For the moment, though, Gramps kept his hand closed.
"The day he died, Skunk and Winny Marteen came to my place to let me know what was about to come down. He thought the whole thing might be a set-up, and that he might not be coming back."
"Did Winny know?" I asked.
"Winny didn't know his asshole from Jupiter. He just kept grinning the whole time. But I don't think either one of them thought they was going to get kilt."
"He gave you something," Todd guessed.
"He did that. Said he wanted to leave something behind for his old pappy and grandma. Not just because we were blood, but for all the good turns I'd done him over the years. Your pappy had a soft heart, Mute."
And tough as hell toenails.
Flint opened his hand.
It was a watch.
"That's it?" Jeremy complained. "That's the Bildass haul?"
"Part of it. I don't know where the rest is."
"Oh shit," I said.
"Yeah!" Flint laughed. "Another treasure hunt! I figured that's why you went to Bartow in the first place, thinking there'd be jewels. In case Vern didn't make it clear, I needed to be here to tell you why that wasn't so—besides offing tinsel-brain here."
Jeremy tried to laugh, too.
"It was Carl and his weenie nephew that gave it away. Kept asking me about Penrose this and Penrose that."
"Shit," Michael hissed.
"I suppose you're the one who told them about the real treasure and pushed them into this mess." Flint seemed to consider popping Michael, too. He had a pair of bullets, after all. "I figured they were looking for a bigger score than jewels or money."
"And all Skunk gave you was that?" Jeremy intoned, as though pointing out our father was an even bigger bastard than we suspected. "How much can it be worth?"
"About twenty years in the pen," said Flint. "Not that I ever needed a watch. Time doesn't mean much in my world."
"Actually…" Michael's 'ahem' as a phony as his face. But what he said next held our interest. "It's a Tom Cruise watch."
"It's Tom Cruise's watch?" Barbara squealed, groupie to the end.
"That's not what I said. It's the same kind that he has. An IWC Grande Complication Perpetual."
Barbara leaned forward for a closer look at its multiple dials. "Well yeah, it's complicated."
"And worth a cool quarter of a million."
"No shit," said Jeremy appreciatively.
"No shit," said his twin.
"What do you plan to do..." I said, then stopped.
"That's right," Barbara said. "Daddy gave it to him. It's his to decide."
"Uh," Michael winced.
"You aren't going to report him to your company, are you?" I demanded. "You have Whacko. That's what you really wanted. Right? Tell me the Kissmecanoe Ice Cream Company doesn't sub its dirty work out to Radcliffe Detective Agency."
The McPherson/Dementis blood rose to his cheeks. "No."
"Really?"
"We were hired by Margaret Penrose to find out what happened to Archibald Penrose. She was the one who stood to lose most if her other brother—that's Morris Penrose—won his claim to half the company. You see, their father—the president of Kissmecanoe—had bought a Piper Cub and was making his first solo flight…he probably shouldn't have taken his wife along…"
"He crashed?" I asked.
"Without finalizing the inheritance. That's the problem with family-owned companies. It's up to Mom and Pop to cross all the T's, and in this case all they knew was ice cream. Archibald-in-the-Grave would have taken a third of the ice cream pie and broke any ties between Morris and Margaret, except he mysteriously disappeared the same week his parents died. Which opened more cans of worms than you can imagine."
With so many millions in the pot, sibling murder wasn't out of the question. Hmmm….
"The police investigated Margaret and Morris, Morris hired an agency to investigate Margaret, and Margaret hired Radcliffe to investigate Morris." Michael laughed. I guess it was funny. "But in this case things are tied up because it involves death in absentia. After seven years, Margaret and Morris petitioned the court to have Archibald declared dead, and it was done. But the two of them were already squabbling over who would run the company—so the stakeholders stepped in and put on the brakes."
"Stakeholders?"
"Kissmecanoe has around 260 employees," Michael said. "That's 260 pensioners. The old man had set up a pretty sweet deal for his ex-employees. Their lawyer pointed out that 53% of family-owned businesses fail within ten years of the second generation stepping in. That stat increases significantly when one of the inheritors is a dumb ass, which Morris is, aces up. He spends most of his time in Aruba or somewhere, and I don't think he's cutting sugar cane. His behavior is so bad that the court put Kissmecanoe in receivership. Yeah, for that to happen to a family business! It was making money hand over fist, not even close to Chapter 11. I've never heard of preventive bankruptcy, but the evidence against Morris is pretty conclusive. If he took over, the company would crash and burn just like his parents' plane. Who knows, maybe he tinkered with their engine. Margaret was awarded interim management and has been running the business pretty much ever since. She has brains—she hired us, after all. But she's making a bad call on this."
