The Last bender, Chapter 40

CHAPTER FORTY

          Helen’s big hair devoured her head. The black satin robe emblazoned with dragons reached halfway down her legs. It was loosely tied with a tattered belt and I could see portions of her tattoo. She blocked the door and peered at us myopically. “It’s late,” she said. “I gotta work tomorrow.”

          “Quit breakin’ my eggs,” Linda said. “Open up.”

          Reluctantly she admitted us. Horses galloped and guns ricocheted through the small TV light. The TV said, “Heeeya!  Woowoowoowoo.”  

          “There ain’t much room. You can sit on the bed.”   She pointed to the TV. “It’s an oater. I think they’re a hoot.”   We followed her into the small room and sat on the sagging mattress. Linda picked up a bag of potato chips buried in the rumpled blankets and started crunching mechanically while I became transfixed by the galloping, whinnying horde of horses and humans. Flags fluttered. Banners burned. I had to wonder what it was like then. Riding into war, shooting from the saddle. Where you had to be brave and all that but also good at something more than pushing buttons and all this pseudoscientific blather covering the real business up. The room smelled like incense and cigarettes. “I don’t got any soft drinks,” Helen yelled from the galley kitchen just behind the TV. It was so small her butt stuck out into the room when she bent down to open the fridge. “You want water? Or coffee. I can boil some water and brew you a cup of Joe.”

          “Any kind of whiskey will do,” I said. It wasn’t going well for the Indians. They were getting hit pretty hard.

          “Howzabout tall boys then?”

          “Can the glass,” I said.

          She brought in three tallboys still in the web and a church key. I poked holes in all three and toasted our health, sucking the cold metallic foam off the rim. I knew this was the life for me then. I’d get home before her, stow the twelve pack in the icebox and start the bacon in the electric fry pan. I’d stand over it in boxer shorts, beer in hand, watching it pop and steam, waiting for it to crisp. While it drained on paper towels, I’d fry up all the onions and other stuff in the grease, drain and add the beans and spice and tomato paste. Then stir the bacon back in with lots of salt and pepper and a pinch of sugar. A few vigorous shakes of hot sauce. By the time she got home it would be thick and bubbly. I’d dish it out, clean the pan and fry up some eggs in real butter. She’d kiss me hello and step out of the cop suit. We’d pull out the bed and lie down and eat dinner in our underwear, touching feet between the cartoons, sports and weather. While she did the dishes I’d shower and then we’d suck sweat and drink and fuck till we passed out. It would be all right.

          “That one there, he’s the hero,” she said slurping her beer. She looked at me a second longer than usual. Linda reclined between us, shifting in and out of a gourd like stare. Her feet reached the end of the bed. The room was small, hot and messy. The TV was propped up on some magazines and an old beige bookshelf stuffed with newspapers and file folders. When I stood the bent coat hanger she used for an antenna spun around, scrambling the picture.

          I headed to the bathroom, afraid to disturb the heaped, balled and draped clothes. A pair of black beat shoes was balanced on a mound of laundry. The telephone crowned another pile. It all looked so precarious and interconnected. From the cotton briefs on knee high boots to the spandex stretched from grommet to grommet like a train trestle and the black lace brassieres forming a skyline against gold and silver Lycra and the red sequins of a morning coat. The closet doors were jammed open with distended cardboard boxes and within, a firmly packed structure of junk surrounded her perfectly pressed uniforms. I made it to the bathroom without creating any disasters. Stockings hung from every available perch. Towels and washcloths were crammed in the racks. The sink was surrounded by a half dozen opened boxes of tampons, make up in dishes and tubes, toothpaste and razor blades torn open in haste. The trash can by the toilet overflowed with lipstick stained wads of toilet paper. Stuck in the mirror above the sink were photographs warped by steam and splattered with toothpaste. The shower was one of those freestanding metal units that bang and echo a lot. It was littered with disposable razors and lumps of soap covered in pubic hair. I pissed into the rust stained toilet bowl and tried to flush it but the tank ran and I was too scared to reach in and fix it. “Don’t bother, it’s busted,” she yelled. So I washed my hands and dried them on a stiff towel.

