Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom

by A. L. Haskett

  “Hey, Sven,” Duncan said, “would you pose for me sometime?”

  “I would be delighted.”

  Duncan reflected on his life’s peculiar course as he waited downstairs for the bus. He had sold a painting and his prospects were good for more sales. His best friend had joined him. And despite the inevitable conflicts, he was glad Fiona had found him. Though he resented it, he knew her meddling was motivated by love. And if necessary, he would pay Pris to pose, as often as it took, until his money ran out. He smiled. The world seemed right. A bus stopped with pneumatic flatulence and a diesel smell. Duncan got on and sat beside an old woman who stunk faintly of urine. She wore a dirty shawl and a stained dress and battered athletic shoes. She bobbed her head like a water witch in tune to an internal rhythm. Every so often she threw her head back. Her shoulders shook and her jaw worked but no laughter erupted from her lips.

  Well, Duncan thought as he changed seats, most of the world anyway.

  Nine

  Duncan’s door was open when he returned home. Despite having become inured to surprise visits by a menagerie of characters, he approached the door cautiously. He hoped Pris awaited within, but feared that it was Sheila who lay in ambush. He peeked inside. Two men in suits, their backs to him, sorted through papers on the desk beside the typewriter.

  “Can I help you?” Duncan asked.

  They turned. Both had mustaches, military haircuts, and bodies sculpted by long hours in the gym. Duncan smelled Old Spice. The taller of the two pushed back his coat to reveal an LAPD badge and a gun on his belt.

  “I’m Detective Randolph. He’s Detective Phillips. Who are you?”

  “Duncan Delaney.”

  “Can’t be,” Phillips said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Duncan Delaney is dead,” Randolph said.

  Duncan sat in the back of the unmarked car Randolph and Phillips drove down a nameless street.

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “Do you want to be?” Phillips asked.

  “Well,” Duncan asked, “do I need a lawyer?”

  “Did you do anything wrong?” Randolph asked.

  “Can’t I get a straight answer from you guys?”

  Phillips laughed. “Apparently not. Just relax and enjoy the ride.”

  “If I’m not under arrest, why did you tell me I had to come with you?”

  “You got it wrong,” Randolph said, “we asked if you wanted to come.”

  That was not the way Duncan remembered it, but he did not challenge the deceit. Instead, he said, “I’ve changed my mind.”

  “Too late.” Randolph stopped behind a big white building. Two patrol cars and three ambulances were parked near the entrance. “We’re here.”

  Duncan trailed them inside the building, down an elevator to a cold basement, and along a protracted corridor paved with tiles. He followed Randolph through the doors at the end of the hall. Fluorescent lamps lit a clean, barren room. It smelled of formaldehyde and was colder than the hall. Steel doors, three feet wide and two feet high, covered the walls. Each had a handle and a frame the size of a business card. Some held tags, others did not. Phillips led him to a steel door on the far side of the room.

  Delaney, Duncan, the tag there read.

  Randolph turned the handle and pulled out a long table. A covered body lay there. Two skinny feet poked out from under the sheet. A red tag hung from the right big toe.

  “If you’re Delaney,” Phillips pulled the sheet back, “then who is this?”

  The body was thin and scarred and white like death. The skull’s weary smile had fled along with the body’s brittle soul. All that remained was skin tight over bone and a hollow space in the open eyes. An expanding vertigo touched Duncan’s brain and he had to look away lest he fall.

  “His name was Edward,” he finally said.

  “Edward who?”

  “I don’t know. He was homeless. He lived beneath my stairs.”

  “A bum you mean,” said Phillips. “What else can you tell us?”

  “Not much. I only really spoke with him once. He posed for me.”

  “You mean like photographs?”

  “No. For a painting. I’m an artist.”

  “Sure you are. What else?”

  “He had a good singing voice.” Duncan shrugged. “And he used to like champagne.”

