Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (13 page)

“We can do better than that, Mr. Noir. A lot better.” And the hand on my leg slid upward. “Pfizer is a giant cash machine. The big money in America used to be in gold or oil or manufacturing cars, but now it’s in feel-good pharmaceuticals. Half of all Americans are on medications now, and in ten years that number will be up to three-quarters. We’re developing drugs to combat discouragement, boredom, ennui, revulsion, fear of death, all the negative emotions once considered inevitable in life, and these drugs can keep a person’s chemistry beautifully balanced at a high peak of lightheartedness. In ten years, nobody in America will experience loneliness at all. It will disappear, like smallpox. Pfizer has been working on a weight-loss drug for years, and we think that your drug can give us a new angle. It’s rather crude. Side effects include dizziness, heightened libido, loss of inhibitions, and flatulence. You give that pill to a thousand people, and you’ll have about 128 of them running around naked, throwing themselves at strangers, and farting up a storm. Whatever Pfizer develops will be nothing so primitive as tapeworms, but the chemistry is interesting. And that’s why we need your queens. There’s some DNA there that we can’t retrieve through reverse engineering.”

Her hand was now up around my pants pocket. “Did you know that Pfizer owns the name Elongate? We trademarked it for the drug that came to be called Viagra instead. So we have grounds for an enormous messy lawsuit that I’m afraid would be personally disastrous for you, sweetheart. Pfizer uses attorneys as casually as you and I use Q-tips. I could make a phone call this afternoon, and tomorrow morning you’d have a man at your door with a two-pound subpoena, and you’d be in for four years of misery that would leave you limp as a used tea bag and a couple million in debt. Miss Fallopian can gallivant around Paris, heedless of American law, but here you are, easy prey. Why go down that chute and land in the sewer? And that doesn’t include the misery of having the feds on your case. There are laws about drugs, you know. A drug like yours needs to be brought into the market very, very carefully, and that means seducing the FDA.”

I pulled back. Her hand had reached a critical spot.

“It isn’t a medication,” I said weakly. “It’s an entirely natural substance, like butter or cheese.”

“And what does the F in FDA stand for? Flatulence?”

“It’s not a food either. It’s an antifood.”

“Then it’s a med.”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted. If Pfizer wanted to put tapeworm eggs into pill form, surely they could figure out how to do it without my permission.

She took her hand off my leg. “Let me get to the point, sweetheart. We’d like your cooperation. We’ve got some questions about genetics. We need to find Mr. Ishimoto. We’d like to borrow some worms. He seems to have vanished into the woodwork. And because I like you, Mr. Noir—I like you a lot—and I mean that—I’m honor bound to tell you that Pfizer has some rough people working for it. We’re not all English majors, darling. Some of our people got an MFA in the art of nasty. There are medications that can turn very nice people into bloodsucking fiends with shaved heads and mirror shades who get a kick out of scaring people into involuntary bowel movements. Men with no family, no friends, who spend their nights at the gym and do three hundred crunches at a sitting and then four hundred push-ups. Men who are programmed to attack on command.”

She made a good case—that Pfizer needed the tapeworm queens and was willing to unleash the dogs of war to get it. I saw no need to tell her that the queens were bad queens and that they were gone, probably in the possession of the Bogus Brothers. I could still make a deal, sell the worms to Scarlett, avoid being pounded to a pulp, walk away with a bundle, and then disappear before Pfizer was any the wiser. Why not? Naomi had two best-selling books and a booming business in China. She was out in the Milky Way somewhere, circling the Pleiades. I ran a daily Google search on her, and she was here, there, and everywhere talking about
The Blessing of Less
as the answer to all of mankind’s problems—it and its sequel,
The Loss of Austerity,
sold like iced lemonade in Hades—and she bought herself an eighteen-room apartment in a co-op on Fifth Avenue so exclusive that the Dalai Lama had been turned down by the co-op board, and so had Toni Morrison, Archbishop Tutu, Mr. Rogers, and Elie Wiesel. I called Naomi’s number over and over and over and got a personal assistant—a different one each time—Anna, Brianna, Arianna, Madison, Addison, Natalie, Destiny, Brooklyn—
Brooklyn??
Yes, Brooklyn. A twenty-two-year-old with a breathy voice, drop-dead polite, like all of them, and she had
no idea
where Naomi was or who I was or why, and she wrote down all my information, as did Anna, Brianna, Arianna, et al.—slips of paper accumulated with my name and number on them, and no call from Naomi.

So I was on my own.

