by Colin Deerwood
I was being followed. I had just pushed out from the brass and glass doors of City Bank where I had gone to break down the c-notes to more expendable denominations. A high crowned fedora with the brim turned down topped a slight figure in a long gray overcoat with the collar turned up. I dropped to one knee in front of the entrance to the jewelry shop next door. I retied my shoe glancing up at the reflection in the display window mirroring rings, jewels and watches. The shadow hesitated, dark goggles and wan cheeks peeking out from above the V of collar. I knew I could probably take him. Unless he had a gun in his hand in those deep overcoat pockets.
I rose and turned abruptly, striding in his direction. He spun and walked hurriedly out of sight around the giant granite cornerstone of the bank building. Just as quickly I turned and ducked into a cocktail lounge two doors down.
It was one of those tall, narrow, opaque window, dark interior, shotgun places that catered to bank tellers, bookkeepers, secretaries, and clerks with tables along one wall and an 
enormous mahogany bar along the other that allowed only constricted access to the darker reaches of the back where the facilities were located. And the phone booth. That’s where I headed.
An older woman in a ratty fox and a dish mop for hair, and an even older purple beezer gent in a rumpled brown suit and shapeless hat pulled down over a ruff of shaggy white feathers looked up from toying with the ice in their tall glasses. The bartender, with whom they had been conversing in earnest hushed tones, was a broad browed palooka with calm guileless gray eyes. He ambled down, a wide door in a dress shirt and a black string tie, to where I had ensconced myself among the shadows and where I had a good view of the entire length of the bar and the entrance. He looked me over as he placed a cork coaster in front of me. I was still wearing the clothes Annie had loaned me, the rough checkered shirt and pair of dungarees, the cracked leather windbreaker. I needed a shave. Maybe he thought I was in the wrong kind of dive. But he understood me perfectly when I held up one finger and then two fingers horizontal to the bar. Double. Whisky. Neat.
I laid out a fin when he brought me the drink and he came back from the register with three fish and some bait. They must expect some well-heeled patrons at those prices. I didn’t say it out loud. Besides the first sip told me that it was the good stuff and why disturb a sleepwalking giant.
Someone had left the daily paper in the corner near my elbow. I unfolded it and angled it to catch the light off the bright mirrored back bar. The headlines screamed about the mess in Europe. Under the fold one headline caught my eye. It read, Mob Boss All Wet and then in sub head, Two Still Missing.
Apparently while trying to avoid capture by Federal and local authorities several reputed crime figures crashed their speedboat into a garbage scow on the East River. All but two of the occupants of the speedboat were recovered from the frigid waters. One of the missing men was believed to be Milosz Yamatski, a man known to be second in command to reputed crime boss, Jan Kovic. The other man’s identity was unknown. I reassured myself that Yamatski’s address book was still in my jacket pocket. I was going to give its contents the third degree once I got the chance. Right now I had more immediate things to attend to. The swelling on my face had gone down and only the hint of a bruise outlined my chin line and the cheek under one eye. If I was going to stay in business I was going to need some new duds, clean up, scrape the stubble off my cheeks. Look sharp, feel sharp. First I had to call my crooked lawyer, Ralphie Silver. Not to ask for legal advice. He was the one who referred me to Kovic in the first place. I figured I should warn him as well as give him hell for setting me up like that. I drained the glass. It went down like cool molten gold. I had to have another.
The old couple looked down my way, annoyed that I was calling away. . .their son? I smiled at the thought and the jolly gentle giant eyed me quizzically.
“Yeah, one more of the high class joy juice, and whatever your mom and dad are having. On me.” He laughed a big belly laugh but his eyes were as cold as ten-penny nails. I pushed the fish and bait toward him and laid out another fin. He gurgled the shot until it lapped at the rim.
I slurped at the excess. I continued to plan my course of action, the one I had begun to form on my way back up the coast. I still had to be careful but I was assuming that Kovic thought I was feeding the eels along with his number two boy. As far as I was concerned that had been a draw. Maybe I was expecting a little more cash for my troubles, but for now what I had was a down payment. The address book was probably worth something to the right people. Maybe a closer inspection of Yamatski’s digs would turn up something else that was my due.
Then there was Al’s sister. That was a prospect I could cut loose though I knew I didn’t have the full picture as far as she was concerned. I went to my wallet and pulled out the pink postal package notice. I had grabbed a deposit envelope while I was in the bank. I folded the pink slip and fit it into the envelope. I called down to Tiny for something to write with and he brought me a stubby pencil. I scrawled my name on the envelope and laid a sawbuck on top of it. I pushed it toward him.