  “Apparently he still did,” Phillips said. “A maid at the Roosevelt Hotel found him naked in bed with a pair of panty hose stuffed in his mouth and an empty bottle of Dom Perignon on the floor beside him.”

  “It should have taken more than one bottle to kill him.”

  Randolph took a sealed plastic bag out of his pocket. Inside was a wad of bills, a slip of paper, and a cracked and empty bottle with a child-safe lid.

  “Phenobarbital. He couldn’t get the lid off so he smashed it with the television remote control. He washed the pills down with champagne. He put a do not disturb sign on the door. He lay down, fell asleep, and choked to death on the panty hose. There was a receipt for telephone service with your name and address in his pocket. Any idea how it got there?”

  “I gave him clean clothes. It must have been in the pocket.”

  The money in the bag was his, of course, but he could not claim it. They would ask why he did not report the theft. Because I was minding a purloined Harley for Satan’s Guardians and I didn’t think you would understand. He recalled a time in kindergarten when he confused bring your favorite book day with bring your favorite toy day. He brought a plastic sub with a working propeller and three red trident nuclear missiles that fired but did not explode. He was embarrassed by his mistake, so he hid the toy in the school yard. A second grader found it and turned it in. The principal went classroom to classroom asking whose it was. Duncan misinterpreted his interest and, fearing retribution, remained silent. Whitey Carpenter, the bastard, claimed the submarine as his own. Now, like then, he kept his interest to himself.

  “All right, sport,” Randolph said, “you can go.”

  “How about a ride home?”

  “No can do. Because of you we have to rewrite our report.”

  Phillips covered Edward’s face and closed the locker. He scratched Delaney, Duncan off the tag and wrote Doe, Edward.

  “Bus stop out front,” he said.

  Out on the street Duncan searched his pockets and came up with seventy-five cents and a stick of sugarless gum. He waved on an approaching bus. Edward’s singing echoed in his mind as he walked. He could not get the song out of his head. When he at last gave up he realized that, despite the thievery, he regretted not asking the name of the song, and he regretted that he would never hear Edward sing it again.

  Something was missing.

  Duncan looked in his closet and in the bathroom. He looked in the kitchen and under the sink. He looked in the box that served as his dresser. He scratched his head and went into the kitchen. A typewritten note was taped to the six-pack on a shelf near the front of the refrigerator.

  Stay away from her, the note said above a bloody smear, or the cat dies.

  Duncan dialed 911. “Someone stole my cat,” he told the operator.

  “Sir,” the operator said, “this line is for emergencies. Come to the station and an officer will take a report.”

  Duncan hung up. By tomorrow Cat could be worm fodder putrefying in a superficial grave. Worse, what if Sheila dismembered the poor feline and dissolved the bloody pieces in a tub of hydrochloric acid? Duncan came to one of those gallant yet foolish decisions that the Delaneys were historically prone to make. Cat had saved him from Sheila. He would save Cat from her. He dialed Angela’s number.

  “Duncan here,” he said when Sven answered, “is Benjamin there?”

  “He and Ms. Moncini just left. Can I help you, Mr. Delaney?”

  “No. Yes. Where does Sheila Rascowitz live?”

  Duncan wrote down the address Sven gave him and hung up. He dialed the Hollywood Bar and Grill. Misty answered.

&n
bsp; “This is Duncan. Is Roscoe there?”

  “Hi, Duncan. No, he doesn’t work until nine.”

  “Damn!” Duncan thought fast. “Misty, would you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.” She meant it. She literally drooled as she spoke. She wiped her saliva from the phone with a bar rag.

  “I need a ride.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  He ran to the curb as Misty pulled up in her car. He got in and gave her the address. She slammed her foot to the floor. The car took off like a bronco out of the chute. She wore a loose shirt over a black lace teddy, a tartan skirt, garter belt, black mesh stockings, and black leather pumps. She looked like a Catholic high school girl gone wrong. Misty had hoped he would notice her apparel but was disappointed by what she incorrectly assumed was his indifference. She let him off at the bottom of a long, winding street in the Hollywood hills.

