"Why are you smiling?" he asks.

"It must be a pretty good act," I say. "This...fantasy I have of myself."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because you bought into it," I say.

"I never thought you'd actually fall for her."

"Why did you think that?"

"Because Blair told me how cold you could be."

Can you drive?" Julian asks as the elevator heads down to the garage. "Or do you want me to?"

"No, I can drive," I say. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yeah, I'm sure," Julian says. "Let's just get this over with."

"Let him have her," I whisper.

"We're leaving tonight," he says.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm not telling you."

Driving along Sunset I keep checking the rearview mirror and Julian sits in the pa.s.senger seat texting someone, probably Rain, and I keep turning on the radio and then turning it off but he doesn't notice, and then we're crossing Highland and the Eurythmics song fades into a voice from the radio talking about the aftershocks from an earthquake earlier, something that I slept through, and I have to roll down all the windows and pull the car over three times in order to steady myself because I keep hearing sirens all around us and my eyes are fixed on the rearview mirror because two black Escalades are following us and the last time I pull over, in front of the Cinerama Dome, Julian finally asks, "What's wrong? Why do you keep stopping?" and where Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood intersect I smile at him coolly as if this is all going to be okay, because in the condo I felt like I was sinking into a rage but now, turning onto Hillhurst, I'm feeling better.

Outside a building past Franklin that's surrounded by eucalyptus trees Julian gets out of the BMW, and starts walking toward the entrance just as I receive a text that says don't get out of the car don't get out of the car, and when Julian realizes I'm still sitting in the driver's seat he turns around and our eyes lock. A black Escalade pulls up behind the BMW and flashes its headlights over us. Julian leans into the opened pa.s.senger window.

"Aren't you coming in?" Julian asks, and then he's squinting at the headlights through the back windshield before they go dark and then he looks at me and I'm just staring blankly at him.

Behind Julian three young Mexican guys are climbing out of the car into the circle of light from a lamppost.

Julian notices them, only mildly annoyed, and then turns back to me.

"Clay?"

"Go f.u.c.k yourself."

The moment I say this Julian grabs the door I've already locked and for one moment he leans far enough into the car so that he's close enough to touch my face, but the men pull him back and then he disappears so quickly it's as if he was never here at all.

On Fountain my phone rings and I pull over somewhere after pa.s.sing Highland. When I answer the phone I notice that my seat is soaked with urine and it's a call from a blocked number, but I know who it is.

"Did anybody see you bring him here?" Rip asks.

"Rip-"

"No one saw you, right?" Rip asks. "No one saw you bring him here, right?"

"Where am I, Rip?"

The silence is a grin. The silence seals something.

"Good. You can go now."

Rain falls into my arms screaming.

"You drove him there," she screams. "You drove him there?"

I push her against a wall and kick the door closed with my foot.

"Why do you hate me so much?" she screams.

"Rain, sshhh, it's okay-"

"What are you doing?" she screams before I m.u.f.fle her face with my hand.

And then I push her to the floor and pull off her jeans.

You missed so many hints about me," I whisper to her as she lies drugged in the bedroom.

"I didn't...miss them," she says, her face bruising, her lips wet with tequila.

"It's what this place has done to you," I whisper, brushing her hair off her forehead. "It's okay...I understand..."

"This place didn't do anything to me." She covers her face with her hands, a useless gesture.

She starts crying again, and this time she can't stop.

"Are you going to be sick again, baby?" I hold a damp washcloth against her tan skin as she slips in and out of consciousness. I watch as her hand slowly b.a.l.l.s into a fist. I grab her wrist before she can strike me. I push it back down until it relaxes. "Don't hit me again," I say. "It won't matter because I'll just hit you right back," I say. "Do you want that?" I ask.

She shuts her eyes tightly and shakes her head back and forth, tears pouring down her face.

"You tried to hurt me," I say, stroking her face.

"You did that to yourself," she moans.

"I want to be with you," I'm saying.

"That's never going to happen," she says, turning her face away from me.

"Please stop crying."

"That was never going to be part of it."

"Why not?" I ask. I press two fingers on both sides of her mouth and force her lips into a smile.

"Because you're just the writer."

