Plainclothes Naked by Jerry Stahl Read Free Book Online Page A

grabbed McCardle’s groin. Grunting slightly, making a claw, she hoisted him off the metal desk. Her grasp brought tears to his eyes. For good measure, she wrapped her other hand around the mini muscle man’s throat, mashing his face to her massive breasts.
    “ Huerco, pay attention,” she snapped, her face no more than an inch from his dainty nostrils. “You try and run some game on Carmella, she’ll hurt you so bad you’ll think this was foreplay.”
    McCardle, spotting the lump of cash in her cleavage, smiled dreamily and went limp.

SEVEN
    There was a weird intimacy, sitting in a car together. Couples sat in cars. Cops and their partners. Strangers became unstrange, sharing a windshield view of the world. Manny contemplated the sensation, this unfore seen closeness with a woman he barely knew, in front of whose house he was now parked, inside of which he’d found a man he’d never met dead on the kitchen floor. Her husband. . . . But none of it was enough to take his mind off the photograph. ‌
    “You have to go?” Tina asked. She sounded more than slightly annoyed. “You have to leave right now?”
    Manny was still in overload. He could not stop gawking at that eight-by-ten glossy. “You heard the dispatcher,” he said mechanically. “Somebody’s being
    murdered. I’m a policeman, remember? Somebody gets murdered, I have to show up. It’s part of the job description.”
    Despite the speech, he made no move to start the car. All he could do was stare at the picture. The words scribbled across the bottom said MISTER BIOBRAIN. Above that plopped the thing itself, a bulging flesh-tone orb, oblong and veiny, with a peculiar shine. Some one’s thumb and forefinger were just visible where they pinched the root, no doubt to make the object in question bulb out that way. To make it... brain like.
    What made this more than just a white man’s scrotum was the Happy Face tattooed on top it. A pair of eyes and a smile. The Happy Face lent a festive, wholesome quality to the whole package.
    Two human faces also appeared in the picture. Part of a man’s and all of a woman’s. The features were easier to make out than the dis tended equipment. They hovered at twelve o’clock and three. Up top, bizarrely enough, was George Bush Jr., beaming and giddy, with that jolly-perplexed expression he wore when asked about foreign-policy issues. Eye level with W’s puffed-out testicles, looking equally jaunty, was Margaret Beeman, mayor of Upper Marilyn since 1995.
    Manny continued blinking over the photo. “Jesus, check out Marge’s expression.”
    “You call the Mayor Marge? ”
    “Not anymore,” he said, sliding the picture back in the envelope. “But I did when we were married.”
    Tina was stunned by this bit of info. So stunned that she didn’t mention that she worked at the very place where the murder-in progress was progressing. She knew, as soon as the dispatcher barked out the address, that it had something to do with the photograph. Whoever stuffed Mister Biobrain in Mrs. Zank’s mattress must have had big plans for it. And she’d fucked them up....
    Tina started to speak, but before she could, Manny took her hands. The radio was squawking nonstop, and he killed it. It was plain that he wanted to say something before letting her out. A rookie named Krantz, who fancied himself a rocker, had been dispatched to guard Marv’s body until it was time to zip it up. They watched him walk in and out of the front door, as if he couldn’t decide what to do with himself. Corpsewise, cops bagged and paramedics carried. It was a union thing.
    Krantz wore his hair in a mullet, which he stuffed under his hat on duty and unfurled when he played weekends in his Top Forty cover band. Manny had heard him once, by accident, while staking out the Holiday Inn, and found himself squirming for two hours to Krantz’s Madonna medleys. “Like a Virgin” nearly killed him. Manny waved to him now, staying as far across the front