Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

  “That’s your plan?” Mike said.

  “That’s my plan,” Danny said.

  “Just one problem,” Mike said.

  “What?” Danny said.

  “Everything,” Mike said, “except Harvey murdering you. That part is perfect.”

  “This right here, what you’re doing now, this kind of negativity,” Danny said, “is why your life sucks and mine doesn’t. You’re in the failure business, Failures Are Us, and I’m in the construction business, Ladders Unlimited.”

  “You’re in the moron business,” Mike said. “Moron Depot.”

  “We’re at the bottom of the hole here, and I’m building the ladder to get us out, and you’re sitting in the dirt saying, ‘This ladder won’t work, and that ladder won’t work, and no ladder will work, and I’ll just give up and stay in the hole and cry like a fucking two-year-old so that Jenny will have pity on me because pity is all I have going for me now.’ And the whole time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, you’re missing the fucking point, which is that this is rock bottom. There’s nowhere to go but up. Nothing else can happen that could dig this hole any deeper.”

  Mike’s cell phone rang as if it were the period to Danny’s sentence. Mike had put his phone on the coffee table. He reached out and hit answer and speaker.

  “Mike Miller.”

  “Mike, George Edwards. Something terrible has happened. I don’t…I’m not sure…I just…your mother is missing.”

  “You can always dig deeper,” Mike said, looking at his brother.

  “What was that?” George said.

  “What do you mean she’s missing?” Mike said.

  “I arrived at the mortuary five minutes ago, and I went straight to the viewing room, as I always do, and she was gone.”

  “She’s deceased, George. She couldn’t have gotten very far,” Mike said.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” George said. “I’ve called the police.”

  Whatever logistics Danny had been calculating had to be refigured now that the police had been added to the equation. No problem, Danny said to himself, sitting back down on the sofa. I need a story for the police. A little story for the police is all I need.

  “You have to come right away, Mike,” George said, the consternation in his voice reaching the red zone. “Your mother is missing, and there’s no time to waste. The police are on the way. I’m very sorry, Mike. This has never happened before…thirty years…never happened. Terrible, just terrible.”

  And then George clicked off the call, and Linda entered the living room from the bedroom hallway.

  “What’s never happened before?” Linda said, crossing the room and sitting opposite her sons on one of the club chairs across from the sofa. “Who was that on the phone? What was he so upset about? Why did he call the police? Never mind, I don’t care. I want to go home. Daniel, drive me home. I want to take a shower and change my clothes and go to the club. I have work to do. Quarterly reports, inventory, payroll. What day is it? Is it a workday? Why don’t I know what day it is? Why am I sleeping here? Where’s your family, Michael? Why aren’t you at the office? Why is Daniel here? I would like one of you to tell me what’s going on.”

  Danny looked at his mother. I’m going to need a bigger story, he said to himself, a huge freaking story is what I’m going to need, a story the size of Montana. And his mojo, which had been rising like a rocket ten seconds ago, flamed out and fell from the sky.

  “Deeper and deeper,” Mike said.

  THE HIGHLIGHT OF MY ROUTINE

  One of the perks of being a police officer who told jokes in clubs, Gary had discovered, was the surprising number of comedian-cop groupies who’d fallen onto the bar stool beside him after his set, then fallen into the front seat of his 1965 Impala at closing time, then fallen into his bed after a nightcap—fallen being the operative word, seeing as how, as a rule, not one of the women had met a drink she didn’t drink.

  Gary was a bourbon guy. Knob Creek. It was above his pay grade, but he enjoyed the smooth buzz he got from the top-shelf brown liquor, so he ordered it the nights he performed—the rest of the time he ordered whatever was in the well. He never drank before his set, but after he left the stage, he would land at the bar, order a double KC rocks, drink it slow, and wait for a comedian-cop groupie to wander along. It had happened more than Gary imagined it would. It had happened last night, Friday night, after his late set at Ha Ha on Lankershim in North Hollywood.

  He had not done any of the jokes from the smash-hit routine he was currently writing—the one with the dwarf and the giant and the piranha and the zombie and the dentist and the dentist’s dead dog in a bag and the branded brother of his agent and Jenny the Gypsy. That story was still magically unfolding.

