Biceps Of Death (9 page)
Authors: David Stukas
7
Nice Kayak You Have There!
I
had slipped home through the reporters, who hounded me with questions as to where I was going, gathered up enough clothes for a few days, and headed downtown to Michael’s place, taking three cabs in order to shake any reporters who might be following. Monette arrived at Michael’s place at seven.
had slipped home through the reporters, who hounded me with questions as to where I was going, gathered up enough clothes for a few days, and headed downtown to Michael’s place, taking three cabs in order to shake any reporters who might be following. Monette arrived at Michael’s place at seven.
“He redecorated again?” Monette asked as I let her into the apartment.
“Two months ago.”
“So what do you call this look?”
“I think its post-communist-Metropolis-deco-minimalist.”
Michael changed the look of his apartment for three reasons: One, he could afford to. Two, he got bored easily. And three, he was afflicted by the one disease suffered by so many New Yorkers: chronic trendiness. These people had one motto and lived by it no matter how foolishly they dressed, how much they spent to stay current, and how long they waited in line at the restaurant
de jour
: Amaze me or I will dismiss you.
de jour
: Amaze me or I will dismiss you.
I led Monette down the hall to the smallest room in his penthouse, which Michael had begrudgingly turned over to me. Michael’s welding torches and acetylene tanks sat unused in a room next door, paneled in stainless steel and equipped with a king-sized bed. But no matter: My tiny room was a safe place to sleep.
Monette threw her backpack on the floor and followed me down the hall to Michael’s computer room. Monette gasped when I pushed back the sandblasted glass door to the room and revealed Michael’s latest makeover.
“My Goddess! It looks like a NATO control room buried under a mountain in Colorado. I can’t believe this!”
Monette wasn’t exaggerating. The room was nothing short of incredible. There was a stainless steel console table facing a huge plasma TV screen, which Michael had gotten rigged up to his computer. There was no looking at a tiny twelve-inch computer screen for Michael. No, you cruised the Internet on a forty-seven-inch screen TV with a sound system that probably rivaled Steven Spielberg’s private home movie theater.
“Is this all for the computer?” Monette asked in wonder.
“No, Michael has all his audiovisual equipment here too. He has a rack of twenty CD players that play music twenty-four hours a day. You don’t hear it now because he has it turned off. But when it’s on, you just have to walk into a room and a motion sensor detects you entering then switches on the music for that room. It’s all-trance, all-the-time.”
“Jesus,” Monette replied. “And I thought when I got my latest Apple computer, I was on the cutting edge.”
“Well, at least you have a computer. Mine is sitting in the hands of some murderer.”
Monette was still looking around the room in amazement when she seemed transfixed by something.
“Robert?”
“Yes. Monette?”
“Why are you and I looking up at ourselves on the TV screen?”
“Oh that! Michael has several webcams focused on various parts of the room.”
“For chatting, I suppose,” Monette said skeptically.
“That’s what he calls it.
Chatting,
” I said, putting vicious quotation marks around the word
chatting
with my fingers. “I call it lining up sex partners on the Internet.”
Chatting,
” I said, putting vicious quotation marks around the word
chatting
with my fingers. “I call it lining up sex partners on the Internet.”
“And having online sex, too.”
“I’m sure of it,” I replied, clickety-clacking my way on the Internet.
Monette slowly rose from her leather console chair and inspected the seat for signs of, well, unpleasant stuff.
“Ah, here we go,” I said as I downloaded the pictures onto Michael’s computer. We had no sooner opened the first set of pictures on the screen than we both looked at each other and laughed. We had to—there wasn’t any other choice. When you stepped back and looked at the situation, it was like life: Truth was stranger than fiction. The best writer in the world couldn’t make this stuff up.
“Oh, I almost forgot,” I interjected. “Eric Bogert, the second trainer to play high-altitude leap frog, was planning on coming into a lot of money soon.”
“Never assume,” Monette reminded me.
“Yeah, but what do you think, Monette? I mean, the guy has a perfect piece of blackmail in his hands and, at the same time, tells his girlfriend that he has a rich aunt who’s going to die to cover his newfound money—not to mention drives a new Hummer.”
“It looks pretty incriminating to me,” she said, clicking on photographs. “I wonder why personal trainers have this
in
to people’s lives?” Monette pondered.
in
to people’s lives?” Monette pondered.