I went to Palm Springs as if nothing had happened. On Highway 111 in the cold desert a ma.s.sive rainbow appeared, its arc intact, shimmering in the afternoon sky. The girl and boy I bought were in their late teens and the negotiations had gone smoothly and an offer was made and then accepted. The girl and boy were distant. In order to do the things I had paid for they had already checked out before they arrived for the weekend. The girl was impossibly beautiful-the Bible Belt, Memphis-and the boy was from Australia and had modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch and they had come to L.A. to make it but it wasn't happening for them yet. They admitted using fake names. I told them to express themselves only in gestures-I didn't want to hear their voices. I told them to walk around naked and I didn't care how absurd or deranged I seemed. The desert was freezing beneath the dark mountains looming over the town and the palm trees lining the street around the house caged the white sky. I watched geckos dart through the rock garden while the girl and boy sat naked in front of the giant flat-screen TV in the living room watching a remake of went to Palm Springs as if nothing had happened. On Highway 111 in the cold desert a ma.s.sive rainbow appeared, its arc intact, shimmering in the afternoon sky. The girl and boy I bought were in their late teens and the negotiations had gone smoothly and an offer was made and then accepted. The girl and boy were distant. In order to do the things I had paid for they had already checked out before they arrived for the weekend. The girl was impossibly beautiful-the Bible Belt, Memphis-and the boy was from Australia and had modeled for Abercrombie & Fitch and they had come to L.A. to make it but it wasn't happening for them yet. They admitted using fake names. I told them to express themselves only in gestures-I didn't want to hear their voices. I told them to walk around naked and I didn't care how absurd or deranged I seemed. The desert was freezing beneath the dark mountains looming over the town and the palm trees lining the street around the house caged the white sky. I watched geckos dart through the rock garden while the girl and boy sat naked in front of the giant flat-screen TV in the living room watching a remake of The Hills Have Eyes The Hills Have Eyes.

The ranch house was in the movie colony and had walls that were cream-colored and mirrored and pillars that lined the pool shaped like a baby-grand piano and raked gravel blanketed the yard and small planes flew above it in the dry air before landing at the airport nearby. At night the moon would hang over the silver-rimmed desert and the streets were empty and the girl and the boy would get stoned by the fire pit and sometimes dogs could be heard barking over the wind thrashing the palm trees as I pounded into the girl and the house was infested with crickets and the boy's mouth was warm but I didn't really feel anything until I hit him, always panting, my eyes gazing at the steam rising from the pool at dawn.

Complaints had been made because the girl had become frightened of "the situation." The manager of the girl and the boy wanted to speak to me at one point and I renegotiated the price and then handed the cell phone back to the boy and he spoke briefly into it before handing the phone back to me. Everything was confirmed. And then the boy took turns f.u.c.king me and then the girl and my fingers kept jamming into him, spurring the boy on, and the human skull in the plastic bag was a prop watching us from the nightstand in the bedroom and sometimes I made the girl kiss the skull and her eyes were in a trance and she gazed at me as if I didn't exist and then I'd tell the boy to beat the girl and I watched as he threw her to the floor and then I told him to do it again.

One night the girl tried to escape from the house and the boy and I chased her down the street with flashlights and then onto another street where he tackled her just before dawn. We dragged the girl quickly back inside the house and she was tied up and put in what I had told them to refer to as the kennel, which was her bedroom. "Say thank you," I told the girl when I brought out a plate of cupcakes laced with laxative and made the girl and boy eat them because it was their reward. Smeared with s.h.i.t, I was pushing my fist into the girl and her lips were clinging tightly around my wrist and she seemed to be trying to make sense of me while I stared back at her flatly, my arm sticking out of her, my fist clenching and unclenching in her c.u.n.t, and then her mouth opened with shock and she started shrieking until the boy lowered his c.o.c.k into her mouth, gagging her, and the sound of crickets kept playing over the scene.

The sky looked scoured, remarkable, a cylinder of light formed at the base of the mountains, rising upward. At the end of the weekend the girl admitted to me that she had become a believer as we sat in the shade of the towering hills-"the crossing place" is what the girl called them, and when I asked her what she meant she said, "This is where the devil lives," and she was pointing at the mountains with a trembling hand but she was smiling now as the boy kept diving into the pool and the welts glistened on his tan back from where I had beaten him. The devil was calling out to her but it didn't scare the girl anymore because she wanted to talk to him now, and in the house was a copy of the book that had been written about us over twenty years ago and its neon cover glared from where it rested on the gla.s.s coffee table until it was found floating in the pool in the house in the movie colony beneath the towering mountains, water bloated, the sound of crickets everywhere, and then the camera tracks across the desert until we start fading out on the yellowing sky.

