It takes a lot of effort to be brilliant, brave and resourceful, especially when one is a.) categorically none of the above and is b.) all the while nursing a Fat Man-Little Boy combo concussion. To top it all off there was c.) the fact that I’d been forced to perform so astonishingly courageously while not loaded off my ass.
The cops picked me up sitting at the side of the road surrounded by a couple hundred freed werecows, who had escaped around the collapsed movie screen and were picking at whatever weeds they could find that weren’t on fire.
The herd and I were sandwiched between the ruins of the Tri-City Drive-In and the wildfire ignited by the burning city bus.
Detective Daniel Jenkins personally hollered at and threatened me, but once my story checked out he delegated the task of releasing my innocent ass to an underling.
Despite my remaining commitment to the remnants of Igor Stradivarius’ Gypsy tribe, it was vitally important to my physical and emotional well-being that I get as loaded as possible as rapidly as possible and remain in bed until the world stopped spinning.
When I crawled back into the ugly sunshine two days later, the world appeared to be more or less stationary, although my feet had a sneaking suspicion that the planet was still rotating beneath them. I made sure to hold on to as many surfaces as agreed to support me for fear that it would suddenly stop and I’d hurtle off into outer space.
Two lines of horse-drawn wagons were double-parked on the street outside the headquarters of Banyon Investigations, Inc. Sullen Gypsies sat on wooden seats holding loosely to (presumably) stolen reins while beside them Vincetti, the fascist downstairs fishmonger, ran up and down the sidewalk waving a broom and yelling for the wagons to ho the hell out of the parking spaces in front of his market. The old mackerel peddler was clearly unaware that shit from two dozen horses was air freshener compared to the rotting fish stink that poured from the open mouth of his fetid establishment.
I pretended to know no one and nothing about anything as I snuck past the caravan and the angry old fish vendor wielding his ancient, worn-out broom.
Upstairs, I was greeted by an elf whose ebullience in the throbbing ear of a desperate hangover I only tolerated due to his enormous great worth repeatedly saving my worthless hide through sheer competence. On the other hand was Doris, whose empty desk was abandoned property and by this time was covered in a foot of dust. Or at least it would have been had Mannix not kept the whole dump so unhealthily clean I could have performed appendectomies in my outer office.
Speaking of worthless appendages, I was not surprised given the convoy outside to find Madame Volga and Victorina Flapchack impatiently holding down a pair of chairs near Mannix. The younger of the two Gypsies was not a cow, which was more than could be metaphorically said for her elderly companion.
The two dames jumped to their four human feet upon my entry.
“Where have you been, Banyon?” Madame Volga demanded. “We have demanded an audience for days, and this impudent little one has been of no assistance.”
“Crank the volume down, sister,” I suggested. “My head feels like the percussion section of an orchestra’s been playing cymbals on either side with my brain in between, and you almost put my eye out with a bangle waving those withered arms over your kerchief.” To Mannix, I said, “Good job keeping the riffraff off my apartment doorstep.”
The elf nodded enthusiastically. “Do you feel better, Mr. Crag?”
“I’m still alive, so no,” I replied. “Mannix, I vaguely remember an airhead in casts the last time I was here.”
“Miss Ivory left to pursue her, um, career,” Mannix replied. The little guy’s face flushed crimson, so I figured the dingbat had embarked on the naughty career path the dead Gypsy king Igor Stradivarius had laid out for her after she’d laid out for him.
“Were-animals heal fast, but not that fast. She’ll have to stay off her feet for at least a couple of weeks until her pegs heal anyway, so her choice of vocation is a positive short-term boon,” I said. “I also vaguely remember another thing. Did I only dream I called you in the middle of the night two nights ago, or was that an actual, real-life event?”
In reply, Mannix held up what appeared to be a check. Under closer scrutiny, which I was surprised my bleary eyes were able to perform, it was. The name Waldo “Snappy” Schmidt was scribbled on the signature line.
“Mr. Snappy was very happy you changed your mind and decided to take his case,” the elf said. “He was very impressed you were able to find his diner so quickly.”
I had technically tracked down the wayward diner, albeit accidentally during what I had no idea wasn’t an unrelated case. But I hadn’t spent a week amongst the Gypsies without learning a thing or two about the art of the scam.
