EQMM, November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "How will I ever thank you,” she giggled, reaching for my boxers. Oh these modern women. I was glad I no longer wore the traditional undergarments. Much too much fuss to get out of. She laid back on the bed again, giving me an eyeful of that young and fit body of hers clad only in the frilly panties I'd bought her. What a self-deluding fool I was. How pathetic I must be to this gorgeous girl who could have her way with any of those snarling boys with their bunching pectorals prowling Vegas to satiate hedonistic desires. Yet here I was, a slave to my baseness.

  "What's wrong, baby cakes?"

  I sat on the edge of the bed and she snuggled close. “I'm not so gone that for one minute I would suppose you have real feelings for me,” I began, touching her hair. “Sending orchids and chocolate bunnies to you at that bar and grill like some teenager.” I wiped a hand over my face. “Why did you agree to see me?"

  "You have to stop doubting yourself, Eldon. I told you. Men my age have grown up playing video games blowing up monsters and making it with digitally animated babes with balloon boobs. Salivating over how they can get a house like they've seen on MTV Cribs and a car featured on Pimp My Ride."

  She kissed my far too rotund belly. “I was and still am flattered a man of your experience would find me of interest."

  I grabbed her by the shoulders, tighter than either of us expected. “What if I'm crazy, Noreen? I know full well you aren't her, she died some thirty years ago. There's plenty of Noreens in this world, and no doubt a fair share in Las Vegas. And sure you favor her some, but she never had a body like yours or—"

  I stopped myself, ashamed and excited all at once.

  "She never did this, did she, Eldon?” She pushed me onto my back and demonstrated a technique, shall we say, I'd never experienced before in sixty-seven somewhat sheltered years. Then she had me reciprocate. Oh my. But I believe that's what the article I read in the AARP magazine advocated—to keep your mind active in the Golden Years, you should learn something new every day to keep sharp. Well I was a damn needle that night.

  Afterward, as we got dressed for dinner, I asked her, “When you decide to leave me, do it quickly, will you? I've convinced myself I can take it easier like that, as if it were a gut punch, okay?"

  "Why do you always talk like that? And why would I leave someone who is so kind to me?” She was combing her hair. As I'd noticed before, she didn't look in the mirror. I suppose I assumed all beautiful women regarded themselves, primed themselves for a night out. But then, what did I know of women such as this second-chance Noreen? She patted my cheek and gave me a look that rolled the tops of my socks.

  Of course at dinner, like before, there were those who ogled, wondering just what sort of relationship we had. Her laughing at my shopworn attempts at humor and me grinning like Tom Sawyer must have when he tricked others into painting that fence for him. They were envious, I convinced myself. Here I was, not particularly handsome nor commanding, yet I was the one who'd struck it rich in Las Vegas. The Wheel of Fortune had spun in my favor.

  The next day in my office, as I sat and admired my Hank Aaron prize, marveling at how that transaction had brought me such luck, my private line rang.

  "Bishop George,” I said upon hearing his voice. “How may I help you today?” I listened. He was concerned about my being with Noreen. Her age wasn't the issue. I knew that despite the public image he cultivated for business reasons, he still practiced plural marriage. I knew too that his third wife was seventeen. Mine and Noreen's age difference wasn't the issue. This call was of a more temporal nature.

  "Oh, no, she has not made such an inquiry.” I listened some more. Bishop Abel George rarely raised his voice, but he was persistent in his manner. “Yes, I understand she's just a cocktail waitress. What? Why would I do that, Bishop George? I've certainly not been very strong in our ward for some time, as you are well aware. But her being a gentile is of no consequence.” He talked, then I said, “It's enough that we make each other happy."

  I wasn't a child. I knew that answer wouldn't satisfy him. Indeed, I was quite aware of where his probing was going. Oh, I didn't know the exact details, but I knew that he would extract what he evaluated as his due from me. Hadn't he always?

  * * * *

  That Mormon creep was scary. Good thing he just saw me as a stupid gold digger. He doesn't know I've done Guys and Dolls at the Rio, and was Big Nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in summer stock. I know how to play my part. He couldn't rattle me, even coupled with his two bodyguards looking all fish-eyed at me.

