L.A. Rotten (6 page)

Working quickly, I enter “Offramp,” “236,” and “homicide” into the logline. Of the 678 jobs Trauma-Gone has done since Harold started the database, 301 of them contain one of those tags. I eliminate “homicide” and the number drops to 148.

“Just use ‘236,' ” Ivy attempts.

“I can't. I only recently started tagging the room numbers a couple of jobs ago. Before then, there was no point. Same with the exterior photos of the room number.”

“How many pictures are in each file?”

“Usually between thirty and sixty.”

“There's got to be a way to narrow this down. When did you start to notice the rooms were the same?”

“About two months ago I began to notice the room numbers. The Bibles have been more recent.”

“You knew something was strange for two months and you didn't do anything? Jesus, you're bent.” I want to say something in my defense, but she is probably right. “Alright, can we narrow it down to just the last three months then?” she asks.

I add the dates to the logline. “Nineteen jobs.”

“That's a start at least.”

“Not all of these are going to be from 236s…but several of them will.”

One by one we begin to cycle through the images, me taking a short trip down memory lane, her getting a gruesome education in the unchanging decor of motel rooms. “Wow, these places really suck,” she decides after the third set has clicked by with nothing standing out.

An hour and a half later, and my eyes have glazed over, unflinching now as image after image crawls by, some horrendously bloody, most the clean, staid “after” photos, where I'd reduced the rooms to a gutted shell: concrete and bare walls. “Wait! Go back!” Ivy commands, apparently still engaged, her expressive eyes broadening in the glow of the computer screen. “There!” she says, pointing at a photo of an end table with miscellaneous possessions on it, the property of some dead former owner. “The cigarettes.” She taps the screen where indeed there is a jumble of cigarettes dumped from their package in a seemingly haphazard collective. “Do you see it?”

“I see the cigarettes,” I confirm, my patience wearing out.

“No, look closer.” She drags her finger around the screen, highlighting whatever it is she thinks she sees. Allowing my eyes to focus in and out, I swat her finger away so that I can look for myself, and it hits me: “I see a face.” Indeed, the cigarettes have casually been arranged in such a way as to appear natural in their positions, but upon closer scrutiny, what appears as a rudimentary “happy face” appears. “So what?”

“So what?” Ivy fairly shrieks at me. “So this!”

Putting her hand on top of mine, she impels me to drag the mouse along, shuttling back till we reach an array of photos from an Offramp Inn in Granada Hills. She stops scanning abruptly and has to backtrack one, but when she points to an open pizza box with two slices missing abandoned on the floor, I can see why she's excited. “The pepperonis—someone rearranged them.” Indeed, someone had sorted the remaining pieces of pepperoni on the six remaining slices into a greasy, leering happy face.

“How did I not notice that when I cleaned up the room?”

“Well, now that we maybe know what we're looking for, we get to start all over again,” she says, rubbing my shoulder enthusiastically.

As much as I want her to be wrong, and the happy faces to be a coincidence right along with the condoms, she isn't. In ten of the nineteen scenes that come up, we find a concocted happy face somewhere in the photos. There is one made with dimes and quarters for a slit-wrist suicide in Pacoima, an arrangement of toiletries for an invasion-robbery-gone-wrong in Sun Valley, a clever one made from the pillows and arranged bedding for a bludgeoning homicide in Sylmar, and even a lipstick drawing of one on a mirror for a female gunshot suicide in Santa Clarita.

I grab a box of pushpins out of the top desk drawer and walk over to our large, color-coded wall map of Los Angeles County. In the early days of my employment, this map had been my lifeline. Nowadays, I have a cabbie's knowledge of the area and scarcely even look at it. With Ivy reading me coordinates, I punch pushpins into all locations at which we've made a connection, including the most recent four, which didn't have happy faces, but did have condoms. Fourteen pushpins in all, none of them forming any sort of cohesive line or pattern, stretched from Canyon Country down to Whittier and out to Pasadena.

“They're all over Los Angeles,” Ivy notes in awe.

“None of it makes sense,” I agree. “Whatever or whoever is doing this doesn't seem to be following any sort of game plan, so we're basically back at square one.”

“It kills me that we make a major discovery and already you're pessimistic.”

