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 Serpent's Dance A prequel to "Closing Time," the first Terry Orr novel, finds the private investigator drawn into a case of blackmail, mistaken identity and sexual intrigue involving, of all people, the gangly rock critic Diddio. At the Byron, Diddio woke up to a distant pounding on a door. He said he couldn't respond; and then he fell back out: a long, slow, murky drift downward. When he came to a second time, a minute later, an hour later, he found a doughy, rotund man in an ill-fitting security uniform flicking water at his face. The concierge peaked over the guard's shoulder and gave Diddio a disapproving stare. "Smack him, Walter," he commanded. The guard he did, hard. Now, in my kitchen, Diddio rubbed his cheek. "Did it help?" I asked. "I guess. I mean, I was kind of awake. But I'm sitting there naked and when I reached for the sheet, my arms weighted, like, a ton. And I couldn't figure out what happened." The concierge came into focus. In a meticulous suit with a white boutonniere, he was maybe 30 years old, and he wore a neat salt-and-pepper goatee and he had a thin scar on the bridge of his broad nose. He told the guard to cover Diddio. "They were glaring at me like they wanted me to go fuckin' die. Then I saw the room: furniture all over the place, cushions ripped from the sofa, the desk upside down. The bedspread was on top of the table lamp. And the Champagne bottle was sticking out the TV. Totally Zeppelin, man." The concierge stormed off and Walter the guard nudged Diddio toward the bathroom. "He told me to take a cold shower." When he finished, he found his clothes stacked on the sink. "I dried off, got dressed, used the little bottle of mouthwash, took a drink of water. I was beginning to feel almost human." "But no memory," I led. "No. Meanwhile, somebody called the cops." Before leaving the bathroom, he reached to the back of his jeans for his wallet. To his surprise, it wasn't on the right, where he usually kept it, but on the left. Someone—the guard, the snippy concierge, one of the cops—had removed it and returned it to the wrong pocket. Diddio opened it to see what was taken and instead found a thick stack of bills: $1,000 in fifties and hundreds. Returning the wallet to its rightful place, he then shoved the bills in his front pocket, where he had a little less than $20. The concierge continued to glare at him with scorn. But, Diddio said, one of the cops seemed amused. "So, what? Place a little too upscale for you?" he asked. "Champagne," Diddio explained. The cop looked over at the bottle that jutted from the TV. "There another one in there?" "Just one," Diddio muttered. "I think." His partner stepped over the haphazard array of flowers on the floor. "There's a considerable amount of damage here, Kenny," she said. The concierge chimed in. "Yes, and the trouble that's been caused. Police at the Byron," he exclaimed. "Unthinkable." "Karen and me, we'll try not to soil the carpet, Mr. Shearwood," the cop replied. "No, that's not—What I mean is—" "Publicity," Karen Medved offered. "The wrong kind." "Precisely," said the edgy concierge. I wondered where Diddio was going next. I took a guess: In the years since we'd met as freshmen roommates at St. John's—me with zero confidence and a full-boat basketball scholarship, him with the taste for pot and '60s rock—I never knew him to have $1,000, either in his pocket or in the bank. But for him to walk out of the Byron, I knew he'd had to give it up. "You made amends," I said. He nodded. "The cop Brunfeld worked it out." "But the big TV must have cost close to $1,000 by itself." "Everybody wanted me the fuck out of there." He slapped the table. "Bang. Go. Shoo." "Are they going to be coming after you for the rest?" "Good luck with that," he said. "No change in the old fruit jar." I went back toward Bella's seat. "So..." Brunfeld and Medved left, he said, and the concierge told Walter the guard to escort him out of the hotel. Before he left, Diddio climbed over a prone chair and went to the large TV cabinet and reached for the compact-disk player. In the drawer sat the small silver disk. "Serpent's Dance," he said, was the title of the music she'd played. "I asked the guard if he minded I take it," he said. "Did he?" "No, but that's not what's weirding me out." "No?" Diddio shook his head. "When I asked him if I could, he said, 'If it's yours, take it, Mr. Orr.'" I wasn't sure I heard him. "What?" "That's right. He called me Mr. Orr." "He called you by my name?" "'Mr. Orr.'" "D, be very careful about this." "I told you I had to talk to you, man," he said. "I mean, you realize they thought I was you, right?" I looked at Diddio: He was well under six feet, his ribs showed when his shirt was off. He had the complexion of a man who hounded rock clubs until dawn then slept in, who ate at odd hours in greasy spoons. He couldn't be mistaken for a fit, 225-pound ex-jock. The set-up with the blonde was for me. By someone who hadn't seen me before. Originally published in Argosy Quarterly magazine in Summer 2005. Appears in audio form on "Mean Streets USA: A Collection of Short Crime Fiction," available at www.kcrw.org. All stories © Jim Fusilli 2005. Reprinted with permission. For permission to reprint, contact the author at jimfusillibooks@aol.com. |