by Josh Cook
“It was excellent planning on our part, I think. Max?”
“Yeah, boss.”
“Let’s punish some pavement.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Max opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Trike followed, but stopped and turned back, holding the door open.
“Just one more thing, Miss Kennedy, before I go.”
“Christ,” Max muttered.
“What is it, Mr. Augustine?”
“Just a little thing I’m confused about.”
“Yes, Mr. Augustine,” Kennedy said with diminishing patience.
“I just can’t seem to get my mind around the property in Santa Fe.”
“The property in Santa Fe?” Miss Kennedy looked startled.
“The one your mother transferred to you before she died, so it wouldn’t be subject to an estate tax.”
“What is confusing about that, Mr. Augustine?”
“Oh, that? Nothing’s confusing about that. Rich assholes like you fucks find ways to skip out on society all the time. No, that part I get. I mean, you’ll all burn in hell, but I get it. It’s just, and this is for my own personal benefit, because, well, what I don’t get is that it was built with a double-level basement.”
“Yes. So?”
“Well. It’s just that it was built right after a change in the zoning laws made basements like that legal. I’m sure a savvy property owner like you knows how crazy zoning laws in Santa Fe are.”
“I am familiar with those ordinances. Get to the point, please, Mr. Augustine.”
“It’s just the weirdest thing. Because it was also built right before they started doing all those sweeps for illegal immigrants. I mean, you’d almost think somebody from immigration tipped off your mother and then she bribed the City Council to change the zoning laws to make it easier for her to keep smuggling in undocumented workers. Probably wouldn’t be too shabby at processing cocaine either.”
Lydia Kennedy pursed her lips. Glared at Trike.
“But I’m not working on that case. Probably just a coincidence anyway. You have a nice day, Miss Kennedy, and let me know if you suddenly remember anything about Joyce or his house.”
Trike slammed the door behind him. Then spray-painted “CLASS WAR” on it.
“That’s why you brought that,” Max said.
“Always be prepared, Max. Always be prepared.”
They walked down the stairs. Max tried to find the theorized support structure. Trike gave Lola a call and told her to train her X-ray specs of a brain on AVRAA.
“She lying, boss?” Max asked.
“Yes, she was, Max. Yes, she was.”
“Sure?”
“I am.”
“Why?”
“I have no fucking clue.”
“Really?”
“I just don’t see what she has to lose by telling the truth. If there was something involved with the house itself, it would have been a very small part of the whole Kennedy operation. And if Joyce were a big enough player for a Kennedy to feel the need to protect him, Lola would have found something.”
“Maybe the connection is personal?”
“Like they’re friends or something.”
“Or more.”
They got into the car. Max started it.
“It’s not impossible, Max, but I get the sense she’s playing a part. Obfuscating the information because the obfuscation is the point.”
Trike slammed the door closed.
“Lot of that going around,” Max said, pulling into the street.
“There certainly is, Max, there certainly is.”
THE SURPRISE PARTY OR THE AMBUSH
If you believe in miracles, it was a miracle it took Trike so long to hit the whiskey. After getting back from the home visit, he went through the stuff Max had been able to drag out of the lawyers. There was something extra-weird about that Bodkin guy, but there wasn’t enough data for a conclusion. That put whiskey in his mind.
Lola’s visit to the police was more productive, but not by much. She didn’t get to the bottom of the radio silence, but learned that Horn-Rims had been taken off the case. Which wouldn’t be weird if they’d reclassified the case as a missing person. Which they didn’t. That put whiskey in the glass.
Then he started going through Lola’s AVRAA research.
If you believe in miracles, Jesus Christ himself would’ve clapped when Trike didn’t rush out for cigarettes after wrestling with the AVRAA folder. Lola had discovered that AVRAA was a perfectly poised tax shelter. That no one was using.
Since there were guns in the house, Trike decided to take his whiskey buzz, flask of sustenance, nicotine withdrawal, and inferno of frustration for a walk.
The city was quiet. Everybody held their breath before the surprise party. Or the ambush.
Or it was two in the morning and the legitimate world slept.
It started to rain again. Trike took a sip from his flask at the corner. The coincident convergence of action and geography suggested a pacing strategy. Take a sip at each corner. Trike thought. Facts of the case. Logic that would fit them together. Something that would give it purpose. Before too much more of the reward vanished. Nothing.
Another corner, another slug of whiskey. He turned right. Left there was a bar with a cigarette vending machine. Straight ahead was a convenience store with the best cigarette selection in the county. Fucking cigarettes.
A large black sedan drove up on the sidewalk across the street and ahead of him. Trike sighed like your annoying cousin found a new TV show to enthuse about. The back driver’s-side window rolled down. The snub of a small caliber handgun stuck out. It coughed a puff of smoke. A chunk of sidewalk ten feet from Trike jumped like a flea.
“Your persistence in the Joyce issue is becoming a nuisance. I would advise you to cease your investigations or I will singe the sweet tang of urine from your being,” said a voice behind the gun.
“Well, I advise you to cease being a douchebag or I will tell everyone you still haven’t read past Hades,” Trike responded.
“You have quite a lot of confidence. For a man with a gun pointed at him.”
