Zero to the Bone Read online

  “What did he say his name was?” Frank asked.

  “Tyler Durden.”

  “Tyler Durden? Fight Club, right?”

  “The movie? Wasn’t it incredible?” She smiled and for a moment she seemed transported, one memory connecting to another, until the smile abruptly dropped from her lips. “He played Tyler Durden. Brad Pitt. In the movie. That was his character name.” She brushed a strand of hair from her face, hand trembling. “He used Brad Pitt’s character name as his own and I didn’t even recognize it. I’m too stupid to live.”

  She picked up her tea and walked toward a window table lacquered in sunlight, hung her purse by its strap on the chair back, and sat down facing the front. I liked the look of the sun slanting across her face, tinting her skin gold and lighting the tips of her long, red eyelashes, but I didn’t want to pull out my camera, not yet. A photograph of the teary-eyed victim might sell to the readers of Scandal Times, but I didn’t want to traumatize her. I didn’t normally care so much about these things. Maybe her lack of size inspired the kind of compassion I felt for children. Maybe I felt that through her, the one who lived, I could soothe Christine’s ghost. I again observed how small she was, her wrists the size of a champagne flute. Christine in heels didn’t reach five foot seven, and she’d weighed less than 110 pounds. Maybe Christine and Charlotte had been stalked and seized not just for their beauty but for their size; small girls are easier to physically control and dominate.

  “You told the cops the name, of course.” Frank took a chair at the two-seater next to her table. I wasn’t surprised he’d caught the reference to Fight Club; trivia like that stuck to his mind like pasta to a wall.

  “They didn’t say anything about it one way or another,” she said.

  “That doesn’t mean they didn’t get the reference. I’m a big fan of the police. Most of the time they do a great job, given the resources at their disposal, particularly homicide detectives. But they aren’t exactly open about sharing information.” He popped the top of his medium-sized coffee to let it cool. “What time were you scheduled to meet Mr. Durden?”

  “Four. But then he didn’t show and I started to feel incredibly anxious, you know? Like wondering if he’d set me up as some kind of joke, this hick girl from Palmdale.” She glanced out the window, her fingers cupped around the tea like a prop, though she showed no intention of drinking it. “Sometimes I get myself so emotionally wound up about things I make myself sick, you know? I mean, like, literally. I thought it was that, at first.”

  “You started to feel, what…sick…drugged?”

  “I didn’t know what I felt like, to tell the truth. I don’t do drugs, not really, just a joint every now and then.” She stared at the ceiling and bit her lower lip. “Don’t print that, okay? About the joint.”

  Frank shrugged, said, “I think I can forget I heard that without losing my journalistic integrity. But you knew something was wrong.”

  She nodded and rotated the cup in her hands a half circle, the bottom rim scratching softly on the table top. “When it kept getting worse I thought I was having an allergic reaction to the tea. But a few minutes later, I really didn’t care. I didn’t feel anxious anymore. I felt really good, kind of heavy and super relaxed, like I didn’t want to move but that was all right, I could just sit there and watch the sun set and it was all good.”

  “Do you remember leaving the café? Or did you black out?”

  “Wait a minute, let’s back up here.” I drew a flicking, annoyed glance from Frank, who didn’t like to be interrupted when interviewing a subject. “Did you notice anyone in line behind you? Someone who might have reached across the counter while you were picking up your tea?”

  The shake of her head was quick and tight, as though she’d already been asked this question. “The store was pretty empty. I mean, I wasn’t the only one in here but there wasn’t a line. But I think I know why you’re asking. The cops wanted to know the same thing, after they gave up on the idea that I’d taken the drug ‘recreationally,’ as they put it.”

  “They said that?”

  “They were real assholes when they first picked me up. Thought I’d been out raving the night before, got so stoned I passed out, implied the whole thing was my fault. But the doctor who examined me, she was good, she knew I’d been strangled, and…” She compressed her lips tightly and took a deep breath. “…that other thing, the rape, she saw that, too. When I told her how I couldn’t remember what happened, she asked me to pee in a cup, and the whatchacallit, the urinalysis, showed positive for Rohypnol.”

