Let There Be Linda

by Rich Leder

  Playing a hunch it was the Civil War sword that had opened Omar’s stomach, Shuler drove from the pawnshop to Escalon Drive in Encino and rang Greenburg’s front doorbell. The dentist had appeared. Ramona stood beside him.

  Gary told them he’d been to Pacoima Pawn and Loan and had seen the bones and the bodies and the ropes hanging from the rafters.

  “Not my ropes,” Greenburg had said. “Not my problem. And as for being eaten by carnivorous, blood-thirsty fish, well, couldn’t have happened to a nicer dwarf.”

  Gary had held up an evidence bag that contained Omar’s slip joint pliers and said, “Found these on the scene. Whose blood do you suppose is on them?”

  “I stick them in your neck, it be your blood,” Ramona had said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Greenburg had said. “You don’t have compelling evidence to make me submit to a DNA test.”

  And then Gary had put his hand in his pocket and removed a wad of tissues. He’d opened the tissues and presented the dentist with a right central incisor. “I bet this slides right into the hole in your mouth where your tooth is gone. I bet the judge will think so too. Compelling enough?”

  They’d invited him into the air conditioning, and Gary had made a deal for the denouement: no evidence and no suspects in exchange for the rest of the story, every detail from the moment Chachi came back to life the first time all the way through everything that happened after the Bride of Frankenstein turned out the lights. They told him the tale, and he’d given them the tooth and the pliers and driven to Miller’s house.

  After checking the garage and discovering Judd Martin and the chainsaw were gone and the blood had been bleached away, he’d found his agent, his agent’s brother, and a disgusting clown lying on lounge chairs and drinking cans of Coors Light by the pool. He’d pulled up a chair and came right to the point: he needed to know what had happened to Linda after she’d escaped to the small yellow house in Canoga Park. And if someone could fill him in on the missing zombie, that would be good too.

  “What’s in it for us?” Danny had said.

  “All of us,” Mike had said, “except him. The clown is expendable.”

  “He means expandable,” Paul said. “Since I got electrocuted, my wiener keeps growing. That’s why I got a future in porn.”

  Gary had thought the clown was an excellent, late-story addition and took notes in his pocket pad while he horse-traded the end of his act.

  In exchange for the return of Mike’s drivers license, which Mike had lost wrestling Paul the Pervert in the mortuary, and Gary deleting the photo he took of Judd Martin, murdered by Makita on Mike’s garage floor, they told him everything that had happened, from breaking their mother’s neck in the fridge door to returning her body to the mortuary hearse.

  Paul had been tasked with disposing of the zombie, and he’d said that was an erotic part of the story unsuitable for human beings of any age.

  That was good enough for Gary, who had long thought great comedic stories should have three loose ends. For his epic act, loose end number three was the missing seventy-five grand Greenburg had pawned from Harvey to pay Danny to pay Jenny to bring Chachi back to life, which she’d done on the dentist’s flagstone deck.

  Gary had the sense that Mike was holding back on the money, that the accountant knew something about the Airstream he wasn’t sharing, but the detective was willing to let it go to settle his loose end logic.

  Loose end number two was Judd Martin, the real estate zombie who had met a bloody chainsaw death at the hands of a woman who a few days earlier had died of a coronary and a few days later had died of a broken neck. What had happened to the zombie’s body? Zombies with chainsaws sticking out of their chests don’t disappear into thin air, not even in the San Fernando Valley. That loose end came with the benefit of introducing Paul the Pervert to the story—and it will bring down the house, Gary thought.

  Loose end number one, of course, was Jenny Stone. Of all the loose ends of all the stories in all the world, this one was a stunner. The woman could raise the dead with a single breath! Gary imagined the audience laughing out loud while wondering: What the hell happened to her? Where is she? How do I find her? How do I get her to breathe life into my dead dog?

  “Nothing worse than a story tied up in a perfect bow,” Gary said to the poodle.

  And then Bland Blaine said, “Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Detective Gary Shuler.”

