A Good-Looking Corpse (13 page)

“Want me to run the stats?” Ivy asks, now in business mode right along with Don.

“Yeah, hit 'em all. Plates read ‘2 Gorgeous Ass Titties 123,' ” Don spits rapid-fire and Ivy takes it all down eagerly, and reads it back: “2-G-A-T-1-2-3.”

“You know Mikey Echo?” I ask the PI as Ivy runs the plate through a service that checks sightings via traffic cameras.

“Oh totally. His father more so.” Don nods. “The Echos bankroll the entire movie industry. I've had a lot of years working around George. George Echo can stop an investigation cold—and has on many occasions.”

“Tell me more about him—the father,” I prod Don.

“This town respects the hell out of him, I'll tell you that. Lots of charity work, lots of philanthropy. George Echo is connected to almost every film that passes through this town—has been in one way or another for the last forty years. And his father was a part of Hollywood before that. Yeah, the Echo name is synonymous with Hollywood.”

“Nothing weird about him, then?”

“That kid of his, Mikey, is the one that scares me.” Don shakes his head. “Never met him personally, but his reputation around this town is dangerous. Ugly stuff.” Don looks around conspiratorially as if Mikey might just walk in. “You understand that I'm not one to tell tales out of school, correct? I would not be such a well-respected private investigator if I went around diming out paying customers? Of course, the Echos have never paid me a dime, so…I think Echo Junior killed his own mother. Frickin' matricide, can you believe such a thing?”

“What makes you say that?” I find myself moving in a little as I ask.

“Christ, I probably shouldn't say anything, but it's the Echos, fuck 'em. Well, back say fifteen years ago or so…when I was a young buck, well, a younger buck,
heh heh
, I ran a wiretap for a client who was interested in getting some collusion dirt on Rich Whitelaw, big name in the public relations trade around here a few years back. Managed to hook into the Whitelaws' home phone. Not exactly legal, if you can believe such a thing. But I intercept this call from Mikey to Rich's son, Doug. Chilling stuff, you see. Mikey says he knocked his mom down the stairs. He's real casual about it though, like weird casual. He wasn't all upset about it, like a teen kid might be. Didn't feel to me like it was an accident though. It wasn't anything revealing, he didn't say she died or anything, just relayed it as a matter of fact in the course of their conversation—two kids talkin' pussy, cars, booze, and that. It wasn't too big a deal to me then, except Mrs. Echo went missing right afterward and stayed missing. I remember George made a big push to try and find her, he was all broken up about it too, but no one ever saw her again. I've always kept that little notion to myself. And everything I've heard about the kid since has done nothing but compound my suspicion.”

I flash back to Mikey showing me the skull in his collection, the chunk of missing bone matter just above the sphenoid.
His mom
.

“I never knew what to do with that call—at the time, it wasn't part of the business I was after, so I didn't give it to my client.” Don's manner is still excited and frenetic, but this is the lowest point of his energy. “That little snippet of recorded information has always been a sort of thing I've clung to…just kept in my vault.” He points to his head to clarify where his “vault” is.

“Do you have that tape still?” I ask, trying not to show any excitement.

“Naw, that thing is long gone. I thought about keeping it in case they ever came after me—maybe a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. But there's not much you can do with a piece of information like that, really. Except be terrified for your life too. Only a fool would try to blackmail an Echo.”

I want to watch his eyes, to see if they look toward a location that might indicate a physical copy of the tape, perhaps a physical vault somewhere, but the short man is so manic, he's all over the place as he talks. Instinctively, I believe him.

Don then turns back to me. “You think Mikey Echo is involved with this Esteban Morales thing?”

I nod.

“Forget it then,” Don says, making a gesture of washing his hands. “It's done. Imma call that attorney back. We're not taking the case. No point.”

“I thought you were a goner,” I say when I see Ramen standing outside the door to my garage the next morning.

“I guess it wasn't my time.” He shrugs. “I was in meetings all day yesterday. Movie premiere on Saturday, you know? Lots of stuff going on. Did I miss anything cool?”

