The Ultimate Exit Strategy, page 1
THE ULTIMATE
EXIT STRATEGY
by Nikki Baker
A Virginia Kelly Mystery
Book 4
ReQueered Tales
Los Angeles • Toronto
2022
The Ultimate Exit Strategy
A Virginia Kelly Mystery, Book 4
by Nikki Baker
Copyright © 1996 by Nikki Baker.
Cover design: Dawné Dominique, DusktilDawn Designs.
First American edition: August 1996
This edition: ReQueered Tales, April 2022
ReQueered Tales version 1.28
Kindle edition ASIN: B0xxxxxxxx
Print edition ISBN-13: 978-1-951092-53-5
For more information about current and future releases, please contact us:
E-mail: requeeredtales@gmail.com
Facebook (Like us!): www.facebook.com/ReQueeredTales/
Twitter: @ReQueered
Instagram: www.instagram.com/requeered/
Web: www.ReQueeredTales.com
Blog: www.ReQueeredTales.com/blog
Mailing list (Subscribe for latest news): https://bit.ly/RQTJoin
ReQueered Tales is a California General Partnership.
All rights reserved. © 2022 ReQueered Tales unless otherwise noted.
BY NIKKI BAKER
THE VIRGINIA KELLY NOVELS
In the Game (1991)
The Lavender House Murder (1992)
Long Goodbyes (1993)
The Ultimate Exit Strategy (1996)
ABOUT NIKKI BAKER
Nikki Baker was born in 1962. In the Game was her first novel, tossed off as a bit of lark and diversion, and published by Barbara Grier and Donna McBride’s Naiad Press in 1991. Written in the spirit of pulp fiction, featuring a black lesbian as hero, her Virginia Kelly mystery series charmed readers instantly. The Lavender House Murder, set in Provincetown, followed in 1992. By the time the third book, Long Goodbyes, appeared in 1993, a substantial audience had grown and the second book had been nominated for a Lambda Literary Lesbian Mystery Award. Kelly’s final appearance, The Ultimate Exit Strategy, was published in 1996. Ms Baker, throughout, remained a bit mysterious herself. In the 25 years since, fans have continued to clamour for fresh adventures, and ponder about Kelly’s ongoing relationships.
ReQueered Tales is proud to restore this engaging series to print and thanks the retiring Ms Baker for coming out of retirement this little bit. A whole new generation of fans awaits and many friends are here to renew their acquaintance with Virigina Kelly.
Praise for the Nikki Baker Mysteries
“Like Baker’s other books, The Ultimate Exit Strategy is too good to miss.”
— Megan Casey,
The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel
“Long Goodbyes is a rollicking story, part murder mystery … Zigzagging between sleazy motels and malls filled with piped Christmas carols, Virginia also resolves some unexplained deaths. Baker’s sharp wit and marvelous ability to read meaning in mundane domestic details add zest to her tongue-in-cheek style.”
— Publishers Weekly
“The Lavender House Murder has adventure, romance, and some of the best internal dialogue anywhere.”
— Meagan Casey
“Nikki Baker’s second novel is one of the best mysteries Naiad has published … Baker has produced a winning character in Ginny Kelly … Read it by the fire one cold autumn night, then smugly recommend Nikki Baker to your friends.”
— Deneuve
“In the Game marks the auspicious debut of a black writer who brings us a sharp, funny and on-the-mark murder mystery. ”
— Northwest Gay & Lesbian Reader
“… an entertaining assortment of female characters makes Baker’s debut promising …”
— Publishers Weekly
“It is a refreshing change to see real-life lesbians with real-life terrors and real-life anger on the pages of a novel …”
— Washington Blade
The Ultimate
Exit Strategy
by Nikki Baker
Baker is back.
Thanks to Kelly, Bella, and Juliet.
Acknowledgments
The quote on page 134 is from The Lover by Marguerite Duras, translated by Barbara Bray, Pantheon Books, New York, translation copyright 1985 by Random House, Inc. The passage used is from pages 4-5.
I
I went down not so hard, really. Gently enough that it felt almost peaceful – the way they say it feels to drown. I remembered considering exactly this in those few slow-moving seconds it took for my body to crumple, an oddly unhurried, unharried thought as I dropped the short distance of my height to the cool, hard floor. It was as if my mind were a prism, perfectly focusing a million coursing streams of time through the blink of an eye, like tons of water in the narrowing nozzle of a fire hose. My thoughts came intensely, a flood, carrying the sordid debris of events that had led to this unfortunate position. I imagined for a moment it was the force of all that sudden clarity that held me helplessly pressed against the floor. But really, I had just fallen – the way people are always falling, with every step, a whole lifetime of lurching forward and handily regaining our balance, just seconds before we crash chin first. I’d stepped away from Wesley Winslow’s bathroom sink, and this time I couldn’t stop myself. On this occasion, my timing was off in so many ways.
Queen of the road. Oddly the last thought I’d had was of Naomi singing, the memory of a few days before, Columbus Day. She had been sitting Indian-style, crooning hoarsely, No girls, no pool, no pets, reinventing this musical list of misfortunes in a way she clearly believed was very clever.
