Killing Paparazzi

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Robert M. Eversz

  Praise for Shooting Elvis

  Copyright

  This book is dedicated in memoriam to my mother, who as a young woman could out-ride, out-shoot and out-fight most men in their prime.

  To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder …

  – Susan Sontag

  1

  The horn sounds before dawn when you’re paroled, as it does every morning. You stand at the bars for prisoner count and when the hundred bolts on your block fire back you step out of your cell and walk in silent two-by-two down a concrete corridor to the same breakfast you’ve eaten for the last year, two years, twenty years, however long you’ve been resident. But it’s not like any other morning, you see that on the face of every inmate you meet. You don’t belong any more. You’re not one of them. You’re out. Some touch you for luck when the officers aren’t watching. Some whisper, See you back here soon, bitch.

  The previous day you reported to work detail. On parole day, they shunt you aside with one or two others getting out the same time. You settle your account at the canteen. They give you a box with the clothes you wore into the joint or something your family – if you have any – brought for you to wear on the day of your release. You remove the prison overalls and put on your street clothes. You sign papers. Even five years out of style you start to feel the blood flow through your veins. If you haven’t been rehabilitated to walking death, you feel a little like you again. Over a scarred counter they hand out whatever money you saved working at twenty-five cents an hour. You sign more papers. They fingerprint you one last time and check your prints against the prints on file to make sure they’re releasing the right inmate. At every step in the process you stop before steel bars and wait for the buzz and thunk of the lock springing back. It’s a sound you know like your own cough in the night. Last of all they cut the prisoner identification number from your wrist. The number is embedded in a thin plastic bracelet and it goes into a file reserved for your return. Through the last set of steel bars and down sunlit stairs an exit sign flickers green above an open door. You’re out.

  I was the first inmate released from California Institute for Women that morning. The San Gabriel mountains rimmed the northern horizon, snow-dusted peaks glinting white and gold under a sun that rolled like a bright yellow marble up the blue bowl of winter sky. Across the road Bandini Mountain steamed under the first rays of sun. Though I hadn’t seen it for five years, I hadn’t forgotten the sight or smell. No inmate could. Six days a week, blue overalled workers shovelled its perpetually expanding base into a fertilizer factory. Bandini Mountain measured over a mile in length and rose so high snow might have capped the peak if not for the heat generated by the horse, cow and human faeces that formed its mass. The stench penetrated concrete, steel and the deepest dreams. Behind the razor wire, everything smelled like shit: the air, the food, the inmates, the officers – even the warden, a well-meaning soul imprisoned as much as anyone by the smell, could never completely wash the odour of excrement from her hair.

  The Sergeant-at-Arms opened the rear door of the police cruiser that was to take me to the bus station twelve miles down the road. I crawled into the caged compartment and shut the door behind me. I didn’t fool myself into thinking I was free. The wire mesh that screened me from the driver was just another set of bars. Nobody released on parole is free. The chain might be longer but the State still owned me. The Sergeant-at-Arms started the engine and accelerated past Bandini Mountain. I moved my lips in a voiceless goodbye to five years of doing the same thing every day the same way. Five years of a concrete and steel room with a squat toilet in the corner. Five years of never being alone, not to shower, to urinate, or defecate. Five years of lock-ups and head-counts six times a day. Five years of being watched everywhere, always. Five years of no dogs, no cats, no birds, no children, no men. Five years of no touching. Five years of imposed silences and arbitrary punishments. Five years of a flashlight beamed up my rectum and vagina. Five years of humiliation, five years of fear. Fear of solitary, fear of emptiness, fear of time. Five years leaking into my veins like formaldehyde to a walking corpse.

  I ceased being the responsibility of the California Institute for Women the moment my foot hit the bottom step of the Greyhound bus. The driver took a long look at me as I leaped on board. He’d been driving a bus so long his butt sagged over the edges of the seat.

  He said, ‘Welcome back to the free world, honey.’

  2

  I grew up watching the fights on television. My dad was a big fight fan. He’d sit me down next to him on the couch and between rounds send me into the kitchen for beer. My favourite part was the introduction, when the referee explains legal versus illegal types of mayhem while the two fighters try to take each other down with bad-ass eyes. That was the stare my parole officer gave me when I walked into her office. The terms of my parole required me to check in with a parole officer upon release. She was the hundred-and-forty-pound ball at the end of my chain. She looked my age plus five years, a thin-lipped blonde with chisel-marks around the eyes. Muscle flexed at the corners of her jaw and corded down her neck. Her body had the cut look of sculpted stone. She could have cracked walnuts between the biceps and forearms showing below the sleeves of her white cotton blouse. Nothing about the woman appeared soft. Even her wash-and-wear hairstyle had a muscular curl to it. We were in the same weight class and I was in the best shape of my life but it was no contest. My jail face was still on. Don’t talk back. Don’t smile. Don’t grimace. Don’t stare someone down who can stick you in the hole or give you a hard time.