  Him asking all polite and slithery with his quiet voice and the way he leans in when he's sitting with his fancy cane and all. Eldon showed some backbone, though, talked up for me, for us, really. That must be kinda new ‘cause that bastard gave him a stare, that's for sure. Getting it regularly makes a man strong.

  Eldon was so ready for the picking, I knew my plan was going to work.

  I straddled him one more time and made all the right sounds. Sorry Eldon, but you're just a means to an end. You and that clown who actually believed I was going to kick back a percentage to him like his other girls had ‘cause this was his idea and he'd set the con up. Nothing worse than a bullshitter who started to believe his own BS.

  * * * *

  "Are you familiar with the Mormon Cricket?"

  If I could talk without spitting blood, I still wouldn't have answered. When the bishop arrived, Hat Boy figured to rack up extra points with his boss, and slugged me when I tried to rise from the corner.

  "The Mormon Cricket,” he continued, “is not in fact a cricket, but a katydid."

  The bishop glanced down at his ostrich-skin boots, then back at my battered face. He sat near me, imperial-like in a folding chair, his large hand gripping his dark wood cane topped with a silver bird of some sort. “They are a large insect, though incapable of flight. They live in and on sagebrush and alfalfa, and I've seen them decimate fields of fragrant Black-eyed Susans and Morningstars. These abominations will even eat their own.” He got a misty look in his pale eyes, then refocused on me.

  "The first settlement's wheat was saved by gulls eating those damned insects,” Bishop George said, glaring down at me like Odin used to mad dog Thor in those worn-out Jack Kirby comics I had. My only inheritance from a long-gone mother. Back when I was in one of the several foster homes I'd supposedly been raised in.

  "Do you not see the significance of that? Here you had birds, seagulls, that came from the ocean, from California, to save us in the desert in Utah.” He pointed his gull-headed cane at me.

  I couldn't muster a response. What did he expect me to do, convert?

  "The spirit of Joseph Smith was with us then, as it is now.

  "Your Jezebel took money from Eldon Dudley and then disappeared. This was some two hundred thousand in cash reserves he kept tucked away for necessities."

  "I don't know what you're talking about.” Yeah, that was pretty lame, but I wasn't inclined to give him the satisfaction that I was beaten. Not only had he caught me, but the chick I'd set up as the dentist's Noreen had skipped out on me as well. How sad was that?

  Given his exertions at tanning my hide, Hat Boy was wiping his face with a handkerchief. He then gulped down some bottled water Leaning Man had passed to him. Bishop George, a tall sumbitch with a mug like a knot of wood and an Abe Lincoln jaw, smiled. That was gruesome. “You make money by setting up lonely, well-to-do men with women who purport to be their lost loves."

  Mostly he was correct. I did background research on the marks like you do in any long con. But I didn't coach the women to be the dead wife or high-school sweetheart, endlessly drilling them with facts and dates. That kind of pretend the chump would see through in no time. The art of my approach was for the woman to remind the sucker of the dead wife or the girlfriend. There were other guys hyped on actresses from their teenaged days. Hell, there was even one mark, a software geekonaire, who had this crush on his junior-high teacher. So I had Steiner remodel Helen just enough to sug
gest her features and he was hooked. We took him for more than three hundred Gs in stock options he signed over to her to save her supposedly ailing son. This setup included a child actor we hired to wheeze and sweat in a hospital bed. His stage mother desperate to get the kid a credit. People.

  See I got the idea for the con watching this Hitchcock flick Vertigo on TV one night in a motel room in El Monte, laying low from a grift gone south. In the movie, Jimmy Stewart has it bad for Kim Novak, who reminds him of this other woman he couldn't save because of his fear of heights. Only of course it turns out Jimmy's being played. Kim is both women, the dead bit faked to draw him into a psychological trap of sexual obsession. And thus I created the Kim Novak Effect.

  I figured the big dog here must have invested money in Dudley's clinics. I knew from my due diligence the dentist was a lapsed Mormon. “How'd you get to me if my girl lit out?"

