by Jerry Stahl
“Well,” said Tina, as Manny watched her fish in her purse for a cigarette. Who the fuck else under ninety-five smoked Viceroys? “If I told you you might find a bit of broken glass in his stomach, would you still, you know, want to hang with me?”
“Bad choice of words, baby. In this state it’s lethal injection.”
“You know what I mean.” She was trying so hard to sound contrite, it was hard not to laugh. This chick is evil, Manny thought. He couldn’t explain why this made him even crazier about her. Made her more seductive than smack. Though if she eased his mind about the late Carmella, he’d feel a whole lot better about life in general.
Manny let her stew a few more seconds, then pressed on. “As long as you tell me everything, we’re cool. There’s just one thing I’m still curious about.”
“Which is?”
“Carmella Dendez.”
“What about her?”
“She a friend of yours?”
“Not exactly. She’s my supervisor at Seventh Heaven. She’s all right, if you don’t mind listening to fashion tips all day. Carmella thinks God made stretch pants right after He finished air and water. Which is amazing, considering what they have to stretch around when she wears them. Why are you asking me about Carmella anyway? You checking up on me? Gonna bust me for pilfering pillowcases?”
“Pilfering’s okay. It’s killing people that gets dicey. Somebody offed your boss on a motel bed.”
“What?”
Manny watched Tina lean her head on the glass. After a second, she straightened up, bit the filter off her cigarette, then fired a match one-handed and lit up. She blew the smoke straight at the phone booth ceiling. He had a feeling her eyes were closed.
“What happened?” she asked, in a voice that sounded older than she was.
“I’m not sure,” said Manny. “It went down at a flatback motel called the Pawnee Lodge. Ever been there?”
“No, why? What is this?” He saw her make a fist at her side. “You think I killed Carmella?”
“I didn’t say that. I’m just saying, first a Seventh Heaven resident gets dropped out a window. Then a woman who works there turns up stabbed to death. And just to make it really interesting, there’s you, another devoted employee, with a dead husband and a certain twisted photo you stole out of the bed of the same lady who ended up taking the shortcut from four floors up. You were me, what would you think?”
There was silence. Tina took a fast drag on her Viceroy. Manny watched her stub out the barely smoked cigarette on the phone booth glass, then throw it down and stomp it.
“If I were you,” she said levelly, “what I’d think is that I should be very fucking careful about accusing me of a bunch of bullshit. That’s what I’d think.”
Manny dug the rage. She wasn’t trying to cover. “I’m not accusing, Tina, I’m asking. There’s a difference. People around you seem to die a lot. If it’s okay with you, I’d rather not be one of them. We’re gonna partner up, it’s important we trust each other.”
“Is that right?” Tina clamped the receiver between her shoulder and chin. She rooted in her purse with both hands. “Well, you sure got a novel way of inspiring trust.” She came up with a scrunchie and twisted it around her hair, making a ponytail. “Maybe there’s something I should know about you, huh partner? What I’ve seen, you’re not exactly Joe fucking Friday.”
“You got me,” Manny said, relaxing. “I boiled my first wife alive for shrinking my toupee. I told her not to spin-dry and she wouldn’t listen. Other than that, I swear, I’m entirely wholesome.”
“That’s almost funny,” she said. “Except I know you’re lying. I’ve seen a picture of your wife, looking nasty, an inch from George Junior’s smiling kumquats.”
“Kumquats, I like that,” Manny said. “Except Marge never looked nasty a day in her life. And anyway, I said my first wife. But never mind. Just listen, and tell me the truth. Besides the glass, is there anything else you don’t want found out about how Marv died? ’Cause if there is, I’m startin’ to think we gotta cremate him. Fast.”
“I already did,” she said, adding demurely, “that’s the way he would have wanted it.”
“What are you talking about?” Now Manny was stunned, and he didn’t stun easily. “His body’s in a drawer. I went to the morgue. I saw him.”
“That was yesterday, sweetie. This morning he was delivered to Martino and Sons. It was a private ceremony. No family. Just Mister Edward and me. He’s been very supportive.”
“Supportive? Are you kidding me?”
