Plainclothes Naked Read online

  The policeman who taught the class owned just the kind of tight butt and big shoulders Carmella liked. Plus he wasn’t too handsome, just knowing. As if the ho-hum face under his no-style brown hair had made its way through a lifetime of peculiar situations, and didn’t judge. Officer Manny. Carmella could never tell if he was smiling at her or not. But she liked it when he picked her to demonstrate the hip-roll. More than one evening, after downing her Slim-Fast, she’d lay on the couch daydreaming about the time she’d thrown the hottie cop over her hip and landed on top of him, the way his eyes went wide when she put just enough push in her pelvis to let him know she didn’t mind tossing a guy around a little.

  Carmella had her hand in her purse when she heard the voices.

  “Hey lady, got a light?”

  “Ain’t nuthin’ light about her.”

  She knew that nasty tone. Mrs. Zank’s boy. That shit. And the Dean Martin–looking hombre negro he ran with. Without turning around, Carmella slipped her fingers in her dress, re-stashing her cash, then eased her hand to her purse, deciding between car keys and comb.

  “May I help you?” she said, without turning around.

  “You can help you,” Zank said, “if you do what I tell you. We need you to walk your big ass back in the office and get the address of the girl who changed my mother’s sheets. That’s not such a big deal, is it?”

  Thinking, for some reason, of the scene in Deliverance where the killer hillbillies ask Ned Beatty to squeal like a pig (another juicy image, along with hip-rolling Officer Manny onto the mat), Carmella took a deep breath and swung around with the comb in her fist. She raked the plastic teeth under Tony’s dime-size nostrils, drawing blood before he had a chance to stop smirking.

  Tony dropped to one knee, clutching his face. His screams caught McCardle off guard. He made a lunge for Carmella, but she was ready for him. Sidestepping, she jammed a high heel down on the tender bones of his foot, where his Florsheim’s loafer stopped and his argyles started. The pain was excruciating.

  McCardle looked at Carmella with honest wonder—Why?—and his suffering visage was meat to her appetite. She felt her heart racing, in a good way, and took her fingers to his ears, twisting with everything she had while the little muscle man flailed. Then Zank picked himself up and kicked her in the shin, and it was over.

  Carmella didn’t go down, but she let go. McCardle rubbed his bruised lobes and tried to breathe normally.

  “Man!” was all he could say.

  Tony told him to shut up and open the trunk. McCardle obliged, looking skeptically from the available volume in the Gremlin to the volume of Carmella in her stretch capris. Most of the available space was taken up with boxes of Jenny Craig’s local snack bars. Chocolate and Banana-Orange. Even empty, it would have been snug for an anorexic.

  “Gonna be tight, T.”

  Zank sneered. “Thanks for the input.” An ambulance wailed from blocks away, no doubt racing over to pick up his mother. “This could’ve been a walk in the park if Miss Porkchop didn’t get heroic. All we wanted was an address,” he said, grabbing Carmella by her chins. He pinched the extra flesh until her eyes watered. This was indignity beyond indignity. She made a silent vow to wreak revenge on this Anglo asshole, if she had to walk a continent of broken glass in paper slippers to get to him.

  When Zank let go, Carmella touched her fingers to her throat flesh, and decided she would pay Jenny Craig the rest of the money she owed. Come her day of revenge, she wanted to be trim and gorgeous. She wanted this malo dog to eat his heart out before he begged for death.

  “It’s gonna be work getting that ass in this bread box,” said Tony. He slapped Carmella hard on her solid behind and McCardle frowned. That kind of talk was uncalled for.

  “Nothin’ wrong with this lady’s ass,” Mac said. “Man could take a winter in the North Pole with an ass like that.”

  Carmella eyed him with gratitude. This one, she promised herself, I pleasure for a while before I castrate…. He had the most adorable little nose she’d ever seen.

  “We don’t gain nothin’ by kidnapping her,” McCardle pointed out. “You already bought a murder beef, less’n your moms landed in some soft mud. And we still didn’t get what we come for.”

