The Man Who Cheated Death (Vincent Hardare) Read online

  “More,” he said.

  “Help yourself.”

  Myrtle watched him eat, marveling at his seemingly inexhaustible appetite. She’d seen him countless times before, hiding in his house as she wheeled Mr. Kozlowski around the block, but this was her first good look. His face was ordinary, with a square jaw and a flat nose, but something about it struck her as odd. Then she realized what. His skin. It was pale white and perfectly smooth, not a trace of a beard, a face as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

  “Pretty good, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled through a mouth full.

  “Have some more. You think these are as good as the ones you carry in your van?”

  Osbourne’s head snapped, his cold, steely eyes locking on her face. Thinking it was indigestion, she dismissed the look with a wave of her hand. “I watch you load up when I can’t sleep. All those candy bars and potato chips and cookies must drive you crazy. You sell them to stores?”

  “Vending machines,” he said.

  “I bet you sneak a couple of bars on the side sometimes.”

  “Stuff tastes like shit,” he said. Standing, he finished the milk and said, “I’ve got to go.”

  Myrtle stood up with him, wishing he’d stay. Sometimes it got so lonely she thought about leaving all the doors wide open and inviting a burglar in, just to have someone to chat with.

  “Thanks for the help,” she said through the screen as he crossed the yard. When he did not respond, Myrtle raised her voice. “Say, how about joining us for dinner tonight? I’ve got a pot roast and a homemade chocolate cake that will bring tears to your eyes. If you’re busy, I could bring a plate of food over later — “

  Osbourne spun around. “No, don’t do that.”

  “ — oh, that’s right, you work nights.”

  Osbourne heard the catch in her voice; she watched him, knew this was night off. “Not tonight,” he said. “I’ve got a date.”

  Myrtle Jones could not hide the disappointment in her voice. “Oh. Well, you have a nice time. Maybe you can take a rain check.”

  “Is your chocolate cake homemade?”

  She had him. Smiling, she said, “It sure is.”

  “Maybe I will,” he said, walking away.

  Chapter 10

  Tawny

  Tawny Starr was a talking head.

  On the Hollywood strip that was a pretty big deal, even gave you bragging rights. She had been in a movie, actually said a line, and that was as close a brush with stardom as any of the vicious drag queens and hookers she shared the streets with ever came to. Seventeen, broke and living three months in L.A., she had walked onto a set at Universal Studios, and nabbed a speaking role in a flick with Brad and Angie directed by Syd Marcus and the Oscar-winning Czech cameraman with the backward last name. It wasn’t much, a crummy line, “That will be five dollars.” while serving colored water to Brad’s stand-in inside a noisy nightclub, but it got her name in the bottom of the credits, and qualified her for a SAG card.

  Talking head. A cameramen had called her that, and Tawny had thought he was making fun of the way her jaw stuck out when she spoke. Humiliated, she’d wept behind a backdrop until a chummy make-up girl pulled her into one of the trailers, and they’d done a few lines. In every movie, the make-up girl explained, there were characters who had no real identity; faces in the crowd who said things, then disappeared. These characters could be anyone, or look like anything, it really didn’t matter, just so long as they said their lines clearly. In the business these actors were called talking heads.

  It had started innocently enough. She was standing in front of Schwabs when a stretch limo pulled up and the passenger window went down. Inside sat a graying studio exec with a funny look in his eyes. No words were spoken, no proposition made. He had simply held up a gold straw while his Oriental driver got out and opened the back door. Tawny had hopped in.

  The exec had a lot of class. They’d eaten dinner at a swanky Vietnamese joint called Le Duc, taken a midnight drive through Malibu, then home to Beverly Hills to snort more coke and screw. The next day they woke at noon, did more lines on an Italian marble coffee table, and screwed some more. When they were finished, he’d announced he was going to put her into a movie.

  “Give me a break,” Tawny had said.

  He had. Down to the MGM lot that afternoon and she was on a movie set being measured for a cocktail waitress’s outfit, then whisked to a sound stage. They had shot her scene four times, then called it a wrap. On the way out she was given a check and made to fill out her first tax form. That night she phoned the exec, dated him a few more times, but couldn’t wrangle any more parts. He was Mister Busy, and had promised to call.

  For a while she had gone on casting calls, and tried to avoid the streets. When the last of her money ran out, she took a job selling black leather panties and other freaky stuff in a boutique called Slut. Working behind the counter she might get noticed, offered another part, and it would lead to something; that was how the dream went back then.

  Tawny got noticed, mostly by men buying birthday presents for their wives, and she regularly turned down dates, endless drugs, and weekends in Aspen and Maui. She didn’t see the point in making someone else happy when it didn’t make her happier. Or a little less broke.

