Dancing Made Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 4) Read online

  Dancing Made Easy

  Phillip DePoy

  © Phillip DePoy 1999

  Phillip DePoy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1999 by Dell Publishing, a division of Random House, Inc.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  For

  the late archetype of the phoenix,

  the even resurgence of the kiss,

  and every new birth of spirit

  find four to name three

  Table of Contents

  1. Ill Wind At Dawn

  2. Jones For Janey

  3. Ghost Flute

  4. Remembrance of Things Past

  5. Foggy New Year

  6. Spider Rhythm

  7. Arabesque

  8. The Tango

  9. Lobster Walk

  10. Show Dog Status

  11. Strange Fruit

  12. Rat Heaven

  13. Zen Punch Line #13

  14. The One That Got Away

  15. Men in Blue

  16. Germ Town

  17. Bad Day in Dreamland

  18. Mickey’s Monkey

  19. A Bigger Bite

  20. Clatter

  21. Heinous Hanging Homicides

  22. The Alliance

  23. Eclectics

  24. Lobster Leash

  25. An Actor Prepares

  26. Blackbird Bridge

  27. Smoke on the Water

  28. Strays

  29. Moonlight

  30. Wired

  31. Dancing Footprints

  32. Single-Bullet Theory

  33. Smoking Gun

  34. Ghost Dancer

  35. Box Step

  36. Faith

  1. Ill Wind At Dawn

  The corpse was swaying in an angular fashion. It was moving in a little box step, hanging from the lamppost in the icy morning air. I was staring up at it.

  “What exactly is that thing tied around her neck?”

  “That’s an apron, Flap.”

  Joepye Adder had lived on and off in Piedmont Park, like a phantom, since 1983. Every once in a while the constabulary would take pity on his freewheeling ways and invite him to a nice little cell for dinner. But once he got out, he’d usually wander back to the park, and most people in the upwardly mobile neighborhoods around the park had grown to feel more uncomfortable when they didn't see him around.

  I squinted. “An apron?”

  “Come on around on this side.” He pulled his coat around him and motioned, stumbling a little from the abundance of alcohol he’d doubtless consumed before coming to my place.

  I followed in his direction and got a better look. Sure enough, sticking out behind her, like a little cape, was an old-fashioned flowered apron. Wrapped around her neck, its strings were all that kept her up in the air, tied to the lamppost arm.

  “Wow, Joe. Good catch.”

  It was just after dawn. The lamp blinked off.

  “Flap, what makes the lights go on and off like that? Is it a timer, or do they have some sort of light sensor on there?”

  “Joe, could we stick to one line of inquiry at a time?”

  “Huh?”

  “You got me up before daybreak, I’m not awake, I’m trying hard not to think about what I’m looking at. You got me down here in the cold wind, you know you’re probably going to get me into some kind of trouble, and the issue is not what makes the streetlights go on and off.”

  He nodded. “Oh. Right. You’re absolutely right, Flap. Sorry.”

  “You just came to get me when you saw this? You didn’t call the cops?”

  He twisted a little, like he was trying to get away from a bee. “What the hell’d I call a cop for?”

  Despite the grisly image, I was still fascinated, in the most macabre and sleepless sense of the word, by the fact that a little cloth string was strong enough to hold up a grown woman. “You found a dead body.”

  “To me” — he shook his head — “if it’s on the ground, like, under a pile of leaves or like that — well, that’s finding a dead body. This, see, falls into a whole ’nother category — in my mind, at least.”

  “I see. So you came to me.”

  “I figured you to get some work out of this.” He grew animated. “And then, when you got paid, I had it in mind that it’d be worth something to you to, you know, toss a little percentage my way, kind of like an agent. I mean, I know ordinarily you let Miss Dally take care of all that sort of a deal, but what her being gone to Paris and all —”

  “Joe?” I gave him a little smile. “She’s been back for six months.”

  “She has?”

  “Uh-huh, and excuse me for saying so, but that says a whole lot about your sorry state.”

  “Sorry state?” He wasn’t offended; he just questioned my choice of words. “I personally prefer to think of myself as more of your happy, carefree vagabond.”

  I blinked. “In what century?”

  “Yeah,” he had to agree. “It’s a mean time in history to try for anything like ‘carefree’, I can see that. Still, it’s my lot in life.”

  “Very philosophical.” I looked back up. “What’s making her sway like that? Is it that windy?”

  He stared skyward too. “Could be your rotation of the earth.”

  “No.” I let my shoulders sag. “It could not be the rotation of the earth.”

  He shrugged. “Just a thought.”

  “You know I’ve got to call Dally about this.”

  “What for?” He made a face. “That’ll just make my percentage go down.”

  “Because” — I raised my eyebrows — “I want to.”

  “Oh.”

  “Isn’t it kind of amazing that the apron string is enough to keep her up there?”

  He moved around to get another angle. “I guess.” More squinting. “How old you think she was?”

  “Young.” I looked at her little hands. “I’m saying very early twenties.”

