“Where’s your propeller, mister?” he says, grinning up at the hat.
“That’s not polite conversation, kid.”
Starts making these helicopter noises – chop chop chop – till it appears he may actually get up there and do some levitating.
“May need to ease back on that bourbon, Jeffrey,” I say. “And don’t tell me you’re not driving.”
“Hell no, mister,” he shouts up at the hat, making this twisty face I really do wish I could pocket. “I don’t drink that stuff.”
“Wise man, Jeffrey,” I say. “Wise man. They probably wouldn’t give you a second chance if you did. The good news is that I’m off the charts chance-wise, and there’s really nothing stopping you from chop-chopping over to that bar over there and bringing back some reserves for yours truly.”
“You let me wear the hat?” he says.
“You let me wear the propeller?” I say. Hit him with a bit of the ol’ Socratic method here.
“Nope,” he says, kicking his legs up under the table such that my glass is looking like a windup toy.
“What I can offer, though,” I say, seeing he’s got me at an advantage here, “is to turn you into a helicopter. Make it official, so to speak.”
He sucks on his thumb to give himself a little time to consider. “Okay mister,” he eventually says, hopping down from the chair without breaking anything and sprinting off through a crowd of broads in big tits and optimistic dye jobs who could give us all a second chance with the rocks they’ve got hung around their necks.
“I’m a helicopter,” Jeffrey explains as he takes out a plastic walker.
“Aren’t you though,” the ladies coo, which presents me a few peaceful moments to study the surroundings. Up on the stage a fella in a mustache and a tuxedo is announcing that the auction will now begin. All proceeds from the auction will go to the Second Chance Society, the tuxedo says, and the first items are two little copper bookends in the form of cocker spaniels. Most of the crowd settles down at the tables, so I take the occasion to move around the edges of the room past these heavy red velvet curtains behind which some of the kids have apparently set up forts. Curtains jerk around like celebrated salsa dancers in long red dresses, ammunition flying out occasionally in the form of olives and little cheese wedges. It’s difficult to stay incognito in the circumstances, and sure enough, Fernanda finds me fending off hors d’oeuvres before I’ve even got her on my radar.
She’s wearing a slinky black silk dress that presents another side of Miss Shore entirely. The side that wears the black dress is also less than pleased to see yours truly. She manages to do both a double-take and a death stare in the span of milliseconds, then chugs the rest of her drink and turns back to her table, attempting to ignore me. I take a seat two tables over, figuring I’ll just wait her out. Private investigating. It’s not always as glamorous as people make it out to be. The good news is that the cocker spaniels go for two hundred bucks, and we move on to a crystal nativity scene.
The men at Fernanda’s table make that nativity worth more than fifty bucks within seconds. A man in a grey sharkskin suit with matching sharkskin hair pulls her close to say something charming, but our little sinner doesn’t even crack a smile. Another suit doubles the bid, and I can’t help but wondering whether all of this is more for Fernanda’s benefit than for the kids. With the kind of attention these fellas are paying her, the tuxedo could put her up on the block and immediately make enough to solve world hunger.
The auction goes on, offering up Persian carpets, Japanese fans, and Swiss cuckoo clocks. After a while I spot Lenny slouching across the room in a flowered dress that’s obviously been picked out for her. She heads for Fernanda’s table and slumps down next to the sharkskin, which gets me wondering if he might be her famous father. That mystery becomes a minor one, however, when the tuxedo goes real quiet before announcing a very special item. There’s a piece of cloth draped over an easel beside him, and as he whips it off he says, “The Blue Madonna! This is an anonymous donation, but it is apparently the work of the school of Botticelli and dates to the fifteenth century. The bidding for this exquisite piece will begin at fifty thousand dollars. Do I hear fifty thousand?”
