A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

“I still have that first used limo. I still have the concierge service. I still solve impossible problems for the people who pay me. But I’ve evolved beyond each of those operations. I’ve built up an operation in Washington. The people who come to us for favors have a great deal of power and when we help them, they transfer that power to me. I no longer fall to my knees and pray for luck, I make my own luck and grow exponentially every day. And the funny thing is now I sleep through the night like a well-fucked dog.”

  Her voice stopped its flow for a moment, thank goodness. The house was starting to rise into wakefulness. Two naked women were cavorting in the pool. I sucked down the watery remnants of my Scotch. No matter how insane she might have been, she did deliver a good swig of Scotch. And, to be truthful, there was something about this woman’s insanity that resonated in my chest.

  “So, Mr. Kubiak, let’s get down to it, shall we? Can you be more than a skitterer? Are you ready to cross the line into something grander? You puzzle me. There’s an admirable coldness in you, and yet wherever you find yourself, whatever the opportunity being offered like a fresh piece of meat to a lion, you seem to find a way to turn it into shit. At these heights, that is something we can no longer afford. Darwin made it clear, the old ways must die and something new must rise. Can you be more than your wisecracking, gold-selling, wife-stealing self? Are you ready to evolve into someone truly fearsome? Someone worthy of being a partner in my organization?”

  For a moment I watched the pretty women frolic in the pool. The taste of copper leached from my teeth and I had the urge to chew their faces off.

  “I couldn’t be more ready,” I said.

  “There is a cold case investigation under way by the DC police,” she said. “A dead woman. Found by a dog in Rock Creek Park. I need the investigation squashed like a water bug.”

  And there it was. All of this, the plane, the house, the drugs, the whores, the long-winded speech, had been about one thing, which meant it was a big thing. Something about the case rang ill. There was too much byplay, too much sell. If Mr. Maambong had assigned this little matter from his desk in Miami, I would have thought nothing of it, but these circumstances gave me nothing but pause. Still, this woman had evolved into something close to a monster, and with it had come wealth and power and a ridiculously fine bottle of Scotch. I was already a monster; what could I evolve into and what would it get me? That was the question of the day.

  “Consider it done,” I said.

  16. Geometry

  We were talking of evolution.

  The office was warm, fragrant with incense, and there was a ceremonial drum beside one of the chairs. This was back on the East Coast now, but in Washington, not Miami. Miami was the land of Mr. Maambong, where his beetle eyes were everywhere; Washington, DC, was the land of reinvention, where the brazen turn themselves into national figures and national buffoons. I was ostensibly there to kill a murder investigation—what seemed then, despite my reservations, a simple enough task for someone with my skills—but I had a deeper purpose for my time in Washington, and so I found my way to that office with its drum. Three bonsai trees lined the windowsill. Set atop a leather ottoman was a wicker-covered box of tissues in the event I broke into sobs. The walls were green, the chair was chocolate brown, the couch was beige.

  I was on the couch.

  “So Mr. Triplett, how can I help you?” said Caroline Brooks, tall, thin, an elderly woman with kind eyes and hoops in her ears. Her face on the website seemed to have answers.

  “I have a question, Doctor.”

  “Call me Caroline.”

  “Good, and you can call me Dick.”

  “See, we’re making progress already.” She leaned forward, gave me an empathetic gaze. “So, Dick, you have a question.”

  “It’s been bothering me for a long while now, and lately it’s become more imperative. That’s why I’ve come to you.”

  “Let’s see if I can help you come up with an answer.”

  “I need to know if people can truly change.”

  She laughed at that. “I hope so, or I’d be out of job.”

  “But from what I understand, therapy is not about deep change. People can learn to feel better about what they are. People can train themselves to react differently to difficult situations. People can turn more cheerful with the right drug taken in excess. Or, alternatively, people can learn ways to live healthier and alleviate stress.”

  “Yoga and yogurt,” she said, nodding. “There’s much that can be solved with yoga and yogurt.”

  “And people simply like talking about their mothers.”

  “Do you?”

  “No.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “Because I know her. But all this is not what I’m trying to get at. I mean, when you cut past the manners, the habits, the learned responses, the drugged-up affect, when you peel back the layers and cut to the root of everything, what you would find is the core. And the question I have is can that core change.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think no,” I said. “I think we are what we are and the rest is bullshit.”

  “But here you are, in my office, which tells me something.”

  “I guess I have doubts.”

  “Or hopes,” she said, and she was dead right about that. The Principal had been talking of evolution at that infinity pool in Cabo and maybe, finally, I was ready.

  The geometry of fate is often simple. In my case, there is a rectangle, two points, and a line. The rectangle is a cheap motel room in New Orleans, the points are my mother and Jesse Duchamp, the line is the flight of the bullet that pierced his malignant little skull. The root of this neat composition is wearying in its utter banality: there wasn’t enough money, there were too many drugs, there were other women. In truth, I believed it was this final factor that ultimately caused my mother to pull the trigger, though she continued to insist the impetus was love and only love. But whatever the true reason, the very geometry of that death haunted me.

