by Jerry Stahl
The one thing Manny liked about his former wife was that she’d hired Lipton as her assistant. The spritely Brit, who wore nothing but Armani, owned a head of hair he could have sold by the pound. His pompadour was so fluffy and lustrous you wanted to sink your toes in it. The peroxide was a touch only Lipton himself could explain, and nobody asked him to. For years Manny had wondered about the relationship, idly speculating on the arcane combinations the gay fashion plate and Her Honor His Ex might possibly concoct. You never know….
As a lover, Marge had been ardent, if a tad distracted. Manny’s dominant erotic memory was a moment when he’d mounted her from behind, pumping frantically while she flicked herself with a buzzing vibrator and barked insults on the speakerphone to a junior realtor who’d let a fixer-upper in Butt-burg go for twenty grand too cheap. “You’re in-COM-petent!” she’d screamed, her face mashed sideways in the pillow. “You’re a FOOL! You have no FEEL for the BUS-iness!” Marge timed every epithet to his thrusts, to the point where Manny felt like stopping just to spare the poor bastard any further abuse.
A year after they split up, it occurred to Manny, out of nowhere, that Marge had actually been talking to him. Getting off calling him a FOOL and an ID-iot and a TO-tal ASS-hole while writhing beneath him. It was, in retrospect, one of the high points of their union.
“Madame’s waiting on the verahn-dah,” Lipton announced, doing his campy-ironic number, and Manny made his way through the high-ceilinged central hall to the patio in back where Marge sat sipping tea. Her one vice was Celestial Seasons Fast Lane: ginseng and mega-caffeine, two bags at once, sipped from a large white mug with her face and logo on it. “Mayor Marge and Business—The Perfect Blend!”
“You have five minutes,” she informed him, without looking up
“Be still my heart,” said Manny.
He had to stare, amazed all over again at the choices his ex had made. Marge seemed to be willing herself to Elizabeth Dole-dom, opting for a stiff, camera-ready do and business suits that might as well have had MIDDLE-AGED spray-painted across the back. When they met, she was a fresh-faced, slightly full-of-herself All-American Rich Girl. All perfect skin, pert breasts, and bouncy ponytail. Now look at her, he thought. If life was Disneyland, Marge looked like she was standing in line for Menopause Mountain. Did I do that? he wondered. In a dishy moment, Lipton confided that milady had a portrait of Margaret Thatcher over her bed.
When he couldn’t handle standing anymore, Manny took the liberty of sitting down and saw that the mayor was reading a brochure, “Brink’s Home Security—Questions & Answers.”
“You’re at four-and-a-half,” Marge said, still not bothering to raise her eyes. A squirrel stared at him from a bone-dry bird feeder, and a pair of crows Heckled and Jeckled across the manicured lawn. Manny knew better than to wait her out. Marge would just as soon freeze him with silence as grant him a thirty-second conversation. And none of his detective tricks would work, either. She was sharing a bed with him when he’d dreamt them up.
“Having security problems?” he asked, by way of icebreaker. “I hear Brink’s does a pretty good job. At least that’s what it says on the ads that come on during Oprah.”
“You’re watching Oprah now?”
“Oh constantly,” he said. “Is that bad?”
Since the divorce, it was plain his ex found everything about him vaguely nauseating. She could ask him his favorite color, and if he said “green” she’d speak to him in the same tone she was using now. There’s something really unsavory about green, that tone implied. Only a deeply disturbed underachiever like you would think green was a decent color….
“Oprah and I are getting married,” he said, just to get her nose out of her Brink’s brochure. “She says she wants a man who can eat as much as her and not gain an ounce. I’m one lucky guy.”
“Manuel!” Marge sighed, slapping down her pamphlet. She met his eyes with more annoyance than malice. “I’m sure there’s a reason you came by, but do you have to do a routine before you tell me what it is?”
Manny cranked up a smile. His hunch was that Mister Biobrain had been pinched from the mayor’s place, maybe on purpose or maybe—imagine their surprise!—by some skells who thought they were walking off with cash and Rolexes and ended up with a bonus: a close-up of W blobbing his family jewels in the mayor’s face. Two-for-one day!
