Zero to the Bone Read online

  He wiped his face with both hands and stared at me above his fingertips. “Have you ever been walking fast,” he said, “your mind on something that takes all your attention, so you’re not really looking where you’re going, and then, bam, you run straight into somebody, and you both go sprawling, wondering what hit you?” He glanced down and saw that he’d kicked himself free of only one pant leg, the other clinging to his ankle. “That’s how I feel right now.”

  Water still streamed over the print in the sink. I closed the faucet and loaded the wet print into the air dryer, turning my back to give him a moment to pull up his pants in dignity. How much did he know about me? Had Frank told him that I was an ex-con paparazza on parole? I packed the negatives, proof sheets, and photographic paper back into my camera bag, wishing I could sort and pack my feelings as efficiently. I’m accustomed to getting screwed by the cops, but this was a first. I gave him the print, said, “This is quick and dirty, not really up to gallery standards, but it should serve your purpose.”

  I opened the door, letting our eyes adjust gradually to the light spilling in from the hallway. Sean swung the photograph toward the light to examine it. “It may be quick and dirty, but it’s beautiful, too.” He sounded as though he spoke about our sex as much as the photograph. “I’ll make photocopies and return this to you,”

  “You can keep it,” I said.

  “Would it offend you if I asked you to sign it?”

  I flipped the print image-side down to sign my name on the back, then slipped the photograph into an oversized envelope to protect it. Outside, in the mini-mall parking lot, he looked at me strangely but said nothing when I gave him my hand to shake rather than a kiss goodbye.

  Among the loneliest places in the world is any street in Los Angeles at 3 AM, where the stray headlights of automobiles skitter past each other like the wary survivors of an apocalypse and every few miles the swift descent of flashing police lights on one car or another demonstrates that no one roving about at such an hour can be up to much good. Los Angeles defines itself by day, a city of sunlight glinting sharply from the glass, metal, and chrome of rushing automobiles. Past midnight, the city extinguishes itself in the absence of the very things that define it, and roaming its streets is like roaming a wasteland. Until that night I hadn’t thought myself lonely. I had my dog, my work, and a few close friends, and even though I sometimes missed the comfort and pleasure of another body next to mine, I didn’t really see the point. The cool, smog-tainted emptinesses of the city by night harmonized with my spirit far more than the glare and bustle of daily life, as though I felt more at ease with the negative image of things than with the things themselves.

  To attach any significance to what happened in the darkroom that night would be a mistake, and given Sean’s profession, an error that could only lead to grief. What had he said? That he felt like he’d been looking in the wrong direction while rounding a corner and knocked into somebody. What do you do when you run into somebody without looking? You apologize and move on. Sure, I felt more passionate in those few brief moments than I had in years, probably because I’d been caught so completely unaware, but a moment of spontaneous passion was nothing to build a relationship on, except one of the most casual kind. The problem was, I didn’t believe I wanted a serious relationship either. If I disallowed myself casual flings and serious relationships, that left me with the sole possibility of sleeping with like-minded friends I found sexually attractive, a phenomenon so rare I may as well have converted to Catholicism and taken vows.

  I keyed the top deadbolt to the door of my apartment and when I didn’t hear the thumping gait of the Rott coming to greet me, I dismissed my foreboding with the thought that he liked his sleep too much to get up. Careful not to wake Cassie, I pushed quietly into the apartment and shut the door behind me, listening for the sound of the Rott’s limbs stretching on the carpet, his regular prelude to rising from sleep. The door to my bedroom, where Cassie slept, yawned open. I crept to the door frame and peeked inside. The covers to the bed lay flung aside, the bottom sheet indented where my niece had slept not so long ago. I called her name and turned to the bathroom, hoping to see a sliver of light or hear the toilet clatter and flush. I called her name again, louder, and leapt to flick on the lights, fearing what I might find but fearing more the dark and silence.

