On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery

by Tom Schreck

  I took Henry’s advice and got the lox on a sesame bagel with cream cheese. He was right on both counts, the lox were very good and the sesame bagel was a tad chewy. Nonetheless, it was a nice way to start the day.

  Hymie finished up and we bid our farewells to the crew with Hymie taking care of everyone’s check. The men took turns each morning picking up the tab, and they all accused Duke of ordering more extravagantly when someone else was paying. We climbed into Hymie’s 2006 Cadillac DTS, the model that used to be called the DeVille. I guess technically it still was, though GM had gone to great lengths to try to distance the current Cadillacs from the cars of their heritage. It was a silly strategy, in my opinion. I highly doubted that the Generation Xers and the rappers and whatever demographic represents today’s youth would be interested in De­Villes, regardless of what they did to them. That’s precisely why I liked them.

  Now, they’re advertised in goofy magazines like Maxim or Stuff and are all muscled up to look “extreme”—whatever the hell that is. The result is you get old guys with osteoporosis and three hairs left on their heads putting on their cardigans and getting into some vehicle that looks like a car that could win at Daytona. The paradox of the situation is that guys like Hymie have been trading in one DeVille for the other every two years and wouldn’t entertain a single thought of doing anything else. So you get cars that can go 160 miles per hour in second gear and they’re driven by eighty-year-olds who go forty in the right-hand lane of the highway with their left turn signal on in perpetuity.

  “You got any fights on the horizon, Duff?” Hymie asked, puffing on his Garcia Vega.

  “There won’t be any fights for a little while,” I said.

  “Why?” Hymie said.

  “There was a bit of an incident in Kentucky.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “The guy said some awful things about Smitty. Then he said some bad stuff about my mom and dad and being Irish and Polish. With all the stuff I’ve been dealing with, I lost it.”

  “What happened?” There was concern in Hymie’s voice.

  “I knocked him out,” I said.

  “And for that you get suspended?”

  “I did it with a thumb and elbow. I broke the guy’s jaw.”

  “You are a crazy Irishman.” He looked at me and laughed, playfully slapping me in the face.

  “Son, tell me about this paperwork problem you got.” He changed the subject, but kept his eyes on the road and didn’t change his expression.

  “Ah, Hymie, it’s my own damn fault. Most of the paperwork is bullshit. I’d rather spend the time with the people than writing about it.”

  “This Claudia, she’s none too happy. It could cost you your job, you know.”

  “I know that, Hymie, and I make no excuses. I should do it.”

  “Son, the place needs you. You’re the soul of the place. I’ve never been a big one on regulations, but you can’t ignore them.”

  “You’re absolutely right.”

  “You know I try not to interfere with how the place is run. If she wants you to go for legitimate reasons, I won’t intervene.”

  “I understand that and wouldn’t expect you to.”

  We were quiet for a while after that. He was direct and honorable in how he handled things with people. Good news or bad news, he delivered it directly and without manipulation. Hunched over, short, bald, about 140 pounds, with thick glasses, he was a man’s man.

  We went out Route 27, which had beautiful trees and an occasional deer and not much of anything else. It’s basically two lanes that take you to some of the most forgotten places in the state. About every ten miles there’s a gas station with a convenience store, or when you hit the really big metropolises, you’ll get an Agway. It’s the kind of highway where running into deer and falling asleep due to the boredom run neck and neck for the lead in causing fatalities. Along the way, we passed the sign for Forrest Point and I got to thinking of that trio of women in the jail group. They were clearly linked together. It was obvious not only from the tattoos but also from the way they related to each other. It was more than just a friendship; it was almost some sort of sycophantic bonding. Like they were all united toward something. Whatever it was, it seemed evil to me.

  Hymie threw in his Louie Prima CD. He was a huge Prima fan, which certainly didn’t fit with being Jewish. Prima’s music recently caught fire again when the Gap ran a commercial with Brian Setzer’s version of “Jump, Jive an’ Wail.” Prima was the real deal and was more rock and roll than anything else. Hymie had the CD queued up to “Buona Sera” and he was starting to groove. First his brake foot started to tap, then, as sax man Sam Butera lit into his solo, Hymie replaced the tapping with all-out stomping. By the time Prima joined in on the trumpet, Hymie was slapping his gnarled-up, arthritic hand to his thigh and improvising his own scat. New Orleans jumpin’ jazz with a Brooklyn Jew accent is really something you’ve got to hear. Then he’d throw his head back and shimmy so much that the four or five hairs that went across the top of his head would get messed up.

  We pulled into the parking lot of the soon-to-be halfway house with Hymie and Louie dueting on the “The Sheik of Arabie.” The building was being renovated so there were several pickup trucks and a handful of contractors mulling around. There were half a dozen cars in the parking lot to the left of the building, and I recognized Monique’s older Volvo and Claudia’s Camry.

  The building wasn’t quite in the middle of nowhere, but nowhere wasn’t far away. Therapeutically, that had its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it meant very few distractions for the clients, giving them the opportunity to focus exclusively on their treatment.

