“Looks like the dude was getting a little pussy,” he noted with a sardonic chuckle.
“The guy said that they’d been having sex when she collapsed,” his partner said. “From the blood, I’d say heart failure and pulmonary edema. Must’ve been a wild ride.”
“I’ve heard cats going at it in the alley behind my apartment. Scale that up to this lady’s size, and I guess a body can only take so much,” the first guy replied while setting up the gurney.
“Her husband didn’t look like he could deliver a lethal banging,” his partner observed, “but it’s easy to underestimate little guys.”
I left them to their medical repartee and went out to the landing, where Stefan was pacing.
~||~
“Stefan, we need to talk,” I said.
“Are you a cop?” His eyes darted from me to the bedroom. “There’s nothing to concern the police. We were just having sex when she became ill and ...” he choked back a sob ...” she died, right there in our bed.”
“I’m not a cop, Stefan.”
“Then how do you know my name?” I took his elbow and moved him to the far side of the landing, out of earshot from the bedroom.
“For the moment, let’s just say that I’m an interested party who’s aware of your business ventures. Now, for your own good, tell me what happened.” I increased my pressure on his arm, he struggled and I clamped down.
“Like I said, we were having sex and—”
“Slow down, Stefan. Your version of sex involved more than a quiet afternoon featuring the conventional positions. I found the costume.” He sighed and I relaxed my grip.
“Yes, okay then. We enjoyed livening up our sex life. Sometimes Michelle liked to experiment with animal costumes. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“So, there you were humping your cat woman when she collapsed?” He looked back at the bedroom. When I released his arm, he started fidgeting with the belt of his bathrobe.
“That’s right, we were just having sex.” His speech slowed and he blinked rapidly. He repeated, “We were just having sex,” but he might as well have said, “I’m just lying to you.”
“And so, you removed her costume and called 911?”
“Yes, she was sweating and said her heart was racing, so I undressed her. When I got back from calling for help, she was dead. There was blood coming from her mouth. It was awful.”
“I can imagine.” I feigned sympathy to keep him talking. “So what’s the problem with the paramedics getting close to the bed?” Stefan continued to twist the ends of his bathrobe tie.
“I was just scared.”
“Scared of what?” He swallowed and took a deep breath. The guy was a terrible liar. Even Lane Linford was better.
“That they’d find the costume and try to humiliate me.” Here was a porn film director supposedly worried that screwing his wife in a furry costume would be his undoing. I wasn’t buying it.
Our conversation was interrupted by the paramedics wheeling the gurney out of the bedroom and struggling to work the body down the spiral staircase. When they got the whole assemblage out the door, Stefan collected himself and realized that I hadn’t explained my presence.
“I want to know who you are and why you’re here,” he insisted. There seemed little reason for deception, so I opted for the truth.
“My name’s Riley. And here’s the short version of why I’m here. The Pleasure Palace had a customer, Lane Linford, who availed himself of your services in acquiring a six-legged alibi.”
“Alibi? For what?”
“Murder, or at least two suspicious deaths which will put my business at risk if the whole sordid story comes to light. And that story involves a further financial transaction with your wife, who blackmailed Mr. Linford. I believe she was in possession of a videotape showing him engaged in a compromising activity.”
“What is your business and how is it involved?”
“I am the owner of Goat Hill Extermination. Mr. Linford’s efforts to acquire the money needed to pay your wife involved a poisoning, probably accidental. But my company could be implicated in having provided the chemicals. And, I might suggest that your business could also be dragged into the spotlight. So, to protect my interests, I need to find out just what the hell happened with Linford and your wife.” Halfway through my answer, Stefan stopped listening and began to stare into space.
“My God, what incredibly good fortune. You’re an exterminator?” Nobody had ever expressed such relief upon discovering my profession, let alone a man whose bloody, naked wife had just been hauled to the morgue.
“Yes. Flies, roaches, rats, pigeons, whatever you have that you don’t want.”
Stefan was suddenly giddy. “Do you have something to kill a spider?”