Ain’t got no cigarettes. This, Naomi caterwauled most ruefully as she had planned the next day to embark on the difficult regimen of smoking cessation her internist had demanded.
I was reading aloud the cautionary selections from the Nicoderm patient information – a flimsy paper pamphlet folded about a million times to accommodate its inclusion in the Nicoderm packaging – by way of homemade aversion therapy: It is possible to get too much Nicotine (an overdose), especially if you use the Nicoderm Patch and smoke at the same time. The threats of various dangers continued for a good many more scary paragraphs, rendered in tiny black print, and illustrated with diagrams of complicated organic chemicals.
Still, that evening Naomi was smoking through her remaining carton of Marlboro Lights and managing her separation trauma with Xanax. She shook out a palm full of pills from the orange prescription bottle and offered me one, two, three, some for now, some for later, extolling their virtues. Don’t you need a little peace of mind? A good night’s sleep?
“You’ll thank me; you’ll feel better. You’ll be better.” Naomi promised as if I were sick, an end to the angst I wasn’t even aware I needed to subdue in the single white pill deftly extricated from its brothers. She tucked the lonely pharmacological soldier in the change purse of my billfold. “Trust me; you need it.” I supposed she was right; it had been a rough few months that promised to get rougher.
Which was Naomi’s point; she’d had her troubles too and she had emerged from their crucible burnished into a better person with the help of Xanax and psychotherapy, and, of course, a stiff upper lip, which was not to be discounted. In July her girlfriend, Maria Sacchi, a twenty-six year old “spin” aerobics instructor at the East Bank Athletic Club had left her stumbling around six bedrooms, four baths and a formal library, filled with mass-market paperbacks which Naomi had expressly created and furnished to suit Maria, as if a particularly fussy issue of Martha Stewart’s Living had exploded.
“But the point is,” Naomi gave a rattle of her Xanax for emphasis, “I’ve grown from my mistakes.”
Not the least of these had been completely remodeling the two flats of her historic, graystone apartment building in De Paul at Maria Sacchi’s gold digging insistence. In little more than a month and a half, Maria had transformed Naomi’s long-time digs from comfortable bachelorette quarters with rental income into a small single-family mansion painted in rag-rolled celadon and taupe, which, according to Maria’s decorator, Falko, were the colors for the next millennium. I could agree that taupe certainly had been a mistake. Not that the whole ugly mess wasn’t something anyone, Naomi included, had not seen coming, but breakups are a lot like head-on collisions – even in anticipation there’s not very much you can do.
I had been watching the end of my own relationship come at me like telltale high beams glowing over the crest of a hill. So, at nearly ten o’clock at the close of a very long weekend, Naomi and I were drinking fatalistically to the ends of our respective love affairs – Naomi’s with nicotine and mine with Spike McMann. We’d enjoyed a companionable evening since early on I had conceded that Naomi’s suffering was far worse than my own as she was not to be outdone – least of all in the quality of her misery.
As for my misery, Naomi had been my friend long enough for me to know she had the emotional depth of a two-speed blender: hard and harder with no setting at all for empathy. Whatever changed in my life, I took a measure of comfort that Naomi’s high marks for hard-hearted consistency would never waver.
Through the drapeless floor-to-ceiling glass, the Chicago skyline sparkled into Naomi’s living room. Looking south, there was the Field Museum. East there was the lake and beyond that Saugatuck, the gay summer Mecca where Naomi’s ex-lover, Maria Sacchi, was now living with a woman who designed same-sex commitment jewelry.
While we were waiting for the walls to talk, I continued to cite the Nicoderm pamphlet: “Signs of an overdose include bad headaches, dizziness, drooling, vomiting, weakness, cold sweats.” Naomi blew a dissolute line of smoke at her vaulted ceiling as if simply hearing this litany of overdose symptoms had brought about the promised weakness. Had she been an equity investment, you could have called Naomi Wolf a “pure play.” She was the oil company that limits itself to the business of drilling, the electric company that only delivers electricity. If for me, mongrelized emotions ran together like too many servings of bad, smorgasbord food on a cramped buffet plate, Naomi knew exactly what she wanted. I envied the crystalline quality of her emotions, all cordoned off into the appropriate compartments – no spillover – neat and homogenized like the artificially-colored portions of salt and preservatives offered up in the TV dinners of my youth.
Growing up, my sister Adeline and I had begged for them, Please, please, please Swanson’s fried chicken, ogling the frost-covered, open freezers at the IGA grocery store, and wheedling shamelessly because my mother considered this fast food to be heretical, palpable evidence of the movement of upstanding Black folks towards a lifestyle indistinguishable from the ways of white trash. A fried chicken back, carrots and peas in their own little private soup of melted butter, heated for twenty short minutes in an oven – no flour-sticky-on-the-counter, all-day-frying smell – to be served to two little, pig-tailed Negro princesses on TV trays in the TV room of our tri-level, suburban, nearly TV-family house. That picture epitomized what I had wanted from my life, present and future: the bland, prepackage, Anglo control that seemed to elude my parents – two adults who raised their voices not only at their children, but at each other as well. Ours were volatile temperaments, patently unsuitable for a Midwestern, Wonderbread existence.
