The Deadly Kiss-Off

by Paul Di Filippo

  Still a bit baffled at seeing these luxury items here, I stepped up to the spread, thinking I might spot something that would appeal to Nellie—a gift to celebrate her eventual return. I eased through the pack and up to the edge of the table. A dove-gray Marc Jacobs saddlebag looked like Nellie’s style. The price tag on it read thirty-five dollars—about one-tenth of what such a bag generally sold for.

  The obvious answer to the riddle of this impossible price came to me perhaps more easily than to some: these items had fallen off the back of a truck and were as hot as the sidewalks in Phoenix on a climate-change August day. Still, a bargain was a bargain.

  I reached down to pick up the bag and suddenly found my wrist clamped in a grip that would have saved Gwen Stacy from a broken neck.

  “I can spot a goddamn shoplifter from a mile off!”

  Immediate recognition of the voice’s owner stopped me from trying to jerk my hand away. I felt a wave of nostalgia, guilt, fondness, and melancholy wash over me.

  Stan Hasso had lost a fair amount of weight. Any slight gut or distributed flab that he once carried had been pared away by lean times. His favored gaudy look of hip-hop overlord, replete with gold chains and styling streetwear, had been replaced by plain jeans, an off-brand polo shirt, and no-name athletic shoes. His face featured some new worry lines and raccoon patches under the eyes. Only his familiar leering grin evoked the Stan of old, the bold fellow who had been able to conceive, inspire, and guide our shared scam.

  Reacting to what they assumed was a genuine accusation, the crowd had ebbed from the table, no doubt wanting to be elsewhere if the cops were called. This unanticipated outcome of his prank compelled Stan to reassure his customers.

  “Hey, people, don’t run off! Just playing a joke on my buddy. He’s really too straight to take an extra penny from the register cup. Glen, you glorious bastard, get back here!”

  Released, I walked around to Stan’s side of the table and was instantly enveloped in a familiar bear hug. I could only be glad he didn’t lift me off my feet, as he had been wont to do when his emotions demanded such a gesture. He still smelled like too much body spray, and I would probably reek of it myself once he let me go.

  He eventually did, and only then did I notice that Stan had a fellow vendor with him behind the table: an older woman with frazzled red hair that was a shade too vibrant to be believable as natural and wearing a tatty beige sweater despite the balmy spring weather. She looked as if she were saving every cent she might earn today for her next bottle of Night Train Express.

  “Stan—” I began, but he interrupted.

  “Alice, can you watch the table for a few minutes? Glen and I have a lot of catching up to do.”

  Alice agreed in a tobacco-cured voice. “Sure thing, Stan. Take a good, long break.”

  He looked at her admonishingly, as if he expected her to pocket more than her share of any sales, but then said, “Thanks. We won’t be super long.”

  Stan guided me out into the aisle. I noticed he had a slight limp still, from when Nancarrow’s goons had shot him in the knee.

  “What say we grab us a beer? My treat!”

  “Okay, Stan, I’d like that.”

  He led us to a beer seller who actually had frosty kegs on ice, not bottled stuff. An umbrella-shaded plastic picnic table held a young couple who were making goo-goo eyes at each other and nursing an inch of warm beer in their plastic cups—until Stan glared effectively at them, inspiring them to down their drinks and move along. Stan sidled onto a bench, and I sat opposite him.

  “You’re looking good, Glen boy. Slick and spick-and-span, without a single mussed hair. Well fed, no worries, and neat as a department store mannequin or a castrated show dog.”

  I felt hurt at Stan’s assessment, maybe because it had some truth in it. I started to frame some suitable sharp comeback, but he beat me to it with an apology of sorts.

  “Oh, Christ, this is not how I wanted our reunion to happen, man. You just took me by surprise. And I’m feeling kinda lousy about everything. I wanted us to hook up again when I was riding high. I was planning to call you once I got myself sorted out. But having you see me now, like this—it just plain sucks. Can I take back the bogus shit I just spouted about you? I’ll eat my words. Whadda ya say?”

