On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery (17 page)

All this excitement was getting to be too much for me to handle, and it was about to get worse. We had another break, and then it was time for the retreat and team-building segment of the day. We all shuffled into the multipurpose area and got ready for a series of goofy lectures and group exercises. The best part of these days was that the lecturers were never well prepared and it usually meant that the day, which was supposed to go to five, would actually wind up by about three thirty in the afternoon.

We were right on schedule to end at three thirty when the Michelin Woman got up and rambled on for an extra fifteen minutes about the importance of a new regulation affecting exactly when treatment plan updates needed to be reviewed by physicians and the importance it was going to have in regard to patient care. She loved the order of regulations, and it kept her from ever having to focus on actually helping a living, breathing person. Talking to the people who came to the clinic was tedious and it was hard to measure if anything we ever did reached them. It was much safer to obsess yourself with regulations.

By the time she finished, I was so bored I felt hypnotized. I couldn’t wait to get out of there and get home. I felt like I needed some mental floss.

19

I got back to
the Moody Blue just after five, got my rousing greeting at the door from Al, checked my mail, and hit the play button on my answering machine.

“Duff, it’s Jerry, c’mon by AJ’s tonight. I got some stuff. None of it earth shaking, but I think you’ll be interested.”

That was interesting, and I was glad to hear Jerry actually got to the project. I was afraid he’d get lost in
Star Trek
stuff and get abducted by some Klingons. It was too early to head to the bar and there wasn’t enough time to head to the gym, so I opened a Schlitz and sat on the good side of my couch. The remote wasn’t on the coffee table and it wasn’t between the cushions or on the end table. Having to actually get off the couch to change stations seemed like the equivalent of rubbing two sticks together to get dinner going. It was unacceptable.

I got off the couch to search for the remote. Generally speaking, it had to be in the general area of the TV because there was no reason to bring it away from the television. It wasn’t underneath the living room furniture or behind anything. On my third search through the sofa cushions, as I tried to heft Al from his side of the couch, it dawned on me.

“You better not have,” I said to my new housemate.

Al’s eyebrows went up, his eyes got a little shifty, and he let out a high-pitched sigh. I wasn’t about to accept that as an explanation. I went to the kitchen and lo and behold, there, next to his food dish, on his special mat with the paw prints were Al’s two newest chew toys. Not the rawhide bones I bought so he’d stop eating the couch, not the fuzzy carrot with the squeaky thing in the middle—those objects remained in the spot I left them with absolutely no evidence of slobber. Instead, there sat my multifunction, all-in-one remote covered in slobber with teeth marks up and down its length and missing the six, seven, and nine buttons. I guess this was Al’s version of parental controls. Next to the remote was what was left of my cordless phone. There was no antenna, there were chew marks all over the back of it, and there was slobber on all the keys.

I took the remote and stood over him as he slept on the couch.

“Bad!” I yelled with the remote in my hand. That was what the
Dogs for Dummies
book I bought at PetSmart said to do. I was vigorously showing my displeasure with Al’s behavior and associating it with the object.

Al opened his eyes, which from his recumbent posture deeply furrowed his brow, and then he closed his eyes and let out a sigh. He was either overcome with guilt and couldn’t look me in the eye or he was practicing some sort of deep breathing transcendental basset meditation.

I pointed the remote at the cable box and no matter what button I hit, it returned me to the Lifetime Channel. Talk about cruel irony. I was either going to have to get up every time I wanted to change a channel, get a new remote, or spend my life watching cable programming for angry women. The thought of watching endless movies about evil men repeatedly wronging victimized women made me shiver. Going to AJ’s a bit early was a much better idea.

Apparently, there’s no such thing as early for the Fearsome Foursome. It was some sort of existential quirk that no matter what time I got there, they were always present. I guess they merely exist independent of the natural laws of time. They were the only ones in and it was too early for Kelley.

“You have to watch it real close,” Rocco said. “But it’s obvious.”

“Why the hell would the Disney Company have a minister in
The Little Mermaid
get a boner?” TC said.

“Ministers get boners,” Jerry Number One said.

“That’s not all,” Jerry Number Two said. “In Finland they don’t allow Donald Duck movies.”

“What the hell are you talkin’ about?” Rocco said.

“They got really angry at the fact that he doesn’t wear pants,” Jerry Number Two said.

“Thank God it’s the minister getting the boners!” TC said.

It was a shame to intrude when so much was getting done, but I noticed Jerry Number Two had a very fat binder in front of him. I walked around the group with my Schlitz and sat next to him. I was hoping that sitting exactly opposite my usual position would not result in complete entropy for the universe.

“Hey Jer, what ya got for me?”

“Check this out,” Jerry slid the binder in front of me.

The binder was about an inch and a half thick. I opened it up and saw that the first page was a title page, neatly typed like some sort of FBI report.