He hears fifty thousand quick, and he may also hear the sound of my jaw hitting the table. Case closed, I’m thinking. Fernanda’s a goner. But maybe not so fast. What about the eyes? Maybe they’re turquoise, maybe she’s a fake, and maybe there’s still some hope of saving Miss Shore. Twiggy said something about there being more than a few fakes out there. ALF had apparently gotten on a reproduction kick. But does Fernanda know that, I wonder? She’s glancing around the room as the sharkskin takes the bidding to sixty thousand.
Fake or not, the Madonna’s generating quite a bit of interest. The sharkskin has found a pretty effective way to impress Fernanda, and Lenny gets to rolling her eyes all over the place, clearly not too impressed by her father’s new love interest. She’s squirming around in her chair like she’d rather be just about anyplace else, and as she does she catches sight of me. This gets me a little wave as the tuxedo says, “Seventy thousand dollars to the young lady in the flowered dress.” The young lady’s father turns to her and barks something unpleasant even from a distance. Lenny rolls her eyes at me, I give her a thumbs up, and the tuxedo says eighty thousand to the man in the hat. Takes me a bit by surprise, but on further reflection, I think Shore might be only too happy to get back his prized possession for a measly eighty grand. Unfortunately I’m outbid before I can figure how I might put this to him in the most positive light.
Lenny comes over and sits down next to me. “That was fun,” she says. “Let’s do it again.” I raise a hand simply to keep her entertained, and we’re at ninety-five thousand.
“I forgot,” she says. “I’m mad at you.”
“And why’s that, sweetheart,” I say, as I stare down a frantic Fernanda, who’s trying to figure out where this thing’s going and why.
“Because you made me late,” Lenny says. “And so my father made me come to this thing. He’s being a jerk. Do you think she’s pretty?”
“Who’s that, Lenny?”
“That woman he’s sitting with.”
“Pretty’s on the inside,” I say. “You should know that by now.”
“I’m not some total idiot, Willie,” she says. “Pretty’s on the outside or they wouldn’t call it pretty.”
“Fair enough,” I say, as I wave down the tuxedo and make it a cool hundred and ten thousand. “So yes, she’s pretty, and you’re pretty too.”
Deep sighs from Lenny, and nothing pretty-looking from Fernanda. I’m getting a little out of my depth, I’m thinking. I need a plan, but the best one I’ve come up with so far is to keep bidding until I come up with a better plan. Another name for that, to borrow a phrase from the great Mister Wittgenstein, is getting the bug out of the box. Stirring things up in hopes of arriving at the holy truth. Forcing Miss Shore to show her cards, though admittedly I’m betting one hell of a bluff. Then again, she may be too.
Things get so out of control in there at the charity ball of the Second Chance Society, Vail, Colorado chapter, that they may well have to call in the World Bank to sort things out. I’m in for a hundred and fifty thousand, Fernanda’s table is in for a hundred seventy. Everybody’s getting in on it. A waiter even pauses as he makes his rounds with the vegetable dip to put in a bid for one ninety. Considering the state of affairs in there, I wouldn’t find that so surprising, except that on second glance I realize that the waiter get-up is just a disguise, and that under the disguise is none other than everybody’s favorite Albanian, Kafka the kid. Honestly I don’t have too much time to take this in, considering Fernanda’s table has notched up the price a bit further, and at this point there’s no chance in hell I’m letting that woman get her hands on my Madonna.
“Are you sure you have that kind of money, Willie?” Lenny asks, beginning to exhibit some signs of concern.
“Would it matter i
f I did, honey?” I say, ignoring the tuxedo’s calls for two hundred fifty thousand to make it an even three hundred. Lenny’s dad turns around and seems to notice me for the first time. Also notices his daughter sitting next to me, and there will be hell to pay. He’s so disgusted with the whole situation that he decides he’s not going to go any higher, and then it’s going, it’s going, and it’s sold, to the gentleman in the hat they call The Kid.
