Zero to the Bone Page 17

  “At thrift shops and flea markets, if you want to know. That’s where we set decorators find a lot of our stuff.” From the cabinet beside the sink she pulled out a mixed set of Fiestaware plates, bowls, and platters. “When I work on a film, I try to get inside the characters’ heads. I think someone’s personal environment says a lot about who they are.”

  “You just stuck a knife in my chest,” I said, and turned to unpack the curries, rice, and noodles from the bag.

  “Why? What’s your apartment like?”

  “A minimalist slum.”

  “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”

  “It is. I don’t decorate. I don’t own things to decorate with. I used to, when I was, you know, before I went to prison.”

  “You’re like a nun or monk.” She hovered over the curry, her mascara-lined eyes widening at the promise of spice. “I noticed that about you right away. You wear your leather jacket like a habit, you know? Maybe I’ll start calling you the warrior nun.”

  “I don’t think I’m that moral,” I said, a little offended.

  “What I’m talking about has nothing to do with morality in any conventional sense of the word.” She dished the curry into small bowls and set them onto the table, next to a larger bowl for the rice. “I’m an epicurean. I surround myself with beautiful, exotic things because I like them. They’re my weakness. Not the beauty of gold and diamonds. I prefer a more occult beauty, the beauty of strangeness. If I had to choose between truth and beauty, I’d take beauty half the time. A beautiful lie sometimes is more attractive to me than an ugly truth—particularly in love affairs. You’re more the Stoic type. You’d never choose beauty over truth.”

  “I don’t think truth can be separated from beauty.”

  “Then how can you explain Christine? She loved the lie, loved to tell one, loved to live one, and that made her mysterious and oh so beautiful.”

  And it got her killed, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I removed my leather jacket and strung it over the chair back. When she noticed the scars on my arm, she hit me with a questioning look that I quickly deflected. We toasted to the memory of Christine and devoted ourselves to the rich, red Panang curry and the complimentary tang of pad thai, a noodle dish leavened by bean sprouts, lemon, and crushed peanuts, the meal and our conversation lubricated by a supermarket Chardonnay. We talked about our childhoods—Nephthys had been raised in a middle-class neighborhood near Madison, Wisconsin, the daughter of an English professor and a failed performance artist—before we drifted inevitably to the subject of our toast. “It’s hard to remember she’s dead, sometimes,” Nephthys said. “I’ll sometimes have this thought, like, call Christine, and I have to check myself.”

  I didn’t have that problem. When the people in my life died, they died. I didn’t imagine them alive again, though I sometimes imagined avenging their deaths. “Do you remember, at her funeral, seeing a young guy, about twenty years old, wearing an expensive suit and looking like he didn’t know anyone? Wait a minute, I’ll show you.” I zipped open my camera bag and pulled from the portfolio of photographs the shot I’d taken of Stewart Starbal wearing baggy clothes and a bucket hat at Sunset Plaza. “This is the same guy, probably the way he dresses most of the time.”

  She tipped the photograph toward the candlelight and nodded.

  “Sure, I remember seeing him there.”

  “Do you know him?”

  She shook her head and passed the photograph back to me.

  “Did she ever mention the name Starbal to you, Stewart Starbal?”

  “Not that comes to me right away.” She tilted her head and looked to the far corner of the room as she thought back. “Any relation to the movie guy? Those vampire-in-space movies?”

  “His son. Any chance she met him through Rakaan?”

  “If she did, she wouldn’t have told me.” She lifted the rim of the glass to her lips, eyes darkly luminous above the golden wine. “A lot of famous people were on his client list. He insisted on confidentiality and she kept it. It may sound weird to you, but they trusted each other.”

  “If you’re strangling each other unconscious for sex play,” I said, “I hope you trust each other.”

  “Why do you want to know about him?”

  I told her about the shadow moving across the corner of the frame in the video of Christine’s killing. She stood and carried the dishes to the sink, and when I bumped her aside to get to the dish soap she said we’d take care of the dishes later. “Grab your chair,” she said. “We’ll hunt back through her diary, see if we can find any kind of mention.”

