On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery

by Tom Schreck

  I nonchalantly made my way to the parking lot, not sure what I was about to get into. Trina was standing next to her Honda, nervously smoking a cigarette.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I asked.

  “Were you looking at porn in the office last night?”

  “Are you with the bishop’s office or something?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Well—”

  She didn’t let me finish.

  “Claudia knows. She checks that shit every morning with some program. She’s going to fire you. She’s already called Hymie and Espidera to meet with her. It’s in the policy manual.”

  “I was looking at it because of Walanda.”

  “It doesn’t matter. She thinks she’s got you now. She’s checking the browser history and she has the board guys coming in around four this afternoon to review it with them.”

  “Shit.”

  “Look, I gotta get back inside before she figures out I’m gone.”

  I didn’t think a small office like ours checked computer activity, but it was just like the Michelin Woman to be hung up on something like that. Looking at porn at work is almost indefensible and I couldn’t let on that I was trying to solve a murder. I was screwed.

  I had a couple of hours to come up with something, and I quickly figured out that it was time to call Rudy. He wasn’t in, but I left a message for him on his service and told them where I wanted him to meet me. Rudy would do anything for me and often did.

  I met Rudy for an early lunch at AJ’s and ordered two double orders of AJ’s hot chicken wings. Rudy loved them and attacked them more than he ate them. Whenever we had wings, he wound up with orange stains all over the front of his shirt and covering the lower half of his face. He looked like some sort of Stanley Kubrick circus clown when he ate wings.

  “What’s goin’ on, Duff?” Rudy asked. “What kind of trouble you in now?”

  “C’mon, Rudy, what makes you think I’m in some sort of trouble?”

  Rudy just looked at me.

  “All right—I need a favor.”

  AJ slid the two orders of wings in front of us. Rudy asked for extra bleu cheese, like he always did.

  “You know, kid, I got my own troubles. What kind of favor are you looking for?”

  “I need to get time off from work.”

  “C’mon, kid,” Rudy rubbed his forehead. “That shit hasn’t died down from last time.”

  “I’m not taking a fight, it’s something else.”

  “What is it then?”

  “It’s not important, it’s work bullshit. I think they’re going to fire me today.”

  Rudy was cleaning the wings right down to the bone like a kind of sabertooth, prehistoric, short fat guy. There were already speckles of wing juice dotting his shirt. The scary clown face was starting to form.

  The wings were good. AJ changed the oil in his Frialator about every solstice, which, as disgusting as it sounds, added to the taste.

  “All right, but I can only give you a temporary thing. You’re not going to be able to go out on a full disability. This will give you about a week.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “All right, let’s see … depression, nah too easy to question … fibromyalgia flare up … nah … better not … I got it.”

  He started to scribble on one of his prescription pads. He wrote as illegibly as any doctor and when he handed the note to me I had no idea what it said.

  “What is this?”

  “Irritable bowel syndrome—stomach cramps, the shits—often brought on by nervousness. You can’t go into work because of the cramps and the shits and, of course, the stress in your life.”

  Rudy was stripping the last evidence of DNA from the saucy drummette he held between his fat thumb and forefinger.

  “Will it work?”

  “Of course it will work. IBS is very hot these days.”

  “Rudy, you’re the best.”

  I finished up lunch and headed to Kinkos. I didn’t want to chance showing up and giving the Michelin Woman her chance to can me, so I decided to fax the note in. I hated the idea of Hymie thinking I was some sort of perv, but I could straighten that out later. They can’t fire you when you’re on disability, so I was in the clear—for a week or so.

  23

  Back at the Moody Blue, I was having problems settling down. There were just too many things happening at once. I was going to get fired from my job for any one of a number of reasons, people were going to think I was some sort of smarmy pervert who spends hours looking at porn sites, Mikey and Eli were still recovering, Shony was still gone, and Walanda’s murderers may or may not have something to do with one of those porn websites.

  Coincidence is a funny thing. The fact that Melissa from the jail was on a porn site and in jail with Walanda at the same time didn’t mean her and her friends had anything to do with killing her. At the same time, it was hard not to jump all over the conclusion that they did.

  I was pacing back and forth inside the Blue, which wasn’t exactly a mansion so I had to turn around quite a bit. I’d walk the length of the trailer, starting in the yellow formica world of the kitchen/dining area, past the built-in sofa and TV, through the narrow hallway by the bathroom, take a right into the living room, through the bedroom door, and finally turn around at the foot of my bed and start over. Al was asleep in the bedroom away from my pacing, which was just fine with me because he would probably find it objectionable and let me know it. I was working myself into a lather when there came a knock on my door.

  I opened the door cautiously. I didn’t feel like taking any chances.

  “Hey Duff.” It was Trina and she looked uncomfortable.

  “What’s up, what brings you out here?” I said. “C’mon in. The place is a mess.”

  “Look, after work, I was thinking.” She sat on the couch and ran a hand through her hair. She had on a pair of faded jeans and black shiny boots with a significant heel.

