Easy (A Flap Tucker Mystery Book 1)

by Phillip DePoy

He saw me and smiled his sweet little smile. He shuffled over, took the stool next to mine. “Hey, Flap. You gonna find my wife for me?”

  “Yes, I am.” I took a little sip of my wine.

  Hal brought Lenny a dark draft and Lenny nodded. “Hey, Hal. How’s your momma?”

  Hal leaned over the bar and rested his forearms in between his own big bulk and Lenny’s tiny glowing face. “She’s out of intensive care, and I think she’ll be home by Christmas, Lenny. Thanks for asking.”

  I looked at Hal. “What’s the matter with her?”

  Lenny answered, very concerned. “It’s her hip. She suffers with it so much.”

  Hal nodded. “Hip replacement. She’s fine.” And he hoisted himself up and went to make more drinks.

  That was Lenny. He turned his countenance my way. “So, Flap…we both got a missing wife, huh?” And he patted my shoulder sympathetically.

  “Yeah, but the difference is, I don’t want mine back.”

  He laughed, as they say, in spite of himself. “That Neena.” He shook his head. “She was a pistol.”

  “So it’s been said. But tell me about your blushing bride.”

  “Augusta.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “Flap, it’s like I wrote out a list of my favorite things and gave it to Santa. She’s everything perfect. She’s the essence of the feminine. She’s yin to my yang.”

  “How long she been missing?”

  “About a month.”

  “Where’d you meet her?”

  “At the hospital.”

  “Really.”

  “She just appeared there one day.”

  “What? Like a patient or a nurse or a visitor…”

  He smiled and looked down, like he was embarrassed for me. “Well, Flap…you know I’m not quite as stuck on labels as most people are. She was just there.” He shrugged. That was enough for him.

  “Last name?”

  “Cascade.”

  “Before you married her, Lenny.”

  “Don’t know.”

  “How could you marry her without finding out her last name?”

  “How could you marry Neena without finding out she was wanted for murder? I mean, it seems to me that a thing like that is lots more important to know about a person than whatever their last name is, don’t you think?”

  I smiled and took another sip of wine. “You got me there, pal.”

  He took a big gulp of his beer, really happy. “Great band, huh?”

  “Yeah. Look — you gotta give me a little something to go on with Augusta, Lenny. What did she look like, where did she live…you know, what was her phone number, things like that.”

  “She lived with me, so, you know, her number was the same as mine.”

  “Lenny…”

  “Honest to God, Flap, I don’t know much about her before we married.”

  “So where’d you get married?”

  “On the front porch of the very honorable Justice of the Peace Mr. Davis. He was irritated with us because he wanted to be fishing instead of marrying somebody.”

  I took in a deep breath. “No, Lenny. That’s how Neena and I got married, remember?”

  “Really?” He seemed genuinely confused. “Then how did Augusta and I get married?”

  And that, too, was Lenny — alas.

  I had to laugh. “Can you at least describe her?”

  “I did. She was the perfect woman. We talked about everything. It’s like I invented my exact match and then there she was.”

  So the evidence was mounting: Augusta was a figment. I said, “I mean, what did she look like, Len? Like hair color, distinguishing marks, you know.”

  He thought really hard for a second, and then, like somebody flicked on a light bulb in the old attic, he said, “Would a photo help?”

  “Uh, yeah, Lenny. A photo would help.”

  He went fishing in the back pocket. Out popped a picture of a living doll, and I use the term advisedly. I think they call that color of hair auburn. I don’t know what word would describe that skin. She did look like something someone would make up.

  “Jeez, Len, what’d you do, tell her you were rich?”

  “I am rich.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Dally told me — but nobody ever believes you when you tell ’em, do they?”

  “No.”

  “So how’d you get such a lovely…person to be even a little interested in a mug like you?” I smiled up at him.

  He grinned really big then. “Yeah…amazin’…ain’t it?”

