Fun House (John Ceepak Mystery)

by Chris Grabenstein

  “So, tell me: You going to play the John Walsh role?”

  “No, Bill. I was going to ask you to do it. After all, you have more stage experience.”

  “Sure. If the TV people want me, I’ll dig out my black turtleneck and leather jacket.”

  Ceepak grins. “That’ll work.”

  I’m smiling too.

  I guess because I’m imagining Broadway Bill Botzong breaking into song and dance, halfway through the show. You know—it’s America’s Most Wanted meets Glee. I just hope Botzong isn’t pitchy, a term I learned watching too much American Idol. It’s all Randy Jackson ever says.

  Botzong and his CSI crew continue combing the crime scene.

  I’m pretty sure they won’t find any fingerprints. The killer on the Harley, after all, was wearing very thick racing gloves.

  Ceepak and I head back across the island (hey, it’s only about a half mile wide) to chat with Mandy Keenan, who, as far as we know, was the last person to see Paul Braciole alive. We’re hoping she can help us track The Thing’s movements, because we need to find where he was killed before someone, maybe even Skeletor, strapped him onto the back of that motorcycle and hauled him over to the Knock ’Em Down booth.

  Huh. I wonder.

  “You think the killer picked the Knock ’Em Down on purpose?” I say as we crawl west on Red Snapper Street. “I mean, they could’ve picked any booth. The Frog Bog. Whack A Mole. Why the Knock ’Em Down?”

  “An interesting question, Danny,” says Ceepak.

  “Maybe they were sending a message. You know, like that Springsteen song, ‘Wrecking Ball.’ It’s a dare. Take your best shot, let me see what you’ve got. Go ahead, put me on national TV. And then, boom—the bad guy knocks Paulie down.”

  “A fascinating hypothesis. It would be in keeping with the very public execution of one whom Skeletor and The Creed obviously felt had betrayed them.”

  Yeah. You don’t hang a dead guy up by his undershirt on a wall filled with stuffed animals unless you want somebody to find the body.

  “So, it looks like Skeletor and The Creed are our top suspects?”

  “Yes, Danny. At this juncture.”

  “That means we need to play along with Marty Mandrake, do the whole America’s Most Wanted bit?”

  Ceepak nods. “No matter how personally repellent, it appears to be the most prudent course of action currently available to us.”

  I pull into the driveway at 136 Red Snapper.

  Up at the house, the front door swings open.

  Officer Kenneth McAlister of the SHPD comes out, shaking his head.

  Ceepak is up and out of our vehicle.

  “What’s the situation, Ken?”

  “This Mandy?” He jabs a thumb over his shoulder. “Now she says the dead guy stole her car.”

  17

  “HE STOLE MY FUCKING MUSTANG!”

  This from Mandy Keenan, who, it turns out, is a real charmer—if, you know, you’re charmed by women who wear T-shirts that say “Feel Safe At Night: Sleep With A Jersey Girl.”

  We’re inside Mandy’s living room. Or maybe it’s her trash compactor. Empty rum jugs litter the floor, mingling with assorted thongs, beach wraps, flip-flops, boogie boards, skirts, shorts, and socks, not to mention all sorts of magazines promising “20 Top Sex Secrets,” Cheetos bags, pizza boxes, Pringles cans, Tastykake wrappers, and maybe six dozen empty Starbucks Frappuccino cups with petrified foam bubbles caking their innards. When you walk across the green-gold-orange shag carpet, hidden crumbs crunch beneath your feet.

  Mandy, whose parents must’ve really loved that old Barry Manilow song, sits in a cabana-striped chair. I think it’s supposed to be a piece of outdoor patio furniture. She’s blonde and built. If she’s ever a murder victim, she’ll be easy to I.D. Breast implants have serial numbers. I can tell she has slapped on her white lip-gloss and matching white eye shadow (with glitter) in anticipation of our arrival.

  Ms. Keenan’s car, we learn, had been parked around the block, up on Prawn Street, because “My fucking roommates and the assholes that rent upstairs took all the fucking parking spaces on the fucking lawn.”

  Yes, reality TV has infected real reality. Everybody thinks they need to sound like the hard-partying smut-mouths on prime time TV.

