Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 1) Read online

  She worked on her problems, underwent therapy at that clinic. I heard all about it from an orderly named Scooter. She actually said the sentence, “I don’t know what the big deal is, they were just hoods.” These things take time…

  Further interaction with the staff included an affair with her therapist, a man named — honestly — Nete Schlag. Then, when she confessed the affair to some other staff at the clinic, Dr. Schlag was disbarred or dismembered or whatever it is they do to you when you have an affair with a patient, and they both went off to work as nurses in a hospital for drug-addicted teens. We divorced through the mail. I just got the final papers in October.

  But, like so many things in life, the story goes on. Some storms never dissipate. In the six months since she’d left Georgia, I’d gotten weather reports. She and Nete moved to Boston so Neena could be closer to Jorge — one of our mutual acquaintances. Last I heard, she was a lesbian dental hygienist in New Mexico. Don’t know what happened to Nete Schlag…or to Nathan. Don’t care.

  And through it all, Dalliance was there. She thought I was an idiot when I got married. She called me honey when I got divorced. She came over with food and wine and conversation as diverting as the autumn night is long. It might not have saved my life, having her for my best friend, but it went a long way toward preserving my frame of mind.

  So when she called me for help I couldn’t refuse. On a cold and lonely November night, about a month after the divorce was final, I met her at three in the morning, an hour past closing time for Easy. Ponce is a wonderland at that time of night. At three in the morning at the Majestic Diner (FOOD THAT PLEASES SINCE 1929), you just might see the guys in R.E.M. or Julia Roberts home visiting Mom or three Hell’s Angels talking to Gene the Episcopal priest about the monastery in Conyers. You get a Coca-Cola and some chocolate pie. You listen for your best friend. The waitress calls you “Flap, hon,” because she knows you from many a night like this. It’s a certain kind of bliss: drizzling rain, neon buzzing, sizzle from the grill.

  And then there it was: the sound of her voice as the door swung open.

  “Marcia, sweetie — how’s your knee?”

  “Hey, Dally. Hardly know it’s there…just like my husband.” Big laugh — like a sound track, like a sitcom — or maybe the buzz from the pie was kicking in.

  Dally turned my way. “There he is.” And she slipped into the other side of the booth like she was falling into bed after a hard day at the office.

  Marcia sweetie knew what to bring: decaf coffee and a chili dog. Dally took a bite before she said anything important.

  “So, Flap…I’m asking: Are you through with the loss of your no-good wife or should I come back in the spring?”

  “The only thing I lost is the cost of filin’ the papers.”

  “You’re not lonely?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I’m not lonely for marriage.”

  “So you ready to go to work?”

  “I guess.” I looked out the window at the rain. I knew what she wanted. She wanted to tap the Source. She wanted me to find something.

  “Muster some enthusiasm, pal. It means a lotta money.”

  “I don’t care about the money. And you don’t understand what it takes out of me. It’s not, like, detective work or some computer search network. My cosmology is the whole human spirit.”

  “My cosmology is the human spirit. Honest to God I’m gonna toss up my chili dog.”

  “Mock. I’m impervious.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “Alrighty then, call me a taxi.”

  “Okay…you’re a Yellow Cab.”

  “Ah. Taunts. Like that’s gonna make me take this job, whatever it is.”

  She slugged back the coffee. “Come on. Don’t you even want to know what it’s about at three in the morning?”

  “All right, I admit I’m a little curious. I haven’t worked in…”

  “A year and a half, from the day you married Neena.”

  “Wow. That long?”

  “Yeah. That was some wife you had.”

  “So what’s the job?”

  “Missing person.”

  I knew better. “That’s it?”

  She looked at her chili dog. “I think you gotta find the connection between the missing person and some other things.”

  “Why?”

  “Great wealth, salvation of humankind, the end of evil as we know it — the usual thing.”

  “Okay, don’t tell me.”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  “It pays fifty thousand dollars upon completion of the task, and three hundred a week to keep you going while you’re working.”

  “Yeah, that oughta get me through the winter. Tell me about the events.”

  “Two nights ago a guy was found very dead behind his house in Decatur, inside a pentagram drawn in the dirt; last night two topless dancers from the other side of town turned up strangled in the trunk of a pretty blue Buick; and tonight just before I talked to you a friend of mine told me, for the third time, that he lost his wife — and he probably doesn’t even have one, far as I know. Pretty interesting?”

  “A little.”

  “More interesting if it’s somehow connected to your divorce?”

  “How could it be connected to my divorce?”

  “So you are interested.”

  “A little.”

  “Just say you’ll take the gig, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  I looked outside again. The rain was coming down a little harder now, and the neon flickered like red lightning. Three A.M. and there were still guys hanging on the corner, in the pouring rain, looking for a handout. In the spirit of that great notion “there but for fortune go I,” someone in my head said, “Yes, I’ll take the job.” And before I could stop them the words were flying out of my mouth like blackbirds migrating south.

  Dally said, “All right then.” And that was that.

  Chapter 2: A Story

  So against my better judgment I said, “Okay, tell me a story.”

