hacienda, Spanish enough to make you want to dance the flamenco on a table, swing on a wrought-iron chandelier, wear a sombrero and a bandolier.
“Here,” Denver says to her. “Get yourselves pretty, and I’ll show you how we can scam some prescription painkillers.”
Jump back to the three days we hid out in Denver’s apartment until we could get some cash together. Brandy, she’s cooked up some new plan. Before she goes under the knife she’s decided to find her sister.
The me who wants to dance on her grave.
“A vaginoplasty is pretty much forever,” she says. “It can wait while I figure some things out.”
She’s decided to find her sister and tell her everything, about the gonorrhea, about why Shane’s not dead, what happened, everything. Make a clean break of it. Probably she’d be surprised how much her sister already knows.
I just want to be out of town in case a felony arson arrest warrant is in the pipeline, so I threaten Denver, if he won’t come with us, I’ll run to the police and accuse him. Of arson, of kidnapping, of attempted murder. To Evie, I mail a letter.
To Brandy, I write:
This seems a little labor-intensive, but we’ve all got something to run from. And when I say we, I mean everybody in the world. So Brandy thinks we’re on tour to find her sister, and Denver’s come along by blackmail. My letter to Evie’s sitting in her mailbox at the end of her driveway leading up to her burned-up ruins of a house. Evie’s in Cancun, maybe.
The letter to Evie says:
To Miss Evelyn Cottrell,
Manus says he shot me and you helped him ’cuz of your filthy relationship. In order for you to stay out of PRISON, please seek an insurance settlement for the damage to your home and personal property as soon as possible. Convert this entire settlement into United States funds, tens and twenties, and mail them to me care of General Delivery in Seattle, Washington. I am the person you are responsible for being without a fiance, your former best friend, no matter what lies you tell yourself. Send the money and I will consider the matter dealt with and will not go to the police and have you arrested and sent to PRISON, where you will have to fight day and night for your dignity and life but no doubt lose them both. Yes, and I’ve had major reconstructive surgery, so I look even better than myself, and I have Manus Kelley with me and he still loves me and says he hates you and will testify against you in court that you’re a bitch.
Signed, Me
Jump to above the edge of the Pacific Ocean, parked curbside at the Spanish hacienda OPEN HOUSE. Denver tells Brandy and me how to go upstairs while he keeps the realtor busy. The master bedroom will have the best view, that’s how to find it. The master bathroom will have the best drugs.
Sure, Manus used to be a police vice detective, if you consider wagging your butt around the bushes in Washington Park wearing a Speedo bikini a size too small and hoping some lonely sex hound will whip his dick out, if that’s detective work, then, sure, Manus was a detective.
Because beauty is power the way money is power the way a loaded gun is power. And Manus with his square- jawed, cheekboned good looks could be a Nazi recruiting poster.
While Manus was still fighting crime, I found him cutting the crust off a slice of bread one morning. Bread without crust made me remember being little. This was so sweet, but I thought he was making me toast. Then Manus goes to in front of a mirror in the apartment we used to share, wearing his white Speedo, and he asks, if I were a gay guy would I want to bang him up the butt? Then he changed to a red Speedo and asked again. You know, he says, really stuff his poop chute? Plow the cowboy? It’s not a morning I would want on video.
“What I need,” Manus said, “is for my basket to look big, but my ass to look adolescent.” He takes the slice of bread and stuffs it inside between himself and the crotch of the Speedo. “Don’t worry, this is how underwear models get a better look,” he says. “You get a smooth unoffensive bulge this way.” He stands sideways to the mirror and says, “You think I need another slice?”
His being a detective meant he crunched around in good weather, in his sandals and his lucky red Speedo, while two plainclothes men nearby in a parked car waited for somebody to take the bait. This happened more than you’d imagine. Manus was a one-man campaign to clean up Washington Park. He’d never been this successful as a regular policeman and this way nobody ever shot at him.
It all felt very Bond, James Bond. Very cloak-and-dagger. Very spy versus spy. Plus he was getting a great tan. Plus he got to tax-deduct his gym membership and his buying new Speedos.
Jump to the realtor in Santa Barbara shaking my hand and saying my name, Daisy St. Patience, over and over the way you do when you want to make a good impression but not looking at me in my veils. He’s looking at Brandy and Denver.
Charmed, I’m sure.
The house is just what you’d expect from the outside. There’s a big scarred mission-style trestle table in the dining room, under a wrought-iron chandelier you could swing on. Laid across the table is a silver-embroidered, fringed Spanish shawl.
We represent a television personality who wishes to remain nameless, Denver tells the realtor. We’re an advance team scouting for a weekend home for this nameless celebrity. Miss Alexander, she’s an expert in product toxicity, you know, the lethal fumes and secretions given off by homes.
“New carpet,” Denver says, “will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it’s been laid.”
Brandy says, “I know that feeling.”
It got so that when Manus’s crotch wasn’t leading men to their doom, Manus was three-piece-suited in court on the witness stand, saying how the defendant approached him in some lurid exposed public masturbating way and asked for a cigarette.
“Like anybody could look at me and think I smoke,” Manus would say.
You didn’t know what vice he objected to more.
After Santa Barbara, we drove to San Francisco and sold the Fiat Spider. Me, I’m writing on cocktail napkins all the time:
In the Santa Barbara hacienda, Brandy and me found Benzedrine and Dexedrine and old Quaaludes and Soma and some Dialose capsules that turned out to be a fecal softener. And some Solaquin Forte cream that turned out to be a skin bleach.
In San Francisco, we sold the Fiat and some drugs and bought a big red
After the Fiat, we rented a big Seville convertible. Just between us, we were the Zine kids:
Me, I was Comp Zine.
Denver was Thor Zine.
Brandy, Stella Zine.
It was in San Francisco I started Denver on his own secret hormone therapy to destroy him.
Manus’s detective career had started to peter out when his arrest rate dropped to one per day, then one per week, then zero, then still zero. The problem was the sun, the tanning, and the fact he was getting older and he was a known bait, none of the older men he had already arrested went near him. The younger men just thought he was too old.
So Manus got bold. More and more his Speedos got smaller, which wasn’t a good look, either. The pressure was on to replace him with a new model. So now he’d have to start conversations. Talk. Be funny. Really work at meeting guys. Develop a personality, and still the younger men, the only ones who didn’t run when they saw him, a younger man would still decline when Manus suggested they take a walk back into the trees, into the bushes.
Even the most horny young men with their eyes scamming everybody else would say, “Uh, no thanks.”
Or, “I just want to be alone right now.”
Or worse, “Back off, you old troll, or I’ll call a cop.”
After San Francisco and San Jose and Sacramento, we went to Reno and Brandy turned Denver Omelet into
