Christopher Moore - A Dirty Job

“Okay, Jane, I’m sorry I said that about you changing girlfriends. I was out of line.”

Jane leaned back on her bar stool and crossed her arms, looking satisfied but skeptical. “But the problem remains.”

“I’m fine. I have Sophie and I have the business, I don’t need a girlfriend.”

“A girlfriend? A girlfriend is too ambitious for you. You just need someone to have sex with.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Yes, I do,” Charlie said, defeated. “But I have to go. Are you okay to watch Sophie?”

“Sure, I’m going to take her to my place. I have an obnoxious neighbor up the street that I’d like to introduce to the puppies. Will they poop on command?”

“They will if Sophie tells them.”

“Perfect. We’ll see you tonight. Promise me you’ll ask someone out. Or at least look for someone to ask out.”

“I promise.”

“Good. Did you get that new blue pinstripe tailored yet?”

“Stay out of my closet.”

“Don’t you need to get going?”

Ray figured that it had probably started when Charlie murdered all those little animals he brought home for his daughter. Maybe buying the big black dogs was a cry for help—pets that someone would really notice being gone. According to the movies, they all started out that way—with the little animals, then before long they moved up to hitchhikers, hookers, and pretty soon they were mummifying a whole flock of counselors at some remote summer camp and posing the crusty remains around a card table in their mountain lair. The mountain lair didn’t fit the profile for Charlie, since he had allergies, but that might just be an indication of his diabolical genius. (Ray had been a street cop, so it hadn’t really been necessary for him to study criminal profiling, and his theories tended toward the colorful, a side effect of his Beta Male imagination and large DVD collection.)

But Charlie had asked Ray to use his contacts on the force and at the DMV a half-dozen times to locate people, all of whom ended up dead a few weeks later. But not murders. And while a lot of items belonging to the recently deceased had turned up in the shop in the last few years (Ray had found antitheft numbers etched on a dozen items and called them in to a friend on the force who identified the owners), none of them had been murdered either. There were a few accidents, but mostly it was natural causes. Either Charlie was devious to an extraordinary degree, or Ray was out of his mind, a possibility that he didn’t discount completely, if for no other reason than he had three ex-wives who would testify to it. Thus, he’d devised the workout ruse to draw Charlie out. Then again, Charlie had always treated him really well, and if it turned out he didn’t have a mountain lair full of mummified camp counselors, Ray knew he’d feel bad about tricking him.

What if there was nothing wrong with Charlie except that he needed to get laid?

Ray was chatting with Eduardo, his new girlfriend at DesperateFilipina.com, when Charlie came down the back steps.

“Ray, I need you to find someone for me.”

“Hang on a second, I have to sign off. Charlie, check out my new squeeze.” Ray pulled up a photo on the screen of a heavily made-up but attractive Asian woman.

“She’s pretty, Ray. I can’t give you any time off right now to go to the Philippines, though. Not until we hire someone to take Lily’s shifts.” Charlie leaned into the screen. “Dude, her name is Eduardo .”

“I know. It’s a Filipino thing, like Edwina.”

“She has a five-o’clock shadow.”

“You’re just being a racist. Some races have more facial hair than others. I don’t care about that, I just want someone who is honest and caring and attractive.”

“She has an Adam’s apple.”

Ray squinted at the screen, then quickly clicked off the monitor and spun around on the stool. “So who do you need me to find?”

“It’s okay, Ray,” Charlie said. “An Adam’s apple doesn’t preclude someone from being honest, caring, and attractive, it just makes it less likely.”

“Right. It was just bad lighting, I think. Anyway, who do you need to find?”

“All I have is the name Madison McKerny. I know he or she lives in the city, but that’s all I know.”

“It’s a she.”

“Pardon me?”

“Madison, it’s a stripper’s name.”

Charlie shook his head. “You know this woman?”

“I don’t know her, although the name seems familiar. But Madison is a new-generation stripper name. Like Reagan and Morgan.”

“Lost me, Ray.”

“I’ve spent some time in strip joints, Charlie. I’m not proud of it, but it’s sort of what you do when you’re a cop. And you pick up on the pattern of stripper names.”

“Didn’t know that.”

“Yeah, and there’s sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name.”

“Ray, you weren’t even alive in the fifties.”

“No, I wasn’t alive during the forties either, but I know about World War Two and big-band music. I’m into history.”

“Right. So, I need to look for a stripper? Doesn’t help. I don’t even know where to start.”

“I’ll go through the DMV and the tax records. If she’s in town we’ll have an address on her by this afternoon. Why do you need to find her?”

There was a pause while Charlie pretended to find a smudge on the glass of the counter display case, wiped it away, then said, “Uh, it’s an estate thing. One of the estates we got recently had some items that were left to her.”

“Shouldn’t the executor of the estate take care of that, or his lawyer?”

“It’s minutiae, not named in the will. The executor asked me to handle it. There’s fifty bucks in it for you.”

Ray grinned. “That’s okay, I was going to help anyway, but if she turns out to be a stripper I get to go with you, okay?”

“Deal,” Charlie said.

Three hours later Ray gave the address to Charlie and watched as his boss bolted out of the shop and grabbed a cab. Why a cab? Why not take the van? Ray wanted to follow, needed to follow, but he had to find someone to cover the store. He should have anticipated this, but he’d been distracted.

Ray had been distracted since talking to Charlie, not just by the search for Madison McKerny, but also because he was trying to figure out how to work “Do you have a penis?” casually into the conversation with his sweetheart, Eduardo. After a couple of teasing e-mails, he could stand it no longer and had just typed out, Eduardo, not that it makes any difference, but I’m thinking of sending you some sexy lingerie as a friendship present, and I wondered if I should make any special accommodations for the panties.

Then he waited. And waited. And granted that it was five in the morning in Manila, he was second-guessing himself. Had he been too vague, or had he not been vague enough? And now he had to go. He knew where Charlie was going, but he had to get there before anything happened. He dialed Lily’s cell phone, hoping that she wouldn’t be working at her other job and would do him a favor.

“Speak, ingrate,” Lily answered.

“How did you know it was me?” Ray asked.

“Ray?”

“Yeah, how did you know it was me?”

“I didn’t,” Lily said. “What do you want?”

“Can you come cover the store for me for a couple of hours?” Then, as he heard her take a deep breath that he was pretty sure would be propellant for verbal abuse, he added, “There’s fifty bucks extra in it for you.” Ray heard her exhale. Yes! After graduating from the Culinary Institute, Lily had gotten a job as a sous chef at a bistro in North Beach, but she didn’t make enough to move out of her mother’s apartment yet, so she let Charlie talk her into keeping a couple of shifts at Asher’s Secondhand, at least until he could find a replacement.