When you’re trapped in a P.I. cliché you’ve got no real choice other than to plod through it and hope that you eventually step onto a trapdoor that drops you out, preferably with a soft landing on a familiar barstool.
The whole “private investigator with amnesia” bit has been done to death. I personally know a dozen bastards who’ve gone through it, and it generally doesn’t end well. I am, in fact, reasonably sure Mannix has sent flowers in my name to at least half the funerals. (Against my express wishes, since most P.I.’s are sons of bitches, and pretty much everybody who’d ever met the deceased gumshoes would consider themselves lucky as hell to erase all memories of the late, amnesiac P.I. SOB’s in question.)
I’d dodged the cliché for years, and if it weren’t for the fact that at least two hilarious subdural hematomas were currently keeping my inhibitions from giving a shit, I’d have been embarrassed to show my forgetful mug around town.
There was one extra problem that I was having to deal with in the case of my own amnesia shtick. I was suffering through the rare, causality loop variety.
For a moment I’d considered just chucking it all, taking my massive bankroll of seven bucks, and buying a ticket to Buenos Ares. But the causality loop was controlling everything I did, thought about doing, or regretted having done.
The big trouble for the amnesiac trapped inside a recurring day is not knowing if every decision is the one that he already made before, which in my case would lead straight into the path of the maniac who dropped a hammer on my skull. Every choice I made that day might be the exact one I’d already made at least once before. Maybe going to the airport was what signed my near-death warrant two nights running. Or maybe rejecting the airport and choosing to stay put is what already nearly killed me twice.
It wasn’t just the airport. The same went for buses, trains, zeppelins, interdimensional portals, Mole Man tunnels, and clicking my goddamn Florsheim heels together. Every choice I made or every choice I chose not to make could be the wrong one. Every corner I turned might be the one I already turned, every face I saw might belong to the bastards in the Rolls Royce who had twice caved in my head for fun and dumped me in that alley.
At that moment, I wasn’t turning a corner, I was hiding around one. The two faces I was looking at across the street had probably never been behind the wheel of a Rolls Royce, since one of them was the broke lady doctor to whom I owed a bundle for various contusions, cracked ribs and near-eviscerations, and neither Mr. nor Mrs. Pops had suggested that either of the two guys who’d tried to kill me was a dame.
Pops wasn’t so decrepit that he wouldn’t have noticed the shapeliness of Dr. Charlotte Cheese’s X-rated silhouette. Mrs. Pops would have sent the lady doctor to the gas chamber out of jealousy alone. My amnesia already had me trapped in one cliché. The odds of a second cliché with the big twist ending that it was the dame all along would be like a flipped coin being hit by two bolts of lightning in the same toss. (Yes, that happened at Super Bowl XIV, but lightning bolts shot from the magical hammers of broke Norse gods trying to rig the toss don’t count.)
As far as the grubby wastrel who my personal physician was impatiently watching walk toward her, neither Mr. nor Mrs. Pops would have had a problem coming up with a 100% accurate physical description if he’d been one of the bastards who’d left me for dead next to Fat-Ass Dave’s Plus-Size Furniture Emporium.
The towering beanpole was a good six-foot-seven, with no visible musculature attached to his gangly frame. He walked like an uprooted willow tree, arms and legs bending and flailing and otherwise doing their damnedest to hamper his progress as he attempted to skulk up the sidewalk. He took a seat on the park bench next to Dr. Charlotte Cheese. His big head and skinny frame gave him the appearance of a softball harpooned on the business end of a #2 pencil.
They talked. She got mad. He argued. She argued back. The meeting took all of four minutes, and when the dame doc was through, the skinny bastard’s giant noggin was hanging heavily and bobbing on his neck like the last October apple on a bare branch. The punk climbed back to his oversized canoes, stood woozily in place for a half-baked moment, got his bearings, took a step, realized he hadn’t gotten his bearings after all and nearly fell when he mistook the sky for the ground, swapped the clouds for the pavement as best as his stoner brain could, and shuffled off down the sidewalk.
Dr. Charlotte Cheese glanced around, trying her amateur best to look like she wasn’t glancing around. She waited until the bum was half a block away before she pushed herself to her feet and casually galloped across the street.
