J. MADISON DAVIS
A true connoisseur of weed—and Herbert “Exemel” Knapsdale certainly qualified in all respects—knows that a new batch takes some adjusting to. Normally he bought his weed from Chuckster, but Chuckster was lying low in Tijuana, so he bought an ounce of Iggy’s stuff. Soil, light, acid rain, age, mold from a bad drying: all these things can tweak the chemistry of a natural substance. Your brain’s, like, test-driving a used car. The brakes are a little spongy; the steering’s tighter or looser.
That’s why Exemel didn’t immediately react to what he saw through the patio doors. Listing to the left because of the fifty-pound bucket of chlorine tablets and loops of vacuum hose on his right shoulder, he squinted behind his sunglasses. The wind was gusting, lifting dust off the desert. The light glinting from the pool slashed at his image in the glass.
But, yes, there, hovering above the reflection of the desert behind him, through himself, within his image, he could see the creamy white of a woman’s buttocks, their perfection narrowing pear-like to her broad shoulders, black hair, and her arms stretched over her head. She was dancing for him. She was stripping off a tee shirt. Her hands stretched above her. And she held—No, she didn’t hold. It was a rope, looped over an iron hook on the pine beam, wound around her wrists six or seven times. She was hanging there like a side of meat, swaying slightly.
Exemel blinked. He tore off his sunglasses leaned forward into the bright light, bending sideways to see better.
“Holy—!”
Exemel dropped the bucket and the hose and charged the door. He clawed at the latch, but it was locked on the inside. He put his face flat against the glass and was certain she was dead, but he banged on the glass. “Lady! Lady!”
She pushed the marble floor with her toes and twisted slightly. She only got halfway around before her foot slipped and she twisted back. He saw a blood-red rubber ball gagging her. There was frenzied terror in her eyes.
He clawed at the door again, then reached for the bucket of pool tablets. He swung it twice to build up power, then hurled it. The tempered glass exploded into a million rough diamonds. He skidded and slipped on the pebbly fragments as he rushed to her across the granite tiles.
“Are you okay, lady? Watch the glass. Who did this—?” He put his arms around her naked waist to hoist her up and get the rope off the hook. The scent of a strawberry oil came down to him from her bare breasts rubbing against his forehead, and the loop wasn’t slipping over the edge. The woman’s body tensed against him, and he looked up. She whined panicky noises out her nose against the gag. He turned and followed her line of sight.
A bulldog of a man had come out of the corridor wearing a leather mask, a spiked leather dog collar, and leather pants he hadn’t finished lacing down the side. He was bare from the waist up, wooly gray hair covering him like the unruly fleece of a neglected ram.
He looked at the glass on the granite tiles, then at Exemel.
“What the—?”
“You don’t move, dude,” said Exemel. “Who are you anyway?”
“Why, you son of a bitch!” he growled and started for Exemel with his huge fists raised.
“Hey! Hey!” said Exemel, backing away. “Stop it! I mean it! Don’t make me—! Stop—!”
Exemel didn’t even see the first punch, as it whizzed by, just clipping his nose. He stumbled backwards down two steps into the pit area around the fireplace, landing hard next to a campaign trunk used as a coffee table. The woman was twitching and swinging, screaming against her gag, trying to get off the hook. “Shut up!” said the man. He grinned with crooked teeth, snatched up the poker.
Still on his back, Exemel grabbed a tall bronze statue of Shiva off the trunk and held it across his torso to block the blows. The man raised the poker and savored the pleasure of what he was about to do. “You need a lesson, you son of a bitch!”
Exemel, however, kicked out, somehow tangled his shoe in the loose laces of the man’s leather pants, and with the downswing of the poker, it caused him to lose his balance and fall on Exemel. His bleary eyes stared into Exemel’s, and his whiskey breath beat on Exemel’s lips.
