13 Stolen Girls (23 page)

The narrow corridor, the marble stairway leading downward, the grand entrance to the Roman-style baths—all were familiar to her. The whole lower level seemed empty, but somehow it didn't feel exactly deserted.

Who am I, baby, who am I?

I'm the one who watched you go

Tarin's Song. But in a different version, some sort of remix, heavy on the reverb. The whispery voice resonated amid the marble surroundings. Echoes nested within echoes.

Holding her weapon in front of her, Remington passed through the baths toward the inner rooms.

Baby I don't know me without you

No I don't know me without you

The second person she encountered was Gus Monaghan. He was dead also.

Mortality had reached out to the great producer
(…as it must to all men, death came to Charles Foster Kane…)
in a particularly gruesome manner. His naked body was violently impaled on the phallic shaft of the gigantic brass Priapus statue. He sagged forward, fleshy and inert.

The music continued, hollow-sounding, narcotic.

Farther on, the ceramic Tarin Mistry statue had been toppled from its pedestal. It lay shattered. A million-dollar artwork, destroyed. Remington had to kick aside the rubble of the statue to reach the last door.

The song ended and the music died. Remington stepped into the small scarlet chamber.

The light in the room was dim. The walls gave off a carmine-colored glow.

Lounging casually in a heavy, straight-backed wooden chair in the center of the room was a striking-looking female of about Remington's age. A jet-black Louise Brooks–style haircut framed her face. A studded leather collar encircled her neck. She remained quite still.

But she wasn't dead. Her eyes were much too alive.

“You are…?” Remington could barely utter the words.

The woman didn't immediately respond. Even in the gloom, her face was eerily recognizable.

“You are…?”

The name caught in Remington's throat.

“You are…Tarin Mistry.”

The black hair threw everything off, but the perfect, sculpted face could have been slathered in blood and would still have been unmistakable.

“On the whole, I prefer the name Bethlehem.” The woman spoke in an offhand tone. “Not Gunion, though, that's hideous. Perhaps…Bethlehem Cordone.”

Remington knew exactly what she should do. There was abundant evidence that a crime had been committed on the premises. She should call out “Police!” and wait for Brasov to bring reinforcements.

But the presence of the dead girl who wasn't dead put Remington off her game. She hesitated just long enough for disaster to strike.

Uberto Cordone stepped out of the wall next to her, appearing from behind a sliding panel. He reached out and relieved Remington of her sidearm as quickly and easily as one might snatch a sharp pair of scissors from a child.

“Detective…” Cordone purred.

Remington recognized the face from the man's prison file.

He trained her own pistol on her. “How do you like my work, Layla?”

Was he referring to the corpse of Gus Monaghan, the shattered statue of Tarin Mistry, or the living girl herself, who now rose to her feet and joined him? Remington couldn't tell.

The couple who stood in front of her displayed an ease in each other's presence. The younger woman rested her hand gently on the shoulder of the older man.

“We were just finishing up here and were about to leave,” Cordone said. He motioned Remington forward with the gun. “We didn't think you'd come after all.”

“We had surrendered all hope.” Consciously or unconsciously, Tarin Mistry echoed the motto emblazoned above the portal. “I did want to meet you, Detective.”

“You aren't dead.”

Tarin laughed. A revelation.

“So who…?”

Tarin lowered her voice confidentially, bending toward Remington. Close up, her beauty appeared vaguely ravaged, like a showgirl's when the footlights snap off. “You should have remembered, Detective, after you thought you had found me in that barrel, that there are more blond girls than one. Especially around Hollywood.”

“We needed a replacement corpse to put people off Bethlehem's trail,” Cordone said. “The necklace made it easy.”

“What was her name? The girl I found?”

“Well,
you
weren't meant to find her, Detective,” Mistry said. “That idiot Larry Close…he was supposed to turn her up. But he kept delaying until it was too late. An earthquake! I couldn't believe it when I heard.”

“Her name…?” Remington asked again. For some reason, her mind focused on that single detail, needing to extract a scrap of significant information from the wreckage of the encounter.

“What does it matter?” Mistry asked airily.

“It matters.” Remington's voice came out in a choked whisper.

“As much as we'd love to discuss the past with you, if we stay here much longer we won't have much of a future.” Cordone pointed the way with a wave of Remington's Ruger.

They proceeded through the outer rooms, Remington moving in a daze. As they passed by the sagging corpse of Gus Monaghan, the body emitted a gaseous sigh.

Cordone laughed. “I wish we'd had the time…Vlad the Impaler, you know, the historical Dracula? He had a method—ingenious, really. He found a way to impale the human body without interfering with the vital organs, so that the victim might live in agony for two or three days.”

