Crime Wave by Simon Nadel

The seagull cocked his head and purred. He dropped his beak into the sand but didn’t seem to find anything worthwhile. He put his head back and squawked loudly at me.

“Sorry buddy,” I said. “I don’t have anything for you.” It was the same way I used to talk to Jeter.

A little boy with a water gun came running toward us and the seagull flew off.

“You probably shouldn’t do that,” I said to him. It’s never a good idea to talk to random children. Their parents usually take offense. This kid looked about three or four. He stared at me with enormous eyes.

“This is kind of like their house,” I said by way of explanation. “You wouldn’t want someone coming into your house and chasing you.”

The little boy looked at his water gun then back up at me. He was mixed-race with a big head of curly brown hair. “That’s what happened to my daddy. Some men came into his house and  killed him,” he said thoughtfully. Then he smiled. “Bye Mister,” he said, and took off running toward a woman sitting a little ways down the beach. She had pale skin and dark hair and large breasts that had made a halfway-successful attempt at escaping her bikini top. I turned my attention to the crashing waves, just waiting for the woman to come over and read me the riot act for scaring her kid, but she never did and eventually I went back to watching the birds. I tried to read my book but I couldn’t stop thinking about how the author was my age when he died. I fell asleep for a little while. When I woke up the beach was mostly empty and it had gotten windy and cold.

Back in my motel room I poured two airplane bottles of Jim Beam into a plastic cup. I had lined up all my little bottles on the window sill, giving it the appearance of a bar in a dollhouse. Besides Jim Beam  I also had Tanqueray but I hadn’t gotten around to buying tonic.

Hannah didn’t care for the airplane bottles, which was high on the list of reasons why I was taking a solo vacation. “You bring them everywhere,” she’d said. “I’m surprised you don’t carry one with you when you walk Jeter.” (I never did, thank you very much.)

I think the breaking point was when I brought one to a restaurant where we were meeting friends for dinner and downed it  right before we went in. “I’m saving us money,” I said in answer to her look of disappointment. “This way I won’t need a before-dinner drink.”

“We both know you’ll still get one,” she said, and as usual, she was right.

I watched an episode of “Law and Order” and walked into the main part of town.

The bartender at the Ugly Mug had an Eastern European accent like a lot of the service workers in town. I ate a crab cake sandwich and drank a couple of glasses of pinot noir. The little boy from the beach’s mother came in and sat on the barstool next to me. She had on a tight gray tank top that like the bikini was having a hard time containing her breasts and a short black skirt. The bartender wordlessly put a glass of vodka on the rocks down in front of her.

“I saw you at the beach today,” she said.

Oh shit, I thought.

“Are you here on vacation?”

“Yeah,” I said, preparing for the lecture. “Just for a few days.”

“It’s always nice right after Labor Day,” she said. “Quiet.”

“Yeah, I like that too,” I said.

“Against the Wind” was playing faintly in the background. “Did you ever notice how all his songs are about the past?” I said.

“Whose songs?”

“Yeah, you’re probably too young. Bob Seger. He was big in the 80s.”

“Don’t most men obsess about the past?” she said teasingly.

“I guess after a while they do,” I said, “once they realize the present isn’t what they hoped it would be.”

“How about you? How’s your present?”

“I guess it’s okay,” I said. I started to motion toward the bartender for another glass of wine. She put her hand on mine and lowered my arm. She had a sexy come-hither smile on her face. “Where are you staying?”

Back in my room I grabbed a Jim Beam and a Tanqueray off the window sill and held them up for her to choose. “Sorry,” I said, “I don’t have any tonic.”

She was standing in the doorway. “It’s 50 dollars for a blowjob, 100 for fucking,” she said.

I’m not going to pretend I wasn’t tempted. Maybe if I hadn’t seen her kid. “I can’t,” I said.

“Maybe you prefer something a little unusual,” she said. “Anything kinky is at least 150.”

“What’s kinky?”

She explained some of the more esoteric sex acts a man might request.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’d be too sad and depressed after.”

“You’re just gonna jerk off to porn later tonight,” she said teasingly. “How sad and depressing is that?”

“How about I just give you some money for taking up your time and we’ll call it even?”

“Okay,” she said. “You can give me 50.”

Not exactly a bargain but I couldn’t help feeling I’d somehow created this whole scenario. I fished around in my wallet but I only had a 10. I asked her if we could go to an ATM. We walked in an oddly comfortable silence. At one point she took my hand. We wound up at a bank in the middle of an empty shopping center. I kind of think I knew what was going to happen.

A large man with a shaved head came out of the darkness pointing a gun at me. He had tattoos shooting up from the neck of his t-shirt like rising flames. “Take out thousand,” he said, one more guy with a thick Eastern European accent.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do ATMs even allow you to take out $1,000?” (I really wasn’t sure.)

