Chapter 14
I was in no hurry, however, to have what I saw as fast becoming my past life intersect with my potential future, so I slow-played it. “Dennis...longtime...what you been up to?”
Never a raconteur Dennis opened his mouth, but before his brains could force the words down Jeff, coked to the gills and shaking like Robert Kraft at a Geisha House, jumped into the breach.
“I’ll fucking tell you...Been fighting with fucking Artfield Police over fucking parking fucking tickets. First, they fucking send me to fucking jail in fucking Rutland on fucking possession charges. Then when I fucking get out they fucking send me a fucking summons for fucking parking violations. I told the fucking town fucking judge, ‘How can I fucking get parking fucking tickets in fucking Artfield when I’m in fucking jail in fucking Rutland’. I mean what the fuck?” he ejaculated in a breathless stream-of-consciousness that sounded like Jack Kerouac with Tourette's.
“Uh, that’s fucked up,” I deadpanned, then turned back to Dennis. I had always had a soft spot for Dennis Trevino ever since he lost an eye in some sort of backhoe incident on his family’s dairy farm back in High School. It wasn’t the loss of an eye that bothered me- I’m sure he was high or his father drunk- it was my idiot friends and I telling everyone to take the yearbook survey, white-out the ‘s’ and vote Dennis “Nicest Eye”. He won, but fortunately less immature heads prevailed in editing.
“What’s up with you?” I turned to Dennis as Miss Iceland wrapped her head around Jeff Jensen’s story. “How you feeling?”
I regretted this immediately remembering we had food on the way. He turned his head as if looking at the front door, fixed me with his one good eye and said, “Not bad, considering. My doctor says I get less than 10% of the nutrients in what I eat. It just passes straight through my digestion system and is excreted as bile.”
I made a mental note to hold my bathroom needs till home.
Then I had an epiphany- which I learned one Valentine’s Day was not a cheap, knockoff jewelry brand sold on the internet- “Did either of you see Curly in the week before the murders?” I addressed to them both. “Was he drinking, do you know?”
“That was crazy,” said Dennis. “Curly was a good guy. I wonder what set him off?”
“Fucking tragedy,” from Jeff. “We were just fucking there for a fucking estimate day before it fucking happened.”
Miss Iceland had her notebook open again. She took a long pull on her beer then began writing. “So Curly was fine, not beating up the Budweisers?” I reasserted, invoking the dead man’s beverage of choice.
“No way. Sober as a judge,” said Dennis and, I thought, if anyone he should know having been in front of his fair share over the years. “We even asked him for a beer, but the place was dry.”
“And we fucking checked his fucking hiding places from when he was fucking married. Fucking nothing.”
I knew I wasn’t in the presence of a pair in the know, but I asked the question anyway, “So was Curly attending AA meetings at the Church regularly?”
I may as well been asking a couple of Crips about a Klan meeting. They looked at each other dumbfounded until Dennis glanced down the bar to his right and said, “Let me ask Lenny…”
That was my cue to be dumbfounded. Liquid Lenny in AA? My jaw hit the ground like a turkey in a WKRP in Cincinnati Thanksgiving promotion. “Lenny‘s in AA?” I stammered. “The last non-alcoholic thing he drank was Similac.”
“It’s terms of the probation from his last DUI. He shows up late, Irish’s up a coffee then sits in the back till it’s over and Reverend Brooks or whoever’s running it signs off he was there.”
Since I broke up with Kayla I hadn’t been attending Pete’s regularly and obviously I’d missed a lot. “Lenny…,” Dennis shouted down the bar, disturbing Serge from his newspaper. “Was Curly Carson at the last AA meeting?”
Lenny looked up from his whatever-and-tonic, turned his perpetually sleepy eyes to us and answered casually, “Yeah, every week for the past month, month-and-a-half. I talked with him a few times. Tried to get me to join the discussions, but I told him, ‘Curly, good for you but I’m just marking time...I’m no quitter’”
Coming from a man who never held a job for more than six months that seemed an odd statement, but I chalked it up to a case of selective stamina. “And he hasn’t been coming ‘round here,” I shouted down the bar further annoying Serge.
