by Jerry Stahl
“Let me deal with Krantz,” he said, startling the chief of police by pinching him on the cheek. “In the meantime, get yourself a hand mirror.”
“Why’s that?”
“So you can watch your ass.”
That was how most of the cops Manny knew actually talked.
On his way out of the station, Manny ran into Krantz. The jealous cop rocker was trimming his mullet over the men’s room sink. More than once, Manny’d been tempted to suggest that the kid change his style: maybe shave his head, or pierce something. That way, no matter how lame his music, at least some of the audience would think he was cool. There were a handful of young urban hipsters, even in Upper Marilyn. Manny knew because he’d busted most of them for dope and sneaked them into treatment. (Having kicked cold himself, he didn’t particularly think anybody else should have to.) But Krantz, he suspected, might misinterpret his fashion tips.
When it came to the Top Forty Cop, Fayton hadn’t told Manny anything he didn’t suspect already. Of course it killed the kid that Manny got to drive around all day, doing whatever he wanted, while Merch got to sit on his ass scarfing Clark bars and ogling Eisenhower-era smut. This left Krantz with the real glamour work: chasing check-jumpers at Denny’s, settling “plate-breakers” (domestic squabbles), or rousting drunks passed out on the train tracks. Who wouldn’t be fucking annoyed?
Merch once told him that Krantz had even offered to tail Bad Detective Rubert to help take him down. By way of placating the Ramada guitar god—and getting him off his back—Manny had decided then and there to ask Krantz for help. It was an old snitch trick—get them to think you’re humiliated, that you need them and you’re ashamed about it. For that shot at superiority, lowlifes craving respect would rat out Mother Teresa. If she were still alive to rat out. Not that Krantz was a lowlife, but the dynamic was the same, more or less….
Manny pissed hugely and stepped to the sink. He scrubbed his hands while the rookie snipped away at what he called his “Sho-Lo.” (Short in front, long in the back: the hep hockey player look.) Krantz played it tough and silent, but when their eyes met in the mirror Manny kicked off.
“Listen, Big-Time, next week I might be bringing down a couple of bad guys. Could be a heavy play. I was hoping I could call you to get my back. Interested?”
“Am I interested? Are you kiddin’ me?”
Manny thought Krantz was going to wag his tail. The rookie slapped down his scissors and rubbed his hands together. “Dude, that is hot! What’s the caper?”
Manny looked right and left, the-walls-have-ears style. “Can’t tell you now. But book some range time. Get in some target practice.”
“Bitchin’!”
Manny nodded, still scrubbing, and Krantz nodded back. Men being men. In the men’s room. While he toweled off he watched the lunkhead guitarist pump himself up. It never failed to amaze how quickly hate turned to devotion when you gave the hater some props. Krantz was already busting his acid-washed britches. “Hey, Manny, I’m playing the Ramada Inn Lounge this Saturday, in Altoona. I could get you free drinks if you wanna come.”
Manny said he’d love to, but he had a stakeout. “Police work,” he said grimly, giving the rookie’s shoulder a fraternal squeeze. “You know how that goes.” For extra gravy, he added, “Love the Sho-Lo.”
“Wow, thanks!”
As a coda to their happy exchange, Krantz fluffed his mullet and inquired, like a shy junior asking a cheerleader to the prom, whether Manny would consider “mentoring him.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know,” Krantz explained, even more cocker spaniel–like, “show me the ropes, the tricks of the trade. You’re a great detective, dude. Maybe I could ride with you sometime. I know the chief would go for it!”
“He would, huh?”
Dying, Manny shook Krantz’s hand. From a great distance, he heard himself mutter that he’d be honored. Then he fled the station wanting to slit his own throat. Clearly, the haircut remark had been a bad play. All he’d wanted was to keep the kid from tailing him. Now the bonehead was his new best friend. Perfect! It was just what he needed, along with Tina, Mister Biobrain, and the Zank and McCardle show: a mullet-cut puppy riding bitch in the Skankmobile.
He had just unlocked the mayo Impala when the solution came to him. It was cold—in fact it was fucking evil—but he could hate himself later. And it could nip his mentor duties in the bud.
