by Dan Ames
Pass me the bottle, draw me a line
Whisper in my ear like you do every time.
-Lime and Coke (Groovy Train)
Alive.
The Hatter was alive.
He thought of the song from Pearl Jam.
And giggled.
And cackled.
And drooled.
The Mad Hatter was delirious, he half-realized. Or should he say, The Mad Hatter was Mad? As in looney tunes Mad?
His body craved a million different substances and in the dark, every shadow was a personification of Satan coming to flay him for all of his past evil deads. Deads? Deeds! He meant deeds!
Shit!
A deep convulsion shook his body and his legs twitched. He couldn’t breathe. When it finally passed, he gasped.
And then giggled.
What a great idea for a song.
Evil Deads!
Or, wait a minute, wouldn’t Satan reward him for evil deeds?
The Mad Hatter cackled again.
He couldn’t keep his fake gods straight.
There was a loud bang and the Hatter jumped. And twitched. His body was racked with the shakes.
Holy shit! Was that a gunshot?
Fuck, he wished he had a pen and paper. The lyrics to Evil Deads were coming to him wrapped in cravings for booze and pills.
He needed a double shot of tequila with a Valium and maybe a Percocet.
An explosion of light shattered his thoughts and blinded him.
The Hatter squeezed his eyes shut but a reverse negative image of a shadow standing in a doorway pressed itself into his shuddering mass of a brain. The image was of a person, he couldn’t tell if it was male or female, with a bottle in one hand, and a goddamned machete in the other.
The Mad Hatter laughed, whimpered and started crying.
A goddamned machete! His brain hissed. What the fuck did they need a machete for? Chop off his head? Why? What did they need his head for? Did someone ask for some head and the original meaning was lost in the translation?
The Hatter giggled, shook and giggled again.
He heard footsteps right in front of him but he refused to open his eyes. It was better not to see!
And then his body tensed until he thought he would snap like a guitar string, when suddenly every muscle in his body relaxed, like air being let out of a balloon.
An awful odor assailed his nostrils and he realized he had shit himself.
Evil deads!
Chapter Twelve
That old man he’s a helluva lost cause
Eyes that’ll hate you never feel your claws.
-Shrug It Off (by Groovy Train)
After a night of fitful sleep in which I was passed around a Mexican prison like a library book, I got up early, showered and went to my office. My prize of the day was when my bank notified me that a substantial deposit had been made into my business checking account and in my email was a signed contract for my services on the Zack Hatter case. I had purposely estimated high, and they had signed off. Like any negotiator, I suddenly wondered if I should have asked for more.
Don’t be greedy, I said to myself. Followed quickly by, “Holy crap.”
This is actually going to happen.
I sat back in my chair and thought about how I was going to investigate a case in Los Angeles and Mexico from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. How much of it would I be able to do remotely, and how much would I have to do in person? I guessed it would depend on how the investigation progressed. Something told me I wouldn’t get too far with my finely sculpted tush in the seat of my office chair in Michigan.
But I would have to play it by ear.
So, in the meantime, first things first.
I typed up a document asking for contact information and numbers of all the people that my client might know. It was a long list with plenty of prompts to get as much information as possible just by filling in some blanks. I emailed that document to Wayne DeGraw. I wasn’t sure exactly how often an ex-rock band roadie checked his email, but one could always hope.
Then I sent an email to a friend from high school, Claire Hutchins, who owned a travel agency in Grosse Pointe and asked her to look into flights to Los Angeles and a hotel. I didn't know how much it would cost but I was now working with undoubtedly the largest operating budget of my career. Hell, I could rent a Ferrari if I wanted to. So to say I had quite a bit of wiggle room in terms of traveling expenses was a serious understatement.
And since DeGraw had given me the name and phone number of Hatter’s ex-wife, Sunny, I figured that was the best place to start. It would be a little early in Los Angeles since they were three hours behind, but I figured I might as well try.
She answered on the first ring.
After I introduced myself and explained why I was calling, she cut me off. “I can’t do this over the phone,” she said.
Sunny Hatter cut out any pretense at bullshit.
“This isn’t going to work,” she said. “I need to see your face so I know who I’m talking to.”
“Do you want to FaceTime, or Skype?”
“What the hell is that?” she said. “Listen, I’m old school.”
“Then how exactly do you want to do this?” I asked. I’d had some flaky clients before and I was starting to wonder if Zack Hatter’s ex-wife, a woman who went by the name of Sunny, was going to be another on that list.
“I need to see you face-to-face, Mr. Rockne,” Sunny told me.
“Call me John, please.”
“Okay, John. I know Wayne has vouched for you, based on your work with Clarence Barre, and I was happy to hire you, but starting off like this is too impersonal,” she said. “I’m getting a good vibe from you, don’t get me wrong, but auras are clearer in person.”
Uh-oh.
I sighed. Here I’d told Anna that I wouldn’t be jetting off to Los Angeles immediately, but now that’s exactly what it looked like I was going to have to do. So Sunny could check out my aura in person.
That sounded so naughty.
