Plainclothes Naked (3 page)

The worst part, for Manny, was that Chatlak never actually arrested him. He seemed to prefer keeping him out of jail so he could continue hassling him. Things were more touchy-feely in the late seventies. The public hadn’t yet developed a taste for sending boys with no armpit hair to San Quentin.

After the dozenth time Officer Chatlak took it upon himself to tell Manny’s father, man-to-man, that his only son had the makings of a “drug-addled degenerate,” the old mill-hunk showed some tough love and threw him out of the house. He was seventeen, and thrilled. It wasn’t like
nothing
positive had ever come out of his mild police prob lem. He got to leave home and move in with a dope fiend named Har vey he met at the Greyhound station.

Why Manny became a cop he didn’t know—or maybe he did and didn’t want to think about it. Near as he could figure, on those rare occasions when he bothered to try, it broke down to two possibilities, equally pathetic. First, being a policeman gave him a reason to feel as badly about himself as he tended to feel anyway. At twenty-two, and coming off his season on heroin, happiness was not part of the package. Being a junkie, when you broke it down, was nothing more than a crazed day job. (Though, oddly, in that capacity, the police never seemed to hassle him at all. He became a daily shooter, thanks to his bus station roomie, and never once got so much as a parking ticket.) On some level, he believed, he needed a life that offered as much bor derline insanity as the one he’d left behind....

The second possibility was more cut and dry. Excluding food serv ice, being a cop was the one job you could get without a college edu cation that did not involve heavy lifting. The last thing he wanted was to join his father at J & L. But even if he’d been dying to spend his days breathing fumes from a blast furnace, the steel mills were expiring faster than World War Two vets with emphysema and Pall Mall habits.

The academy was no picnic, and most of the recruits were assholes. But the brass were overjoyed to get a rookie whose test scores qualified him for more than reminding folks that, for fifty cents more, they could get a medium Coke and free refill with their cheeseburger.

“Ruby, you’re dozing again,” an old cop named Merch, Manny’s ex-partner, barked from his desk by the candy machine. The candy desk was a coveted slot at the station, since whoever got it could just lean over, bang on the sweet spot by the machine’s change dispenser, and knock out a free candy bar whenever he wanted. You never knew what you were going to get, but still....

“You’re dozing,” Merch repeated, unpeeling a fresh Fifth Avenue. Since sliding onto desk duty, he’d packed on an easy fifty pounds. “I’m trying to tell you you’re supposed to go to Carmichael Street. Guy splarked on his kitchen floor. Name’s Podolsky.
Marvin
. They said he was all foamed up. Could be rabies.”

Manny hated being called Ruby, but didn’t mention it since Merch, and everybody else, knew it already. Instead, he replied mildly to the overweight quill-driver. “If it’s rabies, that’s Animal Rescue. We don’t do dog calls.”

“Hardy-har,” said Merch. “I wrote down the address.”

Upper Marilyn maintained a five-man police force, if you counted the chief. The town had begun life as an unin corporated area, a hodgepodge batch of neighborhoods plunked due southwest of Pittsburgh. When the mall craze first kicked in, developers realized that owning their own city would mean heftier tax breaks than even the sweetest deal Pittsburgh could cut them. So Upper Marilyn was born. As conceived, the fledgling burg was supposed to come with a sister municipality, Lower Marilyn.
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All of this took place when J.F.K. was in office, in the heyday of Marilyn Monroe, and certain financially involved Methodists thought that “Lower Marilyn” sent the wrong message. No God-fearing soul would put down roots in a place named for an actress’s nether

parts. Why Upper was okay but Lower taboo was a question that engendered decades of obscene and inflammatory lore.

Old-timers dubbed the two regions “Tit-ville” and “Butt-burg.” And, in certain shot-and-Iron City bars, “Meet me at the Bentelbo, up in Tits” or “Uncle Slats got drunk and lost his Buick down in Butt” were still perfectly acceptable locutions.

An Uppy by birth, Manny now boasted a pad in the heart of Butt-burg. As it turned out, the dead foamer’s place squatted no more than three blocks from Manny’s own half-a-rowhouse. He didn’t need the number to locate Chez Marvin. A black-and-white—the town’s only one—had already pulled into the front yard, where its tires left three-foot ruts in the dirt. If five years on the force had taught him nothing else, it was that cops didn’t pull onto the lawns in Upper Marilyn. They didn’t kick down doors, roust teens on the street, or drag drivers out of their cars at random up in Tit-ville, either.

