Freaky Deaky

  "What'd you get for it?"

  Skip watched her turn to the desk as she asked the question and pick up a can he thought at first was bug spray.

  "I got five grand. That was my price, all hundred-dollar bills."

  Not looking at him Robin said, "It can be worth a lot more than that." She was standing at the clean white wall looking at the can, reading the directions.

  "Well, sure, it was about ten years ago."

  Robin said, "I mean there's a way to do it now with a much higher price tag."

  Skip was thinking, Has it been ten years? He said, "It was at least a couple years before we met in L.A."

  Robin said, "We come back to that." Staring at him. "You know why? Because five days later we were picked up. You said, 'I don't know how anybody could've recognized us.' Have you thought maybe they didn't? They were told where to find us?"

  Skip said, "I thought of that, sure."

  "For how long?" Robin said. "I've been thinking about it for eight years. I made a list of names, anybody who had contact with us then or could've known or found out where we were. I've crossed out names until finally I'm left with two and they were at the top of the list all the time."

  Skip watched her turn to the wall and begin to spray, her arm moving up and down and in half circles to form capital letters about a foot high, painting something on that pure white wall in bright red. She stepped aside and Skip was looking at:

  MARK

  "The hell's that suppose to mean?"

  He heard Robin say, "Dark hair, brown eyes, nice body. On the staff of the Michigan Daily, sold ad space. How about Mark the mechanical mouth?"

  "Mark Ricks," Skip said, "sure, with the bullhorn. He'd lather up the students, get 'em chanting, the cops'd come storming across the quad and Mark'd split for the Del Rio bar. Man, you're bringing it all back. 'Two four six eight, organize and smash the state.' "

  Robin was spray-painting again, making waves, so Skip waited, thinking back. He could see a guy with dark hair and an Indian kind of headband on that corner by the Undergrad Library, the Ugli, yelling through his bullhorn, a guy with him beating on a tom-tom. Skip said, " 'One two three four, Vietnam's the bosses' war.' With his mom paying his way through school, huh?"

  Robin's voice said, "He carried Chairman Mao's red book in the glove box of his red Porsche."

  She was looking this way now and Skip saw she had painted another name under Mark:

  WOODY

  "Shit, I remember him," Skip said. "Mark's big brother. Was always in the bag or stoned."

  "Bigger but dumber." Robin stood there admiring her work. "Woodrow Ricks. We used to call him the Poor Soul."

  Skip was nodding. "I can see him. Fat, sloppy dude with curly hair. He'd do this little wiggle and pull his pants out of his crack. Kind of sissified."

  "Afraid of the dark," Robin said.

  "That's right, we'd turn the lights out on him and he'd have a fit. Hey, but he always had dough, huh? Mark'd make him pay for everything."

  "That's why Mark let him tag along. Mark would run out of money, he'd get Woody to call home and Mom would send a check. You remember their house? The indoor swimming pool?"

  It gave Skip instant recall. "That's where we did it underwater. Yeah, we'd go there weekends to party." He grinned at the memory of that big glassed-in room, voices echoing. "Everybody'd get smashed, tear their clothes off and jump in the pool."

  "Sometimes with our clothes on," Robin said. "Their mother used to lurk. Remember that? Never said a word to anyone, but you'd see her lurking. She was a boozer. Mark said she drank at least two fifths a day."

  Skip closed his eyes against the naked-light glare, to rest them, and listened to Robin tell him how Mark and his mom didn't get along, Mark being a little smartypants. How Woody was her favorite, her little prince, nursed him till he was about sixteen and they started drinking together. Skip grinned at that. Heard how the dad was gone by then, divorced, kicked out without a dime, the money being on Mom's side of the family. Her old man had invented hubcaps or some goddamn thing for the car business and made a fortune. Then when Mom finally drank herself under and they had the reading of the will, guess what?

  Skip opened his eyes. "Mom's favorite made out."

  "Woody scored something like fifty million," Robin said, "plus the house."

  "And Mark got cut out for acting smart," Skip said, "picking on his brother."

