It was a dark and stormy night.  I didn’t know how it could manage to be dark with all that lightning ripping through the sky, but the air that steamed in through my open window was blacker than the hair on a mountain gorilla’s ass.  A rumble of thunder rattled the ice cubes that had just gotten comfortable in their bath of scotch.  I fished through the drawer next to me for the half-empty pack of cigarettes I knew were hiding behind the jumbled papers and dried nibs.  Success.  “Hallelujah,” I muttered, and lit the crumbling tobacco with a kitchen match.

Smoke filtered through the air, which was thick and heavy with damp.  It made toadstools pop up along the floorboards and caused oily patches of rot to bloom on the old copies of the Times that littered the office.  The place was a dump.  But it was my dump.  I had been shacking up in the decrepit old building for a few weeks, nothing serious, just a place to lay my head until the papers decided to run my piece on racketeering in the mayor’s office.  Those bastards couldn’t get away with vote-fixing forever.  They’d either pay for it in credibility or in a hefty sack of bills left outside my door.  But until then, I’d have to stay here.

My stomach growled in time with the thunder.  I shook my head wearily and took a swallow of scotch.  Best breakfast, lunch, and dinner a private dick could ask for.  At the very least it ensured I would save money on clothes, since it kept me fitting in my old school uniform.  The scotch burned down my throat and settled warmly in my stomach.  The fog behind my eyes lifted a little.  Helped the headache, too.

I turned my attention back to the file in front of me.  A job.  Not a big job, but enough to pay the rent on my shithole apartment for another week or two.  I shuffled through the pages.  Pretty standard cheater.  Amazing how many women ran around on their husbands these days.  But with the recession hitting hard in the years after the war, maybe not that amazing.  A girl could do worse than to shack up on the side with one of the countless profiteers who had made a little money playing the odds in the surprisingly lucrative battle between good and evil.  I studied the top sheet of the dossier and blinked hard.  Malloy?  Violet Malloy running around on Dominick?  Sure enough, it was. I wondered why I didn’t remember seeing that greasy little ferret come through my office door.  A glance at the empty glass next to me and I shook my head.   Makes the headaches go away.  The nightmares, too.  Problem with it is that it makes everything else go away in the bargain.

Malloy, Violet.  Suspected of adultery with H. Mancini, proprietor of the Mancini Grotto.

Mancini, huh?  That was even more surprising.  With a name like Harrison . . . oh well.  I wasn’t paid enough to pass judgment.

I looked down at my clothes and sighed.  I certainly wasn’t paid enough to go traipsing around the Mancini Grotto.  I tapped my fingers on the tabletop.

I stood up and poked around the wreckage of the apartment looking for something to make myself look halfway decent.  At least the kind of decent I needed to be if I was going to make an appearance at Mancini’s.  Unfortunately, that was the one kind of decency I didn’t seem capable of producing.  Screw ‘em.  They’d have to take me as I came.

I ducked out into the street, avoiding the watchful eye of the landlady who would most certainly start shrieking at me about rent and garbage and anything else that came into her head.  Part harpy, I was dead certain.  The streets were slick with a rain that had only just stopped.  The lightning still came intermittently, lending ominous shadows to the tall stone buildings clustered around the narrow, winding street.  A streetlamp guttered and went out.

“Hello young squire,” the toothless hag on the corner croaked.  She’d been croaking at me for months.  “Fancy a tumble?”

“Not tonight, Matilda,” I replied.  “Maybe next week.”

She cackled loudly and vanished down the alley.

I wove through back alleys and side streets, my long history of hiding making a habit of avoiding populated areas.  Helped with the job, too.  I had gotten very sneaky over the past few years.

A few twists and turns and I arrived at the side door of Mancini’s place, a dark recess in the stone wall.  A flickering neon light was all that announced it.  I knew from experience that this particular appearance was deceiving; Mancini had somehow managed to profit insanely in recent years.  I hadn’t figured out how, but I had put it on a back burner in my head.  Nothing serious, just something to wonder over on the colder nights when I couldn’t manage to scrounge a decent blanket.  I ducked in the door and was nearly thrown back out into the street by an arm thick as a lead pipe and twice as heavy.

“No riff-raff.  Get out,” grunted a deep male voice.  I rubbed my chest where the arm had made what felt like an inch-deep dent.

“All right there, Lurch,” I muttered.  “No need to be rude.”  I looked up at the troll watching the door.  “Hoyt?” I cried.  Well, it made sense.  He was big enough and dumb enough.  His size hadn’t helped a few years ago when we had met under even less friendly circumstances.  What else could he have gotten after the disastrous raid on the municipal docks?  Certainly not a job in the mayor’s office, and everywhere else he’d be too stupid to make it through an interview.

Hoyt stared at me.  I could hear the tiny gears whirling in his apelike head.  Finally a dull light flickered in his muddy eyes.  “Sharman?” he grunted.

“The very same,” I replied.  “I’ve got an appointment with Harrison.”

“He didn’t say anything about it to me,” Hoyt said suspiciously.

“I don’t recall a man like Harrison saying much of anything to much of anyone,” I replied.  “Unless you’ve got a thousand bucks hiding under that suit.”

“That’s just my stomach, Sharman,” Hoyt said as though I was monumentally stupid.

“Well gosh, Hoyt,” I said, turning on the sarcasm.  “You could’ve fooled me.  Let me in, all right?  I don’t plan on staying long.”

“I better check with the boss.”  Hoyt looked doubtful.

I hopped from foot to foot.  Great.  My first job in a month and I was gonna lose it because of this stupid oaf.  “Hey, well, if you leave, then I’m pretty sure that crone will find some way to get in and disturb your paying customers,” I said, pointing at Matilda who had mercifully appeared just down the block.  Hoyt eyed her carefully, then looked at me.  Doing the sartorial math.

“All right,” he grumbled.  “But don’t make any trouble.  I don’t want to have to throw you out.”  I could see from the way he clenched his fists he’d like nothing better.  But I’d be damned if I’d give him the satisfaction.

“I promise,” I said as sweetly as I could.  “So how’s Boyle?”  It might have been the flinch, or maybe the way he punched the wall, but I sensed I’d hit a nerve.  I suddenly remembered Boyle’s prone body lying in the gutter, blood pouring from the bullet hole just over his left ear.  “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely.  “I forget a lot of things from those days.”

“Yeah,” Hoyt whispered.  Would’ve whispered if he wasn’t the size of an ogre.  “Me too.”  He stepped aside and I crossed the threshold.  Turned back.

“Really,” I said again.  “I’m sorry.”

“Get in before I change my mind,” he barked gruffly.  I didn’t need another invitation.  I saluted sloppily and ducked into the club.

Mancini’s Grotto was styled after god-knows-what, but it was a paragon of bad taste and fast money.  Torches flickered in their cast-iron braces.  Gaudy red velvet curtains cut ostentatious swaths down the walls.  A godawful band was screeching from a small stage near the back.  Dozens of people milled around, sat at tables, ducked into corners.  Not one of them looked up when I entered.  Pimps, whores, and thieves, all of them.  All with that damned moneyed sense of superiority.  I must not smell enough like laundered cash.  I walked up to the bar and tapped a sullen waitress on the shoulder.

“What?” she snarled, clearly making a snap judgment her kind were so good at.

“Hey, I don’t need the attitude.  I wore my best suit,” I said.  She sneered at me.  “It’s the new thing,” I said.  “Hobo chic.  All the kids are doing it.”  She rolled her eyes.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk to the big man.”

She raised her eyebrow.  “I’m so sure,” she said dryly.

“Look honey, don’t get upset.  I’m sure I can make time for you tomorrow.  Come around my place, I’ll show you things they never taught in school.  But right now I’ve got to talk to Mancini.  Tell him it’s Jimmy Sharman.  He’ll see me.”

I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.  First of all, I wouldn’t get caught dead with one of Mancini’s girls.  And considering just how easy it was for me to get caught dead in my line of work, that was saying a lot.  Second, it didn’t seem remotely likely that Harrison Mancini would see me.  But all I could do was hope.

The waitress sighed set down her empty tray next to a bottle of something thick.  Gold flakes swirled around the bottom.  I wondered what it was.  And how it would taste on ice.

“Don’t even think about it,” the waitress said archly.  “Fifteen bucks a glass.”

“In that case I’ll just have one,” I shot back.  Not my best line, but I was in a hurry.  Well, I wasn’t in a hurry, but I didn’t like the look I was getting from the greasy old bastard at the end of the bar.  He looked vaguely familiar in a creeping sort of way that I didn’t like at all.

The waitress sauntered into the back room.  I perched on an empty stool and waited.  The greasy bastard slid over a stool, sitting next to me.  I tried not to look at him.

“Jimmy Sharman?” he hissed, his voice metallic like it hadn’t been used in a long time.  I blinked.  Looked at him again.

No luck.  Couldn’t place him.  Not that I minded.  The fewer slimy criminals occupying space in my head, the better.

“Vaisey,” he said thinly.  “Alvin Vaisey.”

The name was vaguely familiar.  I still couldn’t get a firm grasp on him.  Not that I wanted to anyway.  In any sense.

“St. Mary’s,” he said, obviously trying to jog my memory.  “We were both at St. Mary’s.”

“That’s nice,” I said as noncommittally as I could.  The years had not been kind to him.  He looked about as old as dirt.

“I remember you,” Vaisey continued.  He was obviously drunk.  His hand was creeping along the bar.
“I don’t remember you, Vaisey,” I said, “and you’d better be careful about fraternizing the enemy.”  The hand stopped.  Where was the goddamned waitress?

Finally she emerged from the back room and stood at the doorway, looking bored and impatient.  I took this as my cue to head over.  “Catch you later,” I called to Vaisey who hadn’t anticipated my departure and fell to the ground.  He mumbled something thickly, his mouth smashed against the leg of a barstool.

As I made my way through the throng of people I glanced around.  It was my job, after all.  No sign of Violet Malloy.  Just as I made it to the door of Mancini’s office I thought I caught a glimpse of a very familiar face.  But it couldn’t be.  No way.  Not in a million years.  I chalked it up to not having had a drink in almost an hour and followed the waitress into the inner sanctum.

“Jimmy Sharman,” Mancini hissed silkily.  The years had only made him sharper, more attractive if that’s the sort of thing a person is interested in.  I supposed Violet Malloy would be interested, from what I remembered of her she always seemed to think the sharper the cheekbone, the better the lay.  Not that I would know.  No matter what I tried my own cheeks had remained stubbornly round.

“Harrison,” I said curtly.

“To what do I owe the honor?”  He remained seated at his massive desk.  It was intricately carved with long snakes winding up and down the heavy dark legs.  It gave me the shakes just looking at it.  Then again, that’s probably what it was supposed to do.  The walls were covered in what looked like silk, the color changing depending on the angle.  A large crystal ball stood on another heavily carved stand near the fireplace.  I wondered where he hid his stash.  Probably in the ball.

“Fortune telling?  Harrison, I had no idea.”  I had an idea, of course, but again I don’t get paid to judge.

“What do you want, Sharman?”  His voice was hard.

“I’m just checking in on all my old friends,” I said as steadily as I could.  A drink wouldn’t have been at all unwelcome at the moment.  “Seeing how everyone’s making out these days.”

“Obviously some of us are doing better than others,” he sneered.  “And that’s all you came for?  Just a friendly chat?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Wondering if you keep in touch with any of the old gang.  I see you’ve got Hoyt working the door.”

“We’ll have to see how long that lasts, if he can’t figure out who to let in and who to keep out.”

“Cut the guy a break,” I said.  I couldn’t believe I was defending a criminal, even a dumb one.  “He only let me in because I said some very insensitive things.  That’s what you people like to hear, isn’t it?”  I swallowed hard.  I could see Mancini’s fingers tensing against the leather blotter.  “So Hoyt, that’s nice.  I was talking to someone about Violet St. Clair—Malloy now, I guess.  Just wondering what she’d been up to.”

“Really,” Mancini said coolly.  “And what prompted you to think of me in all this reminiscent goodwill?”

“Oh, nothing.  Except I heard you keep in touch with her.  Dominick can’t like that too much.”

The sound of fingernails scraping on leather isn’t a pleasant one.  Neither is the sound of a gun thwacking against a hand-carved mahogany desk.

“Guess you don’t see too much of each other, then,” I said hastily.  Jackpot.

“I see the years haven’t stripped you of all your fabled intellect,” Mancini growled.

“Not quite,” I said.  “Anyway, it’s been great seeing you, Harrison, we’ll really have to do it again soon.”  His glare was palpable.  “Kidding,” I said with a forced little laugh.  These goons and their lack of humor.  Bad enough most of them hadn’t gotten the hang of showering.  “I’ll just see myself out then.”

The bored-looking waitress made a big show of stepping aside.  I made a big show of slapping her ass on the way out and not risking looking behind me, though I swear I heard Mancini snicker.

I slipped out—literally, sliding past a group of especially slimy men blocking the entrance.  As I headed for the door I glanced behind me one more time.  For luck, I always said.  What I really meant was to make sure nobody was pointing a gun in my direction.  These people weren’t above shooting anybody while their back was turned, everybody knew that.  Just before I was hustled out the door by a disgruntled-looking Hoyt I caught a glimpse of that face.  That face that was burned into my brain.

No way.

Chapter 2

I paced the apartment incessantly for the next two hours.  Equaling about three thousand up-and-down trips.  It wasn’t spacious.  Cozy, maybe, if you were blind and had no sense of smell, taste, or touch.  And if you were deaf.

So I had the dirt on Violet Malloy and Harrison Mancini.  At least enough to get some kind of stipend.  A nasty look and a drawn gun weren’t enough to close the case, but at least Malloy ought to cough up a few clams to keep things going. I wondered briefly why I hadn’t gotten my up-front as usual, but chalked it up to scotch.

Scotch.  Always a good idea.  I poured myself another glass and stood by the window.  The storm had passed and miracle of miracles, a breath of cool, fresh air was making itself welcome in the flat.  If only my head were that clear.  I tried to focus on the few stars I could make out through the smog and city lights, but I couldn’t stop seeing that face.  Her face.  What was she doing there?  How could she?

I realized the ice cubes were clinking.  There wasn’t any more thunder.  It must be me.  I looked down and sure enough my hand was shaking to beat the band.  I drained the glass but all it did was make the shaking worse.  It made her face clearer.  As if I needed any help with that.  I set the glass down on the table maybe a little harder than was necessary if the sudden profusion of ice cubes littering the papers was any indication.

It hadn’t been long since I’d seen her but a day away from that face was like an eternity.

But what had she been doing at Mancini’s, of all places?  She’d never gone in for the rough trade.  Sure the years had been hard, they’d been hard on all of us.  But for her to end up somewhere like that, it wasn’t right.

I crossed the four steps to the liquor cabinet and knelt down, poking around for a fresh bottle.  Supplies were running low.  I’d have to talk to Malloy tomorrow.  Hopefully he’d left his contact information in the dossier, otherwise I had no idea how to get ahold of him.  I leaned in, reaching for a bottle I saw lurking near the back.  My head was fully inside the cabinet, that’s why I didn’t see the door swing open.

“I always liked you from this angle.”

It was her.

I jerked up, banging my head hard on the cabinet.  “Jesus!”

“Nice hello,” Virginia said.

I stood up, rubbing the rapidly-swelling spot on the back of my head.

She stood in the doorway, the thin light from the hall spilling around her body.  I remembered it well.  The body, not the hallway.  The hallway I couldn’t care less about.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?” she asked.  I had been waiting years to hear that.  From her.  But I didn’t seem to be able to make my mouth move.  I waved the scotch bottle I had unconsciously grabbed in a vague sort of semicircle.  She smiled—I guessed, since it was still dark—and stepped into the room.

I’ve always been good at first impressions.  It’s essential for this business.  But my first impressions have generally been of lowlifes, thugs, swindlers, and whores.  As far as I could tell, Virginia wasn’t any of those things.  Though that could’ve just been the power of my conviction about her.  At any rate, I couldn’t get a clear view of her.  It wasn’t the thick air, though the air certainly seemed to have gotten thicker in the few seconds she stood in it.  It wasn’t the dimness, since so many working nights had accustomed my eyes to the dark.  It wasn’t the liquor, which generally made things clearer.  It was the gauzy sort of curtain that had always wrapped around her, at least in my eyes.  She wasn’t the kind of girl a gauzy curtain generally wrapped around, though.  It must’ve been love.  It must be love, or else I had a concussion.

“I see business is booming,” she said.  “Mind if I sit?”  I shook my head, dazed.  She stepped gracefully over a stack of sodden issues of the Times and perched on the edge of my desk.  The streetlamp had relighted itself and I managed to shake off a little of my haze to get a proper look at her.  The stripes of watery yellowish light did nothing for her, but in my experience nothing needed to be done.  Her face was still porcelain-smooth, a smattering of freckles across her thin nose, her bright eyes luminous in the half-light.  She grinned, her lips parting.  I remembered that for sure.

“Hi,” I said finally.  Not one of my better lines.

“Hi,” she replied playfully.

I suddenly had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.  I couldn’t tell if it was lust or danger or both.  Probably both.

“So . . .”  I was on a roll.  I realized I was still holding the bottle and used the excuse of my glass to cross to the desk.  The nearer I got to her the shakier my step became.  She smelled delicious, like expensive perfume and cheap wine.  Her lips were ruby red.  Her hair was too.  I managed to uncap the bottle without making a complete ass of myself and poured a generous measure into the tumbler.  Virginia raised her eyebrow and took the glass before I could get my hands on it.  She tossed half of it back in a single swallow.  It was definitely love.

“I saw you tonight,” she said.  “At Mancini’s.  I knew it was you right away.”

“Did you?” I said, trying to regain my footing.  I glanced around for another glass before giving up and taking a long pull from the bottle.  The scotch steadied me a little.  “I thought I saw you but I didn’t believe it.”

“Have I changed that much?” she asked teasingly.

Had she changed?  It had been nearly two years since I’d seen her, and she’d grown into herself admirably.  She was still lean and muscular but there was a softness.  The sensual kind.  The dangerous kind.

“Your hair’s different,” I said.  Another zinger.

“Is it?”  She flipped it behind her gracefully.  I was hit with a waft of her perfume and it nearly knocked me over.  “I suppose.  What were you doing at the club?”
“What were you doing there?” I replied.  “I know what I was doing there, and it involved getting in and getting out as quickly as possible.  But you looked like you were there for the company.”

“Now Jimmy,” she pouted slightly.  “Don’t say things like that.  It’s not like I was enjoying myself.”

“So what were you doing there?”  I felt myself getting angry.  I was starting to remember everything.  Starting to remember why I hadn’t seen her in two years.  Why I had gotten involved in this business in the first place.  Why I was living in a roach-infested shithole, and most of the whys could be answered by the face of the girl in front of me.

“I was talking to someone,” she said evasively.

“Talking to someone in a cocktail dress?” I said.  “Nice cut, by the way.”  It was.  It looked painted on.

“Thanks,” Virginia said tensely.  “I can leave if you want.”

“No,” I said quickly.  Maybe too quickly.  This could be very bad.  Virginia Waverly was bad news.  So I told myself.  Firmly.

“It’s why I came to see you,” she said finally.

“Not just for the pleasure of my company?”

She sighed and finished her drink.  She always could hold her liquor.

“I need some help.”

My resolve crumbled.  I looked at her again and I thought I could make out a faint worry line creasing her smooth forehead.  Against my better judgment I saw myself reaching out and brushing away that line.  Fortunately my hand was clamped firmly around the neck of the bottle.

“What kind of help?”

“It’s about Louis,” she said softly.  My grip tightened.  Of course.  It was always about Louis.

“What about him?” I said, trying to control my voice.  If there was anything I didn’t need it was to get mixed up with Louis Waverly again.  Sure it had been glamorous for a while, but it had cost me a lot more than it had gotten me when you added up the bodies.

“He’s missing.”

“You sure he’s not just sleeping it off somewhere?” I asked nastily.  Virginia looked away.  I felt bad.  This was the second time I’d felt bad in one night, and I didn’t like it.

“He’s been gone for two weeks.”  She flipped a cigarette out of the pack on my desk.  I didn’t know she smoked.  “I don’t usually,” she said.  I checked myself.  It’s never good for a shamus to show surprise, but I’d never been able to hide anything from her.  “Only when I’m under pressure.”  She fit the cigarette between her lips and looked at me half-expectantly.  I fumbled for a match and lit the end, making sure I didn’t scatter sparks all over her little black dress.

