Puppet Graveyard

by Tim Curran

  Now it was time to turn up the heat and dig a little deeper.

  She’d hired a private investigator three days before and now it was time to find out what he had learned. And when she did, she’d act on it because that’s the kind of person she was. Her sister Gloria was hardly an angel. Kitty knew some of the dirt and it was pretty much the same old shopworn dirt that came with the entertainment business…but that did not make Gloria a bad person.

  Whatever had happened to her, she deserved better.

  She deserved to be more than a statistic in the police files.

  Kitty took out her cell and looked through her photos. Gloria, Gloria, Gloria. Funny, as a kid, she’d been so jealous of her she sometimes broke out in hives and now she languished over her sister’s photos on a daily basis. Gloria was older than she and far prettier. Just ask anyone. Maybe Mom would never admit it, in so many words, but Gloria got the attention because she not only looked good but looked good regardless of what she was doing. Peeling potatoes, doing the dishes…it didn’t matter: she had looks, grace, and poise. All Kitty ever wanted to be was Gloria because her face opened every door and warmed every heart, it brought the boys in slavering packs that she commanded with but one flick of her slender, graceful hand. It brought friends who wanted to be with her, to be part of her world, to bask in her glow that was golden. It was pure sunshine.

  Kitty could remember on her fifteenth birthday, crying in her cake, hating the braces in her mouth (Gloria had naturally model-perfect white teeth) and the hair on her legs (Gloria never shaved her legs because hair didn’t dare grow on those long golden limbs) and her face (no pouting lips or high cheekbones like Gloria) and her eyes (definitely not crystal-blue like Gloria’s) and just about everything.

  “Come now,” Mom had said. “Your sister’s pretty, but so are you. Gloria has the kind of pretty that’s going to get her in trouble, mark my words. But you got the kind the boys respect.”

  Kitty only wanted to be disrespected and have the wrong kind of pretty. Gloria went away to college and a pall fell over the house. Nothing Kitty did could warm up her parents the way Gloria did just by walking in the door. Whenever Gloria came home, they perked up and their blood started running again. Suffice to say, Kitty never formed a close bond with either her mother or her father. She cried only the acceptable amount when they passed within a week of one another via twin coronaries. As much as she seethed with envy over her older sister and boiled with jealousy, Gloria lit her up as much as anyone else. When Gloria came home, she did not ignore Kitty. She always made sure they had special time together. They watched movies, they shopped, they went to restaurants. Gloria always made sure Kitty felt special. Unlike everyone else, she never forgot about her and with that in mind, there was no way in hell that Kitty was going to forget about her now either.

  But it wasn’t going to be easy to succeed where the police had failed.

  It was going to be dangerous whatever path she took. After what Ronny…or Piggy…had said to her in the dressing room, it seemed pretty obvious that they…or he…or it…knew who she was.

  Back in Dayton, Kitty had accomplished everything she’d ever set out to do via sweat and hard work. Even as a little girl there was no quarter, no fear, no backing down from the most insurmountable odds. In a month, she was starting a new job in a new city far from the Midwest and before she opened a new chapter in her life, she planned on closing an old one. She deserved that and certainly Gloria’s memory demanded it.

  So here was another challenge. One with rules right out of the Twilight Zone.

  But Kitty decided she would not back down.

  Not yet.

  8

  The Bamboo Lounge.

  Ten minutes to midnight.

  “Now I ain’t saying you’re stupid, Ronny,” Piggy said to the audience. “But when they emptied the gene pool, you were what was caught in the drain.”

  The drunks out there in that smoky, boozy haze were loving it. Laughing and slapping the tables. And the more they laughed, the faster the liquor flowed and the management liked that just fine.

  “Night after night, Piggy, I sit up here and you insult me. When will it ever end, I wonder?” Ronny said, shaking his head sadly. “You know, if I had a real job, I wouldn’t need you.”

  Piggy laughed. “Sure, and if your dick worked, your wife wouldn’t need me either.”

  The place broke up and Piggy grinned under the spotlight, feeding on it, packing away all the energy like a bear swallowing raw meat and storing it as fat. Ronny could feel him thrumming on his knee, sucking it up like a sponge, growing stronger, more daring…and he did not like it.