“I was supposed to meet a friend here but it looks like he’s gonna be late and I gotta be somewhere. Can you hang on to it and give it to him when he comes in? He’ll know to ask for it. His name’s on it. The tenner’s for your trouble.”
I was talking his lingo. “Yeah, sure, can do.” He smiled like a kid who had just been given a new toy. I watched him stick the envelope in the space behind the ornate cash register on the bar.
Ralphie wasn’t answering so I dialed for a cab from the booth and then strolled to the front door and peered out the small square window. I couldn’t see much from that vantage, just the odd hat bobbing past, and the intermittent shadows of bodies hurrying by. When the cab pulled up, I took a deep breath, pushed the door open, strode across the squares of sidewalk to the curb and jumped in the back almost all in one motion. The cabbie cut back into the traffic flow with a screech of tires. I gave him an address on Second Avenue and glanced out the rear window. A big black town car driven by a tall hat had pulled out from the curb a few cars back. I didn’t want to take any chances.
“The black town car back there, can you lose him?”
The cabbie glanced in the side mirror and then into the rear view at me. “That’ll be extra.”
I slid a sawbuck across the back of the seat to him. I was starting to hemorrhage money.
“Hang on,” he said, and took the next corner on two wheels.
I should have asked for my money back. The cabbie had turned onto a street that was being repaved. Not only that, he rammed right into the back of a dump truck carrying a load of hot asphalt. If that wasn’t enough, the collision triggered the lift on the dump bed and the contents emptied onto the hood of the cab. The cabbie had just enough time to get out before the door was sealed by a mound of steaming black pavement. To top it off, he immediately got into a shouting match with a large man holding a large shovel. I bailed from my side and flattened myself against the bricks of the building. The town car had turned into the street a few cars back. There was nowhere to go. A crowd was gathering and I joined in the flow long enough to duck behind the dump truck and sprint another fifty yards to the narrow shadow of an alleyway. It was blind. Overflowing garbage cans and a few packing crates at the far end up against the brick face of the building and a fire escape that lead up to the roof. I ran to the end and judged the distance from the top of the crate to the bottom rung of the ladder. I could make it. I walked around the crate closest to the building thinking to reposition it at a better angle. I didn’t see the hole. My leg went straight down throwing me face forward against the bricks. It hurt but not as much as my knee wrenched as it was at such an obtuse angle. I collected my senses and saw that I was standing in the entrance to a coal chute. The crate had partly covered the hole and now I was wedged between the wall and the crate. I unstuck myself by pushing on the box, and untwisted my knee. I could feel the side of my face begin to swell and throb. The pain from my knee ripped at my thigh like a claw. I kept my sob to a cough, eyes watering, and realized that I had found my avenue of escape. I lowered myself into the hole and slid the crate to cover it completely. I was in the dark. I felt the wooden hatch cover behind me. It gave way with a slight moan of hinge. I had to assume there was a chute. I set my legs ahead of me and inched forward. There was a ledge and then my feet struck metal, the chute. I went over the edge and gravity took hold. There was a drop and my feet hit, scattering loose coal. Finally after all these years I’d made it to the top of the heap. I was in a coal stall. A faint light leaked through the cracks in the boards. I hoisted myself to the top of the box. There was barely enough room for me to fit between the ceiling and the top edge of the enclosure. My now bad knee wasn’t cooperating and caught briefly on the side along with part of my pant leg. The pain was such that I let go thinking that the drop would not be close to as painful. I was only partly right. My elbow took the brunt of the impact. I lay there for a while, I don’t know how long. I didn’t hear anything that would indicate someone was looking for me. I was in a semi-fetal position, the hand on the arm with the bad elbow cupping the bad knee and the other hand cupping the bad elbow. The shadows of rats crossed the faint light coming from beyond the hulk of brick furnace and boiler. I got to my feet like a man who had just been beat on by six angry stepbrothers.
The steps the single bare light bulb thoughtfully illuminated led up. I followed them. There was a door at the top. The door led to a large closet arranged with mops brooms and buckets. There was another door on the far side. It led to a hallway and the ground floor business advertised on the glass as a purveyor of fine discount clothing. I’d thought about getting to a tailor, just not in such a roundabout fashion.
