Sick City (11 page)

“You awake, Randal?”

“Yeah. Can't sleep.”

“Me neither.”

They lay there for a few moments. The darkness in their room was almost total. The only light was a stray glimmer that crept in under the door.

“What did you think of the doctor?” Jeffrey said.

“I dunno, man. He seems to be saying the same shit they always say. He just does it with a movie star smile, that's all.”

“But don't you think he has something?” Jeffrey said. “Something weird. Like a power . . . ah, I dunno.”

“Celebrity,” Randal said. “He has celebrity. It IS a power. You know, at one point today he held my hand, and looked me in the eye, and told me that I was going to die if I didn't do what he said.”

“Yeah. He said something similar to me.”

“But you know something? Even though I knew what that fucker was doing—even though I've been given this speech before—somehow, I felt for a moment that he was really empathizing with me. That he . . .
understood
me. I got choked up. I almost cried.”

“Wow. You see? I think that there's something different about him. You know, he talked to me about Bill. He said some stuff . . . about my father. Stuff I hadn't thought about in a long time. About our relationship. It was pretty intense.”

“That's just it,” Randal said, “that's what I don't like about him. He has this fucking knack for getting inside of your head, but when he talks, it's all of the same old shit. It's just the way he presents it. I mean, think about it—hasn't every drug counselor you've ever had tried to blame what you do on your parents?”

“Well . . . well, yeah.”

“And isn't it a bit of a tired old fucking cliché that you were living with Bill because you saw him as some sort of surrogate father figure? I mean, haven't you heard that old story before?”

“Yeah. All the time from fucking therapists who don't know the first thing about what Bill and I had.”

“But Dr. Mike just said the same old shit to you, but somehow, he made it seem profound. It's like when fucking De Niro is in a shitty movie. He can be working with the worst piece of shit script and somehow he sells it. Right?”

“Yeah. Christopher Walken can do that shit, too.”

“Right. I had that same feeling you get when you sit through the fucking
Wedding Crashers
or whatever, just to see if Walken still has some of that same
Deer Hunter
magic. You walk out of the theater thinking that Christopher Walken can act his ass off, but kinda pissed off that you had to sit through two hours of shit to see it happen. I dunno. I've been around celebrities a lot. And you know something, when he comes over to your house, De Niro has something kind of unreal about him. Inhuman. Like he can only really be a human being on the screen. When he's sitting on your couch, drinking brandy with your pop, there's something weirdly artificial about him. Like he's half a person. That's what I feel about Dr. Mike. That motherfucker is half a person.”

They fell into silence again. Randal heard Jeffrey sitting up in the darkness.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“What kind of connections do you have? I mean in the industry?”

Randal laughed a little. “Shit, I got connections. I know most of the big guys on a first-name basis, and the rest I can get to within a couple of phone calls. What, you gonna tell me you have a great idea for a fuckin' movie or something?”

“No.”

“You ARE an actor. I fucking KNEW it!”

“No, nothing like that.”

There was a long pause as Jeffrey debated with himself one last time whether to really go ahead and talk to Randal about the tapes. He knew that Randal might just be the one person uniquely positioned to be able to help him with his problem, so he shoved his reservations aside and said, “I have a movie. I have a movie that I think is worth a lot of fucking money. The movie . . . it's all I fucking have. It's all I have to my name right now. But I don't know what it's worth or even what the fuck to do with it.”

“I don't follow you. You a filmmaker or something?”

“No.”

They lay there in silence for a moment. Randal had the vague idea that Jeffrey might turn out to be just another wannabe asshole who wouldn't be able to get over his famous surname. When he signed checks in restaurants, he invariably had to listen to the waiter's spiel that he was only doing this until the right part came along, or until he could get someone to buy his idea for a TV show about a crime-fighting dog with telekinetic powers. He remembered one bitch launching into a David Mamet monologue in the line at Ralph's when all Randal wanted to do was get his groceries and get the fuck out of there.

