A Good-Looking Corpse Read online

  “Making dinner,” she says as if it’s part of her mantra, her tone still unnaturally deep. “Meatloaf and mashed potatoes,” she continues, giving the words holy reverence.

  Behind her, a gossip piece on the TV is showing the live events from Fox Plaza, which is now mostly just a candlelight vigil. The volume is muted but the news channel has ALAN VAN DEAD! strewn across the Chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen in font loud enough that it might as well be a scream.

  In the kitchen, a dinner is indeed in the midst of being assembled; Ivy has seamlessly adjusted to my schedule it seems—my proclivity for showing up later as opposed to earlier. On the counter a bowl of white mashed potatoes. On the stove, a lone pot simmers, the flames reduced to a low heat. Inside, I find a viscous brown gravy simmering. “Smells good.” I smile, worn out, surprised to see her standing behind me when I turn back around. “Done already? Did you even achieve oneness?” I ask, arch.

  “Enlightenment is a marathon not a sprint.” She shrugs, taking my sarcasm seriously. “You’re later than usual,” she adds. “Hot date?” Ivy raises an eyebrow, her blonde hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, and pulls out the top of her sports bra to let her lean top-heavy frame breathe.

  “Something like that.” I nod. “Work stuff.”

  “How was work? Tell me all about Alan! I know you worked it, I saw you on the news.”

  “Business as usual, nothing special.” I try opening the fridge, initially just to stare inside, but I end up staying for a long moment, basking in the coolness exuding from within.

  “You want me to throw you a beating, fucker? Don’s goons have been showing me some moves.” She feigns a karate stance. “I want the gossip.”

  I abruptly twist away from the fridge, abandoning it in its vulnerable open state to seize Ivy, gripping her high and low simultaneously, throwing her up on my shoulder so I can fireman carry her to the bedroom.

  “Ahh,” she screams playfully, raining her fists down on my back, some of them with real force. I slam her down on the bed; she bounces once and then lands in the unruly mix of blanket, pillows, and sheets. “Tell me about Alan Van,” she demands. “Don’t hold back a single detail.”

  “What are you gonna do for me?” I ask, smirking. In attack mode, Ivy snakes out her tattooed arm, a sleeve of foliage and gorgeously vicious spiders, and swats at my crotch with a cupped hand, making me double over as the pain circulates up into my guts.

  “Christ,” I moan, and look upward to meet her eyes, which are ecstatic above a self-satisfied grin.

  “Did that answer your question?” she asks.

  “And any future ones I might have. Not very Buddhist of you to nut-tap a guy you want answers from.”

  “I’m not a Buddhist, I’m just a seeker of higher truth. And there’s nothing in any of the meditation books I’ve read that says it’s wrong to ding a wiseass in the grapes once in a while.”

  She’s in rare form tonight, I think. “You’re one sadistic cookie, you know that?” I say, amused. The pain lessens and I can finally unkink my back and stand upright.

  She begins to hop around on the mattress excitedly. “Tell me, tell me, tell me.”

  “Should I be concerned that you want gory insider details and that you’re acting like a toddler to get them?”

  Ivy flops onto her back: “Telllllllllll meeeeeeeeee.”

  And so I do, from Alan Van’s death to Mikey Echo to Ramen, the dogfighting party (which Ivy rages about), and the woman offering to blow me in the Ferrari. Ivy tells me I should have let her and I tell her I will the next time it happens. I only stop the story there, declining as always to tell her about my newfound habit of reckless driving. Somehow, I just don’t feel she’d understand.

  “You really think he was murdered?” she asks.

  “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.”

  “Why would you agree to get involved with someone who throws dogfighting parties?”

  “You’re always harping on me to be more social. I’m going to a party!”

  “Yeah, but think about the doggies! Any dogs that you neglect to save are going to haunt your conscience as ghosts.”

  I leave her in the bedroom so I can shower. “You forgot to flush,” I yell as I arrive in the bathroom and strip off my shirt.

  “I didn’t forget—if it’s yellow let it mellow. We’re in the midst of a water crisis.”

