DARK THRILLERS-A Box Set of Suspense Novels (49 page)

It was a quarter to six when he came up on the Garden Palm and noticed something not right.

"You see that?" he asked his partner. "What the hell is that?"

It looked like something hanging on the door. It wasn't a package. It looked like . . .

"Looks like a leg, for cripes' sake," Shane said. "Pull over there."

Dorian did a U-turn in the empty street and pulled the cruiser up at the curb in front of the Garden Palm. From his vantage point nearest the curb, Shane said, "I'll be goddamned. It's somebody's fuckin' leg."

Dorian climbed from his seat, his back creaking. Shane was at the door before him. They stood back two feet and stared incredulously at the body part dangling from the door handle of the restaurant. A wire—looked like an unwound clothes hanger—was wound around the ankle and the other end was wrapped round the door handle. Blood had dripped from the jagged thigh to the concrete step.

"I ain't ever seen anything like it," Dorian said.

"And in this area," Shane agreed.

"Wonder where the rest of it is?"

"Guess we better call the lieutenant to handle this. I sure as hell am not going to touch that thing." Shane returned to the patrol car to call for help.

Dorian Lepski rubbed at the small of his back and stood gazing at the hanging leg. He'd bet it was from a woman. Small delicate foot. Smooth skin, hairless leg. Had to be a woman. Damned nasty way to go.

He shivered and rolled his shoulders. Sometimes being a cop made him want to run off to an Amazon forest and build a hut out of leaves and never see another human being again. Especially dead ones.

~ * ~

Pan didn't think of himself as a homeless person. He was just a guy down on his luck and in need of funds. He'd be on top again when he could get a handle on this terrible floating anxiety that came out of the blue to make it impossible to function some days.

He didn't know how he had gotten himself from his usual haunts onto Rodeo Drive, Los Angeles' high-priced shopping district. He'd been walking all night, not feeling sleepy. He could sleep in the day, in the park, when it was warmer. And safer. Never knew what might sneak up on you in the dark. So he kept moving and noticed around dawn that he was way out of his neighborhood. If he didn't get off Rodeo before the shops opened, they'd call the cops on him and get him thrown in the hoosegow for vagrancy.

He hurried down the block meaning to take the next street corner that would lead him away from the area. He almost missed it. Not the corner. The arm.

He was past it before the sight registered on his brain. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked around, all around, up and down the street, behind him, up at the blank-faced windows on the expensive buildings.

There was no one around. A car drove past, but the driver didn't even look at him.

Down at the corner the stoplight blinked red.

Slowly, Pan turned around and walked back to the Rodeo Drive boutique where he had seen the arm.

It hung from a wire attached to the shop's polished brass doorknob. It was really an arm. It wasn't his imagination. He reached out tentatively and touched the wrinkled flesh of the elbow, then jerked back his finger. Cold. Around the wrist there was bruising and discoloration where the wire was wrapped. The fingers stood straight up as if thrown out in alarm. A woman. It was a woman's arm. Nice manicured nails, young tight skin, no rings.

The arm had been cut off at the shoulder socket. A too-white knob of bone stuck out from the end of the raggedly cut flesh.

Pan looked around wildly again, hoping no one had seen him near the arm. He looked at the picture window of the shop. Marvin's Fine Leather. Handbags and suitcases and portfolios crowded the window arrangement.

Marvin sure would be surprised when he came to open up.
Pan stumbled backward, away from the atrocity, ashamed that he had touched it. He turned and ran for the corner, took it going so fast he almost fell down. Four blocks distant he found a phone booth and called 911 to report anonymously, "There's a cut-off arm hanging on the door of Marvin's Fine Leather on Rodeo Drive," he said, then hung up abruptly before they could ask him his name.

He felt the black cloud of fear descend over him again and he began to make gibbering sounds as he hurried toward his neighborhood. He just couldn't stop being scared. Scared of cars on the street, scared of houses full of quarreling families, scared of shelters and strangers and cats and dogs. Scared of thunderstorms and Santa Ana winds.