Through the window I could see the red, white, and blue sign, YMCA. I was neither young or Christian, and I wasn’t so sure about my associates. While the tailor worked on the alterations, I walked across the street and into the building. The kid at the desk was a bleeding heart, wan from self-abuse. I had a choice, a room for six bits a night which included pool and shower privileges or I could pay two bits and just use the shower, towel, soap, lock and locker included. That’s what the sign on the wall behind him said. I went for the bargain. There was a four bit deposit on the lock. It was no bigger than a matchbook and you could probably open 
it with a hard stare. There was an elastic looped through the top of the key. “You can wear that around your wrist when you shower.” He said it as if were a dirty word. And I just wanted to get clean. The use of a razor with disposable blade was another two bits. I followed the arrows that pointed to the lockers and the shower bay. There were rows of wooden lockers with their doors standing open. I picked one closest to the tiled entrance to the showers and shucked off my clothes. I stood there with my towel in front of me feeling very naked. It bothered me that my wallet and Yamatski’s address book would be vulnerable to anyone who bothered to sneeze on the lock and rifle through my belongings while I was in the shower. Most of the other lockers around mine were empty. I took a chance and removed the items and tucked them at the far back of the top shelf of the locker next to mine. I took a fin out and stuck it in my pants pocket. That done I stepped across the cold wet tiles, hung my towel on the rack at the entrance and up to the first shower head. I was alone. And naked. I stayed naked while the hot water gushed over me with pleasant stinging force. I wasn’t alone for long.
The desk clerk stuck his head into the shower room and goggled at the fallen Charles Atlas. If there’d been sand I would have kicked it in his face.
If you took a wedge of pink skin, thick muscle and bones and stuck it on a pair of chopsticks you’d have what this guy looked like. I imagine that it wouldn’t be that obvious if he had clothes on, or that he had a little spigot like those guys on those Greek statues have. His head sat on his broad muscular shoulders almost like an afterthought. He was either a jailbird or a friend of the prison barber. The bluebirds tattooed at the top of each pec were supposed to make you think he was a creampuff. Maybe he was. I got the feeling I was going to find out. I stepped out of the spray and headed for my towel.
“Hey, where you going so fast, I just got here!” He was going to stop me from reaching my towel.
“Come on pally, I don’t have the time or the inclination to play drop-the-soap.” I pushed passed him but he grabbed my arm. His grip slipped and I gave a hard shove against his chest, tangling his pipe cleaners with my foot. He went down hard on a cushion of muscle with a grunt. Grimacing he got back to his feet while I planned my next move. I’d only succeeded in making him mad. He rushed at me and I feinted toward the door and then I lost traction on the wet floor and he had me in a bear hug before I knew it. I had to use my head. And I did. I brought my forehead down on the bridge of his nose. It hurt, but it hurt him more. His grip loosened and I broke it bringing my knee up hard between his legs. From his howl I could tell I caused him big pain. I was about to plant my foot in his face but he started crying, begging that I not hurt him anymore. He was a cream puff after all.
The desk clerk stuck his head into the shower room and goggled at the fallen Charles Atlas. If there’d been sand I would have kicked it in his face. “What’s going on?” he asked alarmed, his eyes darting from me to Samson and back. I got the impression he was more interested in checking out our packages.
I pushed past wrapping a towel around my waist. “Nothing to get worried about, kid, just a lover’s quarrel.”
Smooth as a baby’s ass. Almost. I patted my fresh shaved jaw and eyed what was staring back at me in the mirror above the washbasin. I’d decided to lose the moustache and now my upper lip looked naked and unfamiliar. I imagined with time I’d get used to it. Maybe. It had been a fixture on my map since it was just a fuzzy little caterpillar. But it was the least I could do to change my appearance. Compared to the plum over my right brow where I’d head butted the moose in the shower, the rest of my bruises were fading to a dull bluish amber. Now I just looked rugged, my features chiseled by patent leather shoes and big ringed knuckles. Surprisingly my nose had withstood the onslaught without being permanently bent out of shape. That was a good thing because a peeper needs a respectable looking nose. Someone sees you with a lopsided schnoz and they figure you zigged when you shoulda zagged. Appearance is 99 percent of the presentation I read in the back of a dime magazine once. It made sense. I slicked back my wet hair with a steel comb and gathered up my wallet and the address book from the adjacent locker. My trousers were light the fiver I’d stuck in the pocket. Now it made sense. The ape wasn’t love loony, he was just running interference while his confederate, most likely the kid at the front desk, rifled through my clothes. I figured to collect it when I turned in the useless lock and key. I turned to go and there was Armstrong again.
