Swimsuit Page 15

  When the concert is over, Coachella reverts to an agricultural flatland in the desert, home to young Latino families and migrant workers, a drive-through for truckers, who use the town as a pit stop.

  Henri had told me to look for the Luxury Inn, and it was easy to find. Off by itself on a long stretch of highway, the Lux was a classic U-shaped motel with a pool.

  I pulled the car around to the back as directed, looked for the room number I’d been given, 229.

  There were two vehicles in the parking lot. One was a late-model Mercedes, black, a rental. I guessed that Henri must’ve driven it here. The other was a blue Ford pickup hitched to an old house trailer about twenty-six feet long. Silver with blue stripes, air conditioner on top, Nevada plates.

  I turned off my engine and reached for my briefcase, opened the car door.

  A man appeared on the balcony above me. It was Henri, looking the same as the last time I saw him. His brown hair was combed back, and he was clean-shaven, wore no glasses. In short, he was a good-looking Mr. Potato Head of a guy who could morph into another identity with a mustache or an eye patch or a baseball cap.

  He said, “Ben, just leave your briefcase in the car.”

  “But the contract —”

  “I’ll get your briefcase. But right now, get out of your car and please leave your cell phone on the driver’s seat. Thanks.”

  One part of me was screaming, Get out of here. Jam on the gas and go. But an opposing inner voice was insisting that if I quit now, nothing would have been gained. Henri would still be out there. He could still kill me and Amanda at any time, for no reason other than that I’d disobeyed him.

  I took my hand off my briefcase, left it in my car along with my cell phone. Henri jogged down the stairs, told me to put my hands on the hood. Then he expertly frisked me.

  “Put your hands behind your back, Ben,” he said. Very casual and friendly.

  Except that a gun muzzle was pressed against my spine.

  The last time I turned my back to Henri, he’d coldcocked me with a gun butt to the back of my head. I didn’t even think it through, just used instinct and training. I sidestepped, was about to whip around and disarm him, but what happened next was a blur of pain.

  Henri’s arms went around me like a vise, and I went airborne, crashing hard on my shoulders and the back of my head.

  It was a hard fall, painfully hard, but I didn’t have time to check myself out.

  Henri was on top of me, his chest to my back, his legs interwoven with mine. His feet were hooked into me so that our bodies were fused, and his full weight crushed me against the pavement.

  I felt the gun muzzle screw into my ear.

  Henri said, “Got any more ideas? Come on, Ben. Give me your best shot.”

  Chapter 78

  I WAS SO IMMOBILIZED by the takedown, it was as if my spinal cord had just been cut. No weekend black belt could have thrown me like that.

  Henri said, “I could easily snap your neck. Understand?”

  I wheezed “yes,” and he stood, grasped my forearm, and hauled me to my feet.

  “Try to get it right this time. Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  Henri cuffed me, then yanked upward on the cuffs, nearly popping my shoulders out of their joints.

  Then he shoved me against the car and set my briefcase on the roof. He unlatched the case, found my gun, tossed it into the footwell. Then he locked the car, grabbed my case, and marched me toward the trailer.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll know when you know,” said the monster.

  He opened the trailer door, and I stumbled inside.

  The trailer was old and well used. To my left was the galley: a table attached to the wall, two chairs bolted to the floor. To my right was a sofa that looked like it doubled as a foldaway bed. There was a closet that housed a toilet and a cot.

  Henri maneuvered me so one of the chairs clipped me at the back of my knees and I sat down. A black cloth bag was dropped over my head and a band was cinched around my legs. I heard a chain rattle and the snap of a lock.

  I was shackled to a hook in the floor.

  Henri patted my shoulder, said, “Relax, okay? I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to write this book more than I want to kill you. We’re partners now, Ben. Try to trust me.”

  I was chained down and essentially blind. I didn’t know where Henri was taking me. And I definitely didn’t trust him.

