“Plus I could never really imagine Willie with all these girls he’d loved before,” he says. “Julio Iglesias you could understand.”
I invite him to join me for a beer, and he comes over with his briefcase and introduces himself as Bill Sidell. He’s wearing a rumpled suit and tie on a body pushing five foot nine but not quite making it. Billy’s also in the latter stages of balditude.
“Willie Lee’s the name,” I say, as he looks me over like I’m some exotic creature. “Share a name with the great Nelson himself. So what brings you to New York City, Billy?”
“How do you know I’m not from New York City?” he says, cocking his head to make it clever.
“Guys like us tend to stick out in the big city, Billy. Not that we’d want it any other way, ain’t that right?”
You’d be surprised at what gets some people going. Billy takes this as an invitation to talk politics. Looks to get real heated up about the perniciousness of the big city from where I’m seated. Uses the phrase “moral turpitude” in a sentence if I’m not mistaken. Thankfully there is my grin, and with a dose of it I’d otherwise think unhealthy for a man of his size, I manage to get him around to his life in Arizona, the wife and the kids and whatnot. This is his first visit to the Big Apple, and he’s missing them a lot. Figured it would be better if he went alone the first time, he says, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. Next time maybe he’ll bring the lot of them and take in a few Broadway shows. I ask what he does for a living, and he pulls out a card from his jacket pocket:
Bill Sidell
Mister Pyrotechnics
Eastern Arizona Fireworks Association
Been in the fireworks business since he was a kid, he tells me. Inherited the business from his folks. He does the Fourth of July, he does birthdays, he does New Year’s Eve – year-round pyrotechnical expertise. Apparently he’s made quite a name for himself too. Taken fireworks to a whole new level in Eastern Arizona, such that he’s been named Mister Pyrotechnics three years running. The problem is, he tells me, fireworks can be a dangerous business, and he’s been in it long enough to know that it’s not something he wants his own kids going into. Too risky. It’s been bothering him lately. What if something happened to him? How would the wife and kids get along if he were hurt or even, God forbid, killed? No, he’s looking to set himself right in an up-and-coming business. Make a better life for the family. That’s why he’s in New York City. Scouting the prospects for an exciting new venture.
When I ask what kind of prospects he’s talking, he takes off his glasses and wipes them, looks out through the windows to the street, then swoops back in on me hard: “You know I knew as soon as you walked in here that we’d end up talking.”
“Maybe you better try that out on the waitress,” I say, fluttering the eyelashes a bit.
He laughs. “Not like that. Let me ask you something. What do you know about pheromones?”
“Not a hell of a lot, but then I have a feeling you’re willing to educate me.”
“How about the sixth sense?” he says, reaching down for his briefcase. “Love at first sight?” He spreads a brochure on the table in front of me and reads aloud, pronouncing each word as if it’s an individual little miracle: “Scent Sense: The Miraculous Science of Pheromones. That sixth sense I was talking about is now scientifically proven. They’re called pheromones, and they’re tiny molecules we send out to communicate emotions and feelings.”
“The company I represent,” he continues, “is the first to take advantage of this rapidly advancing field to create a line of perfume and beauty products that are literally irresistible. Here’s how it works: in recent years scientists have discovered what they call the vomeronasal organ – tiny cavities on either side of the nasal wall. This is a major discovery. This is your pheromone sensor, and it is connected directly to the hypothalamus, the emotional core of the brain. Messages received by the hypothalamus bypass the intellectual brain and are immediately felt.”
He’s on a roll, and I guess I’m a good listener. Maybe I would have made a good priest. Father Willie. Who knows? If only I’d taken that other path diverging in the wood, as made famous in the great poem by Mister Robert Frost. The path I took I guess you wouldn’t even properly call a path. Really I more or less took the woods, and don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t sometimes get lonely out there with the wild critters and the hoot owls. One thing that heaven has taught me, however, is that there’s nothing worse than days after days that all look the same, and in the woods I do find that the variety of wildlife you encounter while smashing through the foliage will often make it worth your while. I’m thinking of Billy, who’s telling me they’ve done studies with siblings separated at birth.
