The Last Coin (6 page)

“Day after tomorrow. Are you
sure
they’re contraband? I can’t fathom the idea of contraband breakfast cereal. Can’t you just order them from some local distributor?“

“Not a chance of it. And as I was saying, there’s not a restaurant in the continental United States that serves them, not that I’ve heard of. All the best restaurants in England and Canada wouldn’t open up without a supply. Used to be you could get something called Ruskets. These Ruskets weren’t identical to Weetabix, of course, but they were close—flat little biscuits of wheat flakes. Some people broke them up before pouring on the milk and sugar; other people dropped them into the bowl whole, then cut them apart with a spoon. I had a friend who crushed them with his hands first. What’s the use of that, I asked him. Might as well eat anything—Wheaties, bran flakes; it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. That’s the point here, the strategy. Give the customer something out of the ordinary. Make it wholesome, but don’t make it like the competition makes it or you’re good as dead.”

“But all the way to Canada in the pickup truck?”

“Don’t use the truck. They’d probably just confiscate the crates of Weetabix at the border—spot them in a second. They’d wonder what in the world a man is doing smuggling Weetabix in an old pickup truck when he’s supposed to be in Vancouver at a convention for writers of columns for the lovelorn. The truck doesn’t run worth a damn anyway. Fill the trunk of your car. That’ll be enough. We’ll make another run somehow in a few months.” He paused for a moment and thought. “I’ll pay for gas.”

Pickett nodded, as if he trusted Andrew’s weird native genius for this type of thing, for seeing things roundaboutly and inside out and upside down. It was too easy to doubt him, and if there was anything that Beams Pickett distrusted, it was anything that was too easy. Simplicity almost always wore a clever disguise. If he was caught with the Weetabix at the border, he could claim ignorance. “Contraband? Breakfast cereal?” What would they do to him, shoot him?

“When does the first lovelorn column appear, anyway?” Andrew asked.

“Friday after next. I’m still putting it together. It’ll run daily in the
Herald
, but if it’s good enough, I don’t see why I can’t syndicate it sooner or later. Georgia’s helping me with it.”

“Lots of letters? How does anyone know to write?”

“I’m making them up, actually, addresses and all. Georgia’s answering them. She’s too bluff, though. Too unkind for my tastes. Her advice to everyone is to dry up. I submitted a letter by a woman in Southgate whose husband had lost interest. ‘Lose weight, get a face lift, and tell him to go to hell,’ that was Georgia’s response.
My
advice was to buy diaphanous nighties and packets of bath herbs. That’s going to be my standard response, I think.”

“Bath herbs?”

Pickett nodded. “You can order them through women’s magazines—little bags of dried apples and rose hips and lavender. You mix them into the tub water along with bath oils and then climb in, winking at your mate, you know, provocatively. Turns them into sexual dynamos, apparently.”

“And all this stuff floats on the bathwater? God help us. Isn’t there an easier method?”

“It’s the rage,” said Pickett. “The word from the public is that they want whatever’s the rage. That’s one reason I’m going up to Vancouver. The convention up there is the cutting edge of the lovelorn business.”

“That’s where we part company,” said Andrew. “The science of breakfast cereals runs counter to that, and I mean to prove it. To hell with the rage. To hell with the cutting edge. If it were my column I’d advise celibacy. Either that, or go wild in the other direction. Advise them to heap the bed with suggestive fruit—peaches, bananas, split figs, that sort of thing. Call it the Freudian approach, just to give it legitimacy. And use
Dr
. Pickett as a byline.” Andrew studied his list again, then went after it with his eraser. “I’ve got ice picks, ice tongs, ice scoops, ice shavers, ice buckets, ice molds, and ice dyes. What have I left out?”

Pickett shook his head. “What kinds of molds?”

“Mermaids, toads, comical hats, and high-heeled shoes. I’m purposely staying away from gag items. No eyeballs, bugs, or naked women.”

“Wise,” said Pickett, nodding. “No trash.” He looked over the list. “What’s a muddler?”

