Scavenger Hunt (5 page)

Walsh looked away. “Our hero never hears from her. She doesn’t call him, he doesn’t call her. What’s he going to say? ‘Sorry, I missed you so bad I fucked a stranger, than beat her skull in because she wasn’t you.’ No, our hero keeps quiet. Talking isn’t going to help, it’s only going to drag her into the mess, and our hero would do anything to avoid hurting her.” He cleared his throat. “Did I mention that he loves her?”

Jimmy watched him.

“The prison sequences go fast, because the audience has already seen all the prison movies they want to see. Now we replay that opening scene, where about a month before he’s due to hit the street, our hero gets a letter—a letter from
her.
” Walsh closed his eyes for a moment, savoring the memory. “All that time without any contact . . .” His voice trailed off, and it took him a while to find it. “He lies on his bunk for an hour, staring at the envelope, enjoying the curves and valleys of her handwriting. The things that run through his head. He actually thinks she’s going to say she has divorced her husband, that she’ll be waiting outside the gate, her hair smelling like fresh-cut flowers.

“That’s not what the letter says, though. I bet you figured that out. The wife wrote to tell him that she just found out that her husband knew about them. He had known almost from the beginning. He had known and never let on, never said a word to her. He kept quiet for the whole seven years our hero was inside. When our hero’s name came up in conversation at a party, the husband never reacted. He kept the secret.”

“Just like our hero.”

Walsh glared at Jimmy. “Our hero kept quiet to protect
her.
Maybe the husband kept quiet to protect
himself.
”

Jimmy turned that one over for a while. “You think he set you up?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember killing Heather, but there was plenty of evidence. All I’m saying is that if the husband knew about the affair, maybe he did something about it. I know I would.”

Jimmy had heard crazier stories. Once or twice anyway. “How did the wife find out?”

Walsh looked at him, the sunglasses on his forehead like a second pair of dead eyes. “She . . . heard us.”

“What does that mean?”

“She
heard
us. You deaf?” Walsh was angry again, shifting emotional gears more often than a Grand Prix racer. “She takes pills sometimes to help her sleep, but a few months ago she woke up, and her husband wasn’t beside her, which is no big deal, because he often works all night. So she gets up to get some water, and she hears . . . voices downstairs, and she’s curious. She goes down and listens at the door where he works, and the voices are fainter now, so faint that if it wasn’t
her
voice coming from inside the room, she wouldn’t have recognized it. There’s my voice too and now she’s got her ear pressed against the door, listening. The two of us are inside that room, the sound of us making love, so clear that she actually remembers the afternoon that we said those things. I’m a talker, Jimmy, I got things to say when we’re going at it, and so does she. Her husband has a tape of that afternoon—he probably has a tape of all the
other
afternoons, all the other evenings and mornings. Tell me that’s not sick. This was the first time she had caught him listening to the tapes. Maybe it’s a special occasion, or maybe the fact that I’m going to get out soon has made him want to take another listen, to remind himself what I did to him. That’s the first two acts, Jimmy. What do you think so far?”

“Good pitch, but it’s a big stretch from knowing your wife is fooling around to orchestrating a homicide. That’s why there are more divorce lawyers than hitmen.”

“This guy knew for months that his wife was cheating on him, and he never said a thing,” said Walsh. “The man who could pull that off, kissing her on her way to an exercise class, knowing she’s really going to see me, but letting her go, sleeping beside her night after night, and never giving it away—a man who could do that, he could do
anything.
”

“What does the wife think? Is she still living with him? If she is, that has to tell you something.”

“It tells me she doesn’t know what to think. She still loves me, that’s all she knows for sure. Those seven years that I spent thinking of her, she was thinking about me too.”

“What’s her name?”

“Not yet.” Walsh patted the manuscript. “I got it all down here: names, places, dates. I just don’t have the third act finished yet, the part where the hero nails the husband and wins the girl back.” He thumped the table, then tried to stand, but his legs were rubbery. “I’m going to need proof,” he puffed. “
Then
you’ll see it. I’ll give you an exclusive.”

“You can’t even find your balance. How are you going to find out what really happened at the beach house all that time ago?”

Walsh nudged the bulging file folder beside the table with his big toe. “My legal team hired a private detective to investigate Heather Grimm. The plea bargain short-circuited things, but I got their raw notes here. Some interesting possibilities too.” He glanced out the window, shivering now, hearing voices in the wind, screams in the trees. “The husband’s not done with me.”

