Heartbalm

by Malachi Stone

  “What the hell did you say?”

  “I said I’m on my way over.”

  “We’ll leave the light on for you.”

  And so I added filing a false police report and obstruction of justice to my many sins that day. I gave a video statement recorded on DVD, then initialed and signed page after page of a detailed statement written in Lieutenant Grimm’s hand, wrongfully accusing Snug of everything short of home invasion and murder. When it was done, and my lying ass and I stood on the steps outside the police station in the wintry air, I didn’t feel like going back to my office, or going home, either. Instead, I drove around aimlessly, winding up outside Nana Bobble-head’s house where I sat in my car parked under a streetlamp. I heard the carillon bells at St. Elizabeth’s strike ten. At that same moment my Blackberry went off. I answered.

  “Are you lost?”

  “Depends what you mean.”

  “Do I sense a problem developing here, Ricky?” Ruth said. “Need I be concerned? Am I in danger of your becoming a stalker?”

  “Just had to stop and think things over, I guess.”

  “Why not come in and think things over inside? I was just preparing for bed.”

  “Since you’re asking.”

  “I’m inviting you to talk, not to bed.”

  “Criminal conversation?”

  “How clever you are. And what a stallion. My word: twice in one day.”

  “Too late for that. The sun’s gone down.”

  “As will you, dear boy. As will you.”

  The ringing bedstand telephone awakened us early the next morning. Ruth answered, her voice dry and hoarse, heavy with sleep.

  “I—I don’t understand. What are you saying? No, you woke me.” She listened; a perturbed expression began form, tightening like a drawstring around her lips and brow. “What sort of complaint? Who lodged such a complaint, may I ask?” She listened some more; lying beside her, I feigned sleep.

  “Let me tell you one thing, young lady. I am not accustomed to being roused from a sound sleep and invited to answer whatever scurrilous and cowardly poison pen accusations may have spewn from an anonymous source. The entire notion is Kafkaesque. It smacks of the Star Chamber. I am hanging up now, and the very next person I shall speak to is my attorney. What? Thank you no; I will rely upon his professional opinion as regards my legal rights rather than hearing them explained to me by the likes of you.” Ruth slammed the phone down.

  “Can you imagine? The temerity!”

  “Wha?” I tried, rolling over to face her and rubbing my eyes.

  “That was a representative of the children and family authorities on the phone, claiming that someone—some confidential informant, as they characterized this person—has asked them to investigate me—me!—for child neglect and child sexual abuse, if you please. Who on earth could have said such a slanderous thing?”

  Hoping to distract her from exploring that thought any further, I slid my hand under the sheets and caressed her. It didn’t work as well as I’d expected.

  “Do you suppose a nosy neighbor saw you come in last night and noticed your car parked outside until morning? Could that be it, the fact that I’ve been observed entertaining a male friend under compromising circumstances?”

  “Who knows?”

  “I know just the one who’d stoop to it; I wouldn’t put anything past her.”

  “These things usually turn out to be nothing, Ruth.”

  “Of course you’ll represent me as my attorney in this matter.” She was stating a fact.

  “How’d you leave it with them?”

  “I stated I would be contacting my lawyer, after which I immediately terminated the conversation. Have I done the right thing?”

  “I never want my clients talking to the authorities. Ever.”

  “I anticipated that that would be your advice. Do I ever have to talk to them, Ricky?”

  “Technically no, although the decision whether and under what circumstances you may choose to speak to them is an important one.”

  “If it comes down to that, what happens to me if I don’t?”

  “If they can convince a judge that something bad is going on, they can always obtain a search warrant and toss your place, for instance.”

  “‘Toss my place?’ You’re beginning to sound like Heart again, Ricky. You mean rummage around in my home at will, invading my privacy and disrupting my household peace and tranquility, meanwhile scattering and possibly damaging my personal possessions in the process?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Whatever for? What could they conceivably hope to accomplish in so doing?”