I decide not to tell him about my meeting with Alan Van's agent to see if he brings it up on his own.

“Aww Christ, the Roosevelt?” Ramen says, frustrated, when I give him the short version of my previous day's work. “They had the first Academy Awards there.” Before we get inside the office, he has a grand idea: “Look, Tom, instead of sitting in there, hoping that the phone rings, let's do something fun.”

“Such as?”

“Let's go on a murder tour. One of those bus rides where you go by all the crazy and famous L.A. deaths? Let's do that. My treat. If we get a death call, we'll hop off and take an Uber back to the office.”

I want answers for yesterday too, and if there was anything that could get Ramen talking about murder, it was likely more murder. “Fuck it,” I find myself saying. “Let's go.”

If I'd have guessed, I'd have thought that the L.A. murder-tour scene is a business built on advance reservations and money, but as it turns out, Ramen casually handing the tour guide a baggie of white crystalline powder from his pocket gets us on “the list” just fine. The bus is enormous, a double-decker London-style thing rapidly filling up with tourists and locals who just can't get enough of the romance that is celebrity death in this town. On the outside, the bus has been painted up violently, in detailed graffiti that I would be hard-pressed to admit didn't belong in some sort of macabre museum itself. Small scenes of terror and supernatural distress from the artist's twisted imagination joined with the obligatory movie-monster images and real citizens of Los Angeles, including O.J. Simpson and Charles Manson, to create a truly grim vehicle. The words
L
OS
A
NGELES
D
EATH
B
US
are spelled out down the length of our ride in the funky haphazard lettering of the Hollywood sign.

The driver, a long-hair with a clear meth history and scabby legs grins at us, his teeth a here and there wreck from grinding and neglect. “Welcome aboard,” he says.

“We're dying to go,” Ramen puns at the man.

“You've gotta have guts to trust my driving,” the driver happily responds, as if it is the first time someone has ever made a hammy remark to him.

Ramen insists we ride outside on such a beautiful day and so we climb the inside staircase up to the open-air roof seating. “Do you know how many people have been killed riding on the upper level of these tour buses?” he asks exuberantly as we settle into our seats, me closer to the outside.

“None that I've ever been called for,” I tell him.

“At least one,” he says, unfazed. “Some kid was dancing on his seat and got taken out by an overpass on the 405. True story.”

“I'll try to remember not to dance, then,” I say.

“Hey, sometimes you just got to let the rhythm take you.” He shrugs, turning to eyeball our fellow passengers who are settling in around us. “It looks like a good group today,” he says loudly, causing several people around to nod or smile in agreement. Most of them are chubby to fat, middle-aged and appearing to possess a midwestern look, if there is such a thing. I felt like I could pick out the tourists from the locals without even trying. A rail-thin goth male settles into the seat in front of me, and his chubby equally goth girlfriend takes the seat in front of Ramen. Unabashedly, they begin making out, her leaning hard into his seat to do so. “I thought you people hated the sun,” Ramen says to them, delighted with the spectacle.

“You're not going to be one of those people, are you?” the girl asks, breaking from the tonguing to fix Ramen with a sour gaze.

“Oh probably,” Ramen responds. “I am just…in awe of you getting your jollies off in front of me and the rest of the tour bus. So I might make comments about it, yeah. Right now you're the best part of the tour.”

“It's our anniversary, cut us some slack.”

“Anniversary of what? When you two died? Are you part of the tour?”

“Just ignore him, Sindal,” the male goth implores his husky companion. “He doesn't have what we've got.”

“Overbearing Hot Topic debt?” Ramen continues to pester them. “Blood diseases from dirty needles? A freezer full of headless pigeons and Snickers bars that you trot out whenever you try in vain to summon the Devil during a blood orgy?” Finally, I swat him on the arm and he settles down.

Below us on the sidewalk, two confused Chinese tourists are being told the tour is “apparently oversold” and they can't go. We took their spots, I guess. I don't see the driver give them any money back either. It used to be that I wouldn't have felt bad about a moment like this. I blame Ivy for the fact that I do.

