Plainclothes Naked

by Jerry Stahl

  She slid behind the wheel while he gathered himself on the sidewalk. “Just remember. If you do end up paraplegic, I’ll use your face as a seat cushion.”

  “Promise?”

  “Definitely,” she said sweetly, “but only when I have company.”

  Manny watched her roar off down the street, in love all over again.

  FORTY

  Once, at the flaming height of indian summer, Manny’d stumbled on two half-decayed bodies in a Tit-ville garage. It was a double suicide, weeks old, and the stench hit him like a fist. He had to shove mud up his nose to keep from throwing up. Thirty seconds in Zank’s apartment and the suicide garage seemed like a happy memory, meadow fresh compared to the rank miasma that made every breath in Chez Zank as gut-churning as a gulp of sewage.

  The smell was so stupefying, he didn’t even notice Lipton’s cries. He was overcome. Then he heard them, faintly at first, then louder. The model-handsome mayoral assistant was keening.

  Manny’s head cleared, and he swam his way deeper into the apartment, into the bedroom. He found Lipton in the closet, fully fetal under an army blanket, his peroxide-blond hair pasted to his head. His Armani jacket was badly stained and his crisp white shirt had wilted. When Manny pulled him out, he could barely stand.

  “Lipton, Jesus, what the fuck are you doing here?”

  “I broke in,” Lipton sobbed. “And then, oh God, I got trapped with a dead puppy. He’s got a really cute, really dead puppy in there!”

  Manny gripped his shoulder. “Try not to lose it, okay?”

  The bedroom was no more than a mattress dumped on a molting carpet, strewn with sex mags. Most, as far as Manny could tell, featured “anal” in the title. Anal Antics, Asian Anal, Anal Cheerleaders. Even Senior Anal, which he first misread as Señor.

  “Would you listen to me?” Lipton pleaded. “He’s got a deceased pet in the closet!”

  Before Manny could tear his eyes away from the Anals, Lipton let out a cry and threw a shoe box at his feet. Manny’d never seen him like this. As long as he’d known him, the Brit had never appeared anything less than debonair. He patterned himself as a kind of peroxide Tony Randall. Mannered, suave, impeccably attired. Lipton was the perfect complement to Mayor Marge’s iron blandness. Now here he was, rocking back and forth on the floor of Tony Zank’s meat-stink bedroom, hugging himself and babbling.

  Manny kicked the lid off the shoe box. There was indeed a cuddly puppy corpse jammed inside teeming with maggots. Lipton let out a hysterical giggle.

  “What are you doing here?” Manny asked quietly, dropping the lid back on the box and kicking it aside. There was no point in even attempting to deal with this right now. Not with Lipton still giggling and sobbing. In movies, the hero slapped hysterical characters across the face. In Manny’s experience, all a slap did was make them mad and hysterical. What he liked to do was scream in their ears. Which is what he did, squatting beside Lipton, leaning close, and shouting “CALM DOWN!” at the top of his lungs.

  This did the trick. Manny led the shaken assistant into what passed for the living room: a scarred coffee table and green-plaid couch so riddled with burn holes it looked like it had been strafed by machine gun fire.

  “Sit down,” said Manny, and Lipton dutifully lowered himself to the one good cushion, stopping long enough to wrinkle his nose and remove a pair of burnt bottlecaps and a furry pizza slice. Manny wondered if furniture could grow gangrene.

  “I can’t believe this,” Lipton sniffed. “How does he live?”

  “Doesn’t matter how he lives. It’s his house,” said Manny. “Ever hear of breaking and entering?”

  “But Tony’s a thief!”

  “Thieves have rights, too. This is America. You wanna tell me what you’re doing here or you wanna go downtown? I’m sure Mayor Marge would be happy to provide you with a lawyer.”

  “Mayor Marge!” Lipton grabbed Manny’s hand.

  “Is there a problem?”

  Manny freed himself and picked his way through the empty Iron Cities and KFC buckets to the window. He tried to wrench it open, and nearly threw his back out before giving up.

  “Painted shut,” he said, hopscotching through the carpet rot back to the couch. “You still haven’t answered me.”

  Lipton played with his hair, trying to shape it in approximation of its former splendor. “Tony stole something of Marge’s.”

