Triple Indemnity
by John McGroarty
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: With New York's Siamese triplet population under threat from a possible serial killer, a trio of sleuths are on the case.
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If you throw a stone in a radius of a mile around Byres Road in Glasgow’s West End, you’re almost certain to hit someone who is writing a noir detective novel. The question is, however, what’s going to give yours the edge? How are you going to break out of the formula? How are you going to do it? What will make yours different? Pray tell. – The Herald, July 2006
It came as a shock. A hammer blow to the three of us. A sudden feeling of deep space emptiness covered us like a freezing night starless blanket. And we didn’t feel tucked in. Oh no. The Fawcett Brothers were dead. Courtney, Lenny and Sol. Pushing up daisies. Their checks all cashed. In Uncle Abraham’s bosom were they gathered. Murder was suspected. Murder most dark and murder most foul. The Siamese triplet presenters of the popular chat show and menagerie The Martian Chronicle had been found in their South Central Park apartment with a knife wound at the exact same spot on their fluffy chests. They had died at exactly the same moment. Gone the way they had come. Shorty phoned with tears in his tiny high-pitched voice to tell us to turn on ABC news for the full dirt dish and gory gossip. Angie was in a state of deepest shock. Her eyes popped and her goiter swelled dangerously. She stopped filing her nails and her toes stopped curling momentarily.
“Wow, lipschtick,” she drawled, mouth agape, “youz guys is the only ones left.”
Me and Phil and Sam looked at each other and gulped. It was true. With the Fawcett brothers on that last train to glory we were the only Siamese triplets left from Brooklyn out to the further fingers of the spiral universe. We were, to get a little philosophical, Siamese triplets alone with ourselves. And the same thought hit us at once. What if we were next? What if the killer was serial? Some mad punk sworn to wipe our race off the face of the earth. The only thing to do was to find the killer before he struck again. Luckily we were gumshoes. Six footed, three headed, thirty fingered and thumbed sleuths for hire. And Shorty had said down the blower that we was hired for the job. Shorty was wild distraught. He had been the Fawcett’s midget. Their dwarf buffoon. And he had come to love the big goofballs and to make his fortune along the way. There was now a price on the head of the murderer. A price that would be ours when we revealed who the killer was. When justice was served up for Shorty’s breakfast. Triple indemnity he called it. Angie turned off the TV and opened the blinds. The sun was going down and we sat shell shocked watching night fall on the capital of the world and thought about all the last members of the tribes of this great country who had gone before and a little tear trickled down Phil’s left cheek and Sam told him to stop snivelling and gave him a slap.
It’s always the broad. Never the butler in the sort of stories we inhabit. No, always the dame, always the broad. Directly or indirectly. The broad. The fall of man. The femme fatale. Our projection. Barbara Stanwyck. Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Lana Turner. The Catwoman. This one had a honey-pie name but that didn’t fool us. Veronica Doyle she was called. She had all the right bumps and wasn’t in the phone book but Shorty had given us the address. We thought about taking the cross tricycle or the motorbike and two side cars downtown but the traffic wasn’t serendipitous and Phil was reading Kierkegaard so we took the bus. We sat at the back. Just likes we always do. To tell the truth I was out of sorts. Phil had his head in Fear and Trembling and Sam was polishing his knuckleduster absentmindedly. I just wanted to be somewhere away from these gizmos. From these two schmucks that I had been attached to for forty-eight years now. My mind turned once again to the operation. To us breaking up. Going our own ways before it was too late. I just wanted to be sitting in front of the ventilator smoking Luckies and chewing gum with my brogues up on the desk. ALONE. Sam cracked Phil on the head with the duster but he didn’t respond. I was staring at the screen of my phone. There was a picture of Veronica Doyle that Shorty had sent me. She was a cutie, no doubt about it. She had long dark dimples, blonde tints and a moon face. Gave her a sort of oriental look. You could see how three guys attached at the hip might fall for her. Shorty had hinted that she was bored. Deep existential boredom that must be a prelude to something. But was that a motive for triple murder? Shorty said she had a lover. A Cuban saxophone player from Martian Chronicles called Hector Valdés. He was a big hunk of muscle and Shorty said he used to boast that he had once played a lewd tune in the presence of the Castros and that he had swum the ninety miles from Havana Bay to the tip of Florida in shorts and flip flops. Make a nice couple, I thought. Shorty’s idea was that Valdés had used his contacts in the Cuban mafia to rub out the Fawcetts and get his saxophone tooting mitts on Veronica and the Fawcett fortune. Sam gave Phil another rap on the skull.
“Cut it out!” he screamed.
Sam just laughed. He’s bored too, I thought. Lethargy is the king and queen of New York in summer.
Phil turned to me and he had that earnest anxious look on his face that he always gets when he reads Kierkegaard. He was looking for some sort of meaning. I knew what was coming. I grimaced and scratched the flesh joint between us. It made a match-lighting scraping sound.
“Do you think it’s possible, Mike, for three people who live as one to find themselves in the absolute? Do you, Mike? Do you really?? Or will we always be lost in a multitude? Our name legion? Why don’t the great philosophers ever think of cases like ours? Give us any answers or some clues about what we should do.”
I knew that Phil suspected I had been thinking about the separation again. He was the sensitive one. His brain worked real slow and his wits were his strong point. He solved cases in his dreams or while lost in the Symposium or the Bible. It was sure uncanny. Sensitive though he was, he could defend himself in a jam so don’t go thinking he’s some dolly pushover. Sam ain’t afraid, though. Afraid of nuttin is Sam. He has a black belt in judo, as we all have. It’s difficult to do anything alone. You can imagine the kinda knots we got ourselves into. We all dated Michaela Moravansky one time for six months cause Sam’s got a thing about plump bimbos with frizzy hair and moustaches. It was the only time I’ve ever seen the loony happy. I tried to reassure Phil.
“Yeah, Phil, we can find our salvation together, I’m sure, and don’t you worry about it anyways. We got a case to occupy our brains now, so put the books away.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell the poor sucker that we all inhabited downtown Despairsville and there was no way out. Not in this kinda book. Not on this trolley bus ride. No matter how much philosophy you read or how hard you pray, you’re here for good. Deep down in Despairsville. So fasten your seat belts and make your peace. It’s a long lonely unlit road with no destination. And it’s sure gonna be a bumpy ride, I can sure as hell guarantee that.
“I know you blame Dad, Mike, for abandoning us. But you should try to forgive. Try to understand it from his position. From his perspective. That’s what Fear and Trembling is about. Listen, Mike, Kierkegaard’s father sacrificed him to God. Yeah, that’s what he did. Treated him real bad. So bad he couldn’t even marry that broad that he loved. So he wrote it all out like Abraham and Isaac. He got rid of it like that. Why don’t you write a book, Mike, get rid of the bitter? You could make it about us, about our cases. The first ever detective novel written entirely in third person plural. You can be a hard-boiled detective, a misanthrope, a cynical boozebag but, Mike, all of this times three, all the tropes in Siamese triplets, attached at the hip, you couldn’t make it up! Sure fire success. Guarantee ya.”