  I was vindictive enough to let him stew for just a few seconds before I answered. He nervously sipped his beer.

  “Stan, I don’t think even you could shovel horseshit high enough to bury what we’ve got between us. I’m your friend, and you don’t have to keep up any pretenses with me. I know we’ve been out of touch for nearly a year, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to see you and Sandralene. It was just that I felt … I felt your path was different from mine, and we weren’t really connecting anymore. That’s all. Anyhow, I’m here for you now. You want to tell me what’s up?”

  Stan fussed with his Solo cup, rotating it back and forth like an improvised fidget spinner. I drank a little of my own beer for something to do in the awkward pause. Children ran and shrieked while their parents shopped. Finally, he knocked back his whole drink, tossed the cup over his shoulder in the general direction of the trash barrel, and looked me straight in the eye with a fierce wounded pride.

  “I’m fucking busted, and Sandy’s left me.”

  3

  Stan’s confession sent my mind racing down two parallel tracks—a sensation a bit like trying to play high-stakes poker while doing a jigsaw puzzle depicting polar bears frolicking in a blizzard.

  The first track: he had managed to blow through five hundred thousand dollars!

  The second track: he had let Sandralene slip out of his life!

  I couldn’t decide which was the greater disaster. The impact of both together was obviously enormous—a truth I could see written on Stan’s hangdog face and slumped stance.

  Trying to focus on whichever dilemma was more important and possibly subject to remedy, I decided to concentrate on the money angle. Maybe that said something about my own messed-up priorities—that I valued money above relationships. Or maybe I just wasn’t eager to wrap my mind around the thought of never seeing Sandralene again.

  Stan had planted both palms on the tabletop and squared his shoulders. The gesture was simultaneously confrontational and submissive, as if he were a student expecting to get rapped on the knuckles, but also a desperate suspect under interrogation, who might lash out at his tormentors. I knew I had to offer just the right response or risk pissing him off, making him feel even lousier, and driving him away again.

  “So,” I said, “I’ll bet the begging phone calls from relatives have tapered off lately.”

  Truth be told, I never knew whether Stan had any relatives or, having them, stayed in touch. Once, he had jokingly mentioned a sister, only to deny her existence later. So I was taking a risk in bringing up the potentially fraught topic of family.

  Luckily, my instincts were good. Stan’s wry laugh told me I had hit just the right note.

  “Yeah, you got that right. You see the same people going down that you saw going up. But on the way down, don’t nobody want to even know your name.”

  “Where’d it all go, Stan? That is, if you don’t mind telling me.” I had notions of several hazardous alleys down which Stan’s funds might have wandered, never to emerge. Gambling, drugs, women—the usual culprits. But I never could have guessed the real story.

  “I tried to be a fucking angel.”

  “An angel?”

  “Yeah, you know, it’s what they call suckers who decide to invest in something. A whatchamacallit—a venture capitalist.”

  “You decided to become a venture capitalist?”

  “Well, why the hell not? You don’t think I’m smart enough? Only the people in your scene can do such things?”

  “No, no, it’s not that at all. It’s just that sinking your money into some nebulous
new enterprise requires due diligence, real expertise …”

  “Hell, I investigated the crap outta this project, and it seemed like a sure winner. And I was eager to parlay my money into a few million. The dough we got from MGM for our land was chump change. A million dollars! Half of that left after taxes! And I had to pay out nearly seventy-five grand for my hospital stay. How’s a guy supposed to set himself up for life on that pitiful amount?”

  Stan’s complaints echoed my own dissatisfaction with the consolation-prize money we had earned for all our illegal dealings, so I could hardly fault him for wanting to grow his assets.

  “And it’s all your fault anyhow. You introduced me to the guys who took me for a ride. My only satisfaction is that they got burned even worse than me.”

  “I did? When?”

  “The four of us were eating at that fancy steak house you like, and they came over to our table.”

