Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: THE MILK OF HUMAN VIOLENCE

I polished off a Joe's Special at Joe's Joe's Special Specialty House, and finished the hot black coffee dashed with Craig's Largely Wood-Free Rye, glancing down the fog on California Street for some cow-mouthed palooka I was tailing that was cheating on his wife with, as it turned out, a fetching redhead assistant carpet salesgirl, whose own carpet, I saw from my fancy color negs, didn't exactly match the drapes. I was churning with that fascinating contradiction when the fetching but gin-polluted waitress came by to refill my coffee with steak sauce. That's what you get for ordering a cup o' Joe in Joe's Joe's Special Special place.

Low, low work, marital infidelity. Sitting in cars, peeking in windows like a prairie dog with a fedora, hiding in noisy iceboxes, putting a mike in the lampshade, putting a lampshade over some Joe named Mike. I hadn't had a Nazi spy ring or a Chinatown murder or a municipal bond amoratization rate to check out in two months to relieve the monotony of confirming the amazing fact that Joe Lunchbox has a little love dumpling on the side. Not to mention it was hard to cash the checks when the tears smudged the ink, and bounced anyway, because the rutting little weasel involved invariably cleared out the account right while I was setting my hopes of a full jar of mayonnaise unrealistically high, and all I could look forward to was maybe an empty night of bad love in lieu of cash from the desperate proto-divorcee.

I took out my wallet to pay Joe, reached in and brushed the flies out of the way. Nothing in there but happy memories. Joe gave me one of those looks that a 300lb chef gives a barrel of rotten spinach. Lean month since my last three genius clients shot each other simultaneously over creative differences in a modern dance piece about the death of Trotsky. As an indirect result, my car was gracefully stolen by Martha Graham. I was so tapped out I was living on my office couch and showering at Dardenella's hydrant, whose patience was getting thinner than her panties in her teenager neighbor's fantasies. I'd resorted to stealing a tux and attending fancy parties for the venison puffs and high-living comestibles until I was caught with a bowl of pudding leaking through my diplomatic sash.

There at the old Pine Sol-smelling counter I stood with the kind of a look an 8 year old gets when he realizes he's accidently run over the new beagle puppy. Rattling in my pocket was 27 cents. 4 cents short. I'd seen richer pockets in a Bombay dust factory. Then a pasty-faced gorilla in a blue suit that barely hid a sawed-off shot gun walked up with an outstreched pie-sized hand and held out a nickel - it looked like a elephant foot with a bottle cap stuck in the middle.

"Thanks, pal. I'll pay you back next time I visit the zoo. "

You had to beat this kind of thing back. If you're grateful, it gets to be a bad habit, and the next thing you know you're into Frankie the Fish Head for 10 grand over an ill-timed deuce of clubs. But this muscle slab's black eyes were too small to shrink any farther, and the steam-shovel jaws didn't open, but with the slightest tilt of the head, a feat for a man with no apparent neck, he indicated a silhouette in a back booth.

The way the light through the blinds struck that particular dark shape you could tell she was loaded for bear.

Phyllis Poetilla. The deadliest girl in town, even if you didn't count the chlamydia. A notorious Tenderloin madam and sometime Disney distributor, she left a trail of broken hearts, empty accounts, severed limbs and cheerful sailors from the Oakland docks to Russian hill.

She crooked her index finger and wiggled it compellingly. "Dr. Brain." She said, professionally, although in her profession that could mean anything from fronting a bootleg print of Snow White to a sudden need for 26 cases of pennicillin.

"Phyllis. You're looking well." She was always some crazy combo of expensive and cheap, like a Faberge Egg full of pressed ham. The material was expensive, but her decolletage got up and danced without a formal introduction, and charged 10 cents for it.

"An economic necessity. You're looking desperate."

"Nah, sugar, I'm sitting on top of the world."

"Under of a cardboard box of crap on the top of the world, I'd say. You've got bigger holes in your shoes than the Lusitania. But I wanna check something. Prosciutto, rattle his cage." The gorilla came at me like a freight train. But I was like a penny on the tracks. I'd already tied his shoes together when I'd asked casual-like what on earth that was behind him. The result was like Casey Jones hitting a salad bar.

