The Parallel Apartments (40 page)

Marcia tried to give him a hundred-dollar tip, but he waved it away.

“So, what was up with him?” said Marcia, stuffing the bill into her shirt pocket.

“Lateral PMDV-board overload causing intraspinal seepage that arced the MamaHelpMe circuit in the sixth pelvic conduit, ultimately blowing the alternator.”

“Oh. What caused it?”

“Blunt force trauma, replipenis. Probably a bite. It's been replaced.”

T. S. Eliot left. Presently in came Rance, walking on his knees. He couldn't actually walk; that was still beyond the technological acumen of HoBots.

“Better?”

“Yes, I am,” said Rance. “I want to make love to something!” He began to hump the divan.

Marcia used her remote to send him back to his boudoir.

“Our first client of the night will be here in ten minutes,” said Marcia, finally alone with Casey.

“I'm going home,” he said, putting on a silly porkpie hat he'd lately grown attached to.

“Get back here. I don't understand what you're so pissed about.”

“Bye.”

“You know what? I think you feel threatened by Porifiro.”

“Ha!”

“Or else you've got a crush on him.”

Both, as it turned out.

Over the next few months, Marcia, on the advice of Porifiro, raised the price of a date from $300 to $750 to $1,200 to $1,500. Traffic increased. Marcia was now serving thirty-five to fifty clients a week, bringing in several hundred thousand bucks a month. She paid off her credit-card debts, one at a time, starting with the lenders that had been the nicest to her during their debt-collecting years. Bank of America and Wells Fargo were last. She paid her last penny of debt on August 7, 2004, and by October she had two hundred thousand in a brand-new bank account at the Texas Federal Credit Union. She would be able to pay her 2004 income taxes in full, and still have enough to give both Casey and Porifiro big raises.

Porifiro was making as much as Casey now. Casey did not like this. He pouted, picked fights. Porifiro was doing more work, too. Casey did not like this either. He slacked off more, picked more fights. Casey was becoming redundant. Not that Marcia would ever fire him. Or would she?

The last thrust-and-parry between the two men occurred on October 16, 2004.

Marcia had left for a day of shopping, planning first to drop by Home Depot to buy a handheld spray attachment that she could plug into the showerhead in order to give Rance localized attention to the parts of himself he could not easily clean on his own. But when she got to the register, she realized she'd forgotten the damn hundred-dollar gift card she'd accepted as payment from one client, Miss Tramp, who had paid for her date entirely with gift cards, some fifteen hundred dollars worth of virtual cash from Neiman's, Best Buy, Crammed Shelf, Chuy's, Twin Liquors, and, of course, Home Depot. Marcia carried other bearer instruments on her person, but she wanted to spend the damn
card.

Marcia growled, then smiled at the clerk and told him she'd be back.

She arrived to an empty house; Casey and Porifiro wouldn't be here till five. She heard noises coming from the boudoir. It sounded like Rance and
a companion were on an exceptionally fine and rowdy date, considering the volume of porcine grunting emerging from the room, loud enough to penetrate the acoustic buffers between the boudoir and the house. Rarely could she hear anything going on inside the boudoir without her headphones. What the hell was going on? There were no dates scheduled during the day, and, besides, Marcia was always home, in control, madaming, whenever Rance was on a date. It was
her
company: she screened the clients, she made the daily cash deposit, she organized the schedule, she eavesdropped on every date. Part of Marcia's job was to listen for signs of discord, cardiac arrest, malfunction, and Rance's peculiar, and thankfully rarely uttered, safe words,
Mi madre.

The headphones were as intrusive as she allowed herself or her staff to be, with one exception: the occasional use of a hidden, closed-circuit night-or-day-vision eye-in-the-sky that she only ever turned on when she heard irregularities.

Marcia put down her purse, got the house gun out from under the divan cushions, and, at the continued
eeyi
s,
oh god
s, and
fuck me
s coming through the walls of the boudoir, Marcia flipped the camera on.

Porifiro.

Porifiro, who had declined the job perk of free Rance time; Porifiro, who didn't like to deal with Rance directly at all; Porifiro, who had more than once poked a bit of not-so-lighthearted fun at Casey's gayness, which Marcia usually overlooked and Casey never seemed to hear; Porifiro, who was straight.

Marcia left the house, finished her shopping, and came back home around four. No one in the house or boudoir. It was still an hour before her bickery and tedious employees were due, and two hours before the arrival of tonight's date, Hymie Jeffs, a repeat customer who had paid the discount rate of fifteen thousand dollars, in advance, for a twelve-hour all-nighter, most of which he usually spent dozing and snuggling.

Marcia checked in on Rance. He sat up in bed and said, “Hello, darling. I can't wait for tomorrow morning, when we'll be together again. Would you like a quickie right now?”

“No, thank you, darling. How did you enjoy your afternoon delight with Porifiro?”

“Oh dear, that was supposed to be a secret.”

“I didn't know that Porifiro was gay,” said Marcia, taking a seat at the edge of the bed.

“We've been together many times,” said Rance. “Perhaps he's a straight man who loves bottom-love. On the other hand…”

“What?”

Rance leaned over and whispered something into Marcia's ear.

Casey arrived at Marcia's a few minutes early. She sat him down at the kitchen table.

“I caught Porifiro with Rance.”

“What?”

“In a very compromising and submissive position.”

“No way. He's totally a breeder.”

“Yes way. I saw him.”

“Fire him.”

“I'm just gonna ignore it,” said Marcia. “Let him have his privacy.”

“I hate closet cases.”

“You were one till you were twenty-eight!”

“And I hated myself.”

“Here he comes. Don't say anything.”

Porifiro knocked and let himself inside.

“Yo,” he said.

“Porifiro, I heard you got reamed and rimmed by Rance.”

