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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
A WATERSTONE'S INDIE BOOK OF THE MONTHAN UNLIKELY DETECTIVE TAKES ON A MISLEADING MURDERI was persuaded - provisionally, with confirmation to be given once I sobered up - to give up my career as a call girl and become a detectiveA SUNDAY TIMES CRIME CLUB PICK'Wild, daft, silly, laugh-out-loud, phrase-stealingly wonderful. . . Loved it' Scene Magazine'Any fan of the wise-ass wise-cracking hardboiled detective will find much to enjoy. . . Kudos for updating this approach to the mysteries of human relationships' Riva Lehrer, author of Golem GirlWhen a good friend's beloved graddaughter is murdered, an ambisexual downsized-social-worker and her cat, Bunnywit, are enlisted to help solve the case. For the police, Madeline is just one more dead sex worker - so it is down to our hero and her friends to uncover what happened. (Though not the cat. The cat mainly sulks.)With humour, sarcasm, and a good dose of irony, our protagonist swaggers through the mean streets tracking down leads to get the bad guy. But what at first seems like an average street killing is actually the surface of a grandiose and glittering set of criminal schemes that could mean far more trouble than she signed up for. . .A eye-wateringly comic mystery caper, perfect for fans of Carl Hiaasen, Andrea Lawlor and Chris Brookmyre!'Smart, snarky, funny, to die for!' Sarah Smith, author of the New York Times Notable Book The Vanished Child'You'll thank me for recommending this book to you' S. J. Rozan, author of Paper Son'Quick-fire plotting, snappy dialogue and a love of hardboiled crime make this really entertaining' Crime Time
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“Smart and razor-sharp, with unforgettable characters and a plot that won’t let you go until the last page. You’re going to love it!”
E.C. Bell, author of the Marie Jenner Mystery Series
“The Adventures of Isabel is a winner! The narrator’s voice alone is worth your time – which will be brief. It’s a page-turner”
S.J. Rozan, author of Paper Son
“Candas Jane Dorsey’s terrific mysteries are what would happen if Raymond Chandler and Frank N. Furter collaborated on cozies and the heroine were a pansexual private detective with heart, smarts, and a T-shirt saying MASCARA IS THE NEW NOIR… You’ll scream with laughter… And then, if you’re a nice person and love your friends, you’ll put these books in their hands and insist they read them too”
Sarah Smith, author of theNew York Times Notable Book The Vanished Child
“Demands to be read… The author seeks to shake the reader out of submission and into… the real crime and grime and meanness of the streets on which it’s set. The laughs are thrown in for free”
Janice MacDonald, author of the Randy Craig Mystery series
“[An] exceptional series launch from SF author Dorsey, a droll mixture of mystery and metafiction… Fans of unconventional mysteries will be richly rewarded”
Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
CONTENTS
ISABEL MET AN ENORMOUS BEAR,
1. POSTMODERN DILEMMAS
I hate show tunes.
Las Vegas show tunes, that is, crooner stuff, the kind of thing one associates with Frank Sinatra and Carol Channing. The neighbour was playing them: one of those big-band-pop-singer recordings where the linguistic distinction between po-tay-to and po-tah-to is deconstructed in detail by a hard-voiced pop-mezzo with platinum-bleached Attitude. Sun and hot wind had us all with opened windows for a last-gasp September summer moment, and I couldn’t avoid the experience of hearing paean after paean to the dysfunctional love affairs of stupid heterosexual people.
I live in a suite on the fourth floor of something called the Epitome Apartments. The landlord and locals call it “The EP-ee-tome”, with a silent final e and no irony at all. My balcony, where I have a few straggly window boxes, my feeble tribute to the Earth Goddess, is a three-foot-square iron grillwork cage, the landing of the fire escape, really, floating above a grimy urban alley that leads to the best — in my opinion — Chinese 2restaurant in town. But for months the budget hadn’t allowed eating out even at the rock-bottom prices to be had there, and depression and unemployment had me trapped in the epitome of epitombs, with someone canned asking me what you get when you fall in love.
If the cat and I could have borne the stifling air, I’d have closed the apartment against the racket. As it was, Bunnywit sat out on the fire escape, and I had Ian Tamblyn’s Antarctica on, hoping if not to drown out the brassy voice, at least to turn it into some kind of postmodern sound collage. That was mostly working.
