by D Keith Mano
was ringing—as a gong will, when it is struck. Ringing: she was
all shivers. She held a straw in her hand, and her thin body, in
shorts and T-shirt, seemed to contract around that straw. Even
after my brusque entry, the straw took all her attention.
“ Oh,” she said. “ Is everyone gone?”
“ Who’re you?” I said.
“ I, you know, I came to audition. And I stayed in here. You
told me to.”
“ No, I didn’t.”
“ Huh? You said—you know—t’hide in the john ’til after everyone was gone. Hide there. Then you’d audition m e.”
“ I ’ve never seen you before,” I said.
“ No? Well, okay, maybe—I ’m a little high. Huh . . . But,
wait, I remember that mustache. ’ ’
“ Where’d you see this mustache?”
“ Uh—he picked me up on Queens Boulevard.”
“ In a car?”
“ No—a bicycle. What else, a car.”
“ And you let strange men in cars pick you up?”
“ I was—you know. Taming tricks.”
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“ What kind of car was this?”
“ A car. I don’t follow what kind of cars.”
“ And he looked like me?”
‘ ‘Yeah. Afterward, he tipped me fifty dollars t’come in here. ’ ’
“ W hat’s that, heroin?”
“ My last,” she said. “ Or I ’d give you some. I really would.
But I can’t cop until noon tomorrow. ”
“ You haveta go hom e,” I told her.
“ I don’t have a hom e,” she said. “ My parents, you know,
gave up on m e.”
“ You can’t stay here.”
“ I ’ll go down on you,” she said. “ I ’m good at that.”
“ No, thank you. I have trouble enough. I ’ll let you out.”
“ Please,” she said. “ Let me sleep here. I got raped last
night, sleeping in the park. I won’t bother you.”
And I thought, It’s too late now, anyway. They’re outside still.
If they see her leaving at 5:30 a.m ., it’ll be in the afternoon
edition. (She didn’t look 18.) Maybe by the time Jako and Bert
arrive, when the beer distributors get here, her exit will pass
unnoticed. I ’ll let her dance one or two sets, then she’ll leave.
I was very tired.
“ Com e,” I said. “ I have a sheet out on the stage. You can
sleep there.”
“ I ’m cold,” she said.
“ Well, come then.”
She was a coltish thing—long legs, not shapely, but firm and
resilient. High, soft breasts that lumped themselves together.
And a charming, sleepy smile—the smile of a person who was
resigned to everything. Except a day without her drug. She
pressed herself against me like plastic explosive: she fitted into
every bend and crevice of my body—I was the mold and she the
statue. It wasn’t sexual. It was like a child sucking its thumb. A
kind of female nest-making.
And I was superstitious about her. I thought, as her body
laminated itself to mine, that maybe she was bringing a message
from Tony. Or maybe her warmth was a gift from him. Alive,
dead. But that was over-wishful. This is not such an extraordinary mustache. I see them all the time. She sighed and said,
“ Whatever you w ant,” in her sleep. Around 7 a.m ., Lazarus
climbed on top of us.
* * *
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The girl was gone when I woke up. She had taken all the
loose change from our two cash registers. I never saw her again.
SATURDAY, JULY 30
Joe Solomon came into the kitchen at 11 a.m ., while I was
shaving with a travel razor Jako had bought me. I wasn’t up to
par. In my last year at seminary I had developed a duodenal
ulcer. Now I felt that dull drill-bit just under my sternum a g a in -
screwing pain in. My stool was black. And my breath, I ’m sure,
stank like Beelzebub himself. Jako wasn’t much better off. He
talked to himself all the time now, not just half the time. And,
for some reason, he would count his fingers every five minutes
or so. Sometimes he missed one—and you had to point it out,
otherwise he got panicky.
“ Long time, no see,” I said to Joe. “ We’re under siege here.
People fight their way in and throw money at us.”
“ There’s a line outside already.”
“ Anything new?”
“ Well, the governor has proposed a state income tax law
requiring every topless bar t’file something he calls a “ gratuity
estimate” for each dancer it employs. Sort of a 1099, I guess.
Based on a percentage of sales—some formula. They call it The
Smoking Car law. ’ ’
“ Fame.”
“ That’s quite a girl you have.”
“ Kay? My alibi?”
“ She’s got the homicide crew totally off balance. They don’t
believe a word she’s told them, and yet they say ‘Yes, ma’am’
whenever she opens her mouth. In fact, the reason I ’m here—
it’s a flag of truce kinda. They’d like your help.”
“ What they’d like, they’d like me t’confess.”
“ Yes. That would be the ideal, but—”
“ Fuck ’em ,” I said.
“ Now don’t be too hard on the guys. This is not your average
sensational case. They’re under pressure. They can see promotions passing them by. ’ ’
“ So?”
“ They want you t’know that—if you’ve been shielding someone—they can be very reasonable about immunity and state’s evidence. And I believe them.”
