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    Mamba In A Basket
    Mamba In A Basket
    Mamba In A Basket
    Ebook289 pages5 hours

    Mamba In A Basket

    By Carl Reader

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    About this ebook

    Allie Slayton might be a feminist detective, but the situation he faces in Mamba In A Basket forces him to make use of all the dark skills he learned as a Vietnam veteran and former college football player. An ancient African woman brings a body part to his office in North Philadelphia and commands him to find the rest of the anatomy. Sickened, he immediately gets the police involved, who suspect him of cannibalism. He's hopelessly in love with his former wife, a health-food store owner, and he is the farthest thing from a cannibal, but circumstances force him out of his self-protective shell and into a hell on earth involving a mad antagonist who considers human flesh a delicacy and hopes Slayton will be his next victim. Mamba-Bo is a sick cultist with hypnotic powers and followers who do whatever unappetizing things he commands them to do. Set in Philadelphia and the country setting near New Hope, Pennsylvania, Mamba In A Basket tests Slayton and all his pacifist, philosophic powers to their limits. The story very nearly consumes him, literally.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarl Reader
    Release dateOct 11, 2014
    ISBN9781311180353
    Mamba In A Basket
    Author

    Carl Reader

    Carl Reader trained as a journalist at Temple University and has worked as a reporter, photographer and editor in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Montana. He's published short stories in literary magazines and on the Internet and has self-published a children's Christmas story called THE TWELFTH ELF OF KINDNESS.That book was partially published in Russia under the Sister Cities program. He's also self-published a novella called THE PERSECUTION OF WILLIAM PENN, which has been well-received in several college libraries. He works as a professional photographer and freelance writer.

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      Book preview

      Mamba In A Basket - Carl Reader

      Mamba In A Basket

      By

      Carl Reader

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 2014 Carl Reader

      Smashwords License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All characters in this book are purely fictional.

      Any resemblance to any person, living or dead, is strictly coincidental.

      Mamba In A Basket

      By

      Carl Reader

      I had to climb the stairs, no matter what might await me there. That smell had been following me around for days now, and I knew there was no avoiding it and no avoiding trouble once it showed itself. I might as well face it: there was doom attached to that smell. I might as well face it. The first stair squeaked as I put my foot on it. I stopped, my heart beating fast and my breath coming hard. I glanced toward the kitchen. I had promised Harmony I would help, and instead I had gotten her in trouble again now. I had to go up, if only to get her out of it. A feeling of intoxication came over me. It forced me to go on: it was the intoxication of danger and it came from the feeling I now had someone to protect. It became thicker and thicker within me as I climbed, as if it was a bottle of fine wine I was draining to the dregs. The smell got stronger and it became colder the higher I went on the stairs and my senses got sharper. Whatever was up there was very near now.

      The stench grew to be overwhelming at the top of the stairs. I couldn't say where it came from, but I was going to find out. I waited for thirty seconds in the cold for my eyes to adjust to the dark. I had once been surprised in a hut by a Vietnamese with a knife that left me with a scar on my right upper arm, because I had just come in from the sunlight, and I had sworn I would never be that stupid again. So I let my eyes adjust. And when I could see, I also heard. There was a low moaning, and a hum. Of course. Air conditioning. Feeling a little bit better now that I had identified the source of the humming and the cold, I strode down the empty hallway.

      In a room off the hallway he was impaled by the hands with knives on two huge blocks of wood, crucified with his face to the floor. He was a thin black man dressed in a loose red print pullover top and black pajama bottoms. He was barefoot. He had mounds of wiry hair, scandals lying on the wood flooring near his feet and a brown pallor to his sickly flesh. I saw him as I passed the first doorway on the left. He was face-down but kneeling, his knees slipping on the hardwood floor as he tried to relieve the pressure on his hands. The blocks of wood were two feet thick, with a highly polished gloss to them, and his hands were pinned to them through the backs the way you pin a hide to a board. The knives were the same sort that had fallen out of the ceiling in my office, so I knew the same people who killed O'Reilly did this. All around him, hanging on the walls, were African masks made of wood, frightening things with violent expressions, along with hides of lions, spears and wooden clubs.

