by April Hill
"You want her cuffed?" asked the larger Fascist, dangling a pair of handcuffs in front of her. Mom reacted to this rudeness by erupting into full-blown hysteria, socking the officer in the face with her pink purse, her plastic bracelets clattering noisily. The purse was lightweight canvas, and might have presented no threat to the officer had it not contained several real estate "lock boxes" and a collection of paperback romance novels. The cops grabbed her again and carried her screeching down the hill, presumably to spend her twilight years in solitary confinement. I rejoined Mona, and crawled into the passenger seat, out of the heat.
"Them son o' bitches gonna’ kill her, now," Mona growled.
"She’ll be all right," I said, gagging on the cigarette smoke. "She’s got them outnumbered."
Mona eyed me suspiciously. "You’ Mother says you been runnin’ around with a cop, now. That the truth?"
I nodded. Mona and I share a certain distrust of police departments, for different reasons.
"Cops is nothin’ but bad news," Mona intoned darkly. "Esteban got hisself police brutalized over them goddamned turkeys of his."
I seriously doubted that the Los Angeles police, despite a reputation for being notoriously short tempered, would beat up someone as manifestly dim-witted as Esteban over a carload of frozen turkeys, but I kept my opinion to myself.
"How is Esteban?" I asked, pleasantly. "I haven’t seen him around, lately."
"Esteban ain’t nothin’ but a big pile of dogshit," Mona growled. "You ain’t seen him around, ‘cause he ain’t been around, that’s why. He run off somewheres. With some new whore, prob’ly."
So, Esteban, who had enjoyed quite a long run as Mona’s liaisons went, had finally flown the coop. I wondered whether a new rooster had yet appeared.
"So, who’s the lucky new fella,’ Mona?" I quipped girlishly. I do this, now and then, as though I’m at some high school slumber party. It’s part of an ungainly and pitifully self-serving attempt to find some common ground with other females.
Mona snorted. "I got no use for men,” she crowed. “Goddamn motherfuckers, all of ‘em," Mona crowed. "I’m with Chardonay, now."
Chardonay (formerly Charles, formerly Charlene, or maybe the other way around?) Thinking too deeply about Mona’s love life gives me a headache. Anyway, Chardonay is either a female impersonator, or a male impersonator, I forget which. He or she had been Mom’s longtime hairdresser until she/he purchased a twelve-foot boa constrictor called Cyril and abandoned the beauty business to become an exotic dancer. No, not a stripper. An exotic dancer, in the truest sense of the word. Cyril and Chardonay, in fact, have bonded as few reptile-human couples ever do, and while some of the more intimate aspects of his performance in her act might offend the ASPCA and a few narrow-minded patrons, Cyril seems to have thrived in show biz, and receives quite a lot of live field mice in his fan mail.
"Well, if you see him around, would you tell Esteban that he left his tools at the house?" I asked, though I suspected that Mona had no further interest in any of Esteban’s tools—not the ones he was born with or the ones he'd shoplifted piece by piece from Sears.
"Fuck his motherfuckin’ tools," Mona replied, affirming my suspicions. "He don’t know shit about fixin’stuff, anyways." She had that right. When Esteban fixed anything, it was generally destined for the trash. Mom had only hired him to please Mona, and now his short career as a handyman was at an end. It appeared he’d have to go back to hijacking turkeys.
"That your boyfriend comin’?" Mona asked, pointing out the windshield. "He look like he wanna’ beat the shit outta’ somebody." I looked up just in time to see Hank walking toward the car, looking, indeed, grim. I rolled the window down cautiously.
"What do we know?" I asked cheerfully, hoping he had forgotten his promise in all the confusion.
He didn’t answer my question. "Are you ready to go?" he growled. "I told you to stay in the..."
"Mona, " I interrupted. "this is my friend, Detective Hank Everett. Hank, my good friend, Miss Monaloa Jones."
At the introduction, Mona grunted and leaned forward to write down, as ostentatiously as possible, the number of the badge Hank wore clipped on his belt. I got out of the car, keeping my rear end firmly up against the side of the car, just in case.
"Are they really going to arrest my Mother?" I asked him.
He nodded. "Probably. She bit two cops."
"Two! I only saw the one."
"The other one was me," he sighed, holding up his left hand. It was wrapped in a blood-stained handkerchief. "I tried to help."
laughed. "No good deed goes unpunished."
"Yeah, I know. C’mon. I’ll tell you everything in the car. It was very nice meeting you, Miss Jones."
Mona grunted, and when he turned his back, she flipped him the finger.
"Well," I chirped. "Now you’ve met my Mother. What do you think?"
"I think I might want to consider a vasectomy," he said. "Why risk insane offspring?"
I grinned happily. "That sounds like a proposal, Detective!"
Hank opened the car door and started to push me inside. "Don’t look so cheerful. You’ wont’ be that eager to marry me after I get you home. I told you to stay in the damned car." Before I could dodge it, he landed one terrific smack on the seat of my thin jeans. I yelped and got in the car, fast. If I did marry this man, I was going to start wearing corduroy.