"Sharp, Mack. I hate that in a man. Except when I need it. Thinker and a fighter. Now I figure a guy like you can handle himself- that's two palookas for the money. Meet me at this address at nine. I'll make it worth your while. "

She got up and wiggled off, while some other goon of hers dragged Prosciutto along like a bag of idiot meat.

I looked at her card.

BAY AREA SECRET CASTLE OF LOVE
2-4-69 Bush
(Hard Right on Johnson)
San Francisco, California

KENTUCKY 5497 Ask for the Comprehensive Phyllis

Unnecessary double-entendres in a cathouse ad annoyed me. It's like living in a mansion and putting out a huge sign on the lawn that says "Guess what? I live in a Mansion!" The Chanel #5 on the card smelled mostly like bait- a gilded chum bucket for lovelorn chumps. But money flows from loneliness, and I needed money more than I needed self-respect. I had a suspicion this job would drive me lower than a groundhog limbo dancer. But you don't pay Joe, or any other chef with fragmentation grenade on hand in the kitchen, in pride.

It was raining downtown, cold and wet and bouncing like a shower of kitten noses, and I managed to soak my last pair of dry socks (one argyle, the other Stanford Varsity) before I casually yanked a couple of tourists off the cable car and rode bitterly to Bush street.

It was just my luck that the cloth from the umbrella I'd stolen from the tourists was not really attached at all, and the second I opened it it blew away, covering the windshield of an Oldsmobile which spun out of control and took out a Tibetan restaraunt which was empty because as a sideline I'd happened to have written a less than stellar review of the joint, Madame Than's Yak Noodles N' Chips, just last week in the Examiner. I turned left at the resulting sesame oil fire, briefly hosed off the crying passengers, and found Phyllis's -a bright red and lilac Victorian with the real San Francisco rarity of a wrap-around porch and attached pig-iron foundry, where the off-duty girls poured cast-iron molds of presidents and famous European historical figures for sale at disreputable university book shops. At least, that was the story.

I was about to knock on the door with the velvet cushioned knocker when insert knockers joke here Phyllis came around outside, holding a briefcase. She was all business, like Henry Ford breaking a sit-down strike with a pack of Pinkerton goons, if Henry Ford was a wearing an overstuffed red satin dress and wielding a pretty little chromed .32 auto instead of mooning over the picture of Hitler on his desk. Ironic, because it was a Pinkerton problem. Phyllis laid it out- ten or twelve slabs of pasty-faced, mustachioed Pinkerton detectives snooping around, questioning the girls. They wouldn't be bribed off and they even turned down special favors. Why? Always the question. Pinkertons were the biggest whores and goons around. Odd indeed. It was worth a 100 a day and expenses to her to find out. I was getting hired as a private counter-dick.

"Sure, no sweat. " I said. Unlike a church or a bank, with a whorehouse you know exactly where the money's coming from. She kissed me on the chin and gave me the the briefcase. It had a file with photos of the Pinkertons, $500 cash, a card with the triple underlined address of a good tailor, and my own pitted and slightly rusty .45 retrieved from Mystic Eva's Pawn and Psychic Readings (2 locations.) I never trust a man whose gun is too clean.

"Friday," she said. "I need to know by Friday."

"Not much time, Toots."

"And Mack, I hate to tell ya but your girl's stepping out on ya. Get me the info and I tell you who." She closed the door.

Boy, that dame could pull strings like a piano factory. I walked, through the looming towers of cement and glass and the rain and neon lights and the heaving sea of hats. A paperboy cried out Rommel's Victory in North Africa. A single daisy dropped in the street was run over by meat van. A mother smacked her crying little girl with a soaking wet copy of Being and Nothingness. I walked on, tried put Dardenella out of my mind by concentrating on municipal bonds and drinking a pint of Vjorn's Stumbling Icelander Gin - it was enough to get me to the tailor in one piece.

An hour later I had a cash, a gun, a mission, a new wool suit and a wicked hangover. I was begining to feel like an American again.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Where Blood Stains The Linoleum

Crumples' unbelievably disagreeable face, crinkled and pitted and rutted like some aerial photo of the Battle of the Somme, soured up even more when I asked for a Muu-Muu Tartan for Dardenella, so to say a scotch and mango daquiri, and a pint glass of McCaber's Woolly Old Pickled Sheep Nose Ale of Notable Strength for me. He was the only man I knew whose decades of back-alley boxing greatly improved his face, and he'd started in the bare-knuckle 56 rounds a fight days against animated meat slabs like "Miterbox" Marx the Heavyweight Midget and Sparks "No-Arms" McElroy, a disappointed expert telegraph tapper who had his feet legally re-registered as fists.

