“Contact with intruder,” he huffed into the toy walkie-talkie.
“I’m sorry,” I started.
“Roger that,” he said emphatically, as if in response to some instruction.
He looked to be about 40, pipe cleaner legs under a fast food paunch. Medium height.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” I said.
“Roger that,” he called again into the walkie-talkie, squeezing the fake squelch button.
I wondered if he’d been a guard there once and couldn’t accept the change in situation.
“Who are you talking to?” I tried.
“Command,” he snapped, holding the plastic device up closer to his ear. “Are you authorized?” His eyes mooned behind the glasses.
I flashed my police shield, and to my surprise, he authoritatively displayed his own credentials—an old ACCESS TO FUN pass that used to let you go on all the rides.
“Roger that,” he barked at the handset and then jammed the device in his jacket pocket. “You’ve been granted a Day Pass. Not good for night. Night is not good.”
“Thanks,” I answered, eager to begin shuffling away. You never know with these kinds. They can seem innocent at first, like the Duke—and then come out of a bag on you. He looked and smelled like one of the residents of the sheet metal huts across the Midway. But that headlamp would’ve cost a pretty penny. I swiveled to make my break—only to my further surprise, he grabbed my hand, which is something very few dudes do to a guy my size. Then he extracted from his other pocket a little ink stamp and selected a red plastic token from several on a silver ring he held up close to his face.
“B is for Buffalo,” he announced, examining an orange token. “And for Bonus. Rides and a burger. D is for Dragon and for Day. Day ends at Dark.”
He stamped my hand with a poofy little red dragon. Just then my cell phone beeped in my pocket. A text message. My security friend took that as a sign or got a message of his own, because he brandished his toy walkie-talkie again.
“Roger that,” he confirmed and walked briskly away.
I guess Command wanted him to resume patrol. I smudged the dragon when I tried to wipe it off, so that it looked like my hand was bleeding. Just another one of those screw-loose people a mild climate and a bankrupt medical system allows to roam freely. At least he had a gig. Self-appointed guardian of a forsaken carnival—protector of FUN. I pulled myself through the fence and drove a flock of insolent gulls and California blankets skyward.
Back at my car I checked the cell phone. There were two voicemails. One from the squad secretary regarding a case number. The other from PERS, the state retirement system, about an accounting error in my favor. Naturally, there would be an adjustment. The text was from McInnes. Cab du Neant Sat 10 PM.
That surprised me more than anything else the whole day. I’d been to the Cabaret du Neant once—to bust a pillhead art dealer called Peter Pan for the bathtub murder of his Guatemalan houseboy. I had no idea why McInnes would choose to meet there. While it had once had some pretensions to musical and atmospheric quality, from what I remembered it had declined terminally into a tragic female impersonator’s club and a creepoid bar where transsexuals and predatory midnighters rubbed flesh with Liquid Crystal addicts (what us cops call gargoyles). At least we weren’t likely to be recognized by anyone without an outstanding warrant.
I went home to feed Pico and have my rendezvous with Chet Baker, but I kept seeing those images from the corridor of mirrors. Then I remembered I’d forgotten to return the spittoon. I couldn’t handle it being in the apartment and I didn’t want to leave it in the car in case I got broken in to. I drove over to the Long Room through fender bender traffic. The place was closed. I guess after the party everyone flagged and Wardell didn’t have the heart to stay open. I used the key Jimmie had given me and let myself in. It seemed more desolate than Funland.
When I finally got back to my place, I took off my coat and found Jimmie’s envelope. I slit it open expecting photos to fall out. It was money—and a note in his crabbed handwriting … Look after yourself, Detective. Use your head but follow your heart and don’t forget your gut … or you’ll end up without a leg to stand on. Ha ha! Your dead friend, Jimmie Forever. I counted out the dough. Exactly 10 large. The second time in my life I’d received that exact amount in an envelope. However he came by it, I hoped I was more deserving this time. There’d always been something of the old Murphy man about Jimmie. It was as warm and generous as one of his goofy grins. And the way I was starting to feel, I figured I might need it.
