The Angle of Observation

“We have to believe in free-will. We’ve got no choice,” said Isaac Bashevis Singer. I have always liked Mr. Singer’s story telling. He said those words years ago in a television interview. I can’t remember who the interviewer was, but Singer in his impish manner clearly was having fun with the host.

 I started thinking about that quote recently when I was talking to a customer who used to buy wine from my store. For no apparent reason he began to discuss religion and stated emphatically that he was an atheist. So I asked him if that meant he had no religion. He looked at me as if I were an idiot and said, “Man, I just told you I’m an atheist.” To which I replied, “Well, to not believe in god—isn’t that a tremendous leap of faith?” I just lost a customer because when you win an argument with a customer, you lose a customer.

 In that regard I have always collected such witticisms. The effect they have on the human spirit is also worth observing. I liked Dadaist painter Marcel Duchamp’s credo: “There is no solution, therefore there is no problem.”

 J. P. Donleavy, Irish-American writer: “Writing: Turning one’s worst moments into profit.”

 “You know, there must be happiness somewhere, when a lawyer dies.” ― J.P. Donleavy, A Fairy Tale of New York.

 Reading such pithy wisdom in 25 words or less—puts me in a bipolar state. I get so much enjoyment over the prose and so much depression knowing I’ll never be that clever. I’m just going to have to attend the Excelsior School of Dynamic Writing, Padre Island Campus. I discovered the school on the back of a matchbook…”Hey, if Dostoevsky can do it, so can you. After seven easy lessons you’ll be writing prose…and there’s no telling what the eighth lesson will bring—maybe an ode worthy of inscription on a Greek urn.

 “ And one of my favorite quotes: “Come here till I tell you. Where is the sea high and the winds soft and moist and warm, sometimes stained with sun, with peace so wild for wishing where all is told and telling.” ― J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man.

 Man, that’s writing!

Never Underestimate the Power of Undercover

A sample from "Matters of Taste", Book Two of the Deuce Luce Wine and Crime Trilogy


Deuce wondered if Bystrom was going to show up at Mullins’ office wearing his priest outfit. He recalled Bystrom the storyteller talking about all of his undercover exploits and the various costumes they required. He laughed at the time Bystrom stopped a carjacking in his Bozo the Clown costume. Bystrom was on an undercover assignment in one of the Bozoburger restaurants. The word was out that members of a local theft ring would meet almost daily for lunch at a Bozoburger fast-food joint and discuss future jobs. The undercover assignment had Bystrom in a Bozo the clown outfit passing out balloons and bubblegum to all of the children in the restaurant. He was wearing a small VHF transceiver to monitor the conversations of the crew, which was unaware a microphone was hidden beneath their table.

A loud ruckus and the unmistakable sound of gunshots diverted Bystrom from his surveillance. Running out of the restaurant, one hand on his transceiver and the other on a massive revolver which he called his pocket cannon, he saw a carjacker attempting to pull the driver out of his vehicle. He ran toward him yelling “put down the gun, you’re under arrest”. The carjacker, confronted by a clown armed with a monstrous gun, dropped his weapon and spreadeagled himself on the ground and prayed that the motherfucker on the other end of the gun wasn’t going to cap his ass.  A customer called the police and waited until they showed up. The cops were more confused than the carjacker. Bystrom showed his federal credentials to them. Laughing themselves silly the only question the police had for Bystrom was the same one asked by the carjacker—“man, what kind of gun is that?”  And of course the local newspaper led with the inevitable headline—"Bozo Goes Ballistic!"

Deuce had to figure Bystrom got so many laughs recalling his exploits that he was into undercover work more for the costumes than for the apprehension of criminals. And he reckoned if Bystrom wasn’t so emotionally attached to his handlebar mustache he’d probably grab at an assignment that gave him the chance to dress in drag. Bystrom, on the other hand took his undercover assignments seriously. He had done undercover work for two years of his fifteen year stint with the Bureau.

 Bystrom, back at Marchand’s place was hatching his ‘gorilla my dreams’ plot to get Majeski out of his comfort zone. He figured Majeski had a security camera in his apartment so what about paying a visit while Majeski was gone? It wouldn’t be an ordinary call. He would be resplendent in his gorilla costume doing pirouettes and jetés all over Majeski’s apartment knowing that the security camera would end up with plenty of bizarre video. It was a way of letting Majeski know that the end was near and that he had better get his shit in one sock. What was he going to do? Show the video to the police? And if the authorities would go this far what the hell else would they do? In his paranoid state it was time for the ‘cosmic other shoe’ to fall.

