I had not, in fact, been lying to Victorina Flapchack and I did (also in fact) have several things I needed to check out that morning.
I would have preferred to rely on public transportation which, while as unreliable as a French vow of marital fidelity, was cheap. Unfortunately, the herd of detonating buses was growing thin around town these days, and city trains didn’t fall off their tracks anywhere near my first destination.
I briefly considered sticking out my thumb and trusting the kindness of a passing stranger, but the neighborhood that was my first stop wasn’t known for benevolence. I was pretty sure most of the limo drivers would be instructed from the back seat to drive over me, and I didn’t have the schedule for that day’s yacht races.
The rear of the cab in which I was crammed was so claustrophobic it felt like the side doors were closing in from either direction like the walls in a Flash Gordon serial. Big city cabs have less leg room these days than a uterus. By the time the taxi arrived in the swanky suburban neighborhood of Ritzy-Ass Heights, the blood had stopped circulating to pretty much every part of my body except my wallet, which the driver insisted I empty into his greedy hand if I expected him to sit and wait.
I paid the son of a bitch his two-bucks extortion with a promise for more once he returned me to my offices, and I spilled out of the taxi’s cramped back seat like a pile of sloppily folded laundry.
The cops were still on the scene at retired assistant D.A. Pettifogger’s palatial retirement shack. The legal gasbag was out on his front walk holding court for police and local TV cameras. He was still wearing the red-and-white striped bathrobe that had been unsuccessfully cinching his Orson Welles gut on the front page of that morning’s Gazette, which meant that the long-winded bastard had been standing outside boring everybody within earshot for a six hour filibuster. It didn’t come as a surprise since, like all fat bastard know-it-all, know-nothing lawyers, he was drunk on the sound of his own voice. Also, vodka.
“It is tragedy,” the lawyer SOB was intoning as I walked up the sidewalk. “Quite simply, tragedy. Tragedy of the highest order. It is a tragedy like no other this great city, nay state, have ever before borne witness to.”
A reporter, who for some reason wasn’t ashamed to announce his profession to the world with the press tag in his hat band, raised a chewed pencil.
“Are you suggesting this is worse than 1912?”
The fat idiot lawyer was momentarily taken off message. Bushy white eyebrows that looked like they’d been plucked from the tops of aspirin bottles and haphazardly glued in place collapsed in a cotton train wreck over a rum-blossomed schnozz.
“While I, like all lawyers, am an expert on history and absolutely everything else, please refresh the recollection of anyone here who, unlike me, doesn’t know that to which you are referring, son,” Pettifogger, esq., said, with a blustery jiggle of his saddlebag jowls.
“That was the summer of the Chi-rish Tragedy of 1912,” the reporter explained, glancing at his confreres in the Fourth Estate who were equally surprised that the old bastard was clueless about the most historically significant year in local history. “Pancho Villa read his map upside-down and accidentally invaded and burned Irish Town to the ground. That was just two days before the Martians landed and ate all those Chinamen in Chinamantown. It was also the year of those outbreaks of small, medium and largepox. And in November, Dandy Lucius Melbourne got elected to the city council, then got burned at the stake on Christmas when people realized he was Catholic.”
Pettifogger, esquire, asshole, raised himself to his full, dignified 5’ 3” height.
“Tragedies all, son. But anyone who followed my career at the district attorney’s office knows that I am not a man given to hyperbole,” the bastard lawyer hyperbolically intoned. “So believe me when I say that this is a million times worse than then, and I will tell you why. Back then was a time of lawlessness, with Mexican revolutionaries, spacemen and yellow Chinese with all their whatnots and etceteras. This, on the other hand, is supposed to be an enlightened age of laws that protect men and, by extension, their lawns. Our homes are our castles, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and if the lawn of my castle is not safe, neither are any of yours.”
The moron lawyer was so in love with the sounds emanating from his mouth hole that he didn’t realize that he wasn’t in court or that when he gestured grandly at the end of his summation, his robe fell open. He was currently giving viewers of the 9:00 a.m. Eye-Opener Local Thrilling Action News Squad with Chad and Irene an eyeful of the shriveled contents of his legal briefs.
