No Place Like Home

by April Hill

  "This is a great book," I said, patting his hand distractedly and barely glancing up. "Especially the pictures. No wonder you like your job, so much. Since you’re here, can you explain all this scientific stuff about lividity to me?"

  Hank took the book away from me, stuffed it in a drawer, and went about making up for the fish incident. Within thirty seconds, I'd completely forgotten the book— and the fish.

  * * *

  The next day, while I was not working on my new book, as I’d promised, but watching an absolutely riveting rerun of "The Nanny," the doorbell rang. At my own home, I generally tried not to answer the doorbell, since it was always either a bill collector, my mother, or someone depositing a dead cat on my doorstep. Hank’s house is in that snooty beach section of Malibu where only the anointed few are allowed admission. A knock at the door could mean that someone like Richard Gere or Tom Cruise is trying to borrow an egg, so I ignored all of my careful instructions from the absent Lord of the Manor, and opened the door.

  It wasn’t a bill collector, and it wasn’t Tom Cruise. It was Dooley Fred Potter—or a part of him, anyway.

  The part of Dooley Fred that arrived fit very neatly in a "Whopper" box, from "Burger King." I knew the part had once belonged to Dooley Fred because whoever had delivered the box had thoughtfully included Dooley’s expired Arkansas driver’s license. I was probably in shock, but even with my mind numb, I realized that the Whopper box was meant as some sort of sick joke. And the terrible thing—something I will never understand or forgive myself for— was that my first thought, was that "it" was nowhere near as big as people had told me. Yeah, I know it’s awful. It was insensitive, callous, cruel, you name it, but by now, I was getting to be something of an unwilling authority on the subject of severed organs. I think it was as much my disgust at what I was thinking as terror, but I dropped the box, slammed the door, threw the bolt, put on the chain, then ran for the phone and called Hank and 911. After that, I locked myself in the bathroom, sat down on the floor, and screamed until I was hoarse, which didn’t help a whole lot, but seemed about as useful as anything else.

  Hank arrived within minutes, along with half the police department and a lot of curious neighbors, including some familiar faces from the silver screen. I allowed myself five minutes of hysterical weeping, and Hank held me very close until I was cried out. Two hours later, I was ensconced at a downtown hotel, locked up with two sports-crazy cops who immediately glued themselves to the television set, watching a wrestling marathon. Hell, in living color. Another cop was posted outside the door of the "suite" (two dinky, over-decorated rooms that reeked of cigarette smoke.) Hank didn’t show up again until almost midnight, wasted valuable time reaming out the cop in the hall for napping, and then took my roomies to task for smoking cigars on duty. I heard all this from my room, where I was lying on the bed, reading from a stack of old magazines I’d found in a drawer. By the time Hank came in, he looked tired, and I could tell he was working up to a foul mood. So what did I do? I began whining about the cramped accommodations, the lack of reading material, and pretty much everything else— and demanding to go back to Malibu.

  You’ve heard that old expression about the hand being quicker than the eye? Well, I’m here to tell you it’s possible. Hank may have looked tired, but he still managed to reach to the bedside table for my hairbrush and flip me over onto my stomach so fast that I was still grumbling about the hotel food when I felt him tugging at the waistband of my jeans. He pulled my jeans and panties down just far enough to expose a narrow swath of rear end, and then administered a flurry of quick, hard, finely-targeted smacks to everything that was warm and bare. After the first blazing swat, I knew this was going to be a spanking I wouldn’t soon forget. With the wrestling fans on the other side of the wall, maybe with their ears to the wall, I screwed my eyes closed, muffled my howls with a pillow, and resigned myself to my fate.

  It was over in less than maybe fifteen seconds, but what the impromptu spanking lacked in duration, it more than made up for in pain, since those few vulnerable inches got the full benefit of Hank’s rare show of temper. When it was over, he tossed the hairbrush on the bed and disappeared into the bathroom, undoing his tie as he walked. A few moments later, as I lay there with my ass on fire, and wondering what in hell had possessed me to bring the damned hairbrush, I heard the shower start.

