"You saying you don't want to get it on with Babyschmucks here?" Carl pursued, pornographic to the end. "In January you couldn't get enough. You haven't turned, have you?" He eyed me like a gaudy float from Mardis Gras.
The office door flew open. This was the second unsolicited interruption, and Carl didn't bother looking before he spoke.
"What, another twit who doesn't know how to knock? And by 'twit', I mean..." His voice drifted off when he saw the newcomer was not one of his girls. Not hardly.
"O...kay..." said Sergeant Yvonne Kendle lowly as she stared at me with a naked girl on my lap.
CHAPTER 19
I don't know why she had that look on her face. She recognized Dog from the farm, but her back had been turned when he burst out of my bedroom closet and by the time she glanced around he was out the door. I told her it had been a stranger, which nonplussed her to the point of indifference. She seemed to think strangers (or strangeness) was endemic to my house. And it couldn't be jealously. I mean, it wasn't like we were going steady. I hadn't pledged my troth or any other part of my anatomy. And Monique wasn't strictly naked. Legally defined naked, true—when she jumped off my lap, a rather vital pasty drifted to the floor like an uncrumpled fifty-dollar bill. I don't think I had loosened it, but you can never tell with men.
Kendle was starting to go cockeyed, her ears rolling out the red carpet for an explanation. Then she saw the gun on the desk and her hand drifted towards her waist—wherever that was.
"No need," Carl assured her. "I was just showing Todd here our armory."
"Yeah?" said Kendle, though she was looking at Monique, who was quite a sight as she leaned down for the pastie, displaying some of the serpentine litheness of her stage profession. I wondered if Kendle was lining up a painful schedule of diet and exercise along with her field of fire, a normal enough reaction to physical perfection. I always imagine a tough regimen of weights and aerobics while hunched over my chips during NFL halftime.
"You mind stepping away from the desk, sir?" said Kendle, re-focusing on the real threat. Because she had to shout over the Russian music, which was reaching a climax, she sounded more threatening than she needed to. Or maybe she hit just the right chord. Carl jumped away from the desk as though it was a gargantuan hot potato. Personally, I wished she paid more attention to Dog. There was no telling how he would react.
After a quick glance down for any unsightly evidence that I had been in the lap of luxury, I stood and held out my arms. When it looked like she might draw down on me, I lowered them and sat back down.
"They..." I began.
"Kidnapped you?"
I was suddenly and inexplicably unsure of how my day had gone. Sure, Carl and Dog had kidnapped me. But I didn't understand what they had kidnapped me for. They hadn't asked me about the money from the pump house. They hadn't mentioned Barbara or Jeremy. They seemed to think I had broken some sort of agreement of which I was completely unaware. And I was really befuddled by this 'Todd' business. Who the hell was he, and had he signed a contract? If that was the case, they were SOL. My name was Mud.
"Pretty cushy," said Kendle, who then winced, as if sorry about her choice of words.
I scooted a little to the side to display the uncushioned chair I was seated on.
"Yeah, you've had it rough. Catch and snatch."
Carl let go with a guffaw. This was his kind of humor. Meantime, Monique had retreated to a corner of the office to discreetly replace her dainty heart pasty, as if that really completed her wardrobe. The room was chock-full of hypocrisy and meaningless gestures. That included Dog, whose inaction hid the fact that he wanted to rip someone's head off. We were all watching Kendle closely, as though to adjust reality to her taste.
I felt myself falling in with the unplanned conspiracy. There was no reason for me to be embarrassed. Hell, I was the injured party here. But I was also a victim of ignorance. Something told me to back off from a direct plea to be rescued. Escorting me off the premises in one piece was all the help I wanted. Kendle would want to grill me once we were out the door, but at least I could answer without witnesses pouncing on my lies.
I stood up awkwardly.
"What's wrong with you?" Kendle demanded.
"I'm a little stiff."
