The Carma Klown 5

Chapter 5

© 2013 by the author

Monday, ca. 7:00 p.m., June 7, 2010

“Do you think I should get my hair cut?” Michael regarded himself in the mirror in their bedroom. He was wearing only a pair of lo-rise black briefs, cut square around the thighs. They clung to his well-rounded buttocks and narrow hips. His long-waisted body, the caps of muscles over his shoulders, the flaring triangles of his deltoid and trapezius muscles, the crisp definition of his legs owed everything to years of disciplined exercising and jogging. The pair of jeans and a T-shirt he intended to wear that evening were tossed on the bed. When Jeff entered the room to ask if he wanted to go out for dinner or order in, he found Michael bent forward at the waist peering at the top of his head in the mirror and plucking at his hair. His posture made his ass stick out even more, and Jeff took that as an invitation to place his hands on Michael’s hips and press his groin against Michael’s butt.

“Didn’t you just get a haircut last week? Here, let me see.” Jeff grabbed Michael by the shoulders and turned him half way round and examined his hair judiciously. “Nah, you look fine. You should be good until next week at least.” Jeff patted Michael’s shoulder with his right hand and then let it slide down Michael’s back and inside Michael’s briefs. He cupped a buttock and squeezed it lightly, enjoying the feel of Michael’s smooth taut flesh in his hand. He often did that.

“No, I meant should I wear my hair cut shorter? Maybe like a buzz cut?” Michael ran his fingers through his hair, lifting a strand so that it stood straight out from the top of his head. It was about four inches long and a thick, lustrous black. He moved his fingers down until there was only a small fraction of an inch between them and his scalp. “Like this.”

“A buzz cut? Why would you want to do that? You have great hair. You could be a model.”

“That’s what I mean. Do you think I look too pretty?” Michael scowled at his image in the mirror again. He swung his head from side to side, pursing his lips at it.

“Michael, there are millions of men out there who would kill to have your looks. You’re gorgeous.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Gorgeous doesn’t go with police work. I need to look more butch. I think I’d look more serious if I wore my hair shorter. You know, like maybe I was getting old and going bald, like Jerry Baker.”

“If you got a buzz cut, your hair’s so thick it’d look like you were wearing a black brush on your head. Nobody’s going to think you’re going bald. And it would make you look even younger—like a kid with short hair. Why would you want to look older anyway? Ask me again when you get to be sixty.”

“You said it yourself. I look like a kid. I’m trying to develop a different image. They don’t take me seriously at work.”

“Aargh,” Jeff sighed in protest. “I didn’t say you look like a kid. I said you would look younger if you wore your hair short. Michael, I swear sometimes you are determined to have a poor self-image.” He held up his hands, palms up, in a theatrical gesture of dismay and addressed the ceiling. “What am I going to do with this guy? He’s great looking. Okay, maybe he’s not perfect. He could work on his calves a bit. Maybe put in more time on the treadmill and doing calf raises on the machines, and I’m not saying I wouldn’t like his pecs even more if they were a bit more prominent, but . . . .”

Jeff shook his head and wrapped his arms around Michael from behind. He pushed his nose and mouth into his partner’s hair and nuzzled his neck for a few seconds. Then he rested his chin on Michael’s shoulder and looked into his eyes in the mirror. “So what’s really wrong? What brought this about? It’s not about your hair.”

“Oh, we got a new case today. Altmann sends Jerry Baker and Phil Redding out to interview witnesses and check the crime scene. Then he orders me to sit in front of the computer all day doing research. I’m just a good an investigator as Jerry and Phil, yet I get stuck sitting at a desk in the office with the computer crap. I’m just a technician to those guys. So I was thinking if I looked older, maybe people like Altmann would take me more seriously.”

“Yeah, but you know more about computers than anybody else in your office. Nobody else could do what you do. Besides, it’s the future of policing—that’s what you and everybody else keeps saying.”

