We parked in a “customer only” parking place and went inside the compact showroom. It was ten to three when an eager salesman zeroed in on us. We must have looked like live ones. “Can I interest you in some carpet today?” he asked, rubbing his hands together.
I shook my head. “Actually, we’re here looking for the owner. Is he in?”
The man shrugged and glanced down at his watch. “Mr. Damm isn’t available right now, not for ten minutes or so.” He pointed toward one side of the room, where we saw a counter with a woman sitting behind it. “That’s Mr. Damm’s secretary. You’ll have to talk to her.”
We walked over to the counter. The secretary was a reasonably attractive sweet young thing in her early twenties. She had that funny, nerve-wracking blink of people who have yet to master the art of comfortably wearing their contact lenses. The most noticeable thing about her, however, were her fingernails. They were at least two inches long. Each. It crossed my mind that typing couldn’t be a major part of her job description. A brass plate on the counter told us her name was Cindy.
“We’re here to see Mr. Damm,” I said when she looked up at me and blinked.
“Was he expecting you?” she asked.
“No, we’re here on police business.” I held out my ID. She took it, holding it close to her face to read it. Even with the contacts, she must have been terrifically nearsighted.
“He’ll be out in about…” She held her watch up to her face. “In about five minutes now. You can talk to him then. If you’d like to have a chair…”
She motioned us into two blue side chairs across from the counter, and we settled down to wait. It wasn’t long before a tiny alarm on the secretary’s watch went off. She got up and hurried to a door halfway down a short hallway behind her. I had known there was a doorway there, and from the outside it looked ordinary enough. When she opened it, however, I could tell it was anything but ordinary.
The inside of the door was covered with fur. Fake white fur. The kind you’d expect to find on a soft, stuffed Easter bunny in some little kid’s Easter basket. The secretary disappeared into a room, closing the door behind her.
I nudged Al. “Did you get a load of that?”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This must be our lucky day,” he said.
Moments later the secretary reappeared. “Mr. Damm will see you now,” she announced. “In his office. This way, please.” Since she stood holding the fur-lined door open and motioning for us to enter, that had to be the place. We got up and walked inside.
Outside the door, the interior of Damm Fine Carpets looked like any other fluorescent-lit, modern storefront and warehouse, but walking through the door into Richard Damm’s office was like entering another world. I had never seen an office anything like it. It was dark for one thing, the heavy, oppressive darkness of a dim bar or darkened theater when you first come in from outside and your eyes haven’t adjusted to the light.
Big Al and I stopped long enough to get our bearings while the door swished shut behind us. The better part of the wall to the right of the door was made up of a huge, dimly lit fish tank complete with a wide variety of colorful fish. Beside the aquarium, in one corner of the room was a small fountain where beads of water cascaded down in a circle around a statuette of a naked lady.
At the far end of the room was a seating area-a conversation pit I think they call them-facing a complex home entertainment center. The back of a man’s head was barely visible over the top of the couch. He was seated directly in front of a color television set that was playing the credits to some afternoon program. On either side of the set were a series of four VCRs, all of them with red lights glowing.
By now, our eyes had adjusted to the light enough so that details of the room gradually became clearer. The secretary had called it an office, but there was no sign of a desk or a file cabinet. Directly across from us was a fully equipped, well-stocked bar, and to our left was a tiny efficiency kitchen. The place didn’t look like an office at all. It was a home away from home.
There were no windows in the room. The carpeting, plush white, not only covered the floor, but ran halfway up the walls wherever walls were visible. It reminded me of a padded cell. For all I know, it was a padded cell.
Richard Damm didn’t bother to get up. “Come on in,” he called. “I always watch ”General Hospital‘ during lunch, but it’s over now.“
He was fiddling with a remote control. The program credits disappeared and a movie came on. He had evidently stopped a video in midstream, because the action was already well in progress.
It was one of those Debbie-Does-Dallas kinds of porno flicks, one the first amendment never should have protected in the first place. I thought Big Al’s eyes were going to pop right out of his head when he saw what was happening on the screen.
I suppose I shouldn’t make fun of Al. I wasn’t exactly immune myself. When the sound track got too graphic, Damm finally turned off the volume, but not the machine. Without bothering to take his eyes from the movie, he motioned for us to sit down. “I’m Richard Damm,” he said shortly. “What can I do for you?”
The owner of Damm Fine Carpets was your basic low-brow voyeur with all the class and style of a K-Mart blue-light special. He was probably in his mid to late fifties with a luxurious headful of wavy silver hair and a matching mustache. A closer examination revealed that the mustache was his. The hair wasn’t.
He was definitely not a staid, three-piece-suit, coat-and-tie man. He was wearing a gaudy blue-and-white Hawaiian shirt with white slacks and turquoise boat shoes. The top three buttons on his palm-tree-covered shirt were unbuttoned, exposing far too much of a totally hairless chest. He wore not one but three long gold chains and lots of sickly sweet froufrou water. I figured the chains were as phony as the hair. The bony remains of a Kentucky Fried Chicken lunch sat on the coffee table in front of him.
“Help yourself to a drink,” he suggested.
“No thanks,” I said. “We’re on duty.”
“Coffee, then? It’s already made.”
“No thank you. Nothing. We’re in a hurry.” I was trying my best to keep the questions on track, to keep my mind from wandering away from the point of our visit, but Debbie and her antics with the men from Dallas were interfering with my train of thought.
“We’re looking for one of your employees,” I said.
For the first time, Richard Damm glanced away from the writhing living-color bodies on his television screen. He seemed mildly interested. “Which one?” he asked.
Al and I sat down side by side on the couch. “Larry Martin,” I answered.
Richard Damm sighed, punched his remote control, and froze a mass of naked, nubile bodies in midscrew. “That little shit,” he said. “I’m looking for him, too.”
“He didn’t come to work today?”
“That’s right. He left a note saying that he was taking this week off. The whole goddamned week, when I’ve got twenty-three installations scheduled. He can take the rest of his life off, for all I care. If he shows his face around here again, I’ll fire his ass.”
Damm got up, walked to the kitchen, and came striding back with a stack of Styrofoam cups and a coffeepot. “A hell of a lot of thanks a guy gets for trying to help.”
In his agitation, Damm must have forgotten I had told him we didn’t want coffee. Truth be known, he probably hadn’t been listening. He poured coffee into three cups, passed one each to Al and me, then flopped back down on the couch with his own. He punched a button on the remote control and the bodies on the screen resumed their impossible contortions.
“What do you mean, ”thanks“?” I asked.
Richard Damm shook his head. “Larry’s been straight for five years, give or take. I figured he had his act together, that I could trust him. But now this.”
He lit a cigarette and pulled a brimming ashtray within easy reach.
“Straight?” I asked. “I don’t understand.”