by David Stukas
“That, in a nutshell, is what’s bothering me, Robert.”
“What? The break-ins?”
“Just one, Robert. Just one in particular.”
16
Monette and Robert See the Light
A half hour and a cab ride later, we arrived at my apartment building. We climbed the stairs, and as we approached the door to my dump, both of us knew instantly that something was wrong. From inside the apartment, you could hear two males voices talking to each other and pawing through my things and tossing them aside carelessly when they didn’t find what they were looking for.
“What are we going to do?” I whispered.
“Call the police, I guess,” was Monette’s answer.
“But by the time help gets here, the guys will probably be gone.”
“What do you want me to do, Robert? Burst in there and cuff ’em?”
“Well, no, but I’m so pissed off at everyone helping themselves to my stuff that I want to go in there, pick up a chair leg, and start breaking skulls.”
“Okay, you just go in there, Mr. Terminator, and clean up the joint.”
“Sorry,” I apologized. “It’s just frustrating that I’m torn between what I should do and what I want to do.”
But a second later, my quandary was solved for me. The door to my apartment swung open and Monette and I were staring at two men in their early twenties who were as surprised as we were.
No one moved an inch as we continued to stare at each other, waiting for the other party to make the first move. Suddenly, one of the two men shouted, “Let’s go, c’mon, this way!” and pulled his partner up the stairs toward the roof. While it wasn’t the wisest thing to do, Monette and I bounded up after them, Monette merely following me, rage pumping in my veins.
The twosome quickly unbolted the door to the roof and burst through it and ran out onto the roof. When Monette and I reached the doorway, we stopped for a moment to gauge the situation, which wasn’t in favor of our burglars. They ran toward the building on the west side of mine, but soon discovered that it was several stories too tall. They then ran in the other direction and discovered the apartments next door were a good story shorter than mine. They stood at the edge of the roof, trapped like rats.
Monette and I walked slowly toward them, not sure what we were going to do when we reached them, but that was a bridge we’d cross when we got to it. As we got within fifteen feet of them, the taller one grabbed the coat of his partner and yelled, “Jump, we can make it!”
They jumped, but they didn’t make it—technically. No, they didn’t fall to their deaths like I secretly wished, but they tumbled down onto the rolled asphalt roof and crumpled like circus tents with their center pole removed.
“My leg, my leg!” one screamed.
“Ow, ow, ow ... dear Lord, remove this pain!” the other screamed in agony.
Monette turned to look at me and I read her thoughts instantly.
“Allen Firstborn!” I said excitedly.
“Bingo!” Monette said. “His ass is now officially in a sling. Let him deny himself out of this one!”
We both hugged each other.
“Do you think we should call an ambulance?” I ventured.
“Nah,” Monette replied. “Let ’em suffer for a while. “Let’s go down to your apartment, have a beer, and then we’ll call the police. They’re not going anywhere with those broken ankles.”
Despite having every reason to have the two fundamentalist burglars beheaded on the spot, Monette and I are not complete sadists. We did eventually call the police, who called an ambulance. They were carted away through a throng of reporters who had magically appeared after being absent in front of my building for the last few days. I hated to say it, but I was happy to see them again, getting a lead on a hot story that Monette and I were all too happy to start them on.
When everyone had left, Monette and I got to work.
I began clearing up some of the tornado aftermath that was left in my apartment, but my heart wasn’t into it since I figured that, given another twenty-four hours, everything would be a Red Cross disaster again. Monette, however, was studying one of my windows with an intensity that only a crazy person could match.
“Robert, look at this!” she commanded.
“At what?” I asked.
“The window ledge!” Monette half shouted.
I looked closely at the window ledge for footprints, handprints, or metal shavings, but the ledge was as clean as a whistle.
“It looks as clean as a whistle,” I commented.
“That’s the point. The air in New York is filthy. Car, bus, and truck exhaust—the ledge should be filthy like the others. Unless, Robert, you clean them regularly—something that I wouldn’t put past your obsessive-compulsive tendencies.”
“Clean my window ledges regularly?” I said with mild outrage. “What do you think I am, crazy?” Monette had some nerve. I folded my arms across my chest for effect. “So what are you saying? That someone wiped my window ledge clean?”
“Yes, I am.”
“So you think someone came down from the roof, or up from below, and entered my apartment through this window?”
“I don’t think—I’m sure ... wait a minute!” she said, fingering the filthy window. “Eureka!” she said with a self-satisfied smugness. “Rub your finger across this spot,” she ordered me.
I did and felt a tiny chip in the window.
“It’s chipped,” I responded.
“It’s not chipped. It’s been drilled.”
“Drilled?”
“With a tiny diamond drill bit ... and a cordless hand-held drill. See here,” she commanded. “Robert. Go get a magnifying glass.”
Once again, I did as was told and retrieved the glass from my upended office table.
“See where the hole is?”
I started to see the light.
“Monette, it’s right near the window lock.”
