No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  Pohl took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. He pushed aside the glass of whisky, tired of it and almost everything else, and plucked two fish eyes from the bowl, chewing and swallowing methodically. Not a drop of juice spilled down his chin. He combed his hair back with his hand, smiled at Shimura, who returned a sincere smile of his own, then told him the story of what he’d seen when he’d crept into Angela’s apartment.

  “She wasn’t alone,” Pohl concluded, pinching two fish eyes between his fingers, then putting them in his mouth. “There was someone there with her, and I didn’t see his face.”

  Shimura switched his gaze from Pohl’s sad eyes to the ceiling. Pohl took his hand away from his cheek, his longish hair fell in front of his eyes and he stared through the strands at Shimura. Shimura looked warmly at Pohl. Pohl averted his eyes, cleared his throat, shrugged.

  “What do you make of it?” Pohl asked, his voice almost a whisper. “I saw what I wasn’t supposed to see, okay. I want to know the truth. I want to know his name. Then I’d like to forget the whole thing.”

  “There are things you’ve got to forget at any cost,” Shimura said.

  “If that’s true, fine,” Pohl said. “Any cost.”

  Shimura heaved a long sigh.

  “What about making an investigation?” Pohl asked. “Will you do it? No matter what’s going on between them I won’t interfere. I won’t interfere or meddle with them or cause you any trouble. I want to know who he is and if she loves him. Then I’ll know if I’ve got a chance.”

  “You’re my friend. I’ll do it,” Shimura said without hesitating.

  Pohl plunged his fingers into the bowl and came up with three fish eyes, shook them like dice in a loose fist, then popped them in his mouth.

  “If you go on eating those things you must be hungry.”

  “That’s right,” Pohl said, smiling. “Let’s get out of here.”

  The bartender handed Pohl a special towel, moist and hot, scented with lemon, to wash the smell of the spicy fish eyes off his hands. Shimura went ahead to the exit of the Casino Club. Pohl paid the bill.

  Jackson Street was crowded with people sniffing the fresh night air under the glow of neon lights. Pohl and Shimura went in the direction of their favorite Italian restaurant. On the way, a dog walked toward them with one eye shut and a sticky secretion in the other. The fur covering his ribcage was dyed blue. Pohl turned his head and his eyes filled with blue neon from an arcade with coin-operated games. Shimura patted the dog on the head as it went by. The dog snapped at him, growling.

  At the traffic signal, Pohl saw a roving beam of light behind him and followed it up to a woman standing on a small balcony with a standard flashlight in her hand. She directed a trembling circle of light over the sidewalk that must have been impossible to see from where she stood like a watchtower guard looking for an escaped prisoner.

  Trying hard to focus on the woman, who remained a silhouette in the faint light behind her, Pohl narrowed his eyes, and for all he could see she was alone, the silhouette of a solitary woman, standing straight as a soldier looking for something she’d never find. She tapped her foot impatiently on the balcony, switched off the flashlight. Shimura tugged Pohl’s sleeve, pulling him across the intersection, and he looked back from the middle of the crosswalk at the empty balcony. Pohl followed Shimura to the other side of the street. The restaurant was in the middle of the block.

  [ 16 ]

  The County Sheriff’s Office, founded in 1835, is the largest and oldest sheriff’s office in the state. The constitutional mandates include keeping and maintaining the peace throughout the county, maintaining the county jail, providing bailiff services for circuit courts and serving legal process. It is comprised of four Bureaus: Administration, Police Services, Special Operations, and Detention Services.

  When Captain Rand Hadley retired from the County Sheriff’s Office under the “Rule of 75” (when an officer’s age, added to years of service, equaled the number 75), he’d been working in the CID (Criminal Investigation Division) for several years. He served a total of twentyseven years in a variety of assignments throughout the department including Process, Patrol, Parks, Transit, Courts, Detention Bureau, Airport, Police Services Bureau — HIDTA (High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas), and the Drug Enforcement Unit. He had a Bachelor of Science-Criminal Justice degree from the local branch of the state university, and was a graduate of the Department of Justice’s Death Investigation School and the Midwestern University School of Police Staff and Command.

