The Butler Did I.T. Read online

  I fought my way through the crowd and over to the newspaper stand. The old buzzard behind the warped wood counter spotted me angling toward him.

  “Oh, not Banyon, you rotten son of a bitch.” (I was one of the happy few at whose back he didn’t whisper his most cherished epithet.)

  Pops promptly reached below his counter and proceeded to drop one hefty red brick to the top of each pile of that morning’s Gazette, so that by the time I stopped before him he had every newspaper guarded against the thief he insultingly and correctly thought I was. Even though he had failed to catch me in the act in the decades I’d been stealing papers from him, we each delighted in engaging in our regular kabuki dance.

  “Try and steal a paper today and I’ll put your goddamn eyes out,” the old bastard rasped. To punctuate his point he stabbed the air with the stub of an ancient, chewed pencil; the graphite lance of a miniature Lancelot.

  Pops slipped the pencil stub into the torn pocket of the same faded blue flannel shirt he wore to work every day. His worn blue trousers were pulled up nearly to his armpits, held captive by a pair of red suspenders that were yanked so taut he could have plucked out a two-chord rendition of “Oh! Suzanna.” The clothes were shabby, but clean. This was no doubt thanks to Mrs. Pops, his monstrous wife, who’d taken over duties a couple of times when her old man had been under the weather. Mrs. Pops made sure everything about her shriveled spouse -- from his shirt and pants to the thin white strands of parted hair glued to his speckled scalp -- was neatly pressed every day.

  The old guy had probably had a rough life cadging quarters from stiffs like me, and it almost made me feel bad that I’d already stolen a paper and hid it inside my trench coat while he was shoving his pencil nub in his pocket.

  P.I. tip for anybody new to the trade: when you need answers from a source that hates your guts, it always helps to crank up the charm.

  “Did you see anybody dragging my lifeless body into the alley this morning, or did cataracts and senility hallucinate my would-be killers into a goddamn cat?”

  Pops was always on the scene well before dawn, not wanting to disappoint the last of the evening’s armed robbers who regularly held him up for March of Dimes pennies on their way home from a hard night sticking up convenience stores.

  “That was you?” he grunted. “Huhn. None of my business. I got a stand to run. Still, figured it was some drunk opened his fat mouth when he shouldn’t have.” He laughed. “Gotta tell the little woman I was right.”

  “Redefining ‘little’ in order to inaccurately apply it to the gargantuan Mrs. Pops is a criminal misuse of the English language,” I informed him. “The last time your gallstones flared up and she had to take over here, she could barely wedge her terrifying ass inside your kiosk. In fact, she inhaled at one point and nearly busted down all four walls. Everybody on the block ducked and ran for fear of being bombarded with flying nails and soggy Dolly Madison cupcakes.”

  (Again, I was being extra nice re his pig wife because you catch more flies with honey. Which, incidentally, the rapacious maw Pops married sometimes smeared on her gigantic arms just to have something to lick between customers.)

  The old bastard spluttered, during which wordless fuming I fished in my wallet and removed a buck which I waved in front of his crooked nose.

  “This bribe cuts my net worth down by one-eighth,” I said, so that he might understand how deeply my loss would impact my inebriation budget. “Your years of false accusations about me swiping papers are slanderous, and I really ought to hire a drunken lawyer to sue you for every Hustler you’ve got, so I’d appreciate it if you consider this the extortion you’ve made it today rather than rationalizing it into a partial shakedown for whatever it is you imagine I owe you for past theft.”

  Pops eyed the bill with pretty much the drooling avarice I expected from a perennially broke news peddler with a wife who had Hostess on speed dial.

  “Two bucks,” Pops insisted.

  “Fifty cents,” I replied. (The Yankees need to hire me at contract time.) “But that drops down to a quarter in two seconds.”

  “Deal!” Pops snapped.

  He grabbed for the bill, but I pulled it just out of reach of his grasping fingers.

