Pulling Strings: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Chemical warfare in the Asian jungles. Man on the Moon. Data accumulating by the terabyte in a mainframe world; satellites taking up ever-more stratospheric real estate, prepped one day to ruin the neighborhood one strike, one leak, one tech sociopath at a time.    

“Oh my God,” I proclaimed, awestruck in the presence of a genuine ‘60s technological marvel. “Looka this.”

A millennimom skirted away toward the chick-lit-heavy book box at the lip of the casita’s two-car garage. Sarah reluctantly abandoned the sheet-metal lawn ornaments, and I shook the Ziploc bag as she sidled past the bibliophile. They clonked – a solid, metallic, Clint Eastwood when America used to by-god MAKE things clonk.

“Remember the Thingmaker?” I enthused as my life partner regarded my find and then me with what I can only describe as reptilian apathy. “You’re ruining the moment.”

“Oh, my,” Sarah said. “What marvelous treasure have you uncovered?”

 “Thingmaker molds. Creepy Crawlers and Fright Factory and, oh my God, one of the soldier molds.”

“I can see I’m getting power of attorney far earlier than planned. Fine, what is a Thingmaker, and what things does it make?”

“Oh, gee, everything. You had like this hot plate thing that got up to, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 degrees, and you poured this no-doubt toxic goop into the mold and made a bug or a soldier or a set of vampire teeth…”

“Another piece of the puzzle falls into place. And you used this thing – Thingmaker – where? The kitchen, an asbestos-lined laboratory?”

“My room, of course. There were tongs,” I emphasized. “Once I figured out what the tongs were for.”

“How did you survive childhood?”

“Probably the bastards at the Consumer Product Safety Commission – thank you, Richard Nixon.” I turned toward the cash table. “Uh, ma’am?”

“Not if you want gyros today,” Sarah advised, and returned to the razor-sharp metal flowers.

The See ‘N Say at the back of the card table was in solid if not mint condition, the original ‘60s sun-yellow Farmer Says model, before they yanked the pull string for a slots lever and jammed a computer chip in the thing. I waited for Millenimom to breeze past with her booty, then cranked the red arrow to roughly 8 o’clock and gently tugged the yellowed plastic pull ring. What it belched up was not what the cow said. Ever.

I gave a few more critters a spin, with equal results, then waited for Sarah to cart her death flowers to the SUV before placing the device before the late-bloom boomer. She smiled as she lifted it by the handle to consult a strip of masking tape on the base.

“Boy, I used to play with this thing all the time. About drove Mom and Dad bug-nutty. In fact, I thought my folks had gotten rid of this 50 years ago. But my brother found boxes of all kinds of crap out in Apache Junction after my mom died a couple months back.”

“Sorry.”

“Nah. You know what, it’s about noon. Why don’t you just take it for your grandkids?”

I averted eye contact. “Hey, thanks. The Thingmaker yours, too?”

“Oh, shit, no. My brother almost burned the fucking house down with the thing.”

**

Luckily, we got through the gyros and falafel and basmati without incident – when I got to the car with my prize, Sarah was bolstering the Ugly American image for our prescription helpline guy, so I stashed the See ‘N Say in the cargo hold under my rainy-day windbreaker. It was laundry day, however, and short of simply declaring “Tada!” at the unveiling, I had no choice but to play the pig card.

“What the hell even is that?” Sarah murmured.

**

“It was kind of a fucking technological miracle back in the day,” Owen breathed. It was not a great breath, and I wasn’t sure whether it was the age, the girth, the bowl of dead butts next to the antique register. He looked like David Cosby and Neil Young’s love child, surrounded by bears that cared, dolls raised by cabbages, Barbies who’d never left the box, and every vintage board game that had ever ended with my sisters and I eye-gouging over fake stakes.

The proprietor of Junction Collectables and Curiosities tapped the casing of my Farmer Says with his mini-screwdriver, his fingerless bike gloves creaking slightly. “It’s a pretty cool gizmo – inside, there’s a plastic disk lot like an old gramophone record. Each of the 12 sound waves is embossed on the disk and stored in concentric tracks.