This obsession with the neat, tidy corners of The Good Life had driven me to business school, to a crass, tiny-brained curriculum devoted to the acquisition, care and feeding of capital. But somehow I’d missed the boat. I’d spent the long bull market of the 1990s watching for the next great scam, jealously eyeing the lucky few who’d come upon independent means the old fashion way – inheriting it.
My father was a steelworker’s son made good enough to attend his regionally prestigious college, upgrade to his nationally prestigious graduate school, and plateau in a comfortable, even affluent, home and a job in upper middle management. His position, troublingly, was the mirror of my own (as if, as I had often suspected in so many other personal venues, I was doomed to repeat the lives of my parents), a comfortable situation with all the trappings of power, if none of the kick. Dad had managed just a nice enough living to educate me on what I was missing. If I lasted, like my old man, for thirty-plus years of mediocre employment, this girl could look forward with sweaty satisfaction to nothing more than the rewards of time-in-grade, nothing beyond the expectation of a gold-plated watch and a handshake lunch in twenty or so more years – that is until lately.
Lately, there was the offer by Gold Rush Investments, a big Kansas City money manager. They wanted to buy Whytebread, Greese, Winslow and Sloat – lock, stock and barrel. That meant that Whytebread stock, which junior partners like me had bought mostly for the sake of job security – that in the past had been traded nowhere except back to the company at retirements for pennies more than what had been paid for it – would be exchanged for shares of NYSE-traded Gold Rush stock and cash.
Still, that afternoon, by the time I’d deposited my soon to be ex-girlfriend, Spike McMann, at the United Airlines departures curb of Chicago O’Hare Airport, I needed a drink the way a Peter Pan collar needs some nice pearl earrings and a matching necklace. Our weekend rendezvous had deteriorated rapidly from terrific to tense. It was two months and counting since Spike and I had last had sex and two weeks more since I had ceased to care, proving that even in the face of my Lottery Jackpot-sized good fortune, money couldn’t reliably purchase marital bliss.
“Listen, honey,” Naomi fortified our glasses with another slosh of scotch from the handsome bottle, “all that proves is that you just don’t know where to shop.” I’d resisted the temptation to revisit her financial arrangements with Maria Sacchi. Even in her peculiar dyke grudge, Spike was at least economically self-sufficient, even upwardly mobile in her ambitions as a restaurateur.
Spike, née Mary Ellen McMann, and I had been reunited four years before at my ten year high school reunion, back in Blue River, a Midwestern town so completely mired in the archetype of Sinclair Lewis Americana that I had found my growing up years impossible to explain to the procession of city girls I had been fucking. Blue River was a village, a town so small that you had to drive to the next biggest one twenty miles away to buy underwear. No, I’d told the citified and suburban girlfriends alike, there was no mall. Aside from the desire to escape, my small town upbringing had left me with certain antiquated, stiff-backed sensibilities I couldn’t seem to shake no matter how far I ran from my origins: honor, duty, guilt, a lack of surprise at the highway billboards reading, Got problems? Read the Bible.
“Oh honey,” Naomi pronounced, “you are a rube,” appalled at the notion that in this day and age there could be somewhere in America without a Victoria’s Secret Outlet. She’d chalked up my sticky involvement with Spike as just another unfortunate symptom of my lack of exposure.
But there it was. Spike and I had grown up together in the same provincial, little enclave where my parents still lived, oblivious of the social and technological shopping advances that the rest of the world had come to take for granted, and where Spike had returned after cooking school in New York City to open a restaurant, Spike’s, perhaps, because for all of its narrowness Blue River was still her home.
Somehow, though, in the intervening years between high school and the present, Spike-Mary Ellen had evolved into something a little less straight forward than the girl next door; and predictably, our uncomplicated one-night stand had devolved into a monogamous, committed, long-distance nightmare due in part to the presumption that being from the same tiny spot in a great big world, we understood each other’s secret hearts and in larger part to the congenial disability of lesbians to discern the difference between sex and marriage. At first that was all just fine, as if Spike and I had escaped from the same place to meet in similar emotional places. Certainly both of us wanted companionship. And there was the convenience.
With a long-distance girlfriend I had my evenings to myself, and the cachet of wanting, missing and longing for, which always seems to be more attractive than having. Now the absence wasn’t working so well, or maybe it was working too well at least for me. Really, ever since Spike had had her tongue pierced, I’d felt we’d been moving in irreconcilably different directions.
Not that her name hadn’t been an early tip-off to the woman’s unsettling penchant for self-reinvention. At twenty-five, she’d had it changed legally from Mary Ellen. At twenty-nine, only months into our romance, she had dyed her previously copperish hair a deeply unambiguous purple – not all at once, but in progressively larger patches and streaks until I looked up one day and her whole head was a totally different color than it had been when we’d met – lavender. It was not what I would have elected for my girlfriend’s hair. And it was messy. The semi-permanent dye washed out over time in rivers of grape juice-looking water; and after we made love in the shower spray, occasionally I would be disturbed to discover a peculiar cast in my own hair as if to suggest that Spike’s creeping tendency towards unorthodoxy might be catching.
