Topless

by D Keith Mano

  Daniels and Colavecchia returned. They looked sour.

  The questioning went on for at least three hours. It began, as

  most slow intimidations do, with trivial data. This time the murderer had exited out the rear door—there was a slight, but noticeable trail of blood. It ran from the door, down a narrow alley, and ended at the sidestreet curb—where, presumably, the perp

  had gotten into his car. Oddly, there were also bloody cat paw-

  prints. This, I felt, was a bit of evidence against me. For all his

  Lizzie Borden whacking, the murderer somehow hadn’t scared

  the cat. Yes, I was on good terms with Lazarus. Yes, said Weintraub, and so was Jako: Jako might’ve let the cat out. But, said Daniels, Jako came in the front door. But, said Weintraub, he

  was in shock and barely able to function for over thirty minutes.

  He could’ve put Lazarus out during that time and forgotten about

  it. Daniels let the matter drop. He went into another office, made

  a phone call and came back in.

  “ Do you know a woman named Kay—or Katherine—

  Lyons?”

  “ Sure. She’s my fiancée, or was. She just flew in from

  Nebraska t’visit. I ’d really rather not involve her in this.”

  “ Sorry. It’s germane. When’d you see her last?”

  “ Yesterday. We went to Coney Island—t’relax after my resignation.”

  “ Did she come t’your apartment?” I hesitated. “ Well?”

  “ For a time, yes.”

  “ For how long?”

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  “ Coffee, that’s all. Time enough for coffee and cake.”

  “ Did you make love t’her?”

  “ This conversation is just about over,” said Weintraub.

  “ Don’t answer. W here’s this leading, Daniels? You obviously

  have information I don’t have—tell me now or we’ll just wait

  for discovery. And you’ll lose my client’s valuable help. ”

  “ Okay,” said Colavecchia. “ Kay Lyons says she spent the

  entire night with Mike. Mike, however, says she just had coffee.

  Coffee gives him time t ’wash the dishes, climb over the roof,

  and commit murder. So who’s telling the truth?”

  And Weintraub, with brilliant spontaneity, said, “ All right,

  my client has been lying. We’ll concede that. He was trying

  t’protect his fiancee’s reputation. I advised him against it—but

  with all the allegations of sexual misconduct, you know—”

  Weintraub turned to me. “ Tell them the truth, Mike. Kay spent

  the entire night with you, didn’t she?”

  “ Yes.” I said. “ She d id .”

  They certainly didn’t want to believe me. It exonerated their

  best suspect. And Kay—obviously—had a stake in her fiance’s

  release. Cynicism was in order. How had Kay entered and exited my apartment without being seen? She really unnerved them then. She took Cribbs up to my building roof. There Kay pointed

  out our secret route. When he was still skeptical, before he could

  stop her, Kay jum ped the four foot airshaft.

  Over and back.

  An expression of love, I think.

  TUESDAY, JULY 26, and WEDNESDAY, JULY 27

  I had attained, if not fame, then a fine grade of notoriety. It was

  awful: like those dreams where you find yourself naked and

  mute on the Seventh Avenue subway. Bag packers in the supermarket stared at me—and forgot to wrap my ice cream in plastic.

  The pharmacist would say, come back in fifteen minutes—and,

  when I did (I got a Valium prescription), every employee was

  loitering three feet from the prescription counter. My block was

  virtually impassible. Those who might have been undecided on

  the subject of my guilt or innocence were ready to hang me

  because of the double-parked press cars. Like a Euripidean

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  chorus, the Jewish ladies would yell “ Bum and murderer” as I

  walked down the street.

  I thought of moving to Ethel’s house—but she didn’t want her

  children exposed to the media rush. Weintraub backed her: he

  felt it was important for me to stay away from Kay. I considered

  a motel: but I didn’t really want to be alone. So, instead, I spent

  some nights on the Starship Enterprise.

  Which is also Bert’s two-bedroom—one-mess—apartment. I

  opened his front door and this life-sized Klingon warrior shot a

  phaser gun at me. Flash, flash, flash. You walk carefully, and

  single file, through Bert’s apartment. There is a path six inches

  wide between this display of Trek-shit and that display of Trek-

  shit. Fanzines. Plastic Scotties and plastic Sulus. (Bert’s shower

  stall looks like a beam-me-up transporter.) Autographed photos.

  Studio posters. Wind-up tribbles. Remote control Federation

  starships. The chairs we sat in were “ authentic replicas” (?) of

  furniture found on the Enterprise’s bridge. It was absurd. It was

  claustrophobic-making. It was appraised at $260,000. “ And

  going up as we sit here,” Bert said.

  So that’s what I did for two days: watched Bert’s collection

  appreciate, while, on TV, my character did the opposite. The

  parish chronicler had sold his video of my resignation to one of

  the networks. Over and over again I relived my defrocking. Then

  there was the TV psychiatrist who spoke (very judiciously) about

  repression in the church—and the violent reactions it could foment. He mentioned Rasputin. Everything I might have done was “ alleged,” of course. And alleged and alleged again.

  In another sense, though, my prospects were appreciating.

