Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom (8 page)

Then he went to work on the painting.

“I been watching your bike,” the bum under the stairs said as Duncan unchained the rusty Schwinn he had paid ten dollars for at a garage sale that afternoon. “Never know when someone might steal such a fine machine.”

Duncan gave him a quarter.

“God bless you, Mr. Getty,” said the bum.

“My name’s not Getty.”

“I’ll say it’s not.”

Duncan rode away wondering who Getty was. He did not make the association with J. Paul as he had not expected sarcasm from a vagrant. Four miles later he locked the bike to a post outside a gallery on Melrose Avenue where Angela had arranged for his inclusion in an exhibition of promising Los Angeles artists. An Aryan named Sven attended the door. His wispy blond hair fell to his shoulders. He dressed in black from his linen shirt to his leather storm trooper boots. Duncan was six-two and weighed one sixty-five on a good day. This Nordic giant had six inches and ninety pounds on him and looked like an angry Thor.

“Your invitation,” he growled.

Duncan searched his pockets. “I have forgotten it,” he said. “But I’m one of the artists.”

“Of course you are. Now leave quickly before I rupture your spleen.”

Not sure where his spleen was but nonetheless not wanting it ruptured, Duncan left. He circled the block, hopped a fence, and entered through the kitchen. Cooks spoke heated Spanish at him and brandished sharp kitchen knives.

“Como esta usted?”
Duncan kept his back to the walls and his eyes on the knives.
“Donde es cerveza?”

A cook gave him a beer and guided him through a door into the main gallery where patrons dressed in silk and spandex and double-breasted wool congregated amid framed paintings and bronze statues. Duncan wore jeans and a gray tweed jacket over a paint-smeared t-shirt. His hair was tangled and whipped from his ride to the gallery. Some guests wore cowboy boots of the Italian variety favored by Tiffy. Duncan wore tennis shoes because his boots kept slipping off the bicycle pedals. He roamed through a crowd bent on ignoring him until he came to a painting that stopped him cold.

It was of a naked man strapped in an electric chair. Desperate, hollow eyes stared out of a shaved head. His muscles were tense, his teeth gritted, his eyes wide and legs spread to reveal a small, erect penis, the head of which sported a metal cap wired into the chair. A blond woman in a guard uniform stood in the shadows behind the chair, her hand on an electric switch, her face beatific in its indifference. It was not the subject that interested him though. It was the guard. It was the cowgirl in the painting in Angela’s office and now, he realized, it was the girl in the Cadillac.

Achilles Last Stand,
the card under the painting read,
by Sheila Rascowitz
.

“Isn’t it horrible?”

Duncan turned. Pris stood by him regarding the painting, her eyes electric with disgust. She wore a short yellow skirt, a white silk blouse, and a yellow leather jacket. She pushed a strand of hair from her forehead and smiled at Duncan.

“Hey,” he said, “that’s you, isn’t it?”

“Sadly, yes.” She frowned. “It just sold for five thousand dollars.”

He studied the painting from an alternative viewpoint. “Go figure.”

“I understand you had a good time last night.”

“Umm …” Duncan’s face burned, “I don’t actually remember if I did or not.”

“Champagne told me your virtue remained intact.” Pris touched his arm. “Though I understand you woke with a serious case of blue balls.”

“Can we talk about something else?”

“Of course. She also said you asked about me.”

A muscular woman with a brown brush cut wedged herself between them. She wore jeans stuffed in black boots and a white t-shirt beneath a black leather vest. She was nearly as tall as Duncan and at least as heavy, thirty years old, with light brown eyes and three silver studs piercing her right ear. Chains crossed her boots and vest. She was attractive in a masculine way.

“Come on.” She grabbed Pris’s arm. “I want you to meet someone.”

“Don’t pull your butch routine on me, Sheila.” Pris shook loose. “You pay my rent but you don’t own me. So buzz off. I’m talking to someone.”

Sheila Rascowitz glared at Duncan. He smiled uncertainly. She shouldered him aside and joined a woman dressed like a member of the Hell’s Angels ladies’ auxiliary. The other woman’s name was Samantha MacDonald, and she was an outwardly feminine accountant by day and butch dyke on a Harley by night. She never hooked up romantically with Sheila because neither was willing to sit on the back seat of the other’s bike. Sheila gestured and Samantha stared. Pris took Duncan’s hand.

