Flesh Gothic by Edward Lee (6 page)

Hmm, he thought. "I didn't know that. I'll need you to
show me that access when we leave."

"Yeah, sure, when we leave in-" She looked at the dash
clock again. "-in five minutes. But that side door? It
wasn't just the hookers they'd bring in that way, it was
everyone."

"I wonder why."

"I don't know Maybe they were worried about someone
watching the house."

"Why would someone watch the house?"

She stopped wagging her knees enough to laugh. "Man,
what are you doing?"

"Oh, yeah," he muttered behind the binoculars. He had to think a minute to get his mind back on track. The girl
was distracting him---scratching at that innate, desperate
lust-but he was determined not to do that tonight. This
was his investigation. This was business. "Everyone, you
said? I heard the movie girls lived in the house."

"They did, the guys too. But whenever they'd go out, I
mean. Sometimes they'd go out to dinner downtown, and
that side door's where they'd leave and come back in later."

"I guess they just didn't want anybody seeing," Clements
said.

"Sure, whatever. Hey, man, your time's up. Take me back
now. A deal's a deal. I'll show you that other road out of
here through the woods, but I need to get back."

Clements gave her another hundred. "I want you with
me for another hour. I want to wait till the fumigators
leave."

"Oh, man, come on!" she objected.

Clements didn't get it. "That's two hundred bucks I've
given you for two hours. You're not going to make that
much on the street on a week night. What are you complaining about? You don't have to strut for it, and you don't
have to sweat cops."

Now she was squeezing her knees till her knuckles
turned white. "I'm going nuts here, man. Don't you understand?" For a moment it looked like she would break out
into tears. "I'm a crack addict. I gotta fire up."

Clements smirked, as much as he truly felt sorry for her.
It wasn't the users, it was the dealers, the suppliers. Line them
all up against the wall and machine-gun the motherfuckers. I'll
even volunteer to mop up the blood...

"Outside," he said.

In a half-second she was out of the car. He could hear
her lighter flick.

Movement caught his eye in the binoculars. Finally,
they're done! He squinted. The sun was gone now and just as
he'd suspected, the outside floodlamps flicked on. Four
weary men in hazmat suits came out of the house. Damn,
nobody carrying anything, but then what did he expect? Dead
bodies? The police took all of those. Some occult relic? No,
they'rejust there to fumigate the house. The four sat on the long
stone front step, and Clements was curious about their facial
expressions when they pulled off their gas masks. Deadpan.
Faraway eyes. None of them were even talking.

"Looks like your guys are out," the girl said when she got
back in the car. She sat in her stifled, keyed-up bliss.

"Yeah. You should see their faces. They all look really
disturbed. Something about that place must've really
spooked them."

"You don't have to tell me about that. It's the creepiest
place I've ever been in my life. Just walking around inside."

"Yeah?"

"Like walking around a graveyard where all the bodies
were just buried a day ago. I sure as shit never want to go in
there again."

I do, Clements thought. He'd already been in once.

The fumigation crew was just sitting there. Maybe they're
not done, he considered. Of course it would be a big job, and
he presumed that Vivica Hildreth had paid them big money.
Were they waiting for someone else? No, he was certain
there'd been only four of them, just after the clean-up crew
had left.

"So it was pretty much just orgies going on there, huh?"
he continued to prod.

"I mean, I guess. That's what it sounded like. Lot of hootin'
and hollerin'. Big party going on somewhere-downstairs."

"Maybe they were shooting movies for the porn company."

"Maybe. With all the naked people walking around, I can
believe it. Really good-looking people too. Most of the
men were all buffed up, and the women? There were beautiful women all over the place, not junkies, either. These
girls were tan, implants, great bods. Shit what I wouldn't
give. And they seemed normal too, party girls, sure, but not
whacked out. At first I thought they were just big-money
call girls, but then I started hearing about the porn company that Hildreth owned. Then the last few times I was
there..."

"What?"

"Shit, we could see them walking around, me and the
girls I was there with. We'd open the parlor door a crack
and look out. Really freaky shit-satanic stuff."