The plan was simple. Krantz handled domestic abuse calls. And nothing enraged an abusee like having some male cop buddy up to her dickwad boyfriend or husband. Merch used to do it, back in the day, and Manny’d learned to walk out the door backward after an irate housewife tattooed his spine with a nine iron. Manny couldn’t blame her, but Merch was old-school ignorant enough to think women deserved what they got. It was his worst quality. If Manny told Krantz to always take the guy’s side, ten-to-one some enraged better half would try and put him out of commission. With any luck, he’d stay that way until Manny and Tina were free and clear.
Manny was so psyched, he relocked the Impala and jogged up the steps from the parking lot to the station two at a time. He couldn’t wait to “mentor” this bit of inappropriate wisdom. When he made his way back to the men’s room, happily, Krantz was still fussing with his do.
“One thing,” Manny said, breathing hard from the run. “I was just thinking, Slugger, you do a lot of two-thirty-twos, right?”
“Fuck yeah I do!” Krantz whipped out a can of Hold, and Manny flinched. The rookie sprayed his scalp-mattress as he chatted. “Two times a shift, some twist calls up and says her old man’s using her forehead to pound nails. You know the drill.”
“I know it all right.”
They shared a laugh, and Manny actually managed to high-five the younger man. For most of his life, he was convinced he was allergic to high fives. All that guy-guy stuff at the Academy made him want to puke. But Krantz beamed, and he made himself beam back.
Manny continued, as though sharing a Masonic secret. “Listen to me, Krantz, don’t be afraid to take the man’s side. You hear me? A lot of women just wanna get a guy in trouble, you know what I’m saying?”
Krantz’s eyes went wide. “I guess I do, but—”
“But nothin’!” Manny suppressed an urge to stop and apologize on the spot. “I learned it from Merch. A hell of a domestic abuse man in his day. Just don’t tell ’im I told ya.” Manny winked and clapped his new protégé on the back. “They don’t teach this in human relations, buddy, but trust me. Unless it’s flat-out brutality, you do better siding with your own kind. Try it next time you’re out on a plate-breaker.”
“Well, if you say it’s okay….”
Krantz looked worried, but Manny could see he’d hooked him. It was a terrible thing to do to Krantz, not to mention to any woman who dialed 911 for help. What the fuck was he turning into? He felt like a Union Carbide exec, the one who told the plant manager in Bhopal, “Go ahead, blow off a little steam.”
Manny landed a hearty, you’re-a-big-boy-now clap on Krantz’s back. “Let me know how it works out. We’ll have a brewski!”
“Right on!” cried the wide-eyed rookie.
Manny shot him a finger pistol and left the men’s room for the second time. With any luck, the kid would be kneecapped, frying-panned, or doused with bacon grease by some righteously enraged spouse within twenty-four hours. Once that happened, Manny promised the Cop Gods, he would spend the rest of his life making amends to every wronged and battered female in the tri-state area.
Manny glanced back down at his To Do list, then checked his own face in the rearview. The Code Fours were kicking in, along with the voice of his conscience.
You’re as bad as she is, it said. You just don’t know it yet….
TWENTY
Tina squatted inside the closet, sorting through Marvin’s shoes. She’d forgotten how many he had, since he’d basically stopped wearing any once he went guru. She was the one who had to go to work at the old age
home, bring home groceries, deal with the outside world, such as it was. Marv stayed streaming. He lived on-line, in the bedroom. Turban on his head and loincloth slipping north and south of his hairy belly button, he sat in half lotus before the vid-cam, making his money mantras. It was, she’d told him more than once, like living with a Jewish Gunga Din. Gunga Dinberg.
Tina’d just loaded the last pair of loafers in a Hefty bag when the phone rang. She froze. No doubt it was Mister Edward, from the mortuary, wondering where the check was. She’d promised to drop it off the day after the cremation. By the time he went to the collection agency, she figured, she’d be long gone. With or without Detective Manny.
