High Life (30 page)
Malibu. I hadn’t slept and the room with the French windows alongside the pool stank of cigarette smoke and strong coffee gone cold. Outside, though, the sky was a crisp blue—one of the first cool days on the slopes above the sea—and everything looked fresh. I’d called in sick on a shoot to be there. Lorn could handle it alone, but it wouldn’t do me much good with the channel—a measure, I suppose, of how urgent I thought it was that I talk to Bella about sex with kidneys and Ryan’s latest discovery.
She came home midmorning. If she was surprised to find me sitting there, covered with ash, watching TV on a set I’d dragged in from somewhere else in the house, she didn’t show it. In fact, it looked like she expected to find me there. She settled next to me on the couch, thigh to thigh, perfect white legs stretching long out of a short black skirt.
“You were there last night. You saw what I did.”
“Sorry about the door.”
“Why didn’t you wait for me? You must have had questions you wanted to ask.”
“I didn’t want to do it with Powell around. Where is he?”
“Keeping an eye on the recovery. Finding a donor last night was an attempt to reestablish himself with me. Don’t worry, it won’t work.”
“Your story about giving kidneys to hospitals was a lie.”
“Are you terribly surprised?”
“I’m wondering what else you do that you haven’t told me about.”
“What do you mean?” Bella looked shocked. “I’m not a monster or some sort of serial killer. What you saw last night is everything.”
“You told me you weren’t qualified as a surgeon. That must go double for kidneys.”
“Powell is a good teacher, when he’s forced to be. No one is in any danger. But you want to know why.”
“It would help.”
“I like it. I like doing it. When I take a kidney out of someone I change them forever. Physiologically it’s far more profound than rape. And it takes a monumental effort of will—to go against the law, to go against everything we’re taught about not hurting people. It’s a test. It’s a test of skill. It’s a test of courage. It’s like I take a torch and shine it into the darkest part of my soul. Everyone has secret thoughts, thoughts of murder and torture, but they won’t admit to them. Or if they do they pretend they’re a momentary aberration, something separate from the person they consider themselves to be. But we are the sum of our thoughts, Jack, whether we admit to them or not, and the most potent of those thoughts are the ones we prefer to keep hidden. I’ve found a safe way to access them, that’s all.”
“It all sounds so reasonable.”
“You’re not convinced?”
“What I saw was too primal for that kind of language.”
“All right. What I said was true, but if you want it in different terms: I do it because I can’t fucking live without it. Some people like pissing and whipping and bondage and animals. I like cutting kidneys out and masturbating with them. It gets me off. It’s the only thing that does what it does to me. Is that a better explanation?”
“Ryan knows about the operations.”
Bella had been steaming along with her little speech, but that slowed her down a tad. She looked ill. Her mouth worked silently.
“Not what you actually do with the kidneys, but the whole donor thing. He pulled me over while I was out yesterday.”
When Bella spoke her voice sounded thin.
“How could he possibly know anything about them?”
“He found a guy you operated on, a bar owner or something. Maybe he identified you. It wouldn’t be hard for Ryan to get a picture of you somewhere.”
“I never uncover my face in front of the donors.”
“You did with that girl Karen. If she’s still around somewhere he might have got it out of her. She saw your face, she knows where you live. Do you think she might have talked?”
I watched Bella closely as I said this, but her reaction was only what would have been natural if she thought Karen was alive.
“No. If she’s spent all her money she might try to get more by selling the information. But she’d sell it to me, she knows I’d give her whatever she wanted.”
“At least it figures why he was at your clinic showing pictures of her.”
She put her face in her hands and was silent a while. Then she lifted her head and looked intently at me. Her eyes glittered with buried excitement.
“Why did he tell you? About the operations. Why would he let you know he’d found out? He must know you’d tell me.”
“Of course.”
“He’s thinking of blackmail again. That’s all it is. Thank god …”
“That makes you happy?”
“When the alternative is going to jail, yes.”
“It won’t be fifty thousand this time.”
“The more he asks for, the deeper he’ll be getting himself. But I don’t understand how he found out about the operations in the first place.”
Bella put her head back against the cushions of the couch and stared at the ceiling. I lit another cigarette and wondered how long it would be until she caught me in my lies.
