Earwig and the Angry Itch: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Disclaimer: No relationship to the off-Broadway extravaganza.

“I got a song, I ain’t got no melody…!” I belted, pivoting for my next lap. The sputtering roar of the neglected Cub Cadet drowned both Nature and the relatively sparse human activity in our outdated patch of suburban Millington on a Tuesday afternoon.

Mowing was one of those few times I could give myself wholly unto song, and I clung to the view that Billy Preston was too cool to permit heatstroke. Thanks to Al Gore, it was 91 degrees this fine May Tuesday with rain and high winds and possibly hail the size of a Chicago meatball and maybe firestorms and volcanic activity if Central Illinois was feeling especially horny.

 “I got a story ain’t got no MO-ral!” I proclaimed as I began the next, incrementally shorter trapezoid, swiping away the sweat that had accumulated at the brim of the ludicrous safari/beekeepers hat Sarah’d pushed on me so I wouldn’t get melanoma if the sunstroke didn’t erase my ability to calculate pi to three places (it truly was a precipitously slippery slope).

“I got a dance, I ain’t got no steps, nooo,” I sang as I rounded the last curve. So far, so good.

I finished the last strip before I reached the bridge, which was mainly just a lot of harmonica.

“So,” a voice called from across the street. “Did it?”

I turned instinctively. Dennis Weston was sitting on his stoop, using his hedge trimmer as an armrest, grinning broadly.

“Did what?”

“It. Did it fly high, like a bird up in the sky?”

I dropped the grass bag. “How did you hear that?”

“Hell, you were Liza Minelli-ing it all over the place.”

“Interesting reference for a gym teacher.”

“I’m nothing if not eclectic. Besides, you can only come off so macho screaming at third graders to climb a damn rope.”

“Geez, you guys still do that?”

“Lawsuit waiting to happen. So, you got a dinner show? Beth loves the Four Seasons.”

 “Camila Cabella -- going for a younger, post-rope crowd. You want to heckle while I trim around the patio?”

“No, I actually enjoyed it,” Dennis said. “It was a nice change-up from the Katy Perry last week.”

“Yeah, we had Ella the weekend before, and she’s transitioned from Frozen to female empowerment ballads. You know, I don’t even know how Preston got in my head. I hadn’t heard it in years.”

“Well, you do dance to a different beat. What we like about you, Liza.”

Dennis hefted his trimmer and went off to Scissorhand his rather unimaginative topiary, humming “Let it Go.” I wrestled the bag back onto the mower.

“Havana, ooh na-na, dadadadadadah, Havana, ooh na-na,” I began to croon. “Shit.”

**

“Will it go round in circles? Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky…?”

I nearly collided with a Neighborhood Watch sign a neighborhood too apathetic to actually work up a watch had neglected to take down 10 years ago.

“Dodge,” Vera grunted – her love language. Bernie gave me a baleful dachshund stare, but his piggy tail was going. I righted the Schwinn and engaged the kickstand. Bernie flopped in the adjacent yard in a way I hoped never to see his political namesake replicate, and I rubbed his pink belly.

Bernie was possibly the fourth in a line of rotund wiener dogs Vera’d dedicated to her progressive icons. God save the Republican canvasser or cold-calling thumper who darkened her dominion. She fed unwanted solicitors Oreos and Folgers instead of a face full of door, fattening them for extended sociopolitical cannibalization designed to make them doubt the very existence of a merciful God.

Vera was half blind following a series of cataract procedures. But twice a day, she stumped and Bernie waddled through the hood. More than once, Sarah’d staged a phony household disaster to terminate our sunset driveway debates.

After gauging whether I believed “this latest shit today” and invoking her customary and free-floating thorny doom on Marjorie and Matt and the Speaker and Ron and Florida as a collective entity, I flailed to my feet.

“Hey, this’ll sound weird, but what you were singing when I rode up…”

Vera’s brow rose behind her Roy Orbison shades. “I was singing?”

“’Will It Go Round in Circles.’ Billy Preston. Yeah.”

“Hmm. Guess it’s been kinda stuck in my head the last week. No idea why. More of an Edwin Starr/Marvin fan, back in the day.”

“I’ve been earwigging it, too.”

