sex.lies.murder.fame.

by Lolita Files

  Beryl clutched her throat. She thought she was going to gag. She was coughing, hacking, running her hands up and down the front of her neck. She was still coughing when the next call came in, just moments later.

  “You know what I just realized? I’m leaving all these messages on your machine. I probably shouldn’t be doing that. I’m a little tipsy. I’ve had nearly a whole bottle of Dom. Come over, baby, okay? We could get a few hours in still. I’m having a late lunch with Beryl to go over the paperback cover. Whatever. I might cancel. She can be such a pain in the neck. Especially the way she acted about me plugging you this summer. Hahaha,” she rambled, “I think I got that backward. You’re the one who’s plugging me. So get over here and do it already. I’m wearing something new. Something tiny. Something wicked. Just call me, okay?”

  Beryl began to convulse, her breath coming fast. She sat on the edge of the couch. The phone rang several more times. More messages were left.

  In a compulsive fit, Beryl deleted all of them, one by one. No more came in.

  As of six-thirty A.M., Penn still hadn’t returned.

  Beryl had been crying for hours, examining and reexamining everything she’d done, everything she’d thrown away. Her career. Her ethics. Her relationship with Dr. Ripkin, a man who had been steadfast to her for half her life. A man who had taken her on for free when she had nothing. She just walked out on him, spurned him, pushed him away.

  And all the time he had been right.

  Her right knee shook. Her whole body shook. She’d been pulling at her hair, going through wads of tissue. Her eyes had bowling bags beneath them.

  Penn was everything those girls on those catty websites said he was, and worse. She’d fallen for him despite all those warnings. Despite everything, she’d been completely taken in.

  “I’m a fool,” she said. “I’m such a damn fool!”

  She had been planning marriage! Oh God! Vera Wang was making her dress! Vera Wang! Vera-fucking-Wang!

  She’d talked about having his babies and he had let her! He’d gone along with it, like he wanted babies, too!

  She cried and cried and cried some more. Something inside of her—an entire foundation built upon fantasy and hope—collapsed, caved in, and sucked her soul away.

  She managed to stop her hand-wringing long enough to write him a note.

  I left a little early to get some things done. Meet me at my apartment around eleven so we can go over the key points for the interview with Entertainment Weekly.

  She wrote the note several times, tearing up each until her hand was steady. She didn’t want to give off anything to indicate her broken state of mind.

  She’d deal with that when she saw him again.

  God. How would she be able to see him again?

  Shar was snoring, full of Dom, sleeping so hard, even dreams didn’t invade. She forgot her late-night barrage of phone calls to Penn—calls that had been made under a coke-assisted high. She slept well into the next afternoon, way past her meeting with Beryl.

  Beryl was so stressed from the revelation about Sharlyn and Penn, all she could do was pace once she was back at her apartment. She’d been pacing for hours, too shaky and distracted to even remember to take her pills.

  It was raining outside. The contractors had taken the day off. Her living room, bathroom, and bedroom were a mess of stacked tiles, rubble, loose flooring, scattered nails, plaster dust, and exposed wiring. This was probably why she wasn’t at peace with what direction to take with the rehab of her apartment. Her spirit had known better, had known it was all a farce. Everything about it had been wrong all along.

  Penn wasn’t in love with her. He’d been sleeping with both her and Sharlyn.

  But Sharlyn was married. Why would she even risk doing something like this? All this time, Beryl thought they were friends. Sharlyn was just another star-whore with no morals, values, or concern for anyone other than herself.

  She kept brushing her hand across her forehead, pushing away imaginary strands of hair that were irritating her skin. She was disheveled. Her face was a train wreck.

  She had done everything for him. Put her career on the line by prearranging his deal, going to those corporations and bringing everything together, editing his work and coddling him as an artist way beyond what the job required.

