CHAPTER 4
THE FLAT TIRE CAPER
Days had gone by since the shrinking nuts case ended and business was damn slow, even for a Monday morning. Of course I don't like working on Mondays anyway, so I usually don't even bother going in to the office until at least Tuesday. Otherwise what's the use of having your own business? A guy has his limits. Hell, by rights I should have still been sleeping, but Elaine, my self-proclaimed business partner and fiancée, had other ideas.
“We need more dough,” she said.
So? What else is new, I figured. Me, I was still basking in the glory of the big check from Grisim. Sure, that was last week, so by now the money was all gone, but it had been good for a few days while it lasted.
Elaine worried about things too much. Her moving into my apartment with me had some other disadvantages too. There was her damn black cat, for one thing. Prince, she called him, not that he paid any attention, but I called him several things more colorful that he didn’t pay any attention to either.
I hate cats. Cats are way too sneaky; they’ve got little unpredictable minds of their own, like women. One minute they’re purring, and you figure you’ve got it made, and the next they’re clawing and biting your ying-yang off.
This morning Elaine and the damn cat woke me up before eight AM (That’s right, I said AM!), without even benefit of coffee or sex. You'd think we were already hitched. She sent me ahead to the office to be on the lookout for new clients while she worked on wedding plans, of all things. Wedding plans! For MY wedding! How the hell was I going to get out of THAT one, I still wanted to know! I’d have to tell her the wedding was off, but then she’d leave me, and I didn’t want that either. I really liked having her around. I was in the throghs of what they call a dilemma.
So there I was, laying back on my fancy new recliner, my new Navy-blue suit covered in black cat hairs, looking out my inner-office doorway through the fancy glass front doors of my fancy new office, watching extra fancy broads parade by. That part was a nice change from my old office building, where the only female traffic on the stairs outside my old office door was old Mrs. Binneman, the piano teacher and landlady. She might have been a real looker about half a century ago, but that was then.
Here there were enough good lookers strutting by to keep me awake and then some, if you catch my drift. I guess that besides broads there might have been some guys walking by the office too, I really wouldn't know.
A couple of times women stopped outside my doors for a few seconds and peeked through the glass, like they were maybe thinking about coming in, but then they made a funny face and walked away like they saw or smelled something they didn't like. With the story in the news about me helping Grisim and my fancy new digs, new clients should have been rolling in like crazy, but it just wasn't happening. It was beginning to bug me. I was having a stretch of bad luck, that’s for sure.
On a hunch I got up and stepped outside to take a quick look in at the office for myself. But no, the new place looked plenty spiffy and smelled fine. The crew had worked all weekend to finish it. The office was all brand-new, wall to wall, the works; worth using almost all the remaining bucks from the shrinking nuts case that I hadn’t blown at the racetrack, no matter what Elaine thought of how I decorated it. (What the hell could a dame know about what MY office should look like anyway?)
As I stood there another woman came strutting along, a spiffy brunette business suited type in her mid-thirties, and not too bad looking either, leg-wise in particular. She stared for a few seconds at my place, shook her head, then with a pained look on her face turned and walked away, but slowly, like she was still thinking it over. That gave me a really good look at her legs, which I liked, but it was money walking away from me too, which I didn’t like.
Maybe that’s what kept my lazy ass from returning to the recliner and sent me after her. "So OK lady, what gives?" I asked, catching up with her. "You need a P-I or don't you?"
"I don't need an agency that can afford a fancy office like that one," she replied. "Besides, it looks way too weird. Paintings of nude women, cars, American Indians, and dogs? Furniture that’s early American and modern and Native American and Chinese or something? Paisley and pink polka-dots and red striped wallpaper? I can’t figure it out, and it makes me sick to my stomach. It’s so upsetting I don't know if I could even stand to walk into the place. But what's it to you?"
Her eyes were a touch bloodshot, like she hadn't slept much lately. In the state she was in she probably couldn't appreciate good art and office design, so I let the goofy criticisms pass.
"I'm Jake Simon," I explained, and we shook hands. Her hand was small, soft and warm. Then she looked me over closely up and down. I like it when broads do that, since I have what it takes and I know it.