  A sheet of paper, anchored in place on the kitchen counter by an empty glass, caught my eye. I recognized at a distance the unruly scrawl of printed letters as my niece’s handwriting. “Baby and I gotta go somewhere to do something,” she wrote. “I’ll call tomorrow. Don’t worry.” I crumpled the note and flung it across the room. Don’t worry. Right. Might as well shoot me in the gut, tell me, don’t bleed.

  3

  THE VENICE BEACH boardwalk gleams like a carnival during daylight hours, tarot and palm readers competing with merchants and political cranks for the tourists crowding the boardwalk, but after the sun sets the merchants and mystics pack up and the crowds dissipate, leaving the trash behind. Violent crime escalates, and though most of it is perpetrated by drunks and druggies on other drunks and druggies, I did not always feel safe walking the neighborhood after midnight, even when accompanied by the Rott, and this intensified my worries about Cassie. I searched the beach and boardwalk until dawn, asking the drunks, drug addicts, skate punks, and homeless if they’d seen a teenage girl walking a Rottweiler that night. I called the dog as I searched, certain he’d come if he heard my voice, but the only replies sprang from those so deep into one mind-fogging substance or another that any claimed sighting of my niece or dog would be hallucinated.

  Cassie had proved capable of taking care of herself on the streets, and that helped me pass the night a little easier. She’d been running wild the year we met, one of a gang of runaways sleeping rough in an abandoned Nike missile base. I hadn’t even known she existed until a couple of homicide detectives from the Hollywood station picked me up late one night to identify the body of her mother—my older sister. She had been an even stranger child then, harmless enough to look at but wild and unpredictable, like a feral kitten. She could take care of herself well enough. What I didn’t know was how well she took care of others. She and the dog got along, I knew that. Cassie shied from contact with me but didn’t hesitate to hug or pet the Rott. I knew the Rott would be fiercely protective of Cassie, but I didn’t know how fiercely protective Cassie would be of the Rott.

  The cry of the cell phone woke me a couple hours past sunrise, curled in the cramped front seat of the Metro, parked on a residential side street in Los Feliz. I glanced at the call display, hoping to see the unfamiliar number of a public phone box where Cassie might be waiting to be picked up. The display registered a name instead, Nephthys, returning my call from late the night before. After abandoning my search of the beach, I’d driven across town to park and wait for her to wake.

  “She didn’t say anything to me about it,” Nephthys said when I told her about Cassie. “You know what it’s like at that age. It’s hard to find anything good to say about the people trying to take care of you, but she seemed happy to me, excited to be staying with you. But she’s not your average fifteen-year-old. She does what she wants and damns the consequences.”

  While we were talking I locked up the car, crossed the sidewalk to a 1920s bungalow complex, followed the concrete path toward a rear unit set behind a screen of palm fronds and birds-of-paradise, and knocked on the door. “Wait a minute, someone’s at the door,” Nephthys said, and a moment later her eye blackened the peephole on the opposite side. “Holy crap! It’s you!”

  When she snapped open the door I half expected to see hieroglyphics painted on the walls of her apartment to match the tattoos on her body, but Nephthys’s fetish for things Egyptian pretty much ended at her skin. She invited me into a tiny, cluttered kitchen, the sunlight streaming onto bright yellow walls. “Don’t worry about Cassie, that girl is fifteen going on thirty-five,” she said, pouring me a cup of coffee. “She was s
mart to take the dog with her. The dog will protect her.”

  “Sure, but who’s going to protect my dog from Cassie?”

  Nephthys took my comment as gallows humor. “They’re both going to be okay, don’t worry.” She put her hand on my shoulder and looked up at me—she didn’t stand taller than five foot two—her Egyptian-lined eyes crinkled with concern.

  I was crying again.

  “No, it’s not that, it’s something else, it’s Christine.” I wiped the sleeve of my jacket across my eyes and told her that someone had sent me a video depicting Christine in an S&M scene that featured strangulation, that it probably wasn’t anything serious but I had to find her as quickly as possible. “She told me she worked as a call service representative,” I said. “Do you know the name of the company, how to get in touch with her boss?”

  “Call service representative? That’s what she told you?” The corner of her mouth curved in a wise-girl smile. “That’s not exactly accurate.”