  “You go on, Misty. You don’t want to get involved in this.”

  “Be careful!” she called as he hiked up the hill.

  Sheila’s house overlooked city lights stretching forever across the basin into the night. The front door opened. Duncan dove into the bushes to the side of the house. Sheila and Samantha came out. Parallel scratch marks ran down Sheila’s cheek. Duncan surmised the origin of the blood on the note. They started their Harleys and rode down the hill. Duncan crept up and peered in a window. A plaid couch stood against one wall. A red leather lounger, a long rip in the seat, stood beside a particle board coffee table. Two wicker chairs sat opposite the table. Sheila could paint but she was no interior decorator. Duncan tried the front door. Locked.

  He sneaked around the house. A wine bottle and two glasses sat on a bench beside a Jacuzzi. A chain link fence surrounded an overgrown yard. Spare motorcycle parts lay amongst the dirt and the weeds. He tried the glass patio door. Locked. He looked in a bedroom window. Light spilled through a half-open door to illuminate a wire cage in the corner by a bed. The window slid open two inches, then stopped when a wooden dowel blocked its progress. Duncan heard a soft feline wail. It was the most forlorn sound in existence. The wail flicked a dusty switch in his brain. Most of his life he had let adversity slide from him like rain off a shingle. The few times violence had been called for, however, he had accounted for himself moderately well. Like in fifth grade, when Willy Raskin asked him why his stupid father let himself get killed when any idiot could see by the missing cockpit that the pilot had ejected. Duncan could not have answered if he wanted to, because a rage was on him. His fist flew on its own into Willy’s nose, smashing the bone there and two of Duncan’s knuckles. Willy had been held back a year, and was considerably bigger, but Duncan laid him out like astro-turf, and for once Benjamin had to pull Duncan off an enemy instead of the reverse. It might have gone bad back at the Circle D except, while sitting in the school office with Fiona, the principal had insensitively commented, Mr. Delaney’s action hadn’t exactly been the brightest thing, had it? Fiona brained him with a bronze paper weight and pinned him to the ground with her hands around his throat. She later apologized, as she was running out of schools and principals. The same rage was in Duncan as he stood outside Sheila’s window. He lifted a rusty carburetor from the dirt and hurled it through the glass door. He stepped through, oblivious to the broken glass dangling in the frame. He opened the cage. Cat jumped to his arms, claws digging into him in a hold reminiscent of his predatory past. Duncan heard the Harleys pull into the driveway. The engines stopped. He ran out through the broken patio door, around the house, and to the street. A raging scream loud enough to activate car alarms and turn on porch lights echoed between the hills. Duncan clutched Cat and ran. The Harleys roared to life. He looked behind him. Headlights white and bright and pulsating bore down on him. He turned, ready for one last desperate dodge. Sheila saw him and screamed.

  I am a dead man, Duncan thought.

  A white Cadillac convertible roared past, missing him by inches. The car swerved sideways to a stop thirty feet in front of him. Sheila and Samantha laid their Harleys down to avoid crashing into the car, skidding by either side in a display of sparks like fireworks. Sheila’s eyes were wide with rage and her teeth showed fierce through grimacing lips. She made Three Stooges noises as she bounced past him into a yard of poison sumac. Samantha landed in a patch of ice plant. A blond woman with cupric eyes leaned across the Cadillac’s seat and opened a door.

  “Get in you moron,” said Pris.

  “I’m lucky you came along,” Duncan said.

  “Lucky hell. Misty told me where you were.”

  Her hair streamed gold behind and around her face as she drove west on Sunset. Cat purred in Duncan’s lap. Pris stopped at the curb beneath his studio. She shut off the engine and glared.

  “That was stupid. I could have gotten Cat back. She would have killed you.”

  The notion that he could not defend himself against a female, even one who outweighed him by thirty pounds and could out bench him by fifty, was an affront to his testosterone producing capabilities. He sighed and got out.

