BLACK Is the New Black

by Russell Blake

  Eric and the artist had apparently been in a rush, and he was able to get more than adequate shots through the gap of Eric taking his new friend from behind, her pants around her ankles and her exposed, tattooed breasts leaving little to the imagination. He got a few that perfectly captured the sneering look of contempt on Eric’s face as he drove home his point, and made a mental note to consider getting that one blown up to poster size for the office.

  Black eased the door closed again and moved back to the hall, but not before stopping one of the bored security guards and telling him he’d seen some suspicious characters skulking around conference room C, and believed one of them had a gun. As the guard hurried off, calling on his radio as he bee-lined to the room, Black smiled to himself for the first time that day. With any luck at all this would be an adventure Eric wouldn’t soon forget, even if no charges were pressed.

  The sun was shining brightly as Black moved down the steps in front of the convention center and out onto the pavilion alongside. He watched as a kit of pigeons marched in bobbing lockstep across the square before being chased into the sky by a toddler shrieking with glee at her power over the birds. He checked his watch and yawned, and after thumbing through his new photo collection with a satisfied grin he made for his car, his good deed for the day done, to be rewarded with a long and deserved nap.

  Black stopped at the market on the way home and treated himself to a large bottle of Gatorade, his resentment of the container no deterrent to its contents. Once inside he washed down two aspirin and closed his blinds, his eyes already drooping at the thought of a nap and an easing of the relentless pain that had been his companion all day. He stripped off his clothes, crawled into bed, and had a final look at his compilation of snaps from the show before he drifted off, his mouth open. A rattling snore echoed through the room as the ceiling fan spun lazily, a long strand of dusty spider web trailing from it like white smoke as it circled in its endless orbit.

  Chapter 22

  Gabriel looked through his office window at the street below. Headlights illuminated the darkened thoroughfare as twilight faded into night. He passed a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes – it had been a long day, made more so by the stress created by Black’s warning. He’d had a difficult time focusing on anything since the meeting, and had been noticeably on edge with his staff since the infernal investigator had threatened him.

  He wasn’t cut out for this sort of high-stakes duplicity. Maybe Demille was – he’d always been a schemer and an alpha, whereas Gabriel had a more gentle personality. Which was part of the problem. Gabriel still had strong feelings for Demille, even though he realized that for the modeling mogul he was a disposable convenience, just one in the long string of romantic dalliances that had characterized his career. In Demille’s world, it was all about Demille, all the time, and everyone else was just a satellite to his solar presence.

  Gabriel rolled his head, trying to get the stress kinks out of his neck. He’d reached for the phone countless times since Black’s visit, wanting to confide in Demille and find out what to do. But he had enough self-preservation instincts to realize that if he did that, Demille would gladly take him down with him, and that he could expect no mercy from Black. Gabriel didn’t know for sure that the subterfuge with the agency was criminal, but there was no question that if Daniel found out, he’d make it his life’s mission to ruin him. So now his future depended on the discretion of a thug in a fedora – a state of affairs that couldn’t continue.

  He slid his center desk drawer open, removed a prescription bottle, and shook out a pill. His psychiatrist had given him Xanax for panic attacks, and he’d been gulping them like PEZ just to hold it together.

  A sound reached his ears from the front office – the entry door opening.

  “Hello. We’re closed,” he called, listening for a response.

  Nothing.

  Gabriel stood and moved to his doorway. “Hello…” He stopped when he saw who it was, and smiled. “Well, this is a surpr–”

  His grin froze on his face as a razor sharp KA-BAR knife blade plunged through his ribcage. He fought to breathe, but his lungs suddenly wouldn’t obey. His legs lost their strength and he dropped to his knees, the knife handle protruding from him like a new appendage.

  Puzzled pain flashed from his eyes and he tried to scream, but it was as though someone else’s body was now supporting his head, a foreign form that refused his commands. His mouth formed one word, which came out as a wheezy mewl.

  “Why?”

  His assailant pulled the knife free and stabbed him again and again in a frenzy. The crimson blade flashed in the cold fluorescent office lights, the only sounds a muted thumping as the hilt slammed against him and the wet splatter of blood droplets on the walls.

  When the police arrived with a forensics team and the coroner’s van five hours later, after the cleaning crew discovered Gabriel’s mutilated form and called 911, they counted thirty-four stab wounds, and eventually determined that Gabriel had died after the fifth. Unfortunately, the building had no security cameras, and by the time footage from the traffic cams had been pulled and checked for anything suspicious around the time of the attack, the trail had gone cold, and it was too late.

  ~ ~ ~

  Knocking from the front door jarred Black awake. The pounding continued, so he rolled off the bed and pulled his bathrobe off a hook on the back of the door before moving into the living room to see what the ruckus was all about.

  “Yeah?”

  “Black. It’s Jared.”

  Black blinked and twisted the doorknob. Jared, his landlady’s nephew, was a slacker who’d taken up residence on her couch while he waited to be discovered by the Hollywood machine and made a star.

  “Yeah, Jared. What’s up? Is Gracie okay?”

