Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  He could have watched for hours. Until he noticed the blood. A red swath smudged the left sleeve of Fayton’s jacket, just over the cuff. The chief, watching him, dropped his arm to his lap. Then he leaped out of his chair and faced his Honor Wall.

  “All right, Rubert, if you have something to say, say it.”

  “What’s there to say? You said Chatlak attacked you. So you had to do him. Self-defense. I mean, no disrespect for the dead, but I never liked the guy. He used to hassle me when I was a kid. And he wasn’t exactly efficient as an assistant, right? Just between us girls, maybe you can get a real hottie in here. Get yourself some of that knee-pad dictation. Or am I out of line?”

  Fayton bristled. “If you’re trying to manipulate me, Detective, you’re a lousier cop than I thought. In fact you’re a disgrace.”

  “I agree,” said Manny. “Really. I hate myself all over the place. Thing is, I’m not the one who killed an unarmed seventy-two-year-old in my office. ’Cause let’s face it, Chief, your story has more holes than a bum’s underwear. Even if Chatlak did come at you, which I seriously doubt, he’s so fucking old, you blow on him he’d keel over.”

  “He fell,” said Fayton. “I told you.”

  “Right. What was it again? Hit his head on the desk? After he attacked you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So why’d you wipe it?”

  “What?” Fayton’s left eye began to twitch.

  “The blood. On your cuff there, from when you wiped it up. Too bad you didn’t take the time to get a tissue. It’s gonna take a little more than club soda and Clorox to get that out.”

  Fayton stared at his sleeve, trying on expressions. He finally settled on contempt, and aimed the look at Manny. “So what?”

  “So, an innocent guy isn’t gonna go around wiping blood off the furniture. He’s gonna call an ambulance. And if he’s a cop, if he’s a real cop, he’s gonna know enough not to touch anything. So guess what, Chief, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say you’re lying right through your capped teeth. And I’ll tell you something else, Lyn—may I call you Lyn? I mean, I feel so close to you right now—I write this up, get it to your friend and mine, Mayor Marge, she’ll yank you out of that desk so fast you won’t stop spinning till you’re wearing a muumuu in County Jail. You’ll be popular, too, bein’ an ex–police chief and all. I bet the fellas inside’ll be pretty much killin’ each other to bunk with you. I might consider arresting myself, just for the chance to share a cell. Why not? A guy could get rich quick, peddlin’ tickets. Even if they don’t want to rape you—not all of them, anyway—they’d probably enjoy just fucking you up for an hour or two. What the hell, huh? I could probably make more turning you out in the joint than bein’ a cop—even, like you say, a lousy one.”

  “I always knew you were dirty, Rubert. I could never pin anything on you, but I always knew.”

  “That’s rich,” said Manny, “coming from you. So what’s it gonna be, you gonna offer me something, or do I have Merch come in here with the cuffs? Show you how an arrest is made. I’d do it myself, but I really think it’d make his day.”

  Fayton picked up a brass trophy, for perfect attendance at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and clutched it to his chest. “You’ll never get away with it.”

  Manny laughed. “I’ll never get away with it? You got some grasp of reality. I’m not the one who just greased a senior citizen.”

  Still chuckling, Manny picked up the cordless and started punching out numbers. Then he stopped. He looked at the phone, then up at Fayton, then back to the phone. The mouthpiece appeared to be cracked, and a few strands of long, yellowy gray hair stuck out of the fractured plastic. Manny raised the phone to the light, turning it slightly. The sheen of fresh blood around the trapped hairs was unmistakable.

  Fayton saw the blood at the same time as Manny. He placed his DMV trophy gently back on the shelf.

  “Refresh my memory,” Manny said, holding the phone by its rubber antenna while he dug in his jacket for an evidence baggie. “Are you pro capital punishment? ’Cause the way things are shapin’ up, you might get to see it firsthand. I gotta tell ya, though, you could have avoided a whole lot of trouble if you bothered to just clean the damn phone. Or better yet, if you’d have just got ditched the fucking thing. Pitch it off a bridge, bury it in the fucking woods, throw it in a fire with your FOP pension plan. Anything…. I know you never did a lot of street time, but jeez, Chief, you only gotta watch a couple Hawaii Five-Os to know you don’t leave evidence lying around.”

