Denise Hamilton - Los Angeles Noir

This is the first I’ve heard about any such job, and just as I’m thinking, Who in God’s name would be fucked up enough to hire Cherie as a housesitter? I find myself distracted by how nice her tits feel pressing against my rib cage, and the sensation of her tongue in my mouth is having its own clouding effect on my wits.

“You’ve never shown any interest before.”

“Oh, but I’ve been thinking about it, big boy. I see the way you watch me. Parts of me. You want a glass of wine?”

“No thanks.”

“Meth?”

I shake my head no and she takes me by the hand down the other staircase and down a hallway to a magnificent bedroom, and for the first time since I got there she turns on a light, a bedside lamp. The bed is made, the walls covered with framed gold records and what looks like dark red velvet. In the light I give her a careful up-and-down appraisal and find that she looks very, very nice indeed, down to the one nonregulation item in her uniform: a pair of black high-heeled shoes, the kind that would kill her on an eight-hour shift.

“You want to get naked, or are you one of those guys who gets turned on by the uniform?” she asks, and by way of an answer I jump her.

In three and a half minutes it’s over, which embarrasses me but seems to be fine by Cherie. Cheerfully she doffs the remainder of her uniform and heads for the bathroom, and while she’s in there I wander to the wall to take a look at one of the gold records. To my surprise I know not only the record but the guy who produced it, Gary Hinshaw. Gary is the nicest famous person I’ve ever met; he used to hang around the bar when I worked at Chez Kiki, and he switched allegiances when they fired me and I moved over to Burberry’s. This was a serious step downward in the hierarchy of Valley restaurants, so it was encouraging to have a friendly face following me to the new job, especially one who quickly endeared himself to the rest of the staff as a talented raconteur and prodigious tipper. The funny part is, I didn’t even know what Gary did for a living until Dean told me one day.

“He’s a record producer. You never heard of him?”

“I guess I’ve heard his name. I knew he did something in the music business.”

“Starting in the early ’60s. You ever hear of the Carlottas? The Essentials? Jesus, you kids have no sense of musical history.” Then he went on to name some later groups, a few of whose records I remembered fondly from high school, and I was finally impressed. This also cleared up the question of how, even in L.A., even with money, a guy who looked like Gary had such a way with women. When a 350-pound man with hairplugs and a nose like a yam walks in with a different stunning woman every other week, the temptation is to think call girls, but they didn’t strike me that way. Several of them became regulars at Chez Kiki in their own right, and from what I could see they mostly stayed friendly with Gary once he’d moved on to fresher game.

Gary hasn’t ever brought any of those women into Burberry’s; I had assumed that this was because it wasn’t the kind of place you could bring the kind of woman you might take to Chez Kiki. Now that I think of it, though, one of the prime beneficiaries of his largesse has been Cherie, and it becomes suddenly obvious to me that he’s one of the abject worshippers. The housesitting gig makes sense now, and I ever so briefly feel ever so slightly bad about fucking Cherie right in what I assume is Gary’s bedroom.

After maybe five minutes she comes out all dressed back up.

“Maybe we can go again after we’re done, if you feel like it.”

“After we’re done with what?” I ask, trying to come up with a graceful way of declining her request, whatever it’s going to be. I have the uneasy presentiment that what she wants me to do is something horrible and pet-related: a faithful Irish Setter, dead of thirst, or maybe a million-dollar showcat roaming around the neighborhood in heat.

She leads me back up the staircase to that room with the view and through to the kitchen, where something smells funny. Not food-gone-bad funny, but it’s an aroma not completely out of place in a kitchen. When the light comes on, I see that the source of it is a quantity of Gary’s blood, which has pooled on the tile floor beneath his enormous torso.

“What the fuck,” I say.

“Yeah,” Cherie says.

He looks even bigger lying there on the peach-colored tile, the force of gravity pulling all that adipose tissue down from his chest toward the floor. There’s a blood-soaked hole on his tentlike yellow shortsleeved shirt, quite low on the abdomen. I take a good long look at that shirt and note that it’s moving, slowly and rhythmically.

“Holy shit, he’s alive!” I yell.

“He won’t be for long.”

“When did this happen?”

“About fifteen minutes before I called you.” She leans back, arms folded under her breasts, hips against the counter next to the sink, waiting for me to ask her what I’m supposed to do next. What I do is take out my cell and start to dial 911. She grabs for it, and I have to yank it out of her reach.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Calling an ambulance.”

“If I wanted a fucking ambulance I’d’ve called one myself. You’re going to help me cover this up.”

“Was it self-defense?”

“Are you kidding me? The big fucking ape. Take a look at this.”

She unbuttons her sleeve and pulls it back to reveal a big pink rectangular bandage. When she peels away its corner there’s a fresh red welt, round and dark.

“Cocksucker burned me with a cigarette, and when I objected he pulled a gun on me, swear to God.”

For the first time it occurs to me how fast she’s talking, and I remember her offering me a hit of meth when I first got here. “How fucked up were you guys when this happened?” I ask.

“He had some crank, we were messing around a little bit.”

Something else strikes me. “How come you’re in your uniform? You didn’t work today.”

“Sometimes I wear it on my off days.” This, I know, is a lie, and under the pressure of my stare she cops to it. “Gary likes to fuck me while I’m wearing it, okay? Just like you do, so don’t smirk. Sometimes he likes to tie me to a chair and do stuff. That’s what he wanted to do tonight, but with him being so cranked up and things already getting out of hand”-she holds up the burned wrist as evidence-“I decided that was a bad idea. So he got the gun and started trying to force me into the chair, and I took it and shot him. Simple.”

“That’s a pretty good story, why don’t you just flush the crank down the toilet and tell it to the cops?”

“I don’t function well with cops. They give me the willies.”

“They give everybody the willies, but we have to call 911 and get an ambulance.”

“Like fuck we have to. Look, Tate, I want to be famous again someday, but not for being in this year’s trial of the century, got it? That’s why I called you.”

“What did you think I was going to do? Finish him off?”

She shrugs. “He’s not long for this world anyway. Just help me get rid of him, someplace where nobody’ll find him for a long time. What do you think of the Angeles National Forest?”

“Never been.”

“Doesn’t it seem like they’re always finding corpses out there? Angeles National Cemetery , more like.” She laughs, a staccato, high-pitched giggle I’ve never heard from her before, and the batshit crazy sound of it scares me a little bit more than I already am.

“Won’t people be looking for him?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time he’s taken off without telling anyone. He’s a world-famous nutjob anyway, and by the time anybody figures out he’s really gone, the evidence’ll be cold.”