Manny stared across the street at the woman in black. From this distance there was nothing special about her. Medium height, decent body, dirty-blond ponytail. Nothing intense but that Faye Dunaway face. Those cheekbones of death. Maybe not the girl next door, but definitely somebody the guy who dated the girl next door would love to fuck around with. If she wanted to. Because that’s what clinched it: Tina’s attitude. Like she was so tough she might let you think you could touch her; or maybe she’d even let you, for real. But it was her call, not yours. Never yours.
“You going to tell me how you did it?” he asked.
“How I did it?” Tina twisted the ponytail around a finger. “We’ve been through all that. What do you want, the receipt for the Drano?”
“I’m not talking about that.”
Manny watched, transfixed, as Tina hung her head and grew still. Maybe she wasn’t as tough as all that. Maybe, in some weird way, it was a mercy killing. Unless all the mercy was for herself….
Before he could go down that road, the doors of the 7-Eleven blew open and a trio of sleazoid white guys swaggered out. Each goon clutched a forty-ouncer in a bag. Two had shaved heads, and all three wore tighty-whitey T-shirts to show off their pecs and biceps. The three plunked themselves on the hood of a beat-to-shit pickup parked directly in front of the booth. Manny could hear them from across the boulevard, talking trash. He watched them unscrew the caps, tip back their bags, and guzzle as much as they could get down without gagging. Not good, he thought. Maybe nothing would happen; but if something did, it would not be good.
Tina checked out the action, then turned around again, giving the boys her back. Her voice, instead of growing wary, or even concerned, grew softer, more relaxed. “What are you asking me, Manny?” It was the first time he’d heard her say his name, and it got to him.
“What I’m asking,” he said, trying to sidestep the tremor in his heart, “what I’m asking is…are you okay?”
Then one of the mooks yelled at her, and the rest joined in. “Hey baby, forget him, whyn’t you come over here?” “Yeah, you can suck on me for free.” “I got somethin’ in my pants you ain’t gonna believe.” “Yeah, ’cause it’s so fuckin’ small….” The usual witty bullshit.
Manny could see Tina stiffen. He felt powerless, watching those assholes hassling her. There was so much sadness in her body language. The way she hung her head. Her sudden stillness. As if, on top of everything else, she’d had a lifetime full of assholes hassling her, and it made her sad to have to deal with three more of them now.
When she didn’t answer, Manny plunged on with his original question.
“What I really want to know, okay, is how the fuck you got them to release Marv’s body to the mortuary?”
“I didn’t,” she said, leaning against the door, blocking the comedy from the brown-bag party-boys. If they fucked with her, Manny knew, he’d have to go over, book all three, and hope she believed him when he said he happened to be driving by. Maybe he could tell her the 7-Eleven clerk called the cops. Something…. It was a lose-lose option. Tina had to trust him as much as he had to trust her. If she suspected he was tailing her, forget it. But he couldn’t not go over, if the shit hit the proverbial fan. He couldn’t just watch her get perped by a bunch of tanked-up skeeks.
Sighing, Manny pulled out his binocs for a better look. He recognized one of the a-holes, a terminally laid-off mill-hunk named Ranick. Ranick had more ink
than Satan and thought he was dangerous. The kind of badass whose idea of a hot date was getting beer-drunk and sucker punching his girlfriend. When he had a girlfriend. When he didn’t, the nearest female under fifty would do. Manny’d hauled him in for drunk-and-disorderly enough times to get him court-ordered to AA. Apparently, he left before the miracle.
“Tina,” Manny hollered into the phone, more nervous than she was. She was about to get mauled, and he was the one shouting. “Tina, what do you mean you didn’t get them to release Marvin?”
“I mean I didn’t do it. It was Mister Edward, like I said. From the funeral home.”
“Him? Oh, perfect….”
“You know him?”
As it happened, he did know Edward. There’d been some trouble, years ago, after the mortician mail-ordered a Korean bride. The new spouse, a comely eighteen-year-old named Kim Sung, took one look at her crater-faced beau and decided to head back to Seoul. Edward, of course, had other ideas, and things got ugly. But Ms. Sung had watched enough American TV to know about 911. “Wait, I’ve got the receipt!” Edward kept yelling, after Manny and Merch swung by to pick the girl up and haul her back to the airport. “I’ve got the receipt!”