  “I didn’t know it was you, Banyon, honest,” he said. “About four, maybe ten past four. I just opened up. There was two of them. One helped the other carry you out of sight, then came back and stayed at the car while the other was in the alley. Like I say, didn’t know it was you at the time. Couldn’t see faces. Didn’t see nothing good, ’cept when the one from the alley come back out and walked past the light comin’ out the side of the furniture store’s display window . Dressed pretty good. Snazzy, you know? Like one of them real fancy Mafia types who don’t like to get his hands dirty. ’Course, that don’t give you much. Seems like every rotten son of a bitch is dressed good these days.”

  He aimed the prominent mole on his pointed chin in the direction of the tuxedo store, where the bell over the door was in a constant state of chime from the slew of patrons streaming in and out. In comparison, down the street next to the open mouth of the alley in which I’d spent part of the previous night, the older establishment of Fat-Ass Dave’s Plus-Size Furniture Emporium was nearly a customer-free zone. The only patrons beyond the great divide were a single huge woman in gigantic pajamas and her equally huge male offspring in the first stages of juvenile Type 2 diabetes. The pair were unsuccessfully attempting to jam their asses through the double-wide front doors.

  “What kind of car were they driving?” I asked.

  “Ah, now that one I know,” Pops said. “Rolls Royce. Couldn’t make out the color, so don’t ask. Dark’s all I can tell you. Every dark color looks black under these newfangled streetlights they got now. Anyway, I know it was a Rolls. Don’t get many of them round here. You’re moving up in the world, you rotten son of a bitch.”

  In fact, I was not moving up but away from Pops, his sewer breath, and his warped newspaper stand with the peeling green paint and forty-year-old porno rags.

  “Hey, Banyon, you rotten son of a bitch,” Pops said before I took two steps. “What about my four bits?”

  I patted my pockets for change, but came up empty. I took the buck with which I’d opened negotiations and tore it straight up Washington’s mug, handing the slightly larger half of the bill to the old newsvendor and stuffing the other half in my pocket.

  “Keep the change,” I said, offering a magnanimous wave.

  My memory of the previous night was virtually nonexistent, and at that moment I had no idea who in a Rolls Royce I might have pissed off.

  Genius moments come to those who don’t try to force them, so I put my attempted murder out of what remained of my rice pudding brain. As a distraction, I slipped the Gazette from inside my trench coat, shaking it open as I walked away from the kiosk in order to check to make sure I was not, in fact, listed amongst the obituaries.

  Behind me, Pops screamed bloody murder, and the hurled brick that narrowly missed the back of my head managed to wipe out a bald, middle-aged snob who had just exited the tuxedo joint hauling a plastic garment bag over his shoulder. There wasn’t a lot of blood, but the guy did go down for the count, and suddenly there was a lot more yelling out in the street than from one irate newsvendor.

  “Rotten son of a bitch got in the way!” I could hear Pops angrily shouting over the crowd, in the closest facsimile of an apology a perpetually choleric bastard like him would likely be able to muster on the witness stand for his manslaughter trial.

  According to the paper I wasn’t dead, which was a bit of a disappointment. But I like to think positive so I hoped that would change by tomorrow’s edition.

  Somewhere at my back, Pops still yelled, while somewhere nearby I was surprised to already hear the sound of an approaching ambulance. Some busybody pedestrian who’d never seen somebody hit in the head with a brick by an irate newspaper peddler before must have panicked and called 911.

  You can usually measure the arrival of city rescue equipment by tearing months off a calendar in slow-motion while watching your compound fracture heal, so I figured the crew must already have been in the neighborhood. It turned out to be a private ambulance from Holy Mackerel University Hospital. The white-and-red bone wagon screamed to a stop at the edge of the crowd, which packed the street around the possibly-dead guy in front of the tux shop, and so prevented the ambulance from parking any closer to the newsstand than the mouth of the alley in which I’d spent the night.

  A pair of attendants in white jumped out. Both of them warily eyed the crowd that encircled Pops’ hurled-brick victim. Rather than wade into the mess, they grabbed the one schmuck on the street sauntering in the direction opposite the newsstand.

  “Can we help you, sir?” the smaller of the two ambulance attendants asked the schmuck in question, namely yours truly.

  His much larger, utterly silent companion clenched a huge hand so hard on my arm that my bicep felt like a toothpaste tube squeezed up the middle. I checked to make sure Crest and plasma wasn’t spurting from my fingertips.