  She took another swig of the decaf and got me in her sights. “Let’s start with a guy named Ruby — the drag queen — and his boyfriend-slash-roommate, Teeth.”

  “Guy’s got a roommate named Teeth?”

  “That’s what they call him. I’ll tell you about that in a second. Anyway, Teeth is sound asleep. He knows nothing until about six-thirty when he gets up to grab a smoke. And when he looks around there’s, like, no Ruby. So he calls out. No answer.”

  “Where’s this house?”

  “Decatur, outside the city limits. One of those postwar, fifties, square houses: no personality, but pretty solid. You know, like everything out of the Eisenhower era. It’s a nice quiet little neighborhood. Most of the owners have lived there since the houses were new.”

  “So Ruby and Teeth were a breed apart. The next generation.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a new day, what are you gonna do? So Teeth gets up, out to the kitchen. Where’s Ruby?”

  “I give. Where is Ruby?”

  She took a bite of the chili dog. I don’t think she was hungry; she just did it for effect. “We cast our eye out the back door in the dawn’s early light, and what do we see?”

  “Ruby in a pool of blood.”

  “Nope. Smoke.”

  “Smoke?”

  “So Teeth trundles out in his boxer shorts and stocking feet, shivering to beat the band, and a little past these hedges that separate their backyard from a small wooded area, there lies Ruby, white as snow, dead as a doornail, naked as a jaybird.”

  “Cold as a cliché.”

  “Precisely.”

  I had to repeat, “Smoke?”

  “Yeah. Beside the cold, dead body of Ruby the drag queen was a little campfire, out but still smoldering. And smudged into the clay — drawn there by Ruby’s hand, we presume — was a pentagram as large as a kiddie pool.”

  “A what?”

  “A li
ttle kid’s wading pool. That’s how big it was, the pentagram inside a circle.”

  “Nifty. Where did you read this?”

  “In the paper! Just another news story in between the trouble-in-Washington story and the heartwarming boy-choir-goes-to-Europe story. Told without a hint of sensationalism. I mean, the police guy was calm as the grave: ‘The victim seems to have been trying to crawl inside the pentagram.’ No big deal. See it every day.”

  “That was it?”

  “They interviewed some of the neighbors.”

  “And…”

  “They said they thought the couple were into Satanism. And the cops said they found black candles and ‘books consistent with the satanic life-style.’ Which I guess could be anything from Alistair Crowley to Joseph Campbell.”

  “So, with the goofy black-mass stuff the cops thought that some odd cult ceremony explained everything.”

  “Which it probably does.”

  “Except you think it’s connected to some other events.”

  She nodded. I could tell she was into the story now: The chili dog was cast aside and the coffee was cooling off, but her eyes were heating up. “Last night on the TV news there’s another story — not even the lead story, which means there was something even more hideous before I turned on the set — about these two topless dancers found strangled and stuffed into the trunk of a car parked in Buckhead.”

  “That pretty blue Buick.”

  “Right. The girls had been missing from work for well over a week, but the owner thought they had just taken off for Florida or something for the holidays.”

  “What club?”

  “They danced at the Tip Top, they lived nearby, and they were both in real estate school.”

  “Tip Top’s on the southwest side. How’d they end up in Buckhead?”

  “That’s one of the things the cops want to know. Plus, who owns the car?”

  “Doesn’t belong to one of the girls?”

  “Nope.”

  “How were they strangled?”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t say. Said they were young — I think nineteen and twenty.”

  “What were their names?”

  “I got ’em written down over at the office.”

  “So you heard these two stories and somehow got the idea they were connected.”

  She caught Marcia’s eye. “My decaf’s cold.”

  Without even looking up from her paper Marcia called out, “It’s because you’re talking too much. Just drink the damn coffee.” But she moved to the pot and headed our way.

  “I got the idea they were related,” she said before Marcia got to us, “earlier tonight when Lenny came in the club.”

  Marcia heard. “Looney Lenny?” She made the L’s sing. “He comes in your club? He’s in here about half the day. And then I see his skinny little butt head up Briarcliff. I always thought he was going to GIMH for medication.”

  Dally nodded. “He is. But after a nice session with everybody there he comes in Easy — about ten or eleven at night — and chases his medication with a dark beer.”

  I knew Lenny too. Everybody on Ponce knew Lenny. He was sunny and warm and clean and calm. The only real indication that there was anything wrong with the guy at all didn’t even dawn on you until after you’d been around him for a while. Then you realized he was genuinely happy and really nice all the time. He really, really liked everybody. There wasn’t a mean thought in his head. You tell me that doesn’t spell trouble for a street guy in this part of the twentieth century. So he went to the Georgia Institute of Mental Health on Briarcliff nearly every day as an outpatient. And he came to Easy nearly every night — as a friend.

  Dally went on. “So he comes in to tell me — like, for the third time — that his wife is missing.”

  Marcia said, “I didn’t know he was married.”

  Dally said, “He’s not, I don’t think. One time he told me his wife was Uma Thurman and once it was Angela Bassett. I guess it depends on what’s playing at the dollar movie.”

  Marcia kind of smiled and poured the coffee and said, “That’s Lenny.” And she was gone.