She nodded slowly. "Got a cat I see, a cat that sleeps on your suit. A black one, at that. Yes, well, maybe I could afford you after all. You're actually one of the detectives here?" She seemed doubtful. Who can figure women? They don’t understand things the way us guys do.
"Sure-thing. I'm THE detective here. Come on back to my office." Elaine had arranged for the damn sign to say ‘Simon and Simon’ like me were already hitched, or we were copying from the old TV show, that must be why this broad was confused. I opened the glass doors and pointed the lady towards my inner sanctum. "Come on in and make yourself to-home. I don't charge nothing just to talk."
For some reason I was really relived when she took me up on my invite. Sure, she was good looking enough, and I did need some business, but there was something more about her that I couldn’t put my finger on, something odd that drew me to her like a magnet. Besides the usual, I mean. It was a really weird feeling, like I was being pulled into something, like it or not. If I was smart I suppose I would have ran out the damn door and away from her about then, but I guess I wasn’t, because I didn't.
I sat behind my massive new wooden desk, and she sat in front of it, next to the big nifty Chinook totem-pole with the eagles and bears and fish carved into it, and my brand new white fedora hanging tastefully over a bug-eyed fish-head. I had used some of Grisimm's big check to buy a white fedora, since now that I was a top-rung P-I brown wasn't good enough for me. The damned desk blocked my view of her legs, but that couldn't be helped. Next time I got some spare change maybe I'd replace the oak desk with a glass one or something. In my business I meet a lot of broads and it don’t hurt to be able to check out their legs while you’re talking with them.
"You need a divorce?" I guessed. Most of my clients were unhappy wives that needed me to get the goods on their rotten scum-bag hubbies. Women cheated too, of course, but men don’t hardly ever come to a PI for help. No, my livelihood depended on guys acting natural and gals just as naturally acting pissed off, that’s why I figured that I’d always have plenty of business. You can always count on death, taxes, and sin. I planned to bank on the sin part, until the other two took their final toll on me. Besides plenty of booze and sex, that, in a nutshell, was my whole plan for life.
"No, I'm a widow,” she answered. “By the way, you did some work for a friend of mine. Joan Goth?"
I remembered her. Blonde, nice legs, super boobs. "Right. I found her lost doggie. Cute little pooch. Not my usual sort of case of course,” I lied, “but I like to help folks out no matter what the problem is. So she recommended me to you?"
"Actually, she recommended that I didn't come to you. But when I saw your tiny little ad in the yellow pages it stood out for some reason. I felt compelled to look you up. Curiosity maybe, though I do need help from someone."
"Must be my good karma. So what's your problem?"
"You read the newspapers?"
"Sure, practically all the time. I'm a read-o-holic from way-back." I never touch the internet; there's too damn much stupid information on it. "You featured in some rag?"
She nodded her head. "All of them, local and national, for a day or two. My name is Margie Wainwright. I'm a bank manager for the Third National Bank."
<
br /> "I still can't place you."
“Did Grisim mention me?”
“Grisim?”
“John Grisim. You did some kind of work for him last week; I saw your name in the paper. You still working for him?”
“Nope. That case is closed now. A case of bad nuts. And no, he never mentioned you personally, though he did mention some kind of bank trouble. A lot a people work for Grisim, why would he mention you?”
"My tires didn't get slashed."
I laughed. "Say, that's right, that crazy tire slashing thing a week or two back!” Grisim had mentioned it in our first meeting, but hadn’t gotten into details. “Say, how the hell was that done? They ever figure it out?" The car tires of Third National Bank employees and customers in three states had been slashed mysteriously in broad-daylight. The Third National was Grisim’s bank, and this was one of the goofy things Grisim had told we he was worried about. I had almost forgotten that part, probably because shortly after that I was too busy thinking about myself being turkey sized.
After saving his life, Grisim paid me off, so I had never gotten around to checking out his bank funny business. After the final pay-off, my interest in a case is over-with, end of story.
Actually, I had called his office several times, to ask if he had any other jobs for me, but I couldn’t get through to him. Billionaires can get pretty busy at times, I supposed.
This tire business was really weird, all those tires getting slashed that way and no witnesses. More mysterious yet, even all the spare tires had been slashed, although most of them were locked away in trunks at the time. The same thing had happened to cars of all the Bank employees that weren’t even at work. It happened at schools and in food-store parking lots and at stop signs and at vacation beaches. Thousands of tires had been simultaneously destroyed. Nobody had gotten hurt, though some of the cars happened to be moving at the time, but lots of people were scared and really pissed-off.