  “I don’t watch television,” said Fayton, still playing superior. “And I’m telling you, Officer Chatlak attacked me. He lost control.”

  “Sure he did.” Manny stepped over to the corpse. He squatted down for a closer inspection, gently turning Chatlak’s head. “Oh look, it’s our friend Mr. Hematoma. Wound’s not even that bad. You could probably skate, nobody looked too close. Makes sense a duffer like him might have a stroke and take a tumble. A jury might buy that. Unless, of course, somebody does look a little closer, maybe does an autopsy, finds a sliver of plastic or something embedded in his scalp. I’m only tellin’ you, ’cause I know you go in for that real-life police stuff.”

  Manny straightened up and casually reached for the cuffs he wore hooked to his back belt loop.

  His tone was soothing, even ingratiating, as he drew nearer the chief. A lot of cops were screamers or hitters. They went for intimidation. But Manny preferred to relax his perps. It was like rubbing a wild boar’s belly to keep it from goring you. He’d read about hunters in Botswana who did that. Relaxing them seemed more artful. You could still club the fuckers if they got any ideas.

  “I’m sure you realize,” Manny went on, keeping things conversational, “as long as I have this phone, you’re pretty much done. But that’s okay, right? Plenty of time to work on that screenplay in jail, if that’s how it goes down.”

  He was now only a few feet away from Fayton. This was when things happened. The Suicide Dive. The lunge for your gun so you’d have to shoot them. Or the play for the weapon they’d stashed, knowing this moment might someday come….

  Manny moved with exaggerated ease, speaking calmly. “I bet you can sell your script easy. A cop-killing police chief? Come on, that blows away all that penny-ante Rampart shit. You got the market cornered. But why limit yourself? Write a book, too. Bang out a tell-all, you’ll be the toast of the supermarket. Maybe get on Judith Regan, by remote. You’ll pull in a lot more for the movie rights with a best-seller under your belt. Guaranteed.” He smiled, just to show they were still friends. “Don’t even think about going for the gun, Chief. I know about the Nine taped under the drawer. Be cool.”

  Another step. Another…. Sweet and easy. Manny kept up the patter.

  “Of course, the bad news is, you won’t get to keep any money, on account of the Son of Sam law. Profits go to the victim’s family. But what the hell….”

  Closer now. Arm’s length. Fayton silent and tense.

  “But it’s not about the money anyway, is it? You want the respect. And you deserve it. You really do. That’s right. That’s—”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  Fayton jumped, but Manny saw it coming. He sidestepped, caught the chief’s wrist, and spun him around. He pinned him to the desk with his head on the blotter, his right arm jammed up his back, an inch from breaking.

  “Bad move,” Manny hissed, close enough to lick the Chief’s hairless ear. “Now let’s stop dicking around. I’d love to see you go down. But there’s something I want even more.”

  Fayton’s body began to shake under Manny’s. “What is it? You’re breaking my arm.”

  “That’s the idea. Justice isn’t always pretty. You can put that in your memoir.”

  Manny let his gaze fall on Chatlak. With rigor mortis, the fingers of his right hand had curled. The same hand, no doubt, that had banged on his parents’ front door to rat him out in another lifetime. Small world.


  The chief began to sputter, as the first drops of urine leaked from his pant leg into his sock. “J-j-just tell me what you want!”

  Manny danced out of splash range.

  “For God’s sake, Rubert, what do you want me to do?”

  Manny jerked Fayton’s arm a bit farther up his back, keeping his voice at a dead whisper. “You’ll do what I tell you to do, killer.”

  With this he let him go, and the chief spun back around, reeling, in time to see Manny slide the baggied telephone inside his jacket.

  “Call me sentimental,” he said, “I’m gonna keep this as a souvenir.”

  NINETEEN

  Well, aren’t I a busy little man?

  Submerged in the driver’s seat of his Impala, twenty-four hours after scaring the urine out of Chief Fayton, Manny washed down a half dozen Codeine Number Fours with his 7-Eleven coffee. This morning he’d gone for Mocha Mint, which tasted like Listerine and paint thinner. Taking another slurp, he fought off the gag-reflex and glanced at the back of his gas bill, where he’d listed all the prestige activities he had to slog through that day. Dendez, 1818 Pike was scribbled above another notation, Pics—Dr. Roos, and below that, underlined three times, the single letter T, with a question mark.