"Oh right, you took a beating." A brief stare-down ensued as Kendle sneered at Monique. Instead of wilting under the policewoman's gaze, the pole artiste raised herself to full height, hands on hips, as though to say, "You wish." I had always thought naked immorality caved in when confronted by its fully clothed opposite. Instead, Monique seemed ready to whip off her pasty hearts to show her adversary who was really in charge here. Kendle opted for the better part of valor and changed the subject.
"The bottom line is that I saw you being forced into a van by these two gentlemen."
Dog, who I could now see, jumped at the designation. He probably felt insulted. No one would ever catch him in a tux.
"You saw all this?" Carl said, failing to hide his surprise.
"You were staked out on Ferncrest?" I said, equally put out. How had she known I would be there?
"No, I put a GPS on your car and followed you."
"I'm sure you had a warrant for that," Carl observed.
I stared into a bleak technological future. My car was so bugged it was beginning to sprout antennae—I mean, in addition to the one for the radio, which years ago had been so nicely braided by a local kid that I hadn't bothered straightening it. What exactly had I removed from the undercarriage? I didn't think it was the transmission, or I would never have made it to River Road.
Kendle brushed Carl's comment aside like a girl who bought her own birthday gifts and didn't care who knew. It didn't matter if she had a warrant or not, and none of us was saintly enough to dispute the issue. Carl might play the role of a pulchritudinous David versus a prudish Goliath, but he backed off before a rogue cop who was as shady with the law as Carl was with women.
"You want to turn that crap off?" Kendle said as Khachaturian's music scooped up a million syrupy clichés and dumped them onto our eardrums. As music it was overbearingly beautiful. Converted into a novel, it would have been pure Harlequin. Assuming the pose of the offended aficionado, Carl stepped over to the wall and switched off the stereo. Both Dog and Monique seemed relieved. Carl sneered at the swine who disdained his pearls. Personally, I liked Khachaturian, but I disliked shouting over him to be heard. Making me a pig, too, I guess.
"So you know where it is?" said Kendle after giving our ears a moment to recover.
Dumb looks are my specialty, and I gave her a plump one.
"Did she squeeze it out of you?" she continued, eyeing Monique narrowly like a competitor at a fresh-juice tournament. Making me the lemon.
"There's nothing to squeeze," I complained.
"Got that right," said Dog. From the look of him, two cents was all he had, and now he had spent it.
"You'd rather tell her than me, is that it?" She had not taken her eyes off Monique, and Monique continued to respond with statuesque pride. There was a certain lack of professional humility. If it hadn't been so embarrassing, it would have been something to behold. And yes, I was embarrassed, excruciatingly so. Yeah, I was the victim, but I was also the one caught with a naked girl on his lap by the girl who had been naked in my bed the day before. It was one of those awkward moments that I find impossible to live down, and which accumulate in nightly bruxism that is slowly wearing down my molars to stubs.
"There's nothing to tell," I said plaintively.
"They wouldn't have gone to all this trouble for anything but the Brinks money."
I happened to be looking at Carl at that moment. It wasn't his gun that worried me. I doubted he wanted to add gunslinger to his list of dubious achievements. But any signal to Dog to evict the intruder could result in some serious mayhem They would be within their rights, I thought. Kendle had as much as admitted that she didn't have any warrants up her sleeve.
What I saw on his
face bothered and perplexed me more than anything else that had happened that afternoon. He looked relieved. The policewoman had asked the wrong question, was on the wrong track. I was stumped. If not Brinks, what was the right question? Why had I been kidnapped?
Kendle was sharp enough to catch the look, but cool enough to keep her jaw in place. But she couldn't hide her doubt. She was wondering if she had misinterpreted this miserable scene. Was it really possible that I been brought here for fun and games? If so, she could still take out her frustration by arresting us for being a public disgrace (it happens all the time in Richmond). But as transporters of stolen loot, she was still left with bupkis.
Just like me.