  I nodded. “So Lenny said…”

  “…his wife was missing. And I said that was too bad, and he said he thought it was Dr. Schlag’s fault, and I said Dr. Schlag doesn’t work there anymore.”

  “This is where I come in?”

  She nodded. “I said, ‘Remember, Lenny, Dr. Schlag ran off with Flap’s wife, right? Not yours.’ And he said it didn’t matter, that it all started about six months ago when some guy called Teeth used to work there…and while your bride was still in custody. Teeth got fired sometime before Dr. Schlag left the institution in shame. So with a couple of well-placed phone calls” — she was really excited now; she was almost giggling — “I come to find out that when Teeth the orderly got fired from GIMH, he found him some more respectable work: at a topless bar.” She was so proud of herself, I thought she was going to pop open like a piñata.

  “Teeth worked at Tip Top?”

  “Still does.”

  I felt a certain kind of…jolt, I guess. It’s a sort of preperformance nerve thing I get just before I start a gig. A kind of pleasantly invigorating anxiety: like a double espresso and a mild electric shock. I was about to go to work. I nodded.

  Dally went on. “So the short of it is, I told Lenny that you’d find his wife. That’s the case.”

  “But there’s more to it.”

  “I’ve never been more positive of anything in my life.”

  “How come?”

  “Intuition.”

  “You gotta tell me everything, or I can’t do the work. For example, who’s paying this huge sum of loot?”

  “Lenny.”

  “Lenny? What, in scrap cans?”

  “Lenny’s loaded.”

  “What?”

  “Lenny,” she leaned over to me, looking around the diner for a second, “is none other than Lenny Cascade.”

  “Cascade?”

  She nodded. “Like in Cascade Art Imports.”

  Cascade Art Imports was the largest importer of ancient artifacts in the continental United States. Everybody knew that.

  “Man.” I guess you never know about some people.

  She winked. “There’s a million stories in the necked city, kiddo. They’ve got offices, or at least corporate law offices, right here in Atlanta — but they don’t want you to know that.”

  “How come?”

  She shrugged. “Who can fathom the ways of the corporate lawyer?”

  I agreed. “Don’t want to.”

  “Suffice it to say I talked to some guy name of Davidson, represents ’em — seems nice enough, maybe somebody to check out.”

  “I guess. By the way, Miss Information, you intimated you knew how Teeth got his name.”

  She smiled. “At GIMH? He bit an unruly patient on the arm. It’s his way.”

  “Really.” I was getting my wallet out to pay for the stuff on the table. “I wonder if he ever bit Neena?”

  She yawned, patted my hand after I dropped a ten by the plates. “Everybody else did, baby. Why should he be any different?”

  We were out the door before Marcia even noticed we were gone.

  Chapter 3: Solomon’s Seal

  I got up early the next morning. Early for me: about eleven. I wanted to have a little daylight to poke around at Ruby and Teeth’s place in Decatur. When you live in Midtown like I do, the drive down Ponce into Decatur is very pleasant. It was one of those late-autumn days when the air is impossibly clear and the last of the leaves are raging against the dying of the light with a kind of golden fury.

  Teeth lived in a shabbier part of Decatur, and his house was a ways off from the rest in the neighborhood. It was a neat little square brick job, like Dally said: solid, no character, just like a thousand others in the area. Outside, it looked like a big mess. No yard work had been done since — I was guessing — the turn of the century. And there was a torn or mis
sing screen in every window I could see. I popped a knock on the door, and I heard a rustling sound inside, but it was quite a while before it opened.

  I said, “You Teeth?”

  He said, “Nuh-uh. Wrong house. Nobody home.”

  I said, “I just want to talk about some stuff — have a look around.”

  He said, “What for?”

  I said, “For about twenty minutes.”

  He hesitated. “You’re not a cop.”

  “Nope.”

  “Insurance?”

  “Nope.”

  He nodded. “The family sent you. They never got used to Ruby’s…life-style.” He actually smiled. “They musta gone nuts when they read that ‘satanic’ crap in the papers.”

  “I’m not from the family. It’s not about Ruby at all, really. I — actually I’m looking for a guy’s missing wife. Guy was a patient at GIMH while you were working there.”

  “It’s not about Ruby?” He sounded a little sad.

  “Lenny Cascade.”

  He shook his head, smiled again. It was a winning smile. He had a little gold star in the middle of his upper right incisor. All he said was, “Looney Lenny. He’s married?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  “Well…” And after a second he swung the door open and stepped back.

  I couldn’t believe the difference inside the house. It was like a page out of Better Homes & Gardens. The walls were a rich gold, one of those layered paint treatments. The furniture was very expensive black and burgundy antique stuff, with an oriental rug that probably cost more than the house did. There was a cheery little fire beneath the ornate mantelpiece — and up over it there was a copy of Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus,” only with a different face from the one in the original. Teeth was looking at it too.

  “That’s Ruby, Lucille Ball wig and all,” he said, almost whispering. “Made a lot of money in the impersonation industry. That was painted by a famous Atlanta artist. RuPaul tried to buy it from us a couple of years ago, but we didn’t sell it to him. I told Ruby that Ru just wanted to put his own face on it.”