I made a call to the Boss about Brandy and spread as much goodwill as I thought the market would bear. Then I hit the nickel hard and got to the Long Room right on the button for the service. Wardell had gone formal, ditching his Fat Albert sweatshirt and stuffing himself into a suit that made him look like a home plate umpire. Even more surprising, he’d splashed out with cold cuts, a brand new bag of Wonder Bread, plus a mop bucket brimming with ice and bottled Bud. Nothing but the best for the Long Room’s own.
He’d been busy on the phone too. Milwaukee Mike and Grabowski from the Avenue Bar were playing rotation, Stojanovich, the night clerk at the Stanton—and of course Stutter, Pig Dog and Gershwin the Orangutan, the redheaded bouncer from the Boardwalk. Jimmie’s ashes had just arrived and were sitting proudly in one of the old spittoons under the leadlight on the tournament table. Wardell had cleaned and wire-brushed the spittoon, apparently deciding the crematorium’s standard urn was not up to standard (those more expensive, beyond the budget).
I was miffed when Grabowski had to ask Stutter who I was (which took him a good thirty seconds to explain). The photographs lifted the mood. Wardell’s sister LeRine had gone into Jimmie’s rooms at the Stanton and selected a bunch of photos of him and his wife Camille and arranged them along with some fistfuls of flowers on a couple of the tables. Jimmie and his honey were smiling and smooching in the snapshots, swilling martinis, playing cards and trying to dance. For a guy with only one leg, Jimmie had been surprisingly agile. LeRine was a waitress at the coffee shop in the lobby of the Stanton, but she had a smoky voice, and sang along to some Sinatra. “You Make Me Feel So Young” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
Soon after, the corned beef came out and the mustard started squirting, and I knew I’d want to drink the whole bucket of beer so I took the Dell aside and told him I was heading off. Poor guy, whatever was left of Jimmie, that’s what he wanted to keep. But as fat as he was, he’d have paddled across the harbor himself, with the ashes over his head if that’s what it would’ve taken to fulfill Jimmie’s last request. I was glad to save him the trip. He loved corn beef. I hefted the spittoon, which could’ve held five one-legged men, when he pulled out an envelope.
“Jimmie … wanted you to have this.”
“T-hanks,” I stammered, a little disappointed because I was hoping for some Cubans. Jimmie must’ve run out. I stowed the envelope in my pocket, thinking it was more photos.
“You look affer him,” Wardell admonished. “An’ yo own damnself. You look like we be spreadin’ you soon.”
I tried to smile at this parting shot. Pig Dog and Gershwin were talking about the actor Wally Cox’s ashes that had been left in the keeping of Marlon Brando—how it was rumored that Brando’s ashes had been mixed in with Cox’s when he died.
“They were both faggots,” Pig Dog insisted. “Brando was still in love with him.”
“An odd couple, that’s for sure,” Gershwin nodded.
“That’s what that show was about too,” Pig Dog said, opening a Bud. “Tony Randall and Jack Klugman. Two queens, man.”
No one had paid me much mind, which sort of ticked me off—and now the beer was starting to flow. I caught a cab to the ferry terminal thinking that Jimmie would’ve been pleased by the gathering. He’d at least gone out with some dignity. Dignity was a little harder for me to come by. First the cabbie made some yuck-yuck about the spittoon and then I had to sit on the ferry holding it between my legs. Fortunately there weren’t that many people on board—and the hobo clowns weren’t in sight. On the shoreline, where Jimmie had maybe gone fishing once, or lost his virginity for all I knew—a titan crane thrust out from the pier and vapor from the refinery hung in the air. The view back toward the city was nice though. I said, “So long you old guinea. Hope you find your missing leg,” and spread the ashes as evenly as I could.
I’d worked a case around the Point years back—two different arms floated in wrapped in kelp. One was from a boy, the other a woman. Both cases never closed. Looking now at the cuttlefish shells and pieces of broken Styrofoam, I wondered again about the people connected to those limbs, and let the last of Jimmie blow away onto the water. That’s what we become in the end. Ashtray sand and driftwood. Pieces of boats and booze bottles. Unsolved summer nights.