  I heard the door close and lock. Then Henri started up the truck. The air conditioner pumped cold air into the trailer through a vent overhead.

  We rolled along smoothly for about a half hour, then took a right turn onto a bumpy road. Other turns followed. I tried to hang onto the slick plastic seat with my thighs, but got slammed repeatedly against the wall and into the table.

  After a while, I lost track of the turns and the time. I was mortified by how thoroughly Henri had disabled me. There was no way around the bald and simple truth.

  Henri was in charge. This was his game. I was only along for the ride.

  Chapter 79

  MAYBE AN HOUR, hour and a half, had gone by when the trailer stopped and the door slid open. Henri ripped off my hood, and said, “Last stop, buddy. We’re home.”

  I saw flat, uninviting desert through the open door: sand dunes out to the horizon, mop-headed Joshua trees, and buzzards circling on the updraft.

  My mind also circled around one thought: If Henri kills me here, my body will never even be found. Despite the refrigerated air, sweat rolled down my neck as Henri leaned back against the narrow Formica counter a few feet away.

  “I’ve done some research on collaborations,” Henri said. “People say it takes about forty hours of interviews to get enough material for a book. Sound right?”

  “Take off the cuffs, Henri. I’m not a flight risk.”

  He opened the small fridge beside him, and I saw that it was stocked with water, Gatorade, some packaged food. He took out two bottles of water, put one on the table in front of me.

  “Say we work about eight hours a day, we’ll be here for about five days —”

  “Where’s here?”

  “Joshua Tree. This campsite is closed for road repairs, but the electric hookup works,” Henri told me.

  Joshua Tree National Park is eight hundred thousand acres of desert wilderness, miles of nothing but yucca and brush and rock formations in all directions. The high views are said to be spectacular, but normal folk don’t camp here in the white heat of high summer. I didn’t understand people who came here at all.

  “In case you think you can get out of here,” Henri said, “let me save you the trouble. This is Alcatraz, desert-style. This trailer is sitting on a sea of sand. Daytime temperatures can climb to a hundred and twenty. Even if you got out at night, the sun would fry you before you reached a road. So, please, and I mean this sincerely, stay put.”

  “Five days, huh?”

  “You’ll be back in L.A. for the weekend. Scout’s honor.”

  “Okay. So how about it?”

  I held out my hands, and Henri took off the cuffs. Then he removed the cinch around my legs and unshackled me.

  Chapter 80

  I RUBBED my wrists, stood up, drank down a bottle of cold water in one continuous swallow, those small pleasures giving me a boost of unexpected optimism. I thought about Leonard Zagami’s enthusiasm. I imagined dusty old writing dreams coming true for me.

  “Okay, let’s do this,” I said.

  Henri and I set up the awning against the side of the trailer, put out a couple of folding chairs and a card table in the thin strip of shade. With the trailer door open, cool air tickling our necks, we got down to business.

  I showed Henri the contract, explained that Raven-Wofford would only make payments to the writer. I would pay Henri.

  “Payments are made in installments,” I told him. “The first third is due on signing. The second payment
comes on acceptance of the manuscript, and the final payment is due on publication.”

  “Not a bad life insurance policy for you,” Henri said. He smiled brightly.

  “Standard terms,” I said to Henri, “to protect the publisher from writers crashing in the middle of the project.”

  We discussed our split, a laughably one-sided negotiation.

  “It’s my book, right?” Henri said, “and your name’s going on it. That’s worth more than money, Ben.”

  “So why don’t I just work for free?” I said.

  Henri smiled, said, “Got a pen?”

  I handed one over, and Henri signed his nom de jour on the dotted lines, gave me the number of his bank account in Zurich.

  I put the contract away, and Henri ran an electric cord out from the trailer. I booted up my laptop, turned on my tape recorder, gave it a sound test.

  I said, “Ready to start?”

  Henri said, “I’m going to tell you everything you need to know to write this book, but I’m not going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs, understand?”

