Moist (24 page)

Martin left a quick note for Norberto. He simply wrote “
Viva la Revolución
.” He was careful to lock the door behind him. Now came the hard part.

. . .

Amado sat at the little coffee shop and looked through the
LA Weekly
magazine.
Carajo,
there were a lot of screenwriting classes and workshops to choose from, and each one seemed like some kind of scam. Write a script in thirty days? Sell your script in a week? Learn the secret to getting your script through the Hollywood maze? The secret of the pitch? How to meet an agent? They were like diet ads. Fast formulas for surefire hits. Lose weight now! Ask me how!

All of the classes were taught by people who put their names on them like they were somehow important or famous. Amado had never heard of any of them.

He was looking for one in
español
, because the
telenovelas
were in
español
. But there didn't seem to be one. Still, all he wanted was to learn how to write; he could translate on his own.

Eventually he found one. It was the most expensive one, and, in Amado's experience, you got what you paid for. It had the added attraction of being only two days long. Surely he could learn how to write a script in two days.

Amado tore the ad out of the magazine.

. . .

Don got there as quick as he could. Flores had taken the message and hadn't mentioned anything to Don for about an hour. Then he took his feet off his desk, looked over from behind the sports page, and blandly told him that some mailman, actually a very butch lesbian mailman, had found an arm in a postbox. An arm that matched the description of the arm found on Carlos Vila's garage floor.

So Don jumped in his car and raced over to the West Hollywood PD.

The arm looked exactly like Larga's arm. Except this arm was wrapped in plastic and had several french fries clutched in its hand. It was so similar that Don double-checked with the evidence room at Parker Center. He called and found that the other arm, Larga's arm, was resting comfortably in its cooler.

Don told the West Hollywood detective, a nice-enough man named Lowenstein, that the arm was evidence in an organized crime case he was working, and he needed it. Lowenstein blandly informed Don that it was a West Hollywood case now. They'd send him information as it became available.

Don knew better than to argue. He'd talk to his boss about it later. Right now, things were getting complicated.

. . .

The computer was boring. It took what seemed like an hour for the stupid Web pages to load. And then half the time they would jam or the URL would be missing or changed or something. Besides, what was Bob looking for? Even he didn't know. He was just killing time.

Maybe that's what I've been doing,
he thought.
I've been living my life, killing time, waiting for my Web page to load.

Bob heard the door open.

“I hope you got plain. I don't like vanilla in the morning.”

“Hello, Bob.”

Bob looked up. Martin stood there.

“Hey, man, what's going on?”

“I need your help. Can you spare some time?”

Bob nodded. Thank God, he was so bored.

“Yeah. No problem.”

Bob quickly scribbled a note. Martin looked around suspiciously, then leaned in close.

“I'll tell you about it in the car.”

. . .

Amado was lucky. He'd called the screenwriting workshop and they had room for him. Not only did they have room, but the class was starting that afternoon. Amado went out and bought a college-ruled notebook and several mechanical pencils. He was ready.

He now found himself sitting in a small lecture hall at Occidental College in Eagle Rock with two dozen aspiring screenwriters. Amado looked around the classroom. Most of the other students were younger than him. Several had laptop computers glowing in front of them. There was the cute Korean girl with pink pigtails and a strapless sundress that revealed some artistic tattoos. There were several young men with thick eyeglasses and scruffy haircuts. These men, boys really, lounged around in a kind of superior slouch. Like
they'd already written successful screenplays and were just at the class as a kind of goof. There were a couple of middle-aged women, dressed in black and looking intelligent with stylish eyeglasses and asymmetrical haircuts.

Amado was the lone one-armed Latino in the class.

A cell phone went off.

The teacher, a handsome, slender man who had written several megasuccessful teen comedies in the late '80s, entered the room. He was
simpático
and confident. He assured them that with hard work and his formula they would all be pulling down big bucks in Hollywood sooner than they thought.

Words of encouragement. What every writer loves to hear.

Amado paid close attention, taking detailed notes, as the teacher began to describe the elements of a three-act structure. Every now and then the muted clicking of laptop keys would annoy Amado. But he realized that he would have to get one. He was serious about this and needed to have all the stuff that serious writers used. Like a cool laptop. He would call his friend Alberto after class and see if any laptops had fallen off a truck out by LAX.

Amado listened as the teacher told the class how someone named Shakespeare had used the three-act structure. He wanted to interrupt the teacher and ask him where the commercials went in a
telenovela
script, but decided that this was probably something that the writers figured out after they had the story.

The teacher talked. The class laughed. Amado wrote it down.

Act one: get man up a tree. Act two: shake a stick at him. Act three: get him down.

How hard could that be?

. . .

Esteban picked at a salad. He really wanted some kind of chorizo-and-egg burrito, but Lupe was concerned that he was eating too much fatty food. So Esteban picked at a salad. Not that it wasn't
delicioso.
It had slices of grapefruit and avocado, red chili flakes, fresh
lechuga
.

But something was distracting Esteban. Martin had failed to show up for lunch. Which meant that he was up to something.
Jodido hinchapelotas gringo gorrón
. Nobody liked a rat.

Esteban would have to make some quick moves. Shuffle bank accounts. Move storage facilities. Wire funds to the Cayman Islands and then have it moved back to another account in California. He hated to do it. It was better to stay under the radar. You never knew when some
pendejo
at the IRS would suddenly get suspicious of all these transfers and start snooping around.

But if Martin had really turned on him, and it looked that way, he needed to protect himself.

It was going to be a long day.

. . .

Bob looked out the window as Martin drove along the Angeles Crest Highway. He watched the scrub of chaparral give way to pine forests as the road narrowed and snaked toward the top of Mount Whatever-it's-called. He turned around in his seat and saw the view of the Valley. He wondered where the fuck they were going.

