Flying blind, p.12
Flying Blind, page 12
Mannix was winding down his stack of Post-Its with news of an incredibly rare opportunity to shovel money into the dirty slush fund of some corrupt local mayoral candidate who would have gotten my vote only if a.) I was registered and b.) he signed in blood in triplicate an ironclad vow to immolate himself on the day of his inauguration.
“Finished?” I asked when the last of the Post-Its was shifted to the back of the pile. The elf glanced up with an expectant expression that asked how in the world I was going to decide which terrific prospect I was going to avail myself of first.
Mannix nodded.
“Good. Toss those Post-Its out the window. Vincetti, our ptomaine-peddling fishmonger neighbor, hasn’t enjoyed a really good tickertape parade since he and the rest of Mussolini’s forces bravely routed the unarmed employees at that Esso station in Milan. Plus it will give him something else besides a dead bike messenger to shake an impotent fist at and vainly attempt to sweep out into the gutter. Then get me a Glad bag and a FedEx envelope, stat.”
The elf dutifully tossed the little scraps of yellow paper out the open window. One Post-It didn’t clear the fire escape and flutter to the street with the rest. It fell on the landing just outside my window and caused the whole metal structure to groan under its massive .00000000001 ounce weight. After a harrowing couple of seconds, the protesting fire escape grew silent.
“That’ll end well,” I said. To no one, apparently, since Mannix had already hustled out into the outer office
The elf returned momentarily with the two items I’d requested. I very carefully dropped the one of the things I’d found in my desk into the Glad bag, which was the second item I thought I had in my desk but didn’t. I sealed the bag and dropped it into the FedEx envelope, a supply of which I knew Mannix kept on hand at all times. I dashed off a quick note with my stub of a pencil and stuffed it inside to accompany the contents of the Glad bag on its long journey.
“Send that off to Jack Wolff,” I said. “His contact information is in my files, assuming Doris didn’t use that particular paperwork to mop up one of her Exxon Valdez nail polish spills.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Crag,” Mannix said. “There was one other thing. A bike messenger delivered this a little while ago.”
Before hustling from the room, the elf handed over a white business envelope that I was lucky had made it upstairs before the hipster bike messenger’s final encounters with a runaway taxi, the pavement, Death and Vincetti’s broom, respectively.
I’m suspicious of any sealed envelope that doesn’t have anything written on it. The unmarked envelope might have contained anthrax or a bill. I was rooting for the former as I tore it open and pulled out the single, crisp sheet contained within.
I was right. I would have been better off with anthrax.
At the very top of the page was embossed the legend “From the Desk of Dr. Cohen.” The O in Cohen was particularly stylized, and was darker than the rest of the letters. The interior was lined with a couple dozen rounded bumps, which resembled an inside-out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.
Other than the distinctive “O,” the paper could have come from any of the million Cohens, M.D. in the yellow pages.
There was a handwritten note halfway down and smack dab in the middle of the page which read, in its entirety:
Watch it, Banyon.
“Mannix, did that bike messenger say where he picked this thing up?” I hollered out into the next room.
The little face poked back around the door. “No, Mr. Crag. He was listening to music and didn’t say anything. He just sort of grunted and handed over the envelope, then left. Do you want me to try to track him down for you?”
He obviously didn’t know the messenger was stinking up the sidewalk downstairs.
“No,” I replied. “I don’t have the dough to hire a necromancer, and nine out of ten psychics are frauds and the tenth one is nuts.”
Mannix bowed backwards from the room, happily oblivious, and a minute later I heard him leave Doris’ office and close the door to the hallway behind him, presumably taking off to drop off my vitally important FedEx package to Jack Wolff.
I pondered Dr. Cohen’s cryptic note, holding it up to the light. I hate P.I. stereotypes, but as long as I was alone I dragged out my magnifying glass and carefully went over the scrap of paper. No watermarks, and the only prints I saw were my own.
