The Arborist

by P. T. Phronk

  The shopkeeper wrapped something in tissue paper. Letterman grabbed the package, paid, then headed for the door. Stan slouched and held the camera ready. Bloody slobbered on the seat.

  As they emerged, Letterman’s pinky finger wrapped around his mistress’s.

  “Not bad, not bad,” muttered Stan. “C’mon, give me more. Work it, Davey, work it.”

  Letterman grinned at his mistress. She smiled back.

  Stan exhaled, steadying the camera.

  There was a sound behind Stan—a screech—but he ignored it while he snapped off picture after picture.

  “This is it. Oh my God, this is it,” he muttered. Hand in hand, Letterman’s head lowered while his mistress arched her back and rose on her tippy toes. The golden morning light around them, fall leaves blowing past the rustic porch, it was like a scene from a romantic comedy. If paparazzi were rightly treated as artists, this photo would win awards.

  Their lips touched and Stan’s finger squeezed the button. Just before that ecstatic click, his head jerked sideways, knocking his glasses from his face. A thunderous crunch shook the car. Bloody let out a yelp as she tumbled to the floor.

  Stan’s car had been nudged from the shoulder into the middle of the highway; by what, he didn’t see. Stan whipped his head upright. A Mack truck was bearing down on him. He fumbled for the keys in the ignition, turned them. As he waited what felt like an eternity for the ignition to catch, he heard a second crunch, then a third, then a clamor of splintering wood.

  The truck loomed over him, brakes screeching.

  His car rumbled to life and he floored the gas just in time to avoid being obliterated. He pulled to the safety of the road shoulder before reaching for his dog.

  “Bloodhound! Oh girl, are you okay?” He lifted his dog from the floor onto the passenger seat, patting her down. Bloody was glassy-eyed, but could stand. She shook herself off as if she’d just gotten out of a bath, gave Stan’s hand a reassuring lick, then propped herself up on the windowsill to get a look at the commotion at the antique shop.

  It hurt to turn his head, but when he did, all Stan saw was a cloud of dust and smoke.

  “Stay,” he said, but Bloody leapt out the door as soon as Stan opened it.

  A figure emerged from the cloud. She wore sunglasses not unlike Letterman’s, a long coat, and a wide-brimmed hat. As the dust swirled away from her, Stan saw that the hat had a flowery pattern, and the coat was purple. Above that, an unwrinkled face; she was thirty-something, not much older than Stan.

  Behind the woman, a VW Beetle had lodged itself into the porch in front of the antique shop. Bloody hurdled into the smoke and fire. “No girl! No!” screamed Stan. He turned to the woman. “Are you okay? Were you driving that car?”

  “Must’ve hit a slippery spot,” she mumbled. She was hugging herself, wrapped up in the purple coat as if it was freezing outside, though it wasn’t. Her face was red in the few spots visible between the coat, the hat, and the sunglasses.

  “Ma’m, are you all right? Did you get burned?”

  “Oh honey, don’t you worry about me. Just run along now, I’ll handle it fine.” She brushed herself off and poked at the arm of her coat, where there was a tear surrounded in dark tacky blood.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” said Stan. “What happened to the people who were standing on the porch here?” There was no sign of Letterman or his mistress. The porch where they had been standing was now largely taken up by the VW Beetle convertible, flipped on its back, wheels still spinning. Splintered beams of wood poked up all around it. Smoke billowed everywhere.

  “People? Ah, nope, didn’t see any people there.” The woman turned to enter the antique shop. “Thank you, young man, for your assistance. You can get along now. Okay, sweetie?”

  Bloody trotted from the other side of the car. Stan’s stifled a gasp. The dog violently shook the object in her mouth back and forth. Little tufts of curly gray hair flew off and fluttered away in the wind. Stan’s dog had found Letterman’s hat, soaked in blood and covered in fleshy hunks of talk show host.

  2. CAREER MOVE

  BLOODHOUND WAS NOT ACTUALLY A bloodhound. Stan could never figure out what exactly the little bugger was, but at a pudgy eleven pounds, with grayish-brown fur, the bulbous eyes of a pug and the frowny underbite of a shih-tzu, she certainly wasn’t a bloodhound. The name came from her gift.