Made me think of Stoakes and Whitney again—how all suicides are unsolved murders in a sense. I suddenly had a devastating desire to see her … be with her. Genevieve. Holding hands. It was psycho. Or pathetic.
But at least it was honest. Frighteningly honest.
SWEETHEART,
THEY’RE
SUSPECTING
THINGS
sat out on the shore of Fairy Point, with its marooned inner tubes and Happy Meal packs, longer than I wanted to. When the cell wasn’t haranguing me, my mind started to wander. A military jet flew over. It reminded me how often we used to see them pass overhead when I was a kid. We had sonic booms all the time in those days—when the windows would almost break and Emily Akin, whose breath smelled like celery, would run out and lift her skirt to catch all the birds she expected to fall. Civil Defense was a big deal.
Once at school, they made us play this game. The teachers put on white smocks and hardhats, the fire department came, and a man with suede elbow patches explained air raids. He told us teamwork is the key to survival. He made me a doctor and Pam Cook, a nurse—the other kids became casualties. They wore signs that said things like Head Injury and Third Degree Burns. We were supposed to sort them out and line them up according to the nature of the damage. Adam Tarkington, the tractor man’s son, couldn’t stop laughing. He closed his eyes and kept running into people saying “I’m blind! I can’t see!” Miss Kavanaugh, who was later fired for not wearing underwear, twisted her ankle when he collided with her. No one else was hurt, at least not that you could see—not unless you’d grown up with them.
I saw the signs hanging around their necks. But when I read the words Internal Bleeding or Radiation Poisoning, all I could see was Jamie Hogebom, whose ears got red when we kidded him about his crew cut or accused him of farting. I wanted to say I know you, all of you. You’re Gareth Owens, the masturbator. I saw you crying alone in the schoolyard once when the chain nets on the basketball hoops were ringing in the wind. And you, Tina—your real father’s in Soledad for killing that man he got into a fight with at the Five Spot. They found the body in the power plant turbine on the Díaz Canal. I wanted to tell them it was going to be all right. Everything. But I couldn’t touch them. If I reached out for Jamie, he would’ve thought I was a sissy. If I tried to take Tina’s hand, she would’ve said I had cooties. I tried hard to look like I remembered what I’d been told, but it was difficult to concentrate. On the other side of the backstop, Mr Estevez was using a knitting yarn cone as a megaphone. He kept saying No pushing. Come on now, find that shelter.
All these years later—all the nights of handguns and handjobs since, and I still hadn’t found shelter. At last the ferry returned, arriving ceremoniously it seemed, like a second chance. I had business with a bath, Chet Baker, a mouth load of vitamins and a bowl of steamed vegetables. I was just silly enough to think about getting into fighting shape for Genevieve. She wasn’t like any woman—or person that I’d met. She was like one of those prize Arabian mares who can eat the back furlong. I hadn’t even gotten in the saddle, let alone to the gate—but I wanted to. With all my being.
I dug into a newspaper flapping around on the top deck and found out that the stuffed bison in the lobby of the Frontier Bank building had been discovered to have a 40-pound wasp nest inside it. The local crime news had gone quiet—and that was the best news I could get. I flipped through the sports pages. The odds were running hard against Salazar in the Saturday bout with the Nigerian. I turned to the dirty personals in the back.
Angelcake, a beautiful pre-op transsexual, specializes in Fantasy Fulfillment. Experience the Love Torture of the Bitch Goddess, Molina. Mother Superior teaches lessons in disgrace. Lim
its respected.
That was comforting, I thought. You want to have your limits respected while you’re being disgraced. I couldn’t decide if it made me feel sick or made me feel relieved—to be reminded what people were getting up to in plastic palm hotels named after Presidents and those seamy side entrance labyrinths down where the streetlights turn a blind eye.
Naturally, there was an on-going battle with the newspaper for running these types of ads—the fundamentalists and puritans were always raising a stink. Responding to that kind of pressure, I’d once been in on the bust of a prominent brothel owner called The Panda. We raided his Mercado Street club on a Friday afternoon. We found the then-head of Police Infernal Affairs being ridden like a pony by a chick with a blue Mohawk. In the next room, the soon-to-be former chairman of the investment company (a born again!), who managed the pension fund for city employees, was frolicking with two underage Filipinas in a manner that would’ve raised the eyebrows of even a Finn. Of course the intelligence we were working with was just fine. Me and the raid team were only pawns in a power struggle between the Commissioner’s office and City Hall. Two high profile local execs and a mayoral minder, all family men, also got caught with their pants down.
