“You can’t know!”
Mitch looked him straight in the eye. “For the sake of argument, Captain, let’s assume that you can know. Then what?”
“But you can’t know.”
“Humor me.”
Karoulis licked his lips, took another drag on his cigarette. Then his craggy visage altered suddenly, and he took the cigarette from his lips and stared at Mitch Helwig with dawning understanding. A million images and ideas suddenly welled up in his brain and cavorted about wildly, careening insanely, one against the other. He walked slowly to his desk, found the ashtray under a pile of papers, and methodically ground out the cigarette, still afraid to say what he was thinking. Finally, he turned and gazed long and hard at Mitch Helwig, then managed to mutter, barely audibly, “A Barking Dog.”
The words were delivered almost reverently. His thoughts were clearly still far off, still sorting, sifting, weighing.
Mitch said nothing.
Karoulis, too, seemed temporarily stricken speechless. They were riveted in a snapshot-like stillness, suddenly unreal and two-dimensional.
“A Barking Dog,” Karoulis repeated.
Mitch had not even blinked.
The silence between them grew and yawned, gradually tightening like a wire being twisted, threatening to snap, to lash back at the two of them dangerously.
“You have one.” The senior man’s dried lips crackled like kindling in the quiet room.
Mitch said nothing.
Karoulis licked his lips and cleared his throat, deep in thought. He had a sudden, unexpected flashback to his childhood, to a time when he was in short pants and his mother had given him a few coins for candy at a local store. He had been small, very small, and two of the larger boys in the neighborhood had knocked him down, badly scraping his knee, and taken his money. It had been a pathetic kind of childish theft, an act that would cause embarrassment to all concerned for the rest of their lives, no matter how old they grew or how far distant they traveled or lived. The acts of childhood can often be like that—shameful, agonizing, unforgettable. He had had to return to his mother, had had to tell her of his shame, his defeat, to recount with anger and tears his humiliation, and then to make her aware that unless she accompanied him to the store, unless she gave him more coins, he would never get the candy that hung so brightly in his young imagination. The reason that the incident had never been properly put to rest was that his mother had actually questioned his account of the facts, had even suggested that he had fabricated a large portion in order to wrest more money from her mysterious, matronly purse, whence all wealth that he as a boy knew issued.
Even to this day, he felt his cheeks burn at the memory, at the outrage of not being able to prove his tale, to vindicate his plight as a truthful one. And to his own mother.
His mind flickered instantly to his last sight of her in the coffin, eleven years ago, recalling how even then he had wondered if she had ever truly believed him. Or if it mattered.
Then his eyes focused once more clearly and sharply on Mitch Helwig, the man who had dared to step ahead of the pack, the man who didn’t seem to care what people thought of him—the man who had made a decision that no one else with his sense of society and integrity, as far as Karoulis knew it and believed it to be, had been able to make.
“Captain.” Mitch’s voice broke the minute of contemplation.
“What is it, Mitch?”
“You did recommend me for promotion, didn’t you?” He gazed blank-faced, a cypher, at the older man.
Karoulis frowned. “You asked me that already, Mitch, not too long ago.”
“I’m asking again, Captain.”
Karoulis suddenly understood. He could not tell by looking at the bulky uniform in front of him whether or not it hid a Barking Dog. There was no way he could know, unless Mitch actually told him. Then, wildly, he remembered the last time Mitch had asked, recalled vaguely his platitudinous answer, and felt the beginnings of a warm flush creep into his face.
I didn’t tell him the truth, he realized. Does he know? Did he have a Barking Dog then? Does he even have one now?
His mother in the coffin. The image welled up, unbidden. It was true, he told her, bending over, I didn’t make it up. I want you to believe me. It’s important that you believe me, that you know the truth. I want to tell the truth...
Mitch was waiting.
The truth.
“Mitch,” he began, weakly.
Mitch said nothing.
“I need some time. Can you understand?” He had aged about ten years in the last fifteen minutes.
“Yes, Captain.”
“We have to talk again. Perhaps tomorrow, or the next day.”
“Yes, sir.”
