Hideous scowled at me as I untied him. It was as much gratitude as I expected.
“This don’t change anything! Next time we meet, you’re dead, Jimmy Plush, you’re dead!’”
“Good!” I said, now full of hate and anger where the confusion and numbness had been, “with enemies like you as friends, who needs enemies? Scram! I’ve got business here.”
Chang finished untying Skinny and pleaded with me with his slanty eyes.
“We must go, now, Mister Plush. The spirits are close and remaining here will only bring you closer to death.”
The spirits were unscrewing Sylvain’s head. They’d go for Blasko next.
“I can’t go. Chang, Mittens, Johnny, Skinny, run for it.”
Mittens hesitated.
“I don’t know if I can let you stay here.”
“Scat, cat! The rest of you too!”
And they did. There was just me, Blasko and the ghosts now. Blasko was cowering behind his machine and the bearded ghost babies were going to unscrew his head. I couldn’t allow that to happen.
“Stop!” I yelled at the ghosts and they stopped. Neither of us expected it.
“This man might have wronged you, but he’s wronged me worse. This man is responsible for the deaths of not one but two women that I loved. And I think he might have invented whatever it was that made me a teddy bear and my…friend a cat. And if he did that, he helped turn a good cop into a horse too. Between what this man did and what he might have done, he’s got suffering to do. This man is mine!”
The ghosts spoke with a single voice like the quintuplets outside the carnival, except that they sounded like baritone babies.
“As you wish. We shall move on to our eternal resting place.” They made a “poof” noise and were gone.
As they vanished from sight, I felt something difficult to describe, other than that it was disgusting. I had either intimidated or reasoned with creatures like that. Could it have been that they saw something of themselves in me? It was a scary thought. It’s scary to think you’re something scary. It’s scarier that underneath the disgust you feel you’ve got every right to be scary. More so than I did the day before. I would have felt sorry for Blasko, having to face me when I’m in this state. I would have if I hadn’t used up the last of my pity on Johnny and Skinny.
“Get up!” I roared.
He got up. People don’t expect a teddy bear to roar.
This basement had to be nothing but a temporary laboratory and he must have had something bigger and more glamorous elsewhere.
“Give Chang directions to your lab and no tricks.”
“Yes,” he moaned, drained by the whole ordeal, “no tricks.”
He gave Chang directions to a warehouse on the docks, which to my surprise was not full of Zuvembie thugs ready to dismember me. It was actually just full of junk; devices that did nothing but generate bouncing arcs of lightning or flashing lights, severed robot heads that did nothing but repeat the time and weather and poorly gaffed dead sideshow freaks like a duck with antlers and five squirrels sewn together. The only thing of note were some giant canisters identical to the ones in the mayor’s basement.
I tapped one of the giant canisters.
“So, is this the gas?”
“Yes, that’s the gas, but it’s only a prototype. It’s worthless really. The subjects all showed sensitivity to pain. They were of no use to me.”
I faked a yawn.
“Fascinating, I’ve got more questions.”
“Yes, Plush, I’ll answer anything you want.”
“I know you know I’m not the real Jimmy Plush.”
Blasko cackled like a maniac. I had to slap him to get him to stop.
“Yes, Hatbox, I know who you are. And yes, I did this to you.”
I breathed in and out, in and out. Begged myself to talk instead of shoot so I wouldn’t lose the opportunity to be myself again.
“Then if I brought you the real Jimmy Plush, could you switch us back?”
I was in a bad position. If the answer to the question was yes, I’d have to gamble on him telling the truth, which had to be one-in-a-million. A man in this position who valued his skin would give a “yes”, true or otherwise.
“The body switch process is irreversible.”
I didn’t like hearing that. Saved me some disappointment, though, and surprised me a good deal.
“You’re the most honest criminal I’ve ever met, Blasko.”
“A scientist is a seeker of the truth not a perpetrator of lies!”