“I haven’t seen him,” Lenny replied then turned to the other slugs as if passing the question along. They all shook their heads in agreement to coin a contradiction of terms. Between the four of them plus Dennis and Jeff I figured they had probably covered every open hour of Pete’s since Hands Across America like some sloshed surveillance squad so I was satisfied.
“In that case sell my Anheuser-Busch stock,” I quipped to Miss Iceland who gave me a smile that certainly wasn’t for my wit. I could see the full-blown investigative reporter, she longed to be, kicking in now.
“Curly’s not drinking, Sheehan’s never been fooling around with his daughter and he’s forward looking enough to have Drunk and Drunker here”- she tilted her head at Jeff and Dennis who’d gone back to their cocktails after I remembered Miss Iceland’s real name (Karina) and finally made brief introductions- “come over for an estimate. And nobody’s thinking about going through the guaranteed ass-ache of painting or renovating if you’re planning what Curly did.”
“OK, but who drove him to do it? Chief Bowden has gambling debts, but Curly and Sheehan weren’t making book or loan-sharking and what’s Curly’s connection to Rick James?”
“Why does it have to be one of those two? And who says Curly did anything? Maybe it was staged to look that way.”
“And the Artfield police are dumb enough to buy it?” I said and then added, “...and the State Police took their word for it?”
“Look around,” she said, again nodding at the backs of Dennis and Jeff then half-turning to take in the bar slugs and Serge with his paper. “The cops here ain’t exactly chasing down Keyser Soze. They’ve got it easy and when they’re in over their heads they’re happy to accept the obvious. This isn’t front page news outside your paper which suddenly is no more so the State Police have no reason to not accept the locals conclusion.”
Son of a bitch! Nothing is ever easy. Here I thought Gladys and I had it narrowed down and then Miss Iceland comes out of nowhere with her pasty pulchritude and rational reasoning and craps in my Count Chocula. I mean I liked The Usual Suspects reference, but... Just two weeks ago I had a moderately failing local paper, no entanglements socially, a fridge full of cheap beer and Bagel Bites and a living room scattered with “Books to Read” like bodies on the battlefield at Gettysburg. Now, I had to solve a double-murder-suicide (if that’s even what it was) before penury set in and a pseudo-girlfriend/partner who was going all Dateline on me. Seemed I was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. Fortunately for her the hard place was in my jeans, so I let her Woodward and Bernstein fantasies play out a little longer.
“So who do you suspect?” I was forced to ask though I knew I wouldn’t like the answer.
“I have a coupla ideas, but we have a lot more leg work to do first.”
“Son of a bitch!” this one was audible. “But we only have two weeks until the money runs out…,”I said hopefully, such was the depth of my laziness. Immediately I felt bad: there were three good people dead with no real closure, several jobs on the line if the paper closed permanently and a fine, little New England village descending into corruption and/or greed and I had the means to possibly do something about it if I didn’t, for once, take the easy way out.
“So, then I suggest we get to work,” she answered, breaking my tortured ruminations. Then she held up our empties, found Dot dozing over a cup of coffee and called out. “Two more here…” and I fell in love all over again.
The rest of the afternoon was why my GPA in college never topped 3.0. We talked, laughed, drank and but for the lack of bong hits over a game of Yahtzee I might have suggested we blow off Poly Sci to play Ultimate Frisbee on the Quad.
We went over the evidence again while we ate and I was impressed with her organizational skills and deductive reasoning. She clearly didn’t belong covering church bake sales and High School performances of Brigadoon. She’d be off to a big city daily someday and I’d be left behind which wasn’t a bad thing. I was not exactly marrying timber or anything near it. A mere dalliance with a woman of such beauty, energy and ambition is all I could handle. Anything more and as C.W. McCall once sang, “...they’d be picking me up with a stick and a spoon.”