Mannix hid the check away in his desk before I, his employer, could get my grubby mitts on it.
“We must speak with you about our bible,” Victorina Flapchack interjected, interrupting one of the few business conversations to ever take place at Banyon Investigations HQ.
“Hush, child, for the tribe does not recognize the voice of one as young as you,” Madame Volga chided. “You should not even be here.” She waved her hands high above her head once more with so much exaggerated vigor I thought she might be trying to signal the pilot of a passing jet 40,000 feet up.
“Neither should I, but I woke up anyway,” I said. I produced from my pocket the fabulous key, my possession of which had so infuriated a couple hundred pounds of dead prime bull beef on the other side of town. “Let’s go get the book.”
The two Gypsy dames marched out the door before me so that, unnoticed, I was able to slip a scrap of paper to Mannix on my way out of the office. I tapped the written instructions and the elf looked up at me with wide eyes.
“Wait five minutes before you get the ball rolling,” I told him.
Down on the street, I bypassed the rows of wagons as well as Vincetti, who had managed to holler a Gypsy crone down from her wagon. The pair of them were arguing on the sidewalk through a fog of impenetrable accents as I hailed a cab.
“I see you’re leaving town,” I said once the three of us had climbed into the back of the taxi. “I suspect a host of dissatisfied customers with shoddily sealed driveways descended on the Big Chief Shortpants Campground once news broke of this latest, greatest Gypsy scam. The trick to the con is always not to get caught. I suppose the tribe would be punishing Stradivarius for screwing up, if not for the fact that he’s in a million pieces in several billion cans of beef stew right now.”
“We endure the ignorance of people like you, Mr. Banyon, and, yes, we accept the failings of our former king because it will all soon become clear,” Victorina Flapchack said. “The Scammessiah will be our guide to a brighter future.”
The younger dame was content, the older bag less so. Madame Volga had apparently not felt compelled to fill anybody below the rank of elder in on the fact that the prophesied Scammessiah was in reality a pan-generational hoax perpetrated by the old on the young within their own tribe. The ancient dame was clearly too stressed-out to slap on the poker face she ordinarily wore for the rubes. Madame Volga drummed fingers encased in cheap rings against the front of the seat as she waited for the cab to go.
“According to the contract you signed, which I fully expected you not to honor, you’re supposed to pick up my expenses. Since I didn’t and don’t expect to see dime one on that front, the very least you’re going to do is pick up the tab for the ride.”
I settled back as Madame Volga and her cheap jewelry settled up with the driver.
When I told the hack where to go, the two dames raised a total of four eyebrows, two of them tweezed to perfection, two like a couple pairs of copulating caterpillars.
The burned-out husks of city buses that had exploded in previous weeks dotted our path through a downtown office building labyrinth that broke free to the old plains section of town east of the waterfront. Low one- and two-story factories became the order of the day for several blocks, and the roadside ruins of charred buses grew more numerous as we closed in on our ultimate destination.
The cab finally stopped and let us out in front of the one place in town that was seeing less business than the Tri-City Drive-In.
The sign out front read, “Municipal Mass Transit and Public Transportation Services,” which was fancy-ass, mile-long, college-educated, pencil-neck bureaucratspeak for that which those of us with a less bullshit-oriented way of thinking used to call the goddamn bus station.
The side yard was a chained-in elephants’ graveyard of buses that never made it out of port before their onboard bombs blew. I bypassed the vehicular ruins and ushered the dames straight through the grimy front terminal door.
Inside was clean, air conditioned, and stunk worse than a dead Gypsy in a port-a-crapper. The sources of the stench were the dozens of derelicts who, in the weeks-long absence of any actual transportation activity at the Transportation Service, had set up hobo camp on the benches and floors of the malodorous bus station.
On the nearest bench I passed a familiar snore.
Wino Ray had been released from the hospital, the staff having evidently been unsuccessful in amputating his reeking shoes. The old rummy sprawled semi-comatose beneath a conveniently outdated issue of the Gazette. The headline read MAD COW! Underneath was a photo of the ruins of both Igor Stradivarius and the bus that was the explosive finale to the werebull Gypsy king’s criminal career.
