Zero to the Bone Read online

  In the washed-out streetlight his face looked flush and his eyes glazed. “The disk somebody mailed you?” He cleared his throat. “It wasn’t music.”

  “If it was sent to me, then I should see it,” I said. “In fact, if it was sent to me, you shouldn’t even be looking at it.”

  Frank stared at me like I really didn’t get it.

  “No, it’s all right, she probably needs to see this,” Sean said. “I mean, you’re not sure, right? She’ll know better than you.”

  Frank reached into the trunk, pressed something, and moved aside. “This was supposed to be a good night for you,” he said.

  I stepped up to the rear bumper and looked into the mouth of the trunk, where Frank’s laptop played a high-resolution amateur bondage video already well in progress. The scene depicted what I imagined to be a routine S&M scenario: a young woman, semiclad in red latex and bound at her wrists to a metal rack, was mounted from behind by a man in a black latex suit and ski mask–style hood. A similar hood covered the woman’s head, slits cut for her eyes. A rubber ball was wedged into her mouth, held in place by a strap. With strips of latex disconnecting her features, the woman’s face could have been any young woman’s face. The eyes were listless. She didn’t seem to mind being tied to a rack.

  “Ruffies,” Sean said.

  “Rohypnol,” Frank added. “The date rape drug of choice.”

  I wanted to ask Sean how he knew she was drugged, but before I could speak the man slung a rubber strap around the woman’s neck and jerked it taut. Her head snapped back and she twisted her shoulders, trying to pull away. The man strangling her stood over six feet tall and pinned the woman to the rack like a butterfly. I looked away because I didn’t want to watch, but then I felt Sean’s hand gently supporting my back. The light from the screen illuminated his face from beneath, as though by theatrical stage light, the lupine curve of his lips and miss-nothing intensity of his eyes sadly predatory. I knew then what he was doing there, what he did for a living, and what was happening in the video. When I glanced back at the screen, the latex suit had been unzipped at the back and my eye met the mischievous wink of Betty Boop, tattooed along the upper curve of the woman’s right shoulder.

  2

  I DROVE BACK to Venice Beach trying to convince myself the woman in the video didn’t have to be Christine. An early summer inversion had settled over the city, smog condensing with beach fog to form a swirling yellow mist in the spears of light thrown by the Metro’s headlights. In the passenger seat, Cassie vied with the Rott to see who could lean their head the farthest out the window. Cassie knew nothing about what might have happened to Christine. When I’d returned to the gallery after answering Sean’s questions the crowd had thinned to a few friends, my models, and their hangers-on. I pretended nothing had happened and proposed a toast first to Leonora Price for taking the risk of exhibiting my work, and then to my models for being so photogenic. When I started to cry, everyone thought the emotions of the moment overwhelmed me in a good way. They all seemed happy, both for me and for themselves, like fireflies burning bright for one brief night against the greater darkness that awaits us all.

  I’d shot Christine’s first set of photographs just before Thanksgiving, and we’d gotten along so well she’d accompanied me to the airport to pick up Cassie, who was flying in from Phoenix, released to my care for the holiday by her foster parents. The idea to stage a photographic scene that involved them both had sprung from Cassie’s insistent complaints that I didn’t appreciate her talents as an actress or model, begun no more than a minute after she wheeled her suitcase from baggage claim. We talked about it over dinner that night—pasta and pizza at Angeli Caffé on Melrose—and the next day I rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for the shoot, Nephthys pitching in to help with set design and makeup. We’d scoured Cassie’s face of Goth-girl makeup, secured a curly blonde wig over her purple hair, slipped her into a white dress, and photographed her as a contemporary adolescent Shirley Temple shooting junk amid a zoo of stuffed animals, Christine as her movie-star mom talking on the phone in the background, back turned, clueless.

