A Good-Looking Corpse (17 page)

I awaken to my cellphone ringing early the next morning—Sunday. The day after Halloween. The Day of the Dead.
Día de los Muertos,
the Mexicans call it
.
I wonder if somewhere the Sureño Lowriders are celebrating. “Tom,” I say into the receiver.

“Hello, sir,” the androgynous voice of a call-service rep says, bland. “We have a call for you. Single-victim incident. Female suicide. West Hills. Will you take the call?”

I brush a run of saliva from the crack of my mouth and look around. I'd fallen asleep at the dining room table, my face pressed into the keys of my laptop. “Yeah,” I say without thinking.

“The address is 22100 Michale Street. The informing officer is on the other line. He wants to know what time to expect you.”

“What time to expect me?” I mumble, still not fully awake. “What? Does he got a hot date?”

“I will ask him, sir,” the voice says, no comprehension of sarcasm whatsoever.

“No,” I say, standing and walking into the living room where Ivy is still curled up on the couch, asleep. “Tell him I'll be there in an hour and a half.”

I drive down to the garage and get the truck, un-showered and listless. With this Mikey Echo business looming, normal crime scene cleaning feels almost counterproductive. I want to investigate more, form an angle and play it, not scrub suicide guts out of some suburban hovel. While the whole situation has shifted dramatically in the last few hours, the basics are the same: the actor kid is dead, Morales is dead, and Mikey had in one form or another threatened me. What I really needed to do was corner Bill Amos and confront him. If I could recruit him, some news outlet had to want this story, had to be willing to take down the Echo name. And once the public knew what was up, they wouldn't sit back, they'd demand justice for Alan Van.
Somehow, some way I can bring Mikey Echo down without violence. I just need to beat him at his own media game.
I get excited by the idea and pull out my phone to redial the service, tell 'em to cancel the call. I stop myself though—the cop, I told him I'd be coming. Standing him up would leave a sour taste in his mouth with regard to calling Trauma-Gone in the future.
Maybe ruin the whole West Hills region of the LAPD for my business if he really made a stink about it.
Michale Street was north of Roscoe Boulevard so it might well cost me the entire Topanga Division. I'm not a regular up there, I caught a break that they even chose Trauma-Gone at all.
Goddamn professionalism
.

The drive out to West Hills, on the far side of L.A. County, is an easy one to make on a Sunday. Any other day of the week would be a headache of cars and hampered by road construction. But today it is easy enough. Plus, a single female suicide—
that can't be too much of a mess
.

I reach the address on Michale Street.
Nondescript little one-story corner house, nothing too fancy.
Gate is open, but no car in the driveway to give me a gauge on how much to stick this one to the LAPD. If there is a nice car, they tend to feel more comfortable signing an expensive invoice because they know there's a good chance the department can recoup the investment from the property or vehicle sale.
God help me if there's no car and the suicide is renting the place
, I think, backing the truck into the open driveway.

Climbing out, I note the neighborhood seems decent enough. Quiet. And then it hits me: no cop car. I glance at my cell—I'm within my time frame…early even.
Maybe he ditched, figuring he could get a Mickey D's breakfast sandwich and coffee and be back before I arrived?
Certainly he wouldn't be the first cop to pull that one on me. I go up to the front door, figuring I can at least survey the scene and work out some numbers. Odd that this broad would off herself on a weekend. No one commits suicide on a weekend—it's always Monday. There also isn't a coroner's seal on the door, which is slightly ajar. The address, written in cheap iron lettering beside the door tells me I'm at the right house.
Did the service get it wrong?
That would be a first. I decide to ring the bell. No answer.

