The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (11 page)

He shook his head absentmindedly. A thought had come into his head. It was a big one. He started walking east and I went with him. He worked on the thought for two blocks, stopped in front of the soon-to-be Kirk Douglas Theatre. “Went to the movies here when I was a kid.”

“Me too,” I said.

“You know what I’ve been thinking?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. I think we might have some low-grade telepathy going.”

“What do you think about it?”

“I think we ought to let the police handle it.”

“You did know.”

“See? Telepathy.”

“But I mean, in case they don’t.”

“They will.”

“’Cause you did such a good job the other time.”

“That was easy. Finding someone who didn’t know I was looking for her.”

“You’re saying it would be harder to find someone who knows you’re looking for them?”

“I’m saying it’s more dangerous looking for someone who’s already killed someone.”

“You’re scared.”

“Damned right, I’m scared. You didn’t see what I saw in the den … oh. You did.”

“I made them show me.” He started walking again. After another block I managed to get him turned toward my house. After one more he said, “What could it hurt to poke arounda little?”

A question, I was irritated to realize, I’d already been asking myself. “Let’s see what the police come up with. They’ll probably have somebody in custody by tonight.”

“And if they don’t, you’ll take a shot at it?”

“No.”

“Well, how long does it have to be before you’ll take a shot at it?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“Two days? Three?”

“This is—”

“How about a week? If they haven’t found the guy in a week, will you take a shot at it?”

“I don’t—”

“Come on. A week. Humor me. They’ve got to find this guy in a week, don’t they?”

“Is another side effect of the Zoloft that it makes you a huge pain in the ass?”

He forced a smile. “That sounds like a yes to me.”

“Yet another side effect. Your hearing’s all screwy.”

“A week. Then you’ll start.”

Mostly, I said it to get him off my back. Mostly. “Okay, Mike. After a week, if the police haven’t found the guy, I’ll start poking around.”

“Good man.” He stuck out his hand. I put out mine. We sealed the deal.

We continued back toward my place. Just after we turned down Madison he said,“That’s a week from last night, when it happened, right? Not a week from right now.”

“Don’t push it, man,” I said.

That night. Guess whose
punim
was up there on the screen?

Right. An ages-old head shot that they used whenever they chose to embarrass me by playing up one of my brushes with crime.

It was Channel 6’s lead female anchor, Jessica or Jennifer or whatever she was called. “We now have new information on the Dennis Lennox story. Present on the scene was this man, fifty-year-old Joseph Portugal of Culver City, who has been instrumental on several occasions in aiding the police with difficult cases. It is understood that Mr. Portugal was among those who discovered the victim’s body. It is not known what his further involvement in the case is or whether he is assisting authorities with their inquiries. Or …” Dramatic pause.“Whether he is a suspect in this killing. More when we have it. Ted?”

Anchor Ted—blond, but otherwise a dead ringer for morning anchor Jim—started in on an update on the Phil Spector business—the murder, not the Beatles album—and I muted him.

Ring.

I picked up the phone. “Hi, Dad.”

“How did you know it was me?”

“Wild guess.”

“Again you get involved with killing.”

“I didn’t exactly have a choice. Had I known he was going to be dead, I wouldn’t have gone up to his house.”

“This man. This Lummox.”

“Lennox. You knew that. Don’t make yourself sound like a dope.”

“You shouldn’t hang around with people like that.”

“What am I, sixteen? You can’t tell me who I can and can’t hang around with.” Though he didn’t do it when I was sixteen either, since he was away at San Quentin.

“Advice I can give, though.”

“I assure you, I did nothing to bring this on. Anyway, I’ve gone a whole year and a half without any violence. Doesn’t that count for something?”

Nothing.

“Dad?”

“That was supposed to be a joke, yes? Tell me that was supposed to be a joke.”

“Dad, I know I worry you, and I don’t mean to.”

“You’re all I have left.”

“Stop that. You have Catherine and Leonard.” The other housemate. “And Elaine and Wayne and the kids. And you have Mary Elizabeth.” The woman he’d been keeping company with.

“But you’re my only son. My only child.”

