“Occupational hazard, I suppose.” I paused, “Mind if I pick up that stale sandwich and sit on the chair?”
“Oh, yeah, I guess I haven’t had much time to clean the old place up. I just got back last night.”
“Where’d you go?”
“Berkeley. It’s really wild out there. It’s like this one big huge enclave of beats. Lots of chicks, too. No bras, either. You can see their breasts swinging under their sweaters and blouses. It’s like one of my books coming true.”
“You get laid?”
He shrugged. “I came close.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing. And you’re doing better than I am.”
“No nookie, huh?”
I shook my head. “I’m a virgin again.”
“Don’t tell anybody I went to Berkeley and didn’t get laid, okay?”
“That wouldn’t be good for the old reputation, I guess. Especially for a pornographer. “He couldn’t get laid even in Berkeley.” Wow, that’d be some epitaph.”
“Please, McCain. I’ve told you, I don’t write pornography.”
“I’m sorry, I forgot. For a “writer of erotica.””
He leaned back in his writing chair and picked up his pack of Kools.
“I still don’t know how you can smoke menthols,”
I said. “It’s like lighting up a box of cough drops.”
“Yeah, but as much as I smoke, I tend to get sore throats.”
Two ashtrays overflowing. And a dead beer can with a cigarette filter sticking out of it. I guess I saw his point.
“I got back at six last night and went right to work. I’ve done seventeen thousand words.
That’s nearly a third of a book.”
“How many orgasms you figure in seventeen thousand words?”
He smiled. “Plenty. But the only time you look me up is when you want some scuttlebutt, McCain. So let’s get to it.
I want to get back to work here. I’m trying to hit twenty-five thousand words in twenty-four hours. That’d be a personal record.”
“You told me once you did thirty thousand words in twenty-four hours.”
“Yeah, but I was lying. This would be for real.”
“You really should think of running for political office, Kenny. You lie so well.”
You could hear all those Kools in his sharp, scratchy laugh. I don’t expect my voice sounds any better.
I said, “Brenda Carlyle.”
“I’d like to see her breasts swinging free underneath a sweater.”
“I hear David Egan has had that privilege.”
“That’s an old story.”
Kenny had always known all the gossip in town.
Even with all his traveling these days, he still knew more about the private lives of our little burg than anybody else, including the three ministers, the priest, all four beauty parlors, and Cliffie’s police force combined. A lot of these stories found their way, disguised of course, into Kenny’s books. He’d written me into a couple of them as a short private eye named “Bullets McGee,” a name I think he stole from Raymond Chandler but I’m not sure.
“Could you elaborate a little?” I said.
Kenny took a hit from his Kool. I could taste that menthol crap even over here. “He did lawn work for her husband, Mike. It was pure D. H. Lawrence. Brenda and Mike haven’t gotten along in years. She starts talking to Egan-and nobody can sling the lady bullshit like that kid-and there you go.”
“Instant paperback novel.”
“You bet.”
“Still going on?”
“On and off. You know Egan’s problem. When he’s with one girl, he wants to be with another girl. I’ll bet he could get laid if he went to Berkeley.”
“I’ll bet he could get laid just walking down the street.”
He grinned. “I always wanted to be handsome.”
“I always wanted to be tall and handsome.”
“Well, I always wanted to be tall and handsome and rich. And have a schlong out to here.”
I laughed. “You pretty much covered the bases.” Then, “Then there’s always Sara Griffin.”
“Sad case.”
“Man, I guess.”
“They covered it up by saying she went to England on some kind of foreign exchange thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She went to the nuthouse.
How’d you find out?”
He inhaled deeply of his box of burning cough drops. “This nurse I interviewed for Nympho Nurses. I put it in a nuthouse, figured that’d be a different angle.
And that way I could put transvestites and ax murderers and people who rip out their own eyeballs all in the same novel.”
“Didn’t Fitzgerald do something like that right after Gatsby?”
“Very funny.”
“So this nurse…?”
“This nurse told me about this time this girl managed to sneak away from the nuthouse and meet her lover in this nearby motel.”
“Her lover?” New information. “How old was she?”
“Let’s see, Sara probably would’ve been fifteen, probably.”
“This nurse tell you who her lover was?”
“They never found out. All they know is that it was some older man. His forties maybe. This is what they got from the motel guy, anyway.”
“What happened to Sara?”
“More shock treatment. Kept her a month longer than they’d originally planned.”
“Then she came back here?”
“Finished high school. And met your client David Egan. Which wasn’t exactly what her folks wanted. They’d spent a lot of time and laid out a lot of jack keeping her away from this older man, and then she picks up with Egan. For her it was strictly friendship. For him, he went gaga. That’s why he dropped out of high school.
He was so brokenhearted over her, he couldn’t concentrate. But what can you expect from somebody who came from his background? He’s had a rough life.”
“That’s crap, Kenny,” I said, more sharply than I needed to. “A lot of killers come from wealthy families and a lot of very good, hard-working, moral people come from the slums.”
“Wow, sounds like you’re going over to the other side. You going to that Dick Nixon rally tomorrow night? I plan to go. I hear his wife is going to wear a bikini.”
“Asshole,” I said. “It’s just that half the criminals I represent give me the same story. They have bad lives so they want to make sure other people have bad lives, too. I get tired of it. David could at least be honest with these girls.”
“Tell him, not me.”
“I plan to.”
I stood up.
“You reading anything good these days?” Kenny said.
“A lot of Gil Brewer.” Brewer was a good Gold Medal writer, whose paperbacks with the luridly swanky covers I always buy and that seem to distress nearly everybody in town. They think I should be reading great literature-which I do, actually-even though they themselves haven’t read a novel since the teacher threw them to the floor and jammed Silas Marner down their throats.
“Yeah, he’s great. Got that melancholy down. Always about a woman. He can break your heart. One of these days I’m gonna write a Gold Medal.”
“I wish you would, Kenny. You’re a good writer.” He was. Amid all that writhing and gasping and groaning you found some eminently sound social observation and some very nicely turned sentences in Kenny’s books.
“Thanks for thinking so, McCain. But everytime I sit down to write a Gold Medal-I just freeze up. I just think I’m not good enough to pull it off.”
“Just pretend you’re writing your usual stuff.
Your books aren’t all that far from Gold Medal, anyway. Kind of sneak up on yourself.”
“Yeah, the way I did when I slept with Sandy Mitchell.”
“You slept with Sandy Mitchell?”
“Yeah, didn’t I ever tell you?”
“You slept with the homecoming queen and you didn’t tell me?”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ll bet.”
Most guys couldn’t have gotten close to Sandy Mitchell with a bag of diamonds and a submachine gun. And here was the merry pornographer sleeping with her.