Plainclothes Naked (4 page)

“Mom,
Jesus!
” Tony shrieked. But she was up out of her bed before he could grab her. Lunging for the call button, she thumbed it as she scooted past McCardle, who just managed to nab the tail of her gown. “I could cry rape,” the old lady teased. “You’ve got your paw pretty

close to my thingy. They hang your kind for that.”

McCardle cringed, but Tony smiled. “Maybe he likes you, Ma.” “His type always do,” she said, snatching her walker and whacking

the
America’s Most Wanted
grad across the shins. She smiled saucily, then threw out one exposed old-lady hip, and spanked herself. “You think your father was the only one who wanted a piece of angel cake?” Zank was so horrified he zombied up, staring straight ahead in a catatonic daze. McCardle pulled the walker away from his partner’s mother, and when she fought him he tried to punch her. He’d never hit a woman this old before. Despite topping off at five four, he could bench-press 375, and there was a chance he could do damage. McCar dle was relieved when she dodged the blow, though it meant that now he had to restrain her. After a brief tussle the feisty senior ended up in a headlock. Not sure what to do next, Mac tried to rouse Tony back

to life.

“Come on, big guy, don’t go Thorazine on me.
Wake up!
”

Nervous lest anyone happen by and see him wrestling an elderly white woman, McCardle edged Tony’s mother away from the door. When he tried to force her onto the bed, she screamed “Mandingo!” and bit him.

“Hey, ouch,
shit!
” McCardle cried, trying not to get loud when Mrs. Zank started chewing on his forearm. Her teeth were small but pointy, like a Chihuahua’s. He started to pull her hair, but stopped when he saw the frail map of veins under her blue rinse. Her scalp reminded him of his auntie, with her stroke and hygiene problems.

“Tony.” Mac tried again, pleading this time, and Zank jerked back to life.

“We gotta split,” Tony announced, as if he hadn’t just blanked out. “I think the old bitch pressed the call button.”

Swinging into action, he scooped his mother under one armpit while McCardle grabbed her under the other.

“Ready?” Tony asked. McCardle grunted and, eyes straight ahead, the two men stepped out of the room and half-marched, half-dragged

Mrs. Zank down the hall. They held their breaths, waiting for her screams. But when they finally dared to look, the old lady was beaming. “Check me out, I’m double-datin’!” she called to Snooks, the jani tor, who happened to be pushing by with a floor waxer. Snooks was rumored to have gang connections and deal a little. Dr. Dre leaked out of his earphones and he pretended not to hear anything. One peek at the purple bruise on Tony Zank’s forehead, and the face of the semi-naked crazy lady, and he made a point of waxing fast toward the other

end of the corridor.

When Snooks passed, Mrs. Zank waved happily to a well-coifed woman in a wheelchair. She even winked. “Don’t wait up, Hilda. Tonight’s sandwich night!”

The wheelchair woman just stared, and McCardle and Zank tried hard not to look at each other. A flutey voice on the PA said, “All staff report to Fourth Floor West.”

“That’s where
we
are,” Tony hissed. “Duck in here!”

They tooled into what looked like an empty room, and it wasn’t until Mac turned on a lamp that they noticed the unbelievably old man propped on a wicker rocker.

“Have I had the pleasure?” the ancient fellow piped up, his voice a surprising baritone. He managed to look elegant in a pair of shorty pajamas. “Name’s Fitzer. In my time, I was known as a first-class osteopath. My motto is ‘Bones make the man!’ ”

“Bathroom,” was all Zank said, and McCardle nodded. He had the well-heeled senior tied up and gagged with a fistful of Tucks when Tony hung his mother out the window.

“Mom, you ready to spill?” Tony called to her. He hated the way her ankles felt in his hands and wished he’d thought to bring gloves. Of course, he hadn’t known he was going to be dangling his mother upside down. If he had, he would have made her wear underwear.... “I’ll spill,” she cried up at him. “I’ll spill the beans on what a little milk-pussy you were as a boy, that’s what I’ll spill, you good-for

nothing drug addict.”

McCardle fought hard to keep his face in neutral. He was impressed at the way Tony kept his cool. He didn’t know what he’d do if his own moms shamed him that way. Happily, she wouldn’t be out before 2039, so it wasn’t an issue.

“All I want is a name, Ma. I want to know who had access to the bed. That’s it. Then I’ll let you go.”

