A Good-Looking Corpse Read online

  “Tell me what’s so important that it might mean your life, then,” I shoot back, tired of waiting for the man to bring it up on his own.

  “You think I forgot? No, I didn’t forget. I’ve got a mind like a steel trap, a memory like an elephant. It goes on for days. It’s what makes me a good producer.”

  “Is that what you are, a producer? That explains the car, I guess.”

  “Sort of. The car was a gift. How much do you know about Mikey Echo?”

  “I don’t.”

  “He was the tall guy standing next to me today.”

  “Blue sunglasses?”

  Ramen chuckles. “Sure, blue lenses today. That’s Mikey—a man of excess. I’m sure he doesn’t even know how many pairs of sunglasses he owns. Tomorrow they could be green or red or orange—or no sunglasses at all. Tomorrow he might show up with two dwarves stacked on top of each other, holding a beach umbrella over him.”

  “Did he give you the car?”

  “He did. Drove it a week and then he heard a Maserati Quattroporte’s engine was scientifically calibrated to give women orgasms. Since then, that’s all he has wanted to drive.”

  “Was he there when Alan Van went out the window?”

  “He’s the one who ordered him to be thrown out.” Ramen says this all casually, as if an execution is just a part of doing business here. “You want to know another interesting fact about the Fox Plaza building?” If I don’t, Ramen doesn’t pause long enough to find out. “The thirty-fourth floor, where Alan got thrown out? It used to be Ronald Reagan’s office.” He titters, excited. “Yup, the president of the United States used to be in that office. He even painted a watercolor picture, back when he was all demented with Alzheimer’s and shit. It still hangs on the wall.”

  “You know a lot about a lot of things.”

  “I feel like that’s part of my job, to sort of know everything.” We pull up to the curb on Fairfax, just down from Canter’s Deli and outside a black-walled restaurant with no marquee. Inside, chic young diners sit in a minimalist cafeteria space. “It’s called Animal,” Ramen says when he sees me searching out a name. “They specialize in serving you the worst parts of everything. Chicken feet and goat dicks, shit like that. If you’re a true carnivore, it’s delicious.”

  He abandons the car on the street, keys still in the ignition, indifferent. It says a lot about the little Indian. Well, that and the fact that he’s apparently so casual about ratting out the man who gave him a two-hundred-thousand-dollar sports car.

  “Why did Alan Van get thrown out the window?”

  Ramen winks. “Let’s get settled at a table before you start hitting me with the hardballs.”

  We sit in the apparently fancy restaurant and are quickly inundated by the smells of food from our fellow diners’ tables. “You drink wine?” he asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Good call, give me powders over liquids any day.” Despite riding on leather, Ramen eschews the beef options in favor of deep-fried pig brain. “Gotta keep some of the heritage intact,” he admits coolly, shifting back in his chair. I wave off the waiter, who haughtily takes my menu.

  “You sure?” Ramen asks. “It’s all courtesy of Mikey Echo tonight. How often do you get to sample free goat dick?”

  “Somehow I’ll live,” I say. He shrugs and we fall into an uncomfortable silence as Ramen briefly gets lost in a sea of text messages.

  “So where were we?” he asks, finally looking up, apologetically. You were asking about Alan Van, right? Sorry, that’s the thing about this job—it’s more of a life sentence.”

  “I bet,” I say, letting the prison mention slip by but still wonder if he knows my past.

  “There’s a delicate balance between actors and producers and directors,” he explains. “It’s a creative industry and actors don’t realize that they are at the bottom rung while producers are at the top. I’m not bragging, it’s just how it is. When Alan began acting like a producer, he overstepped his pay grade. When he did it to Mikey Echo, it was fatal.”

  “Tell me more about Mikey Echo.”

  “What do you want to know? Mikey’s the kind of guy who catches flies to put in spiderwebs. Only he’d douse the fly with poison so he’d also kill the spider.” Ramen smiles at himself briefly, as if proud of the aphorism. “He grew up beyond wealthy, dad is super producer George Echo—he has his name on most of the classics to come out over the last half century. Ties all over Hollywood, Washington, the whole fucking world. Naturally, some of that rubbed off on Mikey, and now he thinks he’s a god. Correction: the God. He lives a life you don’t even know how to dream about and hates the word ‘no.’ Actually, I think he rejects it on principle. Of course, that’s his issue too—everybody compares him to his father and he hates it.”

