Lucky Stiff Read online

  The V of Minerva's bathrobe plunged effortlessly down the slope of her smooth neck, across the swelling plateau of her upper chest, then down the intriguing ravine between her breasts, where my gaze lingered openly and long.

  I knelt on the lush rug between the couch and the treat-laden coffee table, more or less facing this lovely, wise creature who regarded me without pity, who looked at me with gentle naughtiness and, I thought, a certain amount of desire.

  "Just a minute," I said. "Do you take me for a masochist? A glutton for punishment?"

  She lifted herself on an elbow. "What are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about Tillie, what the hell else?"

  "Ohhh," she sighed, her lips curling into a conscience-stricken smile.

  I continued, "I was good for a one-nighter once for you, but don't think that merely by flying across the country, drawing out $20,000 of your own cash, letting it get burned to cinders, not uttering a peep about it, and helping me get to the bottom of a terrible crime that resulted in the deaths of my own parents, that I'm just gonna jump in the sack with you for tonight's fling, when you've got your little hot nurse babe at home keeping the waterbed nice and—"

  "Lillian!"

  I stopped, panting with ardor. Oh, how I wanted to caress those curving hips, how I wanted to test the nervous system underlying it all—how I wanted to kiss that hesitant hand, that reluctant foot, perhaps finding a way, some magical way, to bring full function back to them.

  Minerva sat up, drawing her legs in, hugging her knees. "Did you really think," she said, "that all I wanted was that one night?" She set her chin on her knees and gave me a You're not going to get away with anything kind of look.

  "I don't know," I admitted.

  "That's all we got. But that wasn't all I wanted."

  I blinked. "Really?"

  "Lillian, do you think you're unlovable?"

  I realized that I couldn't say.

  She touched my hand. "You're so…appealing. I don't know how you did it, but somehow you've got a grip on my heart. When you move, when you talk, I feel…" Seeing my face, she stopped. "All right. Let me tell you about Tillie."

  She drew herself a bit more erect.

  I gnawed my lips.

  "As I believe I mentioned," she began, "I met Tillie in rehabilitation. She helped me. She was very good. We became friends. When I began having seizures I realized it would be a good thing if I had someone at home with me. Living alone with frequent seizures is no fun. Won't you have a shot of cognac?"

  Indifferently, I poured myself a small quantity of the aromatic liquor and sipped it. She reached for my glass, and I shared.

  "Should you be drinking hard liquor at all?" I wondered.

  "Damn it, I like a drink now and then. Listen. I offered Tillie a good salary to move into my apartment—into her own quarters—and coordinate the last stages of my rehab and recovery. And to look after me when I had a seizure. With the new medication, the seizures tapered off. In fact, I thought they were all over. I was about to tell Tillie—"

  "So Tillie is—"

  "Tillie is a paid employee. As I said, I do consider her a friend as well, but not the kind you…suspected. She's a divorced grandmother and she was happy to have a cushy break from the grind of the rehab facility. When I no longer need her help, she's going to take a vacation and then, she told me, look into teaching."

  There wasn't much I could say except, "Oh."

  "Now, don't you feel ashamed of yourself?"

  "No, goddamn it. I don't feel ashamed of my feelings for you. They're strong and proprietary and I want to kiss you right now and go on kissing you for days on end, until we get evicted from this ho—"

  "So do it."

  And so to her smiling lips flew mine. Oh, my lips were happy then. The level of happiness in the rest of me was somewhere between the Hubble satellite and the edge of Mars.

  After an agreeably long time on the couch, I helped Minerva to one of the suite's two super king-size Las Vegas bedrooms and its super king-size Las Vegas bed. We shed our bath wraps and there began the lengthy, meticulous process of rediscovering each other.

  Now and then we burst into joyful laughter.

  Her body was as marvelous as I'd remembered but different too. Her newfound appetite for food had given her the physical voluptuousness I've already described, and because of that, her body looked and smelled and felt enriched, more robust. To my surprise, the word healthy came to mind. Yes, Minerva LeBlanc appeared, except for the slight weakness on her right side, healthier than she'd been when I first met her.