It’s the J. Edgar Hoover story time and again. The director of the Children’s Charity gets nailed for child porn. Firebrand Reverend Mathers, who feeds his collection bowls by railing against the sodomites, is found in a red garter belt, blue around the gills from amyl nitrate. If you want to find real moral corruption, look at the sermonizers and policy makers. Why do the limousines have tinted windows and the churches stained glass? Stained is right.
I didn’t know where this put me with Genevieve. There was something sordid about it, I admit. I probably wouldn’t have been involved otherwise. But if it was prostitution or therapy—or the beginning of blackmail (and there’s often a link between those three), why hadn’t any mention of money been made? And police favors? I was willing to make a start on that without her asking, and without me even knowing how big a favor would spread the jam. No, everything that had happened so far seemed consensual—as in “con” and “sensual.” If I wanted more, and I confess I wanted a lot more—it was my risk, my ride. My dream.
Reading the personals did, however, remind me again of McInnes, jiggling in the background, like one of those Creepy Crawlers I cooked up with Mattel Plastigoop when I was a kid. It was time to get out in front of that unknown, so I called him on my cell from the ferry deck. The open air of the harbor made it easier. I needed to know if anything I was doing—or not doing—was going to come back and bite me. I got his voicemail. I left a message for him to call or text me ASAP. I thought maybe a little prick of urgency would work to my advantage. It was strangely bolstering to hear his old voice on the message bank. If he hadn’t seemed himself the other day in appearance, his voice message reassured me. It was the same one he used to have.
When I got back to the city, I checked in, completed some paperwork and made some more calls. Monty needed to remind me that ice cream has no bones and for me to have a listen to a 911 tape. The incident presented as a B&E gone bad, but he didn’t buy it. I think old Head and Shoulders kind of liked me. And he hated Haslett. I agreed with him about the background noise and said it was worth getting analyzed. I left a message on Padgett’s voicemail and some file notes on his desk. Then I got in my car. I wanted to go by Eyrie Street. Just to have a look. Then came the worry that I might be observed—if she thought I was spying …
It raised again the thorny question of how she’d been spying on me. How had she known I was coming? How had she found out about my sister—and what else did she know? I drove over to the gates of Funland. I could just see the roof of her house from there. It was something at least. Like the shreds of paper on the other side of the fence, a hint of what used to be—what might give rise to something new. And I heard that old song that Stacy would sing … “Wayward Heart … why do dreams never die … is that why we cry?”
The amusement park may have been closed down in the wake of the Zagame fire—arguably it should’ve been closed down long before—but it was all still there—only a couple of the parking lot fronted buildings had been hit. Watching the bags and drink cups stray—it occurred to me that I could stray too. I was after all a police officer. Still.
The loss of weight helped me slip through the diamond-link fence and I felt that old crossing-the-boundary buzz I’d known as a kid. I’d only been inside Funland when there were hundreds of people milling about. Now there were just empty sacks and inquisitive gulls … stopped-still, collapsing rides. It made me think of opening the Visible Man’s chest and reaching in to touch the internal organs.
I came to the arcade of Whacky Mirrors. They’d all been shattered by vandals and the distortions they put forth were even more extreme than in days of old. In some I was huge and lumpen, or emaciated and tugged—like some kind of quicksilver taffy. I wondered if any of them told any kind of truth. That’s the question, when things start to slide. Have you become truly ugly, or are you just looking in a damaged mirror?
Most of the rides like The Spider and the Tilt-a-Whirl had been at least partially dismantled. The same way I felt. Graffiti had been sprayed over the ticket booths and main toilet block—the Merry-Go-Round animals sold-off or stolen, the one survivor, a unicorn with a broken horn. In what used to be the Oceanside Dance Hall, bird spatters crusted the torn-up floorboards and pieces of the spinning ball lay like shards of a dead star. The whole place was eerie and decrepit, and I could just imagine how unsettling it would be at night. Not entirely uninhabited either, which added to the edge. Down under the Mad Mouse and the Scenic Railway tracks, it looked like some vagrants had taken shelter. I noticed a couple of cardboard lean-tos—sheet metal sections and harvested plywood. My cell rang twice but I let it go.
