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Authors: David Stukas

BOOK: Biceps Of Death
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When we had finished the movie and cleaned up, Monette helped me prepare the sofa in the living room for my slumber. As I climbed into bed, I asked the question that had been on both of our minds since before I arrived.
“Monette?”
“Yes, little Jimmy?” she said like a mother with 2.3 children living in Cleveland, Ohio.
“Monette, I’ve been here a whole evening and you haven’t played one practical joke on me yet. In fact, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop after the last one I played on you.”
“I assume you’re referring to the incident where you sent that e-mail to me at work labeled
Compromising Photos of Ellen DeGeneres
, and when I opened it, the damn thing shot the volume control on my computer way up and screamed, ‘Hey, everyone! I’m looking at porn over here!’ Everyone on my floor heard the fuckin’ thing.”
“Yes, I recall that I might have had some kind of remote connection to that occurrence.”
“Robert, it had your signature style written all over it,” Monette said, giving me a sly look. Don’t worry, you’ll get yours,” she added with an evil grin.
Ever since I met Monette over a decade ago, we both enjoyed playing practical jokes on each other. I think it was the soul mate connection we had with each other that made us both enjoy it, and it was the mental combat that kept things exciting.
I bid Monette good night and settled down to a well-deserved sleep. The noise from the street kept waking me up since I was used to sleeping in a room in the back of a building. It’s funny how living in New York can make you appreciate the difference between sound levels that would deafen those used to the quiet of the suburbs. My apartment on the Yupper East Side was like sleeping inside the muffler of a taxi cab, and Monette’s apartment was like the inside of a Pratt & Whitney jet engine—it was a difference that mattered.
At around two-thirty, I awoke to faint noises coming from the window facing Monette’s balcony. Again, I’d slept right through several fire engines a few blocks away, but awoke because of some tiny scratching noises.
I got up, rubbed my eyes, and went over to the window only to find a man wearing a ski mask partially protruding through an opened window a mere twelve inches from me. The man stared at me for a second and I stared at him, neither of us moving a muscle. Suddenly, there was a horrific, primal growl behind me as I turned to see two glowing eyes racing toward me from Monette’s bedroom down the hall. Amelia must have chewed through her chains, pried opened the bedroom door with her meat hooks and was now barreling down the hall toward my face for a taste of blood. Fifteen-pound Ameila bounded through the air and hit me like a linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys, causing me to lose my balance in the darkness and fall back against the window and our burglar. The window, which our nocturnal guest had apparently propped open, came down on his head like a guillotine blade with a sickening bang. Dazed and contused, Mr. Ski Mask raised the window enough to extract his aching head backward, letting the window slam shut a second time. Ameila had landed on the ground nearby and crouched there, growling at me with eyes afire while the burglar (or was he an assailant?) stood unsteadily outside on the balcony, trying, no doubt, to figure out what had just happened. While he was regaining his composure, I went into action.
I grabbed the nearest heavy object and tossed it through the window at the burglar. The burglar, startled not only by my appearance but also by an unknown object crashing through a window, fell backward over the edge and disappeared, followed by Monette’s 2002 Big Apple Lesbian Soccer Championship trophy.
Monette flew into the living room like a bat out of hell (which was what she resembled until she had her first cup of coffee in the morning), asking, “What the hell is going on here?”
“Someone just tried to break in here, and I threw something at him,” I shouted.
We pushed back what was left of the window and stepped out onto the broken glass of the balcony in our slippers, figuring that we’d be looking down onto the crumpled corpse of the burglar, speared perhaps by Monette’s trophy in a twist of irony—but what we saw was even more amazing. The assailant rose from the sidewalk below and sprinted off, then hobbled, followed by more sprinting, then more hobbling in a painful dance of escape.
We both sat looking down at Monette’s trophy, lying sadly—but intact—below on the street. During its trip down with our burglar, it must have bounced off the convertible roof of a car parked at the curb and landed somewhat safely in the street.
“Thank Goddess that you and the trophy are safe,” Monette said with obvious relief.
Just as Monette’s uttered those words, a taxi came barreling down the street and clobbered the trophy with a speed that left us with jaws agape. The moment of triumph of the Leaping Lesbians of Park Slope was no more.
“Well, one out of two ain’t bad,” Monette commented.
6
The Law of Falling Bodies
W
e spent the rest of the night talking to the police, including Detective McMillan, who was very understanding for two-thirty in the morning.
