“It was my pleasure,” Jack Graves said, and he meant it. He liked Clive Devon. “So long, Malcolm,” he said to the big mongrel dog.
Jack Graves didn’t get up even though he’d paid his bill. He stayed with Doc and watched the action now that two other couples had gotten up to dance to “Cowboy Logic.” The lyrics held Jack Graves in place.
Cowboy logic … ev’ry cowboy’s got it
He’s got a simple solution for jist about
Anythaaaaaang.
That’s when it came to him! Jack Graves had always done police work grounded in the belief that there’s a simple solution for just about anything. With notable exceptions. He knew all about exceptions and insoluble dilemmas.
He turned to the old vet and said, “How about another drink, Doc? I’d like to hear a little more about your golf course up here. I’m thinking about joining it.”
Breda had switched to Scotch at Lynn’s suggestion. She spilled some when she made the second unsteady pass at her own mouth, and didn’t say a word when he ordered her another “to replace spillage.”
He decided to put a stop to it after this one. Her freckle was swimming all over her lower lip! They were both tanked, and into cop-talk, which is inevitable when cops get that smashed.
“I used to work with …” She lost the thread, then picked it up after another sip of Scotch. “Oh yeah! I was saying, I used to work with this alky detec … detec …”
“Detective,” Lynn said, helping her.
“Yeah. Anyhow, he went through treatment programs three times. Last time he fooled his wife for six months. He’s the one that told me a twenty-five-foot garden hose holds a pint. A fifty-footer holds a quart.”
“That’s sad,” Lynn said sadly, putting down a big gulp, watching that freckle bounce and dive, pitch and roll. “I worked with a lieutenant who made four trips to the hospital. They had him make moccasins for therapy. All those trips, he coulda made a hand-tooled saddle.”
“Real sad,” Breda said, and this time she splashed booze all over the front of her silk blouse, but didn’t notice.
“You miss it, Breda?” he asked. “The job?” He was concentrating as hard as he could to make the freckle stop dancing.
“I miss some stuff,” she said. “Like when I worked at Hollywood station there was a toilet stall in the women’s john. Called it the Hollywood Times. Everybody wrote stuff in there. When you got back from vacation you had to run to the john to find out the latest dirt. If it was in the Hollywood Times, it had to be true, Virginia.”
“That reminds me,” Lynn said, giggling. “I heard you had a female lieutenant in your department that was always on a diet. And the guys that worked for her’d always put a note with her uniforms when they went to the cleaners, telling them to take the uniform in a quarter of an inch!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you get it? Her clothes were forever tight no matter how much weight she lost!”
Lynn got the screaming giggles until Breda glared at him and leaned over the table saying, “That’s the kinda juvenile crap the female officers’ve been putting up with since the goddamn world began!”
Lynn stopped abruptly, and said, “Oh. Well, I also heard they jacked up her car a few inches and when it wouldn’t go she couldn’t figure it out!”
Those cobalt blue eyes froze his giggle in place, so he said, “That ain’t funny either, is it?”
“It’s asinine!”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” Lynn said, slurring. “I feel the same way about the time they taped a hard-core porn poster to the top of her police unit and when she was directing a field operation every helicopter in the city was doing a flyover.”
All of a sudden Breda screamed, “That’s funny!” And the waitress shook her head at the bartender. It was, “Cork all bottles as far as those two’re concerned.”
Lynn gave up then. He couldn’t tell anymore what was revolting and disgusting and what was funny. He hadn’t meant to get this hammered!
He called for the waitress and paid the bill. The next move was going to be very interesting. Breda was going to try to stand up.
Lynn tried it first and was astonished by the movement under his feet, like maybe a 6.2 earthquake had jolted the San Andreas Fault. Jesus, this was a dumb idea!
There was no point coaxing and coddling. He just put his arm around her waist and said, “Let’s go, boss,” and she didn’t argue.
“What’s in that goddamn c-c …”
“Coffee,” he said, guiding her toward the departure lobby and the last tram car, which was leaving at 9:45 P.M.
