Puppet Graveyard (6 page)

“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.”

Kitty just nodded. “I see.” Oh, this was getting better all the time. “Tell me, did anyone…any of those witnesses…happen to mention what Ronny and the dummy were doing as this happened?”

“As a matter of fact, that
was
mentioned.”

“And?”

Regis shrugged. “Damnedest thing, really. These people are going up in flames, left and right…and Ronny’s dummy is cackling like a madman. Ronny finally dragged the both of them off stage. Does any of that mean anything to you?”

But Kitty just shook her head. “I guess not.”

“Some people might call that kind of thing witchcraft,” Regis said and said no more on the subject. “Crazy shit, all right.” He opened a folder and sorted through some papers in there. “Well, to the case in question now. What I learned is a composite of public record and inside information, mostly gleaned from cops that were involved in the tawdry history of the McBanes. Now, for starters…did you know that the mother—Dorian McBane—was killed? And I’m not just talking killed here as in getting run down by a bus, I’m talking
killed.”

Kitty told him she knew about that. “A wild dog or something.”

“Yeah. That’s what the coroner put down in his report. But that was old Biggs, he’d write anything down to save his ass some paperwork. Anyway, yes, that was the official version, like it or not. But I talked to one of the investigating detectives and, well, Mama McBane, she was chewed-up pretty bad. But if it was a dog, well then it was one smart pooch because it locked-up on its way out.”

Kitty ignored the implications of that. “And she died from these bites?”

He shrugged. “More or less. Couple the bites with trauma, shock, blood loss…yeah, they did her in, all right. That was about ten years ago. Just a few years after Ronny McBane got himself into the ventriloquism racket.” Regis sat down, drumming his big fingers on the desktop. “The family had a history of trouble long before the mother’s death. Apparently, when Ronny was five or six years old, the father committed suicide. Ronny found him swinging in the basement. After that, it seems that Dorian—Mama McBane—kind of lost touch. Became some sort of hardcore Bible-thumper. I talked to one of her old neighbors, a woman listed on the police report as being the first person on the scene after Ronny found his old man. She told me some pretty wild stories. Lot of it was what you’d expect, you know, Dorian turning into a right pain in the ass knocking on doors and handing out leaflets. The usual. But some of the rest of it? Christ on the cross, you gotta hear this.”

Kitty figured she’d have to, too…not that she really wanted to.

“Get this,” Regis said, enjoying the dirt of other people’s lives maybe a bit too much. “Dorian told this neighbor lady that the father—his name was Robert—was some kind of witch or warlock, whichever, that he descended from what she called ‘witch-folk’ back in the old country…Scotland, I’m guessing. But this neighbor lady said that was crazy, because Robert McBane was a pretty good guy. Maybe his ancestors were a little loopy, but he was okay. She never saw him stirring any cauldrons or flying on any brooms. He was a good neighbor and a good father to the kids. He came from money, but he was no good with it himself. One failed business venture after another. The neighbor lady figured this is why he hanged himself. She also added that if there was a witch in the McBane family, it was the mother…Dorian was pretty screwy long before the old man’s suicide. And if his failed business dealings weren’t enough incentive, the shrew he was married to completed the picture.

“Of course, that wasn’t Dorian’s version of events. She said the old man was born ‘of tainted blood’ and Jesus had compelled him to take his own life. That was what she told the neighbor lady a few months after he was gone. Regardless, there were certain facts in the neighborhood that everyone knew. And one of them was that Dorian McBane was a mean, spiteful old bitch. Everyone felt sorry for the kids without the old man around. It was common knowledge that Dorian did not like children and that she took the belt to her own any chance she got. And after the old man made for the pearly gates? Well, Dorian not only found religion, but she began abusing those kids. There’s some pretty wild tales there, too, bits about her locking them up in the attic, not letting them go outside, burning them…you know the bit. It never changes with these animals.”

No, Kitty supposed it never did.

She sat there, thinking it over. She’d gotten real good at swallowing madness in raw chunks, letting it bubble away in her stomach while her brain tried to digest it without throwing it back up. It left a vile taste in her mouth, but thus far she’d been keeping it all down. Thus far.

“What happened to the children?” she asked.

“A series of coincidental mishaps that don’t sound real coincidental when you put them in the same basket.” Regis sorted through notes on his desk. “Okay. Ronny had a sister named Molly. A little sprite of two when she died. Suffocated in her little bed…or was strangled. Things get a little murky there. The coroner put it down as suffocation…but the cops I talked to, well, they said the kid’s window was wide open and they had suspicions that somebody had reached in and throttled her.”

Kitty tried to swallow, but couldn’t. Jesus, what kind of monster had Dorian McBane been? “What about the other child?”

Regis nodded. “He was six. Just turned six as a matter of fact. Dorian, the neighbor lady told me, was real hard on this one because she said he had the devil in him. A real terror. The neighbor lady confessed that he was just all boy, but Dorian had told her that she feared he was contaminated by the McBane ancestry. So, about a year after Robert McBane hangs himself, the little girl suffocates and about a year after that, the boy is found in his bed with a light cord wrapped around his throat. The cops figured it could have been accidental…kids do crazy shit.”

Kitty sat there, thinking, feeling it coming over her because she was seeing things now, feeling dark truths invade her and seeing connections where there could not or should not have been any. In a weak, airless voice, she said: “What was the boy’s name?”

“The boy?” Regis smiled the cold, dead grin of a beached fish. “The boy’s name was Freddy, but everyone called him ‘Piggy’.”

10

Kitty swallowed two Valiums just before eleven that night and washed them down with two double vodkas. Her head wasn’t right and she wondered if it ever would be again. She had come to Chicago to fill a hole in her life, to possibly get some closure on Gloria if that was even possible, but now that hole was bigger than ever before, so big she was afraid now that she would fall into it and never get out.
Ronny M. and Piggy. Ronny M. and Piggy.
The words kept running through her mind until she thought she would scream.
You honestly don’t believe for a moment that Ronny’s dummy is his dead brother, now do you? All that witchcraft business is insane and you know it.
No, she didn’t really believe any of that, but what she did believe in was Ronny’s madness which was so complete he might decide to name his dummy after his dead brother and commit crimes in its name.

But what about what Bascomb said?

Could some evil intelligence make a vent dummy that was kept in a coffin filled with black, wormy grave earth sit up and smile, start talking to you in the tormented voices of your mother and father—

No, no, no. That was Bascomb supposedly quoting Eddie Bose who wasn’t in his right mind anyway. She’d already more or less dismissed Bascomb as a nutjob. None of those things he said could be true. The dummy killing Bose, then killing his dog, then murdering his wife. Fantasy. It was only when Kitty linked it with what Regis had been hinting at and the possible spontaneous combustion at the Bamboo Club that she began to get the cold sweats.

You said there was a common thread to all this. You said it right from the first. Are you prepared to follow that thread even if it means looking at something that might tear your mind out like moist roots from soil? Are you willing to do that and accept the fact that even if you walk away from all this you can never be the same person again? Bascomb told you to walk away. Maybe it’s time to do that.