High Life (38 page)
Next day what was bound to happen happened. An expression of Lorn’s loyalties. A lawyer and a couple of large guys walked into Willow Glen while
Baywatch
was on and I was doing the best I could to imagine what it was like being Pamela. The lawyer showed me Bella’s signature on some papers and told me I had half an hour to quit the premises. I made a token attempt at refusal but it didn’t get me anywhere. She owned the place and everything in it and my property rights numbered exactly zero.
All three of them followed me around while I packed, making sure I didn’t take anything that couldn’t legitimately be classed as a personal gift. This amounted to some clothes, my photos, the video from Ryan, my watch, and a wallet. And they went through that, too. The only plastic they let me keep was my ATM card—access to the cash in my account, but no credit beyond.
I moved in a stupor. I felt like the people you see being walked to the edge of a pit in Nazi archive footage. But even through the frozen-gut brainfuck I felt the stab of what they saved for last.
Out front. I was about to dump my bags in the trunk of the Mustang but the lawyer shook his head and put his hand out for the key. Insult to injury. But how else would something like that have gone down? They let me call a cab, then they took my mobile off me.
Waiting with them for the taxi was uncomfortable. The lawyer took a fresh set of papers from his briefcase and flipped through them, no doubt readying himself to dispossess someone else. The big guys just stared at me. When the cab came, one of them opened the door and the other one pushed me carefully through it.
The drive from Laurel Canyon to Hollywood was long enough for my head to start working again. But thinking didn’t give me much comfort. With Rex dead and Lorn busy sucking Bella’s cunt, the opportunities L.A. offered for some kind of emotional succor were limited to motel rooms and hookers. I needed a hole to crawl into, somewhere to autopsy what had happened and figure out if I could recover from it.
I had the cab trawl Sunset, along by the motels. Several blocks of twoand three-story courts, all of them so scarred with neon the place looked like some kind of accommodation Vegas. There was no way to tell one from another so I got out at the Palm Grove. Apart from the flashing outline of an oasis, the wall that fronted the street was blank—no windows, no balconies, just slab concrete up and down.
My room wasn’t bad. It had twin beds, a TV, and a big mirror on the wall. The bathroom was at the back and at the front by the door there was a window covered with a blind so people going by on the walkway couldn’t see in. Two stories down, in the center of the court, the pool looked faded and unused. I was sure if I stayed there long enough I’d see trash accumulate under the water.
I had about ten grand left out of what I’d managed to hold onto from my snack-food ad and Bella’s last monthly payment. I could survive for a while, but it wouldn’t last forever.
I turned the TV on. I took a piss and unpacked my bags, then I walked up and down trying to think. Ever since the night I’d walked in on Bella and Lorn having dinner together at Malibu I’d held onto the hope that things would work out, that my relationship with Bella would eventually regenerate itself. Now it was significantly more than obvious that that wasn’t going to happen. Getting fired from the show might have been reversible, but eviction from my house and repossession of my car, without even a phone call from her, smacked of finality.
I considered my position. Incurring more of her enmity was a daunting prospect, but what did I have to lose? She’d taken everything from me already. Public exposure and money are drugs that once tasted can never be washed from the body, and I had no intention of living without them if there was any way at all of reconnecting to a supply. It was time to get a little leverage on the situation. Time to see if what Powell had said while he was dying meant anything.
By the time I came to that decision, though, it was too late to go pick up the Prelude—getting tough would have to wait until tomorrow. Instead, I wandered around the strip long enough to score a selection of pills and some fried chicken. A little while after that, things didn’t seem so immediate.
Four months in storage and the Prelude ran as smooth as ever. It didn’t have the grunt of the Mustang and nobody turned to look, but it beat walking. The sledgehammer I’d bought that evening from a hardware store in Santa Monica thunked about in the trunk as I took corners.
The streets were quiet once I got through the flats of Beverly Hills and they got quieter still when I hit Peavine Canyon.
Apricot Avenue was as dead as the other times I’d been there, no people moving about, no cars on the road. I coasted slowly to the end and parked. No light in the house, but that didn’t mean anything. The basement didn’t have windows and if anyone was home tonight that was where they’d be.
I went carefully with the garage rolladoor, levering it up an inch at a time with the long handle of my hammer until I could see through the gap that there were no cars inside. Bella might have been there, checking on her instruments, maybe even working on a donor. Without Powell or me to scout for her the possibility was slim, and I couldn’t see Lorn taking over the role, but it had been something to factor in nevertheless. The absence of the 850ci meant I’d have free run of the place and I felt vindictively gleeful forcing the door until the mechanism broke and let the jointed metal roll up the rest of the way nice and smooth.
