Wicked Appetite

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Lenny lived in a medium-size colonial on a tree-lined street in north Salem. A plaque on the house proclaimed it to have been built in 1897. The Camry was parked at the curb when we arrived. A FOR SALE sign was stuck in a patch of sketchy grass in the front yard. Diesel found a space half a block away, parked the Cayenne, and we walked back to Lenny’s house.

“According to my source, Lenny’s recently married and recently divorced,” Diesel said. “He was a junior exec in a bank, got fired six months ago, and picked up the claims adjuster job at the end of March.”

Lenny answered the door in dress slacks and a rumpled dress shirt. He had a drink in his hand, his breath was hundred-proof, his eyes were bloodshot, his thinning, sandy blond hair was mussed, and he was wearing a thick, spiked dog collar around his neck.

“Had a hard day?” Diesel asked him.

“Not necessarily,” Leonard said, “but things could pick up. What can I do you for?”

“I’d like to talk to you about your inheritance.”

“You and everyone else.”

“Who’s everyone else?” Diesel asked.

“My brother, for starters. And some cool dude who looks like he has real pain potential.” Lenny slurked down his drink and stared into the empty glass. “Uh-oh, all gone.” He turned and walked into the kitchen, and we followed.

“Do you know the cool dude’s name?” Diesel asked.

Lenny poured more whiskey into his glass. “Wolf. Is that a badass name, or what?” He blinked up at Diesel. “You want some hooch?” He squinted over at me. “You want some?”

“No,” I said. “But thanks. This thing you inherited, it was a ladybug, right?”

“Wrong. And I’m not telling anybody anything, because then I’ll have bad luck forever and ever.”

“That’s baloney,” I said. “No one can put a whammy on you and give you bad luck forever.”

“Hah!” Leonard said. “You didn’t know Uncle Phil. He was a scary kookadoo. He could give you the stink eye.” Leonard held one eye closed with his finger and looked at me with his other bloodshot eye. “And one time, I saw him turn a cat into a fry pan.”

Two days ago, I wouldn’t have believed that was possible, but now I didn’t know what to believe.

Diesel was handing me things off the kitchen counter. Egg timer, key ring, Ping-Pong paddle. I held each of them for a moment and gave them back. Spatula, pot holder, saucepan.

“What’s with the dog collar?” Diesel asked.

“It’s an accessory,” Lenny said. “Some men wear ties. I prefer a dog collar.”

“Fondle it,” Diesel said to me.

“No way!”

“It’s an accessory,” Diesel said. “Think of it like jewelry. He probably got it at Cartier.”

“Wrong,” Lenny said. “Petco.”

I reached out and touched the collar. Nothing. I touched his watch. Nothing there, either.

“Suppose I guessed the inheritance?” I asked Lenny. “Would that be okay?”

“It’s a free country,” Lenny said. “I can’t stop you from guessing. Anyway, you’ll never guess it, and even if you do guess right, you’ll never find it. It’s hidden and booby-trapped.”

Diesel opened an under-the-counter drawer and pulled out handcuffs attached to a heavy chain.

“Sometimes I’m a bad boy, and I need to be punished,” Lenny said. “I have more stuff in my bedroom if you want to see.”

“No!” I said. “Gee, look at the time. I have to go now.”

Diesel wrapped an arm around me. “We can take a couple minutes to check out the dude’s bedroom,” Diesel said. “I bet he keeps his inheritance in there.”

“Don’t know. Don’t care,” I said.

“Has Shirley seen your inheritance?” Diesel asked Lenny.

“Nope. Nobody’s seen it but me and good ol’ deader-than-a-doorknob Uncle Phil. And nobody’s gonna see it, either, because I can keep a secret. You can ask my wife. Oops, I mean ex-wife. She didn’t know about lots of things. And then when she found out, she turned into a real party pooper.”

“Did you tell her about your inheritance?” I asked.

“No. I told her about my paddle collection and my cyber slut. I thought she’d be excited, but she packed her bags and left.”

“Gosh, go figure,” I said, thinking I’d touched the Ping-Pong paddle, wondering if I had hand sanitizer in my purse.

“When did you start collecting paddles?” Diesel asked Lenny.

Lenny rocked back on his heels. “Five or six years ago. One day, it just came over me that I needed a good whacking. And now I can’t get enough of it.”

“Jeez,” I said.

Diesel leaned close, his lips brushing my ear. “At least it’s not fattening.”

If I had to make a choice between getting disciplined by the cyber slut or gaining a hundred pounds, I’d probably go with the cupcake obsession.

