Gascoyne Read online

  “Oh please,” he says as if he’s carrying a big bowl and God knows what in his gloved hands, “we have not anything else to do.”

  About then I think I detect a slight foreign accent, sounds German.

  “But you will get your gloves dirty,” I say.

  “We have others.”

  I smell something fishy but it’s pretty hard talking fast when you’ve got a flat tire underneath you and wondering what they’re carrying all those gloves around for.

  “We even have a pair for you,” he adds.

  About then I really begin to smell a rat and the thought hits me pretty hard and clear that you wear gloves to do a dirty job so you don’t get your hands dirty and that job wasn’t changing my tire.

  “What size?” I ask to stall a little.

  “All sizes,” he says.

  The Porsche’s exhaust goes punk-punk-punk-ta-punk and I try to think of a fast way out of this one.

  “You O’Mallollolly’s boys?” I ask.

  Feather looks at me kind of funny and scratches his chin and mumbles something to Glovesies next to him. Glovesies shrugs.

  “Never heard of him,” Feather says to me which pretty well throws me off my saddle.

  “Okay you guys just what do you want?” I ask.

  “To change your tire,” says Feather.

  “No thanks, I’ll do it myself,” I say as menacingly as I can, which isn’t tame.

  “As you wish,” says Feather with a shrug and then he throws the tin can into gear and just then I remember I haven’t got a wheel wrench.

  “Hey wait a minute!” I yell.

  He stops the car and backs up.

  “Say do you suppose I could borrow your wheel wrench for a couple of minutes?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says and starts getting out.

  “But no sudden moves,” I say and let the tip of the gun barrel show above the windowsill.

  He doesn’t say anything to that one and opens up the hood and pulls out a tool kit and slips out the wheel wrench and closes the hood.

  “Just drop it on the ground there,” I say.

  He does that and climbs back into the Porsche.

  “Okay now scram,” I say. “I’ll leave the thing here for you for when you come back.”

  He gives me a nice little smile and off they go with a shudder and drive down the road about two hundred yards and then pull over to the side and stop, which sort of pisses me off, some people just don’t know when they’re not wanted around here.

  I slip the gun into my pants pocket and slide out the right door and go around to the trunk where I swing down the continental tire kit which doesn’t have a tire in it and unlock the trunk and pull out the spare and jack. I cart all of this around to the front and slip the jack under the front bumper and pump away which is a hell of a lot of work and I swear that one of these days I’m going to get a chauffeur to do this sort of thing. I get the jack up and the tire off and slip on the spare which seems to have enough air in it and tighten everything up and let her down and pile the stuff back into the trunk including the wheel wrench which I decide to keep for all the trouble those jokers are causing me.

  Back in the saddle again I feel pretty pooped from all the exercise and think maybe I came close to overdoing it that time, got to watch that. I slip the thing into drive and bounce over a couple of rocks and head back for town. As I round the bend I can see the Porsche making a U-turn and now I wish badly I’d taken a couple of potshots at their tires. It only takes them about a minute to get back on my tail, damn.

  About then Chester calls.

  “Say boss we’ve been giving that number—”

  “Hang on a minute Chester, I want you to check out the license number of a fairly new Porsche,” and I give him the number of my friends behind, “and find out whatever else you can about the car, the bastards are following me.”

  “Following you?”

  “That’s right Chester.”

  “Serious. O’Mallollolly’s boys?”

  “To tell you the truth I’m not sure,” I say.

  “Okay, just a second boss.”

  I can hear him relaying the number into another phone.

  “Okay boss,” he says.

  “One other thing before I forget it Chester, and that’s O’Mallollolly’s limousine which has been towed down to Rex Auto Wrecks where I think Ralph ought to be able to pick it up for a song. All right, what else is new?”

  “I’m pretty sure that number you gave me to memorize is a Geneva bank account number.”

  “Which bank?” I ask.

  “Well that’s what we don’t know. If we can find that out we’re all set.”

  “Go through Roughah’s papers with a fine-tooth comb.”