  “Do you want me to warn you of stuff like today? I mean, I don’t want to be the one who brings you bad news and I don’t want to feel like I’m, I don’t know …” she said.

  “No, I appreciate it. You probably saved me, at least for a little while.” Trina’s foot tapped nervously. “How’d my doctor’s note go over?” I said.

  “Claudia was pissed, but said something about that it wouldn’t be enough to save you this time.”

  “Figures. Did she tell Hymie?”

  “She called him—so I think so. She also had an emergency meeting of the Quality Assurance Committee.”

  “How does my looking at Internet porn become a quality assurance issue?”

  “She said it put the agency at risk for public relations.”

  “Geez, talk about bullshit.”

  “They met and she had me print out the history on your computer to show the committee.”

  “Great …”

  “Duff?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why were you looking at porn for four straight hours in the office?”

  “It had to do with Walanda and who killed her—but don’t tell anyone that. I don’t want them to know,” I said.

  “You’d rather have them think you’re an Internet pervert?”

  “For now, yeah.”

  “Duff, you’re not a pervert, are you?”

  “No, I’m not, Trina.”

  “Good.” She sighed.

  “Is that what brought you out here? You were worried that I was some sort of wack-job pervert?”

  Trina’s chin started to tremble and a single tear ran down her face. She didn’t make a sound.

  “That stuff was awful. Why would anyone like that?” It wasn’t a question for me, it was just a question she couldn’t answer.

  Trina put her face in her hands and started to sob. I moved to the couch and sat next to her and held her. It was a bit awkward because I had the side with no cushion. She buried her face in my chest and let go. I let her cry.

/>   It took awhile, but it subsided. She pulled back from me and kissed me on the cheek. I kissed her back lightly on the lips and when I did her lips parted ever so slightly. I felt her hand on my back as she pressed herself into me like she wanted to go through me. I held her head in my hands and kissed her hard.

  Trina held on to me with one hand while she untucked her shirt with the other. She was in a hurry and there wasn’t much grace to the movement. She moved my hands under her shirt, first to her waist. Her skin was warm and smooth and she was lean with a hint of muscle like a woman should be.

  Trina pawed at my shirt from the back to try to pull it off my head, and when it got tangled around my head we slid off the couch and down to the floor. She pulled off her shirt and undid her bra with an economy of motion. She rolled over so that she was on top of me and we were both naked from the waist up. This time there wasn’t the playfulness there was in the office, this time it was intense.

  Trina ground into me as she sat up on me, and she seemed to be almost in another world. She was with me, very much with me, but at the same time she was focused on herself. She slid off me and undid my jeans and pulled them and my underwear off with a strong tug. Trina stood and reached to pull the zipper down on each of her boots before she kicked them off. There was no strip play to this, this was a woman with purpose. She undid the snap on her faded jeans and did that same little wiggle to get out of her slightly too-tight pants that she did that night in the office. Trina climbed on top of me and let out a half sigh, half whimper. She pulled her hair back with both hands and tilted her head to one side as her face contorted with intensity. She had found her rhythm and was riding it.

  Trina’s pace picked up along with her breathing, which became shorter and more labored. I had entered my own world of intensity and was completely in the moment when Trina screamed.

  “Ahhhhh! What the hell is that?” Trina screamed while abruptly bucking off me in a way that bent and twisted me and turned pleasure into pain in a hurry.

  Shocked out of my blissful carnal state, I sat up quickly to see Al lapping away at the soft white skin of Trina’s ass.

  “Stop that, stop it, I said.” Trina pushed Al’s nose away from her butt and Al looked at me with an expression of confusion.

  “C’mon, Al, geez,” I said.

  “Make him go away,” Trina said. In a matter of seconds we had passed through a world of intense bliss into a world of unending awkwardness.

  “Al, go—C’mon, Al, go.” Al looked at me, then looked at Trina, and then back at me like he didn’t get why he wasn’t invited. “Sorry, Trina—it’s not that easy,” I said.

  I got up and walked Al to the bedroom while Trina sat with her arms around her knees covering up. Once I got back to the living room Trina looked up at me from the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. It was all I could think of.

  “I can honestly say that that has never happened to me before.”

  “You should be flattered. Clearly, Al likes you.”

  Trina went to punch me and when she did I grabbed her and pulled her on top of me as she giggled and play-acted resistance.

  “Now, where were we before the dog licked you on the ass?”

  Trina and I got dressed and I walked her to her car. It was that awkward moment after, and we found ourselves making small talk. I kissed her goodbye and she smiled at me. When she started up her car, I felt her eyes on me as she pulled out of the driveway. She smiled and reluctantly broke off the contact almost nervously and headed out Route 9R.

  As far as getting my mind off things, it worked, but only for a little while. Pretty soon I was back to pacing and thinking of everything. From what Trina said, it sounded like Claudia was circling her troops to get me in a pretty tight corner. The only way out now was to somehow find out about this Webster bullshit. The phone rang again and it was Jerry Number Two.