Exemel turned his face away but was pinned under the man, who hardly moved, as if he’d got the wind knocked out of him. The puffs of his breath, hot and wet, came out at long intervals, and Exemel began to squirm, pushing at him, desperately trying to get out from under him.
The man howled then, raised himself on all fours, then rolled onto his back. Shiva hung on his chest. The arm of Shiva had gone into him up to the bronze god’s shoulder.
“Man” whispered Exemel. “Man.” He crawled toward him and gingerly reached out to pull the statuette out of him, but hesitated, not sure how to grip it or even if he should.
The woman flexed her body and whined a muffled plea against her gag. Exemel left the man where he lay, arms spread by the fireplace, and went to get a chair from the ultramodern dinette table. Pink and blue and black sex toys of many sizes and odd configurations, as well as three bottles of bright lubricants, had been lined up on the table with the cold precision of instruments in an operating room. He dragged a chair across the floors and stood on it to lift her off the hook. She gasped for air, bending at the waist, as he unfastened the strap holding the ball gag. She was Asian, either Filipino or Vietnamese, he thought. Beautiful.
“Are you okay?” He tried to avoid looking at her nakedness as he picked at the tight knots on her wrist.
“What the hell took you so long?” she said. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”
He blinked. “Uhh, there was an accident out on 215, traffic was stopped both ways. A big truck—”
“I didn’t want to go through his crap again. Ever.” She turned toward the man by the fireplace, pulling her bound wrists from Exemel, and spit. “Sick bastard!”
“It’s a good thing I came along when I did,” said Exemel.
“Get something to cut these damned ropes!”
“Uh, yes, ma’am.” He spun toward the kitchen. On the other side of the dinette counter he saw a chef’s knife in a wooden holder. By the time he got back, the woman was standing over the man.
“He’s still breathing,” she said.
Exemel looked at him. “I don’t think so.”
“I tell you he’s still breathing. Garbage doesn’t die.”
“Maybe we should call the cops or something.”
“Oh, like right,” she said drooping her jaw. “Why don’t we just call the Sun? Or how about Fox News?” Her face twisted with anger. She lifted her foot and stomped the man’s lower belly with her heel. The man’s arm flew up, then dropped limp.
“Whoa!” said Exemel. “He moved.”
“I told you!” the woman shrieked. She grabbed the arm of Shiva that wasn’t embedded in the man. Her wrists still tied together, she rocked Shiva back and forth like a video game joystick, then tugged the statuette. It made a sucking sound. She raised it high and, with a grunt and an aiee!, threw it down. It bounced off the man’s head and clanked against the hearth. Shiva’s bloody arm was now bent in half.
“Whoa!” said Exemel, reaching to her, forgetting the twelve-inch knife was still in his hand.
“Watch it!” she barked. “You could cut me with that thing!”
“You shouldn’ta done that!”
“Will you please shut up and cut these damned ropes off!”
“Okay. I’m sorry.” He concentrated and carefully sawed the thick rope in the space between her wrists. “You’re gonna be okay now.”
“Just don’t cut me. How did you get in this business anyhow?”
Exemel shrugged. “I didn’t have any other possibilities. I hate not having possibilities. I was a games programmer. The business tanked. You ever play Galaxy B72?”
She laughed. “That’s what people used to ask me. How I got in the business.”
Exemel had sawed through the first strand, but the rest of them did not fall away. She struggled with them, staring at the dead man. “Then I thought I got out of the business. The American
dream! Right. Marriage is the same thing, only worse. Worse and boring. The time never runs out.”
Finally the ropes fell away. She rubbed the raw, red bands on her skin.
Her nakedness had distracted him and what she had said slipped through his grasp like a handful of sand. “I’ll get you something to cover up,” he said.
“Never mind that,” she said. “What are you going to do with him?”
“With him?”
“You’re supposed to clean it up.”
The pool?
“Well, what do you do? Bury him in the desert?”
What?
