Killing Paparazzi Read online

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Rose Selavy, you know, your cousin.’

  ‘I don’t have a cousin named Rose – whatever.’

  ‘Of course you do. My cellmate. The one who set this up.’

  ‘That’s just a figure of speech, you know, “Our American cousins”. The marriage was arranged through my lawyer, Harry Bendel.’

  That was when the clock struck midnight and my grand coach of a romance began to turn into a pumpkin. That Rose had lied shouldn’t have surprised me. A junkie prostitute can’t be expected to tell the truth when money can be made with a lie. Maybe the lawyer had offered a finder’s fee. No harm done, except that I’d just married a man who wasn’t exactly who I thought he was. Most brides have a similar experience.

  When we rode the elevator down to the casino I asked him why he needed a green card. I didn’t get an answer. The moment the elevator doors opened he sprang toward the nearest blackjack table. Sometimes people are too tied up in their own thoughts to listen to you and sometimes they just don’t want to answer. I tossed a five-dollar bill on to the box next to his and split two tens. Gabe drew a three and a two with the dealer showing four. I tried again. ‘Do you need one to work, or do you have some hidden desire to become an American?’

  ‘God, no! I’d just as soon be Australian.’ He asked the dealer for a card. The dealer tossed him a king. Gabe glanced up at me.

  ‘Stay,’ I advised.

  He hit, drew an eight and busted.

  ‘Bloody luck.’

  ‘The way you play, luck’s got nothing to do with it.’

  The dealer hit a face card on fourteen and busted. The hand exposed the red plastic marker at the end of the decks and we waited while the dealer loaded a new shoe.

  ‘I’m not drunk enough to play. Hell, I’m not drunk at all. Nobody has any luck stone sober. Want a beer?’ He glanced around for a cocktail waitress but instead of calling for a beer shouted, ‘Bloody wanker!’ Before the epithet cleared his lips he sprang from the table. As we were surrounded by Mid-westerners who had no idea what a wanker was, much less a bloody one, his curse didn’t attract much attention. Even his sprint through the blackjack tables didn’t draw more than a few glances from faces hypnotized by the click of cards. Well ahead of Gabe, past the roulette wheels and breaching the sharp-elbowed grandmother section of slot machines, I spotted a bird’s-nest of bare skull and hair bobbing rapidly above the crowd. I pulled our chips from the table and chased after, partly out of loyalty to Gabe, who might need my help if he actually caught the guy, and partly to learn what the hell was going on.

  Gabe was little better at running than he was at fighting. I caught sight of him through the wall of glass doors at Bally’s entrance, so badly winded he bent at the waist to rest his palms on his thighs. Whoever he had been chasing was long gone. The figure had been too tall to be the one who had attacked us outside the chapel yet Gabe clearly knew him. I didn’t see a need to let him know I followed and retreated to the blackjack tables.

  ‘Your partner, he have friends in town?’ The dealer’s eyes were a faded blue, as though left too long in the sun, and her face had tanned to the colour of leather. By the pale band of skin on her ring finger I could tell she had her share of man troubles.

  She dealt me an ace-ten blackjack so I answered, ‘Who knows? Whatever goes on in the little minds of men is a mystery to me.’

  She paid me three for two and dealt me two face cards. ‘Men. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.’

  ‘Sure you can. You just go to jail if you do.’

  I played through my string of cards until five losing hands in a row proved the deck ran against me. I tipped the dealer ten of the two hundred I carried away and found Gabe at the nearest roulette table, tossing chips at random boxes. His system didn’t make any sense but then neither did Gabe half the time, which I thought to be one of the secrets to his charm, something it had just occurred to me to distrust.

  ‘Who did you just chase out of here?’

  ‘The scalp collector.’

  ‘Who?’

  The steel ball shot around the rim of the wheel, bounced like a wild hubcap and wobbled into the number seventeen slot, about the only bet he hadn’t covered. The dealer raked his chips from the table with the air of a bored bank-teller.

  ‘A bloody thief, worse than this wheel. He must have followed us all the way from Los Angeles.’

  I began to fear I’d just married a guy who had more troubles than I did. ‘Why would he want to do that?’

  ‘Lack of imagination. I’m on a hot streak at the moment and as a result he’s been following me around. He’s a poacher. Probably thinks I’m in Vegas to shoot a big celeb.’

