Planet Willie (6 page)

6

With another
hour or so to kill before I want make an appearance at Fernanda’s, I’ve settled
into a high-class bar in the Village that they’re calling a brasserie. The
evening has stayed warm, and out the open windows on the sidewalks, people are flirting
with what may be the first night of spring. Evenings like these, you don’t want
to rush home too quick. It’s one of those feelings I spend a lot of time missing.
There’s just something in the air. Maybe if you linger a bit, you think,
possibilities might present themselves. And one thing you always want to make
time for, in my experience, are the possibilities. For better or worse, it’s
how I lived my life. Possibilities kept so open they’re not even possibilities
anymore, they’re just what comes next.

The
brasserie’s filling up for cocktails, and I’ve got the Madonna folder out on
the table, pondering the mysteries of artistic genius. The folder tells the
history of the Madonna’s owners, which starts with dukes back in the sixteenth
century and goes right on through to the Americans. Shore bought it off an oil
baron thirty years ago, apparently. He would have been in his thirties, so he
must have started out with money. And I mean big money, since the price at the
time was $350,000. Not a bad investment, considering what it’s worth now.

I look at the
photographs again. Name your color, they’re still the kind of eyes you could
get lost in and never wish to be found. Harry Shore must have been losing
himself in them for most of his adult life. Imagine waking up one morning,
rolling over in bed and discovering that the color of your girl’s eyes has
changed. I bet you’d notice it. And maybe you’d pick up the phone and call
Willie Lee. And I like to think that wouldn’t be a mistake.

It’s turning
out to be a case with not a few intricacies, a case with some dimensions. From
where I’m sitting, nursing my shins, it appears it may involve the whole of
Manhattan and at least parts of Albania. With such international implications,
I figure it’s probably time to send in a little update to Saint Chief via
prayer, so I take a fortifying sip of beer and shut my eyes.

“Dear Lord,” I
mumble. “It’s me, Willie. Please forward this message to Saint Chief Mahoney if
you would. I’m on the trail of this wayward Fernanda Shore and seem to find
myself in New York City. I realize that’s a little further afield than we
originally anticipated for this case, but I assure you I am hot on her trail
and will soon bring her back into the fold. So please don’t send down one of
those Northeastern angels to, ah,
interfere
. We know where that got us
the last time. I just need another day or so to get to the bottom of this, and
in your infinite wisdom I’m sure you’ll understand.”

I could go
through the details of all I’ve learned. I could tell him about how I’m
figuring they got me from the moment I walked into Fernanda’s gallery, which
must mean Havisham’s tied into this somehow. About how she alerted Kafka and
Twiggy, who led me to the Hotel Blue and have been following me ever since – at
least up until about an hour ago, assuming there was only Kafka on my tail.
Then all about the insurance angle we need to consider. I have to assume
Fernanda saw the first photograph, the one with the faded eyes, which also
means that I’m holding the only evidence of those midnight blues other than the
original itself. But ordinary mortals can’t paint a fake Madonna from memory, Lord,
I could say, and even if we could, Fernanda’s no painter as far as I know. One
painter I do know, I left back on the floor of a bookstore south of Union Square. Left him in a bit of a hurry, to tell you the truth, Lord. Forgive me, but I
wasn’t going to wait around to try and convince New York’s finest that what
happened in there was a necessary part of my investigations. Also, last I
checked, shoplifting was a misdemeanor, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to
leave Erasmus behind to take the heat alone. For that I especially ask your forgiveness,
Lord, I could say, but even in his infinite wisdom, I know for certain that he’d
have absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

If the tech
department would get off their clouds for once and finally figure out how to
make prayer two-way, at least the Lord could ask a few questions. But no,
you’re just sending words up there into the ether and hoping you’ve got a
connection. If you’re lucky, maybe down the road he sends you a sign, but don’t
imagine for a second that a sign simplifies anything. You’re walking down the
street and hear a woman singing the most beautiful version of
Amazing Grace
from an open window. I always figure something like that’s bound to be a sign,
so of course I investigate, but sometimes maybe she’s just a woman with a
beautiful voice whose acquaintance you’re pleased to make. How are you supposed
to know? You can close your eyes and pray for the answer, but where does that
get you? Down here they just give us one-way radios.