  “Unless you’re carrying an IV bag of Johnny Walker, I’m stuck getting loaded the old-fashioned way,” I replied. “Your patient is the poor slob lying next to the garment bag on the sidewalk back there. You can’t miss him. He’s got a dent shaped like a brick in the back of his scalp. Watch out for the newsvendor. He couldn’t miss him either, and he’s got a dozen more bricks to heave. And if you’ve ever seen his wife you’d know he’s got nothing to lose except a thousand pounds in the divorce.”

  The two of them wouldn’t let me go. Four eyes were trained on the top of my head. The two of them very slowly lowered their chins as they followed the path of a cool trickle that was suddenly running d
own my forehead and alongside my nose.

  “You’re bleeding, sir,” the smaller of the two EMTs pointed out. Unlike the bodybuilding goon who still held my arm in a vise-like grip, the talkative one was short, wiry, and had darting eyes which seemed to look at everything other than me when he talked.

  “Proof of life,” I told them, offering an accompanying resigned shrug. “We’re all stuck with it for now.”

  I tried pulling away, but at first the big goon wouldn’t let go. It took a nod from the little ambulance attendant to get the behemoth to return me the use of my arm.

  The very large monster in white grabbed a plastic box from the back of the ambulance and without a word began parting the crowd at my back pretty much the same way a 9.8 Richter scale earthquake parts tectonic plates.

  “You really should get that wound looked at, sir,” the smaller guy insisted. He had a plastic case in his hand as well. He gave me a nod of professional concern, then darted after his gorilla pal before the gap in the crowd could slam shut.

  I wasn’t carrying a handkerchief, since I would no more put something I blew my nose into back in my pocket than I’d mix a batch of scrambled eggs in my pants.

  I knew when I’d awakened in the alley that I was bleeding, but I had no idea how bad it was. I located a couple of bar napkins which failed to do even an adequate job soaking up the fresh fountain of blood that was bubbling like lava preceding a Mount St. Helens-like eruption from a wide gash I hadn’t realized was in the top of my head.

  Ordinary, I didn’t worry too much about head wounds, which everybody knows bleed like a bastard. But I had spent a lifetime raising my blood-alcohol level to the point where the scales had finally tipped in favor of the latter, and there was no telling how much precious Seagram’s I was losing through the hole in my scalp. If the pressure in my veins changed too rapidly I’d be locked for weeks in a hyperbaric chamber flooded with cheap gin, which might seem like heaven but who would I get to wheel the goddamn contraption through the turnstiles at the dog track?

  I held my precious fedora far back from the action in order to spare it the grisly scene of its once cozy home. Making certain that my worthless, sopped napkins were clamped firmly in place, I staggered confidently past the parked ambulance and stumbled merrily off down the block.

  CHAPTER 2

  The plastic chairs looked like they’d been fished from the rubbish behind Burger King. They’d been bolted to the floor, so for some incomprehensible reason somebody clearly thought the time and expense of securing them in place was preferable to a thief walking off with them, an act that would only have improved the room’s ambiance.

  There was, in fact, nothing about the waiting room that wouldn’t have been made better by a pack of criminals absconding with absolutely everything.

  There was a wobbly little table in the corner at which kids could begin to become inured to a lifetime of disappointment and depression. The five crayons were busted nubs -- all yellow -- and the coloring books were old Car and Driver magazines. For more advanced play was a lidless cigar box that contained a block, a jack and a dead cricket.

  The grimy carpet looked like the parking lot of a supermarket after a traveling carnival pulls up stakes, except I was pretty sure whatever my shoe was stuck to wasn’t cotton candy. The wall art was generic mug shots of giant ticks threatening to murder me with Lyme disease, as well as close-ups of syphilitic chancres that made getting exsanguinated by an army of ticks seem infinitely more appealing than the fun that rarely but sometimes eventuated in syphilitic chancres.

  The whole joint stunk like the smoky backroom of a pool hall. The tobacco stench was so overpowering that it managed to thoroughly saturate every atom in the dump, from yellow crayon nubs to cheap plastic seats to bloodsucking insect portraits to, I presumed, every cell in any immunocompromised sap too stupid to haul his injured carcass to a less secondhand carcinogenic environment.

