5 Tutti Frutti (21 page)

I
had left the office, debated about wasting time in The Spot but instead, ended up driving down Summit Avenue to Tommy D’Angelo’s home.

Tommy’s place
was a long, rambling, two-story brick structure encompassing three very pricey wooded lots on the Mississippi River Boulevard. The house sat along the river bluff a little south of Summit Avenue overlooking the Mississippi and the city of Minneapolis. The front of the lot was surrounded by an eight-foot high wrought iron fence sporting very sharp-looking spikes. The fence was posted with “Private Property” and “No Trespassing” signs placed about every ten feet.

I rang a buzzer at the front gate then looked up and smiled kindly into the security camera
when the green light blinked. I rang the buzzer and smiled four separate times but never received an acknowledgement.

I drove around
to the far side of the lot. The rear area was walled off by a wood fence that matched the height of the wrought iron out front. Just like a grade school kid, I peered through a knot hole that looked into the lavish backyard and an elegant pool area.

There,
floating on an air mattress in the far corner of the pool was a female figure that looked an awful lot like Swindle Lawless. She was topless.

I
groaned, grunted, and hoisted myself up to the top of the fence then wobbled a bit before I dropped to the brick patio. I landed next to a round glass-topped table sporting an umbrella. Any noise I made didn’t seem to have an effect on the woman in the pool.

What remained of a drink tray sat on the
glass-topped table. Next to the tray was a bowl of sliced limes looking less than fresh, an almost empty bottle of vodka that had probably been sitting in the sun for a couple of hours, and a silver bucket with about three inches of water that must have held ice cubes at one time.

I rema
ined crouched next to the table waiting for a watch dog, a security guard, or the D’Angelos to come storming out after me. But nothing happened.

Swindle remained napping on the air mattress as I quietly approached. Closer examination had me reassess my evaluation. She wasn’t napping, she was
passed out and snoring. Based on the scarlet sunburn blistering her figure everywhere but her postage stamp thong area, she was going to be in some real pain whenever she finally regained consciousness.

Her knees hung off the a
ir mattress so that her lower legs were submerged in the water and remained lily white. The position she was in as she lay there had exposed her inner thighs to the rays from the sun and made the thought of her walking in the immediate future a painful proposition.

Her eye was only slightly swollen
, and the bruise had faded from mostly purple to more of a yellow-brownish cast. It still did nothing to improve her appearance.

Her air mattress had apparently drifted into the
sunny corner of the pool, and Swindle had lain there comatose for God knows how long. She rested a large, empty stemmed glass directly over her navel and her sunburst tattoo. The glass had apparently deflected the sun’s rays leaving a white area the size of a small doughnut surrounding her body art. The rind from a slice of lime nestled in her hair alongside her neck.

Her implanted breasts rose up from her chest like two large
mounds of dessert that had been slathered in a scarlet, sunburned glaze. She must have been passed out here for hours.

I double checked the open sliding glass doors leading into the house for any movement then gently called her name.

“Swindle, hey, Swindle, wake up, you’re getting sun burned.”

She wiggled her nose
but gave no indication of regaining consciousness.

“Swindle, Swindle, wake up
. It’s time to get out of the sun. Come on, honey,” I said and gently shook her knee.

She batted my hand
away. Then, like déjà vu all over again, made to roll over as if she were in a large bed, only she wasn’t, of course. Instead, she rolled off the air mattress and down toward the bottom of the pool before I could even attempt to catch her.

She surface
d a second later looking like a boiled lobster and shrieking.

“What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy? Get me out of here, God
. I feel like I’m on fire,” she screamed.

I reached for
her outstretched arms and hoisted her up out of the water onto the brick patio.

“You maniac!” she screamed. She
coughed a couple of times, stumbled to her knees, and moaned, “Oh no,” just before she vomited.

“Nice
, Swindle. Gee, I really missed you.”

“Oh God, blick.” S
he groaned and coughed a few times. “Blick, blick, blick, get me a drink, quick.”

“Yeah right, a drink is
just what you don’t need. Come on, get up. Let’s get you out of this sun. You’re really sunburned.”

“I don’t feel
so good,” she whined.

“Go figure. H
ow long have you been out there?”

“I just had a little pitcher of martini
s.”

“A
little pitcher?” I looked around the patio for the thing and finally caught sight of it on the bottom of the pool. I gently took her by the hand and led her into the house.

The house
felt like it would have been nice and cool in the air conditioning if Swindle hadn’t left the double glass doors open. I closed the doors behind us as Swindle staggered toward a flowered upholstered couch. She stumbled over the leg of a coffee table and landed on the floor.

“I feel like I’m burning. M
y skins on fire.”

“You passed
out in the sun, Swindle, and earned yourself one hell of a sunburn. You got any cream around here we can use to cool you down?”

“Down that hallway. T
here’s a bathroom off my room, the pink bedroom. Maybe check the medicine cabinet in there,” she said and sort of half-pointed toward the ceiling.

I walked
down the hallway until a nuclear pink bedroom exploded into view. The bed was unmade. There was a vodka bottle on the dresser with maybe an inch of vodka sitting in it. An empty bottle had rolled halfway under the bed. A couple of empty drink glasses sat on a night stand. Dirty clothes were strewn all over and covered the floor. Swindle’s room no doubt. I wondered how anyone could go to sleep with the pink walls in the place let alone wake up and still remain sane. Then again, we were talking Swindle here.

