Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery

by Dallas Murphy

  TWELVE

  BLARING WHITE LIGHT and primordial darkness swirled in a contradictory combination, so I decided to ignore the inexplicable and get a little more sleep. When I woke up again, the light/dark sequence hadn’t changed. All light fades eventually of its own accord. I’d wait it out right here…Then I began to ruminate on just where “right here” might be. Normally, one determines that by empirically perceiving one’s surroundings and then checking whether they looked, smelled, felt—taste didn’t seem applicable—familiar.

  Trees! Aha! Those black shapes, tops swaying gently, were trees, and that meant I was outside. I was outside, and I was sitting down—in a chair, a lawn chair. The trees were not green but black. That meant night. Progress. But what about this light? This light could only be artificial light, electric light, Thomas Edison…But something was wrong with my arms.

  When I realized there was nothing wrong with my arms except that they were chained behind my back, the world around me came into sharper focus. That was bad. I was chained. I was sitting in an aluminum lawn chair on a concrete deck that circled a large swimming pool. The water was lighted from below the dead-flat surface. There was lawn all around, woods in the distance. We weren’t in Manhattan anymore. Now all I needed to do was get a move on, beat it out of this country club to the nearest train station. Could I get my money out of my pocket with my hands cuff ed behind my back?

  “He’s all yours, Henry.”

  The voice came from behind me. Apparently, this Henry fellow was back there as well. I spun as quickly as I could. I saw a black man, but he wasn’t Henry, apparently, because he was addressing Henry.

  Henry was a white guy who wore a minute black-and-red bathing suit. I squinted at him as he passed through a dark patch and into a bright one. It looked like he had a tugboat hawser stuck down the front of his suit. His upper torso looked like an alpine rock face.

  “He the gink I’m supposed to drown?”

  “Yeah,” said the black guy, “that’s him.”

  Drown? Did he say drown?

  Henry was on me. He clamped the back of my neck and jerked me to my feet. With a powerful sweeping motion, he hurled me into the swimming pool. I believe I skipped once or twice like a flat stone across the surface. I stood up in nipple-deep water. Henry jumped in on top of me.

  We came up face to face. His was crazy with activity. The chewing muscles at the hinges of his jaw were twitching a mile a minute; his mouth, brows, and forehead were ticcing rampantly, but his eyes were flat, like dead fish eyes. No compassion in those eyes. He was almost entirely bald. Even the skin on his crown jerked and wrinkled, flattened and wrinkled again.

  He whipped me around, clutched the chain between my cuff s, and hoisted my hands high up my back, causing my face to slap the water. An immense force shoved me under. This was it, the termination of my life, right here, for something I didn’t even understand, in heavily chlorinated water. But I struggled, jerked and twisted around to get at him, to kick him in the hawser. The effort was hopeless, a waste of oxygen, but I wanted to hurt him in some lasting way before I died. He held me under with ease. I relaxed, gave in.

  But he hoisted me back up into the air. I gasped a single, mostly liquid breath, and before I could take a drier one, he ducked me again. He was going to drown me by bits! I thought for an instant I’d just inhale a lungful of water, get it quickly done. He yanked me out again.

  “Stop!”

  Somebody was shouting and waving his arms, coming toward us from what in my limited vision appeared to be an enormous mansion.

  “What the Sam Hill are you doing, Henry!”

  “Why, I’m drownin’ this gink. Rufus said he was the gink—”

  “Rufus said, Rufus said! Rufus is a dick-up! This is not that gink! This is a different gink entirely! This is Artie Deemer.”

  I flopped against the side of the pool. I watched two black ants weave their way along a gorgelike seam in the concrete. I didn’t know ants came out at night.

  “Oh, shit,” said Henry in a thick, stupid voice.

  “Oh, shit is right. Get Mr. Deemer out of that pool this instant. Rufus! You come help!”

  I tried to get a look at the man who had saved my life. Or pretended to. I squinted. He was large. His body was shaped like a pear.

  A black man came through a gate in a white picket fence I hadn’t seen before.

  “Rufus,” said the fat man, “this is not the drowning gink.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Will you two fuck-ups get Mr. Deemer out of that pool right now!”

