Devil May Care Read online

  It ordinarily wouldn’t have been a tough call. Given a choice between O’Hale’s or dancing with the devil, my heart and liver belonged to Mr. Jim Beam. But these were special circumstances. The office rent was overdue as well, and if I lost my home and business addresses at the same time, where would I pass out nights?

  “Yeah, okay, I’ll listen to what you got,” I said, tossing my hat and coat back on the wooden rack. “Just give me a minute.”

  Mannix had had the good sense to filch a tarp from the maintenance closet down the hall and spread it out underneath the demon’s chair. That was catching most of the slime that oozed off his black wings. But his hooves had melted holes through the blue plastic and were singeing the linoleum underneath, and the way things were going lately I’d need some of my security deposit back if I wanted to stay drunk through Labor Day.

  I ducked back out into the next room. Mannix was gone, and so was his notebook. The newspaper was open on Doris’ desk and virtually every name on the op-ed page was circled with a frowny face for “naughty” written after them.

  I found what I was after in the bottom drawer, a souvenir oven mitt Doris had brought back for me from vacation last year with the legend “I Carlsbad Caverns” written on it. Forget the fact that you’ll see the pope figure skating on the surface of the sun before I’ll turn on my oven, and Doris knows it. I’d made the big mistake of asking her what the hell a cave had to do with an oven mitt, and because of that simple and obvious observation I was treated to an hour of screeching and a week of the silent treatment. It had been one of the happiest work weeks of my life.

  I hustled down the hall to a door painted with the legend “Myron Wasserbaum, D.D.S.” Wasserbaum spent Monday mornings these days cleaning teeth at the zoo. Real civic-minded, Wasserbaum was. It was only a happy accident that his sudden generosity of spirit coincided with the community service he’d been stuck with after he’d been caught receiving kickbacks from the Tooth Fairy for a bunch of unnecessary extractions.

  I picked the lock and found what I was after in the hygienist’s chair.

  Back in my own office, I told the demon to lift his hooves. I slipped the oven mitt under one, and the lead vest Wasserbaum had his patients wear for X-rays under the other. The demon didn’t seem too happy, but “happy” was probably not much on the menu for creatures of the lower reaches. Frankly, I wouldn’t know if this guy was the Chris Matthews or Mary Lou Retton of demons.

  I stripped off my suit jack and was rolling up my shirtsleeves as I took my seat behind my desk. “Okay, spill it, gorgeous. What brings you to my parlor?”

  “The name’s Molokai,” said the demon. “That’s it. First name, last name, only name. And no Cher cracks, Banyon, or else. I don’t have powers on this plane like I do below, but I can still beat the living hell out of some smartass mortal two-bit detective.”

  “And just like that I felt my natural affability melt away,” I said.

  “Okay, okay,” Molokai said. “So sue me for being true to my nature. Anyway, I want to hire you for a missing persons case.”

  “Missing persons is easy. Go to the cops.”

  Molokai grew more impatient, and his agitation produced even more slime, mostly from torso and wings. It slopped to the tarp like some new brand of rotten egg maple syrup from the twisted mind of Aunt Jemima.

  The demon produced a clean white handkerchief from the shreds of ancient rags that constituted his best business suit and mopped it across the beaded droplets of slime that were popping up on his forehead between his smallest set of horns.

  “I did,” Molokai insisted. “The cops won’t take it. The missing person I’m looking for has been dead forty-seven years.” The demon flapped his wings and shook his head. “He’s not so much a missing person as he is a lost soul. Turned over to me for eternal punishment. Unfortunately for me, he was lost from my department and there’s going to be hell to pay when the big boss below finds out we’re the ones that lost him.”

  I pulled out a pen and notebook from my desk. “Okay, say I was considering taking the case. What’s your lost soul’s name and where’s he from?”

