Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom

by A. L. Haskett

  “Ow!” said Leroy Kern, finally awake.

  “Hey!” said the tall man.

  His name was Howard Lomo, and he had been a cop in Laramie until he was fired for ripping up speeding tickets in exchange for sexual favors in the back seat of his squad car. In fairness to Lomo, his sergeant’s wife regularly exceeded her limits whenever she saw him and eagerly participated in a game in which she buried her head in Lomo’s lap while he asked easy questions to which she nodded yes or no. But Lomo unwisely pulled her over in front of her house and the sergeant, returning home for lunch, discovered his wife’s head in Howard Lomo’s lap, and that was very much that. Otherwise he was a fair to decent officer and was not about to let a low life punk slap around his new partner, useless or not.

  As Lomo ran up, Benjamin took his coffee from the Taurus’s roof and threw it in his face. Benjamin had learned long before that one axiom of a successful cold cock and follow through was that the hands go to the pain. Lomo screamed and covered his eyes. Benjamin placed his boot hard to the testicles. Lomo grabbed his groin and crumpled. Benjamin unzipped and urinated onto the driver’s seat. When he finished, he knelt beside Lomo and took a wallet out of his pocket. Fiona’s number was on a small paper between a Visa and an NRA membership card. Benjamin threw the wallet on the floor by the gas pedal. He helped Lomo back into the car. He wadded the paper with Fiona’s number and shoved it in Lomo’s mouth.

  “Try to keep up. Fiona won’t be happy if you lose me.”

  Lomo spit the paper out. “You filthy red-skin bastard!”

  Benjamin punched him in the face. Lomo groaned and slumped over the wheel. Benjamin got in his truck and pulled onto the highway. Lomo shook his head, then pulled out and followed so close their bumpers kissed. A police car passed by, made a U-turn of squealing tires and smoke, fell into line behind the green Taurus, and turned on its red lights. Lomo pulled over.

  Benjamin parked and watched the police draw their guns and order Kern and Lomo out of the Taurus. Leroy Kern fell drunk to the ground, but Lomo hopped up and down, gesticulating wildly. A second police car appeared. The officers swarmed Lomo and hurled him to the pavement. One got him in a carotid choke hold and applied pressure. Lomo stopped moving. Benjamin turned around and stopped as two officers carried the now hog-tied Lomo to their car.

  “Everything ok, officers?”

  “Just a drunk driver,” said one.

  “He’s got a gun in here,” said another, “and it smells like he pissed himself.”

  “You’re doing a fine job,” Benjamin said, “and as a citizen I want you to know I appreciate you getting these filthy drunks off the road.”

  “Thank you, sir. Always nice to get positive feedback.”

  As Benjamin left, one officer commented, “That’s the kind of thing that makes this job worthwhile.”

  Then he kicked Howard Lomo in the ribs, closed the car door, and drove Lomo and Leroy Kern off to jail.

  Five

  “Duncan,” a voice sang in his sleeping ear, “wake up and play with us.”

  Duncan opened an eye. Two shadowy figures loomed above him. He screamed. The shadows leaped backwards. Duncan groped for the baseball bat under the couch. He had bought the bat in lieu of the door lock Assan had promised but failed to install. A shadow turned on a light.

  “Remember us?” Cassandra and Champagne giggled in unison.

  Champagne held a blender and Cassandra a brown paper bag. Duncan fell back on the couch and dropped the bat. Champagne sat beside him and stroked his naked shoulder.

  “Why don’t you have a bed?” she asked.

  Duncan blushed. He could not help it. He fought the erection he was acquiring, but could not stop that either. Damn that autonomic nervous system, he thought. He had studied biology in high school and was dimly aware of some of the ways the body betrayed itself.

  Cassandra and Champagne both wore faded jeans with many rips and holes in the denim. Cassandra was small and slim with brown wavy hair, eyes like Mediterranean olives, dark lips, and small taut breasts. She wore a white tank top through which Duncan traced the outline of her nipples. Champagne was taller and heavier in the legs, buttocks, and chest, with blond hair and a milkmaid’s good looks. She wore a Lilith Fair t-shirt over freely swaying breasts. Duncan struggled into his jeans inside his sleeping bag. The effort quieted his tumescent organ. He slipped out of the bag and put on a shirt. Champagne took the blender and the paper bag into the kitchen. Duncan heard bottles clink and grinding ice.

