Loser's Town (12 page)

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to get him off my back,’ said Bobby, suddenly animated. ‘I don’t care how. I mean it. I’ll pay whatever it takes. You do whatever it takes, as hard as it takes.’

‘Are you suggesting I off him?’

‘He’s a fucking weasel. The world won’t miss him.’

‘Gee, Bobby, I don’t know. I have to think about it. I haven’t assassinated anybody in a while and I don’t know what the going rate is.’

‘I want him off my back. I want him to be history.’

‘It’s a good thing you don’t write your own lines,’ said Spandau. ‘You sound like a bad imitation of Jimmy Cagney.’

‘Fuck you, then!’ shouted Bobby. He got up and started pacing. ‘I’ll get somebody else, with balls. Not some fucking washed-up stunt man.’

Spandau took a deep breath. He held it for a few seconds, then let it out in a slow stream. ‘Now I want you to listen to me, kid, and I want you to listen carefully. First, I’m about fed up with the way you and all the other bozos around you have been talking to me. Unlike you and all the other star-struck unfortunates in this town, I don’t need them to like me. Second, I think you’re a snot-nosed little prick, but I’m convinced it’s mainly because suddenly you’re required to act like a grown-up and you don’t have a fucking clue how to do it.’

Bobby stood a few feet away, glaring at him, his fists clenched, the Gauloise dangling from the corner of his mouth like Jean-Paul Belmondo. ‘You think I’m afraid of you? I used to box, man.’

‘No,’ said Spandau, ‘you used to fart around in a gym until somebody gave you that trademark broken nose of yours. Now maybe you look like a tough guy to millions of
mall-rats around the country, but you’ve got girls’ hands and you wouldn’t last ten seconds in the ring with anybody except Stephen Hawking, and I’d still give him odds.’

Bobby got into what passed for a fighter’s crouch. He looked at Spandau and blinked as the smoke from the Gauloise burnt his eyes.

‘Jesus,’ said Spandau, and rolled his eyes. ‘You want to throw a punch? Come on, honey, send it home. But your feet are all wrong, and the second you throw that left cross you got cocked there you’re going to be off balance before it gets anywhere near me. Meanwhile I got fifty pounds on you and four more inches of reach. And while I will try not to mess up that pretty sculpted face of yours, when I hit you it is still going to do some damage.’

Bobby thought about it and dropped his hands. Then he held them up and looked at them. ‘Fuck you, girls’ hands,’ he said, laughing. ‘Anyway, I’m not going to blow this movie because some fucking macho has-been gets lucky with a punch.’

‘Good for you. At least you’ve learned the first lesson, which is never to fight unless you know you can win. Didn’t anybody ever explain that to you? The trick is to wait until I’m off-guard and then brain me with a Louisville slugger. That’s the way it is in the real world. That’s the way guys like Richie Stella do it.’

Bobby took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it into a cut-glass ashtray. ‘So long and thanks for nothing. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass when you leave.’

‘Okay, tough guy,’ said Spandau. ‘You want my help or not?’

‘You don’t have the balls. He’s not going to stop until he’s dead.’

‘Let me decide that. I need to know what he’s got on you.’

‘Then you got it too. I’m fucked no matter what.’

‘Sooner or later you’ve got to trust somebody, sport. How bad is it?’

‘It’s bad.’

He walked across the room and took a wooden box out of a cabinet, and carried it back to the sofa. He sat down, crossed his legs like a brahmin, and rolled a joint. He was hesitant to begin. He lit up, took a deep hit and began talking.

‘I picked up this girl . . . Really cute, man. Really hot. She had this sort of schoolgirl thing going, you know, a white blouse and a cute little plaid skirt. She even had fucking pigtails. It was, like, every dirty old man’s fantasy. She knew exactly what she was doing, too.