  On the negative side, it meant there were very few distractions, giving the clients the continual nightmare of focusing only on their treatment. Although a lot of human service professionals will have you believe that a person can spend all day doing nothing but focusing on themselves, talking about themselves, and examining themselves, I don’t think it’s a very practical idea. Short periods away from bad situations help, but after even a short amount of time, people start getting buggy. Spending all day talking about yourself makes you completely self-absorbed, which I never found to be therapeutic for anything. Unless you’re a social worker, and then talking about yourself all day is a fun and necessary professional activity. It beats working anyway.

  The waiting area/lobby of the building was half done and there were the requisite coffee and goodies set up on a long folding table. The table was filled with simple carbohydrated deep-fried goodies along with fat, tasteless bagels and opened tubs of various cream cheeses. There was one of those fifty-cup percolators going, making what I knew would be horrible human-services coffee.

  There were stickies at the sign-in desk for us to write our names and titles on and stick to our shirts. Espidera was there and tried his “shalom” routine with Hymie and gave me one of those fist handshakes that are now in vogue with athletes and celebrities. I saw Monique talking to a woman with shoulder-length brown straight hair and wearing those very thin, nerdy black glasses, the kind that Ashleigh Banfield and that woman who did the news on Saturday Night Live wore. There was something particularly sexy about those glasses. I think it gave the woman that kind of smoldering librarian look, the kind that made you think the woman was just dying to free herself from all the inhibitions and restrictions that the professional world forced on her. That, or she was nearsighted.

  I went over to Monique with my cup of coffee. Monique was wearing baggy high-waisted men’s pants, a white turtleneck, and a blue blazer, which against her dark skin made her look strikingly handsome.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Hey Duff, good morning,” Monique said. “Duff, this is Katy. She works at the Eagle Heights clinic.”

  I extended my hand. Katy briefly smiled but had a look to her that stated, or at least tried real hard to state, that she was all business and not a flighty girl right out of co
llege. Young women entering the social-work field often work very hard at the feminist thing, and they put a lot of effort into the look of being all business.

  “Hi Katy,” I said. “How long have you been at the clinic?”

  “Four months,” Katy said. “But I did my externship here for the previous year.”

  I never understood the difference between an internship and an externship. For Katy, making the point that she had done her externship here was a way of pointing out that she had far more experience than four months. Being new and young in this business is tough. A lot of counseling skills come from what you’ve experienced in life, and if you haven’t had a chance to experience a lot in life, then your skills will be limited. Counselors like Katy tried to compensate for that by looking serious and immediately adopting as much psychobabble into their vocabulary as possible. It was a futile attempt to cover up the fact that the bulk of their life’s experience has been obtained in dorm rooms and on the campus quads. When college kids like this got clients like, say, Walanda on their caseloads, the clients had a great time taking them for a ride.

  Bowerman called for everyone’s attention and took the time to introduce the board members present and then asked Espidera to say a few words.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Espidera was doing his best sincerity act. “I just feel so blessed to be able to bring to this area such a needed resource.”

  “Especially if you need the deduction,” I whispered to Monique, who smirked inconspicuously.

  “The real credit goes to all of you,” Espidera continued turning toward Claudia and Bowerman. “Especially to Claudia and Rhonda for the leadership and direction you’ve both shown to this organization.”

  It was nauseating but, thankfully, it didn’t last long. From there we were walked through the building where we got to see the suites the patients would live in. They were suites because each bedroom had a small alcove off of it for any children. There was a group dining room that wasn’t finished, but I could already tell that it was going to be furnished in that faux-homey way that somehow screamed institutional while trying to accomplish the opposite. There was a lot of that in these types of places.

  We got to see the multipurpose room, a room where lectures, multi-family counseling, and probably any type of exercise class would be held. There were two separate rooms for group therapy, one with a two-way mirror for observation. There were three small offices for the staff to do their individual sessions and a large office for Bowerman. There was also an unfinished area that Bowerman told us was going to be another multipurpose area that wasn’t complete yet and so we didn’t get to see it.

  All this excitement was getting to be too much for me to handle, and it was about to get worse. We had another break, and then it was time for the retreat and team-building segment of the day. We all shuffled into the multipurpose area and got ready for a series of goofy lectures and group exercises. The best part of these days was that the lecturers were never well prepared and it usually meant that the day, which was supposed to go to five, would actually wind up by about three thirty in the afternoon.

  We were right on schedule to end at three thirty when the Michelin Woman got up and rambled on for an extra fifteen minutes about the importance of a new regulation affecting exactly when treatment plan updates needed to be reviewed by physicians and the importance it was going to have in regard to patient care. She loved the order of regulations, and it kept her from ever having to focus on actually helping a living, breathing person. Talking to the people who came to the clinic was tedious and it was hard to measure if anything we ever did reached them. It was much safer to obsess yourself with regulations.

  By the time she finished, I was so bored I felt hypnotized. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home. I felt like I needed some mental floss.

  19

  I got back to the Moody Blue just after five, got my rousing greeting at the door from Al, checked my mail, and hit the play button on my answering machine.

