Copp For Hire, A Joe Copp Thriller (Joe Copp Private Eye Series) (20 page)

      
I got lucky with the neck lock, sprang the collar off and worked at the tortured flesh with both hands to relieve the hurt as she gratefully bent forward with the crown of her head resting on the couch. "There you go," I told her. "Next time look both ways before crossing to the hard side."

      
She spoke from the upside-down with a deeply wearied voice: "How many girls did I send to this, Joe?"

      
"Maybe not any," I told her.

      
"That's not true. This is what Maria found over here, isn't it."

      
I was working at the other lock. "I guess we'll never know what Maria found over here. She found the worst at home, that's for sure."

      
She shivered. "Both of them are monsters. Evil. Not very clinical of me, but they are evil. And I once actually thought Jim was a nice—"

      
"Put it in your thesis." "Just wait until you read it." I coaxed the other lock open and took the contraption off of her.

      
She sprawled forward and lay panting on the couch.

      
And then I heard the deep, muted throb of marine engines nearby. Her evil men had come home.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I'M NO FREUDIAN psychologist, as you may have noticed, but it does not take one of those to know that probably, yeah, there really is a bit of the whore in every woman—depending on your definition of whore. If, by that, you mean a woman who stands on a street-corner and offers sex for money, then the thing doesn't wash: less than one percent of all women have tried that, I would think.

      
But if by whore you mean a female who uses her femininity to make the world a little nicer place for herself—then, yeah, I've seen two-year-olds who do that. Come to think of it, I've seen damned few two-year-olds who don't do that. It's genetic, part of the survival
 
instinct threaded into sex roles, and let's hope we never civilize all of that out of our women.

      
For myself, I had seen no basic conflict in the idea that a bright and lively twenty-five- year-old woman struggles by day toward a Ph.D. to make life a little nicer in the long run while struggling by night with sensuality to make the same life a bit nicer, maybe more exciting too, during the short run. I didn't even see anything basically jarring in the thought that a woman could actually enjoy a frank display of her female sensuality in a professional sense and still be a basically good person.

      
I mean, hell, Victoria is dead, and long may she lay in the grave if her resurrection would signal a return to chastity belts and
clitorectomies
. On the other hand, I do still give lip service to the idea that sex between a man and woman should be a bit more than a casual brush in the night. Somewhere between the two extremes, though, men and women have got to come together and find the meaning between them; in the meantime they've simply got to come together on one basis or another, and our fractured society is making that more and more difficult every day. Hang in, this is almost over, but you've stuck with me this far, so it shouldn't hurt....

      
Face it, we live in an ambivalent age. We start preparing our kids in all the subtle ways for the mating frenzy before they learn how to write their own names, and the ways become less subtle as they move along. You show me a sixth-grade kid today who hasn't already mastered the subtle lessons of sensuality and I'll be looking at a culturally deprived kid.

      
So the "little bit of whore" finds it natural expression via cosmetics, fashions, music, and all the entertainments. A pretty girl very quickly learns that the world is quite a bit nicer for her than for the not-so-pretty girl— that attractiveness is rewarded and the lack of it penalized—so who are we to call her a whore if she flaunts it for her reward.

      
I know, I know—this is sexism, some say— exploitation, some say—I say bullshit; it's the way life is and has ever been, so we may as well learn to deal with it.

      
I think, see, that was Bewitching Belinda's problem: she hadn't learned to deal with it. Like fire, you know, that warms our hands but also burns the flesh away if not dealt with properly; the willful exploitation of your own sexuality can do the same—and Linda, I figure, just got caught with her hands a bit too close to the flame. I think most any normal woman enjoys feeling both sexually attractive and sexually attracted. Some are bolder about it than others; that's the big difference—and maybe too some simply feel it stronger than others. But for sure every woman and every man finds comfort in the evidence of his or her own sexual attractiveness.

      
All of which, I realize, is an involved way of saying that Belinda danced because at some level Linda loved it, and Belinda found an easy extension into more direct sexuality because Linda did not know how to handle Belinda.

      
But she wasn't a bad person because of it.

      
I came to all this heavy enlightenment some time after I needed it, but I give it to you here, now, for what it's worth....

      
So while we're talking about enlightenment, including by hindsight, let's consider Charlie Han for a moment. Call him a thug, okay, but you could just as easily think of him as a minor warlord struggling for survival in a
hos¬tile
world. Charlie's brutalities, I have learned, were at least confined to the requirements of his own brutal turf—and, while he is definitely a power within his own circle, it is a small circle and I can't believe that he could feel comfortable outside that circle, which means that he would have never ventured outside it if Jim Davitsky hadn't come to him with tempting overtures.

      
Davitsky came only because Davitsky needed a ready supply of easy femininity as grist for his mill, and because Charlie Han controlled that franchise in Honolulu.

      
I can't believe that HPD was really all that terribly concerned about Han even with Davitsky hovering overhead. The politics of that island state are hoary in their patterns—it is almost wholly a one-party state, and the machinations are almost totally predictable. Charlie Han already had his place in that scheme, and he'd been content with that place. He ran his own turf his own way and everybody looked the other way.

