Hairspray and Lighter

By J. Jupes

All Detective Eckerly wanted to do that day was place a bet on a horse. He didn't expect Darlene Johnson to walk into his office with her chocolate box. And certainly didn't expect what followed. . .Book One of Orphan Paper's long awaited Noir series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hekate Publishing (Orphan Paper imprint)
• Release date: Mar 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912017539

Book preview

HAIRSPRAY AND LIGHTER

By J. Jupes

Cover Image by A. F. Knott

Copyright © 2018 Anthony F. Knott

All Rights Reserved

Orphan Paper First Edition, 2018

ISBN for EPub: 978-1-912017-53-9

Orphan Paper

An Imprint of Hekate Publishing

2 Lydiard Green

Lydiard Millicent

Wiltshire SN5 3LP United Kingdom

Hekate Publishing USA

1844 2nd Ave

New York, NY 10128 USA

[e-mail]

https://www.hekatepublishing.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher. Brief quotations, consisting of no more than 50 words, embodied in critical articles and reviews are permissible.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, or business institutions is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter 1 Cat Lady

Chapter 2 Scanton

Chapter 3 Reeves

Chapter 4 Darlene Johnson

Chapter 5 Harlingen

Chapter 6 Dog Man

Chapter 7 Winter’s Garden

Chapter 8 The Two Fer

Chapter 9 Oleg

Chapter 10 Mahoud

Chapter 11 Ajax Novelties

Chapter 12 The Kenmore

Chapter 13 Locker

Chapter 14 The Wounded Amazon

Chapter 15 Hong Kong

Chapter 16 Poker

Dawn yielded, flooding west over Houston like blood backtracking into the gray dope filling that morning’s syringe. Trap Boy stood, frozen, arm raised, mouth open, a prehistoric peat man, until the blue and white Volare made its turn onto B and everything began to move, him cawing No-Joke, No-Joke, No-Joke, the other mad hatters joining in, all of them trolling the east side between 2nd and 3rd. The car’s windows were rolled down. Two blueberries slumped in their seats, staring ahead, listening to brand names, Cash, Chinatown, Poison, echo through gutted space. Something was happening that wouldn’t happen again; the air was torn, and no one had a clue what just spilled out the gash; the city, a rat’s whisker away from shattering.

The RMP cut across the next intersection; a few feet over on 4th, bucket hats, hoodies, Adidas, all lined up behind the jagged hole sledge hammered through a bombed-up cinder block wall. Framed inside was the head of Benji, fourteen, price tag swinging off the side of his Knick’s cap. Benji handed a glassine envelope to a man in a wheel chair, the line nudged forward. Next block, a torn tan polyester suit pushed his way out two cracked glass double doors reflecting the RMP’s skewed white stripe, frosted red bulb over the frame making it for after-hours. The suit spun, plastered, already falling, fell, flat on his face; the officers catching salsa pop before the doors pulled shut. Then a sloppy fist fight, nothing serious; and on that corner, a single soul was tilted, a hand floating in front of his face, eyes closed. The smell of coffee and fresh bagels blew through the car before it made a right onto 14th; slowing in front of a sooty walk-up, sandwiched between two other sooty walk ups. The driver lit his last Chesterfield of the shift.

A pair of sunglasses with parrot winged frames, hand painted guava and mandarin, shaded two lead weights for eyes inching over the cornice to study the arm dangling out the cop car’s window, holding a cigarette. In turn she looked at a manhole cover, a flattened can of 7-Up and an overturned paper plate. Things on the street, the outside, was also on her inside; and been that way for as long as she could remember; then again, not always. When ashes fluttered off the end of the cig, she jerked back, zig-zagged around a stack of paint buckets then jumped over a rat-gnawed mattress to stand in front of the dented metal box at the back of the building’s red brick wall. A nozzle, clamped to the chassis’ side had been machined from an alloy the hue of storm clouds, dull and gray, its shape suggesting the puckered lips of a corpse. She grabbed the strap, swung the box over one shoulder, swiveled and stepped onto the fire escape ladder; then down to a grated balcony below; then two more steel flights and in through 4C’s already open window.

Cats lolled everywhere, gnawing fleas, pawing litter boxes, sprawled on counter tops. Two Calicos strolled over to sniff first the nozzle then the Rite Aid bag dropped by the bed a few minutes before.

