Point Doom

by Fante, Dan

  Hearing this information was like a punch to the head. I took a deep breath. Now I was up shit creek—in hock to my best friend and out over two grand in commission. “Okay, so what happens next?” I said.

  Max interrupted: “Look—I’ll ask this point blank. I have information. Were you involved here in any way?”

  I glared at Max. “Absolutely no way! And fuck your information!”

  Rhett frowned. “Let it go, Max. He’s clean. You can see it in his face. Back off!” he snarled.

  “I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all,” Max hissed.

  I faced my manager again. “If you’re accusing me of something, tell me now! Otherwise shove your information up your ass. Or maybe I’ll shove it up there for you.”

  Rhett waved his arms for us to stop. “Look, JD, I checked over your commissions,” he said.

  “Okay. And . . . ”

  “If we deduct the money you earned from the sale, your check on Friday comes out to be $1,310, before taxes.”

  “Jesus,” I said, my head now banging, “I’m screwed here.”

  “Then, there’s the five-hundred-dollar spiff I paid you in cash. That has to come out too.”

  “C’mon, Rhett,” I said, “that’d leave me with six or seven hundred bucks for two weeks’ work!”

  “Sorry, Fiorella, the store is getting short-sticked and so are you. I’ve gotta spend tomorrow morning at the bank to clean up this mess. It won’t be fun.”

  “Okay, then how about this: spread the money out over a couple of paychecks. I’m really in a tight spot here. I borrowed fifteen hundred based on that sale. Now I owe the money back. You’re my boss. Help me out here.”

  “I know,” Rhett said, pulling out his handkerchief and blowing his nose, then picking more snot out with his fat index finger and wiping it on the handkerchief. “It’s a tough break all around, but there’s nothing we can do. Company policy is company policy.”

  AFTER LEAVING RHETT’S office, I went back to my desk. Vikki watched from two cubicles away as I tore my tie off and picked up my sales tracking notebook. “What’s up, Tiger,” she whispered. “You look like your dog just got run over. What happened in there?”

  I was angry. I couldn’t talk. I felt like hurting Max—the guy had developed a hard-on for me and my anger was starting to build, and that scared me. And tomorrow I would have to face Woody with the news that I could not pay him. I was royally screwed.

  “Look, do you mind,” I said to Vikki, “some other time. I can’t handle any chitchat at the moment.”

  My expression apparently startled her. “Hey,” she shot back, turning away in her swivel chair, “whatever you say.”

  OUT ON THE lot, on my way to my demo Corolla, I told Fernando about the situation. We were standing in our sales patch, between cars, alone.

  Nando sneered, then spit on the window of a Camry. “Deeza preeks. Maz and Writ, dey fuk jou any way dey can. Maybe becauz a da kees. I tink zo. Theysa make up some big fukkin’ lie to tell jou.”

  TWELVE

  The following morning, out on Point Dume, with my head pounding after almost no sleep and another dream about dead-body parts, I woke up sweating.

  While I was dressing I decided that I had no options. I’d make the move anyway, then worry about the consequences on the back end. Hopefully, I’d make a few sales and get even as quickly as possible. I’d tell Woody the truth and let the chips fall where they fell.

  After packing up my clothes and computer I was ready to leave Mom’s place. She and Coco were sunning themselves near the back patio table while Mom studied the astrology chart of one of her celebrity clients.

  “Okay, Ma, that’s it,” I said. “I’m all done. I’m ready to hit the road.”

  She flipped her astrology book facedown, shuffled some papers, then looked up at me over the top of her glasses. “You and I need to have a serious and unemotional conversation, James.”

  Christ, I thought, what the hell did I do now? Then Ma held up a chart. “I’m not pleased with your current aspects at all.”

  Happy to avoid another mother and son confrontation regarding my flaws and dogshit life, I glanced down at the diagrammed paper. “Thanks, Ma,” I said, “but I’ll be okay.”

  “I’ve already told you that Mercury’s retrograde.”

  “Hey, that’s no surprise—whatever it means. Talk to my boss.”

