Hidden Bodies (48 page)

My mind swirls. Brian doesn’t exist. There is no Brian. But Love answered the question. What did she say? This is like in
Magnolia
when the kid breaks down. I am cracking under
pressure and Detective Carr knows it. He knocks his phone against the table and this is the sound of my life ending.

“Are you thirsty?” Detective Carr nudges the water toward me. “Go ahead,” he says. “Trust me, we didn’t slip anything in there.”

I look at him and I am doing it again, digging my own grave. Does he know about the cactus? Was there a camera at the house? Was there a camera in the sky? A drone? He sips his water.
“When did Love meet Brian?” he asks. “Did she meet him before you left town to do the movie? Or did she meet him in Palm Springs?”

He could be lying. Love could have refused to answer the question. She might be playing the same game as I am. I try to imagine that I am Love, pregnant, in love, and there is a man asking me
questions and if I say the wrong thing, the man I love so much will be gone. My heart beats faster and faster, and I wish I could carry it around in a rolling suitcase. It’s annoying, the way
it’s connected to my other bodily functions, the way my little motherfucker pores allow sweat to weep upon my forehead, the way my asshole pupils shrink and expand and I can’t control
them. I’m not a fucking sociopath.

Detective Carr puts his feet up on the desk again. “Joe,” he says. “What was Brian’s last name? Love can’t remember. Do you remember?”

Edmund looks at me meaningfully. “No,” I say. “I don’t remember.”

I don’t remember.
The magic words, according to my attorney, according to Love. If I just keep saying I don’t remember things, I will be out of here soon. I will not let
Detective Carr break me. Love and I shouldn’t be playing the
Newlywed Game
. We’re not even married yet. I will my heart to take it easy and I sip the water and I can’t
wait for this session to be over. I look forward to returning to my cage. I feel empowered when I’m in there, locked up.

Love is the key to happiness in life, and I have no doubt that it will set me free. Love, and Edmund, that’s all I need and I have it all, and I know that if I believe in Love and play by
the rules—
say nothing, remember nothing, say as little as possible, say nothing
—I know I will be out of here soon, watching my child break out of Love’s vagina, my
favorite place in the world.

If Love were here, in this room, she would wrap her arms around me and tell me why she hates Brian, what his last name is, share with me all the elaborate and specific details of when and where
they met, how he offended her. I know it’s ludicrous to say such a thing. After all, Brian doesn’t exist. They never met. I invented him so I could get access to one of the boats. So
because there is no such
thing
as Brian, there is nothing for Love to know. And yet I know she would know because that’s the thing about feeling so connected to someone, so
entrenched, so attached. I believe she knows me better than I know myself, and hopefully I know her as well too.

“Joe,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“How did Love and Brian meet?”

I say nothing. What would Love say?

“What’s his last name?”

I say nothing. What would Love say?

“Why does she hate this guy?”

I say nothing. What would Love say? I know Love and I have to believe in myself right now. I have to walk out onto the plank and I have to jump. I stop sweating. My heart resets and my pores
rest. This is it.

“First of all,” I begin. “I barely know that Brian guy. And the thing is, Love doesn’t hate him.”

He swallows and it’s an unmistakable sign that I passed the test. Love told the cops the same thing and I remember her exact words in the pool that day, talking about Sam the work bitch,
our conversation in Little Compton about Forty.
I don’t hate anyone
, she said. When you love someone, you listen. You remember it all.

“Truthfully,” I say. “Love doesn’t really hate anybody.”

He clenches his jaw. “Yeah,” he says. “So I heard.”

Inside, I pump my fist. I knew it. I know her. I love her.

But most people in love face obstacles and here is ours, Detective Carr, back again, firing away: “But you told Captain Dave that Love hates this guy. Why?”

