I was having one of those mornings. You know the kind, where you lose your reading glasses, discover the milk is sour AFTER you dump it over the last of the corn-flakes, and then stumble into the mangled remains of a former employer/boyfriend while you're walking the dog? By the time Matt showed up at my door, looking as handsome as ever and apparently willing to let our bygones be bygones, I had already been questioned by three OTHER cops, and I was on the verge of losing my usual sunny disposition. So, when I heard another knock at my door, I naturally assumed it was yet another damned officer of the law arriving to invade my privacy and complicate my life – and it was.


I hadn’t seen Matt in several months, though not for lack of trying. He lives a few miles from me, just across the street from a big park. When my car was still alive, I made a point of parking in front of his condo at least twice a week on the pretext of exercising poor, bone-weary Benjamin–the aforementioned dog– in the park. Since the car breathed its last, though, Benjamin and I have learned to settle for walks on the beach. Benjamin is a Beagle, but unlike most of that noble hunting breed, Benjamin is not especially fond of walking, or moving, for that matter. It's a trait we have in common, actually. He also doesn’t like sand in his paws. I sometimes end up carrying Benjamin home after one of our morning outings, and if he could talk, I'm sure he'd point out that if I hadn’t dragged him out on THAT particular morning, most of what happened later wouldn’t have–happened, I mean. He's probably right. In my experience, it's usually the early bird that gets eaten by the neighbor's lurking cat.


Lieutenant Matthew O'Connor and I had dated exactly three and a half times about eighteen months ago, but the affair was, as they say, "short lived." It wasn’t even an affair in the strictest sense of the word, but more like this really badly-timed picnic. You know the kind– where you get overrun by ants and mosquitoes and then it starts to rain before you even crack the container of potato salad? My life and career were in the pits at the time, and I was going through what might charitably be called my depression-induced over-indulgent period, wherein I was indulging in way too many Margaritas and/or frozen Daiquiris. I've never really liked liquor–the taste of it, so if the beverage doesn't involve fruit juice, blenders, and tiny paper umbrellas, I'm usually immune to the perils of Demon Drink. But back then, if you offered me anything that looked and smelled like a snow cone, I was more than ready to overlook the taste of the booze.

Everything between us would have been just peachy if Matt hadn't decided to confront me about what he referred to as my "drinking problem." Of course, I didn’t see it as a problem at all, but as an excellent way to keep me from thinking too deeply about my life and the mess I had made of it. Matt's problem was chivalry. He kept trying to rehab me before he bedded me. MY problem, on the other hand, is that I don’t LIKE people trying to improve me, since that would somehow suggest that I need improving. You see my point? It might have been inferred from any cooperation on my part in such an effort that I AGREED with Matt's unkind assessment of my drinking habits.

Anyway, we had a rather heated disagreement on the subject of my drinking, at the height of which I felt suddenly inspired to bonk him over the head with a sugar bowl. It was kind of cute, really, like something you'd see in a screwball romantic comedy? Unfortunately, Matt didn’t see anything remotely comedic about either the smashed sugar bowl (a family antique) OR a bleeding head wound. He showed his displeasure by dumping me face-down over his kitchen table, hauling down my specially-purchased lace-trimmed panties, and blistering my bared ass with a rubber spatula, while I shrieked bloody-murder and threatened to castrate him with a pair of cuticle scissors.

After that, it didn’t seem that our relationship had an especially bright future. I hadn't been spanked since I was maybe seven or eight, and none of those mild childhood paddlings had been ANYTHING at all like what happened that morning in Matt's kitchen. I kicked and squirmed and swore, and simply couldn’t BELIEVE what was happening, or how much it hurt. I went home that day with my pride in shreds and my throbbing butt on fire, and that night, I could still see the rectangular marks, and feel the burn.

Things remained at a stand-still for more than six months. One day, Matt just showed up where I was now living, (at Gabe's, actually) knocked on the back door, and asked if he could borrow an egg. And then, he winked at me. Since then, we have remained vaguely friendly, and I see him around occasionally– in town, at the grocery store, etc. Now, he was standing at my very own back door again, scolding me for being disrespectful to his fellow officers.

Since the breakup, I have worked out this terrifically clever way of handling what happened between us, in an effort to save what little face I have left to save. What I do is this: I bring the spanking incident up incessantly and then make light of it, as though we were both only kidding around, and I knew it all the time. Lame, huh? Anyway, it was in this whimsical and light-hearted manner that I greeted him that morning.

