Chapter Sixteen
“ Who knew there was so much money in the human freak show business?” Shawn said. “How many eyeballs do you have to poke out to buy a three-million-dollar castle?”
They were parked in Gus’ Echo, outside a grand Spanish mansion high on a hill overlooking the sparkling Pacific.
“Maybe we’ve got the wrong house,” Gus said, checking the paper in his hand against the tiled address sign set into the long white wall. They matched, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a mistake earlier in the information chain.
“Impossible,” Shawn said.
“Why?”
“Because it was too hard to get this one,” Shawn said. “If it’s wrong, we have to start all over again and I refuse to do that.”
It had been hard-much harder than either of them would have guessed. It seemed like a safe bet that a woman who was covered in tattoos, called herself Phlegm, the Human Freak Show, and made her living by plunging knives into her eyes would be fairly easy to track down. At least there wouldn’t be too much trouble confusing her with any of the other Phlegm, the Human Freak Shows in the phone book. And odds were she’d probably have a pretty good Web presence so that America’s legion of knife-in-the-eyeball fans would know where to look for her next performance.
But aside from a couple of fleeting mentions in articles lamenting the failure of the New Vaudeville movement back in the mid-1990s-and a couple more celebrating that failure-they couldn’t find any trace of her. They tried to get her information from the membership secretary at the Fortress of Magic, but that august executive insisted she was sworn to secrecy. Even after Shawn and Gus had successfully bribed her with a coupon for two dollars off two pizzas that had come in the mail that day-apparently the Fortress of Magic was not generous with its employees’ paychecks-she had been unable to find any listing for Phlegm. Gus had insisted she try a long list of alternate spellings of the word, but the closest the records came was someone named Don Flegman, and he’d died around the same time as disco. They even trolled the seedier parts of State Street on the off chance that she was performing next to the buskers, three-card monte dealers, and charcoal artists peddling sketches of Jimi Hendrix, but no one they talked to had ever heard of an act anything like hers.
Finally, Shawn announced that they would have to call their client. After all, he had employed Phlegm as a cocktail waitress. Gus was nervous about the prospect, figuring that if they didn’t bother Fleck, he might forget he’d hired any detectives and not feel compelled to destroy them if they were unable to solve the case to his satisfaction. But as Shawn pointed out cheerfully, a mogul who once sued a contractor into bankruptcy for using the wrong brand of Navajo White paint on his maid’s room’s ceiling was probably not going to forget about the two private detectives who’d eaten his lobster and purpled his white carpet.
Fortunately for Gus’ nerves, when they called the number Fleck had given them, the line was answered by one of his many assistants, an efficient-sounding young woman who introduced herself as Sandy Butler, Associate Assistant to the Assistant Associate. And when they explained what they were looking for, the AAttAA assured them it would be neither necessary nor wise to trouble the big man over something this minor. She could handle it herself. All she needed was a name.
That, of course, was the sticking point, because there was little chance that their subject had applied for- and gotten-a cocktail waitress position under the name Phlegm, the Human Freak Show. Sandy ran a check of the personnel files just to make sure, but there were no listings for Phlegm or any other type of mucus in the system.
They were stuck. One woman seemed to hold their first major clue in this case, and they had no way to find her-or at least no way that wasn’t going to require a huge amount of work.
“I guess we’re going to have to do this the hard way,” Shawn said into the speakerphone. “If we give you a couple of dates, can you send us a list of all the cocktail waitresses who were working then? We’ll track them all down until we find the right one.”
“I can,” Sandy said. “But maybe you’d like me to narrow that list down a little first?”
“Narrow it how?” Gus said.
“Hair color, eye color, height, weight, bra size, place of residence, distinguishing physical characteristics, marital status, citizenship status, food allergies, medical history, legal history, educational history, financial history, sexual history, birth date, birth weight, astrological sign, number of parking tickets paid or unpaid, associations, clubs, political party, Netflix queue, fashion sense, common sense, pets by breed, pets by name, siblings, race, religion, church attendance, favorite book, favorite movie-”
“Wait a minute,” Gus said. “Fleck keeps that much information on his employees?”
“Our background investigations are extremely thorough,” Sandy said, a hint of pride leaking through her businesslike tone. “Speaking of which, you might want to pop down to Santa Barbara City Hall today. And bring cash. The parking ticket you received at 1637 State Street is exactly one month old, and after tomorrow, late fees are going to kick in.”
“I don’t know what I find more troubling,” Gus said, “that you keep all this information in your database, or that it isn’t even correct. I haven’t gotten any parking tickets in the last month.”
“I’m looking at a digital copy of it on my screen right now,” Sandy said. “Apparently you told the ticketing officer that you were a doctor and you had stopped for an emergency. When she pointed out that you were parked in front of a BurgerZone franchise and were walking out eating a Triple Triple, you told her you were a doctor of burgerology and that the emergency was a sudden pickle intervention.”
“I never-” Gus broke off. He turned to glare at Shawn, who was gazing calmly out the window, as if he hadn’t heard a word of the conversation. “Did you borrow the Echo again without asking?”
“That’s a good question,” Shawn said. “If I don’t ask first, can it really be called borrowing? It’s actually much closer to theft. But since I always bring it back as soon as I’m done, technically it’s joyriding. And how can we object to any activity that brings a little joy into this cold, hard world?”
Gus had plenty of ways to object, and several of them involved clubbing Shawn about the head and neck with blunt instruments. But he was a professional, and he knew that the worst thing they could do was argue in front of the client. Or even the Associate Assistant to the client’s Assistant Associate. “Shawn will make sure to pay the ticket today. Thanks for the heads-up.”
“No problem,” Sandy said. “You can also let him know that his teeth are past due for a cleaning.”
“Oh, I’ll definitely make sure he knows about that,” Gus said.
Shawn ignored Gus’ smile and leaned into the speakerphone. “Did you say you can search your database for distinguishing physical characteristics?”
“Moles, freckles, dimples, wrink-”
“How about tattoos?”
“Words or pictures?”
“Pictures,” Shawn said. “Snakes.”
“Location?”
“Arms. Upper chest. Possibly lower chest, but we don’t know for sure.”
They could hear a keyboard rattling as Sandy typed in the information.
“Got a pencil?” she said.
According to the database, Phlegm’s real name was Jessica Higgenbotham, and she lived on a street Shawn and Gus had never heard of. When they consulted a Google map, they understood why. It was a brand-new street in a brand-new development of brand-new mansions. This seemed odd even at the time, since they couldn’t imagine either of Phlegm’s careers bringing in enough cash to pay for luxury housing. But maybe the city had demanded that the developer throw in a couple of “affordable” units, the going exchange rate for permission to erect a fleet of multimillion dollar eyesores on the area’s rapidly diminishing store of open space.
After a quick stop at city hall to pay the parking ticket, they drove up into the hills above Santa Barbara until they found a hilltop that had been carved off, leveled, and dotted with pink Mediterranean villas. They drove right through the development, assuming that the handful of lower-priced homes or apartments would be as far from
