The Irresistible Muse of Jack Kidd

  THE IRRESTIBLE MUSE OF

  JACK KIDD

  A Novel

  Chris D. Dodson

  Copyright 2017

  All Rights Reserved

  By Chris D.Dodson

  The Irresistible Muse of Jack Kidd is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and all scenes in this book are meant to be plausible yet fictional. Similarities to events, locales, or living, breathing subjects are purely coincidental. No part of this publication can be legally reproduced without author's consent.

  We desire the way a twice-poisoned dog eyes a third piece of meat.

  Philip Milito 1953-2016

  Table of Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51 Entropy

  1

  Summer, 2005

  I needed a way in, a way to tap into every attractive, wanton woman, married or otherwise, who dared flaunt her piece of real estate inside my sphere of influence. I couldn’t help myself, those restless wives, luscious in their Chanel attire and Gucci accessories, prowling behind their husband’s expense accounts and chastity belts, all trophies of the rich and famous who’d been cuckolded by me, the greatest cookie snatcher of all time.

  And it wasn’t even their money I wanted, hell, I had plenty of that. I was after the ill-gotten gains behind those chastity belts, and all I had to do was play coy to sly scheduling maneuvers that made sure hubby was out of town the next time documents needed signing. Speaking of which, this morning was no different, documents needed signing.

  So here I trudged through my Newport Beach, CA seaside house, Jack Kidd: wealthy landowner, Realtor, wannabe novelist, most-time gigolo, student of history regarding its parade of the human carnival, half-asleep and half-noxious from last night’s romp with a restless wife, who still reclined in my bedroom.

  I crossed the kitchen floor toward the coffee maker. Because of the summer heat, I wore only a pair of chinos. Bare feet slapping cool terracotta tiles closed in behind me, then a playful hand smacked my backside, ending with a squeeze.

  “Aren’t we the scardy cat this morning?” My sleepover remarked in a raspy, just-got-out-of-bed kind of voice.

  “Coffee, Carmella?” I said, turning around, releasing her squeeze from one of my glutes.

  “Yes, with cream, whipped and naughty, the same treatment you should’ve given me last night—oh, and please try not to burn the coffee this time.” My houseguest, Carmella Falsetto, was trophy wife to a wealthy Napa Valley winemaker, but unlike most gorgeous specimens of her category, she had the charm and wits of a formidable envoy. In fact, I’d recently closed a four-hundred unit residential deal for her and her husband, to which her signatures were required.

  She pulled a pack of chewing gum from her handbag. “They’re Nicorettes,” she said. “They help with the cravings. Want one?” A smirk lined her face.

  “You know I don’t. It’s not funny either.”

  “When a man exhibits delusions of horror in his sleep, it’s funny. You nearly scared me to death, Jack, convulsing and jumping out of bed like that.” Carmella’s nude, lithe shape struck a pose of erotica against the backlight of the kitchen windows. Her short, curly black bed hair was driven to a pointy crown atop her head, offering an inane likeness to a Kewpie doll. She shoved the small wafer of gum into her mouth and said, “Your dream seemed intense, are you all right?”

  “At least I woke up in bed this time and not on the floor.” I began to load the coffee maker.

  “This time?”

  “It’s a comedic adventure I’ve been having lately, full of nightmares of naked women wearing cat masks and claws and all trying to slash me into ribbons, not to mention the bedwetting and screaming that follows. But other than feeling like I was drugged last night, I suppose I’m fine.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, drugged?”

  “It means you make a hell of a nightcap.” I thought of the two cocktails I drained last night before bed. My head felt woozy.

  After I set the coffee-maker switch to the non-burn mode a thought even more distressful than my dream began in my head, one with the irritation of a torn ligament when you move a certain way, down deep in the flesh, refusing to heal. A file I had locked away in a wall safe came into mental focus. Inside the file were profiles of certain women, Janes, as I called them, whom I had escorted through escrow, then landed in bed. Also stashed in my dossier of skullduggery were the names and candid photos of the cheated husbands and victimized children: snapshots of bewildered eyes, dazed by what mommy had done to daddy, unaware of the other culprit who stood half naked in his plush, seaside house, gazing at them in his mind’s eye like a voyeur.

  My voyeurism went further. I researched their lives, where they lived, their schools, professions, hell, even their ancestry. I preyed upon each trophy wife with the deviant skill of a serial home wrecker.

  “Jack...oh, Jack?”

  My eyes shifted toward the centerfold standing in my kitchen.

  “For a moment I thought you were off in another dream.” Carmella’s smirk intensified. She turned and gazed out a pair of French doors that led to my boat dock with one 42 foot sloop slipped inside. “What a beautiful sunrise,” she said, “a delightful color of fiery warmth, unlike my escort.”

  I grabbed the Half-and-Half from the fridge and noticed the fiery sky wasn’t clouds but smoke. I scanned the immediate horizon, noticing no neighboring buildings on fire.

  She said, “Some night watchman you are, you forgot to lock your backdoors. They’re ajar, closed, but not really.” She swung one of the French doors open without turning the knob.

