Shred of Evidence

Midway through lunch, Taylor Chaste stands up from her table at Vicente’s and tells her entourage of three she has to go to the ladies room.

Harlan watches her lurch away, wondering if her clumsiness is more from the pitcher of Long Island Ice Tea or the handful of vikes she dry-swallowed on the drive over. Or some magical synergy of both. Taylor’s two buddies, Mandy and Tate, start laughing as soon as she’s out of earshot. They point at the pitcher and gulp down imaginary drinks with both hands. Mandy pretends to fall out of her chair.

They wouldn’t have been that bold a year ago.

Harlan considers telling the two to shut the fuck up, but since the whole world’s laughing at Taylor Chaste and her disintegrating career, he sees little point.

He’s sipping a beer when the cell in his pocket chimes.

The text reads: MEETME IN BATTH ROOM NOW. She forgets to add ‘please.’ Harlan stands and Tate gives him a collagen-fattened smirk. “Get your booty-call, lover?” she says.

He starts walking. Mandy adds: “Good doggy.”

He finds the restroom sign and a hallway daubed in faux Etruscan plaster, lined with tall ferns cut to look like cypress trees. There’s a door marked ‘Donne‘ and another marked ‘Uomini.’ He knocks on ‘Donne.’ Taylor opens it and pulls him inside.

She locks the door. The bathroom’s nice; smells like violets and there’s crushed dried flowers in a porcelain bowl. Mandolins tinkle over the speakers. Taylor looks at him long enough to smile. She tilts her honey-blond head and flashes some teeth just like on the cover of Booty-Full Dreamer, then wriggles up onto the counter and spreads her flawless legs. Yanks the thong underwear down. Exposed, she grabs the back of his head and starts grinding against him, almost smothering him between her thighs.

He does what he knows how to do. It doesn’t take much. It never does with Taylor, which he supposes is a good thing. In a minute or so she moans and pushes him away. He wipes his mouth.

There was a time when a hundred-million teenage boys would’ve killed to be where he’d just been. Maybe twice that number of fat, middle-aged men. He’d found it kind of novel himself, in the beginning. Hey! I’m blowing a pop-star here! But the sweaty taste of Taylor—combined with the lobster and gruyere pizza he’s just eaten, plus a warm Heineken—is making his stomach hitch.

She sways past him without comment, unlocks the door and leaves.

* * *

Less than five minutes later, the restaurant’s alarm system shrieks as he kicks open the fire-exit door and drags Taylor out by the wrist, into sunlight and pristine City of Angels smog. They hoof it down an alley stacked with lettuce crates. Mandy and Tate giggle somewhere behind.

What had happened, he’d overheard a waiter on the way back from the bathroom. The shit-head was calling the paparazzi.

They reach the back parking lot. Harlan’s fellow handler Coleman is waiting there, muscular arms folded, leaning up against a black Lexus SUV. Harlan yells “Media” and Coleman throws his cigarette down with a curse. Break-time’s over. Coleman gets the SUV doors open and Harlan pushes Mandy’s skinny ass inside, followed by Tate’s, her fuchsia dress snagging. He hears fabric rip and Tate scream, but the sound is muffled as Coleman slams the door shut.

Harlan pulls Taylor to their other vehicle. A rented Honda mini-van with no window tinting. When she’s sober, she bitches about having to ride in it.

“Back seat, honey,” he tells her. “Head down ’til I say it’s clear.”

She complies, a miracle in itself. He gets the Honda started and guides it into the stream of downtown Burbank traffic, not peeling out, which would be a giveaway for any spotters. He stays in the right lane. The black SUV comes roaring up behind them, rockets past, and makes a left on a stale yellow, skidding through the intersection. Probably heading for Rodeo Drive.

Decoy.

“I want to get drunk,” Taylor says, from the floor behind him.

* * *

One A.M. and they’re back in the safety of the hotel suite, Taylor wearing a bathrobe and curled around an ice-bucket on the edge of the bed. The bucket’s full of green vomit—she’d been doing Midori shots at the Viper Room.

Just getting out of there was an epic, an odyssey. The band playing had recognized Taylor and flipped her off between sets. She hadn’t noticed.

His eyelids droop and the phone next to the bed rings.

He answers it. The voice on the other end takes a deep breath and says: “Harlan?”

Oh Christ.

“Harlan, this is Marv. Okay, so I heard the talent kept you busy today. You’re doing a man’s job, I want you to know that. And now a change of plans. Taylor’s not going to the recording session tomorrow. I’ve got a plane chartered at John Wayne International, a puddle-jumper because you’re not flying far. The tough part, the piece you might find challenging, I need you on that plane in an hour. Got that? Are you up for this, Harlan-man?”

