No Regrets, Coyote Page 9

  I asked her what she made of Krysia’s comments. Obviously something bothered her, or she wouldn’t have called me. “Krysia told me her real name was Temple Luxe.”

  “Sounds like a name you make up.”

  “I never warmed up to her husband. He was aloof, smug, indifferent. Riding a high horse. People who don’t need people bother me. Do they bother you?”

  “They worry me.” I took out my memo pad and pen.

  “Temple Luxe,” Geraldine said.

  Temple has issues, I thought.

  9

  Venise called at four A.M. to tell me that Oliver had suffered a flare-up of his gout and I’d have to drive her to Memorial for her colonoscopy. Once Django saw my eyes open, and once he got over the alarm of the telephone’s chirp, he figured it was playtime. He pounced on my toes and dug under the covers. He put his paw on my cheek and nibbled my nose. I showed him where his stuffed mouse was under the other pillow. He wrestled the mouse, held it with his front claws, and kicked at it with his furious back legs. I lay there falling in and out of sleep and dreaming that I’m onstage and I try to walk and my legs melt and I fall and find myself sitting up, waste-deep in a puddle of flesh. This anxiety was summoned by the fact that I had a light rehearsal later in the day and a dress rehearsal on Thursday. We’d open Friday for our weekend run. I ran my lines while I showered and made coffee.

  I poured a go-cup of coffee for me and a thermosful for Red. Outside on the walk I could see the mucus trails left by the garden slugs. A mangrove crab had fallen asleep halfway up the house. The smell of coffee woke Red, but he didn’t open his eyes.

  I said, “How you doing, Red?”

  “Everything is everything, amigo.” He wiped at the drool on his cheek.

  “I’m off.”

  “Hasta luego.” He rolled over in his sleeping bag.

  Venise pushed the seat back as far as it would go. She wore her pink chenille robe, silky blue pajamas, orange Crocs, and she held on to a Publix sack in which she carried the floral muumuu that she’d wear home from the hospital later and a purple plushy goose for good luck. She couldn’t buckle her seat belt, so we had to listen to the chime of the reminder bell as we drove. She shut her eyes, and I asked her if she was feeling okay. She said she was visualizing a polyp-free colon, thank you very much. She told me she hadn’t slept a wink, what with drinking the vile diuretic and evacuating her bowels every twenty minutes. So she watched a program on one of the science channels called The Half-Ton Dad about a guy who weighed over a thousand pounds. He couldn’t even move his arms—just his hands. He could wiggle his fingers and turn his head a little bit. In one day he ate what the normal person eats in two weeks. I said, Who’s feeding him? She said, The firemen had to knock out a wall in his house to get him to the hospital, and not in an ambulance, either, in a flatbed wrecker.

  We saw a car in flames in the breakdown lane on 95. A man I hoped was the driver sat atop the Jersey barrier talking on his cell phone. I dropped Venise at the front door of the hospital and told her I’d be back at noon to fetch her.

  On the way to the office for my appointment with Wayne, I stopped at Starbucks for a coffee and a chance to read B. H. Fairchild’s “Body and Soul” for the hundredth time. I had half an hour to myself. Trevor Navarro sat at his usual table with his makeup mirror, cosmetic case, and box of tissues in front of him. He was applying his auxiliary beauty, midnight-blue eye shadow. He waved to me with his fingertips. I said, Trevor, can I buy you a tea? He said, Black. Shaken. Iced. Venti. Trevor had spiked his orange hair with gel and wore a yellow halter top with jeans and a pair of sleek black leather slingbacks.

  I brought Trevor his tea and carried my coffee to a table by the window. I managed to lose myself in the poem until I heard a familiar woman’s voice say, You don’t have to speak to me in that tone of voice, and a man respond, This is no-bullshit zone, baby! I left the ball players joking about the fat catcher’s sex life and looked up to see my client and housekeeper Cerise and her Russian. He slapped the table. Cerise said, Vladimir, please.