  “Will do, boss. Now we found out that a guy by the name of Jonas Smythe has rented a giant tree sloth costume from Mardi Gras Costume Rentals on upper Ninth Street twice before and has got it rented this very moment. They said he paid thirty-seven dollars to have the hole in the chest repaired with genuine giant tree sloth fur flown directly in from New Guinea or somewhere. I’ve got Jimmy posted outside to see what he looks like when he brings it back.”

  “Good thinking Chester.”

  “Now I’m beginning to get the impression from Mark that there’s some sort of hitch in the freeway deal.”

  “What?”

  “He’s not talking yet, just a hint.”

  “Mmm,” I say.

  “You know Mark.”

  “Yes. Okay now Chester what do you think the chances are of snatching Roughah’s body out of the Police Morgue?”

  “Why boss?”

  “O’Mallollolly’s going to make the inquest say suicide no matter what so the only way we can prove he was murdered is to get the body to the right people.”

  “Right boss. I think Subcommissioner MacGanymede’s got a foothold in Cold Storage and I’ll ask him what can be done.”

  “Do that Chester.”

  I hang up and the Porsche is still on my tail which really makes me burn, and not just because they follow so goddamn close. I wonder who the hell they think they are, tailing me around since it’s none of their business where I go and what I do and I wonder who told them it was. If O’Mallollolly wants to know where I am, he’s got his ways just like I’ve got mine and at least when I have Gifford tail O’Mallollolly he knows how to do it tactfully, though I am wondering what happened to him. Well, I think, it must be O’Mallollolly’s boys in the Porsche because there isn’t anybody else in town who’d do this sort of thing, and maybe he’s doing it for a joke and if so I decide it’s up to me to have the last laugh. I get an idea and call back Chester.

  “Chester I’m switching over to the Kaiser in about ten minutes. Leave a message for Marge at the Wolverine Lodge.”

  “Okay boss.”

  In a minute I turn left onto the east end of Mirindaranda Road and take my time with no fancy traffic and signal work so they won’t lose me because they’ve got to be close if my little plan’s going to work. We roll down Mirindaranda at a fair clip and then I take it real slow on the right turn onto Songtongob Avenue where I try to lengthen the gap to about a half block, but not enough to trap them in the tricky signals. Again I take a slow right at SWEETE OLDE GRANDMA’S SUGARY PANCAKE HOMERESTAURANT onto Kidney Street and go two blocks and turn left down the alley that runs back of Marge’s place and race up that as fast as I can to the next street, where I make a quick right turn just as the Porsche enters the alley.

  I whip the Nash around in a U-turn and head back into the alley with my headlights off. I cinch up the safety belt and shove the thing in low and tromp on the accelerator and point the nose on a collision course at the little silver Porsche. Quick, though, the Porsche catches on that I’m running him down and stops and puts it into reverse and starts backing out of the narrow alley. I’m getting close and the Nash is up to thirty and I turn the headlights on high and go BLAAOUK! with the air horn which puts the Porsche in such a
panic they back into a phone pole and become a sitting duck. Crash and that’s the end of the Porsche and probably the death blow for my trusty Nash too.

  I unfasten the seat belt and spring the door open and from what I can see as I slide out it’s going to take my friends a little while to pry themselves out of their tin can in good health or bad. I hotfoot it down the alley to Marge’s place and up her back stairs, I hope without being seen or followed, and then unlock her back door with the key she always leaves under a couple of rounds of that artificial plastic dogshit you can buy at your local novelty store.

  Inside the kitchen her cat is about to faint or explode so I stop and open a LARGE EXPENSIVE-SIZE CAN of PUSSY YUM-YUM VITAMINIZED CAT FOOD FOR CAT GOURMETS which stinks to high heaven, but boy does it ever sell. Then I run through the living room and down the stairs and let myself quietly out the front door. The coast is clear, but then it’s pretty damn dark out now.

