Pain Killers (27 page)

“Why did you do that? He’s my
driver.
” Tina ignored me and went to work on Jack’s black wingtips. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What’s it look like I’m doing? Untying his shoes, then I’m going to take his pants off.”

She unbuckled his belt and popped the buttons on his pants.

“You could help, you know.”

“Wait! I
like
the guy.”

“That’s nice. When this blows over, you can go bowling together.”

“Tina, what the fuck are you doing?”

“You have to ask?”

“I don’t know what to ask first.”

Why am I even here?
That was the thing about being attracted to a borderline personality. I found myself doing things normal people didn’t do, and going along, because
I
was a borderline personality.

This was the woman I loved. We pulled the driver’s pants down in tandem, our heads nearly above him. I wanted to get out of there, but Tina was Tina.

“I’m sure there’s a good reason you’re messing with a crime scene.”

“What do you think?” She wiped a bead of sweat off her arm. “Maybe Zell hired somebody to kill her. She might have flipped out and told him what she thought about him teaming up with Mengele. Or maybe she was so upset, she wanted to check herself out.”

I gave up and left the driver’s pants at his knees. “Or somebody killed her to get back at Zell.”

“Please. You think one wife more or less makes a difference? The man’s been married five times.”

“Three. You always embellish.”

Tina aimed a gaze of pure uranium.

“Harry Zell deserves to hang for doing
any
kind of business with Mengele. And believe me, when word gets out his wife died in the saddle, riding kosher, he’s going to squirm.”

“You’re doing this to make Zell feel worse? It’s not bad enough his wife’s dead—he has to hear she went out riding Chasid?”

“Believe me, it will hurt him more than her fling with the club tennis pro.”

“How do you know she did that?”

“They all do.”

I leaned down to my pal Jack. He was still breathing. Unconscious, but among the living. Thank God.

“You know,” I said, “if Zell’s behind this, what’s he going to think when he hears his wife had an affair after he killed her?”

“What would you think?”

“I don’t know, but it would make me nervous. I’d think somebody knew something.”

“Well then. Let’s do this and get out of here.”

Tina’s cheekbones shone with the effort of moving two full-grown humans around. Her concentration was fearsome.

“This doesn’t freak you out, Tina?”

“The world freaks me out. All I’m trying to do is control a little bit of the freakdom.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “Jack here may have a different opinion.”

“Hey, he’s in it, too.” Tina flashed me her
man up
look. “The good news is he’s never seen your face when you weren’t Orthodox.”

“Tina, for fuck’s sake, I’m not talking about him ID’ing me. I’m talking about him waking up naked next to a dead woman. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“And we do?” Tina threw up her hands. “C’mon, Manny, like this is your first time at the dance?”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“It means we need a smoke screen. Or would you rather be the prime suspect?” A sleep bubble of saliva appeared between Jack’s lips, and she reached down to pop it. “Do you
want
an APB out on your ass? ’Cause I guarantee, if we’d let your boy just walk in and find a dead lady, the first thought in his head would be that you did it.”

“I told you, he thinks I’m somebody else.”

She glared. “So do I—’cause you didn’t used to be this dense. What are you, on crack? How hard do you think it would be to trace you back to the airport? How many Chasids do you think flew in today? They’ll track you all the way back to SF—or wherever the hell you got the bright idea of dressing up like the Baal Shem fucking Tov. You ever think of finding a disguise that blended in?”

“They didn’t sell wigs in the Quentin gift shop. I had to improvise.”

“Oh, baby.” Tina sighed and touched my nose, the one part of my face that didn’t have hair sprouting out of it. “I can’t believe we’re bickering. Open his mouth.”

“What for?”

“For these.”

Tina opened her fist on a handful of white pills. “Rufies.”

“Why are you walking around with Rufies?”

“I’m not. They’re Zell’s. Or hers. I guess they liked to party. You think you’re the only one who raids medicine cabinets?”

“I don’t do that anymore.”

“You’re a credit to your race. I just thought they might come in handy. And see that, they have! C’mon, hold his mouth open. We shove a couple of these down his gullet, it’s gonna look like date rape.”

“Right.” I didn’t move. “Why don’t we slaughter a chicken and write ‘Kill the Pigs’ in blood on the wall, too? Just to throw ’em off. Make it look like some kosher Santeria Manson thing.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“The point doesn’t matter. If we try to stick them down his throat while he’s out, he might choke to death.”