  Rufus had a big grin on his face as he leaned over me and pulled me up, while Henry heft ed from below. I didn’t think my legs would support my weight, so I sat on the concrete deck and tried not to throw up.

  “Hey, boss,” said Rufus, “while we’re on the subject of the pool, we had frogs again this morning.”

  “Damn, how many?”

  “Ten.”

  “Ten?”

  “Yeah, I called Posh Pools. Guy said ’bout all we could do is build a small-animal fence around it.” Rufus giggled. “A frog fence.”

  “We’ve got a real frog problem this summer,” the fat man said to me. “Like a biblical plague on the suburbs. Frogs hop in the pool thinking it’s a country pond, I guess. Well, they can’t get back out. Next morning we got dead frogs on the bottom. Rufus, you and Henry get on out of here while I talk with Mr. Deemer.”

  “Handcuff s,” I said in a chlorine-burned voice.

  “Why, hell, I almost forgot. Rufus—”

  Rufus unlocked me and took the handcuff s away. Deep red rings circled my wrists, but I didn’t rub them.

  “Rufus, we’ll have two iced teas made the way I like it, with a sprig.”

  The fat man pulled up two director’s chairs. His ass strained the wooden arms apart as he sat in his. He had a brush mustache. Dripping, I sat in the other chair. We sat facing each other in a puddle of weird white light shining down on us from the tree trunks. “I’m glad we can have this talk, Mr. Deemer. I’m sure we can straighten things out, but time is of the essence. People, you see, are closing in on me. I have this closed-in feeling—”

  “You probably need a bigger chair.”

  “Ha! Good one. Some robust fellows like myself take exception to fat jokes and grow nonplussed. Not me. I take them in the spirit they were meant. You see, the fact is, I’m in trouble, I’m in deep shit, as someone as crass as Henry might put it. I need to take extraordinary measures. Normally, I don’t snatch people I want to talk to off the street. Normally, I invite them to lunch, talk sense with them, not drown them. The world is out of joint, as the bard used to say.”

  “So you snatched Crystal, too?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What have you done with her?”

  Rufus arrived with the iced tea. I drank it to ease the burning at the back of my throat.

  The fat man looked up at the sky as if it displeased him. “Rufus, the lights are too bright. Take them back to the late-dusk effect.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  “I want my glasses,” I said.

  “Where are his glasses, Rufus?”

  “I don’t know. Lost in the scuffle, I guess,” said Rufus, and then he left. Soon afterward the lights dimmed.

  “I heard about the scuffle,” the fat man said to me. “I heard you stabbed Barry with an ice pick. Got him good, I hear. You’re a violent man.”

  “I carry that ice pick to gouge dog shit out of the treads in my shoes.”

  “So we’re talking raging septic infections in Barry? No matter, Barry’s an asshole. You know the type—attends martial arts classes, collects Nazi paraphernalia. But then sometimes that’s just the kind of man one needs.”

  “You’re Tiny Archibald, aren’t you?”

  “The sarcasm of that application troubles me some, but I know it’s widespread. Reggie is my real na
me. Reggie Archibald. You recognize me. I still find it gratifying to be recognized.”

  “What have you done with Crystal?”

  “Nothing. Restrained her, that’s all.”

  “What do you mean you restrained her? Like you restrained Bruce?”

  “Personnel management is the hardest thing in business. How can a man control the way his employees go at things? Their methodologies? They’re just following orders. My orders were to find out if Bruce Munger—vulgar surname, huh?—was stupid enough to help Trammell stage his death. Sure enough. So you recognize me? I used to be in show business. You’re in show biz, too. Trammell was in the biz as well. Remember? Here, I’ll do it for you: ‘Come on, son, we’ll get that old motor going yet.’ That ring any bells from your cultural past? One can’t have grown up in the U. S. of A. without recognizing that. Part of our cultural currency. ‘The Mayhews.’ Everybody’s heard of ‘The Mayhews.’ Bingo and Milt Mayhew. Their adorable son, Timmy. Trammell was like a son to me, not just a TV son, a real son. Now look how he’s betrayed me. It hurts an old man to lose his son. Don’t think it doesn’t.”

