Stuffed (27 page)

Nobody said anything, so I continued.

“I think Jimmy is here because he’s convinced that I may still know where the horn is.”

Kim laughed softly, shaking his head. “Really, Garth, that is so far-fetched. We saw you throw it in the river.”

“I told the police and all the other government types who would listen that I dropped the horn on the pier, in the dark, and never saw it again. I never, not once, said I threw it in the river. But that’s what you want to believe, isn’t it? To confirm that nobody else has it?”

“You guys are comedians, I’m serious.” Kim chortled. “Besides, who would ever believe—”

“And that’s exactly what you’re counting on, isn’t it?” I volleyed. “In the ocean of conspiracy theories out there, who would believe this one more than any other? But you were sent down here to chum the waters with doubt.”

“Or to confirm that nobody has it,” Angie added.

“All right, you two kidders, you’ve had your fun.” Jimmy took a few steps back, laughing with all the mirth of someone confronted by the absurdities of the tax code. “Nice chatting.”

“Jimmy.” I grabbed his elbow just as he tried to slip out of the tent. With a hard, intent look into his eyes, I said, “I don’t have it. Maybe it did fall in the river. I don’t know where it is. And I don’t
feel
it out there anywhere, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I know, Garth,” he said with a brittle grin.

“Am I going to be seeing you again? More little chats?”

“I shouldn’t think so.” He pulled his elbow from my grip, and almost winked. “But I left you a parting gift, something to remember me by.”

Jimmy Kim stepped out into the heat and was gone as quickly as a mirage.

“A parting gift?” Rodney belched. “Where?”

“The car?” Angie suggested.

The three of us stepped out into the heat and turned the corner of the tent.

On the hood of the Lincoln was an immense moose head. It was laying plaque flat so that it was staring into the scorching summer sky.

Antlers: sixty-plus inches, masterful, imposing, threatening.

Pelt, Ears, Dewlap, Eyes, Nose, Lips: Superb.

Pose: Moose-head quintessence.

The three of us stood gaping at it, until Angie reached out and looked at the tag hanging from the antler. Rodney and I leaned in. It read:

$50.00
SOLD.

Confronted by this massive beast on the hood of my car, a contemplative silence followed.

“Well, paint my bottom and call me Horace!” Rodney finally bellowed, raising his beer can for another toast. “Here’s to a fifty-dollar moose head.”

Angie held up her can. “Here’s to throwing that darn horn in the river!”

My beer can met theirs.

I winked at Angie.

“Here’s to love.”

Don’t miss

BRIAN M. WIPRUD’S

next comic mystery

Coming in Summer 2006
from Dell Books

Read on for an exclusive sneak peek—and look for your copy at your favorite bookseller.

N
icholas stepped under the awning and into the full bare-bulb glow of a fish stand. Light rippled up his overcoat, reflected from water-filled buckets.

Behind him, Asians flooded the sidewalk, a turbid river of shoppers wielding pink plastic bags laden with pea pods, bok choy, mung beans and squid. The night air was filled with rain, blinking signs, exhaust and the sour vowels of vendors bickering with customers. Cars and semis crept by on Canal Street, a traffic jam headed for the Manhattan Bridge in one direction, for the Holland Tunnel in the other.

Nicholas zeroed in on the fish shop proprietor, a blind old man with a wispy beard, skullcap and pernicious smile who waved his cane through the air with the determination and panache of a maestro before his choral group. Even blind, the shopkeeper knew the locale and price of each variety of fish. The wares wriggled and squirmed in old lard buckets tiered five deep. He was clearly capable of pricing and protecting the wares with his baton, while his harried niece was relegated to making actual exchanges. A pair of crones would double-team the geezer, singing their demands and gesturing with fists at a lard tin full of writhing hornpout. Smacking the edge of a fish tin with his cane, he’d bark a price at the chorus, only to be flanked by the staccato of two other women yowling and pointing to the sea robbins or spiny urchins. The piscatorial patriarch would swing his baton, thwack the bucket to which they pointed, and bark a price. Upstarts would not be tolerated in this glee club.

