Tiles, black and white underfoot. Tile on the walls. Urinals. Wooden stalls. It was a men’s room after all.
But a much older, fancier men’s room. The tile was classier. The urinals were molded into a fanciful, ornate shape on top. The posters on the walls were behind glass. A narrow ledge ran the length of the men’s room at elbow height under the posters, and on it sat some votive candles, unlit.
The match burnt out, scorching his fingers.
He lit another match. This time he used it to light three of the votive candles in their red glass holders. The flames sprang up, throwing a wobbly red glow through the glass.
In a few moments his eyes adjusted to the red gloom. Now he saw that the ledge was piled with dried flowers and cheap-looking costume jewelry and scraps of fur and lace and the ruffly satin lids of chocolate boxes.
In spite of his breezy assurances to Jewel, he felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.
He looked up at the posters.
They were all Wilmas.
The one hanging over the dead roses was naked. She had one hand between her thighs and one on her nipple. She wasn’t so much posing as standing there, as if the painter had caught her in a moment when she wasn’t “on.” She seemed relaxed and happy and decent and kind.
She looked so sweet. Like a kid sister. He could imagine her saying, They pay me for this, can you believe it? and Let’s have fun!
By thick red candlelight, he imagined that he saw her wink.
Chuckling, Clay fished a nickel out of his pocket and laid it on the ledge.
“You’re a grand girl, Wilma,” he said, his voice big and echoey in the tiled room. He put his hands in his pockets and smiled up at all her images.
The Wilma on the poster moved. She took her hand off her breast, kissed her fingers, and reached down to press them to his lips. Her fingers were warm.
His mouth fell open in astonishment.
She leaned forward, then stepped down off the wall, dipping her fingertips into his open mouth, running her hand over his throat and down his arm as she walked behind him. She put both palms over his eyes.
Clay held very still.
He felt her lips touch his ear. A voice sounded in his head, not in the room.
Hey, baby. Tell me what you want.
His dick got hard. This was really spooky. For two cents he could run screaming.
But not yet.
His body felt light and peaceful. A certainty spread through him that everything was going to be all right.
C’mon. Tell me what you want.
Now Clay understood the candles and things. They were offerings. He imagined the snaggle-toothed boy without ear protectors coming in here and laying those roses on the ledge, saying something like, There’s this girl, she doesn’t take me seriously, I want to marry her.
Wilma’s lips moved against his ear again. Tell me more.
Suddenly he let go of his irony and his Buddha-calm and his con-man aloofness. He had come to the shrine of Wilma and made his offering, and Wilma was prepared to answer his prayer, if he had the courage to say one.
He closed his eyes behind her palms and spoke humbly.
“There’s this girl. She doesn’t take me seriously. I want to marry her.” That wasn’t so scary. “She has another guy in her life. He’s, like, really good in bed. Really, really, really, really good. It’s taken him two hundred years and a lot of magic powers to get this good. I think I have a chance, but—” His voice cracked. “I can’t compete with that.”
Hush, hush, you don’t have to compete with that. You have what you need.
“You don’t understand. He can give her anything she wants. Anything.”
You have yourself to give.
“I’d give her anything,” he blurted, wondering if that was really true. “But I don’t have magic sex powers.”
Her palms slipped from his eyes and rested on his shoulders. He could feel her behind him like a wavering warmth, like a bit of music the size of a human hand brushing up and down his body, making him hum back at her.
Hm. Then we can make a deal.
“A deal?”
She slid around to face him. Her eyes seemed huge. You can give me something I want.
A guy would give her anything if she looked at him like that.
He licked his lips. “What?”
The door burst open. “Clay? Are you in here?”
The candles went out.
Wilma vanished.
Clay turned toward the blinding fluorescent light in the doorway.
Jewel was silhouetted there, panting with a little sob in the back of her throat.
He ran forward. “What’s the matter?”
“Randy’s gone! He’s in bed with those porn stars!”
She threw herself into his arms.
“You can’t go in there!” somebody said from the doorway.
Jewel looked over her shoulder, hyperventilating.
“Come outta there!”
Clay shepherded her out into the bright light of the printing plant.