“Earwigging?”

“You know, you get a tune in your brain, and it just won’t go away? I think it came from The Night Gallery, you know, Rod Serling? The one with Laurence Harvey? Earwig burrows into his brain, eats its way across to the other ear?”

“Never cared for him,” Vera said. Harvey or Serling, I did not inquire. “But I get the concept. That rat bastard ex of mine loved war movies – if I ever hear The Ballad of the Green Berets, it pisses me off three times over– at Nixon, John Wayne, and fucking Larry. But then I find myself humming it at the Krogers or bingo.”

Tried to picture Vera even playing bingo with the bluehairs. “Wait a second. You walk Bernie past the house last night?”

She considered. “Yeah. I even saw you, but you were trying to chase water bottles down the driveway, and I didn’t want to interrupt the fun.”

Hers or mine, I did not inquire. Shrink-wrap, my ass. But, mystery solved.

“Dodge,” Vera nodded. “C’mon, Duke.”

Duke, for Dukakis, was two wieners back. “Hey, Bernie, haul ass,” she then growled affectionately. Bernie might survive her, for a change. I pedaled off pensively.

“Fighting soldiers from the sky; fearless men who jump and die,” I began as I coasted down University. “Shit.”

**

For the second time that evening, I nearly took out the Neighborhood Watch sign, as a black blur sped past almost in the other lane. Instead, I went over the handlebars, into a reasonably soft barberry bush.

As I brushed vegetation from my best Smokey Bear tee and flexed my bloody knee, I inspected the bike. It had fared much better than me, but the Gemm’s Market bag was leaking Thomas’s Bagels and the Eggbeaters I had hoped to introduce to some chorizo tomorrow.

The body was about twenty feet away.

I instinctively dropped to the wrong knee and nervously checked for a pulse. I recognized the dead guy as a kid I’d seen skateboarding around the neighborhood. There was very little blood beyond an angry body-length scrape. What looked like a smashed electronic device was just beyond the teen’s outstretched left hand.

I surveyed the area as a few of the neighbors sprinted toward us. Then I spotted the kid’s board, about thirty feet from its owner, where mass and momentum and some reckless or homicidal asshole had propelled it.  

**

“You’re Jessica Fletcher,” Detective Curtis Mead indicted. He eyed the wreckage that was me. “Not as put-together, of course. No idea who the kid was, or the driver?”

“Nice enough kid, didn’t act like the neighborhood was his personal skate park. Driver, I got no idea. About dinner time in these parts, so I don’t know who else might have seen anything.”

Curtis nodded toward the loosely collected throng around the police tarp. Vera and Bernie stood at the periphery and a young woman in a translucent beach cover-up peeked from over the back gate of the split-level next to the mangled barberry. Curtis and I quickly averted. “Well, your buddy Weston IDed him as an old student of his, Jarrett Leschner, lives two blocks over. That ring any bells?”

“Not a chime. Hey, you guys did see that smashed-up gizmo next to Leschner?”

“Chris collected the pieces for possible prints. You’re kinda a techie– know what it might have been?”

“Gray plastic casing, motherboard crushed to shit. Thought I saw a silvery knob sorta thingie. Oh, and some shattered glass.”

“Thanks, Elon. So, what, maybe whatever the thing was had a screen or a display. Wasn’t any iPad I ever saw. Letters ‘DJ’ on a piece of the case. Kid maybe do any musical gigs? The folks will have to tell me.”

“Leschner,” I chewed. “Dad runs a plumbing company – always has that sky-blue van in the driveway, fixed out toilet a while back. Mom’s a realtor, I think.”

As if on cue, a sky-blue panel van slanted into the curb cattycorner from us, and a couple leapt from the cab.

“Fuck,” Curtis muttered softly, departing with an absent wave.

I turned to find Elayne surveying the remains of her barberry bush. WNBA tall, expertly mussed white hair like she was a Chico’s model headed for the wine club, incongruously leathery hands like Jane Goodall had come through on the transplant. Elayne had earned the leather – her yard was a virtual prairie or jungle, depending on the given beholder, and various signs were embedded in the carefully choreographed tangle of reeds and weeds and thistles and tulips and sunflowers designating her plot as an official monarch pollination station and Elayne as a Master Gardener. She’d shown me a detailed “map” of her garden one time.