  “I told Paulie he could borrow it, but he had to bring it back by noon on account of that’s when I wake up. Plus, they’re having this big sale at the Target on the mainland and I wanted to buy one of those George Foreman grills, because if Paulie and I are gonna have like paparazzi taking our pictures all over the place, I gotta keep off the poundage.”

  Ceepak turns to Officer Kenneth McAlister.

  “Have you advised Ms. Keenan as to why we are here?”

  McAlister shakes his head.

  Great. Ceepak gets to do the honors.

  “Ms. Keenan?”

  She bats her eyes. Girls do that a lot when John Ceepak and his muscles are in the room.

  “Please—call me Mandy.”

  Ceepak nods. He’ll try. “Mandy, I take it you have not heard the news?”

  “Not really. I mostly listen to W-A-V-Y. It’s classic rock.”

  “Paul Braciole is dead.”

  “What?”

  “He was murdered last night.”

  “Get! Out!”

  “It’s true,” I pipe up.

  “When?”

  “After he left here.”

  “No fucking way! Some asshole killed him?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Shit.”

  “Mandy?” says Ceepak, as best he can.

  “Yeah?”

  “We need you to tell us what happened last night.”

  “You mean with me and Paulie?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We, you know, got busy. You want to see the video?”

  “Not right now,” says Ceepak. “Tell us how you met Mr. Braciole.”

  “Who?”

  “Paulie,” I say. “The Thing.”

  “Oh. Okay. I had heard the Fun House crew would be at Big Kahuna’s, so I put on my hottest Fuck Me outfit, the one that always gets me laid.” She cups her hands under her breasts to, I guess, illustrate the effect she had been striving to achieve. “Anyway, Paulie, The Thing, he comes over and starts showing me his pecs and shit, and I say I’m more interested in the muscle down below—”

  Ceepak holds up a hand. “Let’s jump ahead a little.”

  “Oh. Okay. To when? Like the second time we did it? Because that time, things got a little kinky—”

  “How about when he left?” I say.

  “Oh. Okay. Paulie had to be back at the Fun House by three, ’cause they have this bullshit curfew. And he couldn’t walk all the way back to Halibut Street, and there are no cabs in this fucking town, not at two or three in the morning, so I told him he could borrow my Mustang. That asshole with the ponytail, the one lugging the camera, he was still out front after tailing us all the way from Big Kahuna’s.” Mandy shakes her kinky hair, lets it tickle the top of her fake gazongas. “Paulie had to slip out the back door and cut across the yards to get over to my car on Prawn Street.”

  “What time was this?”

  “I dunno. Maybe two, two thirty, two forty-five.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Ha. I wish. My fucking watch broke. It was supposed to be waterproof, but I went into the ocean, just this one fucking time because of all the jellies, that was on Tuesday, I think, yeah, Tuesday, ’cause me and Kristen—she’s one of my roommates—we went to the Pancake Palace on Tuesday before hitting the beach because you can get like two stacks of chocolate-chip pancakes for the price of one, so we like split it ’cause we figured we’d swim off the calories. You ever been to the Pancake Palace?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Service sucks, am I right? Syrup bottles are always sticky and shit.”

  Ceepak jots a note in his pad. I see what he writes. It isn’t about sticky syrup bot
tles: “2:00–2:45.”

  “Were any of your roommates here last night?” Ceepak asks.

  “Kristen and Coco? No way. Only one of us at a time can hook up with a guy here, that’s the rule. Since I left the club first, I got first dibs, which was cool with Kristen, because she was totally into this guy Brandon, who I think goes to college part-time and has his parents’ place down here for like three weeks and Coco, well, she was so blitzed, she probably stayed at the club until it closed or they started serving breakfast or maybe she hooked up with the bartender because she just found out that this guy she’d been seeing, this very hot local stud named Eric Hunley, well, Eric’s been hooking up with that skank Soozy K. And Coco used to be a belly dancer. Coco Ihle, you ever heard of her?”

  “No,” I say because I canceled my subscription to Belly Dancing Monthly years ago. “But the Soozy K who stole her boyfriend. You mean the girl from Fun House, right?”

  “Yeah. That bitch has Eric wrapped around her pretty little finger.”