  I’M THE KUROSAWA OF COMEDY

  “It starts with a little white dog,” Gary said to the crowd. “This dog, in fact. I’m not kidding, crime fans. This is the real-life actual poodle that you’ll soon see is the star of the story. His name is Chachi, and he’s had a rough road this week, so let’s give him a big Ha Ha hello and make him feel like a Westminster winner.”

  He lived for this, Gary did—live and in color on the small, raised comedy club stage, the brick wall behind him, the spotlight in his eyes, the crowd calling out in unison as commanded, “Hello, Chachi.” He had them in the palm of his hand after only one minute. If only Pat Paulsen could see me now, he thought.

  A cute little poodle on a leash looped around the mic stand beside him. He wondered why it had taken him so long to incorporate something like this into his act? The women in the club—the men too but especially the women—loved the poodle. Gary had their full and willing attention. They were ready to laugh, ready to like him and his dog, ready to go for a ride in his comedy car. All he had to do was start the engine.

  “I get a call one day from a woman who sees this very poodle get tossed out the back window of a Lexus doing seventy-five on the freeway—the sedan, not the poodle, although Chachi might have been doing seventy-five when he went out the window, only your physicist knows for sure. I know, right. It’s a laugh a minute out there. Anyway, you’re probably thinking: poodle puddle. Nope, not this time. This time the poodle was punted to the side of the road, dead as a dime, and the dog’s ID tags directed me to a broken-hearted dentist addicted to cocaine and gin…”

  They’re laughing, Gary said to himself. They like the story. They like me.

  He knew, of course, the cops in the house did not like him—he didn’t like them either. But they were laughing too, although not like the Monday night comedy club crowd, which was laughing because the story was wild and insane and funny as hell and because Gary’s stand-up style was killer good tonight and because Chachi was on the stage beside him, growling just loud enough for Gary to hear.

  No, the cops were nodding and laughing and rolling their eyes as if to say, Boy Howdy, that’s a Shuler shitstorm of a case. We dodged a bullet on this one because even if it isn’t true, some kind of crazy crap definitely went down if for no other reason than that it’s a Shuler shitstorm of a case.

  Talk show booking agents never laughed. They sat on their hands, stone-faced, just to make the point that you were not now and not ever going to get three minutes with Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or even Jimmy Crack Corn. They were gatekeepers, and their job was to keep the gate closed. To the talk show booking agents, finding the Next Comic Standing was no laughing matter. Don’t ever laugh at a comedian in a comedy club was their unspoken credo. And especially don’t ever laugh at Detective Gary Shuler’s crime capers.

  But the talk show booking agents were laughing, and Gary knew that their laughter was the comedic divining rod of his future—he was going to be a star.

  “…And then the dwarf tells the giant to feed the fish. ‘Feed the fish,’ he says. He means me. I’m the fish food. And the giant says, ‘Deep breath, Detective.’ And he shoves my face into the tank, which, as I said, was the size of a lagoon, complete with vegetation and currents and tides and a shoal of two hundred red-bellied piranha with razor blades for teeth.”

  He told them about Harvey and Omar and Greenburg and Carol and Ramona. He told them about Judd Martin and Jenny Stone and Mike and Dan Miller and Paul the Pervert. He did not name names. Instead, he immortalized his characters with epithets: the dw
arf and the giant; the dentist, his Dr. Seuss wife, and his sword-swinging girlfriend; the zombie and the accountant; the agent and the gypsy. The clown.

  The exception was Chachi, whose name he named as needed.

  The Pawn Palace in Pacoima was a comedy club crowd favorite. Gary’s description of the Airstream earned laughter and applause. The small yellow house, his office at the LAPD tow yard, the accountant’s house…even the locations were funny.

  His future was happening in the present, and time became fluid. He could feel his brain splitting and splintering. He was out of body, out of mind, seated at the bar, drinking Knob Creek while watching himself deliver the funniest story ever told to a Ha Ha audience—including three talk show booking agents—that loved him like Lassie.

  His comedic life passed before his eyes.

