Mystery Girl: A Novel (22 page)

“Holy shit, here we go! Black Mass!” Milo said, opening a bag of chips.

“You mean unholy shit,” I corrected him.

The onlookers hail them. The Priestess disrobes. She is completely nude except for dagger heels, and completely shaved. She lies down on the altar and a couple of worshippers chain her with cuffs that dangle from it. Then the Satanic priest, Zed, drops his robe. He is nude as well.

“Uncircumcised, interesting,” Milo said, crunching a chip. He handed me the bag but I declined, as Zed begins vigorous intercourse
with Mona and the worshippers chant and clap. There is some wilderness footage of wolves crying, forests burning, asteroids vaporizing into the sun. Back to Zed, who turns, tumescent, on the priestling, who worshipfully holds out the pillow. He ejaculates over the host.

“Nachos!” Milo shouted. The crowd in the shop went howling mad. Warriors high-fived. Wizards wailed. I thought I caught a glimpse of MJ hugging Bluebell, snuggled in her cleavage.

On screen, a volcano erupts. A comet crashes. A toreador slaughters a bull. An ax splinters a door while a girl screams. Lava spurts and flows, igniting the darkness. It drips into the sea and becomes glass. An island is born. Then a worshipper, with a clown mask under his hood, slits the rabbit’s throat and lets it bleed into a chalice.

“What the fuck? I’m going to have nightmares,” I said.

“That was unnecessary,” Milo agreed.

Zed breaks the host into pieces. Still nude, he climbs onto a throne that I recalled as the chair Kevin lounged in during my visit, and the congregation lines up. Each kneels to eat a piece of defiled host, sip bunny blood, and plant a soulful kiss on Zed’s hairy bottom.

“What the fuck?” I groaned again.

“That my friend, is the devil’s kiss,” Milo whispered.

Then the congregants gather around the altar, dropping their robes, and as the music soars and dies, they approach the masked priestess, to worship at one of her three open gates.

53

THIS TIME THE CREDITS
rolled in silence. Someone turned on the lights. The community was now strangely subdued. Whether due to substance overload, moral queasiness, or just shooting their aesthetic
wad, they seemed lethargic, sated, even depressed, rather than whipped into the orgiastic fever I’d feared. The White Wizard was downcast, picking sparkles from his beard. Bluebell was still topless, but she now sat on the carpet hugging herself, as if she were cold. MJ was nowhere in sight.

“Well,” I said finally to Milo. “I can see why this was kept secret. It’s a real buzzkiller. Thank God I don’t have to explain to Lonsky how the love of his life was a nasty ho.” Despite the evidence, I found it hard to believe myself: this was the real Mona, the girl I’d found and lost, studied and mourned? “I quit that job just in time.”

“Here’s to Buck Norman and his shitty movies,” Milo announced, uncapping another beer.

“I guess. That thing still seems screwy, though. Why would he want me?”

“Who knows? Maybe he owes Margie a favor and she’s doing it because MJ asked, to keep you from killing yourself.”

“Did she say that to you? She thought I was that fucked up?”

“No, but I might have mentioned it.”

“What? Fuck you.” I shrugged. “And thanks, I guess. For caring and shit.”

“I love you too.” Milo pulled out the tapes. “And you can thank me by putting these back in the warlock’s magical closet.”

“No way. You’re the one who stole them.”

“If you haven’t noticed I’ve got customers here. I’ve got to burn disks, get the place shut. Kevin is gone for the night but if the tapes aren’t back tomorrow, who’s he going to suspect?”

“Shit,” I said, sighing. “I take back my thanks, you fucker.”

“It’s easy. The side window is open. Just creep in and split.” He handed me the two cassettes. “I sure wish we had part three.
Ascension.
What the hell could top this? Maybe they actually shove live bunnies up each other’s asses.”

“That’s why you’re not a storyteller like me and Buck,” I told him. “You don’t see the arc. Part three is where Satan appears.”

54

ON MY WAY OUT
I saw MJ in the shadows. She was next to Margie’s big black BMW and I started over to say hello. Then I saw: Margie was on her knees, crying, while MJ stroked her hair. I hurried past to my own car, pretending not to see.