Now I'm tense. I scan the neighborhood again, searching to see if I'm being watched. Everything seems quiet; no movement anywhere. I still don't like it—things seem too off-kilter, too non-formulaic for my taste. I move back toward the truck, deciding I'm better off leaving. But nobody stops me on my way to the truck either. No surprises and still no movement.
Goddamnit. What the fuck is this?
I start the engine. And then kill it. “If something was gonna happen, it would have happened by now,” I reason. “Okay, talk it out—are you just spooking yourself?” I run through the list of oddities—no cops or evidence of a scene. Sunday suicide. House left open. No family or friends on-site. The word glares large in my brain: Trap. I pull out my cellphone and hit redial. The service was the last one to call me, if I can find out who in the call center fielded the initial service call, I can maybe get some more information. I put the phone to my ear, listening for the ring. When it comes through, it sounds twice in succession—one loud in my ear and then again, faint. I take the phone away from my head and listen. This time the one in my phone sounds faint and another sounds louder…from inside the house. I let it ring once more to ascertain I'm not crazy. I then look at the number I'm dialing—it's a Hollywood area code, definitely not the call center. The call goes to voicemail and I put the phone back to my ear to listen.

“Hi, you've reached Bill Amos, I'm not able to take your call right—” I kill the call slowly, my finger dropping down onto the end button on my touch screen.
It wasn't the call center
, my mind processes the realization over and over.
But what the fuck is this?

Climbing out of the truck, I walk back toward the house, light on my heels, tensed like a spooked cat. I take a pair of black latex gloves from my pocket, sliding them on while keeping my gaze leveled firmly at the house. If there is ever a time I wanted a gun, this is it. “Bill?” I call out slowly. “Mikey?”

At the door, I hesitate, knowing I don't want to know, but knowing I can't back out now, my curiosity too insatiable.
If I didn't want to know what was through this door now, I wouldn't have gone to that first party at Mikey's house
, I admit to myself and push the door open wide.

I can't see anything from the entryway with its wood-tiled floor that extends out into a living room partially obscured by a wall. I pause and swipe my gloved finger across the top of the doorbell, eliminating my previous print. Taking a step inside, I see a shoe connected to a foot and then up into the leg of a pair of sweatpants with the Armani name stitched into them. Rounding the corner, I find the rest of the body, one leg splayed out away from the other, laid out on its back. A makeshift blade, the butt of which is wrapped in black electrical tape, extends from the heart, the blood soaked through his matched Armani sweatshirt and out into a surrounding puddle. I don't need to pull the blade to know it is a potato peeler that has been rejiggered into a prison-style shiv. The recognition of the face is instantaneous: Bill Amos.

“What the fuck?” I gasp aloud, staring down at the corpse. “How could they have known?” There's no mistaking the message. Crozier did this and he wanted me to know it was him. It didn't even need a note—the scene was the note: “This time I didn't miss.”

On the floor beside Amos is the phone—his actual phone. Someone had stood here and called me pretending to be the service. But how would they know about the service? The voice was perfect—flat, ambiguous, and impartial. And then I remember Ramen's eagerness to record the call.
Had he been planning this all along or had he seized on an opportunity?

A glance around from where I stand tells me the house belongs to Amos. An assortment of pictures hangs on the walls, all of them prominently featuring him, set off by movie posters for B movies, the titles of which I recognize from my research. On a little round table to my right, set up against the wall, a framed headshot of Bill is propped up with an autograph and a message he evidently wrote to himself: To my biggest fan. Evidently it was the last thing he would see when he left his house every day.

The sound of cars, several of them, moving quickly on the street and screeching to a stop outside jerks my attention off the dead body and pulses through my blood.
No sirens. They didn't want to warn me they were coming.

“Fuck!” I yelp, noticing my gloves and how complicit they make me look. I'll bet there are no prints on the shiv either. I move toward the back of the house, but officers are already streaming through the rear gate, surrounding me. “What the fuck is this?”

The door, still open behind me, is filled with officers now, SWAT, guns leveled. Any sudden move I make gives them reason to fire. I promised myself I wouldn't go back to prison—told myself time and time again that if it came down to it, I'd die before going back inside. And all those times I said it, I meant it absolutely. But something has changed…a lot, actually.