“I never let anyone point a gun at me without pointing one back.”
“You’re not pointing a gun at me,” the voice said nervously.
“That you can see.”
The gun vanished from the window. Trike heard a hissed, “Drive! Drive!” The car sped off. At the stop sign, it came to a full. And complete. Stop. The driver looked both ways. Then sped off again, tires squealing on the moist asphalt.
Trike watched it go.
Man standing in a trench coat.
“That you can see?” he repeated himself. “Where the fuck would the gun even be? Trained squirrels? Mercenary pigeons? Damn whiskey,” Trike took a huge slug of whiskey. “Damn rain. Damn case. Damn cigarettes. Messing with my retorts.”
A memory floated to his consciousness. City hall. Parking lot. Reserved spot. “That was The Mayor’s car,” he said to himself. He took another long sip from his flask. “Why did he just show me The Mayor’s car?” He emptied the flask with the next sip. “The Mayor’s car? Definitely need more booze. Gotta go home. Only open place with booze present and cigarettes absent. Fucking cigarettes.”
Trike walked home. Tried to keep his brain quiet. Let it slosh around in the whiskey. Just, you know, look at shit. Highlights of the dumbest things he’d said to Lola played in the idle space. Like he needed to feel worse. He brought up some Joyce matrices instead. Idleness was the ivory-billed woodpecker in his brain.
There was a thick manila envelope on Trike’s doormat. It was addressed using his full name. The return address was fake. No such street in said city. The stamps were real. The postmark was not.
Trike stood a foot away, considering it. He paced up and down his walkway, talking out his points.
“Substantial effort has been made to present this envelope as though it were delivered in the standard manner, that is,
by the United States Postal Service, and a lesser detective might be convinced such was the case. But not for long, for any research would reveal the fakeness of the return address. Of course, a fake return address does not an unmailed delivery make, but the fake postmark does. It is not categorically impossible that the mark was applied and then the envelope was sneaked into the delivery mechanisms of the aforementioned national service after such a mark would normally be applied, but that assumes an extraordinary effort, and extraordinary effort is never a safe assumption.”
Trike bent at the waist and examined the envelope. It was bodily safe and bomb-free. “This fake would generally serve its purpose in initially convincing nearly everyone that it was delivered in the standard manner.”
Trike started pacing again. “However, if the individual who directed the delivery of this envelope has any knowledge of me whatsoever, and it is safe to assume said individual does, then said individual should know enough about my abilities to know I would see through—”
“Knock it off already!” a husky woman’s voice shouted from next door.
“Oh. Sorry, Mrs. Kuhne. I didn’t realize I was talking out loud,” Trike apologized to his neighbor.
“Yes, you did. You do it all the time, you inconsiderate prat. Just keep it down. It’s three in the goddamn morning.”
“I will. I’m sorry. Good night, Mrs. Kuhne.”
She muttered something as she closed the window. Probably not “Good night.”
Trike went to the sidewalk. Paced there. He recommenced at a lower volume, “… the ruse so quickly that it makes one wonder why the ruse was employed at all. Furthermore, and here we arrive at the true point of this discussion, why address an envelope, waste several perfectly good stamps, put a substantial amount of effort into creating a fake postmark, all with the apparent goal of convincing the receiver that said envelope was delivered by the United States Postal Service, and then drop it off at three in the fucking morning?”
Trike threw a barrage of furiously sloppy punches, while a low-register growl dribbled from his throat. He recovered from the eruption of frustration.
“When criminals interact with the law, they try to limit the number of questions the law asks about the crime; ideally, to the one question, ‘Who did this?’ It is through the other questions that arise from the evidence that the aforementioned fundamental question is answered. Those questions find the mistake. But whoever left this demanded that I ask additional questions. Everything about this case has demanded additional questions. Why use between one-point-nine and two-point-three pints of blood? Why mess with the nine-one-one call? Why drop the pig in the kitchen? Why replace books with blank copies? Why incorporate a business to buy a house? Why use sixteen lawyers to handle the incorporation? Why put those locks on AVRAA? And now, why put this effort into a fake envelope and then undo that effort by delivering it at three in the morning?
“One could suppose this is like a magician forcing a card: that the criminal intends to control the investigation by controlling the additional questions asked, but that would involve even more risk of detection than the traditional method of limiting the number of questions, as it would create data. Maybe they just assumed I was asleep and would not wake up until after standard delivery time. Though my mail comes around four, that strategy lives near reasonable.”
The rain picked up again. Trike walked quickly, picked up the envelope, and went inside. He tossed his coat on the couch, kept his hat on, and set the envelope on the kitchen table. He got a glass, some ice, and brought them together with three fingers of vodka.
Then he opened the envelope.
The police reports. Forensics. Interview transcripts. Officer depositions. Everything. “Fucked up,” he said. “Way too fucked up.”
He made the vodka in his glass go away. Recorded the new data. Pushed the reports to the side of the table.
“Here’s the plan,” he muttered. “Step one: think about all of this shit for awhile, drinking as much vodka as is required. Step two: pass the fuck out here at the kitchen table, as befits the predicament. Step three: wake up, make myself pretty, give the reports to Lola and Max and enjoy the looks on their faces. Step four: pay a visit to The Mayor. Yeah. Good plan.”
