Zero to the Bone Read online

“Betty Boop?”

  I nodded.

  “She loved that tattoo.” Tamara held her napkin to the bottom rim of her sunglasses and seemed ready to break into tears but sighed instead and blew her nose. “We went down to Hollywood one night three months ago, drank tequila shots at the Viper Room to screw up our courage and got work done at Tattoo Mania on Sunset. Want to see mine?” She stood from the table and bent to roll the cuff of her jeans to reveal a multicolored hummingbird etched into the skin just above her ankle. “It hurt like hell. The skin’s really sensitive there. But I’m glad I got it done. Do you have any work done?”

  “Nothing so beautiful,” I said. “Who do you think was in the video?”

  Tamara rolled the cuff down again, sat, and pulled her hair away from her face. “Do you know where she worked?”

  I shrugged, maybe yes, maybe no. I wanted her to tell me.

  “She did phone sex, you know, one of those 1-900 numbers.”

  “Sweet Lasses,” I said.

  “Not Lasses.” She shook her head. “Lashes. Sweet Lashes.”

  “You mean whips, that kind of lashes?”

  “She worked for a service that specialized in S&M; you know, I’ve been a bad boy, whip me while I kiss your feet.” She scrunched shut her eyes and stuck out her tongue as though spitting out something bitter. “It was really gross. She said it was making her a better actress, you know, a role-playing exercise. I listened to her do it a couple of times and sure, it’s acting, kind of, but so is pornography. I mean, it’s not as bad as that because she’s not, like, doing anybody but still, just to be pretending while the guy on the other end is, you know, I don’t even want to say it, I mean, yuck, it’s just disgusting.”

  I plowed into the eggs while Tamara talked, thinking how a single shifting consonant not only changed “Sweet Lasses” to “Sweet Lashes” but made what seemed an embarrassing and sleazy job into something far more sinister. “At the funeral, when you said Christine was into some dark stuff, that was what you meant?”

  Her hair fell back to her shoulders when she released it and she nodded as though coming to a difficult decision, the kind of nod someone might make before deciding to take a running jump over a chasm. “I was thinking, what if she met someone that way? I mean, on the phone. It was a bondage video, right? What if someone offered to meet her in the flesh and she said yes?”

  “Did she?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  I shook my head, confused. “Sure, it’s possible.”

  “Will you check it out?”

  “Do you have any reason to think that’s what happened?”

  “You mean, like, evidence?”

  “You lived with her. Did she meet anyone else that way?”

  “There was so much she didn’t tell me.” Tamara pushed her salad away, more pecked at than eaten. “I know for a fact she was having at least one secret affair, maybe more.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about Dr. Rakaan?”

  “Her therapist?”

  “I heard they were more than doctor and patient.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I shrugged, not wanting to betray a source.

  “Were they?” I asked.

  “It’s possible.” She made a face as though she smelled something spoiled and tapped the table three times with the lacquered nail of her right forefinger. “I loved Christine but sometimes it was hard to keep up with her, because she wasn’t exactly chaste, you know? The work she was doing with Dr. Rakaan involved how she felt about sex, I know that much, I know it dealt with her past-life relationships, and let’s face it, she was pretty hot. Any guy not dead below the waist is gonna respond if she comes on to him and Rakaan is not dead below the waist.” Tamara’s hand shot to her mouth and she stood so abruptly I thought she was going to be sick. “Christine was a slut. Maybe something did happen between them. But that’s the thing about sluts—it usually doesn’t mean anything.” She excused herself and clipped the table with her hip as she darted toward the bathroom, an odd reaction to our conversation that made me feel guilty I’d joked about bulimia.

