by David Stukas
“My, you are the ecological one, aren’t you?” I commented. “Who won?”
“The same one who always does. The developer,” she lamented with a sigh. “They ended up bulldozing the sight in the middle of the night and the fuck got away with it because money talks. The frogs got revenge in the end, however.”
“And how was that?” McMillan asked.
“It turns out that the ground was filled with hidden underground springs that didn’t show up on surveys and the whole development was unstable. All the house foundations cracked, and the houses they were able to build had to be abandoned. The whole thing is still in court and the developer went bankrupt. The end ... maybe. Detective?”
“Yes?”
“There’s one fact about this case that bothers me,” Monette said.
“Yes?”
“You said that John Bekkman had an airtight alibi?”
“Yes, but criminals can lie.”
“I guess he did,” Monette replied.
“So how did he establish an alibi?” I asked. “Did he get friends to lie for him?”
“Yes, one of his cohorts, Marshall Bryne, said he was with them hiking out of town. He’s under surveillance as we speak and we’re getting a court order to have his phone tapped. We need more than just circumstantial evidence for a strong case.”
“Excellent,” Monette agreed. “As for the bank statement that Bekkman showed you ... the one that showed a payment to Eric Bogert?”
“The one for sixty thousand?”
“Yes, that one,” Monette said. “I suppose that was a fake?”
“Oh sure. It doesn’t take much to create a fake bank statement nowadays. Anyone with a computer can create a reasonable facsimile. But remember, Monette, this guy was slick and the statement he showed me looked like the real thing. The guy has money. I’m sure he had someone make it up for him.”
“You’re right. I should have seen right through that one,” Monette replied.
“Wait a minute,” I spoke up. “Luke, you just said the payment was for sixty thousand. The other day, you said it was for forty thousand. But John Bekkman told us that he paid Eric fifty thousand dollars.”
“Did I?” McMillan said, shaking his head. “I goofed on that one ... I guess I’ve been working too hard. See what happens when you call me day and night?” He laughed.
“I guess you have been working too hard, Luke. The station is in the other direction,” I pointed out. I was about to tell him how turned around he was when I found myself staring into the barrel of a gun.
“That’s right,” Monette said from the backseat. “Our friend here is in cahoots with John Bekkman.”
I was going to say something stupid such as “NO, LUKE, NOT YOU!” but felt that the pistol pointed in my direction made that all unnecessary. Monette was being rather calm about what was happening, but I imagined that the door handles in the backseat of the police cruiser didn’t work, so there was little she could do. Unfortunately, it was all up to me. I started thinking desperately of a way to save us, but short of me zooming out of the front seat with the help of a rocket belt hidden underneath my clothing, I didn’t see a lot of alternatives.
Monette broke the tension in the car.
“I had some suspicions that you might have been involved,” she said.
“And what tipped you off?” he replied.
“The first thing was that you could be so sloppy in your investigations. If you weren’t deliberately overlooking clues, then you were covering them up.”
“Covering up?” McMillan said, taking a hard turn and heading in the direction of the docks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I noticed that even though he was driving a tad rapidly, his gun stayed trained on me the whole time.
“Everyone missed it, but the window latch in Robert’s apartment gave you away,” she said smugly. “Robert and I discovered how the window was drilled and pushed open, but closing it wasn’t so easy. Robert swore up and down that he had latched the window before he left that day, and if you know obsessive-compulsive Robert like I know him, he locked that window that day.”
“So what does that mean?” McMillan said with a knowing chuckle.
“The window was latched after the burglary, meaning you went up first and, while the investigation was going on, went over to the window and latched it yourself to take the focus away from the window as an entry point.”
“You are clever, Monette.”
“But why wreck Robert’s place after the burglary? To scare him?”
“You tell me,” came the reply.
