Bum luck, p.18
Bum Luck, page 18
CHAPTER 15
Lucky for Sally McClatchen her office was on the top floor of the Gazette building, or she might have been buried up to her eyeballs in rubble when the floors above her collapsed on her head. As it was, only part of the ceiling blasted in, and it brought along with it only a minor fraction of the roof.
The rainbow slammed down hard in the corner of the room, blowing out a glass wall and sending a couple of squat, three-drawer file cabinets tumbling into the hallway.
I came crashing down into the carpet along with the chunks of plaster and wood, and when the rainbow fled back up through the hole it had made in the ceiling, I understood why the Pope made out with the ground whenever his plane didn’t crash. I would’ve kissed the holy crap out of Sally’s worn blue nylon carpet if somebody hadn’t just thoughtlessly dumped half her office’s dirty ceiling on top of it.
Down the ruins of the roof and ceiling hopped a small black figure that I hadn’t realized had stowed away for the trip back home.
The scrawny Leprechaun Land cat landed lightly on a collapsed steel beam and jumped over to a potted plant near the door where it promptly sat down and began lapping off any dust that might have soiled its spotless ass on the trip down.
The girl reporter was sitting at her desk when the cannonball hit. I gave her bonus points for the fact that she was clearly more angry than afraid at the ruins left behind by the multicolored meteorite that had come within a couple of feet of demolishing her where she sat, then pulled a hit-and-run job and took off before they could exchange insurance information.
“Before you call security and have me tossed out the window without a parachute, I can tell you who exactly you should bill for all this,” I said.
A ceiling light fixture swung away from the plaster, hung on by one end for a valiant second, then did a freefall to her desk, shattering into a million pieces.
“That, too,” I said.
I pulled out the potato I’d grabbed from the burning floor of Fidelius O’Fart’s luxury mushroom castle. It was still wrapped in my handkerchief, and I very carefully dumped it loose onto her desk blotter.
“For your friend on the force, moron Detective Daniel Jenkins,” I said. “It’s got the mysterious Big Green’s fingerprints all over it, who is mysterious no more. He admitted he killed Seamus McGuire, pathetic bookie, over by the Civil War Cemetery. First, have idiot Jenkins compare prints on this spud with those on the one Doc Minto yanked out of McGuire’s windpipe. While he’s doing that, you might want to wear out some shoe leather walking over to O’Hale’s Bar to interview the ghosts who are right now terrorizing Ed Jaublowski with the threat of a nuisance lawsuit. The spirits in question either witnessed that particular murder or they know which ghosts from the cemetery did. Oh, and here’s page one for you.” I dragged the mail I’d swiped from the mailbox at the old O’Fart home and dumped the envelopes out on Sally’s desk. “Tons of bullshit mailed to Small Potatoes, Big Ideas, the international corporation Fidelius O’Fart is using to corner the worldwide potato market as well as shoehorn himself into organized crime all over the world. The potato shortage in the tri-state area was just a dry run. He’s planning to take it global. Fidelius O’Fart, just in case your research while I’ve been gone has been up to the usual worthless Gazette standards, is Big Green, the leprechaun bastard behind it all. Did I leave anything out?”
The girl reporter’s eyes dragged from the hole blasted in her ceiling to the rubble on her floor to the junk dumped on her blotter to the dapper P.I. with the thousand-watt smile and the aching lumbar region standing in front of her desk.
“Banyon--” she began, spluttering furiously.
“Thank me in your Pulitzer speech, kitten,” I interrupted. “That’s Crag -- no I -- Banyon. In the meantime, I’ve got a major pain-in-the-ass loose end to tie up which, with luck, won’t wind up knotted around my own goddamn neck.”
I trusted that Sally McClatchen’s greedy desire for increasing her notoriety would keep my exculpatory evidence safer than if it had been in a police locker.
Dreading what was coming next, I departed the wreckage of the girl reporter’s office in the company of the ass-licking black cat.
