Cross Country Murder Song by Philip Wilding Page B

head back and sighed happily, then took a long gulp of vodka; he was smiling expectantly, his robe hanging open, he was the kind of brilliant brown you see in imported furniture stores.
    He balanced a small crumbling mound of cocaine on the blade and brought it quickly towards his nose before he spilt it. It felt clean and instantaneous as it rushed through him. He looked up at the actor who was holding his drink forward for him to toast. They touched glasses and he said cheers while the actor saluted him with his free hand. Then the actor leant forward and pushed more cocaine on to the blade before inhaling it hungrily, then he dabbed his finger into the powder and rubbed it emphatically on to his gums, poking out his tongue, so his smile looked lopsided.
    He didn’t go back to the office that afternoon; he didn’t go back to the office again. He doubted they’d let him back in if he did. The actor said he liked him, said he could use him, asked him if he needed a job.
    I’ve got this one, he said, but the actor just laughed incredulously. It transpired that the actor didn’t just get nominated for Golden Globes, win critical plaudits and ingest cocaine, he moved it around town too. He only dealt to friends and associates, he said, and needed someone to deliver it on his behalf, someone, he said, waving the razor blade around, that wouldn’t get into his own stash, someone he could trust. Because, and he emphasised the word, wrapped his lips around it, people trusted him and who was anyone without their reputation, especially in this town.
    He stopped and looked around as if only just realising that it was dusk and his apartment was now dark. His head bobbed and his snorting seemed like it was the only sound ricocheting around the hills. He looked up, a white frosting crusted around his nose. It looked like it was glowing in the half-light.
    Got a car? the actor asked.
    He spent the summer moving from one gated community to another, from isolated hilltop mansions, gleaming and white, to sprawling ranch houses with their own basketball courts and views of the city he’d never seen before. Sometimes, he’d swoop back down into the canyon and feel like he was riding a helicopter over the jutting brows of the hill, LA below, dusty and listless in the daytime, expansive and dreamlike at night. He’d visit the actor three, sometimes four times a week to pick up the supplies and his cash and then he’d work his regular route unless there was a major party or launch happening and then the demand would rise, like people ordering in extra milk over the holidays. The actor would insist that they celebrate their good fortune and thriving business before he set out. A razor loaded with cocaine and a tall glass of vodka and he’d be back out on the sharply inclined streets feeling fresh and alert, always driving too fast for the first twenty minutes or so.
    He’d overdone it one night. Sometimes when he’d take a delivery it would be a simple exchange of one envelope for another. Other times he’d be invited in and, much like the first time he met the actor, be asked to hang out, share the cocaine he’d brought and have a drink. It was hard to say no. Firstly, he didn’t want to alienate the client (and sometimes it would be a producer or actor he admired) and after the first hit he’d taken at the actor’s house he almost always wanted a top-up.
    The palatial white house he drove up to was beyond large gates and a grand circular driveway. It was so bright in the sun that it looked burnished. Two huge marble columns stood impassively either side of the heavy twin doors, one of which was ajar revealing a black-and-white checked hallway and a staircase that he could imagine Fred Astaire dancing down. The producer was playing cards with some friends out at the back of the house on a sundeck beneath a large Sol beer umbrella; it looked incongruously cheap given the