Sea No Evil, page 7
The waiting area inside, where Mannix worked and where Doris sometimes stopped in to read vacation brochures, was empty.
Tarps borrowed from the basement covered nearly everything, and I smelled sawdust in the air. When I pushed open my inner office door, I found the floor as well as the front of my desk had been sanded to bare wood.
“I had no choice, Mr. Crag,” Mannix rapidly apologized. “The water went everywhere and I couldn’t repair the front of your desk without sanding it down.”
All my stuff except for my desk and chair was piled up against one wall. The walls had all been scrubbed down and primer spots dotted the plaster. Goddamn efficiency is what you get when you take on an ex-assembly line toy-maker elf.
Anyway, I didn’t blame Mannix, I blamed the Poseidons and the water sports-loving hitman they’d turned onto my scent.
As I crossed the newly sanded floor, I fished in my pocket and removed the strand of weed I’d recovered at O’Hale’s.
I dropped my hat to my desk and from my top drawer I pulled out the hunk of plant I’d found across the street where Parka Man had been standing. I nudged aside the sizable folder of information Mannix had collected on Mrs. Poseidon and rolled out both lengths of flora side-by-side on my desk blotter.
I’m no horticulturist. I haven’t been a plant aficionado ever since I was a rookie cop and a sergeant from my precinct got swallowed whole by one of those man-eating outer space plants in a seedy florist shop over on skid row. But even my untrained eye could see the pieces of weed I’d rolled out on my desk were identical.
“You know anything about plants?” I asked.
“Only poinsettias,” the elf replied. “They’re pretty.”
“Not terribly relevant at the moment,” I told him. “I believe, Mannix, that we are looking at pieces of a grass skirt.”
In all three cases I had never gotten a terribly good view of my attacker. The first time I’d seen that the bottom of his coat looked shredded, but hadn’t seen why. The second time I was looking down from my office and seeing him at the wrong angle to get a good look below the parka. The third time was in a flash before I shut the bathroom door, and with the lack of decent lighting, which added to the charming demoralizing ambience of O’Hale’s, there was no good look then either.
Jaublowski said Hawaiian, and the sunglasses, zinc landing strip on his conk and now a grass skirt hitched up under that parka lent credibility to that speculation. Of course, I had to further take into account that Ed Jaublowski was a moron but, on balance and until further evidence revealed itself, it all still fit.
“So why does a Hawaiian assassin not want me working for Poseidon?” I mused.
“I don’t know, Mr. Crag, but if he wants to hurt you he’s a very naughty man,” Mannix offered helpfully.
I allowed that this was, indeed, naughtier than all hell, which seemed to make the elf happy.
I figured Parka Man, his Ray-Bans, that mangy grass skirt, and the stolen trident he was wielding the shit out of all had something to do with the threatening phone calls and mail the Poseidons claimed they’d been getting. There was still no way in hell I was taking their case, but I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to talk to them again if only to see what I could find out about my newest pal, the pitchfork-happy maniac. The dame hadn’t been forthcoming, but maybe I could get something out of her meathead husband.
“Get that stuff taken care of, Mannix. And if while at my apartment you happen to bump into any gods or assholes waving around magic tridents, be a mensch and don’t tell them where I am. My dance card’s too full to make room for vivisection tonight.”
The elf left, and I heard the outer door to my offices lock on his way out.
I dragged off my damp suit jacket and tie for the second time that day, but when I went to hang them on my coat rack it was gone. I found it out in Doris’ office. I left my coat and tie on the displaced rack and went back into my own office.
I scooped up the file Mannix had collected on Miss Ravelli. It was a little thicker than he’d made it sound, but it was still pretty thin by efficient elf standards. I brought it over to the spot where my couch was supposed to be.
“Dammit.”
I went to the opposite wall, dumped onto the floor the file cabinets, trash can, window fan, lamps, black and white portable TV, and neat stacks of paperwork Mannix had piled on the couch; I read for nearly twenty full seconds, decided to hell with it, tossed the Miss Ravelli file to the floor with the rest of my office junk and was asleep by the time the second hand reached twelve.
