Love and Other Wounds (8 page)

They meet over the body of a beautiful dead boy. Green likes her right away. Her hands don't shake. She doesn't make bad jokes or cry or act cold. A lot of people wouldn't handle their fear so well. After all, it is her first corpse.

Gray November skies loom in the giant windows behind them. Manhattan babbles four stories below them.

She says her name is Sarah.

“Green Daniels,” he says back.

They shake hands. Her hand is small. It is cold. The other hand fingers the red scarf covered in grinning yellow skulls knotted at her neck. Green gets it. She realizes how inappropriate the skulls are. But she doesn't want to draw attention to it by taking off the scarf.

“Victor sent you,” she says.

UNSAID: You're the cleaner.

Green nods. Victor had called Green from L.A., from the law office in Beverly Hills that he never seems to leave.

“Cleanup on aisle seven,” Victor had said when Green answered his phone. Victor left the rest UNSAID. UNSAID is their second language. He didn't use the word
dead
. He didn't use the beautiful dead boy's name. He gave Green the address and hung up the phone.

Green squats down to look at the beautiful dead boy. He flashes back through the past three years: The rise of a beautiful boy. Magazine covers, blockbusters, red carpets, paparazzi club shots.

And now this room: The fall of the beautiful dead boy. A bottle of OxyContin on the nightstand. The glass of watery whiskey next to the bottle. Downers and booze. The classic star-killer.

“Whose apartment is this?” Green asks.

Sarah hesitates. She tugs on her red skull scarf.

“Not his,” Green says.

She nods. He picks up the prescription bottle and hands it to her. He points to the bottle's label. The name. A woman's name. A famous name.

“That's the thing?” Green asks.

“That's the thing.”

“She's your client,” he says.

“I'm her publicist,” Sarah says. “One of them, anyway.”

There are two kinds of publicists in this world. The kind who get good news out and the kind who keep secrets in. Sarah is the second type.

“She must keep you busy,” Green says.

Sarah tries a smile at this. But it's like she's forgotten how to do it.

Green knows about her client. Everyone does. Young, rich, and famous for being famous. For putting her life on display. He's seen the client's face on a dozen magazine stands. He's seen her Brazilian-fresh vagina, thanks to an “accidental” upskirt shot that hit the web two weeks before her last reality show came out. He knows who she's dated, and when. It doesn't matter that Green doesn't want to know. Everyone can't help but know. The knowing floats in the air like smog.

“She loaned him the place?” Green asks.

“He's in town shooting something. He's been here a week.”

“How many of these does she have?” Green asks, shaking the Oxy bottle. He points to the label again. The bottle is from Florida.

“I don't know.”

Florida is a doctor-shopper's paradise. Someone who braves its mosquitoes and white trash to get themselves a hillbilly heroin script doesn't get just one. They get several. Pure junkie logic. In Hollywood you could be an asshole, a fuckup, a junkie, a woman beater, whatever. As long as there was someone to foot the bill. The client can't handle another scandal. The insurance companies will bolt. When the insurance companies won't play ball anymore, that's when the roller coaster stops. A drug bust right now will ruin the client's career.

This is the job. Keep the client clean. They don't have to talk about it. They keep it UNSAID.

Green asks Sarah to give him the timeline. She breaks it down for him. A house cleaner found him first. A chain of phone calls followed: the client's manager, the agent, the head publicist. The publicist called Sarah. She told Sarah to call Victor. That's who Victor was: the guy you called while the body cooled.

No one called a paramedic. Everyone knew the drill. The
drill was UNSAID: he's dead and that's a shame, but there's no reason to bury the client.

“The house cleaner,” Green says when she's finished, “legal or illegal?”

“Illegal,” Sarah says.

“Piece of cake,” Green says. “Talk to her. Tell her if she didn't see the body, she won't have to talk to anyone from the government. She won't have a problem with that.”

Sarah nods.

