by Elise Sax
“Something’s wrong. I can’t open Facebook,” I said. “Look at this. I got an email alert from Facebook. Holy crap, they’ve closed my account because I posted indecent material. Thank goodness. Now, no one will see it.”
“Except for the thousands who already did,” Silas said. “I didn’t say that.”
“I know. I know. Because you’re a man,” I said.
“It’ll be okay,” Nora said, petting my head. “People have a short memory. Nobody remembers a thing about pay phones or public television anymore. They’ll forget about your boobs in a matter of minutes.”
The door opened, and Rocco and Mabel walked in. “Sharpen your pencils,” Mabel ordered, loudly. “You have a story to write.”
“Hello, Matilda,” Rocco said and smiled lasciviously.
“What can we do you for?” Silas asked.
“Thievery!” Mabel yelled.
“Vandalism!” Rocco yelled.
“They put two Pooper Baskets in my saltwater infinity pool,” Mabel complained.
“They put one in my outdoor reading nook with onyx flagstones,” Rocco complained.
Silas typed on his computer. “How many Pooper Baskets have been stolen?” he asked.
“All of them!” Rocco and Mabel answered in unison.
“What does the sheriff say about it? Any suspects?” Silas asked.
“No, the thieves are too dastardly and clever,” Mabel said. “They operate under the cover of darkness.”
“They’re fleet of foot and wily of brain,” Rocco said.
“All right. I think I’ve got enough,” Silas said. “I’ll call Amos and get his side of it and write it up.”
Rocco and Mabel turned to leave, but as they got to the door, Mabel turned back around. “And keep your fanny off social media, girl,” she told me. “Just because you can crack walnuts on your ass doesn’t mean you need to show it to the world.”
“Mabel, you have Facebook?” I asked.
“Everyone has Facebook,” she said and left.
“I’m pretty sure people remember public television,” I whined to Nora.
“Very few people,” she said, petting my head again.
“Psst!” I turned to see Faye standing in the doorway, gesturing toward me. “Psst!”
Nora and I walked out to meet with her in the courtyard.
“I have good news,” Faye said, quietly. “Secret news.”
We gathered in my bedroom and closed the door. “You’re in,” Faye told me. “Mimi was thrilled to get you. It was genius to do the Facebook video. They want you bad.”
“That was an accident,” I said.
“Matilda was making a private video for Boone,” Nora explained.
“And I changed my mind and wasn’t even going to send it,” I added.
“It was a good video,” Faye said. “Norton said it had good production value. Anyway, can you meet with Mimi tonight? They’re going to pick you up tonight at ten.”
“Who?” I asked.
Faye shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re real secretive.”
“You’re going to be like Gloria Steinem undercover in the Playboy Club,” Nora said, excited.
“Naked feminism. Swell,” I said. Now that it was on, I was nervous about going undercover in the sex club. The killer was probably a member, and I was going to be alone. It wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did.
“We need to provide backup,” Nora said, as if she was reading my mind. “We can’t let her go alone.”
“Norton’s feeling better. I can definitely get the night off,” Faye said.
There were voices outside the door, and the dogs were barking. I left to see what was going on. In the kitchen, Tilly was sitting at the table, sipping from a cup of coffee. Dick Boner was standing by the stove, holding a hammer in his hand and naked as usual. The mayor and the two biddies from the HPA were yelling at Dick, and the dogs were barking at the HPA.
Nora and Faye snuck out of the house. I guessed they were happy to be my backup for the sex club, but the HPA sent them running for the hills.
One of the biddies pointed at Dick’s penis. “What are you doing?” she asked me. “This is not historical preservation. This is perversion!”
“She knows all about perversion,” the other biddy said under her breath.
“This is harassment,” I said.
“Did she say ass?” one of the biddies asked the mayor.
