Not Safe for Work

by Michael Estrin

  He sets me back down roughly, and I hear the wooden chair creak a little. I shift in the seat, feeling more give in the chair, which is a good thing if I have any hope of getting out of this.

  “And you’re sure this scene you’re setting will send Ron into a murderous rage?”

  “You want to offer tips, Heywood?”

  “Well, if you want to talk it out...”

  “Rhetorical, asshole. Rhetorical! This scene isn’t for Ron’s benefit, it’s for the cops. They see this fucked-up sex shit and it’s open and shut, you know?”

  My heart sinks a little at the thought that Beauchamp has thought far enough ahead that he has a plan to help the cops close the book on my murder without finding the mastermind. I take one last shot, hoping to punch a hole in my cokehead captor’s logic that’s big enough to postpone my demise.

  “Looks like you thought of everything,” I say. “You get Ron all coked up, and send him on a murderous rampage. But tell me something. How are you going to explain Ron killing me in your house? The cops are going to want to know the answer to that one.”

  “You’ve met Ron. He’s fucking crazy, like bat shit crazy. He broke in. He took us hostage. He was going to kill us both. I got away. I was going to call for help, but... too late. Seriously, Heywood, I’m a member of the bar. I carry some weight in this world, more than a psycho like Ron and a hack like you. It won’t take much of a cover story, so give me some fucking credit, will you?”

  I sink into the chair.

  Bobby Beauchamp may be a shitty villain, but he made me for a mark pretty early. And like a sucker, I played right into his hand.

  “I thought I was going to have to call you with a hot tip on Ron, Heywood. But you gift-wrapped this one, brother. Man, I dig that about you.”

  Beauchamp takes out my phone.

  “The 911 response time in this neighborhood is eight minutes,” he says. “It’s amazing what you can learn on Google these days. Too bad you won’t live long enough for the boys in blue to save you.”

  Beauchamp opens the door and calls out to Ron. Then he quickly dials 911 and presses mute.

  “Adios asshole.”

  Chapter 52: Big brother fucker

  If Ron is the proverbial bull, I am the big red cape.

  Bobby Beauchamp may have left the room, but he’s left nothing to chance. For one thing, he undersold Ron’s psychosis. The man looks like he’s capable of ripping off my limbs and beating me to death with them. But Ron doesn’t have to go to the trouble of converting my arms to clubs because Beauchamp has thoughtfully provided an arsenal of weapons for the occasion. In fact, the only question is whether Ron will pummel me to death with a metal baseball bat, or snap a hockey stick and impale me with the business end.

  “Ron, I can explain,” I say.

  It’s a cliché line. It’s also probably the worst thing you can say to a man when he catches you with your pants down around your ankles, facing a poster of a woman he’d kill for. No doubt Ron is aware that Mary Jane’s career can be boiled down to that of a masturbatory aid, but there’s a big difference between knowing that information and confronting that reality head-on. Such is the nature of feelings in the sex business. And right now, Ron is feeling it. He beats his chest, turning red with rage. He’s like a berserker getting ready for battle.

  “Ron, this is a setup,” I say. “Whatever Beauchamp told you about me and Mary Jane isn’t true.”

  I lift my legs, trying to break free. It doesn’t work. In fact, it only makes things worse because the sight of my bare legs and exposed groin pushing toward Mary Jane’s image only seems to drive Ron’s blood lust to the next level.

  Suddenly, Ron lets loose a yell that would make a barbarian shit his animal-skin underwear. The yell is loud and it lasts for a lifetime, or at least what’s left of my lifetime.

  And then it’s quiet. Ron grabs the hockey stick and breaks it against the desk. His eyes flicker with delight at the sight of the stick’s jagged point. Stabbing it is.

  “I’m going to carve out your eyes and fuck the sockets,” Ron tells me.

  But before Ron can begin his amateur optometrist impression, there’s a terrible crash outside.

  Ron darts to the window.

  With my tormentor’s back turned to me, I seize the moment.