  Nephthys carried the bottle of Chardonnay and our two glasses into the living room, where a length of red batik draped her computer. I pulled a chair from the kitchen and placed it next to hers. While the computer powered up I refreshed our glasses with wine and caught her staring at the scars on my right forearm, one of the reasons I’m partial to my leather jacket and long-sleeved shirts. She softly gripped my wrist and examined in the monitor’s cathode-ray light the rough-edged holes that crater my skin from forearm to biceps.

  “What happened?” she asked, simply and without pity.

  “An asshole burned me with a cigarette,” I said. I let her take her time. I knew she’d have to ask, eventually, once she’d seen them. “He tied me to a chair. He’d smoke, ask me questions, and when I didn’t answer or said something he didn’t believe, he’d stub out his cigarette on my skin. Burning me with a cigarette, that was just one of the tortures he had in mind. The other wounds, they pretty much healed, but I’ll carry these to my grave, along with the memory.”

  She kissed my arm once and let it go to navigate her browser to Christine’s online diary. “Is that the one you killed? The one you went to prison over?”

  “This wasn’t the guy, no. This one was already dead when I shot him.”

  The screen flashed from page to page, Christine’s quirky biographical data boxed on the left, her diary entries running on the right, each entry accompanied by snippets from those who read her diary and wrote comments, mostly compliments and expressions of support. Nephthys scrawled the cursor to an entry dated two weeks before her murder.

  The bootiful christine got the guided tour of a bev hills manse today—I’m under blood oath not to give out the name but if I whisper in your ear Father of Intergalactic Bloodsuckers you’ll know who I mean.

  While my friend made a (wink-wink nod-nod) professional visit I got surprised by the bloodsucker spawn and their posse, they weren’t even supposed to be there, but it ended up pretty cool cause they gave me the grand tour.

  The place was effing HUGE, room after room, two pools, game room, private screening room, it’s like, their walk in closets are bigger than my entire apartment. The boyz already have their own production company, maybe they noticed what a great poisonality I have, they’ll make me the next great whatever when they get rich and powerful like daddy.

  Too bad they were such spoiled brats.

  One was kinda sweet. I gave him my phone number. When he called I told him I was already seeing someone but stay in touch. I’m such a slut/tease.

  But at least I’m gonna have some fun.

  “She didn’t use real names in her diaries, so everything is in a sort of code.” Nephthys highlighted the first sentence. “I wouldn’t have guessed this without your hint where to look, but the Father of Intergalactic Bloodsuckers has to be Jason Starbal.”

  I reread the text, fitting the details to the little I knew about Starbal. Nearly every big-time producer who didn’t have a place in Malibu lived in Beverly Hills, so that meant nothing. Stewart and one or more of his brothers could be the bloodsucker spawn, but then, Starbal wasn’t the only producer to have kids. “The friend making the professional visit?” I asked.

  “Has to be Rakaan,” Nephthys said. “She usually calls him the boyfiend but she’s coming really close to violating their confidentiality agreement so maybe she’s just being coy.”

  “Impossible to p
rove,” I said.

  “Let’s cross-check her screen name with the site’s discussion threads to see if she mentioned it anywhere else. The threads are like the diaries, they don’t disappear. So what we’ll do is check the threads that were active then.” She tapped at the keyboard and the screen flashed to a page containing fill-in boxes for keywords and member names. She typed bloodsucker in one and Christine in the other. A message appeared stating no results for the search. She typed in a different search term and asked, “When you said the guy who burned you was already dead, did you mean literally, figuratively, what?”

  “Dead as in dig-a-hole dead. Somebody I knew, he shot him first. He was dead by the time I grabbed the gun, but that didn’t stop me from emptying the cylinder into his chest.” I refreshed Nephthys’s glass and finished off the bottle in mine. “The guy who ordered me tortured, that’s the one I killed.”

  She tried another search term and hit return.

  “How’d you do it? You mind me asking?”