  Randall Hadley was sitting in the small kitchen wearing a plaid bathrobe and scraping the burnt patches off his breakfast toast when the doorbell rang. It was eight-thirty. Morning sunlight came in through the window and warmed the Formica tabletop. Steam drifted up from his mug of freshly brewed coffee. He took a sip of it before he got up to answer the door.

  When he opened it, Shimura stood in front of him in a beige jacket, navy shirt and beige trousers, and a cigar between his lips.

  “You can’t smoke that in here,” Hadley said, pulling the door all the way open.

  “You don’t have to tell me, Rand. Give me an ashtray.”

  Hadley turned around, headed for the kitchen, and Shimura followed him. He looked at the familiar, sparsely furnished one-bedroom apartment where he’d visited Hadley so many times in the last ten years.

  Rand Hadley gave him personal or professional advice when he couldn’t find a solution to a problem on his own. He’d spent the better part of the night out with Pohl after dinner in the Italian restaurant, and he had a hangover and didn’t know how to handle the thing Pohl wanted him to do. The personal favor to Pohl would have to be something independent of the Kawamura Agency and it required tact.

  Shimura sat down at the kitchen table opposite Hadley. There was a large empty ashtray in front of him and he put his cigar in it. Hadley picked up a slice of toast he’d spread with cholesterol-reducing butter substitute. He’d quit smoking a year ago, had high cholesterol, and he wasn’t in great shape because he liked to eat although he didn’t cook for himself, so he’d begun to pay attention to what he put in his stomach. The burnt toast made a lot of noise as he chewed it.

  He was fifty-four years old, divorced, and he taught investigative basics in the community and technical colleges system, which gave him a meager salary that filled the gap left by his county pension equal to 2.5 percent earned, per year of service, of the average of his high three consecutive years of earnings. The maximum pension a detective drew was eighty percent.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Do you know what happens to someone hit by a slow freight?”

  “Cut the kidding, Rand. You haven’t looked better in months.”

  “Everything I like to eat I can’t have and everything I can have isn’t what I’d pick if I had the choice, so how do you expect me to look at it? It’s boring, but you’re right. I’m feeling better, looking better.”

  Rand Hadley cracked a smile, took a swallow of coffee.

  “I’m sorry, I forgot to offer you a cup.”

  He got up, took a mug out of the cabinet and poured Shimura a cup of steaming coffee. He gave him the mug and sat down again.

  “You’re looking tired,” Hadley said. “You work too hard.”

  “That’s funny, coming from you.”

  “Did I tell you I got a letter from my ex-wife?”

  “No, what did she want?”

  “More money. But she’s right. I owe her.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “No, she wouldn’t say a thing like that. We get along just fine.”

  “And you take care of her and your kid just fine, Rand.”

  “We’ve been divorced two years, and in the years we had together before that, after I retired, I still wasn’t able to make it up to her.”

  “It’s the same old song, isn’t it? Whether you’re private or public.”

  “A detective? Well, facts are facts. Policemen’s wives have it t
ough.”

  “What’s she going to do with more money that she can’t do with the money she’s got now? She has a job.”

  “The kid’s going to college, and it costs plenty because it isn’t a community college, and he’s not bright enough to have a scholarship — I’ve got to call a spade a spade — and I don’t want him taking a loan. You never get out from under a loan.”

  “True.”

  “Anyway, I wasn’t spending much before, and now that I won’t be eating in restaurants — or smoking cigarettes, even — I’ll have to learn to cook for myself, and then I’ll have money to spare.”

  Hadley finished his cup of coffee, got up, went to the sink and rinsed it. He put it in the drying rack, and without turning around, he asked: “What is it?”

  “What?”

  “I’m always happy to see you, you know that, but what’s on your mind?”

  “Burt Pohl.”

  “Burt?”