“Ya shouldnta done that,” he said and took a swing at me coming from such a long way off I couldn’t have seen it without binoculars. I ducked under it easily and bumped his chest with mine pushing back against the bank of lockers with a loud clatter. I stuck out my tongue and retrieved the steel blue razor blade that had been resting there. I held the edge to the small space between his chin and his chest. He struggled and I slashed the side of his jaw. His yowl brought the desk clerk running. I threw a towel at the bleeder who was now looking at the red on his hands with disbelief. The kid ran to him. “What did you do? What happened?”
“Looks to me like he cut himself shaving.” I yanked the kid back by his shirt collar. “And the fiver you took from my trousers, give!” The kid squirmed and I gripped the back of his neck and squeezed hard. He crumpled to his knees and handed the five to me over his shoulder. I let go and shoved him towards his partner in crime. “A little bit of advice. Next time don’t stand so close to the razor.”
I looked at myself in the tailor’s cheval glass. I was passable as a human being, bruised but clean. I never thought I looked good in tweed, brown’s not my color, but the suit was a nice fit. Maybe it was the new shirt but I almost looked respectable. The shoes fit nicely, who ever had worn them before had done a good job keeping them up. Buffed and polished to perfection, they felt comfortable, like old money.
The tailor had a nose like a can opener, a little cloth beanie on the back of his head, a cuff of pins and needles on one sleeve, and a yellow tape slung around his neck. He was a little older than me by the white sprinkled in the fringe of red beard along the jaw line. He looked pleased with his work.
I reached into my newly acquired wallet, courtesy of Yamatski, and pushed the twenty at him. Not a bad price for a dead man’s wardrobe that fit so nicely.
The establishment was a used clothing store, I’d seen that right away when I emerged from my sojourn in the coal cellar. It was just what I needed. A change of clothes would at the very least give me an edge on whoever it was following me. Business must have been slow and I was able to get a good price on the brown tweed suit and vest. He threw in a pair of new skivvies and undershirt. The tie was extra as was the new Arrow shirt, and shoes, though he was willing to take half off when I balked. The socks were extra as well. I figure he was probably making close to a hundred percent markup considering that he could get a whole closet of suits for that twenty from some widow’s estate.
He handed me a hat. “The pièce de résistance.” He said it like he was serving me dessert.
It looked like a fedora to me. I set it snug on my head and flicked the brim. I was unrecognizable as me. At this point I felt I could splurge and fished for another five in the wallet. Maybe the hat distracted me. I fumbled the address book and it slipped from my hand.
He was quick to pick it up and hand it back, but not before catching a glimpse of an open page. The color drained from his face and he lowered his eyes, hand shaking.
He spoke something I didn’t understand. When I didn’t answer, he tried something else I didn’t understand. He looked at me, blue eyes wide, and I watch it dawn on him that I wouldn’t understand anything but a hundred percent Yank.
“You are not a Slav?” He cocked a large ear at me like my answer was going to give him an idea to run or stay.
I shook my head. “No, pal, I’m as American as a sawed-off shotgun. What of it?”
He pointed at the wallet. “The writing in your book is Cyrillic.”
I looked down at a page with Yamatski’s secret writing. “Is that what that is?” And “What the hell is it?”
“Cyrillic is the alphabet used in Greece and many of the countries along the Black Sea. The Russians use it.”
“Ruskies? Think this is some kind of Communist code?”
The tailor gave a shrug. “Unfortunately I cannot read it. I only recognized it as written using the Cyrillic alphabet.”
He was lying. “Yeah, but you spoke to me in it, didn’t you?”
“Speaking and reading are two different things. Where I come from we learn to speak many pieces of different languages without necessarily reading them.”
Now it was my turn to lie. “Yeah, I found this in a phone booth in Grand Central station. Somebody musta forgot it. I’d return it. . .” I looked down at the page, “. . .if I knew what it said.”
The tailor brightened. “You are in luck. I know a rabbi who can help you. He is an old man well read in many languages including those written in Cyrillic. Allow me to give you his address.” He retrieved a slip of paper and pencil from his shirt pocket and dropped his cheaters onto his nose.
