“I’ve got something they want. A magic formula for weight loss.”
Father Smalley’s eyes widened. “Lord have mercy. An answer to prayer. Where can I get some?”
I handed him a little capsule, and he opened his mouth and down it went. “What sort of diet do I have to go on?”
“Meat and potatoes. All you like. They love pot roast.”
“They?”
“The tapeworms.”
He gave me an inquiring look and then grinned and chuckled. “You’re a funny man, Mr. Noir. A funny, funny man.”
IT IS SPOOKY, TRYING TO drift off to sleep in an empty church. In a crowded church on Christmas Eve, listening to the sermon about how we should observe the Nativity every day of the year in our hearts, sleep comes easily, but in a little room off a big empty sanctuary, lights out, I lay for an hour, turning and tossing. I tried to think positive thoughts. I tried to imagine Marvin telling me I now had a net worth of a million dollars. I visualized my slender self in a red thong swimsuit, my proud glutes glistening in the sun as I strode out onto the diving board at the Minikahda Club. I wanted to be rich so as to free myself from envy, that creepy sin, and the greenish yearning to be cool and go to an Ivy school and not have to think about money. The Kennedy brothers were so cool, they walked around without money in their pockets, knowing that when the waiter brought the check, someone less cool would pay. Midwesterners envy the coastal people who seem not so inhibited by modesty and all the clunky moral baggage. I know better than to envy New Yorkers, being one myself and having ridden the subway all those years, but I envy a flannel-brain writer I know who wrote a TV sitcom pilot in which unattractive people throw insults at each other, and every sixty seconds there is a double take and a slow burn. He hired me to sit in cafés and write down dialogue that I heard. The sitcom got made, and he, without ever having to write another word, got a sliver of the profits, which turned out to be vast, and so he lives in a twelve-room co-op apartment on Riverside Drive with umber tile floors and rattan carpets and antique French country furniture and jets off to Paris or Peru when he likes and has more fun than I do, seeing as how I spend so much time wishing he would get Lyme disease so I could visit him in the nursing home and bring him flowers.
I lay imagining his misery, his remorse, listening to the hum of cars on the interstate nearby, and I detected some clinking and clacking not so far away. And then clicking. A definite clicking in the shadows. A series of sharp clicks, and then a whiff of perfume, and then a shadowy figure leaning over me, and a low seductive voice said, “Guy, I came to see that you’re all right.”
“Who’s there?”
“Chanterelle is my name. I’m a huge fan of yours. I’ve always wanted to meet you. This is so exciting for me.”
There was a sort of vibrato in her voice, a warble in the midrange, that normally you only hear in movies, the throb of womanly desire. I reached out and touched a bare leg.
“I don’t believe I know a Chanterelle,” I said.
“You will, in just a moment. Is there room on that couch for me?” she said. I said that I didn’t think there was. “Then I’ll just lie on top of you,” she said.
And then she did.
She was not heavy at all, I noticed. And also, she was buck naked. My hands traced her bare back, which was long and beautifully curved and led to majestic buttocks whose firmness suggested a regular exercise regimen. “Are you surprised?” she said.
“Astonished. How’d you get in?”
“Knock and it shall be opened unto you.”
She kissed my neck and unfastened my cassock. “I never made love with a man of the cloth before,” she murmured. “Have you taken vows or anything?”
I shook my head.
“Are you a believer?”
“I wasn’t one before you came in, darling, and now I’m seriously reconsidering.”
“Are you Episcopalian?”
“I could be. What about you, darling? I want to believe what you believe.”
She lay there, naked, breathing on my cheek. “Well,” she said, “what I was brought up to believe was that God had revealed Himself to us Southern Baptists and not to anyone else. The others were barbarians and we were God’s chosen, and so if we beat up on them, we were carrying out God’s will. But then I became a dancer, and now I believe that God has given all these wonderful gifts for us to share with others, no matter who they are or what they believe. Gifts like the human body, which is beautiful. Don’t you think?
“I couldn’t agree more.”
“I think that God is getting ready to bless you real good, Brother Guy.” She arose to remove my clothing, and in the faint glow from the open door and the stained-glass window of a tall bearded guy holding a sheep, I caught the silhouette of her bountiful breasts, each one a beauty, so firm, so fully formed, it was hard to pick a favorite. She was a marble goddess who stepped down off a pedestal and became flesh, a goddess of life’s generosity, with curly black tendrils like licorice candy on her head and a tattoo of an orchid on her lower belly and broad child-bearing hips and thighs so white you could’ve eaten off them. She removed the cross from my pectorals. “You have excellent taste in crosses,” she said. She clunked it down on the floor. I could tell by the careless way she handled it that she hadn’t been brought up Catholic. “Don’t you worry about a thing, darling,” she said, and her tone of voice told me that something worrisome was just about to happen. You develop an ear for falsehood in this line of work. Oddly, at the moment, I did not care that she was part of something treacherous. She took the hem of the cassock and raised it and caressed my rib cage and slipped my jockeys off. “All ready to go, I see,” she said. She said that she had never met anyone so manly as I, and she asked me what sort of things I liked, and would it be okay if she went to the little girls’ room and peed, and then a low, gravelly voice said, “You know why you can’t hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom? Because the P is silent.” And a big, hairy arm wrapped around my throat, and I felt the cold barrel of a pistol press against my temple. “Sorry to break up the party, but it’s time to talk, Noir,” said the low, gravelly voice, which of course I remembered from the telephone. “So let’s get up and talk. Beat it, babes.”