“We need to talk to you about the inheritance,” I said.

“Sure. What about it?”

“Where is it?”

“That’s for you to know and me to find out,” Lenny said.

Diesel and I exchanged glances. Lenny was snockered. Helpful for extracting information. Not helpful if he didn’t make any more sense than Shirley.

“Is it in the bedroom?” I asked.

“Used to be.” He looked into his glass. “Empty,” he said. “So sad.”

“He needs food,” I said to Diesel.

Diesel opened the refrigerator and looked inside. “A half-empty bottle of Aquavit, a can of Crisco, and a rubber chicken. That’s it.”

“There’s no food in here,” I said to Lenny.

Lenny stuck his head in the fridge. “There’s a chicken.”

“It’s rubber,” Diesel said, looking like he was going to rupture something trying not to laugh out loud.

“Is that bad?” Leonard asked.

I looked around the kitchen. No bread. No fruit. No coffeemaker. No kitchen knives. No cookie jar. The lone metal spatula I’d tested was propped up in the dish drain. I now had new concerns about its use. I ransacked the cupboards and came up with a box of granola bars. I gave one to Diesel and one to Lenny.

“About the inheritance,” I said to Lenny.

“Can’t get it,” Lenny said. “It’s booby-trapped.”

“Yes, but you know how to disarm it, right?”

Lenny shoved half a granola bar into his mouth. “Nuh. Didn’t think of that. It was during the divorce, and the party pooper took the toaster, and so I got this idea that she was after my inheritance, so I hid it and booby-trapped it. I was doing recreational drinking at the time. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s a piece of junk.”

“Here’s the thing,” I said to Lenny. “It turns out your inheritance might be… enchanted.”

“Don’t care.”

“Of course you care. It’s a Gluttonoid.”

Diesel grinned at me and rocked back on his heels. “Gluttonoid. Boy, that’s a great name. How’d you ever come up with that one?”

Lenny slumped against the counter. “What’s a Gluttonoid?”

“It’s an object that turns people into gluttons. In your case, you’re a glutton for punishment. If we remove the object, there’s a good chance you’ll return to normal,” I told him.

“No more hanky panky spanky?” Lenny asked. “What if I’m a bad boy?”

“Dude, you’re freaking me out,” Diesel said. “Get a grip.”

“This is creepy. And I don’t like the whole booby-trap thing,” I said to Diesel. “Why don’t we let Wulf get this one? With any luck, he’ll blow himself up.”

Diesel looked at Lenny. “Tell me about the booby trap. Are we talking major explosion?”

“Not atomic,” Lenny said.

“Would it kill Superman?”

“You’d need kryptonite to do that.”

“Okay, how about Batman?”

“I don’t know. Batman is tricky.”

“So the let-Wulf-get-the-charm plan won’t work,” Diesel said to me. “Doesn’t sound like we can count on it to kill him.”

The house was around two thousand square feet. Living room, dining room, kitchen, powder room, mudroom leading to the back door. The bedrooms were obviously upstairs. Impossible to know if Lenny had gone to the dark side because of the charm, but going on the assumption that this was the case, I thought the charm most likely was in the house. Hard to believe any of this was real but even more difficult to believe the charm could leak onto someone without consistent exposure. And if I booby-trapped something in my house, it wouldn’t be in a high-traffic area. I’d want it out of the way, hidden from sight.

“Do you have a cellar?” I asked Lenny.

“Yep.”

“Did you hide your inheritance in your cellar?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“I’d had a lot to drink. A real lot. And I tried a bunch of different places before I settled. And it was a long time ago.”

“Your wife’s only been gone for three months,” Diesel said.

“She was a party pooper,” Lenny said. “Did I already tell you that? Anyway, you can look around the cellar if you want, but I’m not going. It’s scary down there. And I might have booby-trapped it.”

Diesel opened the cellar door and went down the steep, narrow stairwell. He got to the bottom and looked back at me.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?”

“Are you coming down?”

“No.”

He was wearing jeans and a cream-colored cotton crew-neck sweater with the sleeves pushed to his elbows. His teeth were white against his beach bum tan. And he was looking very big in the small cellar.

“There are some things I’d like you to hold,” he said.

“I bet.”

“I meant potential charm things.”

“I knew that. Are you sure it’s safe down there?”

He did arms outstretched. “No bad guys or obvious booby traps.”

“What about spiders?”

“Haven’t seen any.”