When I did a search for the name of the dead boy a link moved me to a Web site he had created before his death called the Doheny Project. A thousand pictures detailed the renovation of unit 1508 in the Doheny Plaza and then abruptly stopped. There were pictures of the boy as well, headshots of him blond and tan and flexing-he had wanted to be an actor-and there was the fake smile, the pleading eyes, the mirage of it all. The boy had posted pictures of himself in the club he was at the night he died, high and shirtless surrounded with boys who looked like him and this was before he went to sleep and never woke up, and in one of the shots I could see that he had the same tattoo that Rain had seen when she dreamed about him-a dragon, blurred, on his wrist. And the search led me to an audition reel and in one of the auditions the boy reads the part of Jim in Concealed Concealed, the movie I wrote. "What's the worst thing that ever happened to you, Jimmy?" someone playing a girl named Claire reads off camera. "Unconditional love," the boy says, the character of Jimmy turning away in mock shame, but the boy was reading the line wrong, giving it the wrong emphases, smirking when he should have been totally serious, turning it into a punch line when it was never supposed to be a joke.

When Laurie calls from New York I tell her she has a week to move out of the apartment below Union Square. "Why?" she asks. "I'm subletting it," I tell her. "But why?" she asks. "Because I'm staying in L.A.," I tell her. "But I don't understand why," she says again, and then I tell her, "Everything I do is for a reason."

At a fund-raising concert at Disney Hall that has something to do with the environment I talk to Mark during the intermission and where I ask him about Rain Turner's audition for The Listeners The Listeners. Mark tells me that Rain was never going to get the role of Martina but she's actually being considered for a much smaller role as the older sister-basically, one scene where she's topless-and that they're going to see her again next week. We're standing at the bar when I tell him, "Don't, okay? Just don't." Mark looks at me, a little surprised, and then there's a little smile. "Okay, I get it." At the reception afterward at Patina I run into Daniel Carter, who says he's very serious about making Adrenaline Adrenaline his next film after he finishes shooting the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in. Daniel is also thinking of using Rain Turner in the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in-Trent Burroughs made a call, said it would be a favor, whatever, it's three lines. I tell Daniel to do a favor for me and not to put Rain in the movie and that Rain's more trouble than she's worth and Daniel seems shocked but I mistake this for amus.e.m.e.nt. his next film after he finishes shooting the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in. Daniel is also thinking of using Rain Turner in the movie Meghan Reynolds is costarring in-Trent Burroughs made a call, said it would be a favor, whatever, it's three lines. I tell Daniel to do a favor for me and not to put Rain in the movie and that Rain's more trouble than she's worth and Daniel seems shocked but I mistake this for amus.e.m.e.nt.

"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 wh.o.r.e," I say, shrugging jovially. "The usual."

"Yeah?" Daniel asks, smiling. "I heard you like wh.o.r.es."

"In fact I'm writing a script about her," I say. "It's called The Little s.l.u.t." The Little s.l.u.t."

Daniel looks at the ground before glancing up at me again, an attempt to hide his embarra.s.sment. 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-cla.s.s 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 gla.s.ses 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 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... 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 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 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? 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 m.u.f.fled 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. 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 m.u.f.fled 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.

At the Hollywood Forever Cemetery I recognize very few of the people who show up for the memorial and they're mostly just figures from the past who I don't know anymore and I wasn't even going to go but I had finished two projects in the last couple days that I had been ignoring, one was a remake of The Man Who Fell to Earth The Man Who Fell to Earth and the other was a script about the reformation of a young n.a.z.i, and the last scene I wrote was when a boy in a castle is being shown a row of fresh corpses by a madman in a uniform who keeps asking the boy if he knows any of the dead and the boy keeps answering no but he's lying, and I was staring at the bottle of Hendrick's that sat on my desk while on the TV in my office Amanda Flew's mother was being interviewed on CNN, after she had filed a complaint about the release of the video but she was told that privacy rights don't extend to the dead even though Amanda's body hasn't been found, and there was a montage of Amanda's brief career with "Girls on Film" playing on the sound track as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border, and I was trying to make a decision that seemed daunting either way and for a moment I thought about checking out. and the other was a script about the reformation of a young n.a.z.i, and the last scene I wrote was when a boy in a castle is being shown a row of fresh corpses by a madman in a uniform who keeps asking the boy if he knows any of the dead and the boy keeps answering no but he's lying, and I was staring at the bottle of Hendrick's that sat on my desk while on the TV in my office Amanda Flew's mother was being interviewed on CNN, after she had filed a complaint about the release of the video but she was told that privacy rights don't extend to the dead even though Amanda's body hasn't been found, and there was a montage of Amanda's brief career with "Girls on Film" playing on the sound track as the piece segues into the dangers of the drug wars across the border, and I was trying to make a decision that seemed daunting either way and for a moment I thought about checking out.

