Seriously?

by Duane Lindsay

  “No doubt they will,” agrees Monk. “But how long’s that going to take? Miss Johnson,” he calls to Bonnie, hoping she’ll get it and play along.

  “Yes sir?”

  “What time is our next appointment?”

  “We have the Williams account people for a lunch meeting, Mr. Fleener.”

  She caught on, Monk thinks. Keep up the charade. He doesn’t know what he expects them to do but he’s hoping he can get them to take him someplace else and leave Bonnie alone.

  Erich stares down at him, obviously thinking, obviously furious.

  Monk says, “Clock’s ticking, Adolph. What are you and the goons gonna do?”

  Erich decides. “Take him,” he says to the nearest guy and Monk’s starts to relax, until he hears, “And the girl, too. She’ll help loosen his tongue.”

  Erich’s breathing hard, towering over Monk who decides to really push the envelope. He kicks Erich in the shin again, same place, but harder since he’s got better leverage. Erich screeches in pain and shock and Monk dives under him, rolls to his feet and leaps behind the receptionist counter. He picks up the big electric IBM typewriter and throws it at the first guy coming at him. That guy jerks to the right and Monk grabs everything he can off Bonnie’s desk.

  He leaps out from behind it, arms filled with papers and file folders and he’s throwing them at everybody. “Run,” he yells and sees her leap from her chair like a gazelle and race for the door.

  He throws her heavy red stapler at the face of the guy closest to her and she’s got the door handle in her fist when Erich catches her hair again and jerks hard. Bonnie goes down and Monk goes berserk.

  Not Lou Fleener berserk, all easy-looking moves and ballet like speed. Monk’s berserk is more like a marionette with the strings knotted. He hurls his body at them, punching and stabbing with the ink pen he pulled from his shirt pocket. It’s one of the old style with the sharp stylus that makes for very professional signatures and it does extra duty plunging into flesh.

  As he goes down under a few hundred pounds of angry Nazis, Monk manages to use his pen one more time. He scribbles two words on a piece of paper and crumples it in a wad.

  Several fists pound his face and body as he curls into a fetal ball to protect what he can. He hears a final scream and the lights go out.

  Cassidy turns on the light.

  “Lou?”

  “Yeah?” he mumbles, face pressed against a damp pillow. It’s two AM and the moon is full, shining like a reading light into the bedroom. A glance at the bedside clock tells him he fell asleep less than four hours ago. He rolls over to face her. “What?”

  “I’m worried.” Cassidy’s sitting up in bed, a position she’s often in as she likes to read at night. Lou pretty much likes to sleep at night, believing that’s what night was invented for.

  “About what?” He’s not annoyed, or particularly awake yet. She gets into these late-night moods of wanting to talk, sometimes about Hollywood romances, (Katherine Hepburn and Spenser Tracy are favorites) television trivia, (“Lucy’s going to be in color this season.”) and the serious, (Are we happy, Lou?”)

  Tonight, he waits patiently for the subject du jour and is surprised when she says, “What are we going to do about them?”

  “Who?”

  “Them. The Nazis.”

  Oh. Them. Serious tonight. He blinks sand out of his eyes, sits up and curls to face her. She’s wearing a small see-through nightie and he can see the shape of her breasts in the moonlight. Be a good night for romance, he thinks, except the Nazi thing. It’s kind of a mood-killer.

  “Nothing right now. Tomorrow, I’m going to go see if I can find out where he’s gone.”

  “Do you think you can? Find him again?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Where are you going to start?”

  “Hmmm. Probably at the bar in Mokena.”

  “It’s burned down,” she says. “How will you...?”

  “Cassidy? Do you want to come along? I can show you instead of telling you.”

  “That’d be great. If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” He waits a bit, wondering if she’s done.

  Nope. “I’m worried about Monk,” she says.

  Of course she is. “What about him?”

  “He’s all alone.”

  “He’s got us.”

  “It’s not enough. He needs a woman, Lou.”

  “And I need some sleep, Cass. Can we do this in the car tomorrow? Long drive, lots of time to talk...?”

  “Oh, sure, ok. You want to sleep. I understand.”

