Monsters and Magicians (25 page)

When David had indicated that he would prefer living in the area rather than commuting as needed from the distant city—he had told Von Fridley, by phone, and both Mike Mills and the sheriff in person, that he felt he needed to try to absorb the "feel" of the surroundings and inhabitants and their culture, and since he asked no more than the pitiful (by modern standards) per diem proffered by Fridley, there had been no objection from anyone and not a little praise for such dedication from Fridley; of course, the real reason he chose to exile himself was neither dedication nor Yancey Mathews, it was Amy Fisch— Sheriff" Vaughan had seen a vacant office in the new courthouse turned over to him, equipped it with

basic items of furniture and a telephone, stuck a tag on the bumper of his wagon that would allow it to legally occupy county parking slots, then warned him which bars and restaurants in the general vicinity were best avoided did a man wish to avoid stomach and bowel distress. The lawman also had pointedly added a new china mug to the row ranged above his office Silex.

David could not prove it, of course, but he was sure that it had been a word from Vaughan that had caused the owner/manager of the Honeysuckle Motel to suddenly find it necessary to shift his guest to the bridal suite—two-bay bedroom with a king-sized bed, a larger-screen television set, better and newer furniture, deeper carpet and a bath with dressing table, massage-head shower and a separate, pink marble tub equipped with Jacuzzi jets—at the same price he had been paying for a commercial single.

His first night in the new and sumptuous quarters had also been the night he had told Amy by phone that no, she definitely could not take a bus up to spend the weekend with him. He got shakes as bad as those of his client with a hangover just thinking about trying to explain to the live-in owner of the motel about the nocturnal noises that sex with Amy always produced.

A bit later, as he relaxed in the imitation-marble tub filled with blood-temperature water and let the pressure jets soothe his muscles while the contents of the plastic tumbler of scotch-rocks soothed his innards, he thought back to that first night with his colleague Amy Fisch, hang-up girl of the century, so far out in left field that she had started him wonder-

ing just what he was doing anywhere near her, wondering, if he stayed around her too long, her condition would infect him, too.

When she had come down the steps of her rooming house to get into the wagon with him, the hot pizza, the jug of wine and the package of cookies, she had exchanged her severe courthouse attire for the uniform of her generation—faded, ragged jeans, worn, none-too-clean sweatshirt, thong sandals and an army-surplus backpack which sported the faded outline of a hand-drawn peace symbol.

She said little in the car on the drive to his apartment building, one of a block of several identical buildings in a newly developed suburb of the city. Shrugging into the pack straps, she carried the pizza box, following him up the stairs and entering behind him after he had unlocked the door.

While he was locating relatively clean glasses and pouring them full of the pale red wine in the eat-in kitchen, she had begun to unload the rucksask onto the scarred cocktail table, and by the time he came back in with glasses brimful of wine, a couple of hastily rinsed and dried forks, paper plates and napkins for the pizza, the table top held an assortment of items. There was a medium-sized brass hookah or waterpipe, a handful of small vials that David recognized—"poppers" of amyl nitrate—a big glass jar about half full of several kinds of pills—uppers, downers and unknowns—a much smaller glass jar containing some white powder that David was certain was not the powdered sugar it most closely resembled, a dark green dropper bottle, a cheese knife, a box of Swedish matches, a tube of stick incense and a brass

holder for them, and, peeking shyly out from its aluminum-foil wrapping, a dark brown chunk of enough hashish to keep a herd of elephants stoned for a week. There were other items, too, but David had no eyes for them at that moment . . . though he was to keenly recall them later during that weekend.

Taking a deep, deep breath and carefully setting down the wine and other items wherever there was space on the now-crowded table, he asked, in the calmest voice he could, "You mean you actually keep all this stuff in your room, in a place you can't lock in a damned rooming house, for the love of God?"

Amy Fisch had just shrugged and nodded, "Sure, why not? Oh, I'm not dumb about it, most of the stuff is always locked up in my footlocker and nobody's tried to rip me off yet. Besides, whenever I fire up the hookah, I always burn lots of incense before, during and after, and I leave the window open, too."