On the way back to the station, Hank gave me what good news there was. The second dismembered hand had not actually been found in my yard, but at the edge of the adjacent empty lot, behind a pile of debris, as if someone had thrown it from a car. I could hardly wait to tell Mom that the destruction in the yard hadn't been necessary, after all.
The right hand the police had not found in my yard was already resting peacefully in a stainless-steel basin at the police laboratory when, at four-eighteen that afternoon, the mail person, a Miss Angeline Schwenck, arrived at Mr. Frankie’s house in her small white mail-service vehicle. When she opened the curbside mailbox to deliver Mr. Frankie’s voluminous stack of mail, including his monthly NRA newsletter and his fat new "Victoria’s Secret" catalogue, the head of a Latino man, age approximately fifty-five years, rolled out and bounced onto the hot pavement, causing Miss Schwenck to lose her lunch and pass out cold. Esteban had finally turned up.
Hank managed to get Mother released on his personal guarantee that she wasn’t rabid and probably not homicidal. He drove her home, and although I doubt that he enjoyed it a lot, it was probably just as well that he had an opportunity to spend some quality time alone with her. I couldn’t have kept her a secret much longer.
By the time he got back to Malibu that night, I had learned from the TV news that several other body parts, (an ear and a nose) had been found in the vicinity of my house. The actual address was unspecified, thank God, and the neighborhood was rather rudely referred to as the long defunct Watercolor Rancho development. The body parts— presumably Larry’s— were listed as belonging to an "unidentified white male." It made me a little sad. Larry may have been a jerk, but he certainly didn’t deserve what happened to him. The remainder of the body was still missing three days later when the police stopped the search, feeling that they had recovered about as much of Larry as was readily available.
Hank moved most of what I needed out of the rancho and into his place that very afternoon, and this time, I didn’t object. He was so tired by the time he finished that he forgot to administer the promised spanking, and instead, we sat on the beach until long after dark, talking. When I began to shiver, Hank laid me back on the still-warm sand, undid my bra and slipped my panties off. Then, with the tide coming in around us, exactly like that scene in From Here to Eternity, (Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr), and using nothing more than his mouth and his remarkably talented fingers, Hank managed to take my mind off Larry, the house, and pretty much everything else.
A week later, a little more of Larry turned up in an abandoned warehouse in Torrance. Esteban was fo
und a block away, minus his head, of course, and his penis, but otherwise, more or less complete.
Another week later, and "They" had arrived at the conclusion that my house probably had nothing to do with anything, and that no part of the assorted mayhem had actually occurred on my premises. My yard, "They" decided, was merely a repository for the remains, once the deed(s) were done. Police surveillance tapes revealed that our friend Esteban was a fairly regular patron of Frankie’s, who’d had the misfortune to cross the killer’s path. The killer, it was also assumed, was the same maniac who had dismembered another unfortunate victim a few miles away, in Hollywood, and who had been caught red-handed, as it were, chopping up a fourth victim, in Inglewood.
(Are you confused? Get in line.)
All of the above assumptions, plus the captured maniac’s heartfelt and apparently sincere confession, seemed to signal that I could safely return to my deserted rancho. But Hank didn’t agree.
"No way in hell," he declared, re-reading the final report, or what Hank referred to as "that pile of shit."
"The fact is, this guy may not be the right one," he insisted.
"Of course he’s the right one," I argued. "How many lunatics like this are out there? Chopping up people and spreading them around town like that? With the same M.O.?"
"More than you want to know about," he said darkly. "There’s still the cat to consider, and Larry’s…the part of Larry we found in your yard."
"They told me that the box probably just blew there," I pointed out. "Along with the rest of the crap that’s always collecting against that fence. There was no blood found anywhere around my yard. And the cat? Who knows? Maybe it was just a prank."
"Yeah?" he shot back. "And maybe it was a party coyote, too. And the box blew there? C'mon, Karen, you saw—and felt— the weight of that thing. Do you really think it could have just blown there, without dumping what was inside?"
"Hey, we’re not the CSI guys, remember?" I said. "They are. And this is what they get paid for. I want to go home, Hank. All my stuff is there, and I like the quiet. I never thought I’d say that, but it’s true. Evan a dump can grow on you, after a while. And besides, this apartment's not all that big. You're probably getting a little tired of having me on top of you all the time."
Hank grinned. "Well, not all the time," he said. "I'd say we average more like sixty-forty, my favor, but I am feeling a little worn down, lately, with all the sleep I've been missing, so if you’d like to take on a little more of the heavy work, so to speak, we can always…"
I blushed. "That's not what I meant, and you know it." The truth was, I was afraid that Hank had begun to see me as a responsibility, or a victim, and that he was keeping me around out of sympathy. Okay, maybe it was stupid, but it’s how I felt, then. I'm not an especially mature person. I admit it. Maybe I wasn't ready for a mature relationship, and maybe I wouldn’t have known one if I saw it. What I really needed to do was to think about everything that had happened between us, and I couldn't do that when Hank was in bed with me.
"I don’t want you going back to that house," he said firmly. "It’s time you moved in here, permanently. That way, you'll have plenty of time to start the new book."