Crumples' arm plowed a furrow in the thick dust on the bar, shooting me a look of seering contempt as he fumbled with the paper umbrella for the dacquri, breaking it utterly and furiously crumpling the splinters into a ball before dropping the tiny little logjam onto the crushed ice, like a wolf-spider might decorate a dead but juicy horsefly for his girlfriend, which he knew was about to eat his head. Crumples was famous at the Rusty Hobnail for crushing ice by contemptuously ignoring it, and he was even more angry at me for having the G-Men pick him up and beat him into a sheet of Spam, until they realized he couldn't have spiked my Irish Startup drink with knock out drops from the pulpy fruit of the Concussion tree, because of the lipstick marks on the telltale napkin. It wasn't Crumples' shade by a longshot.

Dardenella was dressed against the fog with a violet silk number with a chevron of alternating sable and bakelite stripes and one of those necklines fallen so low they called it Black Monday and even if I didn't know fashion from taxidermy, I could tell that on Eleanor Roosevelt that same dress might have been confused for a restrictive scarf. Delectable D took a drag on her brand new 36" cig holder that I'd had remade from that blond cookie's sniper rifle, the one I appropriated before she was sent up to the Lindberg Correctional Home for Whacked-Job Nazi Broads, there to watch the earth rotate around the sun 45 times to life.

The cherry on the cigarette was practically the only light in the room, and the orange red light splashed on her perfect cheekbones in the syrupy gloom. The Rusty Hobnail was the last of the overturned '49er ships used as bars and restaraunts in San Francisco- they'd had an abortive attempt at an art deco remodel back in '19, but that just left a gold leaf -flapper Caryatid holding up the false keel ceiling, next to the last human remains of Dinky the Lascar sailor, whose head dangled from a beaded rope with a paper sign in green Magic Marker that said "Last Guy With a Bad Check." Women's underwear of disputable volume hung from the rafters. The pickled egg jar had a mark that made me suspect that it was Confederate in origin, from the war. Class joint. The society girls on Nob Hill, if they ever got drunk , lost and found themselves in here, would probably hang themselves from their pearl strands in despair.

Crumples called the caryatid "Shirley"- her breasts were both bare and covered in cracked yellow varnish- and winked at her dauly with a twinkle or perhaps a displaced eye-booger and the sort of repulsively lascivious grin that might send you to a remote Benedictine monastery to reconnect with moral cleanliness. And here in a whale-oil stained dark, time passed like molasses going uphill to a furniture store in Romania in January on a passport forged in green crayon while waiting for its grandmother to find her purse in the car.

"I'm bored, Mack," said Dardenella. "Why don't we go out dancing, at the Savoy? Runny Beans and His Lip Service Band are playing a whole set of Cab Calloway arrangements of the Ring Cycle."

"Sorry, Baby. You know we gotta wait for Abdul."

"The loathsome little rat! How I hate him!" She pouted, in such a way that it got me thinking of ways to give her more disappointing news. I pushed the cig holder out of the way, knocking over a whale-oil lamp, and stroked her cheek and neck and kissed her on her nose, a nose reknowned throughout Northern California for her perfect oval nostrils. She smelled nice, like lilac and truffles and a sea breeze over a field of candy strawberries.

"Buck up, kid, " I said, blasting the growing fire with the nitrogen extinguisher I always kept handy in a death trap like the Rusty Hobnail. Then I notice a surprised change in her expression.

The shift in the aroma toward stale gyro meat, cheap rye, and second-hand cigars meant Abdul Jimenez was standing behind me: a disagreeable Swiss character actor, used car salesman and political consultant for big water interests. Suddenly, everything went white.

"Like It?" He burbled.

"I can't see anything, Abdul, but you might remember I can shoot by smell."

"'Number One Grandpa?' " Said Dardenella. "Who the fuck elects grandpas?" This phrase confused me.

"I call it a 'novelty T-Shirt'," said Abdul, walking around a taking a chair. "Hey that's some sparkly dame you got here - what's your name, Sweet Cheeks?"

"Mrs. Ballcracker to you."

