The Last Manly Man (4 page)

“Lola? Gus,” we heard. “I'm not sure if you got my earlier message. I might have dialed the wrong number because a strange man picked up as I was leaving it. Well, anyway, I lost my patient and it turns out I'll be in New York on Friday and maybe Saturday. I'm in Boulder, at the Boulderado Hotel, room 511. Call and let me know.”

“Ah, poor Gus, lost his patient
and
then dialed the wrong number again,” Mike said, sounding thoughtful. “Second time he called here today. I hope he finds Lola. Kind of too bad, isn't it? He and Lola might miss each other this weekend.”

Gus had called here before and left messages for Lola, though not for a couple of months, and Mike liked to speculate on who they were, what they looked like, how their romance had unfolded. Mike's romantic for a nonwussy guy—it's an Irish thing, I think.

“How come you're so interested in talking, Mike?”

“We haven't had a chance to talk this week. We haven't had a chance to really talk in a while.”

“You could always stay another day.”

“Can't. I have to be back in San Fran tomorrow to set up for Saturday. There's lighting to worry about, crowd sound, we're working with three cameras, all those temperamental circus folk. The lion tamer Olga is jealous of Veronkya, you know, the trapeze artist, and …”

Veronkya. That name was a cold shower, and not just because it sounds like someone expelling phlegm. She was almost all Mike talked about lately, about how Veronkya, an eighteen-year-old East European, was flying without a net for the first time Saturday, how she had conquered a fear of heights to follow her family into the trapeze-flying business, how bloody brave she was. But as Mike and I were nonmonogamous, it wasn't my place to express jealousy.

“Let's not talk,” I suggested, pushing up against him. Mike was definitely into it—or at least, he was responding. We kissed and sort of dry-humped lightly, when he suddenly stopped and pulled away from me again. He looked very serious.

“I have something to …” he started to say, and our timing being what it was lately, at that moment his beeper went off and I didn't hear the rest of the sentence.

“Damn,” he said, checking the rolling message on the beeper's LCD screen. “It's my ex-wife.”

“Felicia? She can wait,” I said, trying to pull him back.

He threw my arm off him and read the message. “It's urgent, about Samantha. I'd better call her. I'll use the phone in the bedroom.”

He talked real low on the phone and I couldn't hear what he was saying. When he came back, his pale Irish face was even paler, if that's possible. He said, “Samantha was supposed to come straight home after ballet three hours ago to go to her grandmother's place for a birthday dinner.”

“Maybe she forgot,” I said, suppressing the thought that Samantha had escalated her tactics. Lately whenever Mike and I were close to refinding our old intimacy, there was some emergency with Samantha requiring Mike to spend time with her and his ex-wife. You don't have to be a genius to see the Hayley Mills parent trap scenario there.

“Samantha loves Felicia's mom, she wouldn't forget the birthday,” Mike said.

“God, maybe she is missing then,” I said.

“I'll call you later. Sorry, Girl.”

“That's okay,” I said. “But you were about to tell me something …”

“It's … it can wait, really.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Not enough time now. It's complicated … I gotta go, Robin.”

“Not even a hint?”

“Gotta go … Samantha …”

“Yeah, of course. I hope Samantha is okay. Call me when you have the scoop.”

He looked at me in a way he'd never looked at me before, kind of sad, kind of nostalgic, and kissed me. And then he was gone with his suitcase and my newfound hat on his head. It was a far cry from the man I used to know, who would read excerpts from pornographic books to my voice mail at work and then ravish me with chest-thumping gusto for a full hour when I got home.

Men leaving me in the lurch—just part of the curse I travel under, to be attracted to interesting men driven by a vision who just can't be counted on to stick around. But to be fair, I've left a few in the lurch myself. Still, it didn't feel good, standing there half-dressed, my black slip sticking to my skin, all sweaty and slatternly like Patricia Neal in
Hud
, having just been rebuffed by a man.

It wasn't until I turned on the lights that I noticed that Mike had taken some of his Mecca souvenirs with him, the best of his collection of cheesy Mecca knickknacks, including his Mecca snow globe and his Mecca cityscape carved out of cork.

