Bum luck, p.12
Bum Luck, page 12
If Parisians moved for the ammo as fast as the Le Pissoir maitre d’ jumped to unfasten the velvet rope, French schoolchildren wouldn’t still be learning twelve years of mandatory German as a second language just in case.
“Monsieur is most welcome,” the skinny doorman with the greased-down hair informed down at me through a mouthful of grinning yellow choppers.
The grousing erupted once more down the line of wannabe patrons. The society assholes were flinging yipping Pekinese at the maitre d’ like furry snowballs as I hustled up the stairs and through the front door.
Inside, Le Pissoir stunk like runny cheese and live bait.
It was early for supper, and half the tables were empty. The restless crowd outside could have easily fit in the restaurant, but then passing cars would have seen only an empty sidewalk which would have destroyed the air of exclusiveness the dump had so carefully cultivated. They made up for the empty tables with stratospheric prices.
A chalkboard next to the door into the dining room listed the day’s specials.
A bottle of Chicken Valley Wine cost $3,300. The dill, ragweed, leek and snail-chunks salad was $101, plus an additional $20 if you ordered the slime vinaigrette. Snail and sheep marrow au gratin with garlic cloves was $200, and they were calling that le special of le day. At a quick glance as I passed by I saw that the grilled snail and cucumber sandwich was the cheapest item listed, and that was $85.50.
There was a little picture of a grinning cartoon slug wearing a beret and a pencil thin mustache drawn at the bottom of the daily specials board. Francois le Snail Heureux, the Le Pissoir mascot, also adorned the menu that Sally McClatchen was perusing when I slipped into the seat across from her at le table microscopique.
At first, she was mad that anyone would dare sit in her presence. At second, she was even madder when she saw that the anyone in question was the P.I. sap whose pocket she’d picked.
“How did you get in here, Banyon?” she snarled.
“By bullying and lying,” I replied. “Toss in cheating and sleeping with your professors and I assume it’s the same way you got through journalism school.”
She put down her menu and leaned in close. Not hard to do with a table that was hardly big enough for two ramekins of snails soufflé and a bottle of Pepto.
“So you figured out I lifted that page from the autopsy report from your pocket. Big deal,” she said. “It’s not like you’re some kind of saint. You must have swiped it from the morgue. I just have to figure out if you did it because of some case you’re working on or because you were covering your tracks.”
She gave me a superior smirk from a mouthful of lipstick and slapped onto the table a piece of paper she’d rescued from her purse. I saw that it was the top page from Frankie the Eye’s Company B Nightclub and Casino personnel file.
“Oh, this is a copy,” she said. “And don’t worry about the rest, it’s stashed away nice and safe. Interesting reading, Banyon. A triple murder at the casino, and you just happen to have the file of one of the casino employees on you.”
“Not on me now,” I said, holding out both arms wide. “Prove it was ever in my possession or your paper will be hearing from my brilliant, grotesquely overweight attorneys at the prestigious law firm of Shyster, Pilfer and Fraud.”
She flashed a shrewd smirk that made that ruby red lipstick of hers look like the glistening blood of my own heart, and I knew she had something on me bigger than Kirstie Alley’s ass which, along with the Great Wall of China and the prodigious dumper of Rosie O’Donnell, was one of only three manmade structures visible from space. (Although technically a man had never made Rosie’s.)
“I just talked to a source on the police force,” she said. “He says they took some fingerprints from von Schaflikker’s office at Company B, and lo and behold whose do you suppose they found all over the file cabinet where the personnel files were kept? The Gazette welcomes the call from your lawyers, Banyon.”
“Dial down that smug, sister,” I said. “Most of the cases worked on by Detective Daniel Jenkins wind up getting thrown out of court. Granted, many because judges are put off by his oleaginous courtroom personality and liberal application of Old Spice aftershave, but most because of his unique semantic interpretation of ‘competence’ and ‘police work’ as antonyms.”
