Zero to the Bone Read online

  ALSO BY ROBERT EVERSZ

  Digging James Dean—A Nina Zero Novel

  Burning Garbo—A Nina Zero Novel

  Killing Paparazzi—A Nina Zero Novel

  Shooting Elvis—A Nina Zero Novel

  Gypsy Hearts

  SIMON & SCHUSTER

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  places, and incidents either are products of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

  resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Robert Eversz

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eversz, Robert.

  Zero to the bone: a Nina Zero novel / Robert Eversz.

  p. cm.

  1. Zero, Nina (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 3. Women photographers—Fiction. 4. Tabloid newspapers—Fiction. 5. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 6. Paparazzi—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3555.V39Z34 2006

  813'.54

  2005054467

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-8868-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8868-2

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  To Nina Zero’s readers:

  thanks for sharing the wild, bumpy ride.

  The strong men, the masters, regain the pure conscience of a beast of prey; monsters filled with joy, they can return from a fearful succession of murder, arson, rape, and torture with the same joy in their hearts, the same contentment in their souls as if they had indulged in some student’s rag.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  ZERO

  TO

  THE BONE

  1

  A DAY HIKER found her body beneath the thorny skirts of a manzanita bush in the Santa Monica Mountains just north of Malibu, her skin white as sun-bleached bone against the baked earth. She did not look dead to him at first glance and he thought she might be taking sun, but where she lay was not a spot for sunbathing and her clothes lay twisted in the brush rather than folded within reach.

  From a distance her body still retained some of the beauty it had possessed in life and so the hiker expected her to stir at his approach but she didn’t move, not at all. When he dropped down from the trail and into the brush he saw the bruise circling her neck and death’s terrible vacancy in her face.

  He grasped her wrist between his thumb and forefinger, hoping to track a faint pulse of blood. Her skin felt less alive than stone. He called 911 and hiked back to the trailhead to wait for the responding officers, out of sight of the body, because the woman was so young and beautiful, even in death, that the only way he could prevent himself from crying was not to look at her.

  Later, when questioned by a reporter from a supermarket tabloid, he described in photographic detail the body’s pose on the ground and the ruin strangulation had visited upon her face, sordid details expected by the readers of tabloids but ones I’ll omit in this telling because I knew the woman, and the brutal manner of her death will haunt me for the rest of my days.

  The last time I saw Christine she wore a glittering silver strap-dress to the hanging of my show of photographs at Santa Monica’s Leonora Price Gallery, the Betty Boop tattoo on her bared shoulder winking suggestively at the muscular boy in cutoffs who mounted photographs on the near wall. She planned to wear the dress to the opening party two nights later and claimed to want to know whether I liked the style. The photographs were staged tableaux carefully composed to look culled from the pages of the National Enquirer, the Star, or the paper I freelanced for, Scandal Times. Several of the images depicted a blonde bombshell caught by a tabloid-style camera in scandalous scenes involving cars, sex, drugs, and guns. Christine played the role of the blonde bombshell, her wholesome looks shaded at twenty-one with a complicated sexual awareness, the lens capturing little-girl innocence and anything-goes depravity in a single, flashing glance. The depravity made her visually compelling, but in many ways she was far more innocent than depraved. She didn’t want my opinion about the dress—I realized that the moment I saw how assertively she wore it. The dress clung to her with the fierce grace of a tango dancer. She knew she looked stunning. She simply couldn’t wait for the show to open. She wanted to see what she looked like as a troubled movie starlet, unaware that I cast her in a role she played well enough in real life.

  The evening the show opened I was working late in the offices of Scandal Times, trying to suppress my anxiety about exhibiting my so-called serious work, when Frank pitched a padded manila envelope onto the desk. Frank was the tabloid’s crack investigative reporter, author of such seminal stories as “The Truth about Two-Headed Sheep” and “James Dean’s Body Stolen by Space Aliens, Worshipped as God,” practically required reading for every budding tabloid reporter and true aficionado of the form. He’d been in the parking lot, having a smoke, and the scent of cigarettes wafted from his hair like a stale aura.