I wasn’t.
Finances had gone beyond desperate and into hopeless, and even blue sky after weeks of rain and Bun purring like a motorised bread pudding couldn’t cheer me up. What I needed was a dysfunctional love affair of my own, one that lasted for two nights of hilarity and imported beer and ended with drunken protestations of eternal love just before the other party passed out and I slunk away without leaving my telephone number — or even my real name. No, what I needed was a lottery win.
I realised as I sat there that I could do two things well and I couldn’t get a job doing one of them: hadn’t gotten a job after the government “downsized” grants to social agencies and I was “transitioned” from six years perfectly happy as a helping professional onto unemployment insurance, which had run out nine weeks earlier. Job search being what it is in a land of twelve percent unemployment, I hadn’t found anything but frustration yet.
I was seriously considering making a business of the other thing I do well — not that I’ve done any of that for a while either. Tomorrow, when the classified ads office opened at the local tabloid rag, I’d be there. Aaaandrea. Hot bisexual. In and out calls. No Greek. Party girl. Says to-may-to.
I was revising the ad — AAAAbelard. Post-surgery, loves teddy3bears, silk, and fur, threesomes. Will Come to you — when the phone rang.
“Yeah, what?”
“Munchkin, what are you doing home on a day like this?”
“Transitioning my career into the private sector. What are you doing phoning me on a day like this?”
“You now accept that transitioning’s a verb?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
Since the bright Titian cellophane job last week, my friend Denis was the guy the term flaming faggot was invented to describe. Why he wasn’t out cruising the park on possibly the last day of summer sunbathing I didn’t know, but it had to be important.
It was.
“Honey, you busy?”
“That’s a loaded question.”
“Sorry. It’s Hep.” That’s what we called his next-door neighbour out in the suburban crescent where he’d inherited his parents’ house and turned it into a monument to gay kitsch. Her real name was Maddy Pritchard, and she was a woman in her sixties who looked like a five-foot-tall duplicate of Katharine Hepburn and had been an activist for everything long before either of us was born.
“What’s the matter?”
“You know the body on the riverbank?”
“What body? What?”
“I thought you watched the news every night?”
“Cat broke the TV. Can’t afford to get it fixed.”
“A body was found on the riverbank yesterday. When they started sorting out all the stuff in the pockets, they called Hep. They think it’s her granddaughter, Maddy. I’m stuck at work, and —”
“Wait, wait.” Denis was the best crisis worker I’d ever met, and at work he was solid and serious, but he was used to the lightning 4reporting style of emotional triage, and after a year away from it, I wasn’t. The most exciting thing in my month had been Bun throwing up into a stone age TV, and the subsequent tiny implosions. Perhaps he wanted me to buy a twenty-first-century one, but tough luck on that.
“For Judy’s sake, what’s wrong with you, girlfriend? Concentrate! I can’t go, so can you meet Hep and keep her company?”
“Where?”
“At the morgue.”
2. CHANGES IN ATTITUDES, CHANGES IN LATITUDES
That changed the tenor of the day.
I was wearing a silk camisole and tap shorts. I swiped a Thai stone across my underpits, put on some overwear undemanding, neutral, and appropriate for hot weather, put the last of yesterday’s fish sticks in the cat’s bowl, and left for the suburbs.
3. UNDERWEAR MY BABY IS TONIGHT?
This is something my granny used to say. I remembered it as I stood on the subway platform, hoping it wasn’t the day for Canada’s second-worst subway disaster, and trying surreptitiously to tug down my underwear, which had climbed the crack in my butt on the short, sweaty walk to the subway. What can I say: they were cheap, and there was a reason I only wore them when I needed to do laundry. I was to meet Hep (we always called her that: she herself had a thing for her doppelganger) and drive her in her own car to identify her granddaughter.
There was a homeless Asian woman (hey, not racializing — her accent when she asked for a quarter was Hong Kong, if I had to guess) rummaging through the garbage. We talked a little about what food was safe to eat out of the garbage. I gave her all 5that was left in my pocket: a bus ticket, a dime, and a penny. She gave me a piece of paper with the sign language alphabet on it, which she had rescued from the street — muddy Gucci-loafer prints all over it, and one corner was torn off so A wasn’t very clear — so we were both satisfied that we had shared commerce, not charity.
The train pulled in just in time. The salvaged fries she was eating were starting to look good.
