Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny (3 page)

“You preach about love, but none of you has enough warmth in you to melt snow,” she cried. “I don’t know how much of the Bible is true and how much is just a bad dream, but I do believe that if Jesus lived in St. Paul, he wouldn’t be sitting around in this school of sanctimony congratulating himself on what a nice person he is. He’d be walking up and down Selby Avenue just like I do.”

And she marched out of Chapel and never returned, and when I met her three years later, she was dancing seven nights a week at the Kit Kat Klub near the Union Depot, a murky after-hours joint that catered to barge hands and railroad men who needed to get hammered and look at bare skin and shove dollar bills in the dancers’ underwear. The Folies Bergère it was not. Most of the dancers were long past prime and starting to sag, and Naomi was fresh-faced and perky and bouncy and she reminded those old galoots of girls they wished they had dated in high school and there she was doing the Hitchhiker in a sequinny G-string with smiley-face stickers on her nipples that she peeled off, and concluded her performance by tossing the G-string into the crowd. I took a fatherly interest in her and protected her from Dave the comedian (“Hey, who wants to see my tits????”)
and Jervis the manager, who liked to stroll into the dressing room without knocking, and
the mouth breathers who hunkered up close to the footlights, gaping at her, stuffing ten-dollar bills into her butt crack. The crisp new bills scratched her there, and she sometimes asked me to apply Vaseline to the affected area, which I did, respectfully, in a brisk businesslike manner, taking no liberties. I always bought her a beer after her shift and advised her on career matters—she wanted to become an actress and get into the movies—and I persuaded her to enroll at the University of Minnesota, and helped with her tuition, and I fended off her ex-boyfriends who hung around in the alley, pining. I told them, “She’s moving on, fellows, so wish her well and count yourselves lucky to have known her and now get the hell out of here.” She graduated from the U
magna non troppo
and I attended the ceremony and took her to dinner at Vescio’s and urged her to apply for the Mary Magdalene fellowship at St. Kate’s, and she did, and eventually she sort of drifted away, as so many do when they get a Ph.D.

She quit stripping and joined the women’s studies department at the university and wrote a book,
Post-Masculine Dimensions,
in which she held my gender responsible for all human suffering—MENtal illness, MENstrual cramps, disappointMENt, MENopause, HISterectomies, MALEvolence, ballistics, penal colonies, dictators, prickly heat, et cetera. I bought ten copies and subscribed to
Estrogen Times
and read the articles she wrote, and a few years later I got an e-mail:
Guy darling, it’s your old friend from burlesque days (remember me?).
I did remember her, the way you’d remember the Washington Monument if you ever saw it lit up at night, or the French Quarter if you’d been lit up yourself.
I live over in Minneapolis now, near Dinkytown, and I have a problem. Could you help?

I met her at Al’s Breakfast Nook, and she was stunning as ever, though she wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a black pinstripe suit to mute her allure. She missed the old life, she said: the smell of cheap gin and cigars, the gutbucket music, the grunts and whoops, and the rank odor of men in rut. “I felt empowered by showing my body to men. I felt no shame whatsoever. The power a girl has when she dares to undress is breathtaking. All those sad old faces turned up toward me in dazed wonderment as if they’d never seen a bare breast before, let alone a matched pair, and those gnarly hands reaching up for the flying G-string, and that look of transfiguration when I showed them what they had hoped to see. I felt so
iconic.
I fed their dreams. I gave them a beautiful sense of self-worth that they could carry back to the switchyards and endure the cold wind off the river and the back-breaking work of loading boxcars and barges. I feel deracinated in academia. Uprooted. And the pay is miserable. How can a person live on thirty grand a year unless you’re a nun? I want to ride first-class on the California Zephyr to San Francisco and stay at the Huntington and have oysters and champagne for breakfast and sleep on Egyptian sheets with a fabulous thread count and have someone bring me coffee in the morning and a massage in the afternoon!”

Sitting over breakfast with her, I realized that my feelings for her were no longer paternal. I had fallen in love,
boom
, like an anvil dropping from a tree.

I could take care of the coffee,
I thought.
And the massage. And I could sleep next to you and keep you from falling out of bed.

