“If I had known you wanted to come, darling, I would’ve invited you!” Then she stepped back and gasped. “My gosh, you’ve lost weight. You look fabulous! I heard you were dating Naomi Fallopian. Congratulations! She and I go way back. I adore her book, The Blessing of Less. John and I want to make it into a musical. A one act.”
“The blessing of what?”
“She hasn’t told you? She’s become very spiritual lately, and she’s on an antimaterialism kick.”
The lights dimmed, and she and the boyfriend tiptoed out the back door, and the curtain came up on a big photographic backdrop of Duluth, the Lift Bridge and all, and the little orchestra in the pit struck up the overture as a lady usher came by and motioned to her head, and I took my fedora off. “Thank you,” she said.
The music was rather thin and whiny. Four large people in parkas came out and sang:
When you are white
You are white all the time
You’re very uptight
And you drink a white wine
When you are white
An average white man
You get a bright light
And work up a tan.
You can’t hear the beat—
It’s sheer frustration—
You’ve got two left feet
No syncopation,
’Cause you’re Caucasian.
I leaned back and started to doze off and then smelled an exotic perfume from overhead as Birch Bergquist stepped into the row and stood over me, her hair like melted caramel, her jeans so tight, I could read the embroidery on her underwear. It said Tuesday. She sat down next to me and pressed her body against mine. It was like the front bumper of a ’57 Buick. Her heart was pounding like it wanted to get out. Or maybe it was my heart. “I spoke to Mr. Ishimoto today, Mr. Noir,” she said. “Naomi’s in terrible trouble. And I can’t reach her. The Food and Drug Administration has assigned a man named Kress to hunt her down and throw her into prison. I’ve got to make sure she stays in Paris and doesn’t go to Switzerland, where she could be extradited.
“I’m scared,” she said, leaning her head on my shoulder. “Larry B. Larry and those thugs of his are rumbling around and one of the brutes is holding his crotch and bellowing your name. And Mr. Roast Beef is steaming mad. I ran into him in the alley, and he’s furious because I won’t tell him what’s going on with you and Naomi. I told him it was lawyer-client confidentiality, and he told me he was going to change his policy of not hitting women.”
“Baby,” I said, “he’s after me too, so maybe you and I ought to fly to Paris and start a new life together. “
She looked me over. Back when I was a lummox, she wouldn’t have given me five seconds, but now that I had a thirty-inch waist and a nicely defined jawline, she did not dismiss me out of hand. She considered the proposition for perhaps twenty or twenty-five seconds, and then she smiled and said, “Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, buster. You used to be a hulk and now you’re a hunk, and I’ve been feasting my eyes on you for weeks now.” And just then I smelled hair tonic, and it was Joey, all 340 pounds of him. He squeezed himself into the seat next to me, and I could feel the snub-nosed revolver in my ribs. Or it might’ve been a stapling gun, but I wasn’t going to ask.
On stage, a man was singing to a Holstein cow:
Moo a while, chew a while,
Regurgitate
I’ll take a rag and wash your bag
And I will pump out fourteen gallons.
Go ahead and swish away that fly, baby,
I don’t mind you dropping a cow pie, baby.
If your butterfat content is high, baby . . .
You can’t give me anything but milk.
The audience applauded like mad, and the curtain came down for intermission. Joey was not paying any attention to the play whatsoever. “Noir,” he said, “you are the reason I am on Xanax, and now I remember why I’m mad at you. It’s about you and that Naomi Fallopian and this whole tapeworm deal you got going, which you are trying to cut me out of, and if you’re wondering why I’m gonna blow your brains out, that’s your answer right there.”
He sat there, beads of sweat on his forehead, wheezing, his landslide of a gut draped over his belt buckle: he looked like he could use a couple dozen tapeworms himself.
“Shortness of breath, Joey—you better see your cardiologist.”
“It’s just a cold,” he said. And he cleared his throat and spat the phlegm into a hanky. It sounded like someone shoveling wet silage.
“Just ate lunch, huh, Joey? Cheese and onions. Thanks for sharing.”
