High Life (6 page)
Loops of viscous puke hung from his chin, they swayed as his head moved. He looked a lot less healthy now.
“I’m waiting to see.”
He tried to keep belligerent eye contact with me as he went back to the booze. But it didn’t last. He puked again. Swallowed and puked, swallowed and puked, until the cycle exhausted him and the vomit-slick jug slipped from his hands.
He collapsed sideways and his head made a thunking noise as it hit the concrete. I stood up and watched him convulse, he looked like a dog having a nightmare. Between his retching he cursed me—strange old-man curses from a previous era that made him sound like Elmer Fudd.
The jug of whiskey stood where he’d dropped it, upright, unbroken, almost half empty. When his body would let him, he stared at it as though it were some reliquary for the whole of his life. He tried to reach for it. I thought he was going to make it, but a few inches short the strength left him and he closed his eyes and let his arm fall. Without lifting his head he puked a stream of blood that gathered itself into a chest-sized inkblot and washed against the base of the whiskey bottle.
He wasn’t dying—I checked his breathing—but it looked pretty much like he’d fucked an already fucked stomach. I left him with the remains of the booze and headed out into the parking lot. The last sound I heard him make was a prolonged wet fart as his bowels let go.
I had a bit of an erection all the way to the car.
I’d almost got the door of the Prelude closed when a plump white hand reached out of the corner of vision and stopped it. Ryan moved into frame, backlit by the mercury wash from the street.
“Jackie boy. It’s that man again! Don’t start the car.”
He walked around to the passenger side and got in. He settled his bulk comfortably into the seat.
“This is cozy.”
“Have you got some news about Karen?”
I tried to sound tiredly grieving and expectant at the same time.
“Interesting thing to do to the tramp.”
“Huh?”
“I let you have the dumb act last time, don’t push it. I was watching. Been watching a couple of days. You don’t get out much.”
“He asked for a drink. I gave him one.”
“Yeah, I saw.”
“He could have stopped any time.”
“But you knew he wouldn’t.”
I had the interior light on, it made shadows of Ryan’s eyes, outlined the pouches of fat beneath them. He looked even more unhealthy than before.
“Aren’t you here about Karen?”
“Oh, you want to talk about Karen?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Boy, let me think … Maybe because you weren’t surprised when you saw her at the morgue? Maybe because you had something to do with putting her there?”
“Get real.”
“If I got any realer, boy, you’d be face down bleeding through both sides of your head. I know you lied to me … Didn’t she ever tell you about us? Didn’t she tell you who I was?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I knew her, you asshole. She was a whore, I used to buy her. I liked her because she went that extra mile, didn’t have a problem with those frills most cunts get all precious about. She used to call me Daddy while we were doing it.”
“You’re old enough.”
“Yow, Jackie, bitch-ee! You oughta be more respectful, I must have been a regular source of income for you two.”
I wondered if this was all just cop psych to freak me into confessing to something. I’d never heard Karen mention Ryan’s name, but that didn’t mean anything. She might have hated the police but she’d fuck one if there was money in it.
The next thing Ryan said, though, cleared things up considerably.
“You look like a smart guy. Given that seeing her on her hands and knees wasn’t an unusual occurrence for me, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure that I know what you said about her shoulder was a little inaccurate. One of those Egyptian bugs, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Oh, shit, yeah, the scarab! Fuck, I’m sorry, I must have been in shock or something.”
“Ooo, that’s upsetting.”
“What do you want? I’m sorry. When I saw her body I just froze up.”
“Or maybe the tattoo connected to something you didn’t want me to know about.”
“Like what? Why would I hide anything?”
“Right now I don’t know, Jackie. But if I gotta take a guess I’d say because you killed her.”
You have to think of the exact right comeback to a statement like that. Surprise? Indignation? Outright denial? Something that will make him stop believing what he so obviously does. I couldn’t do it. So I lit a cigarette and stared out the window at the floodlit cars. Through the glass of the market people moved around all purposeful and clean, safe in whatever lives they led. And for one brief moment I was envious of them, of their acceptance of the rules of the world they found themselves in. I’d been like them once, but not any more, and I’d moved too far away to ever go back. Now I was in some alien place, sitting next to a cop who wanted to fix me for murder.
A woman in shorts that cut into the crack of her ass walked across the parking lot to her car. Ryan watched her like some flabby predator. When she bent over to put her shopping in the trunk he rubbed his balls.
