Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [105]
“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