  “What’s with all these jokes about my wife, Piggy?”

  The dummy kept grinning, wood that was aware. Wood filled with potential. “I’m just saying you gotta pay more attention to her, Ronny, that’s all. Christ, she told me the other night she feels like Santa Claus.”

  “Santa Claus?”

  “Sure, she only comes once a year.”

  “Now, Piggy…”

  “I’m just kidding you, Ronny,” Piggy said. “Your wife comes all year long. It’s her way. Only the Big Bad Wolf has swallowed more pork than that lady. Hell, more men have been lost in her bush than in the Upper Amazon.”

  More laughter. Some drunken blonde in the front row, breasts spilling from her blouse, was clapping her hands and giggling in a high, piercing tone that cut through the guffaws like a straight razor. Piggy noticed her as did Ronny.

  “Hey, honey, you like that?” Piggy said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong here about Ronny…he’s a good guy. But his wife has needs and all. She told me Ronny’s pecker is so small, she has to blow pepper at it.”

  The woman giggled. “Pepper? Why pepper?” she called out.

  Piggy said, “Well, she has to get the little bastard to sneeze just to find it.”

  The blonde could barely contain herself and some parts of her anatomy. In fact, she was too drunk to even bother.

  “Sure, his wife tells me she feels neglected,” Piggy said. “The only way she can get his dick hard is by sticking it in the freezer.”

  Applause now. A few whistles. It was hard to say whether Ronny was enjoying any of it or whether it was even part of the act or just random ad-libbing by Piggy…or Ronny.

  “Tell me, sweetheart,” Piggy said. “Are you a real blonde?”

  Ronny sighed. “That’s enough, Piggy. A gentleman doesn’t ask such a thing of a lady.”

  Piggy held his hands up. “Listen, she’s got blonde hair and I’m just wondering if the carpet matches the drapes.”

  “What’s your name, honey?”

  The blonde giggled and jiggled. “Mona,” she said.

  Piggy slapped a hand to the side of his head and everyone roared with laughter. “Mona? Mona? I tell you, folks, sometimes this shit writes itself. Mona, eh? I like that. Mona likes de bona. Giver her de bona and she starts to moana. Honey, in the land of gee-gee, you’re strictly a blue light special.”

  Giggling still, the blonde said, “A blue light special? What does that mean?”

  “It means your panties are always half-off.”

  A waitress went by with a tray of drinks and Piggy latched onto her. Gestured at her with his hand, whispered something to Ronny.

  “Leave her alone,” Ronny told his dummy.

  “I was just wondering if you like ‘em with big asses like that, Ronny. Hell, a girl like that? You put a corn cob in your back pocket and she’ll follow you forever.”

  The waitress, a heavy girl, was smiling, but obviously not amused.

  Piggy chortled. “Hey, I’m just kidding you, baby doll. Don’t let me interrupt your work…go make that money, honey. You hear that, boys?” Piggy said to a group of salesman well into their cups. “Hear what she said? Five dolla, make you holla.”

  The drunks were loving it, even if the waitress wasn’t. But she was new and she didn’t know the ropes yet. The others knew you didn’t go anywh
ere near the stage when Piggy and Ronny were doing their thing.

  Piggy turned back to the blonde. “Honey,” he said, “if you’re in the mood for a good piece of wood, you let me know.”

  “Really, Piggy,” Ronny said.

  Piggy chuckled his dry laugh. “Hey, Ronny, I was thinking. Remember when you were a kid and they sold those snack cakes with the characters? Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cupcake, and Fruit Pie the Magician?”

  “Sure. I recall.”

  “Well, they sound like a trio of pedophiles to me. Captain Cupcake liked the kids to lick his icing and Twinkie was always shoving his sponge cake in their mouths so they could taste his creamy filling. I bet when old Fruit Pie the Magician hung around grade schools, fruit pies weren’t the only thing he made disappear.”

  “That’s enough,” Ronny said.

  “Ah, you’re still mad because I was ribbing you about your wife.” Piggy put his hand next to his mouth like he wanted to tell the audience a secret. “Is it my fault his wife spreads faster than a brushfire? We’re talking the champion sword-swallower of Cook County here, people.”

  “Why don’t you quit picking on people,” Ronny told him.

