LAM CHOPS

LAM CHOPS

Excerpt from the forthcoming Ransom On The Wrong Side Of The River: A Ransom Mones Mystery

Jackson’s old lady opened the door in house heels and a dress the size and color of a three-page high-school love letter. She told me to come right in.

Her exact words were, ‘What the hell do you want?” but I knew an invitation when I heard one. She had on long sturdy legs, bounding breasts, and back fat like a pork barbecue. A lot of body parts for a young white widow to pack into one little love letter, I whistled. She had picked up the habit of letting her mouth hang slightly open in jail or from the television like she could not believe the judge she had just bribed would not look down inside her hot air balloon.

Just one peek, and you won’t do it?

You sure you all’s a normal?

I could imagine what words were running through her stacked, shellacked, and humming pile of hair. I wanted to stick a finger or oil dipper into those curls and probe for intelligent life.

In one glance I took in the thick lavender lipstick and the green eyes, puffy from weeping but still flashing with the defiance of the trophy housewife and jiu-jitsu black belt instructor and prize-winning science-fiction novelist and a God-damned hissing bundle of TNT between the sheets, or bent double over the love seat. I felt as dirty and hot as the last time I had been in her apartment with her husband—my partner—passed out in the other room.

‘You stink,’ she said. ‘Take off those filthy clothes and run yourself a bath, like only you know how.’

Or she said, ‘I need a God-dame drink.’

I caught her as she fell across one arm of the sofa and set her back on her feet. She grimaced a thank-you-verrr-much and swayed across the rug towards the remains of her gin cocktail.

Pulled herself upon it and thrust one massive hand of long nails around it, got it, slugged it down. Threw herself perpendicular to the floor for one consecutive second.

Bent her lanky body onto the sideboard and grimaced at me loudly.

I walked over to her.

Reached down into the gaping chest cooler and got out the bottle, three-quarters empty or one-quarters full, and I splashed her glass with the glory and carnation of it all.

‘The gall,’ she muttered, fixing me unsteadily with one cocked eye. I replaced the bottle and stood back, hobo coat swinging open with a reeking motion. She licked the rim of her glass and continued. ‘The gall of you,’ she belched, ‘coming here when my husband is not at home. You might have been trying to take a vantage a me!’

It seemed as though she knew nothing of the accident or murder that had befallen her late Jackson. I licked my eyebrows imperceptibly and threw my filthy coat into a corner.

I turned, I walked.

I sat on the sofa with my legs crossed. I uncrossed my legs. I removed a cigarette from the box on the end table. I lit it with nothing but one quivering match. I sat back and I watched the lady Smallet.

‘Mrs. Smallet,’ I began.

‘Call me Nancy, Ransum,’ she interrupted, voice cracking, waving her glass. ‘No more Smallet.’

‘So you know,’ I knew, I said.

‘Oh, I know,’ she wept, she wailed, her long body continuing to sway. I blinked and shook my head, fearing that I would fall into a hypnotic trance like the ones I’d heard about: one tipsy fatal femme, one down-on-his-luck private investigator, mirrors, and tobacco smoke that curled erotically from the stubble of that man or woman’s lips.

Suddenly she let out a sound, something between a sob and a laugh.

‘I never loved him,’ she admitted, shooing invisible bats from around her ears and face. ‘He was cheating on me with a slut up near Chinatown.’

‘A China slut?’

‘A China lady.’

‘A China lady or-?’

‘I guess it don’t really matter,’ she interrupted gruffly. ‘He thought she was a lady and she thought he was a man. He thought I didn’t know and I thought he didn’t care.’

‘We all thought you were sleeping with my secretary, the dyke Melisa,’ I gagged, instantly regretting my awkward contribution to this dialogue.

The widow Smallet eyed me with a green look and smiled slightly.

She said, ‘All that is over now, as though it ever happened. Melisa is dead, Rans. She had a serious disagreement with a patch of pavement ten floors under a balcony on Akeepulca Avenue.’