  Articles of clothing are what you want. For a B-list celebrity, maybe even low A-list, you can get a signed T-shirt off eBay for twenty or thirty bucks. Clothing traps the skin oils, or the little hairs, or whatever it was that Bloody sniffed to start tracking the owner down.

  Presently, Bloody was taking the celebrity clothing thing a little too seriously. She held onto Letterman’s hat, growling, as Stan tugged at it.

  “No! Bad girl! Leave it!” he said. Finally, Bloody let go. A clump of hair attached to a jiggly strip of flesh rolled off the brim and hit the odd woman’s foot. She was wearing slippers.

  The woman stared at Letterman’s hat, her head motionless, as if she were daydreaming. She caressed her lips with her tongue.

  Stan tossed the hat to the ground beside the overturned car. He held up his hand sternly to keep Bloody from running after it again. The dog was really earning her name today.

  “Hey, lady!” said Stan. Her head turned slightly. “We gotta find those people, okay? They might be trapped under your car.”

  “Was it your ride I nicked before I flipped on over here? I’m terribly sorry about that,” said the odd woman.

  Stan groaned. She must’ve been in shock. He started to run around to the other side of the car, but then the odd woman was in front of him. She lowered her sunglasses, revealing eyes the color of ice, striking in contrast with her red skin.

  “Honey, you don’t want to be involved with this, do ya? More trouble than it’s worth, I’d bet you.”

  She had a point. People from the nearby shops were coming out to see what happened. The shopkeeper from the antique store was behind the cracked window, peeking from behind the counter. Sirens whined in the distance.

  The smoke started to clear. Stan glanced down. Lying on the ground, poking from behind the smashed car, was an unmoving, liver-spotted hand.

  Unconsciously, he touched the camera still strapped around his neck. From deep in his mind, that Elton John song, Candle in the Wind, began playing in his head. The woman was right. He didn’t need that sort of trouble. A beloved celebrity, killed while being stalked by a professional paparazzo? He had nothing to do with it, but he’d never be able to find work again if anyone found out he was there.

  “Okay,” he said, his lips shaking. “You, uh, you can handle it? Good … good luck?”

  He backed away from the wreckage. Bloody stared at the odd woman with narrowed eyes for a long while before joining Stan again.

  Stan studied the details; they told the story of what happened. The parking lot was pockmarked with two shallow pits surrounded by broken asphalt, where the woman’s Beetle had bounced twice before bowling into the couple on the porch. A little pile of broken red plastic sat on the shoulder of the highway; the remains of Stan’s tail light. He gathered up as much as he could, stuffing the bits into his pockets. The less evidence the better.

  On the road, skid marks started at the junction between the highway and a cross road, then formed a curved line to where Stan’s car had been, nicking it before hitting the curb sideways, flipping into the parking lot. Stan took in the details. They could be important later.

  Rubbing his neck, he stumbled to his car. Bloody hopped to the passenger side. Stan gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white.

  He considered going back to see if he could help. Bloody let out a sharp bark. She stamped her paws, alternating left then right. Let’s go.

  “Fine, fine, I’m going.”

  An ambulance sped past him, lights flashing, followed shortly by a duo of police cars. Stan scratched his face, inconspicuously obscuring it at the same time. />
  He drove and drove, his heart forgetting to beat every time he spotted a cop. He stopped only once at a greasy roadside diner, where Bloody barked until Stan fed her an entire bacon double cheeseburger. A few hours later, he was back in New York City.

  He mumbled a greeting to his old neighbor, Mrs. Olson, on the way in, then slammed his apartment door. He stood with his back to the door, eyes closed, breathing heavily, for a very long time. What was the car’s license plate? What color were the woman’s eyes? Dammit, he couldn’t remember the plate number; what if that detail was important? Her eyes though, her eyes were blue. Icy blue.

  He opened his eyes. Bloody was on the bed, snoring.

  He collapsed on the tattered couch in the middle of the apartment. The CRT television flickered to life with a labored boing.

