Peg Hinkle had enough bad dates before and since her divorce to compose a tome on the pitfalls of promiscuity. Tonight was no exception. Even Mr. UPS neglected to respond to her drink-and-dial digit-fest. Another failed prospect from the clustered habitat of single town kept her up beyond her normal bedtime. She guzzled a couple glasses of supermarket Chardonnay and even slipped into a diaphanous nightgown to enhance the illusion that something better than a cold mattress awaited upstairs in her bedroom. Fortunately for her, Agent Mason and Oranger made unannounced house calls whenever the need arose. In Peg’s case, the need was long overdue.
Their sedan pulled up in front of her rundown apartment complex a tick after 12:00A.M. A bluish tint illuminated her apartment’s window, leaving little doubt that Peg burned through the midnight oil yet again. Before arriving for what they hoped would’ve resulted in a brief interrogation, Oranger volunteered himself to approach the door alone.
“I don’t remember drawing straws,” Mason said. “Can you tell me why you get to talk to this woman by yourself?”
“You’re a married man, Brick. I’m trying to save you from yourself.”
“Oh, do you think I’m shallower than a pervert? I can talk to a woman without trying to canoodle with her.”
“First of all, I don’t even know what people do when they canoodle. Secondly, your pecker track record speaks for itself. Remember that quiet gal from Pittsburgh?”
“The mime?”
“Yeah. You figured she’d be a safe bet because she didn’t talk in public, right? But look what happened. After her husband, that carnival barker, found out about your little tryst, she squawked more than a parrot on truth serum.” Mason opted not to challenge that valid point. Besides, Oranger had another reason that he found even more legitimate.
“Aside from that, I think women respond openly to war veterans. Maybe it’s our battle scars or sense of duty and honor they respect. At any rate, they prefer a man in uniform.”
“You’re not wearing a uniform, and you’ve never even owned one.”
“Hey, take a walk in my boots before you pass judgment. You don’t know what it’s like to get ambushed by VC in the Cambodian jungles, Brick.”
“No, I don’t, and neither do you, ass-clown.”
“War is Hell, my friend. Pure hell.”
On that solemn note, filched directly from General Sherman’s orations, Agent Oranger exited the car and marched toward Peg’s apartment door. He only twitched a few times before ringing the doorbell. When the door swung open, Oranger’s eyes were treated to a skimpily clad woman who almost looked too sexy to be a skank. She didn’t even flinch upon seeing the tall stranger on her porch stoop. Sometimes wine stripped a woman of her inhibitions, but Peg never used alcohol as an excuse to strip. It didn’t take more than a few smarmy words from a would-be suitor to get her to count ceiling tile. Unfortunately for Oranger, he possessed all the smoothness of a gravel path.
“Good evening, ma’am,” he said, subconsciously channeling the monotone of Sergeant Joe Friday.
“Not yet it isn’t.” Peg slurred while gnawing on the tip of her pinkie.
She was obviously drunk and peered at her visitor like a black widow spider spinning its silken web. She poised in such a suggestive manner against the door’s frame that even Ray Charles standing in a fogbank could’ve seen her coquettish bid for attention. It didn’t matter to her that her target had the complexion of uncooked lasagna. Before asking, Oranger retrieved his wallet from his suit jacket and flashed Peg an official governmental badge; it wasn’t the flash Peg was fetching for.
“Are you a cop or something?” she questioned.
“You might say that. My name is Agent Oranger. Are you Mrs. Hinkle?”
“I’m hoping you’re in the FBI, because my female body needs inspecting.”
“It’s not your lucky day, ma’am. I don’t work for the FBI.”
“Oh, well, you can call me Peg if I can call you stud. We’ll hold each other up.” She already shimmed closer to the agent, deluging him with as much of her milky loins as he was willing to absorb. He couldn’t ignore the hourglass-shaped mole situated on the outer-top of her left thigh. It lured his guppy-like gaze toward her nether regions like a shiny piece of tackle.
“Do you think my little mole is cute?” Peg thrust out her hip like a showroom dancer. “It looks like an hourglass. Do you know what that means?” Her smile was suddenly as painted as a clown’s counterfeit grin.
“Uh, no,” gulped Oranger. He smelled the cut-rate wine on her breath now.
“Tiii--mme is on my side…yes it is,” she sang, sounding like a sick Mick Jagger. “Get it? Isn’t that funny?”
“Not really, ma’am.”
“Ah, with you being an agent, I should’ve known you wouldn’t like moles.”
Oranger’s own humor was similarly bad, but even he remained indifferent to Peg’s witticism. Maybe he wanted to sneak inside the apartment and show Peg his own timepiece, but he knew that Mason watched him like a buzzard scanning for carrion. He simply turned back toward the car and gave Mason a thumbs-up sign. Peg, of course, was desperately vying for something meatier than a thumb.
“You brought your partner, too?” she chimed artfully. “Are you boys hungry? Do you want to come in and make a sandwich with me?” Peg rarely kept any food in her refrigerator.
“Maybe it’s better if we talk outside, ma’am.” Oranger hated himself for turning down a free meal, particularly when recounting how famished he’d become since his last supper. “I just have a few questions for you, if that’s okay?”
