Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die

by Richard Sanders

  He dropped the phone back in his robe.

  “You deal.”

  Grady nodded, no hesitation.

  “You’re pretty open about it.”

  “Legal product only. No street stuff. I target a more selective market, more I guess you could say exotic. Designer drugs, hard to find. I’m in touch with the best chemists and garage labs in the country. It’s a whole cottage industry.”

  “Must be like the early 60s.”

  “Exactly. That’s exactly the vibe. Everything is legal—or not illegal yet. Soon as there’s legislation on something, I phase it out of the inventory.”

  I looked again at the baggie counter. “Make good money?”

  “I can flip in the six-figures.”

  “So you can afford to collect Amanda Eston memorabilia. Amanda Estonia, I think they call it?”

  “I frankly don’t give a fuck about Amanda Eston.”

  “Arnoud told me you were a collector.”

  “I am, but not that. I don’t follow pop culture much. It’s inorganic.”

  “So what do you collect?”

  “It’s called bumilia. Though I think that’s a derogatory term.”

  “Bumilia?”

  “Stuff owned by homeless people. Here.”

  He limped to another room and switched on the lights. The walls were lined with glass-enclosed, climate-controlled display cases. Individual spotlights picked out ragged pants, torn sweaters, filthy overcoats, blankets, can openers, eating utensils, disinfectant lotions, Handi-Wipes, deodorant, combs, brushes, screwdrivers, switchblades, cigarette lighters, pipes, keys, books, broken dolls, bedraggled stuffed animals, yellowed letters, driver’s licenses, Medicaid cards, mass cards, crosses on neck chains, costume jewelry, dog collars, hand-painted postcards, sculpture made of beer can tabs.

  “I try to find things that speak to a life,” said Grady. “Sometimes I buy it direct off the street, sometimes at auction.”

  “That’s where you found the video, right?”

  “A few years ago—three years, it was—I bid on a pile of stuff from a storage warehouse. It appeared to belong to a guy named Norridge Morris, all left there, unclaimed. This is him.”

  Grady guided me down to the end of one of the display cases. Inside were capes, hoodies and T-shirts painted with weird, flat, totemic faces. Real outsider-art stuff. The faces looked like aliens who’d crash-landed their UFO and were now begging for coin on Fifth Street.

  Other items were grouped with the clothes: balls of twine and rubber bands, a small wad of foreign bills, a flask.

  “He had a lot of things,” said Grady, “not all of it too interesting. One thing I found was a disk of some kind. Still in a jewel box, no label, nothing. Who cares? I forgot about it. Couple of months ago I came across it again. Slipped it into the computer, let’s see what this is.”

  “And you saw it.’

  “I saw it. I don’t know much about entertainment, but I knew who she was. I remember when she died, I remembered the date. Realized, from the TV broadcast, this was the same day. And I realized, holy shit, this is worth.”

  “It’s some collectible. You didn’t think about keeping it?”

  “Means nothing to me. These things”—he gestured to the cases—“these things I would never sell. But this? Why not?’

  “So you found Arnoud.”

  “The world of collectors tends to be pretty connected. I asked around, heard about this guy Arnie Shuyler. Heard he was experienced in selling photos of famous people in what should we call it compromising situations.”

  The ringtone again. Grady drifted into the rest of the house as he answered.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can do that. How much you looking for?... Not a problem. Seven-fifty for you… Six-seventy-five? I can’t do 675. Seven-twenty-five… Can’t do it. Six-ninety’s no good. My CPM’s are too high.”

  I noticed an inside balcony built into an upper corner at the back of the house, ladder leading down to the floor. The top of the balcony poked into and through the thatched roof like a perfect bird’s nest. Must be his bedroom. Probably feels like you’re sleeping in the trees up there.

  Grady pulled a calculator out of his pockets and began punching in numbers. “Seven-fifteen, but you’re killing me… Seven? No way, man. I’m supposed to lose money? Seven-ten, that’s the best I can do. You’ve got me right on the edge… Okay? Seven-ten? Okay, we’re there… Right, I’ll see you later… Yeah, well, it takes one to grow one.”

  The phone and calculator disappeared in his kimono. He looked at me.

  “So?” I said

  “So?”

  “Sell me the video. There’s no cost-per-thousand involved. It’s pure profit.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  He took a seat on one of the small benches and rubbed his eyes for quite a few seconds. “You know what I believe?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I believe we’re all linked in this rhythm, this vast, all-encompassing rhythm. I believe this rhythm is what keeps the world together. And anything we do—or anything we don’t do, for that matter—anything we do to affect this rhythm, we’ll feel the echo of it further on down the line.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, so you see the business I run here? There’s no guns. There’s no hired muscle. There’s no dope-dealing violence. I’d like to keep it like that. I don’t want any attachment to violence further on down the road.”

  “What makes you think there would be?”

  “What happened to Arnie? Somebody shot him. Somebody gunned him down. He got himself killed.”