“The reason is simple, Monette. Personal trainers, after all, are like hairdressers: People tell them everything about their personal lives. The trainer, if he’s got anything on the ball, just sits back and waits for the right moment to pounce. You’ve got Mr. Uptight Wasp on Fifth Avenue, doing dead lifts with Cody or Eric, casually mentions that he was watching
The Horse Whisperer
the other night on DVD, and before you know it, Cody has the guy bent over a saddle with his riding pants down around his ankles and is swatting his butt with a riding crop. You don’t have to give these clients a very big push because they want it so bad.”
The Horse Whisperer
the other night on DVD, and before you know it, Cody has the guy bent over a saddle with his riding pants down around his ankles and is swatting his butt with a riding crop. You don’t have to give these clients a very big push because they want it so bad.”
“That happens with my hairdresser all the time,” Monette replied. “He’s working a machete through my hair and boom—I’m dressed in a French maid’s outfit asking him to paddle me with the backside of a hairbrush.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I think licking honey off Ellen DeGeneres’s breasts while she sits on the back of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle is more your style.”
“You have no idea of what I’d do,” Monette replied. “Well, actually, I have no idea either—it’s been a
long
time since I had sex.”
long
time since I had sex.”
Just then, a voice coming from behind us scared the bejesus out of Monette and me. “I’d go out of my fucking mind!”
“Michael!” I exclaimed, the adrenaline still pumping through my bloodstream.
“Hi, Michael,” Monette echoed.
“So what are you two up to?” Michael asked.
He sat in a chair and listened as we told him about our intentions to question the various suspects, starting with John Bekkman tomorrow at lunch. When we were done, he sat still as if drinking all the information in.
“You know, something like this happened with me a few years back. This guy was following me around town. It was fall, because I remember he wore a trench coat and a hat with a wide brim that almost hid his face in shadow.”
Suddenly, both Monette and I were intrigued.
“Well,” Michael continued breathlessly, “I leave Barney’s, walk a few blocks, and notice that he’s still following me. So I dash down this alley trying to lose him, only to find out it was a dead end.”
“Holy shit!” Monette exclaimed. Even she was on the edge of her chair. “So how did you get out of there?”
“I didn’t. He comes down the alley after me and I get into a corner and crouch down.”
“And?” I demanded.
“He walks slowly toward me, grinning this evil, sadistic grin. He opens his trench coat and pulls out a gun with a silencer the size of a rolling pin and aims the gun at me and pulls the trigger.”
Monette, always interested in crime stories, volunteered the likely outcome. “The gun doesn’t fire and you run out of there like a scared rabbit?”
“No, we made love then and there, on the garbage cans.”
Michael had done it again.
“Michael, are you sure he didn’t pistol-whip you, because you’re talking like a person who suffered a serious head injury,” I offered.
“No, no, he was a guy I was dating and he told me he’d always wanted to play a hit man. So we worked out this fantasy of his ahead of time, he was the hit man and I was the innocent, vulnerable victim. It was scary and hot at the same time!”
“Michael, how is being stalked and almost assassinated hot?”
“It’s all that power! Plus, it’s the thrill of playing someone you don’t get to be in normal, everyday life. That’s the fantasy. Who wants to have vanilla sex all the time, the same ol’ in-and-out all the time?”
Both Monette and I raised our hands.
“See, that’s why you two haven’t had sex in so long. You’re too limited.”
Thinking that he had taught us a valuable lesson, Michael got up from the chair and left the room.
“You know, Monette, I see his point. If I had just let that guy with the ski mask attack me at your place, I could’ve had the greatest orgasm of my life.”
T
he rest of the night was fairly uneventful. There were no goons chasing me, no masked assailants lurking at windows, and no ransacked apartments to clean up. I puzzled over this whole affair that I was involved in. Life is like a huge wave sometimes. You see it coming, but you stand on the beach frozen in fear, knowing that you’re going to get hit and carried wherever the wave wants to take you—there’s nothing you can do about it but wait until the wave has lost its power, then swim back to shore. Fighting it won’t do any good—it will just tire you out. And as I remember my father saying to me as I waded into the ocean for the first time when I was nine, “The best swimmers are always the ones to drown.” Thanks, Dad. To this very day, I won’t go very far into the ocean.
he rest of the night was fairly uneventful. There were no goons chasing me, no masked assailants lurking at windows, and no ransacked apartments to clean up. I puzzled over this whole affair that I was involved in. Life is like a huge wave sometimes. You see it coming, but you stand on the beach frozen in fear, knowing that you’re going to get hit and carried wherever the wave wants to take you—there’s nothing you can do about it but wait until the wave has lost its power, then swim back to shore. Fighting it won’t do any good—it will just tire you out. And as I remember my father saying to me as I waded into the ocean for the first time when I was nine, “The best swimmers are always the ones to drown.” Thanks, Dad. To this very day, I won’t go very far into the ocean.
