Zero to the Bone Page 16

  He peered at me and grunted as though slapped on the back. “The funeral. You were the one taking pictures.”

  “That’s me, a camera wherever I go. Christine modeled for me. I took some photographs of her for a show hanging right now in the Leonora Price Gallery.”

  He fumbled off the lid to his coffee to let the liquid cool enough to sip, looking like he wanted to be awake for this. “You’re her? The one who works at that tabloid? I remember she was talking about it. The show, I mean.”

  “You knew her well?”

  He shrugged, meaning I could come to my own conclusion.

  “I didn’t see you at the opening.”

  “Yeah, whatever; I hope to catch it, maybe this week.”

  “I don’t remember her talking about you. How did you meet?”

  “At the house,” he said.

  “You mean your dad’s house.”

  He shrugged. Whatever.

  “What was she doing at your dad’s house?”

  “This is boring, man.”

  He closed his eyes like he was sleeping.

  “Just think about how bored Christine is right now.” I refrained from calling him a little twerp. “She’s dead, remember? Strangled to death while drugged out of her mind on ruffies.”

  His eyebrows furrowed. I’d upset him. The lid to his coffee skittered away from his fingertips, and when he tried to snare it he nudged the cake with the back of his knuckles. “If I didn’t care about her, I wouldn’t have gone,” he said, meaning the funeral. He pressed the lid back onto the cup, noticed the chocolate, and sucked on his knuckles before backing his chair from the table. “Sorry, gotta go. You want the cake, it’s yours.”

  “You want to be famous?” I asked.

  He gave his head a little shake and said, “What?”

  I slid a fake mock-up of a Scandal Times cover story next to his coffee, a card with my numbers paper-clipped to the top right corner. “Starbal Spawn Mourns Strangled Starlet,” the headline ran, above a telephoto black-and-white image of Stewart Starbal at Christine’s funeral. Frank had composed the story based on the little we knew about his involvement. The text mattered little, Frank said. The Starbal name would sell the story.

  “Arts photography doesn’t pay the bills so I moonlight as a paparazza.” I pointed at the cake. “You sure you don’t want that?”

  He looked at my finger, then the cake, said a stunned, “Go ahead.”

  I could have asked for his shirt and gotten the same response. The cake tasted delicious. I shoveled it down, suddenly ravenous. “You ever been to Palmdale?” I asked, my mouth full of cake.

  He shook his head. “Not to stay.”

  “Ever flirt with somebody online from Palmdale?”

  “Who knows where anybody’s from online?” He continued to stare at the Scandal Times mock-up. “Do you mean they’re actually going to publish this? In the paper?”

  “Do you know a girl, Charlotte McGregor?”

  “No. Why?”

  I pulled the newsstand issue of Scandal Times from my bag, folded to Charlotte’s photograph. I’d taken it in the desert after our interview, the late-afternoon sun setting her skin aglow. “She was given ruffies, raped, and strangled, like Christine. But she was lucky. They didn’t kill her.”

  “No, I don’t know her.” He didn’t look happy about being asked. “But I thought the cops, I thought they already arrested a guy? This Dr. Rakaan?”

  “Get this.” I leaned across the table like I was delivering secret information. “The killers filmed her rape and murder and the video contains evidence that at least two people were involved, not counting Christine, maybe three. Then somebody sent me a copy of the video as a way to brag about it. Can you imagine anything so stupid?”

  I’d never seen someone more likely to melt under the table.

  “Maybe they didn’t want to brag about it,” he said. “Maybe they had some other reason.”

  “Like what?”

  “Whatever. I don’t really know. I’m just speculating.”

  “Of course they were bragging,” I said. “What else could it be?”

  “Maybe they wanted it to stop.”

  He appeared so diffident that I doubt he convinced himself.

  “I’m just curious.” I stuffed the last bite of cake into my mouth and polished the fork. “Why did you go to the trouble of renting a car to drive to Christine’s funeral? Why didn’t you take your own car?”