  “That might not have anything to do with the video.”

  “Well he never got himself killed before. You see? You see what I’m saying? There’s something about this video, there’s something sinister about it, and I don’t want to step into it. So that’s what I’m saying. I’m not selling anything to anybody, not until this thing is cleared up.”

  >>>>>>

  So clear it up, said Louisa Collins. We need the video. You know that.

  The phone was feeling heavy in my hand. “Right, clear it up. Good. But exactly what am I supposed to be clearing up?”

  She’s been dead five years, right? Why would somebody kill for a five-year-old video?

  “We don’t know that somebody did.”

  We don’t know that somebody DIDN’T. What did he say? There’s something sinister about the video? He’s right. Find out why, and we’ve got what we need.

  Why did it sound so simple when she said it?

  >>>>>>

  THE PRE-LIFE

  They had space to give me my own office in the bureau. That was the one lone advantage of layoffs. Everybody was busy that morning microscoping through new and old photos of the actress Lee DaCosta. Pap shots taken last night seemed to show she’d had some surgery done. The distinctive bump on the bridge of Lee DaCosta’s nose looked like it had been reduced. Was it the angle? A result of the flashes? The photos and her old ones were blown up for comparison. Didn’t it seem smaller? A call was made to her publicist. No comment. We don’t remark on our clients’ body parts.

  I stayed in my office. Time to start getting started.

  I found a number for Robby Walsh’s lobbying firm in Washington. They gave me another number to call, a 775 area code. Reno. I explained to the woman who answered that Real Story was looking into the Amanda Eston video and I wanted to talk to him about it. Could be off-the-record, background-only if he wanted.

  I didn’t get an outright rejection. Mr. Walsh is very busy. We’ll try to schedule some time but we can’t make any promises.

  Of course not.

  L.C. Martin was a different story. Yes, he’d meet me. Lunch today? Sure, he said. Absofuckinglutely.

  >>>>>>

  I called up his bio files. They were much shorter than Amanda’s.

  •He grows up in blue collar Ohio, the son of a pharmacist and a jewelry maker. The initials L.C. don’
t stand for anything. His birth certificate lists him as L.C. Martin. His father gets fired from several pharmacies because of chronic alcoholism. Finding work as a cab driver, he begins using heroin and develops a full blown habit. L.C.’s mother sells jewelry on the streets to pay the bills.

  •L.C. gets in fairly constant trouble, frequently suspended from school, arrested once—at 13—for auto theft. He often lives with his girlfriends and their families rather than his own home. At 16, he drops out of school and runs away to LA. “I hated school,” he later says. “I hated every friggin’ minute of it. It was hands down, no question the worst time of my life.”

  •He works illegally as a bouncer and occasional bartender in LA, though most of his time in the clubs is spent as a customer. In his dreams, he’s determined to make it as…well, something, but he isn’t sure what.

  •A friend talks him into trying out for a new reality series, The Pre-Life, supposedly about a group of pre-med students surviving their first year in LA. L.C. gets cast on the strength of his looks and a smattering knowledge of medicine picked up from his father’s years as a pharmacist.

  •The Pre-Life premieres to dismal ratings and reviews. Critics question the show’s authenticity, which is only natural since only a few cast members are actual pre-med students.

  •”The producers were getting really desperate,” L.C. later says, “so they began making changes. We began to appear with fewer and fewer clothes on. By the end of the first season, we were running around practically nude.” The show turns into a hit, with L.C. recognized as the resident heartthrob.

  •Weeks after the show finishes taping its second successful season, one of its stars, Rachel Newman, is killed in a car crash. The producers decide not to go on with a third season.

  •Banking on his Pre-Life fame, L.C. gets himself cast in a few films. Neither they nor his career go anywhere.

  •He auditions for a movie called Days Of Reckoning, starring Amanda Eston. To everyone’s surprise, he gives an outstanding reading as her father, a role that requires him to age from a teen to an old man. The audition is no fluke: L.C.’s performance is hailed as a tour de force, touchingly truthful. He’s named Best Supporting Actor by three critics’ groups and wins an Oscar nomination in the same category.

  •He marries Amanda. “I really thought I could help her with her addictions,” he later says, “because of my experience with my father.” They split after 11 turbulent months.

  •While he’s roundly urged to continue as a supporting actor, L.C. rejects the advice and keeps going after lead roles. The films flop and grow fewer and further apart.

  •After organizing Amanda’s funeral, L.C. wages a media campaign against Robby Walsh. The accusations keep him in the news for three or four months, then he begins to fade. He makes two more movies, both bad, and is never mentioned in the Real Story files again.

  >>>>>>

  UNFUCKINGDENIABLE

  I did searches on him but couldn’t find anything recent, couldn’t find any reference to him after those last two loser movies. When we met for lunch, he told me he’d kissed acting goodbye. Now he was producing corporate videos—training sessions, sales pitches, orientation programs. Said he was doing very well with it.

