A Filthy Business [Kindle in Motion]

by William Lashner

  “It could be.”

  “So tell us, Mr. Triplett. What did the bastards steal from her?”

  “A kidney,” I said.

  Alberto’s eyes widened with alarm, but Maria Guadalupe’s eyes glistened and she bared her teeth like a shark.

  36. Bonsai

  It was all going so smoothly. And why shouldn’t it have been? The dream had shown me something with utter clarity—my life’s true purpose—and in so doing had allowed me to short-circuit the reinforcing loop of self-sabotage that had heretofore always wrecked my prospects. Finally my talents for mendacity and rank manipulation were shining through. It seemed just then that I had found the answer to all of life’s adversities. I had the urge to tell someone, to tell everyone. It was as if the secret of the universe had been whispered in my ear.

  Can we meet?

  Who is this? I don’t recognize the number.

  Phil.

  Fuck yourself.

  After sending Cindy off with Alberto and Maria Guadalupe for the requisite medical testing for our lawsuit, I drove over to a nondescript office building near a Metro stop on Connecticut Avenue. Inside the fifth-floor doors there was no receptionist, the waiting room was bland as fog, the door to the inner office was locked, as I knew it would be. I sat, and picked up a People magazine from three weeks prior, paged through the noxious photographs as I waited. My watch told me I wouldn’t have to wait long.

  I have something to tell you you’ll want to hear.

  Are you sick and dying a slow and painful death?

  No.

  Then there is nothing you can tell me that I want to hear.

  When the door finally opened, a slight man with a bad toupee slunk through the gap. A latex fetishist with a masochistic wife, I guessed. I let him steal out the front door before I stuck my head into the office.

  “Hello, Doctor,” I said.

  “Phil,” said Caroline Brooks, a bit of startle in her voice. She stood abruptly behind her desk, fidgeted with something on the desktop. “Should I be expecting you?”

  “No, and don’t worry, I’m not here to throw a tree.”

  “That’s good to know.”

  “I won’t take long, I know you probably have an appointment in a few minutes, but I was in town and I thought I’d just pop in and say hello.”

  “That’s nice. Thank you. How are you doing?”

  “I’m doing okay. Actually, great. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that, Phil.”

  “I was a little upset the last time we were together. It was no easy thing being told I really was what I feared I was, and that I wouldn’t ever be able to change.”

  “That wasn’t what I actually said.”

  “But that was what you actually meant, I know, and in the end, I must say, it was liberating. I’ve learned to accept what I am, to even embrace it.”

  “I see.”

  “The question was how to move forward knowing what I now know. I decided to make a change.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  “At first I took your suggestion and tried to give other people what they wanted, tried to treat them like things of worth instead of just things that I could take advantage of. And, I have to say, that didn’t work out too well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s a long process. It can’t be done in just days or weeks.”

  “But then I had this strange dream and out of it came the realization that the reason I kept on screwing up my life was because I wanted the wrong things. For me, it was all about money. I was a slave to the dollar bills they were waving before my eyes.”

  “I guess we all are in a way.”

  “But see, that’s them putting their purpose into us. What I needed was to understand my own deeper purpose. And I have, and it has made all the difference. That’s what I came to tell you, that’s the solution to all our dilemmas. To find out why we each were put on this earth and then to act on it.”

  “And why were you put on this earth, Phil?”

  This was the first time I actually tried to put the change into words. It had lived in my breast, imbuing my actions with a strange certainty, but somehow now, having to express it to another person, it suddenly became as easily lassoed as a cloud. Still, I lowered my chin slightly, a lawyer’s move when making the crucial point to the jury, and gave it a shot: “To make the bastards tremble with fear.”

  “Who are the bastards, Phil?”

  “People with money, with power. The people who control everything. I decided I wasn’t going to be their pawn anymore. I wasn’t going to be controlled with dollars, or with perfectly shaped breasts, or job titles with apparent clout that had no real power at all. I was going to play my own game. I’m not out for revenge, Caroline, don’t worry. And I’m certainly not out to do good for my fellow man; you know better than anyone that would be all pretense for me, and pretense falls apart at the first thumb of pressure. But the time has come for all those who looked at me as no better than a servant as I did their bidding, for all those who failed to give me the proper deference, to pay a price for their slights.”

  You know how the face of a child lights up when she finally gets what you’re trying to teach, how the sheer understanding shoots through her and she can’t hide the joy? I expected to see that expression on Caroline Brooks’s face, but that’s not what I saw. Instead I saw deep concern, along with something else: horror.

  “Maybe I didn’t express it correctly,” I said.

  “If you want, we could talk about it some more,” she said, stepping around her desk and toward me, one hand grasping the other. “I do have an appointment but I could cancel it. Let’s talk some more, Phil.”

  “I’d like that, Caroline. But I can’t, really. I have things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Things. You know. I just came to thank you for your help.”

  “You still have limits, don’t you, Phil? You’re not going to resort to violence, are you?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “There’s something different about you. Colder.”