  I crossed the room and examined the doors, then the floor, looking for water residue or tracks.

  “For God sakes, Jack, what are you so edgy about? You forgot to lock your door—that’s all.”

  My hometown Newport Beach was crawling with greedy land pirates, including Carmella and her husband, who, and I had a formulating hunch on this, were all preparing to come gunning for me over my land—a sizable orange-tree ranch worth somewhere in the two-billion dollar range. So, yeah, what the hell was I so edgy about?

  I turned from the door and saw Carmella holding a handgun pointed at my breastbone. After pulling back the reins of my quickened bowels and heart, I asked, “Are you trying to be cute?”

  “Just paying you back for scaring me when you lunged out of bed earlier.”

  I stepped across the room and took the gun from her, a Glock 19, fully loaded. “The safety was off,” I said.

  “I know. I found it in that drawer.” Her eyes gestured toward my countertop. “Stupid thing to do, darling, having a loaded gun lying around for anyone to find.”

  “I’ve been on high alert lately.” I put the gun back in the drawer and returned
to the coffee pot and poured two cups. Knowing for certain that I’d locked those French doors last night, I focused again on that side of the room. I took a drink of coffee, grimaced, and had a sudden urge to slam a small kitchen appliance against the wall. I stepped over to Carmella and handed her a cup of deadly Joe, to which she took a drink, grimaced, then nearly dropped the cup onto the island countertop.

  “I’m no Freud, lover boy, but when a man destroys coffee as easily as you and dreams of nude women wearing cat masks and claws, all the while keeping loaded guns lying around, there must be some perverted significance.” She crossed the room and tossed her chewed up Nicorette into a trashcan. Her eyes caught mine. “My husband’s offer for your land, have you considered it?”

  Ignoring her, I returned to the coffeemaker and looked it over, trying to figure if maybe I was just pushing the wrong damn button.

  “It’s called encroachment, Jack. Your tidy-didy Orange County has only one destiny and that’s to be a complete and total megalopolis, and you’re the only person standing in its way. You’d better do something with your billion-dollar chunk of terra firma besides harvesting orange juice or it along with you will be bulldozed and left the fool.” She approached me and cupped her hand to my face. “You know I’m right. Can’t you see it coming, Jack?”

  “See what coming, Carmella?”

  She dropped her hand. “How much do you really want for your land, darling?”

  “The ultimate price.”

  “Then let’s sign papers.”

  “I won’t let it go that way."

  "Then please tell me how you'll let it go."

  "I’ve decided on an endgame, but only with a certain player, an irresistible and dangerous as hell muse.”

  She huffed out a laugh. “And what if this muse doesn’t want to buy your land?”

  “I don’t want to sell her the land; I want to escape with her.”

  “Escape to where?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I need a different kind of purgatory plush. Costa Rica, Asia, or even Australia. I need to get the hell out of dodge, and preferably with some dignity attached to my nefarious ass.”

  Mrs. Falsetto aimed another marksman’s bead on me, this time less the gun. “It’s a business plan about that land of yours you need to draft together, Jack, and not some dumbass notion about an endgame with some muse.” She paused for a moment, then said, “Tell you what, I challenge you to find this muse, in which you’ll fail miserably at, thus purging yourself of this nonsense so you can finally escape to the land of realists and lucrative business deals.”

  “Care to wager on my escape?”

  “Wager what?”

  “My chunk of terra firma, what else?”

  One of her finely plucked eyebrows crept upward. “All those times you’ve refused my offers to buy your land and now you’re betting the farm on some kind of game? Do you really expect me to fall for this?”

  “Only if you want a crack at a couple billion dollars.”

  She raised her head slowly, like a snake poising to strike. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

  I nodded. “Dead serious.”

  “And if you don’t bag this muse, you’ll deed the land over to me and my husband?”

  “Lock, stock, and orange juice.”

  “How long will you need to play this silly game?”

  “Thirty days should do it.”

  “And how will you find this muse in such short time?”

  “There’s plenty of game in these parts. You want to play, Carmella, or don’t you?” Game or not, I could tell it was hard for Carmella to conceal her jubilance. A prime parcel of real estate with decades of immeasurable lease residuals was finally within her money-grubbing reach and every molecule inside her wanted to leap from this room and notify her pirate husband of the plundering news.

  “Only you would wager a billion-dollar fortune on a game of sudden death, Jack.”

  “I’m an adrenaline junkie when it comes to parlaying affairs, Carmella, what do you expect?”

  “I expect you to pay up when I win.”

  “I’ll win, trust me, and I won’t ask for much in return.”

  “You never do.” After a long moment our eyes locked to a draw; we then shook hands. “Let the game begin,” she said. “Your land is as good as mine.” Mrs. Falsetto marched across the floor. “You do owe me for last night—only one case of Pinot Noir this time.”

  “Sounds fair. I’ll drive you to the airport.”

