Shoot the Moon Read online

  In the outer office was an elf working at a small desk piled high with stale mail. The goddamn nerve center of my impressive P.I. organization.

  “Good morning, Mr. Crag!” enthused Mannix, my trusted assistant who was the precise polar-opposite, all-around good guy that I absolutely was not.

  “Hey, Mannix. You took up the mail.”

  The elf clicked his tongue against his pointed teeth and offered a look that was simultaneously both guilty and stubborn.

  “The bills have to get paid, Mr. Crag,” the elf insisted. Judging by the pile of torn-open envelopes spilling out of the trash can and the stack of neat envelopes on the desk before him, the topmost of which bore my return address label, it was clear he and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on a more recherché level than our appreciable height disparity.

  “That’s only because you’ve chosen to play the game according to the arbitrary fiduciary rules society has imposed upon you, Mannix,” I informed him. “For a change of pace, let your hair down and tear up the water bill. It’ll set you free.”

  “It’s already been paid,” Mannix slowly replied, as if he was talking to a bank robber who was threatening to execute the hostages if his demands for a limo and a private jet weren’t met. His little arm ever-so-carefully snaked around to guard the pile of bills he’d already stamped in preparation for posting.

  I shrugged. “I tried to be your William Wilberforce,” I said. “Where’s Doris?”

  My secretary wasn’t in her customary chair, which was more the custom than her uncustomarily parking her curvaceous ass in said customary chair.

  “She was in this morning, Mr. Crag,” Mannix assured me, his arm still wrapped around my mail like a prison inmate protecting his tray of creamed chipped beef on toast. “She started screaming and crying after about five minutes. I tried to ask what was wrong, but I couldn’t understand her. I offered to go with her to the hospital, but she just kept sobbing and shaking all over like somebody died. And then she just left.” He gave a concerned roll of his rounded little shoulders. “She wasn’t bleeding or anything. I tried calling her house, but no one answered. I thought her mother might be at home.”

  “Doris’ mother has to return to her coffin every morning by dawn or she’ll dissolve into dust, and the old battleaxe never sprung for phone service inside the box,” I explained as I took a cursory glance around my secretary’s desk.

  I discovered the source of Doris’ emotional outburst on what was ostensibly her desk, even though she visited it so infrequently that twice in the past year she had accidentally parked her keister behind a desk in the carpet cleaning company downstairs.

  The object looked like a garishly painted Frito with a little diamond bell hanging off the end. It was, in fact, one of Doris’ ludicrous fingernail extensions, which she bought with the money I didn’t pay her on the weekly salary she didn’t earn. The cover on her typewriter was half-off, so I assumed she’d snagged the little plastic nail halfway through the one function she performed at what she laughably referred to as work, and then ran blubbing from the room to arrange an emergency fingernail appointment.

  I showed the press-on source of Doris’ outburst to Mannix before I dropped the phony nail in the trash.

  “I think we can safely say that this trauma will put Doris out of commission for a good, solid three days,” I informed Mannix. “I know this only because recovery time for an actual busted fingernail four years ago was a week. I think we can cut that in half for the Elmer’s glue variety. Of course, I’m not aware of the cost of fingernail glue, plastic fingernails and silver glitter, all variables that could add weeks to her pain, suffering and inability to get her ass in here to work. If you need me, I’ll be in my office contemplating taking a swan dive off the fire escape.”

  I was making a beeline for my office door when Mannix announced the only thing that could darken the gloom of an already mildly miserable morning.

  “You have a client meeting this morning,” the elf chirped with delighted enthusiasm. “I scheduled it for ten o’clock.”

  I glanced at the clock on the wall. Four minutes to doomsday. I momentarily contemplated escape, but then my slumping shoulders and I all resigned ourselves to the fact that hanging out a P.I. shingle meant occasionally having to deal with the consumer side of the capitalist business equation. Thank you, goddamn Adam Smith.

  “Is it the archbishop?” I wearily queried.