We told the police and the forensic technicians everything—so much so, that by the time the majority of them had left, the sun was coming up. I decided that I might as well go back to my apartment, shower, shave, and go to the gym. I know, I know, you would think that the last place I would be seen was in the gym, but I had worked my tail off to get my body lean and mean for my boyfriend, and no ski-masked bandit was going to stand in my way of that.
McMillan suggested that I be driven back to my apartment by one of the policemen standing in the hallway, where I would be escorted up to my place and seen in the door safely. I didn’t have much to say to the policeman who drove me home, but I couldn’t help think that if Michael had been in my place, he would’ve been raging with lust right now. Michael had a thing for men in uniforms—especially police, military, and firemen, in that order.
I was seen up to my door by the policeman through a crowd of reporters that had, amazingly, started to dwindle somewhat. I turned the key in the lock and was about to dismiss my protector when I realized that my apartment had been broken into again. All my tidying up had been a waste of time.
More cops again—and Detective McMillan. More of the same. More questions, more racking my brain trying to remember “anything that might help.” More shit.
I showered and dressed for work. When I got to my office (a windowless telephone switching/computer server room), I launched into the first order of the day: begging Michael for a place to stay until this whole thing blew over.
I dialed Michael’s private number. (He had one number for his intimate friends, one for tricks, and one for the rest of the world.)
“Yes?” came the sleepy answer.
“Michael?” I asked because I wasn’t sure.
“Robert?”
“Michael, it’s ten o’clock! What are you still doing in bed, you whore?”
“I was up all night ... I was staying up with a sick friend.”
I felt guilty right away.
“Michael, I’m sorry about the joke. Is your friend all right?”
“Oh, he’s fine. In fact, I just sent him home.”
“Michael, do you think that’s wise? I mean, maybe he shouldn’t be outside.”
“Robert, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Your sick friend.”
“Dearest Robert, I said he was sick.”
“Yes, well ... ?”
“I said he’s
sick
. He likes to make love through a piece of uncooked liver, then fry it and eat it.”
“Michael, why do you do this with him?”
“Because he’s hot. But I have to put a stop to it.”
“Because it’s unsanitary?”
“No, I hate liver, Robert. It’s a filter organ.”
“Michael, I have something to ask you.”
“You want to borrow my pair of Frank Addams leather shorts?”
“No. I need a place to stay until this is all over.”
There was a long, pregnant silence on the other end of the line.
“Oh, Robert, you know how I would
love
for you to stay with me, but I’m full up here.”
“Michael, you have dozens of rooms in your penthouse.”
“Yes, but most of them are full of my hobbies.”
“You can’t have all of your rooms filled with welding equipment. Michael, tell me what this is all about. I would let you stay in my apartment as long as you had to.”
“Yes, Robert, but I wouldn’t want to stay in your apartment.”
“No, there’s some reason you’re not telling me why you don’t want me there.”
“Well ...” Michael hesitated. “For one, it would cramp my style.”
“You mean you would feel funny dragging home a trick in front of me?” I suggested.
“Exactly,” Michael replied with a sigh of relief.
“Michael, you have never let me stand between you and a hot date. Remember that time you had sex with that military guy while I was still in the cab? You didn’t even wait to drop me off at my apartment.”
Even over the phone line, I could tell Michael was staring dreamily off into space.
“Yes, he was good, wasn’t he? And that high-and-tight haircut! Let it never be said that I don’t support our troops!”
“Michael, the point is why you don’t want me to stay at your apartment.”
“Oh,
that
. I don’t want you to bring me any more bad luck.”
“Bring
more
bad luck? What have you done now?” I asked, knowing full well that Michael had done something very illegal or highly offensive.
“You know those fuckin’ rocks I brought back from Maui?”
“The ones you said would look good on your terrace garden? You didn’t tell me they were from ... oh no ... Michael, you didn’t desecrate some ancient Hawaiian burial ground, did you?”
“Not exactly.”
“What did you do?”
“The Hawaiians believe that spirits inhabit the rocks, and if you remove them from the islands, the spirits inside get angry and fuck up your life until you return them.”
“And how, pray tell, did they screw up your life, Michael?”
“The day after I got back from Maui, I was dancing at the Metal Club and my leather pants got torn on a loose nail. The next morning, I spilled coffee on myself at Starbucks. See?”
