Eventually, Kowalski gives him a paper towel to wipe his hands. Then he says, “Off with the pants.”
The poor bastard is confused. Also he starts sweating again.
“Drop the freaking pants,” Kowalski repeats, not gently. The mastiff hound’s eyes narrow, the jowls shake. It looks as if King Kong has gone without food for three days. He growls, “The skivvies, too.”
“What for?” the guy asks. He is naturally suspicious.
“For the dickprint.”
“The dick what—?”
“You heard me. We got to be able to identify the salami on all you freaking pillow biters. It’s these new health department rules that just come down. What are you going to do?” Kowalski takes a pair of latex gloves from one of the desk drawers, stretches them out, pulls them on. “Come on now, turd. You think I like this any more than you? Leave us quit stalling. Drop trou and flop your lolly-johnson up here on the desk.”
The perp obviously does not like the idea. At this point, he will usually say something about a lawyer. But it is impressed upon him how it is the middle of the night and how he is in a locked room with an armed, three-hundred-pound pious Catholic cop from Queens—a man who was having a lovely snack that was interrupted on account of an alleged disgusting crime, and furthermore a sin against nature. The perp listens to reason.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Sergeant Kowalski says encouragingly as the perp complies by bellying up to the desk, as it were. “Lay it out there right on the ink pad, big and proud.”
The guy by this time is anything but proud. He seems to be melting, like he was a cake left out in the rain. Usually he will start crying right about now. His nose snots up and he wails away like he was a kid again with his very first skinned knee. And so Sergeant Kowalski advises, suddenly in his most paternal tone, “Take it easy, son. Go ahead and shut your eyes if you want.”
Then while the guy has his eyes shut, Kowalski rummages around through the other desk drawer. He takes his time, and he says, “Let’s see now, where did I put the dickprint forms…?”
Kowalski soon enough finds what he is after. Which as it turns out is not a standard FBI dickprint form, since there is of course no such thing. It is instead a foot-long braided leather sap that will do its job without leaving any bruises.
Eyes hot and righteous red, King Kong Kowalski now slowly raises the sap with his powerful right arm. The perp’s teary eyes flutter open just as King Kong shouts, “Beware, my terrible swift sword!”
And then the sap comes hurtling down, smashing the lolly-johnson on the ink pad.
The perp screams.
All the cops laugh.
And when I finished telling this story, I myself cried.
Maybe if I had groaned and held my crotch like everybody else who was drunk that night, maybe if I had laughed like a loon at the legend of King Kong Kowalski, it would have been all right. But no. I, Detective Neil Hockaday, blubbered like the softhearted sentry at the gate to the Emerald City when Dorothy told him about the cyclone and her poor old Auntie Em and how she needed to see the great and powerful Oz in order to find her way back home.
My face fell to the beer-sopped bar. I covered my head with my hands, and I cried for every poor miserable twisted perp who Joe Kowalski had ever called turd. The fat hump. Then I cried for all the other miserable twisted things I have known as a cop for all these years. Then I cried for bloody Ireland, and for my dead Irish daddo. And then I cried this mournful catechism all over again, starting back with Kowalski’s victims.
Then I cried again, and again.
The fat hump!
I could have sworn at the time I was only screaming this inside my head. Later, though, they told me I was hollering out loud and scaring the boyos so bad they vomited twice the usual volume.
The fat hump!
So this was the way I was carrying on when Davy Mogaill, reformed drunk, walked into the Flanders Bar with three uniforms. That damn Neuman was one of them.
People were already moving away from me, the nodders and the whores and the loudmouths. Especially the loudmouths. I was left alone at the middle of the bar, my foot hooked over the rail. Mogaill and the uniforms surrounded me, and started grabbing hold, one man per limb.
“What the hell is this?” I naturally shouted.
“Did you never hear of us body snatchers?” Mogaill answered, struggling with my flailing left arm and its impotent fist.
They cuffed me, hands and ankles. Then they lugged me out to the street, and jammed me into the backseat of an unmarked patrol car. I screamed inside my head, Daddo … Daddo! They had little trouble with me, for I was limp with shame.