  Vladimir’s short brown hair was shaved at the sides so he had no sideburns. He held an unlit cigarette between his pudgy fingers—four little pelmenis, they looked like. Perhaps he sensed I was spying on them. He looked up at me with these glacial blue eyes, and my own eyes darted to my book, not by choice, but by instinct. When I looked back, I met Cerise’s gaze. She flinched when she saw me like she’d been struck. She folded her napkin into a tight square, lowered her brow, then looked over at me and then at Vladimir. I closed my book and stood. I carried my cup to the trash. I got to the door just as they did. I smiled and held the door open for them. That’s when I noticed the hypertrophic scar on the Russian’s neck that ran from ear to ear. Yikes! Vlad the impaled. Vlad the slashed.

  Something consequential had happened in Wayne’s life, but I couldn’t yet tell what it was. He slumped on the couch, leaned his head back, and stared at the ceiling like he was looking for answers. He held his keys in his hand. He shut his eyes and squinched up his face. I asked him what was going on. He told me he was disgusted with himself.

  “Why is that?”

  He rubbed his eyes, kept them covered with his hand. “There’s a lot of weird shit on the Internet,” he said. “Tons of porn.” He looked at me, stuffed his keys into his pocket, and sat up. “You start off with tits and ass, but pretty soon that’s not enough. You get desensitized to the normal porn. You have to keep going after the harder stuff and the harder-than-that stuff.”

  “How far do you go?”

  “You know you’ve arrived when your brain lights up. I see a little bondage, some teeth marks, and mine lights up like the Fourth of July.”

  “And this disgusts you?”

  “First I jerk off, and then I’m disgusted.”

  “Does this make you ashamed?” I brushed a piece of nonexistent lint off my knee.

  He said, “Is this making you uncomfortable?”

  I told him it wasn’t.

  “Because you seem uncomfortable.” He told me that he often felt his iMac knew his weaknesses and was in control of his life.

  I said, “Then shut if off.”

  He said, “It won’t let me.”

  I said, “Are you listening to yourself?”

  “What I mean is, is that the computer is my connection to the world. It’s not just about porn for me. It’s how I stay in touch with people.”

  “Chat rooms?”

  “And instant messaging. Facebook.”

  “But you don’t know these people you’re chatting with. All thirteen-year-old girls looking for love on the Internet are forty-five-year-old cops.”

  “You’re out of your element here.”

  “Are you completely honest about who you are with these chatmates?”

  “The you online is the you you want to be. The you you can be. The better you. The kinder, smarter, sweeter you. There’s nothing wrong with that. You’re rehearsing to be that person.” Then he smiled and shook his head. “Chatmates?”

  “Sitting alone in a room is not sociable, Wayne. It’s antisocial.”

  “It’s no different than a phone call, than writing a letter.”

  “When is the last time you had a date? Not a virtual date, a real date, with a flesh-and-blood woman?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have a houseguest right now.”

  “Someone you met online?”

  “Someone from the neighborhood.”

  “What’s her name?”

  He smiled. “I have to have some secrets.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “She’s quiet. I like that. I hate all that jabbering. She spends a lot of her time in the bathroom. You know how women are.”

  “Is it serious?”

  “It’s serious, but we both of us know it’s temporary.”

  “And that’s okay?”

  “It is what it is.”

  Wayne met his current houseguest around midnight on Christmas
Eve at the 7-Eleven a few blocks from his house, about the time that I was trying to erase the images of the five ruined Halliday faces from my mind. He asked the clerk, Khalid, for a Heath bar. Khalid didn’t know what he was taking about. Heat bar? Like Miami Heat bar? The girl sucking on a Slurpee knew: chocolate and toffee. Khalid said, If you don’t see it, we don’t have it. Wayne thought Khalid was being narrow and solipsistic, but didn’t say so. He told them both that he was only eating foods that began with H. H for health. His Christmas resolution. Have a Hershey, Khalid said. Have some Hot Cheetos. The girl said, What do you eat for breakfast? Huevos, Wayne said. And Hawaiian pizza for lunch. Muy healthy, she said.