  When he came out of the bathroom, he was dressed, again, which told me he wasn’t going to spend the night. Even with my behind still pulsating and my feelings hurt, I didn’t want him to go, which says a lot about how I felt about Hank. I can usually bear a grudge for months, if I work at it. I wasn’t going to mention what had just happened, but he seemed to want to talk about it, so I apologized for being so bitchy when he arrived.

  “It wasn’t that,” he said wearily. “And I’m sorry if I overreacted. The problem is, you keep scaring me, by being careless—and reckless. I told you not to open the door at home.”

  “I know,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think.”

  “Being sorry isn’t the point, Karen, and it doesn’t help. Until you understand that one more

  wrong step might be your last, I want you someplace secure, where I can leave without being

  sick with worry every minute that this sonofabitch has found you—or gotten to you.” He shook

  his head sadly, and when he reached over to stroke my leg, I could see that his eyes were red.

  So, naturally, I started to cry. No, not cry, bawl. Out of guilt, gratitude, love, whatever. All I knew was I couldn’t stop crying.

  Hank lay down next to me, and held me until I had calmed down.

  “Besides,” he said, “you had that walloping coming for another reason.” He pointed to his

  laptop, which sat unopened on the desk— exactly where it had been when he left for work that

  morning. “What happened to the ten pages you swore to me you’d write, today?”

  I didn’t have an honest answer, of course, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to risk a dishonest one. And despite the residual sting in my roasted behind, I was starting to react as I generally do in a hotel room. I was getting horny. Hank was obviously not in the frame of mind to attend properly to my horniness, which had been further stirred up by being locked in a sweltering hole with belching, cigar-smoking professional wrestling fans. Besides, the walls of the place were ultra-thin, and would you believe this? There is an actual rule, somewhere, that says police detectives aren’t allowed to fuck a crime victim when she’s in protective custody? So we lay on the bed most of the night, just talking. Mostly, we talked about what I was going to do if they never found the Creep, who had now earned the additional nickname of the Castrating Creep. In my time, I’ve had more enjoyable dates. Hell, I’ve had more enjoyable root canals.

  Shortly before dawn, though, Hank consented (under unrelenting pressure, Your Honor) to break the rules just a teeny-weeny bit. He undressed me very slowly, parted my legs, and began kissing the insides of my thighs, moving upward kiss by kiss, and inch by tantalizing inch. When things got serious, and I got vocal in my gratitude for what his mouth and tongue were doing, he reached up to put his hand over my mouth. I’m sure the wrestling fans in the next room could visualize what was going on, but they didn’t need to hear the audio.

  When I finally stopped twitching and trembling and moaning, Hank was already late for work, but when I protested that he’d been shortchanged, he agreed to stay long enough to accept a very mannerly and discreet blow job, in return for reporting in twenty minutes late. Not what you’d call the perfect evening together, but far better than I’d expected with my belching baby-sitters in the next room. When Hank had buttoned up and opened the door to leave, both my champions were fast asleep on the couch, which meant that I could have been fucking my brains out, or gotten decapitated— take your pick. Hank kicked the closest jerk in the leg to wake him up, and called both of them a few choice names, but personally, I was just glad the sports
fans been asleep during our romantic double-header. With the way my life was going, the memory of that lovely hour and a half might have to last for a while.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After I’d spent an entire tedious week at the crappy hotel, Hank relented, and located a small guest-house in Holmby Hills where I could stay safely. The house was owned by a Superior Court judge, and it was set back on an acre and a half lot. It had the added advantage of a six-foot brick wall dripping with thorny bougainvillea vines and climbing rose bushes. But the transfer wasn’t simple. Hank moved me there under cover of darkness, with a police escort, followed by a car with two hand-picked marksmen from the LAPD’s swat team. The guesthouse turned out to be this adorable little cottage, in the rear garden of a gorgeous Tudor mansion the size of a Wal-Mart. Cute, and cozy, but the fact remained that I was now under what amounted to house arrest in a teensy weensy structure that should have been housing the Seven Dwarves. It had leaded windows and sweet little blue wooden shutters with heart cut-outs. When I started making hilariously unkind remarks about my new prison, Hank responded with a quick, hard swat to my rear end, and by laying down the law in a tone of voice that suggested many more swats were possible. Apparently convinced that there was a well-organized and widespread conspiracy afoot, and that my life was in danger even in this indulged and highly protected enclave, he restricted my movements to almost zero, and threatened assorted hideous tortures if I ventured past the bungalow and its tiny enclosed yard.