PFIZER DID NOT BELIEVE IN
Lessness. I knew that much. It had earned gazillions from Viagra and from a super form of Viagra called Biagra that gives a man an erection for eight to ten hours and that nursing homes and hospitals gave to old men at night to keep them from rolling out of bed. And then there was Niagra for urinary tract problems, which makes an old man piss like a palomino. And Miagra, a pacifier that calms anxiety and also induces forgetfulness, so you are likely to take all of your pills a second or third time, thus giving Pfizer sales a nice boost. If Pfizer wanted to hire a couple of shooters to ding my bell, they had the dough to do it. If they could grease the skids for that $200 billion federal giveaway to the big pharms in the Medicare drug program—the day Congress put all of its principles into cold storage and promised to pay
full retail price
for Gamma and Gampy’s Lipitor and not negotiate a deal—then Pfizer could handle an old gumshoe like me.

I rubbed my nose. I tugged on my chin. I looked out the window and crossed and uncrossed my legs. It didn’t take me long to decide to capitulate. I said, softly, “I can get you a worm. Do you want it dead or alive?”

“Either one works for us.”

“Give me an hour, and I’ll have what you want,” I said. We shook hands. She ordered a BLT and an extra-large latte. She intended to stay right there.

17

Mr. Banana comes to town

I WENT UPSTAIRS TO MY
devastated office and looked around in the drifts of debris for the envelope with the death pills. Larry B. Larry’s goons had pulled handfuls of papers from the drawers and flung them every which way, and you know? If someone had stuck a radio transmitter in my scrotum, I might’ve been out for revenge, too. I searched through the mess, and as I did, it occurred to me that (1) I was never going to return to the twelfth floor of the Acme Building and (2) I was not going to miss the old dump much. What a misspent life. A 1978 calendar from Sam’s Clam Disco. A poster for
Splendor in the Grass
starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. A pink boa, a souvenir of some party, a vague memory in a cloud of gin, and a pink polka-dot hanky, probably from the same party. A box of matchbooks from the Capriccio Hotel in Vegas. An ad for comedian Eddie Rictus at the Can Can Casino. Some old detective paperbacks:
The Blonde in 204, Close Cover Before Striking, Dead Men Don’t Shop
. A wall plaque, glass broken:
IT’S BETTER TO GO OUT BURNISHED FROM USE THAN RUSTING FROM PRINCIPLE.
A bronzed fruitcake, courtesy of Thompson Tooth Tinsel. A newspaper story on a survey that showed that the rate of infidelity among women named Evelyn is very low. A sheet of coupons good for 25 percent off at the Hat Hut. A black sweatshirt that said,
GO AHEAD, ASK ME. THE ANSWER IS YES.
A recipe for The Seven Joys of General Tsao Chicken Almond Ding. A paper fan with a picture of Charles Wesley and underneath “Epworth League, Seward, Nebraska.” Two tickets to the Schoolbus Demolition Derby at the Minnesota State Fair. From some catalog, a picture of a girl in a skimpy outfit: “Our shimmering silky flip skirt will make you the belle of the ball, especially topped off with our oh-so-naughty lace tee, festooned with hand embroidered butterflies.”

And the picture of Nevaeh in the Pontiac. Ah, Nevaeh.
Why did you do it? Thank you for doing it. You shouldn’t have done it. What are you doing to me?

I didn’t hear the footsteps in the hall.

“Hey, Numb Nuts. Wake up and die right.”

It was Lieutenant McCafferty in the doorway, in his customary green plaid jacket and porkpie hat, the bulge under the left arm. He looked around at the devastation. “Looks like you survived a tornado, Noir. Consider yourself lucky.” He kicked a pile of folders aside and plopped down in my client chair. “Gimme a shot of your whiskey,” he said, and I dug out the bottle from the bottom file drawer and found a Dixie cup and poured him a shot. “I been dealing with losers all day, I need a little elegance in my life. Ignorance and cruelty and greed, that’s my daily diet. This morning I hadda deal with a little punk who shoved his grandma down the stairs. Two flights. Old lady in a print dress, hair up in a bun, lying there at the bottom of the stairs, two minutes after she’d made him breakfast. Eggs and cottage fries and bacon. Eggs over easy. He wanted sunny-side up. So boom, down the stairs she went.”

He gave me a long, lingering look. “Hey, you look pretty good, buddy boy. I hear the ladies are climbing all over you.”

“I’ve been working out and watching my diet, lieutenant.”

He snorted. “Hell you have. You’ve been ingesting illegal drugs, and you’ve been selling them on the open market. You got Bac-O Bits for brains, buddy boy. And you’re in more trouble than you ever thought possible. You ever hear of Johnny Banana?”

“
The
Johnny Banana?”

“There is but one. The capo del capo del grande primo capo. And also the recto del recto del recto del humungo recto, if you’re up on your Italian. He came to town looking for you, buddy boy. He’s up in the penthouse suite at the St. Paul Hotel, with ten pinstripe guys the size of refrigerators, and he’s sitting and tapping his foot and chewing on his cigar, and he’s saying your name under his breath over and over. The word is out: you’re a marked man. These boys aren’t playing tiddlywinks. They want you bad, and when they get you, they’re gonna squeeze you hard, and then they’re gonna include you in some construction project.”

