How Do You Like Your Blue-Eyed Boy? (7 page)

The only real published objection to the murder was in my series of articles in the
Weekly
. I received a few letters of support, and there were some phone calls to the paper. I wrote back to the people who wrote to me, asking them to write to the police department and tell them how they felt.

Nothing came of it. The cops kept their jobs, but I didn’t keep mine. A couple of days before my last article, I was driving home from Tempe. It was around midnight. I saw that a cop had pulled a driver over to the side of the road. The suspect was a young woman. I watched helplessly from my car as the cop shone a flashlight in her face, holding it just an inch or two from her eyes.
This is where we live
, I thought.

I told Tim I was quitting, that I didn’t think my work was doing anything to help me or anyone else. He tried to talk me out of it, but backed off when I told him that the things I had to witness were depressing me so badly that I was worried I might crack up again. He wished me well and we stayed friends. I still wrote the occasional music or book review for him.

Not knowing what else to do, I read a few books on home improvement and then started my handyman business.

By that time I was with Janine.

I met her because of Laurie. Although she played in Mara’s band, Laurie wasn’t a total punk. She had a kind of musical dual personality. There was a hippie under the pink hair-dye and ripped clothes. She’d go home after snarling her way through a gig at a punk show, and listen to a Joni Mitchell album before going to bed. Finally, she gave in and formed a band of her own, as a kind of side-project. A gang of sensitive neo-hippies, they played acoustic songs about lost love and the natural world.

Their first gig was at Higher Ground, a coffee-house in Tempe. I couldn’t think of an excuse not to go, and I was afraid that if I just blew it off Laurie’s feelings would be so hurt she’d have to write a song about it. Mara had no such qualms, and didn’t show, though she’d told me she’d be there. So I sat at a table on my own, drank herbal tea and tried to keep my face straight at the sight of Laurie actually wearing a dress.

The place was busy, though most people weren’t paying much attention to the band. One woman was, though. She applauded enthusiastically at the end of every song, and didn’t leave her seat once during the set. She was on her own. She was tall and blonde and looked kind of like Olivia Newton-John in
Grease
after she decides to become a slut, except that she was wearing a flower-patterned top and a fringed skirt.

We made eye contact a few times. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I wanted to talk to her, but I wasn’t sure how she’d respond. I was uneasily conscious of how I looked—all two hundred pounds of me, cropped hair, earrings, my tank top and shorts showing off my muscles, my tattoos—the military ones I’d had for years, the Tibetan ones I’d gotten more recently. I couldn’t tell whether an approach from me would please her or scare her.

Eventually she leaned over to my table and said, “You know the band?”

“Yeah. Well, kind of. The bass player’s a friend of mine. That’s why I’m here. I don’t know the others.”

“You like them?”

I wasn’t going to bullshit her, especially if it was obvious bullshit. “Not really. They’re good, but it’s not my kind of thing. Laurie plays in another band with another friend of mine, but it’s pretty different from this.”

“So what kind of music do you like?”

“Punk rock, mostly.”

She smiled. “I’d never have guessed.”

“Laurie doesn’t usually look as mellow as she does tonight. She normally dresses more like me.”

“What’s your name?”

“Andy.”

“I’m Janine.”

When the gig was over, I introduced Janine to Laurie. They talked for a few minutes, then Laurie said to me, “We were going to go get some dinner. You coming?” Seeing me look at Janine, she told her, “You’re welcome to come too.”

“Great,” said Janine. “Thanks.”

We went to Ichiban on University Avenue. Then Janine went home with me.

We talked for hours, then went to bed. She said, “I’m too tired to do anything. Let’s just sleep. Unless you want to jack off on my stomach.”

“Would you like me to?”

“Yeah. That’d be nice.”

I knelt over her, a leg on either side of her. She stroked my hips and thighs and played with my balls as I rubbed my cock. After I came, I lay beside her and rubbed my come into her skin, from her stomach to her tits. She whispered,
“That’s it. Rub it close to my heart.”

