Lucky Stuff (Jane Wheel Mysteries) (13 page)

Fran, her eyes still red, announced herself with a verbal
knock-knock
, and pulled the curtain back slightly.

“Lucky? Got a minute?” Fran nodded to Jane, looking a little curious about the new girl, but too busy to study her further. “I talked to the hospital and Sluggo signed himself out against their wishes. They wanted him to stay another day. They said he was already compromised, and it could have been a candy wrapper in Mickey’s car that set off the reaction and he couldn’t get to his pen. Mickey’s a mess. Blaming himself. He says he should quit.”

Lucky shrugged. “If he wants to go, let him, it’s got to be hard … watching someone…”

Lucky broke off his sentence and stared down at the table. Looking back up at Fran, he waved her away. “Let him go if he wants, cut him a check for two weeks’ pay or whatever the hell the union makes us do. Tell him it isn’t his fault, pat him on the back. Do what you gotta do. I’ll talk to him before he leaves, but get lost for a little while, okay?”

Fran left without seeming to take offense at Lucky’s brusqueness.

Jane watched him write something in a small blue notebook and slip it back into his pocket.

“Had a little flash of something when Fran was talking,” said Lucky. “Something felt weird. Maybe about Boing Boing? Who knows?” Lucky put the cigar back into his mouth. “Read that book, Jane, and you’ll see. It’s amazing.”

“Any reason someone might want to kill Sluggo Mettleman?”

Lucky shrugged. “Probably. He was a mean little shit, always trying to start fights is what Sal told me. Sal’s the, I don’t know, crew chief, I guess. Been around the longest. My driver. Doesn’t everybody always want to kill somebody?”

“I’m serious, Lucky,” said Jane. “If I’m going to help you find out who’s messing with your four-leaf clovers, I have to know what else is going on here.”

Lucky dropped his voice a few notches, to what, for him, probably passed for a whisper. “Sluggo told me that somebody messed with his stuff, too. He told me that after he and Brenda talked about him having a peanut allergy, she wanted to know exactly what his reactions were like. He was a mess, that kid. He was allergic to a boatload of stuff. Anyway, he came storming in here a couple days ago and said he had left his kit out on the writer’s table when he was demonstrating some tai fung fu shit to the other drivers and when he came back he thought it had been moved or something. Threw a fit and said nobody should ever touch his medicine.”

Lucky unwrapped two sticks of gum, unplugged his cigar, and stuffed them both in his mouth and began chewing.

“What did the bag look like?” said Jane.

“Like mine,” said Lucky, chomping on the gum and replacing the cigar. He gestured with his thumb and Jane saw a red kit identical to the one she had figured for a Dopp kit in Sluggo’s hospital room.

Jane noticed Lucky look at his watch, swipe one finger over the face, look again and wipe it again. He repeated the gesture seven times before looking up and saying, “I got to be at some park in a few minutes; can we be done for now?”

Jane looked around Lucky’s curtained-off space.

“Just tell me where you keep your lucky stuff?” Jane almost laughed. She sounded like she was shaking down a leprechaun.

Lucky gestured to a trunk that was covered with a few pillows. It appeared it was being used for extra seating. “Here’s a key I had made for you. Don’t let it out of your sight,” said Lucky. “I’ve been collecting those things for years. You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel like you’re losing all your favorite stuff.”

Jane toyed with giving Lucky Miller a rough inventory of exactly what she had lost in the past twenty-four hours, but decided against it.

“Any other real assistant duties I should know about?”

Lucky shook his head. “You’ll catch on. You just need to walk around with a clipboard and keep track of my schedule. Brenda left everything right there. When you’re here, you can answer that landline, but I got my cell and anybody who’s supposed to be calling me will probably do it directly. We do most of the rehearsal stuff in the morning and remotes, like at your folks’ tavern, in the afternoon or evening. We’ll begin taping next week.”

“Who’s paying for this? I mean producing this?” asked Jane.

“My company. I’m rich, baby. You’d be surprised how much being a second banana comic pays over the long haul. No ex-wives, no alimony, and no extravagances except the usual, so I got a nest egg. Besides, you’d be surprised how cheap everything is here. We got the building in a swap for a fix-up and cleanup and the food and motels are pretty damn cheap compared to anything out west.