  “Then we’re good?” He turns to his side and settles in on his pillow, away from the light.

  Cassidy says, “He does seem to like Bonnie, doesn’t he?”

  Arghh.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ––––––––

  We Have Detecting to Do

  ––––––––

  Monday morning Lou gets even. He’s a morning person and Cassidy is, so very definitely, not. He wakes her at seven when the morning sun is just changing shifts with the moon, sending bright daggers of light into the bedroom.

  “Sweetheart,” he sings happily. “Time to get up. We have detecting to do.”

  The blankets, as expected, don’t move.

  “I brought coffee.” He touches the high part he thinks is likely a shoulder. “It’s time to bustle!”

  “Go away, Lou,” says the blanket or an ogre, hard to tell. “There’s no damn bustling gonna happen.”

  “Not that kind of bustling. I mean we have to go out and find Nazis.” That sounds odd even as he says it. Why are there Nazis in his life?

  “Lou, I swear,” says Cassidy, emerging from the blankets like a disturbed badger, swearing as the sunlight hits her.

  “I’ll leave the coffee and... um, leave.” Which he does, waiting safely in the kitchen for an hour, reading the Chicago Tribune and looking, like every husband, at his watch every five minutes.

  When she’s ready they leave in Monk’s Bel Air as if they haven’t been delayed at all and have a pleasant drive south against the morning commuters heading north. At Blue Island they stop for a bag of tiny hamburgers from White Castle and they’re grinning at each other like teenagers by the time they get to Mokena.

  They pass the burned-out ruin of the bar, drive another eight miles to the small town and ask for directions at the local post office.

  “The bar?” says the postal clerk, a middle-aged woman probably younger than she looked. “Sure, I know it. The Mission Bar, used to be called. Had a big sign out front, lit up like Christmas in a whorehouse. You could see that place comin’ for miles. The truckers out on 30 all stopped there.” She eyes them closely. “It’s gone now. Burnt down last Friday.”

  “We know,” says Cassidy. “We’re trying to find the owner.”

  “Why?” She’s right on the border between curiosity and suspicion, like they’re maybe up to something and she wants to know more.

  Cassidy’s at a loss but Lou steps up. “Insurance, ma’am. We’re agents for Fiduciary Life. Records say the place is insured against fire, floods, ant infestations...”

  “Ronny insured that dump?” Incredulous surprise.

  “Ronnie?” says Lou, interrupting. “Our records show a Mr. Ronald...” stretch out the word, make it just slightly a question... and...

  “Millman. Ronnie Millman. Been the owner for twenty, twenty-five years. He insured the place?”

  “Millman,” agrees Lou, glancing at papers that could be insurance forms but aren’t. “He did. Why are you so surprised?”

  “Not surprised, so much. Shocked, more like. Ronnie never struck me as a guy who could keep regular payments on his liquor bill, no less for something useless like insurance.”

  “Well, there you go; there’s no telling, is there? Do you know where he lives?”

  “Now the bar’s closed? I guess he’s shacked up with Shirley.”

  “Shirley?
” Cassidy’s back in the game, gossip being, in her view, exclusive woman’s territory. But the clerk talks to Lou instead.

  “Shirley Bassett, lives over in the trailer park out past 5th street. Take a left at the Sinclair station and you’ll see it, half a mile.”

  “Thanks.”

  Back in the car, left at the green dinosaur mascot of the oil company, Cassidy says, “That was smooth, the insurance thing. I liked Fiduciary Life. Sounds like a real place. How’d you come up with that so fast?”

  “You get used to making stuff up in this line of work. I got the word from Monk’s talk. Fiduciary.”

  “You know what it means?”

  “Not a damn clue.”

  “Me either.”

  They turn into a rundown trailer park, all single-wide models, all pre- WWI, all in need of either paint and maintenance or destruction. At least three windows have metal slat blinds with fingers making a gap the owners can spy through. A row of sagging mailboxes along the road have names painted on them and they read ‘Basset,’ on number 14.

  “Now, which is fourteen?”