  My lips explored her face, my hands explored her head, where, beneath her shining distinguished hair, I felt evidence of the attack on that astonishing skull. There were bumps and hollows from the injury and the surgery, a deep seam that ran in an irregular shape, something like the outline of South America. A steel plate, I knew, kept her wondrous brains together in there.

  "Do you still have pain?" I murmured.

  "No, not at all."

  I caressed her head, then segued to the other main compass points and most of the ones in between. I elicited delicate moans and soft pleadings: No music could have moved me more.

  She was amazingly energetic. Her hands, hungry and knowing, made the whole of my skin—just everywhere—register a deep ache that only more touching transformed into pleasure.

  The night, there in the desert beyond the windows, flowed in on us and engulfed us in nourishing darkness.

  Chapter 21

  In the morning Minerva and I decided to fly to Detroit, where I would inform Duane of what I'd learned from Trix, collect Todd from Billie, and figure out what to do next. Minerva made the arrangements.

  "But don't you want to go back to New York?" I asked.

  So far neither of us had uttered the L word. Love. I felt as good as I'd ever felt in my life. Something akin to a small nuclear reactor had been implanted just beneath my sternum and was generating constant superefficient energy to all the cells in my body.

  Minerva moved about the suite in smiling serenity. I'd tried heroically to cure her of her lingering afflictions last night, but had to satisfy myself with the glad tranquillity I seemed to have produced.

  "New York," she answered, "can wait. I want to be with you for now. I want to see you through to the end of this…quest you've undertaken." She paused. "Um, would you like that?"

  "Yes."

  We avoided discussing the future beyond that. And that was all right with me. I felt alive enough just then without getting myself all worked up about what was next with Minerva. And my drive to find Bill Sechrist was growing stronger and stronger, filling me with a feeling I'd never known before. The feeling was cold and hot at the same time, like the strongest of cravings. Was it justice I yearned for? No, nothing that explicable. Maybe I wanted vengeance. Did I? The hot-cold feeling of vigor dominated me, that was all I knew.

  As we packed our things I said, "Do you mind if we leave for the airport a little early? I'd like to make a quick stop on the way."

  "All right."

  Minerva wasn't surprised when I pointed the Mercedes in the direction of Trix's mobile-home court.

  "There's something I have to ask her," I explained. "It'll just take a minute."

  However, an incident had occurred at Trix's place. Two cop cars and a medical examiner's wagon were parked out front.

  "Uh-oh," said Minerva.

  A motley assortment of neighbors hung around pretending to have gone out for a walk and merely happened upon this interesting scene.

  I don't know why, but I felt neither surprise nor anxiety. I looked for the ringmaster neighbor, but she wasn't around. Minerva went up to a lady cop and handed her a card. "Hey, lieutenant," said the cop, handing over the card to a plainclothes detective who'd just stepped from the trailer.

  The lieutenant looked from the card to Minerva and broke into a smile. "Welcome back to the land of the living," he said. "Or, as the case may be…" He let tha
t hang.

  "Thanks," said Minerva, extending her hand. "Ramirez, isn't it?"

  "Good memory. What are you doing here?" Lt. Ramirez's tone indicated that he ranked the importance of the present situation as somewhat below an incipient hangnail.

  "My friend here wants to talk to the occupant."

  "No can do."

  "What happened?"

  "Overdose, it looks like. Maybe deliberate."

  Minerva's eyes flicked to mine.

  "May we go in?" she asked.

  To my utter shock, the plainclothesman skipped up the steps and opened the door for us.

  "I know the routine," said Minerva. To me she murmured, "Don't touch anything."

  I don't remember what the lieutenant or Minerva said to the police staff inside the trailer. All I remember is walking slowly through Trix's tacky living room to her bedroom and standing at the door, looking in.

  Trix lay faceup on the bed, crosswise on it, one arm flung out as if in surprise, the other clutched to her chest. Her wasted body was naked; there were no marks of violence on her that I could see. Her lips were drawn back in a grimace, her eyes wide and empty.