It was more bravado than I felt, but at least I managed to wipe the look off her face of a snake that had just swallowed a particularly succulent rat (which, smeared in a garlic and snail paste was #5 and $140.99 on that day’s Le Pissoir specials menu). It was also a stab in the dark that her source was Jenkins, the flatfoot on the local force most deserving of being stabbed in the dark, but when her self-satisfied kisser collapsed precisely at my mention of his name I knew I’d stabbed in the right direction.
“You’ve got an answer for everything, don’t you Banyon?” she snarled, snatching up the sheet of paper from Frankie the Eye’s personnel file and stuffing it back in her purse.
“Not if the question is why I didn’t let you get flattened by that safe,” I replied.
Sally pretended she had not been on the receiving end of my devastating wit and proceeded to haul out another sheet of paper which she waved under my nose.
“I recognized Doctor Minto’s handwriting,” she said, flapping around the page from von Schaflikker’s autopsy report. “Minto made a note about this restaurant on it, and here you are.” She pulled out her notebook and dropped it onto the table, clicking her silver pen as if she were unsheathing a rapier. “Care to make a statement to the press?”
“Yes, tell it the seams from its most recent facelift are coming loose.”
I didn’t see if she was scratching down a note or preparing to lunge across the table and harpoon my Adam’s apple with her trusty poisoned pen.
Ever since I’d sat down, I had been keeping a sharp eye on the kitchen doors. The silver out door swung open at precisely that moment and two of the waiters who had hauled the fatal potato feast into Company B came sashaying into the dining room.
Sally McClatchen, ever-observant girl reporter, noticed I was distracted, and she glanced across the room to where the two waiters were delivering trays of clammy cheese and malodorous mounds of gelatinous main course to a pair of tables, each weighed down by two society dames clocking in at a total of about six hundred pounds, plus jewelry.
“Gee, Banyon,” she sneered, “does one of them owe you money?”
“No, but it’s nice to see that you aren’t completely lacking in a reporter’s instincts,” I replied. “As you know, Sally, I’m ordinarily reluctant to assist members of the fourth estate. This stems from a deep and abiding hatred and mistrust of everyone in your profession. However, I’m more reluctant to waste a year of my life sitting at a defense table while Dan Jenkins contorts reality for a case that will more than likely be tossed out, but which has a very slim chance of seeing me railroaded for the crime of recognizing him for the incompetent asshole that he is. So if you want a story, there are two of the Gallic cretins who poisoned Klaus von Schaflikker. They may also be responsible for a wave of murders that has taken place around the city in the past two weeks, sent out on their murderous rampage by a shady boss who is hiding out behind the scenes. I’ll supply you with a list of the other murders as well if need be, but I know an elf who found eight of them in your own paper in less than five minutes, so I’ll give you more credit than you perhaps deserve and assume that you can do the same.”
Sally might have thought that I was a desperate man implicating the first random slobs to walk through the nearest door if not for that fact that the jerk who’d acted as head waiter at Company B happened at that moment to glance across the dining room.
When he first saw me sitting across the room looking back at him, he thought I was a customer and arched that superior eyebrow that was the French middle finger.
When he suddenly recognized me as the guy who’d been sitting in von Schaflikker’s office when he and his pals delivered the poisoned grub, he dropped his steaming bowl of snail soup on the head of the nearest, fattest society butterball and did his one-man performance-art interpretation of the defense of Paris.
The clumsy waiter ran like hell for the kitchen on spindly Gallic legs.
His confrere had no idea why his buddy was running away like a maniac, but if there was something to be run away from there was no way he was going to get there last. Another dropped tray and the second scumbag from Company B was off like a shot.
I was already up and running just as the first bastard started rabbiting, and I might have been able to snag him before he slammed open the kitchen door. My problems were those of age plus geography, multiplied by the total number of each individual member of the swarm of Frenchmen that was suddenly hemming me in on all sides.