“I'm realistic. What do we really know from this except that it hasn't happened at the same location twice?”

“That's significant. I'm not sure how, but it seems like it matters…I've just gotten into numerology and even though you don't think so, every number is important…maybe.”

“Exactly. Maybe. Neither of us knows what the hell we're doing.”

“All the more reason to give this information to the police.”

I give her a look that shuts her up, and we both resort to quiet introspection.

“Does 2-3-6 add up to anything significant?” she asks, adding the numbers.

“Eleven,” I finish for her.

“Eleven's an unlucky number…” She frowns, touching her forearm lightly.

“In numerology, if I recall, every number is both good and bad. That's what makes it a loony practice.”

“I used to be into astrology…maybe it has something to do with the moon then?”

“Christ.” I press my fingers into my forehead. “What could it have to do with the moon?”

“I don't know. Maybe he only does this on full moons or something?”

“There haven't been fourteen full moons in the last three months!”

“I'm just brainstorming is all; you don't have to snap. I'm not an expert or anything.”

“Brainstorm smarter,” I order her.

“Brainstorm smarter,” she mocks, and twists around to sit with her back toward me.

“What do you think this is, even?” I reason, mostly to myself. “A couple of homicides, mostly suicides, robberies gone wrong, an OD who shit on the carpet. This isn't a person doing this, right? That's not what we're thinking, is it? The Bible thing…this has to be like a cult or something. Cult of the Happy Face.”

“What if it's something…paranormal?” Ivy asks.

“Like a poltergeist? Haunting the 236s of Southern California?”

“Maybe?”

“Did you used to be into séances too?” She blanches and I roll my eyes. “That shit doesn't exist. Trust me. I've been to dozens—if not hundreds—of crime scenes, at all hours of the day and night. There is no such thing as a ghost.”

“Well, if you're so certain of everything, you come up with an answer that isn't stupid.”

“Alright, fine,” I sigh, and stare at the map, committing myself to finding a connection. Ivy turns around fully to watch me, bitterness stamped into her body language. “They're all by major freeways, of course,” I mumble, as this is apparently the philosophy in name and practice of the Offramp Inn Corporation. “What does their Wikipedia page have to say?”

Ivy slides down into the office chair and after a long minute of hunt-and-peck typing, she begins to read. “Offramp Inn…large chain of Southern California motels…started in 1967. First location was in Burbank, California.” I look quickly to see that Burbank's location doesn't have a pin sticking out of it, though I remember doing a job there in the last several months. “Hmm. Two brothers started it…skim…skim…skim…next locations were opened in Sun Valley, Santa Clarita, and Pasadena.”

“Do they have a list of all their locations?”

“Hum…hum…hum,” she says absentmindedly as she scrolls down the page. “Yep. And they have little dates next to them of when they were started.”

“So read them to me in order.”

“All of them?”

“Just read.”

“Burbank, 1967…Sun Valley, 1969…Santa Clarita, 1969…Pasadena, 1969…Pacoima, 1969…A lot of these are 1970, so I'm not gonna read the dates for those. Sylmar, Canyon Country, Los Angeles, Whittier, another Los Angeles, Culver City, Tujunga, Encino, Hollywood, Mission Hills…hey! That's the one we cleaned up.” It takes her a moment, but she finally gets it. “Hey, those are all ones with pushpins in them!”

“Exactly. Except for Burbank, but I know I've been out there semi-recently.”

“Let's look through that one again then.”

I join her at the computer, and wordless, she cedes the chair to me, perching once more on the desk. Punching “Burbank Offramp Inn” into the logline brings up two entries—one before my time, and another, dated three and a half months ago. I click on the more recent one, a suicide.

“I remember this now,” I realize, when the pictures pop up. “He was another wrist cutter, but this guy did it in the shower. Went real ballistic too—rubbed his blood all over the bathroom walls. Took me forever to scrub.” We study the scene for the obvious assembling of possessions, but nothing stands out.

“Maybe it was on the guy? Like on his T-shirt or something?”

“Clerk at the desk told me the maid found him nude.”

“Maybe they didn't do this one?”

“Why would all the Offramps be done—in order—starting at number two? It doesn't make sense.”