  “And he’s a friend of yours?”

  “A ‘Hollywood friend,’ which is an oxymoron.” Ramen shrugs. “I work with him frequently because he tolerates me and he knows how to make projects happen in this town.”

  “Why did you say your life was on the line tonight?” I ask after a bit more uncomfortable text-message silence.

  “You saw what happened to Alan, right? That’s the price of disappointment with Mikey. He told me that he’d have my head cut off and served on a literal silver plate if I didn’t meet with you tonight and get you to agree to come meet him this Friday night. And before you feel the need to ask, yes, I think he means it.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask.

  “When I need to be. But that doesn’t mean I’m honest. I can also be very dishonest when I need to be. It’s up to you to determine when I am being what. Honesty dictates that I’m honest about my dishonesty. I play a liar’s game, Tom, and sometimes withholding or giving false information is part of the game I need to play—professionally and socially. Like I said, it’s a lifestyle.”

  “So you could be lying about the entire mess?”

  “Oh yeah.” Ramen grins with his usual expression of boyish slyness. “This could be a whole Keyser Söze thing.”

  “Tell me about this thing tomorrow night.”

  “Mikey runs a sort-of dogfighting party at his place on Friday nights. It’s a real brutal Roman spectacle sort of thing—a lot of the industry goes. Mikey needs a cleaner for after the matches.”

  “Not interested,” I decline.

  “Okay, we’ll stick a pin in the part where I said, ‘If you decline, I get my head cut off,’ and we’ll circle back to that later. I’m not going to make you feel guilty about my life—it’s not what friends do. I made my bed, danced with the Devil, all of that. My concern presently is for your life. Mikey said he’s interested in meeting you. For what, I don’t know. But when he takes a personal interest in something, he gets kind of obsessive about it. Right now, he’s interested in you, so I’m a conduit for facilitating that interaction. And since I’m a good conduit, I know you’re kind of a strong-willed type. I did my research on you.” Ramen lifts his water glass and shakes it. An attentive waiter rushes over with a steel pitcher to refill it. “I’ve got kind of a dry-mouth thing going on tonight,” he says to him as much as me. “Cocaine does that.” When he leaves, he lowers his tone once more. “So, I knew you might say, ‘not interested.’ Let me know how you might become interested though. Let me problem-solve this. Is it an ethical thing about dead animals?” He digs into his fried pig brain. “You keen on PETA?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Okay, is it a time-based issue? I hope it’s not a ‘money thing’ because the money would be very good. Ridiculously good, in fact.”

  “No, I get calls at all hours, it’s part of the job. I just don’t want to. I’m not interested in being a plaything to some spoiled, wealthy asshole who you claim is capable of murder. I’ve been in that position before.”

  “I did my research—Andy Sample was small potatoes compared to Mikey Echo.”

  “All the more reason for me to decline.”

  “Forget the cleanup, then. We c
an get somebody else. Just come out and enjoy the show, meet Mikey. I think he was maybe joking about the work part. With him, sometimes you don’t know what is real and what is fake.”

  “That makes two of you.”

  “No, no, Mikey and his love of spinning and warping truth? He is a Jedi Master at it. I’m a Stormtrooper at best. Will you please come out? Just for the one meeting?”

  “Let me think about it,” I say. “Give me the address and your phone number. I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  If Ramen is distressed or frustrated by my indecision, he doesn’t show it. Instead he leans forward matter-of-factly. “You want to know what kind of person Mikey Echo is? What if I told you Mikey had Alan Van thrown out of a skyscraper specifically so that he could make your acquaintance?”

  Chapter 3

  Climbing back into my work truck, after exiting the Ferrari, feels like coming back down to earth. The Silverado, which has gotten a chill from being in the cool shade of the parking garage, is basic and unexciting. Nobody will be staring at me, mesmerized, offering to suck my cock, that’s for sure.

