L.A. Rotten (19 page)

Ivy strips unabashedly for me and drops her clothing into the trash bag I extend, neither covering her exposed breasts and bare vulva nor breaking from my gaze. I offer her a long black T-shirt and she takes it casually, slinging it over her shoulder as she turns away from me finally, to walk back into the bedroom. I have no other clothing for her, and so she stays as I lug Tony in two trips down to the Charger, nonchalant as I can be under the circumstances. No sooner do I close the trunk, where the brand new shovel lies across the mass of black plastic, than I hear an aggressively male voice behind me. “Mr. Tanner.” Detective Stack steps out of the shadows and close enough that I catch the scent of his aftershave. “Funny finding you out here. What are you up to this evening?”

“The usual,” I say, and manage a thin smile.

He throws a brief glance upward at the rooftop. “You don't have someone up there with a bucket of paint tonight, do you?”

“No, not tonight.”

He steps closer and I compel my eyes to not look at the trunk. “You're not a very cautious man, are you?”

“Meaning?”

“Those patrolmen were for your own good. They were a visual reminder that you should be-fucking-have.”

“Have I not?” I am taking a chance that he hadn't seen me just load my trunk.

“I think we both know the answer to that.”

“Do you think coming down here to deliver innuendos is going to make me somehow confess to killing Hank Kelly? I've got that airtight alibi and I'm sticking to it.”

“The words of a guilty man…but I'm not down here for you just now. The dead landlady—”

“Ms. Park-Hallsley.”

“That's the one. Her son is back in town, handling her affairs. I missed him the first time, so I've come to have a chat with him.”

“Have fun with that.”

“You smell something?” he asks suddenly, suspicious.

“I can only smell your cologne. Brut, isn't it?”

“Good guess.”

“My dad gave me a bottle. When I was seven.”

“No, the smell I'm talking about is sweeter…like bubble gum.”

He can search me or my car anytime he likes, but I think he's just fucking with me. “Usually the streets around here smell like sewer. Maybe we're moving up in the world?”

Stack moves again, past me this time. “Just because I stopped giving you a babysitter doesn't mean you can stay out late. Don't go getting into any trouble tonight—I don't want someone else to have the pleasure of arresting you.”

The smug part of me has a comeback ready, but the smart part of me silently gets in my car and goes; I can see the detective standing still on the sidewalk, watching my taillights fade into the distance. There is something to be said for good timing, I guess.

City lights drift into the distance as I drive the 10 east toward Joshua Tree. I need a good patch of rocky desert landscape, a place that by and large looks unsuitable for any sort of commercial development in the near future. A place where during a day hike, no one's dog will accidentally unearth a corpse…somewhere where two hippies high on peyote don't drive a tent stake into a mound of Tony's withered thigh flesh.

Out past Palm Springs, I'm betting there are a lot of places that fit just such a purpose. Supposedly, Gram Parsons's body got burned out here. I think Tony would appreciate that. Not that he has a choice.

Illuminated in the twin headlamps of the Charger, my shovel dips into the rough dirt behind a span of boulders that seem to form a fist pointed toward the open night. There are a myriad of visible stars, dotting the sky like drops of semen under a black light. I've been digging for over an hour now, and there is still a long way to go. Anything under three feet, and the coyotes will sniff him out; then it's just a matter of a low-flying private plane, out joyriding, making several passes over the smooth white curve of a human skull licked clean. Granted, it's unlikely, but it's not ridiculous to be so cautious—I can't imagine there being any tangible link between Tony and me, other than my number in his phone (which I will also deal with soon), but that is in and of itself a problem: I did a lot of years with a lot of people who indirectly admitted that they had been “so careful,” and yet, there they were—in jail. The reality is, I have no idea how many people had taken notice of my going to and from Tony's apartment, how many neighbors I had rankled by parking in his parking space or doing some peculiar little thing of which I was completely unaware. Because I hadn't taken the time to consider these extravagances beforehand, I have to overcompensate for the possibility of them now, meaning I can't just toss Tony's corpse in the dumpster behind the Hollywood Wax Museum, I have to drive out to the middle of nowhere, off the road in the dead of night, and dig this deep grave so that no one can come to me with the photos of an excavated Tony Brahma and ask me where I was on this hot August night. Several hours past the darkest part of night and I've managed a serious hole in the desert terrain that will do just fine for a makeshift plot. I haul each of the bags containing Tony out of the Charger's trunk, and drop them, one by one, beside the cavity. They are light now—mostly bone and sinew were left by the time I'd finished cutting. Taking up a disposable razor from my work crate, I hack off the knotted tops of the bags. The decomp-and-bubble-gum stink assaults my nasal passages, and I grip each bag by its base, lifting it to dump the contents down into the sandy soil. This way, the pieces of Tony will wither into the surrounding earth without waiting the hundred years or so for the plastic to break down. It's sort of the gravedigger's version of replacing the divots. The air is still tonight. Out here in the desert, sound carries for miles, and yet, I hear nothing. This is exactly what I'd hoped to hear.