  12

  THE SAN FERNANDO Valley is to the pornography business what Hollywood is to the feature film industry: a dark star whose sheer mass of production draws actors, producers, and technicians from around the world. When I suggested to Frank that we locate and interview the owner and manager of Sweet Lashes—this was one assignment I did not have the courage to attempt alone—he obliged with an enthusiasm and promptness I’d rarely seen in him before, producing the name of the holding company and its address within the hour. Sweet Lashes was only one of several 1-900 numbers the company operated spanning the gamut of human sexual tastes—and tastelessness. By the time we pulled up to the address, attached to a courtyard building that looked like it might have housed medical professionals in more reputable days, Frank had managed to set up an interview with the owner, who was surprisingly willing to talk.

  I expected to meet a slovenly man with untucked shirttails and crumbs in his beard, whose busty, big-haired secretary polished her nails over a dusty keyboard, hired more for her oral than typing skills. I expected to open the door to the musty smell of unidentifiable stains on old carpets and cigarette smoke tarring the walls, scents I associated with losers who couldn’t get a real girl and so resorted to varying forms of fantasy ones. My expectations were not fulfilled. Frank opened the door to a small but tidy lobby decorated in fresh flowers, one bouquet on a coffee table set before a blue couch and another spraying blooms above the desk of the receptionist, a blonde-haired man in his early twenties with lacquered nails and a sweet, nervous smile. My gaydar is not the most sensitive instrument, but he pinned the needle. He notified the owner we’d arrived and waved us through, asking if we wanted coffee or mineral water as we passed by.

  The owner of Sweet Lashes was hovering over the open drawer to a filing cabinet when Frank and I entered the office, a pencil clenched between her teeth and a manila file folder in her hands. “Christine’s employment records,” she said, then remembered the pencil in her mouth and tossed it onto a desk cluttered with papers, cups, pens, and computer gear. “My name’s Anabelle Lash.”

  “I’m a big fan, Ms. Lash,” Frank said, the skin at his scalp line tingeing pink in an unexpected blush. “I wasn’t sure it was you when I saw the name on the corporate records but I’m delighted to see it is. I’m Frank Adams, feature writer for Scandal Times.”

  The woman shook his hand briskly, her black hair falling in waves around a face all the more striking for not being classically beautiful, her prominently ridged nose curving above lips so full I suspected collagen injections to match the silicone implants ballooning her breasts. She wore just enough makeup to cover time’s weathering marks on her skin but not so much that it reduced her face to a mask. I guessed her age at mid-forties. I introduced myself as the cameraperson and asked if she minded my taking a few photographs while Frank interviewed her.

  “Not at all,” she said, her voice surprisingly husky. “One of the first things I learned in the adult film business was to make love to the camera, if not the camera operator.” She wagged her finger playfully. “The only thing you can do wrong with a camera is to make me look ugly.”

  “Impossible,” Frank pronounced.

  I slipped the digital camera from my bag while Frank chatted her up, gleaning from the conversation that Anabelle Lash had been one of the most celebrated adult film actresses of her time, which surprised me because it never occurred to me that something like that would be celebrated. She’d won not one but multiple AVN Awards, pornography’s equivalent of the Oscar, for her performances in films whose titles could not be printed in a family newspaper, even a family newspaper as dysfunctional as Scandal Times. I surveyed the lighting conditions as she talked, and fiddled with the curtains to use the light coming from the window as a key light and the lamp on her desk as fill light.

  “Christine came to work for us six months
ago,” Lash said, following every adjustment of the lights without changing the angle of her face. “I have to tell you she was a natural. It wasn’t my idea to cast her with Sweet Lashes. I originally wanted her to work the Wet and Wild number, which is our soft-core surfer-girl fantasy line, but she insisted on Sweet Lashes, said it would be more fun for her.” She smiled, polished teeth gleaming, as sincere as any sales manager. “That’s really important to us. Our people, they have to enjoy the work. If you don’t like what you do, do something else, that’s what I tell people. And Christine? She enjoyed the work. You remember what she looked like? The girl next door, right?”

  Frank nodded, seemingly so enthralled his eyes bugged out. He always fawned around film people, complimenting their most recent projects and hailing their older ones as classics of whatever genre fit, but his personal servility never encroached upon the articles he wrote, a Dr. Jekyll in the art of the interview and a Mr. Hyde behind the pen.

