty-five thousand members worldwide, the Raelians were now the largest UFO-based organization in the world, easily outdistancing lesser rivals such as Aquarian Perspectives Interplanetary Mission and the First World Conclave of Light, which were honorable in their intent but suspect in their unorthodox teachings about the history, nature, and intentions of our visitors from outer space. The extraterrestrials were not our space brothers, as so many incorrectly claimed. Rood shook his head vehemently at this heresy. The extraterrestrials more correctly were our fathers from space. That was a key difference, the one that defined the Raelians and elevated them above the dozens of other UFO-based theologies.
“The aliens first visited Rael in 1973?” Frank said as though asking for simple clarification. “A lot of psychedelic drugs going around France then?”
“No more than here,” Rood said.
Frank scratched behind his ear with the eraser end of his pencil, said, “No more than, say, San Francisco?”
“Absolutely not. No more than San Francisco.”
Frank scribbled the answer into his notebook. “So according to Rael, we’re all essentially clones of space aliens, is that right?”
“Exactly right!” Rood lurched forward, elbows skidding to a stop on the dull white surface of his desktop. “And this is why the cloning issue is so fundamentality central to the Raelian philosophy, the—if you’ll allow me the phrase—Raelian way of life. We didn’t evolute from apes. We descendemated from extraterrestrials. Tell me, which group would you rather claim as your ancestrals?”
“I prefer the apes,” Frank said. “But I get your point. Has there been any interest or discussion within the Raelian organization about producing clones from the DNA of famous personages?”
Rood looked lost but vaguely hopeful. “Famous personages? You mean, like, people?”
Frank deadpanned him a look, nodded.
“We’ve discussed it, but only as a hypothermical issue.”
Frank cocked an ear, asked, “Hypothermical?”
Rood flushed. “Hypertheoretical, I mean. You know, talking about what might happen without planning to in fact make it happen. I mean, if you get a chance to bring someone like Albert Einstein back from the grave, why not do it?”
“What about James Dean?”
“Absolutely!” Rood bobbed up from his desk, so excited by the idea he couldn’t sit still. “We’d love to be able to clone someone like James Dean. Beautiful, talented young man cut down in the prime of his youth by a tragic accident. Imagine if he could be brought back to life. Imagine the thrill of seeing James Dean perform again, as alive as you or me. All that wonderful charisma and potentiality, saved for humankind!” Rood bowed deferentially toward me, as though expecting my thanks, as a woman, for not saying “mankind.”
“And how about Rudolph Valentino?” Frank asked.
“The James Dean of his time,” Rood enthused. “Handsome, talented, like Dean cut down in the prime of youth and mourned by millions. Another worthy candimate for cloning.”
I imagined the headline Frank would write based on Rood’s clueless admission: “UFO Freaks on LSD Clone James Dean.” I sensed what was coming next and stood to frame the Raelian in the light bleeding through the courtyard window.
“Would the Raelians be able to, say, extract DNA from the bone marrow of someone like James Dean, enough to produce a clone, at least theoretically?”
“From the bone marrow, you say?” Rood contracted his
eyebrows as he puzzled this over, seemingly a little fuzzy on the science. “That’s different from our current experimentations, which are with, like, eggs and wombs. But I don’t see why not.”
“Do you have any comment on police speculation that members of the Raelian sect stole the corpse of James Dean?”
Rood blinked as though the wind had just blown sand into his eyes. “Police? Really? They think that? But why?”
“To clone him.”
The expression on Rood’s face did not appear to emanate from a being belonging to one of the higher orders of intelligence, which contrasted nicely with the light from the window haloing behind his head. I pressed the shutter and held it down, going into rapid fire.
“Wait a minute,” he protested. “I never said we wanted to clone him. You said that.”
Frank’s glance dipped to his notebook. “You said, and I quote, ‘We’d love to be able to clone someone like James Dean.’ ”
“You put those words into my mouth!”
“Yes, but you swallowed them,” Frank said.