The problem she wished me to solve had to do with her boyfriend, a novelist (unpublished) named Scott Marigold who believed that someone was scheming to steal his work and so he wrote in code, and now he’d forgotten the code, and he was bereft and had lost all interest in life, and would I please find a cryptographer who could decipher the work? She showed me a line:

BIQ SUATRO MEECH KWERTY NISK REMPLON NAMLEREP TRIXLY SWISK THEBBRILIP PO ENNER SKWILM.

“Child’s play,” I said. “This passage here,
Biq suatro meech kwerty,
and so forth, means ‘She had big bazooms, and I loved it when she spread peanut butter on them and knelt over me and whopped them upside my head.’”

“Really? That doesn’t sound like Scott.”

“It’s what he wrote.”

“How could you figure it out so fast?”

“I’m a savant. No social skills and I’ve never been able to win the love of a real woman, but I’m a whiz with complex puzzles.”

She put her hand on mine and said, “Oh, Guy—”

I said, “Don’t worry about me, darling, I’m glad you’re happy. Really.”

“I didn’t say I was happy.” Big tears in her eyes. “I think Scott has found someone else. We have sex and I say ‘Thank you’
and he says ‘No problem.’
Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?”

I nodded. A man who’s just had sex with Naomi should be breathless, stunned, astonished, singing “My Way” in French.

“I wish he’d say ‘It was my pleasure’
or ‘I love you’
or ‘On a scale of one to ten, that was a nine-point-five’
—
anything but ‘No problem.’
‘No problem’
is what the carry-out boy at the Super Valu says when you thank him for loading the groceries into your trunk. I am not a bag of groceries, am I?”

We said good-bye, and she clung to me for a long, wonderful moment. “I need you, Guy,” she said. I thought,
Baby, what do you need with a third-rate detective thirty years older, with hair loss issues and flabby abs and droopy delts?
But if she needed me, then she needed me, and who was I to argue?

THAT VERY EVENING NAOMI DISCOVERED
a blue silk garter belt in Mr. Marigold’s computer bag, which he claimed not to know where it came from, which was not believable, and she told him they were through, and he said, “No problem,” and she tried to strangle him with the belt and almost succeeded. The next morning it was on the front page:

U WOMAN PROF TRIES TO THROTTLE LOVER; ARRAIGNED ON FELONY ASSAULT CHARGE; COLLEAGUES SAY: “SHE SURE WAS DIFFERENT.”

AND THE NEXT MORNING
Birch Bergquist of Bergquist, Batten, Bicker, Buttress & Bark, offices two floors below me in the Acme Building, called to say she was representing Naomi and could I come down a.s.a.p. for a confab?

I had bumped into Miss Bergquist occasionally in the elevator and assumed she was someone’s receptionist—the pouty lips, the bluish eye shadow, the blouse slightly unbuttoned—but here she was, a full-fledged attorney, in her leatherbound-book-lined office, certificates on the wall, behind an oak desk the size of a billiard table, and wearing a Mount Rushmore tank top so tight you could keep close track of her respiration. Those four guys never looked so good, especially Washington and Lincoln. Just looking at her gave me chest pains. No signs of brassiere seams whatsoever. I could imagine her saying, “Help me off with this,” as we stood one evening in the penthouse suite of the
Bel Canto,
candles flickering beside the bed.

“It’s my day off,” she said. “I was heading for my boyfriend’s stepmother’s ex-husband’s birthday party when Naomi called from jail.”

The mention of a boyfriend woke me right up, as if she had jerked my leash and said “Sit.” Nonetheless she was a dreamboat. Good skin care, good posture, and an outstanding tank top.

“Naomi’s the impulsive sort, and she and that jerk novelist had been on the outs for a long time. I’m talking to the DA’s office to get this reduced to simple assault, but the DA is a lady, and she’s had a spate of sexual harassment cases involving high-profile men, and she sees this as a chance to show she can prosecute a woman too, so we may have to go to trial on attempted homicide, which is ludicrous, but there you are. I need you to dig up the dirt on the boyfriend and find out where the garter belt came from.”

No problemo. Mr. Marigold was no novelist, just a doink with novelist hair and a big attitude, and the garter belt came from a topless dancer named Ruby Doobie who worked the BoomBoom Room of the Xtasy Club, a seedy sex warehouse in Minneapolis, and who’d been dancing on the boyfriend’s lap. Her real name was Kirsten Hammersmith. She told me that the garter belt was not silk but a breakaway type made of thin tissue. It wasn’t strong enough to strangle a tree toad. I also discovered that Mr. Marigold visited pornographic websites for men who fantasize about big-bosomed women who smack you for not eating your vegetables. And he sent pictures of himself, naked, to numerous Congresswomen.