"What do you mean?" I prodded.
"Right now, she can't do anything without asking permission from Morris and the court appointed receiver. She's so convinced Morris popped Archibald that's she's willing to shell out her own money to anyone who can find the body. It started at one million, and over the years it's grown to twelve…"
"Twelve million?" Jeremy squeaked, though it might have had nothing to do with the amount. Flint's gun had just rounded to his midsection.
"When the coroner finds out it wasn't Morris' gun that killed Archibald, it won't help Margaret. She wants her brother in jail. Then Kissmecanoe could have come out of receivership, because the stakeholders trust her." Michael shrugged. "I can't help that, though. She's just paying for the body. It's her gamble."
"But that means turning in Granddaddy Flint!" Barbara burst out.
"How so?" asked Michael.
"Didn't he use the same gun on Carl and Dog?"
"Damn…" Michael snapped his fingers. "Ballistics will come up with a match."
"What a bunch of simps," I scowled. "There's nothing to connect Whacko with Flint. He picked up his Smith & Wesson in Vietnam. There's probably no record of it. All he has to do is lose the gun."
"Not quite yet," Flint grinned.
I didn't protest because I had just relegated three murders to the realm of the unsolved. Carl, Dog and Whacko Penrose. It was a bit like condemning the dead to a second death. It made me feel queasy.
"You're not planning to cut me out of my cut, are you?" Yvonne snarled suddenly.
"You'll get your share of the Whacko reward," Michael sighed. For a moment I thought he was signing away his portion. Then he turned a sly eye all around and said, "If everyone's in agreement, that is."
So he was asking us to part with a percentage to keep his girl quiet. It made sense. We would all be millionaires, still. But it was too smooth. If Michael's greed was as strong as Jeremy's—and I had no reason to believe otherwise—we might be in serious trouble. I was suddenly very pleased by Marvin's foresight. I tried to spot the microdot on Michael. Where the hell could it be hidden? It wouldn't do much good hidden in his clothes. There were long weeks ahead, and while the reward was being processed he was bound to change his shirt. Up the whazoo? The microdot would be lost at the next dump. I could only hope that Marvin was using 'microdot' as shorthand for a host of monitoring devices.
"What about me?" Jeremy asked.
"What about you?" Flint said.
"Okay, what about that?" Jeremy pointed at the gun still pointed at him.
"I only shot three rats. Six, if you include the two-legged ones. That means I got two bullets left. The plan is as follows: first, I shoot you. Then I shoot myself.
"
It took a moment for Jeremy to regain his breath. "You wouldn't consider reversing that order?"
"Jeremy Doubletalk McPherson Dementis, I condemn you for all those years you put me through hell. All that smut you drew on my shed—remember the head with the antennas? And the swear words you wrote on the side of my house. What was 'hookah-head' supposed to mean?"
"Mute taught me that word. Blame him."
"Mute has a head. Sweet Tooth has a heart. Todd...Michael...I don't know you two very well, and you never knew me, so I'll have to give you a pass. But Doubletalk, no head, no heart. Really...was there any need to be so cruel to a fellow human being? Forget that I'm your grandpappy. I know I don't look human, anymore, but where's your sense of decency?"
But Jeremy was not cowed. "Suck my decency," he said, and actually threw out his chest.
"No!" Barbara ran forward, but Flint pulled the trigger before she could reach Jeremy.
There was a click.
Flint grunted, then pointed the barrel at his own head. Barbara switched directions.
Another empty click.
"Huh. Must've shot more rats than I remembered." He gave us a wicked grin. And a grin from that face was truly wicked.
Then he leaned ever so slowly sideways, his head landing softly on a crusty pillow. He began to snore instantly.
"Charmed, I'm sure," said Jeremy, reaching for the Tom Cruise watch.
"No!" we all shouted—even Monique chimed in, and I was not so sure about her share of the Whacko reward.
"Hey, it belongs to the family!" Jeremy protested, pausing.
"It belongs to the head of the family," I said. "And right now, that's him."
Barbara leaned down and gently kissed the top of Flint's head. Then she gripped her stomach. "Oh...ow!"
"She having a miscarriage?" Todd wondered out loud.
"Can you hold it?" I asked my sister frantically.
She shook her head. "I have to go—I have to go!"
"What happened to that $20,000 you spent on your doctor?" I frowned. Medicine costs a fortune for those without insurance—but not that much. Not for a sophisticated laxative.