“Okay, here's the story. I didn't tell you this when we were talking the other day, but Bill used to be a cop. LAPD, homicide division. He was retired when I met him, and his family had no idea of the life he lived, especially in his later years, after his wife was dead and he could do what he wanted. There was a lot he had to keep secret. There was no room for a fag who wasn't firmly in the closet in the force, especially back then.”

“I can imagine.”

“But that's not all. Bill was a drug user. No, fuck that. That sounds wrong. Bill was a drug
connoisseur
. He liked his boys young and his drugs pure. He was into some dark shit. The macabre, you know? Over the years he collected a lot of stuff. Stuff from the high-profile cases he worked. Stuff that the right collectors would pay a lot of money for.”

“Okay. So, what?”

“So when he died, I inherited what was left of his collection. A lot of the bigger items were sold off toward the end. He'd had a few surgeries, a heart bypass and a cancer scare. A lot of hospital bills. So a lot of it was gone before . . . before he passed. All of it except the movie.”

In the gloom, Jeffrey heard Randal reposition himself. He was sitting up now, wide awake. Jeffrey had his attention, at least.

“Okay, nice buildup,” Randal said. “I'm intrigued. So what's the movie?”

“Bill was one of the first cops on the scene at the Tate house, the night of the Manson murders. August 9, 1969. He said it was a fucking bloodbath. That's the thing—over the years the whole fucking incident got so mythologized that it's almost like it never happened in concrete reality. Like it was always some fucking awful movie about the death of the sixties. That night, though, nobody knew anything about what had gone on, and Bill was just a rookie cop showing up to a call about a murder. He was there with some old-timers on the force, and more than one tossed their fucking cookies when they saw the state the killers had left the victims in. He said the place looked like a slaughterhouse. Bill was a big movie buff. He knew who Sharon Tate was. He said it was the weirdest thing to see someone like Sharon Tate in that condition. I mean, she was beautiful. Totally beautiful and they fucking DESTROYED her. I know that Bill was never really the same after that night. That whole experience left a real mark on him.”

“Anyway, he took some things. Said he had the feeling that this was history, you know? In all of the chaos it was easy for some items to . . . go astray. Things weren't as strict back then, with forensics and all of that stuff. People were walking in and out of the crime scene unchecked. So he pocketed a few things. One of the bigger items he took was a box of film canisters. Eight millimeter and sixteen millimeter. Home movies, shit like that.”

“Go on.”

“Well, he'd had the film for a while before he managed to get hold of a projector and actually check what was on there. Turned out that one of these film reels contained something pretty fucking crazy. Listen, I'm willing to tell you this, but you have to agree that I'm doing it on the understanding that it goes no further than this room. Yes?”

Feeling slightly ridiculous, Randal said, “Jesus. Okay . . . sure.”

Dropping his voice to a whisper, Jeffrey continued, “It was a movie shot at their house. It was a party scene. With some pretty big people. Steve McQueen was there. Sharon. Roman Polanski. Lee Van Cleef. Mama Cass.”

“Jesus Christ. Sounds like an interesting dinner party.”

“Interesting is an understatement. The other tapes had similar things, even bigger celebrities floating in and out. . . . I mean, that was their world, right? It was before the fucking tabloids would stake you out and report on every little thing celebrities got up to . . . so it was just a different time. Even before Bill saw THIS tape, he thought that the others were special. You really got to see these people with their guards down, relaxing . . . candid.”

“So what goes on in this last tape that's so astonishing?”

“Well, according to Bill, a lot of shit that they wouldn't want to be made public. Drugs. Pills, booze. Everybody's acting pretty loose, you know? And then as the fucking camera runs, everybody takes off their clothes, and they all take a pop at Sharon Tate.”

“What?”

Randal was not quite sure he was hearing right.

“They all fuck her. Steve McQueen fucks her, and then he rolls off of her, and Yul Brynner has a go. Mama fuckin' Cass is naked and eating her pussy, while someone is screwing her from behind. I mean, according to Bill it was a full-on drug and sex orgy. Twenty minutes or so of hard-core, uncensored fucking.”