I looked over his stooped back to see a beautiful apparition peek through the curtains to a room at the rear of the shop from which emanated the unmistakable smell of boiled cabbage. I smiled at the vision.
“Hello,” she said.
The tailor jerked his head around at the sound of the voice and then straightened, handing me the slip of paper. “He can tell you what it means.” And then, officiously, “What would you like me to do with your old clothes. I can dispose of them for you or I can have them delivered to your address?”
I gave him my card. “Yeah, bundle it up and send it to my post office box.” It would be a shame to lose that leather jacket, and maybe the shirt and pants would be an excuse to see Annie again.
He glanced at the card and frowned. “You are a private police?”
“Yeah, but I ain’t no cop,” I said still distracted by the comely tomato.
The apparition stepped out from behind the curtain. She was beautiful and petite, red curls cut close to her perfectly shaped head. Even in the ankle length full sleeved shift she was wearing, you didn’t need x-ray vision to make out that the proportions were correct and that everything bulged or gave way in the right place.
“My daughter, Rebecca.” The tailor introduced with a worried frown.
“Hello,” she said. Her big blue eyes bored a hole right through my chest.
“Please excuse, her English is very limited, newly arrived from Salonika.”
As far as I was concerned she spoke the universal language. My heart was deafening me, and I felt a familiar stirring below the beltline.
She dropped her head shyly at my hypnotized gaze and clutched her father’s arm. “Gangsta, papa?”
“Nein,” he answered, “Shimol.”
He heard it first, and the black chattering shape grew larger coming in from the southwest. The chopper swept low over the farmhouse and then back toward the access road where he’d been waiting by his sedan. There was a wide spot in the stubble field beyond the gnarly giant live oak near the entrance to the front yard. A tornado of fine beige dust and sand engulfed the chopper as it set down. The rear passenger door opened once the dust settled and two figures stepped out.
of the small backyard crowded with a detached garage probably built in the early fifties. It was a sturdy two hundred plus square feet that housed his personal vehicle, a Mustang convertible boy toy, a midlife crisis gift to himself. Maybe the original owner didn’t like mowing the lawn although the piebald patch of turf in the front yard had been well maintained when he bought the place almost twelve years ago. He was the one responsible for its current shabby overgrown neglect. So what was he hiding under the slab? Bodies? Something that had occurred to him more than once. Cop thinking, he called it.
—Perry O’Dickle, chief scribe 
Deep in the redwood wilds along the Corkscrew River, someone is shooting neighborhood dogs. The year is 1985 and Lee Malone, former fashion model, queen of the runways from Paris to Milan, once dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world, now a part-time reporter for The Corkscrew County Grapevine, is looking for a story to sink her teeth into. When Lee finds the owner of Kelly’s Seaside Resort brutally murdered, it leads her on an adventure that includes a mysterious gray van, another murder, extortion, pornography, sex slavery, and a shadowy organization of militant feminists known as SAPHO. In the process, Lee Malone’s notorious past catches up with her. 
Just as I choked and coughed up the last of the East River, the rain began. It was a hard rain and it hit the scrubbed wood planks of the deck with explosive force, as if each drop were a spark launched upward in the dim amber of the demon lanterns. I was peppered by its force, wetting me more thoroughly than my baptism in the river. I resigned myself to the fact that my hell would be a soggy one. Then the demons rolled me over on my back and teased me with the vision of an angel, a beautiful, blue-eyed angel with red gold wings protruding from her temples. Her luscious full red lips parted ever so slightly to reveal the pearls of paradise. I felt her sweet breath on my face and heard her melodious voice.
The dwarf said something else, stepping from the shadows, half addressing me. I saw that he wasn’t really a dwarf but a truly short stocky man with a thick mass of graying curly dark hair under a well-worn stocking cap. He was dark enough to be African but his features said maybe Arab or Portuguese. The dim light of the bulkhead lamp glanced off the small gold loop in the lobe of his right ear.
Annie nodded. “Yeah, I thought it was a body too, but turned out it was just a waterlogged tree trunk floated down from upstate. What are the chances, huh? You see people in the water and you go to save one of them and it turns out to be just a hunk of wood.”
under the bed frame as well as my private library of French Art magazines. I stared down at the big red bouche of the brunette on the cover of L’Etoile. Amazingly someone hadn’t disturbed any of the magazines. I reached down and pulled out a buried copy of Seins Marveilleux. The pink postal slip still marked the page where Yvette displayed her substantial endowment. Maybe that’s what someone was looking for. I folded it into my wallet. Then I went downstairs and banged on the super’s door with the edge of my fist. 