Now he would be scared of losing his arms and having them hang from the doors of exclusive shops. He wrapped his hands around himself and hugged tightly, hurrying, hurrying away from the horror that would stay with him the rest of his days.

~ * ~

Cam came out to his Cadillac sedan, his arms laden with papers and the notebooks he took with him to the set every day. He got the back door open and dropped the burden on the back seat.

He opened the front driver's door and was fumbling with his car keys to get the ignition key in his grip so he almost bent down and slipped into the seat before he noticed it was occupied.

He drew back in terror when he saw the head sitting on the white leather.

He let out a yelp and backpedaled from the open car door.

He was hyperventilating. He couldn't get enough air. Maybe he was going to have a heart attack. He clutched his chest and stared at the head. He knew who it was. He knew who that head belonged to.

He turned in the driveway and vomited, bent over, eyes squeezed closed. After heaving up his breakfast of coffee and cinnamon buns, he wiped the back of his mouth with his hand.

It was Marilyn. Someone had decapitated her and left the head in Cam's car. He forced himself to look at her again. Her blond hair was streaked rusty with blood. Her eyes were open and covered with a glassy film. Her neck looked as if it had been sawed and hacked. There were slice wounds above the fatal cut that severed her head from her body.

Cam turned away again, feeling his stomach lurch. Nothing else to come up. He heaved dryly.

"Fuck," he murmured. "Fuck, fuck, fuck." Two emotions warred for his attention. His sadness that Marilyn was dead. And his worry about how this would affect Pure and Uncut.

Already his mind was working on the problem. He could have her written out, edit out her scenes. Or he could have Olivia's character turn on her best friend and kill her. The scene could be shot really dark so anyone in a blond wig could be Marilyn filmed from the rear. He'd have to do that, then. Kill her off. Her murder might even bring some tabloid publicity to the movie when it was shown. The morbid curiosity roused by her death during filming could only help the film. Besides, it was too hard to rewrite some of the already filmed scenes and then reshoot.

When he called the police . . .

He drew himself up straight and ran a hand down over his belly, hoping it would settle down now.

Hell, if he called the police, they'd be all over the set. Add in Karl LaRosa's problems and now this death of one of his actresses and he might as well shut down the project. Cops would interfere. They'd investigate everybody connected to the film, most particularly the man who found Marilyn's head on the seat of his car.

"Fuck," he said again. What was he supposed to do? Just throw away millions of dollars invested and forget making his film when it was going to be the one that superseded anything he had ever directed? The one movie that would catapult filmgoers from the dark ages into the future of film technology? He could be the first. The leader, the innovator.

The revered.

Or he could call the cops to come get poor Marilyn's head off the Cadillac's seat and seal his own failure. No investor would ever trust him again to try the new techniques. Why, they already had the equipment ordered for the theaters across the country, they had already backed more than a hundred theater owners to expand their screens for overhead and wraparound projection!

Too many people would go down the drain. Hollywood would never forgive him. If Pure and Uncut failed, it would make the Heaven's Gate debacle look like a minor setback.

He knew what he had to do. He wasn't proud of it, but he had to do it. There wasn't anything he could do for Marilyn now. She was dead; she couldn't accuse him.

He ran back into the house and found a pair of leather driving gloves someone had given him as a gift last Christmas. He lifted them from the box they had come in and slipped them on. Nice fit.

Then he found a black Hefty garbage bag in the kitchen pantry. He brought it out to the car and flapped open the bag. He reached into the driver's seat and put his fingers into Marilyn's matted hair. He cringed and his stomach flopped around like a fish in his midsection, but he managed to lift the head and drop it into the garbage bag without going into the dry heaves again.

He opened the rear door and deposited the bag on the floorboard. Oh God, if she rolled around back here while he was driving . . .

He slammed the door shut and returned to the house for a soapy wet washcloth to clean down the white leather seat. While washing the blood off, he turned his head to his left and stared at the dash. He held his breath. This was awful, this was worse than anything he'd had happen to him since Nam. If he ever found out the motherfucker who did this, he'd break the son of a bitch's fingers one by one, then he'd break his fucking neck. He'd do that before he ever called the cops.