  “You mean she didn’t have a job?”

  “She had a job, but I think ‘call service representative’ might be a euphemism.” She touched my elbow as though sharing a secret. “She works at one of those 1-900 places.”

  I must have looked confused.

  “Phone sex,” she explained.

  No wonder Christine hadn’t told me the strict truth.

  “Do you know which one?”

  “Sweet Lasses, I think it’s called, but that kind of work, you never leave the house, the calls are patched to your phone line. I have the number stored on the computer.” She edged past me, careful of our cups of coffee, into a dimly lit living room furnished with a thrift-shop aesthetic, mix-and-match furniture from different eras and styles existing in happy harmony, brightened by colored fabrics from India and South America draped across the chair backs and hung from the ceiling, flag style. “Christine is another girl who can take care of herself; believe me, she’s not as innocent as she looks. But if you’re worried, we can take a look at her journal, see if she wrote anything that might explain what’s going on.”

  “Do you have the keys to her apartment?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Then how do we get her journal?”

  “It’s online.” She plucked a red batik covering from an egg-shaped iMac. “Christine is a Suicide Girl.”

  “I can’t believe Christine wanted to kill herself,” I said.

  “Suicide Girls isn’t about killing yourself.” She poked the computer’s start button and the thing chimed to life. “It’s an online community where Goths, punks, and alts show off their tats and body mods.”

  “Alts?”

  “You know, people into alternative culture.” She cracked her knuckles over the keyboard. “For example, I’m a post-post-feminist Egyptologist and body performance artist who reads science fiction and listens to old bossa nova records, and that’s just to start. It’s easier to say ‘alt’ and move on.” Her fingers clattered over the keys and a website loaded onto the screen, thumbnail jpegs of pierced and tattooed young women on the left, some kind of Internet message board on the right, interviews and weird news stories down the center. The women weren’t entirely naked but they didn’t wear a lot of clothes either. A logo in the top right corner depicted the letters SG and an illustrated woman posed before a background of stars. On closer inspection, a shirt I thought a woman wore turned out to be a tattoo.

  The screen flashed purple as the page shifted and Christine’s face appeared in the upper left corner, above her personal profile, which listed her age (21), body mods (tongue, nipple, ear, tattoo), favorite bands (Bowie, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Cure, Sonic Youth, Pixies, Portishead), favorite films (Amélie, Chocolat, Boogie Nights, Edward Scissorhands), favorite books (Harry Potter), and the five things she couldn’t live without (chocolate, Veuve-Clicquot, pain, laughter, latex). To the right of her profile, sentences from her online journal staggered across the page:

  my hair crisis is finally solved and I’m closer to my dream of looking like a 1950’s movie star for that show I’ve been writing about.

  i wanted to go platinum, like marilyn monroe.

  so i went to the all nite drug store to get the die and started fooling around with a pair of scizzors and i woke the next morning my hair like a haystack, just dry and all over the place ugly.

  i thought i’d have to wear a bag over my head but boyfiend the bastard treated me to a day at the stylist and now i look bootifull.

  tonite i see the guy says he’s johnny depp’s producer. probably just another cum on.

  hey, any of u going to the show nite after tomorrow? if u do the bootifull christine will kiss ur face.

  The journal entry was dated the day we’d hung the show, not quite seventy-two hours earlier. She’d dropped by the gallery to model her dress in the afternoon, returned home to type her journal entry, then later that night, if her journal was credible, she’d met the man who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s producer. “This so-called producer, how do you think she met him?” I asked.

  Nephthys said she remembered Christine had written about him before and tapped at the keyboard again. The previous day’s journal entry popped onto the screen:

  i don’t know if this is just more elay bullshit but some guy claims to be a producer on one of johnny depp’s films (from hell, not his best) wants to see

  ME!!!!???!!!

  this is his line—he said he needed people who could be cool around johnny, said i sounded like somebody might be good to hang with, maybe cast in the picture but no, he wasn’t going to lead me on, make promises.

  this means he just wants to screw me, right? whatever. if that’s all he wants, no effing way, but i’m not gonna tell the boyfiend…

  tg he won’t read this, he thinks sg is crap!

  don’t don’t don’t forget two nights from now the show.