“Okay, Sunny,” I said. “Why don’t you give me your address and let me know when a good time for me to visit you in person would be.”
Sunny gave me an address in Malibu, which to even a solid Midwesterner like me, rang a few bells. Weren’t all the rich people in Los Angeles either in Beverly Hills or Malibu? Didn’t Steven Spielberg live in Malibu? I remembered something about a private beach a bunch of billionaires wanted to keep private.
Groovy Train must have done pretty well for Sunny to be living there. Then again, I knew wealthy communities had their fair share of affordable housing. Grosse Pointe was no different. Of course, she had paid my fairly exorbitant fee without batting an eyelash.
She told me she was available most days in the morning, but that she went to a two-hour yoga class every day in the afternoon.
Two hours? What a waste of time.
Clearly, Sunny didn’t have a day job.
I told her I would call when my travel arrangements were finalized and we disconnected. I checked my watch and saw that I was almost late for lunch with Nate so I locked the place up and hurried downstairs, out the building, onto Kercheval Avenue in the heart of the Village.
Grosse Pointe was like a small town, really, and its main street was Kercheval Avenue. It was home to several bagel shops, a drug store, Kroger and a few restaurants. There was a giant clock that spanned main street thanks to an elaborate black metal bridge. It looked a little bit like a prop for a Hollywood movie. Main Street, U.S.A.
The downtown saw a fairly high turnover of stores but it had recently stabilized with a home furnishings retailer, anchored by a medical walk-in clinic right next door, just in case the sticker shock caused you to feel faint. Which had been known to happen.
The newest restaurant was a place called Whiskey Six and that’s where I’d agreed to buy my friend Nate Becker lunch.
Nate was a lifelong friend and a reporter. He’d worked for the local newspaper, the Grosse
Pointe News, before going to the Detroit Free Press, where, unfortunately, he’d been laid off. The newspaper business sucked. After all, who would pay for something they can get for free?
However, as the saying goes, when a door closes a window opens and Nate had thrown himself into the news website business, and business was booming. Online news was kicking its print sibling to hell and back, so if you can’t beat ‘em, why not join ‘em?
His main website was Detroit on Demand, which he described to me as an aggregator with daily articles written by him. But he also had some national websites that dealt with corruption, organized crime, terrorism and all kinds of salacious stories. Nate had always been a prolific writer and essentially launching his own online newspapers had freed his creativity and how he was pumping them out, earning fairly good advertising dollars in the process.
I was happy for him. He’d been through a lot.
I walked into the restaurant, a sleek number with hardwood floors, raised tables and framed photos of old automobiles. I saw Nate in the back of the room and joined him.
“I ordered some appetizers,” he said as I sat down.
Nate was a big guy, very overweight, with a beard and glasses starting to show streaks of gray. He was married, with a daughter who had a medical issue and he typically handled stress with food.
Especially if I was buying, which I was today.
“What’s the deal with these photos?” I said, looking at the walls. There were pictures of old cars with shady-looking men standing around them.
“Something to do with bootlegging,” he answered.
“Ah,” I said.
The waitress came and took our order. I got a salad with blackened chicken, Nate a double burger with onion rings.
“So what do I owe this pleasure?” Nate said. “Or are you buying me lunch out of the goodness of your cold, black heart?”
“There’s no goodness in my heart, you know that,” I said. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about Mexico.”
“Oh, I love Mexican food. If you’re going, you have to get the authentic Mole sauce, on chicken. You can’t get the real deal here, and it’s a pain in the ass to make-”
“Nate, I don’t want to talk about Mexican food.”
“Oh. Bummer.”
I filled him in on Zack Hatter’s disappearance and that I was going to Los Angeles to meet his ex-wife, but the last place he was seen was in a place called Bucerias Mexico.
Nate pulled out his phone, tapped at the screen for a while.
“That’s not far from Puerto Vallarta,” he said. “I know someone in PV.” He tapped the screen some more and then my phone dinged.
I looked down and saw that he had forwarded a contact to me.
Roger Goldman.
“He’s a writer,” Nate explained. “He used to be a reporter but now he writes a newsletter for expat retirees, with a slant toward gay men. PV is home to a huge gay population and Roger is flamboyant, to say the least. Successful, too.”
Our food came and we talked about our families, and what he was working on. When it was time to go, I paid and we stepped outside.
Nate put a hand in my shoulder.
“So when do you go?” he asked.
“Probably to LA in a day or two. Not sure if and when I’m going to Mexico.”
Nate let out a combination sigh and soft belch.
“Well, be careful,” he said. “Mexican prisons are awful and your soft white ass would get ripped apart like a piñata in no time.”
Chapter Thirteen
When you wade into the shallow or swim out to the raft
I’ll be there to follow and I’ll drown out by your laugh.
-Your River, My Lake (by Groovy Train)
"You tell that bitch to go straight to hell," Sunny Hatter barked at Mary over the phone. Mary held the phone away from her ear.
"That kind of attitude runs counter to your name, doesn’t it?” she asked Sunny.
“Oh, we got a smart ass, do we?" the woman responded.