“I don’t think anybody spotted me,” she announced when she reached me, equal parts triumphant and breathless.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “Playboy models in white lab coats sprinting across Main Street in broad daylight rarely draw attention.”
She had flicked her Bic before crossing the busy road, yet somehow her hundred yard dash hadn’t extinguished the flame. Evidently fire was afraid of what she might do to it if it failed her. She ignited a fresh butt with her eternal flame and let loose a victorious burst of smoke that, for blotting out the sun, gave Krakatoa a run for its money.
“His name’s Burt. He’s a radiology technician. His girlfriend works in the ER. He’s going to have her check into any unauthorized ambulance dispatches between the hours you mentioned. Not just the alley, I got him to get her to check all over.”
“All over what?”
“Town,” she said, exhilarated from her walk on the wild side. “She’s got friends in a bunch of ERs all over the city. If there’s secret ambulance dispatches going on, I figured it might not be limited to that dump Holy Mackerel.”
I looked down the road. Burt the junkie was gone from sight. There would be no catching him before he spoke to his emergency room girlfriend.
“So, what you’re saying,” I said to Dr. Charlotte Cheese, slowly so that she might get the point of just how stupid a move she’d just made, “is that you’ve involved a second asshole in this without telling me, thus doubling the chances of blowback. Not to mention, whoever this dame is she’s obviously got a screw loose if she’s dating that homely hophead. And even dragging her in wasn’t enough for you. You changed the plan to involve an untold number of her friends. So now you’ve cast a net so wide looking for ambulances that you’ve increased the chances of this ER dame being found out by about a thousandfold. And if the bad guys question her, she’ll finger the junkie boyfriend, and he’ll point them back to you, and that path will lead them straight back to me, the guy they’ve already tried to murder twice. Great job going off script. You should join one of those improvisational comedy groups where a bunch of social wrecking balls hilariously mime ‘a visit to the gay gynecologist’s office’ for twenty minutes, to the forced laughter of all the shanghaied coworkers who couldn’t think of an excuse fast enough.”
I departed. Unfortunately, not fast enough.
The dame managed to keep pace, albeit wheezing and puffing like a busted radiator.
“What do you mean? Slow down. I’m a doctor.”
“You told me you were talking to one guy. One. That’s risky enough. Now you’ve dragged in his skirt. Is she a junkie, too?”
“How the hell should I know? I never met her.”
“And it didn’t raise about a billion red flags to you to introduce a completely unknown element into a situation that has twice resulted in me staggering into your office doing my side-splitting impersonation of a plasma-spouting Old Faithful?”
She frowned. “I didn’t think it would be a problem. He said they’ve been going out for six months.”
“Lady, I was married twenty times that long and I stopped trusting the ex-Mrs. Banyon when she started dating again. Which, incidentally, was under the gift table at our wedding reception. She busted two blenders and a waffle iron. And even if this junkie’s dame isn’t as duplicitous as my alimonial anchor, we were already risking discovery with just a limited ambulance search. Now, with that citywide vehicular manhunt you unilaterally authorized, you’ve pretty much made everywhere ground zero for us both. Bear in mind,” I added, “lest you get the wrong idea and imagine that my chivalry extends beyond my own revered ass, I use ‘us’ only for complete accuracy on who is likely to get killed as a result of your genius ad-libbing. I don’t, strictly speaking, give two shits about the you part of us. I do very much give an infinite number of shits about me. Did you know that sewage treatment plants work harder on the Friday after Thanksgiving than they do the whole rest of the year? The number of shits that are processed on that day is far, far less than the number of shits I give about myself. So thanks, sister, for dropping me in it up to my eyeballs . See you at the funeral.”
I hadn’t specified mine or hers, but she clearly concluded that the latter was the more unacceptable of the two.
“You think somebody might be after me now?” she demanded.
I was at a crosswalk. Ordinarily, motorists took aim at jokers like me just to relieve the tedium of a dull commute. But that was me alone. Unlike the rest of us mortal schlubs, Dr. Charlotte Cheese had clearly never experienced the joy of a busted “don’t walk” sign accompanied by a nonstop stream of traffic.
