“Or,” said Larry, “maybe the spider provider was a nutcase with a twisted sense of drama.” Dr. Chen probably would’ve objected to Larry’s terminology. I found it appropriate to the moment. We sat in silence, each processing a very bizarre afternoon by anyone’s standards. Finally, Stefan pulled himself together and spoke up.
“I have a business proposition, Riley. The way you handled those paramedics earlier suggests to me that you have more than passing familiarity with law enforcement. Am I correct?”
“That’s quite perceptive for a man who was somewhere between distraught and hysterical. You’re right, I was a detective with the San Francisco police before an unfortunate event led to my leaving the force and taking over the family extermination business.”
“I don’t think we need to know more about one another’s past than is necessary. Wouldn’t you agree?” I nodded and he continued, “We have a shared interest in protecting our businesses, and I have a particular interest in settling a score.” How this little piss ant was going to get even with anyone wasn’t my problem. Getting to the bottom of the Lane and Michelle show was. I glanced over at Larry who shrugged and gave me his you’re-the-boss look.
“Go on,” I said.
“I want to you to find Michelle’s killer. Your investigative skills led you to her and I am asking you to keep going. I can pay very well and I am very discrete. Are you willing?”
I’d come this far. How much slimier could this get? At least that was how I saw things at the time. In retrospect, I’d consistently underestimated the potential of my fellow man to find pleasure in revolting behaviors. This didn’t occur to me before I answered Stefan.
“I am willing, but our association must be covert. I have a license to kill pests, not one to investigate human vermin. Payment will be in cash at a daily rate the same as today’s emergency treatment.” I would’ve put the financial screws to him, but he might’ve enjoyed the monetary pain—and I felt inexplicably sorry for the guy. Sort of like the time I saw a greasy wharf rat satisfying its hunger with a used tampon.
“Most certainly,” he said.
“Then we have a deal, under one condition.”
CHAPTER 18
“I need the truth,” I said. “Your dark little secret about what was under the bed could’ve gotten someone killed. I have no intention of dying in the process of finding your wife’s killer and keeping my business out of whatever the hell she had going with Lane Linford.”
“I was scared,” Stefan said.
“Let me put it this way. If you give me half-truths, I’ll make sure that you are the one crawling under the bed. Not me or my people.”
Larry grunted and headed to the bedroom to gather up his equipment and the lethal fetish which would make an impressive addition to the collection of creatures that he and Dennis had arranged in their warehouse living room. The spider would fit nicely between the mummified, foot-long tail that Larry had lopped off the biggest rat he’d ever whacked and the beach ball-sized paper wasp nest that Dennis had collected from under the eaves of the clubhouse at the Presidio golf course.
“If we’re going to get anywhere,” I said, “I need to start with your telling me who provided Michelle with her animals.”
“You have to understand that confidentiality is critical to the Pleasure Palace.”
“And you have to understand that without a lead, there’s no investigation. We’re done.” I headed toward the door.
“Wait. Give me a minute to check our records,” he said, brushing past me and disappearing into a room at the far end of the hall. Larry came out of the bedroom, gave me a wry smile, offered me good luck, and headed downstairs into the slate gray afternoon. I poked my head into the office where Stefan was rifling through a file drawer. While the rest of the apartment looked like a demented kindergarten, this room looked like a high-end lawyer’s office.
“Find anything?”
“Michelle used a network of suppliers, depending on what was needed. Most customers didn’t want to risk buying from pet stores, so she’d provide standard animals like gerbils and mice as well as more exotic creatures.” I didn’t want to think too much about how rodents were incorporated into the sexual practices of their clientele.
“And you didn’t get involved in that end of the business—other than playing spider man when she needed some leggy arousal?” He looked hurt. I didn’t much care about his feelings, but I needed him to stay focused—and the guy was starting to flag. He pulled out a stack of folders as if they weighed twenty pounds and plopped them on the desk.