“You’re overselling it, Walsh.”

Walsh’s smile caved in, his confidence as fake as the rest of him. “I made phone calls. The studios don’t know what the screenplay is about, but I told them it was based on a true story. The husband—he has to have heard what I’m working on. I need you to tell my story, Jimmy. He wouldn’t have the balls to do anything to me then.”

Jimmy shook his head.

“This scavenger hunt of yours—I played that game when I was a kid. Knocking on doors, asking for treasure and trash, and it’s all the same. Well, open your eyes, tough guy, you stumbled on to something big here.” Walsh clawed at Jimmy’s arm. “Put me on the cover of SLAP, play it up big.”

Jimmy shook him off. “I’ve been hustled by the best, Walsh, and this ancient mariner routine of yours is stale. Hire a press agent if you want publicity.” He saw Walsh shudder, and Jimmy eased up on him. “Look, finish the script, and I’ll read it.”

“I don’t have time. All those years in the joint, I can tell when shit’s coming down. You need to write about me
now.
”

Jimmy’s phone beeped. He listened to Rollo shouting that they had won, that they were going to be famous,
all
of them. He heard the twins crowding around the phone, laughing, and the sound of glasses clinking.

“You’re killing me.” Walsh stared out the window, his face slack. “You’re killing me, and you don’t even know it.”

Chapter 4

Sugar grabbed the phone on the second ring and dropped the receiver, still watching the seagulls floating overhead, looking for lunch.

“It’s me.”

“Been a long time,” murmured Sugar, glancing around. Nothing and no one who didn’t belong there. He adjusted his Dodgers cap, pulled it low over his eyes. “You’re not calling me from home, are you? Not from the house or the office, remember?”

“I remember.”

Sugar went back to watching the seagulls, squinting into the sunlight as the largest one swooped low, its beak sharp and cruel against the sky. Most folks liked birds, thought they were cute, and Sugar had to admit they did look graceful on the wing. But they were predators, every one of them, built to rip and tear, to gulp down life and not think twice about it. People who fed seagulls—it was an insult to Mother Nature.

“Sugar?”

“I’m here.” Sugar smiled as the big gray gull came up with a fish, flapping across the water, the scales of the fish rainbowing in the sunlight as it wriggled in the gull’s beak.

“I—I was expecting more surprise on your part.”

“He’s out. Sooner or later you’re going to call. Why should I be surprised when you finally do?”

“What are we going to do about him?”

Sugar turned away from the seagulls, staring now at the three girls lying face-down on fluffy white beach towels, munching at small bags of French fries. They had their tops off. He didn’t know what the big thing about tan lines was; they were sexy, if you asked him, innocent somehow. The thong bikinis that the girls were wearing—Sugar still hadn’t decided about that.

“Sugar?”

Sugar sat in an aluminum chaise longue, wearing baggy blue swim trunks, his bulky torso slathered in oil. The girl in the polka-dot bikini was rolling over. Sugar watched her try to cover her breasts with an arm as she reached for her top. She wasn’t completely successful, and he saw a flash of white skin, soft white skin that had never felt the sun. Still, he appreciated her efforts to maintain a semblance of modesty—so many of the young ones were whores. Pardon his language, but there was just no other word for it.

“We have to do
something.
”

“I don’t have to do anything.” Sugar moved the phone to his other ear. “I see a sleeping dog, I let him lie there.”

“I don’t think that’s wise.”

“You don’t, huh?” One of the gulls floated over the three girls and their French fries, squawking—if they weren’t careful, they were going to have an unwanted visitor. Girls should know better, particularly the pretty ones. They were just asking for trouble. Sugar reached into the cooler beside his chaise longue, pulled out a bottle of organic apple juice, and took a long drink. He smacked his lips into the receiver. “Well, you know your business, I know mine.”

“I want you to take a more proactive approach.”

One of the other girls shifted on her beach towel, and Sugar watched the taut rise of her hip, the sweetness of her shadow. If he had had his binoculars, he could have counted the sweat beads on her inner thighs. He pinched his own belly, got a handful of fat, then smoothed his warm oiled skin. Not bad. “Proactive—that’s a word you don’t hear in conversation very often, and every time you do, it’s an asswipe who’s using it.”

Chapter 5

“God damn it, Rollo, you should have told me,” said Jimmy.

“B.K. is cool,” said Rollo. “Relax, man. Get yourself a colonic.”

