Then again, we did work for Brett, and the boss was the boss. Course, what sucked was that she wasn’t paying us for the paint job. Not that I expected her to or wanted her to. I’m just grumpy.
We got it painted, and Brett bought a new desk without coffee-cup circles on it, put out some coasters, and purchased comfortable office chairs and a new, streamlined computer. At least there were no flower arrangements or any of that other stuff I feared. She let me buy a movie-poster reproduction of the Robert Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely, and I had that nicely framed and put on the wall. It was the only time in my life I actually did something more than buy a picture at a place like Walmart and frame it myself. I had someone who knew what he was doing frame it. It made me feel a little more like a real private eye, having that poster there. Of course, you got right down to it, I’m about as much like a real private eye as a weasel is like a kangaroo, but I like to dream a little.
The bathroom was kept simple. Clean place to do number one and two with plenty of toilet paper. There was a painting on the wall of water lilies. I thought that was silly. Really, did we need a painting in the shitter? And of water lilies?
Brett also got a better coffeepot for our kitchenette, as she called it, bought some gourmet coffee, and put a bag of vanilla wafers in the desk drawer. The vanilla cookies were the same cheap-ass brand we always bought, primarily for Leonard. He had three kinds of vanilla cookies he liked. The plain wafers, the ones with the cream in the middle, and any other kind that were vanilla. The drawer had a key. Two. I had one, Brett had the other. Leonard couldn’t help himself. Came to those cookies, he was like a crack addict. We were there to protect him from himself. And the other thing I liked about it was it was kind of funny. He enjoyed tormenting me by wearing goofy hats and such, so I liked to return the favor now and again. It’s what brothers do.
There was a little fridge with soft drinks and water in it, including Dr Peppers for Leonard, and there was a couch that could be pulled out into a bed. Brett and I tried it out one night when we were working late. Leonard had gone home to his new digs, and it was just us. We decided to break it in, so to speak. It was only a little more uncomfortable than the rack at the Inquisition. Next morning our backs were out of whack. Brett bought a thin foam mattress that she rolled up and put in the closet. You pulled the couch out, all you had to do was put that mattress on it and it turned the rack into something a little more serviceable and almost comfortable. We thought we might as well be ready. You never knew when you might need sex to bolster your serotonin, or whatever that stuff is that makes you feel happy. I always just thought it was fucking that makes you happy, so there you have it.
Our new dog stayed at the office with us during this time, wrapped in her not-too-tight but tight-enough bandage. While we were making love that time in the office, she watched us with curiosity from her doggie bed. I felt she was a little young for all that information. But I guess since I was taking her back to the vet for an operation that would end that whole having-puppies thing, it was all moot.
Night we were up there trying out the foldout couch, Leonard and John were having a get-back-together dinner. Leonard was making spaghetti with his famous sauce that he bought at the store ready to go. I hoped it worked out for him. He had been trying to put things back together for a while. He had just about thrown in the towel, and then John, who decided he was supposed to like women because he got religion, found out that women didn’t really do it for him after all and maybe God would give him a pass on the whole male-on-male thing. Least that’s where his head was at. I was beginning to think John, nice guy that he was, was just too confused and messed up to know what he wanted. Frankly, these days I avoided him. There was part of me that wanted to punch him in the mouth.
So the day after the night on the foldout, right after Brett bought the mattress and put it in the closet, it was just me and her, doing this and that to spruce up the new office. Mostly little things that I didn’t think needed to be bothered with but that she thought were desperately important. We paused in our work and were both looking at the dog lying on her doggie bed in the corner of the office. Brett said, “You know, we got to quit calling her Her.”
“You think?” I said. “It could be like that H. Rider Haggard novel She. That woman knew who she was. She was all the name she needed. Our dog could be Her.”
“I don’t think our She, or Her, is that confident,” Brett said. “And besides, She actually had a name. Ayesha, I think.”
“You got a point there.”
“But she is starting to feel better, and she’s getting fat, like you,” Brett said.
“I lost five pounds.”
“You need to lose twenty-five, dear boy.”
“Yeah, at least.”
“What have you been feeding her?”
“Nothing.”
“Liar,” Brett said.
“All right, now and then we go through the drive-through at Dairy Queen and I buy her an ice cream cone, plain, no chocolate. Chocolate is bad for dogs.”
“I used to share chocolate candy bars with my dogs when I was a kid,” Brett said. “None of them died.”
“So they’re all still alive?”
“Of course not,” she said.
“See? Chocolate got them. It just took a lifetime.”
“Ha,” she said. “I think we should call her Spot.”
“She doesn’t have any spots,” I said.
“That’s the joke.”
“We will not joke about our dog. I say we name her Ace.”
“That’s a boy dog’s name.”
“I always wanted to name a dog that because Batman’s dog was named Ace.”
“No. Not Ace. How about Buffy?”
“Like the vampire-slayer girl?” I asked.
“Yep. I like that name. More for dogs than for girls.”
“That fits,” I said.
“Let’s call her Buffy the Biscuit Slayer. She does like dog biscuits.”