"Holy shit, woman!" David managed not to exactly shout, "Don't you read the local papers or follow other peoples' cases? The Stinker just last month had a twenty-two-year-old client sent to the state prison for forty years for getting caught holding a couple of lousy dime bags of low-grade pot. Think about it, huh? You're an officer of the court, they'd nail your ass to the wall, crucify you . . . and the way they all seem to feel about Von and the rest of us, simply love doing it, every minute of it!

"Oh, sure, I keep a little stuff around, pot, but it's not anywhere it could be unqestionably pinned to me, either, there are forty other tenants in this complex, you know. I don't want to even think of getting

caught holding or using in this state. But the way you're taking chances, it looks like you do want to get busted." He stopped when he ran out of breath, then demanded, "What the hell you think you're doing, woman?"

"What's it look like, Klein?" she answered calmly, the cheese knife in her hand continuing its steady, even strokes as she shaved hashish off the chunk. "Why don't you turn on that air conditioner, get the air circulating in here, and you can light a couple of those patchouli sticks, too, the purple ones. Then you can get out of that damned suit and all, I wanta see what size basket you've got inside those pants. I just hope you can get yours harder and keep it up longer in action than that damned over-the-hill Von Fridley can."

When he did not move at once, she paused in her task and looked up at him, a faint smile on her thin face and malicious mockery in her voice. "Well, Klein, what're you waiting for? Are you just shy or did urns mommy tell urns not to let anybody see his weewee? Hmm?"

"The . . . uhh, the pizza," he heard himself stuttering, "it'll get cold and ..."

She dropped the knife and slapped the palm of her hand down hard on the stained and battered table, snarling, "Screw the goddamn pizza, Klein, I wanta see your cock! I wanta see it, feel it, smoke some hash and then eat it, okay? Or . . . ?" she choked, then demanded, "Or are you another fag like Czernako? Please, tell me you're not gay, too . . . or better, show me you're not."

"God, what an idiot, what an utter dunce I was

that night," thought David, sipping another sip of the strong scotch as he lay there in the pink marble tub. "That was a perfect out, right there and then, and if I'd only known then what I know now, I'd have told her I was queer as a three-dollar bill. And she'd be stalking some other poor bastard by now, but better him, better any-fucking-body than me!"

He sighed and took another small sip of the smoky nectar. "She gives good head, though, the best I've ever had. That first time, now, there in my living room, on the floor, God\ What an experience. With the hash and the amyl and her tricks, I thought f d just keep coming until . . . until my toenails came out or my heart stopped or my fucking brain exploded or all three at once. If only she wasn't so damned weird, otherwise ... I wonder if she really did make it with her own father, a rabbi, or if it's just some kind of damn Electra thing whirling around in her definitely fucked-up brain?

"Of course, if everything she's told me at various times is all true, if she's done as many drugs as she says she has for as many years as she says she has, her brain couldn't be anything but a bowl of oatmeal. I wonder how anybody that all-time screwy managed to get through pre-law, even, much less law school. I damn near didn't, and I wasn't into a tenth of the stuff she's been—seventy or eighty acid trips? Holy shit!—she must of been in the pants of every dean and prof on her campus is all I can figure. I wonder how the dyke she said she roomed with liked them apples? Or maybe she was a bi acid-head and fast-track doper, too.

"But the big question is how can Mrs. Klein's little

boy, Dave, get out of this unholy godawful mess he's screwed his way into before he winds up in serious deep shit or in a coffin at Weinstein's Chapel, where all his father's high-powered buddies can take a last look and murmur lies about how tragic it was and how a promising career was cut short. And I can't stay up here, can't drag this case out forever.

"No, once Mathews finally goes before a judge . . . and, God and the state bar forgive me for even thinking it, but from all I've learned about the bastard so far, I think the sheriff is right, I think a prison farm or a chain gang is the best place for him . . . and it's all decided one way or another, then I'll have no choice if I want to keep my job, such as it is, th^n to go back to the city. And then my ass will be grass and Amy Fisch will be the fucking lawnmower."

The salvation of David Klein, Public Defender, was yet to come, but he did not yet know of it, of course.

Half-zonked with hashish, a couple of lines of coke, wine and then more hashish, David had not demurred when the woman had asked—no, demanded— that her wrists be tied for sex, and due to the fact that the wooden bedstead included a row of three-inch spools along most of the middle of the peeling headboard, there was no trouble finding a place to which to secure the length of rope—it being furnished by Amy from out her rucksack. At her direction, he left enough slack so that she could get one hand—the one clutching the popper of amyl—to her nose.

