The Butler Did I.T.: A Crag Banyon Mystery

By James Mullaney

"HELLO. YOU HAVE REACHED BANYON INVESTIGATIONS. MAYBE."
Amnesia is to private investigators what chicken pox is to kids: sooner or later they all come down with it.
Crag Banyon's bout of pesky P.I. amnesia comes during what may or may not be his biggest case ever. Unfortunately, he can't remember the case, he can't remember his client, he can't remember where he parked his car, and most of all he can't remember why he joined a profession that gets you shot at, run over, and repeatedly whacked on the head and left for dead.
Banyon is in the fight of his life and not even his trusty office elf knows with whom or why. As the plucky P.I. begins to blindly unravel knots, he busts open a scheme bigger than he could have possibly imagined, and it all ties in with a sexy lady doctor, a nasty news vendor, a passel of time-traveling cowboys and an exceedingly polite cast of thousands.
If Banyon remembers enough to survive to the end, he's going to need a few dozen good, stiff drinks to forget.
"IF WE OWE YOU MONEY, FORGET IT."

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Mullaney
• Release date: Dec 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370754687

James Mullaney

James Mullaney is a Shamus Award-nominated author of over 50 books, as well as comics, short stories, novellas, and screenplays. His work has been published by New American Library, Gold Eagle/Harlequin, Marvel Comics, Tor, Moonstone Books, and Bold Venture Press. He was ghostwriter and later credited writer of 28 novels in The Destroyer series, and wrote the series companion guide The Assassin's Handbook 2. He is currently the author of The Red Menace action series as well as the comic-fantasy Crag Banyon Mysteries detective series.He was born in Taxachusetts, and wishes he were an only child, save one.He can be reached via email at [e-mail]

Book preview

HELLO. YOU HAVE REACHED BANYON INVESTIGATIONS. MAYBE.

Amnesia is to private investigators what chicken pox is to kids: sooner or later they all come down with it.

Crag Banyon's bout of pesky P.I. amnesia comes during what may or may not be his biggest case ever. Unfortunately, he can't remember the case, he can't remember his client, he can't remember where he parked his car, and most of all he can't remember why he joined a profession that gets you shot at, run over, and repeatedly whacked on the head and left for dead.

Banyon is in the fight of his life and not even his trusty office elf knows with whom or why. As the plucky P.I. begins to blindly unravel knots, he busts open a scheme bigger than he could have possibly imagined, and it all ties in with a sexy lady doctor, a nasty news vendor, a passel of time-traveling cowboys and an exceedingly polite cast of thousands.

If Banyon remembers enough to survive to the end, he's going to need a few dozen good, stiff drinks to forget.

IF WE OWE YOU MONEY, FORGET IT.

The Butler Did I.T.

A Crag Banyon Mystery

By

James Mullaney

Copyright © 2016 by James Mullaney

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from James Mullaney.

Cover art © 2016 Micah Birchfield All Rights Reserved

Micah's Web Site: gentlemanbeggar.gq

Editing and Formatting by Donna Courtois and Dale Barkman

Email Dale: [e-mail]

To Shane, with thanks

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

CHAPTER 1

The steady beat of dripping water seeped into my consciousness like warm blood into a cheap polyester carpet.

It might have taken a couple of seconds for the drip to rouse me. On the other hand, maybe it took forever. Time was a concept I wasn’t fully prepared to embrace that morning but was, rather, something that very much needed to be kept at a distance for as long as humanly possible. In the shape I knew I must be in, it was always best to treat time like a rabid dog on a leash who was one demented, barking breath away from sinking its famished, snapping, stubbornly linear canines into my sleeping throat.

I tried to get my aforementioned snoozing throat to issue some unconsciousness- appropriate snores to chase away the pesky seconds, minutes, hours and days. I was sure there was a busted clock somewhere in the neighborhood that would have appreciated time’s efforts to nudge its rusted hands forward a hell of a lot more than I wanted to move any of my four insensate limbs. But it was no good trying to keep my world standing still. No matter how hard I tried to tune out extraneous reality, there was that persistent goddamn water drip-drip-dripping away.