I realized then how truly self-centered I was, too busy headlining in my own dramedy to see that she was a star too. It finally occurred to me that hanging out at my house, drinking and watching movies with Milo and me, and loitering in the bookstore, was a way of avoiding her own home and life and wife. Her relationship was in trouble and it was big-shot Margie who was the pursuer, the bereft, the wounded soul, at least for today. I felt sorry for her, stuck feeling like me.

It is one of the simplest, most difficult truths: the amazing fact that other people are real and thinking all day about their own complex lives, just like we are. In a restaurant, a store, an office, look around: each one of those random brains is a whole world, same as yours, a spinning globe of worries, desires, memories, and fears, with families and friends, enemies and half-forgotten faces, reaching back deep into time, and somehow existing right across the bus. Now multiply that by 6.7 billion. That is our reality: an endless number of endless universes, each one dancing about the others, changing and evolving, blinking out and shining on, appearing and dying, forever, an infinite darkness alive with brief little stars.

55

MILO WAS RIGHT FOR ONCE
. I snuck into Kevin’s without a problem, under the window and over the sill, into a crouch on the floor. I took one step in the dark and tripped over an armchair that seemed to
be in a different spot than before, stumbling into a table full of doodads, which jiggled and rolled. I flicked on Milo’s flashlight, gasping as the beam fell on a mounted cow skull with a baby doll’s head in its mouth. It had little glass diamonds for eyes. Then I picked my way across the room, spotting bits of set dressing from the films—a fake dagger encrusted with plastic jewels on the mantel, a dirty white wig now draped on a stone Buddha head. At last I found the linen closet and opened the door, then drew back the hidden panel. I berated myself for not remembering exactly where the tapes had been before. But it would be fine, I told myself. He had no reason to suspect anything, and how often did he even check? I set the tapes to one side of the pentagram and shut the panel. I pushed the Lysol and toilet paper back in place. As far as I could tell, it all looked the same. I shut the closet and, as I turned to go, relieved to be done with this paralegal errand, the flashlight beam swung over the dark room and landed on Kevin the warlock’s face.

He didn’t look happy to see me. He didn’t look happy at all. For one thing, his face was upside-down. And the eyes and mouth both gaped, aghast, in horror and very clearly without life. Kevin the Satanist had finally met his dark maker, and it did not seem like the reunion had gone well. I jumped, and without thinking, like a child trying to blot out a scary movie, I shut the flashlight, plunging Kevin and myself both into darkness. That was much worse, of course. Now literally in a blind panic, I ran straight into the coffee table and rammed my shin against the marble edge. I howled, then choked it off into a whimper, afraid of what might be listening. I stumbled to the door and found the light switch.

Kevin had been crucified, nailed to his upside-down cross, from which the trailing Christmas tree lights still blinked, now that I’d switched on the power. The nailing had been done with a gun, I surmised, from the many tightly grouped nail heads that lined his blood-encrusted palms like rusty rivets or clustered like thorns on his twisted feet. I also noticed, with a lurch in my stomach, that all of his fingers had been cleanly if brutally removed, sliced right off near
the knuckle, as well as both of his big toes at the joint. The cause of death though, I would guess, was the handful of nails driven into his heart, and the single steel head, which I had failed to see at first glance, that was hammered, skin-deep, between his eyes.

I’d seen enough. Too much. I turned to flee by the front door, switching off the light, then froze again as the thought “fingerprints,” flashed in my brain. Fingerprints, right there on the switch even. I flipped it back on and then, wishing I was the sort of fellow who carried a hanky, grabbed a stuffed bunny doll from the shelf and retraced my steps, wiping the doorknobs, closet, hidden door, tapes, windowsill, and window with a shaky hand. I stole the bunny, fearing DNA. Then I vaulted the window, stumbled, and fell with a splat into the garden. The glass window came slamming down and I heard it crackle into shards and fall, with a sickening tinkle, like a bell. A dog barked somewhere and I scurried to the car in terror, expecting a nail through the mind at any second. As I got into my car, cranked the engine, and split, I thought, or imagined, that my headlights caught Tora, the cat, watching from the shadows with a wicked grin.