“Under pressure?”

She took a deep drag and let the smoke drift out of her mouth.  I know, it’ll kill you, but something about the way she handled that exhale made me certain the sinking feeling in my stomach was definitely lust.

“I got a note,” she said.  She reached inside her dress and withdrew a sheet of paper from between her breasts.

“Nice pocket,” I managed to choke out.

“I don’t have a purse that goes with this outfit,” she said, a smile playing at her lips.  She handed me the paper.  Still warm.  Jesus.

I unfolded the note and glanced at it.  Just what I had been dreading.  Ransom.  Like he was the teenage daughter of a government official.  Of course it wouldn’t be Louis Waverly without some sort of price on his head.

“Well, there’s some good news,” I said after a minute.  Virginia looked skeptical.  “They don’t say they’ll kill him.  That’s good.”

“Is it?” she said.  Something in her tone struck me as odd.  She had meant it as a question, but it rang slightly false.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep the sudden suspicion out of my own voice.  “All it says is ten thousand dollars and the briefcase he keeps behind the portrait of FDR.  What’s in the briefcase, Virginia?”

She blinked and looked slightly away.  “I don’t know,” she said.

“Virginia,” I said calmly, “I can’t lie to you.  You know that.  But you also know,” I fished my own cigarette out, “that you can’t lie to me.”

Her eyes filled with tears.  Any trace of hardass I might have managed to cultivate vanished.  I was always a sucker for a dame with tears in her eyes.  Especially this one.

“I really don’t know,” she said quietly.  “All I know is it’s very valuable.”

“So give it to whoever wants it, and get your husband back.  It’s not like you don’t have the money, either.”

“I can’t,” she said, the tears gathering in earnest.  I was quickly getting in a bad way.  I ought to tell her to get out, her and her gorgeous eyes and ruby lips and perfect body.  I ought to tell her to go to hell for what she’s done to me.  But those gorgeous eyes and ruby lips and perfect body were much more powerful magic than I was able to defend myself from.  “I can’t, Jimmy.  Louis told me I wasn’t ever to give it to anybody, that’s the only thing he ever said about it.”

“What could possibly be so important?  More important than his life?”

“You said they wouldn’t kill him!” she cried, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I said they don’t say they’ll kill him.  But what do I know?”

“Oh Jimmy,” Virginia moaned.  “Please help me.”  She threw herself across the desk and landed in my arms.  It wasn’t the alcohol that made me stumble at that moment, I knew that for sure.

“Virginia,” I mumbled, trying to get my bearings.  It was damned difficult, what with an armful of trembling, warm, delicious-smelling her.

“Please,” she whispered.

“I don’t know what you want me to do about this,” I said weakly.

“I want you to help me find him.  To get him back.”  She shifted her position so she wasn’t spread quite so awkwardly across the desk.  Her arms held tight around my neck.  Her face pressed against my chest, her tears hot on my skin.

“What were you doing at Mancini’s?” I asked.  It was a low trick to take advantage of her emotional state, but I figured it’d be pretty damned difficult getting it out of her later.

“I was talking to some friends of Malloy’s,” she sniffled.  “They’re the ones who delivered the note.”

Malloy?

“What were you talking about?”  My brain was moving a thousand miles a second.  It felt like being in school, working over calculus.

“They told me Louis was still alive.  That he’s okay, for now.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“Is it?”  The same off note.  I couldn’t place it and it was making me crazy.  Something about her conviction.  It was the wrong kind.  It wasn’t the desperate clinging-at-straws kind when the love of your life is in mortal peril.  Even if the love of your life is a stupid bastard who has an undeniable knack for getting himself and everyone around him into trouble.  She said it like it was its own death sentence.

“It’s good,” I said again.  She clung to me even more tightly.  I was getting dizzy.

“Oh Jimmy,” she whispered.  Bad news.  Definitely bad news.  If I was going to do this, and of course I was, for her, I had a feeling I would have to brush up on my fighting technique.

Suddenly it hit me.  Like a ton of bricks.

“Virginia, you don’t even love him.”

“How do you know?” she sniffled.

“Just a guess,” I said, and it was, but I hoped it’d pan out, “but you still love me.”  And I kissed her.

I was in a lot of trouble.

Chapter 3

I couldn’t believe it.  Of course, I don’t believe much after years of lies and obfuscation, but this was one thing I really couldn’t believe.  Namely the fact that Virginia Waverly, one-time love of my life, was laying next to me on the sagging couch of my dreams.  And that she was naked under my suit jacket.

I watched her chest rise and fall as she breathed evenly.  I’m not a saint—it was quite a chest.  And she was quite a girl.  The intervening years had obviously taught her a few tricks, and I was pretty confident she hadn’t learned any of them from her husband.

The thought of Louis made me shudder involuntarily.  He had been my best friend.  We had been through thick and thin—mostly thick.  But once he had married Virginia it had all fallen apart.  It’s not like I hadn’t seen it coming.  Even in those days I had a knack for prognostication.

Virginia’s eyes blinked open and she smiled.  “Hey there,” she murmured and stretched in a way that was probably illegal.

“Hey,” I said.  Post-coital small talk had never been my strong suit.

She yawned and sat up, rubbing her eyes.  I steeled myself for her reaction when the cold light of day illuminated my living conditions.  “What a dump,” she said.

“Yeah, but it’s my dump,” I replied.  “At least for now.”

“What happened to you?”  Virginia asked.  I looked at her, trying to read her meaning.  She wasn’t being unkind, it was just a way she had.

“Things got hard,” I said simply.  “I made some enemies.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Do you?”

She nodded and shook out her hair.  Even the light that filtered into my flat was mangy, but somehow it made her more beautiful.

“I’m starved,” she announced and stood up, my jacket sliding off her body.  I took a moment to drink it in.  Not a lot of beauty around here.  The girls I’d managed to finagle might look good through a pair of scotch-colored glasses, but when the hangover set in they were always as cheap as their price.

She strolled through the flat, picking up her things.  I was struck by a wave of nostalgia, remembering all those early-morning scrambles for clothes before anyone came home.  I shook it off.  Nostalgia was dangerous.  And even though I loved her, had always loved her, too much water had passed under the bridge for me to be able to indulge in this little ritual worry-free.  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

“Breakfast,” I replied, pulling on my own shirt.  “And then I’ve got a few things to do, as I’m sure you do.”

“Kicking me out already?” she said, the hint of a pout making her lips even more luscious.  That mouth would be the death of me.

“Not exactly.  I just think it might look a little odd, you know?”

She shrugged.  “I suppose.  Though you certainly do know how to make a girl feel unwanted.”

“Are you kidding me?” I cried.  “I want you like the key to the city.”

She grinned.  “That’s better.  Get dressed.  I’m buying.”

We ducked out of the building, Virginia not even asking why we took the back stairs.  That’s my girl, all right.  Never questions subterfuge.

I led her to a dirty little café around the block.  The waitress grunted when I walked in and I sat down at my usual booth.  “Eggs,” I said.  “And sausages.  Cup of Joe’s special blend.”  Code word for “plus whiskey.”  Virginia raised her eyebrow.  That girl could see right through me.

“A little early, don’t you think?”

“Hey, I don’t question your entertainments.  Don’t question my breakfast.”

She frowned.  “I told you why I was at Mancini’s.”

I shook my head.  “You told me part of why you were at Mancini’s.  Meeting some cohorts of Malloy’s.  But—and this is no comment on the dress—you looked awfully comfortable.”

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.  The waitress plopped a cup in front of me and I took a deep swallow.  The booze helped immediately.  “Get her one too,” I said.  The waitress grunted again and shuffled off behind the counter.

“I’ve been there a couple of times before, all right?  Nothing serious.”

“I didn’t know you traveled in such exclusive circles.”  It wasn’t the best way to start my day, but I figured my luck from last night had overstayed its welcome anyway.  I didn’t want to upset her, but the years had worn away my sensitivity.  Sure I loved her, who wouldn’t?  But there was still a job attached, and if I was going to do it I had to create a little distance.

“I used to hang around with Violet a little,” she admitted finally.

“Oh really?  Just a couple of girls out on the town?”

“She was my friend!  She was my only friend for a while,” Virginia said defensively.  “You know what Louis was into.  It’s not like I had a lot of choice,” she added, shooting daggers at me with her eyes.

“If you’re implying it’s my fault–”

“Of course it’s your fault!” she hissed.  “You left me!  You left me all by myself with nobody to talk to!”

I sighed and took another swallow of my coffee.  “I’m sorry, all right?  But once Louis started getting mixed up in all that dirty business I had to back out.  I didn’t want to be the one who brought him down.  I know we had our differences, but there was too much history for it to be me.  And you . . .”  I had to stop.  Couldn’t get misty-eyed.  It doesn’t look good for a gumshoe to get all gooey.  Not professional.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.  Damn.  Tears again.

“Yeah.  I know.”  It might not have been true, but I had to change the subject.  “So,” I said a little louder than was necessary.  “Tell me everything, from the beginning.   Louis’s been missing two weeks.  When did he disappear?  Where from?  What about the note?”

Virginia swallowed hard, and looked inordinately grateful when the waitress brought her cup.  “Well,” she began.  “He went out to meet with some of his business partners.  And I don’t know who they are, so don’t ask.  He doesn’t tell me anything.  All I know is it has something to do with the mayor’s office.  When he left all he took was his gun.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?  He could defend himself.”  Louis might not have been the shiniest penny in the bag but he always seemed pretty capable of fighting back.  It was one of the few things I was happy to say I’d picked up from him.

“I guess,” Virginia said doubtfully.  “He didn’t come home that night but I . . . wasn’t very worried,” she finished quietly.

“Habit of staying out late?”

She nodded.

“Women on the side?”

She squirmed uncomfortably.   “It wasn’t serious,” she said.  “At least that’s what he told me.”

“And you believed him?” I cried.

“It’s not like my marriage was serious, Jimmy,” she admonished.  “What did you think I was getting up to with Violet?  Did you think we let men buy us drinks for a nice smile?”

That one hit me like a ton of bricks.  Let Louis gallivant around with all the ladies he chose, but hearing that Virginia, my Virginia, had been two-timing him with the kind of slime that coagulated at Mancini’s made the whiskey-infused coffee churn uncomfortably in my stomach.  Unfortunately it was right at that moment the waitress decided to slap the plate with my greasy eggs and gelatinous sausage right in front of me.  I thought I was going to be sick.  On the other hand, she’d just solved my case.

The day was quickly clouding over.

“So,” I said with difficulty, “what else?”

“I’ve upset you,” Virginia said, sounding dismayed.  Of course she had, and she knew it.   It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up a little.  Time had driven away almost all of my sentimentality.  I wouldn’t put a doublecross past her.  She was a Waverly.

“So he didn’t come home that night,” I said firmly.

“No.”

“And how long did it take before you decided to get worried?”  I had to play it cold as ice.  I was on shaky ground as it was.

“Until I got the note,” Virginia said, a little abashed.

“And that was  . . .”

“Five days later.”

“Five days, huh.”

“Yes,” she snapped.  I had forgotten that she could be a real firecracker when she wanted.

“All right.  Louis disappears.  Five days later you get a note demanding ten thousand dollars and this mysterious briefcase.  And you have no idea what’s in the briefcase.”

“No idea.  He never said anything except I wasn’t ever to give it to anyone.”

“That’s a little funny,” I said.  At last the booze was starting to help my reasoning along.

“Funny?”

“Not, ‘make sure this stays safe’ or ‘don’t touch it.’  Just ‘don’t give it to anyone.’  Like he knew someone would want it.”

“If you take the trouble to have a safe installed in your house I’m guessing it’s not much of a stretch to think someone would want it.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said.  “But still.  How did you come to hear from Malloy’s goons?”

She took a drink of her coffee and grimaced a little.  I shrugged.  “They’re the ones who brought the note, remember?  Then they showed back up again last week.  Said someone wanted to meet with me and that I wasn’t to take any action on the demand.”

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” I said.  This whole thing was fucking ridiculous.  I suddenly had a hell of a headache.  “First they demand the ransom and then tell you they don’t want it.”

“You think it makes sense to me?  I’m just trying to get through this with a clean nose.”

Good girl.  “So why Malloy?  Louis wasn’t dealing with him . . . professionally, was he?”

“No, thank you, Louis had nothing to do with him.  As far as I know.  Anyway, Malloy’s damaged goods, nobody in the city will touch him.  Not after all the shipping business came out.”

It was true.  In the grand tradition of hypocrisy the world over, dozens of the people directly implicated in the big scandal had been shunned, if not imprisoned, while the ones behind the scenes, even the ones everyone knew about like Mancini, managed to come out of it smelling like a rose.  Malloy had been living on what little of his family’s money remained, which wasn’t much.  No wonder Violet was running around.  But I couldn’t think about that.

“Near as I can tell, Malloy just wants the money.  And the briefcase.  Which makes me think it’s got something in it, documents or something, that will help him get a little power back.”

The girl was smart.  Always had been.  Maybe not book smart like I was, but what she knew of the streets could have filled the city library five times over.

“So what did his little henchmen tell you last night?”

“First of all, they weren’t little,” she said.  “And they told me Louis was still alive, that he was safe, and as long as I played along he’d stay that way.”

“What did they want you to do?”

“They want me to go to a party,” she said.

“A party?”  I was gonna need a lot more liquor to make it through this day.

“At Malloy’s.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow night.  I’m supposed to bring the money and the briefcase.  I’m guessing the people I’m supposed to give it to will be there.”

“Good guess.”

“Look, Jimmy, we’re not all geniuses like you.”

“Most days I doubt if I’m one.”  It was true.  Sometimes I’d try to do a little math in my head but there were days when I couldn’t even figure out the hypotenuse of a triangle.  But it was a small price to pay to escape from the horrors of the past few years.  At least that’s what I told myself.

“Anyway,” she said.  “Do you think I should go?”

“Do you want Louis back?”

There was a long pause.  “I dunno.  He’s an awful bastard.”

God, I loved her.

“Thing is,” she said, “I’m afraid.  I’m afraid of what they’ll do to me if I don’t follow through.”

“Did they threaten you?”  I made a mental note to practice my old boxing skills.  Sure she might be a dirty double-crosser, but damn it, if anybody tried to hurt her I’d have to do something about it.  Just the kind of person I was.  Too bad honor doesn’t come with a paycheck.

“Not exactly.  But I get the feeling Malloy sent his giants for a reason.  Jimmy,” she said tentatively, and tentatively on her was like a corsage on a camel—something you noticed.

“Yeah?”

“Would you—would you come with me to the party?  I mean, you can say no.”

Like I could say no to her.  But it would be a tight spot getting through Malloy’s security unnoticed.  I supposed I could make some excuse about working on his case, though I knew how Malloy felt about people getting on his case about anything.

“With my million-dollar wardrobe?  I’ll just saunter right in,” I said.  Hey, I had to make it look like I was tough.  Pretty tall order when you’re sitting across from the girl I was.  Even if she had broken my heart a thousand ways.

“Of course we’ll get you some new things,” she said hastily.  “I didn’t mean–”

“I know you didn’t mean anything.  Don’t worry about it.”

Speaking of picking up the check, at that moment the waitress lumbered over and dropped the bill on the tabletop.  Virginia picked it up and fiddled with it.  She reached into her dress again and fished out a credit card.  Amazing the things she kept in there, and why hadn’t I seen her put it back?

“Well,” I said.

“Well.”

“I really do have some things to do today.”  Like rack my brain for another possible playmate for Violet.

“Yeah.  So I guess we should meet tomorrow before the party?  To get you some decent clothes?”

“Sounds good.  Where?”

“Why don’t you come to the house?”  I inhaled deeply, the air whistling between my teeth.  I didn’t know if I could do it.  I was pretty tough, but I didn’t know if I was that tough.

“Or we could just meet here?  Two o’clock?”  Bless her.

“Two o’clock.  Check.”

We went up to the counter and paid.  Headed outside.  I was about to turn away to go back to my apartment when she caught my arm.

“Jimmy,” she said.  I turned back, but before I could speak she pulled me close and kissed me.  One of those whiz-bang kisses that’ll make you forget your own name.  She was quite a dame.  “Don’t be late,” she whispered.  I nodded dumbly and stared after her as she sauntered down the street.  Hypnotized by her swinging hips.

After she’d disappeared around a corner I managed to make my legs start working again.  I was nearly to my apartment when I noticed two bulky goons loitering in front of the door.  I can’t say how I knew they were goons.  Could’ve been intuition.  Could’ve been the guns.  Could’ve been the way one of them cold-clocked me and laid me out on the pavement.

Could’ve been that.

Chapter 4

I came to who knows how long after.  I blinked slowly, mentally checking over my parts.  As far as I could tell, they were all still there.  Still there, but not moving very well.  A second of panic, then I realized I was being held in place.   Tied up.  A good one.  Whoever had me knew what they were doing.

“Good morning, Mr. Sharman.”  A low voice from across the room.

“I see the maid hasn’t been in,”  I said.  I might not be able to see much but it smelled like an open sewer.

“Clever.”  The voice sounded vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t immediately place it.  “Though I’m afraid your legendary cleverness won’t be of much use to you.”  I blinked a few more times, trying to adjust to the dim light.  It didn’t take long.  One of the benefits of nocturnal living.

The room was empty except for a low-hanging shaded lamp.  Hanging right over me.  I was seated in a straight-backed chair in the middle of the place.  Interrogation-style.  The voice was in front of me, must’ve been coming from the dark shape lurking in the corner.  No windows.  Could’ve been morning, for all I knew.  Most likely it was one of those pseudo-witty things the bad guys are always saying.

“What’s this about?” I said, hard as I could.  Might as well get off to a good start.

“No need to be defensive, Mr. Sharman.  This is just a friendly chat.”

“Oh yeah?  That explains the Chinese rope trick.  And the comfortable décor.”

“I’m sorry if the accommodations are less than your usual standards.  Though from what I’ve seen you should feel right at home.”

“What are you talking about?”  This guy had been in my apartment.  None of this was sounding good.  Especially since it could be about anything.

“You have something of mine.”  The shape moved around the room, just out of the light.  The voice was making me crazy.  I ran down the list of people who might want to knock me out and tie me up.  I stopped when I got to the G’s.  It would take more time than I figured I had to work my way through the entire alphabet.

“Oh yeah?  What’s that, your back issues of the Times?  Or maybe you’re after four crates of empty bottles.”  Being flip was never a good idea when you’re trapped in a windowless room by an unseen bad guy. I was reminded of this by a sharp jolt of pain.  “Easy there, pal,” I groaned.  “You’re gonna hurt somebody.”

“I was hoping not,” the voice said, just behind me.  I thought about trying to turn, trying to dredge up some of my old sleight of hand skills to untie the knots, but the blunt pressure of a gun against the back of my head made me think again.  “But that depends entirely on you, Mr. Sharman.”

“Enough of this “mister” business.  I haven’t been a “mister” since St. Mary’s.”

“Fair enough.”

“So what’s this about?  You say I’ve got something of yours.  I hate to break it to you, but you’ve obviously been at my place.  I don’t even have something of mine.”

A piece of parchment materialized in front of me.  Malloy’s dossier.

“Malloy?” I cried.  “What the fuck?”

“Not Malloy,” the voice replied.  Didn’t sound like him anyway.

“So who, then?  Come on, buddy, I’ve got plans later.”

“Oh, I know.”  I hated it when the villain tried to outsmart me.

“So you think you could give me a hand?  It’s great that we get to play Baby’s First Interrogation, but I can save you the trouble and just let you know all I’ve got on Violet Malloy is a little hearsay and a little gossip.”

“I’m not in the least interested in Violet Malloy,” the voice hissed.

“So . . . Dominick, then?  Sure he’s a slimy fuck but I suppose he’s not without his charms.”  The pain shot through me again.  “All right, all right.  Please kind sir, do enlighten me.  I promise to be a very good boy and listen quiet as a church mouse.”

“I don’t recall that being your style, Sharman.”

So I did know him.  Whoever he was.  The voice.  I racked my brain, trying to identify it.  Problem was it only sounded half-familiar.  Like he was talking through a thick scarf to fool me.  If that was the case I was sunk.  I’d have to try wit and charm.  Unfortunately my stores of both had been pretty much exhausted over the years.