We rode in the dark of a rainy night, through the city and its water-stained colors rolling by outside the car windows. I screamed so nobody but me could hear, Ruby … Ruby! Then over the wide black Hudson River to Jersey and the Straight and Narrow.
Looking back on it, and with the charity of six sober weeks in my soul, I would say a good time was had by none.
“It’s six o’clock. Do you know where your pissbums are?”
“Hello, Hock. I love you.”
“You do? So how come you went and told Davy where to find me that night?”
“Give it a rest. I told you already.”
“You said it was for my own good.”
“That ought to be good enough.”
“It’s not.”
“Miss your Ruby?”
“You want to change the subject? Okay, so I miss you. Also I forgive you.”
“God, Hock—I miss you so.”
“You sound like a girl I once took to a school dance.”
“When you come home, maybe we’ll go dancing.” “You’d be too much for me.”
“We’ll take it easy.”
“So long as we take it.”
“Tomorrow, Detective.”
“Right. Tomorrow when I finally go over the wall. Will you be here to pick me up?”
“You know I want to, Hock.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Don’t be upset. I’ve got a job I’m starting in the morning, nine sharp.”
“That thing you told me about? With your old boss, the penthouse guy with the hots for you?”
“Don’t worry about Jay. He took me to lunch today.” “Yeah, where?”
“The Four Seasons.”
“What do you need with a job offer from a place like that?”
“Money. Besides, it might be interesting.”
“How so?”
“I can’t say yet, I honestly don’t know myself. Why don’t you tell me about your day?”
“Davy sent me a Hallmark.”
“Not another one of those twelve-step cards?” “What else?”
“So what was it this time?”
“A mountain sunset on the cover, right? I open it up and it reads, ‘In this dysfunctional world, it’s nice to know I have someone to feel functional with.’”
“I can’t stand it.”
“You can’t say the man hasn’t got religion.”
“That I wouldn’t deny.”
“Please, don’t say deny.”
Chapter 3
Madison Avenue. Mad, as she used to call it. The times she had here. Old home week. So what?
Such was Ruby’s drab mood—weather inspired—at twenty minutes before nine o’clock on a sunless, windless morning. She disliked such a day’s beginning, when the air was so heavy and still under a lowering sky; air with nowhere to go, and nothing to do but cause trouble. Down home in New Orleans, this was hurricane weather. Up here in New York, it was the kind of weather that went as naturally with ambivalence as lox with a bagel.
Ruby held the collar of her raincoat tight against her neck as she walked up the avenue from her bus stop. She felt vaguely cold and damp, as if she were passing through a long, narrow room lined in wet wool.
At the corner of East Fifty-third Street, Ruby left the Mad parade to enter a sleek building. Five-dozen s
toreys of glazed concrete trimmed in chrome, and what appeared to be giant wraparound Ray-Ban sunglasses. She crossed through the lobby, her own freshly waxed pumps joining the chorus of determined feet marching across a vast expanse of corporate marble. She took her place in the anonymous crowd at the bank of elevators and waited, eyes fixed on the dials above the doors like everybody else.
An elevator car opened with a soft ding-ding sound. Ruby stepped inside, then whooshed one-eighth of a mile up into the Manhattan sky, to the world headquarters of Schuyler, Foster and Crosby, Inc.
The first new sight of her old stamping grounds did nothing to improve her mood.
Half the reception area was occupied by a glossy herd of actresses hoping to be hired for parts in TV commercials or magazine layouts. The cattle call. Everybody had dewy lips and long legs to cross. Most female brands were represented, although the group was weighted on the side of the American pie type.
Ruby knew the routine. And liked it much less than before.
The actresses were there to be seen for nonexistent jobs. Every afternoon, Frederick Crosby had his secretary phone the talent agencies and order up a morning gaggle of sugar snaps, one of Crosby’s more courteous terms for women. This was in accordance with one of Crosby’s philosophies of interior decor. “The office should be lousy with tail every morning,” he once explained to Ruby Flagg, unwisely. “It stimulates the creatives, and it’s a kick for the clients.”