“Maybe it was somewhere that you didn't take a picture of,” Ivy speculates.

“Holy shit,” I mutter, suddenly realizing as I stare at a broad photo of the shower stall. “Look…” The wall is smeared and streaked, and toward the bottom, the dead man's hand had dragged a jagged smile across the splatter. “It's the blood. Bastard made a face in the blood.”

Ivy puts her hand to her head and it disappears beneath a tangle of her blonde hair. “What does it all mean?”

Clicking back over to the Wikipedia page, I look down over the list of Offramp Inns. “Maybe we can find out. After all, I think we know where it's going to happen next.”

Also built during the glut of pop-ups in 1970, the Northridge Offramp Inn on Tampa Boulevard likewise has the bluish-gray exterior and the series of concrete walkways spanning the second floor. All the doorways in the motel face outward, giving the building the look of a two-tall circled herd of elephants protecting the young within. I pull into the Offramp parking lot just before 9:30 p.m. and cruise around until I find a secluded parking space between two minivans. After backing into the spot, I roll down the window, turn off the engine, and begin my watch. I have a perfect view of the door to 236, though I've parked several spaces past it to avoid suspicion. I am mercifully alone; Ivy had begged, pleaded, and threatened to come with me, but I'd told her that my continued participation in all of this came with the cost of my ability to do the stakeouts by myself, and that I would call her the second after I saw or did anything. “It's all for the sake of my sanity,” I said—I didn't think that I could handle sitting for hours on end while she yammered on at me about whatever came into her head. Finally, miffed, she took my phone and called her cell phone with it. Then she saved her number in my phone. “There,” she said, handing my cell back. “Now there won't be any screw-ups.”

The light is on in 236, and every so often, a shadow moves against the window, assuring me that whoever is in there, they are still alive. It isn't surprising to see that the room is occupied; the Offramp Inn website boasted that they regularly run at a 95 percent occupancy due to their “clean rooms, affordable rates, and great service.” This Offramp too has a great big sign out front, advertising their “new hourly rates” while humming away like a bug zapper.

As the hours tick off the clock, I keep the door to 236 in my periphery, but begin to watch the travelers and denizens who are populating the motel on this particular evening. The number of shrieking children running the lengths of the concourses and playing up and down the stairwells, even after midnight, astonishes me. The place is a veritable McDonald's PlayPlace for the near-orphan offspring of vagabond crackheads and unconcerned tourists. When the children finally abate their pell-mell abandonment and trot off to their respective rooms, it is the druggies' and homeless wanderers' turn to cycle, be it going for ice, seeking out trash scraps, or just plain ambling. Near 1:30 a.m., the light in 236 clicks abruptly off, and I sit up, shaking off the inertia that has settled upon me. In this moment, it seems that everything has gone silent and still in the dark of night. No doors bang, no bugs sound off, and even the droning electric buzz of the sign has tuckered itself out. I sit steadfast, watching the dark, patchy shadows of the second-floor walkway—the areas not illuminated by the orange glow of overhead box lights. If anything is going to happen, it is going to happen in this period of eerie inactivity, when even the nearby lanes of the 118, the “Ronald Reagan Freeway,” are momentarily unused.

A sound—a cricket starts back up in the not-too-far distance, and the silence ends; the scene has returned to normalcy and the calm of night. The rest of the evening passes like that into morning, with not a soul even passing the light-stained tan of door 236.

Ivy'd called twice during the nearly ten hours I'd sat placid, waiting for something to appear different or unusual at the bare-bones lodge. The first had been one of nervous excitement, almost a gushy sort of giggling to make sure that I was still awake and alive. The second, at around 5 a.m., was far more sober and dreary; a croaky sort of grimace through the phone to assure me that she was still awake.

When the occupant of 236 emerges at 8:20 a.m., alive, decked out in the denim-and-ball-cap uniform of a trucker, I start my engine, miserable, and drive away. Three hours later, I am awakened by a call from Harold, providing me with the details of a decomposing body found in a trailer parked off the 210 freeway. At his insistence, I have to hurry out there while there is still a sergeant present on scene that I can get to sign off on our invoice, as the sole financial warden of the trailer had evidently died sometime in the previous month. Fortunately, I discover, it is a quick, easy decomp to deal with, as all the seepage of melting skin and fluids has been caught up in the thick sateen comforter encircling the dead man, and none has leeched down into the mattress beneath his corpse.