A day later Lorn and I finished a piece on a penis-implant clinic and the more high-profile of its clients. I’d been rocking up in the breaks between taping and was pretty fritzed, I needed to make it to a bar and booze off the edges until I could find something more effective. Lorn told me to forget it, that she had Librium at her place—an apartment in a court off Melrose.
Vodka and pills, one way to kill the end of an afternoon. Another is by fucking, which we did for the first time in her bathroom after I walked in while she was finishing up a piss. After that we did it in her bed. The walls were a collage of magazine cutouts, lacquered so close together there was no space between them—every Hollywood star under thirty-five. It looked like the inside of my head.
It goes without saying that screwing the anchorwoman of a show in which I participated purely as a result of Bella’s influence was a potentially dangerous thing to do, stupid even. What can I say? It was a hot day, I was out of it, I’d wanted to fuck her since I met her.
We’d grown closer working together, Lorn and I, after all we had a lot in common—we’d both lucked into the media and found it the only world whose reality was worth having. Our humping that day might have been largely due to boredom and blood chemistry augmentation, but there was something within each of us that recognized a key part of the other.
Bella had fish in a sauce with herbs and a selection of undercooked vegetables, I had steak and a bottle of wine—all of it prepared by invisible hands and waiting for us when we came down from upstairs. Candles burned in the lingering twilight. Our table stood on the flagging between her house and the pool. The white columns around the water were lit and the scene made me think of a European set for a Jackie Collins miniseries. Rome or Monte Carlo, maybe. We crooned endearments to each other.
Until Ryan waddled around a corner, dragged up a chair, and helped himself to a drink.
“Don’t look so surprised, Beauty. You must have known I’d be paying you another visit. Got anything else? I don’t like wine.”
“You shouldn’t be drinking.”
“It’s nice you’re concerned, but save the doctor shit for the suckers who don’t mind losing a kidney.”
“Jack told me you had the strangest notion.”
“Notion nothing. You’re performing illegal operations. There’s no two ways about it.”
“You have a videotape?”
“I got a witness.”
Bella laughed.
“Maybe he can’t pick your face, but that don’t make what he saw any less useable. Leastwise for me. How does an Egyptian beetle sound? Right in the small of your beautiful back?”
“It sounds like something anyone with the price of a tattoo might have.”
“I don’t want to flatter you unduly, but not a lot of people have a body like yours. I guess my witness would recognize it if we stripped you down in front of him. The way he tells it he got a pretty good look. And then there’s the guy who picked him up. Distinctive silver hair, easy to ID. I checked some old newspaper photos back when your father had that accident with your mom. He was gray even then. Plus, he wasn’t wearing a mask when he talked my friend into selling his kidney. You got a black Jag registered in your name?”
“No.”
“How about Dad?”
“No.”
“Yeah, I already checked. But I bet if I went looking it wouldn’t be too hard to find. Might even be in the garage here.”
“Have a look.”
“I don’t need to, do I? You already know I got enough. So, here’s the plan …”
It wasn’t what either of us was expecting. It wasn’t just money. It was way worse than that. On top of a million bucks, he wanted to come and live at Malibu. He wanted to share our lives.
“Not forever, of course. A coupla months, say. Shit, the place is big enough, it’s not like we’d be in each other’s pockets. Don’t you think it’d be fun? We could all go out places together. Whaddya say?”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?” Bella’s voice was cold.
“Well, see, when you give me that million I can’t exactly go out and start blowing it, can I? Not a fifty-year-old cop. People would talk. But with you I can walk into any place and all they’ll think is I got lucky with my cock.”
“You don’t need to live here for that.”
“But it’d be so much nicer. See, what I want is the same thing I figure old Jackie here wants—Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. You know? Restaurants, premieres, charity parties like Steven Spielberg goes to. Those kinda things you need connections. And I know you got connections, Beauty.”
Bella didn’t have much choice, she knew he had enough to fuck her up. So she said yes—yes to the million, yes to him living at Malibu. And she didn’t say no when he put his hand between her legs and started stroking her thigh.
Later, Ryan split for home, saying he’d pick up some things and move in tomorrow. I walked down to the gate with him. He’d had to haul his fat ass over it to get in without us knowing, and his car was parked on the road.
“What are you doing, Ryan?”
“Gee, Jackie, I thought I explained. Beauty looked like she got it.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You can figure the money, but not the moving in.”
“Unless it’s just to piss me off.”
“You know what a hidden agenda is? Like the politicians have? That’s what I got.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I ain’t forgotten Karen. That bitch up there is hiding something and the closer I am to her the easier it’s going to be to find out what it is.”
