The multitude of million year-old dames who’d been waiting in line for the good Gypsy mesdames to soak them with their crystal ball shtick might not have had a sparking brain cell between them, but every last one of them had a cell phone. The herd of hags had gathered in the campground’s parking area, and in the next few mad moments I witnessed a lot of frantic long-distance poking with arthritic fingers, and a lot of confused hollering, since it looked like all of them accidentally called a daughter in Flagstaff or an elderly sister in Pensacola. I calculated a better than fifty-percent chance that one of the wrong numbers who wasn’t over eighty and could extricate themselves from a conversation that had suddenly drifted from blind panic to gripes about hammer toes and that afternoon’s Judge Judy would call the cops.
The Gypsies obviously thought so too. I had to hand it to them. It took the entire tribe less than three minutes after Madame Danube was squashed flat in the outdoor shitter to pack up and form a hustling caravan of hustlers. The bangled bastards nearly made it, which skill had doubtless been honed to amscraying perfection from all those times they took off before the sprinklers kicked on and washed away the quart of watered-down latex paint they’d used as driveway sealer.
Their congenital instinct to get the hell out of town at the first whiff of bacon was hindered by the arrival of a dozen squad cars, which came tearing up the road to the Big Chief Shortpants Campground as if the trees had suddenly sprouted Krispy Kreme leaves and java sap. The abrupt appearance of the flashing red and blue lights reminded the old lady customers why they’d placed all those wrong numbers to half the country, and they began pointing at the fleeing Gypsies like Airedales with osteoporosis.
Even somebody who wasn’t an ex-cop intimately acquainted with the sloth-slow workings of the local PD would have been suspicious of the promptness with which the boys in blue had responded to the call, seeing as how the Big Chief Shortpants Campground wasn’t exactly adjacent to the beaten path. The Gypsies probably and, ordinarily, correctly assumed that their choice of encampment assured them that any nefarious shenanigans they got up to that might attract the local constabulary would ensure sufficient escape time, since most of the cops in town would actually be a million miles away and actually in town when the call came.
The first nag in the Gypsy column wasn’t Madame Volga. My client was holding onto the other end of the reins. Madame Volga’s horse was so old it didn’t have the energy to rear up on its hind legs as the lead cruiser skidded to a Starsky and Hutch stop before it. The old gray mare just kind of shrugged to a resigned stop and glanced around for an interesting weed to spend the next hour gumming within an inch of its life.
The rest of the cruisers sped around, dumping out uniforms even before the dust clouds had a chance to properly form. The cops arrested the advance of the convoy of horse-drawn carts before the Gypsies got halfway to the parking lot of the Big Chief Shortpants Campground and herded the whole lot of them back to their abandoned camp.
I’d parked my ass on a picnic table to watch the show, and there my ass remained as the Gypsies climbed down from their wagons. I spotted the very glum pairing of Madame Volga and Victorina Flapchack, who disembarked from their respective wooden wagons and trudged over to wait with me for the inevitable hundred questions.
“How did they get here so soon?” Madame Volga complained. “My whole life I never seen cops show up so fast.”
She tugged angrily at a clump of gnarled hair, which in the madness of collapsing her tent and frantically stashing away her crooked crystal ball had found its way inside the corner of her mouth. I didn’t know which to feel worse for; the hair which had become that much filthier from unlucky contact with a mouth that should have had dental hazard tape roped around it, or the mouth that would now need to be sprayed for whatever lice her raging halitosis didn’t wipe out. In the end, I decided to take the Solomonic approach and not give a shit about either.
“I would imagine they were already in the area for some other reason,” I ventured as I climbed down from my picnic table perch and awkwardly stood on my flopping shoes. “I wouldn’t be too alarmed that it has anything to do with shoddy driveway resealing or grifting old dames out of mattress savings. On the other hand, I don’t know the extent of your criminal activities, so maybe you’re worth emptying out the police garage. I don’t care immensely either way. That ugly dead dame stole my shoelaces.”
I left the two Gypsy skirts at the picnic table and went off to locate the deceased Madame Danube’s wagon. It was easy to spot, as it was the one the rest of the Gypsies who weren’t being corralled trying to escape the cops were in the process of looting.
I squeezed through the door amid the thieving throng.
The old hag who was currently a pancake on the other side of the encampment had been a pack rat in life. The other scavengers were peeling the layers off giant balls of tinfoil and absconding with twenty year old newspapers.
The crush of Gypsies was tipping the wagon from left to right like a ship in a gale. The place was loaded with Lysol cans, which rolled back and forth on the rocking deck. The cans were tipping off of shelves, rolling out from under Madame Danube’s bunk, and falling out of cabinets. I nearly broke my neck tripping over one when it rolled under my foot. As they spun by, the Gypsies were grabbing the cans up and stuffing them away inside their peasant blouses and dresses, along with whatever crooked tarot cards and half-eaten Subway sandwiches were within looting reach.
At the back of the wagon, I spied a couple of huge string balls rolling around near Madame Danube’s pile of dirty laundry. I never thought I’d strike pay dirt and figured I’d just jury rig a couple of paperclips through the holes in my shoes to hold me until I got to my stool at O’Hale’s Bar. As it was, I tugged out a pair of shoelaces that nicely complemented my shoddy Florsheims and returned to the picnic table to lace up.
The uniformed cops were still in position only to keep the Gypsies from fleeing, and hadn’t yet begun to question anybody. Blinding blue lights flashed through the forest night, illuminating flora and terrifying fauna.
A dozen cruisers already in the neighborhood obviously meant big trouble nearby. The cops wouldn’t leave town for just any reason. When I was on the force there’d been a moose homicide at the main entrance to the mosquito-infested mudhole that was the Big Chief Shortpants Campground. The chief didn’t bother to send out a single detective, even though a Gazette reporter scraped up a photograph taken by a camper of the squirrel suspect in goggles and scarf flying away from the scene.
I figured that the very thing that had initially brought the cops in the vicinity of the Big Chief Shortpants Campground was related to whatever-it-was that had done the Tijuana tap dance on the pulverized powder room in which Madame Danube’s ass had met its ignominious, but likely warranted, end.
As it turned out, the prompt arrival on the scene of the brigade of uniformed cops quickly flipped back to more customary lethargy. I pretty much could have guessed that the flattening of some old bag crook inside an alfresco comfort station wouldn’t rate high on the department’s list of crimes against society, but even I didn’t expect the nine hour wait the bastards in blue ultimately put us through.
I watched the large, low moon grow smaller as it rose higher in the sky. Most of the Gypsies drifted off to their wagons, sullen eyes leveled on the contingent of cops who were barring exit from the campground. I eventually fell asleep sometime in the wee hours at the precise time when I should have been getting tossed blissfully on my ear out the front door of some crummy speakeasy. Morning’s biggest busybody killjoy -- a fresh, happy goddamn sun -- had just shoved its ugly yellow snoot over the treetops when Victorina Flapchack nudged me in the ribs.
“Someone is here. Finally,” the young dame said.
While I was catching some shuteye on the picnic table, another cruiser had rolled up the road and stopped alongside the others in the parking lot. In the unpleasant light of a new day, the son-of-a-bitch reason we’d all been kept waiting all night long climbed like mighty Macarthur returning to the scene of the crime out of the front passenger seat.
The plainclothes flatfoot who’d been put in charge of royally screwing up the investigation into Madame Danube’s shithouse slaughter cast a dull eye over the scene. His perpetual sour mood curdled like a milkshake in the Mojave when he saw me sitting on the picnic table, the beautiful, weary-but-awake Victorina Flapchack to my left and the hideous Madame Volga snoring like a Jimmy Doolittle raid to my right.
The cop in command made a point of displaying his agitation for all the Gypsies to see as he strode importantly across the dirt patch where the remains of the previous night’s fires still smoldered. He stopped next to the picnic table where he’d forced my sober ass to spend the night.
“Well, well, well,” announced Detective Daniel Jenkins. “I should have known. If a case stinks like this one, you can’t be far away, Banyon.”
“Keep talking, Detective Jenkins. Thanks to you, the murderer only has a nine hour head start. At this rate, he’ll die of old age as you strap him in the chair. That’s assuming you catch him, which you won’t because you couldn’t detect your thumb up your ass if you had two mirrors and a hangnail.”
Jenkins opened his mouth, thought better, and slammed it shut. I was suddenly invisible to him as he looked past me to the distant line of port-a-johns.
The plastic crap factories were hard to see at night but were shithouse Stonehenge in broad daylight. There were six in all; five still lined up at attention. The sixth, which was technically the third one in from the left, looked like it had been crushed by a steamroller. In the hours since Madame Danube was flattened inside, the sludge that had poured out of it had congealed like canned gravy on hospital cafeteria meatloaf.
“M.E. is finally on his way out,” Jenkins announced.
I could hear the gears grinding in the cavernous space between his ears. He was working on passing the buck for holding off the investigation for nine hours. I assumed by that deliberately emphasized “finally” that he hadn’t even informed the medical examiner’s office until morning of the old crone stinking up the public john.
“Doc Minto isn’t taking the fall for you, Jenkins,” I warned.
Jenkins scowled. “Who asked you, Banyon? And for your information I was busy all night on official business. The lawn at Judge Dillinger’s lake house got ripped out last night, if you have to know.”
“Actually, I robustly don’t have to, but now I’m stuck knowing it anyway. I assume by that Barney Fife snort that you think that makes you some kind of big cheese, Jenkins. First the grass at St. Regent’s cemetery, then old Hanging Judge Dillinger’s lawn. Clearly only the most important landscaping crimes land on your desk.”
If looks could have killed, Jenkins would have had to arrest himself for the eyeball murder of yours truly. Of course, being an utter incompetent, he would have shot his chief suspect in the bathroom mirror and proudly closed the case.
The flatfoot turned abruptly and marched off in the direction of the outdoor water closets. So ticked was he that he didn’t even acknowledge the entourage of me and Victorina Flapchack who trailed him to the edge of the woods. Madame Volga continued to snooze away back at the picnic tables, a purely innocent thieving soul.
The uniformed cops had prevented me from wandering over to the scene the previous night. Not that I would have seen much. By day, it looked as if the outhouse had been crushed by a behemoth possessed of a strong arm and a sturdy club.
“Ogre job,” Jenkins declared.
He glanced disinterestedly at the crushed underbrush behind the port-a-dumper that led into the deeper woods in the direction of muddy Sphincter Pond.
“Yeah, definitely ogre,” Jenkins determined. The conclusion was entirely lacking any evidence whatsoever, yet that wasn’t stopping him from scribbling the fiction down in the half-assed report he was already writing in his head. “You Gypsies should know better than to rip one of them off. I’ll have uniform poke around the sewers to see if they can scare up the one that did this, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.”
“Why are you laughing?” Victorina Flapchack demanded. It hadn’t taken her long to take inventory of Detective Daniel Jenkins. She didn’t give him two seconds to come up with a lying reply before she swung around to me. “Why is he laughing?”
“That little snort and smirk? Oh, that was just Jenkins giving himself credit for the hilarious ‘holding his breath in the sewer’ comment. Give him a break. All it proves is that he can’t even detect a joke.”
Jenkins’ face collapsed into an angry black hole from which only hatred of me escaped the event horizon. The flatfoot didn’t have a chance to explode, since his fury at me was dissipated by the beautiful but volatile Victorina Flapchack.
“Do you think it is funny, the death of one of my people?” she demanded.
“I…what?” Jenkins asked, taken by surprise by the flare of temper from a dame he’d met for the first time in his life all of two minutes before.
Jenkins looked so lost in the blazing glare of the Gypsy beauty’s rush of sudden anger that I felt compelled to intercede, despite the fact that I hated his guts.
“Well, Jenkins is an asshole,” I said, nodding agreement with Victorina Flapchack. “Nobody would dispute that, not even his own mother. But Madame Danube was crushed to death inside a plastic toilet. At the very least, that is mildly hilarious.”
The young Gypsy dame didn’t appear to hear me, which was probably just as well given the ensuing diatribe she launched at poor, dumbstruck Dan Jenkins.
“You police are always harassing us!” she snarled. “‘Round up the usual suspects.’ Always it is the Gypsies. You do not even go after the Eskimos like you do us, and no one likes them.” She gave him a poke in the chest with a finger decorated with three rings, a rubber band and a toy whistle from a box of Cracker Jacks. “Every sloppy handyman who does a bad job resealing a driveway? Oh, he must be a Gypsy. Everybody who adds a few extra zeroes to a check? Obviously a Gypsy. Every pyramid scheme, picked pocket, movie theater scam, shoplifting ring, fake choking to get a free meal, palm reading swindle, stolen baby…”
I gave a gentle touch to her forearm. “FYI, you might want to ratchet it down a notch,” I quietly advised. “Your intimate knowledge of every confidence trick in the history of the human race is undermining your own high-minded point.”
Like every other female I’d ever encountered, Victorina Flapchack just plowed right ahead like I didn’t exist.
“Every time there is any trouble at all you policemen automatically go out and hassle the innocent Gypsies. No more.” She whipped her long hair around, dragging me back into the eye of the storm. “Who is this man, Mr. Banyon?” she demanded.
“I prefer to remain like Switzerland,” I said. “My neutral, middle-aged ass doesn’t feel like getting tossed in the slammer for obstruction of justice.”
She wheeled back on Jenkins who, for the first time since I had the extreme misfortune of knowing him, I actually nearly felt a twinge of almost-sympathy for.
“What is your name, detective?” she snapped. “I want your badge number. I am going to complain to your superior. This is not the old days any longer. We will not be your scapegoats for long. The men of this tribe put up with this, but the young women will not tolerate you police treating us as second-class citizens.”
“When did you move up fifty classes?” I asked.
“Shut up, Banyon,” she said. To Jenkins, she snapped, “Our time is coming. Soon my people will no longer have to stand for this constant persecution.”
A lot of the young Gypsy gals had heard the shouting and had put down their tambourines and stolen credit cards, exiting their wagons to bear witness to the thrilling commotion. When Victorina Flapchack was through, the distaff crowd broke into spontaneous applause. (I noted that a couple of the Gypsy broads weren’t joining in on the fun, as they were over in the parking lot prying hubcaps off the patrol cars.)
Jenkins apparently figured out only at that moment that he and his small band of uniformed cops were greatly outnumbered. The flatfoot did a backpedal like Lance Armstrong realizing he’d just sped past the juice bar. Jenkins was suddenly the photographer in a nature documentary trying not to look like a gazelle as he attempted to make nice-nice with a pride of malnourished lions.
There was a whole lot of “I’m afraid you misunderstood” and “I have a deep abiding appreciation for the difficulties faced by our Gypsy population.” By the time he was finished he’d shoveled more shit into the campground than had dumped out of Madame Danube’s flattened PVC privy.
Jenkins’ salvation arrived in the form of a black sedan that fortuitously chose to appear on the scene as he was mopping his handkerchief across his glistening forehead and swearing on his life that his grandmother was a Gypsy who’d put him through the academy with the cash she’d swindled from elderly homeowners by coating driveways with watered-down black Rust-Oleum and guaranteeing it’d last ten years.
The newly arrived car was stenciled on the front doors with the official seal of the M.E.’s office. The schlub who got out was a junior member of the team and not Chief Medical Examiner Harry “Doc” Minto.
The throng of Gypsy dames was distracted by the young medical examiner’s arrival, and the surge of indignation Victorina Flapchack had inspired in them dissipated as the baby-faced M.E. grabbed his bag from the car’s back seat. The whole lot of them ran off to grab crystal balls and decks of crooked cards, leaving Victorina Flapchack sputtering to an empty glade. Only Madame Volga remained, still snoring over on the picnic table where we’d spent the night, sounding like a garbage truck with busted air brakes.
“Well, I still want to know who you are, officer!” she hollered, with a lot less bite now without a hair-pulling mob to back her up.
With the storm broken, Jenkins hastily supplied his name and badge number to Victorina, who repeated the information without writing it down. After, the dame stormed back over to the picnic tables to angrily awaken my employer, the repulsive old Madame Volga, who was apparently bone-tired from pretending to talk to the dead dogs and late husbands of a bunch of irredeemably stupid old ladies.
Jenkins heaved a sigh of relief. Before the con artist mob could return in force, the flatfoot gave a hasty all-clear to the kid from the M.E.’s office to extricate Madame Danube from the port-a-shithouse.
“Ich bin ein scammer, Jenkins?” I said as the last of the crowd, a middle-aged dame with a fright wig and two teeth, rushed up the rickety steps to her ancient wagon and vanished inside. “That fictitious Gypsy grandmother you just shook out of your family tree pretty much seals the deal that you’re going to half-ass this investigation.”
“I don’t answer to you, Banyon,” the cop sneered. “Besides, this is all cut and dry.” He pitched his voice low to avoid inspiring another tongue-lashing from Victorina Flapchack, who was still loitering near the picnic tables. “I have bigger fish to fry than one lousy murder.”
“Yeah, like most patriotic Americans, I worry more about the landscaped lawns of rich people with connections than I worry about people who get squashed in plastic latrines in the dead of night. Not that you have a prayer of catching the grass assassin either, notwithstanding the cheapskate archbishop’s entreaties to the Almighty.”
Jenkins flashed an oily smirk. “For your information, Banyon, I’ve already made an arrest in the case. Highway patrol found him just after dawn wandering down the interstate not two miles from the judge’s lake house. He was babbling, his shirt was covered in grass stains. Yep, Igor Jones is going away for a very long time.”
Even if I’d been as hung over as I deserved to be -- which, thanks to bastard Jenkins, I wasn’t -- the arrestee’s first name and his proximity to the Gypsy camp would have penetrated the blissful, head-throbbing fog.
I fished in my pocket and pulled out the flyer for the phony 1950s circus scam I’d rescued from the malodorous mattress of Gypsy King Igor Stradivarius.
“This the guy?” I asked.
Jenkins didn’t want to answer any questions from me, especially germane ones, and his porcine peepers were already dismissing my query with tremendous annoyance even as they inadvertently dropped to the photo on the flyer.
The flatfoot didn’t have to speak. He caught a glance at the young face of Stradivarius on the flyer and the spark of recognition told me all I needed to know. The Gypsy king must have aged reasonably well over the intervening decades.
“That’s him,” Jenkins announced. “Igor Jones. That’s one son of a bitch vandal who’s going away for a lawn, lawn time.”
“Yeah, you’re a real comedian, Jenkins. I’m refraining from laughing purely due to the fact that I’m afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop and that I’d require surgery to stitch my split sides back together. This Igor Jones told you that was his name?”
“We don’t take a perp’s word, Banyon. Jones had ID.”
And, I thought, if you hadn’t bought that nom de thieve, he would have produced ten different drivers licenses to prove to you all the other people he also is.
The kid from the morgue had gone back to his car to retrieve the jack from the trunk. While Jenkins and I were talking, the junior M.E. had waded across the brown ground and was using the jack to try to pop the supine outhouse back into something like it’s normal shape. The collapsed middle section abruptly cracked along a heretofore invisible seam and the whole flattened port-a-hopper wobbled as if it was going to split apart.
“Don’t damage the body,” Jenkins snarled at the kid, since in the ace detective’s view a body having already been flattened and left to ferment inside a plastic shit palace for half a day couldn’t afford another contusion.
Jenkins lost interest in me, distracted by the kid with the jack, and he promptly abandoned me without the usual threat to toss me in jail on some trumped-up charge.
I’d already confiscated a pair of shoelaces superior to the ones Madame Danube had stolen from me, and as a shit-smeared corpse she could no longer impart whatever valuable information she thought she’d possessed in life. There was no reason my delicate constitution and I needed to hang around to witness the vomitous birth of dead Madame Danube from her slippery plastic womb.
I decided to do my good pal Detective Daniel Jenkins the great and kind service of sparing him having to question me, especially since most of my answers for the official police record would inevitably involve a single anatomically challenging phrase. (I’m such a kindhearted bastard I intended to get Mannix started on the paperwork to get my name in for Nobel consideration just as soon as I dealt with the matter of catching up on the vitally urgent bender I’d been robbed of the previous evening.)
I ducked around the line of port-a-johns and headed into the woods.
Jenkins had inadvertently done my day’s work for me. There was a near 100% probability that Igor Stradivarius was in police custody.
Stradivarius the man was immaterial. All I had to do was confirm the fact that the grass-stained slob in question was the Gypsy king, and to do that I would have to personally eyeball the bastard the cops had locked up downtown. Madame Volga and the tribe elders didn’t want Stradivarius, they wanted their stolen bible.
It would take a little delicate P.I. ballet -- namely, escaping without being seen -- to ensure the Gypsies were kept in the dark about their incarcerated king. If the tribe got wind that Stradivarius was in stir, a hothead contingent led by Victorina Flapchack might storm the Bastille and screw up the whole gig. What I needed was a clear field to track the bastard back to the book, thus fulfilling my obligation to my clients so that I could get back to my more important, accustomed work of unemployed, inebriated debauchery.
I took one last look over my shoulder. The Gypsies hadn’t seen me enter the woods. Madame Volga was awake now, but still looked exhausted. Victorina Flapchack was still pissed at Jenkins. Jenkins was still a useless asshole. God was in His heaven and everything about the world below was as screwed up as ever.
I headed along the path created by whatever had crushed Madame Danube like an olive in a can of Fresca.
Jenkins’ unfounded conclusion might turn out to be the case. A royally pissed-off ogre might have stomped out of the woods and smashed the old dame in mid-squat. They certainly have the strength. But it might have been a whole lot of other things as well: a giant, a sasquatch, Rosie O’Donnell. Even a case of purely random demigod violence may have left Madame Danube a shit-caked punch line.
I’d had plenty of time while Jenkins kept us stewing to run over the events immediately surrounding Madame Danube’s murder.
The Gypsy elder who fled the scene with his pants around his ankles had hollered that “someone” was attacking Madame Danube, but the old buzzard might not have seen a thing and may only have heard the screams and the racket as he beat a hasty retreat.
Victorina Flapchack had started to call it a “something,” and then a moment later said that “he” had run off into the woods. Maybe that was just a slip of her lovely tongue (for which any red-blooded American male would have maxed out every stolen credit card in her little red wagon), or maybe the Gypsies knew who had made a shit sandwich out of Madame Danube.
Whether or not they had an inkling of who or what killed her, none of them had been forthcoming during the hours Jenkins kept us all waiting. And, frankly, her death didn’t matter to me. I had my own crummy job I’d been hired to botch, and I certainly wasn’t shifting my laser-like focus to solve Madame Danube’s comically entertaining but ultimately immaterial outhouse murder. The bungling of that case was entirely up to Detective Daniel Jenkins and the Klueless Keystone Kops of the local PD.
As an urban animal, I wasn’t designed to have anything but city sidewalk and brass bar rails beneath the soles of my shoes, so I expected I’d spend most of my time in the woods falling on my face, but in a bit of good fortune (which I’d more than goddamn earned) my replacement shoelaces appeared to be well up to the challenge of traipsing through the ugly beauty of an unaccustomed wooded trail.
I’m no Tonto. Good thing, since leather loincloths clash with my Sears slacks and you can’t ride a barstool into battle. Luckily, I didn’t have to stick a feather in my fedora to follow the freshly-made path through the woods. Snapped branches and crushed underbrush ran about a quarter of a mile in a fairly straight line past Sphincter Pond toward upscale Lake Winnipesuckhole.
When I was a rookie detective, one of my first cases was at the lake. A golden flounder was swimming around telling every fisherman who caught it that it’d grant them any wish if they’d let it go. A real genius. Smart enough to talk, too dumb to avoid a dangling worm. It takes all kinds. Word got around about the wish-granting fish, and suddenly everyone with a stick and string was flocking to the lake. Foot traffic was making roads impassable and a thousand outboard motors were rattling apart chimneys in all the fancy-ass mansions on the west shore, including that of the esteemed Judge Dillinger. The fat, old judge phoned the mayor, the mayor phoned the chief, and me and my partner wound up in a boat with a couple of rods and a pair of fin cuffs. The charges were determined before we dropped a line in the water: public nuisance, disorderly conduct, and, if it flopped around in the boat, resisting arrest. We cast off for a week with no luck. Turns out a deaf angler had caught the magic flounder and, unable to hear all the screamed promises of money and fame, fried it over a campfire. A squeeze of lemon, two garlic cloves, a pound of butter, and a million bucks up in smoke. The old buzzard took the news gracefully. Said that if the flounder’s last wish was to be delicious, then mission accomplished. He hung himself with fishing line the next week.
Anyway, thanks to my rookie history I knew the territory over by the lake, and I figured I’d grab one of the cabs which, now that all the buses in town were wired to explode on contact, would be opportunistically hanging out at the public beach bus stop.
The rain of the previous eight days made for muddy ground. As I headed along the path that had been crushed through the woods, I spotted some partially eroded tracks here and there. However, my city eyes, not being jammed into the head of the aforementioned loyal redskin sidekick, perceived them as washed-out shit-smears.
It had been a lot longer than I remembered since I worked the flounder case, and my memory of the layout around the lake apparently wasn’t as crystal-clear as I thought. This became evident when I exited the dense woods and nearly tripped over the yellow police tape that encircled the ruins of Hanging Judge Dillinger’s front lawn.
Nearly every blade of grass had been torn up. So, too, had large chunks of the sprinkler system. Whatever had ripped apart the lawn had also yanked up a dozen sections of pipe. The water was off now, but it was obvious from the thick mud stew glistening in the morning sunlight that water had been shooting all over the joint most of the night.
I had to hand it to Dan Jenkins. He had failed completely to notice that the trail through the woods cut directly from the scene of one crime to another. On one end of the newly beaten path was the all-important missing lawn of a politically-connected bastard judge, on the other was an insignificant old hag who’d been crushed to death in a port-a-john. The crimes couldn’t have been more intertwined if they’d been two cats stitched up in a gunnysack and rolled through the front door of police HQ.
A couple of uniforms were parked in the driveway of the crooked judge’s criminally inexpensive Tudor mansion. They’d clearly been trained at the same academy that had set Daniel Jenkins loose on an innocent public. The pair of them were so engaged in the important police business of napping in their squad car that they failed completely to spot me emerging from the woods and following the yellow perimeter tape down to the road.
The murder at the Gypsy camp was evidently connected to the homicide of the judge’s lawn, and the main suspect was the grass-stained Gypsy king, now in custody under the watchful eyes of a billion cops. The imprisoned bastard, of course (because such was my rotten luck), was the SOB who had stolen the book which I had to recover if I was to end my involvement in a case which I had at the outset (imprudently, it was becoming abundantly clear) thought would be a goddamn cakewalk.
As I hoofed it out of the judge’s froufrou neighborhood down to the public beach and the out-of-order bus stop, I grudgingly realized I might have to do the work of the local PD after all, without benefit of health insurance, paid vacation, free doughnuts, and a swanky forty dollar funeral, assuming the poking around I was now going to have to engage in ultimately ended, as it probably would, with my untimely annihilation.
At least I got some new shoelaces out of the deal, one of which chose that precise moment to snap in half and send me sailing to the asphalt.