  “Okay, okay.” Piggy tapped a hand to the side of his head. “Hey, Ronny, you hear that Newt Gingrich was a test tube baby?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true. Even then he wasn’t worth a fuck.”

  This was the part of the show where Piggy started launching his one liners and the drunks absolutely loved it. Sometimes Ronny and Piggy would do three or four encores.

  “Hey, Ronny, what do you call two lesbians in a closet?”

  “I don’t know. What do you call two lesbians in a closet?”

  “A liquor cabinet,” Piggy said. “You hear about the two lesbians that built a house?”

  “No, what happened?”

  “Well, it’s pretty nice place…no studs, all tongue and groove.”

  It went on rapid-fire like that for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but slowly but surely the laughs were milked from the crowd and Ronny was beginning to look uncomfortable. Piggy was getting that shine in his eyes, looking like Howdy Doody from hell.

  “I think we’re falling flatter than your wife’s chest here, Ronny,” Piggy said in that squeaking voice. “Maybe what these people want is real entertainment…should I give ‘em something they’ll never forget?”

  Ronny licked his lips, swallowed. “No, ha, ha, don’t do that.”

  The dummy seemed to be grinning. “Got a story for you, folks. Listen closely: Mama, Mama, Mama McBane, she had two children who caused her great pain. She was only happy after they were slain. She had another son who was completely insane. The doctors all agreed there was something wrong with his brain. He began to crack under the enormous strain. So what could he do, old Ronny McBane? He delved in the darkness with knowledge arcane. What he did was wholly profane. He snatched two bodies from where they had lain. And now his life is one ugly stain. Isn’t it shocking about Mama McBane?”

  “That’s enough!” Ronny cried out.

  “Aw, come on, let’s heat this joint up.”

  “Please, Piggy.”

  “You don’t think they’d like me doing that?” There was an intensity to the dummy now, an edge there that was somehow sadistic, twisted, and not very funny. “Maybe they want me to pull a rabbit out of a hat? I can’t do that, but I can pull something out of thin air that’ll turn their hair white…”

  “Okay, Piggy, stop that,” Ronny said. “It’s not very funny…”

  “Oh, you’re wrong, this is going to be a real hot one…”

  Piggy was laughing and laughing with that shrill, scratching sound like fingernails on blackboards and it was loud, resounding, echoing, that malefic gleam in his eye.

  The atmosphere of the Bamboo Lounge went from being drunk and care-free to somehow savage and deadly. Nobody was laughing, nobody was doing much of anything but squirming in their seats.

  And about that time, somebody in the audience started screaming.

  9

  Danny Paul Regis looked like the sort of guy who broke legs for a living. He was big and meaty with a head like a cinder block, pumped with bad attitude and experience honed during twenty-odd years of swimming in the gutters and cesspools of the city. But as he liked to say, he knew dirt. He knew where to find it and what it smelled like, what it felt like when you got it all over your hands. There wasn’t a rug made that he couldn’t shake it out of.

  And in his given profession as a private investigator, these attributes came in pretty damn handy. You wanted the job done? You wanted a guy who knew every nook and cranny of the dirty underbelly of the city? Then you wanted Danny Paul Regis.

  So when, after four days on the McBane investigation, Regis called Kitty Seevers to his office for a little chit-chat, she knew he had something.

  “I’ll tell you right off, Miss Seavers, that this whole McBane thing stinks bad,” he said, pouring her a cup of coffee. “I’ve seen my share of bad in this business and what you put me onto here, it’s bad. Oh, yes.”

  Maybe he expected Kitty to be shocked, but she wasn’t. The deeper she dug on Ronny McBane the blacker and more rank the soil became. “Really?” she said.

  “Oh yes, this one is really something. But don’t take that the wrong way,” Regis said, smiling now. “You chase enough adulterous housewives around, something like this really gets your gears turning. And that’s no shit. I love getting my teeth into a freakshow like this.”

  For a lack of anything better to say, she said, “Well, I hope it didn’t disturb you or anything.”

  Regis thought that was funny. “Disturb me? Ha, you can’t disturb a guy like me, Miss Seevers. I’ve had my nose in human trash for too goddamn long. Now and then you can surprise me and sometimes you can piss me off and make me wish to God certain people weren’t born, but you can’t disturb me.” He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “What I found out was weird, but unfortunately, as yet, it’s not bringing us any closer to your sister.”