  He made good on his threat the second morning, when he found me in the driveway, reading the L.A. Times. It was only a few whacks with the rolled up editorial section, but since all I had on was the top half of a pair of Hank’s pajamas, I was impressed.

  "I was fifteen feet from the fucking dollhouse," I protested. It wasn’t just the sting in my bottom that annoyed me, but the destruction of the unread and now unreadable editorial section. "For God’s sakes!" I complained, rubbing my left cheek, which has taken the most damage, "I feel like a puppy you’re trying to house train."

  Hank tossed the ruined paper aside. "Great analogy. Maybe I should get a leash and tie you to the bed, or the damned computer. Let me say this again, in case you missed it. Until we know what’s going on, you're not to set foot out of this house alone, anywhere! If I catch you outside, I swear I’ll blister your ass so hard you won’t sit down for a week, without leaving fingerprints. You got that?"

  Hank can be very colorful when he wants to, but I knew he wasn’t exaggerating. I made a wise decision to stay close to home, enjoy my sweet little cottage, and get another fresh start on the book I kept promising to start.

  After Hank left, I got out my laptop, and arrange everything by my cute little cottage window. For a while, I really did try to write something, but I think I’m one of those creatures that goes insane in captivity, and starts chewing off various body parts. By noon, I was pacing the floor—what there was of it—like a caged animal. Disconsolate and bored, I called Mom, and made the mistake of asking her about the abandoned White Rancho.

  "Have you seen what they did?" she sobbed plaintively. "Your friend and his henchmen? They’ve ruined my beautiful yard, and lawn."

  I tried to point out that my "friend" hadn’t laid a finger on her yard, and that her "beautiful" lawn had been dead as dirt since early 1958, but Mom was already planning to sue the LAPD and various other agencies, and didn’t hear a word.

  "And where are my lovely Tiki gods, I’d like to know?" she wailed. "Ask your friend that!"

  The Tiki gods in question (carved out of what looked like dead cactus or old Styrofoam,) had long since gone to that Great Luau in the Sky. On the very good chance that I would need Mom’s financial assistance in the future, I elected not to confess that her heathen idols had been chopped up and sacrificed to the fire gods— in lieu of charcoal briquettes. I had found a couple of only slightly greenish hot dogs in the freezer, and decided to barbecue them before they went really bad.

  "They were authentic native art work," she raged on. "Your stepfather, Anson, brought them over from Hawaii himself!"

  "Maybe they’re in the garage," I lied. "There’s a lot of stuff out there. Boxes of it."

  "My Tiki gods were six feet tall, Karen!"

  (Yes, they were—every flammable inch of them.)

  I hung up with a brilliant but not exactly new idea in my cluttered mind. The garage! Mom’s dim, spider-webby one car garage with its cracked, oily slab and heaps of sagging, splitting cardboard boxes. Nobody, but nobody ever went in the damned garage. The one advantage of not owning a car is you get to use your empty garage as a trash dump. Such a vast, untidy collection of abandoned and worthless property, home to crickets, plump black widows, and dusty brown lizards whose tails fell off when you touched them—might also prove to be a veritable treasure trove of valuable information and possible clues.