  After a month in Slut her eyes began to wander. Down the block from the store, a white-haired chick had come up with a real calling card. Twirling a boa constrictor, she let it wrap itself in a life-threatening coil around her throat. Sometimes a Mercedes or BMW would pull up, and the chick would jump in, off on another adventure. A few hours later she’d be back twirling the boa, a few bucks richer.

  Tawny had decided to give the streets a shot. From her closet she dug out a halter top and shorts, and painted metallic thunderbolts on her fingernails. She hated whoring, but on the street there was action and the chance, no matter how slim, that someone would pluck her out of the slime, and put her smiling face back in front of the cameras. A one in a million shot; that was how the dream went now.

  The black Eldorado bumped the curb.

  “Hey sweetheart,” called the driver. “Come over here. Don’t be shy.”

  Tawny leaned seductively against the newspaper machine, a stationary object on a street whirling with rough trade.

  “What are you hiding,” she said, trying to make him out. “I don’t like what I can’t see.”

  A dim light illuminated the car’s interior. “You’re a fox. Slide over this way. I won’t bite.”

  She edged up to the gleaming, factory new car. Now visible, the john shot her a sorry smile. His face was old and weathered and he wore a black muscleman shirt that barely held in the tire of flab around his mid-section. I have a daughter about your age, he would confess as he started to do the grossest thing imaginable to her. Give her my regrets, Tawny would want to say.

  “Are you available?” he asked, flashing another smile.

  Something about the guy felt wrong. Tawny had learned to trust her intuition, and banged her hand on the hood of the car.

  “Take it someplace else, Pops.”

  The Eldorado bolted with a rubbery squeal, and she watched its taillights disappear in the traffic.

  The bad feeling in her gut would not go away. She crossed against the light and walked five blocks to Madrid, a pickup joint that she sometimes frequented.

  Madrid’s parking lot was packed. In its center, four police vans were parked in a tight circle. Another roundup. Girls she knew were being handcuffed, others herded into the fun buses. Tawny started walking backwards in the shadows, and when she was sure no one had spotted her, ran in her heels down the street. She ducked into a video arcade.

  She found an old Bally shoved against the back wall, and fed a quarter into a machine that had been rewired to give only three balls and no Free games. As the machine came to life, she imagined the constant thunder of tumbling pins, and thought about her mother playing in the Women’s Baptist Church League every Tuesday night, a
nd never able to break one-sixty.

  “Hey, beautiful. What’s your name?”

  A big dude edged up beside her, his eyes hidden behind a pair of wraparound shades that people wore in L.A. to make tourists think they didn’t want to be recognized.

  “Tawny. What’s yours?”

  “Bob. My friends call me Bobbie. Want to go on a date? We could have drinks, maybe a bite to eat… “

  Tawny crossed her arms, gave him the deep freeze.

  “Or we could act like big kids, and head straight for my place. I live up in the hills.”

  She didn’t like his approach. “It’s going to cost you. Two-fifty an hour.”

  He gave her a boyish grin. “Really? Why did I think you were picking me up.”

  “Fuck off.”

  She stormed out of the arcade. At the corner she started to cross when he came up from behind, pinching her arm.

  “Come on. I was only joking.”

  “Get your goddamned hands off me.”

  “Calm down. How about two hundred?”

  “Two-fifty. Take it or leave it.”

  “Come on. Every price is negotiable.”

  “Not tonight. And not for you.”

  “You, my dear, are a little whore.”

  “So was your mother.”

  He pinched her arm and made her cry. Her foot found his groin, and he doubled over. Pulling off her shoes, she ran across the busy street and halfway down the next block before glancing over her shoulder. He was gone.

  Every guy in this sleazy town had a come on. Even the married ones. At the next block she waited for the light with a dispirited bag lady. The bag lady opened her mouth, and a torrent of obscenities spewed out. Tawny stared in horror past her. Bobbie was knocking people down running towards her, eyes ablaze.

  She ran into the street, dodging one car and then a delivery truck. A man delivering pizzas swerved into another lane, not wanting to get involved. She screamed belligerently at him, then saw a dorky guy wearing a baseball cap drive by in a Celica, and banged on his windshield.

  “Please help me. That guy is trying to hurt me.”

  His window came down. “Get in.”

  Tawny jumped in. Bobbie grabbed her door before she could close it, and tried to pull her out. Leaning across the seat, the driver punched him in the face. Bobbie fell hard on the pavement with blood pouring from his mouth. The Celica pulled away, and Tawny clapped her hands together and let out an elated squeal.

  “That was the best,” Tawny said.

  “Thanks.” Her rescuer sheepishly averted his eyes and drove away. He wore a Dodger baseball cap and thick black glasses.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tom.”

  Textbooks lay on the back seat. Calculus. A book on the fall of the Roman empire. Henry James. Tawny wondered what it would be like to go to bed with a nerd, and blow his socks off.

