The Irresistible Muse of Jack Kidd Read online

  “Better sell now is what I keep hearing, before the bottom falls out,” Gertrude said.

  “What goes up must come down,” Brenda added with more merriment.

  “My mortgage banker says the real estate market should go up for years and that we should hold out for more profit. What do you think, Mr. Kidd?”

  I think you need get the hell out of this room and close that damn door. “In a year or two your property will be worth half of what it is now. Give me a call; I’ll list your property.”

  “My goodness, we’d better hurry.”

  You’d better hurry and close that fucking door.

  “I got your number, Mr. Kidd. Expect a call from me soon.” The old woman finally closed the door.

  I slipped on my Jockey briefs and sat in a nearby chair, hoping Gertrude would be a loyal client now and not go blabbing outside about the naked stud muffin in Brenda’s office. “Don’t you have a lock on that door?” I asked.

  “I run an indiscreet salon. Gertrude didn’t know you were in here.”

  “How does she know I’m a Realtor, and how does she have my number, I work exclusively?”

  “Maybe it’s your backside she’s after.”

  “I have an age-limit clause regarding my services.” I took the chair I sat on and propped it between the doorknob and the floor to secure the room. I began collecting my clothes.

  Brenda sat upright, pointing her breasts and a shot of her crotch toward me and said, “I wonder what that feels like, having someone’s hands clutch around your throat while climaxing.”

  I had to ignore her. I mean, hell, doc, if you really want to know. Voices outside the door had built to a rumble; I picked up my pace retrieving my clothes.

  “When your hands were around Michelle’s windpipe, squeezing the life out of her, did that turn you on, tomcat?”

  “It was an accident, Brenda.” I pulled up my Dockers and fastened the button, then zipped the fly.

  “The Brazilian newspapers reported your accident as a murder, but you luckily left the scene before the authorities arrived. You were in some kind of disguise, weren’t you?”

  “I prefer the term undercover.”

  “A shaved head, pierced ears, and faux tattoos all over your arms and back. You skipped out from Brazil and sailed to Belize on a friend’s yacht, screwing his wife behind his back, I might add, for the month’s duration. Once in Belize, you were there on the lam until you flew home on some lover’s private jet.”

  “Michelle wanted the sex that way—it was Rio for God’s sake.”

  “That’s a hell of a way to have sex, clutching your hands around a woman’s throat. It’s called erotic asphyxiation—”

  “I know damn well what it’s called. Are you interrogating me or analyzing me, Brenda?”

  “I’m simply unraveling you, Jack. Or is it, Jack the Gripper?” She shot me a one of her annoying high-brow smirks and continued, “But the murder happened in Brazil, and your dream, sketch, or whatever the hell it is you’re trying to tell me is also happening in Brazil. The palpability to all this is so transparent it’s completely silly.”

  I gave Brenda a hard stare. I knew what I came here for today, a thorough anal probing, to which she was reaming out masterfully. She stood and walked to the desk and opened a drawer, producing the needed torch to light that stupid cancer stick on fire. “Jack, Jack, Jack, you just can’t keep your hands off the girls, can you?” She steadied the cigarette and began snapping the igniter.

  I shot a glance at her throat. “Be nice if just once I could beat the temptation.”

  “Stop gloating inside your guilt, Jack.” After several flicks of her lighter, a flame failed to ignite.

  “I never feel guilty about anything,” I said.

  As if to punish the lighter for not sparking a flame or to keep her lover/dance student quick on his toes, Brenda sent the small device zinging over my head. She lifted another lighter from inside the drawer. I glanced at the small indentation embedded in the wall.

  “You don’t believe that,” she said, igniting the other lighter.

  “I don’t believe in anything either.” I buckled my belt and slipped on my socks.

  A red ember finally glowed at the tip of her cigarette. She opened a filing cabinet and lifted a tumbler and a bottle of Grey Goose. She poured herself a drink and reclined on the futon. “Leaving so soon?”

  “Uh, yeah, people outside; we both have things to do?” I grabbed my Lacoste pullover and slipped it on. “So, for the sake of science, Doctor, what’s your diagnosis? Am I the sex addict, psycho strangler you think I am?”