“I shouldn’t a …” she said, but trailed off.
“Caffeine’ll kill ya!” he said. “Next time we’ll have decaf Irish coffee. It’s the caffeine causing your problem.”
She almost fell asleep standing up on the ride down the mountain. There were only seven others on that last car and they were all subdued: three amorous couples and a single guy who looked lonely standing among the others.
Lynn kept his arm around Breda’s waist to steady her, and she didn’t resist. That bike riding paid off, he thought. Her muscles were a lot harder than his.
“What’s your size?” he asked.
“Six,” she said. “And … I’m … staying a six.”
“You are a buff size six!” he said, looking down at her cyclist’s calves. Then he said, “Do you like mustaches?”
“I hate mustaches!” she said. “Half a the LAPD has em!”
“Even the females?”
“Macho crap!” she said gruffly. “All those blue-suited stashes strutting around!”
“I been thinking of getting rid a mine,” he said.
Descending the steps of the valley station was a matter that took some planning. Finally, he hung on to the handrail with his right hand, and kept her pressed against him with the left. She was too tanked to know how tanked she was. Lynn knew she’d be dying in the morning.
He half lifted her into her car, and when he got into the driver’s seat and started the engine, he turned the radio from soft hits to the country station.
“This is Nelson’s influence,” he said. “I never listened to country till he came along, but I’ve discovered that country music’s all about me!”
And as though to prove him right, Mark Chesnutt sang:
Brother Jukebox, Sister Wine,
Mother Freedom, Father Time,
Since she left me by myself
You’re the only family I got left.
“See what I mean?” Lynn said. “All about a guy that hangs around in bars. A lonely guy.”
“Huh?”
“Never mind, go back to sleep.”
He drove straight to his mansion. The automatic security lights were on, illuminating the acre of cactus garden as though it were daylight. Neighbors couldn’t complain because Lynn’s patron had surrounded his property with a high wall and oleander, to block the glare.
Lynn had to get out of the car to open the electric gate. It would stay open automatically at 6:00 A.M. for the gardener, pool cleaner and other service people.
“How do ya like my digs?” he asked, and she opened her eyes lazily and said, “Uh huh.”
As he was pulling into the garage, Patty Loveless sang:
There’s a man in a Stetson hat
Howling like an alley cat
Outside my winda tonight.
“My God!” Lynn said. They knew! They knew every move he made! He was an alley cat!
A little sensitivity
Always seems to get to me …
I’m getting tired of these one night stands,
But if you’re looking for a real romance
I’m that kind of giiiiiirrrrl.
Suddenly, he felt awful! Talk about the guilt monkey! An orangutan had him in a headlock. He looked at poor helpless Breda. This was pathetic. This revolted and humiliated him. He despised himself. He was a sorry excuse for a man. He was slimier than a lung-cookie hacked f
rom the death-cough out of the putrid blackened lungs of the most low-down crack-smoking degenerate in the county.
He was all of that. But he was also the guy who continued to lead the nearly comatose P.I. up the carpeted stairway to the master suite where there was a round waterbed bigger than Sinatra’s helicopter pad.
When they got into the bedroom, he left her sitting on the water-filled mattress at the five o’clock position. He went around to eleven o’clock and turned on the radio with some difficulty, and found the country station.
Breda clearly didn’t know where she was and was too drunk to care. She stared unbuttoning her blouse and kicking off her shoes. The effort made her fall back on the waterbed, sending a wave under Lynn Cutter and a powerful thrill through his loins!
Breda rolled off onto the carpet and unzipped her skirt while sitting on the floor. Lynn got up, and with his back turned started undressing.
He said aloud, “This is not my fault.” But there was nobody there to hear him. Breda certainly was past understanding.
“I’m not gonna do this!” he cried hoarsely to the ceiling, but then Michelle Wright began singing with one of those low sexy country voices.
You’ll know that it’s true
’Cause I’ll be there for you
Just a heartbeat awaaaaay.