“Sure. Spiders are easy. Some insects have developed resistance to various chemicals and many species hide in hard-to-reach places. But spiders are susceptible to most insecticides and they tend to either hang out in easily found webs or wander around. Do you have spiders? Or maybe one particularly problematical spider? In that case, a well-placed shoe is more sensible that spraying a whole room.”
“The bedroom. I want to have the bedroom sprayed. And I need it done today, right away. I’ll pay anything, whatever you ask.” Ah, those magical words from a prosperous pervert (Dr. Chen’s admonition about terminology notwithstanding). I figured the standard price for a whole house treatment, added an affluence surcharge, tagged on my contemptible customer tax, and then doubled the result to reflect the emergency timeline. Stefan didn’t blink when I gave him the number. I kicked myself for not aiming higher.
I didn’t have a sprayer in my truck, so the fastest way to arrange a treatment was to call Carol and have her send one of the guys with the chemicals and equipment. Stefan directed me downstairs to the phone in the kitchen. The lemon yellow walls clashed spectacularly with the hot pink refrigerator. Where the hell does a person find appliances in neon colors? Carol said that Larry had just come back from a job and he’d head to the Tenderloin as soon as he loaded up. I told her to have him meet me at PhanTastic Coffee which was a block down from the spider caper.
After telling Stefan I’d be back shortly with the big guns, I headed to Phan’s to put together a plan for dealing with a mysterious spider and a bathrobed dandy while savoring a cup of Vietnamese coffee. The French might’ve left behind a political mess in Southeast Asia, but their culinary legacy included amazing pastries and exceptional coffee.
CHAPTER 17
Larry came into Phan’s, nodded to me and went to the counter. He ordered ca phe sua nong in what was evidently passable Vietnamese. I’ll never understand why he finds such pleasure in the cuisine of a place that holds such horrible memories for him. On the other hand, slowly dripping bitter coffee through a filter into sweetened, condensed milk makes a remarkable drink, perhaps because the damned thing takes so long to make. But Larry didn’t appear to be in any great hurry, despite Carol having presumably expressed a sense of urgency in sending him to meet me.
He came over to the table, one of those white, wrought iron numbers that you’d expect in a Parisian café. Larry had his coffee and a plate of spherical, sesame seed-coated fritters.
“Glad you could find time for an afternoon snack,” I said. He ignored my jab which wasn’t fair given how hard he’d been working to fill in for my absence—and we both knew it.
“They’re banh cam—orange cake. Try one.” He slid the plate across the glass-topped table. I took a bite.
“Orange? Tastes like gooey rice with coconut and vanilla. Good flavor, bad name.”
“Mi chang are so easily confused,” he muttered. “The name refers to the appearance, not the flavor.”
“Yeah, right. So, now that I’ve had my lesson and you’ve had your goodies, maybe we can get down to work.”
“Absolutely, boss.” He popped an entire orange cake into his mouth and chewed contentedly. After washing down the pastry with a slug of coffee, he pushed aside the empt
y plate. “What’s the deal? Carol said it was an emergency job involving spiders, so I loaded up a tank of permethrin.”
“Probably overkill. I suspect we’re dealing with one spider.”
“One? You had me motor across town to spray a spider? Maybe you could’ve stepped on it, although with your dancing talents that might’ve been a challenge.” At the company Christmas party, we rearranged the bedraggled furniture in the warehouse to make space for a dance floor upon Dennis’s insistence. I had a bit too much of the spiked eggnog and made the mistake of being coaxed into a pitiable attempt to move in synchrony to the throbbing beat produced by one of Carol’s pop musicians. After the gang was done laughing, Dennis observed that the song, “Let’s Work,” was aptly named given how much labor I’d expended. My performance was fast becoming a Goat Hill Extermination legend.
“I’m glad everyone’s getting such mileage out of that unfortunate holiday incident. As for today’s job, stepping on the spider was not an option. The guy is frantic and wants the room sprayed. We’re clearing a hefty profit from this one.”