  They walk back through the rows of metal horrors. All have unpainted rickety steps and trash scattered around. The grass that may have once been here has been tramped into hard brown dirt. At the fourteenth trailer, this one painted five different shades of dark blue, as if the paint itself had been scavenged over the course of decades, Lou raps on the aluminum door.

  “What?” rasps a voice inside. Woman, Lou thinks, after a lot of booze.

  “Looking for Ronnie,” Lou yells back. He can feel the eyes on him from all these tin boxes. He wonders how they can keep the doors closed against the afternoon heat. It’s better than ninety outside; inside it must be an incinerator. Yet every one of these coffins is closed tight.

  “Ronnie’s not here.”

  “I got money for him,” Lou yells.

  “Ronnie’s here,” she yells back.

  “Thought he might be,” Lou says softly. They wait on the tiny porch, itself about to collapse, and the door opens halfway. A man with stringy gray hair, tan pants with dangling suspenders and a soaking wet underarm tee shirt peers out against the sun’s glare. He lets his eyes adjust yelps, “You!” And tries to slam the door.

  Lou’s got a solid grip on it and the guy can’t get leverage so they stand there for a minute in a brief tug-of-war that Lou wins by punching the guy in the face through the screen. He falls back, bleeding and they enter the oven of Hell.

  The trailer is small and dark and paneled with old pine wood stained a dark mahogany to make it even dimmer. The windows are small and closed and covered and it’s like stepping into a cave that’s on fire.

  “My god,” says Cassidy. She’s fanning herself and breathing in small panting gasps. “How do you live like this?”

  “Screw you,” says the woman in a voice that sounds like she’s had a lot of booze in her life. Much of it recently. She’s on her knees attending to Ronnie who fell on his ass when Lou decked him.

  Lou takes off his fedora and kneels to eye level. “Listen Ronnie; I’ve got no beef with you. Tell me things I want to know and I’ll walk away without anybody knowing I was here. Cross me and we’ll talk about you cheering them on when they beat on me.”

  “I don’t know nothin’” complains Ronnie.

  “I doubt that’s true. Start by telling me who those guys were, dressed in the Nazi costumes.”

  I don’t know,” says Ronnie. “Maybe a church group having a picnic? Maybe they wanted Halloween early?”

  Lou slaps him. “Don’t crack wise, sonny; I’m not buying your lip. Who were they?”

  “Jeez; don’t go off on me. I don’t know them, all right?”

  “You were there,” says Lou. “Tending bar. I saw you.” He raises his hand. “Talk to me.”

  “All right, all right. I don’t know them guys. The big one, he comes to me a couple of months ago says he wants to rent the place for private parties a few times a month. So I make him a deal that I close the place and turn off the sign, tell people we’re closed for the night.”

  “Yeah? Tell me more.” Lou’s channeling his Mike Hammer, the tough-guy hard-as-nails detective in the books. From the corner of his eye he can see Cassidy’s amused by his tone.

  “The first two nights he doesn’t do nothing but bring in a few guys. They’re dressed normal, regular Joes, you know? They drink and listen to the juke box, smoke a bit. A couple of them brought a chess set and they played.”

  “Yeah?” Lou’s interested but sweating like a pig in this place. He can’t survive the heat much longer. “And?”

  “Third time they bring in the Swastikas and shit. Dressed up like the Germans. Hey, I fought in the big war, in Europe. Killed my share of those cocksuckers. Excuse my French, ma’am. No way I’m renting my bar to a bunch of goose-steppers.”

  “Yeah, except you did.”

  “Not at first,” says Ronnie. He’s sitting up against the large chest of Shirley Basset. “Gimme a cigarette, will ya, Hon?”

  “Sure,” she glares at Lou as she gets up to get a rumpled pack of Lucky Strikes. The air seems to shimmer as she moves, like the heat’s being stirred up. It comes back even hotter. She gives him the pack and goes to the refrigerator, a tiny avocado appliance in the far corner. Lou thinks, If I had to be here, I’d live in that fridge.

  Ronnie says, “Money talks, you know? And it don’t always talk American.”

  “You seemed okay with them while you were serving drinks.” Cassidy feels like collapsing in the heat.

  “Like I said, money talks.”

