Pipsqueak Read online

  “Then why work for him? You’ve got plenty of other clients, and it’s the busy preholiday season.”

  “Two words, Garth: Princess Madeline.” Her grin tightened, eyes twinkling. “Earrings made by Angie, worn by royalty.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah, but Mocano isn’t even a country, it’s a principality, for Pete’s sake.” I wiped my hands on a rag and took a step back from my work, giving Fred’s chops a critical once-over. I bowed before the finished product.

  “Hail, Princess of Mocano! Hail, Viscount of Pago Pago! Hail, Exchequer of Walla Walla!”

  “About ten minutes ago, Garth, you said you’d make coffee,” Angie sighed, forehead wrinkling, smile growing up one side of her face. “So how about it, Sugar Lips?”

  I shrugged at Fred. “Want coffee, Marquis de Fred? Oh, that’s right, it keeps you lion awake at night.” Angie groaned from somewhere behind me.

  I exited my cubby into the living room, which is also the kitchen, sort of. We live in one of those funky old New York City apartments folks rhapsodize over without realizing how drafty and cranky they really are. Remember soda shops, the kind where bobby-soxers slurped malteds and swooned to Dion 45s on the jukebox? No, not like the lame Happy Days set: older, the kind that looks like an old bar but with a big marble counter, black and white checked floors, and booths by a storefront window. That’s our place. We sleep in what once was a storeroom, the soda bar is our kitchen/dining room, and the booth in the window is our meal nook. The center of the room, where Angie and I broke our backs removing the decrepit black and white tile, is reserved for a colossal collection of taxidermy and some overstuffed furniture acquired on Park Avenue. Not in a store on Park Avenue but actually on the street, a common foraging ground for those of us who want real furniture (as opposed to IKEA breakaway stuntman furniture) but not the accompanying price tag.

  Every now and then, in good weather, we cruise Park Avenue, maybe Gramercy Park or the low teens around Fifth Avenue, looking for discarded furniture either to upgrade or add to the crew. We luck out often enough, particularly on Sunday evenings when the building superintendents put the stuff on the street for Monday trash pickup. No cat-piss sofas here. We’re talking primo castoffs from those who buy new furniture every year or so to fend off the charity-ball blues. (Many supers in doorman buildings have exquisite furnishings, more than they can use or give away.)

  Behind our soda bar, there’s a whole array of stainless-steel built-in containers that once held ice cream and toppings. Now they hold coffees, sugar, cookies, crackers, etc. And where the Mixmaster probably sat is the coffee grinder and coffeemaker. I scooped, ground, filled, poured, and grabbed two mugs from the forty or so we have lined up in front of the huge, discolored mirror behind the bar. Why so many mugs? Ask the people who think they make the perfect gift.

  “A guy stopped by looking for you today, Garth,” Angie yelled. “Forgot to tell you.”

  “Who?”

  “Said he’d stop by again. An old friend, he said.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “What’d he look like?”

  “Tweed suit, short hair. A slicker, that’s for sure.”

  Didn’t ring any bells, except on the phone, which rang. I let the machine pick up.

  “You’ve reached Carson Critter Rental. Leave a message and we’ll get back to you. Thanks. Beep.”

  “Hello, this is Janine Wilson, Warner Brothers, and we’re doing a shoot over in Brooklyn? We’re kind of in a jam, and I was hoping—”

  A distressed damsel with deep pockets? I picked up. “Sorry, I just walked in. This is Garth Carson. How can I help you?”

  “Hi. We’re doing a picture up in Park Slope, and we’ve got this sporting-goods-store scene. You rent taxidermy, right?”

  “Yup. Lemme guess: You’re looking for a stand-up bear, a deer head, a boar head too, perhaps, and then maybe something to sit on the counter like a beaver, otter, or wolverine?”

  “Uh, yeah, something like that, you know, to make it look like a sporting-goods store.”

  “Rental rates are structured by big, medium, and small. Full-body mounts like a stand-up bear or sailfish are big at $250. Most heads and fish under four feet are medium at $100. Squirrels, weasel, birds, and so on are small at $50. We rent by the day (or portion thereof) or by the week over five days. You can tell me exactly what you want or have me put together a variety based on how many you want of each category.”