Two hours earlier, Nicholas had been on the phone with a man who called himself Dr. Bagby, a guy with a hot painting and a penchant for a noisy part of town. The background clamor was familiar—the honking, the cane smacking metal buckets, the yammering. Two hours and seven cabs later, Nicholas’s search brought him to the Canal Street fish stand. He’d finally pegged the market din not because he spent any appreciable time shopping Chinatown but because of Figlio’s, a local lounge around the corner. Courthouse-types watered there, and he’d sometimes had occasion to buttonhole young ADAs for information. He’d stood many times in front of the fish stand to hail a cab.

February bowled a wet ball of wind under the fish stand’s awning, and Nicholas turned away from the tin bucket ensemble, water beading on his glasses and close-cropped hair. He waded back through the pedestrian current to a phone booth on the corner where he sought refuge from the tide of pink bags and two-dollar umbrellas.

Dr. Bagby hadn’t called from a cell phone. Background noises were always strangely garbled in digital signals. No, this had been clear—a land line, but on the street.

There was a vendor close to the phone booth. The shop was comprised of a huge golfers’ umbrella, a Coleman lantern and a peach crate, all assembled in the threshold of a defunct savings and loan. Huddled beneath the umbrella, an Asian dwarf woman buzzed away with a hobby tool fashioning netsuke from chunk plastic. The finished product hung by threads from the spokes of her umbrella. It was as if a tornado had lifted a yurt from a Mongolian bazaar and dropped it in downtown Manhattan.

“How much?” Nicholas stepped forward and poked at the carving of a peanut, which twirled in the light of the lantern. “How much for this one?”

Magnifying goggles made the dwarf woman’s eyes the size of fried eggs. Her tool buzzed to a stop.

“That special. Twenty buck.” The eyes vanished and the tool buzzed, puffs of dust pluming from where she crouched.

“Here.” Nicholas held out a twenty, which fluttered slightly to the rhythm of grocery bags whacking him in the shins. The tool stopped buzzing, and egg eyes reappeared. The woman sniffed, looked at the twenty, wiped her hand on the top of her woolen cap and snatched the bill.

“Tank you. En-joy.” Wind battered her umbrella and Nicholas turned up the collar of his tweed overcoat. He admired the twenty-dollar peanut between thumb and forefinger.

“I’d like to buy something else. I want to buy what you know about a man who made a call from that phone booth. That phone booth there. Did you see a man? He coughed. He’s sick.”

She scratched her head in thought, wiping her nose with the back of her glove.

“Man? Sick man?”

“Yes. Sick.” Nicholas demonstrated, coughing and holding an imaginary receiver to his head and pointing at the booth.

Her face sprouted a smile as wide as she was tall.

“I see. Sick man. I see all time. I see come, go, all time. Sick man. Twenty buck.” She put out a hand, but Nicholas held the bill out of reach where the damp winter gusts looked they might just blow it away, to be lost forever in the expanses of the Gobi. Or at least Canal Street.

“Where does he live?”

The building was a pre-war four-story. Spanish American War, that is, and every year seemed to weigh heavily upon its frame. Nicholas stood in the foyer dripping water, wiping the rain from his glasses, razzing the damp from his bristly hair and re-flipping the small curl that formed at his widow’s peak. He’d long since abandoned umbrellas, preferring to tough it out with just an overcoat. He’d spent considerable time in the tropics, where one gets used to being wet, and where being caught in the rain provides welcome relief from the heat.

Ancient shellac had beaded on the chipped woodwork of the vestibule like yellow sweat. A low-watt bulb illuminated an amber tulip sconce and little else. Mailboxes were all unlabeled, flanked both by ancient buzzer buttons and hailing tubes. Nicholas wanted to arrive unannounced, so he tried the door’s rusty knob. The oak door creaked, but it wouldn’t budge. He put his face up to the murky glass and peered beyond the shredded lace curtain.