4. WITH THE BENTFIN BOOMER BOYS …
I stopped being hungry, possibly for the rest of my life, at the morgue.
I also decided that I want to die before everybody I know, so I will never ever have to do that again.
I had picked up Hep and her car at her house. She was doing a pretty good Hepburn that day, hat and all, but her hands were shaking. The photos of her granddaughter that were usually propped up on the fireplace were lying on the kitchen table, and beside them a couple of crushed, wet handkerchiefs (Hep used the linen kind) added to the evidence of her reddened eyes. I took a closer look at the pictures than I ever had, and was disturbed to feel, from the image of the waif who stared defiantly out at me, strong echoes of my teen years. The kid even looked a little like I had.
Hep looked over my shoulder. “I just saw her last week. I gave her some money for her birthday. Here are the car keys …”
Hep’s granddaughter looked even worse on the slab than in her photos. This is not a corpse joke. You could kind of get past the post-mortem lividity and the blotches of settled blood showing that the body had lain on its side, to see that the kid had had horrible skin, makeup up the kazoo, broken fingernails, tracks, bruises, and bad hair.6
She was not mutilated around the face, upper chest, or arms, which was all they showed us. They also showed Hep the cheque with her signature on it that she’d given the kid, which had been tucked in the inside secret pocket of her leather jacket.
“Yes, that’s my granddaughter. Madeline Pritchard. Yes, Madeline Pritchard. Yes, she was named after me.”
5. GETTING TIGHT WITH KATHARINE HEPBURN
I let Hep off at the front, then parked the car. When I came around the house, she had already shed her hat and scarf, kicked off her shoes, and was coming out the back door with two tall glasses of iced tea gathering condensation and tinking with ice cubes.
“Madeline Pritchard,” she said thoughtfully. “Same as mine. Maddy’s mother never bothered to get married. Just as well. The guy was a bum. We found out after he took off that even his name was fake, and certainly the story of his life was made of whole cloth. Why they say that, I don’t know. Whole cloth is solid. You could spit through that guy’s reputation. We never found out who he was.”
“But she was named after you?”
“Her mother loved me. After she died, the kid lived with me for a while. We had to figure out what to call each other to avoid confusion. We used to invent new ones. Names …”
“Artemisia Gentileschi is mine,” I said, taking a glass and then shaking her outstretched hand. She laughed.
“That’s a new one.”
“I’m practising for the paid personals. Artemisia sounds like a wellspring of delights, don’t you think?”
You can talk that way with Hep, and she talks this way: “Too erudite. They want Angela, all tits, French and Greek, available for parties.” 7
“So I guess you were pretty hip to what your granddaughter was doing.”
“‘Hip’? Yes, she and I were … tight.”
I looked at this woman in her sixties, slim, trim, and self-disciplined, and I looked around the suburban, well-mowed lawn on which we stood. “Tight?”
“As in, we were fond of each other. As in, we could talk, though Lord knows I wasn’t always pleased with what I heard —” She turned abruptly and led the way into the shade. “You know, I don’t think I was ready for the change in the personals. ‘Likes dogs, hiking, and romantic dinners’ was about my speed. Now ‘likes dogs’ means something else.”
She set her glass carefully on a white-painted wrought-iron table and sat down in one of the matching chairs.
“Stir it — I didn’t.”
As I sat, she suddenly leaned forward, snapped up her glass of tea, drained it in several gulps, then very precisely threw it against the glass-embedded stucco on the side of the house. The pieces fell into the perfect English garden beside the walk.
I had just started to take a sip myself. I almost dropped my own glass when I tasted it. If there was any actual tea in it, I was a suburban housewife. Hep had just chugalugged a Long Island iced tea, four ounces of dynamite in a glass. Instant indeed.
It didn’t take me long to follow suit. When Denis came by after work, he found us still there, and Hep still had enough presence of foot to mix him one of the dogs which by then had bitten us several times.
6. DELIRIUM TREMENDOUS
Denis and I slipped into our triage mode and did vaudeville all afternoon to try to distract Hep. “Hey, Denis, you think I’d make a good call girl?”8
“You’re too old. Phone sex your only option, girlfriend.” And so on. It was hard work.
Finally Hep stopped us. “Enough of that bullshit. Pay attention. Somebody killed Maddy, and I want to know who. And I want you to find out.” And she pointed at me.