CHAPTER 16
During our dustup with the falling safe outside police HQ, Sally McClatchen, conniving girl reporter, had swiped the personnel file I’d lifted from the Company B Nightclub and Casino, demonstrating a cold-blooded feminine untrustworthiness that would have profoundly impressed the despicable three-toed sloth to which I had once been harmoniously wed. The only relevant fact from the file that I required, however, was an address which I easily recalled from perusing the paperwork on the train ride back from the triple-homicide scene at Company B earlier that miserable day.
And so it was that I found myself standing in front of a tidy brick townhouse at ten o’clock at night in the fruity, artsy-fartsy Pud Heights section of town.
The Leprechaun Land cat had followed me from the Gazette building. I hadn’t seen any of the local strays that had been persecuting me that day, so I figured the single mangy mouse-eater had taken up the slack for an entire city’s bad-luck feline population.
The cat was mistrustful, and a bunch of times on our long walk I could see that it was itching to cross my path and finish me off once and for all with a runaway city bus.
“I have zero interest in O’Fart,” I assured the cat for the umpteenth time as we stood together at the bottom of the disturbingly clean front steps to the townhouse. “I still hope more than anything that he will marry my ex-wife and surgically remove that oozing, pus-saturated boil forever from all my future earnings, although in that matter I’m no longer the wild optimist that is my default, sunny position in everything else.”
I don’t know if the cat believed me. It didn’t run in front of me as I mounted the stairs, consequently a chunk of the ledge three stories up did not come loose and crush me as I rang the ground floor doorbell, so I suppose that was something to cheer about. Rah.
A name written on a piece of clean white cardboard in the neatest calligraphy I’d ever seen had been slipped under the small brass plate beneath the doorbell and could be read through gleaming glass: Franklin Cyclops, Jr.
Frankie the Eye, notorious bouncer from the Company B Nightclub and Casino, answered the door wearing comfortable leather slippers, deep blue silk pajamas and a Kiss the Cook apron. He was holding a wooden spoon in one of his gigantic hands.
The single giant eye of the cyclops had been filled with optimism when he flung the door open, but his fat brow dropped in suspicion when he saw a strange human and his cat companion stinking up his front stoop. His shoulders stretched from one side of the doorframe to the other, and when he straightened his back in an unnecessary attempt to intimidate his unwanted guest, the top of his head touched the upper frame.
“Who are you?” the cyclops asked. His shoulders abruptly deflated and he got more fussy than angry. “Oh, never mind that. I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of making dinner. Just leave a business card and go away, please.”
As he spoke, his eye darted anxiously up and down the street, but not seeing any sign of the individual whose arrival he was anxiously anticipating he turned the horrible orb back on me. He sighed. “Oh, very well. What is it?”
“I’m sure Finnegan O’Fart will be along soon for your romantic, interspecies reconciliation supper,” I told him. “In the meantime, may I come in and take a quick look inside the pot of gold, sans gold, he left here when he temporarily abandoned homoeroticism to get heterosexually engaged to the most evil battleaxe in the history of creation?”
# # #
Sometimes the pieces fall into place when you’re not paying attention.
Of course Finnegan O’Fart had wanted me to locate the missing pot of gold all along. Clearly his brother was deeply interested in it. It was the “it” Big Green had been so obsessed about that he’d dispatched Finnegan to retrieve it.
O’Fart couldn’t get it himself because Frankie the Eye’s townhouse door was no longer open to him once Finnegan had announced his engagement. He definitely couldn’t tell the truth about his actual relationship with the fiercest bouncer at Company B without ruining Frankie’s career while simultaneously suffering through a reenactment of the Blitz with himself assuming the role of London and the ex-wife’s stiletto heel ably standing in for the Luftwaffe’s millions of bombs and incendiary devices.