  Instantly I recalled the night. Chris Tabak and Jess Inkley ran Burning Chrome Ventures. I knew them from my lawyering days. They seemed barely to acknowledge Stan at the time, but their money radar must have gone off.

  Another couple stopped at our table as if to sit down with their drinks, until Stan’s fierce glare sent them scurrying.

  “So you handed over every penny to them?”

  Stan scowled. “A few thousand at a time, but yeah. You woulda done the same thing, damn it! This was gonna be a major, major operation, with mega returns. The company we invested in even had a licensed theme song.”

  “A theme song?”

  “Yeah, a famous one. ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.’”

  “Shouldn’t the fact that their theme song was about a major disaster have clued you in to the inherently iffy prospects of whatever they intended?”

  Stan tossed his hands skyward in exasperation. “Dude, you know my personal tastes in music run toward the blues. But that song is golden, Glen, golden. Chicks especially dig it. Makes them all weepy and ready to put out, moneywise or nookiewise. And chicks were our market.”

  “What was this enterprise intending to sell, exactly?”

  “Called themselves Lake Superior Bijoux. They were going to market jewelry made from the shipwreck.”

  “They were going to scavenge metal and other materials from the bottom of Lake Superior, from a ship that is a sacred sunken graveyard, and turn it into necklaces and earrings?”

  “And bracelets and brooches, too. And those big-ass things chicks wear sometimes on their collarbones and above their boobs, like Cleopatra.”

  “Pectorals.”

  “Huh?”

  “That style of necklace is called a pectoral.”

  “Oh, right. I remember that word now from the prospectus.”

  I considered Stan’s sad story. “Well, it’s not the dumbest idea for a business that I ever heard. Close, but doesn’t take the prize. Who can tell? It might even have succeeded. What happened?”

  “It was the goddamn Canucks. After the LSB guys blew through all my dough and a couple of million more just in the setup stages, they ran smack into something called the Ontario Heritage Act. Turns out they couldn’t get the salvage licenses on the wreck that they thought they could get. End of story.”

  “You have just learned the sad truth that not all criminals rob banks or set fire to buildings, Stan.”

  “Yeah, right, tell me about it! I can’t prove anything, but I think half the money ended up safe in the pockets of the LSB guys. I know a boatload of creditors went begging. But wherever it went, I don’t have any of it anymore. That’s why you found me peddling pocketbooks in this shit-hole. Just trying to squeak by.”

  I brought up the second, perhaps more sensitive topic.

  “And is that why Sandralene left you? Because you blew through all the money?”

  “Hell no! That’s something else altogether!”

  4

  Sandralene Parmalee was perhaps the only woman fitted to be Stan Hasso’s mate. At least, the only suitable candidate I had ever met. Amazonian in her eye-popping endowments, she exhibited an unflappable, taciturn, yet openhearted temperament that camouflaged a quick and canny mind. She struck me as something of a hybrid of Gaia, a Zen roshi, and Little Annie Fanny. Desirous of all the good and deep and simple sensual pleasures, she sailed a straight course through storms of drama that would have capsized someone of lesser mettle. Pondering Stan without her, or her without Stan, was like contemplating a sky from which either the sun or the moon had been removed, leaving the remaining orb unbalanced and lonely.

  Once during our previous time together, I had been blessed by all the gods to have an amorous encounter with her, during a particularly charged moment when that unforgettable Olympian experience was just the elixir to fortify me in the midst of our dangerous machinations. Stan’s implicit collusion with our hooking up had indicated both the depth of his faith in Sandralene and his confidence that no one could ever take her away from him—and maybe also some slight regard for me.

  While I tried to integrate her absence into my conception of Stan, the big fellow got up wordlessly to buy us each another beer. Around our table, beneath the fresh blue spring heavens, the noisy, desperate, accepting life of the junk swap went on in its immemorial fashion. I had a brief fantasy of being present at some analogous Mesopotamian bazaar thousands of years in the past.

