Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  Tina leveled her eyes at him. “Listen, Manny, you ever get bad news in your life? I mean, really bad news?”

  “Nothing but.”

  “Hey, I’m not joking.” Tina touched her hand to her mouth, as if to keep the words from escaping, then gave up and continued. “Something awful happens to you, you don’t want to hear about it from some asshole, okay? That makes all the difference when you’re trying to get over it. If an asshole gives you bad news, then you kind of feel like an asshole. But if somebody all right, somebody decent is the one to break it to you, whatever it is, then at least you have a chance to recover. On top of whatever nightmare your life just turned into, you don’t have to feel like there’s something fucked-up about you because some fuckedup, insensitive jag-off was the one who knocked on your door.”

  Manny stared at her. “Something tells me you’ve had a lot of bad news.”

  “Enough.”

  Manny started to say something else, then stopped when another thought came slamming in. Tina, catching his hesitation, said, “What?”

  “You knew about Carmella, didn’t you? You just never told me.”

  Tina rolled her eyes. “Please. She got a little five o’clock shadow when we worked late, but I figured it was menopause. Weird things happen to older women. I had a great-aunt whose voice got so deep, by the time she was forty-five she sounded like Barry White. Carmella never seemed particularly masculine, but it’s not like I peeped up her dress. Besides, what difference does sex make when you’re dead? You think they have His-and-Her restrooms in heaven? My mother always told me, angels don’t sweat, they don’t burp, and they never have to go to the bathroom.”

  “So what does that leave?”

  Tina slid closer in the seat. “If you weren’t such a tight-ass, you’d figure it out.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m gonna spend mine on a pleasure boat. Fifty, no, a hundred feet long.”

  “What the fuck’s a pleasure boat? You mean a yacht?”

  “Pleasure boat’s bigger than a yacht,” said McCardle. “Yacht’s like a little ol’ kayak compared to a pleasure boat.”

  “What the fuck’s a kayak?”

  “Forget it, okay, Tony?”

  McCardle pouted and rooted in the sopping baggie, feeling for a rock that wasn’t mushed from the malt liquor he’d spilled.

  Once they’d waited out the cop parade without killing the mayor, Mac stopped paying attention to where they were. He kept his eyes shut until he had to open the window on account of Tony’s belching. The jerky fumes were enough to curdle milk. When Mac rolled down the tinted glass, he saw the street sign with Carmichael on it and shouted. “Shit, Tony, we’re here!”

  “Where?”

  The Lincoln swerved crazily, and Mac had to cover his eyes when a kid on a bicycle slammed into the curb and flew over his handlebars. “Careful!” he shouted.

  “Don’t tell me how to drive,” Tony snapped. “My head feels like a bull took a dump in it. I swear, man, it even smells funny. I can tell. Lean over, sniff my head.”

  McCardle balked. “Naw man, no way I’m sniffin’ your head. That’s fucked-up. Listen—”

  “That’s fucked-up?” Tony interrupted. “That’s fucked-up. After what you did you’re givin’ me that?”

  “I can sniff your head later, okay? We’re at the chick’s house.”

  Tony slammed on the brakes. “You fuck! Why didn’t you say so?”

  McCardle flew forward, trying, and failing, to grab the crack bag before it spilled on the floor. He tried to scoop up the mess and smeared a swath of beery crack-paste over the car rug. When he straightened up, he saw they were stopped in the street. Now what?

  “No disrespect, T,” he said cautiously, “folks won’t be able to get around. You either gotta park it or keep goin’.”

  Tony lashed out with a front-seat jab, tagging Mac on the shoulder. “You’re gettin’ bossy, bitch.”

  McCardle stepped quietly out of the car. Times like this it was better not to engage. That’s what the prison therapist who helped him with his Little McCardle always told him: Don’t engage. To Mac that meant act cool and get the motherfucker later. But he never told that to the shrink.

  Tony dropped the torture kit and tried the lock, then jumped back.

  “What the fuck?” he cried, holding his stained palm up to show McCardle. “Shoe polish! At least it better be shoe polish!”

  “I see it,” said McCardle, glancing nervously at the other crapped-out houses up and down Carmichael. “But somebody’s gonna see us, we don’t get our asses inside.”