Her eyes narrowed and she took the chef’s knife out of his hand. “Do you need to cut him up? I want to help. I know exactly where I’ll start. You think he could still feel that? Maybe he’s looking down on us from somewhere. I’ll cut it off and leave it somewhere the coyotes could eat it.” She laughed. “It might make them sick.”
He grabbed her upper arm as she turned toward the body. “Whoa, Jesus, lady. We’re not going to chop him up. Man! Look, I understand you don’t like the dude. He hurt you. I’m with you on that, but he’s dead now. What if, like, coyotes dig him up and somebody finds him? How are you gonna explain that? They can find teeny-weeny drops of blood and hair and DNA and, uh, stuff.” He could see she was thinking. “You get me. You’re just going to, like, tell the truth, see?”
She suddenly tossed her head and laughed. “You’re right.”
“You’ve got to tell it like it happened. Exactly.”
“Then everything matches the clues. Ha! I love it.”
“There’ll be publicity, you can’t help that. It’ll be embarrassing, but people forget stuff and you’ll get over it.”
She smiled. “Sure. Perfect. You don’t look like you know what you’re doing, but you do.”
“Uh, thanks.” Exemel stuck his thumbs in his belt loops.
She rubbed her hands across her hard stomach, smearing two drops of blood towards her navel. She pursed her lips. “I ought to give you a bonus. I’d like that. How about it?”
This kind of thing had happened to Exemel before in the boredom of the upper class suburbs like Red Rock and Spanish Trail. Old man’s out golfing, the wife is sunning by the pool getting ideas from reading Cosmo or some book about men in riding boots. But the woman was usually so old or so fat or so ugly that turning them down wasn’t easy. They’d get offended after he left and call for a different pool boy. He said he was gay a couple of times, thought that would work, but one woman offered to cure him and another offered her husband, provided she could watch. He said he had an infection one time. She freaked and wouldn’t let him clean the pool. So sometimes, if he could stand it, it was easier to go ahead with it until she kept calling up over tiny spots of algae and he couldn’t stand it anymore and decided that cleaning that particular pool was more work than, well, really cleaning a pool. This time the woman looked a lot more like pleasure than work, but there was a guy who was, like, dead, ten feet in front of the huge leather sofa that she was lying back on.
“It would be, ahh, unprofessional,” he said. He waited for her anger, but she merely wiggled her hips.
“Oooh, a professional!,” she purred. “Now I know I would really enjoy it.”
“We got a code. Well, it’s not a code, but it’s sort of a code.”
She sat up and shrugged. “That’s amazing! Even more study.”
“Don’t, like, be offended or nothing.”
“I’m not. I’m impressed. I didn’t think you handled it well at all, being late and everything—”
“There was a big pile-up on 215—”
“—but the proof’s right there. My life’s about to get a whole lot better.” She flipped a finger at the dead man. “Sick bastard!”
“You want me to dial the cops for you?”
“I can handle it,” she said. “I’ll just concentrate on those five million reasons to say the right thing. Cha-ching. It’s my jackpot. The jackpot every tourist dreams about.”
He nodded.
“I’ll get your money,” she said, walking along the far wall and avoiding the glass.
“But I haven’t—” she was already in the corridor to the back “—done the pool yet.”
Exemel stared at the dead man. He knew he was missing something. This was like one of those games where you have to travel through some cyberspace world gathering objects like keys and talismans and sometimes you know where the last door is, but you can’t figure out what opens it. Of course you can always cheat and go to the chat board at Gamester.com and somebody will tell you, but only junior high kids who don’t appreciate the tao of gaming would ask or answer a question like that, though he’d have to admit that once or twice when he was really stuck … .
He didn’t notice her return until she said, “Catch!” A sealed envelope hit his chest and before he could disengage his thumbs from his belt loop, it had fallen to the floor. He picked it up. It was almost an inch thick. Most people wrote a check, he thought. What was this? All ones?
