Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

The chief slipped into his police dress jacket and snapped his freshly polished badge to the lapel. He strained his cranium trying to think of an excuse. They’d already agreed that Florence would meet him at the station, where they’d take his official black Chevrolet Caprice to the funeral, chauffeured by young Officer Krantz. Fayton was a tad miffed he didn’t get to ride in the limousine. But Chatlak, apparently, had a raft of sisters in McKeesport. According to Edward Edward, the Korean bride–ordering fellow from the funeral home, the immediate family had limo dibs.

  If he didn’t call soon, Fayton knew, it would be too late. Flo would be on her way. But he couldn’t think of how to stop her. Much as he might want to, he could not just come out and say, “I love you, honey, I just hate being seen with you in public….” Nor, come to think of it, could he unleash the deeper truth: that he harbored a secret yen for Mayor Marge. Or worse, that he had an itch to trade up….

  The chief was still racking his brains when Krantz, tapping gently on his office door, stuck his head in to say that he’d just gotten a call from Ruby. “And what did he want?” asked the chief, wondering, as always, exactly what was going on with Krantz’s haircut. Somehow, it managed to be too long and too short at the same time.

  “He said he can’t make the funeral,” Krantz announced. “Something came up on the Pawnee Lodge case. He says he’ll call when he nails it.”

  “I’ll bet he will,” Fayton scowled, giving up on his Windsor and staring at himself with the dour, defeated expression he tried to counteract every day with a hundred chin lifts. He was still staring when the door opened again and Florence pranced in, wrapped in an off-the-shoulder black Armani knockoff.

  “Darling,” he gushed, avoiding his own eyes in the Honor Wall mirror as she leaned in for a kiss, “you look absolutely ravishing!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Manny hung up on Mullet-man Krantz and slid the Impala to a tire-over-the-curb stop in front of Tina’s house. He felt slightly guilty about bailing on Chatlak’s funeral, and promised himself he’d pop out to the cemetery and drop off the plastic flowers he’d bought the first chance he got. Tacky as they were in most circumstances, when it came to cemeteries, it was hard to beat phony roses. Not only did they last forever, but nobody wanted to steal them. This was the one bit of wisdom his mother had bequeathed him: Plastic flowers are okay on a grave! Manny clung to this as an absolute truth in a confused and uncertain universe.

  That morning, dreading the hours ahead in the company of Fayton and Krantz—not to mention his ex-wife and the rest of what passed for Upper Marilyn officialdom—Manny’d indulged in an extra bit of medicine: a pair of plump yellow Percodan to go along with his usual Code Fours. Unfortunately, he’d neglected to eat anything, and the stew of controlled substances seemed to be working their way through his stomach like a rogue backhoe, leaving a ragged, acid-tinged divot in their wake. He’d already drunk enough Pepto-Bismol to paint a barn.

  Manny made a thorough survey as he stepped onto the Podolsky property. Nothing looked out of place, except for a tipped-over garden gnome, which the paramedics had upset hauling Marvin’s corpse from the front door to the ambulance. Eyeballing the fallen Hobbit, he decided to take Tina with him to the Dendez house. It might help having a woman there to hold a few hands. If she was up for it, he’d introduce her as a social worker. Families appreciated police bringing social workers along to give them bad news. It gave them one more person to scream at.

  He banged on the door a few times, then gave up and hollered. “Tina? Tina it’s me, Manny!” After a minute, someone tugged a curtain aside in the living room. If that was Tina, fine. If it was Zank or McCardle he’d need more than a plastic bouquet in his fist. Since he wasn’t going to the funeral, he’d decided on impulse to give the faux roses to his new girl. Now he shifted them to his left hand and eased the .38 into daylight with his right.

  Manny was still standing there, palm sweating on his gun-butt, when he heard a rustle behind him. He dropped to his knees, tossing the roses and bringing the gun up with both hands as he swung around.

  “Freeze!”

  “Nice moves,” said Tina, holding a can of Diet Pepsi and sipping it through a bent straw. “I bet you were first in your class at Twister.”

  “Jesus,” Manny sighed, “don’t do that.”

