Postcards from the Apocalypse

by Allan Leverone

  Finally I could no longer stand the suspense and got up the nerve to ask. “I realize it’s probably patently obvious to anyone who’s not a trained accountant, but how in the world are we going to convince the killer to implicate himself in front of us?”

  He smiled and reached into his top desk drawer, pulling out a small voice-activated digital recorder and holding it up for my inspection. “I’m going to place this in my shirt pocket and then I’m going to ask him.”

  “I know you’re the professional and everything, so don’t take this the wrong way. But as plans go, doesn’t that strike you as, oh I don’t know, a little thin, not to mention dangerous?”

  “Well, there’s no need to unnecessarily complicate matters, and over the course of eight-plus decades on this earth I’ve discovered the best way to get the answer to a question is to ask it.”

  “But don’t you think that even if you can somehow get the killer to admit his actions, he might find the recorder?”

  “I certainly hope so.”

  I must have looked completely flummoxed—I know I felt that way—and Brick finally took pity on me, explaining the plan in a way that almost made sense. He would enter The Little Devilz, make a nuisance of himself in precisely the manner we assumed Martin Saunders had done, and wait for the goon who had killed him to take similar action against Brick.

  My uncle explained that once the thug confiscated the recorder hidden in his shirt he would feel free to implicate himself, knowing his words would never see the light of day. “After all,” Brick reasoned, “if he’s going to throw me off a building and then destroy the only evidence implicating him, he has nothing to fear, and thus no reason not to talk freely.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting a couple of important details?”

  “Hmm. I don’t think so. Like what?”

  “Like the fact that you will be dead and the bad guy will be in possession of the critical piece of evidence against him?”

  Brick stared at me and grinned and I suddenly got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I knew what he was going to say before he said it. Hearing it out loud didn’t make me feel any better.

  “That’s where you come in, sonny.”

  ***

  I sat at in a corner in The Little Devilz, having arrived early so that I could secure a table which would allow me the most complete observation of the enormous room. Every now and then I sipped from an eight dollar ginger ale, wishing it was sour mash but figuring it might be a good idea to keep my wits about me.

  The Browning Hi-Power semiautomatic pistol my uncle had given me sat heavy and portentous in the leather shoulder holster under my jacket as I sweated rivers around it. He had slapped a magazine filled with rounds into the handle, explaining the basics of its operation before carefully engaging the safety and handing it to me hesitantly like he feared I might blow his head off or something. I felt completely exposed, like everyone in the place was watching me, although I knew that was nothing more than rampant paranoia on my part.

  On the stage, a succession of young women, all gorgeous but tired-looking and old beyond their years, danced lethargically to music with a thumping bass track that poured from the enormous sound system. Each one flounced out from behind an enormous velvet curtain to an introduction by an artificially enthusiastic DJ worthy of a Celtics playoff game, shaking her assets for a few frenetic minutes before being replaced by another girl cut from the same sexy but hardened mold.

  I wondered what the odds were one of them was Phoebe Simpson. I hadn’t heard the announcer use that name, but all of the girls went by aliases like “Skye” or “Silky” or “Angel” so how would I know? The irony of a girl using the name “Angel” at a place called The Little Devilz was not lost on me and I wondered if it was done intentionally; like calling a fat guy “slim.”

  Probably not. Nobody seemed to have much of a sense of humor here; you could practically smell the loneliness and desperation wafting through the smoky air; a mood projected by the dancers and the customers alike.

  A young woman dressed in the skimpiest red devil outfit I had ever seen came along and smiled at me. Red satin horns protruded from her auburn hair and she carried a plastic pitchfork along with a small round tray of drinks. “May I freshen you up, sir?”

  I returned her smile. “Thanks, but this is as fresh as it gets for me.”

  She did a lousy job of hiding her disappointment and I could almost see her mentally revising downward her estimate of the night’s tip income. Ah, what the hell. Easy come, easy go. “On second thought,” I said as she turned to go, “I will have another ginger ale, thank you.”