It was at that point in the leprechaun’s personal bullshit narrative where entered the story about Frankie the Eye swiping the pot while Finnegan was loitering behind a tree in the park. (There are kernels of truth in the very best lies, but I had no interest in knowing exactly why O’Fart had entered into evidence that part about hanging around behind public park trees with his garbage out.) Once the carefully contrived untruth was told to his betrothed, it was a simple matter of enlisting his future wife’s ex-patsy P.I. to collect that which the leprechaun was too gutless to just go over and pick up on his own.
It would have been a simple matter if not for the fact that the stupid little bastard had wished me “good luck for my -- (meaning his)-- sake.” Since good luck brought bad in his sad sack world, for most of the day I’d been dodging the results of his misguided well-wishing. I figured the only reason a tornado hadn’t lifted me out of a crosswalk and splattered me against a skyscraper on the way over to Frankie the Eye’s joint was that at this point I was only interested in helping myself.
Frankie the Eye sat me on the edge of the most spotless sofa I’d ever seen and gave me the evilest of evil eyes to ensure my cooperation that it would remain thus. He hadn’t let the cat in the house. The feline had taken up a sentry post on the other side of a brand-new Anderson bay window and kept a beady jaundiced eye focused on me.
The cyclops went into a bedroom and returned with a cardboard box which he sat on the coffee table before me.
“I don’t understand what this is all about,” the cyclops said. “Why does the city health inspector need to know what’s in some dirty old pot of Finnegan’s?”
(Hey, the last time I attempted to be a thoroughly truthful human being for a whole twenty-four hours I snapped my honesty bone and had to lie in bed for a month.)
“All questions concerning official health inspection business are to be directed to Detective Daniel Jenkins,” I informed the nosy cyclops. “Just don’t call him at his day job. He’s in the book. Office hours are at home after midnight.”
I dug around through bright green sweaters, a toothbrush, hairbrush and assorted flotsam until I unearthed the infamous pot.
Finnegan O’Fart’s pot of gold was a simple black cauldron as big as a football, with a broad base and metal handle. I set it to the coffee table and did a quick search around the empty bottom. Sure enough, there was a little pop and a secret door flipped open. A few sheets of official-looking paperwork were crammed in the compartment.
“What’s that?” Frankie the Eye asked.
“The reason why your significant other’s brother was forcing him to get married to her satanic majesty, Queen Neuter,” I replied. “Apparently she has for years been investing a significant portion of her alimony payment in potato farms, potato chip companies, and other potato-related businesses. According to this she is a significant stockholder in Tater International of Passaic, New Jersey. Once they were married, were a tragic -- (yet welcome, from my sensible perspective) -- accident to befall her, Finnegan would have inherited it all and then signed it over to his evil twin.”
“Wait. Are you saying Finnegan has a twin brother?”
I looked at my watch. “Yes, and if a certain girl reporter has done her job, you should be able to meet him at the local police precinct within the hour.”
I folded up the paperwork and tucked it in my pocket. If Frankie the Eye wanted to stop me, he lost interest when he heard a pot boiling over in the kitchen.
“My bourguignon sauce!” the cyclops cried in horror.
The teacups in his China hutch rattled frantically as the huge creature lumbered up the hallway with his spoon and disappeared through the louvered kitchen door.
I patted the paperwork in my pocket, left the rest of Finnegan O’Fart’s crap sitting out on the coffee table, and headed for the door.
Outside, the black cat seemed pretty upbeat as it hopped down from the wrought iron railing in front of the bay window. I couldn’t share its sanguinity considering what the paperwork in my pocket would mean to my economic future.
My lack of cheer got a lot more cheerless when the night sky suddenly lit up with a magnificent streak of multicolored light that zoomed down to earth and slammed straight into the tidy brick stoop in front of Frankie the Eye’s townhouse.
I’d barely made it to the top step, and I had to grab onto the railing to keep from being blown out into the street. The rainbow quickly receded, leaving behind Finnegan O’Fart, a potted ficus and a Barry Manilow CD.
“Ah, Mr. Banyon,” the sheepish leprechaun said when he spotted me dragging myself back to my feet on the steps beneath him. He looked at the fey, conciliatory gifts in his little hands. “I think, perhaps, a wee bit of explainin’ might be in order.”