“Me?”
“Don’t squeak like that, you hurt my ears,” said Denis.
“I love Madeline very much,” Hep said precisely, “and I speak in the present tense on purpose. She is dead. I am not. I have spent the day in a melancholic state of self-pity, grief, and fury. With the onset of drunkenness, fury has won. I am determined that Maddy’s killer be found.”
Hep always talked like my high school English teacher. He had been a little, elegant guy with the same great green eyes and white hair. Come to think of it, I’d had a crush on him too.
“The police …” I said, knowing I was being the perfect Canadian, and knowing too from my days working with difficult people that the police have certain, shall we say, limitations.
“I believe in the police. I believe in law and order, all that shit. But the police see a dead hooker, probably killed by a trick.” Coming from her classy lips, the words sounded properly epithetic. “I am not content to leave a busy policeman with too many similar cases, and too many preconceptions, to solve this. And I am not capable of doing it myself.”
She was, as she often joked, a hale old bird. She saw my sceptical look and correctly read it. “Not because I am infirm,” she said tartly. “Because I am too angry. I would bully and badger witnesses. I would try to kill whomever I found guilty. I would not be successful in either endeavour. And besides, look at me. You must know something about what Maddy’s world was like. Do you think they would pay attention to me?”
“And you think they would to me?”9
She laughed. “The ring in your nose, and the one in your nipple, should convince them.”
“I don’t have one in my nipple,” I said involuntarily.
“You’re blushing,” she said. I looked away. The liquour loosened the self-discipline which so far had prevented me from vamping her, and even drunk I could not tell whether she in her dignified way — though how she stayed dignified after matching me drink for drink my fuddled brain could not imagine — was vamping me or not. Besides, these days, I was so deprived that I didn’t trust my impulses. Anyone warmblooded, intelligent, and healthy interested me. Even some people who weren’t. So I acted on nothing, which made the situation worse. Is life sensible? Mine certainly doesn’t prove such a premise.
“This is silly,” I said. “I am an involuntarily retired social worker. To be blunt, a downsized social worker. A transitioned social worker who hasn’t said an empathic thing for over a year, except to my cat. Not even to my cat, the little creep. So what qualifies me to be Sam Spade or whoever?”
“Your sexism is showing. What happened to Miss Marple —”
“You’re Miss Marple …”
“— or Kate Henry, or Victoria Warshawski, or Kinsey Millhone, or Joanne Kilbourn, or Aud Torvingen, or —?”
“Oh, put a sock in it,” I said, forgetting I was talking to The Madwoman of Chaillot.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” she said.
7. PROZAC TOMORROW?
“No we’re not,” I said. “You may as well hear the truth. I spend my days staring at the wall and fantasising about disembowelling my cat as an offering to whatever bitch goddess has been organising my life lately. I am so depressed that if I could motivate myself to 10it I’d commit suicide, but it’s too proactive for me. Furthermore, I know nothing about the real world of crime. I read Dick Francis mysteries, which are too damned nice, and for that matter, they are set in another country.”
“And besides, the wench is dead,” Hep said, quietly.
We all fell silent.
8. LOVE OF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL
“Look, kiddo,” said Denis finally, “you need a job. Hep needs someone who can ask hard questions to people without offending them. Nothing like a registered social worker to do that on an hourly basis. Hep has the money for the hourly basis.”
“When did you two talk this over and decide I was the next Nancy Drew?”
“Before I called you,” Denis said, enough less drunk than we were to still be shamefaced. (We, more simply, were just shitfaced.)
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me this then? I’d have stayed home with Bunnywit and eaten flies. Forget it. I’ve got my new career all mapped out. ‘AAAAAlthea. Poetic but lusty. By the minute, hour, or week. Anything you want.’ How’s that sound?”
“It sounds stupid. These days you gotta have a dungeon and six thousand dollars’ worth of video equipment just to turn a trick. And besides, Althea? Really? Why don’t you just use your own … shit, no way you’re distracting me. You need a source of income, if only to pay me back the big bucks you owe me. Not that I’d be crass enough to mention that as a way of trying to influence you.”
Hep then named an hourly rate which made even my overinflatedly self-indulgent subconscious blink, and between the emotional blackmail of being reminded how much I owed Denis, the memory of my empty cupboard, evocations of the pitiful dead kid, and greed, I was persuaded — provisionally, with 11confirmation to be given once I sobered up — to give up my career as a call girl and become a detective.