“You need to leave now. Dick is working on your ridiculous list, and it’s not your place to judge,” I said with a surprising amount of vitriol. But it didn’t work. It turned out that the HPA had almost unlimited power. They tightened my deadline to get the work done, moving it up two weeks or they were going to take my historical home away from my naked butt.
With their threat issued, they finally left my house.
“A crazy, possessed sex maniac. Who would have thought?” the mayor said as he walked out the door.
Dick gave me an appreciative elbow in my side. “Soulmates,” he said and whispered. “You like to air out your body, too.”
I sighed and walked outside, eager to get away from Dick. Across the courtyard, Boone was leaning against his doorjamb with his arms crossed. He was smiling in his usual predatory way.
“I didn’t mean to put it on Facebook,” I croaked. “I was going to…well, I was going to delete it, anyway.”
“Put what on Facebook? I don’t have Facebook,” he said and crossed the courtyard. He took me in his arms and kissed me. “I’m feeling much better. I’m definitely on the mend. Maybe we can try another date. Someplace safe. A mattress factory, maybe.”
So, he didn’t hear about my dirty-talking striptease. He didn’t have Facebook. He was the only person in Goodnight who hadn’t seen me naked, and he was my boyfriend. How ironic. It was only a matter of time—and probably not much time—for him to find out, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him.
I spent the rest of the day, wasting time until it was time for my sex club undercover night. As the day wore on, my nervousness increased. I laid out a sexy outfit on my bed to wear for the sex club, but a little before ten o’clock, I decided to go with jeans, a sweater, and a coat with sensible shoes because they had already seen me naked, so I didn’t think I needed to do a big sales job.
“I’m doing this to get information about Inga. Where did the money come from? Did the rough sex end up with her death? Simple stuff,” I said out loud in my room.
At one minute to ten, I was waiting outside at the front gate. A few seconds later, an 80s-era Volvo drove up the driveway. Two people dressed in black and wearing black ski masks got out of the car and grabbed me. They put a hood over my head. It was all I could do not to scream and fight them off.
“Sex club?” I asked from inside my hood.
“Don’t worry. This part only lasts a couple minutes.” I was surprised to hear a woman’s voice.
She helped me into the back seat, and the Volvo drove away from my house. I was relieved to hear the familiar roar of Nora’s food truck. My backup was following us.
My captors didn’t say anything during the drive, and I peeked out from the hood to see where we were going. They drove through the Plaza and parked a few blocks west.
“Here we are,” a man said, and they helped me out of the car and into a house. Once inside, they took my hood off.
The house was a bungalow, more or less rundown, with small rooms partitioning the house into little rectangles. The front rooms were normal, middle America, but as we walked down a hallway, the decorations turned decidedly more erotic.
First it was just naughty pictures on the walls, but then I spied rooms full of paraphernalia, like in Inga’s apartment.
And there were people in the rooms, too.
People dressed in erotic outfits, some holding whips.
Oh, no. What have I gotten myself into? I’m so in over my head.
They walked me to the back room, which was furnished with a fainting couch, a desk
, and two chairs. They sat me in one of the chairs facing the desk, and they left the room. Scanning the room, I tried to get a sense of whose house it was and if they would drown a woman in a bucket of resin.
Before I could get a reading, a stocky, short woman in a full dominatrix outfit walked in. She shook my hand provocatively and sat at the desk.
“Well,” she said, putting her elbows on the desktop with her hands together. She was wearing black latex gloves with long, pointy black nails attached to them. “You are an interesting girl, aren’t you?”
I knew instinctively that she was Mimi Pug, the woman who drives a water truck and had tried to draft Faye and Norton into the sex club. “We’re very happy to welcome you to our family,” she continued. “We’ve been wanting fresh blood.”
“Especially since Inga died,” I said.
Mimi flinched. “Inga was unfortunate. How did you find out that she was one of us?” She put her hand up, palm forward. “Never mind. Don’t tell me. The first rule of our family is no one talks about our family. Inga tended to talk. She wanted to bring in people who weren’t approved. I should have known. Inga was eccentric, she danced to her own drummer. It’s my fault for letting her join. Carlos persuaded me.”