This all came out at the trial. Miss Bergquist portrayed Naomi as a good teacher, a caring colleague, an erudite scholar, a cat lady, a reader of scholarly journals, hardly a homicidal type, and the prosecution portrayed her as a slut who put herself through grad school by showing her tits. They played a video of her twirling her pink-tipped twosome and lip-synching to Henny Penny’s “Back It Up, Baby, and Push”—but what stuck with the jury was the testimony of a woman named Herta Goethe who Mr. Marigold had paid $150 to rub anchovy paste all over his body. The jury was out for eighteen minutes. Innocent.

At the acquittal party Naomi gave me a big hug that went on and on, and there was real heat in her coral-blue eyes. “If not for you, I’d be in an orange jumpsuit, swabbing out toilets,” she said. “I owe my life to your ace detective work, my darling Mr. Noir.”

Not strictly true. The men of the jury appreciated the “Back It Up, Baby, and Push” video and also Naomi’s translucent blouse, whose top three buttons she kept unbuttoning and rebuttoning, offering glimpses of two freckled free-range breasts that the jurymen maybe hoped would fall out, and maybe acquittal would make the defendant jump up and down and those puppies would leap over the fence. But I wasn’t about to argue, not with her pressing herself against me in an interesting way, kissing me behind the ear, a spot that’s always been sensitive to me. She whispered, “You’re archetypal in a way I could get to like in a big hurry. If you kissed me forcefully right now, I might not resist as much as you’d expect an associate professor of women’s studies to do.”

Her voice was low and thrilling: “I don’t know anybody who gets me the way you do. And after I met you again at Al’s, Mr. Marigold lost whatever allure he ever had, that big nothing. I’ve thought of you hundreds of times since then. I’ve got a business proposition that might interest you. Let’s get together,” she said. “Tuesday. And please—call me Naomi.”

And then she stood up and hoisted her dress up over her head and danced on a tabletop in a thong so small, the laundry instructions had to be abbreviated (“Hnd wsh cld wtr”)—danced to “I Can’t Get Enough of Your Sweet Kanaka”—and when the song ended, she hopped down off the table and into my arms and whispered, “Don’t forget. Tuesday. Meet you at the Five Spot. In the back.” I was stunned. Still am, thinking about it. You could’ve hit me with a baseball bat, and I would’ve said, “Thank you.”

3

A winter afternoon in the Five Spot Saloon

TUESDAY WAS ONE OF THOSE
grim February days when winter seems permanent in Minnesota and everyone you see is bundled up so you can’t tell men from women, not that it matters when it’s so cold, you wouldn’t know what to do about gender anyway. Your lungs ache, your face is numb, your heart is a lump of anthracite in your chest. The sky is an aluminum lid on the frozen land; it says:
Surrender hope all ye poor huddled masses and wretched refuse who hunker here.
Steam pours from the implacable stone buildings of downtown St. Paul as if the end of the world were nigh. The Five Spot is three blocks from the Acme, and I ankled down the icy walk in a primate crouch, maintaining a low center of gravity, trying to keep myself balanced, like an acrobat poised on a teacup atop a rubber ball strapped to a roller skate, knowing that one slip could usher me into a world of lower back pain and Oxycontin and a physical therapist named Karen saying, “Good job!” if I’m able to put one foot in front of the other. So I kept my eyes glued to the treacherous sidewalk and then realized I had walked three blocks
past
the Five Spot, so I took care of some business on Exchange Street—stopped at the Beethoven Apartments to buzz 4R to ascertain that Mr. Louie Louey was there, as required by his bondsman Barry (The Handshake) O’Halloran, who’d put up the ten grand to spring Louie from Ramsey County jail where he was down for killing spotted owls for owlburgers. He was in 4R, napping. The Beethoven, by the by, was where Sugar O’Toole lived before she dumped me for Wally and moved to his trout farm near Willmar and also where Beatrice Olsen liaised with her secret lover and then dumped me for him, the librettist Brett Brackett, in case you are interested. A building I have many times looked at and wept.

