Shooting Elvis Read online

  I gave the key a turn, sprung the lid. Whatever it was, somebody had packed it up good. The lid opened to a wooden crate. The crate was nailed shut and stamped with that kind of writing the Russians use. I hunted around for a crowbar in Billy b’s studio, found a hammer, used the nail-puller to pry it open. The crate was packed with shredded newspaper. I scooped the paper out, uncovered the corner of something white and hard, couldn’t figure out what it was. It had some kind of ridge which I grabbed onto, pulled it up out of the crate, stared at it, turned it around, let it gently back down again. Clear enough what it was, though I hadn’t ever seen a Russian one before, was surprised it didn’t look so different. Porcelain, bowl-shaped, with a hole at the bottom. New and sparkling white. A kitchen sink.

  I thought, first the bomb in the briefcase, now this, a couple practical jokers, these guys deserve each other. An envelope was taped inside the lid of the case. I ripped it open. A note and key dropped out. The note was addressed to somebody named Fleischer. Said the real thing was hidden someplace the key unlocked. If Fleischer lived up to his end of the deal, he’d be given the address. Right away I knew I was screwed. Whatever was supposed to be in the case was probably stolen. The guy who stole it was trying to sell it to somebody else. He thought up this trick to protect himself in case his buyers tried to double-cross him but didn’t figure the double-cross would be murder. I was the only person left alive who knew about the trick. Frick and Frack saw me take the case. No way they could know the case contained a joke. They had to figure I had the real thing, whatever the real thing was. I could show them the note, but the note wasn’t even signed. They’d just say I made it up, stole the thing for myself.

  I repacked the sink, just like I’d found it, closed the case. It was quiet out in the loft. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how I could get back to my regular life even if I wanted to. I walked into Cass’s studio. The lights were off, she was asleep. The phone was in the corner. I pulled the line into the kitchen, called the police. It seemed like it rang forever. Then the operator came on.

  I said, “I have information about the airport bombing.”

  She switched me over to some guy sounded half awake.

  He said, “Name, please.”

  “This is what you call an anonymous tip. But I know who did it.”

  “Okay then, who did it?”

  “Two guys with mustaches.”

  “These guys have names?”

  “Of course they have names. Only problem is, I don’t know what.”

  “No problem at all. We’ll arrest every man with hair on his lip, then you can come down and identify for us, okay?”

  He said that real sweet, like I wasn’t supposed to know he was being sarcastic. I said, “They’re both about mid-thirties, drive a tan Chevy Caprice.”

  “License number?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Didn’t think you would.”

  “I know they did it.”

  “Can you tell me why you suspect these men?”

  “Can’t tell you that, no.”

  I heard a long and tired sigh on the other end of the line.

  He said, “Thank you very much for the information.”

  “Wait. You got a name?”

  “Sergeant Martinez.”

  I said, “I saw them do it. I’m a witness to the whole thing. But my life’s in danger, I can’t talk right now. You’ll hear from me later. I’ll identify myself as Madame Zero.”

  Then I hung up. The guy probably thought I was nuts, but if I came up with some information, he’d remember who I was. I let myself out of the loft, circled the building to the back alley, made a pile of my driver’s license and credit cards, everything in my wallet that could identify me as Mary Baker. I sprinkled on some lighter fluid, struck a match. The pile went up in a spurt of flame. Plastic melted, paper blackened and turned to twisted ash. Billy b was right. If it doesn’t work, you have to destroy it.

  7

  I took the key in the envelope that came with the case to Lieberman’s Locksmith Shop, asked the man behind the counter, “You have any idea what this key is to?”

  The guy was about seventy, had a sweet smile and tufts of gray hair growing out his ears. Must have been Lieberman himself. He positioned the key under a strong desk lamp, peered through the bottom half of his bifocals, said, “Unless I miss my guess, young lady, this key is to a lock.”

  “You couldn’t maybe guess what kind of lock?”

  “I could guess, but a needle in a haystack I could guess just as good.”