The commotion on the front walk gave me the cover I needed to take a good glance at the fat bastard’s front yard. I walked from one end of the sidewalk to the other, carefully scrutinizing the hell out of everything as I went.
The first thing I observed was that the city maintained better sidewalks in neighborhoods where the politically-connected, retired SOB lawyers who lived there never waddled down them. The second thing I noticed were the fresh cracks to the panels in the sidewalk on the north end of the property, opposite the driveway.
The cops had strung up a mile of yellow police tape around the mud zone where the D.A.-hole’s lawn had been. Had I still been on the force, I would have approached the scene thusly:
First, I would have eaten a bullet from the barrel of my police special. I quit the force for a reason, and even hypothetically I’d have ended the waking nightmare that I thought I’d already ended ten years before by turning in my badge at midnight through the living room window of my asshole captain.
Second, I would have probably survived my .38 sayonara, because I’m luckless even theoretically, so my imaginary self would be stuck on the job until I dropped dead at my desk from a terminal paper cut two days before my retirement party.
But third, and more pertinently than #s one and two, had my hypothetical self been corralled into investigating this latest missing grass case, I would have actually been marginally competent at my job, which would have put me head and shoulders above the cops at the scene. I would have, for instance, roped off the entire crime scene rather than just one portion of it.
The yellow tape should have extended out around the sidewalk. There was evidence of recent heavy traffic across the cement. Not only were there a million fresh cracks, but some chunks of busted cement had in spots been shoved down into the ground underneath from the weight of whatever had stomped across it.
So obvious was the evidence of migration across the sidewalk that I didn’t need to stop and examine the cement closely. A good thing for me, since I suddenly spied Detective Daniel Jenkins up by the corner of the mansion using an official department interpreter to threaten a couple of illegal alien landscapers.
The aliens blinked confusion in their giant, single eyes, made neep-neep alien alibi noises at the interpreter, and unfurled green, foot-long fingers in the direction of the battered little spaceship covered in shovels and garden hoses that had brought them to work that morning from the Horsehead Nebula.
The muddy crime scene that had been the front lawn of Simon Q. Pettifogger was better preserved than that of Judge Dillinger. If the front page article in that untrustworthy scandal sheet the Gazette could be trusted, there had evidently been a lot of activity in the ex-assistant district attorney’s yard in a short amount of time.
The ruins of the sidewalk were covered in muddy hoof prints that led out into the street. I followed the tracks to the middle of the road, where I waved at my cab driver to get the hell over and pick me up, since the meter was still running and I’d already walked enough in the past day to undo six months of carefully cultivated arteriosclerosis.
Just my dumb luck, Dan Jenkins spotted me as the cab pulled up.
The flatfoot had a notepad in one hand and a pen in the other. The two pathetic little green illegals he’d been gleefully browbeating were clutching giant straw hats in their E.T. hands. They looked to me with their single, bloodshot eyes as the distracting salvation that might get them back under their saucer’s bubble dome, which was stacked with leaking sacks of Lowe’s compost for either their next job or lunch.
“What the hell are you doing here, Banyon?” Jenkins hollered.
“I was testing my new Radio Shack asshole detector and it led me straight to you, Detective Jenkins,” I yelled back. “But now that I’m here, the green light is stuck on ‘on.’ I’ve got to get it away from you or the neighbors might call a real cop to complain.”
Jenkins had a murderous look in his eye, which I was sure he’d redirect toward the pair of small, web-footed landscapers.
I hopped into the rear of the cab and smashed both my knees on the back of the passenger seat, because hopping into a modern taxi is like hopping into a desk drawer lined with somebody else’s chewed gum. I was rubbing my knees as I directed the driver to take off down the road before Jenkins’ reddening head went up like an exploding gas line and took out half a block of houses of the stinking rich and semi-famous.
It was midmorning, and the rising sun had pretty much dried out the prints that led from the ruins of the D.A. bastard’s yard. And, of course, just because the world has to make everything even more of a pain in the ass for me, the heaviest of the mud had been mostly clomped off before the hooves had reached the disgustingly magnificent palace two gilded doors down, so eventually there wasn’t even any dust to track. But the prints had pointed in a single direction, and since no other lawns had been eaten along the way I assumed the route continued to lead directly down the middle of the road. The occasional pile of cow shit baking in the sun supported my genius theory.