  He was looking at her clothes. “I’d wager she was a hooker.”

  “I guess.” I shrugged.

  Leather coat, tight black pants, blue ankle boots, not much of a blouse as far as I could tell from my vantage point. Could have been a wig, the hair was pretty well done up. She was wearing one of those rings, the kind you get in a bubble gum machine, plastic gold band, huge blue plastic stone.

  Joepye tilted his head almost parallel to the ground. “Flap? Look. What’s that on her coat?”

  I took a step to where he was. I followed his gaze. “Looks like a … big pin. Is it a pin?”

  She was pretty high up there, all things considered. Her head was only inches away from the light fixture, and the daylight was still pretty dim.

  “I think,” he spoke slowly, “it’s a note. Look.”

  I did. “Maybe you’ve got something. Looks like it could be a note, pinned to her lapel. Man.”

  He looked at me. “You just plan to leave her up there, Flap, or are you going to get her down?”

  “Me? Why is it my business to get her down?”

  “Well” — he shook his head — “you can’t just leave her up there. School kids walk this way to Grady High over there. You can’t have them walking under a thing like this. It’s very uncomfortable.”

  But before I could figure out how to get up there and do anything about it, there was a hideous rending of fabric above our heads, and the girl in question plummeted to the pavement between us like a wet sack of sand.

  We stared.

  Much to my shame, he was the first to
gather his wits.

  “Well, there you are.”

  I stared down at her, but not for long. She was just a kid, but it wasn’t a kid’s face; it was navy blue and twisted. It looked like a gargoyle, like the kind that’s supposed to be a representation of the North Wind, all swollen and puffed up, tongue stuck out, blowing up a storm. If you hang by your neck long enough, you get like that. Anybody would.

  The note on her lapel was written in ornate, time-consuming calligraphy. All it said was “Number One: The Tarantella.”

  2. Jones For Janey

  Well after midnight that night, with the early morning’s event still less than twenty-four hours on my mind, I was in the middle of an unexpected and somewhat uncomfortable conversation at Easy.

  “Go ahead.” I was smiling. “Fire away. Bullets bounce off me, but if you feel like shooting off your little pistol, be my guest. Maybe you’ll get something out of your system.”

  I admit this was, by and large, an idle boast on my part. I had never actually had the experience of bullets bouncing off any part of me. But when you have a person as angry as Mickey “The Pineapple” Nichols staring down his loaded .44 at you, well, it’s my experience that you’ll say almost anything. And I’d also just finished the last good bottle of wine in my reserve, so my mood was somewhat … expansive.

  My take on this matter goes like this: If you’re calm, and you claim that you can take or leave a couple of slugs, the actual threat factor can go out the window; then the person with the gun will sit down and be reasonable. Works about ten to one. These are good odds, the proof of which is that I am still here — and the exception to which is that I have several conversational scars that I occasionally show at parties.

  “But as long as you’re here, Mick, why don’t you tell me what’s on your mind.”

  He kept his .44 pointed directly at my head. “You are no good. This is all I am saying to you on the subject.” I could smell the gin on his breath.

  “I’m no good?” I jutted my head a little toward him. “What could possibly lead you to such a terrible, misguided conclusion.”

  “Janey.”

  Oh. Janey Finster. The girl Mick had often referred to as his “pride and joy”. The girl who had just been found smothered to death in her own bed. The girl who had also recently taken refuge on my couch from the very person who was standing in front of me and aiming to shoot me. Yes, I thought then, this may be something of a problem after all.

  “Mick.” I softened my voice, partly to calm him down, partly because I was genuinely saddened at the mention of her name. “Janey is no longer with us. She is no longer anybody’s pride and joy. This is a sad story. Why bring it up?”

  His gun dipped a little, and his eyes unfocused for a moment. “Little Janey.”

  “You know,” I took advantage of his lapse, “she always spoke very highly of you.”

  With that, his gun fell to his side. “She did? Even at the end, after our fight?”

  “It’s a fact.” I took a step closer to him.

  Easy, the club, was empty but for the two of us. The lights were low, and the clock on the wall was complaining about the fact that it was three-thirty in the morning. I had told Hal, the bartender, that I would lock up the joint, and he knew that I would take care of everything.

  The only time I ever got any peace and quiet, it seemed to me, was when I was alone at Easy. My apartment house was noisy around the clock, and my life in general was a little cluttered. But ordinarily, when I was the last to lock up at the club, I had my moment of solitude. We all need a little solitude every so often. The funny thing was that I had been using that solitude, on that particular night, to mull over everything I had in my own mind about Janey Finster.

  So you can imagine my dismay when, instead of same, I was interrupted by a drunken cuckold with a pistol.

  Now, a cuckold is not, as Joepye had once told me, a bird that makes pleasant sounds. It is a guy that has been stiff-armed in the department d’amour. This is my definition of a cuckold, and Mickey “The Pineapple” Nichols was one such example — although that was by no means his only problem.

