by Todd Grimson
He stepped outside, smelling the flowers. It was dark, the sky purplish, no stars or visible moon.
“Hello?” he tried experimentally, and heard or sensed a movement, not much, but then he cried out, involuntarily, in shock, knowing nothing really, as the axe split open his head. He cried out, knowing that something tremendously significant had occurred. A great light shone into his skull and flooded down his face. He fell sideways, staggering, falling back into the beckoning safety within. Screaming, not his. He knew everything now, understanding, he saw impossibly swift Technicolor visions, mouth open as if packed with black earth. It was impossible to tell what he knew. The axe stuck there, bisecting his brain, as Amber expeditiously ran out the front door.
EIGHTEEN
They had called Larry Planet, and he had provided them with instant technical assistance. And so for several days Kenny the sound man and Mark the lighting guy, Danny the cameraman and Scott the
assistant camera guy (who also operated the boom) had been present to help. Then, after they left, Lisa and Raelyn edited the previous day’s stuff. Raelyn, from her experience in theater, helped with makeup and such. The skin tones for the body makeup covering Lisa’s upper-arm tattoos had to be exactly right. Camera angles and lighting would help. Plus work in the lab.
Tonight Larry had come over and hung around with Chuck, watching a baseball game. Larry had brought take-out Mexican from some expensive restaurant in Santa Monica. After a couple hours more of editing and splicing, Lisa and Rae, exhausted, came in to have a couple of beers and watch the end of the game. It went into extra innings. Lisa lay with her head on Chuck’s shoulder. Edgar G. Ulmer used to shoot films in six days. He shot Detour in six days. Jean-Luc Godard protested when some of his French brethren, in the early sixties, devoted an issue of their magazine to acclaiming Ulmer. Godard thought that they were lowering their standards, that this craze for Hollywood noir was getting out of hand.
Because he was so “method,” Chuck usually went home for the night, returning at noon the next day. There were two problems in Lisa’s mind right now. One was the final fuck scene. The other was, how should she die? A knife was always good, because it was personal, it was intimate, and you get the visual excitement of the color red. They’d wrestle and struggle; Mona was almost as strong as Richard. OK.
The fuck scene … well, after watching the real Mona, Lisa wanted to emulate her, but the idea of faking such an orgasm was embarrassing, faking it in front of the crew. Mostly the shot would be her face and Richard’s: Richard watching her come. This acting shit. It almost seemed like it would be better just to fuck and take her chances like that. Chuck would be up for it, she knew. No, it was ridiculous.
She ate some more popcorn, drank some more cold Beck’s beer. If they had to, they could do all kinds of retakes. The title, at this point, was Glamorpuss.
One thing that would cost a little money was the score. Chuck wanted an old-fashioned full orchestra; if it was melodrama, then go all the way, right? People talked about tragedy, but most everything ended up melodrama anyway Hamlet was melodrama. So was King Lear.
Lisa’s cat was on her lap. Caz liked her hand best, but he also really seemed to enjoy being petted by Chuck and Raelyn. He was promiscuous.
The Dodgers won the game. Chuck and Larry went away. Leaving the beer bottles out, Lisa and Rae, in just fifteen minutes or so, headed to their respective rooms. It was after midnight. Lisa was really yawning, beat. She fell asleep wearing only a marigold yellow cotton T-shirt, the ceiling fan sluggishly circulating the warm and humid air.
NINETEEN
The cops burst in, only Lisa didn’t realize at first who it was—there may have been an element of playacting in this, of dramatization— she had been dreaming, deeply, presumably about some of what she had seen in the company of the jaguar … anyway, she fought them, struggling wildly, perhaps in the midst of it even managing, as her arms were being restrained, managing some version of a kung fu kick, striking with her heel the head of Detective Gomez and knocking her down, right out of sight.
“You fucking bitch,” Lancaster said, and Lisa tried to spit in his face but was jerked off her feet by the handcuffs and pinned down on the polished wood floor. This bumped her head and hurt her knees. She panted and groaned.
Lancaster had woken her up by loudly smacking—spanking—her bare buttock with his hand.
