Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Get Stingy Wheels

August 6, 1942. Prelude.


Waiting: 3AM. Quiet, like a dead goat. Waiting by the streetlight. I am still, like death, like another dead goat. Watching: Up. The street: puddles. The Sky: a drizzle. The Flask: a torrent, rotgut whiskey like a half- distilled Douglas Fir. The window I watch: dark. In my guts: a colon. The building’s very bricks are made of sandy secrets, pulverized dreams, and angry straw. Somewhere in the distance, a failed contralto mangles Carmen. I flip the collar on my overcoat against the chill. A gum wrapper paper boat I made to kill time sinks into a puddle, its foil flashing in the streetlight like a little sailor flashing "Help.” Waiting - and watching - and waiting. Spent Lucky butts pile up by my right leg like a campfire of gnomes. And they are also singing “Carmen.” I guzzle another slug of Chuckley Canuck’s Birch Whiskey from a Calvin Coolidge flask an ungrateful Senator once tried to pay me with. Later, based on a anonymous tip I barely had the nickel for, the papers caught him with a 14 year-old girl in a Senate telephone booth. Unfortunately for him, she was Irish. Big Scandal. Now he rents out paddleboats in Omaha. And me, I'm watching now, watching and waiting some more, tensed to strike like a cottonmouth with a hangover, ready to bring in a dangerous Nazi pastry chef and former San Francisco Seals relief-pitcher, the deadly” Stingy” Wheels. "Stingy," because, being a fascist relief pitcher, he'd bean you when you weren’t looking-like when you were in the dugout, or getting a hot dog, or several hours after the game was over. And it stung, when it wasn’t fatal. When Stingy wasn’t on the kill.

Stingy Wheels: he’d beaned a Red Sox hitter into a coma in December ’35, inducing a popular novel. Stingy Wheels: he'd left a cigarette girl for dead in a Seattle match factory, and took her cigarettes. Stingy Wheels: He shot a kid on Ferris Wheel for his secret decoder ring. Stingy Wheels: once, he was Henry Ford's blintz chef. Stingy Wheels: about 6 feet, greasy dark hair, no distinctive marks, except maybe the murder in his heart and the port wine stain on his back in the shape of Western Poland. Stingy Wheels left a bloody trail down Market Street – even bloodier than you usually find walking down Market Street. Stingy Wheels: A traitor. A lousy Kraut killer. And not the good kind. And sometimes, he let the cream in the Bavarian donuts go off....

I'm waiting. I’m waiting to Get Stingy Wheels. America - I feel America herself beside me, her soft breath of liberty on my neck, her dainty fingers of freedom dancing along my upper thighs, yes, America is waiting with me, and I'm looking up at the filthy window in the dingy brick building, the one made of desperate secrets, my finger feeling the little grooves on the cold metal trigger of the .38 in my Harris tweed holster, tapping out a cadence, a cadence sung in America’s feather light soprano: Get Stingy Wheels. Get Stingy Wheels.

----
August 5, 1942. Steak and Eggs – With Revolution on the Side

The Case of the Lugubrious Celery Stalker wound down when I tracked the culprit to the La Conga nightclub and got him to sign a confession over six or seven Bloody Marys. He snapped like a celery stalk, admitting through a pathetic dribble of tears that on the morning of July 3 he destroyed 27 vegetable stands with a large wooden mallet as a political statement. At least it wasn’t a comedy act. I last saw the joker getting dragged by away couple of lumpy flatfoots, blubbering something about cream cheese.

But the evening wasn’t a total waste- the joint was jumpin’, as the kids say, and I somehow attached myself like a vegetarian limpet to a sweet slice of a dancing tomato named Polly or Pansy or something. Something about her – the way she looked at me like a starving gypsy at a seafood bisque. The way she smelled – it was astonishing, a sweet, refined musk, the mountain flowers of the Urals, a faint trace of tractor oil, and a delicate after-scent of “get over here, Stupid.” Polly or Pansy or something was a tomato with an angel face and devil expression, thick black hair, toned arms- she was built like the Eiffel Tower, but the soft, fluffy kind of Eiffel Tower with impressive sweater knobs and no rude Frenchies stuffing you into the elevator. We danced for hours to Smallie Vast’s Bum’s Rush Band, until hunger stalked us like a Siberian tiger that was also really hungry.