“Here's what we're going to do,” he says. “You're going to go down to that coffee shop down the street and order yourself one of those nine-dollar coffee drinks they have and you're going to drink it. You drink that coffee and tell yourself the story of you being the first one to find the body. When you can tell the story frontwards and backwards and out of order, come back here. I will be gone. Anything else your client wouldn't like the cops to find will be gone. The pills will be gone, except a few in his pants pocket. You will call nine-one-one. Don't try for an Oscar. Just make the call.”

“Can we keep her name out of it?”

“It would take moving the body,” he says. “Never try for miracles. That's when it all goes to hell. No, we can make it look like he brought his own drugs over here, and not give the cops any reason to question your client. Where is she, anyway?”

“She's hosting a nightclub opening in Vegas,” Sarah says. “You wouldn't believe what they pay her to sit there and drink.”

She tries another smile. This one works.

“Perfect,” Green says. “Then she's got nothing to do with this.”

Sarah nods and looks at the body. The smile goes away again.

“It's sad,” she says. “Is it okay, what we're doing? Is it wrong?”

“You should get out,” he says. “Of this business.”

“Why?” She bristles, defiant, and Green likes her even more.

“You asked about right and wrong,” he tells her.

Something stirs in Green as he watches her leave the apartment. Something he thought he'd drowned like a kitten in the bathtub a long time ago. He wants to call her back, to try to talk to her, try to make her laugh. But he doesn't. He tells himself it's because he has a job to do.

Green goes to work. He gets a garbage bag from the kitchen. He trashes the pill bottles. He finds the client's weed stash in green plastic bottles. The bottles have labels: Pure OG. Yoda. Lamb's Bread. LA Confidential. He trashes them. He wipes down surfaces. He finds the beautiful dead boy's phone on the ground near the bed. He goes through it. He checks the photos. He finds POV sex shots. The beautiful dead boy was a phone-hack scandal waiting to happen. Famous faces, famous bodies, famous smiles. Sarah's client, with dope-frosted eyes, spread-eagle on this very bed. Another starlet taken doggy style, looking back at the camera, back at the beautiful boy. Green deletes the pictures. He thinks twice and pockets the phone. Data is too easy to recover. Better to let the cops wonder where the phone got to than let the pictures leak out.

He carries the trash bag out with him. He steps over gray banks of filthy snow. He tosses the bag in a trash can near St. Marks Place and walks away.

He stays in a hotel room in Chinatown almost exactly the size of the queen-size bed, with water stains on the ceiling. New York City hisses and pops right outside the window. Fresh seafood dies on ice in the fish markets outside. The room has Internet and cable. He puts CNN on the teevee screen. He sets
up on his laptop twin windows of Twitter and TMZ. He waits. He eats steamed dumplings from a stand around the corner. He gets used to the smell from outside. Green knows you can get used to almost anything.

Twitter gets it first. TMZ gets a picture of the body under a white sheet. Pretty soon after that the helicopters start buzzing the neighborhood. Constant chopper noises as news channels take meaningless aerial shots of the apartment building. The newscasters repeat themselves over and over, desperate to justify their existence. Green watches until he hears a CNN mouthpiece say Sarah's story word for word. The story will hold. The job is done.

Los Angeles in February. People wear sunglasses and heavy jackets. The beautiful day is cold to them. The body adjusts to paradise.

A man muscled like a gym trainer enters his West Hollywood apartment. The trainer turns on the light. Green sits in front of the trainer's computer. On the computer screen: a photo of the Most Famous Man in the World with a dick in his mouth. The trainer's dick. The trainer is getting deep-throated by a thirty-million-dollar mouth.

“Let me tell you where you fucked up,” Green says.

The trainer tenses up, ready to run.

Green, UNSAID: I'll find you, and then I'll make you pay for running.

The trainer gets the message. He sits down.

“Let me tell you where you fucked up,” Green says again. “You asked for too much money.”

The American moviegoing public likes twenty-first-century special effects and 1950s moral standards. The American moviegoing public still can't stomach a leading man who likes the
flavor of a good stiff prick in his mouth. The Most Famous Man in the World likes the flavor of a good stiff prick in his mouth. A photo of said suck job would spread like a virus through the Internet. Said suck job kills the Most Famous Man's salary quote. It kills his action franchise. It costs the Industry money. Said photo is valuable.

