A Good-Looking Corpse (9 page)

“Actors in this town are the stars to you and me. But they're replaceable. Producers are the stars to actors—they're the real movers and shakers of the industry. And a family like the Echos, they
are
the industry. And you can't throw a lasso around the whole industry, I don't care how big your rope is. So now, do you finally understand why there is no point in you pursuing this?”

“No,” Ivy says.

“Yes,” I say. “We'll get out of your hair. Thanks for the explanation at least.”

Detective Chong stands to escort us out, his legal pad unmarked. “I'm not saying this in any sort of professional capacity, Mr. Tanner. But, if you can't ignore them, there is typically only one way to deal with the lawless.”

“What was that ‘Mrs. Tanner' shit?” I fume as we drive back to Burbank.

“I don't know, I panicked,” Ivy says. “Low blood sugar, maybe?”

“We're not stopping for ice cream, if that's what you're hinting at.”

“What did he mean by that thing he said about dealing with the lawless?” she asks instead.

“He means you kill them,” I respond, tumbling the whole situation over in my mind. “No wonder Mikey was so eager to have me go to the police, he knows he's invincible.”

“You can't kill him, Tom.”

“What?” I yelp, in the midst of changing lanes. A driver in a minivan lays on her horn, overreacting, as I barely edge the line of the next lane. She speeds past angrily, flipping me off as she goes. I flip her off back. “What makes you think I would do that?” I look at her, incredulous, and then past her to her window. “Roll your damn window all the way down, wouldja? You have a pretty head, I want you to keep it!”

“Sorry, I forgot,” she says, hitting the button to send it up instead. “I don't know why I think what I do…it's a gut instinct. I'm a big believer in listening to my gut. I've had bad thoughts about this whole thing since you mentioned Mikey Echo. And…”

“And what?” I probe when she trails off. I guide the Charger to the side of the road and set it in park, sensing the bigger discussion coming. “Stop saying ‘I don't know.' Tell me what's on your mind.”

“There's so much money involved here. And power. That cop told you that Mikey can only be stopped by being killed. I just…I don't want you to go back to jail.”

“Why would you think that I would go back to jail? What do I care if some movie actor was murdered? It doesn't involve me.”

“But it does, Tom. Or it will. The darkness in your aura. It attracts other darkness.”

“Goddamn New-Age shit. And here I thought I was becoming more normal.”

“You just…you stay late at the office most nights. I don't know what you do. I respect you enough to give you your privacy. I don't think it's another woman, you don't like people enough for that. But I'm not stupid. Whatever it is, it isn't safe. I feel that much.”

“You feel that, huh?” I'm not angry at Ivy for saying it, but I'm frustrated by her words all the same. “You wanna know what it is? It's not easy for me to come home to someone, to have you there with the TV on and dinners waiting for me. I feel like I'm being pulled down some drain into a whole new world.”

“Okay,” she says, quietly, not wanting to engage in the fight this discussion could easily become. “Will you just promise me that you won't kill Mikey Echo?”

“I just want him to leave me alone,” I say, pulling back out into traffic.

“And if he doesn't?” she asks, fearful.

“I don't know yet. And I hope we don't find out.”

Ramen is waiting for me when I pull up to the Trauma-Gone office on Monday morning, leaning against his gleaming car and fixing me with an equally gleaming grin.

“Beautiful, right?” he nods up at the billboard across from the office, the cold, staring eyes, the mysterious tagline
.
“It's our movie,” he says.

“Oh?”

“It opens on Halloween. It's going to be EPIC. David Lean–style epic. It takes place entirely in Heaven and Hell. We outdid ourselves with this flick. And I came up with the tagline. And the billboard…fuck the marketing department…buncha hacks.”

I get the vibe that Ramen is planning to hang around a while so I open the garage to move the work truck out, allowing him to park the Ferrari inside. Normally, I would shoo someone like this off and just keep to myself, but for some reason now, I stop myself from telling the producer to get lost. I think it's that I want to get more information on his boss, Mikey Echo, but maybe I'm also a little bit bored with life at the moment. It's a nagging thought that won't go away.

“You missed an epic party, bro,” he assures me. “Pussy city.”

“It wasn't really my scene,” I tell him as we head inside the office. “A little too cool for me.”

“No, Mikey Echo's parties are everyone's scene. And everyone looks the same in the dark.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mikey has this room in his house—the floor is like a giant mattress and there are pillows everywhere. It's like Turkish and shit. So everyone goes in there and Mikey turns off the light. Then you're supposed to fuck the first person you touch in the dark. Guys, girls, whatever. You touch them, you're fucking. Of course, I knew what was up so I positioned myself near Twyla Bateman.”

“Is that good?”

“You don't know Twyla Bateman? The actress? She makes Jessica Biel look like Jessica Tandy. Jessica Tandy now, I mean. Now that she's been dead awhile.”

“What about Mikey? Who did he hook up with?”

“No clue.” Ramen shrugs, wandering around the office. “But Mikey is much more open-minded than I am. He'll bang dudes, trannies, fat women, old guys—anything. For Mikey, it's all about experiences more than pleasure.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what you need in here?” Ramen asks, turning around to face me. “Anything. Some color, some art, a ficus might help.”

