Tongue tied ds-8

by Richard Stevenson

  "Lyle is so upset with me," Welch said to me, "that you almost had him believing I was a major felon."

  "And he's so smitten with yon that lie almost had me believing he was going to tip you off that I was onto you-or even that he was your accomplice."

  Welch swigged more beer. "So," he said after a moment, "what made you decide I was a kidnapper?"

  I explained how comments Lylc had made about Welch's rage over the J-Bird and his radio show had predisposed me to becoming suspicious of him, and how Lyle's apparently exaggerated remarks about Welch's drug use had fueled that predisposition. Then after Leo Moyle told of the powerful scent of fingernail polish in the room where he had been held, I connected that with Welch's use of poppers, which smelled like nail polish, and Welch and his mysterious cohorts suddenly became the obvious culprits.

  "We do use poppers," Welch said. "They're probably not healthy, but they're legal.

  None of us use fingernail polish, though. Delmar, Marty and I are all police officers, and colored nails would not go over big in the department."

  "There was also," I said, "the fact that with Jay F'lank-ton's situation becoming increasingly desperate, some of us hired to find him probably started getting desperate, too. You heard about the tongue at the Post, I take it."

  "I doubt if that's real," Welch said. "Who would do that? It's too wild, too much." "I hope so."

  "Before you pulled up across the street, Lyle was on the phone with the other detectives working the case, including the feds, and he said everybody was sounding desperate.

  The forensics weren't in on the tongue yet, and nobody could find a tattoo artist who looked like a good suspect for the Moyle inkwork. There are hundreds of licensed tattoo parlors in the metro area, and nobody knows how many unlicensed amateurs, it turns out. They'd been hoping that the tattoo search would churn something up. And I guess the FFF end of the investigation hasn't been productive either."

  "Not so far," I said. "The harassment of Plankton, supposedly by FFFers, was just some angry kids in Massachusetts. And apparently the kidnappers then picked up on the FFF name, hoping the kids would be the prime suspects. But they weren't for long."

  With faint light now discernible through the low clouds in the east, Welch and I reviewed the case for several minutes, until Thad and Lyle reappeared. Lyle seemed to have calmed down. To distract him, Thad had asked for a tour of the Welch house, ostensibly to reassure Thad that Jay Plankton was not bound and gagged somewhere. Thad reported to me that it was true-Plankton was nowhere in the house, and there was no evidence that he had ever been there.

  "Upstairs there are two hunky naked guys on a big bed," Thad said, "snoring to beat the band. Earlier somebody had spilled a vial of poppers on a pillow, and the place still reeked. It's a powerful aroma, and I can understand, Strachey, why when you smelled the popper in the subway it triggered this really strong reaction on your part, like Marcel Proust's madeleine.

  "But this stuff didn't really smell like nail polish. It's sweeter, and not so pungent. I was thinking, there's nothing that smells exactly like nail polish. So maybe what Leo Moyle smelled really was nail polish. Wouldn't Moyle and the J-Bird and those guys recognize nail polish when they smelled it? They've got all those girlfriends and ex-wives and ex-girlfriends who probably did their nails a lot. So the J-Bird gang would surely know that smell when they were near it," Thad said.

  That's when something I had been dimly aware of since one of my annoying conversations with Jerry Jerris and Jay Plankton in Jeris's office started to come back to me.

  Chapter 22

  I was seated at Dave Welch's kitchen table, and I had Leo Moyle on the phone. On the table in front of me were the few remaining crumbs from the crullers. And instead of joining Welch in a beer, I was back at the takeout coffee, which Welch had zapped in his microwave. This brought out the brew's acidic qualities, which I needed.

  A groggy-sounding woman had answered Moyle's telephone. Apparently he had taken Jerry Jeris's advice on how to help regain his mental health. The woman was reluctant to awaken Moyle at daybreak, but when I explained that the information might save Jay Plankton from additional harm, she relented, and Moyle was soon on the line.

  I asked him, "What do you know about Steve Glodt's personal life?"