My mind started to wander. Maybe it was a good idea. I could imagine it all …. They were waiting for the signal. They knew it was coming. Coming soon. They wouldn’t let them get away with it. Not this time. They got up and walked around and they all lit a cigarette. Jason, Max and Roger, the three Siamese triplet multi-millionaire special agents, 001, 002, and 003, who could afford the operation but decided to stick it out together. They was, eh, they were nervous. They didn’t know what the signal would be. Their wives were all on the patio shaking Martinis and chatting about their nails. Suddenly three bombs went off. On the patio, blood and blonde hair and painted nails everywhere. Down in the jetty below, in their luxury yacht. Caviar and crates of champagne shooting into the sky. The last in the high range Mercedes in the driveway. What a signal. But they would not be deterred. They would find the evil culprits. In Monte Carlo. In Rome, Venice, Paris, whatever trendy place they fled ……..
Nah, there’s no point. My imagination is all rich guy James Bond escapism, just like the average Joe Six-pack. And I ain’t big on no third person plural verbs anyways. The bus turned into the Burg. I signalled to Sam and he gave Phil a blow in the solar plexus, or somewhere down there.
“OK, we gotta get off here.” I stood up and rang the bell. Phil had a sorta disappointed look on his mush. He could never get me to think beyond the noses on the faces of life. Of the ink on the dollars that move the soul and mark the way for the feelers of the assassins in the dark.
We got off the bus and looked up at the Dumbo building where the Fawcett offices were. It was one of those modern numbers all steel and cables bent in strange lurid shapes. The sort of place which packs in the waves and all the tenants get sick and stop being human beings. It crossed my mind that that’s what happened to the Fawcetts but it didn’t stick, this was only their in-town business address. There was a wild schmuck of a doorman with a hearing aid and a short fella syndrome blocking our way to the lift. He had a gun so we decided to play ball and Sam slipped the duster back inside his trouser pocket. Tough guy, eh?
“We wanna see Veronica Doyle. We ain’t got no appointment but she’s big on Siamese triplets so ya betta let us past,” I said in my best Queen Elizabeth. But the guy was a real little schlep so we had to slip him fifty just to get into the elevator.
“How long you been working here, bub?” I asked as we moved past.
“Thirty years,” he bawled back. He crushed the note into a ball and stuffed it into his hip pocket.
I consoled myself with the thought that he was probably due for some blood disease from working in that cancer cage all those years. We got into the steel box and headed for floor heaven.
Up on the twenty sixth floor of the Dumbo we found Veronica all dressed up in funeral black and no sign of Cuban lover boy. Aw shucks, ain’t she the mourning queen of New York City. She was surrounded by crates and the workers were packing up the whole working life of the Fawcetts. They were taking down the photographs that had lined the wall for decades. Courtney, Lenny and Sol with all the fat and the famous faces of the last fifty years. There they were with Clint, Stevie Wonder, Tom and Nicole, with Woody and Ginger, Mickey Rooney and Goldie Hawn, Jamie Lee Curtis and Rocky Balboa. Three plastic surgery smiles and sets of sparkling teeth and a treble of hairy chests bursting over exponential potbellies. Glittered disrespectfulness and saucy cheek incorporated. Just the way America likes it. The Fawcett Brothers. Three helpings of shiny skin and wisecracks. The show to beat all shows. The talk of the town. The chronicles from showbiz Mars. The workmen were ripping up the photos and piling up the frames. Veronica was sitting in the middle of the room in a black leather armchair. She took off her sunglasses and looked us up and down a couple of times.
“Is this some sort of joke?” she asked, a touch aggressively.
I detected a slight foreign accent in her voice. Swedish or Danish, or maybe Finnish. She had said djok. She still had her moon face but she didn’t seem oriental now. She was like the diphthong dame from the northern marshes. Misty and snowswept. Or maybe it was just Phil and Kierkegaard buzzing around in my head. Or perhaps she was pathetically trying to sound interesting.
“We would like to ask you some questions about your late husbands, Miss Doyle,” I said, sounding as decent as I possibly could. We all handed her our cards.
“We’re private detectives,” I clarified.
“Oh, I see,” she said, “working for Shorty are you?”
There was no point in denying it so I coughed up the truth and we all lit up a Lucky Strike.
She floated out of the leather and went behind the little office bar. It was an exact replica of the bar from Martian Chronicle. The bar with the three stools propped up to it. The place where the Fawcetts used to do their “three regular guys at the bar” interviews routine while the guests had to do the hooch mixing and shaking. Veronica poured herself a stiff one, drank it down, and then poured us all another stiffy each. She stood eyeing us from behind the bar. Sam’s legs were shaking from built up aggression. He slammed his glass down on the bar.
“They got insurance, the Fawcett Brothers, or what?” Sam growled. He was impervious to attractive dames. He was in love with Michaela Moravansky. He lit another Lucky and blew a smoke cloud towards Moon Face.
Her eye twitched a little at the mention of the word insurance. Her peepers screamed guilty. As guilty as Phil’s worst imagined crimes. She gave Sam a filthy look. Just then Phil said he had to go and we all had to shuffle off to the john with him but the case was solved there and then. When we came back, Moon face Doyle had split on us and the workers had all scampered too. Pretty quick mover for a Swede. Her cigarette was still burning in the ashtray and an olive floated mournfully in an unfinished Martini. Sam stomped violently on Phil’s right foot. I sat down on the leather easy to think and Sam and Phil sat on the armrests on either side. Yeah, I was going to write that book and pay for the operation. That was as far as I got. We was hit from behind and all the lights went out.
The next day in the office, ice packs on our heads, we got down to lemon squeezing the brain. Angie was filing her nails and blowing big supergum bubbles. Poor kid, she looked like Bette Davis. What could we do? Insurance was the key to this Chinese puzzle. I was sure of that. I called in a favour from PJ Malone downtown. He owed us for the Chucky O’Rourke case. Sure enough the Celeb Liberty Mutual Annuity was due to pay out ten million on a policy taken out six months ago. And of course that was times three, thirty million smackaroos. That was triple indemnity in capital letters. In big dancing neon script. And the unique beneficiary? Yeah, you guessed, one Veronica Moon Face Doyle. But something didn’t add up. It was a coincidence. And we didn’t like coincidences. Not in this clockwork three for one universe.
“We don’t like coincidences, Sam, do we?” I said, turning to the big knucklehead.
He got ready to thump Phil but I stopped him.
“Well, we don’t, do we?”
“No we don’t, Mike,” he said, before booting the bin across the room.
“Phil?”
“No, Mike, no coincidences, everything’s planned, predetermined, though you have to make the right choices.”
Sam blew a fire hydrant.