“What is that supposed to mean, wise guy?”
“It means you and I are friends and what’s bad breath between friends, but if you’re planning to go visit Lulu LaFollette, you might pick up a mint mouthwash at the drugstore.”
“First I’m planning to blow your face off, and then I’ll get me a mouthwash.”
“How’s Pookie, Joey? Is she better?”
“Who you talking about?”
“Pookie. P-o-o-k-i-e. Your kitty.”
No light shone in the fat man’s eyes. He was gone.
Birch started to say something about taking a deep breath and counting to twenty, and he told her to shut her pie hole. Meanwhile the audience headed for the coffee stand in the lobby. I offered to get Joey a latte, and he told me to shut up and not make a move. I could see Beatrice and her beau in the back of the room, receiving the compliments of their hoity-toity pals.
“Joey,” I said, “we’ve got to get you into an anger management program of some sort. This has got to be awfully hard on your heart.”
“I got a strong heart, Noir, and you broke it with your treacherous ways, and that’s why I gotta get rough with you.”
He drove his fist into my solar plexus, and all the air went out of me whooof, and none of it came back. My liver lit up with pain, my pancreas too, and there was a wetness in my trousers that hadn’t been there a moment before. A flock of warblers circled my head, and church bells rang for vespers. I was looking over the rim of the Grand Canyon, and then I was holding onto a parasail as I drifted down toward the canyon floor, and then my mother was bringing me a birthday gift in a big red box. And then I was very nauseous.
“There’s more where that came from, Noir. Tell me where I can find Miss Naomi Fallopian, because if you two are riding the gravy train, then I’m coming with. First-class. Lower berth.” I wanted to say, “I know nothing about this, Joey,” but I didn’t have enough air in my lungs.
And then the lady usher returned. She had big white incisors and hair-colored hair, and from the shape of her, you could see that she was not a prisoner of Pilates. She leaned over Joey and said, “You can’t bring a gun into the theater, sir.”
“Oh yeah? Where does it say that, lady?” he barked. Well, she must’ve been a junior-high teacher at one time—she simply reached down and took the gun out of his hand and said, “I’ll just hold on to this for a while, mister.” He tried to argue, and she clapped a hand over his mouth. “You make me come back here again, I’m going to slap you so hard, your head will spin like a gyro.” And she walked away.
Joey tried to rise, but that seat wasn’t made for 340 pounds: the arms held him like a C-clamp around a Parker House roll. He tried three times to heave himself to his feet and couldn’t budge an inch. He beseeched me to help him up. “Look. I only brought the gun to get your attention. I never woulda shot you. And I only hit you because it was all I could do since I couldn’t shoot you. So give me a hand, and we’ll call it even.”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the show, pal. Don’t forget to clap at the end.” Birch and I slipped out just as the crowd was filing back into the theater. Beatrice smiled at me—“Not sticking around?” I said I’d had an urgent cal
l from a friend. “So you liked the first act?” I said I’d never seen anything like it. She managed to take that as a compliment, and Birch and I trotted out the door and around the block to the Five Spot.
She asked me if I was okay. “Could be worse,” I said, drawing a shallow breath, the air trickling into my collapsed chest. Jimmy the bartender told me I looked like death on toast. I whispered, “Just had a little run-in with Mr. Roast Beef, thank you, and bring me a gin martini a.s.a.p. And a white wine for the lady.” The wine came, and I could tell it wasn’t dry enough for her, or complex enough, so she just sniffed it. I got some gin in me, and my solar plexus started to revive. “So, ” I said, “you were saying—”
She told me that Mr. Kress of the FDA had to be dealt with pronto, otherwise he would sink the ship and settle our hash, and some of us—she poked me—might wind up in the Big House making license plates. “You got your hand in the Elongate cookie jar, and the feds can snap that lid down on your wrist, and they’ll perp-walk you into the courthouse, and Gene Williker will have a field day, baby. He’ll refer to you as an ‘aging gumshoe’ and ‘local Sherlock,’ and he’ll use an old photograph from your fatso days, pouches under your eyes, jowly, dog-tired, and he’ll quote Lieutenant McCafferty at some length about your being a relic of the old St. Paul underworld, and moms and dads can now sleep better without the likes of you walking around, and all your friends are going to see this, and—don’t kid yourself—friendship is a fragile thing. You see your old pal Guy Noir in handcuffs and read that he peddled pills that hatched tapeworms in people’s bellies, and you turn away in disgust. Mr. Kress can do you real damage, Guy.”
