by Lankford, Terrill Lee; Raphael, Lev; Parker, T. Jefferson
"How did you 'get out'?" Smith asked.
"I went to Europe and started over in fashion. I worked my way up, learned my craft, and got good at it. You'd be surprised how many of the same techniques used in porn are used in fashion photography. It was easier than you would think."
"Why Europe?" Tate asked. I was being cross-examined by my own attorneys. Tate could sense the deeper problems inherent in my story and he was determined to get to the bottom of it all.
"I had some trouble on one of my shoots here," I confessed. I couldn't say more even though I knew it was going to have to come out.
"C'mon, give," Tate pressed. He was close and he knew it.
"A girl died."
Smith slammed on the brakes and pulled the car over to the side of the road. He turned and stared at me over his seat. His eyes looked crazy. Tate appeared perfectly calm, as if he had guessed the nature of the confession much earlier.
"Goddamn, Nick," Smith squawked, "what the hell did you do?"
"I didn't do anything," I protested. "I was just shooting a loop for a guy, and he and a guy who was working for him got carried away and accidentally killed a girl during the shoot. I didn't have anything to do with it. I was behind the camera the whole time. I freaked out and took off. I had to get out of there. I didn't want to go to jail again and I didn't want to get killed by the two guys who did it, so I split. I jumped a red-eye to London, then skipped to France. I lived in a little town on the outskirts of Paris for a few months and watched the L.A. Times for news of the girl's death. When none ever appeared I figured the guys must have disposed of her somehow. She was just another runaway. I don't even think anybody was looking for her."
"You were an accomplice to a capital crime, Nick," Smith said. He was pale. He'd defended his share of scum in his day, but this seemed to be getting to him.
"I'm telling you I didn't do anything."
"Why didn't you go to the police?" Tate asked coolly.
"For the same reason I didn't want to have to tell you guys about this. I figured I'd get the same reaction. If my attorneys think I'm guilty and immoral after hearing five minutes of the story, how do you think the police would have reacted?"
"Good point," Tate said, not disagreeing with my opinion of their opinions.
"I was young and I was scared. I had been in France the year before doing work for a soft-core guy and I liked the place. I thought I could disappear until whatever was going to happen blew over."
"And nothing ever happened."
"Exactly. But I no longer had the stomach for that kind of work. I was too freaked out. I took a job as a camera assistant for a fashion photographer. The money was shit, but I didn't need much. I learned a lot from the old guy and when he died I took over some of his client list."
"You didn't kill him too, did you Nick?" Martin Smith asked half jokingly. I just sat and stared at him. I was getting sick of his nonsense. This wasn't funny to me. It was my life.
"Ease up, Marty," Tate said. "I think Nick deserves the same benefit of doubt that you give your oil clients during tax time."
Smith thought about it for a moment and some of the disgust drained from his face.
"I'm sorry, Nick," he said, "I don't know what came over me. I'm reacting to this thing like some pussy juror that we would dismiss in about five seconds."
"It's understandable," I said. "It's how I would feel if I didn't know the whole story. If I hadn't lived the fucking thing myself. I don't expect anyone to believe me. That's why I changed my name and tried to turn my back on the past. But it looks like it's finally catching up with me."
"It doesn't have to," Tate said. "The two cases don't have anything to do with each other. Not legally. As far as we know, the first case isn't a case at all. It doesn't even exist. If you are square with us and offer full disclosure we will make sure it cannot be played if we end up in court on the Candice Bishop case."
"You're still willing to represent me?"
Tate glanced at Smith for a brief second before answering.
"Of course," Tate said. "We're attorneys. It's what we do."
With that Smith put the car in gear and pulled back onto the road. No more words were spoken for the duration of the ride.
2
It was a little after eight in the morning when I got back to my house. The ordeal had taken all night and I was exhausted. I was pleased to see that no reporters were haunting my place. Tate and Smith had managed to keep the details of my release confidential and the fires were keeping the scavengers busy elsewhere. As far as the media people were concerned, I was still cooling my heels in county lockup. They'd be pissed when they realized I had slipped out beneath their noses.
Once inside the house I saw that the answering machine was blinking frantically, but I was too tired to deal with it. The phone rang as I passed it and the machine picked up. My voice droned out of the speaker; I don't lay music, poems, jokes, or gags on my messages as is the norm for most L.A. answering machines, just a simple "I'm not here. Leave a message." Short and sweet. Well, at least short. After the tone I heard Lou screaming on the machine.
"Nick! Motherfucker! Pick up this goddamn phone! I know you're there! Pick it up!"
It sounded like he was about to have a heart attack. I picked up the receiver.
"What is it, Lou?"
"What is it?" He continued shouting, as if it was going to make a difference. "It's the end of the fucking world is what it is. You seen the Times?"
"No."
"You're the star of the day. You managed to knock Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson down to the bottom of the front page. Happy?"
"What do you think?"
"I think you better get your ass over here and tell me what the fuck is going on. We've got to figure out what we're gonna do."
I considered arguing with him, or even hanging up on him, but then thought better of it. The sun was already getting hot and I could tell I wasn't going to get to sleep. I was too wired. I was so tired that I was beyond sleep as a solution.