He remembered the day well, Valentine’s Day. He was on a domestic violence call on the west side of Santa Lena, in an unincorporated neighborhood on High Creek Rd. A rundown two story Queen Anne knockoff in need of some TLC fronted the High Creek address. Just inside the door a shaggy white haired unshaven older gent lay in a heap at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Accident, at first glance, yet the man was naked below the waist, his pants and briefs wrapped around his ankles. That appeared to have been the cause of his fall. At the top of the stairs sat a woman in a wheelchair, close in age to the dead man. With her was a social worker from Adult Protective Services or Apes, as they were sometimes called, a young woman in her thirties with shiny caramel colored hair and a bright green overcoat. She had a pretty face, but it was marred by a frown and severe expression. She was the one who had found the body and called it in. First responders had arrived about the same time as the deputy. They’d both agreed, a coroner’s case. Something the Ape said to the deputy had made him request a detective from Violent Crimes.
Weston County in February was awash in yellow mustard and acacia blooms. A political compromise in the early 20th Century had created Weston County as a trapezoidal wedge between the conservatives of the Anderson County timberlands to the north, and the well to-do liberals in the agri-burbs of Tolay County to the south. Weston was a sampler of both of those ideologies and equally representative in its topography. To the West, Weston was bound by the rugged coast and the wide blue yonder of the Pacific. Consisting mostly of sparsely inhabited timberland vacation destinations and upscale enclaves notched into and around sheer granite oceanside cliffs, it stretched north to the county line as a continuation of the coastal range. The south and east of the county were taken up by arable lands, home to vineyards, orchards, and truck farms encroached on, steadily and year after year, by housing developments and the attendant paving.
Nelson indicated the Crime Scene van and the elderly woman seated on the passenger’s side with the door open. “Mrs. Elma Snyder. Lives in the granny unit out back. Didn’t hear a thing. She found the bodies.” And as an afterthought, “The tech, Fisher, knows her.”
The sitting room immediately inside the front door was just as immaculate and well cared for as the verandah. Had it not been for the bodies. The tech had placed yellow A-frame number placards by each of the corpses. Donovan stood in the middle of the room and observed the position of each of the dead men. Number one and two, caught sitting, right between the eyes, mouths still open in surprise. Number three, not quite a center shot and may have been standing by the way he had fallen over the arm of the chair. Four looked like he had a defensive wound on his right hand, but the bullet tore right through it and entered just below the right eye. Number five caught a slug just below the laryngeal prominence and then another at the hairline. The efficiency of the killing was chilling.
Woodrow Ames, also known as Woody, was an animal behavior vet who deprecatingly called himself a glorified dog-catcher. A green County issue mesh ballcap held down the explosion of curly red hair that topped his skinny frame. And anyone one who knew Woody would agree with the assessment that he was fastidious about his uniform attire. A neat freak as the not-so polite would say. His new assistant, a young woman, retrieved the wire lasso at the end of a length of pole and he directed her to walk parallel to the fence in plain view of the large mastiff, attracting its attention. In the meantime, he retrieved a long dark case, the kind a pool shark might carry his professional cue in and extracted two long hollow tubes that he fit together to form an even longer tube. One end was fitted with a round rubber mouthpiece. He propped the blowgun on the open window of the driver’s side door of his truck, inserted the dart in the opening of the tube, and positioned himself to aim. His assistant, glancing back over her shoulder once, moved closer to the fence and the dog on the other side that had by then worked itself into a froth of rage.
There was a smiling Blackie leaning on a big motorcycle with his arm around a beautiful blonde betty. Why he was known as Blackie was evident from the commanding jet-black pompadour. Among the assortment of snapshots were a few professional photos of a beautiful woman in a postwar coif smiling confidently at the camera. There were group pictures: Blackie and his pals with their motorcycles sporting tight sleeveless white t-shirts, sunglasses, cigarettes dangling from their mouths. In one, a young man in an Army uniform looked out of place. Another large group photo depicted a line of young men posing with their machines and attendant women in front of a flat roofed industrial building with a sign that read Blackie’s Hole over the doorway. Blackie’s arm was around the woman in the studio photo. There was something radiant about her smile, one that instantly beguiled. I knew that smile. Intimately. Most of the women were attired in short denim jackets or peasant blouses, pedal pushers and sandals, with their big hair wrapped in decorative scarves. From her broad smile, one of the girls appeared quite proud of the way she filled out a knit tube top. She looked very familiar. Perplexed, I realized I was looking at a young Rhonda. Blackie had come to look over my shoulder.