Unless you fuck up the play.

The trainer starts to say something. Green cuts him off.

“I don't know how much you asked for, and I don't care. All I know is, there's an amount you could have asked for and they would have paid it. But you cross a line, and it gets cheaper to hire me to make the problem go away. You being the problem.”

Green doesn't feel anything while he hurts the man. He's not sure the man feels anything either.

Green walks out into the West Hollywood night. Blood on the front of his shirt. His phone vibrates in his pocket.

“Hey, Victor. It's done.”

“Of course it is, champ. You're the fucking best.”

Victor is honest by Hollywood fuckwad standards. His bullshit is so blatant it is a perverse form of telling the truth.

“I'm not calling to check in, baby,” Victor says. “Cleanup on aisle seven. You have a badge someplace, right?”

The Grotto, the nicest no-tell hotel in the world. Green gives his key to the valet and walks up the famous pebble steps, the ones Jim Morrison fell down headfirst. He goes through the locked gate to the right, to the part of the hotel the wannabes and part-time party people never get to see. Heads down the steps to the swimming pool. Beautiful people. Young, naked, and free. Green stays out of the light.

Green knocks on the door of the bungalow. Sarah answers
the door. She is wearing her red skull scarf. She smiles when she sees him. Then she looks down and the smile goes away.

“You've got blood on your shirt,” she says.

“Yeah.”

He shows her the fake badge. Her smile goes fast. UNSAID: it's a bad scene.

“Sheriff's department, ma'am,” he says loudly as he walks in.

A naked man with claw marks down his chest sits on the bed. Aaron Something-or-Other. An actor. He plays a doctor on some teevee show, one of those network shows where the hospital staff looks like a bunch of catalog models playing dress-up. He looks up at Green, disinterested and drunk. He looks back down at his hands. The knuckles are red, swollen.

Out of the bathroom walks a beautiful woman with a split lip. Her shirt is ripped. There is blood on her bra. She holds a fistful of ice to her eye. Green knows the look, the style. She is a pro, high end, the kind who hangs out at the bar at Beverly Hills steakhouses. Thousand bucks an hour or so, Green guesses from the look of her. She radiates something. It takes Green a minute to remember the name for it. Dignity.

“The son of a bitch hit me,” the pro says. She takes the ice away from her eye. The eye is a tight purple swollen-shut bud, a flower before the bloom.

“She's a whore,” Aaron says. UNSAID: whores are for hitting, aren't they?

Green takes a badge out of his coat pocket. He shows it around. The badge is made out of some cheap metal. It reads
CHICAGO PD
. Doesn't matter. The woman doesn't look too close.

Sarah stands in the corner. She fiddles with her scarf.

Green takes the pro to the bathroom. She sits on the marble countertop. She shows him her legs. Crisscross welts across her thighs. A mad pattern to the violence.

“What do you want out of this?” he asks her.

“Come on,” she says, “he beat the shit out of me.”

“You want me to take him in?” Green asks.

The pro looks at him. The pro, UNSAID: pretend I'm not a whore and tell me if you'd still ask that question.

“What's your name?” he asks her.

“Chablis,” she says.

“What's your name?” he asks again.

“Caroline.”

“Priors?”

She pauses.

“He pay you already?”

Caroline doesn't think. She touches her back pocket. Green reaches behind her and pulls out the envelope. He peeks inside. Looks like two grand in twenties. He hands it back to her. He gives her the talk—the talk a million real cops have given to a million bruised hookers. He tells her how it will go down. If he takes Aaron in, he'll have to take her in as well. He'll have to charge them both. Tears gather up in the purple split of her swollen eye.

“Now,” he says, playing the world-weary cop, “are you sure you really want to press charges?”

He watches her think about it. About taking a stand. Then shakes her head no. Green has broken her.

Good job.

She nods. They walk back into the room. Aaron has put on some clothes. He has poured himself another drink. He has invaded Sarah's personal space. He touches her thigh. She squirms. Green clears his throat.