by Jerry Stahl
“So you gonna be all right?” said Manny finally. “This picture, it’s an intense little item to be walking around with. I mean, W with a smiley-scrote…. Not to mention the lovely Marge. I guess you know what certain people would pay for that thing. Or what they’d do to get it.”
He let his voice trail off, and Tina nodded. She cast a last, nervous glance at the picture, whispered “Keep it for me,” then jumped out of the Impala and ran up the muddy path to her door.
Once he saw her go in, Manny swung the car into a neighbor’s driveway, turned around, and sped up the street doing sixty. As he drove, he kept one hand on the envelope. He’d have to find a safe place for it. He’d also have to make a report—leaving out everything—and cook up some version of his interview with Tina that kept her clean. But it was hard keeping his mind off Mister Biobrain. George Bush’s basket, for Christ’s sake! The last thing he thought he was going to see when up woke up that morning was his ex-wife eyeball-to-testicle with the President. The Happy Face was beyond even contemplating…. But he loved the fact that Tina wanted him to hold on to it.
Phone poles clicked past as Manny tried to work out fake suicide scenarios for Marvin. What he needed was proof that the faux guru had a history of guzzling drain cleaners, or some similar weirdness. The answer came to him as he swung up the circular ramp to the parking lot that police headquarters shared with a small office building full of lawyers, insurance men, and some kind of vocational college he could never get a handle on. Arby Tech. The “students” all looked like they’d come straight from their methadone clinic by way of Attica. It was the methadone thing that made him think of Dr. Roos, a bent plastic surgeon he’d busted for selling ketamine two years ago. It turned out Special K was the least of it. Gripped by wholly justifiable paranoia, the doctor believed he was being popped for shopping photos of mutant she-males to fetishists on the Net. He confessed before Manny knew what the hell he was talking about.
Dr. Roos hadn’t claimed innocence, which always impressed Manny, but he did maintain that no one really got hurt, since you couldn’t see anything from the neck up. “Your fetish types don’t care about faces,” he’d explained. “They all have about one square inch that gets them hot.”
It wouldn’t take much to get Roos to lie and sign off on Marv’s history of medical emergencies. The doctor lived in fear. All Manny had to do was hint that the feds were onto him, and he’d do anything for his friend the detective. As if Manny had some kind of federal connections; as if he had any idea what, if anything, they knew about Roos’s current racket. But that was the great thing about paranoids: They were easy to impress.
Manny worked out a story on the drive over. If anyone, namely the chief, wondered why a cosmetic surgeon was involved with a dotcommie’s suicide attempts, Roos could confess that he was brought in as a “friend of the family.” Fayton just liked details. Unless pressed, he didn’t ruffle his uniform trying to find out whether they were real or not.
Manny groped in his pocket for a couple of codeine and gulped them as he thought about the plan. It could, he decided, actually work.
In a good week, Manny only had to set foot in the station four or five times. His record low was twice. His high was twenty-nine, but that was around Easter, a traditionally high-crime period, for reasons too mysterious to fathom. Perhaps, Manny’d heard it argued from the dispatcher, a freckled young woman named Mindy, whose father handled snakes at a church in Wheeling, some people lost faith in God when they got to thinking what He did to His Only Son. Why shouldn’t I shoplift a chocolate egg from the A&P, Mindy posited, by way of example, when the Lord in Heaven bade His incarnation in flesh to bleed and suffer? She may have been right.
Manny, in any case, was not having a great week. Before Tina and Marv’s Drano party, he’d been in five times since Monday morning. And it was only Tuesday. The idea was to keep cases working, have a reason to be out, wherever out happened to be. The catch was, the more time you spent out of the office, the more time you had to spend in it, explaining to Chief Fayton exactly what you were doing out there.
Fayton prided himself on being a hands-on kind of boss. This might have had something to do with his background. He came up riding a desk at the State Department of Motor Vehicles before switching to police administration, as Head of Personnel for the Pittsburgh Police Department. After that, of course, came the big leap to Upper Marilyn chief-hood. Never having actually arrested anyone, let alone ever set butt in a squad car, Fayton loved to hear about real police work. “I want details!” he’d holler, poised in his immaculate chief’s uniform, in his trademark position behind his freshly Lemon Pledged desk: chin propped on his right fist, left hand mysteriously out of view.
