Mystery Girl: A Novel (14 page)

32

I WAS APPLYING
for temp jobs when Roz Lonsky called. It had been nearly a week since the incident in Koreatown. I’d spent it hunting for work and waiting on my wife, both with middling efforts and poor results. I had no idea where Lala had gone, or with whom, and I was beginning to wonder if I was better off not knowing.

Roz told me that Solar was doing better, somewhat. He was still in the hospital, but stable enough for visitors, and he’d asked for me. I was hesitant but she insisted. I was the only person he’d asked to see. At last, with nothing else pressing on my agenda, and with a mixture of morbid curiosity and guilty sympathy, I agreed.

Green Haven was in Pasadena. True to its name, it retired sedately behind a white fence and a deep lawn, with a long drive leading to a mansion in pseudo-slave-plantation-style, columns beside the door, and capitals over the windows. Tastefully screened by Italian cypress were a newer, more hospitalish building and a large parking lot. All in all, it didn’t seem like a bad place. The nurse at the desk was plumply pretty and polite, patients wandered freely over the lawn, and the room where they sent me to meet Lonsky was full of books and board games, with a nice breeze drifting through the screens. I was tempted to check in myself, but I couldn’t afford it.

I was also relieved to see Lonsky looking fine. He entered jauntily, nodding to the nurse, who was reading a gossip magazine by
the door, and smiled when he saw me. He was wearing a plain linen suit, a white shirt, and a cream bow tie, with cream socks and soft brown leather slippers. He shook my hand gravely and gestured toward a pair of armchairs, waiting for me to descend before hitching his creased trousers and taking a seat. I noticed that the chess set from his house was there on the end table between us.

“Yes, my mother was kind enough to bring my set from home,” he said and smiled at me. “I’ve been dying for a game, old foe. It’s good of you to come.”

“What? You know I can’t—”

“Perhaps this time, I’ll take you,” he said loudly, cutting me off, and then leaned in, sotto voce. “These rooms have ears, Kornberg. Keep your voice down and move any piece.”

I looked back at the nurse. She scratched her head and sighed as she turned a page.

“Fine,” I said and slid a pawn forward a square.

Solar smiled sadly. “A small move. Don’t feel inadequate. You tried your best. Her death is not your fault.” Then he shrugged. “Unless the pawn represents the penis, defeated by your wife’s defection.”

“My penis is fine, thanks. Solid as a rook,” I said. “But it’s true my wife and I are taking a break.”

“Then we are both alone,” Solar said. His knight leapt over his pawns and took its place on the field. “Work is a detective’s only salvation.”

“I’m not a detective…”

“Shhh…” Solar wiggled his finger. “Your move.”

Defiantly, I moved my penis pawn forward. “I’m not a detective. And the case is officially closed.”

“Wrong on both counts. True, you are an amateur. And you failed in your first assignment. Tragically so. But you are still my only hope. So what other choice do I have?” He moved his other knight out, jumping the pawn line, to join his brother on the field.

“You just said it wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know she was suicidal.”

“To be precise, I said you failed. Tragically so. But it’s not your fault. It’s mine.” He looked me in the eye. “I am probably the greatest detective of my generation and yet I did nothing to save the love of my life. Your move.”

“Love? I—I didn’t know you even knew her.” I saw myself clutching her by the tree, pulling her panties off in the dark hotel room, staring out at the empty ocean. “She was your girlfriend?”

“Not in the carnal sense. But I loved her nevertheless.”

I fingered a bishop, then changed my mind and pushed out a knight instead. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. But you can’t protect people from themselves. And the coroner closed the case.”

“I suppose that is true, Kornberg, however platitudinous. It is also irrelevant. She did not commit suicide. Ergo, the case is not closed. Rather, it has become a case of murder.”

“What? But I was right there. I saw…” I realized I was speaking loudly and crouched toward him. “I saw her jump with my own eyes.”

“No offense, but I would hardly describe your eyes as reliable.”

“You wouldn’t? Well, no offense to you either, but have you opened yours lately and looked around? You’re in the loony bin. That’s a place for people who don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Lonsky chuckled. “Humor can be refreshing in this dour setting. I consider it salubrious and generally welcome in an assistant, but only in judicious proportions. Now see if you can follow: certainly she was deranged, as am I. But that’s precisely how I know she could never have jumped. Just as I was unable to help her in part due to my own agoraphobia, so she too was deeply acrophobic.”

“Is that spiders?”