I studied on that a moment, said, “Buffy the Biscuit Slayer is for formal occasions, when she has to wear an evening gown or be at a queen’s coronation, but for at home and rides to the Dairy Queen, it’s Buffy.”
Our new dog was christened.
As this christening was going on, I was looking at Brett’s legs. She was leaning up against the desk. She was wearing shorts and her legs were shiny and I was wondering if maybe we might try the couch bed again with the new mattress. That thought was destroyed when I heard someone on the stairs. It was a heavy sound, like a elephant loaded down with a raja and his escorts, and there was a clicking with it, like maybe the elephant had a large cricket for a friend or perhaps was wearing a tap shoe on one foot.
That’s when the door opened and a lady came in who was older than dirt but cleaner. She had a cane, which explained the cricket, but the elephant walk was a little more confusing, as she wasn’t much bigger than a minute. She had more dyed red hair than she had the head for. That hair seemed to be an entity unto itself, mounded and teased and red as blood. You could have shaved her like a sheep and knitted a sweater with all that hair, maybe have enough left over for at least one sock or, if not that, a change purse.
Her face was dry-looking. She had a lot of makeup on it, as if she were trying to fill a ditch, or several. Her clothes were a little too young for her age, which was somewhere near to that of a mastodon that had survived major climate change but was wounded by it. She had on bright red tight jeans and a sleeveless blue shirt that showed hanging flesh like water wings under her arms. Her breasts were too big, or maybe they were too exposed; the tops of them stuck out of her push-up bra. They looked like aging melons with rot spots, which I supposed were moles or early cancer.
She eyed Brett and me, said, “You two weren’t about to do the dog, were you?”
“I don’t think so,” said Brett. “Our dog is a lady.”
The lady eyed the recently christened Buffy on her bed in the corner. Buffy had lifted h
er head to check things out, but she quickly lowered her head again and lay still. I think all that hair bothered her. She probably thought it was a vicious animal ready to pounce.
“I mean screwing,” said the woman.
Like Brett, I knew what she had been referring to, but still, she wasn’t what I expected, though I suppose when I got that old, if I did, I’d still talk the same way I do now. Actually, the more I looked at the old lady, the more I thought the language suited her. She looked like a retired hooker.
“Why, yes, I was just fixing to drop my shorts and bend over the desk and ask Hap here to drive me home.”
“You aren’t shocking me, honey,” the old woman said.
“Or you us,” Brett said.
I was actually thinking I might be a little shocked.
“That was your game, wasn’t it?” Brett said. “To shock us.”
“Naw,” said the old woman, finding a client chair and settling into it as if she were a bag with a bowling ball in it. “I’m just a vulgar old shit.” She laid a heavy eye on me, said, “You’re Hap Collins, aren’t you?”
“I am,” I said. “Do we know each other?”
“No, but when I was forty I’d like to have. You and me could have burned a hole in a mattress then. Course, you may not have been born. But you might want to lose a few pounds, honey. You’re starting to chub up.”
“He’s taken,” Brett said. “Pounds and all.”
The old woman studied Brett. “Aren’t you the Southern belle? I bet you could earn a pretty penny on a Louisiana shrimp boat and never have to toss a net.”
“Listen, you old bag,” Brett said. “Either say what you want or I’m going to stick that cane up your ass and throw you down the stairs so hard the dye will come out of your hair.”
The old lady let out with a howl. “You are a pistol, aren’t you?”
“And all six chambers are loaded,” Brett said.
“Don’t get your panties twisted up your ass,” said the old lady. “I’m just fucking with you. I want to hire Hap here.”
“I charge a little more for the position of male escort,” I said. “And just so you know, I don’t do anal.”
“I might could arrange that—the male escort part,” she said. “And I do do anal and use toys. Or used to. These days I’m so dry I have to grease up to pee.” She said that and laughed. It was a good laugh and sounded young, right up to the end, where she got choked and suddenly sounded like a boiler about to blow.
When she got her pipes cleaned out, I said, “I don’t know you, so how come you know me?”
“I saw you and your colored friend out in the yard the other day. And there’s that sweet dog that got kicked. She looks much happier now.”
I thought: colored friend? Really? Then again, she was old. Hell, she might have been near ninety. A spry ninety, but at least that age. I guessed she was entitled to the old proper style of identification for black people. Then again, the term black was fairly past its shelf life, too. The new word was African American, a variant of Afro-American, a term used in the sixties and seventies. Leonard always said it was obvious he was American and that the closest he’d been to Africa was a geography map. He thought of himself as black. Then again, me and him are about the same age. We like a lot of the same terminology. I just about always say pussy instead of vagina.
The old lady stirred a hand around in her purse and came up with what I still call an electronic device and everyone else calls a tablet. To me a tablet is writing paper between cardboard covers. I especially liked the old-style Big Chief tablets. I don’t even know if they still make them.
She ran a bent finger around on the tablet, then turned it toward me. It was a very nice video of Leonard beating the shit out of the dog abuser. The sound was down. That was okay. I remembered everything that was said, and the machine probably hadn’t picked that up anyway.