Despite my best efforts to play dead, which I fervently hoped would lead to the real thing, the steady thud of individual drops of H2O soaked into every cell in my brain, there to dampen the hell out of my mitochondria and flood over the tops of my RNA’s squishy galoshes. The slowly awakening depths of my logy gray matter were beginning to insist rather firmly that if I didn’t address the dripping water situation soon, my whole brain would wind up developing mold in the drywall which would crash the resale value and encourage the city’s building department to nail a condemned sign to my forehead.

I briefly wondered if I could install a sump pump in my frontal lobe before I at last concluded that the waterlogged-brain metaphor could be bludgeoned no more and that it was time to phone the coroner’s office to come haul off its allegorical remains.

I very reluctantly dragged my eyes open on a world that didn’t have the basic human decency to leave me for dead.

The stab of light was like a shiv to my optic nerves. I was sure that the sudden howl of pain from some nearby animal would get some do-gooder from the ASPCA to come running, right up until the moment I realized it was me doing all the hollering.

I’m not a huge advocate of offering a helping hand to my fellow man. Years of experience has taught me that a very sizable portion of the human race are conniving, ungrateful, evil bastards (add shrill and castrating, and that goes triple for ex-wives). My persistent bellow of pain was clear demonstration of a creature in distress, but not being a hypocrite there was no member of any nosy humanitarian group who might choose to answer my cry that I wouldn’t have told to a.) go find a rope and b.) piss up it. All I needed on top of my intracranial agony was an awkward social pause hanging between me and a passing goody two-shoes Salvation Army band. Worse, there was no telling how much more damage a tuba swung in anger could do to a skull that was already as fragile as a cracked, dainty-ass teacup. I figured the best way to avoid the whole potential mess was to rally all my resources and pass out as quickly as possible.

When I next awoke I thought the sun was higher in the sky. I couldn’t be sure, because this time I made certain to keep my eyes glued shut. The light was an inchoate orange glow that was backdrop for the myriad eye floaters which at that moment were reenacting the Battle of Gettysburg on the interiors of my eyelids.

I was so off my game that I was only vaguely aware that I’d made a cardinal drunk’s error when I’d clawed back to consciousness the first time around.

Too many people when awakening from the fog of mysterious comas make mistakes in the areas of groaning, eye-opening, mentioning the wrong female’s name, and otherwise telegraphing consciousness to anyone who might be loitering in the vicinity. An awakening individual never knows who might be responsible for putting them into their unconscious state, and flopping around like a flounder in a rowboat is often just begging for a booster shot of rebar to the back of the skull.

The second time I awoke, my years of rigorous training as a sloppy inebriate kicked in. When I once more felt the unpleasant tug of the pain-in-the-ass that was life drawing me back to consciousness, my drunk’s morning-after instincts coupled with my inherent lassitude kept me as still as the corpse I wished I was.

Somewhere nearby, water still dripped. It was more nearby than I imagined the first time around. I realized this time that my head was damp.

I figured the odds were pretty good that sometime during the previous night I’d staggered home to the loving embrace of my bathroom floor. The surface on which I was prostrate was cold and damp, and I’d been fruitlessly bleating to my building’s worthless superintendent about the drip under my sink for the past six months.

This time, I was prepared for the pain as I cracked my eyes open just enough to allow a couple of slivers of light to jab my bloodshot orbs like a pair of Ginsus.

My apartment’s crummy little bathroom was a lot bigger than I remembered. Apparently there was now room for tin rubbish barrels, a Dumpster, several curious rats, and a strip of blue sky flanked on either side by six-story brick walls.

The sun that I mistakenly thought had been battling past the nearly opaque coating of grime on my bathroom window was parked directly above me, like an accusing spouse armed with a rolling pin and ready to violently disbelieve every excuse for why I’d missed supper with the in-laws.

I was in an alley. The ton of Taco Bell and Chipotle litter at least informed me I was still in the United States. The name of a local trash-hauling service, which I suddenly noticed was stenciled on the sides of the rubbish barrels at my elbow, bleakly informed me that I hadn’t successfully escaped the city in which I wasted my worthless life.

