Hard Case Crime: Money Shot (20 page)

I glanced over at Malloy and saw that he had gone back over to the car, still smoking and looking up at the stars. I guess he knew I needed to be alone for this.

I took a step closer to the edge of the pit and looked down at the gun Malloy had given me. It was a slightly older sibling of the Smith and Wesson I had used to plug the rhino. I tucked it into my jeans and slid down into the pit with Jesse.

He was crying when I landed beside him. It was hard to right the chair with him taped to it, especially in such a cramped space and with him outweighing me by fifty pounds at least. But I had a kind of hot, crazy focus that made me strong. When I got him upright he immediately started blubbering and begging me not to kill him. His face was muddy from snot and tears mixed with dirt. He looked so young, like a little kid who’d just gotten beat up in the schoolyard. I had to squint to make myself see the cocky bastard who’d had so much fun choking me until I passed out over and over again. I slid the gun out of my waistband and took his gritty, scraped up chin in my hand, looking into his beautiful blue eyes. He looked terrified, desperate. I didn’t even know I was going to say anything until the words came out of my mouth. My line reading was way better than his had been.

“End of the line, bitch,” I said.

Then I shot him.

I buried Jesse. The soft plink of tiny rocks and sand hitting the metal chair seemed way too loud in the big desert night. I could have used some help, but I was glad Malloy hung back and left me to handle it alone. I needed the time to get my shit together.

It’s not that I was freaked out or disturbed by what I had done. I don’t exactly know how to describe what I was feeling as I buried the man who had raped me. Killing the rhino had been different. Impulsive. What I had done to Jesse, well, that was something else. In a way, it’s like I was burying my old self in that pit. The person that I’d been before I’d looked into a man’s eyes and shot him dead. The person that I was now, the delicate newborn killer that Jesse made me, needed the slow thoughtless shoveling like an insect still wet from metamorphosis needs time to dry its wings and figure out how to work its brand new form.

Because the killing wasn’t over yet.

“Done?” Malloy asked when I finally came back to the car. He squinted at me, spit on his fingers and extinguished his cigarette. He put the butt into a small plastic bag filled with several others.

I nodded. It was chilly now that the physical labor was done but I barely felt it. As we quickly loaded the remaining equipment into the trunk, I saw a small, expensive cell phone and a scatter of change on the carpet inside the trunk. Probably fell out of Jesse’s pocket while he was flailing around in there. I took the phone and put it into my duffel bag, figuring it might have some useful numbers. Malloy got into the car and motioned for me to get in, too.

“You got a little...” Malloy pointed to his chin and handed me a napkin from a Mexican restaurant.

I flipped down the visor and looked into the mirror. There were four perfectly round drops of blood like a small constellation on my face. One on my chin, one at the corner of my mouth, one just under my eye and one on my temple. As I wiped them away, I noticed that my bruises were almost completely healed. I still didn’t look anything like I’d used to.

The radio had been on when Malloy killed the ignition and came back on too loudly when he started the car up again. The song was some sappy power ballad that had been popular when I first got into the business. I couldn’t remember the name of the band and couldn’t make myself care. Malloy reached to turn it off.

“Leave it,” I said. I wanted to hear something that didn’t matter.

Malloy nodded and put his hand back on the wheel. We didn’t speak. Malloy drove back to the Palmview.

The sun was coming up as we pulled into the mostly empty lot of the Palmview. We both knew there wasn’t any hope for sleep. I felt cold even though Malloy had given me his jacket again.

“You want coffee?” Malloy asked.

“Sure,” I replied.

We went to a Starbucks down the block. I couldn’t tolerate the clever, market-researched design of the place, so we took our expensive coffee back to the rental car and sat in the parking lot. Neither of us actually said
Now what,
but that’s what we both were thinking.

“Roxette,” I finally said. “I guess we need to figure out where the hell she went.”

Malloy shrugged and sipped his coffee while I called her various numbers again. Again, no answer.

We wasted a couple of hours hitting all the places where Roxette could have been. Nothing. No one had seen or heard from her since last Friday before the meeting with Celestine.