It turned out it was a pretty smart move to get my beauty sleep, since first thing the next morning I was kidnapped by a goddamned god.
CHAPTER 5
Near death experiences aren’t worse than actual death experiences, but they still take the wind out of a tattered set of a paunchy, middle-aged P.I. sails.
Actually, actual death experiences aren’t so bad, provided I’m on the giving and not the receiving end. When I woke up groggy the next morning drooling on my cheap fake leather office couch, it took me a minute to remember that I was not, in fact, deader than de Gaulle after they chased him up the Eiffel Tower and set fire to it.
My elbow had swollen to twice its normal size. My tongue felt like I’d spent the night licking stamps, and my head felt worse than if I’d been sticking them on envelopes stuffed with alimony checks. My clothes were still slightly damp, and there was a disturbing crustiness to the cuffs of my trousers as I rolled over that I hadn’t noticed while soaked and which I made the conscious decision to pretend wasn’t there.
Mannix had snuck back at some point during the night. A clean set of clothes was laid out on my desk, and he’d scraped up an old blanket somewhere that he’d tossed over me. I tried to kick the blanket off but my joints were being uncooperative, so I did a sort of half-sliding, face-down limbo dance out from underneath it.
Gravity and years of practice helped my feet find the floor, and after a couple of failed attempts I managed to wobble upright.
The elf had somehow managed to remove my shoes while I slept. They were parked on the floor in front of my desk. The residue from Jaublowski’s bathroom floor had been chiseled off, and my Florsheims were clean, dry, polished and looking better than they had when I found them on the shelf in the Salvation Army thrift store.
My water cooler was gone thanks to the bastard with the parka, so even half-assed freshening up wasn’t possible. I put my clean clothes on over my stale body and hoped that my last real shower before my men’s room delousing was up to the challenge of pulling double duty.
I took a look out in Doris’ office and found that Mannix had already collected my coat and tie from the rack and replaced them with my trench coat fresh from the worst dry cleaner’s in town. It was clean yet exquisitely rumpled. The perfect job. I made the magnanimous decision to give the rotten old war criminal who ran the cleaner’s the generous tip of not turning him over to the International Criminal Court at The Hague for being Nicolae Ceausescu.
I finally had the energy to look through the file Mannix had collected on Mrs. Poseidon, and rather than endure the depressing facelift my office was undergoing I brought the file out and read it at Doris’ desk, despite the fact that I was a little afraid the poor confused slab of maple might burst into flames from the first actual work that had ever been done on it since it rolled off the showroom floor.
Mannix was right. There wasn’t much to the life of Miss Ravelli prior to the Olympics. There were lots of printouts from newspapers about the Russian shark that had eaten the rest of the gals during the 100 meter butterfly. Mannix had found a picture of Olga Toothchenko’s dorsal fin with her hammer-and-sickle bathing cap pulled down the tip swimming just two feet from Miss Ravelli, but heading off in the other direction. The caption read “Fish or Foul?” which was a pretty good reminder of why I hate the press.
Those were the last Olympics Miss Ravelli had participated in.
She was young enough to have come back and was apparently a veritable torpedo in the water, and after winning the silver she was expected to return for the Shangri-La games four years later, so a lot of people were surprised when she opted out. Mannix had found lots of articles speculating that she was afraid to return to the pool after her involvement in the third worst Olympics 100 meter bloodbath in the past twenty years.
I was surprised so much had been written on the subject. A lot of the pieces had been copied from the Gazette’s online archives. I read the sports page of the local rag as often as I’m able to steal a copy, yet I’d never seen a single one of these pieces on Miss Ravelli when they’d originally run. I assumed they must have all been on some fruity human interest page or mixed in with the comics, since swimming is basically taking a really fast bath with your underwear on and doesn’t count as an actual real sport.
