Little Beasts
Is any crime victimless? A short story of miracle and (dun dun dun) murder.
Ryan
"Damien Chazelle will cast me in one of his movies."
No answer.
"Do you believe me, Ryan?" Theresa asked.
Ryan stared out of the living room window. The streetlights grew paler with twilight's leaving. Sometimes, he would strain to tune out his sister's wistful rambling, but tonight, Ryan's heartbreak did the heavy lifting.
"Come away from the window. It'll come back."
Ryan hated it when she called his dog 'it.' HE hadn't just run away last week like she said HE did. Something must have happened.
"I bet he still calls his movies' pictures.' Don't you love the sound of that?"
Ryan flinched as shadows moved across the grass of neighboring lawns, teasing his hope.
A little more rouge. "I bet he'd love that I have no tattoos to cover."
Ryan watched his sister applying her last touches in the foyer mirror, mumbling nothings to herself. He was accustomed to the solitude that came with her leaving at night, but how he'd hoped the familiar sound of that front door opening and closing behind her would beckon his friend back home.
Rose
Tad and Margo are pieces of shit. Doesn't mean they're unlikable. On the contrary, they tend to grow on people—like scabies.
"We could go back to pets," Tad said, throwing his arm around the passenger seat.
"Not in front of Rose," said Margo.
"Shit," Tad barked back, "if she saw how quick a dollar could come."
I peeled my face off the backseat leather and massaged my hangover into my temples. As Tad slingshotted the rust bucket down Topanga Canyon Drive, my nausea swelled into my throat—the combo of exhaust and centrifugal force almost too much.
"Pets?" I asked.
"Pet-napping, Rosy," said Tad and grinned at me in the rearview mirror. I forced a smile, always afraid my disdain for him would show.
Margo tried not to look at me. "We'd only take them for a week or so," she said.
"Let a little panic set in," said Tad.
"What about—"
"You know how much fucked up shit happens in this city you don't hear about?" asked Margo. "Cops aren't rushing to solve the case of a missing Corgi."
"Couple hundred bucks for dogs and cats." Said Tad. "Fifty for birds or amphibia."
"Barely seems worth it," I said mostly to myself.
"Quick and easy, on to the next, Rosy. It's people like you that get caught." Tad said.
"What is that—"
"Some of us are not so blessed with options." Tad had a hard time trusting me—knowing I came from money and could go back to it whenever I wanted. He rapped his cheap rings against the steel of the headrest, baiting me to argue.
I studied Margo in the passenger seat. Her beauty only ever led her to more trouble.
"I can feel you judging, Rose," said Margo.
"I'm not."
"If you think about it, Rosy," Tad said, "The little beasts don't know the difference. We feed them and play with them. When we bring them back, they're probably sleeping in the bed and eating the wet chow."
I shook my head. "Another victimless crime."
Tad snapped back at me, "And I suppose you'd have Margo tend bar till her youth is dried up, and she's just another prune in a tube top looking for a daddy?"
Our tires spat up gravel as we careened around the next bend—unveiling a briolette of blue ocean that swelled against the ombre of the canyon.
Tad ran his fingers through Margo's strawberry blonde hair, tugging it and eyeing me in the rearview. I sat quiet and glued to my window, watching shrubs of Summer Holly blur into lumbering creatures.
Tad
I know she fucking wants me. Yeah, it's her friend, but she's not better-looking than Margo. I don't see why she would fucking care.
Theresa
She said she felt bad for them. The way they pined for companionship more than the lay. She attributed her 'silver-screen appeal' to weeding out the hot rods with something to prove.
"If I'm bored, I treat it like class." Theresa would laugh and affect a transatlantic accent, "If the world is your stage, nothing is not an audition."
Tonight is the Tiki-ti cocktail lounge with its moonlit murals and fruit syrup effluvium. Theresa waited for her date to bring their drinks from the bar. He wasn't bad-looking, and unlike most of her dates, he didn't reek of cologne that'd been sitting on the dresser too long. He didn't smell like anything.
The man returned to the booth holding two blue daiquiris. Theresa thanked him, marveling at how the Curaçao seemed to glow. She tried to ignore the odd way he looked at her—like he was studying her features separately instead of admiring her as a whole.
After another round of drinks, Theresa was explicating the dilatory pace of her stardom.
"Born in the wrong era. You know, there was a time when it was enough to simply hold the frame." She laughed and curled her lips like Norma Desmond bracing for her close-up.
She thought it strange how the man never smiled with his mouth open. Not even when he laughed.
Margo
They pulled into the beach access and let the engine hack up the remnants of the trip. The Pacific bloat a water balloon ready to pop. At the shoreline, a pudgy young boy sank into the wet sand like a dropped scoop of ice cream. A young woman wearing her hair up in a white scarf with purple Dahlias took selfies on a beach chair nearby.