  “An old lock, a new lock, a house lock, an office lock?”

  “It’s from a Yale lock, that I can tell you for sure.”

  He motioned me to look under the light.

  “See, says so right here. Yale.”

  He handed back the key.

  “You wouldn’t want to rob anybody with this key, nice girl like you?”

  I was shocked, said, “No way!”

  “I didn’t think so, but this town, you never know for sure.”

  I lied, was surprised how easy it was, said, “You know how you sometimes find a key in your drawer you don’t know what it goes to?”

  As I was walking to the door, he called out, “Could be a portable lock, something a nice girl like you would buy in a hardware store, might put on a garage or a storage locker.”

  That narrowed the odds to about a million to one.

  I drove away, wondered how detectives found out these things. I didn’t know if there was some special school told them what to do, or maybe it was all job experience. I didn’t have any experience. Didn’t know what to do next. Spent the next couple days hanging out around the loft, took pictures of Cass, myself, waited to get arrested. If there was some matchbook school of correspondence taught detecting, I was ready to sign up.

  Then Billy b said, “What say we go out for Chinese?”

  I was surprised he asked, because he hadn’t said much of anything to me since that first night. He’d started a new close-up portrait of Elvis, spent most of his hours painting or staring at the canvas. He didn’t seem to know I dropped into his studio a couple times every day to watch him paint. He burned when he painted, lit from the inside by an intensity I’d never seen before.

  Billy b drove us a couple miles into Chinatown to a small restaurant he knew served Peking duck cheap. The restaurant looked like a cafeteria, all bright lights and formica. It was the first Chinese restaurant I’d ever been to had real Chinese people eating in it.

  “How come you never take photographs of me?” Billy b said when we were eating duck.

  I said, “What?”

  “Am I boring? Is that it? You think I’m boring?”

  I wanted to tell him I thought he was beautiful.

  “I was afraid,” I said.

  “Afraid how?”

  “I thought you’d get angry, would hurt your concentration.”

  “Just the opposite. I’m angry because you didn’t.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You have a boyfriend?”

  I thought about Wrex, said, “Not one I wouldn’t kill if given half a chance.”

  “Is that normal for you? Wanting to kill your boyfriends?”

  “Nothing normal about it.”

  “Good,” he said, and picked up the check.

  He took me to an art opening after dinner. It was the first thing like that I’d ever been to. A couple hundred people pressed into a series of small rooms, trying not to step on strange objects Billy b told me were conceptual art pieces. A tube of lipstick imprisoned behind the bars of a birdcage, sheets of Kleenex hung on fishing hooks, a long metal tube an intense guy with curly dark hair called a device for kissing. I laughed at that one, thought it was just what I needed next time I saw Wrex. Everybody wore black, drank white wine, seemed to be an artist or musician or writer in various stages of having or not having a career. Billy b introduced me around, said, “This is Nina Zero. Maybe you’ve heard
about her. A photographer. Explosive new work.”

  When I got him alone a minute, I asked, “Why are you saying that when nobody knows me and you’ve never seen anything I’ve done?”

  “You want to be successful, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t sure I did but said, “Sure.”

  “I’m creating a buzz about you. Talent may be one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, but success is one hundred percent promotion.”

  Before we left, a gallery owner came up to talk. Billy b didn’t have to introduce me. The guy already knew who I was. Said he’d heard about me a while ago, was always happy to look at work from new talent. He was a funny-looking little guy dressed in bright colors, name was Bobby Easter, had a gallery in Santa Monica. He gave me an appointment to see him the next day.

  Suddenly I had a reputation.

  * * *

  “Tell me about your family,” Billy b said when we got back to the loft.

  “Not much to tell.”

  He stood at his workbench, squirted colored lines from paint tubes.

  “Your mother?”

  “I love her.”

  “Your father?”

  “My pop’s all right.”

  He mixed the paints with a palette knife, brushed a fleshy color into Elvis’s cheekbone.

  “Tell me about your family,” he said.

