[Chimp!] [Rants!] [Murder!]
Murder in the Third Degree
ONE
HERE COME THE WARM JETS
In the fountain stood a headless statuette of a nude pubescent girl. She seemed distressed at her condition and was trying unsuccessfully to cover her small bosoms with her hands. At the far end of the garden stood a plastic lawn gnome wearing a guilty look on its rosy-cheeked face and a pointy red hat tilted at a rakish angle. Both hands were hidden behind his back as if he was trying to hide something. I looked at the headless girl, stuffed a cigarette in my head, walked over to the gnome, smiled and kicked him, hollering, "Give it back!" The gnome wasn't talking; he just stood there silent, smirking. As I turned to head for the stairway, I spied a pair of beady slit eyes watching me from behind the curtained window. I struck a match behind the gnome's ear, lit my cigarette, murmured, "I'll deal with you later, Paddy. Don't leave town."
I climbed the leprous, rust-caked staircase and yanked on a brass gargoyle's head. Somewhere deep within the squid, something like a gong echoed. My toes tapped a little Noel Coward number as I waited. I looked up P Street and spotted a smarmy little Jake with a tiny head parked in a powder blue Olds convertible. He was trying to look inconspicuous, which wasn't particularly easy considering the cattle horns mounted to the hood of the car. I turned back to the door and found myself staring at five-and-a-half feet of oily Chinaman. He had tiny rat-like eyes, a rat tail hairdo, and a ratty tuxedo. His vermin voice was what I was expecting.
"Jarsh? May I whelp you?"
"Name's Burns. I'm here to see the Admiral."
Ratboy sniffed, gave me the once-over like I was a dead perch in a suit. "Jars, Meestool Barnzoo. Comb light tin." I stubbed-out my gasper, went inside.
The Chinaman needed breath mints. He would always need breath mints. His accent was thick enough to park a Buick on. Make that two Buicks. I followed the lackey down a dimly lit corridor, tripping over the moth-eaten bearskin rug as I entered the study. I proffered my trenchcoat but he refused. "Jew wheel knead eat," he spat. He snatched my fedora before I could slam it back on my head. As we passed a sideboard, I noticed a carved jade ashtray that was slightly larger than my head. In it were two smoldering cigarette butts that reeked of the acrid stench of clove oil. Half a moment later, my sherpa returned from the cloak room, led me to the covered divan and offered me a cigar from a walnut humidor. Havanas. I grabbed six, pocketed five, stuffed one in my mouth. He sneered, turned, and left.
I palmed a crystal table lighter, stoked the cigar and gave the place the thrice over. For a three-story squid, the joint looked surprisingly well-kept. The parlor had twenty-foot ceilings and was done-up in a style that can only be described as Gothic Colonial. Two of the walls were papered with sky blue fleur de lis prints. The other two were polished burlwood paneling. Either the interior designer had a warped sense of aesthetics or was legally blind. Hanging from the wooden walls were intricately framed portraits of uniformed white boys that looked like they'd been weaned on battery acid. A set of Shaker chairs stood next to an ancient pianola with a perforated roll of music in its heart. I'm no paleontologist, but judging by the dust and wear on the thing, it probably came from the Mesozoic Era. In a rolltop desk next to the piano sat a music box with a carved enamel lid. A Victorian cameo of Lady Godiva. I lifted the lid. It played "Candy Says" by the Velvet Underground. I shut it.
The corners of the room were held up by faux marble flying buttresses that wouldn't have looked out of place at Chartres or Notre Dame. A few Eastern Orthodox icons of the Black Madonna and other relics stood watch from the mantelpiece. The religious motif, combined with the incessant ticking of the grandfather clock, made me half expect to see Quasimodo stumble in looking for sanctuary. Or Esmirelda. Or both. I didn't want to be around when that happened.
I toked deeply on my cigar and admired the life-size painting of Admiral Tiresias A. Beauregard suspended above the parlor fireplace. In his full dress uniform, he resembled John Philip Sousa after a botched root-canal job and a vinegar mouth rinse. All in all, the place was your typical nouveau riche dump packed to the rim with the useless bric-a-brac that siblings give each other instead of love.
