Skunk Hunt

by J. Clayton Rogers

  "What, and smuggled it back past customs? Hello!" Kendle jabbed me with her index finger. Judging from the pain in my shoulder, I was entitled to a lawsuit. But a winnable case for police brutality required witnesses, and at that moment there was no one else around. Besides, only sissies protested against a poke.

  "My department thinks the money was stashed away and hasn't been seen since," Kendle continued.

  "Since what?"

  "Four hundred and fifty-four treasury notes weigh one pound. The bills were all in $100 denomination, meaning someone would have to smuggle eleven pounds of C-notes through customs. If you count the missing Brinks money, you've got almost 200 pounds of cash. Now what kind of numbskull would try something like that?"

  I could think of any number of numbskulls likely to try it. Not me, though. The very idea of flying sends my sphincter into a tailspin.

  "Then where do you think it came from?" I asked.

  "You don't have any idea?"

  "I don't think any of us is in a position to toss off $50,000," I answered dolefully. Then, more hopefully, "If it's not the Brinks money..."

  "Ha!" Kendle bounced like bear storming out of her den. "You won't be getting it, at least no time soon. It's in the station's evidence locker."

  I was more disturbed by her glee than by the resumption of poverty. She was so depressed over the setback that anyone else's bad luck was bound to improve her mood. I suspected she looked forward to the end of the world, or at least Mankind. That would make her day.

  I wondered if I should tell her about the phone call and Skunk's posthumous declarations. Her news about the money alerted me to the fact that there were forces at work here far more sinister than I had anticipated. That gun tucked under her flapping belly might come in handy. It might take her a few moments to tug it out of its holster, but otherwise she was probably a dead shot. She looked ornery enough to take on anyone who might be lurking in my house. Unless, of course, she had been the one doing the lurking.

  I was reluctant to say anything more to her, because it dawned on me she might be taping this conversation. She might not even need to be wearing a mike. They can do that sort of thing from satellites now, can't they?

  "Why aren't you saying anything?" she said.

  "I can't tell you anything you don't already know," I answered.

  "You think I'm taping you, don't you?" She seemed prepared to pull up her blouse to show me how wrong I was. I jumped back in horror. "You're a suspicious little cuss, aren't you?"

  "These are suspicious times," I said.

  "That means you don't trust anyone?"

  "I suppose you could interpret it that way."

  "Hey, don't get hoity-toity on me," the detective snapped, her fingers still hooked at the hem of her blouse. I imagined her beating me to death with her chest. "You've got a real problem here, seeing as you might be an accessory to two crimes."

  "The money in the farm house was stolen?" I squeaked.

  "We don't know," Kendle admitted after a pause. She enjoyed having me on the ropes, but I also sensed a startling vulnerability. Could she be feeling sorry for me? Or was she still digesting a ten-course breakfast? "You're not much like your father, are you?"

  "I'm not an armed robber." Dumb me means dummy. That wasn't what she was talking about.

  "I mean you're not a complete asshole," she said...almost coyly.

  A roundhouse compliment. For a moment I was dizzy from the impact.

  "You might not be a hunk like your brother, Jeremy, but you have a certain indefinable charm."

  My God, was she going to jump me? I didn't know if I should be fearful for my limbs or for my self-esteem. I knew I wasn't Playgirl material. I couldn't even make the cover of Jack & Jill. I'd heard about Facebook, and was sure they would reject as unworthy any pictures or intimate details I cared to post.

  But only a louse would turn away a woman's kind words, if that's what they were. I screwed up my eyes at her (she was an inch taller than me) and shot her a smile that might have been pleasant or smarmy or unchewable ham. Then I realized I had an erection. I must be the only guy in the world who gets a literal hard-on from a vague compliment. If she hadn't thrown in that qualification about Jeremy I might have allowed myself to be raped on the spot. 'Hunk' indeed.

  Women are famous for their ability to pick up cues. I don't think it's all that mysterious, seeing sad-sap men have all the punctuation. Kendle's eyes flitted briefly downwards. I was saddened when she cleared her throat and pulled back a bit, going all business on me. I was so sad, in fact, that I made my fatal error.