It wasn’t his fault! There was Breda, just a heartbeat away, sitting on the waterbed at six o’clock, glassy-eyed and struggling to get out of her bra and panties. Her underwear was sort of violet, like verbeña! What was he supposed to do? He didn’t know what was the right thing to do in a situation like this! He didn’t know she’d have nipples like ripe swollen berries!
When she was completely naked, she just crawled across the round waterbed toward twelve o’clock. She probably didn’t even know where she was. The poor kid. She had such buff calves!
Trying hard to say something nice, he finally said, “I guess I seen tighter skin in my time, but only on a plum!”
All of a sudden she looked up at him and said, “Lynn?” As in, “Lynn, what the hell’re you doing here?”
He crawled toward her under the sheet. Like a sidewinder. Like a scorpion. Like a goddamn tarantula!
She looked so pathetic and helpless. Her lustrous earth-brown hair cascaded. Her eyes, like wet turquoise, were at half mast. Her lips were wet and partially open. That frigging freckle was just sort of trembling there beside the corner of her lower lip!
If only Michelle Wright didn’t have that low sexy voice.
You’ll know that it’s true
’Cause I’ll be there for you
Just a heartbeat awaaaaaaaay.
Okay, I’m just gonna kiss that freckle once or twice, he swore to himself. Maybe touch it with my tongue, that’s all. He just had to do that. It wasn’t his fault! It wasn’t! It was that goddamn bittersweet chocolate freckle!
The fugitive is cramming Lynn’s head into the coffin! The fugitive is gnashing and growling and jumping on the coffin, cracking Lynn’s vertebrae with the lid! The fugitive is smacking Lynn across the face because suddenly the fugitive is inside the coffin with him and Denny O’Doul, the poor Irish son of a bitch! And a sloppy undertaker has gone and spilled corn flakes in the coffin! And somebody on a ghetto-blaster is yodeling country music while Denny O’Doul’s widow keels over in a faint!
Lynn woke up when she slugged him the third time. “Oooooooooo!” he moaned.
She was wearing her skirt, and strangely enough her shoes! But she was still bare-breasted, sitting astride him, smacking him across the face!
The bedside radio had never been turned off. Rob Crosby was singing “Love Will Bring Her Around” while she beat the living shit out of him!
“You dirty sneaky depraved sonofabitch!” she shrieked.
“Ooooooooooo!” he wailed, without being awake enough to stop her!
His face was on fire and he was being whacked from one side of the pillow to the other! Finally, he came to enough to raise up and dump her off backwards where the ebb and flow of the waterbed easily sloshed her onto the floor because she wasn’t all that sober yet!
“I’ll kill you, you rotten sleazy bastard!” she screamed and the first thing he thought was: The gun! He’d seen it in her purse! The gun!
He looked around desperately, but the purse was nowhere to be found! Then he realized it must still be in the car, thank God!
Then she got up and whacked him again across the right ear and his whole head started ringing!
“Stop hitting me!” he screamed, trying to hold her off.
But she was literally leaking venom! He saw a trickle of saliva on that goddamn freckle! Her electric blues had short circuited! She was looking for something to brain him with! She grabbed for the lamp, but he wrestled it away and toppled her onto the bed again and fell on her and they both wobbled and bounced on what seemed like a vat of Jell-O! Her raspberry nipples were bobbing at eye level!
“Stop it!” he yelled, finally able to crawl onto the floor and scuttle like a naked scorpion toward that humongous ugly bathroom. When he got inside he slammed the door and locked it.
There was silence in the bedroom, and he thought: She’s getting the fucking gun! He looked behind him, but the only bathroom window was one of those shitty little openings high on the wall that slid open for ventilation. He couldn’t have squeezed out of that even when he was still thin. He was doomed!
Then he heard something. It sounded like she’d fallen down. He called out, “Breda! Whatever’s troubling you, I’m sure we can talk about it!”
No answer.
“Breda!” he yelled, picking up the tennis shoe telephone. “Don’t make me call nine-one-one!”
No answer.