There were about a million bike messenger services in a town this size, and the spotty employment histories of the lowlifes they hired revolved largely around whether or not they had enough cash for dope stuffed in the pockets of their moldy khakis or if some venue in the tri-state area was hosting a Phish concert. The decomposing kid downstairs could probably go missing for weeks without anybody but his medical marijuana supplier noticing he’d taken the big powder.
I leaned back in my seat to take a look out the window. Neither the cops nor an ambulance had yet arrived. The city’s entire force of full-time emergency responders was probably still busy doing nothing across town at the telephone company.
I took great solace in the fact that I worked in the opposite of an upscale neighborhood. A better neighborhood could expect a cruiser and paramedics on the scene in under ten minutes, and I figured Vincetti or some passerby had called about the dead bike messenger twice as long ago as that. On my fancy-ass block, the arrival of local emergency personnel was coordinated with the advancing and retreating leading glacial sheets of the most relevant, bracketing ice ages.
Examining a dead body before the cops get their mitts on it is fraught with danger, mostly in the area of getting a murder rap pinned to your chest like a corsage. Cops are eager to embrace the easiest way out, and the fact that the guy had obviously been pummeled by a speeding car and polished off by Death wouldn’t matter if they drove around the corner and found me elbow deep in the punk’s pockets.
It would have been quicker to use the fire escape. Unfortunately, that would be doubly true if it tore loose from the wall under the weight of my middle-aged ass, fatally combined with the massive bulk of the errant yellow Post-It note that was still stuck to the rusted metal and flapping in the breeze outside my window.
American impatience took a prudent back seat to self-preservation, and I grabbed up my hat and coat from my busted, old office couch and hustled from the office, riding the elevator down to the ground floor.
The first thing I nearly tripped over was an elf with a FedEx envelope tucked up under his arm running back and forth on the sidewalk.
“What the hell are you doing, Mannix?” I demanded.
“Collecting the notes I threw out the window,” the elf replied. “It was a fun game, Mr. Crag, but littering is naughty.” He said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, and as if I was in on the joke and gave two shits if the Post-It notes blew into the reservoir, in some jerk’s moped engine, or down some sleeping wino’s throat.
The Grim Reaper had fled the scene. Vincetti had successfully swept the dead bike messenger into the gutter and escaped to the safety of his customer-deficient fish market. Mannix and I were the only two souls out front, but I could see the nosy old fishmonger peering through the pair of faded cartoon eyes of the pathetic lobster that was painted on the inside of his filthy store’s filthy front window.
“I’ve found all but one,” Mannix announced worriedly, taking inventory of the stack of Post-Its in his little hand. A gentle breeze delivered the final note directly in front of his nose, and he failed to take note of the groaning fire escape above his head as he happily plucked the once-in-a-lifetime storm window opportunity from the air.
“I’m taking you to Atlantic City,” I vowed. “In the meantime, and before you FedEx that package, I need you to go into Vincetti’s deathtrap and pretend to shop around. He knows you work for me, but you’ll be the first thing in months with less than a hundred legs to scurry through the front door, so he can’t afford to ignore you.”
Mannix was tucking away the Post-Its. “But if I go into a store and I don’t intend to buy anything, it’s kind of like lying.”
I fished in my pocket and handed him one thin dime. “Buy one clam. But unless you’ve got a craving for intestinal parasites and the inevitable accompanying colostomy, you’ll avoid eating it like the plague. Which, no kidding, it probably also carries.”
Mannix ducked inside the For the Halibut Fish Market and, as expected, Vincetti’s eyes instantly disappeared from within their cartoon lobster frames.
I squatted quickly down next to the dead bike messenger.
The dead punk wasn’t wearing anything that identified him with any particular messenger service. The only stickers on his bike were hemp-related. I fished around in his pockets and came up with a roach clip; twenty-two cents in change; a brand-new, folded-up flier advertising Vincetti’s For the Halibut Fish Market (that old guinea bastard was without shame); and three combs. That last collection of matching items was particularly laughable since the kid’s lunatic hair made him look like a stray collie that had spent the past decade living in a sewer pipe.
The only thing of note about the college pothead puke was something I nearly missed thanks to the way Vincetti had dumped the body in the gutter.