  I leave Ramen, my truck following him out, with the promise that I will indeed make an appearance at Mikey Echo’s house tomorrow night. There is much about the legend of Echo that I want to sort out for myself. I feel certain that a lot of what Ramen had to say over the evening will, at the very least, be proven false. And yet, I can’t shake the belief that he was right that Alan Van didn’t jump. Removing that commercial safety glass? That would take a lot of work—as in intricately digging out the caulk that had held the window in place. And that didn’t seem like the work of a suicidal man with a roof option so close at hand.

  I drive the pile of guts and slush that used to be a celebrity back to my new warehouse space in downtown L.A., fighting the urge to head north toward the Valley and the old warehouse. That was Harold’s space.

  Ultimately, after deciding to continue the business, I decided I needed something bigger, more prominently anchored in downtown, without the bad vibes of my former boss’s death confronting me every time I went to the office. The space I now rent used to be a mechanic’s shop. Built for the rigors of big-city life, it is bolstered with concrete and steel, like a fortress. Bars are fixed to everything and there is no large picture window to be broken or shot out—merely a series of small ones behind the prison-like bars. The whole building is just reinforced concrete painted a subtle brick red and molded into a giant two-story square shell. It is the sort of building that requires a tank or an earthquake like L.A. has never seen to bring it down. Even a fire several years back that necessitated a rebuild of most of the block failed to leave more than cursory black scorch marks atop the west wall. Right now, I need exactly the kind of building that can stop an assault.

  The two steel roll-up doors on the building mean I can park both my Charger and work truck inside at all times. With the Sureño Lowriders calling this area of downtown L.A. their turf, it seemed like a smart idea. I wanted to make sure it would be tougher for them to get at me than it had been previously. Their killing of Harold did not in any way squash their beef with me, nor did I think that I would never encounter them again—not while we mutually called the City of Angels home. In fact, I’d counted on it when I signed the lease.

  I needed revenge for my boss’s death; he was one of the few people who had been good to me since I’d gotten out of prison. Revenge meant returning some pain to the Lowriders any way I could swing it. For that, relocation was key—as was a building that could handle the heavy firepower the Lowriders had access to. When I found this brick shithouse of a building right in Lowrider turf, I knew I had to have it.

  I hit the button for the garage door, idling the truck in front of the red building that appears a dark gray at night. The words “Trauma-Gone” are stenciled neatly above the garage doors and a fixed signpost out on the corner informs people who want more information that we are a twenty-four-hour service complete with an 800 number. Trauma-Gone Biohazard Remediation, that’s me.

  The bags containing Alan’s innards go into two of the black fifty-five gallon steel barrels that lined the inside of my shop, each of them stamped morbidly with a skull and crossbones decal. The cans, when full, would be sealed and then picked up by a company who would take them down to their incinerator along with shredded classified documents, medical waste, tattoo needles, and whatever other more normal companies needed destroyed. The two Mexican guys who picked up the goods never asked details about what was inside the barrels—they only made sure that I had sealed them tightly. If I needed more, the company would provide them, always the same black metal, always the skull and crossbones. I wonder who else gets those barrels? It costs me $400 a barrel to have the contents completely burned, so Alan, even with his celebrity status, is sharing barrel space with the biohazards of more common folk. No personal first-class privacy barrel for him. In this case, it is carpet hunks soaked with soupy guts I’d cut from the home of an unattended old man. He’d suffered a heart attack and decomposed into his carpet while waiting on a call from his estranged daughter. It was a call that never came. The old guy’s landlord had discovered him, then hung around outside to talk my ear off about the old man’s sad life. As if to confirm the landlord’s tale, an answering machine inside, near the stain of the body, which blemished the carpet with a “snow angel made in cream of mushroom” look, blinked zero. The sad thing was, over the two weeks the man had rotted, apparently not a single caller had left a message, not even some scam telemarketer. Now the old-timer had the dubious distinction of having his guts burned in the same incinerator with a movie star. Hooray for Hollywood.