We made a short, juicy dash from Sutter Street to Barnacle Bim's House of Hash for eats. Barnacle Jim was too cheap to fix the sign. I followed her – a chance to take in her well-formed caboose, which moved like Astaire and Rodgers dancing in a silk bag.

Barnacle Jim was also unscrupulous, and a week's worth of meat rations on one plate would be sizzling on the grill. Where he got the meat I don’t know, but the zoo was missing a second giraffe.

That Polly or Pansy girl, well she looked fine sitting across from me, gobbling up the pancakes with whipped cream and the little banana happy faces on them that Jim had put there, grinning stupidly through the kitchen window. For the moment I settled on calling her “Kissy Lips.” I crammed toast and marmalade and eggs and stuffed it all in my face with little thought for anything but the giraffe steak on the way.


Someone left the San Francisco Call Bulletin on the table. Kissy Lips picked it up.

“You want me to read to you, Mack?” Damn, she knew my name already- although frankly I think Kissy Lips was guessing.

“Read on, Kissy Lips.”

She scanned a bit: “Which story, ‘Milton Deadd, Dead at 34’, or ‘Mystery Grows as Third Giraffe Missing from San Francisco Zoo’?”

“Deadd is Dead?,” I said, surprised as a family of deer mice unexpectedly offered free medical insurance.

”Milton Deadd, Dead at 34, of a Hammering…” she started.

“You got a swell voice to go with those lips,” I said. A trace of a smile passed those soft, dark red, classically poofy lips, with the kind of little overbite that makes a man willingly hold her purse while shopping, and she tossed her head a little to one side, where a cascade of black hair flowed darkly like the Amazon river at night. What could a man do but paddle upstream, spurning the many signs of piranhas and angry river otters?

She read, her voice lilting like a Celtic harp. If a unicorn had walked in then I would have just patted in on the head and fed it pie.

“Police report a body of what appeared to city experts to be a white man in his early 30's was found Thursday morning in a Potrero area metal shop, beaten repeatedly with an automatic 80 horsepower metal-forming hammer into, according to the coroner, “a gruesome paste.” The hammering took place in "Grimeshaven's Steel and Wire Fabrication" on the 1800 block of Mariposa street. The man's wallet, which police noted was somewhat improved in suppleness by the hammering, contained papers from the White Eagle insurance company which identified the bearer as Mr. Milford Deadd, 34, of the Nob Hill Deadds. The Call-Bulletin's society columnist, Mrs. Dennis Westfield-Porter , noted that Mr. Deadd had just announced an engagement to Miss Anne-Marie Hawthorne, 17, of the famous Los Angeles Hawthorne Publishing firm, while Mr. Grimeshaven, the owner of the metal fabrication ship in question, has suspicions of wrongful activities by Red organizers who have plagued the shop with unceasing demands to raise wages and allow the hire of girls and negros to work on the plant's sensitive War Department contracts. Based on these facts, Police Lietuentant Mr. Don Pockles' feared "Pockeler Squads" have been raiding numerous Red Labor halls in fearsome dragnet regarding the certainly illegal flattening of Mr. Milton Deadd.”

“Typical bourgeois bird-feed,” she said, shaking her head.

Reading the Call-Bulletin is a great way to get the news if you're avoiding facts that day. And facts are my bread. Facts are my lunch and snack. Facts are my brunch when brunch isn't a hailstorm of bullets and knives. Facts are my pancakes, and context is the butter, and the real story is three tablespoons of rich maple truth, and in working my way now through the great breakfast of Justice, I realized, both figuratively and literally, that the waitress hadn't brought my fork.

“They got it wrong. Deadd wrong,” I said, realizing I sounded a little too self-consciously tough guy. Not that I wasn’t tough, mind you, tough as a tarred canvas apple turnover, and I’ll kill anyone who says different, but you know, it was coming on a bit thick.

“The dead guy's name was Milford. Milford Deadd. Even when Deadd was alive, it wasn't the kind of living you think of as living. He was the biggest knob on the hill. I saw him once at La Conga, the band bopping with a beat that would get Eleanor Roosevelt jitterbugging, girls swinging from the rafters, prop rockets flying through the air, gin pouring so fast it was making alcoholic steam, and there was Deadd, balancing his checkbook, with an expression like someone had just read him the Federal Register. ”

"One less Deadd isn’t much of a loss,” she said, her black eyes cool, distracted, distant even, like she was recalling a fond memory of putting some evil joker’s head in a vice, like I did once in Barcelona. “That’s one less bullet we’ll have to buy for the Revolution.”