  “Maybe obtain physical evidence that Little Eve is being sexually molested. For instance.”

  “Absurd. And stop doing that. A woman my age doesn’t appreciate a man messing with her down there immediately upon awakening.”

  “Sorry, Ruth. You seemed to enjoy it well enough last night.” I didn’t stop, and she didn’t push my hand away.

  “At seven-thirty AM I find it less than stimulating. Rather tedious, in fact. And am I to take it from your not-altogether-unwelcome presence in my bed this morning that your wife tolerates your occasional unexplained all-night absences?”

  “I guess I’m going to find out. So I’m not altogether unwelcome?”

  She allowed herself a bashful smirk. Her speech took on an ironic tone. “Especially now, with us both in the altogether. Although I chastise myself for not realizing how a man with his jaw wired shut might find himself rather limited in terms of his cunnilingual talents.”

  “I made it up to you in other ways, didn’t I?”

  A deep sigh seemed to catch in her throat, followed by a soft moan that told me I was getting somewhere. “I confess I do find it scandalously delicious to be nude in bed with a man. I suppose it’s my artistic temperament. And I must admit it undeniably feeds my ego to contemplate how that man must prefer my carnal attentions to those of his wife.”

  “You have such an articulate way of saying you want to fuck, Ruth.”

  “To fuck. Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? How lovely it is to come right out and say the words themselves: ‘I want to fuck.’ To imagine my name crudely scrawled on the wall of a public men’s room for all the world to see the lewd and unmistakable invitation, Ruth wants to fuck.”

  “Do you?”

  “Dear boy, I thought you’d never ask.”

  I stood inside Ruth’s screened-in front porch, concealed from the late afternoon sun, and surveyed the neighborhood before skulking out to our van, feeling every bit as low and despicable as I had the night before standing outside the police station. I thought of the tiny guard hairs, like those of exotic and treacherous tropical flowers, that encircled Ruth’s nipples.

  “You must pose for me nude,” Ruth had insisted while we both still lay in bed, near-paralyzed with post-coital torpor. “I must paint you. You have an enormous penis.”

  With flattery like that, how could I say no? I had stood for what seemed like hours in Ruth’s solarium posed like Michelangelo’s David, my back to the treehouse, wishing I had remembered to bring along some sunblock. The grandchildren were nowhere to be seen.

  A nosy neighbor, Ruth had said.

  I glanced at the house across the street. Another unassuming bungalow that probably had gone up around the time Silent Cal Coolidge was president. Movement of curtains at the upstairs window. A face peered out into the street. A sour, pinched expression squinting through a pair of wraparound ophthalmic sunglasses—Heart as Toots would have called them cheaters. It was the face of Arlene Kuhn.

  “Well look what the cat drug in,” Heart said as soon as I got to the office. “So the coppers finally got Snug under glass?”

  “I dunno. On my way out, Grimm patted me on the ass and told me I was doing the right thing.”

  “They’re probably grilling him right now down at the station, giving him the old third degree.”

  “Better than getting shot at
in a duel.”

  “You’re lucky you don’t ride.”

  “Don’t ride?”

  “A chopper. If you could handle yourself on a chopper Snug would’ve challenged you to a joust.”

  “A joust? Are you putting me on?”

  “I’ve seen it happen. Two bikers with a grudge to settle square off at either end of a flat quarter-mile stretch of country road, each of them holding a six-foot length of one-inch lead pipe for a lance. The pipes are cut crosswise at the end and honed down to a knife edge until they look like great big hypodermic needles. The whole club lines up along both sides of the road to watch. When the flag goes down, the two jousters dump the clutch, open her up and head right for each other. The loser gets skewered.”

  “You mean killed?”

  “Run through and through like shish kebob, what do you think?”

  “Do they give him a Viking funeral?”

  “If I told you that I’d have to kill you.” Heart looked askance at me. “Why this sudden interest in Viking funerals? Don’t tell me you’ve been gawking at that corny portrait in Mom’s studio?”