  Her face lit up like a little girl’s on Christmas morning and I felt an incredible sense of sadness for her as she scurried off to fill the order. Allison and I had never had any children—thank God, that was something we had done right in a marriage that was mostly wrong—but I tried to imagine how I would feel knowing my daughter was slinging drinks to horny men in a strip club and I found myself hoping Brick would hurry up and get here and do his thing; this place was more depressing than I had ever imagined possible.

  On the stage the girls twirled and pranced and showed strangers parts of their anatomy that most people reserve for the privacy of their bedrooms, pretending to get off on their time under the harsh glare of the spotlight, and finally, off to my right, my uncle strolled through the front door and into the semi-dark club. He was dressed garishly in a powder-blue suit with wide avocado tie straight out of the seventies; an outfit that would ensure he was noticed immediately.

  He paid the cover to the goon at the door and walked straight across the big room to the bar, calling one of the bartenders over and asking him a question I couldn’t hear. The man looked at him for a moment in undisguised amusement, as if trying to decide whether Brick was serious, and then shrugged and pointed to a closed door located at the far end of a shadowy hallway to the left of the stage.

  Brick skirted the front of the stage looking, as always, like he hadn’t a care in the world. I couldn’t say for sure, it was too dark and he was too far away, but I would have sworn he flashed a smile and a wink to the chick currently grinding and making creative use of the stripper pole a few feet away. Knowing Brick, she was probably a friend, or at least a friend of a friend. He rounded the stage, no one paying the slightest attention to him except me, and disappeared down the hallway.

  This was my cue to leave. We had scouted the building earlier and I knew there was a single service entrance leading out the back of the club. It seemed unlikely the designated muscle would lead the potential murder victim out to his death through the front of the club in front of dozens of potential witnesses, even if their attention was on other things, so my job, for now, was to get to Brick’s car and stake out that rear entryway.

  ***

  It didn’t take long, which was ideal for me because thinking about the role I was supposed to play in this little adventure was making me feel a little like I did on my wedding day. I was nervous and shaking and hoping I would be able to perform. I hoped this turned out better than my marriage, for Brick’s sake as well as my own.

  I had been seated in the Mercedes for maybe ten minutes, parked in a darkened corner of a used car lot under a huge maple tree which left me a clear and unobstructed view of the strip club’s service entrance next door. The moon was full but the shadows thrown by the tree’s bulk enveloped Brick’s car like a gossamer blanket.

  The door to the service entrance swung open and my uncle exited the club, followed by an almost comically large man pressing the barrel of a handgun into his back. Held in Brick’s hand was an object I assumed was a bottle of liquor—cheap whiskey, probably; he had said they would likely make him drink some and then spill the rest all over him to make it look like he got drunk and depressed and decided to end it all—where had I heard that before?—and I found myself wishing he could toss it to me so I could slam down a slug or two myself.

  The large man with the gun
opened the passenger side door of an inconspicuous-looking Chevy Caprice and Brick bent down and entered, sliding across to the driver’s side, while the other guy followed him in and closed the car door. The brake lights flashed once and then the car was moving, creeping along the side of the club to the street and turning toward downtown.

  I started Brick’s Mercedes and followed, wondering if I would ever see him again alive.

  ***

  When I started doing this job, oh, way back, let’s see, must be three weeks ago now, I was inept at tailing people, either on foot or in a vehicle. It’s something that seems like it should be easy but isn’t, at least for me. I might as well have tapped them on the shoulder or held up a flashing neon sign saying, “Hey, you, I’m following you! Yes, that’s right, you!”

  I shared my concerns on this score with Brick after he told me our plan—the one I had had no input on. I told him I was afraid I would tip off the man kidnapping him and get him killed. Predictably, he told me not to worry about it. “You need to learn how to relax. The guy is going to be amped; getting himself mentally prepared to push me off a building. He’s not going to be worried about an eighty year old man, especially once I make sure he finds the recorder.