Bystrom had Majeski’s work schedule: he had Marchand position himself near the Physical Sciences building with the instruction to call him when Majeski was seen entering the building. Once it was confirmed Bystrom could take his time setting things up for his upcoming gorilla ballet. For a final touch he taped a note to the computer monitor screen which said “Attention—gorilla invasion. Check your security camera for results—film at 11:00”. That ought to shake him up thought Bystrom.  

When Majeski returned home and saw the video, he was living proof that the phrase ‘he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind’ meant something. He was in a state of panic. His first move was to take a valium and try to calm down. He had to talk to his landlady to see if she knew anything. What was he going to do—ask her if she saw any suspicious looking gorillas around? Just that one move of Bystrom’s had Majeski hanging by the ropes in a state of total confusion. It also put Bystrom in a bit of a fix. He would need to step up security around Bette. It was time to call Deuce and let him know what the plan was. He would put on his Catholic priest outfit and play the part of Father Bystrom, who would hang around during her office hours. His cover was that he was visiting from Notre Dame and was there to meet Bette with whom he’d be doing a peer review of an article on quarks and leptons submitted for publication in the Journal of Particle Physics.

Majeski, on his part, calmed down and decided that the best strategy was to do nothing. As far as he was concerned no gorillas had danced in his bedroom. He was still a little confused as to just what the authorities knew about him. He figured if they had proof that he was the one who set off the bomb they would have arrested him. Since they went to the length of planting evidence in his apartment—they supposedly had something on him, but he knew that they didn’t have enough to make a case. At minimum he should continue to do what he usually did—work at the Physical Sciences building and study at home.

The Business of Art

 

At a gallery in the sixties

An exhibition called "found Art".

There is an old lawnmower

Vintage nineteen-twenty-three.

The sign says

Art object—don't touch.

The artist called Lazlo

Said he had to bring out 
Its essence by adding

A coat of flat-black paint.

It becomes all essence and no

Artifact, no longer an implement.

He sees by my outfit that

I'm not a buyer but maybe

A poseur, maybe a critic.

No Lazlo, I report crime

For the local paper—I'm on to you
Like white on rice.

Lazlo pontificates

It's not in the art—it's in the pitch.

Where I'm from we call
Talk like that
Bushwa with a patois.

It was bought by a man 

In a three-piece suit 
For six-thousand

Dethroning Willie Sutton 

From the Pantheon of  Robbers 

Replaced by Lazlo, the pontiff.

Willie said he robbed banks

Cuz that's where the money was.

Astutely Lazlo robbed

The rich and foolish—
That's where his money was.

To honor Lazlo I give you

My found poem—best if read

While listening to

The Rivingtons' Rendition of
Papa Oom Mow Mow.

A papa-oom-mow-mow (4X)
Funniest sound I ever heard
(A papa-oom-mow-mow a papa-oom-mow-mow)
But I can't understand a single word
(A papa-oom-mow-mow a papa-oom-mow-mow)
Well if he's serious or if he's playin'
Woo my my it's all he's sayin
Doot doot doot...

Maybe this stuff could sell
If I coated it in flat black.

From "Readin', Writin' and Route 33"

Chapter One

The body lay in the center of the floor. Its condition—obviously dead. It failed to stop the violent downward stroke of a ten inch filleting knife directed at its back just to the left of the spine. The victim put up a brief fight—the hands and forearms had a half-dozen slashes, received while the victim was trying to fend off his attacker. There was some blunt force trauma on the front of his neck which may have been put there when the attacker put an arm lock on his neck to gain more control. When the knife blade went through the back and through the heart there was no question— that single stroke was all that was needed to do the job.

At this point in the investigation Coeur d'Alene police chief, Roger Mullins, called the Kootenai County coroner's office and requested that the coroner come out to the crime scene which was on Rural Route 95, about two miles south of the town of Coeur d'Alene. He left instructions that the coroner leave his vehicle on the shoulder of the road and to not walk on the driveway leading up to the house. If the killer came in a car Mullins did not want any tracks destroyed or altered with additional vehicle traffic.

"Well, what do we have here," asked Mullins. "It looks like a two thousand page instruction manual for the printing of currency, and documentation of the machinery, ink and other chemicals required. My god, this is a publication put out by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. What the hell is it doing here?"

