Shoot the Moon, page 14
“He’d just been struck by an exploding bus then by a truck, so he wasn’t in a real mood to chat when I arrived on the scene,” I pointed out. “Not that he could have. After all, he didn’t try to wriggle free and flee, naked and horrified, down the street when that fat newspaper dame with the jelly doughnut smear of lipstick started her Dizzy Gillespie impersonation using his blowhole as her trumpet mouthpiece. Any guy who’d sit still for that performance has to be in about a level nine coma.”
I led her to the door, and we ducked out of the sunlight.
“We must get that book back,” she insisted as we descended. “Everything I told you about it is true. Our entire future as a people lies between those covers.”
“America felt that way about Rich Hall’s Sniglets. We got over it.”
I shook open the newspaper and tried to ignore the dame who was, frankly, not a client and was just some irritating cow I’d picked up.
“Do you think you will be able to question him about the book at the hospital?” the dame pressed.
“Are you still here? Why don’t you go loot the pennies from the Jeff Gordon Memorial Fountain?”
I was attempting to read a below-the-fold front page story which I’d just seen and which was way too interesting to deal with first thing in the morning on a sober stomach.
If the thought of looting unguarded change didn’t peel her from my side, nothing would. The dame stayed as stuck to me as if I was wearing a Post-It trench coat.
“Of course you will go to the hospital,” she pressed. “As part of your job.”
“Look, lady, do I tell you how to pick a pocket? If you must know, I actually have another lead which I plan to follow up first. Not to mention that Stradivarius’ll be out like a light for hours as they scan every inch of him with the most high-tech equipment devised by Western medicine in search of a clean spot. If they have to set bones or stitch holes or remove any extraneous, ruptured organs, that’ll all take time. Besides, I suddenly have something new to strain my overtaxed and dehydrated brain.”
I held out the front page of the Gazette for her to inspect, tapping a finger to the front page article which I had yet to follow over to page three.
Victorina Flapchack read the headline and a paragraph or two. I kept a careful eye on her face to try to read her expression. She looked legitimately baffled. On the other hand, I was sure she could also look legitimately happy or sad or Mormon or pregnant or broken down on the side of the highway, depending on whatever the scam du jour.
GRASS RIPPER STRIKES AGAIN!, read the headline. Smaller type below it rhetorically demanded, IS NO BLADE SAFE?
The lawn of retired assistant district attorney Simon Q. Pettifogger was vandalized last night, the third victim in a gruesome string of similar arboreal crimes that have local police baffled.
“We are not baffled,” Detective Daniel Jenkins of the metropolitan police said, when asked for a comment. “I don’t want you to put in the paper that we’re baffled, because we’re not. We had a suspect in custody, but he transformed into a werebull and is now at large.”
Jenkins said that the escaped prisoner, drifter Igor Jones is dangerous. Anyone with information on Jones’s whereabouts should not try to rope
the suspect rodeo-style, but should call the local police hotline.
“Jones should be considered dangerous at all times, but particularly when he is all horny at night,” the detective informed the Gazette.
“Don’t print that either,” Jenkins added.
The lawn of Mr. Pettifogger, esq. has nearly won several prominent landscaping competitions over the past twenty years, most notably coming in fourth three years in a row for the prestigious Golden Hoe Award, which was accidentally awarded last year to Miss Foxy Fishnets of the Highway 6 Motel, Room 8.
Pettifogger said he was awakened by a noise sometime after two a.m. and came out to discover the crime. Police were summoned immediately, but there was no sign of werebull Igor Jones.
Accompanying the story was a photograph taken at night of the former D.A. standing out in the mud remains of his front yard. Floodlights lit up the scene, revealing the sort of tax-subsidized opulence that would have made Caligula blush even if he was in the middle of diddling his horse. The caption read: Lawn Gone Before Dawn.
“This says it happened after two in the morning,” Victorina Flapchack said.
I had once more taken full control of my stolen newspaper, and as we walked toward the side door of the cathedral I shook open the Gazette and took a quick scan of the rest of the article.
“It does indeed say that,” I replied. “In fact, it repeats the time twice on page three. Two o’clock. Confirmed by some neighbors who were awakened by violent mooing.”
I folded up the paper and tucked it up under my arm as I shoved open the huge cathedral door. Victorina Flapchack tailed me out into the sunlight.
We exited on the side of the cathedral opposite naked Igor Stradivarius and the luckless ambulance attendants who were stuck with the odious job of saving his worthless, nude life. My timing was, for a change, not horrible, since I at long last heard the sound of police sirens closing in on the opposite side of the building. I’d be long gone before the cops found their way over to where I soon would not be.
I led the Gypsy dame through a busted old gate and out onto the sidewalk. We jaywalked quickly and, lucky for that particular morning, without getting flattened by a newspaper delivery truck across the main drag and up a side street. The siren sounds grew muffled and died behind us, swallowed up by the hubbub of Little Australia, the ethnic enclave north of the cathedral through which we were strolling. A Vegemite truck was making early morning deliveries, and we had to duck to avoid several zinging boomerangs coming home from a night over the town.