  “He drove into a gas pump.”

  “How was that manslaughter?”

  “I was on a Harley at the time, chasing him with a handgun.”

  “Did you shoot him?”

  “Never got close enough. The gas pump blew up. He fried to death.” I sipped at the wine, wondered whether I’d do things any differently if I could go back in time. “I was a lot angrier then, more desperate, too.”

  “Maybe this is one of the reasons you won’t let Christine go, what happened to you.” Another search term failed. She growled at the screen and tried again. “Most people would back away, let the police handle it. But look at you, you’re actually trying to chase down whoever did this to Christine, just like you chased down the guy who had you tortured.”

  “I work for the tabloids,” I said, not agreeing with her at all. “This kind of thing, it’s my job.”

  “You choose your job.” She whooped and pointed at the screen with the red lacquered nail of her right forefinger, having found something under the search term brats. “This is the day after she wrote about visiting the mansion, a thread called the daily rant, where people vent about things that piss them off.”

  The threads ran the opposite of blog style, oldest entry at the top and newest at the bottom, member names on the left and their comments on the right. Most people ranted about the daily annoyances of urban life, like bad drivers and people who don’t clean up after their dogs, the screen names of the ranters more original than the rants. Someone ranted against Republicans for being rich and a poor Republican ranted against being ranted against. Christine’s rant appeared near the bottom of the page.

  anybody born not just with a silver spoon but a dinner service for twelve in his mouth. I just met some of these a**holes, and it’s not just that they carry daddy’s credit card, not just that they haven’t worked a day in their collective lives, it’s the arrogant attitude they have, that sucksess is their birthright. look in the mirror, a**holes, see the < l.a. bratS > written on your foreheads.

  The passage revealed what Christine thought of the people she’d met—assuming they were the same ones she’d mentioned in her diary—but it didn’t tell me who they were, not definitively. Nephthys gave me a little dig with her elbow.

  “You don’t see it, do you? Look again.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Look in the mirror, that’s the clue.”

  I knew the asterisks were used to write a swear word without actually writing it, but it wasn’t until I considered the way another set of punctuation marks bracketed “l.a. bratS” that I saw it.

  Write “la brats” on someone’s forehead, stick him in front of a mirror.

  It spells Starbal.

  20

  I DRAGGED THROUGH a beach run late the next morning, my pace on the hard, wet line of sand above the receding tide as slow as a jog on dry beach, the Rott racing far ahead, then charging back to urge me forward. I wasn’t surprised at feeling tired. Nephthys was a champion nonstop talker, not someone who dominated conversation as much as pushed, prodded, and goaded it into movement whenever the words slowed; I hadn’t navigated the roving traffic cops back to Venice until well past midnight. After the run I lay in the sand to stretch and do stomach crunches but fell into a light doze instead, luxuriating in the heaviness of my flesh on the warm sand. Losing a few hours of sleep didn’t usually bother me, but my energy levels had been so low that week I was beginning to believe fatigue was my normal state. When the Rott stirred beside me I woke and sat up with the distinct feeling of being watched. The Rott felt it too, his attention divided between the gulls he thought it his genetic duty to chase and a man who had settled into the sand ten yards behind me.

  On late May weekdays the beach at the end of my street attracts a scattering of sunbathers, mostly serious sun junkies and out-of-towners who don’t have the two weeks to wait for full summer temperatures, and the beach offers wide stretches of open sand between bodies. The man behind me sat fully clothed, but that wasn’t remarkable. People came in all styles of dress to sit or walk the sand. He did not look all that different from most of the denizens of Venice Beach, a mid-thirties man dressed in worn jeans and an old T-shirt. I might have figured he was on his lunch break had he been eating something, had he not selected a spot ten yards away from me when he could have settled another twenty yards distant and still remained thirty yards from the nearest person, and most of all, had he not been staring at me with all the obviousness of a hungry man a piece of meat.

  I thought about staring back, one of the power plays allowed to women with big, ferocious dogs, decided I didn’t need the trouble. I hugged the Rott and stood, but made the mistake of turning toward instead of away from him.