      I quickly checked out the room. It appeared no one was in it but the man. He saw me out of the corner of his eye and immediately recoiled back away from me.

      Go! Leave me! he said. Please! I must suffer this.

      I rushed over to him, and was about to pull the knife from his right hand.

      No! It is punishment! he said. I must endure the punishment or it will be worse!

      I pulled out the knife and he gasped. Then I pulled out the other. He fell to the floor, but then sat up on his knees and embraced himself to ease the pain. It bloodied his shirt. His eyes went back in his head. I thought he would faint.

      Oh, no, he said, looking first at one hand then the other. You must put the knives back in my hands. You do not understand.

      At that point, I wondered just who the hell had gotten me into this mess, but of course I knew. It was a woman. It was always a woman …

      I

      All day I sat alone in my office in North Philadelphia day-dreaming about calling my ex-wife. I wasn’t doing anything else, like thinking about a case. I was just day-dreaming. I always day-dreamed of her. When the sun came through the window, I stared at the sun and day-dreamed of her. When the street was shady, I was like a motionless mannequin, thinking of her, day-dreaming, just day-dreaming of her all the time.

      Allie Slayton, I'd say to myself, she kept your name, and that means something.

      She's still called Sarah Slayton, and chose to be called that, so it has to mean something, something important.

      Pick up the phone, pick it up and call her.

      Yes, she kept your name, and only got rid of you, but maybe you could change that if you picked up the phone and poured out your heart to her.

      Hi, Sarah, this is Allie, I blurted. How are you?

      There was silence. I wasn’t sure if she was stoned or angry, so I went on, full steam ahead.

      I don't think what I'm doing here in the city is going to work out. I've been having bad dreams lately, just awful things going through my head, being without you in the apartment, and I can't seem to stop them or sleep well or stop thinking of you.

      Oh, Allie, you darling. You know you're not supposed to call me at times like this, you silly. Remember? You have to depend on yourself now. We’re divorced. I can’t help you at all. We both have to go our separate ways.

      I know, but I ...

      Oh, Allie, you’re so sweet, but you try to hard.

      I’d try even harder, if I could get you back.

      What? Oh, all right. If you feel so bad, maybe we should get back together. I still love you, you know.

      Really?

      Of course I do.

      Do you mean that? Or are you just high, just agreeing with me to get rid of me?

      You know what I always said … if you’re not high, you’re low.

      Sarah, I feel the way I used to before I met you, all confused and not able to focus on what I'm doing, you know? I think I need to –

      Allie, you idiot, just come home right away, lover. Don't talk anymore. Just come home. I love you more than anything in the world.

      Really? It's hard to believe.

      Yes. I mean it. Just come home. I can't be without you anymore. I can’t live without you, darling.

      A noise on the street made me look up from the phone. A car had blown its horn angrily at a pedestrian, and now the boy walked defiantly in the middle of the street with thick text books stuck to his hip and one finger in the air. I looked down at the phone, and didn't dare touch it or talk to it again without picking up the receiver. And if I picked up the receiver and really talked to Sarah, all I might hear was the click of the phone being hung up on the other end of the line.

      I had to stop making things up just to make myself feel better. All of this had just been a dream, a day-dream. All of my life was a day-dream I didn’t have the guts to call the woman who had torn out my heart, blew fake kisses at it and then stomped on it until it was nothing but mush on the floor.

      To make things a little more real, I gave the finger to the guy in the car who had blown his horn, just to let him know how I felt.

