Ruth was busy untangling a mini plastic penis keychain from her hair when the door to the shop clanged open. She gave the metal chain another futile tug as she glanced towards the entrance.
Two uniformed policemen were shuffling into the store, studiously ignoring the plethora of adult video displays, the wall of fuzzy handcuffs, and the artful dildo tower. Their eyes wandered over precisely all of it.
Ruth got a swooping sick feeling. While it was entertaining to watch the men flinchingly avoid eye contact with the life-size blow up doll behind the counter, Ruth still couldn’t look at police officers without feeling the need to fess up to some unknown wrongdoing.
“Afternoon, kid,” said the first officer. Kid? This was the Adult Outlet in Box, NY, not a salty Western saloon. Feeling ancient at twenty-six, Ruth might even have preferred ma’am.
Ruth recognized him as Deputy Clint Yates. His towering height and his shiny bald head were memorable.
“Hi,” she replied. She gave an awkward halting wave. The keychain finally dislodged and fell to the glass counter with a clank. They all looked down at it in an agonizing sync.
“I’m Deputy Hansen, and this is Detective Yates,” He shrugged a shoulder at his pasty counterpart. “Would you mind answering a couple of questions for us?” Ruth had a sneaking suspicion that Detective Yates was the very same officer who blessed her with her first speeding ticket, but she couldn’t be sure. She had been crying too hard to see his face. In the cold light of the store, he was less an intimidating hard ass than a man with a sweet baby face accentuated by a patchy attempt at a goatee. His slumped stature ensured that the Deputy towered over him.
“Sure?” she replied. She sneaked a glance behind her, towards the backroom. The door was opened slightly, but Darlene probably had her headphones at full blast. Backup wasn’t on the table.
“How many people would you say come here everyday?” asked the deputy. Ruth started sweating like she was back at her second SAT retake.
“Hard to say.” Was that a flighty response? Did she seem shifty? “Could be forty, could be a hundred?” There was probably a good ballpark somewhere in that range, but the officers’ eyebrows raised skeptically. Ruth wished that she’d done a more thorough dusting job this week. Despite the fact that there was a decent stream of clientele, the store somehow always looked like it hadn’t been patronized since the mid-eighties.
“Is there a manager here we can talk to?” Ruth crossed her arms.
“That would be me.” Not technically true, but well worth throwing both men for a loop. They exchanged a private look, the likes of which Ruth was painfully familiar.
“Do you know who was working here last Friday at around 3:30 in the afternoon?”
“I’d have to check the schedule,” Ruth said. They both shifted their weight impatiently. “But I think it was probably my sister Darlene.” She half wanted to keep up appearances that they had the business acumen to hire more employees, and half just wanted to appease these men so they’d leave. She knew it was Darlene. Friday afternoons always saw a spike in customers scrambling to find something to spice up the coming weekend, and Darlene, who fed off of that energy, preferred Fridays.
“Could you give us her contact information?”
“Uh, okay,” Ruth said, and pulled out a pamphlet on proper BDSM aftercare technique on which to jot down Darlene’s email address. She felt a pang of guilt about giving her nineteen year-old sister’s contact information out willingly, but she slid it over to the officers. They both looked at the page as though it might bite them, which gave her enough courage for a question of her own.
“May I ask what this is about?”
Deputy Yates molded his face into a grimace that Ruth figured was supposed to be a condescending smile.
“It’s part of an ongoing investigation. We need some information about one of your customer’s whereabouts on Friday night.”
Ruth’s mind felt as blank and panicked as she had during the last time she’d been cold called in high school history class. Friday customers? She couldn’t even remember whether she’d remembered to turn off the stove at the apartment.
“One of our customers?” Ruth felt like a moron parroting his words back, but it seemed a better choice than staying silent and possibly appearing guilty of some unknowable crime.
“The name’s Rusty McCabe? Does the name ring a bell?” Deputy Yates leaned on the counter in a painful facsimile of a casual stance. Ruth instinctively took a step backwards.
She knew the name. One of the few customers of their shop that ever struck up a conversation at the register. He was a regular, but not the usual sort. He never lingered over the edges of the store, gaze flickering feverishly to the counter in case Ruth or Darlene were observing his particular interests. Rusty always burst through the doors like he was making a grand entrance in a spunky broadway musical, strode over to the counter and broke into a long winded description of a very specific fetish object he was in the market for. He always wanted a detailed explanation and price point comparison of the various products. The man felt no shame, and he didn’t know volume control.
Darlene adored Rusty’s regular visits, and often indulged him in a hearty debate over the merit of edible condoms or the like. Ruth always found herself trying very hard not to ask him if he’d ever heard of Google, for the love of God.
“Ma’am?” the deputy prompted. Ruth felt a jolt of electric panic. She was supposed to say something here.
“Rusty… McCabe. He might have been in here, I’m not sure.”
She was sure. He and Darlene had enjoyed an agonizing conversation about the proper material for handcuffs a few days ago. It must have been Friday, and Ruth vividly remembered wishing that her sister had done less meticulous research on chafing, for the sake of the conversation finally reaching a natural end. She then remembered wondering how Rusty’s wife really felt about the ever growing repertoire of sexual acts her husband must be adding to biweekly. At which point she remembered having the delightful revelation that she still had a stamp left in her Gordy’s Gourmet Pizza punch card, which even more conclusively meant it was Friday.
Deputy Yates eyed the stack of paper strewn across the counter. Somewhere in there was Rusty’s clumsy signature, but at this point Ruth knew that she had to save everyone the trouble of this conversation lasting a second longer than a hasty goodbye.
