STRAY CAT BLUES
A MAX PLANK NOVEL
robert bucchianeri
Copyright 2017 by Robert Bucchianeri
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover Design: Deranged Doctor Design
Created with Vellum
For Nick and Paula.
Always.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Author Note
About the Author
More Max Plank Coming Soon
Also by robert bucchianeri
One
My plan was to spend that Friday in late May and then the rest of the summer in peace and quiet, as far away as I could manage from civilization and its discontents.
I was tucked away in my floating home docked at Pier 39, Fisherman’s Wharf, San Francisco.
Home is the Acapella Blues, a 42-foot houseboat, a refurbished relic from World War II, where it served honorably as a lifeboat.
I was lounging on the back deck, sipping scalding black coffee from a cracked white mug. The air carried the scent of salt and seaweed and fried eggs. The sky was as blue as it could bear and filled with the sounds of squawking gulls and waves caressing the wood and fiberglass hull. Off in the distance, Alcatraz Island loomed in all its shady glory.
Napping and reading, some fishing when the tide was just right, strumming my guitar, and maybe jotting down some notes and words towards what I modestly call “the magnum opus” were all I had on the agenda.
Well, there was Alexandra Stone. She was back in town for the first time in weeks and actually wanted to see me. The woman will never learn. I’d promised her Thai food and dancing, and the sum total of my attention, to say nothing of my affection.
Things were looking up. Life was peachy keen. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I was going to savor the moments while it did.
I’d just earned a small boatload of money rescuing the proverbial damsel in distress, enough to pay my boat slip rent and keep me in beans and beef for the next six months. I had no plans to accomplish anything constructive or beneficial for the human race in the foreseeable future.
Alas, as Robert Burns so lyrically summarized in his apology to a mouse:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an 'men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!
I didn’t anticipate the stray mouse that turned up on my dock late that morning. The tapping on my front door, a slab of tarnished oak with a stained glass porthole inlaid with a Knights of the Roundtable motif, took me by surprise.
I don’t often get unexpected visitors. I normally conduct my random business meetings at a dark corner booth of the Rusty Root, my friend Bo Fiddler’s establishment on Fisherman’s Wharf. I try and keep clients, strangers, and other fowl away from my humble abode.
And the visitor herself made it even more of a surprise.
The girl was about ten years old, give or take a few semesters. Ponytail. Brown blinkers. Wearing jean overalls on top of a ratty white sweater with a black shirt peeking out, she had a dark blue skateboard painted with the moon and stars tucked under her arm.
“Hello, young lady,” I said. “Can I help you?”
“Maybe,” she said.
I stepped aside, waved my hand. “Would you like to have a seat and tell me all about it?”
She nudged her mouth to the left in an inconclusive way but entered my floating domain without hesitation. I motioned for her to sit on a small leather couch propped up against the starboard side of the boat. She sunk back into it, dwarfed. A Raggedy Ann Doll sprung to life.
I held up a single finger to her, went back out onto the deck to retrieve my mug, grabbed a folding chair, and placed it in front of Raggedy Ann.
I sat down, brought the coffee to my lips, sipped, and smacked in appreciation.
“Would you like…?” I paused. What would she like that I might have? “You don’t…?”
She looked at me with those big eyes and said, “I’m fine, Mr. Plank. Thank you.”
I like a well-spoken kid, an adult-sounding child. I’ve not a clue as to how to speak to the regular kind.
I gave the kid my best kindly look and waited.
She plopped the skateboard at her feet, took out a well-used Rubik’s cube, and her hands went wild while her eyes stayed fixed on mine. After a lengthy silence, punctuated only by the rasps and whistles of the spinning cube, she said, “So you find people?”
“Sometimes.” The cube was, within seconds, all white on top, all red on one side, all blue on the cover. It had to be some kind of new nautical record.
“You’re big,” she mumbled, staring over my shoulder, out at the sky beyond my desk.
I smiled. “Yup.”
“How do you do it?”
“I’ve got this really cool stretcher rack for a bed and every night I crank myself out just a little further and...” I stopped. She was a tough crowd. Instead of the laugh I expected, I got a no-nonsense frown.
“No, silly. How do you find people?”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Each case is unique.”
“Hmm,” she murmured, studying me while her fingers started again, scrambling up the cube, then moving again to unscramble, twisting like the eye of a hurricane. Whish. Whoosh. Whish.
“Who’d you lose?”
She ignored me.