What I’ve also
never been quite clear about is whether God hears every little thought that
flits through my mind when I close my eyes to pray, or whether it’s only the
words I speak that make the trip. Hell, maybe he’s just been treated to a
mental whirlwind of two-way radios, uncertain signs, and a little Dutchman
named Erasmus. I really have no idea. “I miss you all up there, Lord,” I
murmur, “and I look forward to getting home soon. Again, please do pass this
message along to Saint Chief and ask if he wants me to bring back anything for
him. Ha. That was just a joke. Okay, then. Ciao for now. Amen.”

As I open my
eyes, I’m also wondering if when God hears a prayer he knows if you’re lying, and
then I wonder if he just heard that little thought about lying, and then….
Hell, I guess I’ll just wait for a sign, and I’m perfectly willing to believe
that the waitress who has approached with a menu qualifies. I ask her to bring
me a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder. Sentimental choice, the chowder. I don’t
know why, with all of America’s vast coastline, but the only place I’ve ever
had a decent cup of clam chowder is in New York City. Used to practically live
off the stuff in my leaner days, lining up for takeout at the Oyster Bar in
Grand Central Station.

After chowder
I have another beer and get to humming along to the music they’ve got going, at
which point a fella two tables over looks up with a sociable grin and says,
“Willie Nelson,
To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before
. Duet with Julio
Iglesias.”

“Right you
are, sir,” I say. “Right you are. Julio gave it that little extra something,
didn’t he?”

“Plus I could
never really imagine Willie with all these girls he’d loved before,” he says.
“Julio Iglesias you could understand.”

I invite him
to join me for a beer, and he comes over with his briefcase and introduces
himself as Bill Sidell. He’s wearing a rumpled suit and tie on a body pushing
five foot nine but not quite making it. Billy’s also in the latter stages of
balditude.

“Willie Lee’s
the name,” I say, as he looks me over like I’m some exotic creature. “Share a
name with the great Nelson himself. So what brings you to New York City,
Billy?”

“How do you
know I’m not from New York City?” he says, cocking his head to make it clever.

“Guys like us
tend to stick out in the big city, Billy. Not that we’d want it any other way,
ain’t that right?”

You’d be surprised at what gets some
people going. Billy takes this as an invitation to talk politics. Looks to get
real heated up about the perniciousness of the big city from where I’m seated.
Uses the phrase “moral turpitude” in a sentence if I’m not mistaken. Thankfully
there is my grin, and with a dose of it I’d otherwise think unhealthy for a man
of his size, I manage to get him around to his life in Arizona, the wife and
the kids and whatnot. This is his first visit to the Big Apple, and he’s
missing them a lot. Figured it would be better if he went alone the first time,
he says, to get the lay of the land, so to speak. Next time maybe he’ll bring
the lot of them and take in a few Broadway shows. I ask what he does for a
living, and he pulls out a card from his jacket pocket:

Bill
Sidell

Mister
Pyrotechnics

Eastern
Arizona Fireworks Association

Been in the fireworks business since
he was a kid, he tells me. Inherited the business from his folks. He does the
Fourth of July, he does birthdays, he does New Year’s Eve – year-round
pyrotechnical expertise. Apparently he’s made quite a name for himself too.
Taken fireworks to a whole new level in Eastern Arizona, such that he’s been
named Mister Pyrotechnics three years running. The problem is, he tells me, fireworks
can be a dangerous business, and he’s been in it long enough to know that it’s
not something he wants his own kids going into. Too risky. It’s been bothering
him lately. What if something happened to him? How would the wife and kids get
along if he were hurt or even, God forbid, killed? No, he’s looking to set
himself right in an up-and-coming business. Make a better life for the family.
That’s why he’s in New York City. Scouting the prospects for an exciting new
venture.

