“I meant to tell you yesterday,” she says. “But I guess I’ve been in denial. My mom’s sort of demented. Not really, though sometimes I wonder. She never makes these visits easy.”
“You want me to come along?”
“God, no! That would freak her out. Totally. Not because you’re you. Any man would freak her out…any woman, for that matter. She’d hallucinate I’m having a lesbian affair, and then all I’d hear the whole time is stuff about the lie of the White Goddess and how we’re in a time of social decline. It’s going to be hard enough as it is.” She hoists a small suitcase out from the back of the closet. “I want this visit to be as serene as possible, because the last day I’m there, I’m going to tell her about Orlando.”
“It’s not that big a move,” he says. “You’ll still be within an hour’s drive.”
“To her, it’ll be an extinction event, believe me.” She rummages through her underwear drawer. “One day you’ll have to meet her, but you want to put that day off as long as you can. I love her, but she can be an all-pro pain in the butt.”
Gloomily, he watches her pack for a minute and then says, “I’ll miss you.”
“I know! God, I’m going to miss you so much!” She turns from her packing and, with a mischievous expression, opens her robe and flashes him. “I’ve got time for a quickie.”
“Come ahead.”
She leaps onto the bed, throws a leg across his stomach, bringing her breasts close to his face; he tastes soap on her nipples. She rolls off him, onto her back, looking flushed.
“Better make that a long-ie,” she says. “It’s got to last for two days.”
After she’s gone, Cliff mopes about the apartment. He opens a box of Wheat Thins, eats a handful, has a second cup of coffee, paces. At length, he sits on the bed, back propped up by pillows, and, using Marley’s laptop, starts working on the book. When he looks up again, he’s surprised to find that four hours have passed. He has a late lunch at a Chinese restaurant on South Atlantic, then drives home and works some more. Around eight-thirty, Marley calls.
“This has to be brief,” she says, and asks him about his day.
“Nothing much. Worked on the book. Ate lunch at Lim’s. How about you?”
“The usual. Interrogation. Field exercises. Advanced interrogation.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“No, it’s not…but I don’t want to be here. That makes it worse.”
“Are you coming back tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet. It depends on how much aftercare mom’s going to need.” A pause. “How’s the book coming?”
“You can judge for yourself, but it feels pretty good. Today I wrote about this movie I did with Robert Mitchum and Kim…”
“Shit! I have to go. I’ll call tomorrow if I can.”
“Wait…”
“Love you,” she says, and hangs up.
He pictures her standing in her mother’s front yard, or in the bathroom, a little fretful because she didn’t intend to say the L word, because it’s the first time either of them have used it, and she’s not sure he’s ready to hear it, she’s worried it might put too much pressure on him. But hearing the word gives him a pleasant buzz, a comforting sense of inclusion, and he wishes he could call her back.
He falls asleep watching a Magic game with the sound off; when he wakes, a preacher is on the tube, weeping and holding out his arms in supplication. He washes up but chooses not to shower, checks himself in the mirror, sees a heavy two-day growth of gray stubble, and chooses not to shave. He breakfasts on fresh pineapple, toast, and coffee, puts on a t-shirt, bathing suit, and flip-flops, and walks down to the beach. It’s an overcast morning, low tide, the water placid and dark blue out beyond the bar. Sandpipers scurry along the tidal margin, digging for tiny soft-shelled crabs that have burrowed into the muck. People not much older than himself are power-walking, some hunting for shells. One sixty-something guy in a Speedo, his skin deeply tanned, is searching for change with a metal detector. During spring and summer, Cliff reflects, Daytona is a stage set, with a different cast moved in every few weeks. After the spring breakers, the bikers come for Bike Week. Then the NASCAR crowd flocks into town and everywhere you go, you hear them display their thrilling wit and wisdom, saying things like, “I warned Charlene not to let him touch it,” and, “Damn, that Swiss steak looks right good. I believe I’ll have me some of that.” But the elderly are always present, always going their customary rounds.