"Roger, will you take a look at the steel door right behind us. I'd say it's a door to a room that probably contains the printing press, the ink, chemicals and the paper to print your own fortune," said detective Dale Toepler.

"Dale, let's dust the door for prints and we need to get some prints off of the victim. Maybe he had a partner or maybe there was someone who was aware of the setup, went to rob the place and was confronted by the victim."

"Look, we don't even know the name of the guy we're dealing with. Can we remove his wallet and check his ID," said Toepler.

"Okay Dale, let's see what you come up with. Meanwhile, I have to call the Secret Service as I'm sure we are dealing with a counterfeiter—who knows, maybe a gang of counterfeiters."

After Mullins got off the phone with the Secret Service he told Toepler to secure the crime scene. The Secret Service agent was on his way. No doubt Mullins was going to be in the middle of a turf battle: he naturally would take the position that the homicide was under Kootenai County's purview and the counterfeiting business would be handled by the Feds. But he wouldn't be surprised if the Feds wanted it all. He made a note to himself to get in touch with Larry Bystrom. Bystrom had worked for the FBI for almost twenty years and was a Private Investigator for the last ten years. He had been living in Coeur d'Alene for the past year but he kept in contact with agents he had worked with in the FBI and the Secret Service. It was said that Bystrom had a ton of markers out there so if any help or information was needed he would be the go-to guy since there were still many in the Bureau that owed him some favors.

"Roger, I'd say we have a bit of a problem with the victim's identity," said Toepler.

"For now he's Mr. John Doe. How do you mean as far as identity goes?"

"Well for starters I'm looking at four different sets of ID—so which ID set is the real deal," asked Toepler.

"Wow. I don't suppose any of those sets include a Social Security card?"

"None that I can find," said Toepler.

The lack of a Social Security card brought up a red flag for Chief Mullins. It wasn't mandated by law that you had to have a Social Security number. But if you were employed in the USA it was mandatory. You could get around the employment issue if you were self-employed and didn't report any income. It wasn't easy but if one lived a very low profile existence, one could remain off the radar. Mullins also noted that there were several radical right-wing groups that espoused the idea that their government had no business knowing about their families, their incomes or their politics, for that matter. Maybe the victim was a member of such a group. Mullins took out his pocket memo pad and wrote down 'must talk to Bystrom' and underlined the passage.

A character study of Lurid Lawrence Bystrom, P.I.

This is the start of a blog dealing with the Deuce Luce Trilogy. Read the three books in the order they appear:

Half-life

Matters of Taste

Beaune Appetit

It was just a few weeks ago that I finished and published the third book of the Deuce Luce Trilogy, 'Beaune Appetit'. Here is Larry Bystrom at his best. He is an old friend of Deuce's. He is asked by his wife, Amy, to talk about his exploits when he worked for the FBI. He tried to beg off  saying that he was not allowed to discuss any Bureau business. Finally he relented with the caveat that some details as names and locations had to be changed for security reasons. Here's his story:

" All right, here we go, and the names and location have been changed or deleted to protect the innocent. Deuce, you're an old newspaperman—do you remember the Tri-state Old-timers?"

"Oh yes. Folks this was a gang of old farts that used to go around knocking off banks in the Midwest. I guess they were damned good at what they did."

"Oh they were good, all right. They began their careers back when safe crackers or burglars were called yeggs. We got a tip from a very reliable source that they were going to be breaking into the main bank of the town. The town shall be known as Upper Dufusville. Now these guys, as we later learned, spent an extraordinary amount of time casing their target. It was nothing for them to post look-outs on street corners observing the bank staff coming and going all hours of the day and night. Times were logged into a notebook, the type and manufacturer of all of the locks on the entry and exit doors were duly noted. In short, with the huge amount of time they were devoting to this endeavor, you could not say that crime pays. We reckoned they were knocking down about eighty-cents an hour.

"Anyway, like I said, we got this tip so we set up surveillance on the front and rear entrances. I was with my partner in a car parked about a block away on a street that was on the getaway route. My partner Morrie and I would take turns looking into the rear view mirror. It was important to know not only what was happening in front of us but behind us too. You don't want any surprises while you're playing the waiting game.