9. FISH STICKS
I stopped on the way home and spent some of my advance on food. Lots of my advance, actually. Which pretty much put paid to backing out.
When I got back the cat had disembowelled the leftover fish stick in the centre of the braided rug in the living room. Apparently he had found nothing edible there. I couldn’t blame him. I had had the same experience myself the night before, but the half-empty pack of frozen fish wafers had been the last thing in the freezer, so I’d been forced to try them. Nevertheless, I gave him thirty seconds of scolding as I picked up the larger bits, threw them out, and opened the tin I’d brought home. He fell upon it as if he were starving. He probably was. I know it smelled pretty good to me, which showed the state I was in.
The other thing I’d brought home was steak. Later, Bun and I lay on the couch, replete and somnolent. If it hadn’t been for the pictures of Maddy that her grandmother had shown me, I would have been able to sleep.
10. HAD A CAT ONCE — TASTED LIKE CHICKEN
My cat is called Bunnywit. Actually, he’s called Fuckwit, but I realised after I’d had him for a while that whenever what passes for my family these days came over to visit, I had to stifle my yelling at him, and he got away with a lot of crap during those visits, so I Bowdlerised him to Bunnywit. In true cat fashion, he mostly only answers to Fuckwit. It’s been a couple of months now, and we’re still working on it. 12
Fuckwi—er, Bunnywit is the perfect sounding board. Stupid, feline, Rorschach, he moves in another world. I can pretend to be talking with him and, like the tarot or the I Ching, arrive at truth by impressionism. So when I say I consulted Bunnywit, I don’t want you to think I actually asked him anything. The process was more like divination with entrails. Except, because I can’t afford a new cat every time I have a life crisis, I leave the entrails in situ. It did have something to do with entrails though. After I’d been staring silently at him for about twenty minutes, Bunnywit, obliviously unflappable, walked over to his empty food bowl and miaowed. It wasn’t exactly a sign from heaven, but it got me out of my chair, and there was a certain symbolic weight to it.
ISABEL, ISABEL DIDN’T CARE.
11. THE SOUND OF MONEY AND CIRCUMSTANCE
I decided the next morning when I woke up that counting every dangerous situation I had ever been in at work or play, this was one of the stupidest things I had ever agreed to do. Well, it was the next noon, actually, but that was because I had been up most of the night thinking about how to approach the task of solving a murder. I had reviewed every cheap thriller memory, trying to learn something from them, and it all seemed outrageous. Why had I allowed all that money to get to me?
All that money, Bun’s entrails reminded me, and the sound of Hep’s — Maddy Senior’s — voice as she talked about her dead granddaughter.
The photos of Maddy lay on my table now.
“She had no originality,” Hep had said, “but she had irony. It was going to be her saving grace. She was talking about kicking her habit. She was talking about getting out of the life. She was talking about settling down with Vicki, her roommate — her girlfriend — and living happily ever after.”
14In the first photo, Maddy looked awful. She’d tried to spruce herself up for dinner at her grandmother’s, but it hadn’t worked. Not much could change the condition of her overdyed hair, her bad skin, or the rings under her eyes. Her friend Vicki looked as bad. They leaned on each other, a couple of very thin flying buttresses holding up nothing. They wore hackneyed hooker clothes and grinned like high school kids. Hell, they were highschool kids — or Maddy could have been.
Not that I knew much about high-school kids any more, except from a long, long distance, watching them, bristling with earrings, clumsily capering in their black armed-forces surplus boots down inner city streets and calling pomo chatback to each other under my apartment’s front windows.
When she gave the photos to me, Hep had put another photo down on top of the first. This was printout of a snapshot which she said Vicki had taken. In it Maddy wore thigh-high fuck-me boots, a microskirt, and a cropped T-shirt. She had too much make-up on and looked like a drag queen.
Hep had regarded it sadly. “She was so definite,” she said, “that I decided to treat her as another adult. Was I wrong, I wonder? I have wondered. Should I have abducted her home, deprogrammed her like those idiots who try to convert their gay sons? Should I have abandoned some exaggerated idea of respect? She really wasn’t much, just a scrap of life lying on the street, but I loved her. I love her still. That’s all it adds up to, really.”
