Pipsqueak Read Free Page B

drunks were funny.
    Our happy hero—Pipsqueak—was made from a real squirrel. He was a good-natured goof, who through sheer luck managed not to get killed between the hours of three and four-thirty every weekday afternoon. And for some reason Pipsqueak riveted us kids.
    In many ways, I’d have to say the puppets on
The General Buster Show
inspired my appreciation for taxidermy, perhaps because the five-and-dime plush replicas of Pipsqueak never did the genuine puppet justice. The closest I ever got to meeting the real Pipsqueak was at the grand opening of a new Buster Brown shoe store. But thanks to my little brother’s penchant for petty crime (he’d siphoned and sold the gas from our car to local go-carters), the parental bus ran late and a sizable herd of kids kept me separated from the Nutty Nut by several hundred feet.
    So when I saw Pipsqueak in that glass case, a flood of boyhood aspirations instantly disarmed me. Was it possible that I could—not just touch, not just manipulate—but be
the sole possessor of
Pipsqueak? Alas, it was too good to be true.

Chapter 3

    T he local Sussex County papers dubbed it
The T3 Murder,
and the best efforts of the state police were to no avail in solving the case quickly, although I give them credit for finding Marti Folsom, the actual owner of the little curio shop, in a coat closet at the store. A hook-nosed woman, fifties, with blond beehive hair, she was trussed with duct tape, gagged, and bound by the wrists to the hanger rod. She was very much alive, especially after being unbound. I was still there when they found her, and you haven’t heard such screaming and wailing in all your life. “Thieves! Violated by thieves! What kind of country do we live in where people tape you in a closet! Where are the police? Sleeping in their cars, that’s where they are!” Like that.
    Biker Boy was identified as Tyler Loomis, alias Gut Wrench, former punk-rock devotee, Greenwich Village roustabout, perennial record/poster store employee, and more recently a card-carrying sonopuncturist (that is, an acupuncturist who doesn’t puncture, using tuning forks instead of needles). His activities and association with Cola Woman—presumed murderess—remained a mystery. However, had he not arrived when he did, the cops surmised that Cola Woman might have done me harm.
    As you can imagine, my ordeal with the police was lengthy. I had to go down to the state police barracks. That is to say, they asked me to come down and recite my statement again. Now, you don’t have to go if you’re not under arrest. But the cops have a really annoying way of insinuating that if you have nothing to hide, you’ll go. I don’t know who trains them in this skeezy tactic, but they’re very good at it. It’s as rudimentary—and effective—as saying, “Chicken?”
    So you go, kidding yourself that if you do, the whole thing will pass by like a sun shower. They act all chummy, give you coffee, chitchat about sports, and sit you down in the room with the glass wall, behind which stands a platoon of assistant district attorneys and other animal behaviorists ready to judge your performance. One thing they knew for sure was that whoever did the crime had to be there to do it, and I was there.
    Yeah, well, I know from past experiences with the law—and just from reading the papers—that the innocent can royally botch such interviews, inviting unwarranted suspicion and time in the jug. They want a statement at the precinct, fine, but the right thing to do is get a lawyer, if only to keep you from having an anxiety attack. Sure, the cops will give you the “Chicken?” treatment again, but give them a “Pound sand!” smile and drop a dime on your barrister.
    It helps, of course, if you’ve got one to call. I didn’t. But a New Jersey friend, Bob Martinez, recently sued his garbage collectors and was therefore tight with his lawyer. Dammit—he wasn’t in, so I left a message and hung up. I noted someone