  ‘He’s a competitor?’

  ‘In his wildest fantasies.’ He tossed the last of his chips on seventeen, a bet he liked because nobody else would think of betting on the previous winning number.

  ‘I know I’m a little late saying this, but the kind of marriage we have would be a violation of my parole if anybody was able to prove it.’

  He could see I wasn’t going to let the subject drop. ‘I have a Type One visa. I can photograph and report here as much as I like.’

  ‘I thought the whole idea of a green card was so you could work.’

  ‘I’m already working. I need insurance. What would happen if someone convinced an immigration officer to yank my visa the next time I enter the country?’

  ‘Why would somebody do that?’

  ‘Because I caught him with his knickers down, shagging a hooker in his Ferrari, and published the resulting photograph in newspapers around the world.’

  ‘You really did that?’

  ‘Just an example.’

  ‘So the guy that attacked us, maybe he didn’t come from nowhere?’

  The dealer called an end to betting and made his toss. Gabe watched the steel ball race against the spin of the wheel. ‘He’s nothing. I don’t worry about thugs. The person who sent him, he’s the one who scares me.’

  ‘You know who sent him?’

  The ball hit the 00 slot and stuck.

  ‘No. But most of the people angry with me earn twenty million dollars a picture and that much money can buy the ability to make a lot of trouble.’

  6

  Mid-way down the mountain to the San Fernando Valley Gabe looked at me in a funny way from the passenger seat and admitted, ‘You’re really a lovely girl but you know the time we spent in Vegas was more than a little unreal.’

  ‘Yeah?’ I said, not getting it. I’d been talking about what we could do when we got back to LA.

  ‘I’ve had a great time with you, but we have to look at the situation realistically.’

  ‘What situation?’

  ‘Our situation.’

  ‘What about “our situation”?’

  ‘We can’t continue this same relationship back in the city.’

  ‘You mean, we can’t pretend we have anything more than a strictly legal agreement?’

  Gabe looked like a man long underwater coming up for air. He said, ‘You understand exactly what I’m saying.’

  My right foot – the one on the accelerator – acquired a sudden and uncontrollable weight problem. The Mustang lunged forward. ‘You’re saying this has been nothing more than a weekend of vigorous sport fucking?’

  I could see it in his eyes, the terror that I was not going to be reasonable, I was not going to be a sport about it. He said, ‘Oh dear. I thought you knew.’

  The RPM gauge climbed so far into the red the needle began to bleed. Beyond the windshield, the landscape blurred. ‘Knew what? That you wanted a whore?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I did not say that. I just want to look at the situation realistically.’

  With its light frame, 6-cylinder engine and 200-plus horsepower, I figured the Mustang could go pretty fast and it did, even if it handled with all the sureness of a hang glider in a hurricane. The speedometer claimed the car would do 140 mph but I couldn
’t get it over 135. Then the freeway sloped downhill and I did what I’d secretly wanted to do since getting behind the wheel: pinned the speedometer. ‘If I’m going to be a whore, then at two grand at least I’m not a cheap whore!’

  ‘You’re angry!’ He had to shout above the engine and wind noise to hear his own voice.

  ‘I’m not angry! When I’m angry I shoot people! Now I’m merely annoyed!’

  ‘We have two relationships here! You have two thousand dollars and I have a document for my green card! That’s the legal relationship! I think you’re smart and sexy and so bloody crazy you’ll kill us both! That’s our personal relationship!’

  Men become reasonable when they want to squirm out of something, as though lack of reason explains the mistake of having seemed to care about you. Maybe I lightened my foot on the accelerator but it wasn’t because I believed him. I didn’t want a couple of traffic tickets to add to my troubles. When I pulled into the Department of Motor Vehicles lot in Santa Monica he said, ‘I had a great time this weekend, I’d very much like to see you again, not just about the legal matters, but just to see you again. Do you understand?’

  I understood too well. ‘Your terms are not my terms. You think if you say the right words I’ll sleep with you again without wanting anything more out of it, but I won’t.’

  The truth shocked him. He tried a sad look.

  I slammed the door on it.