“I always knew you had more,” she now thought he had said; he must have meant tattoos. Then she’d gone wild. A big blond uniformed cop had grabbed her; he’d been way too strong. He was still kneeling by her, his hand on her shoulder blade, holding her down. She remembered that she had nothing on below the waist. She let out a big sigh and lay calm and still.
“What the fuck is going on?” she asked, in a semireasonable voice that came out more choked up than she would have wished.
“Why don’t you shut up until we get downtown?” Lancaster said, walking over, his shoes right next to her face. “You’re not helping yourself, adding resisting arrest to murder with an axe. Gomez here’ll need to have stitches.”
Did he really give a shit about Gomez? Lisa didn’t think so. She thought he was pleased. As the police rummaged through the house she gave up trying to guess what they were doing, what they might get into or wreck.
“Can I get dressed?” she asked the blond cop, and he didn’t reply. A few minutes later he said to someone across the room, “Why don’t you see if you can find her pants?”
They allowed her to stand up, handcuffed, the Aryan cop rather absurdly holding on to her by the arm as another uniformed cop, a blond female, held the jeans so Lisa could step into the legs. It was humiliating. She knew Lancaster was watching, staring at her pubic hair and such. She wouldn’t look at him. Her hair was somewhat in her face anyway—she looked down at the floor, avoiding faces and eyes, as they took her out the broken-in front door, out past the bright lights of the press … fuckers yelling at her, saying her name, as if there was much to say at a moment like this. Maybe they were just trying to get her to look up.
Sitting handcuffed in the backseat, Lisa realized that if they put the brakes on suddenly, she’d crash face first into the Plexiglas barrier without the usual guarding reflex of the hands. So she braced herself, bare feet up, knees flexed. It gave her something to do. A few stray tears fell, she couldn’t help it, she wasn’t that tough, she shook her head and said to herself, “Why? When will this shit come to an end?” She cried for Tavinho again, hating to let them see her break down, those clear blue Übermensch eyes studying her in the rearview mirror. There was nothing she could wipe her face on … if she’d had the use of her hands, she could have pulled up some of the T-shirt material, but that option was lost.
At the police station, news cameras again. She kept her head down, though she stumbled on the top step, she stubbed her toe.
“Ouch. Come on, slow down.”
They slowed just a little bit; in the light of the hall, she saw that her right big toe was bleeding a small amount of bright red blood.
In the big, modern area, with the computers, something like a newspaper office but more unfriendly, they sat her down, waiting for whatever. Detective Lancaster was probably still outside, schmoozing with the press.
Standing nearest to her was the female officer who’d helped her into her jeans. Extremely poker-faced, tan, with her blond hair in a ponytail, gun there on her hip.
“Would you wipe my face, please? Would that be OK?”
The woman looked around—Lisa thought of her as being named Debbie—and then replied. “Do you want a tissue? We can’t undo your hands, you know.” When Lisa looked dismayed, if resigned, Debbie said, “Here, I’ll do it for you.” And she did, even cleaning up the prisoner’s runny nose.
“Thank you. I really appreciate it.”
“You’re welcome,” Debbie said formally, and that was that.
Lancaster came in, and with a movement of his head indicated that he wanted Lisa walked in
to an interrogation room.
“Why don’t you undo my handcuffs? They’re too tight, they’re hurting me.”
“You assaulted an officer,” he said superciliously, almost smiling a little.
“You broke into my bedroom when I was asleep, I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I still don’t. I want access to a phone.”
“Did anyone read her her rights?” asked another man in a suit, older, someone Lisa had seen here before but didn’t know.
Lisa spoke to him, even though he didn’t look particularly nice, saying, “They didn’t read me my rights, they didn’t say they were police, they’ve never explained any of this to me. They just broke in and started beating the shit out of me in my own bed. Call my attorney, Watson Random.”
“We know who he is,” Lancaster said. “And the videotape of the scene will show we knocked on the door and called out who we were before we went in.”
“I was asleep!”
