Sea No Evil, page 4
“Not with that health nut,” I said. “Is that all she had to say?”
“She left her number,” Mannix said.
“Oh, I got that dame’s number,” I said. “Stick that note in the Ravioli file and dump it down the incinerator.”
Mannix went back out into the outer office and a moment later I heard a file cabinet drawer roll open and slide shut.
I wasn’t sure if he thought I was serious about St. Attila’s. Mannix was an ex-Christmas elf who’d worked the North Pole factories for over a hundred years. If anybody did sarcasm up there they didn’t do it very well, and Mannix had a hard time recognizing it. I would have set the kid straight about the joke, but part of me hoped that he’d do as I said and leave that folder for Doris. I wondered how loud she’d be able to scream at me with the holes where her tonsils used to be packed in rocky road ice cream.
I changed into a spare white dress shirt from my closet and returned to my desk.
There was still a crowd down in the street. The meter maid had summoned a couple of tow trucks, and they were in the process of hauling away two of the double parked cars. Some of the others had been booted and would sit out in the street blocking in the cars that were legally parked, forcing their owners to feed money in the meters across the street for vehicles that couldn’t be moved. Government. A nice little racket to get into. Too bad the assholes who manage it own the monopoly.
Vincetti was down there by then. I could see him waving his arms and hollering at the meter maid for chasing away the only business he’d had in years. It was the same frantic choreography he usually reserved for chasing off his more everyday clientele, the army of stray cats that regularly camped out front waiting in vain for the old fishmonger to throw out so much as one moldy sardine.
I was turning away from the window when I caught a glimpse of something white and furry on the sidewalk across the street.
It wasn’t like he went out of his way to make himself hard to spot in a crowd. The fringe of his hood was aimed up toward my window, and I got a good look at that familiar pair of glinting bastard sunglasses plus a streak of white sunscreen greasing up the tip of a broad nose. The glasses weren’t the only thing glinting.
Poseidon’s trident was already up and aimed my way.
The meter maid didn’t notice. Vincetti wouldn’t have cared if he had. Everybody else walked by without giving a second glance to the most powerful weapon in the maritime world in the tan hand of a little maniac wearing a pair of cheap public shower slippers and no pants.
I heard a vicious gurgle in the corner of my office from the direction of my water cooler, and I was flinging myself to my stomach even as I hollered out the open door.
“Hit the dirt, Mannix!”
I landed hard on the elbow I’d already smashed an hour before and curled up in a ball in the dark footwell of my desk.
There was a crunch across the room like someone stomping on a hundred boxes of peanut brittle at once, and I knew from the million tiny shards of plastic that harpooned the thin front of my desk that the water cooler had just exploded.
The room rattled, my desk was shoved back, and my lamp thudded somewhere unseen. Water splashed across the floor. The cuff of one shirt sleeve was instantly soaked and I got dotted by the backsplash from the cascade of water that splattered the wall and window behind my desk. It was over in about three seconds.
I sat there bravely cowering for over a minute, but the second assault never came.
As I climbed back out I heard some fabric tear and only then did I notice that one of the bits of hard plastic that had speared my desk had gone through my clean shirt. My upper arm was bleeding like a son of a bitch and, worse, when I stood I saw that the precious grime I’d spent years cultivating was running down the wall and window in muddy rivulets. In one stroke of aquatic vandalism, the parka bastard had robbed my office of an entire decade’s worth of grubby P.I. atmosphere.
“You all right, Mannix?” I called.
The elf poked his head in my office, the very picture of perfect health. He surveyed the water cooler, which lay in burst-open ruins in the corner, and the front of my desk which looked like it had suffered a frontal assault from a plastic porcupine.
“Can I go home for the day?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “And stop talking to Doris. She’s a rotten influence on you.”
I looked out the window. Parka Man was nowhere to be seen.