The door into the house proper had been replaced since my last visit. It had a couple of locks on it and a thicker sheet of steel. But my hammer and I had expected something like that and we went to work confident that a little sweat would be rewarded. It was, but I felt light-headed by the end of it.
Powell had said a fridge, so at least I knew what I was looking for—kind of. There was one in the operating room, I’d seen it before and it seemed as good a place as any to start. I was planning on a quick professional search, but when I pushed through the swing doors from the pre-op area I couldn’t help taking a few moments for myself. All the hard edges and the glittering steel gave me the start of a hard-on. It wasn’t because I was remembering what Bella did to herself there. It had more to do with the alien starkness of the place, a place without the usual sympathies humans demand from their environments. I turned on the cluster light that hung like a great inquiring head on its swing arm. It didn’t let anything hide. Under its harsh mercury limning the vinyl surface of the table shone almost silver.
The fridge stood against one wall and looked like something you’d find in an undersized kitchen. The stuff in it didn’t mean anything to me—just vials of drugs I didn’t recognize waiting to be sucked into syringes. If Powell had been hinting at something in here, his dying breath had been wasted. But I knew his junkie condescension would have placed me somewhere close to the bottom of the brain-power league and I figured whatever it was I was searching for had to be at least halfway obvious. So I kept looking. I checked every room in the basement, even those I was sure didn’t have fridges. After a while I found a storeroom—shelves of disposables: gloves, gowns, scalpels, dressings, along with more reusable-looking equipment made from cream-colored plastic and chrome steel. And, in one corner, a fridge humming away to itself. Only it wasn’t your average cooling unit. It was round and orange and looked like a scaled-down version of something you’d go to the bottom of the ocean in. Pipes and warning stickers cluttered up the sides and instead of a door it had a kind of plug thing recessed into the top, about a foot across.
A long pair of heavily insulated gloves and a set of tongs hung from a hook on the wall next to it. It was pretty obvious what they were supposed to be used for, so I did.
Inside, once a load of vapor cleared, the first thing I saw was a stack of frozen blood in wrinkled plastic slabs. I used the tongs to lift them out one by one. They felt hard enough to shatter. Unless it was all Karen’s, it didn’t mean much. I couldn’t see even fuck-ups like Powell and Bella draining someone. More likely it was just stock to be used in transfusions during the kidney operations. But the fridge held one or two other things as well. Down at the bottom, under the last slab, I found a couple of small plastic packets with creamy liquid frozen inside. And something else, very flat and thin, wrapped in cling film. I put the blood back and closed up the fridge. I took the other things upstairs to the lounge and sat around waiting for them to thaw.
It didn’t take long—I wasn’t defrosting a chicken, after all. I squished the pale liquid around. It felt slimy under the plastic and it didn’t take a major leap to figure it for semen. Or work out whose it was—somehow Bella had managed to stash a few spurts from her fuck sessions with Powell. I felt a thrill of elation. Finding it here removed Bella’s best protection against being marked the killer—the impossibility of her spunking up into Karen’s guts. Now it was obvious all she had had to do was empty one of little these packets into the body.
Of course there might have been other explanations. Powell could have been storing the semen in the freezer himself, or it could have come from one of Bella’s male donors. But I was pretty sure that that wasn’t the case. Powell didn’t strike me as a guy who had any great desire to preserve his genes for the benefit of mankind, and there was no reason at all why Bella would want to save jism from any of the losers they’d dragged in off the street.
I figured I had Bella pretty well fucked, what with the video and an explanation for the goo inside Karen. And when I unwrapped the thing in clingfilm, I was certain of it—a square of skin with an Egyptian scarab tattooed onto it in black ink. The square of skin that had been missing from Karen’s shoulder blade when they found her in the park. Not a thing Powell would want to hang onto, coming as it did from someone he loathed. But definitely something Bella might treasure.
I put the bags of semen and the tattoo on a coffee table in front of me and lit a cigarette. I thought about Powell. His last words had led me to this haul. That he’d known it was here had to mean he’d known about the murder, about its incriminating specifics. And knowing these specifics he could not have avoided the conclusion that Bella had been planning to frame him for it. But the poor fuck had been so hung up on her he hadn’t let on, even to save himself until right at the end when his guts were in his lap. And, looking back on it, remembering the tone of his voice at the time, it occurred to me that even then he hadn’t been trying to destroy his daughter, but to rob me of my self-righteousness, my self-generated certainty that he was guilty. He’d known I’d wanted it to be him, that I’d blinkered myself to anything that might have forced me to confront the possibility that Bella was a killer. And he hadn’t been about to allow me the comfort of maintaining that illusion.
