Plainclothes Naked (14 page)

“The sin,” Mac chimed in, praying another car didn’t come around the corner. It was a street, like so many in Lower Marilyn, lined with dead warehouses and storefronts with cockeyed
FOR LEASE
signs in their grimy windows.

“The sin, exactly,” Zank followed up. “There’s just too much
sin
out there. Y’see, Scoot here is a real church-goer. Confession once a week, whether he touches himself or not! Just kiddin’, of course. I’m his manager, Mack Mustang. Just like the car. Nice to meet you.”

Zank stuck out his hand and the priest ignored it. Instead he stared at McCardle, who shuffled his feet,
aw shucks,
trying to look plantation earnest.

“As a matter of fact,” Zank went on, “we’re on our way to Pitts burgh now. Doing some dinner theater.”

“The Dean Martin Story,”
McCardle blurted, feeling smart until he saw Tony’s eyes. He didn’t look happy.

The priest seemed incredulous. “The Dean Martin story?” “Well, um, yeah, it’s a musical. An all-
black
musical.”

For a second, things were hugely silent. Nothing but clicks and hissing from the shattered cars. The sound of an approaching siren. Father Bob scrunched up his eyes. Then he smiled and showed front teeth the size of Chiclets. “I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
think
so?” Zank returned the smile. He kept smiling as he climbed back into Carmella’s car. “Let me ask you something, Father. Does being a priest make you closer to the Big Dog Upstairs?”

Father Bob rolled his shoulders as Tony tried to start the Gremlin. When it finally turned over, black smoke billowed from under the

hood. The priest had to raise his voice over the coughing engine. “To answer you, Son, I believe I
am
closer, though I can’t say I appreciate you referring to Our Lord as some kind of Divine Canine.”

“I apologize,” Zank hollered, letting his swollen, mutt-lapped face loll out the window. “The good news is, I guess you won’t have as far to travel.”

Tony hit the gas before Father Bob could make his reply. The Gremlin whined like a spoon in a garbage disposal and clipped the priest at the knees, sending him straight in the air, where he did a half-gainer and landed chin first on the windshield, eye level with Zank. Tony slammed into reverse, which launched the priest off again, onto the asphalt.

“My bad!” Tony hollered, but the priest didn’t hear him. Collar askew, one arm curled behind him like a paper clip, the gym-bodied cleric had begun crawling toward McCardle. Fresh blood stained his mouth like sloppy lipstick.

Zank, meanwhile, had jumped out of the Gremlin and made for the Mustang. He hopped in and shouted, “Hurry up, fuckwad. He left the keys.”

Father Bob groaned and grabbed for Mac’s ankle. He hung on, making sounds like a deaf person trying to talk.
“Mah cacchhhh . . . Mah cacchhh!”

McCardle didn’t want to leave him. “He’s a priest,Tony!”

“That’s nice,” said Zank, “but we hang around here, he’s gonna be sprinkling your ass with holy water on death row.”

Mac tried to shake the priest loose as Zank backed the Mustang into the driveway of a defunct doughnut shop and turned around. When he broke free, he jumped over the priest’s head and clambered into the front seat. Once he was upright, Mac started rocking back and forth and hugging himself. “Now what?” he whimpered.

“What do you think?”

Tony touched a finger to his blood-scalloped ear. He winced and checked the powder burns on his temple, then did inventory on the twin bumps on his forehead and the comb-swipes under his nose.

“We know where she lives, don’t we?”

McCardle decided now was the time to mention their little mis take. “Listen,T, there’s somethin’ you oughta know.”

Zank took a corner wide. “What’s that? You still worried about the priest? Trust me, God will provide.”

“It’s not the priest. It’s the lady. We got the wrong one. The chick in the Camry was a reporter. Her name’s Dee-Dee Walker. She musta been doing some kind of story on the real Tina, the one we’re after.”

Zank pounded the steering wheel. “No fucking way!”

“I saw her wallet, man. I got her notebook, too. Maybe there’s something we can use.”

Zank scratched the burned patch on his scalp. “Okay. We dump the car, go back to my place. Then I’ll take a look at that shit.” He smacked the steering wheel, down-shifted, and smiled. “I could live with these wheels, I’ll tell you what... .”