“A plant would suffer under my care. What did you mean about Mikey and experience?”

“Well, imagine that you've spent your whole life having the finest of everything and going around the whole world. Privilege, experience, opportunity. Pretty soon, you run out of regular experiences. How many exotic beaches can you lie on? How many possessions can you buy? How many pretty girls can you bang? Mikey has done all that. Now he's interested in unusual experiences.”

“Like murder?”

“Yeah, that's one of them. He's also got a hard-on for media manipulation. That's his real joy at the moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you been watching the Alan Van stuff on the news?”

“Not really.”

“Mikey has been using his connections to feed them photos of Alan using drugs and stories from ‘anonymous sources' to drive home that Alan really killed himself. The other day he told Libby Griffith, the überblogger, that Alan was smuggling drugs inside rehab. The ‘source' was a roommate of his from rehab whom he shared the drugs with. It was front-page news on all the newspapers the next day—Mikey even came up with some of the more creative headlines. He's just making Alan look like a bad seed. Well, a worse seed. And it's all just to keep from being bored.”

“Hollywood has gone crazy,” I say.

“Oh, old Hollywood was just as nuts, Tom. You ever hear of a guy named Fatty Arbuckle?”

I shake my head.

“He was a comedian. Like Charlie Chaplin–level famous at the time. At a party in Frisco, he fucked a girl with a Coke bottle—a glass one. It wrecked her insides and she died.”

“What happened to Fatty?”

“Basically, it ruined his career. But because he was a star, no jail time.”

“So how come he got his career ruined and Mikey doesn't?”

“Mikey controls the court of public opinion because he controls the media and what gets out there. He feeds them enough juicy actor gossip, like stuff about Alan, that they ignore the stuff he doesn't want exposed. The insiders in this town take care of their own. It's how he can have the wild parties he does. And his jailbirds collect phones from the nobodies and the townies at the door. Keeps the parties from making it onto social media.”

“Nobody took my phone,” I counter.

Ramen laughs his excited laugh. “No one thought you'd be a problem. Remember, we checked into you. You don't do social media.”

“Did you come here just to tell me about the party?” I ask.

“I'm here to job-shadow you. Mikey wants me to learn all the ins and outs of the industry so we can tell the story right. He wants me to learn the sights and the smells. Everything. Also, if you have any cool slang you use, probably let me know now so I can fit it into my vernacular.”

“I say ‘no' a lot. As in, ‘no, you can't job-shadow me.' ”

“Tom, let's not make your character a cliché, man. Look, you think Mikey didn't expect that you were gonna say no? For my sake, just let me hang around with you for a few days. I won't get in the way and I won't get all grossed out. I saw plenty of gross things growing up in Calcutta. Slumdog Millionaire doesn't have shit on me.”

I drum my fingers on my desk, briefly considering. I find myself entertained by Ramen's schtick, his inability to take “no” for an answer. He reminds me of the one friend I'd made back in prison—a little Mexican guy who talked to me during meals, whether or not I talked back. He helped keep me sane and endure prison life. He'd always said we'd meet up on the outside—a joke because he's serving a life sentence for a bank robbery that went bad. Ramen is like the Indian version of him, which makes the little producer tolerable.
Plus, it wouldn't be bad having company to keep my mind off of the Sureños
…“Fine. But you puke, you leave. I can't have you making more messes than I can clean up.”

“Deal. And who knows, this could be the start of a whole new career for me. No, I'm kidding. Producing rules.” He excitedly takes a seat at a chair opposite my desk and pulls a GoPro from his sport jacket. Filming me and the office with slow, steady sweeps of the camera, he tries to capture the mystique. “So what happens now?” he asks excitedly.

“We wait,” I say, leaning back in my chair and putting my feet up on the desk. “Mondays are hit or miss, depending on the suicides. Considering I haven't gotten some early-morning call, it seems ripe for a miss so far.”

After twenty minutes spent mostly in silence, Ramen finally puts the video camera away. “This is fucking boring,” he announces as if it were news to me. “I bet we can make some sort of high-tension scene out of this though—a sort of
Jarhead
bit. Will the phone ring or won't it?”

“There's a good chance it won't,” I assure him. “I've seen weeks go by with no calls.”

“I think I'm gonna seek a writing credit on this one,” Ramen confides to me. “At least a ‘story by' or something. Plus the standard producing line.”

“I already told Mikey I wasn't gonna sell him my story,” I remind him.

“Mikey always gets what he wants,” Ramen reminds me. “One way or another, you're gonna be a movie star.” He smiles. “Or at least your character will.”

I refrain from saying, “Over my dead body.” It sounds like too much of a setup. And a cliché. To my understanding, I have to work on not being a cliché.

“You should really think about getting a side job. Or a hobby,” Ramen says after an hour has passed. “You've got a shitload of downtime here. What about magic? That could make for cool character development—I even have an in at The Magic Castle if you want to learn?”

“I used to have a heroin addiction.”

