Coco Butternut

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Then the driver came around in front of the truck with an odd waddle and stood there for a moment. I was certain it was a guy, and I could see he had a gun strapped in a holster on his hip. It was a big gun. He wore a black hood over his head. It had eye holes cut in it.

  After a moment of staring at me, he opened the camper at the back with a tiny bit of a struggle, dropped down the tailgate and lifted the top of the gate, the part that had a little window in it.

  He gestured for me to come to him. I left the satchel on the grave and went over. He took a small light out of his coat pocket and flashed it inside the truck. I could see a coffin in there. It was rusty looking and it was full size, far bigger than what you’d expect as the last resting spot for a weenie dog.

  The man motioned for me to grab the handle of the coffin, and I did. I pulled, and when the end got close to the tailgate, he took the handle on that side. Lifted it out, and we set it on the ground.

  He held out his hand, implying I should give him the money.

  “I need to see what’s in the coffin before I do,” I said.

  This was something I thought might get me shot for a moment. I wished now I had let Leonard bring a rifle, but then again, another reason I didn’t want him to have one is he’s not that good a shot. Not bad, but he might just as easily shoot me if things went asunder. Right then I thought we should have switched jobs. I can hit a dime on edge at considerable distance with nothing but a glint of moonlight shining on the dime. It’s an inborn knack for someone who really didn’t like guns at all.

  We stood that way for what seemed long enough for the season to pass, and then he nodded his hooded head, and motioned for me to open the coffin. I could see where it had been pried open before, so all I had to do was lift the lid.

  Inside there was a small cloth-wrapped thing that might have been the body of a real dog or a wooden cut out covered in cloth. The cloth had turned brown and was rotting in spots. There was a musty odor, but no real stink of death. The dog was long past that.

  “I need to cut the cloth and see what’s beneath it,” I said.

  A nod from the hooded man.

  I took out my pocket knife and bent over and cut loose some of the cloth. The hooded man helped by shining the flashlight into the coffin. It looked like there were bits of dog under the cloth. Gray, loose skin, and in some places the withered muscles were visible. I decided it was a dog. Was it the right dog? I couldn’t tell. I had done my part. I hadn’t been hired as a forensic expert, which was a good thing.

  As I backed off he put his hand on the lid to close the coffin. He had very small hands compared to the rest of him. He closed the lid, placed one hand on his gun grip, and the other he used to make a kind of gimme motion.

  I walked back to the grave, picked up the satchel and brought it over. He placed it on the tailgate, opened it for a look, made a satisfied grunt, and closed the satchel and looked at me.

  I hadn’t moved.

  He pushed the tailgate up and the upper portion down, walked swiftly to the driver’s side carrying the satchel, pulled himself into the cab and closed the door.

  I gave the truck a good onceover. Yep, spray paint spots, and I still figured it was water color. The truck rumbled and the lights came on, and then it moved away, swiftly, down the dirt and gravel graveyard drive on out to the asphalt road. There was a flash of tail lights through the trees, and that was it, he was gone.

  Leonard, Brett and Chase all had microphones, so they heard me, and in a moment Leonard came walking out of the woods swinging his ball bat slightly above the ground. I thought he looked disappointed. He hadn’t had the opportunity to hit anyone.

  A few moments later I saw headlights through the woods, and knew that was Brett and Chance coming around to meet us.

  They stopped the Prius, got out and came over. Brett looked at the coffin.

  “So that’s all there was to it?”

  “Yep,” I said. “That was it.”

  “Silly fool paying for a dead dog, and we’re talking one hundred thousand dollars, not a few hundred.”

  “I think it’s sweet,” Chance said. “It’s not the dead dog, though I can understand that, it’s about his mother.”

  “Yeah, Farmer and his dear old mother,” Leonard said.

  I went and pulled the pickup around, and me and Leonard loaded the coffin up, and we drove out of there with Brett and Chance following us.