  "Well, not entirely. Mark got two million and blew it trying to put on outdoor rock concerts in Pontiac. Usually in the rain. He bought a theater and now he does plays and musicals. I think with Woody backing him," Robin said. "It's a second-rate operation, but it's show biz. You know what I mean? Mark's a celebrity. People magazine did a feature on him. 'Yippie turns Yuppie. Sixties radical cleans up his act and goes legit in regional theater.' I couldn't believe it. They mention Eldridge Cleaver, what he's doing now, Jerry Rubin, Rennie Davis, like Mark was in the same league with those guys."

  "You're pissed off," Skip said, " 'cause you never got your picture in the paper. Or in the post office."

  Wrong thing to say. Her eyes flashed at him.

  "Sixties radical my ass. Mark was nothing but a media freak. He played to the TV cameras."

  Skip said, being gentle with her now, "Sweetheart, that whole show back then was a put-on. You gonna tell me we were trying to change the world? We were kicking ass and having fun. All that screaming about Vietnam and burning draft cards? That was a little bitty part of it. Getting stoned and laid was the trip. Where's everybody now? We've come clear around to the other side, joined the establishment."

  "Some have," Robin said.

  Look at her telling him that with a straight face. Skip stared at the red names shimmering there on the wall, flashing at him.

  WOODY

  "Mellow me down with the acid," Skip said, "paint the names on big so they'll burn into my brain. You been taking me back to those days of rage and revolution, huh? I'm into a goof, but I can hear and think. What I don't see are Mark and Woody snitching on us. They weren't into anything heavier than a peace march. What'd they know about our business? Nothing."

  Robin said, "They knew I was meeting you in L.A. Mark did. I saw him just before I left."

  "Well, that doesn't mean he told where to find us."

  "Skip, I have a feeling, okay? I know he did."

  Man, she did not like to be argued with. Never did. It tightened up her face, put a killer look in her eyes.

  "Okay, they informed on us and now they're sitting on fifty million bucks. You look around this dump you're living in and you feel they owe you something. Am I telling it right?"

  "We feel they owe us something," Robin said.

  "Fine. How much?"

  "Pick a number," Robin said. "How about seven hundred thousand? Ten grand for every month we spent locked up. Three fifty apiece."

  "I was in longer than you."

  "A few months. I'm trying to keep it simple."

  "Okay, how do we go about getting it?"

  "I ask for it as a loan."

  "Seven hundred big ones. I can imagine what they'll tell you."

  "Maybe the first time I call."

  "Then what?"

  "Then late one night their theater blows up."

  Skip said, "Hey, shit," grinning at her. "The subtle approach, blow up their fucking theater. I love it."

  "The smoke clears, I try again."

  "Pay up or else."

  "No. This isn't extortion, I'm asking for a loan."

  "That what you're gonna tell the cops?"

  "I haven't threatened anyone."

  "They're still gonna be all over us. Shit, me especially, I'm the powderman."

  She was shaking her head at him in slow motion.

  "They won't know anything about you, you'll be at Mother's. She's on a three-month cruise, you'll have the whole house to yourself."

  Skip felt himself getting into it, wanting to move around. "I'd have to line up some explosives
. Keep it at Mommy's. Man, I love dynamite, and I never get to use it. Dynamite and acid, man, that'll Star Trek you back to good times. The way it was."

  Robin was smiling at him, raising her arms, and her arms reached him way before she did. Her hands came to rest on his shoulders. He had to tilt his head back to look up at her face, at her pale skin stretched over bone, her cheeks hollow, sunken in. He could see what her skull looked like in there. He could see hands holding her bare skull and a teacher voice in his mind saying this was a woman thirty-five to forty, a hunter. The voice saying, Look at the fucking teeth on her, this was a man-eater.

  The jaw in the skull moved. Robin said:

  "From that time we first met--oh, but we freaked them out, didn't we?"

  Skip blinked, feeling his eyes wet. "You know it. Couple of the baddest motherfuckers ever to set foot inside of history."

  Now the skull was grinning at him.

  "You stole that line."

  "Yeah, but I forgot from where."

  Man, look at this fine girl.