She went over all of this with me as she watched me with her big sexy eyes. The eyes were weird, I realized. Most times they seemed brown and ordinary, but then for just a moment they seemed to become bottomless black pits, that were staring deep into my head. It reminded me of something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on; something I didn't like getting reminded of.
It had to be too many poppy-seed bagels for me that morning, I figured. Each time the black eye-thing happened I blinked and her eyes were OK again, or I guess maybe mine were.
“It had to be magic of course,” she continued, “and the police think I had something to do with it, because of three thousand bank employee and customer tires, only my tires were completely untouched.”
I had to work hard to keep from snickering. Magic-shmagic; what a bunch of crap! Anyway, most of that magic stuff, if you believed in such things, was supposed to be going on out West in Arizona for the last couple of weeks. This was Jersey for Christ sake! Plenty of tire slashing punks with shrives here, so who needs magic to ruin tires? The tires had to be a gang thing to begin with, I figured, plus a whole bunch more folks faking it so they could scam themselves some insurance dough or get themselves wrote up in newspapers or on the internet.
But maybe the cops would need to hang it on someone easier to finger. Maybe this Wainwright broad was their patsy. So maybe then she was good for a few days’ pay for me. “Did you do it?” I asked her, trying to act really interested. Broads like it when you seem to pay attention to them. All you guys out there should remember that.
“Of course not!”
“So then why do they suspect you?”
“Because I wasn’t victimized, that’s why. My tires are OK.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know; that’s one of the things I want you to find out. Ever since Phoenix was overrun with dwarves and elves a couple of weeks ago weird stuff’s been happening all over the place. But the police seem to want to pin this on me just because my tires are OK. Can you help me?”
I tried to keep a straight face. Dwarves and elves? Right. I’ll see it when I believe it, I always figure. “The police are pinheads, Mrs. Wainwright, that’s why I left the Force. Yeah sure, I can give it a shot. I charge a hundred an hour, plus expenses, one week minimum.”
“I can pay you fifty a day, no expenses, one week maximum.”
That would have sounded good to me a week ago, before I broke my big case about shrinking nuts and made some real dough from a billionaire. Her boss, as a matter of fact; it’s a small world. But now that I had moved up-town and was first rate I couldn’t afford charity cases, and that’s what I decided to tell this broad, despite her nifty legs, and despite the weird attraction I felt towards her. Fifty bucks a day? I was insulted.
“Hello,” said a voice from the doorway. “I’m Elaine, Mrs. Wainwright, Jake’s partner,” she said, as she smiled, walked right in, and shook the woman’s hand, like she ran the place. “We’ll be happy to take your case.” My jaw dropped open, and Elaine playfully reached over the desk to knock it shut with a firm tap to my chin. “Won’t we Jake?” Her eyeballs caught hold of mine.
I could see that she was very serious and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I don’t like it when she does that, but I let it pass.
I felt myself shrugging and shaking my head in agreement. I figured what the hell; fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. Besides, like I said, I had this weird feeling attracting me to this broad anyway. I actually felt relieved that I would be working her case. "So who has it in for your bank?" I asked her.
Wainwright shrugged. "Anyone who uses it, probably. Grisim and the Board have jacked up petty charges to customers and lowered interest rates they pay out. I can't think of any bank enemies in particular, but then I'm just a branch manager. Grisim and his high and mighty bank Board that rake in all the dough would be the folks to ask."
“Grisim is a mullti-billionaire. Why does he even bother with day-to-day bank business?”
”Our bank is how he got his start in business. He still likes to tinker with it, the rich bastard. It's a hobby for him, probably.”
"What about you personally?” Elaine asked, acting like she was a regular detective. “Tell us what happened, leading up to the time the tires died.”
“Nothing really extraordinary happened, until the tire incident.”
“Nothing unusual at all?” I prodded.
“Well, I did have to fire someone.”
"Why?" Elaine asked.
