rituals of today’s twenty-somethings. “Do you have a photograph of your vehicle?”
“Butch?”
“Pardon?”
She does a quick giggle wiggle. It’s supposed to be cute. “I give all my cars nicknames. I called the Mustang ‘Butch’ because it’s a hunk.” Now her eyes shift to sultry. “And, if you don’t mind me saying it, so are you.”
Ceepak just nods. Puking isn’t really an option here.
“We’d like to show the photograph around,” I hop in. “See if anybody’s spotted it.”
“Can I be in the picture?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Awesome! I have one of me in a bikini just, you know, hanging out, leaning against Butch’s hood. I look smokin’ hot.”
“That’ll work,” I say, because Ceepak, the hunk, still doesn’t look like he’s fully recovered from Mandy’s giggle-jiggle.
“It’s in my phone.”
“Forward it to me,” I say.
We work out the details. I forward the photo on to Dorian Rence at headquarters. She’ll download the file and send it out to all our street units, post the picture on the bulletin board in the dayroom.
The hunt is on for Butch, Mandy’s manly mustang.
“Should I call the insurance company?” Mandy asks. “Tell them Paulie stole my car?”
“Probably a smart idea,” I say. “But we don’t think Paulie stole it.”
“Then why isn’t it back where I told him to park it? I looked out the kitchen window and couldn’t see it!”
I just smile. Why tax her brain past its limit?
“Ken?” Ceepak says to McAlister.
“Yeah?”
“Please stay with Ms. Keenan. Help her fill out the stolen vehicle report.”
Yeah, we’re leaving McAlister holding the crappy end of the stick. But he’ll deal with it. He’s a cop. It’s what cops do.
“Come on, Danny,” says Ceepak.
We crunch across the carpet.
“Officers?” Mandy calls after us. “Is that picture of me and Butch going to be on TV?”
“Hopefully,” says Ceepak, “we will locate your vehicle before
“But if you don’t?”
“Then we might indeed need to widen our search and broadcast the photograph.”
“Awesome!” says Mandy like she just won the lottery.
I’m reminded of that Disney World commercial they always run at the end of the Super Bowl:
Mandy Keenan, your last lover was just murdered, what are you going to do next?
“I’m going to be on TV!”
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
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