Jimmy glared at him, then went back to watching the sun-baked road, heat shimmering off the blacktop. He was driving this time, not trusting Rollo’s old VW van to make the steep grade up to Walsh’s trailer, the black Saab whipping around the curves spewing gravel as Jimmy blinked back sweat. Walsh was going to go nuts when someone he didn’t know showed up. Jimmy just hoped they got there before Rollo’s new buddy.

The afternoon was hot and dry and overcast, the twelfth straight day of a thermal inversion. A shroud of pollution hovered over the L.A. basin, getting progressively thicker and more carcinogenic. Jimmy’s throat was raw, and he had a headache that all the aspirin in the world didn’t help. He wasn’t alone. The violent-crime index had gone up seventeen percent since the smog alert had been declared, and the continuing power crisis made the use of air-conditioners problematic. Yesterday two women driving nearly identical minivans had gotten into an argument over a parking space outside a grocery store, an argument that ended with one woman beating in the other’s windshield with a metal baseball bat. The bat was handy, since she was taking her daughter’s T-ball team to practice. As the Channel Five news anchor intoned smugly last night, “Southern Californians now have to choose between life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.” Jimmy had wanted to shoot the set.

It had been a month since the scavenger hunt. Rollo and the twins’ triumphant arrival at the party bearing Walsh’s directing Oscar had been the highlight of the evening. Rollo had called Jimmy, giddy, said Napitano was feeding the twins beluga caviar from his open mouth like a mother bird with her chicks. Jimmy had thanked him for the charming image. Walsh had clutched Jimmy’s arm when Rollo’s van pulled up an hour later, still pleading for Jimmy to tell his story, finally surrendering, promising to have the script finished in a month. “
Then
maybe you’ll believe me.”

Jimmy didn’t argue; he left Walsh to stew in that broken-backed trailer, hearing him pounding away on the swapmeet typewriter, just beating away on it. Jimmy didn’t feel sorry for him, not exactly; but Jimmy wished he hadn’t hit him.

Walsh had stuck his head out the window as Jimmy and Rollo got into the van. “Come back in a month, and I’ll barbecue some steaks. You bring the steaks—New York cut, two inches thick minimum— and a bag of mesquite charcoal and a few cases of cold Heineken. A couple of Marie Callender Dutch apple pies would be nice too, and a gallon of French vanilla. Don’t forget the charcoal lighter.
I’ll
supply the match,” Walsh said, dissolving into drunken cackles, banging his head on the window.

“I don’t know why you’re complaining about B.K. coming to the barbecue,” said Rollo, waving an unlabeled DVD in Jimmy’s face. “Mr. Walsh hasn’t seen this in seven years. You think he’s going to be
upset
when I hand it to him?”

Jimmy adjusted the air vents, the hot wind blowing across him. He hadn’t said anything to Rollo about what Walsh had told him in the trailer; he had promised Walsh to keep quiet about the good wife and the letter she had written to him in prison. “Silence is golden, tough guy—and
safe.
I can trust you, can’t I?” Jimmy had broken at least nine of the Ten Commandments, but he kept his word. He accelerated, sending Rollo’s unopened cardboard boxes sliding across the backseat—a twenty-seven-inch JVC monitor and a Sony DVD player. No receipt, of course.

“You should be proud of me,” said Rollo, not letting it go. “B.K. is a film archivist at Trans-World Entertainment, a fucking
gnome,
man. He’s not interested in hardware or Italian suits or any of the usual beads and mirrors I trade in. Just pulling Walsh’s rough cut of
Hammerlock
from the vaults was a risk for him—the dude could go to jail for making me this copy. The only way he was willing to do it was if I introduced him to the man himself.” He pushed back his floppy hair. “Besides, I had B.K bring the pie and ice cream.”

Jimmy accelerated.

Rollo tightened his seatbelt as the Saab went into a skid, veering toward the sheer drop-off. He fired up a joint, took a couple hits, and started to pass it over. Then the car hit a deep pothole, and he thought better of it. “Me and Mr. Walsh—I think we connected in just the little time we spent together. I’m a filmmaker too. You see the look he gave me when I came back from the party with my camera? He knew. I got about five minutes of great footage of him and the trailer before you dragged me away. I could tell he appreciated my camera work too. No tripod, no steady cam, the real thing, guerrilla tactics, just like he used on
Firebug.
I’m hoping maybe he and I could collaborate on a project.” He nudged the grocery bag between his knees. “That’s why I brought something more than sirloin to the barbecue.”

