Plainclothes Naked by Jerry Stahl Page B

made while bored out of his mind at the Laundro mat. He could type something up later. For now, he had to lay out the story he’d concocted on the drive over. He couldn’t very well tell the truth: that he was late to Seventh Heaven because he was pitching woo to a hot murder suspect, let alone that the beauty had flashed him a photo of the President with a smiling nutsack. . . . It was time to improvise.
    “While I tended to the old lady, Zank and McCardle must have fled,” Manny began. He looked up and pinched the bridge of his nose, as if the strain of reading were really getting to him. “The thing is, I never put anybody in one of these new ambulances, the ones where you have to slide the stretcher onto those tracks so it rolls in and out. I couldn’t get the damn thing flush. So there I am trying to secure the old lady, and the ambulance driver’s flopping around in the grass like a hooked salmon.”
    “So you let them get away?” Fayton did not seem angry so much as personally let down, even hurt. “I can’t believe this!”
    Manny slapped the paper off his thigh. Story time was almost over. “It was tough, Chief ! Before the paramedic went epileptic, I was all over those scumbags. I told them I’d shoot, but the truth is there were too many bystanders. Maybe if Krantz had secured the perimeter, instead of jacking off in the day room, jawing with witnesses who can’t remember their own names, I could have gotten off a shot. Rookie mistake. The good news is, the fall didn’t kill Mrs. Zank. It just broke a bunch of bones and pissed her off.”
    “So she’s not dead?”
    “Not yet,” said Manny, eyeing the signed photo of his ex-wife and Chief Fayton that graced the wall behind his desk. Flanking it were framed newspaper shots of the chief in all manner of gripping police action. Manny recognized the one of himself slapping handcuffs on Everett Welk, a madman accordionist who claimed to be a distant cousin of Lawrence. Hired to play a Pizza Hut opening, Everett stabbed an insurance man in the cheek for talking during “Beer Barrel Polka.” It was one of those joke slayings, though the joke wasn’t too funny if you were the guy who got it in the dimple. The chief had shown up ten minutes after Welk was subdued and asked the arresting officer—in this case Manny Rubert—if he’d mind letting him “re enact” the collar. “Just as a gag,” he’d said, though readers of the Upper Marilyn Trumpet the next morning wouldn’t realize it was Manny who actually tackled the knifer, and not the brave and true Chief of Police, Lyn Fayton.
    Beside Everett Welk was a “candid” of the chief at the shooting range, two-handing his Beretta, and another of him crouched behind a black-and-white, wielding a bullhorn during what looked like a hostage situation at a pet hospital. Manny had no recollection of this particular police action, and assumed the chief had hired a photogra pher and staged it to beef up his two-fisted, crime-fighter image.
    Fayton picked a scrap of paper off his desk and studied it impor tantly. “And what about this Marvin Podolsky thing? Any theories?”
    “Straight suicide,” said Manny. “I’m still writing up the report, but it looks like our guy took himself out with a slug of Drano in his breakfast cereal. He’s got a history of attempts. I tracked down a doc tor who treated him. Plus his wife said he’d had some financial set backs.”
    “So you’re not looking at her for possible homicide?” “All that broad’s guilty of is bad luck in men.”
    The chief frowned. “You’re saying he gave himself Drano?”
    “For the fourth time,” Manny sighed, shaking his head, as if con templating the depths of hell that lived inside such a soul. “Once he went with lighter fluid. But outside of that, he was strictly a Drano man.”
    Manny paused while his old nemesis, Officer Chatlak, now in his
    golden years and semiretired, rattled into the chief ’s inner sanctum with a