  Film and photo shoots promote a quick and easy camaraderie among participants, and during ours Cassie bonded instantly with Nephthys and Christine. We drove to Chinatown for Thanksgiving dinner that night, substituting Peking duck for turkey, and then over the weekend rode the bike paths of Venice Beach and watched films together. The experience seemed formative to Cassie, who was short on noncriminal role models just then, and she studied both Christine and Nephthys with the voracious curiosity of a young girl watching those a few years older to figure out the woman she might become. Christine and Nephthys may not have been the most wholesome role models, but by the age of thirteen my niece had already involved herself in criminal enterprises that would have sentenced her to a juvenile detention facility for the remainder of her youth had she been caught; any corrupting influences were likely to pass both ways. That Christmas we met again, and though I kept in touch with Nephthys after that, calling her every couple of weeks and meeting occasionally for coffee, Christine and I drifted apart, not from any conflict or lack of interest, but because we had little to talk about except what each of us was doing at the moment. We rarely talked about our pasts or personal issues. She was always a cipher to me, though a lovely one, a woman whose chatter captivated me even if, after a moment of reflection, I didn’t find much meaning in it.

  I didn’t really know much about Christine’s sex life, what turned her on. Some people found strangulation erotic, their partner throttling them a few seconds shy of brain damage and death, making the orgasms that much more intense. The video had ended violently but not conclusively, the woman unconscious but not necessarily dead. Maybe the sex had been consensual but had gone a little further than either partner intended. Christine could have been hiding somewhere, her silver dress hanging in the closet while she recovered from a bruised throat. The woman didn’t even have to be Christine. More than one woman bore a tattoo of Betty Boop on her right shoulder.

  I glanced over at Cassie. The Rott stretched across her small body, his head out the window, snapping at the wind as though one night he might catch it. I worried what the polluted air was doing to her young lungs but knew she’d scream if I insisted on raising the window.

  “Why did you start crying tonight?” Cassie asked, aware I watched her.

  “I just felt like it,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her, not then, not until I knew something more definitive.

  “I hope it wasn’t from happiness,” she said. “I hate it when people cry from happiness. It’s so Miss America.”

  “Maybe you’ll grow a heart some day, find out what it’s like.” It does little good to remind teenagers they’re cruel, but Cassie didn’t seem to mind. She peered at me from the far side of the passenger seat, her face a shining darkness in the night.

  “If I had a heart, I’d just suffer,” she said.

  Cassie voiced few complaints about going to bed that night, tired enough by the show and her day of shopping to curl under the covers in my bedroom soon after we returned to the place that passed for home. I lived then in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a twelve-unit teardown a half mile from the Venice Beach boardwalk. The landlord accepted all species of living creatures, from ex-cons with big dogs to illegal immigrants packed ten to a room, though cockroaches formed the largest population by far. Not many landlords are willing to rent to ex-cons, and those who are compensate for the risk by doubling the price.

  In my line of business the phone often rings at two in the morning with a rumored sighting of one A-list actor or another snorting cocaine off the back of a naked model or some other routine paparazzi photo op. Cassie slept in the bedroom because I didn’t want my work to wake her. I pulled the futon from the IKEA sofa and laid it flat on the floor, thinking I might try to sleep, but the images from the video still flickered through my mind and I got no closer to bed than kicking off my shoes
. I pulled a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the kitchen cabinet, poured three fingers into a tumbler, and sat at the kitchen table to explore the digital camera I’d purchased a few months before at the insistence of Scandal Times. The tabloids are catching up to technology, Frank said. From now on the paper would be looking for photographic content in digital form. Get used to it. I still took my most important shots on film but when the subject and conditions allowed I used the digital camera, a Canon SLR as complicated to navigate as a computer, something else I needed to learn to use.

  Just past midnight the cell-phone display lit with a call from an unfamiliar number in the 818 area code, originating from the San Fernando Valley. My network of tipsters, finks, and quislings covers most of the 310 area code—the West Side of Los Angeles—but every now and then a tip comes from the hills on the Valley side of Mulholland Drive. I took the call. A voice asked if Ms. Zero was speaking and it took me a moment to place the voice as Sean’s. “The night’s turning out slower than I thought,” he said. “Any chance you can get her photo to me? I might be able to start work on this right away.”