"Good morning," I cried. "And what brings you to my door on this bright, smoggy morning, Detective de Sade? Are we collecting for the Abusive Policeman’s Benevolent Society or perhaps for the National Association to Encourage Public Caning?"


Matt only smiled. "I heard a vicious rumor that you were being uncooperative with an official investigation. Knowing your sweet, agreeable nature, I figured that had to be a mistake, so I dropped in to ask you– as politely as possible, of course–to get your butt out here and answer their damned questions."

I threw my hands to my cheeks in my best Scarlett O'Hara impersonation. "Mercy me, Detective O'Connor! You are simply SO forceful and masculine this morning! I do declare! Such a display of testosterone makes me positively giddy!"


He leaned on the door-jamb and smiled again. I should explain here that Matt has that kind of smile that forms little crinkles around the corners of his mouth and makes his eyes look like they’re laughing. He has this sandy blond hair, and his eyes are sort of grayish blue, and his… Okay, don’t say it. I know. In spite of his cave-man tendencies, and our painful–MY painful history, I have a very serious case for the Lieutenant. It's too bad he still thinks I'm a drunk and a screw-up. I'll die before I admit it to him, but some time back, I admitted to MYSELF that I richly deserved every stinging swat of that spanking, and probably a lot more like it. The problem is, it's just not the kind of thing you can tell a man, now is it?


Matt took a little notebook and a pen from his hip pocket and assumed a very serious demeanor while we carried on with the familiar silliness. "Are you aware that cruelly mocking a member of the Los Angeles Police Department is a serious crime," he said, "punishable by a fine of one thousand dollars, ninety days in jail, AND by being turned across the offended officer's knee for fifty good, hard swats on the bare butt?"


I rolled my eyes, and played the game as usual. "And have YOU thought about looking for work in a Turkish prison? I was not born yesterday, Lieutenant. There is no such law, and that last part is pure, adolescent fantasy."


Matt shook his head. "Okay, next time, I'll just have them call the swat team, how's that? Now, do you want to try giving me a straight answer, or had you rather we do this downtown?" Then he grinned that wonderful grin I already mentioned. "Sorry, but I’ve always wanted to say that to someone. You know–'We can do this downtown’?"


It suddenly occurs to me that in my eagerness to describe my dysfunctional sex life to a bunch of total strangers and share with them the gross details of the worst, most humiliating moments of my entire life, I've whizzed right by what happened to bring the police to my door in the first place. Let me back up to where Benjamin and I found the mangled corpse on the beach, and explain how I managed to wind up ass-deep in Gabe Tannhauser's murder. If the name Gabriel Tannhauser doesn’t ring a bell, it's probably because you don't make a practice of reading the Hollywood gossip columns. Oh, I don’t mean the big headlines in the major L.A. dailies, but those smudgy, smarmy little bits near the bottom margins in the ratty local rags– where everyone's name gets misspelled or omitted for lack of space? That was Gabe's style–back-page, bottom line, just below the phone-porn ads. If that sounds insensitive and mean-spirited, it's only because you didn’t know Gabe.
All of you who saw the first "Jaws" movie will probably remember that scene where Roy Scheider finds the first victim on the beach, so I won’t need to explain to you exactly what Benjamin discovered that morning on the beach. Benjamin is a massively overweight dog – a Beagle of every small brain, as Winnie the Pooh would say– and his early morning walk is not so much a pleasant outing as it is a precautionary measure, since Benjamin is also a Beagle of very small bladder. Anyway, for those of you who haven't seen "Jaws", please go out and rent the movie. One picture IS worth a thousand words.

Anyway, there we were, Benjamin and I– strolling along and thinking our own lovely thoughts. We were almost home when my reverie was suddenly disturbed by this odd little squishing noise. Benjamin wagged his tail, looked up curiously at me, and then threw up on my sneakers–massively. Although I didn’t immediately recognize the fact, what poor Ben had just stepped in had ONCE been Gabriel Tannhauser – Gabe to his friends, of whom he had, at last count, none at all. Everyone who'd ever known Gabe, probably since the day he bribed his way out of kindergarten, usually just thought of him as that "Rotten Little Prick."


