Free Planet Willie by Josh Shoemake Page A

the species at the gallery, but to my disappointment Billy
and I are providing more than our fair share of flash. Maybe fifty business
types stand around drinking French champagne and scooping shrimply delights off
silver trays, mostly grey hair in suits showing off investments in the silicone
industry in the form of blondes twice their size.
    Billy and I
remain unperturbed. We walk right in there with enough momentum for the desired
cape effect, despite the fact that your leather cape will hang heavier than
your silk, and steal a roomful of eyes from the Old Masters. No blue-eyed
virgins in sight, which is the understatement of the century, but that doesn’t
prevent Billy from walking right over to an Amazon in a gold lamé dress about
the size of a handkerchief and tipping his hat, at which point I figure I
better get in there and rescue my partner before we got a riot on our hands.
    “I’m Willie,
this is Billy, and that was some poetry,” I say. The girl gives Billy this real
breathy hello while pretending I’m some exhibit in the Museum of Natural History. Makes me think either the champagne’s gone clear to her head or the string
quartet’s so loud she hasn’t heard me. Then she actually reaches out and
strokes Billy’s plastic hat, which leads me to one and only one conclusion:
pheromones. Then another little conclusion comes none too fast, which is that
blondie is none other than Twiggy, doing for skin and bones what Marilyn Monroe
once did for tits and ass. Never imagined she had it in her. Hair’s swept up
off her neck real stylishly, and circles of rouge color her cheeks. Quite an
elegant get up, it is. I want to ask her about Kafka, I want to ask her what
the hell she’s doing there – a little phrase that’s starting to sound familiar
– but she’s already led Billy off to a corner, doing to that hat what most
people do to pets.
    So I’m
starting to feel like a character in an Albanian spy novel, and I’m not sure I
like it. Billy may get himself into trouble, I worry, but then with the way
he’s been drinking, Billy’s already in trouble. Besides, I’ve got business to tend
to. Technically speaking, business means saving Fernanda Shore’s soul, et
cetera, but I’ve found that there’s really no technically speaking where souls
are concerned. On my first case, a few months after my death when I joined the
force, I just came right out with it. The fella’s name was Johnny Periwinkle,
if I recall, and he’d been praying to be saved from his gambling. I sat next to
him at a blackjack table in the Isle of Capri Casino, Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Hit with eighteen showing and beat his twenty with a three. Proceeded to tell
him that recommitting to the Lord and quitting the cards would be like hitting
an eternal twenty-one, which got me some extended profanity and a punch to the
face. The case ended up taking weeks, and what I learned is that they may be
praying for salvation, but nothing you say can make them accept salvation, if
that’s what you want to call it. You’ve just got to accompany them through all
the ups and downs until the downs get so low that they decide on their own to
make some change. At best all you can do is help them hit bottom quicker, which
incidentally has always happened to be a specialty of mine. So Detective Willie
has no illusions about putting Miss Fernanda back on the straight and narrow
tonight. He’s merely intending to get down in the mud with her and see if she
can wrestle.
    First things
first, I swipe a champagne glass from a passing tray and murder a few bubbles.
Over the rim of the glass there’s no sign of Havisham, which is good news, but
then there’s no sign of anyone I take to be Fernanda either. I gaze up into the
catwalks, but there’s no sign of life up there. I move around the edges of the
room, checking out some of the paintings as I go. Lots of older landscapes and
fruit bowls, and it is amazing how they could make those apples look so