Every self-proclaimed expert who said she was afraid to swim again was as wrong as know-it-all assholes usually are. She participated in all kinds of charity water events after the Olympics, and even met her future husband just like she told me, halfway across the English Channel. The waterlogged saps were engaged before they reached Calais.
If that was what being afraid to go into water was like, I’m terrified the exact same way of liquor stores. Where’s my goddamn Jerry Lewis Telethon?
Prior to the Olympics, her life story got thinner than Lara Flynn Boyle’s thorax.
She was born in Kansas. Parents dead. No siblings. Mannix had even gone through the video promo spots NBC posted online during the Olympics, and the elf made a couple of notes. No relatives ever cheered her on at any events, she never even mentioned so much as a single distant cousin back home. The blank slate life story of Miss Ravelli sounded like somebody trying to erase her past, and had even roused suspicion in Mannix. He had written “naughty?” in the margin, but he thought that of pretty much everyone he ever met except (for some horribly inaccurate reason) me.
There was stuff on the wedding, but I got bored with that fast. Nothing but puff pieces about the happy couple, some trouble she had getting a dress to fit her butt and legs properly, an allergy she had to the flowers that almost postponed the wedding, the groom’s family friction that would keep his side of the Sunken Cathedral empty.
Taking each article individually, there was nothing there. Cumulatively, I got a pretty clear picture of a dame with something to hide.
I looked in Doris’ main desk drawer for a pencil to write Mannix a note, but all I found was lip gloss and back issues of Entertainment Weekly. One side drawer held nothing but worn-out emery boards and empty nail polish jars.
“I would fire you, Doris, but I’m not quite sure what you do here technically qualifies as work,” I informed the strawberry blonde wig in her bottom drawer.
(Plus since I rarely paid her we were in a gray area as far as official employment as it is generally understood by the United States government.)
I was heading back into my office when I heard a familiar crack of thunder and saw the flash of light on the other side of the closed and locked door to my suite. A cloud of dust from the gale force wind that heralded Mercury’s arrival burst beneath the door.
The doorknob started rattling like a bastard.
“Banyon! You in there?”
There was a rap on the door and all I caught was the brief silhouette of a god in muscle-bound human form through the translucent glass as I grabbed up my trench coat and ran for my inner office. I snatched my hat from my desk and ten seconds later I found myself bounding down the rusted fire escape for the second time in two days.
I made it only one floor down. I was passing the windows of Shyster, Pilfer & Fraud, the downstairs law firm whose senior partners had hilariously accurate yet entirely coincidental names, when there was another brilliant flash of light, this time through the window immediately beyond the aching bruise of my injured elbow. It was accompanied by another ostentatious thunderclap, and I briefly saw the terrified fat face of Schmecky Shyster, ambulance chaser-at-law, who had been in the process of testing out a Swindler 2000 neck brace around his own bullfrog throat. Paperwork blew like an indoor snow squall around the office, and through the maelstrom I saw a very large hand connected to an arm with a glandular problem smashing through the glass behind the lawyer’s desk.
The hand grabbed my coat collar, shattered glass flew everywhere, and for a split second I considered slipping out of my trench coat and continuing on my merry, cowardly way. But after fifteen years I’d only just finally started breaking it in and I hated the thought of wasting weekends picking through flasher estate sales for a replacement.
And in that tiny second of hesitation, the rest of the window’s glass came crashing out along with most of the frame, and I was joined on the fire escape by a nearly naked Greek god with feathers on his shoes and a letter in his hand.
“You’re Banyon, ” Mercury grunted.
“I plead the fifth on the grounds that whatever I say could get me murdered and tossed into traffic. You heard me, Schmecky,” I called to the lawyer through the remains of his office window. “You want the case? I can’t promise cash, but candy canes can possibly be arranged. I have a source.”
Shyster finally found the voice that had sunk a thousand court cases, screamed like a banshee as he tossed the neck brace in the air, and ran like hell from his office, his ass, gut and chins jiggling like an all-girl marching band.