The woman lay face up, eyes fixed, unblinking, the same frown on her forehead for thirty years, brown support hose collapsed around her ankles like two flags at half-mast; the dark varicosities, vines meandering up the side of an old mansion. Rectangular blocks fashioned from the same cadaverous metal made up the jig and lay either side of her head. The woman listened as two pieces of Scotch tape were torn from a dispenser. Hands, gloved in purple latex, came into focus, dropping onto her face, pulling her lids up, way up, and taping them against the eyebrows. The hands dropped into the shopping bag, removed a barbecue brush and dipped it into the bottle of kerosene on the bedside table. The brush swirled first around chin then lips before pausing, like an oil painter might in considering their canvas, before dragging across right cheek, nose, left cheek, and a final traverse of forehead. The paraffin oil dribbled along deep rills chiseled by years of worry and resentment, pooling in the basins of both eyes, feeling like liquid sandpaper if there was such a thing. The hands tossed the brush onto the floor, lifted both alloy blocks and clamped them against her ears. The shivery metal felt soothing in the humidity but far too tight. The hands lifted the jig and slid a thick alloy plate underneath, its hard surface mashing the oozing cysts that ran along the woman’s hairline. This was taking it one step too far.

One of the gloved hands dipped back into the bag, removed a can of hairspray, All Purpose Aqua Net, and depressed the nozzle. The other hand cradled a butane lighter. The thumb raked its spark wheel and the woman heard a pop, then whispering:

Spin round, circle, merrily, merrily, wooden doll, spin round.

The can rotated around and around. Through the dark lenses, petrified eyes regarded not a head aflame but a flare erupting from the surface of a boiling sun; within that burning spiral the woman tumbled through an avalanche of incomprehension, listening to her own corneas sizzle.

The cats, her babies, hissed while the sunglasses placed a knee up on the bed and leaned over their friend as if working on a V8. The old woman went out and came back to scalding worse than birth of her son fifty years before. The kerosene had caught by then and the glasses reflected the tiny orange ballerinas twirling across her charcoal cheeks, leaping over the bubbling black eye sockets.

The woman jerked, shifting the jig a few millimeters before all movement ceased. The gloved hand dropped the can of hairspray, twisted a knob on the square box and moved the lighter under its puckered nozzle. The thumb scratched the knurled wheel again and the woman’s ear drums bowed in and out, not so much with a pop as an oomph. The thermal lance ignited. The last thing she heard sounded like someone exhaling.

The wad of keys fell off the edge of the sink and slid down into the black hole of the garbage disposal. Metal started screaming. Eckerly’s arm swung over the top of his head like a windshield wiper, knocking the lamp off the cardboard box he used as a night stand and sending it clattering against the radiator. His eyes jerked open: The kitchen sink didn’t have a garbage disposal and he kept only two keys, one for the office, one for the apartment. He heard the donkey bay of a fire truck and knew where he was, the lower east side of Manhattan, the year still 1983, when tailors on Orchard Street dragged pedestrians into their shops and forced them at gunpoint to buy a suit.

Eckerly stayed still, listening to a faint tick-tick-tick, the sound he started to hear a year back. Assuming it was a mouse at first, he pulled half the wall down before noticing it at his office, then at his friend Roth’s office. He figured it had to be his brain, all the Cuba Libres and times he’d fallen on his head.

Eddies of cat piss swirled in off the fire escape, followed by a new stink, like a grease fire and Eckerly breathed through his mouth. WABC’s Talk Radio rattled old man Grimaldi’s RCA console one floor down. Brian Wilson was going on about unseasonably hot weather and how people were meddling with mother nature. The traffic report came on and Eckerly stopped listening. Jerking his hips underneath and wincing, he rolled over to stare at the window, trying to remember when he pulled the gate open the night before. He wouldn’t normally do that; like tying a blood-soaked steak to the end of a stick and waving it off the fire escape: The zombies would come.

Eckerly dragged the lamp back over to the bed by its cord, peeled down the sheet that had been sticking to him like fly paper and watched the tiny mushrooms of sweat sprout in and around his pink bandoleers of scar tissue: With two gunshot and three knife wounds, Eckerly’s chest was a junk yard of violence. Two years before retirement, he snapped both ankles jumping across a roof on Bleeker and someone tacked his rookie photograph up on the precinct’s bulletin board, underneath writing Detective Eckerly is a Shit Magnet.

Propped on an elbow, another funk, like dirt deep fried in brown sugar, crawled out from under an armpit: Tequila cut with sweat. Eckerly drew his lower lip back and blew, fanning side to side then stopped. The apartment began to spin like Dorothy’s house on the way to Oz. He needed to focus on something. He stared at one of the open suitcases on the floor.