      *

      Despite the fact that I was born rich, just about as soon as the cord was cut I was poor. I've always worked for a living, but this job I had created for myself was about the worst I ever experienced. No one expected to see Wanamaker Slayton's son out washing cars, or cleaning bathrooms, or enlisting in the Army, but that's what I did at various times. Dad had been born rich, too, having inherited the Slayton Department Store chain in downtown Philadelphia, but he seemed to forget that the family business was something to be passed on. It's lucky for her my mother died young, since my father's basic intolerance would have been inflicted on her instead of me if she hadn't. I never saw a dime from the family fortune, since dad thought newcomers to the country had to work their way up, but somehow he always forgot I had been born here and just because I more resembled in skin tone my Peruvian mother than him, he considered me a newcomer. For years in my youth I reminded him constantly that I was a Slayton, too – despite my long, straight sheaf of jet-black hair and brown skin – and worthy of some of the family's wealth. I needed fast cars and big houses and beautiful women, too. He always replied that he hated spoiled rich brats who fed on the carcasses of the dying, although he had been a spoiled rich brat all his life, and always, it seemed, on the verge of death, too – while running four miles a day and playing squash three times a week. I was too young to remember why my mother died, but I suppose it was because she missed the freedom of the mountains she came from, the high Andes, and simply was squashed under the Slayton family fortune somehow.

      So by my early twenties I had accepted my lot in life as a rich brown brat with no money. I had to work. Dad got to hoard all family's moola – I doubt I was even in the will – and I got to wonder just who the hell I was. A string of adventures and misadventures followed, including a couple of bad marriages, some halting career attempts, other awful jobs selling such things as water vacs and tooth brushes with replaceable heads, and always it seemed my wives left me because the Slayton name wasn't money in itself and my jobs weren't worth the time I spent on them. My stint in the Army I'd like to forget, but the post-traumatic stress disorder that came after it keeps reminding me of it. I was married for the fourth time with Sarah and settled in my own business by my late thirties when divorce struck once again. It seems my wife was fifteen years younger, and hadn't sowed quite as many wild or domestic oats as I had and was still on her mission to save the world. She went through men the way cats go through canaries, and although she was the one woman who hadn't cared all that much about the wealth surrounding the Slayton name, she had a passion for life that wouldn't let her stay with one man. Do you know what life is, Allie? she asked, when she told me we had to depart. Life is God creating himself. The creation is incomplete, and I want to, I have to, be part of that creation for the good. When she was finished with me she went on to more exciting things. What she needed to do was experience all until all experience was gone or she was worn out, she said, so it was back out on the street for me, who only wanted to settle down by then and didn't care about any sort of cosmology. I pursued the one dream I had left, and decided to become a private investigator back near my old university in North Philadelphia. When you're just a hollow shell, with no interest but one, you have to pursue that one interest, no matter how unlikely it might be. So I because a private investigator, with no experience in the field whatsoever, and embarked on the biggest mistake of my life.

      Before I rented the store front on North Broad Street as an office for my detective agency it was occupied by a shop called The Basket Case. The previous owners were two reformed gamblers, Matt and Molly, who had opened the shop, which specialized in wicker, after curing their addition to horse racing at the local chapter of Gamblers Anonymous. Being new to business, they had been foolish enough to think they could sell gaudy wicker baskets in the northern ghetto of Philadelphia. That venture, of course, failed, sending a relieved Matt and Molly back to the track.

      Molly, what the hell does selling wicker have to do with horses, which is what we know? Matt asked, when the collapse of the business was imminent and I was ready to sign a lease with them.

      Well, hell, Matt, horses eat wicker, don't they?

      Nah, horses don't eat wicker.

      Then they must sleep in it.

      Nah, they don't sleep in it, neither.

      Then, hell, Matt, I don't know.

      Wicker was just too much of a luxury, and too prissy, for people who had to struggle to survive. I suppose some of those ghetto people were so desperate they would even have gnawed on the baskets, as Molly said horses did, if they could have laid hands on them. Matt and Molly were experts on the track, not as chief operating officers of a poorly situated wicker shop, and often it's not a good idea to take fish out of whatever water they're used to, no matter how good the intentions. I should have remembered that. Matt and Molly headed back to the track with relief.