“And?”

Now I was doing the glaring, and Tina backed off. “And any third-rate coroner would find the things undissolved in his thoracic tube and know they were shoved in postmortem. I can’t believe I’m even
having
this conversation.”

Tina closed her fingers back around the pills and crossed her arms. “Okay, Rabbi, then what?”

“Then nothing. Let’s just finish this and get out of here.”

“Man of action,” she said. “That’s why I love you.”

It took us another minute to reposition poor Jack on top of the hole-y sheet and the late Mrs. Zell naked underneath.

“I’m surprised her pubes aren’t baby blue,” Tina said. “Do you want to put him through the hole?”

“Are you kidding me?”

Tina started to reach for the driver’s crotch but I pushed her hand away. The only thing more revolting than grabbing his johnson myself would be watching Tina do it. I knew that she’d banked on my reaction. She knew it, too, and smiled.

“Look at you, manning up!”

“Tina, please. Not now.”

Holding my breath, I tried to grab Jack’s organ. But somehow it had gotten wedged between his balls and his thigh, and when I tried to move his scrotum, the spongy dampness gave me a shock.
“Yecchhh!”
Either Jack suffered copious testicle sweats, or he’d urinated when Tina knocked him out.

“What’s the matter?”

“Sweaty,” I managed to say without gagging, and jammed my hand back down for a second try. This time I got a grip on his organ—and thought I felt it stir. I wasn’t sure, but as I tried to extract the thing it began to swell. “Oh, Jesus!” I said, and let it go.

“Now what?” Tina snapped.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Can the comatose get hand jobs?”

“For Christ’s sake,” Tina replied, “I know you liked the guy, but this is ridiculous.”

“Fuck you,” I said. Biting down on my lip, I guided the now rubbery organ, which felt like a dog toy, through the opening in the fabric, in the general proximity of Mrs. Zell’s landing strip, then rushed to the bathroom.

“I have to wash my hands.”

“Not there, I cleaned.” With her baggied hand, Tina eased open a bed-stand drawer. “You’d get more germs on a doorknob. Now where do you think they keep the handcuffs?”

“No!” I ass-bumped the drawer shut and grabbed my ex by the arm. “Baby,
enough.
We’re leaving.”

The first stab of sun was startling after the aquarium light of the bedroom. As we darted from sculptured nymph shrub to six-foot aleph, I kept wiping my hands compulsively on my pants and complaining. “I still don’t see what posing the driver accomplishes.”

“Could you stop whining for one second?” Tina hissed.

I stopped and faced her. “I am not whining. I’m just saying, now that we’ve done it, making a crime scene look like Jewish fetish sex gone wrong might not even help us that much. It’ll take a good criminalist three minutes to figure the scene was staged.”

“Maybe, maybe not. But if you’re Harry Zell, and you already know your wife’s proclivities, you probably don’t want the rest of the world to find out about them.”

“That,” I said, “or he comes back with a crew to get it on film. Mostly I just feel bad about the driver.”

“Enough with the goddamn driver!” Tina stopped beside a buxom sprite hacked from a juniper tree. “Did you even know him? This jim-jim picks you up, lets you think he believes you’re someone else, and just drives you around? Really? How do you know he wasn’t biding his time, waiting for orders?”

“From who? Diva Limousines? I’m just glad I tipped him big.”

“Don’t be. That just makes you more suspicious.”

Tina stopped and looked around. Dust motes circled in the shafts of light that made it through the overgrown shrubs and trees. “I keep expecting a fucking unicorn to come trotting out.”

“Jew-nicorn,” I whispered back as we started moving again.

Tina punched me in the stomach.

“
Owfff…What was that for?”

“Fuck, Manny, if we’re going to be together, I need to feel like you can protect me.”

I contemplated a ten-foot bush carved into Hebrew letters: (in the beginning). The first line of Genesis. I recognized it from my Bar Mitzvah, where I’d had to sing it right out of the Torah. I had no idea, at the time, I’d be cashing in my Israeli gift bonds for drugs.

“First of all,” I said, willing myself back to the present as we started moving again, “I didn’t know
we
were together. You left, remember?”