“I also helped a few members of the Rat Pack bury some bodies, so they took care of me, if you know what I mean?” said Lucky, raising his eyebrows.

Jane opened her mouth and was trying to decide exactly what to ask, when he held up his hand palm up, then pulled back the curtain. “Kidding baby, kidding. I just want the roast enough to produce it myself. It’s like being at your own funeral and getting to hear all the best jokes. Now you be a good girl and read that book. You’ll get me. Belinda’s notes about my case are tucked into the front of chapters and you can read them, too. You’ll see. Belinda says as long as I can afford to do this, I got to do it. And I need all the help I can get.”

Belinda? Couldn’t be. Then again, why not. Jane flipped over the book to the back where the familiar photo of a wise-looking woman with startling green eyes stared back at her, an almost smile playing around her lips. Belinda St. Germaine had been an organizer and decluttering guru, who had been featured on Oprah and whose book,
Overstuffed,
had nearly dismantled Jane’s psyche when she decided to give Belinda’s suggestions a whirl. The author had moved into the life-coaching business in California, authoring a best-selling book about navigating Hollywood that Tim and Jane had mistakenly tried to follow when in California on business and now, apparently, in her most recent incarnation, Belinda St. Germaine was a therapist specializing in the recovery of lost memories. Jane shook her head as she read one of the blurbs praising St. Germain.
Remembering what caused our fears is what allows us to face them. St. Germaine might not be the first to claim this, but she says it in language we can all understand.
Wouldn’t Jane be better off if she could repress some of her Nellie memories?

Lucky gave her a nod as he stepped outside his quasi-private space, parting the curtain with one hand and holding a bulging briefcase in the other.

“Hey,” he said, dropping the curtain and holding it back with his shoulder. “You said you talked to Mettleman? Where the hell did you see him?”

“Hospital visiting a friend and I saw his Lucky hat and popped my head in, that’s all. Figured it was what Brenda would do.”

Lucky took out his cigar and pointed it at her, as if he were bestowing his own form of knighthood.

“You got some Nellie in you, all right.” Jane saw the light in his eyes flash again and he whipped out his small notebook and scribbled something. “It’s coming back, baby. After the writers’ meeting, I’ll have a bunch of new pages to go over. You can put them all in one of those binders in the morning. All the numbers to reach me or Brenda or any of these chumps are in the front of that binder. Meantime, just give me a buzz if anything new comes up on the schedule,
comprendez-vous
?

Scanning the schedule Lucky had shuffled over to her, Jane saw it was dated at the top with today’s date and a time of nine
A.M.
It appeared that it was e-mailed or delivered in person daily to the principals involved and Jane saw a folder where the previous schedules were all filed. She picked this up along with Brenda’s notes and dropped them into her bag.

Jane also dropped the weighty
Recovering Lost Memories and Finding Yourself
into her tote bag and picked up the key Lucky had placed in the table. Before sinking into Belinda St. Germaine’s prose of self-help, she would help herself by unlocking the kind of closed doors she preferred.

Jane removed the chain from around her neck that she wore with a few of her own totems. She had two small openwork iron keys, a Yellowstone Park souvenir silver medal with a deer on it and a tiny gold baby ring she had found in the bottom of a battered jewelry box, otherwise filled with knotted chains and orphaned screwback earrings she had picked up for a dollar at a rummage sale. Jane added Lucky’s trunk key to her necklace, then knelt in front of the box and pushed aside the cushions on the trunk’s lid. Putting the key into the lock and turning it, Jane recovered a few memories of her own. As soon as she figured out what was going on here and who was tampering with Lucky’s lucky stuff, she would get on the case of her own lost memories, boxed and crated, now cruising somewhere through Nebraska or wherever in the back of a moving truck. Between Jane and Tim, they had taken on so many part-time jobs, she realized she had let some of her own household responsibilities slip.
Like getting back my household,
she thought.

“There should be music,” said Jane, turning the key and feeling the satisfaction of the tumbler sliding back. She lifted the top of the trunk. “And light pouring forth.”