  I didn’t have anything in the apartment larger than a thumbnail image from a proof sheet. “I know an all-night darkroom in Hollywood,” I said, and told him I’d meet him there in an hour.

  I collected the negatives I’d need from the hall closet, thought about changing from the dress to a more utilitarian pair of jeans, but decided I didn’t want to risk waking Cassie by hunting down clothes in the bedroom closet. The Rott was slow to understand that his job was to stay behind and play guard dog, but after I whispered Cassie’s name a dozen times, pointing his nose toward the room in which she slept, he curled up at her door, sighed, and watched me go. I didn’t want her to wake and feel abandoned.

  Sean was waiting for me when I pulled into the mini-mall parking lot, sipping a cup of take-out coffee as he leaned against a pole sign advertising discount dry cleaning, a Korean nail parlor, video rental, an optician, a Thai restaurant, a postal store, a photo and camera shop, and the all-night donut shop that sold him the coffee. Many people in Los Angeles hated the garish ubiquity of mini-malls—there seemed to be at least one at every commercial intersection, and often two on dueling corners—but where else were you going to get a frozen yoghurt to go while you mailed a package and picked up the dry cleaning? In a city increasingly blenderized by corporate franchises, mini-malls were thriving shrines to the small businessman and the best places to find exotic but cheap cuisine, from Argentinean to Vietnamese and most every nationality in between. I slid the Metro between the chalk in front of the photo store and shouldered my camera bag.

  A confused look must have clouded my eyes when the door snapped open without my touching the handle; it had been so long since a man had opened the door for me I momentarily thought it somehow opened itself. Getting out of the car in a short, tight dress presented another problem, particularly in such close proximity to a man, but I think I managed it with little flash and some grace.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to any of Christine’s friends?” Sean asked. “Anybody tell you anything that can help us find her?”

  I’d asked Nephthys and a few other models, I told him, but nobody had seen her in the past twenty-four hours. He hadn’t wanted me to mention the video to anyone, not yet.

  “Any idea where she works?”

  “Some call service center,” I said. “The graveyard shift, I think.”

  “Did she report for work yesterday?”

  “I’ll check with another friend,” I said, thinking of Nephthys. “I don’t know where she works, not exactly. Actresses don’t usually go public about their day jobs, even the ones they hold at night.”

  “Anything else she does every day?” he asked. “The thing about work, it can help us establish when she went missing, if that’s what happened.”

  I told him I’d ask around. I knew she had a roommate, though I’d never met her. Christine came from a small central California town she couldn’t get away from fast enough, but I didn’t remember which one. When it came to facts, I knew little more than her address and telephone number. A hipster-technician with curly hair and a patch of scrub on his chin appeared behind the photo-shop glass, flipped the security locks, and swung open the door to let us in.

  We followed the technician to the darkrooms down a back hallway. Like most darkrooms this one had the square footage of a closet, and when the door shut behind us the environment felt a little too intimate. I asked Sean how long he’d been interested in photography. He stood no more than a foot behind me while I unpacked negatives, proof sheets, and photographic paper from my camera bag, so close I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. I knew it was a stock question. I didn’t care what we talked about. He could have been reciting the names of horses running at the track that day and I would have been content, because silence in that small room would have been too powerful.

  “I’ve always liked it,” he said. “You ever take photos in color, or just black and white?”

  “I took color photos in a studio for a while.” I flipped through the proof sheets of the photographs I’d taken of Christine, looking for an image that caught her in an unguarded look, and found a shot in which she sat before a dressing-table mirror, staring at some unfixed point beyond the glass. “A long time ago I worked in a baby-portrait studio called Hansel & Gretel’s, like the fairy tale. All the employees, we had to dress like characters from the fairy tale.”

