By the Balls

by Jim Pascoe

  Stan cursed and slammed a balled fist against his thigh.

  “He journeyed into the Underworld, using his sweet singing voice for comfort and protection. When Hades, the lord of the dead, heard the songs of Orpheus, he agreed to let him take his true love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition.”

  I chimed in: “There’s always one condition.”

  “I know, I know . . . All Orpheus had to do was walk out of the Underworld and not look back. But at the very last minute he did, and his love slipped from his fingers a second time. As if that wasn’t enough punishment, his end was even more cruel.”

  I finished for him, pulling from the various books I’d read: “A band of witches ripped him to pieces. They scattered his dismembered body, throwing his head into the nearby river, where it floated downstream. And the damn thing kept singing. Well, Stan, you certainly made out better than that.”

  Summers just stared up at me on the stairs, thought etched across his face. “Orpheus. The disembodied voice; a ventriloquial voice.”

  He closed his eyes. I saw him shaking and felt the hairs on my arms standing straight up. I gazed down the hall, still seeing nothing. I wasn’t going to wait all night.

  “All right, time to get moving again,” I ordered.

  We marched to the top of the steps, arriving in another hallway much like the one below it but with a little more light. Without hesitating, Stan began hiking toward the back of the building. I followed, guessing the voice he talked about guided him.

  “Stan . . .”

  “Don’t you get it, Mr. Drake? They were the Brotherhood of Orpheus! The legendary Voice of Orpheus taught them the secrets of the dead! That means they could reach my father. They offered to contact him for me . . . but, but they wanted something in exchange.”

  “Let me guess.”

  “They said they needed a sacrifice—a sacrifice to please Orpheus. Phil pointed at my father’s vent figure and told me to give it to him!”

  “What’s Orpheus need with an unfinished puppet?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, and I never found out,” Stan squealed. “I didn’t want to hear any more! I grabbed Black Jack and ran out of there as fast as I could.”

  Sound carried much better on the main floor. I heard the low rumble of a big car outside. I thought I heard it drive by, but maybe I heard it idle for a moment, then stop. I couldn’t tell for sure.

  “As I ran out the door, I heard the ringleader’s high-pitched shout: ‘Think of your father, Stan! Orpheus will find you eventually, but it’s your father who will suffer immediately!’ That only made me run faster. I should have fled sooner, not that it would have helped. I wish I could just put the whole thing behind me.”

  I paused, cocking my head, trying to figure out if soft footprints echoed in my ears or if the puppet man’s paranoia had me hearing things.

  “We’ll put it behind you soon enough,” I assured. Probably sooner than Stan Summers would like. “Why’d you hide? Why didn’t you just go home?”

  “Home? I couldn’t go home; they were watching me.”

  “Then call the cops,” I grunted. “They take care of that sort of thing.”

  Stan took a deep, labored breath. “The cops couldn’t do anything. The Brotherhood wasn’t watching me like normal people watch people . . . they were using the magic of Orpheus.”

  “Come on! The magic of Orpheus?”

  “Yes! Weren’t you listening?” His lips quivered as the tears started.

  “All right. So why didn’t you call Misty? She’s been worried about you.”

  “I know, I know,” he cooed apologetically, “but I couldn’t take the risk.”

  “Risk? Hell, man, use a pay phone! That’s what they’re for.”

  “No way could I call! Everyone knows the telephone itself is the ultimate Orphic invention! Alexander Graham Bell was a secret member of the Brotherhood of Orpheus, and he designed it to be a tool of the Disassociated Voice.”

  I frowned. I knew a woman from the county coroner’s office who loved wacky conspiracies. I was going to score big points when I told her about Ma Bell and Orphism.

  Stan Summers looked at me, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “What could I do but run?” He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. I noticed that it matched his socks. “And I’ve been hiding ever since.”

  Suddenly the sound of shattering glass echoed through the building. Stan Summers screamed.

  I bolted to the nearest door and threw it open, then tossed the quivering mass of flesh that was Stan Summers through it. I followed, slamming the door shut behind me. The door had no lock, so I glanced quickly around, looking for something to block the door.