  She’d spent a great deal of her own money on him. His whole wardrobe, down to the finest shoes. She’d paid for that. Even though he had his own money, she’d been spending hers, because she believed they were going to be together. He was going to be her husband. But he wasn’t. He was lying. He’d been lying. He was a liar. Why did he feel the need to be with another woman? Was it simply because she couldn’t give him enough sex? Why Sharlyn? Why?

  “I explained to him why my sex drive was low,” Beryl said to the air. “It was the medicine. What was I supposed to do?”

  More crying and hand-wringing. More why, why, whys.

  She meandered from corner to corner in the living room, trying to accept the obvious.

  She’d been used. She should face that truth and just deal with it.

  She wandered through the rubble and loose materials, making her way down the hallway on the still-intact parquet floors, into her bedroom. More rubble and materials. All the expensive bedding had been put into the closets. The Rubens painting (rather, knockoff) was in storage. She glanced around at the wreckage in her room, a perfect mirror of the wreckage in her heart.

  She glanced at the small table of African violets and the ones on the sill.

  Some of them were naked from neglect, their petals on the floor.

  Beryl was standing in the living room when he opened the door and walked in.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said, jumping back. “The doorman didn’t call up.”

  “He wasn’t there. I came in behind somebody.”

  She looked awful, Penn thought. Her hair was a mess and her eyes were all red. She’d probably spent the whole night working on things for him.

  “Sorry I didn’t get in before you left. Me and Fiyah were at Bungalow Eight, and next thing you know, it was this big-ass party for me. I got on the mic and everything.”

  She turned away from him and began to pace.

  “You eat yet?” he asked. He was starving. “I know it’s not lunchtime, but it’s close enough. I could go for one of those giant pastrami sandwiches at Carnegie Deli.”

  Beryl didn’t answer.

  “Hey,” he said. “What’s up? Where are you?”

  She was facing the wall now, not speaking at all.

  She’s mad I didn’t come home, he thought. Great. He couldn’t even enjoy one fucking party. It wasn’t like he did that a lot.

  He walked over to her and touched her on the arm. She spun away from him, screaming.

  “You’re fucking Sharlyn!”

  “What?”

  His heart sped up.

  “Don’t ‘what’ me, Penn! You’re fucking her! You’ve been fucking her all along!”

  He stepped toward her, reaching out to grab her hand. She backed away.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I thought we were past these kinds of jealous tirades from you. Sharlyn’s been a mentor, like Fiyah. Fuck, forget that, she’s happily married, so why would you even say something as ridiculous as that?”

  She was hyperventilating now, her eyes bursting with red vessels and tears. He could see the bags beneath them clearly. She’d been crying for a long time. She hadn’t found the loose brick in the wall, had she? That was impossible. That brick was imperceptible to even the sharpest eye. This was panic. She was just having a separation freak-out.

  “Is this because I’m leaving next week on tour?” he asked. “Do you think I’m going to neglect you when I’m on the road? That’s not gonna happen, babe. That could never happen with us.”

  Her whole face was turning red. She was still backing away.

  “You lying bastard. You fucking dog. You think I’m st
upid. Maybe I am. But you’re not going to get away with this. I’ll ruin all of us before I let you get away with it.”

  Her breathing grew heavier. Penn’s palms began to sweat. Not now. He didn’t need this to happen right now. He was right on the cusp of greatness, and she was pulling this shit.

  “I’ll go to my boss and tell her what happened,” she said, her breast heaving, “and I’ve gotten to know Miles pretty well. Wait until he finds out what the two of you’ve been doing. That fucking bitch!” The heaving had turned into gasps. “Pretending to be my friend all these years. Just wait! I’m going to tell Miles ev—”

  She collapsed, her head bouncing off a piece of rubble on the floor.

  “Oh shit!” Penn said, racing over to her.

  He knelt beside her, turning her head to the side. Her temple was bleeding from where it had landed on the rubble. There was a nasty gash along the side.

  Beryl moaned.