  Minerva said quietly, "A crack or meth OD could result in cardiac arrest. Sudden and painful, at least painful at first."

  On second look I saw a trace of something in Trix's face: resignation. Her body had been seized in a wracking grip, then as death neared, she met it knowingly, somehow. That was the impression I got.

  One of the cops said, "She started out with enough shit to get this whole neighborhood high. She made the rounds last night, bought a thousand bucks' worth of stuff."

  Another cop asked, "Who told you that?"

  "Neighbor who knows the dealers here. He said she had a fistful of cash and went on a spree. I'd say the street value of what's left here is about 200 bucks."

  .

  I sat, chin in hand, watching the planes taxiing, barely aware of the clang of the slot machines in the concourse. Minerva handed me a paper cup of water. "What was it," she said, "that you wanted to ask her?"

  A taxiing Aloha jet stopped to make way for a Southwest jet hurrying to deliver more passengers to the town of Trix's dreams.

  "One time," I said, "I got into a fight with a bully girl in the neighborhood. This was a real mini-bitch. She liked to pick on me, trying to get me to fight her. She'd walk behind me on the way home from school, shoving me in the back. One day I turned around, even though I knew I was about to get the crap beat out of me. She slapped me and I kicked her. She was bigger. She knocked me down and got on top of me and spit out her bubble gum into my hair and mashed it in. I went home to the bar, torn jacket, bloody knees, the gum in my hair. My dad was totally oblivious. 'Hi, sweetie,' he says. Trix took me into the toilet and helped me wash up before I went upstairs. She snipped the gum out of my hair and said, Yeah, kid, she's scared a you now."

  I watched the planes some more. "I wondered if she remembered that."

  .

  Minerva had paid for first class, her usual. We settled into our deluxe seats, and she got out a notebook and started to write. The plane took off into the magnificence of the desert sky.

  My mind was going too fast, and I found myself getting more and more nervous. The hot-cold feeling surged through my chest. I gazed out the window at the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains, their crags flattened by the noon sun, every gully exposed. Those mighty mountains appeared tame in that flat light. Tame but somehow not benign.

  I turned back to the interior of the cabin. My mind needed rest. It needed escape. It needed…

  I rooted in my gym bag, found my copy of The Ransom of Angeline Carey where I'd thrown it in the bottom, and opened it. Right away the story occupied my mind and settled my nerves.

  Calico Jones was a marvelous heroine. Oh, the competence of her trigger finger; oh, the lustiness of her grin. I took up where Calico bursts in on the bad guys—you remember Calico's mission in this one: This sexy young beef jerky heiress has been kidnapped by a PETA-like organization. The organization does not demand a cash ransom; they want nothing less than the immediate destruction of all beef jerky processing machinery in the western hemisphere, starting with the state of California.

  As a person who enjoys a chaw of jerky now and then, I really got involved in the ethics of the story. I myself began to question the motives of the beef jerky industry.

  Well, these thugs who are really committed idealists, they got hold of Angeline Carey and spirited her to this very secret location, which is the place Calico Jones needs to figure out and get to, before it's too late. The Carey family is bossed by this crusty old patriarch who wishes like hell the animal rights people would take money. He totally refuses to bargain with them in terms of destroying the beef jerky processing machinery. Beef jerky sales, you may or may not know, run to the millions and millions of dollars per year, a tremendously significant share of the snack food market. The author of these Calico Jones books—I forget her name—boy, she really does her homework. Anyway, this patriarch has hired Calico Jones to rescue his precious niece, but he keeps telling Calico what to do and how to do it, and he keeps dicking around, getting in the way of her investigation, all the while yelling at her to do it faster. So annoying. I kept wishing Calico Jones would just blow the bastard away so she could really flex her muscles and get the job done.

  The amazing thing is that Calico Jones is a vegetarian, yet still she took on this case. Well, that's because she's a professional. She doesn't let principles get in the way of business.