By the time Eckerly left the poker game the night before, the five of them had only killed half the gallon: The hangover was worse than expected. His thoughts skipped like a needle on a scratched LP. His right eye was glued shut and circled with homemade pie crust, that side of his face imprinted with shoe laces. Not able to find his pillow the night before, he had grabbed one of the Converse high-tops laying on the window sill.

Eckerly pried the eye open and tried licking his lips. His tongue was drywall; licking them made it worse. Skewed handsome, a movie buff might have made him for Montgomery Cliff after the car accident, but more squared off and mutilated, with shoulders twice as wide as Cliff’s. A long torso-short leg type, his family came from Welsh coal mining stock; and with five teeth left, Eckerly’s mouth looked like the South Bronx.

Dorothy’s house landed, Munchkinland was silent. He pulled his eye holes off the suitcase.

Each of Eckerly’s wives had asked him to put his clothes into drawers. He couldn’t. If his bags weren’t packed, fear welled up inside like magma bubbling through the sulfur pots at Yellowstone. He didn’t understand why. Scanton, his partner at the Ninth for fifteen years, said he did and had gone over Eckerly’s suitcase issue a half dozen times. The two detectives discussed issues at the Cowboy Bar on First, a piss stink sawdust dive below the office that had a juke box playing nothing but Johnny Cash 45s.

What do you expect? It’s going to make them uneasy. It would make me uneasy. Don’t you think that’s sad, keeping your bags packed like that?

You never know what could happen.

Nothing could happen. You’re in the grip of death fear. I have the same thing, death fear. But you wouldn’t have it if you went to therapy. I go twice a week. I’d go twice a day if I could. I told Powski, ‘How about I rent a basement apartment. You live there. I’m your only client. I’ll throw in a record player and put Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky on the rack by your bed, all alphabetized. You finger the LPs while you’re lying there thinking about what I said that day.’ Powski made a tic mark then scribbled something. I asked him, ‘What did you write?’ He looked at me. Powski won’t show me what he writes. I’ll point to his clip board and say, ‘I don’t believe you’re writing anything. You’re just doodling.’ I told him I was going to bring in my own clip board and give him a taste of his own medicine. He made another tick. I said, ‘Very funny.’

Scanton took Eckerly’s retirement hard and often spoke of the loss. He often spoke in general, the reason no one wanted to work with him. Scanton had the reputation for being a chatter box. Eckerly understood why people might think that:

Everybody on the squad thinks Scanton can’t stop talking. He can. He’ll stay quiet for long periods of time. It took me a month to understand. I just got my gold shield, they assigned me to Scanton. He’d been around ten years by then, and with the dresses, every rookie detective got Scanton until they asked to be reassigned. Scanton was a stigma. We started riding around and I’m thinking, is this guy serious? He sounds serious but he can’t be. I listened. I don’t usually but I realized everything he was saying to me was bullshit. Everything. But it came from the sheer amount of bullshit we deal with, in the street, in the paperwork, in the politics of the job. We approach the bullshit logically when it’s not logical. When Scanton is discussing a case, that’s the only time he’ll be dead serious; but won’t explain that, so most people take him the wrong way. In fact, they find Scanton offensive. The dresses don’t help. They’re another source of confusion. Scanton knows that as well. The term Walters uses is oppositional. Scanton is oppositional but a good detective. We get along.

"I was Pete Malloy, Badge 744. Eckerly was Jim Reed, Badge 2430, my rookie partner. We’d be sweating somebody at the house, filling out 61s, whatever, and he’d say it: ‘1-Adam-12, 1-Adam-12, see the man.’ He’d be on hold or I’d be on hold and he’d say it: ‘See the man, see the man.’ All told, Eckerly probably said it two, three hundred thousand times. That’s no small matter. I can’t say it. Wouldn’t be my place. I say, ‘I’m walkin’ here. I’m walkin’ here.’ That’s what I say. I try to explain this to people, they look at me with that what the fuck look. I nod and ask, ‘Right?’ As if they understand. They don’t understand.

What people don’t realize is after Eckerly retired, I’ll work with anybody. I don’t care. Underneath my billowing hoop skirt, I’m your stereotypical cop: Cynical, aloof, suspicious and alienated. I couldn’t do this job for thirty years if I didn’t have a practical side as well as a fashion sense. Ask Walters. Ask the riding DA if I know what evidence