  “I’ve been sitting here pondering your chart. You must exercise extreme caution these next two weeks, especially in relationships. There’s darkness here.”

  “I intend to, Ma. Thanks.”

  “Don’t patronize me. Be careful. Very careful.” Then she looked back down at my chart.

  “Okay, it’s a promise,” I said.

  Mom’s expression got darker. “There’s also your unpleasant Pluto. It may cause you mischief. It’s a conjunction.”

  “Right, Ma,” I said, kissing the top of her glasses by mistake instead of her head. “I’ll keep this stuff in mind.”

  “Call me, James.”

  Coco was smiling. “Be well, James. You’re a smart boy. This is a new beginning. I wish you great success.”

  “Remember, James: caution,” Mom repeated. ”Do you hear me?”

  “Jesus, Ma, I hear you.”

  MOVING MY CLOTHES and computer into the apartment went easily enough. One trip in my demo Corolla did the trick.

  At the door to my new place I met my next-door neighbor as she was just leaving—a painted sixty-year-old L.A. floozie named Brenda who’d worked all her life, she said, as a barmaid. She was half-tanked as we spoke. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

  MY APPOINTMENT TO work on the script with Woody was at his apartment at Fifteenth and Arizona, in Santa Monica—two o’clock—only a fifteen-minute drive from my new place on Short Avenue.

  Woody lived alone. I knew he’d be expecting me and I hated the idea of having to go back on my word to a pal, to put him off about the fifteen hundred I owed, but I had no choice. He’d be upset but it was time to work my program and face the music.

  I’d already had too much coffee that day, plus a Red Bull, and I needed to pee badly when I got to the top of the stairs and knocked on his door.

  There was no answer. I waited a few seconds, then tried again. The result was the same. I tried again, rapping more loudly. Still nothing. No footsteps either.

  Pulling out my cell phone, I punched in Woody’s number. After a pause I heard ringing from inside the door. He had to be home. Woody always carried his cell.

  I decided to try the door. I was surprised to find that it wasn’t locked.

  Pressing the handle and pushing the door open, I stuck my head inside. It was the middle of the day and all the interior lights were on. I yelled, “Hey Woody, I’m here. Where in hell are you?”

  Still no answer.

  The living room was empty but neat, almost militarily clean. The TV was on and white dots were floating across its otherwise blank screen. In the upper corner green blinking letters printed out DVD. I saw the remote on the coffee table five feet away.

  Walking down the hall I yelled again. “Woody, it’s me, JD. You here?”

  Passing the kitchen, I came to the bathroom. There was a smudge of something black on the door by the knob. I called again, “Hey, it’s JD.” Then I stuck my head inside the john.

  The room was empty but immaculate too. All the towels by the shower were the same color and hung neatly on their racks. My friend was quite the housekeeper for a guy who lived alone. Impressive.

  Then the smell hit me. It was nasty and unsettling. The stink of puke.

  The other half of the bathroom was behind the door so I pushed it open all the way.

  One almost-new toothbrush was tucked into its chrome holder and the soap dish contained a fresh bar. I could still see the letters on it. But the
sink itself was filled with the contents from the medicine cabinet; toothpaste tubes and deodorant, itch creams and spare shampoos, several kinds of aspirin, a box of hair dye, and stuff for an upset stomach. The bottle of pink liquid had spilled and had soaked into some of the other items around it.

  The toilet seat cover was down, so I lifted it up. There was a ring of puke inside—the source of the terrible stink. Leaning closer I stared down at what was in it—something floating in the water—a thick piece of flesh. A penis!

  I leaned down to look more closely at the thing. Jesus!

  LEAVING THE BATHROOM I pulled my .44 out of the rear of my belt, my brain now slamming itself against the inside of my skull. Wham wham wham.

  The bedroom door was closed but ajar.

  I didn’t want to go in. Something terrible was in there. Something I’d seen before and didn’t want to see again.

  After a pause, I crouched, readied my gun, then slammed the door open.