“No. I don't buy it. Have you seen it with your own eyes?”

“No.”

“He was fucking with you, man. Seriously, something like that . . . I mean, you couldn't keep a lid on it. You seriously expect me to believe that this boyfriend of yours sat on something like that for like, what? Thirty years? And he just goes and dies, leaving it to you? It doesn't make sense.”

Jeffrey remained silent for a moment.

“I know that it sounds ridiculous,” he said deliberately, “but you don't know Bill. I never saw the tape because in the whole time I was with Bill he wouldn't let it out of the safe. But I saw other shit. Serious shit. He'd buy and sell and trade stuff with other guys in the force. I mean, unbelievable shit. You know Charles Ng?”

“No. What's he? A kung fu guy?”

“No, a serial killer. Leonard Lake?”

“I dunno.”

“Well, Bill had some of the tapes that they shot. That stuff has never been made public. They were a team. A serial killing supergroup. There were hundreds of these fucking tapes. They would kidnap girls, take them to this compound, and just film themselves . . .
torturing
these women. Rape, mutilation, I mean, horrendous fucking shit. I saw some of those, they were on videocassette. Seriously fucking disgusting. I mean, I couldn't watch more than ten minutes of it. It was like some crazy fucking Japanese porno gore movie, except everything was for real. But the cops, man, they would trade those fucking things like they were baseball cards. Arrange screenings in cop bars. Sit around Bill's place, drinking beers and cheering those sick fucks on. Pretty fucked-up shit.”

“Okay,” Randal said, “okay. I believe you that Bill had access to some pretty insane shit. But as for the Sharon Tate thing . . . why are you telling me about it? What's your angle?”

There was a pause. It seemed as if even Jeffrey was trying to work out why he had brought this up.

“How much do you think something like that might be worth?”

There were a few moments of silence. Then with a sigh, Randal spoke.

“Well . . . I mean, IF it existed, and if it was real . . . I mean, it's priceless. It's a lot of money. If. But that's a big if, you know?”

“Would you help me check it out?”

“Oh, Jesus. Listen, Jeffrey, I like you. And that's saying something because I hate most people. But I don't
know
you. Not really. Not outside of this place. I mean, Jeffrey, I don't have time to get involved in something like this. I have problems of my own to deal with without getting tied up with the shit you have going on right now. . . . I mean, the last thing I need is to get involved in something that might end up being nothing at all. . . .”

“Half.”

“Huh?”

“Half. I'll give you half. Straight down the middle, no questions asked. Look, man, I need help with this. I don't know anyone else who would be able to help me to get this to the right people. You could, you said it yourself. You know those people. That's your world. How much do you think it might be worth to the right collector?”

“Fuck. I dunno. A million? Two? Ten? I mean, you can't even quantify something like this. It's like—it's like you're telling me you have the Holy Grail, or the Shroud of fucking Turin.”

“You know people in porno?”

“Some . . . but that's not the way to go. Something like this has to stay in the hands of a private collector. If it ever gets out, then it becomes worthless. It would be all over the Internet in a heartbeat, and no more valuable than a used copy of
One Night in Paris
. No, somebody is gonna want to pay money to keep this under wraps.”

“What? The family? You mean blackmail them?”

“Blackmail? Not unless you want to see the inside of a jail cell. I mean we need to find the kind of person who wants to be the only one who can see this, who even knows of its existence. A freak. A collector. No offense . . . but someone just like your boyfriend.”

They both lay in the darkness for a while. Jeffrey wondered silently just how much he could trust Randal. Just talking about the film with his new roommate filled him with uneasy reservations. But Jeffrey knew that the time to act was now. In a matter of days he would be out of the relative security of Clean and Serene, and if he wasn't in a position to find a buyer for the tape, then he was well and truly screwed. What else was he going to do? The only other person he knew with connections in the film industry was a strung-out gay porn actor called Spider. Spider was hardly the kind of person you could trust with something like this. At least Randal had his famous surname, and his connections in the industry. As for his reliability, Jeffrey would have to take a chance.