  Pressing my feet to the floor, I rise to a standing half-crouch, the chair tethered behind me. I point my body toward Ron like a missile. As I start my charge, I hear three loud pops from outside the house.

  Ron turns away from the window. Through the lace of the thong, my eyes find his. I quicken my pace to close the gap between us before he can deploy Gretzky’s spear.

  Unfortunately, it’s hard to run with your pants around your ankles. My feet stumble and I spill forward into a top-heavy tumble.

  My bad shoulder connects with the outside of Ron’s left leg at the knee. I hear the sound of popping and the splintering chair. The momentum carries me into the wall and my forehead meets the plaster.

  It’s true what they say about adrenaline. Pain ripples through me, but it doesn’t register. Not yet. It’ll hurt later, but right now I’ve opened a tab and I’m downing pain shots fast as I can.

  Blood trickles down my forehead and into my eyes. The thong is a poor excuse for a bandage. I am cuffed and cornered. But I am alive, for now.

  Unfortunately, Ron is also still alive. His kneecap is turned sideways, but he’s able to stand with most of his weight on the good leg. And he’s still holding the spear, like a gladiator whacked out of his mind on lust and narcotics.

  It’s a standoff. I can either charge or play defense. Live or die.

  “He used you, Ron. Beauchamp used you, but you don’t have to take the fall for him.”

  I’m talking out of my ass, of course, but the way I see it, I need to keep talking as long as I’m able to do so.

  “Think about Mary Jane,” I say.

  Ron’s eyes turn to the poster of Mary Jane, and in that moment I see a softness that I hadn’t seen in him before, a tenderness we reserve for moments of true affection. Then, Ron’s face hardens, and his eyes turn as cold as steel.

  “You’re going to die,” Ron says. “You’re going to die now.”

  I believe Ron, and more to the point, I’m all out of bullshit. A scream wells up from deep inside me. It’s my war cry—something borrowed from one too many screenings of Full Metal Jacket with Miles. The war cry may not be much, but it’s enough to propel me toward Ron with a fury I didn’t know I could summon.

  Ron raises the hockey stick over his head, waiting for my charge to arrive. This time I stagger my steps so as not to trip.

  Suddenly, the door swings open. Ron pivots toward a new threat, assuming a pant-less man with a thong on his head can be considered a prior threat.

  Ron coils his body like a snake, ready to strike. Then, in an instant, he leaps with all the rage a one-legged psycho can muster, not toward me, but toward the door.

  I track Ron’s flight path as he moves in slow motion toward a cannonade of gunfire.

  Ron explodes into a red mist as the bullets rip apart his torso and face. The hockey stick falls harmlessly to the floor.

  I look up to see my salvation. Detective Boyd.

  “What’s with the thong on your face, chucklehead?”

  Chapter 53: Case closed, chucklehead

  They know me at the hospital, but that doesn’t mean I get special treatment.

  An intern puts six stitches in my forehead. She says I might have a concussion, but her boss overrules her decision to order a CT scan because one look at me and he knows I can’t afford it.

  Instead, the intern gives me a pamphlet that outlines the warning signs of a concussion and tells me to wait for someone from orthopedics to come by and put my shoulder back in the socket.

  I’m waiting in an observation room, floating on a cloud of generic painkillers, when I hear a familiar voice.

  “OK chucklehead,” Boyd says. “Let’s talk abo
ut why you had a thong on your head and your pants down around your ankles.”

  I start to explain, but Boyd holds up his hand.

  “Look, you’re going to need to give a statement, but before you do, I’m going to tell you how it is.”

  “Isn’t that against procedure?”

  “Fuck Heywood, I thought we were, I don’t want to say friends, but you know, colleagues on this one.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s New Year’s Eve, OK.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So if I hurry, I can get my drink on and maybe get my wife to swallow the old pork-sword before she resolves not to talk to my ass for another year.”

  “You talk that way about your wife?”

  “This coming from a guy who dislocated his shoulder at a gangbang, and then dislocates it again the next day at a coke orgy that ends in a double homicide.”