  A closed door in the corner was so battered it looked like the night janitors used it for midnight toboggan races down the cellar stairs before hanging it back up at six a.m. quitting time. That was assuming a janitor had ever been spotted within a hundred miles of the office, which rare species sighting probably would have made it into one of the hundred year-old National Geographics on the wobbly table at my elbow, like a giraffe being discovered in flagrante with a happily married penguin at the South Pole.

  A sign on the door silently screamed “PRIVATE” at the top of its lungs at the empty waiting room.

  Behind the dirty, warped and cracked veneer of the closed door I heard the muffled sound of a human being in the midst of a coughing jag that sounded like it wouldn’t end until a set of lungs was embedded in the wall like Civil War cannonballs.

  A different door opened, and a monster in white who was huge even by fat-nurse standards waved a clipboard at a waiting room that was entirely empty but for one bleeding P.I stuck to carpet and chair two feet away from her flabby elbow.

  “Bunion, Craig?” she shouted, nearly putting out my eye with the corner of the clipboard and my eardrum with her honking trombone bellow. “You,” she snapped before I had a chance to open my mouth. “Are you Bunion, Craig?”

  “I’m Banyon, Crag,” I corrected. “I’m not surprised you don’t remember, since I only told you when I showed up, wrote it over at the check-in window, and printed and signed it a hundred times on that pile of paperwork you fork-lifted out to me. What’s more, it’s been my name the other million times I’ve been to this office. Since I suspect I’m your disgraced quack employer’s only patient, you’d think you could keep track.”

  Suspicious, porcine eyes consulted her clipboard and the ream of paperwork I’d filled out when I arrived an hour before, bleeding to death, at the dingy medical office.

  “Hmph,” she grunted, her tone making clear that she was pretty sure I had gotten my own name wrong fifty times that morning, as well as every other time I’d visited the office in the past year. “Whatever. The doctor will see you now, Craig.”

  I realized I was no longer woozy when I got to my feet, which was always a disappointment since I put so much effort into it.

  My blood-soaked bar napkins had given up the ghost en route at exactly the time that I’d begun to regret not catching a lift to the hospital with the Holy Mackerel University ambulance crew. Luckily, a city ambulance had raced up just when I needed it. Unluckily, it had raced right past me, along with a couple of black-and-whites. The ambulance and cop cars tore off down the road, presumably having been 911 summoned to collect the SOB Pops had felled with a brick. It was unsurprising to me that a dead bastard lying on the sidewalk at Pops’ newsstand would rate two ambulances to my zero. I cheered myself with the knowledge that my odds of meriting at least one ambulance would increase dramatically if I only took the initiative to drop dead, which had seemed like a foregone conclusion at that point.

  Once I had arrived at the doctor’s office, I’d been forced to try to staunch the flow of blood from the wound in my head with a page torn from a 1973 Life magazine. An ancient Virginia Slims ad was doing yeoman’s work holding my brains in as I followed the fat nurse through the door and into a narrow hallway.

  The nurse led me to and abandoned me in Examination Room 4, which was four times as many examination rooms than the worst medical practice on the planet needed.

  My trench coat had miraculously managed to avoid being bled on, and I’d successfully kept my fedora out of the line of blood-spattered fire. Their safety was always of paramount concern to me, and I carefully hung them on a hook on the back of the door before taking a seat on the exam table.

  My physician arrived twenty minutes later, half in the bag and with a Marlboro from which she’d busted off the filtered end dangling from her lower lip.

  “I’m not sewing you up for nothing again, Banyon,” announced Dr. Charlotte Cheese in lieu of anything remotely compassionate for the patient she’d left bleeding to death for nearly an hour and a half, from front door to exam room. She temporarily peeled the butt from her lipstick in order to spit a few flakes of tobacco at the floor.

  The thumb, index and middle fingers of her right hand were deeply discolored a sickly yellow-brown that looked like her jaundice had caught leprosy. As she weaved ever-so-slightly in place, she gave me a superior glare with a pair of bloodshot eyes that might have belonged to any lifetime bar floozy.