Manny and Merch loved to speculate what that left hand was up to when they read aloud from their reports. Fayton insisted on being read to. Which made embellishment pretty much part of the job. It was important to invent an extra suspect or three, to justify floating around the city for days at a time, dreaming up ever more salacious and gripping action to pad the paperwork. How better to account for time spent visiting girlfriends, drinking, reading back issues of Field and Stream in the library, or doing whatever else a law enforcement professional did when he was supposed to be working and wasn’t?
Fayton had gained his post by securing jobs for friends and family of cops in his capacity as personnel director back in P-burgh. The chief slot in Upper Marilyn was payback. Despite never having cracked a case, let alone gone out and worked one, he always had busloads of ideas on how to help the men beneath him when they came in with their reports.
What made today peculiar was that there actually was a ton of salacious details—all real—and this time Manny would have to hide almost all of them. The 10–30, Violent Crime in Progress, had popped up on the radio right after he’d opened Tina’s envelope. “All Units to 1660 Bigelow Avenue. Seventh Heaven Senior Village. Repeat….”
He knew Seventh Heaven because his great-uncle Clem had died there. At the end, when Manny was nine, Clem suffered a rare form of senility that made him clap all the time. Every Sunday, when Manny and his brother Stanley went to visit, they’d stand in front of the demented old man and bow, pretending to take curtain calls while he applauded wildly.
By the time Manny stepped in to face the chief, he’d already been to the rest home and had a version of events pretty much straight in his mind—along with a respectable codeine buzz.
“Looks like you got yourself a full platter,” Fayton boomed by way of greeting. His uniform looked crisp. His Princeton had been fluffed and blow-dried to Trent Lott–level perfection. The chief propped a hand under his chin and waited.
“Two on the board in one day,” said Manny, easing himself into the plain metal chair that faced the desk. “The Seventh Heaven thing was grim. Guy named Tony Zank, a known P. A. T.”
“Excuse me?”
“Perp Around Town,” said Manny, who knew the chief would file the term away and use it himself. “Apparently, he dropped his mother out the fourth-floor window. It may have been accidental—two sides to every story—but witnesses say he kind of swung her around before he let go. That, and the fact he was holding her by her ankles, screaming at her, could lead a reasonable person to think there was something he wanted from her, and she wasn’t giving it up.”
“That would be matricide.”
Fayton’s tone was hushed, as though he’d marched the word out on a velvet cushion and didn’t want to get it dirty before he marched it back in again. Manny contemplated the chief’s hidden left hand, noting the slight movement of his forearm, and decided to find out once and for all what he was up to.
“Stick ’em up,” he said, whipping his .38 out of his shoulder holster.
The chief juked in his chair and brought up both hands. The one he usually hid came up clutching a felt-tip.
“Good reflexes,” Manny told him approvingly. “But I didn’t mean for you to actually do it. I was just trying to show you wh
at this Zank character pulled on me when I spotted him. Except he had a bigger gun, a real gorilla dick.”
Fayton scowled, attempting to remain composed. “Language, Detective. And don’t ever do that again. You might get hurt.”
“Right,” said Manny. “Anyway, I saw Zank coming out of the building with his partner, this really short, really pumped-up African-American male. Looked like Dean Martin in his Sergeants Three days.”
Snooks, the young rest home janitor, described Tony Zank’s partner in exactly these terms after Manny’d found some Dexedrine in his CD case. The shot at a possession beef—his third—rendered him suddenly talkative. (“I’m not just into hip-hop,” Snooks boasted, after snitching off Tony Z and pal, “I’m down with the cinema, too.”) The stuff about Zank packing a hand-cannon was a complete fabrication. Though he probably had one, Manny and Tony Zank had not even crossed paths. Since Manny didn’t anticipate Fayton chatting with Tony anytime soon, he figured it was a safe lie. The chief, however, was obsessed by something else entirely.