      I looked down at the phone again, but still didn't have the nerve to call Sarah. It might make her angry or upset.

      That thought gave me the idea to call my dad, after years of no contact between us. He was about as angry and upset as any person I had ever met, no one could tell why, and I'd rather have him mad at me than Sarah.

      Hi, dad, it's Allie, I said, when I reached him at his private number.

      Who?

      Allie Slayton. Your son.

      Oh, yes.

      Well, I've finally done what you suggested. I opened my own business.

      Congratulations. I supposed you're calling to pay me back all the money you owe me.

      My dad was always first to the punch.

      Money? Well, no. I called for a loan. For business things, typewriters and copy machines, that sort of thing.

      I suspected as much. Don't you know what bad timing it is to call a man who's on his death bed for money? It's rude. It's inconsiderate. It's downright rotten. I thought you might have called to find out how I was.

      Oh, I'm so sorry, dad. What is it now you're sick with? Hoarding money? Oh, you poor rich bastard.

      I hung up the phone before he had a chance to get in the last word, now steaming and upset myself. He hadn't really cared for me since my mother died twenty years ago. I could never figure out why he felt that way about me, other than the fact that I was a little brown. I guess he truly never really cared for me at all, just as a person might never care for tuna salad or rice with black beans. It would have been better if all the color had been strained out of me as I passed through the birth canal, since it was his world he wanted me to live in. That was all I could figure. He always acted as though he had indigestion whenever I was around, and the only time I could remember him smiling was in a photo taken of him with President Reagan. After my dad contributed fifty grand to the re-election campaign, he got to have his photo taken with the Gipper. After the photo, the Gipper made some improvements to his California ranch. The Gipper had gotten alot more out of my dad than I ever had. Things hadn't changed between me and the old man, and I went back to staring at the phone at The Basket Case and figuring out how to get the nerve to call Sarah.

      The owner of the shop prior to The Basket Case venture had been even more foolish than Matt and Molly. Joseph Macke had bought and sold silver and gold at profiteering prices, taking advantage of the locals who knew nothing about finance or what their grandfathers' watch was worth. Thinking the price of silver would follow the price of gold in the late seventies and skyrocket, Mr. Mac, as he was called locally, had used his customers' gold stocks – which he had stored for them, if they ever existed – to speculate in the silver market. Needless to say, when the silver market failed to skyrocket as the golden missile of those inflationary times had, Mr. Mac failed miserably. Just before they handed over the lease to me, Matt and Molly admitted to me that The Basket Case was named after the previous owner. Track humor always bored me. It was based too much on the desperation of gambling, but I guess the joke was on Matt and Molly, though, since their dreams of a wicker empire failed, too. While the speculator went to jail, they went bankrupt and fled back into the anonymous life of the gambler, leaving my new office full of wicker baskets and trivets and mats, many of which I kept and had to make excuses for. They also left a note on the desk after they fled with my two-hundred dollar deposit, a deposit they didn't even deserve, since they had told me they owned the shop and I had leased under that presumption, when they too were tenants. The note read: Now it's your turn. I knew right away they meant it was my turn to fail. I also knew that if you fail in the business I was entering, you don't live long.

      I dialed Sarah's number, without picking up the receiver.

      I really want to talk to you, I said.

      The phone was mute, since you had to pick it up to make it work.