  “She’s fine. She just sent me up here to remind you that you still owe her half the rent from the first.”

  “Crap. She’s right. I totally spaced on that with everything else going on. Come on in and I’ll cut you a check.”

  Jared entered and Black closed the door and got his checkbook. He sat down at the kitchen table and began writing, and then glanced up at Jared.

  “You want a beer or something?”

  “Hard to turn down free beer.”

  Black went to the refrigerator and returned with two cans, popping the tops with a hiss. “There you go.”

  “Thanks.”

  Black signed the check and handed it to Jared with a flourish. Jared slipped it into his shirt pocket as he eyed Black.

  “What’s wrong, are you sick or something?” Jared asked.

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “The robe at eight o’clock at night…”

  “Damn, is it already eight? I took a nap. Had a late stake-out…”

  “Oh. I didn’t think about that.”

  “All part of the PI game.”

  “Who were you staking out?”

  “Some bum cheating on his girlfriend. I got him red-handed on camera, but I’m not sure how to break it so it’s public. I’m not really very tech savvy.”

  “You can always upload it anonymously and create a photo album in Flickr, and then send whoever the address with Twitter…”

  Black took a pull on his beer. “That might as well have been Swahili, Jared.”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  “Maybe not for you.” A light bulb went on in Black’s head. “Say, maybe you could help me. Could you create the photo album and see if you can find the person on one of those sites? It’d be worth some money to me.”

  “Did you say money?”

  “As in cash. Cold, hard cash.”

  “How much?”

  “You said it was easy. So…twenty?”

  “I was thinking a hundred’s a nice round number.”

  “So’s twenty.”

  “It’ll still take some time. Make it fifty and we have a deal.”

  “Done.”

  “Fine. Yo
u have the photos?”

  “On my phone.”

  “Let me see it. I’ll send them to my email and upload them from my laptop. What’s the GF’s name?”

  “GF?”

  “Girlfriend.”

  “Ah. I see. Because whole words are exhausting. LMFAO. Isn’t that what the kids say nowadays?”

  Jared stared at him stonily. “So do you have her name?”

  Black wrote down the information and handed it to him. “Let me know when you do it.”

  “Where’s the fifty?”

  “What? I’m good for it…”

  “Then I’ll do it when you give it to me.”

  Black nipped into the bedroom and returned with two twenties and a ten. He slid them across the table to Jared, giving him an evil glare. “I can’t believe you don’t trust me, after all I did for you. And look – I even gave you a beer.”

  “Sorry. Business is business.”

  Black eyed him. “You’ve learned a lot since hitting town. You’ll go far, young man.”

  Jared chugged the rest of his beer and emitted a loud burp before rising. “Gotta run down more deadbeats, my man. No offense.”

  “None taken. You thinking you’ll get it done tonight?”

  “In an hour or so.”

  “And then all hell will break loose,” Black said with a smile.

  “It’s nice to see a man who enjoys his work.”

  Black was exiting the shower for the second time that day, this time in considerably more stable shape, when another knock sounded from his door. He groped for a towel and wrapped it around his waist.

  “Who is it?”

  “Police,” Sylvia’s voice called from outside.

  He pulled the door wide and she regarded him, his hair sticking up at all angles, water tricking from his hairline and down his legs onto the carpet, and held up a white plastic bag with two containers inside with one hand and a bottle of budget Australian Shiraz with the other.

  “I thought you might be hungry after a long day fighting crime.”

  “You know me like you know the beating of your own heart,” he said, stepping aside so she could enter.

  “Sorry I got you out of the shower.”

  “I was just thinking that you could make it up to me by joining me.”

  She set the food and wine down and smiled. “Before or after dinner?”

  Chapter 23

  Demille finished stretching in the lavish living room of his hilltop home and gazed out at Los Angeles laid out before him like a tapestry in the morning light. He loved this time of day, just after dawn, when life seemed filled with possibility. That would quickly change once he went into the office and had to field countless worried calls from clients, deal with insurance companies looking for reasons to stiff him, and talk his models into staying aboard, he knew; but for a short while, the universe seemed in balance, the world at tentative peace.

  Fallout from the Tahoe debacle had been severe, which wasn’t unexpected given the circumstances. The police were stymied trying to figure out who the killer was, and the papers were having a field day with the sensationalistic murder of a semi-famous model. Every paper carried a headshot of Hailey, and she’d become a staple on the news circuit as the networks milked the combination of sex appeal and tragedy for all it was worth.

  Demille did a set of ten knee bends and pulled a lanyard with his house key dangling from it over his head in preparation for his morning run. Every day, regardless of the previous night’s excesses, he ran five miles without fail, which contributed to his lean good looks – which he believed were still at least five years younger than his chronological age. Of course the surgical augmentation, the nip here, the tuck, lipo, and Botox there, had also helped, but it was mainly diet and exercise. He’d been eating almost exclusively high-protein for a decade and swore by it, to the annoyance of his few steady friends, all of whom were experiencing the middle age spread that seemed to be an essential part of moving from their forties into their fifties. But not Demille. He still fit into the same jeans he’d been wearing twenty years ago, and was as rigid in his calorie intake as with his exercise routine – a carryover from his modeling days.