  Lou’s not feeling charitable at all. This guy rents his place to monsters, takes their money and watches while Lou was being beaten. “Does it say you have insurance on the place?”

  Ronnie’s shoulders sag. “No,” he says sadly. “It does not.”

  Monk wakes up with his hands tied above his head in a dark smelly place. It’s dimly lit and his eyes aren’t focusing too well so he doesn’t really know where he is until a bucket of very cold-water slams into his face and he comes to sputtering.

  He looks wildly around. A barn; he’s in a barn. It smells of dry manure and new hay and Monk starts to sneeze as the floating spores hit him. He looks up, following the rope that’s tied to the handcuffs locking his wrists together and sees it’s looped over a thick support beam about twenty feet up. He’s barely able to keep his toes on the floor and he’s spinning in a small circle, making him dizzy enough to throw up again.

  He blinks a lot, getting his vision to settle and sees Erich standing next to a guy holding a bucket. He looks around frantically for Bonnie, jerking the ropes that make him spin even more. She’s nowhere in sight.

  “Where is she?” he demands. “The woman. Miss...” What did he call her? His mind’s a blank. “Miss Smith, where is she?”

  “Miss Johnson, I believe you called her. Or do you mean Miss Lieberman?” says Erich pleasantly. “Bonnie Lieberman?” He’s holding a brown wallet in his hands, looking down at her driver’s license.

  Damn.

  “Why would she live like that?”

  They’re back in the Bel Air, windows cranked full open, wind roaring as they speed down highway 30 to anyplace else. Cassidy’s got the top two buttons of her blouse undone and she’s fanning herself with the folded-up sports section of the Trib.

  “She’s not that bad looking, is she? Why would she live with him?”

  Lou’s tempted to say, “Why do you?” He’s always been sensitive about how a woman like Cassidy could fall in love with a lug like him. He lights a Lucky from the green pack crammed in his shirt pocket. The smoke’s damp from his sweat but it lights when he sucks. He feels the heat from the dashboard lighter before he clicks it back into place and he blows smoke out the side of his mouth. Cassidy almost left him once, a few weeks after meeting him. She couldn’t see past Monk’s good looks or her own lust for money and almost let him slip away. Until she met Barbara Braddock and saw ho
w an empty life with money could be lived.

  He sucks in some more tar, glances over, appreciating the view of her lace bra, purchased before they left from Frederick’s of Hollywood. She sees his look and smiles at him and all the doubts vanish like well, smoke. She’s here with him now and that’s all that matters.

  “You’re looking good,” he says, side of mouth, just like somebody would in the Big Sleep or To Have and Have Not, and she comes back quick.

  “You’re looking,” she says, finishing with a suggestive leer, “good.”

  They’re feeling happy about life in general when the cop car comes out from behind a sign advertising, coincidently, Lucky Strike cigarettes (LSMFT, says the sign in big red letters. “Lucky Strikes mean fine tobacco.”)

  The cop car, dome light flashing red on the roof, pulls them over as Lou stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray. Cassidy’s buttoning up as the cop, a skinny guy with enough heavy cop gear hanging from his belt to pull down the pants of a whole squad room, saunters up to the window.

  “Where’s the fire, Mac?” he says, leaning in. He’s got his ticket book out and his pen in his left hand, waiting to write this up.

  “No fire,” says Lou. “Just trying to get a cool breeze.”

  “It is hot, isn’t it?” The cop’s maybe twenty-five, skinny, a string bean with an Adam’s apple in a too loose blue uniform. He says, “License and registration, please,” politely, and Lou groans a little at how it’s not his car and he’s about to explain when he gets the idea.

  He turns to Cassidy. “We’ve been going at this all wrong.”

  She says, “What do you mean?”

  And the cop says, “License and registration, please,” but a little louder because he’s talking to the back of Lou’s head.

  Lou says, “We gotta find the guys...”

  “What guys?” Cassidy’s wearing a worried look as she stares past Lou at the cop who’s now leaning in farther. He doesn’t appear happy. “And Lou?” She juts her chin to suggest maybe he ought to pay some attention to the guy with the gun.