  Instead, he did his routine about the Asian dry cleaner from Van Nuys who, after a long day of sucking in perchloroethylene (the carcinogenic solvent that causes smog and other bad news), surfactants, and detergents strong enough to dissolve plastic, dressed himself up as Frank Gorshin (or maybe Jim Carrey) playing the Riddler in Batman (green unitard decorated with questions marks and a matching mask). When he was in costume and high on fumes, the Asian dry cleaner broke into West Hills houses with a video camera and an Uzi and filmed the folks he was robbing while he robbed them. That one was a crowd pleaser for a certain kind of crowd.

  Anyway, San Fernando Valley realtor Suzie Shupe fell onto the stool beside him at two in the morning. Gary thought she was a few years older than he was, maybe fifty-two, maybe fifty-five. He didn’t care. He wasn’t particular at two in the morning when it came to comedian-cop groupies—and the brown liquor had warmed him up.

  Suzie was shorter than him, and everything about her was round, her face, her eyes, her mouth, her boobs and hips and belly, her arms and legs—and yet she was not fat, just very round. She had big blonde hair with dark roots, and like a lot of fifty-something single workingwomen, she knew how to use makeup. She had red lips, eye shadow for days, mascara galore, and round cheeks pink with blush, or possibly it was the wine. She was not as pretty as some of the comedian-cop groupies who’d landed on the stool beside him, but she was prettier than some others, which meant she was pretty enough for Gary, who’d bought her a merlot. They had talked about nothing and laughed at less, and then Suzie had fallen into the Impala. Several nightcaps had followed.

  They had drunken, sloppy sex, which Gary had to admit was worlds better than no sex, and passed out naked at five a.m.

  At eight o’clock, Omar muscled the door open, and Harvey walked into Gary’s apartment and headed straight for the bedrooms, where someone was just barely moaning.

  Gary lived in the Villa Allegro apartments on Magnolia between Radford and Ben in Valley Village. It was a four-story, block-long complex, with Spanish-style architecture, pink-stucco exterior walls, a red tile roof, and little balconies with glass sliders on the upper floors. It was a pleasant-looking, middle-income apartment building for elementary school principals, restaurant managers, and LAPD detectives, one of hundreds just like it spread across the Valley.

  Gary had a two-bedroom/two-bath unit on the fourth floor that faced the back of the building—the parking lot and fenced garbage and recycle area. His little balcony was directly above the dumpsters.

  Fancy furniture wasn’t important to Gary. He had a flat-screen TV and a sofa and some tables and not much else. His life was comedy and police work. He didn’t have the time or energy for IKEA. What he had instead was a waterbed and a sweet collection of lava lamps. He was a toddler when the hippies were happening in the late 1960s, but it was an era that interested him later in life because that’s when Pat Paulsen had found fame on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

  Harvey opened the door to the first bedroom and found Gary’s home office, an unsettling combination of jokes and crimes. He continued down the hall to the second bedroom and pushed that door open and found Gary and Suzie sharing an early morning hangover fuck, Suzie riding Gary, her arms reaching behi
nd her, hands on his legs, back arched, little round mouth emitting a super-soft, high-pitched moan.

  While Suzie was fucking him, Gary was holding her tits and thinking that if her moan were any higher pitched or less audible, it would be a dog whistle. And while he was thinking that thought, he was also thinking he should add the dog-whistle-sex bit to his act somehow. And while he was thinking that thought, he saw Harvey and Omar enter his bedroom and so was also thinking his act would have to be an HBO series, what with the sadistic dwarf and the violent giant busting in on his dog whistle sex.

  “Don’t let me stop you, well, yes, actually, let me stop you right now. Omar, what do we have here?” Harvey said.

  Omar moved to the bed, where Suzie, who might still have been drunk from the night before, was just now realizing that she and Gary were not alone. She opened her mouth to scream when she saw the size of the giant approaching the waterbed, but her voice disappeared entirely into the dog whistle register, and nothing at all came out of her mouth.