“I handled the bookkeeping. Michelle worked with the customers. She was the people-person, cultivating the trust of those who society judged to be reprehensible. Her compassion and discretion were key to the success of our special orders, which were both exciting and lucrative. You can only sell so many dildos and vibrators before getting bored, you know.” I didn’t, but I could imagine titillation eventually becoming numbness, so to speak.
“And, I gather, you did some film directing on the side?”
“That was more of a hobby than a business. Michelle was also into videos, making shorts for a wide range of tastes. We sold a few out of the back room of the store, while keeping the standard stock out front.” He continued to flip through the manila folders. “Here we go. This one has our payments to her supplier of insects and spiders. There’s not tremendous demand, so I couldn’t remember his name without finding the invoice.” Stefan pulled out a piece of paper and hesitated. Providing their source was a violation of trust, and he was a principled pervert.
He handed me the sheet, which listed Bug Broker Ltd., a company at the Mission Rock Terminal, owned by Sam Scudder. The invoice described the company as “The West Coast’s Leading Supplier of Live Insects and Spiders,” and in smaller type proclaimed: “Providing film studios, zoological parks, pet stores, and private collectors since 1962.” There was no mention of sex shops. The file contained invoices for Madagascar hissing cockroaches, death’s head roaches, field crickets, lubber grasshoppers, Chilean rose tarantulas, Mexican red-kneed tarantulas, nightcrawlers, and banana slugs. The wholesale prices were impressive, five bucks for a meaty cockroach and twenty bucks for a leggy tarantula. The Pleasure Palace’s customers presumably paid retail, but a fifty dollar spider is a better deal than a hooker if you take into account that the spider won’t steal your wallet or give you the clap.
As I perused the paperwork, Stefan moved to an upholstered leather chair. He propped his elbow on the armrest and cradled his head in his hand, eyelids sagging. In one afternoon, the fellow had managed to have wild sex, lose his wife, survive a deadly spider, and betray a business confidence.
“Stefan,” I said and his eyes snapped open, “you’re wrung out and there’s no sense pushing further today.”
“Sorry Riley, I just nodded off for a sec.”
“Get some sleep and then think long and hard about the last couple of weeks with Michelle and anything that could’ve made someone angry enough to want her dead. I’ll stop by Sunday morning and hope that you’ve remembered something useful.”
Stefan got up slowly and shook my hand with an effeminate grip. He was repugnant, but impossible to fully loathe. My memory flashed back to that disgusting wharf rat, doing what rodents do—using its natural tendencies to satisfy a biological hunger using whatever a screwed up world provided.
~||~
On my way home, I swung by Nina’s place. The afternoon with Stefan had left me with an uneasy feeling about her stalker. I double-parked in front of the apartment complex and stepped out of my truck. Between the twilight and a misty rain, I couldn’t see clearly across the courtyard. But furtive movement near a corner staircase caught my eye, and I headed over to see who was trying not to be seen. A bulky figure in a fatigue jacket scurried from the stairs toward the alley. I started to give chase, but he had a head start and panic on his side.
The guy disappeared before I rounded the corner. Although I did
n’t see his face, I had no doubt it was Tim—and wariness was all he had learned from my recent tutorial. On my next visit, I’d take his education to another level, leaving even the slowest student of ‘boundaries’—as Nina put it—with an unforgettable lesson. I almost found pleasure in contemplating what he had coming, as if kicking a wharf rat made the waterfront any cleaner.
I headed to Finlay’s in South Beach, the best fish and chips place in the city. The thick fries have a crunchy exterior with a fluffy inside and the fish is California flounder with a golden crust. You get a wedge of lemon, a container of malt vinegar and a sneer if you ask for tartar sauce. They wrap the whole works in newspaper and send you away with a side of mushy peas. I spread the feast onto my kitchen table and cracked open a Harp Lager I’d picked up on the way home as the perfect way to wash down the meal. The mail contained the normal assortment of advertisements and bills, but perusing the newly arrived BioQuip catalogue—with its selection of insect pins, black light traps, and collecting nets—made for satisfyingly mindless reading while eating.