          By the time I returned, discreetly wiping away mold spores from my ears, everything had changed. Gone were Linda’s pumpkin eyes and face. Instead she rocked back and forth in Helen’s arms, bawling. I wiped my hands on my shirt and stared at them awkwardly, trying to figure out what to do. Linda delivered a long, vertiginous sniffle, sucked up a ribbon of goo and coughed. She let go of Helen and looked at me, her face fractured. I felt so sad then. She smiled at me through her wet red mask and then dissolved, speaking in a hoarse, weary voice. It was all about Mac. Everything she said. But it wasn’t about how she wanted him back or how she’d blown it. And it wasn’t about him trying to kill her or about how he never fucked her and he was boring. It wasn’t the blow-by-blow description of their rise and fall. “I can’t stand being the fool,” she said. That has a caustic taste. Helen cradled Linda’s head in her breast. She stared at the wall and flexed her nostrils. I bit my lip and thought about Corrie throwing her things in the car and driving up the centerline at two a.m., while I screamed from the door. I looked at Helen and remembered how moments ago I had planned an elaborate future, born of a single can of beer. I looked away when she noticed I was watching her. But I wasn’t fast enough. She caught me, fleeing from the danger. And when I decided it was safe to look again, it was too late. Helen’s moist, thoughtful eyes had swallowed her soul. Linda blew her nose and said, “Mac’s lucky I didn’t shoot back. I got a taste of it before and he’s lucky.”

          I sat down on the edge with a squeak and the women scooted over to make room.

          “Gotta taste of what?”   Helen asked.

          “That’s why we’re here,” I said.

          “Bad guys,” Linda said. “Coming for us. Ask Jack.”    

          “Whose?” Helen stood and cracked the curtains. “Why’d you bring ’em here?”   She turned around and rubbed her chin, looked at us and then the room. “Ya need help so ya come to me. You two are great.”

          “I gave you Braque!”   I said.

          “Yeah. And he never showed.”

          “That’s ’cause he’s dead. Those guys gunned him down.”

          She cogitated that for a while. “What are you packing?” she asked.

          We showed her our guns.

          “So I went out to see your buddy Hubble Watts. Talk about a fruit. He’s so ripe he’s crawling’ with flies. The butler answers the door. I never met one before, but I’m sure they don’t look like her. She’s hot in her mules all right and the crooked bimbo wig, but the way she tripped to the door with her feather duster, I figure it saw more of his crack than the phony books.

          “So mademoiselle tries a curtsy and farts by accident. I get the evil thought of watching for blood trickling down her hams but swallow it and flash my badge. They were expecting me.

          “I’m telling you, I was sitting’ there thinking how bad I am going to get this man. When I’m done, he will be fucked up. She leaves me to nest on a couch so big I sink up to my neck in chinchilla.

          “Finally the guy shows up. He looks like a half burned cigarette with his cork shoes, white suit and grey hair. He gives me a hand getting out of the cushions. His hands are about what you’d expect, cold and damp and too soft. He’s not a guy who worries much. And then I notice, under all the cologne, a faint smell of shit.”

          “Is it a bag or what?” I asked.

          “I’ll get to it. I follow him into this office with vaulted ceilings like a church. I take a chair and check out all the paneling and the lead pane windows. ‘Smoke?’ he asks, holding out a gold case. So I say, ‘I know what it is.’  He snaps it shut and stares at me. Well, I look around the room some more, at the art, which is a bunch of fussy lookin’ paintings in gilt frames of guys with huge cocks. He tries again for the icebreaker. ‘Do you like the paintings?’ he asks, and I say, ‘They’re certainly well hung,’ and he rolls his eyes and now I see he’s getting mad. I say to him, ‘Let’s cut the shit. I’m here about murder.’  Not subtle but with this guy subtle could go on all day and I’m getting a headache.

          “‘What impertinence is this?’ he asks. Impertinence. Then he asks me if I know who he is. Like maybe I thought he was the Queen of France. Which he might be for all I know. They got them queens with peckers now I hear. Ha ha. So. ‘You’re Hubble Watts,’ I answer, lighting up one of my own smokes. I toss the match on the floor but it goes out without burning anything. Queen of fucking France. I’m feeling pretty tough now. It’s time to spring it on him. ‘I can tie you into the murders that went down in the Pechardine.’

          “He sorta laughs, sorta sneers and sits forward. ‘You have proof connecting me to what?’  So I say it again, this time reminding him that he ain’t deaf, and if he is I’d be glad to sign it. ‘Sign it to my lawyer,’ he says, picking up the phone. I say to him, ‘We don’t need a lawyer to discuss it Mr. Watts. I’m here to help you out of a jam.'”

          Helen took a long slug off her beer and shook her head. “The guy’s got me figured for a nut cracker and I see him calculating what it’ll take to shake me off his balls. He makes the tepee with his hands and gets all calm like and starts in on his little speech. ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘The touch. It was a matter of time. A rich man grows accustomed to it. I’m a father of three Det. Stark. Do you know what that means?’  So he fucked his wife three times. Maybe. ‘I’ve paved over my share of scandals. It’s a wonder I have any money left.’  He looks out the window then, like he’s in church or something. Finally he says to me, ‘You’re probably thinking, Old Hubble Watts is good for a cool mil. But you must realize it would make me look guilty of something if I did that?’

