The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries)

Copyright © 2013 Nathan Walpow
All Rights Reserved

Sleeping with a surrogate daughter … A Golden Globe … Hockey at Staples Center … The Velour Overground … Black, green, and oolong tea … Mao’s Kitchen … Alternate realities … Zoloft … Chicken marsala … James Bond … Johnny Depp … Pink Pearls … The use of light and shadow … Fatherhood … Stalking a former lover … A head shop … A time-traveling ninja master … Iraq, because everything’s about Iraq … Beyoncé … The Felonious Monks … A little Taoism … The Venice Riots … A spate of epiphanies … Tentacles

Joe Portugal:
TV commercial actor and perpetual stumbler over dead bodies

Gina Vela:
Joe’s wife, an interior designer by trade

Harold “The Horse” Portugal:
Joe’s father, a man feeling his oats

Ronnie McKenzie:
She made it in Hollywood, but did she make it with Joe?

Mike Lennox:
His troubles would kill a lesser man

Donna Lennox:
His wife, a tea shop magnate, the subject of a fruitless search

Dennis Lennox:
Their son, a Hollywood wunderkind and all-around bad guy

Carrie Fitzpatrick:
Young enough to be everyone’s daughter

Samantha Szydlo:
She has paint on her nose, but does she have blood on her hands?

Alberta Burns:
She’s off the force now, and she has a script to show you

John Santini:
An import-export baron … and a whole lot more

Alma Rodriguez:
Santini’s right arm, a woman who brooks no nonsense

Trixie Trenton:
She tried to be a bimbo and almost succeeded

Claudia Acuna:
A television news reporter at a crossroads

Eric Stahl:
One of Dennis Lennox’s minions, a great father, but …

Sean McKay:
A young man with a way with words and with a bowling ball

Vikki Rodman:
One of those people who’s always looking for something

Ike Sunemori:
L. Ron Hubbard wannabee, or true benefactor?

Emilio and His Uncle:
One’s fat, the other’s a fathead

Dedicated to the memory of William Relling Jr.

“The three most deplorable things in the world: the spoiling of fine youths through false education, the degradation of fine paintings through vulgar admiration, and the utter waste of fine tea through incompetent manipulation.” —Lichihlai, Sung Dynasty poet

Ronnie McKenzie shrieked, hurled off the bedding, and scrambled to her feet. She was naked. I’d seen her undressed before—sunbathing in the back yard next door to my house—but it still made a fine visual. Ronnie’s in her early twenties, and gorgeous.

But, eye appeal aside, there was a problem. The bed she’d abandoned was still occupied. By me. And I was a married man. And Ronnie wasn’t my wife.

I did a quick scan. The bed was unfamiliar and so was the room. My eyes went back to Ronnie. “You’re naked,” I said.

She looked down. Another screech scorched my ears. She tried to cover up, but given two hands, one crotch and two sizable breasts, something had to give. It was one of the breasts. The right one. It perched atop the arm attached to the hand more or less covering the other one, creamy, luxuriant—

I turned away. Had a thought. Was I naked too? If I wasn’t, maybe nothing had—

I reached down. No underwear. Nothing down there but an erection. I willed it to go away. It ignored me. I looked at Ronnie again.

“What did you do?” she said.

“Me? There’s two of us here. We both did it. Whatever
it
is.”

A third shriek. This one from deep in her guts. Then she turned and ran out of the room. I got a great shot of her taut-yet-lush behind as she made her exit.

Three or four seconds later: “My panties!”

That was the last time I heard her voice until I got her fired.

My tongue was furry and so were my gums, and the wool went right up my nasal passages to my brain. My guts undulated. At least the erection was subsiding. A good thing, because I had to take a leak.

I extricated myself from the bedclothes and maneuvered to my feet. Turned out I wasn’t naked. I had a sock on my left foot. Not mine, though.

A doorway led to a bathroom. I emptied my bladder, washed my hands, rinsed my mouth, looked in the mirror. I looked puffy. Also dissolute.

I left the bathroom and spotted my Jockeys under a chair in the corner. “My panties,” I said, and went after them. I shook them and put them on and, as I got my balls arranged, stuff started coming back to me.

It wasn’t enough stuff—it didn’t explain why I’d slept, at the very least in the literal sense, with my barely-into-her-twenties protégé—but it was a start.

The night before …

I’d been at the party an hour, most of which I’d spent wondering why I’d let Ronnie talk me into being her “date.” Hollywood soirées are not my thing. But Gina—my wife— was out of town, and Ronnie didn’t want to go solo. So there I was.

I wandered into the back yard and stumbled upon a guy smoking dope. He turned around and saw me and without a word held out a joint. Equally silently, I accepted it. I took a hit. I looked at the guy. “Keep it a while,” he said. It was down to a roach before he’d take it again. By that time I was, well, you know.

We did what stoned boomers do: talked about music. He spent a good five minutes trying to convince me Foghat ought to be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At which point I announced I needed a bathroom and wandered inside. After I found one I took a wrong turn and came upon an open doorway. Beyond was a room with a wooden desk and a full complement of bookcases. An Oriental rug—
the colors, man, the colors
—overlaid most of the hardwood floor.

The light was dim. Just one small desk lamp. But it was enough to reveal something shiny on a shelf. I was curious. I walked in. Not the kind of thing I’d usually do. Blame the dope.

The shiny thing was a golden ball with a strip of film around it, atop a marble pedestal. A Golden Globe? I moved around and looked at it from various angles. “Neat,” I said.

“Is it?”

I whirled around. Nearly fell down. The person who’d spoken was young, handsome, and confident. It was Dennis Lennox. Our host for the evening. He was a twenty-six-year-old wunderkind with a cop show and three sitcoms, including Ronnie’s, on the air. The Brentwood mansion was his.