From what I could decipher from his letter of introduction, I'd pegged the Admiral for a harmless loon with more cash than parenting skills. His rambling account described the vague details surrounding his daughter's disappearance, along with an elaborate account of the Lindbergh kidnapping (which he misspelled as 'Hindenbergh'); the many uses of tooth powder, and a lament over the loss of the term "gay" in its original sense.
A petite, well-proportioned brunette in a black sequined cocktail dress appeared in the doorway holding a big martini. If her outfit had been any tighter, she'd would have had to swallow it to get it on. Dime-sized holes were cut into the velvet dress, making her look like dominoes or fuzzy black dice. She had a baby pearl choker glistening tight around her windpipe. The bim looked like a forty-year-old who'd blown a second mortgage trying to look twenty. She should have demanded her money back. The Dice Lady stood around one-ten in her underwear, if she wore any. I smiled. She didn't. Legs minced over to the divan, pulled a brightly colored cigarette from the walnut box and sashayed towards me, her suicide-red mules making a whoosh-whoosh sound across the densely packed shag carpet. I reached for my new crystal lighter, lit her cigarette. She blew perfumed smoke in no particular direction. Her expensive dental work gripped the pungent pink phallic symbol like an ivory bear trap.
She looked down, purred: "Big Daddy sent for you, I take it?"
I nodded. "Sure. You can take it. My name's Dick Burns."
"Well, I'm really sorry to hear that." She gave me a look that was colder than penguin shit. "I didn't think they had detectives any more."
"There aren't. I'm an anachronism. One of these days, somebody is going to either wake me up or kill me."
She gave me a funny look, sniffed. "Hmmm. So this is what a private dick looks like. Are you any good at it, Mr. Burns?"
"I jerk off twice a day. Three times during Advent. I can hit little paper targets, too. Wanna see?"
"Intriguing but what I meant was, are you any good at what you do for a living?"
"I pay my student loans off." I flicked some ash on the carpet, put the cigar back in my head. "You the kid's sister?"
She smiled. "You are the flatterer, aren't you? No, Mr. Burns. I'm Vanessa's mother, Eileen. Pleased to meet you."
Mrs. Beauregard extended a tiny, red-nailed hand. She had a grip like a fiddler crab on steroids. Eileen sat across from me on the crushed velvet love seat and jack-knifed her aerobicized legs. Black lines ran up the back of her stockings, hugging her curves like the guard rails on Interstate 95. My eyes followed the shape of her calves, passed her waist and arms until they rear ended her eyes, two deep, dark pools that smoldered like twin buckets of hot roofing tar in mid-August.
"You'll have to excuse my appearance," she demurred, "I haven't had a chance to freshen up yet. Monte Carlo is so hectic this time of year. I barely finished brunch with Jean Baudrillard at Maxim's and managed to catch a Max Ernst reading at the Old Vic. Then it was off on the Concorde, straight out of Heathrow and, well, here I am."
"You get around, then?"
"I like to go where the fabulous people are, Mr. Burns. Strange, out of the way places." She took a sip of her drink and eyed me over the rim, arched an eyebrow. "Tell me something, Mr. Burns. Have you ever been around the world?" She made a graphic, rolling motion with her tongue.
"Yeah, once," I said. "I inhaled a pubic hair and nearly choked to death. Why?"
"Hmmm, justcurious. You strike me as the kind of person who's into that sort of thing. So, Detective Burns, what did my husband want with you?"
"Something about your daughter."
She sighed, brushed some lint from her dress. "I suppose she's off on another voyage of self-discovery, the little bitch." Eileen seemed very concerned about the lint.
"You got a dirty mouth, sister."
"That's not all I've got that's dirty."
"Well, maybe you need to take a bath. A milk bath."
"Or a shower?" she said folding her arms. "A golden one, possibly? Are you into that sort of kink, Mr. Burns? Do you ever let a woman tie you up and do things to you until you're sore?"