  She shows me her pinky to make her point. The nail has a sparkly butterfly painted on it.

  “Anyway, Coco was looking for a revenge fuck. Told me she was going to take whatever she could get.”

  “Fascinating,” says Ceepak—just to shut her up, I think. He’s really not that interested in the modern mating rituals of today’s twenty-somethings. “Do you have a photograph of your vehicle?”

  “Butch?”

  “Pardon?”

  She does a quick giggle wiggle. It’s supposed to be cute. “I give all my cars nicknames. I called the Mustang ‘Butch’ because it’s a hunk.” Now her eyes shift to sultry. “And, if you don’t mind me saying it, so are you.”

  Ceepak just nods. Puking isn’t really an option here.

  “We’d like to show the photograph around,” I hop in. “See if anybody’s spotted it.”

  “Can I be in the picture?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Awesome! I have one of me in a bikini just, you know, hanging out, leaning against Butch’s hood. I look smokin’ hot.”

  “That’ll work,” I say, because Ceepak, the hunk, still doesn’t look like he’s fully recovered from Mandy’s giggle-jiggle.

  “It’s in my phone.”

  “Forward it to me,” I say.

  We work out the details. I forward the photo on to Dorian Rence at headquarters. She’ll download the file and send it out to all our street units, post the picture on the bulletin board in the dayroom.

  The hunt is on for Butch, Mandy’s manly mustang.

  “Should I call the insurance company?” Mandy asks. “Tell them Paulie stole my car?”

  “Probably a smart idea,” I say. “But we don’t think Paulie stole it.”

  “Then why isn’t it back where I told him to park it? I looked out the kitchen window and couldn’t see it!”

  I just smile. Why tax her brain past its limit?

  “Ken?” Ceepak says to McAlister.

  “Yeah?”

  “Please stay with Ms. Keenan. Help her fill out the stolen vehicle report.”

  Yeah, we’re leaving McAlister holding the crappy end of the stick. But he’ll deal with it. He’s a cop. It’s what cops do.

  “Come on, Danny,” says Ceepak.

  We crunch across the carpet.

  “Officers?” Mandy calls after us. “Is that picture of me and Butch going to be on TV?”

  “Hopefully,” says Ceepak, “we will locate your vehicle before Fun House airs again.”

  “But if you don’t?”

  “Then we might indeed need to widen our search and broadcast the photograph.”

  “Awesome!” says Mandy like she just won the lottery.

  I’m reminded of that Disney World commercial they always run at the end of the Super Bowl:

  Mandy Keenan, your last lover was just murdered, what are you going to do next?

  “I’m going to be on TV!”

  18

  WE CLIMB BACK INTO OUR CROWN VIC CRUISER.

  “You want to swing by Big Kahuna’s later?” I say as I crank the ignition so I can blast the AC before the heat radiating off the seats bakes us into a pair of crispy cop cookies. “My friend Bud, the bartender, might’ve seen something when the film crew was in there last night.”

  Ceepak nods slowly, the way he does when he’s half-listening to what I’m saying because he’s busy thinking about something much more important.

  “You remember Bud?” I say. “He helped us back when your father was—”

  “Danny?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s go grab a black-eyed pea cake and a plate of tofu scramble.”

  I glance at the dashboard digital. It’s 3 P.M., 1500 hours in the Ceepak Time Zone. But he’s not thinking about a late lunch or early dinner.

  He wants to go talk to the person who first tipped us off to Skeletor’s drug dealings.

  Gladys at Veggin’ On The Beach.

  We met Gladys a couple summers ago when Ceepak and I were working our first case together. She was a homeless person living out of a shopping cart in the crumbling remains of The Palace, which had once been a grand old hotel, at the northern tip of the island.

  Back then, Gladys was dating a druggie drifter everybody called Squeegie. Gladys refused to call him that, because she found the nickname demeaning, “likening a human soul to a tool capitalist pigs use to wipe away the grime of greed warping their windows.”

  She’s probably what people whose job it is to shout at each other on cable TV all day would call a commie pinko or a Nazi, even though Ceepak has informed me that commies and Nazis are “polar opposites on the political spectrum.”