Those were all the deductions my brain could manage without shutting down again, and I spent the next several minutes idly analyzing a clothesline that was hanging outside a fourth floor window above my head. The last dangling threads of the nearly completely shredded lines were being picked apart by birds. The little feathered rodents were a hell of a lot more industrious than whoever lived in the apartment, if the condition of the ropes and of the clothesline itself, which barely clung to brick with rusted bolts, was any indication. The lines were festooned with massive soiled underwear decorated with yellow smiley faces. Years of use had faded the original dark yellow to the color of weak piss and had stretched the smiles into judgmental frowns.

The frowning underwear didn’t approve of my presence beneath them, nor I to theirs above me. I’ve got enough people in my life passing judgment on me without strange undergarments joining in the criticism, so I decided it was time to go.

It turns out that all my life I hadn’t realized how much I had taken the simple act of sitting up for granted. It took me nearly ten tries to figure out which way was up and which, by painful trial and error, was down.

For most men, mornings like these were when the worst self-recriminations dumped out of the dark corners of their psyches like clowns tumbling from a little car at the circus. Even before they’re fully alert and able to process exactly what they’re regretting, they’re apologizing to every pair of unfamiliar underwear they see. Decent men who spend a night plastered off their asses, as I apparently had, always lament the harm a single, selfish bender does both personally and professionally.

Personally, I was a mess. I’d been dating a dame for about a month who broke it off two months before. I think she was a schoolteacher or a receptionist at a foundry. She definitely wasn’t an airline stewardess. Unless maybe she was. Who knew or cared? She talked nonstop, so I’d spent our time together tuning out absolutely everything she said. I didn’t even know she’d dumped me until I called her for a date and found out those three hours the previous Tuesday when I thought she’d been yammering on about her cat’s irritable bowels, she’d actually devoted to telling me to go to hell.

Professionally, I was an even bigger mess, which I largely blamed on the fact that I’m in a profession populated by professional messes. I’m a P.I. Yeah, it’s not easy to admit. Like being caught shoplifting Beanie Babies and KY. My job is half the reason I spend most of my nights tossing back rounds of liquid courage at cheap saloons. My clients are the other fifty percent.

My choice of occupation was made entirely without coercion or forethought, and I’d only stuck with it for the past decade because it was easier than having to print up a new business card.

With every aspect of my life the shambles that it was, my primary regret as I reluctantly regained consciousness in an unfamiliar alley and hauled myself to a sitting position was that I hadn’t imbibed enough the previous night to forestall consciousness by at least six months.

The dripping that had so rudely insinuated itself into my private oblivion started on the roof six stories above at the mouth of a busted rain gutter. I watched a couple of drops negotiate the distance from roof to alley at breakneck speed, splattering violently on the dirty asphalt where I finally noticed that a puddle had formed a damp version of a police outline around my heretofore lifeless corpse.

It hadn’t rained in days, and so it was disturbing to imagine what might be dripping onto my head from what should have been a dry roof. Morbid curiosity got the best of me, and I reached a hand up to my damp hair.

It’s never a good idea to reach blindly anywhere. You never know when a mousetrap or a wedding band might snap onto an innocent finger. In this case, it turned out that my busybody hand returned streaked with what was presumably my own blood.

The ugly realization that it was pain not pleasure that had dumped me in that alley suddenly reared up on its furry hind legs. So, too, did one of the alley’s overfed rat inhabitants, who had been eyeballing me this whole time like I was a Swanson Hungry Man Dinner that the owner of the frowning underwear had peeled the tinfoil from and tossed uneaten out the window.

It was trial and error, since gravity wasn’t in a cooperative mood that morning, but after several attempts I managed to get to my feet.

The world swam around me like Zombie Esther Williams. My head felt as if she’d already eaten most of my brain and shoved the half-chewed leftovers inside a Tupperware container in the back of her freezer.

So I had not arrived in the alley entirely because I’d been drunk. On the one hand that was good, since it meant I was not yet the sleeping-in-alleys kind of inebriate. (At least not without foreknowledge that I’d taken an al fresco kip.) On the other, how the hell did I come to be where I was, and who had cracked me on the head?

I did a quick inventory and located my wallet, which contained eight bucks. Also, a ragged IOU for five hundred smackers from a long-dead client who’d stiffed me ten years ago and which I kept around to remind me to only accept cash up front and to mistrust every client who walks through my door. I vaguely recalled starting out the previous evening with ten bucks, so if I’d been mugged, the bastard was either lousier at his job than I was at mine or he’d taken pity on pitiable me.