JJ had told me a little about Blackie when I had once asked about the good-looking old guy hosing down the sidewalk in front of the office. She had made some lame joke like ‘Blackie Widower’ but I also learned that his wife, Arlene, had run the antique store while Blackie puttered around in the workshop. After his wife died, he had kept the business open in her memory. It had always been called Blackie’s Antiques and Motorcycle Repair Shop. That had been Arlene’s idea. She thought that the unusual name would bring in the curious. It did, but, according to JJ, the curious just like to look, they rarely buy anything.
By sheer accident, Blackie and his gang of Road Devils, on a road trip up the coast, had turned inland onto Highway 8 at Feather and stopped in Timberton. Arlene had taken one look around and claimed to have found paradise. The pines, the firs, the redwoods, the river all spoke to her spiritual inner self. Blackie couldn’t argue with that. When they got back to LA, they packed a few suitcases, sold everything they couldn’t carry and moved up to the Corkscrew River.
A dog lunged from behind a shopping cart piled high with empty cans and bottles. It looked just like Hitler, Goldstein’s old Airedale. Maybe he hadn’t been shot after all. Maybe he’d just been kidnapped. The mud-spattered urchin, now a young girl with a wreath of dead flowers braided into her hair, followed me with the artificial birds. They were supposed to be finches but the sounds she gave them were like cats in heat.
I hate Chicago. I hate Chicago in the winter. I hate that the snow is not white but a sooty gray. I hate that the chill winds swirl through the high-rise canyons, around your legs and up your skirt, so cold and impersonal. I love the view of Lake Michigan from my mother’s townhouse, sheeted over with ice and snow. I hate my mother’s townhouse. It’s a museum. Not a museum of Louis the XIV furniture or art deco lamps or Japanese prints. It’s a museum of me.
On the walls of my mother’s townhouse were the constant reminders of how gorgeous I was. There were poster sized photo portraits of me by the cream of world famous photographers in the foyer. Discreetly off to one side before entering the glass walled living room was an Oglethorpe nude of me, all white flesh and black background. I was naked but none of my private parts showed. Not that any of my parts were ever private once I became a professional beauty. Still it was pronounced the most seductive image of the century. The oil baron who had privately commissioned the portrait had made that pronouncement. In the formal dining room, taking up a good part of the wall above the chrome and glass table was the most scandalous portrait of all. It was the canvas that the controversial painter, René de Ricane, had done of me, a thicket of violent brushstrokes whose suggestiveness left little to the imagination. My face, as they say, may have launched a thousand ships, but according to the painting, my body was responsible for as many shipwrecks. It was titled la Siréne, The Siren.
I held mother’s soft mottled hands and couldn’t help noticing how much mine were beginning to resemble hers. Sometimes she was there, sometimes she wasn’t. I would get that glowing look of recognition when she woke to see me or a vague troubled frown when she didn’t recognize her surroundings. She had been a strong woman once, a gorgeous, vivacious woman, born in the Ukraine. I was a lucky combination of my father’s cocky Irish manner and her classic good looks. The way I looked was money in the bank to her, the epitome of the American dream. I had been packaged and sold. I’d come to terms with that long ago.
Donovan shrugged. “It’s a CYA operation. Considering the identity of the road burger, everyone who’s politically connected is going to want to be in on it, if for no other reason than to cover their asses.” He stopped a short distance from the carnage, a crumpled upended vintage sports car. “That an old Porsche?”
“Yes, when a large wave breaks close to shore it makes a thunderous noise hitting the sand. The ancients called it the ‘bull of the sea.’ They meant Poseidon, of course.” She pointed to the slide show on a flat screen TV mounted on the wall. “Here are some photos of the recent sculptures we assembled. And the artists. And their friends.” She froze a frame with the remote. “And this is Pol.” The photo was of a young, very handsome man with a long dark mane and a captivating demeanor.
Donovan closed his notebook and turned to leave. “Thanks for your time. Sorry if I inconvenienced you.” He stopped at a small shelf near the entrance to the gallery to look at a bronze statue of a nude woman with a stag’s head that would make a nice base for a table lamp. Inscribed on the pedestal was the artist’s signature, R. Temis.