When I ask
what kind of prospects he’s talking, he takes off his glasses and wipes them,
looks out through the windows to the street, then swoops back in on me hard:
“You know I knew as soon as you walked in here that we’d end up talking.”

“Maybe you
better try that out on the waitress,” I say, fluttering the eyelashes a bit.

He laughs.
“Not like that. Let me ask you something. What do you know about pheromones?”

“Not a hell of
a lot, but then I have a feeling you’re willing to educate me.”

“How about the
sixth sense?” he says, reaching down for his briefcase. “Love at first sight?”
He spreads a brochure on the table in front of me and reads aloud, pronouncing
each word as if it’s an individual little miracle: “
Scent Sense: The Miraculous
Science of Pheromones.
That sixth sense I was talking about is now
scientifically proven. They’re called pheromones, and they’re tiny molecules we
send out to communicate emotions and feelings.”

“The company I
represent,” he continues, “is the first to take advantage of this rapidly
advancing field to create a line of perfume and beauty products that are
literally irresistible. Here’s how it works: in recent years scientists have
discovered what they call the vomeronasal organ – tiny cavities on either side
of the nasal wall. This is a major discovery. This is your pheromone sensor,
and it is connected directly to the hypothalamus, the emotional core of the
brain. Messages received by the hypothalamus bypass the intellectual brain and
are immediately
felt
.”

He’s on a
roll, and I guess I’m a good listener. Maybe I would have made a good priest.
Father Willie. Who knows? If only I’d taken that other path diverging in the
wood, as made famous in the great poem by Mister Robert Frost. The path I took
I guess you wouldn’t even properly call a path. Really I more or less took the
woods, and don’t let anybody tell you it doesn’t sometimes get lonely out there
with the wild critters and the hoot owls. One thing that heaven has taught me,
however, is that there’s nothing worse than days after days that all look the
same, and in the woods I do find that the variety of wildlife you encounter
while smashing through the foliage will often make it worth your while. I’m
thinking of Billy, who’s telling me they’ve done studies with siblings
separated at birth.

“Put them in a
room together,” he says, taking a long sip of beer, “they know something
funny’s going on. Nine times out of ten they’ll end up talking. Seven out of
ten they’ll discover they’re siblings in the first conversation. There’s more.
We’ve done experiments with pigs. Remove their vomeronasal organ, and they
can’t feel love – often they don’t even recognize their own mothers. They are
emotionally dead pigs.”

“Tell me
you’re releasing this technology to the general population,” I say. “I’ve had
more than a few requests to bottle my essence, and now I see it may be
possible.”

“I’m doing a
presentation tomorrow morning for a major perfume outfit,” he says. “Naturally
they are very interested in my products. We’re talking perfumes that turn
heads.
Unscented
perfumes. Perfumes that communicate directly with your
emotional core.”

“Tell me
you’re wearing some right now,” I say

“That I am,
sir,” he says with a grin.

“Then brother,
I’m with you. Let’s have another beer for the road, and then I’ve got us a party
to go to. Test out your product on the general population, so to speak. You
know any of the martial arts? Good. I might need some backup. We might just
experience some turbulence out there, but nothing that can’t be handled by two
emotionally dead pigs set to put the man back in Manhattan.”

7

Billy and I
take it out into the streets and attempt to get reacquainted with walking,
proving yet again that there is really so much we take for granted on this
earth. With the kind of beer we’re carrying around inside, I’m thinking it
might not have been a bad idea to ease up a bit back there at the brasserie.
Smelled the roses, so to speak. The night is young.

Moving along,
more or less, we pass one of these costume shops with one-toothed witches and
headless superheroes in the window. Billy’s been eyeing The Kid all evening and
has decided he needs himself a cowboy hat. Normally I would agree, but under
the circumstances I have to advise against it.

