by Linda Sands
It was his fault, he figured later. He never should have fallen asleep, never should have let her get comfortable on his chest, never should have had that last drink. When he woke up, he was tired, hungover, and sore—in a good way.
In the living room, Sylvia sat in an armchair smoking a cigarette and exhaling out a cracked-open window. He was pleased to see her still there, naked and vulnerable, until he saw the book in her lap. He wondered where she had found it, and why she was looking at him like that.
He played the whole chess game out in his head and knew that there were other things he would have to do, now that she had advanced her pawn on his castle. If he had been a different man he might have allowed himself to have a relationship, might have felt love again, might have made babies, raised a family, taken vacations to the mountains, learned to ski, bought a dog. But no. It was a shame—all of it.
Jimbo almost winced when she asked, “Who’s Sandy Wykowski?” followed by, “Why do you have her son’s book?”
The call was made on a disposable phone he’d bought a month before. Jimbo hated calling in a favor, but a dead girl demanded it. He knew it would cost him later. These guys knew him as a risk-taking gambler, a guy used to having his balls against the wall. They’d help, but they’d hold him accountable. It could mean going to the track to claim a winner, moving a mysterious car to a place it was bound to be stolen, answering a cell phone at a designated time and reading words from a note card, then pitching both into an incinerator in an industrial park—not that he’d been asked that yet, but those were the kinds of things he might expect. The payback didn’t matter when you needed help, when you wanted someone to do what you needed, no questions asked, and all without looking you in the eye.
Chapter 30
TEDESCO HEARS DEAD PEOPLE, AND SOMETIMES THEY SOUND LIKE LOONS
When I work a case, I like to think the guy or girl I’m assigned to is trying to help me by slipping up, by leaving clues. Some people are convinced bad guys want to be caught and the lost want to be found. I guess I’m one of those people.
I couldn’t afford to think this all the time, especially not when the cases were about dead people. That would just be weird. It’s one thing to follow a living creep who’s running around on his girl, lying about where he spent the night, and denying the red-haired son that calls him daddy one weekend a month in Idaho, but it’s a whole different ballgame when I’m on the mound of a grave and I see something no one else does—that the day she died is her wedding anniversary and maybe the husband really wasn’t on that trip to New York as he claimed, because couldn’t anyone check into the Ritz, pay cash, and say he was Thomas Elton?
Maybe I’m making myself out to be more important than I really am. Maybe just being observant, being open to possibility is what it takes to hear the clues, to see the solutions. In actuality I’m no more psychic than fakers who claim they can talk to your dog—the canine who wants to be walked more.
Being as observant as I am can be tiring. Lying on my bed and listening hard to the tape that Tommy’s pal “Big C” broke down for us was making me sleepy. Tommy left the tape and another envelope that I hadn’t opened yet in my mailbox with a note telling me to call him later. At 9:22, to be precise. Not a minute later. He had this way of making me his alibi, his excuse. I didn’t mind. Much.
I was about to close my eyes when I heard it—a sound in the background of the tape that I hadn’t heard before. I sat up, punched Rewind and listened again. I was instantly transported back to the Adirondacks, the seventies, and church camp.
I love how brains can do that. I can hear a song that will put me right back into the angst of teenhood, complete with painful acne and the taste of bong water on my tongue. Aural memories were almost as potent as scent for me, and that sound, a loon crying in the background on James Smith’s tape, took me back to two places where birds were that sad—the lakes of upstate New York and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Having lived through winters in both, I understood the loons.
I’d never truly enjoyed the wintery outdoors. Sure, snowmobiling and the occasional day of ice fishing were fun, but you wouldn’t catch me shushing down a snow-covered mountain for hours at a time.
Growing up with inclement weather meant lazy winters that lasted long enough for you to smell spring coming and start getting the fat off before shorts-and-T-shirt season hit. I had friends who did the whole seasonal thing well. They’d been raised in families that swapped out clothes every three months, had specific houses for specific times of the year, and routines that were celebrated along the way to usher in spring, summer, fall, and winter.