Unprepared downspouts spit like spavined lunatics. Roiling creeks swirled gray with stirred sediment. Soggy downpour days took the heart out of jogging for me. I didn’t fight the urge to curl up on the divan with a fashion magazine or a mindless novel, the gas hearth exuding comfort like a purring cat. The horrible events of the previous week hadn’t been washed away by the dramatic change in the weather, however.
I had to admire Rhonda’s candidness. After Wallace and Rikki had gone over to reacquaint themselves, more out of morbid curiosity than auld lang syne, I invited them all in for a drink. Anna and Ward had demurred, but Rhonda was game, and held us spellbound with her anecdotes of life as a porn actress. She was still very sassy and loved to shock as her racy stories demonstrated. I’m not one to blush, but there were a few times my cheeks burned accompanying my hearty laughter. I respected and perhaps even envied her tenacity, her toughness. Eventually Wallace and Rikki, having been drunk under the table by the old gal, passed out on the pullout couch and snored away like babies with apnea. It was then that she spoke those words. It was a truth I wasn’t going to deny.
When I explained who I was and it suddenly dawned on him that I was the one who had been in the news, he took on a tone of fatherly authority. That’s the way it usually works with older guys. They figure if they can’t be my lover they might as well be my daddy. Apparently there were, as he put it, crispy critters in the vehicle, bodies, so they had to wait for the coroner. I focused in the direction of the hulk of smoldering metal half hidden by the undergrowth. It was a long rectangle, like a van. I stepped a few paces forward to the edge of the bramble bank and strained for a closer look. There was a round hole in the upper rear panel. Below it, a tear of melted plastic adhered to the scorched and mottled gray paint. It was the van. My van!
The anger on the driver’s face seemed directed at me, like it was all my fault, the freezing temperatures, the ice. My thoughts turned on that odd reflection. I had been called an ice queen, aloof, unsympathetic, freezing people out. Personally I thought of my demeanor as radiant, more often too bright for mere mortals. I believed in the power of my beauty and the access that it allowed. And I used it. The downside was that everyone thought I was unapproachable. And manipulative. That wasn’t the real me, though at this point I was still a little fuzzy as to who the real me might be. Still, I could have been cashing in on any number of aging model endorsements, all legit. Instead I was writing flack for a two bit rag out in the middle of nowhere for a woman with a serious sugar habit.
Contemplating suicide, I thought to myself as I crossed Main Street. I was accompanied by an irksome suspicion. JJ was having lunch with Detective Santos. She knew I had been after him for an interview as a follow-up on my theory that there was a connection between Fashwalla’s murder and the dog shootings. And she had brushed off any suggestion that there had ever been anything between her and Santos while he was a deputy assigned to the Timberton substation. I wasn’t convinced. I had called his office on numerous occasions and thought that I had finally secured an appointment. He said that he’d get back to me to confirm it. And now she was sending me off on a fool’s errand? If I didn’t know better I might think she was trying to steal my story. Maybe I didn’t know better.
He caught the intent and grinned sadistically as if he had snared me in his trap. The use of force was his turf. He stepped with me as I backed to the door. He was telegraphing his moves and I calculated the arc of my swing. Then he stopped, the sneer on his face replaced by a look of puzzlement. I too stopped, having bumped against a presence behind me. I turned. He was a tall man with a full head of silver hair. He held an aluminum baseball bat against his shoulder as if he were readying to step up to the plate.
It wasn’t long before Kovic’s limo swung into view followed by a big blocky sedan carrying the troops. They all hurried inside except for one guy who stayed in the car as a lookout. He wasn’t the one I wanted.
I pulled on a heavy peacoat and fit a stocking cap on my head. A pair of my rattier shoes and I looked like any mug that’d likely be drifting around the riverfront docks and warehouses.
Alice gave one of her sighs and lapsed into more silence. Sipped from her cup, pensive. Her bobbed hairdo fell around her ears like the puff of pantaloons and she was gazing out the window when she said, “I was more alone than I could have ever imagined when Ted died.”
corner in the shadows where I could keep an eye on the door at the top of the stairs where Kovic had his office. I’d been there before. I knew if I went in I’d recognize the red shag carpet. I didn’t have a plan. I just wanted to get even. I’d play the rest by ear.
Dime Pulp 