Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  Fayton hit the intercom. “Chatlak, get me John Walsh!”

  “You mean,” asked his sluggish assistant when he shuffled in with his container of take-out potato salad, “the America’s Most Wanted guy?” Chatlak could never get his dentures to fit and pretty much lived on potato salad, a gob of which now dotted his lower lip.

  “Of course that’s who I mean. And wipe your mouth! Tell Walsh it’s Lyn Fayton, chief of police in the town of Upper Marilyn, in the glorious state of Pennsylvania, in the United States of Kiss My Ass!”

  Oh, he was feeling Alpha Male now. It was a smart move, not mentioning Mac McCardle to Mayor Marge. He’d save the spade gay-killer for himself. To heck with Rubert! This was going to be good! This was going to show everybody. Oh yeah! Now he was cooking with gas.

  Unfortunately, it took nearly an hour for Chatlak to find the AMW phone number and another forty minutes to get through to a human. By this time Fayton’s adrenaline had drained significantly. Once somebody from WANTED actually picked up, things got worse.

  “John Walsh? Chief Fayton,” Fayton barked into the phone when Chatlak handed it over.

  The elderly cop tried to signal “No!” but it was too late. The man on the other end spoke in a tone that was beyond patronizing. “Walsh doesn’t take the eight hundred calls,” he said curtly. “What is this regarding?”

  “Regarding? Oh, well, I’ll tell you,” Fayton sputtered, spilling his cards in his lap. He waved for Chatlak to leave the office but the doddering prick just stood there, stooped over and grinning his cadaverous grin. He absolutely had to get the city managers to authorize a real secretary.

  Damn! Fayton thought. He could feel prickly sweat in his armpits. Somehow his perspiration smelled different when he was nervous. Kind of like smoked salmon. He could smell himself now, loxing up. “I’m, uh, really sorry to bother you, but, well, I’m chief of police here in Upper Marilyn….”

  “Where?”

  Was that a laugh? Was the man laughing at him? Fayton felt suddenly tired. More than anything, he wanted to take a nap. Right there. Just drop the phone and go fetal under the desk. Instead, curling his toes in his brogans, he sputtered on.

  “Um…Upper Marilyn, Sir. It’s a…a small town here in southwestern Pennsylvania. There’s a few thousand of us, and, well, uh, I think one of your Most Wanteds, I guess you’d say, has been seen here in the last day or two, so—”

  “You think?” the man cut in. “You think? Buddy, you know how many calls we get a day? Try fifteen hundred. You wanna be a hero? Give us something real. Or better yet, get a real job. Upper Marilyn, Kee-rist!”

  Chief Fayton clutched the receiver with both hands, listening to the dial tone after the man hung up. It was hard to believe, five minutes ago he’d been so…there. So on top. Making moves! And now, some glorified boiler room hack had treated him like a joke. Well, he’d take care of that. Lyn Fayton was no quitter! He’d take care of that fast.

  “Chatlak,” he hollered defiantly, “make another call!”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  The ancient policeman was still smirking, and when he caught his superior’s eye, he started giggling all over again. To Fayton, at this crucial juncture, Chatlak had never seemed more repulsive: crooked gray teeth, face full of gin blossoms, yellowing hair so riddled with dandruff it looked like confetti. And he was laughing at him!

  “It’s not funny,” Fayton said, sounding schoolmarmy even to himself. “I said, it’s not funny!”

  Unable to stop, Chatlak waved his hand helplessly. The sickly veteran’s laughs turned to wheezes. He yanked out a stained hanky, blew his nose, and tried to compose himself. But the hacking giggles persisted.

  “Chatlak! Settle officer!”

  While authority cowed him, the chief liked to think he ruled his underlings. Mayor Marge and the America’s Most Wanted man were one thing, but Chatlak…Chatlak worked for him.

  “I am not a joke!” Fayton yelled, pounding the desk, his voice going high and quivery with rage. “Chatlak, do you hear me! I am not a joke!”

  But the old man was past hearing. He reeled in the center of the room, holding his sides, tee-heeing into his handkerchief, literally weeping, until Fayton, squeezing more police action into a single second than his previous thirteen years on the force, scooped up his cordless telephone and hurled it at him.