“Jeez, Mike, what the Hell’s he talking about? Let me torture him. Set the boy straight.”
The phone rang. Angie stopped filing her nails and picked up the hand set. She turned to us, “It’s some weird guy, got a deep throaty rasping voice, like he’s choking on something, a fish bone or something, wanna talk to you, Philip.” She had a big crush on Phil and always called him Sunday best.
It was Abernethy from Star Struck magazine. His prickly diction would shred up your lugs but he knew all the secrets.
“Hey, Phil, heard youz guys was investigating the deaths of the Fawcetts,” he crackled down the line.
Phil said he heard right and switched the phone to mega mode. Me and Sam locked ears onto the voice box.
“Well, thought you oughta know. They was all washed up, the Fawcetts. The channel was going to cut the line for good next month. They had stopped paying for it eight months back and the boys were financing it out of their own money. They was all but broke. The creditor vultures were all hovering. Sad, those guys were legend in the Eighties! You owe me one, Phil.”
He hung up abruptly and the dead line haunted the room till Phil hit the switch.
He looked at me and shook his head. Now we all knew what had happened but Phil, like always, had to go and put it into words.
“So now we know. It wasn’t murder though it would suit a certain party to have everybody think that it was. You were right, Mike, it was for insurance. And the companies don’t pay out on suicide. Not in the first couple of years anyways. I’ve been reading the gossip columns on the brothers and they had all the numbers. Abernethy just confirmed it. Sol and Lenny was on coke and pills and Courtney was collecting rubbish, hoarding it, making them all participate. What else could they do? You see, psychologically, they was all trapped, rich, famous, but they’d lost their souls and everything was the same, every day was a repetition, they couldn’t go on. None of us can go on like that. Imagine, they didn’t live in the past, or have no hope for the future, just the same shit every day, and the coke, and the pills and the booze. And then the garbage. Who could go on living like that? I ask ya. Who?”
“You forgot something, wise guy,” growled Sam, “how did they do it? They never found any weapons, no knives, no stakes, no nothing. People don’t just get holes in their chests and die out of thin air.”
“I’m speaking about why not how, Sam, how is easy, we’ll figure it out.”
Just then the office door opened and Bannerman and Goody from the precinct blew in like a pestilent prairie wind. Three or four uniformed stooges followed on their coattails and started searching the office.
Bannerman was a bad cat thru and thru. And Goody was just too dumb. Even to be a cop but how they decide these things is anybody’s guess. Bannerman leered at Sam just to get warmed up. I put a hand on his knee to restrain him. Bannerman’s hard grey eyes and chiselled head inclined towards us.
“Suppose you guys heard about the Fawcetts,” he snarled.
“What gives, Lionel?” I said, looking around and trying to sound unflustered.
I could hear Angie getting more and more hysterical, hey, youz can’t touch that, can’t go in there.
Bannerman smiled malevolently and tossed a slip of paper onto the desk.
It was a warrant to search the office and our apartment.
“Read it, date it, and sign, you three weirdos are in a lot of trouble.”
He pulled up a high back and straddled it.
“You were seen at the Dumbo building yesterday, spoke to Miss Doyle, what was that all about?” he asked.
Sam’s palms were bleeding but I was fresh stream cool. As cool as Rocky mountain air.
“Yeah, we’re investigating the case, working for Shorty,” I said, holding his steely grey peepers.
“Shorty’s a little bitch,” he spat in disgust.
“You see the way we got it figured is that the Fawcetts all dying at exactly the same time and all means that there must have been three killers to deliver the blow. Synchronized they must have been. In fact, attached at the hip would be better. And, do’h, how many guys is there in New York who fits that description?”
He was watching our faces as he spoke and Goody was doodling something lame-brained in his nincompoop notebook.
“We got an alibi,” I said, “and, say, what’s you guys looking for? Angie don’t like people disordering her system, she’s lacking in confidence and this could cut her deep. Set her progress way back. Back to when Lincoln was President.”
“Cut the cracks, Mike. We just need the murder weapons and they’ll be rigging up a special three seated fryer down at the Clink for you freaks. And then,” he paused, “there’s the tape. Didn’t know about the tape, huh?”
Him and Goody were staring at us. They think if you look a little guilty when they say something pertinent then you’re the bad guy. Poor dumb boobies. And to think we’re paying for these guys with our federal taxes.
“OK, have it your way,” I sighed, trying to keep grips on my patience, “what tape?”
“The tape that’s gonna show you three circus clowns murdering the Fawcetts. Courtney Fawcett was a real paranoid bird; he had video cameras everywhere in the apartment. But they’s all missing. The killers stripped them all out.”
Him and Goody looked hard at us again for a full two minutes.
I glanced at Phil. He made an almost imperceptible sign that it didn’t mean anything. Changed nothing.
Bannerman got up. “Don’t you queer birds fly off anywhere out of town, we’ll be back for you soon.”
They all trooped out of the office and slammed the door.
“Lipstick, what a cheek those copper guys got, thinks they’s the law or something,” shouted Angie all angry red faced.
“What do you think, Phil, Sam?”
“I think we should pay Moon Face a visit, but this time at home,” said Phil calmly.
We all got our hats and oxygen masks on and made for the subway. I stuck a pint of booze in my pocket in case of emergencies. Something told me that we was close to cracking this one. And we better had, as we was suspects now, suspects in the most bizarre crime ever to enter the mind of Bannerman and Goody. Or anyone else on this godforsaken rock for that matter.
We came out of the subway on the south side of Central Park at 59th Street where the sun shines on the rich and on the poor alike but a helluva lot more on the rich. That big red ball in the sky was boiling up the tarmacadam and steam cleaning our suits. There was sweat and heckles on the backs of our necks. We looked up at the block. The Fawcett Building, it was called. Even by people who’ve been to college and should know better. You could see it a mile off. Maybe even from space if you was an astronaut type of fellow. They was making so much money in the eighties that they had their three pouting physiognomies carved into the upper façade. Like a lowbiz showbiz Mount Rushmore. I wished we really had killed them. Sam read my thoughts.
“We should have smashed those jerks years back,” he growled, and twisted Phil’s right ear violently.
My mobile rang. It was Shorty. I was somehow expecting his call.
“Got anything for me, Mike?” he squealed in that half-comic castrato of his that had made a nation laugh for the last fifty years. First just as a midget and then as a post-modern parody of himself.
“We think they killed themselves, Shorty, did the hara-kiri on you. We’re deeply sorry. Too much of the same, lots of things, no souls, Phil says. They was broke too, the show was over at the end of the month. The station was shutting it down. Pulling out the plug. Got some moralizing clean-cut comic in a suit to take their place.”
I paused.
“There ain’t no Fawcett fortune, Shorty.”
There was a silence down the line.
“Shorty? Shorty??”
I heard a match strike and Shorty inhaled deep and blew out slow.
“I’m here, Mike,” he said, “got any proof?” He already sounded far far away. Like in another dimension place.