If Bella and Powell had been co-killers, everything was cool. Powell had deserved his death and I had something to threaten Bella with. On the other hand, if it had been Bella by herself—and if I was truthful with myself, that was what I now believed—then the semen as evidence would still function, but Powell had died without reason. And that meant I’d helped kill an innocent man, or at least a man innocent of Karen’s murder.
I forced myself to relive that night, to bring up again the image of the blood-soaked car interior, Powell’s belly bursting open, the smell of his insides. I tried to feel bad about it. I tried to feel angry with myself for doing it, with Bella for manipulating me into it. But dredging up those kind of emotions right then was a nonstarter. I was too busy basking in the knowledge that before me on the coffee table I had the means to force a return to my preferred lifestyle.
I connected with Bella through her machine. She hadn’t returned any of the messages I’d left since she took
28 FPS
away from me, but I recorded a few lines about wanting to discuss something Ryan had told me the last time I saw him alive, and she was on the line before midday.
We sat in her video suite, the obvious place. Bella had her hair tied back and was wearing a robe with nothing on underneath. As she shifted position in her chair the silky material slipped open to show her cunt. She didn’t bother to cover herself and I caught the scent of fish.
I played my cassette and explained how there should have been stitches on Karen’s belly. Bella spent more time watching me than the screen and the satisfied look on her face gave me a bad feeling that right from the start things weren’t going to go quite as well as I’d hoped. For an absurd moment the whole purpose of the meeting seemed to have been reversed, that rather than accusing her of murder, I was there to admit my guilt at being in possession of something dangerous to her. I did my best to fight it down, but I knew my voice sounded weak.
“Ryan had it figured the night you killed him, it took me a little longer. What did you think, we weren’t going to see it?”
“Oh, I thought you’d see it all right. But I was quite sure you’d be reluctant to recognize it.”
“Because of your money?”
“You and Ryan were very similar. You see money as life’s ultimate validation. It makes you easy to predict.”
“Powell didn’t kill Karen.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“You made this tape. You knew he’d take a copy and that sooner or later we’d find it. And you knew how we’d read it.”
“I knew how you’d want to read it.”
“How long had you been planning it?”
“Killing Karen? I didn’t really plan it at all.”
“But the tape was made before you took her kidney out.”
“The tape was just one I had, it wasn’t part of any plan, at least not until later. I shot it in Powell’s apartment to hurt him, to rub salt in the wound, so to speak. That’s all. The planning only came after I realized what it could be used for. Erase my copy, make up a story about the bracelet … Almost too easy.”
“Why did you kill her?”
“Do you care?”
I didn’t say anything. Bella shrugged, rewound the tape, and started it playing again slow motion. She watched it as she spoke.
“Karen came back much sooner than I’d expected. We hadn’t planned to meet again for a couple of weeks after she’d recovered from her operation, but she had some trouble at home. The man she was living with threw her out and she had nowhere to go. I let her stay, of course. But knowing she was accessible, that she was a woman who had no real prohibitions against selling parts of herself, was a constant temptation. The door had already been opened, you see, and I wanted to go back. After a week I offered to buy her appendix and she agreed.”
“Only you didn’t stop with her appendix.”
“No. It’s a much simpler operation to perform so I was working without Powell. I hadn’t planned to do anything other than what I’d paid for. But being there alone, with her laid out on the table so … available, it seemed cowardly to limit myself once I’d started. I took out almost everything she had.”
“But why?”
“I’ve told you before, the operations are a test, even with outcasts they require an effort of will. With Karen, when I took her kidney, I moved to another level. She wasn’t anonymous. She was my lover, I felt a great deal for her. And to damage her, even surgically, required proportionally more from me. The second time the challenge was even greater.”
“But you rose to it valiantly.”
“We only achieve self-mastery by testing ourselves, Jack. It’s the only way to become more than we are. But I don’t expect you to understand.”
“What about Powell, did he understand?”
Bella laughed.
“Hardly, he wanted to leave the countr y. He was so fright-ened he removed her kidney scar, he thought it could be used to trace us. I thought he was being ridiculous, but I suppose Ryan proved me wrong in that respect. I wouldn’t have involved Powell at all, but I needed his help getting rid of the body.”
“And his thanks was that you decided to frame him. To kill him.”
“I couldn’t allow him to have something like that to hold over me.”
“He would never have told anyone.”
