It was somewhere post-dawn when I awoke the next morning, although I was not aware of the precise time of day of my reentry to the goddamn land of the living. Nor did I remember that I’d been to the hospital where I’d gotten kicked in the head by a rampaging physician werebull. I also didn’t remember where I’d passed out for the night, the current month, the date of the unknown month, the year, the president, what 2 + 2 equaled, or wherever the hell I was in either the physical or philosophical sense.
I unfortunately remembered who I was, which is always a kick in the teeth any time of day but is most disappointing in the early a.m. when, on most days, I’d prefer to wake up as anyone other than me.
I felt a sharp toe repeatedly jabbing me in the side. Not enough to crack bone, just enough to make it feel as if my wounded ribs were about to snap and perforate a lung.
I suddenly remembered that my ribs were bruised in a hospital, but was vague on the specifics. I thought it might have had something to do with a porterhouse steak and a baked potato that looked like an elf, but that didn’t seem like the full picture. Then I forgot about trying to remember how I was injured, because I suddenly remembered what I did for a living, and I immediately wished that whoever was kicking me awake would wind up and give one big, compassionate, vicious boot and end my misery.
Worse than remembering my own appalling vocation, when I pinched open my eyes I had total recall of the individual who was gently kicking me in ribs. My flickering brain also decided at that moment to recall how my ribs had been bruised but not broken by a bunch of werecows and -bulls, the existence of which I had blessedly forgotten entirely in my hours of blissful unconsciousness.
“I’ve changed my mind. I want to live, at least long enough to get you out of my life forever, so I’d appreciate it greatly if you’d kindly stop kicking me in my ribs, which are already halfway on the way to snapping thanks to you and your thieving clan.”
I told all this to Victorina Flapchack, the lovely owner of the beautiful foot that had been attempting to split apart my fourth and fifth ribs.
“You are finally awake,” said the Gypsy dame, who was a lot more perturbed than somebody kicking me into consciousness had a right to be. “I was beginning to think you would sleep all day.” She stopped kicking, though with reluctance. “You complain too much,” she added. “I was barely nudging you.”
“First off, I was not sleeping,” I informed her. “Thanks to your bastard king, I was out cold. And, lady, you could nudge field goals for a living. I know working for an honest buck isn’t your thing, so the NFL would be home sweet home to an unrepentant criminal such as yourself.”
I attempted to roll over on my office sofa, where I figured Mannix (who was not a baked potato after all) had dragged me the previous day. I thought I’d offer Victorina Flapchack my back, which she could kick around for a little while just for variety’s sake. When I turned I found not the back of my couch but a soggy corrugated box labeled: Property of Myron Wasserbaum, D.D.S.: Settled lawsuits. A newer box stacked on top was marked: Pending lawsuits.
The sofa also felt lumpier than usual; more like a half-inflated air mattress. The air smelled like a musty basement, the brick walls wept exposed mortar like those in a basement, and the bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling, as would be the case had they been deployed to illuminate the musty air and bawling walls of a basement.
I applied my keen private investigator’s training and determined that I was not, in fact, in my office, but in a goddamn basement. Specifically, and judging by the boxes of junk belonging to my third floor neighbor, notoriously incompetent dentist Myron Wasserbaum, I was in the basement of the headquarters of Banyon Investigations, Inc.
I rolled over on the air mattress that Mannix had apparently laid me out on the previous day. There was a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water on the floor beside me which Victorina Flapchack, in her enthusiasm to assault me, had failed to steal.
The Gypsy dame had been about to start up again, but she stopped in mid-kick when she saw I was finally rousing myself. I hauled my ass to a sitting position.
“Mannix told you I was down here,” I said.
The elf would have obeyed my instructions to stay out of the office until after sunup, when Igor Stradivarius would have returned to human form after a night of bovine merriment and homicide. I had no doubt that Mannix stayed by my side ministering to me until after sunrise, but by eight o’clock the lure of sharpening pencils and reorganizing my case files would have become too great a temptation to resist.