  I shift on the exam table, careful to hold my hanging shoulder in place. The drugs are wearing off and the orthopedist is nowhere in sight.

  “Paperwork, dick-brain, paperwork.”

  “What?”

  “Paperwork. I hate doing paperwork, so before you give me your statement I’m going to tell you how this fucking mess ended. That way, we don’t have any loose ends.”

  “Is that ethical?”

  “Ethical? You really need to grow the fuck up, kid.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  “Bobby Beauchamp,” Boyd says. “Figures that a William H. Macy–looking motherfucker would be the evil mastermind. It’s like Boogie Nights with a body count.”

  “He looked more like William H. Macy in Fargo, and technically, you know, that one had a body count, so...”

  Boyd’s eyes narrow, and I know that now is not the time to discuss nineties cinema.

  “The Wayne Gretzky fan with the foot-long dong was the muscle.”

  “I know.”

  “But did you know that Susie Big Tits was in on it?”

  “Mary Jane?”

  “Her real name was Nora Clayton, but yeah. She was the honey trap. Makes sense, I guess. You aren’t the only chucklehead spanking it to her.”

  “I wasn’t spanking it.”

  Boyd holds up his hand.

  “A man’s spank bank is need-to-know, and I do not need to know.”

  “She’s not my type,” I say.

  Boyd considers that for a moment.

  “Yeah, you’re probably one of those moody hipsters who likes emo chicks,” he says. “Anyway, doesn’t matter. Gretzky-fan was obsessed with her. I’m talking obsessed with a capital O-face. Seriously. I got a forensics team going through his personal effects—we’re talking sick shit.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the kind of sick shit I don’t want ending up in a story with my name in it, chucklehead.”

  “I’ll file a freedom of information request,” I say.

  “Fine by me,” Boyd says. “I’m not the one who has to deal with that paperwork.”

  My head sinks a little.

  “Don’t be like that, Heywood. This is the good part.”

  Beauchamp and Johnny Toxic were partners, Boyd explains. Johnny stiffed Mary Jane, so she went to Beauchamp to get paid. Only Beauchamp had a business proposition for her instead.

  “Double the money to rent that honey,” Boyd says. “She needed cash like we need air. Meanwhile, Beauchamp had been looking to eighty-six Johnny because the two had been feuding over money for more than a year. Classic motive.”

  “What about the lawsuit?” I ask. “That must have solved the money problems.”

  “You want a recipe for murder?” Boyd asks. “Too much cocaine and no money. The recipe also works if you add money. Basically, too much cocaine and anything is possible—especially murder. Trouble was, Johnny always kept Ron around for protection. Before he was Beauchamp’s muscle, he belonged to Johnny.”

  “Belonged?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Boyd says. “Ron wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. Johnny gave him everything—coke, steroids, roof over his head, cash in his pocket, and all the pussy he could fuck. But all he really wanted was Mary Jane. She had the key to his heart between her legs, you know what I mean?”

  “You’re about as subtle as a cannonball.”

  “For some reason that crazy fucker was in love with her,” Boyd says. “Can you imagine that, loving a whore?”

  “Don’t call her a whore,” I say. “She’s a person.”

  “Whores are people too. Beauchamp paid her coke bills and her mortgage and in exchange she led Ron around by his pecker. Then one day, when they knew they had Ron by the balls, she told him that Johnny had roughed her up.”

  “Roughed her up—like how?”

  “No Heywood, pay attention. It was all a lie.”

  Despite the narcotic fog in my head, the wheels turn and lock into place.

  “So that’s why Ron killed Johnny Toxic?”

  “Bingo,” Boyd says. “He did it all for love.”

  “Wait a minute, he put a medieval battle-ax through Johnny Toxic’s heart because he loved Mary Jane?”

  “Why not? He was going to gut you with a hockey stick for the same reason.”