  When I turned around I admit I felt a little shock run through me.

  We stood on the old theater’s stage.

  Other than the two of us, nothing else filled the small scene. There weren’t even any curtains. Beyond us—except for a dim light that glowed down from the broken skylights, illuminating the area in front of the stage—inky darkness consumed the empty theater.

  Stan had curled into a ball, protecting his still-bagged puppet, right in the center of the stage.

  “Oh my goodness!” he whimpered. “They’ve found me! I told you they could find me if I stayed in one place—”

  “Calm down!” I snapped. “They can’t see through the phone lines, Stan! They were lying to you. The only reason they knew you were here is because I was followed.”

  “You were followed?” Stan said.

  “Yeah, ever since I left your place this evening I’ve had a tail. And not a very good one. There’s a couple of other things you don’t know . . .”

  “What kind of things don’t I know?”

  “That whole bit about the Brotherhood and Orpheus . . . now, that’s a great story, but it’s nothing more than a story created by some people trying to pull a fast one on you.”

  I waited a couple of minutes, allowing the emptiness of the theater to sink in, then shouted out toward the dark: “Isn’t that right, Misty?”

  Stan pulled himself into a sitting position, a confused look on his face, just as Misty Summers stepped into the light, tears heavy on her cheeks. An unimposing figure wearing a trench coat waddled out beside her.

  “I’m so sorry, Stan, darling,” Misty choked out, “but I did it for us. I did it so we’d never have to worry about money again!”

  “Yeah, Stan, I’m sorry too,” her sidekick mumbled. “I thought I planned everything out.”

  Misty took a step toward her husband, who was still curled up clutching his puppet, then turned to me. “Ben Drake, how’d you figure out I had anything to do with it?”

  “I’m a detective, lady. I get paid to figure things out. I told you in the beginning that I didn’t know what the crime was. Once I nailed down the fact that this case was about money and not about a missing husband, I knew you were pulling the strings.”

  She stared at me like she didn’t know what I was talking about. I made it simple for her: “Let’s face it, Misty, you’re no actress.”

  Stan sat there, slack-jawed, not knowing what to think. I helped him out.

  “You see, Stan, I originally thought your wife was trying to pull some kind of insurance scam. Then I got my hands on the reports of your father’s death. The killers were looking for something, something I bet they never found. What was it, Stan? Reports I saw said twenty years ago the talk on the street was that Stan Senior had some secret treasure he kept hidden.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Why don’t you pick up the story from here, Rudy.”

  The clown in the trench coat stepped forward. Before he could start, Stan cried out: “That’s just a myth! There’s no secret treasure! I don’t know how it all got started.”

  “It got started ’cause it was . . . ’cause it was true!” Rudy gasped.

  “Shut up!” Stan yelled. He started rocking back and forth on the floor.

  “Now, now, Stan,” Misty s
aid. “He’s right. Tell him, Rudy.”

  “Ahh, it’s kinda like, um, it’s kinda like this: I was down on my luck, drinking in this old bar, and I talked to this guy, this . . . he was a retired clown. And, ah, he asked me if I knew anything about that killing, that ventriloquist that got killed years ago. Well, you know, I knew Stan Junior, so yeah, I knew about it. And he goes on and on about these diamonds that Stan’s dad got somehow, maybe ’cause, well, Stan’s dad did a little work for the Mexican Mafia.”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” Stan clutched his father’s puppet even harder. His forehead looked like a compressed spring ready to pop. “That’s not true!”

  “Well, I wasn’t ready to just go and believe this old guy, Stan,” Rudy said with a bouncing lower lip. “But then he started telling all about all the, ah, criminals that came looking for it but couldn’t find it. And then he said they weren’t looking in the right places.”

  “They weren’t looking in the unfinished puppet,” I said.

  “That’s it exactly!” Rudy blurted out, throwing his hands into the air. “So I called, ah, Misty and tells her. But she goes into how the puppet never left Stan’s side. And how Stan’s father meant so much to him that she couldn’t just tell him about the diamonds, ’cause he wouldn’t go for it.