His fingers are digging into the receiver, turning white. Marv Meyer, the head of Phantom Records. Calling him personally and taking the time to schmooze, which can’t be good.

“Harlan?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I hear someone throwing up in the background. That wouldn’t happen to be our little nightingale, would it?”

“Uh, yes, sir. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. She’s the lush, not you. Which is why I’m sending her to rehab. Shasta Ranch. They work with horses there. You believe that, giving drunks a horse? In my day they just shipped your ass to Betty Ford.”

“Sir—”

“What we’ve got to do, Harlan, we’ve got to make her finish this third album. Prove to the world Taylor Chaste isn’t tanking. I mean, I know she’s really tanking, but after the third album her contract with Phantom is up. Charter’s waiting. I’ll give you a call tomorrow and square the rest.”

He hangs up.

Taylor stirs and opens a single red-rimmed eye. A strand of bile thin as a spider’s web connects from her mouth to the corner of the bucket.

“That was your boss, honey,” Harlan says. “He told me you’ve been working so hard, the album’s sounding so good, he wants you take a little break. We’ve got to check out now.”

* * *

The “puddle-jumper” turns out to be a Lear, and the passenger’s cabin is furnished in teakwood with a thirty-six inch plasma and a mini-bar, the last of which Taylor is too comatose to notice. He gets her tucked in by the window. She’s snoring as the engines whine and the little jet pushes its way up into black California sky.

He leans his head on her shoulder but it feels alien, like he dares too much.

They’d met at a club in West Hollywood called the Stuyvesant. He’d been working the door. Taylor and about a dozen hangers-on came through. She’d given him a single, bored glance, but later one of her drunk friends came up and told him Taylor thought he was cute. She’d hired him at the end of his shift.

After that everything churned into long days and marathon nights, crowds, alcohol, interviews, car-trips. He became aware of her slow descent. She had a well-publicized affair with an older producer. Then a director. Then she started coming on to him, wanting cunnilingus at strange times and places. They seldom kissed. She did not allow him to penetrate her.

Her ’slow descent’ became a crash.

Cold night air vibrates against the window, and he thinks: how can you take care of someone and not feel anything for them?

* * *

They land in some Podunk airport, the sky still dark. Harlan slides in and out of sleep during a long, jostling cab ride over unlit roads. The cab smells like cigarettes and country music turned low keens from the front seat. He opens his eyes at one point and sees dawn breaking over a clump of saguaros. The cab stops. He pushes money into the driver’s weathered hand and then he and Taylor are plodding through a parking lot, the straps from her four bags digging into his shoulders. An adobe, Santa Fe-looking building with a lot of plate glass windows seems to rise out of the desert.

She asks him what the fuck this place is and he tells her it’s a spa. It looks like a spa, anyways.

But then they’re through the door and there’s a white-coated doctor wanting to take her blood pressure. She starts spitting like a cat. The word ‘valium’ is mentioned. She calms and is whisked away to an examining room, leaving him with the bags.

He wanders through what looks like a giant hotel lobby and finds a leather chair next to a window. Slumps down.

“Are you that girl’s boyfriend? Or just another tired handler?”

There’s a woman sitting across from him. The sunlight fades from his retinas and he sees a bob of dark hair framing a narrow, intelligent face. She’s in her early thirties. His first impression: Pocahontas. She’s wearing a white suede blouse with fringe and a butt-load of turquoise jewelry. White feathers dipped in red hang from each ear.

“I’m both,” he says.

“Yeah, I recognized your charge back there. Ms. Chaste. You look familiar, too, like I’ve seen you in tabloid photos. In the background.”

He doesn’t really want to talk, but he’s trapped. “Are you a handler, too?”

“Oh, no. I’m a licensed therapist. I’m also a shaman. I trained in Ecuador for three years under a master. My English name is Ellen, but that’s not my True Name.”

“Okay.”

“You can call me Ellen, though.”

He does, and it develops Ellen really is a handler, despite protests, her sole client being a sitcom actor Harlan remembers from the eighties. She talked him into coming here. He has “serious issues.” Harlan hears that and pictures IV heroin laced with absinthe, late-night trips to Singapore and strange fetishes indulged with Asian boys. He says as much.

“No,” she says. “Worse.”

“What’s worse than that?”

“He suffers from a truncated ego.” She tugs a necklace up out of her blouse and fingers a crude, stick-like figure suspended there. “I’ve got my spirit helper working on it right now.”

* * *

Taylor’s examining physician tells him she’ll need to undergo detox the next forty-eight hours. After that she’ll be assigned a horse and a counselor, and the Healing Journey can begin.