Rood sat behind his desk like a man falling from great height and cradled his head in his hands. “You misunderstandimate,” he said. “Theoremetically, we’d love to clone everyone. But we have no reason to clone James Dean, not when there are so many other more qualifiled candimates around.”
“Such as Rudolph Valentino?”
“Such as Albert Einstein,” Rood said.
I watched Frank pen what would be the story’s subheadline, “Einstein Next to Be Cloned.”
“How far along are your plans to clone Albert Einstein?” he asked.
“But we have no plans to clone Einstein!” The palms of Rood’s hands thwacked onto the desktop. “You’re twisting everything I say. I was just speaking hypertheoretically. You said someone stole the body of James Dean?”
“Last week in Indiana,” Frank said. “Rudolph Valentino last night in Hollywood.”
“That sort of thing just isn’t our style. Grave robbing sounds like the work of one of the darker cults, not the Raelians.”
“What makes you say the Raelians aren’t a dark cult?”
“We’re not a cult at all,” Rood said, offended. “We’re the truth.” He plucked a copy of Sensual Meditation from the short stack of books on his desk and held it up for our inspection. “If you want a glimpse into what the Raelian revolution is really about, we’re holding a local seminar based on the teachings of this book next week. Sensual meditation allows Raelians to enjoy sounds, colors, smells, tastes—our entire sexo-sensual environment—to achieve a more intense sexual experiensation and, for the truly advanced among us, to reach cosmic orgasm.” Rood looked smugly modest, as though he counted himself among the few.
“Cosmic orgasm?” Frank repeated, unsure he’d heard correctly. “That sounds like something Hugh Hefner would dream up while watching Star Trek.”
“You have to experience it to truly understand.” Rood attempted a soulful look into my eyes.
I avoided it.
“I think I’ve got everything I need,” Frank said, rising from his chair. “Thanks for agreeing to talk to us.”
I scrambled for the door but the Raelian, taking advantage of my pause to shoulder the camera bag, beat me to it. “I missed hearing what you thought about our seminar on sensual meditation,” he said, his eyes hot and sticky.
“Sounds like a great way for horny men to con women into having free sex with them,” I said.
Rood looked shrewdly hopeful. “Does that mean I can put you on the guest list?”
Fifteen
THE GIRL in the lavender glasses backed away as though seeing a ghost when the Rott and I found her panhandling that afternoon on the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, her soft green slacks filthy at the cuffs and mud staining the elbows of her calfskin jacket. The rigors of sleeping rough and eating badly had chapped and reddened her skin. Life on the street is hard on the complexion and even harder on the spirit. She half turned from me, cracked lips parted in shock.
“If you run, I’ll catch you,” I said.
“You can’t hurt me, not here.” Theresa glanced at the streams of people flowing past the sign she’d penned to go with the upended baseball cap at her feet.
“Why would I want to hurt you?” I asked.
FUTURE MOVIE STAR NEEDS DONATIONS FOR ACTING LESSONS, her sign read, the handwriting as flowery as a rose garden. I counted fifty-seven cents tossed into the cap.
“I thought you were dead,” she said. She pressed her hips against the painted brick wall of the clothing store she’d chosen as her panhandling spot and wrapped her arms around her stomach as though the sight of me somehow sickened her. I’d traded tips with one of the dredlocked skate punks who hung out near Broadway, five bucks to hear that he’d skated past a girl who looked like my description not more than half an hour earlier. A single week had peeled Theresa’s veneer of confidence to the raw, frightened, and increasingly desperate girl beneath. I blocked her in with the Rott on one side, my outstretched arm on the other. I asked, “Why did you think that?”
Her chin dipped into her chest, the breath flitting in and out of her lungs with birdlike speed. “I heard. At the cemetery. Someone had been killed. I thought it was you.”
“You’re disappointed to see me, then?”
Her head shook a quick denial.
“Did you set me up?”