  Carefully, I calculated my time, allowing an hour there, an hour back, and three hours rummaging through the unwanted debris left behind by fifty years of ex-husbands and insolvent tenants. If I were very cunning, and if I told Hank a couple of creative, preemptive lies to explain my failure to answer the phone, and if I could slip the police "tail" Hank had probably assigned -to me, and then got Mona to corroborate everything—I could just swing it and still be home before Hank finished his shift. Of course, if Prince Charming came back to Snow White's adorable little cottage unexpectedly, Snow White's ass would be grass. She'd get royally paddled and chained to a wall in the teeny-weeny dungeon that was no doubt just beneath my feet.

  "Mirror, mirror, on the wall,

  Who’s got the sorest butt of all?"

  Nonetheless, proving yet again how exceedingly stupid I can be when I really work at it, I called Mona and begged for her car—her aging Caddie, this time. She spent a good ten minutes castigating me (at top volume) for my lapses in the matter of the ill-fated Honda, but finally granted me access to her precious aqua Cadillac, on the condition that I get Hank to "fix’ several of her large collection of outstanding tickets and/or warrants. I agreed to this instantly, knowing perfectly well that Hank would no more try to fix a ticket than he’d go out and knock over a couple of liquor stores. With all the corrupt cops there apparently are in the world, I had managed to involve myself with one with spotless scruples.

  Once I’d made good my clever escape from Snow White’s Cottage, I dropped Mona back at her house and drove on to the Watercolor Ranchos. I stopped on the cul-de sac just below the deserted White Rancho with the engine idling and studied the exterior of the house. Something about it was bothering me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. My reverie was disturbed by a flashing light in my rear view mirror. The jig was up, damn it! I’d been outwitted, again. I sat there swearing a blue streak while a tall, burly cop emerged from a black-and-white and ambled up to my window.

  "I’ll need to see your driver’s license ma’am," he drawled. I groaned as a sudden vision of my purse sitting on the hall table flashed through my mind.

  "I’m sorry, officer," I chirped innocently, "I seem to have left my license at home." I tried batting my eyelashes at him, but the gesture apparently only works for a certain kind of woman, which I’m not. Mona told me, once, that when I try to bat my eyes, I look like I’m being electrocuted.

  The officer pulled the long narrow pad from his hip pocket.

  "Registration and insurance card," he said woodenly.

  Guess what? Neither of these items was in Mona’s glove compartment. (When I asked her later about this apparent oversight, she informed me that she kept "all that legal shit" in her freezer, so "the terrorists" couldn’t steal it.) The only thing useful in the glove compartment was a coupon for a free Big Mac with a purchase of equal value, and several feminine hygiene products in case Mona got lucky on the road, somewhere.

  "Your name Karen Thatcher?" the cop inquired, putting his citation pad away.

  I nodded miserably, knowing I was doomed. The guy was a tail, n
o doubt about it.

  "Hang on a minute," he said, and walked back to his car. A few moments later, he reappeared. "Lieutenant Everett of Homicide says this car is probably stolen."

  "Lieutenant Everett of Homicide is a pathological liar, a known deviate, and an asshole," I replied sweetly.

  "Yeah, he told me you’d say something like that," the officer remarked. "I’m supposed to take you to an address in Holmby Hills, and wait for him there, on account of he needs to talk to you.…No, he said he needs to give you something."

  I grimaced. "I’ll bet."

  We left Mona’s beloved Cadillac on the street, and as Officer Farnum called a tow truck to impound it, I sat miserable and helpless. This cinched it, for sure. I’d borrowed my last vehicle from the Monaloa Jones’ Rent a Wreck office.

  When we got back to the cottage, Officer Farnum was extremely polite, and sat on the wee little living room couch watching game shows while I waited for Hank to show up and hang me from my thumbs. I sulked for a while before decided to go for a little swim in my little pool, and show the officer how unconcerned I was about Hank’s imminent arrival. This was my second failed attempt to go back to the house, and now that I was a two-time loser, I was fully expecting the maximum penalty.