“Okay,” he said, leaning forward and reaching for the Brink’s brochure, “I’m just wondering if you’re checking on extra security because your place got hit.”
Marge studied him, crinkling her eyes, and Manny could sense her drive to find out what he knew doing battle with her desire to keep him from knowing anything. She opened her stay-hot teapot and dropped in another Fast Lane, then closed the top with a little thwop.
“The thing is, Marge, there’s this snitch claims he knows a guy who knows a guy who knocked over the mayor’s place. I don’t have to tell you, people will spout all kinds of crap to get out of a corner, and since we caught this guy peeping in the window at Immaculate Heart, where the girls change for field hockey, I don’t want to waste time tracking this if it’s nothing but stay-out-of-jail bullshit. But now that I see you with your shiny Brink’s brochure, looking a bit—no offense—less self-assured than usual, I’m wondering if maybe it’s true. I’m wondering if this guy with a snitch jacket long as your femur might actually be dealing straight.”
Marge opened her teapot and plopped in another bag—that made three—and Manny was reminded of the odd geometry that abides between the formerly married. Much as they may loathe each other, they also know each other. So that even the things that drive them craziest are somehow comforting, a source of familiar fury, fermented over time to one of life’s most dependable, piquant joys.
“Your instincts are off, as usual,” Marge informed him. “If anybody tried to break in here, they’d be caught. But if they did manage”—she smiled her build-a-stadium-in-my-town smile—“I’d report it to the police. So if there’s nothing else….”
“Just a little unasked-for advice,” said Manny. And, standing up with a pleasant smile, he picked the teapot off the table and peeked inside. “If you really want to make great tea, you might think about adding water. Stuff doesn’t taste the same when you drop the bags in dry.”
“Very Columbo,” said Marge, “but your five minutes are up.”
ELEVEN
“Don’t talk to me. Not a word. Nothing. Don’t even aim your eyeballs in my direction.”
“But Tony—”
“I told you, goddamn it! In this car you do not exist!”
Zank slammed his palm off the Gremlin’s steering wheel, sending the tiny hatchback into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer. He swerved at the last minute, a frantic move that slammed both men sideways. The Gremlin’s front seat was so cramped, McCardle’s shoulder brushed Zank’s before he could scramble upright.
“DON’T TOUCH ME!” Tony screamed.
“But Tony, I didn’t do anything.”
Watery blood bubbled from the bruise on Tony’ forehead, where his mother had ashtrayed him. A plumsize contusion oozed beside that, and a welt swelled under his nostrils, courtesy of Carmella’s comb-slash. Where Mac had accidentally shot the top of Tony’s ear off, a clamshell of dried blood gunked the side of his head, flanked by flesh-tone streaks where the hair had been scorched away.
“Tony, I—”
“NO!” thundered Zank. “What is wrong with you? Shut up! Stay shut up!”
“But Tony, come on, man. I didn’t want to do it. She made me!”
“She made you? She made you!”
The madder Tony got, the more weight he put on the gas pedal, until they were zooming down Liberty Boulevard, Upper Marilyn’s main drag, swishing by SUVs and pickups that seemed parked doing 35.
“You’re sick, you know that?” Tony shouted, pounding the dashboard while McCardle cowered. “And I’ll tell you something else, if you ever mention what happened, if you so much as
think of telling anybody you…you….” He couldn’t bring himself to continue and bit his lip. “If you do, I’ll kill you so fast you won’t know you were ever fucking alive. You hear me? I might kill you anyway, just to make sure. I’ll rip out your fucking kidneys with a fork.”
“You’re kidding, right? She had a gun on me. Your gun! You saw!”
“I saw,” said Zank. “She had a gun. You had a boner. That’s what I saw. You weren’t some kind of faggot, or half-faggot, or I don’t know what, you’d have taken the bullet. You’d have risked it. But you had my ass in your lap, and you were all pudgied up.”
McCardle began to sniffle. His lower lip quivered over his soul patch. “C’mon, Dog, it wasn’t you. I like fat ladies, okay? My auntie was a fat lady.”
Zank snorted. “So fucking what?” He rounded a corner with no signal and sent a mail truck screeching out of the way. “My aunt had a fucking moustache. That don’t mean I like broads who shave. You had your skink in me!”