  “Since when did you start getting mail here?” he asked.

  I glanced at the envelope, addressed to me care of the tabloid, with no return address and twenty Walt Disney commemorative Mickey Mouse stamps pasted down the right side, as though the sender had neither a clue how much postage the envelope required nor the time to get it metered.

  “I get mail here all the time.” I dipped into the side pocket of my camera bag for a Swiss army knife and slit open the envelope’s top flap. “Most of it’s from people peddling information, you know, the four Ws of tabloid journalism: who’s doing what to whom, and where.” I shook something that looked like a CD loose from the envelope.

  “I get mail too,” Frank said.

  “What kind?” I asked.

  “Death threats mostly. Last week, Steven Seagal’s PR girl threatened not only to kill me but to make sure I was reincarnated as a leech.” He fingered the edges of a candid I’d taken of Ben Affleck walking out the door of the Brentwood Starbucks, fingers wrapped around his morning latte. The image was set to run with a story about celebrity caffeine addicts. It had been a slow news week, Hollywood scandal-wise.

  “Affleck’s easy,” he said. “Can’t pay more than two hundred for him, plus a hundred bonus points for the coffee. You got anybody else?”

  I showed him Owen Wilson in a geeky bucket hat and dark sunglasses, shot through the window of Kings Road Café as he inhaled the fumes wafting from a large porcelain cup. The disguise was effective enough that we argued back and forth about whether Owen Wilson sat beneath the hat or some look-alike, until I settled the argument by tracing the baby-arm-on-steroids contours of his nose, which even the modern miracle of plastic surgery can’t duplicate, should it want to try. I walked the CD to the boom box on the shelf behind Frank’s desk and pressed play. Nothing happened. Frank pulled open his petty-cash drawer. I forgot about the CD, thinking someone had sent me a blank disk by mistake. He paid five large in advance for the Wilson, plus three for Affleck.

  It had been a tough couple of months, financially. I needed the cash to bail my car out of the garage and to finance the black cocktail sheath of a dress I planned to wear to the gallery that night, when friends, models, and art collectors would gather to drink wine and gossip while pretending to look at the so-called art. High art is a low-pay occupation, and I’d pretty much invested—or sunk without trace—the last of my
money in producing and then printing the photographs to be exhibited. Then, two weeks before the show was to open, an idiot in a BMW rear-ended me in traffic, sending my beloved 1976 Cadillac Eldorado into the shop for bodywork and a two-hundred-thousand-mile makeover. His insurance was covering the bodywork but not the makeover. The mechanic had offered me a loaner while my car was in the shop. I couldn’t afford to say no.

  This explains why I pulled into the gallery’s parking lot on the biggest night of my life in a six-year-old Chevy Metro with a four-cylinder, 1.3-liter hamster cage for an engine, my toothless Rottweiler riding shotgun, resplendent in a red bow tie and his usual goofy grin. Unlike me, he didn’t feel humiliated to be seen in such a car. My Goth-girl niece waited out front, leaning with calculated teenage sullenness against the passenger-side suicide door of a 1967 Lincoln Continental. Cassie had flown in the night before from Phoenix, where she lived with her foster parents, and spent the day shopping for vintage clothing on Melrose Avenue, accompanied by the owner of the Continental, Nephthys, a woman who looked like a punk Barbara Stanwyck. Cassie had met Nephthys and Christine six months before, when they modeled together for several photographs in the show, and since then she clung to them as her new role models. Her lips scrunched as though she bit into something sour when I stepped from the car and she said, “Since when do you wear miniskirts?”