Not wasting the nightfall I've got left, I begin shoveling heaping mounds of dirt onto the fragmented body below, stopping only briefly to finally kick the trash bags in as well.

Sweat coats my upper body and has made me slick. I search for the T-shirt I shucked off hours ago, towel myself down, and put it with my pants and shoes in the bag for incineration. Soil samples can be pulled from them that might clue the po-pos in to this spot; murderers have been found with less. I slip into my third pair of clothes tonight, fresh ones from the backseat, and give one glance back to assess my work. I'm impressed, I have to admit—I did good work. The desert looks even and smooth, plenty capable of keeping Tony hidden for a long, long time.

I drive out, continuing forward, narrowly missing the freshly packed grave as I turn my wheel to cruise around it. I must drive forward, blazing a new trail in the unpaved dirt, to keep my tire tracks from looking more suspicious than they already appear. If suddenly two thick tire tracks were to go veering sharply off the road out into the unpaved desert land for a ways, stop abruptly, and then come back out onto the main road again, back the way they came, even the most unmotivated of park rangers would doubtless take notice. The drive back to Los Angeles is a long one, and my arms feel rubbery, like lengths of worn hose. I pull over in Palm Springs and leave the shovel, wiped free of my prints, leaning against a telephone pole. The first day laborer along in the morning will be happy, I figure.

The bag containing the clothes, while smelly and dirty, is innocent enough, and I doubt too many cops would give me much hassle about it. Still, I take it down to work, seal it in a biohazard drum, and set it with others to be incinerated. Next I hit the car wash, where I scrub the Charger inside and out, ridding it of its dust and desert stink. Now it's a matter of getting rid of a certain cell phone, and that will be all she wrote concerning ol' Tony Brahma and me.

Ivy is asleep on my stripped-down bed when I get home, wearing my T-shirt like a nightgown. I detect lingering whiffs of both decomp and deodorizer in the hallway and bedroom, but both smells have dissipated to the point where it's safe to close the windows and try for some shuteye. My phone rings. It's after four in the morning. This means it's either a crime scene or Andy, but then, these days, it's only ever a crime scene or Andy.

“Tom,” I answer, not sure which I want it to be.

“Hiya, slugger,” Andy responds, full of energy. “Had a long, full night, did ya?”

“Yeah, so how 'bout letting me get some sleep?”

“I can't sleep, Tom, I'm excited.”

“What for?”

“For you, buddy. You're comin' along nicely. Going up like a sunflower.”

“I'm glad, I guess.”

“Well, yeah,” he says, jumping on my words manically. “You're on the cusp of change, brother, change larger than life. You should be ecstatic.”

“It's late.”

“It's early.”

“What do you want, Andy?”

“You need to kill her, Tom.”

“What?”

Ivy softly moans from her spot on the bed, deep in a dream.

“No attachments, Tom. You need to kill her. I thought about maybe you could just break up with her, but then I realized: this is your final test.”

“I'm not going to kill her, Andy.”

“Why not? She's just a person, a stupid, vapid waste of resources. Fuck her. Kill her.”

“No.”

“Tom, she's a liability. She's got that sick-puppy-dog thing where she just wants to follow you around with her nose in your ass. You need to drown her in the river. C'mon, man, think of the team.”

“Andy, I'm fucking exhausted. Let's deal with this tomorrow.”

“You're not going to try to sell me on the notion that you like this broad, are you? Jesus Christ, Tom, call it what it is.”

“What is it?”

“Really? Okay. It's your fucking guilt manifested, okay? Blonde hair, about twenty-one years old, pretty girl, kinda trashy—she's Holly Kelly, all grown up.”

A sharp, eerie tingle arcs up the back of my spine and into my brainstem. “That's ridiculous!”