  Paperwork was the bane and backbone of police life, and Manny took great pains to ensure that his comings and goings were left out of the never ending slime trail of reports, case files, and Day Log entries maintained at the station. He’d already stopped by earlier to pick up the Pawnee Lodge report that Mindy, the Pentecostal dispatcher, had transcribed off his answering machine.

  Mindy shot him her usual scowl, no doubt partly inspired by the rank nature of his Pawnee Lodge notes. (The labial details alone would have her phoning The 700 Club.) Mindy claimed she could type without listening, but she’d confided to Krantz, who had a crush on her, that she had to take a shower and pray after handling Manny’s case reports. Mostly, Manny believed, she scowled because he’d made the mistake of buying her a Christmas present his first year on the force. Since then the freckled Christian single had been waiting, in a hot ball of resentment, for him to ask her out. Despite her faith in the Lord, Mindy was a spectacularly high-strung and angry young woman. With good reason. Among other things, it was rumored, she’d once had an affair with Chief Fayton—until he dumped her, seduced by the contact prestige of bedding down and wedding a former celebrity assistant. (Before she became Mrs. Fayton, the chief would proudly recount, his wife had gotten dry cleaning for Dr. Laura and Britney Spears’s mom, respectively.)

  Over the years, Manny had tried to explain to Mindy that he didn’t date. It was nothing about her, he just wasn’t a dater. But the fact that he’d bothered to show her some affection in the first place—that ill-conceived Xmas gift, a pair of macrame plant holders—made it all the worse that he’d showed her virtually none since. Still, Mindy grudgingly consented to the extra work Manny threw her. It was, he reasoned, the least he could do to help fuel her fury. Her Manny-hate, along with her faith in a Personal Savior, seemed to comprise the abiding passions in her life. Which was a fairly scary thought. But anything was better than doing his own typing, let alone listening to more than a minute of his own tape-recorded lisp.

  Manny was in the station now to drop in on Fayton and make sure the chief was still in line. He had the killer cordless stashed in a safe-deposit, but it had been twenty-four hours. He knew Fayton well enough to know he had to be sat on. The chief had the metabolism of a PR-driven shark: self-promote or die. Which made the frenzy in the Trumpet a tad problematic. On a mission to glorify one of its own, the paper could not generate enough retro-heroics for its fallen star. In death Dee-Dee Walker was reborn an ace journalist, cut down before she could snag the Pulitzer that was her due. Nobody seemed to remember that the bulk of her copy involved pet neutering and snow removal.

  Faced with Fayton’s salacious love of the limelight, Manny felt compelled to brace him again. It was an odd phenomenon, but perps had a way of forgetting humiliation. Forgetting they were on borrowed time. Merch used to call it the Bad Dream Syndrome. It never failed: A day after some little dealer had been paid a visit, after he’d agreed to rat out the big dealer by way of saving his own ass, he would decide, in some irrational blast of optimism, that he could just—go figure—go on with his life. As if what happened had never happened…. But the Syndrome could get worse. More than once, when Manny paid a suspect who’d agreed to cooperate on Monday a visit the following Tuesday, the guy wouldn’t even recognize him—so thoroughly had he blocked out his Bad Cop Dream. With Fayton, no doubt, garden-variety denial would be turbocharged with vanity and greed.

  Yesterday Manny’d left the chief in a quaking puddle. Today, if he knew anything about bent psychology, the chief would be unable to resist the chance to make himself look huge by spilling tidbits to the Trumpet about Ms. Walker’s final subject, the lonely widow, Tina Podolsky. It was the kind of thing he lived for. Visions of law enforcement glory would no doubt obliterate the nasty reality of his chat with Detective Rubert.

  Manny barged into the office of the chief without knocking. Fayton peered up from his desk, a jar of silver polish in one hand, a fresh Handi Wipe in the other. His badge rested on a bed of Handi Wipes.

  “Let me guess,” said Manny, “you’re buffing your badge.”

  “You could have called ahead,” the chief replied testily.