I failed to see the connection between ancient Hawaiian spirits and tearing pants at an attitude-filled dance club, but I let Michael continue or there would be no end to it. Michael, more than anything, loved to talk about himself and, even better, to draw people into his misery, no matter how trivial.
“I know you don’t believe that this is all connected because you’re not
spiritual
like me. I won’t even bother to tell you about the person who stole my cab from me.”
Michael had a point there. In my memory, no one had ever stolen a cab from Michael and gotten away with it. I knew this for a fact since I’d witnessed an incident one Christmas season. Michael and I were shopping in the Village and we decided to take a cab to Soho for lunch. Some princess in a fur coat and expensive boots ran out and grabbed a taxi that was clearly ours. Michael confronted her, heated words were exchanged, and Michael put an end to the stalemate by dragging the girl from the cab and throwing the princess into a pile of slush at the curb, coat and all. His pièce de résistance was to throw her shopping bags into the slush with her. He pulled me into the cab and off we sped with the tempestuous tulip shouting obscenities at us until we were out of earshot. Merry Christmas!
“Well, Michael, just get rid of the stones and their bad luck,” I suggested. It was too simple of a solution, however.
“You can’t just throw them out!” Michael retorted. “You have to have someone of true Hawaiian ancestry take them back to Hawaii and restore the spirits to their resting places.”
“And how much did this set you back?”
“What makes you think money was involved?” Michael asked.
“With you, there always is.”
Michael hesitated, then volunteered the information. To most people, what he was about to tell me would make him look just plain foolish, but to Michael, he confessed because it made it clear that he had big sums of money to throw around.
“Eight thousand dollars.”
“EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS!” I almost screamed. “Let me guess, you had some guy in Hawaii offer to take the rocks back to Hawaii first class, then there was a fee for interring the rocks back to their proper settings.”
“You’re forgetting the hotel bill here in New York. He had to stay here for five days to draw up maps to determine from where I had taken the rocks.”
“And that cost eight thousand dollars?”
“Well, the guy had to eat while he was here. You know how hard it is to find good Hawaiian fusion cooking here in Manhattan?”
“Let me make another guess, Michael. He just had to go to Paia, the most expensive and overrated fusion restaurant in town?”
“Well, I couldn’t send him to Food Emporium to pick up a can of pineapple and some mahi mahi.”
Sensing that Michael’s mind was possessed by Kalikakala, the goddess of stupidity, I played the only trump card I had left to play: I reminded Michael that I had once saved his life from a group of fag bashers. That seemed to do the trick. If there’s one thing that appeals to a narcissist like Michael, it’s the fact that you prolonged his life so that the rest of the world could be eternally grateful that they merely existed. What can I say? I was desperate.
 
 
I
called Monette and told her to meet me at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station, a convenient meeting spot because it was roughly halfway between her office and mine. I said it was time to start interviewing suspects.
“Well, who do we start off with?” Monette said as I handed her the list of suspects.
“Monette?”
“Yes, Robert?”
“Are you sure this is such a good idea, questioning these guys at work and at home? What if they go after us with a knife or a gun?”
“Calm down, Robert! We’re holding the trump card here. We have the pictures. These guys will behave themselves because they don’t know what we might do with the pictures if they threaten us. Plus, I have another idea concerning the CD. It’s not just enough that we ask some questions. We need to lure the real killer into the open.”
“And how do you propose to do this? Handcuff me to a chair in my apartment and leave the door open for the killer to finish me off?”
“Close. No, while we’re questioning these guys, we drop the fact that we have the CD safely in your apartment.” Monette smiled demonically, pleased at something so simple and yet so clever.
“So that someone desperate enough to kill two personal trainers will break into my apartment and retrieve the CD? Of course, we know that the police are watching the apartment and they’ll be caught?”
“You forgot the most important part: without putting your safety in jeopardy.”
My eyes lit up like Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
“I like it, I like it!”
“Good.”
“So when are we going to visit these guys? I have a full-time job ... and so do you,” I reminded her.
“We do it on our lunch hour just like we’re doing now. Most of these guys have their work phone on this list. We just call them, say we’d like to discuss the pictures, and we see where it goes.”
“Okay, why don’t you come over tonight and we’ll do this—at Michael’s apartment. I’m staying there until things cool down a little. I should be safe in his penthouse, unless someone has the ability to climb up the wall like a spider.”
“Good idea, Robert, although with some of the trash Michael brings home, you might be safer off elsewhere.”
“Like where?” I asked.
“In prison.”

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