“I don’t know, entirely. I looked it up but there was nothing in the dictionary after muddleheaded. It has something to do with stirring things up, I think.”

“Couldn’t just use a spoon, then?”

“Go down to the Potholder if you want spoons. Here we use muddlers. At least I think we do. I’ve got to call down to Walt’s to find out what they are.”

Pickett stepped across to the street window and rubbed off a little circle of glass wax so that he could peer out better. “I’ve been having a look at Pennyman’s books. At several of them.”

Andrew nodded. “Anything telling?”

“I think he bears watching.”

“In what way? Has an eye for the silver, does he? Waiting to rob us blind and go out through the window?”

“Hardly. I don’t think he needs to rob anyone. I’ve got a hunch that your Uncle Arthur would know something about him—though he’d never let on. It’s more than just his name.”

“Names, names, names. Remember what you said about old Moneywort. If anyone was less likely than Moneywort to be involved in that sort of thing, I can’t think who it might be. Poor devil, crippled by some wasting disease. What was wrong with him, anyway?”

Pickett frowned. “I’m not sure, exactly. Age, maybe. A bone disease. He couldn’t get up from his chair there in the end.”

“And then cut to bits in his shop by a dope-addled thief! My God that was grisly.” Andrew shuddered, remembering the account in the newspaper. “I’ll say this, though, if Moneywort was up to some sort of peculiar shenanigans, that wouldn’t be the way he’d die. You know that. It would be something exotic. Something out of Fu Manchu.”

“That’s exactly what it
wouldn’t
be. Not necessarily. That’s where you’ve got to get ‘round them. Sometimes it’s the slightest clues that give them away, rather than anything broad. You won’t see them driving up and down in limousines. Have you gotten a glimpse of Pennyman’s walking stick?”

“Of course I have.”

Pickett squinted at him, nodding slowly. “Remember Moneywort’s hat—the one that was all over fishing lures?”

“Vaguely.”

“Well
I
remember it. There were things hanging from that hat that no sane man would try to entice a fish with. Most of them were smokescreens, if you follow me. But there was one that signified—a sea serpent, curling around on itself and swallowing its own tail. What did he hope to catch with that? A blind cave fish? That wasn’t any lure, and you can quote me on it. And the devil who sliced him up wasn’t some down-and-out dope addict looking for a twenty. Do you know that the murderer died before coming to trial?”

Andrew looked up at Pickett, widening his eyes. “Did he?”

“For a fact. Poisoned. Fed the liver of a blowfish, scrambled up in his eggs. Pitched over nose-first into his plate. I got it out of the police report.”

“Just like—what was his name? The man with the eyeglasses. Or with the name that sounded like eyeglasses—impossible name. Must have been a fake. Remember? Sea captain. Died in Long Beach back in ’65.
You
told me about it. Didn’t they find blowfish poison in his whisky glass?”

Pickett shrugged, but it was the shrug of a man who saw things very clearly. “That was one of the explanations that turned up later. Hastings made an issue of it, but the man was dead and buried, and ninety-odd years old to boot. Nobody cared what killed him. He could have been carried away by a pterodactyl and it wouldn’t have interrupted anyone’s lunch. There goes Pennyman,” Pickett said, watching through the window again. “Where in the devil does he go every morning? Why haven’t we followed him?”

Andrew shook his head. “Haven’t time. Rose is all over me with her list. It’s long enough to paper the hallway with. She doesn’t understand the fine points of setting up a bar—of setting up the whole damned restaurant, for heaven’s sake. She has doubts about my chefing. She doesn’t say so straight out, but I can sense it. I’ll be damned if I’ll back down now. There’s got to be something around this place that I can do right. Rose got the upstairs coming along, though. I’ll give her that.”

“Well,” said Pickett, sitting back down, “for my money, your fellow with the walking stick there amounts to more than we can guess. I bet
he
could tell you a little bit about poisoning a man with the guts of a fish, except that you couldn’t get anyplace close to the subject in a conversation with him. “You’d suddenly find some damned half-eaten thing in your sandwich and him grinning at you across the table. That’s the last thing you’d see this side of heaven.