I climbed out the window and clanked double-time down the rusty stairs. The retractable ladder to my sandstone deathtrap was locked solid so I had to hang from the second floor landing of the fire escape and drop to the sidewalk. I pushed through the crush of people, nearly got plowed over by a city garbage truck that I figured was making a delivery to Vincetti’s, and somehow made it to the opposite side of the street in one stumbling piece.
I looked around, but there was no one nearby to interview. The meter maid was yelling into her radio for backup to come collect one furious fishmonger, and Vincetti was puffing his elderly way back across the street to barricade himself inside his market. His replay of the Siege of Florence would have worked better if he hadn’t had all the fish inside laminated. Even the local cops weren’t dumb enough to let him send out for pizza.
I glanced around the ground where Parka Man had been standing but the only thing that looked out of place was a single, very long strand of some kind of dried weed.
I grabbed up the flora and headed back across the street. This time it was a laundry truck that nearly creamed me, and I barely avoided the speeding bumper with a complicated little double-yellow-line dance step that would have made Madame Carpathia proud. I landed backwards on the sidewalk with my heels teetering on the curb, did another pirouette, regained my confident footing with the grace of Gene Kelly, and proceeded to plow straight into the counter dame from The Seaweed Palace Bar.
Girl, her pocketbook contents, and smelly Vincetti fish went everywhere.
“Sorry, babe,” I said. “But in my defense you’re a crummy defensive walker.”
I pocketed the hunk of weed I’d found on the sidewalk across the street and gallantly pulled her up off her ass. I’m a regular Sir Walter Raleigh.
The dame scowled at me and went to work scooping everything back into her handbag, including the bottle of aspirin that was two pills lighter thanks to yours truly. The last thing she grabbed up from the sidewalk was her package of rotten wrapped fish, and she carefully examined the paper for tears.
“Yeah, it’s important none of Vincetti’s fresh fish escapes its wrappers. Last time the EPA had the block quarantined for a month. He’s not quite reached Chernobyl level yet, but I hear he’s cultivating some salmon in the back room that should give the Reds a run for their rubles in a few years in the ecological Armageddon department. We didn’t meet properly back at that fruitcake factory you call a job. Name’s Banyon.”
Just five minutes since being nearly murdered for the second time that day, yet still smooth as a Burma-Shave kisser. I could give Zombie Hefner lessons.
“I know who you are,” she snapped. “You owe me for that towel and the bottled water. Those people you told me to bill wouldn’t pay, and it’s coming out of my salary.”
“Of course they wouldn’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Why would the richest couple on the Forbes 500 Deep Sea Edition shell out for the cost of a towel for the guy they almost got murdered? It’s just lucky for all of us they evidently told you who I was so we could make sure the right sap got the bill.”
It turned out Mannix wasn’t the only one who didn’t do sarcasm.
“Absolutely,” she agreed. “Those bottled waters are four bucks each. Anyway, it’s lucky for you they told me your name so I knew it when your friend came in looking for you just after those two left. Did he find you?”
“My friend,” I said, already knowing where this was heading. “He about this tall, with a pair of General MacArthur sunglasses and Admiral Peary’s windbreaker?”
“That’s him,” she said. “He asked your name, and I’d just found out from them, so I told him and I said you’d just headed down the sidewalk. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes after you left. You mean he didn’t catch up with you?”
It wasn’t the least bit peculiar to the dim bulb that the good friend that she’d set on my trail hadn’t known my name. I wondered if Doris had kept from me the fact that she’d had a long-lost sister matriculating in a petri dish at Harvard all these years.
“Oh, dear,” the dingbat counter girl complained. She tried to brush away some thick sidewalk grime she’d just noticed on her skirt but only smeared it worse. She tsked and tried to wipe the gunk off her palm, succeeding only in smearing both palms black. She looked up in desperation. “What are you even doing here?” she accused.
“My office,” I explained. “Upstairs.” I pointed up to the third story window, outside of which the arms of my trench coat were flapping hello from the fire escape.
