Brand New Cherry Flavor

by Todd Grimson

  Phil loved this connection, he was proud of it, so Bluestone had let Lancaster accompany him to interview both of them, he thought he might as well. Bluestone had already talked to Lisa’s ex-boyfriend, Code, and to Lou’s wife, Veronica, who was living in reduced circumstances. Why? It wasn’t yet clear. And Bluestone had interviewed people who knew Christine, like her boyfriend, Oriole, and the gay friend, Adrian, and the fellow named Jim with whom she’d almost done some wildlife show for PBS. Earlier Bluestone had also talked to Nehi Laughton, to Raelyn (now twice), and to Popcorn’s assistant, Nicole.

  Predictably, Lauren Devoto completely stonewalled on the property aspects; she didn’t know anything about it, that’s all she would say. A cold one. Acted like they were gratuitously wasting her time. She managed to be icy and rude while maintaining perfect decorum.

  They drove to Alvin Sender’s office, hoping to catch him by surprise. But he was out of town, gone to Jamaica. The Mexican woman in his office said she knew nothing, that she only answered the phone, and that most of the time people left messages on his voice mail. She didn’t have a very cooperative attitude, and seemed unafraid. Shit. Another long drive for nothing. Ordinarily Bluestone was careful to call ahead, but Lancaster had been eager, excited about his lead—it was a good one—and Sender was a shady figure. Lancaster had figured that Sender might turn out to know more about this business than anyone else, if they could ever get him to talk.

  Back to the station, listening to the female dispatcher’s voice. Lancaster called Jamaica, to no avail.

  Profit Brown said to Bluestone, “Why don’t you come in here? Check out what Mannix has to say about Lisa and Christine.”

  Mannix described the only time he’d met them. “They killed this guy for Boro. They cut his motherfucking throat.”

  “Did you see this?”

  “I saw the body, man. They carried him in.”

  “Who carried him in?”

  “Fucking zombies carried him in.”

  “Wait—where were Lisa and Christine?”

  “I told you. They come in and sit down, like, at the man’s feet. Boro starts giving the good-looking bitch a neck massage. Zombies bring in the dead white dude. Boro says, ‘My friend today, my enemy tomorrow,’ some shit like that. A warning, see?”

  “Did either of them say anything like, ‘Yeah, I killed him’? You know, something specific.”

  “No,” Mannix said, answering Brown. “It might all have been a lie. ‘Cept the motherfucker was all bled out.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Dead. White dude.”

  “Is this him?” showing him a picture of Moyer, two years ago, when he’d been booked (though never charged) for assault.

  “Might be. He had on one of those jive-ass wack Hawaiian shirts, pineapples or something.”

  “What kind of a deal did you have with Boro, that he was showing you dead bodies and giving you warnings like that?”

  “I told you: I barely knew the motherfucker.”

  “Do you know him?” Brown said, putting down a full face and profile, in color, of the unidentified African-American male, still catatonic at this time.

  Mannix studied the pictures, then shook his head.

  “We found some skulls down under the house, buried in some dirt,” Profit said, revealing news that Dave Bluestone hadn’t yet heard. “Any idea who they might be?”

  “I heard about the shrunken head shit,” Mannix said, as if this was just too vile. “No, Boro never mentioned nothing like that … but he was such a freak, nothing would surprise my ass.”

  They let him go. The only one he would ever have talked this much to was Profit Brown. They now knew more than before about Duane Moyer’s demise, but still not very much.

  “What’s this about the skulls?”

  “More madness,” Profit said. “Three skulls, not enough to match up with all the shrunken heads … oh, but there’s a possible ID on the blond female. And it’s not going to help cool things down. One of the lab techs recognized her from some porno mag he’s seen … and it turns out she’s been missing for a few months, we had the photographer in, and he said yeah, it might be her. Candy St. Claire. He had a Xerox of her driver’s license, along with the release. Scared as shit.”

  “They’re supposed to be eighteen, aren’t they? I haven’t worked vice in a long time, but that must be the same.”

