Fun House

18

We climb back into our Crown Viccruiser.

“You want to swing by Big Kahuna’s later?” I say as I crank the ignition so I can blast the AC before the heat radiating off the seats bakes us into a pair of crispy cop cookies. “My friend Bud, the bartender, might’ve seen something when the film crew was in there last night.”

Ceepak nods slowly, the way he does when he’s half-listening to what I’m saying because he’s busy thinking about something much more important.

“You remember Bud?” I say. “He helped us back when your father was-”

“Danny?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s go grab a black-eyed pea cake and a plate of tofu scramble.”

I glance at the dashboard digital. It’s 3 P.M., 1500 hours in the Ceepak Time Zone. But he’s not thinking about a late lunch or early dinner.

He wants to go talk to the person who first tipped us off to Skeletor’s drug dealings.

Gladys at Veggin’ On The Beach.

We met Gladys a couple summers ago when Ceepak and I were working our first case together. She was a homeless person living out of a shopping cart in the crumbling remains of The Palace, which had once been a grand old hotel, at the northern tip of the island.

Back then, Gladys was dating a druggie drifter everybody called Squeegie. Gladys refused to call him that, because she found the nickname demeaning, “likening a human soul to a tool capitalist pigs use to wipe away the grime of greed warping their windows.”

She’s probably what people whose job it is to shout at each other on cable TV all day would call a commie pinko or a Nazi, even though Ceepak has informed me that commies and Nazis are “polar opposites on the political spectrum.”

This is why Ceepak and Rita spend more time at Veggin’ On The Beach than I do. The restaurant is way too intellectual for me. Besides, I like meat in my sandwiches, not tempeh bacon, pan-seared seiten, or hiziki seaweed.

We head east, cutting across the island, aiming for Ocean Avenue and Hickory Street. The restaurant, which always smells like stewed beets, is set up in a brightly colored cottage right in front of the sand dunes.

We pull into the parking lot where Stan The Vegetable Man-a ten-foot-tall plywood portrait of this dude with a smiling pumpkin head, tomato torso, carrot legs, and corncob feet, greets us. There are about a dozen newspaper machines lined up in front of the porch, because Gladys thinks all newspapers print nothing but lies fed to them by “the man” so maybe if you read enough of them you can cobble together the truth for yourself.

I check out the headline peeking through the window on The Sandpaper box (our weekly newspaper). Apparently, “Fun Hou$e = Be$t Touri$t $ea$on Ever!” Cash registers up and down the island are having sunny, funderful days. It’s amazing what a hit TV show will do for T-shirt and trinket sales.

We climb the plank-and-beam steps, push open the screen door.

Ceepak enters first like he always does when we’re heading into dangerous territory. Hey, it’s a scientific fact: soybean products, such as tofu, make people fart. The last time Ceepak decided we should grab lunch at Gladys’s, there were so many butt barks I thought we’d walked into a trombone recital.

Gladys is behind the counter, wrangling with a sagging sack of sweet potatoes she means to steam on an August day when it’s already 95 and extremely steamy outside. Oh, Veggin’ On The Beach doesn’t believe in air-conditioning. It’s bad for the ozone, not to mention the electric bill.

“Good afternoon, Gladys,” says Ceepak as he strides up to the counter.

“Easy for you to say. You’re not the one hoisting a damn fifty-pound sack of yams.”

Ceepak goes over to the stove to lend a hand. Even he has trouble getting a grip on the bag as the gnarly tubers tumble around inside the burlap.

“Careful, jarhead. You bruise a sweet potato, it turns to mush fast.”

“Roger that.” Finally he is able to hoist the burlap sack up and over the steaming kettle and empty out a rumbling rockslide.

“Thanks, John,” says Gladys, who is a small woman. In fact, she’s so short, I wonder how she dumps anything into her stock-pots without climbing on a stepstool or calling Ceepak for backup. Today, she’s wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt with no sleeves and no bra underneath. She’s also sixty-something with boobs bigger than the Casaba melons on the brunch menu, so I think, maybe for the first time in my life, a bra here would be a good thing.

“What are you making?” asks Ceepak.

“Spicy sweet potato and coconut soup. Marty Mandrake and a bunch of those other jerks working on Dumb House love organic vegan food. We’ve been mobbed since they rolled into town from La-La Land. I shouldn’t complain-but, if I didn’t, then I wouldn’t be me.”

Ceepak grins.

“So, how the fuck you boys been?”

Gladys may be sixty-something, but she’s not what you might call grandmotherly about it.

“I’ve had better days,” says Ceepak.

“Really? So now you know how a dairy cow feels, artificially inseminated year after year so she’ll keep on pumping out milk even though her newborn calf is snatched away from her two seconds after it’s born because the farmer man doesn’t want her to waste any of her milk on her own children, leaving more for those assholes at Skipper Dipper so they can make fifty fucking flavors of ice cream out of the life-giving nectar leeched from her teats!”

Ceepak just nods. Guess he’s used to Gladys’s rants.

Vegans are much tougher than vegetarians. Don’t like the exploitation and abuse of animals that fills half the refrigerator cases at the Acme Supermarket. There’s a bumper sticker slapped to the back of Gladys’s cash register: “Heart Attacks. God’s Revenge For Eating His Animals.”