“Does Joey know about this?”

The lieutenant laughed. “Joey is a sardine. When the killer shark comes on the scene, the sardines find a rock to hide under.”

“What does he want?”

“You, buddy boy. He wants you.”

“I may need your protection, Lieutenant.”

McCafferty chuckled. “Lots of people maybe need my protection, Noir. Fourteen-year-old girls out on their first dates may need my protection, and folks purchasing a home unaware of the plumbing problems, and folks who leave the potato salad sitting in the sun too long, and maybe someone has taken too big a bite of porterhouse steak and isn’t chewing it properly, but we can’t protect everybody, can we? Somewhere this very minute a blind man may be crossing a busy street against a red light. Somewhere there are oily rags close to a frayed extension cord. I’m not Clark Kent, pal.”

I mentioned to him that as a peace officer, he had an obligation, and he held up his hand—“I don’t know nothing about it, Noir, and I wasn’t here, and anybody who says so is a liar.” And he finished his whiskey and upped and left. The door clicked shut, and my heart jumped. It sounded like the hammer of a gun.

I SAT IN MY OFFICE,
and I tried to scope out a plan. Nuts to Scarlett and Pfizer. I’d clean out my savings account and head north. Birch had a cabin on Lake Watab near Avon. I could cool my heels in the woods and catch up on my reading and wait for Mr. Banana to get bored and go away. I removed a couple ceiling tiles where I’d stashed a hundred packs of Elongate and my old .38 snub-nosed revolver and a box of shells, and I fished my Rolodex out of the debris and dropped it all in a Dayton’s shopping bag, and then my phone rang.
UNKNOWN CALLER
, it said on the screen. A second ring.
ANSWER THE PHONE
, it said. A third ring.
HEAR ME, MR. NOIR??
So I clicked
answer.

A voice at the other end sounded like a load of gravel sliding down a chute. “Mr. Noir, this is Johnny. Johnny Banana. I’d like to meet with you. Right away.” It was the voice of a man who’s been drinking whiskey on a daily basis with battery acid for a chaser and smoking acetylene cigarettes. If concrete blocks could talk, they’d sound like that voice.

“What a pleasant surprise,” I said. “I was hoping you had come to town to see me. It’s been a long time, sir.”

“A long time since what?”

“We met once before. In Chicago. At Benny’s.”

I was lying through my ears. Also I was sneaking down the stairs as tippy-toe as possible toward where my car was parked, in the alley by the back door to Nacho Mama.

“Benny?” he said. “Benny who?”

“Well, he went by a whole bunch of names.”

“You mean Benny Brunello?”

“Yeah. The big guy. With the eyebrows. Right?”

I was in the alley now and putting the key in the car door.

“What’s that sound?” he said. “You on your way somewhere?”

“On my way to wherever you want to meet,” I said. “But you better hurry because my battery is about to die. In fact, I think—” And I clicked off the cell phone. I got in the car and raced onto I-94 heading north toward Avon. Traffic was light through the Loring Tunnel and past the Basilica of St. Mary. I had six grand on me. I wondered if I should go back to the bank and get more. I got off the freeway and circled around behind the basilica to meditate on what to do. It’s a big basilica, and it casts a long shadow. I punched in Birch’s number on the phone and was about to call her and ask where the key to the cabin was hidden—
on the porch, under a bait bucket,
I thought—and there was no answer.
Naomi.
I dialed her number, and—a miracle!—she answered. “
Namaste
,” she said. I heard water bubbling in the background and women ululating, accompanied by drums and tiny bells.

“
Namaste
yourself, babes. This is your security man, and I am about to go into a permanent weight-loss program, the kind you do underground in a narrow wooden box.”

“I can’t deal with this right now.”

“You can’t? Well, think how I feel.”

She was at a spa in the Adirondacks called Serenity Springs. Lying in a hot mineral bath while someone named Jorge massaged her face with mint leaves. He was whispering something to her, something about leaving all anxiety and conflictedness behind.

“My yoga session is at two. I’ll call you afterward,” she said in a serene voice.

“There is no afterward. Afterward doesn’t exist. Serenity is not applicable here. I’m in deep trouble, kid. My little boat is drifting toward Niagara, I need to get ashore.”

She sighed. “I wish you the inner peace of a harmonious heart,” she said. And then she said, “Oh, wow.” And then dial tone. I pulled out of the basilica parking lot and back onto I-94 and put the pedal to the metal, thinking about Birch’s little cabin in the pines, also estimating how long I could live on six thousand dollars. And then I saw movement in the rearview mirror, and a man’s voice behind me said, “Easy does it, Mr. Noir. Let’s pull off at the next exit and have us a little conversation.”