The girl got off me. “I’m going, Johnny, I’m going.” She put a hand on my cheek. “’Bye, sweetie. You take care now. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to like you as much as I’m sure I could.” She ducked out the door, and her high heels went klikklikklik across the marble floor. A young woman with magnificent buttocks walking buck naked into the sacristy and past the choir stalls of St. John the Lesser. An image to conjure with, except that Mr. Banana was pressing the barrel rather firmly into my temple.
“Stand up nice and slow,” he said, “and nobody gets hurt.”
I stood up and covered myself with the cassock. My maleness, which had been at attention a few seconds before, now hung flaccid, which, I suppose, is perfectly natural when you are about to be shot in the head. I looked at Mr. Banana and chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” he said.
“That line, ‘Stand up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt.’ You been watching old Richard Widmark movies? You been reading Dick Tracy in the funny pages? What a letdown. I figured that when you nabbed me and bumped me off, at least it’d be done with style and a modicum of originality. I suppose there’s only so many ways of saying ‘Stick ’em up,’ but still.”
He jabbed me with the pistol. “Shuddup, you. When I want your literary opinion, I’ll ask for it,” he growled. But I could tell that I had struck a nerve. He nodded toward the door and shoved the pistol into my back, but his brow was furrowed, he was thinking over the line about standing up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt, rewriting it. Johnny Banana is no small-time street punk, he is a capo del capo del grande primo capo, and as such he naturally wants to walk and talk with a g
rand style that is his and his alone, not employ worn-out clichés, same as he wouldn’t go around in threads he got from a Goodwill store or drive an old beater of a car or order beans and wieners at a café. He pushed me out the door and past the high altar, a single candle flickering on it, and down past the choir stalls and down the steps into the sanctuary, and then he stopped.
“So what would you have said if you were me, smart guy?” he growled.
I pondered that. “I would’ve said, ‘One false move out of you, and I’m gonna fill you with more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese.’”
“Ha! That’s even worse than ‘Stand up nice and slow and nobody gets hurt,’” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, crum bum.”
I said, “I was pulling your leg—how about this? ‘Rise and shine, boy-o, and don’t be reaching for anything ex-cept air.’”
“That’s better,” he said. “But I don’t know about ‘boy-o.’ I ain’t Irish.”
“Okay, then. Try this. ‘On your feet, pal. And if I see any sudden moves, you’re going to be suddenly dead.’”
He shook his head. “Don’t sound right. There’s no rhythm to it.”
“Okay, I got it. This is good. ‘Time for the recessional, choirboy. And say a prayer that my trigger finger don’t slip and send you skidding into the hereafter.’”
He said it to himself, under his breath. “I like it,” he said. “‘Recessional’ is good, and ‘skidding into the hereafter’—very cool.” He pointed to a pew. “Siddown.” I sat. He stuck the gun in my mug and said, “Time for the recessional, choirboy.” He said it again. “I like it,” he said. “Except for the trigger finger. That doesn’t sound like me.”
“How about ‘And say a prayer that my gun don’t go boom and make your skull a part of the real estate’?”
“I like ‘skidding into the hereafter’ better.”
I nodded. He drew himself up to full height: “Time for the recessional, choirboy. And say a prayer that my gun don’t go boom and send you skidding into the hereafter.” He said it again. And a third time. Johnny Banana was, like any other capo del capo del grande primo capo, a true stylist. I could see that, looking at his pegged pants with the sharp creases, the spotless white tie against the black shirt, the padded shoulders of his silver jacket, the perfect crest of his pompadour.
“I don’t know about ‘skidding into the hereafter,’” he said. “I liked it at first, and now I’m not sure.”
“How about ‘flapping into the hereafter’?”
“I don’t know. Let me hear you say it.”
“You want me to say it?”
“Yeah. Say it.”
“Wouldn’t make any sense coming from me. You’re the one with the heater.”
“Here.” He handed me his pistol.
“Sit down,” I said. “I can’t get the right feel for it with you standing there.”
So he sat down in the pew.
“Actually,” I said, “I think it’d be more realistic if you kneel.”
“I just want to hear the line,” he said.
“I gotta feel it before I can say it,” I said. “I want to say it with conviction.”
So he pulled out a kneeler and knelt on it, as if in prayer, leaning forward over the back of the pew in front.
