Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom

by A. L. Haskett

  Assan went downstairs. Reality slowly but thoroughly slapped Duncan with meaty fingers about his face and head. The walls needed paint and the floor required sanding. He turned the taps in the kitchen. The water ran rusty. The refrigerator and water heater worked, as did the toilet, but the tub was a disaster, the shower head needed replacing, and the lock on the front door was broken. Assan returned with a lease, a pen, and a beer. Duncan twisted the cap off and downed the beer without stopping. He could not remember a beer ever tasting so good. He belched quietly and set the bottle down. Consigning himself to an uncertain fate, he took the pen.

  “Where do I sign?” he asked.

  “Hey, Roscoe,” Misty said to the bartender the next afternoon when she reported for work at the Hollywood Bar and Grill, “some guy across the street wants me to come up to his studio and pose for him.”

  Roscoe was a huge biker of a man with a black rose tattooed on the back of his bald head, a fu-Manchu mustache hanging down to the gold nipple rings piercing his pectorals, and tattooed muscles built up over ten years pumping iron in and out of prison. Misty dropped her bag and sat at the bar. She was a naive young peroxide blond from Ohio with artificially enhanced breasts and big brown eyes.

  “Did he try anything?” Roscoe asked.

  “No, he just asked me to pose.” Misty twirled a strand of permed hair around a finger. “He’s kind of cute.”

  “So why tell me?”

  She picked up her lingerie bag and headed for the dressing room. “Just thought you should know.”

  “So now I know,” Roscoe said.

  He forgot about it until Champagne clocked in and told the same story. Her real name was Mary. All the strippers wanted to be rock singers or actors and figured they needed stage names. Except Pris, Roscoe thought, the only one who could make something of herself uses her real name. At two, Cassandra clocked in.

  “What’s with the cute guy across the street?” she asked.

  Roscoe stood. If a guy came into the Hollywood, paid his cover charge, bought a few beers and tipped the girls, then it was all right if he hassled them, as long as it stayed friendly and no one got touched. But a nut hanging around outside could be dangerous. He cracked his knuckles, put on his sunglasses, and headed for the door.

  “Watch the bar,” he told Misty.

  “Don’t be long,” Misty said, “I’m a dancer, not a bartender.” Roscoe grunted as he stepped through the door. “And don’t hurt him too bad!”

  After fifteen minutes, Misty told herself Roscoe was just doing a thorough job. After an hour she reasoned that Roscoe had gone to lunch. After two hours she was angry. The afternoon crowd was coming in, and she was a dancer, an artist, damn it. Roscoe had no right to make her wait tables. She threw down her bar rag and marched across the street to the sidewalk beneath Duncan’s window.

  “Hey Roscoe,” she called, “get your fat ass down here!”

  “Don’t move, Roscoe!” a male voice commanded.

  Misty’s hand flew to her mouth. Roscoe was not so big a bullet could not slow him down considerably. When Roscoe did not come to the window, Misty ran across the street and called 911. No one answered their knock, so the two policemen who answered her call drew their guns, pushed Duncan’s door open, and cautiously stepped inside.

  Roscoe sat in a torn leather chair, tattoos running like jackals across his naked chest. He stroked an orange cat on his lap with one hand and held an empty beer in the other. Duncan stood across the room before a canvas propped on an easel, his Stetson atop his head, a brush in one hand and a pallet in the other, furiously painting. Roscoe saw the police first.

  “Hey, mothers,” he said, “you got a warrant?”

  The police holstered their guns, apologized, and left. Misty burst into the room.

  “You scared me half to death, you goddamn ape!”

  “Duncan,” Roscoe said, “this is Misty.”

  Duncan smiled and nodded. “It’s a pleasure, ma’am.”

  “We kind of already met,” Misty said. She took the cat from Roscoe’s lap. “What’s his name?”

  “He doesn’t have one yet.”

  “A cat needs a name.”

  “Well,” Duncan said, “I’ve just been calling him Cat.”

  “That’s silly.”

  “Take a break, Roscoe,” he said. “I’ll get you a fresh beer.”