The older guy went out of the room. It was just Lisa and Detective Lancaster. She then did something she knew she might regret, but emotion took over, having to look at him, and she said, “If I have to go through getting booked and fingerfucked by a matron again, just because of you … I’m gonna fucking kill you,” and she wasn’t sure what she was doing, she looked from his face down to his belly, his crotch, she felt something loosen, and his face changed … the tan material of his pants darkened at the groin and down his thigh, he pissed himself, and from his eyes it looked like he dimly saw some connection, it shook him, he dropped his Styrofoam cup of coffee and, trying to control himself, in a very strained voice, got out, “It’s a felony to threaten an officer of the—excuse me …” and he walked funny out of the room.
Was there urine on the floor? Yes, but next to the spilled coffee you couldn’t really tell, even if he left a trail.
Detective Brown came in and said Bluestone would be arriving anytime now.
“I’m not talking to you guys. Nobody’s told me a thing. What’s going on? Lancaster and Gomez just broke in and jumped me in my bed, like a gangbang.”
“Well, you remember Alvin Sender?”
“Sure,” Lisa said.
“Tonight he caught a hatchet in the head. Naturally we’re curious where you might have been.”
“Larry Planet and Chuck Suede were over, watching the baseball game. Ask Raelyn.”
“We will.” Brown considered her answer, looked down, looked at her again. Then he came around to unlock the cuffs. He put the phone down in front of her and said, “Make your call.”
Bluestone showed up, and Brown went out to talk to him in the hall. Watson Random was on his way. The two questions seemed to be, for now, When had Sender been killed? And what time had the baseball game ended? In any case, if Planet and Suede had really spent the evening at the Topanga Canyon house, it was a vastly different circumstance than if it had been just Lisa and her friend Raelyn. What about the tall black guy, who’d escaped from custody not too many days back?
A janitor—an old white man—came in to mop up the spill. In a few minutes Bluestone walked in and said, after sitting down across from her, “You really didn’t hear them say they were police?”
She shook her head.
“Who won the ball game?”
“Dodgers. In the twelfth. The Mets’ guy couldn’t throw the ball over the plate.”
“Yeah. I watched it too. Until I got the call.” He appeared to be thinking it over, rolling a Life Saver around in his mouth. “What happened to Lancaster in here with you?”
She shrugged. A gesture: I don’t know.
“He says he suddenly got the flu really bad.”
Bluestone looked at her as if he knew something or suspected something—but this was the way he looked a good deal of the time. It was a mannerism, a ploy.
“He abused me,” Lisa said. “I don’t think he can get away with treating me like that. I’ll see what Watson thinks.” Then she added, out of spite, “He acts like he’s on drugs.” She was sort of trying this out, to see if it got a reaction.
Bluestone didn’t say anything, though, and now Brown came in with coffee, followed by Debbie with a box of donuts.
“Somebody’s checking the mileage,” Brown said, “but it doesn’t seem likely if you really saw the end of the game. Larry Planet confirms it over the phone. He’ll give us a statement tomorrow morning. Clark’s still trying to get hold of Chuck Suede.”
Lisa kept her mouth shut. She had the impression that neither of them much liked Lancaster, but she didn’t want to spoil things by threatening to sue. They’d close ranks then for sure.
Detective Brown said, after a bite of glazed donut, holding up the rest, gesturing with it, “So tell us: Did you kill him? Did you hit him in the head with an axe?”
There was some kind of obscure cop humor going on here between the two men. Lisa said, without annoyance, “No. I didn’t do it.”
“You hear that? She didn’t do it,” Brown said, looking over at his friend, who nodded without surprise and indicated with a slight head movement that Lisa should take a donut from the cardboard box, so she did.
After a while Lancaster appeared in the doorway; it looked like there had been water all over the front of his clothes, on his shirt and tie and even in his hair, obviously he’d splashed himself and washed himself as best he could. But he seemed rattled, he didn’t linger, it didn’t seem like the other two detectives wanted him, so he just said, “I’m going to my desk. I’ve got some things to check out on the computer.”
It was satisfying to see an enemy so shaken. Lisa remained deadpan.