McCardle dug up
an Old Spice deodorant stick and rubbed it under his nostrils. Anything was better than breathing in musty Bundthouse sausage fumes. He wondered if that’s why Tony chewed Slim Jims, so his mouth would taste even worse than his apartment smelled. Com pared to jerky-breath, maybe the stench of old meat seemed minty fresh. Then the thought grabbed him, maybe it wasn’t the usual apart ment stench. Maybe it wasn’t old meat. Maybe it wasn’t jerky. Maybe it was—

“Oh
fuck!
” McCardle forgot about the deodorant. He let the green stick slip out of his hands and and looked frantically around the apart ment. “Oh fuck,T, what happened to Puppy?”

“Puppy? Oh yeah!” Zank’s mouth split into the snaggled, bloody slit, which, with Zank, passed for a smile. “Where is that l’il guy?”

Puppy—they’d found the spotted little thing, soaked and shivering, under the Dumpster a few days (or was it weeks?) ago, and couldn’t agree on a name. Zank wanted “Killer” or “Savage,” McCardle was holding out for “Malcolm.” So they stuck with Puppy. For a couple of nights it was ‘Puppy this,” “Puppy that,” until they ran out of money, and ran out of rock, and Tony had the bright idea of staging a little breaking and entering to make things right again.

“Fuck it,” Zank groaned. He slapped the notebook on his molting carpet and rubbed his eyes. “The little fucker’s fine. He’s in here

somewhere, isn’t he? We’re in here and
we’re
fine, so what the fuck?You got your panties up your crack over nothing!”

“What?”

Zank was always doing that: making arguments that Mac knew were insane but somehow, when he tried to get a grip on them, just kind of slipped out of his grasp. “He still has to eat!” McCardle declared finally, hearing his voice go high and getting a bad feeling in his stomach. “Maybe he’s all starved and sick under a major appliance.” “He had worms,” Zank answered, as if that were the solution to everything. “If he gets hungry he can eat them. Hell, I’ve eaten ’em. Last time I was in the joint, the bologna sandwiches had these little worm-things in them that tasted better than the damn bologna. I ate the fuckers, and I’m the only guy in the cell who didn’t get crabs. The

little bastards are good for you, hear what I’m sayin’?”

Before Mac could respond to this bit of logic, Tony picked up the reporter’s notebook, again banged it off his forehead, and threw it across the room. “I can’t read any more, y’hear me? I can’t do it. This don’t say squat about Mister Biobrain. Just stuff about the husband, who was some kind of swami. I still think the chick’s sitting on the pictures.”

“Meaning what?” Mac knew there was no point talking about Puppy anymore. Puppy would have to fend for himself, until the next time they thought about him. Being sort of an abandoned child himself, he felt extra-bad, but right now Tony was talking and he had to listen.

Zank shot Mac his how-can-you-be-such-a-moron look.

“What do you
think
I mean? I mean Tina baby’s got the envelope stashed in her pad. We go over, show her we’re serious, and walk out with Georgie’s happy-bag and the mayor’s kisser. Then we’re back in business. Get me another brewski, and one for yourself.”

“You know nine’s my limit,” McCardle said. “We’ve been through that.”

“Then get two for me. I like to be in a good mood when I gotta get something out of a lady. That’s my specialty!”

Tony belched and Mac swore he saw a little brown cloud puff out of his mouth, like Chernobyl.

Manny tapped a pair of Codeine Number Fours into his palm. He stared at them, dropped them back in the pill bottle, closed the lid, then popped it off again, tapped four into his hand, and made the mistake of catching his own eyes in the rearview mirror.
‌

I know, I know,
he sighed.
But I’ve got a day ahead of me. . . .

Mornings were the worst. If he could make it through the first half hour of being awake, he could usu ally stay clean. Before that, staring down the barrel of another day, it seemed to make more sense to lay in some chemical buffers. He knew codeine wasn’t exactly good for you, but once you’ve been through heroin, everything else felt like health food. Especially this morning. In the middle of a creepy dream that his

penis turned into a fork as he was mounting Tina, he got the call. On one level, he was still asleep, groping for a way to tell a naked murder suspect that he was usually normal but had somehow morphed into a kitchen utensil. On another, he was listening, savoring the lavish islands of silence between rings, yet hating them, too, knowing the more peace he let himself feel, the more shattered he’d be when the little Princess rang again.

Finally, tearing himself from his fork-and-Tina dream, he answered the phone, and was drop-kicked into the sunshine of awareness with news that a honeymoon couple at the Pawnee Lodge had noticed the dread SOSO—Strange or Suspicious Odor—from the room next door. (In policeville, if somebody asked how you were, and you said “So-So,” it wasn’t good.)