  “How?”

  “How what?”

  “How did he betray you?”

  “He made a videotape—TV is the tumor that will kill this country; I’ve seen your dog on TV—a videotape which, let’s just leave it, would incriminate me. I’m not an honest man, Artie.”

  “No shit.”

  “But with me, there’s a philosophical component. I love to corrupt. Or assist people to corrupt themselves. I expose the darkness at the core, the intrinsic darkness of humanity. It’s deeply satisfying work.”

  “Let Crystal go, and I’ll give you whatever I’ve got, I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

  “Gee, that’s very cooperative. Trammell was cooperative like that, but then, look what he went and did…Trammell is alive. That makes for a big problem. I don’t have any problem with Trammell skimming a few hundred grand off the top, but this tape business, that’s a different matter entirely. That could lead to publicity, if not prosecution. Some of the folks I deal with tend to shun publicity. The dark of night is their milieu. A few of them want their money back—I can take care of that—but they all want silence. The tape is the problem. For all I know, Trammell’s taken the tape and entered the witness protection program; however, the half-assed manner of his going, with some poolroom lout as the only witness, suggests haste. In any case, my customers feel they’re in danger.”

  “The CI A?”

  “Oh, sure, they need the services I offer to cover their extracurricular activities, which in most cases are stupid as shit, but then I’m not my customers’ keeper.”

  “So you run a bank for criminals?”

  “I know you disapprove of me. All honest people—both of them—disapprove of me. Sometimes I disapprove of me. But that brings us into philosophical waters, and you’ve already had a swim. Let’s remain on concrete ground, hmm?” Tiny Archibald must have weighed 350 pounds buck naked, which would have been an unappetizing sight. He was wearing a natty blue suit with a red tie and a matching pocket handkerchief. His loafers were fashioned from the skins of endangered species.

  “Why did you kidnap Crystal? I don’t see what that gains you.”

  “Crystal is bait in the search for Trammell Weems. And, of course, there’s you. I understand you and Crystal are in love. I understand further that you used to hang out with Trammell. In law school.” He giggled at that notion. “I also know that your records weren’t stellar among students of jurisprudence. I have nearly unlimited access to information. I know every move you make. I know about your dog. You’re well placed, for my purposes. Trammell’s going to get wind of the fact that Crystal’s been kidnapped. He cares about Crystal, don’t mistake that. He’s going to come looking for her. If I were him, you’d be one of the first people I talked to. When he does that, call me, and then I’ll return Crystal to you.”

  I pretended that we were talking about a real estate deal in which I had only financial interest. “You’re going to hold her prisoner until Trammell turns up?”

  “Right. Like I said, I’m usually a congenial fellow, but I don’t have time for social niceties now, so there we are. What do you think?”

  “Presumably you’re going to let me go?”

  “Absolutely.” He began patting himself for a pen. He found one, then laboriously extracted his wallet. He thumbed through a sheaf of business and credit cards, but he didn’t seem to find the one he wanted, so he picked another. He turned that one face-down on his knee and wrote on it a telephone number with a Manhattan area code. “I can always be reached here.”

  “Where are you keeping Crystal?”

  “Now, come on, Artie, do you take me for an imbecile?”

  “I had to ask.” I smiled falsely. “You know how it is, Tiny, you’d do the same thing in my position. Good tea. I have one request, no, one stipulation. Crystal and I have been followed. I’m still being followed. I want you to get everybody off my tail. I won’t have any room to operate, and I’ll get that same closed-in feeling you have. Besides, Trammell’s not going to approach if he sees twenty assholes trailing me. See what I’m saying, Tiny?”

  He cocked his big head suspiciously to consider me out of the corner of his eye. “Well, okay.”

  “Is Crystal comfortable?”

  “She’s not uncomfortable. She won’t be harmed or molested in any way, but she won’t have complete freedom of movement. If this works out, all she will have been is frightened, maybe a little bored. Anything else?”

  “No, I guess that’ll do it.”

  “Now I’m going to call Rufus out here to handcuff you again.”

  “Why?”