When I spotted my fedora on the ground a few yards away, I realized it could not possibly have been a mugging. No matter how kindhearted was the brigand who’d just cracked open some sucker’s skull, he never would have been able to resist making off with such a flawless example of male millinery. I kept my hat in hand, fearing more for its health than my own if it came in touch with my blood-stained head.

Dots of blood speckled the alley on the way out to the street, so whoever had dumped me in there had whacked me somewhere else and dragged me into the alley.

I checked the heels of my Florsheims and found that both shoes were marred by little ragged divots where they’d been pulled over rough terrain. On my way out I saw a couple of long scuffs from my heels that scraped through a patch of oil, across some kitty litter, and through the ketchup smears in some rotting, discarded takeout. Definitely dragged. So it was likely I was dealing with either a man not brawny enough to toss me over his shoulder, a dame, or somebody too lazy to carry me the full way in.

There were a million other possibilities for weak creatures who would have had to drag me, but I didn’t see any superficial evidence of pixies, nymphs, dwarfs, sprites, gnomes or imps anywhere. Anyway, most of my dealings are with homo sapiens, who are bastards to a man and are far more likely than any other species to whack you over the head and leave you for dead underneath some dirty, frowning underwear.

The dragging started a couple of yards in from the mouth of the alley, so it looked like I’d been carried at least partway in. Probably two guys, with one turning over the job of dragging me once they’d cleared the street. Out there was a greater risk of them being spotted, so the head honcho pitched in until they were out of sight. That possibly suggested a pecking order, with one son of a bitch taking orders from the other. (Don’t be too bowled over by my genius deductions. Being halfway competent at the worthless job of P.I.-ing is as impressive as a stripper who can walk a straight line in heels. Although most of the worthless hacks in my profession would miss the pole and take a header off the bar into the laps of three drunken Shriners, so bully for goddamn me.)

There wasn’t much more for me to detect. I could have called the cops to get a forensics team to the scene. At least, if I wanted to hear a bunch of hyenas in blue laughing their union asses off at me over the phone.

I wandered out to the street where I was surprised to spot a familiar newspaper stand a couple hundred feet away. I looked back and realized I’d spent an unknown number of hours napping in the alley next to Fat-Ass Dave’s Plus-Size Furniture Emporium. Down near the newsstand was that new tuxedo rental joint that had opened where the old Ein Nazi Florist used to be.

The newspaper stand was staffed that morning by the wrinkled old bastard who owned it and who had pretty much been the sole employee for the past fifty years. Everybody called him Pops. He called everybody rotten son of a bitch, but mostly only under his breath and definitely only after they’d already paid for their dirty magazines.

The sidewalk was more packed than normal with foot traffic, most of which seemed to be focused around the tux store. I figured it must be prom season again, which meant that the kind of winos who woke up in alleys on a more regular basis than me would soon be supplementing their deposit-bottle incomes by buying booze for underage punks whose young hearts were set on spending one glorious night vomiting out a limo sunroof before being decapitated by a low bridge. I wasn’t quite up there with the rest of the serious drunks yet, but it was nice to know I had one career opportunity less humiliating than P.I. work to look forward to.

I fought my way through the crowd and over to the newspaper stand. The old buzzard behind the warped wood counter spotted me angling toward him.

Oh, not Banyon, you rotten son of a bitch. (I was one of the happy few at whose back he didn’t whisper his most cherished epithet.)

Pops promptly reached below his counter and proceeded to drop one hefty red brick to the top of each pile of that morning’s Gazette, so that by the time I stopped before him he had every newspaper guarded against the thief he insultingly and correctly thought I was. Even though he had failed to catch me in the act in the decades I’d been stealing papers from him, we each delighted in engaging in our regular kabuki dance.

Try and steal a paper today and I’ll put your goddamn eyes out, the old bastard rasped. To punctuate his point he stabbed the air with the stub of an ancient, chewed pencil; the graphite lance of a miniature Lancelot.