The bathroom was the same
violent pink color with white subway tiles half way up the walls. The vanity boasted two sinks set in an eight-foot length of white marble. The marble was completely hidden beneath a variety of makeup containers, hair driers, about twenty different makeup brushes, and some sort of dreadful silk kimono with a modern art design that looked more like splattered paint. About a dozen prescription bottles were mixed in amongst all the clutter. Three different sandals lay scattered across the bathroom floor next to a towel dropped over the bathroom scale. One-half sheet of tissue was all that remained on the toilet paper roll.

I couldn’t locate any skin cream amongst the debris on the
marble vanity counter. But I did find a medicated sunburn spray in the medicine cabinet. Apparently, this wasn’t Swindle’s first time to burn. I grabbed the spray and the ugly kimono.

I sauntered back down the hallway looking in various rooms. All we
re nicely appointed and uninhabited. I wandered up the large staircase, looked into a nice den, five different bedrooms, a billiard room with a bar, some sort of large flat screen type of theatre, another den, and an office. All were devoid of human life. One of the bedrooms held a wheelchair and a pair of crutches in a far corner. A large Sesame Street poster hung on the wall above the bed, but other than that, nothing unusual.

Apparently
, Swindle was the only one home.

By the time I return
ed to the flowered couch she was across the room on all fours pawing through a cabinet that held liquor bottles, a lot of liquor bottles.

“God, we can’t be out of vodka, I know there’s some in here. What the hell did you do with it?” she half yelled. She was pulling
liquor bottles out of the cabinet and tossing them off to the side. They clanged against one another as she tossed them but thankfully none had broken.

“Swindle, come on get up. L
et me get this spray on you so you can cool down. I brought you this thing so you can cover up afterward. Here, stand up,” I said.

Amazingly
, she followed my direction and stood facing me.

“Okay, put your arms out and close your eyes,” I said
, shaking the aerosol can lightly. Once she assumed the position I sprayed her. The white ring around her navel and her sunburst tattoo looked even more ridiculous as she stood there. Her legs were scarlet down to just below her knees then almost snow white where they had hung in the water. While I sprayed her skin, I detected the slightest hint of a smile creep across her face.

“Better?” I asked.

She nodded and kept her arms extended and her eyes closed.

“Here put this on,”
I said handing her the ugly kimono. She slipped into the thing then tied it loosely around her waist.

“Swindle,
do you remember being photographed the other night?”

She looked at me blankly
then sort of shook her head.

“You were naked
with a riding crop.”

She smiled and
a sense of recognition or memory gradually spread across her face. “It’ll cost you another fifty bucks if you want to take pictures.”

I knew where this was going. “I didn’t take any pictures of you
, Swindle. Do you remember what happened to your eye?”

“
My eye, who the hell knows and what difference does it make? I’ve been hit a lot harder.”

“Who hit you
this time?”

“I think I must have been
kinda drunk cuz I can’t remember. I just woke up and had a black eye.” She extended her arms out, palms up, then gave a shrug as if to say it happens all the time.

“Did you have fun
with Dudley Rockett?”

Her smile
suddenly turned to a frown as she stared at the floor before glancing up at me with a confused look. She brushed her wet hair away from her face. “Dudley Rockett? Did he have a party?”

“
Maybe, I don’t remember being there either,” I said. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

“What’d
Tommy say?”

“He
said I should take you to a safe place so you can relax and take care of that sunburn.”

Chapter Forty-Two

“Are you crazy? No,
no, no,” Louie half screamed.

“It’ll just be for a little while, maybe over night until I
can get something else lined up,” I said.

“No
, Dev. Come on, this will absolutely end everything with the D’Angelos and Joey Cazzo. They’re my meal ticket, man. Besides, to tell you the truth, honorable idea that it may be, I just don’t want to have anything to do with her,” Louie said. He looked over my shoulder as Swindle half stumbled out of my car. His eyes seemed to get wider with every step she took. She had the kimono on, sort of. The belt around her waist had come undone and was trailing on the ground behind her as she walked unsteadily toward us. The kimono hung open exposing her sunburned figure, the lily white spot of skin surrounding her tattooed navel, and the postage stamp sized thong.

“Oh h
i, Swindle,” he said, giving a little wave and sounding very unsure.

“Hey, I gotta pee.”

Of course, I thought.

“Oh yeah, let me sho
w you the bathroom,” Louie said then glared at me while he held the door for her. “Just down that hallway, it’s the second door on your right. No your right side, Swindle. No, the next door. Yeah, there you go, that’s it.”

“Absolutely not,” Louie said
, coming back out to the porch. “Dev, I don’t need the hassle. She’s gonna get up in the middle of the night, turn on the gas burner on my stove then pass out and I’ll get blown up. Or she’ll smash up my car, or pass out and leave the water running in the bath tub and the ceiling below will collapse. Believe me, I’ve been around too many folks like this. I know you want to help, but they’re just a disaster waiting to happen.”

I couldn’t argue with him.

“Maybe check her into Detox,” Louie suggested.

“She said she has no memory of being photographed and no idea who beat her up. She said it wasn’t the first time she’d been hit.”

“Probably not, people only have so much patience after all. Besides, she could have do
ne it to herself for all we know. Maybe she just fell down or bounced off a wall or something.”

“You’re not sounding too sympathetic,” I said.

“Dev, I’ve been here before, I know where this is going. She’s on a race with herself to hit rock bottom, and she’ll inadvertently destroy anyone who gets in her way. Stay away from her. You should probably just take her back to wherever you found her.”