  I slip across the lawn to the ’55 Kaiser supercharged and am about to climb in when I notice the left front tire is flat as a pancake, which irritates me pretty badly because it happens to be a BIG DADDY LIFETIME EVERLASTING RETREAD about a month old and they’re usually good for at least six months. Today is a bad day for tires I tell myself and get the tire pump out of the trunk. I unscrew the cap and blow that out and screw on the pump nozzle good and tight and start pumping. It’s a lot of work and if I had the choice I’d change a tire any day to pumping one up but it so happens the street is really too dark to consider that even though I’m pumping against the theory that the tire’s got a slow leak and not that some teen-ager’s given it a couple of jabs with his knife.

  In spite of not being used to this kind of exercise, I do get the thing pumped up and when I kick it it sounds about like the others, so I figure I’m okay. I stash the pump in the trunk, thoroughly expecting now the five sardines to come around the corner on foot and ask me for a ride, they’re that type. No signs, however, and I climb inside the beast which smells like an old couch somebody’s turned water on, but then the thing has been shut up and sitting in the sun for weeks now and the fog at night. I fire her up and after one hell of a lot of coughing and missing and smoking out the rear, she finally smooths out and acts like she’s ready to be moved, so off we go.

  About then I realize the exercise has made me pretty hungry, but not for another Hershey bar, which I don’t have anyway. I turn left at the first corner and hit the BEAU CHATEAUX CITY ESTATE HOMES TRACT and take the main street wandering through, lined with trees illuminated by various colors of ground floodlights except green, ending up at the vast sprawl of YOUR LOCALLY OWNED AND RUN BONANZA-BANQUETTE SUPERMARKET. As a matter of fact, it isn’t at all locally owned since I don’t live around these parts and of course in a neighborhood like B. C. CITY ESTATE HOMES nobody owns anything and nobody knows who owns what they don’t which is almost everything.

  I steer the Kaiser into the huge floodlighted parking lot which is half the size of the largest runway of the municipal airport and roll along slowly toward the main entrance. There’s not one leaf of vegetation on the lot and most people notice that on the long hike from the car to entrance and think what a nice thing it would be to have trees around, and so we very obligingly surround the main entrance with the BONANZA-BANQUETTE GREEN OASIS NURSERY where they can buy a whole forest to take home if they want which some of them need since the B. C. CITY ESTATE HOMES were sold without one leaf of vegetation on them also.

  I dock the Kaiser next to the entrance in the G space and step out and walk through the OASIS NURSERY into the main supermarket and around the snack bar that’s been put in the way to siphon off the kids, and through the soda fountain with multicolored’ liquids sloshing around noisily in large conspicuous roundish transparent plastic containers that’s supposed to make everybody drool who’s been out on that parking lot.

  Things are pretty crowded tonight whatever day of the week it is, and I push my way through the shoppers and turnstiles and look for the canned fish section which I can never remember where it is, somewhere over in the corner I think. I grab a shopping cart not because I need one but because I don’t want to give people the idea that it’s respectable to go through a supermarket without one, and if you’ve got a cart you’ve pretty well got to put something in it because you know how much they bounce and rattle when they’re empty. Also I want to try out this new kind of cart we’ve got and so I head for the conspicuous EXPENSIVE FANCY GOURMET FOODS AND DELICACIES DEPARTMENT and trundle along at an average fast shopper’s speed. As soon as I hit FANCY FOODS I feel the almost imperceptible drag in the cart wheels which is caused by a magnetic field in the floor actuating tiny magnets which push small abrasive pads against the cart wheels and thus slow the cart and shopper down to a slightly slower than normal browsing rate which is often enough to drag the shopper down to the average buying stance, which is characterized by an instant of total immobility and silence and a reflective look on the face immediately preceding the dancelike gesture which removes the can or whatever from the shelf and drops it into the cart while at the same time already moving on to the next item, or cash register.

  I wheel through that and around little traffic jams of shoppers and think the magnets are working well, I was a bit skeptical before. The fish department I find around the corner in the next aisle and spot the little stack of cheapest kippers of some sort and pick up a can and make sure it’s got a key on it and then head toward CRACKERS where I pick up a big box of Ritz. That’s all I want, so I wheel my way down the aisle and turn left toward the six-items-or-less checkout counter which is a hell of a lot less fancier than the thirty-five checkout counters for more than six items. I roll the cart up and pull out my Ritz crackers and kippers and slide them over to Miss 285 who’s clearly the real bitch type we want for six-items-or-less. She claws at the cash register a second and then looks up at me with that special cheap bastard look.