Of course, this wasn’t the growth I was looking for, but one thing at a time. I promised myself I’d stay with her on the investigation until it was completed. Completion of difficult problems never being my strong suit, so that was something. Besides I was feeling for the deceased and the town as a whole. When I had walked in to Pete's I looked around and had one of those “You mean this is my life” laments as I surveyed the assembled. But they were good folk for all their quirks and, hell, who was I to judge. They came through with some key info and if the paper ever had a chance to get back on its feet they’d be here for Max Lipper’s proposed fundraiser. And that, I realized, maturity in and of itself, but before I tore a labrum patting myself on the back, I recalled I was forty and should have come to these realizations many a year ago.
After the meal the afternoon continued to degenerate easily, culminating in a tour of Pete’s history via the special occasion photo montages on the wall: St. Patrick’s Day, New Year’s Eve, Super Bowls, etc. It also dovetailed, sadly, with my romantic history if one cared to search me out, one arm drunkenly flung around the ‘Lush O’ My Lust’ at the time and Miss Iceland, sadly for me, did care.
“Who’s this?” she asked pointing to a buxom brunette several sheets and a couple of pillow cases to the wind leaning up against me in a Polaroid.
“That’s Crazy Mary,” I replied, reflexively cringing. “We were friends since High School, tried dating...and, long story short, we don’t acknowledge each other’s presence anymore.”
“Why go out with her in the first place? Isn’t that kinda ending implied in her name?”
“You mean ‘Crazy’?” I countered. “Hey, sometimes crazy’s good...uh, but you’re right it has a short shelf life.”
The construction guys at the end of the bar were getting loud over the games on their phones and Serge peremptorily served them with their check. Meanwhile Miss Iceland and I returned to our table. It had turned to dusk outside and a few families drifted in for an early dinner before the heavy drinking crowd took over. The construction workers settled up and exited with a leer at Miss Iceland and I signaled to Dot for our own check though it wasn’t delivered with the alacrity Serge brought to the task.
I seldom courted “moments of truth”. In fact, I spent the better part of my life trying to avoid them. Unfortunately, as we approached our cars there was to quote “The Boss” Bruce Springsteen- and I can cause I’ve been listening to him since he was only Middle Management- there was “no place left to run and no place left to hide”. Not necessarily a spot where I shine.
As we approached our vehicles I placed a hand on the small of her back and she turned to me surprisingly easily. Behind her bumper we shared a beery kiss as I tried not to burp in her mouth- it had happened before on almost this exact spot.
It seemed too late and we were too buzzed to chase down any leads so I steadied myself, looked into her forehead- as she had meanwhile listed forward- and delivered my most eloquent ultimatum, “So…?”
At that moment I looked down, she looked up and somewhere in the middle she gave me an awkward kiss: all noses, teeth and chins banging.
“Let’s go to your place,” she mumbled into the general vicinity of my left ear. My loins leapt and I was actually giddy- something I hadn’t been since I quit doing 'whip-its' off whipped cream cans in college- but before I could suggest I drive she had hopped into her Volks and started the engine. She seemed to be in a rush to get to my humble hovel which is something as regards women that had never happened. Coaxed, coerced, begged and bribed being the more standard ploy. But fearing I’d be left behind and/or run over I fumbled for my keys while heading at a quick-stagger to the Falcon. The state Miss Iceland was in vis-a-vis my attractiveness being like the career of Right Said Fred; fleeting and capricious. Now, though, she saw me as “...too sexy for my cat…” so without bothering to ponder the deeper meaning of that lyric I jumped in the car and we were off.