“That may be all there is,” I said, and Hep looked at me, hearing, I think, the compromise I’d drawn between “that’s all that matters”, which is what the social worker would have said last year, and “that may count for something … or not”, which is what I was afraid to think now.
In the cold light of morning — which was actually the warm light of noon on another hot day — I shook crunchies into Fuc—er, Bunnywit’s bowl. I was so tired I could hardly 15move. It wasn’t physical. I was climbing a mountain of despair and lack of self-esteem. It doesn’t matter how well I know it from the counsellor’s side, it’s still the same black cloud. Bunnywit was in an unusually kind mood: he rubbed against my hand as I filled his water dish, then licked my fingers. I imagined that I was a cat. A big hand was rubbing me behind the ears. It was offering me crunchies if I would do tricks. I wanted to bite it.
I shook myself. Bun’s jaws split the hard cat food with a sound like the foundations of my self-image crumbling between the jaws of an army of rats. I had to laugh at that one. I was getting maudlin, and the sun was barely over the yardarm.
Wednesday afternoons I volunteered in the abortion clinic, but not today. I called in sick-and-tired, and picked up my wallet. To the bank first, to get rid of some of these fifties, and then to the police station.
12. I’LL HAVE IT IN FIFTIES AND THREES
The bank was glad to see me — my line of credit had topped out the day before, and they had called me at five yesterday to say I had to be in with a deposit before two today or I’d have my rent cheque bounced back. Since the slumlord was the leader of a vocal anti-gay-rights lobby and I was an equally vocal out bisexual,1 it was better not to come to her notice. When I left the bank, my account was in the black for the first time in months, and I still had two hundred bucks in my wallet after buying a transit pass.
1613. ROGER
The detective handling Maddy’s case was in, typing a report into a computer terminal and chewing on a doughnut. Not only that, it was someone I knew. He used to be in Vice, when I worked with teenaged girls, lo these many years ago. When that institution was shut down due to budget cuts and I moved on, I lost touch with all the people uptown. But here he was.
“Is Homicide a lateral transfer?” I asked from the doorway. “Or did you get demoted for eating doughnuts?”
He didn’t recognise me for sure at first. Then he jumped up to his full 6'6" (what the hell is that in metric?) “Is …”
“Is it really me? Yeah, it is, Rog. Strange as it seems.”
He hugged me. “Didn’t recognise you looking so femme.” When Roger knew me, I’d had a brush cut and more Attitude. Ironically, it was before I started sleeping with women as well as men, and yet it had taken some time to convince him that I wasn’t a dyke — maybe all of half an hour, as I recall, before he unbuttoned. But that had been a long time ago.
“Madeline Pritchard.”
“What about her? You had something to do with her? What agency are you with now?”
“Well, none, any more. I’ve been re-efficiencied. I’m a friend of her grandmother. She wants some help figuring out what happened.”
“She got killed. What, you doing grief counselling now?”
“Nah. Asking questions.”
“What, some kinda private detective schtick? You need a licence for that, don’t you?”
“Roger, I have no idea. I’ve been unemployed for aeons, and Hep — Maddy Senior to you — offers me a job asking questions about her grandkid. I admit, my head was turned. My rent cheque was bouncing sky high and I really needed the universe 17to cut me some slack. Since it’s you and not some TV cop with testosterone overdose, can you maybe give me some idea of what happens next?”
“Well, we’ll put it in the media …”
“What, you’re that hard up?”
“Yeah. It’s the usual bullshit. Dumped hooker. But there’s something wrong.”
“What?”
He was staring out the window.
“What, Roger?”
“No semen. No semen, no lube, no rubber glove dust, no professional-activity traces at all. And the level of dope in her tissues is too low.”
“Too low?”
“The tracks are fresh, not post-mortem or anything, but fresh. We’re supposed to think OD, maybe? But the girlfriend said the kid was quitting. And according to the pathologist, she really was. So what was that? Window dressing? What could I see if I found that window? And …”
“And?”
“And she hadn’t cashed the cheque.”
14. SHE SHOULD HAVE DIED HEREAFTER
I was haunted by the image of the dead girl. When I was in child care, at the beginning of my career, I had taken a lot of kids to hospital to treat a lot of self-mutilations and overdoses, but I hadn’t been on duty for any of the three suicides. I had never regretted missing that experience. I’d seen two other dead people before Maddy, and found the difference between dead and alive spooky, mysterious, thought-provoking, and shivery. But this feeling wasn’t me confronting mortality and the cold clay: the fury that Hep felt had its echo in my anger, reawakened from 18my caregiver days, at the brutal way the kid had been used, while alive and in death.