  Two minutes later, scared out of his wits, Chief Fayton retrieved the phone. Fighting a twitch in his finger, he punched out a number.

  “Ruby? It’s Fayton. This is important. I need you at the station. Now!” He panted into the mouthpiece, saw it was dotted with blood, and wiped it off on his sleeve. “I think,” he babbled on unsteadily, “I think Officer Chatlak just had an accident.”

  EIGHTEEN

  At the station, Merch sat wheezing behind his desk, thumbing through a girly mag as Manny breezed past on the way to the chief’s office. Merch had a thing for girly mags but preferred those published in the halcyon days before Larry Flynt came along and things went pink. The ones Merch liked had names like Wink and Titter, and featured smiling carhop types posing in leopard-skin bikinis, or tied up Betty Page–style on white leather sofas. His current mag, Manny noticed, was called Vixen. The cover sported a busty brunette done up in skimpy squaw-wear, holding a bow and arrow and blowing a kiss.

  None of these magazines had been published since the midsixties. Merch, however, had somehow acquired a bottomless trough, and no amount of prodding would reveal his source. It was weirdly comforting, after the tense ten minutes Manny’d spent with Tina before getting Fayton’s call, to walk in and see a world that was still halfway normal. As soon as he was through here, he was going back to meet her, ostensibly about their next move with the photo. But they both know the real reason was something else entirely.

  The whole deal was insane, at the very least, if not completely self-destructive. But, Manny kept hearing himself think, when you hate your life, what do you care about destroying it? Especially if there’s a chance you won’t: A chance, if you don’t end up behind bars or tied off for the lethal fix, you’ll end up in bed with a bent, beautiful, edge-of-your-seat genius female who sees right through your eyeballs to the dark room in the back of your brain, the one you never let anybody into because you didn’t know it was there….

  From Guru Marv to Carmella Dendez to Dee-Dee Walker to God knows who else, there was a stack of bodies around Tina, which made a powerful argument for steering clear of her. There was a bigger stack of reasons to bring her in for questioning, if not jail her outright. But Manny, busy as he was counting the milliseconds until he could see her again, couldn’t come up with any at the moment.

  “Nice of you to drop by.” Merch honked, blowing his nose at the same time he talked. “There’s a goddamn crime spree, in case you haven’t noticed. Latest thing, a priest gets one-eighty-fived and left on the sidewalk. Goddamn priest, Manny. Some sick fuckos pancaked the sky pilot and left him for dead down in Butt-town. Front of the old Smooty’s Donuts. Christ, I miss Smooty’s, don’t you? They had a choco-sprinkle-cream make you come in your pants.”

  The memory, apparently, was too much for Merch, who ka-banged the defecto candy machine and dug out a Chunky with a satisfied sigh.

  “Don’t get sentimental,” Manny told him, stopping by his own desk to swipe an arm’s length of memos into the trash. “Those weren’t sprinkles. That was fly shit. But what about the priest?”

  Manny knew about the accident from Fayton but let his old partner fill him in anyway. Virgin ears got everybody more excited. So he pretended the news was new and shocking.

  “I talked to him,” Merch huffed. “I like my job so much I thought I’d do yours, too.” With six months to retirement, Merch was indignant about ever actually having to leave the station. It was all he could do to issue a parade permit without bitching about having to lift a pencil. “Humped all the way over to the damn hospital. And lemme tell you, that Christer looks like he crawled out of a cement mixer. Sa
ys it was two guys, a salt-and-pepper. Entertainers,” Merch sneered, rolling his baggy eyes. He took a bite of his candy and spit it on the floor. “Yecch! When’d they deliver this shit? When Nixon was president? They still even make Chunkies?” He slammed his snack in the basket. “Where was I?”

  “The priest was run over by entertainers.”

  “Right, right. You’ll love this. They told him they were on their way to Pittsburgh, to do dinner theater. ‘I’m starring in The Dean Martin Story.’ That’s what the moolie told him. The Dean Martin Story. Guy’s black as James Brown’s asshole and he’s playing Dean Martin.”

  “Zank and McCardle,” Manny said.

  Merch perked up. “Tony Zank? Guy who dropped his mommy?”