This verification perked Clements up. "Why do you say
that? Did you see them doing an occult rite, a black mass,
something like that? Why exactly do you think it was something satanic?"

"The girls, man. The way they looked."

"But you said they looked normal. Beautiful, like pin-up
girls-,,

"Yeah, earlier. But later on, after midnight, we'd look out
that door, and none of the lights were on anymore. Just candles. All through the foyer and downstairs. And the girls
would walk by our door sometimes. Black lipstick, black
fingernails and toenails. It looked like fuckin' Halloween,
man. Oh, and the piercings."

"What piercings? Body-piercings, you mean?"

"Yeah. One time-the last night I was there-one of the
girls saw us looking out so she stood there and kind of giggled, and posed for us. Her nipples, bellybutton, and cht
were pierced with rings, and hangin' off each ring was a lit tle black upside-down cross. Earrings like that too." The
prostitute rubbed her face. "Now, if that ain't fuckin' satanic, I don't know what is."

Clements nodded; it was a fulfilling enlightenment. And
he'd seen a pilfered autopsy report on a few of the girls:
they'd all had piercing holes in their nipples, navels, and clitoral hoods.

"Did the people at the house-these men-put piercings
on you and the-" He stopped, almost having said, And the
other crack whores?---but he recovered. "Your three friends?"

"Hell no, man. I mean, we would've done it probably,'cos
Hildreth was payin' out the an, plus all the crack we could
smoke while we were there. With these guys? It was strictly
scat stuff with them."

"Scat?" Clements didn't know the term, which surprised
him. Given his experience, he thought he'd heard all the
darkest and most obscene street slang and underground
lingo that was out there.

She sighed, her bony shoulders dipping in what could only
have been shame. "The gross stuff. Golden showers, Hershey
showers-hell, one night they gave us each a spoonful of this
awful tasting shit and made us puke on each other."

Clements felt crushed by a sudden press of darkness in his
heart. How could people do that? What could possibly be the turnon in watching a bunch of desperate girls shit and piss and mmit
on each other? What mental perception could urge a very
rich man to manipulate a group of victimized drug addicts
to do these things? Clements was beginning to see that answer more and more.

Maybe it really was evil.

Her final note was worse.

"Oh, and animals, too," she said.

Clements spewed more smoke out the window, numbed.

Her tone of voice was turning brittle, sardonic with resentment and self-loathing. "I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking how could she do disgusting shit like that?
Only a complete loser, a complete white trash piece of shit
could do stuff like that... "

He turned and grabbed her shoulder. "That's not what I'm
thinking. Nothing like that at all. All I'm wondering is what
kind of piece of shit could make somebody do stuff like
that." He kept staring at the house. "And you know what? I
wish I'd been there that night because I would've gone in
there and killed them all, and I wouldn't care about taking
the rap. It'd be worth a death sentence to take out a bunch of
scumbags like those guys." Yes. He really could've done it.

The girl was wiping tears out of her eyes, the meager
remnants of the real her-the real person with a soul and a
life and dreams-leaking through the rents that the world
had carved into her.

"Tell me about Hildreth. How many times did you see
him?"

"Five, six," she said. "Just coming and going. It was the
other guys I saw all the time, the beefcake guys. Hildreth
was always nice to us, even though we knew what he was all
about before long."

"So something else was going on in the house, while you
girls stayed upstairs?"

"Yeah. Some kind of freaky ritual, I guess."

"But you and the others never went to one of the rituals?"

"No. Never. They kept us upstairs for their little pregame show or whatever you want to call it. The men'd all
stand around and watch while we did the scat stuff."

"And then you'd-"

She knew what he was going to ask. "No, that's the weird part. Hildreth and his guys never laid a hand on us, never
wanted us to get 'em off. They'd all just stand around, buck
naked, watching. We'd do it with men sometimes, just not
Hildreth's men. They'd bring people in-crackheads, bums,
rednecks all fucked up on PCP-and those guys would do
us. A lot of times it was just plain rape. These guys would
smack us around and rape us, while one of Hildreth's people would film it. It was pretty sickening sometimes, but the
rock was so good-all we wanted when we were done.
You'd have to be hooked to know what I mean. And the
whole time, Hildreth and his guys would watch. Sometimes
they'd say weird shit, like we were being seasoned. We
needed to be debased. How do you like that shit? I remember one night one of these boneheads looked at me and said
`You're not soiled enough yet.' Then he-" Her eyes went
back to the window, as if there were safety out there. "Then
he brought in a goat."