“Sorry?” I suggested. Elayne looked up and surveyed me clinically.

“You have mud on your face,” she advised. “And your knee is a disaster – I have some antiseptic, come on in.”

“Thanks, but Sarah prefers to minister to me herself -- she finds the wincing reassuring, that I learned something. But sorry I, uh, maimed your shrub.”

“No matter,” Elayne dismissed, her face clouding. “Most of this is probably coming out, anyway. The neighborhood busybodies have been trying to get rid of the butterfly refuge and prairie plantings for years –it’s an eyesore, reduces property values, breeds rodents. They went to the city, and the Zoning Board’s looking at an ordinance to restrict residential nature plantings. Harold is frantic.”

“Shit,” I said. Elayne had found late-life romance among the perennials with a rangy fellow Master Gardener down the block.

“Why, yes, it is. You know, I was so touched by your lovely granddaughter’s enthusiasm over the milkweed . I’ll get a sack of seed for that butterfly garden she wants to start.”

Ella months ago had moved on from caterpillars and ecosystem dynamics to nattering Youtube videos with pre-adolescent hyperactives testing toys and backpacks for endorsements that likely would fund more toys and backpacks.

“She would love that,” I assured Elayne, cringing as I mounted my Schwinn.    

**                                                                                                                    “This is…”

“Hot chocolate,” Sarah supplied, placing a steaming mug next to my La-Z-Boy. “Your knee all right?”

I couldn’t see it under a WWI infantryman’s cocoon of gauze and Ace wrap, but the burning had subsided, and I got to pick the night’s TV. “Sure. So, Bosch?”

My bride confiscated the smart TV remote and disappeared into the kitchen, stranding me with both Property Brothers. I took a sip of my chocolate, snuggled in, and began to hum and tap my foot euphorically.

“You got mud on your face, you big disgrace …” I muttered.

“The cocoa too hot?”

“No, babe,” I called, cursing Freddie Mercury and Laurence Harvey.

The anxiety returned as Sarah searched for Connelly’s lone wolf cop. We’d only recently popped for the 55-inch set, and Sarah hadn’t had the remote Ted Talk.

“You need to scroll with the left or right arrows,” I leaked as she clicked into the documentary picks. “Up, no, down. No, downer …”

I stopped, and as Sarah drove into the Prime Settings, Googled Leschner Realty. A few drop-downs and detours later, I was examining the bereaved mom’s listings – 360 room views and aerial shots of the haunts of the rich and not-so-much. I rerouted to Best Buy and keyed two letters into the search window. I triumphantly texted Curtis, then looked up to see a splash screen for the new Nicholas Sparks made-for with Amanda Seyfried and some broody dude I thought I’d seen on Law and Order.

“This looks good,” I sighed.

**

“DJI,” Curtis told me as I swallowed a gulp of tepid Walmart Donut Shop. “You were right. We found the serial number on a shard in the gutter last night – controller for a high-end camera drone that matches one the kid’s mom bought for online listings. It is, need I say, missing.”

“Boys will be boys, by which I mean horndogs,” I said. “My guess is Jarrett borrowed Mom’s drone for late afternoon reconnaissance of I’m guessing the sunbathing lookie-loo we saw at the scene. Yes, I saw you see her. I assume you’re combing every rooftop and hedge for our fallen craft.”

“Roger. But I checked the boy’s phone and laptop, and found a very interesting photo gallery.”

“Chill the merlot – I’ll meet you, where, Carl’s?”

**

“I kinda thought she was a religitroid,” I said. We were alone in the neighborhood ice cream shop. “I mean, she’s got pro-life bumper stickers and a cement Jesus in the front yard.”

“God used to like nudity,” Curtis noted. “Don’t remember my pastor ever drawing a distinction between tan lines and religious lines. Surprised Mrs. Cutter never spotted the drone.”

“Somebody else did. She doesn’t remember seeing it, and with her deteriorating vision, she probably only saw a blur. But it registered subconsciously. Vera, she lives down the street. She’s got a song lodged in her head, and passed it on to me. Will it go round in circles?”