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D. Keith Mono
“ Who would I be shielding? Do they really think I ’d protect
someone who might kill again?”
“ Suppose the someone were dead.”
“ Dead?”
‘ ‘A man named Augustus Manning committed suicide early
yesterday m orning.” I cut myself with the razor. “ You knew
him?”
“ Yes. He was a priest.”
“ So it seems. He left a cryptic note mentioning The Car.
And you.”
“ I knew him as a customer. Hardly more than that.”
“ Yet you didn’t mention him t ’Colavecchia or Daniels. They’d
like t ’know why. You should have.”
“ Joe, from the day I left Nebraska I haven’t done one blessed
thing right. Except my resignation.”
“ Were you protecting him?”
“ O f course I was protecting him—from the humiliation I ’ve
just gone through as a priest. Not because he was a murderer. ’ ’
“ They think he did it, M ike.”
“ It can’t b e .”
“ The man was a manic-depressive apparently. He had beaten
his wife on numerous occasions before they separated in 1972.
He has the right profile.”
“ Joe, Manning was the man in the floppy hat. He used to sit
by the buffet table, way in the back. Remember?”
“ Him? That was Manning? Well, he was big enough.
A n d - ”
“ And he was another repressed priest.”
“ You said it, I didn’t. ”
“ Thing you guys should realize by now—the Episcopal
Church doesn’t repress its priests e
nough. ’ ’
“ You could get that idea.”
“ Joe—” I turned to him. There was shaving cream on my
face. I looked silly, and it caught him off guard. “ I saw you
with Linese a coupla nights ago.”
“ O h,” he said. I noted a sharp reaction, but the nature of it
escaped me. Shame at being found disloyal maybe—maybe
something more portentous than that.
“ Yes?”
“ It’s nothing. I consult on security m atters.” Joe took out a
card. It said, “ THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON, Residential-
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Commercial Security Consultants. Ex-NYPD.” And his phone
number. “ Linese owns a lot of buildings.”
“ Oh.”
“ Linese is a scumbag—but his buildings’re legitimate.”
“ Forget it, Joe. Y’know what they say about paranoids.”
“ Sure.”
“ But—” I couldn’t help saying it: I was paranoid. “ If it
comes t’trial—don’t change your testimony, Joe. Linese would
love t’see me do hard tim e.”
“ Mike—” he said.
I turned back to the sink. I didn’t trust Joe. After a moment
he left.
By midnight I was so sick of topless—the whole mincing,
perverse charade—that I almost closed The Car down, Ethel or
no. I loathed all that high-camp teasing. Wet tongue over lower
lip. Butt cheeks half-inched apart. Dance steps that pantomimed
some excerpt from the Kama Sutra. This, I thought, is what
children do when they play grown-ups. This is, yes, childish.
And, much more than I would admit, Manning’s suicide troubled me. I had been savage toward him. Out of malice. After all, only Manning in all this sordid environment had been morally inferior to me. And so I sicced myself on him—the wounded straggler. The priest who had not been scrupulous enough to
resign^ Inexcusable as sins of lust may be, dry sins of gratuitous
cruelty are far worse.' God—if I may speak for Him—can have
compassion on the hot sinner. Murderous Moses. St. Paul, an
accomplice in the death of St. Stephen. There is energy in such
sins that can be turned to a torrid rush of blessedness. But grace
could never transform what I had done to Augustus Manning. It
was just cheap.
But why had he patronized The Car? Not for the sexuality of
it: the man had no real sexuality in him. For two reasons, I
thought. One: to participate in die routine humiliation of women.
Topless has always been about that: profitable humiliation. And
Manning’s other reason—well, I suspect he wanted to get caught.
Problem was: nobody, not even his church, cared much one
way or another. Until the deaths.
Just after two a.m. I came down with a galactic case of the
runs and befouled my own underwear.
“ Bert,” I said. “ I ’ve had a little accident. I think I ’ll go back
t’your place for a while and take a shower.”
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D. Keith Mono
“ No problem ,” said Bert. “ Happens t ’me all the tim e.”
I tried not to speculate on that. I asked Lars-Erik to bring his
Plymouth around—I ’d dive from The Car into Lars-Erik’s before
the media could react. And then take a cab back.
The crowd was absolutely pulsing. Sure, the music supplied
certain erotic rhythms—but this was different. A Brazilian gill
of torrential beauty, Dolores, was dancing with Cleopatra and
Shane. Dolores had taken an ice cube and, with it, had given
her body a sheen. The disco lights reflected from her. Her breasts
were gala-round, high, so buoyant—the glare lent them exquisite
definition. And she was dancing at just the right speed. Many
women dance fast, so that their nakedness will be blurred: it is
the smallest modesty. Other women dance too slowly—the eye,
bored, slips away. But Dolores moved to the exact beat of an
orgasm—and, along with that, she had grace and imagination.
