Zero to the Bone

by Robert Eversz

  The Rott woke me when he stirred, his ears twitching forward like birds on a limb. I traced by sight the line of his hearing to the back of Rakaan’s house, where a wall-mounted lantern threw a half-circle of light onto the descending hillside. I tucked the Nikon and tripod under my arm and crept through the brush toward a clearer angle. Like most houses on the ridge, Rakaan’s had been partially built into the descending hillside, the structural supports invisible from the street. A figure cloaked in black clipped down a set of stairs at the side, a bag slung over its back. At the base of the stairs the figure paused, facing the abrupt slope below the house. The bag reflected light—probably a plastic garbage bag. I jammed the tripod into the earth, opened the aperture wide, slowed the shutter to a thirtieth of a second, and put my eye to a telephoto image of Dr. Rakaan’s flowing black hair. He stepped cautiously off the landing, the slope steep and slick with gravel over packed earth. No more than thirty feet from the back of the house, the hill dropped sharply to rock and canyon. Rakaan stooped over the bag, as though making certain the contents were securely bound, then swung it over his head. He let it go like a rock from a slingshot, and after four seconds of silent free fall it crashed into the deep brush near the bottom of the canyon.

  The Nikon’s motor hummed in auto-rewind as Rakaan climbed the stairs back to his house—I’d shot out the roll. I didn’t think I’d just witnessed the nightly ritual of taking out the trash. The cops had clearly spooked Rakaan. The contents of the bag made me curious but not curious enough to goad me into doing something stupid, like prowling through the canyon brush at night to retrieve something that would be tainted evidence in a murder case if I touched it. I planted the tripod in front of the scrub oak, dug out another roll of Tri-X, and while I reloaded called Detective Tyler. When he picked up the call I said, “A source tells me Dr. Rakaan just threw a stuffed trash bag into the brush behind his house.”

  “Who’s your source?” His voice sounded distracted, as though I’d just pulled him from a task that required concentration.

  I yipped and softly howled into the mouthpiece.

  He laughed, his voice brightening.

  “Your source is a coyote?”

  “My source is anonymous and hoping to stay that way.”

  “And what about you? Are you on record for this if I pass it on?”

  “Logan already hates me. He hears my name with this, he’ll want to stick me in a cage.”

  “So the tip I’m supposed to give him is, an anonymous source of an anonymous source says Rakaan is illegally disposing trash behind his house.”

  “Maybe you can simplify it, say an anonymous source.”

  “You being the anonymous source who saw the bag in question.”

  “I can see why you made detective. You’re sharp.”

  He told me to hold for a second and I heard voices in the background, muffled by the palm of his hand. He came back on line, his cadence more hurried. “I haven’t heard anybody say Rakaan’s the one yet, but remember it’s not my investigation.”

  “What are you working on now?”

  “Twelve-year-old kid. Gunned down in a drive-by.”

  I told him I was sorry.

  “Nothing to be sorry about, it’s what I do for a living.” His voice slowed and softened. “Maybe when you’ve completed your parole agreement we could meet for a cup of coffee, take up where we left off that night in the darkroom.”

  I broke down my camera gear and packed it in the bag, wondering how someone could so effortlessly make meeting for a cup of coffee sound like a euphemism for sex. I’d spent enough fruitless nights camped out on hillsides or slumped in the Cadillac, waiting for a shot, not to take Sean’s hint that a bust wasn’t planned for the night. I liked hanging out in the hills but that didn’t mean I wanted to sleep rough. The surveillance cop didn’t give me a second glance when I ran back down the hill, the Rott heeled beside me.

  Most of the night remained ahead of the clock. I sponged the sweat from my skin in the front seat of the Cadillac, changed into my street clothes, and drove down the hill into Los Feliz to meet Nephthys for a drink at the Good Luck Bar, thinking I might as well drop by while I was in the neighborhood. Maybe I wanted to celebrate getting a photograph that implicated Rakaan and maybe I wanted to feel more like a normal human being. Normal people meet friends for drinks after work. Nephthys and her friends didn’t fit anyone’s definition of normal, but at least they celebrated their nonconformity together. I missed that in my life. I missed friendship, particularly with other women.