“She could have taken the money and fucked off to South America by now,” Malloy said.

I shook my head.

“She has money,” I said. “Her folks are loaded and she’s still pulling a huge day rate. She took the briefcase because she was curious, because she takes things. Not because she needed the money. Anyway it’s locked with a combination. She probably hasn’t even tried to open it.”

“Ok, then where the hell is she?” Malloy asked. “Do you think she might have fallen off the wagon?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Meth was her drug of choice, right?” Malloy asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“So if she wanted to get back into it, who would she call? Who would hook her up?”

I knew exactly who would hook her up, but just thinking his name made me queasy.

If you spend any amount of time working in the porn industry, you quickly get numb to drug casualties, just like you get numb to prolapsed rectums on set and guys sticking needles in their johnsons and all the other workaday atrocities of the modern smut racket. But I have to admit the sordid downward spiral of Thick Vic Ventura got under my skin. Not just because we had been lovers off camera, but because he had been so smart and funny. So real. So much like me.

Vic was from the South Side of Chicago, like me. Italian like me. His real name was Joey Pagliuca. He’d gone to high school with my brothers at St. Laurence and dated a girl two grades ahead of me at Queen of Peace. He’d left for Hollywood when I was just a freshman. He’d looked like a rock star, with his tattoos and long black hair—not exactly handsome, but charismatic. He had come to L.A. with ambitions to be a stand-up comedian. He was irreverent, sharp and wickedly sarcastic, but his comedy act had never caught on. In the end, it wasn’t his dirty jokes but his astounding endowment that made him famous and gave him the nickname Thick Vic.

Like a lot of guys blessed (or cursed) with freakishly enormous dicks, he sometimes had trouble getting it up. It never really got all the way hard and he always joked that if it ever did, he would pass out from lack of blood to his brain. Still, with a good tight grip on the base, he was able to squeeze enough blood into the top nine inches to get the job done.

That was on camera. Off camera it didn’t much matter to me. So many guys think they won’t be able to cut the mustard with me because they aren’t packing thirteen concrete inches. The truth is, the biggest, hardest dick in the world is useless if you don’t know how to eat pussy; and Vic not only knew how to eat pussy but genuinely enjoyed it. He was one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.

But unsurprisingly, after a few years in the industry, the rock star lifestyle and hard partying took its toll on him. It got tougher and tougher for him to perform and he started getting a reputation for unreliable wood. A reputation like that is a death sentence for male talent.

Anything approaching real “dating” in the porn industry is challenging at best. When one partner is on the way up and the other on the way down, emotional disaster is pretty much a forgone conclusion.
A Porn Star Is Born.
When Vic stopped getting calls, he started getting clingy and jealous. He threw macho Italian temper tantrums in public places and we started having more screaming fights than screaming orgasms. His drinking and drug use got more and more out of control. It would have only been a matter of time before he pulled a Cal Jammer and blew his brains out in my driveway, so I put the relationship out of its misery. I don’t think I personally sent him over the edge, since he was already well on his way before I kicked him to the curb, but I’m sure he’d tell you different. The last I heard of Thick Vic, he had failed his third attempt at rehab and was making ends meet by dealing methamphetamines to girls in the business.

When I’d first met Roxette, she had laughingly admitted that she used to party with Thick Vic before her drug-induced heart attack. She told me that he was still hung up on me after all these years and when the meth psychosis got really bad, he often thought she was Angel Dare.

I didn’t tell any of this to Malloy. I just told him I thought I knew a guy who might know where Roxette had gone to ground.

Finding Thick Vic wasn’t hard. A couple three phone calls and we discovered he was currently mooching off has-been plastic surgery casualty Taylor Simone.

Taylor was big around the same time that I was. Pretty in that standard blonde California way that everybody was back then. We did a few scenes together but all I remember about her was the fact that she ate pussy like a dog playing tug-of-war and left me raw for days. She lived out in Valley Village, near the freeway. Her sad little house was a disaster of strewn lingerie and chihuahuas and vodka bottles. She came to the door dressed only in little kid’s Batman boxer shorts and a tan. She looked worse than I could have imagined.