But she ignored my complaint and pushed me aside as she rushed for my bathroom.
"Get out!" I shouted. "Everybody get out!"
"What is it?" Todd asked.
"You don't want to know."
Yvonne pushed herself up from her chair. "Has everyone gone crazy?"
But when she and Todd saw Jeremy and me and even Monique racing madly for the door, they followed.
We stood clumped outside, not knowing what to do next. We watched the students sway and stumble across each others' paths, oblivious to the future. There was lingering anger and animosity among us, and we drifted a short distance from each other. Unfortunately, Todd, for some reason, drifted with me. We found ourselves next to Yvonne's van. We looked inside and saw Mom, sleeping. Yvonne or Michael had considerately left the rear window open a crack, like they would do for a favorite pet. (Jeremy, I firmly believed, would have let her roast.) We could hear her snoring, and we didn't have to look hard to see the graying hair and gaping mouth.
"How much did she know?" Todd said.
"How much has she done?" I said.
"And when did she know it?"
"And when did she do it?"
"She knew about Whacko getting whacked."
"But did she know where he was buried? And about the reward?"
"Did Winny and her...?"
"She used to make cupcakes for Flint..."
We spent a few moments interchanging and intermingling our thoughts, latching onto the eerie frisson of twinhood and realizing it would probably last the rest of our lives.
We didn't stare at her for long. Todd less than me, since he had spent over a decade seeing her like this.
"You know that poem by what's-his-name?" Todd said.
"You mean the one about going around the world—"
"And ending up finding yourself?"
"Of course you know it. By what's-his-name."
"Yeah, what's-his-name."
Our ignorance was almost identical. But I was sure I knew more about Catherine de Medici than he did. At least I hoped I did. If you read enough, you start looking into yourself. No, I'm not talking about self-help manuals or Popular Mechanics or even Psychology Today. It's the classics that trigger the inner commentator that set out examples and exemplars—whether they decide moral decisions for you, or leave you to decide on your own, they make you think about your place in the pancreatic cosmos. You could say we're all searching for our identity, especially in this identity-saturated society, where 'me for a day' becomes 'me of yesterday' as quick as a zipper. This is the spin on the school of thought that says we create our own identities, and judge the result from how we reflect off of others. Looking at Todd, I winced. He was what I could have been, and to tell the truth there wasn't that much difference. I decided then and there that I was Mute McPherson, and nobody else.
Except, perhaps, Mute Dementis.
"So we went around the world," I said.
"And found ourselves."
Todd was looking away from the street at that moment and didn't see the rattlely red pickup chugging up Pine. He wouldn't have recognized it, anyway, since he had forgone the pleasure of being raised on Oregon Hill. But I knew it was Buford Skrank, one of Skunk's old hangarounds. Like me, he had managed to cling to the Hill, pursuing the only vocation he was capable of: scouring the alleys for discarded junk. He thrived in the current environment, especially when the school term ended and students moved out en masse. Like sailors attempting to save a sinking ship, the kids threw out everything that might prove a drag on their fast track to nowhere. Working appliances, television sets, furniture, the occasional computer. Heaps of it, tons of it, making Buford the happiest man alive, despite the fact that nearly all his old drinking buddies were gone.
I lifted a hand, as I always did when he drove by. Sometimes Buford would stop for a chat. More often, he would be in a rush to get home before the pile in his truck bed toppled into the street. Judging from the way a washing machine rattled up and down in its lazily cinched girdle of ropes, I assumed he would keep driving past my house. His window was open and he lifted his hand in the usual salute, not bothering to tap his horrendously skreeky brakes.
He had a passenger. Not so unusual. Buford sometimes lassoed in a decrepit neighbor to help with heavy lifting. But as I looked past the driver's alcohol-swollen face, my heart did a thump-stop. For a half second I saw a man grinning at me, holding a finger to his lips.
Todd didn't see. I'm not sure he would have recognized him if he had. That was something else we would have to sort out later on. Although he denied ever seeing him, I had to wonder...had he ever met Skunk?
Or his twin?
It was in that instant that our lives diverged. Because I had seen something that Todd hadn't, apprehended and comprehended a vital fragment of existence that had slipped by him, we would never be the same. Whether what I saw was a clue or a hard fact, a truth or an impossibility, it didn't matter. Hallucination or not, I fully intended to obey the silent injunction:
Hey Mute...stay mute.
"We found ourselves?" I asked Todd rhetorically. "Actually, I was going to say we found a Skunk."
Skunk Hunt Page 54