  "You woke me up at 5:30 A.M. to ask me whati"

  "Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton once mentioned to me in passing that Steve Glodt had a girlfriend in Oyster Bay who runs a nail parlor. It was my impression from this conversation, as I recall it, that Glodt also has a wife wherever he lives on Long Island. Is all of that true? I'll explain in a minute why I'm waking you up at this early hour, and how all this might be relevant to your kidnapping and to Jay's."

  There was a pause, and then Moyle said, "What are you trying to say, Strachey? Just spit it the fuck out. What are you implying about Steve?"

  "It sounds, Leo, as if you are ready to be indignant over any imputation of wrongdoing on the part of your big boss, Steve Glodt. I guess you are much fonder of Glodt than it's my impression Jerry Jeris and Jay Plankton are. Your confidence in his integrity is far greater than theirs. They both talked about Glodt as if he is greedy, mendacious, treacherous. Maybe your experience with Glodt has been different."

  Moyle said, "Steve's a total asshole, don't get me wrong."

  "Uh-huh."

  "But what are you saying? That Steve had me snatched and dragged out to the Island and tortured? And now he's doing the same thing to Jay? Even if he was that skanky, why would he do that? Sure, Steve is a depraved son of a bitch. Anybody who's ever been in contract negotiations with him knows that. The man is capable of just about anything he thinks he can get away with. But why would he do this to Jay and I?

  There'd be nothing in it for him."

  "What about publicity? A spike in the ratings?"

  "The show's ratings have never been higher," Moyle said. "Unless. .." There was a silence.

  "Unless what?"

  "Unless Steve thought that by putting Jay and me through the wringer it would make us angrier."

  "Why would he want that?"

  Moyle was breathing audibly now, as if the idea that someone was calculatedly trying to make h i m angrier was making him angrier.

  "Steve's been working on a deal to get the show simulcast on cable TV-on GSN, the Gonzo Sports Network. But according to Irene Wojkowski, my agent, the GSN people have been offering less money than Steve thinks the deal is worth. They told him they thought the show was losing its edge, that we all weren't angry enough. The angry-white-male audience wants raw red meat, and the GSN people aren't sure we're mean enough. They want us foaming at the mouth for three hours a day, Irene said, and they claim we aren't doing it. Which is idiotic, because Jay and I are as vicious as we've ever been, and if any pussy-whipped dickhead tries to say otherwise to my face, I'll break his pansy-wristed fag neck."

  Could necks have wrists? Now was not the time to inquire. "I guess, Leo, that when you use the term 'mean,' you are using it in the Jack Welch-style American corporate sense. By 'mean,' you mean relentlessly, even amorally, profit-oriented."

  "Not really," Moyle said. "By 'mean,' I mean shitting on wussy, oversensitive, PC types of people for the sheer, sadistic pleasure of it."

  "I'm sorry if I impugned your motives."

  "Steve Glodt is only interested in money," Moyle said. "I have my beliefs, and I have my principles."

  "So tell me about rotten, unprincipled Steve Glodt's girlfriend in Oyster Bay. She runs a nail parlor there?"

  "I've heard that, yeah. She has an apartment over the nail parlor, and Steve spends as much time there as he does with his hideous wife in his mansion in Center Island, according to Irene. The wife knows about it, but what's she gonna do? Out in the open market, she'd be worth about eighty-nine cents a pound, and she'd miss her Chris-Craft and her helipad and her New Year's-to-Groundhog Day in Boca. The setup works perfectly for everybody involved."

  "What's the girlfriend's nam
e?"

  "Annette, I think. But that might not be her real name. No, it is, it's Annette something. Listen," Moyle said, "do you really think Steve could be behind the kidnappings? I've been fucked over by people I knew before, but… This could be some major shit of a type that a man even as cynical as I can be finds very hard to get my mind around."

  "I'm not sure," I said, "but Glodt is looking more and more promising. The girlfriend's apartment over the nail parlor in Oyster Bay might have been where you were held, and it sounds like a good locale to produce an overwhelming smell of nail polish. It's the right distance from the city too, at the end of a route that includes tunnels and expressways. And now you yourself, need I add, have offered up a specific motive, even beyond Glodt's well-known general horri-bleness. Is it safe to say that when you do the J-Bird's show on Monday, you'll be seething?"

  "Oh, I'll be pissed beyond belief-at Steve, if he did it."

