An Accidental Affair (34 page)

I said, “Zugzwang. Eight-letter word. That’s where you have me, Bobby Holland. In this game of chess, you have left me in that position. No matter what I do, I can’t win. Bravo.”

I squatted down next to Holland, grabbed him, and dragged him down into the frigid waters of the pool. He struggled until the water covered his face. I would’ve undressed him first, but I wasn’t the type of man who found joy in undressing other men.

“My pool is heated, Holland. I’m going to catch pneumonia murdering you. This is haphazard. Like throwing furniture into a truck and moving to Downey. Unsystematic and haphazard. If I had known that this was how this would end, I would’ve at least worn duck hunting boots. And I would’ve driven to your home in a car that wasn’t mine.”

He tried to fight the frigid waters, again his battle in vain. I stood over him like I was his conscience. Watched him struggle to breathe as spit gathered in his mouth and he was forced to swallow that spit to keep from choking to death on his own saliva.

“You have to have Regina. You need her fame. There is no substituting her type of talent. She’s bigger than the script. She will never be as large as her own brand. She’s Regina
Baptist
and she’s fighting every day to live up to the standards of being Regina
Baptiste
. Behind my gates, she didn’t have to be Regina Baptiste. She was the girl from Montana walking around in flip-flops and wrinkled jeans from the Salvation Army. Yeah, she still shopped there. She wore ten-thousand-dollar dresses on the red carpet, but at home she wore five-dollar jeans and tees.”

He kicked and splashed water in my face, but I pushed his head underwater, submerged his face for around thirty seconds, the water numbing my hands. When I pulled him up, he was shivering and twice as terrified, a man who could see his own cold, cold death on the horizon.

“Take my cars. Take my money. Slap me. I can deal with that, Holland. I can make more money. I can buy more cars. My wounds will heal and the scars will add character to my face. Be corrupt, I don’t care. But you went too far. You fed my wife coke. You fed her coke. She’s not your girlfriend anymore, Bobby. She’s not the girl from Montana you used as your eye candy. Regina is my wife. You shoved coke up her nose. I can’t forgive you for that.”

I put him under again, then brought him up and watched him struggle to breathe.

I waited until he could because I wanted him to hear every word that I said.

“You know that this deal wouldn’t be the end. You’d keep coming back. You’d bankrupt me. Or you would break Regina. You’d have her in Beverly Hills seeing a psychotic-and-Botox-faced shrink twice a week. You’d watch her drug up and waste away like so many other actresses have. You’d make her spindly, stick skinny, and dejected just to make a buck.”

I put him under again, that time for only fifteen seconds.

“The tape. Bergs and my wife. The tape of me beating Bergs. The tape you showed me. The video that I showed you. And the one where I beat Bizarro Bergs. Almost had forgotten about that one. We have enough tape to edit and make a feature film at this point. It’s getting to be too much. Too fucking much. I’m numb. But I applaud you. This session of sex, lies, and videotapes is Oscar worthy. Your best work to date. Bravo, Holland. You have directed this well. You might have figured out when to start this bullshit, but you just didn’t know when to stop.”

He made muffled sounds, did his best not to choke as he begged for his life.

“Bobby Holland. There’s no begging in blackmail.”

He shivered and closed his eyes and the begging, the supplicating continued.

“I didn’t beg you, did I? Probably would’ve done you a lot of good to stop at five mil and two cars. I would’ve complied. But five mil
two hundred and fifty
thou and
three
cars? You’ve over-bid on
The
Price Is Right
on that one. Payment requested became ludicrous.”

He prayed. When scum like Bobby Holland prayed, religion became a punch line.

“Take a deep breath, Holland. Take a deep, deep breath.”