Being part of the senior parade makes Cliff uncomfortable. In the midst of this liver-spotted plague, he fears contagion and he goes up onto the boardwalk. Most of the attractions are closed. The Ferris wheel shows its erector set complexity against a pewter sky; many of the lesser rides are covered in canvas; but one of the arcades is open, its corrugated doors rolled up, and Cliff wanders inside. Behind a counter, a short order cook is busy greasing the grill. Three eighth- or ninth-graders, two Afro-Americans and one white kid dressed hip-hop style, backward caps and baggy clothes, are dicking around with a shooter game. As he passes, they glance toward him, their faces set in a kind of hostile blankness. He can read the thought balloon above their heads, a single balloon with three comma-like stems depending from it: Old Fucking Bum. Cliff decides he likes playing an old fucking bum. He develops a limp, a drunk’s weaving, unsteady walk. The kids whisper together and laugh.
At the rear of the arcade, past the row of Ski Ball machines, where they keep the older games, the arcade is quiet and dark and clammy, a sea cave with a low ceiling, its entrance appearing to be a long way off. Cliff scatters quarters atop one of the machines, Jungle Queen, its facing adorned with black panthers and lush vegetation and a voluptuous woman with black hair and red lips and silicon implants, her breasts perfectly conical. When he was a kid, he’d lift the machine and rest its front legs on his toes so the surface was level and the ball wouldn’t drop, and he’d rack up the maximum number of free games and play all day. It didn’t take much to entertain him, and he supposes it still doesn’t.
He plays for nearly an hour, his muscle memory returning, skillfully using body English, working the flippers. He’s on his way to setting a personal best, the machine issuing a series of loud pops, signifying games won, when someone comes up on his shoulder and begins watching. Ashford. Cliff keeps playing—he’s having a great last ball and doesn’t want to blow it. Finally the ball drops. He grins at Ashford and presses the button to start a new game.
Ashford says, “Having fun?”
“I can’t lose,” says Cliff.
Ashford looks to be wearing the same ensemble he wore during the interview, accented on this occasion by a fetching striped tie. The bags under his eyes are faintly purple. Cliff’s surprised too see him, but not deeply surprised.
“Have you guys been watching my building?” he asks.
“You didn’t answer the buzzer. I took a chance you’d be somewhere close by.” Ashford nods toward the counter at the front of the arcade. “Let’s get some coffee.”
“I’ve got twelve free games!”
“Don’t mess with me, Coria. I’m tired.”
The two men take stools at the counter and Ashford sits without speaking, swigging his coffee, staring glumly at the menu on the wall, black plastic letters arranged on white backing, some of them cockeyed, some of the items misspelled (“cheseburgers,” “mountin dew”), others cryptically described (“Fresh Fried Shrimp”). The counterman, a middle-aged doofus with a name badge that reads Kerman, pale and fleshy, his black hair trimmed high above his ears, freshens Ashford’s coffee. Even the coffee smells like grease. The arcade has begun to fill, people filtering up from the beach.
“Are we just sharing a moment?” asks Cliff. “Or do you have something else in mind?”
For a few seconds, Ashford doesn’t seem to have heard him; then he says, “Stacey Gerone.”
“Yeah? What about her?”
“You seen her lately?”
“Not for a coup
le of weeks. Jerry said she ran off to Miami with some rich guy.”
“I heard about that.”
A shorthaired peroxide blond in a bikini, her black roots showing in such profusion, the look must be by design, hops up onto a stool nearby and asks for a large Pepsi. She has some age on her, late thirties, but does good things for the bikini. Ashford cuts his eyes toward her breasts; his gaze lingers.
“Ain’t got no Pepsi,” Kerman says in a sluggish, country drawl. “Just Coke.”
“This morning around five-thirty, one of your neighbors found a suitcase full of Stacey Gerone’s clothes in the dunes out front of your house.” Ashford emits a small belch, covering his mouth.
“Any idea how it got there?”
Alarmed, Cliff says, “I didn’t put it there!”
“I didn’t say you put it there. You’re not that stupid.”
