Stuffed (5 page)

“Carson, it’s not like they cleaned you out.” Walker was calling me a crybaby.

“Oh, yeah? Imagine, Detective Walker, somebody breaking into your house and stealing everything but the veggies, fruit, and condiments from your refrigerator.” I raised my arms toward the aviary of predatory birds hanging from the high ceiling, then at Fred, then waved my ice pack at the stand-up bear, the full-body albino deer, the badgers, beavers, otters, porcupines, bobcats, muskrats, weasels, martins, and polecats. “All potatoes and no meat. What’s left doesn’t add up to what was taken. This is mostly domestic, a few nice pieces, but nothing like the African skins. I still have a few cat mounts, but . . .” I smacked an armchair with a fist.

“What about the man Garth told the officers about?” Angie sidled up next to me and gave me a squeeze, trying to calm me. She’d already reproached me for having held back my encounter with Kim until we were at the hospital. “That guy in the bar who asked Garth about the crow.”

Walker flipped a page in his notepad. “Do you have any idea how many Kims are listed in the phone book, and how many of them might have changed their Korean first names to Jim? Forget about it. Probably a phony name anyways.”

“A Korean?” Renard knitted his brow, a bad dream disrupting his sleep. “There was a Korean asking about the crow?”

“Said I should give the crow to some people he knows who wanted it, before they took it from me.” I sighed. “But I dunno. These guys took a lot more than the crow.”

“Indeed? Well, Mr. Carson, I should think you’re most fortunate that you two weren’t more severely injured.” Renard fitted a blue plaid porkpie hat on his shiny head. It had what looked like a red salmon fly in the hatband and was the kind of thing Perry Como would have worn. “You do realize they could have killed one or both of you, on purpose or by accident? Doesn’t seem worth it.”

I rearranged the ice pack on my head and squeezed Angie’s hand.

“You’re right about that,” she sniffed.

“I’ll put the list on the wire.” Renard opened the door. “By the way . . .”

I knew the sound of that opener. It’s the “one last, small question” ploy detectives use just as they’re going out the door, when the suspect’s guard is down. His spin on it was to yawn first, like he was just turning in for the night and was about to remind me to set my alarm. I found myself wondering what kind of pajamas he wore. Stripes, plaid, or polka dots?

“Any idea why they took the white crow? Why the Korean warned you?”

“Nope.” I was too disgusted to even think about it.

“I see. Where did you ever find a white crow?”

“Bermuda, Vermont. That important?”

“I’ll be in touch.” Renard ducked out the door.

“By the way, Carson,” Walker grinned, “I don’t suppose you noticed how the parking regulations keep changing in front of your building?”

I gave him a smarmy squint. “Teenagers: such a handful.”

Walker slammed the door behind him.

Angie and I sniffled back tears and sat for a while without speaking, as we finished our beers.

The apartment suddenly seemed unbearably quiet. No solace in this sound of silence, just the victim’s mute and relentless echo of frustration. I’d never been the victim of violence before, not like this, and it made me angrier than I think I’ve ever been, mostly with myself for failing. Failing to protect Angie, failing to capitulate, failing to anticipate. I didn’t ask Angie whether she felt the same. But I know we both had that nasty lump of humiliation in our throats, which in combination with my anger had me ruminating on all sorts of fantasies where I locate the bastards and hack them to pieces with the sawfish bill on the wall over the sink. And naturally, I felt somewhat emasculated. It was the first time either of us had been “mugged” in all our years in New York, something that only happened to other, less savvy people. I guess we should have felt lucky. That’s what our friends told us. Then again, none of them had been gun-whipped, kicked in the head, had their partner smacked around, and then been thrown down a flight of stairs and locked in a dark basement. But mostly I think we couldn’t get over coming so close to losing each other, all for a mere sixty thousand dollars of dead animals.

Had my prayers in that dire moment been answered?

Please, God. Don’t ask me to hand out pamphlets in Penn Station. Goat sacrifices, you say? We’ll talk.