  The room smelled of paint and Lysol. Books and a stereo were stacked by a wall near a box of clothes. A brush sat on a paint can in the corner. A sleeping bag was laid out on the couch. Misty noticed there was no bed. She touched a wall. Her finger came back white and tacky. She went to Duncan’s easel. The Roscoe in the unfinished painting looked cuddly. She frowned. Normally, something in Roscoe’s eyes made you suspect that, given the choice, he would prefer to rip your lips off than kiss them, though she could not remember Roscoe ever trying to do either to anyone. Yet the eyes staring out of the painting were virtually gentle. Duncan returned with three beers. Misty reached for one but Roscoe waved her back.

  “No thanks bro,” he said as he put on his shirt. “We got to get back.”

  “Hey!” Misty said, “speak for yourself.”

  “I’ll speak for us both. You got work to do.”

  “Thanks for explaining,” Duncan said. “I won’t bother the girls anymore.”

  “Screw ‘em,” Roscoe said, “they can take care of themselves.”

  “Nice meeting you, Misty.”

  “Nice meeting you.”

  She followed Roscoe across the street. She stopped at the door and looked up at Duncan’s window. The orange cat sat on the sill licking a paw. Duncan moved the easel and canvas close to the window and pushed his hat back. A fiery waterfall of hair streamed around his shoulders as he flicked his brush like a sword against the canvas.

  Something happened there, Misty thought.

  She was not sure what, but she no longer felt right calling herself an artist. She danced, an artist created. She mentally commanded Duncan to look down and favor her with his smile. But he did not.

  Her real name was Joanne Kowalski. She had dropped out of an Ohio high school half way through her senior year and had hitch-hiked to Los Angeles, where she bought a fake ID and took a job as what the ad in the newspaper called a Dance Hostess. It was not easy stripping at first, but five years had hardened her to where she could bend over and stick her firm, g-stringed derriere in a stranger’s face without a second thought. She had seen a lot in her twenty-two years, much of it bad, and God help her, she was not the swiftest deer in the concrete forest. But through it all she still believed in Prince Charming, and she half-suspected Duncan Delaney was his first cousin.

  Misty wished Pris were there. Pris hung out with artists. Pris could advise her on how they felt and what they thought. But Pris was not scheduled to work that night. So Misty sighed and went back inside the Hollywood Bar and Grill and told Champagne and Cassandra about the peculiar painter across the street.

  Duncan finished the painting at midnight.

  A shaft of light divided Roscoe into sun and shadow, tattoos quiet across his muscles like the sleeping cat on his lap. All was harsh and dark except for a light in Roscoe’s eyes that was not innocence. Instead there was wonder there, and a juvenile thrill Roscoe had thought lost years before.

  Duncan sat on his window sill. Cat jumped into his lap beneath his hand. Long hairs and businessmen, union men and those without proper documentation, went in and out of the Hollywood. Each time the portal opened rock music drifted onto the street like a guitar call to arms. He turned off the lights, stripped, and crawled into the sleeping bag. A streetlight outside his window bathed him in its creme soda glow. He pulled his Stetson over his eyes and settled into a restless sleep.

  Duncan dreamed he sat at a picnic table beside his father in a courtroom on the open prairie. Benjamin sat on the bench holding a gavel and wearing a robe black as his eyes. Fiona sat in a witness stand to his right. Woody wore a bailiff’s uniform and
carried a cattle prod in a holster. Tiffy stood before a jury box filled with Fiona’s bridge club.

  “What happened next, Mrs. Delaney?” Tiffy inquired.

  “I remember smelling kerosene as the jet dumped its fuel. We heard a sound like a cork popping out of a champagne bottle, only louder, and then the jet trailed smoke.”

  Fiona touched a lace handkerchief to her eyes. Duncan, in a rare flash of perception, saw where she was heading.

  “Your honor!” he yelled. “Benjamin! I object!”

  Benjamin peered down from his seat near the clouds, mist swirling about him. “On what grounds?”

  “This is irrelevant and pointless. My dad did what he had to do. He should have been given a medal but instead my mother has put his memory on trial every day since the day he died.”

