Sick City (19 page)

Things had been bad all week. Trina had spent most of her time in the motel, waiting for Pat to return from prowling the streets, trying to get a lead on Jeffrey. His already terse style of communication had gotten even more tight-lipped than usual, so that he barely even grunted at her anymore. Trina began to fear that unless something changed, Pat could conceivably decide to take off without her. The one thing that Trina feared more than anything else was being abandoned. For once in her life someone had taken her in, looked after her. Now she felt as though she were incrementally losing Pat with each successive day.

Sometimes, alone in the motel room, she would pull out the briefcase that contained the money. She even tried to open it, but found that Pat had locked it and changed the combination. She pushed aside the dread feeling that this discovery gave her. More than once, the thought had crossed her mind to empty the case and split by herself. It sometimes seemed that it would be the only way to protect herself. If Pat beat her to the punch, she would be stranded. No job, no money, nothing. With this kind of money, she supposed, she could disappear. At the very least she could get her goddamned nose fixed.

But fear kept her rooted to the spot. Fear of having to start over somewhere new. But most of all, fear of Pat. He seemed to have a sixth sense about people, and she imagined that he could probably hear these thoughts as they went on in her head. Just thinking about leaving seemed like a dangerous thing to do. Sometimes she caught him looking at her. Not looking at her the way he looked at her when he wanted to fuck her, but in a different way. Looking at her like a butcher might look at a slaughtered pig, deciding the best way to chop the animal down into its component pieces. As soon as the thoughts of leaving would surface, she'd shout them down.

Pat is my man. We've gone through something together, something that means that you stick together for life. I saw him kill a man. I helped him to kill a man.

This is our life now. Like Bonnie and fucking Clyde.

This childish thought gave her some comfort. Sometimes, alone in the motel room, she would shoot some meth and stand naked in front of the bathroom mirror, playing with Tyler's gun. She'd point the gun at the mirror, admiring the way she looked holding it.

“Beg me if you wanna live, motherfucker!” she would whisper to herself. It made her feel good, it made her feel more
real
than she'd ever thought possible. For once, her life was as colorful, vibrant, and REAL as the movies were. In those moments she felt what she guessed was true love for Pat. Someone had finally liberated her from the tyranny of dull, disappointing reality.

She'd feel good until the next time the drugs wore off, and the nagging, black doubt surfaced again. The fear. What the fuck WAS Pat capable of? She already knew that he could kill without remorse. If she didn't have a role to play, then why would he even keep her around?

Pat barely slept. When he did take enough downers that he'd pass out for a few hours, Trina would watch him dream. His fists would clench and unclench, his body stiff as a board as he ground his teeth continuously. Sometimes he would bark insults: “Cunt!” “MotherFUCKER!” “SHITsucker!” as he lay there, trembling.

She gave him a list of everyone she knew who frequented Tyler's place, and who might know Jeffrey away from that scene. It was a pretty short list. Mostly part-time meth users, crackheads, rootless musicians, and barmen, people who operated on the periphery of the city, scuffling in shady doorways and unlit streets. For most of them, she had no more than a first name and a description. The others, some sketchy details. One guy who worked the door at a monthly S and M night in a club downtown. A girl who worked the hostess bars in Koreatown. A wannabe writer who lived in a motel on Hollywood Boulevard. A guy who owned a bike repair shop over by Sunset and Benton. Each day Pat came home, sometimes with a name crossed off the list, but never any closer to finding Jeffrey.

· · ·

“Nobody knows nothing about this guy,” Pat grumbled, staring at the list one evening. “We're gonna have to rethink.”

“Rethink what, Papi?”

“Just rethink. That's all.”

And so it went, until the day that she heard the lock scraping back and Pat burst into the room. “The list,” he demanded, “where is it?”

Trina had been examining her nose in the mirror, carefully peeling back the bandages, exposing the angry, swollen flesh underneath. She immediately stopped what she was doing and scurried over to the refrigerator. The list was held on there with a magnet in the shape of a California license plate.

“Here it is. Why?”

Pat glanced at it. Then a grin, long and slow, spread over his face.

“Spider,” he said, “tell me more about this motherfucker Spider.”

Trina shrugged.

“He's a cheap motherfucker. Creepy. He was always hanging around Tyler's place, trying to get freebies. He useta stop by the club once in a while. Christ knows why, he was into dudes mostly, I think.”