Chapter 5

A
s if the attack by burglars wasn’t bad enough, the morning-after cat-and-mouse with the fuzz left Angie and me feeling at loose ends. We sat around staring at the vacant spots on the wall, a bad taste in our mouths. We slept fitfully for a few hours, then went out to a coffee shop and found we had nothing to say, except to rehash our unfortunate episode, upon which we were clearly tired of dwelling. We gave up. Angie hopped the subway to catch up with fellow goldsmithies uptown.

I had work to do. There was an Elks’ convention in town, and I was supposed to get back to them about supplying an elk head for above the podium. At a film studio in Astoria, they were shooting a Freezy Cone commercial and wanted some stuffed penguins to fill in the background behind some live ones. I had to get my six Magellanic penguins over to them by eleven-thirty that morning, if for no other reason than I wanted to talk to the live-penguin wrangler to make sure he’d keep his birds away from mine. Live ones will viciously attack the taxidermy variety—I’ve been told they think the stuffed ones are sitting so still that they’re nesting on their turf. Never mind that they’re in a television studio and not on an ice floe. I lost one of my squad members (poor Sneezy, RIP) in just such a tragic incident two years before. The penguin squad is almost always rented as a set—nobody ever wants just one penguin, for some reason.

This particular variety of penguin is not protected by CITES and is quite prolific along the Pacific coast of South America, though commercial fishing has put a serious dent in the Falkland Island populations. Estimates of breeding pairs is around 1,600,000. However, you do have to know your penguins to stay out of trouble, because the Magellanics can easily be confused with jackass penguins, from Africa, which are classified as “vulnerable” and thus protected. The jackasses (named so for their braylike utterances) have been decimated by habitat degradation at the hands of guano prospectors. The way you tell them apart is by the markings. The Magellanic has white brow markings that do not connect to the rest of the tux.

I also had to pick up my zebra skins at the Expedition Club uptown, which I figured I could do on my way out to Astoria. (At least some of my zebra skins were out of the shop and thus spared.) You’d think they would have had enough of them lying around over there at the Expedition Club, but they needed a few extras as part of buffet table settings. I suspect that they preferred to have Richard Leakey and Robert Ballard spill wine and gravy on my pelts instead of theirs. So a light coating of Scotchgard goes on mine before I rent them out, and the tough stains come out with a dynamite little product called Furz-B-Clean. You’d be surprised how many people on the Upper East Side want to serve their cocktail weenies from a table cloaked in zebra skins. Better that than as a rug. Soak ’em in pinot noir, if you must, but nobody scuffs the hair off my skins with their boots. I don’t rent them as rugs, ever.

I called the Elks and got a machine. So I rolled my penguins in bubble plastic and boxed them in foam peanuts. Appropriately, they looked like they were frozen in ice and up to their necks in snow. I had just grabbed my car keys when the phone rang—I hoped it was the Elks so I could save myself an extra trip.

But it wasn’t the Elks. It was Pete Durban.

“I heard” was all he said.

“Word travels fast.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Not really. My penguins are waiting for me.”

“You going out drinking with your penguins rather than me?”

“Who said I was going out drinking?”

“That’s what guys do when they feel sorry for themselves,” Pete said. “And believe me, I’m a much better listener than your seven dwarfs.”

“Six. Remember the refrigerator commercial?”

“Right.” Pete sighed. “Poor Sneezy. So, what say we get drunk and toast his memory?”

“Can’t. Got business.”

“A wet lunch, perhaps? One o’clock, the Mexican place?”

“I’ll be there.”

