More whodunits, p.11
More Whodunits, page 11
Bobby the bartender, busy setting up for the late afternoon rush, suffered a broken arm and multiple cuts and bruises.
Arthur Pym, hobbling painfully on the sidewalk just outside the front door, was thrown to the ground. He was not seriously injured, although he bled spectacularly from a number of shallow cuts caused by flying glass.
Even so, as he lay on the sidewalk a few feet from his crutch and his briefcase, Arthur murmured, “Thank you, George.” But none of the passers-by who came running, their attention captured by the explosion and their curiosity by the sight of the demolished saloon and the injured man, made out the words—or would have understood them anyway.
TOM CRUISE’S TIGHTIE-WHITIES, by William Maltese
1.
When first perusing the on-line selection available from Mainline Male Escort Service, Paul Belieux momentarily ventures into the “for-chubby-chasers” section, with vague thoughts, maybe, of finding someone who reminds him of Jeremy Field. It appeals to his sense of satisfaction that he might fuck a Jeremy look-alike, now, by way of proxy-fucking the real Jeremy who he’d so figuratively screwed over in university.
Paul, though, when placing his order, doesn’t pick “Calvin,” who could be Jeremy’s doppelgänger; Jeremy is still fat, as Paul has verified via GOOGLE. Other than lurking on the internet, Paul hasn’t been in contact with any of his old classmates, since he’s never made enough money to run in the same circles. Maybe, though, his luck having recently changed for the better, it’s time for him to check-in and renew old acquaintances. Hi, there, Jeremy! Remember me?
Paul selects “Brad” from the escort menu. Brad is a big, husky, studly number, with black hair, blue eyes, dimples, cleft chin, hair from his jugular notch to his ankles, hung like a horse, and is, after all, what Paul prefers—and deserves—over fatties, especially as Paul is celebrating his “boat” having finally come in. His present windfall is the result of the money he’d earned in university, conning Jeremy Field, only to think it all pissed away, when, having been drunk one night in a bar, Paul had committed all of it, and, thereby, been conned himself by a very attractive young woman, into buying acres of then-uninhabitable land that he’d only been able to sell, all of these years later, albeit for a small fortune, to a conglomerate of oil-developers.
Kismet. Karma. God bless!
Paul is in the Honeymoon Suite of the Inn at Carmel-on-the-Sea, complete with its complementary caviar, champagne, wet bar, vibrating bed, Jacuzzi, and stellar view of surf and, and....
He checks his reflection in the mirror and sees his blond hair, green eyes, and all the rest of his movie-star good looks. At least, he sees himself as looking good. Apparently, he’s only one of a few who do. Handsome men in California are a dime a dozen. His father’s name and one-time reputation in the movie industry may have opened doors, but not much ever happened afterwards. Maybe things might have been different if Paul’s old man hadn’t gone bust after a long line of box-office disasters. Maybe...maybe.... No sense moaning over spilt milk.
He’s picked Carmel-by-the-Sea because it’s fitting he celebrate in the town where Jeremy Field lives. Thank you, Jeremy, who would likely be madder than hell if he knew how he’s contributed to Paul’s present success, even though Jeremy has always had lots of money inherited-from-grandmother, even more incoming when both of his parents conveniently died, at one and the same time, in a well-remembered California earthquake.
There’s a knock at the door, and Brad, looking exactly as advertised (how seldom that happens!), arrives.
“Hi!” he says. “You called?”
2.
Jeremy Field is sexually aroused. As usual, he doesn’t really understand the how or the why of his arousal, although he’s read everything he can on fetishes, including all the total bullshit by Sigmund (fucking) Freud.
He shuts the drawer to conceal the lone package in it. The package has remained unopened since its return from the lab. Jeremy is afraid to open it, on two counts. Firstly, he’s seen what damage those fumbly-fingered scientists can do. He’d been promised the sample taken would be infinitesimal, but, from experience, he knows what he calls infinitesimal, and what the lab guys call infinitesimal, are not necessarily always one and the same. Secondly, he’s even more fearful of what they may have found.