  He thought about that as though considering the question for the first time. “It wouldn’t start,” he said. “It was the battery or something.”

  “So you cabbed all the way to the airport to rent a car to drive to the funeral of a woman who…” I shook my head, not believing a word of it, but letting him know I was trying to stay open-minded. “I’m sorry, how did you know Christine? Did I forget, or did you not tell me?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Wait, that’s right, at your dad’s house. Was it one of those big Hollywood parties I’m always reading about?”

  “I didn’t say it was my dad’s house, I didn’t say anything, and if I did say something, I lied. I didn’t know Christine, I’m just a vulture likes to go to funerals, okay?” His eyes, already reddened by whatever substance he’d been abusing, looked like they bled when he cried, the tears pouring from him like blood from a wound. He lurched to his feet, knocking aside the chair next to him before regaining his balance. “I gotta go.”

  “If you go, I can’t stop them from printing this.”

  “You can print anything about me you want. It doesn’t matter.” He took a step toward the door and bumped into the table, then swung wide around the back of my chair, shoulders hunched as he stumbled out of the café.

  18

  NOTHING SELLS LIKE fame, the reasons for celebrity far less important than the fact of it. Since Charlotte McGregor’s appearance in the pages of Scandal Times, two film agents had approached her about representation and casting people from three different productions had called to encourage her to audition. The phone hadn’t been ringing off the hook, she said, only because modern phones don’t have hooks. She’d driven into the city from Palmdale that morning to interview with one of the agents and to audition for a small part in a low-budget horror flick. She’d be happy to talk to us again, she said, because we’d brought her so much luck. When she emerged from her casting session, held in the office of a tiered, red granite and green glass building near the Variety headquarters on Wilshire, she appeared to glide across the paving tiles. A young man with stylishly tousled hair and a rumpled suit, worn without the tie, held the door open for her, grinned winningly when she thanked him, then wandered toward the courtyard fountain as though waiting for her to finish with us.

  “Is that your boyfriend?” Frank asked. He butted his cigarette and returned the unsmoked half to the box, a frugal but disgusting habit that made his clothes reek like an ashtray.

  Charlotte glanced back at the boy and smiled.

  “Just someone I met at the audition.”

  “Big part?” I asked.

  “Two lines and a scream when I get hacked by an axe.” Her fingers traced the contours of the scarf around her neck and adjusted it’s position. “I couldn’t do the scream because of my throat, you know, it’s not healed yet, so I’m not sure I’ll get the part.”

  “If your boyfriend sees this guy,” Frank said, the forced casualness of his tone a sure sign of something nasty to come, “won’t he beat the crap out of him? I mean seeing that he’s a violent criminal who’s done time for assault. Or are you thinking he might beat the crap out of you instead?”

  “You mean Randy?” Her voice cracked a higher octave at the mention of the name, as though she couldn’t believe he’d intruded upon her new reality. “I haven’t seen him in months.”

  “Is that why he tried to strangle you?”

  “He never did that to me,” she said, her hand again rising to her throat.

  “Oh, you mea
n it was just other girls he strangled, not you.”

  “It wasn’t other girls. He got into a fight with his girlfriend when he was, like, under a lot of stress.”

  “So he only strangles girls he likes, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Oh my God, you sound just like the cops.” She glanced at me as though deciding whether to stay and fight or turn and run.

  “He sounds like the cops because they just blindsided him,” I said.

  “The blindsiding, that was no big deal,” Frank said. “It was the threat to throw us in jail that bothered me.”

  “So, what, it’s my fault you didn’t ask me about my ex-boyfriend?”

  “No, it’s my fault for being such a sucker.” He didn’t have his notebook out, jotting down her replies. He was angry and being a bully about it. “It’s my fault because I believed you were being shafted by the cops. Because you looked like someone had victimized you. And because you look so completely innocent and believable I gave you the star treatment in the pages of Scandal Times.”

  “I am innocent,” she said, the blush of indignation firing color to her cheeks. “I was victimized.”

