High Life (20 page)

She laughed.

“It wasn’t an opportunity I could pass up.”

She led me back into the bedroom and began brushing her hair.

“What are you doing?”

“I have work to take care of.”

“What work? It’s almost twelve.”

“Some results I need to check before tomorrow. I’ll be gone a few hours, don’t wait up.”

She showered quickly and left the suite.

It wasn’t what I’d expected on my first night in her house, but then she hadn’t known I was coming. I lit a cigarette and lay in the dark thinking.

Both Bella and Powell were involved in the homeless medical care thing. Neither of them had said anything about kidneys, but if the operations were for real it seemed a fair guess that they would both be involved in those too.

A doctor who took out kidneys and who was also one of the clients Karen spent extended time with …

Joey had said he’d been examined by a woman, but after the anesthetic came down he wouldn’t have known who did the actual cutting—Powell’s messenger-boy act would have fooled him the same as it did me. So who had Karen been fucking? Powell? Certainly his age and general creepiness wouldn’t have stopped her if there was money to be had. But then I couldn’t rule out Bella either—she didn’t strike me as a woman who placed limits on her sexual menu. And to Karen, cock and cunt were all the same as long as they were equally financed.

What clinched it for me was the tattoo. Karen’s had first appeared when she came home from some stay-over fuck job. Bella said she’d had hers done with a friend. Identical designs. It had to be more than coincidence. And you don’t go out with someone and get the exact same picture unless you have a pretty strong attachment to them.

If that made Bella the sex partner, did it also mean she was involved in the killing? Lovers waste each other all the time, but I couldn’t see what reason Bella would have for murdering Karen. She’d already got her kidney, after all. And even if Karen came back and started hassling her about the operation, maybe trying to blackmail extra cash, one glance was all it would have taken to know there was no way she’d make good on any threat of going to the police—she just wasn’t that kind of person. Still, there could be a whole load of shit I didn’t know anything about.

In the absence of knowing any of that shit, however, two things made Powell a better bet as killer. He could produce spunk and, for some reason, he hated Bella’s lovers. Which meant the jism they found in Karen’s guts could have been his, and that maybe he had a motive for the killing.

Of course it could have been a double act—daddy and daughter cooperating in an operation that went a bit too far—but from the vibe between them I didn’t think that was likely. There was too much antagonism there, too much vicious jousting to figure
cooperation
was a word they used very often.

I ran my head in circles for an hour trying to figure it out, but I didn’t have enough info to feel conclusive about anything. All I got was a panic attack over the thought that, if Bella did turn out to be the killer, things might go terribly wrong before I had a chance to benefit from my association with her.

Chapter Twenty

Morning light woke me. The windows were open and let in a breeze that carried a taste of the sea. Bella stood next to the bed, she was fully dressed and looked too fresh to have spent all night working.

“I was hoping you’d wake up before I left.”

“Where are you going?”

“I own a clinic in Brentwood.”

“The place Powell took me?”

“No. This one is more orthodox.”

“You work full-time?”

“Just the odd day here and there. It keeps me current.”

“Even though you don’t have to?”

“It has its compensations.” Bella smiled suggestively. “Will you stay here until I get back?”

“Sure. Can I use the pool?”

“Of course. And call Welks.”

She handed me a business card.

“What time did you come to bed?”

“Late.”

An hour or so later I dragged my ass out of bed, had a shower and wandered through the ground floor until I found a room with open French windows and a table laid with breakfast. Cereal, fruit, pastries, and coffee for one. The trappings of wealth around me made me feel a little slovenly at being the last to rise.

I ate the pastries and drank the coffee and smoked a couple of cigarettes. There was no TV in the room and after a while I got bored, so I took the French windows and went out to look at the grounds. I was at one side of the house and the garden there was just fifty yards of deep grass bordered by woodland. Thick ferns grew at the edge of the trees. I kicked my way into them, wondering if Arnold Schwarzenegger’s estate was anything like this. I’d seen Leibovitz’s photos of him on a white horse and had always figured his home life must be set against some transplanted Bavarian forest.

The sun had burned the dew off the tops of the ferns, but underneath they were shaded and my shoes came away wet as I shuffled through them. It was a childish thing to do, like running through autumn leaves, but who was there to see me? I hadn’t seen one servant yet, and Powell was probably occupied mixing up his morning shot. Besides, I liked the sound it made.

And then my right foot got stuck in a dead dog.