She shook her head again, this time so violently her shades slipped to the side. She straightened them with a quick, furtive hand. “The woman who died. Was it your sister?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t tell anybody she’d be there. It wasn’t my fault, what happened. I swear I didn’t know they’d kill her. How could I possibly know that?” She gulped her apologies and held her guts like she was afraid of losing them and at the end broke into a sustained fit of sobbing. On the sidewalk at her feet tears fell like rain. I offered neither reassurance nor comfort, merely watched, like someone waiting out a cloudburst from the dry safety of a doorway.
“You’ll have to tell me everything,” I said.
She held her breath to stifle the sobs and straightened her back against the wall. “I don’t know anything,” she said. “My boyfriend arranged everything. I just made the call. I mean, look at me! I’m broke, I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours, I haven’t even had a bath in a week.” She stooped to pick up the cap at her feet and showed me the change. “Not even a dollar and I’ve been here for two hours!”
“Where’s your boyfriend?”
She cried like a burst of siren, one long wail broken by whooping gasps for air. A few passersby looked but no one stopped. It took her several broken attempts to explain that the boyfriend had abandoned her yesterday morning after an argument, taking every single one of the two hundred and fifty dollars my sister had given them for the tip that had brought her to Hollywood Forever Cemetery and to her death.
I waited her out. No one cries forever.
“How did you know about last night?” I asked.
She shrugged, too self-involved to cooperate.
“Did you know they were going after Valentino?”
“You mean the fashion designer? I didn’t even know he was buried there. I thought he’d be somewhere like in Italy.”
Her confusion seemed sincere. It’s hard to pretend that much ignorance. I asked, “Where did the tip come from?”
“Heard it on the street.”
“You make it worse for yourself when you lie.” I probably sounded like her mother, assuming she had a mother who cared enough to level with her. “If you’re going to lie do yourself a favor and keep your mouth shut.”
Vivid patches of red blotched her skin in the colors of high emotion and a look of defiance rose behind the tears welling from her eyes. “I don’t have to talk. I don’t have to tell you fucking anything.”
I lifted the cell phone from my pocket and tapped out an eleven-digit number, keeping her pinned against the wall with
the Rott on one side and my arm on the other. “You think I feel sorry for you, you little creep, because you haven’t eaten for a few hours? My sister is dead. They broke her neck because of your innocent little tip.” A voice picked up on the other end of the transmission and I changed my tone to talk to it. “LAPD Hollywood? Can you connect me to Detective Smalls in homicide?” I swiveled the phone away from my lips while I waited, said, “You’re going to need acting talent where you’re going, if only to save your candy ass from the sisters in county jail. The cops aren’t going to be as gentle as I am in making you roll over on your friends.”
She glanced wildly about, as though looking for an escape route. The dog frightened her enough to keep her from bolting, even though he’d done nothing more threatening than try to lick her hand. “I didn’t know it was going to be Valentino,” she said, her voice breaking again. “I just heard it was going to go down in the cemetery next to Paramount.”
“Who told you?”
“The gang breaking in.”
The transmission connected to Detective Smalls’s voice mail. I pulled the phone from the side of my face and pressed it against Theresa’s ear. At the sound of the tone I said, “No message,” and disconnected.
Theresa sniffled, threatening to break out the siren again. I didn’t have time to waste watching her cry. “I’m either going to be your best friend or worst enemy.” I took her by the arm. “Your decision. Pick up your cap.”
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
I took her down to the beach at sunset, a large take-out bag from the local Fatburger stand clutched to her chest. Life was already adventurous enough for Theresa and given the choice between tacos and hamburgers, she chose the familiar. I figured she’d be less likely to bolt weighed down by the bag, and once we’d eaten, she’d have a hundred yards of sand between her stomach and any chance of escape. I shouldn’t have worried. The only bolting she intended at that moment was the food. She reversed her baseball cap and attacked the hamburger with ravenous bites, washing down half-chewed swallows with a large cola. I didn’t want to ruin her appetite or give her time to think about her options. To distract her I asked about her favorite movies.
Digging James Dean Page 10