Zero to the Bone

by Robert Eversz

  “Everybody who lives in L.A. knows that,” I said. You couldn’t drive past a location shoot without seeing a half dozen motorcycle patrolmen working traffic control.

  “It’s a good source of additional income, and not just for uniforms.” He dropped his foot and straightened. “About a dozen years ago Jason Starbal produced a police thriller set in L.A. From a cop’s perspective, the film got the details right. Guess who served as the technical advisor?”

  I stared at him, thought, no way.

  “That’s right, Robert Logan, working homicide out of North Hollywood then.”

  “Your station,” I said.

  “Before my time.” He made a face as he sipped the bourbon. “But his legend lives on. One of the reasons we don’t get along.”

  “You and Logan?”

  “The bastard thinks he still owns North Hollywood and I don’t encourage his delusions.” He closed his eyes, sipped again, shook his head. “It’s not so bad as that. We’re collegial. I wasn’t worried about him until you connected Stewart Starbal to the murdered girl.”

  “You think he has a conflict of interest?”

  “I’d be careful mentioning any links to Starbal, let me put it that way.”

  “You know the package, the one that came in the mail?” I opened the refrigerator door, suddenly ravenous, and finding it depressingly empty, settled for a carton of milk. “I’m pretty sure it came from Stewart Starbal, and the photograph of Luster, it refers to his father, to Jason Starbal.”

  He stared at me across the countertop.

  I glanced at the carton in my hand, thinking it was that.

  “So I feel like drinking milk, anything wrong with that?”

  “Help yourself,” he said and shrugged. “What makes you think the photo has anything to do with Jason Starbal? I don’t get the connection.”

  “The stamps on the envelope were the same ones used to post the video of Christine’s killing.” I took another swig of milk, not liking the way he looked at me. “Stewart all but told me he’d sent it. I always figured he felt guilty because he was there when the video was made, a passive spectator maybe, but there. That he’d hooked up with Christine when Rakaan brought her over on a visit to his father. But now, I don’t think Rakaan had anything to do with it.”

  A surprised bark gusted from Sean’s chest. “Whatever you do, don’t tell Logan that. He’ll think you’re working for Rakaan’s defense team, or worse, inventing stories just to make more sensational headlines. They’ve got all the evidence they need to convict; believe me, it’s just a question of time before Rakaan asks to plea.”

  “To a lesser charge, like manslaughter,” I said.

  “From what I’ve heard, that’s what everyone from the district attorney on down agrees is what happened here. They had a history of sadomasochistic practices. He just went too far one night and killed her, then panicked and dumped the body.”

  “And the shadow moving across the frame? In the video?”

  “A dog, a cat, a newspaper blowing in the wind, a figment of your imagination.” He shook his head and finished his drink, clattering the glass to the kitchen counter in a gesture of frustration and, I thought, anger. “What makes you think the Luster photograph refers to Jason Starbal?”

  “Just a guess,” I said, not wanting to go into it.

  “Glad to see that degree in criminology is finally paying off.”

  “I think Stewart feared other girls might be killed and wanted it to stop,” I said, goaded into responding. “That was why he mailed me the disk and later, the photo. But why not just step up and turn the killers in, unless he couldn’t do that either. That’s what made me think his father was involved.”

  “People do all kinds of things because of guilt, you’d be surprised.” He lifted his leather jacket from the kitchen table, where I’d thrown it while undressing him. “If he was part of what happened to Christine—let’s say he was in the room with Rakaan when she was assaulted and did nothing about it—he’d do small, pretty much meaningless things to chill his guilt.”

  “Like mail evidence to a tabloid,” I said.

  “Rather than turn himself in, yes. And when he still didn’t feel any better about himself?” He punched his arms through the jacket, glancing around the room to see if he’d forgotten anything. “You get what you found at the Chateau Marmont, a confused kid dead from an overdose, half suicide, half cry for help. But you know what?” He moved to the door, turned, gave me a smart-ass smile. “You don’t have proof for any of this, not even that Stewart Starbal sent you the video or the photo. It’s all rumor and innuendo. Perfect for Scandal Times.”