A grizzled eight-fingered printer scowled at them. “Look at this door! What does it say?”
Jewel looked at the ‘keep out’ signs. Clay was impressed to watch the changes cross her face: blankness as she put her hysteria aside, then a questioning frown, then curiosity, then comprehension. By the time she looked at the printer, she was all cop.
“Why?” she said in a sinister voice.
“Because it says keep out!” The printer picked up the barricade board and tapped it into place with his fist, using, Clay noticed, the same old nail hole.
“Clay Dawes, Consumer Services.” He showed the printer his badge. “If you don’t mind, we’d like to have a word with you.”
The printer’s coverall said Vincente over the pocket. He looked at the badge. Silently, Jewel showed him hers. He swallowed. “Come into my office.”
Clay followed him to a grubby, wood-partitioned workspace.
“It was the old men’s room. We had the posters up, same as everywhere else. We all have a personal feeling for Wilma,” Vincente said, and the hairs rose on the back of Clay’s neck. Vincente looked from Clay to Jewel, frowning, and Clay could imagine him wondering how to explain to a nice-girl-slash-cop what happens when you light a candle in front of a Wilma poster in there. “It’s too dirty.”
“Gross,” Clay said, helping him along.
“Yeah.” Vincente seemed to struggle for words. “So we boarded it up. Nobody goes in there now.”
“Unless they really feel the need?” Clay suggested.
Jewel frowned. “What need? What are you talking about?”
Vincente cut his eyes to Clay.
Clay said, “Remember O’Connor’s sofa cushions?”
“Euw.” She wrinkled her nose.
“You don’t even want to see the men’s room they use now.”
A panicky look flickered across her face. “Was it the same as O’Connor’s apartment?”
He nodded and stood up. “We’ll probably have more questions later. Thanks for your time.” He shook Vincente’s hand, and a look passed between them that was strictly male.
“I’m always here,” Vincente said.
o0o
Jewel blamed herself all the way back to the office. Clay was driving, so she had both hands free for tearing her hair.
“This is horrible. How am I gonna get in there? I can’t.” Ugh! Her skin crawled with heebie jeebies. “I can’t go back in there and — and let him — oh, ugh! And meanwhile,” she added angrily, “every minute he stays in that bearskin rug, he’s doing Velvita Fromage or the Tokyo Twins.”
“On another note,” Clay said, “I wonder if your new employer orders their staff meeting pastries from Hoby’s Bäckerei. You’ve realized, of course, that the pastry bags in O’Connor’s apartment and his locker come from the same address as his porn collection. If you’re looking for a hinky vector—”
Jewel’s jaw dropped. “You�
�re shitting me.” She blinked. “Hoby’s? What do you mean? Hoby’s stuff can’t be hinky.” The implications were staggering. “Oh, no! Hoby’s is a Chicago institution!” she wailed. “I don’t believe it!”
Clay shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
Hoby’s cow plops too hinky to eat? “Ow. Whis is not happening.”
“I’m sorry,” Clay said.
“Oh, God. It could be true.”
“Well, don’t panic. We’ll experiment.”
“Good idea.” Her brain veered off onto her real worry. “And how the hell am I going to get at that rug?” She imagined Randy and Velvita Fromage on the white fake bearskin rug — Randy and Velvita and Sancho, Randy and Velvita and Sancho and the Tokyo Twins — oh, and she mustn’t forget Flash Titty — could he do multiple women? Of course he could — plus the guys in animal costumes — she put her hands over her eyes. “Argh! I need to steam-clean my brain!”
Clay patted her hand.
She sniffled. “I guess we’d better report to Ed.”
At the DCS offices in the Kraft Building, Ed seemed to be holding a meeting. Most of their fellow investigators sat or stood in the staff room. Jewel and Clay slid into the back.
Ed looked gray and grim. “Assistant Commissioner Neebly from the Office for Economic Development will be comin’ around to look the place over. So no clowning around. I need all youse to get busy. Wherever he is, you fill it up. Mill around. Move boxes outta storage and pile shit around on desks and stuff. Everybody cuddle him up with hoops a steel by jowl so’s we squish ourselves through the halls like fuckin’ lemmings inna mosh pit in spawning season, know what I mean? Make it look like we need every inch. That’s all. Go back to work. Heiss, Dawes, get in my office.”