  So the bad guys—I should say "bad" guys, because in their eyes they're the good guys—they've got Angeline Carey, and they've lost patience with the Carey patriarch, who still thinks he can buy them off. They're about to do away with her in a particularly grisly fashion when Calico Jones, wearing her trusty .45-caliber semiautomatic, finally breaches the security of their hideout. I hate to ruin it for you, but get this: Having invaded the compound and neutralized the guards outside, she threads her way through the air shafts and drops down from the ceiling right onto this depraved scene of bondage and menace. Single-handedly, she rescues the helpless, gorgeous, innocent yet sexually competent heiress just as the "bad" guys are about to begin their chopping procedures, and she drills only two of them (out of a total abduction team of five) only after they pull their illegally modified 9mm Uzis on her.

  At this point Angeline Carey's pure violet eyes are bottomless pools of gratitude, and I was betting that Calico Jones would receive quite a special and intimate reward for her tremendous achievement, as of the very next chapter, when I became aware of Minerva reading over my shoulder.

  "My God, that's awful writing," she commented.

  "What?" My jaw dropped. "What?"

  "Well—Lillian. Just look at it. Is every sentence in the whole book hackneyed, or is it just that page? I mean, the vocabulary is fourth-grade level, the clichés are so abundant they're practically—"

  "Whoa," I said. "Wait just a minute. Are you kidding? Do you know how popular this writer is? Are you telling me that her millions and millions of fans must be dimwits or something? Take me, for instance, I have a college degree. Don't you think I can tell the difference between a good story and a pile of—"

  Minerva backed off fast. "Lillian, Lillian…" She patted my arm comfortingly. "No, I certainly am not saying that. It's just that—"

  "I know a good story when I see one!"

  "Yes…Yes, absolutely."

  "I think the Calico Jones series is great."

  "I think they're about to give us lunch."

  I knew in my heart Minerva was right, but I couldn't admit it out loud. I just love those books and that's all there is to it. My soap bubble of fantasy is tenuous enough as it is, without somebody coming along trying to mangle it.

  .

  I helped Minerva settle in at the Ritz-Carlton in Dearborn, her favorite local hotel, helped her hang up her elegant sophisticated clothes, then got ready to go pick up Todd and look
up Duane.

  "Lillian, wait a minute," said Minerva. "I want to talk to you."

  "Yeah?"

  "Sit down."

  I did so.

  She sat beside me on a beautiful upholstered thing that I somehow knew was called a divan, not a couch. It's hard to say why. This hotel was tremendously classy; I'd first met Minerva in its flower-bower lobby. The lack of a clanging casino made the place calmer than the Hilton in Las Vegas—quieter, certainly—but also somewhat boring by contrast. The view from Minerva's upper-floor suite could hardly compare to Las Vegas: instead of sere mountains and desert—or the dazzling Strip, depending which way you faced—the windows here in Dearborn overlooked the Southfield Expressway, the Ford Glass House, sundry office parks, and the monotonously level, albeit treed, glacier-scraped land. But it was a familiar landscape to me. I was back in Michigan. Back home.

  "I have something to ask you," Minerva began. She took my hand. Her eyes were solemn. "I want to write your story."

  "Uh…what? I mean…You what?"

  "I'm ready to write a book again," she said eagerly. "My next book. I'm well enough to write again. And I want to write about this. This incredible story you're living right now, this amazing story you're discovering, this puzzle you're solving."

  Had she whacked me between the eyes with a kielbasa, I couldn't have been more surprised.

  "How do you feel about that?" she asked.

  "Uh," I said, "you mean a book about—"

  "About the fire at the Polka Dot Bar so long ago, and about why the embers there are still hot."

  "Uh," I said.

  "What do you think?"

  "Uh…I guess I should have realized…uh. I don't know if I can answer you right now."

  "Well," she said, looking at me closely, "please think it over today, OK?"

  "OK. I—I will."

  .

  I walked out of the hotel into a taxi for home. I expected to drop my bag in my flat and turn right around again and take the Caprice out, to pick up Todd at Billie's. My car was all right in my spot at the curb, but as soon as I walked into the vestibule, the McVitties' door swung open and my landlord, Mr. McVittie, motioned me urgently to come in.