  “Thing is, we sort of need this right away. Do you deliver?”

  I started untying my smock. “Delivery is included in the five boroughs with orders over two-fifty. But there’s a ten percent one-day surcharge for same-day service.”

  “Whatever. How about two of each?”

  “No preferences? Mammals, fish, birds? Mixed bag?”

  “Mixed bag.”

  “How many days?” My pen was poised over a pad.

  “I dunno. Let’s just say a week.”

  Zowie! $2,500 + 1,000 + 500 + surcharge = four thou and change. “Address?”

  Minutes later, I brought Angie her full mug.

  “Thanks.” She swiveled away from her bench, slid her goggles atop her head, and took the coffee. “Got work?”

  “Warner Brothers, in Brooklyn, Park Slope.” I drained my coffee and went to the closet for some moving blankets and polystyrene logs.

  “How many pieces?”

  “Six. Two each, for a week.”

  “Not bad!” Angie toasted the air with her coffee mug. “With the dreaded surcharge, no less.”

  “You bet. Gimme a hand?”

  “Sure.”

  In about forty minutes we had the trailer loaded with the standing black bear, though we had him on his back on polystyrene logs and blankets like he was tucked in for the night. In bed with the bruin was a nasty full-body wild pig. In the wild, they go after snakes, so I always bring a snake mount to put in the pig’s mouth—no extra charge. Arranged among blankets in the Lincoln’s backseat I had a ram’s head, a barracuda, a twin squirrel mount, and a wall-mount pheasant.

  Angie brushed some blanket fluff off her sweatshirt. “You’re set. Be home in an hour or so?”

  “Not if I can help it,” said a tweed man sauntering toward us.

  I was just a little thunderstruck. You know, just a little, like atop a castle in a storm holding a steel rod. I found no words, so the tweed man turned from me to Angie.

  “Hi.” He put out a hand. “The name’s Nicholas. Nicholas . . .” He gave me a sly look. “. . . Palihnic. Garth and I go way back. Childhood friends.”

  Angie sensed my shock but shook his hand cordially. “Hi. I’m Angie. You’ll have to excuse Garth, he’s just on his way—”

  “Still with the dead animals.” Palihnic surveyed the car’s backseat and locked eyes with me, nodding. “Garth never really was much one for words, were you?”

  “Hi, Nick,” I finally mumbled. “Where you been?”

  “I don’t want to hold you up, Garth. You headed out somewhere? Why don’t I ride along, and we can catch up.”

  “Yeah, sure.” I answered Angie’s stare with a glance and a wink to let her know nothing was wrong. “Let’s go.”

  “Fine.” Nicholas paused before opening the passenger door and admired the Lincoln. “Still got your dad’s old car.” He gave me one of his big smarmy smiles. “He’d be proud.”

  My little brother got in, shut the door, and we drove off toward the West Side Highway.

  Chapter 5

  Both as a brother and as a person, Nicholas had always harbored ulterior motives, a secret agenda that made him feel smarter than everybody else. It also made him a charming son of a gun, replete with a dash of freckles and farm-boy features. But now he looked a little too smooth for his own good, perhaps betrayed by the short, slick, dark hair with a little widow’s peak “flip” or the bags that had started to form under his eyes.

  I’d not seen this incarnation of Nicholas. The tweed seemed out of character, but maybe that
was the idea. I hadn’t heard from him in over fifteen years, and the last time I saw him was before he entered the Peace Corps, of all things. That had been just after our father’s funeral. Dad was a professional butterfly collector and finally succumbed to emphysema and congestive heart failure while chasing down spangled fritillaries in a field of marigolds. My father and I were kindred spirits, both possessed by a passion for collecting and identifying. As a kid I collected bugs by the thousands, and now I collect taxidermy, which is sort of the same thing, except on a much larger scale. And we shared a fondness for big convertibles, like the Lincoln he left me in his will.