  Out of respect for the esteemed religious figure in question, Mannix straightened up in his tiny little chair. “No, sir, Mr. Crag,” he announced, shooting a worried glance at the telephone, which I could see he suddenly thought was not polished enough for such an important call. “She didn’t say who she was. Do you expect the archbishop to call?”

  I took the paper I’d swiped from Wino Ray out from under my armpit and glanced at the top story of the missing St. Regent’s cemetery lawn one last time.

  “No,” I said, with a little disappointment.

  “Maybe,” I amended, with not a shred of optimism.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, which will be the epitaph carved into my headstone at the aforementioned church boneyard.

  I used my heel to shove the newspaper deep in the trash, stuffing it down amongst the empty envelopes Mannix had spent the morning feeding into the basket.

  I hung my trench coat and fedora on the rack in the corner and trudged into my office. A morose and steady rain splattered the window at my back, sliding molasses-slow rivulets of dirt from the unwashed panes in the direction of the fire escape.

  I was slumped behind my desk when, three minutes later, Mannix ushered in a crush of clients so excited about retaining my services that they didn’t have the decency to repress their enthusiasm and not show up sixty goddamn seconds early.

  Let me say right off the bat that I’ve got nothing against Gypsies. Banyon Investigations is a fragile enough corporate entity as it is without an army of P.C.-driven anti-defamation lawyers kicking in my front door and pawing through my desk drawers. (Lawyers always know where to ferret out the booze.) Still, despite my aforementioned love of Gypsies as wonderful human beings, I did take a quick inventory of my fingers to make sure that if they wanted to shake hands I got the full set back.

  The group consisted of five men and one ancient dame. The men were dressed in very old Old World suits that consisted of vests and three-quarter length short pants. The suits were three sizes too small and a hundred years out of date. The fabric was some kind of velour dyed in dark maroons and blues, but the shirts were starched white and adorned with black buttons, and the high collars were wrapped in those huge, droopy, Euro-swish bowties which as a bold fashion statement shouted: I am an asshole.

  The men doffed their black hats to demonstrate their deep respect for someone they needed something from. The hats looked like they’d mugged them off some naive Amish carpenters which, being Gypsies, they probably had.

  The one dame in their midst wore a babushka, a ridiculous layered peasant skirt, and a multicolored blouse with sleeves so poufy she could have hidden eight decks of cards -- all aces -- up them, along with two stolen chickens and half the silverware in my office if I didn’t keep an eye on her. (Also, if I owned any silverware, which I don’t.)

  “Mr. Crag Banyon!” the dame, who was their spokesman, announced.

  She gave me the Barbara Bush bug-eyes that lent urgency to every syllable, and intoned the sepulchral shit out of my, frankly, boring-as-hell name. She waved her arms in the air to stress the importance of this meeting. Thirty cheap tin bracelets clattered from her bony wrists and negotiated a straight path up her even bonier forearms to her boniest-of-all elbows.

  “First off, I don’t need my driveway resealed,” I informed the clutch of horse thieves. “Second off, tell your colleagues to return the merchandise they are currently swiping while they think my attention is diverted by your ugly mug.”

  The old Gypsy crone snapped something under her breath to the five men, who in the twenty seconds they’d been in my office had managed to pilfer pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down on the other side of the room.

  Caught red-handed, the men did not display so much as a microsecond of guilt as they proceeded to redecorate my office with all the photos, ashtrays, books, mugs, sofa cushions, files, spare shoes and radiator they’d somehow managed to stuff in, up and around their tight-fitting, old-fashioned Gypsy monkey suits.

  “Madame Volga apologizes for her people,” said the old bag who, I presumed, was the third-person dame in question. “We are poor and often misunderstood, and are forced by a society that shuns us to survive in whatever way we can.”

  “It sounds to me like you’re knocking all that stuff, sister,” I warned her. “I take offense. Toss in a cheap suit and a monumental tab at O’Hale’s Bar and what you just described is my choice of lifestyle.”