The most dangerous time to be caught up in a French retreat is in the first few seconds. I’d read in an Omni magazine I found at a bus stop a couple of years ago how a bunch of Norwegian scientists ran some tests on squirrels and French student volunteers in which they’d pop balloons or set off firecrackers to frighten all their test subjects. In every test, the human students made it out the laboratory door long before the squirrels, and either fled in their cars, climbed trees or on several occasions surrendered to a German janitor with a mop called Gunter (the article didn’t say why the kraut named his mop). The researchers’ big surprise came when students in the next room unaware of what was happening in the lab also fled the building, while at the same time their squirrel counterparts remained calmly on the table enjoying a pile of pistachios. Turns out the big deal thing the researchers discovered was some kind of pheromone that the primary test subjects released into the air the instant the scary balloon popped. The students in the other room who were isolated from the noise somehow picked up on the scent and ran like warm brie. The research won a Nobel Prize in Applied Satire. Ooh la-la.
Fascinating scientific bullshit that I filed away and forgot about until that minute, but the upshot for me was that getting from my table to the kitchen proved a hell of a lot more difficult than it would have been in one of those schnitzel joints over on Rommel Avenue, since as soon as I stepped away from my chair I was nearly plowed over by the stampede of waiters and busboys trying to surrender.
“Please, monsieur, I have a wife, two mistresses and a new Peugeot!” a waiter wept, flinging his arms around my ankles and knocking me into the next table.
The table flipped up and gleaming silverware went flying in every direction while glasses and plates shattered on the floor.
“Le noise! She frightens me so!” a busboy screamed. He grabbed my hand and tried to kiss it to death.
I knocked the slobbering kid back into a second charging busboy and kicked away the jerk who was wrapped around my ankles and sobbing onto my Florsheims.
Across the room, the chief waiter had vanished into the kitchen and the second waiter from Company B was plowing straight through after him. The silver door swung back and forth, and for the seconds that it was open wide I caught several glimpses of bright green hustling around in the kitchen beyond.
“Get them off me!” a nearby voice screeched.
Sally McClatchen was being swarmed by surrendering French restaurant staff. Obsequious hands clawed at her arms and waved white handkerchiefs in her face.
I slugged one waiter in the mug, knocking him back onto a bartender who’d run in from the lounge desperately offering a bottle of wine and the key to the cash register.
I grabbed Sally by the arm and dragged her in close. The mass of flesh pressed in around us as I attempted to wade through to the kitchen. Hot garlic breath steamed the wrinkles from my trench coat.
The maitre d’ came charging in through the front door on stick-like legs, knocking over potted plants and oui-oui-ing his neatly pressed pants as he joined the crush of submissive wait staff that clogged the spaces between the tables.
I’ve seen guys dragged down by zombie swarms, and there’s a point where the mass of the mob becomes too great to fight against. In another minute they’d have had us both down on the floor, crushing us under their weight, forcing the air from our lungs until the girl reporter and I were as dead as joy in French cinema.
“Please, take ze finest table in ze ’ouse!” the maitre d’ cried. “You may also ’ave my family châteaux in Bordeaux. She is lovely in ze summertime, no?”
“Bordeaux…Bordeaux…Bordeaux!” the mob chanted.
I stumbled and nearly fell. I managed to grab onto the back of a chair and hold myself upright as hands wrenched at the back of my coat. Sally and I fought against the riptide of French weasels and I somehow managed to yank the chair off the floor.
The Le Pissoir staff were overjoyed.
“Take a seat!” they shouted in unison.
“’Ere is a menu!” cried the chorus.
“The snails, they are tres bon today!” the crowd shouted.
Their squealing delight lasted only until I kept on lifting the chair. I brought it right up off the floor, and their clawing mitts pulled back for a curious, fearful moment as they probably wondered if I was moving it to a better table over by the window, for which they’d deeply regret having to charge me a bundle extra.
In that moment’s hesitation I sent the bottom of the chair hard into the prominent beak of the fawning maitre d’ with the stilt legs.
