Plainclothes Naked (31 page)

Somehow, by the time he was sprung—Merch wanted $300 for tearing up the arrest report and driving him back to his car in the Para keet lot—Lipton had drawn Zank a map of the mansion’s treasures, told him where he could find a key, and given him special instructions on how to find A Certain Photograph. Hating himself, he remembered Tony’s grin when he’d explained his one condition: “I keep the pho tograph,Tony, you can keep everything else.”

“Don’t worry,” Tony had said, running his fingers through Lipton’s pompadour. “You have real power hair. I’d rather have hair like that than all the money in the world.”

Lipton found himself running his own fingers through his pomp when he thought about it. No doubt Zank, in his criminal fashion, was toying with him. Only he’d been too naïve to see it.

Ricocheting between panic and despair, Lipton plucked a fist-size dust-kitten off his nostril and swept his arm under the couch.
“Oh please,”
he pleaded, appealing to the Divine Being he imagined ruled the universe, a sympathetic, slightly crazed diva, like Judy Garland in her tranq-plagued later years,
“I deserve it!”
The problem was, he didn’t just want money, he
needed
it. And the person he needed to give it to needed it as much as he did.

Lipton’s thoughts whirled in frantic circles. If he could only
find
it, he had no doubt he could parlay the close-up of those puffed-out, illustrated presidential testicles into boatloads of cash. For days, after the mansion was burgled, he’d plotted his Biobrain moves: whom to con tact first for possible purchase, where to set up his offshore accounts, even what new items to add to his wardrobe—starting with some replacement Prada loafers, since the first had taken three months to

save up for—once the payoff came in. All the while, what he was really doing was trying not to go crazy while waiting for Tony to phone. And waiting some more. And a little more. Until, in a heap of 4:00
A
.
M
. Wellbutrin sweat, he had to face the fact that his brand-new friend had fucked him.

Now here I am,
thought Lipton, trying to block out the reek of molting dishes and buried muskrat fumes. He dragged a magazine called
Labe Happy
from under the couch and peeked at a photo spread. The glurping vulva made him think of open-heart surgery and he had to close it. How did straight men keep their lunch down?

Every time he moved, he heard the crackle of glass vials, discarded jerky wrappers, and God knows what else.
The horror!
In a sudden fit of sense memory, he reexperienced the greasy slide of Zank’s hand on his blond pompadour and began to shake. That awful, brutal, cold-eyed man!

Mmmmmm
... STOP IT!

Giving up, he crouched behind the sofa and punched out Manny Rubert’s number. He remembered it, because it spelled HUNKY 11.
Dreamy!
He’d heard rumors—

Never mind!
Manny would know what to do. That’s what mattered.

He would tell the detective everything.

“Come on,” Lipton chanted.
“Pick up pick up pick up pick up!”

His shaking had progressed to a full-body quiver. He had to hold the cell phone with both hands. Knee-walking back to the window while Manny’s phone rang, Lipton perched his chin on the sill and peeked outside.

“Jesus, Mother and Mary!”

Forgetting his sanitation concerns, he pressed his face against the filthy glass. As if that would give him a better view of the street... the sidewalk . . . the now empty patch of asphalt where he’d parked the Lincoln.

Just then Manny’s machine picked up.

“Someone stole my car!” Lipton screeched, jumping up to see fur ther down the street, as if maybe the Town Car had decided to move, on its own, to a better spot. Catching himself, he skittered away from the window. He was in Tony Zank’s apartment.
What was he thinking?

“Can you hear me, Manny? They stole my car, and I’m
trapped,
” he whispered hoarsely. How many Wellbutrin had he taken? If you took more antidepressant, why didn’t you get more antidepressed?

He squealed into the phone, “Please, please,
call back!
” Then he crawled on his belly across the malodorous carpet, counting inches until he got to a closet. He just wanted to hide. To curl up in the dark. He needed safety. Wombness. He made it to Tony’s bedroom, which somehow smelled even worse than the rest of the apartment, and found a closet there.

“Oh Judy,
help!
” The second he scurried inside the bedroom closet the odor was staggering. He had to slide the door open to let in some air. When he did, a shaft of light landed on a shoe box. His heart leaped. Maybe this was it! Where Tony hid the photo!
Yes!