Once I am back at home again, it takes hours of lying inert on my own mattress before I finally doze into a restless sleep. I awake again at 9:30 in the p.m., miserably groggy, and not at all refreshed for the long evening ahead. I consider calling Ivy and asking her to take the watch tonight, but a part of me just won't give in to the notion. Dressing, I yearn for a spike of heroin, but fight off this urge as well.

I pull into the parking lot in Northridge once again, arriving at approximately ten-thirty, only this time the lights in 236 are dark.
Have they already gone to sleep or has the killer already been here?
I park inconspicuously once more and begin my watch. Several people move toward the door over the course of the evening. One guy even stops just outside the door, a wispy little man dressed in a button-up shirt and slacks; he smokes a cigarette at the railing, picks his nose, and then moves on. I consider tailing just to be cautious, but I feel he is not the one I am after.

Morning comes to the Offramp Inn once again, and 236 is, once again, unmolested. I stay long enough to watch the maid bypass the room, assuring me that it went unoccupied the previous evening and that, of course, I spent my night alertly guarding an empty room. When I tell Ivy about this over the phone, she just asks, “Why didn't you call the front desk and ask if the room was available?” as if I am the idiot in our fledgling partnership.

Thursday night I get to the Offramp while it is still twilight hours, setting up once more for the long night with a freshly emptied bladder. The parking lot is just beginning to fill. Someone has parked in the spot I've occupied the previous two evenings, so I am forced to park farther away than I'd like. I fiddle absentmindedly with the knobs on my dashboard, recognizing that this night, if nothing happens, will be longer than the previous two.

The various occupants of the motel look so much more wretched and human in the daylight hours, moving around pre-fix. In the evening, they take on the aspect of vermin, slinking in shadows, alert and cagey. In natural light, their downtrodden misery is discernible and much less unsettling. The door to 236 opens suddenly, and I am startled out of a mental fog I'd not realized I'd entered. The occupants emerge: First comes a fat man, bespectacled and goofy, who beneath his sweat suit seems as if he has stretched the bounds of his skin to its absolute limit. Behind him is an asparagus of a woman in a dress that hangs short and limp on her curveless body. They are an odd pair and carry no luggage with them. I assume they've gone for food, but a short time after they've left, a maid comes in to clean the room, and it takes her a long time to do it.

I'm at a crossroads here; it's probable the fat man and his hooker are done with the room for the evening, their hour exhausted, and the room will likely stay empty. On the other hand, if I leave and he comes back and somehow gets gutted in the night, the previous two nights of my life will have been a waste. I decide to stick it out until midnight.

At 9:55 p.m., a tall, lean woman in high-waisted jeans and a peach-striped blouse climbs the stairs to the second floor, ratty suitcase in hand. She shifts along the veranda, halting every couple of doors to check the number as if someone might be playing a trick on her, or as if the numbers might shift to some other senseless scheme and she will be lost between rooms forever. She finally stops at 236 and inserts a keycard into the electronic lock before disappearing into the room. The interior light snaps on and she has found her home for the night. This also means I won't be leaving at midnight.

Shortly thereafter, the harsh pale whiteness of the room light is extinguished, and only the softer blue of the TV's glow emanates from beyond the curtains. I sit, watching, forcing myself to remain awake, counting doors, dissecting the architecture of the overall building, counting people, anything. When the crackheads and weirdos go in for the night, I am alone.

At 1:20 a.m., a figure appears on the veranda from around the curve of the building. He walks quickly and from my direction, so I note only the frame of him as he slips through the darkness. The likelihood is that he is going for the ice machine stationed at the end of the walkway, but when he reaches the entrance to 236, he pauses. I am instantly vigilant, but giving him the benefit of the doubt. The question I have not asked myself in all of this so far is, If this man is our man, what happens next? Do I go charging up there, screaming my head off? What if he has a gun? The woman in Santa Clarita died of a “self-inflicted gunshot wound,” so obviously, if he's the one we're seeking, he has access to firearms. Of course, in creating the appearance of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, he would have had to leave the firearm in the hands of the victim, so maybe the gun is no more? The stranger looks around sharply, but in the shadow, and from my distance, his features are soft focus and indistinguishable. He turns back to the door; the man's next move is to pull a black ski mask down over his head. My pulse quickens as I reach for the door handle, only to pause and question my own sanity. What am I doing? Why do I give a fuck about any of this? And yet, I already know the answer:
Holly Kelly
.