They stood staring at one another. “You can go now, Mitch.” His dismissal of Helwig surprised even himself. He just suddenly heard himself saying it, heard it slide forth naturally in response to a deep and powerful need to be alone temporarily with his thoughts, with his feelings.
Mitch stood immobile for a moment, surprised himself. Then he uttered a quick “Thank you, sir,” turned, opened the door, and closed it softly behind him.
Outside, he noticed both DeMarco and Huziak viewing him quizzically. He brushed by them, heading for the garage below the station and the closed cocoonlike comfort of his skimmer.
24
“Get a load of the ass on that one,” Mario Ciracella had observed astutely as they drove down Yonge Street several years ago, trying to separate the hookers from the kids who just wanted to dress like hookers without understanding any of the consequences.
Mitch grunted.
“Wha’s that? Some kinda pig noise? Now that’s an ass, I tell you. But she’s gonna be in big trouble, I tell you.”
“How’s that?”
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“I wait for you to read it to me.”
“That I can understand. Well, it seems this babe...” He craned his neck to glean one last appreciative look at the bottom that had captured his attention, groaning with deep, soulful wistfulness as it dwindled into his personal history, tracking it to a pinpoint on his side-view mirror.
“You were saying?”
“Ten on a scale of ten,” he muttered.
“About the big trouble that fitful young thing is headed for...”
“Yeah. Right. Well, it seems that there was this babe who thought she had a brain tumor when her hips and thighs went numb.”
“This was in the paper—”
“Right. But it wasn’t any brain tumor.”
“It was an ass tumor.”
“You’ve got an ass tumor. Only it’s spread to your brain. Comes from sitting right there so much.” He nodded, indicating the passenger seat of the cruiser.
Mitch giggled! “I give up. So what was her problem?”
“Tight-fitting jeans.”
“Tight-fitting jeans gave her a brain tumor.”
“Naw! You’re not listenin’. I said she thought she had a brain tumor. But it was her tight jeans.”
“Well, what’d she have then?”
“There’s a tricky medical name for it. Too tricky for you.”
Mitch chuckled.
“Problem started because she sat eight hours a day at her job in an orange juice booth. Tight garments trap the nerves, deadening them. The paper said it was a fairly common neurological diagnosis, going as far back as 1885, when girdles first became popular.”
“You don’t wear a girdle, do you?”
Mario raised one eyebrow, his only concession to having heard the remark. Mitch smiled.
“So,” Mitch continued, “do you think it’s our duty as law enforcement officers to go back and wrest that young thing from the fiendish clutches of her pants, lest she succumb to the imagined terror of a false brain tumor alarm? Hmmm...I see the sense of it. A very humanitarian gesture. Backed by the scientific community...By the way, what’d that girl wear while she sat eight hours a day behind th
at orange juice booth once she’d received her medical diagnosis?”
“I guess she wore no pants. Just think of it, eight hours a day, squeezin’ oranges, with no pants on.”
“I am thinking of it.”
“So am I.”
They both smiled.
“Is this what havin’ a pregnant wife does to you, Helwig?”
“What?”
“Make you think about girls behind orange juice booths with no pants on.”
“Among other things, yes.”
“What do you do about it?”
“Squeeze your own oranges.”
They both laughed, Mario almost choking on his high-pitched cackle. “Frenchmen dream about women without underwear, you know,” he added finally.
“Was this in your paper, too?” Mitch asked incredulously.
“Psychology Today.”
“Jesus, Ciracella, you never cease to amaze me with your wide erudition—”
“Angela subscribes,” he interjected with a shrug.
“Frenchmen dream of women with no pants...A potentially earth-shaking discovery. What do you dream of?”
“Italy is very close to France.”
Mitch hooted.
“Very close.”
“O.K, O.K., so I get it. Pregnancy lasts a long time, doesn’t it? How much longer?”
“A month.”
“Think you’ll make it?”
“If I can find that girl selling orange juice.”
They both chuckled, having run the joke for all it was worth, and they proceeded in silence for a while.
