Dead End
Wes Noyer, P.I.
Monday, OCT 3
It’s a crooked world. There’s a Dutch angle on the whole thing. Makes me want to go jump in the lake and leave it all behind. Makes a lot of folks think that way—those who have lingered in the shade and not spent their lives on the right side of the law know. Who in the smooth angles would ever think to question if they’re not pure goodness? Who in the smooth angles would know what the cold really feels like? I guess that’s why the nooks and the crannies exist. They’re a place to hide for those who have felt the cold, even if for just a moment when they see the world for what it is. A dog eat dog—cat eat cat—world. The nooks are places to get your bearings; places that assure you no matter how crooked it is, you’ll never slide off. Not even when you’re dead. At least not for certain. My brother’s presence attested to that. Maybe I’m peddling my fish to the wrong market. Most folks can’t see it: the tilt. They’re lollipops. Ignorance is bliss, as they say. When you stand angled your whole life, it feels like right side up. It’s enough to send someone to the booby-hatch if they find out and can’t cope with the truth.
I felt like I was going mad myself, seeing my brother before me at the blinds of my motel room window. Light went through him just as it did the blinds. With the contrast of the light outside, my brother’s white bones appeared black. The space between his ribs where his heart used to be shined white.
None of us could think of a thing to say. Gargling some cream, I watched them both. I was in shock, Hannah Barbara was just thankful for a bed to lay down on, and Waldo… Waldo seemed embarrassed. I decided if someone would ever break the silence, it would have to be me.
‘How long have you been like…’ I gestured to my brother’s bones from my place on the ladder-back chair, ‘this?’
Waldo turned around. ‘Ever since that night of your raid.’
‘That was years ago!’ I growled like a mad dog. After a few deep breaths, I asked, ‘Why did you never come to see me? What’s your angle?’
‘I don’t know. When I skipped out, I guess—’
I couldn’t help but interrupt him as he had interrupted my entire existence, ‘You shook up my whole life!’
‘I always did,’ Waldo said. ‘I guess I didn’t want to mess up your life any more than I already had. I was always getting into trouble and you were always there to take half the blame for something I mucked up all on my own. I was ashamed of my life. After I got a second chance, I wanted to prove I could be better. I wanted to prove to you I could be good. Cleaning myself up, I started the laundromat business, but it was never enough in my mind. Felt like I’d just be a disappointment again.’
‘You were never a disappointment to me,’ I said. There was no need to cut him up any more than he had himself. My brother had turned his life around. I couldn’t be mad about getting what I always wanted back—my brother—just because it’d taken years. ‘I didn’t like the crowd you ran with, but you were always my brother, first and foremost.’
With this we shared a hug then turned towards Hannah Barbara who chimed in with a sarcastic ‘aww.’
‘We should get to work,’ I said and cleared my throat. There was a film of thick cream and it made my voice deep as if with longing. ‘I just wish I knew where to go from here. It seems I’ve run into a dead end.’
‘A dead end. Dead end,’ Waldo repeated as if reciting a mantra. Then as if he’d reached enlightenment, he exclaimed, ‘Dead End!’
‘Yeah,’ I sighed. ‘A dead end.’
‘No.’ Waldo shook his head. ‘Dead End. The undead flea market. Someone there is bound to have heard something. I have connections there.’
‘Who?’
‘Doubt you’d know him.’
‘You’d be surprised,’ I straightened my collar. ‘Who, Waldo?’
‘Lurking Larry—’
Though I didn’t know how the shopkeeper could be of help, I did know him, and I finished my brother’s thought, ‘—of the Bizarre Bazaar.’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Hannah said.
‘You’re not, doll.’
‘Not your doll,’ she quipped. ‘I’m coming.’
‘Sorry. Doll or no doll, you’re trouble. I’ll be in contact,’ I said coldly, still bitter about being nabbed at the Laundromat on her account. I gestured for Waldo to follow me out of the room. Together we made our way to our only lead. My pipestems moved with purpose—Waldo’s dragged as if anchored.
‘I have to say, I’m a bit scared, Wes. I’m not like you. I’m not a hardboiled gumshoe. I’m an upper world laundromat owner. I really don’t like this Dead End place. I just buy discounted detergent there on occasion.’ Waldo said, nervously. ‘It’s full of monsters.’
‘There are monsters everywhere,’ I said, knowing Waldo was turning yellow. Though it pained me to do so, I had to make him scared of everything and everywhere. I needed to lead him towards Dead End. ‘Dressed up in the skin of men and women, are monsters. I’d be surprised if there were any good folks left at all in this world.’
‘You’re a good cat.’
‘I used to be.’ I cast my eyes down to the damp sidewalk. ‘now, I’m not so sure.’
‘What about this Lucy? She seems like a nice dame.’
‘I don’t know what’s easier to swallow: a good cat kidnapped and brought into this crooked place, or a bad cat leaving a good thing behind for a place like this.’