  Ron’s motive is easy to believe and yet hard to fathom. Love isn’t impossible in the porn business, but it sure feels that way. Truth is, I suspect you’d be more likely to find a porn star who really loves sucking cock than actual love between two people, because I’ve seen way too much of the former, and none of the latter. Then again, whatever love Ron felt for Mary Jane didn’t exactly blossom, and it certainly wasn’t mutual. He was a strong guy who knew how to kill, but love was his weakness, his Achilles’ heel. She used his love and it metastasized into something dark and brutal.

  “Half my cases are about love and the rest are about money.”

  “This one had both,” I say.

  “Yeah. And we knew that from day one because I don’t totally suck at my job like you do.”

  “You knew from day one?”

  “We took prints and DNA off the murder weapon, ran them in the usual databases and—winner, winner chicken dinner—the prints matched Ron’s Marine records. Semper Fuck, right?”

  My head spins and I can feel my stomach turn. I aim for the wastebasket, but miss by a good two feet.

  “Jesus,” Boyd says, sidestepping a stream of my puke. “Looks like someone likes apple fritters.”

  I use my sleeve to wipe the spit off my lips and chin.

  “You knew it was Ron all along?”

  Boyd nods.

  “Why didn’t you just arrest him?”

  “We couldn’t find him,” Boyd says. “Do you know how hard it is to locate these assholes?”

  I nod because I do know how hard it is to locate someone in porn. It’s a transient business, and you’re not somebody until everyone knows your alias.

  Then it hits me like a battle-ax to the chest.

  “You used me,” I say. “You fucking used me.”

  “Watch your language, chucklehead.”

  “You fucking used me,” I insist.

  “Yes, I used you.”

  “You hacked my phone, used to it to track me.”

  “I used it to track you, but I didn’t hack it,” Boyd says.

  “Then how?”

  “That’s a little off topic.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Explain.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive,” Boyd says. “It’s all perfectly legal. Well, mostly legal. We have relationships with mobile phone carriers. I tracked you, but it was for your own safety.”

  “Reservoir Dogs,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “Miles said you guys showed up at the gangbang too fast,” I explain. “He figured it out. He knew you were tracking me.”

  “That roommate of yours is so fucking paranoid, he thinks Minority Report is a documentary.”

  “Yeah, well you aren’t exactly proving him wrong.”

  “H
ey numb nuts, a little gratitude would be nice,” Boyd snaps.

  “Gratitude? I should be thankful that you used me, put my life in danger, and tracked my every movement?”

  “Well, when you put it like that I sound like an asshole, Heywood. But think about it the other way. You’re the nosy chucklehead who wanted to break the big story. So guess what, Woodward, you did it!”

  Boyd is smiling, but I’m not having it.

  “You cracked the case and helped bring down the killer. Congratulations. I warned you off, told you it was dangerous, but you went anyway. You’ve got big brass balls. Metaphorically speaking.”

  “So I’m supposed to thank you? I don’t think so. The worm doesn’t tell the fisherman how happy he is to be on the hook, Detective.”

  “What the fuck do you know about fishing?”

  I shake my head because I don’t know what else to say and, truly, the only thing I know about fish is that it’s best served in stick form.

  “It’s not like you were in any real danger,” Boyd says. “I knew you’d go after the story, and that eventually you’d find Ron. He was your ticket out, right?”

  I nod my head.

  “So you were going to use him, right?”

  Boyd makes a good point, maybe the only point that matters. If the crime is exploitation, I’m as guilty as the victim, who in turn is as guilty as his killers. Sure, there are relative degrees of exploitation, but any attempt to rank them feels like a cop-out.

  “It’s a circle jerk of exploitation, kid. As long as you’re still above ground and breathing when it’s all over, that’s all that matters.”

  “So the ends justify the means?”

  “How the fuck should I know? I’m a cop, not a philosophy professor. What I do know, Heywood, is you’ll feel better when you file your story.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Boyd rolls his eyes.

  “I don’t know that,” he says. “It’s just something to say. The truth is, I’ll feel better when you sign your statement. You’re kind of a moody fuck, so maybe you’ll never feel better.”