Coping with opening the envelope made me want to look at the pictures from the Foto Booth. The top shot was blank, the second one chowdery, the third a little clearer. The bottom shot showed traces of a woman of indeterminate age staring vacantly—or fearfully—I couldn’t tell. But I got the impression she wasn’t right in the head. Maybe someone like “Roger That” would be associated with. She wore a man’s sport coat, like something she’d found in a clothes bin. Nice eyes. I slipped the strip of photos onto the fridge door under a faded vinyl Funland magnet.
FTER I FED PICO I REMEMBERED THAT I DIDN’T HAVE anything for my dinner and hadn’t eaten since the won tons with Padgett. I knew I should check in to see what was happening with the investigation of the store owner’s murd, but I couldn’t bring myself to call him. I felt cramped. Both stretched and compressed. Fluidy. And my mind kept flitting … back to the richly appointed interior of Eyrie Street … to my fantasies about what lay in hiding in the other parts of the house. Forbidden rooms. Private worlds. Gave me the flicker of El Miedo.
I decided to walk over to a Lebanese place called The Cedars. It was early for dinner but I figured I could grab some take-out and reheat it at home. Maybe El Miedo could be held at bay. My reflection wavered across the glass of the TV screen. I damn sure needed to adjust my horizontal hold.
Beyond paying another visit to Cliffhaven, I couldn’t think of anything that I wanted or hoped for anymore. You can’t blame a guy with a past like mine. I wondered if Genevieve had drugged me—certain that in some way at least, she had. But how? It felt both like I’d been poisoned—and awakened. I seemed to alternatingly float and crawl down the pavement, words and pictures from the advertising messages streaming by like colored noise. Consolidate your debt. Increase your bustline. Microsurgical Reverse Vasectomies … Cruelty Free Meat …
I didn’t even remember ordering my food at The Cedars, but coming back I could smell it was lemon chicken. I took 10th Street and passed Shenanigans, a bar where I’d spent hours in the past, months maybe. Merle the Pearl, Juicy Fruit, Latigo, Slippery Will Carothers and Star Fontaine, this gimcracked stripper who had no qualms about taking her dentures out at the bar—they were all still there, mechanically drinking like toy dipping birds in the Blue Curaçao gloom. They might not have even noticed that I’d been gone several months. Dooner was probably on dialysis now, or six feet under. And Betty’s Always Ready, a dissipated brunette who worked at a boob job place (she gave me a silicon implant once that I used as a paperweight)—she died of breast cancer just before I went on the wagon and Polly pulled the pin on our marriage. Guido gave us one on the house. Then the circle closed and the hole she’d left sealed over.
I’d come in and order two double brandies, one neat, one on the rocks. Half the time I wouldn’t even be listening to the others. I’d slide out of my body … oozing like albumen into the past. Juicy Fruit would be swilling gimlets, Merle would be on the beer until he got on the Beam and onto the floor. Will would be pounding Johnny Walker Blacks, standing there as if his tie was nailed to the bar, all of us knowing that his middle management job had been axed half a year before and he hadn’t had the stones to tell his wife about the pink slip. As if she didn’t know. We were like children playing peek-a-boo, thinking no one could see us if we closed our eyes. But still I missed them. Not the booze, I missed their broken company. I didn’t think I’d paid much attention to it in the old days, but I had.
>
On the wall above the garnish station I could see the clock with the maraschino cherries, olives, onions and lemon slices—and the three swizzle stick hands. According to that clock … It’s Happy Hour! Yeah. Today is Happy Hour. I shuffled home to my Persian roommate, thinking back to Joan, a lifetime ago. Bee stings up top, but a caboose on the loose.
A chica shimmied past already wearing a July-short skirt and it wasn’t even June. A Rapid Response car shot the yellow light—a 459 in progress. So many sirens and singles bars … memories of Briannon … and Stacy before. All that was left was a Kotex container that smelled of sinsemilla, a cinnamon toothpick and a song that stuck in my head. “Only memories survive … surprised I’m alive … with this Wayward Heart.” There was even less with Bri. Just gun shot residue and regret.