“You were also the person who cut the lock on Robert’s locker at Club M and removed the original CD-ROM before Robert had a chance to give it to you. I think you were already there at the gym, waiting for Robert to arrive, knowing that if you weren’t there yet, Robert would lock his gym bag containing the CD in a locker. When Robert was on the treadmill, you slipped into the locker room, cut the lock, got your hands on the CD, and then made a big show of arriving to make Robert think you had just gotten there.”
“That’s what you think, huh?” McMillan said, remaining cagey to avoid spilling any information. The guy was going to shoot us soon probably in some warehouse in lower Manhattan, but he was still hedging his bets.
“I also surmised that you called the reporters and told them that Robert had the CD so that all the other suspects would know where Robert lived. You then waited for some of them to do what you knew they would: try and break into Robert’s apartment so that you could start implicating them as having murdered Cody Walker and Eric Bogert.”
“An interesting theory,” McMillan conceded.
I wasn’t sure whether Monette was deliberately trying to bait McMillan for some purpose to make him nervous, but to what purpose? Or was she just trying to show that the clues he had left would eventually be discovered by another investigator. In any case, I felt it was a long shot and would do us no good when we had bullets in our heads.
Strangely enough, McMillan cracked enough to let us know our fates.
“You would have made a good detective, Monette. Would have, I said, because that won’t help you once Chet Ponyweather shoots the two of you.”
I was stunned. Monette was stunned.
“He’s waiting for us to arrive at a warehouse.”
There was an uncomfortable silence in the car for far too long. I was still trying to find a way out of this mess, but the wheels in Monette’s head were still turning.
“Ah,” came the voice in triumph from the confines of the backseat. “Let me guess. Chet Ponyweather smuggled the Van Goghs out of the Netherlands for you via his shipping firm and he’s wrapped up in all of this. He’s waiting there for us to arrive and you are going to shoot him, then make it look like he shot the two of us and you’ll make it look like he killed us to keep the CD photos quiet and save his marriage and his company. And his role in smuggling the Van Goghs out of the Netherlands dies with him. Am I right?” Monette asked.
“You are correct,” McMillan said, finally giving in a bit. “Not that your knowledge is going to do you any good.”
They say that at times like these, your whole life flashes in front of you, and I want to go on record and tell you that this is a big crock of shit. The only thing that flashed through my mind was why a car company would plaster a warning label about baby seats and airbags on the sun visor of a car where you couldn’t read the yellow and red warning unless you had the visor down in your face. I guessed that they were just trying to avoid another lawsuit from a stupid parent who would inadvertently turn her child seat into a projectile ...
In the wink of an eye, I grabbed McMillan’s arm and smashed his hand against the windshield. With my free right hand, I grabbed the steering wheel of the car and jerked it to the far right while stomping on the gas pedal at the same time. Being a police cruiser with an oversize engine in it, the car lifted off the pavement and flew into the stratosphere while I tossed McMillan’s metal clipboard in front
of the steering wheel. A millisecond later, the airbag inflated, followed by a huge bang and the sound of breaking glass and metal being twisted and crushed. Then everything went black—a deeper black than I have ever experienced.
21
If This Is Heaven, Then Why Does It Smell Like Urine?
To make matters short, I was dead. Monette was dead. McMillan was dead. The whole world was dead. So why was I strapped to a board and being lifted into an ambulance? Couldn’t Heaven get its shit together? And why were there paramedics in Heaven? What a farce! I thought there was no sickness, no pain. So why did my ribs hurt so much? And my hip? Why were such thoughts going through my head?
It was all a great, big lie. Sister Mary O’Grady had lied to us in third grade catechism. Heaven wasn’t a great big city full of light and angels singing wondrous hymns. It smelled like urine and dog poop and garbage dumpster drippings mixed with cigarette butts. Some afterlife, I thought. You try to be good and get some reward in the Great Beyond and it turns out to resemble New York on a late spring night. The ultimate screw job! Then everything went black again.