“I haven’t been to the house for three days. I just drove by to see if everything was all right.”
The blond, after pondering the Pepsi problem, asks if she can have some fries.
“You want a large Coke with that?” asks Kerman.
Again the blond ponders. “Small diet Coke.”
Kerman, apparently the genius of the arcade, switches on the piped-in music, and metal-ish rock overwhelms the noises of man and nature. Ashford, with a pained expression, tells him to turn it off.
“Got to have the music on after nine o’clock,” says Kerman.
“Well, turn it fucking down!”
“You got no call to be using bad language.” Kerman sulks, but lowers the volume; following Ashford’s direction, he lowers it until the music is all but inaudible.
Ashford rubs his stomach, scowls, and then gets to his feet. “I have to hit the john. Don’t go away.”
As he walks off, the blond leans the intervening stool and taps Cliff on the arm. “Do I know you? I believe I do.”
Cliff mentions that he was once an actor, movies and commercials, and the blond says, “No, that’s not it. At least, I don’t think.” She taps her chin and then snaps her fingers. “The Shark! You used to come in. You were seeing Janice for a while last year. I’m Mary Beth.”
All the women at the Shark Lounge, waitresses and dancers alike, are working girls and, after hearing about how Janice has been doing, Cliff has an idea.
“Have you got time for a date this morning?” he asks.
That puts a hitch in Mary Beth’s grin, but she says coolly, “Anything for you, sweetie.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for my friend. He needs to get laid. He’s a cop and the job’s beating him up.”
“You want me to ball a cop?”
“He’ll welcome it, I swear. Make out you’re a police groupie and you saw his gun or something. And don’t let on I had anything to do with it.”
“Whatever. It’s two hundred for a shave and a haircut. You know, the basics.”
“Shit! I don’t have two hundred in cash.”
“What about a credit card? I do Visa and Master.”
She hauls up a voluminous purse from the floor beside her stool and digs out a manual imprinter.
“Hurry!” he says, looking toward the bathroom door as she imprints his card.
Once they’ve completed their transaction, he says, “I didn’t mean to go all business on you. It was…”
“It’s no thing. I do a lot of business with older guys this time of day. It beats night work. They’re usually not freaks, so it’s easy money.”
“I know, but you were being friendly and I….”
“Oh, was I?” The blond shoulders her purse and smiles frostily. “You must have me confused for somebody else. I was working the room, Clifford.”
“Cliff,” he says in reflex.
“Okay. Cliff. I’m going to move to another stool so I can make eye contact with your buddy. But I’m down here most every morning, so if you need me for anything else, you just sing out.”
Cliff doesn’t know why he does this type of thing, plays pranks for no reason and without any point. He wonders if had it mind to compromise Ashford, to get something on him; but he doesn’t believe it’s about manipulating people. He figures it’s like with the sea turtle—he’s showing off, only for himself alone, his audience reduced to one. Another instance, he thinks, of his nonchalance.
Ashford returns and tells Kerman to bring him a glass of water. He swallows some pills, wipes his mouth, and says, “They should blow up that john. It’s a fucking disaster area.”
“I can help you with that.”
“Huh?”
“I was in a demolition unit during Vietnam.”
Ashford’s eye snags on something— Mary Beth is sitting across from him, eating her French fries, giving each one a blowjob, licking off the salt and sucking them in. He tears himself away from this vision and says to Cliff, “We haven’t been able to locate Miz Gerone, so officially you’re a person of interest. If that blood on your house matches DNA the lab extracted from her hair brush, I’m going to have to bring you in.”
Cliff offers emphatic denials of any involvement with her disappearance. “We fucked occasionally,” he says, “but that was it. We didn’t have much of an emotional connection.”
“I know this is a frame. But the way you’ve handled everything, telling that story, lying about your girlfriend, it…”
“That wasn’t a lie. I couldn’t get back into my house because you were processing it. So I went over to Marley’s after you released me, and things got deep. I swear to God that’s the truth.”
