Plainclothes Naked (40 page)

“Oh come
on!
If your President Bush makes a call and says ‘I want Marge Beeman,’ the Heinz boy will have to find another seat to buy. Maybe
he
can be mayor. Scandal trumps money, that’s what Marge says.” Lipton seemed to go in and out of hysteria. One second his voice was screechily high, the next it dropped to an urgent monotone. “She’s already made high-level inquiries, to some of Dick Cheney’s team.” Here he sighed dramatically. “Don’t you
adore
that man? He’s so buttery and ruthless!”

Lipton closed his eyes, in the grip of some private, vice-presidential swoon, and Manny had to tap him. “Keep going.”

“Okay, okay! These were Deep Politics People. That’s what she called them.
Deep Politics People
.” Lipton giggled. “It sounds like one of those tribes in New Guinea, doesn’t it? Where they practice
manhood rituals!
”

“Maybe I’ve banged my head off the wall too many times,” Manny interrupted, “but am I missing something? Marge is
in
these photos, right?”

“Exactement!
And if the President doesn’t give her what she wants, she has a
very juicy
story about how she got there. Believe me, that pho tograph is more than enough to get our girl in Congress. Assuming George doesn’t ask Daddy to send some old hand from the CIA to make
wet work
out of her. Washington, D.C.,” he concluded dreamily. “Dupont Circle... .”

“Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself ?”

“Right, right,” said Lipton, racing from chirpy to morose and back

again. “Did you find my car? God, this odor is like a
living thing
on my skin. Do you think we could catch ebola? We are both going to have to get
steam
-cleaned!”

Something in Lipton’s frenzy set off a buzzer in Manny’s brain. The last thing he wanted to do was hang around Zank’s apartment. If Tony was fucked-in-the-head enough to come back, it would be a catastro phe. But he did not want to walk out without the whole story. Espe cially the part that Lipton, unless Manny was losing his touch, was holding back. The part that had the traumatized personal assistant jumping out of his skin.

“How come you got so freaked-out?” Manny asked, trying and fail ing to speak without breathing. “You were in that closet for what, an hour? Two hours?”

Lipton’s mid-Atlantic grin looked depraved. “I lost my nerve. Like those blokes who try to rock climb, then get paralyzed with fear halfway up the cliff. They have to be snatched by your Park Service rescue copters.”

“And I’m your rescue copter?”

“Yes!”
Lipton went tittery. Pleased with himself.

“Well, what would happen if I called Mayor Marge right now?”

“What?”
Lipton fell back on the couch as if struck and plunged his face in his hands. Manny pulled them away.

“She didn’t send you, did she?”

“No.” Lipton whimpered. “Oh damn! I knew I shouldn’t have done it.
I knew it!
”

“Done what, Lipton? Help Tony Zank rip off the mayor’s man sion?”

“I only gave him the
key!
” Lipton bellowed. “I told him I wanted the photo. He could keep everything else. But he had to get greedy! After he did it, I never even heard from him. I mean, I waited. I called. I even wrote him a letter. Not a word! Finally I decided to come here. What else could I do? But then it all went wrong. Somebody took my
car
. Only it’s not my car, it belongs to the mayor’s office.
Oh God!
It was so easy to get in here. The door wasn’t even locked! But once I was inside, I suddenly realized,
I could be killed!
”

Lipton tried to compose himself, and his tone changed again. Now he sounded like a BBC commentator.

“One doesn’t generally think about violence. All we see is the eleven o’clock news kind. The kind that happens to someone else. But, once I walked in, the reality began to just
wash over me
. I realized, it could be
me
on the news! I could be one of those bodies they carry off in the bag, before they interview the neighbors who say what a jolly nice fellow I was.”

Suddenly his voice veered back to squealy terror.

“
I’m going to die!
That’s what I kept thinking. I could not stop imag ining what would happen if Tony Zank, that
criminal,
that
beast,
that . . .
disreputable person,
just barged in while I was sneaking around his apartment. I realized,
coming here was crazy!
But what could I do? I was stuck. I was too scared to stay and too scared to leave. I simply
could not move!
”

Lipton fussed desperately with his hair. Manny let him rave.