The corpse was wearing short pants, and I noticed a large purple bruise on the outside of his left thigh. It was obviously a result of the accident, but what caught my eye was that it was a perfect O with rounded bumps along the interior that exactly matched the stylized O in “Cohen” on the cheerfully threatening note the dead kid had delivered to my office in the final minutes of his worthless life.
That bruise had come from the impact, which meant that the O in question was prominently displayed somewhere on the front of the car that hit the hipster. Which meant that the sinister Dr. Cohen was the only M.D. in town who still made house calls. At some point in the previous forty-five minutes, Dr. Cohen had flagged the messenger down, paid him to deliver the note, then ran him down and -- since there was no folding cash on him -- took his money back. It was such a cheap bastard move that I was, frankly, surprised that he hadn’t tried to hire me at one point like all the rest of the shameless deadbeats in town.
A cab was pulling to the curb as I stuffed the dead punk’s pocket garbage back inside his baggy, khaki shorts. A very long right leg exited the taxi’s rear door accompanied a moment later by a mirror image left gam, both ending in a pair of high-heel clogs that I imagined were similar in podiatric comfort to strapping a couple of copies of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare to one’s feet.
“Ju are not stealing from the drunks to pay for my dinner,” Senorita Tamale insisted, horrified, as she teetered on her towering footwear.
“No, on several points. One, this jerk with the worthless, four hundred grand sociology degree is dead, not drunk. Two, he has nothing in his pockets worth stealing, unless there’s resale value for Kinko’s aquamarine fish market fliers that have been stuffed into corpse pockets postmortem by entrepreneurial dagos. Three, I am not paying for dinner, you are. Four, we’re not having dinner.”
Showoffs in tights steal all the hero thunder in every town they decide to make home, but the true hero of that moment was Senorita Tamale’s cab driver.
The Arab cabbie was completely uninterested in involving himself in any way whatsoever with the dead body in the road. He made a point of not looking at the corpse under the accepted taxi driver rule that if a hack doesn’t see something, it does not exist. This worked great for traffic signals, stop signs, other cabs, every other car and truck, pedestrians in crosswalks, dames pushing baby carriages, mailboxes, sidewalk cafes, and P.I.’s seemingly mugging corpses in the gutters of crummy neighborhoods. He accepted Senorita Tamale’s dough, groused the absolute minimum amount of union-dictated time over the tip, then sped off around the nearest corner posthaste.
Senorita Tamale was nudging the corpse with the cautious toe of an enormous platform shoe to confirm my diagnosis of terminal death as I glanced around.
The sidewalks were as dead as the corpse rolling away from the senorita’s foot.
I was living in a world obsessed with shinnying up every light post to hang a security camera, yet I was standing in a neighborhood which that particular privacy-invading technology had passed by. The only outfit that might have had a camera was the check cashing joint across the street but, thanks to Minus, the window behind the steel security fence had been blown out by an exploding bolt from my fire escape a couple hours earlier. There was a fresh sheet of plywood covering the window.
If anyone had seen the accident, nobody had stuck around to give an account to the cops. It would be no use questioning Vincetti. The old guinea justifiably hated my guts. Even if he’d seen anything, he’d clam up like one of his months-old mollusks. Not that he’d say anything to the cops, whose sirens I’d just begun to hear in the distance. He believed firmly in the principle of omerta when it came to dealing with government representatives, a code that had kicked in right around the time Il Duce was getting strung up by his fascist heels, and which as a lifelong policy had extended decades thereafter and across the Atlantic to apply to meddlesome local health inspectors.
I led Senorita Tamale back toward the downstairs corner door that led to the elevator, intercepting Mannix en route as he exited the fish market. Vincetti’s beady eyes were back inside their lobster goggles as I plucked the clam from Mannix’s tiny hand and rolled it like a grenade back through the old fascist bastard’s front door.
“Oh, didn’t you want that one, Mr. Crag?” the elf asked. “I can go back and exchange it for a different one.”