  “I don’t remember her filing a report.”

  “It’s not that kind of something.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Tony stole a photograph that belonged to her, all right?” Lipton smoothed down his shirt, rubbing at a fresh brown stain over the pocket. “She sent me to get it back.”

  “She did, huh? It wouldn’t be anything like a picture of our beloved President smiling at his own balls, which happen to have a happy face drawn on them, would it? With Mayor Marge down in the right-hand corner rooting him on?”

  Lipton clamped his hand over his mouth. “You know?”

  Manny stared at him, expressionless, until Lipton couldn’t take it and started babbling.

  “Okay, don’t look at me like that! You probably know all this already. There’s a congressional seat opening up because of redistricting, and Marge wants it.”

  “So?”

  “So, the Heinz family gave a quarter million dollars to the Republican party. They wanted to get one of H. J.’s heirs, some character named Melton, out of the ketchup business, which he’s apparently running into the ground. So they thought they’d put him in Congress. For their ‘contribution,’ the party will back him, supply endorsements, even fly in a couple of trophy Republicans, like William Bennett, to talk about his character. There’s not even going to be a Democrat opponent. Maybe the Heinz people bought them off, too. I don’t understand the American system.”

  “What’s that have to do with my ex-wife?”

  “Oh come on! If your President Bush makes a call and says ‘I want Marge Beeman,’ the Heinz boy will have to find another seat to buy. Maybe he can be mayor. Scandal trumps money, that’s what Marge says.” Lipton seemed to go in and out of hysteria. One second his voice was screechily high, the next it dropped to an urgent monotone. “She’s already made high-level inquiries, to some of Dick Cheney’s team.” Here he sighed dramatically. “Don’t you adore that man? He’s so buttery and ruthless!”

  Lipton closed his eyes, in the grip of some private, vice-presidential swoon, and Manny had to tap him. “Keep going.”

  “Okay, okay! These were Deep Politics People. That’s what she called them. Deep Politics People.” Lipton giggled. “It sounds like one of those tribes in New Guinea, doesn’t it? Where they practice manhood rituals!”

  “Maybe I’ve banged my head off the wall too many times,” Manny interrupted, “but am I missing something? Marge is in these photos, right?”

  “Exactement! And if the President doesn’t give her what she wants, she has a very juicy story about how she got there. Believe me, that photograph is more than enough to get our girl in Congress. Assuming George doesn’t ask Daddy to send some old hand from the CIA to make wet work out of her. Washington, D. C.,” he concluded dreamily. “Dupont Circle….”

  “Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself?”

  “Right, right,” said Lipton, racing from chirpy to morose and back again. “Did you find my car? God, this odor is like a living thing on my skin. Do you think we could catch ebola? We are both going to have to get steam-cleaned!”

  Something in Lipton’s frenzy set off a buzzer in Manny’s brain. The last thing he wanted to do was hang around Zank’s apartment. If Tony was fucked-in-the-head enough to come back, it would be a catastrophe. But he did not want to walk out without the whole story. Especially the part that Lipton, unless Manny was losing his touch, was holding back. The part that had the traumatized personal assistant jumping out of his skin.

  “How come you got so freaked-out?” Manny asked, trying and fai
ling to speak without breathing. “You were in that closet for what, an hour? Two hours?”

  Lipton’s mid-Atlantic grin looked depraved. “I lost my nerve. Like those blokes who try to rock climb, then get paralyzed with fear halfway up the cliff. They have to be snatched by your Park Service rescue copters.”

  “And I’m your rescue copter?”

  “Yes!” Lipton went tittery. Pleased with himself.

  “Well, what would happen if I called Mayor Marge right now?”

  “What?” Lipton fell back on the couch as if struck and plunged his face in his hands. Manny pulled them away.

  “She didn’t send you, did she?”

  “No.” Lipton whimpered. “Oh damn! I knew I shouldn’t have done it. I knew it!”

  “Done what, Lipton? Help Tony Zank rip off the mayor’s mansion?”