After dinner, I treated myself to a glass of Tullamore Dew and put on the 1965 recording of Salome featuring Birgit Nilsson in the title role. Some aficionados prefer the studio recording from a few years earlier, but there’s something less authentic when the performers are not on stage. Moreover, Fritz Uhl made a better King Herod than did Gerhard Stolze, whose energy faded in the later scenes, which is to be expected when there’s no live audience to engage. And so my evening combined one of Ireland’s finest whiskeys with one of Germany’s strangest operas.
As I pinned and labeled a series of bees that Tommy and I had collected last summer from patches of gumweed and star thistle, I wondered what people would make of a fellow deriving pleasure from impaling dead insects while sipping a toxin (as I learned during my hard drinking days on the force). My source of entomological satisfaction wouldn’t fall into what society deemed normal, but there’s surely a difference between the gratification that comes from a cabinet of insects in my living room and a jar with a spider in another man’s bedroom.
I remembered the time my father was first showing me how to make an insect collection and I didn’t leave a California root borer in the killing jar long enough before pinning the creature. I was excited by having caught such an enormous beetle at our porch light—a female stretching nearly four inches including her antennae. Being a kid, I wanted to get the insect into my collection before bedtime. When I went to look at my trophy in the morning, the beetle was slowly flailing its legs while suspended on the pin. I was so horrified that I nearly gave up collecting, but my father dispatched the insect in the freezer and assured me that I’d made a beginner’s error. He explained that what I’d done was not a moral failing unless I either intended unnecessary pain to the creature or failed to learn from my mistake. I learned that killing has to be done well. It matters how one takes life—or makes love.
~||~
Having pinned the well and truly dead bees, I refilled my glass and settled into the recliner with the readings Scott Fortier had given me a couple days ago after my louse lesson at Berkeley. The one that caught my eye was a copy of a chapter from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography. Nabokov was the entomologist, or more precisely the lepidopterist, who wrote Lolita, the story of a middle-aged man who becomes sexually obsessed with his twelve-year-old stepdaughter.
Scott had paper-clipped to the chapter a copy of a review of the play based on the novel and performed at the Testiclovary Theater. The venue was named for the statistical peculiarity that the “average” person has one testicle and one ovary (as the theater notes on their marquee) by dividing the number of each gonad by the number of humans. This mathematical tidbit is supposed to undermine conventional notions of what is normal and natural. But it mostly undermines comprehension.
Lolita had been staged on Broadway last year and was panned by the New York critics using phrases that were about as brutal as pinning a live insect. Of course any theatrical production promising to meld perversion and art is worth reviving in San Francisco. However, the local review was about as lukewarm as Michelle’s body when the paramedics strapped her to the gurney.
Also attached to the chapter was an article copied from Harvard’s alumni magazine about the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, including a sidebar that Scott had highlighted. Although lacking advanced training in entomology, Nabokov had been the museum’s de facto curator of Lepidoptera. The museum houses Nabokov’s “genitalia cabinet”—a remarkable collection of male genitals belonging to the ‘blues,’ a large subfamily of butterflies that Nabokov discovered could be distinguished by their sex organs. He spent so many hours studying the insects’ privates under a microscope that he permanently damaged his eyesight. This struck me as an ironic demonstration that, “if you don’t stop, you’ll go blind.” However, the magazine didn’t make this connection—the Ivy League not being known for its sense of humor.
Scott’s real purpose in giving me the chapter from Nabokov’s autobiography was penned at the top: “Riley, check your collection for any of these.” In the chapter, Nabokov described finding a rare, gynandromorph butterfly—a specimen with a genetic anomaly in which one half of the insect was male and the other half was female. The condition is relatively easy to discern in species where the sexes have distinctively different coloration. I figured that Scott was hoping I might have such a specimen unnoticed in my collection that I’d donate to the Essig Museum. But after an hour of careful searching, I came up with zilch. Seems I was better at finding bizarre forms of human sex than discovering weird forms of butterfly sexes.