“I started to freak out, and next thing I knew I was in the closet. In a full-blown panic attack. Have you ever had one? My God, it’s like bad LSD. I used to dabble, at university. But a panic attack is even worse, because you know you’re not
on
acid. It’s just
you!
The walls close in. The floor starts to wobble like a teeter-totter. I went absolutely
catatonic.
This dreadful stench . . . the danger... the
sheer stupidity
of what I’d done! I just kept thinking, I am going to
die
in this
cesspool!
”

Lipton punctuated his soliloquy with a quick sob. “So you called me?”

“I...I... called you. Was that wrong?”

“Not particularly.” Manny arranged his face in a bored smile. “I can get you out of here. There’s just one thing.”

“What?”

“How’d my ex-wife get the photo in the first place?” Lipton clucked. “Oh
God!
There’s a story and a half.” “I’m listening.”

Lipton sat back on the mildewed couch and crossed his legs. “San Diego,’Ninety-six. The Republican Convention. Marge was a dele gate, you know.”

“I haven’t kept up.”

“Well, she was. And,
apparently,
she and George Junior met up after some kind of platform committee thingy. I don’t know, I suppose he

wasn’t having much fun. It was all about Bob Dole. And Jack Kemp. Remember him? The footballer. A bad time to be a Bush.”

“Fuck the political landscape. Tell me how she got the picture.” “All
right!
” Lipton raised his hands in front of him, palms out, as

though warding off a blow. “Look, I am
not
going to say cocaine and single malt scotch were involved. I’m paid to be discreet. Let’s just say George and Marge hit it off. They became very...
relaxed.
Very ...
uninhibited.
”

Lipton pursed his lips in what Manny supposed was his “knowing” look.

“One thing led to another, and they ended up in Marge’s suite at the Four Seasons. You figure it out.”

Something skittered across the carpet, mouse or rat, and Manny gave a start, surprised that even vermin could stand the odor.

“You still haven’t told me. Who took the picture?”

Lipton blushed all the way down to his GQ jaw. Then he looked away and admitted, in a tone shot through with embarrassment,
“I did.”

There was a tense silence. Manny sat with it. He fancied himself a connoisseur of awkward pauses. Verbal discomfort was a powerful tool. (Rubert’s Law Number One: When grilling suspects, do not react. The more provocative the admission, the more not-reacting you did. Which generally drove them to admit more, because of Rubert’s Law Number Two: All perps crave a reaction. It didn’t matter if they were hard-core felons or shoplifting trophy wives. Nine times out of ten, they’d tell you more than you asked, just to get you to say “Wow!”)

Manny waited a beat, then marched out his most ho-hum demeanor. “You want to tell me what happened?”

Lipton nodded rapidly. “They were, I don’t know, getting kind of silly. Marge started it. She asked if he wanted to play Abraham Lin coln.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s what W. wanted to know. So Marge showed him. First she took off her blouse and painted eyebrows over her nipples with Magic Marker. Then she drew a nose under her cleavage and painted a lipstick mouth just under her belly button.”

“And then what?”

Lipton appeared near tears. “Then she pulled down her panties and said
‘Look! Here’s Abe’s beard!’
”

“Thank God there’s no picture of that.”

“The light wasn’t right,” said Lipton, missing the irony. “But they were both so loopy by then,
he
pulled down
his
pants and said, ‘Okay Marge, now I’ve got somebody I’d like
you
to meet!’ ”

“Mister Biobrain?”

“Not yet.” Lipton shot his cuffs. “Before he drew the smiley face, he painted a pair of eyeballs on his stomach, with Groucho brows, then he pretended his penis was a sort of long nose. ‘Look at my big honker, I’m Rabbi Dickstein!’ That’s what he said. ‘I’m Rabbi Dickstein! Have some matzoh!’ I suppose it’s some kind of fraternity gag. After that, I don’t know where he got the idea, he just started squeezing his, pardon my French, his
man-bag,
until it absolutely
bulged,
and then he sketched on that preposterous face. When he told her its name was ‘Mister Bio brain,’ Marge laughed so hard they both nearly fell off the loveseat. That’s when she said, ‘I must get a picture of this!’ I don’t know if she was thinking about blackmail, but I am certain that Mister Bush—he’s rather scrumpy in person—would not have agreed if he hadn’t been, as the saying goes,
feeling very little pain
... .”