Though the icing may have been buttery soft, this cookie was harder than a granite eviction notice.

The fact was the Deadds were rich. The Deadds had dough like Iowa’s got wheat. They made the Astors look like Okies. I thought about it a moment. Kill Deadd. Why? Cabbage. It’s always the cabbage: with Deadd dead, he was reborn as a big sauerkraut barrel of cash, and everyone would be circling around, carrying a naked bratwurst.

”Petunia!” I yelled – her name discovered by the old "let's look at each other's wallets" ruse. I'd been dating a Red with long brown hair and a Wobbly card called Petunia Mathleby- turned out she was a machinist and shop steward for the IWW All-Girl Local 673.

She was barely 24, according to her license. 5’ 8”. Long legs. Big black eyes. Believed in free love, hot jazz, D.H. Lawrence, gymnastics, and was still steamed over the Second International excluding the anarcho-syndicalists. That wasn’t on the license. Her father was sent up for a dime in WWI for entering the White House in protest over the imprisonment of Eugene Debs by placing an empty banana peel right where Woodrow Wilson could walk right over it. She was born the day Wilson got out of the hospital.

She also had a bad habit of calling people "the Masses," as in "The Masses will reject Errol Flynn as a genuine auteur, " or "in the syndicalist worker state, the Masses will not caper to orders for more coffee." The comment got a look from Maybelle, the old French waitress at Bim's, so old she made Crumples the bartender over at the Rusty Hobnail look sprightly, and he’d claimed to have beaten Gentleman Jim down with a brick in his glove. But that look seemed to say “comme cela,” because every French look seemed to say “Comme cela.”

This opened a turn so unexpected my teeth stretched.

“Petunia, mon ami jolie, all work is ze prayer,” Maybelle said. As she turned toward Petunia, her tiny skeleton rattled around in her loose, dry skin like a cat lost in a grocery sack.

"I have been watching you both,” she said, pointing a crooked finger to Petunia's gorgeous oval face, Maybelle’s watery blue eyes bugging like a beached grouper. “It is not ze coincidence that I have arranged for you Monsieur Mack and Petunia to meet at La Conga – last night, no?”

Petunia looked aghast. Then confused. Then aghast again. “You! You were the old woman at Macy’s – who sold me the perfume!"

“The Soviets’ finest secret of spycraft: Female Worker’s Seductive Initiative Scent, No. 5.”

“How’d ya manage that, Gramms?” I asked, stupidly.

Maybelle was no ordinary diner waitress. First, she’d killed a lot more people. Second, she was a genuine revolutionary. 'Turned out the Lugubrious Celery Stalker was working for her, luring me to La Conga. She worked through Petunia’s Wobbly Girls to get her there, proposing through Petunina’s friend Missy Sailorwelcome that uninhibited jazz dancing would subtly destabilize the State. Maybelle fired up her particular form of business during the Paris Commune 70 years ago, from when she was known “as La Femme Croissant Fatale,” a spy for the revolutionary committee, known for her buttery softness and flakiness. And Third, she enjoyed her job.

“Ah, Petunia, you remind me of moi. I was beautiful in those days, I had ze fire of ze revolution, the winds of ze change, the waters of ze fall of ze bourgeoisie. And I was deadly, too, yes. I was ze finest sniper for the Central Committee. Ze beasts of ze traitor army fell like ze lap dogs from ze lap.” She said this, miniscule in her yellow and white waitress outfit, looking like a garden gnome, holding the coffee pot steady as a rock, giving us a creepy eye.

“But I know you, Monsier Mack, you find ze Nazis for the U.S.” she said. “ And I know Petunia, and as she searches her heart, she will come to know what I have done.”

Petunia was no daisy. “You put Milford Deadd’s head in that RD-417 Power hammer, ” she said, coolly, as if she were announcing a train arrival. Real riverter, that one. Knew her machinery. I was a bit put out, figuring that Maybelle just cheated me out of a fat paycheck from the Deadds for solving the murder.

"But I didn’t kill him, although I would have – how do you say - relished it.” She leaned in to Petunia, who was both repelled and fascinated. “Deadd was a traitor. To America, to France, to ze free peoples of the world everywheres. And Deadd was hiding ze most….

"Hey, where the hell is my cheeseburger,?’ demanded a man with a striped shirt and yellow bow tie.