  “It’s human nature, junior, he’ll figure he got the drop on the dimwit old man trying to put one over on him and he’ll let his guard down. Trust me.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but what could I do? It was too late now to worry about it, anyway.

  The Mercedes hugged the road as I concentrated on maintaining a three to four vehicle interval behind the big Caprice. The farther we drove, the more I became convinced we were heading to the same building in Chinatown where Martin Saunders had met his untimely demise last week. In fact, I became so certain this was the case that when we got close, I pulled to the curb right around the corner from said building and watched as the Caprice did the same directly in front of the entrance.

  The level of arrogance of the people running The Little Devilz was astonishing. Did they really expect anyone to believe two separate people who had never met would each decide, within a matter of days, to end their lives in precisely the same manner, by throwing themselves off precisely the same roof?

  Apparently that was exactly what they expected, because there was my uncle, marching up the sidewalk to the front door, head held high, engaging his presumptive killer in a conversation about what I could not imagine. Hopefully he was getting the evidence we would need to put these people away if we somehow managed to survive, a prospect which I was beginning to think was remote.

  The man with the gun reached around Uncle Brick and slipped a key card into a lock, pulling the front door of the apartment building open and shoving Brick inside. The odd-looking pair disappeared inside and I reluctantly climbed out of Brick’s Mercedes, noting with appreciation how solid and reassuring the CLUNK of the door sounded compared to the tinny noise made by my Subaru upon completion of the same task. It’s strange how our minds work under pressure. Or maybe it’s just mine.

  I slouched toward the door, feeling exposed and conspicuous—like everyone could see the gun under my jacket—and wondering how out of place I must look to anyone peering out a window. In this area people probably saw worse all the time; it was the sort of neighborhood where if people knew what was good for them, they didn’t see anything; even if they saw everything.

  To the right of the door was a panel filled with white plastic call buttons. Next to each button was a small card listing the apartment number and the last name of the associated tenant. I shrugged and picked one at random, pressing it and waiting, hoping someone was home. Fifteen seconds went by and I began to sweat. I had no idea how long it would take for Brick and the guy with the gun to reach the roof, or how long the man would wait once they got there before throwing my uncle to his death.

  Finally a tiny speaker under the buttons erupted to life with static. It seemed to be on its’ last legs, a conclusion you could reasonably arrive at about the entire building, and I jumped even though I had been expecting it. My nerves were thrumming. “Yeah?” a disembodied voice demanded.

  “Uh, this is Tommy in 3B,” I answered. “I went to the store and locked myself out; could you please hook me up?” I wondered how many of his neighbors this guy actually knew and was counting on the natural tendency of most city dwellers to keep to themselves and mind their own business. It was the first rule of city living and one I followed religiously when I shared an apartment with Allison in L.A. A second later the buzzer sounded, followed a half-second after that by the barely audible CLICK of the door’s lock disengaging.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and walked into the building.

  ***

  Access to the roof was gained by walking up a short stairway and stepping through a dilapidated wooden door. A rusting sheet metal entryway protected the door from the elements, although how long that would continue to be the case was open to debate. The entryway canted precariously to one side and long strips of peeling brown paint hung from both sides.

  From the roof I could hear my uncle chatting with his abductor as if sharing coffee and a cinnamon roll at Beekman’s Deli. I pulled the Browning out of its leather holster and slipped off the safety, gripping the weapon in both hands like I had seen done on TV a million times. My hands were shaking and I had a sudden terrifying vision of the gun slipping from my hands and shooting me in the groin as it bounced off the roof. I took a deep breath and peered around the entryway.

  Standing maybe five feet from the edge of the roof, five stories above the cement and pavement below, stood Brick and the gigantic man from The Little Devilz. The man held Brick’s voice-activated recorder in one huge paw and was turning it over in his hand, looking at it with undisguised amusement.

  “So lemme get this straight,” the man said, smirking at Brick. “You’re a friend of that idiot lawyer and you decided you were just gonna march into the club and get me to implicate myself and my bosses? You didn’t think it might occur to me to frisk you? Just how friggin’ stupid do you think I am?”