Trike snapped out of his matrices. He had two fresh detecting resources in front of him; the mysteriously delivered police reports and a bottle of vodka. He switched to his favorite fuck-my-life vodka cup.
He liked to save that cup for special cases, but he figured he’d earned its privilege by quitting smoking. Trike poured four fingers of vodka into his glass. At four matrices a second for forty minutes, Trike had discovered that not a fucking thing made a fucking bit of sense.
Trike could render explanations for why AVRAA was locked up like a coke king’s mansion, or why someone shot at him from The Mayor’s car, or why Lydia Kennedy lied to him, or why Joyce’s house was owned by Joyce House Ltd. But nothing could get them all to stick together. And even if they did, it was only possible that such an explanation would indicate Joyce’s present location.
Trike found a portion of his brain searching for the possibility of a cigarette somewhere in the house. Fallen from a pocket; shaken to the floor while being shaken from the pack; dropped from his mouth after he passed out drunk. None came to mind, which meant there were none.
It is possible that such a situation occurred while an intense amount of focus was on some other problem and thus was not recorded, but to confirm or deny such a scenario would require the kind of search where stethoscopes are pressed to walls, long needles are stuck through couch cushions, and gimlet holes are bored into furniture. There was too much vodka in the bottle in front of him and too much bullshit in the day behind him to mount such an effort. He could barely get through what he was being paid to do.
He turned to the police report. He worked through it page by page, committing every word to his easy-recall memory. Vodka sips paced by page turns. Halfway through the report he refilled his cup. Fuck his life. When he got to the end he consolidated the data, removed redundancies as well as he could, and drew an initial conclusion.
The report was bursting with depositions, forensic evidence, and official statements, all attesting to the irrevocable certainty that all involved and questioned didn’t know shit about shit. Mere anarchy.
Through the window over his sink he saw the dim blue light in the dark that most likely came from Mrs. Kuhne’s TV, as she watched Animal Planet to get back to sleep after being so rudely awakened. His glass was empty. Again. The bottle of vodka was at an alarming level.
“Step one completed to reasonable satisfaction,” Trike said. “On to step two.”
Trike folded his arms in front of him on the table, put his head on them, and passed the fuck out.
FIVE PERCENT OF GOLD CUP CASINOS INCORPORATED
In the last four days, The Mayor moved his desk an inch to the left. He skipped breakfast. Bought an SUV. Read the sports and classifieds sections. His wife lost sleep to infomercials again. He planned to leave early to play raquetball. Time at the accounting firm was stressful but lucrative. His son would be visiting in a month. So would his mother-in-law. He was cutting down on caffeine. He didn’t understand blind carbon copy. He did not know about the car.
Trike saw it all walking from the office door to the chair in front of the desk. To Trike, the world was a teleprompter of itself.
The Mayor stood up so fast that his Kennedy hair waved. He robustly thrust his arm for a handshake. “The great Trike Augustine graces my office,” he said, in the tone of politico-enjoyment cultivated over decades of pretending to care about people.
Trike didn’t shake. Sat down.
The Mayor shook his head, unthrust his arm and sat down. “Ah, yes, the quirks of genius,” he said, as if remembering the quirks of genius he experimented with in college.
“Yes,” Trike said, “how enlightened society is to allow those who demonstrate atypical abilities to eschew conventions of decorum
, how indulgent it is of the differences between individuals, how accepting it can be when it knows there is a give-and-take between talent and manners. However, as you well know, this is not a true act of openness. At the core of this indulgence beats a weak and quivering heart of fear, a fear that if precautions are not taken, if foibles are not accepted, if the talented are asked to dance the same steps as the mediocre, they will turn their talent upon you, wreaking a cruel and terrible revenge.
“But that too is an inversion of the formula, for it is not society that indulges the genius; the genius indulges society. You think you show forgiveness by allowing me to not shake your hand, but rather it is a very grudgingly given permission on my part, to allow you to believe in the value of the shaken hand, to believe that something is accomplished when hands are shaken, to believe that it is something more stable than enlightened self-interest that keeps those of us with atypical abilities from tearing the reins of power from your weak little fingers and relegating you to tasks commensurate with your limited abilities.
“But I did not come here to tear comforting veils from your eyes and expose the core precariousness of your existence. No, I am here for much more immediate, much more tangible, perhaps even more mortal reasons.
“You see, Mr. Mayor. You sold your car.”
The Mayor looked like his tonsils were pulled out and set in a commemorative cup on his desk.
“Yes. So? What does my car have to do with anything? I mean, I cleared my schedule for you. I assumed, given your prominence, that you had something important to discuss. Instead, you tell me I sold my car.”
“You didn’t ask how I knew you sold your car.”
“You looked at my shoes. Who knows with you? Maybe there was something on my secretary’s desk—ooh, or maybe you’d just pretend it was something like that, but really you just saw a different car in my parking spot, eh, was that it? That was it, wasn’t it?” The Mayor pointed at Trike with a level of triumph.
“Somebody shot at me from the back window of your car last night.”