  “Do what? Walk out of my own house?” Slurping her drink, she stooped to scoop up the fake bouquet. “These for me?”

  Somehow, in her hands, the plastic flowers looked supremely cheesy. “Not really,” he mumbled. “I just sort of had them on me.”

  He stuffed his gun back in the holster and rubbed mud off his pants. The pills had churned south, into his bowels.

  “You had them on you?”

  “I was actually going to a funeral, but I changed my mind, so, you know….”

  “So you thought you’d stiff the dead guy and lay these on the merry widow.” Tina dropped the can and crunched it flat. “Don’t think I’m not touched.”

  That was not, of course, the way Manny’d planned his entry.

  “Fuck this,” he said. “You call me to say two nut-jobs threatened to kill you. So I tear over here, and when I knock on the door, there’s no answer. Next thing I know, I hear rustling in the bushes. You think I’m gonna just stand there so I can look cool in case it’s you? Forget it.” He heard himself sounding like a defensive boob, but couldn’t stop. “One thing I learned on the street, you can’t save your ass and your face at the same time.”

  “So what are you saving your ass for?” she asked, turning the knob on the front door and heading in. “Your wedding night?”

  Manny pounded himself on the forehead and followed. Once inside, he tried again. “I wasn’t bringing you fake roses, okay? They were sitting in the car and I grabbed ’em without thinking about it.”

  “No need to explain.” Her smile let him know how much she was enjoying this. “Leave stuff that nice sitting in a car, you’re just tempting fate.”

  Inside, every available inch was covered with shoes, clothes, videos, or papers. Tina cleared a space on the sofa for Manny to sit, then disappeared into the kitchen as he called after her.

  “You know,” he started, then caught himself before he said what he was going to say: I can see why your fucking husband might want to swallow drain cleaner. Instead, he declaimed, somewhat sheepishly, “If we’re going to work together, you gotta stop busting my balls. We’ve got a lot of business to take care of before we’re free and clear.”

  Tina returned with another Diet Pepsi and one for Manny. “I only heard up to ‘balls.’ I was in the fridge.”

  She pushed a pair of TaeBo tapes aside, sat down, and curled her legs underneath her. Manny swallowed some soda, which splashed like hydrochloric acid on his codeine divot. He wondered if he were getting an ulcer. Finding out would entail going to a doctor, which might involve someone finding out how the hole in his stomach actually got there. Which meant it was out of the question, unless he could go under an assumed name. It seemed like a lot of work just to find out he’d fucked himself up.

  “You okay?” said Tina.

  “Stomachache.”

  “Pepsis are supposed to be good for stomachaches. Pop Lee, my granddaddy, used to guzzle seventeen a day. He heard Hugh Hefner drank sixteen, so he figured if Hef was such a stud, he’d drink one more and be a bigger stud. Whenever I had a tummyache, he’d fix me one warm, mixed with milk.”

  “Did it work?”

  “You mean did it make him a stud or did it make my stomachaches go away?”

  “Both, I guess,” said Manny, taking an audible gulp.

  Tina flattened her black skirt over her knees and gave him a half smile. It was the first time he’d seen her look anything but all-business. “Well,” she said, “Pop Lee never had much stomach trouble, and I think my tummyaches went away just ’cause of the attention. Studwise, the old goat used to mow the ladies down like duckpins. The only reason he didn’t father more bastards was that he liked
them over forty. He always used to say, ‘a woman under forty is like an unripe peach.’”

  “That’s pretty enlightened.”

  “Yes and no. What he really liked were nine-year-old girls, but the over-forty thing was a pretty good front. All the ladies from church thought he was a sexy old guy. How’s your stomach?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Manny. “That’s a lot of information. Anyway, there’s a couple things I want to do before we get going.”

  “Oh really?”

  Manny couldn’t tell if she was being seductive or mocking. Tina had, he’d discovered after knowing her three minutes, the peculiar ability to be both at once. One second he was sure they were deeply connected, the next he felt like he was wearing clown feet. It left a guy feeling off balance. But it was weirdly exciting, too. Like French kissing on a tightrope. Your partner might be in love, or she might be trying to make you splatter….