      If I was superstitious I suppose the thought of failure would have bothered me, but failure was a familiar condition for me. I dealt well with it, and expected it by then. I was already a basket case before moving back to North Philly from the bliss of the suburbs, and was determined not to sink any lower. Having just passed through a divorce with a girl I loved and would always love because she had brought me out of my southeast-Asian-inflicted depression, I had invested what little I had gotten from the sale of our home in this office, an apartment and a few new suits. Despite our divorce, I took Sarah's advice never to look back and always to look ahead as my credo, except for that small incident with my dad and the need to stare at the phone and think of calling her. She had made me forget the war, by forcing me with her love into forgetting and looking ahead. Now it was time to forget her and start over, just as I had forgotten the war and started over with her years before. Still, my new world was unfamiliar and swirled around me it was in a big washing machine and it was tossing me around inside with wet, sloppy objects that had no regard for me.

      Having no mechanical aptitude, I left The Basket Case sign hanging over my door. Many times during those first few days alone in my new office I thought of changing the sign, or adding to it. I could envision the new sign reading, The Basket Case Detective Agency. That would have made for an interesting addition to the street. Still, I intended on taking down the sign when I had the time and money for tools, or changing it to let people in the neighborhood know who I was.

      Also, for reasons of economy, I let the telephone company think that The Basket Case was still a going concern. I thought I could get at least a few weeks free service that way and make up for the deposit I had lost to Matt and Molly. My number was listed as The Basket Case, and a few times I got calls like this:

      Good morning, Allie Slayton, private investigator..

      You got dem big wicker chairs?

      No, this is Allie Slayton, the private investigator. Can I help you?

      Oh, like that big department store. I need four them big wicker chairs, like them peacock things I think they called. Relatives are showing up for the week-end. Send me four.

      Click.

      Being bored, I got to like calls such as these in my first week. I talked to some real characters on the phone. One guy with a voice that could only have come from smoking a dozen cigars before breakfast called and threatened me.

      Mr. Mac, I'm gonna have your balls in my back pocket by next week if you don't get my gold.

      I guess those are the only balls you'd have, I answered.

      I can see I'll have to introduce you to Mr. Razor, he said. Boys, go over and introduce Mr. Mac to Mr. Razor.

      Nobody ever came, so I suppose it was just a threat, but you'd be surprised who you'll talk to if you're alone in a new office whining to yourself about your ex-wife. It helped alleviate the boredom. I had put a paper sign – done as neatly as possible with a felt tip – in my front window, since old dad wouldn't spring for a typewriter or printing services.

      Allie Slayton

      Feminist Detective

      Your Man for Domestic Problems and Abuse

      No Harsh Methods Ever Used

      I made sure it didn't block the view of the street, since the view was my only amusement, a view outside the washing machine. Besides, I wanted to know if and when Mr. Razor finally showed up.

      When I wasn't getting calls for wicker baskets, or threats from gravel-throated morons, or moping around thinking of Sarah, I was watching people pass in the street. There were college students from the nearby frat houses going to the university across the street. They indulged in education to insure their future, just as I had, and they reminded me of the me of long ago, and I wanted to warn them, watch out, watch out for promises. There were kids from the ghetto with boom boxes and grimy clothes and bandannas tied around their heads. They indulged in drugs to insure they had no future. There were old black women creeping along with groceries and drunken old black men reeling by with bad memories, sunk in bad bourbon, and I wanted to warn them, too, to watch out for guys like my dad. I liked the drunken old men the best, with their grey stubble beards and bleary eyes, because they at least had survived whatever had made them drunks. They were the most honest of anyone out there. But there was also a crazy old woman named Elizabeth who had Tourette's Syndrome, the disease that makes you swear all the time (I saw a segment on the disease on a network news program on my first boring day at the office, so I knew what it was). I knew her name was Elizabeth because she was always crying it out between swear words. Elizabeth! Shit! Damn, dis mother-fuckin' Elizabeth! Shit! You pissin' on my leg! Elizabeth! She was very honest. With the world the way it is, maybe everybody should be cursing like Elizabeth. Once, just once, I tried to talk to her while she stood on her habitual spot in front of my door. She let out such a string of obscenities that the air turned ice blue around her head, a halo of profanity from an angel of truth. Let me tell you: you're never aware of how much real craziness can scare you

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