"Thanks, " I said. "But I can’t afford this place, and I keep telling you, there is no new book. I haven’t paid you a cent for anything since I got here, and I make it a practice to only take charity from relatives."
"It’s not charity," he said irritably.
"Oh, I see. I’m being kept. Okay, if that’s the way it is, I could really use a car. Maybe a nice little red BMW? And I’m very partial to emeralds. What about a new TV? A really big one, high def, maybe even 3D?"
Hank threw up his hands. "What, exactly, is the matter with you?"
"Nothing." I said sullenly.
"You’re either the most stubborn woman I’ve ever known, or maybe just the dumbest!" he roared.
"Au contraire!" I protested. "1485 on my SATS, I’ll have you know."
"That was a few years back," he shot back. "If colleges handed out grades for common sense, you’d have tanked it, kiddo."
So what did I do? I demonstrated exactly how little common sense I had by slapping Hank’s face, and calling him a very colorful name that I'd learned from Mona.
Hank simply sighed, and without further ado, turned me across his knee, reached under my skirt to pull my pants down, and began swatting my naked behind with my own wooden hairbrush. He said he was going for 1485 smacks, but the hairbrush was heavier than I remembered, and hurt like hell. By smack twenty-two, I had capitulated, apologized for the slap, and promised to clean up my vocabulary. Apparently unimpressed, Hank spread my legs and swatted the insides of my thighs a couple of times, while suggesting that I make my apology a bit more sincere, which I did—immediately.
"That was maybe thirty-five, altogether," he said as he let me up. "I owe you another 1450. Try keeping that in mind next time you feel like slapping me."
"That’s not fair," I whined.
"Where is it written that life is fair?" he asked with a chuckle. Hank, Philosopher Detective.
"Well, anyway, you can be awfully goddamned cranky, sometimes," I pouted. "What happened to your sense of humor?"
"I lost it somewhere," he said grimly. "Probably when the head rolled out of the mailbox."
After the quarrel and the spanking was over, though, I got my way— sort of. Hank finally agreed that I could go back to the rancho—on a trial basis. After he had all the locks changed, installed a security system, and drilled me for two hours on how to work the stupid thing. (I do not function well with gadgets.) He also equipped me with a cell phone, which I kept getting mixed up with the TV remote. I didn't bother mentioning to him that I had carried the remote around in my purse for a week, and regularly tried to change channels with the damned phone. It was cute, though, my little phone, and his office and home phone were programmed into it, so I couldn’t screw it up, Hank said. Poor guy. He just couldn't understand the extent of my technical disability.
Three days after I get back to my rancho, I was seeing more of Hank than I had when I was at his place. He "found himself in the neighborhood" at least twice a day
The day after I went home, he arrived at my door at eight in the morning, trying the lock on the front door— to test me, apparently. I’m a slow learner, but Hank's last painful reminder about locks had succeeded in making me a devoted advocate of household security. The very night I moved back in, I had made an innocent little joke as I got in the shower—a joke involving that terrific shower scene from Psycho. The joke was rewarded with what Hank called a "house warming"—meaning I got draped dripping wet over the side of the tub to have my bare ass smacked with a plastic bath brush. From that moment on, I kept the door properly locked at all times, and even installed tiny curtains made of blue Kleenex over the door’s three little window-panes.
Every day that first week, he came by and wandered around the house playing with all the gadgets he'd put in— never really satisfied with the elaborate precautions he’d already installed. At some point, he even pulled the lever on the fireplace, which I'd always assumed was there for effect.
"Don’t bother," I yawned. "The fireplace doesn’t work."
"What’s wrong with it?"
"It’s fake or something."
"What does that mean?"
"It means it doesn’t work," I explained patiently. "It’s purely for looks. A southern California movie fireplace. Mom used to keep a potted plastic plant in it, but I think I killed it."
Hank jiggled the lever of my fake fireplace again.
"That’s funny," he remarked. "It’s got a working flue." God, don’t you love the kind of men who know about stuff like fireplace flues? I was immediately turned on.
"It should work," he said, jiggling the flue thing again.
I sighed. "So should the dishwasher, but it doesn’t. Tell my landlady about it. All I know is, it doesn’t work." I sidled up to him and tried rubbing my lower
parts against his, but he was all revved up with the flue business, and showed no interest whatsoever in ravishing me. In fact, he moved me aside so he could kneel down in front of the damned busted fireplace and look up the chimney.
"You’d better call your Mother," he said, standing up again and wiping his hands on his handkerchief. "That could be dangerous."
"It doesn’t work," I repeated. "How can it be dangerous if it doesn’t work, and I never light it?"
He nodded, obviously distracted, and so puzzled by my non-functional fireplace that he was totally immune to my attempts to seduce him. That's when it suddenly occurred to me that Hank probably liked football, and hockey, and all the rest of that ball nonsense. I figured that men who knew about fireplace flues were likely to be sports fans, as well. I was apparently stuck with the spanking thing, but maybe I could break him of the sports thing, if I started early enough. I wasn't real fond of having my ass smacked, but I have always truly despised sports. I was perfectly ready to compromise, if he was willing to meet me half-way.
