Zero to the Bone Read online

  NEPHTHYS CURLED HER small body onto a plush red lounge chair in the back room of the Chinese-themed Good Luck Bar, gold silk pajamas flowing from her limbs and bead-embroidered black slippers adorning her feet. Surrounded by her friends, she looked like the habitué of an opium den, a blue drink served in a bowl-shaped glass instead of a pipe balanced on her knee. She called the Good Luck her local bar, and with a postmodern decor of Chinese lanterns, latticework, and lacquered screens mixed with thrift-shop furniture, it was the kind of bar only someone from a Bohemian neighborhood like Los Feliz could call local. Her friends did not dress so extravagantly—two in jeans and bare-midriff blouses and the third in bicycle shorts, calf-high lace-up boots, and boy-beater T-shirt—but judging from the pierced eyebrows, tongues, ears, and noses, they all shared a similar aesthetic of the scarified body beautiful. Everyone had been inked, either along their arms or stomachs or legs, the designs sometimes playfully macabre and other times fantastic; a green dragon flew up one girl’s arm, background clouds billowing from her skin like waves.

  Nephthys lifted her drink so I could better appreciate the deep blue color and asked in a stage-loud voice, “You want one of these?”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A Yee Mee Loo.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Blue drink.”

  Everyone laughed in the spirit of an old gag pulled on someone new. Their faces looked familiar, and after a few minutes of conversation, I realized they had come as a group on the night my photographs were first exhibited. They knew each other from an art school over the hill in Pasadena and were trying to make the transition from studying the arts to the more difficult task of making a career. I pulled up a chair next to Nephthys and ordered a Jack Daniel’s neat from a passing waitress. They talked so fluently about the Los Angeles arts scene that I felt like a fraud, not an unusual feeling when I’m around other people in the arts.

  I picked up the digital camera to tune out the conversation and found myself the sudden center of attention. The girls were not camera shy; they made faces, kissed each other, and showed off their tattoos, mugging playfully—and sometimes shamelessly—for the camera. The digital revolution has put the world onstage, making us all actors in the theatrical performance of our lives. We’re all on camera all the time and more vain than ever. This can be a disaster for a photographer seeking the quiet truth of an unguarded moment. When I want to be ignored, I pull out a film camera. Film takes too long to be developed for anyone to care what you shoot. After I bagged the digital camera the conversation drifted to job opportunities, a topic that didn’t interest Nephthys so much. She worked as a set decorator for mostly independent films, work that she liked and paid her well. I told her about my talk with Christine’s roommate, Tammy. Nephthys had identified Dr. Rakaan as Christine’s boyfriend, something Tammy disputed. “I get the feeling you two don’t see everything the same way,” I said.

  “Just because I think she’s a two-faced, lying bitch?” Her lips, painted the color of dried blood, spread in a happy smile. “Nothing wrong with her that a total personality transplant wouldn’t cure.”

  “What does she lie about?”

  “She lies about herself to herself. Like she thinks she’s going to be this big movie or television star but the roles she’s cast in? Bimbo of the week.” Nephthys growled like an angry cat and laughed. “Tammy’s okay, I’m sure, she’s just not my kind of girl.”

  “Christine must have liked her.”

  “Christine was a complex girl, more complex than she looked.” She raised the drink to her lips, blue against red, and sipped. “Part of her was this conventional, small-town girl, superficial and boring, not much different than Tammy. That’s why they got along so well.”

  “And the other part?”

  “Unpredictable. She could light you on fire with her smile but sometimes when you looked deep inside her, the darkness you saw could freeze you. She was wild, incredibly sexy, and…what?” She sipped at her drink and nodded, as though alcohol fueled her thinking. “Not immoral. She had a conscience. She never willingly harmed anyone that I know about. But she liked to be a daredevil, to try things other people might find shocking.”

  “You told me she was into some twisted stuff, with Rakaan.”

  Nephthys chewed at her lower lip and when she opened her mouth to sip at her drink, she revealed that lipstick had stained the tips of her front teeth red. She shook her head, not to contradict what I’d said but to signal her reluctance to talk about it.

