The office had been a carrot, an attempt to woo him into a life of purpose and productivity. He even had his own secretary, Amy. And while Victor still didn’t find the business world at all appealing, he felt obligated to put on the engaged-and-highly-motivated-son act and, at the very least, go through the motions. Because if he didn’t make a go of it, Amy would be unemployed, as would several programmers who did not work out of his office but over whom he was in charge. He didn’t want that on his conscience.
Slowly but surely, against his will, his dad was reeling him in.
Victor resented him for that.
The elevator arrived at the fifteenth floor, and he walked down the carpeted hallway past the mortgage company and the property management firm to the unmarked door that led to his office. Amy was typing something on her computer and she looked up when he entered. ‘‘Good morning, Mr. Lo—Victor,’’ she corrected herself.
He smiled. ‘‘Good catch.’’
‘‘Sorry. I’m still not used to the informality.’’
‘‘That’s what working for my dad’ll do to you.’’
Amy held out a stack of mail. ‘‘Are you in today?’’
‘‘For the morning,’’ he said. He walked past her desk into his private office, pretending to sort through the mail. Victor liked Amy, but he had a sneaking suspicion that part of her job was to keep tabs on him and report back to his dad. It was why, even after six months, the two of them were emotionally still at arm’s length with each other, and why he spent most of his time away from her. Several times, he’d considered letting her know what his dad had told him, that despite her loyalty and hard work, she would be out on her ear should Victor screw up this opportunity. But he had the feeling that she would immediately tell the old man, who would feed her a reassuring lie, and then his relationships with both his father and his secretary would be more strained than they already were.
He threw the mail on his desk and stood next to the window, looking down at the traffic on Wilshire Boulevard. He shouldn’t have come in today. He should have just called Amy, told her he was busy, and spent the day cruising around, having fun.
There was still the afternoon.
He flopped down into his chair, turned on his PC and then swiveled around in a circle while he waited for the computer to boot up. There wasn’t really any work for him to do, but if he touched base with the programmers, had Amy send an update memo to their clients and answered his e-mail, it would look like he’d accomplished something today and he could bail, guilt free, after lunch.
Victor accessed his e-mail. There was the usual spam and assorted interbusiness correspondence, but jumping out at him was a message from his father, sent earlier this morning. He called it up, his stomach already tightening. Whenever his dad e-mailed him, it was always with some sort of ‘‘suggestion’’ that was really nothing more than veiled criticism of his job performance, a helpful reminder that he was not as smart or as successful as he should be.
Not this time, though.
Instead of words, streaming video appeared on his monitor, and the knot in Victor’s stomach tightened even further as he watched, his dread growing as he viewed the unfolding images. A close-up of a growling dog’s face pulled back to reveal that the dog’s head was severed and sitting atop what looked like a wedding cake. The camera panned around, finding not only the animal’s lifeless, bloody body on a white-sheeted bed, but a mutilated bride and groom lying on the bedroom floor, their faces shoved into matching dog bowls. Words appeared onscreen, white letters against a black background: THIS IS WHERE IT BEGINS.
Suddenly, two naked old people, an Asian man and a dark, possibly Hispanic, woman, were in what looked like an empty garage, dancing crazily on oil-stained cement, lunatic smiles held tight on their otherwise pain-racked faces.
The man’s genitals had been hacked off.
The woman’s breasts had been sliced from her chest.
Both were bleeding profusely from their wounds, the blood mixing with the dried oil on the garage floor and making a sickening sticky puddle. No audio accompanied the images, and the sight of the two old people in their grotesque dance seemed all the more frightening for the silence. It gave the scene, in a strange way, a documentary verisimilitude that sound would have lessened.
The dancing grew quicker, more jerky, as though the camera had sped up, and the entire scene spun, became blurry, segueing into an extreme close-up of a yellow plaque-covered tooth, which once again pulled back to show the growling mouth of the dead dog.