Anger flashed across her face. "Because the Bank sucks, from top to bottom,” she spat vehemently. “Grisim and his Board of Directors are cheap, stupid, money grabbing bastards, that's why. Grisim especially doesn't have the balls to run a bank. Shrunken nuts Grisim, I call him, sometimes."
Wow. Even after being in this business for years and seeing it all, women with tempers and nasty language bug me, but I kept a straight face. Fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day.
"Grisim is the worst, the penny-pinching bastard,” she continued. “He phoned me that morning to tell me that the Bank had to save money, and I had to pick someone to fire. Imagine that, a billionaire bothering with such things? Never mind the fact that we’re short-handed and over-worked."
I yawned. What the hell did bankers know about REAL work? But Elaine elbowed me in the ribs and I put my sympathetic face back on, the one that I use for all my clients. "Bummer. So who'd you pick to fire and why?”
“Grisim said it had to be a full-timer. He hates full timers because the Bank has to pay them benefits. That narrowed it down to Stacy or Henry. Stacy Land is my head teller. She does more work than any three other people in the branch, me included. If Grisim and the others weren’t such asses, she’d have had her own branch to manage years ago.”
Elaine frowned. “She's held back because she’s a woman?”
“Sure. In me they already have their token woman branch manager; they don’t want more.”
Again, I tried not to snicker. Women have too damn much power as it is, over every poor gu
y with a pair between his legs, so why give them power in the workplace? “So let me guess. You fired this poor sap Henry?”
She nodded. "I didn't like it, but I did it. Someday I’ll hit the state lottery super jackpot, buy the damn bank, and throw Grisim and the Board out on their fat hairy asses. But until then my three kids and I need this job.” It sounded to me like a clear-cut case of discrimination against poor Henry, but I let it pass.
"Tell us about Henry," coaxed Elaine.
"Not a lot to tell. Henry Jenkins had always been solid as a brick, though twice as dull. Quiet, polite, precise, but distracted and slow. He has a scholarly temperament probably more suited to university research than to bank-telling. He always had books with him to read when things were slow; odd, old books in weird foreign languages, not your popular fiction. Very often it seemed that Henry was off in his own fantasy world. He took a trip out west shortly before I fired him and came back weirder than ever."
"What does Henry look like?" I asked, not really thinking that it mattered, but trying to act interested. Sometimes you get lucky by doing that, and you find out something that does matter. That's the way that we P-Is figure stuff out.
"A balding, bespectacled little man of about sixty, that's good old steady Henry."
"How did he take the news of his firing?" Elaine asked.
"With surprising anger for such a shy, quiet little old man. He'd have been eligible for partial retirement benefits in only two more years, but now he'll get nothing but a little temporary unemployment pay. Before he left he threatened the Bank."
"How?" I fit in, beating Elaine to the punch that time.
"He wasn't specific, but he said that the Bank was making a big mistake in firing him. He mumbled a few words of gibberish as he got together his personal effects, and complained that something of his was missing. He was really upset about his missing little figurine. Then he said that the Bank was cursed, shouted more gibberish, and stormed out."
"Gibberish?" asked Elaine, before I could.
"I guess it was gibberish. It didn't sound like any language I ever heard."
That seemed vaguely familiar to me too, but I couldn't place it. "Then what happened?" I cued her.
"We had a lousy day, even more lousy than usual. The air conditioning broke. Numbers didn't add up right. Customers bitched, even more than usual. Grisim himself called twice more and bitched. I bitched. Not particularly unusual stuff, but it came at us all at once, and the more I complained about it, the more it happened.”
“You don’t think Henry has anything to do with your problems, do you?” I asked.
“You know, maybe he is involved. He was always screwing around with weird mumbo-jumbo. If he’s screwing me over he’s going to catch some crap from me in return, I promise you that much. I’ll rain down some shit on him!”
This broad had a temper and a gutter vocabulary, in addition to the great legs. I sort of liked her.
“What else happened?” Elaine prompted.
“Hours later, when Eric ended his shift, the serious trouble was discovered. He returned from the parking lot wide eyed and told us that his new tires had been slashed, all four of them! He had been bragging about his fancy new tires all damn day, actually to the point of annoying the rest of us. Tires, tires, tires! I was tired of hearing about the damn things! I was tired of all the crap that was going on that day.