Report on Internet Sites Related to Webster,
Web, Spiders, and Related Search Words

Prepared by Gerald M. Freeman

After the first page was a detailed table of contents listing websites and separated into categories. The categories included Webster, Web, Spider, and Miscellaneous Related Words, and were further divided into the subcategories Free Access, Pay Access, Member Only by Invitation, and Non-Pornographic.

“Holy shit,
Gerald
, this is unbelievable!”

“It’s the best I could do quickly. With more time, I could have got you more detail.”

“More detail? Are you kidding? Where’d you learn to do this kind of work?”

“My old gig.”

“I didn’t realize you used to work. I mean I knew you must’ve …” I began to realize how insulting that must have sounded. Jerry didn’t seem to care.

“I used to be big into computers. I was really into it.”

“Where did you work?”

“In the early eighties I spent some time with the Quantum Computer Services corporation doing Internet stuff,” Jerry took a hit off his Cosmo.

“In the early eighties?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t realize there even was the Internet back then.”

“Well, there wasn’t really, at least not like today. We were working on it.”

“What happened?”

“The company changed hands a few times, got bought and sold, and got really commercial. I wasn’t thrilled with the commercialization, so I quit.”

“What ever happened to Quantum?”

“It became AOL.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No,” Jerry downed the rest of the Cosmo and slid it to the edge of the bar. “I took the stock options they paid me and got out in ’94. Cashed in the stock in ’98.”

“You mean you got stock when it wasn’t worth much and sold it when it was worth a ton?” I tried to keep my jaw from hitting the floor.

“Pretty much.”

“I don’t want to pry …”

“Oh yeah, I got a ton of money,” Jerry interrupted. “I developed the protocol that eventually was used to create chatrooms and instant messaging.”

“I thought you were disabled?”

“Well, I had a few bad trips and spent a little time on a funny farm, but that’s not why I don’t work.”

I bought Jerry another Cosmopolitan and sat thumbing through the report in front of me. It was overwhelming, and it was going to take a lot of time to go through it. I was about to start going through the report when Rudy came in. As usual, he had deep pit stains under his arms, he had his hands in his pockets, and he shuffled to a barstool with the energy of the participants of the Bataan Death March. He looked like a wrung-out, very fat dishrag.

I bought him his first drink and sat next to him.

“You don’t exactly look like the poster child for stress management.”

“There’s some fuckin’ insight,” Rudy said.

“How are the guys doing?” I asked.

“You know, remarkably well, thank God.” Rudy drank half of the Hennessy in the rocks glass. “Both of them look almost unfazed by the radiation—that’s wonderful.”

“How about the other stuff?”

“That’s time—and a little luck. I’m still worried about Mikey because he’s not as stable. They’re both in some pain but getting all sorts of good pain medication.”

“That’ll certainly keep both of them happy,” I said.

After that, the conversation wound down. I got the sense that Rudy didn’t need the company, that he was there to drink and let the Hennessy do its job. I finished my Schlitz and watched the TV in silence until I figured it was time to go.

I bid my farewells and headed out with my head down and twirling my keys around my fingers, thinking, when a voice jilted me.

“Duff?” It was Lisa. It was late and Lisa was way too much work this time of night.

“Hi.” It was all I could think of.

“I miss you,” Lisa said. She looked down at her new Doc Martens. “I don’t know what else to say.”

“I don’t either, Lis. It looked to me from the other night that you found somebody new.”

“You hate me because I’m interested in a woman.”

“Nah, I don’t think it’s that.” I tried to choose my words carefully. “It just seems to me that you found someone new and I ought to move on.”

“Do you have to be so closed minded?”

“I don’t have a lot of experience with this type of thing, Lis.” I never wanted to be in a conversation less. “Look, I got to go, take care of yourself.”

I didn’t wait for her to say anything else, which seemed a little cheap, but sometimes there’s nothing left to say. The situation had gotten to maximum weirdness, and I think I had some hurt around losing a girlfriend. That was then multiplied by the fact that it looked like I lost her to another woman. That wasn’t revolting, but it didn’t fit neatly into any particular category on the hard drive of my mind.

I was turning left on Main heading toward 9R when the headlights in the rearview took me away from Lisa. My buddy in the Crown Vic was back. He stayed with me, didn’t accelerate or slow down until I pulled into the Blue, and then he kept right on going up Route 9R.

20

Not having a home
computer meant using my work computer. Considering the vast majority of these websites were pornographic, that meant that I would have to wait until everyone had gone home for the night. No one would suspect anything about me staying late because I was so far behind on my work. Of course, burning the midnight oil looking at porn sites with a spider theme wasn’t going to help me get my records up to snuff, but that was beside the point.

At five thirty, the only people left in the clinic were Monique, Trina, and myself. Monique had a women’s group to run and Trina was covering the front desk. That meant I was pretty much alone to surf the net.

I had no idea where to begin, so I just started.

Spiderweb.com wasn’t pornographic; it was a seldom-used search engine and it didn’t look any more exciting then a poorly constructed search engine would be.

Webster.com had something to do with dictionaries.

Web.com had to do with an Internet access company.

