The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) (4 page)

“Yep.”

“Really, Hob, that’s tacky; you shouldn’t put up with it.”

“What can I do? They’re in love.”

“Then they should move out of your house and find their own place.”

“The trouble is, neither of them is sure exactly what he or she wants to do. I don’t know if Mylar’s quite ready to set up housekeeping with Sheldon, and he’s not going to leave until she says she will.”

“It’s a hopeless mess,” Katie said. “Why on earth did you ever get involved with a woman named Mylar?”

“It seemed a good idea at the time,” I said.

These are the words that I expect to have carved on my tombstone.

SHELDON

7

My apartment on State Street is one half of a frame house painted a color you can’t quite identify and forget as soon as you turn away from it. I went in and stood a moment in the dark, narrow hallway. “Mylar?” I called.

“She’s not here,” a voice said from the parlor.

It’s one of those houses with a parlor and a bay window. Mylar and I rent out the attic room. Sheldon was sitting in the parlor. Sheldon is short and intense, a stocky, vaguely Assyrian-looking man with tightly waved black hair. Features a trifle heavy. Mouth a little droopy. Fixed smile frequently on face. Not the sort of person I’d go for, personally, but of course I’m not the one who picked him.

“Where’d she go?” I asked.

“She said she’d be right back.” There was something fishy about the way he said it.

“All right, but where’d she go to?”

“Nowhere in particular,” Sheldon said. He paused, then blurted, “She just wanted to give us a little time together.”

I stared at him. “What on earth do you and I need any time together for?”

“To try to work things out,” Sheldon said.

“Oh, no, Sheldon,” I said. “Not now. Not
things.
I’m tired. I’ve got a client. The initial interview took a lot out of me.”

“A good-paying client?” Sheldon asked, momentarily brightening.

“No. Just a normal deadbeat client like the usual kind I get.”

Sheldon stood up, walked up and down the room pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand. I believe he was portraying frustrated anger. Or maybe angry frustration. In any case, he turned to me after a moment and said, “Damn it, Hob, this can’t go on.”

“My sentiments exactly. Does that mean you’re going away?” Sheldon lives with us due to a concatenation of circumstances too ridiculous to be chronicled, and tangential, in any event, to my story. But I see that now, having mentioned them at all, I must explain.

I met Sheldon five years ago, when the I.R.S. (on whose name be peace) audited me. After an exchange of paperwork, they sent Sheldon from the Newark office to look over my records. After spending a few hours going through the sackful of paper I dumped in his lap, some of them on the sort of extremely flimsy paper that Ibicenco shopkeepers used in the days when I lived in Ibiza and accumulated these pieces of paper, he looked up in annoyance. “Mr. Draconian” —we were still quite formal at that stage— “don’t you have any better records than these?”

“I’m not so good about pieces of paper,” I told him. “I try to keep them all: I know that Uncle Sammy wants me to. But they get lost; you know what I mean, man? But you might ask my wife, Mylar; she may have some old cash ledgers; I believe she’s sentimental about things like that.”

And then, pat upon the moment, Mylar entered. Five feet nine, slender, pointy-breasted, svelte-legged Mylar of the radiant smile and china-blue eyes. Sheldon saw (as he told me afterwards) the fulfillment of his most impossible boyhood dreams when he beheld this beautiful, outrageous lady in skintight jeans, sequined blouse, snakeskin boots, cowboy hat, clunky jewelry, crazy makeup, with purple streak in her hair. It was love at first sight, he confessed to me months later over too many beers in McGinty’s on Grit Street down near Macadam. For him she represented the impossible dream.

To be honest about it, Sheldon’s sudden interest in my wife was not entirely unwelcome; I had been wondering how to get rid of Mylar. Not that there was anything wrong with her. She was just crazy in her way and I was crazy in mine, and we had drifted so far apart that only the cosmic interrelatedness of everything gave us anything at all in common. And here was this nice fellow with high moral standards and a steady job, who was going to take her off my hands so that I could jettison my other responsibilities as well, sell the house and go live
my
impossible dream, namely, to return to Europe and find the magic again. They say you can never do it twice; once is all you get, and if you don’t like once try none, the other option; but I can dream, can’t I?

There was a difficulty, however. I was Sheldon’s case and he’d staked his reputation and pride on this one, and the only thing that would satisfy his exquisitely well-honed sense of ethics was to bring my case to successful completion; that is, to collect Uncle Sammy’s due for the dinero I had somehow failed to fork over in previous years even less successful than this one. Only then would he feel the moral right, the
certitude
, I believe he called it, to allow him without guilt to take my wife.

Well, shucks, I’m not a bad guy, and I’d just as soon have paid up to government. I just didn’t have the money, that’s all. There are the payments to Katie and the kids. There’s rent on my office. There’s this and there’s that, and never enough for everything.

But I remembered a time once, long ago, when I had lived without money, or without the anxiety of it, on a magic island where no one starved and you couldn’t bomb out because you were Home, in the great good place where everyone looked out for everyone else.

That is fantasy, of course, or rather, delusion; but what can I do; that’s how I feel about it, and a man needs a dream even if it’s chimaerical.

I had, of course, some residual feeling for Mylar, whom I had found myself married to after an unsuccessful attempt on state-of-the-art drugs to find The Supreme Unity that unifies Apparent Diversity. You can wind up in some surprising places on these new hallucinogenics. Like standing before a justice of the peace in Leesville, North Carolina. You say you’ve had your own experiences along that line? Yes, but you didn’t wake up and find yourself married to a woman who called herself Mylar and had a streak of purple dyed in her hair, and who was zanily and cheerfully impossible, especially for one whose favorite pastime is feeling sorry for himself.