          “I had to agree with that. But then I told him, ‘I got you connected to Monozone, and Monozone connected to three crime scenes. Mass murder crime scenes.’  He roars like an old drunk. ‘That all you have?’  He hits the buzzer and in walks the butler in the French floozy clothes. ‘You don’t expect me to buy this, do you?’ he asks. I say, ‘It depends on what you mean by buy. I want some answers or I’m all over your books, your taxes, your affairs. I’ll have your asshole hairs under a microscope. You want it that way?’  He looks at me all pissed off then, like he’s gonna spit. ‘Awww,’ he says, pointing out the window. ‘Look at that god damn ass!’  He stands up, leans across the desk and starts pounding on the window. He screams, ‘You, you down there. Gardener!  Those aren’t your god damn balls you’re playing’ with, they’re roses!’ and on like that for a while. He takes a big breath and blows a cloud of rotten mint in my face. ‘What, still here? Join me for lunch.’

          “I tell him I ain’t hungry. ‘Not hungry? A husky dame like you oughta eat like a horse. Fifi, bring up the girl. And a bottle of bubbly.’  Then he says to me, ‘So, what’re you asking?’

          “I say to him, ‘I want to know what you know about importing Botrytis compounds from France.’  He drops the pen. He says, ‘It’s a good thing I asked you to lunch Det. Stark. I was going to pay you the usual nuisance fee, more money in one shot than you ever earned fucking your way to the front. But I can see now that you need to go away with a stronger message.’  I unhooked my gun then and switched off the safety. He sees me do it and says, ‘One move for that gun and you’ll be ground up for dog food. I’m not scared of you. No cop scares me. And I don’t give a shit what your price is now.’  The door opens. It’s Fifi, with this girl, no more than fourteen, in a leather skirt and white T-shirt. She looks terrified. Her eyes all red and lips puffy. There’s a tear in her ear lobe with dried blood.

          “He says to me, very calmly, ‘I’m a rich man,’ and I’m thinking, can we get to the part I don’t already know? ‘I endow several schools and colleges, one for girls. Every year ten talented girls receive full scholarships to the Hayslip Academy. They’re known as the Watts Fellows. A thousand girls apply for those ten spots. Of those ten, the top one receives a living stipend. Part of the honor is spending a weekend here at my house, as my guest. Most like it so much they stay. Ms. Bascomb here is this year’s honoree. Say hello to the police officer, Ms. Bascomb.’   She attempts this sick little curtsy. I tell her not to bother. I’m thinking, how do I get her outta here alive? ‘I suppose you think she’s unhappy here. But I assure you, they are all very carefully screened. Shall we Ms. Bascomb?’

          “She gets down on her hands and knees and crawls over to him. Then Fifi hands him this silver bowl. I can’t see what’s going on behind the desk, it’s too big. The guy tells me to stand. What am I gonna do? I could start shooting but by now I believe him when he says if I do I’m dog food. Plus if I do make it out the door it’s a murder rap, which after the drug bust pretty much means they’ll drop the pill on me. That is if I make it out the front door.

          “The kid’s on all fours. He lifts her skirt, making her squat over the bowl. She’s got this silver plug up her ass. He pulls it and she craps in the bowl. All the while he’s saying, ‘That’s a good little girl,’ and ‘Don’t be afraid,’ stuff like that.

          “Fifi looks pretty worn out by now but we’ve only just begun. The kid sticks the plug back in all by herself, with this ho hum expression, like she was plugging in a radio, and hands him the bowl. He takes a big deep whiff, like its Beef Bourguignon and hands it to Fifi. He says to the kid, ‘You may begin,’ in this pompous voice. So the kid starts to suck him off. There are needle marks up and down her legs. There’s this bowl of turd and a kid’s sucking some billionaire’s cock. I’m a fucking cop!  He turns this way and that in the chair, his eyes glazed over like a jellied calf’s head. He’s huffing and hooing and rolls back his eyes and starts jerkin around like his head had been cut off, yelling real loud, ‘YES, YES, YES!’ like anyone in the world cared. So then he’s all done getting his car washed and tells the kid to beat it. 

          “Fifi pours us a couple of glasses of champagne and he stares at me with this dreamy look. The room stinks like cum and shit. My mouth is dry and yeah, I’m scared. He takes a sip of the bubbly and a spoon of the shit and eats it just like ice cream. ‘I only feed them chocolate,’ he says. ‘Sweet as can be. You can go now.’

          “I walked out the door feeling like an idiot. I didn’t run till I got home. Then I put on my shoes and went out. I ran ten miles to get the stink out of my nostrils. And that little girl.

          “Now tell me Jack. Isn’t that the man you’re trying to protect?”