“Put a corncob in it, Meatball!” I said. Stiped shirt slumped in his booth until his eyes were just under the lip of the table.

“Deadd was hiding a man so dangerous, so notorious, ze most heinous Heinie in the California. Ze man who repaid the kindness of the Deadd with ze death.”

"STINGY WHEELS!” I gasped!

Twenty minutes later, full of breakfast and briefed by Maybelle with what she called “Committee Orders”, Petunia and I ran through the gathering rain and mist to catch a streetcar downtown. We plopped down inside, the rain pelting the roof in the warm electric bulb gloom, steam rising from everyone’s hats. Petunia’s hands, hid discretely under the afternoon Call-Bulletin- and it’s LIES!- were handling the new .22 Trajoe Mexican Machine pistol Maybelle had picked up from Trotsky’s place the night he was axed to death. Her hands, delicate but strong, shook slightly.

"Need a little courage, Baby?” I said, offering her the flask of Chuckley Canuck’s Birch whiskey.

“Sure,” she said, gamely drinking it back. “Like Whitehorse on fire,” she coughed. Petunia’s searching black eyes took me in for a second longer than she need to. She rested her cheek on my shoulder. Nice cheek, that one.

The streetcar screeched and wobbled and rattled on. All we had was an address, a cold lead on a fat chance. But I was bleary and addle-headed, rinsed out like a kitchen rag. Some organ I didn’t know the name or function of ached. Even my gun throbbed from overuse. I was taking a crowded street car to find and maybe kill a man, or die, or both, and there wasn’t any juice in it, no money, no glory, no ration card, no vacation upstate, no mimosas on a Baja beach, and all I could think of was unpaid bar tabs and a seersucker suit I left at Wu Ho’s cleaners in June, 1937. The only thing was Victory. For other people. For all the people that weren’t in with Stingy Wheels and all the goons in the world with fancy suits and dead hearts. For Petunia.

We got close, hoofed up the steep hill in the rain until we found the dingy Victorian brick box under an overhanging hill off Jones Street, above the Art Institute. Only sailors, Italians and art students would put up with such a sketchy neighborhood. View was nice, though.

“914 Jones. That’s it.” We were quiet. Maybelle’s dope had it that Stingy was coming here tonight. When, we didn’t know. I jimmied the handle on a old Cadillac parked there, the sitting room on wheels model, on the same side as the street level door to Stingy’s flop. A red door. Like a maraschino cherry, or fresh blood.

“You wait in here, Petunia, and keep that tenderizer ready- with the safety off.” She nodded. As she got in her body brushed mine. Female Worker’s Seductive Initiative Scent, No. 5 was doing its work, convincing me of the inevitability of socialism. She kissed me, eyes open, drinking me in like cheap Canadian whiskey.

“Dead heroes don’t stop the Nazis. Stay alive, Mack.”

“I’ll consider it, Kissy Lips.”

She got in, nestling under a quilt. I closed the door, and went to stand on the opposite corner, in the tiny wind shelter of the streetlight. I pulled up my collar, and fiddled with my .38, noting again the engraving of Brughel’s 99 Netherlandish Proverbs on the handle. Cost me a pretty penny, that one. Might have time to figure out a couple now.

The hours went by, rain and fog came in waves. My feet were soaked. My cardboard belt disintegrated, threatening to unburden my waist of pants. I burned through the first pack of Luckys. No signs of Stingy. No way to know whether our tip was good or a complimentary ticket to Chumptown, which I believe is in Indiana.


August 6th, 1942.

I'm waiting. I’m waiting to Get Stingy Wheels. I'm looking up at the filthy window in the dingy brick building, the one made of desperate secrets, my finger feeling the little grooves on the cold metal trigger of the .38 in my Harris tweed holster, tapping out a cadence sung in America’s feather light soprano: Get Stingy Wheels. Get Stingy Wheels..."

Finally a noise, a rustling, an indefinable sound, sort of like a horse at trot but all wrong, lopier, slower. A car engine roared in low gear, climbing. Then, a shot rang out, a small caliber, a pea-shooter, a girl-gun.

Petunia started, got up, still covered in the quilt. “Mack, what is it?,” she whispered across the street.

“Get down, you adorable comforter!” The quilt deflated.

The sounds grew louder, and on up Jones street they came, first a girl, a pretty little blond waif of a woman in a white silk dress, riding a large caliber giraffe with a concerned expression, its orange fur wet in the drizzle, the girl hanging on to its neck with one hand and firing the small revolver with the other at something behind.