Just as Big Rog had done, I kept calling her “kid” and “girl”. She’d been twenty, it turned out, though her thinness and vulnerability and bad hair had made her look like a teenager. I’d been twenty when I started working with “delinquent” kids, and (especially given what I’d gone through myself before that) I’d felt old. Now I was almost twice that age, and Maddy, who must have felt like she’d lived a millennium in her short life, had seemed like just a child, lying there in the mortuary.
Bad skin, she’d had, but young skin: not much in the way of wrinkles, laugh lines — she’d been real short on laugh lines — or weathering. The unhealthy life she’d led had given her skin a texture like mid-leavening dough, puffy and pasty, rather than charring her into smoked leather or shrinking her into an apple doll as it would have with a woman my age.
I looked closely at my own face in the mirror. Laugh lines, sure, but I still looked younger than I am, enough that in my work it had occasionally been a disadvantage. A moment ago I’d felt old, thinking about her. Now I felt young — young and fortunate to be alive. I was swinging on the emotional yo-yo, spinning on the string of the human condition.
15. A WHITE SPORTS COAT AND A PINK CARNATION
Vicki was a bleached blonde with such an amazing silicone job that she looked like a tiny version of one of the “gorgeous she-males” who advertise in the business personals, but the tatty pink nylon teddy she was wearing, combined with the recent wax job, left no doubt as to her genital configuration. She’d been crying, and along with her hooker-red rayon housecoat and hot pink undies, she was wearing big stuffed slippers shaped like chickens. I deduced that Maddy had given them to her, but it was 19an easy one: there was another snapshot, printed out on flimsy 20lb. typing paper and tacked roughly above the mantel, a selfie of sorts that showed the two of them, blurry and laughing, with wrapping paper around them and matching slippers kicking in the air.
She poured a Coke™ for herself, and one for me. “We don’t have any booze in the house,” she said. “We were the two stupidest drug-usin’ sluts you ever saw: no booze, and no Twinkies. Can you imagine? We were thinkin’ we were healthy, eatin’ two squares a day and keepin’ fresh lettuce in the house.” She snorted. “When we went to the clinic, woman there told us to put a hunnerd’n’fifty-watt bulb in the bathroom light. Man, any time it was hard to keep our promise, we usta go in there and look at each other in the mirror. It was easier to see in the mirror. If I looked her in the eyes, man, I still drowned in them. I s’pose you think that’s sick.”
“Why sick?”
“Coupla lez hookers, dopers, pitiful.”
“I don’t usually do this on the first date,” I said, and pulled up my skirt. Up high on my thighs, where hardly anybody ever looks in sunlight, the old tracks still show. Not many of them, I was lucky, but I have enough to have broken the ice in a number of situations, therapeutic and otherwise. “I may be twice your age, cupcake, but you didn’t invent fucking up. People have been fucking up like you and Maddy since the dawn of time — or at least since the invention of the hypodermic.”
“You got clean.”
“I got locked up in a secure ward when I was fifteen. Why I became a social worker — I thought they saved my life.”
“Yeah,” she said. “With me it was the teachers in the home for unwed mothers. Can you believe it? I made one semester of college. I kept sayin’ I’d go back.”
“How old are you?” 20
“Twenty-three.”
“You look thirteen. Except for the tits.”
“Yeah, well, it’s my schtick. School uniforms. The tits are for later in the scene.”
“Do you do dungeon stuff?” I said, diverted. “Do you advertise? ‘Bouncing Betty, 44-24-34’ and all that?”
“You thinkin’ of gettin’ into the trade?”
“Well, until yesterday I wasn’t making any headway anywhere else. Now I seem to be working for Maddy’s grandmother, trying to gather data.”
“Like a detective?”
“Well, I’d need a licence for that. I think. Besides, I’m not an idiot. Find out anything, it’s to the police in a New York minute. Let them break the doors down and make the big arrests.”
She laughed. Her face split down the lines of the mask, she was herself for a moment, and I could see what Maddy had seen. What had she seen in Maddy?
I asked her.