“Thank you, Wino Ray,” I said, plucking the newspaper from the revolting rags that were desperately attempting, through unraveling cuffs and missing buttons, to escape the odious assignment of enveloping the old bum’s putrid body. “I haven’t had a chance to read about my heroics yet, as I’ve spent the past couple of days prepping my liver to overtake yours in the final hundred yard dash of our miserable lives. Warn your pit crew of hepatologists they’d best bring their A game.”
I shook out the paper and read as the dames and I walked. I spotted very quickly a glaring omission on the front page of the two day-old copy of the worthless local rag.
“I am somehow neither mentioned by name nor so much as referenced by innuendo,” I said. “My office manager elf must have been deeply offended at the snub and nearly equally disappointed at the lack of free advertisement. I, on the other hand, am delighted that my office phone won’t be ringing off the hook, as I intend to devote as much time as humanly possible to doing anything other than working.”
The story covered the beef scam and the recent spate of vandalized lawns. A side article covered the hospitalized herd that was being monitored while its members, some of which had been cows for weeks, transitioned back to human form. Detective Daniel Jenkins was quoted in both stories, and offered to humbly accept accolades for being the superstar cop who cracked the case even though no one was offering any and he hadn’t.
I dropped Wino Ray’s newspaper over the blissfully cataleptic form of one of the drunkard’s inebriated confreres who had selected the bus station’s tile floor as a satisfactory substitute for a Ritz Carlton mattress.
The dames were my silent entourage as I forged onward. I figured both of them had figured out by this time where we were heading. Victorina Flapchack’s face was that of a determined devotee, while Madame Volga was getting more and more antsy with every footstep. As we walked, the old bag’s eyes were darting in every direction in search of an escape hatch.
I led the two dames into the unused back rooms of the old terminal wherein dwelled hundreds of rusted storage lockers.
There weren’t many people these days under the age of a million who took advantage of the cliché of storing valuables at the bus terminal. It might have been that Stradivarius fell into the right ancient demographic and had done so from years of habit, or maybe the Gypsy king figured his secret would be safe in the forgotten bowels of a joint nobody went to anymore due to the high risk of being blown to kingdom come. Whatever the late werebull’s reason, I produced the key which I’d spotted as bus terminal property as soon as I’d fished it from Stradivarius’ fetid trousers, searched out the corresponding locker number that was etched into it and, after a brief struggle with some rusted hinges, produced the missing Gypsy bible.
Both dames attempted to yank the old leather-covered tome from my hands -- Madame Volga with more violent determination than her younger, less ugly companion -- but I managed to hold them at bay long enough to flip through a few pages.
“Blasphemy!” Madame Volga cried, her heart not really in the outrage as her worried, bulging eyes darted to Victorina Flapchack.
“Our bible is not for the eyes of outsiders,” Victorina Flapchack snapped.
“It will no doubt come as a surprise to fifty percent of you that it doesn’t have much in the way of practical spiritual information for insiders either,” I informed the younger of the annoying Gypsy dames.
I held the book out to her nose and brought a thumb down along the pages. Blank page after blank page passed Victorina Flapchack’s increasingly shocked mug. In the margins of several dozen pages near the end, Stradivarius had doodled a little flip-book art in ink of a couple of stick figures hastily blacktopping a driveway and riding away laughing while a stick-figure old lady in a flowered dress cried by the curb.
“It would seem that The Big Book of Gypsy Scams is itself a scam,” I informed the younger of the Gypsy dames. “It would also appear by the look of intense unease on her wrinkled puss that Madame Volga was, like your exploded werebull king and your tribe’s male elders, aware of that fact the whole time. I further regret to inform you that Stradivarius, before he blew up, told me there’s also no Scammessiah. You’ve pretty much got a Russian nesting dolls thing going on here as far as scams inside scams inside scams are concerned.”
I handed the book over to Victorina Flapchack. The cover did appear pretty old. All good scams looked good on the outside. Aside from the stick figure margin doodles, Stradivarius had made a half-assed attempt to jot down a few words at the front, but only got as far as writing a couple of instructions for resealing driveways, which boiled down to: add water to Hershey’s syrup and keep the engine running.
The younger Gypsy dame glared at the old Gypsy broad.