  “When I met Rakaan, at his office, it seemed clear to me that you were right, he was sleeping with Christine.” I put my heels on the edge of the chair, curled my arms around my knees and stared at her, hoping she might respond to the intimacy of eye contact. “He denied it, pretty strongly, in fact so strongly it was like an alarm going off, you know, liar, liar, liar.”

  “It wasn’t that they just slept together,” she said, making it sound like sleeping together meant nothing at all. “And it wasn’t that they were lovers either. Christine had more than one lover.”

  “Were you one of them?” The question popped from me unconsidered. I lifted my hands in apology. “Sorry, none of my business.”

  Nephthys smiled a small, sad smile and shrugged. “You’d have to put chains on Christine to tie her down and that’s what Rakaan did to her, but she slipped loose every now and then.”

  “You talking metaphorical chains or real ones?”

  “Both.” Her lips tightened and she leaned forward, coming to some decision, her forehead less than the span of a hand from mine. “Christine told me that she was working out her past-life karma with Rakaan, that her sessions with him began with hypnosis and deep, probing conversations but quickly evolved into bondage scenarios.”

  “You mean, they’d talk about it.”

  “No. I mean they’d do it. Not in his office but later, at his house.”

  I pulled my head back and tried to read her face for signs that she was kidding or trying to deceive me and saw none.

  “He’d tie her up?” I asked.

  “That was just one of the things he did, with her permission. They’d take turns doing things to each other—whipping, slapping, spitting, hot candle wax, you name it.”

  “Strangling?”

  She bit her lip and nodded. “Choking is supposed to be a big turn-on. That’s why, what happened, it wasn’t such a big surprise for me. But the way she talked about it, she wasn’t doing it just for kicks. The bondage scenarios were an important part of her therapy.”

  “Her past-life regression therapy?” After a moment of sheer incredulity, I realized my mouth hung open. “Just so we’re absolutely clear on this, he would tie her up and do stuff to her, whip her, have sex—whatever—and he did this to her because…” I tried to think of a good reason but my imagination failed me. “Why?”

  “She said it helped her work out some emotional issues she had about sex and it didn’t hurt that the sex was incredible. Rakaan said she got off because she was connecting with her past lives.”

  I remembered my brief interview with Rakaan, how he’d said their sessions were about Christine’s love of pain. “He told me she’d been murdered in her past life,” I said. “He made it sound like it happened not just once but a couple of times.”

  “She told me the same thing, that it was like this thing she had, this violent history with men from one lifetime to the next.” She gripped my arm with her free hand. “She gave me one very specific example. In the nineteenth century she was a young widow working in London, as a milliner’s assistant she said. She had some health problems and the doctor who treated her fell in love with her. The doctor, he liked rough sex and one day he went too far and killed her. Do you know who the doctor was?”

  I shook my head, expecting Jack the Ripper.

  “Dr. Rakaan,” she whispered. “They were lovers in at least one past life, you see? Christine said when he strangled her to death back in England it
was an accident, he didn’t mean to kill her. The therapy aspect is, they have to relive in this life what ruined their lives in the past.”

  “Meaning he ties her up and strangles her,” I said.

  “Except this time, he was supposed to bring her back, he wasn’t supposed to seriously hurt her. That was how it became therapeutical. They were supposed to see how her death in the past lifetime had been an accident and learn how to trust again.”

  “Except he screwed up again and killed her,” I said, feeling sick to my stomach. “What’s he going to tell her in the next lifetime, Oops?”

  Nephthys released my arm and settled back into the lounge chair, the plush fabric haloing her in red. “I don’t take this reincarnation stuff so seriously. I mean, it’s fun to think about but I don’t really believe it. I can’t even tell you for sure whether Christine believed it either but it unlocked some serious demons inside her. She really got off on the things they did together.”

  “Have you talked to the police about any of this?”

  She hid behind her blue drink, then slowly lowered it to peer above the rim of the glass, regarding me as though she felt guilty about something, then shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not so simple.” She released a little tension with a sigh. “If Rakaan killed her, it was an accident. Should he spend the rest of his productive life in jail because he went too far?”

