They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee dk-3

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  MacClough wasn’t too terribly surprised by the news. He said he would have been more shocked if Zak’s dorm room had been left untouched. He made me write down some questions for Kira Wantanbe. I asked what was going on on his end. He said he was reinterviewing as many of the Castle-on-Hudson friends as he could, but that all it had gotten him so far was a couple of cups of herbal tea and several dirty looks. He had one or two more friends to check out before calling it a night. He was staying up at Jeffrey’s place. Fazio had located a safe-deposit box key at Caliparri’s house, but couldn’t be at all sure it had anything to do with Zak’s disappearance or Caliparri’s murder. Fazio was going to track down the bank and get a subpoena.

  “Wait a second,” I said. “What did you and Fazio do, kiss and make up or something? How do you know so much about what he’s doing?”

  “Sergeant Hurley’s been helpful.”

  “How did you get to her?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “She came to me.”

  “That old MacClough charm strikes again.”

  “It’s not me she’s interested in, Klein. Can I help it if she’s got no taste in men?”

  “Fuck you very much. Later.”

  “After noon. Maybe I’ll have something.”

  It had begun to snow as I made my way across campus. Once again, Kira Wantanabe was waiting. She didn’t notice me right away, so I stood in the shadows watching the white flakes landing on her lush black hair that fell well below the shoulders of her coat. She was slender as a blade of grass and not much taller than five feet, but she stood strong against the wind. The sharp lines of her calf muscles showed themselves through her thick wool leggings. Under the light, the skin of her triangular face was milky and translucent all at once like the outer layer of a pearl.

  When I stepped out of the shadows, we shook hands nervously and for too long. She smiled broadly and then, embarrassed by what it might have said to me, she made it disappear.

  “Come on,” she said and led me off campus.

  We did not talk. I was glad for that. I felt tongue-tied and awkward and seventeen all over again. I could smell her hair: jasmine blooming in the snow. It was odd that this girl should make me feel alive. It had been a while. My internal voice kept reminding me about Zak and my father and Detective Caliparri, but after several hundred yards all I could hear was our footsteps.

  The coffeehouse was downstairs, dark, and smelled like Fazio’s office. There was graffiti and drip paintings on the walls. Some clown in a beret was playing the bongos, snapping his fingers, reciting “Beat lite” poetry. It wasn’t half bad but I was willing to bet he knew the lyrics to Pearl Jam songs far better than he knew Mexico City Blues or Howl. It was kind of fun, but facade. It was a fashion for the college kids to try on and discard like miniskirts or love beads. Next year it would be a disco.

  I ordered an Irish coffee. Kira ordered tea. When the waitress left our drinks, Kira pulled something out from her bag and laid it on the table near the candle.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she hid her face, “but could you sign this for me?”

  It was a dog-eared copy of my last book-the one I couldn’t sell as a screenplay-They Don’t Play Stickball In Milwaukee. Too hard-boiled for the 90s, the critics said. Too hard-boiled, my ass.

  When I hesitated, she panicked a bit. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. Please-”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said and took her pen.

  She read the inscription: “‘Dear Kira, Skin of pearls. Jasmine blooming in the snow.’ It’s beautiful. I don’t understand it, but it’s beautiful.”

  “Maybe sometime you will understand.”

  She leaned across the table and kissed me on the cheek. “I like the way your beard feels.”

  “The kiss didn’t feel too shabby.”

  She put the book back in her bag. We ordered more drinks. She had an Irish coffee this time. The waitress carded her. Good thing Kira carried the requisite fake ID. It had been several decades since I’d had a drink with a coed below drinking age. Her attentiveness, enthusiasm, not to mention her physical beauty, all appealed to my vanity. And at forty, my vanity had grown small, weak.

  I asked her MacClough’s questions to no avail. She knew more about Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance than Zak’s. Johnny and I had only been at it for two days, but it was getting to the point where a dead end might’ve seemed encouraging. Kira was good about not asking too many questions I could not or would not answer. She sensed, I guess, my unwillingness to go in that direction.

