They went blind as they jumped out of the way, throwing themselves into a random choreography of arms, legs, wild air-shots and black patent leather lace-up boots.
>>>>>>
I drove back to the Chateau asking myself—all the way—what I thought was a pretty natural question. WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT? How had that happened? Had L.C. set me up? I went to call him—I had his number from when I first called for the meet. But instead I called Kumiko Davis in New York. Could she run a quick check on L.C. Martin’s home address? Did he live in Santa Monica, anywhere near the vicinity of Emory Road?
It took her two minutes. No, nowhere near there. His address was 58 Chenille Lane, Beverly Glen.
I called L.C.
“Did you leave a message for me at my hotel?”
What’re you TALKING about?
I told him. He went off like a nuclear warhead.
You SEE? You see the SCOPE of it, the dimensions? They’re after you. That’s how wide this thing is, that’s the REACH of it. They’re after you now.
“Who? Robby Walsh?”
You go careful with him. You go careful with him and those people. They’re dangerous. They’re CORRUPTING. You deal with them you end up talking like a Republican and sleeping with prostitutes.
“Sorry?”
Bottom line, what I’m saying here is, there’s no TRUTH. NOBODY’S telling any motherfucking TRUTH. And you know why? Cause it’s DANGEROUS. Things are dangerous. We live in dangerous times.
An echo of Arnoud Shuyler.
“But haven’t people been saying that,” I said, “since we started keeping time?”
>>>>>>
Should I report the shoot-out to the police? Probably not. My chances of buying the video from Grady Alexander, I thought, would get appreciably dimmer if I did. No matter how much Grady talked about the legality of his head candy, I didn’t think he’d be open to a deal that had cops hanging all over it. And with guns going off in the streets? On top of Arnoud Shuyler’s death? No, Grady would shut down like a catatonic on smack. So I wouldn’t go to the cops. Not yet.
>>>>>>
I checked out of the Chateau Marmont that night and checked into the Four Seasons. Under a different name.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
CHAPTER 3
EYES OF RAZORS AND BLOOD
SOME VERY WEIRD WAVELENGTHS
Another message. I got it the next morning. This one came in through the Real Story bureau’s general number, and after the usual series of human and technological delays eventually got transferred to the office I was using. Another message, but this one felt different. It was from Tasha Eston, Amanda’s sister. L.C. had told her I was in town, asking about Amanda’s death.
I called the number she’d left.
I hear you met L.C. yesterday, had a long talk.
“We did.”
I think I’d better talk to you.
Tasha suggested lunch. Okay with me, but can we make it a more out of the way place than Reggie’s? She knew the perfect spot: Café St. Anthony’s.
To meet its expenses and keep its funding going, St. Anthony’s Church, right nearby in Westwood, had converted its terrace into an open-air restaurant. Nice joint—a little piece of secluded, friendly, sun dappled paradise.
Tasha looked a lot like her sister. No mole, but her lips were definitely Estonesque. Same plump, witchy sultriness. Her eyes were different, though. Amanda’s had been large and almondy and strangely peaceful. Tasha’s were smaller and maybe not model perfect, but the at-peace expression was way more pronounced.
We sat at a table for two, surrounded by other lunchers. She was wearing carefully crumpled jeans, a crisp white shirt, a small gold cross around her neck and a pair of shades resting on top of her head. Strong whiff of allspice and cloves to her, maybe as a result of what she did for a living. She was a rep for what she called a comprehensive line of organic soap, cosmetic and hair care products.
“Did you hear about broccoli?” someone at one of the near tables said. “Did you hear what they say?”
I didn’t care, not today.
“So you thought I should talk to you.”
Tasha laughed. “After a dose of L.C.? Yeah, I thought it was called for. Me, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t listen to anymore of him. It’s all, this is the way things would’ve happened if they would’ve happened this way.”
“You think he’s off the wall?”
“Don’t misunderstand, I love L.C. Just that sometimes he gets a little…inconsequential. Sometimes he gets wired into some very weird wavelengths.”
“So you don’t believe what he says.”
“I’m a big disbeliever in what he says. What L.C. is, he’s a crumb gobbler. He’ll pick up little pieces of this, little pieces of that, try to mush them together into one big cookie. But the cookie keeps crumbling apart.”
“I don’t know, he brings up some interesting questions.”
“There are always questions in things like this, like what happened. Any trip to the hospital, somebody forgets something, somebody doesn’t know, something gets misplaced, your records don’t get switched over. Happens.”
“And the rest of it? All that Robby Walsh stuff?”
“Please, L.C. and Robby Walsh. Whose wiener is meaner. I’m sick of it.”