“Maybe you can help, Shorty, we need to find the tapes, Courtney’s video tapes, they disappeared. Or just maybe somebody got them hid somewhere.”
“They got a little secret room off the main kitchen, a hang out to watch movies and drink hooch, you open the oven three times rapidly and the door springs open. If there’s anything to be hid, it’ll be in there.”
I finished the call. I got out the pint of liquor and passed it round. We all had a long pull. We wiped the sweat off our necks.
“OK,” I said in a tired voice, “the show’s nearly over but we gotta get those tapes. We need to go in the back way, we don’t want Moon Face to know we’re there.”
We walked round the back of the building and looked up at the fire escape. I located where I thought the kitchen was with my eagle computer architect’s eye. We started to climb. It was hard going as the steel stairs were narrow and we had to shuffle up sideways like three escaped crab convicts on the ball and chain. Sam got out a little knife and after a coupla minutes prodding and probing, he managed to get a window open. At the tenth attempt we made it thru and found ourselves in a gigantic kitchen with black and white tiles like a big chess board and hundreds of killer fridges and chiller cabinets. There were bags of rubbish everywhere. The smell would have felled a bathtub of skunks. We thanked the lord for our oxygen masks. There were twenty odd ovens so we got to it. We heard a click and a portion of the far wall transmogrified into a door and swung open. We crabbed thru the slot and came out in a big room with lots of video screens, three beds, three sofas, a big over-bursting booze cabinet and a sea of cases filled with movies and videos.
“We’ll never find anything among all this garbage,” said Sam, taking off his mask and lighting up a Lucky.
I took another slug on the bottle and looked around. The psycho triplet was right. We would need an army of Siamese triplets working round the clock to sift through all this trash. I slumped down violently on one of the sofas, pulling Phil and Sam with me. There was a remote control beside me. I lazily switched it on and the screen sprung into life. The crazy romantic sons of bitches. Flashdance. They was watching Flashdance. What a feeling. What a bunch of tasteless degenerates. Yeah we should have killed them. The volume was up way too high. Sam smiled for the first time since we stopped dating Michaela Moravansky. He used to imagine she was like Irene Cara and him and her dancing round the room like a coupla movie stars. I suppose he too had pondered the split as the way to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We looked up and Veronica Doyle was standing in the doorway. I got it now. She was the Fawcetts’ pursuit of happiness. Her moon face was shining from too much New York summer and she was holding hands with a young muscleman in a baseball uniform and flip flops.
“I think this is what you are looking for,” she said, and handed us a video tape, “I ain’t smart enough to keep up the façade.”
“Hey, son, slip it in the machine for us, there’s a good boy,” I said, looking at Hector Valdés. Shouldn’t be too difficult for a guy who can swim ninety miles in a pair of cheap flip flops. Moon Face hit the lights and the Fawcett brothers appeared in the main hall of their Mount Rushmore mansion. We watched in silence. There was no sound. None was needed. We watched the boys drink down a long draft of wine. Then they went down on their knees. Jeez, they was praying. Like little kids before bed. This soul to keep. Maybe they got theirs back in the end. Then the knives appeared and we watched horrified like as they all plunged the blade into one another. That is, for youz mathematicians out there, it was a little algebra of death. A stuck B and B gutted C and C done for A. So both A and B and then C was dead. A perfect suicide circle and the poor slobs was no more. We watched the silence for a coupla minutes and then Moon Face appears. Looks like she’s sobbing. Maybe she really did love those bums. Then she approaches the bodies. She picks up the knives and puts them in her bag. Clips it shut. Then she throws stuff around like there was a struggle or a robbery or something. She disappears from the screen and then she’s back. She ain’t no dumb broad even if she does turn out to be a Swede. We see her chubby hands and that moon face magnifies as she approaches the camera. The hands go round the back and then the screen goes blank as she pulls the plug. There is darkness and silence.
I know Phil is feeling sorry for Moon Face. And so am I if truth be told. Even Sam seems to be feeling some sorta species solidarity thing. They was just regular Siamese triplets like us. Poor dumb freaks sons of bitches.
Veronica Doyle says, “It was intolerable in the end. I loved the three of them but they were crazy. Their lives were crazy. I think they knew that they couldn’t hold out and that’s why they took out the insurance. For me. So I would be safe and happy. If anything happened. But those companies they wouldn’t have paid.”
“And what about me?” came a squeaky voice from behind. Shorty was standing in the doorway. He had seen and heard it all. He had a hangdog unshaven look on his face and a Lucky in each hand.
“Those Fawcett guys never paid me a living wage, not once in over forty years. You only had it for two. Me? For forty-six! Every night I was slaving away bringing on guests, taking off guests, getting cheap laughs while they stashed the cash in Malibu apartments and cheap broads and popper pills. What am I supposed to do now? I ain’t got nothing. Just my talent-never recognized by the way. Where will I get a job? After the Fawcett boys political correctness was the end for guys like me. So I got an idea. An idea of justice. Of justice for all. I know about the thirty million. Let me tell you a little joke as way of explanation of my plan. The last joke I’ll tell for those tight asses.”
Shorty stubbed out his coffin nails and lit up two more. He laughed a bitter little high pitched laugh.
“OK,” he went on, “one time City Hall wanted to build a municipal aquatic gymnasium with saunas and spa stuff and all that jazz up in Harlem in order to buy votes at the next elections and they put out the contract to tender. Well, along comes some dumb Mexicans and they says we’ll do for two millions and then some smart aleck Canadians and they swear they do it real cheap for four million and then finally a group of wiseacres from the Bronx presents themselves downtown and says we’ll do it for six million and the joker in the mayor’s office says but youz guys is crazy that’s three times another offer how can you do it? And the Bronx boys says, easy, two million for us, two million for youz guys and two million for those dumb Mexican schmucks to build the thing.”
Shorty paused and gave us all a greedy knowing look.
“So I say we do it like that, Veronica, ten for you and lover boy, ten for me and ten for the freaky detectives, what do you all say?”
Phil looked at me imploringly. But now my mind was made up. That was the way it was going to go down. Three million bucks each. We was innocent and we had an alibi anyways. Bannerman and Goody would find some other suckers to take the rap. We all shook hands and Moon Face Doyle French-kissed the Cuban meat ball and started talking excitedly about moving out west to California. Sam would get to be alone with the Moravansky broad and her moustache and poor Phil could go to Yale and study the great philosophers and just maybe he’d find something somewhere that would speak just to him and help him make it out of Despairsville and into the Absolute. And as for me? I got to sit at my desk and smoke Luckies and chew gum. Just the way I always wanted to. And yeah, I started that book, that book to get all the bitter out. Maybe I’ll publish it one day, or maybe it’ll just sit in my desk drawer and I’ll close the typewriter down and go out alone into the world and maybe just find me a life. Who knows? That nobody, Siamese triplet or not, can ever tell ya.
Swearwords: None.