I dragged it out onto an open patch of lawn and twisted my shoe clear of the soggy mess of flesh and bone that had been its rib cage. Once, when I was a kid, I found the carcass of a drowned dog floating in a creek. Someone had gotten to it before me and jammed a piece of wood up its ass and the skin there was torn and fluttered in the current like tissue paper. It had given me a hard-on because I knew whoever had done it must have been turned on too. But this dog looked different. It looked like it had died in pain. The skin of its muzzle was desiccated and drawn back and its eyes had been eaten out. It must have been in the undergrowth some time.

The animal corpse worried me. There were feral dogs in the hills all around L.A. and one of them could easily have picked this place to jump off from for doggie heaven. But I didn’t think that was the case here. This dog was a domestic animal and it hadn’t chosen anything. Someone had cut it open from groin to chest and pulled its guts out into the air.

I kicked it back into the brush and walked round to the back of the house. Powell was on the far side of the pool, dressed in a dark, conservatively cut suit, staring at some clouds moving across the sky. I called out good morning, but he didn’t respond, just fish-eyed me for a few seconds then turned his head back to the sky. I couldn’t be bothered with that kind of shit so early in the morning so I sat in a chair near one of the pillars that ringed the pool, pointed myself toward the sun, and closed my eyes.

A couple of minutes later a shadow fell across me. Powell, of course, standing there like he was contemplating sticking something sharp into me.

“Come with me, I want to show you something.”

In some room on the ground floor, sitting on opposite sides of a low table, a photo album between us, closed.

Powell touched the book like it was a treasure he took pride in owning. He had long slim fingers.

“You expect your relationship with Bella to last?”

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“Look at these.”

He opened the album and turned pages, holding them so I could see. The pictures were all of Bella. They started off with a run of mid-teen shots. She wore tight jeans and bathing suits. They weren’t the type of photos you’d expect a father to take of his daughter. Some things were too obvious—young labia separated by a crotch seam, bending rear shots, a hint of pubic hair around a bikini, nipples visible through a thin T-shirt. But Bella seemed natural enough, as though she were unaware of the focus of the camera.

In the next set she was a few years older, naked and posed—a series of glamour-mag copyings in which she either flaunted her body with full-frontal pride, or looked bored.

“I took them all myself. Look further.”

He pushed the book across the table to me and I flipped pages into porn territory—legs spread, cunt held open, ass exposed, fingers and other objects inside both holes. From her early twenties to the present. And in all of them Bella looked like she was brandishing a weapon, controlling whatever dynamic existed between her and Powell when the camera came out.

Powell took the book back and closed it.

“Do they shock you?”

“Nothing there I haven’t already seen.”

His jaw muscles tightened.

“But you find it strange, do you not, that I should take such pictures?”

“I wouldn’t call it exactly normal.”

“Bella was a willing participant in all but the earliest of them. This estate, my friend, is not the place to look for normality. It is a world within a world, a private universe, and in it we have lived lives outside the rules that govern yours. If you think Bella is just another woman to bed, someone who behaves in an essentially similar manner to the trash you are used to, then you are very much mistaken.”

“You’re trying to frighten me, right?”

“It will be interesting to see how long you maintain that bravado.” Powell stood. “I am going to the city. Shall I leave the photographs with you?”

I looked up at him, at the poisoned hardness of his junked eyes, and I knew Bella had been right when she said he hated me.

After he’d gone I pulled Howard Welks’s card out and found a phone. But I hesitated—the thought of calling the boss of a TV station for a job made me nervous. I punched Rex’s number instead.

“Guess where I’m calling from.”

“Who’s this?”

“Jack.”

“Oh.”

Rex sounded like there was nothing left inside him. He also sounded more than a little stoned.

“I’m in Malibu, man. At that woman’s house. Jesus, you should see the place.”

“What woman?”

“The one I got dumped out of the agency for. I tracked her down.”

“Jack, is this, like, a joke?”

“A joke? Shit no, it’s real. What do you mean?”

“You don’t think it’s kind of inappropriate, considering the situation.”

“Fuck, man, it was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I still killed him.”

“Yeah, I know. And no one’s saying it wasn’t an awful thing to have happened. To you and to him.”

“But I bet you don’t think about it much.”

“What do you want me to say, for Christsake? I’m not going to make it the central fact of my life.”

“Well, it’s the central fucking fact of mine.”

“Maybe you should talk about it with your doctor. You know, get some counseling.”