  “And the agency.”

  “You had any breakfast?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Let me fix you some bacon and eggs — you can tell me about it.”

  Rand Hadley didn’t wait for an answer, he took a frying pan down from a hook on the wall, switched on the gas burner, went to the refrigerator for eggs, bacon and a cholesterol-reducing butter substitute for cooking.

  [ 17 ]

  Burnett undressed slowly, his arms and legs weighed more than his whole body and he could barely stand up. He put his hand to his forehead. He didn’t have a fever. Wearing only his underpants, he went to the study and stood at the window next to his desk and separated the Venetian blinds to look down at the street. There was the car with blackened windows that had followed him since he’d gone out to check the locations the real estate agent had given him. He placed his hands on the sill and peered through the blinds at the car and sighed. He wondered now what his sexual adventures had got him into.

  He looked down at the erection that pushed against his boxer shorts, pointing northeast. His right hand was more than averagely dexterous, he kept his left on the sill, and he touched himself beneath the crisply laundered fabric. His cock jumped, his fingers were cold. No circulation, he thought. He went on looking at the car. The headlights blinked on and off like a pair of eyes. His right hand came out of his boxer shorts, he jumped back, away from the window. It was the wrong time for pleasure even though that’s what he looked for all the time. He suddenly felt sick, ran to the toilet and vomited.

  Burnett took off his boxer shorts, turned the shower on and got in, letting the warm water flow over him. In three-minute cycles he experienced severe muscular stomach cramps accompanied by spasms until he regulated the temperature to a higher degree of heat. This calmed him down. The telephone rang but he didn’t leave the comfort of the shower to answer it because he was sure it was Violet Archer, who had the worst timing of any woman he’d known.

  Violet called from the public phone at the corner whenever she saw the light of the desk lamp shining through the blinds like a signal he’d given her. He loved Violet’s slanted green eyes, and after he’d finished with her, though it’d taken him a long time to get some distance between them and still she clung to him like lint, he thought of her eyes blinking and tearful with the pain he’d happily inflicted on her lithesome body. The phone rang, Burnett went on scrubbing himself under the shower, and he let it ring until she hung up.

  [ 18 ]

  Violet left the Kawamura Agency with a worried look on her face. Even Kawamura noticed it when she went past the open door of his office. Shimura hadn’t turned up anything for her on Burnett. There was nothing she could use against him. She wanted to squeeze money out of him, and she’d hired Shimura to give her something to hold on to. Violet figured that Burnett owed her more than money, but it was money that she was most likely to get out of him, and losing money hurt him more than anything else. Violet went straight to the elevator, fixing her hair in front of the mirror while she waited.

  She stood on the sidewalk in front of the building where the agency occupied the sixth floor. The soft wind blew her jet-black hair across her face. She caught a few strands with her fingertips and put them in her mouth. Her green eyes, slanted like wings, looked down at her feet. With plenty of money, she would’ve been accepted by the world. It was money that made happiness, and her own happiness was the only thing she thought about. Now she was hungry.

  The restaurant on Waterford Street near the river was small. There were a dozen tables and they were all occupied. A middle-aged woman folded her napkin, set it down next to an empty soup bowl and a torn piece of French bread and got up from her chair. Violet waited for her to leave the table, and the waitress cleared it and laid out placemat, napkin and cutlery.

  The waitress waved Violet to the table and was handed the laminated menu. She was hungry, but she watched her weight. She ordered a green salad and an omelet. She sipped absentmindedly from the glass of water. She knew that she looked good, and it was obvious that a lot of men were attracted to her. She’d got mixed up with Burnett because she’d wanted it with him, and he was always looking for women. But why did she have to find men like Burnett, who only abused her?

  She didn’t know until she was involved with him that he had a particular way with women and what he wanted them to do for him, even expected of them right up to the moment he was finished with them. She ate her omelet slowly, chewing each mouthful twenty times before swallowing, drinking room-temperature bottled water, and kept the salad for last. Most of the customers left the restaurant to return to work.