McCardle whimpered. “Just an inch.”
“No, man, you fucked me!” Tony cried, his voice beginning to crack. “You fucking fucked me!”
“Not technically,” McCardle protested. “As soon as you cut her I pulled out.”
“Bullshit! You stopped ’cause you thought I was gonna cut you. You were afraid I’d cut your plumpy off. I would’ve, too, you fucking man-ho!”
The pair kept squabbling at the red light. The windows of the Gremlin were down, and a swarthy man in a Boy Scout uniform glared at them from the wheel of a minivan. Behind him a dozen Scouts pressed their faces against the glass.
“Damn perverts!” the scoutmaster yelled, waving his cap to get the Gremlin screamers to pipe down.
Zank saw who was yelling and screamed. “Boy Scouts! I fucking HATE Boy Scouts! They should all die!”
Tony clawed at his seat belt, trying to leap out of the car, but McCardle held him back. “Calm down, Tony, they’re kids.”
“Get off me, goddamn it! I’ll waste ’em all! The little fuckers!”
McCardle grabbed him by the shoulder, and Zank threw him off.
“I told you not to touch me!” he roared. “Didn’t you hear me? I know about you, man. I know about the Parakeet Lounge!”
Before McCardle could defend his honor, Tony was rolling again. He caught sight of Carmichael Street and swung a hard left. Mac dug his fingers into the seat, to keep from flying sideways and grazing his irate companion a second time.
“You even know why we went to that motel with that fat slit?” Zank asked. “You ever figure that out?”
McCardle was busy fighting back sobs and barely heard the question. “I don’t know anything, Tony!” He buried his face in his hands. “I just know it wasn’t you that got me stoked. It was her, that Carmella, the way she spread them big legs, the way the inside of her thighs got all sweaty-like, how they touched all the way to her knees, and then, Sweet Mother of Jesus, when she pulled out that big vibrator….”
“Enough! You’re gonna make me blow chunks.” Zank straight-armed McCardle to make him stop. “We went to the motel for insurance, Cocoa Puff. The idea was, one guy stays in the room with the broad, one guy goes out and checks the street and number she gave us, makes sure we’re not bein’ gamed. I find out Carmella slipped us some phony address, I call you up and you torture the cunt till she coughs up the right info. Then you kill her. That’s how it’s done. Where’d you go to school, man?”
McCardle dabbed his eyes with the sleeve of his parka.
“You mean, I could’ve been with her? While you were out checking?”
“What’d I just say?”
“But what if she gave us the right address?”
“Then we don’t torture her,” said Zank. “We just kill her.”
McCardle hardly heard. He was still thinking about what could have been: a blissful hour or two, alone with that massive beauty. He could have tied her up, buried his face in her beehive, licked all over her hips…. The Big Love opportunity of a lifetime, gone. He plunged his face in his hands.
“Get ahold of yourself,” Zank growled. “We gotta kamikaze.”
Tony shifted on the seat to find a position that didn’t ache. He wondered if Mac could tell he wasn’t cherry, and quickly blocked the thought with a dozen other ones. But McCardle was somewhere else entirely. In Mac’s mind he was tying the bodacious rest home supervisor to the bedpost, cinching the rope tight below her belly button, letting his fingers linger over that shaved slope down to her no-doubt chubby lovelips. Oh yeah! He wanted to leave her hands free, so when he tickled her she could still hit him. He wanted—
“There she is!” Tony cried, gunning the Gremlin up Carmichael just as Dee-Dee Walker stepped out of Tina’s house and strode toward the Trumpet pool car. He slowed down to check her out and lowered his voice.
“Looks kind of hoity-toity for a fucking old people’s nurse. I bet she already got some dough for Mister Biobrain and spent it on clothes, the thieving bitch!”
Tina, meanwhile, watched from behind her living room curtain as the reporter set her camera and notebook on the roof of her Toyota Camry and unlocked the door. She kept watching while her inquisitor picked up her stuff, got in, and started the car. If Tina noticed the avocado Gremlin with the bleeding white guy and buff little black man squeezed in front, it didn’t register.
She closed the curtain before the two vehicles disappeared around the corner.