When my eyes opened again, Marc Baldwin was looking down at me. Well, all right, I thought. Finally, something is going my way. Maybe Heaven is okay after all. You get to be with the one you love and get to have endless sex and long, protracted lunches at the Union Square Café and get to sit at the coveted main room tables having mouth-watering pasta dishes that taste so good they could make you cry, followed by dessert with glasses of grappa and tiny demitasse cups of espresso. I was beginning to like this. Even better, I wouldn’t have to live in a crappy, substandard apartment and work in advertising writing brochures and sampler package copy for feminine hygiene products that make vaginas smell like fresh papayas.
“Robert?” came a voice on high. “Robert?”
God was calling my name. I was an avowed agnostic, but God was calling my name.
“Robert?” He injected himself into my dream again. No wonder people said this guy was omnipresent—you couldn’t even have any peace in your dreams. Why was he bothering me again?
“Robert? It’s Marc! Are you there?”
Again with the pestering. Didn’t God know not to pester people? If he could read people’s minds, didn’t he get it that I wanted to be left alone with my dreams?
“Robert? It’s me, Buddha.”
Oh fuck, now I was in trouble! I spend all this time being indoctrinated by Sister Mary O’Grady and now it turns out that I got an even bigger screw: God is a Buddhist. What could you expect from a nun I had caught drinking holy water from a bottle in the coatroom in third grade catechism? At least that’s what she told me was in the bottle. A few months later, in homage to Christ, she nailed her hands to the desk in her room at the convent, requiring three firemen and a physician to free her. Afterward, I heard she was transferred to a convent in Montana for some much-needed rest. I guess it was all that holy water—she got too holy for her own good, which would go a long way in explaining her holier-than-thou attitude. But I digress.
“Robert? It’s Marc. Marc Baldwin. Remember me, your boyfriend, from Palm Springs. Er, Cathedral City, if you want to be technical.”
This was not heaven, but something very close to it. I felt a hand grabbing mine and felt the warmth travel up my arm to my heart. It felt comforting and safe.
“Robert, there you are,” the voice said. “You’ve been in a very bad accident, but the doctors said you’re going to be okay. You’ve got three fractured ribs, and two hairline cracks in your pelvis, but you’re going to be okay. You’re on morphine now to ease the pain, so you’re going to be a bit logy.”
Suddenly, it started to rain. Not a big, summer thunderstorm drenching, but enough to splatter on the hood of your car and make you want to wash it—if you had one. Through the opium-den haze of the morphine, I could tell that Marc was crying, his tears falling on my arm and chest. I wanted to cry too, but all I could do was laugh like a drunk at a joke that wasn’t funny to the sober.
“Monette is here and she wants to see you. Even Michael is here—imagine that—Michael is here!”
I felt two people come into the room and I immediately knew that I was not in Heaven, but in some place far better—I was surrounded by dear, dear friends.
I got out of the hospital in a few days, mostly because my shitty insurance plan wouldn’t let me stay beyond seventy-two hours. I went to my temporary apartment in Michael’s place. I didn’t really want to stay there because living with Michael wasn’t the best place for recuperation, owing to the constant comings and goings of tricks, but at least it had an elevator. The doctors agreed that my fifth-floor walk-up was too much for me to handle under the present circumstances, so I relented. It’s amazing what eighty milligrams of Vicodin every six hours could do for your resolve to hang tough on your own. So I stayed at Michael’s place for a while and heard my tale of bravery repeated over and over, but strangely enough, I never got tired of hearing it.
By now, you’re probably wondering what happened to Luke McMillan, Chet Ponyweather, John Bekkman, Michael Lau, and the goons who chased Eric and Cody and probably helped break into the Van Gogh Museum. They were all behind bars now, awaiting the results of a grand jury investigation. I could see Luke now, his mangled nose hidden in a swath of bandages from the clipboard that I had sent flying into his face. Monette, who suffered a few facial bruises and a gash on her forehead, said my quick thinking had sent the cruiser crashing through a storefront window, setting off burglar alarms in three buildings at once. I had knocked McMillan out cold and Monette managed to kick out the broken back windows and get the gun out of the front seat. She said she stood on the sidewalk crying for help, then crying like a baby, wondering if I had given up the ghost.