  Manny nodded. “The very same.” He noticed the slight palsy in his ex-partner’s hands. When he’d first met him, the man had a punch that could shatter Plexiglas. One more reason not to get old.

  Merch brushed a Chunky crumb off his trouser leg and whistled. “And McCardle, he’s the one did a guy with a shovel, right? Some kind of sissy-fit? Got him on America’s Most Bullshit?”

  “That’s him,” said Manny. “These two’ve been busy. I make ’em for the party at Pawnee Lodge, too.”

  “That ties in. Carmella Dendez’s car was found on the scene. A Gremlin, no less. I tell ya, there’s a lot goin’ on around here.”

  “Yeah. Good thing you’re elderly, huh? You’ll probably have a stroke and die before things get bad.”

  Merch frowned. “You take asshole lessons, or does it come natural?”

  “On-the-job stress,” Manny replied. “I’m not myself. So when did these bo-bos talk showbiz, before or after they ran the priest over?”

  “Before, okay?”

  Merch was still pissy from the stroke line. He’d been convinced he was about to die from one for as long as Manny’d known him. But delight in detailing the saga at hand blew out his anger. Next to insulting him, there’s nothing a cop likes more than sharing a truly sick war story with another cop. Who the fuck else could you tell? Manny felt it would be wrong to deny his ex-partner such pleasure.

  All but cackling with glee, Merch forged on. “Wait’ll you hear this. Ol’ Father Bob’s minding his own business, rolling through town on his way to Wheeling to visit an aunt with TB or some shit, when who does he drive by but El Negro Deano, standin’ there rifling the dead lady’s wallet.”

  “What dead lady? They killed a lady before they ran the collar over? These guys must be taking their vitamins.”

  Merch slapped a hand on his girly mag, spanking the squaw. “If you’d stop bein’ such a lop and let me finish…. Reason the priest stopped is ’cause there was an accident. The two clowns bashed up the Gremlin. But that’s not the big news. The big news is Dee-Dee Walker.”

  “The reporter?”

  “Yeah, that bitch. May she rest in peace. The one who nearly got me canned with her little exposé. Graft, she called it! What’d I take? A goddamn ham at Christmas? A fucking Thanksgiving turkey? Come on, Manny, you can’t tell me that’s graft.”

  “The turkey was stuffed with twenties, way I heard it.”

  Merch cleared his throat. “Can we stick to the story here? Dee-Dee Walker, the late Dee-Dee Walker, is lying on the ground, dead, her Toyota wrapped around a utility pole. No, not true,” he corrected himself. “Her head was on the ground. Her body was pretty much still in the Toyota. Anyhoo, she’s worm bait. The Afro-American entertainer is cooling his heels, going through her wallet, and the white guy—Zank, I guess—is knocked out behind the wheel. Until he perks up, sees Father Bob hassling his partner, and gets the bright idea to run him over.”

  “Who says crackheads don’t know how to have fun?”

  “Yeah, right. In case he ain’t suffered enough, Our Father has to lie there with two broken shoulders, half his teeth smashed, and a busted ass-bone and watch these fucks steal his ride. Apparently he’s some kind of car freak.”

  “Who, Zank?”

  “The priest! What’s wrong with you? He collects classic cars, God’s okay with that, so he’s driving this cherry ’Sixty-six Mustang, which his new pals take off in, and nobody’s seen since. Father Bob didn’t say a lot more than that, on account of flying twenty feet up in the air and landing on his tongue. Did I mention that? He bit his tongue off. They had to sew it back on. So getting him to chat was no picnic. What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “Fayton called. Said it was urgent. Didn’t he tell you?”

  “How could he? He won’t come out of his office. Must be relievin’ himself in a desk drawer. Haven’t seen the old fart, either.”

  “Chatlak? I’m guessing you won’t,” Manny said, and headed in to see his esteemed superior.

  The expression on Chief Fayton’s face was so pathetic, so I’ll-do-anything-to-cover-my-ass abject, Manny fought an urge to just walk up and bitch-slap him. Normally, he felt compassion for the helpless. Dalai Lama–level empathy. But not when the helpless in question had been acting like God’s Own Smug Prick for the past five years. Not when it was Fayton.