  THE BODY ON the bed had been placed on a large piece of clear plastic sheeting that covered the light-brown, unwrinkled bed spread. Four blue pillows were above the corpse, at the head of the mattress. Arranged pillows.

  The arms and legs of the body were splayed, pointing at the four corners of the bed. It was Woody.

  I stood staring at the thing for a few seconds; this strange, white mannequin block of flesh with its tattooed upper arms and a thick chest and belly. Blood had pooled at the bottom of my friend’s corpse. The color was purple-black.

  I stepped closer with the gun still in my hand, aiming it at my friend Woody for some reason, still expecting something to move or jump out from somewhere.

  My brain began sputtering—attempting to make sense of what my eyes were seeing. I was getting the same messages I had received five years before when I’d been at the East Bronx apartment building in New York City. The shock of violent death is something you never get used to. The unrealness of it scrambles the senses. It’s scary shit.

  Now, just inches from the body, the thing that was no longer Woody but a sort of purpled-stained porcelain mummy. I looked at it more closely.

  My friend had been a big guy. He had hairy arms and a wide, hairy chest. The bruised slab before me appeared to have been shaved, head to toe. The body was on its back yet its arms, legs, and head were all facing down. There was massive bruising on all the limbs. The wound at the crotch had to have been delivered postmortem because there was no significant blood loss.

  Prolonged pain had to have been the MO here. Hours and hours of torture before the relief of death.

  I stepped back. To breathe. To take everything in.

  Whoever had been here with this body was long gone.

  I felt my head shifting into investigative mode. It had been a long time. My first boss as a detective in New York had been ex-FBI—Eddy Zakowski. Eddy had twenty-five years as a veteran field agent before he retired and went out on his own. He knew the job inside out. I had started with only one skill: I was good at martial arts. Then, over time, Eddy schooled me on photography, bugging, disabling security devices, effective bribery, surveillance, money laundering, basic kinesics, and so-so computer hacking skills. I had also learned the best way to visually dissect a crime scene in under five minutes without destroying trace evidence and DNA. We’d worked cases together time and again. But the most effective skill I had learned from Eddy was how to deal with death from the delivery end: I wasn’t afraid to use my gun when I needed to. But my one weak spot had always been my shooting ability, hence the cannon I carried in my rear waistband.

  I MOVED QUICKLY back to the bathroom. In the sink was the box of hair dye. I opened the box and took out what I was looking for: the thin plastic gloves inside. I put them on.

  Back in the bedroom, still being cautious, I moved to the closet with my gun in front of me. Keeping my hands free I opened the door with my elbow and cleared it. An overwhelming smell of vomit reeked from the enclosed space.

  I flicked on the light and looked around at the walls in the narrow space. One of them had several drying stains.

  Backing out of the room, I removed several tissues from a box on the dresser, then returned to the closet.

  Holding the Kleenex between my fingers, I pinched enough of the puke away to have a sample. Then I wadded the tissue sheets into a ball and stuffed them into my inside jacket pocket.

  After that, for another sample, I found one of my friend’s dirty socks in a full laundry basket, then stuck it in my pocket too.

  Everything inside the little room, all the clothes and shoes, had been pushed around. Half a dozen starched, long-sleeved car salesman’s white shirts had been torn open and pulled off their hangers.

  Woody had apparently owned three leather jackets. They were in a heap on the floor. Two black and one brown. Their arms had been sliced off and lay on top of a pair of boots in the corner.

  I reclosed the door, hit the light switch, then tucked my .44 away.

  The bedroom’s shades were closed and everything electronic in the room appeared to be on. The stereo on the nightstand was softly replaying a CD and there was an open bottle of Hiram Walker’s Ten High next to the machine.

  Woody, of course, didn’t drink. When I picked up the bottle by inserting my finger into the open top I noticed that it was one-third full. I felt my stomach wrench again involuntary.

  Knowing better than to mickey any evidence and possibly get myself jacked up in the process, I began using more tissues to pick things up, just to be sure.

  I turned up the sound on the CD player.