  Then again, maybe I just wanted a drink.

  Past 10 PM a young arts crowd packed most of the chairs and tables in the Good Luck Bar, the clash of shouted conversations nearly overpowering the chill-out music blasting through the sound system. The Los Angeles club and bar scene divides mostly along the lines of sexual orientation but the vibe at the Good Luck Bar wasn’t gay or straight; even though the clientele seemed as sex-obsessed as any other group of twenty- and thirty-year-olds clustered together, sexual orientation wasn’t the draw. The girls around Nephthys welcomed me like a friend, and the one who liked to wear boy-beater T-shirts bought me a drink. She’d been interviewed that morning by an abstract painter who needed an assistant, one of the few jobs available to young artists in their actual field of study. Whether or not she got the job wasn’t the point to her; she was happy enough just to get the interview. Some time later she and the girl with the green dragon tattoo spotted a couple of wild-haired boys they knew at the bar and drifted over to talk. I told Nephthys about Rakaan tossing a bag into the brush behind his house. She listened from behind the rim of a margarita, the green contrasting nicely with her red silk blouse and black slacks. I was beginning to think she chose her drinks by color rather than taste or alcohol content.

  “What do you think was in it?” she asked.

  “His dirty laundry.”

  “You photographed him?”

  “It was pretty dark out but yes, I think I got him.”

  “Maybe I’m not a regular reader of Scandal Times but I’ll buy that issue, I promise. I only met him once—twice now counting the funeral—but I’ll be happy never to meet him again.” She flashed a happy, acid smile. “And if he’s in jail, I won’t have to meet him again.”

  “You met him just once?”

  I’d assumed they’d been well acquainted, if not friends.

  “He didn’t like being seen in public with her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the public considers sleeping with a patient unethical.”

  “Some people are so narrow-minded.”

  She smiled at the joke and sipped at her drink, remembering.

  “They were eating at this sushi place on Olympic. She asked me to drop by, pretend it was a coincidence. Rakaan wasn’t happy to meet me. In fact, he buried his face in the menu like he’d been caught cheating on his wife.”

  “Why did they continue to hide?” I asked. “Sure, I understand he could get into trouble if it gets around he’s boning his patient, but once they formed the connection why didn’t they just drop the patient-doctor relationship and come out as lovers?”

  “They liked the deception.” She glanced behind her, not wanting to share the conversation with a casual listener, and pressed her mouth closer to my ear. “The bondage was only one manifestation of what was going on between them. The idea of two people tying each other up and having sex isn’t so wicked, not anymore it isn’t, but the idea that two people are murderous lovers through multiple lifetimes, that they’ve murdered each other before and might very well do it again, that’s wicked. I think they both got off on the idea that their sex could end in death, that one could kill the other.”

  “I thought Christine was the victim.” I shifted my stance, aware that such conversations should not be shouted, and spoke in her ear like she’d spoken in mine. “In her past life, I mean. I thought the whole point of the so-called therapy was to relive the past-life experience that�
��s screwing up the present.”

  “That’s like saying you’re healed the moment you admit you have a problem. That’s only the first step. After that comes the cure.” Nephthys pulled back and faced me, her black, scythelike eyebrows arching high to dramatize the idea she wanted to get across. “The scenario evolved from sexual reenactments of past-life murder to her taking revenge in the present life. You understand what I’m saying? Christine became a dominatrix toward the end of their relationship. Their roles reversed. She tied, whipped, and strangled him.”

  I remembered what Anabelle Lash had said, that Christine had excelled in playing the dominatrix to her phone-sex clients. That Christine enjoyed deception made sense; Nephthys may have known about her relationship with Rakaan but knew little about her phone-sex work. Tammy, who knew about her job with Sweet Lashes, was ignorant of her twisted sex life with Rakaan. “If Christine liked deception in her sex life, do you think she also liked to deceive her friends?”