I did a mental note, saving the Carlos name for later. If he was the one who brought her in, maybe they were playing around on the side. Maybe it got too rough, and he killed her.
Mimi pursed her lips, and her eyes hardened into narrow slits. “I hate that she talked about us. Obviously, you’re a safe person, but still. We’re a closed group. If word got out, I can’t imagine the persecution we would face. You know about that, I’m sure.”
I nodded. Oh boy, did I know. You make one porn video and broadcast it on Facebook, and you become a pariah. I was never going to live it down. It was going to be a hundred percent humiliation from here on out.
I wondered how angry Mimi was about Inga’s big mouth. Angry enough to kill her? Mimi was definitely strong enough. She lifted big bottles of water every day. Pushing Inga’s head into a bucket of resin and keeping it there would have been easy for her.
“So, tell me about your preferences,” Mimi asked me.
“My preferences?”
She smiled like a Cheshire cat. “You know. Preferences.”
My preferences were a monogamous relationship with a nice guy who had a job. Maybe a dinner out, too. But I had to make up something gross in order to fit in, although I refused to mention anything that would hurt. No whips and chains for me, not even when I was lying. What wouldn’t hurt but would be kinky?
“I have a thing for pillows. Lots of pillows,” I said, finally.
She arched an eyebrow and leaned back a little. “Interesting. I’ve never heard about pillows before. You’ll have to tell me all about that so we can make you comfortable.”
I smiled, like I was delighted to be in the club. “I’ve got a shipment of my favorite pillows coming. They should arrive in about six weeks. Then, I’ll be ready to show you everything.”
Mimi’s face turned down in a disappointed frown. “Six weeks is a long time. We were hoping you’d be ready to start this evening.”
I cocked my head to the side, as if I was disappointed too. “Sorry. But I’ll be raring to go in six weeks. In the meantime, how about giving me the tour?”
“Sure,” she said, still disappointed. “Wait here a minute.”
When she left, I realized I had been holding my breath, and I gasped for air. I was relieved that I had managed to get out of actual sex and nakedness with the pillow shipment excuse. I already had two suspects. Mimi was suspect number one since she was upset that Inga had a big mouth and was doing some sex stuff on the side without the club. And there was the mysterious Carlos who had brought Inga into the club.
There was a scratching noise to my right, and I jumped when I saw two faces plastered against the window. It was Adele and Faye. I figured Nora must have been playing lookout at the food truck. I put my finger to my mouth, urging them to be quiet. Adele gave me the okay sign, and then they dropped out of sight.
To my left, Mimi returned. “Come with me. I’ll show you around.”
I followed her into the hallway. She didn’t introduce me to any members, even though there were about ten of them in the house, as far as I could tell. Mimi stopped at a doorway in the next room. She didn’t invite me in.
“This is the polyamorous room,” she said, and she gestured to the five polyamorous club members in the room. I gasped and covered my surprise with a cough.
I knew three of the members, and I never—not in a million years—would have ever imagined they would be here in the polyamorous room.
Chapter 11
The mayor and the two biddies from the HPA were all in different levels of undress. They were busy with what they were doing, so they didn’t see me in the doorway. My mouth dropped open, and I shut my eyes tight. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that the mayor and the HPA were members of the sex club.
I moved on to the next room, which was full of people doing nauseating kinky stuff. But I was distracted by the mayor. Mayor Carlos Bowser. Carlos. Could he have been the one who got Inga into the sex club? If so, he was now my number one suspect.
Their hypocrisy was almost too much to handle. How dare the HPA call me names and threaten my house because of my video when they were kinky, gross people doing nasty stuff in a sex club? I wanted to wag my fingers at them and call them names, but I wanted to leave the house more.
“Thank you very much,” I told Mimi and practically ran out of the house.