  “You murdered someone, Jack. You have to resolve that. But we’re almost there.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Where you can’t believe. Same time next week?”

  “If I’m still alive.

  “It’s called karma, tomcat.”

  “It’s called a billion dollar price on my head, or if I’m lucky, a one-way ticket to freedom.” I slipped my feet into my Docksides, then looked in a nearby mirror and combed my fingers through my hair. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I’ve given myself thirty days.”

  “Thirty days?”

  “To catch the last train for the coast.” I began toward the door, making a final adjustment to my clothes and stopped. “And from there I’ll catch a boat for Tahiti, a desolate atoll, or even Australia. I’ve never been to Australia.”

  “It won’t help, dear. Those places won’t set you free or help you believe.”

  I placed the binder I’d used as a fig leaf back on Brenda’s surprisingly organized work desk. What appeared to be an open personnel file lay open on the desk. I noticed a particular name. “She danced on Broadway,” I said.

  “She?”

  “Your recently hired blonde, Catherine Fleming.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “We shared a ride on the ferry the other morning.” I then said with baiting anticipation, “I’m sure you have her psychoanalyzed by now.”

  “I’m in the process. She’s way overqualified to work in my humble brick-and-mortar. She is intriguing.”

  I turned back toward the desk and stared at the file.

  “She’s also dangerous, Jack.”

  “I damn well hope so.” I considered my psychoanalyst’s bemused regard and said, “You’re wanted on the dance floor, Dr. Murphy.”

  6

  A previous client, a matron of business and science who owned a local pharmaceutical laboratory, owed me a favor. I had taken my cocktail tumblers to her lab to have an analysis done for any residual drug that may have remained in the cocktails that I drank three nights ago. I should know the results in a week’s time.

  After closer inspection of my fax machine’s cache, I discovered that certain documents, pertinent to my ranch, had been rustled from my possession by none other than my grape-stomping lover, Carmella Falsetto. She had stepped outside the boundaries of lovers and adversaries and changed the rules of warfare. No longer were she and her hubby merely aiming their cannons, they were now swinging across the gunwales and onto my ship.

  I kept asking myself, just who the hell passed through my backdoors and into my house that night? I saw nothing stolen or out of place except that sealed envelope with Emily’s printed message. It must have been before Carmella and I came home that evening from the nightclub.

  I walked into my home-office and sat at my desk. I deciphered the old and current newspaper articles regarding the recent murders, reports of lacerated victims, a motel fire and corresponding red sky, all warnings, seemingly connected.

  Going back five years, my Internet searches confirmed my comparison of recent murders: London, Paris, New York, Miami, a sequence of events with murder-by-slashing as front-page features that drew a revealing time line straight to Newport Beach.

  Images of my recent dreams flashed through my mind: the house, a Brazilian beach, my fruit trees, a masked killer and her victim. It’s all vague yet so
damn clear, as if I’m on the fringe of this somehow and drifting closer to the center—the reason. I kept thinking how it was that my dreams could be so dead on to these newspaper stories? Too much booze, too many women, and way too much at stake, that’s how. Or was I still dreaming, or in la-la land, or worse, delusional? Wouldn’t be the first time.

  I recalled the scene with Gertrude yesterday in Brenda’s office: I felt a draft, then turned to see an elderly woman in the doorway. That’s it, it was that locked-and-loaded stare she had on me until I acknowledged her, causing her to switch to sweet, Granny Gertrude, and also the way she said, “I got your number, Mr. Kidd”. My lottery number? Phone number? The assessors-parcel-number to my land? Are there such things as granny pirates?

  I leaned back in my chair and massaged my eyes and face. Gertrude’s gape at my bare ass left me stranded on an island of intrigue. I couldn’t shake that look of hers, as if she were sizing up a target more than just gawking at a real estate agent with his pants down.

  I lifted the manila envelope and pulled out its contents. Sorting through my collection of news clippings and data, I found the case profile, the kind a skilled private investigator would compile—the best guardian angel a gigolo could have. A face came into view, a photograph of her, Catherine Fleming, a Broadway performer teaching ballroom dance on the fly.