“It’s not you
who wears the hat,” I tell him real serious. “But the hat who wears you.” Zen
koans, I believe they’re called. Anyway, he reflects on this for a moment, then
bolts into the store like a maniac, and by the time I arrive in the Wild West
section he has picked himself out a shiny yellow affair that fits him nicely
but is unfortunately made of plastic and generally unflattering to Billy and
anyone else within a hundred mile radius. I attempt to enlighten him on this,
but Billy is one stubborn son of a bitch.

“Let’s ride,”
he says. What the hell. Considering the circumstances, specifically considering
the alcohol, I just nod and pick me out one of your finer suede capes to
salvage something from the experience. Willie El Matador – who knows, it’s
worked before. At the cash register I pull out the wallet and tell Billy we’re
putting this one under the column that reads business expenses.

“What business
is that?” he says.

“Trouble
incorporated,” I say. “And you’re vice president.”

He nods real
slow. Catches sight of himself in the mirror behind the counter, makes a finger
gun, and shoots himself dead. Takes a rack of clown wigs down with him and
appears to have abandoned the land of the living till I break into
Mama,
don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
, which is a duet I know he
can’t refuse. Eventually I manage to coax him out of there with
They’ll
never stay home, and they’re always alone, even with someone they love
.

By the time we
get to Fernanda’s we’ve worked ourselves up enough glamour to formally declare
ourselves a constellation and name it Willie Nelson. I’m also expecting some
more glamorous of the species at the gallery, but to my disappointment Billy
and I are providing more than our fair share of flash. Maybe fifty business
types stand around drinking French champagne and scooping shrimply delights off
silver trays, mostly grey hair in suits showing off investments in the silicone
industry in the form of blondes twice their size.

Billy and I
remain unperturbed. We walk right in there with enough momentum for the desired
cape effect, despite the fact that your leather cape will hang heavier than
your silk, and steal a roomful of eyes from the Old Masters. No blue-eyed
virgins in sight, which is the understatement of the century, but that doesn’t
prevent Billy from walking right over to an Amazon in a gold lamé dress about
the size of a handkerchief and tipping his hat, at which point I figure I
better get in there and rescue my partner before we got a riot on our hands.

“I’m Willie,
this is Billy, and that was some poetry,” I say. The girl gives Billy this real
breathy hello while pretending I’m some exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. Makes me think either the champagne’s gone clear to her head or the string
quartet’s so loud she hasn’t heard me. Then she actually reaches out and
strokes Billy’s plastic hat, which leads me to one and only one conclusion:
pheromones. Then another little conclusion comes none too fast, which is that
blondie is none other than Twiggy, doing for skin and bones what Marilyn Monroe
once did for tits and ass. Never imagined she had it in her. Hair’s swept up
off her neck real stylishly, and circles of rouge color her cheeks. Quite an
elegant get up, it is. I want to ask her about Kafka, I want to ask her what
the hell she’s doing there – a little phrase that’s starting to sound familiar
– but she’s already led Billy off to a corner, doing to that hat what most
people do to pets.

So I’m
starting to feel like a character in an Albanian spy novel, and I’m not sure I
like it. Billy may get himself into trouble, I worry, but then with the way
he’s been drinking, Billy’s already in trouble. Besides, I’ve got business to tend
to. Technically speaking, business means saving Fernanda Shore’s soul, et
cetera, but I’ve found that there’s really no technically speaking where souls
are concerned. On my first case, a few months after my death when I joined the
force, I just came right out with it. The fella’s name was Johnny Periwinkle,
if I recall, and he’d been praying to be saved from his gambling. I sat next to
him at a blackjack table in the Isle of Capri Casino, Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Hit with eighteen showing and beat his twenty with a three. Proceeded to tell
him that recommitting to the Lord and quitting the cards would be like hitting
an eternal twenty-one, which got me some extended profanity and a punch to the
face. The case ended up taking weeks, and what I learned is that they may be
praying for salvation, but nothing you say can make them accept salvation, if
that’s what you want to call it. You’ve just got to accompany them through all
the ups and downs until the downs get so low that they decide on their own to
make some change. At best all you can do is help them hit bottom quicker, which
incidentally has always happened to be a specialty of mine. So Detective Willie
has no illusions about putting Miss Fernanda back on the straight and narrow
tonight. He’s merely intending to get down in the mud with her and see if she
can wrestle.

