Plainclothes Naked by Jerry Stahl Read Free Book Online Page B

seat from Tina as possible. He knew he’d have to explain to the guitar god why it was smart to get chummy with good-looking possible murder suspects. Krantz was always eager for tips, and Manny tried to be nice to him. When he wasn’t, the rookie ratted him out to Fayton.
    “So you gonna be all right?” said Manny finally. “This picture, it’s an intense little item to be walking around with. I mean, W with a smiley-scrote.... Not to mention the lovely Marge. I guess you know what certain people would pay for that thing. Or what they’d do to get it.”
    He let his voice trail off, and Tina nodded. She cast a last, nervous glance at the picture, whispered “Keep it for me,” then jumped out of the Impala and ran up the muddy path to her door.
    Once he saw her go in, Manny swung the car into a neighbor’s driveway, turned around, and sped up the street doing sixty. As he drove, he kept one hand on the envelope. He’d have to find a safe place for it. He’d also have to make a report—leaving out everything—and cook up some version of his interview with Tina that kept her clean. But it was hard keeping his mind off Mister Biobrain. George Bush’s basket, for Christ’s sake! The last thing he thought he was going to see when up woke up that morning was his ex-wife eyeball-to-testicle with the President. The Happy Face was beyond even contemplat ing. . . . But he loved the fact that Tina wanted him to hold on to it.
    Phone poles clicked past as Manny tried to work out fake suicide scenarios for Marvin. What he needed was proof that the faux guru had a history of guzzling drain cleaners, or some similar weirdness. The answer came to him as he swung up the circular ramp to the parking lot that police headquarters shared with a small office building full of lawyers, insurance men, and some kind of vocational college he could never get a handle on. Arby Tech. The “students” all looked like they’d come straight from their methadone clinic by way of Attica. It was the methadone thing that made him think of Dr. Roos, a bent plastic sur
    geon he’d busted for selling ketamine two years ago. It turned out Spe cial K was the least of it. Gripped by wholly justifiable paranoia, the doctor believed he was being popped for shopping photos of mutant she-males to fetishists on the Net. He confessed before Manny knew what the hell he was talking about.
    Dr. Roos hadn’t claimed innocence, which always impressed Manny, but he did maintain that no one really got hurt, since you couldn’t see anything from the neck up. “Your fetish types don’t care about faces,” he’d explained. “They all have about one square inch that gets them hot.”
    It wouldn’t take much to get Roos to lie and sign off on Marv’s history of medical emergencies. The doctor lived in fear. All Manny had to do was hint that the feds were onto him, and he’d do anything for his friend the detective. As if Manny had some kind of federal con nections; as if he had any idea what, if anything, they knew about Roos’s current racket. But that was the great thing about paranoids: They were easy to impress.
    Manny worked out a story on the drive over. If anyone, namely the chief, wondered why a cosmetic surgeon was involved with a dot-commie’s suicide attempts, Roos could confess that he was brought in as a “friend of the family.” Fayton just liked details. Unless pressed, he didn’t ruffle his uniform trying to find out whether they were real or not.
    Manny groped in his pocket for a couple of codeine and gulped them as he thought about the plan. It could, he decided, actually work.

    In a good week, Manny only had to set foot in the station four or five times. His record low was twice. His high was twenty-nine, but that was around Easter, a traditionally high-crime period, for reasons too mysterious to fathom. Perhaps, Manny’d heard it argued from the dis patcher, a freckled young woman named Mindy, whose father handled snakes at a