“Look at that. What sort of beard you say she’s got? Real hairy, or just one of those wispy things around the outside of her hole? Whaddya say, Jack? You shack up with someone like Karen, I know you gotta like cooze.”
“My wife’s just been murdered.”
Ryan laughed.
“You ain’t in mourning.”
“Maybe it just doesn’t show.”
“Maybe it’s just that old shock thing again, freezing you up. Where were you Monday before last? Evening into night.”
The quick change threw me for a second, then the meaning of the words sank in. Monday night. Two days before she was found in the park. Totally cool, I had an alibi.
“That was when she was killed?”
“Answer the fucking question. And you better hope it’s checkable.”
“I was working. Donut Haven on Wilshire, West Hollywood. Four till midnight. You can check it with the guy who runs the place.”
“I will, but I gotta check something with you first.”
“What?”
“They found come in her guts.”
“She was a hooker, what do you expect?”
“I’m not talking about her pussy. I’m talking about that big hole in her tum-tum. Looks like after she was gutted someone relieved themselves at close range. Know what I’m saying?”
“Me, I suppose?”
“I’m hoping. But I tell you what, Jackie, I’m a guy who tries to see all sides of a problem, you know, consider all possibilities. So I’m gonna give you a chance to settle the spunk aspect.”
“Er … how?”
I had a feeling something bad was coming, and it did.
“We got come in her guts. The obvious step, obvious to me, anyhow, is get a sample from you.”
“Sure, anything to help the investigation. What do I have to do, give some blood?”
“I’m kinda picky about these kinda things. We find spunk, we should match it against spunk. Call me old-fashioned.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m giving you a chance.”
“Jesus, all right … Where do I go?”
“Shit, Jackie, I don’t want to put you to any trouble. You can do it right here.”
“Are you serious?”
“It’s up to you. Of course, if you refuse it’s gonna be difficult for me not to draw the obvious conclusion.”
“You want me to jerk off in the car?”
“Why not?”
“No way. This is too weird …”
“Say, have I shown you my gun?”
Ryan leaned over on one side of his ass and pulled a short revolver out of a belt holster. The metal was dull. It looked well used. He twisted it in the cabin light.
“Thirty-eight. Not as powerful as the Glocks the young guys carry, but it does its job. Know how many people I’ve killed with it? Enough so I have to use my toes to count.”
“This is like a subtle threat, right?”
“When I was fucking her I used to wonder what her old man was like, what I was competing with, so to speak. Turns out he’s a worthless fuck who won’t even cooperate solving her murder. I got two reasons to shoot you, Jack. First, it would close the case. You tried to escape—you musta been guilty. Second, I’d just like to do it. Now, if I was a guy sitting next to a guy like me, I wouldn’t be arguing over a couple of teaspoons of love juice. Get my meaning?”
“Okay, okay … Will you at least get out while I do it?”
“Can’t. Sorry. You might contaminate the sample in some way—cigarette ash, say. And I don’t want to have to do this all over again. Here, you can use this.”
Ryan took a plastic pharmacy jar from his pocket and handed it to me. It was a safe bet that no cop on a bona fide investigation was going to collect evidence like this. But there wasn’t much I could do. His gun was pointing in my direction and I’d already painted myself into a corner by lying about the tattoo. So … I got my dick out.
The starter bone from the tramp was long gone and getting hard was an impossible task. I rubbed for a while and tried to think of something dirty, but Ryan staring at me made it difficult to concentrate.
“I can’t do it with you watching.”
“Sure you can, you just need a kick-start.”
He took a photo from his inside pocket and held it out. It showed a rear-end view of a naked young woman, face down on a concrete floor, knees drawn up under her chest, arms thrown stiffly out to each side. The angle of the shot made it possible to see the blood that had run out of her mouth and pooled around her head. She had a crowbar sticking out of her ass.
“Gang killing. South Central squadies like to pass these things around. Kinda erotic, huh?”
Despite the sickness of the subject, Ryan was right. The flat, pitiless quality of the lighting, the thick flesh of her cunt, the violated anus—all combined to produce something that made my head swim. The horror of it drew me out of the world for a while, blocked out Ryan long enough for me to pump up.
After that it only took a minute to spurt into the jar. There was a lot and some of it missed and splatted against the dash. The intensity of the orgasm surprised me, but as soon as it was over I felt disgusted. Being watched while you wank is as bad as taking a shit in front of someone.
“That’s the spirit, Jackie.”
Ryan put his gun away, screwed the top on the jar, and held it up to the light.