  “Then he’s going to blindfold you. It’s either that or another dose of ether.”

  I stood submissively while Rufus gathered my arms behind my back and clicked the handcuff s snugly around my wrist bones. He pulled a black hood over my head and down around my shoulders. Utter blackness. I began to pant in fear.

  “Just like for your execution, right, Artie?”

  “Tiny—?” Did the hood smother my voice?

  “Yeah, Artie?”

  “I just want you to know that I pissed in your pool.”

  From far away, on the other side of the dark, I heard Tiny laugh heartily. “That’s okay, everybody pisses in my pool.”

  THIRTEEN

  THEY REMOVED MY handcuffs and shoved me, still hooded, out the door.

  “Ta-ta, now,” said Rufus. By the time I yanked off the hood, threw it down, the van had already pulled back into the traffic heading south. I might have gotten the license number, but without my glasses I could barely see the cars. I stood soggily, trying to figure out where the goons had dropped me.

  Two emaciated winos stopped mid-swig to watch me. “Neighborhood keeps gettin’ weirder and weirder.”

  “Where’s it gonna end?”

  There was a major intersection forming a square. There are dozens of squares formed by major intersections in Manhattan, but I couldn’t really be sure I was in Manhattan.

  Though blurry, this square looked vaguely familiar. I walked to the nearest street sign and squinted up. West End Avenue and Broadway. Okay. This was the northern terminus of West End Avenue where it merged into Broadway. The cross street would be 106th. I was only two blocks from home. How convenient.

  My shoes squished all the way. I took the elevator to the eighth floor and walked up the rest of the way, slowly and quietly. There was no one lurking on my floor. I quickly opened the door, slipped into my apartment, and flipped about $300 worth of dead bolts to the locked position.

  Forlornly, Jellyroll lay in the dark in the foyer with his chin between his paws. I made a big fuss over him so he wouldn’t worry, but you can’t fool this dog. He followed me into the bedroom, stopping to sniff each wet piece of clothing as I shed it en route. Naked and uncertain, I returned to the living room, sat in my morris chair, and ponde
red the question at hand. I was pissed. I rolled up a thin gasper for objective perspective, but I remained fuzzy-headed and pissed.

  A bloated felon named Tiny Archibald had kidnapped Crystal. The question for me was, what was I going to do about it? Try to forget anger, fear, outrage, and think strategically. I could call the cops. That was the usual response when your lover (not to mention yourself) gets kidnapped. But how could I know how the cops would handle it? If they acted crudely, Archibald might make Crystal disappear forever. He said himself the heat was on, that he felt closed in upon, the miserable runny-ass, arrogant, obese son of a bitch—wait, that was anger. Anger was a luxury Crystal and I couldn’t afford, anger would lead to missteps, and missteps could get Crystal killed. But why did I think I could handle it better than trained professionals on the police force?…Pros like Detective DiPietro.

  I retrieved my wet shorts from the living-room floor and found Tiny Archibald’s card in the pocket. His number was running blue ink, so I wrote it on the wall near the phone. 555-4100. Wait, that rang a bell. I knew that number. Why? I fumbled DiPietro’s card out of the kitchen drawer where I’d stowed it earlier. His number was 555-4200. I called Archibald’s number—

  “Hello,” said another recorded melodious woman’s voice, “you’ve reached Mr. Archibald’s line. Please leave a message after the tone.”

  I put on some thinking music. I wanted to hear a lot of notes, and I wanted them fast, I wanted hard-driving, brain-blasting bebop, goddamnit. I cranked up the volume. For vocalists I picked Babs Gonzalez and King Pleasure. Thinking: what did I know about Tiny’s location? I knew that he went to some extremes to keep it a secret—the blindfold and so forth—unless that was more for intimidation than secrecy. What else did I know? That it was about an hour’s drive from New York City. Chet Bream might know—the tape he’d described on the beach sounded as if it might have been shot at Tiny’s place. But I didn’t want to get mixed up with Chet Bream, because journalists tend to publish things, and an article in a major metropolitan newspaper didn’t seem in Crystal’s best interests. So what else did I know? There were a lot of trees. And the big swimming pool…