  “I’m an English Literature major, you know.” She was quick to change subjects. “I love writing, but I can’t write. Too much loneliness. Too much looking inside.”

  “You know a lot about loneliness, do you?”

  “Yes.” There was an uncomfortable silence. “So, what’s it like to be a published author?”

  “The fantasy’s a lot better than the reality. Mainly, getting published helps you get in touch with your own obscurity.” She frowned. That wasn’t the answer she wanted to hear. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m out of sorts and lonely. Lonely is okay when I’m home at my desk writing. Here. .”

  “I understand.” Kira put her face very close to mine. “Where are you staying?”

  “The Old Watermill Inn. Why?”

  “Because, Uncle Dylan, there is nothing obscure about you and I want to chase our demons together tonight.”

  I had no argument to make that would have convinced either one of us she was wrong.

  The World Did Spin

  I lie in the dark listening to the faint hiss of the hotel shower. There is a red-and-yellow neon light flashing through the blinds. I’m up now, an unfiltered Camel dangles from my lips. Reaching into my suit jacket, I come away with a pint bottle wrapped in brown paper. I break the government seal with a twist and take a bracer of the cheap hooch. It goes down smooth as a mouthful of cut glass. I take another swig. The glass is still cut, but the edges aren’t as sharp. I unholyster my.38 and spin the cylinder just because I enjoy the clicking sound it makes. I press my ear against the bathroom door. The shower’s still going. I unclasp her handbag and use the barrel of the.38 to poke around. Never know what a frail might carry in there that’ll jump up and bite you. But this one’s smart. There’s nothing to let me know the real motive for her sharing my bed. The water’s off. I clasp the bag, replace it. I holster my piece and pour some of the liquor into the glass marked with the come-and-get-it silhouette of her painted lips. She steps back into the bedroom, towel wrapped just above her pink nipples. I hand her the glass, saying: “I missed you.”

  “Well,” she says, “I had to give you enough time to go through my bag, didn’t I?”

  “You’re smart, angel, very smart.”

  As she reaches for the glass, the towel falls conveniently to the floor. The smart talk stops there.

  Of course, there was no neon sign. There was nothing remotely neon about Riversborough. And though I lay in bed listening to the hiss of the shower, distracting myself with pulp cliches, all I could think about was that slender blade of glass.

  She had been remarkably shy, not coy, not virginal. She did not want light. And there in the blackness, we moved slowly. Kira removed my clothes, marking her progress with gentle kisses. There was no clawing, no fury. It was ritual. Her clothes fell away without much urging. I took hold of her at the back of her thighs and pulled her weightless body up along my torso. Her breasts were smallish and firm. I held her nipple between my teeth and used the tip of my tongue to tease it hard. She purred, clutching at the back of my neck, wrapping her legs above my waist. She began to roll the nipple of her other breast between her own fingers.

  “Please! Please! Please!” She stiffened, shuddered, shuddered again.

  I could feel moisture pouring out of her, meandering through the hair on my abdomen. She released herself and slid down my body washing her orgasm off me with her tongue. She took me into her mouth and I exploded almost immediate
ly. I might have in any case, even without physical encouragement on her part. She braced herself against my thighs, struggling to take it all in. I fell back on the bed and for the first time in a long time, I remembered that the world did spin.

  “I knew,” she whispered in the darkness, “that I would love your taste.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “Later,” she said, “I will show you.”

  She crawled up onto the bed next to me. She coaxed my hand onto the sparse, wet hair of her pubis. I massaged her clitoris and as I felt her muscles tense, I slid my finger down hard inside her. Kira clamped her hands around my wrist and held my hand in place until the waves had fully passed. When she relaxed, I pulled my hand up to my mouth and licked her off my finger. She licked, too. I wanted more and moved my mouth along soft skin until I picked up the taste of jasmine mixing with something raw, untamed and mildly bitter.