“No doubt conferring with senior partners Pilfer and Fraud on the major case he just landed for the firm. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, legally speaking. Frankly, not just legally speaking. Those wings aren’t a look that would work for me. You, however, not only manage to sell it, you look exceedingly manly in the process.”
“Shut up, Banyon,” Mercury said. “Read this.”
Nothing delivered to me by the messenger of the gods could possibly be good news. Hell, for two years a decade ago I tossed all of my regular USPS mail straight in the incinerator under the sensible assumption that any checks were purely theoretical since my clients mostly stiffed me, and any checks that might be there would be more than offset by bills. It was a kind of perfect postal equilibrium. But when Mercury stuffed the letter in my hand, folded his arms over his gym rat chest and stood there watching me like the last candy bar in the vending machine, I had no real choice.
I popped the wax seal on the letter and shook it open.
It was set up exactly like formal business correspondence no longer is. The previous day’s date was at the top and the inside address identified me as Mr. Crag Banyon, President of Banyon Investigations, Incorporated.
“It’s possible this is meant for a Crag Banyon from another dimension,” I informed Mercury, “since I’ve never once referred to myself as ‘president.’ I’m more the
‘if nominated, I will not accept; if elected, I will not serve’ type. The good news is that I’ve had some cross-dimensional experience, so I suggest you engage my services to search for myself. I can have my office elf start drafting up the paperwork and we can get something out to you in the mail in fifty or sixty years.”
He was still clutching the collar of my trench coat and there was no strain on his face as he raised his arm. My feet left the fire escape and my toes dangled.
“Read,” insisted the stubbornly single-minded messenger of the gods.
I read the entirety of the note aloud. “‘I want to talk to you.’”
I flipped it over. There was nothing on the back except the remains of the wax seal. The note had the “Very Truly Yours” complimentary closer along with the typed name “Zeus” below the god’s signature, which would probably fetch a bundle on eBay.
“Not one for lengthy communication, is he?” I said. “I admire that in a deity. Have you seen this Bible they’ve got now? Showed up after your time. Thing weighs a ton and could be summed up in one phrase: ‘knock it off.’ Okay, have Zeus’ people call my elf and we’ll set something up. How does a decade from next Tuesday sound?”
I could see from the scowl that he wasn’t buying. If he’d given me the chance, I could’ve run to the paper supply store to pick up a pocket calendar so we could sit down and hash out a firm date for a meeting that I most definitely planned to skip out on. Instead he dropped my soles back to the fire escape and wound his hand tighter into the collar of my trench coat.
There was a flash of light, a roar of thunder that felt like it was blasting straight through one ear and out the other, and the fire escape below my feet and the grimy sandstone wall with the blown-out window vanished into nothingness.
CHAPTER 6
Being transported through a vortex of thunder and light against your will is a little like being stuffed alongside a million watt light bulb and a sack full of cats into a dryer set to spin at a hundred miles an hour. The whole trip took a fraction of a second and when we exited the far end and landed back on solid ground I felt like I’d been drawn through a thousand mile-long Silly Straw. Mercury, on the other hand, looked none the worse for wear and very annoyed.
“This would’ve gone easier if you hadn’t dodged me yesterday, Banyon,” the messenger god informed me.
I doubted any consequence of Mercury’s surprise initial visit would be easy on me, which was why I’d done my unsuccessful best to dodge him, and at that moment I had fresh reason to doubt the accuracy of his declaration.
We had been teleported to Greece. I could tell by all the crumbling columns that weren’t holding up the crumbling roofs of the crumbling buildings. Plus the whole dump reeked of feta cheese and olive oil and there was a guy across the road putting lipstick on a goat.
The ancient Greeks were so proud of all their sophisticated architecture, philosophy, literature, sodomy and math that when they were through they all took one giant pederastic step back to admire a job well done. In the couple thousand years they’d been loitering around waiting for the paint to dry on the Parthenon, their whole civilization had collapsed into postcard-perfect picturesque ruins.