Slowly, I raise my gloved hands to surrender.

The arrest and ride down to the Topanga station house is a blur. Handcuffed, my gloves stripped from me for evidence, I am driven down into a secure unloading dock and a metal door rattles down before I am removed from the backseat of the police car, giving me no chance to make a run for it. The officers, a black guy and a Latino, march me through the corridors within the station and thrust me into a cage for processing, taking no chances with their prisoner.
A murderer caught in the act is a big event for them.
Beyond my little steel enclosure is an office, a gray-haired sergeant sits at a computer, ready to process me into their system. Rolling his chair over toward my cage, he lifts his legs, enjoying the short ride.

“Place your hands through the grate,” he instructs, no trace of whimsy now. I turn and put my hands through a small opening as demanded, and he unlocks the cuffs. Twin lines of reddened skin have been traced around my wrists where the cuffs hugged too tight.

He has me remove my wallet, keys, and phone and inventories them in front of me, having me sign off that they have been counted entirely. I was too drunk to remember this the first time it happened, so now every step in the process feels new. The cops return for me and I am led to a machine for fingerprinting. “You already have my prints,” I insist, but they insist too and I am cataloged, photographed, and placed in a cell. “Please can I make a phone call?” I ask, courteous, hoping that these two will remember how polite I am when this all gets sorted. And maybe that they'll call Trauma-Gone for future cleanups.
This has to get sorted
. The cops promise me I'll get my chance to make a call.

When Detective Stack thought I'd killed Holly Kelly's dad, he'd taken me right to a conference room to get a statement. Evidently, they did things a little differently around here. They would want a statement from me soon enough though. A detective at the scene had tried to elicit a response from me, asking my motivations, but I'd kept quiet. “Call Detective Marcus Stack,” I'd told him as the other officers tucked me into a waiting cop car. The SWAT guys were just hanging around at that point, grousing about the fact that I'd gone so quietly.

I take a seat on the cement block that was supposed to serve as my bed and collect my thoughts.
This would be Stack's favor,
I think.
If he can get me out of this, we will be squared up forever. In the meantime, what are the ways I can prove my innocence?
Ramen—Mikey—had been clever to call me from Bill Amos's phone on scene. That way it would look like Bill had called me out, we'd maybe gotten into an altercation, and I'd jammed a blade in him. The cops had me at the scene, they wouldn't need too many more answers than that. I could demand that they check the time of death against my location when the calls were made, but that was banking on the idea that Bill was dead before they called me. They could have waited until the last minute, baiting the unsuspecting actor along and then jammed him shortly before I arrived. Crozier and I were both right-handed, but even if we weren't, that wouldn't work in my favor.
Even suggesting the idea would make it appear like I switched hands because I thought I was being clever.
Height differentials wouldn't work either. Crozier is three inches taller than me, but aiming for the heart took away any notions I had about impact trajectory. It didn't matter what direction the blade came from because the target was planned. Downward slashes from a tall person, upward slashes from a short one, it made no difference with the blade sticking out of the heart like that. There has to be something though—
no way can I go down on this.
It seems pretty damning though, I have to admit—me with my gloves on, caught in the living room with no discernible reason to be there. When you claim you were set up, the burden is on you to prove it, rather than the lead investigator to prove you weren't.
And with my background, forget it.
My best bet is Stack showing up as a character witness. Or maybe private investigator Don Tart—if he will even go up against Mikey Echo. He could just as easily say nothing and then spend my prison days trying to worm his way into Ivy's panties.
Don't think like that,
I tell myself, pacing the cell.
Concentrate on a solution to get yourself out of this, don't hope for a miracle. Think, goddamnit!