“So what is my style, then?  I’d hope it’s a little more subtle than yours.”

“It’s all a matter of degrees, Sharman.  A matter of experience.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re someone with a great deal more . . . experience than you let on.  Very adept at hiding.  At sneaking around.  At not getting caught.”

“That explains my present situation, then, doesn’t it?”  My captor whacked me hard upside the head with the butt of his gun.  What I wouldn’t give to rub that spot.  Or to use a little rough stuff of my own.

“You’re not the only one good at hiding.  At sneaking around.  At taking things without getting caught.”

This guy was starting to get on my nerves.  I didn’t mind it when people threatened me.  It made the day more interesting.  But when they went to such lengths to be mysterious it always struck me as more than a little showy.  “Enough small talk,” I snapped.  “I’m a busy man.”

“Oh yes.  Very busy.”  It sounded like the bastard was smiling.  Not smiling.  Smirking.  “Terribly sorry to interrupt your packed social schedule, but I’m sure Mrs. Waverly won’t mind waiting just a little.”

My blood boiled.  It was one thing to sap me and stick me in a foul-smelling room.  It wasn’t the first time, God knows.  But to bring Virginia into it took it to a whole other level.  “Stay away from her,” I growled.

“I might advise you to do the same thing, Sharman.”  He was pissed.  And not like I wished I was.  “I might advise you to stay just as far away from her as you can.”

“Oh yeah?”  This asshole was clearly looking for a fight.  If I had only been able to move my fingers I would’ve shown him all the fight he wanted.

“Most definitely.”

“And why would I do that?”

“Because she doesn’t belong to you.”

“Doesn’t belong to me?  Last time I checked, pal, she doesn’t belong to anyone.”

I must’ve said something he didn’t like because there was a bright flash and then everything went dark.

When I awoke again I had a splitting headache.  And my cheek was cold and damp.  In fact, my entire body was cold and damp.  And sore.  And gritty.  I twitched my fingers experimentally and felt what seemed to be wet pavement.  I groaned and opened my eyes.  Street level, judging from the proximity of the car barreling down the road straight for me.

I jerked hard and rolled out of its path.  It barreled past me without slowing down.  Close call.

I pushed myself up gingerly.  Whatever the mysterious bastard had hit me with had left a lasting impression.

“I thought I told you not to come back,” an amused voice sneered from behind me.

“Yeah, well, listening isn’t one of my strengths,” I grumbled.  I turned around.  Mancini was leaning against the door of his club, arms crossed, a thin smile slicing across his face.

“Clearly,” he said.

“So you were just gonna let that car hit me?”

He shrugged.  “Accidents happen.”

“What about the old days, Harrison?  All that school spirit?”  I needed a drink and how.

“The old days were a long time ago, Sharman, and we were never friends.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” I muttered.  “So are you going to invite me in or what?  I’m parched.”

“Not open yet.  Only four-thirty.  So sorry.”

“Come on, Mancini.  I know you want to.”

“You couldn’t pay for it even if I did let you in.”  He had a point.

I couldn’t believe I was about to say what I was about to say.  “Please?”  The hope of a drink made a person do crazy things.

He smirked.  “Since you asked so nicely.”  He stepped into the dim Grotto, not bothering to hold the door.  I caught it just before it latched shut.  Pompous prick.

It was empty.  I could still feel the malice in the air, though, and I reminded myself not to stick around too long.  Didn’t want to catch something.  Mancini walked behind the bar and poured out a glass of scotch.  Good stuff, too.  The wages of sin bought some fancy drink.  “Put it on my tab,” I said and tossed half of it back.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mancini said, obviously forcing the words out.  “This one’s on Violet.”

Violet?

I didn’t know whether to ask Mancini about it or just finish the drink.  The pain in my head urged the latter.  As I threw it back Mancini sighed heavily.  “I’m not staying long, pal.  It’s pretty clear I got dumped in front of your dump for a reason.”  He stiffened.  “And a very charming dump it is, too,” I added hastily.  “So why is Violet Malloy buying my drinks?”

“Don’t ask me,” he said.  “I don’t know why Violet does half of what she does.”

“But she’s been around since . . . last night?”  It felt like it had been a week.

“She was here last night, Sharman, you idiot.”

With Virginia.  I didn’t want to think too hard about it.

“So why the sudden largesse?”  Sometimes I could fish a fancy word out from that brain of mine.

“I don’t ask too many questions,” he said.  He looked nervous.  It couldn’t be.  Mancini, proprietor of one of the shadiest of the many shady businesses on this side of town, nervous about a dame?  “Last night she just said if you ever came back I should give you what you asked for.”

“I didn’t know you were in the business of taking orders from the wives of disgraced politicians.”  The comment cut deep.  Mancini’s eyes flashed.

“Malloy’s got more power than you know about, Sharman,” he snapped, then immediately clenched his fists.  Not like he was going to hit me.  I knew what that looked like.  This looked like he was going to hit himself.  For saying something he shouldn’t have.  I was about to open my mouth and probably say something I shouldn’t have when the door swung open.  Mancini jumped.  It was the same bored-looking waitress from the night before.  Her eyes narrowed when she saw me.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked coldly.  Mancini shook his head.

“Mr. Sharman was just on his way out.”

“Cut it out with the “mister” stuff, Mancini.  Do I look like a “mister” to you?”

He eyed me.  “You look more like a “what” to me,” he sneered.  I didn’t care.  I knew his pride had been shaken.  Always happy to help out a friend.  I set my glass back down on the counter with a little pang of regret.  It was good stuff, all right.  Violet Malloy had my number.  Must’ve gotten it from—

I shook my head and turned to leave.  As I was going out the door Mancini called after me.  I looked back at him.
“Violet says you look good, Sharman.  Can’t say as I agree with her, but we have very different tastes.”  So I was right about him.

“You tell Violet she can tell me in person next time,” I replied.  “I usually don’t go for her type, but hey, I owe her one.”  Let the door swing closed behind me.  Stood on the street for a minute rubbing the sore spot on the back of my head from where the goon had pistol-whipped me.

As I trudged back to my flat I mulled over the conversation I’d had with Mancini.  Malloy had more power than I thought.  But how?  He’d been practically in seclusion since the scandal.  Hadn’t started any businesses that I knew about, and I made it my business to know about those things.  And Violet.  What was she doing in all of it?  She was just Malloy’s arm candy. His cover.  Never thought a St. Clair would lend anybody any respectability, but when you’d sunk as low as Malloy I guessed you took what you could get.  But she seemed to have a little power of her own, if she could make Mancini quiver.  And Violet would’ve know about my penchant for the good stuff from Virginia.

Virginia.  Her face flashed through my brain and along with it a little pinch.  She was mixed up in something, all right.  I thought about the mysterious voice from earlier.  Because she doesn’t belong to you.  But who did she belong to, then?  Whoever it was who had whacked me upside the skull?  It was somebody I knew.  Why else would he hide in the dark and muffle his voice?

Something started buzzing in the back of my brain.  Where I kept what little sense I had left.  I didn’t know what it was, but it didn’t feel good.  Felt like algebra, but all the numbers were jumbled up.  Something about Louis’s disappearance.  About Malloy.  About Violet.  About Virginia.

I huffed up the stairs to my apartment, not even noticing the landlady screeching at me from her doorway.  I fit the key into the lock and realized a second later I shouldn’t have bothered.  The lock was broken.  The door swung open to reveal a state of disarray not even I could’ve come up with.  Papers were scattered everywhere, pulpy sludge tracked across the floor.  My desk had been flipped, the drawers scattered around the room.  The couch, where I’d found heaven only a few hours earlier, was shredded.  I sighed, reached in my back pocket for my gun.  Fortunately it hadn’t been damaged as much as I had.  Only a couple of minor scratches.  I wandered around the room and managed to clean up most of the mess.  Not that it mattered that much anyway.  I knew nothing was missing, except Malfoy’s case file.  I couldn’t say how I knew, it was just a way I had.

I wondered briefly why whoever had done it had gone to so much trouble. Making a point, I guessed.  Point made.  Didn’t change my mind about going to Malloy’s party any.  If anything, today had reaffirmed my decision even more.  I’d have to be careful about Virginia, though.  If she was mixed up in this it wouldn’t be good to find myself in a compromising position.  I thought about the previous night.  I’d miss those compromising positions.  But sacrifices had to be made.

I halfheartedly looked to see if my bottle of scotch had escaped unscathed, and was more than a little shocked to find it sitting intact on the windowsill.  More than a little shocked, and more than a little grateful.  The alcohol burned going down and made me miss the smoothness of Mancini’s drink.  Oh well.  Hopefully I’d come out of this with a little money.  Enough to buy a bottle.  Hopefully I wouldn’t come out of it dead.

Chapter 5

Malloy’s place was lit up like the old days.  Should’ve been my first clue.  But I couldn’t see much aside from Virginia.  She looked spectacular.

I’d managed to get myself cleaned up all right after my busy day making the rounds.  Sleep that night didn’t seem like a possibility, but I dug deep and managed to come up with enough loose change to buy a pill off one of the less reputable dealers in my building.  So at least I’d woken up not looking like something the cat had coughed up.

Virginia had met me at the dingy café.  Seeing her in full daylight had taken my breath away.  She was knock-down drag-out beautiful.  Just like I remembered.  I had let her lead me around like a dog on a chain down the half-crowded streets to a dim tailor shop.  Everybody inside looked about a thousand years old.

“This is exactly right,” she’d said when the tailors had finished the last stitch.  I examined myself in the mirror.  The tux fit like a glove.  I’d never worn such a classy suit, but the gleam of approval in Virginia’s eye made me wonder why I’d never tried it before.  And I won’t lie, the idea of waltzing into Malloy’s wearing a monkey suit with a gorgeous woman on my arm wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

Of course, that was before I found myself standing on the stone steps staring up at a giant coat of arms.  A snake and a lion.  Nice and cozy.  And even though Virginia was holding my arm tightly I still felt less than eager about going in.

“Come on,” she hissed.  “You’re making a scene.”

Which I thought was unfair.  So maybe I was hanging back a little.  So maybe I was holding up the line.  Wasn’t it more important that I determine why there was such a line to get into a party given by Dominick Malloy, sleazebag par excellance?  I couldn’t wonder over it too long, though.  Virginia was pulling at my arm.  I decided to follow her.  Who wouldn’t follow a red-headed goddess in a skintight golden dress?  Only idiots and blind men, and at least a blind man would’ve followed her smell of honey and amber.  To the ends of the earth.

My little reverie was interrupted by the sucking sound of mucus being pulled through a particularly tight nasal cavity.  Dominick Malloy himself had come to greet us at the door.  From the sneer on his face it was evident that I hadn’t been expected.  Or it was just his expression.  I didn’t know.  I hadn’t seen him in awhile.

I studied him closely.  Wondered why he had taken the trouble to greet us personally.  Of course,  one glance at Virginia was enough to make anyone greet her personally.  She had decided on a gold sheath, long and faintly shimmery, tucked neatly under her breasts.  She had worn her hair long, and it fell in a smooth red ripple over her right eye.  Malloy’s eyes flicked up and down her body, like anybody’s would have, but it still took some doing to keep myself from giving him a sock in the jaw.  Didn’t want to cause another scene.  Instead I gave him my best shit-eating grin and shook his hand heartily.

“Dominick, pal.  Good to see you.  Place looks great.  Open bar, am I right?  Good to hear it.”  I hooked my arm around Virginia’s waist and hustled her inside.  Tried to do it quickly enough to keep Malloy from noticing Virginia wasn’t carrying a briefcase.

We had decided leave the briefcase and the money where they were for the time being.  Rather, I had decided it  and Virginia had eventually gone along with the plan.  When I had assured her if anybody was gonna get roughed up if the bad guys didn’t like it was gonna be me.  I wanted a little more time to work over the connections that were starting to form in my brain.  At least this way I’d know who it was who wanted the damn thing, instead of Virginia handing it over to some dumb troll who made a career of being a bagman.  Amazing how quickly people make things personal when you don’t give them what you want.  And if things got sticky I always had my gun.  Virginia said she had hers too, a little pearl-handled number she’d gotten from her husband, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where she had it stashed.  A burned match would’ve stood out if she’d tried to hide it under her dress.

“I’m nervous, Jimmy,” she breathed next to my ear.  “Don’t leave me alone.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, baby,” I said out of the corner of my mouth.  “We’re a matched set tonight.”  We crossed through the large entrance hallway to the livelier party in the first drawing room.  If “lively” was a word that could be used with this crowd.  Their entire purpose for being there seemed to be an unkind curiosity about Malloy’s sudden re-emergence on the social scene.  I had to admit I was more than a little curious myself.  Eyes raked over me as I escorted Virginia through the throng.  I knew they were looking at me because they were whispering behind their hands as I passed.  If they’d been looking at Virginia they would’ve been dumbstruck.  At least I would have.  But the sight of a not-altogether-welcome face, especially atop an exquisitely tailored tuxedo, was enough to make them choke on their own smarm for half a second.

I knew I couldn’t avoid Malloy forever.  He’d be stuck doing the courtesy rounds with his invited guests for at least half an hour.  But I suspected top of his list of things to do when pleasantries were dispensed with would be tossing my sorry ass out on the street.  I wanted to get a little information before that happened.

Virginia squeezed my arm as two tall men approached.  I recognized one of them as my friend from the street.  Not the one who sapped me, but still a little too comfortable for my liking.

“Nice party,” I muttered.  The goons recognized me and went for their guns, but suddenly one of them punched the other on the arm.  They looked just over my shoulder and backed off, disappearing into the rest of the party.  I turned around and saw Violet Malloy slinking over to us.  Easy now.  I tightened my grip on Virginia’s waist a little.  Felt like a heel for doing it, but even though she didn’t belong to me, as I’d been so politely reminded, I still felt like reminding Violet of whose date she was.  Not very sporting, but I’d never been one for baseball.

“Virginia,” Violet drawled.  She was wearing a tight little purple number, short enough to make half the room blush and the other half drool.  I didn’t know which camp I belonged in.  Her hair was cut in a blunt bob, sleek and glossy.  She had enough lipstick on to kiss everyone in a ten-foot radius and still leave a mark on a champagne glass.  “And is that Jimmy Sharman?  Goodness, aren’t you a sight.”  She meant it as a compliment, near as I could tell.  She leaned in and planted a kiss on Virginia’s cheek, a long purplish smear trailing across her skin.  “Oh, look what I’ve done,” she said coquettishly, and leaned in again and licked lightly at the spot, rubbing at it with her thumb.  She meant it to be provocative.  It was, but fortunately I was too busy thinking about getting the bruiselike splotch off Virginia’s face before someone thought I’d clocked her one.

“Violet,” I said curtly.  Virginia pressed a little closer to me.  Not out of fear but because that’s the kind of girl she was.  Her fingers played with the buttons on the tuxedo jacket.  I wasn’t used to being used like this, but I figured if this was what being a trophy meant I could do a lot worse.

“So lovely to see you,” she purred.  “And don’t you look dashing.  I’ve always had a weakness for a well-cut suit.”

“Isn’t that nice,” I said, relieved that a waiter was passing by with a tray full of champagne flutes.  I reached out and nabbed two of them, pressing one into Virginia’s hand.  I took a long drink and realized I was getting looks.  Some nasty, most plain envious.  Violet noticed it too.

“Why don’t you come into the office where we can have a nice chat?” she said silkily.  I looked at Virginia.  “Keep away from prying eyes.  And ears,” she said.  There was a naughty promise in her voice.  Good thing I kept my naughty promises away from girls like her.

“I’m a little busy, Violet,” I said.  I wasn’t.  I wished I was.  Busy finding out just what the hell was going on, and what Malloy knew about Louis.  About the friendly encounter I’d had the day before.  My head was still awfully tender.  I hadn’t told Virginia about it.  She’d get worked up.

“Come on now, Sharman,” she said.  Her voice stayed light and teasing but there was an undercurrent of something dark and urgent.  “Let Virginia flirt with the other boys.”

Virginia didn’t seem the least interested in flirting with the other boys.  She kept her hand tight around my wrist.  Her body pressed close to mine.  If I hadn’t been surrounded by people who doubtless wanted me to come to some kind of harm I would’ve called it close to heaven.

“Not interested, Violet,” I said, turning to go.  She reached out and brushed my arm.  It felt nice.  Nicer than I’d expected.  Nicer than I’d hoped.

“Come on,” she whispered.  “For old times’ sake.”

“The old times were a long time ago,” I said as quietly as I could.  “And you and I were never friends.”

“Been around to Harrison’s, I see,” she said just as quietly.  So she’d been listening in.  What for?  “Why don’t we go somewhere and talk, Jimmy?” she said again.  “Somewhere nice and private.”

I don’t know what came over me.  It felt like something hot and fizzy had been let loose in my bloodstream and was making me want Violet Malloy something awful.  I looked at Virginia.  She might have been looking at me strangely.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t care.  All I knew was right at that moment I was ready to kick her into the arms of whatever passing man happened to step in my line of fire.  Or woman.  I was ready to follow Violet Malloy into whatever nice, private place she wanted.  Provided, of course, she kept working that little dress the way she was.

I realized with a sinking feeling my champagne had been drugged.  That’s why I stick with the hard stuff.  It didn’t matter that I knew it.  I knew vaguely I’d regret it later, but right now all I wanted was Violet.  “Be back in a minute, baby,” I muttered.  I slipped out of Virginia’s grasp, which later I would realize hadn’t been as easy as it seemed, judging from the livid purple bruise on my wrist.  I saw the red blossom on Virginia’s cheeks.  It might’ve set the air on fire it was so hot.  But then I felt Violet’s cool hand slide between the buttons of the tux jacket and I let her lead me down a series of stone corridors to a dim room.

It might have been an office.  There was a desk that matched the heavy dark paneling.  The remnants of a fire glowed in a grate set into one of the walls.  Heavy drapes were closed against the night.  She shoved me down on the plush sofa.  A man could get used to this.

“So Sharman,” she hissed, her mouth leaving hot tracks up my neck.  “We were never friends.”

“No,” I stammered.  The mickey was a good one.  A little part of my brain, same place I stored my reason, objected.  The rest of me was putty.

“But we could be friends,” she murmured.  Her fingers were making short work of my jacket.

“Yeah?”

“Oh yes.”  She straddled my lap, that little skirt riding up.  Best belt a girl could ask for.  I was dizzy as I’d ever been.  Violet’s mouth was hot.  Her hips moved like they had a mind of their own.  “I think we could be very good friends.”  Jesus, I wanted her.  Like I’d never wanted anything before.

“So what’s a guy got to do to be your friend?” I mumbled.  Whatever it was, I seemed to be doing it.

“Just play nice,” she whispered, biting my lower lip.  She sucked it into her mouth and I groaned.  I vaguely hoped she’d led me far away from the party.  I didn’t want Virginia seeing this.  Didn’t want her seeing how little resistance I was putting up.

“I can play as nice as you want me to,” I said thickly.  Hard to talk when half your face is occupied in other pursuits.  I ran my hands over Violet’s body.  She whimpered.  If it was for effect it was a hell of an effect.  My bones were melting or something like it.

“I have no doubt.”

I closed my eyes and let her do whatever she wanted.  Felt like a bastard for it, but there was nothing I could do.  I was helpless.

“Tell me about the briefcase,” she groaned, thrusting her hips against mine.  Writhing like a snake.

“The briefcase?”  That little rational part lit up again.  Started beeping as loudly as it could.  Not as loudly as Violet’s heavy breath, too bad for it.

“Yeah,” she murmured as she undulated against me.  Jesus her hands were quick.  “Tell me about it.”

“I don’t have it,” I panted.  I knew I shouldn’t be talking to Violet Malloy about Louis’s briefcase.  It was pretty damn clear she was playing a bigger part in all of this than I’d originally thought.  I knew I shouldn’t be doing it, but there were a lot of things I shouldn’t be doing at that moment and I seemed to be doing every single one of them.   “I don’t know what’s in it.”