  Settled, and changed into street wear that isn’t emblazoned with the Trauma-Gone logo, I slip into the Charger and back it out onto the narrow patch of asphalt that is my parking lot. A glance at my cellphone informs me that I’ve missed several calls and texts from Ivy. I don’t answer them because it will make her think I am heading home. I am not. No, right now I need some “me time.”

  I sacrificed a perfectly good heroin habit for Ivy—or really, for everything Ivy represents: longevity, stability, a relationship and life. And it was worth it—but all that comes with a price. The day-to-day routine of coming home for dinner, eating a pleasant meal, talking about our respective days, doing the dishes and then watching some television as we drift into sleep—it isn’t me. Initially, I tried it and it had seemed like a sort of vacation from my reality—a goofy, surreal peep into normalcy. But by the middle of the fourth week, when it started just feeling like my existence, I lost my cool. I began to stay at the office later and later, surfing the Web, absorbing any knowledge that sounded worth a damn, until I couldn’t stare at the computer screen any longer. That’s when the drives began. Heading out into the black nights cruising dark streets with the windows down and the radio up, I get lost. Side streets, backstreets, alleys, I barely slow for stop signs and red lights as I run the Charger through the landscapes of this good/bad city. I push myself, testing my knowledge of its roughly five hundred square miles and my willingness to soar through its streets. It feels wrong—running my car so hard and fast, to skirt the limits of what is breaking the law and what is edging toward criminal recklessness. It’s the sort of action that got Holly Kelly killed. And yet . . . I can’t stop. I need this like I need air in my lungs. Simply being out of prison doesn’t cut it like it used to. You’d think I could just appreciate not being in a cage, but these little explorations through the urban sprawl are a necessary part of my freedom these days . . . I just worry that the time will come that this habit too will need to be escalated and what that might look like. Boredom has never brought out the best in me. But for the time being, the drives keep me calm.

  Only when I begin to feel selfish about my time away from her, only then do I turn the Charger and head home to Ivy.

  Ivy, on the other hand, has taken to cohabitation in a way I simply haven’t. She likes a sort of Donna Reed thing—cooking a meal and
hearing about my day—with the caveat that I listen to her stories right back. She’d taken a gig working for a private investigator—the sort of cornball that followed cheating husbands around, exposing petty criminals and doing occasional bail-jumper work. Ivy has blossomed there, working for PI Don Tart, acting as his Girl Friday. Don, a harmless old letch, insisted that Ivy wear her most salacious outfits for the office. She was more than happy to oblige, but she had no clue what “salacious” meant. I just told her to keep wearing what she usually wore. The place was a step up from the bikini bar she used to work at, and Ivy loved what she did all day, so I had no cause for complaint. Of course she was still a slob, so much of my home time was spent ensuring that the common areas didn’t slide into the level of her car—her new car. That is us, two people existing in our new reality. If she was anyone else, I might have given up long ago. Fortunately, I think she feels the same way. She could do a lot better than me if she wanted, so I have to remind myself that it’s me who is the lucky one.

  The door is unlocked when I arrive at the entrance to our Burbank apartment, a ground-floor cottage within a communal gated enclosure. Close to the entrance and stacked identically alongside several other upper and lower insulated facades that bracket a cheerful kidney-shaped swimming pool on three sides, our apartment is pleasantly unremarkable, just my style. The building is utterly forgettable, lost in the crowd. I shake my head when I enter, trying the knob out of knowing habit, because I ask her every day to keep the door locked. I don’t care that we have “friendly, watchful neighbors” and a security gate that requires a punch code to get in. I clean up enough people who were victims of a malevolent city that takes notice when you get too comfortable.

  Ivy is meditating when I walk in, a continuation of her ceaseless quest for New-Age enlightenment. The meditation is new—last week it was yoga, but that felt too much like exercise for her. So now she is sitting, legs crossed, in the middle of the living room, in comfy pajama bottoms and a teal sports bra, seeking her inner light. Palms pressed together as if in prayer, and eyes squinted shut, she repeats an “Ohm” noise that is lower than the normal register of her voice.