We hadn’t gone ten feet when we faced a black metal gate. Tina reached for the handle and I grabbed her, spinning her back toward me. “Second,” I said, holding her by her shoulders, “knocking somebody out with a trash can is not the same as protecting. Shit like that creates more problems than it solves. And you don’t want to leave prints on the gate.”

“Yeah,” she said, her voice suddenly sultry, “tell me what to do, Daddy.”

She stood on her toes to kiss me but I pushed her away. “Not here.”

“Why not?”

“This is Brentwood. We probably triggered ten kinds of motion detectors and a silent alarm crossing the yard.”

I ripped a fern leaf big enough to cover my hand and unlatched the door.

“You know what I wish?” she said, before stepping through. “I wish we could just talk about normal stuff. Like normal people.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know, that’s the problem. We’re in the black Prius.”

“What happened to the Virgin pussy wagon?”

“I got tired of that giant-ass carbon footprint. A girlfriend loaned me her Prius.” By “loaned,” I suspected, she meant “left the keys in.” But this wasn’t the time to press.

Sure enough, the black Prius waited like a cute puppy on the other side of the Hebrew jungle. But before Tina and I tiptoed out of the copse, she pulled me back. “I’m with you now, Manny. But where the fuck are you?”

“Meaning what?” I was getting sick of dramatic pronouncements.

“Meaning, I love you, but you shouldn’t do drugs. They’re not your friends.”

“And you think they’re yours?”

“Hey, I’m not the one in a beaver hat and a Bobover makeover. I’m functioning.”

I had nothing to say to that. The limo I’d arrived in was still parked kitty-corner on the lush street. Some men in suits milled behind it, conferring with their backs to us. We ducked silently out of the shadows to her Prius. Tina started the soundless engine. She U-turned out of the mega-upscale Brentwood lane and aimed us back down to Sunset.

For a minute and a half I steamed with indignation, but that passed by the time we made it to the first stop sign. “Shit, Tina. You’re right. I am fucking up. I got into some strange powder I found up there under my trailer.”

“Under your trailer?”

“Don’t ask. It came in a Red Cross box. But I was fucking up before that. I should have gotten more on Zell in the first place. Scoped out his home and office. That’s the reason I came back to L.A. But I didn’t expect to find his wife dead and you in his bathroom. I’m just”—I knew I had to dial back the emotion, but I’d been numb for a while—“I’m just really happy to see you.”

Tina took her eyes off the road and scrutinized me while she steered. “Look at us, huh? Maybe we had to pull a Burton and Taylor. Split up just so we could reconnect.”

Somehow the prospect sounded as tiring as it did exciting. I said, “I don’t know, baby.” But when I stared at her, I did know.

Today, from a certain angle, she looked Björkish. Critical cheekbones and straight bangs over her eyes. The sirens closing in made the moment movie dramatic. Maybe the ditzy housekeeper finally checked on the lady of the house. Or maybe the driver came to.

“Zell’s got an at-home office. His den,” Tina said quietly. I groaned, realizing I’d forgotten to check. Tina read my mind. “That’s all right.
I
remembered. But he’s one of those guys who keeps everything in his head.” Then, not bothering with a transition—mutual ADD made transitions unnecessary—she added, “You need to lose these.”

She snatched my fur brim and forelocks and flipped them into the backseat.

“There, Detective, you look better already.”

“Detective. What lifetime was that?” I said, tugging my tallith off. “But I like you in a Prius. You make it look dangerous.”

“I’m all about saving energy, sir. But the smart money’s in solar vibrators. You want to talk about where we go next?”

“I was just thinking about that,” I lied. “I was hired to get information on the doctor, but so far I’ve found out more about the guy who hired me.”

“Hey, somebody hires you to identify Josef Mengele, you want to know all about your employer.”

“A life tip I only wish I’d have heard earlier. I get impulsive.”

“It’s funny, him having twins in Quentin. Especially with the king of twin dissection in the house. Maybe it’s coincidence, but it’s still weird.”

“Not as weird as him having a big Jew son who’s a shot-caller in the ALS.”

“Which reminds me.” Tina fished in her open purse between her legs on the seat, then gave up, muttering to herself. “Fuck it, I can live without a cigarette…. I think. But I forgot to mention. His second wife’s maiden name was Bernstein.”