  “So I thought of this whole, ah . . . ah, performance to get the puppet—you know, just like borrow it and then give it back later. That way we could all have a nice three-way split. I staged the whole thing, hiring these guys I used to know back in the circus, paying them five hundred dollars for a night’s work. I just didn’t, I couldn’t know that Phil DeMarco musta heard the same story, and tried stealing the show from me.”

  “That ain’t all we’re going to steal, you clown!” a tough but chewy voice echoed out from the shadowy wings of the theater. “What you and the ventriloquist are gonna do now is hand over the puppet.”

  Three men moved into the light. The biggest of them stood unarmed, his mean knuckles prepared for doing damage. The tattooed fellow, an oily, big-boned brute, flicked open a long, thin switchblade. The guy between them, the wild-eyed Phil DeMarco, held a gun. So did I.

  “First of all,” he squeaked, pointing at me with his gun, “would you be so kind as to put that nasty pistol away?”

  “Do I have to? I’d rather keep it out so it can play nice with yours.”

  The Brotherhood of Orpheus stepped closer to me. They were on my right; Misty and Rudy were on my left.

  Phil barked, “Now, how should I deal with this piece-of-meat detective? The choices are many and various indeed.” He spoke to an imaginary audience in the empty seats. “Clearly, on the one hand, I could send Mugly, my strongman, to pound, pulverize, bash, and smash him with his massive fists. Of course, on the other hand, but also equally clearly, I could send Jacko, my nimble knife man, to slice, dice, and julienne him to bits. And then, very simply, I could just shoot him myself.”

  “Or I could, I could just shoot you!” Rudy’s shaky hand pulled out his own gun. He shouted like a teakettle: “I’ve got a deal for you! I’ll pay you the five hundred and get you a share of the diamonds . . .”

  Phil laughed with smug stupidity. “And I’ve got a deal for you! You keep your lousy five and we get all the diamonds.”

  “Phil,” I said, “the only deal you boys will be getting is a jail cell.”

  I kept my eyes bouncing between Rudy and the thugs. Thoughts sped around my brain: Could I take out Phil before he shot Rudy? Could I take out Rudy before he shot Phil? Or could I take out both of these guys before they shot me? My heart worked overtime, pumping blood through my body like cars around a racetrack.

  Phil broke his tight frown long enough to complain: “Enough with this long-winded and entirely unnecessary discourse. We’re going to grab the dingus, put the PI on ice, and vamoose on out of here.”

  “Don’t be an idiot. Tougher guys than you have tried to cool me,” I snarled. “You’re better off dropping the pistol and letting me take you in.”

  “That’s enough outta your mouth, you worthless piece of trash.” Phil motioned over his shoulder to his giant associate who then stomped toward me. “Mugly, I want you to tear this detective apart limb by limb.”

  A low drone came out of Mugly’s mouth: “I will hurt you now.”

  I had to take care of this thug—and fast. If I could drop the guy and push him in Phil’s direction, I’d have a good chance to take control of this mess.

  Suddenly the thunderous roar of a gunshot echoed through the room.

  I immediately flattened myself on the stage.

  A few more gunshots barked out in answer to the first.

  I figured Rudy’s trigger finger got a little itchy and that made Phil’s itchy as well.

  “You killed my father! You bastards killed my father!”

  Oh, Christ. Stan Summers had a gun.

  It was time for this caper to come to a close, but first I had to get behind something solid. I rolled off the stage and scampered behind the first row of theater seats, then peeked out just in time to see the knife man slump to the ground, clutching his belly.

  “Jacko!” Mugly shouted, trudging over as fast as his thick legs would take him to help his fallen partner.

  I looked over and saw Misty kneeling next to the bleeding Rudy Romaine. “No, no . . . please, don’t let it end like this,” she sobbed.

  Phil’s face burned as he took aim at Stan, who stood on stage as if in a trance, holding a smoking antique Colt service revolver.

  “Stan, you stupid, stupid simpleton!” Phil screamed. “All you had to do was fork over the puppet. You weren’t supposed to die, but now you’ve forced my hand and I have no recourse but to kill you!”

