Lady Slings the Booze Read online

  ONCE in a while, the afterglow can be as good as the orgasm. You’ve been that fortunate, haven’t you? This time it was better. I’d never shared it before. Among a thousand other feelings was a fine sweet sadness, pity for the poor man I used to be, the hundreds of thousands of hours I’d wasted. I did math in my head: more than three hundred and five thousand hours I’d lived without her. How?

  Yeah, part of my head was saying, For Chrissake, Quigley, she’s a hooker! But I’m happy to say that even then, when I was just realizing this hooker’s hook was set in me, the rest of my head answered with my heart: Yeah, and if I’m really lucky, she won’t think of a PI as marrying down…

  I know. I’m trying to tell you that an experienced prostitute, after five minutes’ conversation and two sexual acts, not only told a client she loved him, but meant it—and you don’t believe me. Subsequent events proved the point, but I won’t get to them for a while. All I can tell you now is, I have trouble believing it to this day myself. At that point in my life, my only proven talents were for entertaining absurd thoughts, lying, and surviving violence. Yet Arethusa read my mind a few times and decided to love me. It forces me to conclude that even back then, I must have been a fairly decent guy.

  What I’m sure of is that I never doubted her, then or ever. It took days for it to occur to me that another man in my position might have interpreted those four words as merely a professional politeness.

  An indeterminate time later she rolled off me, and we smiled at each other in silence for a while. When I thought I could stand it, I finished my coffee. The warmer had kept it just right.

  “That one about, ‘Would you care to cross eggs?’—‘Ah’m in!’ was really terrible,” Arethusa said.

  I blinked a few times. My defenses stirred in their sleep. “You can read my mind too?”

  She shook her head, and her blonde hair whispered on the pillow. “Only then,” she said. “And mostly just surface stuff. But clearer than with most men.”

  “Huh.” I was thirty-five then; I’d been with whores. It never occurred to me to doubt Arethusa’s last statement. Interpret that however you want.

  Suddenly I giggled. “S’cuse me: I just pictured us forty years from now, and you said, ‘You never talk to me any more.’”

  She giggled too. “Vee haff vays uff making you talk,” she said.

  “You do indeed,” I admitted. “Say, I just thought: is that ‘you’ singular or plural? I mean…that is—” Was I asking a rude question.

  She twinkled. “How many of my bodies have you been in, you mean?”

  “Well…Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s what I mean.” The question didn’t seem to offend her.

  “One, so far.”

  “Oh. Uh…was it good for you both?”

  Her twinkle became a full-scale pulsar, a brilliant smile that seemed to strobe just too fast to see. “Oh yes,” she assured me.

  Huh. “Huh. Interesting. Not the first time I’ve made love with two women at once—”

  “I know,” she said.

  “—but on such occasions, they were both in the room at the time. Does it ever present any problem for you?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well…I picture myself in your shoes: one of me is down in the Parlor, chatting with the priest I saw, say—”

  “Father Newman. I chat with him a lot.”

  “Okay, so you’re discussing theology, let’s say, and suddenly your other body has an orgasm. Do you ever lose the thread of the conversation?”

  She giggled. “Well, no. Not usually. But it’s funny you should ask that. Father Newman can always tell when that happens. Most people don’t notice at all…but he always blushes. I think it’s sweet.”

  So did I. “So Father Newman doesn’t…uh…”

  She shrugged. “I couldn’t say. I’ve never performed for him. He hasn’t asked me.”

  “Then he doesn’t,” I said positively. “Look, Arethusa…tell me if this is a snoopy question, okay?”

  “I will, Joe,” she said. “Always. The worst misunderstandings are the unspoken ones.”

  “Okay, then. I was just wondering…is there any special reason why…I mean, I guess it stands to reason…”

  She knew where I was heading, and took me off the hook. “When it stands,” she said, tweaking it, “it isn’t interested in reason. I think I understand your question. See how close I come: you’re wondering if one of my bodies is better than the other one at performing the art, and that’s why I haven’t swapped in the night, the way you think twins would…and somewhere in there is a subtext about, does the other one ever subconsciously resent the one that’s better? Am I close?”