The whole thing with Dee-Dee Walker had spooked her. Same with Carmella. One day people were there, love them or hate them, the next they were somewhere else and you didn’t know where you were. When she was in second grade and found her mommy swinging from a noose made of pantyhose in their trailer living room, her first thought, before grief, before fear or panic or simple horror, was Where am I? This was not the world she thought she lived in. In that world, mommies didn’t hang from their trailer ceiling. They might get high and bring home truck drivers. They might beat you with a belt or make you waffles or disappear for a day or three, but they didn’t dangle in the air.
For an hour after she found her, Tina sat on the floor and sang her mommy songs. It was Christmastime so she stuck to carols. “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night.” “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.” Her mother was dressed in tight black jeans and a polka-dot halter. One of her high heels had fallen off and Tina couldn’t get it to stay on. To Tina, she didn’t look sad. Her blue-green eyes were open and her mouth was fixed in a funny O, like she was about to yodel. “That’s my one skill,” she used to joke, when she’d put her medicine in her arm and feel happy for an hour or two, “the boys all say I’m a hell of a yodeler.”
Tina took a nap underneath her, on the scratchy carpet. When she woke up she got her schoolbooks and did her homework. They lived close to the highway, and every time a semi roared by the trailer shook and her mother swung a little, like she wanted to dance. Tina reheated some SpaghettiOs in the kitchenette and came back to eat. She brought in the clock radio, too, since Mommy liked to listen at night. She couldn’t stand the quiet and had to sleep with the radio on. Tina never slept in her own bed, always with Mommy. Unless a truck driver was over, then she curled up on the couch, watching Christian TV. She liked how shiny the people were. Two days later, when the trailer park lady came by for the rent, she peeked in and saw the body, still hanging there, with the little bed Tina had made folded neatly underneath: Mommy’s quilt and pillows, and her two stuffed puppies, Johnny and Merle.
Tina came home from school and found a policeman and police-lady sitting in the trailer. The police-lady smelled like salad dressing and had a pointy face. But the policeman was nice. He called her “Punkin.” He pulled a quarter out of her ear and she asked if he was her daddy. Mommy always said Daddy would come back someday. The policeman smiled and said no, he had his own little girls. Twins. “Maybe you can meet them. Would you like that?”
This was another secret, an older one: Besides liking jet crashes, since that afternoon she’d liked policemen, too. No one was ever that nice to her before. After all the grown-ups finished asking her questions, the policeman took her home with him. He lived in a ranch house, with a nice yard and a big oak tree with a tire hanging from a rope tied to a branch. When he saw her staring at the rope he took her by the hand and hurried her in. Waiting by the front door, clutching her Minnie Mouse suitcase, Tina heard the policeman talking to his little girls. They were her age, but taller, better dressed, like miniature Avon ladies. “She doesn’t have a Mommy or Daddy,” he said. “Be nice.”
Much later, when it was very dark, Tina found herself awake. She’d never slept in pajamas before and felt hot. She took off the flannel bottoms, and then the top. The air was cool and familiar on her skin. She got out of the cot the policeman and his pretty wife had fixed next to their daughters’ bunkbeds and walked down the hall. She peeped into every room—closet, bathroom, den—until she found where the policeman slept, and crawled into his bed. It was bigger than her Mommy’s, the sheets so soft on her skin she fell asleep immediately. It was still dark when she heard the screams. The lights were on. And the policeman’s wife, who no longer looked pretty, whose face seemed to have puffed up while her eyes had shrunk and lost their lashes so that she looked, to Tina, like some terrible white reptile, stood over her with her hands covering her breasts and her mouth wide open, staring.
“Get her out of here!” she shrieked, aiming those awful, lashless eyes at Tina, making her feel like a thing. “I don’t want this girl in our house! Get her out!”
Then the policeman’s daughters were in the room, giggling and whispering in each others’ ears. The policeman, somehow smaller without his uniform, wrapped a blue bath towel around Tina’s naked body and lifted her in his arms. His hands were smooth, not like the truckers Mommy sometimes made her cuddle. Go ahead, Darlin’, Howdy really likes little girls. The policeman’s hair was mussed and his lean face had a sad expression.
“She’s just scared,” he said.