  ‘So which one are you going to be, Miss Baker?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Are you a loser?’ Her blue steel glance made one smooth incision from my pelvis to forehead. ‘Or someone who can straighten out her life?’

  S
he wanted me to think about that one. I didn’t worry about going back to the criminal life because I’d never been in it. Before my arrest I’d photographed babies for a living. I wore knee-length white skirts and pink sweaters and painted my nails to match. I never did drugs or broke the law. I was a good girl. Then everything went wrong and I discovered my goodness was a façade carefully constructed over something so dark and twisted it frightened people.

  I said, ‘Only time on the outside can judge that.’

  She dipped her shoulder, yanked back a drawer and flipped a thin manila file onto the desktop. ‘Just about everybody who comes to this office swears they’re going to stay clean and the ones who swear the loudest are usually the first to fall.’ She flicked through the file page by page, spending half a minute on one, a few seconds on the next. ‘You just might be the rare parolee with a healthy attitude. Then again, you might be clever at conning people.’ She stuck me with an inquisitor’s smile and went, ‘Hmmmm?’

  Nothing I could say to that. She was the professional, the one who did this for a living. I was a first-timer along for the ride.

  ‘Most of the people assigned to me are just marking time before they’re bounced back to prison. That’s where they belong. They’re losers. I might sympathize with them. I might even like them. But when the time comes, I’ll punch their ticket back without a second thought. Don’t expect me to treat you any differently.’

  ‘No ma’am.’

  She lifted a No. 2 pencil from a chipped white coffee cup and drew a parolee release form toward her elbow. On the wall behind her head hung a framed diploma from USC. She’d received her bachelor degree in psychology. Other than that diploma and the chipped coffee cup, her office was stripped of any evidence of a life. Considering the quality of her clientele, I didn’t wonder why. It would take just one convicted murderer to comment ‘Nice family’ to pull every photograph off the desk.

  ‘Do you have a job lined up?’

  ‘I thought I’d try to find work as a photographer.’

  I watched her write ‘Photographer, no steady employment’ in a box marked ‘Means of Support’.

  ‘What about your place of residence? Where do you plan to live?’

  ‘With my husband.’

  She began to write it but stopped mid-word and set the pencil down.

  ‘What husband? I didn’t see any mention of a husband in your file.’

  ‘That’s because I don’t have one yet.’

  ‘Are you overly optimistic or have you actually met somebody?’

  She thought she was being funny.

  ‘We have hotel reservations tonight in Las Vegas.’

  ‘What’s the rush?’

  ‘Anything wrong with me wanting to get married?’

  The muscle above her jaw jumped. The workout she gave it daily built and defined it like a triceps. ‘There’s little I can do to prevent it, let me put it that way. He have a criminal record, your fiancé?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘How did you meet him?’

  ‘Through my cellmate.’

  She flipped open my file again and rifled through the pages. ‘Rose Selavy, that cellmate?’

  ‘They’re cousins.’

  ‘Your ex-cellmate Rose is a hooker and drug addict.’

  ‘Was,’ I said. ‘There’s not so much opportunity in prison.’

  ‘What does he do, this guy you want to marry?’

  ‘He’s a photographer.’ I laid out the information without comment, knowing that was the beauty of the arrangement. We were in the same business. That was how Rose thought of getting us together in the first place. Her cousin was English. He needed a green card. I needed money. She’d never met her cousin but they used the same lawyer, Harry Bendel. I never questioned the illegality of marrying him. Bendel had made the arrangements. I didn’t even know what my husband-to-be looked like.

  My parole officer picked up the pencil again and tapped it gum-side down, each tap premeditated like the squeeze of a trigger. ‘Forgive me for being blunt, but why does he want to marry you?’

  ‘You don’t think I’m attractive?’

  ‘Look in the yellow pages under escort services. A hundred places will sell you attractive for a lot less than a wedding ring.’

  ‘He knows my work. Five years ago he saw photographs of mine in an art gallery and fell in love. He thinks I have talent. He wants to help me. And I hope to hell he wants to jump my bones.’

  She thought she could judge whether or not I lied by my eyes. Law-enforcement officials like to observe the eyes of suspects for traces of truth or deception. My eyes had a naturally honest shine. I fooled everybody, including myself. I’d lived a lie until my first crime at age twenty-three. I’d always been a good liar, even when I thought I was telling the truth.

  My parole officer reached into her top desk drawer and slipped out a form stamped with the state seal of California. ‘I hope you’re not being clever. No matter how clever you are you’ll screw-up and I’ll know it. Criminals are screw ups by nature. Sooner or later you all end up behind bars.’ She filled out the form with the dates and locations and signed it. ‘This is your travel permit. You need it to cross the state line. Check in with the Las Vegas Police Department when you arrive. They like to know when felons come to town.’