  Frank tapped his thumb and forefinger together, mime for a running mouth. “Everybody’s an actor in this town. What about the hits of ecstasy in your purse? You told us you didn’t do any drugs.”

  “They weren’t mine,” she said.

  “I’m sure the cops believed that when you explained it.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, her mouth wrinkling to a sour turn. “Of course they didn’t believe it. Not even I could believe the little fucker set me up like that.”

  “You mean your ex-boyfriend, Randy,” I said.

  “We were at the rave together and when the cops raided he dropped his stash in my bag.” She tossed her head back and her auburn hair jumped from her shoulders. “I didn’t even know it. He told me later he couldn’t risk getting busted, because of his record. Can you believe anybody could be such an asshole? I was like, sure, just drop it on the ground then.”

  “But he didn’t think they’d search you, right? Because you were a girl.” I put on a boy voice, said, “‘So what’s the big deal, babe? I didn’t know they were going to look in your bag.’”

  “You read my statement? The one I made to the police?”

  “No, but I’ve been around enough low-life characters in my life to know how it works. You wouldn’t be the first woman to take a fall for her boyfriend.”

  “I hate it when you do this,” Frank said.

  “Do what?”

  “Play the gender card.” He fingered the half-finished cigarette from the pack in his pocket and flicked his lighter. “Men are shits. Women are abused innocents.”

  “It’s true,” I said, laughing.

  “That’s why I hate when you play it.” He exhaled the smoke like a sigh of exasperation. “Show her the photographs, not that I’ll believe a word she says.”

  I lifted a folder from my bag. I’d pulled a sheaf of random eight-by-tens from the trunk and stuffed them into the folder with a single shot of Stewart Starbal, the same way the cops show suspects in a mug book. “Tell us if you recognize anyone,” I said.

  Charlotte shuffled through the first few, squinting as though nearsighted or just serious about getting it right. “This one,” she said, holding up a photograph of a sunglassed man holding a cup of coffee. “Ben Affleck, isn’t it?”

  Frank rolled his eyes at me, his way of calling me a moron.

  I photographed celebrities for a living. No surprise one had slipped in by mistake. I told her to go through the photographs from beginning to end without commenting, then to go back and identify anyone she recognized. I watched her carefully, looking for the light of recognition and dreading it might be sparked by another misplaced celebrity.

  She completed her pass through the sheaf of photographs and said, “Him.” She flashed the telephoto image of Stewart Starbal. “This looks like the guy who bumped into my table, the day I was drugged.”

  “Looks like or is,” Frank asked, blowing smoke.

  “He’s got the same hat, that’s for sure, and it looks like the same sweatshirt, except not turned inside out. How can that be a coincidence?” She pulled the photograph closer to her face, then flipped it toward us and pointed to Stewart’s soul patch. “He didn’t have one of these things below his lip, at least I don’t think he did.”

  “You don’t think he did, or he didn’t,” Frank said. “Those are two different things.”

  “I spent thirty seconds with the guy,” she said, and stuffed the photograph into my hand as though glad to be rid of it. “And after that, I was drugged out of my mind. He looks like him, but with different facial hair. I can’t get any more certain than that.”

  “Easy enough to grow a soul patch,” I said to Frank.

  “Easier to grow the patch than the soul,” he answered. “But I don’t feel comfortable going to print with this.” He thanked Charlotte for taking the time to talk to us. “I’m sorry if I offended you but I had to see where you’re coming from,” he said, the closest I’d ever heard him come to an apology.

  The art of acting teaches how to lie with the seamless ease of the truth, and the pressures of trying to make a living at it can make its students masters of manipulation. Charlotte was polite enough to thank us before she clipped away, toward the fountain, the boy, and her new life. I believed her performance but didn’t so certainly believe she told the strict truth—not that I disbelieved her either. That was my problem with actors. With the good ones—and Charlotte was good—I couldn’t always tell when they weren’t acting. If she’d told the straight and strict truth, we’d managed to further traumatize a woman who’d been victimized enough.