  Skip said, "You're working me over like you used to and I love it. Getting me to play your dirty tricks on those boys. . . . But just suppose for a minute, what if it wasn't Woody and Mark that got us busted?"

  Robin's face came down close. He could feel her breath. In the moment before she put her mouth on his, Skip heard her say, "What difference does it make?"

  Chapter 5.

  Saturday noon in the kitchen of his dad's apartment in St. Clair Shores, Chris said, "This doctor, he not only won't look you in the eye, he doesn't listen to a thing you say. I tell him why I'm leaving the Bomb Squad. I don't see where it's any of his business, but it doesn't make any difference anyway, he's already made up his mind. I'm leaving 'cause I'm scared, I can't handle it." Chris was getting a couple of beers out of the refrigerator.

  Chris's dad, Art Mankowski, was frying hamburgers in an iron skillet, working at arm's length so the grease wouldn't pop on him. His dad said, "Get an onion while you're in there, in the crisper. Listen, you'd be crazy if you weren't scared."

  "Yeah, but this guy wants to read a hidden meaning into everything, like with the spiders."

  "You want your onion fried or raw?"

  "I'd rather have a slice of green pepper, if you have any, and the cheese melted over it."

  "I think there's one in there, take a look. Get the cheese, too, the Muenster. Where'd you have it like that?"

  "It's the way Phyllis makes 'em," Chris said. "You put A-1 on it instead of ketchup. See, if you don't like spiders there's something wrong with you, you're queer. So I know, after we get through the spiders and have I ever been impotent, if he brings up why am I going to Sex Crimes, there isn't a thing I can say the guy's gonna believe. I must be a pervert, some kind of sexual deviant."

  Chris's dad said, "Well, I can understand him asking. Why not Homicide, Robbery, one of those? They seem more like what you'd want to get into."

  "I asked for Homicide, I told the shrink that. There aren't any openings."

  "Sex Crimes," Chris's dad said. "You know the kind of people you'd be dealing with?"

  "Yeah, women that got raped and the guys that did it. Also different kinds of sex offenders. You sound like Phyllis. She can't understand why I'd want it. I told her I didn't. You go where there's an opening and they think you'll do a job."

  Chris's dad said, "I can't imagine, with all the different departments you have in the Detroit Police . . ." He said, "You want to put your things away before we sit down?"

  "I'll only be here a few days, a week at the most. I have to find a place in the city."

  His dad said, "So you're gonna leave your things out in the middle of the floor?"

  In the front hall three sportcoats, pants, a dark-blue suit, poplin jacket and a lined raincoat lay folded over a mismatched pair of canvas suitcases and several cardboard boxes. Chris carried his possessions through the hall to a room with a hospital bed, where his mother had spent her last three years staring at framed photographs of her children and grandchildren. The pictures were taken at different ages so that Chris, his sister Michele and her three girls became a roomful of kids. Faces that gradually lost identity as they stared back at his mother from the walls, the dresser. . . . Chris had stood at the foot of the bed watching Michele comb their mother's hair, Michele saying, "Look who's here, Mom, it's Christopher." His mom said, "I know my boy." Then looked up at Michele and said, "Now which one are you?" He was hanging his clothes in the empty closet when he heard his dad's raised voice and answered, "What?"

  "I said why don't you go back to Arson?"

  Chris walked through the hall to the foyer. His dad was across the formal living room in the dining-L, the glass doors to the balcony behind him, filled with pale light. His dad was placing the cheeseburgers and a bag of potato chips on the table, ducking under the crystal chandelier, his dad in a plaid wool shirt, sweat socks, no shoes. Art Mankowski was sixty-eight, retired from the asphalt paving business. (Chris had grown up thinking of that black tarry substance as "ash-phalt" because that was the way his dad had pronounced it, and still did.) His dad went up north deer hunting in the fall, spent the winter in the Florida Keys bonefishing, and would stop off in Delray Beach to visit Michele and her family on the way back. After being with the three grandchildren Art would call his son the cop and ask him if he was married yet. In the spring he'd look out the window at Lake St. Clair, wanting it to hurry up and thaw so he could get out in his 41-foot Roamer.