Victor stared at the blank screen, feeling more unnerved than he’d expected. He’d seen far worse things in horror movies, but the immediacy of the video and the sense that it was real, that it was a recording of actual events rather than a staged depiction of a fictional narrative, made it seem especially disconcerting to him.
And the fact that it had been sent to him by his dad?
That was the creepiest thing of all.
Of course, lately his old man had been talking about investing some of his money in a movie. A hard-core film fan, Victor was all in favor of the idea. He was well aware that in Hollywood, con artists routinely scammed wealthy businessmen out of millions of dollars with the promise of producer credits and lucrative back-end deals should their false projects get made. Indeed, his dad had been approached numerous times by filmmakers looking for private investors, and none of those movies had ever come to fruition. But recently, with all of the problems at the studios, a lot of legitimate directors had gone the indie route and were lining up their own financing. Victor himself had fielded calls from half a dozen big-name directors on his father’s behalf, and his suggestion was to roll the dice.
Maybe, he thought, one of those filmmakers had submitted the video to his dad as an example of his work, and his father was merely passing it along to him for his opinion.
Why no explanation, though? Why no cover page?
The whole thing was disturbing.
What made it even more unsettling was that the dog looked familiar. And so, come to think of it, did the bedroom. And the garage. He had seen them before, but he could not for the life of him remember where. He thought hard, trying to place everything, but he kept drawing a blank.
He replayed the video once more and was again nagged by a sense of familiarity, although full recognition remained frustratingly out of reach.
The damn thing was even creepier on second viewing.
He’d never gotten the hang of the office’s phone system, so he called out to Amy and asked her to give his dad a call and patch him through. A few moments later, she knocked on the doorframe and poked her head in. ‘‘I’m sorry. He’s unavailable.’’
‘‘Who’d you get? Tyler? Janeane?’’
She shook her head. ‘‘He hasn’t checked in today. No one knows where he is.’’
Victor thought of the e-mail. In the back of his mind was the vague thought that his dad might be in trouble, that there might be something wrong, but he dismissed that possibility almost immediately. There was nothing Tom Lowry couldn’t talk or buy his way out of, and if there’d been any sort of medical emergency, he would have instantly found his way to the finest room in the finest hospital.
Maybe he was having an affair.
The idea made Victor smile. He couldn’t imagine his straitlaced old man doing any such thing. Hell, he couldn’t even imagine him with his mom.
‘‘Well, try again later,’’ he said. ‘‘I need to talk to him about something.’’
Amy nodded. ‘‘Okay.’’
But there was still no sign of his father at lunchtime when he left. He grabbed a couple of hotdogs from his favorite Farmers’ Market stand and then went to Amoeba to look for new music. Hooking up with a few friends, he spent the rest of the afternoon just chilling, and forgot all about his dad.
There was a concert he wanted to see that night at the Wiltern—a retro pairing of Joe Jackson and Todd Rundgren, with the opening act Ethel to attract scenesters—and he scored some scalped tickets outside the venue after picking up Sharline at her apartment. They’d parted on bad terms last week after a very public fight at the SkyBar, but she seemed to have forgotten all about it—either that or she was so desperate to partake of some nightlife that she was willing to completely tamp down her true feelings—and when they had a couple of drinks at the bar across the street before going into the theater, everything seemed fine.
The concert itself was amazing, the performers exhibiting a virtuosity and breadth of styles that made him nostalgic for the eclecticism of the 1970s.
Not that he’d actually been around then.
Victor wished he
had
been born twenty years earlier, that he’d been a teenager or young adult in the seven-ties. He’d missed completely the artistic ambition of that decade, experiencing it only thirdhand, but he still found it compelling enough that he actively sought out music and movies from that period. As critics never seemed to tire of pointing out, even all these years later, there’d been overreaching, but Victor found that vastly preferable to the complacent mediocrity with which he’d grown up. Francis Ford Coppola, not content with his
Godfather
success, had striven for even greater heights with the vastly more ambitious
Apocalypse Now.