From the Beethoven I passed under the dim flickering marquee of the Fitzgerald Theater (LOS PAMPAS CASA COMPANEROS, 5 PM ATURDAY), where I once attended martial arts movies with a lady shot-putter from St. Peter named Roxanne (Rocky) Nimitz. “You try any funny stuff with me and I’ll launch you into space,” she said. She was a big-boned gal, 285 pounds, close-cropped hair, disciple of Ayn Rand, All-American in women’s track, and proud of her ability to fart “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” in perfect pitch, time after time. She was saving her affection for the right man, and I was grateful not to be him. The Fitzgerald had also been the home of
A Prairie Home Companion,
but people lost interest in corn fiddles and Ole and Lena jokes and paeans to Main Street U.S.A., and the show became
Los Pampas Casa Companeros
, which means “
The Friend of the House on a Flat Place,”
and it switched over to salsa music and mariachi bands and olive-skinned women in thigh-high boots with stiletto heels, and a host named Garcia Columbo told stories of village life in Yucatan and the show got popular again. It gained cachet among the young and restless and became a radio show you’d like to be heard listening to.

I inched along the killer sidewalks between high mounds of glazed snow past Eisenberg’s Fruits, past the police station and Central Presbyterian, where I once attended a Sunday service with Beatrice when we were trying to not break up and the sermon was basically “Live and let live, we are all human,”
which, if that’s what Presbyterians really believe, I’d sign up for Adult Bible Study. Here in Minnesota, people are anything but tolerant. They are vicious sociopaths on the freeways and will speed up to prevent you from merging into their lane ahead of them. And if you happen to catch one in a sinful act, they hate you for it. I once saw a Republican legislator shoplifting ballpoint pens in Walgreens, and he caught me watching him and he introduced a so-called Privacy Act, which requires a sleuth to inform a person if he or she is being surveilled. They attached this as an amendment to a bill providing warm lunches for wounded veterans, and it passed on a voice vote, and suddenly I am on the dark side of the law, and Lieutenant McCafferty has one more sharp stick to poke in my eye. Likewise, the young Lutheran pastors hanging around Miller’s soda fountain on Como Avenue near the seminary. I was tailing a seminarian named Gibbs who Barnes & Noble believed was shoplifting the texts of other religions and dumping them in recycling, and I sat near this gang of clerics and listened to them savage their senior pastors mercilessly, ridiculing their wimpy sermons, imitating their pious drony voices—and then they spotted me taking notes and came after me like hounds on a possum and there was a Laying On of Hands and a Snatching of the Notebook, and when I went to start my car, it wouldn’t. Someone had poured water in the gas tank. Minnesotans imagine they are nicer than other Americans, and if you point out that they are not, they’ll put sand in your meatballs.

ANYWAY.

I ARRIVED HALF-FROZEN AT THE
Five Spot, and no Naomi, so I perched at the bar. The Five Spot is dim and lustrous, like a Rembrandt painting, especially if you’ve had a whiskey or two—the dark wood, the brass trim, the glow of the lights, the old Rembrandt faces. I had a dollar fifty in my pocket, I’d have to count on Naomi to buy the drinks. Hard times in private eyedom. I’d had one case all month—
one case—
lady asked me to nail her cheating no-good husband, and I made the rounds of the gin mills and bordellos, and she calls me five hours later to say that he’d run off with someone he met on Facebook and good riddance. “Anyway,” I said, “You owe me a hundred fifty dollars for my troubles.” She laughed a hearty bronchial laugh, and then my ear was filled with dial tone. Rule number one in the Famous Shamus Handbook
: Get the money up front.
A basic rule, along with
Never be rude to a waitress from whom you have just ordered soup.
—Anyhow, I was flat broke. “What’s wrong? Somebody shoot your dog?” says Jimmy the bartender, swabbing the bar, his sandy hair brushed back, starched white apron, bowtie in place, a neutral look on his pale mug. “Gimme a glass of water,” says me. On the jukebox, the Surf Men singing “Laura”:

L-a-u-r-a

Beautiful city on the Pacific coast

And you are the lady I love the most

On this warm and sunny day.

Minnesota is so far away.

Guess I’ll stay.

