Skinflick Read online

  “Zoom, you asshole!” he shouted. “Zoom—remember?”

  “Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Spence,” the cameraman said.

  Spence looked at the ceiling. “Herman, where are you when I need you?” He sighed, wiped his face. “Okay. Get it right this time.” He turned back to the mummy case, leaned his hands against it, whirled, repeated the fist-shaking, the crazy laugh. He held the pose. The cameraman worked something on the camera. Spence held the pose. He broke it.

  “Cut.” He untied the cape and let it fall, made a face and took out the teeth. “That gets it.” He dropped the teeth into a pocket “Strike the mummy case.”

  “Don’t you want the blood running out of it?” The boy with the Adam’s apple came into the light holding a floppy script, blue covers, big brass brads. “That’s the next shot you wrote down here.”

  “Not while I’ve got actors sitting around getting paid,” Spence said.

  Derisive laughter came from the dark.

  “We haven’t got ketchup right now, anyway,” Spence said. “I’ll smuggle a couple bottles out of Fatburger after supper.”

  “Cheap, cheap!” voices chanted from the dark.

  Spence took off the domino. “Move it out,” he said. “And let’s have some worklights for a minute, okay?”

  Someone warm, smooth, and naked brushed past Dave. Light switches clicked. The big brick room had walls of assorted colors. Against a red section, a dummy slouched in an antique barber chair. Above a wing collar, the dummy’s plaster throat was cut. The head lolled back. Memory said something to Dave about a demon barber of Fleet Street. Manacles and chains draped a blue section of wall above a wood-frame torture device with ropes and a big wheel—a rack? A brazier with fake glowing goals had fake branding irons sticking out of it.

  The switcher-on of lights brushed past Dave again. He was perhaps twenty, blond, smoothly muscled as a Roman marble. He wore his economical young flesh as unerotically as clothes. He went and sat on a butt-sprung daybed with a tattered spread of black velvet sewed with sequins. The girl from the mummy case sat there too, smoking a cigarette, legs crossed. The boy picked up a Coke can from the cement floor and drank from it. The boy with the Adam’s apple, and another boy even younger and wearing earphones with the cord dangling, got the mummy case onto a two-wheeled dolly to cart it out of the way. Spence called to them:

  “Easy. Don’t bang it around. I want to use it in my next billion-dollar box-office smash. As a bathtub full of champagne.”

  “Ginger ale,” one of the tall girls said.

  “How about a sports car?” the naked boy said. “Paint on lights and a grill. Tack on some wheels. Let it roll off a cliff and catch fire. Just like TV. Sensational.”

  “Varoom!” Spence said, studying a script. He flapped over pages. “Okay, where’s Inspector Hardcock of the CID?”

  A middle-aged man said “Hah!” and came out of a corner where a brass bed glistened against purple-flocked wallpaper. He tucked his script under his arm, put a deerstalker cap on his bald head, set a meerschaum pipe in his teeth. He wore a moustache and a tweed suit, and he chuckled.

  “This is fascinating,” he said. “Why don’t you film it in order?”

  “I’ll be lucky,” Spence said, “if I can get it in order when I edit it. Where’s the gun? I didn’t give you the gun, did I?” He went past the couch where the naked youngsters sat and rummaged in a curve-topped trunk that had been gold-leafed and stuck all over with glass jewels. He came up with a tin pistol and tossed it to the middle-aged man. He went to a tall flat, painted to match the brick wall. The flat had a door in it. “You come in here. Bursting in, you know? Only be careful. It’s only lath and cardboard.” He squinted at a pair of heavy-headed lights on standards that flanked the door. He looked around. “Randy? Do me a favor, baby? Get these out of here. Out the back. I’m tired of moving them for every shot.”

  The girl who had let Dave in went and picked up the lamps. She was strong. She brought them past Dave. They creaked and squeaked and nodded. The girl widened her mascaraed eyes at him. She muttered, “How the fuck did you get in? You’re going to be in trouble.”

  “It should happen to everybody once,” Dave said, and pushed open the door for her. The sun was bright and hot out there. Clumsy in the skirts and scarves, she wrestled the lights outside. They clanked and clashed. Bright metal tags were riveted to them. The tags read SUPERSTAR RENTALS. Dave let the door fall shut. Spence was lecturing the middle-aged man in the deerstalker cap.