  He stepped outside and looked up at the trees surrounding his home. The cool air smelled of dewy grass and privilege. After three deep breaths he trotted to the end of his drive, where he turned right and slowly picked up the pace. Down the street a gardening van crawled up the grade, the undocumented aliens inside of it accustomed to the early hours their employer demanded, and Demille hugged the shoulder as the tired vehicle passed him. It pulled to a stop across the street and the crew tumbled out of the doors. Demille could hear the leaf blowers fire up as he wound his way around the corner on his customary route.

  He barely registered the roar of an engine behind him, hurtling down the hill at increasing speed – and then he was flying through the air, tumbling head over heels in a limp mockery of a back-flip before bouncing against the pavement like a rag doll, his skull splitting open with a sickening crack. He rolled four more yards and lay still near the gutter. Blood pooled beneath his head as his last few breaths burbled in his chest. The rising sun’s golden rays caressed his face while he convulsed violently, his hands curling unnaturally before he stiffened and lay still.

  The driver continued down the hill, unobserved by the sleeping neighbors, safe behind their faux Tuscan walls in a neighborhood where money insulated them from the ugliness of the outside world. A man walking his dog discovered Demille’s battered corpse fifteen minutes later, by which time his blood had already coagulated in a rust-colored puddle as his body cooled. In the pocket of his jogging jacket Demille’s cell phone trilled, with nobody to answer it ever again, or to retrieve the shocked, sobbing message from Gabriel’s sister.

  ~ ~ ~

  Roxie’s eyes were red and swollen when Black made it into the office toting a chai for her and a half-drunk drip coffee for himself. Her heavy mascara was blotchy, as though hurriedly applied. Mugsy purred loudly in her lap as she hugged him to her chest. Black envied the corpulent cat for a moment and then shook off the inappropriate thought as she snuffled and reached for a tissue.

  “What’s wrong? Allergies?”

  “Something like that.”

  Black stopped. “Something? What’s wrong?”

  “Eric and I broke up,” she stated flatly. “He was cheating on me. Again.”

  “What?” Black exclaimed, taking a seat on the couch across from her station, careful not to sound too shocked. “What a piece of shit.”

  “Yeah. I never should have given him that second chance. But I thought he’d changed…”

  “You’re better off without him. If he doesn’t know what a good thing he had going, he’s an idiot,” Black said, and meant it.

  Roxie told him about the anonymous Twitter account that had sent her the URL for a photo album containing explicit photographs of Eric in flagrante delicto with his new friend from Berlin – his new very good friend, judging by her expression in three of the shots.

  “Wow. So someone got him on camera? What a moron. I don’t really follow all that tweet stuff, but that’s the end result, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. I keep forgetting that you still think phones have rotary dials.”

  “Hey. I’m learning. I can check my email from my cell now.”

  “After how many years of not knowing you could do that? Hello.”

  “For me it’s progress.”

  “So anyway, we had a big fight last night and I told him to leave for Berlin early, because I was throwing his lying, cheating ass out.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’m not going, by the way.”

  “I read between the lines on that.”

  “Yeah. Besides, I’ve been following the weather online. Who would want to live there?”

  “Lying, cheating scumbags?”

  “At least one. I hope she’s got a big enough pad to accommodate him. Probably lives
with her parents. Serves him right. I hope he winds up sleeping on a park bench in the snow.”

  “Well, I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but it’s probably for the best. You don’t need that crap. You deserve better.”

  She sniffed. “I know. It’s just…it’s hard.”

  He nodded sagely. “Of course it is.”

  She eyed him. “You look relieved.”

  He rose, trying to force his poker face back into place. “I am. Now I don’t have to worry about how to explain there’s no big bonus.”

  “I knew it.”

  “But that’s water under the bridge. Did he move out yet?”

  “Yeah. I own everything but his clothes, so it wasn’t hard.”

  “Did you get the locks changed?”

  “Late last night after he left. Cost a fortune, but hey, with such a generous boss, I figured I could afford it.”

  “Put the receipt into the company folder and write yourself a check.”

  Black was just settling into his office, satisfied after a job well done, when Roxie called out from her position in the outer sanctum.

  “Boss. Did you see this?”

  “See what? I haven’t seen anything.”

  “Come out here. It’s Gabriel.”

  “What about him?” Black asked as he approached her desk.

  “He was murdered last night. It’s on the local news page.”

  “Murdered?” Black’s face froze as he processed the information. “Where? How?”

  “Says here in his office. Stabbed to death. Police will issue a statement later. Blah blah.”

  “That bastard,” Black muttered under his breath.

  “Who?”

  “Demille,” Black said, and ran back into his office for his cell phone. He pressed a speed dial button and Stan picked up.

  “Stan. It’s me. I just saw the news. Last night one of the guys involved in this modeling case I’m working got offed in Santa Monica. Stabbing.”

  “Yeah? I got my own problems. Good morning, by the way.”