  He sure seemed prosperous. Gucci suit. Open Hilditch & Key dress shirt. Diamond-studded cufflinks. One of those pricey, octagonal-shaped, back-ordered-for-years Fleischer-Koch watches peaking out from under his French cuff.

  L.C. looked the same as he did in his acting days. Older, but still quarterback handsome with a build to match. The only thing that felt different about him was his manner. He seemed twitchy and anxious. He reminded me of a smoker who’d just grabbed a few puffs and was now experiencing some quivering, imperfect nicotine buzz.

  We met at Reggie’s, on Robertson, but well up the street from the pap-haunted Ivy. He wanted to sit outside—“too many ears indoors”—at a table away from anybody else. We found one along the white-washed arches that separated the restaurant from the moneyed shoppers strolling down the street.

  A waitress wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt with a human stick figure silkscreened on the front brought us menus and took our drink orders. Diet Coke for me, Stella Artois for him. I didn’t want to stare at the waitresses’ chest, but the head on the stick figure had a weird but vague resemblance to those painted faces I’d seen in Grady Alexander’s collection. Only this one was much more sophisticated, much more produced.

  I’ve gotta stop free-associating in public.

  L.C.’s first question: “Have you seen the whole video?”

  “Just a couple more minutes.”

  I told him what it showed.

  “This is so sad,” he said. “This is so horribly sad. I know that’s a cliché, I know it sounds a little exaggerated, but that’s how it makes me feel.”

  Our drinks came. I sipped mine. He triple-sipped his.

  “I guess there’s one thing about the video,” he said. “It’s making people remember what happened. It’s bringing her back.”

  “It’s doing that.”

  “Unbelievable how people forget. Unbelievable how this amnesia fog falls over everything the second you look away. I mean, you know what I did, you know what I tried to do. I worked my bazoozies off trying to get people to look closer into what happened. But it just gets lost. It gets forgotten.”

  I shrugged. “Time passes.”

  “Yeah, time passes, sure it does. But not like that. Not at all like that.”

  He picked up his menu, eyes darting all over it like he’d seen it a million times. I studied mine.

  Two women going inside Reggie’s were talking to each other as they passed us by.

  “Sex with him is such a pain in the ass,” the one with the pink Dodgers cap was telling her friend. “And I mean that literally.”

  L.C. put his menu down. “People keep telling me, you gotta get on with your life. You gotta move on. Put it behind you. But how can you put it behind you when it’s still fucking in front of you?”

  “You still feel the same?”

  “Same about what?”

  “The official ruling.”

  “Fuck the ruling. Accidental overdose? Bullfuckingshit. What happened to her was no accident, and nobody but a knee-jerk idiot could believe it. The ruling, please. The ruling is positively, verifiably full of mistakes. All it is is fart-water and nothing more than that.”

  The waitress came back and took our order.

  “I didn’t start out like this,” L.C. said when she was gone. “You know what it’s like? You’re looking at something everybody says is true, only the more you look at it you see it isn’t true at all, it isn’t even close to true, only in your heart of hearts you don’t know what the fuck is true?”

  “But you found out.”

  “I looked. I looked at everything. I looked at pralicin. Are you kidding me? Pralicin? She never fucked around with pralicin. Few people did—it was very uncommon. The whole time I knew her, she never even mentioned pralicin. And even if she did it, even if she did it that night, the evidence doesn’t back it up.”

  “They found it in her system.”

  “But what didn’t they find? That’s the question. Because with pralicin—I looked into this—you swallow pralicin capsules, you can tell. Pralicin capsules leave a bluish purple discoloration on the lining of the intestines.”

  I’m thinking, like Purple Blues, the last movie she was going to make?

  “But there wasn’t any,” he said. “I read the autopsy. I read it and read it and read it. There’s no mention of any bluish purple discoloration. She didn’t swallow any goddamn fistful of pralicin pills.”

  “So it got in another way.”

  “Somebody put it in her system. Somebody put a massive dose of it in her system. That’s how they killed her. They killed the person I loved and that’s how they did it. My whole life there was only one person I ever loved and that’s how she died. They killed her.”

  He gul
ped his beer to a finish.

  I let things sit. The tablecloth in front of us was beige with brown hairlike veins running through it.

  “A question,” I said. “Is that you in the video?”

  L.C. laughed. “I don’t have any birthmark on my cock. I can prove it to you. I’ll pull it out right here.”

  “Not at lunchtime.”

  “No, it’s not me. I hadn’t seen her for a few days. If it’s anybody, I think it’s him.”

  “Robby Walsh?”

  “Repulsive individual. Truly offensive. A scumbucket. He was with her all the time for a while there, all the time.”

  “Something tells me your opinion of him hasn’t changed. You still think he killed her.”

  “Which is based on irrefutable thinking and stone-strong proof, which is based on proof so unfuckingdeniable it takes you to having no other opinion but that.”