  “Thanks a lot, Tom.”

  He smiled nervously. “Was that guy… your husband?”

  “Ha-ha. You moonlight telling jokes?”

  “Sorry. Guess that was a pretty dumb question.”

  “Know where the Las Palmas hotel is?”

  “Sure. It’s on my way.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “I’m taking a few classes in education. This might be another dumb question, but that guy back there, do you even know him?”

  “Not his name. But I sure know his kind.”

  “You a hooker,” he asked, watching the street.

  “You a Boy Scout?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. Tommy the Boy Scout. My good deed today was helping a hooker get home safely.” He took a sharp right off the Strip, and a mile later parked beneath the blinking neon sign of the seedy Las Palmas. “Well, nice meeting you.”

  “You too,” she said, opening her door.

  “Wait a minute,” he said in alarm.

  She followed his gaze. On the sidewalk in front of the hotel lay a smoldering cigarette butt. Someone had been there moments before, yet had managed to become invisible. Tawny shut her door, not moving. “He followed us,” she said under her breath.

  “Sit tight.”

  He got out and had a look around, then got back in. “Must of been my imagination. It’s okay; you’re safe with me.”

  He wasn’t much to look at, but he cared, and Tawny liked that. Their eyes met, and behind the glasses she saw the wanting look that was always there in her line of work. She placed her hand on his left thigh. “Like that, Tom?”

  “Yes. I think… you’re very pretty.”

  She ran her forefinger up the pant seam to the growing bulge in his crotch and put her mouth up to his ear. “Want a BJ?”

  “Sure.”

  She pulled down his zipper. “I’m going to tell you a little secret. I’m not really a hooker. I’m an actress.”

  “Really?”

  “I was in Straight and Narrow. Do you remember the scene in the disco, and the girl who serves Brad Pitt a martini? That was me. I had a line.”

  “That’s tremendous. Are you going to be in any more films?”

  “Someday.”

  “Wow. I always wanted to kill someone famous.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  Their eyes met, and Tawny knew right then she’d jumped into a car with a madman. She tried to scream, and he grabbed her by the throat. Reaching beneath the dashboard, he drew a knife, and in one swift, practiced motion, plunged it deep into her chest.

  Tawny felt the life seep from her body as the Celica drove around the hotel, and her passenger door was opened. Felt a pair of hands drag her out of the passenger seat, and dump her body into an open garbage can, then heard the car pull away.

  She grew weak, and started to pass out. She did not want to die like this. She thought of her poor mother, and how she’d react. She’d never cared how her mother felt, yet she did now.

  She heard a man’s deep voice. Thinking she’d died and gone to heaven, she opened her eyes, and saw a homeless person standing over her, his hands rifling her pockets. She grabbed his arm.

  “Please help me,” she whispered.

  Chapter 11

  Wondero

  On their twentieth wedding anniversary, Wondero’s wife had given him a propane grill from Sears, and on the same day they had nearly gotten a divorce trying to assemble it. It had more parts than an automobile engine, and too many that did not fit the way the instructions said they would. In the end they had kissed and made up, and Wondero had slid the grill into a corner of the garage, hoping to never see it again.

  But on a sunny Saturday afternoon a month later he pulled the grill out and fired it up, just to see if the home breaker actually worked. In a few minutes he was a convert: the flames were evenly distributed over the layer of lava rocks, the grid hissing like a cat. Going inside, he found a platter of raw hamburgers on the kitchen table, his wife fixing cole slaw, smiling at him. His kids raced past in their bathing suits, the dog on their heels, and before he could yell about dog hair in the pool, he heard the splash.

  He groaned and Corey tossed him a cold beer.

  “That’s what Saturdays are for,” she reminded him.

  She was right; he needed to loosen up. Taking the portable radio outside, he turned the volume up so it competed with his kid’s screams. A few minutes later Corey brought out a plate of buns to be toasted. “You’ve got a phone call from downtown.”

  Over the radio he heard the sweet sound of a baseball hitting a bat. The tone in her voice suggested it was nothing important. Irritated, he went inside to his study, and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  The line was dead. He hung up feeling a lump in his throat. The house had grown quiet and he went into the kitchen and looked outside. Everyone was gone. Corey, the kids, all the food, everything but the grill. In the pool he saw something floating, and sticking his face against the sliding glass door, realized it was the dog.

  He shuddered,
feeling all of his internal alarms go off. In the stillness he could feel a deadly entity lurking somewhere within his home. For a long moment he felt paralyzed; his worst nightmare had come true.

  He stumbled through the downstairs, unable to find his gun in any of its usual hiding places, his stomach feeling like it was about to explode. Dread, he had learned long ago, was like nausea with horns.