Not our family. When the Tedescos said we were “going to camp,” we were talking about a one-room hunting cabin in the Adirondacks, not a million-dollar lake house retreat or a quaint, historic, shabby-chic cottage at the shore.
My dad and his buddies from the bowling league had bought the land in the late sixties and built a cabin that they swore every year to modernize but instead left it as it was, mending it with tar paper, caulk, and cast-off barn wood when required.
The men loved that rustic place. They hauled in buckets of well water, cooked on a woodstove, pissed in the woods, and shit in a two-hole outhouse while resting their feet on a mouse-eaten bag of lime and perusing twenty-year-old Playboy magazines. There were windows in the one-room cabin but the huge pines hid the sunlight, encouraging the growth of moss on the roof and the burrowing of squirrels in the drainpipes. Sleeping in the cabin was a claustrophobic test. Night descended like bondage.
The place smelled like decay and skunk with a hint of maple syrup. I imagined that when the men were up there in the winter during deer season, it would smell more like tobacco, baked beans, and bourbon—with a gassy overtone.
I never got a chance to experience the place as an adult, add my own scents, since the government bought up the land with plans to expand the hydroelectric plant upriver. By that time our family had separated into two different kind of camps: them and us. And that never made good company in the woods.
For the most part, I’d forgotten about the cabin and the summers my brothers tormented me there until I was dancing with the guys as Free Willy and Axle, our promoter, decided to expand our circuit with shows in the Adirondacks—thankfully not during hunting season.
He already had us dancing at birthday parties, drunken bachelorette fiascos, and once even at a gay guy’s coming-out party. Sometimes the clients wanted a pair, sometimes we went solo. It was easy money. I never felt uncomfortable and almost always segued the dancing into a karaoke session starring the guest of honor. I’d leave my card and at least one T-strap behind, assuring I’d be remembered. Sometimes a familiar face would show up to vote for me at a local contest and I’d have to think twice to remember if I’d stripped for them, slept with them, or wished their Granny Ethel a happy eighty-fifth.
When the bookings ran dry—thanks, Chippendales, for raising that bar—we played bodyguard to female strippers, or exotic dancers as they preferred to be called, even though the only thing exotic about them was their choice of career.
Axle set up a guy’s sixtieth birthday party all the way out in Number Four, New York. The Leopard Lounge girl couldn’t go. She had issues. It might have been that there was no one to watch her kid, or that she had her period, or any one of the bullshit excuses Axle said he had to wade through when he worked with women. At any rate, he’d booked a waitress instead, a friend of the stripper, a girl who appeared so young and innocent that she had no business even listening to the kind of music I was supposed to play for her at that gig.
As her driver and bodyguard, I was the guy who was supposed to save her if something went down. I couldn’t carry a real weapon, but I was bigger back then, and sometimes intimidation was enough. Especially in Number Four, New York. I hit the weights hard before I picked her up, trying to get as pumped up as a guy could who’d spent the last week eating extra-cheesy nachos and drinking twelve-packs of beer.
> I pulled up to the perfect little white house in the perfect little neighborhood and practiced a grimace in the rearview. I looked more constipated than cruel.
Mandy stepped out, calling good-bye to someone inside, then skipped to the car and tossed a small pink bag into the backseat. She was as sweet as they had warned me, and that made my stomach turn, made me feel like a pusher in a schoolyard. Next time, Axle could do his own dirty work, I thought.
I hesitated before I put the car in reverse. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Been wanting to for a long time,” she said, letting her coat fall open to reveal a plaid miniskirt and gartered stockings.
I made my way up to her face. She smiled, then ran her tongue over her lower lip and winked.
“Are you Catholic?” I asked.
“How did you know?” she said.
“Just a guess.”