The Five Spot is classic art deco, mirrors everywhere so you can stare at people without looking directly at them. There were three others in the joint, an old man studying his reflection in the bottom of his glass, and a florist named Ray on an extended lunch break, and a woman in a navy blue suit, weeping into her gin rickey. “Her kid didn’t get into a top-ranked kindergarten,” Jimmy whispered. And suddenly there was Naomi, like a genie in mink, leaning down, saying “Hi, darling,” her remarkable cleavage eight inches away, like two Bosc pears in a Modigliani still life.

She ordered a white wine, dry, and led me back to a booth by the door to the storeroom. As she walked, her golden wool gown undulated on her womanly hips like curtains in a light breeze. I wanted to open the curtains and let the sun shine.

She hung up her mink and slid into the booth and patted the bench beside her, and I sat down and she leaned in so close, I could feel the breeze from her eyelashes’ flutter. She said, “Here’s the deal, babes. Between you and me, I’m on to a simple brilliant business scheme that can earn millions of dollars in a big hurry. The sort of idea that people daydream about, but in this case it’s for real. I have quit my job in women’s studies, and I got all the pieces in place, and it’s ready to go, the motor is running, and I need you to work security. If you want in, I’ll tell you the whole story. But I want you to know up front—I had to swipe the idea from a jerk who swiped it from somebody else, which I did because why should a jerk have all the luck, and now he’s sicced a goon named Larry B. Larry on me, and I need you to run interference. And it’s dangerous, Guy. Because there’s big money involved. So I want you to know that. This guy will stop at nothing.”

“Larry B. Larry, the shyster lawyer who isn’t a lawyer. I know him well. Know him like a mongoose knows a cobra.”

“He’s left two ugly messages in voice mail, about putting my tits in a wringer.”

“He’s a rough customer, babes. He put himself through a mail-order law school by stealing money from geezers who’d forgotten their own names but remembered their PIN numbers. He managed a local thrash band called Cold Reptiles, which became Croutons of Abuse. A band that stomped on their fans’ fingers and sang about cruelty to animals but in real life were vegans. Mr. Larry is a creepy, bone-headed guy with pinkish eyes and a bad overbite and wears a ring with a rhinestone the size of a cashew. Splashes himself with lawyer cologne and leases a two-room office suite in the Shagmire Tower with framed photos of local celebs and a shag carpet made of old toupees. Tried to hire me once to follow his ex-wife around and knock down the guy she was keeping company with. I told him, ‘I don’t hit people for a living. I only hit people for personal spite. Not for money, thank you. My elevator doesn’t stop at that floor.’ So what did he do, the jerk? He glanced over my right shoulder and smiled as if someone were approaching, and when I glanced back, he bopped me on the chin. And then he laughed. I went to poke him in the snoot, and he whipped out a hatchet and cut a rope—I hadn’t noticed it there behind me—which released a powerful hydraulic spring that sprang up, yanking a noose that I had inadvertently stepped in, and suddenly I was hanging by my left ankle. The old Sprung Leg Trap trick: I’d fallen for it. It was humiliating. Like stepping into an open manhole. The brute laughed onion breath in my face and inquired if I cared to reconsider the offer. There was a smirk on his big mug that didn’t belong there. I lashed out with my right foot and plonked him in the gonads, and he grunted
Hunnhhh
like a dying water buffalo and collapsed and lay there agitating for a few minutes, long enough for me to cut the rope and escape.

“He never forgot that kick. For the past fifteen years since I rang his chimes, I’ve been the victim of late-night pizza deliveries and calls from telemarketers and political fund-raisers, which is Larry B. Larry paying me back for getting his nuts jingled. And, perhaps thanks to me, the man is childless. There is no Larry B. Larry, Junior. Anyway, yes, I do know the man.”

“Good,” she said. “I don’t want to know him any better than I already do.” And she put her hand on my knee. “Let me tell you how you and I are going to find the Good Life, babes. French designer clothes and a deluxe apartment in a doorman building and travel all over the world in unparalleled comfort.” She smiled. I did notice that she referred to “we”
and she did mention “a deluxe apartment”
and not two deluxe apartments. One apartment. My skin tingled at the thought. Actually, many thoughts, a procession of them, racing by, many of them involving nakedness and heavy breathing and her saying, “When two people are very much in love—“ etc. It sounded to me like a proposal of marriage. “I am all yours,” I said, and I meant it.