I had a physical therapist who visited me daily for two weeks to help me get back on my feet, however unsteadily—then my insurance ran out. Bye-bye, therapist. But it was Marc who pushed me, got me to do my exercises every day, and helped me get out of and into bed, which was a Herculean effort in itself. And it was he and Michael who threw a party in my honor three weeks later, when I was able to get up and around with a cane, all by myself.
“My little hero,” Monette said as she placed a kiss on my forehead. I was the king of the moment, sitting at the head of Michael’s dining room table. There were several gifts on the table wrapped in wonderful handmade paper—a favorite of mine.
“Go on, open them,” Marc urged. “Start with mine first.”
I tore at the paper like a little kid on Christmas morning.
“A soccer ball ... very funny!” I responded.
Marc was looking very satisfied with his gift. Or should I say smug.
“Open the next one—it’s from me, too.”
I proceeded to open it, but much more slowly. I had opened only one gift, but a theme of practical jokes seemed to be established by now and I could sense that Monette was directly behind it.
I opened the box and removed the contents. “An athletic supporter. How thoughtful,” I said, feigning thankfulness.
“Wait, there’s more,” Marc informed me. “Look down at the bottom.”
“Oh, Marc, you shouldn’t have!” I said, lifting the protective crotch device worn by boxers out of the gift box. (I had to admit, it did look kinda sexy, but I didn’t dare reveal this in front of everybody ... I was still hearing jokes about wearing a saddle in Berlin to this very day. With friends like this, putting an embarrassing story out in the open was like throwing a monkey into a piranha-infested stream.)
“Marc, thanks, I can wear this the next time I take on Mike Tyson.”
“Monette has one just like it,” Michael joked.
“Michael, please, I’m proud of my status as a hermaphrodite,” Monette countered. “Okay, okay, this one’s from me.” She pushed a large, flat object in front of my place at the table.
“A chalkboard! Oh, Monette! How did you know!”
“Just open it, smart aleck,” Monet
te warned me.
It was a two-by-three-foot blowup of my genitals, as anyone possessing an Internet connection has seen.
“Gee, Monette. You know I’ll get you back for this. Double. You wouldn’t treat me like this, any of you, if I weren’t in this wheelchair,” I said, doing my best Joan Crawford impression from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
“BUT Y’ARE, BLANCHE, Y’ARE!” all three of them shouted back in unison.
“Okay, okay, this one is from Michael and me,” Monette said, handing me a small box no more than two inches square.
“I know what it is,” I shouted. I rattled the box near my ear. “It’s either a brown recluse spider or a black widow in a really bad mood!”
“Don’t shake it too hard,” Monette blurted out and grabbed my hand. “I want to be out of the room before it detonates.”
I was thankful to have such twisted friends.
I peeled the paper back, opened the box, and dug through the tissue paper. As I parted the last of the crumpled paper inside, I could hear a sharp intake of breaths around me.
It was a key. Not to a car, because it didn’t have the telltale logo of the make embedded in the key design. The key to a lock? But where?
“A chastity belt?” I guessed.
“On you?” Michael laughed. “It would be unnecessary.”
I couldn’t figure it out.
“Apartment 19F, on Eighth Avenue and Eighteenth Street,” Michael said matter-of-factly.
I was still confused.
“An apartment? But I have one on the Yupper East Side.”
“Well, now you have a new one and it’s in Chelsea. In a new building,” Michael replied.
“But, but, I don’t have the money for something that nice ... to rent or to buy,” I protested. “I sold the car Michael illegally shipped to me from Berlin and saved the money, but it’s not enough, guys.”
“It is now.” Michael smiled, then lit up a huge cigar.
“But, but,” I stammered as my eyes welled up with tears. It was impossible. “How?”