He did and I took him under again. He had a new stench. The rancid aroma from terror dancing with horror overpowered the reek from the Seven Deadly Sins. The disgusting odor of helplessness came in third. I held him under for close to a minute. I held him under and each moment I looked down at him, as carbon monoxide bubbles escaped his lungs, I held down someone different. I held down Holland. I held down my wife for being so weak that she let Bobby Holland’s drugs seduce her into a so-called accidental fuck that was broadcast worldwide. I held down Mr. Holder. I held down Vera-Anne. I held down Hazel Tamana Bijou because she had sent a text to James Cameron and not me. I held down Johnny Handsome. I held down Bizarro Bergs. Then, once again, I held down Bobby Holland, the evil puppet master.
The bubbles escaping him became fewer. I felt him struggling. His neck muscles tensed. His back. His legs. My hands were again numb. He ran out of energy, didn’t fight as hard. Then he had a burst of energy and struggled once more. He fought to live. Again I brought him up and watched him suffer to remain amongst the living. It took another minute before he stopped suffocating. Right now he loved life more than he did my money. He wanted a lungful of desert air more than he did my wife. Now he appreciated the simple things in life. I dragged him to a corner and placed his head in the concrete wedge. I needed to open and close my cold hands, get my circulation going, find warmth. My legs and feet were doing better. But my hands were in and out of the water and the night air did me no more favors than it did Bobby Holland. He had to use his leg and neck muscles to keep from slipping back into the water. He shivered and couldn’t kick. All he could do was open his eyes, concentrate, breathe, and listen to me.

“I want you to feel what you put my wife through. I could have killed you right away. But you made my wife suffer for years. Now you have ruptured our marriage. We suffer. You suffer. Even if I did this all night, that would be too kind, you piece of shit. Be glad I’m nice.”

He was weak, but determined to stay alive. He got his feet underneath himself. I stood where I was and watched, wondered what good that would do. Hands taped behind his back, bound at his knees and ankles, he tried to hop away in fear. On the second hop, he fell and went underwater. I waded through the water, pulled him back up, and turned him face up. He struggled to breathe again, his chest expanding and contracting, begging for decent respiration.

He was in excruciating pain. And still his pain wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

The moonlight glowed in his terrified eyes.

I pushed him under the water again. This was tomorrow’s news. This would be the RSS feed that would be on fire for forty-eight hours. This would be what would cause the media to orgasm. There
was something else I knew, but couldn’t prove. But I felt it in the heart of my gut.

Someone had sent that explicit video of Johnny Handsome and my wife to my phone. They had sent the video to a phone number that only a few people had access to. The crew wouldn’t do that. Alan Smithee wouldn’t want that leaked. But it was leaked before the night was over. Bobby Holland was on the set. He had stolen my numbers from Alice Ayres. Maybe Alan Smithee had rejected Holland as well, and part of that was global retaliation. Same for Johnny Bergs. Holland had sent that video to my phone, had sent it to Hazel Tamana Bijou’s phone, and posted it online for the world to see. It had done damage to everyone that he had loathed. Bergs. Baptiste. Smithee. And me. As I gritted my teeth and held him under, it was all clear to me. My wife had rejected him. He’d had two years of pining over a love that had first cheated on him then celebrated that affair with a spectacular wedding made for a queen. She had broken the rules. When a woman left a man she was supposed to do worse, not better. When he had come on to her in Johnny Bergs’s trailer, that last rejection was too much to bear. She had laughed in his face and he had attacked her where she was the most sensitive.

Bobby Holland was the butterfly that had flapped its wings and caused a hurricane.

I remembered what Driver had said about murdering or killing a man.

He said a man was never the same once he took the life of another man.

But sometimes a man would never be the same if he let that man live.

He had fed my wife cocaine. He’d attacked her self-esteem and fed her cocaine.

He had fed her cocaine.

Cocaine.

I left him terrified, floating on his back, and eased out of the water. I hurried back to his office, pool water dripping everywhere. I stepped over the shattered Razzie and bloodstained carpet and took the cocaine from the top drawer of his desk. I took his packet and grabbed scissors to cut the plastic that housed the South American imported powder open.

When I got back to the pool, Bobby Holland had flipped over in my absence. He was wiggling like a fish, about to expire. I turned him over and he was happy to breathe again.

Happiness became strife when he saw me waving the Bolivian marching powder.

I said, “Benzoylmethylecgonine. From the leaves of the coca plant. Nervous system stimulant. Cocaine. For Eric Clapton, it was a wonderful song. Tonight, for Bobby Holland, the man who insufflated the drug, for what you did to my wife, this will be poetic justice.”