“Why’d you go this far?” It’s odd how much morbid curiosity I possessed. Why is it there’s nothing more interesting than knowing exactly why your life’s been ruined again? In my mind, I’d pulled the trigger about four times already.
“I wanted to pay you back for killing me before. Nobody kills Arizstid Blasko!”
“I think that statement’s about to become a lie twice over, Blasko.”
He folded his hands like he was standing before his maker. It was a little early for that, if a man like him would ever get the privilege, that is.
“Wait!” he said, his eyes tearing up, “I didn’t come up with this plan! I’m innocent! I was given a briefcase of money by a man in a police uniform. Officer Berry, John Berry. The same officer brought me the whore for this party. I don’t know who sent him, I swear! Please, spare my life, Plush! I repent for my sins! I repent! Let me live!”
I chuckled ominously.
“Don’t worry, you’ll live.”
I pistol-whipped Blasko unconscious then strapped him to his machine. Reading this man’s notes wasn’t easy. I had to phone around town to find somebody that read funny Russian squiggles and spoke Hungarian that had no problem coming out to a mysterious warehouse laboratory at four in the morning. Blasko woke up and got knocked out four times before I managed that small miracle. Then I had to call a scientist out to calibrate the machine according to the instructions. Then I had to shoot the tutor and tell the scientist at gunpoint to keep his mouth shut. Then I had to wait for Blasko to wake up so that he could feel the life energy draining out of him and the Relivineating gas overtaking him. Then, I had to shoot the scientist. Maybe I didn’t have to, but I felt like it and most of the time, I try to do what I feel like because that’s what people expect of Jimmy Plush. God knows what people would expect of a bereaved, angry Jimmy Plush. In my head, Mittens kept saying that I was the worst man he knew.
After the fifth or sixth time killing Blasko, I stopped caring. His screaming was almost unbearably loud while I spent three days skinning him and sticking safety pins into his exposed organs.
I left him in his lab, strapped down and squirming in pain forever and walked off to find the man who had to be behind the corrupt cops that brought Jean to Blasko, the man who financed his damned experiments. The cops in this town bowed down to Vic Halperin. The time had come to finally put an end to The Pale Peril.
I was feeling tired, angry, sad. Dead inside. I was feeling like I was stuffed with lead and roaches instead of cotton. Chang had offered to sew up my stitches, but I didn’t feel whole, so there was no reason to look that way, no reason to act like it would heal. Nothing was going to heal me but Vic Halperin’s heart in my hand so I could squeeze the blood out like he’d done to me.
“Chang is worried, most honored Mister Plush. Chang does not believe that Halperin was behind the incident.”
I slapped him, then I pistol-whipped him in the face.
“Chang does not tell most honored Mister Plush how to be a detective. This trench coat, this hat, this phony goddamn job are all most honored Mister Plush has! And most honored Mister Plush is going to take it out of the man that took it from him. Who did Hatbox owe so much money to? Halperin. Who made my girlfriend a whore? Halperin! Who makes this town too damn dismal to live in? Victor Halperin, that’s who!”
It’s a sad state of affairs when a man is almost too tired for a massacre.
“You’re going to lose all
your stuffing.” That was all he said. Made me mad. Made me want to hit him again. But damned if he wasn’t the only one looking out for me now.
“Get the bag from the car.”
“And the sewing kit?”
“No time for that.”
“Everyone has time to stay alive.”
I shook my head.
“Halperin and his mooks don’t. So get me the damn bag from the car.”
Chang got the damn bag. I grabbed a wad of stuffing and shoved it in. I don’t think it was in there particularly tight, but I couldn’t care less about all that. There was nothing I wouldn’t mind losing except for a chance at revenge.
I kicked open the door and shot the maître d’ in the gut.
“Is there something…” He was holding his gunshot wound, but didn’t cease to be a perfect maître d’.
“Yeah, there’s something you can do for me. Take your hand off the wound. I gutshot you because I wanted to see ya bleed. Don’t disappoint a little bear with a gun who wants nothing more than to kill you. You might live if you crawl bleeding to your boss. If you don’t crawl and you ain’t bleeding, you won’t live.”