Mary debated the wisdom of choosing to start her investigation into the disappearance of Zack Hatter by calling his ex-wife. Mary’s client, Connie Hapford, had given her the list of friends and family. The list was very short.
“No ma'am, we have a private investigator here,” Mary explained, her voice calm and soothing. “Just trying to find out what may have happened to your ex-husband."
"And you're working for that bitch Connie Hapford? How the hell did she even get my number? You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m not sure, Sunny,” Mary said. “Maybe Zack gave it to her.”
Wrong thing to say.
“Bullshit!” Sunny shouted. “That bitch has been trying to steal Zack from me for decades not to mention the fact that she screwed him, probably literally, out of a bunch of his publishing rights. She couldn't give two shits about him. She just wants his money."
Mary sighed. She really hated it when clients only gave her half the truth which happens more than half the time. Mary would have appreciated a little heads up that one of the first names on the list was going to be extremely hostile. It would’ve been some helpful information.
Mary started to ask another question when she heard a click and then the dial tone.
Great.
Ol’ Sunny should have been named Dark Cloud.
Mary dropped her cell phone onto the table with a bang.
"What the hell was that all about?"
Mary looked into her living room where Aunt Alice sat with a glass of Chardonnay. "Another one of your satisfied customers?” Alice said.
The Cooper family prided themselves on sarcasm. And not just any sarcasm, but the nonstop kind. And the more inappropriate time for that humor the better.
Mary still thought back with chagrin to her Uncle Brent's funeral where Kurt decided to make the eulogy into some kind of half-assed comedy routine. Not only was it unfunny, it was extremely uncomfortable. It was the only time in her life she’d actually heard people boo and heckle at a eulogy.
Mary poured herself a glass of wine and joined Alice in the living room. Mary’s condo was in Santa Monica and even though it was a block from the beach she had a fairly decent view of the Pacific Ocean. Now, the water was eerily calm, with the occasional jogger trotting past a few tourists taking photos.
“Sometimes my job isn’t as much fun as I make it out to be,” Mary said.
“Just remember all of the great benefits,” Alice said. “Oh, that’s right. There aren’t any.”
Alice had always chided Mary on being a private investigator. Even though she’d solved quite a few cases and had achieved at least a small amount of notoriety and professional esteem in Los Angeles, her aunt felt it wasn’t a good career choice.
“Flexible hours,” Mary countered.
“Speaking of flexible, did I tell you Sanjay dumped me?” Alice said. “That little pretzel of a man found some big blonde bimbo who does a better downward facing dog than me.”
Now a widow of many years, Alice had been seeing a variety of men with a fair amount of regularity. Much more regularly than Mary, in fact, which she occasionally pointed out.
“I guess it’s back to Tinder,” Alice sighed.
“You’re on Tinder?” Mary asked.
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“I am, I just don’t use it.”
“Well, why the hell not?” Alice asked. “Are you still with Jake?”
Jacob Cornell was a detective with LAPD and Mary had been seeing him off and on for quite some time.
Lately, it was off.
She didn’t say anything.
Alice sighed. “What did you say that pissed him off?”
“What makes you think that’s what happened?”
Alice laughed. “What else could it be? Oh, wait a minute. Did you cook for him? That would do it, too.”
Mary took a sip of her wine.
“Jake’s a good guy,” Alice continued. “You should do somethi
ng about him before he comes to his senses.”
“Taking dating advice from you is like asking Keith Richards about sobriety,” Mary said. “Pointless.”
“That’s funny,” Alice responded, without smiling. “I have to admit that since my hot little Indian pepper Sanjay left I’ve been in a bad mood. I should have wrapped that little bastard into a Windsor knot and kicked him to the curb.”
“Maybe I should call him,” Mary said.
“You couldn’t handle him,” Alice said. Her eyes grew wistful. “For a little guy, he could really jackhammer the daylights out of me.”
“Too much information!” Mary said. She stood and went back to her phone.
“Let’s hit Tinder,” Alice said from the living room.
Mary sighed.
Chapter Fourteen
You got a good way to go, a wild way to shine
You got a glass jar in your hand, nose on the line.
-Twist One Off (by Groovy Train)
I said goodbye to Anna and the girls the night before I left. The girls acted sad when I said I would be gone for a few days, and it seemed like Anna tried not to act too happy.
But I knew how she was. Probably before the door hit my ass on the way out she’d be on the phone to her book club friends or gourmet group friends or old high school friends or sorority sisters, organizing a night of wine drinking and vulgar humor.
My kind of ladies.
Early the next morning, before anyone was awake, I took a cab to the airport.
I just had a carry-on and my backpack with a laptop ready for Los Angeles. It was an early morning flight, leaving Detroit at around eight in the morning and arriving in Los Angeles around ten. A five-hour flight, minus the three-hour time difference.
Luckily, I had an aisle seat with a skinny hipster in the seat next to me. That gave me a little extra room.
It was too early to sleep on the plane so instead I went over all the notes that Wayne DeGraw had sent me. There wasn't a whole lot to go on. I had also printed off a few articles about Groovy Train and their rise to fame. It was very entertaining reading.