  “Hey,” Benjamin said, “that’s good!”

  Tiffy said, “the relevance, your honor, is that he didn’t have to do anything. And the point is that what he did accomplished nothing except his death.”

  “Well,” Benjamin wobbled, “since you put it that way. Overruled. Go on, Fiona.”

  “Thank you, your honor,” Fiona said.

  Duncan suspected it was a dream. Benjamin and Fiona were being too cordial. Plus, most courts were located indoors.

  “When the jet came down Sean jumped onto his horse and rode away. That’s the last I saw of him. Now I see the same thing happening with Duncan. This stupid desire to do what’s right. Right for who? Not for me!”

  Tiffy speared Duncan with her eyes. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  “Hey,” Duncan demanded, “who’s on trial here anyway?”

  “Exactly!” said Tiffy, and both Benjamin and the jury of old women fixed stony eyes on Duncan.

  “I’m losing my baby!” cried Fiona.

  “Quiet, woman,” Sean Delaney said. “You’re embarrassing the boy.”

  “Mr. Delaney, if you don’t mind, I’ll admonish the witness.” Benjamin turned to Fiona. “Control yourself, Mrs. Delaney, or I’ll be forced to have Woody discipline you.”

  Woody had been half-asleep through the proceedings, but he perked up some and produced a nasty looking bull whip.

  Duncan turned to Sean. “I’d like to wake up now if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all.” Sean Delaney clapped his hands.

  Duncan woke to gunshots and screams. He tried to get up, but he was tangled in his sleeping bag. He fell hard to the floor. The gun fired again. Glass shattered, tires squealed, an engine roared. Duncan crawled to his window and looked out.

  A young Hispanic man lay on the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, glass strewn about his body and a dark stain spreading across the sidewalk around his head like a wet, black halo. He wore a white t-shirt, blue jeans, and a blue bandanna around his bleeding skull. A young girl with long black hair knelt wailing beside him. A woman peered out of the Hollywood Bar and Grill and screamed. Soon spears of red light whizzed through Duncan’s windows and across his walls and sirens and police radios filled the street. Girls from the Hollywood, clad in lace and high leather boots, pushed up against yellow police tape and watched paramedics work over the silent man. One paramedic stepped away and the other leaned back. A man and his wife walked beneath Duncan’s window as a man in a coroner’s jacket took a body bag out of his truck.

  “Just another drive by,” Duncan heard the man say and then he and his wife were gone.

  Duncan pulled on his pants, put on his Stetson, and took a beer from the refrigerator. He set his easel beside the window and laid his paints and brushes across the desk. Cat paced between Duncan’s legs as he watched the coroner load the dead man into a van and take him away. By the time the last police car had gone, Duncan had sketched a rough outline of the scene below. The street he painted with his eyes, but the dead man and the girl he painted from a snapshot in his mind. But his brain was not a camera and the picture evolving on canvas lacked the detail with which Duncan normally painted. The result was simple and dark and brutal. The young Mexican lay dead on the cement, his blood black, his face turned away, one leg bent backwards at the knee.

  But the evolving painting was not about death, it was about grief, and the focus was the kneeling girl, her face in shadows but the anguish obvious in the curve of her back and her hands on her dead lover.

  And all around them, dots of broken glass like diamonds cast unwanted into the gutter.

  Four

  All that remained of the rodeo clown was a mild stench.

  It did not interfere with his sleep, but it vexed Benjamin during his waking hours, and made his meals unpalatable. He took shallow breaths until a deputy came after breakfast and led him to an interview room with a plexiglass partition and salmon colored walls. Benjamin did not suspect that he was about to endure the first of two tests of honor in what would be a day of minor tribulations. All he wondered was who had come calling. He settled in a metal chair facing the glass and surmised it must be Duncan. He was first sad that his friend had ceded his dream so easily, then pleasantly relieved when Woody entered the room opposite the glass. A laugh perished in his throat when Fiona followed him in.

  “Well, slap my ass and call me Sally,” Benjamin said. “Fiona, if you weren’t the last person I expected to see here.”

  “Ben, for once in your life,” Woody said, “just shut up and listen.”