  It was the first time she’d seen me in a dress, even if I’d accessorized it with a pair of Doc Martens, a rhinestone nose stud, and a black leather motorcycle jacket. Cassie had just turned fifteen. I was twice her age. To her eye, I was a dinosaur. I gave her a friendly shove and asked where Nephthys was. She shrugged and pointed her chin toward the gallery, its brightly lit picture window framing an exhibition hall more packed than I had a right to expect. When I asked her why she remained outside she sidled up and bumped against my arm, her wary interpretation of a hug. “You’re late,” she said. “I was afraid you weren’t going to show.”

  I kissed the side of her head. Cassie didn’t show sentiment often. I wanted to reward it. Something shoved me from behind—the Rott, eager to bull his way into the party. Cassie broke away from me to kneel and give the dog a bigger hug than I’d ever seen her give a human being. I tossed her the leash and a moment later we swung open the gallery door to a D-list Hollywood arts crowd, not a single true celebrity among the young and trendy who dressed, talked, and gestured like movie stars in training, as though fame awaited them as certainly as age. A half dozen in the crowd had modeled for the fauxtabloid photographs that lined the walls, and all had invited their equally young and beautiful friends. Leonora Price—the sixty-something doyenne of L.A. arts photography—called my name when I pressed through the door and glared at me from behind rhinestone-flecked cat’s-eye glasses. She cleaved the crowd, big red-bead necklace swaying above the bodice of her lime green dress, to wrap a withered arm over my shoulder, scold me for being late, and swing me face-to-face with two of the few people in the crowd not wearing black, a doctor and her doctor husband, who announced that they’d just purchased two of my photographs.

  “Hold on to them,” Leonora advised. “My girl is queen of the tabloids, the first serious photographer to cross over since Weegee.” I shook their hands solemnly, embarrassed by such high praise. Leonora promptly slung me toward two men in gray Italian suits, maneuvering me with a hand on the nape of my neck as deftly as a puppeteer. The two men wore black shoes that gleamed with the high shine only the professional classes can achieve, their smiles polished to match. Personal injury lawyers, Leonora whispered, who had just purchased three images for their Century City offices. The lawyer on the left said how much they loved the photos, their jaundiced take on celebrity, and we talked a minute about what it’s like to work as a tabloid photographer. “If Leonardo DiCaprio ever breaks your nose while you’re snapping his candid,” one said, “give us a call, we’d love to represent you.” They cawed with laughter and I barked back, two personal injury lawyers and a tabloid photographer, fellow scavengers recognizing each other across the species barrier.

  Leonora steered me close to the wall, the long, bony forefinger of her right hand curling toward a red dot beneath the nearest photograph, signifying the work had been sold. She painted her fingernails red to match the sales dots; red and green were her good-luck colors. “The photographs, they look wonderful up, don’t you think?” She flicked the nail toward the next photo, and the one framed beyond that, all three marked with red dots. Still gripping the nape of my neck, she turned my head to plant a loud kiss on my brow, her milky blue eyes fierce and gleeful. “Be proud,” she said.

  The emotion vented through me like scalding water seeking a fissure, and I turned away because I didn’t want to burden her with a sudden burst of tears. Two weeks earlier I’d gone alone to see the comic-book flick Spiderman, where the sight of Kirsten Dunst lifting enough of Spidey’s mask to plant a wet one on Tobey Maguire’s lips provoked such a surge of Eros and sorrow that I’d bolted for the bathroom, locked myself in a stall, and sobbed through a half pack of tissues. Since the deaths of my sister and mother I’d been increasingly unable to control my emotions, prone to jagged crying fits at moments that once would have provoked no more than a smirk of irritation. I’m not a photogenic crier, and the only thing that prevented tears from sizzling down my cheeks and snot dripping from my nose was the sight of the Rottweiler towing Cassie through the crowd, Nephthys one step behind.

  “Have you seen Christine?” Anxiety thinned Cassie’s voice to a whine. “We’ve been calling her, like, all day. We even stopped at her apartment.”