He shouldn’t have sent this particular item, still the favorite of his collection, for analysis. He should have resisted his growing need to verify his long-held suspicions that he’d been taken for a ride by Paul Belieux, back in university, having suspected, from the get-go, that these particular underpants were part of a scam, a joke, a let’s pull the shit-streaked drawers over the head of deviant fat-ass Jeremy Field and make him pay for the privilege. Although, since then (because of then?), Jeremy has been more careful in his dealings, lucking out with people far more responsible than he suspects that devious, jealous, money-grubbing Paul Belieux ever was (or is today).
The scientific procedure isn’t cheap that determines if the feces stains on the packaged underpants contain the same DNA as the saliva obtained from the water glass Jeremy purchased from a member of the hotel kitchen staff, after a charity luncheon, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The two hundred bucks paid for the glass is more money down the proverbial rat hole if Jeremy, now, decides not to access the lab findings.
“So what if you’re out a few bucks, Jeremy? You’re rich as Midas.” He often talks to himself. Sometimes, truly, he fears for his sanity. Sometimes, he’s sure he’s crazy. However, his madness has nothing whatsoever to do with the money he’s spent on the underpants, the water glass, and the testing, but it does have a lot to do with feelings deep inside him. I could very well kill Paul Belieux if that asshole did, indeed, pull a fast one with one quick wipe of cotton-undies’ back panel along the crack of his own ass!
Jeremy thinks a lot about killing since he killed the neighbor’s cat, whose smelly feline shit had always ended up at the end of Jeremy’s driveway. Has he really killed the cat, though, or has his desire to kill it been so great that he just imagines it’s so? Has he really scattered poisoned bread crumbs to exterminate shit-machine seagulls? No big deal if he has. Cats, seagulls, possibly even Paul Belieux, are vermin, one and all!
He sniffs the air. His fingertips run the countertop. He checks the pads of his fingers for dust after the slide and finds nothing. Good thing, too, in that he pays his fucking cleaning lady a mint. So good is she, he has nightmares of her finding all of his dirty-underwear collection—and washing it. He’s made it perfectly clear to her that she is never, ever, to open any dresser drawer in his bedroom.
He opens one such “forbidden” drawer, and, again, looks at the package ensconced within it. He picks up the parcel, brings it close to his nose, and sniffs.
Probably, he should check, at least to see what damage the lab has done. When the technicians had finished with the shorts that the character, Beecher, had worn (or partially worn) on the cable-television series Oz, during the scene where he’d had a swastika tattooed on his ass, Jeremy had been hard-pressed to find where (along one hem) the sample for analysis had been taken. Maybe, he had lucked out, again, this time.
He likes the old cable series Oz, of which he has all the CDs. He likes all its rapes, all its murders. Yes, all its violence.
He wonders if it’s ever easy to get away with murdering someone. Certainly, it’s easy enough to kill seagulls and a cat and get away with it. Paul Belieux was always such a pussy-who-considered-himself-a-stud.
“Here, pussy, pussy, Paul. Wring your fucking pussy neck! Throw you in a dumpster! Bye-bye, pussy.”
He more heartily sniffs the package’s brown wrapping, but it’s not the paper smell in which he’s interested. He wants at those funky odors beneath the paper, inside the plastic. He craves the musky fragrance—lovely, delicious, marvelous, sexy, sensuous—emanating from the tainted fabric within.
He keeps possession of the package, but slides the drawer shut.
He’s going to masturbate while he can still believe the contents are the real thing.
Masturbation is something with which Jeremy is intimately familiar. He discovered its potential at a very early age, and he relies upon it, constantly, for sexual release, even at this time in his life. His physical appearance (AKA fat) always makes other avenues of sexual release less convenient. Not because there aren’t people, even attractive ones, ready, willing, and able to have sex with him (or anyone), if the price is right, because there are. Always having had the money to pay, Jeremy simply doesn’t like his body enough, and never has, to put it on display on a regular basis. Even now, he’s clothed from head to foot. Sometimes, he even showers, in private, with his clothes on. In school, fellow classmates had been teacher-appointed, as monitors, to make sure he didn’t skip personal hygiene.