  I said, ‘Yes ma’am, I will,’ knowing I wouldn’t. I didn’t expect any trouble. Despite my time in prison, I never thought of myself as a criminal. Maybe that was because I never really regretted the acts that imprisoned me.

  3

  Run-off from a storm the night before swept newspapers, lawn clippings, dog droppings and shredded cardboard into the storm drain at Pico Boulevard and from there out to the fish in Santa Monica Bay. Toward the pier, black smoke piped from a swarm of bulldozers pushing sand into a line of defence against the next tantrum from El Niño. I waded through fifty yards of beach sand and sat at the sea’s faltering edge, where the waves beat themselves into a line of beige foam. For the first time in five years, no one watched me. When I worked up the courage I stripped to my underwear and sprinted into the Pacific. I’d been dreaming of that moment for five years. I dived through the first wave and swam furiously until my body temperature rose to fight the December chill. Past the wave break I trod water in a slow half-circle. The coast curled from Point Dume to Palos Verdes like the tail of a beast backed into a great blue wilderness. I felt almost peaceful.

  At my arrest I’d worn eight silver earrings and a dagger nose-stud. All but three of those piercings had fused to scar tissue during my time in the Institute. The jewellery stripped from me at my booking lay sealed in a zip-lock baggie with keys to a car I no longer owned and an apartment I no longer rented. Not much of what I once was still fit what I’d become. I jabbed two rings into the lobe of my right ear and the dagger stud into the left and stored the rest in the side pocket of a leather jacket I’d just bought, along with white jeans, a stretch velvet v-neck and black Converse All Stars, at a retro-fashion shop near the beach. The jacket looked like the last person to wear it had been hit by a truck. I sympathized. I tossed my jail rags into the first trash-can I came to. I felt more free than I had in a long time.

  At a row of vending machines I bought a fresh newspaper and walked into the Firehouse Café to wait for my prospective husband to show. I propped the newspaper against a sugar shaker on a table by the window and scanned the headlines. Political scandals, wars and fires raged around the world. In five years nothing much had changed. When a waitress stopped by to fill my coffee cup I ordered bacon and eggs sunny side up with hash browns and a side of ham, another side of pancakes and a glass of orange juice.

  The guy at the next table asked, ‘You know what my mother always said to me about food?’ He sat splay-legged, black jeans tucked over Beatle boots, one long leg curled under the table and the other sticking into the aisle like an accident waiting to happen. A wise guy. While he looked at me he spun an empty coffee cup with one hand, caught it,
and spun it again, grinning like he thought he was really something. His smile was contagious. It had been so long since a man smiled at me I’d forgotten how dangerous it could be.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Never eat anything bigger than your head.’

  I could tell from his accent that he wasn’t from California. I asked, ‘You know what my mom always said to me about food?’

  He wagged his head. I let out a belch. It took him a moment to get the joke but then he thought it was pretty funny. He had a peculiar laugh, high pitched and percussive, like a dog with a stepped-on tail. I couldn’t help but want to laugh along with him, even if I didn’t.

  ‘No, that’s not true. My mom is a lady. She always told me, “Mary Alice, mind your manners.” It’s not her fault I turned out how I did.’

  He snapped the wobbling coffee cup from the table and the pinpoint focus of his eyes diffused as though he was suddenly unsure he wanted to be talking to me. I looked like the woman he was supposed to meet but the name threw him. ‘Is that your name? Mary Alice?’

  ‘Was then. Now, just strangers call me that.’

  I dug into the hash browns and eggs the waitress laid on the table. He went back to spinning the coffee cup and watching me. Soft brown hair tumbled down his forehead and over his ears. His hairstyle and square black plastic glasses seemed cut from the sixties, as did the silver pendant that hung down the front of his black T-shirt. Like a lot of people into retro, maybe he unconsciously wanted to look like his parents.

  ‘Those who know you, what name do they use?’

  ‘Nina. Nina Zero.’

  He sprang to his feet and introduced himself as Gabriel Burns, my prospective husband. I wiped the bacon grease off my hand and when I extended it he flipped the wrist palm down to kiss my fingers at the knuckle. Nobody had ever done that to me before. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  ‘This is just business, right?’

  He slid into the chair across the table and though he did not speak, his mischievous grin communicated plenty. He brought the empty coffee cup to his lips and stared at me over the rim. The hands wrapping the cup were broad at the palm and the fingers long but small-knuckled. In form, they matched the width of his shoulders and the angular tapering of his torso to the limbs below. The sudden desire to feel those hands on my back reminded me how long it had been since I’d had a man.