  Surely the news of Letterman’s death would be all over the networks. With the recent scandal, he was already near the top of the celebrity gossip list, and for the gossip shows, the timing of his death couldn’t be better. Especially when his mistress had been by his side.

  Was she dead too?

  When Michael Jackson croaked, five minutes wouldn’t go by without his name flashing across the TV. Stan wondered who had taken the last picture of Jackson alive, and which tropical paradise he was living in now.

  Would he even be able to sell his pictures? Or would it dump too much suspicion on him? Maybe he should have just stayed at the scene and cooperated as a witness. Ah, but then the pictures would be confiscated as evidence, so he still couldn’t sell them, and his career would still be in the shitter.

  What a damn mess.

  The television image faded into view. It was already tuned to CNN. Stan mashed the volume up button.

  He gasped when he saw what was on. Bloody perked up her ears.

  There, on the television, was some bullshit story about the pros and cons of the H1N1 flu vaccine. No celebrity “expert” blabbing about Letterman. No live helicopter shot of the ambulance carrying the body. Nothing on the ticker about the odd woman who’d bowled into him.

  He flipped from channel to channel. Nope, nada, nothing. Somehow, the world hadn’t found out that David Letterman was dead.

  3. CONTRIVED ENCOUNTER

  “MAYBE IT WASN’T AS BAD as it looked,” muttered Stan. He sat on his couch, knees to his chest. It had been a week since the Letterman incident.

  Bloody lay on her side beside the couch, her belly flab spilling out in front of her. She rolled her bulging eyes.

  “Don’t you give me sass!” Stan pointed a shaking finger at the dog. “All we saw was the hat. Could’ve been a flesh wound.” He pushed his glasses up on his face. “Even a minor cut on the head can bleed profusely. Or. Or! Or it was the girlfriend that was bleeding.”

  Bloodhound rolled onto her back, her little legs wiggling in the air in an effort to flip the rest of her pudgy body over to turn away from Stan.

  “Okay, fine, I know, we’ve been over this.” He touched his finger to his upper lip, stubbly from days of avoided shaving. “Okay, what if. What if!” He paused, staring glassy-eyed at the television screen. “I got nothing.”

  He jumped and shouted, “ahhh!” Bloody flipped onto her feet, her floppy ears perking up. “It’s on!”

  After a flyby of the Statue of Liberty and a zoom through an animated New York skyline came the announcement of the guests, a lame joke, then the familiar Daaaviiid Lettermaaan. The band’s trumpets squealed.

  Stan leaned forward on his couch. Bloody rolled over again. She hated Letterman; whenever Stan got home in time to put the show on, Bloody would either stomp out of the room or make a point of snoring loudly. She whined when Stan came up with the idea to stalk the talk show host for a while. Maybe he should’ve listened to his dog.

  Letterman appeared on the glossy stage, the simulated skyline of New York behind him. He looked healthy. Not a scar on him.

  “Thank you,” said Letterman. He shuffled awkwardly on the stage, made a funny face. The band sounded an orchestra hit, and the audience laughed. “Welcome to the program, ladies and gentleman. I know we’ve got some out-of-towners here. Don’t know if you’re aware, that’s it’s been raining a lot in New York City. Raining a lot in the whole North-East. They’re talking about rain tonight; could get some of that high wind, flash flooding. And you know what that means. You folks could be sleeping over.”

  “Yeah,” muttered Paul Shaffer. The audience howled with laughter.

  Stan bolted from the couch, then pulled a curtain aside. The sidewalks were deserted, save for a couple entering the pub across the street. Its neon lights flickered, reflecting off of nothing; the street was as dry as a bone celebrating a year on the wagon.

  “It isn’t raining! What the crap, Bloody.”

  Letterman was now monologuing about Al Franken getting sworn in as a senator in Minnesota. That happened months ago!

  “This episode is from months ago!” Stan collapsed onto the couch. He picked up a beer bottle from the floor and took a swig. “It’s a damn re-run again, Bloody! He was supposed to be back this week. Said so right on the CBS web site.”

  Stan rubbed his temples. Bloody sighed, then trotted over to Stan and rested her head on the couch. Stan turned to her. “What should we do, girl? Call someone? The police? CBS?”