  As we rode along in the pickup, I said, “I keep thinking who would know the dog was worth that much to him, and then, why all the mystery, why hire us to do it? He could have done what we did.”

  “Said he was scared,” Leonard said. “So I got a feeling he might know who had the dog, and whoever it was wasn’t in love with him. Knew he came to get it, they might take the money and shoot him in the head and that would be the end of it. But if one of us came, the kidnapper might not feel the need to kill anyone he didn’t know. Just make the exchange and drive away.”

  “Could be,” I said.

  “What I’m getting is we’re being made monkeys for something we don’t understand, and I don’t like that. This stinks more than a dead dog, brother.”

  “Dog didn’t stink that much, actually.”

  “Well, it stinks to me. I don’t believe that Farmer fucker at all.”

  “You are a skeptical man,” I said.

  “Find a place to pull over. I want to take a look at that dog myself.”

  “Already have. Musty. Loose fur. Mummified under the wrap.”

  “Pull over.”

  We were still out in the country, so I pulled over by the side of the road near a stand of trees next to a little, trickling creek.

  We got out of the truck and the Prius pulled up behind us and killed the lights. Brett and Chance got out.

  “Car trouble?” Brett said as she and Chance came over.

  “No,” I said. “Leonard wants to look himself. He thinks Farmer’s story stinks.”

  “Really none of our business how true his story is,” Brett said. “We’ve done what we were paid to do. I don’t think swapping money for a dead dog is illegal.”

  “Unless you consider that whole extortion thing,” I said.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” Brett said.

  Leonard had the tailgate on the pickup down and was tugging at the coffin, paying us no mind. I went over and took hold of the other handle and we set it down behind the pickup. Leonard opened it up. He had a flashlight in his pocket, and he was shining it around on the dog.

  I said, “Okay. There is one odd thing. The dog is lying on a bottom that’s higher than the real bottom. I didn’t notice that before.”

  “I noticed it right off,” Leonard said.

  “I have your word for that,” I said.

  “Looks obvious to me,” Chance said.

  “Remember, I am your dad,” I said.

  “Yes, Daddy,” Chance said.

  By this time Leonard had lifted the dog out and placed it on the ground. There was a small hole in one corner of the false bottom and Leonard’s finger fit in there. He lifted the false bottom out, and on the true bottom of the coffin lay a corpse.

  I couldn’t distinguish age, but enough of the flesh and features had survived that I could tell that it was most likely a woman, way the hips were set, way the wide edges of the bones cut through the rotting flesh.

  Chase said, “Yuck.”

  “Damn,” Brett said.

  Leonard stepped back, pushed the fedora up on his head and looked at me. “What kind of dog is that, Hap?”

  Leonard and I took the Prius. Brett and Chance took the pickup and drove the body to the police station. Me and Leonard went to Farmer’s house. We might get our nuts in a vice over that with the police, even if the police chief was a good friend.

  Farmer’s home was inside a gate and there was a tall rock wall around it and great oak and hickory trees that might have been around when Davy Crockett died at the Alamo bordered on either
side of a long, white, winding drive. We stopped at the gate and pushed the button on the device outside, but the buzzer we heard went unanswered.

  I walked up to the gate and looked through. It was a big house at the end of that long, white drive. It loomed like a mountain and was as dark as a murderer’s dreams.

  “He was expecting us to deliver,” I said. “So why doesn’t he answer?”

  “Might not like the answer to that question,” Leonard said. “Grab a flashlight.”

  I went back to the car, got a flashlight out of the glove box and gloves for both of us. They don’t call it a glove box for nothing.

  Leonard walked along the fence until he found a thick vine that wound down off the wall. He took hold of it, and pulled himself up and got over the wall, nimble as a squirrel. I followed, doing the same, less nimbly.