“Casey, goddammit!” said Marcia.

“Wha…? I wouldn't get with that thing, that's for you two to do.”

“Porifiro,” said Marcia, “I saw you. You don't have to lie. You're among friends here, we won't say anything. You can even have regular nights with him. Casey and I will each give you one of our nights. Three for me, two for each of you.”

Casey stood up, wan with indignance. “I am not giving up one of my nights to this fucking case!”

“Whoa, and I don't want no nights, I told you I'm normal. I don't go for that ole mud-tunnel shit, man, it's pussy for me all the way.”

“Little fucking liar,” said Casey.

“Stop it, Casey. Porifiro, what if we just never bring it up again, and you
use Rance whenever he's free.”

“Like I said, I don't go that way.”

“Okay. Whatever you say. I don't like being lied to right to my face, though.”

“
Casey
's been lying to you,” said Porifiro. “Ain't that right, man?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

Porifiro said, “He tells you he runs that robot's diagnostic machine every day, but I know for a fact he don't do it more than maybe once a week.”

“You shit.”

“That true?” said Marcia.

“I don't know, mayb—”

“So you both lied to me.”

“I ain't lying, just him,” said Porifiro.

“Forget about it, now why don't we just move along, we need to talk about Mr. Jeffs tonight—”

“I oughta get up and kick your faggot ass, man.”

“Go for it, queer,” said Casey.

“Porifiro,” said Marcia, “I can't believe you said such a thing. Apologize to Casey. And you apologize, too, Casey.”

“You ain't my fucking mother.”

“You're fired, Mr. Mirrin,” said Marcia.

“Good, gimme my pay.”

“Out!”

Porifiro stomped off, slamming the door on his way out.

“I hate that guy,” said Casey.

“Well, he doesn't hate you.”

“What? What's that supposed to mean?”

“Rance told me that when he was with Porifiro, he kept calling Rance
Casey
.”

“You… you're making that up.”

“Go ask Rance.”

“That bitch.”

“Don't call him that!”

“I'll call him what I want.”

“Say, why don't you take some time off.”

“You're firing me, too?”

“I'm putting you on indefinite administrative leave.”

“Why?”

“Because you're angry all the time, because you might be a little deceptive, because you're mean to Rance and call him names.”

“Fuck you, Marcia Lathers Brodsky. I quit.”

XIV

July 2003

Murphy was thirty-one when he learned about the Big Three. Knowledge of the Big Three gave Murphy, for the first time ever, a Purpose.

For the past four years Murphy had been laboring below poverty level as an unprized, overburdened book buyer at Crammed Shelf, a three-floor used-and-new-book shop wedged between a decrepit, poisonous health-food franchise and a parking garage on North Lamar not far from the Colorado River. His job consisted of evaluating stacks of books brought in by estate-sale agents, clerks from other bookstores, shoplifters, or cash-poor desperadoes certain that the James Pattersons and Dan Browns they'd pinched from their parents' bookshelves were worth at least a few dollars apiece. To perform the evaluations, Murphy simply multiplied the retail price of a book by .03 on a pocket calculator powered by a moody solar element that he had to go to a window to activate. One thing Murphy liked about his job was watching the exquisite variety of appall the human face was capable of expressing when offered sixty cents for a brand-new hardcover.

Another part of the job Murphy liked was Sousou, one of the weekday register operators. Cynical, gloomy, lazy, promiscuous, larcenous, well read, forgetful, brilliant, nippy, sexy, unhealthily crushed out on Bob Newhart, betrothed to a local Satanist, tattooed from earlobe to instep with wandering, particolored scrolls and long vines of mysterious rhetoric that crept beneath the cuffs of her cutoff overalls, then emerged from under the collar of her T-shirt and circled her neck a few times before disappearing into the hairline behind her left ear… Sousou was the bookshop's premiere draw, its nuclear glue, its anima, perfume, index, aurora, cortex; she was its mirth and gravity. She was also its fourth in command, reporting to a fierce but lovable Central American, who was in turn supervised by Embree, the general manager, who himself was puppeted about by the owners, Mmes Blake and Wintry, a pair of elderly lady “companions” whom no one had ever seen.

Embree was a tyrannical, endomorphic blowhard glazed with Joycean spectacles and piled with a spongy meadow of black chest hairs so springy that they made his partly unbuttoned Hawaiian shirts float an inch above his skin. Whenever he moved, his chest hairs audibly tickled the polyester in crinkly tones, which, to Murphy, sounded just like what frying bacon would sound like if frying bacon could stage-whisper. Murphy sometimes thought he would like to kill Embree. Murphy sometimes thought he would like to kill some customers. Murphy often thought he would like to fuck Sousou.

Embree decided each day when his employees would break for lunch. Today he decided Murphy's lunch would begin now, at 8:00 a.m., about fifteen minutes into his shift.

“Sous,” said Embree, “eat when you want.”

It was no secret that Embree also wanted to fuck Sousou. But Sousou apparently wanted to fuck only her betrothed, Mandune, a fellow no sensible person would ever cuckold: he had once pulled out his own pinkie fingernails so that he could get “Vlad the Impaler” and “Nostradamus” tattooed on the beds of exposed flesh. None of this mattered, though: Mandune or no Mandune, neither Murphy nor Embree was going to get any Lebanese pussy, ever.

“Clean the shitter first, Crockett,” said Embree, pointing at the bathroom but staring at Sousou's thighs.

Murphy growled quietly; he didn't want Sousou to see him pissed.
On the way to the bathroom Murphy grabbed his
Once and Future King
lunchbox and a book he'd purchased yesterday from some penniless dipshit:
Wet, Set 'n' Slay,
by one Dr. Winnie Slarchj. It was about murderers. Serial killers, specifically.