Skunk Hunt (70 page)

"We're rich," she said. "We're
all
very
rich."

CHAPTER 30

And we were, too, if what I heard during the
ride back to Richmond was true. And for once, a notary public was
not needed. Because there really was no other explanation.

The man in the grave was none other than Dr.
Whacko.

I had heard about the Kissmecanoe Polar Bar
controversy on the news a couple of years ago. I had not made the
connection between the disappearance of Archibald Penrose and the
corporate dilemma because, as a child, I had only known him as
Whacko, and had only been filled in on the ice cream connection
this very day.

"But you
told
me," Marvin sputtered at his uncle soon
after we reached I-64 and the beeline to town. "You lied to me,
when all the time you
owed
me!"

Uncle Vern yawned deeply. When was the
last time he'd slept? Would we get home alive, or end up taking a
Jet Blue Special into the trees? At least we would not become
anonymous corpses, to be discovered
a la
Whacko
years later by a group of jack-offs. It was
morning rush hour. People who lived in the countryside were going
to work in Staunton; people in Staunton were headed for
Charlottesville; workers from Charlottesville were going to their
offices in Richmond. It was a hell of a carbon footprint for a few
measly bucks, but since those paltry salaries kept people alive, I
was reluctant to lodge a protest with the EPA.

What all this meant was that our theoretical
crash would be witnessed by hundreds of drivers, all of whom would
become heroes by pressing their intercontinental ballistic cell
phones, thereby demolishing whatever privacy our demise might have
provided us.

The sun was darting into our eyes. I was
blinded and annoyed. I didn't feel rich, or I didn't feel that it
mattered—hard to say which. Twenty million, split nine or ten ways.
Did that put us in the upper 1%? Maybe not, but since most of us
had dropped beneath the income radar coverage years ago, any
percentile was an improvement.

We had started out as a convoy: Uncle Vern,
with me and Todd and Marvin; Yvonne, with Jeremy and Michael; and
Monique and Sweet Tooth bringing up the fairy tale caboose. The
line didn't last long. We were scarcely out of Bartow when Yvonne
(no doubt at Jeremy's prodding, though Michael would not have
cared) shot ahead of us, screeching up the mountainside, and were
soon out of sight. Soon after, Monique crossed the double line on a
dangerous curve and zipped ahead. Uncle Vern considerately braked,
or else she and Barbara would have head-on'd an oncoming Winnebago
tilting back and forth down the road. Sweet Tooth must have dumped
a load of helicopters as the fenders almost kissed. I thought it
served Monique right, having her passenger bucket seat filled to
the rim with the same kind of ghastly ooze that had chased a
hundred customers out of Starbucks. But I questioned my
complacency. I had instinctive reservations about seeing babes in
distress. More moron me.

Uncle Vern lowered his sun visor and squinted
ahead.

"Want me to take the wheel?" I asked.

"Marvin, I want you to dispense with your
phony wrath," he told his nephew testily. "From the very beginning,
you have been concerned only about the money. Now you have more
than you dreamed of."

"I have pretty big dreams."

"Then lay back and enjoy them," Uncle Vern
admonished.

"You led me on," Marvin persisted. All of his
monitors were switched off, leaving him free to stare daggers into
the back of his uncle's head. "You had me playing games with this
bozo—"

"The bozo who just made you a millionaire,"
Uncle Vern said. I appreciated the correction, but it still made me
squirm. Monique had been convinced that Uncle Vern, and maybe
Marvin too, had killed Carl and Dog in my bedroom. I still voted
for the Congreve brothers, but that was only because I was more
comfortable with the idea, now that they were safely under lock and
key. Uncle Vern continued: "Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't all
the high-tech pinballing your idea?"

"You agreed to it. You financed it."

"It's true, we had to check out the
opposition," Uncle Vern granted. "In the end, your methods
succeeded, except in the one thing we most wanted: the body." He
turned sideways, a perilous procedure when half-asleep and driving.
"Mute, you agree that we are all better off than we were
before?"

