Pipsqueak (4 page)

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

Chapter 5

B
oth 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.”

Chapter 6

B
eck’s.” Chin in my hand, I grinned faintly at the young blonde in a midriff.

“Macallan on the rocks. Double twist.” Nicholas smiled at the bartender. “It’s Kelley, isn’t it?”

She smiled back quizzically, tossing coasters on the bar in front of us. “Yeah. How you doin’?”

“Just swell, thanks.”

She went about getting the drinks, and Nicholas pulled from his pocket a pile of newspaper clippings with various phrases highlighted in yellow. He put on a pair of wire-rim specs, with too much flourish, I thought.

Unlike the few pubs I’d been to in Brooklyn, this bar wasn’t your typical outer-borough place where strangers are ogled like invaders from Alpha Centauri. It was akin to the comfy taverns in Manhattan: dark, with an ornate wooden bar-back proscenium and mini-spots lighting the bottles.

Nicholas pointed a clipping at me. “So it’s like this woman who took the squirrel was in a costume?”

“Read that in the papers?”

“Who’s Columbo now? Yes, in the papers, Garth.”

“And you’ve been hired by . . . ?”

Nicholas smiled, wagging his head.

“Can’t say. Client confidentiality.”

“An insurance company, then?”

“Could be. Point is, Pipsqueak was stolen from somebody and ended up in Tiny Timeless Treasures as part of an estate sale.”

“Here y’go.” Kelley placed our drinks and Nicholas handed her a twenty. He held out his drink to mine for a clink. “Auld lang syne?”

I clinked without relish, and Nicholas wagged a finger at me. “Grumpy Garth. You’ll have to show a little enthusiasm if we’re going to rescue Pipsqueak.”

I hiccuped. “Rescue? We?”

“I need your help to find Pipsqueak, Garth! You’re the only one who’ll recognize this woman.”

“You know what she looks like from [
hiccup
] the papers. Red and white checked shirt, blue jeans, red lipstick . . .”

“Right. Elly May Clampett driving a Packard. Good. I’ll get right on it, Garth.”

“It was a Chrysler. That I’d recognize.”

“But not Elly May.”

“She was in that costume with painted freckles. I seriously doubt anybody goes around dressed like a
Hee Haw
refugee. So how am I going to [
hic
]—damn hiccups—recognize her?”

“You saw the way she moved, her speech patterns, the look in her eye. The indescribable.”

I lowered my brow, looking up into Nicholas’s eyes. “I’m not one of your ‘chumps,’ Mr.
Palihnic
[
hic
].”

“You don’t care about Pipsqueak, object of even
my
desire as a youngster?”

I smiled grimly. “Except you desired to kidnap him and ransom him back to General Buster.”

“Is that much worse than the schemes you must have been considering when you saw him in Tiny Timeless Treasures? Let’s see, maybe you aimed to pay the shop owner a fraction of what he was worth. By a factor of, what, ten? Is that ripping someone off? Is that stealing?”

“I won’t debate this with you, Nicholas. The point is, I don’t want to get involved with the criminal element again.”

“Again?”

“[
Hic.
]” I thought about that a second and decided I didn’t really want Nicholas to have the satisfaction of savoring sour morsels from my past. I didn’t want him getting any ideas that he and I were in any way alike. “I, uh, once turned in some black marketeers selling bear gallbladders. Had to go [
hic
] to court, waste a lot of time. It’s not my racket, Nicholas.”

“You don’t say?” He took his glasses and pointed them at me. “Fair enough. I wouldn’t want you in on a crusade you don’t believe in, and I certainly wouldn’t want you to waste your time. Like any other subcontractor, I’ll pay you.”

“Pay me? To do what?”

“One evening, maybe two, but that’s all. I’ll pay you thirty bucks cash an hour, off the books. We go to a few clubs, look for Elly May. I think I have an idea where she might hang out.”

“Tiny Timeless Treasures is way out in New Jersey. You think she’s in New York?”

“Might be. There are clubs that cater to people who dress up. I’ll need you to make a couple of hundred easy bucks to find out.”

I was suddenly interested. But then I noticed the eyeglasses in Nicholas’s hand: His index finger was protruding through where the lens should be. They were fake glasses, a prop, which for whatever reason put my thoughts on Dad. My mood darkened. “Easy money, huh?” I finished my beer, stood up, and started working my pants pocket for loose bills. “It’s always about easy money.”

Nicholas flushed. He knew I was reflecting on Dad. “Gimme a damn break, Garth. Just what makes you so perfect, so good, and so true of heart that with a clear conscience you call me a monster? I’ll play our damn childhood game if it’s the only one you know, but I’d kinda hoped you’d grown up a little. Life’s not checkers.”

I almost said something, but felt any retort would have no greater effect than my silent disapproval. Turning from my stool, I went through the door. Outside and walking to my car, I heard him yell after me.

“Life’s a game of chess, Garth, and the moves you make aren’t always your own.”

I’d forgotten that. It was never enough for him to have the last word. He had to have it twice.