I was amazed that someone so thin was able to stand up without assistance, let alone counterbalance the fifty pound pair of silicone beach balls shrink-wrapped to the front of her box-kite ribcage. Under her frazzled blonde weave, her face was a cheap doll’s face, flash frozen and nerve-dead from too much surgery. Her nails were crooked pink sloth-hooks and her bony, nervous hands made clutching, Nosferatu shadows across her concave belly. She had drenched herself in cloying, sugary perfume that smelled like the kind of cheap vanilla frosting that comes in a can.

I have never understood this new trend where girls who don’t eat anything but lettuce and ice cubes want to smell like cupcakes. On Taylor, the childish scent was made far worse by its inability to mask the toxic booze-breath and the underlying corruption of her slowly dying flesh. She made no attempt to cover her freakshow tits as she stood in the doorway glaring at us.

“Are you here to get that girl?” she asked.

Malloy and I exchanged puzzled looks.

“We’re looking for Vic,” Malloy said.

“He went to find someone to help get that fucking psycho bitch out of my bathroom,” Taylor said. She gestured down a dim, cluttered hallway to her right. “If he doesn’t get back soon, I’m gonna call the cops and let them know they can take him too for all I care. You see if I don’t.”

“Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?”
a hoarse voice shouted.
“Do you? You don’t know who I am!”

It was Roxette.

Suddenly, Taylor was crying. Her frozen face struggled to crumple into something like a human expression but all she could really do was open and close her bloated lips, like a dying fish.

“I told him not to bring girls here anymore,” Taylor said, leaning heavily into the doorframe. “What he does on his own time is his business, but this is my house. It’s
my
house.”

“That’s terrible,” Malloy said, taking her by the shoulder and gently moving her out of the doorway so we could enter. “You let him live under your roof, the least he could do is treat you with some respect.”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Taylor said, looking up at Malloy. “I’m not the jealous type. I don’t want to run his life, I just want respect in my own house. Is that so much to ask?”

“Of course not,” Malloy said, motioning for me to shut the door. When it was closed, he caught my eye over the top of her head, gestured toward the bathroom door with his chin.

I left Malloy with Taylor and headed down the hallway toward the bathroom where I had heard Roxette’s voice.

“Roxette,” I said, knocking tentatively on the door.

“I know what you’re trying to do,” Roxette replied. “I’m not stupid.”

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Roxette,” I said. “Why don’t you open the door and we can talk about it?”

“You think I don’t know about the transmitter?” she whispered. “I know all about the transmitter.”

I shook my head. This was going to be really bad. I took a deep breath and took a gamble.

“Roxette,” I said again. “Roxette, it’s Angel.”

“Angel?” Roxette’s voice sounded suddenly anxious and childlike.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

“How do I know it’s really you?” Roxette asked, voice suddenly closer as if she had just pressed up against the other side of the door. “What shoes was I wearing on the day we met?”

I rolled my eyes. That was nearly a year ago. I couldn’t even remember what shoes
I
had been wearing that day. I tried to focus on recalling Roxette’s feet. It had been the middle of a hot San Fernando summer and I seemed to remember her painted toenails so the shoes must have been open toed. Sandals of some kind, but that was the best I could do. I was drawing a blank.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t remember.”

A jagged sob sounded behind the door.

“I can’t remember either,” Roxette said, bawling like her heart had just been broken. I heard a rhythmic thumping and was pretty sure she was hitting her head against the door.

“Please, Roxette,” I said. “Just open the door a little ways. I won’t try to come in if you don’t want me to, okay?”

The thumping stopped.

“Okay,” she said suddenly, like it had never been any big deal.

I heard the lock disengage and then a sweaty slice of Roxette’s face appeared in a narrow crack, a single pinhole-pupiled eye staring out at me like the eye of a trapped animal.

“Oh my god,” Roxette said. “They cut your hair!”

A hot, skinny hand reached out and pulled me into the bathroom.