The contrast between Lipton’s mannered enunciation and the sub ject at hand, not to mention the gamy flavor of their surroundings, was enough to induce some kind of psychic bends. And the codeine didn’t help. He kicked himself for not bringing a tape recorder.

“So you were there the whole time?” he asked.

“In the next room,” Lipton let out sheepishly. “Marge and I had adjoining suites. But, well, the door
was
open a crack. Anyway, she didn’t invite me in until she wanted the picture. So of course, I came in with the camera and I ...I took the picture. That’s the whole story.”

“Except for the menage-à-trois, right?” “Don’t even
joke
,” said Lipton.

By now, Manny’s leg had gone to sleep. He shook it and saw that a viscous divot, some kind of green carpet-mold, clung to the bottom of his shoe. He prayed it was guacamole, but the stuff wouldn’t budge. He had to pry it off with his fingers and wipe them on the couch.

“Let’s hear the rest,” Manny said matter-of-factly. “What do you mean?”

Manny massaged his calf. “C’mon, you ripped off your boss. You wanted her to think some burglar had the photo, so you could pretend to buy it back and pocket the cash. Or else you were gonna double-cross her and sell it yourself. That was it, wasn’t it? Only Zank double-crossed you first. He kept the picture, so you decided you’d steal it back.”

Lipton hung his head. He looked stricken. “It’s true.”

Manny felt a rush of sympathy. “You’re no criminal. Why the hell would you do something like this?”

“I need money.” For the first time, Lipton’s voice sounded unaf fected. “And the man I needed to give the money
to
needs money.”

“Somebody’s squeezing you?”

As if forces within him were waging war for his soul, Lipton raised his head, then looked down again, then turned back to Manny, jutting his Ken doll–perfect chin defiantly. “The money is for Dr. Roos,” he declared. “So that he can make me the woman I am.”

Tina was halfway back to her house—she had to clean up sometime—when she got the tingle. She’d been get ting it since childhood. That prickly sensation, like a cool, rough hand on the back of her neck. Letting her know.... She’d had it, for the first time, on the way home from school, the day she found her mother hanging from the trailer ceiling. And she had it now, imagining Manny in Zank’s apartment. It was nothing specific. A kind of cellular dread, a whisper across the skin:
You’re
‌

here, but you should be there.

Ignoring the vituperative honks of the blueberry SUV behind her, Tina slammed on the brakes, pulled a Richard Petty 180 in the middle of Liberty Boulevard, and aimed the rattling Impala back toward slaughter house row.

Dreading something awful without knowing what, she screeched to a stop before the Bundthouse Arms. Leaving the car a foot from the curb, she scrambled out and made for the entrance. She was nearly there before she sensed him.

Zank.

She knew that stink. Even in the waft of long-dead pork that clogged the air, it dominated. The rank scent of crack-sweat, of flesh gone off. Shuddering, she recalled his tongue, that puff of corpse gas and malathion when he opened his mouth to kiss her. And the worst,
the worst:
that diseased slug of a penis, sliming her lips.

Tina stopped on the sidewalk, senses on alert. She reached in her purse and touched the straight razor. She couldn’t see him, but she knew.
Any second.
Stiff-legged, she remained still, torn between run ning back to the car or into the building to warn Manny. She needed another cigarette. Fumbled in her purse for pack and lighter.

And then—“Miss me,Tina?” The voice like curdled syrup.

Tina cracked off the filter, finished lighting herViceroy, and exhaled with exaggerated leisure. She turned slowly. He wasn’t there. She turned again. Nobody. Then, from behind the Dumpster fronting the rutted alley that ran beside the building, a figure stepped toward her. Draped in a Pawnee Lodge bedspread, Tony’s face was shadowed, his coke-psychosis eyes blasting affable madness.

“Ready to party?”

Tina spotted the muzzle at the same time she noticed his bare knees. When Tony raised the .357, the bedspread parted, revealing his bloody thighs and sex. It was hard not to gag. But her fear was not about his lack of pants. It was about the gun. The blue-steel twin of the Magnum Manny’d snagged in her bathroom.