“Isn’t that shooting yourself in the foot? Look what she’s giving you.”
“I liked Karen.”
“I could tell Bella what you’re up to.”
“And I could tell her about you. I bet she don’t know you two were married. I bet you ain’t even told her you knew each other.”
“Of course I haven’t.”
“So if I tell her different she won’t like you so much maybe. Don’t be dumb, Jackie. There’s no point in fucking each other up before we have to. You want something out of her? I don’t have a problem with that. As long as you don’t get in my way.”
Ryan winked and got into his car. Before he pulled away he wound down the window like he’d just remembered something.
“I checked what you said about the kidneys, that she gives them to welfare hospitals? Don’t happen. There ain’t that many on this side of L.A. and none of them ever received anonymously donated organs. I hope you’re playing straight with me, Jackie boy.”
So a pretty bizarre time started. Bella put Ryan in a suite on the other side of the house, gave him a suitcase full of money and a set of keys. During the day things ran on the same as they always had—Bella hit her Brentwood clinic a couple of afternoons a week and I backed up Lorn on reports for
28 FPS
and did a few solo slots. Ryan got on with whatever pig business he had happening at the time. But downtime, that’s when the new situation really showed itself.
Bella’s preference was to stay home most nights, but Ryan was hot to get a taste of society. So every evening those first few weeks the three of us were out dining and turning up at glitzoid parties from the Malibu beach front to the Hollywood hills. I didn’t mind the socializing, it was all more California to me, but the way he jammed himself next to Bella was a major pisser.
I didn’t spend much time at Willow Glen around then. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of Ryan and Bella alone together, consequently I had to suffer the greater part of his onslaught. The time after our outings was generally the sickest—him, Bella, and me in a knot on the floor, or bed, or by the pool, or wherever else the connection occurred, grunting away at each other in a kind of incestuous frenzy. Bella had let him fuck her as soon as he moved in and Ryan had never looked back. He sweated and popped nitro and rolled around in an ecstasy of dreams come true. And didn’t notice that Bella lay underneath him completely self-contained, unaffected by his penetrations, even by his presence in the house, it seemed.
Sometimes I’d leave them to it, rock up some coke in the microwave, and smoke it out in the garden. Other times I’d sit and watch them writhe. Ryan got a lot out of the sex—a beautiful woman with an incredible amount of money, she was as much a badge to him as she was to me.
“Aren’t we two lucky guys?”
We were alone drinking coffee by the pool. Bella was out and Powell still hadn’t shown his face at Malibu since the first kidney operation. Ryan wore a white toweling robe and sat close to me. I could see fine black hairs against the pallid skin of his calves.
“Whaddya say, Jackie, are we sitting pretty, or what?”
“She isn’t stupid, she’ll figure out why you’re here.”
“If she’s guilty she’s gotta know already. But what’s she gonna do? Call the police? Take my money back? Don’t worry, Jackie. Her running scared will only be good for us.”
“For you. It won’t do me a shit of good.”
Regular sex must have softened him because he smiled then like he really didn’t want me to feel so bad.
“Look, I gotta admit I’m getting kinda fond of Beauty. I’m not going to do anything unnecessary.”
“Fond? You’re blackmailing her, for fucksake.”
“Things don’t always finish the way they start. I think she’s into me too.”
“Oh, Jesus …”
“Hey, you don’t fuck the way she does without feeling something.”
“I guess you’re not after her for Karen anymore, then.”
“I said I wouldn’t do anything unnecessary, but if she’s the one, then she’s the one. But I been thinking about what you said about her father. It’d be a nice solution—Bella skates, you’re happy, I’m happy, justice gets done, the money keeps coming … Persuade me.”
So off we went, Ryan still in his robe, tramping through the undergrowth at the edge of the grounds. Until we found the carcass of a dog. By then it was just a collection of eaten-out bones wrapped in skin.
“I found another one the first time I came here.”
Ryan squatted beside it and poked it with a stick.
“Sorry, Jackie, this don’t tell me much. It’s too far gone. Impossible to determine the exact nature of the wounds. You say they were the same as Karen’s, but then you would.”
“Doesn’t it tell you something about him? Bella said he does it when he gets jealous—”
“We must be pissing him off plenty then.”