The driver clambers into his seat down below and the bus fires up with the great belching reverberation of a diesel engine shuddering to life. “Welcome aboard Los Angeles Death Bus, the sightseer's guide to the gruesome side of Los Angeles. Blood, guts, murder, and mayhem await you as we revisit horrors of Hollywood past, both real and cinematic. Whereas other death bus tours might try and cheat you out of the nightmares and horrifying secrets this city holds, we give you every last spleen and scream. Hold on to your hearts because you never know when a murderer might sneak up and stab you in them.”

I look at Ramen to convey the oddness of what we are in for, but I find he is obliviously lip-synching the driver's speech from memory.

“How many times have you been on this tour?” I ask.

“At least once a month for the past five years.” He shrugs.

“The driver doesn't seem like he knows you…”

“Roy? Roy's a druggie—a real one. He's done legendary amounts of meth. I'm impressed he remembers any details on the tour. I've used that same bullshit ‘dying to go' line on him probably hundreds of times. He's never picked up on it.”

Roy finishes his spiel and we rumble into the late-morning Hollywood traffic, heading west on Sunset.

“Where are we going first?” I ask Ramen.

“Well, the tour tends to change up, depending on what sort of mind-set Roy is in.” Ramen shrugs. “Hell, sometimes he just pulls random stops and makes up the stories. But if he's on point today, we should be heading to Michael Jackson's death house first.”

“Where's that?” I ask.

“You'll see.” Ramen laughs.

The bus cruises up Sunset and abruptly takes a hard right onto Carolwood Drive, stopping outside the high walls of the corner house: Mikey Echo's mansion.

“You mean this house…?”

Ramen nods, pleased.

Roy intones the necessary details about the grim end for the pop legend through the speakers beside the bus seats. Everyone takes pictures except for Ramen and myself and the goth couple, who are still playing tonsil tennis. “Show some respect,” Ramen hisses at them sarcastically.

“Sometimes I just hop off the tour here.” Ramen smiles. “It gets people excited. They think I'm crazy when I go inside. Next we should be heading to where Whitney Houston died, the Beverly Hilton on Wilshire. I remember when they added that stop.”

“Wait a minute? So we just go to buildings where stuff once happened? And people take pictures of a building? And they pay to see this stuff? You pay for this?”

“Yeah, these death bus companies make a mint doing this shit and people eat it up. What? You thought we got to see murders take place?”

“You know, I don't know what I thought. It just seems kinda anticlimactic.”

“For you, maybe,” Ramen clucks. “You live this shit. For most of us turds, this is as close as we get. Though maybe it isn't as interesting AS SATAN,” Ramen elevates his voice to turn it into a stinging condemnation of the two goths.

“Do you think Esteban Morales will end up on this tour?”

“Tom, look at you, all detective and interrogative. Remind me to make a note of that for your character.”

“What happened to him? Is he still alive?”

“Tom, you can't keep pulling this shit. It will irritate Mikey. Like that stunt you pulled yesterday with Brandon. Yes, Mikey knows about that.”

“I'm not asking Mikey, I'm asking you.”

Ramen sighs, now cagey and feeling trapped. “It's just one of those things.”

“One of what things?”

Ramen makes a low buzzing sort of noise as if he's debating within himself whether to talk. “You know I like you, right, Tom?”

“I know you want me to think you like me. I don't really know though.”

“Look, I'm genuine—to a fault. I want us to be best friends. I like the way you look at the world. But if I tell you stuff, there has to be a mutual trust. You know what kind of person Mikey seems to be, you know what he's capable of. I want to be able to talk with you about Mikey because he's so fucking insane and I can't talk to anyone else about him. You're literally the only person that I can come to and say, ‘This guy is a psychopath.' But in order for me to talk to you, I've gotta know that it won't get back to Mikey. That's the problem with psychopaths—they don't have limits if they think you betrayed them. So you CAN'T tell him shit like that thing the other day that I thought he'd murder me. That's the kind of shit that gives him ideas…he internalizes that stuff. I'm willing to tell you about Esteban, but you've got to keep it just between you and me. Deal?”