“It was all a lie!” Victorina Flapchack accused.
A calm resignation settled on the rounded shoulders of the ancient hag. “So, we’re busted,” she said with a bad-breath sigh. “All good scams must come, etcetera. I prefer to be out of town when it happens. Hey, keep your mouth shut and I can get you your own tent. All the male elders are either dead or taking the rap on this beef deal. We’re a matriarchy now, and I’m the big cheese. I can arrange for you to be promoted to Madame Victorina. Nobody your age receives that honor. You can park your crystal ball next to mine. Hell, Madame Danube ain’t using hers no more. You won’t even have to hose it off, since she didn’t haul it in the port-a-john when Igor killed her.”
“You mean when you killed her,” I interjected. “Or, technically, when you arranged to have her killed.”
There was just a hint of cornered rat in the scammer queen’s darting eyes.
“I didn’t have anything to do with that,” she insisted. “That cop said it was Stradivarius. What’s his name? Jenkins.”
“I would put more faith in your blank bible, which Victorina Flapchack appears to be considering bashing you over the head with, than I would in the manifestly shitheaded conclusions at which moron Detective Daniel Jenkins invariably arrives.”
Victorina Flapchack’s knuckles were white as she gripped The Big Book of Gypsy Scams. Madame Volga flashed a smile guilty of both murder and dental neglect.
“Prove it,” the old dame said.
“It’s just a couple of little things. The line at Madame Danube’s tent was longer than yours, even though you were working your ass off and she was cooling her heels on break over by the fire. She was obviously more popular with the social security check set. I’m betting that’d gnaw at you like Wynonna Judd at an all-you-can-eat Sizzler buffet. Next, she was going to spill the beans to me about Stradivarius’ scheme. The dame was probably an old-school scammer, and didn’t like the idea of the potential attention from the cops that might show up on the tribe’s doorstep from the big deal beef con Stradivarius and the rest of the male elders were working.”
“Yes, yes,” Victorina Flapchack said, nodding. “There were arguments. I did not know what they were about, but Madame Danube was being shunned. The other elder women kept hiding her crystal ball polish, they stole all her stolen credit cards, and every day they forced her to the back of the borscht line.”
The younger dame’s timely interjection afforded me the perfect segue, which I took advantage of by rotating deftly in the direction of her protruding pontoons.
“Then there’s something you said that morning outside St. Regent’s after the night you spent mooing around the parapets,” I told Victorina Flapchack. “You suggested that on the night Madame Danube was flattened, Stradivarius must’ve overheard her threatening to spill the beans to me, hence the port-a-crapper crushing. Except I faced the bastard down in werebull form three times, and as a bovine he was an absolute maniac. If that was Stradivarius who did in Madame Danube, he wouldn’t have stopped at stamping one shitter, he would have charged through that entire camp like a Gypsy with a stolen MasterCard through Best Buy. Werebull Stradivarius operated on instinct. He was like Charlie Sheen: an unthinking, instinctive lunatic.”
Victorina Flapchack’s brow creased. “What about the church basement? He found you there, and he was already a bull for hours that night.”
“I told you, sister. Instinct. He wasn’t after me at that point, he was after you. He sniffed you out as a cow, even though you were still in knockout human form. I thought you were there for him, since at the time I didn’t know you were a cow, but you were at that meeting for you. No, at night, whenever Stradivarius transformed into a bull, it was Madame Volga who had control of the train and some of the cows--”
(The posture of the dilapidated dame in question was getting less defensive and more resigned by the second.)
“--which were moved around for her by one or more of the elder hags. She’s the evil genius. She wanted the men out of the way so that she could establish the tribe as a matriarchy with her running the show, despite the ironic fact that her post-menopausal lack of estrogen has produced a mustache of Ambrose Burnside grandiosity. On her way to the top, she took out the competition of blabbermouth Madame Danube. There wasn’t just one set of hoof-prints on that plastic crapper. Doc Minto at the medical examiner’s office will tell you a small herd crushed the old dame flat, assuming the coma he lapsed into when I last left him isn’t the final one he’s longed for yet somehow miraculously avoided all these years.”
“The police and newspaper said only Igor Stradivarius was wanted for the murder of Madame Danube,” Victorina Flapchack insisted.