  A minute later, after fish-pinning the lock, Tony tripped over the guitar string Manny’d slung over the threshold and landed on his hands. “Ouch, shit!” he cried, plucking shards of lightbulb out of his palms. “It’s a fucking booby trap. This chick’s playing games!”

  McCardle helped dust Tony off and stepped into the living room, glass crunching underfoot. Then he spotted the hanging rabbits. “Oh Lord!” His shriek caught in his throat. The furry creatures’ eyes seemed to follow him. Their bloody bunny mouths formed winsome smiles. This was worse than the rock-goblins. This was real.

  Tony grabbed McCardle’s wrist. “Something’s fucked-up,” he whispered, then realized they were holding hands and quickly let go.

  “Voodoo,” McCardle whispered back. “Those bunnies look fresh! Maybe she’s a priestess. This could be some kind of Marie Leveau shit.”

  “I don’t give a fuck if it’s Marie Osmond. We find the photo and we split.”

  Sneaking further inside, breathing hard, Mac and Zank made a tacit decision to stick together. They got as far as Tina’s bedroom when something bumped Tony’s forehead.

  “Ahhh-EEE…Get off me!” Without thinking, Tony snatched the thing and yanked. He fell backward clutching Tina’s tampon. “Take it,” he squealed, tossing the tainted item to McCardle.

  “Yeeech!” Mac flicked it away. “This look like some Blair Witch thing, man. Like them women who grow thigh hair and throw oat bran at the moon.”

  Tony clutched his skull. “I don’t care. I can’t take any more of this. You see what she did?” He bit his knuckle and pointed at the bedroom wall. “Welcome Tony! She wrote my fucking name. In blood…. This she-devil is trying to put a curse on me. I need something to drink.”

  “Probably wine in the kitchen,” McCardle said, avoiding the welcome note on the wall. This was Manson shit, but he decided not to bring that up. “I had an aunt once into black magic. Them voodoo priestesses always drink wine. Sometimes chicken blood, too, so you gotta be careful.”

  “Fuck! Don’t tell me that! What’s wrong with you?”

  “Sorry, man. I was just sayin’…”

  Fearing that Tony was headed for a whiteout, Mac steered him gently out of the bedroom, past the dangling bunnies, over the crunching lightbulbs, and into the floral-print kitchen. It was the one room, as far as he could see, that was more or less normal—minus maybe the color snapshot of a man in a turban taped to the refrigerator. The strange thing, when Mac looked close, was that the turban guy wasn’t one of those Indians. He was a white man. A redhead. You could tell from his mustache. For a second, he thought it was Ned Beatty. (Deliverance again!) But why would Ned Beatty wear a turban? And why would Tina stick him on her fridge? Chicks liked Tom Cruise and Ben Affleck. Kevin Costner maybe. But Ned Beatty? Topless? What kind of strange-o would want a porky redhead as a pinup?

  “I got period on my hands,” Tony babbled nervously. “I gotta wash.”

  “It’s okay, the shoe polish’ll kill the germs.”

  “You sure?”

  “Absolutely,” said McCardle, with no basis for the statement whatsoever. He just wanted to calm his partner before something awful happened. Something awful always happened when Tony got wound up. Mac started opening and closing cabinets, scoping out booze, while his partner talked to himself.

  “Unclean…unclean,” he kept repeating, struggling fut
ilely to wipe his hands on the dishcloth over the sink. “That’s one of the Kosher Commandments, man. ‘Thou shalt not touch chicks when they’re packin’ the pillow.’ It’s a Moses thing!”

  “Just relax, okay? Wine’s probably in the fridge.”

  “I’m fucking hungry, too. See if she’s got any Slim Jims.”

  “Right,” said Mac, hesitant to point out that no one ate beef jerky except for ex-cons and truckers, White Trash peckerwoods, which this lady plainly wasn’t.

  Before McCardle could scare up some alcohol, Tony began hopping up and down, clapping his hands in front of what looked like a brass cookie jar.

  “You find it?” Mac asked cautiously. He hoped Zank hadn’t flipped out altogether. “You find Mister Biobrain?”

  “Fuck that, Judah Macabee! We got rock, baby. This bitch got beau-coup rockaloo.”

  By way of demonstrating, Tony plunged a hand in the urn, sifting a fistful of off-white chunks—what looked, to McCardle, like albino granola.