“Nice and thick. Must have a high sperm count.”
“Can I go now?”
“Soon.”
“Jesus, what now? A stool sample?”
“Getting smart with me ain’t smart, Jackie. Did she know any doctors?”
“Her client list wasn’t in my top-ten chart of great books to read.”
“I’m trying pretty hard here, Jackie. Right now it’s the only thing pointing away from you.”
“How’s that?”
“You saw the way she was cut. Coulda been someone with surgical experience. A doctor, no?”
There was something so majorly unkosher about Ryan I was reluctant to tell him anything, let alone stuff about illegal kidney operations. But I figured a little info might put me in a better light.
“Maybe she did mention one. Over in Malibu, I think.”
“Oh, really? Got a name? An address?”
“No. She didn’t talk about him. It was just like comments she made. I don’t even know if his place was on the beach or in the hills.”
“You get a look at him? He ever come by to pick her up?”
“No.”
“Did she keep an address book, any sort of record of the guys she fucked?”
“Not Karen. She wasn’t that organized.”
“This ain’t good. Not for you, anyway. Doesn’t give me anything to go on. I guess I’ll just have to stick with you. Tell me, what was it like being married to a whore?”
“Not good.”
“Could be it pushed you a little too far? Maybe she fucked a guy with a big dick one night, came home and told you about it. And ’cause you ain’t so long you flipped out with something sharp?”
“I didn’t kill her, Ryan.”
He smiled for a moment then nodded at the photo of the dead girl.
“A present.”
He got out of the car and walked off into a night that wasn’t distant or insulated anymore. Everything in it was sharp and immediate and dangerous. The kind of environment that looked like it would suit Ryan just fine.
Daytime, on the bed. I was interfacing, but at one remove, blurred and borderline irritable behind a filter of pills. Lorn on the TV, on a tape. As perfect as the teen sex visions on Nintendo. Talking about things that possessed me. I lay on the bed like one of those slovenly filter-feeding fish, gulping it in too fast to taste, but drawing bedrock nourishment from it all the same.
Then Royston turned up to collect the rent—a little weasel of a guy who owned a couple of properties along the coast and liked to keep a handle on things via personal connection. He had a habit of pushing his head forward and up that made the front of his neck bulge like the underside of a penis. Black-framed coke-bottle glasses, hair that looked synthetic, a thin white body that seemed to be always coiling and twisting and trying to escape its clothes. He was in his thirties, but it was hard not to think of him as a child—an idiot child, protected from life by his inability to appreciate the hassles the rest of the world suffered.
I found it almost impossible to stay civil around him.
“Hiya, Jack, it’s that time of the month again.”
He laughed like he’d made a joke, a sort of braying noise.
“Yeah? I haven’t started bleeding yet. I must be late.”
“Oh, Jack, you’re wild. Come on, you know what I mean.”
He threw an air punch and made a growling noise like he appreciated me playing along with him.
“This isn’t a good time.”
“Oh, wow, I can see that. You really should try to keep the place a bit cleaner, you know. Is that chocolate pudding on your chest?”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Why don’t you open the blinds? It’s such a lovely day outside. The sun’s shining, the birds are singing, and God’s in his heaven. That’s what my mother used to say. The sun’s shin—”
I walked out of the room to get a beer from the fridge. I looked at the pill jar and wondered if I could take enough to pass out before Royston managed to bring himself to say the R-word. Unlikely, so I flipped a single DF 118 and went back and fell on the bed. I was wearing stained, stretched-out briefs that let my cock swing around. Royston avoided looking at my crotch.
“You don’t look happy, Jack.”
“I got a few problems.”
“Oh, problems … Don’t we all? But, Jack, you know? Problems are just things to overcome. Even the tough ones go away if you give them enough time. Like, I had some water damage at my other property? And the living room carpet was completely ruined. I could have let it get to me—I mean, it was really nice carpet. I could have agonized over it and wondered why something like that had to happen to me. But I chose not to. I made the decision. Instead of letting it achieve major proportions, I acted straight away, went right out and replaced it. End of problem. Say, where’s Karen?”
“Dead. Somebody cut her open, pulled out her guts, and blew a load into the hole.”
For a moment his mouth worked silently, like he had to chew my words out of the air to get past them. Then his voice started again on the end of a shocked, indrawn breath.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to say things like that? They might come true.”
He was sitting on the couch, he bounced up and down on the cushion.
“The springs are going in this.”
“Replace it, then.”
“Oh, it’s not that bad. I mean, it’s not out of place.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you live at a certain level.”