The maître d’ got down on his wounded belly and started to crawl to the back of the restaurant. Nobody stood up. Everyone here knew where they were eating and knew that it was just a matter of time before something like this happened. Some of them were also smart enough to know that when I start shooting, I don’t like to stop. It’s one of my less pleasant features. Today, I really didn’t feel like putting my best foot forward.
Halperin himself didn’t come out with the crawling Maître d’. Instead, his right and left hand men, Johnny Hideous and Skinny Valentine did.
“You got a problem, Plush?” Hideous asked with an impressive sneer.
“You remember the soiree?”
“Yeah, what about it?” Skinny tried to look tough.
“That night I saved your lives. And I ain’t Chinese. I believe when you save a man’s life, it’s yours to take back whenever the hell you please. Do you know what that means?”
Skinny appeared shaken.
“I ain’t afraid of you, little bear.”
“Well, you should be. And you should be scared of a man that left you two to be turned into mindless undead slaves.”
Skinny and Johnny both put hands on their chins, visibly pondering my words.
“So, boys, are you more obligated to a man that left you for dead or one that’s saved your life and will kill you if you try to protect the man that left you for dead.”
They shook, but continued to appear obstinate.
“Pair of cupcakes like you might not know what it’s like to lose a woman, but I’ve lost two. If either of you got enough humanity in you to let a grieving man deal with his pain, I suggest you back away from that door. Otherwise, my pain becomes yours and I’ve got a lot of pain in me right now.”
I was being real fair to those two and they finally knew it, in fact they marched into Halperin’ s office side by side with me. Not only side by side, but Hideous went in first.
Hideous approached Halperin’ s oversized desk and pounded it with his oversized fist.
“You sold us out, Vic! You sold us all out!”
I drew my gun and took aim at Halperin’s head while he was distracted. With Blasko I felt like torturing him and making him feel everything I’d felt. Halperin on the other hand, I just wanted dead.
If I’d blinked, I’d have missed the events that occurred a second later. I fired my gun. Hideous grabbed for Halperin’s throat. Halperin grabbed Hideous’ arm with one hand and tossed him over his shoulder into the giant gong behind his desk He reached out with his other hand and grabbed my bullet before it hit him. The gong made a “bonnngggg” noise because somebody had just smacked into it. Skinny Valentine fled screaming. It was a very eventful second.
I was kind of scared of the guy after that. I still felt like killing him but he’d just displayed a level of skill in the Chinese fighting arts that an actual Chinaman would be jealous of. I squeezed off three more shots, which he swatted from the air like insects. And suddenly, he was standing in front of me, looking me in the face.
“Most honored, Plush,” he said, “I am aware why you have come here. And were I the man responsible for your loss—and I am not—you would be most justified in shooting me down. But, of course, I don’t need to tell you that and I think we’ve known each other long enough to know that you don’t give a damn about justice, but rather are ruled by a series of petty, violent impulses that would be embarrassing for a small child, let alone a distinguished private investigator.”
For some reason, I was listening to him. I was trembling, scared of an enemy I’d always thought of as quite pathetic. What kind of man pretends to be Chinese all day?
“I’m still going to kill you.” I had to say it. Whether I’d do it or not was up for debate. Whether I could or not, even.
“That’s all well and good, but we have a mutual antagonist it seems.”
“I always knew from your damn gaudy décor that you secretly hated yourself, Vic.”
Halperin put a finger against his temple massaging it.
“Someone is causing me great stress. Someone is hurting my operation, giving my girls over to the police. You know what happens when the police get a hold of people in this city. I didn’t send Jean to the soiree. She was taken off the street and brought there. I did not sell out my men. I am not a traitor and I am not as crooked as you think I am. I want you to find this man.”
I holstered my gun.
“If there is such a man, I want me to find him too.”