I saw men with their mouths open: as if, like cats, they had a
Jacobson’s gland—that smeller of sexual traits—just behind their
upper lips. They were inhaling Dolores. And she, in response
to their response, in a sea of dollar bills, had performed mass
hypnosis. She had entranced the room. No man there would go
home innocent of her.
And I knew she was only 18. Eighteen and a virgin: shy. It
brightened m e, her power. I ran for the front door.
But I stopped dead in front of Bert’s apartment. Something
wasn’t kosher: the Klingon had begun firing his phaser. I could
see a flashing light along the threshold crack. The Klingon was
wired to Bert’s door. He began firing when it opened, and you
could only turn the damn machinery off by pressing a button
behind his left knee. Someone was in Bert’s apartment.
I should’ve gone away then—called 911. Six days a week I*m
not a particularly brave or reckless man. But the intruder, whoever he might happen to be, had caught me at the wrong mom ent. I was, shall we say, hyper. I had been ducking confrontations for half a month. I was weary and afraid, and I
was in the mood to make someone pay for it. More than all that,
probably, I needed to take a shower.
Carefhlly, quarter inch by quarter inch, I inserted my key.
Then I hurled the door open. There, by the on-off lighting of
phaser blasts, I saw Leonard. A disgruntled Leonard. He was
bent forward, back to me, shoveling through a pile of TVek-
abilia. He was dredging the room for something. Leonard didn’t
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even turn around when he heard the door hinges crack. He just
said,
“ This place is a dump. We’ll never find it in here.” The
“ we” should’ve alerted me. “ T ’hell with it—I ’m gonna put a
decent light on.” He turned then and saw me.
“ Leonard, you fuck,” I said.
“ You?” He stood up: all six foot five inches of him.
“ What’re you doing here?”
“ I ’m working for the census bureau. Hey, you gonna call the
cops? I don’t think you wanna see fuzz any more’n I do. So
long, schmuck.”
And, with indignation, as if angry that I had interrupted him,
Leonard went for the open door.
But I closed it. Leonard stared at me—on-off, on-off went the
phaser light. And then he pursed his lips and blew on me—like
maybe I was thistledown, inconsequential. And he grabbed
the doorknob.
I had never hit a man with all my strength—let alone in the
face. I think most males fantasize about that sort of blow. The
side of Leonard’s face was exposed to me, bent just a bit forward
as he leaned for the doorknob. I let go a right-hand punch that
had everything behind it: leverage, 180 pounds, the full torque
of my body and a lot of self-disgust.
Leonard’s left eyebrow split open and he fell forward on both
knees. My hand screamed. I stood back as Leonard, more from
reflex than intention, tottered up. He came at me arms out—for
Leonard, contact with his prey was essential. Blood ran down
into his mouth.
“ That’
s the end of you, priest-fuck,” he said.
“ Did you kill them, Leonard?” I said.
“ That’s the end of you.”
He bulled toward me—but, instead of fear, I felt a mean sort
of clarity. I wanted there to be blood all over his face. I wanted
it—and I didn’t care if Leonard killed me in the transaction. My
body was electric. I jabbed him three times: nose, nose, nose.
On my third jab the bridge snapped and Leonard began to howl,
“ I ’ll KILL you!”
But one eye was puffed shut, and the pain was starting to
uncoordinate him. By then, also, Leonard knew that he had
engaged another sort of being. I was a mongoose, a ferret: I
hope never again to encounter that vicious me again. It is enough,
once, to have known true animal exhilaration—when all the re-
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D. Keith Mono
straints of sense and a civil nature are gone. I could’ve killed
Leonard in that flashing room.
One. One. One. I jabbed him, and his head whip-lashed back.
Leonard covered his face with both arms and shuffled ahead,
hoping to pin me against something. But I stepped aside, and
he staggered knee-deep through Bert’s mania. Leonard fell. For
a moment I thought he might give up—and it disappointed me—
so I stood back, took his measure, and kicked Leonard as hard
as 1 could in the ribs.
It was a shitty thing to do. And it was almost fetal: Leonard
got part of my leg, but I twisted free. He stumbled to his feet—
he was swaying, he seemed a dancer. And then pain from my
kick came through the switchboard of his nervous system. He
roared and went silent—breathless. Diaphragm frozen. And I
hit him full in the mouth with my right. At just arm ’s length. I
snapped off the punch, I gave it twisting English, I was analytical about it. And bridgework—bridgework that I didn’t know Leonard had—came out like a fighter’s mouthpiece.
“ No m ore,” he said.
But I hit him—on the ear, in the throat, behind the neck—
until he fell. My teeth were chattering. I was up on my toes. I
wanted to hurt him more.
“ Enough. Please,” he said. He lay crouched, his lacerated
face was falling apart in his hands.
“ What were you looking for, Leonard?”
“ Berry’s bag. My coke. She stole it from m e.”
“ Did you kill her?”
“ Nohhhhhh. Nohhhhh,” he said.