  On top of the painkillers, the whole Tina situation made him slightly dizzy. The more he stared at that Faye Dunaway face, the more it was all he wanted to do. He was tired of talking, so he shut his mouth, letting himself just take her in.

  “So where are we going?” she asked when she realized Manny wasn’t going to keep up the banter. Most guys, in her experience, would try to outtalk her, as if that were going to somehow suck her in. But Manny could meet her gaze and stay silent, which made her nervous. She didn’t like not having control. She kind of loved it, which was even scarier.

  “We’re going,” Manny replied finally, back in Total Cop Mode, “to meet the family of Carmella Dendez. To tell them she died. You haven’t met them before, have you, at some rest home picnic or something?”

  “No, but—”

  “Good,” Manny interrupted. “I’m going to introduce you as a social worker. You ever meet a social worker?”

  “A few.”

  “Don’t worry. If you’ve met one, you know. All you have to do is act kind and clueless. Hold the babies, if there are any. Tell them about survivors’ benefits.”

  Tina finished her Pepsi and put it down on top of a stack of magazines: Fortune, Money, Inc., and American Yogi. “So why the hell do you want to take me?”

  “Couple of reasons.” Manny stood and took in the piles of self-help books and sandals scattered around the living room. “For one thing, there’s a couple of low-IQ killers on their way over to mutilate you. For another, I really hate going all by myself to somebody’s house to tell them their mother died. It’s a complete fucking drag, and I could use some company. After our ‘Mommy’s Dead’ visit, I’ve got to go to a doctor’s office. A plastic surgeon named Roos. Bent as they come. He developed some pictures for me, plus I think he can help us unload our friend Mister Biobrain. You got any string?”

  Tina didn’t question the left turn in the conversation. She was used to those. “I have guitar strings,” she said. “Marvin was known to pull out his acoustic and break into “We Are the World” when he hit the catnip.”

  “I’ll bet that was fun,” said Manny. “Grab one and we’ll run it a few inches off the floor across the front door, then scatter glass on the carpet. You got any lightbulbs left, or did Marv eat them all?”

  Tina smiled again. “Actually, I was saving some for you.”

  “Terrific, we’ll use those. What about shoe polish?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “Then find that, too,” said Manny. “Brown if you have it. We’ll put it on the doorknobs.”

  “What’ll that do?”

  “Not much, but when they see brown shit all over their hands they’re bound to get spooked. Especially if they’re cracked to the gills. I want these slime to be muy paranoid. What about dolls?”

  “Like Barbie and Ken?”

  “Love ’em, but we have work to do. If you can’t dig up any dolls, use stuffed animals.”

  Tina smirked. “Marv kept a family of furry bunnies. Mummy, Daddy, and Baby Marvin, for his inner child work. What do we do with those?”

  “String ’em up. Believe me, a couple of crackheads roll in and see a batch of stuffed rabbits swinging from the ceiling, they’ll tweak right out the window. I want these fuckers wigged-out. Jailhouse logic: If you can’t be badder than the badasses, be crazier. Crazy takes bad every day of the week. You got ketchup, we can dab some around the mouth and paws before we hang ’em. Special effects.”

  Tina grew quiet, and Manny knew he’d crossed a line he never saw coming. “What is it?” he asked, feeling her anguish more than he ever felt his own. A slave to empathy. For one fleeting second she seemed vulnerable, capable of being hurt, which made her infinitely more real. A girl who wasn’t just tough, but tough because she had to be, because something inside her wasn’t tough at all. Now he really had it bad….

  He reached toward her, to stroke her cheek, but something checked him. His hand hung there, inches from her face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said Tina. “What’s wrong with you?”

  She dropped her eyes to his hand, now stalled ludicrously in midair. In some dream moment, out of body, Manny continued to reach, and ran his finger along one staggering cheekbone, on a diagonal to Tina’s parted lips. His heart felt like exploding butter. Neither spoke, though Tina came close. She almost told him about her mother. About the days she’d spent alone with her body after she hanged herself. But why? It would either freak him out or make him feel sorry for her. Fuck it.

  When Tina met Manny’s eye again her gaze was hard. “Let’s just take care of this spookhouse bullshit so we can get out of here.”