“I thought we didn’t use insecticides unless they were needed. Isn’t that sort of how we got into the Linford mess?”
“Good point, but I didn’t see any chance of changing Stefan’s mind.”
“So he’s mental, eh? And rich.”
“That would about cover it. But I need you to take your time and poke around to see if you can find the spider.”
“Won’t this Stefan guy freak?”
“Probably, but I want him rattled, somewhere between anxious and panicked, to erode his defenses. He’s connected to the Linford case. His wife was blackmailing Lane and I want to figure out what the hell was going on.”
“You could ask him,” said Larry, throwing back the last of his coffee.
“Tried that. He’s hiding something.”
“Yeah, a frickin’ spider.”
~||~
We headed up the street, with Larry carrying a two-gallon sprayer. At the apartment, he took in the surroundings and asked me if Pee-wee Herman was the interior decorator. Stefan was upstairs standing guard outside the bedroom.
Larry started systematically looking under and behind the furniture, working his way around the perimeter of the room. I focused on the bathroom as the creature’s potential lair, although a spider would need pretty weird taste to choose a floor featuring pink marble and a haphazard mosaic of multicolored tiles. I made sure that the spider hadn’t fallen into the square sink or the sunken tub.
Meanwhile, Larry was doing a great job of cranking up Stefan’s dread by leaving the bed until last—the most likely place for the spider to be hiding. After rummaging through the sheets and tossing them aside, he dropped down on all fours to look under the bed.
“Holy shit,” he said, reaching inside his coveralls for a penlight.
“Whatcha got?” I asked as Stefan retreated toward the door.
“There’s a big-ass spider under here, at least four inches across including its legs. Black, shiny and definitely pissed.” I knelt down beside him and had a look. The spider was rearing up and gaping its fangs like something out of a horror movie.
“You had a right to be unhinged,” I said to Stefan over my shoulder. While crawling under buildings I’d encountered angry rats backed into corners, along with a memorable showdown involving an ill-tempered raccoon in an attic. But insects and spiders had the good sense to retreat from exterminators—with the notable exception of this bruiser looking for a fight.
“That is one mean mother. I take back anything I said about your not stomping on that fucker.” Larry wasn’t prone to using profanity in front of customers, except in extreme situations. This one qualified. “What should we do?”
“I don’t want to mash it or we won’t figure out what it is.”
“Believe it or not, Riley, I think I know what it is. But I’ll take a closer look once we have it subdued.”
“We could try catching it in the jar Stefan left next to the bed,” I suggested. “But that beast is damned serious about causing some hurt, and I’d rather not see either of us on the receiving end.” It was still poised on its rear legs, with the front four legs waving in the air and its fangs held wide.
“I heartily advocate a dose of permethrin to even the odds,” Larry said, reaching for the spray tank. I didn’t have a better idea. In the background, Stefan was almost in tears, murmuring, “Just kill it, please just kill it,” over and over. Larry hit it with a shot of insecticide and within a few seconds the spider was thrashing violently in its death throes.
Neither of us was excited about reaching under the bed and grabbing the presumably, but not certainly, dead creature. Larry took one of the paintings off the wall, slid it under the spider and pulled it out from under the bed like a pizza from the oven. The enormous, shiny black body on the glass contrasted with the sky blue background, hot pink squiggly lines and electric green saw-toothed shapes. The spider definitely enhanced the art.
“Okay Stefan, the drama is over. Now explain what the hell this was doing under your bed,” I said. He answered from the doorway.
“Michelle was frightened of spiders, and we’d use them to get her excited. Usually, she’d get aroused just by having a tarantula in a jar on the bed. Sometimes I’d make her lie still and have the spider walk on her naked body. She’d become so hot that I could hardly get the thing back into the jar before she was all over me.”
“Let me guess. This afternoon you took the spider for a walk across your wife but something went wrong.”
“Exactly. I knew tarantulas didn’t bite, but when this spider tumbled out of the jar onto her belly, it reared up and really terrified her. I tried to brush it off with a pillow, but it bit her several times like it was crazed before I could knock it to the floor. I trapped it under the jar.”