  "But even if you went into the studio Monday morning thinking some radical gay group like the FFF was responsible for what happened to you and the J-Bird, you'd be very, very angry, wouldn't you, Leo?"

  "I'd be ripshit."

  "A state of affairs that would not go unnoticed at GSN, I'll bet."

  I described to Moyle the overnight development in the case, where a moist object that the kidnappers asserted was Jay Plankton's tongue had turned up in the New York Post newsroom. "But I doubt it's actually the J-Bird's tongue," I said. "Plankton would be of no use to Glodt if the J-Bird was in a perpetual rage every weekday morning but his diction was worse than Quasimodo's."

  Moyle said, "If Steve is actually behind this, somebody's tongue is gonna get ripped out, but it's not gonna be Jay's. If Annette wants her cunt licked in the future, she's gonna have to go down to the pet store and shop for a new friend other than Steve Glodt."

  I guessed Moyle was speaking figuratively in his colorful way, but his breathing was sounding labored again, so I wasn't sure.

  Chapter 23

  Oyster Bay, despite the popular misconception, was a largely working-class town on the Island's generally silk-stockinged North Shore. Theodore Roosevelt had had a home there-Sagamore Hill, now a museum-but most of the town's residents were neither political nor business aristocracy. They were the people who installed the hot tubs, pumped out the septic tanks, and rolled the lawns of this section of Long Island's old and new rich. Oyster Bay, it appeared, as we drove through it en route to the House of Annette: Nails of Glory-which we had found in the Nassau County yellow pages-was not so much a Jay Gatsby town or a Tom and Daisy Buchanan town as it was a George and Myrtle Wilson town.

  There was no Doctor T. J. Eckleburg sign, as in Gatsby, but plenty of suburban retail and office sprawl, most of it identical to what we'd passed in Hempstead. One difference between the commercial suburbia I was familiar with in Albany and that of Oyster Bay was the Long Island preponderance of retail stores in long buildings, probably dating to the 1920s and 1930s and done in a brick "colonial" motif or an "Old English" style that featured leaded windows and exposed timbers. These were the North Shore versions of LA strip malls, except sometimes with second stories.

  The strip we parked down the street from included- along with a pizza parlor, a tae kwon do emporium, and a copying center-the House of Annette: Nails of Glory. Of additional interest to Lyle, Dave Welch, Thad, and me-all of us in Lyle's NYPD

  Ford-was Annette's next-door neighbor, Damien's Den of In-Ink-Kwity, a tattoo parlor.

  At 6:25 Sunday morning, all of the businesses were closed. So was the chain video store we were parked in front of. Traffic was all but nonexistent, and a fine mist was in the air, which was so rainforestlike that I would not have been surprised to hear a macaw cackling or see a salamander skitter across the hood of the Ford.

  We sat for several minutes going over our options. Both Barner and Welch were skeptical of my theory-which had become a conviction over the past hour-that Steve Glodt was the mastermind behind the Moyle and Plankton kidnappings. Both cops agreed that powerful people were capable of savage criminal acts-Lyle had seen it numberless times over his long career-but they both doubted that Glodt would be so spectacularly arrogant and reckless.

  Having spent a couple of days, off and on, with Jeris, Plankton, and Moyle, I thought I understood them well enough to make this argument: Glodt had calculated he had plenty to gain from the cruel stunt-publicity and, even more importantly, added

  "edge" that the Gonzo Sports Network would go for. And he figured he had little to lose if caught. Glodt could well have speculated that if Plankton and Moyle remained in character, they would consider the whole thing a hilarious practical joke-just guys joshing other guys on a colossal scale-and they would consider it unsporting, even unmanly, to press charges or ever to testify in court against the charmingly roguish prankster who also happened to own their network.

  Having observed Plankton and Jeris at their most oafish, Thad found my scenario plausible. He was also eager to expose Glodt and, like me, to test the limits of the J-Bird's willingness to let sadistic straight male jerks of a well-known type be sadistic straight male jerks of a well-known type. Lyle was indulging Thad and me by driving us over to Oyster Bay, and Welch came along to watch. On the way to Oyster Bay, Lyle had checked again with the other detectives working the case back in the city, but none reported any breaks.

  Lyle said, "Miss Annette living next door to a tattoo parlor does get my attention."