Bones cracked, the bastard’s nose became twin fonts of gushing blood, and he and his expensive black penguin suit took a sharp dive for the dining room floor.
At the sight of the first French blood spilled in battle in over a hundred years, the Le Pissoir staff screeched loudly enough to rattle stemware on tables all around the restaurant before turning tail and scattering like cockroaches in every direction.
With the coast finally clear, I sprinted for all I was worth for the kitchen, Sally McClatchen, annoying dame reporter, hot on my heels.
It had been no more than twenty seconds since the creeps who’d murdered von Schaflikker had disappeared through the doors, but by the time we got inside the kitchen the pair of bastards were long gone. The door to the back hung open wide and I could see the rear parking lot and the overflowing Dumpster I’d spotted from the library window.
I’d lost two of the reasons I’d come to the French slop house, but all it took was one step inside the kitchen to see that the trip wasn’t a complete waste of time.
In those moments just after the first waiter had disappeared and as the doors swung back and forth into the kitchen, I’d spotted a lot of little flashes of green scurrying around the restaurant’s kitchen. Now that I was standing inside the doors it was clear that my eyes, which are usually only reliably creative in the mirage department after a night of ocular corruption at O’Hale’s, had not, in fact, been playing tricks on me.
When I stopped dead just inside the kitchen door, Sally McClatchen plowed into me so fast she nearly sent me sailing face-first onto the floor. The dame gave me a shove, trying to propel me for the open door and the runaway waiters, but I didn’t budge.
“What the hell’s wrong with you, Ban--”
The dame stumbled out around me, and when she finally caught sight of what I’d seen she slammed on the brakes beside me.
“What the hell is going on here?” the girl reporter demanded.
Apparently, Sally McJournalist, like many members of her unseemly profession, was in need of a layperson to state the obvious at every turn, and with nobody else around over four feet tall to fill her in, I grudgingly accepted the assignment.
“It appears,” I replied, “as if the premier Frog restaurant in this dump-of-a-town has a kitchen staffed entirely by leprechauns.”
The little magical buggers were crawling around the room like bright green ants in a slime-covered anthill. There were a bunch sweating around the oven, pulling out loaves of French bread and shoving in a couple of orders of filet of snail. A couple more were standing on stools working at boiling pots on the stove, their green bowlers replaced with bobbing green chef hats. Still more slaved on little stepladders around stainless steel prep tables, sorting slugs, doling out parsley, hammering cloves of garlic flat, and otherwise involved in the preparation of the organized criminal endeavor that was French cooking.
A couple more leprechauns struggled to wash massive pots covered in mounds of white suds at a line of stainless steel sinks over in one corner. Like all the rest around the room, the bushy beards of the dishwashers were bound up in hairnets.
One of the drenched washing staff teetering on tiptoes on his stepladder was operating a hose hooked up to the faucet and looking utterly miserable in his work.
I didn’t allow my shock at the fact that a French restaurant actually washed its dishes to overpower the fact that the little half-in-the-bag bastard operating the hose and looking like he wanted to drown himself with it was none other than Finnegan O’Fart.
The midget green skunk must have gotten wind of me. Possibly because, unlike the French staff that Le Pissoir permitted the world to see on the other side of the kitchen door, I knew my way around a bar of soap and stick of Right Guard. Before I’d taken two steps for the sinks, O’Fart glanced over and saw me heading towards him.
“Sure and it’s the divil himself,” O’Fart cried. “I mean…oh, shit.”
His face paled behind his hairnet, he dropped the hose inside the sink, and the tiny jerk hopped down from his stool and booked it for the open kitchen door.
I lunged after him, but the instant I took a step something crashed beside me.
When I’d shoved the door open to the kitchen, it had struck a mirror on the wall next to the bulletin board on which was posted the leprechaun work schedule. The instant I resolved to go after O’Fart, the big mirror slipped from loose screws that had been holding it to the white plastic paneling. The mirror slammed hard at my feet, sending shards of glass scattering all around the stove and prep counter area.