After pulling into the driveway—it never hurt to block a perp’s car, even if somebody’d already cashed his Lotto—Manny slapped and shoved his way through the sight-seers milling around the yard like guests at a summer wedding. About the only officially sanctioned police violence left was the pummeling of “necks,” as the souls who flocked to crime scenes were called. What moved these humans to drop what they were doing so they could loiter within sniffing distance of death was anybody’s guess. Manny wasn’t the kind of cop who needed to blow off steam doing some honest “neck-deckin’.” But he understood guys who did.

Right away, he made a note of the house: a nondescript brown brick on a street of nondescript brown bricks. This stretch of non–Upper Marilyn had seen swankier times. At one point the people who lived here actually had jobs. Some still boasted little lawns, but the deceased’s featured only mud. There was nothing else notable, except for the paramedics at either end of the empty gurney being hauled through the front door. Both, for some strange reason, were giggling.

Tina slouched
at the kitchen table, absently tapping the stubby toe of her tennis shoe a few inches from her husband’s white-sheeted head. A pair of “evidence technicians” (plump chemistry profs from Pitt who

moonlighted scooping hairs into tiny sandwich bags) knee-walked around Marvin’s body, occasionally “oohing” and “aahing” at a partic ularly intriguing spray of fiber. They’d already bagged his hands, and spoke in meaningful whispers. Manny had a theory that they dumped the stuff in the nearest Dumpster, and billed the P.D. for lifting the lid. Tina did not know what to feel. She plucked tissues from a Kleenex Junior box one of the social workers had left, dabbing her eyes and puffing on a Viceroy with the filter ripped off. It was the first thing Manny noticed, that little mountain of cast-off filters in the middle of the table. You could still see the fan pattern where someone had

recently sponged the pink Formica.

Manny liked to arrive on the scene a little late, when whoever he was chatting up was already tired and pissed off from talking and being talked at by half a dozen other nightmares with faces. All detectives had their specialty—reading the scene, turning snitches, following leads. But Manny’s was more basic. He had ears. He knew how to listen, could almost taste things in the way people talked. It wasn’t about what the pacing neighbor or bottle-blond sister-in-law actually said—or not
just
—but how they picked the lint off their elbows when they said it. How they made sure their eyes drilled into his. (
Look at me, I’m hon est!
) How an accent thickened up or faded in the course of a five-minute chat.

Much of the time, the people he interviewed didn’t believe he was a cop. He was too upset with himself. He kept sighing. He stared at the ceiling a lot. Which unnerved them even more. This was
their
drama—and here was this unhappy weirdo clearly struggling to forget his own problems long enough to do his job.
“I’m sorry . . . I had a thing with my wife,”
was one of his standard openers
. “Go ahead, I’m lis tening. . . .”

When Tina saw Detective Manny Rubert shuffle in, she threw a balled-up Kleenex on the floor. “Not another one!”

Manny pulled a chair from the table and sat down like an in-law. “I know, it’s a drag,” he said. “Believe me, I’m not in the mood, either.”

He hadn’t expected anyone so pretty, and it threw him. Tina had that Faye Dunaway thing. Faye before the surgery, when her cheek bones were still sharp as can openers and she looked like a feral gazelle.

She was that kind of gorgeous. She didn’t look like the wife of a foamer.

“If you think I’m going to answer another fucking question about anything, you better have a hard ass,” Tina said.

“Beg pardon?”

Manny had no idea what that meant. Rather, he had a couple of ideas: She was going to kick him, or he was going to have sit there until Christmas....

The meaning didn’t matter. Just the
weight
of the sentence, the way it came at him like a rock dropped off a freeway overpass. (
Airmail,
in happy cop lexicon.) Tina hit that tingle in the back of his head, the fuse that usually stayed damp, the one that got lit on those rare occasions when he met a woman who actually scared him. It was sort of like sex, but harder to find.

His mother’s ankles felt like hot salamis as Tony Zank held her out the rest home window.
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“You gonna talk, Ma, or am I gonna have to waggle?”

He was surprised by how tough she was. And he wasn’t loving swinging her out the fourth floor of Sev enth Heaven, where anyone could look up and see he wasn’t exactly running her a sitz bath. The worst part, though, was the view. Mrs. Zank wore nothing under her nightie, and every time Tony looked down he got an eyeful.

