A Good-Looking Corpse (10 page)

“Were you sitting on the couch while waiting for us?” I ask.

“Yeah, yeah I guess I was. It seemed as good a spot as any. Wadn't no blood where I was sitting.”

“You were? Gross!” Ramen chimes in behind me. I want to slug him.

While not horrible, the stain is revealing, as most stains are. A small, slender woman no doubt, she was sitting on the couch when she caught both bullets. I pull out my camera to snap photos of everything—I always document the before and after to protect myself from litigation. Now that the company is squarely in my name, this function seems extra important.

The old man stands out of my way, his back to a large window at the front of the house, watching everything I do but internalizing none of it. If Ramen's insensitivity stung the man, he doesn't show it. I circle the couch, clicking away with my small silver Minolta, taking all relevant angles in along with my assessment of the scene. The bullets were clearly small caliber—there weren't exit holes in the back of the couch, but there was a single larger hole in the backrest where the forensics team had dug them out, the fabric still stained and hanging in flaps over the gapes in the white downy couch stuffing. So they'd popped through her, the two bullets tightly grouped, and had smacked into the beige fabric backing of the overstuffed couch, stopping there. A long thin strand of blonde hair stood out from the cushion directly in the bloodstain, dipping in and out of it in places like a series of bridges and tunnels. There were no faded tips on either ends of the hair—she'd been a natural blonde.

The victim was also younger than this gentleman, but how much younger I couldn't tell. She'd been sitting down when she was plugged and had expired where she sat; the amount of fluid that had drained down into the cushions declared as much. It was the shape of the blood on the seat cushion that betrayed her lithe figure—not much of an ass on the girl. Considering the topmost layer of blood was still a bright slick of wet red goo, the seat beneath her was full—too much fluid had puddled up and the coagulated surface blood couldn't seep in any farther. I gesture for Ramen to help me, causing him to set down his video camera and apply pressure to the couch so I can ensure it hasn't bled down into the hardwood floor beneath. It hasn't. This one would be a simple job; couch removal was still expensive and a pain in the ass—particularly because we would have to slice it into pieces to get it through the door—but it wouldn't break the old man's bank. I billed him $600 and he paid it, sliding his meaty paw down into his suspender-held pants to retrieve a checkbook that had been permanently bowed from its time in his back pocket.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” Ramen says sympathetically, after the old man had ripped the check free with a satisfying tear from his pocketbook and handed it over. A quick glance at the address line tells me that the check writer, Ronald Casey, does not live at this address.

“Oh, not my loss exactly. My son…shot his wife last night. I'm just here dealing with the aftereffects.”

“Gnarly,” Ramen exclaims, once again shocking me with his lust for the details.

“Outside,” I snap, jabbing a finger in the direction of the door. It is the same reason I didn't allow Ivy to work with me—she was just too curious and opinionated.

“Old guy has to deal with his son's violent murder,” Ramen mutters into his voice-memo recorder once we are down at the truck.

“I need you to not talk anymore,” I demand, eyeballing the excited producer sternly. “These people aren't here to satisfy your craving for gruesome experiences.”

“I need details, Tom. I need sad backstories of human strife. Hollywood feeds on the misery.” He does a quick bump of coke off the back of his thumb, seemingly from nowhere. I know I should tell him not to, but the reality is I'm envious.

“How proud were you of me for not taking one look and puking my guts out?” Ramen asks excitedly. “I did good, yeah?”

“Yeah, you did fine,” I admit. “Just keep quiet and act somewhat professional.”

“I don't know why, but violence tends to not faze me. Oh shit, that reminds me. Mikey wants to see you again. Today, at his place.”

“I have no reason to see him.”

“But he wants to show you something.”

“I've seen his world. It doesn't interest me.”

“Such a strange thought,” Ramen concedes, smiling. “Mikey Echo doesn't scare the hell out of you.” He shakes his head, as if he can't quite wrap his mind around the idea.

I push a disposable Tyvek protective suit to his chest. “If you're gonna help, suit up.”

The Sawzall cuts through the wooden couch frame quickly and I'm happy the old guy has no qualms about me using it. I have to chase him from his spot at the far end of the couch to do it though. He's focused more on the fake drama on the TV than the real drama happening next to him. Ramen, for his part, seems to have learned his lesson and is mute for most of the operation, except for a brief moment of fussiness when a splotch of blood ruins his perfectly white Tyvek suit.

“Damn it, I was gonna go to a rave in this,” he grumbles.

Like clockwork, as soon as we are done with the couch job and heading back down the hill, the phone rings. “Oooh, ooh,” Ramen exclaims and pulls out his phone to record the call. “Might as well get some realism here.” Humoring him, I put the call on speaker as he pushes his own right up to it. It's a death in Silver Lake.