  That was. . Jesus, I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping time. I wanted to join her in the shower, but she resisted. She said she liked the scent of sex on a man. I was stunned by her, by her skillful blend of ritual and spontaneity. I had never been with a woman so understanding of her partner, so aware of herself and so young. It was an addictive combination to a man with as many miles on him as I had. She had the rare ability to make the few seconds leading up to orgasm more exciting than the orgasm itself. It was no wonder that Zak was intimidated by her. At nineteen I was so unsure, so inexperienced that I wanted to jump out of my own skin. I would have been completely overmatched by a woman like Kira. I was overmatched now.

  As I waited for her to return to my bed, I wondered if Zak had been embarrassed by Kira, if he still hurt when he thought about her. I wondered if he was all right. I fell asleep wondering.

  I felt her slide herself around me as I opened my eyes. Light crept in through the shade, but it was so diffuse that it did not blind me. My vision was grainy, faded like a blowup from a cheap photo lab. Her back was to me, riding slowly, the muscles of her vagina tight against me. I lay back for a minute and let her ride. I reached up and ran my fingers through her thick, straight, ebony hair. It was frighteningly like silk, too perfect.

  “Pull it!” she demanded, picking up her pace. “Pull it! Make it hurt!”

  As I pulled, I got an eerie feeling that I had done this before. I hadn’t. Believe me, I would remember. But I couldn’t escape the familiarity of the scene. There was a resonance in her words, even in the way she rode me.

  “That’s it!” she sighed. “Harder!”

  I pulled harder. She quickened the pace. She reached back, taking my right hand, and guided it onto her right nipple. I pinched it, but not too hard. She gasped. Her back muscles flexed erratically. Her thighs began to stiffen. And as they did, another wave of resonance passed through me. My head was swimming, fighting to keep one part of itself uninvolved. Was I losing it completely? Had I done this before?

  “Harder!” she repeated. “Pinch it! Pinch it!”

  I sat up some and placed my left index finger on the moving target of her clitoris. When I found it, Kira wrapped her hand around my finger and rubbed herself. We rubbed together, fast and faster. We were very close now. I waited for her to start crying: “Please! Please! Please!” But that cry never came.

  “That’s it, lover,” she sang. “That’s it! Hard-er. Hard-er”’

  Breathless, she could barely speak the words. And again the words, even the intonations were familiar to me. But how?

  “Oh God, Wyatt! Wyatt! Wyatt!” she screamed, stiffened around me, and shook so fiercely the bed moved. “Wyatt.”

  As I writhed in orgasm beneath her, the confusion vanished. Wyatt Rosen was my character, the detective featured in my two novels: Coney Island Burning and They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee. In They Don’t Play, Wyatt Rosen hooks up with a newspaper reporter named Anne Curtis. In an attempt to gain insight into Rosen’s investigation of an allegedly corrupt Wisconsin congressman-a transplanted Brooklynite, hence the title of the book-Curtis enters into a steamy affair with the detective. On the morning after their first night together, Anne Curtis wakes Rosen up in exactly the same manner Kira did me. Curtis speaks the same words Kira spoke. No wonder the scene was familiar to me. I wrote it.

  “You’re better than Anne Curtis,” I said, pulling Kira onto my chest.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “That scene between Wyatt and Anne is the most erotic thing I have ever read. It’s ironic, when Zak bought me your book, I avoided reading it at first.”

  “Not much of a detective fiction fan, huh?”

  “No. And I didn’t want to hurt Zak’s feelings anymore than I already had.”

  “What hap-”

  “Let’s not talk about it,” she cut me off. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, but I never thought I could be with you.”

  “Dream big, that’s what I say.” I laughed.

  She punched my arm playfully and slid her hair down my chest, down my belly. “As I recall, Anne couldn’t get enough of Wyatt,” Kira said as she put me in her mouth.

  Anne Curtis, of course, was lying about that. But for some odd reason I chose not to remind Kira of that.

  Thread Hunting

  We showered together. Kira was more playful in the light. I wanted to take her to breakfast, but she turned me down. She had acted out a dream. Dreams end in the morning, she said, don’t push them. To push them is to destroy them. We had real lives to get back to. She had to go to her room and find her paper on twentieth-century existential novels. I had to find Zak.