  “Can you remember anything that happened between the time you ordered the tea and when you started to feel different?” I asked. “Did anyone approach or talk to you?”

  She touched the scarf at her throat, a quick gesture to check its position, and nodded. “Less than five minutes after I sat down, this guy? He came toward the window, and it was like he wasn’t watching where he was going, he bumped into me.” She lifted her tea and wobbled the table. “You can see, the tables aren’t so stable, so he reached down, like immediately, to hold it, and of course some of the tea spilled, so he got a napkin to wipe it up.”

  I didn’t notice a dispenser on any of the tables.

  “Where did he get the napkin?”

  She pulled her head back an inch, surprised by the question, and it took her a moment to remember. “He had it with him. Had to. He was mopping up where the tea spilled a second after he bumped the table.” She pushed her tea forward and folded her hands carefully in front of her, the pressure of her grip reddening the tips of her fingers. “Do you think he was the one who drugged me? You think he put something in my tea?”

  “No way the barista does it,” Frank said, glancing toward the service counter. “Unless he leaves the country the next day. The guy who bumped the table, what did he look like? Can you describe him?”

  “I can try.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head toward the ceiling. “He wasn’t big or small, kind of average in height. About my age. I can’t describe his face in detail because he wore sunglasses and one of those floppy hats guys like to wear. You know what they look like?”

  “Bucket hats,” Frank said. “Like a fisherman’s hat.”

  “Exactly. This one was sky blue, with a red band. What else?” She tapped her index finger against her knuckle and nodded. “Right. A faded red sweatshirt turned inside out, his jeans fashionably baggy, but not hip-hop baggy, more surfer baggy. I got the idea he was posh.”

  “Why posh?” Frank asked. “A lot of young guys dress that way.”

  “But only someone who comes from money, serious money, knows how to put it all together so perfectly. It’s like they all go to some fashion school for rich kids, learn how to get the perfect slumming look.” An expression of pure class awareness lodged in her eyes, as though she so keenly felt the differences in class that she’d become expert in spotting them, something I’d noticed in those with money and in the less advantaged driven to achieve financial and social success. “It was in his voice too the way he talked. He had that lazy, laid-back kind of voice, like he didn’t have to bother with things like money or achievement because he’d been born with his, you know what I mean? He wasn’t from around here, that’s for sure.”

  “Did he stick around?” Frank asked.

  She shook her head. “He went into the bathroom, I guess to wash his hands or something, and then he took off.”

  “How long before you started to feel funny?”

  “About twenty minutes, I think. Long enough to drink my tea, and worry that the guy I was supposed to meet wasn’t going to show. After that, I don’t remember things so clearly.”

  “Do you remember how you got out of the café?”

  She shook her head and said, “Vaguely. I remember somebody came up, said he was Tyler Durden. I remember hearing his voice, hearing him say his name, but I can’t remember what he looked like. Wait a minute!” She nodded, remembering. “He was standing behind
me. That’s why I couldn’t see him. He was standing behind me, asking if I was okay, and then he helped me up, out of the café, and into a car.”

  “Do you remember what kind of car?”

  She cupped her hands to her face, hiding a grimace. “It gets really blurry after that. I see shapes, colors, light, but it’s all like a ghost world. The car?” She shook her head. “Black. We took a drive, then I remember a room somewhere. I think he must have kept drugging me because I blank out completely after that. I can’t even remember him, you know, doing things to me. Not really. All I remember after that is coming out of it, sitting in the desert, half my clothes flung around me, the other half just gone.”