“I know. But people like Altmann don’t really believe that. They think real cops solve crimes by getting out there and interviewing witnesses and intimidating crooks. They think that what I do is just pushing paper around, even though there’s no paper involved. I’m just a desk jockey to them, not a real policeman. All I’m good for is helping them with their computers when something goes wrong. And even when they do solve cases with my help, they never give me any credit. It’s like they think I’m cheating when I find evidence online rather than by bullying people into confessing. I graduated from the Police Academy just like the rest of them. And I’m in better shape than most of them. The only time I get sent out into the field is if they need someone to unplug a computer without destroying evidence. Jeez, they can’t even do that. Just once I wish Altmann would say, ‘Mike, get your butt out on the street and bust some ass.’ ”

“Hmm, I would start worrying if Altmann noticed your ass. If he ever does, tell him I’m the only one who gets to tell you where to put your butt.” This was followed by another hug and a kiss and several squeezes of Michael’s rear. “Hey, I saw Altmann on TV earlier—before you got home—The Carma Klown investigation.”

“Yeah, that’s the new case I’ve been assigned to.”

“Michael, that’s great.” Jeff pounded Michael’s back and hugged him. “That’s got to be the most important case going now.”

“Yeah, I suppose. I brought the video files home. Of the six Carma Klown tapes, I mean. I was sort of hoping that maybe you could look at them with me. Maybe you’ll see something I missed. I’ve also got a couple of ideas I want to run past you. We’d better wait until after dinner, though. Some of the things on the tapes are guaranteed to make you lose your appetite.”

“Sure. Be glad to help. Oh, that reminds me. Carson and Will asked if your nephew would like to come back and record some more green-screen and motion-capture shots and vocals for the new edition of the Five Worlds game.”

“Like to? Mikey would love to. His friends are so jealous of him because he’s the voice and body of the Eagle Scout of the Ice Sickles, or whatever it’s called. You’re his hero now because you got him that work. He even likes you better than me.”

“It’s the Eagle Prince of the Ice Imperium. And they’ll need him for about five days, but once school’s out, time shouldn’t be a problem. And they can schedule shots on the weekend until school is over. I think they’re kind of hoping that your mother will chaperone Mikey again. The entire production crew likes all the food she brings. Plus I think they want to persuade her to be the Empress Dowager of the Fire Heptarky—that’s a new character I’ve written. Don’t tell her, but I sort of had her in mind when I came up with the idea.” Jeff’s facial expression gave away that he was being a bit disingenuous. He, and not his boss, wanted to persuade Michael’s mother to play the role.

Michael smiled for the first time. “Give Mom a chance to cook and boss lots of people around, and she’ll be there. She’ll love it. And you don’t need to worry about me telling her that she’s your inspiration for the Empress Dowager. She’ll figure that out herself.”

“Do you think she’ll be upset?”

“Tell your bosses to be very diplomatic and ask her if she wouldn’t mind helping them out for a moment, just to block out a scene. They can explain the character to her and maybe she’ll think up the idea on her own. As long as she thinks she’s doing them a favor—maybe if Carson and Will tell her it’s to help Mikey be more relaxed by having her in the scene—she might not realize you’re behind it.”

“You think?”

Michael shook his head. “No. She’ll know.”

Both men sighed.

*****

Monday, ca. 9:15 p.m., June 6, 2010

“This is disgusting.” Jeff had laid his head on Michael’s shoulder and insinuated an arm between Michael’s back and the sofa when they began to watch The Carma Klown videos. He had watched the first three videos in silence, occasionally nodding or humming assent to a comment of Michael’s. But as the victim in the fourth video began crying and sobbing because he didn’t have enough cash on him to pay for more minutes of torment, Jeff sat up, pulling his arm out from behind Michael, and grabbed the remote. He paused the video, but when the picture stalled on a shot of the man’s tormented face, he impatiently clicked the TV off. “How could you stand to watch these all day long? I felt like I need a shower after watching the first one. It’s not that we haven’t done the same things and enjoyed it, but this is all wrong. I can’t watch this. That last bit was horrible—the way the guy clawed his buttocks apart so that his anus opened up and the camera looked down into it and this Carma Klown idiot taunting the victim with ‘Isn’t that inviting? You just want to stick your tongue into his asshole, don’t you? Just imagine the tip of your tongue digging into that.’ The guy’s a bastard.”

“I know, but I have to watch these tapes. It’s for my job. I’m sorry I made you watch them. But did you see anything I can use to help trace this guy? I’ve looked at these a half-dozen times each, and I still don’t have a clue. I can’t find any extraneous sounds or any visual indications where these might have been shot. I assume they’re made somewhere in the city. None of the victims was reported missing. There aren’t even any long absences they can’t account for. None of them admits to traveling recently. So the tapes have to be made locally.”