“I need a drink,” she said.

They walked to a table where croissants and crackers lay beside paté and cheese. A white jacketed waiter supplied plastic glasses of Chardonnay, though at the time Duncan could only distinguish with limited success between Mexican and American beers.

“She makes me so mad sometimes,” Pris said.

Sheila found the doorman and spoke in his ear. Sven studied the room.

“Let’s get some air,” Duncan said.

Outside a string quartet played Bach. Women wearing pearls wandered around a fountain, arm in arm with men brandishing checkbooks.

“My dad used to call daisies sunshine on sticks. You look like that.” Pris looked confused. Duncan felt clumsy. “I meant it as a compliment.”

Pris smiled. “Then I’ll take it as one.”

Duncan peered into the galley. Sheila and the Swede were nowhere in sight. “Would you like to see my paintings?”

“I’d love to.”

They found his canvases in an alcove by the toilets. The cards beneath read
Roscoe
and
Drive By,
with his name below the titles.

“They should have hung them above the urinals,” he said. “At least then someone might see them.”

Pris squeezed his arm. “I think they’re wonderful.”

Duncan’s annoyance evaporated. His heart sprouted wings and fluttered up his chest to lodge in his throat.

“I’d like to paint you,” he chanced.

Pris shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Duncan felt as if his heart had been pierced by twenty gauge bird shot, as if the giddy wind stirred by her proximity had been knocked from his punctured lungs by her denial, like his wings were ripped off and his carcass had fallen bloody to be trampled in the gutter.

“Could we at least have dinner sometime and talk about it?”

“No!”
Pris yelled.

Duncan doubted the invitation merited so harsh a response, and he quailed at the severity of the rejection. When he was lifted into the air and thrown bodily into the men’s room, he realized her exclamation was not meant for him. He hit the tiles with a squeak. He rose as Sven came at him, eyes angrily furrowed. Duncan hit him as hard as he could across the jaw with absolutely no effect.

“Uh oh,” said Duncan.

The Teutonic giant lifted him like a sack of rice. “You are not welcome here.”

Sven was preparing to throw Duncan head-first into a urinal when Pris kicked him square between the legs from behind. His eyes crossed and he dropped Duncan. Sven grabbed his genitals and sank gasping to the floor, his face white as mold on last week’s bread. Sheila grabbed Pris from behind. Pris elbowed her in the gut. It degenerated from there. Angela, on her way to show Duncan’s paintings to the gallery’s owner, found the four tangled on the floor as Sven applied a choke hold on Duncan.

“Duncan!” Angela cried.

“You mean …” the gallery owner was a small, well-dressed man of sixty, with worried eyes and expensively coiffed and dyed hair.

“Yes! That’s Duncan Delaney!”

“Sven!” the owner cried. “What have you
done?”

Sven relaxed the choke hold. “I thought he was an intruder.”

“No,” Angela said, “he’s one of my artists.”

Duncan stood and helped Pris up. Sheila slapped his proffered hand away. Sven tried to rise, but Pris’s kick had caused minor structural damage to the genitals.

“You’re fired,” the owner said, adding the insult.

“He thought he was doing his job,” Duncan said. “That’s all.” He helped Sven to a chair and brought him a glass of water.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Delaney,” Sven said. “I could cry.”

“Angela,” Sheila said, “you represent this, this … person?”

“That’s right.”

“Not anymore you don’t.”

“Sorry?”

“Either he goes or I do.”

Angela smiled sadly. “I’ll be sorry to lose you.”

“You’re keeping him over
me?”

“If you change your mind, I’d love to have you back.”

Sheila stared at Angela for a long moment, her face red and her eyes sharp. She turned and stomped away. Angela dusted Duncan off.

“You should care more about your appearance,” she said sternly.

Inside she smiled. A crowd, attracted by the commotion, gathered by his paintings and eyed him thoughtfully. Duncan turned to see Pris reach the door.

“I’ve got to go.”

“Watch out for Sheila,” Angela said. “She’s not all there.”

He burst onto Melrose in time to see the Cadillac’s taillights fly from him. He heard motorcycles. Thundering Harleys ringed him. Sheila Rascowitz stopped before him. Samantha MacDonald and two others circled like gluttonous wolves. If he was not so scared, four women on motorcycles dressed like fugitives from a Marlon Brando fan club would have been comical.