“Yes, but in defense of our local constabulary, they’re irredeemably stupid,” I informed her. “Granted, that isn’t the kind of rousing, Scopes Monkey Trial defense they’d get if they hired the Zombie Johnnie Cochran for the job, but on the other hand it explains how your tribe has wandered through town sealing driveways with watered-down Nestlé’s Quik every spring for decades and never got caught.”
Victorina Flapchack continued to grip the Gypsy bible as she wheeled on Madame Volga. “Is all of this true?” the young babe demanded of the old hag.
Madame Volga offered a conniving, Jean-Paul Sartre shrug. “What is truth, exactly?” she philosophized.
“Just think of everything you’ve ever done in your life,” I suggested. “It’s the opposite of that. In the meantime, let me wrap this up since I’m currently teetering in that unpleasant no man’s land between dead drunk and encroaching hangover, and it’s already touch and go that I can get to O’Hale’s Bar to reverse my recovery before I start glimpsing a world uninhabited by dancing pink elephants and, thus, less effeminately joyful. Madame Volga was settling a couple of personal scores along the way, not just with Madame Danube. I didn’t check court records, but I’m guessing at one point in her long, crooked career she crossed paths with the archbishop, Judge Dillinger and Assistant D.A. Pettifogger, whose cemetery and lawns she demolished. I figure even our cops can do the ten minutes of research to overturn that rock. You’re guilty, sister. The law can’t fry Stradivarius because he’s an exploded cow, but they’re going to cook your ass on Old Sparky and serve you up with a side order of onion rings.” I stepped back and hollered back to the opening of the locker-lined alcove. “Now’s as good a time as any, Jenkins. Unless you want me to dust off my badge and arrest her for you, too.”
I knew I could rely on Mannix to follow my instructions to the letter, I just wasn’t sure if my elf assistant’s phone call would fall on the deaf ears of a dumb flatfoot. Fortunately, for the sake of denouement histrionics, Detective Daniel Jenkins appeared right on cue, barreling around the corner and storming into the bus terminal locker room. The cop waved his gun around at the four corners, which he hoped would distract from his expression of baffled ignorance. The gambit was about as effective a distraction as a teenage girl drawing attention away from an unhappy childhood by getting knocked up by her sixty year old boyfriend.
“I heard everything,” the cop declared. “Let’s see those hands, lady.”
Madame Volga hesitated. When she obliged and her arthritic fingers rose into the air, they were clutching a crystal ball, which she raised high above her head.
“Nobody move!” the old bat screamed. The ancient metal locker doors vibrated with the pitch and fury of her quavering voice. “This globe contains cyanide gas! I smash it on the floor, and we are all dead! Deeead!”
Jenkins backed up a step.
“You field this one,” I told Victorina Flapchack. “My skull is still technically cracked in two places, and flooding my cerebrospinal fluid with Jack Daniels didn’t accelerate the healing process, which my NASA-reject bartender insisted would work.”
Jenkins didn’t have time to warn the younger dame away before Victorina Flapchack marched forward in an act that was not, frankly, such a terrific display of bravery given the fact that Madame Volga was full of shit. The young Gypsy dame plucked the crystal ball from Madame Volga’s shaking hand and smashed it on the floor, subsequent to which the four of us trapped in that small space persisted in not dying.
“Never bullshit a bullshitter,” I told the murderous old bat.
As Jenkins slapped the cuffs on her I took the opportunity to swipe back my watch, which she must have stolen from me back in the cab and which was nearly lost forever amongst the bangles decorating her bony wrist.
“Don’t bother to thank me for saving your career, Jenkins,” I volunteered magnanimously. “Your continued hostility and lack of competence is all the reward I need. That, and maybe the impound fees waived if my car’s been towed from St. Regent’s. With luck, it’s been more deeply misplaced than that and I’ll never see it again. If that’s the case, you’re welcome to join it and I’ll die a happy man. Hopefully soon.”
“Don’t expect applause from me, Banyon,” Jenkins the ingrate grunted. “Yeah, this puts out one fire, but I still got my own problems. Some broad’s out there impersonating me. Calling herself Danielle Jenkins. Using my badge number to get all kinds of freebies. Wagon wheel alignment at Jiffy-Lube, a couple of pails of driveway sealer at Home Depot, about a hundred garlic pizzas from parlors all over town.”