It was a grotesque and depressing spectacle: the outraged young Edward crying and waving his piece of paper on the front steps of his parents’ split-level on Duquesne Street, up in Tit-ville. The boy mortician, ironically, was sporting a wifebeater. With no sleeves, you could see that even his shoulders had acne.
That shoulder acne, Manny’d suspected, is what made the terrified bride decide to hightail it back to her homeland. Keeping Edward Edward out of jail was one of the first favors a DMV-drone-turned-police-chief named Fayton ever did for the town’s old money. Martino and Sons had been founded by an Upper Marilyn patriarch, the original Edward Edward, a Methodist minister who also happened to be young Edward’s great-grandfather. Since much of the local populus hailed from Italy, Edward the First realized he’d get more business if folks believed their neighborhood mortuary was paisano-owned. So he named it after his wife’s favorite crooner, Al Martino, and never looked back.
Manny stared across the street as Tina slid the elastic off and redid her ponytail, ignoring more bons mots from the yapping drunks on the truck. She seemed to be gazing at the ground. Distracted. Only one question remained. It was not strictly relevant, but it fucked him enough to ask it anyway. “Just out of morbid curiosity, Tina, why would Edward do you such a big favor?”
“He likes me,” she said, and before Manny could pursue that line of questioning, she asked calmly if he’d mind holding on.
Manny watched, with mounting dread, as Tina pushed open the phone booth door and blew a kiss at the rowdy lugs in front of her. Through his binocs, Manny saw Ranick smirk at his buddies. He pimp-walked toward her, swigging his forty. When he was just outside the booth, Tina smiled in a way that soured his stomach. She licked her lips and slipped in a finger to deepen her cleavage.
Ranick, the idiot, leaned closer, and Tina, still smiling that Do me smile, whispered in his ear. There was a frozen moment—whatever she said must have meant something—then Ranick let go of his bottle, which shattered on the sidewalk as he staggered backward. He held his hands out in front of him, petrified. Even from across the street Manny could see the color drain from the young thug’s face. He jumped in his pickup and started it before his buds were even off the hood. “Get in,” the overgrown delinquent shouted. “Just get in the motherfucking truck!”
Manny did not even realize he’d been holding his breath. More amazing, Tina had yet to stop smiling. But what cinched it for Manny—what wrenched his insides with that awful, delicious mixture of fear and desire that, in his life, passed for true love—was the way Tina had kept the receiver covered the whole time. Because she did not want him to hear.
The truckload of brew-hogs peeled out of the parking lot and Tina settled in to resume their conversation. “Sorry, where were we?”
“Tina,” was all he could manage, as he watched her tear the filter off a Viceroy and gaze benignly in his direction.
“Tina what?” she said, giving him a wave and a smile. “Is there some kind of problem, Detective?”
SEVENTEEN
Furious, Chief Fayton gazed at his Honor Wall, focusing on the framed photo of himself and Mayor Marge.
For ten minutes he’d pleaded his case, explaining till he cracked a sweat that what the city needed was a task force. The chief liked the sound of it. Task force. Which he, of course, would head up in his capacity as Whip Hand at the UMPD. (Whip Hand. He liked the sound of that, too.)
“Carmella Dendez and Dee-Dee Walker. Two women dead in two days!” he’d exclaimed, reading off the three-by-fives that Officer Chatlak had typed so he’d stay on point. At first the mayor didn’t seem to be listening, but the chief wrote that off as typical Marge. Her Honor always did ten things at once. She was probably having her nails done and signing a law outlawing spittoons while talking to him. Marge was the original multitasker.
Knowing her tendencies, Fayton had plowed ahead with renewed determination. “Not to mention, Mayor, a priest has been run over and an old lady’s been dropped out a window. In a rest home, damn it!”
He’d gone back and forth with “damn,” but decided to throw it in, to show he meant business.
“If our citizens can’t be safe in an old age home”—he’d underlined for extra emphasis—“where can they be safe? We’re talking about the Golden Years, Your Honor!”
The chief paused, counting one-two-three, like it said in the Orator’s Handbook, for extra emphasis, then escalated his attack.