First things
first, I swipe a champagne glass from a passing tray and murder a few bubbles.
Over the rim of the glass there’s no sign of Havisham, which is good news, but
then there’s no sign of anyone I take to be Fernanda either. I gaze up into the
catwalks, but there’s no sign of life up there. I move around the edges of the
room, checking out some of the paintings as I go. Lots of older landscapes and
fruit bowls, and it is amazing how they could make those apples look so shiny
and good. You just want to pluck them right off the canvas for a bite. Liberate
the apple, so to speak, or as my acquaintances in ALF might say. Unfortunately
for the apples, I’m about the only one in there paying them any attention. Harry Shore may be right about his daughter’s poor business sense, but then I catch sight
of the woman who must be his daughter, and I forget all about Harry Shore.

She’s over by
the bar in a little circle of socialites, anxiously looking out across the gallery. She’s no hard-edged New York type, Fernanda. No, she’s still all Gulf of Mexico. Light green sundress of the sort girls used to wear, showing her shoulders
but covering her knees. A distant smile that comes into focus when somebody
turns her way. Dark blonde hair she hasn’t tried to make too fancy. I felt it
out on the sidewalks, I sniffed it on the air. Spring has most definitely
arrived, and I couldn’t be happier to be among the seasons again.

Somebody says
something funny, and it seems to take her a minute to remember to laugh. She
covers her teeth with a fist, then quickly shifts the hand down the string of
pearls around her neck, pulling them through her fingers like they’re rosary
beads. It’s times like these when I want to walk over and tell a woman about my
heavenly circumstances. Not to save her soul or any other part of her. Just to
get it off my chest and maybe see her eyes light up. I’ve been stuck on a cloud
for the past five years, I want to tell her, and then I guess I’m always hoping
she’ll believe me for once and say a little prayer that the switchboard might
hear and get me made human again. Hell, even angels still hope for miracles.
But of course the mysteries never stop, and while I wait on miracles I’ve still
got a case to work.

She sees me
watching her and gives me a vague smile, as if I might be some client she can’t
afford to ignore, which only confirms my suspicions of her poor business sense.
I reciprocate with a little something of Swedish origin I call the Smorgasbord
– just light it up in all directions, there’s something for everybody in there,
and I’m sure hoping that includes Miss Shore.

Then at that
very moment – and this may well be the effect of the Smorgasbord – she tugs the
necklace a bit too hard, and it snaps. Pearls scatter across the floor,
clicking like teeth as they hit, rolling up under the bar and through the legs
of patrons of the arts. Her hands fly up to her neck, and her eyes go big and
moist. I catch a pearl against my boot and kneel to pick it up. Then I crawl
across the floor to round up a few of the others, which when freed from the
necklace are proving to be lively little critters. She’s down hunting them too
and depositing them in a champagne glass she’s got in one hand, her mouth
twisted shut like if she were to let go of herself now, she might just scatter
loose across the floor like those pearls.

 I crawl over
and deposit a handful into her glass. She looks up at me with green eyes that
match her dress. Wrinkles mark the corners of her eyes and mouth, the kind
you’ll see in a woman who’s gotten pleasure out of life. Freckles cover her
cheeks and make me wish I could scoop them up too and maybe put them in my
pocket.

“Cast not your
pearls before swine,” I say with a little wink.

“Now you tell
me,” she mutters, sounding even more Texas than she looks. “I think I’m
supposed to know you,” she says, shooting out an arm to catch a pearl, “but I
can’t quite place the name. I’m sorry, it
has
been a rough night.”