  “Duff, I got something you should see,” he said.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I think we better do this in person.”

  “Jer, you’re scaring me.”

  “Maybe we should be scared.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said.

  I got directions to Jerry’s place and headed over. My mind was racing and I was trying to slow my thoughts and, I guess, my fears down a bit. Elvis was doing “It Hurts Me,” the one from the Comeback Special, not the studio one. It was the type of song that calmed me down and helped me focus.

  Jerry lived in a basement apartment in the college ghetto part of town, which was kind of puzzling considering what he told me about his wealth. The neighborhood was filled with two-family homes that were rented to college kids who promptly littered their front lawns with beer cans, pizza boxes, and empty Doritos bags. Many of the houses were once the old homes of Crawford’s working class who took great pride in their appearance. Now, these homes were either bought up by real estate investors or handed down to sons and daughters whose only goals were to make money. You can charge each kid seven hundred dollars a month, put five of them in each apartment, and they never bother you about fixing anything as long as they can have their weekly keggers. Once nice neighborhoods become ugly, any property owner who does care about their house finds the fastest way possible to move to the suburbs. Of course, there were the college ghetto perks too. Down the corner from Jerry’s place there were two ultra-cool coffee shops, a place to get a tan and your nails done, and three places to buy used CDs.

  There was one door to his place and it was at the end of a five-step cement stairwell. The building was a hundred-year-old five-story apartment building with about ten apartments. Jerry hollered for me to come in, and I did.

  His living room consisted of a futon couch, a futon chair, and one of those big circular rattan chairs with the pillow in the center. The place was filled with big plants, hanging in front of the basement windows and standing on either side of every piece of furniture. As I looked around, it dawned on me that I was standing in the middle of a bumper crop of marijuana. Jerry called to me from another room and I followed the sound of his voice.

  Jerry’s office looked like something you’d see in the Batcave. There were four computer monitors going, there was a stack of black metallic boxes with lots of wires and blinking lights, and the room hummed from the sound of all the fans within the computer machinery. I had no idea what all the stuff was, but I knew it wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t simple.

  “Hey Duff.” It was weird seeing Jerry without a Cosmo in front of him. “Thanks for coming over,” he said.

  “Sure, Jer. What have you found?” I said.

  “Pull up a seat. This will take some explaining.”

  I wheeled over one of Jerry’s four office chairs. Jerry called up www.Xcracksterweb.com on his computer and pivoted the twenty-inch monitor so we could both see.

  “Okay, try to follow me, Duff. When you look at this webpage you see the usual stuff, in this case, porn. The menu on the bottom brings you to other pages, like the page that asks you for a password and user name.”

  “I gotcha so far.”

  “I got into the pay site with some hacking software.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Basically, I have software that throws the dictionary, the alphabet, and numbers zero through nine at the user name box. When the software finds a user name it starts the same process with the password.”

  “Does that always work?”

  “It does because most people are very lazy when it comes to password security. They use birthdays and initials and common names. This site required at least an eight-character password, which is very unusual. It means they were really concerned with getting caught.”

  “Go on.”

  “So anyway, I got in and this is what was there.”

  Jerry went to the pay page and I braced myself to see something really disturbing. When the page appeared, I let out my breath and became confused. It was the web pattern again being spun by a spider.
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br />   “What’s this? Why would anyone pay for this?” I said.

  “That’s what the Webmaster wants you to think. There’s something else to it,” Jerry said.

  “What?”

  “All right, this is where it gets a little complicated. Looking at this, all you see is the little spider spinning an endless web, right?”

  “Yeah …”

  “If you go to the menu on the top of the browser and click on ‘view’ and then click on ‘source’ this is what you get.”

  Jerry pulled down the menu and it revealed line after line of that cryptic computer language, some in different colors. Some of the words said things like “table,” “head,” “width,” and “style.”

  “Jerry—now you’re getting weird on me. I have no idea what this shit is.”

  “All it is, is the code for techs to understand how the page was constructed. It’s sort of like a blueprint to understand its construction.”

  “So?”

  “If you scroll all the way down, you see this called ‘area shape poly’?”

  “Yeah …”

  “That means there’s a hidden link in the page.”

  “What do you mean ‘hidden’?”

  “You know when you’re on a webpage and there’s a menu and you can just click on it and it brings you to another page?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well this is a link that’s not labeled.”

  “So—where is it?”

  “It’s the little spider. If you click on the spider it takes you there.”

  Jerry clicked on the spider. At this point the suspense had me on edge and I wanted Jerry to just get to the point, but I realized knowing the hows and whys had some value.

  The hidden link was a plain white page with the following web address:

  briefcase.yahoo.com

  Under the address there was a simple line of directions that said:

  Username: Webster

  Password: 4#crackgirls

  Jerry went to the briefcase webpage and put in the instructed username and password. It immediately went to a page with a series of folders marked simply with dates.