“So what’s this I hear about Naomi writing another book?”
“Naomi is out there in Cloudland. Like a lot of enormously wealthy people, she’s gotten all wrapped up in spirituality. She’s about to go live in a yurt with some yahoo in a saffron gown and let him explore her inner being, if you get my drift. We’ve got to save her from herself.”
I was shocked, naturally—Naomi had been telling me for months that she was in love with me and the ground I walked on. “Who’s the yahoo?” I said.
“His name was Rosen, he was raised on a resin farm in Racine, but he’s risen from Rosen and become Rama Lama Monongahela, and he’s celibate, but I suppose that’s up to her now, isn’t it. Anyway, they live in her cottage in Southampton, but they’re planning to move to Rawalpindi, and Naomi is weaving her dhoti on a hand-loom and chanting in Sanskrit, and she shucked her tapeworms, and she’s gained forty pounds, which, how you can do that on a diet of lentils and chickpeas, I don’t know, but she has. You wouldn’t recognize her.”
My adorable Naomi, transformed into a full-figured Hindu mama. As the kids would say, Ack!
“So how do I get in touch with this Kress?” I said.
“He contacted me through Larry B. Larry. You know him?”
“Larry B. Larry? I know him like a white rat knows a python. How’d he get hooked into this?”
“He’s a friend of your ex-girlfriend Sugar O’Toole’s husband Wally’s boyhood chum Brett, who was married to Beatrice Olsen, the composer whose musical we just saw the first act of, until he found that his memory loss was cured by a well-bred brunette from Broken Umbrella, Nebraska, named Brenda Brickelle, a heartbreaking beauty with big brown eyes, and Brett crossed that bridge and burned it behind him.”
My head spun. A whole Russian novel’s worth of complications in a hundred words or less. “But how did Beatrice find out about me and Naomi?”
“Beatrice’s hairdresser is Naomi’s treacherous half-sister Missy. Who happens to be dating Lieutenant McCafferty’s son Sean, who plays shortstop on Sugar’s masseur, Sheldon’s, softball team the Shoreview Sharks along with Beatrice’s trash man, Trent. St. Paul is just one big small town, Guy. Everybody knows someone who is a friend of a person who knows you. It’s not like Minneapolis. There are secrets in Minneapolis. For example, the fact that you jumped in between the sheets with Sugar—it happened in Minneapolis, and so nobody knows it.”
“How do you know it?”
“I didn’t. I was just guessing, and now you’ve confirmed it.”
Birch turned away, and I saw a tiny iridescent tear form in her eye. “I hate to admit this, but—I’m jealous, Guy. I always thought that you and I would make a wonderful couple. I’ve been flirting outrageously with you ever since I don’t know when. Been batting my eyelashes until the lids are sore. Wearing blouses with necklines down to my sternum. What do I have to do? Pull my skirt up over my head?”
I bought her a drier, more complicated wine, and she liked that more, and I tried to explain that the night with Sugar was a one-shot deal, a trip down Memory Lane, but women have a built-in lie detector when it comes to Other Women, and Birch wasn’t buying it, and who could blame her? “I’m glad that you go to the trouble of lying to me,” she said. “I take that as a compliment. It means I’m important in your life.” She swigged the rest of her wine. “I see you and me in a cabin in the woods with a big woodstove in the middle and a bed hanging from the rafters on chains, and I imagine us making that bed swing from side to side, night after night. But first I want you to get Mr. Kress off our backs. Otherwise, I’ll be talking to you through two inches of Plexiglas, baby.” And she stood up, and out the door she went.
