SK01 - Waist Deep (26 page)

47

I sat at
Roger
Jackson
’s dining room table and drummed my fingers.
My options were running out.
I could leave now and clear out of the second burglary I’d committed in as many days.
Or I could wait for
Roger
Jackson
to find his way home and get what I needed from him.

With a sigh, I decided to wait.
Like I told Adam, i
n for a penny, in for a pound.

I stood up to wander around
Jackson
’s house some more, taking time to open his fridge.
A whole row of Heineken’s were in the door, but I dismissed them and grabbed a Coke instead.

Maybe I wasn’t so pathetic, after all.

The fizzy liquid splashed down my throat.
I was surprised at how thirsty I was.
I drank half the can in one long swig.
Then I wandered aimlessly through the rooms, listening and waiting.

As I walked and drank from the Coke can, I thought about Gary LeMond and Yvette.
I heard his lesson on “society’s bullshit” again in my head and wondered if it were true what he said about taboos.
I knew there was at least a kernel of truth to it.
Most societies slowly became more and more liberal as they went along, so taboos weakened and fell.
Take interracial marriages, for instance.
Or gays.
Just a hundred years ago in America, both were certainly spurned, and sometimes worse.
How many people were beaten up or even killed simply because of who they loved?

I
smiled slightly
.
I was starting to sound a lot like
Marie
Byrnes.

I rifled through
Jackson
’s medicine cabinet, found some Tylenol and took three, washing them down with the last of my Coke.
I tossed the can into the bathroom trash.

LeMond had used oral sex as his example.
I didn’t know if he had his history right on that one or not.
I grew up in the 80s and there was nothing taboo about a blowjob then.
But he might’ve had a point.
I’d thought the same thing about pornography.
While I was growing up, there were books and movies available, but you had to go through a little work to get them.
At the grocery store, you had to ask the person at the
check stand
to hand you a Playboy or a Penthouse.
If you wanted anything harder, you had mail order it in a plain brown paper wrapper or head down into the wrong part of town to the dirty book store.
It took a little deliberate effort.
Now, with the advent of the computer and the Internet, all the porn a person could want and a lot that they didn’t was two mouse clicks away.

I’d never wondered what kind of an effect that had on our society before, but now I was face to face with it.
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that it wasn’t a very positive effect.
Not if girls Kris’s age in cities like River City could get involved.

A wave of guilt passed over me as I thought of Yvette’s body in LeMond’s hot tub.
What if I had seen a picture of Kris without knowing she was
sixteen
and Matt Sinderling’s daughter?
What if it had been a nude picture?
Would I look away?
I didn’t think so.
I’d
found it difficult
to look away from Yvette when I was at LeMond’s.

She was seventeen.
Just a few months from eighteen, is what LeMond had said.
An arbitrary date, a line in the sand that somehow made it different for him to be sleeping with her.
At least as far as society was concerned.

Of course, my guess was that she was one of his students, too, and there was a different set of rules
and laws
there.

Still, what was the difference between Yvette now and Yvette in May?

I shook my head.
It was wrong.
Anyone with sense knew it and all the fancy, liberal intelligentsia arguments couldn’t change that.
It wasn’t society’s bullshit.
It was LeMond’s bullshit.

Where was Kris?
I kept coming back to that as I paced through
Roger
Jackson
’s square, neat house.
Where was she and, more importantly,
how
was she?
What had she gotten herself into?

I went back downstairs and into
Roger
Jackson
’s office.
I didn’t know much about computers, but I guessed that his computer was on because he was running a server.
And that the box of electronics underneath the printer is what ran that server.
Or was the server.
However it worked.
Either way, the copies of
Videomaker
magazine on the shelf and the
editing
software in his desk drawer told me that
Jackson
wasn’t just running a website.
He was in on the movies, too.

I went back upstairs and replayed the phone message again.
The voice didn’t sound like it could belong to Kris.
Her words were clear, though, and so was the intent.
She was coming over for some filming and it sounded like the agenda was girl-on-girl.
Perfect for “Barely Legal Beaver.”

The clock on the living room wall read 1:30.
I’d been inside
Roger
Jackson
’s house for over two hours and what had I really done but walk around his little square, neat floor plan like I was Bill the
security
guy protecting the property of the mighty filmmaker,
Roger
Jackson
?

I stopped walking.

Floor plan.

A
square
floor plan.