  I nodded, said, “Sure, if he killed Christine.”

  “Look, you can cross an ethical line and get away with it—people do it all the time—but when you cross the line habitually you sometimes forget where the line is, and one day you don’t just cross it, you break it, you shatter it to pieces. I think maybe that’s what happened to Christine. They just kept crossing the line, venturing further out each time, and they just went too far.” A tear spilled from her eye and tracked a black line down her cheek. “I’m trying to figure out what Christine would want. If she and Rakaan finally broke a line they crossed every time they were together, would she want to see him punished?” She wiped her face and saw the mascara on her fingertips. “Crap, I hate it when I cry. Now I gotta spend the next half hour in the bathroom, repairing the damage.”

  “Why are you telling me this if you don’t think he should be punished?”

  “You know what I think?” She sat up straight and pressed at her eyes, drawing concerned looks from her friends. “I think he should be hung by his balls, that’s what I think. Maybe I didn’t go to the police but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be thrilled to see him exposed on the front page of Scandal Times for the unethical pervert he is.”

  “Then the cops will end up knowing anyway,” I said.

  The next morning, Nephthys told her story to the police.

  14

  DR. RAKAAN LIVED in a modest million-dollar French chateau in the Hollywood hills—if any French chateau costing a million can be considered modest—on a ridge above Beechwood Canyon. At the top of the ridge the sky cracked open to a vista that on windswept days curved with the earth to the milky-blue band of the Pacific, but on most days terminated in a curtain of smog just past the tar pits at La Brea. Million-dollar views on the ridge were just that; real estate prices began at seven figures and went up from there, depending on the size of the lot and the age of the house. Rakaan’s house had been built in the 1920s by one of Los Angeles’ many eccentric architects. Back then the area was known as Hollywoodland, the real estate development that gave the world the Hollywoodland sign, later shortened to just Hollywood, which towered above the brush-choked hillside at the dead end of Rakaan’s street.

  I scoped the weave of hillside streets in the Thomas Guide and decided I wouldn’t risk a drive by. Earlier that afternoon I’d tried to stake out Rakaan’s office, but the lack of clear sight lines for a telephoto lens and the presence of an unmarked surveillance unit on the street convinced me to try his house instead. At Christine’s funeral the surveillance cameraman considered him someone of interest, and Nephthys’s testimony probably shot him to number one on the list of suspects. The police would certainly have a unit down the street from his house but I hoped the mixed suburban and wild hillside terrain would provide camouflage. If the evidence and my instincts were accurate, Rakaan would soon be practicing past-life regression therapy out of his cell in the Twin Towers, the city’s futuristic jail complex. We had an image from Christine’s funeral to run in the event of his arrest but I wanted to take a photograph that clearly implied his guilt, something furtive and hurried and just a little bit sleazy. I let the Cadillac drift to the curb on a side street a half mile down the hill, calmed the Rott with a few strokes to his head, and went to collect my gear in the trunk.

  The trunk space of a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado is bigger than some apartments. Mine functioned as a roving closet, office, kitchen, and bathroom cabinet while I drove around town, hunting down one shot or another, sometimes for twenty-four hours a shift and longer. I pulled a running outfit from my change-of-clothing case and loaded a day pack with extra clothing, water, food, and camera gear. The Rott jittered on his front paws and barked to hurry me along while I changed clothes in the front seat. We ran the hill at an optimistic clip, cramped from too much sitting, but the Rott was a sensible dog and when he started to tire he went on patrol. I scanned the street while I waited, running in place to keep my muscles warm, and spotted the surveillance sedan parked across the street and three houses down from Rakaan’s. In a neighborhood of fifty-thousand-dollar automobiles and two-thousand-dollar gardening trucks, the sedan—a five-year-old Chevy the color of dirt—didn’t qualify as covert surveillance; if Rakaan knew he was being watched, he couldn’t miss spotting it.