Peg’s standoffish posture projected her disapproval. She backed up and cocked her head against the open door in frustration. “What does a gal gotta do to get laid nowadays?” Her question was rhetorical, of course, but Oranger had the answer if she truly sought it: even the demand for filet mignon diminished if offered for no cost on a buffet table every night.
“Actually,” Oranger proceeded, “I came here to talk to you about your husband.”
“My husband? You mean my ex-husband. We’re divorced.”
“But you lived with Kip Hinkle until recently, correct?”
“Uh-huh.” Peg turned her head toward Oranger and noticed that the one side of his face twitched spasmodically. “Are you doing that on purpose?”
“Doing what?”
“That quirky thing with your face. It’s kind of creepy, yet tantalizing in a twisted way.”
“No. It’s a neurological condition. It happened during Operation Ranch Hand.”
“Were you a cowboy?”
“No. A soldier in Nam.”
“Where’s Nam?”
“Vietnam, ma’am. Southeast Asia. I was in the war.”
“Oh,” remarked Peg. “Were you wounded?”
“Did you ever hear of Agent Orange?”
“I thought you were Agent Orange?”
“No, I’m Agent Oranger. Nobody knew it at the time, or nobody was willing to tell us, but that herbicide caused nerve deterioration.”
“Well, you can’t be too ill then, because you gotta lot of nerve showing up at my place after midnight with no intention of showing me your helmet, soldier boy.” Peg’s humor missed the bull’s eye more often than Stevie Wonder shooting at an archery range.
“Can we get back to your husband?”
“Not much else to say about him,” Peg returned despondently.
“I’m under the impression that you moved out recently. Was he living at your former residence by himself?”
Peg had thrown out more signs than an interpreter for the deaf at a convention for hearing aids, but Oranger proved to be a finicky catch. It was going to take a stronger line to reel him into her sticky net.
“Kip’s lame,” she said. “I really don’t know what he does half the time. Why can’t you just be nice and show me your privates, private?”
“I’m not in the mood for any monkey business.”
“Bananas to that,” she sighed, staring at
his bulging crotch. “Your mouth might be saying ‘no,’ but your trousers are saying, ‘Chiquita, Chiquita, Chiquita!’”
Oranger’s inflamed cheeks appeared as red as hot ingots now. His patience was suddenly thinner than her nightgown. “I really want to do this the easy way, ma’am.”
“Is there a hard way? ’Cause I’d prefer it be done like that.”
“I don’t think you would.” Oranger’s eyes narrowed, giving him the countenance of a gritty gumshoe.
“You know,” she cooed, “I’ve heard that a dick and private eye do the same job. They probe for details. Is there any truth to that rumor?”
“I wouldn’t know, ma’am.”
By now Peg’s overuse of double entendre seemed futile. She leaned away from the door and scowled at him. “You’re even lamer than my ex,” she sneered. “I’m so tired of trying to figure out what guys really want. Do you even know yourselves?”
“ESPN. But right now I just need to know whatever you can tell me about your husband’s living arrangement.”
“I think he was renting to somebody, but I didn’t know the guy.”
“A man then?”
“Yeah. Is this guy in some sort of trouble? Did he steal your libido?”
“Let me ask the questions. Do you know anything about this fellow at all?”
“Nope,” Peg grumbled. “Just that he drives a Jeep. That’s it.”
“A Jeep? New or old?”
“How should I know? It looked older. It was yellow, I think. Just like you.”
“When was the last time you saw this Jeep at your ex’s house?”
Peg paused, which falsely made it seem as though she had lent this question polite thought. “Maybe yesterday or the day before. I can’t remember.”
Oranger recorded the fact mentally. He had no reason to suspect that she had any further information worth divulging. When it became clearer than a defoliated forest that Peg had nothing left to offer but her own weedy garden, Oranger bid her goodnight. She couldn’t even muster the energy to hurl the expletives at him that usually summarized most of her encounters with men. When Oranger returned to the car, Mason waited for him with the window open.
“I heard the whole thing,” Mason said. “Why didn’t you take care of the lady? I would’ve waited. An extra two minutes wouldn’t have made any difference at this point.”
Oranger paced around to the driver’s side of the car, adjusting his trousers accordingly before sitting behind the wheel. “I know you may find this hard to believe, Brick, but unlike you, I prefer a little bit of a chase when it comes to bedding women.”
“Right,” Mason simpered. “Like that invalid in the wheelchair you dated a couple years back? Who would’ve ever thought that she’d get away from ya?”
“Hey, don’t talk flack about Tang. She was out of this world, and if it weren’t for that damn hill, she’d still be with me.”
“Never park a paraplegic on an incline, Leif. Your relationship was destined to go downhill from there.”
“What could I do? She wanted to see Alcatraz. That was the best view in town.”
Oranger started the car. By chance or not, the radio was tuned to an oldies station. Tony Bennett crooned, “I left my heart in San Francisco….” Mason decided that now was a good time to leave the subject as well. He already had pulled out his cellphone.
“How many yellow Jeeps do you think are traveling on the roads tonight?” Brick mused.
“I guess we’ll find out soon.”
Oranger then drove away from the complex, trying his best to ignore Peg’s middle finger gesturing in the car’s rearview mirror.
Chapter 18