Description: With New York's Siamese triplet population under threat from a possible serial killer, a trio of sleuths are on the case.
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If you throw a stone in a radius of a mile around Byres Road in Glasgow’s West End, you’re almost certain to hit someone who is writing a noir detective novel. The question is, however, what’s going to give yours the edge? How are you going to break out of the formula? How are you going to do it? What will make yours different? Pray tell. – The Herald, July 2006
It came as a shock. A hammer blow to the three of us. A sudden feeling of deep space emptiness covered us like a freezing night starless blanket. And we didn’t feel tucked in. Oh no. The Fawcett Brothers were dead. Courtney, Lenny and Sol. Pushing up daisies. Their checks all cashed. In Uncle Abraham’s bosom were they gathered. Murder was suspected. Murder most dark and murder most foul. The Siamese triplet presenters of the popular chat show and menagerie The Martian Chronicle had been found in their South Central Park apartment with a knife wound at the exact same spot on their fluffy chests. They had died at exactly the same moment. Gone the way they had come. Shorty phoned with tears in his tiny high-pitched voice to tell us to turn on ABC news for the full dirt dish and gory gossip. Angie was in a state of deepest shock. Her eyes popped and her goiter swelled dangerously. She stopped filing her nails and her toes stopped curling momentarily.
“Wow, lipschtick,” she drawled, mouth agape, “youz guys is the only ones left.”
Me and Phil and Sam looked at each other and gulped. It was true. With the Fawcett brothers on that last train to glory we were the only Siamese triplets left from Brooklyn out to the further fingers of the spiral universe. We were, to get a little philosophical, Siamese triplets alone with ourselves. And the same thought hit us at once. What if we were next? What if the killer was serial? Some mad punk sworn to wipe our race off the face of the earth. The only thing to do was to find the killer before he struck again. Luckily we were gumshoes. Six footed, three headed, thirty fingered and thumbed sleuths for hire. And Shorty had said down the blower that we was hired for the job. Shorty was wild distraught. He had been the Fawcett’s midget. Their dwarf buffoon. And he had come to love the big goofballs and to make his fortune along the way. There was now a price on the head of the murderer. A price that would be ours when we revealed who the killer was. When justice was served up for Shorty’s breakfast. Triple indemnity he called it. Angie turned off the TV and opened the blinds. The sun was going down and we sat shell shocked watching night fall on the capital of the world and thought about all the last members of the tribes of this great country who had gone before and a little tear trickled down Phil’s left cheek and Sam told him to stop snivelling and gave him a slap.
It’s always the broad. Never the butler in the sort of stories we inhabit. No, always the dame, always the broad. Directly or indirectly. The broad. The fall of man. The femme fatale. Our projection. Barbara Stanwyck. Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Lana Turner. The Catwoman. This one had a honey-pie name but that didn’t fool us. Veronica Doyle she was called. She had all the right bumps and wasn’t in the phone book but Shorty had given us the address. We thought about taking the cross tricycle or the motorbike and two side cars downtown but the traffic wasn’t serendipitous and Phil was reading Kierkegaard so we took the bus. We sat at the back. Just likes we always do. To tell the truth I was out of sorts. Phil had his head in Fear and Trembling and Sam was polishing his knuckleduster absentmindedly. I just wanted to be somewhere away from these gizmos. From these two schmucks that I had been attached to for forty-eight years now. My mind turned once again to the operation. To us breaking up. Going our own ways before it was too late. I just wanted to be sitting in front of the ventilator smoking Luckies and chewing gum with my brogues up on the desk. ALONE. Sam cracked Phil on the head with the duster but he didn’t respond. I was staring at the screen of my phone. There was a picture of Veronica Doyle that Shorty had sent me. She was a cutie, no doubt about it. She had long dark dimples, blonde tints and a moon face. Gave her a sort of oriental look. You could see how three guys attached at the hip might fall for her. Shorty had hinted that she was bored. Deep existential boredom that must be a prelude to something. But was that a motive for triple murder? Shorty said she had a lover. A Cuban saxophone player from Martian Chronicles called Hector Valdés. He was a big hunk of muscle and Shorty said he used to boast that he had once played a lewd tune in the presence of the Castros and that he had swum the ninety miles from Havana Bay to the tip of Florida in shorts and flip flops. Make a nice couple, I thought. Shorty’s idea was that Valdés had used his contacts in the Cuban mafia to rub out the Fawcetts and get his saxophone tooting mitts on Veronica and the Fawcett fortune. Sam gave Phil another rap on the skull.
“Cut it out!” he screamed.
Sam just laughed. He’s bored too, I thought. Lethargy is the king and queen of New York in summer.
Phil turned to me and he had that earnest anxious look on his face that he always gets when he reads Kierkegaard. He was looking for some sort of meaning. I knew what was coming. I grimaced and scratched the flesh joint between us. It made a match-lighting scraping sound.
“Do you think it’s possible, Mike, for three people who live as one to find themselves in the absolute? Do you, Mike? Do you really?? Or will we always be lost in a multitude? Our name legion? Why don’t the great philosophers ever think of cases like ours? Give us any answers or some clues about what we should do.”
I knew that Phil suspected I had been thinking about the separation again. He was the sensitive one. His brain worked real slow and his wits were his strong point. He solved cases in his dreams or while lost in the Symposium or the Bible. It was sure uncanny. Sensitive though he was, he could defend himself in a jam so don’t go thinking he’s some dolly pushover. Sam ain’t afraid, though. Afraid of nuttin is Sam. He has a black belt in judo, as we all have. It’s difficult to do anything alone. You can imagine the kinda knots we got ourselves into. We all dated Michaela Moravansky one time for six months cause Sam’s got a thing about plump bimbos with frizzy hair and moustaches. It was the only time I’ve ever seen the loony happy. I tried to reassure Phil.
“Yeah, Phil, we can find our salvation together, I’m sure, and don’t you worry about it anyways. We got a case to occupy our brains now, so put the books away.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell the poor sucker that we all inhabited downtown Despairsville and there was no way out. Not in this kinda book. Not on this trolley bus ride. No matter how much philosophy you read or how hard you pray, you’re here for good. Deep down in Despairsville. So fasten your seat belts and make your peace. It’s a long lonely unlit road with no destination. And it’s sure gonna be a bumpy ride, I can sure as hell guarantee that.
“I know you blame Dad, Mike, for abandoning us. But you should try to forgive. Try to understand it from his position. From his perspective. That’s what Fear and Trembling is about. Listen, Mike, Kierkegaard’s father sacrificed him to God. Yeah, that’s what he did. Treated him real bad. So bad he couldn’t even marry that broad that he loved. So he wrote it all out like Abraham and Isaac. He got rid of it like that. Why don’t you write a book, Mike, get rid of the bitter? You could make it about us, about our cases. The first ever detective novel written entirely in third person plural. You can be a hard-boiled detective, a misanthrope, a cynical boozebag but, Mike, all of this times three, all the tropes in Siamese triplets, attached at the hip, you couldn’t make it up! Sure fire success. Guarantee ya.”