  As I listened I realized I knew the album. It had been a favorite of my father, Jimmy Flowers, and it had played over and over again in his writing den when I was a boy: Sinatra Sings Cole Porter. The song was “At Long Last Love.” Sinatra crooned, “ . . . is it Granada I see, or only Asbury Park?”

  SOMETHING WAS OFF about the music. This was not Woody’s taste. My friend was a Fleetwood Mac and Eagles fan. I’d heard their songs often enough on his Honda’s car stereo outside AA meetings, after the session, when we’d talk.

  To double-check my memory I opened a drawer on the nightstand in search of Woody’s music stash, again using more tissues in addition to the plastic gloves. Twenty CD albums lined the inside of the drawer. No Sinatra. Only seventies and eighties soft rock. The music playing on the stereo might have been brought in.

  Is it Granada I see, or only Asbury Park?

  Definitely, this was fucking Asbury Park.

  CLOSING THE DRAWER, still looking down, I saw that my friend’s laptop case was open on the floor nearby. The computer was gone.

  My eyes scanned the bed again and took in the other night table. On it I saw an absurd-looking seventies lava lamp with its green bubble floating slowly to the top. That was definitely Woody.

  Then, on the floor, near the head of the bed, I spotted what I thought to be a stack of men’s magazines. A Penthouse and half a dozen others. Near it on the carpet but not in the stack was a lone copy of Cuffed, with a seminaked girl on the cover, her wrists clamped to the headboard of a steel-framed bed, and her thonged ass extending toward the camera.

  I flipped open Cuffed and saw page after page of mocked-up seminude torture scenes.

  I’d had enough. I badly needed to take a piss.

  RETURNING TO THE bathroom, I stared down at the penis in the toilet. Whatever blood there was in the water had drained to the bottom of the bowl, below the puke-stained rim.

  I didn’t want to piss in his shower and leave my DNA there, and his bathroom sink was full of junk that I should not move, and I couldn’t bring myself to piss on my friend’s cut-off cock in the toilet.

  Back in the kitchen I opened drawers until I found the one with cooking utensils, the drawer next to the one with the regular knives and forks and spoons. Pulling out two wooden salad tongs, I returned to the bathroom. Then, leaning down,
using the things like chopsticks in my gloved hand, I picked up the penis and carried it to the sink, then set it on the wide rim.

  Screw the cops and the crime scene stuff. After I’d peed, I flushed the toilet. I let the bowl fill and flushed again.

  Then I made a decision: I wasn’t going to put Woody’s dick back in the toilet water. That’d be an easy tell for the crime-scene guys. I’d leave the thing somewhere else, somewhere obvious, where they could find it.

  Returning to the bedroom, still holding my friend’s cock with the wooden tongs, I dropped it down on the bed.

  That was wrong too. Would a killer slice off a guy’s cock and then just leave it there next to him? No way. A severed penis had to be a trophy, otherwise why leave it floating alone in the toilet?

  But this was getting too crazy. My brain went numb as it continued thumping in my skull, on overload. Screw it! I couldn’t deal with it.

  Crossing the carpet to the dresser, I pulled several tissues out of the Kleenex box, then laid the thing down on the dresser, on top of the tissues. The hell with it. Let the cops figure it out.

  PULLING OUT MY cell phone I punched in 9-1-1.

  The voice that answered sounded authoritative and metallic. A female voice. “Whaz your emergency?” it demanded.

  “I’ve found a body,” I said. “A tortured body. Cut up too.”

  “You’re saying you have found a dead person?”

  “Yeah, a tortured dead person. My friend is dead. Very dead. You need to send your people over here.”

  “Whaz the location, sir?”

  The question stopped me. I couldn’t remember the address. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean I know I’m in Santa Monica. I’m at my friend’s apartment on Arizona Avenue.”

  The voice was apparently writing the information down. “I needs an address. In full.”

  “Wait, okay,” I said, forcing my still plastic-gloved hand into my shirt pocket, clawing to locate the slip of paper with Woody’s address. “Hold on.”