After a few weeks of going to see movies, hanging out in cafes, driving into the mountains, spending hot days and nights fucking in every way you can conceive of that’s legal (and a few ways that aren’t under Arizona law), she suggested that I move into her apartment. I did.

She had never had a job or needed one. Her parents had died and left her a house and a trust fund. She’d sold the house and moved from Santa Barbara to Phoenix, where the cost of living was low enough for her to live on the trust fund.

She had a real problem with my background. She was a pacifist, and couldn’t stand even the idea of violence. The fact that I’d killed people scared her, and it scared her even more that I didn’t have a guilt trip about it. She told me vaguely that she’d seen a lot of violence in her childhood—a family thing she didn’t want to talk about—and that consequently she’d always chosen placid or timid men who’d never even gotten into playground brawls in grade school. She said she couldn’t believe she’d ended up living with a trained killer, a professional. I was shocked when she said that, because I’d never thought of myself that way. But, when I considered it, I couldn’t logically deny that it was true. And it freaked her out when I admitted it and told her that I still wasn’t ashamed of it.

“You can deny it to yourself if you like,” I said to her once. “But I’m not that unusual. There’re lots of people around who seem just like you. But they’ve killed people, and now they’re just trying to make it.”

When Mara was killed and I started the classes, Janine was disgusted. We couldn’t even argue about it, it was all so black and white to her. She said I was training people to be no better than whoever had killed Mara. I told her that kind of sermonizing was the indulgence of a well-fed, overprivileged white girl. She got angry and said that we shouldn’t discuss it any more. And, most of the time, we didn’t.

THREE

It was a Saturday. Sometimes I worked on Saturday afternoons, but never in the mornings. I liked to sleep late. The band met for practice on Sunday mornings, so Saturday was the only day I could do it.

That morning, though, I was awake. I was supposed to have breakfast with Tim. Since I’d stopped working for him, we’d made a point of getting together at least once a week. I got up at nine—Janine was still asleep – dressed, and drove South to Cafe Arte.

Tim didn’t show. I called his house a couple of times, and got his machine. When he was nearly an hour late, I realized he wasn’t coming and I got irritated. I wondered if he’d flaked on me or if something had come up. I called my place to see if he’d left a message. Janine answered and said he hadn’t. Fuck it. I had a bagel and some tea and then left. When I got home I went back to bed and slept until one. When I got up, I got into my sweats and drove to Leininger’s Dojo on 32nd Street to work out. It was just after five when I got home.

“Have you seen the news?” Janine asked me as I walked in the door.

“No. What’s up?”

She came over and hugged me. “Thank God. If you have to hear it, I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“What?’

“Sit down.”

“Quit the drama. What’s going on?”

“This isn’t drama. Sit down.”

I sat on the couch. She sat next to me and held my hand.

“Tim’s dead.”

I just sat there and looked at her. Then I said, “He didn’t show up this morning.”

“I know. I’m so sorry.”

I didn’t know what to do, if I should say something, if I should cry. “What happened to him?”

She hesitated, not wanting me to hear it. “Somebody shot him. He was murdered.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do the cops know?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How did you find out?”

“Laurie called. She heard something on the news.”

I went to the bathroom and pissed. The piss was colored orange by the vitamins I took every day. Then I sat down and took a shit. Afterwards I wiped my ass, then washed my hands in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror on the medicine cabinet. I wasn’t old. At thirty-four, I sometimes felt younger than I’d felt ten years earlier. But I’d lost two friends in the space of eight months. More than a young man should. In my life I’d seen so many friends killed. I didn’t know how many and I was afraid to count.

I called the cops and asked them about Tim. They wouldn’t tell me shit. So I called Spike.

Spike was a journalistic legend, up there beside Woodward and Bernstein. Not that he’d ever brought down a government. His fame wasn’t based on one scoop, but on the countless major ones he’d pulled during fifty years in the business. An Englishman, he was already a respected investigative reporter in his own country when he emigrated to the US in his late twenties. He picked up a succession of awards, including a Pulitzer, and worked for newspapers and magazines on both coasts. He wrote feature articles as easily as he cranked out hard news copy, and was as likely to be assigned to interview a musician or actor as he was to be sent to a war zone.

