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Authors: Dan Fante

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BOOK: Point Doom
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The voice that answered sounded authoritative and metallic. A female voice. “Whaz your emergency?” it demanded.

“I’ve found a body,” I said. “A tortured body. Cut up too.”

“You’re saying you have found a dead person?”

“Yeah, a tortured dead person. My friend is dead. Very dead. You need to send your people over here.”

“Whaz the location, sir?”

The question stopped me. I couldn’t remember the address. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean I know I’m in Santa Monica. I’m at my friend’s apartment on Arizona Avenue.”

The voice was apparently writing the information down. “I needs an address. In full.”

“Wait, okay,” I said, forcing my still plastic-gloved hand into my shirt pocket, clawing to locate the slip of paper with Woody’s address. “Hold on.”

After pulling the crumpled paper open, I recited what I read. “Twelve-eleven Arizona Avenue. Apartment 201.”

The aloof voice continued. “Okay, I’ve got that. Izzat where you’re at now? You at that location now?”

“You mean, as opposed to Lego-Land!? Yeah, for chrissakes, I’m at the apartment.”

“Okay, whaz the name of the deceased person?”

“O’Rourke. Woody O’Rourke. I’m pretty sure his legal name is Robert. Robert O’Rourke.”

“Whaz your name?”

“Humpty Dumpty! You don’t need my fucking name. Currently, I’m alive!”

“Stay on this line, sir. Don’t be hangin’ up. I’ll contak a unit. We’ll get you some officers there ASAP.”

But I didn’t stay on the line. I’d suddenly had a thought, an
oh shit!
thought. It made me click off my cell phone. I wasn’t going to be talking to the bulls with my Charter Arms .44 tucked into the rear of my pants or, for that matter, with that puke sample and the sock in my pocket. I’d had my recent fill of dealing with the police after Mom’s car fire. I decided to take my gun and the samples down to the demo Corolla and leave them there.

People do strange things—illogical things—in numbing emotional circumstances. Even trained people. They think through brain fog and overload, with their heads up their ass. At the moment, I was no exception. Later, I’d still be upset with myself for what I did next.

Returning to the kitchen, I opened drawers until I found a stash of plastic supermarket bags, used bags that Woody was apparently recycling for his garbage.

I went back into the bedroom, wrapped more tissues around Woody’s dick, then stuffed it into a garbage bag. Then I returned to the bathroom and collected the hair dye box where I had found the plastic gloves. I didn’t want to give away that I’d walked the crime scene.

I LEFT THE
apartment door ajar and took the stairs to the front of the building.

I opened the trunk of my demo Corolla, looking for somewhere to hide the gun, Woody’s cock, the hair dye box, the puke samples, and the sock.

I located a thick paper shopping bag that I’d forgotten to take inside my new apartment. It contained a pair of tennis shoes, paper towels, and a small box of laundry detergent. As I was unrolling a handful of the towels, my cell phone began buzzing. Knowing who it was—the law—I ignored it.

I wrapped my gun and my friend’s penis and the dirty sock and tissues and the dye box and the plastic gloves in a wad of the towels, then opened the driver’s door and popped the hood of the Corolla.

After looking to make sure no one was witnessing the event, I stuffed my bundle in the tight space between the battery and the fender’s wheel well.

My cell buzzed again. I knew I’d better answer it. “Yeah?” I said.

The same 9-1-1 dispatcher’s voice again. “We been tryin’ to contak you. Are you Fiorella? James Fiorella? We waz disconnected.”

Now they had my name, after tracing my cell’s number. “What the hell’s up with you guys!” I yelled. “Where are you? My friend’s dead here in his apartment. You said you were on the way here ten minutes ago.”

“The officers’ll be there ASAP. We needs additional information—”

I clicked the off button on my cell again.

BACK IN THE
apartment, sitting on Woody’s living room couch, I lit a cigarette and tried some deep breathing as I sucked back half a dozen hits from my Marlboro Light.

This room was just as neat as the rest of the apartment. In front of me, beneath the wide, smoked-glass coffee table, was a stack of newspapers and martial-arts magazines. On the floor, too, next to the wastebasket, was Woody’s computer printer. I concluded that my friend must’ve done most of his writing here at this table, not in the bedroom.

The screenplay he had wanted me to work on with him was also there. On top. He’d e-mailed it to me but I had not opened the file.

