The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes (10 page)
Read The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes Online
Authors: Marcus Sakey
“What do you think?”
“I don’t recognize myself.”
“That was the point, right?”
Down the block the smell of tomato sauce from a restaurant
tightened his stomach, but he walked past to the tanning salon on the other side. A bell on the door jingled as he stepped in. “Do you guys have that spray stuff?”
They did.
Next was clothing. A squirrel-cheeked girl told him they’d be closing in fifteen minutes, and he browsed quickly, then got a fitting room and pulled the curtain. Time for new clothes anyway. Scrubbing his shirt in a rest stop sink had stopped doing much seven states back. He slid on a pair of canvas cargo pants, a black tee, and a Hawaiian shirt with blue and green parrots on it. Bug-eyed sunglasses and a canvas messenger bag completed the outfit.
Daniel looked in the mirror.
Well, it’s official. You’re a douche bag.
The man staring back had a dark tan, trying-too-hard hair, and sunglasses that obscured half his face. Not so over-the-top that he would be noticeable, but he certainly didn’t look familiar to himself.
Of course, that and four dollars will get you a cup of coffee.
“You look familiar,” the clerk said as she rang him up.
“I get that a lot.” He turned away. Let her think he was a B-list star who wanted privacy. Out on the street, he transferred the bank statements, computer, and Laney’s moisturizer into the bag, then bundled up his old clothes and tossed them in a trash bin on the way to the Third Street Promenade.
It was dark outside, and the sunglasses made it darker, but he didn’t want to risk taking them off. Luckily, he was in Los Angeles. If a second head had sprouted from his belly and begun pitching a spec script, it wouldn’t have drawn more than a glance.
Okay. That takes care of Step One. Now, Step Two.
The café had tall bookshelves and a varied clientele, a few chatting, most lost in their laptops. There were fancy juices and a dozen kinds of tea and complicated coffee apparatus. Most important, there was a sign offering free wireless. He got coffee and a bran muffin, and took a table in the back, away from the window.
A person’s computer could reveal more about his life than his mother. Especially a writer’s computer. There would be e-mail, years’ worth. Addresses and phone numbers. Scripts and stories. Pictures and financial statements and maybe even a journal. Plus he could get on the Internet, log back into the world. Google himself and his wife. Do a little research on amnesia, see what the hell he was suffering from exactly, and what could be done about it—
The screen welcomed him to Windows XP by name, and then asked for his password.
Daniel rubbed at his face with both hands. What were passwords? Birthdays. The name of a girlfriend or a dog. The things that people never forgot, that they could count on being able to remember dead drunk or a year after they’d last entered it. The exact kind of thing that he was lacking.
He typed “Laney,” hit enter.
When he clicked the button, a dialogue box appeared with the words “Life Begins.” Huh. Life begins. Probably just the thing to prompt him if he forgot—unless he forgot everything, in which case it was just cryptic. He tried again.
“Life Begins”
Did you forget your password?
“LaneyThayer”
Did you forget your password?
“CandyGirls”
Did you forget your password?
“EmilySweet”
Did you forget your password?
“Malibu”
Did you forget your password?
“BMW”
Did you forget your password?
“FuckYouYouPieceOfCrap”
Did you forget your password?
This was pointless. He could type random words for the rest of his life and never get it right. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic. Survive a suicide attempt, drive three thousand miles, break into his own house, flee the police, and then end up stymied because he couldn’t remember the name of his favorite movie. Awesome.
Daniel stowed the laptop. It was still a treasure trove; he just didn’t have the key yet. There had to be a way to break the security. Or he would remember, the same way little bits of his past kept leaking into his consciousness. Maybe he’d have a dream where the cast of
Candy Girls
broke into a musical number about his password.
As he was choking down the rest of his muffin, he spotted a lonely terminal on a small desk in the back of the room. He stood, brushed the crumbs off his shirt. “How much to rent the computer?”
Daniel passed the man a ten, got a slip of paper with a temporary log-in. The chair creaked as he sat down; the computer damn near creaked as he fired it up.
He opened Firefox, waited for it to load, then went to Google and started to type. He’d gotten as far as “Laney Th” when it popped up suggestions: Laney Thayer, Laney Thayer Candy Girls, Laney Thayer Naked, Laney Thayer Accident, Laney Thayer Murder.
The world throbbed out of focus.
Everything blurring but the words “accident” and, worse, “murder.” The letters not making sense. The vicious serifs of the “M,” the complicit wriggle of the “r.” The stone in his stomach twisted, revealing edges that snagged and tore.
Laney Thayer Murder.
Oh god.
He hovered over it. Stared. Foolish, foolish man. It wasn’t a rabbit hole he was falling down. It was an abyss.
ACTRESS IN FATAL ACCIDENT
LOS ANGELES (CNN)—Los Angeles Sheriffs responded to an automobile accident resulting in the apparent death of actress Laney Thayer earlier this afternoon.
Thayer, 30, lost control of her vehicle during a hairpin turn on the Pacific Coast Highway. The 2007 Volkswagen Beetle slid through a barricade and over the edge, falling more than 100 feet before landing upside-down in the water. Preliminary evidence suggests that Thayer was going approximately 75 miles an hour, 30 mph faster than the posted speed limit.
Sheriffs responded quickly, cordoning off the road and calling on the Coast Guard for support. Tidal conditions and the severe slope prohibited officers from reaching the car for nearly an hour.
“At this point, Ms. Thayer’s body has not been recovered,” said Sheriff’s spokesman Parto Barkhordari. “However, given the condition of the vehicle, and the riptides at this time of year, that isn’t surprising.”