  Anyway, Nicholas was often as not the object of Dad’s disapproval. He was not born with the scientific ethos that Dad and I shared: Rather, he seemed hatched from the egg of avarice. Even as a fledgling, Nicholas took a shine to the persuasive, psychological ploys of commerce. He couldn’t have been more than five before he started setting up all manner of stands out in front of the house, from which he proffered whatever he thought he could sell. We’re not talking about lemonade and cookies. Stock in trade was more like gold (rocks painted that way), the neighbors’ cats, dead batteries, worthless stock certificates, etc.

  I most vividly remember an early venture in which he made shoes out of cardboard. They were painted with watercolors, garden twine for laces. Some male teens came by his shop and laughed themselves sick, ridiculing him. Assuming he’d been humiliated, I went to console Nick after they left. He turned on a big sly grin and held up a crumpled dollar bill in his little fist. He didn’t care what they thought of his shoes or that the reason they bought a couple of pairs was to parade around in front of his stand. “Chumps!” was his reply to my compassion. Nicholas couldn’t have been more than seven then, and I’ll admit to being a little bit frightened of him ever since.

  So it had been plain to see that Nicholas was destined for Vegas, Wall Street, Sing Sing, or worse. He had his share of high-school troubles, pummelings, and suspensions: a pyramid scheme here, an applejack racket there. Rather than college, Nicholas used the bankroll he’d accumulated (which some of his varsity henchmen hinted was in excess of twenty-five grand) to buy into real estate. Using a shoebox full of Visa cards, he financed New York property deals that he turned to profit rapidly enough to pay off the creditors before incurring massive financing charges. Yeah, that gimmick they once advertised on TV. Well, it worked for him, and he became an overtipping hotshot and a club-scene fixture. Then he developed an obsession with penny stocks, around 1987, just before the market crashed. The brokers went to jail with all Nicholas’s pennies. And just after that, the New York real estate market slumped, and Nicholas found himself with creditors he couldn’t pay. A judge made him hand over the shoebox.

  This would have been all well and good had Nicholas not convinced Dad to invest with him, to allow Nicholas to make good on all the trouble he’d been. I was out of town while much of this happened, and if I’d got wind of this I would have tried to talk some sense back into Dad and some shame into Nicholas.

  “It’s not just for me, or for yourself,” Nicholas told Dad, “but for Mom. You guys aren’t getting any younger, and what if something happens and you or Mom needs a long hospital stay? You can’t pay the hospital with butterflies.” Little did Nicholas know the old man was having lung trouble.

  Dad was sucked into the scheme and became an eager, willing participant. Anyway, he took the loss hard, and even though I offered to kick in what little I had, Dad insisted on an absurd quest to earn back his lost nest egg. Any idea how many butterflies he’d have to sell to make a couple hundred grand? That’s how he died, a septuagenarian run amok with a butterfly net.

  Well, I was contemptuous of my brother for bedeviling Dad. And while Nicholas acted like he was devastated, I was too jaded by that time, as I think Mom was, to believe he was upset about anything but his own financial calamity. In a bizarre bid to prove his sincerity, he enacted his own redemption by way of the Peace Corps. (The Foreign Legion had turned him down.) That was the last we heard of Nicholas. Well, almost. Mom and I each got a postcard from him that first year, strictly factual stuff with no indication he’d had any moral or ethical awakening. Nicholas sounded bored out of his mind. After that, we got several inquiries from Peace Corps officials wanting to know if we’d heard from him. Apparently, he’d gone AWOL in New Guinea. I rather fancied cannibals had made Nicholas Stew, though I imagined he’d have wangled a pretty fair price per pound for himself before climbing into the pot.

  I’d never told Angie much about Nicholas, except to say he was a black sheep. Angie’s the inquisitive type (to say the least), and for a time she urged me to track down my lost brother. “He’ll show up one day, Angie,” I said. “Then you may be sorry.”

  “Garth, you look good behind the wheel of Dad’s Lincoln, you really do. It’s right where you belong, like a captain behind the wheel of his ship. And still with that rockabilly blond hair the girls like so much. Little cool for the top down, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t say anything as I made a sweeping left onto the highway. Then I looked him up and down, his left elbow over the seat back, the other over the door. “Palihnic?”

  He winced and shrugged in one motion. “I like anonymity. Besides, I like the sound of Nicholas Palihnic. It’s a name people remember.”