I let out a long breath through my nose. She’s a kid, I reminded myself, trying to reign in my impatience. I drained my mug of coffee.
“You already know my name, which is a little unfair because I don’t know yours.”
Her eyes flitted around the room, landing on a grouping of photos that Alexandra had taken during a photo shoot in Africa a couple years back. Her fingers continued to worry the Rubik’s cube. “I like giraffes,” she whispered.
“Me too.”
“My name is Frankie,” she mumbled.
It fit her. The kid looked tough. Worldly, in a cute rough-and-tumble way, for a ten-year-old.
“Nice to meet you, Frankie.”
She did not respond in kind. Her eyes found mine again and bored deep.
“One more time,” I tried. “Why’d you come out here to see me? Shouldn’t you be in school today?”
She looked up and away, and her fingers paused. She flipped the cube into the air and caught it by twisting her left hand backward. It plopped into
her palm, and she planted the cube between her legs with a loud crack.
She stared at the square of plastic between her legs for a few seconds, then raised her eyes to me. “Mr. Plank, how much do you charge to find somebody?”
“Once again, that depends.”
“Mr. Plank, I’ve got money.”
“Frankie, can you just tell me what you want?”
“It’s kind of… well. My sister. She needs help.”
“With what?”
“Some guys.”
Some things never change and never will. Gals in trouble with guys are one of them.
“Tell me more, Ms. Frankie,” I said with a smile.
She narrowed her eyes, trusting my smile as much as a honey badger trusts a cobra. “She did a deal with them. Fair and square.” She stopped, looked down at her cube, frowned.
A deal with them. Most of the time when someone utters the word “deal” in my presence, it is not a hopeful sign.
“What kind of a deal?”
“Just a deal. Okay?” She glared up at me, narrowing her eyes.
Okay. Had she been a normal-aged person, I would have just thrown her out at that moment, but I tried to take her lack of years into consideration.
“How old are you?”
She looked away, searching Alexandra’s safari pictures, perhaps for some other animal she liked. After a long while, she decided it wouldn’t be too dangerous to answer my question.
“Twelve.”
“Ahhh. What grade is that?”
Again, she looked away. I was asking awfully tough questions, after all.
“I’m homeschooled.”
“But what grade would you be in if you weren’t?” I was curious for my own edification.
“Sixth grade.”
“I see.” I paused. A twelve-year-old is a sixth grader. This interview had not been a total waste of time.
“Why don’t you just tell me why you came here to see me?”
She closed her eyes, nibbling her lower lip with her tiny crooked teeth. “My sister is… missing.”
“And it has something to do with this deal?”
“Uh huh. It has to.”
“How long has she been missing?”
She sniffled, sneezed, and rubbed the side of her nose with her thumb in an odd, endearing way. “A week ago yesterday.”
“Have your mom and dad called the police?” I already knew the answer but had to ask anyway.
“I don’t have a mom and dad. Just Johnnie.”
“Johnnie’s your sister?”
She nodded vigorously as if her life depended on it.
Her parents, wherever they’d gone, must have had a weird sense of humor, naming their two baby girls after a boy and a girl who kills him for being unfaithful.
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-two.”
A big girl then, but still, out there in the City by the Bay, too many big girls and small ones lived on a razor’s edge of safety.
“Tell me about the day she disappeared. When was the last time you saw her?”
She tapped the Rubik’s cube against the chair, staring at her blue tennies. “Last Wednesday morning. We had chocolate chip pancakes and then Johnnie said she had to go see Vince and Scooter. She said that they were trying to screw her. She said they weren’t going to get away with it.” Frankie clutched her knees. “I told her not to go. I was afraid. Scooter and Vince are scary. She said she had to or we’d lose our house. We’d have nothing, no place to live, and then child protection would take me away from her. I couldn’t stop crying. I just kept telling her no… no...” Suddenly, her eyes filled with tears. She gritted her teeth, regained her composure, wiped away the wetness with the back of her hand, and glared at me, daring me to say a word about her moment of weakness. I took the cue.
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
She shook her head emphatically.
“You have no idea where she went or what might have happened?”
“Thursday, I went and saw Vince and Scooter myself.”
“You talked to them?”
“They said they hadn’t seen Johnnie at all. They were lying, and I told them that.”
“What did they do?”
“Scooter hurt my arm.” She held up her left arm and twisted it so I could see the fading red bruise that still looked nasty days after it was inflicted.
“I ran away. I didn’t cry. I told them they were shit heads and fuckers and that I was going to get them.”
