The Reckoning (16 page)

Crazy Cat had arrived all ditzy and carrying two white Chinese takeout food cartons, which Royce thought odd. Food was the least of Kris’s wants. But then Kris was the same girl who let Cliff slice her fingertips with razor blades and suck on her digits—part of the vampire thing.

Cliff and Kris had to smoke some more when Kris was told Carly was pretty much history. Sort of a wake. The little strumpet made a big to-do about the situation, crying and telling Royce how sorry she was about “poor Carly.” Then Cliff had dragged her into the bedroom to bang her.

The pounding from the headboard stopped.

Kris screamed from the bedroom. Then: “Royce. Help!”

He rushed into the bedroom. Crazy Cat was sitting on Cliff’s petite frame, her fleshy buttocks wide over his bony white hips, her floppy knockers hanging practically to her belly button. Desperately, she was reaching behind her and trying to stuff Cliff’s flaccid dink back into her vagina.

“It’ll be okay, baby,” she cooed at Cliff.

On his way to the bed Royce saw a brown hamster scurry into the closet.

Christ
, Royce thought,
had Cliff stooped to sticking hamsters up his asshole for kicks?

Cliff’s eyes were cold open, pupils dilated in Never-Never Land. Royce gently touched his fingertips to the side of Cliff’s neck, like they did in the movies, and felt nothing.

Then he saw it: the bulge in Cliff’s throat. The bulge twitched.

Royce spun and retched on the carpeting.

“I wouldn’t let Cliff bite my neck,” Kris explained tearfully. “Fingers, that’s okay, but not my neck. Your neck shows. So he asked me to bring him a couple hamsters from the pet store, said he had to eat something alive. Kinda gross, eh?”

“He’s dead, Crazy Cat,” Royce said, and left.

He went home, hurriedly packed a few essentials and stuffed them into Darth. Head throbbing from the tequila, Royce took off, heading east.

By seven a.m. he was speeding along I-10 into the warm sun, halfway to Phoenix. The booze and drugs had worn off, leaving him uncomfortably numb. Even pain would have been better than this.

He never cried, never looked back.

13

Tying Up Loose Ends

Thursday morning, Royce presented a new wrinkle for Craig’s emergency preparedness routine while driving the boy to school: If calling Royce at work, he was to let the phone ring just once, then hang up and immediately redial—unless, of course, the answering service was on, in which case Craig was to just leave a message and clearly state whether it was an emergency or not.

This additional intrigue seemed to further solidify the bond between them, especially when Royce confided that “someone bad” was giving him a hard time.

“Does he want to beat you up?” Craig asked.

“No, in business they get even in worse ways than beating you up. They say untrue things about you. Try to make you do dishonest things.”

“Oh, I see.” The boy appeared to accept his explanation as absolute truth, and right then and there, Royce vowed to stop this business of telling half-truths as soon as possible, especially when it came to Craig and Les.

He dropped Craig off, and on the way to work he finalized an “exit scenario” he’d been mulling over since last night, in-between the nightmares. After conducting a brief situation analysis, Royce decided he must accomplish two objectives posthaste: get Cliff Wells and Monica Pleshette the fuck out of his life forever, and make his peace with Leslie and get his family back.

First thing he did at work was phone Brenda at home. Susan, Brenda’s five-year-old, answered.

“Rollins residence.”

“Susan, this is Royce McCulloch. Would Brenda be there?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“I know. I’m not really a stranger. I’m a friend of your mother’s.” Friend? Yeah, right, little girl. I’m the asshole who fired your Mom right before Christmas, so your mommy can’t afford to buy you that doll you asked Santa for.

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,” Susan repeated.

“Yes, I know, but…”

He heard the phone being handed off, then, “Who is this, please?”

“Steve?” He thought it was her junior-high kid.

“Mr. McCulloch?”

“Yes. Say, you two playing hooky or what?” he said jocularly, trying to dispel his Scrooge image.

“We’ve had a tragedy, Mr. McCulloch.”

Royce’s heart gained fifty pounds. “Brenda?”

“No, George. He was stabbed by some Bloods last night.”

“Bloods? Is he hurt bad?”

“George is in surgery right now at Johns Hopkins. Guess his stomach and kidney got cut bad. Mom is at the hospital. I’m home lookin’ after Susan.”

“Look, do you need anything? Anything I can do for you at all?”

“No, we’re getting along—just waiting to hear from Mom.”

“Then I’d better let you go.”

“Okay. Thanks for calling.”

“Give my concern to Brenda—and George. Tell her…” His throat cinched. “Tell her I will be praying for George.”

Royce put the phone down. It just didn’t make sense, George mixed up in bad business with the Bloods and the Crips. He was an honor student at Westside High, not a gang member.

He picked the phone up and punched in his access code. Just as he’d been dreading, there were three messages—from Cliff (demanding his presence at a big powwow at Naughty’s tomorrow afternoon at two-thirty “to hammer out all the deals we got cookin’”), from Monica (telling him of the same meeting, but adding a breathy, sex-drenched come-hither appeal with the words, “And don’t schedule anything later.”), and from Marvin Garden, who sounded upset.