“Look at them,” Mitch said, breaking the quiet and nodding toward a trio of platinum-bleached hookers in high heels and skintight jeans, idling outside the Zanzibar beneath the gaudy yellow and blue marquee. “Beauties, huh? Plenty of brain tumors there.”
Instead of responding with a typical one-line, Mario sat pensive, looking straight ahead. Taken aback somewhat, Mitch also remained quiet, letting whatever was on his partner’s mind work its way through. His moods were swinging wildly, Mitch had noted lately. But that was to be expected, with Angela eight months pregnant and his life about to alter permanently. In fact, emotional unevenness would constitute the norm, especially in his friend.
But this had the feel of something more.
Mitch waited for Mario to talk. Finally, he did. Without taking his eyes from the road, without taking his hand from the wheel, he told him. “I went with a hooker.” His tone remained flat. “Last week.”
Mitch said nothing. There was nothing to say. He just listened.
“Got tired of squeezing my own oranges.”
The silence fell between them. Mitch wasn’t sure that he wanted to hear what he had just heard; but it didn’t matter. He had heard it. And from his best friend. He let him continue.
“It’s not like Angela wasn’t willing, or anything like that. She’s great. She’ll do anything for me.” A wan smile appeared momentarily from beneath the bushy moustache, then disappeared just as swiftly. “It was me that stopped having sex with her. I was afraid of hurting her, of hurting the baby. You understand?” His appeal was weak, but sincere.
Mitch nodded. “I understand.”
“But I was going crazy. I felt like a teenager again, jerking off all the time. But you gotta do something, right?”
Mitch nodded again, remembering it all, recalling the wild internal conflicts of guilt, desire, and compassion that eddied up uncontrollably during Elaine’s last months. He lowered his head. What was happening to his friend was anything but unique; it was a universal, haunting time that all men shared. And it was as uniquely male as carrying the child for nine months was uniquely female. We all, Mitch knew, handle it in our own way. But we all have to handle it. It’s there to be dealt with. Somehow.
“I think maybe being raised a Catholic is the worst of it. Us and the Jews—we got the monopoly on guilt, I think. Don’t know what it is....Anyway, last Thursday night, on my last night off, I think I went crazy or something. Told Angela I was going out for a drink, and maybe some fresh air. She knows I’m restless, so it was no big deal. I go out and I have a drink downtown, at the Satin Slipper. I have three drinks. I get to brooding. I’m horny. I’m anxious. I have a fourth drink. There are hookers in the bar, slidin’ up and down off them stools, flashin’ leg and cleavage, painted up red and yellow and slinkin’ around to drive you nuts. One of ’em catches me lookin’ and smiles. I smile back. She slips off that stool like she’s practiced it all her life, and comes for me. I got to admit”—he paused, sighing—“I was bubbling good by the time she got to me, and I guess she knew it.”
Mario made a left at Shuter, cruising steadily eastward. The story continued to ooze out, as though a button had been pushed. “She sits down. ‘Lonely?’ she asks. I say ‘Yes.’ ‘Want some company?’ she asks. I say, ‘How much?’” Mario laughed now, nervously. “Just like in the movies, eh?”
Mitch didn’t know what to say. So he said nothing. It seemed best.
“Sixty-five for a blowjob, she says, or eighty-five for a lay. Half-and-half is a hundred. That’s what she said. Exactly. Then she waited, smiling. And I waited, too—to hear what I was going to say. I was afraid what I was going to say. And then I heard myself saying it: ‘Whereabouts?’ ‘I got an apartment I share with my girlfriend on Maitland,’ she says. ‘We could go there. We could talk about it on the way.’ So we go,” Mario said, with an air of finality. “I went up to her dump of an apartment with her, like I was in a movie or something. You know?”
The question was rhetorical. Mitch wasn’t sure he knew at all.
“She opens the door to her apartment and there’s this great fucking Doberman standing inside, in the entranceway. He starts to get up and come toward me, and she shouts for him to go back and sit down. By Christ, I’ll tell you I was glad he did. I’ll tell you, I looked at her with new respect after that. Havin’ him around seemed like sound business practice—a real professional touch. For the first time, though, I felt like a trick. What I was doin’ became clearer to me—but only partially. If it had sunk through my thick, hormone-riddled skull thoroughly, I’d have walked out the door right then. But,” he added, “I didn’t. That was where it probably all changed, though.”