  “Don’t bother. A cab driver will make better company.” She stopped before exiting the kitchen and turned around, striking another erotic pose. “So tell me this, farm boy, just what kind of muse will it take to pry a man like you away from a billion-dollar fortune?”

  “One hell of a dangerous catch, that’s for sure.”

  Carmela chuckled and said, “There really is no hope for you, darling, or for your shitty coffee. I’ll be in touch—ciao!” Quick footsteps scuffed away through the house with one nicely shaped derriere twitching delightfully behind.

  2

  After Carmella had left for the airport, I remained in the kitchen nook with coffee cup in hand hoping my diesel-grease elixir I called coffee would cause me to vomit the nausea that possessed my head and gut. I boldly sipped some of the black gruel and peered over the brim of the cup at the stacks of old newspapers, files, folders, and other crap that usually clutter my nook. I lifted a manila envelope from the top of one stack, then opened the envelope and pulled out a collection of newspaper clippings and printed Internet searches.

  I zeroed in on a news article regarding the slash murder of one Dr. Bernhard that occurred here in the harbor last week:

  “The victim was found in bed on his back with multiple lacerations on his body, in which police are calling a mutilation...”

  An interesting news story, for sure, and one apparently with a motive, yet its timing and similarity seemed adjacent to a foreboding precipice, my nightmares, causing me to pull apart each page, article, noun, verb, adjective, and so forth. A guy on his back paralyzed and then slashed to death in bed, except my version had to do with a masked, beautiful woman lingering in the shadows. A needling hunch told me that Dr. Bernhard’s version did too.

  I pinched my nose and slurped more of the gruel and noticed an unfamiliar envelope inside the manila packet. The envelope was sealed and addressed to my P.O. Box. The sender was a distant lover of mine named Emily Pearce who lived in London, England. A fresh stamp stuck to the letter, no postmark. Because I had a P.O. Box, I never received mail at my house. How did this get inside here? I thought. Carmella? She doesn’t know Emily from Eve. I emptied the envelope and read what appeared to be a printed email message:

  Dear, Jack:

  I’ll be in town in a few weeks. I need to see you—really see you. We have things to talk about. Do try to keep your dick in your pants until I pull in. Things both poignant and perilous have occurred in my life as of late. I can’t go into details on this now, but I think your life may be in danger. Please be careful. I’ll explain after I arrive.

  Love, Emily.

  I strained my brain to detect some meaning from the letter, which was hard to do when coming from Emily. My eyes began wandering the room for a moment until they focused again on those French doors and then on a glint of sunlight striking the polished floor tiles. I studied the floor closely, noticing how the sunlight revealed a patchwork of footprints, mine and Carmella’s, tracking in random lines of disorder, and yet...starting from the French doors and across the room were traces of dissimilar footsteps—a third pair—tracking straight through my kitchen and into my house.

  3

  Holding a bottle of talcum in my hand, I squeezed white puffs of the stuff onto the floor, landing a fine dust atop the footprints. The pleasant-smelling powder did a good job of transposing the exact size of the trespasser’s feet. Small and delicate, the tracks revealed a woman’s prints, and by the length of stride, she was about medium heigh
t.

  Using tracing paper and a soft-lead pencil, I etched out a usable facsimile of the one set of footprints that had entered through the French doors and then made a B-line through the kitchen and into my house. I compared the prints with Carmella’s and saw no correlation. The tracks were mucky from the harbor water, which meant the trespasser didn’t disembark from a boat but had most likely swum to get to my private dock. Streams of water residue also tracked along the floor, suggesting a hurried entry.

  After reviewing last night’s recordings from the hidden cameras inside my in-home office and art gallery, I discovered no unfamiliar intruders prowling through those rooms. I did discover that Carmella had nosed through my computer and filing cabinet, helping herself to my personal files. I also noticed she had helped herself to a chocolate éclair and a carton of chocolate milk I had stashed in the fridge. So she’s a chocolate fiend like me. At least we have something else in common besides the love of my land and hard-romping sex.

  The only rooms I had web-cams installed were my office and art gallery. I wished now I had web-cams throughout my house, particularly the kitchen.

  I knew people, nefarious nerds with quasi-crime labs who could dust this letter and possibly find fingerprints and compare them to an FBI database that they more than likely knew how to hack into. But the prints on the envelope are probably too compromised by now, and besides, my collage of dainty footprints should suffice until I needed more.

  My head still swam in a grip of pain and dizziness. In fact, almost every day now for the last two weeks I’ve had these same headaches and nausea: getting older, too much booze, delusion, maybe? I’ve hit the sack so many times with a gut filled of alcohol to know exactly what the weaving route to the Sandman’s house feels like. So a drug of some kind was probably slipped into my drink last night, and I was damn sure going to find out what kind. Carmella is a conniving, greedy sexpot, but a player of espionage to the extent of slipping me a mickey? And what about that letter from Emily? One thing I did know; Carmella pillaged my files, and her husband, James Falsetto, aka, Black Beard, had his ships circling the harbor with cannons ready and swords drawn.