  He was nine years old and eating Oreos with his parents in their Shula Vista kitchen, telling a funny story about some unlucky kid in chemistry class who accidentally spilled acid on his pants and had to take them off in front of everyone because the pants were disintegrating while he wore them.

  He was thirteen years old and playing the role of Albert Peterson in the middle school production of Bye Bye Birdie. They were rehearsing in the cafeteria and his line was: “Here’s our luggage.” At the moment of delivery, the principal and vice principal walked into the room. Without missing a beat, he gestured at the administrators and deadpanned his line.

  He was on his honeymoon with Maryanne, at his police academy graduation, home for the holidays after his divorce, in the courtroom under oath, in the heat of intercourse with a woman he hardly knew.

  As he bounced through time and mind and memory and comedy, he never lost his grip on the story—the chronology of events, the character arcs, his Machiavellian manipulation of the plot points, the rhythms and cadence of the dialogue, and especially the jokes.

  When he arrived at the dentist poolside part of the story—dentist poolside part one, he called it (not to be confused with the accountant poolside story, in which the dwarf and the giant shoot the Hello Kitty lounger and drown the Bose)—when he arrived at the dentist’s pool, where Jenny brings Chachi back to life, the poodle barked on cue, as if he and the dog had trained for weeks to speak at that particular moment.

  Because everyone was busy laughing and applauding, Gary imagined it was likely no one in the club had noticed the underlying bite in Chachi’s bark, likely no one had seen the accompanying flash of teeth. He had noticed it, but he had let it go because the laughs were rolling in like the San Diego surf. Greenburg, Ramona, Danny, and Mike had each told him about the poodle in the garbage bag, the dogsicle jokes, and the colorful arrival of the Seuss Search and Save posse, and so Gary told the crowd, unfolding the story from each of those characters’ point of view. I’m the Kurosawa of Comedy, he thought as the club went wild.

  And then on with the story he went: back to the Airstream and the branding of the accountant, out to Santa Anita and the confiscating of the seventy-five grand, over to the funeral home and the stealing of Linda (who Gary had labeled the Bride of Frankenstein), until finally he came to dentist poolside part two, in which Chachi kills the Dr. Seuss wife and the dentist drowns the dog.

  There was, Gary had always thought, a bloodthirsty element to a comedy club crowd. If you weren’t funny, they wanted you to bleed to death on stage. And if you were funny, they wanted someone else to bleed to death—literally or figuratively—in your jokes. One way or another, the audience wanted blood.

  And so it was with great flourish that Gary told them about Chachi chewing through the leash that was tied to the pipe at the end of the pool. The audience roared with laughter as the poodle attacked the Dr. Seuss wife and the dentist. They howled as the dog opened her carotid artery and it spurted like a cherub fountain.

  And then Gary got to the part where the dentist grabbed the poodle and plunged into the pool and drowned it in the bloody water, and Chachi, who had been barking and growling and snarling throughout dentist poolside part two, jumped like he’d been fired from a cannon, and chomped the detective in the nutsack.

  A million flashbulbs went off in Gary’s head, and the world went blinding white. He had never in his life experienced pain like this. Every nerve ending in his body screamed in agony. He could barely breathe. His eyes opened wider than they had ever been, and all he could see was the dog sinking its teeth into his crotch.

  Time, which moments ago had been fluid, became a block of ice, and Gary was frozen in the moment for what felt like hours but was really five seconds. And then time exploded forward like a burning train on a one-way track to Ha Ha hell.

  “Get him off me, get him off,” the detective said, yelling for someone in the house to help him. While he was screaming, one lone lobe somehow bypassed the blazing neurons in his brain, and he realized the laughing crowd thought the dog biting him in the balls was part of the act, as if he had written “poodle punctures comedian’s nutsack” in his script.

  Gary fell to the floor, and the lone lobe succumbed to the mind-imploding pain, and he knew he had to act or lose his balls forever.

  He dropped the microphone, reached around his back, grabbed his gun, and—bang, bang, bang—shot the dog three times in the head at point-blank range.