I assuaged my disappointment with another glass of Tullamore, thereby affirming my lack of judgment and moderation. But the velvety warmth lusciously offset the cold, wet night. The sound of the wind and pattering rain complemented the grimness of the opera. I’d not paid attention to the music while searching for deformed butterflies, so I placed the stylus onto the outer third of the record, and drifted into the scene where Salome is being offered anything by Herod—her lecherous stepfather—if she will perform the dance of the seven veils, which some productions turn into a full-blown, high-brow strip tease. I read somewhere that Flaubert’s version of the story described Salome as dancing like a gigantic beetle, a detail he extracted from a carving on a French cathedral showing the temptress dancing on her hands. Maybe Lane and his fellow formicophiles were onto something.
After her dance, Salome demands that the king, who was almost as turned on by her naked feet as the rest of her body, lop off the head of a holy man who earlier refused her advances—and deliver this payment to her on a silver platter. Herod is fine with incest but appalled by beheading. However, he makes good on his promise and watches his stepdaughter kiss the bloody head of the chaste prophet. While hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, Judea hath no rage like a king disgusted. So Herod orders his soldiers to kill Salome and they rush forward to crush her like a revolting insect beneath their shields.
I tossed back the last swallow of whiskey, turned off the stereo and the lights, headed upstairs and fell into bed. In the darkness, I reviewed the day, concluding that humans have been screwed up for at least a couple thousand years—and that having genitals and imagination but lacking morality is a very dangerous mix.
CHAPTER 19
I woke up with a cottony mouth and queasy gut reminding me that moderation is increasingly advisable, perhaps virtuous, with age. Even a fine whiskey can punish a guy in his forties—not unlike how cheap beer can make a thirteen-year-old kid regret stealing a six-pack from Hill Top Grocery with his kid brother and getting caught by their father who teaches them a lesson about shoplifting and boozing by insisting that the big brother drink four cans while the younger is assigned two. Maybe virtue is its own reward, but wickedness delivers its own punishment.
I decided to start my morning at Gustaw’s Bakery with a mug of his caffeinated sludge. Another instance of poor judgment, as it turned out.
Ludwika noticed my condition, having had decades of practice with her husband. I soon decided that my father’s lesson was a cakewalk compared to how a Polish babushka deals with a wayward man. I’d previously experienced her kefir—a thick, grainy version of sour milk designed to settle stomachs, or so she claimed. However, Ludwika was out of kefir, so she resorted to the alternative remedy for hangovers which she probably used to remind Gustaw that his vodka indulgences had unfortunate consequences. The old Pole shook his head sympathetically as his wife brought me a glass of pickle juice, whisked away my coffee, and commanded, “Drink. First sour, then fat. I make food to complete the cure,”
As she bustled back into the kitchen, I noticed a newly framed cover from Time magazine on the wall behind the cash register, proclaiming Lech Walesa as man of the year. All it took was letting my gaze settle on the picture and Gustaw took his cue to regale me with a political tirade about the Soviet occupation of his homeland and the courageous countrymen who defied their oppressors. Like Walesa, Gustaw had worked at the Gdansk shipyard so he felt a bond to the leader of the nation’s Solidarity movement. Gustaw insisted that more than a quarter of Poland had joined the trade union which seemed a tad exaggerated, but I wasn’t about to challenge an impassioned former shipbuilder whose biceps, even with age and disuse, were damned near the size of my thighs.
“One month, Riley,” he said pounding my table while ignoring the couple who’d come into the shop and looked to be calculating whether the goodies were worth engaging a colossal, agitated Pole, “that is how long Poland has been under martial law. If I could reach across the ocean I’d beat General Jurazelski with a hammer and slice him open with a sickle.”
Lethal Fetish Page 14