  Bishop George was smoking a cigarette in one of those old-fashioned cigarette holders. On him, it wasn't gay, just eerie. “Searching for the woman's trail, I worked backwards.” He blew a stream of smoke into the still air. “The bartender at the Blue Velvet told me, for a hundred dollars, you'd gotten her hired there. Said he owed you a favor over some sort of misunderstanding. One I'm sure you engineered so as to have him in your pocket when you needed him.” He tapped ash. “That put me on to you and,” he spread his arms wide, “here you are."

  "So what do you want?"

  "I'm your new partner, partner. And you will pay back the money, with interest."

  Shit. “That right?"

  The bishop stood, poking my leg with the end of his cane. “Yes, that is so. You will continue to do what you do, the research and selection of the woman.” He showed his blunt teeth. “I have no insight into the type of devious female you seem to be able to ferret out for this work. But I do have ideas on certain businessmen and politicians that we will go after."

  "Wonderful."

  "Get him cleaned up,” Bishop George said to his muscle. Hat Boy made to snatch me off the floor but stumbled and then went to one knee, heaving.

  "The hell,” he said, and keeled over like a felled rhino.

  Bishop George stared at this and Leaning Man said, “Let's go,” to me. There was a gun in his hand.

  "What's going on here?” the bishop sputtered, gaping at his goon. He squinted, pushing his homely face toward the hood. He started to laugh. “Very good. Very clever,” he said.

  We left the bishop in the unfinished room, methodically tapping his cane. Out in the dusk Leaning Man helped me into the late- model Mustang they brought me in, and we rode away from those unfinished two stories in a development where the bishop was one of several investors. At a motel on 93, near the Arizona border, Helen was waiting for us as we entered a room. She was still hosting her Jerri Rocklyn look. “Guess we've worn out our welcome in Vegas,” she cracked, noting my condition.

  Leaning Man had already removed the bulky coat and now his shirt, revealing the wrap and sports bra Shauna Cheung wore to hide her breasts. She scrubbed off her fake beard and the glue she'd used on her eyelids to make them temporarily rounder and less of her natural epicanthal fold.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. “How'd you two work this?"

  "The bishop was asking around about you once he got your name from Burt,” Helen said. Burt was the bartender at the Blue Velvet. “This I learned from a girlfriend who works the VIP lounge at Caesars."

  I looked at Cheung, who had stripped down to her underwear. I supposed that whatever she gave Hat Boy in the bottled water to knock him out, she'd done to the hood she'd impersonated. She'd worn some padding to give her quite obvious female physique more of a manly shape. Pointing at her I said, “You two already knew each other."

  "Yep,” Cheung answered. “We figured you and the doc needed watching."

  That was horseshit. Neither of them gave a damn about me or that cokehead. They'd been setting me or Steiner up for something, only the bishop's intervention presented another opportunity. Plus, they let me take a beating to make me grateful when they got me out of it. They wanted me for something.

  "We better get down the road.” Helen was up and moving.

  I could have split—or tried to, since I was sure Shauna didn't just wave around that pistol for show. I should have gone on and left these two scheming honeys to work their juju on some other sucker. But I was the dude who came up with this and damned if I was going to turn over my most lucrative swindle to them for nothing.

  Turns out Helen had been scamming the Leaning Man, the real one, for a while. He was too young to know about Jerri Rocklyn, but was mesmerized by that rack she sported. That's why she'd tried to beg off getting re-cut. She'd recently learned from him that the bishop had a network of non-Mormon business and elected-official types he hobnobbed with, and not just in Nevada.

  * * * *

  Relocated to swell Laguna Beach, California, Steiner modeled me to look just enough like the long-disappeared surfer son of a widow whose Frank Gehry-designed glass-and-stone pad overlooks the Pacific. I clip her toenails, make sure she takes the right meds at the right time, and give her back rubs with lotion that, well, let's just say often leads to other duties, if you follow my meaning. Ugh.

  I couldn't run now anyway. My real name and face was on some kind of Homeland Security watch list thanks to the bishop. According to this bent-lawyer acquaintance of mine, this also put getting to my funds in the off-shore accounts iffy—at least for now, until I figured that out.