“Put them in a room together,” he says, taking a long sip of beer, “they know something funny’s going on. Nine times out of ten they’ll end up talking. Seven out of ten they’ll discover they’re siblings in the first conversation. There’s more. We’ve done experiments with pigs. Remove their vomeronasal organ, and they can’t feel love – often they don’t even recognize their own mothers. They are emotionally dead pigs.”
“Tell me you’re releasing this technology to the general population,” I say. “I’ve had more than a few requests to bottle my essence, and now I see it may be possible.”
“I’m doing a presentation tomorrow morning for a major perfume outfit,” he says. “Naturally they are very interested in my products. We’re talking perfumes that turn heads. Unscented perfumes. Perfumes that communicate directly with your emotional core.”
“Tell me you’re wearing some right now,” I say
“That I am, sir,” he says with a grin.
“Then brother, I’m with you. Let’s have another beer for the road, and then I’ve got us a party to go to. Test out your product on the general population, so to speak. You know any of the martial arts? Good. I might need some backup. We might just experience some turbulence out there, but nothing that can’t be handled by two emotionally dead pigs set to put the man back in Manhattan.”
7
Billy and I take it out into the streets and attempt to get reacquainted with walking, proving yet again that there is really so much we take for granted on this earth. With the kind of beer we’re carrying around inside, I’m thinking it might not have been a bad idea to ease up a bit back there at the brasserie. Smelled the roses, so to speak. The night is young.
Moving along, more or less, we pass one of these costume shops with one-toothed witches and headless superheroes in the window. Billy’s been eyeing The Kid all evening and has decided he needs himself a cowboy hat. Normally I would agree, but under the circumstances I have to advise against it.
“It’s not you who wears the hat,” I tell him real serious. “But the hat who wears you.” Zen koans, I believe they’re called. Anyway, he reflects on this for a moment, then bolts into the store like a maniac, and by the time I arrive in the Wild West section he has picked himself out a shiny yellow affair that fits him nicely but is unfortunately made of plastic and generally unflattering to Billy and anyone else within a hundred mile radius. I attempt to enlighten him on this, but Billy is one stubborn son of a bitch.
“Let’s ride,” he says. What the hell. Considering the circumstances, specifically considering the alcohol, I just nod and pick me out one of your finer suede capes to salvage something from the experience. Willie El Matador – who knows, it’s worked before. At the cash register I pull out the wallet and tell Billy we’re putting this one under the column that reads business expenses.
“What business is that?” he says.
“Trouble incorporated,” I say. “And you’re vice president.”
He nods real slow. Catches sight of himself in the mirror behind the counter, makes a finger gun, and shoots himself dead. Takes a rack of clown wigs down with him and appears to have abandoned the land of the living till I break into Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys, which is a duet I know he can’t refuse. Eve
ntually I manage to coax him out of there with They’ll never stay home, and they’re always alone, even with someone they love.
By the time we get to Fernanda’s we’ve worked ourselves up enough glamour to formally declare ourselves a constellation and name it Willie Nelson. I’m also expecting some more glamorous of the species at the gallery, but to my disappointment Billy and I are providing more than our fair share of flash. Maybe fifty business types stand around drinking French champagne and scooping shrimply delights off silver trays, mostly grey hair in suits showing off investments in the silicone industry in the form of blondes twice their size.
Billy and I remain unperturbed. We walk right in there with enough momentum for the desired cape effect, despite the fact that your leather cape will hang heavier than your silk, and steal a roomful of eyes from the Old Masters. No blue-eyed virgins in sight, which is the understatement of the century, but that doesn’t prevent Billy from walking right over to an Amazon in a gold lamé dress about the size of a handkerchief and tipping his hat, at which point I figure I better get in there and rescue my partner before we got a riot on our hands.