“Don’t try to be hero,” he said, sounding like a goon from a Liam Neeson movie. He took a step forward and backhanded me across the face with his gun hand. It hurt like a motherfucker and I went down on one knee.

She grabbed the man’s arm. “That is enough,” she said. “There is no need for violence.” Suddenly she had an accent as heavy as his.

He looked at her then back at me. “One-thousand,” he said petulantly.

I didn’t have a particular set of skills, or really any, so I did what I was told. I held out the cash and she swiped it from my hand. “What about your kid?” I said.

“Don’t make stupid assumptions,” she said. “It may be harmful to your health.” She smiled but I couldn’t tell if it was meant to be friendly or mocking.

I went back to the Ugly Mug. The lights were off everywhere but over the bar. “We’re closing up,” the bartender said. He didn’t acknowledge that I’d been in there earlier or comment on the blood on my shirt.

I sat down on a barstool. “Just give me a fucking drink. It’s the least you can do.”

He leaned two massive heavily tattooed forearms on the bar. “I said ‘get out of here’.”

I held his stare. I knew he could probably kill me but I had one big advantage–that undefeated combo of nothing and nothing left to lose. “I’m not leaving without that drink,” I said.

He sighed and poured me a pinot noir. So he did remember. “Here’s to crime,” I said. He rolled his eyes  and went back to cleaning up. I drank the wine while I watched him finish his chores. He was surprisingly meticulous and I found myself disliking him a little less.

***

SJ Nadel wrote music criticism for the City Paper, an alt-weekly in Washington, D.C. He was a big proponent of The Jam and Elvis Costello. He once wrote ten-thousand words in praise of the band Talk Talk. SJ’s only novel, “This Town Is My Town” came out in 1988. It’s ostensibly a murder mystery where a big city cop returns to the small town he grew up in, but the book was really an indictment of the Reagan years. The  novel was DOA and his publisher dropped him. In 1996, at the age of 52, he came to this very town, drank himself half silly, chewed a handful of  pills, and walked into the ocean.

I wrote a book with a similar plot that sold just as poorly. Someone had noticed the similarities and recommended SJ’s novel.  I read it in one sitting, occasionally glancing up to see what the seagulls were doing or if my date from last night might be around. She wasn’t but I saw the little mixed race boy walking with his actual mother and father. She was a petite black woman, he a large white guy with the beard and build of an MMA fighter. I smiled at them as they got near. The man stopped and approached my chair. “You ever talk to my son again, I’ll kick your ass,” he said.

I never got to ask if the little boy’s story was true.

***

I ate a different crab cake sandwich at a different bar. I kept looking around for that girl but I couldn’t decide if I was trying to avoid her or desperate to see her again. She wasn’t at that bar and when I stopped by the Ugly Mug she wasn’t there either. It was a different bartender as well, a thin young blonde but with that same accent. I drank two glasses of pinot noir and tipped her generously for not setting me up to be robbed or killed.

I went back to my room and grabbed my last two little bottles of Jim Beam. The Tanqueray bottles looked lonely and dejected. I walked on the beach and stared out at the blue-black water, both beckoning and menacing, just like all the people I’d met so far on my vacation for one. I wondered if this was the spot where SJ took his final nighttime stroll. I took my shoes off and waded in up to my knees.

“Don’t do it.” I turned to see her sitting on the sand. “It is not worth it. It is not romantic.”

I trudged over to her and sat down. “Well look at you,” I said. “A sex worker with a heart of gold.”

“And look at you,” she said smiling. “The person is so enlightened that he uses the latest approved terminology.”

“You did a pretty good American accent last night,” I said.

She explained that she’d studied acting back in Romania.

“Well, I think you’re a hell of an actress,” I said.

“Maybe you are just a good audience,” she said, and laughed.

Her eyes were an unusually dark shade of blue. I found myself staring into them.

“Don’t get an idea,” she said. “I just wanted to know if you’re okay.”

I stood up, wiped the sand off my backside. “I don’t suppose you could point me in the direction of a convenience store. I need to get some tonic.”

She raised her arm toward me and I helped her up. “That’s right,” she said. “You and your little bottles of booze.”

We walked and at some point she once again took my hand in hers. She must have sensed my question. “Don’t read anything into it,” she said. “Just let it be.”

“Okay,” I said, but as we wandered further from the main part of town I was definitely reading many things into it.

“They must have your precious tonic,” she said when we got to a small lighted-up store in an otherwise deserted part of town. “I have to go.” She hugged me and I felt all kinds of weird ways about it–a little paternal, a little protective, but mostly just aroused.

