IF THE SKY OPENED TO DISGORGE A DELUGE OF fanged and poisonous toads, if the wind blew hard enough to flay the skin to bloody ruin and to blind the unprotected eye, even such cataclysmic weather would fail to dissuade ghouls and gossips from gathering at the scenes of spectacular accidents and shocking crimes. By comparison, a steady drizzle on a cool December night was picnic weather to this crowd that followed misery as others might follow baseball.
On the front lawn of an apartment house, catercorner across the intersection from the police barricade, twenty to thirty neighborhood residents gathered to share misinformation and gory details. The majority were adults, but half a dozen energized children capered among them.
Most of these sociable vultures were outfitted in rain gear or carried umbrellas. Two bare-chested and barefoot young men, however, wore only blue jeans and appeared to be so steeped in a marinade of illegal substances that the night could not chill them, as though they were being cooked flamelessly like fish fillets in lime juice.
An air of carnival had settled upon this gathering, expectations of fireworks and freaks.
[200] In all his glistening yellowness, Corky Laputa moved among the onlookers, like a buzzless bumblebee patiently gathering a morsel of nectar here, a morsel there. From time to time, to blend better with the swarm and to win friends, he offered a taste of ersatz honey, inventing florid details of the vicious crime that he claimed to have heard from cops manning the second barricade at the farther end of the block.
He quickly learned that Rolf Reynerd had been killed.
The gossips and the ghouls weren’t sure if the victim’s first name was Ralph or Rafe, Dolph or Randolph. Or Bob.
They were pretty sure that the luckless fellow’s last name was either Reinhardt or Kleinhard, or Reiner like the film director, or maybe Spielberg like another famous director, or Nerdoff, or possibly Nordoff.
One of the bare-chested young men insisted that everyone had confused the victim’s first name, surname, and nickname. According to this wizard of deductive reasoning, the dead man’s true identity was Ray “the Nerd” Rolf.
All agreed that the murdered man had been an actor whose career had recently rocketed toward stardom. He had just completed a film in which he played Tom Cruise’s best buddy or younger brother. Paramount or DreamWorks had hired him to costar with Reese Witherspoon. Warner Brothers offered him the title role in a new series of Batman movies, Miramax wanted him to play a transvestite sheriff in a sensitive drama about anti-gay bigotry in Texas circa 1890, and Universal hoped he would sign a ten-million-dollar deal for two films that he would also write and direct.
Evidently, in this new millennium and in the popular imagination of those who dwelt on the glamorous west side of L.A., no failure ever died young, and Death came early only to the famous, the rich, the adored. Call it the Princess Di Principle.
Whether the man who had killed Ray “the Nerd” Rolf had also [201] been an actor on the brink of superstardom, no one knew for certain. The murderer’s name remained unknown, unmangled.
Indisputably, the killer himself had been gunned down. His body lay on the lawn in front of Rolf’s apartment house.
Two pairs of binoculars circulated among the onlookers. Corky borrowed one pair to study Rolf’s apparent executioner.
In the darkness and the rain, even with magnification, he was unable to discern any identifying details of the corpse sprawled on the grass.
Crime-scene investigators, busy with scientific instruments and cameras, crouched alongside the cadaver. In black raincoats draped like folded wings, they had the posture and the intensity of crows pecking at carrion.
In every version of the story viewed with credibility among the gossips, the killer himself had been killed by a police officer. The cop had been passing by in the street at the right moment, by sheer happenstance, or he had lived in Rolf’s building, or he’d come there to visit his girlfriend or his mother.
Whatever had occurred here this evening, Corky was reasonably confident that it would not compromise his plans or cause the police to turn a gimlet eye on him. He had kept his association with Reynerd secret from everyone he knew.
He believed that Reynerd had been likewise discreet. They had committed crimes together and had conspired to commit others. Neither of them had anything to gain—and much to lose—by revealing their relationship to anyone.
Stup............