“I didn’t want to go here. Ray and Dottie have been through enough . . .” I work up some tears. My lawyer asks for a minute but I say no. “Look, Detective, I can’t
stress this enough. I’d rather Ray and Dottie not know that Forty was involved in this, but well, fuck. Brian was Forty’s friend,” I say, and it’s the money shot, my
would-have-been-brother-in-law saving me from the great beyond. “I just met him in Cabo. He and Forty got really fucked up and Forty didn’t want to just leave him out there, but he was
too fucked up to deal with it himself.” I shrug. “I was just trying to do him a solid.”

“Why not let him crash at the party? La Groceria has more than a few spare bedrooms.” Detective Carr is the one sweating now, drumming his fingers on the table. And this is the
beauty of reasonable doubt. He may suspect that I’m making this all up, but at the end of the day, he can’t prove that and Forty’s not around to tell him differently.

“Because it was our wrap party,” I say. “It wasn’t a free-for-all.”

“Who else met this Brian? Anyone
alive
, I mean?” he asks.

I shrug. “I don’t remember.”

I was worried I would sound sarcastic, like a senator’s son at a date rape trial, but I didn’t. I pulled it off. I took a leap of faith and made an educated guess on what Love said
and I guessed correctly. I did it. We did it. Detective Carr is standing, irritated. He says it’s odd the way I know so many people who
don’t fucking exist anymore
and I let
him rant. I don’t tell him that the last person who said that to me wound up dead.

I have my priorities in order: Love comes first, above all. She is patient and kind as the Corinthians say and I bring patience and kindness into this room as I watch this poor bastard pace.
He’s older than me, more tired; he probably lives in Torrance, in some house full of Bud Light and expired coupons and firearms and soiled diapers. It can’t be easy, being a cop in
California and he’s not very photogenic or articulate. I bet he never wanted to be an actor and I bet he wasn’t even in love with his wife when he proposed to her. I bet he was just
with her and I bet she was dropping hints and I bet he was one of those guys who proposes because he’s thirty, because he figures it’s time to get married and settle down. I bet there
was no love in his heart when he got down on one knee and asked the girl to marry him, not any more than usual, I mean.

“You can’t tell me
anything
else about this Brian?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “For all I know, that wasn’t even his real name.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“I’m not fucking with you,” I say. “I met him briefly. He was Forty’s friend and Forty knew some shady people, you know. He did drugs, he got around.”

“It’s bad luck to speak ill of the dead.”

“I’m not speaking ill,” I say. “I’m trying to help you guys out.”

Detective Carr sits in his chair. In a way I think it would be terrible to live in LA devoid of aspirations. How would you do it? How would you put up with the traffic and the monotony of the
sun, the way people use the word
hella
and lie so freely? How could you stand it here if you weren’t striving for something better? Oh that’s right; he liked
The Wolf of
Wall Street.
He aspires to take someone down like me, a
serial killer.
But he chose the wrong guy. I am done with all that. And I will not let my past dictate my future.

He rubs his forehead. “You know, Joe,” he says. “We have all of our officers looking for Brian. You do know that we will find him. We’re gonna make sure he’s okay.
We’re checking hotel records and we’re gonna find out all of it, who he was, what you did with him, why.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and I feel bad for him. He’s so close. And he’s going to get closer. He’ll come in here tomorrow talking about
The Godfather Part III
and
asking me if I heard about a cop disappearing in Mexico, a guy named Fincher who also visited the set of
Boots and Puppies.
But the thing is, it’s all circumstantial evidence.
It’s not enough to keep me here. I was very good at killing people when I needed to be.

Was.
The past tense. I’m retired.

And really, when you grow up, and get over yourself, when you
fuck narcissism
and leave the hashtags at the door, you see what really matters in life. What matters is what you do next.
I get it. And this is America. You have to prove that someone did something and they can’t prove that I did anything.

In
Fast Five
, Dom is in a prison bus, glum. His friends force the bus to crash so they can free him. But my team doesn’t have to do that for me. They won’t be able to
convict me or get me on a bus because there is no evidence of my past actions. Well, aside from the baby growing inside of Love.