Fortunately, he’d chosen to crack heavily-used existing inventory, and he displayed a now-off-white disk with diagonal grooves along the outer edge.

“Those are the starting points for the 12 concentric tracks,” Owen explained, growing a little too excited. “This metal needle rides in one of the grooves depending on where you point the pointer. The ‘chatty’ cord, like they call it, lifts the needle, pulls it out to the edge of the disk, and winds a brass spring that turns the disk. See that plastic cone over the whole deal? The needle transmits the vibrations embossed in the ‘record’ to that T-shaped plastic piece it’s embedded in, and it transfers them to the cone speaker through that red dingle at the top. Pretty awesome. Right?”

“Mm,” I said in an ostensibly awestruck manner. “How tough to replace the disk?”

Owen leaned perilously back on his wooden stool and snagged a Styrofoam cup of coffee that looked cold and oily, from among a scattering of Styrofoam cups.

“Anybody today with any reasonable mechanic skills could rejigger this thing, maybe even use a 3-D printer to reproduce that disk. But I assume this recording was made in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Still don’t want me to open ‘er up?”

“Eh,” I reiterated. The guy surely knew what he was doing, and I wasn’t even sure it was evidence of anything more than a warped mind, and if that was so, the phantom tinkerer’s fingerprints or trace was trapped inside a sunny yellow case with the incriminating recording. In the end, I imagine my reservations were related more to pulling a thread on a hazily pleasant past.

“You wouldn’t want to sell, would you?” Easy Rider Elf grinned. “Give you, say, $100? The case is pretty cherry, the string‘s still intact, and I got all the innards on the counter in front of you.”

I pondered the pursuit of truth versus the pursuit of next month’s Hulu and Netflix fees. “Can I get back to you? Besides, doesn’t it screw up the value to swap out parts? Not exactly OEM.”

Owen shrugged. “Neither am I,” he chortled.

**

Junction Collectables actually was on the dusty stretch of East Main outside Apache Junction, where inexplicably surviving stucco cafes and low-rent gun and souvenir shops and esoterically specific shops like JC&C attracted more dust motes than walk-ins. I followed Main until it became East Apache, and meandered around to the Apache Junction Public Library.

I could have done this on the iPhone, but apart from major past tragedies, celebrations, local misadventures gone national, or sports, the digitized news archives had a coin slot. The new library had a nice lady named Trish and a sweet microfilm/.pdf run of mid-‘60s Apache Junction News and Sentinels and a shelf of vintage town directories.

Like everything else in the Valley before Starbucks and Walmart and La Quinta and old golfers and the mobile young rode into town, the Junction was a relatively tiny place during the Johnson years, so what I was calling the precipitants stood out like saguaros. The little things that might set someone to a sadistic and time-consuming gaslighting campaign.

At the same time, I wanted to gauge community resources, and by the time I’d inhaled a shit-ton of nearly 60-year-old pulp dust, I had what I think I wanted.

Bone Thugs N Harmony, Alicia Keys, and the Jonas Brothers had laid down tracks at Mesa’s Saltmine Studio Oasis, according to owner Don Salter owing to “our philosophy of combining vintage old-school analog classic tools with modern, new-world digital.”

Rattler Studios, not so much. Located toward the mountains in what appeared to be a branch Oppenheimer bunker, Apache Junction’s best-kept secret and deservedly so appeared to have scored its new-world digital from a high school AV department, hidden among vintage old-school analog classic tools most of the current staff might need a high school AV crew to reboot.

“Local bands and artists, mainly – way it’s always been,” Red Greenway described after fetching me a stout cup from the studio Keurig. He resumed grazing what looked like old-school chow mein -- about a half-mile back, I’d spotted a Chinese restaurant probably as old as the saguaro flanking it. “Most of its a mix of godawful country, worse indie shit, and even some hip-hop, rich folks’ kids who couldn’t bust a rhyme with a jackhammer. Hoped digitizing the whole thing might help us branch into audiobooks, podcasts, that sort of thing, but you said you were at the library. You seen their new studio? Green screen, video editing, podcasts, instrumental tracks? I may have to convert this all into a meth lab.”