That was six months ago. Now here we were, in a pleasant little trap of our own devising. Sheldon had moved out of his apartment in Hoboken and rented our attic bedroom when it became available. It was a little tough on Sheldon’s conscience that Sheldon and Mylar simply stay apart any longer. But they also couldn’t sleep with each other, at least in Sheldon’s view, because that would have turned a nicely ripening tragedy into a domestic farce, and you get no points for idiot roles in the reviews which self-appreciation publishes daily. No, you gets no bread with one meatball and so Sheldon and Mylar lived sexlessly, with the attendant augmentation of desire so often noted in circumstances of enforced chastity, until the very walls steamed with their contained and pressurized lust, and I took to spending a lot of time in my office or at the movies because, despite my best attempts, I was not
entirely
a removed observer.

“Now listen to me,” Sheldon said. “You must resolve this thing. You must get some money together and pay the government, so I can close this case and take Mylar away from here to my new position.”

“What new position?”

“Didn’t I tell you? I’m next in line to become Senior Auditor at our Morristown facility.”

“Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll make a great auditor. And Mylar will make a great Mrs. Auditor. I assume your intentions toward her are still honorable?”

“Of course they’re honorable,” Sheldon said. “I want Mylar to divorce you so I can marry her and take her to Morristown with me. But I can’t do anything until I close your case.”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. “The Home Office won’t hold one unclosed case against you.”

“I’m not worried about the Home Office,” Sheldon said. “The fact is my own conscience won’t permit me to take the promotion and your wife until I’ve closed your file. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned, inner-directed sort of guy, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He laughed with the false self-deprecation of a man well pleased with himself. I could have kicked him.

Still, on the bright side, Sheldon’s character gave me an avenue of escape from the constrictions of my life with Mylar. Pay the money, Draconian, and so win freedom. But where to find the money?

“Maybe I’ll make something on this case,” I told him. “I’ll be leaving for Paris in a couple of days.”

“You’re going to Paris?” Sheldon said.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “That’s where this case is taking me. You and Mylar have a good time while I’m gone, hear?” I gave him a suggestive leer. It’s not that I get off on that sort of thing, but I wanted to encourage him because I knew that when Mylar deigned to sleep with a dude, he didn’t get away. I hadn’t.

MILLIE

8

i went over to Millie’s loft on Water Street so she could arrange the air fares. Millie’s an old friend from Ibiza. I let myself in with my key. Millie was in bed asleep, lying on her back and snoring noisily, resembling a pink baby whale in a blue nightie. One of the things she brought back from Ibiza, aside from a big floppy Formentera hat and two pairs of sandals from the Sandal Shop at the beginning of the Dalt Vila, was a nasty habit with Quaaludes.

I try to put all my friends into the Alternative Detective Agency. My international organization is made up mostly of friends from various periods of my life. Some of them are former hippies. A lot of them were a lot of other things. Our paths crossed in Ibiza, one of the main stops on the exile’s circuit.

One advantage of living abroad is that you end up with friends everywhere. The only difficulty is trying to figure out how to use them. I figured I was performing a social service, opening up trade to people who usually don’t get it. Down with the big grifters; let the small ones get into the action. Don’t go Hertz or Avis; try out our very own Nosedive Motors. Let our Haitian Brigade paint your house.

We need the work, we exiles. We are the third-worlders of western civilization. Believe me, you don’t have to be black or Hispanic to feel disinherited and disenfranchised in America in the closing years of the twentieth century.

It hasn’t anything to do with politics, race or religion. There are a lot of bright, personable people who are being hammered into the ground because they don’t fit, because they aren’t a part of the growing obsolescence of everything that was ever worth having.

That is the reasoning behind the Alternative Detective Agency. It’s sort of a commune. We don’t call it that; of course. “Commune” for most people calls up an image of pretty, longhaired girls performing loathsome sex with skinheaded freaks with crankcase grease impacted under their fingernails. Whereas my organization tries to exude an image of normal Americans engaged in the national pastime, Making Money Any Which Way You Can.

The Alternative Detective Agency is the holding company for me and my people. We’ve got branches all over the world, wherever one of my old Ibiza friends happens to be living. They help me solve my cases and I cut them in on the profits, if any. If there aren’t any, we get high and talk about old times.

They are my people, and they inhabit my real country, the exile’s misty kingdom of memories and displacements. They are wanderers and vagrants, artists and would-be artists, con men and remittance men, students of the university of perpetual reeducation, a floating English-speaking society that travels south to San Tropez and Ibiza in the summer and north to Paris, London and Amsterdam in the winter, like herds of delicate reindeer crossing Ice-Age Europe.

Everybody has heard of ludes, those little white pills that make you feel very good unless they kill you. Not everyone knows what Quaaludin does. First of all, you have to take it on an empty stomach, so the little white pill can dissolve quickly and get through the stomach wall into your bloodstream. If you put a lot of food in its way you can’t expect a good hit.

And of course the lude doesn’t always come on. Usually it’ll work, but sometimes something goes wrong, something to do with body chemistry, maybe, and the lude just doesn’t take. And that’s a tough one, because that’s when you start getting strung out.

I’d had the habit for a while myself. The first thing you notice is that your face has turned to rubber. After that, it really gets good. The price, unfortunately, is that the junk stays in your system a long time, twenty-four hours at least, so you don’t function so good the next day after a pill. And if you take one or more every night, like I used to do, you end up not functioning well any of the time. Another of Quaaludin’s side effects is its tendency to form stones in a user’s kidney. Passing a kidney stone is the male equivalent of difficult childbirth.