I was less alarmed at that moment by his earlier lack of forthrightness in my office than I was by the screeching cat that had just jumped across the stoop directly in front of me, presaging the appearance of the out-of-control tow truck that was barreling at a hundred miles an hour directly at the steps on which I was cowering.
“Bad luck! Wish me bad luck!” I hollered at the leprechaun. The tow truck cut across the far lane, slamming a speeding Volvo and sending it spinning wildly out of control and into the front window of a florist as it headed for the sidewalk.
“I’m sure I don’t underst--” the leprechaun began.
“Wish me goddamn bad luck in all my endeavors now!”
The leprechaun made a little unhappy clicking sound with his tongue and said, “Bad luck to you and yours, Mr. Crag Banyon.”
Tires shrieked, the truck spun sideways as the driver managed to regain control at the last minute, the tow truck broadsided a couple of parked SUVs, the big vehicle bounced crazily up the street, and it came to a spinning stop two townhouses away.
Concurrent with the attack of the speeding truck, a stray lightning bolt, which I’d been unaware of, redirected from a trajectory that would have slammed it through the felt roof of my fedora. It instead blasted into the chest plate of an electrically-charged supervillain who happened to be staggering half-defeated up the sidewalk on the other side of the street. The bald bastard was abruptly charged with new energy, and he clapped his hands as he ran off screaming something about ultimate vengeance.
The insanity died down pretty much as quickly as it had erupted, and I turned to Finnegan O’Fart, who was fussing around the fronds of his potted ficus.
“Well, sure’n’ none of that don’t mean nothin’ a’tall,” sniffed the in-denial, gay, midget, bad-luck bastard leprechaun.
CHAPTER 17
I awoke on what I thought was late Sunday morning, but which according to the lightly blaring radio turned out to be early Tuesday afternoon, to the soothing sound of no one banging on my front door.
There were no scraggly cats impeding my route to the bathroom. I noticed a piece of glass from my shattered mirror from the previous disastrous Friday glinting in the light near the mopboard, and I managed not only to not step on it but also to not slice open my hand when I picked it up, thus not necessitating a trip to the emergency room for seventeen stitches I couldn’t afford.
I tossed the glass in the overflowing trash barrel in my hallway. It was loaded down with the rest of the mirror, plus frame, that had shattered on Friday morning. Around the hunks of mirror were stuffed paper towels I’d used to wipe up the raven crap in the hall. The bird had taken a powder by the time I got back home from Frankie the Eye’s on Friday night. Beats me where it had flown off to, and I felt only sympathy for the poor bastard it was harbingering the hell out of right now.
There was another, smaller frame sticking out of the top of the rubbish barrel. It was a brand new article that had been thoughtfully matted and mailed to me on Saturday.
I’d made the front page of the Saturday the 14th early edition of the Gazette, although even in that my luck had changed for the better, since my name wasn’t mentioned in the article and you couldn’t see my homely mug in the photograph.
REPORTER SAVES DRUNK FROM CERTAIN DEATH!
I could see the blaring headline sticking out at an angle from the trash barrel as I gargled with my own special blend of Listerine and bourbon. (Not a big hit at parties, but I never host any soirees anyway so it just meant more for me.)
The framed article had been wrapped in brown paper and thoughtfully mailed from the offices of the Gazette by girl reporter Sally McClatchen.
The accompanying picture of Sally McClatchen mugging me beneath the falling safe outside police headquarters had been taken by a pedestrian with a cell phone.
There was all kinds of bullshit in the article about the girl reporter’s remarkable bravery and disregard for her own well-being as she leapt into the fray to rescue a derelict who, the article speculated, was probably at the police station on a morals charge. The impartial reporter who had written the article was more qualified than anybody else to write about how swell Sally McClatchen was, owing to the fact that the byline belonged to dame reporter Sally McClatchen herself.