“You said he knew the faggot pretty well.”

Pat wouldn't say Jeffrey's name anymore. He referred to him exclusively as “the faggot.” Tyler was referred to as “the dead faggot.”

“Yeah. They were all queer boys together. I think they hung out. Why?”

Pat pulled out his cell phone and said, “Well, guess who's looking to make a connect for meth? Just got the call from Juan.”

“No!”

“Uh-huh. Seems homeboy lost his last connection unexpectedly.”

At this Pat laughed a little.

“What are you going to do?” Trina asked.

“I'm gonna be nice as fuckin' pie to him. Let's see how cooperative he can be. . . .”

Pat dialed a number and signaled for Trina to be quiet by raising a finger to his lips.

“Yeah. You Spider? Juan said you were looking for some, uh, materials that I can help you out with. Where you at? Oh. I'm pretty close to you. I can be there in twenty minutes. How much do you want? Uh-huh. Okay.”

Pat clicked the phone off and said to Trina, “Get yourself cleaned up, baby girl. We got an appointment.”

By the time they'd made it back to Jeffrey's room in the Mark Twain, Randal had clocked up seven missed calls from his brother. He turned the phone off. It was make or break time. The decision between living the life his brother wanted or risking everything on this long shot with Jeffrey was really no decision at all. He knew that one way or another he would never see his brother again.

The room was a far cry from his opulent digs in Brentwood. The brown carpet was threadbare, and the connecting door to the next room had a tiny peephole drilled into it. It was plugged with a piece of filthy cotton. There was writing on the walls, in spidery, obsessive script, crude cartoon reproductions of genitals, and places where the lime green paint had been scraped off altogether. Mystery stains covered the bedsheets, and the toilet was backed up. The windows didn't shut properly and looked out upon a parking lot and another flophouse hotel called the Cecil half a block down Wilcox.

Once Jeffrey was safely asleep in bed, Randal rummaged through the tote bag. Inside were the film canisters, old, rusty, and cool to the touch. In faint, barely there writing on the box was the date
Dec 1, 1968
. So it
did
exist. Randal felt a slight shudder work through his body. What he was holding was a genuine, honest-to-God slice of Hollywood history. He felt like an archaeologist, brushing dirt away from the remains of some unimagined, unfathomable creature.

Because of his industry connections, Randal had once been privy to a one-off screening of
The Day the Clown Cried
, a long-buried flick from the late '70s starring Jerry Lewis as a clown who leads Jewish children into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. . . . The film was a travesty, and Lewis had devoted much of his life to ensuring that it would never be seen publicly. It was a screening so shrouded in secrecy that Randal had been forced to sign a confidentiality agreement before being allowed to watch . . . but that was small fry compared to this, a piece of film that could change forever the way the world saw one of America's tragic icons. People KNEW about the Jerry Lewis movie. It was a staple of those stupid “50 Worst Movies of All Time” books. The script had surfaced on the Internet years ago. . . . But this, the Sharon Tate sex tape in Randal's trembling hands, was something totally different. This was a truly historic piece of celluloid.

Randal looked over to Jeffrey, still unconscious on the bed. He knew that it would be easy for him to walk out right now, taking the tape and the drugs with him. Even if the tape still turned out to be a fraud, there were enough drugs in the bag to make it worth his while. In a way Randal thought that it would serve the fucker right for disappearing like that.

He looked over to the door and imagined himself closing it gently, stealing out into the Hollywood streets below.

He looked at Jeffrey again, who was almost unrecognizable from the guy he had roomed with in rehab. Thin, pale, and totally ruined by drugs. And yet, in the midst of everything that had been going on with him, he had called Randal. Randal wasn't sure what that meant, but it gave him pause for thought when it came to ripping Jeffrey off.

Randal had made enough bad decisions in his life to know that every shitty trick you pull on someone will one day boomerang and hit you full in the face. No, for once Randal was determined to do something the right way. Even if what they were doing wasn't exactly legitimate, Randal decided that he could at the very least go about it in a dignified manner.

Randal silently replaced the canister. Also in the bag was a handgun. Randal picked it up and pointed it at the window. He whispered “blam!” to himself before replacing it carefully. Then he took out the drugs. He looked over at Jeffrey's still form, and then started to work out what he wanted to try first. There was no internal debate about whether he should use or not. Faced with the drugs, no debate was
possible
. He cut out a line of coke and inhaled it with a fifty-dollar bill. He sat back and felt the sensations starting in the back of his skull.
Oh, Jesus, yes
. He looked at the film canisters again and became filled with an urge to do something—to do anything. He started writing down names that would be helpful to them when it came to selling the tape.