Prison isn’t that bad and I treasure the solitude. From everything I know about parenting, I expect that in a few months, I’ll be glad I got to spend some time alone before becoming
a father. We all need to be with our thoughts. Angelenos like to meditate and stare at expensive statues of Buddha, and I stare at the cement. Same difference. I learn to smile at everyone and I
feel the world reciprocate.

The guards are polite. And then when I’m not alone, I’m in the room. I kind of like it in there, the way Detective Carr challenges me every day. My lawyer says I’m
damn
good
under pressure. This is all great research for my screenwriting career and I can see myself writing a movie that takes place during a trial. I use this time to learn how to become the
best possible father, to figure out how to provide for my family
.
One day Love and I will be buried together or cremated, I haven’t decided yet, and Detective Carr will undoubtedly
spend eternity in a plot selected by his controlling wife.

“Don’t move,” Detective Carr says. He leaves and this is the most awkward time for me, when I am the most afraid for my safety, when I know they are watching me, studying my
face, trying so hard to figure me out, talking shit about me, speculating. I have no phone to play with, no TV to watch. I look into the orb that connects me to them. I wait. In my head, I recite
Corinthians;
Love is patient, love is kind.

This is how you get away with murder, how you get out of the interrogation room—a woman cop comes for me
okay, let’s move you back
—and this how you get escorted into
the safety of your cell, locked up, left alone to recover from the day’s needling, to dream of what might come tomorrow or the next day. You believe in love. It really is all you need,
although yes, a solid defense attorney helps too. But I do believe in love, in Love, and when it’s time, I will hold our baby. The thought soothes me and the mattress feels softer.

Life puts you in cage so that you’ll treasure your freedom, how lucky you were to be running on a beach, the way your girlfriend looked over her shoulder at you, the ring you did not
fashion out of a straw. All time is good. No time is hard, not if you think of it as time to celebrate love.

I roll over into the fetal position and I think of my child, in the same position, so much younger, unconscious, gestating, serving time just like Daddy, waiting. It doesn’t fully exist
yet, but Love and I created a human, a boy or a girl, we don’t know, can’t know. It’s too early. You could say the same thing about my fate. The future is a frontier we
can’t fully explore until we make it there, but then we arrive, and the distant horizon has become something else, something less romantic. It’s just the present—the mattress
coils in my back, the bars on my cell, Love waiting for me to come home.

You think about this stuff in jail so you don’t go crazy. You realize your intuition is stronger than science, truer than a molecule. I feel it in my caged gut. I will be free soon. I also
know that we’re going to have a baby girl. I don’t have to close my eyes to see her, a little version of Love with my dark irises on her heart-shaped face. I smile. We exist. We are
both on a journey and we are both in love and that’s all anyone can hope for in life.

IT’S
time to thank all the people who worked zealously to bring this book into your hands. Everyone at Emily Bestler Books, Atria, and Simon
& Schuster, I thank you. My editors Emily Bestler and Megan Reid ask smart questions. Line for line, you care and invest. I am continuously awestruck. I count my blessings for Josh Bank, Lanie
Davis, and Sara Shandler at Alloy Entertainment. Your eyes and ears mean the world to me. You get it.
☺
I’m grateful to Les Morgenstein, Judith Curr, David Brown, and Jo Dickinson. You
are champions. Natalie Sousa, thank you for your astounding ability to tell a story with images. Santino Fontana, thank you for your voice.

Big thanks to the WME team. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Claudia Ballard, Laura Bonner, Maggie Shapiro, and Katie Giarla, you make wonderful things happen.

To my mom: You have always made me feel like everything I write is an event, like it matters. You are brave and honest. Thank you for saying
hmmm.

To my dad: Thank you for your voice. You are always with me. Your clarity and your chutzpah, your poetic nature and your love of words, you live on.

I love the world of books. It’s a joy to connect with readers, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, authors, journalists, and podcasters. The bright side of technology is a tweet from
someone who was up all night reading your book. I love you guys for reaching out to ask for more Joe.

Finally, I raise my glass of vodka to my beloved friends and family. You crack me up. You make me think. Thank you for believing in me. Thank you for your love.