At first glance, it looked like Gabe had been eaten, or snacked upon, by a shark and/or sharks, or run over by an outboard motor of more than average horsepower. My first inclination, though, was to glance seaward for that telltale dark form and tall dorsal fin that haunts every beachgoer's nightmares. Since Ben and I were standing almost directly in front of Gabe's house, where he normally did his swimming, the conclusion was natural enough. Mind you, I have lived in California on and off for most of my life, and other than in an aquarium, I have NEVER seen a live shark. Nor have I ever known anybody who was attacked by one, but somehow, the disagreeable possibility of being eaten by one always seems to lurk just below the surface–a primal fear, I guess.

Anyway, not being a scientist, like Richard Dreyfus in "Jaws", I can’t absolutely guarantee my forensic analysis of the corpse's truncated condition, but he/it certainly looked eaten to me. It upset Benjamin's digestive tract, that's for sure, and Ben has been known to consume with no hesitation whatever long-dead horseshoe crabs, rotting pineapple-pepperoni pizza, and huge quantities of unattended garbage. (Please don’t assume that Benjamin’s lack of culinary sophistication accounts for his rotund figure, by the way. Benjamin may not be a gourmet, but he’s not a glutton, either. I prefer to believe that he and I simply share an undiagnosed glandular problem.)

When I summoned the courage to take a second look, I realized that the corpse and I knew one another, or HAD known one another, anyway–fairly well, so I dashed home (two doors away) as fast as my broken ankle and Benjamin’s portliness would permit, and attempted to call 911. Guess what? Did you know that 911 doesn’t WORK when your phone service has been shut off? Well, it doesn’t, which hardly seems fair to me, but then, I don’t make the rules, do I? But, I ask you, now, what are the deadbeats in this world supposed to do, just BURN to death? I had to limp next door to call the police from Barry’s place. (Barry Halliburton is my neighbor, a writer who looks like Richard Gere on Gere's' very best day. Barry, incidentally, is also hung like a bull, and would be perfect for me, except that he’s gay. Besides, he doesn’t care much for what he insists upon calling–with some justification–my "abysmal" housekeeping.)


I had barely gotten my good foot on the bottom step to Barry’s deck when I heard a bloodcurdling scream from the beach, telling me that Regina had also found the luckless Gabe. Regina Vanderplum is another of my neighbors, by the way, though she’s not quite as neighborly as Barry. Regina lives on the other side of my humble cottage, between me and the deceased, and she walks her poodle, "Puddle", at approximately the same time I take Benjamin out each morning. I have it on excellent authority that Regina spends the remainder of each day trying to get my landlady and me blackballed from lovely Encantada Cove, where we all live, and which Regina and Barry can afford, and I can’t. ( I am a member of that class generally referred to as the working poor, meaning I work my ass off, and get poorer each day.)

After the police had finished their first round of questions, I wandered back over to Barry's to watch the goings on. Before long, the beach was crawling with L.A.'s finest, and since I hadn’t yet become a person of interest, Barry and I sat on his deck, drank iced green tea, and chatted while the cops scooped Gabe up in a plastic storage bin–several actually. They had to keep going back to their van for extras. They took a lot of pictures, too, in which the usually photogenic Gabe never smiled for the camera, even once.

"If it wasn't a shark, who do you think would want to kill a loser like Tannhauser?" Barry asked, leaning over the railing with a wide yawn.


"Get out the phone book, and throw a dart." I suggested. I knew that Barry wasn’t especially interested in what had happened to Gabe, but we were waiting for his Chicken Marsala to finish, so he could feed me again. Barry's a pal, and always feeds me when I crawl to his door, flat broke and hinting broadly.


Barry grimaced. "I only knew him from those parties he gave, you know. Remember the one where we all had to dress up like silent movie stars."


I groaned. "I’m sorry. That was Gabe’s idea–for the movie crowd. I only did the decorating."


"Then justice has been done," Barry snorted. "That was the worst party I’ve ever been to, even worse than that first party – the Halloween thing? That's where I first met you, you know, at that Vampire Barbecue. Where you set Tannhauser's living room on fire?"


Ah, yes, the Vampire Barbecue. Right after I broke up with Matt and took that rotten job working for the ex-Mr. Tannhauser. Looking back, a lot of what happened really started at the Vampire Barbecue–I think.