The elegant neighborhood of Ritzy-Ass Heights petered out at the periphery with a couple of measly million buck shacks, and the road ended at a dead end. A gate that consisted of a single pipe with a hinge on one end and a padlock on the other blocked a city access road. The gate was still fastened, but the overgrowth beside the right post had been crushed into a path that led around to the access road.
The cabbie scrutinized the gate as his engine idled and his meter spun.
“You want I should turn around?” the driver asked.
“I want you should continue to sit on your ass while that meter of yours continues to spin around with incredibly fishy velocity,” I informed him as I popped the door. “I want you should also enroll this evening in an English-as-a-second-language class over at Chrissie Hynde Junior High School, because good grammar are important. Without it you could wind up a cab driver or, worse, a private investigator.”
I left the cabbie to absorb the wisdom of my sage counsel and headed on foot to the gate. The taxi-driving bastard demonstrated his imperviousness to good advice by spinning a dust cloud with his rear wheels and peeling off down the road.
It was just as well that the son of a bitch abandoned me, as I’d paid him every last cent in my possession, including the nothing back at my office, in order to get him to sit and wait back at the ex-assistant D.A.’s dump, so I’d have inevitably had to stiff him on the majority of his fare and on the totality of a nonexistent tip.
The path around the gate had, like the route from the Gypsy camp to Judge Dillinger’s home, been recently formed. Freshly snapped branches and pulverized leaves led straight in to the access road which in turn led a half-mile through dense woods.
I heard the muted sound of highway traffic even before I came across the twenty-foot high noise barriers.
The hoof prints periodically reappeared along the shoulder next to the more hard-packed earth of the access road, and I followed them through a gap in the high barrier.
I’m not usually lousy at geography. If one’s lifestyle choice dictates that one spend a significant time half in the bag, the need to haul oneself to men’s rooms in dingy bars becomes of paramount importance post-midnight, which means knowing one’s way around is an important skill to hone unless one wants to break one’s ass tripping over an inconveniently situated stool, table or prostrate floozy.
Still, I haven’t spent a significant time amongst the moneyed class. My invitation to a life of wealth and leisure had been lost en route to the ghetto in which I live, which is just as well since polo ponies give me hives and I have conscientious objections to caviar and inbreeding. Because of my lowly position as king of the hoi-polloi, I hadn’t realized that Ritzy-Ass Heights swung around so close to either the highway or the old freight line that ran next to it.
The trains still ran, although infrequently. Those of us on the uncivilized side of the noise barriers sometimes heard them rumbling in the night like a ten mile-long burrito painfully negotiating its way through the decaying city’s failing digestive tract.
Hoof-tracks stopped at train tracks.
There was no sign of a train on the rusty tracks; just an empty rail line stretching in from the desolate east and vanishing around a distant curve to the bleak west. Whatever had been sitting on the old rail line the previous night was long gone in daylight, and with Detective Daniel Jenkins on the case it was pretty much guaranteed the cops would never punch their way beyond the yellow police tape in which Jenkins had corralled both the dead zone of bloated ex-assistant D.A. Simon Q. Pettifogger’s front lawn as well as the flatfoot’s own insurmountable ignorance.
I could see the old dilapidated pedestrian bridge that ran over the highway a quarter mile away. It was covered in depressingly misspelled graffiti and looked as if it was held aloft purely by the hopes of the motorists who visibly sped up as they approached and passed beneath its rotting, ominous shadow.
With my lousy luck, it wouldn’t collapse beneath my feet on my way back into the city as it swayed underneath me like some Third World rope bridge connecting Shitbuktu
to Outer Crapgolia. Still, being the ray of sunshine that I am, I kept a positive thought that the drug addicts who lived in the woods along the tracks had stolen most of the rivets that were keeping it aloft, and that in a matter of moments I’d be blessedly pitched down onto the highway in front of a convoy of speeding eighteen wheelers.
This merry thought to sustain me, and my first errand dispatched in what was promising to be an even longer, even more shit-filled day than I’d imagined, I struck off for the decrepit highway bridge.