“Call me
Willie,” I say, dropping another pearl into the glass. “Capital W as in Wow.
I’m from Texas.”

“You don’t
say,” she says distractedly, scanning the floor.

“South Texas, actually,” I say. “But I do manage to get up here occasionally to see the art.
Great lover of the fifteenth century, I am.”

“Interesting,”
she says, though she’s not looking it. If she’s putting two and two together,
it’s not equaling four.

“This may not
be the best time,” I say, scampering around her to trap a little fella who’s making
a run for it, “but I was incidentally wondering if you might have anything
fifteenth century and maybe Italian for sale, say a little Madonna for example.
Maybe even something with freckles if you’ve got it.”

She squints up
at me and twists those lips, which aren’t painted and don’t need it. “I’m not
for sale.”

“Sweetheart,”
I say, “I’m flattered you think I could afford it.”

“So maybe I
don’t understand,” she says, standing with the champagne glass and irritably brushing
off her dress.

“Recently I saw
a school of Botticelli Madonna in South Texas,” I say, standing to meet her
eyes, “but she wasn’t the one I was looking for. Actually I found her a bit
fake, if you want to be blunt about it. You know those South Texas girls. Of
course it’s not my style to talk about a woman behind her back, but desperate
circumstances call for desperate measures.”

“What in hell
are you talking about?” she says through her teeth. “Who are you, and why are
you here?”

“Maybe we’d
better talk in private,” I say.

“I don’t want
to talk in private,” she says. “I want you out of here.” So I take her by the
elbow and drag her over behind the bar to where the fiddlers are into what I’d
like to say is Mozart. It’s her show, so she’s forced to come along as
graciously as she can manage.

“I’m a private
investigator,” I say as she smiles sweetly to another patron across the room.
“Your father hired me to get his Madonna back, and the way I see it, we’ve got
two options. The first is you hand it over, we get out of here, and I buy you a
drink. The second is more or less the same except you’re buying.”

“You’re
insane,” she says.

“A man who
sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane only because this happens
to very few people.”

“No,” she
says. “I mean really insane.”

“A few weeks
ago, your father’s Madonna was replaced by a fake,” I say. “The eyes weren’t
quite right, if you want to know, and I get the impression your father’s the
type who notices pretty much everything. What he doesn’t know yet, and what I
found out just this afternoon, is that you paid a visit to his insurance
company last month. The way I figure it, you obtained a photograph of the
painting and had it copied. Then you somehow had it swapped for your father’s
original. Not bad work, but the photograph was just a bit off. That’s the bad
news.”

“So what’s the
good news?” she mutters.

“If it wasn’t
for that one act of incredible sheer dumbness, we wouldn’t be standing here
getting acquainted tonight.”

“I don’t know
what you’re talking about,” she says coldly.

“Your father
thinks you do,” I say.

“It’s him you
should be investigating,” she bursts out. “For the first time in my life I’m
finally doing something I really love, and he…he…he just won’t see me happy.
You can’t imagine the kinds of things he’s accused me of, but this really takes
the cake.”

“I understand
he bought you this place,” I say. “Sounds pretty decent to me.”

“He can afford
it,” she mutters. “If it were my sister, he’d of bought her ten. That’s the way
he’s always been, and there’s nothing I can ever do to change it.” Her hand
goes to her throat as she says it, as if she’s searching for some pearls to
hold onto. Then her eyes go moist again as she tells me how her mother died
young, and how since she was the oldest, she had to take care of the house.
Daddy wouldn’t hire any help, but then he resented everything she did to help.
She got out of South Texas as soon as she could, she says. The words are coming
fast now, as if we’re the only ones in the room. She says she’s made mistakes,
God she’s made mistakes, but dammit if she’s going to let her daddy go and ruin
it for her again. She really loves art, and maybe the gallery hasn’t been too
much of a success just yet, but she’s damn sure going to make it one.