DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL: Chapter Ten

January 29th, 2007 at 05:45am Michael Conniff 2

DROP DEAD BEAUTIFUL
By Michael Conniff
Copyright © 2005-2006
All Rights Reserved

Chapter Ten: Topsy-Turvy

When Ozzie left I put my head back on the plush pillow of my very own bed and fell head-over-heels asleep like I had not slept in a million years. There were no sheep leaping in my sleep: I dreamed of Amanda Madison – who else? – and if rapid eye movement constituted real life I would never have woken up. We were sailing, sailing on Nolo Contendere in deep water off Montauk and we were never ever coming back. The sun toasted her freckles just enough to make her girlish again, and I realized somewhere in my deep sleep I could see that we had known each other from the start, and that we would be together forever.

The phone rang and it was Jimmy Burns.

“Did you get the cup?” he said.

“Cup?”

“You just do your business in the cup – ta-da – end of story. Use your imagination, Baggie. I could send you a Playboy if you need a jumpstart. Or one of the lad rags.”

I could hear the restaurant noise on the other end of the line. My guess was Frangello’s was doing a nice lunch business on the East Coast as of this very moment.

“What part of ee-jack-u-lay-shun don’t you understand, Baggie? It’s not the worst thing in the world, you know. Some people even enjoy it. Especially single guys like you.”

“I’ve got other things to think about.”

“But this is immortality in a bottle, asshole,” Jimmy Burns said. “Two minutes of work and if you’re a good boy maybe get eternal life.”

“Over my dead body,”

“Are you coming through for us or not?”

“I’m coming.”

“You got a pencil? Let me give you the address of the clinic.” He did. “Just seal up the little bottle with your love juice and overnight it. We got babies we’ve got to be making.”

“You got it. As soon as I wake up.”

I hung up and tried not to wake up but it was too late. My mind was off and running. Mortal thoughts were in the air.

Sam Albright came to Aspen leaving a bad man and a bad marriage behind to find something she would always need in the mountains. She was drop dead beautiful, and that helped her to get by – that was good for hundred dollar bills from the guys she turned over to Tiny – but that was coincidental to her. She had the advantage of the way she looked even though she knew none of that really mattered in the end.

That was why I loved Sam, but I had never slipped love into the conversation because love was not “I love you.”

I rolled over onto my back and folded both my hands behind my head. Why had I ever thought I could run away from it all, from the two things I loved most: Amanda Madison and a boat on the water with a Latin name that made me think of my father? You meet your soul mate and from day one you know (a) this is it; and (b) it will never work. Then you spend the better part of your adult live foaming at the mouth about (a) while never forgetting (b). You’re dead in the water, but you just don’t want to admit it. So you go back and forth from (a) to (b) – like a ping pong ball.

You feel like an idiot, a fool…and then ping you go back again.

For years the O’Kells had been pinging and ponging us and maybe (maybe) we could not let go of the O’Kells because we could not let go of each other. Maybe we needed the O’Kells because it gave Amanda Madison and Arnold Bagdikian a reason for being (for being together) and without that reason there could be no us to speak of, and there could be no real me.

Somehow, somewhere along the line my life had gotten twisted up with the O’Kells like a coil of DNA, as if we were not so much joined at the hip as present at the creation.

“Baggie!” There was a banging at the door. “Get your ass up!”

I pulled the sheets up around me like a Bedouin and opened the door.

“Jesus Christ,” I said.

The only thing missing heretofore had been Mike McGuff—and here he was, stage left, ploughing right past me. I hadn’t seen him since he gave up the column at the New York paper and made the deal to turn his script about the O’Kells into a movie for Dreamworks. Last I heard the O’Kell movie was in development hell but he had done very well by this particular hell and now he had a new house, a new car, and a new deal. The last time I’d seen him he was a slobbering news junkie with bad ties mismatched with bad coats and a belt with extra notches cut out of the leather with a steak knife. Now that person, the guy who got drunk on bourbon, was long gone, and in his place was a creature of the Left Coast: longish brown hair trimmed just so, tinted glasses, a shirt with no collar beneath a snow-white down vest. The bloated McGuff, drinking bourbon, had been deep-sixed by this trim and tan guy straight out of an exercise video.

“Sorry, Baggie,” Mike McGuff said. “It couldn’t be helped.”

“What happened to you?” I said.

 “I had to put all that New York shit behind me, ” McGuff said.