Define
'better'
, I thought, but a referendum on my inner
common sense held my peace.

"Don't go mute on us," Uncle Vern continued.
"You've done plenty of talking, lately. You have no congenital
defect that would prevent you from using your mouth."

"All right," I said. "Who killed Dr.
Whacko?"

"Skunk had more moxie than any of us gave him
credit for," Uncle Vern explained. "Penrose was blackmailing your
family, and it is assumed Skunk handled it the best way he knew
how."

"Blackmail? But Whacko didn't need the
money," I protested. "You told me—"

"Not money. Information and access. Once he
found out that Skunk was shifting his children around like chess
pieces—"

"Not Skunk," I said. "I mean, not chess."

"Like checkers?" Uncle Vern ventured,
kowtowing to my niggle-fit.

"Yeah," I said, although the only game I had
ever known my father to play was with our heads. I was trying to
delay Uncle Vern's revelation.

"Skunk never spoke much about it. Even your
mother knew nothing of the details. But around the time they
concluded Penrose had gone from being a pest to a threat, the man
miraculously disappeared."

"Really convenient," Marvin snorted.

"Hey!" Todd complained. "You got snot on
me!"

"We assumed Skunk had something to do with
it," Uncle Vern said. "It's only now that we know for certain. He
knew where the body was."

"You don't know
how
he died," I responded.

"I wasn't inclined to dig up the entire body
to find a bullet hole in the skull," Uncle Vern shot back. "It's
'no questions asked', so it doesn't matter. Besides, for all we
know, Skunk threatened Penrose—you know how he could get when he
pulled out all the stops—and the professor dropped dead out of
sheer terror."

Many had been the times my own heart had
stopped in the face of Skunk's wrath. I had been young enough to
survive without benefit of defibrillation.

"Once he was declared dead, all questions
regarding dispersal of the Kissmecanoe inheritance should have been
settled. But a funny thing happens when a million becomes tens of
millions. Human psychology deteriorates."

As if a kid never punched another kid over a
quarter, I thought.

"The law, which is never very clear in the
first place, becomes thick as molasses. Let's just say that when
Archibald disappeared, his brother Morris thought he would get the
whole enchilada, and his sister, Margaret, begged to differ."

It sounded like all those renaissance princes
whose elder brothers died, which was pretty frequent in those
pre-penicillin, poison-drenched days, leaving the throne to them.
You might recall that I was reading a biography about Catherine de
Medici during the time this story takes place. This was a woman who
knew her hemlock, but also had the sorrow of seeing her sons become
kings of France, only to croak one after the other. You had to
wonder if someone in the Penrose family had laced a relative's
Kissmecanoe Tar Bar with deadly caramel, or an overdose of
fructose. It's universally acknowledged that sweets will kill
you.

None of this meant that I would give up
Kissmecanoe Drippy Cones or Kissmecanoe Angel Tits (okay, 'tips'),
but I would certainly now consume them with a respectful nod to the
dead.

"Hey, creepazoid," I said, turning to Todd.
"When's the last time you ate Kissmecanoe?"

"For breakfast yesterday morning," he said
without a blush. "A Kissmecanoe Nose Snarfer."

Crapolicious. Same here. All the identical
twins I had ever seen interviewed on TV doted on each others'
shared habits, like getting sick at the same time and using the
same brand of toilet paper and that kind of thing. As you well know
by now, I find the concept repulsive. I spit upon my brother's Coke
can.

"I can assure you," said Uncle Vern, "the
reward is still valid."

"But why does Michael have to be the one to
claim it?"

"Yeah," Marvin groused. "If he's like
his twin brother…if he's like
any
of the McPhersons—"

Todd and I snarled in unison, but not
in disagreement. Before leaving Bartow, Uncle Vern had sketched out
the arrangement. Michael had legitimate credentials. The rest of us
had credentials, too, but they wouldn't bear close scrutiny. Not
that, by the terms of the reward, we
needed
credentials. But you see what I
mean....