“Exactly. Someone was outside your window and drilled a tiny hole right here. Then, they probably inserted a stiff wire through the hole and pushed the window latch back enough until the window could be opened.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“It’s an old trick an electrician taught me. You can do the same thing to the tamper-resistant glass cover on your electric meter. You drill the hole, then stick a stiff wire into the wheel that spins on the meter and it stops the wheel from spinning, and voilà, free electricity! You remove the wire on days they read your meter.”
“So that’s why you always leave the lights and the television on in your apartment!”
Monette smiled. “The cat likes to watch Bravo. I come home and she’s in front of the TV napping.”
“So you think that they used the same trick to latch the window again?”
“Not likely. I don’t think the trick works so well in reverse. It’s one thing to push the latch open, but a lot different to close it by pulling on the window—you might break the glass. It seems too difficult ... I don’t know.”
“Monette! You’re amazing! So I guess our next question is how someone got to the window ledge?”
I raised the window sash and looked several floors down to the ground below us.
I made a few observations. “It seems too far down to have a ladder. Plus, it would make too much noise. So I guess the only way was down from the roof.”
Monette could see that I wasn’t quite convinced. “You look skeptical about that route, Robert.”
“I am. McMillan went up there and didn’t find any sign of ropes being used.”
“I think we should go up and take a look around.”
“Good idea,” I replied, and up we went. We looked around for any sign that ropes had been tied to the building’s boiler chimney. Nothing. Nor were there any holes in the roof or spikes having been driven into the mortar to provide a place to secure a rope. After half an hour we went back down to my apartment and returned to the open window, staring up to the roo
f above us. Nothing.
Then, as luck would have it, a light shone down on us. Literally. The sun cleared the roof and illuminated the air shaft between the buildings.
“Eureka again!” Monette announced. “Look up at the bricks above your window! Quickly! The sun is moving fast!”
I leaned out the window upside down and there, against the light, were small, but noticeable pieces missing from the mortar between the bricks. A distinct pathway wound its way upward to the roof—or down from it, depending on your point of view. Then, in a flash, it was gone.
“The sun rays aren’t hitting it anymore,” I said to Monette, “but I did see it! So someone did come down from the roof!”
“Yes, they certainly did!”
“But we didn’t see any rope marks anywhere on the roof. I know! Maybe there was a second or third person on the roof holding the rope while an accomplice rappelled down to my window.”
Monette scratched her lava red head then shook it. “Perhaps, but I have another idea.”
“Another way down? How?”
Monette grabbed me by the arm and pulled me outside the window again.
“See how close the next-door building is to yours?”
“Yes ... oh, no ... you’re not going to suggest that someone shimmied down between the two buildings, wedging themselves step by step.”
Monette smiled that smile of hers that she got when she solved the unsolvable.
“That’s what I think!”
I was in a state of disbelief. “But that would mean, that ... that.”
“Exactly!” Monette pounced. “Go on.”
“That would mean that the perpetrator was an extremely agile person. Like a cat burglar.”
“Or ... ?”
“Like in Cirque de Soleil. A circus!” I said, sitting down.
“Yes, it’s worse than we think.” Monette said, shuddering as if a raven had just walked across her grave.
17
Send in the Clowns
Monette slunk down in a chair like a person fainting in slow motion. Fortunately, she had the foresight to place a chair underneath her. Circuses, if you don’t know either of us, are the one thing that strikes terror in our hearts, but for different reasons—reasons that you will soon understand.
“I think Cirque de Soleil is behind this,” I said. “They won’t forget that incident when they came to New York years ago. Remember?”
The incident that I just mentioned was, without a doubt, the most humiliating moment of my life. Monette and I attended a Cirque de Soleil, mistakenly getting front-row seats. If you’ve ever seen one of their shows, you’d know how they have a comic ringmaster who gets on stage now and then and pantomimes between acts to give the cast time to prepare their costumes and accommodate scenery changes. This clown loves to pick someone out of the audience and make them play along with some act. Well, this one grabbed me and tried to take me up on stage, but I kept pulling away. The crowd was roaring with laughter. When I started walking back to my seat, the clown grabbed my arm and I pulled it back good-naturedly. Well, the clown slipped on some water left from the last act and he hit his head on the floor and was out cold. It was all completely innocent, but from the audience’s point of view, I had hit the clown and knocked him out. The audience started booing me. Some of them even gave me the Roman Coliseum thumbs-down gesture. I got back to my seat next to Monette and she was sitting there in a state of shock.