  “I’m not through yelling at you.”

  “You can yell at me upstairs.”

  She followed him to his studio. Aspirations shot down despair and he dared hope again. Benjamin and Roscoe were waiting inside. Duncan put Cat down and sagged onto the couch.

  “We were just getting ready to rescue you,” Benjamin said.

  “I guess you two met. Benjamin, this is Pris.”

  “Howdy. I caught your act this morning.”

  “I wasn’t working this morning.”

  “Here, I mean.”

  “How come she didn’t kill you?” Roscoe asked.

  “Sheila or Pris?” Duncan asked.

  Benjamin laughed. Pris smiled despite herself. Roscoe looked confused.

  “Sheila,” he finally said.

  “Why does everyone think I can’t take care of myself?” Roscoe and Benjamin and Pris traded knowing looks. “I’m serious!”

  “Rascowitz is nuts,” Roscoe said. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  Pris picked up Cat and sat on the couch beside Duncan.

  “The night is young,” she said.

  “Come on, Roscoe,” Benjamin said. “I want to see what this bitch looks like. Don’t worry,” he said when Duncan frowned, “nothing’s going to happen.”

  “What’s he going to do?” Pris asked after they left.

  “Something pointless and stupid.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  Duncan pulled his cuff back. A gash ran halfway from his wrist to his biceps. He had not felt the cut until he looked at it, then it throbbed and burned. Pris led him to the bathroom and unbuttoned his shirt. He took it off and held out his arm. Duncan watched her, awed by one small perfect part of God’s creation. He noticed two white, rough lines against her tan wrists. The scars ran two inches from the bottom of each palm toward her elbows. A potent wave of empathy washed through his soul. She poured Mercurochrome onto his wound and the pain drove the evolving question from his brain. She dried his arm and wrapped it with gauze and tape.

  “Thank you,” he said, “for everything.”

  Her hair fell across her forehead into her clear blue eyes. A sigh whispered past her lips. She pushed the hair away and headed for the door.

  “Give it up,” she said. “I’m not falling for you.”

  “What did I say this time?”

  She stopped. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Try me.”

  “What could you give me? You don’t even have a car. How would you take me out, on a bicycle? Grow up, Duncan. I’m high maintenance. All you could offer is love and long ago I learned love doesn’t matter. It should, but it doesn’t. Sooner or later someone gets hurt.”

  He struggled into a shirt and followed her downstairs. “Maybe you shouldn’t go home,” he said when they reached the street. “If Sheila . . .”

  “Sheila’s one of the few people in the world who would never hurt me
. And besides. I don’t live with Sheila.”

  “But at the gallery you said . . .”

  “I said she paid my rent.”

  She got in her car and started it. Duncan jumped in front of the Cadillac. Pris rolled her eyes.

  “Get out of the way.”

  “I want more than money. I think you do too.”

  “Easy to say when you’ve always had it. Get out of the way.”

  “Not until you answer one question.”

  She shifted back into park and sighed. “One question.”

  Duncan knelt by her door. “If all you care about is money then why haven’t you married it? You’re beautiful and charming when you’re not being psychotic.” His frustration pushed him past the point of tact. “You could have any man you wanted.”

  She took a folded paper from her purse and put it in his pocket. She stroked his hair and almost smiled.

  “Because I’ve never wanted a man before you.”

  She floored the Cadillac and roared into the night, her tail lights flying away like the afterburners of his heart. He took the paper out of his pocket. It was a check drawn on Fiona’s bank in Cheyenne made out to Priscilla Nolan for twenty thousand dollars. He put the check back in his pocket.

  Well, he thought as he climbed his stairs, at least now I know her last name.

  Benjamin stood outside Sheila Rascowitz’s window and watched her sleep on the couch. Samantha lay across the room beside an empty quart beer bottle, face down in the dusty shag carpet. Benjamin turned away from the window. Roscoe knelt in the driveway examining one of two Harleys.