The guy was slowly moving his stuff out of my place. I was losing him, I thought.

“Men! Why do I like them so much?” I asked Louise Bryant, who was scratching at the window. She wanted to go out to visit my neighbor Sally. Lately, she'd been spending a lot of time with Sally. It was like my cat was cheating on me too.

“Don't leave me tonight, Louise,” I said to her.

As the Roman poet Ovid said, if you seek a way out of love, be busy. I had plenty of other stuff to think about, i.e., the Man of the Future series and my interviews the next day with Gill Morton, CEO of Morton Industries, and incendiary man hater Alana DeWitt, who believed men were devolving to extinction.

Despite how lukewarm Benny Winter had been at our dinner meeting, I still hoped he would come through with anthropologist Wallace Mandervan. I had the old boys' network on my side—specifically, my CEO Jack Jackson and Gill Morton of Morton Industries. It was Jack who set me up with Gill Morton, who in turn set me up with Benny Winter. They were powerful allies.

For the next hour, I read through my research and pre-interview notes, until just before 11:00
P.M.
, when Mike finally called to say Samantha was home and she was okay. She had fallen asleep in the library at school (or so she claimed). He was going to spend the night out at his ex-wife's place in Jersey and fly out from Newark in the early
A.M.

“What did you want to tell me?” I asked.

“I can't talk here. Someone's here …”

“Give me a hint.”

“It can wait.”

“Should I worry?”

“No, don't do that. Once you get started you don't stop. It's fine. No big deal. I'm going to be crazy the next few days, but I'll try to call you when I can. If Veronkya calls, will you give her Felicia's number?”

“Oh, I'll be sure to,” I said, half wishing I'd replaced the condoms in his shaving kit with the promotional talking condoms a sex magazine sent me when we were doing a series on porn magazines featuring dominant women. I collect talking and singing condoms. A tiny microchip at the base of the condom is activated by body heat to make the penis appear to be talking, in this case, saying, “Bad boy! Baaad boy!” The Hungarian singing condoms were pretty good too.

A talking penis, that'd put the fear of God back into Veronkya. Not that I had any right to complain, not with Gus coming to town.

I'd almost forgotten about Gus.

Mike imagined Gus to be a short, blond doctor in his late thirties, married with two kids, and Lola a raven-haired mistress, or mister, Gus saw whenever he could get away to New York. He couldn't have been more wrong. Gus was a single, hetero, brown-haired actor, five eleven, thirty-eight years old, who liked rock climbing, simultaneously translating Tori Spelling movies into Shakespearean dialogue, and going to a dark restaurant called Mia Cara, where the tablecloths reach all the way to the floor.

I hadn't heard from him for a while.

I called the Boulderado and left a message, “Lola is free.”

When I got off the phone, Louise was back scratching at the window.

Sometimes I think the only reason I have her is to keep me from talking to myself, though she also warms up the bed. Bed. That was a good idea. I grabbed Louise Bryant and crawled into bed to watch the news. The day had been jam-packed, my bones were tired, and my bed was criminally comfortable.

Just as I was about to doze off, an anchor intro to a breaking news story jarred me awake.

“The dead man had no ID on him,” the anchorman said. “He was wearing a brown suit. The only thing the police found on the body was some Doublemint gum in the jacket pocket. We now go live to Archer Wilkie at Coney Island. Archer?”

According to Archer Wilkie, the body of a white man in late middle age had washed ashore on Coney Island, shortly after sundown, and been discovered by a gang of preteens, who, before they reported the corpse, put a blunt cigar in his mouth and had their pictures taken with it. And then, after they had squeezed all possible fun out of the dead man, they went for the police.

CHAPTER THREE

While we waited for the morgue attendants to locate and pull out the right corpse, Detective June Fairchild, public relations liaison for NYPD Homicide, asked a fair question: “Other than the Doublemint gum, what makes you think this might be the same man you saw on the street?”

“You know my history, June,” I said. “I've had several run-ins with people who later ended up as corpses.…”

“So have I. It comes with my job, and with yours too, doesn't it?”