“Will it fly high like a bird up in the sky?” Curtis crooned, pitch-perfect. “You think the Cutter woman killed that boy because he was, uh…”

“Scanning the local topography? I doubt it – the bumper stickers are on a cute little VW, and Sarah said her husband’s still peacekeeping in Afghanistan or somewhere.”

“Cat will play,” Curtis pointed out. “But let’s see what else the little perv captured.”

Swiping left, we discovered a lone Nike on the roof probably right above us, Vera and Bernie on a morning constitutional, Jarrett’s old gym teacher mowing his lawn, an intriguing aerial landscape study of an overgrown back yard with an excavated square dead-center, and an assortment of neighborhood women celebrating summer fashion and particularly fit joggers.

“Ansel Adams, he wasn’t,” I concluded. But I felt an earwig propagating.

**

“Mike Dodge, right?” the bony but buff old guy smiled, extending a filthy hand. “Met you a while back – you were talking to Elayne about, what, culinary herbs?”

“She’s my rosemary supplier.” Harold’s plot was even lusher than Elayne’s. “Look, I was going to ask Elayne, but she doesn’t seem to be home. She’s helping my granddaughter start a butterfly garden, but I remembered her saying the milkweed Ella needs to plant’s poisonous? They have a couple of dogs, neither terribly bright.”

“Oh.” He looked concerned. “Then, she might reconsider. The ‘milk’ or latex from a damaged plant can cause vomiting, weakness, diarrhea, seizures, kidney or liver failure, respiratory paralysis, or death in a cat or dog. Same for us. Monarchs feed on it, and that even protects them from predatory birds that would get sick from ingesting it.”

“Yikes,” I said. “Hey, by the way, I heard about some of the neighborhood jerks trying to shut you guys down. Sorry.”

Harold nodded, frowning. “We got a meeting Monday night with Councilman Frutz and some of the neighborhood folks pushing this rezoning crap, at Elayne’s house. Hell, if it doesn’t work, I got a parcel outside town where Elayne and I can reestablish. She’s gun-shy about getting married, but I told her, what’s mine is hers.”

I took a breath as I peered into the garage. “To what extent?”    

**

Like any self-respecting Midwesterner, she had a refrigerator in the garage. It stood out from the kombucha and water -- a recycled Poland Springs bottle half-filled with a white, dairy-ish substance.

“Mike! What the hell are you doing in here?”

Elayne stood like one of Wonder Woman’s sistas from Themyscira in the garage entry, a machete in both hands. I wondered if I was going to have to Uma Thurman my way out of here.

“Tell me this was just for the councilman, that you weren’t going to wipe out half the neighborhood assholes.”

The Master Gardener stepped closer, leathery hands tightening about the implement. “You know how much monarch populations are shrinking every year? Mexican deforestation, climate change, urbanization, famers and homeowners treating milkweed like a noxious weed. That short-sighted prick is more concerned with his planet-hating constituents than with the planet itself.”

“Which is why I wondered why you’d tear out part of your milkweed patch before the council took a vote.” I nodded toward a laminated diagram above Elayne’s work bench. “Yeah, out back, right where Jarrett Leschner’s drone photo shows. You harvested your secondary milkweed patch for enough poison to kill an elephant, metaphorically speaking. Were you going to take out the councilman, preempt the vote?”

“With Frutz gone, the others probably won’t want to bother. I saw that boy’s drone, recognized it from Judy Leschner photographing properties down the block. I thought Judy was part of the push to shut us down, but then I saw the kid surfing, whatever, around the neighborhood, flying that drone around back, trying to catch a glimpse of the fundamentalist exhibitionist next door. Harold let me borrow his truck to get some compost, and I saw Jarrett looping that thing around the block. If Frutz’ death got linked to me, and Jarrett’s snooping turned up as evidence I’d harvested the milkweed…”

“Jesus, Layney.” The machete clattered to the concrete as Elayne spun toward Harold. And Curtis, holding a damaged drone.

“That boy may have been a perv, but he had some mad multitasking skills,” Curtis murmured. “You wouldn’t believe what was right above you as you ran Jarrett down, snapping off shots. Like a bird up in the sky.”