  “It does sound silly,” I admitted. “There’d be no point in swapping, would there? And how could either one be better?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “you’re partly right. This body is better at sex: that’s why it’s here. The other one’s never had any complaints, but this one is special.”

  “I don’t get it. How can that be?”

  “Because artistic talent lies not just in the mind, or even the brain. In large part it’s found in the upper spinal column.”

  “Really?”

  “Skills, not ‘talent,’ excuse me. Skills are the flowers you get if you water your talent bush well enough. Like, if I took you and Oscar Peterson, and transplanted your brains, Mr. Peterson would find that he couldn’t play a damn with your fingers. And if you sat down at the piano in his body, you’d find that you knew his whole repertoire—as long as you didn’t think about it. You’d never be able to play those pieces with the same feeling he does—but you could impress a nonprofessional, because you’d have the spinal column where Mr. Peterson keeps his skills.”

  “Huh, I saw a guy once in a veterans’ hospital. They said he didn’t have enough forebrain left to take a decent tissue sample…but he could play any early Rolling Stones song you named on the guitar, note for note, and he was pretty good. Couldn’t learn a new lick, though, no matter how simple.”

  “Maybe that was Keith Richards,” she said. “Whoever he was, he learned guitar before his injury. Anyway, it’s kind of the same with me. This body started out with the most talent for the art, and it’s spent the most time developing the skills, so it’s better. Not so much better that a lot of clients notice it…but I notice. Nothing but the best for my Joe.”

  What do you say to something like that?

  “And no, of course my other body doesn’t resent this one. Does your left hand resent your right because it has better penmanship? And if such a thing were possible, I think this body would envy the other one. That one can play the piano—not as good as Mr. Peterson, but damned well—and that is about the only thing a person can do that I’m willing to admit might sometimes be even better than making love. I play here at least a couple of hours, most nights.”

  “I’d love to hear you play sometime,” I said.

  “That’s not all you’d love. If we rate this body as a ten, at the art, I mean, the other one is about a nine point five. And it has certain digital skills this one lacks. If you’re ever in the mood for something manual…”

  “Most of what I enjoy is in the manual, yes,” I tried to say, but she started tickling me before I got the fourth word out. And there was nothing wrong with her fingers. She could have made her own holes in a bowling ball.

  Then they were gentle again, and shortly she was showing me an interesting new way to play “Chopsticks.” Admittedly it’s not a very demanding piece, but she played the hell out of it. Call it a nine point five. And after a while she went back to what her body did best.

  It was indeed an Arethusa bulbosa: a solitary rose-purple flower, fringed with yellow…and I was a busy little bee.

  Like I said, one of the favorite mornings in my memory.

  FROM there the day got less wonderful, in gradual increments.

  Well, it could hardly have helped it, now, could it? That’s one of the sweetest
parts of a morning like that. Knowing it will end, eventually, and never come back in just the same way again.

  But the first increments were so small I scarcely noticed them.

  I’d just asked her if she’d been born telepathic, and she’d said; “No more than most twins. I have dim half-memories of being two people.” So I was going to ask what brought the change on…and there was a knock at the door.

  All things considered, it could have been worse timed. “Come in,” I said, suppressing a momentary impulse to pull a sheet over us first.

  It was Doctor Kate, but it took me a second to recognize her. In her off hours she wore a sweatshirt and baggy comfortable slacks, and her hair loose around her shoulders instead of up in a doctor’s bun. But the black bag and stethoscope were a dead giveaway. She approached me briskly, shaking a thermometer.

  “Hi, Kate,” I said. “I’m feeling much glorp.” I won’t reproduce the rest of the sentence because it sounded like a man trying to talk with a thermometer in his mouth. I raised my hand to adjust it like a cigar and she intercepted the hand to take my pulse, readying her stethoscope and getting out the blood-pressure gizmo with her other hand.

