Trust Me (24 page)

CHAPTER 55

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The place was on fire.

Tony looked out into the audience, grinning, his Fender Precision bass hanging low over his belt, hands in the air as the crowd cheered and whistled. People were screaming, “More!” but the manager had told them to cut it at one o’clock and their second encore had already taken them ten minutes past that.

Thursday night at the Roxy, midnight show, and a crowd that knew how to party: rock critics that knew the night was young, record company guys that liked to burn it until dawn, dealers and dealmakers and other musicians, checking out what’s hot. No lames like at the early shows, the ones where the wannabees and the hasbeens cranked out their over-rehearsed noise.

Tonight it was Tony that was hot. Tony and his band had just ripped through the best set of their lives and now, staring into the spotlights, he was searching for the payoff.

It was the women that made the evening interesting. Especially the women at the Roxy on a late Thursday night. The models, the party girls, the coke whores, the waitresses from the restaurants, the hot ones that the house let in free.

Later, after packing their gear into the truck and getting their share of the draw from the club manager, the band went next door to the Rainbow for pizza and whiskey and beer and whatever else presented itself. They scored a booth in the far corner of the back room, where it was dark and private but not so dark and private that they couldn’t be noticed.

By the time their pizza arrived, at least a dozen people had stopped by the table to tell him and the band how good the show had been. Three of them, party girls from the Valley, he figured, were now wedged into the booth, picking at the pizza and ordering drinks as though they were intimates of the band members. He wasn’t interested; there was too much possibility in the air.

It was on the way up the narrow stairs to the restroom that he saw what he wanted to see. A wild tangle of dark hair, high, sharp cheekbones under brown eyes that laughed all by themselves, the almost boyish body with the round little ass that he had watched from the Roxy stage. She hadn’t cared about anything or anybody. Just the dancing, the music—his music. She had danced in the aisles, danced on her chair, danced on a table and clapped her hands to the beat high above her head, tossing her crazy hair out of her face, completely on fire.

Now she was coming down the stairs, swiping the back of her hand across one nostril and then the other.

“Hey!” she said, and she put her hand on his wrist. “You were fucking great.” And then just looked at him, her mouth curved with a sly humor. Standing two steps above him, she was eye to eye with him. That’s fine, he thought. He liked them small.

A vial materialized in her hand; she tapped it twice on his wrist and motioned with her head toward the top landing. There was something aggressive, almost pugnacious, in the set of her jaw. Her nose was slightly off, perhaps broken and never set properly.

In the men’s room, he set his back to the door so they could be alone, and opened the vial. He poked into it with the key to his van and put the white powder to his lips, inhaling gently through his mouth. A subtle medicinal aroma filled his mouth as the powder dissolved instantly. He knew that flavor. In a city of rip-offs and ridiculously diluted street drugs, this girl had the best coke he had seen in years. She smiled up at him with perfect white teeth. Using the key again, he helped himself to a couple of healthy snorts, then capped the vial and held it out to the girl.

“I’m Lilah.” She took the vial and then let her hand fall to the buckle of his belt, which she hooked with her index finger. She gave a couple of little tugs and, with the coke just freezing the back of his head, he thought,
Yeah, cool, I’ll go for some right here
. But instead, she said, “Let’s go,” and tugged his belt again, this time pulling him away from the door, which opened behind him. He realized he had heard knocking without even registering it.

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They stopped at the market for some Wild Turkey and ice cream. The place was so bright he put on his sunglasses, but Lilah careened around the place like a child at a playground. She wore skintight pants in a leopard-skin print and a halter top and pointy silver flats.

When they met at the check stand, he put his bottle of Wild Turkey on the counter and watched as Lilah removed items from the basket she had filled. Espresso ice cream, lemon sherbet, two six-packs of cherry soda, a pack of scouring pads, a can of butane cigarette-lighter refill, baking soda, and a bottle of Courvoisier.

Starting up the van, he said, “What’s all that stuff about?”

“Oh, it’s stuff for Richard, so he doesn’t run out.”

“Who’s Richard?” The whole way from Hollywood, there hadn’t been any mention of a Richard, or anyone else for that matter, that might turn up at her place.

“Oh, Richard’s great. You’ll like him.” She waved her hand in the air, vague and dismissive. She tipped some powder from the vial onto her hand and it placed it under his nose. “This came from Richard.”

He decided that Richard’s presence might not be such a bad thing after all. He inhaled sharply and turned out of the market parking lot and up Montana to where Lilah said she lived.

He stood in the hallway as Lilah unlocked the door to her apartment. She opened it and then, holding the bag of groceries, she turned and pushed the door hard with her ass. It had a large crack emanating from an indentation at about hip level—right where a foot would go if you were pissed off enough, he thought. There were cracks in the doorjamb as well, and the door popped open on Lilah’s third try.

From the hallway, he saw a perfectly normal, orderly living room. A sofa, a couple of chairs, a television set in a console. Windows at the far end looking out at trees and a neighboring apartment building. To his right in the small kitchen stood a man in boxer shorts and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, frozen in place with his mouth and eyes seemingly stuck open. In his hand was a long glass vial full of liquid.

