“Sure. I recall.”
“Well, they sound like a trio of pedophiles to me. Captain Cupcake liked the kids to lick his icing and Twinkie was always shoving his sponge cake in their mouths so they could taste his creamy filling. I bet when old Fruit Pie the Magician hung around grade schools, fruit pies weren’t the only thing he made disappear.”
“That’s enough,” Ronny said.
“Ah, you’re still mad because I was ribbing you about your wife.” Piggy put his hand next to his mouth like he wanted to tell the audience a secret. “Is it my fault his wife spreads faster than a brushfire? We’re talking the champion sword-swallower of Cook County here, people.”
“Why don’t you quit picking on people,” Ronny told him.
“Okay, okay.” Piggy tapped a hand to the side of his head. “Hey, Ronny, you hear that Newt Gingrich was a test tube baby?”
“No, I didn’t know that.”
“It’s true. Even then he wasn’t worth a fuck.”
This was the part of the show where Piggy started launching his one liners and the drunks absolutely loved it. Sometimes Ronny and Piggy would do three or four encores.
“Hey, Ronny, what do you call two lesbians in a closet?”
“I don’t know. What do you call two lesbians in a closet?”
“A liquor cabinet,” Piggy said. “You hear about the two lesbians that built a house?”
“No, what happened?”
“Well, it’s pretty nice place… no studs, all tongue and groove.”
It went on rapid-fire like that for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, but slowly but surely the laughs were milked from the crowd and Ronny was beginning to look uncomfortable. Piggy was getting that shine in his eyes, looking like Howdy Doody from hell.
“I think we’re falling flatter than your wife’s chest here, Ronny,” Piggy said in that squeaking voice. “Maybe what these people want is real entertainment… should I give ’em something they’ll never forget?”
Ronny licked his lips, swallowed. “No, ha, ha, don’t do that.”
The dummy seemed to be grinning. “Got a story for you, folks. Listen closely: Mama, Mama, Mama McBane, she had two children who caused her great pain. She was only happy after they were slain. She had another son who was completely insane. The doctors all agreed there was something wrong with his brain. He began to crack under the enormous strain. So what could he do, old Ronny McBane? He delved in the darkness with knowledge arcane. What he did was wholly profane. He snatched two bodies from where they had lain. And now his life is one ugly stain. Isn’t it shocking about Mama McBane?”
“That’s enough!” Ronny cried out.
“Aw, come on, let’s heat this joint up.”
“Please, Piggy.”
“You don’t think they’d like me doing that?” There was an intensity to the dummy now, an edge there that was somehow sadistic, twisted, and not very funny. “Maybe they want me to pull a rabbit out of a hat? I can’t do that, but I can pull something out of thin air that’ll turn their hair white…”
“Okay, Piggy, stop that,” Ronny said. “It’s not very funny…”
“Oh, you’re wrong, this is going to be a real hot one…”
Piggy was laughing and laughing with that shrill, scratching sound like fingernails on blackboards and it was loud, resounding, echoing, that malefic gleam in his eye.
The atmosphere of the Bamboo Lounge went from being drunk and care-free to somehow savage and deadly. Nobody was laughing, nobody was doing much of anything but squirming in their seats.
And about that time, somebody in the audience started screaming.
9
Danny Paul Regis looked like the sort of guy who broke legs for a living. He was big and meaty with a head like a cinder block, pumped with bad attitude and experience honed during twenty-odd years of swimming in the gutters and cesspools of the city. But as he liked to say, he knew dirt. He knew where to find it and what it smelled like, what it felt like when you got it all over your hands. There wasn’t a rug made that he couldn’t shake it out of.
And in his given profession as a private investigator, these attributes came in pretty damn handy. You wanted the job done? You wanted a guy who knew every nook and cranny of the dirty underbelly of the city? Then you wanted Danny Paul Regis.
So when, after four days on the McBane investigation, Regis called Kitty Seevers to his office for a little chit-chat, she knew he had something.
“I’ll tell you right off, Miss Seavers, that this whole McBane thing stinks bad,” he said, pouring her a cup of coffee. “I’ve seen my share of bad in this business and what you put me onto here, it’s bad. Oh, yes.”
Maybe he expected Kitty to be shocked, but she wasn’t. The deeper she dug on Ronny McBane the blacker and more rank the soil became. “Really?” she said.
“Oh yes, this one is really something. But don’t take that the wrong way,” Regis said, smiling now. “You chase enough adulterous housewives around, something like this really gets your gears turning. And that’s no shit. I love getting my teeth into a freakshow like this.”
For a lack of anything better to say, she said, “Well, I hope it didn’t disturb you or anything.”
Regis thought that was funny. “Disturb me? Ha, you can’t disturb a guy like me, Miss Seevers. I’ve had my nose in human trash for too goddamn long. Now and then you can surprise me and sometimes you can piss me off and make me wish to God certain people weren’t born, but you can’t disturb me.” He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “What I found out was weird, but unfortunately, as yet, it’s not bringing us any closer to your sister.”
Kitty felt her heart drop. “No?”
He shook his head. “This is just preliminary stuff. Getting a feel for Ronny McBane you might call it.”
Kitty said, “What did you find out?”
“Well first off, let’s start with what happened over at the Bamboo lounge a few nights ago. I’m sure you heard about that little tanglefuck… hell, the papers and TV ain’t talking about much else in this city.”
Kitty knew about it, all right.
And it was just another little gem for her collection: there had been a fire at the Bamboo Lounge. And, as it so happened, the fire started during the Ronny M. and Piggy show. Of course, the media wasn’t seeing the implications of that. Most of the patrons escaped with minor injuries, but twenty of them were roasted to smoking husks. The media, true to form, were following the usual tract—overcrowding in the club, poor wiring, numerous safety violations. Ho-hum.
Kitty, however, had a few ideas of her own, and they were the sort of things she was afraid to admit even to herself. It was a coincidence, the reasoning mind would say, that Ronny and the dummy happened to be on stage. But some coincidences grew less coincidental the closer you looked at them.
She told Regis what she knew and he laughed. “Now are you ready for what really happened?”
Kitty swallowed. “I don’t know… Am I?”
Regis looked her straight in the eye. “You familiar with the theory of spontaneous combustion?” He saw that she was. “I was in on one of these investigations years back and that one was strange, but this is a little stranger. See, in a good many spontaneous combustion cases, the body will burn itself to cinders, yet sometimes the bed it lays on or the chair it sits on will remain un-singed. Go figure.”
“Are you saying these people just burst into flame?”
“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Regis explained. “It’s the investigating cops that are saying it. Those twenty stiffs went up and didn’t even melt the vinyl cushions on their seats. A few witnesses said they saw it… just those random twenty people all of a sudden billowing with smoke. By the time they realized what was happening, they were engulfed in flames.”