He wrapped a towel around his waist and unlocked the door. He had a crazy idea that he didn’t want to be found naked and dead, like a fucking book title.
“Breda!”
She was sitting rigid as stone on a straight-backed chair by the window, staring outside with her back to him. She was fully clothed now, but panting from the pounding she’d given him.
“Breda,” he said softly. “I think I can understand why you’re mad at me, but honest, I had too much to drink! I didn’t know what I was doing!”
She never turned around when she said, “You’re the most vile evil horrible person I’ve ever known.”
“I ain’t that bad,” he said.
“You raped me,” she said quietly.
“What?”
“Date rape,” she said. “And I’m going to sue you, you filthy perverted creep!”
“Date rape! I didn’t rape nobody! I just put you to bed cause you were drunk! Hell, I was drunk too! If I hadn’t a been drunk I woulda noticed that I put you in the wrong bed is all. Date rape? Gimme a break!”
She still hadn’t turned around when she said, “I’ll pay you what I promised, but then I never want to see your slimy rotten self ever again.”
He looked at his watch. Three A.M. The Drinker’s Hour. All the grief and agony of mankind happened at three A.M., after booze made the blood sugar drop.
“Breda,” he said, “we’re both still a little bit lubricated. We shouldn’t try to communicate right now.”
Finally, she turned around and he saw that her face was white as china and tear-stained, and all of a sudden he did feel like a rapist!
Choking back a sob: “How could you do that to another human being?”
“Know what I did? I kissed your freckle. That’s all I did. That’s all I could do. I admit I had some other ideas, but I was too drunk. I just kissed your freckle maybe three times. Then I passed out.”
“You kissed what?”
“The freckle there by your mouth,” he said. “I had this uncontrollable desire to kiss your freckle since the first time I laid eyes on you.” Then he staggered sideways and had to sit down on the bed. It went GLUP!
“Christ, I hate this freaking bed!” he said. “It makes me nauseous.” He was nauseous, and his head was p
ounding. “Breda, I’m still hammered,” he whined. “You must be at least as drunk as me?”
“You got me that way so you could rape me,” she said. And that caused him to look frantically around the room again. Was that fucking purse still in the car or not?
“Look, we’re grownup people,” he pleaded. “You got your forty-third birthday coming up, for chrissake!”
“How do you know when my birthday is?”
“I had you run through DMV. The second of April. You’re almost as old as me.”
“You ran my name through DMV? You swine, how dare you!”
“I did it right after we met. I only do stuff like that when I like a woman!”
“When you’d like to rape them, you mean! You had your way with me!”
“Had my … Jesus! That kinda line went out with the zoot suit! Had my way? This ain’t Forever Amber! Look, we’re just two lonely middle-aged people is all we are! This can’t be such a big deal!”
“I’m not lonely, you bastard! And if I was, that doesn’t give you the right to … to …”
“To kiss your freckle? I told you, that’s all I did. I passed out. You wanna give me a sobriety check? I’ll prove I’m still tanked. I couldn’t walk a line you painted with a push-broom. Honest!”
Now she seemed uncertain, but even angrier. “So you just take off a woman’s clothes and slobber on her and … and degrade her! You think that’s okay, you foul slithering vermin!”
“You’re mad if I did it! You’re madder if I didn’t do it! And in the second place I didn’t take off your clothes. But you ain’t gonna listen to reason. Why’nt you just shoot me and get it over with.”
All of a sudden she jumped unsteadily to her feet and said, “I will, you asshole!”
“WAIT A MINUTE!” he screamed. “WHERE’S YOUR PURSE? WHERE’S THAT GODDAMN PURSE?”
Then she sat down again and he could see that she was sick, very sick. He crept a little closer.
“You’re whiter’n Gramma’s undies,” he said. “I think you oughtta get in the bathroom real quick.”
She did. He heard her throwing up two seconds after the door slammed. Then he weaved his way down the hall to the guest bath. Christ, his head! He got a glass of water and a clean towel and returned to the master suite, standing outside the door.
Fugitive Nights Page 20