  Weintraub reported a newspaper offer of $125,000 for my exclusive “ life” story. “ Don’t bite,” he said. “ That just sets your bottom figure.” Meanwhile he was maneuvering to have The

  Car reopened. The blood had been cleared up, new flooring put

  in, but Jako had suddenly lost all his hair—every follicle dead

  from shock. “ And,” said Weintraub, “ be good t’your girlfriend. She has you by the short ones.”

  “ I ’m innocent, Mr. Weintraub,” I said.

  “ Sure. But innocence is a lousy defense. You don’t wanna go

  t’trial—even though I ’ll get you off. You don’t want two years

  of m e.”

  * * *

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  “ B ert,” I said, hanging up. “ You ever been m arried?”

  “ N eh.” He was cataloguing his collection on a PC. “ Where

  would I fit her? A wife. ”

  “ Well, have you had girlfriends?”

  “ I had a mother. Enough. Man should learn from his

  mother—one woman is enough.”

  “ The dancers don’t arouse you?”

  “ Fortunately I can’t see so w ell.”

  ‘ ‘If you could—see them, I mean. ’ ’

  “ I ’m a collector, Mike. Finding one of my tsatskes is a turnon. It completes a piece of my existence. Now, for you, women are a collector’s item. Each of them completes—nu?—a piece of

  your existence. This one brings out the big romantic in you.

  That one makes your petzel stand up in a different direction.

  Another maybe is spiritual. Men like you borrow a personality

  in bed. My father was a big womanizer. ‘Today, ’ he would say,

  ‘I found out I was a singer. ’ This girl told him he could sing.

 
; ‘Ibday—I understood what it is t ’be tender. ’ Some other chippy

  said he had a big heart. To this day my mother hates him. He

  was like a jigsaw put together by women. ’ ’

  “ It’s an interesting idea,” I said.

  “ But that’s the good part I told you.”

  “ W hat’s the bad part?”

  “ The bad part is—most of these women are lying. My father

  couldn’t sing a note—the cat would run if he opened his mouth. ’ ’

  “ Maybe I should start collecting.”

  “ Don’t be snide. You see this mess? Better a mess in the

  living room than a junkhouse in the heart.”

  “ Are women the same? Do they derive their personalities

  from men?”

  ‘ ‘Women come finished from the womb, ’ ’ Bert said. ‘ ‘It’s the

  difference between egg and sperm. The egg is there. It’s the

  little sperm that needs a road map. So they show us: ‘Yoo-hoo,

  over here.’ It reduces to biology.”

  “ I ’ll get another beer,” I said.

  The New York Post headline on July 29th was: PRIEST HAD

  HISTORY OF SEX HI JINX.

  The Ottomanellis, in their grief, had made a statement to the

  press. “ Even as a teenager,” said Mr. Ottomanelli, “ Mike Wilson was a pervert. He got a sixteen-year-old girl pregnant.”

  (Amanda was sixteen and so was I—but he made it sound like

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  Mike Wilson had gone poaching at a Brownie Scout convention.)

  He blamed Berry’s drug trouble on me. He blamed her topless

  career on me. He said the police were covering up. And he

  announced a $5,000,000 lawsuit against the Episcopal Church

  for—I don’t know—failure to inspire morality or something.

  Worse, though, Mrs. Ottomanelli told Daniels that Berry had

  gotten a phone call at 4:30 a.m. It had woken the whole house.

  Berry dressed. Berry said that a nightshift worker had been

  taken ill. That she’d been called in to replace him by her “ boss”

  at the “ restaurant. ” Me, it was generally presumed. They didn’t

  mention the six ounces of cocaine and the two dozen bags of

  heroin found in Berry’s bedroom closet at home.

  “ Who did it, Bert?” I asked. We were watching the episode

  where Spock falls in love.

  “ If you didn’t?”

  “ I like that. You think you’re watching TV with a murderer?”

  “ It wouldn’t surprise me. After Auschwitz who can be surprised? I feel safe. I ’m not your type.”

  “ Who did it?”

  “ Me maybe.”

  “ Seriously.”

  “ Why not?”

  “ But you weren’t even there when Bubbles died.”

  “ We don’t know Bubbles was murdered. Tanya and Berry—

  you can be sure they didn’t commit suicide. Neh. Mike, I was

  there, I had access, why not me?”

  And, for a half-moment, it seemed plausible. The domineering mother, like in Psycho. The repressed sex life. The strength, Lord knows. And all the goddam LUNATIC JUNK in that

  apartment. Bert was crazy. He could’ve done it.

  The two of. us, sitting in this cockamamy room, building

  cases against each other.

  Then Weintraub called. He felt that the Ottomanelli press

  conference had done damage. Cribbs might have me arrested

  just to save face. But the $125,000 deal had gone up to $175,000.

  And there was a message from Rev. Augustus Manning.

  I called. Manning was oblique. Said he had something important to tell me. We agreed to meet in Bowne Park at 11 a.m.

  And so I spent the night building an indictment against Manning for the murders of Rita and Bubbles and Tanya and Berry.