  “You’ve discovered Doctor Dreadful’s House of Horrors at last. You’ve been running all over Soho in the fog looking for it. You stare all around. You’re appalled, right? We’ll keep cutting in shots of the mummy case, the torture instruments, the dead dummy, all of it. So take your time. Then there they are—the kids you’ve been trying to protect. You gape at them. Really shocked, okay? You’ve come too late, all right?” He turned. “Junie? Harold?”

  “Oh, shit, here it comes.” Harold set down his Coke on the floor and pushed his beauty up off the couch. He looked abused and resentful. “This is where I have to carry her, isn’t it?”

  “That’s rude.” The girl called Junie uncrossed her legs, bent, and stubbed out her cigarette on the cement. “You know how I diet and diet.” She got up, shaking back her hair.

  Spence said, “You come in from over there by the washrooms, holding her in your arms. You walk into camera range right past here, got it? You stop where the tape is on the floor. Only don’t look down for it, this time, okay? Feel it with your toes. You’re stunned. No expression. That ought to be easy. Just stare at the Inspector. Junie, you’ve passed out from pain, remember? So let your head hang back, way back. Be dead weight in his arms, right?”

  “Aw, Spence.” The naked boy trudged back to Dave.

  “It’ll be over before you know it,” Spence said.

  “I hope you’ve got a truss in that trunk,” Harold said.

  “That would look fetching in the sex scenes,” Spence said. “Bend your knees when you lift her. You’ll be fine.”

  Junie grinned. “Be thankful he never makes retakes.”

  “Never use that word in my presence,” Spence said.

  “Do I have to pick her up now?” Harold said.

  “Once for practice,” Spence said. “You don’t have to carry her till Hardcock comes in and starts looking around.”

  “Yeah, looking around slowly,” Harold said. He blew air out through his nose. Disgustedly he got into a half crouch and held out his arms. “Come on, Pudgy.”

  But Junie saw Dave. “There’s a strange man here.”

  “What?” Spence saw Dave too. He came over. “This is a closed set,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “To know where Charleen Sims is.” Dave took out his wallet and showed Spence his license. “She told people she had a job in films. You’re Spence Odum, right? She’s got a poster from one of your productions on a wall over her bed. In an apartment she left hurriedly ten days ago and hasn’t come back to. I don’t suppose your posters get around much.”

  “We’re very big in Possum Stew, Arkansas,” Spence Odum said, “and Gopher Hole, Nebraska. But not in Ninevah and Tyre.” He gave his wristwatch a pained look. “Listen, I’m on a very tight budget. I can’t hang around talking. Who?”

  “Charleen Sims,” Dave said, “or maybe Charleen Dawson.”

  “Never heard of her,” Spence Odum said.

  “I’m suffocating back here.” The middle-aged man opened the painted cardboard door in the painted cardboard flat. “If I have to turn this knob, I’ve got to use my right hand. The gun will have to be in my left hand.”

  “We’ll run through it,” Odum called without turning.

  “Blond, small, slender,” Dave said. “Possibly as old as sixteen but she looks twelve.”

  Odum clowned shock, eyes wide, fingers to mouth. “But—but,” he stammered, “that’s—why, that’s—degenerate!” He held an open hand out to the naked young pe
ople who laughed. “Do I look like that sort of man?” He turned to the big brick room, holding out his arms. The cameraman was grinning. So were the boys stowing the mummy case in a corner. “Do you see anything decadent about this operation, anything depraved?” He turned back to Dave, taking off the slouch hat, clutching it to his breast “I hope you won’t spread that opinion around. It could ruin my future with Walt Disney Productions.”

  Junie giggled. Harold and the crew guffawed.

  “It’s Charleen’s future that worries me,” Dave said. “She’s mixed up in murder. She may even have been murdered herself. Now, do you know anything about her?”

  The laughter stopped. Odum looked sober. “No. I don’t. I never met her, never heard of her. I don’t know where she got the poster. Everybody rips everything off these days. You know that. I wouldn’t use her. Too young. Truth.” He turned away, turned back. “Why would somebody murder her?”