“Look at this.“ Pickett reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a newspaper clipping—a photograph. He glanced around the room before opening it up. In the clipping was a picture of a man on a hospital bed—apparently dead. Three other men stood by the bedside: a doctor; a trim, no-nonsense looking man in a suit; and a man who looked for all the world like Jules Pennyman. It was a fuzzy shot, though, and the third man, really, could have been anyone.

“Who is it?” asked Andrew.

“Pennyman,” said Pickett, plonking out the answer without hesitation.

“Does it say so?”

“No, it doesn’t say so. It refers to an ‘unidentified third party.’ But look closer.”

Andrew squinted at the picture. The Pennyman figure held something in his open palm—two coins, it seemed, as if he were handing them over or had just had them handed to him or as if he were getting ready to do something else with them, like lay them on the dead man’s eyes. “Good God,” Andrew said, mystified. “Is he going to put coins on the corpse’s eyes? I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

“That depends upon who ‘they’ are, doesn’t it?”

Andrew looked at him. “They?” he asked.

“The ubiquitous ‘they,’ “ said Pickett. “Who do
you
suppose we mean by using the term?”

Andrew shook his head again. “I don’t know. It’s just idiom, I guess. Just a convenience. Like ‘it,’ you know. Like ‘
it
,’ won’t rain this afternoon.’ Nothing more to it than that. If you try to put a face on it you go mad, don’t you? That’s schizophrenia.”

“Not if it’s
true
it isn’t. Not if it actually
has
a face. And in this case I’m afraid it has. Any number of them, known in fact as ‘Caretakers.’ ”

“Pardon me,” said Andrew, smiling. “Who are? I lost you, I’m afraid.”

“
They
are. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. This reference to ‘they’ isn’t idiom, not in any local sense. It comes down out of antiquity, and it has specific application—deadly specific.” Pickett let his voice fall, casting another glance at the door to the kitchen. “You’ve read of legends of the Wandering Jews?”

“Was there more than one of them? I thought it was singular.”

“There might have been a heap of them, over the years. Throughout Europe. The peasantry used to leave crossed harrows in fallow fields for them to sleep under. It was a magical totem of some sort, meant to protect them. Animals brought them food. There was a central character, though, a magician, an immortal. The rest of them were disciples, who extended their lives by secret means. I’m piecing it together bit by bit, and it involves fish and coins and who knows what sorts of talismans and symbols. What I’m telling you is that this is not fable. This is the real McCoy, and like it or not, I think we’ve been pitched into the middle of it.”

“So you’re telling me that there’s—what?—a whole company of ‘them’? What do they want with you?”

Pickett shrugged. “I don’t know enough about it, mind you. And any ignorance here is deadly dangerous. But it could be that they control everything. All of it. You, me, the gatepost, the spin of the planet for all I know.”

Andrew snapped his fingers. He had it suddenly. He’d read about it in a novel. “Like in Balzac! What was it?—
The Thirteen
. Was that ‘them’?”

Pickett looked tired. He shook his head. “What Balzac knew about it you could put in your hat. Some few of them might have been assembled in Paris, of course. Or anywhere at all. Here, even.”

“
Here
, at the inn?”

“That’s what I mean. One of them’s here already, not at the inn
necessarily
. Here in Seal Beach.”

“So Pennyman, you’re telling me …”

“I’m not
telling
you anything. Some of it I know; some of it’s speculation. Go easy with the man, though, or you’ll find yourself looking at the wrong end of a blowfish.”

Andrew wondered which end was the
right
end of a blowfish. He poked idly at the newspaper clipping, still lying in front of him. “Who’s the dead man, then?”

“Jack Ruby,” said Pickett.

Andrew suddenly seemed to go cold. He looked again at the picture. It
could
, certainly, be Pennyman. But coins on a dead man’s eyes … The idea was too morbid. And it didn’t amount to anything either. What did it mean? “Why coins on his eyes?” Andrew asked, folding the clipping in half and handing it back to Pickett. Somehow, he’d seen enough of it. It hinted at things he really didn’t want to learn more about.