  Violet put her hand between her legs and pushed the hem of her skirt high enough to touch a raised part of the skin on her inner thigh. It was a scar Burnett gave her during one of his games. She’d agreed to it, but it left her with a permanent, discolored ridge on the silkiness near her pussy. She pulled down the hem of her skirt, shifting her legs under the table.

  She put her hand to her mouth. She touched her full lips with the fingers that had caressed the blemish. It was the only imperfection on her skin. She vowed to get even with Burnett. She bit gently on her lower lip, pouting.

  Her hands itched, she reached for the glass of water just to do something with one of them, wanting the uncomfortable feeling to go away, and when it didn’t go away she thought a slap in the face might do the trick. Instead, she quickly swallowed a mouthful of water, a few drops ran down her chin. She ignored them. She took a deep breath, then finished the salad, spearing slices of tomato with her fork. Violet ordered coffee. When she finished it the waitress re-filled the cup.

  She left the restaurant and wasn’t in a hurry to go anywhere though she knew what she was going to do at nightfall. It was late afternoon now, people walked slowly along the sidewalk window-shopping. She watched them as if they couldn’t see her. She gave the younger, wealthy-looking men a perfect examination with her eyes. It made them uncomfortable. They gazed back at her, taking stock of every line and curve, trying not to draw attention to themselves. Some of them stared thoroughly, boldly at Violet Archer, their eyes sharp as razors climbing slowly from her shoes to her black hair.

  Burnett hadn’t looked at her like that, but he was smart. The transparent ones didn’t appeal to Violet Archer. Burnett didn’t let it happen right away, he kept his interest in her just beneath the surface out of sight. He played the hand he held just to get her, and he didn’t use the same cards again.

  Violet saw him once or twice a week if he wanted it that way whether or not she was in the mood to see him. He never told her she was anything more than someone to play with and that was what kept her from leaving him. She liked it. And she liked the games he played with her even when they hurt. Then he was bored, it was over, he dumped her, and it threw her out of balance. Now she’d get something out of him that would make her happy. He was going to pay for his indifference and the scar between her legs.

  She went to a department store open late Thursday nights. On the ground floor, she bou
ght cosmetics and paid more than she was used to spending on them. She took the escalator to the fourth floor, bought a set of underwear, panties and bra, and then looked at clothes. She didn’t want to buy anything, but she tried on a short, beryl-blue dress that complemented her slanted green eyes. The salesgirl stood next to her as she looked in the mirror and told her she was just like a television star. Violet left the dress in the changing room. She wasn’t interested in television. Her eyes looked good enough without a beryl-blue dress.

  It was after seven and the department store closed at eight. Violet went through the swinging doors and onto the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. She gave the driver her address, left her purchases just inside the door of her apartment, then went downstairs and got back into the taxi and gave the driver an address a block away from where Burnett lived.

  [ 19 ]

  Frankie Lundquist, a driver who did freelance surveillance work for the Kawamura Agency, was behind the wheel of the car with blackened windows, following two car lengths behind Burnett who was cruising along the Midwestern city streets heading home. His car made a turn and he drove into the garage and she pulled up to the curb and parked in the failing twilight near his apartment building. It was the second day she’d been following him.

  Shimura had asked for her because she was the best driver they had outside the agency. The two in-house drivers were busy today. She was called to Shimura’s office where she picked up the keys and was told what she had to know about Burnett from what he’d learned from his client, Violet Archer. He gave her the description and registration number of the car. He handed her a camera with a telephoto lens and an agency notebook. He wrote Burnett’s address on an advertisement for a sporting shoe he’d torn out of a magazine. He pulled a snapshot of Burnett out of an envelope and gave it to her, waving goodbye, smiling politely.

  Shimura didn’t know why Violet wanted to know more than she already knew about Burnett. It was an ordinary investigation and whatever else there was to know didn’t matter because he was being paid to do a particular job and when he was being paid to do a job he didn’t have to think about anything else.