“923 Vendome,” I say aloud, mentally repeating the number as I attempt to man the phone, get my bearings, and maneuver the large truck safely out of the hills.

“Not exactly a lively dude, is he?” Ramen asks, referring to the dispatcher.

“I think that one was a girl.” I shrug. “They're all like that—soulless.”

“You think they're Indian?” he asks.

“No clue,” I say.

“Man, I'm glad I escaped that life. If I hadn't made it to the States, you know that would be me on that phone. ‘Sir, we have a service request for you,' ” Ramen says, effecting a flat, impartial impression of the call-center employee.

“I gotta drop the couch off,” I tell Ramen when we exit the hills. “I can drop you off as well. No sense in you having to see another crime scene.”

“Nope, I'm sticking to you like a booger, Tom. I want to delay the news that you're not going with me to see Mikey as long as possible. Plus, if we're going to Silver Lake, I can check out the HaFo SaFo sign and let it decide if he's going to kill me or not.”

“The what?” I ask.

“Are you sure you're from Los Angeles? I'm not and even I know about the HaFo SaFo sign,” he tries, hoping to jump my memory. I stare back at him blankly for as long as I safely can while driving. “Sigh,” he says audibly. “It's this foot doctor's office. The big spinning sign for his building has a happy foot on one side and a sad foot with, like, crutches and shit on the other. It spins all day long and then they turn it off at night. Whichever side of the sign you see first tells you what kind of luck you're gonna have. It's famous. It's like a fortune-telling sign. So if I see the happy foot first, I know that Mikey won't murder me. If I see the sad foot, I know to get the fuck out of Los Angeles for a couple days.”

“Crazy fucking town,” I mutter.

“Write the HaFo SaFo into the story,” Ramen says into his recorder, on a roll. “Make the Tom character live by it, believe in it. Love it even.”

“You've got coke on your nose still,” I tell him.

Ramen collects the powder onto his finger and sucks it off.

Ramen sees the sad foot first. It is a surprisingly sad-looking foot. Bent on crutches, with a bound-up hallux, it has been anthropomorphized to have a crestfallen face on the pad of the foot, complete with oddly blue eyelids. Still spinning on a tall pole, the blue sign is positioned over a Comfort Inn marquee and assures passersby that the doctor can deal with Spanish-speaking patients. “Fuck!” Ramen exclaims when he sees what fate has dealt him, and he looks to really mean it. “I knew it, I fucking knew it.” He looks like he wants to punch something, but respects that it isn't his ride. The other side of the sign comes around—the same foot, with tiny appendages wearing sneakers this time, stands exuberant, its mouth agape in delight, next to the phone number. This side does not say anything to the Spanish crowd.

“What happens now?” I ask, partly in jest.

“I'm gone,” Ramen promises quickly. “For at least a few days. I'm gonna head out to Santa Barbara or maybe New York. Not Frisco, Mikey would sodomize me with a Coke bottle to be snarky. Pretty much anywhere other than L.A.”

“Why do you associate with him if he's so dangerous?”

“I love movies. I've always loved movies—since I was a kid, I used to watch any American film I could. I never bought into the Bollywood crap. I liked the American classics—
Commando
,
Rocky
,
Predator
. Good flicks. In Hollywood today, most of it is compromised; it isn't about entertaining the hell out of adolescent kids the world over, it's about money. When Don Simpson died, pure Hollywood died with him. Mikey only cares about money because he has to; his job is to get a return for his investors—but he tells an amazing story in the process. He genuinely wants to entertain people and I respect that. He's a fucking psychopath, but my whole life was about getting to America and making the kind of movies I loved as a kid. Mikey makes those movies.”

“Your life is worth making Mikey's kind of movies?”

“One hundred percent. Being friends with Mikey is not without its challenges, but you saw the Ferrari. The parties. It has its upsides as well. I've been challenged my whole life—Mikey is just a furthering of the hustle. So if I have to leave town for a few days because you don't want to see Mikey, so be it.” His expression is that of a man trying to hide the fact that he is intentionally giving me a sad expression.

“Look, I'll go see Mikey with you,” I tell Ramen, frustrated. “But I'm not going to buy into the ‘Mikey's gonna kill me' panic anymore. This is the last time you get to play that card. And I'm not going to say yes to the movie shit.”

“You're a true friend, Tom.” He reaches over to grip my shoulder. It seems genuine, but what the fuck do I know about Hollywood anymore?