“I’ve always been your only son. How come now it’s suddenly worth mentioning?”

“I’m getting old, Joseph.”

“What’s with you? You’re especially morbid today. Did one of your old gang buddies die?”

“Heinie Silverberg.”

“Heinie the Hanky?”

“Him.”

“Wasn’t he, like, ninety-five?”

“Ninety-six.”

“That’s twenty years older than you. Not worth this they’re-dropping-like-flies routine you’re laying on me.”

“How close do they have to be for me to lay?”

That was a tough one. I didn’t have an answer.

Nor did he expect one.“See, I can make a joke too. You’re right. I should snap out of it. You’re fine, right? That’s all I care about.”

“I’m fine.”

“Good. Let me say hello to that gorgeous wife of yours.”

I turned over the phone and looked at the TV. Sometime during my conversation my gorgeous wife had changed the channel to the James Bond marathon on Spike TV. It was
A View to a Kill
, the one with Patrick Macnee, and I knew he was going to get knocked off and that made me sad. Then I thought of
The Avengers
, and how Mrs. Peel was in her sixties now, and how did that happen? And how old did that make Patrick Macnee, if he was even still alive?

I knew something then. I knew that the worries about aging and mortality and the big sleep I thought I’d worked my way through back during the Platypus reunion were still with me. They were as profound as ever, and they’d be there until the day I died.

Eventually I went to sleep. Still on the couch. I kept waking from dreams where I was being chased by gangsters. Or maybe they were aliens. They had characteristics of both. Sometime after two in the morning they showed up again and I discovered they were from Homeland Security. I awoke yelling and kicking and fell off the couch.

I sat in the living room with the TV on and the sound down low. The Bond movie was a Timothy Dalton one that had nothing to do with anything Ian Fleming ever thought of. After twenty minutes I began surfing. I stopped on an infomercial where a woman with canyonlike cleavage asserted that size did matter. I thought of fixing her up with Vito until I realized the whole thing was about penis enhancement. You took one of their pills every day, and in three weeks you’d be longer and bigger around. After six weeks you’d have grown a full three inches. How did they get away with advertising this stuff ?

At some point I dropped off again. When I got up the shower was going. I went in the bedroom and undressed and looked at myself in the mirror covering the sliding closet door. I imagined what I would look like if I were a full three inches longer. And bigger around.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Gina was standing in the doorway. She was wrapped in a ratty robe and had a towel on her head.

“Do you think I’m adequate?” I said. “Penis-wise, I mean.”

“Of course you are. What a dumb thing to say.”

“I saw this ad on TV last night. For enhancement.”

“Your dick is just fine.”

“Remember in
Boogie Nights
, where Marky Mark had that foot-long schlong?”

“It was prosthetic.”

“I
know
it was prosthetic, but still.”

“Still what?”

“Still, a guy wonders what it would be like.”

“You know what it would be like? Painful.”

“You’ve been with a guy like that?”

“Jesus. No. I’m just conjecturing. Now stop. It’s not appropriate to talk about penises on Thanksgiving.”

She seemed to have called a truce. But maybe it was just for the holiday. Like that Christmas during World War One where the French and the Germans took the day off from fighting and celebrated together. If that were the case, my respite would be short-lived. The next day they were back to shooting each other’s heads off.

We had a baker’s dozen for Thanksgiving. Me, Gina, my father and his girlfriend Mary Elizabeth, Leonard, Catherine. Elaine and Wayne and their twentyish daughter Lauren and their seven-year-old Miles. Gina’s mother and the mariachi she was seeing. And my father’s friend Sonny Patronella, recently widowed, who I’d last seen five years back, during my first murder extravaganza, when my father called in a favor and had Sonny follow me around to make sure I didn’t get myself killed.

I managed a few minutes alone with my father. He asked advice about his posies, which to him meant any flowering plant smaller than a rosebush. I told him what I could. He treated me as his own personal gardening expert, though my expertise never went far beyond succulent plants, and even that knowledge was fading.