The door opened suddenly.

“Yahj!!” gasped a Chinese gent in a porkpie hat. A carpetbag fell from his grasp as he staggered back in alarm, hand raised defensively. Looked like he’d almost given the poor guy a heart attack.

“It’s O.K . . . It’s O.K . . .” Nicholas took the opportunity to step past the door. He picked up the carpetbag and held it out to Porkpie.

Porkpie quickly recovered from his cardiac infarction and snatched the bag back. His malady was replaced with indignation, and he wagged a threatening finger, scolding Nicholas in Cantonese. Nicholas shooed him out into the foyer with reassuring gestures.

German Expressionists seem to have designed the staircase; the whole shebang looked as though it might spiral in on itself like a collapsing cup. Nicholas ascended carefully, each step voicing a creaky complaint. One dim sconce at each landing barely lit the way. Scents of sesame oil and soy grew stronger the higher he went. At the top landing, next to a sconce, was a door without a Confucian icon thumb-tacked over the number. He put an ear to the door. A gentle steam-heat slurping came from within. He turned the knob and the latch clicked.

Peering into the apartment, Nicholas had a view along a crooked, dark hallway that terminated in an illuminated kitchen. It was there that a man sat slumped at a table with a towel over his head. Wisps of steam snaked from under the towel. The man was dressed in a worn terry bathrobe and grimy slippers. Bagby sleeping? Next to him, leaning against the stove, was a large, square, flat wooden crate, one that might hold, say, a painting. Somewhere a radiator valve hissed like a snake ready to strike.

Nicholas slid quietly in and pushed the door closed. It was roasting hot in the apartment, and he loosened his trench coat. It didn’t help that he was wearing a tweed suit. He pulled the neatly folded handkerchief from his top pocket and mopped the back of his neck as he made a quick survey of his surroundings. The place was stacked with old newspapers and magazines like some kind of recycling center. Clearly Bagby was one of those freaks who couldn’t throw away reading material of any kind. Furniture must be in there somewhere, along with legions of roaches. Chinatown was rife with roaches. Nicholas expected the place to smell musty, of decay. But instead it smelled of menthol.

His eyes latched back onto Bagby. A few steps in that direction and the floor squeaked a loud warning—but the man at the kitchen table didn’t stir. Nicholas approached more swiftly, and realized that the man was more than asleep. A hypodermic needle stuck out of one side of the man’s neck, a large bruise graced the other. Clubbed and stuck.

Nicholas circled to the side and lifted the towel. The corpse fit the dwarf’s description of the man from the payphone. Heavyset. Dark curly hair. Eyebrows pierced by small silver rings. He may have once been swarthy, but his complexion now was waxy. Eyes open, dilated, dead. His cheek smooshed against a croup kettle, like wet clay. Droplets, condensed steam, clinging to the stubble of his beard.

Bending over to raise one of Bagby’s pant legs, Nicholas noted that the ankle over the white sock was just turning purplish. Blood beginning to pool in his legs. With the back of his hand, Nicholas felt the hairy leg. Warm. Bagby had been kaput for a half hour or less.

He stood. The top of the table was strewn with nasal sprays, cold formulas and lozenges, some of which had been knocked to the checkered tile floor by the victim’s sprawled arms. One bottle had the old-fashioned label “Doctor Bagby’s Croup Elixir;” the source of the dead man’s alias. A used Kleenex was clenched in his extended hand.

Time to watch the prints. With his handkerchief, Nicholas tilted the nearby crate towards him for a look-see. Just an empty frame where the Moolman had been. He lifted out the familiar gilt frame and saw the ragged ends of the blue canvass where it had been hurriedly cut from the frame. Sloppy, but quick. The frame had held the 24'' x 36'' painting
Trampoline Nude 1972,
which had been lifted from a private collection in Westchester six weeks earlier by a man posing as an exterminator. Nicholas let the frame drop back into the crate with a thud.