“I’m Willie, this is Billy, and that was some poetry,” I say. The girl gives Billy this real breathy hello while pretending I’m some exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. Makes me think either the champagne’s gone clear to her head or the string quartet’s so loud she hasn’t heard me. Then she actually reaches out and strokes Billy’s plastic hat, which leads me to one and only one conclusion: pheromones. Then another little conclusion comes none too fast, which is that blondie is none other than Twiggy, doing for skin and bones what Marilyn Monroe once did for tits and ass. Never imagined she had it in her. Hair’s swept up off her neck real stylishly, and circles of rouge color her cheeks. Quite an elegant get up, it is. I want to ask her about Kafka, I want to ask her what the hell she’s doing there – a little phrase that’s starting to sound familiar – but she’s already led Billy off to a corner, doing to that hat what most people do to pets.
So I’m starting to feel like a character in an Albanian spy novel, and I’m not sure I like it. Billy may get himself into trouble, I worry, but then with the way he’s been drinking, Billy’s already in trouble. Besides, I’ve got business to tend to. Technically speaking, business means saving Fernanda Shore’s soul, et cetera, but I’ve found that there’s really no technically speaking where souls are concerned. On my first case, a few months after my death when I joined the force, I just came right out with it. The fella’s name was Johnny Periwinkle, if I recall, and he’d been praying to be saved from his gambling. I sat next to him at a blackjack table in the Isle of Capri Casino, Lake Charles, Louisiana. Hit with eighteen showing and beat his twenty with a three. Proceeded to tell him that recommitting to the Lord and quitting the cards would be like hitting an eternal twenty-one, which got me some extended profanity and a punch to the face. The case ended up taking weeks, and what I learned is that they may be praying for salvation, but nothing you say can make them accept salvation, if that’s what you want to call it. You’ve just got to accompany them through all the ups and downs until the downs get so low that they decide on their own to make some change. At best all you can do is help them hit bottom quicker, which incidentally has always happened to be a specialty of mine. So Detective Willie has no illusions about putting Miss Fernanda back on the straight and narrow tonight. He’s merely intending to get down in the mud with her and see if she can wrestle.
First things first, I swipe a champagne glass from a passing tray and murder a few bubbles. Over the rim of the glass there’s no sign of Havisham, which is good news, but then there’s no sign of anyone I take to be Fernanda either. I gaze up into the catwalks, but there’s no sign of life up there. I move around the edges of the room, checking out some of the paintings as I go. Lots of older landscapes and fruit bowls, and it is amazing how they could make those apples look so shiny and good. You just want to pluck them right off the canvas for a bite. Liberate the apple, so to speak, or as my acquaintances in ALF might say. Unfortunately for the apples, I’m about the only one in there paying them any attention. Harry Shore may be right about his daughter’s poor business sense, but then I catch sight of the woman who must be his daughter, and I forget all about Harry Shore.
She’s over by the bar in a little circle of socialites, anxiously looking out across the gallery. She’s no hard-edged New York type, Fernanda. No, she’s still all Gulf of Mexico. Light green sundress of the sort girls used to wear, showing her shoulders but covering her knees. A distant smile that comes into focus when somebody turns her way. Dark blonde hair she hasn’t tried to make too fancy. I felt it out on the sidewalks, I sniffed it on the air. Spring has most definitely arrived, and I couldn’t be happier to be among the seasons again.
Somebody says something funny, and it seems to take her a minute to remember to laugh. She covers her teeth with a fist, then quickly shifts the hand down the string of pearls around her neck, pulling them through her fingers like they’re rosary beads. It’s times like these when I want to walk over and tell a woman about my heavenly circumstances. Not to save her soul or any other part of her. Just to get it off my chest and maybe see her eyes light up. I’ve been stuck on a cloud for the past five years, I want to tell her, and then I guess I’m always hoping she’ll believe me for once and say a little prayer that the switchboard might hear and get me made human again. Hell, even angels still hope for miracles. But of course the mysteries never stop, and while I wait on miracles I’ve still got a case to work.