“She was desperately afraid of heights, Kornberg. A hotel balcony atop a cliff over a crashing sea? She could not have set foot on it. Not even to gaze at the moon.”

He gripped the arms of his chair and pushed himself to his feet. “You will have to excuse me. It’s time for my meds. My mother can
arrange your pay. Our first step is to build a dossier on the victim. A biography if you like, in your writerly terms. The background.” He waved a finger like a baton. “The reason for her murder lies buried in her past, Kornberg. Thus must we dig.”

He held out his gigantic hand, cracked and creased and stained as a catcher’s mitt. I gave him mine. As he squeezed it softly, I felt like a girl accepting her first dance.

“It’s true,” he said, “my personal feelings were engaged. That, along with my psychosis, may indeed have clouded my judgment. But now that she’s gone, this is just like any other case.” He laid the heavy hand on my shoulder. “A woman was murdered on our watch, Kornberg. We can’t have that. It’s bad for business.”

33

I WAS ON MY WAY
back out when the pretty front desk nurse stopped me and said Dr. Parker wanted a moment, if I didn’t mind. I followed her down a hushed hall to a white wooden door. She knocked reverently before showing me in. It was a big room, book lined and high ceilinged, with a marble mantelpiece and a large Oriental rug. Dr. Parker, whom I dimly recognized from the inquest, stood at the other end, behind a big desk, staring out french doors at the garden and surveying his domain. He turned.

“Ah, yes, Mr.…” He put on glasses and glanced down at file on his desk. “Cronenberg.”

“Kornberg, actually.” I held out my hand and began the long march as the nurse shut the door behind me. I had plenty of time to look him over on the way. He had wavy gray hair combed back from a distinguished forehead and the smooth good looks of a tan tennis player. White teeth and a white doctor’s coat over his suit and tie. He leaned forward and gripped my hand, revealing the thick gold Rolex on his wrist, then sank back into the depths of his
leather command chair while I plopped into one of a smaller upholstered pair.

“Thanks for stopping in,” he said.

“Sure.”

“It’s unusual, of course, for me to meet with a patient’s visitor,” he went on, “but Solar is hardly the usual patient.”

“I understand,” I said, though I didn’t. What did this guy want?

He took his glasses off and sighed. “The death of a patient is always terrible. Mona’s was tragic. In many ways I feel I failed her. Her loss will be with me always. And I know how much she meant to Solar as well. Don’t forget, I’m his doctor too, although he sometimes forgets it. He is quite brilliant, but he is a sick man and in this case utterly without objective judgment.” He looked me in the eye, half pleading, half accusing. “She committed suicide. You know that better than anyone.”

“Yes,” I said. “I do.”

“She was young, beautiful, bright, but she was deeply wounded. She swung from manic highs to suicidal lows. She’d made other attempts, which I doubt Solar knows.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because if he persists in believing her delusions, if he takes them as his own and allows himself to become unhinged by grief, the consequences could be severe, another breakdown, perhaps a real psychotic break. I’m asking you as his friend, to try to calm him down, rather than, let’s say, aggravate the condition. He knows she wasn’t killed. It’s just his guilt driving this. Something we can all understand, I think.” He peered at me, this time with a look more like sadness. “The fact is, between her childhood, her husband, and her own demons, there was nothing anyone could have done. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. “I understand completely.” I stood and put out my hand, which he took warmly in both of his. “Just curious,” I said. “You mentioned a husband. I didn’t know she was married. Is he still in the picture?”

“You haven’t heard? Her husband was an obscure avant-garde filmmaker. He blew his brains out, right in front of her.”

34

I TOOK THE CASE.
Why? Guilt, I suppose. And curiosity. I felt as though I’d failed her, but how? What had she wanted from me? I’d failed Lonsky too, in my first and only mission, and betrayed him, however unknowingly. I knew their ideas were total nonsense, the love song of two loons. But I felt an obligation to help, if only by playing along a little more.

And then I suppose there were all the things I couldn’t help, my own unsolvable case. My life had suddenly become such a complete and total mess that fleeing into someone else’s fantasy world seemed like a relief.

Besides, I needed a job. Clearly, no one sane was going to hire me.

35

THE FIRST STOP
in my investigation was the video store. I wanted to consult Milo.

“Zed Naught?” He thoughtfully scratched an armpit, where his finger found a small tear in his T-shirt’s seam. The video monitors played
Sullivan’s Travels.
A customer wandered up with a stack of Pixar movies and a little kid in tow.