“Did you say, like Dean Martin, except colored?” he asked.
“Actually I said African-American, but yes, that’s pretty much what I said.” Manny was a fan of political correctness, since it covered so many other sins.
Fayton wriggled excitedly in his chair. “That has to be Mac McCardle. He was on America’s Most Wanted! Killed that nancy boy right here in town! There’s a reward, too. A hundred grand for information leading to his arrest. Those kind always a have a lot of friends.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Manny. In fact, he’d made Zank’s pal for the celebrity shovel murderer as soon as he’d heard Snooks’s description. But it was always best to let the chief think he was a jump ahead. It made him feel good about himself.
Fayton hid his hand again, and this time Manny leaped up and stepped around the desk. Sure enough, there was a pull-out writing slab between the first and second drawers, and Fayton was busily jotting notes on a pad.
“So that’s what you do with your missing hand. Some of the fellows were wondering.”
Fayton reddened. “For your sake, I’m going to forget you said that, Ruby.” Then, unable to hide his pride, he added: “I’m writing a screenplay. About my experiences on the force.”
Manny nodded. “Is that right? Well whatever you do, don’t leave out the DMV years. That’s some damn exciting stuff, you ask me.”
Chief Fayton went red again. “Could we just get on with the report? I want to get back to this McCardle situation. This is going to be big.”
“Of course, Sir.”
Manny returned to his chair and, with a flourish, produced a folded paper and smoothed it on his knee. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll pick it up at the part where one of the paramedics has an epileptic fit loading Mrs. Zank into the ambulance.”
“I can’t wait,” said the chief.
Manny cleared his throat and considered his “report.” It didn’t matter that there was nothing on the paper but a list of celebrities with drug problems he’d made while bored out of his mind at the Laundromat. He could type something up later. For now, he had to lay out the story he’d concocted on the drive over. He couldn’t very well tell the truth: that he was late to Seventh Heaven because he was pitching woo to a hot murder suspect, let alone that the beauty had flashed him a photo of the President with a smiling nutsack…. It was time to improvise.
“While I tended to the old lady, Zank and McCardle must have fled,” Manny began. He looked up and pinched the bridge of his nose, as if the strain of reading were really getting to him. “The thing is, I never put anybody in one of these new ambulances, the ones where you have to slide the stretcher onto those tracks so it rolls in and out. I couldn’t get the damn thing flush. So there I am trying to secure the old lady, and the ambulance driver’s flopping around in the grass like a hooked salmon.”
“So you let them get away?” Fayton did not seem angry so much as personally let down, even hurt. “I can’t believe this!”
Manny slapped the paper off his thigh. Story time was almost over. “It was tough, Chief! Before the paramedic went epileptic, I was all over those scumbags. I told them I’d shoot, but the truth is there were too many bystanders. Maybe if Krantz had secured the perimeter, instead of jacking off in the day room, jawing with witnesses who can’t remember their own names, I could have gotten off a shot. Rookie mistake. The good news is, the fall didn’t kill Mrs. Zank. It just broke a bunch of bones and pissed her off.”
“So she’s not dead?”
“Not yet,” said Manny, eyeing the signed photo of his ex-wife and Chief Fayton that graced the wall behind his desk. Flanking it were framed newspaper shots of the chief in all manner of gripping police action. Manny recognized the one of himself slapping handcuffs on Everett Welk, a madman accordionist who claimed to be a distant cousin of Lawrence. Hired to play a Pizza Hut opening, Everett stabbed an insurance man in the cheek for talking during “Beer Barrel Polka.” It was one of those joke slayings, though the joke wasn’t too funny if you were the guy who got it in the dimple. The chief had shown up ten minutes after Welk was subdued and asked the arresting officer—in this case Manny Rubert—if he’d mind letting him “reenact” the collar. “Just as a gag,” he’d said, though readers of the Upper Marilyn Trumpet the next morning wouldn’t realize it was Manny who actually tackled the knifer, and not the brave and true Chief of Police, Lyn Fayton.