  “Harvey Waters. He’s from right here in town, so I’m assuming he’s hiding out around here. You know…return to the old life. That’s why I came here. He was born at County General and died on Piedmont twenty-eight years later. Hit by an ice cream truck in front of his house. Not evil in the grand schemer sense. I mean, we’re not talking Kim Il Sung or Ted Turner here. But bad enough in an everyday, kick-the-dog, cheat on the wife, talk on the cell phone at the movies way. You know, a jerk. It’s easy to not be one, but Waters was one of those guys who found it just wasn’t worth the effort to not be an everyday asshole. So we got him. Anyway, widow still lives at their old place. At least she’s still listed in the phone book. I didn’t check the house. I need a human face on this, Banyon. I can’t exactly march door to door looking for the guy myself. The last thing I need is to draw attention to myself. The big boss would hear about it for sure.”

  “How long has Waters been missing?”

  “Six days.”

  I looked up from my notes. “He corporeal or incorporeal? I don’t take ghost cases. If Waters is a ghost, we end it right here.”

  “Corporeal. We got him body and soul. But he’s no zombie, Banyon. No rotting flesh or that bullcrap. His body’s still in his grave. It’s a whole metaphysical thing you mortals can’t understand. No, Waters, is as healthy as the day he got dumped in our…that is, in my lap.”

  “All right. So what’s your relationship to this guy?”

  Everybody has a tell. For Mannix, it was swinging from the light fixtures when he had a good poker hand, for Molokai, his black wings retracted tightly when he was about to clam up. “I don’t see how that’s relevant,” he sniffed.

  “I need it for background. Look, you want me to find this Harvey Waters, or don’t you?”

  The demon’s eyes narrowed. His wings stayed buttoned up tight to the protruding black bones of his spine. “You’re taking the case?”

  “I’ll do a little poking around. No promises. But only if you tell me what your relationship was with Waters. I need the full picture. The devil is in the details.”

  Molokai sighed and I decided his breath was way worse than a stale pastrami sandwich. It smelled like rotting chicken filtered through a Frenchman’s armpit. His wings slowly unfurled.

  “I’m a VP in the cruel and unusual punishments department. Sisyphus rolling that boulder up the hill? That was me.” He shrugged his wings. “Well, my committee. I’m more involved in oversight, allocation of resources, supplies, that sort of thing.”

  A demon paper pusher. I should have guessed it to look at him. I knew a little about demons. I’d met a few in my time. I’d infiltrated a cult of them in Oklahoma in order to save a PepsiCo heiress a few years back. They needed the girl for some ritual to raise Colonel Sanders from the dead. Beats me what’s with Sanders and death cults, but a new one crops up in the papers practically every other month. My demon cult had the girl chained over a pit of boiling Moxie, and it was only lucky for me that their wings are mostly ornamental or they would have got me when I backed my Pontiac over a succubus who’d let its guard down. I saved the girl but the bastards tore the hell out of my roof. I didn’t get paid on that one and wound up being sued by Coca-Cola. Don’t ask.

  The demons that time had looked a lot like this one. Molokai was sitting down but even so it was clear he was nearly eight feet tall. The legs on the folding chair were bending under his massive weight. Guy had to clock in at 370, easy. His entire body was liked burned leather left to dry out in the sun. Not a lot of Noxzema on CVS shelves down in H-E double hockey sticks.

  The other demons I’d met all had the same dripping fangs and yellow eyes as big as cantaloupes as Molokai, but the others had put them to much better sinister use. The demon in my office was more nervous and twitchy than menacing. He looked like he wouldn’t so much kill you with a glare as file a grievance with human resources and shoot you a little smirk of victory over his yogurt in the break room.

  “So Waters was on your committee?”

  “A mortal?” Molokai said with a derisive snort. “Very few mortals make it to any committees down there, Banyon. You do understand that it’s about punishment, not reward. There’s only a handful of humans that are evil on a level that can compete with those of us born down there.” He counted off on his crooked fingers. “Hollywood celebs, record moguls, rap stars, Al Sharpton. That’s pretty much it. Harvey Waters was just an office boy. Spent his days going from office to office and his nights getting his kneecaps flayed off and his eyeballs boiled in pickle brine.”

  “Why pickle brine?”

  “Individually crafted punishment. Not my department. Is this twenty questions game really necessary?”