——————

Even before he opened his eyes, Jeffrey knew where he was. It was the smell. The Mark Twain had a certain odor to it, a cocktail of mildew, cooked heroin, and metallic body odor that was all its own. He blinked, and his eyes adjusted to the mid-afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows. The heat in the room was oppressive, unbearable. Outside honks, sirens, yelling, and the heavy rumble of drills on tarmac. He sat up and unpeeled his nude torso from the thin, wet sheets.

He saw Randal first, scribbling furiously onto a legal pad. Also on the table was Jeffrey's copy of the
Big Book
, with a pile of white powder and a rolled-up fifty-dollar bill on top of it. And there was Eddie fucking Murphy staring at him from the bag, which sat on top of the busted chest of drawers. Sensing movement, Randal looked up.

“Good afternoon,” he said.

“Hey.”

“How you feeling?”

“Like shit.”

Randal nodded sagely. He pointed toward the book. “Wanna bump?”

“Sure.”

· · ·

Jeffrey flopped back onto the bed and ran his fingers through his filthy hair.

“How long have I been out?”

“A day and a half. I picked up some supplies. There's beers in the bathtub. And I got some tins of soup. I picked up some pizza, but it's cold now.”

“Thank you.”

Jeffrey got up and shuffled over to the table. He glanced at the pad that Randal was scribbling on. Then he focused on the pile of blow, scraping together a line with the credit card lying on there, and snorted it. He sat back on the bed, snuffling and shaking himself awake. When the coke started to make him feel better he looked up and said, “I'm kind of surprised to see you here.”

“Oh, yeah? You called me, remember?”

“I know. It's just that somebody else might have decided to take the shit and split. You know? Just leave me here.”

Randal shrugged. “Not me. I ain't a thief. But tell me, if you thought that I might have just ripped you off, why did you even call me?”

Jeffrey fell silent, and for a moment the image of Tyler's mutilated corpse flashed across his mind. He shuddered at the recollection. Jeffrey looked around the room and said, “You're the only person I could call. You're the only one I have left. . . .”

When Jeffrey started in with the garbled story of walking into Tyler's apartment to find his friend's mutilated corpse duct-taped to a chair, Randal initially thought he was suffering some kind of drug-induced psychosis. Still reeling from the two weeks of abuse he had heaped upon his body, Jeffrey didn't do much apart from sleep, eat, and get high over the next few days. Randal gave him the bed and set up camp in the rickety chair that comprised the rest of the furniture in the place. Sometimes in the night, he would wake up to the sound of Jeffrey moaning in his sleep. But after a few days' rest, the story remained the same. There was a twenty-four-hour newsstand on Cahuenga. Randal walked over and picked up a stack of porno magazines and newspapers.

Randal didn't expect to find anything in the paper about the weeks-old murder of some anonymous lowlife. The death of a drug dealer was about as newsworthy in LA as stepped-on cockroaches or rats run over by cars. But having nothing else to go on but Jeffrey's scrambled words, he looked anyway. Randal scoured the papers and finally found, at the back of the local news section, tucked away among rapes, dismemberments, and yesterday's winning lottery numbers . . .

No Leads in Suspected Drug Slay

AP—Police say they have no leads in the murder of suspected drug dealer Tyler James. Police found James's corpse after an anonymous phone call led them to the victim's apartment building. The killing appears to be a home invasion gone wrong, and police are not ruling out that James's death was drug-related. The victim had been convicted in 1992 for possession of methamphetamine and cocaine, and police say that he was a suspect in a drug ring that specialized in prescription medication.

“Home invasion, my ass,” Jeffrey had snorted when he read that part. They had been in the room, getting high and drunk for two days now. Randal was fixing himself a stiff drink. He had bought several bottles from a liquor store on Hollywood Boulevard and kept the booze cool by stacking them in the bathtub, which he had filled with cold water. He winced, taking a gulp of vodka. It was four o'clock somewhere, he figured.

“Hm?”

“They say it's a home invasion. This wasn't a home invasion. They were looking for me. Either that, or they were looking for the tape. This shit ain't unrelated, man. This is bad. We need to unload this stuff and get the fuck out of town.”