  I stayed fixed on her photo. A hunch, a logical conclusion—riddle me this, Lady Catherine. I then recalled the other woman, Lena, who arrived in Newport Beach the same time as Catherine, and who also works at Brenda’s studio. She was tall and slender and had every bit the dancer physique as Catherine. Yet this bird was pale skinned, a poster child for anemia, with ink-black hair and a self-assurance about her that was as menacing as it was enticing. Paper tigers they both seemed, and hopefully the kind that can set fire to more than seedy motel rooms.

  I went back to my dreams and the nights I couldn’t sleep, pounding away on my computer with my nemesis and friend by my side, a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey. So perplexed I was by the nightmares that they evolved into a journal I’d written for Dr. Murphy. I then got this hair up my ass to craft the dream into a work of fiction, a novella, hell, why not a screenplay, my memoirs: a blueprint for escape. Twenty-seven days to go, Jack.

  People are fucked up, I’ve concluded. We can’t control our egos and so we’re doomed. A passage from some bygone Sunday school lesson, one in which I’ve been ruminating on a lot lately, began chanting in my head, “Meaningless, meaningless, says the teacher. All is meaningless...all is vanity.” Who can know the heart?

  My cell phone rang. The name of my hired snoop, Sam Ivy, appeared in the caller I.D.

  “Hello, Sam.”

  “Mr. Kidd. I got information for you.”

  If there was ever a character who could plod doggedly in a pair of gumshoes, it was Sam Ivy: ex-police detective, Los Angeles Vice.

  “I need you to move this thing up a notch, Sam.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I need you to travel for me, do some serious sniffing. New York and London is where you’ll probably find the scent the strongest.”

  “I don’t cross any ocean, Mr. Kidd. Mexico’s as far as I go.” Sam was street smart enough to never back himself into an unfamiliar zip code. But I needed my snoop to break method and venture forth.

  “You’re doing an outstanding job here locally, Sam, but I need more.”

  “I’d advise against it. The two dancers, the blonde and brunette you hired me to tail have a crowded orbit.”

  “Crowded orbit?”

  “Every time I set a stake, someone else is there with a long lens, and they’re not private dicks neither.”

  “Maybe it’s the same people trying to pirate my land?”

  Ivy paused for a moment. He cleared his throat, loosening what sounded like a night’s worth of phlegm. “Could be, but I think it’s more than that. It’s getting pretty fucking mixed up out here. You’ve got more people tailing you right now than a U.S. President has body guards.”

  Welcome to my endgame, detective. “So who are these people?”

  “Feds, it looked like, some local cops, too.” He paused again. I could tell that what the man knew or suspected of knowing was probably of epic significance. He went on, “Let’s just say I’ve got no more camouflage in any of this. There’s a hell of a lot of surveillance going down on you and these two birds and whatever your reason to spy on them, I say you put the brakes on it.”

  “I’ve used your services for years, Sam, why the apprehension?

  “I was a cop for forty years, Mr. Kidd. The Feds I don’t give a damn about, but there’s a brotherhood among us cops, and I won’t shit in their back yard, if you catch my drift. Besides, these aren’t the usual jealous husbands wanting to file a lawsuit on your ass or eighty-six it neither—oh, and another thing...”

  Sam sometime tried to withhold information from me for tactical reasons, I always surmised, but like any good sleuth on a generous retainer, he knew when best to cough it up. “You were saying, Sam?”

  “It looks like you’re a mark, Mr. Kidd.”

  “Of course I’m a mark; I’ve got a billion dollar bull’s-eye on my backside.”

  “This one doesn’t seem to be after your high-price backside. She’s a young one, eighteen, nineteen years old maybe, been following you around with a long lens. She has a knack for lying low, too, a smooth style.”

  “Describe her to me.”