  We talked while she dressed. I asked about her loneliness. She didn’t run away from the subject. She had been born in Tokyo, but her father, a V.P. for Japan Airlines, was transferred to Chicago when she was only four, to San Francisco when she was nine, to L.A. when she was eleven, and finally to New York when she was fourteen.

  “I was kind of an army brat,” she said sadly, “but without the support of others with the same fate. At least army brats have the base. Then, when I was seventeen, my father was given his big promotion and called back home.”

  “You stayed?”

  “What choice did I have, really? I wasn’t Japanese. I wasn’t American. I was both and neither. I had no good friends here, but I had none there. My family in Japan were strangers to me. In America at least, there is room for misfits. At home-listen to me-sorry. In Japan, a misfit is treated like a protruding nail. It is hammered down. I will not be hammered down.”

  “I can see that. You’re pretty brave,” I said.

  “No, Dylan. Only people with choices can be brave.”

  I asked again, as I had the night before, if she knew any other of Zak’s friends who might be able to help. The answer was unchanged. She and Zak guarded their friendship jealously. They did not mix in the other’s circle. She asked if she could check in with me. I said that was a silly question. I asked if we might dream again. She said we would have to see what the night would bring. We left it there.

  I went down to the local pancake house and had a breakfast that would have made my Uncle Saul jealous. Uncle Saul was the only man I knew who could have lunch while still eating breakfast. He had also consumed enough scotch whiskey to float an aircraft carrier. It worked for him. Saul was eighty-four and looked like sixty. Who needed bran and mineral water?

  Somewhere between the cheese omelet and the corned beef hash, I managed to read the local paper. It was pretty much what you’d expect: two pages of local news, two pages of national and international news off the wire, an editorial about zoning variances, and twenty-three pages of advertisements.

  I was about to put the paper down, when I overheard two guys who seemed to be groundskeepers from the college angrily discussing somebody named Jones. Their anger had a nasty racial bent. “Crack-pushin’ nigger” topped the list of their favorite phrases. “Black bitch is just like her daddy” was a close second. I turned back to page three of the Riversborough Gazette. The headline read: “JONES JURY SELE
CTION TODAY.”

  Valencia Jones was big news in Riversborough. A freshman last year, Ms. Jones was stopped for a broken taillight as she was leaving town at Spring break. In spite of the fact that both her license and registration were in order, the cops searched her vehicle. In Riversborough, apparently, black face plus BMW equals reasonable cause. Their search netted two vials of a drug the cops were calling Isotope. Relatively cheap and easily produced, Isotope was a far more potent chemical variant of LSD. The paper said that the cops said that one of the vials found in the spare tire compartment of Ms. Jones’ car contained enough Isotope to dose all of New York City. But since you can never believe what you read or what cops say about drugs, I figured there was enough Isotope in the vial to dose the Bronx. Anyway you cut it, that’s a lot of stoned New Yorkers.

  But beyond the drugs, the validity of the search, and the inherent racial baggage, there was Valencia Jones herself. As the paper pointed out in at least three instances, Valencia Jones was the daughter of the late Raman “Iceman” Jones. Until someone introduced him to the business end of a 9mm, the Iceman had controlled the heroin traffic between Stamford and Hartford, Connecticut. So, despite her exemplary scholastic record, her oft-stated desire to distance herself from her father’s heinous life, and vows of innocence, no one seemed inclined to believe her. Her mother had even encountered difficulty finding a lawyer to take the case. No doubt my friend Larry Feld was previously committed to defending Jack the Ripper’s latest devotee. Lord knows, this wasn’t Jeffrey’s kind of case.

  Remembering I had to call both of them, I put the paper down. I felt sorry for Valencia Jones. I don’t know why, exactly. I just did. But I had troubles of my own. However, as a gesture to racial harmony, I did a pratfall and dropped my tray of dirty dishes all over the two groundskeepers at the next table.

  “Sorry,” I said, “but this Jones trial’s got me all riled up.”