      
What bothered HPD, I think, was the fact of the linkage itself—between Han and Davitsky—and the possibility that Han would emerge from his "place" and look for an extension of turf. That would mean warfare in a real sense, and the surface tranquility of the island would be disturbed. The police philosophy in that troubled paradise is simply to keep the lid slightly askew while the pot gently boils.
Davitsky's
presence on the island together with his political ambitions was simply adding too much heat beneath the pot.

      
They could live with Charlie Han, if Charlie kept his place.

      
They could not live with Jim Davitsky.

      
So I guess I came to them like a gift, and they used me.
   
I know that now. And I am not

even mad about it. I would probably do the same thing, in their place.

      
This
Kahala
"resort" of
Davitsky's
was indeed a "stage," as Charlie Han had called it. Men like Davitsky tend to gravitate toward one another, I've learned, finding community in ways that mystify the rest of us; but they do seem to find one another, whether by chance encounter or subtle communication or whatever: there seems to be this need to get together and act out their fantasies. Whether Davitsky found his way into politics by way of this gravitation or the gravitation resulted from the politics I don't know and probably never will. But the evidence is now clear that he romped in group-sex activities with a large circle of important politicians and that he'd set his "stage" in Hawaii at great expense, a stage designed to entrap and ensnare and extend power over unwitting contributors to miles of videotape memoirs of the romps.

      
Apparently Maria Avila had discovered the secret video equipment. I doubt that she ever knew of any "stolen" tape; she merely invented it as a threat to keep Davitsky away from her, without realizing that the invention was her own death warrant. It also killed several people who could have been offering her aid and comfort, and it would have killed quite a few more, I'm sure, if Juanita Valdez had never entered my office.

      
Somewhere along his twisted trail, starting maybe even in childhood, this guy Davitsky had built one strong hatred of
femaledom
, and apparently it was a hatred that corrupted his sexual expression. I don't believe he was a homosexual, though there may have been tendencies. His sexual attraction was certainly female-oriented, but it was an attraction that called for domination, brutality and degradation. I give all this to you from Linda herself as a close reevaluation of her relationship with the guy, and as a result of her night of terror at his hands... .

      
The party at sea had ended at two o'clock. Linda knows only that Charlie Han left in a huff, taking some of his girls with him. Two Oriental girls remained on the boat with Ed Jones; Davitsky came into the house and began pushing Linda around, trying to learn more about Maria Avila and what she'd known of the
Kahala
operation. He dragged her down to the boat and Ed Jones had a go at her. They stripped her and put her in chains and turned the Oriental girls onto her. Apparently none of that satisfied Davitsky. The whole party returned to the house and the terror for Linda went on; she was repeatedly gang-raped by all four. She passed out at some point in the nightmare, and was alone . when she came to. I showed up shortly thereafter.

      
That is where we are at now. It is daylight. Davitsky and Jones have returned alone from another go at the sea. I have sent Linda into quick retreat toward her bedroom. I sit at the bar facing the gaping hole where the front door had been, Billy
Inyoko's
pistol in my hand.

      
The prince and the prick stand at the shattered door, dumb with surprise. They are inside before they see me. The prince whirls about as though to run back outside, but the little prick takes a menacing step forward and goes for his gun.

      
"Aloha," I greet them. "Let me tell you who sent me. Maria sent me. Juanita sent me. George sent me. Tanner sent me. Finally, Charlie sent me, maybe in the name of too many anonymous China girls in the bellies of sharks."

The prince has checked himself and now stands just inside the shattered doorway. Draped around his neck are several chain contraptions similar to the one I removed from Linda.

      
The little prick has a gun in his hand and is frozen dumbly in a halfhearted firing stance.

      
They are both unsure, I guess, because I am just sitting there at the bar, and they are looking for my reinforcements.

      
That holds for about five seconds.

      
Then Davitsky says something to Jones in a stage whisper and bolts out the door; Jones flings himself toward cover behind a couch and begins unloading on me.

I just sit there, because it is not really me but an image of me in the mirrored wall. That image shatters as the glass wall disintegrates under the gunfire to reveal catwalks and video equipment.

      
I hear the little prick gasp in understanding but I already am on him. I rip his gun loose and hear several fingers crunch in the release. I am thinking maybe of a class lady with his baby in her belly as I decide to leave him with his head intact. I merely bang it on the floor until he quits struggling.

      
Then I am up and out of there, on the trail of a mainland prince with bondage devices dangling from his neck.

      
I find him dancing with agitation beside a vehicle in the driveway, trying to find keys to let himself inside it.

He throws a large key ring at me and runs off toward the boat slip.

      
I catch the ring of keys and put them in my pocket. Damned if I know why I did that, unless it was some sort of symbolic grasping for the key to the whole mess, as though the keys were my case ... and maybe the case was a key to myself.

      
I did not know—and still don't—what exactly Jim Davitsky represented in any big- deal larger sense. I only knew that I had to shut the guy down, even if it meant shutting myself down in the process.

      
It just seemed a strange place to be reenacting this ages-old drama of man versus his darker side. But then . . . why the hell not? It had all begun in paradise, hadn't it?