“A crucifixion—that takes quite a while, too,” Tarin Mistry added.

Cordone beamed at Remington. “You see? She says things like that. It's why I love her. Too brilliant to kill, that's my Tarin.”

“The detective might wonder why your old friend Mr. Monaghan had to die.” Mistry's tone was brisk.

“He tried to own the memory of Tarin Mistry, didn't he?” Cordone shook his head sadly.

“But I wasn't his to own,” Mistry said. “It's in the Bible, Matthew 6:24. No one can serve two masters. I certainly am not girl enough to have two.”

As they left the baths and mounted the marble stairway to the first floor, Remington heard the far-off sound of police sirens.

“Here come the Marines,” Mistry sang out, her tone fey.

The dead bodyguard lay where he had fallen in the entrance hall. “Go and pose next to big boy over there,” Cordone said, giving Remington a forceful push in that direction.

Mistry patted the man affectionately on the arm. “I'd rather not watch this one. I'll just…disappear.”

“Meet me at the place,” Cordone told her.

“I will,” she said, and walked off toward the back terrace of the mansion.

“Are you a God-fearing woman, Detective?” Cordone asked as soon as he and Remington had been left alone. The sound of the police sirens rose louder, approaching from the south.

He didn't wait for Remington to answer the question. “I never saw the use of it myself. Like the man says, blasphemy is a victimless crime. But you might want to begin your prayers.”

He raised the pistol.

Remington fell forward, going on her knees beside the cold bulk of the bodyguard.

“I submit to you, Master.”

Cordone hesitated.

“End me.” Remington lowered her gaze submissively.

It represented the beginning of a catechism of sorts, taken from the Cor books. The Sacred Dialog of the Ultimate Consummation. An exchange between slave and master.

“You know the words?” A grim look of satisfaction took hold of Cordone.

“Yes, Master.”

“You command me to do this?”

“I have not the power to command you, Master. I ask this only of myself.”

“A sacrifice?”

“An offering.” Remington laid herself out for the man, prostrate beside the dead bodyguard, still keeping her head up so that her face might be visible to Cordone.

He lowered the pistol by degrees. “You wish me to free you from pain?”

“I ask you to imprison me in death.”

“God alone holds the power of life and death.”

“You hold the power of life and death. Therefore you are God.”

“Say the sacred words again.”

“End me.”

“You must repeat it three times.”

“Fuck that.” Remington raised the pistol that she had stripped off the bodyguard's inert form and shot Cordone in the chest. The marble surroundings pealed like a bell with the enormous sound of the blast.

An expression of surprised hurt passed across Cordone's face. A red bloom blossomed on his shirtfront. He staggered backward and fell.

Brasov screamed up the mansion driveway in the Alfa and skidded to a stop. Weapon in hand, he sprinted up the steps and through the front door into the entry hall.

“You all right?” he yelled, too loud for their proximity.

Behind him, a rush of police cars came roaring up the front drive, their sirens drowning out all other sound. So Brasov probably didn't hear when Remington finally spoke.

“You'll never believe who I just saw.”

Remington offered to drive Dixie Close back to her parents' home in Scottsdale. The girl said she was fine with a bus, the way she had come to L.A. in the first place. But Remington insisted. She figured it was the least she could do for the person who put Larry Close down and helped her solve the puzzle of Tarin Mistry.

The blowback from the night in the Toy Box trailer ended without any legal impact on Dixie, who had now started calling herself Victoria Combe—Vicky. A coroner's jury had ruled the death of Lawrence Decker Close a case of justifiable homicide and Dixie/Victoria's action a matter of self-defense.

Annette Close had been released from jail. She had repeatedly tried to contact the niece who no longer considered herself a niece.

“I'm not going to have anything to do with her,” Vicky announced. “She might not have done anything bad herself, but she stood by while bad was being done.”

The day after the coroner's jury delivered its verdict, Remington drove east on I-10 toward Arizona, Vicky beside her in the passenger seat. Remington had taken up Brasov's practice of checking out confiscated vehicles from the sheriff's motor pool. They rode in style, cocooned within a massive Cadillac Escalade SUV, the former ride of a hedge funder convicted of insider trading.

The suburbs just got uglier the farther east they went, until the endless panorama of car dealerships, strip malls and apartment complexes faded and the wastelands took over.

“I was thinking, I've always lived in the desert,” the younger woman said, gazing out at the passing landscape. The Morongo Indian casino went by on their left. Off to the right, the hills showed the blackened scars of a recent wildfire. “Maybe I should try somewhere a little greener, like New York or Chicago somewhere. Someplace new.”