We sat down to dinner at three o’clock. My father and Leonard wanted to do it later, “like Jews do,” but Catherine said if and when they ever did the cooking, they could set the time. There was enough food to feed Albania. We went through it like a pack of starved hyenas. By four-thirty all the men were arrayed in the living room, rubbing their stomachs, watching an Animal Planet show about sharks. By five the women, a traditionalist lot who did all the cleaning up, had joined them.

I got tired of the talk about Kobe and Michael and the war and wandered into my father’s bedroom. Miles was in there with his dinosaurs. He knew all the names, and proudly told me each one. I played dinosaurs with him for a while, until he asked if I wanted to play chess. I said I didn’t know how. He said he’d teach me. He beat me three straight games.

Sometime around nine, in the midst of my father’s recitation of our family history, I realized I hadn’t thought of Mike Lennox or his recently deceased son Dennis for a couple of hours. I wanted my father to continue. I wanted him to keep spinning yarns, like an old gray Scheherazade, for hours and days and weeks, until all the Lennoxes and their troubles and foibles and demises were just a dim memory.

I didn’t hear from Mike, and I didn’t call him. I’d let him phone me when he was ready. If after a month or two he didn’t, maybe I’d give him a call. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe I’d never talk to him again, yet another person I didn’t care enough about to keep track of.

The airwaves and the newsstands were still filled with Dennis Lennox’s sudden end. The media frenzy rivaled the one when Nicole and Ron were killed. Michael and Kobe were relegated to the inside pages. Iraq and the Mars landers didn’t get the attention they deserved. The earthquake in Iran registered less on the Richter scale than the killing did.

After a few days Lu was upgraded from critical to serious. She was able to give the police a statement. She’d been upstairs in her room watching TV, had heard odd noises, and gone downstairs and into the den to find the same thing I had, less the Golden Globe. She heard a sound behind her, but got clobbered before she could see who it was. She lost consciousness briefly, came to, heard the doorbell and banging, made it out front and let us in. The police didn’t know how the killer had gotten in, but he or she had probably escaped through a side door, which was found unlocked.

The story the papers got said we had all gathered there for “a meeting.” Nothing about him righting any wrongs, nothing about him screwing everyone over. During my interview with the police I’d simply told them we’d had a disagreement to work out. Theta said Ronnie’d told them much the same. Ronnie was still making herself scarce, and I didn’t have any contact with any of the others. I didn’t know if the cops had put together what a creep Dennis was, or if they’d already known, and I didn’t much care. I just wanted them to find whoever offed him and be done with it.

Everyone who’d been at Dennis’s house had an alibi covering the time just before they got there. Most of them involved watching TV. Ronnie with Theta, Samantha with Carrie, Sean McKay with his father. Trixie, last name Trenton, was the exception. She had spent the evening at Ambiance, the est-like group my fake wife in the anti-herpes commercial frequented, leaving only when Dennis called on her cell phone. She had a dozen witnesses to her whereabouts.

The
Times
ran a sidebar with a paragraph about everyone who was there that night, along with a photo of each of us. They too had discovered my crimefighting exploits and ran a shot left over from one. Sean McKay, who had “worked with the victim on a project that never came to fruition,” was represented by a fuzzy portrait. Ronnie got a glamour shot, as did Trixie Trenton. It turned out Trixie’d done a couple of soft-core porn flicks, the kind they ran on the Playboy Channel. And yes, that was her real first name. Her sister was Alice, her brothers Ralph and Ed. Her father was a big
Honeymooners
fan.

Channel 6 was running a special at nine every night, pre-empting the usual
Hunter
reruns. Claudia Acuna hosted. A segment on Trixie Trenton was the highlight. They’d gotten hold of one of her soft-core films and ran a couple of minutes of the most revealing footage, smudging the picture anytime a nipple or any pubic hair threatened to make an appearance. Then they had her on live. She sat there wearing a dress cut up to here and down to there and said, no, she didn’t regret for one minute doing those movies, that there was nothing shameful about the human body, and that she’d had very special feelings for Dennis and hoped his killer was found “like, tonight.”

Claudia Acuna called one evening and asked for an interview. I turned her down. Then I ranted about how this was a perfect example of how loathsome local television news was. She waited until I was done and said I was absolutely right. My opinion of her went up a degree. Maybe two.