  It’s funny: right up until then my head hadn’t hurt a bit.

  By the time I had been pronounced fit to put my pants on, I had a reason to: Lady Sally arrived, looking indecently radiant for that hour of the morning in a soft cranberry silk kimono. She waited politely while Arethusa and I dressed.

  I could see the sheaf of printouts in her hand, and the expression on her face, but I did not say, “I told you so.” I even managed somehow to wipe the smug look off my face. Not an easy trick for a man who has just passed a night and a splendid morning with Arethusa. Doctor Kate reported that I was “all right,” and I decided not to quibble.

  Arethusa finished dressing, gave me a brief but emphatic kiss, said, “To be continued…” and started to leave with Kate. I took her arm, and she stopped.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to say to you since I woke up,” I said, “and I keep getting sidetracked. I love you too.”

  “You said it,” she told me. “I heard you plainly.” She turned and left. I watched until the door closed behind her. God gave women buttocks because sooner or later they have to walk away from us, and at least this way there’s some consolation.

  “I’ve listened to some of the tapes—and scanned the MacDonald book,” Lady Sally said formally then. “I owe you an apology, Mr. Quigley.”

  “It’ll be in my bill,” I said. “But I’ll double it if you don’t stop calling me ‘Mister.’ It sounds like an insult on the firing range.”

  “I must ask you to take my word for it, Joe, that it is unusual for me to be required to apologize to a new employee twice within the first twelve hours of his employment.”

  “Well,” I said, “I can’t fault you for doubting the judgment of a guy who’s just been laid out with his own sap.”

  She relaxed. “Thank you for taking it that way.”

  “I’ll let you off the hook,” I said, “wipe that apology off the bill, if you’ll answer one question.”

  “Ask away,” she said.

  “Why didn’t you believe me?”

  It’s funny. She didn’t move a muscle, flicker an eyelid…and somehow the temperature in the room went down a couple of degrees. After two seconds, she said, “Are you joking? The idea is so prima facie absurd that I can scarcely believe it even after it’s been proven to me.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not it.”

  By now it was cool enough in here that I was glad I was dressed. “It’s not?”

  “No way in hell. Anybody else I know, okay—the idea is so whacky it makes my own head hurt. But the menagerie you run here, with talking dogs and cigar-smoke sculptors and a setup out of the Arabian Nights—Christ, if Donald Duck walked in here and asked for service, you’d just take his hat and tell him to look for somebody that felt like getting down. A simple time machine shouldn’t even have made you blink.”

  She shook her head. “If Donald Duck showed up, I should assume I was hallucinating. I’m willing to accept the fantastic-but-possible and take it in stride—especially once I’ve had my nose rubbed in it—but up until today I accepted the general consensus that altering the flow of time is simply an impossibility. Provincial of me, I admit, in light of subsequent evidence…but if a ghost should suddenly start haunting the place, or a perpetual motion machine be offered me for sale, I would react with the identical skepticism.”

  I nodded slowly. “I know what you mean. It’s hard to strike a balance between keeping an open mind and being a sucker.”

  “You do it quite well.”

  I shrugged. “I have this curse. If good logic takes me to a place, and it happens to be in the Twilight Zone, I stay there anyway. I can’t seem to reject an answer just because it’s ridiculous. I’ll give you an example. They had a weird one at a state pen upstate a few years ago. There was a break-in one morning. Three guys set off alarms cutting through a chain-link fence, ran like hell through the garden, and were seen running into the yard. Then the big sirens went off, and all the cons in the yard went into a huddle. They always do that when the horn goes off: the idea is, the guys on the edges of the huddle will stop most of the slugs.

  “So the screws sealed the joint tight, got the local cops in to help, and locked down the population one by one. Slow and easy, alert every second. And when they were done counting heads, the three guys were just…gone. All they found were their coats. The screws positively identified every human in the joint, and there was nobody that didn’t belong there. The general suspicion was that the screws who said they saw the guys run into the yard were drunk or crazy. But there was that hole in the fence, and three sets of footprints through the corn.”