Michael's employer, the Radcliffe Agency, was
one of several detective agencies hired by Kissmecanoe to try and
track down the missing Whacko. He had been reticent about sharing
his findings with the university. The foundation sponsoring his
grant wouldn't know for a while that he was fobbing off
second-rate, second-hand results as his own. Dr. Whacko was, in
fact, a plagiarist, which must have accounted for his
do-unto-others-what-they-sure-as-hell-better-not-do-unto-me
mentality. The detectives who went to the university to find out
what Penrose was working on when he disappeared would find a blank
chalkboard. Even if the school had known our name, we would have
been covered by a confidentiality mandate. A good snoop could have
bypassed that restriction, and they probably had—only to find
nothing to be found.

Michael had the inside track. He could not
clearly recall Penrose, but his foster parents filled him in.
Unfortunately, Whacko had become cagey when it came to the
McPherson clan and had given Michael's stepparents a phony name. He
had also inflated their heads with promises of monetary
remuneration for being a token Mumsy and Dadsy. All they had to do
was let him take a swab here and there and keep him apprised of
Michael's lousy upbringing. It was as if a little gold mine had
landed in their midst. No need to break a sweat. Just stick out a
hand.

But the promise had gone unfulfilled because
Whacko had abruptly disappeared. It was later, when Kissmecanoe
hired his agency, that Michael remembered their story about the
weird genetic researcher. The timing was right, the location ideal.
He and Whacko had to be one and the same.

"Michael contacted me soon after
Skunk's death. His adoptive parents had contacted him to tell him
his beloved biological father had been blown away, wasn't that sad.
Sure, he was a good for nothing, but he had been one of
them
and it was too bad he had to go
out like a busted light bulb that way. "Remember all those
stick-ups he pulled off?" they said by way of sympathy. "And why
not? He had to support your real mom and your twin
brother."

Well...speaking of light bulbs....

Why else would Archibald Penrose aka the
Nutty Professor be interested in little Michael, except because of
his twin? Michael pretty much confirmed this by studying a list of
deceased alumni and noting their specialties.

"To top it off," Uncle Vern continued, "his
stepparents told him about Skunk's participation in the Glass
Heads. They thought it was a hoot. There was no need for Michael to
visit the prison and ask for my name. All he had to do was google
the group...is that the right word? Google?"

"It's the
only
word," Marvin asserted. "And yeah, it means
to do a search on the internet."

"I wasn't sure I could use it as a verb,
that's all," said Uncle Vern exhaustedly. "Michael found out I was
the director of the Glass Heads. From that he discovered I was the
owner of the Ice Boutique. He knew through his agency that there
had been a long series of unsolved jewelry store..."

"Robberies," said Todd.

"It's just a word, Uncle Vern," Marvin
added.

But Uncle Vern had betrayed a sensitivity to
words, as his googling question attested. 'Robbery' was fraught
with low-class connotations. He, for one, had never sullied himself
by being on-scene whenever one of his jobs came down. Skunk and his
other cohorts, however, were mere laborers who followed detailed
plans even the sluggish-minded could comprehend. Advanced Felony
for Dummies. He did not appreciate Marvin spelling out the obvious:
he might be considered a mastermind in some quarters, but in the
end he was just a lowlife.

"Michael told me what he suspected—that
I was behind the
robberies
. As
a matter of fact, the Radcliffe Agency was employed by some of the
jewelry stores that had been
robbed
, and it would be quite a feather in his
cap if he turned the spotlight on me. But he had bigger game in
mind."

"To help him find Whacko."

"I don't know the terms of his employment.
Does he work on commission? But tonight's work has been a lot more
profitable to him than anything else that has ever been assigned
him."

"He could still come back on us," Marvin
said.

"As you know, that possibility is being
attended to."

"But I don't speak Portuguese!"

"Goddamn it!" Uncle Vern shouted.

Too late—the cat was out of the pet carrier.
Uncle Vern and his extended family was headed for Brazil. Or it
could have been Portugal. But I doubted it. Not enough luscious
babes and nearly bankrupt.