Read Online Tough Baby (Martin Fender Novel) by Jesse Sublett - Free Book Online Page A

yelling at each other when you first got here tonight?”
    Ladonna stood up. It was time for Michael to go to bed. He got the message and slid off the couch. “I’ll come tell you good night in a minute,” said Ladonna.
    “Michael,” I said, “I like Michael Jackson. But I think his last album was better than this one.”
    “Me too,” he said, hands in his pockets, walking to his bedroom, a small man. Before he shut his door we heard him say, “Roland Gift is a better singer.” Then the door shut, and we were alone. Sort of.
     
     
    &&&
     
     
    Her body was perfect.
    She sat on the bed, arms locked around her knees, bathed in dim light from a lamp with a perforated black shade that cast protozoan designs on everything in the room, including us. She’d taken off her clothes and was going to take a shower before going to bed, but when she saw how I was looking at her she was faced with a decision: should he stay or should he go?
    So I sat on the other side of the bed, and the satiny topography of the dimly lit sheets might as well have represented the Sahara Desert. Or the Antarctic. I felt that far from her. And it wasn’t fair that she had to sit there so quietly with her feelings, so naked and beautiful and perfect.
    And by perfect I don’t mean to imply that she was some sort of human mannequin, either. Aerobics and an almost bottomless well of energy kept her firm and trim, but there were small traces of stretch marks on her breasts from having Michael, there was a vaccination mark on her arm, there was a little brown mole somewhere. But they just made her more appealing. Like tiny flaws in Michelangelo’s marble. And knowing that I knew where they were and that I might not ever caress them with my callused bass player’s fingers again, was causing me pain.
    “So there was no semen in her,” she said abruptly. “But there was a trace of someone’s blood under her fingernails. What type was that?”
    “O positive.”
    “And yours is B positive.”
    “Right. And it had a cocktail of Librium, Dalmane, Percodan, Demerol, Seconal, and PCP swimming around in it. Just like hers did, although I got most of the dose.”
“And she gave it to you.”
“Well, I don’t think ...”
“How long did you know her? An hour? An hour and a half?”
    “Yeah. About an hour and a half.” I didn’t add that that didn’t include whatever time elapsed after I drank the drink and before the time that she was attacked.
    “So how could you know if she gave you the drink on purpose or not? Or did you know her before? Did you maybe go out in the parking lot for a blow job, a musician’s handshake?”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “You know damn well what I mean. I’ve heard your pals say it millions of times.” Acidly sarcastic, she said, “ ‘To some girls sex is like a handshake.’ ” And pointing to her crotch, “ ‘Put her there, pal.’ ”
“I can’t believe you’d even ask.”
“I can’t believe you’d answer with a bullshit response like that. Indignation is the first defense of a liar.”
“Maybe so. But the answer is still no, and it happens to be the truth.”
“But you’d lie to keep from hurting me. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
    “And maybe you think you’d spare us both a lot of hurt if you were able to just gloss over the whole thing and pretend that whatever happened didn’t have anything to do with you. But you can’t remember, so you can’t say for sure. Even though they didn’t find your semen inside her and someone else’s blood was under her fingernails, you were with her. What about fingerprints? They didn’t find your fingerprints in her room?”
    “They haven’t been able to do anything with the smudges and partial prints they have, except to determine that none of them belong to me. I don’t think I went to her room.”
“You went to a party with her.”
“I’m not denying that.”
“Good.” She folded her arms and looked at the wall. “Bastard. I trusted