I cautiously crept down the stairs, stood next to Diesel, and looked around. The cellar floor was crudely poured cement. The walls were mortar and stone. A bare 60-watt bulb lit the space. The air was cool and damp and smelled musty, like rotting wood and mildew. The ceiling was riddled with pipes, and wires running along support beams. The water heater and furnace were to one side. The rest of the cellar was cluttered with plastic bins and cardboard boxes.

“You don’t expect me to go through all these bins and boxes, do you?” I asked Diesel.

“Yeah.”

“It’ll take hours. And what about the hiding and the booby-trapping? This stuff’s just sitting here.”

“No stone unturned,” Diesel said. “No pun intended.”

Okay, let’s get this out in the open. First, I’m a big coward. I don’t like the idea of getting blown up, and I don’t like spiders. I know at first glance we don’t see any spiders, but they’re sneaky. They hide in places and then jump out at you. And second, what about my muffins and my cookbook? I don’t have time to save the world. I need cookbook money to fix my foundation, or my house is going to fall over. And third, this whole thing is weirding me out. It would make a good television show, but things like this aren’t supposed to happen in real life.

“If we go back to my house, you can eat more muffins,” I said to Diesel.

“If we stay here and go through these bins, I’ll get out of your bed.”

“Really?”

“Scout’s honor,” Diesel said, wrangling the lid off a plastic bin.

I looked inside the bin and found it was filled with sheet music for classical guitar. The second bin Diesel opened held CDs. Opera, guitar, symphonies. A lot of Haydn and Mozart and artists out of my scope of knowledge.

“Hey, Lenny!” I yelled up the stairs. “Do you play the guitar?”

“Used to,” he said. “Traded it for a fraternity paddle used in the movie Animal House. It’s a collector’s item.”

“That’s so sad,” I said to Diesel. “He had a whole other life before his inheritance.”

“Focus,” Diesel said. “At the risk of seeming insensitive, I don’t care about his life then or now. I care about the charm. Anyway, he’s got the paddle used in Animal House. I’m jealous.”

Fortunately, the rest of the bins contained neatly folded men’s clothes, which was sad only in Lenny’s sometimes unfortunate choices in ties. I ripped through the bins in record time, and Diesel opened the first of the boxes.

“Are you okay up there?” he called to Leonard.

“I want a pizza.”

“We have three boxes to check out, and then it’s pizza time,” Diesel told him.

The boxes were filled with the sort of junk you acquire over a lifetime and can’t discard but no longer need. A baseball mitt, a broken stapler, a bunch of photos, Hardy Boys books, a commemorative chunk of the Berlin Wall, a cassette player, a bicycle chain, his high school yearbook, a kitty litter scooper.

I was making my way through the last box when there was a whoosh of air, the cellar door slammed shut, and the light went out, throwing us into utter blackness. Diesel moved flat against my back, his arm tight around my waist. There was thirty seconds of wind screaming on the other side of the door, and then all was quiet and the light blinked back on.

“What was th-th-that?” I asked, my heart knocking around in my chest.

Diesel took my hand and tugged me up the stairs. “That was Wulf.”

“Is he here?”

“Not anymore.” Diesel opened the cellar door and stepped into the kitchen. “And neither is Lenny.”

“Where’d they go? Are you sure Lenny isn’t here?” I looked around the kitchen. Nothing was out of place. No sign of struggle. No damage from the howling wind. “It sounded like a tornado blew through here. Why aren’t things tossed around?”

“I guess that wasn’t part of the show,” Diesel said.

“And you think it was Wulf?”

“I know it was Wulf. I can sense his presence.”

“How?”

“I know his scent. The air pressure changes. I get a cramp in my ass.”

I didn’t notice a change in the air pressure, and my nose was still stuffed with cellar smells. Fine by me. I didn’t want to add any more special skills to my Unmentionableness. I already had one too many. I could deal with baking Unmentionable cupcakes. I’d like to lose the empowered objects thing.

“Where did Wulf take Lenny?” I asked Diesel.

Diesel shrugged. “Someplace to talk.”

I had a really icky feeling in my stomach. Lenny was creepy, but he didn’t seem like a bad person, and I wasn’t happy about him being whisked away.

“Wulf won’t do the death claw on him, will he?”

“Not as long as he needs him,” Diesel said. “A dead man can’t tell you where the treasure is hidden. If we weren’t here, I’m sure Wulf would have stayed and had Steven Hatchet sweep the house.”

“So now what? Do we chase Wulf down and duke it out with him?”

“That would be the movie version. In the real-life version, we go through the rest of the house and look for the inheritance.”

I wasn’t crazy about either of the versions. I wanted to get back to my muffins.

“The muffins will wait,” Diesel said. “Let’s start upstairs.”