  Tony slammed the hatchback shut again.

  “So what’s your idea, Puff Daddy?”

  “I say we stick to the plan. Send the lady back into the building to check the files, find us that damn Tina’s home address. She’s not gonna do nobody any good locked in here. That’s on the real.”

  Zank considered, then scanned the parking lot to make sure they were still in the clear. “What makes you think she’s not gonna run? Or should I say waddle,” he snickered. He reached for her chins again but Carmella slapped his hand.

  “If you’re worried about that, I’ll go with her,” McCardle offered. “A thing worth doing is worth doing right.”

  Tony regarded the pair of them skeptically, then reached in his jacket for a Slim Jim.

  “This bitch called me a Gomer,” McCardle reminded him as Zank unwrapped his snack. He wanted to sound persuasive, and laid it on thick. “No way I’m lettin’ her get away without payin’ for that.”

  “Man’s got mental problems,” whispered McCardle, when they were out of earshot.

  He spoke out the side of his mouth, keeping his head straight forward as he limped alongside Carmella through the parking lot, toward the Seventh Heaven employees’ entrance.

  Carmella spit on the ground and turned to give her handler some full-on stink-eye. Mac melted under her scrutiny. His Auntie Big’n had been a woman of girth. When she wasn’t beating him with magazines, or making him clean her, she would let him nuzzle up on her fifty-four-inch bosoms.

  “You gay?” Carmella asked him.

  “No way! I’m cool,” Mac replied, weirded-out by the question but enjoying the nearness of so much flesh. (He could swear, the big woman gave off heat.) “I’m just saying, don’t let Tony see you talking to me or he’ll think something’s up. You got him pretty good with that comb.”

  Carmella stopped and plunked one lethal heel down on the asphalt. “You know I could pick you up and throw you across a room, don’t you?”

  She could see the effect of her words on the tiny-nosed black man. A glaze came over his eyes. “I didn’t mean to call you a bitch,” he apologized, gazing up at her with abject emotion. “I had to say that. I have to make Tony think I’m that kind of person.”

  For a little guy, Carmella was thinking, Mac had pretty good muscle. Biceps like baby hams. In spite of herself, she reached out and gave one of his arms a squeeze. McCardle was a small but muscular Dean Martin.

  “Four-fifty,” he lied. “That’s how much I bench. I bet I could lift you over my face. How’d you like that?”

  “Carmella Dendez does her own lifting, Meester.”

  “Maybe we could bench each other,” he said, heart pounding under well-developed pecs.

  Before Carmella could respond to that, McCardle zipped up the wheelchair ramp and threw open the door. “I’m courting,” he tittered to himself, waiting with head bowed while his companion stomped past.

  Back inside the old age home, McCardle tried to put his arm around Carmella’s waist. He barely made it before she swatted his hand away. “Are you on drugs? Is that what this is all about?”

  “Baby, with you around, I don’t need drugs,” Mac answered, employing his smooth-ass, Barry White voice. “Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

  “I’m thinking this,” said Carmella, and jammed her heel in his foot for the second time. McCardle hopped in a tight circle while she tried to figure things. The hall smelled like Lysol. She knew that Snooks, the janitor, snuck around spraying little scented puffs out of a spray can to make it smell like he’d done some cleaning. Anything to keep from actually taking a mop to anything. If the lazy son of a bitch didn’t have a line on diet pills, she’d have fired him at Christmas.

  McCardle stopped h
opping and checked over his shoulder. Then he turned back to Carmella. “You ever do any wrestling?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t mean professional,” Mac exclaimed, as though this misunderstanding was the source of her reaction. “I mean, private-like, just you and…a friend. I like to wrestle,” he added, in case he hadn’t dropped enough hints already.

  Carmella parked her hands on her hips. “You mean, you think…. You and me?”

  “Darling,” McCardle cut in, “we shouldn’t stand here like this. We have to look normal.”

  Carmella flicked his ear, which was still sore from being twisted. “Listen, mango, the people here know me, okay?” Her accent thickened the angrier she got. “They see me walking the halls with some puto fireplug when I’m supposed to be at home, getting ready for my Weight Watchers meeting, normal is the last thing anyone is going to think, ho-kay?”