“He was upstairs in your offices,” Victorina Flapchack said, nodding. “Mr. Banyon, I demand to know what progress you have made on locating our sacred bible.”
“You’re still going on about that?” I asked as I attempted to rub the ugly events of the past two days from my eyes with the heels of my hands. “That’s old news, sister. I found that yesterday. It’s not technically in my possession, but it’s just a matter of collecting it.” I ignored the excitement on her face and glanced around. “You didn’t happen to see a naked cow with a pair of busted pegs lying around here, did you?”
“Where is our bible?” Victorina Flapchack demanded.
I flashed an insincere grin. “It’s up here, sweetheart,” I said, tapping a smart-ass finger to my temple. Big mistake.
I regretted the action at once. Fresh pain from the bull kick to my noggin shot like a branding iron through my medulla oblongata, blasted out my ear and set fire to the box that contained the records of Myron Wasserbaum’s current legal entanglements.
I blinked away a layer of sheer agony and saw that the box was not, in fact, ablaze after all. I reasoned this was because the flaming pain had torn like a rocket around the back of my head and shot straight in through the other ear, detonating on contact with the ragged ruins of my beleaguered brain.
I fumbled up the bottle of Bayer.
While I’d slept, Victorina Flapchack had apparently been busier than I’d given the Gypsy dame credit for.
“You couldn’t leave two?” I snarled, shaking the empty aspirin bottle.
She’d even swiped the cotton. I tossed the bottle into the corner for the rats to play with and held out my hand.
The dame had not a hint of shame on her pulchritudinous kisser as she reached into a rattling pocket in her peasant dress and dropped a couple of hot aspirin onto my open palm. I tossed them far back in my throat and snatched up the glass Mannix had left out. I poured a mouthful of air onto my dusty tongue.
“You stole the goddamn water, too?”
And, naturally, because I’d been up for less than five minutes yet it was already that kind of morning, I proceeded to choke to death on the pair of pills.
# # #
The two chalky aspirin were still stuck in my dry throat, strangling me from the inside out, when, three minutes later, I flung open the door to Banyon Investigations and half-stormed, half-staggered inside.
Mannix was working at his little desk. The elf looked up with eagerness at my grand entrance. Seated beside him was the dame with the rack from Pauper Memorial’s emergency room. She was no longer a cow, which could be chalked up to the rising sun of a miserable new day. In human form she looked about as confused as I figured she did every time she accidentally mixed up her shoes and thought her feet were on backwards.
“Hey, it’s you,” correctly observed the dame who Mannix had rescued from some bushes, her voice laced with suspicion. To my little assistant, Miss Ivory said, “This is the mook what you said’ll keep me safe from whatever’s out there I’m in danger from?”
“Sister, my head is too busy erupting like Krakatoa to untangle the thought you’re holding hostage in the middle of that sentence. Mannix, give her a stapler to play with. Just keep an eye on her. If she impales one of her fake knobs, she’ll be whizzing around the ceiling like a deflating balloon.”
I had scarcely stumbled two feet into the room when an angry voice drove a railroad spike into my skull from behind.
“You have not answered me about our bible,” Victorina Flapchack said, charging into the room in my wake.
The Gypsy dame had dogged me from the basement. I’d tried to lose her on the elevator, but that only works with a crowd and the only other passenger was an eight year old student from Madame Carpathia’s top floor dance studio who refused to share the bottled water that was sticking out of her backpack despite repeated assurances to the brat that I was, in fact, asphyxiating on aspirin and did not have goddamn whooping cough.
“I haven’t answered your relentless queries about your missing bible because, in case you hadn’t noticed, I’m in the process of aspirating aspirin, thanks to you,” I gasped.