Manny’s first thought, after absorbing the notion of anybody “honeymooning” at a motel wedged between an Earl Scheib and a dis count truck parts outlet, was that his chops were slipping. He’d gone to the Pawnee yesterday, straight from Mrs. Zank’s hospital room, and checked it out. According to the day manager, a clammy fellow with some kind of crust on his lips, the dude with the bruises on his face and the fucked-up ear, had paid for Cottage Number Two. “So was he alone?” Manny’d asked, expecting a simple yes or no. But, as happens occasionally, his interviewee relished the chance to be part of some “real police work” and weighed in with the long-form answer.

“Was he alone? That I couldn’t say, Detective. Sometimes, if they’re doin’ some skorkin’, they keep the girly in the car when they register. Like I’m gonna ding ’em for a wedding ring,” the crust-man snick ered. He touched a tongue to his bearded lips and leaned his elbows on the greasy checkin desk, getting intimate. “I guess you plainclothes boys see a lotta action, huh? A lotta sex stuff ?”

Manny’d assured him it was mostly paperwork, then excused him self with the duplicate key to check things out. In the room, he had found nothing more heinous than a damp copy of
Teen People
under a chair. But what did that prove? Zank was some kind of ’N Sync freak? After his minor poke-around, Manny headed back to the office to ask if the maid had cleaned the room.

“Maid?”
His new pal, the Pawnee desk clerk, thought he was mak ing a joke. “That’s a good one. We got fourteen units and maybe two

customers a week. Mostly we hold off on cleaning till all the rooms are used, then we bring in some rummy from the Salvation Army to change the sheets and mop up. It ain’t the Hyatt, if you get my drift.”

Manny told him he did, and drove off wondering if Tony Zank was the neatest felon in history. Or if, for reasons of his own, he’d checked in, gotten cold feet, and headed elsewhere. No doubt pining for a place with free Danish and cable.

Parked in
the Pawnee parking lot a day later, contemplating his co deines and gearing up for another crime scene, Manny realized his mis take. Zank, God bless him, was a craftier thug than he’d originally made him for. After registering, he must have pocketed the key to Number Two, then discreetly picked the lock on Three, from which the night manager—Crusty the Day Man didn’t show up till eight— informed him that the SOSO was emanating. Sometimes it took a week for the dead to stink, sometimes half a day. A coroner once told him it had to do with polyester and fat consumption. After that Manny stopped asking questions. The honeymooners, in any event, had cut short their dream vacation and vanished.

“Fuck it,” Manny mumbled, and tossed the four tablets off the roof of his mouth. He crunched them dry, punishing his tongue with the sour, chalky crumbs of Tylenol-and-codeine as he ground them to powder. Twisting out of the Impala, he stopped to crack his back. If waking up to murder didn’t justify a fistful of minor opiates, having to contort his spine behind the wheel of the Skankmobile definitely did. There wasn’t much you could do to prepare yourself for a violent crime scene. But you had to do
something.
All cops had their own ritu als, and Manny’s was no stranger than most. He plucked a couple of Salems from a pack he kept in the glove compartment, then snapped off the filters—recalling, in a warm and fuzzy way, Tina’s peculiar habit—and plugged his nostrils with the menthol stubs. After that he slapped on headphones and tuned his Walkman to KMLD. K-MOLD, as it was known locally, catered to a demographic, he could only assume, whose average age was dead. The station featured songs of such execrable corniness it was hard to imagine anyone listening vol untarily. In a given hour, willing souls endured anything from Wayne

Newton to the Carpenters, each tune more revolting than the one before, and all announced by deejays whose sepulchral drone made them sound like they’d been buried alive before every broadcast. But what made it extra-special for Manny were the K-MOLD advertisers: a low-end collection of rib joints, keypunch academies, discount dental offices, and miracle weight-loss products that never failed to make him pause and imagine just what breed of audience the swells in charge were shooting for.

This morning, having mentholed his nostrils, covered his ears, and gulped his battery of Code Fours—the same term, strangely enough, the Upper Marilyn P.D. used for Violent Crime—Manny stepped into the room expecting the worst and knowing, from a long and checkered career, that he would not be disappointed. If nothing else, he decided, trying to look on the bright side, a dead body would take his mind off his penis-fork.