  So I started thinking all sorts of things. Lenny could have gotten this photo anywhere and decided she was the object of his affection. I didn’t believe for a minute she was his wife.

  “So, Len…what about the time you told Dally you were married to Uma Thurman?”

  He was baffled. “She believed that? Man, she’s more gullible than I am — and I think we’d both agree that’s goin’ some. I mean, you know, Flap…” He leaned in confidentially, tapping my elbow. “How does a guy like me get Uma Thurman? Come on.”

  “Yeah, but…Len…how does a guy like you get anybody?”

  He looked down. I could see right away I’d hurt his feelings, and I wished I hadn’t. He spoke real low. “Hey. That’s mean.”

  I nodded. “Sorry, Lenny. That was mean. I was just kiddin’ around — like before with the crack about you bein’ a mug an’ all.”

  And there he was, instantly back, grinning ear to ear; all was forgiven. “Okay.”

  “So…if I go and ask around GIMH about Augusta, they’re gonna remember her?”

  “You saw the picture. Would you forget her?”

  “Right. Could I take the photo with me, just in case?”

  It took some doing, being the only photo of her he had, but in the end I prevailed upon his astute understanding of human nature.

  “Lenny, how am I gonna describe a woman like this without a picture? Words’ll fail me, nobody’ll understand me, I won’t find her for you.”

  He looked hard at the picture. “Oh.”

  “So…” I held out my hand like he was a kid with a stolen toy.

  He handed it to me the same way. “Just, you know, be careful.”

  “I’ll carry it right next to my heart.” And I slipped it into the breast pocket of my tweed.

  He examined me for a minute or two, like he was staring a hole in the pocket where I put Augusta, then he said, “You’re a pretty swell dresser for a layabout.”

  “I’m no layabout. I got a college degree.”

  “You ain’t worked in a year and a half…Dally said.”

  “Yeah, well…I was working on my marriage for a while there, right?”

  He nodded and sipped his brew. “Takes work. And compromise.”

  Yeah. Compromise. It was still my contention that Lenny had compromised with reality — to the extent that it had eventually just given up and gone south for the winter.

  I finished off my glass. “So…you got nothing else to say to me?”

  “About…”

  “About your missing wife, Lenny.”

  He looked at me like I was captain of the goon patrol. “Jeez, Flap. What more do you want?”

  I could see it was no good. Details just didn’t trouble Lenny. He was a big-picture man. And if I thought about that long enough, I’d probably come to envy the guy.

  He skipped off the stool. “Welp, I gotta go. I just wanted to make sure you were on the job. Plus, I’m not supposed to have too much beer on this medication.”

  Hal overheard. He winked at Lenny. “You’re really not supposed to have any beer with it, pal.”

  Lenny smiled back. “Like one beer’s gonna kill a guy.” Then he leaned in to me so nobody else could hear. “Find her, Flap. That’s all I want you to do. I love her like fire. I already gave the first money part to Dally, so…okay?”

  And then he looked into my eyes with such a sweetness and a…sadness. God. I thought I might cry. I patted his arm rea
lly hard. “I’ll get her for you, bud — some way or other.”

  And there it was: the pact. There was no turning back for me now. I’d promised. If she was a real live girl and not some yin-Pinocchio from his fevered daydreams, I’d get her back. If she was all in his head I’d restore her there. I could do it too. I can talk most people into anything…especially if it’s something they already want to hear.

  Lenny Cascade accepted my promise. He nodded, and some of the sadness even left his eyes.

  The band was ending another number, and the crowd was getting a little rowdy. Some drunk was screaming. Lenny waved a little-kid wave and he was off. He weaved through the dancers and the drinkers and the dunderheads. I watched him until he was almost out the door, and everybody he’d bumped into had smiled at him and said, “Hey, Lenny.”

  “Quite a guy.”

  I hadn’t noticed Dally coming up behind me. She’d watched him exit too. I turned. “Yeah. He’s something else.”

  ‘‘Did you get what you needed from him?”