Foul language normally doesn’t bother me. I occasionally indulge when warranted. But coming out of the mouth of such a young lass, it still has the ability to startle. Such old-world sentiment.
“How did Mr. Vince and Mr. Scooter react to that?”
“They just laughed. But I’m not kidding. If anything happens to Johnnie, I’ll kill them both.” She bit her lip hard, her face a fierce mask of pain and anger.
“And you think that I can help.” I posed it as a fact, not a question.
She nodded, her face still firm, resolute.
“Why?”
“Man told me.”
“Told you what?”
She tightened her grip around the cube, tapped it again lightly, repeatedly, against the seat of the chair and mumbled, “You’re tough. Fair.” She stopped, wrinkled her nose, then spit it out like it was a mouthful of Brussels sprouts, “Good.”
Those were three adjectives all right. To my knowledge, no one had called me the latter in many moons. “Who said that?”
“Aren’t you?” She peered up at me with suspicious eyes.
I shrugged. I try not to toot my own horn. Anyway, tough, good, and fair are pretty relative qualities. My ex-wife, old buddies, and clients all might well disagree.
“What was the man’s name?” I tried again.
Tap tap tapping of Rubik’s cube against old wood. A picture of a scrawny woodpecker working an old oak popped into my mind. A fall day, brown leaves floating in the shimmery sunlit air outside my window, a million years ago when I was about the same age as this kid.
Memories light the corners of my mind.
“Poe.”
“Poe? Poe in Treasure Island? At the casino?” How did she know Poe?
“Poe,” she said firmly.
I didn’t like it. Why was she involved with Poe? It wasn’t a good sign for her or her big sister. It bothered me and I wondered why.
“Here,” she said, digging around in her shirt. She pulled out a creased photograph, stood up, and reached over the desk to place it in my hand.
It was a picture of Frankie, taken in the not-too-distant past, standing next to a tall brunette. The brunette wasn’t wearing makeup and didn’t need any. She was a sight for sore eyes. I tried to hide my reaction. When I looked up, I thought I detected an accusatory look in Frankie’s eyes, but maybe it was just me feeling guilty about my primal urges in front of a little girl who loved the object of my untoward affection in a purer way.
“That’s my big sister,” she said proudly, almost defiantly.
“It sure is,” I said. “You look like her.”
Her features softened, her shoulders rose, her eyes relaxing a bit. Once in a while, I say the right thing despite myself.
“I don’t usually take missing person cases like this one. I think it would be a good idea to go to the police and see if—”
“No!”
“Frankie, I—”
“No, please, Mr. Plank. You’re our only hope. We can’t go to the police. Trust me. That would be the end. I’m afraid… Johnnie would kill me. They wouldn’t help. They’d take me away. They might put Johnnie in jail.” She stopped talking in order to squeeze her eyes shut.
I reached out and put my hand on her knee until she looked up into my eyes.
“I probably won’t be able to help, but for sure I can’t unless you tell me about what your sister’s business was with Vince and Scooter.”
She stared into my eyes for a lon
g time. “I don’t know,” she murmured.
“Frankie...”
She closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears.
See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak evil truth.
She let out a sigh and started in. “Paintings. She sold paintings and sculptures. She’d order them online. From far away mostly. Then she’d resell them and make money. She’d go out a couple times a week with a painting or two, sometimes a statue, and she’d be gone for most of the day. When she came back, we had money again. Enough so we could pay our rent and buy food, and sometimes we’d go out to IHOP or even to a movie. The Terminator.”
I admired her taste in flicks. Arnold’s thespian heights can thrill even the most jaded moviegoer.
Maybe I’m a cynic, but I had my doubts about big sister Johnnie and her art dealing business. Having seen her photo, I could guess where the money she brought back home to Frankie came from. Beauty like hers was a valuable commodity. There were men, all too many men—some of them otherwise good men, others rotten to the core—who would trade their souls, to say nothing of their money, to spend a little time with such beauty. To take advantage of a woman at loose ends, with too much responsibility too soon.
But it seemed as if something more was going on here, too. Maybe she was the one taking advantage of the weaknesses of the frailer gender. Whoever was to blame, she’d been double-crossed somehow, and it seemed to be a significant threat to her livelihood. More than sex was involved, although usually, that ingredient could spoil an otherwise perfectly good stew.
I had no idea what the paintings were about. Just a ruse to fool her sister so she wouldn’t find out what was really going on? It seemed too elaborate. You could fool most twelve-year-olds with way less time and trouble.
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