I wave a little to the crowd. From the stage the tuxedo thanks me from the bottom of his heart. “Hell,” I holler out. “I didn’t do it for you. I did it for the kids.” Everybody loves that, and so I give them all an extravagant bit of face works of the sort you really don’t want to try at home, and preferably not in enclosed spaces. Needs the wide open spaces, this smile. I call it the Billboard Jesus, and mister it just blesses them all with my undying love, all the people. The kind of billboard smile where maybe you get a little glint of starlight off of one of your big white teeth and could sell anything from toothpaste to the moon. Gets to feeling so good I just keep smiling, putting it out there, professional secrets be damned. I mean it’s come unto me, ye little children, and preferably ol’ Jeffrey right about now.
Everybody chuckles real pleasantly for a bit, but soon enough even the excitement generated from a Billboard Jesus begins to fade, and people go back to their conversations, or their drinks, or whatever it was that was occupying them before the auction began. Philanthropists stand to mingle again, refreshing their charitable outlook at the bar.
At this point I’m forced to admit that I may not have three hundred thousand bucks on me. May need to have a word with my man on Wall Street first, to tell you the truth. What I do in the meantime is slip to the back of the room in hopes of making myself a little less conspicuous. I bid adieu to Lenny, which I sure as hell don’t want to do, but I’m a private investigator, it’s what I do, and now that I’m thinking a little clearer, it occurs to me that I wouldn’t mind having a word with Kafka. Why the waiter get-up, I have no idea, but if that’s the way he wants to do it, maybe he could bring me a drink while he’s at it.
So I settle down real low at a table near the entrance and manage to flag down the kid as he comes racing by with some caviar. He’s got a nasty looking bruise on his cheek and is wearing a red jacket and white pants, with a red bowtie and a little red hat on his head. Kid does love his hats, which you have to respect.
“Now would that be what you call a fez,” I say, pulling him down into a chair, “or one of those native Chinese hats, I’m not sure what they’re called.”
Kafka says something in Albanian it’s just as well he doesn’t translate. “Speaking of hats,” I say, “how’s the head. Last time I saw you, you were floating like a butterfly, and I imagine it stung like hell.”
“They took me to the police station,” he says. “You just left me there.”
“What were you expecting?” I say, taking a delicious little caviar-topped toastie from his tray.
“Nothing, I guess,” he says, sounding more than a little depressed. His posture’s gotten so bad he’s practically curled up on the table. “This whole business is getting too crazy for me.”
“By that I assume you mean the catering business,” I say. “I myself am no stranger to the service industries, and you don’t have to tell me how unfulfilling they can sometimes be to the finer self.”
“They wouldn’t let us in,” he says. “We tried everything. It’s five hundred bucks a plate. Finally I heard they’d lost a waiter, and they gave me a uniform.”
“Well you’re looking quite snappy, Kafka,” I say, helping myself to another little toastie. “So what brings you to Vail? Don’t tell me ALF’s expanding the revolution to Colorado. And speaking of which. Where’s the lovely Twiggy? Don’t tell me they’ve got her in one of those hats too.”
“She refused to be a waiter,” he says. “We’re having a few disagreements right now.”
“It’s a long way across America in a Volkswagen Beetle,” I say.
“Yep,” he sighs, looking around a little nervously.
“Well I’m glad you stopped by,” I say.
Then he starts snickering to himself and may even straighten up a bit. “You just spent three hundred thousand dollars on a fake,” he snorts, laughter shaking his whole body now. “And you know what else? I painted it. This charity has an office in New York. We’re giving them out to everybody, so I thought it might be nice to give a few to charities and maybe help out some people. ALF believes in social equality, you know. Screw the rich art collectors. There are other people who need it more. So we donated a few anonymously. Then we found out Fernanda was coming. That wasn’t part of the plan, but Twiggy refuses to let her out of her sight now. She’s very determined. She says Fernanda will have to meet up with Alberto someplace, and when she does, we’ll be there. And if she hasn’t paid us before then, we’ll get that painting. I can promise you that.”
“Well in the meantime just let me say that I am honored to be one of the few to possess, at least in theory, one of your creations,” I say.
He gets to smiling again. “Three hundred thousand bucks.”
“Once again, in theory.”