Pete’s a high-school dropout who literally ran away with the circus. Hard to believe that sort of thing has even happened in the last fifty years, but he apparently had a full beard at seventeen and they weren’t particular. He started on the lowest rung: cage cleaner. But like most people who really adore animals, cleaning up after them comes with the territory. That’s how he got close to the lions and mentored with the lion tamer, a man who had lost his own son in a car crash three years earlier. Pete stayed until his late twenties, when the circus went into receivership and threw everybody out of work. His mentor retired, but the bank hired Pete to care for the lions and find buyers. Well, to make a long story short, some of the buyers who came sniffing around weren’t exactly legitimate, and Pete helped the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the feds nab a chop shop, which in this case was a black-market operation that sold exotics for parts. The DEC had an opening for someone who could make big cats purr instead of devour and was relatively fearless around dangerous animals. So once the lions had new homes, they signed him up.

We were meeting at a Mexican place over on Washington Street, which is walking distance from my place. I’d picked up my zebra pelts and found them to be relatively clean—Jim Fowler and Sir Edmund Hillary must have used their plates. Made my penguin delivery and duly admonished the penguin wrangler to keep his beasts’ beaks away from my squad. He showed me that his birds were suitably contained, penned up in a chicken-wire enclosure at one end of the set. They jostled and squawked like a bunch of wobbly bowling pins. I would have thought they were cute if they weren’t crowded at the end of the cage closest to my birds, casting their beady eyes at the nearest box. They must have picked up the scent. You could see the little bastards already gleeful about the prospect of shredding Doc, Dopey, and Grumpy.

Arrived home, no messages from the Elks. Hoped they hadn’t found another source.

As I walked down Washington Street, I wondered how this latest development in my life bode for my burgeoning midlife crisis. I felt like I was against the ropes. At least before the sacking of Garth’s Castle, things were fine. Not great, but fine. Now things were crappy, which isn’t great and isn’t even fine. A setback or a sign of things to come?

Pete is not your strapping lion tamer of lore, the one with the black handlebar mustache, but a small, hairy sinewy guy with a red handlebar mustache, small wire specs, and thin, frizzy hair. You can see he’s one of those guys who has to try to figure out where his chest hair and beard begin and end. Pete chose to shave to the edge of his T-shirt collar. In keeping with his character, it was always a little dangerous visiting with Pete. Ever since he roped me into that chop-shop sting operation, he’d somehow gotten the impression I was a fellow thrill-seeker. He specializes in going undercover for the feds, often as a redneck but on occasion as a Dutch trader, a befezzed Turk, or an Australian magnate. And no matter how preposterous the ruse, he always manages to keep a straight face and avoid getting drilled by the humorless folk on the other side of the law. Well, so far.

We sat in a booth in the back that had pictures of Ernest Borgnine covering the walls. Why, you ask? Because it was the Ernest Borgnine Memorial Booth at my local Mexican restaurant. That’s New York for you.

“Y’gotta try this, Garth.” Pete held out the animal perched on his arm. I tried to make my recoil look like I was hailing the waitress.

“Better box that critter before someone freaks out.” I glanced at Borgnine as the lead in
Marty,
and he looked disapproving. The waitress approached, and Pete put the arm with the critter under the table.

“W-we’re ready to order,” I stammered.

“Black beans and rice for me.” Pete beamed. “And a shot of tequila, a can of Blue Ribbon, and a slice of peach pie with whipped cream.”

“Beef burrito and a Corona. No fruit.”

“He’ll have a tequila too, won’t you?”

“Well . . .” I looked at Borgnine as McHale, and he seemed to be urging me to have one.

“Give him a tequila.” Pete gave her a wink. “He needs one.”

As the waitress retreated, Pete brought his arm back up onto the table and said, “Uh-oh.” His arm was empty, his pet gone. Did I mention Pete collects venomous animals?

My reaction to the escaped pet was immediate and much to Pete’s amusement. Several other diners came to help me off the floor and right the chair I’d tripped over in my haste to exit the booth.

“Don’t worry, Maddy’s back in the box.” Pete giggled like someone who’d just fooled me with a joy-buzzer handshake. Once I was seated again, he insisted on giving me a last look at his humongous emperor scorpion. “Don’t like the bugs much, do yuh, Garth?”