  “What portrait is that?”

  “The one mom’s painting of herself with her lungs hanging out, carrying my dead dad up to Valhalla on a horse. Looks like it oughta be hanging on some hophead’s wall.”

  “Doesn’t ring any bells.” Remembering Ruth’s tits swinging like Hell’s bells as I mounted her from behind.

  Heart eyed me curiously. “Unless she’s gotten distracted by some new project lately.”

  “I’ve got an idea, Heart: why don’t you do a little impromptu legal research for me.”

  “I’m your girl.”

  “Look up the law against dueling in the State of Illinois. There’s a criminal statute, I just forgot the citation.”

  Fifteen minutes later she peered up from her computer to ask, “Boss, you sure about that? I can’t find a thing on dueling in Illinois Compiled Statutes.”

  “There has to be. It was there when I went to law school.”

  “When was that, Boss? They probably had laws about curbing your horse and spelling out how many spittoons you had to have in public buildings back then, too.”

  “I’ll research it myself.” I closed the door to my inner office and called Bobbi Peterson, assistant state’s attorney.

  “Bobbi, what’s the number for the anti-dueling statute?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The criminal provision against dueling, you know,” I explained. “I can’t seem to put my finger on it.”

  “It comes right before the statute against jousting,” she said, dry sense of humor intact. “Try looking under ‘Quit wasting my time.’”

  “I know there used to be a statute,” I said.

  “There used to be. Trouble is, they went and repealed it around the time Slick Willie was still in the White House.”

  “No kidding?”

  “They have this thing they call continuing legal education now,” Bobbi said. “You ought to give it a try some time, Ricky. You sound like you could use a day out.”

  “Everybody’s sharpening up their standup act at my expense.”

  “Seriously, did Grimm put you up to this?”

  “What’s Grimm got to do with it?”

  “He was up here not five minutes ago trying for a warrant against one Harold ‘Snug’ Robbins. I take it he’s a personal friend of yours?”

  “Which one? Snug or Grimm?”

  “Let’s start with Grimm.”

  “More of a ‘known associate.’ You mean there’s been no arrest warrant issued yet? Snug’s still running around loose?”

  “Loose as a goose. The wheels of justice turn slowly. Are you willing to stand up in court and do it to this guy, Ricky? Is this statement of yours righteous, in other words? Or are you just screwing around?”

  “Why?”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “I mean, you have to ask? Me, an officer of the court?”

  “You know, it’s serendipitous, your timing, calling me at this moment and asking me about dueling.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because there are those who claim that your boy Harold is single-handedly trying to bring it back, dueling.”

  “Is that right?”

  She gave it a beat before asking, “He didn’t happen to challenge you to one, now did he?”

  “I don’t think something like that would have slipped my mind.”

  “Would you tell me if he had? Challenged you, I mean.”

  “Let’s say hypothetically he did. Would I be entitled to police protection?”

  “Same as any other law-abiding citizen.”

  “In other words, lock my doors.”

  “We’re talking Snug Robbins here. A locked door poses no particular obstacle for a guy like Snug.”

  “Very reassuring.”

  “I prosecute violent crimes if and only if they’ve already occurred. Reassuring the public’s not in my job description.”

  “Then why should I report a threat like that to you in the first place?”

  “Evidence. As I’m not at all sure you’re aware, there’s a statute on the books as of December 08 amending the hearsay rule and making extrajudicial statements of a murder victim admissible. If Snug were to murder you, I’d be able to testify at his trial and tell the jury everything you’d warned me about.”

  “Oh goody.”

  “The thing is, I’d have to recuse myself as prosecutor first. I’d sure hate to do that. So if you change your mind and decide to tell us about any threats, go find another associate, okay? Maybe somebody in traffic bucking for a promotion.”

  “Hey Bobbi?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What is the penalty for jousting in this state?”