  In the parking lot, a couple of kids with droopy denim cargo shorts, wife-beater shirts, and Yankee ball caps, little kids who should have been at home dreaming of sugar plums and reindeer, blew up a strip of M-80s. Khalid rapped on the window and motioned for them to leave or he’d call the cops. He held his thumb to his ear and his pinky to his lips. One of the pair lit a thunder bomb and hurled it at the window. When it went off, a woman outside at the pay phone dropped her cigarette and held her heart. The kids ran off laughing and holding up their sagging shorts. Khalid shook his head and said he blamed the parents. Wayne asked the girl if he could buy her a real drink. She said he could. He bought two cans of Heineken, put them on the counter, winked at Khalid, and said they were both for him. He told the girl they should walk over to Etling Park and sit on the bleachers. Deal, she said. He asked her what her name was.

  I brought our conversation back around to Wayne’s self-loathing. He said there were images he saw that were so vile that not long ago he would have turned away from them. In fact, any normal human being ought to be repulsed by them. But he did not turn away. He stared at them. And they stared back.

  “And how does that feel?” I said.

  “There’s pleasure and then remorse. Guilt. And then I think I don’t recognize myself—I’m not someone who could enjoy this sick, sadistic shit.”

  I asked him if he ever worried about getting caught. He told me he didn’t download images and didn’t share them. Nothing he did was illegal. Caught looking? That’s not a crime.

  “But you’re alarmed at your behavior?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want to stop this acceleration into … dangerous—”

  “You could say depraved.”

  “Territory?”

  “I do.”

  “So. Let’s try turning off your computer for one week.”

  He shrugged. “I have a closet full of magazines with the nastiest photos you’ve ever seen.”

  “All I’m saying is that pornography is your drug. And the computer is an efficient drug-delivery system.”

  “I’m addicted to porn, maybe.” He folded his hands on his knees and then cracked his knuckles. “All right, no maybe about it. I’d like to be able to look at slutty pictures without jerking off, but I can’t. I have urges. We all do. We can’t stop. We’re human. But as long as I’m in my room alone, listening to loungecore and slamming the ham, I’m not hurting anyone.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re hurt by your behavior.”

  “But I’m not addicted to the computer. I’m on the computer because I enjoy it. Some people spend all their time at the movies or on the golf course, and you wouldn’t call them addicted, would you? You spend all your spare time reading, from the looks of it. Are you addicted to literature? Should you put your books away for a week?”

  “From the looks of what?”

  “I know about you.” Wayne took a memo pad out of his shirt pocket, wet his thumb, and flipped through a few pages. He read me my Social Security number. He knew that my middle name was Vytautas and that my brother had been murdered and that his killers were serving life sentences in Raiford. He knew my credit rating, and I didn’t. He knew my bank account information, as sad as it was. He knew my date of birth, my driver’s license number, and the number of my cell phone. I told him the number was unlisted. He smiled and said it had been until I called Hunan Wok and ordered Mongolian beef, extra spicy, and egg drop soup. He knew my debit card number, the expiration date, and the security code. No, he did not know the PIN, but didn’t think it would take him very long to find it. “Shakespeare’s birthday?” he said. “Girlfriend’s phone number?”

  Wayne knew that I had been sued by a severely delusional ex-client, a woman who claimed in court documents that I was a fraud and that the emotional trauma she had suffered on my couch had rendered her permanently unfit for gainful employment, robbing her of a lifetime’s income, when, in fact, I had gotten her her job back with the collection agency from which she had been fired and where she lied for a living, making harassing phone calls eight hours a day, a woman who had sued her first attorney when he had told her she did not have a legal leg to stand on. Wayne knew that I had won the frivolous lawsuit, but not until after two years of legal maneuvering by her shrewd and perky new attorney, who was dancing to the tick of the billable clock.

  “It goes to show you,” Wayne said. “No matter how creepy and fucked up you are, you can always find a lawyer who is even creepier, more fucked up, greedier, carnivorous, and untouchable. Am I right?”