Spirits soaring, Lipton opened the box, saw the cute little face, the maggots teeming in the hollows of Puppy’s eye-sockets, and crumpled to the floor.

They’d been inside Tina’s house two minutes when Manny heard the scream from the kitchen. He was still in the doorway, checking the knob. Someone had rubbed off a swath of shoe polish.
‌

“What is it?” he called, catching his foot on the trip wire and tumbling knee-first onto broken bulb-shards. The glass ripped his pants. He cursed himself for not unmanning the booby trap, then fumbled for his gun and ran into the kitchen.

Tina stood beside the fridge, holding what looked like a brass cookie jar over the Formica counter. She wore an expression somewhere between shock and hilarity. Manny recognized that look. People got it when they came home and found the hamster microwaved, or walked in on their spouse kneeling in front of the UPS

man. It was the look that said,
“If this weren’t the worst thing that ever hap pened to me, it would be fucking hysterical.”

Manny stepped closer. He saw the two lines of grayish white pow der and crumbs beside a broken crack pipe on the Formica. “Okay, so they were here. We knew that was gonna happen.”

“It’s not that,” she said, her voice catching slightly. “It’s Marvin. I think they snorted him.”

“What?”

Tina lifted the urn and Manny spotted the embossed logo:
MAR TINO AND SONS
. She turned it over and a few chunks of what looked like kitty litter hit the counter. Tina picked one up, then picked up the pipe and showed Manny. An identical grayish-white nugget was jammed in the tip.

“See? They probably tried to smoke him, and after that, they said ‘Hey, let’s smash him up a little, see how he snorts.’ One way or the other, they figured he was drugs.” She paused, and Manny couldn’t decipher the expression on her face. “Talk about bad karma. My hus band died and came back as
crack.
”

Manny was careful not to react. Some jokes it was better not to laugh at. “Well,” he said evenly, “my guess is, they’ll be back.”

“Why?”

“Well. . . .” Manny struggled for a way to word it delicately. There wasn’t one. “If Marv got ’em high, they’ll wanna head back and scarf around for more. If they think he’s bunk—no knock on your husband, I’m sure he was a great guy—they’ll wanna head back here and get
you
. By pipehead logic, you ripped them off. Either way, they’re coming.”

Manny tramped out of the kitchen, moving quickly through the house and calling behind him. He ducked into the tiny bathroom and popped five more codeine, washed down with a slurp from the sink.

After he swallowed his bad vitamins, Manny studied himself in the mirror, then said what he always said to his own face.
“Don’t look at me that way, it’s still better than heroin. . . .”
After that, he dashed back into the bedroom and yelled. “They didn’t do anything else that I can see.” He walked face-first into a dangling string and yelled again. “Check that. They took the tampon down. God knows what they did with it.”

“What?”
came a return yell from the kitchen.

“Nothing,” Manny answered. “They must’ve just found the shit—

I’m sorry, the ashes—and forgotten about the photo. A guy like Zank would figure it’s easier to move primo rock than a hot scrote-shot. I’ll tell you what, though. They realize how much money they’re not gonna get for Marv’s ashes, they’re gonna want the picture twice as bad.”

“What are you saying?”

Tina stepped in from the kitchen. She seemed composed, but you never knew. Manny tried to keep things matter-of-fact.

“I’m saying, when they come back, they’re going to come back mad.”

“This is insane. So what do we do?” “You got a camera?”

“Marv had a Polaroid. And a couple of disposables.” “How about one of those fax-copier deals?”

“We have one, but—” “Magic Marker?” “Yeah. All that stuff.”

“Perfect.” Manny unbuckled his belt and took Tina’s arm. “Get the camera and marker and bring ’em to the bathroom. The light’ll be bet ter there. We gotta work fast.”

Tina glanced at that blood-scrawled
WELCOME TONY
on the wall and looked away. That’s when she noticed Manny’s condition. “What’s up with your pants? You trying to get me hot?”

“That’s optional,” Manny said, unsnapping his trousers as he headed for the bathroom. Once there, he closed the door, reached in his underpants, and squeezed. He wanted to work up some heft before she came back. This may have been work, but a man still wanted to look his best....