  We walked along the drive toward the house. A walk like that you damn near needed provisions. The shadows from the trees were as thick as chunks of chocolate cake. A chill wind was blowing hard, lifting dead leaves, tumbling them over us and across the drive in an explosion of crackles and pops. More leaves snapped underfoot like locust husks.

  When we came close to the house we could still see no light, not even in the side rooms. There was a brace of dried winter trees and evergreen shrubbery all about. At the back of the house we found a door pried open, as if with a crowbar.

  We pulled our burglar gloves on and nudged the door open further and slipped inside. It was a corridor, and we went down it into a room large enough to keep a pet pachyderm. I moved the flashlight around enough to see that the furnishings were expensive and the paintings on the wall seemed to be as well. The frames were all impressive. I got my frames at Walmart, so I might not be an expert.

  I found a light switch and hit it and the lights came on. We wandered out of the main room and down another hallway and poked our heads in rooms along the way, switching lights on, but nothing jumped out at us. We turned lights off as we left the rooms. The hallway was very long and the walls on either side were covered in dog photos in nice frames; all weenie dogs. There were award ribbons too, lots of Best In Show stuff, and there was a large photo of Coco Butternut. I knew this due to my superior sleuthing skills and because underneath the photo which was encased in a gold frame was a metal plate that read: coco butternut, my sweetie.

  Last room on the left, Leonard turned on the light at the edge of the door and we went inside. More nice furniture, a fireplace you could have roasted a whole hog in. Farmer lay on the floor. He was not napping or watching a bug crawl across the ceiling, which was one of my pastimes. He lay on the floor next to the couch and there was blood all over his head and all over the floor and his head was a lot flatter than when we had last seen him. He hadn’t just been smashed in the head, he had been worked over good. One of his arms was at an odd angle. His toupée lay in a puddle of blood, like a dead kitten.

  “Now we call the cops,” Leonard said.

  We didn’t need to, because no sooner had we walked back to the main room, than we saw flashing lights out the front window at the top of the drive. We stood where we were until someone got the gate open, and then three cop cars came rolling down the drive to park in front of the house.

  I turned on a light that gave the front porch illumination, that porch being a giant concrete slab surrounded by shrubs, except at the steps which led down to a concrete walk. Leonard and I walked out there and stood with our hands loose in case the cops thought we were burglars or might be reaching for something.

  Chief Marvin Hanson, our friend, got out of the head cop car and came over. “You guys,” he said. “What assholes.”

  “What did we do?” Leonard said.

  “Brett and Chance gave us the scoop, showed us the body, and we came here to talk to Farmer, and who do I find, but two salt and pepper assholes.”

  “That asshole stuff,” Leonard said. “That hurts.”

  “You won’t get to talk to Farmer,” I said.

  “He not home?”

  “Oh, he’s home, but someone in a very bad mood got here before we did and rearranged his head.”

  “Yeah,” Leonard said, “he’s all over the place in there.”

  “Shit,” Marvin said.

  So Marvin and some of the cops, took a peek-a-boo while me and Leonard sat on the steps and shot the shit with one of the officers who had been assigned to make sure we didn’t turn to smoke and disappear. The officer’s last name was Carroll and last time we had spent any time with him was when Leonard was beating the hell out of a dog abuser and Carroll had been called to make sure Leonard didn’t kill the guy. Leonard and Carroll got along well and they were laughing about this and that and pretty much cutting me out of the conversation, though I tried several ways by which I might enter into the discussion, only to find myself ignored or given short shrift.

  I was still looking for my opening when Marvin came out on the porch and sent Carroll inside to do this or that. Marvin said, “Thing is, we get here and there’s a dead body, and we got you guys, and this after making a trade at a cemetery for a dead woman in a coffin.”

  “We thought we were trading for a dead dog,” I said.

  “But you didn’t call the cops when this blackmail was going on, now did you?”

  “We did not,” I said.

  “Bad us,” Leonard said. “You guys really would have cared about a guy trading money for a pooch corpse? That would have been like a priority?”