I decided to skip the Midway and the stretch of the park that contained the old food emporium and the Swing-a-Ling rides. But I didn’t want to run the gauntlet of those warped mirrors again, so I detoured through the Shooting Gallery. All of the tin ducks had been pinched, and only one of the clowns whose heads used to rotate remained. Someone had stuck a bottle in its jaws, which looked disrespectful and lewd. I pulled it out and heaved it against a wall. That’s what we really need. Not amusement parks—places where you pay to smash things.
Remarkably, the Skill Tester hadn’t had a rock thrown through it. It was once a Plexiglas booth that you stood in front of, operating two handles that worked a claw, fishing for prizes. I remembered being there once with Briannon and a group of young Samoan boys were trying to pick up these red stuffed devils (like something Dilley’s Chocolates would give away for Valentine’s). I was thinking that my Dad had had a pair of boxer shorts with little devils like that on them—when Briannon said, “I’d like to see a bigger one—where those kids are down in the box and a devil’s working the claws, trying to grab ‘em.” It struck us both funny. A big pile of entangled kids, wriggling to get out of the way of the descending claws.
Now the kids were gone and a couple of Hello Kittys wallowed amongst a bunch of flattened cans and cigarette packs. Maybe Briannon’s wish had come true. I felt a little wistful then, thinking about her. We’d had some fun, even if it was squalid. But she was just a dime bag version of Stacy. She had the racket but not the game. It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t mine either. Her dream was to save enough money and move beyond the methadone clinic, out to the suburbs somewhere. What could I tell her? She looked the part, sometimes. In those Bearpaw boots. But whenever she said something funny, I knew my glass was half empty and it was almost closing time. At least I bought her a burial plot at Greenlawn—and don’t think the word didn’t get out on that.
She OD’d a week after she shot me, and from the size of the speedball, she meant to do it. You can’t plug a cop, even one you’ve been screwing, and just walk. She could see the claws coming for her. We were both using each other. But I was using her more—because she was o
nly a warm ghost—a way of regaining the past with Stacy, the snowflake blonde I’d hooked up with when Polly was pregnant. Stacy looked into my eyes one summer night after I’d been pulling OT, her expression all switchblade and lipstick, and that was it. I was gone. It didn’t last long. But it lasted too long for me to forget. And I’d never been able to lay her to rest.
I turned to go—and then I saw the Foto Booth. It had rude images scrawled over the faded faces of the sample photos. The curtain had been ripped but it still hung in place. I figured the camera would’ve been removed or foraged ages ago. I sat down on the shelf seat, just like those ones in department store dressing rooms, and stared into the black hole with the red circle, trying to pose for the lens that wasn’t there.
It was a very peculiar thing. Very. I knew there was no camera in there—but I heard the sound of the shutter. I would’ve sworn in court. I’d been so mired in thoughts about the past and the neglected atmosphere of the park, I hadn’t looked down at the little slot where the photos are supposed to come out. When I did, I saw that there was a strip wedged in place. The simple explanation was that someone had left it there. It had just been forgotten. Whoever it was had gotten distracted—or they were stoned. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. Yet I couldn’t leave them there and not know either. So I swiped the little sheet of pics and slipped it in my pocket, feeling the envelope from Jimmie. I remembered I’d better get the spittoon back.
I got up to go drive back to the Long Room, and ran smack dab into a big blue shape.
When we recovered our balance I lost mine again. He had Coke bottle thick glasses tied with rubber bands around his head, which sported a burr haircut I suspected he’d given himself using one of the trick mirrors. Above his glasses was a headlamp on a strap, the kind that people who do caving or work in mines wear. His pants were flophouse rayon, and made me feel better about my own. He had on a worn blue jacket that said Security and in big yellow letters FUN, but he was carrying a kid’s plastic walkie-talkie. Hanging from an improvised loop in his belt was a small but very red fire extinguisher.
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