My mind started to wander. Maybe it was a good idea. I could imagine it all …. They were waiting for the signal. They knew it was coming. Coming soon. They wouldn’t let them get away with it. Not this time. They got up and walked around and they all lit a cigarette. Jason, Max and Roger, the three Siamese triplet multi-millionaire special agents, 001, 002, and 003, who could afford the operation but decided to stick it out together. They was, eh, they were nervous. They didn’t know what the signal would be. Their wives were all on the patio shaking Martinis and chatting about their nails. Suddenly three bombs went off. On the patio, blood and blonde hair and painted nails everywhere. Down in the jetty below, in their luxury yacht. Caviar and crates of champagne shooting into the sky. The last in the high range Mercedes in the driveway. What a signal. But they would not be deterred. They would find the evil culprits. In Monte Carlo. In Rome, Venice, Paris, whatever trendy place they fled ……..
Nah, there’s no point. My imagination is all rich guy James Bond escapism, just like the average Joe Six-pack. And I ain’t big on no third person plural verbs anyways. The bus turned into the Burg. I signalled to Sam and he gave Phil a blow in the solar plexus, or somewhere down there.
“OK, we gotta get off here.” I stood up and rang the bell. Phil had a sorta disappointed look on his mush. He could never get me to think beyond the noses on the faces of life. Of the ink on the dollars that move the soul and mark the way for the feelers of the assassins in the dark.
We got off the bus and looked up at the Dumbo building where the Fawcett offices were. It was one of those modern numbers all steel and cables bent in strange lurid shapes. The sort of place which packs in the waves and all the tenants get sick and stop being human beings. It crossed my mind that that’s what happened to the Fawcetts but it didn’t stick, this was only their in-town business address. There was a wild schmuck of a doorman with a hearing aid and a short fella syndrome blocking our way to the lift. He had a gun so we decided to play ball and Sam slipped the duster back inside his trouser pocket. Tough guy, eh?
“We wanna see Veronica Doyle. We ain’t got no appointment but she’s big on Siamese triplets so ya betta let us past,” I said in my best Queen Elizabeth. But the guy was a real little schlep so we had to slip him fifty just to get into the elevator.
“How long you been working here, bub?” I asked as we moved past.
“Thirty years,” he bawled back. He crushed the note into a ball and stuffed it into his hip pocket.
I consoled myself with the thought that he was probably due for some blood disease from working in that cancer cage all those years. We got into the steel box and headed for floor heaven.
Up on the twenty sixth floor of the Dumbo we found Veronica all dressed up in funeral black and no sign of Cuban lover boy. Aw shucks, ain’t she the mourning queen of New York City. She was surrounded by crates and the workers were packing up the whole working life of the Fawcetts. They were taking down the photographs that had lined the wall for decades. Courtney, Lenny and Sol with all the fat and the famous faces of the last fifty years. There they were with Clint, Stevie Wonder, Tom and Nicole, with Woody and Ginger, Mickey Rooney and Goldie Hawn, Jamie Lee Curtis and Rocky Balboa. Three plastic surgery smiles and sets of sparkling teeth and a treble of hairy chests bursting over exponential potbellies. Glittered disrespectfulness and saucy cheek incorporated. Just the way America likes it. The Fawcett Brothers. Three helpings of shiny skin and wisecracks. The show to beat all shows. The talk of the town. The chronicles from showbiz Mars. The workmen were ripping up the photos and piling up the frames. Veronica was sitting in the middle of the room in a black leather armchair. She took off her sunglasses and looked us up and down a couple of times.
“Is this some sort of joke?” she asked, a touch aggressively.
I detected a slight foreign accent in her voice. Swedish or Danish, or maybe Finnish. She had said djok. She still had her moon face but she didn’t seem oriental now. She was like the diphthong dame from the northern marshes. Misty and snowswept. Or maybe it was just Phil and Kierkegaard buzzing around in my head. Or perhaps she was pathetically trying to sound interesting.
“We would like to ask you some questions about your late husbands, Miss Doyle,” I said, sounding as decent as I possibly could. We all handed her our cards.
“We’re private detectives,” I clarified.
“Oh, I see,” she said, “working for Shorty are you?”
There was no point in denying it so I coughed up the truth and we all lit up a Lucky Strike.
She floated out of the leather and went behind the little office bar. It was an exact replica of the bar from Martian Chronicle. The bar with the three stools propped up to it. The place where the Fawcetts used to do their “three regular guys at the bar” interviews routine while the guests had to do the hooch mixing and shaking. Veronica poured herself a stiff one, drank it down, and then poured us all another stiffy each. She stood eyeing us from behind the bar. Sam’s legs were shaking from built up aggression. He slammed his glass down on the bar.
“They got insurance, the Fawcett Brothers, or what?” Sam growled. He was impervious to attractive dames. He was in love with Michaela Moravansky. He lit another Lucky and blew a smoke cloud towards Moon Face.
Her eye twitched a little at the mention of the word insurance. Her peepers screamed guilty. As guilty as Phil’s worst imagined crimes. She gave Sam a filthy look. Just then Phil said he had to go and we all had to shuffle off to the john with him but the case was solved there and then. When we came back, Moon face Doyle had split on us and the workers had all scampered too. Pretty quick mover for a Swede. Her cigarette was still burning in the ashtray and an olive floated mournfully in an unfinished Martini. Sam stomped violently on Phil’s right foot. I sat down on the leather easy to think and Sam and Phil sat on the armrests on either side. Yeah, I was going to write that book and pay for the operation. That was as far as I got. We was hit from behind and all the lights went out.
The next day in the office, ice packs on our heads, we got down to lemon squeezing the brain. Angie was filing her nails and blowing big supergum bubbles. Poor kid, she looked like Bette Davis. What could we do? Insurance was the key to this Chinese puzzle. I was sure of that. I called in a favour from PJ Malone downtown. He owed us for the Chucky O’Rourke case. Sure enough the Celeb Liberty Mutual Annuity was due to pay out ten million on a policy taken out six months ago. And of course that was times three, thirty million smackaroos. That was triple indemnity in capital letters. In big dancing neon script. And the unique beneficiary? Yeah, you guessed, one Veronica Moon Face Doyle. But something didn’t add up. It was a coincidence. And we didn’t like coincidences. Not in this clockwork three for one universe.
“We don’t like coincidences, Sam, do we?” I said, turning to the big knucklehead.
He got ready to thump Phil but I stopped him.
“Well, we don’t, do we?”
“No we don’t, Mike,” he said, before booting the bin across the room.
“Phil?”
“No, Mike, no coincidences, everything’s planned, predetermined, though you have to make the right choices.”
Sam blew a fire hydrant.
“Jeez, Mike, what the Hell’s he talking about? Let me torture him. Set the boy straight.”