“You want to count it?” she asked.
“Uh, if you’re trusting me, I’m trusting you. That’s what I say.” With a roll of his head, he smiled and stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. “I’d better get to work.”
“On what?”
“The pool,” he said.
“Very funny,” she said. “You get out of here, a long way out of here. I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Have a good life. I’ve got things to do. You’ll read it in the papers. The guy who broke in was black, about six feet, with a shaved head, a Mexican accent, and an earring.”
He squinted, still unable to decipher the lock on that last door, but nodded and picked up the bucket of chlorine tablets that still lay in the lake of broken glass. The handle was hot from lying in the open doorway and seemed a lot heavier than usual. The vacuum hose had unrolled all over the patio. As he wound it, he barely noticed the telephone ringing inside.
“Marty?” she said. “It’s just great! Just perfect! I’m going to call the cops and—”
Exemel straightened up and squinted into the house. Just great? Just perfect?
“You had to slip out to a pay phone? Why? No records, I understand, but—?” Suddenly she looked up at Exemel. “What?” she said. “That can’t be. He’s right here. Talk to him yourself. He’s about six foot two.” She listened carefully. “No,” she said
slowly. “This guy could fall down a drinking straw.” Her eyes widened. She walked toward Exemel. “Marty sent you, right?”
“Marty? No, it was Lester. Marty don’t work there no more.”
She shuddered her head trying to clear it. “Where? Where does Marty work—? Used to work?”
“Desert City Pool Services. My real name’s Herbert, but everybody calls me Exemel. Like in XML, you know, ‘Extensible Mark-up Language.’ It was kind of a joke.”
Her mouth fell open and she did not move. The phone was squawking in her hand. “Shut up, Marty,” she finally said. “Just a minute, damn it!” She blinked, thought, then smiled like a mother holding a newborn. “Uh, umm, Hex-abel, or whatever, could you come back inside for a minute?”
“Exemel. But really, ma’am, I’m flattered and all, but the code, you know … I got three more pools this afternoon and we don’t get overtime.”
“Just—” she said, barely controlling herself, “just come in for a minute. Please. My nerves are shot. Just a few seconds.”
Exemel crunched in across the glass. “You don’t look so good. I mean, you look good, but, you know, you don’t look good. I can wait for the cops with you. I got no problem with that.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Maybe a toke or two would help. I’ll just step out to the truck. It’s new stuff so it shouldn’t smell too much like chlorine yet.”
“Just—damnit—stay there. Don’t move. I—I want to get a robe. Promise?”
“Sure.”
Exemel gazed at the dead man sprawled in front of the fireplace. With the leather pants and mask, his skin pale and unreal, he looked like a really big action figure. An X-Man or something. Deathmaster. Sado-Man. Sick Bastard Dude.
He heard the padding of the woman’s feet on the granite floor. She was still naked, but she was holding an enormous nickel-plated pistol in front of her.
“Whoa,” said Exemel.
She stiffened her arms. The heavy gun wobbled in front of her. “Look, I’m really grateful for all you’ve done, but Marty knows about things like this and he says you’ve got to die.”
“Me?”
“You heard Marty’s name. It’s tough luck for you. What can I tell you? I mean, I didn’t know you weren’t the guy.”
“But I am the pool guy. Exemel Knapsdale. That’s me!”
“Not for the damned pool! The guy who was supposed to off Ted. He was killed on 215. All burned up. He was in Marty’s car.”
“This is the Marty who used to work with me?”
“No! The guy with the car! Will you pay attention?! Marty owns the Pleasure Garden! I used to work there. He hooked me up with Ted. I pretended to be just off the boat and the sick bastard married me. Marty said he’d arrange it. He knows people.”
“Okay,” said Exemel. “Okay. But what’s this got to do with the pool?”