“Your father never messed around. Did you know that?” his mother shrieked. Not once!
The idiot!
”

Tony’s jaw began to twitch. He hadn’t had any crack for twenty minutes, and it was killing him. He swung his mom so her head crunched off the ivy crawling up the wall. Then he leaned out the win dow and called down to her. “I hate when you talk nasty, Ma. You didn’t used to do that. You used to whine all the time, but you didn’t talk nasty.”

“Fell in with the wrong crowd,” she yelled. “You dump somebody in this bone factory, they’re gonna get wrong pretty fast. Everybody in here’s pissed off, ’specially us boozehounds.” The effort of speaking upward was taxing, and she let herself sag. “All we got to slurp in here is mouthwash.”

By now, people were starting to gather in the plaza under the window. McCardle couldn’t watch and decided to check on the osteopath.

“Okay,” Mrs. Zank cackled finally. “I saw the girl who took your precious envelope. Her name’s Tina, but she’d never go out with
you.
She hates losers. She likes her sugar with class. We talked.”

“Mom,” Tony sighed, but quieter than before, like he didn’t
want
to say what he was about to say, but he just
had
to. He didn’t have a choice. It was something he’d once heard on
Dr. Laura.
“Mom, when you hurt me this way, I have to let you go with love... .”

McCardle,
who’d popped back out of the bathroom after peeking in on Fitzer, could not quite believe what had happened. At first, hearing the screams and shouting from outside, he told himself that maybe a celeb was visiting. Tony had bragged that Joey Bishop sometimes dropped in to Seventh Heaven to visit his older brother, Rummy. But he couldn’t imagine the seventy-plus, second-tier Rat Packer getting those kinds of screams.

“We better go,” Tony said, slipping a Slim Jim out of his pocket and sniffing it. He had a theory that they made them in batches, like cigars, and some were more vintage than others. “We wanna get painadelic

on this Tina chick, we gotta get there before she thinks anybody’s comin’.”

“Right,” said McCardle, but as they were leaving, he kept checking the room. One minute Mrs. Zank’s scarlet toenails were poking over the windowsill, the next Tony was walking toward the door, unwrap ping a beef stick.

“I wish I hadn’t seen between her legs,” was all Tony said on the way out.

McCardle didn’t mention that he agreed with him. Or that a guy who nibbled Slim Jims after dropping his mother out a fourth-floor window might need a little therapy himself.

Manny could not take his eyes off the straw. Tina kept it lodged in the left side of her mouth, between a gap in her teeth. A splotch of chocolate dotted her lip, and he resisted the urge to reach over and wipe it away. Instead, he glanced out the window, fixating on the Golden Arches, which weren’t gold at all. Which were, in fact, a vitamin-rich urine yellow.
‌

“McDonald’s,” Tina said, when she’d sucked her way to the bottom of her shake. “I bet you’re a regular charm-pot with the ladies.”

“This isn’t a date,” Manny said, returning her gaze and keeping things bland.

“Oh, it’s not!” Tina threw herself back in the booth. “Gee, Mistuh Powiceman, I thought you wiked me.”

Manny sighed and pushed the stirrer around in his

coffee. It tasted like watered-down transmission fluid. He hadn’t known he was going to ask her out until he did. This raised the eye brows of the chubby evidence guys, but Manny’d made a show of tap ping his nose behind Tina’s back, letting the hair-pluckers know he thought she was hinky. Though he wasn’t sure he did. In fact, it was just the opposite. There was something about her that made
him
feel guilty. But he didn’t need to share that with Tweedledee and Tweedle dum. They might not understand existential angst.

“I hate baby talk,” Tina blurted suddenly. “Marvin thought it was cute.” She plucked the straw from her mouth and threw it at him. “What do you think?”

Manny considered, decided to ignore the question, and waited to see if she’d say more. When she didn’t, he leaned toward her over the table. “Nothin’ personal, but I don’t see you with a Marvin. Not
your
Marvin specifically, just, you know, any Marvin. You don’t look like the Marvin type.”

“You never know until you get there,” she shrugged. “Besides, I’m not gonna tell you I didn’t like the guy. He was a train wreck. But he didn’t start off that way.”

“Do they ever?”