The next morning, Monette and I had our list, ready to contact our first blackmailee at lunch: John Bekkman.
I did a little research on John Bekkman and what I came up with was fascinating. He was the quintessential renaissance man. He did what he wanted when he wanted. While that may at first sound like Michael Stark, they were worlds apart. You would never catch Michael kayaking on the East River at five-thirty in the morning. Michael wouldn’t dare to backpack across the Himalayas, let alone fly over them. (“Nothing to do there!” I could hear Michael saying.) And you would never see Michael giving away several grand masterworks of art to the Metropolitan Museum—or giving anything away, except for the occasional dose of crabs.
John Bekkman was the man I wanted to be. Correction, the man I was
supposed
to be. I always felt that I was switched at birth and was actually born to a wealthy family that spent its time reading obscure books in equally obscure languages, traveling to exotic countries that were barely on the map, and engaging in sports that had changed little since the ninth century. But some lunkhead nurse returned me to the wrong crib in the hospital nursery and I was taken home by a hopelessly middle-class family to a middle-class city and lived a middle-class life. And here I was, in John Bekkman’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, staring right in the face of what I could have been. I could have had sandy blond hair (okay, I could still dye it from my teddy bear brown), an athletic body that looked like it was always thin, wear simple but chic clothing, wear driving moccasins with no socks, and live on Fifth Avenue with a knockout view of Central Park and be surrounded by an impeccable collection of art. It was like Steve McQueen had come to life as the character of Thomas Crown in my all-time favorite movie,
The Thomas Crown Affair.
I doubted that John Bekkman was a high-caliber bank robbery mastermind like Thomas Crown was, but you had to wonder where his money came from. Was it possible to inherit
this
much money? Monette, never one to be impressed by signs of wealth, was clearly wowed and she said so.
supposed
to be. I always felt that I was switched at birth and was actually born to a wealthy family that spent its time reading obscure books in equally obscure languages, traveling to exotic countries that were barely on the map, and engaging in sports that had changed little since the ninth century. But some lunkhead nurse returned me to the wrong crib in the hospital nursery and I was taken home by a hopelessly middle-class family to a middle-class city and lived a middle-class life. And here I was, in John Bekkman’s apartment on Fifth Avenue, staring right in the face of what I could have been. I could have had sandy blond hair (okay, I could still dye it from my teddy bear brown), an athletic body that looked like it was always thin, wear simple but chic clothing, wear driving moccasins with no socks, and live on Fifth Avenue with a knockout view of Central Park and be surrounded by an impeccable collection of art. It was like Steve McQueen had come to life as the character of Thomas Crown in my all-time favorite movie,
The Thomas Crown Affair.
I doubted that John Bekkman was a high-caliber bank robbery mastermind like Thomas Crown was, but you had to wonder where his money came from. Was it possible to inherit
this
much money? Monette, never one to be impressed by signs of wealth, was clearly wowed and she said so.
“Nice place you have here,” she commented.
“Thank you, Ms. O’Reilley.”
“Yes, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a personal collection like this before,” Monette gushed again. “I’ll bet that when you have too much art, you rotate them around just to keep things interesting.”
“Something like that,” Bekkman answered coyly.
“I just mentioned that because I noticed that you changed the color of your walls since you had Cody Walker in here for your sexual fantasies,” Monette stated cheerfully.
I watched John’s reaction and thought I detected a minuscule shudder run through his body, but it was hard to tell. He was so cool about it, so in control, that I wasn’t sure. Of course, being hit with an ice breaker like Monette’s reference to his sexual fantasies could rattle just about anyone.
“I change the wall colors because I rotate my paintings in and out of storage. I can’t put my Kandinsky on the same pastel wall where my Cassatt just hung. That’s why the wall is red now.”
Monette pushed on. “Yes, well, lovely. Could we ask a few questions about Cody Walker and Eric Bogert?”
John folded his hands and shifted himself into a more comfortable sitting position. He seemed to expect that we were going to read him a story.
“Ask all the questions you want,” was his reply.
“How did you first develop your
relationship
with Cody Walker?” Monette queried.
relationship
with Cody Walker?” Monette queried.
“
Relationship?
Cody was just a sex partner, Ms. O’Reilley. I met him through the gym.”
Relationship?
Cody was just a sex partner, Ms. O’Reilley. I met him through the gym.”
“Is this Club M?” she pried further.
“Yes.”
I chimed in. “I’m a member, but I don’t remember seeing your face there.”
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