  Ten minutes later, the place was prepped with dangling bunny rabbits, trip wires, broken glass on the carpets, and—Tina’s touch—

  WELCOME TONY ! tamponed on the bedroom wall. It washes off, she said, prompting him to ask if she’d done it before.

  “I used to dabble in interior decorating,” she said, with a look that might have meant anything.

  Their work done, the pair stepped out of the house, past the comatose garden gnome, over the tire tracks left by Krantz’s black-and-white, and into Manny’s Impala.

  They didn’t speak until Tina told him the car smelled like somebody died in it.

  “Somebody did,” said Manny, “and he’s behind the wheel.”

  Tina regarded him, then slid closer on the ripped-to-hell car seat.

  “The way you talk,” she said, “you know how to get a girl hot.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tamping his blood-blotched face and skull with a paper towel, Tony Zank slowed the black Lincoln to a stop at Liberty Avenue. A funeral procession, led by a phalanx of motorcycle cops, was taking its time crawling by.

  “Man, check out all them po-lice,” McCardle said, slinking down in the seat to sample some of the rock they’d just bought from a fourteen-year-old who’d been slinging on a corner by Roberto Clemente Elementary. They’d snagged a new stem, too, since the last one had been crunched down to the length of a cashew.

  “Po-lice,” Zank repeated, still mocking Mac’s part-time ghetto inflections. “You kill me. Why you ducking down like that, anyway? This baby’s got tinted windows. You could wiggle your dick and stick a needle in your neck and nobody’d know the difference. Looky.”

  Tony hoisted the Colt 45 forty-ouncer he’d brought for the drive and chugalugged half the bottle. When he was done, he burped out a cloud of jerky vapors and grunted, “Quit hogging the merchandise.”

  Tony grabbed the new pipe from his partner. He fished a chip from the baggie on the seat and shoved it in. He fired up, sucking till his eyes bugged and waving the pipe at the police procession twenty feet away.

  “Oh shit,” he squeaked, a second later, “maybe they can see. Maybe they got some anti-tint radar thing. Fuck! We gotta turn around.”

  “Whoa, Tony, no!” Mac grabbed Zank’s arm before he could spin the wheel. “There’s about a thousand rollos in front of us. You’re just tweakified, cuz. You smoke that much you get all paranoidal. You gotta learn
to moderate.”

  “Right, right.” Tony jerked sideways and slapped at something only he could see, then jerked the other direction. “You’re right. Gotta sit tight. Nothin’ crazy. You got any smack? Gotta relax! This new shit is strong.”

  “Anything’s gonna seem strong when you been smokin’ paint chips and cheese all day. This shit’s just regular shit.” Mac sat back in the plush leather seat and stretched his short, musclebound legs. “Man, this ride’s nicer than my crib.”

  “Since when you have a crib?”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’, if I had one, it wouldn’t be this nice.”

  After twenty minutes stuck watching squads of Pittsburgh Police and State Troopers motor by to honor the fallen veteran, Dominick Chatlak—the last black-and-white sported a banner bearing the image of Chatlak at forty, looking Karl Malden–like—Zank couldn’t take it anymore.

  “See if this thing got a phone,” he exploded, his voice back up to a coke-induced warble. “We oughta call that Tina twat.”

  McCardle, who’d just glimpsed the crack-troll grinning from the dashboard, jerked back in his seat and knocked over the malt liquor.

  Zank bitch-slapped him. “The fuck you doing? You spilled all over the stuff. That’s all we got, man!”

  “You don’t have to hit me,” said Mac. “I thought I saw something.”

  “You’re gonna see a shiv in your lung you don’t find somethin’ to dry that shit off.”

  “Okay, okay!”

  McCardle unsnapped the glove compartment and poked around. In front of them, a white Cadillac with the Seal of the Mayor of Upper Marilyn on the door rolled by at two miles an hour, followed by a hearse.

  “Holy shit, the mayor!” McCardle cried.

  “Big deal,” said Tony. “She don’t know it was us knocked over her pad. Don’t matter if she do. Long as we got that picture of her within lickin’ distance of President Happy Boy’s nuggins, she not gonna do nothin’ about it. She’s probably more scared than you.”