  “Maybe not too much,” Marvin said, and sat down on the steps by us. He shooed the other cops away.

  “So how bad a trouble are we in?” I said.

  “I don’t think you did it,” Marvin said, “if I take Brett and Chance at their word, and I do, but I’m not sure how a judge and a courtroom would take all this.”

  “He was our client,” I said. “We came to find out why he had lied to us about getting a dog’s body back, and there was a woman’s with it. We wanted answers.”

  “You should have come to me,” Marvin said. “I’m the law. We get paid to get answers.”

  “Okay. Here’s a thought. Is there some kind of privilege for private investigators and their clients?” Leonard said.

  “Only in the movies, boys. Only in the movies.”

  They took us downtown but didn’t throw us in a holding cell. We sat in Marvin’s office with Brett and Chance. I had that feeling I had in grade school when the teacher made you write something or another on the blackboard multiple times.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Marvin said. “I’m letting everyone go, and I’m saying you told Brett and Chance to tell me that you were going to Farmer’s to do a welfare check, cause the guy in the cemetery looked dangerous, and you thought he might be a threat, and you thought you should get there and see he was okay. He wasn’t.”

  “Could be the guy in the graveyard did it,” I said. “We were farting around with loading up the body, stopping along the way to look in the coffin, and Leonard gave me bad directions, so it took us an extra ten minutes.”

  “I gave you bad directions?” Leonard said. “Bullshit, you can’t follow a straight line if a string was tied to your dick and to where you wanted to go. Oh, sorry, Chance. No offense meant.”

  “None taken, but now I got that image in my head.”

  “Sorry again,” Leonard said.

  “He’s not sophisticated like me,” I said. “You’ll have to forgive him.”

  Marvin said, “What I’m going to do is let you two go home, and then you’re going to need to stay out of it. This could still come back to you, you know. No use adding fuel to the fire. Stay away from this.”

  We left out of there and drove our respective rides back to the office where Leonard put on a pot of coffee and got a bag of vanilla wafers out of the desk drawer.

  As he did, he said, “These help me think.”

  “Sure they do,” I said.

  Brett and Chance drove up slightly after we arrived and came upstairs
and into the office.

  Brett said, “That was not too smart, boys.”

  “Yep,” Leonard said. “Our usual.”

  “You know, guy in the cemetery would have to have been in a real rush to get there and do the job before you went over,” Brett said. “I mean, he had to figure you might take the coffin right to him. He wouldn’t know you were going to spend time looking inside or getting lost, so that would be some chance he was taking.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Means he probably had him a partner,” Leonard said. “That means they get the money and while we’re fucking around with Coco Butternuts and a corpse to be named later, he’s got this other guy over there playing T-Ball with Farmer’s head?”

  “Butternut,” I said.

  “What,” Leonard said.

  “It’s Butternut, not Butternuts.”

  “Whatever.”

  There were no more revelations in the offing that night, so we all went home. Later, upstairs Brett lay in my arms, her sweet breath close to my face, her hand on my naked thigh.

  “You know that gets me excited?” I said.

  “I’d be disappointed if it didn’t,” she said.

  “That’s why you let Buffy stay downstairs, huh?”

  “She likes it downstairs now, since Chance is there. You know, we could do it if we did it quietly. I don’t want Chance or Buffy to hear.”

  “Perhaps we could do it in slow motion,” I said.

  “I like slow motion,” she said.

  “Somewhere in the midst of it, though, we can move a little faster, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Sure, but not too soon.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  And it was.

  I’d like to say with our great powers of deductive reasoning we figured out who did what and why by the next morning, but we didn’t.

  When I came downstairs Leonard had used his key to come in, and he was fixing breakfast and Chance was in her footy pajamas with dinosaurs on them, sitting at the table, sucking at a large cup of coffee. Buffy was sitting at Chance’s elbow, waiting for her to drop something.