  “It is if you want me to find him. I want to see where he worked, I want to talk to his coworkers, and if he had a cellmate, I need to see him too.” The wings flapped a few vigorous times. “You want to-- What? No. No, Banyon. That’s out of the question.” He became agitated once more and the metal seat creaked under his enormous, jagged rear end. I wasn’t sure how strong the floor was and I didn’t feel like testing it. I only hoped that if he went through the floor and kept on going to his home in the fiery depths, that he’d sweep Vincetti along for the ride.

  “I don’t know what you think, Banyon, but don’t believe every divine comedy you read. Mortals can’t just go prancing through the front gates of Hell. It’s invitation only, and even then it’s off limits until you’re dead.”

  I clicked my ballpoint and tossed it to my desk. “And I don’t expect a demon to play straight with me, but I know a thing or two about Hell, and I’ve got the alimony payments
to prove it. In point of fact, I’ve been down to your address twice before on different cases. It’s just this time it’d be official. I don’t feel like sneaking in like a thief in the night when I finally have someone who’ll give me an all day pass to all the rides.”

  Molokai was skeptical. “You. You’re saying you’ve been to Hell.”

  I smiled. “And back.”

  Another heavy sigh. “I’ll see what I can set up,” Molokai said. “I’ll have to clear it with my supervisor and get back to you on that.”

  “Fine,” I said, standing. “Do it fast. The longer you wait, the colder the trail gets. In the meantime, that’s three hundred bucks upfront.”

  Molokai turned his head to peer at me from the corners of his huge, narrowed eyes. “That sounds awfully steep,” he said with slow suspicion.

  “It’s my retainer rate for acolytes of the Prince of Lies,” I said. “And that is just a retainer, Molokai. If this goes beyond just a little poking around, it could run a lot more than that by the time I’m through. You’ll be getting an itemized bill once the case is finished. And that’s American dollars. No funny foreign currency.”

  Molokai’s face puckered. He’d thrust his hand in his change bag, but stopped dead. “I only have thirty pieces of silver.”

  “Exchange it at the bank,” I said. “Mannix!”

  The elf poked his tiny head into my office. “Yes, Mr. Crag.”

  “Standard contract. Entered into on this date. Missing persons case for a lost soul who escaped from Hell. One Harvey Waters. You got all that?”

  “Yes, Mr. Crag,” the elf enthused, popping back into the outer office. An instant later I heard the rapid clatter of Doris’ sturdy old typewriter.

  “Bring back three hundred to Mannix,” I instructed the demon. I rolled my sleeves back down and buttoned them as I crossed to the coat rack. “I want to make it absolutely clear here that I don’t trust you. No offense. You have that kind of face. I’ll float you all of forty-five minutes after you leave. You’re not back here with the cash for Mannix by then, I’m off the case. And you try to pull a fast one with the dough, it might be I find the nearest Ouija board and get a message to your boss that you were here.”

  I shrugged on my coat.

  The threat made him nervous. His wings pulled in tight and he shivered a fresh batch of slime onto the slippery tarp. “Fine, fine,” Molokai said.

  Mannix skipped back into the office with the contract. I ordinarily don’t sweat the legal mumbo-jumbo so much, but with a demon I was taking no chances.

  “We’ll get these signed and notarized in Stan Abelman’s office downstairs,” I said. “He’s my crooked accountant. We make this nice and legally binding, Molokai. You get a copy, I get a copy, and we’re in business.”

  The demon stood, and his head nearly scraped the ceiling. If I ever decided to start a volleyball team, I’d park him at the net and sit back in a beach chair with a Travis McGee novel and a six-pack of Seagram’s Seven Crown.

  “So where are you going to be starting?” the demon asked.

  I dropped my fedora on my sweating head.

  “By paying my respects to the widow Waters.”

  Chapter 2

  Mrs. Harvey Waters lived in a lousy little ranch at the end of Piedmont Street.

  The tire marks from the ice cream truck that had wiped out her husband were long gone. Piedmont must have been paved at least a couple of times in the forty-seven years since a runaway Captain Cone truck scattered Harvey’s mortal parts all over the street like a handful of jimmies. As for the house, I wagered it looked worse than Harvey had even with an ice cream truck parked on his neck.