Now nothing quite sobers one up like a giant chrome spotlight through the rear window and a boxy vehicle with an audible V-8 bearing down on one’s bumper. At that point the cherry-top is inevitable and as I appeared to witness this happening to the trailing Miss Iceland my emotions took an immediate roller coaster ride:
Sobered up Miss Iceland Bad
My knowing all the cops in town Good
Police Chief not happy with me Bad
My brother-in-law on the force Good
In debt to my fat-ass brother-in-law Bad
Before this Olympian over-thinking could get any further I noticed the VW quickly inching up on my bumper. I realized there were no flashing lights yet so I grabbed the unglued rearview mirror from the dashboard and tried to get a better look at what was going on. At what was approaching 70 MPH this, as expected, failed spectacularly. I turned back to my sideview mirror and saw that the vehicle behind us was taller and wider than the sedan-sized cars of the Artfield PD.
Suddenly, there was a crunch, a crack and the realization that something bad was happening; the same I had that time I’d bitten down on a handful of Skittles. Miss Iceland was now right on my ass when, ironically, I thought that’s where I’d be on her by now. Then there was another clash of metal and when her Volks banged into the Falcon’s bumper even I realized it was no time for crass wordplay.
Looking back I saw a full-sized pickup with its brights on dropping back and then accelerating for another run at the Volks. Fortunately, the road had some semblance of a shoulder and I slid over giving Miss Iceland the opportunity to speed past me without having to cross completely into the oncoming lane on this quickly darkening rural Vermont night.
The truck followed her path, but the fact that it was wider than her compact gave me an idea. Now I’ve been known to rehearse my order before going to the fast food drive-up window, so quick thinking is not necessarily my forte. However, between adrenaline and seeing my tumble with Miss Iceland going by the books both my heads for once worked in sync. Moving over alongside the Volkswagen I took my foot off the gas and let the rear passenger side bumper of the Falcon smash into the front driver’s side bumper of the pickup.
The impact was a stalemate allowing Miss Iceland time to move out of harm’s way. Luckily the Falcon was constructed with the densest metal this side of the Monitor and Merrimack. It made Old Ironsides look like one of those toy balsa wood gliders and the crunching of the pickup’s fiberglass bumper was the sound of chalking one up to 1960s environment-be-damned technology.
Miss Iceland sped ahead and I accelerated leaving the truck in a non-catalytic converted cloud of trachea scorching black smoke. The pickup, its headlights halved, began to drop back. At a junction Miss Iceland made a hard right and I followed until we both slowed down when we saw our pursuers continue straight. I pulled alongside the Volks and we nodded an ‘Everything’s OK’ since reaching across the seat, finding the pliers that substituted for the missing handle and manually rolling down the window seemed a waste of seconds in our still potentially precarious position.
We turned around, her in a deft semi-circle, me in an unwieldy forward-and-reverse turn that resembled a script capital ‘Q’, and pursued a circuitous, back road-sy route to my apartment. As we did I felt guilty when I caught myself not thinking about Miss Iceland’s well-being, the damage to her car or who and why we were attacked, but instead worried how this would affect the likelihood of sex. This surprised me in that as a average-looking introvert in rural America I could go months, even years, without female contact all the while standing on my head whistling the theme song to The Patty Duke Show until ‘cousins’, indeed, starting looking pretty good. So much about these last thoughts made me think women were wise to avoid me, but before I could mull this into a fine powder we had reached my parking lot.
We pulled into adjacent spots and Miss Iceland was out of her car and coming around my driver’s side as I emerged gingerly, such as I knew how to do anything in that manner, squeezing the bridge of my nose.
“Are you alright?” she questioned, immediately.
Her concern was touching, but I was incapable of playing the hero. “My nose banged the steering wheel when he hit me,” I half whined.
“Were you wearing your seatbelt?”
“Uh...no. But that’s my father’s fault, he always said he preferred to be ‘thrown clear’. In case of fire or what not...He’d have been 70 last month,” I fake lamented with a smirk. “Besides it’s hard to get parts for this thing. I think my unlicensed mechanic used the driver’s side one as a fan belt last time she broke down.”