  “I don’t know, T. That’s a stupid lot of crack, if that’s what it is.”

  “What else could it be? Maybe that’s why she’s into so much freaky shit. I had this much coke in my crib, I’d be hangin’ bunnies from the ceiling, too. Fuck, I’d be hangin’ from the ceiling. I’d be all-the-way buggin’!”

  Zank cackled and sniffed a knuckle-sized chunk, then brought it to his mouth for a quick lick. “Oh yeah! It’s payday, man! We keep half this shit and sell the other half, we’re fartin’ in silk! We’ll be high and money! All we gotta do’s go out and get us some vials, and we’re in business.”

  McCardle tried to catch Zank’s excitement but didn’t feel it. “That’s cool, but we still gotta—”

  “Gotta what?” Tony was on a mission. “Don’t you get it? A chick lives in this dump, with this kind of weight—what’s that tell you?” He made a fist and knocked on McCardle’s head. “Hello? Anybody home? What that tells you, my short nigger amigo, is that she already unloaded the fucking photograph. She made a ton of cash and she spent it on rockareeno.” He rubbed his groin and leered. “Tell you the truth, I wish the slit would come back now. I’d love to blow some of this candy and go Rick James on her ass. Get freaky with the freakette. You got the pipe? I’m gettin’ hard as Jesus’ forehead just thinkin’ about it.”

  “Yeah,” McCardle said, “I got it, but I don’t know…. If we’re not gonna look for the picture, we should probably just book.”

  “Chill out. Load some up, I wanna try this stuff.”

  “All right, man, but this feels kind of fucked-up.”

  Halfheartedly, McCardle tugged the pipe out of his pocket and wodged in a whitish crumb. Before he could raise it to his mouth, Zank snatched it away. “I found it, I get the first taste. Beam me up, Scotty!”

  Sighing, McCardle sparked the Bic and held the flame to the stem while Tony sucked for all he was worth. Finally a thin spindle of smoke billowed in the glass and he crashed against the counter, eyes popping out of his head.

  “Fuck,” Tony sputtered and exhaled a small puff of smoke. “Strong.” Mac had a feeling it was pipe residue, not the pallid nugget he’d fired up. But he knew better than to cross Tony when he was enthusiastic.

  “Bag it,” Tony chirped. “Sooner we get it bottled up and hit the street, the sooner we get some cash money.”

  “But Tony,” McCardle tried not to whine. “What about the photo?”

  “We’ll get it. You gotta be flexible, man. That’s the key to bein’ successful in business. Opportunity knocks, you don’t slam the door on its fingers. Read Og Mandino. Greatest Salesman in the World.”

  While Mac was busy bagging the contents of the urn, Zank had another idea. He rifled the kitchen drawers until he found a hammer, then plucked a choice morsel out of the urn and placed it on the counter. With a happy whoop, he brought the hammer down, then brought it down again, until he’d reduced the solid nugget to a batch of chalky powder.

  Using his shiv, Tony worked the mound into four straight lines, then leaned down and rhinoed two enormous snorts.

  “Oh yeah,” he said, pinching his nose when he’d horned up the deuce. “This shit’s off the hook! We got tootonium here. I left a bump for you.”

  “Not right now.”

  McCardle hoisted the four stuffed sandwich bags. Tony grabbed one and hooted. “All righty! Let’s make tracks. We sell this shit fast, we can come back in time to torture the broad before dinner. Find out what she did with the happy-balls. Two fortunes in one day, not too shabby.”

  “No, it’s not,” Mac admitted, though, deep down, he had a feeling shabbiness was going to be the least of their problems.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It had been over an hour since they’d left Chez Dendez, and Manny was still smarting. But not, for better or worse, because of what happened with Carmella’s sons. Heinous as it was, that kind of weirdness tended to dissipate once you left the scene. On an average day, a cop saw more lives ruined than saved. Saved was the exception.

  By comparison to some of the shattered worlds Manny’d walked in and out of, what Louie, Hector, and Gordo had to deal with was relatively benign. True, the trio might be psychologically shattered—especially when they got details of the murder. (Bad enough their dad was a woman; now they’d start wondering if maybe she was some kind of slut.) But still, nobody was bleeding brown from their liver, nobody picking brains out of the playpen. He’d witnessed both and wished he hadn’t.