  “I only gave him the key!” Lipton bellowed. “I told him I wanted the photo. He could keep everything else. But he had to get greedy! After he did it, I never even heard from him. I mean, I waited. I called. I even wrote him a letter. Not a word! Finally I decided to come here. What else could I do? But then it all went wrong. Somebody took my car. Only it’s not my car, it belongs to the mayor’s office. Oh God! It was so easy to get in here. The door wasn’t even locked! But once I was inside, I suddenly realized, I could be killed!”

  Lipton tried to compose himself, and his tone changed again. Now he sounded like a BBC commentator.

  “One doesn’t generally think about violence. All we see is the eleven o’clock news kind. The kind that happens to someone else. But, once I walked in, the reality began to just wash over me. I realized, it could be me on the news! I could be one of those bodies they carry off in the bag, before they interview the neighbors who say what a jolly nice fellow I was.”

  Suddenly his voice veered back to squealy terror.

  “I’m going to die! That’s what I kept thinking. I could not stop imagining what would happen if Tony Zank, that criminal, that beast, that…disreputable person, just barged in while I was sneaking around his apartment. I realized, coming here was crazy! But what could I do? I was stuck. I was too scared to stay and too scared to leave. I simply could not move!”

  Lipton fussed desperately with his hair. Manny let him rave.

  “I started to freak out, and next thing I knew I was in the closet. In a full-blown panic attack. Have you ever had one? My God, it’s like bad LSD. I used to dabble, at university. But a panic attack is even worse, because you know you’re not on acid. It’s just you! The walls close in. The floor starts to wobble like a teeter-totter. I went absolutely catatonic. This dreadful stench…the danger…the sheer stupidity of what I’d done! I just kept thinking, I am going to die in this cesspool!”

  Lipton punctuated his soliloquy with a quick sob.

  “So you called me?”

  “I…I…called you. Was that wrong?”

  “Not particularly.” Manny arranged his face in a bored smile. “I can get you out of here. There’s just one thing.”

  “What?”

  “How’d my ex-wife get the photo in the first place?”

  Lipton clucked. “Oh God! There’s a story and a half.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Lipton sat back on the mildewed couch and crossed his legs. “San Diego,’ Ninety-six. The Republican Convention. Marge was a delegate, you know.”

  “I haven’t kept up.”

  “Well, she was. And, apparently, she and George Junior met up after some kind of platform committee thingy. I don’t know, I suppose he wasn’t having much fun. It was all about Bob Dole. And Jack Kemp. Remember him? The footballer. A bad time to be a Bush.”

  “Fuck the political landscape. Tell me how she got the picture.”

  “All right!” Lipton raised his hands in front of him, palms out, as though warding off a blow. “Look, I am not going to say cocaine and single malt scotch were involved. I’m paid to be discreet. Let’s just say George and Marge hit it off. They became very…relaxed. Very…uninhibited.”

  Lipton pursed his lips in what Manny supposed was his “knowing” look.

  “One thing led to another, and they ended up in Marge’s suite at the Four Seasons. You figure it out.”

  Something skittered across the carpet, mouse or rat, and Manny gave a start, surprised that even vermin could stand the odor.

  “You still haven’t told me. Who took the picture?”

  Lipton blushed all the way down to his GQ jaw. Then he looked away and admitted, in a tone shot through with embarrassment, “I did.”

  There was a tense silence. Manny sat with it. He fancied himself a connoisseur of awkward pauses. Verbal discomfort was a powerful tool. (Rubert’s Law Number One: When grilling suspects, do not react. The more provocative the admission, the more not-reacting you did. Which generally drove them to admit more, because of Rubert’s Law Number Two: All perps crave a reaction. It didn’t matter if they were hard-core felons or shoplifting trophy wives. Nine times out of ten, they’d tell you more than you asked, just to get you to say “Wow!”)

  Manny waited a beat, then marched out his most ho-hum demeanor. “You want to tell me what happened?”

  Lipton nodded rapidly. “They were, I don’t know, getting kind of silly. Marge started it. She asked if he wanted to play Abraham Lincoln.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That’s what W. wanted to know. So Marge showed him. First she took off her blouse and painted eyebrows over her nipples with Magic Marker. Then she drew a nose under her cleavage and painted a lipstick mouth just under her belly button.”

  “And then what?”

  Lipton appeared near tears. “Then she pulled down her panties and said ‘Look! Here’s Abe’s beard!’”