We drove through the familiar towns of my youth, but this time I didn’t have fishing and marshmallow-roasting on my mind. It didn’t help that Mandy’s skirt had ridden up, or that her fingers were doing a dance of their own up and down my leg, with the occasional squeeze when a wild animal crossed the road. Eventually we arrived at the Elks Lodge, parked in the back as we had been told to, and were met at the door by a crooked old man who smelled like boiled cabbage. He tried to stand a little taller when he saw Mandy, but even pulling on his suspenders and jutting his wobbly chin out, the poor guy was still angling toward the floor.
I thought I should invent something for old crooked people, like a ceiling pulley system or The Tedesco Antigravity Belt. I was thinking so hard about this great invention that I missed what the guy was saying to Mandy. I figured the gig was a surprise like they all were and that the birthday boy would be happy to see us, just maybe a little shy at first. I hoped it was only the guys, then I remembered where we were—in an Elks Lodge on the outskirts of a logging town in the Adirondacks. Yeah. It would be men.
I followed Mandy down the hall, reading the hand-written posters on the wall informing members that dues needed to be current and that this Friday the fish fry would be delayed in honor of the annual Bob Miller parade. I wasn’t sure who Bob was or why he’d earned himself a parade, but I figured he must be a pretty important guy because I knew how much those Elks liked a fish fry.
Mandy stopped short and I bumped into her, catching her in the back of the knees with the swinging boom box. She buckled but recovered quickly with a little “whoopsie” and a giggle.
“Sorry,” I said.
“That’s okay.” She looked around, started to take off her coat.
“Is he here already?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m supposed to wait until they start singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ then walk out. Do you think they’ll be able to hear the music from the doorway? Or should I walk it out with me?”
“It’s kind of heavy. Maybe I should just run it from here. If you need it to be louder I can bring it out to you.”
“Yeah, okay.” She started to stretch, legs wide, arms overhead, swaying side to side. She hummed something low in her throat and closed her eyes. It was pretty damn sexy. I had to look away. Twice.
I stepped up to the door and looked through the window. There was a big, open space with a fireplace on one wall, a bunch of windows on the other. It looked cold in there—and empty. Seven or eight guys sat behind cheap buffet tables arranged in one big rectangle. I looked at the room from my perspective, as if I was the entertainer and this was my show. You could leap over the tables into the center of the rectangle and dance inside, but the flimsy tables wouldn’t hold if you climbed up on them. I’d had one collapse on me in Ithaca—gave me a bruised ass for months.
The chairs were metal folding chairs, nice props for swinging around, standing on and tipping over, or slapping closed. The sound always got a yelp out of the ladies.
As for Mandy, I bet she’d look pretty hot straddling one, showing off her gartered stockings or perched sideways, frozen in the Flashdance pre-water drenching moment. I hoped she wasn’t too new to be able to work the room.
See, that was the thing. You were hired by the buddies as a gift to the birthday boy, but for them to feel like their money was well spent, you had to do something special for the rest of them. Everyone wanted something, and it was up to Mandy to figure out how to give it to them and come out richer for it in the end.
I glanced over my shoulder to see her bumping and grinding, running her hands down her body, warming up with an invisible audience. Yeah, she’d be able to work the room.
Celebratory singing filtered through the door—the voices of old men with secrets and hearing aids. I let Mandy through and as soon as the fat, bearded guy said, “Look what we got for ya, Vern!” I pushed Play and let the sounds of The Gap Band remind Mandy what she was there for. She pranced into the room, spun around twice like one of the Jacksons, then unzipped her skirt and stepped out of it, rotating her hips and moving her hands higher and higher, all the while shaking her nice Catholic hair. She approached the tables half-undone, kicked and spun and wriggled like a combination karate/ballet/tango instructor. She turned around and was working the buttons of her shirt when the birthday boy held up a hand.
“No, no,” he said. “It’s all right.”
Mandy approached, swiveling her hips and pouting.