  I forged keys to The Car for him. To him I attributed astonishing

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  physical strength. And the motive, of course was easily come

  by: we were all repressed, we priests, weren’t we?

  And, in a sense, from Berry’s m urder to the end, I never

  entirely ruled myself out.

  THURSDAY, JULY 28

  I watched Manning for a few moments from my Lincoln. He

  was seated on a bench near the duck pond in Bowne Park. Feeding squirrels. Manning had shorts on. And, under his KISS-FM

  T-shirt, he sported paps. They were almost feminine. He wasn’t

  fat particularly—he just had the slackest skin I have ever seen

  on a human being. His cheeks hung to jowls. And under each

  eye there was a big purse of flesh.

  “ Sit,” he said. I sat. He gave off a sour odor: it reminded

  me of a Paris pissoir. Sleep, I guessed, had been snubbing him.

  He handed me a bag of peanuts.

  “ Is this an official meeting?” I asked.

  “ N o,” he said. “ I ’m acting on my own. But I think I can

  help you.”

  “ How so?”

  “ The diocese, indeed the national church, has taken a terrific

  drubbing because of your antics.”

  “ I ’m sorry for that.’’

  “ There are . . . ’’ he touched me on the shoulder, “ there are

  people in the Diocese of Queens, important people, who feel

  you shouldn’t have stepped down.”

  I stared at him.

  “ I happen to be one of those people.”

  “ Excuse me. Did you just say—I shouldn’t have resigned?”

  “ First of all—if I may make an important theological point—

  you cannot resign from the priesthood. A priest is ordained

  forever according to the Order of Melchizedek. You are still a

  priest.”

  “ Yes. But I will not function as a priest. I can’t consecrate a

  chalice in my present state of alienation. I ’m not fit.”

  “ Who says? My word, we ordain lesbians in this church with

  great pomp and honor. You didn’t commit adultery—neither you

  nor the young lady were married. You were helping your sister-

  in-law and her four small children. And surely—surely—you’re

  not saying you murdered those women.”

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  “ No. I didn’t .”

  “ Then I see it essentially as a First Amendment issue—and

  I ’ll back you on that. So will many others. This is, after all, an

  activist church.”

  “ Come again?”

  “ There are people in Queens Diocese who think we should

  take the high ground. It never pays t’get defensive. Look what

  happened t’Reagan with Irangate. He should’ve said ‘Of course

  we did it. By our interpretation, the Constitution grants a president the authority to act at his discretion in foreign policy matters of great import. Others disagree. Fair enough: let’s bring it before the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, we apologize for nothing. ’ End of Irangate. Can you see what I ’m getting at?”

  “ Frankly, no.”

  “ All right. There are important people, myself included, who

  feel that your case should be handled as a civil-rights issue.”

  “ My First Amendment right to earn a living from nudity?”

  “ I repeat—whatVe you done wrong? You were indiscreet,

  but passionate. You did a favor for your sister-in-law. In the

  process you hoped t’bring some Christian love to a tawdry and

  jaded enterprise. Do I haveta remind you what Jesus said about

  His mission? It was to save sinners—not those who are already

/>   blessed by grace.”

  “ But I hid my identity. I didn’t preach—”

  “ You were biding your time for the auspicious moment. Then,

  well, these terrible murders took place. It got too late. Listen,

  you could be a tremendous asset to your church. You’re handsome. You’re smart. You’re certainly glib as hell. Your resignation speech was excellent theater. There are churches across the river in New York Diocese—down in the Village, say—who

  would kill t’have you as their rector. You’ve had national publicity. You could do more for the Episcopal Church on the Oprah Winfrey show than a hundred monks praying. Stop thinking

  about yourself for a moment and think about feeding your

  flock.”

  As if to illustrate, Manning offered a peanut to the squirrel

  beside him. It was another hot day. I stared at a naked infant

  girl playing with her bare-shinned mother in the shallow water.

  But, to tell truth, I was numb with fear. The devil was sitting

  on a park bench. It had to be him. Who else would be so persuasive? Manning had almost convinced the rational me. And the world of Christ was stood on its head.

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  “ The Oprah Winfrey show—’’

  “ A syndicated column. You could be a bishop some day. And

  a good one.”

  “ W ell,” I said thoughtfully. “ The good thing is—what adds

  credibility—the good thing is . . . y o u ’ve been at The Car all

  along. I can say I was working there under your pastoral supervision—”

  “ N o,” said Manning, “ you can’t tell them that.”

  “ Sure I can. What about your civil rights?”

  “ Don’t play games, Mike. I ’m not stupid.”

  “ Games? If it’s all right for Mike Wilson t’be in a topless

  bar—why not you?”

  “ Because I don’t have any official position at The Car. I don’t

  have the compelling reasons for being there that you have. I

  was—”

  “ Just committing a sin.”

  “ I ’m 56 years old and I don’t intend t’let myself be judged

  by a child.”

  I stood up.

  “ I don’t judge.”

  “ W a it- ”

  ‘ ‘Manning—whether liberation theology allows for it or not—

  sin still exists in the world. Things can be wrong. Me, I ’m all

  wrong. My soul is an open sore right now. I ’ve given in to lust