My motions are soft but quick in an attempt to minimize the noise; there is a lot of ground to cover between me and him. I don't bother closing my car door, leaving it to chance that in my quest to save this woman, some creep doesn't boost my stereo.

I run, keeping low, hoping he doesn't peer over the balcony at the sound of my footfalls. I can no longer see what he is doing but I know that I've got seconds with which to act. My best bet is to pin him in the bedroom, trap him with the woman and hope he doesn't kill her or take her hostage. From my perspective, it beats grappling with him—and if I can turn him over to some Good Samaritan, I can maybe leave before the cops get there. I reach the top of the stairs and, crouched, I just glimpse his leg disappearing into the room, with what appears to be the end of a long, serrated hunting knife at his side. He's switched up his weapons. This isn't the short pig-sticker blade he used on homeless Annie—this is a serious piece of tactical equipment. He's going the homicide route on this one. I creep up on the door, awaiting some sort of scream from the woman inside upon realizing that a man in a mask is occupying space in the dark of her room. It feels as if my heartbeat should be audible to everyone in the motel, and at the last second, I get the perverse notion that maybe this is some rape fantasy the woman has paid good money for, and the real killer is out there in the dark, watching and having a laugh.

The door is ajar, only slightly, and I can hear nothing from inside the room, which scares me further. The neon hum of the sign out front kicks on again, startling me, and I hesitate a moment before gripping the doorknob and yanking the thin door shut, fiercely. They say that in an emergency situation, you never yell “Help” or “Rape,” because no one will come; instead, you're supposed to yell “Fire.” And so I do.

Screaming “Fire” at the top of my lungs as soon as I yank the door to 236 closed has the twofold effect of rousting everyone in the vicinity and causing the masked man to go for the door's handle inside, which I cling to outside, preventing his exit. At this point, the woman inside the room begins screaming, having apparently no idea of the danger she'd almost been in, instead focusing on the considerably lessened danger she might still be in. The blade of the knife punches through the midst of the door, just below the peephole, its tip coming shockingly close to my face. I lean to the side as the knife is drawn abruptly back through the door, disappearing to the other side. The man slams against the door, aggressively trying to splinter the wood, which mercifully holds. “Someone get out here, goddamnit!” I scream, glancing around into the dark parking lot. I can see the lights have beamed on in most of the rooms to my right and left, but thus far no one has emerged to heed my warning. Either they are certain that I am a loony crackhead in the grasp of a particularly potent hallucination, or they too know the trick about yelling “Fire” instead of “Help.”

The woman in 236 is delirious now, making a sort of gagging wailing scream that irritates me through my terror. “Lady, shut up in there,” I yell, desperate. In that instant, she does, and I hear the curtains of the room's large picture window draw open. “Someone help! Help me!” I beg of the emptiness around me. The window explodes violently outward, spraying glass over the lip of the veranda and down to the pavement below, as the room's sole chair smashes through and bounces onto the concrete walkway. Knife first, the masked man steps through the window, kicking out some of the remaining shards of glass as he does. I find myself, eyes drawn to the blade, releasing the doorknob and taking a step back. He is only slightly broader than myself, and maybe an inch taller, but he seems to loom large as he stands facing me, his black workman's boots with their waffle tread grinding the glass beneath him. The woman inside rightly begins to cry now, and it is far more tolerable than her screams. “Don't do anything stupid,” I tell the man, who appears to be considering just such a thing. Instead, he turns and runs down the veranda, away from me, disappearing around the corner. Adrenaline threatening to explode from my veins, I give chase, leaping over the chair and after him. Rounding the corner, I feel a white-hot burn across my forearm as I crash into the attacker, who, waiting for me, has gashed open the soft meat near my wrist. My body impacts against his and I feel his strength push back against me, forcing me harshly off balance and into the steel side of the ice machine.