  “No!” Misty screamed as she jumped in front of Phil’s gun. “I won’t let you hurt my Stan!”

  “Jacko’s dead!” Mugly bellowed, thudding his way over to the frightened Stan Summers, leaping up on the stage with ease.

  “Mugly, grab the puppet and let’s go!” Phil commanded.

  But instead of grabbing the puppet, Mugly plucked the gun right out of the trembling ventriloquist’s hand. Stan yelled like a girl, but went quiet when Mugly’s fist connected with his jaw and sent him skating across the wooden floor of the stage.

  The strongman picked up the puppet and headed for the door.

  I flinched as the sound of another shot filled the theater. This one came from Phil’s gun. Misty’s body crumpled to the ground.

  “Damn it, Phil,” I cried from behind my hiding spot. “It’s over! Drop the gun and—”

  Bullets flew at me, ricocheting off the metal of the chairs in front of me.

  I fired a couple back, but not in time. The two crooks had fled the scene. Only the echo of Phil’s high-pitched laughter stayed behind.

  I stood up and looked around. Rudy and Misty lay like a pair of dolls on a playroom floor. On the other side of the theater, Jacko had curled up, trying to hold his guts in. I could hear Stan sobbing up on the stage.

  I walked over to Rudy Romaine. Half his face had been blown away. His one remaining eye stared straight at me. I shook my head and walked over to Misty.

  The bullet had ripped through her shoulder. Blood soaked through most of her blouse. I checked for a pulse. She would live. Good thing Phil was a bad shot.

  Jacko gurgled off to the side. He’d been hit squarely in the gut and blood trickled across his lips, but if he could hold out for the ambulance, he’d make it.

  Stan pulled himself up to a sitting position and continued whimpering. His face was already starting to swell and bruise from the knuckles he took.

  I wanted to tell him not to worry; his wife would live, and even Testacy City’s police would be able to nab those two dummies soon enough, but I knew that would be no consolation for a man like Stan Summers.

  “My father’s dead . . . oh, God . . . my father’s dead . . .” he said in a hoarse whisper.

  I never knew my father, so I could only guess at
how Stan felt. Even though his entire life had been spent in the shadow of his father’s death, his real torment was only just now beginning.

  But for this case, the curtains came down. The show was over.

  Case Two

  Death Plays a Foul Game

  I spied Trout Mathers and his buddy Blackie Lawton chasing back tequila shots at the bar of the H.M.S. Pandora. It hadn’t been my plan to spend Friday night watching two of Testacy City’s most sought-after gangsters do the salt-slam-and-squeeze. I’d anticipated taking the night off, doing nothing but relaxing at my favorite hangout. But this particular Friday night found me pulling double duty as I lounged at the Pandora, a hand on a drink and an eye on these thugs.

  Lawton’s laughter ripped through the place like the growl of an angry dog. Mathers shot him an elbow to the ribs. The look he gave Lawton suggested they were there to lay low, not loudmouth their way into the spotlight.

  I didn’t know either of these heavies personally, but I sure knew their reputations. As a rule, Mathers pulled carefully calculated heists, the bigger the better. He was all spectacle and show. Even now at the bar he looked like a showman, with his tight pinstriped suit, his greased-back wavy hair, and his sharp mustache that resembled an upside-down V. Naturally, he caused quite a stir in the hot sheets, crime sheets, and bedsheets.

  Lawton always got his share of attention too, though not because of his résumé. His loud mouth and violent habits, usually something to do with the drug trade, were what kept him in the spotlight. People dismissed him as stupid, but I sized him up as more careless than dumb. He’d been busted a lot but never spent too much time behind bars. Apparently, he knew the right people.

  Another round of tequila kept my pals quiet for the moment, whispering back and forth to each other. When Trout Mathers spoke he flicked his index and middle fingers with his thumb, not at Lawton but randomly to the side. This motion somehow matched the devilish light in his burning eyes.

  I could smell something foul brewing between the two of them. Yep, I could smell it all right, even though I sat all the way across the room in one of the Pandora’s high-back leather booths.