Brownie and the Dame (11 page)

“I’m Janie,” Janie said, “and this is Brownie. We’re investigating the thefts.”

The young woman’s dreadlocks swung back and forth as she obviously tried to keep something inside. Finally she said, “I’m Kiki.” She looked at Brownie. “I know your, uh, your uncle? Bubba?”

“He’s my second cousin,” Brownie said, “or cousin something removed twice with a lime twist. I’ll never understand that rule.”

“And I’ve heard of you, too,” Kiki said with a smile. “Kid with a science project. Dahh— dang, I mean. Bet that morning show host never looks at a ten-year-old the same way again.”

“
Word
,” Brownie said reverently. Then he remembered himself and said, “That’s hitting on the eight, dish.”

“And you’re Willie’s niece, am I right?” Kiki asked Janie. “I live next door to your aunt. Mostly I go to college, but I’ve been working for the fortune cookie company for the last couple of months, and they needed some extra help during Spring Break, so I jumped on it.”

“Oh yes,” Janie said knowingly. “Auntie Wills says you guys like to party like it’s 1999. Whatever that means.”

Kiki chuckled. “Oh, you’ll get it later. So, seriously, you guys investi
ma
gating and all?”

“We’re
investigating
,” Brownie enunciated carefully. He was beginning to think that the lady with the dreadlocks was a few fries short of a Happy Meal, although he was curious about what kind of work went into getting one’s hair to look like that.

“Did you see anyone suspicious yesterday?” Janie asked.

“Well, the owner is suspicious,” Kiki said. “He wears the weirdest color combos. Pink with stripes. Purple with green. Weirdness. I would never mix stripes with spots.” She swept her dreadlocks over her shoulder.

“Was there anyone sneaking around?” Janie persisted.

“You mean someone with a shovel?” Kiki smiled at Janie. “No, but John Leroy, Jr., esteemed mayor of Pegramville, came by to dedicate the new building.”

“This building isn’t new,” Brownie said.

“Well, John Leroy, Jr. wasn’t sober, either,” Kiki said with a laugh. “I sent him to the building around the corner. Good thing he wasn’t carrying the scissors, but he did have MD 20/20. Can you believe he had two bottles? One was flavored Orange Jubilee and the other was Banana Red. As a college student in the pursuit of serious party-hardy-marty, I was not aware that they made those flavors.” She suddenly realized that she was talking to two elementary school-aged children. “Not that drinking is good except in moderation and only when you’re over 21 and never when you’re driving.”

“The owner,” Brownie repeated as he wrote, “and Mayor Leroy, who was so loopylegged he dint know where he was.”

“You’re not going to repeat that, are you?” Kiki asked, aghast.

“We’ll keep it on the lowdown, dollface,” Brownie said. “The mayor dint have a shovel, right?”

“The mayor had two bottles and two hands, although there might have been some more hands in his jacket somewhere,” Kiki said with a shudder. “He did say something about his wife and he having an
arrangement
.” She shuddered again.

“No one else?” Janie asked.

“I was a mite busy,” Kiki said. “Those cookies don’t pack themselves. And there are tons of people in this world who want fortune cookies.” She rubbed her top lip with the tip of her finger. “Think it has something to do with the economy.”

“Should we give the mayor the third, shake him down, brace him proper?” Brownie asked Janie. “I hear Big Joe has a way with bright lights and rubber hoses. We could ask him for an assist.”

Janie shook her head. “Politicians are bad news. They complain to people. People complain to other people, like aunts. Aunts come down on our heads, and then we can’t investi
ma
gate, I mean, investigate.”

“Besides the mayor is drunk all the time,” Kiki said. “I don’t think he’d steal a tree unless he thought it had alcohol in it.”

The three wandered over to the hole. A few piles of dirt and a ball shaped depression were all that were left of the scene. Janie and Brownie knelt down beside it. Brownie saw that something had been dragged away and left a clear trail. It was almost like someone had drawn on the grass with a very wide magic marker.