  “Is that a rhetorical question or do you actually want an answer? Because, after all, you did admit everything before it occurred to you to search me. And if you’re waiting for specifics, I fail to see what will be gained by discussing your lack of intelligence.”

  The man’s face tightened in annoyance and I wondered briefly why Brick was pushing the guy, but it was a fleeting thought because I was focused most intensely on his hands and what he was holding in them. Or, more specifically, what he wasn’t holding. The gun he had pressed doggedly into Brick’s back as they left The Little Devilz was nowhere to be seen. He had apparently decided he could handle a lone octogenarian without benefit of the weapon and holstered it somewhere on his massive body.

  He slid the tiny recorder, roughly the size of an MP3 music player, into his breast pocket and reached for Brick, placing one beefy hand on my uncle’s shoulder and roughly shoving him toward the edge of the roof. It happened so quickly it almost caught me off-guard. I had been waiting for some big speech from the guy about what he was going to do to Brick, like the ones the bad guys always seemed to make on TV.

  Apparently this particular bad guy wasn’t bright enough to come up with such a soliloquy, or maybe he was just unmotivated and wanted to get this unpleasantness over with so he could get back to the club and all the naked women. In any event, he began pushing Brick toward his death. To my utter amazement, my uncle still looked completely unruffled.

  I stepped through the door and made sure I cleared the sheet-metal entryway before training the gun on him and demanding, “Stop right there!” My voice sounded strong and confident and I wondered where the hell that was coming from. I certainly didn’t feel strong or confident.

  The man froze and for a long moment nothing happened. Far off in the distance I heard a siren wailing and I wished it was headed here although I knew it wasn’t. The man swiveled his head and looked over at me, surprise etched in hi
s eyes and maybe a little regret, too, as it dawned on him, much too late, that he hadn’t been up against just one octogenarian. He had been taken down by one octogenarian and one mostly out-of-shape divorced accountant from L.A.

  Brick removed the man’s hand from his shoulder gently, almost apologetically, and straightened his jacket. I could see the man calculating the odds of grabbing my uncle and using him as a human shield in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage. “Don’t even think about it,” I snapped as I pointed the gun at his chest. Incredibly, my hands had stopped shaking.

  The man’s shoulders slumped as the reality of the situation hit home. He shook his head and sighed. I almost felt sorry for him; this was the sort of thing he would never live down in the joint.

  ***

  “I don’t know how to thank you for getting to the bottom of Martin’s death, Mr. Callahan, and so quickly. This won’t bring him back, of course, but I simply couldn’t live with the world thinking he committed suicide.” Lillian Saunders appeared to have aged a decade in the short time since we first met her following her husband’s death. It was obvious she wasn’t taking the tragedy well and I hoped the resolution of the case would give her the opportunity to achieve a little peace. It didn’t seem likely to me, but what do I know?

  The recently widowed Mrs. Saunders handed Brick a check. He folded it and placed it in his breast pocket without looking at it.

  “Believe me when I tell you it was our pleasure to help,” he said. “Your husband died trying to protect a young girl who was being victimized. He was a hero, Mrs. Saunders.” He stood and took the elderly woman’s arm, walking her to the door. “Please don’t hesitate to call on us if there is anything we can help you with in the future.”

  He escorted her to the elevator and when he returned he had a satisfied smile on his face. “I talked to my friend Lieutenant Fischer of the Boston Police this morning,” he said, “and Curt told me this thing is about to blow sky-high. That goon we took down is just the hired help. He’s scared to death and not about to take the fall for his bosses. Even as we speak, he’s spilling his guts. I’m telling you, sonny, heads are going to roll. Bigshot heads. Fatcat heads, both in the City Council and the BPD. All the people who were taking kickbacks, letting the scumbags running The Little Devilz employ underage strippers and eventually graduate to murder are about to wish they had made some different choices in their miserable lives!”