  Hey, I know, the situation's somewhat reversed, but I'm also lining up some of the widow's male friends for the women to do their thing. So as I sat here on the deck of the old girl's house, as she napped from our rub-down session, I sipped a merlot and watched the sky turn orange. On the sound system Celine was singing about the Last Plane Out. And I dreamed of being on one some day, no longer trapped by the Kim Novak Effect.

  (c)2008 by Gary Phillips

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  Reviews: BLOG BYTES by Bill Crider

  Patti Abbott gets the credit for coming up with one of the more interesting recent projects in the mystery blogosphere. She asked bloggers to post (on Fridays) their recommendations of “forgotten books,” novels in any field that the bloggers remember fondly but that are in danger of disappearing down the memory hole. She's had a fine response, with more than twenty bloggers contributing on the most recent Friday. Recommended books have included Neil Albert's The January Corpse, Ian MacDonald's Sacrifice of Fools, Anne Rowe's Too Much Poison, Jack Ehrlich's Revenge, and Luke Reinhart's The Dice Man. That's just a small sampling, since the project has been going on for several weeks now. You can check Patti's blog (pattinase.blog-spot.com) every Friday for links to the reviews on the participating blogs, and you might want to search for her previous posts with the earlier links. You're almost certain to run across some gems to add to your reading list every week. I know I do.

  Rex Parker, who claims to be “the 55th greatest crossword puzzle solver in the universe,” has a blog (salmongutter. blogspot.com) devoted to his collection of vintage paperbacks (mostly mysteries). Every couple of days, Parker pulls a book from his shelves at random, presents scans of the front and back covers, and talks about whatever amuses or interests him about those covers. He's even willing to sell the books. I recommend his blog for both the cover scans and the entertaining commentary.

  And while we're talking about covers, I should mention a site called Judge a Book by Its Cover(judgeabook.blogspot. com). The blogger says, “I work in a public library. I see literally thousands of books every week: the good, the bad, and the truly hideous. These are the covers from the latter category.” Covers come from all genres, and you're even invited to send in your own examples.

  This leads me to recommend Bruce Black's Book Scans(www.bookscans.com). The purpose of this site is to “provide a visual catalog of ALL vintage American paperbacks.” A worthy project, indeed, and you can find covers of all kinds, from the subl
ime to the ridiculous. And not just front covers. “Significant” back covers are also included. If you like paperback books, you can spend hours browsing this site, and not a minute will be wasted.

  Bill Crider's own peculiar blog, Bill Crider's Pop Culture Magazine, can be found at billcrider.blogspot.com.

  (c)2008 by Bill Crider

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  Novelette: TOO WISE by O'Neil De Noux

  Lucien Caye is one of the most appealing historical P.I.s we've come across. In cases set in the late 1940s, in New Orleans, the WWII vet tries valiantly (and sometimes fails) to protect the beautiful women who cross his path. He's a former cop, like his creator, author and New Orleans native O'Neil De Noux. Readers interested in seeing more of Caye should try the collection New Orleans Confidential (Point Blank Press).

  Friday, February 14, 1947

  t was a kiss with promise behind it, as much prom-ise as a good girl would give, enough to make my heart race as we stood under the yellow bulb on her front gallery, Annette's lips pressed against mine for long, scintillating seconds before she pulled away. Her blue eyes seemed to shine as she smiled, disentangled herself from my arms, and went inside. I glanced at my watch and she'd made it in by midnight, two minutes to spare.

  I took in a deep breath of cool February air, shoved my hands into the pockets of my brown suit coat, and backed down the steps to the sidewalk, which we call banquettes here in New Orleans. I watched lights go on in the narrow shotgun house where Annette Bayly lived with her parents. Turning to my left, I headed home. The faint echo of the band at the Knights of Columbus Hall traveled across Washington Square and I looked through the wrought-iron fence toward the hall where I'd met Annette four hours ago at the Valentine's Dance.

  She'd come with a friend, Annette in a dark blue sweater, tight black skirt, strawberry-blond hair hanging in long curls past her shoulders. I spotted her immediately, but waited to ask her to dance. When she finished dancing with a stiff who danced like an awkward ostrich, I eased up and asked for the next dance. It was a slow one and she felt so nice in my arms. Except for a pushy blond guy with a familiar face I couldn't place, who cut in three times, we danced every dance.