“Be right with you,” Milo said, sniffing his finger meditatively. “Hmm, Zed Naught…” The kid knocked over a stack of used DVDs and Dad bent, sighing, to retrieve them.

“He shot himself,” I offered.

Milo snapped his fingers. “Zed Naught!”

“That sounds familiar,” I said.

“
Ladbroke Grove,
” he said, and dashed into the back.

“Excuse me,” the aggrieved customer called. “I’m trying to rent these?”

“I’m helping someone, sir,” Milo answered. Giggling, the child knocked the stack of videos over again and the father looked at me beseechingly, begging me either to help him or kill him. I knelt to gather discs until Milo reemerged.

“Not there. It’s off the market. We only have this.” He handed me a VHS tape with a torn cover depicting a cartoon woman with large breasts, demon eyes, a serpent tongue, and blond beach hair.
Succubi!
The credits listed Zed Naught as director and the screenplay by Zed and Mona Naught. The unpromising tagline read, “They’re Hot, They’re Bi, and They’ll Suck Your Soul Dry!”

“If you want to know anything else,” Milo said, nodding upward while the dad listened in confusion, “you’ll have to ask the man upstairs.”

Although his video store was my second home, I had never been up to Jerry’s apartment, but his long reign as the ailing king banging his cane on the floor to summon soup had given him an aura of wonder, and I was excited when Milo told me that an audience had been granted for later that afternoon.

His place was tastefully threadbare and cluttered in a manner keeping with an old, gay upper-middle-class intellectual with good taste and poor health who had lived in the same place for thirty years. The walls crawled with culture: books, records, DVDs and CDs, even a metal cabinet full of film reels and a 16mm projector standing like a shrouded Futurist sculpture in the corner. Underneath the rows of paintings, drawings, and framed photos, the walls were painted bold colors, now mellowed, chipped, and faded, crimson, gold, sky blue. The once blond and modern furniture was old and worn. The curtains were drawn against the sun.

Milo said, “Just a minute,” then left me on the couch for what seemed like a very long time. I heard barking from beyond the walls. Then, in the distance, I heard the clop of a cane, a sound I knew from below. The knocks grew louder, like the stately gait of a stallion approaching, and a high steady wheeze reached me, a whistling that rose louder and higher. At last, the door opened and Milo emerged, wheeling a small oxygen tank, followed soon after by Jerry, the master of the house, leaning on two canes and breathing through a clear plastic mask, trailed by the trotting pooch.

I stood and put my hand out, but he ignored me, focused on reaching the recliner across the room. I had expected older and thinner, but he somehow looked shorter too, littler all over, as if time had melted him down to an ancient child. His skull floated in a cloud of white hair. His teeth and eyes jutted out, white and blue. His hands shook, ribbed with blue veins. The fingers bristled with rings. He didn’t acknowledge me but it was clear he’d dressed carefully for my visit in a blue shirt and white slacks with a black scarf knotted around his neck. As he lowered himself deliberately into the chair, I noticed a bottle of water, an inhaler, and a pair of glasses ready on the table. The dog leapt into his lap.

Milo bent over him and spoke loudly, pointing at me: “Sam is curious about Zed Naught. Zed Naught!”

Jerry lifted a withered hand and I jumped up to shake but he ignored me again, and pointed at the inhaler, his arm wavering like a twig in a storm. Milo removed the mask and handed it to him. He drew deeply and released a long sigh, then took a tiny sip of water, slid the glasses on, and finally aimed his bright, wide eyes at me as if surprised to find me there on his couch. He smiled a deathly grin and spoke, in a pleasant, even tone:

“Actually, he was born Johannes Zachary Naughton, in 1950 to an English military officer stationed in Bavaria and a local woman of the minor aristocracy. He attended the Slade in London and studied painting, but also acquired a used sixteen millimeter camera and
made some early shorts, like music videos really, with some obscure rock bands, which he then scratched, painted, drew on, and burned. Since the films were silent, he had to play the records alongside the screen. His first feature was ambitious. Known as
Ladbroke Grove,
it was a four-hour black-and-white opus featuring two women and a man, all small-time players in the music and art scene at the time, and set in a rambling dilapidated house in London. Financed by drug dealers, the film’s original negative was seized in a tax case following the producer’s arrest, but its notoriety grew after one of the female stars, a well-known punk hair stylist named Maxi Paddington, died from an overdose. The other one is Daemonica Uta-Floss, the former model, who you might remember as the singer from Sküm, who later married Dick Fungus of Putrid Corpse.”