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I look at him hard.
“I thought you French bastards were supposed to be romantics.”
“You must be thinking of someone else.”
“There’s no secret formula for turning back time with people? Bring her enchanted posies that sing show tunes? Magic escargots that pick lottery numbers?”
He laughs a little.
“Trust me. I’ve looked for tricks in all my books and travels. Nothing can truly fix a fractured romance. And love potions just drive people mad.”
“I was afraid of that.”
He thinks for a minute.
“I liked your lady friend, Janet.”
“It’s nice, but a whole other kind of complicated. I mean she’s great. And she gets me free donuts.”
“At least there are some compensations.”
“It’s nice hanging out like this. You should come to my place. Just you and me. We’ll drown our sorrows in movies and booze.”
“I’d like that.”
I say, “To whatever the hell it is we’re doing with our lives.”
We clink mugs. Then I remember what brought me here.
“What do you know about exorcisms?”
Chris Stein’s police report is sitting on the living room table when I get back. The folder is old and thick. There are coffee stains and some smeared inky fingerprints on the front. When I open it, the file smells musty. You can tell no one has so much as touched it in decades. I open it and start spreading papers on the table. There are interview transcripts. Medical reports. Police reports about the original call. Detective reports about local resident interviews. Hair and blood samples. An autopsy report diagrams the exact angle at which Stein was cut in half.
Now I remember why his murder stuck in my brain. It wasn’t so much that he was a hot young actor cut down in his prime, it was that he was the punk-era Black Dahlia. Sliced in two and left in a small long-gone park in West Hollywood. I go straight to the crime scene photos.
They’re strange. I’ve seen plenty of human and inhuman bodies ripped apart and cut up, but seldom so neatly. The cut is so straight it’s like someone put him on a worktable and pushed him sideways into a giant circular saw. But that can’t be what happened. The flesh around the wound wasn’t ripped or damaged the way a saw blade would. In fact, the edges of the wound, Stein’s internal organs, and his spine were smooth. Cauterized. Like someone cut him up with one of those hot wires you use on Styrofoam. Only I never heard of a foam cutter that goes through bone. From the reports, it sounds like a lot of people thought it was some kind of cult killing. Maybe he was trying to get out and they wanted to send a message to the other members not to run. A couple of detectives decided it was Satanic ritual abuse, an idea that would catch on big a few years later.
In the photos, Stein’s right hand is balled into a fist. When I look closer, I realize that he’s holding something. I drop the photo and paw through the other papers fast. Inside a plastic envelope I find it. A note. It was crumpled in Stein’s hand, but someone smoothed it out. The night Stein was murdered it rained, so most of the ink is illegible. But the part he clutched in his mitt—the very bottom of the note—is still clear. In a neat cursive hand someone wrote, “Forever Yours Forever Mine.” I don’t know what that means, but it doesn’t ring Satanic to me. The cult angle might still hold. It could be a code. Something you’d say to a fellow traveler to let them know you’re on their side. Really, though, it reads more like a mash note to me. A love letter from a killer who was sorry for what they were about to do.
I read through the file for a couple of hours, especially the interviews. Stein’s career was on a severe downturn by the time of his murder. Scattered parts in B- and C-grade films. Mostly quickie one-or-two-day jobs. He did a lot of local theater, keeping his hand in with the L.A. arts scene. There were stories that he was a member of the Hollywood sex party crowd, too, making side money hustling sparkly debutan
tes and/or their handsome boyfriends. Nothing surprising there. It was the seventies by then. With access to the best cocaine and the prettiest bodies in the universe, who wasn’t going to dive in? But 99 percent of the partiers were doing it just for kicks. If Stein was making money, combine that with drugs and sex and Hollywood careers that could topple if the right stories got out, and you have a great motive for murder.
But what kind of maniac turns a simple murder into a Vincent Price movie by chopping the victim in half and carefully cooking the wounds closed?
There’s one other thing that hits me: Stein never lived in Little Cairo. Ever. And the park in West Hollywood where they found him was miles away from there. So much for my one brilliant theory.
When I can no longer stand the crime scene diagrams and witness transcripts—all of which amount to one big nothing—I get another bright idea.
I put on Stein’s movies and go through them in chronological order, watching him go from bit player with a few lines to matinee idol playing second fiddle to bigger stars, to Murdering Mouth, his last big movie. It seems to me that the phrase “Forever Yours Forever Mine” is so stilted it might be from a movie. I check all Stein’s roles on IMDb and it’s not a title. But it still might be a line of dialogue in a cheap melodrama.
It takes all day, from the afternoon to sunset, to go through his fucking oeuvre, and by the time I get to the closing credits of Murdering Mouth, I’m pretty sick of Stein’s chiseled good looks. What’s worse, no one ever says “Forever Yours Forever Mine.” I even freeze-frame the music credits of each film, hoping it might be a song title. Nothing. If the phrase is from a movie, it’s none of this batch, and I’m sure not going to crawl through Stein’s fifty-odd movie and TV credits. That means I’m right back where I started. A would-be star who fell off the map, was killed Roger Corman–movie style, hustled his way through the movie swinger world, and is now a murder-hungry ghost haunting a neighborhood he never lived in or had any connection to.
Maybe my whole “figure out Stein and you’ll figure out the haunting” idea is garbage, but I’m not willing to give up on it yet. There’s one more thing I want to see.
When I check my phone, Janet has texted me about classes and a band rehearsal but says that she—they—will call me later. That leaves me free to try out my new genius theory.
An hour after sunset, I pop back through a shadow into Little Cairo, the Colt reloaded and ready to go.