* * * *


Let me say, right up-front, here, that I have never murdered anyone–not yet, anyway– despite a number of severe provocations that I’m pretty sure would have gotten me off in any unbiased court of law in the country. I didn’t murder Gabriel Tannhauser, either, although I will admit to having fantasized about it once or twice. Okay, so maybe more than once or twice. There were months when I whiled away quite a number of languid afternoons plotting various grisly scenarios in which Gabe got his just desserts, but hey! I wasn't alone. So, I was a bit put out when the LAPD showed up again later that morning, suggesting that I might be involved in Gabe’s demise.

I explained patiently to the cops that the Hollywood art world–on whose glittering periphery

we all live–was positively INFESTED with women who’d jump at the chance to disembowel Mr. Tannhauser with rusty spoons or back over him with their cute little red or green Mini-Coopers. A lot of these women are not flesh and blood women at all, of course, but surgically altered and inflated starlets, along with a number of models of the "art" variety, all of whom used to wind their way in and out of Gabe’s photo studio like an endless line of grease-eating ants. The fact was, that in Gabe's world, where sleaze balls are pretty standard issue, Gabe was a world-class sleaze ball. But I didn’t kill him–Girl Scouts' honor, and even if I had wanted to, I’d have been at the tail end of a VERY long line.


The police interviewed me at length, and expressed a good deal of curiosity about how I was

able to so easily identify the victim, in the absence of his head. (Oh, did I forget to mention that the corpse was missing its head?) Anyway, I was forced to admit with some embarrassment that I had lived briefly with the deceased, and was therefore familiar with certain distinctive aspects of his person. For one thing, Gabe was the only guy I've ever known who claimed to be Jewish who wasn't circumcised. In addition to this anomaly, Gabe was extremely fond of tattoos, including this revolting monstrosity on his back the approximate size of Rhode Island that depicted a dragon in the act of consuming a young woman with gigantic breasts. I always figured the dragon was sure to choke to death on those breasts, when he finally got around to swallowing her.

Anyway, I explained to the police that while I HAD once been employed by the late Mr.Tannhauser for several months as a housekeeper, photographic assistant, and as what he persisted in calling his "Girl Friday," I had no reason to kill him. Yes, I HAD left his employ under strained circumstances, when he refused to pay me what he owed me. I had also began to discover his many lady friends drunk and disorderly in my bedroom at odd hours of the night.

(There WERE a few details of my business dealings with Gabe that I did NOT divulge to the police, for the very good reason that I didn’t want to spend what remained of my fading youth in prison.)

I was fortunate, just before I had the final blow-up with Gabe, to make the acquaintance of Carlotta–the lovely lady with whom I now reside. Her home was just two doors down from the ex-Mr.Tannhauser's, between Regina's house and Barry's house. I am an artist by trade, and by a great stroke of luck, my new landlady was in need of an artist. It was Fate, for sure, or maybe just my usual rotten luck.

But I digress. Back to that first day, and the murder, or the shark attack–whatever. When I had finished sharing my entire miserable, drab life with a series of policemen, and just as I was trying to get back to work, there was another knock on my door. I hobbled over, only to be rudely informed by a completely DIFFERENT policeman that my car was blocking access to the "crime scene" and was about to be towed, and incidentally, there were so many past-due tickets on the windshield he couldn’t see the VIN number. The car’s dented hindquarters were obstructing the driveway, he said. This situation has never before created a problem, since I never have any company, and the house's only other occupant– my landlady and employer, the winsome Carlotta–is rarely here, and when she is, she always comes and goes on an elderly, hiccuping Vespa.

"Do you have the vehicle’s license and registration?" The officer’s voice was very stern, but he was about to discover that I am not a woman easily intimidated. I was tired, Benjamin had just barfed again on the couch, and I was trying to make a living, for God's sake!

"No, but it’s had its rabies vaccination," I growled back. "I can probably find proof of that, if you’ll give me a few minutes. You may have noticed, officer, that I am a helpless cripple, not that such a detail would interest you. Still, the search may take some time, with my present infirmity."

The officer evinced no interest whatever in my tale of woe. "Did you know that your tires have been slashed?" he asked.

I tried to register shock, but the tire-slashing atrocity was old news. I suspected Regina. At a spry seventy-nine, the woman bears one hell of a grudge, and works out regularly at Gold's Gym.