  In so many ways Jesse Duchamp was my brother. We had both suckled at the same breasts; we both suffered, I had no doubt, from the same flaw. With every job I lost, with every chance I chumped, with every disaster I brought down upon myself, Jesse Duchamp and I were becoming ever closer. He must have felt a bright-green bitterness fill his soul as the copper-jacketed round he had loaded into his handgun expanded to the size of a penny in his brain, and so I couldn’t shake the sense that with every coppery piece of failure I was tasting my own death. Jesse Duchamp’s ultimate fate was hurtling toward me with the unerring trajectory of a bullet, unless . . .

  We were talking about evolution, and was I wrong to believe that this opportunity, in the swamp that was Washington, DC, could also be my opportunity to change, to grow, to evolve out of Jesse Duchamp’s fate and into a brighter one of my own? The Principal wanted me to evolve into something that wouldn’t screw up as I had multiple times before, something that would be worthy of a partnership in her enterprise. I didn’t yet know if it was in me to become this new and brighter thing, but I believed I needed all the help I could get to find out.

  “I will say first of all,” said Caroline Brooks, “that you shouldn’t discount the power of what you call manners and habits and learned responses. Behavioral therapy can be quite effective. Our actions very much define us.”

  “But a lot of it is just happenstance, don’t you think? I won’t cheat on my wife if the right woman with stiletto heels doesn’t come along to tempt me.”

  “Are you married, Dick?”

  “Not anymore. Let’s just say that those stiletto heels did come along. And I won’t steal a bar of gold if I never happen to see one lying around. But I could still, at heart, be a cheater or a thief just waiting for my moment.”

  “Are you?”

  “Do you want an honest answer?”

  “Nothing of worth can happen here if it doesn’t come from honesty.”

  “Then yes, absolutely, I am
both a cheater and a thief. You also should know it’s not easy for me to be honest. Lying is more than second nature. It is my nature.”

  “But you’re here, of your own free will.”

  “And I guess, in the spirit of honesty, I need to tell you my name is not Dick Triplett.”

  “So the very first words you said to me were a lie.”

  “The hello was genuine.”

  “Why didn’t you want me to know your real name?”

  “I thought it would be safer for everybody.”

  “You must have some terrible secrets.” She laughed at that, laughed with just a touch of nervousness. “But as you know, whatever we say here is privileged; I can’t reveal it or be forced to reveal it. So you can trust my confidentiality. What is your real name?”

  “Phil.”

  “Just Phil?”

  “Let’s leave it at just Phil.”

  “I suppose then you’ll be paying me in cash.”

  We both laughed at that.

  “Okay, good,” she said. “Now we might really be getting somewhere. Your name is Phil and you want to know if people can change because you want to be someone other than who you are.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but it’s certainly implied. What is it you do for a living, Phil?”

  “I fix things.”

  “You’re an engineer?”

  “Of a sort. I fix situations. If our clients have a problem, no matter how difficult or unseemly, I engineer a solution for them. It is very specialized, very lucrative.”

  “I suppose in the fixer business it helps to be a liar and a thief.”

  “It’s a prerequisite.”

  “But something about it troubles you?”

  “Only that it may not last.”

  “What is it you want to become?”

  “Something different than what I am,” I said. “Something that doesn’t screw up every opportunity that comes his way. Something that doesn’t end up dead on the floor of a New Orleans motel.”

  “That’s quite a specific fear. We’ll have to get into that at some point. But first I couldn’t help but note that you used an interesting construction. Not someone, but something. And you believe you’ve screwed up your life at every opportunity?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?”

  “I screwed up the good job I had at the firm that hired me out of law school. I had a sales job that I screwed up by being too good a salesman. I was married once and I pulled that apart like a kid pulling the wings off a fly. And every disaster tastes the same, if you know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Bitter and metallic, like I’m sucking a penny.”

  “And now you’ve got this new position and you’re afraid if you can’t change what you are, you’re going to mess up everything again.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve told me you want to be something new. So tell me, Phil, what is the something you believe you are now?”

  I hesitated. I’m not one to hesitate—a salesman who hesitates is lost—but I hesitated just then as Caroline Brooks’s eyes shined with an almost indecent expectation. Some words have an incantatory power. Some words once spoken change everything, like the calling forth of a demon. The sky darkens, the air crackles with power, the word creates its own truth within you. But we were talking about evolution. Time to make the call.

  “What I believe,” I said, “is that I’m a psychopath.”

  17. The Case of the Dead Blonde

  Whoa,” said the outlaw after the magazine writer downed what remained of her Scotch so forcefully the cube of ice bounced off her teeth. “You bolted that last bit like it was antacid. If you knew how expensive this Scotch actually was, you’d throw it up and drink it again just to get my money’s worth.”