  “Well, I did buy a gun. Two, actually. These are not pleasant people, Caroline. You don’t know them like I know them. Maybe I screwed their wives and got away with it, yeah, but that was just small-time grifting. This is something else entirely. Now if they make one wrong move, step one foot over the line, give me any excuse at all, they will know that their days of judgment are coming and that I am the Hellmouth.”

  “Stay and talk to me, Phil. Sit down. Let’s talk this over.”

  “I can’t. I’m only here to say thank you. In a way, you were right all along, I did originally come to you to get fixed, and somehow it worked. I am a better psychopath now.”

  “Phil?”

  I looked over to the windowsill. Where there had been three bonsai trees, there were now only two.

  “What happened to the bonsai I threw, the one we repotted together?”

  “It didn’t make it,” she said. “The needles were turning brown, falling out.”

  “So you just tossed it?”

  “It was dying, Phil.”

  “We’re all dying.”

  “I want to help you, Phil. How can I help you?”

  “Good-bye, Caroline. I’m sorry to have bothered you. I won’t be back.”

  Well, that hadn’t gone as I expected. Maybe the Hellmouth thing had been a bit much.

  After I stepped outside the building I looked up to her office window. With the reflection of the sky playing across the glass I couldn’t see inside, but I assumed she was looking down on me. I couldn’t figure out if it was just a failure of language—if I had merely presented the new and improved vision of my life all wrong—or if there was some deeper problem with my altered direction. It had been such a peculiar moment that I wanted to talk it through with someone, but who could that someone be? I couldn’t talk to Caroline Brooks anymore, that was clear. I took out m
y phone and typed.

  Do you really think BB killed himself?

  You don’t?

  Six o’clock, where I first met you.

  Fuck yourself.

  The drinks are on me.

  You bet they are.

  And keep it quiet.

  When I turned off the phone I looked around. For some reason things had suddenly turned alarming. It felt as if there were guns pointed at me from every direction. The whole Caroline Brooks encounter had upset my equilibrium, but the thing that troubled me most was the fate of the tree. The repotting of the bonsai had been the metaphor on which I had based my new direction. Change the pot and even though the tree remains the same, it suddenly thrives. The metaphor was all too obvious and a little too cute, I admit now, but I had found it comforting until Caroline told me the repotted tree had been tossed out with yesterday’s garbage.

  37. The Switch

  I parked in a lot across the street from the bar and sat in my car watching the goings-on. I was ridiculously early, and not because I had time to kill. I was looking for patterns of strange in the street, anything that indicated I would be taken down as soon as I stepped toward the bar’s entrance. I watched that woman in the orange vest, that cop car cruising, that pedestrian walking back and forth as if he had someplace to be, that guy sweeping up litter from the street. But even though I was still filled with the alarm I had felt after leaving Caroline Brooks, I saw nothing that definitively scared me off. And then, right at six, I spotted Linda Pickering making her way down Massachusetts Avenue.

  She was dressed like a cop, no short skirt or plunging neckline, no blue heels with points sharp as a shiv. Her shiny blonde hair was tied into a short ponytail, her shoes were utterly sensible. I liked the look, surprisingly, but then I liked all her looks. I didn’t feel regret seeing her, I don’t feel regret, but I did remember the smell of her naked and on top of me, boozy and smoky and musky all at once, with the sharp smack of a perfume that was trying too hard. She looked around before climbing down the stairs to the entrance, and I had to determine whether it was just the natural carefulness of a cop or a furtive glance to make sure her operatives were in place. The scent of her still smoking through my memory convinced me all was clear.

  The bar was quiet, not yet crowded, and so it didn’t take me but a moment to spot her. She was waiting for me at a small table off the bar, seated on the bench seat with her back to the wall, facing an empty chair. She didn’t smile when she saw me coming, and she positively cringed when I slid onto the bench seat beside her.

  “There’s an empty chair,” she said.

  “This is more romantic, don’t you think? Like in those old French movies, sitting side by side, smoking cigarettes and sipping champagne.”

  “Except it’s illegal to smoke cigarettes in here.”

  “And we don’t have champagne.”

  “And I can’t bear the rotten smell of you.”

  “It’s my cologne,” I said. “Eau de spoiled camembert. Drink?”

  I looked around, made a quick judgment about everyone I could spy in the bar, and then kept watch on the entrance.

  “I’ve been spending the last week wondering,” she said, “why I didn’t arrest you for obstruction of justice at our last meeting.”

  “Did you figure it out?”

  “I was just so flustered, so appalled, and so fascinated at the same time. It was like I was watching a cockroach eat its own vomit.”

  “Do they do that?”

  “You’re the expert, you tell me.”

  A beefy man walked in alone and stood with a spread-legged stance, looking around, before he broke into a smile and joined a crew at the other side of the room. I signaled the waitress. When she came over to our table, I ordered a martini, double olives, and a Scotch with ice.

  “Maybe I should arrest you now,” said Linda after the waitress left.