  “What can I do for you ladies?”

  “You asked us to come up,” Cassandra said.

  Champagne appeared with three glasses on a tray. “To pose for you.”

  He sipped the Margarita she gave him. It was cold and tart and salty. Champagne and Cassandra sat on the couch and smiled.

  “Ready anytime you are,” Cassandra said.

  Duncan looked at the clock. It was two thirty in the morning. He sighed and put a canvas on his easel. He picked up a brush and his palette and began to paint.

  “Do either of you know a girl who drives a white Cadillac?”

  Champagne said, “That’s Pris. She dances with us at the Hollywood.”

  Cassandra said, “Forget about her. She’s a dyke.”

  “You should be concerned with us,” Champagne said. “We like men.”

  Duncan changed the subject. “Do you like dancing at the Hollywood?”

  Champagne shrugged. “It’s okay if you can put up with the assholes.”

  Cassandra took a wad of bills from her pocket. “Plus the tips are great.”

  “People tip you for dancing?”

  “No, dummy.” Champagne pulled her shirt off and waved her breasts at him. “They tip us for these!”

  “Hey, put that back on!” Duncan said.

  Cassandra giggled and took her shirt off too.

  “Oh god,” Duncan said with overdue clarity, “you’re strippers.”

  “What the hell did you think we were,” Cassandra asked, “stock brokers?”

  “Roscoe said you were dancers.”

  “We’re both,” Champagne said.

  Duncan gulped his Margarita and painted in embarrassed silence while Champagne made another pitcher. Cassandra flipped through his compact discs, finally putting Beggar’s Banquet on the stereo.

  “Jesus,” she said, “don’t you have any music from this century?”

  Cassandra and Champagne threw crumpled dollar bills at him as he painted. Despite the two beautiful, topless women drinking and laughing on his couch, Duncan’s thoughts returned to Pris. The idea of her dancing naked on stage before a room of drunk, horny men disappointed his heart. He thought about Tiffy. She didn’t take her clothes off for a living, but she used her sex just the same.

  Or was he just being bitter?

  Much later, when the alcohol had dulled his brain to the point where thinking was difficult if not dangerous, he was dimly aware of two naked, laughing women tackling him and ripping his shirt off. He remembered Champagne holding a brush.

  He woke the next morning on the floor beside his easel with Cat lying on his face. He spluttered and spit fur and Cat went away. Cassandra and Champagne and the dollar bills were gone. They were strippers, but they were not stupid. He crawled past his easel, wishing he was cold and covered with dirt. The painting was half finished and the remarkable thing was that he could not remember having painted it. It would one day be regarded as a pure example of his studio period. A southern Senator would falsely cite it as the sort of decadence funded by the NEA. But he did not consider that. He was only thinking of the incredible pain in his skull.

  He crawled to the bathroom, hanging on to the hardwood to keep from plunging off the floor. He vomited in the toilet. He climbed to the mirror. A painted red arrow adorned his chest, pointing towards China. He looked down and groaned. His testicles were painted a bright, baby blue. He rolled into the tub and turned on the water. His throbbing skull matched his pounding heart. He wond
ered what else had happened. Probably nothing, he concluded. Past experience with Tiffy had proven that excessive alcohol and sex were, for him, incompatible. Tiffy always stopped him after a six-pack, though she would continue drinking until she caught his head between her legs in a scissors grip. Which was fine until the one time, after she had joined a gym and begun working out on a Nautilus machine, when she nearly dislocated his jaw at her moment of truth.

  He scrubbed the paint from his chest and scrotum, dried himself, dressed, drank a quart of orange juice and took three aspirins. He ate three Neapolitan ice cream sandwiches in an effort to settle his stomach. He filled Cat’s bowls with cat food and water.

  Then he went to work on the painting.

  “I been watching your bike,” the bum under the stairs said as Duncan unchained the rusty Schwinn he had paid ten dollars for at a garage sale that afternoon. “Never know when someone might steal such a fine machine.”

  Duncan gave him a quarter.

  “God bless you, Mr. Getty,” said the bum.