Even as the knockout doc was lifting one curvaceous gam from the sidewalk down to the asphalt, drivers were already slamming on brakes from here to Seattle. I heard the crunch of fender benders to the rear of the metal herd. The pasty dolt in the lead car spit in his palm and slicked his hair back. He flashed the dame a yellow smile.
“This is what you don’t get, sister,” I said, gesturing to the sudden gridlock. “I could’ve stood here until the last drop of gas on Earth dried up, and I still would’ve wound up the first chariot hit-and-run since Spartacus. You think you hit the skids when you got shit-canned from Holy Mackerel? Sweetheart, you don’t know what bottom is. Guys are always throwing themselves at your feet. Well, thanks to your med school arrogance, it’s gonna be different this time. Make sure your mortal affairs are in order, because the guys who are after you this time are out for blood.”
The babe dogged me into the street. There were a few impatient honks, probably from jealous broads or guys so blind they shouldn’t have been behind a wheel. Construction workers on the skeleton of a nearby building-in-progress succumbed to the stereotype and hooted their blue collar asses off.
The dame doc didn’t appear to notice anything unusual about all the attention. She grabbed my arm, stopping me dead in the middle of the crosswalk.
“Banyon, how do we get out of this?” she demanded.
“Get your pronouns right. There’s no we, lady. I’ve got enough collapsing around my ears that’s going to require a Mr. Bojangles amount of fancy footwork to dance around. If I’m carrying anything on my back, it’ll be a flak jacket, not you. Preferably one with pockets wherein I can conceal vast amounts of cheap alcohol, which would technically make it a flask jacket. Don’t steal that. It’s brilliant, and I’m going to have my office elf copyright it. I’ll be contacting the Ronco people about my late-night infomercial, just in case I live through this. The Booze Coat. Yours for just ten installments of $19.95. My point is, exquisite as your posterior is, when it comes to filling the only seat on the lifeboat, mine comes first.”
I resumed my march for the opposite sidewalk. Dr. Charlotte Cheese ran right along behind me, panting like an obscene phone call and puffing like a goddamn magic dragon.
“You can take me on as a client,” she insisted. “You must do personal protection. You got me into this mess, you can babysit me until I’m safe. Which I would be now if it weren’t for you. I’m not paying you, obviously, because I’m not insane. How about this? Those last two rounds of stitches are on the house. Hell, toss in the next two, as well. That’s assuming you live to get the shit kicked out of you again. If not, they’re nontransferable. I’m not running a free clinic, Banyon, despite what you think.”
“I already have a client,” I replied. “And I like to give laser-like focus to one nuisance at a time. Granted, I have no idea who she is, and I’ve only guessed that she wants me to find her missing father, who has apparently had a midlife crisis and run out and become a butler on her, but the fact remains that she is my current client.”
“I’ll wipe the slate clean,” she announced. “Every blood test, every tetanus shot, every X-ray, every werewolf antitoxin. The whole past year I’ve been carrying you since I left HM University Hospital, gone.”
“That’s tempting,” I admitted, nodding, “but the truth is I never really intended to pay you, so you’re not exactly incentivizing. On the other hand, I’ve got an office elf who’s punctilious with unpaid bills, and if he found out I’ve had you billing an out-of-work car salesman for my occasional light bodywork he’d probably sell my desk to pay you, and I need that to pass out on. Deal.”
I figured the dame had already decided to attach to me like a social disease. I was already working the case as it was, so it was no skin off my nose if she wanted to tag along. Which she did, judging from the sound of the expensive shoes clip-clopping along behind me, as well as the furious flick of a lighter and subsequent coughing jag.
The first stop was back at my offices, where Mannix’s tennis ball-size eyes opened wide in delight with the appearance of my knockout M.D.
“Hello, Dr. Charlotte!” the elf announced as I ushered the dame into the outer sanctum of Banyon Investigations, Inc.
“This isn’t a social call, Mannix,” I said, marching past him and into my inner office. I flung my hat and coat on my sofa and collapsed into my chair behind my desk. “Get some blank client paperwork, and let’s see for a change if we can get it properly filled out.” The doc and the elf had followed me into the room, and the littler of the two immediately darted back out into the outer office. “Speaking of which,” I shouted out to Mannix, “I noticed in passing that Doris’ desk is still empty. Her head still is as well, wherever it is she’s hauled that Loreal disaster. Any news on that front?”