She ground her teeth in frustration and closed her eyes. “Never mind! It wasn’t a black guy. You broke in, looking for drugs or something. Ted tried to defend me. I ran for the gun. You killed Ted. I killed you.” She licked her lips. “That will work. Yeah.”
“Well, I did kill that dude,” said Exemel. “That dude is Ted, right? It was an accident, but it’s still, like, killing. So it’s like karma coming back on me or something. I started work on a game called Karma once, but they pulled the plug on it because like Hindus or somebody might get the wrong impression—”
“Will you shut up?!” The gun wobbled, but she gritted her teeth and squeezed. Nothing happened. She looked at the gun in astonishment and tried again. Nothing happened. “What the—?”
“Some joke,” said Exemel, taking one step toward her. “That wasn’t funny! You really had me going there!”
The woman’s face twisted in fury. It seemed to morph and massage itself, and Exemel hesitated at the sight, waiting for her to turn into an American Werewolf or just explode like in Scanners. Before he could react, she snatched the chef’s knife off the dinette table, raised it, and charged him.
This was no joke, dude. His sneaker went out from under him as the glass pellets skidded. He stumbled over the patio door sill and dropped to one knee. He covered his face with his hands and braced to feel the knife in his back. He stared into the darkness of his hands to see what Death or God or Shiva or whatever it was really looked like.
But there was only the pain in his knee and a strange noise: whee! whee!, like the sound of a tiny, distant bird. He spread his fingers and saw the woman sitting in the glass pellets. She had slipped on them as well. The noise was her breathing, growing weaker and weaker. The knife was buried deep under her rib cage.
“Lady!” said Exemel. “I’ll get a doctor.”
Her eyes rolled up to look at him. Her mouth gaped. She seemed to want to say something to him, and shook her head. “The jackpot,” she said and her pupils rolled up like cherries on a slot machine. She fell back white-eyed.
“Lady?” he asked. “Lady?” He looked at her and wondered what she would have looked like with clothes on. He’d never see that now. She was seriously dead. He crossed the room. Ted was even deader than he’d been a while ago. He thought about the envelope of money in his back pocket, and about Marty, and about the dude who was burned up on 215 and blocked the traffic going both ways. If he could write a will for Ted, he’d be rich! Dude, would that be stupid. Greed is not good, no matter what the evangelists say. He thought about DNA, and blood spatter stuff, and he was glad he hadn’t taken her up on the offer, which he’d really wanted to, but not with the dead guy watching.
He concentrated. It wasn’t easy because he wasn’t in, like, that stoned way that makes you understand everything real clear. After thinking for what seemed a very long time, wandering through several mental detours about whether Shiva could materialize and be a witness, he picked up the woman’s phone.
“Man,” he told the woman who answered, “something’s happened at the house down here! Dude, it’s like Sharon Tate or something!”
A short while later, under the pergola by the pool house, the detective lifted his stetson and set it on the chaise lounge next to him. “Okay, Mr. Knapsdale—”
“My friends call me Exemel.” He had brought a bucket of granular chlorine from the truck and was using it as a stool.
“I’m not your friend, Mr. Knapsdale.”
“I thought—” He was going to say that the police were supposed to be our friends, at least that’s what they taught him in
elementary school. “You can call me Exemel, anyway. If you like. My real name is Herbert.”
“So you’re sure she said ‘Marty’?”
“I think so. Sir.”
“She didn’t say a last name?”
Exemel narrowed his eyes and thought.
“Well?”
“No. Just ‘Marty.’” He nodded.
“And you don’t know who this Marty is?”
“There used to be a Marty who was my boss, but he moved to the coast a year ago.”
“And do you know his last name?”
Again, Exemel narrowed his eyes and thought. “No. Just ‘Marty.’”
The detective scribbled on his note pad.
“You think Marty knew these people?”
Exemel shrugged. “If we did their pool back then.”
“They moved in here seven months ago.”
“Marty was already gone. The good life in L.A., you know. I used to live in the Silicon, you know. Ever play Galaxy B72?”