  “Oh Christ,” whined the chief. “Oh Christ, Ruby, it’s awful. He just…he just…went crazy. That’s what happened. Really. He just went off, attacked me, and when I tried to protect myself, I don’t know, he just kind of spun around and fell. Hit his head on the desk. See? Right in the corner. That’s what happened. That’s really what happened…. It’s such a tragedy. I mean, I did everything I could, I swear! One minute he was standing there, the next—”

  “Shut up!”

  Manny’d been waiting years to say it, and the look Fayton gave him made it worth the delay. He savored the moment as he tugged a fresh pair of plastic gloves out of his jacket. He met the chief’s eyes as he blew into each glove before putting it on.

  Fayton was in shock. “Wh-what did you say?”

  “I said ‘shut up.’ There’s a man dead on the floor, and all you can think about is covering your ass. So yeah, you heard what I said.”

  Fayton tried to puff himself back up to chiefly splendor, and Manny bumped him on his way to the corpse. Chatlak lay on his back, bloodshot eyes still open. He wore the same expression he wore twenty years ago, when he knocked on Manny’s door to tell his parents their son had been seen smoking “that maryjane” in the high school parking lot. The old goat had made his young life a living hell. But in retrospect, Manny realized, he’d done him a favor. Chatlak could have shipped his ass to juvey, or off to some work farm where the cons would have eaten him with a spoon. Instead he amused himself by tormenting him.

  Manny kneeled down beside the body. He could never stand Chatlak, but he knew he owed him. He whispered, “Rest in peace, you bastard,” and closed the old cop’s eyes. Then he straightened up and turned his attention to Fayton. The chief had put on his tailored blue police coat and stood fingering his badge. The whole setup had wrong all over it.

  The chief stepped behind his desk, sat down in his power chair, and leaned forward. “You’ve got a real problem with authority, Rubert.”

  “You think so?”

  Manny dropped carefully into the metal chair opposite the desk—its legs had been sawed short two inches, so whoever sat there would be lower than the chief—and slowly pulled out his notebook and pen. With elaborate deliberation, he bit the top off the blue felt-tip and stared blandly across the desk at his boss.

  The chief chewed a cuticle. “Wh-what do you think you’re doing, Detective?”

  “It’s not about me,” Manny said. “Guy locks himself in a room with a dead body, doesn’t let anybody in, doesn’t even call the paramedics, I think you’ll agree, that doesn’t look good, Chief.”

  “What are you implying? This was a police officer!”

  “And you’re in a police station—911’s down the hall, so why the hell sit around waiting for me? Not that I’m not flattered. But, call me controversial, that smells a little like last week’s haddock.” Fayton had used the line on Manny frequently—it was
one of his favorites—and Manny relished the chance to lob it back at him. “Quite frankly, I’m surprised, Chief. Surprised and disappointed.” Surprised-and-disappointed was another Faytonism. This would have been fun, if it weren’t for the dead old man on the floor.

  The chief cringed indignantly and spoke like a slandered martyr. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that, Detective. If you’re saying I wanted to bend the rules a little to protect the good name of an officer who, perhaps, crossed the line before he died, who, if the story got out, would lose that good name and, quite possibly, the benefits due his family for his years of good and faithful service, well, all right, sir! I’m, uh, I’m—” Fayton glanced quickly down to his left, to the drawer where he kept his “notes,” then raised his eyes again—“guilty as charged! Book me for wanting to preserve the honor of a friend. For trying—”

  Manny was out of his chair and behind the desk before Fayton could slam the drawer. He grabbed the chief’s hand and plucked it, finger by finger, off the three-by-five card he was trying to cover. The man’s palm felt soft as a debutante’s.

  “For trying,” Manny read aloud, “to maintain the dignity of a man who gave his entire life to the service of his community. Who saw no shame in wearing the uniform of an officer of the law, who—Jesus Christ, Fayton, I’m impressed. You work fast. Did you just write this, or did you have it sitting around in case the old guy keeled over on his own?” Fayton gaped, red-faced, as Manny pocketed the card.

  Manny couldn’t help but smile. Right now, it occurred to him, Fayton was exactly what he’d always been: a man playing police chief. Badly.