Whereupon, Ruby smacked him in the face. Which surprised Ruby far more than it did Crosby. She was rarely impulsive and had not struck anyone since back home, where she and her sister, Janice, tussled on a daily basis. Certainly she had never struck an adult; most certainly never a pencil-neck like Frederick
Crosby, who reminded her of a bandy-legged rooster named Charlie she kept as a childhood pet. Ruby was shaking with embarrassed fear after walloping a partner of the firm, no less, but Crosby never noticed that.
Hand covering a reddened cheek, he laughed at Ruby, again unwisely. “You don’t like me calling them tail? Give me a break. I’ve come a long way, baby. You don’t hear me calling you girls babes or gashes anymore, do you?”
“I don’t like you talking, period,” Ruby said, looking at his sneer. Embarrassment and fear turned to anger now; she decided that slugging a runty misogynist had been for a good cause after all. She added, “I don’t like the dumb lifts in your shoes, either. Or your padded shoulders, or your puffed-up hair, or the way you eat your cuticles.”
“You don’t have to get personal.” Crosby moved on her, like maybe he was going to hit her one back.
“Get out of my face, weenie.”
“What are you saying?” Crosby screeched. To Ruby, he sounded like Janice caught in a half nelson back behind the house on Gibson Street, hollering like blazes for Mama to come save her. Crosby screeched some more, “I want your apology right here, right now!”
Apologize to this peckerwood? Maybe if she were a man, maybe if she were white; maybe if she were of her mother’s generation. But she would not—she could not—say she was sorry. An apology would only be held against her. For the likes of Ruby Flagg in the time and place she lived, the only option was audacity. Bodacity, as it was said in Louisiana.
“You’re fired, Freddy,” she said, bodaciously inspired.
“The name is Frederick. Or Fred.” Crosby touched blood trickling from a nostril of his long, delicate nose.
His voice was now wounded, too. “Just what’s got into you, Ruby? What are you thinking? You can’t fire me, I’m a partner around here. Hell, I’m your goddamn boss!”
“Who cares, Freddy? You’re history. I’m giving you one hour to clean out your desk and split.”
“You crazy black-assed—!”
Whereupon, Ruby clouted both his ears. Blood flowed.
“Jesus Christ! I’m going in to see Jay—right now. Then I’m calling up my lawyer.”
“You’ll need a lawyer because I’ll be calling the New York City Human Rights Department, the United States Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, the NAACP, the advertising trade press of New York, and the national news media. When I’m through talking to them, I’ll be ringing up the performers’ unions to tell them how you’re treating actors like they’re potted plants for your lobby with these phony audition calls. Which means the unions won’t let you hire talent anymore—which means you’re out of business.”
“You—!”
“Don’t say it, Freddy, I’m warning you. Just answer me yes or no. You still want to talk to Jay?”
“No.
“That’s funny, I do. I’m going in to tell Mr. Schuyler exactly what just happened here, word for word. Want to come along with me?”
“No.”
“You mean yes, Freddy.”
“Yes.”
“Good boy.”
“Scary bitch!”
Ruby kicked his shins, very hard. Crosby staggered along beside Ruby as she steamed into Jay Schuyler’s office. When Schuyler finished listening, he promoted Ruby Flagg to a vice-presidency. It was further agreed that sham auditions would be eliminated at SF&C. Frederick Crosby, since he was a partner, could keep his job.
“I think that’s fair, don’t you, Freddy?” Schuyler asked him.
“Goddamn it, Jay—it’s Frederick, or Fred!”
That all happened twelve years ago.
For the past two years, Ruby had been free of Mad Avenue. Free of moronic clients and useless products, free of the office politics, free of the fool Crosby. That part was easy. The hard part was that she was also free of her old Mad Avenue salary.
But now here she was again. Back to where she started a dozen years ago, back to Jay Schuyler.
Back. Only to find that some things never change, starting with the reception area. Where was Freddy, that scrawny ofay?
