Shaun said nothing. There was no curiosity at all. He realized for the hundredth time that she was a beautiful woman but she left him cold.
She had perfect features. A model’s cheekbones and a model’s posture. But Gordon, who was naturally attracted to pretty much every woman on earth, no matter how dumpy or plain, shuddered at the thought of fucking this one.
It wasn’t that she came off a bit mannish. It wasn’t even that god-awful haircut, a man’s haircut, what you’d call a “fade,” clipped close to her skull.
No. Sex, no matter if it was with one of the maids from housekeeping or an alcoholic socialite or the hottest movie star in LA, was special to him. Performance art in the sweetest possible way. But he knew, with this woman, it would just be…mating.
Shaun finally spoke. “What did Max see?”
Gordon didn’t know for sure if Max Conroy saw anything. And frankly, it was a side issue. The fact that he saw anything at all was only relevant to the fact that it might have spurred him to leave.
“So what did he see?” Shaun repeated.
“Nothing that important.” It was just another problem in a string of problems Gordon had to deal with. And problems invited scrutiny.
“He might have seen a body,” Gordon said at last.
Deedee Wertman, an inbred socialite from Montauk, had come out to Arizona to recover from a bad love affair. It was easy to see why she got dumped. She was fat, loud, and abrasive.
She was also headstrong. She insisted on going into the sweat lodge.
Thing was, Gordon had put a temporary moratorium on sweat lodges after the tragedy at another self-help place just up the road. The insurance costs were way too high. But Deedee Wertman kept at him, hectoring like a magpie. She wanted the sweat lodge experience. She’d paid for the sweat lodge experience. It said “sweat lodge experience” right in the brochure—was this a case of false advertising?
He should have refunded her money. He should have told her to go to hell and never darken his doorway again. But Gordon had too much on his mind, and so he relented. He’d instructed Mike, his sweat lodge man (during the interim, Mike had been relegated to gardening and landscaping duties) to keep the temperature down and provide plenty of air vents. He insisted Deedee drink ten glasses of water before going inside, and if she was in there for more than fifteen minutes he would pull her out personally.
Deedee Wertman was so excited at the prospect of the sweat lodge experience, she didn’t watch where she was going. She tripped over a tree root at the entrance to the lodge and speared herself on the finial of one of the two waist-high ceremonial lamps outside.
Deedee Wertman bled to death before they could summon the paramedics.
So they didn’t. Summon the paramedics.
In a panic, Gordon directed her to be taken to the storage room and put on ice.
This was a liability problem he just couldn’t face right now. It was his sixtieth birthday, there was a big party planned, and there was the Other Thing.
The timing was impossible.
Fortunately, Deedee Wertman had virtually no friends and, better yet, was estranged from her family. She was childless and hadn’t spoken to her only sister in twenty years. Deedee loved “adventures”—she globe-trotted around the world by herself, spending her inheritance down.
It was amazing what Gordon could learn through hypnosis. From what she’d told him, he figured that Deedee had only a hundred thousand or so dollars left, and he’d planned for her to spend most of it here.
The best-laid plans…
“So you think Conroy saw her?” Shaun said.
“Why else would he take off like that?”
“Because he hated it here?”
Gordon had to admit that was a possibility. Not everyone took to the Desert Oasis Way.
“You said he wasn’t right in the head.”
“He was royally fucked up, all right. I did a pretty good job of screwing with his psyche, not to toot my own horn. Kids, don’t try this at home.”
Shaun ignored this. “Where is the dead woman now?”
“Don’t you worry about that.”
“So what do you want me to do? Kill him?”
“No, I don’t want you to kill him!” He leaned toward her, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. “You have to get him back here.”
Chapter Seven
FROM THE ALLEY behind the diner, Max made his way to the motel. The place seemed quiet, no cars in front of the units. Certainly no stretch limos. After ten minutes or so watching the Rat Motel from a shaded yard across the street, he realized that he couldn’t go back to his room. That was the first place they’d look.
Instead, he walked a block over to the Subway/Short Hop Trucking Center. There, he bought stick deodorant, a $2.99 pair of pull-on shorts, sunglasses, a ball cap, and an extra large T-shirt with the words “Arizona: Rattlesnake Capital of the World” printed on the front. He took his purchases into the restroom and came out a new man.
After dining on a sub sandwich while sitting in the back booth with a good view of the doors, he went looking for a place to think. He needed a dark place, a busy place, an anonymous place. It just so happened Paradox had a game arcade for the disaffected youths who were forced to grow up here. He found himself a dark corner to play a video game while he tried to think about what to do next.
Jerry wasn’t giving up. All Jerry wanted was to get Max back to the gulag so he could stumble through another vampire epic. To Jerry, Max was an ATM machine.
The thugs were over the top, but Jerry always did have a flair for the dramatic. Max felt a little embarrassed by the way he’d overreacted. It was pretty clear to him that Jerry’d sent guys to scare him into going back to LA, but it wasn’t going to work. What were they going to do to him, really? Break his kneecaps? He was a valuable commodity. No way they’d hurt him. The limo, the guys in suits—that was all for show, to intimidate him into doing what they wanted.
For the first time in days, Max asked himself if starring in another vampire epic was such a bad thing.
He was the luckiest man on earth. He was married to one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood. In two weeks’ time, Talia would come winging her way back from Africa with their adopted baby girl, just in time for the premiere of the next installment of the V.A.M.Pyre Chronicles. Their reunion on Piers Morgan’s show would be Hulued and YouTubed and TMZed.
Lots of red meat here. The rekindled romance with his former/current wife, the new theatrical release, the sweet orphan baby girl from Africa. And Max’s stint in rehab was the icing on the cake. It was all about redemption—the bad boy movie star brought to heel by true love.
Fans—especially female fans—loved to see the bad boy tamed.
Max suddenly asked himself, why was he being so stubborn? What was so bad about his life? He wasn’t an impoverished tenant farmer in Appalachia. He wasn’t a starving child in Bangladesh. He was a star, for Christ’s sake. He was lucky.
Would it hurt to be just a little bit thankful for all his good fortune?
He could go back to his old life, no problem. In fact, he could start now, by walking across the street and plunking down some of his hard-earned cash at the Branding Iron. Go from one cave to another, but that cave would be soothing and have that cool, slightly dank smell of beer. Budweiser signs, quiet darkness, middle of the day.
He pictured an icy bottle of Rolling Rock. OK, they wouldn’t have Rolling Rock in a backwater like this. Heinie, maybe. They’d have Heineken, wouldn’t they? He could see the green bottle, the amber waves of grain, the droplets of sweat cold and crisp in his hand. He pictured pouring it into a bar glass, lifting it to his lips—