The detective adjusted his underwear at the crotch and stood. Another detective, much younger, approached. “Mr. Knapsdale, when you went inside, what did you touch?”
Exemel thought. “I don’t know, man. I was, like, freaked out. I came around the corner with this bucket of chlorine—” he touched the container he sat on “—and the hose and saw the glass was smashed in and then I saw her on the floor and I ran inside and I saw the dead dude and, I don’t know, I was checking her out and him out and—”
“Yeah, yeah, so you said. Did you move anything? It’s all pretty much as you found it?”
“I might have moved something when I was checking them out, but I didn’t take nothing.”
The detective nodded. He spoke to his older partner. “It’s her, all right.”
“I knew it was her,” said the older man. “I busted her and Marty Grego bailed her. I figure he rolled her john, too, but the vic wouldn’t come back from Pennsylvania to testify. I made sure his wife found out about it, though.”
“You think Grego did this?”
“He or one of his goons.”
“The killer comes around back, maybe by the desert. There are some four-wheeler tracks out there, but the wind has been blowing. He grabs a bucket of chlorine tablets by the filter over there and smashes the patio door, surprising the couple, who are in the bedroom cleaning up after their afternoon recreation: untying, taking off the perv outfits. Out comes Ted Bigelow. They struggle, the killer smashes him in the head, then stabs him with something.”
“I think he used the statue for that, too.”
“That’s pretty weird,” said the younger detective. “The wound could be a bullet hole or some kind of knife.”
“The lab will figure it out. Either way, then out comes the missus with the gun.”
“She wasn’t able to fire it. It was loaded and the safety was off, but she didn’t jack a bullet into the chamber. Goon knocks it away, stabs her with her own knife. Or maybe he had a gun and forced her to put hers down.”
The older detective pulled at his lip. “Marty Grego would normally use Paul Champion, but he was killed in a car accident today.”
“There was an untraceable .22 in the car and the car was Grego’s, but it was coming this way.”
“Maybe Champion left here, went somewhere south, then turned back north. Make sure about the time of death. Of course, I’d rather pin it on Grego. A dead Champion is a little less likely to squeal on Grego than a live one, but only a little less.”
The younger detective suddenly cocked his head. They had forgotten about Exemel. The older detective turned to him. “You got big ears, Knapsdale? You been listening?”
“Huh?” said Exemel.
“You know a man named Marty Grego?”
Exemel narrowed his eyebrows. “I don’t think so. He the guy who moved to the coast?”
The detective shook his head. “Look, Knapsdale, you don’t breathe a word about what you’ve seen here. Anything about this crime scene gets out and you’re looking at obstruction of justice. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll bet if we had a reason to get even with you, we wouldn’t have any trouble finding an illegal substance or two,” said the younger detective.
“You’ll get no trouble from me, sir.” Exemel stood up and hefted the bucket of chlorine. “If you need me for anything, you can just call Desert—”
“Goodbye, Mr. Knapsdale,” said the detective, picking up his stetson.
Exemel was relieved the questioning had ended. He didn’t know how long it might take the money in the envelope, buried in the granular chlorine, to get all burned up or bleached out. He felt like some fine weed had kicked in. Dude! He now had possibilities. Sweet possibilities! Maybe start up his own game company, and finish Karma. Maybe he could go to India and work the deal there. It would take some thinking how he could spend that ten thou, but you can’t spend it if it’s all eaten up or bleached white. He was also thinking he wouldn’t buy any more of Iggy’s stuff. Back to Chuckster and the tried and true. Iggy’s stuff was way too weird.
“Loser,” whispered the younger detective.
“To the problem at hand,” said the older. “Let’s find out how Grego spent his day.”
“He’d better have an explanation for every minute,” said the younger.
“Every minute,” repeated the older. “If Marty Grego even stepped out for a phone call—”
“Toast,” said the younger.