“Are you listening to me? A guy who does this because his daughter’s fucking someone obviously has a major problem. Don’t you think it’s conceivable it could have something to do with what happened to Karen?”
“It’s a dog, Jackie, not a person. And we got nothing to say he knew anything about Karen at all. I’m not saying he didn’t, but we got no proof.”
“Fucksake! They do the operations together, he would have to have known about her.”
“But only as someone selling their kidney. And Joey’s living proof that being a donor don’t have to mean you wind up dead. Beyond what you say, there’s nothing that gives him knowledge of any affair between them. So we got no jealousy motive.”
“Bella’s into videoing stuff, right? You got that tape of her and Karen.”
“So?”
“So she told me Powell sneaks copies of all her tapes. If he has a copy of the one you’ve got, it’d mean he knew about the affair.”
“It still wouldn’t prove he killed her.”
“But it’d point in that direction.”
“Maybe.”
Powell’s suite at the house was paneled in wood. It had olive carpets and brass fittings like a gentleman’s club. Ryan went through it without making any attempt to hide his tracks. What we wanted, though, wasn’t hard to find. In plain sight in the bedroom, a wall-mounted rack held an exact duplication of Bella’s video collection. Ryan worked his way through them. He saw me unconscious getting my dick sucked, he saw me performing actively in a more recent tape. He went slowly through the donor tape, trying to recognize faces of unsolved homicides as Bella performed her examinations.
“I gotta say, Jackie, this ain’t helping Bella any. She’s getting off on it. That plus the kidneys just disappearing don’t inspire confidence.”
I took the remote off him and fast-forwarded to the section with Bella and Karen.
“There. You can’t say he didn’t know about an affair between them now.”
“Depends if he got it before or after the murder. If it was after it don’t mean shit.”
“I don’t fucking believe this.”
“Hey, Jackie, I’m trying, but I gotta consider all angles, especially in a situation where a man’s liberty is at stake.”
I handed Ryan the last tape on the rack. I knew what it would be and I didn’t know whether he’d read it as for or against Bella. But there wasn’t much I could do to stop him watching it.
Bella and Powell fucking, a selection of their sessions together.
“Oh, Jackie, what have we got here?”
“Daddy’s favorite pastime.”
“Look at the old bastard go.”
“He’s obsessed with her.”
“Hey, with a body like hers, who wouldn’t be? If you’ve been saving this to ace me with, I’m surprised at you. You should know me better than to think a little incest would shock me into jumping on him.”
“You’re doing this to fuck me up, aren’t you? You don’t want it to be Powell. Because if it isn’t him, then it has to be Bella. And if it’s Bella and you take her down, I lose everything. What does it take to satisfy you? You want to destroy me? Why? You must know by now I didn’t have anything to do with Karen’s death.”
Ryan killed the tape and turned to look at me. For the first time since I’d known him, he looked sincere. More than that, in fact, he looked conflicted.
“Jackie, it hasn’t got anything to do with you, boy. I’m being straight. You think I want it to be Bella? Shit no. I like living here, and you know I like fucking her. Add to that she’s a goldmine I haven’t even scraped the surface of yet and I’d be insane to fuck her up for no reason. But I gotta have someone for Karen and I gotta feel confident it’s the right person. Sure, there’s shit about Powell that looks plenty suspect, but without something to tie him directly to Karen it’s just dead dogs and nudey pix. With Bella we got a definite connection and we got stuff that’s just too weird to ignore. I don’t know what the story is with the kidney thing yet, but those examinations make it look like some kinda sex trip for her. And if that’s what happens when she’s checking them out, what the fuck happens when she’s cutting? You said Powell’s involved too, but it ain’t him sticking his fingers into those people on the tape. And it wasn’t him in that motel room. Shit, that was almost a murder right there.”
“She didn’t kill Karen.”
“I hope you’re right, I really do, but unless you can find me something more than Fido out there, you better start looking for another source of income because the one you got ain’t gonna last.”
I went back to Willow Glen later that day. Alone, I looked at my pictures and remembered the feel of the dead woman in the morgue. I wished I could have taken a photo of her to help me. Better, I wished I had a video of us doing it that I could splice into a Calvin Klein commercial. The dead and the living together—hard to think of either of them as important if their images aren’t recorded and available for viewing. I spurted, then took some pills and fell asleep thinking about Lorn. We shared an obsession with a better way of life. In Los Angeles that was probably as good as love.