  “Water crisis, huh?” I say, turning on the shower faucet and shaking my head. When did I become so domesticated?

  Chapter 4

  One Hundred North Carolwood Drive is the address Ramen gave me the previous evening for Mikey Echo’s palace in Holmby Hills. Below that he has written Password: Alan Van. I don’t know much about Holmby Hills, other than that it’s adjacent to Beverly Hills, and has the reputation for being nicer than its more famous neighbor. There’s a private golf club and the Playboy Mansion is there too. I’d brought an unmarked black polo along to the office so I didn’t have to stop off at home. The party isn’t slated to begin until nine, according to Ramen’s scribbled note, but if I go home, I know Ivy will pester me to let her tag along. It was the same deal with Trauma-Gone—once we moved in together, Ivy began to make comments about coming to work for the company. She said she could answer phones, accompany me on the bigger scenes and just generally be my shadow. I shut down that idea pretty quickly—I couldn’t have us working and living together. It became an either/or situation and since we were already living together, that made the decision an easy one. Once she’d discovered working for Don Tart, the issue resolved itself.

  I don’t have any crime scenes pressing, so once I ship out the barrels containing the leftover bits and pieces of the crime scenes from the last four days, including Alan Van, I set myself at the computer and educate myself about Mikey Echo.

  Surprisingly, there isn’t much at all. Google Images brings up the same image of the man but from multiple sources—from insider newspaper Variety to tiny editorials extolling tales of his philanthropic aims. Most of the articles that come up are actually about his father, George, with Mikey’s name only appearing in passing. “That’s odd,” I mutter. For such a prolific force, you’d think there’d be a little something more substantial. Or at least more than the single stock photo.

  As Ramen had said, George Echo is the real draw. Steeped in old Hollywood, old money, and old politics, the man is omnipresent in Hollywood society, hosting several presidents in residence, and being seen with senators, movie actors, oil sheiks and seated courtside at Laker games. The articles formulated the idea that the son would not be successful without the father. It was easy to see why Mikey resented George Echo.

  It makes me think of my own father. A surgeon, he’d been strict and aloof with me, putting a premium on achievement all through my education. I had to live up to his standards, his image of me. Sure, the immediate result of his toughness had been my acceptance to medical school, but the price I’d paid in emotional attachment was severe. Still, it made it easier to accept him and my mom disowning me when I’d drunkenly hit Holly Kelly with my car. Not having to wonder if he’d come to visit me in prison during the almost nine years I’d spent in jail made the time easier too. Not having parents worrying about me also made it easier for me to go on existing after a thick oak of a fellow inmate had jammed a shank into me, missing my heart by the narrowest of margins.

  At the thought of the prison yard assault, my scar burns where the inmate, a beast of a man, had stuck me. The old wound does that sometimes, the nerve endings flaring up around the scar tissue where the blade had punched into me, searching out the source of my pulse.

  It had actually come in at an angle, a potato peeler stolen from the kitchen that had been rejiggered into a shank. It had sliced into my pericardial sack—the insulation around my heart, which spilled the formerly encapsulated fluid into my chest cavity. Keeping the serrated teeth on one edge of the peeler, the inmate, known only around the yard as “Crozier,” had sharpened the
instrument to a fine point with the handle wrapped in black electrical tape. He’d even gone so far as to keep the blade portion slightly concave so that when he twisted it in me—as he’d done—it would inflict maximum damage. That I’d survived the attack was nothing short of a miracle. I remembered it perfectly—the curse of what was sometimes (and erroneously) called a photographic memory.