Asked whether Thayer could have survived the accident, Barkhordari said, “We’re making every effort to find her. But I don’t see how she could have gone over that cliff and lived.”
The actress starred in the popular television melodrama
Candy Girls.
Her husband, screenwriter Daniel Hayes, was unavailable for comment.
CANDY GIRL
ACCIDENT NO PIECE OF CAKE
Laney Thayer’s story was just getting started . . . until it ended tragically in a car crash that could have been pulled from her hit show
.
While sheriffs are close-lipped about the crash, the focus of the investigation is shifting from accidental death to something more ominous.
Sources within the LASD have revealed that according to skid marks found on the Pacific Coast Highway, Laney may have been forced off the road.
Meanwhile, what is it about the PCH and celebrities? Let us count the ways those two don’t mix: Mel Gibson, Nick Nolte, Robert Downey Jr., Bridget Fonda, Shannen Doherty . . .
LANEY THAYER MOURNED BY HOLLYWOOD, CAST
“Laney was a beautiful woman with a beautiful soul,” said co-star Robert Cameron. “Everyone adored her. Me? I loved her.”
Thayer had recently made news with her decision to leave the FX show
Candy Girls
in the midst of contract disputes. The show, which was a surprise success, has run for four years—
WHERE IS DANIEL HAYES?
Car chases, rumors of affairs with co-stars, sheriff’s investigations, oh my!
But where is hubby Daniel Hayes in all this? Why can no one seem to find him?
LANEY THAYER HUSBAND SOUGHT
LOS ANGELES (CNN)—Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Parto Barkhordari today acknowledged that police sought Daniel Hayes, husband of actress Laney Thayer, in connection with her death on November 2.
The case, originally believed an accident, has come under investigation as a possible homicide based on forensic evidence as well as “financial irregularities.”
The officer leading the investigation, Detective Roger Waters, stopped short of specifically naming Hayes a suspect. However, he did note that in cases of this nature, family members were “the first people we look at.”
Investigators have confirmed that blood traces found on the airbag matched Laney Thayer’s blood type. Analysis of the stretch of highway leading up to the fatal spot bears evidence of a high-speed chase involving another vehicle. Neither Waters nor Barkhordari would go into detail regarding the financial evidence, though both noted that it could constitute a motive . . .
HAPPY COUPLE?
Laney Thayer and husband Daniel Hayes look awfully cozy in this behind-the-scenes snap from
Candy Girls.
But sources on the set say that their relationship was “anything but simple.”
Click for a slide show of Laney’s career, from her modeling days to strolls down the red carpet to beach frolics with hunky co-star Robert Cameron!
DANIEL HAYES = SCOTT PETERSON
Does anybody else notice that Daniel Hayes, husband of
Candy Girl
Laney Thayer, is starting to look an awful lot like Scott Peterson?
True, Laney wasn’t pregnant—that we know of—but otherwise, things look grim for the writer.
Especially since he disappeared. Sources within the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department have told TMZ that Hayes isn’t just laying low—he appears to have fled.
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Reader Comments
1. First!
Posted at 3:50PM on November 7, 2009 by newsjunx
2. She’s rich AND hot but he kills her? Talk about a d-bag play.
Posted at 3:52PM on November 7, 2009 by hisnameisrobertpaulson
3. 1st.
Posted at 3:52PM on November 7, 2009 by K
4. Just cause she’s dead doesn’t mean I wouldn’t tap her . . .
Posted at 3:54PM on November 7, 2009 by PinkLVR
He closed the browser window, bile on his tongue. November 7, that last article was dated. Today.
This had been going on around him all the while he drove west, oblivious. He could have had half the answers to his questions just by reading a tabloid. All the time he wondered what was wrong, all the time he felt this massive, crushing guilt—
No. That can’t be true.
Daniel’s stomach was crawling things. He lurched to his feet. Behind him, a voice said, “Hey, dude, you’ve got like ninety minutes—” The slamming door cut off the clerk’s words.
What the fuck is happening to you?
Who are you?
He turned left at random, stalked down the street, everything spinning. A happy couple parted to make space for him. A homeless woman yelled at an ATM. Coffeehouse, clothing boutique, coffeehouse, restaurant, coffeehouse. Fucking Santa Monica and its fucking 340 days of sunshine and its fucking coffee. Last things he needed were sunshine and coffee.
How could all of this happen to one person? It was too much— the memory, the lonely terror of the last week, making it home to find he had a beautiful life, and then scant hours later learning that that life had been ripped from him. Learning that everyone believed he was to blame.
That can’t be true. You couldn’t have done what they say you did.
Please. Oh god, please. Better to have died on the beach in Maine.
Please let me not be that man.
her battered white van through the desert.
She’d thought about buying what she needed in one of the towns outlying Los Angeles. The rules in the city were strict, but once you got a couple of miles out, things were simple. Show a driver’s license, pay in cash, and you were good to go.
But she didn’t really want to show her driver’s license. The odds it would lead to her getting caught were slim, but any trail, any trail at all, could be a problem. She’d never killed someone before, and while she wasn’t excited about doing it, she was even less excited about the prospect of getting caught.
So she’d gone a safer route. It had taken five hours to make the drive, two of them fighting L.A. traffic. Once she’d cleared city limits and was rolling north on 15, things had thinned out. Just her and the rocky sprawl of the desert and the wide white sky.
She made it to the outskirts of Vegas a little after one. Belinda always felt naked outside of a city. All these wide lanes and huge parking lots, all these car washes and cluttered signs. The Walmart was on a street called East Serene, which she could relate to, being east of serenity. Sort of how she felt since Bennett had come back into her life.