“Everyone lives at a certain level.”
“You can’t expect a brand-new couch.”
“I’m not asking you to give it to me. This is a furnished apartment. I pay rent, the furnishings should be at least halfway decent.”
“That’s what I’m saying. They are decent … For your level. I’m not being shitty, Jack. It’s just the way of things. Come on, dude, this isn’t important. Let’s do a number. I got this South African stuff. Total head. If I’m lying I’m flying.”
Royston thought smoking was the height of hipness and was prone to ODing on slang when the subject came up. He pulled out a bag of grass and some papers. Sharing a joint had become a habit on rent days. It made him feel better about asking for the money, like we were really friends and the rent was just incidental.
I didn’t like grass—too much love and too many flowers in its history. Give me a member of the benzo family any day—something made in a clinic, not a fucking herbal accident. Something with a zero-paranoia quotient. But I figured if he was stoned he might be more flexible on the issue of money. Plus I knew the asshole would keep whining until I agreed to get fucked up with him.
“Get on with it, then.”
Royston dropped the bag of weed twice in his eagerness to get one rolled.
We smoked and coughed and smoked. He didn’t know to take the seeds out, so the joint exploded periodically and showered the carpet with burning ash. Each time it happened he got down on his knees, clucking like a chicken, and rubbed frantically at the singed spot.
By the time the joint was finished we were both pretty much confused. Royston had a couple of hacking fits and kept taking his glasses off to wipe his eyes. I got up and went to the kitchenette for another beer. My face felt like it was sizzling and things darted about at the edge of vision. But they were hard to catch and when I turned head-on they disappeared.
Out the back window the girl I’d seen before was on her balcony again. She wore a few more clothes this time and was bent forward painting her nails. The THC riding my bloodstream made it easy to project all the sadness of the city onto her. With the glory of the setting sun thrown orange against the walls around her, working so hard at something like painting your nails seemed such a desperate thing to do. My thoughts chained out along dope corridors and I was sure if I went over there and put my arm around her she’d break down crying and everything would be all right in her life from then on. I began to feel an overwhelming kinship with her.
Until she looked up, saw me watching her, and gave me the finger.
And then I was suddenly tired of it all—of other people, the noise of the outside world, the evening light, fucking Royston and his fucking rent … What I wanted was to drift, maybe watch some more TV, maybe look at the picture of the dead girl with the crowbar up her ass.
I went back to the lounge with my drink.
“You were a long time, Jack.”
“I don’t have the rent.”
He looked like I’d slapped him, like it was something I just should not have said.
“Oh … Well, er … Gee, Jack, that’s not something there’s much leeway on. You know? I mean, it’s not that difficult, is it?”
“Karen really is dead.”
“Oh, Jack …”
“I mean it. She was killed.”
“Oh, boy.”
Royston started rubbing his palms backwards and forwards along the tops of his thighs. He looked uncomfortably around the room like he was hoping someone would come and rescue him.
“That’s … Oh, boy …”
“Yeah, it’s pretty bad.”
He stood up and scratched his head, other hand on his hip.
“I feel a bit manipulated here, Jack.”
“What?”
“Well, first you don’t have the rent, then you tell me Karen’s dead.”
“Well it’s true. I don’t have the rent and Karen is dead.”
“But you’re putting them together. There’s an implication.”
“Hey, I was only going to ask if I could make it up next month. You won’t lose anything. It’s been a difficult time.”
“That’s not the way things work, Jack. That’s not the way of the world. We have a contract, we have to work inside the rules it sets out. What would happen if everybody did this? Chaos. Nobody’d pay rent.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“I don’t either, Jack. I’m really disappointed.”
“Jesus, Royston. A few weeks. Is it that much to ask?”
“It’s the principle. If I can’t trust you to pay on time, how can I trust that you really will make it up?”
“I promise, okay? This is the first time in two years, for Christsake!”
He shook his head like this went against everything he’d ever held dear.
“I can’t give you another month. It’s not possible. I’ll give you two weeks, and that’s a favor, Jack. Okay?” He walked to the door, still shaking his head. “Jeeze, I feel pretty upset.”
After he’d gone my rage boiled over. I felt belittled, I felt demeaned. Something as trivial as an extension on the rent … I walked round and round the room clenching my teeth, but it wouldn’t go away. In an effort to calm myself I took out the photo Ryan had given me. I was instantly transfixed. I held it with one hand and jerked off with the other. Standing in the middle of the room. My spunk made a pattering sound when it fell on the carpet.