  “Duff, it’s Jerry, c’mon by AJ’s tonight. I got some stuff. None of it earth shaking, but I think you’ll be interested.”

  That was interesting, and I was glad to hear Jerry actually got to the project. I was afraid he’d get lost in Star Trek stuff and get abducted by some Klingons. It was too early to head to the bar and there wasn’t enough time to head to the gym, so I opened a Schlitz and sat on the good side of my couch. The remote wasn’t on the coffee table and it wasn’t between the cushions or on the end table. Having to actually get off the couch to change stations seemed like the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to get dinner going. It was unacceptable.

  I got off the couch to search for the remote. Generally speaking, it had to be in the general area of the TV because there was no reason to bring it away from the television. It wasn’t underneath the living room furniture or behind anything. On my third search through the sofa cushions, as I tried to heft Al from his side of the couch, it dawned on me.

  “You better not have,” I said to my new housemate.

  Al’s eyebrows went up, his eyes got a little shifty, and he let out a high-pitched sigh. I wasn’t about to accept that as an explanation. I went to the kitchen and lo and behold, there, next to his food dish, on his special mat with the paw prints were Al’s two newest chew toys. Not the rawhide bones I bought so he’d stop eating the couch, not the fuzzy carrot with the squeaky thing in the middle—those objects remained in the spot I left them with absolutely no evidence of slobber. Instead, there sat my multifunction, all-in-one remote covered in slobber with teeth marks up and down its length and missing the six, seven, and nine buttons. I guess this was Al’s version of parental controls. Next to the remote was what was left of my cordless phone. There was no antenna, there were chew marks all over the back of it, and there was slobber on all the keys.

  I took the remote and stood over him as he slept on the couch.

  “Bad!” I yelled with the remote in my hand. That was what the Dogs for Dummies book I bought at PetSmart said to do. I was vigorously showing my displeasure with Al’s behavior and associating it with the object.

  Al opened his eyes, which from his recumbent posture deeply furrowed his brow, and then he closed his eyes and let out a sigh. He was either overcome with guilt and couldn’t look me in the eye or he was practicing some sort of deep breathing transcendental basset meditation.

  I pointed the remote at the cable box and no matter what button I hit, it returned me to the Lifetime Channel. Talk about cruel irony. I was either going to have to get up every time I wanted to change a channel, get a new remote, or spend my life watching cable programming for angry women. The thought of watching endless movies about evil men repeatedly wronging victimized women made me shiver. Going to AJ’s a bit early was a much better idea.

  Apparently, there’s no such thing as early for the Fearsome Foursome. It was some sort of existential quirk that no matter what time I got there, they were always present. I guess they merely exist independent of the natural laws of time. They were the only ones in and it was too early for Kelley.

  “You have to watch it real close,” Rocco said. “But it’s obvious.”

  “Why the hell would the Disney Company have a minister in The Little Mermaid get a boner?” TC said.

  “Ministers get boners,” Jerry Number One said.

  “That’s not all,” Jerry Number Two said. “In Finland they don’t allow Donald Duck movies.”

  “What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Rocco said.

  “They got really angry at the fact that he doesn’t wear pants,” Jerry Number Two said.

  “Thank God it’s the minister getting the boners!” TC said.

  It was a shame to intrude when so much was getting done, but I noticed Jerry Number Two had a very fat binder in front of him. I walked around the group with my Schlitz and sat next to him. I was hoping that sitting exactly opposite my usual position would not result in complete entropy for the universe.


  “Hey Jer, what ya got for me?”

  “Check this out,” Jerry slid the binder in front of me.

  The binder was about an inch and a half thick. I opened it up and saw that the first page was a title page, neatly typed like some sort of FBI report.

  Report on Internet Sites Related to Webster,

  Web, Spiders, and Related Search Words

  Prepared by Gerald M. Freeman

  After the first page was a detailed table of contents listing websites and separated into categories. The categories included Webster, Web, Spider, and Miscellaneous Related Words, and were further divided into the subcategories Free Access, Pay Access, Member Only by Invitation, and Non-Pornographic.

  “Holy shit, Gerald, this is unbelievable!”

  “It’s the best I could do quickly. With more time, I could have got you more detail.”

  “More detail? Are you kidding? Where’d you learn to do this kind of work?”

  “My old gig.”

  “I didn’t realize you used to work. I mean I knew you must’ve …” I began to realize how insulting that must have sounded. Jerry didn’t seem to care.

  “I used to be big into computers. I was really into it.”

  “Where did you work?”

  “In the early eighties I spent some time with the Quantum Computer Services corporation doing Internet stuff,” Jerry took a hit off his Cosmo.

  “In the early eighties?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t realize there even was the Internet back then.”

  “Well, there wasn’t really, at least not like today. We were working on it.”

  “What happened?”

  “The company changed hands a few times, got bought and sold, and got really commercial. I wasn’t thrilled with the commercialization, so I quit.”

  “What ever happened to Quantum?”

  “It became AOL.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “No,” Jerry downed the rest of the Cosmo and slid it to the edge of the bar. “I took the stock options they paid me and got out in ’94. Cashed in the stock in ’98.”