Greenway swept a hand toward the back wall gallery of local concert and club posters, album covers, and CD sleeves featuring the Rattler’s early undistinguished alumni – mostly pick-your-clone cowboys and metal heads and such ‘60s/’70s none-hit wonders as The Wally Goetticher Experience, the O-K Chorale, and The Three Horseman of the Apachelypse. Middle guy must’ve been Pestilence.

“Kevin Cisneros – the K in O-K -- was about our only real success story, sort of,” he sighed. “I mean, he and his partner there with the steel guitar -- got quite a following at the area bars and even a little local airplay, but the partner quit playing after getting effed up in some accident or something, O-K Chorale dissolved, Kevin went solo somewhere else. We felt bad for the partner and made him gofer/janitor. By the way, all this is off the record, right?”

“It’s all off the record,” I said. “I used to be a reporter. I came across something odd at a garage sale.” I pulled the See ‘N Say from its Old Navy bag and pulled the sting.

“The frog says, ‘RIBBIT! RIBBIT”

“It has a beat,” Greenway conceded. I frowned at the recalcitrant toy, and cranked the arrow a few clicks to the left. The rooster’s dark pronouncement raised his brows.  “What kind of bastard would put that on a kid’s toy. I mean, this did belong to some kid, right?”

“She didn’t tell me this was The Psycho Says model. Or she didn’t know. Lemme ask: Could somebody have done that here, back in the mid-‘60s?”

Greenway considered as a malnourished-looking group of emo wannabes straggled in and he nodded them presumably toward the studio. “It’s a slow day, and you got me curious. Let’s pull this puppy apart and see what’s up. Don’t worry about them – they’re self-starters, you couldn’t tell.” 

**

Sarah had had several help desk innocents to terrorize, so I was off normal chec duties. “Got your lunch, or I guess dinner by now,” she grinned unsettlingly as jaunty hold music plunked at her very last nerve. “Just stick it in the microwave.”

I left the dinosaur Spaghettios in too long, but Sarah’d went to considerable sarcastic expense digging out Ella’s old Mickey Mouse spoon, so I cleaned my plate.

Jesus called after lunch. The other one.

“I reached out to the Apache Junction Police and Fire folks,” the Gilbert PD detective reported in his unflappable, chamomile rumble. “Only reason there was a file at all was there was a brief arson investigation. The fire investigator found a charred device with a heavy-duty heating element, and the bedroom carpet was saturated, laminated, in fact, with what he thought might be an accelerant. Turned out to be plastic, and the department found a serial number that tracked of all things to some toy. After a little persuading, the 10-year-old son admitted he and a neighbor boy had been performing unauthorized experiments with the, ah…”

“Thingmaker.”

“And when the inevitable fire started, the neighbor’s brother — who was watching a western with the Dad — rushed upstairs and pulled both kids out. Had second-degree burns on his hands and was treated for chemical smoke inhalation. Little brother sustained more severe facial burns, requiring extended hospital treatment.”

“You get names?”

“The Dautrives and the Wisters.”

And it came to me in a deductive Batflash.

**

“I don’t understand,” Rita McClelland drawled with polite terseness. “You want a refund or something? It was free.”

“Nothing like that,” I assured her. She set us up in lawn chairs on the driveway as I described the modifications made to her favorite childhood toy.

“I don’t remember anything like that,” Rita stated.

“I would assume, from, like, you putting it in the garage sale.”

“You think my brother did it, as some sort of prank? Bob could barely change his bike tire.”

“Well, it was dark, and kind of threatening in a creepy way. Not obscene or predatory, but disturbing for a kid to have to hear.”