“Too bad,” she whispered.  Suddenly she was off my lap and halfway across the room.  My body wasn’t at all happy about the change of plans.  Without any input from my mind it flung itself off the couch and crawled across the floor to her.  She kicked me away.  “I was so hoping we could come to an understanding, Sharman,” she said coldly.  It was like a bucket of ice water dumped right on my head.  Not anywhere else, though.  I kept reaching for her like some kind of lust-crazed animal.  Which I was.  Fucking dope.  At least now I could think a little more rationally, even if I led from the hips.

“What do you want with it?” I managed to get out.  She snorted derisively.

“As if I’d tell you,” she hissed.  “What a brilliant idea.”

“Are you just trying to get it for Dominick?  Since sapping me and smacking me around didn’t seem to accomplish anything?”

A look of confusion flitted across her face.  “What are you talking about, Sharman?”   I don’t know why but I believed her.  So she didn’t know about my little interrogation.

“Well, it’s pretty obvious to me that Dominick wants whatever’s in that briefcase,” I said, barreling on ahead.  I was just talking.  Didn’t know how much of it made sense.  Of course, I didn’t know how much of what I was thinking made sense.  Violet didn’t have anything to do with what had happened yesterday.  But she had known I’d end up back at Mancini’s.  She knew about the briefcase, but didn’t seem to have any interest in giving it to Dominick.  Did she want it for herself?  Was Malloy really that untouchable, that his wife could run such a fast game on him?  Did he have anything to do with it at all?

Malloy’s goons had delivered the note, Virginia had said.  Virginia.  I hoped again that she wouldn’t be able to find us.  Even though Violet’s sudden change of heart had made me realize what I was doing it hadn’t caused the drug’s physical effects to wear off any.  Malloy’s goons.  But which Malloy?  That was the new question.

Violet reached down with a speed and agility I almost envied.  She wrapped her hand around my throat, hard and cold as steel.  “I want that briefcase, Sharman,” she said.  Her voice was dangerous.  “Virginia should’ve brought it to me like I asked.”

“Virginia . . . should’ve . . .” I choked.

“Yes,” she snapped.  “I asked her so politely.”

“You’ve . . . got Louis?”

She tightened her grip.  Blackness smoked the sides of my vision.  She didn’t say anything.  Didn’t have time to.  At that moment the door swung open.  Virginia stood silhouetted against it, along with a few other partygoers.  The rage on her face was unmistakable.  It would’ve been clear at a hundred paces.

I have to admit it didn’t look good.  Me on my knees in front of Violet.  My hands on her hips.  Her hand around my neck, though she’d used that same quickness to slide it around to the back of my head as soon as she’d heard the door opening.

I struggled to my feet.  “Virginia–”

It was all I managed to get out.  She swung back and slapped me hard across the face.  Tears were glittering in her eyes.  Mine too.  She still had quite an arm.  She turned and fled from the room.

The crowd at the doorway parted.  Dominick Malloy glowered at me so hard I thought all the glass in the room might break.  “Get the fuck away from my wife,” he growled.  With that, the two goons rushed me.  One of them got me around the throat.  The other one grabbed my legs.

Just like that, my party was over.  Or maybe it was when they threw me out.  Literally.  I landed hard on the gravel drive a good ten feet from the doorway.

I stood up slowly.  I was sore already.  I could only imagine how it’d be in the morning.  And I’d have to talk to Virginia.  Not the sort of sniveling apology she’d be expecting, either.  I had the distinct feeling I’d been set up in more ways than one.

Dames.  Pretty as a picture.  Cold as ice.

Chapter 6

 The morning dawned gray and cool.  Mist from the river saw fit to wind itself through the apartment.  Like everything else that ended up there it was thick and dirty.  Not as dirty as I was.  I had gotten home from Malloy’s party a little worse for wear and after drowning those particular troubles in the remnants of my scotch I had passed out, still wearing the fancy tux.

When my eyes cracked open I was face to face with the cold reality of another day.  Not to mention a hell of a hangover.  I rubbed my eyes gingerly, then stretched my legs.  A large scrape from the gravel drive pulsated with pain.  I rubbed at it.  Couldn’t fix the pants.  Tough break.

A knock at the door.  I groaned.  That door had seen more action in the past two days than it had in the past two months.  Too bad none of the action included cash.  My visitor didn’t bother waiting for me to answer and pushed the busted plank open.

“Nice party?”

It was Virginia.  Jesus.  She looked cold, and not like she’d just come from a winter scenic tour of the Arctic Circle.  Her hair was pulled back tightly and the rest of her was just as tight, a long black fitted suit, the skirt penciling down to a hem so sharp it looked like it was about to cut her off at the knees.  She was wearing gloves.  I worried for a moment that she’d come to finish me off.  Though once again her outfit clung so tightly to her body that the outline of a gun would’ve been a dead giveaway.

“I’ve been to better,” I mumbled.  My mouth felt like it’d had a cotton charm put on it.  She crossed a little nearer to me but didn’t get close enough to touch.  Her lips were set in a hard line.  Her eyes were flat as nickels.  She didn’t look happy to see me.

“I’d say you had a grand time,” she said, the hint of a snarl in her voice.

“I was doped, Virginia,” I snapped.  “I thought you’d at least have worked that out.”  What I really thought was that she’d had a hand in it, but I figured I’d play nice until I knew whether or not she felt like buying me breakfast.

“I know,” she said.  I’d hoped it’d make her soften a little toward me but she was about as soft as a brick wall.  Hell, I didn’t feel decent about what had happened.  Thinking about Violet Malloy crawling all over me was as appealing as a dinner date with a sober whore.

“What?” Virginia said crossly.  I didn’t feel like telling her.  I didn’t feel like telling her much, not with the suspicions that were ticking in my head.

“Just wondering where you keep your gun,” I replied.  A look of disgust flitted across her face.  Against my better judgment and sense of self-preservation I couldn’t help but think of what a knockout she was.  Even when she was being disapproving.  “And what brings you to my humble abode this lovely morning?” I said, standing up and brushing the gravel dust and other assorted wreckage from my suit.  Virginia was silent for a moment, watching me.  I felt a little flush of victory.  I could still make her stare.  Of course, that little flush of victory headed right to the spot where it had no business being.

After another second she blinked and coughed slightly.  “Turn around,” she said.

“Me?”

“I don’t see anyone else, thank God,” she replied.

“And I’m turning around because . . .”

“Because I asked you to,” she said irritably.  I shrugged and faced the wall.  Snuck a peek.  Couldn’t resist.  She was lifting one side of her skirt.  I gulped.  She had pins to make a hardened criminal plead for mercy.  Her fingers inched up the long white expanse of her thigh, revealing her little pistol.  It was held flat against her skin by a snug black garter.  The girl had style.

I must’ve made some kind of a sound.  It didn’t seem possible that I wouldn’t.  She flushed a deep red and pointed her wand at me.  “I asked you to turn around!”

“Did you honestly think I would?  Turn my back on someone who very probably wants me to suffer great physical pain?”

“For good reason,” she added, lowering her gun.

I shrugged again.  “So what’s the piece for?”

She glowered at me.  “Protection, Jimmy.  Seems like being seen with you doesn’t make a girl too many friends.”  She set the little toy down on the desk and removed her brooch.  I hadn’t noticed she was wearing it.  A big gold flower.  Orchid or lily or something.  She set the brooch down on the desk and tapped one of the petals. I opened my mouth to ask a stupid question but she held up her hand.  A few seconds ticked by and the unmistakable sound of Violet Malloy’s voice filtered into the room.

I shuddered.  I couldn’t help it.  Virginia shot me a dirty look and I shook my head.  “I’d rather dance a tango with Boyle,” I said.  I thought I saw a half-smile try to crack through her icy veneer.

“—we’ll have it,” Violet was saying.  “She didn’t bring it, I got word from the guards at the gate.  I think that Sharman asshole convinced her not to.”  A muffled male voice.  Couldn’t make out what he was saying.  Then Violet again, laughing.  “Don’t worry about it, baby.  I doped the champagne. He’ll be putty in my hands.”  More muffled words.  Sounded like a protest.  “Of course not!  Do you think I want to put myself through it?  But it’s for us.  Oh, wait, Harrison has just seen them come in.”  The voices stopped.

I looked at Virginia with admiration.  I wanted to kiss her.  At the very least I wanted to throw her down on the sofa to get a good look at that garter.

“I got one of the waiters to drop it next to her office door.  Before your little excursion.  A friend of Louis’s,” she said to answer my unasked question.  “I didn’t know if she’d be up to anything, but I thought it would be smart just in case.”

“I’ll say,” I said.

“I knew you were drugged before I heard it,” she said a little quietly.  “I thought it might happen.  Because you wouldn’t–” she stopped.

“Never in a million years.  Not for a million bucks.”

“It still hurt,” she went on.  Her lip trembled.  “Seeing it.”

“I know,” I said softly.  “I’m sorry.  Thinking about it now, well, it makes me want to throw up.  If I had anything to throw up.”

She reached toward me tentatively, then stopped.  She shook her head like she was shooing away a fly.  “I don’t know who she was talking to,” she said brusquely.

“Dominick?”

“Couldn’t have been, he met us at the door.”

“Yeah.  Right.”  I sat back down on the sofa and kicked off my shoes.  Have to be pretty drunk to fall asleep with shoes on.  “I didn’t see Mancini there.  But I wasn’t really looking for him.”

“Didn’t have much time, either,” Virginia said a little sharply.

“Come on, Virginia, are you ever going to let it go?”

“Not for a little while,” she replied.  “I figure I can use it against you for at least a few weeks.”

I didn’t take the time to fully savor her words.  A few weeks.  I tucked them back in a nice warm little corner of my mind for later.

“So who was she talking to?”

“I have no idea.  But it proves she wants the briefcase for someone else.  Someone not her husband.  Did she ever—I’m gonna ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind, and some of them you may not like, but I have to.”  Virginia nodded, her eyes downcast.  She looked like a nun.  The image almost made me laugh again but I held it in.  “When you two were . . . running around, did she have anyone that you knew of?”

Virginia thought for a while.  “Nobody serious.  She’d go around with a few guys she met at Mancini’s, but it mostly just seemed like a good time.  I’d see them one night but never again.”

“Anybody you knew?”

She shook her head.  “I didn’t make it my business to know too many of Violet’s friends.”

“How did you—and here’s where we start the ones you might not like—how did you two start . . . you know.”  I felt like a fool for not being able to say it.  But I just couldn’t ask.

Virginia blushed a little.  I tried to keep up my suspicions but her pretty face was making it a hell of a job.  “It was . . .” she paused like she was trying to work up the courage.  “It was Kitty,” she said finally.

It hit me hard.  My mouth went even drier than it had been.  I clutched at the dirty cushions.  “Oh yeah?” I said weakly.

She took a deep breath.  Like she wanted to get it all out at once and I loved her for it.  “After you two split up, well, she wasn’t too happy,” she said.  Putting it mildly.  I wondered briefly where she’d learned such diplomacy.  I guess being a con man’s wife has its fringe benefits.  “Moaning about how she’d lost the will to live, all that stuff.  Got so bad I couldn’t take her anywhere any more.  She was living with me and Louis then.  Making Louis crazy.  Making me crazy too, but I’m her friend, I’m supposed to be supportive.  Besides, I had other reasons for being crazy about it,” she paused.  “But I figured I’d be able to hide it easier if I helped her out.”

“Louis is her brother, isn’t that his job?”

“Well, Louis was starting to develop . . . other interests,” she said almost embarrassed.  “He wasn’t too keen on listening to Kitty moan on about her ex-boyfriend.”  She shuffled through the papers on my desk.  Looking for a cigarette.  She lit it and inhaled deeply.  “So anyway, Louis had started hanging around with some shady characters, and I figured it would be best if I took Kitty around too.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“Crooks don’t ask questions,” she said.  “And they’ll sell you anything if you’ve got the cash.”  She took another drag.  “It was Louis’s idea, really.  Said if Kitty was so desperate for a man why didn’t I just go get her one.  I tried to explain that it wasn’t just any man she wanted, but Louis didn’t care.  Said get her a man and get her some good dope and she’d be fine.  I don’t know why I went along with it, Jimmy,” she said quickly.  Her eyes were starting to well up.  “I don’t know why I did and I’d take it back in a second if I could.”

I could see it clearly.  Virginia had taken Kitty to Mancini’s.  Gotten her started on some bad junk to take her mind off things.  I didn’t doubt that she hadn’t meant for it to get out of hand, but what I remembered of Kitty made her an easy target for fast living.  “And Violet?”  I asked, trying to keep my voice neutral.

“After the docks Dominick didn’t have a lot of options.  Not a lot of legitimate ones, anyway.  Mancini’s was the perfect place for him to set up shop.”

Dominick Malloy a dope peddler.  How the mighty have fallen.  Explained how he managed to keep the manse so immaculate.  An underground business, nothing on the books, nothing anybody else would have to attach their name to.  Jesus, I needed a drink.

“So that’s how I got hooked up with Violet.  Malloy never shows his face in public if he can avoid it.  Violet runs everything on the street.  She was more than happy to . . . help Kitty out,” she said bitterly.  “Giving an old enemy that first kick to help them slide into the gutter seems to be a favorite pastime of theirs.”

“But why did you . . .”

“Because I missed you!” she cried.  “Because I’d been hanging around Kitty for months, listening to her go on and on about you.  How do you think it made me feel?  When I’d been going through the same thing, only longer?  And I couldn’t even talk about it!”  The tears were falling fast and thick.  “And so Violet and I used to see a lot of each other.  And sometimes we’d . . . get into a little bit of the merchandise.”

It stung to hear her talking about it like that.  Like a professional.  A nasty wave of guilt washed over me.  The kind that comes pre-loaded with driftwood and dirty needles.

“I told her about you,” Virginia whispered.  “We’d been up late.  We were both pretty gone on the stuff, and it just came out.  Before I knew what happened.  And she looked at me funny and said she’d always wondered about it and then she introduced me to some man who was at the club.  At that point I just didn’t care.  If I couldn’t have you I didn’t care who I had.”  She was crying hard then.  I wanted to wrap my arms around her and kiss the tears away.  I wanted to throw her out of the joint.  I just sat there.

“I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she sobbed.  “I’m so sorry.”

“But it’s all over now,” I said.  She nodded.  “And Kitty?”

She went silent.  Shook her head.

“She isn’t . . .”

“I don’t know,” she whispered.  “I haven’t seen her in almost a year.  Last time I did she was living in some filthy place and she barely knew who I was.”  She took a deep breath.  Lit another cigarette.  “I can’t tell you how hard it was for me to leave her there,” she said, her voice barely audible.  “My friend.  Practically my sister and I’d done it to her and all I could do was leave her.”

“You didn’t do it to her,” I said.  My voice was hollow.  Mouth felt like the Serengeti.  I wanted a drink so bad I thought I’d pass out.

We sat in heavy silence for a few minutes.  Virginia’s sniffling faded out.

“So what about the briefcase?” I asked dully.  “Anybody been around to inquire?”

“No,” she said.  She sounded dead tired.  I wondered if she’d slept last night.

“Little odd,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I could have a drink,” I said.

“Me too.”

We headed for the door.  Got there at the same time.  Stiff little dance for a moment and I let her go out ahead of me.

Nobody was in the café.  “Two of Joe’s special,” I muttered to the waitress.  “Hold the joe.”  She shuffled behind the counter silently.  No crosseyed looks.  It’s why I love this place.

Virginia sat silently at the table, engrossed in the peeling Formica.  “We have to find out who Violet was talking to,” I said.  She nodded.  “We have to find out what’s in that briefcase.”  She nodded again.  “You know how to get into it?”

“I can figure it out,” she said.  Of course she could.

“Anybody at home?”

“Just me and the mice.”

“Sounds like it’s time I paid a visit to your place.”  I tried to keep my hands from shaking.  Even though I knew whatever cozy family life I would see there was a joke, I still didn’t want to have to put myself through it.  The waitress set two mugs half-filled with thin amber liquid in front of us. I downed mine immediately.  Felt good.  Virginia fiddled with the handle for a moment before taking a sip.

“I’m going to leave him,” she said.  “When I get him back, I’m going to leave him.”

I coughed a little.  Must be the whiskey.  Must be the whiskey making me so warm.  Not Virginia leaving Louis.  Couldn’t be that.  “You don’t say.”

“I do say.  First thing I’m going to do is punch him right in the jaw, second thing I’m going to do is pack a suitcase.  Do you think . . .” she paused and threw back her drink.  Her cheeks flushed a little.  “Do you think you might have a little room?”

“It’s all I’ve got,” I said.  “But you’re welcome to it.”

“Good,” she said, looking out the window.  “I want out of all of it.”

“Good,” I repeated.  It was the best news I’d heard all week.

Chapter 7

“So Violet Malloy’s after Louis’s briefcase,” I said for the thousandth time.  I pulled the last crumbling cigarette out of its beat-up pack and lit it with my last match.

“Yes,” Virginia said.  Good girl, not half as exasperated as I would’ve been.  I had been trying to puzzle the whole thing out as we walked toward her house.  It was making me crazy.  I used to be so good at puzzles.

“What do you think is in it?”

“I told you, I have no idea.  He never said.”

“Just don’t give it to anybody.  Could it be a weapon?”

She shrugged.  “It could be anything.”

Right.  Anything.  But what would Violet want?  More to the point, what did whoever she was giving it to want?  Who was it for?

“I don’t have any idea, Jimmy,” Virginia said, a slight hint of weariness creeping into her voice.  Must’ve said that last part out loud.

“Okay, then, who is it not for?”  Process of elimination.

“Louis,” she said.  “That one’s obvious.”

“I guess so,” I replied.  Though I was beginning to be less and less sure of that.  Not that I thought he would’ve kidnapped himself and demanded a ransom that already belonged to him, it didn’t make any sense.  Though not very much of it made any sense.  Still, had to keep my options open.  “Who else?”

“Malloy.  He saw us at the party.  It wasn’t him Violet was talking to.”

“It could be a team effort,” I said.  She shook her head.

“I don’t think so.  You don’t go to all that trouble to sneak around on your husband on the off chance that someone might be listening, I don’t care if you are a crook.”

She would know something about sneaking, all right.

“Louis didn’t give two damns who I slept with,” she said.  Reading my thoughts again.  “I never had to pretend.”

“But Violet did?”

“Malloy might have been a lot of things, but a permissive husband he wasn’t,” she said.  Perceptive girl.  I ought to give her half my take on this case.  Of course, the way she was dressed, she probably didn’t need it.  “And anyway, unless there was a rubber mask in that briefcase nothing in there would really do him any good.  He’s got the most known face in town.”

“Ugliest, too,” I said offhandedly.  “Malloy was on to her, anyway.”  Virginia looked surprised.  “What did you think I was doing at Mancini’s that night?  Malloy hired me to find out who she was running around with.  So what other man would be involved?”   She shrugged.

“I really don’t know, Jimmy.”

“It has to be someone.  Someone who worked with Louis. Someone who knew about that briefcase and what was in it.”  This was getting me nowhere.  “Mancini’s out.”

“How come?”

“Well, for one thing he doesn’t strike me as the type to run around with Violet.  Or any woman, for that matter.”  Virginia nodded, smiling.  “Anyway, he doesn’t seem like much more than a two-bit sleazebag.  And he’s scared of her.  It’s easy to fake a lot of things, but a guy like him faking being afraid of anything but a bar of soap, that’s not so easy.”

“So it must be someone else.  I don’t know ninety percent of who Louis was in business with.  Could be anybody.”

We were at a dead end.  Literally.  I hadn’t noticed it but the road had turned wide and smooth.  Trees lining the sidewalks.  A nice little suburban lane.

“Here we are,” Virginia said, half uncertain.  She looked at me closely, then took my hand and squeezed it.

I took a deep breath as I stared up at the front of Virginia’s place.  Being on the front lines of the most violent scandal in recent memory couldn’t prepare me for the thought of going inside.  The war begins at home, so they say.  So it was.

“Come on,” Virginia said, tugging at my arm.

“Yeah,” I muttered, throwing my cigarette on the curb.  I ground it out with my foot.  Shame to disturb the neatness of the place, but I had other things on my mind.