We ordered. She got a red-oak lettuce salad with tangerine wedges, mint sprigs, toasted pignolis and ricotta salada. I went for the butternut squash ravioli with Marion County blackberries. Funny thing, I couldn’t remember what I ate with L.C., and that was only yesterday. This food, I remembered every bite.
“What you’re saying,” I said as the menus were carried away, “you’re okay with the official ruling. Accidental overdose?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Overdose, yes. Accidental, no. She did it on purpose. Sad thing is, she didn’t think she could help it.”
“Can’t help killing yourself?”
“She talked about the family history, not fighting it, playing out the Eston family legacy.”
“What legacy is that?”
“We come from a long line of self-killers.”
“Suicides tend to run in families.”
“Thirteen in 27 years? That’s a big statistical chunk.”
“Thirteen? No exaggeration?”
“Not by one.”
Jesus Christ and his brother Bob.
“Well, I know about your father and mother.”
Tasha took the sunglasses off her head and laid them on the table.
“I don’t remember my father much, I was just a year old when he left. What I can remember is a man with dark circles under his eyes, that’s about it. And I can remember the smell of his aftershave. Strange thing to remember.”
“Those things happen.”
“We never saw him after he left. Then one day, I was 3, all of a sudden there’s a lot of people in our house. I knew something had happened to him. Later I found out he’d been living in a rooming house up in D.C., an SRO. They found him in his bed, sheet soaked in blood. He’d slashed his own throat.”
“I’m sorry. Bad thing to learn.”
Tasha played with her glasses. “My mother always said they fought a lot. She’d say that when he got mad, you could see the razors and blood in his eyes. She never knew how prophetic she was.”
Living out in semi-suburban Virginia, she said, there wasn’t much in the way of counseling after suicides. A shame, because she thought her mother at least could’ve used some. Her mother started to get real fruity, or even more so, after her father died. Hands trembling, crying all the time, talking trash about her own children. She never should’ve had Amanda, she told both kids, I should’ve blown him instead. As for Tasha, she admitted she’d tried to miscarry her by drinking quinine. She said she wasn’t ready for children—she was under too much stress.
Which is why—for a time—the girls kept getting residentially toggle-switched, out of the house with other relatives, back
in the house with mom. It was the other relatives who enrolled Amanda in acting, singing and dancing classes.
Tasha was 7, Amanda 9, when their mother was finally sent away. The girls were told she was going to live in a home for sad people, and Tasha had no reason to believe it wasn’t true. When they went to visit, she always seemed unhappy and unhealthy. Even news about Amanda’s St. Joseph’s Aspirin commercial, or getting voice work in cartoons, couldn’t cut through the sadness. Their mother would complain that she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, though everyone else would say, no, she’s getting better, she’s doing much better.
“I was at school one afternoon, a policewoman walked into the class, asking for me. She took me into the hall, said something had happened and she had to take me back to my Aunt Renee’s. The whole drive I was thinking my sister or my aunt had been involved in some kind of accident. I couldn’t even ask the policewoman a question I was so scared. Then she pulled into my aunt’s driveway and took me inside. Amanda was sitting on the couch. Aunt Renee too, arm around her. They were both crying, sobbing. That’s when I knew—it was my mother. They’d moved her to a halfway house and she’d hung herself in the women’s bathroom, tied a bedsheet around one of the ceiling supports in the stall.”
>>>>>>
The food arrived. We dug into it like it was the bread of life. Tasha ate with a good appetite, despite what she was talking about, despite compiling the Eston family body count.
She used to think the pattern had started with her father, but as she grew up she found about the other blood deaths. It was like suicide was coded in the family DNA.
•Her uncle, her father’s brother, had killed himself with their father’s snub-nosed .38 handgun.
•One of her grandfathers had driven his car off a bridge.
•One of her grandmother’s sisters on the other side of the family had starved herself to death. Five-foot-three and 48 pounds when she died.
•A cousin, only 12 years old, had taken a hatchet to his house, chopped up all the furniture, smashed all the windows, then put a 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth as the police responded.
•An older cousin walked in to her son’s bedroom one night, put a gun to the sleeping boy’s head and fired once before turning the gun on herself.
•One of Aunt Renee’s own sons had gone to the top floor of the tallest building in Richmond, thrown a chair through a plate glass window and jumped.
•Among other relatives, there were two overdoses, two slashed wrists and one death by carbon monoxide poisoning when an aunt left her car running in a locked garage.
Thirteen in 27 years.
Loss after loss after loss.
>>>>>>
“We’re really lucky, you know,” someone at one of the other tables was saying. “We’re lucky to be living in the Milky Way.”
All things considered, we probably were.
“Amanda knew all this, right?” I said. “She talked about it?”