  So I told him. Started with the furniture and knickknacks. The La-Z-Boy recliner for Pop, his garage full of work tools and hunting pictures, the .45 caliber revolver in the nightstand by the bed, his hard smell of machine oil and metal shavings. The pictures of Jesus Mom hung on the walls of the kitchen, hallway and bathroom, pictures full of beautiful forgiving and grace. The decoupage she did one Christmas, cutout pictures of the whole family pasted onto a wood board carved in the shape of a heart, varnished over with high-gloss. Her sweet-sick smell of soap and anxiety.

  Billy b fell into painting to the rhythm of what I said, his brush flowing with my words, falling still when the words wouldn’t come. I told him about the Lutheran church Mom and I went to until a couple years ago when I stopped going. I talked about going to junior college and dropping out because I couldn’t afford it anymore. I described how a typical night at my parents’ house was early dinner and three hours of television, Mom doing the ironing and Pop falling asleep in his recliner. The arguments, I left out. I didn’t say how my pop sometimes liked to hit people. That wasn’t something I wanted to talk about.

  “What’s your family like?” I asked.

  “Rich,” he said, as though that explained everything.

  There was something about the way he looked at his painting that I wanted to study and remember. I went to get my camera. His studio was lit by photo-floods. I clipped a couple to his workbench, lit him at the canvas. I moved around him as he painted, took shots of his hands, his waist, his face. It was sexy, the way he moved when he painted.

  I said, “Talk about your family.”

  He said his family lived in Malibu. His dad was a producer with a string of action-adventure hits in the sixties and seventies. His mother was a blond bombshell in the Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe mold, her movie career stalled by an unwanted pregnancy, meaning Billy b, and finally blown away by the generational changes of the sixties. He’d grown up calling movie stars auntie and uncle. His first experience with sex was under the expert direction of an actress living in the Hollywood Hills, an old friend of his mother’s who hired him to paint on the bottom of her swimming pool a half-nude portrait of herself as a mermaid.

  There was something else I wanted to be seeing from Billy b but didn’t know how to ask. I decided I should just say it. That should be part of the changes I was going through as a person. Part of the new person I was becoming. If I wanted something, I should feel free to say it.

  I said, “Take off your shirt.”

  He took off his shirt, continued to paint. Billy b had an unconscious habit of wiping his hands on the front and sides of his shirt, his chest was soon smeared with splotches of paint. I shot out the roll, loaded another. Just say it, I thought.

  I said, “Take off your pants.”

  “Okay, cool,” Billy b said, took off his pants.

  I concentrated on looking through the lens. I liked what I was shooting, a brightly lit man painting naked beneath the huge eye of Elvis. I shot through the second roll. When I pulled the camera away from my eye, out of film, he stopped being a picture I wanted to take. He was a naked man I kind of liked but didn’t know too well. I ran to get him a robe.

  Billy b painted another twenty minutes or so, ignored the robe but sipped at the whiskey I brought him.

  He said, “You ever read Milan Kundera?”

  “He’s the guy they made that movie from his book, right?”

  “Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

  He set aside his paintbrush, put on the robe, said, “Kundera once wrote something about kitsch. He said that no matter how we may despise it, kitsch belongs to the human predicament.” He walked up to the painting of Elvis, diagrammed the sentence on canvas. “I’m going to paint that right here, across Elvis’s face.”

  “Why kitsch?”

  “Part of my cultural heritage.”

  “I thought rich people had taste.”

  “Think about Donald Trump and say that.”

  When we stopped laughing, I was aware of a moment being approached. He gave me a look, and I gave him a look back suggested if he tried I wouldn’t hit him. I wanted to take Billy b inside me, surround his flesh with my flesh, in the same way a baby wants to put a newly encountered object in her mouth. I wanted to understand him.

