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
“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.”
“Where’s the gun?” I ask, the brilliant idea being that I’ll take it from her and call 911 like a sane person. When she produces it I lunge for her, and to my utter and complete astonishment she fires at the floor next to my feet, drilling a jagged hole into one of the tiles and scattering dusty shards in all directions. I drop the cell and she kicks it out of reach.
“Fucking hell, Cherie. Way to wake up the neighbors.”
“I knew you were going to try and take the gun. Soon as you asked for it. Now, you listen.” She raises the gun so it’s pointing at my face rather than my belly. “You fucked me while he lay here dying, and that makes you my accomplice.”
Rather than pointing out the flaws in her logic, I concentrate on placating her. In between our words I discover that I can actually hear the thin whistle of Gary’s breath, and it occurs to me that I’d better get help to him sooner rather than later.
“All right, then, take his feet,” I tell her.
“I’m not putting down this gun.”
“I can’t carry 350 pounds of Gary up those steps all by myself.”
“We’re going downstairs, to the garage. Gary’s got a Hummer.”
“Hummer’s no good, it’s too conspicuous.”
“Fuck conspicuous, you do what I tell you. Take him by the feet and drag him.”
I start pulling him toward the staircase. It’s harder than I thought it would be, hauling a sixth of a ton of deadweight across the tile, harder still when I reach the carpet of the living room. Then Cherie starts down the steps ahead of me to turn the light on downstairs, and I step over Gary and kick her right in the ass. She stumbles-did I mention those heels?-and when she hits the landing with a squeal of pain and outrage, she twists around and fires at me. I’m already headed up that other set of stairs to the front door, though, and as soon as I