I arrive late just as the memorial concludes, and I'm standing in the back of the room scanning the small crowd as Julian's father walks by and doesn't recognize me. Rain isn't here and neither is Rip, who for whatever reason I thought would be, and Trent didn't show up but Blair's here with Alana and I duck out before she sees me, and then I'm walking past the Buddhist cemetery where the dead are guarded by mirror-lined stupas and peac.o.c.ks roam the graves and I'm staring up at the Paramount water tower, through the bristling palm trees, and I'm wearing a Brioni suit that had once fit but is now too loose and I keep thinking I see figures lurking behind the headstones but I tell myself it's just my imagination, taking my sungla.s.ses off, squeezing my eyes shut. The cemetery pushes up to the back walls of the Paramount lot and you could find meaning in that or be neutral about it in the same way you could find something ironic about the endless rows of the dead lined up beneath the palm trees with their fronds blooming against a sparkling blue sky or choose not to, and I'm looking at the sky thinking it's the wrong time of day for a memorial, but the day, the sunlight, chases the ghosts away and isn't that the point? They show movies here during the summer, I remember, studying the giant white wall of the mausoleum where the movies are projected. arrive late just as the memorial concludes, and I'm standing in the back of the room scanning the small crowd as Julian's father walks by and doesn't recognize me. Rain isn't here and neither is Rip, who for whatever reason I thought would be, and Trent didn't show up but Blair's here with Alana and I duck out before she sees me, and then I'm walking past the Buddhist cemetery where the dead are guarded by mirror-lined stupas and peac.o.c.ks roam the graves and I'm staring up at the Paramount water tower, through the bristling palm trees, and I'm wearing a Brioni suit that had once fit but is now too loose and I keep thinking I see figures lurking behind the headstones but I tell myself it's just my imagination, taking my sungla.s.ses off, squeezing my eyes shut. The cemetery pushes up to the back walls of the Paramount lot and you could find meaning in that or be neutral about it in the same way you could find something ironic about the endless rows of the dead lined up beneath the palm trees with their fronds blooming against a sparkling blue sky or choose not to, and I'm looking at the sky thinking it's the wrong time of day for a memorial, but the day, the sunlight, chases the ghosts away and isn't that the point? They show movies here during the summer, I remember, studying the giant white wall of the mausoleum where the movies are projected.

"How are you?"

Blair is standing over me. I'm sitting on a bench next to a tree but there's no shade and the sun is burning.

"I'm okay," I say in a hopeful voice.

She doesn't take her sungla.s.ses off. She's wearing a black dress that accentuates her thinness.

From where I'm sitting I watch the dispersing crowd, their cars pulling out onto Santa Monica Boulevard, and farther away there's a bulldozer digging a fresh grave.

"I guess I'm worried," I say. "A little."

"Why?" she asks, sounding concerned, like someone trying to comfort a child. "About what?"

"I've been questioned twice," I say. "I had to hire a new lawyer." I pause. "They think I'm involved."

Blair doesn't say anything.

"They say there were witnesses who saw me with him the night of his disappearance and..." I look away from her and don't mention that the only person I could imagine this to be true of now that I'm sure the three Mexicans are dead is the doorman at the Doheny Plaza but when the doorman was interviewed he couldn't remember anything and there were no records because I'd told him before Julian arrived that I was expecting a delivery and to just send up whoever stopped by, and all I've done is deny everything and tell everyone that I might have seen Julian earlier that week but the fact remains I don't have an alibi for the night I drove him to the corner of Finley and Commonwealth and I know Rip Millar and Rain both know this. "Which means...well, I don't know what it means," I murmur, and then try to smile. "A lot of things, I guess." The Hollywood sign blares from the hills and a helicopter flies low over the cemetery and a small group dressed in black is wandering through the headstones. I've only been here for fifteen minutes.

"Well," Blair starts haltingly, "if you didn't do anything, why are you worried?"

"They think I might have been part of...a plan," I say casually. "I actually heard the word 'conspiracy' used."

"What can they prove?" she asks softly.

"They have a tape someone thinks is incriminating...this...this drunken rant I made at Julian one night and..." I stop. "Well, I was sleeping with his girlfriend so..." I look up at her and then away. "I think I know who's involved and I think they're going to get away with it...but no one knows where I was."

"Don't worry about that," Blair says.

"Why shouldn't I worry?" I ask.

"Because I'll tell them you were with me."

I look up at her again.

"I'll tell them you were with me that night," she says. "I'll tell them we spent the entire night together. Trent was away with the girls. I was alone."