Goddamn, I was so dense.

I turned tail and headed back downstairs.

4
8

The laundry room was small.
Too small.
The entire section of the basement that should have been beneath the living room seemed to be missing.
I had supposed at first that it was only a half-basement, but
now
I had a hunch I’d been wrong.

The closet in the laundry room had a sliding door.
I opened it.
A few bottles of laundry detergent, fabric softener and dryer sheets were on the high shelf.
A white wall was below the shelf.

I tapped on the wall, expecting to feel concrete.

The hollow sound of wood echoed back at me.

I traced my fingers along the rear corner of the closet and found a finger-hold and pulled.
The wall slid aside as easily as the closet door.

I slipped through the open doorway and into another world.

49

The door opened into a small room, walled with paneling.
A red light bulb burned on a wide flat desk near the door.
Another doorway was on the left, a few feet away.
I fumbled for a light switch and found one.

Light flooded the room and I saw numerous photos strewn across the desk.
Blank DVDs were stacked up next to the photos, along with unopened mini-cassette tapes.

A poster was on the wall, featuring a leggy brunette with her breasts barely contained in a medieval serving wench costume.
The title of the movie was “One Night at the Inn” and the caption read, “See ADRIANA APPLE serve it up for all the customers.”
The poster looked seedy, but professional.
I wasn’t familiar with the name or the face of Adrianna Apple, but there was a list of credits near the bottom.
I didn’t recognize any of those names, either, but I figured it to be a legit movie.
Maybe it was
Jackson
’s favorite.
Or his inspiration.

I left the small office area and stepped into the larger room.
A huge mattress dominated one third of the room, though it sat low to the ground.
I’d seen that hundreds of time
s
on patrol—just a box spring and a mattress on the floor.
Sometimes only the mattress.
But this one was adorned with silky white pillows and a cream colored comforter.
It was made, of course.
Very neat and tidy, although the pungent smell of someone else’s sex hung faintly in the air.

About two feet from the foot of the bed was a camera on a tripod.
The lens cap was on.
Off to the side were different lights and microphones and some of those umbrella-
shaped reflectors t
hat they use in the movies to affect a certain lighting for a scene.
Behind the camera, on the wall, was a shelf full of sex toys.

Roger
Jackson
had his own little film studio.

He must shoot the scenes here on his little sound stage, edit them on his computer with that digital software and then upload to his website.
Simple and quiet.
I wondered how much he made at it.
It didn’t look like he was making a killing.
His stuff upstairs was nice, but not extravagant.

There was no sign of drug pipes, needles or ash trays anywhere.
I sniffed the air again, trying to sense the remains of any marijuana or crack.
All I got was th
e
stale
smel
l of
intercourse.

I shook my head in disgust and left the filming room.

When I walked back into the small office area, I remembered the photos on the wide desk.
I picked them up and started thumbing through them.
There were several different girls in a variety of poses.
I didn’t recognize any of them, but they all had the same quality—a young look but
with
enough mystery to it to let the guy watching off the hook.
Their poses and the pouty looks they assumed asked the viewer, “Am I fifteen and look nineteen?
Or am I nineteen and look fifteen? Either way, you want me, don’t you?”
The photos were un-retouched
and looked a little rushed.
I thought that they might be audition shots.

I flipped through the photos, forcing myself to look each girl in the face, knowing that my eyes were picking up every swell of breast, every curve of hip, every hint of pubic hair.
I was half way through the stack when I found three of Kris Sinderling.

That stopped me cold.
Three audition pictures.
The first showed her fully clothed, though with her shirt unbuttoned and her hip thrust out.
In reality, it wasn’t any worse than the glamour shot that Matt had given me at the Rocket several days ago.
The second showed her topless, but with her arm across draped across her breasts.
I’d seen worse than that in beer ads.

But in the third picture, she was completely nude and on her knees, leaning forward.
The shot was carefully staged, at just the right angle so that all the viewer could see was hip and the curve of her buttocks.
Her left arm was crossed over her chest, exposing and pushing up her cleavage.

Beneath the third picture, someone had scrawled in black Sharpie “Star=Classy, 100%.
Just like A.A.”

I set the pictures of Kris aside
and flipped through the remainder
of the stack.
There were no more of Kris, but when I got to the last photo, it stopped me cold again.

Smiling, wearing only bikini bottoms and with one hand shyly cupped over each breast, was Yvette.