TWELVE
Manny had a brother named Stanley he never talked to who went to Penn State and became a stockbroker. Stanley moved to New Jersey, married three shiny blonds in a row, and fathered a pair of children with names like colognes: Artemis and Jade. What made Manny think about Stanley was the stench in the Liver Ward.
Along with cracking her coccyx, breaking some ribs, rupturing her spleen, and shattering both elbows after her rest home plummet, Tony Zank’s mom had been diagnosed with acute cirrhosis. So she’d been shipped from Seventh Heaven to Marilyn Charity, where they stuck her in Liver.
Most of the other occupants, walking-dead rummies with distended bellies and tears flowing hepatitic yellow when they begged for a bottle, slumped on the edge of their beds and stared at their hands. An odd fact: Once they stopped seeing giant insects flying out of the walls, dying drunks pretty much stared at their hands all day. But their hands were not what Manny was pondering. It was their stench that grabbed him by the throat, a toxic cocktail of sweat, bile, soaking sheets, and rank desperation that watered the eyes as it keelhauled the stomach. Manny couldn’t describe the smell exactly, but there was one thing he was certain of: His brother Stanley would never have to inhale it.
Manny never thought of his brother except in revolting circumstances. Breathing in the hell of a Hefty garbage bag housing an aborted fetus, the stink of a month-dead junkie bloating on a rooftop in July, or the thousand other olfactory treats his job bequeathed him, the same thought always wriggled into Manny’s skull: Fucking Stanley the fucking stockbroker never has to breathe this shit. Once this bit of psychic self-laceration was over, Detective Rubert could get on with the job, which in this case meant going toe-to-toe with a drying-out hard case named Dolly Zank.
“You the cop?” the old lady whooped the second he stepped toward her bed. “You wanna talk to me, you gotta get me wet—and I don’t mean south of the border. I mean in here.”
Mrs. Zank made a feeble attempt to point down her throat, but so much of her was in traction the effort was doomed. “Don’t expect me to rat out Tony,” she informed him hoarsely. “You don’t pour me a slug of something potent, I’m gonna clam up tighter than the pope’s vagina.”
She was, clearly, borderline mental. But the part that hadn’t crossed the border, Manny figured, would be wondering how big a patsy he was. Manny slid a short dog of Four Roses out of his jacket pocket, unscrewed the top, made a show of checking right and left, then gave her a wink and tipped the bottle into his mouth. He made sure she could see every wriggle in his g
ullet as he took a long, slow pull. “Hoo-doggy, that hits the spot,” he said, smacking his lips. He screwed the lid back on the bottle, held it up to the light, and shook it. “Empty,” he sighed. “I guess this little soldier’s ready to retire.”
The old lady stared at the bottle, jowls wobbling. “At least let me lick it,” she pleaded. “You can’t deny an old girl a little lick.”
“No can do.” Manny said, “Your doctor said one sip could kill you.” He peeked around again and slipped the top of a second bottle out of his other pocket. “Of course, I always travel with reinforcements.”
He thought the old alky’s eyes were going to crawl out of her face and grab his pant leg. “Mmm,” he smiled, going thoughtful on her. “Sometimes I just like to screw the top off real slow and sniff it. You ever do that? I do. I like to take a whiff, then screw the top back on and slip it back in my pocket. Just knowing it’s in there makes me happy. Knowing I can take myself a big, fat, kick-in-the-head swallow whenever I want, just knowing that makes life pretty damn sweet. Is that crazy?”
Mrs. Zank’s tongue lolled out of her mouth, and Manny wondered if he’d laid it on too thick. But her bloodshot eyes packed a mean, hard look that told him otherwise. He hadn’t gotten to her. Not completely. Bad as she needed a drink, if she had to choose between killing him or killing her thirst he sensed she’d still have to flip a coin. Clearly, Tony didn’t get his sterling personality licking the wallpaper. Mom was tough. Manny tried one more maneuver, pulling the bottle out and kissing it.
“I think I’m in love,” he said, and Mrs. Zank finally cracked.
“Okay, okay!” she wailed. “Just tell me what you want to know. I got no reason to protect my boy. He dropped me out the damn window, didn’t he?”