  Bloody moved her shoulders up and down.

  Stan patted her head. “You’re a good girl, you know that?”

  The dog darted her eyes toward the kitchen.

  “You just ate.”

  She snorted.

  Both of them jumped when the phone rang. Stan sat up. “I’m not answering it. I just—I just can’t deal right now, you know?”

  It rang six times before it stopped.

  Stan lay back down, ready to pass out for the night.

  The phone rang again. He rolled over and pressed a cushion to his ear. Again, six rings, then silence.

  “Persistent buggers,” he muttered.

  It rang again. “Aaargh!” he shouted. The shrill cry of the old rotary phone seemed to pierce into his brain. He bolted upright, making to tear the chord right from the wall, but after six rings, it stopped. He hovered over the receiver, ready to toss it across the room the instant it made a peep.

  Nothing. Blissful silence. Only the usual din of sirens way off in the distance. Stan prayed that they didn’t draw closer.

  He wrenched the blanket on the couch out from under his butt, shook off some pizza crumbs—Bloody immediately licked them up—then swaddled himself in it and lay down. When Bloody had found every last crumb, she jumped on the couch too and took advantage of the warmth of Stan’s feet.

  There was a sharp rap at the door.

  Stan groaned. He sat up, nostrils flared. Bloody bounded to the door and sat staring at it, a low growl on her breath.

  Holding his face up to the peeling-painted door, Stan glared through the peephole. It was her. The odd woman who had killed David Letterman. She wore the same flower pattern hat from when Stan last saw her, and a matching flowery dress. When Stan spotted her through the peephole, she leaned forward to hold her icy blue eye up to the other side.

  He jumped back. “Ah! It’s her! That freak woman!” he said, a little too loudly.

  Bloody raised one eyebrow.

  “Dammit, you’re right,” whispered Stan. “Now she knows we’re here. What do we do?”

  Bloody trotted to a spot beside the door. She crouched, then nodded her head, as if to say, go for it, I’m ready for trouble.

  Stan sighed. He ran his fingers through his tangled hair, pushed his glasses up, then opened the door a crack. The chain kept it from swinging open further.

  “What do you want?” he asked. He felt Bloody’s breath, hot and fast, against his ankle.

  Her face was still pressed up against the door. Those eyes flicked sideways to meet his. “Hey Stan,” she said.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Oh sweetie, I know a lot of things. Can I come in for a sec?
”

  “No you cannot come in for a sec.” Stan frowned and held his face to the opening. He made sure none of his neighbors were in the hallway. “How did you know where I live?”

  “I got your license plate in our little mix-up. You see dear, I just need you to sign a couple of papers. For insurance purposes. I’m not very fond of this legal mumbo jumbo myself, but the investigators found your car’s paint smeared on my poor car’s bumper, so I just had to tell them you were there. I was kind, you see, I told them that you handed me your business card before you left but I lost it. They say we can clear all this up with a few signatures. I tried to telephone before I came over, but there was no answer.”

  Questions flooded into Stan’s head. Chief among them: where was David Letterman? Second: could this situation get him laid? He glanced back in his apartment, all empty beer bottles and mouldy pizza boxes.

  “There’s a bar across the street. We can talk there. Let me get my coat.”

  He closed the door. Bloody tilted her head sideways, frowning.

  “It’s all right, girl. I’ll get some answers and clear this whole mess up,” he whispered.

  The dog sighed.

  “Won’t be long. Be good,” he said.

  Under the flickering blueish light in the hallway, Stan got a good look at the woman. Her skin was pale, perfect except for some red patches on her cheeks. She was not much older than he was—maybe thirty two, thirty three—which made her odd fashion choices and odd manner of speaking even odder. Frizzy auburn hair tumbled over the puffy shoulders of the flowery dress that hung off her slim figure. It was either straight out of the seventies or stolen from her grandmother’s closet.

  As they crossed the street, Stan asked: “Where’s your coat? Aren’t you cold?”

  She hugged herself and shivered. “Oh yes, brrr,” she said. “Must have forgotten it in my car.”

  “We can go get—”

  “No no,” she interrupted. “I think we’d both prefer to get this over with as soon as possible.”