“Thanks,” I said.

She put her hand on the side of my face. I had to give her credit, she had a way with intimate gestures “Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “They really raise the prices there. Talk about a robbery.” She laughed then she turned and walked off into the darkness. I had an inclination to try to catch up with her like a character in a story might do.

“What’s your name?” I yelled after her.

“What’s yours?” she yelled back without breaking stride.

The store was over air-conditioned. Two shady-looking characters were loitering near the freezer section. More goons from a shitty action movie. I grabbed a bottle of tonic, paid the exorbitant price to the teenager behind the counter, and hurried out.

As I got further from the store I was in total darkness. I thought I heard footsteps. Probably just a cute little animal, I told myself, a squirrel or a rabbit. I quickened my pace even though I had come to the realization that I didn’t really have any idea where I was going.

Somehow, I thought, I just need to get back to where I was.

***

On my last day I got up early and took a walk along the beach. It was empty save for a chocolate lab galloping along the shoreline to greet me. I got down on one knee and let him sniff my face. I ruffled his ears. At some point I realized there were tears streaming down my cheeks.

“Let me guess,” said the woman walking behind him. “You just lost yours.”

I stood and ran a forearm over my eyes. “Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t cry when either of my parents died but now, now pretty much any dog can set me off.”

She was thin, pretty, probably about my age with an impressive mane of gray hair. “I bet you’re trouble,” she said.  “My husband was a nice guy too. Maybe not as nice as you.” She held out her hand. “I’m Elizabeth.”

I introduced myself and rubbed the dog’s head some more.

“He’s my sister’s,” Elizabeth said. “I need to return him to her place.”

“Well it was nice chatting with you,” I said, and started to walk away.

“You know,” she said, “I could murder a stack of pancakes. You want to meet me at Little Bill’s?” She looked at her watch. “Say about an hour?”

I didn’t see her when I got there so I grabbed a two-top by the window facing the water and thumbed through a Jean-Patrick Manchette paperback. Elizabeth plopped down in the seat across from me and looked at the paperback.

I put it down on the table. “I seem to only read books these days by writers who died in their fifties.”

We ordered coffees and I got blueberry pancakes while she got chocolate chip.  

“So let me guess,” she said, “other than the dead dog , you’re recently separated, maybe divorced.”

“You’re good,” I said. “My first vacation alone in forever.”

“And how’s that working out so far?”

“Well,” I began, “I’ve been threatened, robbed and assaulted. I also got infatuated with a Romanian prostitute.”

Our coffees arrived. “I think they’re called sex workers these days,” she said.

“I also had some fairly mediocre crab cakes and drank more than my doctor would approve of.”

She held her coffee cup in both hands. She had a nice smile and I noticed she’d put on some lipstick. “It seems like an eventful trip.”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure it adds up to anything.”

“Maybe it doesn’t have to,” she said. “Maybe it’s just some stuff that happened. Sometimes that’s enough.”

Our pancakes arrived and she took an enormous bite followed by two more, as if she was worried someone would confiscate her plate. She sat back and closed her eyes. “I love these,” she said.

I took a bite. “They’re really good,” I said  in a show of solidarity. They were good. She continued sprint-eating, with a few savoring pauses.

“I think they’ll be my last meal,” she said. “You know, like on death row.” 

“I don’t know if they’re that good,” I said.

She laughed and took the final bite. Then she motioned for the waitress and ordered another stack. It’s a little strange, I thought, but she’s nice and funny and very pretty. And she likes dogs. I can get beyond an odd, possibly unhealthy love of pancakes.

“I grew up coming here,” she said. “My parents had a house; now it’s my sister’s and mine.” She smiled a melancholy smile. “I knew it was the only place I wanted to be.”

The waitress arrived with her pancakes. She looked at them, then at me. I felt an overwhelming urge to kiss her.

She said, “I consent.” I went over to her and leaned down. We both went in open-mouthed, realizing there was no time to be coy. I tasted syrup and chocolate on her tongue.

“It’s all about timing,” she said while I collected myself. “You can meet someone when you’re way too young, or when you’re too old. It’s the right person but the wrong time.” She paused and looked out the window at the crashing waves. “Or we could meet today, when it’s far too late.”

Now I got it: this town, her favorite place, where she wanted to be at the end, her last meal. Meals, technically, I guess. “How’d you get rid of that nice guy husband of yours?” I asked.

I heard sirens outside, and not for the first time in my life I knew there’d be no happy ending.

She took one more bite of her pancakes and pushed the plate away. “I killed him,” she said matter-of-factly.

Nope, definitely not, though it had been a lovely morning. I told her I’d pick up the check.

Simon Nadel

Image: A stack of american pancakes from Pixabay.com