So far I’d been lucky enough to duck my boss. Claudia Michelin, a certified social worker who lived for rules and regulations, hated most folks and probably got into social work because it gave her power over weak people. The supermodel world had closed down for Claudia a while ago, as she had more chins than the Hong Kong phone book and sported a black curly perm just like Starsky used to have… or was it Hutch? Anyway, the Michelin Woman has been trying to fire me for years and came pretty close to being successful about a year ago.
I was busy dunking the second donut into the coffee and cursing at the amount of white powder that had gotten all over my shirt when the phone rang. It was my cop friend, Mike Kelley.
“Good morning, officer. Keeping the streets safe for us grateful citizens?” I said.
“Uh, Duff, you are the counselor who sees Hackin’ Howard, aren’t you?”
“We like to stay away from nicknames, but yes, I am.”
“You see him today?”
“You know I’m not supposed to divulge confidential information like that.”
“Uh-huh,” Kelley said.
“I certainly wouldn’t disclose to one of you heartless police officials that a client didn’t keep his ten a.m. appointment.”
“Hey, Duff?” Kelley sounded serious, which he always did, but a little more serious than usual.
“Yeah?”
“A girl from McDonough High was found this morning with her throat slit. Her name was Connie Carter.”
“Holy shi-,” I said.
“And Duff…” Kelley hesitated. “She was the captain of the cheerleaders.”
2
I agreed to meet Kelley after work at our usual hangout, AJ’s Grill. The key to AJ’s is consistency. It’s consistently empty except for Kelley, the Fearsome Foursome, and AJ himself. The Schlitz, my adult beverage of choice, is consistently cold, AJ is consistently rude, and the Foursome are consistently arguing over the most inane of topics. Tonight was no different.
“I’m telling ya,” Rocco said. “Mr. Ed was really a zebra.”
“That’s horseshit,” TC countered.
“Or zebra shit,” Jerry Number Two said.
“If Ed was a zebra, how did they hide his stripes?” Jerry Number One asked.
“In black and white TV, the stripes all came out the same, which is why the football players were always running into the refs,” Rocco explained.
“Huh?” TC said.
“How come Wilbur wasn’t always running into Ed the zebra?” Jerry Number One asked.
“Hold it.” TC wanted to slow things down. “Why were the football players running into the refs? Were they watching the games on TV while they played?”
“Remember the horse in the Wizard of Oz?” Jerry Number Two chimed in. “Was he a zebra too?”
Kelley was in his seat, which was one removed from the Foursome, half turned away from them, watching the television. I decided to forgo the resolution of the Ed the zebra/horse discussion, and I sat next to Kel. AJ opened a longneck of Schlitz and slid it in front of me.
“They can’t find him,” Kelley said.
“Rheinhart?”
“No, Ed the fucking invisible zebra.”
“A little tense tonight, huh?”
“What’s to be tense about? It’s not like there’s a serial killer on the loose.”
“I don’t know, Kel, he didn’t seem like he was capable of it,” I said.
“C’mon, Duff, history would point in the other direction,” he said.
“It’s been thirty years, and the whole time in prison they didn’t have any trouble with him.”
“How much trouble is a 140-pound redhead going to cause at Green Haven? He probably never left his cell,” Kelley said.
Kelley sipped his Coors Light and watched the TV. I say “watched the TV,” but even though his eyes were pointed in that direction, Kelley faced the TV to avoid getting drawn into the Foursome’s discussions. ESPN Classic was showing the Johnny Unitas story. It seemed like you could see the referees very clearly in the black and white footage.
“Look, Kel, what do I know? Talk to the shrinks,” I said.
“I’m sure the detectives will. I was hoping you could give me some insight,” Kelley said.
“Sorry-I don’t know a whole lot about Howard. The last time I met with him, he broke down and said he wanted a life where people weren’t out to get him.”
“Heartwarming from a guy who murdered four people.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, the guy’s never had a chance in life. What he did back in high school was his only way of standing up for himself.”
“Wouldn’t you say that he might have gone a tad overboard?”
“Of course-but this guy had nothin’ his whole life in terms of a family. He had nothin’ normal to base his actions on. He spent his whole life getting his ass kicked, and this was the time he said ‘enough,’” I said.
“Uh-huh. That’s great. You’ve been hanging around that clinic too much. You’re starting to sound like the rest of the social workers,” Kelley said.
Maybe Kelley was right, but something told me that Howard’s life and motivations weren’t that simple. Talking about it didn’t help me figure it out, so I let it go and joined Kelley in watching the Unitas story.
Meanwhile, the Foursome had moved on. Jerry Number One was confused about Canadian Football rules.
“Why do they only get three downs?”
“Because the field is wider,” Rocco said.
“What?” TC said.
“The field is so wide they don’t need a fourth down,” Rocco explained.
“Don’t they all have an extra player?” Jerry Number One asked.
“Yeah, so?” said Rocco.
“They’re Canadian, what do you expect?” said TC.
I didn’t want to kick around the plight of the gridiron ballers to our north, so I got in my Eldorado and headed home. I recently had the burnt orange ’76 Cadillac tuned up, and it still didn’t exactly purr like a kitten-maybe like a kitten with a hairball issue. I headed out of the industrial part of town where AJ’s was located to Route 9R where I lived in my somewhat-customized Airstream trailer, the Moody Blue. It’s named after Elvis’s last hit, at least while he was alive. I only listen to Elvis, and most of the time it’s on eight-track tapes because in ’76, eight-track players were what the cool Eldorados came with. I take a lot of shit for being an Elvis fan, but it’s just another one of those cases where I believe I’m right and the people who don’t like Elvis are wrong. Actually, it’s deeper than that. If someone doesn’t like Elvis, at least a little bit, I feel there’s something wrong with their character or their spirit or something. Tonight, on the way home, he was singing his Dylan medley, “I Shall Be Released” and “Don’t Think Twice.” I never heard Dylan’s versions.
I rent the Blue from Dr. Rudy, my buddy, my cutman, and an all-around good guy. Rudy has done me more than a few favors over the years and I try to pay him back, but I know I’m deeply in arrears when it comes to favors.
Al, my roommate, greeted me at the door with his customary kick to the nuts. He’s a basset hound, his full Muslim name being Allah-King. He used to belong to a client of mine named Walanda who used to be in the Nation of Islam. Walanda went off to jail and I promised to take care of Al for thirty days, but then Walanda got murdered. Al never does anything he’s told, he’s eaten a couch, and he’s never quite mastered the whole housebreaking thing. The thing is, Al saved my life a couple of times a while back and he has a patch of reddish-brown hair on top of his mostly black head from where a bullet grazed him to prove it. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other.
Al did a couple of 360s, grabbed an old running shoe, and jumped up on our new couch. The arms of the couch lost their upholstery within seventy-two hours of its delivery because when Al writes in his day planner “Ruin expensive item” and puts A-1 next to it, he makes sure the project gets done. He is committed to his time-management system.