I cut open the end of the package, then used the scissors to bring out a small amount. I sprinkled the cocaine inside his nostrils, used the scissors as a makeshift spoon and administered it a little at a time. He knew his options. Sniff, sniff, sniff or get flipped over.

“I sat and listened to you talk. I let you ramble out your verbal manifesto. I gave you a chance to extricate yourself from this atrocious predicament. I didn’t hear one word of apology. Not one fucking apology. You took me for granted. I don’t fancy myself as being a tough guy, Holland, but I am. I might dress like I belong on the yard at Princeton, but that’s just my costume. Now. This is what I could do for you at this point. I could ask Regina to do a small part. A part that requires one day of shooting. And on that day of shooting, you’re to be barred from your own set. I could do that. But I’d never insult my wife by asking her to work for you.”

With each breath, eyes wide, he tried to not suffocate, and the drug absorbed into his mucus membranes lining his sinuses. He had to inhale the coke because all things living had to breathe. He had to
be terrified of getting a nosebleed, because that would do him in; he’d drown in his own blood. I told him that this was what he had done to my wife. This was what the video on his Mac had showed her doing with rolled-up banknotes and hollowed-out pens. He didn’t enjoy the blow now. Not when he was in water. Not when it would increase his heart rate. Blood pressure. Might make him vomit. Could make his muscles contract. Or he could pass out.

“You can take your last deep breath. Or you can go under and start drinking water. Bet you hate that you have a home with a pool. And before you start drinking, I just took a piss.”

Bobby Holland shuddered and took a deep breath, as deep a breath as he could with cold water and brisk air contracting his lungs. He gathered air and closed his eyes. Over five million dollars and luxury cars were no longer on his mind. All he had left was regret. Regret for fucking with me, the Londoner born in San Francisco. I wondered what that felt like, knowing this was his final moon, mine the last face, the last person he’d fucked over reminding him that Hollywood was built on secrets kept as quiet as a silent film.

“For now, here are words of comfort. I might go to jail for this. I know I will. And when I do, Baptiste will be free of both of us scoundrels. We lose. She wins. Say good night, Gracie.”

Then I flipped him over and pushed his head under water.

I was seconds into sending Holland into his watery grave when the lights came on in one of his bedrooms. The bedroom was on the opposite side of the home. He wasn’t home alone. Bobby Holland struggled, legs bound together, turned harshly, kicked like a mermaid, made water splash in my face and out to the concrete at the edge of the pool. Lights turned on in a hallway, seconds later in the kitchen. Somebody moved around then came to the back door. I lowered my body into the water, hid my face, and held Holland under. But the Tumi bag was on the ground. So were my shoes. The windows were closed. The night air was too cold. So I guessed that we
hadn’t been heard all evening, not inside of his office, and not out by the pool. Bobby Holland fought and I held him down. But I wanted to escape. For me there was no escape. I felt my heart beat, felt panic trying to kick in and take control, wondered if I would have to kill someone else just so I could finish my business with Bobby Holland. The sliding glass door opened and a Coca-Cola shaped silhouette appeared. As I fought to drown Bobby Holland, she stepped out onto the patio, but not into the moonlight. I held Bobby Holland’s head down and he fought to turn over and get air. I held him and punched him in the lungs. Right now I needed him quieter than a new tenant inside of an old graveyard.

Bubbles escaped his nostrils. He inhaled. He jerked. Then he stopped moving.

The silhouette stepped out into the backyard. A bare-naked woman in stiletto heels.

It was the silhouette of Regina Baptiste.

She called out for the dead man in the pool.

“Yngvar?”

It was the silhouette of Regina Baptiste, but relief came when I realized that it wasn’t my wife wearing that beautiful shape tonight. She had loaned it to a woman from another nation.

“You can not hide from me. I hear you splash the water. You try and scare me.”

The accent was both as soft and strong as it was glamorous and exotic.

It was a woman whom I had seen before, and for a moment I didn’t know from where. The fear of being recognized ran high and now I was breathing like I was gasping for air. Then it came to me in a rush that I had seen her attractive face earlier, but we had never met.

“Yngvar, it is so beautiful in America tonight.”