  “I don’t think anybody saw all sides to her,” Nephthys said. “I think part of her appeal was that she was a little like a chameleon, able to transform herself to meet the fantasies of the person she was with, no matter what the relationship.”

  “How well does Tammy know Rakaan, you think?”

  “About as well as any patient knows her therapist.”

  “Rakaan was treating Tammy?”

  Nephthys stepped back, surprised that I hadn’t known.

  “Of course. How do you think Christine met Rakaan?”

  Nephthys put her hand on my shoulder and turned to say hello to the two boys from the bar her friends were swinging our way. The conversation splintered into fragments, nobody saying anything of much importance but everyone enjoying the diverse company. Nephthys began to flirt heavily with one of the new arrivals, a tall and pale-skinned boy with a wounded look—maybe it was the pierced eyebrow—who said he played guitar in a band. I’d heard of the band so I supposed he was vaguely famous. I hung around long enough to finish my drink and kissed everyone goodbye, apologizing that work intervened.

  Frank would want to see the images of Rakaan the next morning and I was far too curious to wait to see how the exposures worked out. I drove to the all-night darkroom in Hollywood, where I developed the negatives and printed the corresponding proof sheets. Four of the shots looked promising, despite the lack of light. I set up the enlarger and went to work printing eight-by-tens. One of the photographs caught Rakaan’s unshadowed face in clear focus the moment before he released the bag. I tried enlarging the sweet spot, eliminating the foreground, and dropped the resulting print into the fixer just as my cell phone rang.

  The call was coming from Frank’s phone. I checked the time; the only stories that break at 4 AM are big ones. Frank sounded wide awake when I picked up the call. A source monitoring the emergency services scanner reported the police were raiding Rakaan’s house. I packed up and drove across town as fast as I could risk, but by the time I reached Beechwood Canyon a police barrier stretched across the road a half mile down from Rakaan’s house. Journalists and photographers were not invited.

  I’d missed the shot.

  15

  OLD-TIMERS—DEFINED by local standards as anyone over forty—have told me that rush-hour traffic once moved in predictable directions, from San Fernando, San Bernadino, and the beach communities toward the center of Los Angeles in the morning, the flow reversing in the afternoon, with routine and predictable slowing in local commercial hubs like Long Beach. Traffic now jams in all directions, the roads resembling long and narrow parking lots for three hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon, with almost as many people trying to get into the beach communities most mornings—particularly Santa Monica—as those trying to get out. I did the sensible thing; I found a quiet, tree-canopied street and a level parking spot off Beechwood Canyon and curled up in the backseat, the Rott slumbering on the floorboards just below my side.

  The heat woke us well before noon, inland temperatures rising toward the mid-80s, a beautiful late-spring day if you like it hot. I fed the Rott some kibbles softened with water, stretched out the kinks, and drove the Hollywood Freeway north to the Scandal Times building, stopping once along the way. I found Frank reclined in his workstation, feet up on the desk and his head cocked back against the headrest of his chair, oblivious to time. Like me, he worked odd hours and was prone to napping during unguarded moments. I pulled a sugar donut from the box I’d bought on my way to the office and held it under his nose until he woke enough to lift one eye to see what was giving him such sweet dreams.

  “Too late?” he asked, referring to the bust from the night before.

  “Way late,” I said, and propped against the computer monitor the proof sheet of thirty-six images I’d taken of Rakaan throwing the black bag down the hill behind his house. “But maybe this will work for you.”

  He grabbed the donut, dropped his feet from the desk, and pressed his nose to the proof sheet, looking at the images while he ate. I handed him a viewing loupe and a cup of take-out coffee and told him how I’d climbed the hill behind Rakaan’s house the evening before, intending to get a tabloid-worthy shot. Frank pressed the loupe against his eye and hovered over the proof sheet, scattering crumbs with each bite. “Why did he panic?” He mumbled, mouth full. “I understand why he didn’t think anybody could see him, why he thought he could get away with it, but why didn’t he just hold on to whatever he had in the bag? Why take the risk of dumping it?”