  This was so fucked! She was fucking up everything. She was going to ruin his whole career before it had a chance to see daylight, and now she had this fucking gash on her head. He’d have to take her to the hospital and it would certainly make the gossip news. Beryl would squeal to everyone, even though he didn’t know how she knew what she knew. She’d make him out to be some kind of a monster.

  Beryl moaned again, her eyes closed.

  This couldn’t happen.

  Penn picked up the piece of rubble she’d fallen on. He raised it in the air and, without a moment’s hesitation, he bashed her skull in.

  She’s not

  …breathing.”

  “Of course she isn’t.”

  “Did you check her pulse?”

  “Yes. Hours ago.”

  Mercury squatted beside Beryl’s body. A small pool of blood had gathered beneath her head. A jagged piece of concrete was under the cracked part of her skull. The concrete was stained with clumps of brain. A little more brain had oozed onto the floor.

  Mercury looked up at Penn.

  “So she fell on this piece of concrete and it fucked her head up like this?”

  Penn’s eyes met his.

  “Yeah.”

  Mercury turned his attention back to Beryl’s mangled cranium.

  “Damn. She must have fallen really hard. Her head cracked open like a walnut. You gotta fall with some serious velocity to get an injury like this.”

  He looked up at Penn again. They held each other’s gaze, long enough to acknowledge the unspoken contract being effected between them.

  “So we handle it,” Mercury said. “That’s all there is to it.”

  He stood and walked over to the front door. He peered through the peephole, turned the knob, stuck his head out into the hallway, looked both directions, then came back in.

  “Did she scream?”

  “No, but she was yelling.”

  “Yelling about what?”

  “Crazy stuff. A magazine interview, the tour.”

  “You think anybody heard her?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. A lot of people aren’t home that time of day.”

  “What time did it happen?”

  “Around eleven, eleven-thirty.”

  Merc walked around Beryl’s body, checking it from every angle.

  “Damn.”

  He went over to the window facing Central Park. He watched a rush of taxis whiz by. The night glimmered with flickering lights.

  “Why’d you take all day to call me?”

  “I was kinda freaked out. I’ve been sitting here for hours, since this morning. I can’t believe this shit. I just can’t believe it.”

  “This is a prewar building,” Merc said, turning around. “There’s thick firewall in here, not that cheap stuff.” He stood in the middle of the living room, his hands on his hips.

  This was Mercury King the professional talking now. The problem-solving project leader.

  “It’s probably cool. If someone had heard something they would have knocked on the door or called the cops right off. So you didn’t call 911?”

  “No, Merc,” Penn said with irritation. “I called you. What the fuck.”

  “Look, man, don’t ‘what the fuck’ me. I’m just doing due diligence.”

  “I know. This is just…it’s crazy.”

  “You need to relax,” said Mercury.

  He was standing in front of Penn now.

  “This ain’t nothing new. Shit like this goes down every day. You might not have seen it before because you had a privileged life growing up, but I didn’t. I’ve seen some shit.”

  Mercury was an intense man of medium height with a burst of fuzz that coated his dome and the space of flesh just above his top lip. Dark brown eyes hovered above a thick nose and a horizontal slice that passed for his mouth. His neck was almost as wide as a thigh, and massive hairy guns and forearms burst out of the sleeves of his beige T-shirt like he was some kind of brooding brown Hulk. His calves were hairy stones jutting from the openings of his long saggy khaki cargo shorts, stumping down into a pair of broad feet that terrorized the weathered Tims he was wearing. This was an intelligent man with a postgraduate degree in an elite profession, but on the street, at first blush, he seemed a natural bone-crusher.

  “When I was five, my pops killed my uncle Pito, his brother, right in front of me. You wanna know why?”

  Penn waited for him to say.

  “Because Uncle Pito told a joke that made my moms laugh too hard. Harder than she ever laughed at anything Pops ever said.” Mercury’s eyes had a far-off look. “So he shot Uncle Pito right in the face. Blood spattered all over me. I’ll never forget that shit for as long as I live.”

