Imperial Bedrooms - By Bret Easton Ellis Page 0,55

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 sunglasses 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."

"Why would you do that?" This is a question you ask when you don't know what else to say.

"Because ... " she starts, then stops. "I guess I want something in return." She pauses. "From you."

"Yeah?" I say, squinting up at her, the muffled sounds of traffic on Gower somewhere in the distance behind me.

She holds out a hand. I wait a beat before reaching out to take it but once I stand up I let it go. She's a witch, someone whispers into my ear. Who is she? I ask. She's a witch, the voice says. Like all of them.

Blair takes my hand again.

I think I realize what she wants but it's not until I see Blair's car that it finally announces itself clearly. It's a black Mercedes with tinted windows not unlike the one that had followed me across Fountain or the one that cruised by the Doheny Plaza all those nights or the one that tailed the blue Jeep whenever it was parked on Elevado or the one that followed me in the rain to an apartment on Orange Grove. And in the distance the same blond guy I saw at the Santa Monica pier with Trent and at the bar in Dan Tana's and crossing the bridge at the Hotel Bel-Air, and talking to Rain outside Bristol Farms one morning last December is leaning against the hood of the car and stops shading his eyes with his hand when he sees me staring at him. I thought he was maybe looking at the graves but then I realize he's watching us. He turns away when Blair nods at him. I keep staring at the car while I feel Blair's fingers lightly stroking my face. Just go where she says, the voice sighs. But she's a witch, I whisper back, still staring at the car. And her hand is a claw ...

"Your face," she says.

"What about it?"

"You don't look like anything has happened to you," she whispers. "And you're so pale."

There are many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the things you wipe away - I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people.