  They sat down to lunch. Chris said, "You remember the Huckleberry Hound cartoon where Huckleberry smells smoke, he goes looking for it and sees all this heavy smoke coming out of the birdhouse?"

  His dad held his cheeseburger poised, picturing the scene. "Yeah?"

  "Huckleberry Hound climbs up the pole and looks in. There's a crow sitting in there smoking a cigar, watching TV."

  His dad, starting to smile, said, "Yeah, I remember."

  "Huckleberry Hound says, 'Hey, are you burning garbage?' And the crow looks at him and says, 'No, I like garbage.' "

  His dad said, "Yeah, you know what I remember? The way the crow was sitting there with his legs crossed. Talked out of the side of his mouth. 'No, I like garbage.' Your mother would look at us and shake her head, like we're a couple of nuts."

  "The point I want to make," Chris said, "that crow would love the Arson Squad; you live with that smell, it clings to you. I can smell a burnt-out building just thinking about it." He took a bite of his cheeseburger with green pepper; it was good. "But what you said, Mom not understanding how we could sit there watching cartoons, that was exactly the way Phyllis looked at me."

  "When you told her."

  "Yeah, we're at Galligan's, it's Friday, so all the secretaries and young executives from the RenCen are in there looking for action. I get us a drink and tell her, Well, I'm no longer with the Bomb Squad. She just looks at me for a minute, sort of surprised. Maybe even a little disappointed, and I'm thinking, What is this?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I tell her I'm now with Sex Crimes and she gets a funny look on her face and says, 'Sex Crimes?' Real loud, everybody turns around and looks. She says, 'You're gonna associate with perverts, rapists, filth like that and then come home and tell me about your day?' I said, 'When'd I ever tell you about my day? When'd you ever want to hear about it?' She says, 'You don't tell me anything, you never talk to me at all.' She's crazy, we talk all the time."

  His dad said, "You seem to have a lot of trouble with women. They keep throwing you out."

  "I do what she wants, she comes up with something else, I don't talk to her."

  "I don't know what it is," his dad said, "you're not a bad-looking guy. You could give a little more thought to your grooming. Get your hair trimmed, wear a white shirt now and then, see if that works. What kind of aftershave you use?"

  "I'm serious."

  "I know you are and I'm glad you came to me. When'd she throw you out, last night?"

  "She didn't thro
w me out, I left. I phoned, you weren't home, so I stayed at Jerry's."

  "When you needed me most," his dad said. "I'm sorry I wasn't here."

  "Actually," Chris said, "you get right down to it, Phyllis's the one does all the talking. She gives me banking facts about different kinds of annuities, fiduciary trusts, institutional liquid asset funds . . . I'm sitting there trying to stay awake, she's telling me about the exciting world of trust funds."

  "I had a feeling," his dad said, "you've given it some thought. You realize life goes on."

  "I'm not even sure what attracted me to her in the first place."

  His dad said, "You want me to tell you?"

  "She looks like a bed doll--you know what I mean?"

  "A big healthy one. I know exactly what you mean."

  "But she's so serious all the time. She doesn't have much of a sense of humor."

  "I'll say this for Phyllis," his dad said, "I like her idea, the green pepper with the cheese and the A-1. It's not bad."

  "You can get tired of it," Chris said. He took a sip of beer. "I called you first thing this morning, you still weren't home."

  "You were worried about me." His dad would study his sandwich before taking a bite. "I wasn't far, if it'll make you feel better. Two floors up. I was at Esther's."

  "You spent the night with her?"

  "Why, you think it's a mortal sin or what?"

  "I'm surprised, that's all."

  His dad said, "Esther's sixty-four, she weighs one eighteen on the nose. She's attractive, knows how to dress, was married forty years to a doctor and now she's having fun. I take her places--she never been to Hamtramck, if you can imagine that. Never listened to WMZK, the polka hour. You know what her favorite song is now? 'Who Stole the Kishka?' "

  "No, I think it's nice you spend the night together now and then," Chris said. "Why not?"

  "Couple times a week," his dad said. "Plus Saturday night if we're out late, which is usually the case. Esther likes to party."