The house was located in one of the nicer suburbs, a far cry from my squalid inner-city digs.  There was a yard.  Well-tended.  Some nice trees, if that’s what does it for you.  The house itself was smaller than I expected, which is to say it was only about two-thirds the size of Malloy’s place.  No peacocks, either.  Just your standard suburban avian life.  A sparrow or something cheeped from a branch.  Through one of the windows I caught a glimpse of an aspidistra.  “Homey,” I said as nicely as I could.  Didn’t feel as bad as I’d feared, though.  Despite all its middle-class pristine gleam the whole setup looked as phony as a ten-cent pistol.

Virginia was walking up the little concrete lane that led to the front door.  She slipped her key in the lock and the door swung open.  The house was dark inside.  Silent.  She went in.  I hung back.  Steadying myself.  Focusing on the sham of it all.  I took a deep breath and followed her in.

The interior of the place was as blandly bourgeois as the burbling fountain planted next to one of the oaks outside.  Bourgeois, with little flashes of taste that must’ve come from Virginia.  Light wood floors.  Pale walls.  An anonymous sitting-room set complete with tasseled ottomans.  I could tell from the factory creases that it hadn’t been used much.  So far no sign of family life.  If it kept on like this I thought I might just make it.

Virginia disappeared down one of the dim corridors.  I followed her.  Nice tapestry carpet runner.  Pictures lined the walls.  I didn’t look.

“They came with the frames, most of them,” she called from a room at the end of the hall.  “Louis wanted it to look like somebody actually gave a damn.”

I breathed a little sigh of relief.  Not too loud.  The place was quiet as a mausoleum.  All of a sudden I got a funny little prickling feeling.  The old itch started up in my head again.  Like I was being watched.  I shook it off and followed Virginia’s voice into the kitchen.

It was sunny.  Not warm, but it’s hard to make a stainless-steel vault feel comfortable.  Every surface looked untouched.  There were some modern appliances mixed in with a good old-fashioned stove.  Old-fashioned but brand-new.  Virginia trying to replicate  a real home, I guessed.  She was fishing in a cupboard for something.  Pulled out a bottle of single-malt whiskey.  “Not your brand, but I figure it’ll do,” she said with a half-smile.  Took a couple of glasses from another cupboard.

“Where’s the safe?” I asked.  Didn’t want to disturb the little domestic scene she was working up but the prickly feeling was damned persistent.

“Upstairs,” she said.  “In Louis’s office.”

“Good.”  I took the glass she handed me and swirled it around.  It’d been a long time since I’d had anything this good.  Took an appreciative sip.

“Like it?” she asked.  I nodded.  Goddamn, but I liked it.

We sat in the kitchen silently for a few minutes.  I looked around a little more.  Everything steel, everything polished.  Give a guy a headache from the glare.

“I don’t really come in here much,” she admitted.  “I’m not much for cooking.”

“Guess we’ll be taking our meals elsewhere,” I said.  “I can’t boil water with three hands and someone else to do it for me.”  She giggled.  I loved that sound.

“Jimmy,” she said, and stopped.  I raised my eyebrow along with my glass.  She bit her lip.  “I didn’t mean it.  Those men from Mancini’s,” she added.  “I didn’t want it.  I didn’t like it.  But it was . . . it was contact, I guess.”

I held up my hand.  I didn’t want to talk about it.  Not right now.  Virginia crossed to me and took my hand.  Her touch was magic.  The real stuff.  I pressed her fingers to my lips.  She tasted like nicotine and heaven.

“Can I show you something?” she asked.  Like she needed my permission.  I swallowed the rest of my drink and set the glass on the countertop.  She led me out of the room and up a set of well-carpeted stairs.  A few doors, some open to reveal quiet rooms.  The toilet.  What looked like a spare bedroom.  The rest closed.  “Louis’s office,” she said as we passed a room with one too many locks on the door for my comfort.  I thought we would stop there but she kept moving and I kept following.  She came to a halt at the farthest door.  “My bedroom,” she murmured.

“Not Louis’s?”

She shook her head and pointed back down the hallway.  “His is through there,” she said indicating a small passage I hadn’t noticed.  I kicked myself mentally.  I should notice these things.  But trailing after Virginia meant my ability to notice was severely diminished.

“Cozy setup,” I said.  She grimaced.  “I like it,” I continued.  “No complaints here.”

She turned the knob and the door opened without a sound.  Unlike the rest of the house Virginia’s bedroom was genuinely warm.  Not just the temperature.  The room was spacious without feeling too big.  Nice furnishings.  A big bed.  Not the time to think what I was thinking.

Virginia seemed to have other ideas.  “It’s over here,” she said almost coyly.

“What is?”

“This,” she whispered, pulling me close.  It might have been the booze but all of a sudden my legs turned to jelly.  She pressed her mouth to mine and I thought I’d pass out.  Her tongue worked all sorts of tricks against mine.  I felt her fingers fumbling against my body, and it took me a second to realize she was unbuttoning her jacket and not mine.  Not that I minded either way.  She slid it off her shoulders.  Smooth and white.  Little constellations of freckles.  Just like I remembered.

“I thought you might like to see,” she breathed.  Did I ever.

She pushed me onto the bed and unbuttoned her skirt.  Long row of buttons all down the side. The kind of skirt you wear when you want to torture someone with taking it off.  It slid to the ground to join its partner.

“Virginia,” I mumbled weakly, “it’s not that I’m not crazy to see you taking your clothes off, but is this really the time?”

She shushed me with a look.  “A little longer can’t hurt,” she murmured.  “I want to.  I want to do it in his house.”

“Kinky,” I breathed hoarsely as she slid her little gun from its garter.  Set it on the side table.  I did likewise.  Like a dream my clothes were suddenly in a puddle on the floor.  She leaned in and the sensation of her bare skin on mine was like an explosion.  I groaned as her fingers wandered deftly across my body.  “Virginia,” I whispered.  And then like I knew I shouldn’t, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she replied softly, her mouth making little expeditions down my throat.  My head was spinning.  The drink had been a strong one.  Virginia was making me feel all kinds of things.  She pushed me farther up on the bed and settled her body on mine.  “I love you, Jimmy.”  Her fingers.  Her mouth.  I brushed her long curtain of red hair away from her face.  Eyes glittering like diamonds.  Lips like whatever the poets say they are.

“I . . . I love . . .”  Something was going wrong.  My head spun faster and faster.  My mouth was getting dry.  I blinked.  She was all out of focus.  I saw her face coming towards mine with a wide smile crossing from ear to ear.  A hungry kind of smile.  A predator’s smile.

“Goodnight, baby,” she whispered.  Everything went black.

Chapter 8

Blackness.  My old friend.  We were getting to be pretty familiar these days.  So was the feeling of total helplessness.  Chinese rope trick again. The cool breeze, though, that was a new one.  I groaned softly, trying to fight off the last of the poison.  I was in as tight a spot as I’d ever been, and when you’ve built your career on getting into tight spots that was saying something.  I could hear voices murmuring.  More than one.  I thought I could hear Virginia’s low whisper but I couldn’t be sure.  The dope was taking its sweet time.

I managed to crack one eyelid.  Blurry shapes in front of me.  Could’ve been anywhere.  Nothing to do but wait.  And think.

She’d double-crossed me.  It stung more than I’d thought it would.  I’d suspected her a little right from the beginning.  I decided I had.  Made it easier to take.  But why?  I didn’t think she still had anything going with Violet Malloy and the boys at Zabini’s.  I couldn’t say why I thought that, it was just a feeling.  Like that little prickle at the back of my mind, only this time I decided to listen.  Still, it didn’t make the shit luck of it all any easier.  Not that luck had anything to do with it.  But why?  That was the part that hovered just out of reach, like an angle with one of the lines drawn crooked.  I thought as hard as the dope would let me, but I was stumped.  I loved her.  That was what hurt the worst.  I knew it was a mistake.  It had always been a mistake.  But I hadn’t been able to help myself.

I tried my eyes again.  They were feeling a little more cooperative.  The blur was coalescing into the far wall of Virginia’s bedroom.  I must still be on the bed.  That would mean the cool breeze was from—Jesus Christ.  I strained my eye in its socked.  Rewarded with a sharp pain.  I’d felt worse.  Like what I felt as I took in the sight of my clothes still piled on the floor.  At that point, the hierarchy of betrayal took on a whole new look.  A doublecross was one thing.  Tying me up me naked on the bed right after you’d double-crossed me, that was something else entirely.  The voices were getting clearer.  It was definitely Virginia.  Sounded like Violet Malloy as well.  Couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it sounded nice and cozy.

There was another voice.  Male.  Familiar again.  I strained my ears but I still couldn’t quite make it out.

“I think he’s coming to,” Virginia said.  There was a smile in her voice.  Malicious.  I blinked again, hard.  Everything snapped into focus.  I was there, on Virginia’s bed.  Naked.  Tied up like a Sunday roast.  She was standing on the other side of the room.  She’d had the courtesy to dress herself, at least.  Violet Malloy stood next to her, arms folded, staring at me with one eyebrow cocked like I was the latest hat propped up in a store window.  Take it in, you fucking bitch.

Neither one of them had their guns drawn, and I couldn’t tell if Virginia’s was strapped to her leg. Not that they’d need them.  Would’ve made me feel better in a perverse way if they’d had them out, though.  A little more formidable.

I heard a scuffling sound by the doorway and strained my orbs once again, trying to make out who it was.  The man, I guessed.  He hovered just out of sight.

“Baby,” Violet simpered, crossing to him.  At least she wasn’t looking at me any more.  Virginia, on the other hand, circled around the bed like a vulture.

“Nice of you to join the party,” she murmured.  She flashed her teeth.  Not a smile.  I struggled to speak.  I didn’t know what I’d say, but I figured it wouldn’t be proper in mixed company anyway.  Virginia sat on the edge of the bed next to me, her eyes suddenly dark and serious.  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly so the others couldn’t hear.  I’ll bet.

I was in a bind.  Literally.  Figuratively it could’ve been worse.  Virginia could’ve just pulled out her gun and with a little twitch of her finger she could’ve sent me home down the lazy river to join all my old friends.  Tommy.  Fred.  All the boys from the docks.  All the boys from the force, back when Louis and I both had the nerve to wear a badge.  Hell, even Boyle.  But she’d chosen to keep me around.  Why?  Why had I gotten mixed up in whatever this was anyway?  It’s not like anybody needed my help to bilk Louis Waverly out of a few bucks.  It’s not like I was crying out for some two-bit dame to break down my door.  Sure I’d gotten a couple of nice nights out of it, but on the whole the arithmetic was shady.

And what was Virginia doing in this whole business anyway?  It’s not like she needed the money.  It was probably her money anyway.  She’d done just fine for herself.  The briefcase?  But she could get it any time she wanted it.  She said herself she’d be able to figure out how to get at it.  And with Louis out painting the town red with his boys, she seemed to have all the time in the world.  What was in it?  The curiosity was killing me.  Virginia’s eyes on my body were killing me.  Everything was killing me, I just wasn’t dead yet.

“Is it time?”  Violet’s voice.  Hard.  A muffled yes from the mystery date.  “Let’s go, then,” she whined.  “Let’s just get it over with.”

“Not yet,” Virginia said suddenly, her voice louder than it needed to be.  She caught herself.  “A few minutes couldn’t hurt anything,” she finished, a little softer.

“Well hurry up,” Violet snapped.  “Someone could catch wise.”

I found myself wishing they’d hurry up too.  Suddenly that lazy river was looking mighty nice.  After all, what did I have?  A shitty apartment and a broken heart.  Not a lot to build a life on.  I looked hard into Virginia’s eyes trying to figure her out.  Trying to figure anything out.  Trying to tell her to just go ahead and blow my ass into oblivion, since she’d taken care of everything else so handily.

Virginia looked at me strangely before she sat up.  Like there was something she wanted to say.

“Hold on,” the muffled voice said.  Virginia looked over at him and I could feel the heat from her eyes.  It was nice.  I was freezing.

Suddenly my jaw seemed to melt a little.  My tongue flopped around uselessly inside my mouth for a second and I realized the dope was starting to wear off.  “What the fuck is this?”  I rasped.  “Virginia, what the fuck are you doing?”

“It’s not me, Jimmy, I don’t–” she started.  Interrupted by the gentleman caller.  How chivalrous.

“Virginia’s just been . . . uh, tying up a few loose ends,” he said.  Violet howled with laughter.  A little over the top, I thought.  Virginia was a much better actress.  But something—

I realized with a thunderbolt who was talking to me.  No way.  No fucking way.

Louis Waverly strode into my line of sight.

Chapter 9

“All those years on the force and I never once saw you helpless, Sharman,” Waverly said, malice oozing off him like pomade from Mancini’s hair.  I wanted to spit at him but it was clear from the way the saliva gurgled in my throat the poison hadn’t worn off enough to allow me even that simple pleasure.  I coughed with difficulty.  Found myself wanting a drink.  Even Virginia’s doctored whiskey.  Waverly walked around the bed, examining me.  I felt lower than an earthworm with a head cold.

“I’ve got one up on you then, Waverly,” I said as nastily as I could.  Not my best retort, but I had to start somewhere.

“Yes, well,” he said dismissively.  “Virginia, be a doll and fetch me my gun.”

Virginia shot him a cold look.  Set her lips thin.  Stalked out of the room.

“She’s such a good girl,” Louis said almost fondly.  “So useful.”

“Not your girl, Louis,” I said.

“Not yours either,” he smirked.  “She doesn’t belong to you, remember.”

Of course I remembered.  Of course it was him warning me to stay away from her.  Of course he had muffled his voice so I wouldn’t recognize it, the bastard was supposed to be rotting away in some dank cellar somewhere.  But if she was a part of this plan why had he gone to all the trouble?

“Why’d you choreograph this nice little dance?” I asked.

“Had to keep you interested, didn’t I?”  He smirked again.

“I would’ve stayed interested, Waverly.  A girl like Virginia, you stay interested without any help.”

“That’s where you and I differ.”  He leaned close and flicked something off my collarbone.  I could feel his breath.  I shuddered.  I would’ve rather punched him in the mouth.  “A fly,” he said.  “Don’t want to make you look silly.”  Never mind that I was naked as a plucked chicken.

“What’s this all about?”  I said again, trying to make myself sound a little more forceful.  Pretty tough to sound forceful when you’re immobilized from the neck down, but I was doing my best.  “It’s your fucking money.  It’s your fucking briefcase.”

“That may be,” he said.  “But I had to make it look like so much more.  That briefcase,” he leaned close again.  I tried to keep down my nausea.  Didn’t want to meet old Boyle with a gullet full of vomit.  “That briefcase can’t be opened for just anything.”

“So it’s a pretty nice one, then?  Calfskin and gold fittings?  Saving it for a special occasion?”

He hit me across the face.  Hurt like a bastard.  That bastard.  I could feel blood oozing out of my nose.  Could taste it on my tongue.  Violet gasped a little.

“What is contained in that briefcase is more important than you or I could ever be, Sharman,” he hissed.

“More important than Louis Waverly?  Be still my heart.”

He raised his hand to hit me again and Virginia shouted from the doorway.  He smiled a little.  Raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that smile.  “Yes,” he said, his voice pinched.  “More important than that.”

“So what is it?  Come on, Waverly, it’s pretty clear you’re going to off me anyway.  Let’s have it.”

Louis just smiled again.  “It really is a shame you and Kitty couldn’t settle down,” he said. “You’re just her type.”  The slimy fuck.  “Violet, baby, don’t you think so?”  Violet crossed next to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.  Made my skin crawl.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said sweetly.  “You’d have to ask Virginia.”

I wanted to strangle both of them with my bare hands and to hell with a gun.  I wanted both of them to look into my eyes as I did it.  They were just that kind of people.

“Fuck you,” I croaked.

“You had your chance,” she shot back.  I had to admit it was a pretty snappy retort.

Louis stood up sloughing Violet off like an old skin.  “My gun, Virginia.”  She gave it to him, but I could see that her hand was trembling.  Her other hand drifted down to her thigh.  Fingers twitching.  She must have her own gun snapped safely against her skin.   I caught Virginia’s eye.  Not hard to do.  She was looking at me.  A pleading look, I would’ve said if she hadn’t poisoned my whiskey and tied me up naked on her bed.  But there was something in that look, something that made me want to play for time.  Maybe Tommy and the others could wait a while.  Play another hand of pinochle, or whatever it was they did on the other side.  Take some time before dealing me in to the game.

“So Waverly,” I called after him.  “You didn’t finish telling me why you kidnapped yourself.  Unless it was just because even you were tired of being around you.”

He stopped.  Turned back.  His eyes were almost black.  Never a good sign.  But my ploy seemed to have worked.  I figured it would, since the bad guy can never resist the opportunity to brag.

“I needed it to look that way, Sharman,” he said silkily.  His fingers sliding up and down his gun.  “I couldn’t open that briefcase unless I was in mortal danger.”

“But you were never in mortal danger.”  This seemed obvious enough even for Violet, who was looking interested.

“It couldn’t be opened,” he said, “unless someone thought I was in mortal danger.”

“And how, pray tell, did you go about doing that?  Faking your own kidnapping wouldn’t fool a kid in nursery school.”

“Fooled you, didn’t it?  More importantly, it fooled Virginia.  At least for a while.  And the instructions I gave her were clear.  She wasn’t to open it until she believed my life was at stake.”

“Touching,” I spat.  “Trusting her like that.”

“Isn’t it?  She believed it just long enough to get serious about getting into the case.”

“Why not just open it?  Who cares if it’s the right time?”

Waverly gave a little grimacing sort of smile, the kind you give when a kid hands you a self-portrait done in uncooked macaroni.  “Virginia might not be the most fidelity-minded of women in many respects, but she has a nasty habit of loyalty.”

“Can it, Waverly.  Why not just open the case?”

He sighed.  “There are two keys to the case, Sharman.  I have one and Virginia has the other.  I can’t get into it without her key.  So I had Violet send Virginia my key when she sent the first note announcing my kidnapping.  So she’d take it seriously.”

“Five days later?”  I asked.  Eyes back on Virginia.  She was bright red.  Still clawing at her leg.

“I had that first little envelope delivered the day after my alleged disappearance.  She believed I was truly in danger.  She’s already got the briefcase, Sharman.  She’s had it the whole time.  But I don’t think she’s opened it yet, not until she knew how it would all pan out.  I must admit I was a little worried she’d be hasty about the entire thing.  So a few days later I had Violet here send her a little love note filling her in.  Once she knew the plan I must say she took right to it.”

Shook my head.  “So she brought me in.  What the fuck for?  So your life was allegedly at stake.  Just open the goddamned case already and be done with it.  I was doing just fine without all this shit, thanks.”

“Virginia?”  Louis said.  She opened her mouth a few times.  Good impression of a goldfish. “I . . .”  She didn’t seem to be able to continue.  Louis pointed his gun at her.  The blush was sucked back into her cheeks in an instant.  She was dead white.  Took a deep breath.  I suddenly wanted to kill Louis even more.  I wish I knew a little voodoo.  I wanted to kill him and bring him back to life so I could kill him again.  Even though Virginia had screwed me but good, I still held that little flickering flame for her.  Right in the part of my brain that controlled stupidity.

“Virginia?” he said again, bearing down slightly.

“Kitty,” she cried finally.  “I did it because of Kitty.”

I would’ve frozen if I wasn’t frozen already.  Kitty.  Her sister-in-law, who she loved more than Louis ever could.  Who I’d loved and left.  All because of Virginia.

“It’s not my fault what happened to her,” I said quietly.  “If it’s anybody’s fault it’s those two.”  Louis.  Violet, who was trying to slink away.

“I know that now!” she all but shouted.  “I know!  But Jimmy, when Violet told me what was going on, I was still so mad at you.  I wanted to kill you.  You didn’t see her,” she said, tears starting to gather in her eyes.  “You didn’t see what she’d turned into.  She was like my sister, Jimmy!” she cried.  “I loved her, and you didn’t see it, but she . . .”  She broke down.  Fell to the floor.  I didn’t think she was acting now.

“So you just thought you’d use the opportunity to take care of a few outstanding problems?”  Nothing like kicking a man when he’s down.  I ought to know.

Virginia didn’t say anything.  She was crying too hard.  She must’ve saved up all those sobs over all the years that I’d known her when she never shed a tear.  She’d cried more in the past two days than the past decade.

“Answered all of your questions?”  Louis snapped.  He was clearly itching to get down to business.

“What’s in the case, Waverly?”