  “What the hell.” Benjamin sat back and folded his arms.

  “The way it was explained to me,” Fiona began, “is that, based on your previous criminal history, you can expect a significant period of incarceration in the state penitentiary for your most recent transgression.”

  Benjamin said nothing. This was his understanding too. Ten years was considered the best bet in the pool organized by Billy Masterson. Benjamin had put five dollars on two years and then only because three and four were already taken. One year and probation were left without takers. The winner stood to make fifty dollars.

  “If you wish, I will post your bail and obtain a lawyer for you.”

  “I got a lawyer.”

  “What you have is a drunken public defender who couldn’t get you out of here for the last four days. I’m offering a real lawyer and the money to make your case interesting.” Fiona took a deep breath. “All I ask in return is my son’s address.”

  “He just left a note saying he went to California,” Woody explained.

  The thought of a retained attorney tempted Benjamin. Public defenders had failed to gain acquittals for him four of five times, two of which he had actually been innocent. All he had to do was supply Fiona with Angela Moncini’s phone number.

  “What would you do, Woody?”

  “Hell, Ben, you know what I’d do. I’d tell her. He’s her son and she’s worried sick. Duncan would understand.”

  “Still banging her, eh Woody?”

  “Damn you!” Fiona yelled through the holes in the glass. “You can rot here on your way to hell if you want! But if anything happens to my boy I will bribe or buy your freedom so l can personally rip your heart out and stuff it back down your throat!”

  A deputy came in. Her expression did not change when he whispered in her ear, though her complexion advanced into the pale end of the spectrum. The deputy left.

  “You have my offer,” Fiona said. “Take it or leave it.”

  “Fiona,” Benjamin spoke so softly that she had to lean forward to hear, their faces segregated by four cumulative inches of atmosphere and one of glass, “you can take your offer and blow it out your sweet Irish ass.”

  Fiona leaped at the partition and struck it with her small fists. The glass vibrated with her wrath. Woody pulled her away.

  “Ben, you always were a special kind of stupid,” Woody commented as he dragged Fiona screaming from the interview room.

  “That woman could screw up a wet dream,” Benjamin muttered.

  He sat back. Someone was always preventing Fiona from assaulting him. He did not doubt she could damage him before
he finally put her down. He frowned. That would not benefit his friendship with Duncan. He resolved to be more cordial in future encounters, not for Fiona’s benefit, but for Duncan’s. Billy Masterson came in and led him from the room down a hall and to the left.

  “Hey,” Benjamin said, “my cell’s back that other way.”

  “Jesus, Ben, I know that. It’s my jail after all. We’re letting you go.”

  Benjamin’s public defender, a gray haired man named Conley whose breath whistled through his nose with a perpetual whiskey smell, waited in the lobby. Lightning struck Benjamin’s brain. He turned to Masterson.

  “You looked at the tape!”

  “Actually,” Conley said, “it was me who looked. They just assumed they knew what was on it.”

  “What took you so long?”

  “Well,” Conley admitted, “I guess I assumed the same thing they did.”

  “We’re really sorry, Ben,” Billy said.

  Benjamin laughed, realizing what the deputy had whispered to Fiona. It must have rankled when she realized any leverage she possessed was lost. But she played it through and almost roped him. Billy gave Benjamin back his wallet, two hundred and forty-eight dollars in bills and seventy-three cents in change, a Canadian nickel, cigarette papers and a tobacco tin, two ribbed condoms, the keys to his truck, his belt, his shoelaces, and his hat.

  “Let us know if you want to prefer charges against Leroy Kern,” Masterson said.

  “Let me think about that one.”

  Benjamin tied his shoelaces and put on his belt. Masterson gave him the fifty dollars from the pool.

  “Your guess was closest,” he explained.

  “Thanks, Billy. You boys treated me okay this time.”

  “I’ve talked to the judge,” Conley said. “He agreed to apply time served against your previous sentence and suspended the remainder. Your weekends are forthwith free.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Conley.”

  “You come see us again soon,” Masterson said.

  “Not me. I’ve mended my ways.”