  Charlotte tugged at the loose knot tying the scarf around her neck, her lips drawn into a tight, defiant line. The scarf slipped away to reveal a faint bruise the width of a purse strap circling her throat and two thumb-sized blotches of purple on opposite sides of her larynx. “The doctor can’t tell me when I’ll be able to regain my voice.” She nodded as though coming to some decision with herself and swiftly unclasped the hook at the back of her dress, pulled down the zipper, and turned in her chair to show us the cross-hatching of faded red welts between her shoulder blades. “I asked the doctor about these. She said it looked like somebody whipped me.”

  She zipped up the back of her dress but couldn’t locate the clasp. When I reached over to help her she thanked me, her voice cracking right down the middle, and she bit her lip, hard, to keep from crying. “How can I be an actress with a voice like this?” she croaked. “How can I play to the back of the theater if the audience can’t hear me in the front row?”

  9

  THEY BURIED CHRISTINE about a hundred feet from U.S. Highway 99 in Cherokee Memorial Park just outside of Lodi, the pastor’s portable sound system dueling with the diesel roar of produce trucks plying the lettuce route between Stockton and Sacramento. I stood outside the immediate ring of mourners, more interested in witnessing the service through the lens of my Canon than aligning myself with Christine’s old friends from high school, her new friends from Los Angeles, or the members of her family. I didn’t know her as well as the others who gathered for the funeral and I hadn’t driven three hundred miles just to mourn her passing. My motives were more complicated.

  The pastor eulogized Christine with platitudes that sounded to my ear more predictable of a small-town girl than accurate of a big-city one. I knew little about her life except that it had been short, and remarkable mostly in the brutality of her death. She had been born in Lodi twenty-one years before they buried her, the third child of five. Her mother served in the local Methodist church as a secretary and her father worked as the manager of a chain supermarket. She hadn’t excelled in school except for the theater arts classes she took in her junior and senior years. Even though she’d been dragged to church every Sunday, she never had been particularly devout. At the age of sixteen she had—to the dismay of her parents—simply refused to go anymore, except for Easter and Christmas services. On her eighteenth birthday she took a Greyhound bus to Los Angeles.

  I wasn’t the only one who felt more comfortable standing away from the cluster of family and friends. Dr. James Rakaan stood several steps beyond the fringe of the crowd, eyes cloaked behind Dolce & Gabbana wraparound sunglasses, his long black hair waving dramatically to the shoulders of a black suit. The suit tapered to his waist in a way that only the finest tailoring can provide and a single white lily dangled by its stem from his clasped hands. If GQ ever decided to come out with a special funeral style issue, he was ready to model for it. Though I hesitated to take photographs while the pastor spoke, a man sitting in the passenger seat of a sedan parked on the fringe of a nearby service road wasn’t so timid, taping the crowd with a video camera. I traced the line of his lens. He thought Dr. Rakaan looked as photogenic as I did. I wondered if the cameraman worked for the local police department or had driven north from Los Angeles.

  A flutter of white in the cemetery beyond Rakaan caught my eye and I shifted a step to get a clearer view. The tissue wrapping a bouquet of flowers flapped in the breeze, lightly held by a man in a sport coat who squatted over a distant headstone as though he’d come to pay his respects to a dead relative. I caught my smile before it surfaced and forced it back down. Sean. He noticed when I raised my camera to look at him and blew me a kiss. Very funny.

  A good documentary photographer sees not only through the lens but also to the side of the frame, a difficult trick to master but critical in catching a more arresting image to photograph or a rock hurled at her head. While I watched Sean through the viewfinder my opposite eye caught a glimpse of a young man at the back of the crowd looking away, as though trying to keep his face out of the shot. Like Rakaan, he wore a black suit and black sunglasses, and though his hair was blond he too wore it long, in the style of young Kurt Cobain, a combination surfer-grunge look. He stood so far to the side of the frame the movement wouldn’t have diverted my attention for more than a moment had he not looked out of place. None of Christine’s friends from L.A. dressed like him; most wore oddly matched clothing of various colors, including red and yellow, as though they wanted to celebrate her life more than her death. Her local friends dressed more traditionally, the young men in sport coats and slacks but nothing so obviously Italian. He looked like he’d stumbled across the wrong funeral, as though he hadn’t known Christine well enough to have met her friends or family.