  29

  THE SUN STRUGGLED to pierce a June haze hanging over the L.A. basin on the morning Stewart Starbal was scheduled to be buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, his body marked for a plot near the crest of a green hillock that offered sweeping views of the foothills of Glendale and north Los Angeles. Frank drove like a lost tourist along labyrinthine cemetery roads named Enduring Faith Lane and Precious Love Drive, searching for one that led to high ground. A gardener had tipped him about the time and location of the memorial service, to be held in Wee Kirk O’ the Heather, one of the cemetery’s three faithful re-creations of Scottish and English churches, and though we didn’t plan to crash the service, we did intend to observe the mourners at a respectful distance.

  We weren’t the only ones at the cemetery not mourning the death of a loved one; along the way we passed a Japanese tour bus parked near the Last Supper Window Memorial Terrace, which boasted Leonardo da Vinci’s immortal work re-created in stained glass. Not even the mortuary business is immune to the fairy-tale kitsch culture of Southern California, turning cemeteries into amusement parks of the dead. Casual visitors were welcomed—no, encouraged—by mortuary management to stroll the sumptuous grounds and admire several exact replicas of Michelangelo’s greatest works at no charge whatsoever, with souvenirs of their visit available in the mortuary gift shop. I stepped out of the car and gazed down the slope of grass to the pitched roofs and stone spires of Wee Kirk O’ the Heather and nearby Little Church of the Flowers. Below the church two late-model Japanese sedans and a black BMW parked at the edge of the road, where it curved around the hill and widened to allow mourner parking.

  “There he is,” Frank said, pointing toward a cluster of men huddled near the church entrance. “Ray Spectrum, the guy with the black ponytail.”

  I aimed the camera and caught in the telephoto frame the suntanned face of a man who could have once played professional football, his black and brilliantined hair swept back above a massive brow and tied in place with a black band, the shoulders of his black matte suit so wide he’d need to turn sideways to fit through the average door. At that distance it was difficult to get a good read on him, an oversized pair of Valentino sunglasses covering his face like an eye mask, but from the way he spoke to the two gray-suited bruisers huddled next to him he was accustomed to command, and when he pressed his hand to his ear and glanced up the hill, directly into my telephoto lens, I knew he was wired and we’d been spotted. The way he looked at the lens, I felt he expected to see me there.

  I burned a few images into the digital camera to document his presence and then pointed the lens toward the entrance at the base of the hill, where the first in a convoy of black stretch limousines cruised through the cemetery gates, black ribbons flapping from their aerials like diplomatic flags. I zoomed back for an epic shot, the solemn black vehicles moving amid rolling green and misty sky. At the end of the limousine procession drove mourners in private cars, a steady crawl of sports and luxury metal driven by kids who might have been Stewart’s rich friends. The black Corvette in the middle of the pack was not particularly remarkable, neither newer nor more expensive than many of the other cars in the procession, except that I’d seen it before. At the curve beneath the church, the limousines parked bumper to bumper and disgorged their cargo of black-suited men and women in elegant mourning dresses and
pantsuits. Spectrum personally opened the passenger door to the lead limousine and whispered into the ear of the balding middle-aged man who emerged.

  “Jason Starbal,” Frank said. “Can you get him?”

  A private bodyguard hustled around the hood with something black in hand that blossomed into an umbrella when he approached Starbal, blocking him from view and shielding the next person to emerge from the passenger compartment. I’d caught a few frames of the back of Starbal’s head but nothing more; Spectrum had no doubt warned him that we were watching from above. I’d seen umbrellas deployed before—it was a favorite trick of security teams to shield celebrities from paparazzi cameras. I lowered the camera to locate the position of the black Corvette and noticed two cemetery security guards in a modified golf cart sputtering toward our position on the hill.

  “Uh-oh, we’re busted,” Frank said.