He checked to see if the leather was clean and when he was satisfied, he took the cloth indoors, rinsed it out in the kitchen sink, and draped it over the counter edge to dry. The scent of blood was in his nostrils and he didn't know if it would ever leave. He should find something to deodorize his car, but. .

He had to hurry. He was holding up the production already. He was late. Catherine or Robyn would be calling any minute to see what was wrong. When he got to the studio, he'd tell them he'd overslept. He would act as if he had a hangover. They'd believe that. He often had hangovers.

He drove away from his house and out of Beverly Hills. He passed a stretch of undeveloped woods and slowed. He parked, leaving the car running, waited for cars to thin out until no car was visible on the road, then he opened the back door and withdrew the garbage bag. He walked quickly to the edge of the road and looked down at the overgrown ravine. He hauled back and swung the bag the way he would a baseball, giving it his all, and saw the round object lift, bump a limb, fall and tumble down the ravine out of sight.

In the car again he put it into gear and drove away carefully, not wishing to leave his tire tracks behind in the gravel lining the road.

Done, he thought. I'm sorry, Marilyn, but the picture means more to me than you do. The cops will find the bastard who did this later. Right now you just have to understand what I'm working against.

He came onto the set flushed and angry. Everyone stayed out of his way, which worked to his advantage. He had a feeling his day was all uphill from here if he didn't think too much about what he had done. But he didn't want to fuck with anybody and he didn't want to look anyone in the eyes. One of them probably cut off Marilyn's head. Filming a movie about a killer and dealing with a real one weren't the same thing at all.

A few people asked about Marilyn, wondering why she wasn't in her dressing room. Catherine called her house and reported no answer.

Luckily she wasn't due to be in the scene today. They'd discover soon enough she was missing and would begin to shoot around her until Cam could finally write her out of the rest of the picture without drawing any protest. If she didn't show up, how could they use her?

He didn't give himself time to worry why the killer had put Marilyn's head in his car. Not until much later, after he had gone home for the day and he had stopped by one of his hangouts to drink beer with construction workers, did it occur to him to wonder why that had been done.

Maybe the killer knew him so well he or she knew he would dispose of the head and not call in the police? Had he been used? Manipulated?

"Fuck," he said to his bar companion, a man with a fifth-grade education and biceps the size of a wrestler's. "I'm having a lot of problems doing this film. A lot of really serious problems."

"Tell me about it," the other man said, hefting a can of Bud to his mouth. "I like movies."

But Cam couldn't. Not this, he couldn't tell. He would never tell this to anyone, ever. His shameful act would be buried in his psyche until he died.

37

"Cinema, radio, television, magazines are a school of inattention: people look without seeing, listen in without hearing."

Robert Bresson, 1950-1958: Exercises

The whole office was buzzing with speculation about the latest grisly Hollywood crime. Not since the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman had any Hollywood death caused such a sensation.

In some ways, Karl thought, reading the account in the front pages of the newspaper, this crime was more frightening than the ones involving Simpson's ex-wife. The body parts of the unidentified female victim had been strewn all over the city. The Garden Palm restaurant had to close when the press swamped it, shooting film for the television news stations and taking pictures for the newspapers.

On the other hand, the owner of the shop on Rodeo Drive kept his doors open and became a minor media celebrity by giving lurid accounts of how the dismembered arm looked hanging by wire from his door.

A teenage boy, interviewed on A Current Affair about reporting the leg he found lying on the star-studded sidewalk in front of Grauman's Chinese Theater, was offered a part as a Power Ranger on the TV Saturday Series because he looked so fresh and handsome on the tube.

The second arm was discovered sticking out from a dumpster at an all-night restaurant on Sunset and the torso, armless, headless, legless, was reportedly sitting propped upright on a bus stop bench not more than four blocks away. An old woman called in to report it, complaining the elderly couldn't even depend on mass transportation in this city because of the crime problems and what they might find waiting for them at bus stops.