Randal looked somber. Ever since he'd dragged Jeffrey out of that loft space downtown, he had been muttering cryptically about needing to get out of town. When he tried to pin Jeffrey down on who exactly he suspected was looking for him, the story would change. At first he suspected rogue elements in the LAPD who had somehow found out about the tape and were trying to suppress it.

“Why would they give a fuck?” Randal had asked. “I mean, why would they care about the tape being made public?”

“Because it can be traced back to Bill. And if they find out more stuff about Bill, then it's a problem for the others. This shit goes way up to the top! I don't even know about half of the material those fuckers had access to. This isn't a fucking game! These are some cold-blooded killers we are talking about here. They are the kind of guys who shoot first and then plant a fucking gun in your dead hand later. Fuck, I mean . . . even in rehab . . . one of them was there. Leading a meeting. The Hammer. Old friend of Bill's, and he had a fucking grudge, too. I wouldn't be surprised if he recognized me, did a bit of research, and decided to come after me. . . .”

A rattling coughing fit wracked Jeffrey's body.

“They don't want this tape getting out. If this tape sells, they want to be the ones selling it, controlling the process, controlling who has access to it. You don't think that's worth killing me over?”

“But you can't be sure of that!”

“I know! That's what makes it worse. All I know is that we gotta stay away from the fucking cops. We gotta watch our backs, Randal!”

Randal was cutting out lines of blow on the nightstand. He looked up to Jeffrey.

“How do you know it wasn't a home invasion, just like the papers said?”

“Why would they wait around to chase me? I didn't see who they were. I didn't see nothing! I grabbed the bag, and suddenly some fucking hick psycho is threatening to gut me. If Bill's fucking gun hadn't been in my hand at that exact moment I'd be dead meat, just like Tyler. Why would anybody hang around after a fucking home invasion? They should have been long gone, man. No—they wanted the film. Or they wanted me. Or both.”

When Randal heard Jeffrey talk like this, he'd get a sick feeling in his gut. He sounded like every crazed, paranoid crackhead he'd ever dealt with. It scared him, because he knew full well that sometimes crackheads just never get it back. One day something in the brain just overheats and blows out. When that happens, the change is irreversible. They go from being common crackheads to card-carrying paranoiacs and nobody can do anything about it. But . . . in some nook in the back of his brain Randal considered something even more disturbing. What if Jeffrey was right? Randal remembered the LAPD's Rampart scandal, where undercover cops basically became one of the most organized and out-of-control gangs in the city. They sold drugs, killed with impunity, and framed the innocent for murder. One of them had even robbed a fucking bank. In light of shit like that, Jeffrey's paranoia seemed almost justified.

“Either that, or . . .” Jeffrey trailed off.

“Or what?”

“Ah, it's nothing.”

“Come on. Don't give me that shit. What's up? If we're going to do this thing, you gotta tell me everything. Okay? If there's someone else who knows about this, then let's get it all out in the open. . . .”

“Remember I told you that I had to leave London suddenly?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there was more to it than that. I left because if I didn't I was going to get murdered. I was working in Piccadilly. I was a prostitute. Sometimes they'd be so drunk I could empty their wallets without even having to touch their nasty old cocks. I had a few regulars, and one of them was Simon Price. You probably don't remember him. He had a big song in the mid-eighties called ‘Flick the Switch,' with a band called Drone Cathedral.”

“Weren't they one of those one-hit wonder bands, like Dexys Midnight Runners and shit?”

“Dexys weren't one-hit wonders back home. They were a good band. That fucking ‘Come On Eileen' shit was not what they were all about. They had a bunch of great albums before they did that piece of shit. Drone Cathedral, on the other hand, yeah, they were a one-hit wonder band. Not a very good one. And, yes, that was Simon.”

“Simon was at the height of his fame then. He was also one of the first people I met in England who knew how to freebase. Said some junkie hangers-on had introduced him to it during the band's first U.S. tour. He'd read all of these horror stories in the papers about this new killer drug that was sweeping the U.S. called crack, so of course he went out to find some the first night he landed in the U.S. It got to be so that Simon was seeing me most every night. Then I stopped asking him to pay. He told everyone I was his assistant. He wasn't out, not in the slightest. His band had this fucking fan base of fourteen-year-old girls who would have died if they knew he was queer. A queer crackhead, to boot.”