“Don’t you want a ride home?” she asked as I reached the door.
“Nope. I love to walk,” I lied.
Adele and Faye tackled me when I got outside and shuffled me around the block to the food truck. I hopped inside with them.
“Do you need the morning after pill?” Nora asked, handing me a package.
“Do you need a shot of penicillin?” Faye asked.
“I didn’t have sex,” I insisted, handing the box back to Nora. “And I was very careful not to touch any surface. But if you have any hand sanitizer, I could go for some.”
Nora gave my hands a couple squirts of her hand sanitizer, and I rubbed it in up to my elbows.
“Good girl,” Adele said. “How did you manage not getting down and dirty? Isn’t that part of the initiation? I was figuring you’d have to wear a horse head, at least.”
“I was picturing stuff with lube,” Nora said.
“I saw you more with a whip in one hand and handcuffs in another,” Faye said.
“I told them that my pillows wouldn’t get here for six weeks, and I couldn’t do anything without my pillows,” I said.
Nora nodded understandingly. “I have a pregnancy pillow that I’ll never give up.”
“It was an excuse,” I said. “I don’t have a pillow fetish. But listen to who was in there.”
My three friends moved in close to me to hear better.
“You’re never going to believe this,” I started. “The mayor and the two biddies from the HPA.”
There was a collective gasp.
Faye punched me in the arm. “Get out of here. You’re lying.”
I crossed my heart. “The mayor and the two HPA women. They were doing…things.”
They gasped again.
“You just never know,” Nora said.
“It’s like a soap opera, but a soap opera on HBO where everyone’s naked,” Adele said.
“I kind of want to wash my eyes out with bleach,” I said.
“We need a drink and carbs,” Adele announced. “That’s the only thing for this kind of shock. That and we need to talk about it for a couple hours.”
Faye drove the food truck to the diner, and Adele opened it for us. We raided her refrigerator for leftovers and brought them to a booth. Sitting down, Nora took a flask out of her purse and poured a little into four cups.
I was starving. Infiltrating a sex c
lub had given me a big appetite. I scarfed leftover macaroni and cheese and roast chicken, washing it down with Nora’s booze.
“This is the best news you’ve ever had,” Nora told me.
“How so?” I asked.
“You’ve got the HPA right where you want them. Tell them to leave you alone or the whole world is going to know what they’ve been doing.”
“Isn’t that blackmail?” Faye asked.
“And what’re they doing to Matilda?” Nora said. “They’re threatening to take away her house. That’s blackmail.”
“This morning they said I was perverted,” I said.
“Blackmail them!” Adele said.
“It would be nice to eat breakfast tomorrow without Dick Boner’s butt in my face,” I said, wistfully. “No more need for expensive renovations would be a huge relief. There’s something else, too. I think the mayor was the one who got Inga into the sex club. Mimi said that Inga was a maverick. She did things on her own. I’m thinking that she might have been doing her own little sex club on the side, and if the mayor was part of that, it’s a good chance he killed her. Maybe the kink got too rough like I figured before.”
“Holy smokes,” Adele said. “I don’t think I can get more surprised. Nothing could shock me now.”
“Me either,” Faye said. “Moses could walk through the door, and I wouldn’t bat an eye, now.”
The door opened, and an older man walked in. He was tall and thin, and he wore khaki pants and a button-down shirt that had seen better days.
“We’re closed,” Adele told him.
“I’m here to see the woman who’s investigating Inga’s death,” he said.
Adele, Nora, and Faye pointed at me. He approached our booth. “I’m Shep Bucephelus. I was Inga’s boyfriend. I’m looking for information about her…her…her passing. Can you help me?” His eyes filled with tears, and his voice hitched with emotion.
“Hello, Moses,” Faye said.
“Are you talking about Inga Mueller?” Nora asked him. “You’re Inga Mueller’s boyfriend?”
He nodded. “Two years of bliss.”
“Are you joking? Is this a joke?” Adele asked.