“Doesn’t matter. It looks bad. You want to know something else that looks bad? I got a copy of one of your movies in the mail the other day. Jurassic Pork. Came in an envelope with no return address.”
“Aw, Christ. I did that picture for the hell of it. I was curious to see what it was like.”
“Somebody’s trying to besmirch your character.” Ashford chuckles. “They’re doing a hell of a job, too, because you were definitely the shortest man in the movie.”
“Yeah, yeah!”
“Prosecutors love to drop that sort of detail into a trial. Juries down here tend to think poorly of pornography. But the frame is so goddamn crude. The person doing the framing must have no comprehension of evidentiary procedure.”
“So you believe me?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I believe something’s going on at the Celeste.” Ashford has a sip of water, sneaks a peek at Mary Beth, who returns a wave, which he brusquely acknowledges. “You know of any way a used car can be given a new car smell?”
“Polyvinyl chloride,” Cliff says. “The stuff they make dashboards out of. It comes in a liquid form, too. The manufacturers use it as a sealant. When a dealer has to take a car back on warranty, some have been known to slap on a coat of PVC and resell the car as new.”
Ashford takes out his notebook. “What was that? The sealant?”
Cliff repeats the name. “The stuff’s poison. Every time America has a whiff of a new car interior, they’re catching a lungful of carcinogens.”
Apparently unconcerned by this threat to the nation’s health, Ashford says, “I might have found that Ford Escape. About five years ago, we were investigating a stolen car ring and we thought Muntz could be involved. We put a man into his service center in South Daytona. Nothing came of it, but I still had my suspicions. I went up there Tuesday and there was a red Ford Escape sitting out back under a tarp. I had one of our people take a look at it. It had that new car smell, but the engine number had been taken off with acid and the paint job wasn’t the original. The car was originally gray, like the one you saw.”
“If Jerry was chopping cars, they would have cut it up within an hour or two of bringing it into the shop,” Cliff says. “It’s been a month.”
“He might have a special order for an Escape. It might be a present for one of Muntz’s bimbos. Maybe he had a buyer and the guy has a cash flow problem. Who knows? Maybe it slipped his mind. Muntz is no Einstein.” Ashf
ord’s cough is plainly an attempt to disguise the fact that he’s taking yet another look at Mary Beth. “He’s got papers, but the name on them doesn’t check out. He claims the guy came in off the street and said he won the car on a quiz show. I haven’t got enough to charge him, but my gut tells me that was your Escape.”
“So what’s next?”
“I might check in to the Celeste tonight and see what’s what. Vice has some expensive cars they use for undercover work. I can finagle one for the night, tell the guy on-duty at the yard I need it to impress some woman. That should get me into Room Eleven.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“I can’t see what else to do. I don’t have much time. If Gerone’s DNA comes back a match to the blood on your house, you’re going to become the sole target of the investigation.”
“I thought you said you believed me!”
“I may buy your story. Some of it, anyway. But no one else does. The only reason you haven’t been arrested is there’s no evidence, no body. I’m on my own. The captain…” Ashford grimaces. “He’s a results kind of guy. He’d love to make this case. It would look good on his resume. You’re about as close to a Hollywood celebrity as we got around here, and a trial would get him exposure. It’d be huge on Court TV. He won’t authorize me to do diddley until after the DNA comes back. If it’s a match, you’re in the shit.”
“When’s it due back?”
“Depends how far behind the lab’s running. Maybe two-three days. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.”
“Fuck!” Cliff tries to concentrate on the problem, but he’s too agitated—he flashes on scenes from prison movies, the wavy smear of blood on his porch, the face of the witch. “You shouldn’t do this alone.”
Amused, Ashford says, “Yeah, it’s going to be rough, what with demons and all.”
“You don’t know what happened to all those people.”
“First of all, we don’t know it’s ‘all those people.’ We don’t even know for sure about Gerone. Second…” He pushes back his coat to reveal his holstered weapon. “I’m armed, and I have thirty years on the job. I appreciate your motherly concern, but nothing’s going to happen that I don’t want to happen.”
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