They met in the back room on a Wednesday morning, before the store opened. Charlie had made coffee and taken a seat at the desk so he could prop his foot up. Ray sat on some boxes of books.
“Okay, shoot,” Charlie said.
“Well, first, I found three more crossbow bolts. Two had barbed-steel tips like the one that went through your leg, and one had a titanium spike. That one was stuck in the pneumatic closer on the back door.”
“Don’t care, Ray. What about the two women?”
“Charlie, someone shot you with a deadly weapon. You don’t care?”
“Correct. Don’t care. It’s a mystery. Know what I like about mysteries? They’re mysterious.”
Ray was wearing a Giants cap and he flipped it around backwards for emphasis. If he’d been wearing glasses he would have whipped those off, but he wasn’t, so he squinted like he had. “I’m sorry, Charlie, but someone wanted you and the dogs out of the house at the same time. They threw that rug on you from the rooftop across the alley, then, when you were pinned down and the dogs were outside, they shot the closer on the door so it would slam shut. They sabotaged the back door’s lock and glued the front doors shut, probably before they even started with the rug, then they slid down a line to the hall window, slipped between the bars, and—well, then it’s unclear.”
Charlie sighed. “You’re not going to tell me about the two women until you finish this, are you?”
“It was highly organized. This wasn’t a random assault.”
“The hall window upstairs has bars on it, Ray. No one can get in. No one got in.”
“Well, that’s where it gets a little crazy. You see, I don’t think it was a human intruder.”
“You don’t?” Charlie actually seemed to be paying attention now.
“In order to get through those bars, an intruder would have to be under two feet tall, and less than, say, thirty pounds. I’m thinking a monkey.”
Charlie put down his coffee so hard that a java geyser jumped out of the cup onto some papers on the desk. “You think that I was shot by a highly organized monkey?”
“Don’t be that way—”
“Who then slid down a wire, broke into the building, and did what? Made off with fruit?”
“You should have heard some of the stupid shit you were saying the other night at the hospital, and did I make fun of you?”
“I was on drugs, Ray.”
“Well, there’s no other explanation.” To Ray’s Beta Male imagination, the monkey explanation seemed completely reasonable—except for lack of motive. But you know monkeys, they’ll fling poo at you just for the hell of it, so who’s to say—
“The explanation is that it’s a mystery,” Charlie said. “I appreciate your trying to bring this…this furry bastard to justice, Ray, but I need to know about the two women.”
Ray nodded, defeated. He should have just shut up until he’d figured out why someone would want to get a monkey into Charlie’s apartment. “People can train monkeys, you know. Do you have any valuable jewelry in your apartment?”
“You know,” Charlie said, scratching his chin and looking at the ceiling as if remembering. “There was a small car parked across from the shop all day on Vallejo. And when I looked the next day, there was a pile of banana peels, like someone had been staking the place out. Someone who ate bananas.”
“What kind of car was it?” Ray said, his notepad ready.
“I’m not sure, but it was red, and definitely monkey size.”
Ray looked up from his notes. “Really?”
Charlie paused, as if thinking carefully about his answer. “Yes,” he said, very sincerely. “Monkey size.”
Ray flipped his notebook back to the pages in the front. “There is no need to be that way, Charlie. I’m just trying to help.”
“It might have been bigger,” Charlie said, remembering. “Like a monkey SUV—like what you might drive if you were transporting—I don’t know—a barrel of monkeys.”
Ray cringed, then read from the pages. “I went to the Johnson woman’s house. No one is living there, but the house isn’t on the market. I didn’t see the niece you talked about. Funny thing is, the neighbors knew she’d been sick, but no one had heard that she’d died. In fact, one guy said he thought he saw her getting into a U-Haul truck with a couple of movers last week.”
“Last week? Her niece said that she died two weeks ago.”
“No niece.”
“What?”
“Esther Johnson doesn’t have a niece. She was an only child. Didn’t have brothers or sisters, and no nieces on her late husband’s side of the family.”
“So she’s alive?”
“Apparently.” Ray handed Charlie a photograph. “That’s her latest driver’s-license photo. This changes things. Now we’re looking for a missing person, someone who will leave a trail. But the other one—Irena—is even better.” He handed Charlie another picture.
“She’s not dead either?”
“Oh, there was a death notice in the paper three weeks ago, but here’s the giveaway—all of her bills are still being paid, by personal check. Checks she signed.” Ray sat back on his stool, smiling, feeling the sweetness of righteous indignation over the monkey theory, and a little guilt alleviation for not telling Charlie about the special transactions.
“Well?” Charlie finally asked.
“She’s at her sister’s house in the Sunset. Here’s the address.” Ray tore a page out of his notebook and handed it to Charlie.
21
COMMON COURTESY
Charlie was torn—he really wanted to take his sword-cane, but he couldn’t carry it while using the crutches. He considered duct-taping it to one of the crutches, but he thought that might attract attention.
“You want me to go with you?” Ray asked. “I mean, you okay to drive, with your leg and all?”
“I’ll be fine,” Charlie said. “Someone needs to watch the store.”
“Charlie, before you go, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask, Charlie thought.
“Why did you need me to find these two women?”
You robot-necked bastard, you had to ask. “I told you, estate stuff.” Charlie shrugged. No big deal, let it go, nothing to see here.
“Yeah, I know you told me that, and normally that would make sense, but I found out a lot about these two while looking for them—no one in either of their families has died recently.”
“Funny thing,” Charlie said, juggling his keys, the cane, his date book, and his crutches by the back door. “Both bequests were from nonrelatives. Old friends.” No wonder women don’t like you, you just won’t leave things alone.
“Uh-huh,” Ray said, unconvinced. “You know, when people run, when they go as far as faking their own death to get away, they are usually running from something. Are you that something, Charlie?”
“Ray, listen to yourself. Are you back on your serial-killer thing? I thought Rivera explained that.”
“So this is for Rivera?”
“Let’s say he’s interested,” Charlie said.
“Why didn’t you just say so?”
Charlie sighed. “Ray, I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff, you know that. Fourth Amendment and all. I came to you because you’re good, and you have contacts. I depend on you and I trust you. I think you know that you can depend on me and trust me, right? I mean, in all these years, I’ve never put your disability pension in jeopardy by being careless about our arrangement, have I?”
It was a threat, however subtle, and Charlie felt bad for doing it, but he just couldn’t let Ray continue to push on this, particularly since he was in unexplored territory himself—he didn’t even know what kind of bluff he was covering.