  It was hard to imagine that Madame Volga hadn’t heard me, given that neither her giant knot of graying black hair nor the kerchief wrapped around it were sufficient to prevent her Dumbo ears from sticking out of the sides of her head like radar dishes. Or maybe her ears only seemed so big because she had attached a pair of hubcap-sized hoop earrings to lobes that were straining to reach the floor by Gypsy New Year. Whatever was the case, the dame did a spectacular job ignoring me as she produced an old cloth bag that reeked of garlic. She dropped it on my unsuspecting desk.

  “We are in need of your assistance, Mr. Banyon,” Madame Volga mysteriously informed me as she rummaged up to her homely elbows inside the depths of her bag.

  She produced two crystal balls, an Arby’s coupon book and, finally, a photograph. This final item she slapped triumphantly down before me.

  It was black and white, it was a photo of a man, and jud
ging by his attire it looked to have been taken at least a hundred years ago. Then I looked up at the collection of fashion anachronisms who were currently stealing the contents of my corner water cooler by pouring it in their pockets and I realized it could have been taken last week.

  “See, here’s the thing, lady. I’m at a point in my life where it’s a massive strain on my few remaining brain cells to pretend to be interested in anything that doesn’t get me loaded, so let’s cut to the chase. Who?” I asked. “And while we’re at it, why?”

  “Who?” Madame Volga cried, feigning deep insult. “You ask who?”

  “If I take it back, will you get the hell out and we can all forget this unfortunate encounter ever occurred, including the part where your friend over there just stuffed an entire stack of Dixie cups up his sleeve?”

  But Madame Volga wasn’t having any. She raised her bugging-out eyes to the yellowed ceiling tiles. “That is our king!” she cried. “The king of the Gypsies!”

  She waved her scrawny arms in the air and managed to elicit some forced awe from her five companions with the damp trousers.

  “I can see this means a great deal to you,” I told both the woman who was faking it like a hooker orgasm and her five male pals who were eyeballing what to steal from my office next and didn’t give two apathetic shits about their king. “In ten words or less, I need you to get across to me why it should mean something to me.”

  “Let me first ask this trusted council of elders if they will permit their lowly female spokesperson to speak to you alone,” the old crone said.

  Madame Volga consulted with her five male companions. They didn’t seem to want to let her go it alone, and I got the impression that they’d given her the gig as their mouthpiece with great reluctance. She was sharper than any of them, easily shrewder. You could see it in her eyes that were bright with cunning despite the cataracts, and you could see they were a pack of morons from the dim looks on their faces, the Poland Springs patches on their trousers, and the giant square bulges my sofa cushions were currently making up the jacket backs of three out of five of them.

  Madame Volga might have held a lowlier position in the Gypsy caste system than five old buzzards -- or, indeed, anybody from her tribe with a male chromosomal advantage -- but she was possessed of a persuasive tongue. She got the elders to reassemble my couch and managed to get all five of them to file from my office, the various components of which seemed more or less in the order they had been in when the thieving Gypsy bastards first filed in.

  “Mannix, keep an eye on every paperclip,” I hollered out to my elf assistant. “If, however, our light-fingered guests feel like looting the Maybelline cosmetics counter that is Doris’ desk, they have my blessing, provided they’ve brought along a couple of stolen back belts and a wheelbarrow, since they’d probably bust a vertebra lifting that much mascara and lipstick, and I’m not looking for another lawsuit.”

  “Put that back! Stealing is very naughty!” I heard Mannix’s disembodied voice shouting as the last of the men to leave my office pulled the door shut behind him, which wasn’t easy since he’d stolen the knob.

  Madame Volga and I were alone. She refocused her unnerving Marty Feldman eyeballs on yours truly and flashed a tight smile that consisted of no warmth and a whole bunch of half-rotten incisors. I spoke before she could get out a crooked word.

  “Just a friendly suggestion, lady. If you’re not through just yet with your latest crime wave (and being Gypsies I assume it’s an ongoing adventure), you should steal yourselves a dentist. You can swipe the one down the hallway. His name is Myron Wasserbaum, D.D.S., and as luck would have it he’s an utter incompetent, so nobody but a few TV lawyers with outstanding settlements would miss him.”

  I was pretty much convinced that Madame Volga had selective hearing, since she ignored me yet again and tapped a long, crooked finger at the photograph on my desk.