Too large to hold in one hand, the damn thing looked like an ill-shaven patent-leather lobster. Can a big, black, hairy, shiny, and bumpy animal that waves pincers and a stinger be anything but evil? You could hear the creak of its segmented tail as it flexed like a gunfighter’s nervous trigger finger.

“Lordy, Pete, that’s not your everyday mantis or cicada or anything. I collected beetles as a kid, my dad was a butterfly collector, and I can take cockroaches, giant walking sticks, and the occasional tarantula even. But that thing looks like a freakin’ alien being. Too big to stomp on is just too much bug.” If I hadn’t known better, those rats covering Borgnine in the still from
Willard
could have been emperor scorpions.

“Awright, I’ll put Maddy away. But she’s a pussycat, really. Scorpions like this with big pincers look mean, but it’s the ones with itty-bitty pincers that’ll zap you but good.” Pete shoveled the evil bug back into its box and slid the lid shut. “Thought Maddy might distract you from your recent woes.”

“I appreciate the thought, but . . .”

“You got smacked around a bit, that’s for sure. Sonsabitches.” Pete waved a pinky finger at the stitches on my head. “You find them, you let me know. We’ll kick their ass. I’ve got a Malay cone snail that is absolutely vicious. This tetrodotoxic bandito boy is like a gun and can shoot its radula
—pffft, pffft, pffft!
Those bastards’ll be in such incredible pain . . . they’ll wish they were never born. Ha!”

Patrons seated in our vicinity did their best to ignore Pete’s bravado.

“Cone snails? Let’s not break out the big guns right away,” I jibed.

“Why not?”

“Pete? I was kidding.” The idea of us kicking anybody’s ass with or without snails was ludicrous, yet the notion of Pete on my team in a revenge plot was oddly reassuring.

Our drinks arrived and I wrapped my bubblegum in a paper napkin. “Anyway, I’ve got other problems, like Agent Renard, your replacement.” There was a lime in the top of my beer and I removed the offending fruit. As though under the power of suggestion, the words
no fruit
never fail to sail right over a bartender’s sphere of consciousness. “He’s starting to bust my chops already.”

“Thought Detective Walker was your number-one porcupine?”

“He was there too, adding color commentary.”

“Never met this hombre Renard. But I took a glance at his resumé before leaving the DEC. Worked out of the Albany office tracking export of domestic fauna. More the office type, a bean counter who issued figures on the black market. West Indian, from Guyana, originally. Used to work for Guyanese Customs, and then for some Asian shipping outfit that moved tropical fish, I think. Don’t understand the transfer south from Albany, tell you the truth. Some guys just itch to get out in the field, get some action. Garth, y’gotta figure on him giving you the business at first. He’s gotta let you know who’s the bear, that kinda hoo-ha.”

“As a victim, I could do without police harassment just now. I mean, it might actually be nice if the DEC was circulating a flier on my stolen property.”

“Leave it up to Pete.” He downed his shot of tequila and gave me a wink. “I’ll get the list from Renard and pigeon it out to every police bulletin board in the country. U.S. Fish and Wildlife is better connected than the state outfits. Hey, muchacho? You okay?”

“Gee, I dunno.” I rolled my eyes, and gestured at my cut scalp. “Do I look okay?”

“You know what I mean.”

I squinted, and he continued.

“I can see it in your eyes. The green meanies have got you, am I right?”

“Green meanies? Green meanies?”

“Don’t kid a kidder. I know that look ’cause you had it two years ago. You were in a funk about your life. About your career. And now this.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

He pulled a folded paper from his pocket. “I know we talked before about looking into a job at U.S. Fish and Wildlife.”

“I don’t want a job. I have a job.”

“You don’t sound so sure, amigo. Here.” He handed over the paper and I unfolded a copy of an e-mail.

I scanned the paper. “What is this?”

“That, muchacho, is a job interview with USFW.”

My bruises suddenly felt warm. “An interview? For a job?”

Pete looked exasperated. “That’s what I’m talking about. You keep thinking that you need to get out of taxidermy brokering. Well . . .” He pointed at the paper and folded his arms.