Free Closet Case (Robert Rodi Essentials) by Robert Rodi

said brightly, lowering her big-hipped frame back into her own chair again. “Didn’t do badly, if I do say so myself.”
    “It does have a taste to it,” said Colonel Frank, looking into his spoon perplexedly as he lifted it again to his lips. He let a cooling puff of air issue from his lips, then tipped the spoon into his mouth and grimaced. “Nothing like the taste of lobster, unfortunately. Don’t know how you managed to mask it, Ramona, given the sheer number of the poor beasts you spent the day flinging into the pot.”
    Lionel turned to his sister Greta and gave her a quick, private look, which she returned; it was their way of acknowledging that their father and aunt were back at it again.
    Greta herself was looking more like a Big Top attraction than usual. Her hair was wildly teased and was of a strangely unnatural hue — the kind of impossible blue-black Lionel had only ever seen fifteen years earlier, on the head of a Cher doll. He would’ve wondered if it were a wig, had he not been able to catch disturbing glimpses of scalp between the wildly spiraling fibers. Greta’s dark purple makeup encircled her eyes to Lone Ranger-ish effect, then stretched out to her temples, where it curled into little drawings of stars. From afar, it looked like she’d been smacked in each eye with a live cattle prod. And she wore a ratty old sweatshirt with the arms and most of the neck ripped away (the shirt’s emblem, a crucifix made of flesh and dripping blood, was unfortunately still intact), with neon lime Lycra shorts and black Reebok high-tops with neon orange laces. She reached for her glass of milk (she still drank the stuff with the fervor and frequency of a nine-year-old) and Lionel noticed a Cleopatra-like armband biting into her biceps.
    He choked back any comment on Greta’s haute couture, and instead flickered a smile at her and said, “Not the same without Killer.”
    Greta shook her head and licked away her milk mustache. “Poor old Killer,” she said with real emotion. It was the only point on which she and Lionel were still in complete accord, and it was about the only thing they had left to talk about: the good old days with good old Killer.
    Before Lionel could continue in this vein, his father jumped in. “How’s business, son?”
    “Good, good,” said Lionel. He didn’t know what else he could say; he knew that his father had only the faintest understanding of what his job entailed. Almost everything that Samson X. Frank knew about advertising agencies had come from watching old episodes of Bewitched. He still occasionally made the mistake of presuming that Lionel came up with all the ideas for his clients’ ads, and then wrote and drew them himself. That Lionel did none of this puzzled him to no end. What, then, did he do? Lionel hadn’t yet managed a satisfactory reply.
    “I saw an, I saw an All-Pro Power Tools commercial yesterday on The Joan Rivers Show,” said Aunt Ramona as she swirled the ice cubes in her glass of tea (another of her annoying habits). “I forgot what it was about — well, there was such a, there was such a good-looking young man on it, I remember that much, he —”
    “Chainsaw?” said Lionel at once, his spoon poised to enter his mouth.
    “Yes, chainsaws, that’s the one,” she said brightly. “Clever of you, clever of you to remember. That one had some funny lines in it …” She stopped swirling the cubes and stared into space for a few seconds. “Can’t remember any of them now …”
    “Well, you’re not the only one who got a kick out of it,” said Lionel between gulps of bisque (which, contrary to his father’s opinion, tasted quite wonderfully lobstery). “It just won an award. Matter of fact, we get to go to the awards banquet in a few weeks and go up to the podium and accept it and everything.”
    Aunt Ramona raised her eyebrows and in a hushed, awed voice said, “Like the Academy, like the Academy Awards?”
    “Kind of,” Lionel