I tried to smile but could only manage a look of pain. I clenched my teeth, admired the carpet and the drapes, drummed a bored little tattoo on my knees. On the coffee table, I noticed Kraft-Ebbing's Psycopathia Sexualis, along with Tristram Shandy, and a copy of The Golden Bough with a few pages ripped out. Eileen had me stumped. Not only was she better read than me, she had the kind of body a guy wouldn't mind waking up next to, if he woke up at all. We sat there for a moment that seemed like two eternities and an eon. My discomfort hung in the still air like halitosis. She took a deep drag, leaned over towards me, exhaled, whispering: "What's the matter, Mr. Burns? Don't you appreciate women who take charge of their sexuality?"
"I like them just fine, ma'am. It's just there's this little rule we have in the detective business: never pee on a client's wife."
She let out a sweet little kid's laugh, one that didn't suit her. "Mr. Burns, you misunderstood me. I was imagining you taking the submissive role! It just strikes me as something you're not accustomed to. Believe me, I'm certain you'd find liquid humiliation emotionallycleansing."
"It's also pretty stinky," I chimed in. "Especially if you eat a lot of asparagus." I took a long puff from the cigar, admired the glowing cherry. "You do like asparagus, don't you Mrs. Beauregard?"
"Funny you should mention that, as a matter of fact I do, Mr. Burns." She crossed her legs again, wiggled in her seat, leaned towards me. I could smell the perfume wafting off of her now. Something pungent, exotic, more than feminine and yet less than noxious. It fit her like a surgical glove. "I have developed a taste for those long, firm stalks, their pointy little heads and creamy flesh all hot and dripping with butter. You have to make sure they don't get too hot, Mr. Burns. They have this unfortunate tendency to wilt before they're ready."
"I usually take mine cold," I said, trying to blow a smoke ring and failing. "I put them through the steamer, drench them in some olive oil. Then I lay them on a bed of ice. Helps keep them firm anderect. They'll stay rigid for hours that way. If you know how to prepare them, that is."
She puffed some more. "Yes. Yes, otherwise the flavor's lost, isn't it? I know all about lost flavor, Mr. Burns. It's so hard to get good firm asparagus nowadays, don't you think?"
"Funny, never had any problem with mine," I said. "You need a new greengrocer, someone who knows how to handle your perishables. Someone who'll give them a good watering every day, make sure they stay all moist."
Her tongue rolled over her swollen red lips like a blood engorged leech writhing in a bed of calves livers. "Yes. Yes, perhaps your right. Sometimes we all have to settle for something that's old and wilted. Stale. Past its prime. Just because there's nothing else available. Even though it's not what we're used to. Still, we must learn to live withlimp vegetables." A look of melancholy flushed her face. She looked like a second grader that just found out she got a failing grade on her diorama.
"Ah hell, you could always smash them with a rolling pin and soak them in lemon juice," I said, trying to cheer her up. "You ought to come 'round my place some time, ma'am. We can trade fluidsrecipes. Trade recipes. Yeah."
Before she could throw back a snappy retort, the Chinaman shuffled in and cleared his throat. He sounded like a consumptive bull walrus with an oak pollen allergy. He threw a jealous glance at the lady.
"Adoomelal wheel she jew now, Meestool Barnzoo. Furrow me police."
I turned to the mistress of the house as I rose to leave. "We'll continue this sick conversation later, ma'am."
"I certainly hope so, Mr. Burns," she said standing up, smoothing her clingy dress. "I intend to take you up on your offer. I'll have to remind myself to pick up some Brussels sprouts. You do know how to cook Brussels sprouts, don't you, Mr. Burns? Just scrub them with some cold water andboil."
"Uhyeah," I said, "Sounds real nice." I left quickly.
The Chinaman led me through a set of chunky oak doors into a musty room that was darker than an Anacostia brownout. The place smelled like the Southwest Fish Market minus the tourists. I trailed behind Rat Boy down a spiral staircase that didn't so much descend as plummet. The stink got worse the further down we went. I felt as if I was riding a corkscrew into a bottle of rancid wine. We reached the bottom and walked to the far end of a drafty cement room to a massive steel door. He heaved up a rusted metal latch that was the size of a small child, slid the door open. The cloud of icy frost that wafted out of the doorway smelled unpleasant. From deep within the mist, a fragile southern drawl echoed.
"Do shut the door, Dong. I don't want to sweat to death." More...
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