  “Let me see if I can guess this,” Lady Sally said. “Three men broke out of the prison by running backwards to a prearranged hole. The witnesses all persuaded themselves they’d seen men running forwards, since what they actually saw seemed unreasonable.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody was missing. They checked ten times; they actually fingerprinted every con and every screw. So they left the place locked down and tore it apart, brick by brick. They got out the architect’s plans and accounted for every cubic inch in the complex, one at a time. They used dogs, and X-ray machines, and after a week they finally turned up exactly one possibility: a tunnel from the supplies shop to the outside, an old forgotten maintenance tunnel that dated back to before the place was a prison. It was supposed to be sealed off and it wasn’t any more. So now they know how the three guys got out—except the warden’s gotta ask himself three questions.”

  Lady Sally ticked them off. “Why would three men break into a prison and sneak right out again? How did they know of the tunnel’s existence when the prisoners themselves didn’t? And how did they get from the yard to the tunnel while the whole prison was crawling with triggerhappy guards?”

  “Well, four questions, then,” I said. “The other one was, how did they manage to get through the fresh cave-in at the far end of the tunnel? Experts dated it to the night before the break-in.”

  Lady Sally looked dubious. “Here we seem to be entering the realm of ghosts and perpetual motion machines again.”

  “Exactly. So after a week or two of waiting for the other shoe to drop—for a time bomb to go off or somebody to yell ‘April Fool!’—the warden did the sensible thing. He put it out of his mind. As often as necessary. There were no prisoners missing; his ass was covered. He had the tunnel quietly resealed, made sure the cons didn’t find out about it, and forgot the whole thing.”

  “And you became involved in this somehow?”

  “About six months later I was hanging out at the One-Seven with a gold shield I know named Murphy. He had a good set of prints on a liquor-sticker, a guy that knocks over liquor stores. But when he ran ’em through the computer it came out you got the wrong guy, that guy’s doing life upstate,
been there thirty years. Shit, Murph says, I thought those prints were good. So I say, maybe they got the wrong guy up there in the joint. Murph says no way, it happens they just printed every guy in that can fresh a few months ago. And he tells me the funny break-in story. And before he gets to the end, I tell him that the tunnel was blocked at the end.”

  Lady Sally held up a hand. “This is the point at which I’m supposed to try and solve it myself. Give me a minute.” She went into what is called a brown study, for the life of me I don’t know why, and played with the puzzle for maybe twenty seconds. Then she looked up and said, “I surrender. I can work out unlikely scenarios for how some of the individual phenomena were produced, but the overall motivation baffles me.”

  I smiled. “I usually charge a beer to finish the story. You’ll love it: even Donald Westlake could never have made up something so brilliantly bent:

  “The three guys that broke into the can were inmates.”

  Her jaw dropped satisfactorily. In less than three seconds I saw the tumblers start to click into place. Suddenly she began to laugh. She had a great laugh onto her. Stuff jiggled.

  “The way I reconstruct it, a lifer stumbled across that tunnel and managed to unseal it. It must have taken him weeks, with no guarantee it was worth the trouble—but one night he found himself on the outside, in a ravine. So he walked through the forest, and stole some clothes off a clothesline, which they still have up there, and went into town. I’ll bet he had him a good night. But a little before dawn he was trying to hitch out of town, and all of a sudden it came to him that he was cold and broke and scared stiff. So he turned around and sneaked back into the joint, and went to bed.

  “From then on, whenever he got restless, he’d sneak out and have himself a night on the town, with money he had some friend wire him care of General Delivery. Then he’d sneak back in before morning headcount. Left a dummy in his bed, just like in the movies. He had the comfort and security of the joint, no bills, no taxes, easy work, and he could step out whenever he wanted. It must have taken a lot of the sting out of a life sentence.”