No music, though, and no light. Inside the trunk were several small boxes and bottles. Jane settled herself cross-legged on the ground to open them one by one. Four-leaf clovers, rabbits’ feet, stickpins crafted into horseshoes, and a large vintage celluloid box apparently devoted to lucky tokens and coins that had been advertising pieces from various shoe stores, bars, and amusement parks made up most of the contents. There was a small jar of beach glass, another one that held smooth round beach stones. Jane picked up a small silk drawstring pouch and shook the contents into her hand. Petrified wood? No, these were teeth, large and pointed. From a shark? No, not angular enough. An elk, a buffalo? Were teeth considered lucky? Not for the elk, of course. A felt jewelry bag held a lop-sided blue marble and two wrinkled buckeyes. Jane smiled at the buckeyes, which were her personal favorite lucky pieces. In addition, of course, to Nellie’s four-leaf clovers, now that she knew Nellie had the “gift.”

There was also a buttery soft leather lidded box shaped like a fortune cookie that held, naturally, fortunes. There were hundreds of scraps of paper, most with dates printed neatly on the back. Apparently Lucky not only noted memories in his little book, he also kept track of any ancient Chinese wisdom that accompanied his mu shu pork. One of the fortunes had been separated from the pack and was tucked into a tiny clear Ziploc, the kind Jane used for special buttons in her collection. Carefully separating the sealed top, Jane pulled out the paper and read:

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID

There was no writing on the back of this one. Either Lucky had been so unnerved by this ominous message he had neglected to date it,
or,
thought Jane
, Lucky hasn’t seen this one yet.
This might be one of those tweaks to his collection that had prompted him to hire her. Jane put it back in the box, planning to ask Lucky about it later. She opened a few more small cardboard boxes. There was a bottle filled with holy water from Lourdes. Jane resisted the urge to open it and dab it on her pulse points. After all, who was she to deny powers? There was an empty Skippy’s glass jar with wooden disks printed with
LUCKY
signs on one side and
DON’T TAKE ANY WOODEN NICKELS
on the other. Two identical charms, mustard seeds encased in small glass orbs, hung from a silver chain.

Jane heard Fran’s voice just on the other side of the curtain and closed and locked the trunk, listening and tugging to make sure the lock caught. She slipped her own necklace back around her neck, thinking about how lucky she was that she had already been wearing keys, so one more would never be noticed.

“Knock-knock,” said Fran, parting the curtain as Jane was fluffing the pillows and staring at her phone. She hoped she looked like she was just tidying up the office space. And although Jane had warmed slowly to the idea of these phones too smart for their own good, she now appreciated that anytime she wanted to look busy or distracted, all she had to do was pull out her phone and stare at it intently.

“Lucky told me to give you this list of everyone working here, although I can’t understand why you’d need it, filling in for Bren just a few days, not like you’ll actually see half these people.” Fran clenched one fist then unclenched it, as if she were working one of those hand-exercisers or squeezing a rubber ball. “Half the people on the payroll are the rubes who live in this town who he’s paying to make their places look like he remembers them. Easy money for people to use for remodeling, if you ask me.”

Jane gave her what she hoped was the encouraging un-rube-like smile of a coconspirator. “He’s paying townspeople to upgrade their businesses?”

Fran shrugged. “Paid a guy to reopen his grandfather’s diner and paid to upgrade parking lots at a few bars and restaurants. Paying for extra security at every place scheduled for a visit. Oh, and all those banners and signs and stuff? You think that the town has money to pay for that kind of blitz? Lucky’s a man who likes buzz and he who buzzes loudest gets the most buzz back—that’s his motto. I know I sound like a crank, but I’m his personal accountant, too, and the man’s bleeding money for this project and who knows if it’ll even see the light of…” Fran broke off to take a phone call and handed Jane a sheaf of papers.

Jane slipped those papers into her tote bag with all of the other Lucky Miller material she had gathered. She checked her own phone for the time. She was going to have to remember to always wear her wristwatch now that she was a working girl. She couldn’t keep depending on her phone as a clock, having to pull it out every time she checked to see how late she was for her next appointment.

This time, though, there was a message on the screen. She hadn’t felt the vibration, so missed seeing Nick’s message when it came in thirty minutes earlier.

just kicked butt in our soccer game against St. Rs—nobdy expects math and science geeks to be jocks, but a few of us know what we’re doing. Love you.