“Tom, I've been on your ass like a pimple these last couple months. I've walked right by you on the street; I've been in your apartment—hell, I was there tonight, watching your girlfriend sleep. You don't eat, you don't drink booze, you're a junkie, or at least you used to be…no friends, no hobbies, and you clean up crime scenes for a living when you could be doing any measure of other jobs. You're living with guilt, brother. But once you accept it, you and I can get down to brass tacks. You don't need her; you don't need anyone—just like me. Fuck everybody. Let's make the most of it together. So kill her, bury your guilt, and let's set the fucking world on fire.”

“I'll call you,” I say finally, unable to take my eyes from Ivy's slumbering form, and click the phone off.

Ivy wakes slowly, blinking off the sleep to find me staring at her, as I've been doing now for the last several hours. “Morning,” she says, smiling, demure.
Andy
, as much as I fucking hate to admit it,
is right
.

“We gotta talk.”

She knows me enough to know that talking isn't good. “What's wrong?”

“This isn't going to work.”

“What's not going to work?”

“Us. This…whatever this is.”

She turns over on her side, away from me. “Don't be a dickhead.”

“It's for both our good.”

“Just shut up, Tom.”

“You need to leave.”

She flips back toward me, animated, and I flash back to the night in the Electric Candy Factory's parking lot. “In what? This?” She grabs at the black shirt that just barely reaches her thighs. “You took all my clothes.”

“I'll go out and get you some new ones, but then you've got to leave.”

“What the fuck is this about, Tom? I'm willing to endure your little neuroses, but you've got to be honest with me—what caused this?”

“My life is just heading in a direction that you can't follow. It isn't safe.”

“Let me be the judge of that. You never gave a shit about me before, why start now?”

“I thought I cared about you, but then last night I realized—I don't.”

“Liar.”

“Not this time.”

“Bastard.”

“Exactly.”

“You do care about me even if you don't want to admit it,” she tries.

“No, it was just guilt; it always was.”

“Do you even realize how fucking hurtful you're being?”

“I think I do.”

“No, you don't! You're more like a robot than a human—you know that? I saw those flashes in you, the good person inside the shell, and I thought I could bring that good person out.”

“You can't.”

“Fuck you.”

“I'll go get you new clothes,” I say, maintaining my iciness for both our sakes.

“Don't. I don't want anything from you ever again.”

“I'm sorry about all of this—”

She leaps up off the bed, stalking past me, and smashes my shoulder with her balled-up fist. “Shut up, Tom! Just shut up. Don't try to be a human now, because it might make me try to fight for you again, or make me think that this is somehow all my fault.”

“It's not.”

“You don't have to protect all of us—me, your parole officer—you don't have to be some sort of martyr. Stop pushing everyone away just because we care about you.”

“Just because you care doesn't mean I have to,” I remind her bluntly.

Tears well in the corners of her eyes and spill out onto her cheeks though she fiercely tries to rein them in. “Was I not nice to you? I tried to be supportive…just tell me what I did wrong.”

“You look too much like a ghost.”

She forgets her tears for a moment and stares at me, alarmist. “What does that even mean?”

“Forget it.”

“No! You, who doesn't believe in ghosts, you've got some factoid being computed in that robot brain of yours—finish it.”

“Subconsciously, I think, I was only with you because you remind me of…”

“Holly Kelly,” Ivy supplies, grim.

I slide my hands into the back pockets of my pants because it seems like the right thing to do.

“I can dye my hair, cut it, whatever.”

“It's not you—”

“Spare me the clichés, Tom. I don't deserve this.”

“What did you think would come of all this? We're both fucking messes. We'll never have a house with a yard and a white picket fence. We won't have a fiftieth wedding anniversary surrounded by our kids and their kids. We won't join a senior center and learn how to square dance. You and I are not those kinds of people. We don't get long, happy lives. We're the kind of people that die violently surrounded by no one. Can you see me pushing a stroller with little Tom and little Ivy in it? Can you see you? How about when one of our kids finds a video of your porn on the Internet? And are you going to take the kids to soccer practice, or am I?”

“Just stop,” she begs, no longer angry, it seems, just wounded. She looks down the hallway and I sense it is all almost over. “You know you can't do this alone, Tom. It isn't going to work that way. The universe is at work here and it's bad. I just hope you realize before it's too late.”

“Goodbye,” I respond, attempting to make it sound as emotionless as possible. When she walks out of the bedroom, I do not follow. I hear her grab her keys from the counter and expect her to slam the front door on her way out, but she does not.