  “We called her the Mistress of Kink. She could work both sides of the aisle, so to speak, but she excelled as a dominatrix. I mean, nothing was too wild for her.” She shook her head as though such a thing was to be both pitied and admired. “She could have been a star in the adult film business if she wanted. Christine was really special.”

  That struck me as odd because from what I knew, Christine had played the submissive role in her relationship with Rakaan. Frank decided to go in a different direction with the interview, asking instead about Christine’s experience in adult films.

  “Christine was all talk,” she said. “I know for a fact she never worked in adult films. It’s a small world and news gets around. I don’t think she even modeled topless. But the girl had a mouth on her that could boil dirt.”

  Frank sat up and looked over his shoulder. “The calls, are they routed through here?”

  “This is just the business office. We’ll screen applicants, meet employees when necessary, but the calls are processed through a call center off the premises, a service we contract out. And the employees, of course, all work at home, where the calls are forwarded.”

  “Do you ever monitor the calls?”

  “That would be an invasion of privacy.” She placed her hand flat on her desk and arched her back, a theatrical gesture meant to convey indignation. “I don’t know about you, but most people would not want someone uninvited listening to their private fantasies of licking the boot of a dominatrix—unless of course that was part of their fantasy.”

  “Nice reply,” Frank said, smiling, charmed by her performance. “But it doesn’t answer the question.”

  “I can monitor any call I want, but do I want?” Lash glanced at the ceiling, shrugged, and then fixed a darkly blunt look on Frank. “Do I really want to hear another freak shout ‘beat me baby, eight to the bar?’ I mean, excuse me, this is what I do and I’m not ashamed of it—the career choices of adult film stars of a certain age are shall we say limited—but it’s like I’m a fertilizer salesperson, maybe I sell bullshit but I don’t need to take a bath in it. I listen only when training someone, and taking live calls is the last step in the training process, so I listen just long enough to make sure she’s got it.”

  “So if a girl, say, wanted to meet someone who called her through the service, you might not know about it?”

  “Stop right there,” she said, flashing her palm. “This is not a front for prostitution. No way, no how. If one of my girls or boys tries to set up a date with one of our clients outside the service, they’re gone. They can’t have so much as a cup of coffee, and if they do, they’re fired.” Lash flipped open the cover of the file on the desk and brandished a document several pages long, stapled at the top left corner and signed on the last page. “It’s all in the standard contract everybody signs, including Christine.”

  “I take it this means your answer is no,” Frank said.

  “No, what?”

  “No, you wouldn’t know about it.”

  He met her glare with a calm smile.

  “The front-for-prostitution angle, I don’t really care about that.” He shifted in his chair and leaned forward, his shoulders slumped and baseball cap tipped high. “I’m a tabloid writer, not a cop. But Christine met someone dressed in latex who chained her to a rack and then strangled her to death. Given that she worked an S&M hotline, I have to think it’s possible she met the killer through a call routed from your service. This can’t be a surprise to you. I’m sure the cops already talked to you about it.”

  “Talked?” She flung her hands in the air. “I feel like a grilled cheese sandwich. My business is one hundred percent legal. The cops don’t like it, I don’t give a flying fuck.” Her head dropped into her hands and she looked out the window through the grate of fingers splayed over her eyes. The way the light spilled over her, she looked lost.

  I took the shot.

  “They threatened to subpoena our records yesterday,” she said. “We’ll fight it, of course. I can just imagine the cops calling every one of our customers, asking why they called Christine and what they talked about.”

  “Don’t you think it would be worth it,” I asked, “if one of your customers is Christine’s killer?”

  “Christine wasn’t a whore,” she said. “If the police investigate her murder like she was, then it cheapens her memory, ruins my business, and wastes everyone’s time.” She stood, nodded toward Frank, and stared at me. “And speaking of time, yours is up.”

  Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley are twinned economically and politically, part of the same metropolitan area and ruled by the same mayor, but the two regions are divided by more than the high hills that obstruct the view of Hollywood from Burbank. The dozen communities that comprise the San Fernando Valley burst from the razed orange groves in less than twenty years, asphalt, concrete, and steel fertilized by the economic miracle of water piped over the mountains. They rolled the cityscape across the valley like a rug, the streets straight and flat and the blocks largely distinguishable from each other by street numbers more than landmarks. Though not particularly scenic, the San Fernando Valley is a driver’s paradise compared to the jammed streets of Los Angeles, surface traffic flowing steadily along the wide avenues even during rush hour. We lowered the Caddy’s ragtop and reveled in the late-afternoon warmth, Frank jotting notes of our meeting onto his pad while I drove.

  “How’s your love life?” I called across the seat.

  “The only thing worse than my love life is my sex life.” He pocketed his notepad, lowered his Cubs cap over his eyes, and leaned against the passenger door. “If I called Anabelle Lash, do you think she’d go out with me?”

  “That’s a little like asking if you went up to the counter at McDonald’s, would they take your order,” I said, trying not to sound catty. “The woman all but had a sign sprouting from the top of her head reading ‘Billions Served.’”

  “Lucky for me I like McDonald’s,” Frank said.

  I hadn’t laughed in a week and that gave me a good one.

  “You knew Christine better than I did,” Frank said. “Maybe she wasn’t a full-time pro but did you ever get the feeling she wouldn’t turn down a little money for sex on the side?”

  “That wasn’t Christine’s style. She was more into fun than money. I can see her maybe trying it once just to see what it was like, but to turn it into a regular gig?” I shook my head. “No way. She had too much going for her.”

  “What if it wasn’t a paid gig?”

  “You mean, what if she was doing it for fun?”

  “I don’t know what I mean, I’m just throwing it out there.”

  I felt something warm and wet on the back of my neck—the Rott’s nose. He’d clambered onto the seat back to rest his head on my shoulder. He normally rode shotgun. Just because he was a good sport about giving up his seat didn’t mean he didn’t need a little attention.

  “I guess that depends on the dynamics of the conversation,” I said, stroking the Rott’s muzzle with my free hand.
“If she liked someone enough to want to meet him for one reason or another, the threat of losing her job wouldn’t stop her.”

  “What if the caller said he was Depp’s assistant?”

  “She’d meet him, no hesitation at all, if she believed him.”

  The Rott lifted his head from my shoulder and shifted toward Frank. He’s a sociable dog and isn’t happy until everyone in the immediate vicinity pays him some attention, as though he considers himself the glue that holds our little pack together. Frank pushed him away. The Rott considered that a good game and bulled forward again and again until Frank relented and stroked his head.

  “Unless we can come up with a better angle,” he said, “we’ll play up the Sweet Lashes connection as the most likely way she met the killer.”

  “I’d like to talk to Nephthys first.”

  “You mean the tattooed babe?”

  As good a way as any to describe her. I nodded.

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  I took my eyes off traffic and stared at him.

  “She’s hot,” he said. “And it’s not just the freak-show appeal of the tattoos, either.”

  “I don’t know whether she’s got a boyfriend—or a girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriends are fine as long as she shares.”

  “You dream,” I said.

  “Dreams are all I have, so I may as well enjoy them.”

  He rubbed his knuckles on the Rott’s head, giving him a noogie. The Rott rewarded Frank with a wet one to his stubbled cheek.

  “Just wanted to warn you,” I said, “if you go with the Sweet Lashes connection, it’s going to ruin your chances of getting Anabelle Lash to date you.”

  “I hate it when professional ethics get in the way of opportunities for cheap and meaningless sex, particularly when I have so much of one and so few of the other.” He pushed the Rott away and lifted the cell phone from his shirt pocket. “I’d better ask for that date now, before we run the article.”

  13