  People break up all the time. I didn’t have anything to complain about. I was free. I had over two thousand dollars in my pocket and after standing in line for an hour, taking the test and getting my photograph taken, I possessed a valid driver’s licence. I took it to a used car lot on Santa Monica Boulevard and bought a 1976 Cadillac Eldorado with 170,000 miles on it. Nothing matters more in Los Angeles than the car you drive and the Caddy was a stylish monster, a gas-guzzling, road-hogging, middle-finger-extended statement on four wheels. So what if I didn’t have enough money to pay rent after the purchase? The trunk was bigger than some apartments and the back seat alone could sleep a family of four.

  I keyed the ignition and drove north, through the San Fernando Valley and over the pass to the town that I hadn’t so much grown up in as been stunted by. It was a small town that had stopped being small because people who worked in Los Angeles fell in love with the fresh air and big houses and country lifestyle and moved there in such numbers that the air wasn’t so fresh any more and most of the countryside was hidden beneath vast sprawls of tract homes. Part of the American dream is finding something you love and then destroying it.

  I pulled into the parking lot of the new K-Mart Mom worked at, didn’t go inside but stayed in my car, radio on, watching the entrance. She came out a couple hours later, looking smaller than I’d remembered, more frail. She’d had me at the end of a run of five children. In another year K-Mart would fire her and call it retirement. I stepped out of the Cadillac, smiled and waved. I had in my mind this photograph she’d taken of me when I was about ten. In the photograph, my bony red knees poke out beneath a green corduroy jumper. I wear white sandals and oversized white sunglasses. My lips open to a gap-toothed smile. I wave at the camera, my arm bent at the elbow to a crescent shape. I look not just happy but innocent.

  Mom had come out of K-Mart with a younger woman who shared her same home-permanent hairstyle and owlish glasses. You could tell from the red and white K-Mart blouses they worked together. They looked like mother and daughter. When Mom saw me she turned to the woman and very clearly said goodbye. The woman got into a primer-grey Toyota Corolla one row over. Before pulling away she looked at me like she guessed who I was. I didn’t blame Mom for not introducing us. It would have been too complicated to explain how somebody who did the things I was convicted of could be her daughter.

  Mom took my arm, said, ‘Well, look at you,’ then, ‘I just can’t get used to that hair, Mary Alice, no matter what.’

  I wanted to hug her but we weren’t a hugging family so I just stroked her arm and tried not to let her see how shocked I was. She’d come to visit me twice at the Institute but the circumstances were so strained that I hadn’t really noticed the changes. It wasn’t just the age lines webbing across her cheeks, the wattle of loose skin at her throat, the increasing curvature of her spine, the shortness of her steps or the seeming precariousness of her balance; she seemed less certain of being, her eyes opaque as if she had already begun her retreat to the void. I couldn’t reconcile the figure standing before me with the young and vital woman of my childhood. My mother had become old.

  ‘I knew you were getting out soon, but I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t know when to expect you.’

  Code. I’d written her the date of my release and promised to see her soon after that. But we’d made no appointment. ‘Don’t worry Mom. I just drove up to say hi.’

  ‘I have to get home, fix dinner…’ She didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. I knew. Home was off limits.

  I said, ‘Good to see you.’

  Mom said, ‘Sure is.’

  Her grip on my arm loosened. She looked toward her car. I knew she didn’t feel comfortable with me. She had her own problems reconciling images, of understanding how her sweet blonde child had become a black-haired virago who, the last time she’d seen her father, had held a gun to his temple and threatened to blow his head off.

  I said, ‘Next time, can I ask you to do me a favour?’

  She didn’t say yes or no, just cocked her head to the side.

  ‘Could you bring some of the stuff I left in my apartment? I could really use some clothes, ‘specially my jeans and tennis shoes.’

  Mom looked stricken. ‘Your dad cleaned out your apartment after you were, after you were, after…’

  ‘After I was arrested,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. And I’m afraid he gave everything to the Salvation Army.’

  ‘My camera?’ I asked. I had left it at the house that night, the night I had been arrested. ‘Did he give that away too?’

  Mom snapped open the purse on her arm. ‘No. He took your camera to his workbench in the garage. Then he…’ Mom lost track of what she was saying, her mind down with her fingers.

  I asked, ‘What did he do to my camera?’