My unfortunate encounter with clowns pales in comparison to Monette’s. From an early age, Monette had developed a mortal fear of clowns that was equaled only by her fear of sauerkraut. The fear of clowns came from a childhood trauma she experienced at her third birthday party. It seems that her mother hired a clown for entertainment, not realizing that Mr. Happy the Clown (an unfortunate choice for a clown’s name, I think), was a bitter man and a heavy drinker. During a lull in the festivities, Monette chanced upon Mr. Happy drinking from a flask behind a party tent staked out in her backyard. When he refused Monette’s request to share in some of the Kool-Aid with which he was whetting his whistle, she playfully pushed him, knocking his flask to the ground and spilling out his precious whiskey. Mr. Happy, being about four minutes away from an attack of the delirium tremens, was in no mood to have his mental safety net drained away by a precocious, redheaded whatnot. He removed his big, floppy shoes and chased Monette around the yard with them, threatening to “pound her into the ground with them until she reached China.” Mr. Happy, however, underestimated Monette’s speed and agility, always following Monette by a good thirty feet. Then Fate and Betty Crocker intervened. Slipping on a piece of cake dropped on the grass by an easily distracted three-year-old party attendee, Mr. Happy hit the sugary mess and went down like, well, a drunken clown hitting a piece of cake lying in the grass. He lay motionless in the grass for some time, let out a loud gasp, his tongue shot out between his red lips, then he lay there quietly in the grass while Monette stared in horror from behind the trunk of a large elm tree. Monette’s father emerged from the kitchen to survey what had happened in his two-minute absence. Prodding Mr. Happy endlessly, then feeling his wrist for a pulse, Mr. O’Reilley quickly concluded that Mr. Happy had donned his red nose and goofy wig for the last time. As if the chase hadn’t traumatized Monette enough, seeing the alcoholic clown carried out of the backyard on a stretcher covered with a white sheet was the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. From that day on, she cringed at flea-market portraits of Emmett Kelley (but then again, who doesn’t?), gave mimes a wide berth, and could be coaxed into attending Cirque de Soleil performances only while under the influence of five or six stiff gimlets.
As for the sauerkraut, the mystery would remain just that: a mystery. Monette was too terrified to speak about it and would avoid it in the same way that she steered clear of Oktoberfest—no matter where it was being held.
“Let’s add everything up here. You had several break-ins to your apartment. The first one is extremely elaborate, owing to the press that was crowded outside your building.”
“So does that mean that the other amateur break-ins by Chet, Allen Firstborn’s minions, and Frank’s hired henchmen get them off the hook as far as the murder is concerned?”
“Absolutely not. They all could’ve murdered in order to keep a scandal hushed up.”
“But the only person who didn’t clumsily break into my apartment was George Sheffield.”
“That we know of,” Monette added slyly. “Maybe he was the first to arrive. You and I could be right in the middle of a mini-Watergate.”
“You’re not suggesting that the Republican Party is behind the murders and the elaborate break-in, are you?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Shhhhiiiit,” was all I could say.
It’s one thing to find yourself drawn into a series of murders, but it’s another when you find yourself in the middle of a conspiracy at some of the highest levels of the government. Was the CIA in on this? The FBI and the NSA too? Was I destined to vanish without a trace, my apartment inhabited by a look-alike and everyone who ever knew me silently erased? Or would I end up as a scientific experiment in some secret government lab, my head disconnected from my body and bobbing up and down inside a giant test tube, my body being used for DNA to build a master race of cyborgs that would take over the United States and make everyone wear hip-hugger stonewashed jeans?
I told Monette the theory that had just flashed through my brain. Wasn’t it possible that there lurked some sinister organization in the background, I asked?
She was patting me sympathetically on the head like a good mental patient when she stopped in mid-pat and seemed transfixed at a point in space eighteen inches over my left ear.
“What, Monette, what is it!”
“You’ve just got me thinking of something.”
“Yeah, what?”
“Just what you said: some sinister organization in the background.”
18
A Huntin’ We
Will Go
Monette jumped on her idea right away.
“Robert, Michael’s slept his way through just about every guy in town, hasn’t he?”
“Yeah. In fact, he’s actually repeated with some guys already.”
“Michael also knows a lot of the gay elite in New York. Could you ask him to find out a few things about some people?”
“I’m sure he’ll comply. He’s still in the doghouse with me over taking the photos and blackmailing men behind my back. What do you want to know?”
“One, does Chet Ponyweather have anonymous sex in bathrooms and areas around Central Park? Two, I want to know about George Sheffield’s past gay sexual habits—the dirtier, the better. Third, who was John Bekkman’s last lover and was the breakup messy?”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it, Robert.”
“So you’re going to solve this whole matter out of the answers to those questions?”
“No, but it’s a start.”
I called Michael from my apartment and asked him to get some answers right away. He was only too eager to comply since this was the first time I had talked to him since our Death March across lower Manhattan.
“So what are you going to do now, Monette?”
“I’m going back to Brooklyn right now. I want to look over the photos on that CD for a while.”
“I know. You’re going to look and see if George Sheffield is wearing a Nazi SS ring or something,” I said, trying to test my sinister organization theme.
“No, Robert. I don’t think George is some escaped Nazi, although that would explain his behavior in dealing with some of his tenants.”
“So what do you want me to do in the meantime, Monette?”
“Why don’t you go back to your ... I mean Michael’s apartment and just do nothing.”
“Actually, I was thinking about cleaning up my apartment. Just about anyone who’s wanted to break into my apartment has already done so—I guess I’m safe for the time being.”