“Okay.”
And moments later Sam Niles was giggling more hilariously than before, because, by God, it worked! He knew she would soon be beside herself with jealousy, curiosity and debilitating rage. Then Sam began chuckling in earnest, his body and bed shaking.
Finally Kimberly spoke again. “Sam, honey.”
“Yes?”
“No offense, but any guy who won’t screw his wife and giggles a lot really should try to get himself together on Hollywood Boulevard. Why don’t you put on my yellow miniskirt and go out strolling. You might get lucky.”
So Sam Niles angrily decided that what worked for Celeste Holm would not work on Kimberly Cutler Niles. He was not yet convinced that Oscar Wilde was right and Aristotle was wrong: that life imitates art. So he went back to television for an answer to his domestic misery And he found it on “The Late, Late Show.”
It was John Wayne telling Maureen O’Hara that there’d be no locked doors in their marriage as he broke down a three inch oak door and threw the stunning redhead onto their four-poster, breaking it to the ground.
Like so many policemen, Sam Niles was a John Wayne fan, though he had never fallen prey to the malaise the Los Angeles police psychologist called the “John Wayne Syndrome,” wherein a young hotdog responds with independence, assurance and violence to all of life’s problems and comes to believe his four inch oval shield is as large as Gawain’s ever was. Roscoe Rules, who swaggered and talked police work every waking moment and wore black gloves and figuratively shot from the hip and literally from the lip, was surely suffering from the syndrome. But though Sam Niles had never been a hotdog or black glove cop, he admired the direct, forceful, simplistic approach to life found in a John Wayne film. And he was given the chance to be the Duke that very week.
It started over Sam’s bitching about Kimberly’s cooking which like everything else in their marriage had deteriorated to the point that even she could hardly eat it. It ended with her in angry tears, which was not unusual, and running into the bathroom and locking the door, which was extremely unusual.
“Goddamn women,” Sam Niles muttered in consummate frustration, hurling his half-eaten plate of food against the wall, his stomach afire from the poisons he was manufacturing.
Sam found himself standing in front of the bathroom door, making a fist and shouting, “There’ll be no locked doors in our marriage, Kimberly Cutler Niles!”
And when there was no answer he John Wayned the door, kicking it right next to the lock and sending it crashing across the bathroom to smash into the wall and crack the porcelain toilet.
The door exploded. It made a loud boom. But nothing like the boom his Smith amp; Wesson.38 made in the hands of Kimberly Cutler Niles as she stood inside the bathroom, half out of her mind, watching the door sailing past.
Then Sam Niles was lying flat on his stomach from his feet trying to run backward. Then he was kneeling on his broken glasses pleading, “Please Kimberly! Please don’t kill me! Oh, God!” And then there was another explosion and a third, and Sam Niles was up and crashing through the aluminum screen door and running down the walk and across the street to a vacant lot where he lay trembling in the knee-high weeds, watching the front of the apartment building, waiting for a wrathful figure to emerge from the darkness. Ready to run like a turpentined cat as far as his legs could carry him from the maniacal Kimberly Cutler Niles.
The police were called by three neighbors that night, but the walls and concrete walks of the apartment building had played tricks with the sound of gunfire and no one knew the shots had come from the Niles’ apartment. It was finally thought that someone had driven by and shot up the place. Two detectives worked for three weeks on the theory that an unknown assailant had a grudge against the apartment house manager who sweated off ten pounds during the investigation. Kimberly bought a new door and toilet and had the interior bullet holes patched before she moved out and filed for her divorce.
When he was sure Kimberly was in class Sam Niles came back and got his clothes, ready to bolt out the door any second. He found his belongings on the living room floor. There was a note beside his gun which read, “Who’s got the biggest balls now, hero?”
Sam Niles never fully appreciated a John Wayne film after that night.
But he wasn’t thinking too much about Kimberly Cutler or John Wayne the night the hype blew their case away and they arrested the man who painted himself red.
Both Sam Niles and Harold Bloomguard had heard of the man who painted himself red. But prior to the contact with him he was known only as the man who painted his car red. His name was Oscar Mobley and he was fifty-eight years old, white, unmarried, lived alone, was unemployed and liked to paint his car red. It would never have been called to the attention of the Los Angeles Police Department if it weren’t for the fact that Oscar Mobley did it with a paintbrush and bucket and did it perhaps once a month. The policemen who knew him said that his fifteen year old Ford outweighed a Cadillac limousine, so thick were the coats of peeling red enamel.
And yet Oscar Mobley would probably never have become the subject of rollcall gossip if it weren’t that he would occasionally paint his headlights red and drive along Wilshire Boulevard at night, making cars pull over. Oscar Mobley had many warnings and traffic tickets over painting his headlights red, but just as it appeared that he would give up painting his headlights red, Oscar Mobley suddenly for no apparent reason painted all the windows of his car red, and unable to see through a red opaque windshield, got himself into a traffic accident on Washington Boulevard. He was ordered by a traffic court judge never ever to paint his headlights or windshield red again.
Oscar Mobley had not been heard from for several months, apparently content to have a car with red body red bumpers, red tires, red hubcaps and red grille, but with unpainted windows and headlights. Then something happened on the night Sam and Harold met Oscar Mobley.
“Seven-A-Twenty-nine, see the woman, male mental case, Eleventh and Irolo, code two.”
“Seven-Adam-Twenty-nine, roger,” Harold responded as Sam picked up speed a little and drove through the nighttime traffic to the residential neighborhood of Oscar Mobley.
“It’s about time you got here,” said the caller, Mrs. Jasper, the next door neighbor of Oscar Mobley Her hair was wet with red paint and a blue cotton dress she held in her hands was covered with the stuff. “I just asked that crazy nut Oscar why he was painting his headlights and windshield red, that’s all I did…”
“Wait a minute,” Sam Niles said as he and Harold stood in the street with Mrs. Jasper, her husband, her brother and eight other neighborhood men and women who had almost decided to lynch the frail Oscar Mobley until someone had the presence of mind to call the police.
“Oscar started to paint his car again tonight,” said Mr. Jasper, a man with receding hair and a parrot’s face, who was even more frail than Oscar Mobley and who had no stomach for fighting for Mrs. Jasper who could have licked Oscar Mobley and Mr. Jasper at the same time on her worst day.
“Yeah, we know about Oscar,” Sam Niles said.
“Well he started to paint again,” Mr. Jasper continued. “He ain’t done that for three, four months now. He won’t ever tell anyone on the street why he paints his car red and we asked him a thousand times, maybe a million. He just smiles and keeps painting and won’t answer you. Well tonight he done what the judge told him not to do, he started painting the headlights and the windows red, and my wife just came out on the front porch and asked him why.”
“That’s all I done and that crazy little…”
“Please, ma’am, one at a time,” Harold said.
“Well, my little woman just comes out and sees him there under the streetlight, painting everything red and she asks him why he’s doing it and he says something she can’t hear and she thinks at last maybe she’s gonna learn the secret of why Oscar Mobley paints his car red and she just walks over…”