“Banjo Invest?” she said. “The financial councilor? My roommate lost three thousand bucks last week following your advice. She had to quit her job and move back to Wichita to live with her parents. Now I’m stuck with her share of the rent.”
“It’s more art than science,” I admitted. “You want to buy me dinner?”
She threw her fish at my head and stormed off down the street.
A cruiser had drawn up the block and the patrolman was conferring with the meter maid. I could see Vincetti’s frightened, beady peepers peering through the eyes of the cartoon lobster that was painted on his window.
I framed my mouth with both hands and hollered through the makeshift megaphone to the cops across the street. “He says he hates cops for framing Sacco and Vanzetti and he wants the same funeral director the Mussolini family uses!”
Vincetti’s eyes popped wider than the cartoon lobster’s and he ran screaming from the window. More cop cars were swarming up both ends of the street as I hastily reentered my end of the building. I didn’t want to be in the line of fire when they started reenacting the toll booth scene from The Godfather with old Vincetti as Sonny stumbling around the street with a .45 caliber flounder dangling from his fingers.
Upstairs, Mannix had found a pair of pliers and was pulling plastic water cooler shards from the front of my desk.
My office looked like a dusty car after a rainstorm. Until ten minutes before you could have written “wash me” in the dust on the walls. Now the streaks of mud running from where my precious dry dust had been made it look like some graffiti bastard had gone nuts all around the room with a Hershey’s squirt bottle.
I snatched up my lamp, which was wedged between the wall and a file cabinet, and slammed it back onto my desk. I felt two simultaneous pains, the first from my elbow which was having the worst day of its life, the second from my bicep.
Turns out the tear in my shirt and the bleeding from my upper arm was from more than the one shard of plastic that had jabbed me while I was heroically hiding out under my desk. Another, smaller piece had apparently gone straight through the front desk panel and was still sticking in my arm. In all the fun and near-death of the previous five minutes, I hadn’t even noticed.
“Dammit,” I groused, pulling the plastic chunk out. It was as small as a toothpick, but sharp as hell. I dropped it to my damp blotter. “Get the first aid kit, Mannix.”
The elf hustled over to my closet and returned with a white tin box with a red cross on it. The kit used to be loaded up with Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide and all the usual useless medicinal bullshit, but I’d made sure that they’d all been crowded out by one large bottle of the most important medicine on earth.
I poured myself a couple of belts of Seagram’s, downing them one after the other until the multiple pains in my arm became less important than the pain in the ass who was responsible for them. I slammed down my glass onto my damp blotter, getting doubly angry when the cloud of dust that usually exploded from the surface of my desk with such dramatic displays failed to materialize.
“Mannix,” I called to the elf who’d slipped back into the other office. “Get Miss Ravioli on the phone.”
CHAPTER 3
“I’m sorry that you had a problem at your office, Mr. Banyon, but I can’t see what it has to do with me or my husband.”
The god of the sea’s wife was playing it cooler than the lead beatnik in a bongo quartet. At first she didn’t answer her cell phone herself. She let me pass up three layers of servants before she deigned to come on the line. She was in full politician spin mode before she even opened her mouth, denying and obfuscating like an amateur magician tossing a blanket over the two boxes he’s just sawed in half and trying to cover for all the blood all over the stage with a lousy card trick.
“I don’t even know who that man was,” Miss Ravelli said. “Poseidon and I never saw him before in our lives. You were the one who pointed him out to us. You were the one he attacked then ran from. Maybe he’s someone with a grudge against you.”
“I’ve got an entire phone book of people with grudges against me, sister, and not one of them has a magic pitchfork that controls water.”
“Well…I still don’t know,” she said.
“Look, I don’t know either. I don’t know, for instance, what you’ve got me mixed up in, but whoever this maniac is he followed me because he obviously thinks I’m working for you. Therefore, I want you to let everybody under the sun and sea know I’m not in it and I never was. Take out a full page ad in the New York Times, hire skywriters. Hell, send an owl to the goddamn Ministry of Magic if that’s what it takes.”