Manny did his staring-off thing, letting his eyes fall on the French Fry boy, a sloe-eyed stringbean named Lance. He’d popped him a few years ago for planting a bug in the women’s rest room of an Exxon station. Lance was caught sneaking in to remove the tape. It wasn’t the most sophisticated setup: a sound-activated microcassette superglued under the sink. What intrigued Manny was the kind of charge a fourteen-year-old got from listening to strange women relieve them selves. It wasn’t until he interviewed the family that he found out the truth. Mommy French Fry had a thing for the station owner, a wiry Egyptian named Haik. She and Haik liked to sneak off for romantic lit tle Exxon trysts. The boy wanted to play the evidence to Daddy, who worked three jobs so his wife could stay home and watch the kids. Unfortunately, by the time Manny’d made his discovery, Lance was already outted. His junior high paper ran a story:
POLICE NAB POOPER SCOOPER
!—and the scorn was so harsh Lance dropped out. Since then, he’d joined the glamorous world of fast-food preparation. Where he was clearly thriving.

When Manny thought he’d ignored her long enough, he turned back to Tina, who was shaking her head. “My luck,” she said, “I get a cop with A.D.D. Does your insurance cover Ritalin, or are we stuck here?”

“I was just thinking,” Manny lied.

“Anything good? ’Cause much as I love watching you cogitate, I’ve got a lot of loose ends to tie up back at my house. My husband just died, in case you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget. That’s what I was thinking about. How whatever happened happened. You realize everybody’s gonna pretty much assume you did it, right?”

Tina appeared to size him up for a moment, her face tightening, then did the exact opposite of what he thought she’d do. He expected denials, flight, maybe a milkshake flung at his head. Instead—and now he was really hooked—she laughed in his face.

“What are we, on TV? You think I’m gonna roll over and say ‘Please Daddy Cop-man, don’t hurt me?’ ”

“What I think is that a guy who was gonna drink drain cleaner wouldn’t bother to pour it over his cereal, you know what I mean? I’ve seen foamers before. A guy’s gonna go out that way, he doesn’t get gourmet about it. He just guzzles.”

Tina shrugged. “Marvin was kind of a roughage freak. Maybe he wanted to make sure he was regular in the afterlife. Say what you will about Lucky Charms, they go right through you.”

“Is that true?”

“Well, I don’t know from experience. I don’t eat breakfast. I need to be up a while before I can chew and swallow. But from what Marv said, the stuff got the job done.” She paused to pull a pack of Viceroys out of her purse. She flipped one out, tore the filter off, and lit up in a single motion.

“You know you can’t smoke here,” said Manny, though he loved that she’d just gone ahead and fired one up. A family of overweight towheads at the next table was already grumbling “Mickey D’s is a wholesome place.”

Her response was a smoke ring the size of a Krispy Kreme blown straight at his nose, followed by another that floated through the first. “You’re about to bust me for breakfast food murder, and I’m supposed

to worry about smoking in public? What’s that gonna get me, an extra half hour on top of life?”

Manny smiled and sipped his transmission fluid. He was such a sucker for women with balls.

Tina flicked ash in his coffee. “So you gonna arrest me or what?” Just then the McDonald’s manager, a serious Asian fellow with

WING
on his nametag, stepped smartly up to their table. He stopped cold when he saw the look on Tina’s face. “I’m on medication,” she said to him. “If I don’t smoke cigarettes I break things.” Wing looked at Manny, who busied himself picking ash out of his coffee. The man ager remembered him from his uniform days. People were always expecting the police to solve their problems.

“Where were we?” she said, when the young fast-food exec was safely back behind his counter.

“You asked if I was going to arrest you.”

It was a question Manny’d been sidestepping since she’d told him he’d better have a hard ass.

“Well are you?”

“That depends,” he said, more cautiously than he’d intended.

Tina picked up her shake and tipped the last of it down her throat, tapping the bottom. “On what?”

He didn’t have an answer, so he just stared at her, furrowing his brows and squinting as though deeper meaning were just oozing out of him. In his mind he looked like Clint Eastwood, but something told him it stopped there.

Tina fixed him with a mirthless smile. “That something you prac tice in front of the mirror, or they teach that ‘Look at me, I’m deep’ look at the academy?”

“Tell you the truth, I forget,” he said. “I only went ’cause I couldn’t get into Clown College. I’m actually pretty fucking sick of it.”

“You lookin’ to get out?”

She regarded him as much with curiosity as anything else. If she’d reached under the table and rubbed his thigh, or licked her lips, he’d have pegged her as another perpette trying to slut her way out of a fall. But Tina was different. She was just laying it out. He got that tingle in the back of his head again. Only this time his fear had a friend. A little pal called lust.