  “No, not really. I gotta go over to GIMH tomorrow and see if I can maybe separate his perception from the bulk of reality.”

  She sat on the barstool where Lenny had been. She was dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit, three sizes too big for her, a dark shirt, and a pale pink tie. It was gangster gag drag from the forties.

  I smiled at her. “Nice look.”

  “Yeah. I got a look, all right. So what did he tell you?”

  “He thinks he’s married. He showed me a photo.”

  She sat forward. “Really? That’s new. He didn’t have one the other day.”

  “Well, that’s just more fuel for my fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “I got a hunk of burnin’ feeling that our boy Lenny has made the whole thing up. He fished out this photo from somebody’s dream library, and he’s passing it off as his other half.”

  She nodded. “That’s Lenny.”

  “So anyway, he said he met her at the hospital, and I thought I’d go see if anybody there knew her.”

  “Good.”

  I moved my glass toward Hal as he passed me by. “Look, sugar…you said something last night about the connection between these…events, the thing about Ruby, the girls in the trunk, Lenny’s wife…you said they were all connected in some important way, like I was supposed to figure it out, and then you gave me the connection: Teeth.”

  “Teeth is not the connection, he’s just something they all have in common — like Lenny missing a wife and you missing a wife gives you something in common, but it doesn’t necessarily make you connected, right?”

  “Right, that’s what I was gonna say: Teeth is just a coincidence…I think he’s not the connection.”

  “Right.”

  “So what is the connection?”

  She slapped my knee. “That’s for you to figure out, big boy.”

  “No, I mean, what makes you think there’s a connection at all?”

  “Woman’s intuition.”

  “Say what?”

  “We all got it. Especially Southern women. You know Loretta Lynn saw a vision of her daddy on the day he died in another state.”

  “I saw the movie.”

  “Southern women have a very high ESP quotient.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, Flap, and you know, I thought you’d be a little more…disposed to this kind of thinking, given your penchant toward the mystical.”

  “It’s exactly my predisposition in favor of the Zen thing that makes me suspicious of every little bit of it.”

  “Really?”

  “The Tao that can be said in words is not the Tao.”

  She slipped off the stool and rolled her eyes. “I should know better than to talk to you about this stuff.”

  I stood up too, just as Hal brought my new glass. “So there’s really nothing more than a hunch that makes you think something’s up with all this?”

  She stepped in closer to me. “A hunch and a letter from Lenny’s father.”

  And there it was. The real reason for our little adventure: Mr. Cascade. His import business, Cascade Art imports, was the most successful enterprise of its type in the world. He specialized in cool archaeological artifacts from Asian countries. He usually bought them for a ton of money and then sold them to rich people for ten tons of money — which, as any dope can see, is a tidy profit of nine tons. No inconsequential sum in today’s market.

  I smiled. “And what did good old Mr. Cascade have to say?”

  “Just that Lenny had called him, needed help; said I was his only real friend outside of the nuthouse. So Dad wrote and asked me to help and promised to pay whatever Len had offered.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yup.”

  “Can I see the letter?”

  “Sure. It’s official. Company stationery and everything.”

  “A business letter.”

  “Right.”

  “Can I see it?”

  “It’s in the office.”

  So we moved through the fair-sized crowd to her office behind the bar area. The band was singing some song about being behind the eight ball. I was thinking how often live music seemed like a sound track to my life — and speculating as to how this particular song might fit in.

  Her office was messy, as usual, and too dark, but it was actually very clean and well-organized, like Ms. Oglethorpe herself. She went right to the letter on her desk.

  “Here.”

  I took it and got it in the light from the lamp on her filing cabinet.

  Dear Ms. Oglethorpe:

  My son Leonard has mentioned you. I believe you are in a position to do me a great service, for which I would be very grateful. He needs help in locating a missing person. If you can secure such aid, please contact me at the above number. I herewith guarantee to pay whatever monies are promised by my son. He and I have spoken of this matter. I look forward to hearing from you.

