Bad Monkey

Billy Dickinson was the local state attorney, and he had no appetite for ventilating scandals.

“Sonny could still fire me,” Yancy said, “or bust me down to deputy.” Still, a misdemeanor wasn’t insurmountable, career-wise.

“What do you think of the wine?”

“Yeasty,” said Yancy, “yet playful.”

Their affair had started on a Saturday afternoon in the produce section at Fausto’s, the two of them reaching simultaneously for the last ripe avocado. From there they beelined to Bonnie’s car and sped up the highway all the way to Bahia Honda, where they spent the night, hiding from the park rangers and humping madly on the beach, carving their own private dunes. For breakfast they split the avocado.

Yancy had been aware of Bonnie’s marital status; Cliff Witt was his dermatologist at the time, always ready with a frigid zap of liquid nitrogen whenever Yancy burst into the office to present a new, ominous-looking freckle. Yancy appreciated Cliff Witt’s accessibility but knew of his reputation as a horndog perv and pill peddler.

Still, guilt fissured Yancy’s conscience when he began undressing the man’s wife. It was his first encounter with a Brazilian wax job, and rapture soon blinded him to the manifest hurdles in his path. Usually he avoided married women.

“I suppose I should go,” Bonnie said, rising. She had pale blue eyes and reddish lashes that looked gold-tipped in the light.

Yancy suggested a detour to the bedroom, and she said no. “But I’m a little drunk. Maybe a shower would wake me up.”

“There’s an idea.”

It was just like old times, Bonnie’s bare bottom slapping against the wet tile while Yancy’s heels squeaked in joyous syncopation on the rubber bath mat. Somehow they broke the soap dish off the wall and also spilled a bottle of Prell, which played havoc with Yancy’s traction. Afterward they toweled each other dry and fell into bed, and there Bonnie made a peculiar revelation.

“I am wanted in Oklahoma,” she said.

“You’re wanted here even more.”

“I’m serious. That’s why I married Cliff. I was a fugitive. Am a fugitive.”

Yancy wasn’t always a good post-coital listener, but Bonnie had gotten his attention. She said, “My real name is Plover Chase.”

“Ah.”

“The Plover Chase?”

“Okay,” Yancy said.

“I can’t believe you don’t remember the case! Stay right here.”

Naked she bounded from the sheets, returning with a French handbag that Yancy judged to be worth more than his car. From a jeweled change purse she removed a newspaper clipping that had been folded to the size of a credit card. As Yancy skimmed the article, he recalled the crime and also the steamy tabloid uproar.

Plover Chase was a schoolteacher in Tulsa who’d been convicted of extorting sex from one of her students in exchange for giving him an A on his report card. The boy was fifteen at the time; she was twenty-seven. On the day of her sentencing she’d disappeared.

“The judge was a shriveled old prick. I was looking at ten years,” Bonnie recapped. “So instead I hopped a plane to Lauderdale. Cliff’s medical office was advertising for a receptionist, and the rest is history.”

“Does he know the truth?” Yancy asked.

“Of course.” Which explained why Bonnie had stayed with him.

Yancy eyed the headline on the article: WARRANT ISSUED FOR TEACHER CONVICTED IN SEX-FOR-GRADES SCHEME. He wasn’t sure whether he should act shocked or jealous. Certainly he had nothing as sensational in his own past.

He said, “May I offer a couple of observations? One, you’re even more beautiful today than you were then.”

“That’s a mug shot, Andrew. And, FYI, a dyke named Smitty had just given me a full-on cavity search, which is why my eyeballs are bulging in that photo.”

Yancy plowed on. “Number two, ‘Bonnie’ is so much sexier than ‘Plover.’ I don’t think I could ever be intimate with a Plover—it’s just not a name that can be seriously howled in the heat of passion.”

“Cody had no trouble,” Bonnie said.

Yancy raised an eyebrow. “The teenage victim of your seduction?”

“Yeah, some victim. He knew more positions than I did.”

“Actually, Cody’s a good sturdy name. He would be, what, about thirty now?”

Bonnie said the young man had sat in the front row of her AP English class. “I have no defense for what happened. He flirted with me, fine, but so did lots of the boys. Our … whatever … only lasted a couple of weeks, and of course he blabbed to everybody. His mother was the one who went to the cops.”

“Even after you gave him an A?”

“There was no trade! Cody was an outstanding student.”

“I assume he took the stand.”

“His parents threatened to sell his Jet Ski if he didn’t testify. Apparently he’d kept a journal of everything we did and how many times we did it. His writing was quite jaunty and explicit—I should never have turned him on to Philip Roth.”

“So what was the final tally? How many trysts?”

“The jury was a horrid bunch, Andrew, leering like gargoyles.”

Yancy said, “I can only imagine.”

“Anyway, I wanted you to know the full truth, now that we’re closing the book on each other’s lives.”