  “What we have here, Harvey,” Omar said, “is a round mound of hound.” He towered over the comedian-cop groupie, who was still as stone with shock and fear and incredulity, buck naked and frozen solid, Gary’s dick still inside her, for Pete’s sake. “Good night, hound,” Omar said, and he hit her on the top of the head with his fist, as if his fist were a mallet (which it kind of was), and her skull was a fence post (which it might as well have been), and he was driving the fence post deep into hard earth. He knocked her out cold, and she fell forward in slow motion and landed face down on the pillow beside Gary.

  “I couldn’t write it better if I tried,” Gary said. “One minute I’m getting laid, and the next minute you pound the round mound of hound and she’s downed without a sound. I say it all the time because it’s true. It’s a laugh a minute out there.”

  Harvey and Omar cracked up, and Harvey climbed onto the bed by Gary’s feet. He looked resplendent this Saturday morning, wearing a seersucker suit with a pink shirt and sky-blue bowtie. On his little dwarf feet he wore leather dress sandals.

  “Oh, Detective,” Harvey said, putting Detective in air quotes, “if you enjoyed that, you’re going to love this. Omar, escort Detective Shuler to his balcony, please.”

  “Wife says to her husband, ‘Honey, whisper dirty things in my ear,’” Omar said, lifting Gary off the bed, holding him under the armpits, facing him out, and carrying him so that Gary’s feet didn’t touch the floor. “Have you heard this one?”

  “Not that I remember,” Gary said. He was completely naked and considerably hung over, though not so hung over that he couldn’t recognize comic gold when he saw it. No one would believe this part of the story, the part where the dwarf and the giant broke down his door, interrupted his sexual intercourse—by bonking his groupie on the top of her head—and carried him nude to his balcony. They wouldn’t believe it, but they would roar with laughter. Thank you, Jesus, Gary thought. This is hilarious shit!

  The cop on Gary’s shoulder said, Snap out of it, Gary, you’re a LAPD detective. Act like one—offer some resistance, threaten to arrest them, call for backup. But the comic on his other shoulder said, ignore the idiot detective. You’ve been digging for comic gold all your life, and now you’ve hit the mother lode. Stake your claim and mine this vein for all it’s worth. HBO awaits you—violence, nudity, foul language, and sex!

  When he wasn’t listening to the voices in his head, Gary was wondering, Why are we going to the balcony? And then Omar crossed the living room, and Harvey slid the slider, and Omar stepped outside and turned Gary upside down and suspended him in midair over the balcony railing by holding onto one ankle.

  “What does the husband say?” Gary said to Omar, who appeared upside down to him. Gary’s head was spinning, and his arms and free leg were dangling in space four stories up. I’ll die if I fall from this height, he thought, and I’ll die naked because just then he remembered he had no clothes on.

  “Husband says, ‘Kitchen, living room, dining room, balcony,” Omar said.

  “Hilarious,” Gary said, but he didn’t laugh because he thought he might puke.

  “We went to Dr. Greenburg and asked him to return my seventy-five thousand dollars, and the dentist said he handed it to your agent,” Harvey said.

  “I don’t like heights very much,” Gary said, underplaying the fact that he didn’t like heights at all, especially when he was hanging upside down by an ankle. He hadn’t liked heights since he was a kid in Chula Vista and had climbed a tall tree and then was too afraid to do anything but hold on for dear life. Just climb back down, Gary Shuler Vista, the crowd had called up at him. But he was frozen with fear and wanted an Oreo. The firemen had to get him with a hook and ladder—as if he were a cat.

  “And so we went to Danny Miller, who we followed to Santa Anita, and he said that you had found him first and taken my seventy-five thousand dollars from him before he could place his bet. Is that accurate?” Harvey said.

  “True fact,” Gary said.

  “So do you have my money?” Harvey said.

  If I don’t pass out, Gary thought, this will be the highlight of my routine. “No,” he said. “I gave it to a zombie named Judd Martin. You can find him at the Little Valley Trailer Park in Sunland-Tujunga, on Sherman Grove near Foothill, trailer seventeen. It’s in a paper bag on the floor. He’s got a gun, a knife, and a branding iron.”