He wanders the grounds. Native American decorations hang everywhere. Painted drums, shields, and bundles of rubber-tipped arrows. The only dark-skinned people he sees, though, are outside doing the landscaping.

He finds a cafeteria and after a breakfast of buckwheat pancakes washed down with weak coffee, runs into a concierge who shows him to his room. It’s in an adjoining building screened with mesquite trees. No TV. No phone.

There is a bed, however, and he collapses as soon as the concierge leaves.

His cell wakes him up twenty minutes later.

“Harlan? Marv again. Listen, I need you to call me back on a land-line. Here’s the number.” He rattles off some digits without waiting for Harlan to find a pen.

There’s a phone in the front lobby. “You’re back. Good. Took you awhile. Okay, so Taylor’s there and everything’s humming. Nice place, huh? What I need you to do, I need you to connect with an old cowboy there named Bobby Rhoades. He’s going to be her counselor. I want you two to bond. Help him out, whatever he needs. Because Taylor has to finish this thing, okay? No quitting. You keep her in line. You’re good at that. Also, when Bobby does his horsey-thing with her I want you right there. Alongside. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bobby Rhoades. He’ll be expecting you.” Click.

Back in his room, he finds it impossible to fall asleep again. So he takes out the bottle of Southern Comfort he swiped from the Lear’s mini-bar. At least he understands his place in this whole thing. Old Harlan, Mr. Step-and-Fetch, is the only person who can make Taylor stay put.

And gives killer head.

He goes through half the bottle. With all the puke he’s been seeing lately, he keeps expecting to throw it up. But the whiskey stays down like bitter truth.

* * *

“I don’t see how taking care of a horse is supposed to make you sober,” Harlan says. “My uncle Dwight had two horses and all he did was sit around and guzzle Lone Star all day.”

Bobby Rhoades cracks a smile. He’s a cowboy alright, the gen-u-ine article with snaggled teeth and a slouch-belly drooping over tight Wranglers. It’s the next day. They’re both squinting under noon sunlight, leaning against a fence made out of old railroad ties and barbed wire. Bobby’s just finished rubbing down a horse. His hands reek of liniment.

“Way you said that,” he says, “you sound kind of like a country boy. Is that true, Harlan? You got a little country in you?”

“I grew up in Montana.”

“No shit? You ever hear of a town called Meriwether? They got a lot of bars there.” His eyes narrow, and Harlan gets the feeling of being sighted at down the barrel of a rifle. “Speaking of bars, son, you look hung over.”

“I might be.”

“Drinking in rehab, huh?”

“You didn’t answer my question. About how horses make people sober.”

“Oh, that. You want the truth or some line of yuppie bullshit? Alright. Truth is, most people get all emotional when they see a horse. They’re beautiful animals, and kind of scary. So when people ride one, brush ‘em down, they have what’s called a catharsis—I know, that’s a big word.”

“I went to college,” Harlan says.

“Good for you. It means a purifying experience. Emotions come out. You talk some twelve-step crap while that’s going on and people think they’re finally seeing the light. Get it?”

“You make it sound like a racket.”

“Son, everything’s a racket. Take the music industry, for example. Take Marv Meyer. He’s practically a mobster, ‘cept he’s a Jew with a pony-tail.”

“You know Marv?”

“Oh, hell yes.” He opens his mouth and then shuts it, like maybe that’s something Harlan isn’t supposed to know. “Look, don’t get all depressed because I told you Shasta Ranch is a scam. We might be able to help your girlfriend yet. Now, what do you say we find that booze I know you got stashed?”

* * *

Taylor emerges from detox with only a slight tremor in her hands. She doesn’t talk to Harlan. Not at first.

After breakfast, she checks into her private room and comes out an hour later wearing a pink Hello Kitty T-shirt and a white Stetson with matching boots. She prances around in front of Harlan and then seems to remember she’s still pissed off. Her face settles into a mask. The mask says: You’re in big trouble for talking me into this. Punishment to follow.

But she lightens when she meets Bobby at the stables. He’s all redneck charm, saying “yes, ma’am” and “no, ma’am” and deprecating himself until she melts. He shows her the horse he’s picked out; a spirited, black-maned mare named Flossie. Harlan knows a little about horses, and wonders if this is such a good choice for a beginner.

“I love her,” Taylor says, wrapping her arms around Flossie’s neck.

That settles that.

* * *

About two hours in the practice corral, then another hour on the “kiddie trail” that winds around Shasta Ranch, and Taylor announces she’s ready for the real thing. The catharsis bullshit Bobby was talking about seems to be working. It’s at least a hundred degrees and Taylor hasn’t made a single complaint about the heat.