Fairchild was a well-pressed, very efficient, and unflappable woman, and just thirty years old. The local media knew her as the “Debutante Detective” because she came from a well-to-do family on the Upper East Side and had gone to Dalton before going on to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the NYPD. Despite her connections and fair looks, she had not been a deb, having opted out of the social whirl of the frivolous rich in favor of a career as a crime fighter. Naturally, this made the media love her and her boss, Detective Richard Bigger, resent her.

A logical sort of person, she didn't buy my theory that I was traveling under a curse. True, my job did take me into some hairy corners with some hairy characters, but the murders in my life went beyond that.

“The guy you met had a half package of Doublemint gum … not just one piece,” Fairchild pointed out.

“The rest might have washed away, or those kids who found the body might have taken it,” I said. “There was nothing else found on him?”

“No.”

“Distinguishing marks?” I asked.

Fairchild consulted her notepad.

“Port wine birthmark shaped like a small banana on lower back. Tattoo on left bicep, the word ‘Fraternité,'” she said with a perfect Parisian accent. “Oh, this is interesting. He only has nine fingers. He's missing the pinky on his left hand.”

“Born that way or severed?”

“Not severed recently. But we won't know more until an autopsy is done. Did the man you met have all his fingers?”

“I didn't notice and I think I would have if he was missing a finger,” I said. “Does it look like the John Doe was murdered?”

“This one hasn't been classified yet,” Fairchild said. “Looks like death by drowning. Could be accident, suicide … Even if it is the same guy, I don't know how you can help. You don't remember the car make. You don't remember the license plate number, and you didn't clearly see the faces of the occupants.” She sighed. “Robin, I'm reminded of the dead dry cleaner case. Remember that one? You were convinced you knew him and that there was some clue in your laundry receipt.”

“That was an easy mistake! He even looked like my dry cleaner.”

You wouldn't be a tad paranoid if you'd been involved in several unfortunate murder cases? Whenever a dead body showed up without explanation, I was compelled to find out if there was any connection at all to me, because in the past, if I'd been more alert, if I'd been smarter sooner, I could have saved a life or two, or at the very least, saved myself a whole lot of trouble. The other detectives got sick of talking to me, and Fairchild inherited me. Up to now, she'd been very patient, but today she sounded annoyed. This was what … my ninth, tenth such call in the last four or five months? Hardly excessive, all things considered.

“I really hope this is another of your mistaken hunches, Robin, because my boss will be much happier if you're not involved. If he's happier, I'm happier,” she said.

“I'll be happier too,” I said.

Her boss, Richard Bigger, and I had crossed paths before on homicides, always unpleasantly. He was a stick-up-the-ass guy, what my friend Tamayo would call a “cube,” square squared, Joe Friday without the stylish wardrobe and erudite cocktail conversation.

“Bigger really, really doesn't like you,” she went on. “Among other things, he seems to think you gave his home phone number to a crackpot neighbor of yours … a Mrs. Ramirez who, thank you very much, I have since inherited.”

“Is he still pissed about that? I don't know how she got that number,” I said.

“Mrs. Ramirez also sees murders everywhere,” Fairchild said. “You two should form a club.”

“But I have a history of actually being involved in murder cases. She's just nuts,” I said. “By the way, I hear she has a gun and I'm fairly certain it's unlicensed.”

“I'll have someone from the precinct check it out,” she said.

We both knew nothing would be done until old Mrs. Ramirez shot someone. A uniform would inquire if Ramirez had a firearm, she'd deny it, and nothing would happen. It wasn't like the cops and ATF agents were going to storm her apartment to confiscate a gun from an elderly, churchgoing woman with no criminal record. A thing like that can too easily turn into a standoff and a PR disaster.

“We're ready,” said the morgue attendant, wheeling in a stainless steel gurney. The body was covered with a pale blue sheet.

“Are you ready?” Fairchild asked me.

Just thinking about seeing a corpse gave me a chill, exacerbated by the morgue's heavy air-conditioning, which made me wrap both hands around my take-out coffee cup, trying to suck warmth out of it.