  “Caucasian, dark hair, brown eyes, pretty as hell. A prima-donna type with motive chiseled in her face. Not typical, but then again a lot of various flavors are doing this kind of undercover shit nowadays. I snapped a few frames of her. I’ll send them with the update. Between you and me, Mr. Kidd, there’s a weird kink in all this. Two guys so far, Casanova types, were skewered in motel rooms, and it’s all happened in the last few weeks.”

  “So I’ve read. Do you think it’s a serial killer?”

  “Could be. Wouldn’t surprise me neither if they weren’t contracts being worked.”

  I thought about that, including Sam’s lowbrow tendency to speak in double negatives. “Contracts?”

  “You know—a hit—a hired killer. They’re usually done with a 9 mil round to the back of the head, but these episodes kind of all smell like contracts being worked.”

  Realizing the possibilities of Sam’s details, I halted my line of questions. I could tell he sensed I lay snared by his latest theory. He went on, “You need to leave this alone, Mr. Kidd. In fact, if I were you I’d hire some real protection. I’ve seen it all.”

  Sam had seen it all, the Manson murders, Hillside Strangler, the L.A. riots, etcetera, and when it became known on the street and in the force that he was sidestepping into the world of private dicks, he was labeled a rogue. But rogue or not, the tone of his voice was imminent: move cautiously along this plotline.

  He continued, “It’s not just the nine zeros you’re worth, Mr. Kidd. These slime balls after your land are there to intimidate you, not kill you, not yet anyways. But you do fit the sketch of these dead vics.”

  “Which sketch, a gigolo with a hard on for married women or an aloof land baron?”

  “All I’m saying is if it ain’t the cuckolds, it’s the land grabbers, and if it ain’t the land grabbers, then, hell, I don’t know. All this shit started going down when these pretty birds showed up in town so there could be a connection. If I had more time and knew I wasn’t in the way on this, I’d close in on these birds, but you only hired me to work your orbit.”

  “I’ll pay you three times more to go outside my orbit, Sam.”

  “Say again.”

  “And I’ll pay all expenses.”

  “Just what is it with you and these women anyway?”

  “Is it a deal?”

  More raspy breathing from the other end until the man spoke, “I can’t do this anymore, Mr. Kidd. The way I’ve been working for you has really been eating at my gut.”

  “Where el
se are you going to find steady work like I give you, Sam?”

  “I can’t stomach this work anymore. You’ve got me tracking all these broken families you helped break up with your bimbo shenanigans. Hell, I could be busted for being a pedophile by the way I shadow those kids.”

  With the phone pressed against my ear I paced through my house and stopped at the wet bar. I needed a drink. “I’ll pay you five times what I’ve been paying you, Sam, and that’s a hell of a lot of money. In fact, after this investigation I’ll withdraw your services entirely. No more shenanigans.” I grabbed a bottle of Bushmills, set it down, and opted instead for a bottle of fermented agave.

  “That’ll be it...you won’t need me no more?”

  “I won’t need you anymore.”

  Silence filled the other end until pondering sighs hissed through the phone. With enough greenbacks waved in front of Sam’s nose, he’ll hopefully tweak his work ethic and heal into one last adventure. He said, “To be honest, I am getting kind a tired of this grind. I do have family to think about. I’ll draw out a timeline and amend the contract, including waivers, kind of an insurance policy.”

  I poured a shot of the Tequila. “That’ll be fine. I’ll have a contact pick up the update, and I’ll wire the money through escrow to your account and fax the amendment to you. Just give me a full and complete story, Sam, and do find out who’s marked me. Incidentally, you haven’t seen an old woman snooping around, have you?”

  “Come again?”

  “An elderly woman with white-cottony hair. She’s average height and build. Goes by the name of Gertrude.”

  “Negative on that. This old bird been following you?”

  “No. It was just a one-time gape.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s probably nothing. Sort of a cold draft up my ass, you could say.” I threw back the shot of tequila, bracing my throat against the bite of its fumes.

  The man laughed quietly. “There’s more than one way to smell a hound, Mr. Kidd. Keeping a close watch on your rear flank is usually the most reliable. I’ll keep my eye out.”

  “Thanks, Sam. How many languages do you speak, by the way?”