Part of his legend involved Marilyn Monroe. He was one of a bunch of journalists who’d arranged to interview her at a hotel in LA. When his turn came, there were about a half-dozen others awaiting theirs. Spike went into her suite and didn’t come back out. After the scheduled twenty minutes, Monroe’s press agent went in to find out what was going on. He found Monroe and Spike talking and laughing. She said everything was okay and told her agent not to interrupt again. Spike stayed with her for seven hours. The agent and the journalists could hear them talking. Then there was just silence. But the press party was far from silent. Was Spike fucking her or something? When Spike eventually emerged, he just apologized to them for keeping her so long, then left. The press agent went into the suite, then came out a few minutes later to announce that Monroe wouldn’t be doing any more interviews that day.

Spike never told anyone what had happened. When his interview was published, it turned out to be a standard celebrity profile that gave no hint of anything personal between interviewer and subject.

Forty years later, he told me what had happened. Or hadn’t happened. He’d really hit it off with Monroe, and, when he’d finished the interview, they just drank and talked. Eventually she fell asleep in her chair. And for a long time he just sat and watched her sleep, just watched her and wished he could help her be happy. Then he stood up quietly and left.

I never met the man of the legends. By the time I met Spike, it was all over for him. In his seventies, he had arthritis, so he’d moved to Arizona for the climate. His marriage had collapsed and he had an alcohol problem so severe that he sometimes became delusional.

In spite of the mess he was in, the
Arizona Republic
hired him. Even if he was of no practical use to them, just having him on their staff gave them the kind of kudos that’s rarely the province of papers outside of New York, LA, Chicago or DC. They didn’t put him on any major stories—he mostly wrote political commentary or movie and theater reviews.

The reason for his nickname reflected the fact that he was an anachronism. In the Dark Ages of journalism, before the arrival of computers, they’d used a device called a spike to save articles that weren’t going in the next edition of the paper but might be used later. It was a short metal pole on a solid base. Journalists would keep it on their desks, and if a story was to be “spiked” they’d impale the typewritten pages on it.

Spike never learned to use a computer. He still used a manual typewriter. And he still used a spike. The typewriter and the spike sat on his desk along with two mugs—one for coffee and the other for whiskey.

I met him during my time at the
Phoenix Weekly
. It was at a press club awards dinner. I was there to pick up an award, and Spike was guest of honor. What a come-down for him—from Pulitzers and National Book Awards to regional affairs hardly better than high school prize—givings.

But if he was bitter he didn’t show it. After I’d gotten onstage and accepted my award and gotten back offstage, Spike came to the table where I was sitting with Tim and Janine. He politely introduced himself, told Tim that he really liked the magazine, and told me that he especially liked my stuff. “There are things that need to be said in Phoenix,” he said as he shook my hand. “I’m glad someone’s saying them.”

He gave me his card and told me to call him sometime. I did, and we met and had dinner or coffee pretty regularly. Sometimes he’d insist that we meet in a bar. I don’t drink alcohol, so on those occasions I’d sip soda and listen to him as he got drunk. I think he became quite fond of me, but mainly he liked getting to hang out with a young guy who admired him enough to tolerate his bullshit and humor his delusions.

“Spike? It’s Andy Saunders.”

“Hello, Andy.” After nearly fifty years in the US, his English accent still made him sound like he was just off the boat. “I’m very sorry about Tim.”

“Me too. That’s why I’m calling you. How much do you know about it?”

“Probably more than you.” He didn’t sound like he’d been drinking. I knew he had—he always did—but he didn’t sound like he was drunk. “What do you know?”

“Almost nothing. Just that he was shot. And of course the cops won’t tell me anything.”

“Mmm. They said plenty to me, though. I’m not working on the story, but of course I wanted to know. So I spoke to our heroic law enforcers.”

“Who did it?”

“They don’t know. And they don’t expect to find out. Apparently it was a professional job. A contract killing.”