And later I separated myself still further with gossip magazines—a plunge into the pool of a better way of being.
Tom Cruise had booked the honeymoon suite at the Ritz in Paris and filled it with flowers for a second honeymoon with Nicole. While in the City of Love they spent a quarter of a million bucks on new clothes. Rumors flew that Heather Locklear was pregnant, but the star herself was being coy. Farrah Fawcett danced the night away at a Hollywood gay bar, as sexy and athletic as ever. Tim Allen gave his wife a new Jag for her birthday and Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith spent twenty-five grand on furniture for baby Stella’s nursery. Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen dealt with marital tension arising from working on the same TV show by sleeping in separate rooms on the weekend and not talking to each other on Saturdays.
A few days after Royston’s visit I realized I was bored. Booze tasted stale, my body felt soft, and the pill fog around my head was starting to bug me. The fugue of the last week and a half had burned itself out and I was suddenly tired of lying around. Like some cathartic dawn, the desire to be out in the world again threw its light over me. I wanted a more active distraction than TV. I wanted to participate in what I saw there.
I shaved, showered, and dressed. Late night. Black sky powdered orange. Outside, taillights would be streaking the roads with journeys far more exciting than those of the day—drug transportation, deals in the backseat, fucks to be tracked down in bars and clubs and nailed on the wet tiles beside pools in the hills, meetings to be kept or deliberately broken, steps to be taken toward success or someone else’s destruction. Ah, the L.A. night!
I stood on the steps in front of the apartment and breathed it in. It smelled different. It was a different place from the city I’d known before Karen’s death. Without the daily grind of a job, without the headfuck detrition of worrying about accepted patterns of behavior, it had changed from impenetrable monolith to become again a place where anything might happen—a glittering arena of streetlights, headlights, lighted windows, and neon.
The Prelude fired up first go—smooth function Nippon tech. I let it idle and thought about Karen.
Dead in a park shortly after an illegal kidney operation. The scar on her belly and all her organs removed. It wasn’t hard to come up with a scenario—Karen dumps her kidney, comes home and tells me about it, we fight and she splits, she gets back in touch with the doc, then something goes down and he wastes her. Seemed logical to me. The operation and the killing were close in time. The wounds might have been made by a surgeon. And who better to have a motive for such thorough body emptying than someone who wanted to obliterate all traces of an illegal operation?
I had a feeling I’d linked these thoughts for a reason, but right then I wasn’t sure what it was. So I rolled the windows down and hit the road and hoped the night air would blow them away.
For a short time I felt free. There was nothing to stop me from driving forever if I wanted to—no alarm clock, no doughnut boss. My actions had so little impact on the world around me I felt outside time. What did it matter when I stopped, where I went, what I did? Without ties to one of the visual media industries I was irrelevant to the city.
North on Lincoln, east on Santa Monica, all the way to Hollywood and the drag.
Prime time, around twelve. Parallel with Hollywood Boulevard, a few streets south, the drag was hot. Its littered half-mile of fake fronting and excessive wattage crawled with buyers and sellers like a radiant, maggot-riddled carcass. Porn theaters, fast-food joints, a couple of bars, hard-eyed men with rough skin and too many rings on their fingers. And hookers, hookers, hookers.
Cars rolled slowly, close to the curb, viewing the trade. Cunt, pussy, snatch … Hunted by all the types the city could throw up. College kids crammed six to a car, hanging out the windows, whistling and yelling and banging the door panels with the palms of their hands, bringing with them the only innocence the drag ever saw, out to get a friend laid, or find some slag-heap bitch who’d do a carload cut price. The pros, the regular customers, confident and relaxed, alone or with a buddy, calling the girls by name, cool in their negotiations, explicit in their demands. They were going to get what they paid for, sure as shit. And the guys who took it a whole lot more seriously. Always alone, windows shut, until the need got bad enough to force that final swoop up to a woman they’d already passed ten times that night. Hot in the car, sweaty, driving with a hard-on, risking a job or a wife or the house or the kids, but unable to stop themselves. Sex as a drug, dirty and dangerous and built on fucked-up psych foundations—shit hanging over from childhood. Sickos and sneaks, yeah, but they were the real face of drag consumption. Unlike the kids and the goodtimers whose laughing transactions did not cut beyond the flashy first layer of the whore animal, these desperate men were its bone and muscle. They were the truth of what went on here, the true counterparts of the whores. Pain slotting into pain.