  “My name’s not Getty.”

  “I’ll say it’s not.”

  Duncan rode away wondering who Getty was. He did not make the association with J. Paul as he had not expected sarcasm from a vagrant. Four miles later he locked the bike to a post outside a gallery on Melrose Avenue where Angela had arranged for his inclusion in an exhibition of promising Los Angeles artists. An Aryan named Sven attended the door. His wispy blond hair fell to his shoulders. He dressed in black from his linen shirt to his leather storm trooper boots. Duncan was six-two and weighed one sixty-five on a good day. This Nordic giant had six inches and ninety pounds on him and looked like an angry Thor.

  “Your invitation,” he growled.

  Duncan searched his pockets. “I have forgotten it,” he said. “But I’m one of the artists.”

  “Of course you are. Now leave quickly before I rupture your spleen.”

  Not sure where his spleen was but nonetheless not wanting it ruptured, Duncan left. He circled the block, hopped a fence, and entered through the kitchen. Cooks spoke heated Spanish at him and brandished sharp kitchen knives.

  “Como esta usted?” Duncan kept his back to the walls and his eyes on the knives. “Donde es cerveza?”

  A cook gave him a beer and guided him through a door into the main gallery where patrons dressed in silk and spandex and double-breasted wool congregated amid framed paintings and bronze statues. Duncan wore jeans and a gray tweed jacket over a paint-smeared t-shirt. His hair was tangled and whipped from his ride to the gallery. Some guests wore cowboy boots of the Italian variety favored by Tiffy. Duncan wore tennis shoes because his boots kept slipping off the bicycle pedals. He roamed through a crowd bent on ignoring him until he came to a painting that stopped him cold.

  It was of a naked man strapped in an electric chair. Desperate, hollow eyes stared out of a shaved head. His muscles were tense, his teeth gritted, his eyes wide and legs spread to reveal a small, erect penis, the head of which sported a metal cap wired into the chair. A blond woman in a guard uniform stood in the shadows behind the chair, her hand on an electric switch, her face beatific in its indifference. It was not the subject that interested him though. It was the guard. It was the cowgirl in the painting in Angela’s office and now, he realized, it was the girl in the Cadillac.

  Achilles Last Stand, the card under the painting read, by Sheila Rascowitz.

  “Isn’t it horrible?”

  Duncan turned. Pris stood by him regarding the painting, her eyes electric with disgust. She wore a short yellow skirt, a white silk blouse, and a yellow leather jacket. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and smiled at Duncan.

  “Hey,” he said, “that’s you, isn’t it?”

  “Sadly, yes.” She frowned. “It just sold for five thousand dollars.”

  He studied the painting from an alternative viewpoint. “Go figure.”

  “I understand you had a good time last night.”

  “Umm . . .” Duncan’s face burned, “I don’t actually remember if I did or not.”

  “Champagne told me your virtue remained intact.” Pris touched his arm. “Though I understand you woke with a serious case of blue balls.”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Of course. She also said you asked about me.”

  A muscular woman with a brown brush cut wedged herself between them. She wore jeans stuffed in black boots and a white t-shirt beneath a black leather vest. She was nearly as tall as Duncan and at least as heavy, thirty years old, with light brown eyes and three silver studs piercing her right ear. Chains crossed her boots and vest. She was attractive in a masculine way.

  “Come on.” She grabbed Pris’s arm. “I want you to meet someone.”

  “Don’t pull your butch routine on me, Sheila.” Pris shook loose. “You pay my rent but you don’t own me. So buzz off. I’m talking to someone.”

  Sheila Rascowitz glared at Duncan. He smiled uncertainly. She shouldered him aside and joined a woman dressed like a member of the Hell’s Angels ladies’ auxiliary. The other woman’s name was Samantha MacDonald, and she was an outwardly feminine accountant by day and butch dyke on a Harley by night. She never hooked up romantically with Sheila because neither was willing to sit on the back seat of the other’s bike. Sheila gestured and Samantha stared. Pris took Duncan’s hand.

  “I need a drink,” she said.

  They walked to a table where croissants and crackers lay beside paté and cheese. A white jacketed waiter supplied plastic glasses of Chardonnay, though at the time Duncan could only distinguish with limited success between Mexican and American beers.