A spray of bullets, fired from a moving vehicle, have raked the row of houses clustered in this part of Silver Lake. The victim was a young man out walking a herd of dogs. A professional dog walker, he was killed instantly while wearing a pair of headphones, pieces of which are still splintered about the sidewalk when we arrive. Apparently he hadn't heard the gunshots because of his music. One of the bullets had obviously been a headshot. Looking around I find only the large concentration of blood, no small offshoot puddles—Ivy would be relieved to hear all the dogs likely survived. “Seemingly random,” the cop spouts, first to me and then to Ramen when I walk by him to take pictures of the scene. “The poof still had the friggin' leashes gripped in his dead hand,” he adds, tactless. I tune the cop out, but Ramen is more than happy to banter.

The cleanup goes quickly, and after I'm done collecting the bigger pieces of brain matter and sanitizing the little stuff, I am able to hook the power washer up to a spigot nearby and blast what's left of my chemicals into the gutters of L.A. The officer, still too green on the job to know better than to attach his name to any large invoices, signs off on my $2,950 price tag. With the cop's signature on my invoice, they'll have no choice but to pay up. Sure, the LAPD, which has a jurisdiction contract with Silver Lake, will raise hell and this young cop will get his ass reamed by his CO, but it will serve him right for being an insensitive little shit.

It occasionally feels like cheating to use the power washer—after all, the fire department could do the same thing if they took a moment to kill off any blood enzymes before they hosed down the sidewalk—but it makes my outdoor work much easier so I keep quiet about it. Ramen wants to take a bloody mood ring he finds as a souvenir, but eventually I persuade him to throw it in the biohazard bag so we can be on our way.

We drop the biohazard off at the garage and package it into barrels—well, I package it. Ramen insists on videotaping me doing everything and offering opinions on how it could be made more cinematic.

Ramen offers to drive me to Mikey's, there and back. Admittedly, I look forward to the thrill of blasting down the road in the luxury car again, but I know there's a good chance that I will need to make another early exit.

“Follow me,” Ramen yells across the seat through the open passenger window.

Rolling out in the Charger, its finish a glossy black in the sunlight, I feel the urge to be dangerous. I know I ought to behave, but with the sun out warming the streets and a Ferrari beside me at the stoplight, I just can't help myself. It's the addictive part of my personality crawling out to tempt me. “No, you follow me,” I yell back, revving my engine. We share a mutual grin of camaraderie and then he revs his engine as well, seamlessly doing another bump of coke in the process.

I mash the accelerator as soon as I sense the traffic light's impending shift. Ramen does likewise, but I've got almost a hundred extra foot-pounds of torque on the exotic car and I hit off the line first. His Italian pony will win a sprint in a straightaway, but in Los Angeles, it's all about moving through traffic. I pull into the lead on the one-way street and go screaming through the tunnel beneath Grand Avenue. Lucky with the traffic flow, our path through the tunnel is wide open, allowing us to test our cars side by side. The real test will be who gets to the left lane of the 110 on-ramp first—they will have the advantage of merging into the streaming lines of cars on the always busy freeway. From there, it will be about navigating obstacles. Heart pounding with fear and intensity, I throttle my Charger forward and cut in front of him sharply, forcing him to jump out of the lane as we rocket out from the tunnel together with me positioned to occupy the left lane of the on-ramp.

Ramen senses my intent though and careens back behind me, anticipating that he can draft behind me and force me to make the lane choices first.

I shouldn't be doing this, not with my past, but for some reason, I can't bring myself to slow up.
Hollywood producers bring out the asshole in all of us
.

It's still early enough that we can find and fill the gaps between cars, the two of us splitting apart, me picking the right-most lanes to work with, him picking the left. We slalom onto the 101 together, matching up momentarily before he is forced to slide in behind me once more to avoid an SUV.

The 101 is also open—an anomaly here at the 110 interchange and I take it as a sign. I feel like I can beat him, fair and square. And yet, Ramen has no intention of playing fair. Accelerating, he takes the little red roadster up north of 150 miles per hour, a speed I can't keep up with. Reckless, he forces more horsepower out of the car and it lurches forward faster still, leaving me in the proverbial dust. The message is clear: I can't compete.

With Ramen's Ferrari gone into the maze of asphalt and autos, I slow down to legal speeds to finish the trek, soundly beaten.

The diminutive Indian producer is overjoyed once I finally drive onto Carolwood and pull up behind the Ferrari, which is still running, as he stands outside it, on the street. “Finally,” he shouts. “Glad you could make it. Italy beats America today.”

“Why are you waiting outside?”

“Okay, Tom. Quick pep talk time. I wasn't exactly honest with you this morning. Remember when I said I got Mikey to call off making our slow day less slow?”

“Yeah…”

“Okay, well, I didn't exactly get ahold of him. I left him a message telling him not to do anything. And it might be nothing, but, that drive-by shooting back there…that has Crozier and his crew written all over it.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I didn't want to say anything because I was worried you'd change your mind about coming here.”

“Christ, why would you tell me now?”