The officer tried another tack. "You’ve broken about ten laws, here, you know, starting with all these missing vehicle documents. The vehicle is unregistered, uninspected, uninsured..."

"Unbaptized, unwashed, unloved," I added, always ready to be helpful. "Besides, you can’t ticket me for that. It's private property, isn’t it?" Hey, it couldn’t hurt to try.

"It's sticking out two feet onto the coast highway," he snarled, and I tried to look surprised.

The cop leaned around me to looked around the room, obviously dazzled by Carlotta’s unique take on decorating, which involves hubcaps, lots of empty tomato-sauce cans, gnarly driftwood, and oily hunks of rusted metal. I should explain here that I share my cramped living quarters with extraordinary amounts of trash– including the vast numbers of dented hubcaps that are stacked up on every available surface. Carlotta wears many hats, you see, and finds genuine beauty in all sorts of urban debris. She explained once all that trash takes on character– from those it once lived with. Therefore, all trash has a soul. The hubcaps, on the other hand, she simply sells to a guy she calls Oovie, and no, I don’t know what Oovie means. I try to stay out of Carlotta’s business arrangements, too many of which involve people named Sammy the Purse, Dirtynose, and the always popular Big Bubba.

"Just spit it out, lady," the cop snapped. "Do you own this property, or don’t you? That vehicle is parked in the street, not on private property, so it’s about to get towed, at the owner’s expense. Is she here?"

"The house is hers, but the car is mine," I conceded glumly.

"You want to unlock the trunk for us, then?" It didn’t sound like a question. "The tail lights are busted out."

I sighed. "It’s not locked. The lock quit locking in 1994, just after the radio went out and the clock ticked its last. There was sort of an epidemic that month. It started with the air-conditioner, and spread like wildfire." All of this was true. I bought the car, well-used even then, with my first paycheck, when I was a real person, with a real job.


And so, they opened the trunk, and guess what? It was full of all this stuff that belonged to my old friend, Gabe–including his head, one foot, and several fingers. That's when they began asking me a lot of questions about Gabe–mainly about how parts of him might have gotten into the trunk of my car. I had no idea, I insisted, and then shut up like a wise clam. I watch a lot of TV, and have never missed an episode of "Law and Order." I knew my rights. Besides, I didn’t want to get involved. Is someone had offed Gabe, good luck to them. (Okay, I don’t really mean that–not exactly, anyway. He still owed me money.)


Things like this are bound to happen, I suppose, when you leave your car parked for too long in a no-parking area with eleven fading parking tickets on the windshield to announce your sloth and civic irresponsibility. The truth is, I had gotten rather blasé about the accumulated parking tickets, since they had been collecting for some months with no apparent consequences other than several warrants being issued for my arrest. I was assured later that I had been notified by mail of these outstanding warrants and the unpleasant things that might happen if I didn’t respond in a timely fashion, but the thing is, I have no mail-box. I HAD a mail-box, once, but it became severely disabled when it was run over by the very same vehicle, in an unfortunate parallel parking incident. It came to rest at the bottom of a shallow ditch – the mail-box, not the car– and not a day has passed that I haven’t promised myself to fix it. But then, if you can’t break promises to yourself without guilt, to whom can you break promises? Anyway, the mailperson customarily rides around in this adorable little three-wheeled vehicle, and has apparently lost the use of his/her legs through atrophy, and after the first three weeks, he/she refused to bring the mail to my door. Thus, my mail arrives and then sleeps peacefully at the post office until I go and pick it up, which I don’t, because my car is stuck in a ditch. It’s kind of a vicious cycle, you know? It’s wonderful how tranquil life can be when you have no mail or phone service.


Anyway, after I had offended several more officers, Matt showed up. He got me off the hook for the moment by explaining that while I am not an ideal candidate for Woman of the Year, I am probably not a murderess, either. I'm not sure the cops were convinced, but they seemed willing enough by then to hand the problem off to Lieutenant O' Connor for the time being. Then, after going through our usual little tap dance, Matt turned very coppish on me.

"Why don't you start by telling me everything you know about this Gabriel Tannhauser,"

he said. "From the beginning, and skip the crap. I'm warning you right now, I'm not in the mood."

I should have known right then that it was going to be a very long, hard day– and knowing Matt, I should have guessed that it would be a LOT harder on one part of me than on others.

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