  “Because she saw Gerald Dawson murdered,” Dave said.

  Odum moistened his lips. “Superstar Rentals?”

  “The place you get your stuff from,” Dave said.

  “I don’t know the girl,” Odum said. “Believe me.” He read his watch again. “Look, will you get out, now, please?”

  “I’ll be back,” Dave said and left.

  Blinded by sunlight, he was inside the Triumph before he noticed that Randy was in it ahead of him, in her hoop earrings and beaded false lashes. She gave off a powerful incense smell. “You want to buy me a drink?” she said in her husky voice. “Or do you want me to buy you a drink? Women’s lib and all that. We could have dinner. It’s not too early.”

  Dave still couldn’t see so he reached out and laid fingers on her face. Under the heavy makeup was beard stubble. He laughed and turned the key in the ignition. The Triumph started with a splutter of loud little valves. He backed out of the shadow of the white van. “I have to see somebody at the marina,” he said. “Do you like to eat at the marina?”

  “I like to sit and drink mai tais at the Warehouse and watch the little boats sink in the west.”

  “It’s those tiny parasols they attach to the mai tais.” The Triumph raced down the alley and into the street. “Poor butterfly and all that, right?”

  “’Neath the blossoms waiting,” Randy sighed.

  The decor at the Warehouse was barrels and cargo nets. On the wooden decks big pots of flowers perched on tarry pier stakes. It was three. Most of the lunch tables stood empty. The tourists had gone away with their neck-strap Minoltas full of out-of-focus blue water and white boats. The boats tilting around the long, narrow bay had sails striped red and orange. The moored boats sported blue canvas covers. None of these was Fullbright’s. Fullbright’s was over yonder. He’d visit it next.

  “No,” Randy Van said, “Spence doesn’t want to be fooled. He knows I’m a TV. Does he ever! If he could figure out how, TVs are all he’d use. But for obvious reasons, at least one girl has always got to be real.” He twisted the dinky bamboo-and-tissue-paper parasol off his drink in fingers with scarlet nails. He’d abandoned the turban and most of the scarves in the Triumph out on the lot by the big wooden tanks of koi fish. He smiled at Dave. “Boo-hoo,” he said. “Reality is always messing up my life.”

  “It can’t be a career,” Dave said. “He doesn’t make any money. He couldn’t pay union scale.”

  “Be serious.” Randy sipped at the big drink that looked like laboratory blood. “He pays eighty a day, but even if he paid scale, he shoots in two days. Then he lays off for months. My career is running a double-needle sewing machine in a loft full of lady Mexican illegals. They think they’re a persecuted minority. Hah!”

  “He says he never used a skinny little tyke called Charleen. Blond? Hardly out of grammar school. Did he?”

  “Never.” Randy shook his head. It loosened his wig that was shiny black Medusa curls. He set it tight with both hands. “I’ve worked in every flick he’s made, so I know. If he wanted to, he couldn’t. The Iowa hicks that line up Saturday nights on main street would be outraged. Down Alabama way, they’d burn out the theater.” Randy sipped his mai tai. A lot of lipstick had accumulated on the rim of the glass. “I mean, he wants me, but he sighs and hires big tits and lots of corn-fed ass. Like Junie.”

  “She looks like a college girl,” Dave said.

  “Pepperdine.” Randy nodded. “She does it for laughs.” He cocked an eyebrow. “You didn’t think it was hard-core, did you? Oh, no. She and Harold will roll around naked on that brass bed and kiss and moan a lot, but that’s all. The rednecks would burst a blood vessel if anything really happened. That’s what skinflick means—what you see ain’t what you think, but it makes you think it is.”

  “And he shoots them in two days?” Dave asked.

  “On a lavish ten thousand bucks. Can I have a cigarette?” Dave pushed his pack across the shiny planks of the tabletop. He lighted cigarettes for both of them. “Thanks,” Randy said. “Most of the budget goes on lights, equipment, studio rent. Music? He sneaks tape recorders into jazz clubs. Crew? College film students who want the experience and beg for the chance. Pay? What’s pay?”

  “Cameraman too?” Dave said.

  “Now,” Randy said. “Before, it was always Herman.”

  “Before what? Odum misses him. Where is he?”