“Maybe it’s some sort of humiliation-for-pay club or service.”

“Baker thought of that. All the men are carrying large amounts of cash. So they must have expected to pay for the service. I mean, even rich guys like that don’t go around with that much money on them, do they? I suggested to Altmann that we ask around about such clubs and check Rossiter’s bank account to see if there are frequent withdrawals of large sums of cash. But he’s the only one whose bank account we can check without a warrant, and the others won’t give us permission to look into their finances. Maybe Vice knows something about pro doms who specialize in humiliation.”

“What else have you thought of?”

“Well, all of the videos were uploaded at 9:18 am. The time must be significant, but I can’t see why, can you?”

Jeff shook his head. “Google it and see if anything happened at that particular time. Or 9:18 could be 918 or maybe September 18. It’s also the start of that strange series.”

“What strange series?”

“9, 18, 27, 36, 45, 54, 63, 72, 81, 90—the digits in each number add up to nine, and they also happen to be 9 x 1, 9 x 2, 9 x 3, etc., up to 9 x 10. It doesn’t work for 9 x 11, which adds up to eighteen, but then the numbers start adding up to nine again with 9 x 12, 9 x 13, up to 9 x 20. Then the next two items in the series add up to eighteen again, but then starting with 9 x 23 through 9 x 30, the digits add up to nine again. It keeps going like that, with one more number whose digits add up to eighteen and one less that add up to nine in each decade of numbers. Or something like that. Carson was talking about it last week. He thought maybe I could work it into a story. You know how he likes to use math puzzles as part of the challenges in the games for people to solve.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Yeah. There are just too many possibilities. It would take forever to track them all down. It might even be meant to be divided as 91–8 or 9–1–8 rather than 9–18.”

“Right. It’s the type of thing that gets explained only after you find the guy—if you’re lucky. Sometimes you don’t find reasons for everything. And who knows? It might be nothing more than one of the times each day Star in Your Own Porn uploads videos. In which case, it has nothing to do with The Carma Klown. I have to check on that.”

“What else have you got?”

“The other thing I thought of doing is appealing to Star in Your Own Porn and see if they will reveal the IP address from which the videos were uploaded. But the only contact I can find for them is a post office box in Florida. And it’s at one of those private mailbox outfits. We’d have to get a warrant to make the owner of the mailbox store reveal the name of the person who rents the bod, and then we’d have to persuade the local police to serve it, and even if the owner didn’t take us to court to dispute the warrant, we’d probably find that the box was rented through one of those remailers that guarantees anonymity or by somebody in Russia who paid for it in bitcoins.”

“You could always hack the mailbox service or even Star in Your Own Porn and find out what you need.”

Michael shook his head. “I thought of that, but we can’t use information unless we obtain it legally.”

“What if someone else, I mean someone who’s not the police, found the information for you? Sort of a public-spirited citizen. And it just kind of showed up in your inbox with a return address for Star in Your Own Porn as if someone there had secretly supplied the information to you.” Jeff grinned.

“That might work. At least it would give us a start. I’d have to see. I’m sure the DA’s office could figure out some way to use the addresses that would be legal. But we couldn’t know that the addresses came from a hacker. It would have to look as if they came from someone at the website.”

“Well, it’s a quandary, isn’t it?” Jeff smiled. “Of course, this is all hypothetical. I mean, neither of us knows a public-spirited hacker, do we? Or any hacker for that matter.”

“Right.” Michael squeezed Jeff’s thigh and laughed. “It’s all just hypothetical.” He reached for the remote. “Now, I’ve got to finish watching these. Unless you want to be completely turned off, you’d better leave. They get worse. The Carma Klown is learning from his earlier efforts.”

“I’ve got some work I need to get done for tomorrow. Carson wants me to work up some sketches and dialogue for new characters. I’ll be staring at my computer screen for a couple of hours. But tonight I’ve resolved to get to bed by 11:00.”

“Don’t work too hard then. You need to conserve energy for later.”

“Why, Detective Chang, what do you have in mind?”