“I mean it, little lady,” Vern said, louder. He held out the skirt she’d tossed in his direction and turned his head away. “You don’t have to,” and then, softer, “You never have to.”
Something in Mandy clicked off. I turned up the music a notch, tried to get her attention, but she was frozen to the spot, her eyes tearing up. She was losing it.
None of the men there got it, not really. When Mandy pretended to laugh, threw back her head and danced away, I was the only one who saw her wipe those tears from her cheeks, the only one who saw how that old man had touched her. I figured we wouldn’t be using this waitress again. She’d be back in church before Sunday.
The men paid us in full, along with a little tip, as we’d driven all that way and arrived right on time. Apparently punctuality was a big Elks thing.
That was almost twenty years ago. I wondered where Mandy was now, what she’d done with her life, if she’d ever regretted her moment with Vern and the boys, if she’d ever told anyone.
Smith’s tape was still humming in the microcassette player. I rewound it to hear the loon calls again, then pulled out my wallet and fished through the receipts, balling a few up and tossing them, until I came to Candy’s business card—I mean Susan, the lake property specialist. I liked to say I was a U-turn from anywhere. Now I was pleased I’d come full circle, back to the strip club.
Sometimes you know where you’re supposed to be, you just have to remind yourself by fucking up a bit. That was my theory about life, for the most part. There are no mistakes if you learn from your choices and there is no such thing as a dead end as long as you can still put it in reverse. It took me a lot of trash-ridden alleyways to understand that, and though I was no valedictorian, I wished I could impart this knowledge to every college graduate.
But I wasn’t Vonnegut. I was a PI with a hunch.
Chapter 31
SHE WAS LYING WHEN SHE SAID DON’T WORRY IF IT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR ANYONE ELSE TO HEAR, JUST SING, SING A SONG
I called Tommy on the way out the door, told him about the loons—told his voice mail anyway—and floated my idea about how we could provide a little legitimate work for a struggling single mom.
It was too early to find Candy-aka-Susan Harrington, the stripper-realtor at The Leopard Lounge, so I sent her a text. I punched in the little letters on my phone thinking I was taking on these technological advances pretty well, even if my spelling still stunk. I figured she’d need a few hours to get all the info I’d requested and in the meantime I’d head to My Place so I could do a little thinking.
I parked the Lincoln in the owner’s slot out front, knowing Randall would
want me to and not caring what Francie said. She was going to give me shit no matter where I parked. It was what we did.
As I walked into the bar I heard a girl singing, or maybe it was a guy. After all, I had to remember where I was.
I sat at my regular booth and tried to shake off the ghosts of my past as I strained to see around the fake plants to the karaoke stage. I could see Francie’s back, her waving arms, and bobbing head. She seemed engrossed in her bitch-out session, but not so much that she missed shooting me a dirty look when my phone gave off a loud and jarring ring.
She yelled, “You know the rule. Mute it or lose it.”
“Sorry. I’ll just take it outside,” I said, getting up and heading for the exit.
“Yeah? That’s good,” she said, walking away from the stage.
I saw the girl that had been singing—a skinny thing with glasses and frizzy hair. She was crying.
Francie shot me another glare from behind the bar, as she added, “And Willy, why don’t you leave it out there?”
The guy at the bar high-fived Francie as if she’d just said the most amazing thing. She slapped him back, smiling, then slid a fresh beer his way. I wondered what Randall would think of that, then immediately felt bad for even thinking it, because this was Francie and Randall—the great not-so-American love story, and he was dying and who the fuck was I to deny her companionship, or love, even?
I let the door close behind me, glad to see Francie too engrossed with the new guy to bother locking me out.
I figured the call was Tommy getting back to me, so I was short and snappy when I answered, “Tedesco.”
“Oh. Hey, it’s me, Buf . . . Barbara. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, sure.” I cleared my throat. “How are you?”
“I’m fine. But, I wondered if I could see you today?”