The shadows of the cathedral’s spires stretched across the low tenements that packed the neighborhood around the old church. Wild wallabies dug around in overturned trash barrels, knocking around bottles of Fosters and gnawing on damp Weet-Bix boxes. Sunlight glinted in stabs of fire off the high windows of the office buildings that rose above the tenements opposite the side of the street down which we walked.
Victorina Flapchack had dummied up at the noise of the sirens, her Gypsy instinct to run from the law asserting itself over all else. Once we were both safely out of any danger of observing our civic responsibility to report what we’d seen to the proper legal authorities, her one-track mind was back on message, as if we hadn’t just spent the previous four minutes hustling our asses in a direction away from the cops.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Well, what?” I asked. “If you expect me to dig you one, there’s no way in hell. If you’re inquiring about my health, it’s excellent because I don’t wear myself out digging wells. Not to mention that I oil the machine with more than eight eight-ounce glasses of booze daily to keep my liver limber, per order of my alcoholic doctor, Charlotte Cheese. She’s currently accepting new patients, but if you’re interested you’d better switch fast, since every day she doesn’t have her license revoked is a medical miracle.”
I was hoping the dame would get the picture that I was a clam when it came to business, and that she’d grow bored with my non-answers and abandon me in order to hold up the didgeridoo emporium we were passing, but it was no good.
“Did Stradivarius leave the cathedral during the night and come back before dawn?” Victorina Flapchack pressed.
I gave her a look that was probably a mixed-up grab bag of several emotions, heavy on the annoyance.
“No, in fact, he didn’t, which means I’m the bastard Gypsy king’s alibi. The only comfort I get from that is that Detective Daniel Jenkins is at least partly wrong, maybe completely wrong, about Stradivarius being guilty in those other two lawn-homicide
cases. My world, unbearable as it is, at least makes sense once more.”
She was looking worried, and I knew why.
“Nor was it you, Miss Flapchack,” I assured her. “I assumed a smart dame like you would have figured that out. Recall, you were in no shape last night to shinny down a drainpipe, tiptoe past Stradivarius, hail a cab across town, lay waste to the crooked ex-D.A.’s landscaped pasture, then get back here before sunup. Which means we’re looking for yet another werebovine marauding around suburbia. You wouldn’t happen to know of anybody else your dirty, naked thief leader converted to cow?”
A dame who shamelessly made her living stealing from the cookie jars of little old ladies suddenly looked ashamed. I was guessing it was for the first time in her life, because she wasn’t all that practiced at it and it came off more like she needed a couple gulps of Pepto to chase down some bad Peloponnesian takeout. But the way she abruptly fell silent and started staring at the cracks in the sidewalk was universal code for shame.
“Look, lady, I’d be ashamed too if some P.I. schmo like me figured out I’d made it with a gangly shit-smear like Igor Stradivarius. Actually, check that. I wouldn’t have time to be ashamed, since I’d be dead from a self-inflicted jump off the Larry Mondello Bridge.”
Her head snapped up. “You think I…with him?” She shook her head so violently that the individual strands of her thick Gypsy mane were at risk of launching out like porcupine quills. “How could you possibly…” She couldn’t get out any other words, since her appalled voice was smothered by the indignation caught in her throat.
“For one, you’re a cow,” I informed her. “Not that that’s my business, but I’d give up being in denial about it. The truth will set you free. Not,” I quickly added, “for the million crimes you’ve no doubt committed in the forty-eight contiguous states. For those, you’ll probably get prison for the rest of your life, assuming the cops ever find a net sexy enough to toss over you. I’m talking strictly about Stradivarius turning you into a cow. By the way, you and I are through. I’m not prejudiced against nocturnal Holsteins -- I’ve dated a few cows in my day, some even in broad daylight -- it’s that my ego would join me jumping off the bridge if I thought anybody thought Stradivarius and I were doing the backstroke around the same dating pool.”
She found her voice as quickly as she’d lost it. “This was the fault of Igor Stradivarius,” she admitted, bitterly adding, “Not that it was not my fault, too.”
“I’m glad you were able to have this breakthrough,” I said. “Accepting blame is the first step on your road to recovery. I gleaned that from all the pamphlets I don’t read that my well-meaning elf assistant leaves around the office. Your king gored the WAA meeting at St. Regent’s, but there are other were-animal support groups around town. Run back and ask the archbishop for a list. I promise I’ll wait right here. If you don’t see me when you get back, it’s because I’m an inveterate liar and I hailed a cab to Tahiti.”
Clearly I was too subtle for Victorina Flapchack, since the Gypsy dame persisted in following me up Wagga Wagga Street to Dame Edna Boulevard.