I had to stop reading her the riot act because I nearly inhaled one of the stuck aspirin into a lung, and the ensuing coughing spasm -- which, as a bonus, caused a fresh, white-hot pain in my aching skull -- rendered me incapable of ripping a new one for Victorina Flapchack and her entire goddamn thieving Gypsy tribe.
I shoved open the door to my inner sanctum and made a beeline for the corner cooler. I usually avoid guzzling water, not including the gallons of H2O Ed Jaublowski regularly poured into the booze at O’Hale’s Bar, but this was an emergency.
If I hadn’t been kicked in the head by a bull thanks to the king of the Gypsies, my brain would have remembered that the elders of the tribe who’d hired me along with Madame Volga had emptied the tank into their thieving pockets two days before.
I stuck my head under the spigot and gave a tap. Only a couple of feeble drops fell onto my tongue before the nozzle went dry.
In the seconds I had left before I dropped dead on the floor, I considered flinging myself off the fire escape. The law of averages dictated some bastard with a grudge against me was passing beneath my office window at any given time, and I didn’t feel like riding off into the horror of eternal bliss alone. I only hoped that I’d land on old Vincetti, the fascist fishmonger who ran the For the Halibut fish market on the ground floor, and who had been committing olfactory crimes against the entire neighborhood for decades.
I’m not absolutely sure that I would have expired in the next twenty seconds, but I didn’t have the chance to find out since Mannix chose that moment to sweep into the room, uncapping a bottled water. The elf handed the bottle off like a baton and I was able to dislodge the recalcitrant aspirin from my epiglottis.
“Thanks, kid,” I rasped, handing back the bottle. “Give yourself a raise, but before you get started on the paperwork wheel that dim bulb in here.”
Mannix trotted obediently from the room.
Victorina Flapchack watched the floor show with increasing agitation.
“Do you or do you not know where our bible is?” she demanded.
“The first one,” I replied. “Possibly the second. But nearly probably the first. However, there are bigger things to consider before I retrieve it, namely ensuring the safety of my ass. I’ve almost gotten it killed a number of times while working this case, and there is a fine line between almost killed and actually killed. Probability is beginning to weigh heavily against me.”
As I spoke, I took my seat behind my desk.
Mannix had defied my implicit orders yet again and had retrieved the day’s mail from the box downstairs. He’d piled the pile of USPS junk on my blotter. I didn’t have a chance to pointlessly reprimand him, nor did Victorina Flapchack have the opportunity to grill me about her tribe’s MIA bible, before Mannix came hustling back into the room.
The elf was shoving along a wheeled office chair in which Miss Ivory with-no-last-name had parked her curvaceous derriere.
I hadn’t noticed during my rush through the outer room that Mannix had crafted the dame a new set of plaster casts, which were a clear improvement over the shoddy ones she’d had constructed around her busted gams at Pauper Memorial and Rug Remnant Factory Hospital that must have fallen off during the night when she was a cow. They probably wouldn’t be needed long, since her were-animal DNA was working overtime to knit the busted bones. The elf had also scraped up a skirt and blouse, although being a thoroughly handy ex-North Pole employee it was entirely possible he’d personally stitched together a new ensemble for her during the night.
“The little guy says you’re some kind of big-shot hero,” the dame accused as she was bounced before my desk. “You don’t look like nothing to me. Where’s Mr. William Morris? You didn’t catch him yesterday, did you? Told you so. Hah! Moo!”
She had a copy of the morning’s Gazette in her lap. The headline blared Cow-tastrophy in the ER! I nodded to the paper, and Mannix slipped it efficiently from her lap and slid it next to the pile of mail on my desk. The stack tumbled, and a few pieces of junk mail spilled off to one side.
“As I tried to tell you in the hospital, your Igor William Morris, talent agent to the stars, is in reality Igor Stradivarius, the king of the Gypsies,” I informed the dummy. As I perused the front page, I fished from my pocket the ancient picture of the charlatan I’d found inside the mattress back in his wagon and displayed it for the moron dame to see. “He is a confidence artist, who I now strongly suspect is a lot more artistic than the run-of-the-mill shoddy driveway sealer I initially thought he was. Tell her.”