‘Anyway, I brought her back here. I’m wrecked, I don’t even know how I made it up the hill without killing both of us. So we’re in here, and we start making out, and she says to me, “You got anything I can use to relax, it’s better when I’m high, I get wild.” And I’m thinking, Fuck yes. And I’ve got a little rock, and she says, oh yeah, she loves rock. So we’re sitting over there and we smoke a little rock and then she comes over and we start to mess around again, but
she says wait, she’s got to go to the bathroom, so she takes this little purse she’s got with her and she goes upstairs to the bathroom.

‘So off she goes and I’m sitting here and then the crack hits me and I’m sort of blissed out for a while, I don’t know how long. That rush, you know? So in a few minutes I’m back in the real world again, and she still isn’t back. So I get worried and I go upstairs . . .

‘I check the bathroom. I knock, nothing. I open the door. It’s unlocked. And she’s sitting there, on the toilet, sort of slumped over, her tights pulled down around her ankles and this fucking needle sticking out of her thigh. She’s like fucking blue. And she’s not breathing, and there’s this whole set of works on the sink, man, she’s been cooking up heroin and she’s shot up and fucking OD’d in my bathroom. I got this dead girl in my bathroom . . .

‘I panic. You know? The fucking crack doesn’t help. I’m like running around the place beating my fists against my head, crying like a fucking baby . . . I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I mean, this dead girl. I don’t know what to do. Then I think of Richie.’

‘Why Richie?’

‘Because that’s what Richie does, man. That’s what Richie’s all about. He’s the champion fixer of all time. You want something, Richie gets it. You want something done, Richie finds a way to make it happen. He’s fucking famous. Richie the Fixer. Half of LA uses Richie.’

‘So you called Richie . . .’

‘I’m on the phone, I’m like babbling, and Richie tells me to calm down, talks me down. Richie’s like that, he’s good at that. He’s got that voice, you know. Really calm when he needs to be. You trust him. Anyway he calms me down and I tell him what’s happened. So Richie tells me, “Okay, give me the details.” And I tell him and he says okay, don’t panic, be cool, it’s not a problem, he’ll take care of everything. But it’s going to take a couple of hours. So he tells me to get the fuck out of the house, go check into a hotel or stay with a friend, just disappear for the rest of the night while he takes care of it. Says to just beat it and leave the door unlocked. Said when I got home tomorrow it would be like nothing ever happened.’

‘Where’d you go?’

‘I got in the car and fucking drove out to the desert. I checked into a motel and got shitfaced and passed out. When I finally got the balls to come back here next day, it was all gone, though the fuckers he’d sent forgot to take the set of works. Man, if the fucking cleaning lady had seen that . . . I called Richie, asked him what had happened. He said nothing. He said nothing ever happened, and that was the way I was supposed to think about it. Nothing happened. It never happened. I asked him what I owed him, and he acted like he was really insulted. “Fuck that,” he said, “we’re friends,” he said. “This is the sort of shit that friends do for each other.”’

‘And you bought it.’

‘What the fuck else was I supposed to do? There was a
fucking dead girl in my bathroom, then there wasn’t. She was there, now she’s gone. I’m sad about the girl, but I didn’t fucking kill her and I’m not letting this fuck up my entire life. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just wanted the whole thing behind me. I wanted the whole thing to be gone.’

‘But it wasn’t gone.’

‘No. It wasn’t gone. A couple of weeks later, Richie comes to me with this script. He wants to produce it, wants me to star in it. I explain to him I can’t do it. Then he reminds me that I owe him. He says if I need to be reminded he’s got photographs.’

‘They took pictures of the dead girl?’

‘Yeah. Says you can tell it’s my place, there’s no mistake. Says anybody who sees them is going to know exactly where it is and what happened. There’s this cute little girl dead on my toilet with her panties down and a needle sticking out of her leg. Said a grand jury isn’t going to be sympathetic, anybody is going to think I killed her. That I gave her the dope, that I was taking advantage of her . . .’

‘How well did you know the girl?’

‘I told you. I’d just met her.’

‘At Richie’s club. That’s convenient. What’s the girl’s name?’

‘I don’t know. Sally something. We didn’t exchange a lot of pleasantries.’

‘Anybody see you leave with her?’

‘One of the guys let us out the back door, behind the VIP room.’