  He might be her secret lover, I speculated, or just a casual one who’d fallen for her more than she cared for him, someone who still carried a bright enough torch to see his way to her funeral. And he was rich, I thought. Like Charlotte, I had an eye for the telling differences between the rich and the rest of us, particularly those born into money. I saw it in his clothes and the way he stood, and I’m sure if I’d been able to get close enough I would have seen it in his hands.

  I lowered the camera and strolled clockwise around the back of the crowd, looking for a better shooting angle like a wolf looks to cull a herd, and when he glanced back to see where I’d moved, what I was doing, I took his photograph. He looked young, no more than nineteen or twenty, the wisps of hair on his chin as thin as cigarette smoke. I lowered my head when the pastor spoke in prayer and I added my own to go along with the official one, nothing poetic, just rest in peace and all that, and when he said amen the crowd broke apart.

  Nephthys stood arm in arm with two young women, one with long, blonde dreadlocks and the other with home-chopped hair dyed red and black. As I walked toward her someone touched my elbow from behind, as though trying to catch me, and I turned to a petite young blonde in a long-sleeved black blouse and iron-gray skirt, her makeup tracked by dried tears.

  “I’m Tamara, Christine’s roommate; we haven’t met yet.” She hooked her hair behind her ears and stared at me with granite-gray eyes both curious and a little afraid, her immaculately pinked lips twitching as though smiling came so naturally to her she needed consciously to repress it. “You’re Nina Zero, right? The photographer? I just got back from location yesterday, I can’t believe what’s happened, I’m just in like total shock. Total.”

  “Like everybody,” I said. “You were where, Canada?”

  “Toronto. That’s where we were shooting. It’s cheaper up there—at least, that’s what they tell me.”

  “It must have been hard on you.”

  She looked confused.

  “Not to be here, when your roommate was murdered,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, totally.” She shrugged, a gesture she meant to convey helplessness. “We talked on the phone, like, every couple of days, so it’s not like I felt out of touch. Christine was so happy she was going to be in your show. She was struggling, you know? Going to auditions, doing a small part here or there, the typical struggling actress life, but nothing that made her feel good about herself, and when she saw I was starting to get work, it was like really hard for her. I know what it’s like to struggle, believe me. ‘You’re goi
ng to be next,’ I’d say, you know, trying to get her to believe in herself.” Her smile finally broke through, unrepressed, a bright and shiny show of teeth and lips. “But the photos? She thought they were way cool. Believe me, I was sad I couldn’t break away from shooting to fly down, attend the premiere.” The recognition of something horrible flew across her face like a shadow. “Of course, she was already dead by then, at least, that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” I asked. “Not here, not at the funeral.”

  “Of course.” She stepped quickly back, thinking she’d offended me.

  “We’ll meet in L.A.?” I reached out and touched her arm. “I want to talk to you, not like this, but really sit down and talk.”

  “Christine was into some wicked dark stuff,” she whispered. “But she had a great heart.” She crossed her arms over her chest and moved toward the chapel, her steps long and careful around headstones set flush in the ground. She knew I worked for a tabloid. Her comment about Christine hadn’t been malicious, but she was letting me know she had a story to tell and assumed I’d already heard enough to understand the reference to dark stuff. She looked back, once, to mime a phone with her thumb and little finger and mouth the words, “call me.”

  Further on, Nephthys walked toward the chapel with a group of L.A. friends. Between the growls of trucks on Highway 99 I heard the sweet sound of their singing, “If I Ever Leave This World Alive,” a song I recognized from an Irish band, Flogging Molly. Nobody like the Irish to celebrate the dead. I knew I’d start crying if I listened to more than a verse and struck out across the cemetery, spotting the distant figure of the young man in the black suit. He strode casually beside a group of locals who headed for their cars as quickly as they could without breaking into a sprint.