Jude Lyon was in love with my Theon. He followed him around and did odd jobs for him, and for me too sometimes. Jude was gay but rarely had a lover. Theon was straight but I suspected that he’d had sex with Jude a time or two.
When Theon couldn’t make it to pick me up at the airport or accompany me to one of the dozens of porn industry galas, Jude would show up in his vintage BMW dressed in just the right clothes.
Jude loved Theon with an uncritical passion. Though he had no interest in things like baseball, barbecues, or me, he learned to care for these things because Theon did.
“What’s up with that guy?” I once asked my husband. “I mean are you two in love or what?”
“It’s not like that, babe,” he said. We were sitting in the kitchen drinking cognac from juice glasses.
“Then what?”
“You don’t want to know too much about JL,” he said. “He’s probably the most dangerous man I ever met.”
“Jude? He doesn’t look like he could do five reps with my three-pound dumbbells.”
“Don’t be fooled; that little faggot could carry the whole world on his shoulders if he had to.”
I asked more, and at other times, but that’s all I ever got about Jude and what Theon thought of him.
The last message was from a collection agency. The loan company that Theon was borrowing from was dunning him for a sixteen-thousand-dollar payment. They would repossess everything that he’d put up for collateraclass="underline" the Humvee, the house, the condo in Aspen, even certain pieces of jewelry that were being held by a third party.
It was like the first page of the first tale in a short-story collection, the first line in a romance of descent.
The red phone was my most precious possession. It was a ruby-colored, semiopaque, glistening cell phone that only a few people had the number of. Built into it was a device that recorded every time someone spoke into the line. It had more than sixty-four gigabytes of memory.
I picked up the little phone in Las Vegas when there was both an adult film convention and a tech convention in the same hotel.
The pasty-faced kid who was in charge of the spy booth was a young man named Bobby Seaton. I asked him to give me one of the samples and he refused.
“If you give it to me I’ll fuck you till the ache in your nuts won’t stop for a week.”
Bobby wasn’t fat but his body was very soft. There was no definition or strength. He insisted on wearing two condoms and had a scared look on his face the whole time we were in his hotel bed.
The only indication he gave that he wanted to be with me was a small, unflagging erection.
“Can, can we stop now?” he asked after his fourth ejaculation.
“Give me the phone,” I said.
He hesitated and I grabbed his dick.
He took the phone out of his pants on the floor and handed it to me.
“You can’t tell anybody where you got it,” he stammered. “It’s a federal crime to record phone conversations without consent.”
He showed me how to change the chip and use the various features. When he’d finished I reached for his cock again — it was erect immediately.
He actually whimpered.
“Lie down, white boy,” I whispered.
He got down on the bed and I fucked him twice more.
If he’d worn only one condom at a time I don’t think I would have tortured him so. I hated his fear but reveled in my power to frighten him. I loved it that he could cringe and orgasm almost simultaneously but I loved that phone even more.
I entered a certain code and was told by the display that I had three unanswered calls from Linda Love’s number. I erased them without listening. Then I noticed that the battery was at half power and that the ringer was on. I did a different search and saw that there was another call answered and recorded...
“Hello,” Theon said in his faux-distracted tone.
If you knew Theon you knew that this quality of voice was a ploy on his part. He was trying to keep the caller from understanding his intentions; in this case he didn’t want the caller to know that he was secretly spying on me.
My stardom didn’t raise envy in Theon’s heart but rather he was hungry to share in that success, like an elder in a pride of lions wanted to share in the kill. He must have been overjoyed that I’d forgotten the phone with the ringer on. That way he’d be able to spy on me like a little boy peeking through the keyhole of his mother’s boudoir.
“Hi,” a girl’s voice said — Jolie Wins, Myrtle May. “Is Deb there?”
“She’s not in right now,” my husband said. “Can I help you?”
“Who, who are you?”
“My name’s Axel. I’m Deb’s manager. She’s out of town and left her phone here at her house. Who’s speaking?”
“Jolie. Jolie Wins. Did Deb tell you about me?”
“Jolie? Yeah. Met you the other day at that thing, right? Can I do anything to help?”
“I wanted to ask Deb if maybe there was some kind of job I could do on the set of her new movie. I’m unemployed and they kicked me out of my place. I mean I don’t blame ’em. I couldn’t pay the rent and so I had to go. Deb’s the only kind person I’ve met in Hollywood. I’d work real hard.”
“Well,” Theon mused, “like I said, Debbie’s out of town on one of her exotic shoots... in Tahiti actually.”
“Tahiti,” Jolie said breathlessly. “Man, I’d love to be there.”
“Yeah, me too. But I’ll tell you what, Jolie. This is Deb’s private line. If you have this number that must mean that you’re important to her. So what I’ll do is send a car over to get you and bring you here. Maybe I can help you out until Deb gets back...”
They talked a little longer. She was down on Alvarado at a diner. The cook was buying her coffee and doughnuts, probably with the same intentions of my sometimes-slimeball husband. Theon promised to send a limo over to pick her up.
The rest was obvious.
When Theon took one look at Jolie he saw dollar signs and got an erection too. He told her that she could make the same kind of money that I did when I was a kid and that all he had to do was see how she worked on camera. The date on the recording was a week before the two died. He might have been fucking her that whole time for all I knew. Maybe he was putting her up somewhere, promising her a starring role in his upcoming feature-length adult masterpiece.
It was my fault. I should have kept tabs on her. Or I should have ignored her at the hip-hop party and let her find her own way down. Instead I gave her false hope and a phone number that Theon had access to.
I had killed them both.
“Hello,” Kip Rhinehart said, answering his phone.
“Hey, Kip, it’s me — Deb.”
“Hey, babe. Long time no see.”
“I been kinda busy.”
“I know, big important woman like you. What can I do for you?”
“I was just wondering...”
“Yeah?”
“Did Theon have a girl in one of your rooms up there?”
“I heard he died,” Kip said.
“Yeah. Him and this sixteen-year-old. They let a camera fall in the bathtub and electrocuted themselves while fucking.”
“That’s hard.”
“Was she there?”
Silence.
“Come on now, Kip,” I said. “He’s dead. She’s dead. There’s no one left to protect. You’re the first person Theon’d call if he needed to put up someone on the QT.”
“Yeah. She had one of the garden rooms. Nice kid. Fucked-up, but she was nice. Had manners, you know?”
“I’m gonna wanna see the room and her stuff,” I said.
“Sure, Deb. Nothing worth anything there but I’ll lock it up until you come.”
“I’ll drop by tonight or at the latest tomorrow morning.”