  ‘He took a hammer to it.’ She laughed, small and nervous, and plucked out a wallet. Her voice turned to sing-song. ‘You know your father.’ She slipped a twenty from her wallet. ‘I felt that wasn’t right. I saved some money but I didn’t bring it with me.’

  She meant to give me that twenty-dollar bill. It horrified me. I put on the cheeriest smile I could, told her I’d just got a big assignment from one of the glossy magazines and swept my arm across the vast expanse of El Dorado. ‘You can see they gave me a lot of money up front. I got more than enough left to buy a camera, I needed to get another one anyway.’

  I leaned in through the window to grab the cardboard instamatic from the front seat. The moment Mom saw it she stepped back. ‘Now honey, I just got off work and I look a fright.’ But I insisted, just a snapshot for my wall when I had one to put something on. I put one arm around her, held the camera out facing us, told her to smile, laughed like I was having fun and snapped.

  ‘I’ll be back to see you again soon as I can,’ I promised.

  ‘I look forward to it,’ she answered.

  We both lied.

  7

  Two days later I sobered up enough to look for work. I don’t know what had gotten into me. I’d parked my car across from a church a couple blocks from the beach in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park, stepped into a bar on Main Street and didn’t stumble out until 2 a.m. closing time. From a homey with a pit-bull on the Venice Beach Boardwalk I’d bought a used Nikon F3 with a 28–85 mm zoom lens, no questions asked. After that I lost track of events, woke up on the sand thirty hours later with plum-sized bruises on my arm and knuckles scraped raw. I couldn’t remember hitting anybody. Under my leather jacket I still clutched the Nikon. The last of my Las Vegas money had been given awa
y, spent or stolen except for a twenty-dollar bill hidden in my shoe. A cheap bathing suit took most of that and after I washed up in the open air showers at the beach I spent the last of it on breakfast and the paper.

  I needed work but didn’t qualify for any of the jobs listed in the classifieds. My only work experience had been taking pictures of toddlers and infants and I didn’t think I could go back to that. I walked up and down Main Street looking for Help Wanted signs but didn’t see any. At a dozen stores I asked to fill out an application but when I admitted that I’d spent the last five years in prison they couldn’t get me out the door fast enough. Nobody wanted someone a little down on her luck. I was feeling pretty low about myself. I didn’t mind starting at the bottom. I would have felt happy being tall enough to reach up to the bottom.

  My stomach began to eat its lining after sunset. Hunger is a problem solver. You can have a million troubles but if you don’t eat, hunger is the only one that matters.

  Across the street a steady procession of Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches rolled up to a restaurant’s valet parking. White block letters spelled out a nouvelle cuisine name on the awning. Nobody stopped me when I walked through the glass doors and stood near the bar area to the right. I didn’t sit anywhere, just stood around like I was waiting for somebody. The faces at the bar and across the partition in the dining-room had that airbrushed quality of having emerged from a television set. Everybody was young or played themselves ten years younger. You could hear the jangle of platinum credit cards with each step. Even those who dressed informally – and LA is the informal dress capital of the world – wore their jeans, bomber jackets and baseball caps with the carefully studied intent of costume design. Most galling of all each of them drove cars worth more money than I’d ever made in my life.

  When I worked up the courage I backed to a bar table vacated by a party of four and jammed bread sticks into my pockets a fistful at a time. I didn’t get more than two steps out the front door before I heard someone shouting at me from behind. I took off running. The bread sticks might have been worth less than a quarter but people have been arrested for less and theft was a violation of my parole. The shouts kept up for about fifty yards and stopped just before I veered onto a street that would take me over a parking fence and out to the beach. What stopped me from jumping the fence was my name. It had been the last word called out before whoever chased me pulled up lame. I eased an eye around the corner of the building to observe him. From the shabby look of his jeans, windbreaker and tennis shoes he didn’t work in the restaurant and didn’t have the money to patronize it. He walked with a winded gait, clutching his hand to his ribs to cover the stitch the run had given him. I didn’t recognize him at that distance but maybe I’d met him while I’d been drunk and just didn’t remember. He had some size to him but most of it was out front where he could see it hanging over his belt. I couldn’t see the gain in waiting to hear him out but curiosity wouldn’t let me do the smart thing and disappear.