"I'll be in the office in forty-five minutes," I said.
"See you there." Lou hung up.
I put the phone down in its cradle and it rang immediately. I picked it up, thinking it was Lou calling back with something he forgot. A deep voice crackled on the line.
"Nick Bracken?"
I was shocked, totally caught off guard. I tried to keep my composure, fearing a trap of some sort.
"Who's calling, please?" I asked, as if I was a manservant.
"Nick, it's your father. This is Greg Bracken." The voice was tremulous, as if spoken from a deathbed. It was a voice I had not heard in fifteen years.
"There's no one by that name here," I responded. I was about to hang up the phone, but I found that my hands were shaking as severely as the voice on the other end of the line.
"Please don't hang up, Nick," the voice pleaded. "It's been a long time. So very long."
"What do you want?" I asked. My voice had become almost a whisper.
"I just wanted to know it was you. I saw the paper this morning and I thought it was you but I couldn't believe it. I thought you were dead long ago."
"As far as you were concerned, I was."
"But why?"
"I don't want to get into it."
"Nick, you owe me an explanation." The voice seemed to be strengthening with resolve.
"I don't owe you anything. You owed us. Your wife and your kid. You made your choice. She died, you know. Two years after you left."
"I know." The voice was weak again.
"They said it was pneumonia, but let me tell you—it was grief. She never got over you. You trashed her life."
"I went crazy. It was a midlife crisis. I thought I was in love with that girl."
"I always wondered, how'd that work out?" I asked sarcastically, my voice now strengthening with a resolve of its own.
"We lived in Kansas City for five years. She left me for a city maintenance worker."
"Tough break," I said without sympathy.
"I tried to find you when I came back, but you had disappeared."
"You were too late, old man. You're too late now."
"I want to see you."
"Forget it. If I see you I'll step on your neck."
There was silence on the other end of the line.
"Where are you?" I asked.
"La Jolla. I'm in a nursing home. My lungs. . . . "
"The wages of sin, huh?"
"Nick, this business about you in the paper, is there any truth to it?"
"It's all true," I said, trying to inflict as much cruelty on him as possible. "You taught me well."
"Perhaps it's best that Elizabeth didn't live to see this."
With that I managed to hang up the phone. It began ringing again before I could reach the door. I left it to collect with all the other messages that I would be ignoring later on the answering machine.
3
I was sitting on the couch in Lou's office when he got there. A small green-shaded desk lamp partially illuminated the room. A plaque bearing the name Wide-Eyed Productions decorated the wall above my head. The name for the company had been Lou's idea. He liked to consider himself an idea man and that had been one of them. It was his major contribution to the company, other than the seed cash he had kicked in to get us started. He was a good negotiator. I had been cutting good deals before we partnered up and I could have continued on my own, but there was something comforting in not having to do that, not having to deal with the weaseling of the clients and the bullshit when it came time to collect. Lou had earned his share of the partnership, as hard as it was for me to admit. And I had been left alone to do the work. To make my magic. To bust my ass so the fat cats in the ad agencies could get rich pawning my silly-ass chromes to their clients for ten times what they paid me. The more I thought about it, the more I missed the porn world. There was an honesty inherent in the grit of it all that was absent from the "real" world. The "legit" world. In the porn world you were paid an honest dollar for an honest day's work. It was usually cash and it was paid on the spot. No bullshit. No chasing deadbeats for your wages. No suits throwing their lame ideas at you.
I handed Lou a glass of whiskey that I had pre-poured for him. I was already half through a glass myself. He sipped the whiskey. His hands shook a little as he drank. He was taking this even harder than I was. He seemed to be sensing that his meal ticket might be imploding.
Lou took a seat behind his large marble desk. He refilled his glass from a bottle of AA Kentucky bourbon he kept next to the phone when no one was around. He threw down a newspaper on the desk in front of me. The headline read:
FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER LINKED TO PORNO QUEEN MURDER
Lou picked up the paper and shook it for emphasis.
"'Fashion Photographer Linked to Porno Queen Murder.' If we're going to get headlines like this from the Times, think what the Enquirer is going to do to us."
I rubbed my forehead with both hands. I was lost.
"C'mon, Lou. I'm in trouble."
"Tell me about it. We've had four cancellations since I spoke with you this morning, and it's Sunday. I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings. I've been on the phone with John Casablancas trying to convince him that you won't carve up his models if he sends them to work with us. If this keeps up we'll be lucky to book the cover of Soldier of Fortune."
"It's not funny," I said.
"I'm not laughing. Want to tell me what happened?" He seemed to be calming down.
"Nothing . . . I mean . . . I met this girl at a party Friday night. She was hot, but she was crazy too."
"Nothing new in that."
"No. But there was something different about this one. She was nuts all right, but she seemed to have a brain. It was just fucked up. She was real schizo. I don't know, maybe it was the dope. Fuck, I knew that chick was trouble."
"Then why didn't you back off?"
"If you had seen her you'd understand."
"I can see her right here in the paper. Everyone can. The girl was a hooker and a porn actress. I thought you were smarter than this. Can't you spot a pro anymore?"