Yes. Clements knew that he could easily have killed them
all. Just walk in there with the Remington ... and start pumping.
He needed to change topics, for this one, as informative as it
may have been, was making him too depressed. "And the
pay waste

"A grand apiece, each night, for each of us. And all the
crack we could smoke before sundown. When we were
done doing the scat stuff, Hildreth would bring in a bond
of it, like someone would put out a bowl of fuckin' afterdinner mints. They'd go downstairs for their little devil
party and we'd sit up in the parlor and crack it up till dawn.
Someone'd drive us back in the limo in the morning."

"But you say you never saw Debbie-" He held up the
picture once more. "-you never saw her doing any of this
freaky stuff?"

"No."

Clements had a good feel for this sort of girl. Crack addicts were consummate liars; they could beat polygraphs
sometimes because their devotion to the addiction overrode
physiological responses. But this one's not lying. There's no reason why she should. There's no one to protect.

A welcome breeze blew through the car's open windows.
Clements looked up when he heard some hollow thunks in
the distance.

"Looks like those guys are finally leaving," the girl said.
She was rubbing her knees again already.

One last glance in the binoculars. The fumigation van
was pulling around the estate's great circular entrance drive.
Clements watched them disappear as the road was swallowed by the woods.

"What now?" the girl asked.

I want to go in there, the thought popped up instantly. He
had his lock-picks with him, and his gear. But-

Don't be stupid.

"You must really want this Debbie girl bad. What is she,
your daughter?"

"No. Her parents hired me to keep tabs on her. Then I
started snooping around, and the parents wound up murdered."

"That sucks. So you're a PI?"

The house loomed in its curtain of floodlights. "I used to
be," he said.

"So where's Debbie? Is she dead, too? Did that Hildreth
kook kill her like all the others?"

"Nope. All the bodies were accounted for, and she wasn't
one of them."

"Then where is she?"

Clements started the car up. "I can't explain why I feel
this way, but I just feel it in my bones, I can feel it all the way
at the back of my heart, that she's still in that house."

Westmore felt less than confident when he hopped off the
#35 trolley at the Baywalk shopping complex. In the front
of the window of some ritzy designer purse boutique, he
could see himself. Jew Christ, I look like a tourist ... White
slacks, loafers, and loose blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt
with pineapples on it. He'd have worn his suit, but ... he
didn't have one anymore. It was part of his paring down
process when he'd quit the St. Petersburg Times to go freelance. Move into a really small, really cheap efficiency, sell
the car (not that he could drive legally anymore anyway),
and give all the clothes he didn't absolutely need, plus any
other clutter to Goodwill. The white slacks and pineapple
shirt were all he had clean at the last moment.

And ten grand in an Express Mail package is one hell of a serious job inquiry.

He'd done a quick Nexus-Lexus search on Vivica Hildreth and found nothing of consequence. Plenty on her
husband though, the recently deceased Reginald Parker
Hildreth-mostly links to adult DVD distributors, but the
wife was the goose-egg, which would've made him suspect
were it not for ...

Ten fucking GRAND in an Express Mail package, he reminded himself. Cash, too, not even a bank check. A very
loud hello.

Tampa Bay past the Pier shined like lime-green ice in the
blaze of sun. The sunshine and the fresh, salty sea-scent off
the water reminded him why he'd moved to Florida. Several stunningly attractive women in provocative bikini tops
and sheer sarongs provided another reminder. Westmore
hadn't cut his hair since he'd left the paper; now it was a
shoulder-length dark mane, and when he stepped across 2nd
Avenue, a breeze stirred round his head and blew it all back
in his face in a tangle. When he reached for his comb, he
frowned, realizing he'd forgotten it. Yeah, I'm gonna make a
great impression, all right.