“You brought some of your movies too?”

“Just six of them,” said Rollo. “Hey, don’t give me that look. We got enough beer here for an all-night festival of Rollo’s greatest hits.”

Jimmy smiled. For all he knew, Rollo would be up on stage accepting an Oscar someday, squinting into the spotlight as he thanked the little people. In L.A. anything was possible. Even Walsh’s innocence.

After the scavenger hunt Jimmy had run a Nexus search on Walsh’s arrest and trial, hoping to find something that would either bolster or deflate the idea of a setup. The legal documents alone ran to more than four hundred single-spaced pages; Jimmy had been too busy to do more than read the highlights. There was solid forensic evidence against Walsh: His skin was under Heather Grimm’s nails, his semen was in her vagina, and her blood was spattered on his purple silk pajama bottoms. No wonder Walsh had pled guilty even though he had no memory of committing the crime. The silk pajamas alone would have been enough to get a conviction in the hands of the right prosecutor. What was missing from the reports was an in-depth portrait of Heather Grimm, something over and beyond “an innocent girl, with a talent for trigonometry and Spanish club bake sales,” in the memorable words of some clown from the
Times.
Nothing in her bio suggested she had the icy calculation needed to take part in setting up Walsh.

That’s what it came down to. If Walsh had been framed, Heather Grimm had to have been in on it, which meant that the husband would have originally planned on Walsh getting hit with a statutory rape charge. That would have been enough to stop production of
Hammerlock
and stop Walsh’s career. It wouldn’t do much for the great love affair either. So what had happened? Either Walsh had really killed her, or the husband’s plan had escalated. Jimmy intended to ask Walsh exactly what had happened once he invited Heather Grimm into the beach house, what she had said, how she had behaved, her tone of voice, her familiarity with drugs, and the eagerness with which she took part.

“I brought Mr. Walsh a copy of the new SLAP too,” Rollo said proudly. “That scavenger hunt pictorial is already paying off. Next week I’m being interviewed on this public access channel, and the Seven-Eleven where I get breakfast put our page up next to the cash register.”

“Oh, joy.”

“I was a little surprised they used the HOLLYWOOD sign Polaroid,” bubbled Rollo. “Full frontal nudity is cool with me, but I didn’t think SLAP did that. I bet now Jane wishes she had come along.” He saw Jimmy’s expression. “Maybe not.”

The Saab crested the hill, and Jimmy saw a red Ford Escort parked beside the trailer.

“That’s B.K.’s car,” said Rollo. “Party time!”

Jimmy pulled in beside the Escort, turned off the engine, and stepped out into the racket of crickets sawing away, a mating song more desperate than melodic. He lugged the three cases of beer toward the trailer, while Rollo followed behind, carrying the steaks and charcoal. Jimmy stopped so suddenly that Rollo bumped him.

“Hey, watch it,” said Rollo.

Jimmy nodded at apple pies strewn on the ground, a half-gallon of vanilla ice cream melting beside them. He could hear the sound of someone sobbing nearby.

“M-maybe we should come back later,” said Rollo.

Jimmy followed the sound of crying and found a balding, middle-aged man slumped against a stunted lemon tree, holding his head in his hands. He was overdressed in chocolate-brown corduroy pants and a button-down shirt, his thinning hair limp and moist around the crown of his head. Jimmy thought at first that the poor guy had had a sunstroke.

“B.K., dude, what’s wrong?” said Rollo.

B.K. covered his face with his hands.

Jimmy wasn’t interested in B.K. anymore—his attention was drawn now to the koi pond. A gigantic beach ball floated in the water, a bloated two-tone beach ball, red on one side, blue on the other. As Jimmy approached, a cloud of blackflies lifted up from the pond, drifting overhead like a cartoon thought-balloon of dark intentions, and then the breeze shifted, blowing the stink toward him, and Jimmy covered his mouth and nose, his eyes burning. It was Walsh—or what was left of him.

“Fuck,” said Rollo, right behind Jimmy now.

Walsh floated face-down in the dirty water, unrecognizable, hands and feet chewed away. He wore jeans and no shirt, just like the night they had first met, his swollen torso lobster red from the sun, blistered, the flesh of his back split open. The devil tattoo on his shoulder was so stretched and distended, it looked like a map of terra incognita. Fat foot-long koi swam lazily around the body as the blackflies settled back down.