The resultant Italian invective that issued from somewhere along the cartoon lobster’s faded orange carapace made a return trip inside Vincetti’s fish market by Mannix an unjustifiable risk.
“I think I’ll forgo food poisoning for the evening and concentrate on alcohol poisoning,” I said. “Why don’t you hurry up and get that in the mail.”
Mannix dutifully trotted off down the sidewalk, the FedEx envelope tucked firmly up under his little arm.
The sirens were on the far side of the building and closing in around the block. Fortunately, a second cab pulled to the curb before their arrival on the scene, and I spied annoying client Mrs. Gwendolyn Johnson emerging from the back seat.
I hustled a confused Senorita Tamale back across the sidewalk.
“Mr. Banyon--” began Gwendolyn Johnson, the dame with the possibly cheating, definitely boring husband.
“I’m afraid you’ve arrived after office hours,” I interrupted before my annoying client could drone out a fifth, irritating syllable. “But you’re fortunate to have timed your arrival to coincide with my need to beat a hasty retreat ahead of the imminent arrival of the inquisitive, moron local constabulary. So, as recompense for your exquisite timing, I’ll tell you everything about your case that I’ve collected since our last meeting once we arrive at our destination which, forewarned is forearmed, is an utter dump. You’re paying for the cab. Your carriage awaits, Senorita Tamale.”
Gwendolyn Johnson’s eyes hesitated just a split-second longer than the rest of her flawless feminine carcass. As a client, my autonomic response was to be irritated by her, but I found myself momentarily admiring her for her quick decision and a rapid response time that put the local cops to shame. She dumped herself back into the rear of the taxi and permitted the two of us to pile in beside her as she slid to the far side of the seat.
“You’d better not disappoint me, Mr. Banyon,” she warned.
“You’re a dame. I invariably will.”
“Ju said a mouse-full,” Senorita Tamale interjected.
The last time I was flanked by a pair of hostile dames in the backseat of a car it was my ex-wife and former mother-in-law on my wedding day. Unless this night ended with me dumped on a desolate stretch of rabid raccoon-infested highway covered in melted Carvel wedding cake with a bleeding gut wound (the result of a busted ceramic groom shiv attack), I figured it’d end far better than had that other blissful evening.
I settled back in the rear of the grubby cab as it sped off in the direction opposite the approaching patrol car and the accompanying superfluous ambulance.
CHAPTER 9
O’Hale’s Bar was so dead that even the lazy dust mites weren’t motivated to get up off their asses for the swinging front door.
The booths and barstools were empty. No one was splashing around in the can, which had been declared a toxic Superfund site by the federal government the previous month. Even though Jaublowski kept cutting through the yellow hazard tape to make the john more inviting to desperate souls who had abandoned all hope of reaching the alley out back in time, I could see through the open door that it was empty.
An old dame in tattered B-girl threads snoozed on a pillow made from a folded-up apron on the end of the bar near the cigarette machine. The smoldering stub of the butt that dangled from her cracked lips was being slowly extinguished by the puddle of drool that oozed from her open mouth. Chardonnay, the sometimes-waitress at O’Hale’s, would die in that post, assuming she hadn’t already snuffed it. I didn’t bother to check if she was still breathing. I’d dealt with enough corpses already for one day.
The only sign of a pulse in the joint was Ed Jaublowski, who was standing lonely sentry duty behind the bar and came to life when he saw the biggest crowd in O’Hale’s history piling through the door, then collapsed back to sullen reality when he saw it was I leading my female entourage into his booze-drenched crypt.
Neither Mrs. Gwendolyn Johnson nor Senorita Tamale seemed particularly overjoyed at the pigsty rum parlor into which I had gallantly escorted them, so I turned up my gentlemanly charm as I dumped their attractive asses at a sticky table.
“I know that it looks like the kind of joint where serial killers do their shopping, but according to a pal in the FBI that has only been the case sixty or seventy documented times. And, contrary to that scurrilous report in the Gazette, it is not technically the suicide capital of the state, it just happens to be where many of the most successful and flamboyant ones stop off first. O’Hale’s is more a suicide suburb.”