In a few moments Brown said, shaking his head, “Well, it looks like the best thing to do is blame it on the black man. James Doe.” He sighed and wiped his mouth with a napkin, wiping his fingers as well.
Bluestone said, “Looks like the tall black guy or some assailant unknown. That is, if it’s true, like everyone’s assuming, that Boro’s gone south.”
“Blame it on the black man,” Brown said again, making a kind of mournful, deep joke. Then he spoke to Lisa directly, asking, “Are you in danger?”—like she would know.
As a matter of fact, she had been seriously considering this question, on one level or another, since the moment it had become clear what happened to Sender. Whom did she suspect? The tall black guy, “James Doe,” zombie or not, and the other zombies still at large—she didn’t see them as doing something out in the open like this. She thought they’d hole up somewhere and not be too dangerous unless disturbed, or unless—she didn’t know—they needed something to eat.
The people in costume comprised the evil unknown. The guy in the bird suit and the Aztec warrior.
“I don’t know who it is,” Lisa said, glancing into both men’s eyes, demonstrating sincerity, admitting she was afraid. Showing a certain desire to please.
“What about the black man?” asked Brown, intently
“I have this feeling” Lisa said, “that he isn’t a big threat to me, that he’s just gonna go away, they just used him as a prop … but I don’t know what he wants. Maybe he was supposed to be the one who killed me in the Black Dahlia thing.”
“What Black Dahlia thing?” asked Bluestone, and she realized she’d gone too far. But she felt like talking now … it was a relief.
“Boro wanted to stage this kind of Black Dahlia murder, with me as the victim, the star … he was playing with me, and I was never sure if he meant it or if he was just trying to get me to act a certain way.”
“Tell us more,” Brown said. “He told you all this, and you kept going out there? Or what?”
“I, uh, acted it out for him one night. He said it would get it out of his system, to see it, you know, as a tableau vivant. It was really dumb, but he told me I could take back Christine, so I went along. It was too gross, and too intense, and I got sick.”
“What do you mean,” injected Bluestone, “you ‘went along’? The Black Dahlia was cut in two.” This idea seemed to
make him mad.
“I dressed up,” Lisa said reluctantly, “and lay down on this bed, in a set, like a hotel room … and then I passed out for a little while, after the tall black guy played this tape, and when I woke up I was covered in blood and shit. They all applauded, and I went into the bathroom and threw up. And then he didn’t let me take Christine. He called the scene Tomorrowland and said that was how I was going to end up. I ran away and went looking for Christine anyway, but I couldn’t find her.”
It went on, and at one point, when they touched on Boro again, Lisa blurted out that it was her opinion he was dead. She said she had no evidence, that this was just her belief.
Watson Random arrived, and he and Lisa talked for a while, alone. Then Watson talked with Brown, and Lisa was allowed to leave. Raelyn was waiting to go, all indignant, but Lisa’s own feelings had been soothed by the trick she’d played on Lancaster, and by the fact that nobody was saying anything any longer about resisting arrest or assaulting Gomez, and she thought this was quite a concession on their part. She felt weird that she’d talked so much. A little mournful, too, though not exactly because Alvin Sender’d been killed.
TWENTY
Lauren said, “It isn’t as bad as it looks.”
She and the detective sat on the only two chairs left in the large living room, two wooden chairs, incongruous, the only pieces of furniture to be seen. No carpeting, either. There was a vacancy surrounding them, and the windows seemed far away. Lauren wore a black bustier top, a champagne-colored little jacket and skirt… she had the look of an aging sex symbol, heavy makeup on her face, exquisitely composed, blond hair tumbling in uncountable ringlets, a certain confidence peculiar to Hollywood in Detective Brown’s experience, he a somewhat roly-poly black man dealing with these celluloid folk. No woman twenty years old, or thirty, would wear so much makeup, but it mimicked beautiful youth, it came close to a kind of beauty—it probably created a perfect illusion when seen the right distance away. He could smell her expensive perfume. Her throat… her throat was a slightly different shade of flesh-pink, and it had too many muscles or tendons that moved when she spoke, or simply thought—this throat gave her away.