“Mr. McCulloch, if I don’t hear from you by five o’clock this afternoon, I will assume you are evading me.”

No shit, Sherlock.

He decided to take care of Marvin first. Monica and Cliff would just have to wait.

“So why should I believe you’re telling the truth now?” Marvin hammered.

This afternoon it was pie and coffee at the same Denny’s—pecan for Marvin, Dutch apple for Royce.

“Because it is the truth.”

“You’re telling me you had an affair with this Carly Anderton some years back in LA, and that now one of her old lovers has come back to harass you and your family?”

“Something like that.”

Marvin scowled. “Something like that, you say. When are you going to tell me exactly the way it is? Look, Royce, I don’t understand this at all. If you don’t want to avail yourself of my services, fine. You’ve paid me in full. I say bye-bye. If you need help, you have to level with me or I can’t help you.”

The P.I. picked a pecan off his pie, chewed it.

“Okay, it’s this way,” Royce said. “I was involved—or about to be involved, I should say, in a scam with these two. It was a money-laundering scheme Cliff Wells dreamed up. Cliff offered me the services, shall we say, of his girlfriend as a sort of incentive to get me into it. I got into it just long enough to get into her, if you know what I mean.”

Marvin smiled knowingly.

Royce continued, “But you have to know I backed out before I did anything illegal. The whole thing fell apart when I split LA. But now, this Cliff has come back into my life. He wants me to launder drug money through my clients’ businesses. To put pressure on me, he is threatening to tell my wife about my little fling with Carly.”

“But that was more than ten years ago. You weren’t married at the time—I guess not, anyway. You were free, white and twenty-one. So what if you banged this Carly? Why would your wife have a beef about it now?”

“But I told you, the money-laundering scheme.”

Marvin shook his head. “I told you, Royce, I don’t get involved in things like this. You should go to the police right away.”

“Yeah, I could, Marvin, but I would have to put my family, especially my wife, through some grief, with the potential of some bad publicity. I’m not exactly a celebrity, but I am well-known in the business community. If some of my clients found out about this, I would be ruined.”

“So, you must have some ideas.”

“I do. I just want you to find this Cliff Wells for me. That’s all. I don’t know where he lives, not even his phone number. He just calls my office every few days, makes a nasty threat and hangs up.”

“You got Caller ID?”

“Not on my business line, but I’m sure he calls from a blocked phone anyway. Look, he should be easy to find. Christ, he looks like a sideshow freak.”

“Find him and do what?” Marvin said suspiciously.

“Nothing, I’ll do the rest.”

“That sounds even worse, Royce. What are you going to do? Firebomb his house? Hire some bikers to beat the shit out of him?”

Royce sipped his coffee but left his pie untouched, which didn’t go unnoticed by Marvin. Royce surmised the dick might be AA, bingeing on chow instead of booze.

“Nothing like that. All I want to do is tell him that my wife now knows the full truth—that there is nothing he can do to hurt me or my family.”

Marvin gave his client a stern look and said, “That the truth?”

He nodded solemnly. “That is the truth.”

“Okay, let’s say I agree to find this Cliff Wells for you. If you don’t have a clue where he might be, how am I to locate him? If he only contacts you by phone, he might be calling you from another state, for Christ’s sake.”

“Oh, Cliff’s in town, all right.”

“And how do you know that?”

Royce hunkered over the table, cast a guarded eyeball about and whispered, “Because it just so happens we share the same dominatrix.”

The detective grimaced. “Come again?”

“Yeah, you know, the mistress fetish. Whips, chains, nipple clamps, hot wax on your balls, the works,” he blurted, vaguely wondering if talking to your private dick was the same as talking to your lawyer when it came to the can’t-testify-against-me angle. “I’m really into it, and so is Cliff. For kicks, we used to hang out at a private club in Santa Monica called the Dungeon. Real kinky. These girls, most of them were just hookers or porno actresses, would dress up in leather and whip our butts.” He could tell by Marvin’s reaction the shamus was hooked. He’d take the assignment, all right, just to have a juicy peek.

“You? Into that sort of thing?”

“Yeah. All day I have to play the role of the big business stud, Mr. Macho in total control of the situation. So every once in awhile, I get my rocks off by being dominated, by completely letting go and putting my life—just for an hour or two—in the hands of someone else, in this case, my Mistress, Christine. She knows when I’ve been bad. She also, thank god, knows my limits, which is critical in that kind of relationship.”

“And Cliff goes to this Christine as well, you say?”

“Every Friday afternoon, at two-thirty. A little place on South Gaylord that bills itself as a lingerie boutique but is really a glorified whorehouse. Now, Christine won’t reveal anything about Cliff’s personal life to me because she’d lose a good customer, and I certainly can’t follow the guy when he leaves there. He knows me. Besides, I’m not a pro at that sort of thing.”

Marvin nodded, washed the last of his pie down with ice water.