56

I RACED TO LONSKY
. In retrospect I find this curious. Why him and not the police? OK, not the police, I was afraid of having to explain my very dubious presence. But why not just home or to Milo and MJ even, any of who might have provided as much or more comfort, protection and sane, or sanish, advice than the Big Man? As Lonsky would say, what would Freud say? Was I running to my father figure in my hour of infantile terror? Was I fleeing the madness of the real world for the far more orderly and wise world of a madman? Was this the famous “flight into illness”? Was I cracking myself and about to cross the line into crazy? Was I already gone? Was I driving
through Hollywood lost in my own nightmare? Had my broken heart eaten my brain?

Or was I beginning to believe that this was in fact a real case, a real crime, and that Solar Lonsky was the only detective real enough to solve it?

57

LONSKY LISTENED AS HE
always did, blank as a mirror, placid (and flaccid) as a Buddha. He was not alarmed by my alarm or frightened by my fear, though when I got to the end, the part about falling in the garden and limping off, he looked up, and when he was sure I was done, he stood, a little more quickly than usual.

“First you must undress.”

“What?”

“Your clothes are no doubt saturated with soil and other evidence. Remove them all, shoes as well. And I’ll take the bunny too, if you’re ready.” I looked down and realized I’d been strangling it in my lap. I gave it up.

“Don’t worry,” he continued. “The authorities have no reason to connect this with you and I shall incinerate the items in question. You may retain your underwear. I assume you managed to keep it, at least, out of contact with the crime scene.”

“Can’t I just throw them in the wash?” I called as he left the room, but I did what he asked and undressed. He returned with a plastic garbage bag, into which I deposited everything I had on, including some fairly new sneakers, and he gave me his own circus tent of a robe, which I wrapped around me. After this exhausting burst of action, he lowered himself with a sigh into his chair. “Now then… tell me about these films.”

I told him. He took in everything, including the awful icky details, without reaction, then peppered me with detailed questions
about setting, lighting, and who did what, with what, to whom. Then, just when he’d gotten me confused, he asked me to go through it all again from the top. The meeting with Kevin. Milo’s robbery, or borrowing (borroberry), of the cassettes. Also both films again in their entirety. And then the return of the tapes and the discovery of the dead warlock. I balked briefly but knew it was impossible to move the mountain, so I told and retold until finally, exhausted, I seemed to exhaust his curiosity and even my own fear, as I sat back, drawing normal breaths. Lonsky, meanwhile, appeared to fall asleep, his chins resting softly upon his fulsome breasts. His hands clasped each other across the small world of his belly. I knew he was alive because he occasionally grunted, though I admit he did not actually snore. I sat still as long as I could. Where could I go, in that elephantine gown? Then I cleared my throat. He raised a finger to still me, so I waited another century. Then his eyelids rose, he took a deep breath, sighed, sort of sat up, and said, “I would very much like to meet this Mexican girl, the one called Rosa Negrita in the film. I would like that very much indeed.” For no particular reason, at that moment, he reminded me of Gertrude Stein, though I couldn’t recall reading if she was ever quite this fat. Something about his repetitiveness, his oddly formal oddity, his perfectly smooth, unruffled, ordinary bizarreness. Imagine Uncle Gertrude as a detective. Did this make me Alice B. Toklas? Did she ever try to quit?

“Yes, well, so would I,” I said, “but no one seems to remember her real name, if they ever knew it, and we’re going back ten years now. Apparently she headed home to Mexico after Zed died.” I crossed my legs uncomfortably in the billowing garment, remembering Kevin’s white thighs crossing in his. “Do you really think he was killed for those tapes?” I asked. “It seems incredible. I mean they’re somewhat outrageous but nothing compared to half of what’s on the Internet, or right on the shelf in the porn section of Milo’s store, believe me.”

“I do believe you. But he was most certainly killed for them. Or for something on them, more precisely. Perhaps some detail whose
significance we don’t know. Or for the missing third tape. You’ve told me everything?”

“Yes of course. You know I have. You ran out of questions.”

“And there is most definitely a connection to Mona’s murder,” he pronounced, as though gazing into a crystal ball, “though I don’t yet know in what it consists.”

My mind returned to Kevin and his missing digits, the horror in his face, the nails. “Why do you think he refused to talk when they tortured him? I would have.”