“Where are we going?”

Martin turned and looked at him.

“The desert.”

Bob nodded.

“Cool.”

Bob wondered if there was something in the trunk that needed to be buried. Or maybe they were going to meet a private plane coming up from Mexico with a clandestine cargo. It annoyed Bob that Martin was so aloof. Was it because he was stoned all the time? Maybe. Stoners never talked much. Or they talked too much. Bob couldn't remember. Martin didn't say much. Bob thought that it was because Martin didn't like him. Bob had tried to tell Martin how smoothly his plan had gone. How the police didn't suspect a thing. How smart Martin had been to think of it in the first place.

Martin just told him to shut up.

Bob figured he still might be mad from the time Bob had punched him out. Bob figured it probably wouldn't be so good to bring that up, so . . . he kept quiet and enjoyed the view.

There was a beat inside Martin's head. He couldn't figure out if it was a Beastie Boys track or just some kind of random percussion his brain had decided to obsessively repeat over and over again. It didn't bother him. He rode with it. Tapping it out on the steering wheel. It was better than listening to Bob brag about how fucking cool he was.
Yeah, you're slick, Roberto. One cool fucking cat. Too bad your sad carcass is about to be dumped in the desert.

Martin had never thought of himself as a killer. He had always lobbied against it as a solution to problems. But now . . . well, now it made a certain amount of sense. It was, after all, an effective business strategy. And any qualms he'd had
in the past about pulling the trigger on someone, well, somehow they had vanished too.

For the first time in his life Martin had a tangible goal. It wasn't just the idea of an MBA, the promise of a good job with an important firm. It wasn't all smoke and mirrors. It was real. Esteban had millions of dollars stashed somewhere. Millions. Cash.

The cash was the goal.

Martin imagined himself sitting on some kind of chaise longue, underneath a ceiling of blossoming bougainvillea, sipping espresso and listening to the waves of some warmwater ocean crash against the beach. Maybe some topless chick, like in a painting by Gauguin, would sit with him on the chaise and roll a jumbo. A big fat fucking spliff.

Yeah. Cash money.

Bob, and his insipid questions, brought Martin out of his fantasy.

“When are we gonna get there?”

Martin wanted to tell him to shut up and enjoy the view because it was his last fucking ride. But he didn't, he tried to ignore him. Martin wished he could blow a joint right now. He turned to Bob.

“Can you roll?”

“Roll?”

Martin cringed. Why was this guy so stupid?

“A joint.”

“No, man. Sorry.”

Typical, worthless fuck.

“I was never good at it. They wouldn't burn evenly.”

It doesn't matter. You're as good as dead.

“Whatever.”

. . .

“People, the general public, the movie-going audience, they like murders. Murders are interesting and murderers are the most interesting of all. That's why so many TV shows and movies are about murders.”

Amado sat listening to the teacher. If people only knew the truth. They wouldn't be so interested. Sure, the part leading up to it is kind of exciting, but after you've killed.
Carajo.
What a fucking mess.

The professor told the class to take a ten-minute break. Cliques immediately formed as like-minded souls asked each other to be writing partners or what agent they had.

Amado walked out into the hallway and plugged some coins in the soda machine. He was getting used to this one-armed thing. It wasn't going to be as bad as he'd thought. At first he hadn't thought he'd be able to wipe his ass again. Now he could do all kinds of stuff. Well, he couldn't move heavy objects like Norberto's big dead body, but he could do lots of other stuff.

The cute Korean girl with the pink pigtails came up to him.

“Hi. What's your name?”

“
Hola.
I am called Amado.”

He extended his hand.

“And you?”

“Cindy.”

Amado pushed a button and a lemon-lime soda fell to the bottom with a thunk.

“Can I buy you a soda? Cindy?”

She smiled at him and their eyes met. Amado could see
that animal thing inside of her switch on as he looked into her eyes. It was strange, he realized, he hadn't thought about having sex in days. In fact, he was even a little shy about it, not knowing if he'd be any good with just one arm.

“No, thanks.”

Amado noticed that her knees were shaking. He smiled at her. She stammered when she spoke.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Because you look like someone who's had a lot of life experience.”

“What the professor was talking about? Life experiences.”

“Yeah. Life experiences make you a better writer. You look like a person who's had some.”

Amado smiled.
You don't know the half of it.

“
Sí.
One or two.”

Cindy looked at him, looked deep into his eyes.

“I haven't.”

Amado sipped his lemon-lime soda and shrugged.

“You are young.”

The other students started back into the lecture hall.

“How did you lose your arm?”

“Maybe I will tell you after class.”

. . .

Don jimmied the door to Larga's house. A uniformed officer and several crime-scene investigators stood behind him. Don drew his revolver and entered the house.

“Mr. Larga?”

He listened for a second.

“This is the police. Mr. Larga?”

Don nodded, and the uniformed officer and some of the crime-scene guys entered. They moved quickly in pairs, covering each other as they entered one room after another.

“Bedroom, clear.”

“Bathroom, clear.”

“Kitchen, clear.”

It was not a big house, and they were able to search and declare it clear of dead bodies, hostages, or intruders in about thirty-two seconds.

One of the crime-scene guys, a balding man with those eyeglasses that make your eyes look really big, and who enjoyed collecting bugs off corpses because forensic entomology was his hobby, came up to Don.

“Looks like this isn't a crime scene. We're going to pack it up.”

“No problem.”

“Call me when you find the rest of his body.”

Don nodded.
Yeah, so you can pick the maggots out of his eyes. Like I want to see that?

As the uniformed officer tacked a notice to the front door, Don began to sift through Larga's mail.