I think at that moment we were waiting for a deux ex machina. Kendle and I were stumped. Carl was unwilling to speak and risk exposing his hand. Dog was undergoing a fit of unreasoning civility—at least he wasn't biting anyone. And Monique looked as though she wanted to put on some clothes. Yes, it was about time for someone to appear or something to drop from the sky that would shake our numbnuts out of the tree. If we waited long enough, we would follow the natural order of things, like croak from old age. But something always happens, because we're trapped behind the racetrack rabbit of time, always trying to catch up. You can't resign from the race because time always has you by the nose, the rabbit always circles around. Anyway, this seems like a reasonable analogy, what with Dog here and all.
Let's face it, though, some deux ex's verge on the miraculous. Angels descending, old buried bombs blowing up underfoot, long-lost relations popping up from the dead. And I'm sure you're expecting my father to put in an appearance. But when the office door opened again (again, no knock—this was a culture-free zone), we weren't confronted by a corpse dangling rank strands of meat from its bones, a skeletal finger pointed accusingly in my direction.
I did a double-take—a pretty good pun under the circumstances. Because standing there in the door, smirking at all of us but mainly at me, was...me. He didn't just resemble me. He was me to a T. Wait...strike that. His clothes looked like they had come straight off the gold rack (meaning Kohls, not Goodwill), his hair was neatly trimmed, and I like to think haughtiness had always been a stranger to my face. Even his posture was contemptuous, although I have a natural tendency to cringe before anyone who doesn't slouch.
"Shit..." Carl said in a half-whisper, glancing at Dog. "We got the wrong one. Couldn't you tell them apart?" he added, as though his mutt could distinguish our scents.
"What was he doing at the Neerson place?" Dog said plaintively. He didn't sound like himself.
It seemed they had instantly distinguished the Ace from the Joker. It was up to me to decide where I belonged in the deck.
"You can thank Doubletalk for that," said the nattier me, stepping further into the room and casting Monique an appreciative leer. "He thought I was double-crossing him, so he got back by double-crossing me." Turning to Carl, he amended this to, "Us."
"Were you, Todd?" Carl asked.
"Double-crossing my brother?"
So the Joker's name was Todd. I got the creepy feeling his surname was more familiar. One of those hyphenated monstrosities: Neerson-McPherson. The creepiness grew creepier when he added:
"My own precious flesh and blood?"
I got the impression he wasn't just talking about Jeremy. It was at this moment that I developed a tic that has persisted to this day. I won't go into detail beyond saying it involved my left nostril and made me look like Basil Rathbone sneering at cinematic peasants.
"You're twins?" Kendle said. Like me, she had dropped a few beats and was struggling to catch up. I doubted she was thinking in terms of doubling her fun, but even as a remote possibility it doubled my stress.
Todd had scarcely noted her presence. Maybe he thought Kendle was a former pole dancer who had gone to seed and was only fit to employ in the back rooms. In other words, someone easily ignored. His dismissive frown closed the shutter on her, but he was forced to peak through his mental blinds when she poked him in the chest.
"Hey, nit-brain, I asked you a question."
I have to admit I admire people who possess the ability to shove themselves down other peoples' throats. Not from a distance, like the government, but mano-a-mano. I know this conflicts with my earlier complaints about the bullies of my childhood. But there's a difference between a young tough taking advantage of his size and roughhousing for the truth. She was no sadist. I couldn't imagine her waterboarding anyone...yours truly probably being an exception, but all in the name of fun. She was risking her neck to get the facts. I mean, Kendle was in a precarious situation. She might be a cop, but she was most definitely outnumbered. She was an overweight female Bogie, and at the moment I was sort of proud I had slept with her. Her status had rubbed off on me.
But in Todd's eyes, Kendle had the status of a jackhammer. Her poke to his sternum had sent a bruising wake-up call to his inactive soul. He waited a moment, as though expecting Carl to plug her on the spot and end all this fuss. Then he turned to Dog.
"I think this session is over," said Dog, reaching up to his mouth and removing his teeth. Instead of raw gums, his yellow, chipped teeth were replaced by a pearly white dental armory. Well shut my mouth, I told myself—and I did.
"Leaving character?" Todd said with skeptical dourness.
"I preferred you in The Fantasticks, anyway," Carl said, shrugging.