I summoned Victorina Flapchack forward. The Gypsy dame didn’t want to get involved, so I had to assure her that it was the only path to finally getting her mitts on The Big Book of Gypsy Scams, and so she shook her head and sighed.
“It is true,” Victorina Flapchack said, her jaw clenched impatiently.
The dame with the busted gams immediately believed a professional liar over trustworthy me, which was probably precisely because Victorina Flapchack was a pro. An honest face on an unscrupulous fraud wins out over pug-ugly veracity every time.
“A Gypsy?” the dame said, her face souring. “Ew.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “But we’ll just set that ‘ew’ aside for now. I’m sure the anti-defamation league will want to bring it up in their letter writing campaign.” I tapped a finger to the front page of the Gazette. “According to this poorly written article which was filed before dawn, the police say they have Stradivarius back in custody. Detective Jenkins has undoubtedly been backpedaling like a unicyclist on a high wire over that screw-up since sunup, when the werebull he arrested and booked as Stradivarius transformed back into a quack M.D. But things have heated up way too much for the Gypsy king to allow this to go on for much longer. You. The ditz,” I said to the ditz. I paused. “Just what the hell’s your name, anyway?”
“Ivory Keyes,” the dame replied. “Mr. William Morris said my name was perfect for films. That lying, gypping bastard.”
Victorina Flapchack was too furious to speak in defense of her indefensible tribe. She flung her splendid ass on my office couch, violently crossed her legs, and glared at the cracked plaster ceiling.
“Actually, that was probably the one truth he uttered in his entire life,” I told the dame with the born dirty movie actress name. I tossed her a pad and pencil. “I need you to write down everywhere you’ve been with Stradivarius. Not just actual places, but impressions of where you might have been with him. Thoughts (if you’re capable of them), images, landmarks, anything that comes into your head. You might have seen something important when you were a cow that managed to burrow into your subconscious, assuming you have a conscious, sub or otherwise. Mannix, go get whatever maps and local guide books you’ve got stashed around here.”
The elf dutifully darted from the room. I heard file drawers opening and closing in the outer office.
Before Mannix made the colossal mistake of coming to work for me, pretty much all I had on file were overdue bills, Smirnoff bottles and pairs of shoes that Doris hoped would come back in style but didn’t want to surrender closet space to back home. Mannix had stocked the office with the sort of stuff P.I.’s might actually need, and a moment later he demonstrated his worth yet again when he hustled back into the room with an armload of maps, pamphlets and a book released by the local historical society.
Mannix had done great junior detective work finding Ivory Keyes, but as a lead the dame was iffy. The mystery train she’d fallen off of could be miles from the spot where he’d found her stuck in the bushes. The locomotive had to be stashed somewhere between Ritzy-Ass Heights and the Big Chief Shortpants Campground, but that area along the old railroad line was too vast to search sober on a pair of worn Florsheims.
It was slow going, since we were dealing with a dame who spent nearly fifty-percent of her time as a cow and 100% of her time as a moron.
I had begun to lose faith that we’d get anything worthwhile out of Ivory Keyes, so I’d surrendered the job of coaxing information from the bimbo to Mannix. Across the room, Victorina Flapchack whiled away the better part of a half-hour in sullen silence, broken only by the occasional angry clearing of her throat so as to remind the rest of us that she was still there and still pissed off about something.
Mannix had gone through page after page of material with Ivory Keyes before something finally sparked just this side of the event horizon of the black hole that resided in the middle of her skull.
“Why do I remember this thing?” the aspiring mature motion picture actress suddenly asked, scrunching up her nose like a rabbit. “I don’t remember remembering this thing.”
Mannix took a couple of items from Ivory Keyes and passed them across the desk.