“And then?”
“Well, she was definitely aroused but the bites really hurt. I asked her to put nipple clamps on me so we could share in the pain. We had really intense sex for about fifteen minutes and then it was her turn to decide what came next.” Larry stood there, shaking his head.
“And she opted for the cat costume?” I was becoming unfazed, although I made a mental note that it was to their credit that one of them dressed up as a big cat rather than involving their little dog.
“Yes. She had it on when she became sick to her stomach. I thought it was a lingering effect of the fear and pain. But then she started sweating and trembling. I helped her out of the costume and went to get her some water. By the time I got back, she said her mouth was tingling and her heart was racing. I tried to calm her down. When she started having muscle spasms and passed out, I went to call for help. That’s when I knocked over the jar and the spider dashed under the bed. You pretty much know what happened after that.”
Stefan looked sickly, so we took him into an adjacent room furnished as bizarrely as the living room. He laid down on the couch and I took a chair. Larry went over to examine a projection television with one of those gigantic, four-foot-wide screens. As the color slowly returned to Stefan’s face, which had been almost as white as the ermine collar of his bathrobe, I marveled at what compelled anyone to engage in dangerous, even deadly, sex. Dr. Chen had explained the similarity of fear and arousal, but a woman needing foreplay with a spider doesn’t say much for the guy’s abilities. However, what with how easily AIDS is being passed around these days—and I guessed that Stefan’s interests were not limited to women, let alone his wife—the possibility of lethal sex is becoming normal, whatever that means.
“Alright Larry,” I said, as Stefan starting looking less nauseous, “you heard the plot for this afternoon’s soap opera, but it would make more sense if I knew the characters. What did you mean when you said you knew what spider we had cornered?”
“When I was on my way to Nam, I was stationed for six weeks in Australia at Base Richmond, about thirty miles from Sydney. The Brits ran the operation, and they were gonzo
about poisonous spiders and snakes. I guess there aren’t any in England, so the RAAF training included having some guy from the Sydney Zoo come to the base, show us live specimens, and lecture about ways to avoid dying Down Under before giving the VC a chance to end our misery.” He flashed the lopsided smile that tended to punctuate his less gruesome war stories.
“And one of the creatures resembled our little eight-legged voyeur?”
“To a T. I’m willing to bet a pitcher of Guinness at O’Donnell’s that we hosed a Sydney funnel-web spider. Whoever provided that bad boy to our customer here was either really stupid—or meant to kill somebody.”
“Any ideas, Stefan? Did Michelle’s supplier have a reason to want her dead?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe. She had questionable dealings with some unsavory sorts.” I couldn’t keep my face from registering confused amazement. “I know, you think that I’m unsavory. Let me tell you, what I do with lovers is consensual.”
“No need to explain yourself. Just tell me about these shady associates,” I said.
“I told her we were making plenty of money without having to do business with psychopaths. But she was a fiercely independent woman. I can imagine she might have become involved in some sort of double-cross or extortion or whatever you call these situations.”
“Okay, but why would anyone take a chance by using a spider? If someone wanted your wife dead, why not just stage a robbery or mugging that went bad.”
“The police investigate shootings and Michelle’s death appeared natural,” he said. I might’ve questioned the naturalness of the setting, but I understood his point. The paramedics would report heart failure, the cops would concur, and there’d be no autopsy. Suspicious circumstances trigger a postmortem, but this was a just a case of weirdness—and San Francisco was up to her hairy armpits in weird.
“I’m not about to call the cops and have them digging into my sex life,” Stefan declared. “That bastard in the district attorney’s office, Grant Roberts, is waging a holy war on anyone who seeks satisfaction outside of biblical guidelines. Whoever gave her that spider knew that my reporting how she died would give Roberts what he needed to destroy the Pleasure Palace. They’ve already raided Big Richard’s and The Pussy Cat on trumped up warrants.”
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