“That won’t bring him back to fucking life, will it?”

“What are you going to do, then? I mean, it sounds like you need to do something, man.”

“You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to have another hit, then I’m going to take a page out of your book, Jack. I’m just going to pretend it never fucking happened. How’s that?”

He broke the connection before I could think of a comeback.

The next phone call I made went a little better.

Howard Welks was in a meeting, but he’d left word with his secretary and she routed the call through to some guy named Larry Burns who turned out to be head of production. Burns wasn’t overjoyed about having to make space for a new presenter, particularly one with zero experience, and he worked hard at finding a reason to kill things before they got started. But I’d been following the lives of the stars too long to fuck up on any of his questions, and in the end he told me to come in the next day for a dry run in front of the camera.

When I put the phone down my hand was shaking. Two months ago I’d been struggling to make ends meet serving dough-nuts to truck drivers and process workers. Now I had a chance at what everyone in L.A. wanted—visual exposure. A chance to become someone other people wanted to be.

I knew it had nothing to do with me. If I made it onto TV it would be due to Bella’s financial power and nothing else. But what did I care? As long as I got a fast car, a place in the hills, and my picture on the pages of magazines, nothing else mattered. Even so, the thought of walking into a studio full of technicians and cameramen made me feel distinctly edgy.

But then, that’s what drugs are for.

I swam nude in the pool, then lay with my back against one of the columns and caught some sun. The clouds Powell had been staring at earlier had disappeared and the sky was the kind of blue Californian license plates used to be. Above the trees the slash of visible ocean glittered distantly.

Later I got dressed and went around the front of the house to the Prelude. The last set of photos Ryan had given me was still in the glove compartment. I took them upstairs to Bella’s suite and sat on the bed and looked at them—plastic-bag lovers, dead rubber bodies joined by a dick. After a while I went into the bathroom and had a wank over the sink.

I spent the rest of the day in front of a TV smoking and catching up on current affairs.

After surviving surgery to remove a brain tumor, Elizabeth Taylor was now facing diabetes. Leonardo DiCaprio had been snapped eating organic popcorn during breaks from work on
Titanic
and, on the set of
Michael,
Nicolas Cage helped with a birthday surprise for John Travolta. Later, John dropped four-point-seven big ones on a mansion and twenty-five K on a party where he celebrated with Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, Sharon Stone, Priscilla Presley, and Dustin Hoffman.

Bella came home around five. We fucked and had dinner and sat out by the pool.

“Powell and I had a chat this morning after you’d gone.”

“That must have been edifying.”

“He showed me some photos.”

Bella sighed.

“His private collection, I suppose.”

“I imagine.”

“What did you think?”

“Sexy.”

“You know why he showed them to you, don’t you?”

“I guess he thought it’d put me off.”

“He’s a consummate bastard.”

“You mind that I’ve seen them?”

“I mind the way they were shown to you.”

In the twilight the water in the pool looked beautiful.

“Feel like a swim?”

Bella shook her head and held her hand out to me.

“Come on. This can’t happen again.”

Up in the video room we sat in black leather chairs. Bella selected a tape from the hidden cupboard and fizzed a monitor into life. A succession of clips, all of them looking like they’d been shot in the house. Bella and Powell fucking, a variety of positions, most of them extreme. Nothing tender—not rape, but definitely not love—more like combat.

“What do you think?”

“He’s got a big dick.”

“Jesus, Jack, these are now. It’s still happening. I wasn’t working last night, I was fucking him.”

“Oh …”

“I’ve been doing it since I was sixteen.”

“He forced you?”

Bella’s smile made me feel naïve.

“He didn’t have to. My mother was killed in a car accident when I was fifteen. Powell was driving. He was drugged, as usual, and he ran into the side of a truck—he might as well have murdered her. The opportunity for revenge was too good to pass up.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’d let him do it, then deny him for weeks, sometimes months. It drove him out of his mind. And once I’d had a taste of that kind of power I wasn’t about to give it up. He was powerless against me. He couldn’t even threaten me financially because my mother had been the one with money and had left most of it to me. On top of that, it was a thrill.”

“It turned you on?”

“Not the way you mean. But testing how far I can go has always excited me.”

“What about now? It can’t still be a thrill.”

“Manipulating another person is addictive.”

“But it’s been going on what, fifteen years?”

“On and off. But you’re right, control for control’s sake is ultimately pointless.”

“Then why?”