“Richard, darling, we didn’t mean to startle you.” Lilah put the groceries on the counter and gently took the vial from Richard. Tony watched as she removed the cap and poured off most of the liquid, leaving only an inch at the bottom and something that looked like a congealing blob of oil. She pulled a bottle of Perrier from the refrigerator, popped the plastic cap from it, and poured the cold mineral water into the vial. The mass in the vial seemed to harden and lose its translucent quality, suddenly becoming a pale white rock almost an inch in diameter, which Lilah removed and placed on a coffee filter. Richard, having come out of his paralysis, picked up a hair dryer that was lined up among an arsenal of accessories between the sink and the stove and commenced to blow hot air at the rock in the filter.

“Hey, close the fuckin’ door, okay?” Richard sounded like he was out of practice talking, as if some serious effort were required just to summon and assemble words. A sparse fringe of hair was matted to his head, wet with a perspiration that covered his face and chest with a sheen. He nodded to Tony as Lilah introduced them, his mouth still hanging open.

Tony pulled the Wild Turkey from the bag on the counter and was about to ask Lilah for a glass, but thought better of it and, removing the cap, took a good hard pull from the bottle. Lilah opened the Courvoisier and half-filled two large snifters, which she then placed on the counter. As she put away the other contents from the grocery bag, Richard scooped the white rock from the coffee filter and said, “How about your room?”

Lilah said, “Fine,” and put the ice cream in the freezer. “Hey, you can’t keep leaving the flame burning on the stove.”

Richard didn’t appear to have heard; he was already out of the kitchen, moving toward the end of the hallway—toward, Tony presumed, Lilah’s bedroom—holding the rock out in front of him as he walked. He held it between his thumb and index finger at about chin level, his head tilted back, seeming to appraise it as he disappeared from view.

Lilah carried the drinks and some of the items she had bought at the market. Tony followed her, carrying the two bottles. The evening had looked so promising; it still had potential, but he had always hated freebasers. Every time he had seen people smoke cocaine, it seemed that they did it obsessively and to the exclusion of all other activity: sex, eating, bathing, conversation.

Richard was sitting on the edge of a king-size bed in Lilah’s room, an elaborate glass pipe in his hands. A blue flame hissed out of a butane torch directly onto a white chip that was already melting into a tangle of copper strands—a piece of the scouring pad that Lilah had bought. Suddenly the bulb of the pipe, which was about the size of a tennis ball, filled with a thick white smoke. He watched as the smoke streamed up the glass stem, Richard staring intently at the tip of the flame as he inhaled.

Holding his breath, Richard handed the pipe and the torch to Lilah, who had put the drinks on a bedside stand and pulled Tony to the center of the bed. She took a new chip from a silver dish on the bed, placed it on the wire mesh, and fired it up. When she was through, she offered the pipe to Tony.

“No, thanks. If you’re offering, though, I wouldn’t mind having some for my nose.” On the dresser against the wall opposite the end of the bed, a shining white slab of coke the size of a telephone book sat on a large sheet of blue plastic wrapping.

Lilah passed the glass pipe back to Richard, grinning while she held the smoke in. Then, putting her hand behind Tony’s neck, she drew him to her, brought their mouths together, opened soft lips, ran her fingers up through his hair, let her other hand drop to his thigh and slide upward, and filled his lungs with the harsh, sweet smoke.

The next time the pipe came his way, he accepted it.

CHAPTER 56

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Would you please talk to me? What’s going on?”
Holly was speaking through one of the holes Jeff had gouged in the wall. Startled, he brought the flashlight up and saw her pull away.

“Go pack. We have to get out of here.” Suddenly he wanted to be far from this place. Crouching low, he swept the flashlight beam across the entire underside of the building, imagining a deranged Doctor Jack Stanley crawling toward him in the dirt.

When he emerged from the hole in the closet floor, Holly was standing in the hallway, hugging herself as though she were cold.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, then realized it was a ridiculous question.

“I was hoping . . .” She faltered.

“What?” He was impatient. It was time to get out of here.

“I think that I really wanted you to prove that I was crazy, delusional. That none of this was really happening.” A tear streaked down her cheek; she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I mean, I don’t want to be crazy, but this”—she gestured toward the closet floor—“is a pretty crummy reality.”

“One thing . . .” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Can you leave the pills behind?”

She hesitated, eyes wide and moist, then nodded.

Ten minutes later they emerged from the apartment, Jeff carrying a suitcase that Holly had packed in a dazed silence. She stepped into the carport and looked apprehensively at the door to the laundry room; to its left, the windows were ominously dark.

He placed the suitcase in the trunk of the BMW and said, “Look, are you okay to drive? Maybe we should go in one car . . .”

Holly faced him in the darkness, put a hand out and touched his arm, left it there. “Thank you for helping me. I’ll be all right.”