“Deal,” I say, pausing first to give my reply the proper gravity Ramen is looking for.

“Esteban got the ‘Mulholland Falls' treatment.”

“What's that?”

“There's this section of road on Mulholland Drive where the cliff is so steep, cars can't be recovered. If they go off the road, they just get lost down in the canyon forever. There are all sorts of skeletons down there, just stuck behind the wheels of luxury automobiles that went down, lost forever. They call it Mulholland Falls. Crozier handles the dirty work. I don't know the specifics, but I imagine Crozier forcefully took him from his home, put him in the trunk of his own car, and sent it over the edge, never to be seen again.”

If the goths are hearing any of this, it doesn't distract them from their date.

“Whew, I gotta say. It feels good to get that off my chest.” Ramen laughs after a while as the bus makes its way up into the hills to visit the house where Sons of Anarchy actor Johnny Lewis murdered an old woman and her cat before throwing himself off a balcony to his own death. Roy tells us a haunting version of the events through his crackling loudspeaker, about how Johnny was high on bath salts. I just remember how hard it was to get the stains out of the bedroom; I ended up taking out patches of drywall.

“Why did Esteban Morales have to die? Was it because of what happened with me?”

Ramen sighs. “That was just one thing in a long line of issues between Mikey and him. So don't feel like it was your fault in the least. Esteban just had a long overdue date with the Reaper. I don't agree with how Mikey—”

“Why aren't you on IMDb?” I interrupt. “Your name—your real name isn't listed anywhere on the site. I thought Mikey had it wiped, but now I don't know what to think.”

Ramen's emotions shift quickly across his face as he processes this blindsiding of information. “You saw that, huh?” he asks finally. “Tom, you're pretty sharp, so I guess I should have known you would. I haven't been entirely truthful with you—and I know I said I would be, but this hasn't exactly come up as something I've needed to be honest about. I'm a producer in this town like most of the people are.” He hangs his head. “I work for Mikey; I dress the part, I look the part, I get to drive around in his kick-ass car, but technically I don't produce anything. Not yet, at least. That's maybe why I'm so ingrained with Mikey—he's kinda giving me my break. I mean, I went to film school, but I'm not fully legit just yet. Right now, I'm more like a…personal assistant.”

“That makes a lot more sense.” I nod.

“I promise—I'll level with you if anything like that comes up going forward. I just wanted to be a big shot, you know?”

“I get that. This town is all about appearances, right?”

“So you won't rat me out if we're, say, hanging out somewhere and I call myself a producer to impress the ladies?”

“Your secret is safe with me,” I promise, earning me a sort of small hug from the man, who perks right back up.

“You know what I don't like about this tour? It skips Wonderland,” Ramen says after a beat, annoyed. “I've brought it up to Roy several times, but he's done dick about it. Skipping it is a real injustice.”

“What's Wonderland?”

“Oh, Tom, man, you have got to learn some appreciation for your craft. Wonderland is one of the all-time great murder scenes in Hollywood lore. You know John Holmes at least, yeah?”

“Porn star? Big dick?” I ask.

“Huge dick. HUGE. It looked like a boa constrictor trying to swallow a peach. Lucky bastard. Well, he was also a notorious Roy-style druggie who was always posting freebies off people. Not an uncommon attitude for actors in this town. But back in '81, Holmes was hanging out with a crew at a house on Wonderland Avenue, up in the hills. And he tells them about this house they can rob to get more money for drugs. So they rob the house, which belonged to this shady nightclub owner—a guy named Eddie Nash. Well, the story goes that Nash figured out scumbag John Holmes was involved, right? So he gets Holmes to leave the gate open at the Wonderland house and then Nash's people went in and killed everyone there. John Holmes totally skated on the whole thing. But it's an epic story and that it's not a part of this tour is a goddamn tragedy.”