“You want some apple crisp?” She gestures to a pan of gloppy brown goo on a cake plate under a dome.

“No, thank you,” says Ceepak. “Is Jerry here?”

Jerry is Squeegee’s real name.

“He and the dog took the truck and headed over to the mainland,” says Gladys. “Jerry says he found a deal on some juicing equipment up near New Brunswick.”

“I see.”

“I think they’re really in Bridgewater. There’s a Fuddruckers.”

Ceepak gives her a confused cock of his head.

“It’s a burger chain, meathead! They sell hamburgers with two thirds of a pound of chopped beef squatting on the bun! They make milkshakes-in one of those machines where the steel blades scrape against the steel canister, which should fucking remind people of the pain inflicted when we steal milk from the udders of exploited mothers.”

“The cows?” I say, just so I’m clear.

“That’s right, Boyle. How would you like some asshole dairy farmer sticking a fucking vacuum cleaner to your man boobs every morning, sucking them clean?”

Okay, just for the record, I don’t have moobs. Gladys is being extremely hypothetical here.

“Jerry is no longer vegan?” asks Ceepak.

Gladys flaps up both hands and I wish her T-shirt didn’t have such giant armholes. The Casabas are flopping up and down and around.

“He’s cheating on me, John. Every now and then, he gets an uncontrollable craving and comes home with cooked cow on his breath.” Now she gives a dismissive flick of the wrist. “Guess he couldn’t kick all his addictions at once.”

“Speaking of Jerry’s former addictions,” Ceepak says, quite smoothly, I might add, “we’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What? About that skeeve Skeletor? I saw you and him on TV last week. You two cowboys hot on his trail?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Jesus, don’t start in with that ma’am shit again, John. It’s not polite, it’s patronizing.”

“Sorry. I suppose using that term is my bad habit.”

“Yeah, yeah. Eat some fucking apple crisp.” She lifts the lid off the pie plate. Ceepak, brave soldier that he is, takes the oozing wedge she slides onto a paper plate, nibbles at the edges.

Gladys wipes her hands on her stained prairie skirt, finding the one spot she hasn’t already used as a dishrag.

“Skeletor,” Gladys huffs. “I can’t stand that skinny son of a bitch. Bastard’s got a mean streak. Used to rip Jerry off like crazy back in the day, back when he liked to dip and dab Mexican Mud.”

That means Jerry used to mess around with heroin.

“And when Jerry couldn’t pay what he owed?” Gladys waves at the blank TV screen. “Skeletor would unleash those douchebag bikers who chased you two around that fucking parking lot on TV. Those Creed assholes would roar into town on their Harleys, find Jerry, rough him up. This one time, I thought he was gonna die, they messed up his face so bad. Kicked in a couple ribs, too.”

Ceepak nods grimly.

“I remember one February, Jerry was sleeping off a high up in one of those Tilt A Whirl cars at Sunnyside Playland, they marked him, man. Marked him bad. He still carries the scars.”

“How so?”

“Next time you see Jerry, ask him to roll up his sleeve and show you the ‘88’ they carved in his arm with a knife.” She taps her shoulder.

“Why 88?” I ask. “Is that how much he owed them?”

Ceepak shakes his head. “The eighth letter of the alphabet is H. 88 becomes HH, which represents the phrase ‘Heil Hitler.’”

“The Creed?” says Gladys. “Bunch of white supremacist assholes. You need to bust these dudes, John. If you don’t, I will.” She clutches a melon-chopping butcher knife to make her point.

“Gladys,” says Ceepak, “do you know where Skeletor has been operating of late?”

“You mean ever since you two burned down his Hell Hole hideout?”

Actually, we weren’t the ones who burned it down, but Ceepak lets it slide. Gladys is not lying, she’s just operating with faulty intelligence, something, Ceepak says, the Army has to do all the time.

“We know he is still in operation,” says Ceepak. “He has been supplying steroids to members of the Fun House cast.”

“Figures. You don’t get meat like that the natural way. Did you know that two thirds of America’s beef comes from cows pumped up with steroids? All those hormones in hamburgers, that’s why girls are going into puberty at age ten these days.”

Somehow, Ceepak stays on point. “What about Skeletor?”

“From what I hear, ever since the fire, he’s a floater. Moves around. But Jerry said he saw the skinny turdpole hanging out behind that fried candy stand on Pier Two. Right across from the Fun House. The All American Snack Shack, the guy calls it. Jerry says Skeletor was up to his old tricks, dealing dope out of the back of the stall.”

“When was this?” asks Ceepak, probably wondering why we didn’t know about it.

“Couple weeks ago. But like I said, Skeletor’s a floater. Only his regular customers know when he’ll come back to any particular spot.”

Ceepak puts down the apple crisp. Wipes his hands on a brown napkin.

“The candy stand, you say.”

“Yeah. Pier Two. That red, white, and blue booth where they fry Oreos and Snickers and all sorts of shit filled with polyhydrogenated chemicals people can’t even pronounce.”

“Danny?”

We’re off to Pier Two.

At least fried Oreos smell better than boiled beets.