  “Drawing and quartering.” I could hear her laughing as she hung up the phone.

  “Snug’s still out running around,” I told Heart.

  “Holy shit! You better scram, Boss.”

  “We’d both better scram. Grab your coat.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I think it’s about time for another trip to Dwight.”

  Heart ripped off a letter asking them to schedule another attorney visit tomorrow morning and faxed it to the warden’s office. She had committed the number to memory. Then a quick trip to the ATM to clean out most of our personal checking account. We were on the road before I called Diane on the Blackberry. Her greeting was succinct.

  “Fuck you,” she said and hung up.

  “Got the wife’s permission,” I said. “Step on it, Toots.” It was like telling Rusty Wallace.

  The first hundred miles or so, something nagged at me. If Grimm was really all that eager to put Snug away permanently, why had so long a time gone by without him aggressively hounding me to give my statement? And once he had that statement, why had he waited until this morning to even seek an arrest warrant? Had Bobbi’s questions to me been subtle hints for me to back off and recant, that the trap was about to spring?

  I was filled with a former crank addict’s paranoia. What was it Grimm had told me there in my office with Snug and Drey? That my luck had almost run out? That people well-placed in the department were salivating waiting for me to fuck up?

  By the time we reached the outskirts of Springfield I had convinced myself it wasn’t Snug Lieutenant Grimm was after at all. It was me.

  A few miles farther north I asked Heart to pull off the interstate and look for a fast food joint where we could grab a bite and avoid the dinner rush. She took the Lincoln exit. We drove for miles. Finally a clot of artery-cloggers appeared up ahead. We chose the closest.

  While Heart used the ladies’ room I stood in line and studied the menu over the counter, settling on the Davy Jones special, a fish sandwich doused in tartar sauce with a wheelbarrow-sized side order of fries. I avoided meat because, after all, it was still the Advent fast.

  A woman came in with a dog on a leash. Nobody seemed
to notice or object. She stood three feet away in the line next to me. The dog regarded me with baleful eyes. He looked like what we used to call a weiner dog only jacked up on stilt-like legs, making his ball sack seem enormous. Above and at either side of it on the dog’s hindquarters were two red puncture marks spaced apart like they’d been made by a vampire down on his luck. While the woman was busy ordering, and without preamble, the dog trotted over and sunk his fangs into my leg.

  “Fuck, lady! Look what your goddamn dog just did!”

  “Kindly refrain from speaking the Lord’s name in vain,” she said.

  ‘I’ll say any goddamn thing I want!” I screamed, clutching my calf. “Your cocksucker dog just bit me!”

  A pimply-faced kid behind the counter said, “Sir, if you can’t control your language I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

  It was at this point Heart returned from the rest room. “Oh, what a cute doggie,” she cooed. She reached to pet the dog, who seemed to revel in the attention. She rolled his neck flesh back and forth and made his ears flap. She patted him on his back over and over with the flat of her hand. She offered him her other open hand to sniff and he slobbered all over it like it was a ribeye. “Good doggie, yes, yes,” she went on, pursing her lips.

  “Fritzy never bites,” the woman advised Heart confidently. “Since I had him neutered last week his aggressive tendencies have marvelously improved.”

  “Neutered?” I said. “Look at that nut sack, lady. I should have such a nut sack. All the vet gave that dog was a vasectomy. Don’t pet him, Heart; I’m telling you, the fucker bit me.”

  “That’s it,” Pimple-face said. “Sir, I’m asking you for the last time to leave the premises.”

  “Or what? You’ll throw your paper hat at me?” I felt the ooze and trickle of blood down my leg, but was afraid to roll up my pant leg and look at the bite site.

  “Sir, I will call local law enforcement to forcibly remove you if you refuse to leave. Get out of here right now or I make the call.”

  “C’mon, Boss, let’s scram,” Heart said.

  “I am an attorney and I intend to sue your ass! I want names!” I screamed.