Woody Allen built upon
Annie Hall
with
Manhattan
and then the truly daring
Stardust Memories
. Rock groups like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Renaissance incorporated symphonic textures in their music and toured with their own orchestras. Even hard rockers like KISS put out simultaneously released solo albums in which they followed their own muses.
What had happened to those sorts of aspirations? Why was everyone now content just to coast within the easy parameters of their abilities?
Why was he?
This always happened when he attended concerts he really enjoyed. He always ended up thinking about the unbridgeable gap between perfection and reality, between the way things ought to be and the way they really were.
He forced himself to clear his mind and concentrate only on the music.
Afterward, he took Sharline back to her apartment and did her quick and hard on the floor of the living room, finishing in her ass though he knew she didn’t like it that way. ‘‘You bastard!’’ she yelled, slapping him as she pulled away and headed to the bathroom, one hand cupped between her legs. He smiled. It helped him get off, doing things to women they didn’t like, and he supposed if he had a shrink that was one of the things they’d have to talk about. He felt good, happy, and he pulled up his pants, shouted good-bye and left before she came out, not really wanting to see her right now, not sure if he ever wanted to see her again.
It was late, after midnight. Beverly Hills was a city that went to bed early, where the sidewalks were rolled up by eight and whatever happened after dark happened behind tall walls and security gates, and he sped up the winding road toward home, the only car on the street. To his surprise, the gates to his family’s house were wide open. He slowed down, in case one of his parents was on the way out, but the short drive was empty and both the Mercedes and the Jaguar were parked in front of the garage in their usual spots. Seemingly all the lights in the house were on because the windows were blazing. None of the shades or curtains had been drawn.
That was odd.
Victor pushed the button on his dashboard to close the gate and pulled to a stop next to the fountain.
The door to the house was open.
He cut the engine and got out of the car, looking around the upper drive, trying to see through the first-floor windows. He approached the entryway of the house and started up the porch steps, stopping at the top. He should have dialed 911 immediately, but he didn’t want to look like a complete candyass in front of the police if it turned out to be nothing, so he poked his head in the foyer. ‘‘Dad?’’ he called.
‘‘Back here, Vic!’’
Alarm bells were going off in his head. The joyous, almost singsongy voice was nothing like his father’s usual rumbling stentorian tones, and he could not recall the old man
ever
calling him ‘‘Vic.’’
He thought of this morning’s e-mail. The streaming video.
Suddenly, he realized where he’d seen the dog before. And the bedroom. And the garage. It had been years since he’d seen them, but they belonged to the Jensons, their next-door neighbors.
This is where it begins.
‘‘Vic!’’
It was a game. It had to be. Or a trick. ‘‘What?’’ he called out.
‘‘Come here!’’
Call 911,
his brain was telling him.
Dial 911.
He walked through the foyer, through the living room, through the drawing room, down the east hall. All of the lights
were
on, and that was a red flag right there. His mom was a freak about conserving energy, and unless there were guests, she never left lights on in an empty room. Especially now, in the middle of the night, when both of his parents were usually fast asleep.
Victor realized for the first time that the house was silent. With all of the lights on, Lizzie and Jonnie, his mom’s two Pomeranians, should be yapping up a storm.
Maybe his mom had left and taken them with her.
No. The Mercedes was still in the driveway.
‘‘Vic!’’
His dad was in the music room, and Victor made his way down the hallway toward the door. He slowed as he approached, not wanting to go right in, thinking he should check it out first, just in case.
Wise move.
The room looked like an abattoir. Blood was splattered over furniture, floor, wall, even the ceiling, in random bursts that reminded him of the paintings in an art exhibition his parents had dragged him to when he was ten. The Pomeranians had been slaughtered and gutted, their entrails flattened and ground into the once-white rug, their little heads smashed open, pieces of their furry bodies strewn about the room. His mom, or what was left of her, was lying on the piano bench, her eviscerated form draped over the seat like an empty rag doll. Her face had been peeled away and placed on a potted palm.