I hadn’t been to Dead End in a long time. It isn’t exactly a vacation destination. While The Lion’s Share might be seedy, Dead End was the soil those seeds were planted in. Thick with filth. Lousy with criminals. The worst of the worst did business there and they never did take too kindly to the living unless they were dead inside. Typically I wouldn’t worry as I am dead inside, but after finding out my brother was among the living I had been given a little meaning. Meaning fostered a sense of life. That life was a threat to me in the streets of Dead End.
Entering the underground city, one is immediately struck by a sense of impending doom. It’s something in the air, I think. A mixture of smog and sewage. Though it doesn’t snow there, it’s always cold. The roads are unusually dark and even the small areas lit up by lamps are dim. The dim sights further this ill feeling. There are crooked steeples on nearly every building that puncture the brown sky like teeth of a great big starving beast. By sky I mean the sparkling gemstone stars stuck in the earthen ceiling.
Waldo and I came in from a quiet sewer entrance hoping to mask the smell of my living body with the stench of waste. The streets were dead, but still I pulled my hat down to cover my eyes. We could have melted into the shadows if it weren’t for Waldo’s bright white bones. The two of us walked slowly together towards the Bizarre Bazaar.
Though the store front signs are obscured by shadows, they hide nothing. There are signs for grave robbers for hire, goons, and even poison. ‘You pick it, they’ll kick it,’ said one particularly old wooden sign with a depiction of a skull and crossbones burned into it.
‘Wessss Noyer,’ came a faint hiss from a dark alley we passed. Though outwardly I ignored these calls, the voice hissing my name put me even more on edge. I squeezed my yo-yo tightly in the pocket of my coat. Even with my sharp vision, I couldn’t make out anything in the shadows. Could have been a vender, a crook, a tomcat, or perhaps just a joker calling out my name.
Floaters filled the sewage stream beside the cobblestone walkway like a logging drive. The grave robbers had been busy.
The Bizarre Bazaar was impossible to miss. Lit up like Vegas, the storefront was a graveyard of neon lights. Signs of products that didn’t even exist anymore claimed plots around the largest neon sign. This sign had moving parts. Strips of orange and purple, green, and blue made up the face of Lurking Larry. A segment of orange rose up and sunk down to make it appear as if the neon face was talking.
Waldo had one foot through the front door when my gut twitched. I had a bad feeling.
‘Let’s go in the side door.’
‘Larry is a business man,’ Waldo said. ‘Let’s just walk in normal like.’
‘He’s a business man, yes. So he cares about money, not people; certainly not which way they come in. We’ll go in the side.’
‘I’m sorry, Wes.’
‘Sorry? For what—’
‘He’s here.’ Waldo yelled. ‘Detective Noyer is here!’
Though the yelling hurt my ears, it was the betrayal from my brother that truly wounded me. In an instant the De Tullio brothers stepped out from the Bizarre Bazaar and surrounded me. Drawing my yo-yo I slung it and clipped Lars in the knee. He fell to the ground with a yelp and began to nurse his wound. I slung my yo-yo again and hit Cornelius in the chest. He flew backwards into the stool-pigeon, Waldo. My brother collapsed into a pile of bones with a cat skull on top that looked down in shame. Fred managed to get his strong arms around me. Being squeezed tightly, I nearly blacked out. Luckily, I managed to slip out of my collar, coat, and hat. Without the tan of my clothes, I was free to slip into the blackness of the shadows. Closing my eyes, I could all but disappear.
‘Le Chat Noir!’ Lars screamed and scrambled away, limping. Cornelius followed with his blond pompadour waving like a flag of surrender. The two of them called out in warning with a tune that grew fainter and fainter the further away they ran, ‘Le Chat Noir! Le Chat Noir!’
‘Just let Lucy go,’ I said to Fred, ‘and I won’t hurt you.’
Fred simply crossed his muscular arms. His pompadour stood up as rigid as the rest of him. Even in the dim light of Dead End he found the need to wear sunglasses, which made it impossible to read what he was thinking.
‘Lucy doesn’t want to be found,’ came a deep male voice from within the bazaar. It wasn’t Lurking Larry’s, nor Fred’s. It was the same voice I had heard from the pay phone outside The Lion’s Share.
‘If that’s true,’ I said from atop a stack of empty wood crates. ‘I want to hear it from Lucy’s mouth.’
‘Easy enough,’ the deep voice said. Out from the store stepped the cat I had been searching for. Lucy, white and unharmed. A little puff of white hair above the brow, the rounded tail—it was Lucy all right. But whose voice was that? So deep. So male. It spoke again, ‘Easy peasy. You just did.’ It was Lucy speaking in that deep tone. ‘Le Chat Noir meet La Chat Blanc, or should I say Le Chat Blanc.’
‘But, but—’ to say I was confused would be an under statement. I sunk mechanically into prowling.