  “She’ll show.” I deflected the Rott with my knee and told him to sit. “She’s already seen the photographs, so she’s probably planning a big, fashionably late entrance.”

  “Christine, she’s late to everything,” Nephthys said, then wrapped me in a congratulatory hug, not oblivious to the fascinated stares of both men and women in the crowd. She wore a thin black halter and stretch shorts, showing as much of her tattooed body as possible in public without getting arrested. She was insanely proud of her tattoos, precise re-creations of the hieroglyphics and pictographs depicting her namesake, the Goddess of the House and Friend of the Dead in Egyptian mythology. She gave the hug full body contact, then pulled her head back to drop a lip kiss on me, unexpected at that moment but not so bad really, in a nonlesbian girlfriend kind of way. “You rock, girl,” she said. “The photographs are killer.”

  “Cindy Sherman meets Weegee,” someone said behind me and I turned to see who, because those were exactly the two traditions I intended to cross when I began composing the photographs in my head. The man who had spoken turned to look at me over his shoulder and then this really weird thing happened to time, the glittering hum of voices ground down and vectored out to silence, the crowd at the peripheral fringe of my vision spun into a centrifugal blur, and if I knew I had a soul, I’d say it broke its moorings and lurched momentarily free of my body.

  I’d never seen the man before, but still, his face looked strangely familiar, and I would have sworn I knew him in a previous life if I believed in such things, which I don’t. Yes, he was handsome in a black-haired, blue-eyed, and black-leather-jacketed way, but I wasn’t that conscious of his face; I felt as though I’d found something I wasn’t particularly looking for and never thought I needed until that moment, and now that I saw it, I didn’t know whether to grab it or run headlong in the opposite direction. I floated toward him, not consciously moving my feet at all, and then the sensation of timelessness wavered and broke, because I’d walked right up to a strange man without an idea in my head about what to say, and that made me feel uncomfortably self-conscious.

  “You’re the photographer, aren’t you?” He turned to a photograph of Christine on the nearest wall. “I can’t tell you how many times I stepped into the grubbier version of this scene.”

  I’d taken the photograph at night off the Pacific Coast Highway a few miles south of Malibu, a white-gowned Ch
ristine hitchhiking in the headlight glow of a Mercedes convertible stopped on the shoulder, a little chrome automatic pistol dangling from the forefinger of her opposite hand. The driver’s door to the Mercedes wings open into the center of the image and the body of an elegant young man in a white dinner jacket sprawls toward the pavement, his legs and hips still inside the car, the back of his jacket stained with vivid blossoms of light gray, the color of blood in black-and-white photography.

  Frank stuck his shaggy head between us and introduced the man I’d been speaking to as Sean Tyler. We shook hands, his palm leathery smooth, like a good work glove. “Let’s go out to the car for a sec,” Frank said, and hoisted toward Sean the laptop bag slung over his shoulder. “I got something I want to show you.” And then they were gone, just like that, Sean’s big shoulders gracefully creasing the mob, leaving me face-to-face with Terry Graves, my parole officer, who pinched the muscle between my neck and shoulder and said photographs weren’t her thing but these wouldn’t be so bad if she could drop a neutron bomb in the middle of the room to eliminate the poseurs. I told her I needed a glass of wine and pressed toward the door, curious about Sean and what kind of business he had with Frank. He didn’t look like the kind of scamming tipster Frank usually met in alleyways and other dark places.

  Out in the parking lot they stood hunched over the open trunk to Frank’s Honda, a silvery light illuminating their faces from beneath, the blue-black of Los Angeles night blanketed around their shoulders. Frank had parked at the far end of the lot, near the street and away from the casual glance of passing eyes. When he heard my footsteps, and glanced to see me walking toward them he reached down into the trunk and shut off the light.

  “There’s really nothing you want to see here,” he said, and I realized then that the source of light had been his laptop.

  “Maybe I should be the one to decide that,” I said.