  “Thank God there’s no picture of that.”

  “The light wasn’t right,” said Lipton, missing the irony. “But they were both so loopy by then, he pulled down his pants and said, ‘Okay Marge, now I’ve got somebody I’d like you to meet!’”

  “Mister Biobrain?”

  “Not yet.” Lipton shot his cuffs. “Before he drew the smiley face, he painted a pair of eyeballs on his stomach, with Groucho brows, then he pretended his penis was a sort of long nose. ‘Look at my big honker, I’m Rabbi Dickstein!’ That’s what he said. ‘I’m Rabbi Dickstein! Have some matzoh!’ I suppose it’s some kind of fraternity gag. After that, I don’t know where he got the idea, he just started squeezing his, pardon my French, his man-bag, until it absolutely bulged, and then he sketched on that preposterous face. When he told her its name was ‘Mister Biobrain,’ Marge laughed so hard they both nearly fell off the loveseat. That’s when she said, ‘I must get a picture of this!’ I don’t know if she was thinking about blackmail, but I am certain that Mister Bush—he’s rather scrumpy in person—would not have agreed if he hadn’t been, as the saying goes, feeling very little pain….”

  The contrast between Lipton’s mannered enunciation and the subject at hand, not to mention the gamy flavor of their surroundings, was enough to induce some kind of psychic bends. And the codeine didn’t help. He kicked himself for not bringing a tape recorder.

  “So you were there the whole time?” he asked.

  “In the next room,” Lipton let out sheepishly. “Marge and I had adjoining suites. But, well, the door was open a crack. Anyway, she didn’t invite me in until she wanted the picture. So of course, I came in with the camera and I…I took the picture. That’s the whole story.”

  “Except for the menage-à-trois, right?”

  “Don’t even joke,” said Lipton.

  By now, Manny’s leg had gone to sleep. He shook it and saw that a viscous divot, some kind of green carpet-mold, clung to the bottom of his shoe. He prayed it was guacamole, but the stuff wouldn’t budge. He had to pry it off with his fingers and wipe them on the couch.

  “Let’s hear the rest,” Manny said matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean?”

  Manny massaged his ca
lf. “C’mon, you ripped off your boss. You wanted her to think some burglar had the photo, so you could pretend to buy it back and pocket the cash. Or else you were gonna double-cross her and sell it yourself. That was it, wasn’t it? Only Zank double-crossed you first. He kept the picture, so you decided you’d steal it back.”

  Lipton hung his head. He looked stricken. “It’s true.”

  Manny felt a rush of sympathy. “You’re no criminal. Why the hell would you do something like this?”

  “I need money.” For the first time, Lipton’s voice sounded unaffected. “And the man I needed to give the money to needs money.”

  “Somebody’s squeezing you?”

  As if forces within him were waging war for his soul, Lipton raised his head, then looked down again, then turned back to Manny, jutting his Ken doll–perfect chin defiantly. “The money is for Dr. Roos,” he declared. “So that he can make me the woman I am.”

  FORTY-ONE

  Tina was halfway back to her house—she had to clean up sometime—when she got the tingle. She’d been getting it since childhood. That prickly sensation, like a cool, rough hand on the back of her neck. Letting her know….

  She’d had it, for the first time, on the way home from school, the day she found her mother hanging from the trailer ceiling. And she had it now, imagining Manny in Zank’s apartment. It was nothing specific. A kind of cellular dread, a whisper across the skin: You’re here, but you should be there.

  Ignoring the vituperative honks of the blueberry SUV behind her, Tina slammed on the brakes, pulled a Richard Petty 180 in the middle of Liberty Boulevard, and aimed the rattling Impala back toward slaughterhouse row.

  Dreading something awful without knowing what, she screeched to a stop before the Bundthouse Arms. Leaving the car a foot from the curb, she scrambled out and made for the entrance. She was nearly there before she sensed him.

  Zank.

  She knew that stink. Even in the waft of long-dead pork that clogged the air, it dominated. The rank scent of crack-sweat, of flesh gone off. Shuddering, she recalled his tongue, that puff of corpse gas and malathion when he opened his mouth to kiss her. And the worst, the worst: that diseased slug of a penis, sliming her lips.