  "Was that you calling from my house?" I said.

  "What call? When?"

  "About ten minutes ago."

  "A woman called you?" she asked. "A roommate?"

  "I live alone."

  "Someone broke into your house and called you from there?" She swelled like an alerted sea lion. "You haven't called the police?"

  "I guess that's what I'm doing now," I said reluctantly, bowing to unpleasant necessity.

  CHAPTER 15

  We funneled our way through the students crowding Pine Street, Kendle trailing me in her van. Cars were stretched along the street in a shifting foundation of shiny imports and downtrodden Motor City domestics. You couldn't tell the locals for the Lexi. Unless it was Carl's iconoclastic pimpmobile, pinpointing a vehicle that didn't belong in front of my house would have been a chump's game.

  In case you haven't noticed by now, I'm not a mover and shaker. If my clones took control of world history, we'd soon be back in the trees—caves would be too advanced. My genetic forbears never led armies, raised skyscrapers, drained swamps or contemplated the stars. They might have invented beer and inbreeding. So I should keep my mouth shut about all the changes going on around me. People without grit or innovation in their soul don't deserve to comment on plunging markets or turbulent architecture. I wouldn't take a risk if you planted me on a high-wire. I'd be stuck there to this day, not going forward, not going backward, certainly not going to either side. The students were on Oregon Hill because someone had the gumption to found a university and the university needed homes for their students. If the students were filled with empty-minded exuberance, they were no different from any other life form from the past. The McPhersons had been particularly adept at stupefying inertia. So I shouldn't bitch about willful realtors or the course of empire. You can grow tired of your own complaints.

  My short-lived euphoria was succumbing to the doubts of wisdom. Sure, you can choose to see life in whatever shape or form you want. But if you screen The Wolfman day after day on your metaphorical VCR, you begin to see wolves everywhere. That makes it kind of difficult to cheer yourself up. I glanced at Kendle's van in my rearview mirror. Another wolf. They were crawling out of the woodwork.

  We parked. I stood on the waffled sidewalk and tried not to look as she waddled my way. Thank God none of the neighbors knew me. In the past, I would have been pegged as a hard-up case. "Going after the chubs, are you?" Not that the old residents were anything you'd want to present on a fashionista runway. A bunch of snaggle-toothed pie-faces stewed in moonshine and OxyContin, with child-mothers happily shunting their runts in busted carriages from one alleged father to the next. Worst of all, they had known me, and known that I belonged among them.

  Come to think of it, Kendle had something of the untethered Hill look about her. I could easily imagine her pulling a brown paper bag from under her blouse for a sip of heartstopping rotgut.

  "You want to stay out here admiring the view, or you want to lead the way?" Kendle said, breaking into my dementia. By the way she struck a pose, I presumed she meant she was the view, and that I had been ogling her. Well, yeah, I guess I had been giving her an eyewash, but that was only because she was almost too scruffy to allow past my doorsill.

  But she had a weapon. That was the important thing. Until Jeremy's unwelcome revelation, I had been certain there was no gun in my house. Now, unless Skunk had secreted a
way an armory in the wall, I was confident my premises were as gun-free as a school zone.

  Oversalted irony is another McPherson trait.

  I nodded at a passing group of future presidents. They all looked capable of prankish behavior. But seeing as they were the educated elite, I scratched them from my list of suspects.

  I tested the doorknob before taking out my key. No, I hadn't left it unlocked, the way I usually did.

  "Think it was picked?" said Kendle with professional savoir faire.

  "How can you tell?" I asked, leaning down, looking for scratches on the metal.

  "If it was done right, you wouldn't know." She nudged me aside to apply professional scrutiny. "Any of your girlfriends have a key?"

  "Naw," I said. "I lock them out."

  "Such a good, prudent boy," she said, her blouse settling like a pup tent on her bosom as she stood erect. "Well, I can't see anything. Don't your brother and sister have keys?"

  "Yes..." I admitted warily. "But why—?"

  "Families are capable of anything," she said, as though profiling the worst sort of serial killers. "What exactly did this caller say? Did you recognize the voice?"

  Did I ever.

  "Someone was playing an old tape of Skunk," I said.