“Perhaps not. But it changed the dynamic of our relationship. He came to feel that he could make demands of me. And that wasn’t something I could tolerate. Besides, it would have been stupid not to take what steps I could to protect myself against the possibility of investigation.”
“But he was innocent. He didn’t do anything.”
“Can you imagine what it feels like to clean your father’s come from between your legs?”
Bella stopped the tape and turned toward me.
“If Powell means so much to you, perhaps you should think about this—he only died because Ryan came to Malibu. And Ryan only came to Malibu because you brought him here. Without you, Jack, Powell would still be alive.”
“I’m not buying it. I want my life back.”
“You still have your life.”
“My house, the car, the show, all of it. I want it back.”
“But you told Lorn I was dangerous. That was … indiscreet.”
“Either make things the way they were, or this tape is going to the police.”
“Oh, Jack, I really hoped you wouldn’t do this. It was so much nicer when I could pretend you loved me.”
“I’m serious.”
“What does the tape really show? A girl masturbating. It shows I had contact with her, I suppose. But she was a prostitute and there’s nothing to say I ever saw her again. It certainly won’t support an accusation of murder. What’s to say I didn’t find it on the street, even?”
“Your other tape, the one with the donors. She’s on that too.”
“Already erased. And you’ve forgotten the semen in her body. A little hard to lay that at my door, don’t you think?”
I took the tattoo and one of the bags of come out of my jacket and dropped them on the console in front of her. She didn’t move to touch them.
“Powell’s last laugh, I presume.”
“Right at the end your attraction for him kinda lost its hold. I guess being setup to be killed does that to a guy.”
“An event in which you played such an integral role.”
“What’s with the tattoo? Was she so disposable you thought you’d forget her if you didn’t keep a piece of her?”
“I’m not going to forget her, Jack. We had them done together, at the same place, on the same day. It’s an unusual design and there was a slim possibility it might have connected us. It had to be removed. I probably shouldn’t have kept it, but I have a sentimental side.”
I snorted and pointed to the packet of semen.
“Cute idea.”
“Effective, at least.”
“You must have been over the moon when you figured blackmail wasn’t Ryan’s only bag. He was ready-made. You got to get rid of Powell without any of that nasty fuss an investigation would have involved.”
“I got something else as well. I got to link you to Powell’s death. Funny how one thing leads to another.”
“It was Ryan who forced me into that, not you.”
“Who do you think persuaded him it was so important in the first place?”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m not going to argue about it. The fact is, even if you can explain the semen, you won’t go to the police. You’re too heavily implicated yourself. Now that Ryan’s not here they’d probably hold you solely responsible.”
“There’s nothing to prove I had anything to do with it.”
“Actually, there is.”
Bella popped out the tape of Karen, chose another from the cupboard, and ran it. The screen showed a pair of kitchen gloves covered with blood, lying on a sheet of newspaper.
“From Ryan. They have your fingerprints inside, I believe.”
“I don’t fucking believe this! You set me up!”
She ejected the tape and put it away.
“I bought some insurance. I hope I don’t have to use it.”
A high-speed about-face seemed the only possible course of action given this less-than-encouraging development. I put a lot of effort into it.
“Look, I wasn’t really going to show that stuff to the police. I was just trying to get my life back. I mean, I can’t take it, Bella. Don’t you understand?”
“You shouldn’t have said what you did to Lorn.”
“I know. Jesus, isn’t there anything I can do?”
I took the tape of Karen, put it in the machine, and erased it.
“There, I was just bullshitting. I’d never have gone to the police. You know I’d never do anything like that. Don’t you feel anything for me anymore?”
“This isn’t about feeling, it’s about safety.”
“But you are safe. Keep the tattoo and the semen. I can’t do anything without them.”
“There was another packet.”
“Yeah, sure, here.”
I took the second wrap of semen out of my pocket and handed it to her.
“Now you’ve got everything. Please, Bella, I’m begging you. Will you give me the show back, at least?”
Bella weighed the semen in her hand for a moment, then reached out and killed the power to the video console.
“Give me your number. I’ll consider it.”
“Excellent!”
I passed her one of the Palm Grove cards, hoping to see her smile a little and let me know things were okay between us again. But she didn’t. She just looked coolly at me and pulled her robe closed.
“I’m not promising I’ll call, Jack.”
The drive back to the motel wasn’t pleasant. The ocean looked cold and unfriendly under a half moon and I couldn’t stop thinking what a pathetic shit I was. My grand plan of making Bella give me what I wanted had come to nothing, had crumbled to dust against the force of her will. I’d gone in with evidence that should have destroyed her and I’d come out with nothing.