"Holy shit." Tad pointed to a copper-colored Labradoodle running full speed around the boy in the sand. "Goddamn, if I could be as happy as a dog running on the beach."
Margo knew what this meant.
"People cough up more if it's their kid's pet," Tad said, craning back to Rose.
"Tad, no." Rose contested.
Tad licked his fingers and threw his Cheetos wrapper out the window. "Rosy, need I remind you, this ain't a free fucking ride."
Rose looked to her friend, but Margo sat transfixed by the lady in the beach chair. "That woman is beautiful," Margo muttered—channeling some familiar torment. She could have sworn their eyes met. Odd, she thought, that no matter the distance, you could always sense when your eyes locked with another.
The bickering between Tad and Rose had grown to a fever pitch when the three were startled by a single bark. There, at the front of the car, was the Labradoodle licking the crumbs out from the littered Cheetos wrapper.
Ryan
Ryan sat on the waiting room couch. His palms slid along the leather, still sweaty from nerves. The hosts of Blood Red Summer were in the booth wrapping up sponsorship ads. He felt like it had gone okay—his first podcast.
It had been a decade since his sister's disappearance but only three years since the shocking discovery of what True Crime coined The Cannibal of Canoga Park.
Ryan had declined countless podcast appearance requests, disinterested in glorifying the dark and crowded ranks of Los Angeles atrocity. But with the nature of Theresa's acquaintances now common knowledge, he felt a responsibility to humanize his sister's memory.
The show's first half felt stale—conversation not a merit Ryan had ever had the privilege to practice. But by the end of the segment, he brought one host to tears.
"My dog had run away just a week before Theresa went missing. Not long after her disappearance, there was a knock on the door. It was this cool-looking guy with tattoos and rings. A few of Theresa's friends talked to him—there were always people there during that time—but he didn't leave his name or even want the reward the poster advertised."
The podcast host was invigorated with the opportunity to sensationalize. "Do I sense a mystery hero?"
"Seeing my best friend again for the first time—the way he just leaped onto me—licking and huffing the way dogs do when they don't know what to do with all their joy. Thank God for that miracle. I just cried into his fur until I fell asleep."
Tad
I drove to the ocean to pacify my thoughts. The thing that got to me was Rosy denying any part in it. Flirtation full of hot air. Hell, it was just a fucking kiss. But I swear to God, the drama began the day we took that damn dog.
I shut off the engine and walked the boardwalk. The whitewash in hi-def, the echo of cobblestones rolling under the waves. I could breathe a little slower.
I almost missed the Lost Dog Poster stapled to the light pole with a picture of the three of them.
I stood there and stared at the photo for I don't know how long. Hard to say why, but something shifted in me. Now, there may be parts of us that have been suppressed for so long we ourselves couldn't pick them out of a line-up. Then some arbitrary association pulls those parts to the surface, and we're left stunned with no choice but to reckon with the queer virtue of change.
The girls were asleep when I loaded the pup back in the car.
Rose
The kids were almost asleep. Graham applied the final touches—brushed teeth and bedtime stories while mommy decompressed—a glass of Rombauer Chard to help the ocean swallow the day.
"A queer ritual," my husband would call my R&R—me cozied up on our protected perch with its grand view of Catalina, letting the graphic accounts of murder wash over me in a wave of True Crime bliss.
But tonight, my methods backfired. I sat paralyzed, listening to this soft-spoken man delineate the events of his sister's abduction and missing Labradoodle.
The likelihood this was the same—no. NO, this was precisely the brand of paranoia spawned from these shows—according to Graham.
I thought about my beautiful friend. I hadn't spoken to Margo in years. Not since—
"The little beasts are asleep!" Graham said, bounding through the open glass door, a glass of red in hand.
I scrambled across the daybed to turn off the podcast.
"Who's head they find in the crockpot this time?" he jabbed rhetorically, nosing his Domaine Serene.
Theresa
Yes, last time was to be the last time, but then today happened, and there was no fucking way she'd be spending her first SAG paycheck on getting that damn dog back. The thought of another John made her sick, and she was tempted to send the low-lives that took their dog a bag of treats and wish them luck. But her baby brother had suffered enough loss. She hadn't the heart to tell him about the ransom note.
She tried to distract Ryan as she readied herself.
"Damian Chazelle is going to cast me in one of his movies! Do you believe me, Ryan?"
Sometimes, Ryan ran lines with his sister and helped her pick outfits for her auditions. She told him all the time that she would be in the movies. He believed her from the first time she said it.
Theresa pouted like Thelma Todd as she pulled her bangs from her scarf and carried on about the bygone Hollywood she belonged to—unsure if she sought to assuage her brother's frenzied thoughts or her own.
She blotted her lips in the foyer mirror, "Last fucking time."