Jewel followed Clay, feeling a certain amount of unfocused dread. “What was that all about?”
“Those OED sons a bitches. I’d like to tell him to take a hike.”
“Why don’t you?” Clay said. “OED has no clout in this department, has it?”
“Can’t.” Jewel shook her head. “Bing Neebly went to high school with our commissioner.”
“What’s he inspecting for?” Clay said.
“Hinky shit,” Ed said succinctly. “They demolished the building, and then it came back outta thin air. What if they sold it, and it did something hinky again? God forbid it should vanish before the bonds clear. The feds would be all over us like a cheap suit. Da mayor would not be happy.”
“Ed,” Jewel cut in. “What do you want us to do?”
“I dunno. Think of something.” Ed’s caterpillar eyebrows worked with the effort of thought. “Maybe if we could make the place look just a little hinky. But not too hinky.”
Clay said, “I get you. Make him doubt his eyes.”
“Yeah. Scare him. Speaking of which, where’s your driver?”
Jewel said guiltily, “Uh, he’s detained.”
“Undercover,” Clay said, and she sent him a sharp look. “We got some intel on the pocket zone downstairs, by the way.” He filled Ed in on the possible connection between Hoby’s, Artistic Publishing Company, and the pocket zone poppets in O’Connor’s locker and apartment. “It could be the pastry is involved somehow. Contaminated.”
Jewel shuddered at the very idea.
Ed looked skeptical. “I ain’t takin’ their danish away from those women.” He gestured toward the outer office. “They’d kill me.” Of course, Ed loved Hoby’s, too.
“Oh, and get this,” Jewel said, “Randy packed up O’Connor’s porn and moved it out of the apartment, and the pocket zone went with it. Mrs. Othmar must have done the same, which just shows she has more balls than I have.”
Clay crinkled his eyes at her.
Ed grunted. “I wouldn’t touch ’em.”
She said, “So our hunch about how the pocket zone got there looks good. Inspectional Services is involved, so it has to be someone in the city. That kind of points in a certain direction. So can you get clearance from the Fifth Floor to give us the lists of properties the city wants to buy?”
Ed said, “I’ll try. They’re tight with that shit.”
“Great,” Jewel said. “And I think we may have found a way for the city to employ Randy. He can move hinky stuff for us.”
“Don’t get carried away.” Ed waved both hands. “I got no clout. You know that.”
“Hey, if pocket zones become a regular issue in Chicago, the Hinky Division will definitely need a toxic waste removal guy.”
“He got papers? I ain’t crossing the Immigration on this.”
“Of course he has papers,” she said, and sent Clay look intended to drill straight into his skull. Randy needs that ID, stat! she tried to beam at him telepathically.
Chapter Thirteen
Clay suggested Thai food and a movie and Jewel let him come back to her place. They sat on the sofa and pigged out.
She felt very sorry for herself.
She felt pooped, stupid, fat in the can, and, what was most unfair, guilty. The sadness in Randy’s face as he faded away wouldn’t leave her.
“What did I do wrong?” she wailed.
“Couldn’t tell you,” Clay muttered, nose in the pad thai.
“He always acts so insulted! I never met anybody so worried about his dignity all the time! Swear to God, if I worried about his precious lordly feelings, I’d end up tiptoing around like I really am his milkmaid or something.” She stabbed a pot sticker with her chopstick and bolted it. “I can’t stand thinking of him in that place where those women are — are working.” She noticed Clay wasn’t saying anything. “I’m sorry. I won’t rant any more. I’m totally wiped.”
Clay put his chopsticks down and scooted closer to rub the tendons on top of her shoulders. “Save your worries, worrywart. Tomorrow’s another day.”
“You should get on the system at work and find out what you can about Bing Neebly. Use Ed’s ID.”
“You’re loosening up,” Clay remarked, his hands working wonderfully on her back.
“Mmm, thank you.”