“That tree,” Brownie said, “is it heavy?”

Kiki shrugged. “The root ball is about the size of a bowling ball, I guess. Maybe ten pounds, most of it is the dirt in the roots. I don’t see why they had to drag it off, unless it was some kids, oh hey, I didn’t mean you guys. Obviously you guys are much different.”

Brownie was thinking of a p-p-penguin. Mortimer had been identified as about a foot and a half tall. If Brownie remembered his plushes, that would make the penguin’s tushie about a foot wide. It wouldn’t have weighed much, but someone had dragged it through the field and through the woods of the Boomer’s farm, as if it had been too big to carry.

“Ifin it don’t weigh that much, why drag it at all?” Brownie mused.

“Maybe the perpetrator
couldn’t
carry it,” Janie suggested. “We need to find a suspect who can’t carry things like regular people.”

Kiki said, “Maybe someone without arms.”

“Do you know someone without arms?” Brownie asked.

“I know the bartender at Grubbo’s, and he lost one hand in Afghanistan. He’s got a hook thing he uses to shake the mixed drinks. Also he tells this one rotten joke about pirates, but— hey, what was I saying?”

Brownie sighed and stood up. “Let’s follow this trail, Janie.” He glanced at Kiki and winked. “Thanks for the straight dope, sweetheart. I hope you never get a fortune cookie that says, ‘Help, I’m being held prisoner in a Chinese fortune cookie factory.’”

Kiki’s face quirked into a smile. “You’re a riot, Sam Spade.”

“See,” Brownie said to Janie. “She gets it.”

They left Kiki behind and walked their bikes while following the meager dirt trail. A few minutes after looking downward, Brownie tripped over a curb and said a bad word. Janie snickered. Then Brownie stopped. He hunkered down and picked up something. He displayed it for Janie. “This is hair,” he said.

Janie looked at it closely. “It’s hair. It’s brown and white.”

“The goats were brown and white,” Brownie said.

“So are a lot of animals,” Janie said.

Brownie got his notepad out, ripped out a page, and made an impromptu envelope for the hair. “Evidence,” he said. Janie nodded in approval.

After a few hundred feet, the dirt dispensed into nothingness. They walked slowly for a few hundred more feet and discovered themselves to be in front of the Moose Lodge.

Janie looked up and said, “Hey. Look where we are. Maybe this is where all the perps are. I think the Faithful Order of Perpetual Moose sounds suspicious anyway. Since when are there moose in Texas? Mooses? What’s a group of mooses called?”

“It’s just plain moose. And they come for the barbeque,” Brownie snorted. “And it’s
The Loyal Order of Moose
.”

Janie stared at the lodge. It wasn’t really a lodge. It was just a large building with a large sign with a moose and a number on it. It was large enough to have a pretty good-sized congregation in it, with a parking lot to match. It looked empty for the moment. No cars were about, and no one was coming or going. It was pretty dead for a Wednesday morning.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“I reckon we should take a look inside,” Brownie said. “All the signs point here. This place would be next on the map ifin someone had a push pin to stick in it.”

“It’s locked and breaking in is illegal,” Janie said.

“Wait,” Brownie said. “Do you hear that?”

“What?”

Brownie stepped closer to the lodge. Janie followed reluctantly. As they approached the main entrance, he said, “I hear someone calling.”

“I don’t hear anything, except— was that you farting?”

“I don’t think the French toast agreed with my tummy,” Brownie said, “and listen.”

Silent for a moment, Brownie cupped his hand over his ear so that he could hear better. “Listen,” he said again. “‘
Brownie, Janie
,’” he whispered loudly, “‘
come on in. It’s okay, ya’ll. You need to come in.
’”

They got up to the front door and Janie said, “No one is in there, and they aren’t calling us.”

“I’ll testify to it in a court of law,” Brownie said. “Someone said it was okay to go right in, make ourselves at home, grab a co-cola and a moon pie.”