  “Supposedly she’s a local kid, so maybe there’ll actually be dental X rays out there someplace.”

  “Have we got them for Lou what’s-his-name, the producer, and Roy Hardway?” Bluestone asked after draining his paper cup of decaf coffee, heavily creamed. “I’m suspicious as hell of people who just drop out of sight. You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I do,” said Profit, and he smiled before saying, “And you realize, both these missing males were good friends of Lisa Nova.”

  “Well,” Bluestone rejoined, “they both probably also knew Lauren Devoto, the way things are going, and maybe this scumbag Alvin Sender. I think Sender’s the man we need to push hard on when he gets back.”

  “Where’d you say he is?”

  “Jamaica. Loading up on ganja for his friends.”

  “Your girl Nova knows most everything we need, if we could squeeze it out of her,” Profit said, not without a certain repressed fury.

  “You think she was out there fucking chickens and all the rest of it? Boiling heads to shrink them down?”

  “I think she knows about it,” Profit said, and Bluestone had to agree.

  “The part I don’t understand—one part, anyway—is what has happened to these bikers we’ve heard about. Usually people on motorcycles are more outgoing … but nobody seems to know anything about these guys.”

  “Mannix just called them zombies, ” Profit said. “Maybe they’re strung out on one of those new drugs. Lisa Nova had traces of some unusual chemicals in her urine….”

  “Maybe Alvin Sender will know,” Bluestone said. “We need to get something on him and make a deal.”

  “We’ve got theft, and unlawful possession, on Nova. What Mannix describes … it sounds like she either killed Duane or was an accessory to snuffing him out.”

  “It’s not even circumstantial.”

  “It’s something. Maybe she’ll crack.”

  “I wonder how that shit went down in Brazil. Until she managed to bribe her way out. It might have some bearing on what happened to Duane.” Bluestone did wonder. He was curious. He had seen the video of her under arrest in Rio de Janeiro.

  “Indeed,” Profit said with a nasty smile. “I don’t know why we’re pussyfooting—we’ve got her as accessory on the people Tavinho Medeiros shot down. As far as I’m concerned, that makes a lot of sense.”

  “Pass the potato salad. You’re crazy”

  “Our big mistake was believing even a single word she said there at the beginning. If we had just started with the facts we had, the bodies at the scene … but we let her model of the scenario control how we approached it. If she’d been in a coma for a week, we’d have a completely different case.”

  Profit was just talking, Bluestone thought. Going off on a jag. Making Alvin Sender sweat seemed a reasonable plan, so until that happened, Bluestone would collect all of this other information, and wait. Some of it was starting to cohere.

  “Why don’t we go see Javier, Roy’s houseboy? No pussyfooting,” Dave said, and Profit laughed. The word was their new private joke.

  FIVE

  Naturally, on TV they made quite a sensation out of the confirmed identifications on the unearthed skulls. Lisa and Raelyn watched, Lisa controlling the remote. Now everyone finally knew that Lou was

  dead, along with Max Doppler, private detective, and Candy St. Claire, porn star. This morning Lisa and Watson Random had met at the police station, by invitation, and Lisa had said no, she didn’t know anything about these apparent murders, the only person here she’d ever known was Lou. She hadn’t seen or
talked to him for several weeks before she’d left town for Brazil.

  Detective Brown said, “You’re sure you didn’t know this Candy St. Claire? Never met her?” He tossed a garish pink magazine down on the table. Dildo Babes.

  “I don’t think I recognize her,” Lisa said coolly, gauging the deliberate insult in Brown’s manner of presenting the pornography

  “Are you sure?” he said. “Think hard. You might have gone to a party together, something like that.”

  “Lieutenant,” Random said, looking to Bluestone, “she’s said she doesn’t recognize her. Is there anything more?”

  “I’m curious about this private detective, Max Doppler,” Bluestone said. “After all, there’s precedent. Duane Moyer was hired to follow you, to check you out, and we have some idea by now of what happened to him. So when we find the remains of another detective, the question naturally arises: Was he also, at one time, following you?”