  Sincerely,

  It was signed by Charles Cascade himself, and on the business stationery.

  “You waited to tell me about all this?”

  “I wanted to check it out.”

  “And in checking it out…”

  She nodded, reading my mind, as she so often did. “That’s when I found out more about Teeth.”

  “Like he was Lenny’s keeper.”

  “He gave Lenny his medicine, yeah.”

  “And when you went looking for him you found out about how he was currently working at Tip Top…”

  “Well…you know, then it was in the papers, all that about his boyfriend, and there’s good old Teeth sniffling and talking about Ruby…”

  “And then the next night you see the telecast about the girls at the Tip Top who got strangled…”

  “…which maybe has nothing to do with anything…”

  “…but the coincidence factor is just about off the charts by now…”

  “…and, plus, I got a hunch.”

  “A woman’s intuition.”

  “Right.”

  I set the letter down on the desk. “Okay. So maybe there’s no connection at all, or maybe, because of Mr. Cascade…something.”

  “Right…something.”

  I started to say how she was nuts, but then I remembered the day she had told me not to mess with Dannen because something bad was up with her. Then I thought about how Dalliance Oglethorpe had once told me that the President of the United States was going to die. She told me this in the early days of November 1963, when we were just little kids on our adventures in downtown Atlanta. I had told her then that I thought she was nuts.

  I looked at her, then, in her office. “Dally…”

  “I know you think I’m nuts.”

  “No, I was thinking just the opposite, actually.” I held out my hand and she took it in both of hers. “I was just thinking how crummy my life would be if it wasn’t for you.”

  She whispered herself over to my face, kissed me on the cheek, and
turned away a little bit. “Yeah, well, it’s not all that great as it is.”

  It made me smile. “Uh-huh, but at least I got work.”

  “There is that.”

  “You said last night you had the girls’ names here, where the car was in Buckhead, stuff like that?”

  “Oh.” She seemed distracted for a minute. Then she found another piece of paper in the pile on her desk and handed it over. “Here.”

  Written in Dally’s ornate hand were the words Hanna Georgia and Patty Pumpkin found in Buckhead parking lot behind cinema.

  She smiled. “Stage names, wouldn’t you say?”

  I looked up. “I’d say a lot more than that.”

  “It’s all I got.”

  She shrugged and headed back out into her crowded dominion. The band was playing “Mood Indigo,” and I said, “Isn’t it great these kids today got a respect for Ellington?”

  She winked. “Think again, pal. Take a look at who’s sitting in with the band, singing with Kelly.”

  I peered through the smoke and the fuzzy lights, and sure enough, there were the Indigo Girls, cheek to cheek with Kelly and in harmony heaven.

  I listened for a minute as we were walking back to the bar. “Still — it’s nice that they’re singing a song by the Duke.”

  The song ended. The audience went wild. I looked over at Hal, who had been protecting my glass of wine like it was the Holy Grail — which, in some small way, it was. I took it from him. “Great song, huh?”

  He was whistling between his two index fingers, and he stopped long enough to say, “Yeah, man, those Indigo Girls sure can write ’em.”

  Dally giggled. It was very charming and sort of uncharacteristically girlish. “You know what’s wrong with the world today, Flap?”

  “Everybody’s ignorant?”

  She was still laughing. “Nah. What’s wrong with the world today is that now there’s more knowledge available out there than anybody could ever get ahold of, so everybody ends up looking a little stupid. Information overload. I mean…you can’t know everything.”

  Before I responded I looked her in the eye, and I could tell she was trying to say something big, something about how the information explosion was making idiots of us all. All these facts are available, but they’re just so overwhelming that we shut down. We don’t even want to avail ourselves of them. It’s like how I get when I go shopping in a mall. There’s so much to take in that I can’t focus on any one thing, and I usually end up after a couple of hours just giving up, dazed and humiliated, with nothing in hand. But I could tell she was also trying to say something about this particular thing with Lenny.