Pops slipped the pencil stub into the torn pocket of the same faded blue flannel shirt he wore to work every day. His worn blue trousers were pulled up nearly to his armpits, held captive by a pair of red suspenders that were yanked so taut he could have plucked out a two-chord rendition of Oh! Suzanna. The clothes were shabby, but clean. This was no doubt thanks to Mrs. Pops, his monstrous wife, who’d taken over duties a couple of times when her old man had been under the weather. Mrs. Pops made sure everything about her shriveled spouse -- from his shirt and pants to the thin white strands of parted hair glued to his speckled scalp -- was neatly pressed every day.

The old guy had probably had a rough life cadging quarters from stiffs like me, and it almost made me feel bad that I’d already stolen a paper and hid it inside my trench coat while he was shoving his pencil nub in his pocket.

P.I. tip for anybody new to the trade: when you need answers from a source that hates your guts, it always helps to crank up the charm.

Did you see anybody dragging my lifeless body into the alley this morning, or did cataracts and senility hallucinate my would-be killers into a goddamn cat?

Pops was always on the scene well before dawn, not wanting to disappoint the last of the evening’s armed robbers who regularly held him up for March of Dimes pennies on their way home from a hard night sticking up convenience stores.

That was you? he grunted. Huhn. None of my business. I got a stand to run. Still, figured it was some drunk opened his fat mouth when he shouldn’t have. He laughed. Gotta tell the little woman I was right.

Redefining ‘little’ in order to inaccurately apply it to the gargantuan Mrs. Pops is a criminal misuse of the English language, I informed him. The last time your gallstones flared up and she had to take over here, she could barely wedge her terrifying ass inside your kiosk. In fact, she inhaled at one point and nearly busted down all four walls. Everybody on the block ducked and ran for fear of being bombarded with flying nails and soggy Dolly Madison cupcakes.

(Again, I was being extra nice re his pig wife because you catch more flies with honey. Which, incidentally, the rapacious maw Pops married sometimes smeared on her gigantic arms just to have something to lick between customers.)

The old bastard spluttered, during which wordless fuming I fished in my wallet and removed a buck which I waved in front of his crooked nose.

This bribe cuts my net worth down by one-eighth, I said, so that he might understand how deeply my loss would impact my inebriation budget. "Your years of false accusations about me swiping papers are slanderous, and I really ought to hire a drunken lawyer to sue you for every Hustler you’ve got, so I’d appreciate it if you consider this the extortion you’ve made it today rather than rationalizing it into a partial shakedown for whatever it is you imagine I owe you for past theft."

Pops eyed the bill with pretty much the drooling avarice I expected from a perennially broke news peddler with a wife who had Hostess on speed dial.

"Two bucks," Pops insisted.

Fifty cents, I replied. (The Yankees need to hire me at contract time.) But that drops down to a quarter in two seconds.

Deal! Pops snapped.

He grabbed for the bill, but I pulled it just out of reach of his grasping fingers.

I didn’t know it was you, Banyon, honest, he said. About four, maybe ten past four. I just opened up. There was two of them. One helped the other carry you out of sight, then came back and stayed at the car while the other was in the alley. Like I say, didn’t know it was you at the time. Couldn’t see faces. Didn’t see nothing good, ’cept when the one from the alley come back out and walked past the light comin’ out the side of the furniture store’s display window . Dressed pretty good. Snazzy, you know? Like one of them real fancy Mafia types who don’t like to get his hands dirty. ’Course, that don’t give you much. Seems like every rotten son of a bitch is dressed good these days.

He aimed the prominent mole on his pointed chin in the direction of the tuxedo store, where the bell over the door was in a constant state of chime from the slew of patrons streaming in and out. In comparison, down the street next to the open mouth of the alley in which I’d spent part of the previous night, the older establishment of Fat-Ass Dave’s Plus-Size Furniture Emporium was nearly a customer-free zone. The only patrons beyond the great divide were a single huge woman in gigantic pajamas and her equally huge male offspring in the first stages of juvenile Type 2 diabetes. The pair were unsuccessfully attempting to jam their asses through the double-wide front doors.

What kind of car were they driving? I asked.

"Ah, now that one I know, Pops said. Rolls Royce. Couldn’t make out the color, so don’t ask. Dark’s all I can tell you. Every dark color looks black under these newfangled streetlights they got now. Anyway, I know it was a Rolls. Don’t get many of them round here. You’re moving up in the