“But you are so L.A.”

“It’s like the neocons in Washington. They used to be liberals, right? But once they go over to the other side they’re the worst because they’ve been converted, they’ve seen the light, like it or not.”

“You could have called.”

“I know,” McGuff said. “‘Hi, how ya doin’? Yada yada yada.’ But aren’t we beyond that, Baggie? Aren’t we in a different space?”

“Space?”

“Hell, we used to be roomies.”

I knew what was coming. In the middle of the Rebecca O’Kell case somebody who knew somebody who didn’t like me very much threw a Molotov cocktail into my apartment. All my belongings were burned to hell and I was forced to live in the cesspool that Mike McGuff called his apartment in New York City.

“Okay,” I said. “So I owe you. You need a place to stay?”

“Here?” McGuff looked around at my humble abode and harrumphed. “Not on your life, Bag Man. I’m at the St. Regis. When you’re ready to roll just give me a call. I’ll be in the spa getting my nails done.”
“Got nothing,” Ozzie said.

Ozzie was drinking a grande black and white mocha latte through a straw at Zele’s on Hopkins and I was drinking my coffee black. For Ozzie to have nothing really said something, because if there was anything to find in the death of Sam Albright then he would find it.

“Nobody saw you two go into her place,” he said, “and nobody saw nobody go out.”

“A blank.”

“Precisely.”

“Murder weapon.”

“Heretofore unknown.”

“Motive?”

“Ditto.” 

Ozzie pulled on the straw.

“How can you drink coffee from a straw?

Don’t like to slurp,” Ozzie said. “Not polite in mixed company.”

I took a gulp of my coffee.

“That’s not really coffee anyway.” I pointed to his cup.

“You going to read me my rights?”

“What about Picatti?”

“Smart dude,” Ozzie said. “Cleans up his messes.”

“I’m not sure where this gets us.”

“Depends on if you believe Dr. Melville,” Ozzie said. “Without a murder weapon there’s no case. With a knife Picatti be dining out on your ass.”

“It could happen. I ate at Jimmy’s a lot. It wouldn’t be hard to take one of the knives I used and throw it in a plastic bag. But it would take coordination.”

“It would take money,” Ozzie said.

I thought about that for a minute while I finished my coffee.

“Funny,” I said. “They’re going to all this trouble to keep me from taking the case, but I haven’t heard from any of the test-tubers yet.”

“My guess is O’Kells working that end, too,” Ozzie said. “Real heavy-handed – breaking some windows, breaking some legs.”

“That would explain it. What about Jeanette?”

“Pisses me off. I’m leaving on a jet plane in about an hour.”

“You’re going to leave me all by myself?”

“Not exactly,” Ozzie said. “You got Katherine Hallaby now. And there’s always McGuff.”
I went up the Ute Trail to get the blood flowing. It’s a trail that runs up the side of Aspen Mountain and hiking there guarantees you’ll run into somebody you know, the athletic types. But this time, mid-morning, pre-winter, I had it all to myself until I could look back down and across my adopted city, the home away from home that was as close as I could get to home. Sam had made it that way, but because of her murder people would start to look at me in a different way, like the suspect Sheriff Dominic Picatti wanted me to be.

By the time I made it down all the way back into town I was starving. I grabbed one of those meals-in-a-tortilla from The Big Wrap and went to City Market for some staples: milk, eggs, bread, beer from one of those Colorado mini-breweries. I saw some people in there who had been to Sam’s funeral, and one of them, an old woman, rubbed my back as I passed by.

If I closed my eyes on the way home I could almost convince myself that life was normal, that life was good – coffee at Zele’s, a hike, some groceries, and a Big Wrap. But when I turned the key on my place I remembered why life was never going to be the same again. If my room had been food then it would have been a tossed salad. My mattress was upside down and half out the window. Every drawer had been pulled all the way out, rifled through, and left for trash. Every level surface had been upended, and all the dishes and silverware were strewn on all available floor space. The kitchen door was open and all the food was topsy-turvy, the ketchup, mayo, and milk meeting in a puddle on top of the apples and oranges.

I sat down where my dining room table used to be and leaned against a pile of books against the radiator. My life was no longer my own, but I was still starving. There was that. I unwrapped the Big Wrap and wolfed it down and tried to think of the name of that cleaning woman I had heard of.

Entry Filed under: Books, Aspen, Drop Dead Beautiful, Mystery