  Not for the first time, Manny realized that what constituted tragedy, in his mind, was a few notches beyond what most souls would consider endurable. Except, of course, when it came to his own feelings, tender waifs that they were. In spite of all the plates he had spinning—the Zank and McCardle show and Fayton and Krantz, Dr. Roos and the wrath of Mayor Marge, not to mention George W. and his smiling testicles—the only thing Manny could think about was Tina calling him a tight-ass. That hurt. He knew he was overreacting, but each time he recalled her words, he had to bite the insides of his cheeks to create a pain big enough to blot out his anguish.

  He assumed that his current moodiness was due to drugs. Or lack thereof. Not that knowing helped. It was Newton’s Law of Applied Narcotics: The higher you got, the lower you fell. And he’d gotten pretty blitzed, what with the Percodan he’d added to his usual breakfast of codeine and coffee. Whenever he started jonesing, he tended to get emotional. That was the first phase. Which was fine, if you were home alone and weeping at a Volvo commercial. But here he was, with the first woman who’d stopped his heart since forever, and he was acting like a twelve-year-old girl who’d been cut from the pep squad.

  “Pathetic,” he muttered, before he realized Tina would hear him talking to himself. He tried to play it off by squeezing the wheel and setting his jaw in a manly fashion, but Tina wouldn’t let it pass.

  “What’s pathetic?” she asked, clearly glad to be speaking after his sulky lull. “That you’ve been taking every back alley in Butt-burg at eighty miles an hour? Or that I’m riding around with a guy who pulls down dead she-male’s underpants? Not that I’m criticizing. I’m a live-and-let-live kind of girl.”

  Manny stole a glance at her, and she met his eyes as if daring him. But daring him to what?

  “Lighten up, cowboy. You want to do strong and silent, that’s fine. Girls love that. Some girls. Me being newly widowed and all, I wouldn’t say no to a little social intercourse. But hey, it’s your car. You wanna go all broody and mumble ‘Pathetic!’ every couple of minutes, knock yourself out. My house is being overtaken by killer crackheads. It’s not like I can throw a snit and say ‘Take me home!’”

  “Look,” said Manny. “I know I’m being weird.”

  Tina smiled. “It’s okay. I was you, knocking around with a hot chick who probably offed her husband, I’d get the clam-ups, too. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at him thoughtfully. “You’re conflicted. Your right brain says, ‘I really like her.’ The left is like, ‘What are you, insane? She made the la
st guy gargle glass!’ So where are we going again?”

  “What?” Manny glanced over just in time for Tina to dive sideways and turn the wheel a foot before they rammed an oncoming mail-truck.

  “That was exciting,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I have great reflexes. I’ve heard cops were lousy drivers.”

  “I don’t mean that,” said Manny, feeling retarded but forging on, in the grips of some narcotically deprived need to express himself, a stress-fueled combo of terror, lust, and all-purpose emotional confusion. Even as he spoke, he knew he’d probably regret it, but regret not saying anything even more. Every thought in his head was like a fork in a toaster. “I mean, I’m not used to this.”

  “To what?”

  “To feeling anything. Okay? I feel something for you. You know how unfucking likely that is? Most of the time I don’t feel. I don’t want to. The life I live, it’s better not to. But now, I mean, looking at you…. From the minute I walked into your kitchen, it’s like, I don’t know, I won the lottery and forgot how to cash a check.”

  He went back to watching the road and felt his whole face burn. Tina’s silence was crushing. Air whistled through the back window that never closed all the way. He steered blindly, seeing but not seeing: warehouse, stop sign, bar; vacant lot, gas station, red light, church…. His grip was slick on the steering wheel. He more or less knew the way to Dr. Roos’s office and trusted his car to get him there.

  After what seemed like months, Tina spoke. “Give me your hand.”

  “My hand?”

  “Your hand. Give it to me.”

  He reached over and she took it, her own fingers warm around his. She studied both sides intently, following the groove of his knuckles with her fingertip, the play of dead veins leading down from his wrist. He used to shoot there, in his fun-filled youth, and his sclerosed vessels had never forgiven him. The effect was tantalizing and clinical at once.

  “What are you,” he asked finally, slowing as the light went yellow to red. “A palm reader?”