  “If you’re not doing anything, I know this convent nearby,” I said to Frank. “Maybe we can go, beat up a few nuns.”

  “Hell no, nuns are tough,” he answered, stubbing out his cigarette. “I went to Catholic school. The nuns, they kicked my ass plenty of times.”

  “What can you tell me about Stewart Starbal?” I asked.

  “Second of four kids, born to Jason Starbal and…” Frank flipped back in his notebook until he found the relevant entry, “…Minnie, maiden name Minnie Mapes; her first marriage, his second. She was an actress when they met, nothing more distinguished than the usual cute girl roles, sacrificed her career to raise a family. She broke her neck in a slip-and-fall accident six years ago.”

  “Starbal the elder never remarried?”

  “Dedicated his life to being a single dad, lots of high-profile dating, low-profile rumors before his wife died of being one of the names in Fleiss’s little black book.”

  “You mean Heidi Fleiss,” I said. She’d been arrested in the mid-’90s for running a call-girl ring to the stars. “No big deal there, half of Hollywood was in her book. But that’s ancient history.”

  “So what if he had a wife and four kids at home, right? I’m not commenting on the man’s morality here, just pointing out that if he was active as a married man we might speculate that as a long-term widower he’s either found God or someone to replace Ms. Fleiss.”

  “You’re so cynical. How old are the other kids?”

  “Jagger, the oldest, he’s a product of Starbal’s first marriage, already has his own film production company called Illusterious Productions, oddly spelled.”

  “Oddly spelled how?”

  “With an e, like a cross between illustrious and mysterious. Stewart is the second child. He’s got a younger brother, Redford, who’s already entered one of his student films in a festival, and a baby sister, Dalí, who plays piccolo in the youth symphony.”

  “Dolly?” I asked, not quite hearing it. “As in baby doll?”

  “Dalí, as in Salvador,” he corrected. “C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.” It was an offer of convenience rather than courtesy; he’d parked his Honda on the street, his front bumper nestled against the Cadillac’s rear. “You m
et Stewart. How does he look to you?”

  “Stoned, clueless, and guilty. I figure he’s the shadow in the video.”

  “A shadow, that fits. He hasn’t made much of an impression so far.” He jangled his car keys as he walked. “You do any kind of search for him and you come up with little more than references to his famous dad. Graduated from high school with grades that wouldn’t have gotten him into USC, except Starbal senior is one of the school’s most famous alums and biggest benefactors. Rumored to like video games and playing guitar, not supposed to be particularly good at either. No arrests, no trophies, no known girlfriends.”

  “He could always play for a slacker revival band,” I suggested.

  Frank stopped at the Honda, not quite making good on his promise to walk me to my car. “You’re right, he’s the perfect shadow. The kid, he casts no light at all.”

  19

  NEPHTHYS ANSWERED THE door to her courtyard bungalow that night wearing a red kimono draped over black silk pajamas, an Oriental motif that complemented her Egyptian pageboy hairstyle and charcoal-lined eyes. She looked so beautiful, framed by the exotic fabrics that hung on the walls of the living room behind her, that I felt an admiring kind of envy, wishing I was the type of woman who felt comfortable lounging around the apartment in a kimono and silk pajamas and thought interior decorating involved more than tacking a poster to the wall. I carried a sack of Thai takeout from Chan Dara in the crook of my arm, the scents of spices and meats pinning the Rott to my side like a magnet.

  “Is it okay if the dog comes in?” I asked. “He gets lonely in the car.”

  “You’re both welcome.” She tugged me into the kitchen by the sleeve of my leather jacket. Brightly glazed flowerpots stood in the wood-framed windows and in the few days since I’d visited she’d hung an entire community of Mexican Day of the Dead figures from the ceiling, the costumed skeletons dancing overhead like spirits. Halloween was months away; she’d hung them for reasons that had nothing to do with a seasonal celebration.

  “Your apartment is so beautiful.” I set the food down onto the counter and laughed, too self-conscious. “Listen to me, next I’ll be asking where you bought your dishes.”