“Ahh, the case.”  I wanted to slug him right in his melodramatic kisser.  “It contains something more powerful than–”

“You and me and baby makes three, yadda yadda yadda.  What’s in the fucking case?”

He smiled again.  That same creepy smile.  Stroked his gun.  “A document.  A very important, powerful document.  A piece of paper that will cause all the good works–” his mouth twisted at that—“done by all those well-meaning bureaucrats and politicians fall into dust.”

“So you did all this to get a bigger piece of the action?”  I said.  I didn’t even bother being shocked.  I’d wondered before if Louis might have gone a little mad with power.  And seeing as how I was all but dead already it didn’t seem worth the effort to get worked up.

“Don’t be stupid, Sharman, it doesn’t look good on you.”

“What, then?”

“The old days are gone.  Nothing will bring them back.  And this paper, this set of papers, will make the city docks look like a Sunday picnic.”

All right, maybe my stomach got a little cold at that one.

“That’s why I was so careful with it.  A little present from our dear departed mayor.  Enough dirt on everyone in this city, this state, all the way up to the feds, enough dirt on all the players to make them fall down and declare me President.  I locked it up with the explicit instructions that if I was ever in mortal danger Virginia was to destroy its contents.  That was how it looked on paper, anyway.”

“Cozy,” I muttered.

“It’s easy to be nonchalant about it when you’re going to miss all the fireworks,” Louis said coolly.  “And on that note.”  He raised his gun.

“No!” Virginia cried, struggling up from the floor.  She’d used her time down there to fish her gun out from under her skirt.  She brandished it at him.  The room exploded in action as much as a room with three people and one mannequin can.  Louis whirled around to face her.  Violet screamed and dove behind him.  He kicked at her and she yelped like a struck puppy.  Pulled out her own gun.  Probably a reflex, since she didn’t seem to know who to point it at.  Virginia leapt onto the bed, her body shielding mine, still pointing her gun at Louis.

I needed a drink like Saint Nick needed his eight tiny reindeer.

“Jimmy,” Virginia said still focusing on Louis.  “Jimmy, I’m so sorry for all of this.  I’m so sorry.  I love you, Jimmy, I swear it.  I never would have gone along with this, I wasn’t thinking.”

I was.  I knew she was thinking it was just like Kitty all over again.  I don’t know why I went along with it, Jimmy.  I don’t know why I did and I’d take it back in a second if I could.

“Get away from her, Virginia,” Louis barked.  His voice was cold as ice.  Colder.  It would’ve frozen water and made the ice cubes break out of sheer terror.  “Get away from her.  I will kill you.”

“I know.  I don’t care.  If I have the chance to get you first I’m taking it,” she said.  Like a whole different woman.  Nothing timid.  Nothing remorseful.

“I mean it, Virginia.  Nothing must stop me.”

I stepped out of my body then.  Watched everything happen.  Louis talking like he was in a bad movie.  Violet cowering down low, her little pistol vacillating between targets.  Virginia straddling me, gun arm straight and unwavering.  She loved me.  My hovering consciousness was able to drink that thought straight down without worrying about how many bodies would be slumped in this room in just a few seconds.  That thought would push my little boat calmly down the river to the grand old cardroom where my friends sat waiting.  They’d probably have good scotch there.  And Virginia loved me, and she was sorry.

And then, in a flash, it happened.

If I could slow that flash down, it would’ve looked like this:  Virginia dropped her hand and fired off a round.  Suddenly my limbs were loose and fluid, she’d hit the knot.  I scrambled for my gun, still resting on the nightstand.  In that second there was a terrible scream that filled up more time than standing in line at the DMV.  It filled up that whole moment.

Louis’s lips moving.  Violet’s too.  Except her gun was pointed at him.  Louis’s finger was twitching in that way that strikes fear into a man’s heart just before it strikes you dead.  Couldn’t tell what Violet said, but her gunshot knocked his off course and the mirror on the wall next to the bed exploded.  Flying glass everywhere.  Louis on the floor, not moving.  Violet shaking like a leaf.  And Virginia.

She was warm in my arms.  Warm and sweet.  At first I couldn’t tell what it was that was making everything so warm and I thought it must just be her.  Then I tore my eyes away from hers, wide and unblinking.  Blood everywhere.  But she hadn’t been hit.

“Virginia?”

Nothing.

“Virginia?”  I was getting a little panicked.  I realized the blood was hers.  Shards of glass from the mirror protruded from her body like little icebergs.  She coughed.  More blood.

Violet screamed again.  Dropped her gun.  Louis started to stir and I whipped my gun to face him and fired off a round.  I aimed for his leg but I didn’t really care what I hit.  “Call somebody,” I shouted at Violet.  “Go!”  She nodded and bolted.  I hoped she’d do it.

“Virginia?”

“Jimmy?” she said weakly, her voice faraway.  “I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t waste your breath on it,” I choked.  I tried pick out the shards of glass.  I didn’t have much time.  My hand was shaking hard.

“I love you,” she whispered.  More coughing.  Jesus, I had to stop the blood.  But I couldn’t.  She was too broken.  My little broken doll.  I kept trying to pull the glass out of her, to stanch the bleeding.  She was getting lighter.

“Don’t go, Virginia,” I mumbled feverishly.  “Don’t go, Virginia, baby, I love you.”

But I could see her getting into her little boat.  Climbing into it.  Stepping in daintily, just like a lady.  I saw her turn back and wink at me, lifting a cigarette to her lips.  Just like a dame.

I leaned over and kissed her lips.  Still warm.  Still soft.  Still my girl.

I would’ve screamed if I was that kind of guy.  But I’ve always thought of myself as more the strong, silent type, so I just held on to her and cried.  Silent guys cry.  You just don’t hear them.

What you do hear, what I hear in the nightmares that not even a good handle of scotch can blot out, are sirens.  Violet must’ve called the cops.  I held on to Virginia’s body and half-hoped she’d managed to wrangle a few who weren’t so crooked they walked on their hands.  I wanted Waverly dead, if he wasn’t dead already.  I wanted him the kind of dead that takes years.

Heard the flatfoots pounding up the stairs.  I realized I was still naked, but I didn’t care.  If they were gonna be distracted by that instead of the blood and death, fuck ‘em.

It was like a dream play.  Boys in blue swarming into the room.  Waverly still alive.  Hauled downstairs.  Some faceless blot with a gold badge trying to pull Virginia out of my arms.  Wrapping a sheet around me.  Pushing me into the bathroom so I could wash off some of the blood.

They were escorting me out the door before I remembered the case.  Tried to tell one of the boys about it.  Still wet behind the ears, green at the gills from the scene.  He hollered for his boss, one of the few real friends I’d had on the force who didn’t hop their own little raft that day on the docks.  Tried to explain it to him.  Said he’d take care of it.

I believed him.  It felt good to believe someone.

They took me to a hotel.  Not too cheap.  My old buddy pressed a brown paper bag into my hand and advised me to drink the whole thing.

Friendship.  I guess that’s something.

The pineapple farm was in the middle of one of the most desolate stretches of the American Southwest. Surrounded by howling desert on all sides, it was a two-day drive from the nearest town, and then a day-long walk from where the road was abruptly abridged by a set of iron spikes planted deep in the sand. “You can try to drive on it,” he said, nonchalantly twisting the stem of his cocktail glass in lazy loops, “but you’ll sink, and the vultures love shiny things.” Instead there was a makeshift track, miles of weatherbeaten planks that pilgrims trod grimly, gritting their teeth against the onslaught of blowing sand.

It was a marvel of engineering, the pineapple farm, rooted as it was to some of the most unforgiving land around. He had bought the property specifically because of its harsh remoteness, but his motives had never been made publicly available. Some speculated a failed love affair with a Hawaiian princess, others the madness that comes of great wealth acquired too quickly, but few could resist the curiosity. Fewer still had made the attempt; barroom boasts were as frequent and empty as their proclaimers’ beer bottles, but there were three known expeditions, of which only two returned.

Nobody knew what was so compelling to those who set out to see for themselves the pineapple farm’s miraculous workings, but it was generally agreed that the sorts of people who would be lured by such things were the sorts of people who tried for them, so nobody was impressed by the two gritty, sunburned tales of failure on a fool’s errand, and nobody was particularly upset at the loss of the third, a known idiot. Still, the occupants of the tavern nearest the pineapple farm still found time to speculate about his fate.

“Damn fool got hisself stuck in the quicksand they got up there.”

“You’re the damn fool, there ain’t no quicksand in this desert. You gotta have water to have quicksand.”

“You gotta have water to have pineapples, too, and that old loon up yonder’s got a whole field of ‘em.”

“Ain’t nobody ever seen it for themselves. I think it’s just stories.”

Around and around, their curiosity unfulfilled, impossible to satisfy. One evening, after recounting a well-worn version involving bandits, coyotes, and a Gypsy queen, a voice spoke up from the back of the room.

“You’ve got it all wrong.”

Heads swung around in shocked unison. The voice emanated from the darkest corner of the shadowy end of the dim bar, seemed to come from the darkness itself.

“Well, just what do you think happened then, smart guy?”

There was a low chorus of half-menacing agreement. The voice in the corner shifted, rather, its owner shifted, but it seemed only to be a rearranging of the shadows.

“The path leads to a lake so big it might as well be the ocean.”

The murmurs escalated, a few jeers punctuating the tension that grew despite the most practiced nonchalance of the tavern’s inhabitants. “A lake? You know we’re talking about the desert here, son.” “A lake? Maybe a dry one.” Not known for their fancy talk to being with, even the most eloquent among their number could not seem to overcome their astonishment to deliver a satisfyingly demeaning dismissal.

“It’s a lake. A big one. I saw it.”

“Bullshit you saw it!” shouted one indignant young pup. The sausage-fingered bar matron shushed him with a whip of her towel.

“I went out looking for the pineapple farm a long time ago,” the voice continued. “I can’t rightly say what it was made me go looking, only I had a dream that wouldn’t stop coming, every night. In it I was sailing through the golden waters of Paradise, and there were flowers and trees and all sorts of wonders, and I looked down and my boat was a hollowed-out pineapple, and I knew right then I had to find the pineapple farm.”

A few of the more religious congregants murmured their assent.

“So I set out from my home, with a full tank of gas and a pair of good shoes.”

The members of the first expedition looked down shamefully. They had worn only flip-flops, and the sting of that innocence still burned in each of their souls.

“I made it to the end of the road, and set out along the path. I brought a full flask of water and a compass, because the sand had blown over the planks but I knew I had to head north, because that was the direction I had been going in my dream.”

The leader of the second expedition bit his lip hard. They had worn sturdy leather boots but had been given no premonitions and had left their map in the car.

“After what seemed like a lifetime of walking through the desert, you can imagine my surprise when I fell headlong into the vastness of that body of water. I tell you all, I swear to you on my life, it was the coolest, freshest, purest water I have ever fallen into.”

By now even the most outraged had lost their enthusiasm for bilious disagreement and were leaning in close to hear.

“I thought I had died, and was on my way to my reward, whatever that may be. All around me I heard the songs of birds, and I could smell the sweetness of pineapple in the air. It was the Paradise of my dream, and I had reached it.”

“Well?” demanded the young pup. The matron whipped her towel at him and he whimpered.

“I didn’t know what to do, if I should swim toward what I thought was Paradise, or if I should wait and see what happened. I was just about to start swimming when something came up from the depths and pushed me toward the far shore.”

The occupants of the tavern were silent. The silence overwhelmed the room until it became a palpable force, squeezing at the throats of the patrons until one let loose a wild half-cough, a strained and guttural exhalation of suppressed anticipation.

“The strange beast—for it was a beast, no question—pushed me across the clear blue waters of the lake until I was thrown hard against the shore. I rubbed my eyes to clear them and I found myself staring at two of the cleanest, most well-tended shoes I’d ever seen in my life.”

A low shuffle permeated the room for a moment as the assembled townsfolk tried to hide their shoes out of embarrassment.

“Before I could speak, I heard the soft sluice of water as my unknown conveyance revealed itself. The sun was so bright I couldn’t make it out, only that it must be very large from the way the mysterious figure before me looked up to receive it.”

The voice paused, the darkness wavered for a moment as a single match illuminated only an indistinct palm, and the tip of a waiting cigarette. There was a half-breath of smoke before the flame was extinguished and the voice continued, unencumbered by the light.

“The man—for it was a man standing in front of me—asked the great beast why I had been spared, and only then was I able to see it. Rising out of the waters was a monstrous dragon, a serpentine monolith with a fierce beard and razor-sharp claws.”

It was at this point that the least credulous in the bar let out a sharp cacophony of disbelieving snorts, though they were quickly reprimanded by the matron and several others more devoted to the possibility of the fantastic. Don’t forget, their stern, reproachful glances seemed to say, this man is talking about the pineapple farm.

“The dragon reared back as though it was about to strike my name from the book of the living,” the voice continued. “But at the moment I was certain I was to truly enter the Paradise of my dreams, it stopped its fearful motion and pushed back away from the shore. I tell you all, its words to its master, as the man before me certainly was, have stayed with me all these many years.”

“What were they?” the young pup whispered as the matron hushed him with a half-conscious flick of her towel.

“The dragon doubled back as though it were making sure it had me fully in its sights, then turned first to its master and then back to me, hissing such a condemnation that at the time I wished it had done as it was intended and killed me at the outset of this insane journey.

‘I can really see what you tried to do with that outfit,’

and it slid languidly beneath the waves, the poisonous disdain of those words rising to the surface in unhurried bubbles, bursting bright as the scouring lights of the Rapture, exposing my weakness, my most secret shame.”

The voice fell silent. The crowd vibrated with the impulse to gasp but none dared draw breath. Finally, after several tortured minutes, a young barmaid ventured a stuttering query.

“What-” she began, then took a moment to collect herself before continuing. “What were you wearing?”

The voice did not resume for a long time. The darkness layered upon the shadowed darkness shifted uncomfortably, yet nobody else dared speak.

“You know,” came the voice after a desperate eternity. “The usual.”

There was a communal release of breath, sharp as a pistol crack. A low rumbling of voices became an increasing cacophony of pity and disbelief until a loud whistle from the corner stopped the blare.

“It was gone. It had spared my life but had taken a terrible toll on my soul. I no longer cared for the golden pleasures of that pineapple-studded dreamscape. I had squandered my time on this Earth, and was unworthy of such treasures. I knew this deep inside. The journey had been a failed undertaking from the start. I had felt, as I was packing up my Taurus, that I should be better-prepared for the splendor of what I might find, yet I had neglected even that duty in my rush to acquire Paradise.”

The weary nods of the older, less idealistic patrons were almost audible.

“But what about the man?” the barmaid whispered, clutching at her ample bosom.

“The man,” the voice said, and then trailed off before returning at its full strength. “The man held out his hand to me. He congratulated me on my having survived this final test of the will, that I had not succumbed to the monster’s searing insight, that my mettle was of a kind worthy of the metaphysical pleasures he had spent his lifetime devising. Yet I knew within myself that the opposite was true, that I had been proved unworthy. The man seemed to sense this resignation in my soul, for he looked at me intently for a few moments before speaking.

‘Don’t mind Betty. He can be a real bitch sometimes.’

No matter how I tried to convince myself of the man’s honesty of intention I felt sullied, unbecoming of Paradise, so I thanked him for his implicit hospitality, then confessed my feelings. This man, this madman or this angel, who had created a pineapple farm to rival any in Heaven here at the center of a ravaged Hellscape, held out his hand to me, and told me there was a boathouse about fifty yards from where we were standing, and that I could take his outboard as long as I tied it up to the dock across the lake. With those words, he was gone, a retreating figure of mystery, of veneration, a pineapple-scented God on Earth, whose folly had shown me the folly of my own trembling and inconsequential humanity.”

With that, the dim amber searchlight of the cigarette was extinguished. The patrons were silent, anxiously searching each others’ faces for how they were meant to feel, to perceive this new life.

“So you didn’t even get to see the pineapple farm?” the young pup asked, only a hint of disappointment. The matron waved her towel, signaling her shared curiosity.

“No,” the voice said, heavy with sorrow. “I never did.”

“Then how do you know it was even there?”

The voice was silent for a long time. Finally, the hand that had heretofore only been seen as the chiaroscuro windscreen to a cigarette emerged from the darkness, clutching something as though releasing it would engender a terrible strife upon the world.

“Here,” the voice said, before it was absorbed back into the shadows for eternity. The hand released its precious cargo with a dull thud upon the tabletop.

Several of the more daring occupants immediately crowded around the table.

“What’s this?”

“It’s–”

“It can’t be.”

“But it is.”

There, illuminated by a soft corona of its own generation, lay a single pineapple ring, fragrant as Paradise, fringed with regret.

Nobody said anything for the rest of that fateful night, nor for a long time after. Whispers of expeditions to find the pineapple farm were met with a sad resignation that outsiders could not understand, nor could they fathom why the townsfolk, so eager to assist them in any way, pointed so dejectedly toward the last building on the way out of town on the road that lead to the pineapple farm. The pilgrims would approach this last structure before the trials that awaited them with trepidation, with a penitent’s fearful devotion, unsure of their need for diamond-studded cufflinks but certain of the path to Paradise.

At this point the American political process so bitter and divisive that the belief in meaningful change in a single election cycle, or from here atop this cliff a dozen election cycles, is just as much of a delusion as the belief that ensuring the basic health care of the citizenry means the terrorists win.

Essentially it needs to be okay, more than okay, it needs to be an accepted practice or a self-evident truth or a plainspoken no-brainer that our leaders are held accountable not only for big things like the economy and foreign policy but for their smaller actions and words. Did you hear about Robert Bentley, governor-elect of Alabama, the man who says everyone is his brother and sister unless they’re not Christian, in which case they’re not his brother and sister, which makes him sad, because he wants everyone to be his brother or sister, so he recommends conversion? Did you hear the outrage? Not just the wait-a-goddamned-minute-when-did-I-get-on-the-bus-to-Crazytown outrage, but the shock and pearl-clutching that anyone would dare to question an elected official? However, it’s not the implications of the action that are getting attention, it’s the man himself and the furor surrounding him, it’s a starving dog’s relentless snapping after meat and these fuckers are pure fat, Religion and Freedom and Choice and The First Fucking Amendment Says You Can’t Tell Me I’m Wrong, they’re already sizzling, they were made especially for you. Nobody will tell you it’s bad for you, because an unhappy fact is first and foremost unhappy. Facts, too, are unhappy in themselves, as they are unchanging, they are just so right there, and as facts have become synonymous with rules and restrictions and it’s always the guy you hate who reminds you that smoking causes cancer, it’s not because he’s got the facts it’s because he’s got a thin moustache, he looks just like that guy you hated in high school, because of these things it’s time to overthrow facts in favor of personality.

It’s easy to understand why the public is so eager to accept the politicians as the story: the story itself is too overwhelming. The story is absolutely terrifying. Governor Bentley’s suggestion of religious conversion with its corollary veiled threat of monumentally unconstitutional exclusion, is the story of a place whose people have chosen to represent them a man who appears to have an inverse amount of respect and regard for the “sacred documents” establishing the place’s foundation to that which he so righteously displays. Hiding beneath that American flag pin, made in China, sure, but it’s just a pin and things made in America are, let’s face it, more expensive, and next time it’s USA All The Way, you know we’re serious about that, lies a PIN pad, its gentle beeping as it waits for him to continue the transaction fooling the best cardiologists his money can buy into thinking he’s a real boy, and this is the man that was chosen by the people. It’s the story of a nation so divided the chasm seems unspannable no matter how many Bethlehem girders we can so rapturously reminisce. However, the Far Right Victimhood Parade, while satisfyingly outrageous, while ludicrously loud and addictively colorful, is doing nothing except churning up vitriol. It’s just more sugar in the gas tank of this bus that was supposed to drive us into the glorious future. We’ve already argued so much over the directions that the map is torn and indecipherable, so now we’re on a service road patrolled by concealed-carry vigilantes, and nobody could afford to keep paying for the OnStar, and Sarah Palin, who was invited along because she seemed cool, like us, like she’d know all the lyrics to the Tom Petty tape that was the only one we could find but hey, it’s good, it’s America, keeps putting all the sugar in the gas tank and then pointing fingers when her coffee is bitter. So now we’re lost, stuck, and arguing about the coffee while some stranger who doesn’t like your face or your name or where you put your cock is feeling pretty good about the new 30-round magazine he got at the gun show, and fuck it, might as well go out a celebrity.