  Kitty felt her heart drop. “No?”

  He shook his head. “This is just preliminary stuff. Getting a feel for Ronny McBane you might call it.”

  Kitty said, “What did you find out?”

  “Well first off, let’s start with what happened over at the Bamboo lounge a few nights ago. I’m sure you heard about that little tanglefuck…hell, the papers and TV ain’t talking about much else in this city.”

  Kitty knew about it, all right.

  And it was just another little gem for her collection: there had been a fire at the Bamboo Lounge. And, as it so happened, the fire started during the Ronny M. and Piggy show. Of course, the media wasn’t seeing the implications of that. Most of the patrons escaped with minor injuries, but twenty of them were roasted to smoking husks. The media, true to form, were following the usual tract—overcrowding in the club, poor wiring, numerous safety violations. Ho-hum.

  Kitty, however, had a few ideas of her own, and they were the sort of things she was afraid to admit even to herself. It was a coincidence, the reasoning mind would say, that Ronny and the dummy happened to be on stage. But some coincidences grew less coincidental the closer you looked at them.

  She told Regis what she knew and he laughed. “Now are you ready for what really happened?”

  Kitty swallowed. “I don’t know…Am I?”

  Regis looked her straight in the eye. “You familiar with the theory of spontaneous combustion?” He saw that she was. “I was in on one of these investigations years back and that one was strange, but this is a little stranger. See, in a good many spontaneous combustion cases, the body will burn itself to cinders, yet sometimes the bed it lays on or the chair it sits on will remain un-singed. Go figure.”

  “Are you saying these people just burst into flame?”

  “No, I’m not saying that at all,” Regis explained. “It’s the investigating cops that are saying it. Those twenty sti
ffs went up and didn’t even melt the vinyl cushions on their seats. A few witnesses said they saw it…just those random twenty people all of a sudden billowing with smoke. By the time they realized what was happening, they were engulfed in flames.”

  Kitty just nodded. “I see.” Oh, this was getting better all the time. “Tell me, did anyone…any of those witnesses…happen to mention what Ronny and the dummy were doing as this happened?”

  “As a matter of fact, that was mentioned.”

  “And?”

  Regis shrugged. “Damnedest thing, really. These people are going up in flames, left and right…and Ronny’s dummy is cackling like a madman. Ronny finally dragged the both of them off stage. Does any of that mean anything to you?”

  But Kitty just shook her head. “I guess not.”

  “Some people might call that kind of thing witchcraft,” Regis said and said no more on the subject. “Crazy shit, all right.” He opened a folder and sorted through some papers in there. “Well, to the case in question now. What I learned is a composite of public record and inside information, mostly gleaned from cops that were involved in the tawdry history of the McBanes. Now, for starters…did you know that the mother—Dorian McBane—was killed? And I’m not just talking killed here as in getting run down by a bus, I’m talking killed.”

  Kitty told him she knew about that. “A wild dog or something.”

  “Yeah. That’s what the coroner put down in his report. But that was old Biggs, he’d write anything down to save his ass some paperwork. Anyway, yes, that was the official version, like it or not. But I talked to one of the investigating detectives and, well, Mama McBane, she was chewed-up pretty bad. But if it was a dog, well then it was one smart pooch because it locked-up on its way out.”

  Kitty ignored the implications of that. “And she died from these bites?”

  He shrugged. “More or less. Couple the bites with trauma, shock, blood loss…yeah, they did her in, all right. That was about ten years ago. Just a few years after Ronny McBane got himself into the ventriloquism racket.” Regis sat down, drumming his big fingers on the desktop. “The family had a history of trouble long before the mother’s death. Apparently, when Ronny was five or six years old, the father committed suicide. Ronny found him swinging in the basement. After that, it seems that Dorian—Mama McBane—kind of lost touch. Became some sort of hardcore Bible-thumper. I talked to one of her old neighbors, a woman listed on the police report as being the first person on the scene after Ronny found his old man. She told me some pretty wild stories. Lot of it was what you’d expect, you know, Dorian turning into a right pain in the ass knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. The usual. But some of the rest of it? Christ on the cross, you gotta hear this.”