Shoot the Moon, page 15
“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.
CHAPTER 11
I had no idea what time I arrived at my office, since my busted watch was in the thieving hands of a Gypsy cow-girl, and I made a point of not looking at the clock on the wall so as to not remind myself of how long it had been since I’d last experienced the joys of booze, sleep or, most pleasurable and lamented of all, a booze-induced blackout.
Mannix was, of course, at his desk working. Doris was, of course, not within a country mile of hers and, presumably wherever she was, not working.
“Did she even bother to call?” I asked
I pointed a thumb at my absent secretary’s chair while simultaneously cutting off my elf assistant in the middle of a cheerful “Good morning, Mr. Crag,” lest the completed sentence risk lightening my lousy mood.
“I haven’t heard from Miss Doris,” Mannix replied. “I called her house. Her mother said Miss Doris was very sad because she hasn’t been able to find a cosmetologist who can take care of her fingernail emergency.”
I vaguely remembered Doris mentioning during a recent nonstop monologue that her girlfriend who regularly glued on her overpriced fake nails was going on vacation. I hadn’t really been listening since at the time I was preoccupied mopping up the freezing cold coffee Doris had forgotten on her desk for two hours before bringing it in and spilling it in my lap. The cosmetologist girlfriend in question lived in my apartment building and had set herself up as Doris’ in-house spy. I only hoped that the nosy dame was vacationing in some war-torn Middle East hellhole from which she would return happy, rested, and in the cargo hold of a DC-10 in an airless steel box.
“I’d hang out a ‘help wanted’ sign, but I wouldn’t be able to explain her duties to her replacement. Frankly, I’m hard pressed to figure out what exactly the hell it is Doris does around here on those few days a month she isn’t experiencing some kind of cosmetological catastrophe,” I said. “Let’s just embrace the silence and hope she forgets to crack the window while painting the remaining nine fingernails. How about you? You make sure you stayed away from the office until dawn?”
“Oh, yes, sir, Mr. Crag,” the elf replied with a serious nod.
“Good. You didn’t have to, the bull was with me. Get on the phone with all the hospitals around St. Regent’s and see where a scrawny, naked accident victim who was driven over twice this morning got delivered. Start with Pauper Memorial. When you’re finished with that, I need you to shut down this dump and run out and do some legwork for me. I’ll be in my office trying to come up with a reason not to drown myself in the water cooler.”
I hung up my fedora and trench coat on the rack in the corner and went into my private office.
My head probably wouldn’t fit inside the tank on the water cooler, and I didn’t feel like getting soaked trying. A real crying shame, since I definitely could have used the sweet escape when I saw the blinking light flashing on my message machine.
There were seven messages. Mannix would have checked the machine when he came in that morning, but the elf in the outer room was already yapping on the phone with the hospital so I couldn’t ask him for the Reader’s Digest versions of the seven calls.
I trudged over, dropped behind my desk and stabbed the message button. The tape rolled back, beeped, and I was stuck first with Madame Volga’s voice.
“Banyon. What have you found out about our sacred book?” asked the scratchy baritone of my ancient, homely client. “We did not hire you to sit on your ass. Call me.”
The old Gypsy dame gave the pay phone number of the Big Chief Shortpants Campground, threatened me with some five-and-dime Gypsy curse and hung up.
A whir of wrinkled tape, a sharp beep and the next caller arrived via the magic of forty year old technology I’d picked up for two bucks at the Salvation Army store along with a stack of ten-cent Louis L’Amours.
“Mr. Banyon, I will not be ignored or abandoned,” said Victorina Flapchack, who I thought I’d pretty successfully done both to (I reluctantly checked the clock) approximately three hours before. “That book belongs to my tribe. If you must know--”
Apparently she thought I must know something. I demonstrated with my finger that I actually must know nothing and began fast-forwarding through her message.
Click, whir.
“…not just the property of the elders…”
Click, whir.
“…driveway resealing…”
Click, whir.
“…I found that credit card…”
Click, whir.
“…reverse the curse…”
She had stumbled into something which I didn’t really have to know, but which at least piqued my curiosity. I rolled the big spool of ancient tape back half a mile.
“…is for the Scammessiah,” she told my finger when it pressed play. “Obviously that is why we need it back the most. But that is not all. There are old scams, and untested scams, and scams that will not be revealed until the coming of the Scammessiah. There are also recipes in the back for goulash and instructions for our many curses, as well as how to lift curses and goulash stains off of heads and head scarves. Mr. Banyon, you know my secret now. There might be a passage in there instructing me how to reverse the curse. It is possible that the Scammessiah, when he arrives, will know how to lift it, but we will not know where or how he will arrive or even who he is, or if there are instructions on how I might deal with this problem unless the book is found.”