Spider.com was a motorcycle parts business.

Webbies.com was a site for computer geeks.

Daddylonglegs.com was the first porno site. It was dedicated to the men who love long-legged women, preferably in fancy hosiery. The woman on the front page was naked except for very sheer stockings and a garter. The stockings had the seam running up the back and she was wearing impossibly spiked heels as she bent over to touch the floor. I’m guessing she dropped a contact lens or something.

The left side of the page featured links to live webcams, white hosiery, black hosiery, fishnet city, body stockings, and message boards. I took a surf through and saw some interesting-looking women with interesting-looking outfits, but nothing that looked like it could possibly have anything to do with Shony. The message boards were filled with messages to the models from lonely men with far too much time on their hands, who somewhere along the way got way too wired on what women wear on their legs.

Daddyslonglegs.com was a very similar site, as was Dadslonglegs.com and Daddylongleggs.com. Who were these people? I mean, a good-looking woman in stockings is nice to look at, but don’t these people ever leave the house?

Next came a long series of sites that combined the word “sex” with spiders, webs, and websters. Some were pay porno sites, some were sites featuring amateur models, and some were sites for clubs. There’s a funny thing about pornography. I think most men enjoy it; some will admit to it and some won’t. I’ve always thought it was like Mexican food—I really liked it in small amounts. If I eat Mexican food a couple times in a week, it starts to taste crummy. With porn, looking at it once in a while was okay, but too much or too often and it loses its flavor.

Apparently, not everyone thought so. I’ve had clients who lost jobs, relationships, and went bankrupt because of it. Probably like people who get hooked on crack, porn addicts remember how turned on they got the first time and they keep chasing that feeling.

I was forty-five minutes into looking at women and couples in every position I ever dreamed of and some I hadn’t. It wasn’t the least bit exciting, in fact it was kind of a drag. I had worked my web through about 40 percent of Jerry’s report when I came across a site called www.Xcracksterweb.com.

The page opened with a slowly spreading black spider’s web. There were no graphics or photos, just a spider’s web that continued to grow. When I looked closer, I saw that the web was coming from a tiny spider that spread its web until it covered the entire screen. After a minute or once the web covered the screen, red lettering that said, “If you’re over twenty-one and not offended by depictions of sex, enter here.”

I clicked on the enter link and the screen went bright white. A large red-and-gold banner began to fill up the top of my screen. It said “Crack Hos for U.” Then a series of photos appeared of women, most naked and most engaged in a variety of sexual positions with different men. There were extremely graphic shots of oral sex, anal sex, sexual intercourse—you name it, it was there. In every shot, either the woman or her partner had a crack pipe in their hands.

The photos were not just graphic, they were degrading in the sense that the woman depicted were engaged in sexual activity with crack being held up to them as a reward for what they were doing. The men in the shots were mocking the women while having sex with them.

Crack addiction and prostitution are strongly linked. Selling your body is an almost instant way to get money and why women addicts often turn to prostitution. Men usually turn to crime, not because they object to selling their bodies, but because the market for male hookers is small and made up almost exclusively of gay men. The prostitution we’re talking about here isn’t the Julia Roberts
Pretty Woman
kind. We’re talking repeated episodes of oral sex in a crack house with the payment being a single rock of crack. That high wears off in about ten minutes and then it’s back to more oral sex. A woman in a group session once tearfully told me that she had done over two hundred acts in a single twenty-four-hour crack binge.

Along with child abuse, it was the most disturbing thing to hear about on my job. I hated both of them for the lifetime of damage they inflicted upon people. The fact that there were actually people who wanted photos of this shit was more than disturbing. I understand pornography’s attraction and I understand fetishes, but the evil that had to be in someone’s heart to find this stuff arousing was despicable.

The background of the website was covered in a spider’s web motif. The top of the page had a smaller version of the same “Crack Ho” banner with a little spider sitting on top of the “o” in “Ho.” On the bottom of the page, there was a menu of links to other pages on the site. The pages included girl-girl action, group scenes, all oral, all anal, streaming video.

Looking at this shit made me feel like I needed to wash, but I felt like I was on to something, so I kept on. The all-anal page was the toughest, but it also proved to be the most interesting. On the third page, I recognized Melissa, the youngest of the three women from the jail group. I clicked on the photo to enlarge, and there was no doubt it was her. I looked closely and sure enough, she had the small web tattoo. I went back and studied all the photos, and all the women had the tattoo.

Knowing crack addiction as I did, it was obvious what was going on. Whoever set this operation up knew they could get crack addicted women to do just about anything if they got crack for doing it. It sickened me.

After I had worked my way through the rest of the site, I clicked on the “streaming video” link. I came to a page that informed me that this part of the site required payment or a password. I didn’t want to put any money into the pockets of whatever scum profited from this, and I figured I had learned enough for tonight. I’d visit Jerry and see what he could tell me about the site and how to get into the other section without a password.

I closed out the Internet from my computer and headed to AJ’s. As much as I ever did, I needed a drink.