  “Anything else, honey?” she asks.

  “Nope.”

  She gives the cash register a last rabbit punch and I slip out a Presidential Voucher pad and write one out for seventy-nine cents and hand it to her. She looks at it and compares the signature with the master form and stamps it and gives me back the carbon and starts reaching for the next six-items-or-less load not even bothering to say thanks, of course she isn’t supposed to.

  Good girl that one, I think as I hike back to the car, more of her and we’ll have six-items-or-less completely stamped out; what doesn’t pay ought not to exist, as I always say.

  I go out the automatic doors which puts me right by the Kaiser, and there’s this checkstand boy sweeping up a bag of rice somebody dropped who watches me go over to the car and step in and as I put the key in the ignition he walks over too.

  “Hey,” he says, “you’d better get this wreck out of here damn quick, this space is reserved for GASCOYNE.”

  “It’s all right sonnyboy.”

  “You think? Just get your ass out of here—”

  “It’s all right I said, I’m GASCOYNE.”

  He takes a look at the driver’s license I shove under his nose but I can tell he’s the skeptical kind and I don’t have the time to give him the whole proof. I don’t get around to these places very often so this sort of thing is common enough. I start up the Kaiser and race the engine to clear it out and shove it in reverse and take my driver’s license back. He gives me a mean look for his young age and I pull out of there.

  I cruise through the parking lot steering with one hand and ripping the box of Ritz crackers open with the other and then I bounce onto the street and turn left and pull over to the curb to get the can of kippers open which I can’t quite manage while driving. I slip the key in and twist the thing open and pick out the little fishes and stoke them in one by one wishing I’d got a box of napkins since I’m out of them. Chewing away I throw a look back at the BONANZA-BANQUETTE which is actually pretty new and think we did a pretty good job on making the thing look three times more expen
sive than it was to build. We want to make people afraid not to shop there and so we give them the idea that if they don’t the thing’ll go bankrupt and there’ll be an economic depression just around the corner for the whole neighborhood and pretty soon the whole country. Sales went up sharply last week when we spread the rumor the thing wasn’t making money, but the truth is the only people not making money are the six neighborhood grocers we put into retirement while getting a fantastic bargain on their unsold goodies.

  I finish up the kippers and toss the can out the window and take on some more crackers as I get the Kaiser rolling again, missing a bit more than normal. All of a sudden I wonder where the hell I’m going and feel a little drowsy which is what happens every time I eat dinner though my memory’s something that sort of comes and goes. There’s this Roughah and O’Mallollolly thing to be cleared up, I know that, but I’m just too tired to think of how far I’ve got.

  Nothing else to do, so I pull back over to the curb and turn off the lights and ignition and push the seat back and hit the hay.

  I wake up about ten minutes later and pull the seat forward and turn on the ignition and lights and put the Kaiser into drive. Then I give Chester a ring.

  “Hello Chester?”

  “No boss, this is Steve.”

  “Where the hell’s Chester?”

  “Went out for a late night snack,” he says.

  “Hell I told him to have his food brought in, what’s got into him?”

  “Don’t ask me, boss.”

  “Goddamn I’m asking you, pinhead.”

  “Sorry I don’t know, boss. He didn’t say anything else.”

  “That’s better. He didn’t tell you where Nadine Corell is right now?”

  “No boss and I can’t make out a word of his shorthand.”

  “Damn!”

  I hang up thinking Chester above all ought to know better than to do something like that but there’s not a thing I can do about it at the moment so I decide to run over to the Roughah digs on the chance of finding the Widow Roughah there and seeing if she has anything new to say. I put on the supercharger and whiz up through the VIEWORAMA RIDGE FAMILY HOMES WITH GARDENS TRACT and then down to Mirindaranda Road where I turn right heading straight for the Roughah digs. Traffic’s getting lighter every minute and I always look forward to the time when there’s nobody else on the street but a few cops and street cleaners and drunks.