And then it hits me.
Locard's exchange principle
—the first rule of the forensic sciences! I'd learned about it from a CSI tech, making awkward small talk while waiting on a cleanup once. There's always an exchange at every crime scene…the killer brings something with him, the killer leaves with something, she'd said.
Every touch leaves a trace
. I never touched the body, had no interaction with it. Even with gloves on, there had to be something exchanged if I'd stabbed him from behind like Crozier had doubtlessly done. Hairs, some sort of clothing fibers—a proof of interaction. That they'd caught me at the scene would force them to admit I couldn't have hidden anything like a Tyvek suit. If they couldn't find it, it meant it didn't exist! And if it didn't exist, the lack of evidence could be just as effective as evidence. They hadn't taken my clothes because they didn't think they needed to. I begin banging on the thick cell door, demanding attention. I can have them take my clothes, test them for Bill Amos's DNA. They can test his corpse for
my
DNA. The words of O.J. Simpson's lawyer ring in my head: If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit!

But no one comes. I'm just a lunatic raising a ruckus. They probably hear it all the time. Finally, I have to stop for fear of raising a sweat. It's warm enough in my cell already, I can't risk my only defense being destroyed by contaminating it with sweat. Carefully, I strip down to my boxer briefs, my scrawny body showing off my pale white skin stretched thin over the ridges of my costal cartilage. Laying my work polo and pants down carefully, I spread them out on the concrete block and then resume my assault on the cell door.
Now I look really crazy
.

Exhausted, I lie on the floor to wait it out. The cold concrete there is soothing but probably swimming with remnants of piss, blood, shit, and semen—I can't imagine the cells ever get properly sanitized, a quick blast occasionally with a regular old garden hose at best. But it doesn't matter really, like public toilet seats, the risk of infection is absurdly low.

After an hour of tense deliberate plotting, figuring out how I can best give my statement and demand my request that they test my clothes, I finally hear footsteps. They aren't the heavy clack of street boots, more the gentle click of wingtips.
A detective
. They've finally come for my statement. A key turns in the heavy lock of my cell and I hop up, eager to explain.

“What in the hell?” the detective asks once he has opened my door. He's alone, the same man who interrogated me earlier at the scene. He already thinks I'm guilty and now I'm standing before him clad in only shoes and underwear. “I can prove my innocence,” I say, solemn and calm.

“By what, joining a nudist camp?”

“Test my clothes. You'll find that they're clear of any DNA from Mr. Amos because I never touched him, which I'm sure you'll agree touch was necessary for the stabbing.” I've adopted a sort of highbrow scholarly air here, but as I'm standing in my skivvies, I'm sure eloquence just makes me look that much crazier. All the same, I refuse to back down from the idea. And if he declines to have them tested, why that would be just as much a part of my defense at trial.

“Get dressed. We don't need to test anything; you're not being charged in the murder.”

“Why not?” I ask, suddenly indignant. I'd been proud of my deductive aplomb.

“You're protected by angels, I guess. I just got a call from Christ himself to have you released. I'm not even allowed to question it. You are no longer a suspect.”

“Mikey Echo,” I say, watching the detective's face. He grimaces as if eating sour fruit but says nothing.

“Let's go already,” he insists. “I've got a mile of fucking paperwork to write up and my chief suspect just got pulled off the meat hook.”

When I leave the police station, by the front entrance this time, I'm angry but confused.
Why would Mikey have me caught only to have me released?
As if summoned up from Hell, Crozier is suddenly standing on the sidewalk before me, waiting. I need answers more than anything, so I walk in his direction.

“You've got a phone call,” Crozier says when I reach him. He hands over his cellphone.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask into the phone, now furious.

“You didn't think Steve Simon would double-dip? He was all too eager to sell me the news that you were asking questions. I told you the fucking paparazzi were a necessary evil. The real question is: how did you figure it out?” Mikey asks.

“I should have known from the get-go—your obsession with death. But it was your gift that ultimately gave you away—Holly's skull. Before I went to jail I was in medical school at USC. I used to study the skulls regularly. But all the ones I had access to were from India. I felt like something was off when your white actor showed me your mom's skull, it didn't physically match—like he had the wrong one or it wasn't really his mother. I should have noticed in your skull room, but it caught me off guard. I finally realized when I looked at Holly's skull—the differences in the zygomatic arch, the orbitals, the nasal passage—Holly Kelly was a white girl, the skull you showed me belonged to an Indian woman. Your mother.”