Beside Everett Welk was a “candid” of the chief at the shooting range, two-handing his Beretta, and another of him crouched behind a black-and-white, wielding a bullhorn during what looked like a hostage situation at a pet hospital. Manny had no recollection of this particular police action, and assumed the chief had hired a photographer and staged it to beef up his two-fisted, crime-fighter image.
Fayton picked a scrap of paper off his desk and studied it importantly. “And what about this Marvin Podolsky thing? Any theories?”
“Straight suicide,” said Manny. “I’m still writing up the report, but it looks like our guy took himself out with a slug of Drano in his breakfast cereal. He’s got a history of attempts. I tracked down a doctor who treated him. Plus his wife said he’d had some financial setbacks.”
“So you’re not looking at her for possible homicide?”
“All that broad’s guilty of is bad luck in men.”
The chief frowned. “You’re saying he gave himself Drano?”
“For the fourth time,” Manny sighed, shaking his head, as if contemplating the depths of hell that lived inside such a soul. “Once he went with lighter fluid. But outside of that, he was strictly a Drano man.”
Manny paused while his old nemesis, Officer Chatlak, now in his golden years and semiretired, rattled into the chief’s inner sanctum with a tray of coffee and cinnamon buns. Fayton eyed the baked goods with longing as Manny plunged ahead.
“Confidentially, Chief, I wouldn’t advise going after the girl. On top of everything else,” he lied, gripped by sudden inspiration, “she’s pregnant. The papers would crucify us. Police hassling a widowed mom-to-be? Not good. Especially when hubby punched his own ticket.”
Fayton harrumphed. “I really don’t think bad press should be a consideration.” Meaning there wasn’t any other consideration, but better a lowly dick like Manny Rubert should say it than him. “Detective,” he added, “I don’t have to tell you, I want those men. Especially McCardle. A hundred thousand dollars would go a long way toward improving the station.”
“Amen,” said Manny, leaning in to speak man-to-man. “But between us, I’d stay mum about the AMW deal. Word gets out Big Mac’s on the street, every bo-bo with a phone’s gonna be gunnin’ for the reward. I say we call the show when we make the collar. It’d look bush-league for a cop to give ’em a tip and have somebody else arrest the guy. You want the cash and the glory, right? This could put us on the map.”
Chief Fayton puffed himself up in his uniform and fingered his Windsor. “Agreed,” h
e said. “But make sure you bring him to me before you lock him up. I want to get some pictures.”
EIGHT
Tina could still smell her dead husband’s garlic breath on their telephone. For months, convinced that constant garlic-chewing could boost his sperm count, he had been walking around in a reeking gust. The result, ironically, was that his sperm count became irrelevant. He’d become so saturated his skin began to give off fumes, and Tina had told him, more than once, that the only way she was going make love to him was wearing a gas mask or through a hole in the wall. What she had not told him was that she’d had her tubes tied at nineteen. There was no need to be mean. Next to making a killing in money mantras, squiring a brood of mini-Marvs had been the man in her life’s number one dream.
Tina wondered if the people on the other end would ever pick up. When someone finally answered, and said “Good afternoon,” her own words came tumbling out. “Is this Martino and Sons Funeral Home? Hello? Do I have the right number?”
Tina spoke through a wadded up hanky soaked in Scope, which muffled her voice. The funeral human said a few words, and Tina replied rapidly. “Yes, yes…I do have a recently departed. That’s why I’m calling.”
Oddly, it sounded as if the man at the mortuary was also speaking through a rag. Maybe all those dead people gave off fumes of their own. Maybe talking on mortuary phones was as unpleasant as talking on a receiver marinated in Marv-breath.
“It was all very sudden,” said Tina vaguely, after Mister Edward, the “grief representative” handling her call, asked how her husband had “passed.” He then asked how she happened to select Martino and Sons. When she told him she remembered their ad from the bus bench by the minimall where she took Jazzercise, he sounded slightly hurt. Still, things didn’t get really awkward until the mortician inquired about “transporting the deceased.” Tina had to explain that she wasn’t sure when that could happen, on account of the police were holding the body.