  He told me what books I had ordered online. He told me the Modern Library edition of Proust was in the mail. “Expect delivery on Friday.” He knew that I had driven to Orlando twice in the last year and that I regularly drove the Dolphin Expressway on my way home from Books & Books in Coral Gables. He knew my passport number and where I had traveled. He knew what I had bought at Publix and at Quicker Liquors. He said, “You seem to think you can live on cognac, cashews, and chocolate.” He said, “Do you feel violated?”

  I said, “How do you know all this?”

  “Like I told you. I don’t just play games and look at porn on the Internet.”

  “I’ll have to change everything.”

  “Don’t bother.” He tore the pages out of his memo pad and handed them to me. “A bit of advice,” he said. “Use cash. It’ll afford you what little privacy you have left. For the time being anyway. Pretty soon every product you buy will be embedded with a microchip so that retailers and cops can track you down wherever you go. They’ll have sensors in every airport, train station, and bus terminal, at every border crossing. They’ll put sensors in the walls of your house that’ll inventory your possessions and monitor your habits—culinary, medical, sexual, and whatever. All in the name of commerce and quiescence.”

  I said, “How long did it take you to get this information?”

  “It took some digging.”

  I stared at the pages. “I can’t believe this.” I was thinking I should probably empty my bank account before someone else did it for me. Put the money in the mattress.

  He said, “The age of privacy is over. You can’t walk into a store, can’t pump gas; you can’t enter a public building without being on camera. Every damn traffic light in this town has a camera mounted on it. Google’s got a photo of your house online for everyone to see. They put microchips in pets these days so if Fido goes missing, you can track him down. They’ll be doing that to children pretty soon. You can bet on it. You’ll always know where little Amber is. No more alerts.”

  “And on that note,” I said, “I believe our time is up.”

  We scheduled Wayne’s next appointment. We walked to the door. I asked him if he wanted to meet at the DeSoto Street house. I was being funny. He said we couldn’t. “It’s occupied.”

  “Did the Parkers move back in?”

  “Just long enough to spruce up, shampoo the carpet, touch up the paint. They’re renting it out.”

  “They don’t own it.”

  “They’re resourceful people.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “I answered their ad on Craigslist. I went and had a look around. Dave’s a short, pudgy guy with a wandering eye. Deb’s a brunette at the moment. Plump as a blowfish. They had the power and water back on and a
house full of rented faux-leather and mica furniture and glass tabletops. They wanted $1,500 a month, all-inclusive. I told them they were dreaming. I could still smell the dogs.”

  We said goodbye and then he turned and said, “They want you to think you’re being watched all the time so that you’ll be good, or at least you’ll be discreet.”

  I considered asking Wayne to do a little research for me but knew that would be inappropriate in so many ways. I called Oliver and asked him if he’d be willing to find out some information for me on a couple of people.”

  “My pleasure. I have nothing but time.”

  I gave him the names Jack Malacoda and Chafin Halliday.

  I called Carlos to tell him my car had been towed out of my own parking space.

  He said, “How do you know it wasn’t stolen?”

  “It was stolen. The tow-truck driver laid on his horn till I came out the door, and then he waved goodbye as he drove off.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “I’m sick of that dickwad Shanks, and I’m calling someone.”

  “This will not happen again. I promise.”

  “I have to be at Memorial in an hour.”

  On our drive to the impoundment lot, I told Carlos about the carcass in the car the last time. I said, “I don’t know why your department puts up with that asshole.”

  “That asshole is the secretary of the union.”

  “And?”

  “He makes all of the off-duty assignments for the department. You can double your annual salary with those assignments. Triple it. No one wants to rattle his cage.”

  Carlos wasn’t buying my theory that a left-handed Halliday—if indeed he was left-handed—could not, or would not, have fired a pistol with his right hand. But why wouldn’t he have used his dominant hand? I said. We stopped at a red light. I looked up at the camera. Carlos honked the horn and waved to an older gentleman sitting with a coffee at a sidewalk table in front of the Falafel House. The man smiled and waved, and then went back to texting on his cell phone.