But,
he realized,
these women are perfectly capable of beating the piss out of me
.

“I’ll tell you once,” Rascowitz yelled above the roar of the bikes, “stay away from her.”

The sound of engines lingered long after the women vanished around a corner. Duncan returned to the fence where he had left his Schwinn. Only a cut chain remained.

I’ve had problems with women before,
he thought as he walked back to his studio,
but never like this
.

Six

Benjamin was sitting alone at a black jack table when he spied Howard Lomo and Leroy Kern. He had arrived at the casino two hours before, and the four red chips he began with had spawned a multitudinous pile in an assortment of colors. The dealer was a Hispanic looking man several years older than Benjamin, with a gut under his vest and piercing black eyes beneath wire rimmed glasses. Benjamin considered relinquishing his seat before they spotted him, but he would forfeit his fifty-dollar bet, and he was more curious about how Kern and Lomo had regained his trail than he was alarmed by the fact that they had.

“In
-surance,” said the dealer.

The dealer showed an ace. Benjamin held two tens. He put a twenty-five dollar chip out. The dealer took it and flipped his hole card. A queen.

“Blackjack,” said the dealer.

Leroy Kern poked Howard Lomo and pointed to Benjamin. Lomo wore dark glasses which roughly concealed the shiner around his right eye. Leroy Kern wore a dirty bandage over his nose and a brace around his neck. They settled on stools to his left and to his right.

“I feel a run of bad lack coming,” Benjamin said, but he left his bet on the table.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” said the dealer, “will you be playing?”

“We just want a word with our friend,” Lomo said. “Ain’t that right?”

“That’s right,” said Leroy Kern.

“I’m amazed you boys found me. Considering your general lack of competence and all.”

“Shut up and play.”

Lomo surveyed the casino. Benjamin was dealt a ten and a deuce. The dealer gave himself an ace up.

“In
-sur
-ance.”

Benjamin nodded
no.
The dealer looked at his hole card and put it back face down. Benjamin waved off another card.

“He’s alone,” Lomo said.

“Are you nuts?” Kern asked. “Standing on a twelve against an ace?”

The dealer turned up his card. A six. He busted with a jack and a nine.

“You play your way,” Benjamin said. “I’ll play mine.”

“We’re not here to play, boy.”

Something poked Benjamin. He looked down. Lomo held a blue steel thirty-eight special against Benjamin’s ribs. This was his old throw down gun, with a hair trigger and the serial number filed off. He had left his forty caliber duty weapon back in his hotel room, as it was too large to conceal.

“Tell you what,” Benjamin said, “why don’t you and your moron buddy take fifty dollars each and play awhile. On me.”

“You must think we’re pretty stupid,” Lomo said.

“Well, him at least.”

“Come on.” Leroy Kern said, ignoring the insult, “it ain’t like it’s our money.”

“Well, all right.” Howard Lomo put the gun in his waistband and closed his jacket. He appropriated a pile of chips. “But when the money’s gone, so are we.”

“I said fifty each,” Benjamin said.

“I heard what you said. But I chose to ignore it.”

After ten hands Kern and Lomo were broke. Benjamin won eight of the ten and was now up seven hundred and eighty-five dollars.

“Jesus,” Leroy Kern said, “how do you do that?”

“I got a system.”

“Well, so do I.” Howard Lomo snatched another pile of chips.

“Sir, management frowns upon players taking other player’s chips.”

Lomo read the dealer’s name tag. “Stay out of this Keith Gomez.” Something about the man plagued him. Lomo flashed a badge. “This is police business. I’m taking this boy out and don’t want any interference.”

Lomo had ordered the badge from a catalog after his was ripped from his shirt by his former employer. It was a Soviet Intelligence officer’s badge. Lomo had selected it because he liked the dagger dripping blood above the fractured heart. He had flashed and pocketed it so quickly that Gomez could not be faulted if he believed it legitimate.

Gomez said, “I’ll notify security.”

The glory of Lomo’s old occupation reasserted itself in his chest.
Nothing as tasty as a good ass kissing,
he reflected. Gomez whispered to a pit boss. The boss looked to the table and picked up a phone.