If flammable and inflammable are interchangeable, why not fame and infamy? Sarah Palin’s embrace of this lack of distinction, this manufactured outrage at having the enormity of her legion of small mistakes—itty-bitty, nitpicking, just picking on her, really—pointed out, virtually guarantees her absolute lack of viability on the legitimate political stage. Of course, the legitimate political stage is so boring, there’s no laugh track and there’s never anybody getting kicked in the nuts, and you have to wear nice pants and sometimes the people there use painfully difficult words. Given that sort of opposition, and who needs it anyway, those people aren’t us, they’ve got cars and houses and jobs and passports, Palin has abandoned the stage and run away with the circus. Never mind her portrait hanging in the Oval Office, it’s painted ten times as big as life on a thousand big tops from sea to shining sea. She’s a celebrity who wants to be a politician who wants to be a celebrity, she’s a neophyte with aspirations of Nero, who has a whole saying with his name in it so he must be really famous, something about Rome which smacks of Papism but also fiddles which smacks of the front porch, we’ll call it a wash, Palin’s ersatz martyrdom is a comforting enough replica to warrant a place of honor on the knotty pine mantels of believers everywhere. When the medicine runs out because of the Communists or the Socialists or because of that damned government interference the guns will come out and the gloves will come off and to the last rotted tooth and the last splitting, yellowed nail that good night will be met with the last great bellow of indignant rage, trailing almost inaudibly into sighs of hopes dashed, of opportunities missed, of a lifetime of regrets that things didn’t work out as expected, of every small slight and misremembered grudge, but serene and happy, almost pleased, as the knowledge that there’s nothing I could have done swells within our hearts, those pillars of salt and cholesterol and excess and misery, goodnight, goodnight, I was a better person than anyone will ever know.

Because that’s America. Live fast, die of a curable disease.

I have friends who live for traveling—Costa Rica, New York, Paris, Vienna, you name it, they’re excited to go and loathe to return.  I’m happy for them.  Honestly, go somewhere, eat gelato, take pictures of weird birds, bring me a keychain.  I’ll be at home snuggling my cat and making sure the Canadians don’t invade and steal all your stuff.

That said, all this guilt and insecurity about not liking to travel is really bringing me down.  I just returned from four days in Denver, Colorado (I had altitude exhaustion and brain-scramble for most of it) and when I was picked up at the airport my friend remarked on how different we are.  She’s one of my traveling friends.  She loves going to new and different places because they’re new and different, and because I respect her tremendously and think she makes good decisions and has good opinions I immediately feel less-than for not liking travel.  She doesn’t judge me (out loud, anyway) for being a homebody, but I have no doubt it’s very difficult for her to comprehend.  Why wouldn’t someone like to go somewhere new and see things they’ve never seen before?  I suppose if I (ever) had my wits about me, I’d say why go somewhere new when there are infinite mysteries still to be discovered about the place I live now?  And the people I live with?  And the ways I feel about all that stuff?  But since my wits are so rarely around (I assume they’re usually off getting stoned on the couch, watching The West Wing) I just mumble something about yeah, I totally love being home, and then I feel dumb later and write some stream-of-consciousness nonsense like this to try to explain my position to myself.

When my traveling friends return from their far-flung expeditions they are invariably disappointed with their mundane lives and jobs and houses and friends who talk about television and Facebook and their mundane lives and jobs and houses.  These traveling friends return flushed with the glow of far-off places and exciting experiences and strangers and foreign languages and they always have cool-looking money that I always try to filch, not because I’m jealous of their travels or acquaintance with otherness and want to capture some tangible essence of the foreign, but because seriously, that money has holograms on it.  I like to hear about their trip to an extent, but my dislike of traveling is so intense even talking about it is distasteful.  And besides, how excited should I reasonably be expected to get about hiking through a beautiful rainforest and seeing beautiful things when I didn’t see them and the person who did can’t describe it in a way that really captures the essence of the thing?  I don’t mean to imply my friends are bad at describing stuff; many of them are very good at it.  But there’s always something missing.  For me, it’s the desire to go see those things in the first place, and no amount of breathless description or beautiful photographs can overcome the sinking feeling I get after two nights away, thinking about my cat, and my bedroom, and how much I’d rather be drinking dirty martinis with my friends.

I suppose I’m a creature of habit.  Perhaps if all those layers were peeled away, I am fundamentally insecure and anxious, and instead of being invigorated by change and newness, I’m exhausted and distressed.  I never know how to behave in new places.  For a lot of my traveling friends that’s not an issue—they’re intelligent, gracious, and respectful.  They’re also pretty good at not being afraid.  I myself am not good at not being afraid.  I’m always convinced, be it in New York or a day’s drive from my house, that I’m about to make some monumental gaffe and get my sorry ass hounded out of town.  Or worse:  nobody will like me and I’ll be left to my own devices, which happens at home, sure, but at least at home I have all my familiar objects and places (and cats) to ground and comfort me.  I can’t get my bearings elsewhere.  Being comfortable when I’m away from home is not something that comes easily or naturally or really, at all.  And I don’t like being uncomfortable.  For some it’s a thrill, a way to feel more alive.  For others the discombobulation is brief, if it happens at all.  I don’t envy those people, since I don’t know how to envy something diametrically opposed to my own basic experience of the world.  I don’t envy it, but I do let it make me feel bad about being such a devoted homebody.  I feel guilty and insulated and naïve when I hear friends raving about their trip to Luxor, or planning a drinking tour of France.  Why can’t I want those things?  What’s wrong with me?  Am I really so satisfied with my little life in my little town?

Okay, yes I am.  I exist in the place between being outgoing and sociable and travel-ready, and being a recluse.  Sometimes I feel like I’d get more credit as a recluse, since that’s a label with some mystery and intrigue and sex attached to it.  Something makes people reclusive.  They’ve got the inverse of whatever it is that drives people to travel.  It’s a thing.  It’s not just “oh, I’d rather stay home.”

Maybe I’m selling myself short.  For one thing, I don’t know if anyone actually cares that I don’t like to travel.  Obviously I’ve got some problems with it, if I can feel so easily judged.  I’m very sensitive about my love of home, and the security of familiarity.  Obviously I feel like there’s something wrong with me for getting homesick after two days away.  It seems childish to me when people bring it up.  I am ashamed of not wanting to go out into the world and experience it for myself.  But I just don’t want to.

I suppose part of the reason is that I don’t really have anyone to travel with.  I am the type of person (as it may be assumed from the whole intense need for security and familiarity thing) who feels a million times better, about myself and the world I’m in, if I feel like I’ve got someone on my team.  I am not good at being alone.  I’ll go one farther and say I am possibly the absolute worst at being alone.  I have an intense need to be solitary sometimes, but not for very long, and if I can’t have contact with people I care about I start panicking and feeling sick.  Like, physically sick.  It’s lame, and I should probably figure out why that is—aside from the standard psychological tropes of abandonment and self-worth, if there’s anything aside from those—so I can knock it off.  But I will defend this position by arguing that the people who are significant to me are just as integral a part of my definition of home as the place I live (and my cat).  I need them around because I feel lost without them.  I don’t mean to say my perception of myself is defined solely by my interactions and relationships, but there’s no denying that’s a huge part of it.  I figure a person can be judged by the company they keep, and if my company is a thousand miles away, what does that make me?  Lonesome and bored and anxious.

My friends who live for traveling are some of my very best friends, but this relationship to relationships is another thing we don’t really have the same perspective on.  The biggest travelers I know are the people I would describe as being the worst at maintaining close friendships.  Maybe I expect too much, but I communicate with my close friends regularly, several times a day.  Text messages, online, in person:  I like to be connected to them.  I live in a house with three roommates, but I definitely live alone, and spend a lot of time by myself, and while I absolutely need solitude sometimes I need contact more.  My traveling friends don’t have this same need, or they don’t seem to, and just as I don’t understand how they can be so gaga over going away for three weeks, they don’t understand why I want to talk to them every day.  Or that’s how it seems.  One friend struggles with this especially; they don’t quite know why it’s so hard to develop close friendships with other people, but if I point out how it’s been three days since they’ve said hello there’s an inevitable furrowed brow and a declaration of why they don’t think that should matter so much.  I have always wanted to jump on the table and demand to know if they’re shitting me, that contact with friends is the only thing that matters.  Of course I don’t, since I am the sort of person who is eager to defer, and if that means feeling bad about liking to be home, well, that’s what I’ll do.  Then, like I said before, I will write this sort of thing as an apologia.

Here’s how I feel about my own relationship to home:  it is more important to have a deep knowledge of and connection to what defines home for oneself than it is to have a broad and shallow connection to the larger world.  I don’t mean for that to sound judgmental, since obviously our opinions probably differ.  But putting down deep psychological and social and creative roots in a place, and nurturing those roots for the lovely tree of blah blah blah to flourish is infinitely more valuable to me than walking through a pretty garden of strange plants that I might not see again.  Certainly the experience of seeing them and smelling their exotic fragrance is valuable, but I will always want to be sitting under my big ol’ poetic oak tree, taking in the view I’ve seen a thousand times before.  I think finding tiny differences in the familiar is so much more interesting than being surrounded by difference in the unfamiliar.  I suppose I have drawn a direct analogy for myself about my life:  I want a life that is rich and well-tended and deeply connected that covers a very small territory.  I want to learn everything about my town, and friends, and weave my own history from the threads they make.  I want to be defined by an incredibly detailed experience of the world, to give myself limits to push against in a way that makes what I do more intimate.  I love intimacy.  Maybe that’s it.  Maybe I dislike travel because it’s the opposite of intimate.

I want to live on a farm in rural England.  BUT THAT WOULD TOTALLY REQUIRE TRAVEL, you say.  This is a fact, indisputable.  However, I don’t want to go hang out in London, or see the white cliffs of Dover, or send you a postcard I got in a tube station or whatever it is they have.  I want to live on a farm in rural England because I want to live on a farm in rural anywhere, and England because America and I are involved in a long, drawn-out, messy breakup, and I don’t want the total alienation of not speaking the language of the place I live.  I could certainly learn a foreign language, but because of my chosen field I would have to attain absolute mastery of another tongue before I could even begin to feel comfortable.  Language is essential to my identity, and playing tricks with English is an integral part of who I am (there’s a reason I am hesitant to even imagine actually visiting a foreign country, even though I have a strange compulsion to go to Spain).  I want to live on a farm because that’s a part of my heritage, because I can’t imagine anything more intimate in every sense (except there will be no sheep-fucking on my farm, take it somewhere else).

Sometimes I wish I could really get into traveling.  I mentioned to this friend who picked me up that when we get transporters all these problems will be solved.  I need to be able to escape from escapes.  The possibility of escaping back to my house is pretty distant if I’m half the world away.  But when the day comes that I can get into a little phone booth and zap my molecules across an ocean, that’s the day I’ll hassle pigeons at the Trevi Fountain or climb a bunch of ancient stone steps carved into some beautiful misty, mystical mountainside in China.  See, these are things I’d like to do, honest.  I’d really like to go to Marrakech, and Kerala, and St. Petersburg.  Maybe if I were fabulously wealthy I’d have homes dotting the globe to retreat to, which would probably help keep me from feeling totally adrift.  Of course, if I were fabulously wealthy . . .

Anyway, I feel the compulsion to justify my love of home.  Maybe I need to get out more.  Maybe I need to learn to love travel, to let coming home be a cause for celebration, not a constant yearning.  Maybe I need to get comfortable in my own skin first.  Yeah, that’s probably it.

Upset about what? you ask because you are perceptive and intelligent. Well, I respond because I am feeling balanced and reasonable (except for the part where my hands are shaking with furious anger), I’m upset about dudes.

There was a piece written about the TUSH! Burlesque show that happened earlier this month. It was published in a quasi-local newspaper. It was written by someone who has generally published straight reviews, so the (natural) expectation was that it would be a straight review. Instead, turns out it was a “fluff” piece (not my word) about burlesque in general, and in the words of the reviewer, “This article was not, nor was it intended to be, a review of this particular performance of TUSH! Burlesque, which closed before the article could possibly run. It was only meant to help publicize the group and its art form.”

Which is the polite way of saying it was done to give these little ladies a boost. Because, as a commenter asserted, “It was a bit of a fluff piece to keep TUSH! in good publicity. I recommend being grateful for that and understand that you are still not having “real” fans come to your performances. They are all friends and relatives for the most part. This is a piece that can help widen your appeal.”

Don’t whine, girls, we’re doing you a favor!

Also, it strikes me as highly unlikely that 8 women would have 300 friends and family between them coming to every show, but hey, that would require some logic and math, and as a lady I am not good at that.

The real root of my anger, aside from the specific slights, is the sexism oozing from every pore of both the reviewer and commenter. The (actually quite clearly stated) overtones of patronizing male privilege are inescapable and overpowering. Like this:

“Indeed, only a true cad would write negative criticism of ladies sufficiently brave and generous enough to doff their duds for art’s sake, and I am not that cad.”

Thing is, burlesque is about ladies taking their clothes off. I mean, there’s a lot more to it, which you know I’ll get into in a minute, but when you go to a burlesque show, you are going to see ladies take their clothes off. The performers spend hours and hours and hours practicing taking their clothes off. To totally disregard that, to announce that you aren’t going to criticize the performances because of what they are, is to completely disrespect the performers. I fear that the reviewer assumed in order to criticize a performance he would be criticizing a performer’s body, since the ostensible goal of a burlesque number is to exit the stage in next to nothing. However.

One criticizes a performance. Not a performer’s body. It is never, ever okay to criticize someone’s body. Especially women who are, as the reviewer rightly pointed out, brave and generous. But to deny any sort of critical examination of the performance because of this is in direct opposition to a) what being a critic is about and b) the idea of what burlesque as an art form is.

Burlesque, at least in its present revival (and yes, there is a huge burlesque revival, and no, a short article in a small alternative paper is not going to convert legions, contrary to apparent expectation), is based around the idea of female empowerment. Women supporting women. Women participating in an activity centered around their bodies, and the ways they can use their bodies and personalities to reclaim their sexual power. Not to get all Laura Mulvey on your ass, but the male gaze is totally a real thing. It’s a gross thing. When everything a woman does is interpreted through the lens of a man’s experience of it, the woman’s contribution is inherently devalued. Burlesque is a way of owning sexuality. Owning one’s body. Controlling exactly how that body is revealed. Beyond that, it’s about helping women develop confidence by doing something incredibly difficult and incredibly vulnerable in a place that is totally safe and supportive.

Basically, the TUSH ladies don’t need your permission to be strong, sexy, creative, self-directed women. The organization is run entirely by the women in the troupe. Every single thing that happens in a show happens because they make it happen. Finding out that they should be satisfied with what they get because at least some dude is willing to allow them precious column inches is disgustingly misogynistic. Saying that if it wasn’t for articles like this nobody would come is simply the most stunning display of self-indulgent ego that I have encountered in a long time.

Some of the women of TUSH are incredibly upset by this. Some of them commented. Most of the comments were met with “quit whining, at least you got an article.” Question is, if this article had been about men, would anyone have said that? If a reviewer had written very little about the content of a performance (even taking into account the later avowal that it wasn’t really a review, but a pat on the rump to help the performers up the ladder of public acceptance)(ESPECIALLY taking that into account, actually) but instead had gone out of their way to be so self-righteously magnanimous, would anyone have said “quit whining” if someone complained? Probably not. Sure, people would’ve been on both sides of the debate, but wouldn’t have been a question of hurt feelings.

That’s the thing that matters the most, really.  There’s been a day for Christina to chill out, but that also means there’s been a day for people to talk about how embarrassing the entire thing has been, and how everyone should just relax and put it behind them.

True.  To a point.

Calls for apology by the people who got upset?  Possibly justified.  However, due to the polarizing nature of this issue—and please do not forget I am talking about the issue of sexism as it pertains to a female-dominated art form not the issue of a poorly-researched and poorly-written article—I cannot simply apologize and move on.  Sure it’s important to put up a professional front, and to be gracious.  Those are excellent qualities.  But what sticks in my craw about the response is that it is undeniably tinged with the whole “quit whining” thing that incenses me so much.  In this case, “whining” is code for “having a response to something that the author did not intend,” which in this case is all this sexism I keep harping about (just like a woman).  Of course the author would be surprised; how often do people think they have abhorrent opinions or qualities?  I’m sure I’ve got some, but I’m sure I’d also be shocked and surprised if called out on them.  So, there you are.  That’s my disclaimer for that.

Why should anyone have to apologize for their emotions?  Sure, we can always work on sounding smarter and more together than the person we are disagreeing with, that’s always beneficial (always).  But to get chastised for disagreeing in the first place?  That’s where I take issue.  Women are under societal pressure—and have been for centuries, millennia, forever—to be meek and apologetic; to have emotions but to turn them on and off whenever they’re told.  The indignation felt by some of the group about the piece is totally justified.  Sure it wasn’t entirely negative, but it was incorrect.  It was un-researched.  It was unbelievably condescending.

But I’ll return to my earlier question—had this been about men, would the response have been different?  I have a hard time imagining men getting “emotional” (which is not the fucking plague, just so you know, and if you have a penis getting emotional or encountering the emotions of others does not cause it to fall off) over an issue like this, especially in a public forum.  Judging from the response of the men who felt like commenting on the article, author included, I’m right.  They didn’t get “emotional.”  They got exasperated, and confused, and defensive.  They got totes patronizing.

PS:  If you don’t see how this was patronizing, and are unwilling to try, you are not the person I thought you were.

I’ll say it again (or for the first time?  I cannot keep track of my own brilliance sometimes.)  I do not mean to attack the writer of the piece for what he said, necessarily.  My issue is with how he said it.  And how he is one example of the same old tired sexist song-and-dance with a refrain meant to keep women in their place, meaning at the mercy of what men deem permissible.

Doubtless I’ll be accused of feminazism.  Doubtless I’ll tell you to stick that idea pretty far up your ass.  I’d rather be accused of challenging the status quo, and maybe having an unpopular opinion, but my whole frigging crusade is to help everyone along via vehement opposition and challenging my detractors, to the point at which the opinions and autonomy of women aren’t suspect, or symptomatic of something negative.  There’s nothing wrong with being smart.  Or totally hot.  Or smart, hot, and gracious, like TUSH! and every other burlesque performer I’ve ever met.  I will personally apologize for whatever poor phrasing might have been used, but no way am I going to sit by and let this kind of horrible sexism run rampant.  Granted, I don’t expect much to change as a result of this—I’ll get called some names, some people will lose respect for me, other people will gain it.  It’s all happened before; that’s how it goes when you have Sometimes Unpopular Opinions.

These women (and lots and lots of others, by the way) are sexy, empowered, happy, hardworking, creative, and successful. Don’t worry about doing them any favors. Especially if you’re going to do it by treating them like little girls. Don’t denigrate their anger at being treated that way. Women have been treated that way for thousands of years; hey, maybe we’re tired of it.

In conclusion:  sorry dudes, I’m mad at you.  I’m not calling you sexist.  I’m calling you out on it.  I’m happy to talk about it with you—not to argue about it, since I don’t know if I made this clear, but in my opinion there is no argument.  If you’re interested in discussion, bring it.  I’m always happy to advance my socialist feminist communist man-hating agenda!

Oh, wait; let me translate that back into what I’m actually saying, as opposed to what a lot of people seem to hear:

I’m always happy to share my opinions.

ETA:  Do you guys like the ninth-grade five-paragraph persuasive essay closing line?  I sure do!