  “You gave my money to a trailer park zombie?” Harvey said.

  “It’s a laugh a minute out there,” Gary said, trying to be comical. But instead of humor, he heard in his voice the sound of fear, which was an emotion he would have to explore at a later date because now his head was exploding and his heart was pounding like a motherfucker. He wished he could be there when the dwarf and the giant confronted the zombie, but mostly he wished Omar would put him back on his balcony. I need an Oreo right now, he said to himself.

  “Is it me,” Harvey said, “or is he not as funny as he used to be?”

  “It’s not you,” Omar said, and he let go of Gary’s ankle and dropped him headfirst four stories.

  SOMEBODY SOMEWHERE GOING TO PAY SOMETHING TO SOMEONE

  Dr. Donald Greenburg never scheduled office hours on Saturday, but today he made an exception for Ramona Clifton, who had become his closest friend, trusted confidante, and personal bodyguard since Thursday, when she saved his life with her Civil War sword at Pacoima Pawn and Loan. He was paying for her friendship, wisdom, and protection—whitewalls and gasoline for her Eldorado, cost-free dental work—but so what? Ramona was all he had going for him, and if he had to buy these things for her to get these things from her, then he would open his wallet. For God’s sake, Greenburg thought, at this point I’d open a freaking vein.

  He had finished filling her cavities and was washing his hands. She was sitting in the dental chair, holding a mirror in front of her face, admiring his handiwork. It was just the two of them in the office at eight thirty in the morning.

  It had been hard for him to concentrate on what was happening in her mouth because of what was happening with her breasts, which were in the same vicinity as his hands. She was wearing a blouse that was pulled tight across the front—buttons holding on for dear life, by a thread, as it were—and with every breath, her breasts would rise and fall, ebb and flow—a magnificent rolling tide of tits.

  He’d had sexual stirrings over the years—for various hygienists and dental assistants—but he’d been numb for a long while now. Carol had broken his manhood, and the gin and cocaine had anesthetized him to the pain. The lust he felt for Ramona had awoken his libido. He couldn’t get enough of her, and he wasn’t sure how long he could control himself.

  But it was more than her curves that turned him on. She was a strong woman who spoke her mind and told the truth, whether or not you wanted to hear it. It was exhilarating to be with her. She might do or say any honest thing. She was the first honest person he’d met in ages. There was no subtext with Ramona. It was thrilling.


  She viewed the world through refracted lenses that bent the light at outrageous angles, allowing her to see straight through what appeared opaque to him. She judged everyone, including him, but didn’t hold her judgments against anyone, also including him. She had told him that the world “was what it was because that’s what it was, so you have to deal with what it is because that’s what is.” She was a breath of fresh air in his suffocating life.

  On top of all that, she was his private ninja. Indeed, her Civil War sword was leaning against his exam room wall. She had inherited it from her uncle as it fell from her family tree, branch to branch, over the generations. The story was that a distant Clifton had been gifted the sword by his commanding officer after the Battle of Jonesborough in 1864, a Union victory that led to the fall of Atlanta, where the Cliftons hailed from before they moved west one hundred years later. It was either that story or the one where her uncle had stolen it from a collector in Fullerton and given it to Ramona’s mother before heading to jail, which is how it came to be in the back hall closet, where Ramona had discovered it at age fourteen. No matter, Ramona had dropped out of high school to work as a hair stylist and had spent some of her money on fencing lessons. She was a natural. There was talk of an Olympic tryout. It never happened.

  “Dan Miller called as I was leaving the house,” Greenburg said.

  “He the hair dude think he a movie star?” Ramona said.

  Of course she would remember Danny’s hair. She’d grown up in Anaheim, in the Hispanic slums of Disneyland. Maybe she’d seen her father five times in her entire life. Her mother owned a small salon, which is how and why Ramona became a hair stylist after she dropped out of school in the ninth grade. She was between jobs right now.

  “Yes,” Greenburg said. “The talent agent.”

  “What he want?” Ramona said, angling the mirror and smiling so her gold tooth caught the overhead light.