  “That’s me, no manners.” Manny kicked the door closed behind him. “So you went and got a new phone? That’s good. Glad you’re keeping busy. ’Cause I’ve got your old one on ice. Not that DNA needs a whole lof of upkeep.” He put one foot up on the chief’s Lemon Pledged desk and leaned in. “Now listen, I know from Marvin Podolsky’s widow that Dee-Dee Walker came by to talk to her before the accident.”

  “Is there a reason you’re telling me this?”

  “Yeah, for the same reason you’re shining your little star. Her editor probably knew where she’d been before she died, and he’s gonna be all over it. Maybe they’re coming to take your picture, huh? Ask you a couple of questions. Let you act like you know what the fuck’s going on. We know how much you love that. Problem is, Chief, I think Mrs. Podolsky’s been through enough, so I’d appreciate if you kept any inspiring comments to yourself.”

  Fayton dipped a fresh Handi Wipe in the polish, then picked up his badge and resumed polishing. “Mrs. Podolsky,” he declared, looking put out, “works at Seventh Heaven. The same place where Tony Zank swung his own mother out the window. The same place where Carmella Dendez was employed as supervisor before Zank and McCardle took her to the Pawnee Lodge and killed her. I know you finished ninety-third out of a hundred and two at the Academy, but surely even you can you see a connection.”

  Manny hated himself for wincing. “You checked my file?”

  “Of course. I’m an old personnel man, remember? Since I’m going to be answering to you, I got curious. You’re even dumber than I thought.”

  “That makes two of us.” On impulse, Manny snatched the chief’s badge and wiped it off the bottom of his shoe, hoping he’d stepped in something. “Not a day goes by I don’t blush about my Academy rank. It haunts my sleep. So who the fuck told you about Zank and McCardle?”

  “You did, Ruby. Mindy showed me your case report. Very colorful.”

  “Shit!”

  Fayton smiled his thin-lipped smile. “You know, you really should go out with Mindy sometime. She’s a special girl. Perhaps you could escort her to Officer Chatlak’s funeral.”

  Manny slapped the badge back on the desk. He wondered, for a jagged second, if the drugs were making his brain soft. Why the fuck was he still writing reports when he had Fayton in his pocket? Pathetic! It was one more example of something he’d long suspected about himself, that deep down he wasn’t a real lawbreaker. Bad didn’t come natural. He had to work at it. The awful truth: Sometimes he felt like Mister Rogers playing The Bad Lieutenant. Unlike Tina, he thought, and smiled in spite of how pissed off
he felt. You knew out of the gate that Tina could write the book on being bad.

  “New rule,” Manny announced. “From now on, no reports.”

  Fayton did not look cowed enough, so Manny cranked up the volume. He jammed his face an inch in front of his boss’s. Any closer and their nose hairs would mesh.

  “And one other thing, Sir. You ever get the bright idea you can get out of this by wearing some kind of wire, or planting a bug, you might think twice, ’cause whatever the fuck I go down for, you go down for killing a cop. You got that? You do what I fucking tell you to do.”

  “Which in this case,” said Fayton, in the peculiar tone of ass-kissy arrogance he’d affected since Manny made off with his bloodstained telephone, “means lying to the press. Well, I can do that. But maybe it’s not me you should be worrying about. Maybe you should be thinking about a fellow officer.”

  “Merch wouldn’t talk. The Trumpet almost crucified him over his stuffed turkey.”

  “A dozen twenties soaked in gizzard juice? I’m not surprised. That man’s a disgrace to his profession. But I’m not talking about Merch. I’m talking about Krantz. He was first on the Walker accident scene. He found a crack pipe and he’s all excited.”

  “That’s terrific. I didn’t know he liked crack.”

  Fayton sneered. “Go ahead and laugh, he’d love to show you up. From where he’s standing, you and Merch have it cushy. Plus he thinks you’re a grass-eater.”

  “A grass-eater?”

  The chief loved busting out cop-talk. In his mind, it made him a regular, round-the-station kind of guy, though Manny assumed he found the term in a book of police slang he’d ordered from Amazon. None of the cops Manny knew would call you a “grass-eater.” They’d just call you a dirty cop.

  For another minute he listened to Fayton’s drone, wondering where he’d heard that same tone of mealy-mouthed threat. Finally it hit him. Peter Lorre. When he tried to be tough, the chief conjured up Peter Lorre, without the accent. Once he’d figured that out, Manny felt weirdly elated.