“Oh yeah? Awesome!” Ramen says, pulling out his iPhone to make a voice memo. “Heroin addiction,” he says into it. The phone beeps in acknowledgment.

“That's it? You don't need any more details?”

“We're Hollywood.” Ramen smirks. “We've got the best detail men around. It doesn't matter what your addiction was before, we'll make it Oscar-worthy.”

After another ten minutes of silence, Ramen climbs up from his position slumped down in his seat. “Mikey will want me to check in.” He quick-walks outside to make the call.

When he returns, he seems nervous and sets the GoPro on the desk. “That didn't go well,” he says, solemn.

“What happened?”

“Well, Mikey didn't like that you haven't had any calls. He says I'm not out here to sit around and bullshit. I think I fucked things up.”

“You don't think he'd have someone killed, do you? To make us get a call?”

“I think he'd do exactly that,” Ramen says, frowning.

Before I can tell Ramen what I think of that, my phone rings. Sick to my stomach, I grab my cell from the desk between us as Ramen hits record on the GoPro. “Trauma-Gone, Tom,” I say into the vocal abyss.

“Hello, sir, we have a service request for you, a homicide,” the voice says flatly—a dead giveaway they're from the calling service.
It couldn't be this soon
, I think.
Ramen just got off the phone with him. Mikey couldn't possibly be that fast
.

“It's a private residence, female, gunshot wound. On a couch. Will you take the call?” My mind goes right to Ivy.
It couldn't be
.

“What's the address?”

I look over at Ramen and even he is confused by the suddenness of it all.

“One moment…” the voice says, almost mechanical and miserably slow. “The address is 6301 Quebec Drive, the Hollywood Hills.”

Not Ivy. I end the call. “Is this Mikey's doing still, do you think?”

“No.” Ramen shakes his head vehemently. “This seems like a coincidence.”

“I don't like it. Maybe give him a call back and make sure.”

Ramen nods and races back outside. While he's gone I shut off the GoPro. I feel like calling Ivy, just to check in on her.
Maybe I do attract darkness
.

I call her cell and she answers. “What's wrong?” she asks, straight off.

“What makes you think something's wrong?”

“You wouldn't call me otherwise.”

“Maybe I'm trying to be better at us,” I insist.

“Well, that's exciting,” she agrees. “Do you want to meet for lunch?”

“I've got a call,” I tell her.

“Maybe we can go out to dinner tonight, then?”

“Dinner works,” I say as Ramen walks in. “Gotta go.”

“I think we're in the clear,” Ramen says when I look up at him.

“Good. Let's roll,” I say, standing.

Ramen pulls out his iPhone and mimics my saying “Let's roll,” into the voice-memo function.

“Can we take the Ferrari? You can drive,” Ramen says when we reach the garage with its assortments of chemicals and cleaning tools stocked on shelves.

“Not if you want it to stay clean.”

“Aww, I had this awesome vision of you cleaning up crime scenes in a Ferrari. Think of that character—a sort of Don Johnson in Miami Vice. The dangerous, rich bachelor who cleans up crime scenes to escape a haunted heroin-fueled past. Hell, we could have you living on a boat.”

“Sounds like you're gonna tell any story but the true one. Why does Mikey need my permission for that?”

“Okay, okay, you're right,” Ramen concedes. “We'll take the truck. But to be fair, as long as we say, ‘
Based
on a true story,' no one will be the wiser.”

High in the Hollywood Hills, up a series of narrow streets nearly too small for the lumbering truck, we find the location. Ramen has been going nuts with his voice memos, mentioning anything he can think of that sounds Hollywood-worthy as we make the climb. He's also decided I need a pet—something that I can talk to during the slow times at my office—a parrot like in Baretta or an orangutan like with Clint Eastwood in
Every Which Way but Loose
.

“It will add dynamic interaction during the lulls in the movie—and comedy. This thing is gonna need some comedy in it,” Ramen states as we pull into the short, fat driveway, blocking the two-car garage.

The house is a classic one—a sort of noir–Los Angeles pad with an octagonal Spanish Colonial appearance and outdoor brick stairs leading up to the middle of the property. “What happens now?” he asks, pulling out the GoPro again.

“What happens is you put that thing away. We're not gonna show up to the door and jam a camera in some grieving husband's face.”

“Can I at least ask if he'd be cool with me filming?”

I sigh audibly. “When it comes time for me to take pictures, then you can film. But stay out of my way and act like you've been to one of these before.”

“No problem.” Ramen shoots me a thumbs-up, but I still can't help but feel this is going to look like amateur hour.

We knock and a pleasant-looking old man answers, a rumpled fedora folded down in one hand and a sober, hangdog expression on his face. “We're from Trauma-Gone,” I say, making no assumptions about who the man is or his role in the situation.

“It's the couch here,” he says, gesturing before he turns and leads us down two tiled steps into a recessed living room. A black-and-white drama is on the television and there is a small bowl of peanuts on a table beside the clean spot on the couch, with another bowl beside it for the shells. A can of off-brand diet soda sits behind the bowls, condensing. “I've just been sitting here waiting for y'all to arrive,” he says and there is a numbness to it, as if, quite likely, his whole world had ended earlier today.