Self-gratification is all he needs—yes, please, and thank you. It’s just so uncomplicated, no strings attached. Once he’d realized his penchant for dirty underwear, able to bring that into play, he never found sex with another person as enjoyable as sex with his hand, complemented by a piece of soiled underwear in the other.
The undershorts in the package were Jeremy’s very first major fetish purchase. Before which, it had merely been a case of his sneaking smells of dirty, sweaty jockstraps left lying around in locker rooms. Should he, now, find out that, as long suspected, the package contains not what he’d bought and paid for, he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Except, murder does keep coming to mind. He’s getting a severe headache just thinking about what the lab results might tell him.
Of course, the tests could well vindicate Paul Belieux, just as previous tests have proved that other sellers, about whom Jeremy has had questions, were, indeed, upstanding businessmen whose for-sale items were exactly as advertised. On the other hand, Paul was there at the beginning when Jeremy had been exceptionally vulnerable and, admittedly, not yet as careful as he should have been in heeding that long-proven truism: Let the buyer beware!
Jeremy would likely have remained more confident of Paul’s honesty if Paul hadn’t been (and probably still was) such a shit. Jeremy really never liked him, and, he suspected (even now), it was vice versa. Paul had so obviously been jealous of his fellow students who had had access to a lot of money, Paul’s family having lost most of theirs. Paul was always mocking Jeremy’s fatness. Likewise, Paul had always mocked Jeremy’s fetish until he’d decided to take advantage of it—for the money.
Paul’s explanation as to how he’d acquired the item was reasonable enough. After all, his father, on his last financial legs at the time, still had connections within the movie business. Although Jeremy (it now gave him even more headaches to admit to it) had been so willing to take it all at face value, because he had been, and still was, made so sexually excited by what Paul had offered.
Jeremy remains tempted to bypass the lab report, at least for the foreseeable future, and to carry on as usual. As long as there’s the uncertainty, he can hold out hope that what he was promised, what he had bought, what’s now in the bag, home from the lab, is the real thing. Why spoil it?
In truth, he just can’t stand the idea, even all of these years later, that Paul—asshole Paul—has put something over on him. He abhors the notion that Paul—shithead Paul—chuckled all of the way to the bank, with a mocking, “Poor, fat, stupid, easy-mark Jeremy!”
He tears open the paper to reveal the transparent lab bag. Suddenly, nothing separates him from the pair of underwear, and from the neatly folded lab report, regarding those shorts, but the flimsy piece of sealing lab-tape that holds the plastic shut.
3.
Jeremy Field a killer! Why hadn’t she seen that coming?
Dr. Melissa opens the door that accesses her gewgaw-filled home office from her gewgaw-filled entranceway. She nails her visitor with her chalky, porcelain-gray eyes. Her chalky, porcelain-gray eyelashes, against her pale, bleached skin, are almost invisible without mascara; she isn’t wearing mascara. She isn’t wearing lipstick, either; it’s difficult to define her thin-thin lips. Her thin-thin body is wraithlike in her usual dowdy housedress (this one polka-dotted); her run-rampant liver-spots seemingly float in the air.
This “client” (she never calls them patients), is a well-known silk manufacturer and high-fashion designer, and he gets up from what has to be the most uncomfortable-of-all-times antique, turned-maple, banister-back, four-splat armchair.
“Mr. Draqual,” she says. Almost never, if ever, does she address him by his Christian name…which she still has a hard time believing is “Stud.”
“Dr. Melissa.”
“Dr. Doolittle,” she corrects. She never wants a client to address her by her Christian name, either.
He follows her into the Victorian-clutter where she positions herself between him and the window. She picks up a stainless steel ruler from the edge of her art nouveau (pierced-legs) writing desk of bleached mahogany and beech. The action as much as insinuates her suspicions that he’ll attempt a peek, through the lone small crack between otherwise drawn and heavy damask drapes, for a look-see at her previous client, just released via a side door, and, if he even tries, she’s going to stop him. She flexes the thin band of metal, like a schoolmarm anxious to rap knuckles (his), and simultaneously nods him toward the surprisingly uncomfortable wingback chair (not a stereotypical psychiatrist’s couch in sight).