  “And New Guinea?”

  “Some parts were okay, others were hard.” Nicholas surveyed the Hudson River and the distant lights of Jersey City, his voice tightening. “I survived.”

  “Redeemed?”

  He laughed like he’d rolled craps twice in a row, his eyes sharp. “Hard-ass, that’s what we always liked about you, Garth.” Nicholas would substitute we for I to give his sarcasm a royal sting. “Let’s you and me play nice. We’re big boys now. I don’t call you a chump, and you don’t call me a scoundrel. Role-playing is dull stuff.”

  Ha. That was good, coming from him. “I’ll take that as a no, then. What brings you to town?”

  Nicholas threw his arms out. “This is my town, Garth. I live here, I hang my shingle here. I have for—what? Six years or more?”

  The Lincoln slid into the Battery underpass. “So, what’s written on your shingle, Nicholas?”

  “Professional Killer. International Jewel Thief. Food Stamps Accepted.” He snorted at my pained expression. “Lighten up, Garth. I’m not here to borrow money or steal your wife. But then, Angie’s not your wife, is she? What do they call it? She’s your ‘Cohab,’ your ‘SigOt,’ your ‘DomPart,’ your—”

  “Companion will do.” I didn’t like Nicholas talking about her.

  “And I haven’t come looking for any pointers on taxidermy either. Christ! You know, you may not be very proud of your little brother, but it isn’t easy telling people your big brother deals taxidermy.” Nicholas raised an eyebrow at the animals in the backseat. “To think you could turn that hobby into a buck. A lot of people find that dead stuff just a little creepy, Garth.”

  We pulled up to the tollbooth, and I handed the attendant a ten. She handed me a receipt and change, giving my backseat passengers a double take.

  “Been following up on me, Nicholas?”

  “Yup. I’m a regular Columbo with the Yellow Pages.”

  “They have my marital status in the book?”

  “I asked your landlord this afternoon while he was sweeping the walk. Talkative fellow.”

  “So, what is it you want, then?”

  “Garth, I am not El Diablo,” Nicholas sighed. “Isn’t it possible I just wanted to drop in and catch up with my disapproving big brother? You know, like old times, maybe I just wanted to come by and push all your buttons, watch you bristle?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “See, like that! You’re bristling!”

  “Am not.”

  “Well, what do you call that?”

  “What?” I sat back and unbugged my eyes, steering the Lincoln onto the Prospect Expressway.

  “That’
s better,” Nicholas chortled. “Relax, Garth, my baby-eating days are over. These days I undo other scoundrels. I’m an investigator.”

  “Investigating what?”

  He tucked a card into my shirt pocket. “Thefts. Art, jewels, valuables. For insurance companies.” He searched his inside jacket pocket and came up with a pen, which he held up for me to see. “I even have my own promotional pens, so people can write me checks and get the name spelled right.” He slipped it into my inside sport-coat pocket. “Sorry, all out of air fresheners.”

  “An insurance investigator? What’s the angle?”

  “I get a percentage of whatever I recover. Mostly, I try to locate the thief and bargain for return of the goods. Other times, I arrange to take back what was stolen.”

  “You apprehend criminals?”

  “There’s no money in apprehending anybody, especially if you end up with a knife in your neck. No, I just go for the item. You’d be surprised how reasonable a lot of these thieves can be when properly motivated.”

  “Sounds more like you’re a fence.” I veered the Lincoln onto the Tenth Avenue off-ramp and came to a stop sign. “Should I ask how you got into this business?”

  “Er, probably not.”

  “Should I ask again why you’ve chosen now to reappear?”

  “Maybe once we unload your ‘critters,’ we should drop in for a drink somewhere. I know a bar over here . . . no, that place is too Brooklyn. I know another place.”

  At a traffic signal, I gave him what he used to call my X-ray-vision look, my Amazing Kreskin glare, my sodium pentathol stare. The glow from the stoplight shone red on his face and eyes.

  “I really think you want to hear this over a drink, Garth.”

  “Tell me.”

  Nicholas took a deep breath, and his face turned green. “I’m looking for Pipsqueak.”