“Mom-twat,” McCardle said, shaking his Dinoesque head. He’d sidled up to give moral support after tying the ninety-year-old whose room they’d appropriated, a retired osteopath named Fitzer, to the wheelchair bar

beside his bathtub. “Not something a boy should ever have to see. My mom used to get drunk and do splits on a pool table, so I oughta know.”

“Do I need to hear about this?” snarled Zank. “Right this minute?”

Originally,
the idea seemed simple. Once his mom calmed down and crawled back in bed after her trot down the hall, Tony managed to convince the attendants that she’d been having an “episode.”

“She imagines things,” he’d confided, looking just ashamed enough to make it sound authentic. “It started when my dad hit her with a bowling pin twenty years ago. Today she thought I was trying to steal something from her. That hurts, you know? This is my mother. This lady
raised
me. Plus, and tell me if I’m wrong here, there’s nothing in this dump anybody’d want to steal.”

Carmella, the big Puerto Rican lady in charge, had cut her teeth in Leisure World and seen it all. Her beehive gave her an extra six inches on top, and her hips, though shapely, could have smothered triplets. She was the sort of large woman who celebrated her largeness, accentuat ing it with doughnut-size hoop earrings and brash magenta lipstick plumping up her lips. She neither replied to Tony’s explanation nor totally ignored him. Not until McCardle popped out of the bathroom waving a jar of thyroid medication, mistaking it for speed, did she slam her palm on the bedpan like a tambourine and pipe up. “You wanna ransack the joint, you gotta pay like everybody else, Gomer.”

Carmella whipped her hand out to Tony but her eyes stayed fixed on McCardle, who responded with courtly charm.

“I don’t believe anyone has ever called me Gomer before. Not many of us Negro fellows get named that.”

Carmella didn’t bother to reply, but kept her hand extended until Tony warmed it with a pair of twenties.

“Just don’t leave stains,” she warned, “and don’t put no cigarettes out on the furniture. The inspector from the state board sees burns on the furniture, he’s gonna think we’re letting residents smoke, which since they tend to nod off—and ain’t allowed to have matches—means all kinda bad news. You got me,
hombres?
Behave your ass in here!”

Before Tony could even thank her she turned and hurried out.

“You believe that?” he said, checking to make sure his mother was under control. Carmella either hadn’t seen his grip on the old lady’s wrist, or hadn’t cared. “She thinks we don’t know half the staff is ban-gin’ old guys for pin money. That’s why they hire ’em so young. A smart chick can mop up. Get one of these bum tickers to smoke out in the sack, it’s payday. Any family with dough will cough up. Who wants it gettin’ out Gramps bought the farm goin’ Tommy Lee on some gash whose last job before this was homework?”

Zank shook his head, then turned on his mother and asked her straight out. “Who’s been sniffin’ around your bed, Ma?”

“What are you,
jealous?
” she snapped back. “A girl gotta have some fun, even on this crap farm.”

His mother didn’t talk like this before entering the home. For as long as Zank could remember, she was a mild-mannered, miserable woman who tended to housework and made lunch for the vicious lunk of a husband she’d married at nineteen until he keeled over, under questionable circumstances, when she was forty. Decades later, after a bowling party on her sixty-third birthday, Zank found her passed out on a throw rug with her face in her needlepoint. It turned out she’d been guzzling a quart of gin a day for years and hiding it. The doctor said it was not uncommon. “It’s when they don’t get the stuff that you notice,” he’d explained, before announcing that his mom needed round-the-clock care. He suggested a convalescent home, and the cheapest Tony could find was Seventh Heaven. But since moving in with the other seniors, she’d become a gutter-mouth.

“You think you can put the squeeze on me, you’re stupid
and
ugly,” she told her son.

“Mom,” Zank pleaded, “how come you’re talkin’ like this? You used to talk nice.”

Mrs. Zank snorted. “You had the good sense to bring a bottle when you visit, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.”

Genuinely distressed, Tony dropped his mom’s wrist to tap for the Slim Jim in his jacket pocket. In a second she had her fingers around her ashtray, which she kept in a hollowed-out phone book by the bed. It was a brass replica of William Penn, with grooves in his three-cornered hat for butts. And it made a dent in Tony’s forehead like a ball-peen hammer.