“Well, turn it fucking down!”
“You got no call to be using bad language.” Kerman sulks, but lowers the volume; following Ashford’s direction, he lowers it until the music is all but inaudible.
Ashford rubs his stomach, scowls, and then gets to his feet. “I have to hit the john. Don’t go away.”
As he walks off, the blond leans the intervening stool and taps Cliff on the arm. “Do I know you? I believe I do.”
Cliff mentions that he was once an actor, movies and commercials, and the blond says, “No, that’s not it. At least, I don’t think.” She taps her chin and then snaps her fingers. “The Shark! You used to come in. You were seeing Janice for a while last year. I’m Mary Beth.”
All the women at the Shark Lounge, waitresses and dancers alike, are working girls and, after hearing about how Janice has been doing, Cliff has an idea.
“Have you got time for a date this morning?” he asks.
That puts a hitch in Mary Beth’s grin, but she says coolly, “Anything for you, sweetie.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for my friend. He needs to get laid. He’s a cop and the job’s beating him up.”
“You want me to ball a cop?”
“He’ll welcome it, I swear. Make out you’re a police groupie and you saw his gun or something. And don’t let on I had anything to do with it.”
“Whatever. It’s two hundred for a shave and a haircut. You know, the basics.”
“Shit! I don’t have two hundred in cash.”
“What about a credit card? I do Visa and Master.”
She hauls up a voluminous purse from the floor beside her stool and digs out a manual imprinter.
“Hurry!” he says, looking toward the bathroom door as she imprints his card.
Once they’ve completed their transaction, he says, “I didn’t mean to go all business on you. It was…”
“It’s no thing. I do a lot of business with older guys this time of day. It beats night work. They’re usually not freaks, so it’s easy money.”
“I know, but you were being friendly and I…”
“Oh, was I?” The blond shoulders her purse and smiles frostily. “You must have me confused for somebody else. I was working the room, Clifford.”
“Cliff,” he says in reflex.
“Okay. Cliff. I’m going to move to another stool so I can make eye contact with your buddy. But I’m down here most every morning, so if you need me for anything else, you just sing out.”
Cliff doesn’t know why he does this type of thing, plays pranks for no reason and without any point. He wonders if had it mind to compromise Ashford, to get something on him; but he doesn’t believe it’s about manipulating people. He figures it’s like with the sea turtle—he’s showing off, only for himself alone, his audience reduced to one. Another instance, he thinks, of his nonchalance.
Ashford returns and tells Kerman to bring him a glass of water. He swallows some pills, wipes his mouth, and says, “They should blow up that john. It’s a fucking disaster area.”
“I can help you with that.”
“Huh?”
“I was in a demolition unit during Vietnam.”
Ashford’s eye snags on something—Mary Beth is sitting across from him, eating her French fries, giving each one a blowjob, licking off the salt and sucking them in. He tears himself away from this vision and says to Cliff, “We haven’t been able to locate Miz Gerone, so officially you’re a person of interest. If that blood on your house matches DNA the lab extracted from her hair brush, I’m going to have to bring you in.”
Cliff offers emphatic denials of any involvement with her disappearance. “We fucked occasionally,” he says, “but that was it. We didn’t have much of an emotional connection.”
“I know this is a frame. But the way you’ve handled everything, telling that story, lying about your girlfriend, it…”
“That wasn’t a lie. I couldn’t get back into my house because you were processing it. So I went over to Marley’s after you released me, and things got deep. I swear to God that’s the truth.”
“Doesn’t matter. It looks bad. You want to know something else that looks bad? I got a copy of one of your movies in the mail the other day. Jurassic Pork. Came in an envelope with no return address.”
“Aw, Christ. I did that picture for the hell of it. I was curious to see what it was like.”
“Somebody’s trying to besmirch your character.” Ashford chuckles. “They’re doing a hell of a job, too, because you were definitely the shortest man in the movie.”
“Yeah, yeah!”
“Prosecutors love to drop that sort of detail into a trial. Juries down here tend to think poorly of pornography. But the frame is so goddamn crude. The person doing the framing must have no comprehension of evidentiary procedure.”
“So you believe me?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I believe something’s going on at the Celeste.” Ashford has a sip of water, sneaks a peek at Mary Beth, who returns a wave, which he brusquely acknowledges. “You know of any way a used car can be given a new car smell?”
“Polyvinyl chloride,” Cliff says. “The stuff they make dashboards out of. It comes in a liquid form, too. The manufacturers use it as a sealant. When a dealer has to take a car back on warranty, some have been known to slap on a coat of PVC and resell the car as new.”
Ashford takes out his notebook. “What was that? The sealant?”
Cliff repeats the name. “The stuff’s poison. Every time America has a whiff of a new car interior, they’re catching a lungful of carcinogens.”
Apparently unconcerned by this threat to the nation’s health, Ashford says, “I might have found that Ford Escape. About five years ago, we were investigating a stolen car ring and we thought Muntz could be involved. We put a man into his service center in South Daytona. Nothing came of it, but I still had my suspicions. I went up there Tuesday and there was a red Ford Escape sitting out back under a tarp. I had one of our people take a look at it. It had that new car smell, but the engine number had been taken off with acid and the paint job wasn’t the original. The car was originally gray, like the one you saw.”
“If Jerry was chopping cars, they would have cut it up within an hour or two of bringing it into the shop,” Cliff says. “It’s been a month.”
“He might have a special order for an Escape. It might be a present for one of Muntz’s bimbos. Maybe he had a buyer and the guy has a cash flow problem. Who knows? Maybe it slipped his mind. Muntz is no Einstein.” Ashford’s cough is plainly an attempt to disguise the fact that he’s taking yet another look at Mary Beth. “He’s got papers, but the name on them doesn’t check out. He claims the guy came in off the street and said he won the car on a quiz show. I haven’t got enough to charge him, but my gut tells me that was your Escape.”
“So what’s next?”
“I might check in to the Celeste tonight and see what’s what. Vice has some expensive cars they use for undercover work. I can finagle one for the night, tell the guy on-duty at the yard I need it to impress some woman. That should get me into Room Eleven.”
“You think that’s a good idea?”
“I can’t see what else to do. I don’t have much time. If Gerone’s DNA comes back a match to the blood on your house, you’re going to become the sole target of the investigation.”
“I thought you said you believed me!”
“I may buy your story. Some of it, anyway. But no one else does. The only reason you haven’t been arrested is there’s no evidence, no body. I’m on my own. The captain…” Ashford grimaces. “He’s a results kind of guy. He’d love to make this case. It would look good on his resume. You’re about as close to a Hollywood celebrity as we got around here, and a trial would get him exposure. It’d be huge on Court TV. He won’t authorize me to do diddley until after the DNA comes back. If it’s a match, you’re in the shit.”