“You’re going to be OK,” the ER white who’d removed the slug said. When I asked my own doc later about what the other boys in blue called “shot term manhood loss,” he said “You’ll come good. Just give yourself time to heal.” I remembered wondering how many Happy Hours that would take. Even with swizzle sticks for arms, you can’t put time back in the clock, and when the real wound is yourself, healing’s got to be a kind of dying, doesn’t it?
Polly I found too hard to hold in mind. It was too near in time. Too raw. I had a feeling she was seeing this shipping agent that her friend Melissa had introduced us to. Tall. Dark.
Back in the apartment, the scanner was pretty quiet. The television news, on the other hand, was one crisis after another. Earthquake in Java triggers tsunami. Israel launches another attack. Greenhouse gas emissions up. I shut it off, ran a bath and put on Chet. “You don’t know what love is, until you learn the meaning of the blues …” I could’ve been back in Shenanigan’s.
Then, while Chet was crooning and the suds were bursting around my ears, I must’ve dozed out. That’s where things get even hazier, crazier. I could’ve sworn I woke up and climbed out of the bath, but left the water in. I don’t know why I did, maybe I was thinking I’d have another soak later. The Chet Baker CD was long over. Art Pepper too. It seemed surprisingly quiet outside. I put on my robe and made some chamomile tea, thinking that in days gone by I’d have had a Scotch. My skin felt very tender, swollen and elastic at the same time, and my eyesight was blurred. I found it hard to focus on the mirror. My JT seemed sucked up into my body, not lolling loose as it usually did when I took a bath. Then I tried to remember the last time I’d had a bath. I always took showers.
I went to the fridge to see if I’d put away the remains of the lemon chicken. I couldn’t find the take-away container anywhere. But I noticed the little strip of pictures from Funland stuck to the Westinghouse door. Before, the top two frames had been empty or so grainy you couldn’t see anyone. Now the figure was quite apparent in the second one, at least not as fuzzy as I remembered in the third and almost completely in focus in the final square. She looked now like a woman I recalled seeing in Shenanigans. A reflection in the bottle-lined mirror behind the bar. I made the tea and turned on the TV again. It was all those late night ads. Lustrous haired women in skimpy outfits staring back with glossy lips and eyes. “I’m Simone. Call me now … for a chat …”
Superimposed numbers started trailing in. For a hoot I turned down the sound, picked up the phone and dialed. It rang and rang—the chatlines are on fire I thought and was just about to give up when a woman answered. But it wasn’t Simone or Cheetah asking for a credit card number. It was Polly. I recognized her voice instantly. I must’ve called the number by instinct. She sounded out of breath and annoyed. I was so surprised and embarrassed I dropped the phone. She hung up. I flicked the channel, hoping she didn’t have caller recognition now. There was a Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan movie on. Tarzan and the Mermaids.
I don’t know how long I tried to watch, I felt so skuzzy I had to haul myself to bed. I lay there listening to my heartbeat until things started to break apart in my head. Then I was in some kind of city park. Palm trees, Japanese-style gardens. There were sculptures all around. One was a primitive piece carved out of driftwood. A male nude. When I got closer I saw that his John Thomas was the head of a duck decoy. The narrow pathways were lined with rosebushes. I stalked down them carrying a spear. It was a large spear but surprisingly light. I was expecting trouble but there was no one around. On basalt and sandstone pillars were finely wrought pieces of silver. They were so complex I couldn’t look at them. Then from the opposite end of the park a funeral party emerged, led by a woman talking loudly. The sculpture park had turned into a crowded cemetery. There were so many marble angels their wings touched.
Above the graves, on an embankment overlooking the iron fence that surrounded the cemetery, a billboard advertised a new Dilley’s Chocolate in the shape of oysters. The pallbearers were women. The coffin they carried looked like an ice chest. Inside was a child. People clutched wreaths woven in the shape of babies—dolls made of ivy. The loud woman led the service because the mother of the dead child was too distraught to attend. I tried to mingle with the crowd, mostly women, but the spear drew attention. Some of the women asked how I knew the mother. I slipped away, trying to get out. On a bench I found a small carved coffin. Inside the coffin was a smaller coffin, and a smaller coffin inside that—like Chinese boxes or those Russian dolls. One by one I opened them. Finally I got down to the tiniest coffin of all. Inside was a miniature orange plastic buffalo.