  We took off again when the Rott had left his mark, setting our pace to a seven-minute mile, fast for an uphill run. As we approached the Chevy I reminded the Rott to heel; we wouldn’t remain anonymous for long if he decided to mark the cop’s tires. Any cop other than Logan would see us as a jogger and her dog, a common sight in the hills. I figured Logan would be out working the case, not warming his butt in a surveillance vehicle. At the end of the street the pavement yielded to a dirt fire road, blocked from traffic by a gate. I glanced at the scrub-brush hills above Rakaan’s house as we ran, scouting out a suitable blind. We skirted the gate unchallenged. Fifty paces beyond the gate I knelt to unleash the Rott and studied the hillside, searching for a path through the chaparral and scrub oak. The terrain broke sharply uphill to the left, boulders exposed during the excavation of the road jutting from the brush. Another twenty yards from the road the hill sloped up a cut made by runoff water. I hit the hillside near the cut in full running stride, the brush tearing at the skin of my legs as momentum carried me up the steepest few yards of slope. When I stalled out, I grabbed a stalk of chaparral and pulled myself to a lip of earth that marked a more gradual incline. The Rott followed me part way, then dropped back down to the road and barked. Big dogs aren’t great climbers, particularly Rottweilers, and he clearly thought I was crazy. I slapped my side to encourage him and he came bounding up. When he slowed near the lip, I grabbed his collar and helped him over.

  We cut diagonally up the hill until the terrain curved to a view of Rakaan’s house, well within telephoto range on the street below. I didn’t expect to run into any police surveillance in the hills and didn’t. I grew up hiking hills like the one above Rakaan’s house, felt as much at home there as anywhere. I chose a scrub oak as our photo blind and settled into the hillside for a long wait. The Rott wasted little time in nosing around the day pack. I zipped it open, pulled out a small aluminum bowl, and filled it with water. While he lapped it up I snuck out a pound of hamburger wrapped in butcher paper, his expression turning mournful when I pretended I was going to eat it all. I couldn’t torment the poor creature for long, broke it into his bowl and watched him gum it down.

  The blind I’d chosen angled down the hillside to a three-quarters profile of Rakaan’s house. I planted a telescoping aluminum tripo
d into the dirt, mounted a 500-millimeter telephoto lens to the Nikon, and screwed the tripod into the camera’s base plate. The Nikon came loaded with high-speed Tri-X black-and-white film, and in the event clouds veiled the moon I’d brought along a roll of infrared film, capable of exposing the face of Benjamin Franklin on a hundred-dollar bill in the darkness of a locked safe. Then I leaned back against the scrub oak and waited, reading from a book I’d bought the day before, Transcending Anger: How to Harness the Power of Rage for Positive Change. After the first few passages I decided the book wasn’t going to help me much, but reading it was as good a way as any to pass the time.

  I heard Rakaan’s vehicle before I saw it, a new Porsche Cayenne SUV, eight turbo-charged cylinders in full throaty roar as he powered up the incline. It was a beautiful car and he drove it like he might never get another chance behind the wheel, whipping into the chateau’s circular drive and stopping with such quick precision that I nailed only one shot before the driver’s door flashed open. I reframed the telephoto, left hand gently cupping the lens and my right shoulder pressed like a sharpshooter’s against the tripod mount, and when Rakaan’s head emerged from the cabin I pinned the shutter release. The Nikon’s auto-advance motor hummed in rapid fire, 2.5 frames per second as I followed Rakaan to the front door, where he fumbled his key into the lock and glanced over his shoulder as though he feared something might be gaining on him.

  I double-checked my shutter speed and F-stop for accuracy of exposure, noted that I’d burned over twenty frames of film, and decided to reload. I threaded a new roll of Tri-X into the camera and snapped closed the back, satisfied that I’d lensed at least one usable image of Rakaan looking furtive. Arrows of light flashed from the glass facades of the city’s midrises as the sun arced toward the sea. I returned to reading my book about anger management. A blood-red mist settled over the city, smog reflecting the last rays of the sun. When the light faded to darkness and the air cooled I slipped into sweatpants and rested my eyes, the Rott snuggled against my side. Like film work, gotcha photography requires moments of intense activity spaced between hours of waiting, and in my experience, the best gotchas almost always occur at night.