“You know what, yes. I think he was. Yes, sometime in the afternoon.” Ruth picked off a long hangnail, and then sucked in a quick breath.
Detective Yates cleared his throat.
“Thank you, this has been of great help,” he announced gravely, and took a quick note on his spiral notebook. Ruth thought absurdly of Blues Clues as he crossed his final t and then flipped it shut with a flourish.
“Have a nice day, sweetheart,” said the Deputy. He gave a solemn nod and they both began their retreat.
The second their searching eyes weren’t pointed at her, Ruth felt a rush of vindictiveness.
“It’s buy one fleshlight get one half off today, in case you were interested before you go!” She called.
The two men turned back at her. Deputy Yates sucked on his teeth, white faced, while Detective Hansen turned beet red. He finally let out a snorting laugh that sounded downright painful. Suddenly, they were at a stalemate.
The moment passed, and the two officers hustled out.
The second the bell in the doorway tinkled shut, Ruth sagged to the countertop. She felt all of the blood drain out of her face.
Darlene was going to have a field day.
—
Darlene jammed her left headphone dangerously close to her ear drum in an attempt to fully immerse herself in her current song selection. It was a slow day, which meant that it was her time to brainstorm uninterrupted in the Outlet’s tiny, cramped storeroom. She periodically glanced down at the dusty monitor of the shop’s decade old computer as she hastily copied down the phone she would need to call to inquire about the use of a decrepit billboard on I-90. Underneath this, she scrawled some thoughts on a post-it-note.
better advertising ???
get quote, check w/ Lisa
She delicately placed the memo along the computer monitor’s rim. It joined a rainbow of similar notices, many overlapping to the point of illegibility. Ruth lovingly referred to this patchwork mess as Darlene’s idea graveyard.
She paused for a moment, satisfied with her latest scheme, before cranking up the volume on her phone another two notches and kicking up her feet on a box of dust-covered Playboys. Ruth had told her countless times that she’d rather Darlene kept the noise low enough so she could hear her scream for help in the event of an axe murderer coming into the shop, and Darlene paused momentarily at this thought. She couldn’t help but impassionately imagine Ruth fending off a ruthless criminal with nothing but a ten inch dildo in one hand and steel spreader bar in the other. If she thought they were at serious risk of getting robbed and/or serial killed at 12:21 pm on a Monday, she might have paused to feel bad about how much she enjoyed that image.
Instead, she selected her playlist titled “business bitch” and set her focus towards the spreadsheet of inventory that needed restocking. Between her intense focus and the calming sounds of Britney Spears, thoughts of Ruth completely disappeared. The only thing powerful enough to knock Darlene off her game was the abrasive chime of a text message notification that rudely cut off Britney mid-sentence.
Darlene tried to ignore the urge to check the notification for a noble three seconds before flipping over her phone and taking a peek. Seeing a text from her former high school classmate, June, was not out of the ordinary. As some of the unlucky few who never moved out of Box after graduation, they frequently relied on one another to exchange tired in-jokes and town gossip. The content of this message, however, was far from their usual fare.
holy shit my dad just told me that someone got murdered???
After rereading the message two more times, Darlene still couldn’t bring herself to believe it was true. It wasn’t that she had a storybook vision of her hometown in mind; she had just thought that the typical level of local government corruption and an uncontrolled meth trade was the extent of the crime problem. Still, June’s father was a police officer, and a notoriously loose-lipped one at that.
Darlene furiously typed the first response she could think of, her fingers flying so fast that one of her poorly self-applied acrylic nails began to dislodge from her pointer finger. Her headphones flopped out of her ears and abruptly clattered on the desk as if to further announce the dramatic nature of the situation.
what the actual fuck?? who???
She absently attempted to jam the loose nail back into its rightful position while she anticipated a reply, feeling oddly as if she was waiting to hear the insane plot twist of a low budget soap opera as opposed to news about an actual tragedy. Her phone buzzed again a moment later, and she scrambled to unlock the screen to get more information.
some old guy idk. my dads being really weird about it so it must be some freaky shit, definitely murder. he didn’t tell me more but im gonna ask
Darlene shot out of her seat, suddenly unsettled by her solitude. With urgency, she hurtled herself towards the office door in a single bound, swinging it open only to be greeted by the sight of a startled Ruth rushing into the office at a similar clip. Ruth was forced to jump out of the way to avoid being bashed in the face by Darlene’s arrival.
“You won’t believe who just-” Ruth started, but Darlene couldn’t possibly wait another second.
“Apparently someone got killed! Like, actual murder,” Darlene announced unceremoniously.
A moment of silence passed between the two, and Darlene watched Ruth’s expression go from annoyed to vaguely horrified.
“Wait, but then…” Ruth began quietly, her brow furrowed in a mixture of confusion and concern.
“June told me about it just now, because her dad is on the case, I guess? And it’s some old guy but I don’t know-”
“June shouldn’t go around telling everyone about stuff like that.” It was Ruth’s turn to cut her sister off.
Darlene’s mouth slammed shut immediately, and she blinked in surprise, processing the information slowly but surely.
“Well yeah, sure.”
“It was… I mean… they were asking about Rusty.”
“Oh,” Darlene said. “So, Rusty is…”
The words ‘gone’, ‘dead’, and ‘murdered’ all rattled around in Darlene’s throat, but none emerged. For a moment, the tinny sound of XM Radio playing on low volume over the shop’s outdated sound system filled the space between the two. Then, the chime of the doorbell announced the arrival of a wide-eyed young couple fresh off of the interstate.
“Hi, let us know if you need any help,” Ruth called out, stilted but professional.
Darlene angled her body so the customers couldn’t see her sour expression. Without another word, she returned to her post in the storeroom.