“It was mostly the fault of the Big Chief Shortpants Campground,” she insisted. “They are supposed to put a can of Lysol in each of the campground port-a-johns, but they claim that someone is always stealing them.”
“Were I you, I’d check out Madame Danube’s wagon when you get back,” I suggested, remembering the avalanche of Lysol cans that had dumped out of every hidden space when the rest of the tribe was looting the dead dame’s wheeled home.
But by now the Gypsy babe was on a confessional tear and wasn’t listening to a word I was saying.
“A few months ago, I used the toilet after Stradivarius!” she cried. “Mr. Banyon, I failed to put tissue down on the seat! That night I turned into a cow for the very first time. That was the extent of any intimate contact.”
I gave her a nod. “That’d do it. Statistics say most divorces are caused first by fights over money, and second due to embarrassing social diseases contracted on unsanitary public toilet seats. That is, in fact, where my chronically unfaithful, she-witch ex-wife insisted she picked up the majority of hers. The rest, according to the surveillance cameras, were from the parking lot behind Denny’s.”
Victorina Flapchack took my wrist in her hand, which a half-hour before had been a hoof, and stopped me on the sidewalk.
“The night when I first became a cow was when I realized what he was, Mr. Banyon. Madame Danube knew as well. She always carried a can of Lysol, so she was safe from the curse of the dirty campground toilet seats, but she knew what had happened to me. That is what she was going to tell you that night at the campfire. I would have, but I was too ashamed. Stradivarius must have been behind a wagon or nearby in the woods. He overheard you, which was why he crushed her to death in the plastic portable toilet, before she could tell you the awful truth.”
I’d had a long night to reflect on all of the above while freezing my ass off on top of St. Regent’s. I’d been off the mark about how Victorina Flapchack had become a werecow, but I’d pretty much figured out everything she’d just told me about the flattened old hag, Madame Danube. The crone’s warning to beware the moon, with all those extra portentous O’s, was a dead -- and, in retrospect, unsubtle -- giveaway.
“What about anybody else in the tribe he might have turned?”
“I know of no one else,” she replied, eyes downcast once more.
It seemed like she was telling the truth, but half the time most people say I only seem a little drunk, so seeming is a lot different from being.
The cracked sidewalk was shedding dew thanks to the warming rays of another goddamn beautiful day. I, unfortunately, was stuck out in it, with much detestable daylight work to do.
“Look, I’m sorry you’re a cow. Take comfort in the fact that a lot of women are these days and they seem to do okay for themselves. You ever watch The View? In the meantime, if you ever want to get that bible back I’ll need this--” I peeled away her tight fingers and reclaimed my wrist. “--to follow up on a couple of leads.”
She frowned, and her exquisite human face managed to murder whatever interest my libido might still have had in her when I somehow caught an impossible, shadowy glimpse of the bovine that lurked beneath the surface of the beauty.
“I do not understand,” she said, following me down the sidewalk once more. “Moo,” she added under her breath, I’m pretty sure without even realizing it. Then, fully human once again, “I thought there was only Stradivarius to question.”
“That’s why P. I.’s are, like prostitutes, professionals. It’s my business, lady. Or maybe I’m just lying to you so I can escape to the bleak ambiance of O’Hale’s Bar, which I missed out on almost entirely last night thanks to you and your bullshit king.”
She screwed her face up with the kind of determination dames get when they want a new set of patio furniture just because the house frau next door just got some, or when they want to marry you even though you’ve locked the doors and are pouring boiling oil on the maid of honor and justice of the peace from the upstairs windows.
“I’m coming with you,” she announced.
I could see there would be no arguing with her.
“Sure thing,” I replied.
I flagged down a cab, climbed in the back, slammed and locked the door in her incredibly attractive yet somehow simultaneously vaguely bovine face, and instructed the driver to get the hell out of there.
The last I saw of Victorina Flapchack, she was waving her fist while standing on the sidewalk in her peasant dress and blouse, both of which had miraculously shrunk back to normal size after spending the night wrapped around the udders of a flatulent cow.
“Broad looks mad,” offered the cabbie.
“If they don’t look mad when you leave them, you’re doing something wrong,” I informed him. (Completely gratis, mind you, yet he’d be the one demanding a tip from me.)
“Hey, I’m just sayin’ I wouldn’t ditch a good-looking dame like that, pal,” counseled the driver, whose eyes were glued to the rearview mirror rather than the more traditional road ahead, which apparently didn’t hold much interest for him.
“That’s true, because she’d ditch you first,” I told him. “She’d also steal your cab out from under your hairy nose and sell it to the Chinese to make ball bearings.”
I attempted to slump back in a display of forbearing and insightful world-weariness, but the seat was as comfortable for slumping as a morgue slab. Also, and on an unrelated note, I suddenly noticed that the Gypsy babe had swiped my busted watch.
CHAPTER 10
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.