  The house hadn’t been much to look at even in its heyday. It had gone to seed in the past five decades. The picket fence was rotted and missing every picket but one. The last soldier standing clung to a bent and rusty nail next to the gaping hole where a gate once hung. The front yard was bleached, packed dirt where it wasn’t towering weeds. The mound of rotting wood at the far end of the driveway had been a garage at one point, but was now a tarpaper-capped rat hotel. The dilapidated house looked as if it could use a paint job just to hold it together another week. The whole building slouched to the left, as if it was about to make a dash for a better neighborhood.

  The only thing new about Waters’ dump was the fifty bird feeders out front. It looked like the widow Waters bought a new one every other day. They hung off the porch and from posts jammed into the hard-packed front yard. A dozen had been nailed to the rotting trunk of a tree that was more a glorified stump, since at some point in the distant past it had been decapitated ten feet up. There was birdseed ladled thick all over the ground, but not so much as a single pigeon in sight. One look at the ambience of the dining establishment and even flying vermin decided to take its business elsewhere.

  Out back, electrical towers ran through the adjacent empty lot and up and over a hill. The kind of power lines Godzilla ate for lunch every couple of years in the movies. Of course, they stopped making those movies back in the Eighties when that real life giant dinosaur undersea lizard monster ate most of the population of Japan, including the emperor, and leveled Tokyo. Bad taste. But I’m sure I wasn’t alone when I still thought of Godzilla every time I saw electrical towers. Now, thanks to Molokai, I had something new to worry about: that just thinking something like that might make me a jerk on the level of Harvey Waters. Which meant that after I died I could look forward to a trip south to a place almost as bad as Guadalajara.

  I put my foot through the rotted porch on the first try. I pulled it back out and stepped lightly around the hole, mindful of every creak with every step.

  As I rang the bell, I thought that it was probably just as well that Doris was on vacation during this caper. She wouldn’t have been happy that I’d taken the case, but it’s not like I had much choice in the matter. I couldn’t refuse the first client that walked through my door in a month, even if he was the embodiment of pure evil. I don’t have a clue how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. I never had the chance to count. Angels don’t come waltzing through the front door of Banyon Investigations.

  The minute I rang the bell, a dog started going nuts in the backyard next door. I’d seen the chain link fence on the way in, and five feet was too low for my tastes. I didn’t know what kind of dog it was, but I could hazard a guess. Shitty neighborhood = pit bull. What with all the attacks in the paper lately, I didn’t want to be victim number thirteen. I’m like any other self-respecting private investigator. I want to get in the paper for excessive DUIs, not as a limping statistic with a dog’s mouth-print on my ass.

  The old woman who finally pulled open the rotting door was five foot two and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Her hair was showroom blue, dulled only by the thick lacquer that gave the permanence to the tight spools of her permanent. She wore a housecoat, sneakers, and a scowl that was hard to spot amongst her facial furrows.

  “Whadda you want?” Beatrice Waters demanded, probing the air between us with a lit cigarette that was mostly ash.

  “Mrs. Waters, my name’s Crag Banyon. I’d like to talk with you a minute about your husband.”

  “He with you?” Beatrice Waters demanded. Just like that, a broom was in her hands and she was sweeping vigorously at the air behind my coat like I was smuggling a piñata. “Get, you. Outta here! Bastard….get out!” The cigarette now dangling from her lower lip made it hard for her to breathe and swat at the same time.

  Only two possibilities here: either the old dame was senile and had forgotten her husband had been dead for nearly fifty years, or dead Harvey had already stopped by the old homestead for a visit with the missus. Two more words and I had my answer.

  “Dang ghost,” the widow Waters complained. “Go and haunt your bookie.”

  “I’m alone, Mrs. Waters,” I said, turning and offering a clear view of nothing but her dilapidated porch and a thousand and one unpopulated bird feeders.

  “Yeah, well…” Without another word, she tossed the broom into the foyer.

  “Your husband stopped by to see you, I gather?”