  Stan returned with our drinks, and I took a long gulp of mine.

  “What drove Sandralene off, if it wasn’t money problems?”

  “Glen, my man, you keep making the same boneheaded assumption. Nothing drove her off. Something pulled her away. A little thing like me losing all our hard-earned cabbage wouldn’t knock the props out from under Sandralene and me. Our happy love nest was still rocketing along on all eight cylinders, right up until she hadda go. It’s what happened after that’s disturbing and leaves me up in the air, like.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “What kind of cozy love nest features an internal-combustion engine?”

  “Jesus H. Mohammed! I forgot what an annoying nitpicking jerk you can be! No wonder we ain’t got together for so long. How does Nellie stand living with you, anyhow?”

  “Nellie and I are doing just fine,” I said, instantly regretting how smug and superior that sounded. Well, the hell with it. I was proud of the loving relationship that Nellie and I had developed and nurtured since we met nearly a year and a half earlier, especially after it survived some essential-at-the-time lies on my part. “My only complaint is that having a girlfriend fifteen years younger than me is tiring work—in every way.”

  Stan must have been reading my mind a minute or so ago, as I reminisced about that unforgettable night with Sandralene. “Yeah, sure enough. All the more reason you need me back in your life. Seems to me there is some little imbalance in our foursome that needs to be put right.”

  Now it was my turn to glare, which only made Stan bellow out a laugh. “Okay, pull your horns back in! That skinny little Portagee girl of yours don’t appeal to me. She’s too juvenile and hyper. It’d be like trying to screw a young bobcat on a merry-go-round.”

  “That is an image I will now never be able to erase from my mind.”

  “My work here on Earth is done.”

  “If we’re past all the boasting about whose woman is the better lay, let’s get to the reason why Sandy’s not here.”

  “Simple. She had to go home to help her mama.”

  Somehow, I had never conceived of Sandralene as having parents. I had always assumed she sprang full-grown from the brow of some deity like Robert Crumb, à la Devil Girl.

  Stan continued. “Sandy’s mother is named Lura. She lives all alone on the ancestral homestead. Sandy got word she was ailing, and took off to play nurse.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Hedgesville, West Virginia. Population three hundred and sixteen, on those d
ays when the bearded hillbillies aren’t out in the woods tending their stills.”

  “C’mon, now. You ever visited there?”

  “Never. And I was hoping to maintain that stellar record for the rest of my days—until one Caleb Stinchcombe showed up.”

  “Nice. What’s his real name? Where’d he come from? The neighboring town of Hooterville?”

  “Ol’ Caleb and Sandralene were an item back in high school. And now that Sandy’s returned to town, Caleb, who never left, has come sniffing around.”

  “And you know all this how, exactly?”

  “Sandy’s told me as much when she calls me up. Totally up front, like always. She doesn’t boast or tease or play games—just gives me the news like she was reporting the most natural thing in the world, like whether it rained that day or not. You know her way of saying things flat out. But the very fact that she’s not dismissing this jerk out of hand is making me think maybe his charm offensive is having an effect. I mean, me and Sandralene have been together for a long time now, like old marrieds. Maybe she’s yearning for a taste of something different. Maybe this Caleb guy, despite having a name like a puller of goat teats, is all slick and charming. Oh, how the hell do I know what’s going on down there! It’s driving me nuts.”

  “Okay, big guy,” I said, “just take a long, slow breath. Any shenanigans are probably just in your head. When Sandy comes home, you’ll see it was all in your imagination.”

  “But that’s another thing. She was supposed to come home three or four times already, and she keeps putting it off, saying her mama’s had a relapse or she’s got to oversee some house repairs. It’s awful suspicious.”

  “Awfully suspicious, or maybe just the plain truth. Listen, the only way you’re gonna satisfy yourself that everything’s all right is to go down there and see. I assume you can take a few days off from this high-pressure job of selling stolen handbags.”