He said, “Two weeks ago, you wouldn’t have encouraged me to use a supervisor’s access code to snoop on a city official.”
She moaned under his squeezing fingers. “I’m broken. My integrity and my common sense are shot. Plus, it turns out I’m a milkmaid after all. Lowborn and provincial-minded.” She thought of the scene on the bearskin rug and shuddered.
“What’s with milkmaid? Did Randy call you that?”
“You wouldn’t understand. I guess it’s because he knows my family owned a dairy farm. He told me recently that if I was back in eighteen-whatever, when he was a lord, he wouldn’t even give me the time of day. I’m too low. I suppose he wouldn’t bother to fuck me if he had his druthers,” she added gloomily.
That was the worst part. She faced this every single time he did a zapper into some other woman’s bed.
She’d got used to Randy’s sexual services. Perilously comfortable with his magic mojo. Scarily satisfied, probably addicted.
And she wasn’t good enough for him. Oh, good enough to save his butt when he got stuck in a bed somewhere. But long term? If he ever got free of the curse?
“Let me get this straight,” Clay said, his hands pausing on her shoulders. “He told you that if he was walking down the street in eighteen-whatever and saw you, he’d just walk on by?”
She sniffed. “Yes. And I could see what he was thinking, too, because that was before you fixed what that Venus Machine did to me, when it gave me telepathy about men and sex? And he thought I was a milkmaid. I mean, with the yoke and pails and a big white stupid hat like some girl in a beer ad!”
Clay turned her on the sofa to face him. “You do know that machine was a fake, right? It didn’t work.”
“I only wish.”
He looked exasperated. “Jewel, you can’t afford to be credulous. We’re supposed to be catching frauds, not buying into the con.”
“I suppose you think you can teach me all about th
at,” she said, stung. “Mr. Yeah-but-I’ve-never-been-indicted.”
“Well, yes. That’s more or less what Ed said when he hired me.” Clay seemed miffed.
Was he cheesed off because she was obsessing about Randy?
“I could see what you were thinking, too.” She lifted her eyes to his. Suddenly he looked very not-frivolous and unsmug. “You would look at me, and I’d see a white picket fence and a golden retriever.
A moment of panic flickered in his eyes. He pulled away. “Tell me again what you thought you were doing.”
“Reading men’s minds. Randy put it into my head,” she said with venom, “and then that stupid Venus Machine zapped me, and then whenever I made eye contact with a man, euw. Randy was like a sheet of glass, I always understood what he was thinking. But then, I almost always do. You, I don’t know. I never figured out the dog and fence thing. Probably you thought I was a bitch, or else I was trying to keep you inside the law, or something. But random guys on the street, euw. Thank God you were able to fix the machine and reverse the effect.”
Clay made a sound in his throat.
She frowned. “You had this whole explanation about chakras and vibrational frequencies. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”
In a troubled voice, he said, “You thought it would work, so it worked.”
“Is that like real magic?”
He shook his head, watching her face. She’d never seen Clay look so serious for so long. When he wasn’t trying to put one over, he seemed like someone who’d been fighting a losing battle all his life. A sweet boy, too young for war.
While she watched, his eyes darted to hers and crinkled up in a mischievous expression. Kid to con artist in four seconds.
He held up a cellophane-covered square.
“Wanna look at feelthy pictures?”
So she let him play the Hot Pink movie Onika had given them. She was too tired to argue. Sheer surprise at having an intimate moment with Clay Dawes when she wasn’t the one on the defensive had thrown her off balance.
She was so off balance, in fact, that she let him get fresh on the sofa.
Onika’s porn for women came across cute and sweet and sexy, sort of like Wilma, the blonde mascot of Artistic Publishing. The story was about a lady librarian in hornrims and frumpy clothes who hooks up with a geeky male professor-type in hornrims and a tweed jacket, while researching Tantric sex in the limited-access shelves. Once they were naked, of course, they proved to be physically perfect. But at least the professor didn’t have a foot-long schweinstücke. And the camera spent more time on their faces and slow caresses than on jackhammer genital action. He even wore a condom.
The Hinky Bearskin Rug Page 8