Allan Leverone - Postcards from the Apocalypse

The report was accompanied by a video feed of the accident scene, which of course showed nothing more than a nondescript city cement mixer parked at the side of a busy road, emergency beacons busily flashing. This visual warning was too little, too late for Mr. Dawes, of course, but made for a colorful addition to the live report and was thus included. It may have been my imagination, but I could have sworn the truck looked a little off-kilter, tilted a bit like it was parked on top of something. Or someone.

My uncle and I fell silent, neither of us speaking until the report ended. The irony of Jimmy Kills using the same method to dispose of Harold Dawes that Dawes had used on Robert Billingsley contained, I thought, a certain poetic justice, in an Old Testament, eye for an eye sort of way.

After the blonde newsbabe had finished the story, Brick reached for the telephone and handed it over to me. “I’ll bite,” I said. “Who am I calling?”

“Why, Maggie Billingsley, of course,” he replied. “Or would you rather I set up the appointment?”

I pictured the willowy brunette with the long legs and the tight white sweater and the story we could now tell her. “I’ll handle this one,” I told Brick.

He nodded and smiled. “I thought you might.”

I had so much fun writing the first Uncle Brick story that I knew immediately I would make the characters into a series. A few months later I started writing “Uncle Brick and the Little Devilz,” an adventure featuring a teenage runaway, kidnapping, murder and strippers. This story first appeared at Mysterical-E exactly one year after the first, in the Summer, 2010 issue. I hope you enjoy it.

Have you ever wondered how many revolutions a ceiling fan makes on the low setting as it pushes the stifling summer air around an un-air conditioned second floor office? In Boston? In July? I hadn’t, either, until I started working in my uncle’s Boston-based PI firm, Callahan Investigations.

A little background: My Uncle Brick Callahan operated the agency for decades with my father Dennis, while I went off to Los Angeles to seek fame and fortune—okay, mostly fortune—as an accountant. Then my wife divorced me, taking most of my money and all of my business, and my father managed to get himself murdered thanks to an investigation gone horribly wrong.

I returned to Boston, ostensibly to keep an eye on my now-eighty year old uncle but really because,

A) I had nowhere else to go,

B) Boston is three thousand miles away from LA and my ex-wife, and

C) I was determined to solve my dad’s murder.

It turned out my Uncle Brick needed absolutely no one to keep an eye on him, certainly not me, but he did agree to allow me to work with him in the agency until I could get back on my feet. Oh yeah, and we were able to solve my dad’s murder, turning the tables on the upwardly mobile mobster who killed him. That cold son of a bitch is in the ground now.

I can’t say evening the score on my father’s behalf made me feel any better about losing him, but the sense of satisfaction I got from seeing Harold Dawes get what he deserved was one sweet reward, despite the fact that I nearly ended up face down in the dirt myself, and on my very first case, no less.

By the way, the answer is about one hundred. Our ceiling fan makes roughly one hundred revolutions per minute on the low setting. Yours might be different.

The point, though, and believe it or not there is one, is that I had never gained a true appreciation for the meaning of the word “boredom” until I took the job working with my uncle. After wrapping up the investigation of my dad’s murder we had been sitting around the office playing sports trivia—which Uncle Brick always won because he asked questions from the 1940’s and ‘50’s—while waiting for another case to come along.

I had begun to doubt it was ever going to happen. In my own private version of hell, we were going to sit around the Callahan Investigations offices, asking each other stupid sports questions day after day, until eventually the bank would come knocking and repossess all our furniture and office equipment and we would find ourselves shooed unceremoniously out into the street. That would be bad enough in LA, but Boston gets cold in the winter!

“How can you just sit there?” I finally asked. “Aren’t you even a little bit antsy?”

“Why should I be?” Brick answered without taking his eyes off the Globe sports page. The Sox had just lost their fourth series in a row and Brick was certain he was going to get the call to manage the team any day now. “Waiting for a case to come walking through the door is nothing, kiddo. If you think this is tough, you should try sitting in a car with a faulty heater outside a seedy motel for three hours in the middle of a February snowstorm waiting for some dope to finish screwing his bimbo so you can obtain photographic evidence of his infidelity for his wife. Now that’ll make you antsy, let me tell you.

“Hang in there, kid, a case will come along eventually, they always do.”

Right on cue, the door to our second floor office opened, squealing in protest, reminding me I had told Brick I would oil the hinges. I hadn’t gotten around to it yet. We had been pretty busy, after all.

An older lady with a full head of snow-white hair—think Barbara Bush; the wife of George Senior, not the party-girl presidential daughter—peeked hesitantly inside as if worried she might be interrupting an important meeting or something. She had obviously never been in our office before; important meetings here were few and far between. She seemed unconvinced of her location, despite the fact CALLAHAN INVESTIGATIONS was prominently displayed on the frosted, pebbled window of the office door.

Instantly, Brick was on his feet, striding toward the woman with a welcoming smile as though he had been anxiously awaiting her arrival for the last few hours, rather than picking his teeth, which was how he had actually been spending his time. The newspaper he had been engrossed in simply vanished. I had no idea how he did that.

I finally got to my feet as Brick pulled the door open completely, ushering the woman inside with a courtly grace I knew I could never master if I lived to be two hundred. I felt like the class dullard.

“Welcome to Callahan Investigations,” Brick smiled, leading the woman across the office to a comfortable leather couch. She sat and began wringing her hands nervously. “I’m Brick Callahan,” my uncle continued, “and this young man is my nephew. How may we be of service to you, Miss—?”

Tears welled up in Barbara Bush’s eyes. She seemed mere seconds away from a breakdown. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Where are my manners? My name is Lillian Saunders.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms Saunders—“

“Mrs., please.”

“Very well, Mrs. Saunders, how can Callahan Investigations help you?”

“It’s my husband, Martin. He’s dead.” The dam broke and the tears which had been threatening to let loose rolled down the distraught woman’s face as a great wrenching sob shook her body. Uncle Brick produced a tissue, from where I had no idea, handing it to the grateful woman and waiting for her to compose herself enough to continue. Finally she did.

“He was found on a sidewalk in Chinatown next to an old apartment building. They… they say he got drunk and leaped from the roof.”

“And you don’t believe he killed himself.” Brick phrased it as a statement, not a question.

“That’s right; I most certainly do not. He wasn’t drinking and he had no reason that I know of even to be in Chinatown.”

Lillian Saunders continued, pausing every now and then to blow her nose and wipe her eyes. She adopted a look of grim determination, which she maintained until she had slogged through to the end of her narrative.