  “Our king has vanished -- poof! -- Mr. Banyon,” she said, opening palms that had been pressed together in prayer to demonstrate her crooked sovereign’s disappearing act. “One evening he was in our camp, the next morning he was gone.”

  “I’m not a big fan of missing person cases,” I said. “A lot of people who are missing want to remain that way, and will do anything to maintain their missing-ness, including blowing the heads off nosy private eyes. As kings go, at least according to this blurry crap picture you’re suddenly waving in front of my nose (and, please, stop that), he looks like the kind I’d foment a revolution to overthrow and then assassinate in exile. If you want him back, and I don’t know or care why, I suggest you go to the cops.”

  The gray sheets of her sagging jowls tightened. “That cannot be. We Gypsies are not popular with the police.”

  “I think what you actually mean is that you’re too popular,” said I. “When I was a cop, you were popular in the same way rats are popular with exterminators.”

  Her wrinkled lips puckered, and for a terrified instant I thought she was going to level some Gypsy curse at me or, worse, blow me a kiss. Instead, she curled her mouth up to one side and considered deeply.

  “Look, Banyon, can I level with you?” Madame Volga said. “Those assholes out there don’t have the savvy to talk to a guy like you. Oh, little old ladies that they’re bilking for a few ten spots, sure, but the king did most of their talking to the few people out there who aren’t rubes, and it looks like you might be savvy. You know, they didn’t want to give me this job. I’m a dame, after all.”

  “Technically, yes, but barely,” I pointed out.

  “Hah-hah, fine, whatever,” Madame Volga said. “You’re a real laugh riot. You should take the act to Vegas. In the meantime, the tribe doesn’t give a fat Gypsy shit if we ever see the old skunk again. He’s only king because he won the title in a rigged card game. What we want is what he took with him when he disappeared. Namely, that.”

  She dropped the photograph back to a desk blotter which I was unaware I owned and which Mannix must have picked up for me at Staples. The old crone jabbed her finger back down hard on the picture.

  Behind the half-blurred Gypsy king was a cheap pressboard Woolworth’s stand on which rested what looked like an ancient leather-bound book.

  “Looks expensive,” I said. “You steal it from a museum, a library or a private collection?”

  “That is our bible, Mr. Banyon,” Madame Volga intoned. “It is the most sacred book in the Gypsy world.” She bugged her eyes with such reverence I was afraid they’d pop juice all over my desk.

  I took out my magnifying glass from my top desk drawer to get a better gander at the tome in question.

  “The Big Book of Gypsy Scams,” I said, reading the gilded words embossed in the wrinkled, black leather. I glanced up at the dame sitting across from me. “The title really gives away the whole plot, doesn’t it?”

  “It contains all of our guiding principles,” the old crone said. “I have never read it, of course.” She closed her gray eyelids and wiggled in front of them arthritic fingers adorned with a multitude of cheap rings to demonstrate her unworthiness to read her tribe’s holy book. “We who are not royalty are not permitted to so much as glance at the sacred text. And since our royalty can only be men, it is meant only for the eyes of the king.”

  “And you don’t have any idea where his royal eyes are right now?” I asked.

  Her face fell, which was a pretty impressive feat since I didn’t think that mass of hideously dangling flesh could droop any further.

  “No,” she said. “We need that book more than we need him, Mr. Banyon. Tradition dictates that the king fill us in on the scams and we go out and pull them on the straights. That is the very book from which originated the sacred driveway resurfacing con. Without the book, all we got are the scams we already got, and pretty much everybody under eight-five is already onto us. We need fresh swindles.”

  I was used to catering to lowlifes. Ethics is a four letter word for any down-on-his-luck P.I., and any P.I. who tells you he isn’t down on his luck needs to hold a seminar at the airport Marriott for the rest of us because we’re all doing it wrong. But crooked Gypsy kings and their stolen how-to scam books were on the other side of the ethical red line I’d drawn down the middle of my brain. On the other hand, there wasn’t exactly a horde of clients beating down my front door lately.