  "Your father?"

  "Yeah." I gave her a suspicion-loaded glance. "From the background noise, it almost sounded like a prison." In other words, in view of her job and current assignment, it might be a recording she had access to.

  She raised and lowered her thick shoulders. "Or a cafeteria?"

  "It could've been," I said, adding, "A prison cafeteria."

  "You've got bars on the brain."

  True that. After I opened the door she brusquely pushed me out of the way. "Lemme take a look, first."

  Barbara's recent visits had alerted me to the sad state of my house's hygiene. I had wanted to lead the way, if for no other reason than to cook up logical reasons for the mess. As it was, Kendle would get a first-hand view of my slobhood, free of editorial excuses.

  Within five seconds I spotted the clue. Right there, under her nose. There was no way the detective would know its meaning. I remained mute.

  It was obvious my visitor was gone, his purpose accomplished. But if I said so to Kendle she would ask how I knew. I had to let the charade continue. I was a past master at wasting time, and had no qualms about sharing my talent.

  She moved cautiously, pausing at every door before inching into the next room. Her body seemed more massive in the narrow hall. I followed almost involuntarily, as though I was trapped in the gravity field of a gas giant.

  "You're not much of a neat freak," she whispered as she lumbered through what some people would have used as a dining room, but which I employed for storage. Items large and small left over from when this house had held the entire McPherson family instead of a single differentiated mute. Chairs, tables, a multitude of old knickknacks, all condensed into a single room. While much of the house remained unchanged (down to the dust that had accumulated since my mother last swept a rag over the furniture), there were some things that were too much in the way to leave in place. Heaped indiscriminately were Barbara's cosmetic mirror, Smashbox and Lancôme bottles (neither of which she could have afforded, so how had they gotten here?), and old Harley Davidson Barbies. Jeremy's weights, posters and Playboys. Mom's sewing machine, a pile of sewing patterns still in their unopened envelopes, various pots and pans. A litany of tools Skunk had used once or twice then dumped in a closet. All of these things were marked for disposal. Yet with inheritance came responsibility. The same arduous impulse that chained me to the house kept me in the grip of these moldering odds and ends. My family was hopelessly ephemeral, but the accretions endured. The negative side was that I felt more nostalgic warmth for these things than the people who had owned them. God knows, I never gave or received a hug from Skunk. But his rusty hammer and screwdrivers still prompt an inexplicable lump in my throat.

  I hope it's not cancer.

  Kendle gave the piles a slightly more than cursory glance. Did she think the Brinks money was hidden in there? The police had searched the house any number of times for any number of reasons and had never found it. But they hadn't found Jeremy's gun, either. C.S.I. is a fantasy show that employs an inaccurate acronym for Pinocchio and Cinderella bust the Drug Lord of the Rings. The benefit to me was the search for fingerprints. It was the first time my house had been dusted in decades.

  She skimped on the kitchen, where cursory was ne plus ultra and sine qua non and every other Latin smorg-fest you didn't want to know unless you were into bacteriological warfare.

  As she approached the stairs to the second floor I swallowed a bark of protest. There was nothing sacred about upstairs, except it was an unwanted repetition of downstairs. Jeremy had been oblivious to how I had trashed the old homestead. But I didn't want Kendle to know that I not only lived above a pigsty, but inside of one, too. Upstairs contained all the dirty laundry, literally and figuratively. I couldn't tell the detective her tactics were pointless, but at least I could be consoled by the fact that the mess would drive her away.

  "You're sure the call came from here?" she whispered as she panted up the last steps.

  "Caller ID," I said, as though I was privy to the latest in hi-tech snooping.

  "And you don't have a cell?" she inquired.

  I looked at her blankly.

  "Cell phone," she elaborated, adding sign language that even a rhesus monkey could understand.

  "Oh, no. Just a regular dial phone."