  Mac didn’t answer right away, but instead took her in—savored her while rubbing his foot. She’d mashed the same one twice. “That’s not right!” he cried.

  This time Carmella ignored him. She brought the keys out of her purse, found the one she wanted, and slipped it in the door of the Administration Office. Again, a layer of honey seemed to glaze McCardle’s eyeballs. Breathing heavily, he stared at the exposed flesh between Carmella’s capri pants and her sweater as she bent to the lock.

  “I’m saying you don’t have to do all that,” he went on, his voice cracking slightly.

  “You know another way to get in, besides unlock it?”

  “Not that. I’m talking about Weight Watchers. You don’t have to lose weight. You’re perfect the way you are. I’ve been wanting to tell you since I saw all those Jenny Craig bars in your trunk.”

  “You seem to know a lot about the subject.”

  McCardle dried his palms on his pant legs. “That’s because I care! I don’t think a real woman should have to make herself small. Women, some women, were meant to be big. I believe…” Here he stopped, grinning shyly, eyes lowered to the unpolished floor. “I believe women like you are the kind of women that God would want if…if God messed around with women.”

  Carmella paused, then hip-bumped the door open. “So you’re one of those, eh?” She pulled the door shut behind them, careful not to slam, and brought her face very close to his. “Well listen, maricón, I don’t see you pointing no gun, so don’t think Carmella is going along with this ’cause she’s scared you know jiujitsu. The only reason I have not splattered you off the wall already is ’cause your boyfriend is out there with my car. I can’t afford to have some loco freak who beats his mother in public do something to my car.”

  McCardle, crestfallen, sulked by the file cabinet while Carmella opened a middle drawer and walked her fingers over the tops of the file folders. “Aha,” she sang, plucking out a hazy Xerox of Tina’s driver’s license. “You’re lucky I remembered her last name. Podolsky. What kind of a name is that for such a pretty girl? I was her, I’d change it.”

  Carmella whomped the drawer shut with her buttocks and handed over the paper. Then, with no warning, she grabbed McCardle’s face. She jerked it right and left under the light, checking his profile. McCardle continued to pout, but her violent interest, the way she squeezed his cheeks, really hurting him, gave him all kinds of hope.

  “Do I know you?” she asked suddenly. “I feel like I know you.”

  McCardle guessed what was coming next. He gazed moistly up at her, resting against a metal desk with a Dilbert cartoon taped to the computer monitor. (He didn’t get people who went to work. Why didn’t they just steal something expensive and quit?) From this point on, things could go a couple of ways. But if they went the way he wanted, he wondered how much time he’d have alone with Carmella before Tony got antsy and came barging in.

  “Oh my God,” squealed Carmella, when the synapse she’d been waiting for fired off. “America’s Most Wanted! You killed that chavalla with a shovel.”

  “It wasn’t my fault.” McCardle protested. “He tried to brain me with a fire extinguisher.”

  But Carmella wasn’t listening. “There’s a reward, right?”

  Unconsciously, she fingered the wad between her breasts. She imagined how thick it would feel with a hundred thousand friends folded around it.

  “You’re mine now,” she said, which McCardle took as his cue.

  The little strong man looked from side to side, then lowered his voice theatrically. “Listen, baby, you want to make some money, I can get you something worth a lot more than my black ass.”

  McCardle slid toward her on the desk, until his bulging thighs grazed her swollen stretch pants. She reached for the phone and he stopped her. His tiny hand clamped hers like a turtle on its mother’s back.

  Carmella considered an elbow to the neck but held off. “How much more and what I gotta do to get it?”

  “That all depends,” said McCardle, easing his phone hand free, pirouetting his fingertips off one of Carmella’s haunches. It was all he could do not to try and climb her right there. “I’m gonna be conservative and say a million. But, like I say, that’s being conservative.”