The dumb dame had circled in ink a photograph in the historical society book, as well as an ink drawing of what looked like the exact same picture from a yellowed pamphlet dated 1962, which Mannix had dug up from God-only-knew where. For good measure, she’d also sketched the same image in the corner of a scrap of paper on which she had been doodling as she was going through the stack of paperwork.
“Tri-City Drive-In,” I said, casting an eye from one image of the drive-in movie screen to another. “The dump’s been abandoned for a quarter century. Closed down when home video made it simpler for teenagers to get knocked up in the comfort of their own living rooms. Stuck in the woods, yet convenient to roads and rail lines.”
I offered for the perusal of the crowd a scrap of paper of my own. It turned out that Mannix, in defying my direct orders in favor of running Banyon Investigations, Inc. like an actual business, had come in handy yet again.
“It was in that pile of junk mail you left on my desk. That doesn’t alter the fact that my standing order is for all mail delivered to this dump to be either ignored or burned with extreme prejudice and copious amounts of lighter fluid.”
Ivory Keyes had no clue what the clue meant, but the piece of junk mail brought stewing Victorina Flapchack up from the couch and over to my desk.
The lovely Gypsy dame’s eyes grew wide. “He cannot be serious,” she said. “When did this arrive?”
“It was in the box this morning,” Mannix said. He was frowning with the entirety of his little face as he attempted to grasp the significance of the flyer.
The flimsy leaflet looked like it had been printed up in a pre-Kinko’s mimeograph machine. Half the ink was smeared, and it had been sent using the cheapest USPS bulk rate. The paper itself was puckered as if it had gotten wet at some point and dried out, although, since it hadn’t rained for a couple of miserable days now, for once my overpaid USPS mail schlepper couldn’t be blamed for leaving the windows down in his truck or dropping important correspondence down a storm drain.
Thieves can afford to be choosers more than beggars, but sometimes all that’s available to steal are damp cases of paper from Kentucky Fried Chicken.
The flyer had been sent to my office, but was addressed simply to “resident.”
I recalled a couple of teetering piles of KFC office paper jammed inside a crummy old wagon parked in a mosquito-infested campground. I imagined that every mailbox in the lobby downstairs had gotten a flyer and, if the scam was as big as I now figured, every single box around town had one stuffed inside it that morning as well.
The text was blaring, but simple.
BEEF, BEEF, BEEF!
SAVE $$$!!!!
FRESH STAKES CHEEP!
TENDRELOIN TO GO AT PRICES THAT R GONE!
HAMBHURG BY THE PADDY OR LB.!
ONE DAY ONLY SAIL!
SEE R AD IN TOMMORROWS GAZZETE 4 DETAILS!
There were a couple of smeared public domain images of cartoon cows stamped around the edges to lend an air of frivolity to the multitude of depressing misspellings.
Victorina Flapchack wore the appalled look you’d expect from someone who was legitimately appalled. Either that or she was in on the scheme and was great at faking being horrified which, being a professional cheat and liar herself, wouldn’t come as a terrific shock.
Ivory Keyes -- she of the porn star moniker and gravity-defying gunships -- yawned and glanced around for something more interesting and less bloodcurdling to distract the vacant lot between her ears. She discovered an old People magazine belonging to Doris that Mannix had thoughtfully tucked beside her in her rolling chair. She quickly tuned out the massively fascinating and horrible set of circumstances in which she was a direct participant in favor of the excitement of Emmy fashion faux pas, circa 1997.
Mannix tried hard to get it, but the little guy was too thoroughly decent to appreciate the great ocean depths to which human beings were capable of sinking without need of bathysphere or cement overshoe. The elf tore his eyes away from the flyer clue that he himself had placed on my desk. He looked up to me for an assist.
“What does it mean, Mr. Crag?” my small pal asked.
“It means, Mannix, that the driveway is being sealed and the wagon is already revving its engine out back in anticipation of a rapid getaway.”