  "I knew it couldn't be a smart phone." With a low snort she turned to the first bedroom, which had once been Barbara's. I had not bothered with it much beyond piling a few boxes in the corner and removing the mirror (for reasons mysterious to me but probably obvious to everyone else). My mother had striven to grace the house with a few feminine touches, fighting stern male dominance with traces of faïence and pink trim. But Barbara's room was raw female, by which I mean the room you saw was the woman you got. Much of it was incomprehensible to me. Spice Girl and Playgirl pinups (long and long gone), dainty bottles which she had refilled from gallon jugs of dime store perfume, a Betty Boop phone that she had rescued from the dump and retouched with emphatic daubs of non-matching acrylic paint. I wondered if the caller had used it, pressing his face against Betty's thighs as he looped the tape to another inane comment from Skunk. Barbara had created the female steroid. Not muscle, but the kind of knock-you-down femininity that gave men cramps without a hand being laid on them. I wouldn't say she was a predator, but she presented an overabundance of bait.

  Kendle studied this ovulatory landscape with the awe of the criminally deprived.

  "Is this your sis or your lady in waiting?" she said.

  "No one's waiting for me," I said.

  "You didn't have carnal knowledge of her, did you?" She rubbed up against me. I hoped it was an accident.

  "Is that cop talk?" I asked.

  "I hope no one jumps out of the underwear drawer and shoots us," she said, massaging her holster.

  "She took all her underwear with her when she moved out."

  "And I'm sure you checked."

  Gimme a break. Of course I checked. And I'm sure Skunk checked, before me. Scientific curiosity, hillbilly style.

  Next came my parents' bedroom, scene of reluctance, misery and transitory euphoria, if you count drunken ruts in that category. I never knew Skunk and Mom when they weren't miserable with each other, but in those early days there wasn't much to compare them against. Misery loves company, and there was plenty of that on Oregon Hill. It all added up to a kind of ecstasy of hopelessness. The McPhersons fit right in, what with all the slapping around and besottedness and bouts of lethargy that verged on the comatose. A little crucifix sat on the dresser, the only beacon of spirituality on the premises, courtesy of Mom. Her suicide seemed to indicate its inefficacy, or maybe she really had gone to a better place. I had been reluctant to add it to the pile of ju
nk in the dining room, maybe out of an unconscious dread that I would land in a worse place. Skunk must have suffered from the same superstition, seeing he had left the cross in place all those years he had slept there by himself. There were no pictures of Mom anywhere, and I don't remember ever seeing one.

  "It's actually neat in here," Kendle observed, by which I assumed she meant relatively clean and uncluttered. I had even made Skunk's bed after I heard of his demise. A Miss Havisham thing, I guess. This little temple to my parents' existence, which would never be occupied again unless the mice took over in winter.

  We moved on. I winced as she stuck her head in my room.

  "Hey!" she exclaimed lowly.

  Expecting a comment on the gooey bachelor funk, I gave a resigned "Yeah..."

  "Books!"

  "They're not mine," I said.

  "Then why is one of them lying open on your bed?" she asked, casting investigative glances in either direction before entering.

  "It's from the library," I protested. When I was a kid, reading anything but comic books amounted to a high crime. Culture was chugged from a can while watching Judge Judy. Even 20/20 was an intellectual stretch, so you can imagine Skunk's reaction when I got hooked on the Hardy Boys. And since you can imagine it, I don't need to go into details.

  Kendle went over to my seedy bed and flipped the book over. She gasped. I backed away in embarrassment.

  "What are you doing reading about her?" she demanded.

  "It's got lots of stuff," I reasoned. "Adventure, sex...even a cool massacre."

  "'Catherine de Medici'," Kendle read, her wonder increasing as it dawned on her that it was non-fiction. "So you're into ancient history..."

  I had always been interested in history. Even as a kid, whenever Sweet Tooth threatened to hit me with a crying fit unless I joined her with her dolls, I insisted on calling Ken Sir Yeranus and Barbie Lady Poopalot. Catherine de Medici wasn't exactly Babylonian, but I guessed for Yvonne Kendle anything pre-Sex in the City was tarnished by age. She was behaving like all the alphabet-challenged yokels of my youth, as though I was some kind of mutant chimp blowing off the Times with all the aplomb of an Einstein. But there was a big difference: appreciation. Her fat blue eyes went from disbelief to approbation. My slob-hood was forgiven because it was explained. Scholars didn't have time to maintain a proper house.