Driving up Fairfax, watching his rear-view mirror to make sure that he didn’t lose her, he wondered if, by taking Holly from her apartment, he had blown a good chance at catching Jack Stanley. Maybe they should have turned out the lights and waited for him to return, to burrow under the goddamned building and set up camp on the other side of Holly’s living room. He thought of his sister Marilyn and imagined firing the Walther into the wall, firing into the closet door, emptying the clip and then doing it again. He started to play it over again in his mind but something stopped him. It was useless, he realized. Old thinking, part of the world he had left behind. This was the best course, to move away from insanity and toward the sanctuary he had been given, and to bring Holly along.

The canyon air was cool and clean when they left their cars on the gravel drive in front of Ron’s home. The porch was lit, but the house inside was entirely dark. The Land Rover was gone.

He carried the suitcase into his room, which he had offered to let Holly use. He would sleep on the sofa in the living room. When he put the suitcase down, he asked Holly how she felt.

“I think I’m ready to fall asleep.” She smiled for the first time that night. “In a New York minute.”

“Is there anything you need?”

“Yes.” She looked at him, pretty now in the soft light from the bedside lamp. She put her hand out and touched his arm like she had done earlier. “Would you stay here and just hold me?”

CHAPTER 57

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It was Wednesday afternoon, and Doctor Jack Stanley’s rage simmered like sauce in a pot.
Every now and then a new bubble of anger rose to the surface. It was infuriating to have to give up a perfectly good name. He had had a good run as Art Bradley, MFCC, and co-founder of SOL. Now that was irretrievably gone. And now the girl was gone.

“Hey, man, you want a hit?” It was the idiot with the glass pipe, exhaling a huge plume of chemical smoke in Lilah’s kitchen as he spoke.

“No, Richard, I don’t, thank you.” Almost time to stop being nice. “When do you suppose Lilah and Tony will come out?” They had been in the back room—Lilah’s bedroom—for hours now. Occasionally, noises from Lilah punctuated the interminable rhythmic hammering of the headboard against the wall.

Richard coughed and fell back against the refrigerator, then shuffled out of the kitchen and disappeared through the hallway without replying.

He had tolerated this zoo, as he thought of it, since early Sunday morning, shortly after the debacle at the Malibu pier. He had gone home, glad that Bobbi was in Portland lecturing, and packed a suitcase. When he appeared at the Brentwood apartment, Lilah had opened the door and thrown her arms around him, crying out, “Dahling,” and inviting him in. Nobody, himself included, had slept during the next three days, and the moronic behavior of Lilah and her two friends was wearing thin.

He went to the stereo and inserted the Miles Davis CD into the deck, turning it on loud. Time to clean house
.
The Art Bradley charade was crumbling beyond repair. He had been seen on the pier, the girl was alive, and Joanie, the fool, could put him in line for lethal injection. Worse, Jeff Fenner and Lilah linked him with his past.

He finished his drink and came to a decision. He went out of the apartment and down the hallway. The elevator took him to the underground parking, where the Jag was safely hidden from general view. He took the tire iron from the Jag’s trunk and wrapped it in an old red towel he kept over the spare wheel.

When he got back to the apartment, the music had been turned off. He saw Richard sitting on the sofa at the end of the living room, the one area that Jack had staked out as his own. He said, “I’m sure I’ve asked you to sit somewhere else . . .” for the hundredth time. The mindlessness of it.

“Hey Doc, no reason to get uncivilized.” The man sat there in his jockey shorts, lighting a butane torch and adjusting the flame. “I’ll get up in a minute.” He picked up the glass pipe from the coffee table and, putting it to his lips, aimed the hissing blue flame into the blackened bowl. The cocaine rock ignited with a sizzling sound. “By the way, man—” Richard wheezed—he was holding his breath and puffs of smoke escaped with each word “—your music sucks.”

He walked across the living room, flicking the music back on and turning it up as he passed the console. The tire iron had a nice heft to it—he held it at his side by the end that curved back in a U shape. He had never killed a male before. Not directly, anyway, he thought, reflecting that he had always relished the image of his stepfather with a prison shank sticking out of the side of his neck.

Richard sucked mightily at the pipe, his chest heaving as he suppressed the urge to cough, holding it in, eyes intent on the flame vaporizing the bubbling white rock. Jack lifted the metal bar and brought it down on the shiny bald top of the man’s head.
There. That was easy.
The torch and the hot pipe fell into Richard’s lap, the flame still hissing as it bit into flesh. He let the towel fall to the ground and struck again, methodically, until it was clear that the job was completed.

The torch, its flame extinguished, lay on the sofa next to the glass pipe. He picked both items up, flipped over the sofa cushion so that the bloody side couldn’t be seen, then walked to the kitchen and threw the drug paraphernalia in the trash.

There were two bottles of Bushmills left in the refrigerator, plus a beer and a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, purchased special for tonight’s occasion. He popped the top off the beer and placed the other bottles in a shopping bag, which he left on the counter at the end closest to the front door.

He pulled the body into the spare bedroom, stuffed it into the closet, and closed the sliding door. Next to a scale on the dresser was Richard’s massive block of cocaine: he broke off a corner and placed it in a small zip-lock baggy.

Time to get the show on the road.