“Look, I didn't want you to find out from them. Or Mikey to find out I fucked something up, you know? I'm sorry, Tom. I warned you I sometimes might have to lie to you.”

I turn and walk away from the man to consider my options.

“I was hoping he would get the message in time,” Ramen says low, behind me. A person across the street from us selling maps to the stars' homes has glanced up at the commotion and attempts to determine if I'm a somebody. A Ferrari at the scene complicates matters.

I return to Ramen. “No more bullshitting me, okay?”

“Tom, I'm sorry. My life is at stake here. I needed to play the game a little. It wasn't to hurt you, I swear.”

“No more bullshit,” I warn once more. “Let's go talk to Mikey.”

I go to climb in my car, but a jogger rounding the corner has reached me and stops, doubled over and panting. A middle-aged Mexican with a tummy, he's dressed in a matching brown tracksuit with the initials E.M. embroidered in rounded cursive font over his soggy and sweat-stained left tit.

“I know you,” he says, between gasps. “You're the hero blood cleaner. Tanner, right?”

Upon seeing the jogger, Ramen is up and out of his car. “Keep jogging, Morales. This doesn't concern you.”

“Are you inking this?” he asks Ramen, suddenly irritated at him.

“As far as you're concerned, it's a done deal.”

“Kid, do yourself a big, big favor,” he tells me. “Break that contract. I'll double whatever this clown is offering you.”

“Don't call me kid,” I warn the jogger, but he doesn't seem fazed in the least.

“Keep jogging, Morales,” Ramen warns again, as ominous as I've ever seen him.

“Fuck you,” Morales shoots back and then turns to me. “Do what I'm doing, Tanner. Run.”

Shaking his head, the jogger continues on up the block.

“Thanks for not getting more into that, Tom. He's a knob.”

“Who is he?” I ask. I can tell Ramen doesn't want to explain, but he's been hamstrung by my demand for transparency. He likely didn't think a test of that would come so soon.

“He's another producer,” Ramen allows reluctantly. “His name is Esteban Morales. He works in television predominantly. He also lives next door.”

“Why did he tell me to run from you?”

“Because he's a lousy prick and he knows it. You're still a hot property whether you're aware of it or not. He just happened to make you a bid earlier and you turned him down. So, naturally, to see you at Mikey Echo's house, no matter the circumstances, has him rankled.”

We move our cars to the stretch of driveway directly in front of Mikey's mansion. There are no valets this time, but the house is still impressive to behold in the daylight. The same black ex-con doorman lets us inside, nodding familiarly to Ramen. “He's out back,” the doorman says courteously.

“Tom!” Mikey announces joyously to me, overlooking Ramen who is in front. The well-toned producer is hanging out by his pool, the 80-plus-degrees making for perfect pool weather even in mid-October. Mikey is wearing a navy Speedo with an expensive linen shirt hanging open unbuttoned and aviator shades. His cock is noticeably thick, bulging inside the cloth sheath working extra hard to cover his genitals.

One chair over from the producer, Crozier lounges shirtless in blood-red swimming trunks. My scar practically ignites seeing my would-be killer face-to-face. I must look murderous because Crozier laughs. “I know that face, champ,” he says to me, unconcerned. “Even had it a few times myself.”

“Be nice to him,” Mikey chides. “I gave him the opportunity to have you killed and he didn't take it.”

“I changed my mind,” I say, heated. “Shoot him.”

Crozier grins up at me, still not worried by my presence in the least.

“Nobody get emotional,” Ramen speaks up. “We're all buddies now. The past is the past, right, Crozier?” It's an interesting dynamic standing in the midst of the three of them—as if there is an unspoken power struggle happening between the men. Something bigger than my involvement.

“I was just a soldier doing a job,” Crozier says and folds his hands behind his head. “I'm willing to squash anything that needs squashing. Including beefs.”

“Crozier's one of the stars of the prison rehabilitation program we started,” Ramen explains evenly to me. “He's training to be a producer.”

“In a way, prison was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Crozier says, mock sincere. “If it weren't for prison, I might still be a bad person.”

“You've met Doug, right?” Mikey hurriedly interrupts when he sees me open my mouth to respond. The third member of Mikey's entourage from the day of Alan Van's death sits, less impressive a specimen but similarly stuffed into a banana hammock, his gut hanging over the edges of the swimsuit on all sides and a straw fedora jammed down on his head. A frothy white beverage that looks like a piña colada sits on a small table beside him. “Doug essentially controls Hollywood's relevant media trades,” says Mikey. “If you need to spin a story in this town, Doug's your man.”

“I'll remember that,” I say, giving the man no more than a glance. Instead my gaze falls on the girl next to him, a Lolita-esque dyed-blonde teen in a green bikini.
She can't possibly be more than sixteen or seventeen
.