  This is why Ceepak and Rita spend more time at Veggin’ On The Beach than I do. The restaurant is way too intellectual for me. Besides, I like meat in my sandwiches, not tempeh bacon, pan-seared seiten, or hiziki seaweed.

  We head east, cutting across the island, aiming for Ocean Avenue and Hickory Street. The restaurant, which always smells like stewed beets, is set up in a brightly colored cottage right in front of the sand dunes.

  We pull into the parking lot where Stan The Vegetable Man—a ten-foot-tall plywood portrait of this dude with a smiling pumpkin head, tomato torso, carrot legs, and corncob feet, greets us. There are about a dozen newspaper machines lined up in front of the porch, because Gladys thinks all newspapers print nothing but lies fed to them by “the man” so maybe if you read enough of them you can cobble together the truth for yourself.

  I check out the headline peeking through the window on The Sandpaper box (our weekly newspaper). Apparently, “Fun Hou$e = Be$t Touri$t $ea$on Ever!” Cash registers up and down the island are having sunny, funderful days. It’s amazing what a hit TV show will do for T-shirt and trinket sales.

  We climb the plank-and-beam steps, push open the screen door.

  Ceepak enters first like he always does when we’re heading into dangerous territory. Hey, it’s a scientific fact: soybean products, such as tofu, make people fart. The last time Ceepak decided we should grab lunch at Gladys’s, there were so many butt barks I thought we’d walked into a trombone recital.

  Gladys is behind the counter, wrangling with a sagging sack of sweet potatoes she means to steam on an August day when it’s already 95 and extremely steamy outside. Oh, Veggin’ On The Beach doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. It’s bad for the ozone, not to mention the electric bill.

  “Good afternoon, Gladys,” says Ceepak as he strides up to the counter.

  “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one hoisting a damn fifty-pound sack of yams.”

  Ceepak goes over to the stove to lend a hand. Even he has trouble getting a grip on the bag as the gnarly tubers tumble around inside the burlap.

  “Careful, jarhead. You bruise a sweet potato, it turns to mush fast.”

  “Roger that.” Finally he is able to hoist the burlap sack up and over the steaming kettle and empty out a rumbling rockslide.

  “Tha
nks, John,” says Gladys, who is a small woman. In fact, she’s so short, I wonder how she dumps anything into her stock-pots without climbing on a stepstool or calling Ceepak for backup. Today, she’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt with no sleeves and no bra underneath. She’s also sixty-something with boobs bigger than the Casaba melons on the brunch menu, so I think, maybe for the first time in my life, a bra here would be a good thing.

  “What are you making?” asks Ceepak.

  “Spicy sweet potato and coconut soup. Marty Mandrake and a bunch of those other jerks working on Dumb House love organic vegan food. We’ve been mobbed since they rolled into town from La-La Land. I shouldn’t complain—but, if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t be me.”

  Ceepak grins.

  “So, how the fuck you boys been?”

  Gladys may be sixty-something, but she’s not what you might call grandmotherly about it.

  “I’ve had better days,” says Ceepak.

  “Really? So now you know how a dairy cow feels, artificially inseminated year after year so she’ll keep on pumping out milk even though her newborn calf is snatched away from her two seconds after it’s born because the farmer man doesn’t want her to waste any of her milk on her own children, leaving more for those assholes at Skipper Dipper so they can make fifty fucking flavors of ice cream out of the life-giving nectar leeched from her teats!”

  Ceepak just nods. Guess he’s used to Gladys’s rants.

  Vegans are much tougher than vegetarians. Don’t like the exploitation and abuse of animals that fills half the refrigerator cases at the Acme Supermarket. There’s a bumper sticker slapped to the back of Gladys’s cash register: “Heart Attacks. God’s Revenge For Eating His Animals.”

  “You want some apple crisp?” She gestures to a pan of gloppy brown goo on a cake plate under a dome.

  “No, thank you,” says Ceepak. “Is Jerry here?”

  Jerry is Squeegee’s real name.

  “He and the dog took the truck and headed over to the mainland,” says Gladys. “Jerry says he found a deal on some juicing equipment up near New Brunswick.”

  “I see.”

  “I think they’re really in Bridgewater. There’s a Fuddruckers.”

  Ceepak gives her a confused cock of his head.