  “Damn, dude.”

  “That was the first death I ever saw. That’s the kind of shit that went down in my neighborhood. What you gonna do? You can freak the fuck out and get killed your damn self or go to jail and get killed in there, or you can be cool and do what you gotta do. I learned a long time ago how to do what I gotta do.”

  Their eyes met.

  “You got that?” Merc said.

  “Yeah.”

  “I need you to be cool.”

  “First we gotta get this blood up.”

  It was ten minutes later. Mercury had gone from room to room, negotiating the logistics of what would come next.

  “We’ve got a distinct advantage here,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The construction. We’ve been tearing stuff up and rebuilding in here for months. The doorman’s seen our work crew come and go. There’s rubble all over the place. All we gotta do is take care of the body, and then we can have the crew carry off anything in here that might have blood, DNA, whatever on it. We’ll take it down to the landfill we use in Jersey. And that’ll be that with that.”

  “Has your crew done something like this before?”

  “We’re from Washington Heights. We’ve done a lot of stuff.”

  Merc paced, rubbing his chin.

  “You called my cell from here. You probably don’t even realize what a good move that was.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it’s consistent. Beryl was always calling my cell, first thing in the morning, different times throughout the day. She often did it from here whenever she stopped by to check on the work and I happened to be out. She was always trying to track me down.”

  “So why is that good?”

  “Phone records, man. The police will check everything.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes. The fucking police. Don’t even sweat that shit. Dealing with the police is just standard procedure. We can tell ’em she was crazy, practically stalking you, going way beyond the editor role, you know? That’ll be credible. She was kinda nuts. She was damn near stalking me, and I was just her contractor.”

  Merc looked around the living room.

  “Once we get her situated, the workers can carry off the debris, which will be business as usual with all the changes we’ve been doing a
round here. My guys are all clean, no priors or nothing, we always make sure of that.” Merc turned to Penn. “But you and I are gonna handle the body. The hardest part will happen in the bathroom.”

  “In the bathroom?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re gonna have to take her to the tub and handle all the dirty business there. We’ll clean up the tub when we finish, and the crew can haul it out tomorrow with the rest of the shit. It won’t be a big deal. We’ve brought three new tubs in since we started rehabbing this place.”

  They were in the bathroom. Beryl’s naked body was in the tub.

  Mercury kneeled beside her and turned on the faucets. Penn stood by the bathroom door and watched him.

  “I’ll have the guys take up all the flooring tomorrow in all the rooms and put new material down over the next few days. We’ll paint. Do everything. We have instructions to rebuild anyway.”

  “People will be looking for her,” Penn said, “won’t they?”

  “Not necessarily. She could have taken a vacation. Maybe she wanted to be left alone for a week.”

  “A week?”

  “Yeah. I figure that’s about how long we’ve got. Maybe two. She got a lot of friends?”

  “No. She doesn’t have any. She has a lot of acquaintances in the entertainment and business worlds, but she’s pretty much a loner.”

  “Was a loner,” Mercury said, getting up.

  Penn watched his best friend’s muscular girth and heavy feet seem to glide without effort throughout the apartment. He wandered around in silence until he found the kitchen. He could hear Mercury opening cabinets and poking around.

  He was still standing when Merc returned with a sky-blue bucket filled with two big tan sponges, a small green one, some 409, a bottle of Mr. Clean, something with a black handle, and something with a cord. He took the items out and put them on the bathroom counter. The cord was attached to an electric knife with a serrated edge. The black handle belonged to a large stainless-steel knife, one of those never-needs-sharpening infomercial wonders, the kind used to carve mammoth turkeys and thick cuts of prime rib. A rubber handle was sticking out of Mercury’s right pants pocket. He reached for it and pulled out a silver-headed hammer and set it on the counter beside the rest. He opened the bottle of Mr. Clean, poured some into the bucket, put it in the deep sink at an angle, and turned on the faucet in the sink.