“What are you looking for?” I ask again. I taunt the cat. I poke the tiger.
“Nothing,” she says. “It’s okay.”
“You said you were looking for toilet paper,” I remind her. Dumb girl. Can’t keep her own story straight. “Did you find any toilet paper in there?”
She stands up. “I think I should go.”
“I think you should stay.”
She stands in front of the Pantry bag, as if her legs are cover. “Find anything good in there?” I ask.
“Joe,” she says. “I am not like that. I was just looking for toilet paper.”
“Delilah,” I say. “I don’t think you’re telling the truth.”
It’s always the same with these fucking people, bad people when they’re caught. They try to sell you. In Delilah’s case, she actually tells me that she knows people who could make a documentary about all this. “Like Serial,” she pitches, as if this is what I want. “I mean, I’m not going to jump to conclusions about this bag and the way you were at Henderson’s and all the ways things are adding up but, Joe, this could be very interesting.”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“Let’s just talk about it,” she says.
“Get in the tub.”
She whimpers. “Please no. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
I point. “Get in the fucking tub.”
She cries and I had a feeling this would get loud and she yammers again. “I know people,” she says.
“No,” I remind her. “You fuck people.”
I knock her back into the tub and she falls. I use some of the tape from the bag to seal her mouth shut and tie her arms together. I close the bathroom door and block the doorknob with a chair. I turn on some music—Journey’s greatest hits—to drown out her muffled cries and I tear the Kandinsky off the wall. She doesn’t know art. She doesn’t know anything but celebrities and she is an empty person, a mean person. She will never be happy. She won’t stop shooting for the stars, sucking them off, trying to pull them down to her futon, to her chicken bones.
I am not going to kill her just because she knows I killed Henderson, because she’s crying about it in my bathroom, as if this is the path to freedom. No. I’m also going to kill her because there is no happy ending for a star-fucking girl like Delilah, a girl who actively refuses to embrace her talents, celebrate her insides, lead with her brain. After this “famous” guy, whoever he is, finishes with her, she’ll go tramping for someone else until one day she realizes she’s too old to be taken seriously by these motherfucking pricks. And then she’ll either spend her savings on surgery or pop pills or move away and try to sell her secrets to a publisher.
Oh, the sadness of the Angeleno with a bank account dwindling, a forehead creasing, a self-esteem level deflating. I wish Delilah were a little more like me. I wish she were more confident. I wish she never stopped believing in herself, like her tattoo, but she did. She thought she needed someone famous in order to feel worthy. She could have settled down with Dez or Calvin or me or any of the guys she met. But she wanted fame more than love. She will never be happy, and really, I’m doing her a favor. She will never find what she’s looking for. I pull an orange Rachael Ray knife out of the butcher’s block. LA kills women. It’s a shame that Delilah moved here. She should have gone back to New York. You don’t belong here unless you’re tough, beautiful, or talented. What I am doing is a kindness, a mercy killing. I am putting her out of her misery.
I open the bathroom door and she’s cowering in the tub, on her knees. Sad cat. Poor kitten. Her face is a wad of chewed-up gum. All the joy is gone. Somewhere along the way she broke her own heart and without a heart, you can’t get better.
“I know,” I say. “I know how sad you are. I know how sick you are. But it’s over.”
Steve Perry’s unmistakable voice crescendos and Delilah hyperventilates. She cries and cries, and how badly she needed this. How much more of this there would be for her were she to stay on this long and lonely road ahead. The girl who paid someone to inscribe words on her thigh, words that she could not live by, words she did not understand. The key is not just to continue believing, after all, but the key to life is to believe in something that matters, something big and beautiful, something more profound than fame, money.
I grab her extensions and smash her head into the tub and that’s it. No more tears. Blood trickles down her forehead. I was right. She isn’t beautiful. She was pretty. And I don’t feel sorry for her. It’s like they say about everything in this world. You can’t feel sorry for yourself. A lot of girls, they would have loved to be so pretty.
31
IT’S a good thing I brought that giant duffel bag to LA. I don’t know how else I’d get her the fuck out of here. But first I have to get dressed and find my keys and run all the way up to Tuxedo Terrace and get my car. I throw on sweatpants and a shitty old T-shirt I wore when I worked at the bookstore. It’s cold. My lungs hurt. And when I get to my car, it’s all fogged in and I don’t have time for this. This is LA, there shouldn’t ever be any bullshit with the weather. My teeth chatter as I defrost the windshield and Henderson is a bad luck charm, even dead.
When I reach Hollywood Lawns, I put on my hazards and put the car in park. I jog up the steps, back inside, and get my giant empty duffel bag out of the closet and unzip it and the zipper is loud, stuck, no. I yank. No. I know for a fact that I don’t have any trash bags big enough to hold her and I pull again and I cut my finger but the zipper behaves. I lift Delilah out of the tub and set her inside the bag. She looks like she’s being swallowed by a giant black flower and I pull the zipper over her feet, covering her legs, past her Journey tattoo. I zip more, obscuring her cheap panties and her cheaper bra and her too-short neck and her too-big mouth and her closed eyes and her rounded forehead and her hair. She never needed extensions.
I try to lift the bag but I’m going to have to drag it—and fast. This is a crowded neighborhood and everyone wants to be skinny; soon there will be exercisers. I carry the bag out to my Prius and Wolfe is fucking right. You can’t go home again. Not if you live in an apartment building.
I haven’t been in the Donzi alone. A few weeks ago, we were at this bar in the Marina and I ran down to the dock to get Love’s sweater and I remember standing on the boat thinking about how different it is being alone than it is being with other people.
I wanted to take the boat out and push it. I wanted to drive it to Japan. I had this moment. The cover band inside was doing Toto—that “Africa” song—and I was so fucking happy. It was enough to choose Love inside on the dance floor over the great sea, the unknown. And then there’s also the fact that I don’t have a fucking license. Love’s family can get out of anything; I know this. But Love has warned me not to take the boat out on my own.
“It’s infinitely easier to deal with boat cops if Forty or I are there,” she said. “And if we’re not, you know, it’s harder.”
I am on my way back to shore after burying Delilah at sea, watching the weighted-down bag make its way to the center of the Pacific, far from the world she couldn’t quite fit into. I will always think of her kindly, her unfulfilled potential, how she extended her arm for that blender that was just out of reach. She embodied the danger of aspirations and I will always wish she hadn’t turned into a menacing fame monster.