  “She makes me so mad sometimes,” Pris said.

  Sheila found the doorman and spoke in his ear. Sven studied the room.

  “Let’s get some air,” Duncan said.

  Outside a string quartet played Bach. Women wearing pearls wandered around a fountain, arm in arm with men brandishing checkbooks.

  “My dad used to call daisies sunshine on sticks. You look like that.” Pris looked confused. Duncan felt clumsy. “I meant it as a compliment.”

  Pris smiled. “Then I’ll take it as one.”

  Duncan peered into the galley. Sheila and the Swede were nowhere in sight. “Would you like to see my paintings?”

  “I’d love to.”

  They found his canvases in an alcove by the toilets. The cards beneath read Roscoe and Drive By, with his name below the titles.

  “They should have hung them above the urinals,” he said. “At least then someone might see them.”

  Pris squeezed his arm. “I think they’re wonderful.”

  Duncan’s annoyance evaporated. His heart sprouted wings and fluttered up his chest to lodge in his throat.

  “I’d like to paint you,” he chanced.

  Pris shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Duncan felt as if his heart had been pierced by twenty gauge bird shot, as if the giddy wind stirred by her proximity had been knocked from his punctured lungs by her denial, like his wings were ripped off and his carcass had fallen bloody to be trampled in the gutter.

  “Could we at least have dinner sometime and talk about it?”

  “No!” Pris yelled.

  Duncan doubted the invitation merited so harsh a response, and he quailed at the severity of the rejection. When he was lifted into the air and thrown bodily into the men’s room, he realized her exclamation was not meant for him. He hit the tiles with a squeak. He rose as Sven came at him, eyes angrily furrowed. Duncan hit him as hard as he could across the jaw with absolutely no effect.

  “Uh oh,” said Duncan.

  The Teutonic giant lifted him like a sack of rice. “You are not welcome here.”

  Sven was preparing to throw Duncan head-first into a urinal when Pris kicked him square between the legs from behind. His eyes crossed and he dropped Duncan. Sven grabbed his genitals and sank gasping to the floor, his face white as mold on last week’s bread.
Sheila grabbed Pris from behind. Pris elbowed her in the gut. It degenerated from there. Angela, on her way to show Duncan’s paintings to the gallery’s owner, found the four tangled on the floor as Sven applied a choke hold on Duncan.

  “Duncan!” Angela cried.

  “You mean . . .” the gallery owner was a small, well-dressed man of sixty, with worried eyes and expensively coiffed and dyed hair.

  “Yes! That’s Duncan Delaney!”

  “Sven!” the owner cried. “What have you done?”

  Sven relaxed the choke hold. “I thought he was an intruder.”

  “No,” Angela said, “he’s one of my artists.”

  Duncan stood and helped Pris up. Sheila slapped his proffered hand away. Sven tried to rise, but Pris’s kick had caused minor structural damage to the genitals.

  “You’re fired,” the owner said, adding the insult.

  “He thought he was doing his job,” Duncan said. “That’s all.” He helped Sven to a chair and brought him a glass of water.

  “I’m so sorry, Mr. Delaney,” Sven said. “I could cry.”

  “Angela,” Sheila said, “you represent this, this . . . person?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Not anymore you don’t.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Either he goes or I do.”

  Angela smiled sadly. “I’ll be sorry to lose you.”

  “You’re keeping him over me?”

  “If you change your mind, I’d love to have you back.”

  Sheila stared at Angela for a long moment, her face red and her eyes sharp. She turned and stomped away. Angela dusted Duncan off.

  “You should care more about your appearance,” she said sternly.

  Inside she smiled. A crowd, attracted by the commotion, gathered by his paintings and eyed him thoughtfully. Duncan turned to see Pris reach the door.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Watch out for Sheila,” Angela said. “She’s not all there.”

  He burst onto Melrose in time to see the Cadillac’s taillights fly from him. He heard motorcycles. Thundering Harleys ringed him. Sheila Rascowitz stopped before him. Samantha MacDonald and two others circled like gluttonous wolves. If he was not so scared, four women on motorcycles dressed like fugitives from a Marlon Brando fan club would have been comical.