“Oh, now that’s just silly,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of fantasy world you live in, Mr. Banyon, but my husband Poseidon -- the god of the sea who rules from a barnacle-encrusted gilded marble palace at the bottom of the ocean -- and I live in the real world. Now, we would be more than happy to hire you for that matter we discussed. Have you changed your mind?”
“I almost had it lobotomized by a chunk of exploding water cooler, but luckily it’s the same one, so it’s still not stupid enough to get within twenty thousand leagues of whatever it is you people are tied up in.”
“In that case, Mr. Banyon, we have nothing further to discuss.”
She broke the connection before I could thank her for not picking up the check for one measly towel and a bottle of water.
Mannix had already collected all the broken shards of plastic from around the office and swept them into a Glad bag. He’d wheeled out the remains of the cooler and was just reentering the room when I slammed down the desk phone.
“Is something wrong, Mr. Crag?” the elf asked.
“I am the magnet of wrong, Mannix. I am the epicenter of wrong. I am the sun at the center of the goddamn solar system of wrong, around which all the planets of wrong rotate on a daily basis to shower shit on. There is always something wrong, Mannix. I just wish for once in my life it’d be wrong somewhere on the other side of town.”
I leaned back and grabbed my tie off the windowsill. It was made from the same space-age material as Frisbees, so it was already dry. I looped it contemplatively around my neck and wondered how tight I’d have to pull it to end my misery.
On the street down below a heavily armed SWAT team was leading old Vincetti into the back of a police van. He was yelling in Italian and trying to call the cops’ attention to me waving down at him from my office window.
“I guess there’s always a bright side,” I said. I leaned out the window and hauled my suit jacket and trench coat in from the fire escape.
Pretty much everything was pretty much dry. I heaved on my rumpled layers, snatched up my hat and headed for the door. I’d nearly made it, but at the last second I grabbed the door frame and leaned back into the room.
“Mannix, do me a favor and dig up whatever you can find on this Ravelli dame,” I said reluctantly.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Crag. Are we taking the case?”
“No. Definitely, unequivocally no. But if I’m going to get killed for no good reason, I want to know exactly who I’m libeling in my obituary.”
I departed the Banyon Investigations suite and headed straight for the elevator. I’d tapped the down button and was cooling my heels in front of the closed silver door when there was a sudden flash at the end of the hall, like one of those courthouse steps scenes in old movies where the press lights up a hundred flashbulbs all at once.
A gust of gale force wind burst down the hall and I was suddenly holding onto the elevator doorframe for dear life. Beats me where my hat blew off to, because at that moment I was too blinded by the blast of light to see around the dancing black spots. A crack of simultaneous thunder rattled my eardrums
As quick as the storm struck, it passed. The wind died, my coat stopped flapping like a flag up a pole and my eyes cleared well enough to see the naked guy standing down the hallway in front of the closed door to my offices.
He was built like one of those Hollywood jerks who spend more time at the gym than the library but are still experts on all the nuances of everything they don’t read about.
He wasn’t completely naked. A little towel wrapped his waist so, provided he didn’t bend over to pick something up off the floor, my world was safe. He wore a little pair of felt booties that would have shamed Errol Flynn and a hat that looked like a satin construction helmet that had been shrunk in the wash. Tiny little wings adorned both shoes and hat, yet I doubted he was there to make a Church’s Chicken delivery.
The SOB had immortal deity written all over him, and unless I missed my guess I was looking at Mercury, the messenger god and patron saint of UPS, FedEx, and all those crooked US Postal workers who suddenly get religion when they finally get caught with forty years of undelivered mail stuffed out in the garage.
My shit luck, the god saw me cooling my heels by the elevator.
“Hey, you. Mortal,” Mercury demanded. “You Banyon?”
I made a show of looking behind me, then pointed a confused finger at myself. (My improvisational skills are the envy of that whole asshole Groundlings crowd.)