  “The wicked witch, too?”

  “No, she was considered too scary for little kids.”

  “It’s a scary story. You remember how it goes? A starving woodcutter and his wife—the wicked stepmother—abandon their children in the forest.”

  “I don’t remember that part.” I shuffled through the negatives and found the one that matched the image on the proof sheet. “I only remember the breadcrumb trail, the candy house, and killing the witch at the end.”

  “That’s what everybody remembers.”

  I loaded the negative into the enlarger and switched off the lights. The safety light cast so faint a red glow that Sean’s black leather jacket disappeared and his face hovered in the darkness like the face of a ghost.

  “If you go back to the original,” he said, “it’s a story about felony child abandonment and a serial child killer that ends in justifiable homicide.”

  “Gretel burns the witch to death, right?”

  “She shoves her in the oven and slams the door.”

  “My kind of girl,” I said. I flicked on the enlarger light and focused it onto an eight-by-ten photo, then clicked it off. “Two years of taking photos of screaming babies convinced me that birth control is not a bad thing.”

  I liked the warm sound of his laughter in the dark. He slid around the room to watch over my shoulder. I flicked on the enlarger light and counted to three, burning the image into the photographic paper, then slipped the paper into the developing tray. Immersed in liquid developer, Christine’s image surfaced, the shadows surrounding her like dark clouds to frame the blank purity of her face. Sean leaned over my shoulder to watch the image develop, his face so close I smelled the coffee on him, fused with the light scent of his sweat and the oils in his black hair. When the shadows ripened to a dense black, I tonged the photograph into the stop bath to halt the changes in the image and eased it into the fixer to seal the results.

  “You know what I love about this?” Sean asked. “It’s like an investigation. You start with a blank and you end up with an image of what happened.” He gracefully slipped aside as I turned to the sink to wash the print beneath running water, the final step before drying. “Homicide investigation, it’s black and white, too. I’m not talking about moral issues here, I’m talking about how it feels. Things happen in my work that don’t happen in the real world, the world of color. Sometimes I think I live and work in a shadow world.”

  I turned to him, my interest sharply focused because I’d thought the very same th
ing about my work in the tabloids, that I lived and worked in a world that shadowed the real world but really wasn’t the real world at all, in the same way that most people who work graveyard shifts and long nights feel distanced from the daylight world of sun and color. Space in the darkroom was cramped and Sean had been hovering over my shoulder to watch me work, and so when I looked up at his face glowing beneath the safety light, our lips no more than a breath apart, what happened was my fault as much as his; I kissed him as much as he kissed me. Even though I considered it a little odd that a homicide investigator was so willing to talk to me about abstract feelings for the work he did, I hadn’t even been conscious of our flirting, in the same way that I wasn’t conscious of the terrible and wonderful consequences of kissing him. Yielding to the impulse to kiss him was like the first step toward falling together downhill, all tumbling-forward momentum, our limbs entwined as though the swift exhilaration of our coupling required an even tighter embrace to hold us together, his tongue in my mouth tasting as rich and fertile as earth, and when he penetrated me I launched into free fall, clutching his leather shoulders, my legs wrapped around his waist and my teeth dug into his neck.

  He made a sound like weeping when he came, as though he released his pain with his seed. I stroked the back of his head and kissed his brows and it wasn’t until I thought about his pain that I thought about anything except pleasure. Wild sex had been far from my thoughts when I entered the darkroom. It had been over a year since I’d made love to a man. Sean and I had coupled with such spontaneous passion that I’d neglected some unpleasant but essential realities. I hadn’t asked him to wear a condom and he hadn’t volunteered. I had to trust that he’d been surprised by the encounter no less than I, that his sexual history was clean enough that he hadn’t infected me with anything, and that I was late enough in my cycle not to get pregnant. That was a lot of trust to place in fate and someone I’d just met. I broke away from him and pulled down the hem of my dress.