I jumped where I sat in surprise. The widow was gazing at me, sizing me up. My heart was beating a hundred ticks an hour but I could not show the widow I had human feelings. My forehead was suddenly wet with perspiration—I was making a funny wheezing sound because I was jogging in place while sitting down.

‘It’s not true,’ I stammered.

‘Yes, it is,’ she countered.

‘The name of the street,’ I managed. ‘It’s not Akeepulca.’

The widow laughed—hard and short, like a snub-nosed .32.

‘Anyway, now nobody can touch her. Not you, not me, and most importantly, not my dirty good-for-nothing bastard cheat of a dead husband.’

‘It sounds like maybe you did him in.’

‘Maybe I do did him on. Maybe I do not do him on.’

‘Maybe you doughnut dish is Don.’

‘In your twisted dreams Rams it on.’

‘You think Jackson was also having an affair with Melisa?’

The widow laughed through her hot and wanting lips.

‘Detective Smallet wrote everything down in his diary,’ she said. ‘I know everything.’

I gasped and turned pale—turned a pail upside up where it had fallen from the piano. The cigarette had flown from my mouth and was smoking on one of the many sofas in this room, or perhaps on a patch of hidden carpet. I looked around and could not see the God-damned thing. I looked everywhere for my cigarette but the widow kept her gaze fixed directly on me, neither angry nor in a hurry, right past my hobo sweater and straight into my creeping soul. The room quickly filled with smoke but the widow didn’t let it stop her. She removed a small leather-bound notebook from an inscrutable recess in her dress or body and tossed it to me. I caught it with the reflexes of a man who’s caught bullets fired by men in righteous anger for a righteous cause: with two hands in my lap.

‘Well well well,’ I whistled long and low, imagining that recess in her dress or torso and regaining my cool. ‘So you know everything?’

‘The bitch’s name was Cheaply. She-’

‘Wait one second,’ I interrupted quickly. ‘Did you say Cheaply?’

‘Strange but true,’ laughed the widow, schnozzling her glass, drinking from it and licking her lips, chin, cheeks and nostrils with the massive tongue of a troll mother.

‘If Jackson Smallet was banging Mrs. Cheaply,’ I exclaimed, ‘then we have both been set up.’

The widow laughed and continued.

She said, ‘That’s not all. On the night of August the Fourth, Melisa had a secret rendezvous with Mrs. Cheaply.’

‘Mrs. Cheaply, not Crystal Hope?’

‘That’s right, buster.’

‘You mean to say, we were betrayed by our own shareholders?’

The widow smiled and said, ‘Your partner Lieutenant Smallet the dead detective was clearly onto something big,’ continued the former Mrs. Smallet. I blinked as the waif widow shimmered on the furniture, moving her body closer and further away.

I reached for a bottle in a second ice chest and drank without pouring. The cool refreshing gin went down my neck and soaked my pants and the sofa cushion on which I was sitting. It tasted like water on my torso.

‘This calls for a celebration,’ I said, burping with delicious irony.

‘Better lay off that booze,’ said the widow, clearly not seriously in surprise, as I staggered to my feet with the bottle and tried to take my clothes off with one hand.

‘It’s either the hooch or the intravenous drugs,’ I protested, and flung one shoe at a wall. The widow growled and stepped out of her ‘dress’. I fell across the carpet with my pants and man whites—the outer clothes for my lower body—twisted around my ankles. I took a bite of her discarded garment because my face landed on top of it. It tasted like one cherry. The widow was already on me, like a mountain lion on a small and helpless rabbit who would be king. We rolled and our mouths clamped together in a hideous wet and open kiss. We wrestled with aching thrusting movements like trussed goats attempting to shimmy out of a burning kitchen that they had lit on fire for that purpose, and I felt my ears or ghost penis tremble or stiffen. Her long thick tongue plunged past my teeth and against my tonsils and tried to wrap them up like a tentacle lined with clammy suckers.

‘No,’ I gasped, spitting out her long thick-veined licker muscle. ‘We must honor the memory of your late husband.’

‘My husband respected you more than anyone he knew,’ panted the widow, running her hands all over my hard and liquor-slick torso. ‘He wrote that you were the finest human being he had ever known.’