  The security guards looked to be nice enough guys, their duties at the cemetery entailing the use of calm authority rather than conflict, a law enforcement posture emphasized by their near-retirement age and dumpling-shaped bodies. The lead officer was a gray-haired black man with crinkled eyes that made him look worried we might cause more trouble than he could handle. “Sorry folks, no photographing the memorial services, I have to escort you off the premises.”

  “You’re telling us you don’t allow cameras?” Frank’s voice spiked with indignation. “We just passed a busload of Japanese tourists with cameras. Are you going to throw them out, too?”

  “Please, sir, we ask you to respect the rights of the mourners to a little privacy.” He pressed his palms out in a calm-down gesture while his partner lifted a walkie-talkie to his lips, ready to report a disturbance on Loving Kindness Lane.

  I apologized to the officer and walked to the car, glancing over my shoulder when I ducked into the passenger seat. On the road below, a twenty-something with flowing black hair stepped out of the Corvette to exchange fist-taps with two other men in their early twenties, then hugged another young man who approached the group, the last to arrive. I snuck the lens over the doorsill and maxed the zoom to isolate the four of them. The late arrival looked vaguely familiar, but at that distance, I couldn’t get a clear enough look at his face to know why.

  “You get anything worthwhile?” Frank asked, poking his head through the driver’s window, and when I told him about the group of four young men gathered by the black Corvette, he pretended to stretch and checked them out. “The one on the left,” he said, referring to the late arrival, “he’s Stewart’s older brother, Jagger. The Corvette, think it’s the same one you saw at Chateau Marmont?”

  The feigned casualness didn’t fool Spectrum, who hustled to the group the moment he caught the direction of Frank’s glance and ushered the boys toward the chapel entrance. I pointed the lens out the side window as we pulled away from the security guards, catching the Corvette driver as he moved toward the chapel. I hadn’t seen his face clearly when he’d come down the stairs of the Chateau, but the hairstyle and body type matched closely enough. I suggested we wait outside the cemetery gates, then tail him to see where he went after the funeral.

  Frank dropped me off at the Cadillac—like true Angelenos we’d driven out in separate cars—to let the Rott out for a quick patrol while he backed into a parking spot across from the cemetery, using a white panel van in the space ahead of him like a blind to conceal his car. The Rott went about his business efficiently, accustomed to short bursts of activity between hours of waiting, and hopped into the rear seat of the Honda without complaint. To pass the time we talked about Anabelle Lash. Since our visit to her office he’d continued to call and leave messages that Lash had so far ignored. We both speculated that she’d been warned against talking to us; if Starbal watched his first wife so closely that she’d been spotted talking to us, then he’d probably posted armed guards around Lash, who could divulge far more dangerous information than old news about a failed marriage.

  “Something else might be interesting,” I said. “You ever hear rumors that Logan worked as a technical advisor on one of Starbal’s films?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “A source,” I said.

  He tapped the rearview mirror to an angle that reflected my face and fingered a lit cigarette outside the window. “How much are you seeing Sean anyway? Like, every night?”

  I stared at him in the reflection, stone-faced.

  “I never figured he’d move so fast and then stick around.”

  “He have a reputation for quick moves and moving on?”

  “No more than any other guy twice married and divorced by thirty-five.”

  I waited for the smile that signaled a joke, but Frank didn’t tip me that one had been made. He puffed at his cigarette, obliquely watching my reaction as he stared out the windshield. “He didn’t tell you,” he guessed.

  “Any kids?”

  “None that he claims formally.”

  This time he smiled.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sean and I had been together no more than a few times and though I never felt we couldn’t talk to each other, our bodies spoke with far greater urgency—and probable honesty. Neither of us had fully or even partially disclosed the shadows trailing our lives. Not having to talk about the past liberated us from incidents that encumbered us, things we might not have regretted but that required too much explaining to justify to someone else. Animal attraction was one thing and true compatibility something else. I didn’t know Sean, not really, no more than he knew me, even though I was already more than a little bit in love with him. We were ciphers to each other, attracted to the mystery of who the other might be as much as the reality of who that person really was. Our moments alone took place in a world of our own making, far from the intrusions of the outside world, and when the time came, inevitably, that the world flooded in, the relationship might not survive it.