Jenkins the ace detective evidently didn’t recall that Victorina Flapchack had, while confronting him back at the Big Chief Shortpants Campground, demanded his name and badge number. At the moment, the young Gypsy dame was suddenly intensely interested in the open locker in which The Big Book of Gypsy Scams had been hidden.
“Good luck with that, Jenkins, although you shouldn’t be too optimistic you’ll have any luck cracking that case either. After all these years on the job you haven’t yet succeeded in detecting your head up your ass.”
The flatfoot put less of an effort into his furious scowl than I’d ordinarily find acceptable. However, as my skull was still splitting from where a bull kicked it, not to mention that my subsequent failure at self-medicating at O’Hale’s Bar was now roaring back to haunt me in the form of a pounding headache on top of a throbbing concussion, I gave his beet-red head a gentleman’s passing C.
The city’s #1 detective had Madame Volga rattling like a tambourine thanks to her numerous stolen Woolworth’s bangles as he manhandled the old bag’s gypping ass out the nearest side door.
“No refunds!” I remembered to holler as the door swung shut. “This is all covered in the fine print,” I explained to Victorina Flapchack once we were alone. “You might not be surprised how many of my clients wind up in jail, but you’d be astonished at how many of them are there as a direct result of hiring me.”
I escorted the dame back out through the arena of sleeping winos that was the main bus terminal and out the front doors. All the while she clutched the once missing, now recovered, Gypsy bible to her pair of ample chests.
“I am thinking the tribe does not really need to know about any of this,” Victorina Flapchack said, after taking a long time to ruminate. “After all, Madame Volga said it herself: Stradivarius and the rest of the elder men are either dead or are going to prison. She controlled the elder women. I have the bible now. I know the secret.” She riffled through the blank pages as her scheming gears turned. “The old women will follow me or I will tell them that I will inform the youth of the tribe of their deceitfulness.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “I’m sure a bunch of young Gypsies, tramps and thieves will be deeply wounded to discover that the older professional liars who taught them everything they know about lying were, in a shocking twist, lying to them. One envisions a massive cloud in the shape of a Mobius Strip hovering above the Big Chief Shortpants Campground constructed solely from the breath of exhaled lies. That is, when one’s brain isn’t banging like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman on the inside of one’s skull. C’mon, we’ll discuss your crooked future over breakfast drinks at my favorite bar.”
I shoved out my elbow and she slipped her delicate hand into the crook. It wasn’t nearly enough to subdue the Burning Man version of a heavy metal concert that was well into its third day with no end in sight that was going on between my ears, but at least it beat getting kicked in the head by a bull.
“I suppose we could say that the Scammessiah is not coming for another ten…no, twenty years,” she said as we strolled through the chain link gate.
“Hell, you’re young. Make it fifty. Did I tell you you’re buying? No stolen social security checks. Just bill our coming week of debauchery to Detective Danielle Jenkins and my conscious will be clear. Or, rather, acceptably translucent.”
There was no longer the shadow of a cow buried just beneath her knockout Gypsy face. If I were a betting man -- which I habitually am, I’m just lousy at it -- I’d have bet all the money I didn’t have that her nightly cow curse had been lifted the moment Stradivarius had been blown sky high. I’d know for sure at sundown, but in the meantime we had some time to murder.
I checked my wrist to see if it was time yet for Ed Jaublowski to fling wide the doors to O’Hale’s Bar. I found that my watch had once more gone missing.
I located it on the wrist of Madame Victorina, who was so deep in planning the artichoke layers of scam she intended to unleash on generations of deserving Gypsies that she hadn’t even attempted to remember to hide it. She caught my gaze amidst her scheming and absently shoved her tribe’s blank bible further up into her armpit while peeling the watch off her dainty wrist.
“Keep it,” I informed her. “I’m exhausted from stealing it back and, frankly, it looks even better on you than I’m going to.”
Two blocks away, a city bus romantically exploded on cue just for us beautiful young lovers, leveling the Dairy Queen, setting three apartment buildings ablaze and showering the neighborhood in a ticker tape parade of flaming jimmies.
***~~~***