Then the flush of rage. "This is a private shoot. Where's your pass?"
"Drop your hand, Crimmins. Do it now!"
"Oh," said Crimmins. "You talk so I'm supposed to listen, asshole?"
"Drop it, Crimmins, this is the last time- "
Crimmins said, "Okay, you win."
He shrugged. The lipless mouth curved upward "Oh well," he said.
He lunged for the fishing line. Milo shot him in the smile.
41.
THE EXPLORER SHOWED up on a Hollywood Division want list. Stolen from a strip mall at Western and Sunset two months before. In the rear storage area were five sets of license plates, three phony registrations, two videocams, a dozen cassettes, candy wrappers, soda cans. Wedged in the spare-tire case, barbiturates, Thorazine, methamphetamine.
Hedy Haupt was traced to a family in Yuma, Arizona. Father's whereabouts unknown,
Welfare Department clerk mother, one brother who worked for the Phoenix fire department. Hedy had earned a B average during her first three years at Yuma High, played a starring role on the track and basketball teams. After she "fell in with a bad crowd" during her senior year, her grades had plummeted and she'd dropped out, earned a GED, gotten a job at Burger King, run away. During the ensuing eight years, her mother had seen her twice, once for Christmas five years ago, then a one-week visit last year, during which she'd been accompanied by a boyfriend named Griff.
"Had a bad feeling about him," Mrs. Haupt told Milo. "Carried a camera around and did nothing but take our picture. Wore nothing but black, like someone died."
Milo and Mike Whitworth found the tapes while excavating the mounds of stolen goods in the garage at Orange Drive. Sixteen cassettes in black plastic cases, buried under thousands of dollars' worth of motion picture gear that Derrick Crimmins had lacked the will, or the ability, to master.
Sixteen death scenes.
The first recognizable victim was the fourth we viewed.
Richard Dada, young, handsome, talking animatedly about his career plans, unaware of what lay ahead. Cut to the next scene: Richard's head yanked back by the hair, exposed for the throat slash. The body bisected with a band saw. The dark-sleeved arms of the murderer visible, but no face. The camera was stationary, making it possible for one person to murder and film. Other tapes featured a roving lens that necessitated two killers. The log on the tape said Dada had been killed at one A.M.
Ellroy Bearty's tape featured two segments, an initial shot of the homeless man sucking a bottle near the train tracks, then, four months later, Beatty prone and unconscious on those same train tracks, followed by a long shot of an approaching express. Poor technique; the camera jumped around and the moment of impact was just a blur. Next came brother Leroy, also in two installments. Smiling drunkenly as he talked about wanting to be a blues singer. Four months later, a similar smile, cut short as a black hole snapped onto his forehead like a decal and he collapsed.
Both brothers killed the same night. Ellroy first, his death mandated by the train schedule. Leroy's turn two hours later. Midway through the stack was Claire Argent's final day on earth: like the others, she'd been unprepared. Crimmins had filmed her in front of a bare white wall. Whether it was her own living room couldn't be determined. She talked about psychology, about wanting to learn more about madness, made allusions to the project she and the cameraman would be starting soon, then said, "Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to forget you're there, right?" No answer from the cameraman.
Claire talked more about the origins of madness. About not jumping to conclusions, because even psychotics had something to tell us. Then she smoothed an eyebrow-primping for the camera-and smiled some more. Five seconds of shy smile before she was smothered by a pillow. Long shot of her motionless body. Close-up on the straight razor... Twelve other home movies, unlabeled. Seven females: five teenage girls with the haunted look of street kids, two attractive blond women in their thirties. Five males: a painfully thin goateed boy around sixteen or seventeen and four men, one Asian, one black, two Hispanic.
Folded into an empty box were two sheets of paper.
Title page: The Monster's Chosen. He Canot Be Stopped.
Second page: Cast
We worked on that for a long time.
The "fag actor" was most likely Dada, the "old-maid pro-fesor," Claire. Other designations included "the wino twins (Monster finds a perfect match)" and three headings- "pompos businessman," "coke whore," and "girl shopping"- for which no conforming tape could be found. "Greaser farm-chick" matched Suzy Galvez, "the sheriff's hotblooded wife" Marvelle Haas. The "teenage pimp" could've been the goateed boy stabbed in the chest, then dismembered. But he fit "street punk," so my guess was Christopher Soames. Never had his audition, lucky lad.
At the bottom of the page: "more?????? definitly. how many????????????"
The job of identifying the unnamed victims was assigned to a six-detective task force from LAPD and the Sheriff's Department. After two months, three of the teenage girls had been matched with runaways on various missing persons rosters; all the girls, it was believed, had been living on the streets of Hollywood. Hedy Haupt would've understood that scene. Two girls and the goateed boy remained nameless, as did the younger of the blond women, probably the "stripper," and the black man (the
"nigger stud"). "Greaser 1" and "greaser 2" turned out to be Hernando Alas and
Sabino Real, cousins from El Salvador seeking work as laborers by standing outside a paint store in Eagle Rock. Contractors seeking cheap labor cruised the store daily.
No one remembered who'd picked up Alas and Real, but family members living in the
Union District finally stepped forward to make the identification.
A Korean-American salesman named Everett Kim, bludgeoned with a baseball bat-the
"chink"-was traced to the Glendale-based skydiving club where Derrick Crimmins and
Hedy had first met. The ex-wife of another member, a dental hygienist from Burbank, turned out to be Allison Wisnowski. "The nurse."
Four months later, no new I.D.'s and only one of the bodies had been found: one of the runaway girls, a sixteen-year-old named Karen DeSantis, discovered by hikers in
Bouquet Canyon.