16. VICKI’S STORY
I dunno. She was cool. She was just always cool in every situation. She gave me the idea to stay alive. Before then I didn’t much care. I was like, movie-of-the-week profile, I got fucked by my stepfather and pregnant, and gave up the kid, and tried to make college, and just fell apart. And by the time I met her, it was almost gamers. Listen to those bitches down in detention talk about self-respect, what do they know? They wear silk shirts and gold chains in the hot tub, man. They never have a hangnail even.
She was getting it together. She was. She never OD’d, that Roger Rabbit cop told me. Don’t know if we were gonna quit the life, but we were independents: no pimp to chain us to 21a bed. We prob’ly woulda advertised, like you said, come to think of it. But maybe in Vancouver. Or Victoria, I heard it was pretty there.
17. LONG DISTANCE TRUCK DRIVER SEEKS COMPANION ON LONG TRIPS; WILL TEACH TO DRIVE
We kicked around a lot of useless ideas. Finally we decided we would fit me with some high heels and on Sunday night, a week from when Maddy had died, I’d go out trolling with Vicki. See what turned up.
“Sundays are pretty dead,” she said, then flushed with despair, and her eyes filled with tears. She got up, rushed into the bedroom, but clearly only to find a distracting topic: in a moment she was back with the fuck-me boots Maddy had been wearing in the photo Hep had.
“One good thing, she had big feet,” she said. “Try ’em.”
Thanks, kid, I thought, but she went on obliviously, “Five inch spikes like this, you gotta have big feet. Man, we used to envy the trannies. When you got size eleven feet, five inches is nothing. When you got size five like me, you gotta stuff the toes, and they still hurt like hell. Probably why I do the Suzy Creamcheese act. You only gotta wear Mary Janes.”
“That’s why drag queens never complain about the shoes!” I said. “Hey, they fit.”
At the odd mix of slightly-stricken and proud on Vicki’s face, I leaned over to touch her shoulder. “We’ll find out something,” I said. “Maddy would want to be in on it, even if it’s only by the spirit sticking to her boots.”
“That’s so tacky,” she said.
We laughed, but we sounded like the teenaged boys who can’t help, to their mortification, laughing at the rape scene in a movie. 22
18. LITTLE SHIP OF DREAMS
I dreamed about Maddy Junior that night. I woke up because F—… Bunnywit was sitting on my head, purring. Purring for him just means “here I am, serve me”, it isn’t a sign of anything special. At least, that’s what I’d always thought, but his dishes had food and water, the litter box was clean, and he wasn’t in the mood to play. When I sat down in the big rocker, he climbed up and sat on my head again, his heavy hips anchored on the back of the chair, his paws embracing my temples, licking the part in my hair.
I dozed off there, in the chair. Woke with the air cooling my saliva-soaked head to hear Bun scratching in his box in the bathroom, and stumbled back to bed. He returned to my head for most of the night, and I figure the only reason I didn’t dream again was that it was too damned uncomfortable.
Only benefit to Bun being a Manx is that at least his tail wasn’t up my nose. Morning, for a change, was welcome. I had to thank him, though. He’d done his best. I hoped I wasn’t as competent as a detective as Bun was as a therapist.
I had to wash my hair before I went out, which must have been why it rained.
1. The correct word, of course, is ambisexual, as in ambidextrous, but I’m reconsidering both words in light of my complete lack of interest in the gender binary. I’ve decided I should start saying pansexual, which is more accurate, but given the luck I’ve had changing Fuck—er, Bunnywit’s name, I will warn you to allow for a bit of backsliding ongoing.
THE BEAR WAS HUNGRY, THE BEAR WAS RAVENOUS,
19. THE STORIES OF THE STREET ARE MINE
The inner city is a hungry beast feasting on the lives of children: jailbait pickups sucked into silver Lincoln Continentals so that sexually-incontinent old tourists from the ’burbs can spill their worthless lust into people they consider as disposable as the condoms they use to protect themselves from infection.
They drive home sated and smug, believing they’ve outwitted the street once again, not knowing that the street has their number, the kids have learned much more from them than they have learned in the transaction, and unable to imagine that the human beings they leave behind as trash have more to say to the universe than their rich, white, and much more trashy clientele.
I stood in a doorway in Maddy’s boots, my feet and my spirit hurting. I was wondering already if this caper would cause permanent damage to both.