  The guard nearest to me had purposefully turned his back, and the hairs on my neck had tingled, as if sensing the incoming behemoth. Crozier grabbed me around the throat, yanking my considerably more fragile body back into his, and then planted the blade upward, brutally grinding through my costal cartilage to get a straight shot into my heart. He’d missed, landing the blade neatly between the aortic arch and the pulmonary trunk. “For Holly Kelly, motherfucker,” he’d murmured as he’d done it, his breath a hot stink on my face, and he’d maneuvered the makeshift blade around, twisting and scraping as he drove it in. The hand holding the knife had a Christian cross tattooed into it, against his dark black skin—that I remembered clearly. I should have died right there in the prison yard, dropping forward as he released me, falling onto the unpaved concrete, the impact of my chest hitting down, driving the knife into me farther still. I should have died again in recovery—Crozier, that sly son of a bitch had coated the blade with his own feces, figuring that if the stabbing didn’t kill me, the infection would. It too had done its work on me, wreaking havoc with my wounds, threatening to corrupt my injuries with festering infections. The recovery was painful—I’d wished several times that he’d been able to finish the job out in the rec yard. The whole ordeal left me with a three-inch scar over my heart, thick as a finger.

  As expected, no charges were filed against Crozier. He’d been secretly acting on behalf of the police, doing “God’s work” to rectify what I’d done to Holly Kelly. Holly’s parents had been assured that I would die in prison; to them, Crozier was no doubt a sort of avenging angel. I never pushed the issue of the guards who’d been in on it, or Crozier getting brought up on attempted murder charges either—I just quietly healed and went back into special custody to finish out my sentence. If anything, the assault probably got time off whatever stretch Crozier was pulling. Fucker should have gone for my brain stem if he wanted to do it right, might have at least made me a quadriplegic. And my father, the disowning bastard never had to worry about any of that once. Hell, I could be dead for all he knows.

  At four o’clock, I decide I should eat. Ivy had been on me about food intake lately, packing bag lunches for me to tote out on jobs and stocking my work refrigerator with nonperishable foods. Or at least hardly perishable. I’d already neglected several packs of hot dogs, causing them to rot. I didn’t even know hot dogs could mold, but they’d achieved a shrunken, gray and furry look on my watch. The only surprise was that I myself hadn’t shrunken, turned gray and furry during that time.

  I decide to go out for lunch . . . or is it dinner by now? Technically, I guess since I haven’t eaten, it’s breakfast. I lock up the place and head out on foot, narrowing my options between Mexican and Chinese. Mexican, I decide. Santee Alley.

  Santee Alley is a multicultural hub of backstreet bodegas, a series of narrow alleys accessible only on foot and crowded with tourists and native bargain hunters seeking out the deals among the imported trash. It’s a great place to get knockoff designer handbags . . . or a street taco.

  It’s a bit of a hike on foot, but who knows what parking will look like in the area. Besides, I’ve got my phone and any other possible suicides will take the weekend. People who kill themselves tend to wait ’til Monday morning—that absolute last moment before they decide whether or not to go to work. Ironically, their decision not to go to work means I have to go.

  The crowd moving along the long alleyways of Santee Alley are thick and touristy today. Some people don’t like tourists. I do. They show up, see what a dirty shithole Hollywood is, buy a map of the stars, tour around and realize they can only see tall gates and privacy hedges instead of celebrity mansions, buy knockoff Beats headphones for their kid and get the fuck back to Bowling Green, Ohio, or wherever, forever disillusioned. It’s the ones who decide to stay here I mind.

  My street-taco guy isn’t in his usual spot, so I have to travel. Moving through the crowds, Russian women call out to me to buy wristwatches, Hong Kong emigrants want to size me for suits, a Sikh wants to sell me a dancing toy robot. I just keep moving, ignoring the calls. They don’t take it personally, it’s the tourists who think they have to stop and be nice without spending money whom they hate.

  Up ahead of me in the distance, I spot the vendor cart I’m searching out. It’s staffed by a jolly, short Mexican man from Oaxaca—we aren’t on a first name basis yet, but we’re close. I move around some slob eating veined white meat from a stick, and stop short at a hat rack loaded with straw fedoras. The back of a bald head has stepped out from one of the market stalls, Bic’d clean and sporting the single word “Sureño” in crisp black ink along the median line between his ears. Above them, a pair of tattooed eyeballs glare out, always watching, but not seeing.

  “Wait up, Coco!” a voice yells from inside the shop and the head turns toward the voice, putting me firmly in the periphery of both sets of his eyes. I turn casually back and fade myself into the fedora stand as much as possible. I don’t think he’s seen me, but I’ve seen him. I recognize that head.