Mannix was already back in the room, blank paperwork in hand. He walked into my question like a solid wall. It stopped him dead. He couldn’t dodge answering, which he would have preferred. He bit his lip and offered a helpless little shrug.
“She called about an hour ago,” the elf reluctantly admitted. “She wanted to know what was included in her severance package besides the money she, um--”
“Stole? Swiped? Heisted? There are a lot of synonyms in Roget’s for what she did,” I said. “And do you know what, Mannix? It’s strangely comforting to be able to rely on the papal-like infallibility of the idiocy of Doris Staurburton.”
“Who the hell is Doris Staurburton?” Dr. Charlotte Cheese demanded.
“Hold that thought, preferably forever,” I said.
There was some commotion down in the street. The way he was hollering it sounded like Vincetti the fishmonger had gotten his hand bitten off by a bass, which was impossible since he only dealt in fresh fish that had been dead for years.
I took a moment to spin my chair around, just in case my would-be killers in the mysterious Rolls Royce were causing the commotion. I looked out the open window and past the rusted fire escape to the grimy slum beyond.
Down in the street, Vincetti was yelling with both hands at the bastard in the suit who’d tried to foist some rotten fish on me a few hours before. The fish market’s butler was standing at attention, his white gloves at his sides. His glazed eyes were staring obediently ahead as the old guinea marched around him as if he was trying to untangle a tetherball. Vincetti clutched the corpse of a pickerel in his hand. He waved the reeking fish in the butler’s face for emphasis while yelling “atsa mattah” and employing language that would have made Mussolini’s catamite blush.
I remembered watching something on the news about the butler craze and why so many guys were choosing to switch professions late in life. Some sociologist from Harvard claimed it was basically a bunch of poor bastards who had gotten fed up with society collapsing around their ears and were seeking to reestablish order in a chaotic world. As a fad, it was passing, like hula hoops and pet rocks. The TV pointy head said that the butlers would eventually wake up to the reality that the world stinks and crawl back to their old lives, blinking like Patty Hearst. But while the craze was hot, poor lost slobs like the one downstairs would continue to enroll in Butler University for the privilege of being screamed at in fluent pidgin by reeking fascist fishmongers.
“Who is Doris Staurburton?” Dr. Charlotte Cheese demanded again.
With a sigh, I spun away from the riveting fish peddler street theater and back to the catastrophe that was my life.
The sexy doctor who’d followed me home like a stray mutt was running a finger along the edge of a file cabinet. She seemed surprised when it came back devoid of so much as a speck of dust, which was entirely, unbeknownst to her, thanks to the squirming elf who was standing in the doorway trying desperately not to rat out his coworker.
“Doris Staurburton is a moron of generally no consequence who is not on the medical insurance plan Banyon Investigations doesn’t have,” I explained.
“Oh, we have an insurance plan,” Mannix announced, delighted at the sudden, unexpected change of subject.
I offered my elf-de-camp the most sincere frown I dared, conscience of the risk a flexed jaw posed to popping my second round of stitches. “Since when?” I asked.
“Since I came to work here,” the elf replied. “When I saw you didn’t have one, I knew that was bad. All three of us are covered, including dental.”
I gave Dr. Charlotte Cheese a shrug. “If it makes you feel any better, I ripped off a succession of dentists for years before and since -- apparently unnecessarily -- Mannix came to work here.”
Mannix was doing two of the things he did best: turning a blind eye to the adorable little mendacities with which I added spice to an otherwise mundane existence, and waving around paperwork to add to his rising stack of case files. He handed over the client forms and began to supervise the lady physician as she began filling them in.
She eschewed the desk and held the paper against my doorframe.
As he watched her, worried about the damage her pen was causing to the wood but too polite to say anything, Mannix filled me in on the details of my dingbat secretary’s phone call.
“I asked Miss Doris about Miss Amanda,” the elf said. “She said she wasn’t very sure that ‘Amanda Johnson’ was the client’s name. She said she thinks that she might have been asking the client her family information and that maybe the lady said the father of the man she wanted you to find was named John.”
“‘A man named John’s son,’” I said. “Naturally, Mannix. It’s my fault, because I should be fluent in moron after so many years of language immersion. Anything else of no value from the world’s most worthless secretary?”
“No, sir, Mr. Crag,” the elf replied. “Just that she hasn’t found a job yet. She’s checking with an agency again today, since the jobs listed in the paper didn’t work out for her. She had some--” He cleared his throat. “--not-nice things to say about you.”
“Who doesn’t?” I asked, with a casual self-assurance. “Speaking of which,” I said to Dr. Charlotte Cheese, “in light of the fact that I now (and apparently always have had) health insurance, we need to renegotiate the terms of our contract.”
As a doctor, she was used to tearing through reams of useless paperwork, and she had burned through Mannix’s contract in record time. This was nearly literally true, and Mannix had to slap out a fire in the corner of one of the sheets of paper where a bit of dropped cigarette ash was curling up the contract as she handed it back over.
“Like hell, Banyon,” she said, lighting the end of a fresh butt with furious vigor. “I might not even be able to collect on some of those visits from a year ago. And you owe me co-pays on all of them, which for the year adds up to a couple hundred bucks, easy. I’ll never get that out of you. Which means I’ll have to sue you, which I will if you bail out on our oral agreement to take me on as a client. Not that it’ll be very demanding for you anyway. I’ve seen you in action. Suck it up, Banyon.”
Mannix handed back the form, tapping a blank spot for her signature. She finished up with a horrid, chicken-scratch medical school ink mess so deep that her name would be forever embedded in my doorframe. She snapped the form back to Mannix.
“My self-destructive nature can’t decide whether I should fight you in court now or marry you, which would inevitably dump us both in court anyway. Why don’t I just let you stick around for the duration and see how this plays out? With any luck I’ll be dead before tomorrow, at which point all deals will be off.”
The screaming in the street reached what I was sure had to be a crescendo, and then shot up a million decibels higher. This racket was bad even by Vincetti standards. It sounded like the old fascist was taking out a lifetime’s worth of frustrations that had dogged him ever since, as a young asshole full of hope and pasta fazool, he’d boarded a slow boat from Sicily after crooning one last romantic “Arrivederci Roma” to dangling Il Duce.
I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder. “Mannix, does that go on all day now?”
“Well,” the elf said, trying to be diplomatic. “You know that Mr. Luigi does talk kind of loud to everyone. He talks loud to you all the time.”
“Does he? I guess I couldn’t hear all his loud talking over all the insane dago screaming.”
Mannix plowed right on as if I hadn’t opened my yap. “Mr. Luigi talks very loud to Mr. Haversham. I found out that’s his name. I think it’s his first name and last name, like Miss Cher before she became a zombie. Mr. Luigi talks loud to him all the time.”
Vincetti hadn’t had anything without gills to bully since he’d snuck across the border from Palermo to Ellis Island. If Haversham the butler was going to be his public whipping boy for the foreseeable future, I was immensely pleased that I spent so little time at the office that half the time I got lost in the hallway and wound up in a broom cupboard.
“Great,” I announced. “I’ll make that the million and first reason to torch this place for either the insurance money or for the hell of it, depending on if you’ve kept the premiums paid up, Mannix.” I reached back and slammed the window and latched it, which turned the insane, Battle of Anzio racket down in the street into a muffled St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. “I’ll die a happy man when this goddamn Jeeves craze is over and every middle-aged coot goes back to his real job. Speaking of which, let’s go.”
I got up, grabbed my coat and hat, which had scarcely had time to catch their breath, and headed back out the door.
“Where are we going?” demanded my M.D. shadow. As I stepped into the outer office, she was glued to me like a licked envelope flap.
“I am going to make a half-assed attempt to find my secretary,” I said, shrugging on my trench coat. “She probably won’t remember anything worthwhile about a man named John’s son, but happy hour is still a few hours away, so what the hell? Doris has just signaled that she’s back at the place where hopeless losers who can’t find respectable work go.” I looked the dame physician up and down. “You know, given your current sorry state of employment compared to your elevated position one year ago, and given my, well, this--” I waved a hand at my shabby command center. “--you and I should fit right in.”