‘But Lucy is a sweet little girl? You can see how that might drive me nuts, I’m sure. You have probably just found yourself in an unfamiliar state of mind, detective. That’s called confusion. That’s what I spent the majority of my early life in. Always being given dolls and makeup I didn’t want. The Addams wouldn’t accept me as anything but a sweet little princess, though. I was living well and didn’t want to sleep on the street, so eventually I began to play the part. Well, the curtain has been drawn. I’m on to act two. I don’t need the Addams to do anything but leave me alone now. That’s where Waldo comes in. Your brother—’
‘Brother,’ I scoffed from my new dark spot in an alley. ‘He stabbed me in the back.’
‘To save you.’
‘To save me?’ I tested the phrase with my own mouth from behind a trash can as I moved silently towards Fred.
‘Yes. We were just going to waste you before your brother rewrote the plot to include you. See, you’re going to ‘find’ me, ‘find’ their Lucy ‘murdered.’ You’re going to bring back your brother’s bones, he’s going to play me, dead, and the Addams will have a nice little funeral for their sweet little Lucy. You get paid, I get freedom, and the Addams family gets closure. It’s a win-win-win.’
The plan, though shady, sounded logical. It must have been pure instinct that caused me to leap from the shadows and pounce at Lucy. Fred caught me midair by the scruff.
‘Please, Wes,’ said Waldo’s skull from his pile of bones. I looked from him to Lucy.
‘Or you can go and try to explain the truth to them. I tried and failed many times, but a cream addicted detective’s word will mean so much more to them than their sweet little Lucy’s.’ In Lucy’s sarcasm was a cold truth.
It took me a moment to consider my options before I had to admit Lucy had a sound plan and agreed to play my part.
‘You’re not as dumb as you look,’ Fred said to me. I scratched his nose and he dropped me. It took him several minutes of punching the empty shadows in search of me before he calmed down enough for me and his boss to talk over the details of the plan.
To see the hearts of the Addams break with my grim news nearly broke me. Several days later, I helped lower my own brother into a grave marked for a sweet cat who never existed. The rain set in as soon as the grave dirt had been tossed on top of the coffin. I walked back to my office without an umbrella, thinking myself undeserving. With the money for my trouble, I bought some premium cream I had hoped to enjoy in solitude. My office wasn’t empty, though. In the dark corner by the window, a figure stood.
I reached for my yo-yo, but quickly pocketed it.
‘Hannah.’
‘Any news on my property?’ the beautiful calico said in a husky voice, turning from the rain beating against the window glass.
‘Things came up.’
‘Like faking Lucy’s death?’
I froze, shocked to hear those words spoken. Was the con so easy to see? ‘How’d you know about that?’
‘I won’t be the only one soon enough. You really think Lucy is going to leave loose ends? He’s either going to take you out or ruin your credibility. He likes to keep his white paws clean and from what I hear you’re a mean marksman with that yo-yo, so I expect the latter.’
‘He’s going to call me out on burying Waldo for money… Pin the whole thing on me?’
Hannah nodded. ‘And who wouldn’t believe him when sweet Lucy shows up publicly and folks find out Waldo is your brother. You’ll be ruined.’
I paced back and forth a few times before I thought to question Hannah. ‘What’s your angle?’
‘The De Tullios stole something of mine, you’ll recall, and I need help getting it back.’
I didn’t even bother to sit down. I knew I’d have a long night ahead of me. I didn’t bother to ask what it was that was stolen either, for I knew Hannah would not say. ‘Let’s get to the hardware store.’
‘For what?’
‘Shovels. I have a brother to dig up.’
‘That’d take all night.’
‘Perhaps you’re correct.’
‘There’s no time. We’ll have to hire some grave diggers in Dead End.’
I nodded in agreement. ‘I can search for some leads while I’m there.’
So, yet again, I found myself journeying to the pits of the underworld, this time in the company of Miss Hannah Barbara. When we came upon the entrance sign to Dead End, I stopped. I might have come across as hesitant, but I was simply thinking about my path. My life felt like anything but a dead end in that moment. It felt like I had come to a fork of many directions, all leading into obscurity or suffering.
A couple of monsters strolled past me on tentacles and furry pipestems. They brought me back to my senses. I found my hand clutching at my yo-yo and let it go. These monsters were talking about Slender-Tenders and the pop star Loch Ness. Nothing harmful. I recalled suddenly how innocent Lucy seemed in Mrs. Addams photo and how mean he turned out to be. I guess it’s like I had said to Waldo, most everyone is a monster. Perhaps, if anything, it is motive that decides if one is bad or slightly less monstrous, or perhaps just perspective. I’ve always said I’d rather be on the good side of the wicked than the bad side of the lollipops upstairs, but then who wouldn’t? No one is truly innocent in my world, after all.
In any case, I was no one’s stooge. I’d walk my line. I’d get my justice. I was doomed—I always was, but with my yo-yo and my wits, I knew I had a good chance of coming out on top this time. Le Chat Noir would have the last laugh.
It’s a crooked world. Unfortunately for the villains, I have excellent balance.
To be continued….
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