It had been all that he could do to drag his weary, burnt-out carcass back up the stairs on the Sunday

night of that ill-recalled weekend of sex, hash, sex, wine, sex, coke, sex, bennies, sex, cookies and cold pizza, sex, reds, sex, whiskey and then sex. He had not been worth a damn on the following Monday, and Amy had not come into the office at all.

When she had come in on the Tuesday morning, she had nodded to him as she stalked back to Frid-ley's private office and slammed the door behind her. Whence loud, angry voices presently could be heard to emanate, their decibel rates steadily climbing, though still lacking in clarity due to the sound conditioning of the smaller office and the noises of the thirty-six-inch floor fans in the larger room.

"Oh, shit!" Morris Mullins had muttered, heaving his bulk up from out his desk chair and beginning to frantically stuff his peeling briefcase. "Whenever that shit starts up, anybody with any sense says bye-bye until it's over and done with. Those two'll drag anybody that's around into it, and you don't want any part of that, Klein, believe you me, buddy. It's a 'heads you lose, tails you lose' proposition."

A few minutes later, ensconced in a booth at an eatery favored by the city police and so avoided by Fridley, who called it "The Pig Pen," David sprung for coffee and doughnuts and was related some facts by another of his fellow employees, Gregor Czernako, Mullins having lumbered out and away ahead of them.

"We should be safe in here from that dust-up back there, David . . . may I call you David? Good. I'm Greg," said the slender man with his singular, ash-blond Afro, a full beard but no trace of a moustache. "You spent the weekend with our Amy? Of course

you did. Welcome to the club, David." He smiled. "This sort of thing happens every time Amy sets out after a piece of fresh meat."

Czernako took a swallow of the coffee, licked the doughnut glaze from his fingers, then continued, "Amy and Morris have been here longer than any of those still around and they've outlasted not a few who came after them, you know. Morris is good at what he does, you've seen that, he knows his law, and what he doesn't know, he's not long in researching and absorbing. Our Amy, on the other hand, is real bad news for any poor fucker so unlucky as to draw her to represent them, but she also has obviously got poor Von by the balls in some way and so she not only stays here engaging in what amounts to continual misrepresentation of her luckless clients but she gets away with bloody murder in other ways, too."

"I got the impression, from her," said David, sotto voce, "that she and Von had been an item for a while, some time back."

"Ahh, poor, poor Von," sighed Czernako, sadly, "for two thirds of his life, he tried to find a good-looking, progressively minded young woman who practiced free love and, when he finally found her, she was too much for him. I had a very dear friend once, a Jesuit, who used to say that when God really has it in for you, He gives you exactly what you think you want. That's been the case with our feckless leader, I fear; unquestionably powerful a man as he is, in a political and bureaucratic sense, Amy is his superior in all else. The sad old man still thinks her his mistress, for all that she's openly, flagrantly put

horns on him with nearly every man he ever brought into the office, at least half the local cops, and God alone knows who and how many others. She even tried it with me once, but f m not her type, thank God." He smiled again. "I'll turn on with her anytime, naturally; I'll never turn down good hash or grass or coke."

Even more softly than before, for all that the few other diners this early in the morning were clustered at the counter some feet away, David asked, "That's another very troubling thing, Greg. In a place as uptight as this is, how in the hell has she stayed out on the street with all the stuff she holds and does, not even making much of a secret of it? And how in hell can she afford to buy shit like that on the pitiful salary we're paid? Do you know?"

"Like I said, David," replied the blond man, "she's got some kind of a lock on Von and Von has great power in certain quarters; also, as I said earlier, she's got a whole string of conquests on the cops, hereabouts, all ranks and divisions. As for where she gets the money for the shit, maybe from Von or some others I don't know about. I wouldn't put a wee tad of blackmail past a woman like our Amy. Hell, David, she could even be turning tricks on the side, for all any of us could know. Morris says that if that woman had as few as half as many sticking out of her as she's had sticking in her just since she'd been here, she'd look like a prickupine." This time, he grinned widely enough to show every crooked, yellow tooth as he added, "Of course, he could truthfully say the same thing about me, God be praised, and that's what J like about the South, David."