  He had acquired his nickname, for example, not by being prickly on the outside — although he was — nor by having a wild-shock sort of hairstyle — which he did — but by being known as a guy who would, given the proper provocation, toss a hand grenade into your bed whilst you were asleep in it. People who have served their country in the armed forces will often refer to a hand grenade as a pineapple. This is my explanation of his nickname.

  I moved one step closer to him. “Would you mind very much if I sat down, Mick?”

  He shook his head to chase away the ghosts in it and looked at me. “Oh, jeez, by all means. Look how late it is, and here I am just going on and on about my own problems. I should let you talk. You are the one with the scintillating conversational techniques.”

  This was another thing to know about Mickey. He fancied himself something of a wordsmith. He would just as soon toss a ten-dollar phrase at you as he would a hand grenade.

  I sat. “Yes. Scintillating.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Flap? I’m sorry I pointed my pistol at your head. I don’t know what’s come over me lately.”

  I shrugged. “Love makes a man do strange things. It’s even in the Bible.”

  “Is it?”

  “Or it ought to be.”

  He squinted his big eyes at me. “Did she really speak well of me, Flap?”

  “Whenever your name came up in the conversation around here, Mickey,” I smiled, “she would say the most glowing things. How you were a gentleman —”

  “And my vocabulary?”

  “I was getting to that: how you had the biggest vocabulary of any man she had ever been with.”

  “Really?” His eyes moistened. “The biggest?”

  “By far.”

  Finally he slumped into the seat opposite me. “Flap. What are we going to do?”

  I didn’t mean it to sound harsh when I said, “Janey is dead, Mick. What can we do?” But maybe it did sound a little rough.

  Bing, he was agitated again. He moved like a firecracker. His hand flew up toward me, and the gun was no more than two inches from my nose. His face was red, and he was spitting while he talked. “What can we do? I’ll tell you what we can do. We can shoot you in the head ten or twelve times and see how that makes us feel. You took her away, Flap! You took her away from me!”

  “No, I did not.” I tried not to move. “There was never anything between Janey and me. I barely knew her. She came to my place when she left you because she didn’t want to wake up with an explosive device on her pillow and I am widely known as a sucker for a pretty face.”

  He wouldn’t hear of it. “You took her, Flap! I’ll pop you six ways from Sunday!” And the gun touched my cheek.

  *

  Now maybe if this story were being told by someone else, it would be more suspenseful, because unless it is to be a very short story, it would seem obvious that Mickey did not kill me that night. I’m saying this so we can all relax and get on with the tale without fear of some kind of bloodbath. On the other hand, what if he shot out my eye, for instance, or mutilated my face in some horrible way? So, I would still not be completely out of the woods.

  *

  “You’re not mad at me, Mick. You came to me so you could get over being mad by talking with someone you knew would be sympathetic to your situation, which is me. I will not get mad back at you, because that is not my way, and you know it. You are truly mad at Foggy Moskovitz.” I was guessing.

  “Foggy Moskovitz.” Mickey let out a growl like an animal. He jerked the gun from my face and fired it five times into the gentlemen’s rest room door. So I’d made a good guess. Outside, dogs began to bark.

  I let the smoke clear. Then I leaned back and folded my arms. “Feel better?”

  He pressed his lips together, thought about it. “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

 
“What do you care?” He arched an eyebrow. “Bullets bounce off you.”

  “If I’m in the right mood.” I nodded. “But what if I’m off my game tonight? You have a very good gun.”

  “The gun, yes.” He glanced at the bathroom door.

  “But look at my pattern. It stinks. It’s all over the place.”

  I looked at the bullet holes in the door. It was a mess. “You’re right. Maybe you’re tense and squeezing too hard.”

  “I’m not concentrating.” He set the gun down on the table between us, almost as if it had offended him. “I think that’s the problem.”

  “You have a lot on your mind.”

  He intertwined his fingers together and leaned toward me. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “So, then,” I took in a breath, “tell me.”

  “Well, Flap” — he closed his eyes — “just kick me in the head when I tell you, but the cops think I’m the one that killed Janey.”

  “Well, Mickey, you have to admit you can see why they might think this. You go all over town with your guns and your grenades and you punch this guy and you threaten that guy and by and by everybody in town knows what you are liable to do — plus they all know about your Jones for Janey.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with this redneck city.” He clenched his teeth. “They don’t understand how sensitive a guy like me can be.”

  Somewhere outside there were sirens joining the chorus of dogs, sirens coming our way.

  “What’s wrong with Atlanta, my brother, if you don’t mind my saying it” — I sat up — “is an influx of guys like you.”

  There. I’d said it. He could shoot me or not. I grew up in Atlanta, in the shadow of the Wren’s Nest, where Joel Chandler Harris stole his stories from his African servants. I made out in the balcony of the theatre that premiered Gone with the Wind, the theatre they tore down to put up a high-rise office building. I am the closest thing we have in my city to a native. It was guys like Mickey, with their Yankee gangster ways, who had helped to wreck the entire ambience of the city, and I didn’t mind telling him so.