  “Maybe he noticed an increase in police surveillance, figured he was about to be busted.”

  “That hot tattooed girl, she talked to the police?”

  “Yesterday morning.”

  “What she said must have made an impression.” He lifted a grease pencil from the coffee cup that served as his pencil holder and tapped it against the proof sheet. “Last night, you call Logan about these?”

  “Not Logan, no. I called someone else, a mutual friend.”

  “Tyler?”

  “He suggested I was wasting my time with Rakaan.”

  “It didn’t take him long to screw you, did it?”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Not literally. Figuratively. He suckered you into leaving the scene.”

  I didn’t know if Sean intended to betray me, but that was the way it turned out. When you don’t know the heart of someone, results matter.

  “So you missed the bust shot. A bunch of cop cars in front of a house. So what? Bust shots are overrated.” He circled an image of Rakaan, feet braced against a clump of brickellbush and arms extended above his head, the moment before he flung the bag into the canyon below. “This is the image I’ll pitch to go with the story. How do you think it’s gonna print up? Will you see enough of his face to know it’s him?”

  I dug the print of that same shot I’d enlarged the night before and tossed it onto his desk, Rakaan’s face as bright and clear as a mug shot. Frank craned his neck to look at the print and smirked with satisfaction; the print gave him a front-page image to sell the story.

  “How are we feeling about the cops these days?” he asked, lifting the print toward the light. “Should we say screw ’em—figuratively speaking only—or should I fax the print to Logan?”

  “If they bother to look for the bag, the photograph is evidence.”

  “And withholding evidence is a crime. That’s a parole violation, isn’t it?”

  “I forget to flush, it’s a parole violation. Maybe you can trade the photo for information about what’s in the bag.”

  If nothing else, my gullibility managed to give Frank a good laugh. The police did not like to trade information, particularly not with tabloid reporters. They gave you what they wanted to give you and never anything that could remotely compromise their investigation. While Frank photocopied and faxed the print to Logan, I flipped through the sheaf of photographs I kept in my camera bag until I found the one of the license plate I’d snapped at Christine’s funeral.
>
  “You find out about this license plate yet?”

  “Why do you care?” He tossed the print onto his desk and rooted around for something in the drawer next to the printer. “We’re already running with Rakaan in the next issue. If he’s good enough for Scandal Times, he should be good enough for you.”

  “He’s only one guy,” I said. “The video suggests two more.”

  “You can’t seriously tell me you think Rakaan isn’t guilty for this.” Frank yanked the drawer to the end of its pull and stuck his head into the gap. “Past-life regression therapy that includes sadomasochistic practices with a patient? What a slimeball! I’ve never even met the guy and I hate him.”

  “Did you run the plates or not?”

  “They’re rental car plates.” He pulled his head from the drawer, eyebrows twitching as though something completely confused him. “Registered to Budget out of LAX. Anybody could have driven that car.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “My Nicorettes!”

  “You’re trying to quit?” I asked.

  “No!” he shouted the denial, as though the idea terrified him. “I work in a smoke-free office. What, I’m gonna light up in here, get fined by OSHA, and then fired by the paper?”

  A fresh-air fan is one of the benefits of driving a convertible. I told Frank that I’d let him smoke in the car, all the encouragement he needed to grab his gear and accompany me to the airport. He worked his cell phone while I drove, blowing smoke into the wind and tipping his ashes into an empty can of Diet 7 Up. In addition to the Rakaan story, he was writing against deadline on the Komodo dragon attack of Sharon Stone’s husband, new medical evidence linking dieting with depression, and a story provisionally headlined “Why the FBI Murdered Elvis,” the tabloid defining murder loosely to mean the FBI knew Elvis was addicted to various drugs but did nothing to help him. “All the news that’s shit to print,” Frank liked to say, and he was neck deep in it as usual.