“That fucking school—with all the money my family has donated to it, you'd think they'd get a more diverse anatomy collection,” Mikey gripes. “Didn't think an ugly little Indian guy could be this cunning though, huh? Mikey Echo makes too much sense as a handsome, athletic white guy, right? That's what everyone thinks. Man, I love racism. Well, you know what Bill Amos wanted more than anything? Fame. He wanted to be a star. And he was willing to put that before human lives.”

“What are the odds that you'd find someone as fucked up as you to play your part?”

“You think lust for fame is
sui generis
to Bill? You know how many people would pull a trigger to step into the life I live? Don't think he didn't take full advantage either. The shopping sprees on my dime, that orgy he threw at my house? The Quattroporte! That was all him. He was begging for this role when I discovered him. He was past his expiration date in this town and he knew it. He wasn't even my first choice for the role, but the other guy got a little too camera shy during the screen test.”

“Screen test?”

“Oh, we made him take a life, we even filmed it. That limo you were in? It's specially equipped for such actions. Bulletproof, soundproof, and completely wired with cameras. My first choice wouldn't pull the trigger. So we went with Bill—who was willing to accommodate us. And we kept the tape to ensure he would never back out of the part. It's not exactly the sort of role that can have an understudy.”

“So that's it, then? You got the rights to my story finally, you're just going to leave me alone, right?”

“Hahaha, no, no, no, amigo! The real fun is just beginning. See, the rights to your story are what we in the industry call a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock term—it means an elusive and bullshit object that moves the plot along. Like the briefcase in
Pulp Fiction
. Or the jewel-encrusted bird in
The Maltese Falcon
. Your life story is the definition of a MacGuffin. I just needed something to get you emotionally invested in me. Most people would love to have a movie made about them—for you though, I had to use putting your story on the big screen as a threat. No, I need you, not your past,” Mikey continues. “Bill's great with a script, but I need someone who can get things done on the fly. I need you. But you were never gonna go along willingly—I know your character type, I knew I needed to get something on you. To put you between a rock and a hard place, so to speak.”

“What do you actually want from me?”

“Tell you what? There are conversations I don't like having over the phone. This is one of them. Why don't you get in the car with Crozier and come pay me a visit. We can meet somewhere neutral…say the Polo Lounge on Sunset?”

“Nothing in Hollywood is neutral. And I'm not going anywhere with this asshole standing next to me,” I say. Crozier breaks into a broad grin at that.

“Okay, we'll head to your turf. Burbank. Top of the Holiday Inn parking garage. Off the freeway. We'll do this right now so you don't get any smart ideas about arming yourself. And ride with Crozier, you fucking whiner. Ramen took orders from you, but his part in this is over.” As if Crozier heard what was said, once I hand him the phone, he once again reassures me by flashing open his coat—he's armed.

“You like what I did back there?” Crozier asks, driving me in his silver Bentley, sunglasses on, music pulsing, just flat-out enjoying getting away with murder. He laughs. “Felt good, like the old days. Was starting to get the itch for the prison-yard life. Of course, I've been living life out of balance lately.
Koyaanisqatsi
, the Hopi Indians called it. Learned that shit from a movie.” He's proud of himself. “I've been watching a lot of movies lately, learning the industry, learning its history. But I haven't forgotten my history either.” Crozier points to an outline of a teardrop on his right cheek, one in a stream of filled-in teardrops. “This is you,” he says. “Unfinished business.”

“You're actually not the first person who has gotten a tattoo representing me. How weird is that?” I say to show him I'm not touched. It was true, Ivy now has a nasty-looking spider tattoo on her arm from when I'd pissed her off once upon a time. Mine was just one of many representing the low points in her life.