Dog took off his straw hat and tossed it across the room. It landed neatly on his boss's desk. "You're into polyester?" he mocked.
I was being bombarded by identity crises. Todd's appearance had made me wonder exactly who I was, and now my abductor was tossing off his disguise.
"You're an actor?" I said.
"They cancelled the revival of L'il Abner at the dinner playhouse," Dog said mournfully.
"When did you find out?" Carl asked.
"Two days ago," said Dog, who added sheep-doggishly, "It takes me a while to get out of a role."
"That's a relief," Monique chimed in. "I hate it when you play frugal with the toilet paper."
Well, that explained why it stank so much in the van.
Monique had used the distraction of Todd's arrival to slip on a sports jacket that had been hanging on a coat rack. This allowed me to focus on her legs, which were quite nice. No identity panic, here. She was what she was.
"But I was looking forward to playing Stupefyin' Jones," she added.
Damn, another actor. I eyed the others warily. The walls might collapse at any moment and I would find myself in some off-Broadway dumpster for thespians and half-assed musicals. Carl could be General Bullmoose, Kendle a plump Appassionata von Climax, and Todd...I had to give some thought to that one.
Kendle's radar was not set to detect wannabe stars and starlets. She was still waiting for an answer from Todd. Were we twins?
Was it possible someone had hired Todd as my lookalike? If so, why? To convince someone else that he stood to 'inherit' the Brinks fortune? Possible, but not likely. But it was just as unlikely that my flesh and blood would be regaling himself in the puritanical fleshpots (that's what rich neighborhoods are—the residents just don't know it) of River Road? And Todd certainly had that righteous air of the rich about him, the let-them-eat-cake, what-are-they-to-me, get-out-of-my-way attitude towards the less fortunate and unmotivated masses. Carbon copies have a tendency to smudge, and I was beginning to feel like a poor imitation.
But not for long. As soon as he realized Kendle was a cop, Todd began to melt. His postured unglued and sagged, his head nodded to the side, his eyes went misty. It would only take a glass of water tossed in his face for him to dissolve. He didn't know what to do next. A very imperfect deux ex machina. If he bolted for the door I doubted Kendle could catch him, but where would he go? It seemed everyone in the room had Ferncrest on their radars. I was certain that was where he lived. That would explain Carl's and Dog's mistake.
I looked towards the door, waiting for another entrance.
A raw chorus line, the National Guard, anything to shake us out of this stalemate. Would Kendle smack Todd out of his stupor? If she could sleep with me, she was capable of anything.
"Am I under arrest?" Todd squeaked, sounding an awful lot like me.
"Should you be arrested?" Kendle smiled, anticipating with relish the prospect of clamping handcuffs on him. For some reason, I suddenly felt a little jealous.
Her response roused Todd into amicable wariness. It was a good reaction, as though Kendle was no more trouble than an overenthusiastic pet. All he had to do was make sure his next step directed her away from his bag of secrets.
"We're not exactly twins," he said. "Like, twins grow up together, right?"
"Not if they've been separated at birth," Kendle said, crowding him towards the wall. "You two could have been part of a nature versus nurture experiment."
It was a startling idea that immediately piqued my interest. Skunk had been arrested so many times that the state might have stepped in and removed one of his children. Gang-busting at the source, you might say. One twin grows up bleachy clean, the other a slimy creature from the black lagoon. Todd was smarmy, but River Road was no swamp. I began to feel greasy and unweaned.
Kendle's suggestion swept over Todd's head and out the door, although Dog's appreciative bark told me the reference was perfectly comprehensible to anyone with a smattering of pop psychology. With an uncertain smile, Todd tried to squeeze past the policewoman.
"It was a perfectly civil question," said Kendle, giving him another poke in the chest. The bruises would show tomorrow morning.
"Twins," said Monique, tired of waiting for Todd to answer. She had grown bored. I had the impression she wanted to burnish her toenails.
Kendle turned to the pole dancer. I won't say her expression was malevolent, but when she said, "What did you say, whorebitch?" it was hard to put another interpretation on it.
Skunk Hunt Page 28