  “It’s your story, Henri. Tell it however you want.”

  Henri leaned back in his canvas chair, folded his hands over his tight gut, and began at the beginning.

  “I grew up in the sticks, a little farming town on the edge of nothing. My parents had a chicken farm, and I was their only child. They had a crappy marriage. My father drank. He beat my mother. He beat me. She beat me, and she also took some shots at him.”

  Henri described the creaking four-room farmhouse, his room in the attic over his parents’ bedroom.

  “There was a crack between two floorboards,” he told me. “I couldn’t actually see their bed, but I could see shadows, and I could hear what they were doing. Sex and violence. Every night. I slept over that.”

  Henri described the three long chicken houses — and how at the age of six, his father put him in charge of killing chickens the old-fashioned way, decapitation with an axe on a wooden block.

  “I did my chores like a good boy. I went to school. I went to church. I did what I was told and tried to duck the blows. My father not only clocked me regularly, but he also humiliated me.

  “My mom. I forgive her. But for years I had a recurring dream about killing them both. In the dream, I pinned their heads to that old stump in the chicken yard, swung the axe, and watched their headless bodies run.

  “For a while after I woke up from that dream, I’d think it was true. That I’d really done it.”

  Henri turned to me.

  “Life went on. Can you picture me, Ben? Cute little kid with an axe in my hand, my overalls soaked with blood?”

  “I can see you. It’s a sad story, Henri. But it sounds like a good place to start the book.”

  Henri shook his head. “I’ve got a better place.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  Henri hunched over his knees and clasped his hands. He said, “I would start the movie of my life at the summer fair. The scene would center on me and a beautiful blond girl named Lorna.”

  Chapter 81

  I CONSTANTLY CHECKED the recorder, saw that the wheels were slowly turning.

  A dry breeze blew across the sands, and a lizard ran across my shoe. Henri raked both hands through his hair, and he seemed nervous, agitated. I hadn’t seen this kind of fidgety behavior in him before. It made me nervous, too.

  “Please set the scene, Henri. This was a county fair?”

  “You could call it that. Agriculture and animals were on one side of the main path. Carnival rides and food were on the other. No breadcrumbs, Ben. This could have happened outside Wengen or Chipping Camden or Cowpat, Arkansas.

  “Don’t worry about where it was. Just see the bright lights on the fairgrounds, the happy people, and the serious animal competitions. Business deals were at stake here, people’s farms and their futures.

  “I was fourteen,” he continued. “My parents were showing exotic chickens in the fowl tent. It was getting late, and my father told me to get the truck from the private lot for exhibitor’s vehicles, upfield from the fairgrounds.

  “On the way, I cut through one of the food pavilions and I saw Lorna selling baked goods,” he said.

  “Lorna was my age and was in my class at school. She was blond, a little shy. She carried her books in front of her chest, so you couldn’t see her breasts. But you could see them anyway. There was nothing about Lorna I didn’t want.”

  I nodded, and Henri went on with his story.

  “That day I remember she was wearing a lot of blue. Made her hair look even more blond, and when I said hi to her, she seemed glad to see me. Asked me if I wanted to get something to eat at the fairgrounds.

  “I knew my father would kill me when I didn’t come back with the truck, but I was willing to take the beating, that’s how crazy I was about that beautiful girl.”

  Henri described buying Lorna a cookie and said that they’d gone on a ride together, that she’d grabbed his hand when the roller coaster made its swooping descent.

  “All the while I felt a wild kind of tenderness toward this girl. After the ride,” Henri said, “another boy came over, Craig somebody. He was a couple of years older. He looked right past me and told Lorna that he had tickets to the Ferris wheel, that it was unreal how the fairgrounds looked with the stars coming out and everything lit up down below.

  “Lorna said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that,’ and she turned to me, and said, ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ and she took off with this guy.

  “Well, I did mind, Ben.

  “I watched them go, and then I went to get the truck and my beating. It was dark up in that lot, but I found my dad’s truck next to a livestock trailer.

