Broken Heart (13 page)

It was Melanie Craw.

‘At the risk of sounding like an old, nagging wife,’ she said, by way of a greeting, ‘you have a doctor’s appointment in an hour. You remembered, right?’

I’d forgotten all about it.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Don’t bullshit me, Raker.’

I was in the kitchen now. From where I was, I could see the untouched bottle of antidepressants on a shelf in the kitchen.

‘Do you want me to drag you down there?’ she said.

‘Look, Craw, I –’

‘Let’s not forget, at the end of last year, you hit the deck like a rag doll. You need to check in with someone, Raker, just to get the okay. If you
don’t
do this, if you keep on pretending that what went on last year didn’t happen, next time you might black out and not wake up again.’

‘I think that’s unlikely.’

‘You’re a doctor then, are you?’

‘Craw, I’m not going to the –’

‘Stop being so bloody selfish.’

Her words hung there on the line between us. For a second I thought of the moment with Alex Cavarno at the Comet cinema the day before, and then the guilt started to pool in my stomach again.

‘Okay,’ I said.

‘Good. Let me know what they say.’

And then she was gone. Basically, it was Craw in a nutshell: five seconds after telling me my health was both our
concern, she’d hung up on me. I looked at the time, and then over at the four horror films.

For now, they’d have to wait.

My doctor was a small Indian man in his late fifties called Sunil Jhadav. He had an immaculate silver beard and old-fashioned, horn-rimmed spectacles. The first time I’d been in, after I’d blacked out, he’d set up an appointment for me every three months, ostensibly so he could write me a fresh prescription for the antidepressants I never took. But I missed the last one, and I’d only made the one before that because Craw had happened to have a day off and told me she was going to drive me.

‘How have you been since February?’ he asked.

If it was a jab at me, he’d disguised it well.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Headaches?’

‘No.’

‘Any difficulty speaking, or understanding people?’

‘No.’

‘Ever feel like you’re going to be sick?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

He checked my heart and then moved on to my blood pressure. After that, he looked over some scarring I’d sustained to the head, shone a penlight into both my eyes, and then stepped back, rolling his chair out from under his desk.

‘Any more blackouts, Mr Raker?’

‘No.’

He sat down. ‘I’m not sure we ever discussed your medical history.’

I just looked at him.

‘It makes for colourful reading, I must say. Injuries to
your back, your hand, you’ve been stabbed in the stomach, you even had your heart stop on the operating table. Did I ever ask you what it was you did for a living?’

I briefly considered lying about my line of work, but he’d read my medical history. He was smart enough to know that I wasn’t holding down a job in retail.

‘I find people,’ I said.

‘Find them?’

‘People who are missing.’

‘I see.’ He adjusted his glasses and slid back in his seat. ‘And that appears to be quite dangerous work.’ He studied me. ‘Are you having trouble sleeping? You look … tired.’

I shrugged, recalling the night I’d spent watching Hosterlitz’s movies, and the way I couldn’t stop thinking about them afterwards – their themes, what linked them, the way the camera sat there and watched, the dream I’d been left with afterwards, when I’d dropped off.

‘Is that a yes?’ he said.

‘I happened to have a bad night last night.’

‘I see. Any particular reason?’

‘Just work.’

‘I see,’ he said again. ‘Are you feeling depressed at the moment?’

‘No.’

His head rocked to one side and he pursed his lips, like he was having a conversation with himself. ‘Do you mind if I ask whether you have any family?’

I frowned. ‘I have a daughter.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘No.’

‘No wife or partner?’

‘My wife died.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. What about brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

‘You’re an only child?’

‘Yes.’

‘Parents?’

‘What’s the relevance of this?’

He nodded again, this time more forcefully, as if my answers were helping cement whatever conclusion he’d reached. ‘How long ago did your wife die?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with anything.’

‘Mr Raker,’ he said, his voice suddenly softer. ‘I don’t know how honest you’ve been with me, but I’m guessing not very.’ He waited for a response, as if he expected me to fight him on it. ‘You’re alone, you’re tired, you can’t sleep, you may even be having a delayed reaction to the trauma of burying these people you cared about. You were diagnosed with PTSD back in November, you had chronic fatigue, were probably depressed. As a result of that, you were referred to a psychologist, yet I can see from your notes that you never turned up to any of those appointments at the hospital.’ He stopped again, steepling his fingers in front of his face. ‘It’s difficult to move forward if we don’t know precisely what is wrong with you, and earning a living in a world where, as a matter of course, you’re attacked with knives, and sustain blows to the head … well, I can assure you, that isn’t going to help you recover what you’ve lost.’

‘What I’ve lost?’

His eyes strayed to the scarring on my head, to other scars he knew I had on my body. ‘I used to have a friend, back in Mumbai, who worked as a detective for the Indian Police Service. He joined after his brothers were killed in a house burglary. He never wanted to be a policeman, not really,
although I dare say he was good at it, but he thought the police service might bring him some answers; maybe he thought it would address the emptiness he felt. But you can’t bring back the dead, Mr Raker, and trying to do so … well, that will make you careless. My point is, this job of yours might cost you your life. And maybe it won’t be because you get stabbed. Maybe it will be because you’re sick.’

‘I’m not sick.’

‘How do you know if you don’t turn up for your appointments and don’t take the pills I prescribe you? Mr Raker, I don’t know you. I don’t know how long your wife has been dead. But the only reason to do the kind of work you do is to make something right.’

He looked at me, almost as if he pitied me.