When Tina
returned, Manny was down to socks and jockeys. He’d propped the original photo on top of the hamper. George Junior, he now realized, had cupped himself in such a way that the main event was hidden. All eggs and no sausage. Which was easy enough. The tricky part was attaining Biobrain. To get that full-on Mister B. bulge, you had to really
swell
your testicles. This, he discovered, involved mak ing an O with thumb and forefinger, and squeezing at the root. He

tried a couple of practice squeezes, until he pretty much mastered the technique. But he didn’t want to just whip himself out and go Bio before telling Tina what was up. She might get the wrong idea.

Tina set down the Magic Marker and two cameras—an old Polaroid and a Thrifty disposable—on the furry toilet seat. The seat cover was the same saffron shade as Marvin’s loincloth.
What a special man,
she thought, at the exact moment she took in the photo on the hamper and the sight of Manny in his skivvies.
And here’s another one
....

“You want to tell me what we’re doing here?” she asked.

There was no attitude in the query. No snarky undertone. She’d just lost her husband, for the second time, but she wasn’t whining about it. For Manny, this made her even more incredible. Almost heroic. He tried to sound halfway together as he spoke. “My plan, remember? This is it. We make a duplicate of the Bush photo. Develop that. Then we let Zank steal it. Leave it under the sink, in the towel drawer, somewhere he’s gonna think he’s a smart guy for finding it.”

“He finds the fake, so what?”

“So while he’s busy trying to break into the White House to make Bush a blackmail offer, or whatever genius move he thinks he’s gonna pull off, we unload the genuine article.”

“Who’s gonna know the difference?” “What do you mean who’s gonna know?”

“Say somebody showed W. a fake Biobrain, you think he’d know?” “Of course.”

“Guys recognize their own balls?”

“Definitely. They spend a lot of time looking at them.” “Why?”

“To make sure they’re still there.... C’mon, we gotta get started.” Manny was determined not to make this into sex. This wasn’t sex.

If it was sex, it wasn’t the kind of sex he’d imagined when he imag ined sex with Tina. When he thought about sex, with Tina, he thought—

“Manny, you’re mumbling again.” “Sorry.”

“Stage fright?”

“What? No,” he said. “It’s just, this made sense when I came up

with it, but I didn’t think about the reality. This just feels kind of... strange.”

“It was
your
idea. Think of it as an icebreaker.” “Thank you.”

Manny felt the same way he did before he went to the beach with his brother as a kid. Stanley always plunged right in the water. But Manny was a toe-dipper. He’d stand there, thinking about how cold it was going to be, how
wet,
until he drove himself blue and goose-pimpled before even hitting the water. That was the trick. Work your self up to such a state of agitation, whatever you were originally agitated about starts to seem like relief compared to the hell of
dreading
it.

“Okay,” said Manny, cranked up to his take-the-plunge head. “Okay!”

Keeping his eyes on the photo, he quickly tugged off his under pants. He caught them on his right foot and kicked them into the air, snagging them with his left hand. It was something he’d been doing since he was three, and when he realized he’d done it in front of Tina, he was mortified. But Tina didn’t say a word. He made himself look at her, and saw her staring. Of course.

“What?” He knew this was going to happen. It always did. “Sorry,” she said, “I mean, not for nothing, but did Roos make you

that big?”

“I’m afraid that’s the original package.”

“You’re afraid? Most guys would be passing out cards.”

“Trust me, the kind of women who think this means anything are the kind I don’t need.”

“I don’t mean to be crude,” she said. “But I don’t think there
are
any other kind. When you popped out in the car before, I thought that was all of you. I didn’t realize it was a preview. You’re too humble.”

“So what? Now you’re all hot? ’Cause I’m party-size?”

Tina laughed in his face. “I know, where are my manners? And who said I was hot? I’m just wondering why you’re a cop when you could have been a porn star.
Officer Wadd
. How cool is that? See Manny Wadd, Johnny’s long lost son, starring in
The Naked Detective
. Or maybe
The Naked Dick
. Or, no, wait ... how about
Plainclothes Naked
? That’s got a feel. What do you think?” Tina stopped and crossed her arms. “I’m pissing you off, aren’t I?”