"Next thing I know Morrie says 'there's a bogey at six-o'clock—open your door and crouch behind it and get a better look'. So I get out, it's about three in the morning and the street light is out, so I have to wait and let the guy walking toward the car get to within ten feet so I can make a determination: friend or foe? Now I'm laughing uncontrollably and I just about fell to the ground in a paralytic heap.

"My partner, Morrie gets out and draws his weapon, then re-holsters it and says to this guy, 'who in the fuck are you and what the fuck do you think you're doing?'

"I try to compose myself as best I can and take a closer look at him and start laughing again. Really, it was very unprofessional on my part. But if you would have seen this character: he was dressed in jockey silks but missing the pants—naked as a jaybird from the waist down but he did sport a spiffy pair of cowboy boots and a cute little jockey's cap. Between his legs he had a child's toy horse—the kind that looked like a broom stick but with a horse's head on top. And he had a riding crop that he was using to spank his butt while yelling giddyup, giddyup. Again, Morrie asks him who he is. The guy says he's the poet laureate of Keokuk, Iowa.  At this point I completely lost it—my stomach muscles hurt from laughing so hard.

"Morrie looks at the guy with a straight face and says, 'Here's the deal Mr. Lone Ranger—you and Seabiscuit better skeedaddle back to the OK corral', then looking at me, he continues, 'or Tonto over here is going to cap your ass with a couple of silver bullets'.

"And the guy takes off. Evidently he got the message. So after I regained some of my composure, I asked Morrie how he could remain so cool with this half-naked dufus spouting all kinds of nonsense?"

To which Morrie replied "You mean he wasn't the poet laureate of Keokuk?"

With the punch line Deuce spits out a mouthful of coffee and Bette and Cindy can't stop laughing. Then Bette chides Deuce that he can't drink coffee and laugh at the same time. Amy says to Deuce not to worry, she'll clean up the mess. Bette asks Amy if she thought the story was funny because she wasn't laughing that much. "Bette, I was doing all I could to stop from peeing in my pants—well, for the most part I was successful."

 Amy asked Bystrom what happened after the half-naked dufus got out of there?

"Glad you asked, dear. It turns out that Morrie was a brilliant guy. He had a hunch that the dufus in racing silks was just a diversion so he gets a hold of agent Likens on the walkie-talkie. Likens is scoping out the rear entrance of the bank from an adjoining roof-top. He says to him there ought to be a bunch of old geezers fleeing the bank any moment. Sure enough, almost on cue, like a bunch of roaches scurrying for cover after a light is turned on, six senior citizens are doing all they can do to flee the scene. They were rounded up without anyone breaking a sweat."

"Larry, you need to write a book about your Bureau experiences."

"No, Deuce, you're the writer. You can't believe all of the shit like this that went down. Trouble is I'm not allowed to talk about it."

... "Now that we are alone honey, I'm going to haul you off to bed and have my way with you."

"Larry dear, you can have me any way you want me but before I willingly submit, answer me this one question."

"Anything for my insatiable wife. What's the question."

"How did you Bureau guys know that the tip you got was for real and who did you get it from?"

"Amy, I told you there is some FBI business that I can't discuss with you. But let me think. I'll tell you what—the leader, the brains of the Tri-State boys was sleeping with the wrong bimbo."

Thinking about the phrase 'sleeping with the wrong bimbo', Amy chuckled, "I know the answer—the guy talked in his sleep."

"God, thank you letting me have the good taste and the good sense to marry the smartest woman this side of the Mississippi, and the hottest one too. Bingo, Amy—you shoulda been an agent."

Matters of Taste

With all of the recent revelations concerning the NSA and some of the nasty stuff they're up to I am suddenly concerned about the chances of me being in trouble. One of the characters in 'Matters' is a kook by the name of Mike Majeski. It turns out he has a lot of animosity toward Deuce Luce's wife, Bette. So much so that he goes to the extreme of making a few bombs and using them. I got on to some Internet URLs that discussed bomb-making, the components as far as mechanical devices like timers and detonators as well as various chemicals to make bombs extremely lethal.

So it occurs to me that with the NSA snooping on everyone's use of their phones and their use of the Internet I am probably on someone's shit list as far as dangerous radicals are concerned.

Original Cover for Matters of Taste--can you find the mistake?

This was the original cover for the second book in the series--if only I got it right--it should have read 'Matters of Taste'. Finally I decided to be consistent and use the same background jpeg of the Hospices de Beaune for all three books.

Posted by Mark Paley at 4:55 PM No comments: