Back when I was on the force, I would have known the name of every uniform and plainclothes cop all over town and they, in turn, would have been acquainted with my gorgeous mug. One of the benefits of ten years in the P.I. wilderness was that the ludicrous retirement rate for blue-clad civil servants assured that almost nobody from the old days was still on the job to stop me from impersonating a lawyer as I strode like Perry-goddamn-Mason up to the front desk of Main Police Headquarters, Precinct #1.
“I am an insufferable, know-it-all lawyer with the disreputable firm of Shyster, Pilfer and Fraud,” I informed the sergeant at the front desk.
I showed him a business card from the stated law firm, which I’d lifted from their waiting room one floor down from my own swanky offices and which I periodically liberated from my wallet when I had need to impress the sorts of people who were still impressed by some asshole waving a card around announcing he was a lawyer.
“You are currently holding in custody one Igor Jones,” I said. “As a court-ordered condition of the community service for my most recent DUI, I’m here to ensure that he receive the worst possible pro bono legal representation money can’t buy.”
It’s a lot easier to impersonate a lawyer than somebody whose livelihood requires knowledge of something that actually matters, like, say, a surgeon or an electrician. You could always try to operate on a spleen or hook up a ceiling fan, but you’d probably wind up with an inside-out corpse or a pile of smoking rubble where a house used to be. But with lawyers, all you’ve pretty much got to do is swagger through the front door like a fat douchebag who drinks too much and toss around a few Latin catchphrases.
I worked “habeas corpus,” “in flagrante delicto” and “coitus interruptus” into a sentence so as to impress the impressionable desk sergeant. That, along with the business card, my natural disheveled appearance and my hip flask breath sold the act.
I was placed in the care of a uniformed officer, who as far as I was concerned was too young even to play cops and robbers, and chaperoned upstairs.
I’d had to wait all day for Jenkins to leave the building before I dared sneak into the dump. The moron flatfoot had held a press conference on the steps of the station at three that afternoon to boast about the suspect he had in custody and to pronounce that every patch of grass in town was safe with him on the job. I don’t know if the public bought the act, but with Jenkins doing the promising they should have been rushing home to hide their Chia Pets in the toilet tank. It was dusk by the time Jenkins went home for the night, confident in his erroneous belief that he’d left the city safer than he’d found it that morning.
The boy cop in whose delicate hands I’d been placed led me through the squad room on a path that took me within spitting distance of Detective Jenkins’ dark office. I decided for the sake of my brilliant cover story not to set fire to it.
Five minutes after I first flashed my stolen lawyer business card downstairs, the subject of Jenkins’ half-assed investigation was brought into the interrogation room where I’d been deposited by the prepubescent peace officer.
There was no doubt when the door opened and the gangly old man shuffled in that I was in the presence of Gypsy royalty. Igor Stradivarius’ face was unshaven and the whiskers were gray, but it was the same gaunt mug that adorned the ancient flyer I’d scavenged from the musty makeshift mattress back at the Gypsy camp. Older, yeah. Uglier, definitely. Shiftier and creepier, without a goddamn doubt. But it was definitely the bastard in question, especially if your question was, “Where’s my wallet?”
This iteration of Stradivarius wasn’t wearing a top hat and dressed as a ringmaster. The Gypsy king was wearing a pair of torn and faded blue jeans smeared with so much black paint they looked as if he’d worn them for a thousand driveway con jobs. The soles were falling off boots so worn out they looked as if he’d mugged them off a dead hobo at the town dump. He wore a yellowed T-shirt with a stretched-out neck and armpits stiff as boards and stained orange from age. The front of the shirt was grass-stained, which Jenkins had claimed was proof positive that Igor Jones was guilty of the massacre of Judge Dillinger’s lawn.
It’s fairly easy to bluff your way past cops, especially if you had the misfortune of being one yourself once upon a time. It was tougher to con a conman.
As soon as the door closed behind him and Stradivarius got a good, hard look at my radiant face beaming at him in all its shit-eating beauty across the table, I got a hint that my brilliant cover story might not work as well on him.
“You are not a lawyer,” the Gypsy king acting critic said. (Rudely, I thought, for all the trouble I’d gone through getting into lawyer character by getting half in the bag.) “Who are you? What do you want? The book? You cannot have it. I lost it. It was stolen. I burned it.”
His rapid-fire staccato sounded like he’d swiped it from a 1930s Warner Brothers gangster B flick which, if he could have shoved Jimmy Cagney’s cadence in his pocket along with a box of Junior Mints when nobody at the Bijou Classics refreshment stand was looking, he would have.
“I believe we’re in one of those ‘it takes one to know one’ situations,” I informed Stradivarius. “No, I am not a lawyer. I had high hopes that my booze breath and asshole demeanor would carry the act. Even though I won’t be acting as your public defender after all, I don’t suppose you’d spill your guts to me anyway?”
The old codger pinched his eyes shut and peered silently at me from across the table. There was no way this bum was spilling word one about the stolen bible.
I sighed and pushed myself to my feet. “Listen, I can see you’ve got a lot to do here. I suggest you start with laundry. Now, while I’m magnificent at causing socially awkward situations, I’m not terribly adept at cleaning up after them, and since you just nearly screamed your lungs out with that not-guilty monologue a moment ago, I think it would be better for all involved (but mostly me) if I take my stolen asshole lawyer business card and quietly exit.”
I rounded the table and Stradivarius rounded to the other side. We were suddenly a pair of prize fighters circling the kitchen table. He stopped on the opposite side of the table as I rapped a knuckle on the door. He gave me an even more narrowed eye which, while not entirely evil, was a million miles away from have-a-nice-goddamn-day.
“They sent you to find me,” the Gypsy king accused. “You are some kind of detective. They want the book back.”
When one doesn’t have much in the way of ethics, one tends to shelter from harm what little one possesses. One of my unwavering business rules is not to discuss a case with the bastard I’ve been sent after, unless there is mortal peril or free booze involved. Both of us in that crummy little police interrogation room knew Stradivarius had my number within two seconds of eyeballing me, but a polite thief would have let it drop.
I let the Gypsy king’s accusation hang in the air between us, an ethical clam holding tight-lipped to my only pearl principle.
The interrogation room door remained closed and locked, and I heard not a single sound of a footstep in the hallway outside.
“Listen,” I said, as what started as an annoying pause strayed into socially awkward territory. “That kid cop has apparently taken his coffee break on Pluto. I wouldn’t even be talking here at all, but you staring at me like I’m your blushing prison bride isn’t helping.” I rapped more insistently on the door, to no goddamn avail. “Tell you what, you’re a professional liar. Why don’t you make up a good one for why I’m here, and the two of us can swear to that and ignore the eight hundred pound gorilla of why I’m probably really here that is currently peeling bananas with its metaphorical feet over in the corner of the room.”
I didn’t know it then -- unable as I was to confer with Madame Volga and her crooked crystal ball -- but a living, breathing version of that imaginary gorilla would have come in handy in the ensuing calamitous minutes.
When I’d first knocked on the door, Igor Stradivarius had slowly taken a seat on the other side of the table. A window wired with a cage was to his back, and I could see from the faint glow of parking lot lights that the sun had set on another miserable day.
The pale wash of the blue moon bathed Stradivarius in the same way water hadn’t in many -- if any -- decades.
As I knocked for the fifth or sixth time, the Gypsy king abruptly stood up and began to disrobe.
The old man slowly pulled his T-shirt off over his head. I wasn’t sure if he was attempting a provocative striptease, or if arthritis in his aging joints necessitated the revolting, slow-motion reveal of his emaciated old-coot torso.
“I’m not quite sure exactly what you’ve got in mind,” I pointed out, “but we’ve only been trapped in this room for all of five minutes, which might be enough to rev your engine but is nowhere near the eight billion years I’d need to make this marriage work. Also, and not insignificantly when it comes to guarding my virtue, I’m armed.” I patted my gat, which was poorly hidden under my trench coat, and I gave the half-naked old buzzard a knowing nod. “The metal detectors downstairs are easier to fool than the cops who don’t have a clue how to run them.”
Igor Stradivarius kicked off his ratty boots. I momentarily admired the utter shabbiness of his black socks before I realized he wasn’t wearing any. Between the dirt, the corns, the bunions and the inch-long yellow toenails that could have kicked holes through a bank vault, I was exceedingly glad I hadn’t wasted any precious real estate in my stomach on solids to go along with my liquid lunch.
Stradivarius went to work on his trousers and I resigned myself to the fact that I’d be repelling the advances of the horny old bastard until the cops (who were probably ogling the gruesome scene on closed circuit camera in another room) managed to stop guffawing long enough to free me from the side-splitting, all-male reboot of Dames Behind Bars.
The scene of the aforementioned movie remake in which I found myself a reluctant extra was already Eraserhead-weird enough before Stradivarius picked up his pants and shirt and placed them on his head.
“Don’t expect me to holler ‘Polo’ to your ‘Marco,’” I advised the emaciated head, now hidden under a pile of filthy laundry. “We can add that to the growing list of games the two of us won’t be playing.”
The old buzzard didn’t reply. He just sat his dirty, naked ass down on a chair (which I intended to tell the cops to incinerate once he was done with it) and proceeded to shove his crummy old boots back on his crummier old feet.
When he stood back up, something didn’t seem right about his head. First and foremost, he hadn’t passed out with his cabeza covered by that rancid T-shirt and filthy pair of blue jeans, either of which could have marched out of the room on their own if the bugs nesting in them unified behind a single chigger leader. Probably more important even than that, the Gypsy king’s noggin was suddenly twice as large as it had been. “Okay, I see your head is now huge. Scary huge. Family Circus kids huge. I assume, considering who I’m dealing with, that this is some encephalitis scam. Just to put a pin in it right now, I’m the only charity I give to regularly, and a hundred percent of all donations go to my bar tab, not Gypsy swindlers.”
I thought my miserly message had gotten through when his inflating head, which was now three times the size it been at the outset and was still concealed beneath his dirty laundry, seemed momentarily to stop growing.
There was a moment of calm before the storm.
Then a pair of horns sprouted out both sides of the Gypsy king’s concealed head, and suddenly all goddamn bets were off.
I don’t know one cow from another. A Texas longhorn is a Guernsey is Kirstie Alley. But I’d stared at enough Black Bull whiskey bottles at O’Hale’s to know a boy bovine when I saw one.
As the horns grew, they carried with them, in opposite directions, the T-shirt and jeans. The head grew, the horns extended and the parting curtains of dirty clothes revealed the face of Igor Stradivarius in mid-metamorphosis.
I watched as the nostrils turned up flat and the nose extended into a snout. The human ears drew up high and sprouted coarse, black fur as they transformed into animal head-flaps.
The Gypsy king mooed, he snorted, he eyeballed me with increasing fury through increasingly cow-like eyes as I listened to the sounds of cracking bones issuing from within the all-beef casing of his ever-expanding head. The noise from his reforming skull was excruciating to listen to, so I figured it was probably about a billion times worse for the guy going through it. By the look in his eyes, his burgeoning animal instinct was apparently blaming the physical agony on the only human being in what was suddenly becoming a much smaller room.
I don’t like were-animals, especially because I’ve come across more than my fair share in my line of work. For one thing, you never get used to them. It’s a pain in the ass to be questioning some spineless little accountant you’ve got on the verge of tears with a couple of skillfully deployed hollow threats, only to have a single moonbeam fall through the Venetian blinds and turn him into a snarling, flesh-hungry werewolf. Those of us who work for a living aren’t made of goddamn silver bullets.
Although I’d never in my life witnessed the transformation of man into werebull, there was no doubt that’s what was going on even before Stradivarius dropped to all fours and his fingers began to melt and reform into rudimentary hooves. The appendages grew darker and, like the Gypsy king’s head, massively outdid their human counterparts in both size and destructive potential.
The werebull clomped his new hooves on the floor and eyed me with menace. I, in turn, pulled out my piece and began doing some clomping of my own, specifically with the butt of my gat on the locked interrogation room door.
“Fun’s over!” I hollered, hoping like hell someone was out there watching my impending murder unfold on streaming video. “This is, almost literally, bullshit.” I glanced over my shoulder. “Make that literally.”
Until that point, I was looking mostly at the scrawny body of Igor Stradivarius with a brand-new enormous head parked on top of it, like some drunk staggering around St. Charles Avenue in a giant plastic clown mask for the annual Mardi Gras parade of inebriated assholes. But once the feet transformed into hooves, the werebull’s spine suddenly shot out to what had to be fifteen feet in length. As each human vertebrae separated, then lengthened and reformed into the new and improved spine of what was now clearly going to be an outrageously huge bull, there was an accompanying crack like an iceberg dropped in a swimming pool’s worth of warm booze. With each violent crack, the werebull howled in pain and fury and generally displayed the kind of profound irritability you don’t want to see coming from the exceptionally large monster with whom you’ve been locked in a very small room. (Also, of particular distress to my newly mended shoelaces, his impolitely-timed incontinence intensified.)
I could see now why Stradivarius had placed his clothes on his head, and it wasn’t to considerately spare the world the sight of his ugly mug. The T-shirt on one side and the jeans on the other slowly slipped down the rapidly extending horns and settled firmly in place next to his head like a pair of dirty earmuffs. Apparently the Gypsy king had figured out a way to spare himself the effort of stealing a fresh set of dirty clothes every time he had the misfortune of changing back into himself. The dilapidated boots remained stubbornly attached to his oversized rear hooves. Considering the beating the things must have taken on a nightly basis during the transformation alone, let alone stomping around attached to a foul-tempered werebull all night long, I changed my mind and decided his rotten old Timberlands weren’t in such rough shape after all.
The werebull roared a terrifying moo, and I was pummeled by a hot blast of breath that reeked of Taco Bell and crabgrass.
Its legs and arms were still mostly the scrawny appendages of Stradivarius, and I was amazed that the toothpick-thin bones were able to support a beast that was already huge and still growing. It looked like a beanbag chair balanced on four #2 Ticonderoga pencils, and judging by all the portentously undulating black bumps that were rippling around its bloating torso, the behemoth had not yet reached full size.
With a roar, it reared up, tearing away cheap floor tiles. Its left horn speared one of the recessed overhead lights, cracking plastic and shattering florescent bulbs. The beast twisted furiously and the tip of its long left horn snagged the metal cage that covered the window. With a wrench of its head it tore free not only the thick wire mesh, but half the window frame. The stink of night in the city came roaring in on a gush of cool air.
The werebull dropped its head and flicked its horns, and the window frame soared off, crashing to splinters against the wall of the interrogation room.
No more time to await rescue. I was stuck using the only key I had.
Shooting off a lock is swell for bigshot movie actors, but it isn’t all that easy in real life, especially when the marksman’s hands are shaking like Katherine Hepburn on a paint mixer. It became even more difficult in this case since, just as I was taking aim, the door suddenly jerked open and the pimple-faced kid in uniform who’d dumped me in the room suddenly and belatedly stuck his irritated head inside the room.
“What the hell’s going on in here?”
The kid cop went rapid-fire through a series of comic book reactions.
First, he looked extremely annoyed that he’d had to drag himself from wherever he was napping to answer my persistent pounding on the door.
Next, he looked scared shitless when he realized I was holding a gun which I’d yanked back just in time to narrowly avoid shooting him in his Twix bar.
Lastly, he looked for the nearest exit when he saw the gigantic beast with the plumes of furious steam pouring from its flaring nostrils who was at that moment attacking the furniture inside the interrogation room.
The werebull hooked the underside of the pockmarked conference table in the middle of the room with its clothesline horns and flung the heavy hunk of furniture like it was Styrofoam into the rear wall. The table smashed to bits above the busted-out window. A few big chunks of wood and broken wall sailed out into the night and dropped from sight.
I vaguely heard the sound of horns honking and tires squealing. Only vaguely, because by the time the shattered remnants of the werebull’s furious outburst had reached the traffic below, I was running like the Schwarzenegger I am down the hallway outside. The only human on earth more cowardly than me at that moment was the rookie cop, who had paused only long enough on his panicked, headlong dash for safety to bravely hurl his half-eaten Twix at the snorting, furiously lowing behemoth.
The world exploded behind us as we ran. The floor shook beneath our feet. I glanced back to see the werebull now in the hallway with half the wall to the interrogation room scattered on the floor around its massive hooves.
“MOOOO!” bellowed the werebull, evidently unembarrassed by its limited Fisher-Price See ’n Say vocabulary. I supposed it had a right to feel its oats, as pulling the string didn’t usually result in the piggy’s “oink” shattering a dozen office windows.
Window after window exploded beside me as I ran, victims of the vibrations from the werebull’s single, Ella Fitzgerald vs. wineglass moo.
The kid cop floored it out into the squad room, with me hurtling right behind.