I loved the sight of her rear end sashaying out of the bar. It spoke a language all its own. It said, “I am yours soon as you do the work, and the sooner the better.” On the jukebox, Amy Miami was singing,
Why do I keep trying when I know the score?
You will leave me as you have before.
But I love you, my beautiful one.
Oh there is nothing new, nothing under the sun.
14
Making my move
I DON’T EVER ATTEND CHURCH. If you saw me in church, sorry, but that was someone else, not me. I don’t go. For one thing, organ music reminds me of creepy movies about deformed people. And for another, the sermons just get dumber and dumber. Priests used to address the subject of sin, and now, for fear of offending the sensitive, they mostly talk goodness and mercy, and if they talk about sin, they come at it from the wrong direction—”Alas, alas that man is capable of such despicable things!”—whereas the private eye accepts that the despicable thing was done and asks, “Why was this done and by whom?” Big difference. Bad people are capable of inexplicable nobility and good people can be meaner than skunks. Man is capable of larceny, rape, incest, murder, and all sorts of dark deeds that would horrify your average coyote, and that’s a fact, so don’t pretend that the Golden Rule is who we are. Mr. Larry was out to slit my throat, and I had to stop him by whatever means. Simple as that. Why waste time on moral indignation?
Sugar had loaded an app onto my cell phone so I could keep track of the blue ball that represented the Bogus Boy’s scrotum, and it was sticking close to downtown St. Paul and spending plenty of time in and around the Acme Building. So it was time for me to decamp from the Shropshire Arms nearby and head across the river to Minneapolis. Sugar begged me to move in with her, but I am not a good roommate. I like to be able to put a Mose Allison record on the turntable and not be asked, “Who is he and why does he sing that way? Why the big vinyl disc? Why not a CD?” I also need to be able to go out the door and not be asked where I am going. Sometimes I don’t know, myself. When I got a check for $158,000 on July 1, I made my move and called a real-estate agent. (“Darling,” Naomi wrote, “Elongate is now sold in China, and it is such a sensation, there being no laws against worm medicinals there, and so I’ve opened a production plant in Chang-dao, and may be able to close down Mr. Ishimoto’s operation in the near future. The Chinese plant has unlimited capacity, the sky’s the limit. We can now open sales offices in Beijing, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, and Seoul. I’m in Paris, btw. I bought the sweetest little apartment near the Trocadero Garden
s with a view of the Eiffel Tower through the French doors of my bedroom, and from my breakfast room, the Cathedral of Notre Dame. I do my exercises on parquet floors and out onto the balcony and down the grand staircase into the courtyard and around the fountain and out the gate and along the Seine, which is a stone’s throw from my door. What a city!
“But I’m hoping to get home when the new book is done. Did I tell you about the new book? No? Well, all in good time.”)
Though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, the cash flow was strong, and my love life was picking up speed. One more reason to leave the dank and dismal Shropshire Arms and my eagle-eyed landlady, Doris, taking note of my movements large and small, the contents of wastebaskets, the extent of my puzzling (“Can’t do the Saturday crossword anymore, huh? My 12-year-old nephew does it in less than a half-hour.”). The real estate agent was a dazzling beauty from Beige, Walz & Flors named Peyton Peterson, milky skin, golden hair, teeth aglow—I had to put on dark glasses to dim her luster.
“Location is everything, Guy,” she said, putting her pale lilac-nailed hand on my shoulder, “and figures show that the hottest properties are close to water. I’m going to show you Pillsbury Mill condominiums overlooking St. Anthony Falls and downtown Minneapolis.” Peyton could see I was moving up in the world, and she encouraged me to take a big leap and not inch my way up the slope. “Luxury properties hold their value better. Everyone knows that. You want to stay out of the midrange. It’s taken some big hits.” She took my elbow in her hand and fondled it. “I’m only guessing at what your financials are like, but I think you should aim for the $1.5 to $2.5 million range.” This was heady stuff for a guy with a thousand-dollar-a-month studio apartment, and when a tall blonde says it and her hand is roaming up your back and coming to rest on the back of your neck, it sounds very reasonable.
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 10