The Boy Detective Fails
Praise for Joe Meno’s previous books
Hairstyles of the Damned
“Meno is a romantic at heart. Not the greeting card kind, or the Harlequin paperback version, but the type who thinks, deep down, that things matter, that art can change lives.”
—Elgin Courier News
“It’s a funny, sweet and, at times, hard-hitting story.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“[Meno] writes in the most authentic young voice since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield.”
—Daily Southtown
“Meno’s language is rhythmic and honest, expressing things proper English never could.”
—SF Weekly
Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir
“In only a few pages per story, Meno crams in loss, healing, familial bonds, unrequited love and understatement to spare.”
—San Diego Union-Tribune
“An odd, romantic, and compelling group of tales.”
—
Bookslut.com
“A jazzy collection of short stories and little moments … musical tales of love and loss with hardly a word wasted.”
—Kirkus Reviews
How the Hula Girl Sings
“Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman whose language is simple and direct and never loses sight of its origins.”—Hubert Selby, Jr.
Tender as Hellfire
“We’re hooked.”
—NewCity Chicago
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Punk Planet Books/Akashic Books
©2006 Joe Meno
Punk Planet Books is a project of Independents’ Day Media.
Illustrations by Koren Zelek
Author photo by Joe Wigdahl
Cover design by Dan Sinker and Jon Resh
Book design by Pirate Signal International
The angel food cake recipe on
NURSE ELOISE’S ANGEL FOOD CAKE!
is courtesy of the Angel Food Bakery, 1636 W. Montrose Ave. Chicago, Illinois.
To the astute reader:
It may be of interest to you to note, for purposes of decoding the hidden story placed within these pages, that A=N.
ePUB ISBN 13: 978-1-936-07049-7
ISBN 10: 1-933354-10-0
ISBN 13: 978-1-933354-10-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2004106233
All rights reserved
| Punk Planet Books | Akashic Books |
| 4229 N. Honore | PO Box 1456 |
| Chicago, IL 60613 | New York, NY 10009 |
| [email protected] | [email protected] |
| www.punkplanetbooks.com | www.akashicbooks.com |
For:
K.Z.
D.S.
J.T.
J.R.
M.Z.
J.V.
“Genius: the ability to prolong one’s childhood.”
—H.L. Mencken
Table of Contents
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE:
THE MYSTERIOUS IDENTITY OF THE BOY DETECTIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
: THE CASE OF THE BROWN BUNNY
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
: THE CASE OF THE VANISHING LADY
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
: THE CASE OF THE GHOSTLY FIGURE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
: THE CASE OF THE SECRET TREASURE
THE MYSTERIOUS IDENTITY
OF THE BOY DETECTIVE
It is no parlor trick: There is a skull and, in the dark, it is glowing. Somehow it is now floating above us all. Listen: The skull is speaking. It is saying your name. It knows about you and your favorite flower and all about your tenth birthday. But it does not matter. You are not convinced. For some reason, you are still full of doubt. You stare into the dark, looking for wires. Grasping for strings, you hold your hands out.
Dear Reader,
The story thus far, as you may have forgotten: Even as a young boy, Billy Argo showed an uncanny talent for solving puzzles of almost every configuration, arrangement, and design.
That is all.
No—it was more than a talent. It was a kind of very sad genius, so that in the end, the very sad genius appeared on the boy detective the way a child born with a deformity—a missing hand or one leg shorter than the other—might make the same adolescent distant and dreamy; like a birthmark in the shape of an elephant smack dab on the forehead, it led Billy to be somewhat shy, somewhat withdrawn, though not at first. No, at first the boy was at play: happy, daring, secretly cunning.
In the stark world of Gotham, New Jersey—small white houses and green, murky woods surrounding a modern factory town, home to both the Mold-O-Form Plastic and Harris Heating Duct plants, a burg bustling with both Prosperity and its companion Crime—Billy would run hand in hand with his younger sister, Caroline, and behind them, their childhood friend, a husky neighborhood boy by the name of Fenton Mills, would often come calling.
Through the nearby grassy field, with the chimneys of the plastics factory churning black clouds in the distance, the children would hurry, shouting, trampling the fuzzy white puffs of dandelions and sprawling knotty underbrush. Their hideout was an abandoned lot which was wide and silver and green with enormous, expressive daisies. The lot had remained unsold—being too filthy with lead after an explosion during the days when the land had been home to the old Drip-Less Paint Factory. Above the dirt of an unmarked grave and beneath the shadow of the abandoned refinery, the children would play their own made-up games: Wild West Accountants! in which they would calculate the loss of a shipment of gold stolen from an imaginary stage coach, or Recently Divorced Scientists! in which they would build a super-collider out of garbage to try and win back their recently lost loves. Together, forever, they would explore the near-dark world of wonder and mystery.
The boy detective in his youth was pale with dark wispy hair and was generally a nervous child, both quite short and strange-looking for his age. There was an incident in the boy’s elementary school cafeteria involving a bully named Wayne Meany III concerning Billy’s unusually large eyes. One day, Billy, sitting unsuspecting beside his younger sister, felt a pronounced thump at the back of his head. When Billy turned, the back of his cranium sore, his face red, he discovered a knotty green apple lying there on the floor. Wayne Meany III laughed and pointed, then remarked, “How do you like them apples, owl-eyes?” Billy pondered the question for a moment but did not have a proper answer. His eyes were indeed large and wise, and yes, somewhat unbecoming, but with his sister and their one true friend, those same eyes would be central in examining a collapsed ant hill or measuring the size of a wrecked nest of speckled robin eggs, carefully held amongst all three pairs of their small dirty hands.
His sister, Caroline, both blond and petite, was the charming one: always taking notes in her white-and-gold diary, a perfect record of all their discoveries; always curtseying; always learning French, or so it seemed. Her favorite word?
Jejune
, as in: “What they force us to wear as school uniforms is very
jejune
.”
Their neighbor friend, Fenton, short and chubby, sweaty, and always out of breath, followed last in his small red beanie, his mother’s solution for the boy’s persistent psoriasis. The portly boy always reminded the others when it was getting too dark, admonishing them when he thought that what they were doing might somehow make their parents worry.
It was a summer that never ended for the three of them: a summer of games and puzzles and surprises.
It was a summer that, lying in bed, we wish we had once had.
When Billy Argo turned ten, he received a True-Life Junior Detective Kit from his aunt Eunice for his birthday. The family was all there in the small yellow kitchen: Mr. and Mrs. Arg o, Billy, Caroline, their older brother Derek, in visiting from the Navy, and the neighbor boy, Fenton. Billy, on that day, wore a small blue party hat, along with his favorite blue suit and clip-on tie, which featured an orange owl along its wide center. The family stood around him at the white linoleum table, cheering, handing him gift after gift.
Hooray,
they said,
the boy is one year older. Hooray, we are all one year closer to our deaths.
The gifts that year had been quite lackluster: From Mr. Argo, Billy received a woodworking set, which was not recommended for anyone under the age of eighteen and had to be taken back. From Mrs. Argo, a new blue cardigan which was exactly the same size as the previous year’s and thusly too small. From Caroline, a set of colored markers which produced fruit smells and which all looked suspiciously used. From his older brother Derek, a record entitled
Mood Music for the Enterprising Bachelor
, a gift which his mother called “perhaps somewhat inappropriate, but thoughtful nonetheless.”