"Oh.ho..ho, Mack, she's a spicy noodle, eh? Here, check out these other shirts," he said, offering them hanging on his arm, the tips of his tiny moustache pointing to his cotton bearing hands.

I picked through a few - ordinary undershirts with sayings cheaply printed on them, like they were stolen from some deranged athletic club - with sayings like 'Hot Stuff" and "I'm with Stupid" and one moronic idea that looked like a picture of a tuxedo and the only one that made any sense at all- "23 Skidoo."

"And you're planning to CHARGE for these?," I said.

"Not much, frankly. It was the dumbest thing I could think of. It's just a front. I'm going to soak them in liquid opium and ship them around the country safely and then refine it into heroin."

"Nice to catch up. Why tell me?"

"I wanted you to know why I'm going to have to kill you," he said, whipping out a specialty 20mm handgun with a 4 round cylinder that must have weighed fifteen pounds. I seen one once before, at the climax of the case of Fats Scharnhorst and the Exploding Hindenberg.

"Mack!" Dardenella exclaimed considerably, diving under the table,

"Sorry, Abdul, I missed something there. We go back a ways. I never liked you, and I did sleep with your wife, and got you fired and then had your mother evicted, and snuck in and hid your car keys, and I think I ratted you out to the cops about fifteen times, but we go back. Why tell me your little smack scheme and then say you're going to kill me, you pan-Equitorial fruitcake? "

"Maybe I don't like you either, Brain. Maybe I'm a twisted hero-hating bastard. Maybe I haven't had a chance to try out my little cannon here. Maybe I've got tapioca for a conscience, and I'm looking for a few laughs. "

"You've confused me with someone who's not drunk. " I tossed back the ale - about as refreshing now as a bucket of hot sand. And what the hell was Crumples doing anyway? The samba? "What do you want, Jimenez?" Everyone wants something. I'd learned that in the detective business and once when I went to a Halloween party dressed as Jean Harlow.

"The Brown Envelope. And tell Crumples to shut off that bloody samba music."

"Take a powder, Crumples. " He stopped mid-step, crestfallen, his face collapsing like an earthen dam in an LA rainstorm.

Goddamn. Jimenez knew about the envelope. And he knew I could get it. If he knew what it really meant, it explained everything: The mysterious Buicks. The albino massage therapist. The bicycle bomb. The robot hookers. Did he know how many good men had died for the Brown Envelope? How many cops? How many actuaries? How many classical trombonists? The Brown Envelope - it was such stuff that dreams are mailed in.
"You're going to tell me where it is, and how I can get it." Jimenez glowered in a sick and strangely misplaced kind of triumph, like a poodle who's just swallowed an ashtray.

The Brown Envelope had built a que for death longer than the line for water at the Death Valley Rock Sucking Contest, and I wasn't about to spill just because some rye-swilling balloon-head was pointing a howitzer at my latest girlfriend.

"Say Baby, how bout a manicure?" I said.

Abdul looked at his hand. "But I just had them done this week..."

Dardenella was faster than greased lightning with an art history degree cashing a check. She whipped out her nail clippers and snipped in just the right way at just the right moment, and Abdul and his newly severed Achilles Tendon came crashing to the floor, him screaming in eerie silence, and as his gun hit the floor a monstrously huge report rattled every bottle of watered rye and the old oak ribs and Dinky the Lascar's head swayed sardonically in a circle. I kicked the gun away and got a foot on Adbdul's throat.

"You alright? I aksed Dardenella. She was panting, her chest heaving up and going down a bit, before poofing out , and then sinking and then poofing up again, was holding the bloody nail clippers from the end like a dead fish, and the blood dripped to the floor like Chinese Blood Torture, of floors.

"Mack, you're getting me a new pair of clippers. OH!" She was looking to the bar and held her hand to her mouth in distress, dropping the clippers with a tinny clank.

"OW!" It was Crumples. There was a spattering of blood on the racks of bottles and the bar. He'd taken the 20mm cannon round on the chin. Where it promptly skipped off. He'd probably done more damage to himself shaving that morning. The round itself left a 2 foot hole in the wall with a lovely view of the Bay, and the first sunlight to hit that place in a century scorched the linoleum.

Tough old guy, Crumples, like seal jerky from the Napoleonic Wars. You had to hand him that.