“Just super.” He snorted.

Had Chinatown been first on his dance card, Nicholas would probably have had the canvass in hand. Sorry son-of-a-bitch. Bagby would still be suffering from his head cold. Only someone else got to him first.

A door slammed at street level. Heavy footsteps sounded on the stair. As did the squelch of a police radio.

Nicholas didn’t have to think about what his next move was. He operated on instinct and turned to the kitchen window. Flipping the catch on the security gate with a forearm, he opened the grimy window with his palms and crawled out onto the fire escape. Flower pots and a mop tripped him up in the gloom, and he had to grab the railing to keep from cartwheeling down the metal steps. Would have been a long hospital stay, and that he couldn’t afford. Cautiously, Nicholas sidled down each flight towards the backyard, keeping his weight mostly on the railing. Rusty old fire escapes—he knew from experience that the steps sometimes snapped unexpectedly.

No sooner had Nicholas jumped from the fire escape to the backyard than he glanced up to see a cop appear in Bagby’s kitchen window, talking into a radio. He turned his attention back to his escape. The backyard wasn’t some grassy nirvana with sprinklers, lawn gnomes and azaleas. It was more like a small prison yard, a patch of broken concrete surrounded by a wall topped with razor wire. Broken beer bottles and cigarette butts blanketed the ground. Nicholas skirted the wall, trying to stay out of view, his footsteps crunching lightly on the faintly glittering glass. As he stole quietly around the corner into a blind alley that stabbed between two buildings, he could see a basement walk-down near the end. He tried the door, but it was locked. A few shoves of his shoulder and the moldering jamb gave way like stale bread. A wave of sewage reek flushed from the dark.

Streetlight spilled into the rank basement through a coal grate at the far end of the long, black space, a grim beacon. What sounded like a dozen rats scuttled for the corners. By the sound of them, he gauged they were welterweights compared to the wharf-bruisers down near the Brooklyn Bridge where Nicholas lived. And certainly neither as fleet of paw as the upper west side rail yard variety, nor as insouciant as the Tompkins Square model. Even as the bear was friend to Grizzly Adams, the rat was a pal of Nicholas Palihnick. He took a shine to their independent nature, their tenacity, their gritty lifestyle. But he knew enough to respect the domain of the cellar rat. Generally slow, mid-size, and shy, they also have a tendency to be defensive, if not openly hostile on their home turf. Nicholas recalled the story of a man trapped in a Chicago basement who was reduced to a paraplegic before he was rescued. Nibbled around the edges like a saltine.

But Nicholas’s years in gritty third-world slums had taught him not to fear places that were merely dark, squalid or rat-infested. Worldly battle scars that broke some men had armored him for a new lease on life. Disillusionment and subsequent hard lessons about human nature had warped idealists into cynics, and Nicholas into a practical solipsist. Whatever New York could dish out, Nicholas had decided to bottle and turn into a buck. So a stroll through Ratville was little more to him than a Park Avenue jaunt. It might be hard on his tweed suit, but he had a lot of them.

Making a bee-line for the coal grate’s light at the far end of the blackness, he managed to cross the room without stepping on any rats, though one brushed by his leg, perhaps a coy test of his resolve. Drawing near, he could see bright lines that could only come from the underside of sidewalk cellar doors to the right of the coal chute, and steps leading up to them. His ears rang with the clicking of palm-sized roaches scattering as he climbed the steps.

A padlock sealed the cellar doors.

Eyes still adjusting to the gloom, Nicholas spied the shadow of another stairway hunkering mid-basement, and the dark forms of rats trundling from his path as he headed for it. He heard a roach flying toward his head and batted it away. He remembered the halcyon days, back when roaches in New York didn’t fly, before the euphemism “waterbug” came to replace “big fat disgusting roach.” Having tangled with giant Columbian spiders that feasted on birds, roaches were nothing to him now.