“Pam Rice called me today,” he begins. Dr. Melissa looks back at him with a glance that says, who-the-hell-is-Pam-Rice? Or, more likely, she’s just ticked off that it’s taken him this long to bring up the subject. He gives her the benefit of the doubt and says, “You know, the author?”
Dr. Melissa sits behind her desk, but doesn’t surrender the ruler to its complementary easel atop the highly polished wood surface.
“Ms. Rice heard you like fellatio, and mistook you for one of her blood-suckers?” Not even a trace of a smile accompanies her sarcasm.
“Not vampire-maven Anne Rice, Dr. Melissa.” He’s pleased at the downturn her mouth takes upon hearing him back on a first-name basis. “I’m talking Pam Rice, the author of The 101 Killer, Dead by Daylight, and Need to Kill.”
“Surely, not another book on the Slip-to-Die-for-murders! How many does that make now? Is Ms. Rice really out to elaborate, all the more, upon your personal penchant for getting involved in thoroughly sordid adventures?”
“She wants to interview me about Jeremy Field.”
“Jeremy...?” Dr. Melissa doesn’t complete the echo and looks as if she doesn’t have a clue.
“...Field,” he finishes for her.
“Knew him, did you? Same school, was it? Same graduating class?”
* * * *
“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Jeremy?” Stud challenged. As captain of the swim team, he’d checked into gym early for a confab with the coach who wanted to discuss who Stud might recommend as a tutor for Paul Belieux, who just wasn’t keeping up his scholastic grade point.
Jeremy stood his ground, and looked quite guilty, what with his having Stud’s locker open. Granted, his locker duties provided him entry to all of the lockers via the list of combinations in the coach’s filing cabinet, but….
“Tell me you weren’t doing what I think you were doing,” Stud said.
Out of the corner of one eye, Stud saw Paul Belieux arrive.
“What’s behind your back, Jeremy?” Stud’s inquiring mind wanted to know. “If it’s my jockstrap, and if you’ve been snarfing it, you’re going to be in deep shit!”
“Have you been snarfing Stud’s jockstrap, Jeremy?” chimed in Paul.
“And, what if I have?” challenged Jeremy, who weighed close to 210 pounds and had the coach continually trying to recruit him for the wrestling team. “Are either of you chicken-shits really out to make something of it?”
* * * *
“The victim was a one-time classmate of yours, too, if I’m not mistaken” says Dr. Melissa. Stud can tell she has made the connection way before then. She probably hates how it has taken the Pam Rice phone call for him to bring any of it up.
* * * *
“There!” said Paul. “Freeze-frame!” He went over to the television set, knelt down, ran his hand across the surface of the screen, putting the tip of his index finger to a character’s head pretty much completely obscured by the helluva-lot-ongoing-party scene. “There I am.”
Paul was from LA-LA Land. His father was once a bigwig in the movie industry. No denying Talbot Belieux’s name was on the credit scrolls of Unknown Creature, Unknown Creature II, Death by Dynamo (I through IV). However, was that really Talbot Belieux’s son, Paul, movie extra, in the middle of an old Tom Cruise flick?
“Yeah, well, I think you’re full of shit,” said Jeremy from where he occupied the heavy-duty sofa. “I don’t think that’s you, and no way is a chicken shit like you ever going to convince me otherwise, short of having Tom Cruise show up and bear more-likely-than-not false witness.”
* * * *
“The movie was Risky Business,” Stud tells Dr. Melissa.
“Mr. Field, apparently, eventually, was convinced of Mr. Belieux’s bit part in it,” Dr. Melissa superfluously makes it a comment, not a question.
* * * *
“What would be the point of showing them to a Doubting Thomas like you, Jeremy?” Paul said. You’ll just say they’re a pair of my own undershorts, the skid marks mine. Nothing to do with Tom Cruise.”
“I’ve a sixth sense,” said Jeremy.
“Yeah, I forgot you’re such an expert on the subject. He’s an expert on the subject, right, Stud?”
* * * *
“Mr. Belieux sold to Mr. Field the supposed Tom Cruise underpants from the musical pantomime scene in Risky Business,” says Dr. Melissa.