One additional tape was found in the Explorer, the scene barely discernible because of poor light: Hedy Haupt aka Heidi Ott, getting out of the four-wheeler, smiling uneasily. Handing the camera to someone off screen, then turning her back and cocking her hip. Moving slowly, seductively. Vamping. Smiling as she turned to look back.
Saying, "How'm I doing-sexy enough?" just before her head disappeared in a flash. No designation on the list. Perhaps Derrick Crimmins had conceived her as "coke whore," or maybe he had yet to dream up a designation.
Creating characters, killing them off.
Folded in a pocket of Crimmins's black silk shirt was a copy of the Blood Walk title page we'd found in his night-stand. On the reverse were several handwritten paragraphs in the same sharp-edged hieroglyphics used for the production notes:
The Monster: combenation of extreme evil-madness and supernatural psychic ability s to tell the future and to get into peoples heads. Locked up in the high security asylem just like Haniball Leckter he also cant be stopped like Leckter, can go through walls, beam himself around change his moleculs like a StarTrek alien. Exits at will, goes around killing at will. Various people, all types just cause he likes it, gets off on it, not crazy all the time this is just what he does, his job, his callin in life, no one will ever understand it because theyre not in the same dimension. And he canot be stopped anymore than Jason or Freddie Kruger or Michael
Meyers.
Except by The Daredeveil Avenger. Who understands him cause He grew up with him and
Hes also got the psychic powers but for good not evil. Once Hhe was a kid now He's a man, tall and muscular and silent, a real John Wayne Dirty Harry type but with a sense of humor. True Lies meets James Bond. Doesn 't waste action except whem it counts. Women love him the same as James Bond but He has no time for them because only He knows what The Monsters really capible of, so only he can stop The Blood
Walk which otherwise would be inevatable.
He wears Black but He's the Good Guy. Keep it different, creative. The actions in the end always between him and the Monster. Prime-evil battle. Only at the end can we know how it turns out. In the last scene the Monster dies the worse death of all.
Maybe burning, maybe grinded up in some kind of hamburger machine. Or acid. Either way, he's dead.
Or maybe not.
If it works there's always a sequel.
42.
"WHAT THE HELL was he planning to do with it?" said Milo. "Take a meeting with some studio scrote?"
He stuffed pretzels into his mouth. No answer expected.
We were sitting in a bar on Pacific Avenue on the south end of Venice, not far from the Marina. Jimmy Buffett on tape, sun-roughened faces and zinc noses, sports talk, the pretzels. Mostly calls for beer on tap.
It was Thursday. I'd spent the afternoon just as I had every day this week. Out in
Bellflower with Suzy Galvez, trying to break through. Milo had offered my services right after the rescue. Mr. Galvez, a landscaper with a vicious scar running from his left ear to his shoulder blade, had turned him down, growling, "We handle our own problems."
Three weeks later, I got the call from Mrs. Galvez. Meek, halting, slightly accented voice. Apologetic when she didn't need to be. Suzy was still waking up with screaming nightmares. Two days ago, she'd started wetting her bed and sucking her thumb; she hadn't done any of that since the age of six.
I drove out the next day. The house was a brown box behind freshly painted white pickets, too many flowers for the space. Mr. Galvez greeted me at the door, a scar-faced, muscled keg of steam. Shaking my hand too hard. Telling me he'd heard I knew what I was doing. Handing me a mixed bouquet, cut fresh from the garden, when I left.
Marvelle Haas was rumored to be seeing a therapist in Bakersfield. Neither she nor her husband had returned anyone's calls. The task force was still looking for bodies, contacting departments in other cities, other states, trying to figure out how many people Derrick Crimmins had murdered. Cases in Arizona, Oklahoma, and
Nevada seemed promising. Evidence on Derrick's brother's motorcycle accident was sketchy, but Cliff Crimmins's name had been added to the victim list.
Milo snarfed more pretzels. Someone shouted for a Bud. The bartender, a black-haired
Croatian with four rings in his left ear, palmed the tap. We were drinking single-malt scotch. Eighteen-year-old Macallan. When Milo asked for the bottle, the
Croatian's eyebrows lifted. He smiled as he poured.
"What the hell was it all for?" said Milo.
"That's a real question?"
"Yeah, I've used up my ration of rhetorical."
I was sorry he asked. I'd thought about little else, had answers good enough for talk shows but nothing real.
Milo put his glass down, stared at me.
"Maybe it was all for fun," I said. "Or preparation for the movie Crimmins convinced himself he'd write one day. Or he was actually going to sell the tapes."
"We still haven't found any underground market for that kind of crap."
"Okay." I sipped. "So eliminate that."
"I know," he said. "There's an appetite for every damn bit of garbage out there. I'm just saying nothing's turned up linking Crimmins to any snuff-film business deals, and we've looked big-time. No cash hoard, not a single bank account, no meetings with any shifty types in long coats, no ads in weirdo magazines. And the computer
Crimmins had in the house wasn't hooked up to the Internet. Nothing but basic software, no files. Our guy says he probably never used it."
"Technologically impaired," I said. "No sweat. Video's as good as film."
"All I'm saying is it doesn't look like he was after the money. Stole all that gear but never tried to sell it. We figure he was probably living off dope sales."
"And Heidi's salary," I said. "Till she became superfluous. No bank accounts means the two of them spent everything as it came in. They weren't living like royalty and they avoided paying rent, so a good deal of it probably went up her nose."
"His, too. Coroner found some coke in his system. A little meth, too. And something called loratadine."
"Antihistamine," I said. "Doesn't make you drowsy. Maybe Crimmins was allergic to the desert, needed to keep his energy level up for the big shoot."
Milo refilled his glass. "Blood Walk."
"Whatever his specific motivation," I said, "and he may have had several, in his head it was a major production. It was the process he loved. He got hooked on playing God sixteen years ago."