  He kissed me very sweet at first, and I thought, Okay, this is nice. Before my thoughts went from nice to now what, the kiss deepened. My head started to spin, and then he had me naked in his arms and wondering how he got my clothes off so fast. It never occurred to me that any man could touch my body and know exactly what I was feeling, what I wanted to feel, how to get me from one to the other. It was like he plugged directly into my nervous system. He set off sparks of energy that could make me shake. I was amazed at how responsive I was when he touched me. The only time Wrex made me shake was with anger. He worked just hard enough to get me excited, so he could think yeah, he’s sexy, he’s good in bed, and then, bang, it was over. Sure, Wrex had a great body, but I’m sorry, even if you own a Ferrari, you’re not going to win many races when you’ve got a nine-year-old behind the wheel.

  “I’m going to paint,” Billy b said after, sitting up in bed.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep. That’s what men do after. They fall asleep.”

  “Sleep is boring. I’m going to paint,” he said.

  “Talk to me first.”

  “About what?”

  “You decide,” I answered.

  He talked about painting. I didn’t hear much of what he told me. The sound of his voice put me adrift, thinking about his lovemaking and how he was the most brilliant guy I’d ever met. My life had been pretty short of brilliant men up to then, so maybe that’s not saying much. By the time he got up to paint again, I was asleep.

  8

  I woke up staring at a reclining portrait of Madonna painted on the folding screen that separated Billy b’s bed from the rest of the studio. The covers on the other side of the bed were cold. Madonna was smiling, held a big black cigar in one hand, reached under her skirt with the other. I think she was supposed to be masturbating. The smell of paint was in the air, blankets, my hair, on my skin. My body was warm, heavy to move. The floor squeaked somewhere out in the studio. I rolled over, sat up, saw splotches of paint like animal tracks all over my body. The only clothing I could find around the bed was my underwear. I got up, stumbled around the partition.

  Billy b worked at his canvas. He didn’t look at me when I walked up. Just stared at his work, a blue-smeared paintbrush between thumb and forefinger. My clothes were scattered around his workbench. I put them on. He propped a
cutout stencil of the letter H on the canvas, brushed the interior blue. The words NONE OF US IS A SUPERMAN ABLE TO ESCAPE KITSCH were painted in blue block letters across the close-up of Elvis’s face. Billy b said, “Glad you’re up, wanted you to see me sign it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you helped create it.”

  “I did?”

  He dabbed black paint onto his workbench, selected a clean brush, dipped it into the paint. He said, “Something you should know.”

  “What?”

  “Women come in, watch me paint, and they want to sleep with me. I’m lucky that way.”

  “You mean women like me.”

  “Something else. I’m not into long-term relationships.”

  “You’re saying I shouldn’t expect anything else out of this, just one night.”

  He shrugged, like maybe, maybe not, met the canvas with the black-coated tip of his brush.

  I said, “Takes no guts to be honest the morning after.”

  “If you regret what happened last night, it doesn’t have to happen again.”

  I said, “Just tell me what you want, so I don’t get confused.”

  He stepped back from the canvas, dropped the brush into a jar of solvent, said, “That’s it, it’s done,”

  I collected my camera and portfolio, drove twenty miles south through the biggest nowhere in L.A., a city with a lot of places nowhere at all. Stopped at a phone booth to call my apartment, wouldn’t matter if the cops traced my call, no one would see me. The answering machine picked up second ring. My voice came on, sounding sweet and insecure, like it was really important the caller left a message, didn’t hang up on me. I punched in my access code, listened to the machine rewind. Got a lot of hang ups at first, then Wrex, sounding pissed off, saying, “Where the hell are you, goddamn can’t trust anybody, you trying to rip me off or what?” Then Mom, Wrex a couple more times, my boss at Hansel & Gretel’s, Mom asking where I was, my boss firing me for not showing up, Mom again, asking why didn’t I call her. That’s the one really hurt. No way I could call, explain what happened. The last message was from Wrex, not sounding angry at all, more like desperate, begging me to be reasonable. He said, “You remember where we met, couldn’t forget something like that could you? Know I couldn’t ever. I’ll be there tonight, six P.M., so why don’t you come, bring the case, okay? Nobody knows anything about you-know-what, so babe, please, just bring the goddamn case, okay?”