Miss Iceland “turned her pretty head and walked away” as Joe Walsh and The James Gang once sang and surveyed the rear of our cars, as I followed surveying the rear of her. From behind it looked like we’d just had a run-in with the Malachi Brothers while in no way exhibiting the cool of Pinky and The Fonz. In fact, we were experiencing a case of not unexpected gender role reversal with me shaky and weak-kneed and Miss Iceland angry and vengeful- and here I thought that wouldn’t happen till after we’d slept together.
“Who the Hell was that?” she seethed over her chewed up fender and deeply dented trunk. “I’ll bet it was those construction guys that looked at me when they were leaving."
“In their defense everyone was looking at you in Pete’s. You just happened to notice them. Did you get a plate number or a description of the truck? I remember a white Dodge in the lot when we arrived.”
She turned on me like a badger...or at least in a way I thought of a badger turning since outside a University of Wisconsin football game who the heck ever sees a badger. “Sorry, I wasn’t taking copious notes while they tried to ram me up your ass like a gerbil on Fire Island.”
I let the homophobic remark go because, first off, she wasn’t that and, second, she, at that moment, ran her two hands through her spectacularly blonde hair causing me to think of the word “cascade”, which having never owned a dishwasher, was not one I used or thought of often, if ever.
As I watched the gilded locks rain down over her shoulders she regained her composure and said evenly, “But, you know, this does mean we’re on to something. Whoever came after us was trying to send a message.” At this she smiled, and I blanched. I barely liked people coming close to me let alone ‘after’ me.
We moved over to my car to assess damages. However, determining so amongst the dents, dings and chipped paint was futile. Then she shifted emotional gears yet again and looked as if she was about to cry.
“You saved me,” she stammered, looking into my eyes.
I was trying to placate these varying feelings, but it was like those novelty birthday candles, blow one out and another lights up. “‘Save’ is a powerful word,” I started before finishing torturously. “Let’s just say I, uh, un-prolonged your, ah...vulnerableness.”
This checked the tears and she drew me near delivering a uvula rattling kiss that woke up Mr. Peabody, so to speak.
As soon as I was able to extricate my keys from my left-front jeans pocket- I list to the portside- we were upstairs with clothing trailing behind us like a horny Hansel and Gretel. As I mentioned it had been a long time between amorous encounters, but I fell back on the old cliche about riding a bike to see me through. Of course, some women are tricky like a unicycle, some are easy like a Schwinn 3-speed and some are like those gay-90s bikes with the giant wheel in front- just climbing on them is such a feat you had little energy left for anything else. Miss Iceland, though, was like a sleek 10-speed and though I’d never been good at riding those she put me up on the handlebars and did all the work. This was fine with me. When it came to sex with a woman like Miss Iceland top, bottom, watching from outside through a window, it didn’t matter. Like a boil on Scarlett Johansson’s butt I was just happy to be here.
In a lip lock we passed the bedroom door which was a good thing since the “bed” was two stacked mattresses on the floor and the possibilities linen-wise was my childhood NFL team sheets or nothing. Meanwhile her shirt was off and I ran my hands slowly over the curves at her sides and the small of her back; so pronounced and smooth were they it felt like I was driving a freshly paved Lombard Street. We veered toward the kitchen table as I tried to undo my pants to the point of easy removal, but not so much that they’d fall and we’d tumble over backward. Sex was harder as you got older so I was overjoyed she didn’t want to climb up on the table. Not that I didn’t enjoy a little kink, but it took Kayla and I 15 sweaty minutes to get positioned there once only for her to immediately start yelling, “Get off, get off me please!”...I looked down to see I was kneeling on her hand.
Finally, she stopped the bike- to continue the metaphor- at the living room sectional, threw me down and slipped off my jeans. She then mounted a different kind of banana-seat (hence the metaphor continuation) and when she leaned over me all golden hair, full breasts and creamy skin it was over...uh, I mean in my heart...no, not the other way.
So, I laid back and enjoyed the sweet beginning. Of course, the middle is where I screwed up, leading to an inevitable end...but for now I was going to take it one screwing at a time.