On the table was the TV remote, a Post-it pad, and a landline telephone. Woody’s house and car key ring lay nearby. Next to the remote was a plastic container that held pencils and pens.

My friend had been a physical fitness guy and not a smoker and I could see no ashtrays anywhere, so I dumped the stuff out of the pencil jar and began using it for my ashes. My hands were shaking.

I didn’t care what I contaminated in this room. I had a logical right to contaminate anything I wanted to contaminate. Screw the blues.

I picked up the Post-it pad. On it, in Woody’s thick handwriting, was a phone number. An 877 number. I tore the top sheet off the stack and stuck it in my shirt pocket.

Taking more deep hits off my Marlboro, I took in the rest of the room, finally focusing on the TV set with the blinking green letters across the carpet in the center of a credenza.

Picking up the remote, I pressed
PLAY
. Nothing happened. I got up and crossed to the unit. There was no CD in the player, so I clicked off on the remote.

Then I scooped up Woody’s screenplay. It was neatly stacked and on the floor, unbound.

I was waiting for the blues, trying to collect my thoughts, but the cock thing was haunting me. A very dumb mistake.

With nothing to do and my brain burning through my scalp, I decided to flip to the last five pages of the script to see if I could extract whatever punch would come from what I was sure was a very bad script. I’ve always been impatient when I read anything, much like my screenwriter father.

It was a death scene that would end the film. The wife of the Mafia don was in her room at the hospital, on life support—a girl in her twenties. She had taken a bullet for her son, a six-year-old kid named Michelangelo.

As I read the pages I felt myself beginning to tear up. The scene was run of the mill but the dialogue was good, very good, in fact, especially for a Hollywood screenplay.

FINALLY, OVER HALF
an hour since my first call, I began hearing sirens outside. They were distant but becoming louder.

A couple of minutes later I was standing near the window when two patrol cars pulled up in front of the building.

Back at the couch, I sat down and I lit another cigarette.

The sirens from outside went silent and I began to hear voices and then radio transmissions—someone yelling something to someone else.

I picked up Woody’s keys and shoved them into my pants pocket. Screw the blues.

NOW I COULD
hear them coming up the cement stairs, taking them two at a time. They burst through the unlocked front door; both had their hands on their weapons that were still holstered.

The smaller one, a black guy, whose silver nameplate had “Ormond” printed on it, barked first. “Was it you that called 9-1-1?”

“Right, it was me,” I said.

“Raise your hands, get up, and step backwards toward the center of the room,” Ormond ordered.

I did what I was told.

“Do you have any weapons concealed on you?”

“No, I don’t,” I said, still moving backwards.

“Okay, now down on your knees—raise your arms over your head!”

I went along with Ormond’s orders.

Then his partner, whose nametag read “Muskie,” patted me down.

“You reported finding a body. Was that you?”

“Right. In the other room.” I pointed. “That way.”

Muskie turned to Ormond, who looked very young, probably twenty-one or twenty-two. “I’ll check it out,” he said.

Muskie left the room and then Ormond checked my wallet. After that, I was allowed to stand up again.

“How long have you been here?” Ormond wanted to know.

“I’ve been waiting for you representatives of law enforcement for over half an hour. Whoever did this murder could have mowed down half the old ladies in Santa Monica in the time it took you to get here. Nice work, guys.”

Muskie had just reentered the room. “You shut the fuck up!” he barked.

“Look, my friend’s dead in there and I didn’t kill anyone. I’m just a little upset here.”

“Shut the fuck up!”

“How about getting me a glass of water?”

“Shut the fuck up!”

HALF AN HOUR
later I was still where I’d started, on the couch, smoking. Muskie and Ormond, having secured the scene and quizzed me with the standard stuff, were writing up field reports in their fat, wide notebooks.

Then the detectives arrived with what I assumed to be the ID techs, print guys, and a photographer—almost all at the same time.

The first detective I talked to was Archer. He announced his name when he saw me and came through the door. “I’m Detective Archer. What’s your name?”

I decided not to answer. Screw being polite to these guys.

Archer stood there in his tan polyester sports jacket and cheap brown tie, and when I didn’t answer, he began quizzing Muskie in a low voice.

Archer was tall and built like a tight end, with a skinhead haircut and a lean, mean, no-nonsense attitude. He was probably forty-five. I made him as an ex-Navy Seal or the equivalent. After talking to Muskie he glanced back at me, then went into the bedroom with the tech guys.