“Anyway, the tires of all the Bank employees and customers had been slashed, except for my old beat-up ones. Later we learned that the same thing had happened at all the other Bank branches, all fifty-nine of them. Thousands of tires were ruined.
"The incident became national and international news. Local, state and federal law enforcement are investigating. Bank workers were interviewed of course, including me. I'm afraid that because my tires weren't slit the cops will try to use me as a scapegoat. So I decided I'd try to seek some professional help. I looked in the on-line yellow pages and for some reason your silly little ad caught my eye. So here I am. Quite a coincidence though, that you just did a job for Grisim."
I let the silly little ad crack pass, probably because of her great legs. “Sure as hell is a coincidence,” I agreed. In my business those kinds of things are damned suspicious, but I couldn’t see any connection.
"Do you have a lawyer, Mrs. Wainwright?" Elaine asked.
"I’m just a normal citizen; I couldn't afford a lawyer. Besides, I haven't been charged with anything yet. I figure that you guys are much cheaper than lawyers. If you guys turn up something that sets the cops back on the right track, I won't need a lawyer and I’ll save some dough."
She was right about that. I had to smile. "You figure that in one week we'll solve a mystery that so far all the cops and Feds in the state can't crack?"
She shrugged. "So what do you think you CAN do?"
It was my turn to shrug. Elaine kicked me again. "Plenty. I can ask around. I still have some cop connections at the local precinct, I should be able to nose around for a few days and at least find out if you're really a serious suspect or not and if so what they have on you. My guess is that you aren't, but you might sleep better if I can at least confirm that. Sound useful enough?”
She smiled and nodded her head. "Yes. That sounds useful enough, at least for a start."
"What's the name of the local cop leading this thing?" I asked.
"A detective named Joseph Kebony."
It figured. My old partner Joe. The idiot that claimed I owed him money every time I saw him. The man that cursed me out just last week because Elaine had dumped him for me, and because his prisoners from my last caper, two ugly foreign chemists named Mick and Grog, escaped from his custody on the way back to the precinct. Tough damn break, but why take it out on me?
I thought back to the last day of the shrinking nuts case. Joe phoned me later that day and claimed that one-minute the freak chemists were both cuffed in back of his squad car, and the next they had simply disappeared, leaving empty cuffs. Right. Joe was a loon. Divide his age by two and you'd have his IQ on a good day.
"Sure, we both know Joe," said Elaine brightly. “Very well.”
Exactly how well, I wondered? An ugly image of Elaine and Joe together, naked limbs entangled, flashed through my sick mind. I almost puked. "Some of us know Joe better than others," I quipped, and I stared at Elaine.
Elaine slipped me her little Mona Lisa smile. "You want me to go see Joe?” she asked me.
Hell no, I had made that clear to her. Did I want to see Joe myself? Hell no, not especially. But fifty bucks a day is fifty bucks a day. "I'll go talk to Joe," I heard myself say. The big dumb bastard! What had Elaine ever seen in a big dumb guy like that anyway? The insensitive lout even called her ‘Baby’, and that ain’t even politically correct or good English neither.
"Fine. Meanwhile I'll nose around the Bank," agreed Elaine. "Oh. And say hello to Joe for me."
"I'll kiss the big lug's ugly puss for you," I promised.
And that was that, or so I thought. We'd make a fast fifty bucks and I'd be back in the sack with Elaine by nightfall, I figured. Elaine left with Wainwright to go check-out the bank, while I grabbed my fedora and headed for Joe. My old Ford started up like a charm, and I used it to mosey on down to my old precinct, where this time of day odds were good that I'd find Kebony.
Sure enough, instead of being out on the town scrounging for leads, there was good old Joe, at his desk right where I left him five years ago when I quit the Force, still scarfing down doughnuts and coffee like it was the last food on Earth. At least he was awake.
"Hi-ya Joe," I said pleasantly enough, as I plopped down with a smile into the chair in front of his messy desk. I knew enough not to try for the doughnuts, so I nosed around the empty pizza boxes, but they were truly empty; not even an old mushroom, damn it! Food was all Joe ever thought about, or at least that’s what I thought before I saw the bastard kissing Elaine last week.
"What the fuck is that thing on your head?" the big dumm
y said. At least he wasn't laughing. But why was he frowning?