The phone rang. Angie stopped filing her nails and picked up the hand set. She turned to us, “It’s some weird guy, got a deep throaty rasping voice, like he’s choking on something, a fish bone or something, wanna talk to you, Philip.” She had a big crush on Phil and always called him Sunday best.
It was Abernethy from Star Struck magazine. His prickly diction would shred up your lugs but he knew all the secrets.
“Hey, Phil, heard youz guys was investigating the deaths of the Fawcetts,” he crackled down the line.
Phil said he heard right and switched the phone to mega mode. Me and Sam locked ears onto the voice box.
“Well, thought you oughta know. They was all washed up, the Fawcetts. The channel was going to cut the line for good next month. They had stopped paying for it eight months back and the boys were financing it out of their own money. They was all but broke. The creditor vultures were all hovering. Sad, those guys were legend in the Eighties! You owe me one, Phil.”
He hung up abruptly and the dead line haunted the room till Phil hit the switch.
He looked at me and shook his head. Now we all knew what had happened but Phil, like always, had to go and put it into words.
“So now we know. It wasn’t murder though it would suit a certain party to have everybody think that it was. You were right, Mike, it was for insurance. And the companies don’t pay out on suicide. Not in the first couple of years anyways. I’ve been reading the gossip columns on the brothers and they had all the numbers. Abernethy just confirmed it. Sol and Lenny was on coke and pills and Courtney was collecting rubbish, hoarding it, making them all participate. What else could they do? You see, psychologically, they was all trapped, rich, famous, but they’d lost their souls and everything was the same, every day was a repetition, they couldn’t go on. None of us can go on like that. Imagine, they didn’t live in the past, or have no hope for the future, just the same shit every day, and the coke, and the pills and the booze. And then the garbage. Who could go on living like that? I ask ya. Who?”
“You forgot something, wise guy,” growled Sam, “how did they do it? They never found any weapons, no knives, no stakes, no nothing. People don’t just get holes in their chests and die out of thin air.”
“I’m speaking about why not how, Sam, how is easy, we’ll figure it out.”
Just then the office door opened and Bannerman and Goody from the precinct blew in like a pestilent prairie wind. Three or four uniformed stooges followed on their coattails and started searching the office.
Bannerman was a bad cat thru and thru. And Goody was just too dumb. Even to be a cop but how they decide these things is anybody’s guess. Bannerman leered at Sam just to get warmed up. I put a hand on his knee to restrain him. Bannerman’s hard grey eyes and chiselled head inclined towards us.
“Suppose you guys heard about the Fawcetts,” he snarled.
“What gives, Lionel?” I said, looking around and trying to sound unflustered.
I could hear Angie getting more and more hysterical, hey, youz can’t touch that, can’t go in there.
Bannerman smiled malevolently and tossed a slip of paper onto the desk.
It was a warrant to search the office and our apartment.
“Read it, date it, and sign, you three weirdos are in a lot of trouble.”
He pulled up a high back and straddled it.
“You were seen at the Dumbo building yesterday, spoke to Miss Doyle, what was that all about?” he asked.
Sam’s palms were bleeding but I was fresh stream cool. As cool as Rocky mountain air.
“Yeah, we’re investigating the case, working for Shorty,” I said, holding his steely grey peepers.
“Shorty’s a little bitch,” he spat in disgust.
“You see the way we got it figured is that the Fawcetts all dying at exactly the same time and all means that there must have been three killers to deliver the blow. Synchronized they must have been. In fact, attached at the hip would be better. And, do’h, how many guys is there in New York who fits that description?”
He was watching our faces as he spoke and Goody was doodling something lame-brained in his nincompoop notebook.
“We got an alibi,” I said, “and, say, what’s you guys looking for? Angie don’t like people disordering her system, she’s lacking in confidence and this could cut her deep. Set her progress way back. Back to when Lincoln was President.”
“Cut the cracks, Mike. We just need the murder weapons and they’ll be rigging up a special three seated fryer down at the Clink for you freaks. And then,” he paused, “there’s the tape. Didn’t know about the tape, huh?”
Him and Goody were staring at us. They think if you look a little guilty when they say something pertinent then you’re the bad guy. Poor dumb boobies. And to think we’re paying for these guys with our federal taxes.
“OK, have it your way,” I sighed, trying to keep grips on my patience, “what tape?”
“The tape that’s gonna show you three circus clowns murdering the Fawcetts. Courtney Fawcett was a real paranoid bird; he had video cameras everywhere in the apartment. But they’s all missing. The killers stripped them all out.”
Him and Goody looked hard at us again for a full two minutes.
I glanced at Phil. He made an almost imperceptible sign that it didn’t mean anything. Changed nothing.
Bannerman got up. “Don’t you queer birds fly off anywhere out of town, we’ll be back for you soon.”
They all trooped out of the office and slammed the door.
“Lipstick, what a cheek those copper guys got, thinks they’s the law or something,” shouted Angie all angry red faced.
“What do you think, Phil, Sam?”
“I think we should pay Moon Face a visit, but this time at home,” said Phil calmly.
We all got our hats and oxygen masks on and made for the subway. I stuck a pint of booze in my pocket in case of emergencies. Something told me that we was close to cracking this one. And we better had, as we was suspects now, suspects in the most bizarre crime ever to enter the mind of Bannerman and Goody. Or anyone else on this godforsaken rock for that matter.
We came out of the subway on the south side of Central Park at 59th Street where the sun shines on the rich and on the poor alike but a helluva lot more on the rich. That big red ball in the sky was boiling up the tarmacadam and steam cleaning our suits. There was sweat and heckles on the backs of our necks. We looked up at the block. The Fawcett Building, it was called. Even by people who’ve been to college and should know better. You could see it a mile off. Maybe even from space if you was an astronaut type of fellow. They was making so much money in the eighties that they had their three pouting physiognomies carved into the upper façade. Like a lowbiz showbiz Mount Rushmore. I wished we really had killed them. Sam read my thoughts.
“We should have smashed those jerks years back,” he growled, and twisted Phil’s right ear violently.
My mobile rang. It was Shorty. I was somehow expecting his call.
“Got anything for me, Mike?” he squealed in that half-comic castrato of his that had made a nation laugh for the last fifty years. First just as a midget and then as a post-modern parody of himself.
“We think they killed themselves, Shorty, did the hara-kiri on you. We’re deeply sorry. Too much of the same, lots of things, no souls, Phil says. They was broke too, the show was over at the end of the month. The station was shutting it down. Pulling out the plug. Got some moralizing clean-cut comic in a suit to take their place.”
I paused.
“There ain’t no Fawcett fortune, Shorty.”
There was a silence down the line.
“Shorty? Shorty??”
I heard a match strike and Shorty inhaled deep and blew out slow.
“I’m here, Mike,” he said, “got any proof?” He already sounded far far away. Like in another dimension place.