Jimmy stared at the body, feeling light-headed, his skin clammy in the heat, the crickets sawing away, the rhythm broken by B.K.’s sobs. “Did you tell anyone else where Walsh was staying?” he asked Rollo.

“What does that mean?”

“Did you?”

“No, man—I only gave B.K. directions this morning.” Rollo was breathing heavily, but the smell didn’t seem to bother him. “Mr. Walsh, I was keeping him for myself. To be honest, I was half sorry I told
you.
”

Jimmy sidled toward the body, swatting at the bugs, until he reached the rock border of the koi pond. He had been in apartments that smelled worse—crackheads who bought a pound of raw hamburger, left it on the counter while they fired up a rock, and a month later it was still there. The fish had long since finished with the soft parts—Walsh’s face was eaten away to the ears, and the koi were grazing now on his fingers and toes, the tips of the finger bones stark white in the murky water. There was no obvious wound to the head or torso, no gunshot at least, but decomposition could have hidden almost anything. He could see the outline of the linoleum knife in Walsh’s back pocket, so whatever had happened to him had come as a surprise.

Rollo tossed a pebble at a shattered bottle of brandy at the edge of the pond, sending ripples across the water. Broken glass glittered in the sunlight. “It’s like I always told you, Jimmy, alcohol
kills.
” He fired up the remains of the joint he had started in the car, inhaled, then held it out. “Take a hit, Jimmy. Kills the stink.”

Jimmy turned, walking quickly now.

“Where you going?” called Rollo.

The trailer was unlocked. Jimmy stepped inside, careful not to touch anything. The lights were all on, so Walsh had probably died at night. The sink was piled high with empty cans and crusted plates fuzzy with mold—after the koi pond the stale beer smell was like fresh-cut flowers. The main room looked pretty much the way it had the last time Jimmy had been there, but it was Walsh’s study that Jimmy was interested in. He pushed aside the curtain and stayed there, surveying the small room. The bed was made, the sheets pulled tight and pillow fluffed. The two Academy Awards were back on the bookcase, and the typewriter was still on the table. But the script was gone, as was the accordion-style file folder with the investigator’s raw notes. There was no balled-up paper in the wastebasket.

Jimmy barged into the room, looking for something amiss: a book askew, a piece of the fake wallboard bowed out, a ceiling panel that didn’t quite fit—anything to indicate where Walsh might have stashed his precious script, his notes, his files. He rested a hand on Walsh’s chair, still seeing the fear in the man’s eyes as he begged for help that night, hearing his voice crack as he glanced out the window. Jimmy knocked over the chair and picked it back up, clumsy now. He bent down and checked under the mattress, felt the mattress itself, then moved into the tiny bathroom, looking behind the toilet and inside the tank. He wasn’t really expecting to find the screenplay. It was a lousy thing to wish that a man had gotten drunk and drowned in a glorified lily pond, but that was what Jimmy had been hoping for: an accident.

B.K. was wiping his tongue when Jimmy walked out of the trailer. He had thrown up all over his corduroy pants. Rollo stood in front of the koi pond, staring down at Walsh, right where Jimmy had left him. He looked up as Jimmy approached.

“Give me the phone number for the Monelli twins,” said Jimmy.

“They didn’t tell anybody about Mr. Walsh. He said to tell Napitano that we got the Oscar from an anonymous collector, and that’s what we did.”

“You should give it to me anyway.”

Rollo turned back to the body. “Mr. Walsh—I think he might have gotten a kick out of us finding him like this. You know, like
Sunset
Boulevard.
”

Tires crunched on the gravel road, and Jimmy turned, his heart pounding way too loudly. It was a police car, Anaheim PD, and another, unmarked unit. The full treatment.

Rollo gobbled down the last of the joint.

B.K. waved feebly to the cops. He would have called 911 sometime after seeing the body and before throwing up. Guys like B.K. always called the cops when bad things happened. That’s what you were supposed to do.

Jimmy had other ideas. He had no respect for rules or authority, no regard for holographic ID badges, formal invitations, or signing in at the front desk. He cheated on his taxes, trespassed when he felt like it, and broke the speed limit every time he got behind the wheel. But he never stiffed a waitress and never told a woman he loved her if he didn’t—his internal compass
always
pointed to true north. If you had to think about a moral choice, wondering what you should do, then it was best to roll over and play dead, leave it to the cops or just let the bad guys inherit the earth.