  “That’s a nice dog you have,” he called, in that aggressive way some men have of making a comment about the weather a challenge.

  I looked at him long enough to be polite, nodded, and walked toward the boardwalk. He had the dry, furrowed look and stringy hair of a long-term meth abuser, someone thirty-five going on sixty. Maybe he thought complimenting my dog was a good pickup line.

  “I’d take extra good care of that dog, if I were you,” he said.

  The line and its implicit threat stopped me in the sand and I looked at him again, noticed the lightning bolts home-tattooed into the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. He’d done time, the tattoo said, and he’d done violence while doing time. I’d been an angry person when first released from prison, and had he said something like that to me in those first months I would have taken serious offense. He wasn’t me. He needed to mind his own business. I’d matured since then. I thanked him for his concern and ran instead, calling the Rott to heel in a forceful tone he obeyed without hesitation. The guy didn’t look in good enough cardiovascular shape to chase me more than a hundred yards, but tired or not, I took the long route back to my apartment, doubling back to make sure I wasn’t followed, proud of my newfound maturity and self-restraint but not so mature I didn’t fantasize kicking what remained of his teeth down his throat.

  After I showered and dressed I worked on a shrine to Christine I’d begun after her funeral, tacking photos to the wall, one by one, as the mood struck me. Earlier that week I’d stopped in a church and bought a half dozen devotional candles in the style popular with Mexican Catholics, the ones in glass holders bearing the appliqué images of saints and the sacred heart of Jesus. I’d arranged the candles on a few upended fruit crates propped against the wall below the photographs. I planned to light them one night and say a prayer for Christine and all the others I’ve lost. I’ve always respected the atmosphere of belief if not the text preached from the pulpit. I guess that makes me half pagan.

  When my cell phone rang I answered in a meditative mood, staring at a candid shot of Christine laying across Nephthys’s lap. I didn’t recognize the calling number or the caller, who, without giving his name, asked, “Where do the lost people go when they slip through the hole in the center o
f everything?” The voice reminded me of some of the drunk or stoned boys who used to call me when I was in my teens and early twenties, so slurred by one intoxicant or another that I struggled to separate the words from the ellipses.

  “If they’re Catholic, they burn in hell for eternity,” I said.

  Laughter keeled over the line.

  “That’s funny. I’m not Catholic.”

  “But you’re lost.”

  “So lost I don’t know the way home.”

  The silence at the end of the sentence made me think he’d severed the connection.

  “What’s going on, Stewart?” I pushed a tack in the wall, securing the top two edges of an image of Christine applying a sheath of red lipstick to her lower lip. “I know you didn’t mean to hurt Christine. Where are you now? If you want to talk to me about it, maybe I can help.”

  “You don’t know anything,” he said, pain spiking through whatever substance numbed him. “The cops, they don’t know anything, you don’t know anything, everybody’s wrong about what happened to her and so it’s like, kick the shit out of Stewart time, you know? And who do I think maybe might understand what I’m trying to do? My family, everybody in my family hates me. My friends, they want to soak me in gasoline and burn me alive. And you, Christine’s friend, the one person I thought might understand, even you want to beat the shit out of me. I didn’t mean to hurt her? You know what I say to that? Fuck my family! Fuck my friends! And fuck you!”

  The line closed like a stone door with me on the wrong side, staring at the cell phone in my hand and wondering if the call had been a hallucination inspired by Christine’s shrine. From the sound of Stewart’s voice he’d taken the kinds of drugs that dulled the emotions rather than excited them, but still he’d lashed out, unable to control his anguish and anger. Why did he think I’d understand? I’d done nothing to help him. Instead, I’d threatened to brand his name into the headlines of a tabloid newspaper. I looked at the return number left on the cell’s call display—another cell phone by the look of the digits. In my experience hallucinations didn’t leave evidence. I pressed call, let it ring a half dozen times, hung up, then called again after a two-minute wait.