The large room was lightly staffed in the evening, as the department’s official position was we lived in a golden, crime-free age where the city’s streets were free of nighttime danger and all the murderers and drug dealers held hands and sang Kumbaya and nobody tried to stab anybody in the throat until the sun came up.
The cockamamie staff schedule worked in my favor that night, since there were no quick-thinking cops on duty to shoot me when it appeared as if an armed lunatic had chased one of their fellow officers into the room.
Only one detective thought to start reaching for his piece, but the terrifying “moo!” that echoed from out the hallway we’d just exited froze his hand on his holster.
“Igor Smith!” the young cop hollered at the startled room. “He’s some kind of were-animal!”
“Igor Jones, actually!” I corrected as I flew right along behind the rookie for the main exit. “And he’s clearly a werebull. Unfortunately for him, my firm doesn’t defend were-creatures. But for all other legal needs be sure to contact the friendly assholes at Shyster, Pilfer and Fraud, LLC.”
It was lucky that the dozen plainclothes cops in the room through which I was running and screaming weren’t in a profession that expected armed men to make split-second decisions, because the entire lot of them just stood there like mannequins as the kid and I floored it around desks and booked it for the hall. Another roaring moo! echoed from deep behind me, and this time came with it the clomp of heavy feet.
Coffee cups, pens and stacks of manila files dumped off desks to let me know that somewhere to my back a huge goddamn bull was charging. The cascade of crap barely incommoded me, and I jumped and leapt over and around it like a goddamn gazelle. Beneath the soles of my shoes came an earthquake-like shaking that felt as if one end of the floor was being stomped on like a teeter-totter.
There came a massive crash, like a meteor or one of those Moon Men cheese rockets had struck the building. A plume of dust belched forward and passed me by, the leading edge of the cloud making it out into the main hallway a split-second before me. I glanced back as I stumbled out of the squad room.
The werebull was nearly fully formed. Only the legs weren’t quite there yet, but as the kid cop beside me stabbed at the elevator button I watched what remained of the scrawny legs and arms of Igor Stradivarius transform into a quartet of the most powerful, muscled gams this side of Radio City Music Hall. The werebull shrugged off the chunks of plaster and pulverized wood from the wall it had just blown apart.
The behemoth seemed momentarily disoriented as it glanced around the squad room. The werebull’s eyes raked over a whole bunch of terrified detectives, who were only now finally getting around to drawing their pieces. Its eyes, as big and gleaming as bowling balls buffed with Pledge, scanned the room, almost as if they were searching for one face in particular.
I had no idea how much of its previous occupant inhabited the brain of the werebull after its transformation, but it was clear when its malevolent eyes fixated on my ass cooling its heels way over by the elevators that it must have held on to at least some of Stradivarius’ memories, even if only on the instinctive level.
The werebull flung back its head and let loose a terrible roar.
“MOO!”
The head dropped back down, evil eyes located me once more, and a blast of hot mist blew from its nostrils like steam from a sidewalk grate in winter. The massive bull began charging like a floozie with a sugar daddy’s credit card.
Horns hooked desks which instantly splintered and blasted apart in either direction. The walls of goddamn Jericho shook. Cops drew a bead on the rampaging monster and plugged its glistening black sides with round after round of lead as it pounded through their midst on insanely large hooves in the direction of the hallway.
In the meantime, at ground zero, the elevator light continued to read “lobby,” and the doors remained steadfastly shut.
“Might I suggest you jab the goddamn button again?” I snapped.
“I pressed it twice already!” insisted Twix cop. He stabbed the button two more times. The arrow above our heads continued to remain stuck on the red “L.”
In the squad room, the werebull hooked both horns into the front of an old wooden desk. Without slowing its advance, its powerful neck muscles shuddered and it gave a single, violent flick that sent the desk soaring back over its chuck roast and straight through the windowed partition that separated Dan Jenkins’ office from the main squad room. Jenkins office exploded to busted-up bits, and I deeply regretted not being able to enjoy the second happiest moment of my life after my divorce.
In the next instant, the werebull crashed into the ancient, narrow wall that separated the squad room from the upstairs lobby. It charged through the ruins with a murderous gleam in its eyes and the business end of one horn, which was decorated with a pair of filthy jeans, aimed square at my savagely pounding chest.