But Tina did not know who he was talking to. After she got dressed, she spent the rest of the night in the policeman’s car, driving to a place where he said they put children like her until they found some family to take them, or people who wanted to make them part of their family. He asked if she wanted him to put the cherry-top on, and she said yes. “We only do it for special passengers,” he told her. So that’s how they rode, with the red light flashing and Tina curled against him, her head on his shoulder, watching the white lines on the highway until she fell asleep. It was light by the time they arrived. And two weeks until Pop Lee, her nine-fingered grandpa, swooped through to take her to live with him, in a whole other nightmare.
When the phone rang again Tina snatched it on the first ring. She’d turned off the machine. She didn’t want messages. It was better not to answer. But she wasn’t thinking. Lost in all that history…. All that shit she never thought about. Her own life.
“What?” she snapped, looking around at the pile of shoes.
“Give it up, bitch.”
“What?”
“Fuck you! You’re already dead!”
The voice was frantic, quavery. A tweaker. When her first husband, the part-time RV salesman, got deep into freebase, he sounded the same way. She could hear fast breathing, then a worried voice in the background. “Just tell her, Tony.”
The phone dropped with a clatter and she could make out the first man’s garbled scream. “Don’t say my name, you fucking dink! What the fuck’s wrong with you?” The second voice said something else, and the tweaky guy came back on, panting and talking fast. “Okay, right. Shut up! We know who you are, bitch. You took something that doesn’t belong to you. We’re going to come and get it.”
“I love company,” she said, going kittenish. “Can you come over now?”
The tweaker giggled. “She’s a nympho! You believe this shit!” Then he remembered he was supposed to sound heavy, and started in again. “We’re coming when you don’t know we’re coming. And you better have what we’re coming for.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “I really do!”
There was a barking laugh, and the line went dead. She hung up and, two seconds later, another ring. She stared at a tassel loafer—when the hell had Marv bought that?—then picked up without saying anything.
“Tina? Tina, you there?”
“Manny? Is that you? My God—”
“What’s happening? You sound, I don’t know…what happened?”
Tina pulled herself off the floor. Took a breath. Steeling herself. “I got a call,” she said, “that’s all. Somebody knows where I live. Somebody wants something I have. Somebody’s coming to get it. One of them’s named Tony.”
“It would be,” said Manny, calculating. Today was Cha
tlak’s funeral. After that he had to go to Carmella’s house. To tell her family. At Manny’s insistence, they’d been sitting on the news. Waiting to see who came forward, maybe filed a Missing Persons. But no one had. Normally Fayton liked to make the Hanky Calls, to represent the Force. “We want you to know, we’ll do everything we can to find the scum who did this to your mother-father-husband-daughter-wife-or-son. You know, I’m no stranger to loss myself….”
More than once, Manny’d had to sit beside him at these visits, breathing in the chief’s insincerity like steam off horseshit. No doubt he’d make a speech at Chatlak’s funeral, move himself to tears over the virtues of this fine, departed officer, a credit to the force, an inspiration to law enforcement everywhere, and a close, close personal friend.
“Fuck it,” said Manny, making a left instead of a right on Liberty Boulevard, three blocks from the station. “I was supposed to go a funeral, but fuck it, the guy’s dead anyway. I’m coming over.”
“I don’t need that.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
For some reason, Tina remembered the time a long-distance hauler slapped her mother for spilling his drink. Tina stabbed him with her homework pencil, and her mother locked her out of the trailer until morning. Tina could still hear her whisper as she slammed the door: “You little bitch, that was my medicine money. Timmy’s our friend….” She was maybe seven.
“I can take care of myself,” Tina said finally. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”
“So I figured.”
Manny swerved to miss a pair of dogs mating at the intersection. A collie coming in low to nail a willing schnauzer. A small crowd had gathered outside the Bentelbo to cheer. The Bent opened at six, for the wake-up boilermaker crowd. In the old days, the mill-hunks from J & L Steel used to roll in after the graveyard shift, or before heading out for the six-to-two. Now that J & L was history, they rolled in and didn’t bother to roll out again. Manny waved at a pair of early-bird juicers and spoke slowly into his cell. “Tina, pay attention. Don’t answer the door. Don’t leave the house. And stay away from the windows. I know these guys, and they’re freaks.”