Mitch looked at him then.
“We’d decided on a lay on the way over, since she’d told me that she’d only do blowjobs if the guy was wearing a safe. That made absolutely zero sense to me, since I was the guy who needed the stimulation, and that idea struck me as about as appealing as eating a corned beef sandwich without taking the waxed paper off.”
Dropping his eyes, Mitch shook his head, a rueful smile surfacing. Poor goddamn Mario, he thought. Fished in so completely by a pro—right down to the withdrawn promise of oral delight. She had had no intention, he was certain, of dawdling with this one. Finish him fast, and get back on the streets. Or the bars. Or wherever.
“Said she’d only lay me if I wore a safe, too. Hygiene and stuff. That made a certain amount of sense to me, too, even from my position. And using a safe for gettin’ laid isn’t all that new to me. I could handle that. I didn’t want no AIDS neither.” He pushed his hat back on his head, running his fingers through the curly mop of hair that sprang forward.
“So what happened?” Mitch asked, finally.
“Nothing.”
Mitch looked at his partner questioningly.
“Nothing to speak of, anyway.” He sighed, continuing to tease the hair at the front of his cap. “She took her clothes off, I took my clothes off. I couldn’t get it up for a while. She tried to help. Finally, it’s up. She slips the safe on it, I slip it into her, and I hump around on top of her for a while. Pretty soon, it falls down again.” He paused again. “And I know it isn’t going to go back up.”
“Why?” Mitch knew why.
Mario shrugged, embarrassed. “It was all just too ridiculous. It was a mistake. You know?”
“I think so.”
“Th
e apartment was a dump. A tiny bachelor—mattress on the floor of the living room, bedding everywhere. If you looked at the kitchen area, dirty dishes, even a box of goddamn cornflakes lying on its side, spilled all over the counter. TV’s still on. Jesus. Goddamn Doberman lookin’ up my ass, too, don’t forget!”
It was almost funny. Mario knew it as well. It was almost tragic, and he knew that, too.
“It wasn’t what I thought, you know?”
“Doesn’t sound like my fantasy either.”
“I was stupid, Mitch. Just stupid.”
“We’re all stupid, sometimes. You can’t lay claim to that all by yourself.”
“I mean, what the hell was I thinking of? What the hell was I thinking of?” His right hand had come into dramatic motion now, gesticulating helplessly.
“What’d the hooker say?”
“I’ll give her that. She never laughed or nothing. I told her my wife was pregnant, that I thought I could do it, but I guess I couldn’t. She was pretty good about it. Besides,” he added, “I’d already paid her. And you know, it never did seem like her fault. It was mine. I mean, I was the one with the problem. Not her. Right?”
Mitch shrugged. “Sounds like you solved your problem, Mario.”
For the first time, Mario looked at his partner, and the look in his eyes was one of relief, of gratitude that he’d been able to tell someone, and that that person hadn’t belittled him.
“What’d you do then?”
“I drove her back to the Satin Slipper, dropped her off, told her to take care of herself.”
Neither said anything more for a few blocks. At Parliament Street, they turned north. Then Mario asked, “Do you think what I did was rotten? Do you think I was unfaithful?”
Mitch shook his head. “You’re the only one who can answer that, Mario. I can’t. I’d be inclined to classify it more as a mistake than anything else, though, if that’s of any help to you.”
“Yeah,” said Mario, mulling it over. “Yeah.”
Mitch knew that he wasn’t particularly good at hearing this type of confession or confidence, and that there was probably much more he should say. The responsibility of the role gradually enveloped him. He tried once more: “It’s how you feel about these things that counts. In here.” He punched a closed fist at his heart. “Not what you think about them. Nobody ever stayed up all night worrying over an intellectual problem. At least, nobody normal. Nobody I’d beat down a door to spend time with.” He looked out the window. “That’s why you couldn’t do it, why it wouldn’t work.”
Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Page 12