  “Dead. Herman Ludwig. Some kind of refugee from behind the Iron Curtain.” Randy winced. “That expression always makes my teeth hurt. He was supposed to have been famous in Europe. Once upon a time.” Randy gazed out at the curvetting boats, the gleaming water. He blew away smoke. “He was shot. On the parking lot in back of the studio. Late at night. Those two days usually stretch their full twenty-four hours. Spence was setting up. Herman went out to bring back coffee. And somebody blew his head off with a shotgun.”

  “Who?” Dave said. “When?”

  “Nobody knows who. They just shot him and drove off. We didn’t hear it. The place is soundproof. The sheriff found out later that neighbors heard it but nobody phoned in. I got sent out to find him when he didn’t come back. I stumbled across him. Dear God.” Unsteadily Randy gulped down all that remained of his mai tai. “Talk about your hair turning white in one night!”

  “When?” Dave said again.

  “Oh—what? Ten days ago? Spence really misses him.”

  11

  LIEUTENANT KEN BARKER OF the LAPD said, “The Strip’s not even city, you know that. It’s county. You have to see the sheriff.” He sat behind a green steel desk strewn with file folders, report forms, photographs. It was in a room partitioned off by glass and green steel from a wide glass-and-green-steel room where telephones jangled, typewriters rattled, men laughed, coughed, grumbled. Barker’s nose was broken. His shoulders strained the seams of his shirt. His collar was open, tie dragged down, cuffs turned back. He was sweating. He drank from a waxed-paper cup printed with orange swirls. Shaved ice rattled in the cup. He set it down. “Christ, is this weather ever going to let up?”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Dave said.

  “Two murders a night? It’s damn near normal. You tell me how they could be more different—a broken neck in Hillcrest, a shotgun blast away out west in a parking lot.”

  “There’s a connection,” Dave said. “Spence Odum rents his lights and cameras and recorders from the company Dawson was a partner in.”

  “Don’t a lot of people?” Barker said. “How many outfits like that are there? From what you tell me about Odum’s operation, they sure as hell couldn’t keep solvent if he was their only customer.”

  “He was their only customer who had a cameraman murdered the same night as Dawson,” Dave said. “And that’s not all. Dawson was sleeping with a teenage hooker called Charleen something, who told people on the Strip she was about to get into the movies, and who had a poster from a Spence Odum picture on her wall, and who disappeared the same night as Dawson and Ludwig died.”

  “They go off,” Barker said. “The prowl cars see them ever
y night, like matches in the dark. And then they don’t see them anymore. Some middle-aged account executive with holes in his superego takes them on a expense-account jet ride to Vegas, some John, right? And strands them there. So they sit in some casino with a dead drink in one hand and a silver dollar in the other till the next John offers them twenty bucks, bed, and breakfast—and the next, and the next.”

  “Till they meet some crazy,” Dave said, “who carves them up and puts them in a plastic bag with your name and address on it. I thought of that.”

  Barker’s eyes were gunmetal color, about the same gray as his hair. They regarded Dave for a few seconds. “You are a terrible man,” he said. “Did you know that?”

  “You’ve got one now,” Dave said.

  Barker stood up, chair backing to deepen a dent in file cabinets behind him. “Skinny little blond. We’ve had her for a week. No ID.”

  The body didn’t make much of a rise in the sheet that covered it. It didn’t take up much room on the long steel slab the attendant in the green smock pulled on silent rollers out of a wall. Barker laid the sheet back. She had hardly any breasts at all. She was greenish pale except for the slash down her front made by the medical examiner and the cut where her scalp had been laid back and then replaced. The hair was the color of sun-bleached southwest hillside grass—between yellow and white. There were bruises on her throat, scratches.

  “Strangled,” Dave said.

  Barker opened a file folder. “Right. Also skull fracture. Also raped. And”—he pulled the sheet all the way down—“she once had polio. One leg shorter than the other.” Dave looked at it. It was sticklike, the knee a pitiful outsize knob. He took the edge of the sheet and covered the girl up again.

  “I don’t think it’s her,” he said. “Nobody mentioned any limp. One of my witnesses said she danced well. This one may have danced—I hope so—but it can’t have been well.” He called thanks to the attendant.