  The magazine writer closed her eyes for a moment and let the alcohol burn away the sudden spurt of fear that had choked her throat. When she opened them again, she was staring into the outlaw’s hard, scarred face. She tried to see something in his eye that would reassure her, something in the line of his jaw, something of the higher purpose she had expected to find. What she saw, she realized, was a cipher. Every magazine interview was a dance of artifice; the subject presented an attractive facade and she grabbed hold of whichever shard of that facade created the juiciest story. It was all about words on the page instead of truth, because in the magazines she wrote for no one wanted the naked truth. No one wanted it ever, really. But now, after years of accepting faces at face value, when she desperately needed to know the truth of this specific subject, she was lost.

  Was this man what he had thought he was? And if so, how could she have come to this place and trusted him with her life? But if he was what he had thought he was, who else would be better equipped to do this dark thing she needed done? She pushed her glass toward the bottle, as if the answer might be somewhere in there, beyond the sketch of the Japanese warrior.

  “More?” said the outlaw. He poured another finger’s worth of the precious Scotch. “I understand your sudden thirst. I’ve already told you my background, my work, my way of seeing the world, and in just the telling you could get a sense of my superficial charm, which is one of the telltales. You must have at least considered the possibility. And yet, still, when I accused myself out loud you couldn’t help yourself from dashing the last swallow down your throat all at once. Though I sense in you it wasn’t only fear but also hope. Hmm?”

  With a sudden shriek of the door hinges, a shaft of light pierced the interior of the bar and slammed directly into the magazine writer’s face.

  She threw up a hand to shield her eyes and squinted. This was a private meeting, the outlaw was a wanted man; was the intruder someone coming after him, someone who wouldn’t care about collateral damage in the quest for the bounty? Through her squint she could just make out a silhouette, short and slight—a boy’s figure?

  And then the door thumped shut and she saw him clearly, wild hair, scruffy beard, staring at the two of them. And, my God, those hands. The outlaw, who had twisted to see the intruder, turned back to the magazine writer with concern on his face.

  “Stop staring, and we need to keep our voices down,” he said. “The lost soul who has just entered is one of the gang of pathetic regulars that kill whatever ambience might actually exist in this joint. He’s a glad-hander, despite having hands like the wrinkled claws of some prehistoric crab. If he sees an opening, he might want to join our little party and bore us to tears with his inane chatter. Put your head down and I’ll whisper something and it’ll appear like we’re having a private moment and maybe we’ll shame him into minding his own damn business. Laugh.”

  The magazine writer laughed, as if the outlaw had offered the most delightful bon mot, and the outlaw laughed with her and in the sound of their laughter the man turned toward the bar. The outlaw took a careful glance over.

  “That’s a relief,” he said. “The word among the cactuses is that his mutilated hands were the result of a mishap in a meth lab. But I like to believe he grew up in a Catholic orphanage where the nuns who prowled the bathrooms carried torches and swords.

  “So where were we? Oh yes, the psychiatrist and my little piece of self-diagnosis. I bet you’re wondering if the skies did in fact darken and the air did in fact crackle with power when I said it out loud. Sadly, no. The only crackle of power was the way Caroline Brooks’s eyes lit with fascination as she leaned toward me. I had just disclosed the secret that circled my heart like a ring of thorns and the woman to whom I had chosen to bear this brutal truth reacted like a hungry Parisian watching a snail slither across her plate.”

  “Interesting,” Caroline Brooks said. “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Because of what I feel.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Very little.”

  “Do you not get angry?”

  “Oh, I get angry.”

  “Do you have envy, sexual d
esire, do you ever want to rip someone’s face off?”

  “Constantly.”

  “Then you do feel.”

  “But I don’t feel awe, or love, or any of the things other people claim to feel. I can’t look into your eyes and feel what you feel. I can fake it as well as you can, but it’s not there.”

  “And you believe this is why you keep failing?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “What do you want from our sessions together, Phil?”

  “To be repaired.”

  “Like a car.”

  “Exactly.”

  “To what end? To become a better fixer? To become, maybe, a better psychopath?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way.”

  “No, I suppose you wouldn’t. But that’s the sense I’m getting. And I must say, I believe you’ll be disappointed. In all probability you are not a psychopath.”

  “And how can you know so soon?” I said.

  “You’re here,” she said. “It’s common for patients to dwell on their deficits when they diagnose themselves. Many come to the conclusion that they must be psychopathic. But the one thing we know about psychopaths is that they don’t seek help for their condition. In fact, they don’t even believe they have a condition. You think you’re one, ergo you’re not.”

  An interesting piece of logic from the good doctor, no? If you follow it to its logical conclusion, Descartes suddenly vanishes into thin air.

  “Still, if you’d like,” she said, “a few protocols exist that would help me make a more considered diagnosis. I could simply ask you some questions, and if your answers are honest, we could have a pretty decent idea of what we’re looking at.”

  “A psychopath test?” I said.

  “Of a sort.”

  “I think I took one already.”

  “How did you do?”

  “Pretty damn well.”