Imperial Bedrooms

"I heard you were with her," Daniel says.

"No," I say. "I wouldn't call it that."

"What happened?" he asks, as if he already knows, as if he's waiting to see if I'll keep it secret.

"She's just a whore," I say, shrugging jovially. "The usual."

"Yeah?" Daniel asks, smiling. "I heard you like whores."

"In fact I'm writing a script about her," I say. "It's called The Little Slut."

Daniel looks at the ground before glancing up at me again, an attempt to hide his embarrassment. I knock back the rest of my drink.

"Anyway, she's with Rip Millar now," Daniel says. "Maybe he'll help her out."

"I don't get it," I say. "How could Rip help her?"

"You didn't know?" Daniel asks.

"Know what?"

"Rip left his wife," Daniel says. "Rip wants to make movies now."

Julian's body is found almost a week after he disappeared, or was kidnapped, depending on which script you want to follow. Earlier that week three young Mexican men connected to a drug cartel were found shot to death in the desert, not far from where Amanda Flew was last seen. They were decapitated and their hands were missing and they had at one point during the last week been in possession of a black Audi that was found outside of Palm Desert, torched.

Someone filmed me with a digital camera in the American Airlines first-class lounge at JFK when I was sitting at a table with Amanda Flew last December. A disk is mailed to me in a manila envelope with no return address. The scene comes back to me: Amanda reading my palm in the Admiral's Club, the empty glasses on the table, both of us laughing suggestively, leaning into each other, and though the lighting and sound quality are bad and you can't hear what we're saying it's obvious I'm flirting hard. Sitting in my office watching this play on the screen of my monitor I realize this is where everything started. Rain picked Amanda up from LAX in the blue Jeep on that night in December and then they followed me back to Doheny because Amanda had told Rain she met the guy Julian had been telling her about. I heard you met a friend of mine, Rip told me outside the W Hotel last December at the premiere of Daniel Carter's movie. Yeah, I heard you really hit it off ... When the footage ends a series of doctored pictures fade in and out of one another: Amanda and me holding hands in line at Pink's, wheeling a cart out of the Trader Joe's in West Hollywood, at Amoeba, standing in the lobby of the ArcLight. All of the pictures are faked but I get it - this is a warning of some kind. And right when I'm about to eject the disk Rip calls me, as if he's timed it, as if he knows what I'm looking at, and he tells me another video will be arriving soon and that I need to watch that one as well.

"What is it?" I ask. I keep staring at the photos fading in and out: Amanda and me buying star maps on Benedict Canyon, the two of us standing in front of the Capitol Records Building like we were tourists, at an outside table on the patio at the Ivy having lunch.

"Just something somebody sent to me," Rip says. "I think you should see it."

"Why?" I'm staring at a photo of Amanda and me in the black BMW in the parking lot of the In-N-Out in Sherman Oaks.

"It's persuasive," Rip says, and then he tells me that the licenses for the club he wants to open in Hollywood have finally been approved, and that I should stop telling people not to put Rain in their movies.

The new disk arrives that afternoon. I remove the disk of Amanda Flew and me at JFK and put the new disk into the computer but I turn it off almost immediately once I see what it is: Julian tied to a chair, naked.

After I drink enough gin to calm down I stand at my desk in the office. They had drawn lines with a black marker all over his body - the "nonlethal entry wounds" as the Los Angeles County coroner's office was quoted in the Los Angeles Times article about the torture-murder of Julian Wells. These are the stab wounds that will allow Julian to live long enough to understand that he will slowly bleed to death. There are more than a hundred of them drawn all over his chest and torso and legs as well as his back and neck and the head which has been freshly shaved, and when I'm able to look back at the screen one of the hooded figures standing over Julian whispers something to another hooded figure but the second I pause the disk I get a text from a blocked number that asks What are you waiting for? About twenty minutes into the disk I mistake static for the clouds of flies swarming around the room below the flickering fluorescent lights and crawling over Julian's abdomen which has been painted dark red, and when Julian starts screaming, weeping for his dead mother, the video goes black. When it resumes Julian's making muffled sounds and that's when I realize they've cut out his tongue and that's why his chin is slathered with blood, and then within a minute he's blinded. In the final moments of the disk the sound track is of the threatening message I left on Julian's phone two weeks ago and accompanied by my drunken voice the hooded figures start punching him randomly with the knives, chunks of flesh spattering the floor, and it seems to go on forever until the cement block is raised over his head.