The second detective, who someone called Taboo, then came through the door. He was short—my height—and thick. He wore a dark suit that was probably Armani or something else upscale. His tie was red. He looked way more at ease than high-test, Special Forces Archer.

He walked over to me on the couch and shook my hand. “Hi, my name’s Afrika,” he said.

I decided I’d talk to Afrika. “JD,” I said.

“Sit tight here, JD. We’ll go over some things together if that’s okay with you. I know this is a bad time.”

“No problem,” I said.

He then joined Archer in the bedroom.

While I was sitting on the couch doing nothing and smoking, it came to me that I recognized the second detective. We were about the same age. Maybe we’d been neighbors in Malibu a hundred years ago, although Afrika was black, and in those days blacks were a scarce commodity in California coastal towns where movie stars lived.

ANOTHER HALF HOUR
passed. Finally Afrika appeared again and pulled a chair up on the other side of the coffee table, opening his notebook. He frowned, then pointed down the hall. “Pretty sick stuff in there,” he said.

“Woody was an AA pal,” I said. “A good friend and a damn decent guy. Whoever did him was a sick fuck and deserves all the payback they get.”

Afrika rolled his eyes. Black, humorless eyes that spoiled his friendly, nice detective act. “That’s our end, sir. You can be sure of that. . . . So, do you remember me?” he asked.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t. You looked familiar when you walked in but I can’t place you.”

“We went to the same summer school in the tenth grade. We were both in a science course. It was a make-up class for you.”

“St. Monica’s? You went to St. Monica’s? I don’t remember you.”

“I was just there for that summer. You and I sat in rows next to each other, third from the back. The teacher was named Jack Menotti. You were on the baseball team—making up the F you got, so you wouldn’t get kicked off the squad.”

“Geez, good memory,” I said.

“I skipped tenth grade that year. I was a pretty quiet kid in those days, but to get in the XL class, I needed the science credit. You don’t remember me because we almost never talked to each other. But I let you copy my answers on all the tests.”

“So you’re some sort of a whiz-kid detective,” I said.

“Nah,” Afrika said. “I’ve got this kind-of memory skill—like playing the piano by ear or something. A doctor once told my mom it’s a kind of autism. I had tutors and stuff and went to special schools. I guess you might say having a good memory is a blessing and a curse. It got me through college and law school.”

“Hey, good for you,” I said, not liking the chitchat or wanting to review old times anymore. “In my experience a good memory can be a shit deal.”

Afrika removed two mini BabyRuth candy bars from his jacket, peeled the paper back on each, then popped them both into his mouth. “Yeah,” he said, chewing. “I see a thing once and, you know, usually, that’s it.”

“I guess torture murders don’t have much effect on your candy bar consumption.”

“Hey, sorry,” he said, “I skipped lunch. By the way, call me Taboo. That’s how my co-workers refer to me.”

“Look, Afrika, I’m just a little freaked here, okay? I could use a drink—several drinks—not a fucking candy bar.”

Afrika ignored what I’d said. His black eyes were boring into my head. “So, let’s get down to business, if that’s okay. Officer Ormond gave me the time line. He says that you arrived twenty minutes before you called 9-1-1. What took you so long to make that call?”

“I was busy being upset,” I said. “Then I watched my favorite game show, took a Jacuzzi, and waited for
Oprah
to come on. Gimme a fuckin’ break here, okay?”

AN HOUR LATER
I was about to be released. The things I’d left out in my recital of the facts were the parts about me removing the samples from the closet and the Post-it with the 877 number, Woody’s keys, the plastic gloves, and his dead, gray dick.

I had already made up my mind that I was going to square the books with whoever tortured my friend. Maybe I wasn’t the mental equivalent of Taboo Afrika, my new good-buddy ex-classmate, but I’d been here before and I knew my way around. I was a guy who had been taught ways to get answers—something they didn’t teach in Taboo’s postgraduate criminology course or at detective school or law school. I, too, had a set of skills. Those skills had saved my life, then damaged it beyond repair. They had ruined a marriage and put me on suicide watch. In the time I had been away from New York City, I had hoped to have grown past those skills. But the truth is the truth: I am a man who will not quit or stop. I am a man who has pointed guns at other people’s heads, then watched them explode. I am a man who knows how, no matter what, to get even.

BOOK: Point Doom
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