‘I can’t remember the man’s face,’ I admitted. ‘Did he wear glasses?’

The widow had worked a hand inside my second pair of shorts (the little panties pair) and froze as a look of overwhelming surprise drained her sex lust faster than a male orgasm in a woods suddenly swarming with families on bikes with cameras, clutching corndogs.

‘All right,’ hissed the late Mrs. Smallet, leaping up and looking at me with sober, competent anger. ‘Where is the dossier.’ From thin air she took a .32 revolver from a drawer and aimed it between the top of me and me middle, a.k.a. nether parts. Sitting up in surprise, I screamed and waved both hands in front of me to ward off the bullet. ‘Tell me where you have it!’ she yelled.

‘It’s no use,’ I cried. ‘I already turned it over to the Mockwasser Estate!’

‘Bang,’ went the gun, but the bullet flew several feet over my head and lodged into a bust of Julius Caesar with a knife-like thunk. I opened my eyes and saw that the naked widow had crumpled against the piece of furniture and blood was gushing from her breast from a tiny neck wound.

‘What did-?’ she stammered, looking at me with wide eyes in disbelief.

‘I never-’ I protested, getting my pants up in a hurry and rolling away from the open window, which fluttered with flowery print curtains.

‘Wait,’ gasped the widow, then toppled forward onto the itchy carpet, as gone as Gomorrah.

Gun in hand, I put my head out of the window and peered down the fire escape.

I looked down the alley, a notorious dead-end on both sides. I shook my head in disbelief and utter sadness.

There was a sudden scuffling from above and I glanced up in time to glimpse the figure of a man or monster leap off the fire escape onto the roof five floors above me. Nobody ever needed to ask me twice to put myself in danger’s way, sniff a chicken sandwich to see if it had gone bad, rub the spot where the baseball had clobbered them, or paint a barn.

I climbed out of the window and made for the rooftop, taking the stairs five at a time.

I got there in two split seconds, crouching low to avoid projectiles, and made visual contact with the suspect. He was already on the neighboring rooftop, moving low and fast, black cape swirling behind him like a long and dangling sinister sister wig.

‘Stop!’ I shouted, sprinting across the roof and leaping into empty space.

I thought for a long moment I had misjudged the gap, because my eyes were closed and time stood still. My pulse hammered in my ears and throat, my arms windmilled quixotically and I cried, ‘Yaaarg!’ as my hard soles clattered onto the hard roof surface. I rolled forward to my feet, opened my eyes, and trained my gun this way and that.

The gun fiend had disappeared! The roof was completely empty.

I cautiously stood.

Jogged to the other side of the building in my pants, scanning the neighboring buildings for any kind of movement, even the fluttering corner of a black hijab or conventional Amish head covering. I looked over the edge of the building into a little park with a jungle gym in it.

I could hardly believe my eyes and snorted in derision.

This child’s paradise had four swings, two slides, and even a little chain bridge stretching between two towers with slits for firing pretend arrows! Who paid for it all? Where did the money come from? Where did these children go to school? How did they have time between classes for so much fun? Was this even a playground for children? It had monkey bars, for chrissake, a teeter-totter, a fireman’s pole, an enormous abacus, and—in the middle of it all—the black-cloaked corpse of a killer-for-hire assassin.

This fucking guy had made his last leap, I chuckled, waving my big-pilled revolver at the crumpled form.

Squeezing off four or five rounds in the air from sheer sick happiness.

But the laugh caught in my wimpy throat as the unmistakable cold steel cylinder of a poison dart blowgun pressed into my fifth lumbar.

‘Drope the peace an put you ans in the are,’ growled a low and sexy man or woman’s voice in a fake Cockney accent. ‘Anno funny bidness, chummay, fow I’ve got you compretery coverd.’

I dropped the .38 to the concrete roof with a clatter, raised my hands above my head with the sound of a shirt, and turned to get a look at my mysterious caped captor with a look that was not one of meek resignation.

The dart gun dropped me on my real gun and my eyes closed with the sound of a golden retriever, happiness and guilt in equal proportions.