  "Is this one of the tattooists that was checked?" Welch asked.

  "I'll find out."

  Lyle phoned his office, spoke to someone there, and hung up. "It was checked out yesterday by the Oyster Bay department."

  I said, "What did the questioning consist of? Did they ask Damien the tattooist if he was involved in the Moyle kidnapping, and he said no, and they left, or what?"

  "It could have been something like that."

  We sat for another minute looking down the street through the mist at the nail and tattoo parlors. The long business block was set back from the highway about thirty feet, with face-in parking along the facade. The second-story windows bore no signs or lettering, and it looked as if there were apartments behind them. That would square with my information from the J-Bird gang that Glodt's girlfriend lived above her nail parlor. At the center of the block was what looked like a first-floor entryway leading to the second-floor apartments. Fire regulations, I guessed, would have required a second entrance and stairway, probably in the rear of the building.

  Thad said, "What if we just went up to the apartment over the nail parlor and knocked on the door?"

  "And say what?" Lyle said. "Even if I identified myself as a police officer, whoever's in there could tell me to screw off. I could wake up a judge and ask for a search warrant if I had something more to go on than Strachey's imagination running wild. But I don't, so getting in there with either a legal document or a battering ram is not in the cards."

  "The chances are good," I said, "that at this early hour everybody inside the apartment is asleep. Maybe Thad and I could get inside the apartment, look around, and either confirm that the J-Bird is being held in there or that he isn't, and then leave. Thad, do you think you could get us inside?"

  "Probably so. It's an old building without a lot of updating otherwise, so it may well have old locks I could go right through. Do any of you have a lobster pick with you?

  I reckon not."

  Lyle said, "I have a department tool you could use. But I'm just trying to figure out how I'm supposed to explain to a commander-or to a department inspector or to a judge- that the rescue of Jay Plankton was effected through a citizen's breaking and entering-and a B and E that I was myself an accessory to. Or even worse than that and this is the likeliest way for all this to play out-that Plankton isn't in there at all, but my lockpicker was employed in a B and E that led to a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against the department, against an Albany PI, and against a Mennonite turnip farmer from Jersey."

  "Eggplan
t," Thad said.

  "But Lyle has a point." Now this was Welch getting into it. "If you going in there the way you said goes wrong, we're all fucked. That's why I think, Thad, that instead of you using Lyle's department equipment, you should use some of the finer implements on my Swiss Army knife, which maybe you found on the roadside somewhere. And that while you go in, Lyle and I should cruise up and down the highway until we get a call from you to either pick you up, and we all go to IHOP for breakfast, or to come to your aid pronto and we do."

  Lyle was shaking his head, but instead of objecting he just let out a long sigh and said, "Jee-sus."

  Thad and I were in the backseat of the Ford, and when Welch reached over the seat to hand Thad the Swiss Army knife, I saw that Thad had goose bumps on his arm. His hand was not trembling, though, an indication that he was anticipating not sex but house-breaking. An unusual Mennonite was Thad, or so I assumed from my limited experience.

  Lyle made Thad and me both memorize his cellphone number, and when we had, we climbed out into a fine spray of light rain.

  "This feels nice," Thad said. "I feel like a pile of fresh lettuce at the old Rinella's market in Ephrata when I was a kid. They had a machine that sprayed the produce, and I liked to stick my face in the mist."

  "Actually, those gadgets are back," I told Thad, as Lyle pulled onto the highway and headed away from the strip mall. "I saw one in a supermarket recently that not only misted the greens periodically, but when it did so a nearby speaker broadcast thunderstorm sounds."

  "And let loose with a blast of Ferde Grofe?"

  "I'm not kidding," I told him, and I wasn't.

  "No lightning bolts though, I hope."

  "Not yet."

  We crossed the highway and walked toward the business strip with apartments above it, then cut along the side of the building and around back. There we found an acre of tarmac, with garbage dumpsters next to some of the rear entrances to the pizza parlor and the other businesses. Six cars were parked side by side at the far rear of the paved area, which apparently provided parking for the business employees and the building's second-floor tenants. No light-colored van was among the cars, just Chevy, Pontiac and Honda sedans and a beat-up old VW Rabbit.