I picked up the paper to look at the story.
"She was a porn actress?"
"It's all right there in black and fucking white. She did porn. And she had been arrested for prostitution twice. Two times."
It was there all right. The woman's name was Candice Bishop, just as I had been told. I hadn't remembered hearing her last name the night I met her and it didn't really seem relevant at the time. Candice had performed in more than forty hard-core porn flicks under a wide variety of names, usually Candice King or Kandy Kane or some variation on the Candice/Candy theme. Aliases were common practice in the porn industry for a variety of reasons. She had dropped out of the business last year due to unspecified "health reasons." The writer of the article speculated that the demand for tapes starring Candice Bishop was about to soar. Nothing like actually dying to jump-start a dead career. The public has a definite taste for necrophilia. Even the porno-loving public.
The article went on to say that Candice had been picked up on the street for pandering once back in 1987, then she did a brief stint in Sybil Brand Correctional Institute for her second arrest in '88. She was busted while working for a high-class escort service. The vice squad nailed her and twelve other girls during a sting operation the papers had dubbed "Sweet Charity's Baker's Dozen Bust," Charity being the name of the woman running the escort service. The cops had gotten a lot of bad press on the whole thing. Seems the taxpayers weren't so happy with the fact that so much of their hard-earned cash was being spent on a bunch of cops trying to get a pack of cute hookers in bed and on videotape. Candice's time in the slam must have clued her that she needed a better way to work, so she went into porn and became an immediate star. I had never heard of her or seen her, but then again, I had not had anything to do with the porn world in over a decade. I was way before her time.
I was mentioned none too complimentarily throughout the article as the man last seen with Candice Bishop, quite possibly the man who had killed her, although they did not come right out and say that, due to the slim chance that they could face a libel suit. They managed to imply plenty anyway. Speculation ranged from my hiring her for her services to some kind of bizarre Svengali theory that actually proposed I may have been behind her entire career as a porno star and hooker. When these newspaper guys got hold of something they managed to make pornographers look like Sunday school teachers. There was no firm ground I could sue them on. They danced around the hard facts with words like "alleged" and "suspected" and they quoted a variety of unnamed sources to take the heat off any malicious intent that could be read into the editorial tone of the piece, which was, however, supposed to be a news article. It was going to be another trial by media and this time I was going to be the victim.
I threw the paper down on the desk in disgust.
"It looks bad," I admitted.
"No shit," Lou said. "I think you should take some time off."
I was starting to get a clearer picture of Lou's attitude. I was quickly becoming a liability. He wanted to save the ship before it sank, even if I was supposed to be the captain. I got the distinct feeling that I was getting eased out of my own company.
"What are you saying, Lou?"
"Just that we need a low profile right now."
"Are you going to be behind me on this or not?"
"To tell you the truth, partner, I'd like to be so far behind you that I'm invisible."
I got up and dropped my glass onto Lou's desk, sloshing booze all over the newspaper.
"Thanks, buddy," I said as I walked out. "I'll be in touch."
_____
"My wife thinks I'm not being loyal enough to Nick. She thinks I should stand by him, no matter what he's done. But I say bullshit on that. Not only is it bad for business, but frankly, if you kill someone the way they say Nick killed that girl, I don't want you in my lif
e. You're persona non grata around here. Sure, Nick was my pal. We made a lot of dough together. We partied together. He had helped me out of rough times, but fuck, you have to draw the line somewhere."
—Lou Collins
_____
PART VIII
"Nobody makes anyone do anything."
—Jennifer Joyner
1
I cruised along Santa Monica Boulevard in the Lamborghini. I didn't know what to do, but I didn't want to go home. I needed someone to talk to. Someone who might believe me. I headed over to West L.A., to Jennifer Joyner's condo. She had a one bedroom on the border between West L.A. and Beverly Hills. Two blocks over and she would have had to pay an extra thirty grand for the place.
I banged on Jennifer's door. No response. I banged again. Finally the door opened and Jennifer peered over the chain-lock. She was disheveled, almost plain looking without the trappings, messy on top of it, still half asleep, or so she seemed.
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Jennifer asked. "I thought you were in jail."
"Sorry to disappoint you."
"What do you want?"
"I need to talk to you."
"Do you know what time it is? Get out of here."
She started to shut the door. I jammed my foot into the crack.
"Please let me in."
"If you don't leave I'll call the police."
"What's your problem?"
"My problem? It's ten-thirty in the morning and I've got a killer stuck in my doorway! That's my problem."
"Do you really believe I killed that girl?"
Jennifer stared silently at me for a long time. Too long. I turned and started to walk quickly down the hall. Jennifer shut her door and I could hear the chain being dropped. She opened the door and stepped out into the hall.
"Nick."
I stopped, turned, and faced her.
"This is dumb of me, but come on in," she said.
Jennifer ushered me into her place and poured me a cup of coffee. We sat at the breakfast table, morning light softly illuminating the room. She seemed nervous, which was understandable, but she said nothing, as if she was afraid of what she might hear if she asked me what she wanted to ask. I tried to relieve her silent curiosity.