She’s the only one riding, of course.

Bobby leads them up the side of a rust-colored hill. The ‘trail’ becomes a narrow shelf of rock, just barely wide enough for Flossie’s muscular flanks. There’s no room to turn her around. Harlan starts getting a flutter in his gut, and the occasional glance over the steep hillside doesn’t help. They’re at least forty feet up. Sharp boulders and clumps of cholla cactus line the desert floor below.

He wants to say something. He’s walking behind Flossie’s rump, with Bobby in front leading the horse by the bridle. Bobby’s doing his counselor-thing, talking in a gentle voice about how life’s a mountain and you have to face your fears by gripping the reins tight. Taylor, her head cocked, seems to be absorbing every word.

“Uh, Bobby—” Harlan says.

Ahead of him, Bobby cusses. The horse comes to a stop. “Shit, Harlan. I think she threw a shoe.”

“Just now?”

“Now or a couple seconds ago. She’s limping on her right foreleg. You see anything?”

Harlan scans the ground. “Nope.”

“How about behind you?”

He re-traces his steps, wondering how he could miss something like a thrown horseshoe. There’s only rock and clusters of foot- and hoof-prints on the trail.

Taylor screams.

He turns to see her Stetson go flying, blond hair unfurling in the sun as Flossie bolts erect on two feet and the saddle rips free. Taylor slides off with sickening ease. She goes right over the trail’s side and disappears. But just for a moment because he leaps after her, the shock of his feet digging into the hillside and he scrambles to stay upright, to avoid pitching forward and rolling, and somehow he slows and his shoes dig twin furrows as he reaches bottom.

He sees Taylor, lying in a heap about ten feet away.

She’s come to rest against a boulder, one arm draped over it. The arm hangs limp in a way he doesn’t like. Also, she’s not making any noise. He bounds towards her. Her other arm has a forest of cactus spines jutting out.

She should be crying, screaming; anything with all those spines stuck in her.

He crouches and sees the place where the side of her head struck the boulder. Some kind of clear, sticky fluid drips down the rock. He reaches to brush the hair from her face and stops, afraid to touch her, wondering if her neck’s been broken.

Bobby’s voice echoes from the trail above him. He can’t make out what he’s saying.

He sees her eyelids flutter, behind the veil of hair.

She’s still breathing.

* * *

The aftermath tumbles by in the non-time of shock, all meaning gone, starting with Bobby’s ashen face telling him he’s going to get help, and ending with a Medivac chopper whipping dust as it makes a straight ascent from the gorge. The middle part, the waiting in the desert with Taylor, takes forever.

* * *

She spends a week in the Mayo Clinic’s ICU, just outside Phoenix. Harlan stays bedside when the doctors allow him, and eats greasy burritos and drinks coffee in the hospital cafeteria. He forgets about sleep.

After surgery she can walk—with assistance, but she’s not going to be singing or dancing anymore. Talking has become sort of optional, too. She stares at him with vague recognition before the physical therapist comes and wheels her away for exercise.

The media hovers, of course, and for once Harlan doesn’t have to do anything about them. He learns the fate of Taylor’s recording contract and her now-doomed third album watching Entertainment Tonight. Marv Meyer looks furious on camera. He threatens to sue Shasta Ranch into bankruptcy for “depriving him of his greatest talent,” but the lawsuit shrivels over the next few weeks, becomes a modest settlement that Meyer accepts without comment.

Bobby Rhoades disappears.

The police speak to Harlan eventually, but he sees little point in telling them his suspicions. It’s not going to help Taylor. He doesn’t even tell them about her saddle, how he’d checked the straps and buckles himself before Flossie left the stables.

* * *

What’s left of Taylor’s estate goes into a trust. All her property and cars are sold, with the exception of a small beach house in Malibu, which Harlan fixes up with ramps and safety bars before they move in. He buys food from an open-air market a couple blocks away. A nurse comes by every week to check vitals.

He’s her caregiver now. Taylor’s family is content to fight over residual income, leaving the details of her day to day existence to him.

He’s not going to fail her this time.

And it’s strange, but caring for her has become so much easier in this child-like state, the little bubble of him and her. She’s not restless anymore. They spend their mornings and evenings on the back patio, listening to the throb of the Pacific like a retired couple, and she doesn’t mind to take his hand. The other day he bought her a little turtle made from blown glass, blue and green swirled together, and she actually smiled, where months before she’d only shrugged and glanced stone-eyed when the dealership left a new Aston-Martin running in the drive.

She’s not restless anymore.

And neither is he.