“You people are sick,” he says. “You’re all sick.” Devours a couple of toasties as he says it and just keeps shaking his head. Then he catches himself and takes a quick glance around the room to make sure the boss isn’t watching.
“So where is this all taking us, Kafka?” I say. “I don’t have the painting. I wouldn’t have bid on your fake if I did. Neither does Fernanda, apparently, or she wouldn’t have bid either.”
“She knows where it is,” he says, then suddenly jumps out of his chair like he’s been bit. The boss, a little hatless man in a jacket matching Kafka’s is bearing down on us fast. “She arranged it,” Kafka murmurs, while making a show of offering the tray to me real professional-like, which slows the boss down just a tad. He may not want to interfere, considering I’ve become a major Second Chance celebrity in the past half hour. “We know that for a fact,” Kafka says. “So good luck, Willie,” he says, snatching the tray away before I can get a last bit of caviar. “May the best man win.”
Then he’s off to his waiting duties, and I’m left needing to talk to Fernanda fast before anybody comes around asking for a check. In the meantime, the entertainment portion of the evening has begun, and a dozen chorus girls in short skirts and military caps come out on stage and start kicking to a brass band, legs scissoring up and down so prettily that I wouldn’t mind getting up there myself and letting those legs make confetti out of me. The legs on the girl at the end of the line are so long that I need four or five of her kicks just to take them all in. Then I move up to the rest of her, which takes at least another minute or so. I like to think of myself as a bit of a connoisseur of chorus girls, and it has to be said that she is a bit off in her timing. Seems to be desperately watching the other girls’ legs in an attempt to catch up. Not that it matters too much. With a body like that, in a skirt like that, she could serve as the evening’s entertainment just doing jumping jacks. These are my reflections on her body, but eventually I do make it up to her face, and when I do I’m more than a little disappointed in myself for not recognizing the legs in the first place. Seems like everybody’s got a second job in these tough economic times, and considering my powers of observation, maybe I could use one too. I mean I studied those legs on the driving range, I studied them in lamé. Those legs, mister, are none other than Twiggy’s, and she’s looking like she’s regretting not putting on a little red hat of her own. Then Fernanda stands and starts moving across the room, and Twiggy stops kicking entirely.
Which may not enhance the evening’s entertainment, but it does put Fernanda back on the map. She’s moving in my direction, and I imagine she’ll want to talk, but before I can picture exactly how she’ll flip her hair, or how she’ll hide her teeth, or how those freckles might just break my heart, the real life version is standing in front
of me, and I can assure you she’s no less vivid in the flesh.
“I want to talk to you,” she says from down in her throat somewhere, without moving her lips. Her eyes are rimmed red and she’s drinking what looks like some kind of fruity liqueur.
“I just saved you and your friends over a quarter million bucks,” I say. “The least you can do is talk.”
“It’s worth four times that,” she says, running some fingers through her hair, then suddenly sitting down, as if she’s decided to do me a big personal favor. Wilted rose is apparently the effect she’s after.
“Not fake, it’s not,” I say, as she pours the rest of the drink down her throat.
“Since when are you the expert?” she says, staring down into the bottom of her glass and scooping out a few last thick drops with her finger, which she absent-mindedly puts in her mouth. This is the last place in the world she wants to be, I’m thinking. Maybe she should have never left South Texas and those warm nights and easy mornings that make you want to leave the rat race to the rats.
“Let’s cut to it, Fernanda,” I say, harder than I want to be. I notice Twiggy watching us from up on stage, where she’s kicking again like she wants us to know what she could do to us with those heels. “I think I might like you,” I say, “and it just seems stupid to keep chasing each other across the whole of the United States when we could sort it all out right here. There’s still hope for you, Fernanda. I’ll explain eventually. And maybe there’s hope for me too.”
“I didn’t chase you,” she says, still wanting to pout a bit.
“It’s my job,” I say. “And I never tried to fake a Madonna and pass it off as an original. What I don’t get is why the hell you were bidding on a painting you’ve already stolen.”
Planet Willie Page 10