“Something to put your talents to good use and continue what you started this morning.” Michael patted the back of Jeff’s thighs as his lover stood up. “See you later, handsome.” Then he sighed and picked up the remote.

*****

Monday, ca. 11:30 p.m., June 6, 2010

Jeff’s body was warm and smelled faintly of soap. Jeff always showered before he came to bed, and over the seven years they had been together, Michael had come to associate that warmth and the slight tackiness of Jeff’s damp skin and the smell of soap or shampoo with being in bed with Jeff. Often the combination alone was enough to arouse him. He would lie in bed listening to Jeff brushing his teeth and gargling and then the long silence while he flossed, followed by the variations in the sound of the water striking his body as he turned beneath the shower. And finally the metallic squeak made by the mixer as he turned the shower off and then the click of the shower door being opened. In his mind’s eye, he watched Jeff towel himself dry and then drape the towel over the rack. He opened the medicine cabinet over the sink and retrieved his comb. Sounds of bottles being moved, uncapped, used, and then restored to their proper places on the shelves. Finally Jeff would switch off the fan and turn off the light as he opened the door. A few steps would bring him to his side of the bed. He would lift the sheet and slide in next to Michael. That was one of the rewards of being married, or as good as married, he thought. I know everything about Jeff. There are no secrets.

Sometimes they would talk and then have sex. Sometimes they had sex and then talked. Sometimes they fell asleep almost immediately. Sometimes they spent an hour talking. Sometimes they just embraced and snuggled close. There were also those nights when Jeff stayed up late working and didn’t come to bed until he was asleep. That seemed to be happening more and more often of late. Poor Jeff. Carson and Will were taskmasters, and they dumped too much work on him. I have to find some way, Michael thought, to get Jeff to be more assertive and refuse all the extra work his bosses were piling on him. It wasn’t as if Jeff couldn’t find work elsewhere. He had turned down plenty of attempts to lure him away from Jacoby and Greene Games.

And I have to do something, thought Michael, to pay him back for this morning. It had been months since Jeff had done anything like that. It was great that Jeff still wanted to surprise him. God, it had felt so good just to stand there and be made love to.

Finally Jeff finished and emerged from the bathroom. Michael turned toward him and lifted the covers. “Hey there, lover.” He tried to conjure up a sexy, sultry voice.

Jeff barely nodded in response and then got into bed, grabbing the covers away from Michael and pulling them up over his body. Unusually for him, he turned onto his side, facing away from Michael. It had been Michael’s experience that he did that only when he was angry with Michael or upset about some issue that didn’t involve Michael directly. In both cases, experience had taught him that it was a sign that Jeff wanted to communicate his distress and talk it through. When Jeff was angry with Michael, he tended to position his body at the far edge of the bed, and hold it rigidly straight. Usually he kept both arms outside the covers and drooping over the side of the bed. Sometimes he would even extend a leg outside the covers. It was as if he wanted to ensure he could escape from Michael easily. When he was upset with someone or something else, he tended to back his body closer to Michael when he got into bed, keep all of his limbs under the covers, and, best of all, form his body into a V-shape that put his buttocks closest to Michael. It was meant to be an invitation to embrace. If Michael didn’t react quickly enough to suit Jeff, he would turn his head and look at Michael over his shoulder.

Since they hadn’t argued and since Jeff had positioned his body invitingly close, Michael chose to interpret Jeff’s back as indicating that he was upset about something. He reached up and turned off the reading lamp on his side of the bed and then spooned his body around Jeff’s and pulled himself closer. He had to admit that it did feel good to be so close, even if the ensuing discussion might make it necessary to deal with a problem.

One of the principles taught in the Police Academy for interviewing friendly witnesses was to put them at their ease by beginning with questions that had easy answers. The idea was to relax the person by giving them something familiar to deal with before moving on to the real questions. His first questions inadvertently plunged right into the heart of the matter. “How did your writing go tonight? Come up with any good ideas?”

“Well, I produced a couple thousand words, but I don’t think any of them will be usable. We’ll see how things look tomorrow.” Jeff shifted his body about, pushed at his pillow until it was a tight roll wedged against the headboard, and pulled the sheet and blanket up under his chin. It was his usual routine when he finally settled down to go to sleep.