  Lisa and Watson huddled. She actually thought she knew who Doppler was-the local guy hired by Ariel Mendoza before Mendoza changed sides … posthuddle, since (as Random said) she’d never heard a name, so it was only an informed guess, sheer speculation, she said only, “I don’t know him, I don’t know anything about him.” She felt slightly guilty, though strictly speaking this was the truth. Then she couldn’t resist adding, since Dildo Babes was still in front of her, “Do you have any more magazines for me?”

  Bluestone smiled, and put the pornography away. “Leaving Doppler for now, why don’t you tell us again about your relationship with Roy Hardway? How did you meet him? He just suddenly called you up?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “He saw me at a party or something. I don’t remember exactly”

  Brown said, “Javier, his devoted houseman, insists that Roy went out with you and never returned. You’ve said you don’t know anything about that. Someone’s told us you and Roy went to a motel, had a party with some other young women. What motel was that?”

  It was the story she’d given to Nehi Laughton. He’d blabbed.

  “I don’t know. I got really drunk.”

  “Maybe Candy St. Claire was there.”

  “I’ve already said I don’t recognize her.”

  Bluestone nodded and asked a few more kind of bored questions about where the motel might have been. Was it on Sunset? Well, if she had to make a guess? She wouldn’t, she said.

  Now home watching TV, she flicked from a commercial for Prell shampoo to more coverage of the press conference where the newly uncovered victims had been revealed.

  Q: Do you expect to find more?

  A: We’re digging up the grounds.

  Q: What about the rumor that Roy Hardway’s back in the U.S., that he’s had plastic surgery?

  A: No comment.

  “You know,” Lisa said to Raelyn, “I never fucked Roy. I’m being linked with him, and with Miguel Casablanca, and I never fucked either one.”

  Raelyn tried to assume an expression of sympathetic understanding. The night before, Lisa had totally lost it, thrown a tantrum, broken some glasses and a lamp, after seeing for the third or fourth time Code’s “ail-American kinkiness” remark. She was under tremendous pressure. Eric Lemongrass, on a talk show, had smiled and acted coy, showing his dimples, not coming out and saying it but clearly implying that Lisa had come on to him, that he’d turned her down. The tabloids proclaimed Lisa and Christine to have been lovers, to have attended a “bisexual black mass” together in New York. The voodooand-black magic angle was, from this point of view, why Lisa had gone to Brazil.

  Penthouse was going to run nude stills taken on the set of The L.A. Ripper. She supposed they were of her in the dressing room, or walking around. Windfall profit for some voyeuristic gaffer or key grip. Rolling Stone wanted to talk to her. People was running a story on the unsolved case, running a black and white photo of Lisa’s face on the cover in a little box.

  Idea One was rushing Manoa, City of Gold into stateside distribution and pairing it as a double feature in some places with Girl, 10, Murders Boys. Lisa wasn’t impressed. The newer film had been reviewed twice by the Village Voice, the paper that for many years had set her standards for all kinds of things. It was still important to her. Lucinda Max hated Manoa and went back in time to hate Girl, 10; she was someone, Lisa knew, whom the Roy Hardway connection was sure to annoy The other writer, Emerson Gill, who was young and black and gay, liked Manoa as a “symphony of colors” and “an impressionistic visual tone poem” of medieval times. He mentioned the earlier film only briefly, calling it “a chilling study of a young female psychopath, shot in the same style as her emotional apprehension of her life.” Lucinda Max, by contrast—and hers was the name with more weight—called the first film “typical morbid art-school tedium” and the second “unrelieved garish pain. Really, it’s pornography with production values. I wanted very badly to walk out. I kept thinking, Is this a joke?” The review caused Lisa some anguish that strangers would read it and think badly of her, that they wouldn’t think there was another side to all this stuff.