“Maybe you can help, Shorty, we need to find the tapes, Courtney’s video tapes, they disappeared. Or just maybe somebody got them hid somewhere.”
“They got a little secret room off the main kitchen, a hang out to watch movies and drink hooch, you open the oven three times rapidly and the door springs open. If there’s anything to be hid, it’ll be in there.”
I finished the call. I got out the pint of liquor and passed it round. We all had a long pull. We wiped the sweat off our necks.
“OK,” I said in a tired voice, “the show’s nearly over but we gotta get those tapes. We need to go in the back way, we don’t want Moon Face to know we’re there.”
We walked round the back of the building and looked up at the fire escape. I located where I thought the kitchen was with my eagle computer architect’s eye. We started to climb. It was hard going as the steel stairs were narrow and we had to shuffle up sideways like three escaped crab convicts on the ball and chain. Sam got out a little knife and after a coupla minutes prodding and probing, he managed to get a window open. At the tenth attempt we made it thru and found ourselves in a gigantic kitchen with black and white tiles like a big chess board and hundreds of killer fridges and chiller cabinets. There were bags of rubbish everywhere. The smell would have felled a bathtub of skunks. We thanked the lord for our oxygen masks. There were twenty odd ovens so we got to it. We heard a click and a portion of the far wall transmogrified into a door and swung open. We crabbed thru the slot and came out in a big room with lots of video screens, three beds, three sofas, a big over-bursting booze cabinet and a sea of cases filled with movies and videos.
“We’ll never find anything among all this garbage,” said Sam, taking off his mask and lighting up a Lucky.
I took another slug on the bottle and looked around. The psycho triplet was right. We would need an army of Siamese triplets working round the clock to sift through all this trash. I slumped down violently on one of the sofas, pulling Phil and Sam with me. There was a remote control beside me. I lazily switched it on and the screen sprung into life. The crazy romantic sons of bitches. Flashdance. They was watching Flashdance. What a feeling. What a bunch of tasteless degenerates. Yeah we should have killed them. The volume was up way too high. Sam smiled for the first time since we stopped dating Michaela Moravansky. He used to imagine she was like Irene Cara and him and her dancing round the room like a coupla movie stars. I suppose he too had pondered the split as the way to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We looked up and Veronica Doyle was standing in the doorway. I got it now. She was the Fawcetts’ pursuit of happiness. Her moon face was shining from too much New York summer and she was holding hands with a young muscleman in a baseball uniform and flip flops.
“I think this is what you are looking for,” she said, and handed us a video tape, “I ain’t smart enough to keep up the façade.”
“Hey, son, slip it in the machine for us, there’s a good boy,” I said, looking at Hector Valdés. Shouldn’t be too difficult for a guy who can swim ninety miles in a pair of cheap flip flops. Moon Face hit the lights and the Fawcett brothers appeared in the main hall of their Mount Rushmore mansion. We watched in silence. There was no sound. None was needed. We watched the boys drink down a long draft of wine. Then they went down on their knees. Jeez, they was praying. Like little kids before bed. This soul to keep. Maybe they got theirs back in the end. Then the knives appeared and we watched horrified like as they all plunged the blade into one another. That is, for youz mathematicians out there, it was a little algebra of death. A stuck B and B gutted C and C done for A. So both A and B and then C was dead. A perfect suicide circle and the poor slobs was no more. We watched the silence for a coupla minutes and then Moon Face appears. Looks like she’s sobbing. Maybe she really did love those bums. Then she approaches the bodies. She picks up the knives and puts them in her bag. Clips it shut. Then she throws stuff around like there was a struggle or a robbery or something. She disappears from the screen and then she’s back. She ain’t no dumb broad even if she does turn out to be a Swede. We see her chubby hands and that moon face magnifies as she approaches the camera. The hands go round the back and then the screen goes blank as she pulls the plug. There is darkness and silence.
I know Phil is feeling sorry for Moon Face. And so am I if truth be told. Even Sam seems to be feeling some sorta species solidarity thing. They was just regular Siamese triplets like us. Poor dumb freaks sons of bitches.
Veronica Doyle says, “It was intolerable in the end. I loved the three of them but they were crazy. Their lives were crazy. I think they knew that they couldn’t hold out and that’s why they took out the insurance. For me. So I would be safe and happy. If anything happened. But those companies they wouldn’t have paid.”
“And what about me?” came a squeaky voice from behind. Shorty was standing in the doorway. He had seen and heard it all. He had a hangdog unshaven look on his face and a Lucky in each hand.
“Those Fawcett guys never paid me a living wage, not once in over forty years. You only had it for two. Me? For forty-six! Every night I was slaving away bringing on guests, taking off guests, getting cheap laughs while they stashed the cash in Malibu apartments and cheap broads and popper pills. What am I supposed to do now? I ain’t got nothing. Just my talent-never recognized by the way. Where will I get a job? After the Fawcett boys political correctness was the end for guys like me. So I got an idea. An idea of justice. Of justice for all. I know about the thirty million. Let me tell you a little joke as way of explanation of my plan. The last joke I’ll tell for those tight asses.”
Shorty stubbed out his coffin nails and lit up two more. He laughed a bitter little high pitched laugh.
“OK,” he went on, “one time City Hall wanted to build a municipal aquatic gymnasium with saunas and spa stuff and all that jazz up in Harlem in order to buy votes at the next elections and they put out the contract to tender. Well, along comes some dumb Mexicans and they says we’ll do for two millions and then some smart aleck Canadians and they swear they do it real cheap for four million and then finally a group of wiseacres from the Bronx presents themselves downtown and says we’ll do it for six million and the joker in the mayor’s office says but youz guys is crazy that’s three times another offer how can you do it? And the Bronx boys says, easy, two million for us, two million for youz guys and two million for those dumb Mexican schmucks to build the thing.”
Shorty paused and gave us all a greedy knowing look.
“So I say we do it like that, Veronica, ten for you and lover boy, ten for me and ten for the freaky detectives, what do you all say?”
Phil looked at me imploringly. But now my mind was made up. That was the way it was going to go down. Three million bucks each. We was innocent and we had an alibi anyways. Bannerman and Goody would find some other suckers to take the rap. We all shook hands and Moon Face Doyle French-kissed the Cuban meat ball and started talking excitedly about moving out west to California. Sam would get to be alone with the Moravansky broad and her moustache and poor Phil could go to Yale and study the great philosophers and just maybe he’d find something somewhere that would speak just to him and help him make it out of Despairsville and into the Absolute. And as for me? I got to sit at my desk and smoke Luckies and chew gum. Just the way I always wanted to. And yeah, I started that book, that book to get all the bitter out. Maybe I’ll publish it one day, or maybe it’ll just sit in my desk drawer and I’ll close the typewriter down and go out alone into the world and maybe just find me a life. Who knows? That nobody, Siamese triplet or not, can ever tell ya.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story Rainbow, his novel The Tower and his short fiction collection Everywhere are McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.