She was moody, and told Remington she would sleep, but never dropped off. Later on, she posed a question, asking it out of nowhere. “Do you believe in God, Detective?”

“I thought I didn't. But now it turns out that I might after all.”

“If there is one, it doesn't seem like he gives a rat's ass about us. I had a friend whose sister died of bone cancer. It was awful, and she was just a little kid. And, like, I heard of this beetle or something in Africa? It's an insect, anyway, and it burrows into the eyes of children and makes them blind. Tell me that God cares, Detective.”

“For this drive, while we're spending time together, you should call me Layla.”

Dixie/Vicky gazed out the window at the stark desert landscape. Remington didn't blame the girl for the blast of cynicism. It was incredible, her story, the Uncle Monkey who dandled her on his knee turning out to be her mother's killer. The world could be one terrible place. Remington wasn't about to argue otherwise. Back in L.A., the news media were going wild over “Bondage Book Club Beasts!” and the Stolen Girls case. How many lives had those damned bestsellers destroyed?

They sped along I-10, deeper into the parched Sonoran nowhere. Past wind farms, past the turnoff to Palm Springs and, finally, through Joshua Tree National Park.

“Joshua Tree,” Vicky murmured.

The night Gus Monaghan and Uberto Cordone died, Tarin Mistry had vanished for a second time. Or was it a third or fourth? She was last seen by Detective Layla Remington striding purposefully across the blood-spattered marble floor of the Brokedown Palace. There was a full acre of gardens and grounds behind the Knollwood mansion. In the confusion of the moment, the LAPD officers on the scene delayed the search for her until an unreasonable amount of time had elapsed.

The Monaghan property abutted other estates with generous amounts of property, including the Playboy Mansion. Perhaps Mistry had found refuge there.

Remington's story about seeing the former actress alive was not believed by most rational people, including the majority of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Sam Brasov, Gene Remington and Rick Stills humored her but didn't really believe her. Surprisingly, Johnny Velske turned out to be her only supporter, an overenthusiastic one, spinning webs of conspiracy.

No trace of Hollywood's most famous missing person was ever found.

Because of Cathy Gunion's stubborn refusal to permit the taking of DNA samples, the body that Remington found in a barrel after the Malibu quake never got genetically tested. The mother chose not to pursue the idea that her daughter was alive. Simply in terms of dollars and cents, Tarin Mistry was worth much more to her dead. Released by the State of California, the remains were buried in a modest grave in a rural cemetery on the Nevada-Arizona border, near Las Vegas. The graveyard belonged communally to the Church of Our Lord's Two Thousand Twenty-Five Words.

Since the irrational populace embraced a vast sector of America, the myth of a living Tarin Mistry endured, eventually swelling to compete with that of the living Elvis. Sightings of Mistry popped up in Venice Beach, California, and Venice, Italy, as well as in New York City, Hong Kong, Rio, Brisbane, Fairbanks and, just for good measure, Area 51.

She was also seen in Joshua Tree, California, where the former actress was reportedly living mostly a reclusive life, though with occasional incognito forays to a local nightspot called Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace.

“No one just walks away from celebrity like that,” claimed the talk-show host Bill Mahr, speaking for the rational minority. “Tarin's
dead,
people!”

Remington knew the truth. She stopped proclaiming it to the world, though, realizing that the truth wasn't always to the world's taste. Tarin Mistry still haunted her dreams, a woman who had turned her back on fame and wealth in order to serve as a slave to a con. Her true story seemed more bizarre and unlikely than ever.

Remington looked out at the Joshua trees alongside the interstate now, raising their spindly fingers to the sky, either proclaiming salvation or pleading for redemption.

“I've seen a lot of bad things as a police,” Remington remarked to her passenger, breaking a long silence.

“That's funny how you say that, you always say, ‘a police,' not ‘a police officer.' ”

“The Stolen Girls case is about the worst. Lawrence Close, Gus Monaghan, Uberto Cordone—they were all bad men. You think about this awful stuff too long, and everything goes dark, right? I usually don't like to talk about God, because that seems to me to be a prideful human creation. But I will say that the universe doesn't care. Look at this country we're passing through. Do you think if you and I were dropped down into a hostile landscape like this the universe would care if we lived or died?”

“No,” Vicky said.

“But we would care. You and I would care. We'd help each other to survive. The universe doesn't care, so we have to.”

“I like that,” Vicky said, after a few more miles. “ ‘The universe doesn't care, so we have to.' That seems about right, Detective.”

“Layla, Dixie.”

“Vicky, Layla,” the girl said.