“But I never did. After Bob had an…’accident’ with that Thingmaker I told you about, Dad kind of went off the rails. The See ‘N Say seemed to set him off, so I just set it aside after a while.”

“Somebody’d replaced the original recording with another one. That accident,” I ventured, cautiously. “The fire.”

“How’d you know about the fire?” she whispered.

“I was a reporter,” I said for the lack of anything relevant or cohesive. “Somebody wanted to hurt you, or your family, what, almost 60 years ago. I did a little digging, probably out of boredom, and discovered the fire in Apache Junction. A boy got hurt, right? One of your brother’s friends?”

“Pete Wister was a wild kid,” Rita Dautrive McClelland muttered. “We always thought he was the one goaded Bob into whatever started the fire. The Wisters understood it was an idiot accident, and Dad paid Pete’s hospital bills. They understood.”

“Not sure all of them,” I murmured.

**

 “Thought I should let you know I decided not to sell.” I called as the tarnished bell above the door jangled. I’m just going to give it back to Rita, remember, your old neighbor?”

The welcoming grin froze on Owen’s face. Owen Wister, the O in O/K Chorale until the nerve damage to his half-gloved hands ended his musical career.

“I’ll give you $500.”

“That was your fatal mistake, offering me twice what a vintage See ‘N Say goes for online. You really wanted it, or at least take it apart and ‘accidentally’ destroy or switch out the disk or leave your fingerprints along with teen Owen’s.”

“I was young and pissed off,” Owen stammered. “I thought Bob’d destroyed my life. My dad managed one of those tourist shops off the highway, and he had molding equipment to make cheesy Southwest souvenirs. I was always good in shop, and I had after-hours access to Mr. Greenway’s equipment. I thought if I couldn’t fix my brother, I’d hurt the Dautrives. Even after the fire, I went over to watch The Virginian with Mr. Dautrive every Wednesday. It was my Dad’s favorite before he got cancer.”

“Well, he named you after the guy who wrote the original book. What you were watching the night of the fire, right? And how you sneaked Rita’s Farmer Says out of the house, installed the new disk, and replaced it.”

“I thought I’d freak her out, mess with her mind, make her feel as shitty as the kids at school made Pete feel. It was a crappy, vicious plan, and after I left for ‘Nam, I realized how far off the rails I’d gone. But what could I do? Nobody said anything after I got home; Rita was in college and seemed to be doing OK.”

“It was harsh stuff, but it sounded vaguely familiar. The Lotus King down the road – I assume it’s been around forever? That where the guys at Rattler’s Studio generally sent you for lunch, right?”

“Yeah. I’d usually pick up stuff for the family on the way home, too.”

I nodded. “Curious why you didn’t record a message to go with the frog, then I discovered you only modified the tracks for the cow, cat, horse, sheep, rooster, dog, and pig. Stopped by the Lotus King, got me an couple eggrolls, and verified they, like nearly every other Chinese-American joint, use the throwaway Chinese Zodiac placemat, which includes the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Each animal of the zodiac represents a cycle of years and both good and bad traits attributed to those born in each year. The zodiac gave you the inspiration for the predictions you offered about Rita’s future personality and fate. But not for the frog, turkey, bird, duck, or coyote on the Farmer Says ‘zodiac.’ You substituted the cow for the ox and the cat for the tiger and personalized it for maximum psychological effect.”

“I was the guitarist – he was the writer,” Owen grinned before the pistol came shakily from under the counter. “Just give me the See ‘N Say.”

“You realize how goofy that sounds,” I responded. “Relax. You really trust your trigger finger even after all those years? The statute of limitations is long past, even if anybody could figure out what to charge you with. And Rita says she gets it, that you were an angry teenager.”

Then I dangled the yellowed plastic ring with its freshly snapped string, and set the Old Navy bag with what remained of the Farmer Says on the formica floor by the door.  The gun clicked on the glass.

“You didn’t play it for her, did you?” Owen asked quietly.

In fact, I’d advised her against. There are some strings, some threads you shouldn’t pull.