“Since the door is locked, it shouldn’t be an issue— ” Janie started to say and reached out to pull the door’s handle. The door easily came open. “And now it’s an issue,” she sighed.

Brownie put on his most innocent appearing façade. “Since we’re not breaking in, how can it be illegal?”

Janie was outraged. “You’re like the uber master criminal of all the other master criminals. How can you think like that?”

“There could be a 10-c perpetrator inside. We might miss our golden opportunity,” Brownie wheedled.

Janie looked intrigued. She had missed out on the Christmas Killer, and she had missed out on rescuing her aunt, so clearly she was fully involved. “Well, there is evidence that points to a criminal in the vicinity,” she allowed. “The law is very clear about the pursuit of criminals.”

“Hello?” Brownie said to the emptiness beyond the open door. “We’re investigators, and we have reasonable probability.”

“Probable cause,” Janie corrected. Then she yelled it inside, “We have probable cause!”

No one answered.

So of course, they went right in.

Chapter 8

Brownie and the Shifty Skirts

Wednesday, April 4th

Brownie crept into the darkness. Janie followed closely behind him, holding onto the tail of his t-shirt. The shadows inside the long hall seemed to envelope them. She whispered, “It’s dark in here.”

“Blacker than a witch’s hindquarters,” Brownie said.

“Darker than pitch at midnight on the backside of the moon.”

Brownie didn’t want to be left out so he said, “Blacker than a republican’s heart, or democrat if you’re so inclined.”

“It’s blacker than a carpet of carbon nanotubes in bimolecular laboratory.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I think you whupped me something fierce,” Brownie admitted with no little amount of gall.
I’ll have to remember that one.

The door behind them shut gently, and both children jumped at the soft click of the latch.
 

“Do you have a flashlight?” Janie asked.

“Do
you
?”

“It’s broad daylight out, and I wasn’t expecting such a dark place,” Janie protested.

“Miz Demetrice decided that my Maglite was a potentially lethal weapon and took it along with the stun gun,” Brownie said. “I hadn’t really thought of it as a weapon, well, not until
then
.”

“Well, snap.”

They stood in the darkness for a moment, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom.

“Look, I see a sliver of light,” Janie said. She nudged Brownie in the right direction. At the end of the hall was a doorway. Beyond the closed doors were lights that were causing the line of light they could see. The whole building didn’t have many windows, and Brownie hadn’t ever been here before, so he didn’t know what was back there.
Could be elephants with cattle prods, I reckon.

Abruptly they could hear a strange murmuring. It sounded like a chant. It was rhythmic and strangely enticing.

“I don’t like this,” Janie muttered. “It sounds satanic.”

“Satanic,” Brownie repeated.

“My grandma calls me that when I’ve been bad,” Janie whispered. Her little hand clutched his shoulder so fiercely he thought he would have finger-sized bruises there the next day. “Be quiet,” she whispered quickly.

They inched closer and closer to the single line of light between the two doors that opened into who knew what. “Stay behind me, Janie,” Brownie murmured. “I’ll protect you.”

“But
I
know jujitsu,” Janie argued.

“We’ll look through the crack,” Brownie said, “at the same time.”

They made their way to the door and positioned themselves such that Janie was lower and Brownie just above her, so that they could see through the crack at the same time. It took them a few seconds for their eyes to adjust to the lights in the other room.

Brownie closed one eye so he could focus the other one better on the contents of the inner room. It could be a collection of moldy thieves, perhaps with the Fat Man as the ringleader, wearing his shoddy suit and sweating up a storm. They would have all the stolen goods in their lair, laid out as they prepared to sell them to the highest bidder. Perhaps the spatula was really a lost piece of artwork or government technology accidently sold to Miz Adelia. Spies could be all around them. It wasn’t Sam Spade-like but it was interesting. The brassieres could be part of the cover-up in order to fool the local yokels. The tree could be an add-on to further muddy the waters. Who knew about the plush penguin? Could the Boomers be in on the deal?