“Sorry,” I said. “For what?”

“I suppose I shouldn’t have wandered in here.”

“Not a problem.” He gestured at the award. “I got that for
Protect and Serve
, you know. Everyone expected
The Sopranos
to win.”

“I would’ve voted for
24
. I mean, if I had a vote. Which I don’t. Being as I don’t belong to—did I just say ‘being as’?”

“You did. You’re Joe, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Ronnie’s date.”

“Not a date, really. Her—” I couldn’t think of the right word. Finally, because I was loaded: “Her father figure.”

He didn’t say anything. Just came and stood beside me, regarding the Golden Globe. His nose twitched, and I knew he knew what I’d been up to outside. Finally he spoke. “It doesn’t mean shit, you know.”

“No?”

“It doesn’t mean shit, and it’s given out by a bunch of old men who can’t find their dicks anymore.” He positioned a hand behind my shoulder and hastened me to the door. “Nice talking to you.” Then I was back in the hallway and the door was closing behind me.

I found my way outside. It was the front lawn this time, but my new friend was there anyway. He produced another joint, and I used it to combat the feeling of dread that had appeared out of nowhere. He started singing “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and I joined him, both of us on air guitar. Then he ran into the house and came back with a beat-up Alvarez acoustic. I guess my air guitar was so phenomenal he could tell I actually played.

I didn’t have a pick, so I used a quarter. The two of us sat on the grass and exhausted our repertoire of Beatles songs. The dread only surfaced once more. We were doing “Helter Skelter,” and I thought of Charlie Manson and the Sharon Tate thing and how it happened in a house that was probably a lot like this one. I shivered once and grabbed another hit, and my mind jumped elsewhere.

Somewhere along the line I crashed right there on the lawn. It was that soft grass that pushes itself up into little pillowlike hillocks, and it called to me. I awoke once to the strains of “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” That was the last thing I remembered before waking up with Ronnie.

She’d come out from Arkansas a year or so back to chase down fame in Hollywood, and, against all odds, had found it. I helped some. I set her up with my cousin-slash-agent Elaine, who immediately got her onto the latest ser ies of inane commercials for The Gap. Somebody casting a Dennis Lennox pilot saw her, the pilot made the fall schedule, and now she was on a better-than-mediocre sitcom called
The Galahad Sisters
that had just gotten picked up for a full season.

Ronnie’s father died when she was two. A traffic accident. He got out of his car to fix a flat and got smashed to pulp by an errant semi. Her mother’d done a pretty good job raising her. But I knew she missed having a dad.

You see what’s coming, right? She moves to L.A., there’s this nice man next door who helps her get her acting career going, getting her to grow her hair out in its natural dark color, and to drop the cheap-sexy-gal stuff she was pushing in favor of her honest-to-God girl-next-door sex appeal. He’s always there to offer support and advice, he’s got a woman and clearly isn’t trying to get her in the sack, and he genuinely seems to care about her welfare.

That’s why I told Dennis Lennox I was Ronnie’s father figure. In light of what followed, not the brightest thing I’ve ever done.

I went to the window. It was a gorgeous early November day. The sun lit up the lawn. I was pretty sure it was the same one I’d been on the night before. I was still at Dennis’s.

Two women were running across the lawn. The one bringing up the rear was wearing sweats and a baseball cap. The one in front was wearing a towel. Ronnie. She had her shoes in one hand and her purse in the other.

I entertained thoughts of going after her. Then she disappeared around a bend in the driveway. A few seconds later I heard the burble of the busted muffler on her Miata.

I turned from the window. Looked around the room. Found my shoes under the bed. One of my socks too. Maybe I’d traded the other one for the one I had on.

My pants were out in the hall. About, I estimated, where Ronnie’d found her underwear. I put them on, added my shoes and sock, found the stairs. Halfway down, I stopped. Sat on a step. The import of what I might have done swept in. Married less than a year, and already cheating. What kind of shit was I?

But maybe nothing had happened. Maybe there was a perfectly logical explanation for waking up naked with Ronnie. Maybe aliens had abducted us and dumped us in the bed when they were done sticking probes up our rectums.

Or it was all a psychological experiment. A woman I met the night before was with the psych department at UCLA. No, the philology department. Then maybe it was a philological experiment. Seeing how my language evolved when—

Or it was terrorists. Bed-putting, memory-sapping terrorists.

Or maybe we really had gotten it on.

The scene where I would tell Gina filled my head. It would be in the kitchen. Because being in the kitchen always gave you a lot to occupy your hands when undergoing psychological trauma. She’d be dicing onions. Gina, I would say, I’m afraid I slept with Ronnie. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t even remember it.

The chopping would falter. She wouldn’t say anything, though, and I’d be dying there. I’d open the fridge, stare at the milk and eggs and Trader Joe’s salads. Then Gina would come at me with the knife—

I heard a radio. I stood and followed its sound to a kitchen. It looked somewhat familiar. Another dim marijuana memory. If I could remember stuff like that, why didn’t I remember getting into bed with Ronnie? Or what, if anything, happened after that?

One of the Sunday morning Beatles shows was on.“The Long and Winding Road” started up, the new-old version before Phil Spector got his hands on it and crapped it up with strings. The
Let It Be … Naked
album had come out that week, and a couple of days later Spector finally got charged with the murder of the woman who’d been shot at his house several months back. There was some kind of poetic justice there. Someday I’d be able to figure out what kind.

There were two people in the kitchen. One, who’d recently been spotted chasing Ronnie across the lawn, was loading the dishwasher. A tiny Asian woman I’d seen floating around the night before with trays of hors d’oeuvres. The baseball cap said
The Galahad Sisters
across the front.