“Good. Then go to Muffinhead Howard’s on the docks. Find Bulgy O’ Toole and the Ritz Brothers. Put some fear into them. They know you. They know you, they’ll talk.”
So, that was it, I turned around and left the office, but not before addressing Halperin one more time.
“I just want you to remember this: I don’t work for you, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Chang was waiting for me in the car.
“Did you kill him?”
“He didn’t do it. We need to go to Muffinhead Howard’s by the docks. You know the place?”
“Yes and so do you.”
“Tell me then. And tell me how I know Bulgy O’ Toole and The Ritz Brothers.”
“Some time ago, a very bad man needed a shipment protected from Halperin. He was, in fact, not just a bad man, he was the worst man in town.”
I couldn’t begin to conceive of the worst man in this town.
“Do you think he has something to do with this case?”
Chang stifled a laugh.
“The tiger need not whisper. When an elephant takes a step, everybody hears it.”
How very Chinese of him.
“So what was this shipment?”
“A Sexquatch.”
“Oh, just a Sexquatch? Why all the commotion then?”
Yes, that was sarcasm. I don’t know how he expected me to know what a Sexquatch was.
“A Sexquatch is exactly what it sounds like, a lady sasquatch trained in the arts of pleasure. Halperin wanted it for himself, so Plush was hired to protect it. Bulgy O’ Toole and The Ritz Brothers were hired to steal it. They were not successful. Worse still, Plush took the Sexquatch for himself, used it until he got tired of it then, posing as a meat salesman named Isaac Bickerstaff Jenkins sold the Sexquatch’s meat to Halperin for use at J.L Wong’s. Halperin thought it was perfectly edible cat meat. But Sexquatch meat causes hallucinations and vomiting and there was a food critic in the restaurant when it went out. Halperin fired Bulgy and killed one of the Ritz Brothers for failing him.”
I shuddered thinking about the person everybody believed I was.
“And Muffinhead Howard?”
“Mister Plush briefly dated Muffinhead Howard’s sister.”
“Assuming that Muffinhead Howard is called Muffinhead Howard because he has a muffin for a head, that’s pretty disgusting
.”
“No. His sister had a snickerdoodle for a head.”
That made a bit more sense. Snickerdoodles are a very sensual cookie.
“That one I can understand. She sounds cute.”
“She was, until he got tired of her and bit her head off.”
That was disgusting.
“How could you work for a man like that?”
Chang shrugged.
“Hard to find good jobs for Chinese in this town. They fired me from kitchen of J.L Wong’s.”
That was more disgusting.
So, there I was at Muffinhead Howard’s. I was a bear hell-bent on finding his girl and this was where my shifty pseudochinese archnemesis had sent me. It was about what I expected, blackjack games, crap games, poor lighting, a guy in a cougar suit taking wagers on a wrestling match between two dwarves and a monitor lizard. As I was putting twenty on the lizard, the man behind the bar caught sight of me. It should have been hard to tell, him being the aptly named proprietor of Muffinhead Howard’s and therefore having a muffin for a head (unless two of those blueberries happened to be his eyes) but the way he stroked his shotgun like it was his manhood and Veronica Lake had just walked in to dry off her angora sweater was kind of a giveaway. I’d have to tread lightly here...who the hell am I kidding? No, I wouldn’t.
I scanned the room for Bulgy O’ Toole and the Ritz Brothers. Siamese twins, one dead, one a vaudevillian with a penchant for lime green suits and a guy with eyes the size of baseballs didn’t take me long to pinpoint. It didn’t take Bulgy long to pinpoint me either. With those eyes, why would it?
“Don’t you know you’re unwelcome here?” he tried to splash his drink on me, but was a poor judge of distance and missed me by a couple inches.
“Come on, if I only went where I was welcome, I’d be cooped up in my office all week and what fun would that be?”
“That would suit us just fine,” said Spanky Ritz, the putrescent half of the team. He didn’t stink half as bad as his brother’s ventriloquism.
Jimmy Plush, Teddy Bear Detective Page 6