“I gotta have a motivation,” I said. “What’s the story?”
“Imagine that you caught me welshing on a deal, and you came to find me, and there I was in church, naked, about to stick it to my girlfriend, Chanterelle, and that’s when you pulled the gun on me,” he said.
“You dirty rat,” I said, and I conked him a good hard one on the noggin, and he toppled over, and his head bounced off the arm of the pew, and he lay crumpled in the aisle, getting his nice suit wrinkled. Johnny Banana, Mr. Big himself, toppled in the sanctuary of St. John the Lesser, saliva trickling out of a corner of his mouth.
I poked him with my toe and said, “How quickly the tables turn, banana brain. Vanity goeth before a fall, and so forth and so on.”
I stuck the pectoral cross in Mr. Banana’s limp paw and called Lieutenant McCafferty and told him I’d gone to church for early mass and caught someone stealing a crucifix and could he come right away, and then I called up Gene Williker and said, “Big scoop, pal,” and told him, and called Boyd Freud, and then I slipped out the side door and spotted a black car, motor idling, the lights on, four goons in pinstripes inside it with headphones on, heads bouncing to the beat of different drummers, and I stuffed a wad of cardboard up the tailpipe, and a couple minutes later, up comes McCafferty in the squad car and peels to a stop and jumps out to find the goons in dreamland from carbon monoxide and Johnny Banana staggering out the church door with a cross in his hand, bleeding from where I had whopped him. He stood in the entrance, swaying like a tall spruce in a high wind. “You’ll never take me alive, copper,” he said, and McCafferty snapped the cuffs on him and then spotted me.
“What you looking at, Noir?” he said. “You involved in this? If you are, I got an extra pair of cuffs in the car.”
“Just out for a walk in my cassock, and I stopped to admire the fine police work,” I said. “I’d offer to lend a hand, but it looks like you got it under control. Remind me to drop a note to Mayor Coleman and tell him that when the chiefship comes open, there’s no need to look outside the department.” McCafferty shrugged and went to call for reinforcements. Mr. Banana gave me a ferocious and baleful look. It would’ve been more ferocious, but his eye was starting to swell shut from where he’d hit his head. “I’ll get you, Noir, if it’s the last thing I do,” he growled.
“Johnny,” I said. “I don’t mean to put words in your mouth, but the press will be on the scene shortly, and you want to make a good impression. Now you could say something rough and mean, like ‘I’ll be on a plane and out of this stinkin’ town before you guys have another cuppa coffee.’ Or you could go for a humorous touch—something like ‘Well, looky who showed up at the party. What’s the matter, boys? Ain’t you ever seen a man in bracelets before?’ Or how about ‘Tell my muddah I ain’t never going to early Mass again’?”
Mr. Banana pondered these possibilities. “What’s wrong with ‘I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do’?”
“Johnny,” I said. “As a friend, I got to tell you, that is a horseshit line. Number one, it’s craven and mealy-mouthed, and number two, people don’t know who I am. It’s Banana they know. Noir they never heard of. It’s like Richard Nixon blaming a stenographer for Watergate. Think big, Johnny.”
“Think big?”
I whispered the phrase in his ear. And up rolled the paddy wagon, and six cops jumped out and, ten seconds later, Gene Willikers and his photographer Flash Flanagan, who was jumping around like crazy, his Speed Graphic going kachik kachik kachik kachik, snapping McCafferty, who stood patiently in an aggressive law-enforcement pose, right hand on his pistol handle, left hand on his hip, hat at a rakish angle, a stern but judicious and slightly jaded expression on his face, as if he were weary of all the attention and acclaim.
Johnny faced the camera and said, “You think you got Johnny Banana, but all you got is a handful of shadows. I’ll be out of this stinking town before you guys”—and then he forgot the line—“before you guys”—he looked around for me—“before you guys get your second cup of coffee and a jelly doughnut.” He looked grandly contemptuous, just as a top-level mobster should look, curled lip and all. And then Boyd Freud wheeled up in the Channel 5 newsmobile, and McCafferty had to wait for the newsman to unbundle his camera and a portable floodlight and a microphone, and when he finally had the camera on his shoulder, McCafferty uncuffed Johnny Banana and hauled him back into the church, and when Boyd yelled “Action!” the detective walked the perp down the steps.
“Any comment, Mr. Banana?” said Boyd.
“
I already said what I had to say.”
“Okay, but I didn’t get it on tape.”
Johnny thought for a moment. “By the time you guys get out of this stinking town, I’ll be on my third cup of coffee. Tell my mother I’ll be home for lunch,” he said. Not a bad line at all. McCafferty recuffed him and said, “Watch your head, Banana,” and shoved him into the back of the squad car.
Gene asked me what happened, and I said, “Gene, it was ace police work, top to bottom. I was a block away, out for a walk, and heard a scuffle and saw McCafferty overpower the five of them single-handed, and by the time I arrived on the scene, the show was over.”
Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Page 15