‘Grief is a sickness, Mr Raker. My friend – the one I was just telling you about – he was so devastated from the loss of his brothers, he felt so much the need to avenge them, the grief he carried was so heavy, that he tried to take down a gang of four thieves one night in November 2010, entirely on his own.’ He shrugged. ‘They lured him into a dead end, and then they shot him in the back of the head.’

We stayed there in silence for a moment, looking at each other, and then Jhadav opened up his hands. ‘In the end,’ he said quietly, ‘my friend chose not to see what was coming. Just make sure you don’t do the same thing.’

PART TWO

00:06:44

‘You know what they used to call this place?’

Ray Callson is looking out of a window to the left of him. Five floors below, traffic is backed up along Wilshire Boulevard in a long, unbroken line. Nothing moves out there. It’s just late-afternoon sky and the shimmer of exhaust fumes. Above the whirr of the camera and the hum of air conditioning, it’s possible to hear car horns and police sirens in the distance, and there’s music closer by – the deep thump of a bassline.

He turns back to the camera. ‘Do you know?’

‘Do I know what?’ a voice responds.

‘What they used to call this place?’

‘You mean, Los Angeles?’

‘Right.’ Callson glances out of the window again. ‘When my old man moved here – back in the early twenties – they used to call it the “white spot of America”. Did you know that?’

‘No.’

‘Yeah. LA was billed as this Protestant promised land where you could live in peace and harmony among your own kind. But it was all bullshit. Blacks, Latinos, Asians – they were already here. I mean, this place doubled its population in the twenties – you think that happened because only white people came to live here?’

‘Do you think it’s better or worse now?’

‘LA?’ Callson tears his eyes away from the view and looks back at the camera. ‘I don’t know. All I know is that everything in this place is a lie. Always has been, always will be. By the middle of the twenties, they had six hundred brothels in the city. You could get your dick sucked by another man at a Ninety-Six Club a few blocks from City Hall. We had communists running around Boyle Heights. We had elephants and circus freaks luring people out to housing developments with the promise of a free lunch, and people gawping at the corner of Wilshire and La Brea because they’d never seen neon signs before. Some white Protestant promised land, huh? All it was, all it is, is a magic show. LA was a lie back then, and it’s a lie now. There’s no black or white here. There’s just grey.’

‘You sound frustrated.’

Callson smirks. ‘Yeah, I guess I am. That’s something you learn to get used to as a homicide detective. The frustration. Thirty to forty per cent of all the cases you take on, you won’t solve. That’s just a fact. You gotta face reality.’

‘Is that because people lie?’

‘Not always.’

‘But most of the time?’

‘Yeah, most of the time people lie. You spend enough time in this city, I honestly think it gets into your blood. It becomes a part of who you are. You’re lying without even realizing. I mean, what do you expect from a place where men and women stand around on studio lots, in make-believe sets, and get paid to pretend they’re someone else? Of course they’re gonna lie. They’re doing it every day of their lives. It becomes second nature.’ He shrugs. ‘This city is just a magic show. Everyone’s got a trick.’

17

In the end, I decided to get out of London.

I stayed in Bristol, at a hotel near Temple Meads station. It was one of the last rooms I could find, as the bank holiday weekend had accounted for everything else. After checking in, I took a walk through the crowds at the Harbourside, found something to eat, then returned to the room, keeping the lights off and the air conditioning on, and sat at the window, looking out to where the spire of St Mary Redcliffe rose upwards like a pale blade out of the earth. Six floors up, everything below me seemed stilled, more obscure; all suggestion and shadow.

After a while, I made myself some coffee and grabbed my rucksack off the floor. Inside were the four horror films Korin had made with Robert Hosterlitz.

The set had cost me £44, which seemed steep for four movies no one else in the city had even looked at in the entire time they’d been on sale at Rough Print. The owner suggested a book too,
Dia de los Muertos
, about the European horror movie industry in the 1970s and 1980s, which included a section on Hosterlitz – or, rather, Bob Hozer, the alias he’d gone by during that time. I’d decided to take it when I saw that it had a chapter on the
Ursula
films and a transcript of the panel Korin did at the Screenmageddon convention in 2011. That had been the same panel that both Marc Collinsky and Louis Grant had attended. In the end, it proved to be the only public appearance Korin would do at an event like that in the years after she walked away from acting.

The four films were all shrink-wrapped and sported equally lurid covers.
Ursula: Queen Kommandant
had a full-length colour photograph of Lynda Korin in her mid twenties, in a ridiculously tight shirt, buttons open far enough to reveal the curves of both breasts, a swastika stitched on to one of her pockets. Above a title awash in blood was a tagline:
She’ll make you scream for more!

The cover for
The Drill Murders
was grisly – a close-up shot of an unseen assailant, just his hand visible, about to start drilling into the head of a screaming woman. It was the Italian version of the film, so I understood nothing of the copy on the back, but a ridiculous tagline on the front, written in English –
Drill, drill, drill! Kill, kill, kill!
– helped to offset the gratuitous, somewhat distressing nature of the photo. When I checked the credits, I saw Hosterlitz again listed as Bob Hozer – as cinematographer, editor, writer and director – and another name I recognized in the cast: Veronica Mae. Out of interest, I logged on to IMDb again and found a photo for her, taken in her twenties. She was petite, pretty, with long, sandy hair and a tiny beauty spot at her nose. It was her eyes that stood out, though – they were a startling green, like chips of jade.

The covers of the other two films I’d bought – the English version of
Axe Maniac
, and
Death Island
in Spanish – were basically just repeats of each other: both featured a generic, buxom woman running away screaming, one in a forest, another on a sandy beach fringed with palm trees.