  “We should at least wait for the drinks. And from what I can tell, I didn’t obstruct anything. You kept right on investigating. I heard about your meeting with Senator Davenport. How did that work out?”

  “None of your business.”

  “It sure didn’t work out well for Bradley Beamon. I give you a friendly warning, you are just enough of a hard-ass to ignore it, and then . . .”

  “One had nothing to do with the other.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Me? Nothing, I wasn’t involved. I was actually sunning in Jamaica at the time. When I heard, I was as stunned as you undoubtedly were. But now that you’ve got Bradley’s confession, I suppose you’ve already closed the Scarlett Gould case.”

  “They want me to.”

  “But you’re fighting it. Good. I’ve missed you, Linda. I think about you at odd times. Your laugh, your scent, the way your hair tickled my cheek when you were riding me like a Harley.”

  “Can you lend me a bucket? I need to hurl. Or maybe I’ll just do it right on your shoes. Do you have any idea how disgusting I find you right now?”

  “I have a pretty good idea.”

  “And I suppose this is the moment you tell me how much you disgust yourself.”

  “But I don’t, you see. I was just doing my job. I only regret that it happened on a night you looked so fetching.”

  She barked out a laugh at that, which was peculiar because I wasn’t trying to be funny. The drinks came. We sat quietly for a bit. Even with her back hunched in tension, I liked being next to her.

  “So,” she said.

  “So what?”

  “You said you had something to tell me. What do you know, Phil?”

  “I know enough to sit with my back to the wall.” I gave the crowd another quick scan. There were two men in suits, barely talking, standing in the corner by a chalkboard with the names of wines listed. “I know enough to blow the lid off some pretty ugly stuff in this god-awful town. Did you tell anyone we were meeting?”

  “I’d be too embarrassed.”

  “Do you know those guys in the corner?”

  “Don’t be so paranoid. If I was coming after you, you’d already be gotten. Let me have what you’ve got.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What a surprise, you were bullshitting me all along.”

  “It’s not bullshit, but I need something from you first.”

  “I bet.” She lifted up the martini, drained it, pulled out the plastic toothpick, and bit off one of the olives. “If I see you again, I will arrest you.”

  “I have a case for you,” I said. “You’ll want to move on it right away. There’s a woman in Philadelphia. She’s rich, and she’s vile. Her name is Wister and she’s put out a hit on a woman named Cindy Lieu who lives in Memphis. And the reason why will slay you.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Because the old lady already stole Cindy Lieu’s kidney for her grandson. How’s that? And now she wants to destroy the evidence.”

  “You know the sweetest stories,” she said, and then went quiet for a moment. “What can I do about it? Philadelphia, Memphis. I’m a cold case cop with no jurisdiction.”

  “It’s a federal case, with all the crisscrossing of state lines. I figure you know someone in the FBI who could take this and run with it.”

  “I might,” she said. “Yeah, I do. But why would I bring him in?”

  “Because if he puts you on the task force and you work the case like it matters, it will wend its way right back to the Scarlett Gould murder and give you all the answers you could ever want.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Because the son of a bitch who right now is trying to kill Cindy Lieu is the same son of a bitch who killed Bradley Beamon. And the organization he’s working for is the organization that killed Scarlett Gould.”

  She took a moment, biting the second olive off her toothpick, and then she gave her verdict. “It sounds too cute.”

  “It does, yes.”

  “And I know you’re a liar.”


  “I am.”

  “And you still want me to believe it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I was working for the same organization. But I’m not anymore. I’m trying something new.” I gave her my most brilliant smile. “I’ve gone rogue.”

  “So that’s it. You’ve gone rogue. That sounds so romantic it makes me want to punch you in the face. What it means is you found a new route to the money.”

  “There’s money involved, sure, there always is. But the pursuit of other people’s money isn’t driving me anymore.”

  “Then what are you really after, Phil?”

  I thought about it for a moment. I would have blurted out my line about making them tremble with fear to Linda Pickering, the same way I blurted it out to Caroline Brooks, but if Linda looked at me the same way Caroline did while I spoke about judgment day and my role as the Hellmouth, the game was over. I needed her to look at me with some understanding, at least. I needed her to believe I was different than I had been, led now by a nobler purpose. I not only needed this, I wanted it, too. From her. Especially from her. I wasn’t going to lie to put it over, this new purpose was too fragile within me, too susceptible to my own words to taint it with deceit. What I needed instead was a way to repackage my new purpose in a spiffier box, to make it salable to this new audience. What would Linda Pickering be willing, even eager, to buy?

  “Justice,” I said. “I’ve decided to pursue justice.”

  “Bullshit.” And she laughed when she said it, but something had lit in her eyes. The brightness seemed to contain, if only in nascent form, a newfound respect and admiration, along with a gratifying element of fear. “I don’t believe you,” she said, but she did believe me. She believed me because she wanted to believe me. You all want to believe I am more than I could ever be. That’s your secret power. Your naive belief is what I ruthlessly take advantage of, but it also bears strange fruit.