  “Standing outside the trailer was another girl I knew from school, Molly, and she had a couple of calves with show ribbons on their halters. She was trying to load them into the trailer, but they wouldn’t go.

  “I offered to help her,” Henri told me. “Molly said, ‘No, thanks. I’ve got it,’ something like that, and tried to shove those calves up the ramp by herself.

  “I didn’t like the way she said that, Ben. I felt she had crossed a line.

  “I grabbed a shovel that was leaning against the trailer, and as Molly turned her back to me, I swung the shovel against the back of her head. There was the one loud smack, a sound that thrilled me, and she went down.”

  Henri stopped speaking. A long moment dragged on, but I waited him out.

  Then he said, “I dragged her into the trailer, shut the tailgate. By now she’d started to wail. I told her no one would hear her, but she wouldn’t stop.

  “My hands went around her neck, and I choked her as naturally as if I was reenacting something I’d done before. Maybe I had, in my dreams.”

  Henri twisted his watchband and looked away into the desert. When he turned back, his eyes were flat.

  “As I was choking her, I heard two men walking by, talking. Laughing. I was squeezing her neck so hard that my hands hurt, so I adjusted my grip and choked her again until Molly stopped breathing.

  “I let go of her throat, and she took another breath, but she wasn’t wailing anymore. I slapped her — and I got hard. I stripped off her clothes, turned her over, and did her, my hands around her throat the whole time, and when I was done, I strangled her for good.”

  “What went through your mind as you were doing this?”

  “I just wanted it to keep going. I didn’t want the feeling to stop. Imagine what it was like, Ben, to climax with the power of life and death in your hands. I felt I had earned the right to do this. Do you want to know how I felt? I felt like God.”

  Chapter 82

  I WAS AWOKEN the next morning when the trailer door rolled open, and light, almost white sunlight, poured in. Henri was saying, “I’ve got coffee and rolls, for you, bud. Eggs, too. Breakfast for my partner.”

  I sat up on the foldaway bed, and Henri lit the stove, beat the eggs in a bowl, made the frying pan sizzle. After I
’d eaten, we began work under the awning. I kept turning it over in my mind: Henri had confessed to a murder. Somewhere, a fourteen-year-old girl had been strangled at a county fair. A record of her death would still exist.

  Would Henri really let me live knowing about that girl?

  Henri went back to the story of Molly, picked up where he’d left off the night before.

  He was animated, using his hands to show me how he’d dragged Molly’s body into the woods, buried it under piles of leaves, said that he was imagining the fear that would spread from the fairgrounds to the surrounding towns when Molly was reported missing.

  Henri said that he’d joined the search for Molly, put up posters, went to the candlelight vigil, all the while cherishing his secret, that he’d killed Molly and had gotten away with it.

  He described the girl’s funeral, the white coffin under the blanket of flowers, how he’d watched the people crying, but especially Molly’s family, her mother and father, the siblings.

  “I wondered what it must be like to have those feelings,” he told me.

  “You know about the most famous of the serial killers, don’t you, Ben? Gacy, BTK, Dahmer, Bundy. They were all run by their sexual compulsions. I was thinking last night that it’s important for the book to make a distinction between those killers and me.”

  “Wait a minute, Henri. You told me how you felt raping and killing Molly. That video of you and Kim McDaniels? Are you telling me now you that you’re not like those other guys? How does that follow?”

  “You’re missing the point. Pay attention, Ben. This is critical. I’ve killed dozens of people and had sex with most of them. But except for Molly, when I’ve killed I’ve done it for money.”

  It was good that my recorder was taking it all down because my mind was split into three parts: The writer, figuring out how to join Henri’s anecdotes into a compelling narrative. The cop, looking for clues to Henri’s identity from what he told me, what he left out, and from the psychological blind spots he didn’t know that he had. And the part of my brain that was working the hardest, the survivor.