I have no interest in telling you all about the grotesque minutiae of my upbringing because a) I have either repressed or denied most of it and therefore simply cannot remember it, and b) you do not have enough invested in me for me to feel comfortable telling you about what little I do remember.  What’s interesting is that if I were a stranger this wouldn’t be a problem.  If we did not know each other at all I would feel much more comfortable using concrete examples.  Because that’s the only impression you would have of me, and it seems unlikely that we would meet, does that make sense?  But let me give you a rundown of how Christmas works at my house—at least the traditions that I can recall happening more than twice:

When I was a child I got up first.  Then, after the age of about 13, I had to be woken up by my impatient parents.  We would go sit in the living room and I would dispense the gifts and I would always (and still do) feel guilty about having more than my parents.* During the five years my dad’s parents lived in the apartment attached to the garage (which was a beautiful apartment, I guess I should call it the Mother-In-Law Suite) we would trundle over and eat stale cinnamon rolls and open our puzzles and flocked color-in posters and VHS tapes of movies recorded off the television.  I have no objection to minor presents.  I have no objection to no presents.  But, like so much else in my relationship with my parents and then my grandparents (who set some sort of gold standard for horrible passive-aggressive family dynamics), these gifts were tests, and nobody ever passed.  My mother would sit in the corner avoiding my grandmother’s patented sour face, my father would be at the table with his eyes to his syrupy, raisin-bedotted plate giving one-syllable answers and there I’d be, clutching my latest pair of rubberized slipper socks, desperately counting the minutes until I was able to run back through the garage and up to my room, where I would spend the rest of the day assembling or testing or watching whatever I’d been given by my parents.  My mother would spend the day cooking for twelve when there were three at the table, and my father would retreat to the garage to chain-smoke, drink Bud Light, and do whatever mysterious things he did in the garage to a constant backdrop of conservative talk radio.**

So, Christmas equals solitude, fakery, false gratitude, and a sense of avarice generally abandoned the day before, when there is literally no more shopping time until actual Christmas (but we manage to keep it up all day, who knows).  I learned to smile politely until everyone’s performed their bit of the pageant and then you can go home and spend the rest of the day surrounded by gifts whose value is generally disproportionate to the amount of money the family has (well, more recently the value has been appropriate but for many years my family was what could be considered “broke-ass.”)  Essentially, there is nothing overwhelmingly positive about the holiday.  There is nothing not connected to greed or duty.  There is no way for me to understand why you, with your families who talk to each other voluntarily, who are sometimes excited to see each other, who hug freely and without awkwardness or discomfort, are excited about Christmas.  I have absolutely no frame of reference for Christmas as a positive family experience.  This makes me sad, though, it’s not one of those cilantro things.  I actually really wish I knew what your holiday was like.  I would say I’ll get to know someday when I have a family of my own, but at this point, hoo boy, I am not at all prepared to generate a family that won’t end up like the one I have now.

I have an elected family, and if you’re reading this you’re probably in it.  You are the people I like best, the ones I opt to spend time with, and I am always so delighted when you opt to spend time with me.  That’s what makes proper holidays even weirder for me.  Instead of spending time with my family, all my favorite family goes away and the only ones I have left are the ones I am actually biologically related to, who are, frankly, the people whose company I would be most willing to forgo (and frequently do).  So I’ve got Opposite Holidays.  When you go away to visit your family and celebrate the spirit of togetherness and happiness and wonderment with people you like, or can at least carry on a conversation with, I am at home, sleeping with my cat on my face.  I used to think (I used to pretend?) this didn’t bother me, but as I get older and less and less interested in being around my biological family, it gets harder and harder to tell the day to go fuck itself.  I also blame Facebook.  Well, blame is a stupid word, and not clever enough to carry the concept, but I will use it anyway.  Seeing everyone’s photographs and updates and blah blah blah, it is a powerful reminder of not having that kind of family to go to.  Basically, it is a bummer.  But that’s okay, I do not want your pity, chosen family.  I just, for some reason that escapes me at this moment, felt like explaining to you how much I hate the holidays.  The obligation of them.  I feel obligated to put on the Good Daughter face even though I am a terrible daughter.  I would probably take steps toward cutting off all ties with my family except they have money and I don’t.  Oh, that sounds horrible, doesn’t it.  But the thing is, hard currency is the currency of affection.  At least when I go to my parents’ house.  This is also why I have an odd relationship to money, but that’s a whole other navel-gazing blog entry.

Well, Merry Christmas, then.  Fa la la la la.

*This is Advanced Guilt, the kind you can only get with years of training.  Please, for your sake and your family’s, do not attempt feeling this guilty about anything without the supervision of someone raised by Lapsed Catholics from at least 50% Troubled Upbringing.

**My father is not a conservative.  He listens to Sean Hannity because football isn’t on all year.

Oh right.  When I was younger I had a friend who, every year on my birthday, would forgive my debt to him.  I think maybe I would be happy if my friends would do the same.  I don’t know if I owe any of my friends significant sums of money, I don’t think so, but one never knows.  If that’s the case, I’d be happy to pay them back.  But if it’s a minor amount, say less than $35, or if it’s non-monetary, I don’t know what would be more pleasing or gratifying or charming or truly appreciated than to be granted absolute absolution up to right now.  In fact, if it’s financial I would want to exclude that kind of debt altogether.  I’ll pay back the money I owe.  I want to be forgiven for being a bad friend, or a bad lover, or a bad daughter.  I want you to forgive me.

I don’t suppose people really ask for forgiveness any more.  It doesn’t seem done somehow.  Perhaps it goes with the absolution from personal responsibility that is so in vogue right now.  I don’t mean to say that abstaining from responsibility is at all new, but it seems to have been a cultural touchstone for at least the past forty years.  At least among my liberal friends, who comprise the vast majority of my friends.  Enough to pass a compositional purity test.  And the people I know who are at the other end of the spectrum (I lump my moderate friends in with my lefty friends, at least in terms of political expediency) are willing to assign blame to others just as easily, which is the complementary term for disclaiming culpability.  When I call out my liberal friends, I mean that I find some validity to the idea that there is a curious paradox in the belief that the world’s problems were caused by someone else, and that you can’t solve them without damaging something/endangering someone/pissing off political enemies so you are trying to elect leaders who you think will take on your guilt and solve your problems but in reality, every time, they are the someone else causing said problems and so it goes.

It’s a vulnerability caused by goodwill for the most part.  That’s what I choose to believe.

Anyway.  My liberal friends don’t think they have anything to ask forgiveness for because they didn’t cause anything.  That doesn’t mean they’re not interested in solving pressing issues, but disclaiming culpability takes at least as much energy, and however much one saves by bypassing this step I’m pretty sure one uses up by being morally outraged at the idea that one is somehow part of the problem.

I would say “my conservative friends don’t think x because x” but all right, I don’t have any.  At least not the queer-hating kind of conservatives, who I hope are impaled ironically when they are trying to jump a fence while drunk.

What am I fucking talking about.  I really have got to stop getting sidetracked by semantics.  Semantics don’t make friends, they only make babies.  Amiright?

Oh, right.  Dear friends, for my birthday instead of getting me a present, or thinking about getting me a present and then not doing it and feeling bad (within reason), or thinking about how you resent the pressure to get people presents for their birthdays because you don’t expect anything for your birthday so why should it be such a big fucking deal:

Forgive me.  Please believe that I am acutely aware of my shortcomings as a friend, lover, or daughter (though it is highly unlikely my parents are reading this, if so, I’m sorry) and I promise I will call/write/buy you drinks more often, or that I will think about it and then not do it and feel really bad (within reason).  What’s important—okay, what is important—is that you are important to me.<sympathetic audience reaction>I mean it.  You are cool, or amazing, or funny, or loving, or kind, or all of the above, and I thank you.</sympathetic audience reaction>

So.  Okay.  Here’s the actual part where you get to say ‘yes, okay, that is free and I don’t mind doing it’ or ‘no, that is stupid, I like grudges’:

Dear Friend, for my birthday, to clean your slate of my misdeeds before I embark upon the slog of cleaning my own against the world, will you do me the great service of forgiving my debts of honor, attention, twelve-ounce-drip-with-cream, or minor instances of follow-through to you?

Super!  (I am presupposing you fell for my cleverly disguised editorializing and opted for ‘yes’ above)

Okay.  That’s done.  I am not looking forward to my Saturn return, can you tell?  I can tell.  And while I don’t throw my whole hand in on astrology I believe a) human behavior is not, at its most fundamental, that radically different than it has been for the past five thousand years and b) with such a comparatively long history individuals have doubtless been able to identify behavioral patterns over time and also c) I’ve totally convinced myself I believe in it just enough for it to affect my life.

Point being, I am dreading just a little the next three years of my life.  They might be amazing.  But the idea of the return is that you are reckoning with the established patterns and directions and assumptions of your life up to now and mine is not totally awesome, guys.  So I am going in with the notion that it is going to suck out loud, but that I will be a better person at the end, and I guess that’s what matters.

Let me just say that in the current economic and cultural climate for me to be thinking about any sort of long-term investment is significant in itself.  If you’ve made any sort of long-term investment—material, emotional, physical—you should pat yourself on the back as well.  Go ahead.  Nobody’s looking.

Basically I feel it is time that I do as much proactive settling of accounts as I possibly can.  But please don’t think I want you to actually write out all your grievances against me (I can think of a bunch of stupid universal ones that I have against all of you, but I recognize my distaste for your chewing gum is hardly worth noting).  I just would like to extend myself (in a non-sexy way) to offering either an apology for wronging you or a promise to work harder at fulfilling the promises I have made to you.  Professionally, socially, creatively (or in a sexy way),  I promise to do right by you if—and only if—we are doing right by each other, <sympathetic audience reaction>deal?</sympathetic audience reaction>

At this moment I am reminded of the eternal wisdom of one Mr. Bill S. Preston, Esquire:

Be excellent to each other.

Also:

If you want to buy me a drink next Tuesday, I will not stop you.

WYLD STALLYNS.

Gross.  You’re gross.

I’m sorry.  I should try to be more accepting of your filthy habit but I cannot bring myself to condone eating peanut butter from a jar with a knife on a city bus.  I know your carbon footprint is allegedly smaller than most, and you study/have studied sustainable ecosystems/community organization/semiotics.  That’s great.  I’m glad you’re doing something valuable (except the semiotics thing, which is the path I took.  I still don’t eat on the bus, though).  My beef is not with your lifestyle or interests, even though they’re not mine.  I don’t care that you crocheted a cozy for your water jar.  My problem, right now, revolves solely around how you’re eating goulash, from a Tupperware container, with a fork, on the 41.

I suppose I should be more charitable about your time.  Maybe this is the only opportunity you have to eat—between your Wednesday Indigenous Cultures, Sustainable Lives lecture and your daily trip downtown to sit at Sizizis for seven hours.  I shouldn’t begrudge you this precious mobile mealtime.  I shouldn’t expect a certain standard of community behavior, especially since you took fifteen credits of Community Behavior in your second freshman year.  I guess since food is one of the five things you can’t create with magic it’s also one of the five things you can’t criticize for any reason (the other four being ugly haircuts, deliberately roughed-up $300 jeans, insufferable smug superiority, and deodorant crystals).  I am clearly the asshole for expecting you to abide by some widely-accepted social conventions.  Oh, fuck a duck, yes I am an asshole, as social conventions are by their nature conventional, and therefore they are patriarchal, oppressive, and contrary to the correct-thinking progress of humanity.

God, I’m sorry you guys.  I just get so riled when I see you eating hummus and pita on the bus.  There’s nothing wrong with it.  I am totally overreacting, please, carry on.  I defer to your obvious superiority, which is obvious in the way Chuck Norris’s superiority is obvious:  someone once said it as a joke, and now everybody takes it seriously.  You are exempt from the politesse of the unenlightened masses who seem to have no problem waiting until they get home to eat dinner.  The rules are different for you, which is true because you know it in your heart.  If someone has a problem with you eating straight from a large open container of peanut butter, passing it back and forth between members of your program/people who live below you in the Soup/that dude you work your shift at the Co-op with, they are trying to impose their false beliefs upon you.  I totally get that.  I refrain from eating on the bus (or chewing gum, which is a whole other ball of wax) out of deference to your advanced ideals, not at all because I have respect for my fellow riders.

I know some of my friends are guilty of this crime.  That’s okay.  I’m not saying I don’t like you any more, I’m just saying I don’t like it when you eat on the bus.  I have habits you don’t like, but we’re still friends, right?  I will admit that if we weren’t friends I would probably judge you as harshly as I judge all those bus diners I don’t know personally.  I will admit that some of those bus diners are probably nice people and we would have a good time together.  But don’t eat on the bus.  It’s not cool.  I don’t know why you do it, and am forced to believe it’s because you have somewhere in your DNA the coding that activates moral and ethical superiority and liberal entitlement.  Before you get huffy, please remember that in my DNA is the coding that activates intellectual elitism and cultural snobbery, and I have been known to be a total bitch.  We all have our faults.

Also, I’m not really talking about you anyway.  I might as well just say it, I’m talking about out-of-state Greeners and people who are allegedly hitchhiking from Forks to Austin and haven’t yet made it past Olympia.

To those of you I don’t know, I’m looking forward to the day when I can accept my narcissism to the point of not bothering to adhere to common courtesy, just like you.   I’ve got a lasagna I can’t wait to eat between my house and the bar.

Love,
Christina

I completely understand how my existing alongside you would be offensive, even to those of you who like me anyway and who don’t really mind that if someday I found a nice girl and she got sick I would be able to visit her in the hospital.  I mean, the threat is pretty obvious, isn’t it?  It must be, otherwise you’d think we as a society would’ve gotten over it by now.  Clearly, heterosexuals, there’s some undeniable truth to the idea that I am a second-class citizen, or maybe another species, since you people have been obsessed with what I and my squalid kin do in our spare time for centuries.  It must be something really awful, otherwise you wouldn’t absolutely have to know, right?

But heterosexuals, don’t feel bad.  It’s not your fault that I’m an abomination.  Either your God made me this way as a test or a punishment or to be an example—a fine use of the Lord’s time (though if it’s a test, you should think about who’s really been failing it for the past six thousand years or so), or it’s genetic and I should be hidden away before I somehow have a baby of my own and potentially infect generations to come with my defective DNA.  I mean, my parents are straight, and their parents, and their brothers and sisters, but you never know, right?

Of course, you know all of this already.  The main point is that okay, yes, I’ve finally gotten the message.  We had this almost-equality thing going on for a few years, but I think we can all agree it was too much.  Really, it’s a mitzvah that some of your kind decided to make everyone take a good hard look at how damaging the domestic partnership law has been. Who can’t think of some way the homosexual agenda (or the agenda of people over 62) has negatively affected their life?  I’m also relieved that the upstanding straight people behind this brave legislation chose to make the process as duplicitous and convoluted as possible.  Using confusion and deceit as a way to get enough signatures means you’re standing really solidly on the moral high ground, right?

So thanks, heterosexuals, for the laughs.  We’ve had some good ones, huh?  I’m a little sad I won’t be sharing any more with you, but once you share a laugh it’s practically the same as fucking, isn’t it?  I’m really glad you’ve taken all this time and money and effort to remind me yet again that I’m not the kind of person you want paying taxes, working at a low-wage service industry job, and getting an advanced education with the idea of teaching your children to read one day.  Thank your God that’s not going to happen now, right?

Sincerely,

Christina Collins

All right, I’m on the bus because I’m drunk. I could ride my bike home but it’s up a fucking steep-ass hill and I can’t be bothered because again, drunk. There’s an Evergreen hippie eating pizza from a paper bag. That’s one of those things that sounds really weird and unrelatable until you know that Old School Pizzeria packages its to-go slices on a paper plate in a paper bag. My girlfriend is very conscious of environmental issues so now all I see is fucking tree holocaust.

None of this is the point.

The bus has just stopped and opened its doors even though nobody is getting on or off. I’m assuming this is because the bus has to equalize its time schedule and at 11 p.m. not enough people are riding the bus to account for all scheduled stops. Oh wait. Some sleeping tweekers just realized that this is where they’re supposed to get off. They smell like unwashed bodies and one has a Travis Bickle haircut which is always a good sign. They just got off the bus with what I would not be surprised to learn is everything they own. I won’t go into a dissertation about ownership because my stop is coming up.

So by the grace of God I was not too drunk to miss my stop. Not that I’ve missed my stop due to drunkenness on evenings previous, but there’s always that fear. I’m at home now, having pilfered some of my roommate’s almond chicken. She offered it to me earlier in the evening but I have some sort of latent—or not latent—guilt around accepting what is offered. I’d rather feel like I’m stealing than accept a gift. Fucked up, huh? That’s just my manifestation of fucked-upedness, I guess. Some people turn to prostitution or Jesus.

No offense if you’re into Jesus. I’ve had this realization recently that I am totally callous when it comes to other peoples’ beliefs. It’s just projection and self-defense on my part. Can we accept that I understand why I’m dismissive and also accept that my dismissal of your potential beliefs is not to be taken seriously?

A lot of what I say is meant to be taken seriously, but not to heart. Or the other way.

I’ve moved from the backyard to the front porch. The backyard has some lovely seating and a fantastic view of Nature and shit, but also wet chairs because it’s late August in the Pacific Northwest and we’re entering the rainy season. But you already know this.

The move is insignificant, or maybe it’s significant. Or maybe I’m still drunk, which is totally true. Thus, the significance or insignificance of every instance of my life at this time is completely up in the air. I could get hit by a rogue meteorite and my last thought would be “does this matter? Or not?” and that would be okay by me, I think.

Right now I am having an extremely involved text conversation with my boss and one of my co-workers. It is both hilarious and deeply inappropriate, which I think would be an acceptable inscription on my tombstone. The meat of the conversation revolves around how I have six dollars in my wallet, and what that will buy me. Why am I telling you this? I guess it’s indicative of the sort of rhetoric that can be expected from me.

A black sports car just revved its engine in a way that is more obnoxious than I thought it would be. Maybe that’s because I’m on the front porch, not a window away, and therefore got the full brunt of the engine’s mighty wrath, or whatever. I got mindfucked by the driver’s magnificent cock, maybe? Isn’t that the point?

None of this is the point.

Tomorrow I am going to the city with my girlfriend to go to museums and then a dance. I wonder what you think of when you hear “dance” in this context. I mean, I’m sure you’ll work out what sort of dance I’m talking about—maybe—but I wonder what your first thought is. Mine is a sock hop, which is bizarre since I’ve never been to one, or even a forced facsimile of one. It only lasts for a second, though, before I realize I’m actually talking about a dance peopled entirely by lesbians and encompassing cage dancers, techno remixes of Eurotrash club songs (probably), and overpriced drinks. I don’t know what I think about this. It’s not the sort of thing I like to do but I’m going to do it anyway to make an attempt at Growing As A Human Being. The museums are fantastic, it’s the dancing that makes me wary. I’ve given it several solid tries but I am just not social in that way. I am also uncertain of my rhythm and dancing abilities, but I think that all has to do with insecurity and low self-esteem, which blah blah blah, who cares?

See, I say that after years of navel-gazing and self-indulgent self-pity. The realization that my suffering is not unique was bracing in the way that I imagine an Arctic wind to be bracing. It was uncomfortable to the point of pain, vaguely terrifying, and, eventually, cleansing and revivifying. I don’t mean to denigrate anyone else’s pain (ref. earlier comments about Jesus) but for myself, understanding that I am not special, and therefore not alone, in my despair was intensely comforting. I still can’t stop talking about myself, though.

This is why I don’t write fiction.

Is it necessary to be able to—hold on, the dog across the street is whining and squealing again. I can’t tell if it’s being mistreated or if it’s just an asshole.

Is it necessary to be able to stop talking about yourself to write fiction? Is all writing essentially about the self? I mean Self, with the capital. Who has already addressed this issue? I am woefully undereducated about the names. Who said what, etc. The names that immediately come to mind around this line of questioning are Emmanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietszche. I could be—probably am—completely off on this, but it’s what my gut is telling me. The whole thing about my gut, though, is that I don’t know how accurate it is. Maybe because it’s never led me astray and is therefore extremely accurate? Because it’s never set me on the right path and is therefore extremely inaccurate? Or because it’s just unreliable? I vote for the latter. But I always do. The jaundiced eye, etc.

All right. I am very hungry. And drunk, and a little stoned. But that’s to be expected. I’m trying a little bit to live my life as an archetype. Maybe a low-level archetype, like the god of paperclips, but an archetype nonetheless. One involving periodic lapses in judgment along the lines of indulging in Microsoft Word while chemically addled. Also wearing a lot of black eyeliner.

I want to be an archetype, is what I’m aiming at. Because I want to feel comfortable in my own skin. I, at least, don’t think I’ll ever be truly comfortable until I accept myself as an archetype for the kind of person I want to be.

Deep shit, that.

Speaking of, that’s what I’ll be in if I don’t go to bed soon. Because tomorrow is a day that promises to be chock full of activity and adventure. But none of this is the point.

Point being, thank you for everything.

Love,

Christina