"It's my new white fedora, Joe. Nifty, right?"
"It looks like a horse-track shyster's Panama hat. So you got money to buy fancy hats like that, but not to pay back my fifty?" he accused, without a trace of civility. His hands formed fists as big as over-sized grapefruits.
"Easy buddy, I'll pay you, but right now I came to help you out on a case."
When Joe finally stopped laughing he got curious. "What case you talking about Jake? Some broad needs divorce ammo? Or did some poor sucker loose another dog? Strange how dogs disappear suspiciously from rich good looking women and you seem to be the only guy in town that can ever find them. Some of them dames get awfully grateful, I bet, when you bring home their sweet little pooch. Hey, speaking of animals, is that cat hair all over you?"
Joe was an idiot and I needed his cooperation, so I let all the cracks pass. As to the lost dogs, Joe is still on the government dole, so he don't know what it's like out here in the private sector. Sometimes you have to stir up a little business yourself when things are slow. "I just got natural talent Joe, you know how it is. But no, this has to do with some slashed tires at a bank."
Joe sobered in a flash, and then half stood and leaned over the desk and me as he spoke quietly, maybe so that the other guys in the squad, who weren't even there or weren't paying any attention anyway, couldn't hear. "What the hell do you know about the Third National Bank case? If you came to razz me I'll rip off your fat head, Jake."
In my business you have to be able figure out what makes people tick. In this particular instance I could see that something was bugging Joe, something more than just Elaine and the fifty bucks this time. I had to play it cool. "Easy Joe; I just got a new client that works at the Bank and is afraid of what’s going on, that's all. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours, same as always. You in charge of this case or ain’t you?"
The big guy slumped back in his chair, calmer but still all upset and pouty. "I'm still working it, but I ain't in charge no more, not since this morning."
"Sure Joe, it's a big case, what with all those ruined radials. So who's in charge?"
The lazy lug shifted his eyeballs to the right, towards the glass-windowed inner-office. Lieutenant territory. Through the windows I could make out someone standing there that had long silvery hair and nice curves. My jaw dropped open. "A woman in charge? You're shitting me Joe!"
"Look closer. Check out the ears."
I worked my way up from the more interesting parts to the ears. They were big and pointed! “The broad’s a Vulcan?”
“No you idiot, she’s an elf cop. Don’t you read the papers or at least watch TV?”
“I usually skip the funny papers, Joe,” I lied. Actually aside from horse racing news the funnies are normally all that I read.
Joe snorted like the pig he was. “Nothing funny about that broad, partner."
Just then she looked up and stared back at me, like somehow she had felt my own eyes on her. Her eyes were huge. Impossibly huge. In a flash she was walking towards me, her odd eyes still locked on mine. With her was Lieutenant Ed Marks, my former boss.
“Jake Simon? What the hell are you doing here? What the fuck is that thing on your head?” Marks bellowed as he stomped towards me.
But the thin little pointy-eared woman silenced and stopped him with a mere wave of her hand, while never taking her gaze off of me. Marks froze-up in mid-step.
She continued to move towards me, so smoothly and gracefully that she could have been floating towards me like a cloud. As she got closer I saw that her hair was metallic silver, her skin was pale and white as snow. Her eyes were silver too, deep, and impossibly huge and round as silver dollars when open but impossibly slanted when she blinked. Her age? I couldn’t tell. She was like one of those ageless porcelain dolls, but come to life.
And she wasn't all that perfect either. The image of beauty faded fast as she got really close, and her weird features stood out more and more. That happens a lot, you know, when you first see some broad in the distance and think she might look like some Playboy centerfold, or you see her in the dim light of a bar, but then up close reality sets in, if you're not boozed up enough.
The strangest thing about this chick was that her face was totally expressionless, like a blank mask. Plus, her eyes were too damn big and weird colored. And her skin was too damn white. And her curves weren't all that curvy after all. And her smile showed teeth that were way too long and pointed. And the ears were even bigger and pointier and freakier than I first thought.
So up close she didn't look so hot. Up close two things were obvious, which together caused my head to spin. First, like I just said, the broad wasn’t such a knockout like I first thought. There certainly wasn’t enough dim light or booze to help things out, so close up she got really nasty, in the looks department. Second, she wasn't human.
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