‘You get the crack from Richie too? Is that one of his other services?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You sure you didn’t bring home a little something else? Like a small bag of bad smack?’

‘Fuck no, man. She brought it herself. I mean, I didn’t even know she had it.’

‘But you were doing dope with her, before she got up and went to the bathroom.’

‘I don’t see what fucking difference it makes.’

‘It makes a difference. She was fucked up before she went in there, which explains how she might have died. You do anything with her other than the crack?’

‘Man, what are trying to do, make it look like I fucking killed her? I didn’t, okay?’

‘We got a dead underage girl, Bobby. A minor. Somebody’s darling, somebody’s little girl. She died in your bathroom. It doesn’t make a goddamn bit of difference if you stuck the needle in or not, it’ll look like you did. This comes to court and nobody on the planet is going to believe you didn’t give her the dope that killed her.’

‘It wasn’t me, I swear to God. We were just doing a little crack, that’s it. I was a little fucked, it took me a while, then I went to check on her and there she was with the fucking spike in her leg. But I didn’t put it there, man. I didn’t.’

‘When you found her, are you sure she wasn’t still alive?’

‘I did that thing where you check the pulse, you know,
the fingers on the neck, but I didn’t feel anything. I tried her wrist, everything, but I couldn’t feel anything. I’m not a fucking doctor, man. She looked fucking dead. What do you want? I dunno, fuck, but she looked fucking dead to me. She was fucking blue and cold and she wasn’t breathing.’

‘You think about calling an ambulance?’

‘Yeah. I thought about it. I picked up the phone and was about to call.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘She was dead.’

‘But you’re not sure, are you? You weren’t sure then, either, right? A little case of career anxiety got to you.’

‘You fucking bastard!’

He came at Spandau, but it was half-hearted. Spandau pinned his arms in a bear-hug and Bobby went limp and began to cry. Spandau let him pour it out then placed him back on the sofa.

‘You think I’m proud of this? You think I don’t feel like I killed her?’ said Bobby.

‘How’d you meet the girl?’

‘Richie sent her over.’

‘That sounds about right. You think the girl got the heroin from him?’

‘I don’t know where she got it. Like I said, she brought it with her, I didn’t even fucking know she had it. Yeah, I guess Richie could have given it to her. He could get you about anything you want. Sometimes you’d have to wait a
few days, maybe. But he always had a steady supply of rock. You just call and he could get you as much as you want in about fifteen minutes.’

‘He ever say where he got it?’

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘So you got no idea where he got it from, who supplied him.’

‘This shit doesn’t come with a fucking money-back guarantee. All I know is that, if you wanted it, Richie could get it. The crack was fast and it was cheap. He had a pipeline somewhere. Richie just fucking loved to hand it out, like fucking candy. The fucking crack king of West LA.’

Bobby stopped talking, suddenly, as if he’d hit a wall and could go no further. Then he said: ‘You think maybe she wasn’t dead? That maybe I just let her die? You think maybe that’s what happened? You think maybe she was still alive?’

Spandau felt sorry for him. ‘No. I think she was dead.’

‘But you don’t know, do you? And I don’t either.’

‘No,’ Spandau said to him softly. ‘You don’t.’

Six

Pookie was painting her nails black when Spandau got into the office on Monday morning. She looked like a vampire today. Normally chestnut hair dyed black. Low-cut tight black dress that showed a distracting amount of youthful and faultless breast. Artfully shredded sleeves that took someone half the night to do. Makeup somewhere between kabuki and Forest Lawn corpse. And still she made the heart skip a beat. An expensive education could do a lot, but never underestimate the value of good genes. Her mother looked like Grace Kelly.

‘You in mourning?’ Spandau asked her.

‘I have a gothic ball tonight,’ said Pookie, finishing her left ring finger. ‘Everything is black, black, black.’

‘I didn’t know you were into that.’

‘I’m not. But there’s this very cute musician who invited me. He looks like Marilyn Manson, if Marilyn Manson looked like Tom Cruise and didn’t have the eye thing.’