Ruby slipped the raincoat off her shoulders and folded it over an arm. Underneath she wore a drapey cream-colored silk suit and a topaz-brown crêpe blouse. She walked through the buzz of actresses toward the reception desk. Eyes vacant of much more than mascara, tinted contacts, and jealousy followed her every step of the way.
“I’m Ruby Flagg,” she announced.
The receptionist placed a caller on hold, glanced up at Ruby, then consulted a piece of paper with names on it. She was wearing an expensive pair of tortoiseshell glasses. They were big as welder’s goggles, the kind of glasses favored by society matrons and ladies of a certain age who lived uptown before they were widowed and then became midtown office receptionists. Which was the type addressing Ruby now.
“Let’s see, dear,” she said. “Are you the one with William Morris?”
“No, I’m the one all by myself.”
“Oh, my. Would you like to take a seat?”
“Is Freddy in yet?” Ruby heard hissing sounds behind her.
“My goodness. Do you mean Mr. Crosby, dear?”
“Dear Freddy, yes.”
The sounds Ruby now heard behind her were of an elevator sliding open, a confident man striding across a tile floor, an affable, well-bred voice, and rustling skirts as legs coyly crossed. The receptionist started to say something when Ruby turned.
“Ruby! Sunshine! Buttercup!” Jay Schuyler, chairman of the board, approached from the elevator in his pinstripes, arms open to embrace Ruby. One of the actresses muttered, “Bitch.” There was no telling who.
“So here I am, boss, early on the job,” Ruby said, smiling. Her teeth were white as sugar, lips lightly rouged in maroon.
Schuyler said to the receptionist, “Arlene, I’d like you to meet Ruby Flagg, our new genius. She’ll be on the Likhanov business.”
Arlene sputtered, “I didn’t realize … I’m so sorry, Miss Flagg.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Ruby said.
“Mr. Schuyler?” Arlene said, nervously adjusting her goggles and consulting a nest of telephone messages. “Miss Malreaux is in with the Russian gentlemen.”
“Check. The Likhanov brother
s.”
“Yes. Miss Malreaux has escorted them to Mr. Foster’s old office.”
“Good. Ruby here will be taking over that office.”
“Oh, my.”
Schuyler looked appreciatively at the cluster of hopeful actresses, then took Ruby’s arm, and said to Arlene, “We’re on our way there now, in fact. To Ruby’s office. No calls there for the next hour.”
“Very good, Mr. Schuyler. Oh, but, sir—one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Mr. Crosby called in sick.”
“Today? When we’ve got the Russians here? This account, it’s Freddy’s baby!” Schuyler slapped his forehead. Only seconds ago he was pumped and fresh, now he looked as if he had spent the afternoon rush hour on the D train to the Bronx in mid-August. Wilted, he asked, “What’s the matter with him?”
“His wife didn’t say.”
“Wife? Freddy’s a bachelor.
“Oh, my.” Arlene’s face flushed scarlet. She patted her hair nervously. “Nevertheless, it was a woman who telephoned. Perhaps a housekeeper?”
Schuyler shrugged, a gesture now of annoyance at the news of his partner’s absence. He turned to leave. Ruby followed him.
They walked down a wide corridor with money-colored green carpet and glazed gold walls full of Clio Award certificates and grabby magazine ads that were nicely matted and framed. Heads of various rank bobbed up from desks or out of doors along the way, and greetings were offered according to station. “Good morning, Mr. Schuyler” … “Hiya, Jay, how’s it hanging?” … “Morning, sir” … “Morning” … “Let’s do lunch, how about it…?” Schuyler responded to each greeting with a noncommittal “Check.”
“I have an old bone to pick with that dog,” Ruby said as they walked.
“Who—Freddy?”
“I thought the sugar snaps number was all over.”
“It is.”
“So what’s with the debutante ball back in reception?”
“That’s legit. They’re here for the Likhanov account.”
“Freddy’s idea?”
“Look,” Schuyler said, touching Ruby’s arm, “I’d like it if you could go easy on poor Freddy.”
Drown All the Dogs Page 37