I TOOK THE DOWLING EXIT
and drove west to Crystal Lake cemetery and drove in, slowly, and stopped next to a statue of a weeping angel and a headstone that said, B
ELOW THIS HUMBLE MONUMENT THERE LIES, MUZZLED WITH DUST, HER SOUL IN
P
ARADISE, OUR CHERISHED DAUGHTER QUICKLY FLED TO THE IMMORTAL LIVING FROM THE DEAD.
C
ORINNE.

The man in the backseat slipped slowly out of the car and stood by my window for a moment and then strolled around the front of the car and opened the door and sat in the shotgun seat. He was short and plump, with moisturized skin and caramelized hair, in a black short-sleeve silk shirt and black spangly pants, skintight, and sandals with tassels. If he was packing a gun, he had concealed it awfully well. He smelled of an exotic fragrance, sweet and lemony, and he smiled an insincere smile. “I’m Cliff Kress, chief acceptance officer, Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Noir.” He snapped open his billfold and flashed an ID with a gold seal on it.

“What a coincidence. I was just about to call you, Mr. Kress.”

He shook his head, as if I had said something very dumb. “Please spare me the persiflage, Mr. Noir. I’m not in the mood.”

I pressed on. “I have so much I want to tell you, Mr. Kress. I don’t know where to start.”

“Let’s start with you shutting up,” he said. I could see by his bemused expression that he was onto me. He looked like Miss MacDonald looked when I told her I had forgotten my book report on the bus.

“I am a private investigator, Mr. Kress, and I’ve been working undercover trying to get the goods on these shysters who are selling parasites to the American people. And I finally have succeeded in tracing the chain of command up to Mr. Big. An old man named Joey. And he asked me to make you an offer. One hundred thousand-dollar bills, the ones with Mr. Grover Cleveland on them. We can have them in your hands by tomorrow morning. Nine a.m.”

“I’m not for sale. Been bought already.” He laughed a hard, worldly laugh.

“Mr. Noir, you and I are grown men. Let’s not waste time playing footsie. You’re selling a drug called Elongate. You’re earning a lot of money from it. Uncle Sam doesn’t like it when you put a drug out there without asking permission. The FDA has lawyers who practically come to climax at the thought of prosecuting people like yourself.”

I was about to say something about the presumption of innocence, and he held up his hand. “Hear me out, Mr. Noir. It’s not what you think it is.” He reached over and switched on the radio.

“Just in case your car is bugged, sir.”

It was a jazz station. A breathy woman sang:

I get no kick from cocaine.

Mere crystal meth doesn’t take away my breath

But kick me, darling, please do

And I’ll get a kick out of you.

Mr. Kress leaned over and said in a quiet voice: “I’m retiring from the FDA in three weeks, Mr. Noir. And I’m taking a job with Pfizer. I’m leaving public service at $71,000 a year, and I’m joining Pfizer for $385,000 a year. Not a difficult decision. So I guess you can figure out why I’m here. Two months ago, my friends at Pfizer would’ve been happy to negotiate a deal with you, but the time for talk has passed, Mr. Noir. You stood up Scarlett Anderson an hour ago. That wasn’t very smart of you.”

“I went up to my office to get the stuff she asked for and someone had trashed the place.”

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a folded paper.

“Just sign this, Mr. Noir, and your troubles are over.”

I glanced at the paper. It seemed to be a transfer of all rights pertaining to Elongate or any weight-loss product whatsoever.

“What about Naomi? What about Mr. Ishimoto?”

“They’ve signed it already.”

“What about Johnny Banana?”

Mr. Kress turned a slight shade of pale. “What about Johnny Banana?” The name set off Mr. Kress’s internal alarm system, no doubt about it. Very interesting.

“I just sold him my interest in Elongate this morning. I’ve got his number here if you want to call it.” I lied in a calm businesslike tone, the way a person is supposed to. I scrolled up the call register and gave him McCafferty’s number.

I couldn’t tell if Mr. Kress was buying the story or not. “I’ll get back to you,” he said. He turned the radio off and pulled out his cell phone and pressed a button, and a minute later I could hear a helicopter descending. It landed about fifty yards away, and he walked to it and climbed in. On the fuselage it said:
PFIZER
.
And up it went into the sky, the air pounding with the beat of the rotors until it disappeared beyond the river, heading east.

He hadn’t told me to wait around so I didn’t. I turned the car around and headed toward St. Paul on I94. There would be no Avon for me until I could reach Naomi. I was 100 percent sure she had signed no transfer of rights whatsoever. Well, I was 85 percent sure—anyone who had written a book called
The Blessing of Less
was conceivably capable of throwing away a fortune. I called Mr. Ishimoto, and he denied having signed a paper for Mr. Kress. His voice sounded odd on the phone, though. Like maybe someone had a loop of piano wire around his neck.