And then I understood. Of course I did. She wasn’t just an old lady who had seen what had happened. She was the one who recorded the dog abuse, said she didn’t have Leonard and Marvin recorded—but she did. She had filmed everything from the minute we showed up to the moment everyone left. It was pretty cool to watch, both Leonard and Marvin. I almost asked for a replay.
What kept me from asking for that, however, was I had a sinking feeling that I knew why she had come in.
5
Here’s what I expected. She had blackmail material, and though I wasn’t involved in the actual ass-whipping, I was there and was part of the deal by proxy, and the way it would come down was all of us on that video, and that included Officer Carroll, were about to get rubbed raw as hamburger meat.
“You think I’m here to blackmail you, don’t you?” she said.
“Never crossed my mind. Why would a nice lady like you blackmail anyone?”
“Shit, boy, you’re a bad liar. If you were a woman you couldn’t fake an orgasm.”
“All right,” I said. “It crossed my mind. And just for the record, I think I could fake an orgasm.”
“Totally,” Brett said.
“I want you to take my case,” said the lady, “if that’s what it’s called. Think that’s what they say on the TV shows, or maybe it’s movies. Are there private eye TV shows anymore?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Those were always kind of fun,” she said. She seemed to be thinking about a favorite episode of something before she shifted to: “Here’s the way I see it.” She patted the tablet. “I want you to find my granddaughter. The cops gave up. For them it’s a cold case, and from what I can tell it’s not getting any warmer. I’ll be honest. I don’t have any illusions. I’m too old to have any. She’s most likely bones by now, but I want her body found, and I want to know what happened to her.”
“You don’t need threats,” Brett said. “We just need payment. Actually, I own this agency now, so it’s me you deal with.”
“Well, that’s the rest of the problem,” she said. “I got some money, but not what it takes to do the deed, cause I presume it’ll take awhile, and usually this stuff is by the hour, right? That’s why I brought the tablet. What’s on it is my down payment. And if you’re thinking of pushing me down the stairs, I got a copy of this elsewhere, somewhere where you can’t get it. I’m pretty tech-savvy for an old geezer.”
“I think you’re a lying bitch,” Brett said. “How much money you got?”
“How much you need?” the old lady said.
They went back and forth with that for a while until it was determined the old lady had about half of what Brett charged for a couple of weeks, having raised her prices from those Marvin used. I guess she was thinking about paying for the paint and the new furniture and a lot of vanilla cookies and the toilet paper for the snazzy bathroom.
When the money talk was done, and an inferior sum was agreed to, the old lady pulled a manila envelope out of her purse. Inside were some papers and photos of her granddaughter. She was a good-looking girl in a short white dress and those Greek lace-up sandals. She had thick red hair like Brett’s and like maybe the old lady’s original hair used to be. The girl was striking a model pose, which was appropriate, because her grandmother said, “She wanted to be a model when she was a kid, then she wanted to be a journalist. Her name is Sandy Buckner.”
“What’s your name?” Brett asked.
“Lilly Buckner.”
“We have a painting of lilies on the bathroom wall,” I said.
“What?” Lilly said.
“Never mind,” I said.
Brett asked her a few questions, and I listened. Five years ago Sandy had gone missing. She had graduated college with a journalism degree and found that the newspapers and magazines that did hard news had gone the way of the dodo bird and drive-in theaters, so she tried being a weather girl, but she was no good at it. She looked wonderful on camera, but she had zip charisma, as her grandmother put it. It’s odd how that works. There are people who in life are beautiful, but on film, beautiful
or not, they have all the personality of a ham sandwich without the pickles, and then there are those who look all right, nothing special, a little too thin, but the camera loves them, spruces them up, makes them glow. Sandy didn’t glow. She was just pretty. She ended up taking a job at a used-car lot that only sold high-end used cars—Mercedes, Lincolns, Cadillacs, muscle cars, that kind of thing—mostly old cars that had become rare and classic.
Sandy worked there six months and was making some money, then one day the boss called Lilly Buckner looking for Sandy. Hers was one of the numbers Sandy had left as a contact. She hadn’t come to work, and she never showed up again. She hadn’t been seen for five years. Her car, which wasn’t up to the level of those she sold but was pretty nice, had been found in the parking lot of the apartment complex where she rented. It was a nice complex, and it and the pretty nice car led Lilly to think Sandy was making money that was a little too good.
The whole missing-person business had gone through cop channels without any solution. Lilly hired a private agency that had taken her money and told her what she already knew, then went out of business. The owner of the agency decided being a private eye lacked some of the excitement he had hoped for and had gone into real estate. Ms. Buckner said it made her happy the bottom fell out of the market right after he made that decision.
Then she saw us and the dog. She talked to the cops and got Marvin’s name, and then she researched him, and that led to all of us. She did it, she said, because all she had to do was shit and eat. She discovered Marvin had an agency, and now Brett had it.
She researched us to brag on us saving the dog. She did in fact do that while she was with us, said good things about us, but thought Brett might could use a little less eyeliner, told her she had to watch tight shorts when they got sweaty. “You get a camel toe you’re not careful,” she said. It sounded like a sincere suggestion. Brett gave me a look that said: What the hell?