Michael had always wondered if the sequence was a conscious series of actions that Jeff associated with sleep or if it was just something he did automatically. “I’m sure it will look fine tomorrow.” Michael began lightly stroking Jeff’s chest and stomach.

Jeff caught Michael’s hand and interlaced his fingers with Michael’s. He held it tightly, preventing Michael from moving it, and pulled it away from his body. “I don’t know. I kept seeing images from those videos. Some of their nastiness crept into the sketches as I was writing. Parts of it got very dark.”

“I thought Five Worlds was supposed to be a dark saga.”

“Yeah, but not mean-spirited. It’s a coming-of-age saga. The Eagle Prince is being challenged by various tests and strict teachers, but they’re not cruel. He and his friends are supposed to be proving themselves worthy of leading the Ice Imperium. Tonight I crossed the line in creating the scenario for the next challenge. I introduced an evil demon and then wrote myself into a corner. The devil kept taunting and tempting the Eagle Prince and his companions. Some of them even began to give way to temptation.”

“There are evil demons in the real world. Even Eagle Princes of the Ice Imperium have to face them at some point.” Michael pushed his body up in the bed and lifted his head so that he could see Jeff’s face.

“I know that. I just want to keep them away from my life. I don’t want any Carma Klowns in my work.” Jeff rolled over, still within the circle of Michael’s arms and buried his face in Michael’s chest. “I’ll probably have to delete everything I wrote tonight and start over tomorrow.”

“I wish I could do that in my job. At least your evils are fictions.”

“You want the real evils to be as easy to conquer as the fictional ones.”

“Yeah. I’d like that. Can you write that into my life? It would make my job easier.”

“I’d would if I could.”

“I know you would.” Michael pulled Jeff even closer and kissed his forehead. “And that makes my job bearable and my life worthwhile, O Eagle Prince, king of my heart.”

“You wish.” Jeff laughed and snuggled in even closer. “Oh, I did think of two things. In those videos, at least in the ones I saw, there is a point when the victim counts out a stack of money.”

“Right. That happens in all the videos.”

“You’d have to look at them again and check me on this, but I think each time the victim holds the first bill so that the camera can see it’s a $100 bill, but then he holds the rest of the bills so that they face away from the camera. It all looks natural, but I was thinking that maybe only the first bill is a hundred and the rest are just ones or pieces of green paper. You know, so it looks as if the victim has intentionally brought a large sum of money to pay for sex. Well, not sex, you know what I mean. So there might not be any large cash withdrawals from their accounts. It could be a deception to mislead you.”

“That’s a good point. Thanks. I’ll check into it. What’s the second thing?”

“Some of the people in the video are wearing watches. At least in the videos I saw, most of the time they’re shown from their right side and the watches aren’t visible, but I wondered if maybe at some point a watch was shown clearly. You might be able to get a time from that. You wouldn’t know a.m. or p.m., but you could check their schedules and see if you could eliminate one or the other.”

“That’s great. I hadn’t thought of that. It would really be a help to know when the videos were made.”

“Well, it’s just a thought.” His message delivered, Jeff took a deep breath and relaxed. Within a minute, he was sleep, his chest pressed against Michael’s torso and their feet and legs intertwined. Michael lay there, the images from The Carma Klown videos circulating through his mind. The scenarios Jeff wrote for the video games produced by Jacoby and Greene often featured carnage and destruction. But for Jeff, and for Carson Jacoby and Will Greene and the other employees of their company, they were games, stories. The side of Jeff’s personality that allowed him to imagine all those horrors seldom appeared in his life outside work. Occasionally there were grandiose comments accompanied by villainous mwa-ha-ha laughter. “Die the death of a dozen cuts, you cheesy pie-shaped monstrosity,” as he sliced a pizza, or “Prepare to be eliminated, foul stain from mouth-watering source on the Grand Stud of the Universe. Queen Bleach, the ruler of Laundryland, is here to zap you away,” as the sheets went into the washer. But melodrama was usually the only intrusion he allowed into his real life—or at least what I hope he thinks is his real life, thought Michael. A real life where there are no magic swords or wise wizards or saints or virtuous princesses. Just demons and deadly dragons. All we can do is hold each other, thought Michael. I hope that that will always be enough to make the demons disappear and keep people like The Carma Klown from contaminating us.