  Carmella did some figuring. She sucked on her ring finger and gazed out the window, where her car sat at the far corner of the parking lot. An agitated Zank could be seen pacing in front of it, popping his fist in his hand. If she didn’t call America’s Most Wanted just this minute, McCardle would not be worth any less tomorrow. The reward wouldn’t go away unless someone else dialed 1-800-NOCRIME, or he disappeared.

  Carmella made up her mind. She whipped sideways and grabbed McCardle’s groin. Grunting slightly, making a claw, she hoisted him off the metal desk. Her grasp brought tears to his eyes. For good measure, she wrapped her other hand around the mini muscle man’s throat, mashing his face to her massive breasts.

  “Huerco, pay attention,” she snapped, her face no more than an inch from his dainty nostrils. “You try and run some game on Carmella, she’ll hurt you so bad you’ll think this was foreplay.”

  McCardle, spotting the lump of cash in her cleavage, smiled dreamily and went limp.

  SEVEN

  There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world. Manny contemplated the sensation, this unforeseen closeness with a woman he barely knew, in front of whose house he was now parked, inside of which he’d found a man he’d never met dead on the kitchen floor. Her husband…. But none of it was enough to take his mind off the photograph.

  “You have to go?” Tina asked. She sounded more than slightly annoyed. “You have to leave right now?”

  Manny was still in overload. He could not stop gawking at that eight-by-ten glossy. “You heard the dispatcher,” he said mechanically. “Somebody’s being murdered. I’m a policeman, remember? Somebody gets murdered, I have to show up. It’s part of the job description.”

  Despite the speech, he made no move to start the car. All he could do was stare at the picture. The words scribbled across the bottom said MISTER BIOBRAIN. Above that plopped the thing itself, a bulging flesh-tone orb, oblong and veiny, with a peculiar shine. Someone’s thumb and forefinger were just visible where they pinched the root, no doubt to make the object in question bulb out that way. To make it…brainlike.

  What made this more than just a white man’s scrotum was the Happy Face tattooed on top it. A pair of eyes and a smile. The Happy Face lent a festive, wholesome quality to the whole package.

  Two human faces also appeared in the picture. Part of a man’s and all of a woman’s. The features were easier to make out than the distended equipment. They hovered at twelve o’clock and three. Up top, bizarrely enough, was George Bush Jr., beaming and giddy, with that jolly-perplexed expression he wore when asked about foreign-policy issues. Eye level with W’s puffed-out testicles, looking equally jaunty, was Margaret Beeman, mayor of Upper Marilyn since 1995.

  Manny continued blinking
over the photo. “Jesus, check out Marge’s expression.”

  “You call the Mayor Marge?”

  “Not anymore,” he said, sliding the picture back in the envelope. “But I did when we were married.”

  Tina was stunned by this bit of info. So stunned that she didn’t mention that she worked at the very place where the murder-in-progress was progressing. She knew, as soon as the dispatcher barked out the address, that it had something to do with the photograph. Whoever stuffed Mister Biobrain in Mrs. Zank’s mattress must have had big plans for it. And she’d fucked them up….

  Tina started to speak, but before she could, Manny took her hands. The radio was squawking nonstop, and he killed it. It was plain that he wanted to say something before letting her out. A rookie named Krantz, who fancied himself a rocker, had been dispatched to guard Marv’s body until it was time to zip it up. They watched him walk in and out of the front door, as if he couldn’t decide what to do with himself. Corpsewise, cops bagged and paramedics carried. It was a union thing.

  Krantz wore his hair in a mullet, which he stuffed under his hat on duty and unfurled when he played weekends in his Top Forty cover band. Manny had heard him once, by accident, while staking out the Holiday Inn, and found himself squirming for two hours to Krantz’s Madonna medleys. “Like a Virgin” nearly killed him. Manny waved to him now, staying as far across the front seat from Tina as possible. He knew he’d have to explain to the guitar god why it was smart to get chummy with good-looking possible murder suspects. Krantz was always eager for tips, and Manny tried to be nice to him. When he wasn’t, the rookie ratted him out to Fayton.