  She and Raelyn hadn’t slept together in the Topanga Canyon house. There was tension between them. Some nights Lisa tossed and turned, and her bedroom was right next to Raelyn’s, but she was afraid of what would happen if she invited Raelyn in. Once they started again, they’d be at it all the time. She didn’t know why this so troubled her, but it did. It was better, even if harder in a way, to be austere. Lisa couldn’t actually connect the dots on why she shouldn’t do it, but sometimes when they laughed together during the day, or when Raelyn reassured her about something, telling her earnestly that everything would be OK, telling her how talented she was, the friendship between them was so simple and pure, and Lisa trusted her totally in a way she might not have if Raelyn had been her sexual partner, because those things always came to an end. Look at Code, talking about her like that, so shamelessly. Big smile on his face. Loving it. What a motherfucker.

  Sometimes they lay next to each other on the couch, sort of entangled, watching TV, and they embraced, and Raelyn sometimes rubbed her shoulders and back (Lisa had only once returned the favor). That was enough.

  Raelyn, on the other hand, although resigned to the situation, believing she understood Lisa’s position to some extent … still, she fantasized about her—tonight she borrowed Lisa’s car and drove to a bar, kind of a long drive, but out here everything was.

  The bouncer carded Raelyn; she looked that young. Well, she was barely twenty-one. Dressed neutrally: tailored black pants, cream-colored silk shirt, big silver bracelet. Sort of a young intellectual look, a bit innocent, maybe.

  A lesbian Elvis impersonator was doing her act, which most everyone enjoyed. Raelyn went into the bathroom and watched a killer femme in a short-short skirt apply her lipstick, staring into the mirror. The femme smiled at a leather dyke who came in, greeting her by name.

  Back in the bar, Raelyn was surprised when a tall young dyke with a blond crew cut, wearing sunglasses indoors, asked her if she could buy her a drink. Usually Raelyn made the advance.

  “Do you want to dance?”

  “Sure.”

  Rae didn’t know her name, but she was looser than many butches, a better dancer … they had one more drink, or one sip each, before they decided to leave. They went to the other woman’s home. Her name was Danica.

  “How do you like it, big boy?” she said a while later, and Raelyn blushed intensely, she could hardly stand being rolled over this way. But her ass moved uncontrollably, and she was so wet, there was certainly no going back now.

  “Make it pretty for me, baby. That’s a nice little boy All the way”

  SIX

  Breakfast at the Hollywood Canteen, on Seward, with Larry Planet, who asked Lisa not to judge Selwyn too harshly for bugging out. Larry had pronounced male pattern baldness, but was younger than he looked at first glance. He seemed very intelligent to Lisa, and very worldly wise, someone who knew how
the game was played.

  Lisa shrugged, or didn’t respond. She had written Popcorn off, he was fucked, but since Popcorn was one of the people taking care of the house in Topanga Canyon, she wasn’t about to start saying things she couldn’t take back. It was true, she hadn’t let Popcorn in on things, she hadn’t confided in him. And his movie had been just about to open; if it had gotten derailed due to him, the studio would’ve held it against him. A lot of money was going into promoting Call It Love—and it had opened big, the Susan Heller cult was in full sway, even a certain dress she wore in it was becoming the fashion (of course, this too had been planned). Lisa blamed Popcorn anyway and now felt competitive with him, even if he was unbelievably

  far ahead, it was hopeless, she had already lost but she didn’t care. Maybe in ten years he’d take seriously what she did. She knew it was misdirected—trying to get Daddy’s attention, as her therapist had said when Lisa was thirteen—but she didn’t care. Bad motives could fuel you as well as good ones could.

  She was conscious that a few people were noticing her, recognizing her, giving her second and third looks. Larry Planet noticed it too. He Smiled, as if this was what he had expected, what he had planned. Still, he seemed benign.

  Lisa wore a long-sleeved red shirt and her totally ripped fucked-up jeans over red cotton tights. Rae hadn’t come home with the car until five o’clock. It had been just about dead empty of gas.

  Lisa ate sliced fruit arranged beautifully on her plate: mango, papaya, pineapple, kiwi. Larry picked at an omelet and seemed to particularly like his toast and jam. The coffee was great here.

  Larry asked her what her plans were, and she told him how she’d been thinking about doing a film about Cassandra, but this was out of the question now since Christine’s death.