“All the time. She thought a lot about joining the rest of the family, fulfilling the family heritage, the destiny. She’d try to keep busy with other things, but it was always there, the thing under the other things. She could always feel the past reaching out for her.”
“Always? All through school and everything?”
“That I don’t know. School I don’t know. We weren’t so close growing up. It was only later, when I came out here, that we got to be friends.”
“Is that why you moved here?”
Tasha shook her head like she was flinging shower water out of her hair. “That was the producers’ idea. She’d just held up a movie, Call And Response, and they didn’t want to go through it again. They thought, get a family member out here, maybe she’ll simmer down some. The producers paid for my move, got me enrolled mid semester in marketing courses, UCLA. That’s when I got to know her.”
“And she talked about the family history?”
“She talked about the fear, the old terrors that come at you in the night. She talked a lot about it toward the end, what turned out to be the end. She thought suicide was like this big goddamn magnet that just swooped us all to it.”
“At the end, toward the end, she talk at all about Robby Walsh?”
She shrugged the subject away. “They were seeing each other—she told me about that. She liked him—it was new thing, you know?—but it wasn’t too serious.”
“She talk about bribes, pay offs?”
“Never.”
“What about L.C.? Were they really getting back together?”
“I don’t know—it was vague. It was very vague.”
“She bought dishes? Went shopping for furniture?”
“She was always shopping, always buying something. I know what L.C. thinks, but that’s only in the look-back. It wasn’t like that when it was happening.”
“He has an odd form of nostalgia?”
“Very.”
“And you? How do you look back on it?”
Tasha had one tangerine wedge left in her dish. She stared at it for a while, then speared it and ate it.
“With regret,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I’m sorry I wasn’t with her that night.”
“Did you stay over often?”
“Never. She liked her privacy. Even when I moved she wouldn’t let me stay with her, but we talked almost every day. The only time I really stayed there was when that guy was bothering her, and that was only for a week or two. Otherwise, she liked to keep a guard on, what did she call it, her personal self.”
I glanced around us. Beautiful setting. Blue and yellow light hanging over the Westwood horizon.
“A guy was bothering her?”
“A stalker. She had lots of stalkers, goes with the territory, but this one… She really went tailspinny over this one, asked me to stay over. Said she was scared to death—that’s what she said when she testified against him.”
How had I missed this in the files? I’d just skipped it over?
“Who was he?”
“Some homeless black guy. He started showing up everywhere, on location, following her to parties. Sent her hundreds of notes. They even caught him sleeping on her property once. She went to a premiere one night, he stood outside the theater and took all his clothes off, yelling at her please save me, please save me. Then he got violent with the security people.”
“What happened?
“He got arrested, went to jail. He was mad-crazy.”
“When was this?”
“Long time ago. A couple of years before she died.”
“Is he still in jail?”
“I have no idea. I haven’t thought about him in years. I never thought of him as a factor in what happened, if that’s where you’re going. And I still don’t.”
“Family history.”
“She thought she was helpless against it. She thought no matter what she did, she couldn’t get away.”
“I know. You climb and climb and climb, but there’s always something downstairs.”
Tasha took a long breath, picked up her glasses and fixed them on her head. “Growing up’s a bitch, it really is.”
“Nothing leaves you less prepared to be an adult than childhood.”
She nodded, moved her head for a long time. Too long for just a response—
something was on her mind. “If you find anything out, will you let me know?”
>>>>>>
HAUNTED FACES
This time when I went through Amanda’s bio files, I narrowed the search to stalking. That’s how I figured out why I hadn’t seen it before. She hadn’t testified at the trial—when she said she was scared to death, she’d only given a taped deposition. She’d never gone to the courthouse. That’s why there were no photo tags, no video, only a few tiny storylets. It wasn’t a media event.
I’d only been looking for the highlights of her life my first time around. This wasn’t considered big news.
But it went the way Tasha said. Whether Amanda was wor
king, partying or sleeping, the guy followed her around like heat on fire. He once tried to break into her trailer on a shoot. He mailed letters, sometimes three or four a day, confessing that he was obsessively in love with her. Many of the letters were accompanied by strange and disturbing drawings. When he stripped down naked at the premiere and asked her to save him, he threatened to kill the guards restraining him. And when they found a box cutter in his pants pocket, they called the cops.
His name was Norridge Morris.
Of course I knew who he was. Grady Alexander had bought his belongings at a public storage auction. Grady had found the video of her last night in Norridge Morris’ junk.
A jury convicted Norridge on two counts of second-degree aggravated harassment and two counts of fourth-degree stalking. At his sentencing hearing, where he was given two years, he made a point of telling the court that he wasn’t at all angry at Amanda and still loved her very much.
Tell No Lie, We Watched Her Die Page 5