She sees me watching her and gives me a vague smile, as if I might be some client she can’t afford to ignore, which only confirms my suspicions of her poor business sense. I reciprocate with a little something of Swedish origin I call the Smorgasbord – just light it up in all directions, there’s something for everybody in there, and I’m sure hoping that includes Miss Shore.
Then at that very moment – and this may well be the effect of the Smorgasbord – she tugs the necklace a bit too hard, and it snaps. Pearls scatter across the floor, clicking like teeth as they hit, rolling up under the bar and through the legs of patrons of the arts. Her hands fly up to her neck, and her eyes go big and moist. I catch a pearl against my boot and kneel to pick it up. Then I crawl across the floor to round up a few of the others, which when freed from the necklace are proving to be lively little critters. She’s down hunting them too and depositing them in a champagne glass she’s got in one hand, her mouth twisted shut like if she were to let go of herself now, she might just scatter loose across the floor like those pearls.
I crawl over and deposit a handful into her glass. She looks up at me with green eyes that match her dress. Wrinkles mark the corners of her eyes and mouth, the kind you’ll see in a woman who’s gotten pleasure out of life. Freckles cover her cheeks and make me wish I could scoop them up too and maybe put them in my pocket.
“Cast not your pearls before swine,” I say with a little wink.
“Now you tell me,” she mutters, sounding even more Texas than she looks. “I think I’m supposed to know you,” she says, shooting out an arm to catch a pearl, “but I can’t quite place the name. I’m sorry, it has been a rough night.”
“Call me Willie,” I say, dropping another pearl into the glass. “Capital W as in Wow. I’m from Texas.”
“You don’t say,” she says distractedly, scanning the floor.
“South Texas, actually,” I say. “But I do manage to get up here occasionally to see the art. Great lover of the fifteenth century, I am.”
“Interesting,” she says, though she’s not looking it. If she’s putting two and two together, it’s not equaling four.
“This may not be the best time,” I say, scampering around her to trap a little fella who’s making a run for it, “but I was incidentally wondering if you might have anything fifteenth century and maybe Italian for sale, say a little Madonna for example. Maybe even something with freckles if you’ve got it.”
>
She squints up at me and twists those lips, which aren’t painted and don’t need it. “I’m not for sale.”
“Sweetheart,” I say, “I’m flattered you think I could afford it.”
“So maybe I don’t understand,” she says, standing with the champagne glass and irritably brushing off her dress.
“Recently I saw a school of Botticelli Madonna in South Texas,” I say, standing to meet her eyes, “but she wasn’t the one I was looking for. Actually I found her a bit fake, if you want to be blunt about it. You know those South Texas girls. Of course it’s not my style to talk about a woman behind her back, but desperate circumstances call for desperate measures.”
“What in hell are you talking about?” she says through her teeth. “Who are you, and why are you here?”
“Maybe we’d better talk in private,” I say.
“I don’t want to talk in private,” she says. “I want you out of here.” So I take her by the elbow and drag her over behind the bar to where the fiddlers are into what I’d like to say is Mozart. It’s her show, so she’s forced to come along as graciously as she can manage.
“I’m a private investigator,” I say as she smiles sweetly to another patron across the room. “Your father hired me to get his Madonna back, and the way I see it, we’ve got two options. The first is you hand it over, we get out of here, and I buy you a drink. The second is more or less the same except you’re buying.”
“You’re insane,” she says.
“A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane only because this happens to very few people.”
“No,” she says. “I mean really insane.”
“A few weeks ago, your father’s Madonna was replaced by a fake,” I say. “The eyes weren’t quite right, if you want to know, and I get the impression your father’s the type who notices pretty much everything. What he doesn’t know yet, and what I found out just this afternoon, is that you paid a visit to his insurance company last month. The way I figure it, you obtained a photograph of the painting and had it copied. Then you somehow had it swapped for your father’s original. Not bad work, but the photograph was just a bit off. That’s the bad news.”
Planet Willie Page 6