  The Corvette took good advantage of its speed after the memorial service ended, streaking between the exit gates at the head of a like-minded queue of those who didn’t want to waste the entire morning at a funeral. Frank was slow to start the engine and extricate the Honda from its blind, and by the time we were rolling, the Corvette had vanished over the horizon line. My shouts to hurry up didn’t improve our speed or Frank’s driving skill. Neither of us thought to look behind us. Frank was too enthralled by the hunt to worry about traffic cops, and I was too busy hanging on to the restraint strap with one hand and the Rott’s collar with the other. We caught our next sight of the Corvette as it crossed the concrete-lined Los Angeles River and swung left to ramp onto the southbound lanes of the Golden State Freeway. Frank settled back into the seat after we merged into the fast lane, several car lengths behind, confident we could keep up. I put my eye to the viewfinder and waited until shifts in the traffic flow created a gap between the Nikon and the Corvette’s titanium exhaust pipes. The license plate that slid through the telephoto frame read OZZY13.

  “You mean Ozzy like Ozzy Osbourne, the singer?” Frank asked when I read him the plates.

  I thought about the kid behind the wheel while Frank called a contact with access to the DMV’s database. The kid had met up with Jagger Starbal and two other boys of similar age at the funeral, the four of them looking like a tight group of friends. What had drawn him to the Chateau Marmont on the day that Stewart had died? Had he been a close friend of Stewart’s, his number called either just before or after mine? He might have been responding to a plea for help from a drugged friend. But if he was a friend of Stewart’s, why hadn’t he phoned the front desk on finding him unconscious? Even if they’d been doing drugs together, he should have summoned help before fleeing—unless he didn’t mind seeing Stewart die. I again considered the possibility that Stewart had been given a hot shot, then realized it didn’t have to be murder. Ozzy might have gone to the hotel not to talk Stewart out of committing suicide but out of going to the police or confessing to the tabloids. If Ozzy thought Stewart was crackin
g, about to confess their involvement in Christine’s death, then finding him dead or dying of an overdose would be a relief, even if they were so-called friends. He wouldn’t call emergency or the front desk. He’d run. He’d let Stewart die.

  “All we need now is a Keaton and an Einstein to get the joke,” I said.

  Frank told his DMV contact to call back with the information as soon as possible and disconnected. “Get what joke?” He asked.

  “Jason, Ozzy, Keaton, Einstein.”

  “J-O-K-E, you mean? Like what was written on the back of Luster’s photo?”

  “Why not J for Jason and O for Ozzy?” I suggested, voicing the thought out loud to hear how it sounded. It sounded only half right. Ozzy belonged, but not Jason. My head spun from the centrifugal force of reversing suspicions. “No, not Jason. J for Jagger.”

  “Jagger?” Frank shouted the name, incredulous. “First you’re so convinced it’s Rakaan you almost single-handedly get him arrested, then you decide it’s not Rakaan, it’s Jason Starbal and Anabelle Lash, and now just to piss everybody off you’re saying it’s not Jason, it’s Jagger?”

  “Jason pays women to have sex with him,” I said, stroking the Rott’s head to help me think. “He’s a pervert just like Rakaan but he doesn’t need Rohypnol, and even if he decided to try it for kicks, he’s too experienced to accidentally strangle someone to death. He’s been doing it for years, remember. And where does Charlotte McGregor fit in? She doesn’t. And neither does Luster. Stewart sent me the photograph of Luster because he wanted to show what was going on involved more than just Christine. Luster was a serial rapist who used Rohypnol on his victims. That doesn’t fit Jason Starbal.”

  “And Anabelle Lash?” Frank groped the dash for a cigarette, disturbed enough to need a calming hit of nicotine. “Christine connects to Lash and Lash connects to Jason Starbal. Come on, it fits! And it makes a great headline.”

  “That’s how Christine met Stewart,” I said. “She went with Lash, not Rakaan. She probably met Jagger there, too. That’s how he got in touch with her later. He got her number when she gave it to Stewart and then contacted her, claiming to be Depp’s producer.”