  Coco. So that’s your name, I think, the growling of my stomach instantly forgotten. I’ve suddenly gotten a different appetite that needs feeding. Coco hired me once upon a time to dissect his murder victims. Coco whom I’d betrayed. Coco who killed my boss, Harold.

  “You like? Cheap!” A dark-skinned gypsy woman barks, suddenly beside me, as if stepping out from the walls of the narrow shop. I duck down, keeping my eyes locked on Coco, expecting his glance. He would likely kill me just as quickly as I would kill him, given the opportunity. He doesn’t look, instead he calls something indecipherable but impatient back to his compadre. The gypsy woman, not knowing the first thing about surveillance, keeps at me, undeterred by my clear uninterest. “Try on. Buy,” she persists. She attempts to take one off the rack, but Coco and his accomplice are suddenly on the move. I go with them, keeping back and attempting to blend in—no easy task in my crisp white work polo. I stray into a stall full of shirts and sunglasses, a long narrow space that like many of the hubs on Santee Alley extends through a larger building and abruptly dumps off inside a retail shop on the next block. A door-less arch on the back wall, strung with hanging beads, is all that separates the two shops.

  Barely giving them a glance, I reach into the pile of folded T-shirts stacked on a long card table and select the first thing my hand touches. It’s a baby-blue thing with an interstate sign reading “Los Angeles 420” on it. Good enough. From the other side of the stall, I take the blackest pair of shades I can find and a baseball cap from the hanger above. A portly Mexican man, knowing the drill, moves up to me from behind his register. I hand him a $20 bill, intending to tell him to keep the change.

  “Thirty,” he says, garbled and in earnest.

  Fishing into my pocket, I grab another twenty and hand it over. “Keep it,” I declare this time and stretch the tee over my polo. It’s way too big, but I don’t care. I can give it to Ivy as a nightgown later. Hat and shades on, I head back out after the gangsters, now looking much more like a slob tourist. “Free mustache rides” my hat advertises, though I have no mustache to offer.

  The two men are ahead now, but their pace is slow and casual and I cover the distance quickly, not so worried about sticking out in the crowd anymore. Coco’s sidekick, also Mexican, is leaner with none of the prison-yard bulk that Coco has engineered onto his frame. Still, he must have done something violent to get into the gang, so I don’t kid myself that he’s any less dangerous.

  The sidekick is running whatever hustle they are currently involved in, darting sporadically into the stalls to talk hastily with the merchants.
At one point, I get close enough to peer inside, watching money trade hands but no purchases being made. Coco stays out of the shops mostly, as the two make their way south, down toward the end of Santee Alley. I hang back and make myself interested in some ornamental samurai swords that an old Chinese man has outfitted floor to ceiling in his stall. He smiles blandly at me, apparently recognizing my interest as fleeting and does not approach.

  Coco, I see, has followed his buddy into one of the shops now and neither has come out. I look back at the Chinese guy and smile. “Nice,” I tell him, trying to reassure him I am not going to rob him. Again he smiles uninterested and stays put.

  Could they have cut through to the other block? I wonder, wanting to advance forward and check. Neither is in the short expanse of alley that I can see. A minute passes into two and neither of the men have emerged. “Fuck,” I murmur and finally decide the opportunity outweighs the risk.

  I walk forward, unable to put my hands in my pockets, so draped is the shirt. My nerves are tense, screaming at me to be smart here, but I ignore them, propelling my legs onward and into the shop. As I turn the corner into the stall I saw them last enter, I notice that it does indeed run through into another store. But Coco’s buddy is still in the store, toward the back with the shopkeeper; he’s staring directly at me though, curious. Where’s Coco? my brain clicks, alarmed. And then I sense a gun barrel press into the small of my back—the unmistakable, blunt feel of a semiautomatic.

  “You suck at following,” the narrower gangster says, grinning from his place by the register. I take the insult hard.

  “Take off your shit,” Coco mutters icy, meaning my hat and glasses. It means he doesn’t recognize me yet. He will.