Royce slid his pie plate across to Marvin, saying, “What I’d like is another one of those Whereabouts watchyoucallums.” He followed the pie up with a company check and a slip with his home phone number on it. “This time, the minute you find something, I want you to call me—day or night, at home, if necessary.”

That wasn’t Royce McCulloch sitting across the table from Marvin at Denny’s. No, he told himself on the drive back to his office, that was someone else who had put on that shameful act.

It was an old trick he’d learned years ago, when he was an apprentice Big Swinging Dick and studying under Jesse Green, his “rabbi” at Salomon Brothers.

“Remember, kid, it’s not you they’re screaming at, it’s not you who is lying your ass off,” Jesse had barked, adroitly levitating a huge Macanudo cigar between his yellowed teeth. “The sooner you create that alter ego asshole, the sooner you’ll make it in the big game—and the sooner I can wean you off my tits.”

Good old Jesse, his irascible mentor, what a character. Royce hadn’t thought of him in years. The Salomon trader was always worried Royce was too wimpy to make the grade, too California to make it as a Big Swinging Dick.

“You California guys grow up soft on sun, sprouts and beach bunnies,” Jesse told him once over several Crown Royals during an FAC in the Village. “I was raised on violence, racism, greasy food and whores blowing johns off in the alleys. You boys from the land of the fruit ‘n nut just aren’t predatory enough.”

But Royce had made Jesse eat his words. Hadn’t he?

And what became of Jesse? Something dreadful, he later heard through the grapevine. Something you only whispered about late on rainy nights, in a smoke-filled Manhattan bar, over warm snifters of heady brandy.

“Shocking,” your fellow Big Swinging Dick would say.

“Yes, some nasty business there,” you would reply, and think:
Better him than me
.

Jesse Green, father of two children in graduate school and married to a woman he tenderly called “that conniving bitch,” had taken a twenty-two-year-old hottie with him to Hedonism, a swingers’ colony in Jamaica. There he’d died of a coronary in a hot tub, a dildo stuck up his ass.

Royce parked the Porsche (he still hadn’t taken up Andy on the deal for two spaces) and walked into his office about two-thirty. He was relieved to hear just one recorded call, from Brenda.

“George is in intensive care, still critical, but we are praying,” she said, dry-sobbing. “Thank you for your concern, Royce.”

Well, today he had done one nasty thing and one decent thing. Maybe they balanced each other out, he hoped.

His phone rang once, then nothing. Seconds later, it rang again.

“Craig?” he said excitedly. “You okay?”

“Hey, calm down, old buddy. It’s me, Cliff. And I’m A-Okay.”

Royce felt panicky. Did that fuckhead have Craig?

“Where are you, Cliff?” he asked, putting an edge in it.

“Just over here at Monica’s place, making plans for our big meeting tomorrow afternoon. We figure on really making some headway.”

“Yeah, look, Cliff. Something has come up. I might not be able to make it.”

“Oh, don’t tell me that, Royce. We’re really counting on you.”

“I know, but…”

“Two-thirty it is, and you should count on being here,” Cliff urged, some threat in his tone.

“All right,” Royce sighed. “I’ll try.”

“Do more than try. Oh, and Monica just came back from the one-hour photo place.”

“The photos look simply darling,” Monica chimed in on another extension. “You’ll be super pleased. Most of them turned out—all kinds of yummy positions.”

“Great,” Royce said.

“Bye, Royce,” Cliff said.

“Bye, Mr. R.,” Monica cooed.

Royce hung up. Photos? What was she talking about?

Immediately, he phoned “Information” for the number of Craig’s school. Of course, it had to be that dick Chalmers he was put through to. Royce explained that something of an emergency had come up. And could he talk to Craig?

“I hope nothing too serious, Mr. McCulloch,” Chalmers huffed, only after telling him it was highly frowned upon to pull a child from class to receive a phone call, unless there was a close death in the family.

“No, not a death, but I do need to talk to Craig, if you can arrange it.”

Chalmers relented, and some anxiety-ridden minutes later Royce was relieved to hear Craig’s voice.

“You in trouble, Royce?”

“No, just wanted to let you know I might be a few minutes late picking you up. I have to drop by a client’s place southeast.”

Craig then said Steve McDonald had invited him over to his house, anyway, to play with an RC-controlled racecar and have hamburgers.

“Will Mrs. McDonald be picking you both up at school?” Royce asked.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Just call me tonight when you’re ready. I’ll pick you up at the McDonalds.”

Craig again asked if Royce was okay.

“Sure,” his stepfather said, intrigued by the role reversal that was going on.

“Hey, Royce?”

“Yes?”

“I still have all my fifty.”

“Right on, dude.”

It wasn’t until nearly an hour later, when Royce was on his way to the computer, that he noticed a fax had come in.

He grasped the slick paper and immediately felt nauseous.

It was a photo, of himself and Christine, in a shot too hardcore for even
Hustler
to run. She was locked in that pillory, and he was taking her doggie style, a real goofy look on his face. Clenched teeth, eyes rolled back. He must have been ejaculating.

Over the picture was hand-scrawled: “Wouldn’t want this to get around! Your pal, Cliffie.”