  I asked when she’d last seen Christine.

  “I didn’t. I mean, we communicated here on the site but I haven’t actually seen her this week.” She scrolled down the page to a series of comments made in response to Christine’s journal entry that day. A few of the comments were marginally pervy, but most were touchingly supportive messages. Ur soooo Hawt!!! One comment read. I can’t believe ur not gonna be a ***. And then, further down the page, I saw a thumbnail close-up of Nephthys next to her name and the exhortation, U Rock Grrrrl!

  “You wrote this?” I asked.

  “We all post messages to each other’s journals.” She darted the cursor to her thumbnail image and clicked. “I can’t tell you how excited I was when the first photoset of my tats went online. That’s how I met Christine and a bunch of my friends. Here, let me show you…”

  I dug my address book from my camera bag while she loaded a page that contained her thumbnail photo, personal profile, and journal. She clicked another jpeg at the top of the page and a photograph surfaced onto the screen, Nephthys standing at a brick wall, legs pressed tightly together but arms stretched wide, her hieroglyphic-tattooed body like a canvas framed in red. I took my eyes from the screen long enough to show her the address I listed for Christine and she confirmed it was the same as the one in her book. “I keep calling her cell but I don’t get an answer,” I said. “Do you know her roommate?”

  “Tammy.”

  “Another Suicide Girl?”

  “No, she’s an aspiring actress.” Nephthys’s mouth crinkled as though wrapped around something sour. “Tammy’s a real girly-girl. She’s on location right now, somewhere in Canada I think, shooting some made-for-dreck movie.”

  “What about the boyfriend?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to betray any confidences, but the video you mentioned?” She turned in her chair and looked up at me, her face small and compact as a child’s but the look in her eyes not childlike at all. “It doesn’t surprise me. They were into some really twisted shit.”

  Christine’s supposed boyfriend, the self-help author Dr. James Rakaan, practiced past-life regr
ession therapy on a dead-end street in the hills above Sunset Boulevard, just east of the Beverly Hills border. I remained a little fuzzy on the underlying theory, but as I understood it past-life regression therapists uncovered a patient’s memories of past lives through hypnosis, sometimes because it was just a cool thing to do but most often because some memories were so terrible that they influenced the patient’s present life. One case history I read on the Internet described a man with chronic phantom back pain who discovered he’d taken a Roman spear to the liver in the second century while trying to save his family from slaughter. Once he remembered and dealt with the trauma, the pain disappeared. According to the promotional information on his website, www.RakaanHeals.com, Dr. Rakaan was not only one of the most revered practitioners of the exciting new science of past-life regression therapy, but also the author of New York Times bestsellers such as Healing the Past-Life Child Within and Soul Mates: One Love Through a Hundred Lifetimes, plus one title that stayed twelve straight weeks on the self-help bestseller list, You’re Not Crazy, You Really Are Napoleon: How to Unleash the Power of Your Past Lives.

  In his private practice, Dr. Rakaan charged hundreds of dollars an hour to a star-studded list of studio executives and celebrity clients, but almost anybody could afford the price of a book, the website quoted him as saying, and he was happy to make his techniques available for the benefit of the general public. Most impressive of all, Dr. Rakaan not only elicited past-life experiences from his patients—any second-rate past-life regressionist with half his credentials could pull that off—but with certain talented subjects he could invoke future lives as well, telling patients what shapes their reincarnations would take up to six lifetimes from now, something he called future-life progression, or FULP.™

  While I drove toward Beverly Hills I called the phone number Sean had left with me, and when his voice mail picked up I left a detailed message about Christine’s journal and the name of her employer. When I finished giving him this information I nearly said something sappy about our encounter the night before but restrained myself, instead suggesting he could call to let me know he’d received the message. I figured he wouldn’t mind my talking to Rakaan. I tracked people for a living, if celebrities can be called people and photographing them a living.