“What we’re looking at is a vicious serial killer, in our own backyard. This man Zank is a threat to every decent man, woman, and child in Upper Marilyn. We’ve got to act, for our loved ones, for our constituents.”
Fayton was especially proud of that last part. The word “constituents,” he felt, was his pièce de résistance, and he sat back in his chair after he’d pronounced it, waiting for the mayor to cave. “Constituents” conjured up voters, which conjured up elections, which conjured up the fact that if she didn’t act he would damn well throw his weight to her opponent. Maybe he’d even run himself. That would show her! Of course, the city managers had yet to decide whether or not to actually have elections. They raised the issue every November, and the Trumpet ran pro-election editorials. But when push came to shove, the bastards preferred simply reappointing Marge, as they’d been doing every two years since handpicking her for the job. Which, now that he thought about it, probably cut his legs off, rhetorically speaking.
Fayton steamed. What was the point of being police chief if you couldn’t capitalize and run for higher office? He had a weird feeling Mayor Marge did not even want to catch Tony Zank. “For God’s sake,” she kept repeating, somewhat peevishly, “we don’t even know for certain it’s the same man.”
“Maybe not,” Fayton hedged. He was always nervous when he strayed from his three-by-fives. “Dee-Dee Walker, Your Honor, was a reporter. You don’t think the Trumpet’s going to be all over that?”
“She was their only reporter, so if any paper’s all over it, it won’t be that one. What they’ll run is a nice obituary and a bunch of puff pieces full of testimonials about Dee-Dee. More important, do we even know for sure she was even murdered? No,” she snorted, “we do not.”
Mayor Marge let out a long I-have-more-important-things-to-deal-with sigh, then continued in a tone that made him feel like a pest.
“I’m no police chief, but I do think if we start alarming the public now with word there’s some kind of Son of Sam running around, it’ll do more harm than good. People will start to panic. Not to mention the possibility of copycats.”
Copycats! he wanted to shriek. You think other people are going to start bouncing their loved ones out of rest home windows? You think that’s going to start a TREND?
He didn’t say this, however. He didn’t say anything, except “Th
ank you for listening” and “Have a nice day” before hanging up. His authority problem was something the chief was working on. No matter how much he prepped and three-by-fived, no matter how many hours of rehearsal and mirror-work he put in before talking to someone of Mayor Marge’s stature, the second he opened his mouth he heard himself doing everything but offering to wash their car to get them to like him. It was his own little Stockholm Syndrome. No matter how spunky he started out, he ended up agreeing with whoever abused him.
To calm down after his debacle with the mayor, the chief decided to review some notes for his screenplay. That’s when he had another brainstorm. There was one way to go above Her Honor. If it worked he’d be the hero, and not just in Upper Marilyn, either. Nationwide! Rubert had said as much when they discussed McCardle and the Most Wanted thing. Manny’d also suggested they wait until they’d actually caught the guy before calling the show. But damn it, some things couldn’t wait! Besides, how did he know Rubert wasn’t going to double-cross him? Maybe phone in a tip-that-leads-to-arrest himself and snag the reward money. You couldn’t put anything past a character like that. No, if anyone was going to look heroic, it was he, Chief Fayton, the man with a plan. And after that, who knew?
For one, lovely second, the chief let himself daydream about hob-knobbing with James Woods when they shot the movie of his life. Sure, James was older, but he had the same kind of cockiness, the same kind of Outta-my-way, I’m-in-charge! quality the chief liked to see in himself. Or, more accurately, that he’d like to see on-screen when somebody played him.
“Fayton—The Story of a Small-Town Lawman.” Just saying it made him feel taller.
He chuckled to think about Mayor Marge’s face when she saw Kathy Bates or Roseanne playing her. He’d slap that in the contract, too. Iron-clad!
Then again, if he could get his script to the networks, it might be better to go for a series. Like the Homicide guy. Or what’s-his-name, Bill Clark, the ex-cop who got that executive consultant credit on NYPD Blue. That had to bring in a chunk of change. But would James Woods do TV? If he wouldn’t, he decided, he’d settle for Tom Selleck. Or that young handsome guy, from the Law and Order reruns. Benjamin Bratt. The one who dated Julia Roberts. The chief read TV Guide religiously. He liked to keep up with show business, so he’d know his way around when he got there.
