The Long Way Down (Daniel Faust #1)(11)
“What’d he want?”
Paolo looked over his shoulder, making sure no customers were in earshot, and leaned close.
“He wanted to know if I could get him a snuff movie.”
Six
Paolo sent me away with two DVDs wrapped in brown butcher paper and a fresh chill rippling down my spine. The store’s air conditioning gave way to the arid heat of the Vegas sun, but the chill stayed with me.
“Kaufman is one of those guys,” Paolo warned me, “where you just know you’re gonna be seeing his picture on TV someday, with all his neighbors talking about how nice and quiet he was, and in the background they’re pulling bodies out of his basement. Just something wrong with him that you can’t put your finger on. Like you look in his eyes and there’s nothing really there.”
I pulled into the drive-through at Burger King and then headed back to my place for lunch and a movie. The cinematic masterpieces Paolo had picked out for me were volumes seven and eight of Daddy’s Gutter Sluts. I’d never seen the first six, but something told me I wasn’t going to have any trouble following the plot. Loading the first DVD into my laptop, I noticed the company logo: a pair of linked steel rings and the name Second Circle Studios. Cute. The second circle of hell, in Dante’s Inferno, was for the sin of lust. Artie Kaufman knew his classics.
Five minutes into the first DVD, I put my half-eaten burger aside. Fifteen minutes in and I felt like I needed to shower with bleach. There was no plot, no characters, just a tired-looking girl and Kaufman acting as his own cinematographer and star. He shot each scene on a handheld camera in one unbroken take, the lens acting as his point of view. He never showed his own face. The video rotated between eight or nine segments and featured four actresses. I immediately recognized Stacy. She wasn’t as pretty as her prom picture, not with the swell of a black eye and a fresh cut on her lip.
She showed off her new tattoo in her first scene. It said “Daddy’s Girl” in swirling script on the small of her back. She stood in some filthy little hellhole—it looked like a truck-stop bathroom—and looked over her shoulder with a smile as she hiked up her pink tank top for the camera.
“Do you like it?” she asked, the tinny sound echoing over my laptop’s speakers.
“Come here,” a man’s voice answered, almost gentle. Had to have been Artie, holding the camera.
She sauntered close, giving the lens a plastic smile. Then a sudden blur of motion as Artie backhanded her to the floor. The focus wavered when he lowered the camera, showing her on the grimy tiles. A boot slammed into her stomach, leaving her gasping for breath, curled into a fetal ball.
“You’re not here to talk, you’re here to f*ck,” Artie said in a monotone, the screen dropping to show his free hand fumbling with his belt buckle. “Don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”
Things got worse once his pants came off. This wasn’t just rough sex. It was barely sex at all. Each segment was the same: Artie beating down and degrading his actresses while the camera zoomed in for close-ups. “Actress” wasn’t even the right word. They weren’t acting; they were genuinely terrified. I’d gone to an S&M club once, on a job. I saw some rough stuff going on there, but everybody was into it and nobody was getting any treatment they hadn’t willingly signed up for. The whole spectacle had felt more like elaborate play than anything else.
This was the polar opposite. The stream of abuse spilling from Artie’s mouth set my teeth on edge. He hated these women. The sex was just a tool to reach his ultimate aim: hurting them. Stacy’s scenes were the worst. For some reason, he’d singled her out. I fast-forwarded through a scene where he shoved her head in a toilet, something he’d done with a couple of the other actresses. Then he got creative and did something that sent me running for the bathroom before I lost what little lunch I’d been able to choke down.
Wiping my mouth with a paper napkin, I loaded the second DVD. More of the same. Same actresses, same filthy bathroom “sets”, same abuse. I skipped forward five seconds at a time, not sure what I was looking for and feeling sick. My instincts told me there was something here, something to see, but what?
“—go home,” Stacy said, cowering on the floor.
I reversed the video.
Her voice was soft and choked with tears. I had to play it four more times before I was sure what I heard her say.
“Don’t want to. Want to go home.”
Artie’s voice wasn’t any easier to make out. He lowered the camera, whispering to her in a threatening hiss.
“Anytime, bitch. You think they’ll be proud, finding out what you’ve been doing for a living?”
Stacy finished the scene, her tears leaving mascara trails down her cheeks. Artie’s quip hadn’t been for the audience. It was a genuine threat. I could only imagine how wholesome Stacy from small-town Minnesota would feel at the prospect of having her grandfather find out about her secret life as a porn star.
“You son of a bitch,” I said to the screen. “You were blackmailing her.”
Had she finally had enough? Did Artie find out she was leaving and snap? Paolo’s words lingered in the back of my mind: he wanted a snuff movie. Maybe he’d decided to make one of his own. Looking back at the last clip, I was starting to get a nasty idea of how Stacy might have really drowned. At the very least, Artie was a blackmailer and a rapist.