  Brain matter and blood spewed across the stage and up onto Gary and out into the first row of comedy clubbers—as if Shamu had sprayed them with saltwater at a sold-out SeaWorld show—and Chachi died for the third time in a week, his jaw locked solid on Gary’s groin.

  The attack took thirty seconds from start to finish, and in that time, Gary’s world went completely out of focus while it concurrently zoomed in sharp and clear. He had been out of body and out of mind, watching himself in the past, present, and future from the Ha Ha bar, where he had planned to later drink a double KC rocks and wait for a comedian-cop groupie to fall onto the stool beside him. But when Chachi chewed his nutsack, all that went hazy and fuzzy and blurry, and he was sucked back into his body and into his mind, and everything in the world was the dog at his dick.

  Now that it was over, gun in hand, he reached down, unhinged Chachi’s jaw, and removed it from his crotch. The pain was inconceivable, though it was now the echo of pain more than the pain of the moment. As he breathed in and out and the comedy club again became part of his reality, he looked up and saw half a dozen LAPD detectives storming the stage, guns drawn and pointed at him.

  And then they were on him, snatching his gun, forcefully flipping him onto his stomach, cuffing his wrists behind his back. Sergeant Adam Austin, a hardcore career cop who probably detested Gary more than anyone in the LAPD, did the honors.

  “Detective Gary Shuler, finally, at long goddamn last, you’re under arrest. You have the right to remain silent, though we all know that’s not fucking possible. And you can bet your goddamn ass that anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law or in a back alley in the middle of the fucking night, if you catch my drift.”

  As they dragged him out of the club, Gary thought if he hadn’t been in so much pain and if his hands hadn’t been cuffed, he would have written it all down in his pocket pad.

  IF A WEEK CAN CHANGE A MAN’S NATURE

  It was five minutes to nine on Monday, and Mike was screwing up the courage to FaceTime Marcy at her parents’ house in Paramus, where it was five minutes to midnight. Earlier in the day, she’d agreed by text to accept his call at exactly twelve a.m. her time. He paced in front of the built-in desk in the home-office nook in the corner of their master bedroom. The iMac was ready. The iMike was not. Because though today he had done plenty to win back his wife and daughters, he didn’t know if it would be enough.

  He had cried like a child after finding seventy-five grand in a ratty paper bag on the floor of the vile Airstream—itself inexplicably stashed in Mrs. Alemi’s doublewide unit. And while he wept, on his knees in prayer position, he’d looked up at the poster of his Wasserman and Waddell headshot, stuck with knives
and covered with curses and condemnations and expletives and execrations, and he’d had an epiphany titled: if a week can change a man’s nature.

  With the money locked in the trunk of his car, hidden at the bottom of his golf bag, which hadn’t seen a course in many moons, he drove straight to Santa Monica. On the way, he’d called an insane and insanely expensive attorney named Bob Bogatz and put him on retainer.

  Stan Wasserman and Ira Waddell were waiting for Mike in the conference room when he’d arrived. Though much had changed in the week since he’d been fired, the room was precisely the same: credenza at one end, flat screen monitor at the other, cherry table, red leather chairs. Stan and Ira had not changed either. Stan was still marathon runner thin, and Ira was a muscle man chiseled from stone. They did not look pleased.

  “You hired Bob Bogatz to sue the firm,” Stan said.

  “Wrongful termination,” Ira said.

  “He called us,” Stan said.

  “You can’t do that,” Ira said.

  “He was happy to take the case. What did he call it? Oh yes, unfinished business,” Mike said.

  A dozen years ago, Ira’s personal assistant had been let go for insubordination, poor work performance, tardiness, illegible handwriting, brewing bad coffee, breaking team spirit, and being a bad apple, but she was really fired for refusing Waddell’s sexual advances—known in certain circles as attempted rape. Unbeknownst by (and unfortunately for) Wasserman and Waddell, the secretary was Bogatz’s kid sister.

  Known as The Jackhammer, Bogatz had shoved a wrongful termination lawsuit so far up Stan and Ira’s company asshole that the partners were still shitting money they owed Bogatz’s sister more than a decade later.