I woke up naked in the empty bathtub at 5:30 AM. Muscle spasms, hot flashes then rushing cold. A mass of gelatinous fuzz had dried to a crust on my upper body, but between my legs and under my buttocks it remained slick and gooey, with that smell of brine shrimp and pantyhose that I associated with Polly when she got home late from work on a hot day. I wondered if I’d had a wet dream—or some kind of hemorrhage. But what kind? It wasn’t like any bodily fluid I was familiar with, and I thought I was an expert.
I tried to stand. I had to grab a hold of the sink and then the door. Pico was snuggled in bed where I should’ve been. The light in the kitchen was on. Still no sign of the missing Lebanese. Even in the old blackout days there’d always been something to take hold of. Now I couldn’t be sure of what I’d just dreamed and what I’d actually done. Or what had been done to me.
My bones felt lighter. My face was leaner and softer—and younger looking I thought. The acne scars had cleared. I got on the scales. My feet seemed to take up less space—a notion that so stirred me up I had to race to the closet to see if my shoes still fit. They were all a size or more too big for me. It was high. I went back to the bath to investigate.
The unnatural gel had hardened into a pearly scum. I wished I had a chest plate like the Visible Man so I could reach in and feel if my internal organs were still there. I went to have a leak and was disturbed even further to find my boy was smaller. It’d looked little when I straggled out of the tub, but I’d figured it had gotten scared from being in the bath for so long. Now it actually felt smaller in my hands. What was happening didn’t make any damn sense. People don’t shrink, get younger … change shape … because of a bath … or even a drug. I stepped into the shower while a pot of very strong coffee brewed. I had to wake up.
Hot lather and needles from the showerhead streaming down brought both relief and a wildfire of sensitivity to my skin so that I had to turn up the cold. Scrubbing was out of the question—I was forced to let the weird film rinse off with just the pressure of the flow. Any way you looked at it something major was wrong—with my body or my mind. Or both. The gunk in the bath, the dreams, the not being sure of where I’d slept—it appeared I’d never made it to the bed. I had to get a grip. But onto what? Even El Miedo seemed familiar relative to this.
Finding anything to wear was another serious challenge. Nothing fit. My underwear was no longer serviceable, the waistbands all stretchy. I tore through piles and drawers—and down in the back of the closet I found a bra and g-string. Mauve. Like something from Victoria’s Secret. I’d never brought a woman
back to the apartment. It had to have been something I’d bought for Briannon and stashed away. I wondered how Polly had never found it. Maybe she had. What would it be like to find something as intimate as lingerie in the bottom of your husband’s drawer, knowing only that it wasn’t for you?
I tried to remember where and when I’d made the purchase, but it was lost in a haze of booze. I’d been so spaced I’d squirreled the things away and forgotten about them. I held up the delicate pieces against my body and realized I was losing body hair. Not only did my skin feel smoother, the flesh of my chest and legs was more visible.
I knotted some old pants tight enough to not fall to my knees and put on a wrinkled cotton shirt Polly and I’d bought on a trip to Phoenix—stuffed wads of newspapers in my shoes. I looked like I was working undercover at some soup kitchen, but it was the best I could do. I had to get out of that apartment. Let them make jokes at the Precinct. I wondered what Genevieve would say when she saw me. Or if she knew.
I went straight to work, picking up a buttercream from Nelly’s—but it looked so grossly fattening when I got it out of the bag, I only took a couple of bites. For once I was in before Chris. I was braced for banter and put-downs from the likes of Haslett and Montague, not to mention the Boss. Instead I got whispers from Has Been and worried stares from Monty. That worried me all the more. I tried to look busy shuffling papers. Then I got the notion of calling McInnes. Maybe some casual work-related shooting the breeze would open a door to what in hell was going on—or at least clue me in on why he’d chosen the Cabaret du Neant as the meet for Saturday night. I got his voicemail message on the cell again, so I decided to ring him on the land-line. When I called the Three-One-Two, the station house that he worked out of, I got an earnest young pup named Rodriguez—and a big shock.
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