Now, this was an entrance. Or a hallucination. I was transfixed, dopey as they came up the hill, but I grabbed the .38 and held it up, ready for something even slightly more surprising.

A big blue Buick crested the intersection at speed, and I saw it’s undercarriage before it’s hood.

As the speeding giraffe passed, the girl looked right at me, her blue eyes big as commemorative plates. “Mister! Help me!,” she pleaded.

Before I could react, I saw a flash and a heard bigger report – a Luger - and saw a splash of blood and the girl on the giraffe fall to the ground right in front of me like a pile of uptown laundry. The giraffe hung a right and ran down the street, looking sad, bleeding on it’s right hind quarters from a glancing wound. And the Buick roared past, taking a potshot at me for good measure so I had to dive for cover into the gutter next to the girl. I fired a couple rounds lying down, not much chance, but I heard the tinny slap of lead against the steel of the Buick’s trunk.

In a moment, Petunia was standing above the girl and me. Nice view. She bent down and hugged me, her exotic squishyness in full bloom.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, fine, girl’s just passed out.”

“Who is she?,” said Petunia, glancing at the little blond angel in white sprawled on the wet black road.

“Milton Deadd’s fiancée, Anne-Marie Hawthorne. Saw her when I was stealing shrimp from the reception.”

“The Buick?”

“That…that was Stingy Wheels…the Nazi of North Beach, the Baker of Prague. Now you know what he’s capable of. And if we’re going to smash that squarehead’s soufflé, we gotta amscray, and tout de suite. ”

“What about her?” said Petunia, her chin toward Anne-Marie.

“Bring her. She’s alright, and she’s gotta know something, like where a joker goes after he shoots a giraffe. "

I took Petunia by the waist and looked out into the dark, early morning city. The streetlight cut the mist in a sick yellow shaft. A few dim lights twinkled on bridge. Somewhere on Russian Hill, a bleeding ungulate was going to surprise a milkman. And Stingy Wheels was still rolling.

The Rebar for Tootsie Rolls Stories, which are missing most of the important chapters, are first posted at Isengard.Gov.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: I Wandered Lonely As a Corpse

The dripping dank dark danced with the dreary dawn drizzle, and the cold cut in like Fred Astaire on Ginger Rogers. I  woke up on a park bench with my face and back aching, flopped down near the Ferry Terminal with a damp suit and a cut on the cheekbone from a fusillade of dungeoness crabs tossed by my untimely but accurate aspersions on a wharf fisherman's sister, who I'd been seeing until she showed up with a Vichy French sailor at a Russian Hill fête, pom-pom in pom-pom.   

I was still picking crab meat out of my lapel when my watch- a fancy moon-phase Bulova I’d grabbed off the wrist of a dying SS officer whom I'd shot with a spear gun in Venice over a curvy Venezuelan tomato and part time B girl named Imeldine- informed me I was late for a meeting at the Rusty Hobnail, an original 1849 overturned whale ship bar,  a place so old that on a hot day the ceiling dripped whale oil in your beer.

I gathered myself among myself and walked toward the Rusty Hobnail to the songs of the waterfront: a ship’s bell, the creak of a wooden mast, the gruff, siren call of a fairly convincing transvestite.  Someone started practicing a saxophone with a riff from St. James Infirmary- practicing to discredit the saxophone as a musical instrument by producing a sound like a rutting walrus with asthma.

Finally, the Rusty Hobnail. Home away from home if home smelled like barfly sweat and rancid whale oil. "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than have a frontal lobotomy" said the sign behind the black oak timber bar that took up exactly the same place in Crumples the bartender's brain Wordsworth might have plugged up in a Stanford co-eds'; only when Dorothy Parker said it she was in the Algonquin Hotel, which was swank and beautiful, while the dingy, dusty dregs of this ill-kempt, upturned Forty-Niner ship, the last of old San Francisco's waterfront bars, where I tended to store my liver when I wasn't walking around with it, utterly wasn't.

My memory wasn't what it was after the Case of the Omega Three Affair, when “Moose” Fritters the Novelty-Item Jeweler (he’d invented the moose-dropping swizzle-stick) dropped a crate of cod-liver oil fell on my head; now the only Wordsworth poem I knew:

I wander'd lonely as a corpse/
That floats on white o'er lakes and hills
When all at once I saw a crowd:
a host, of collectors of bills

This wasn’t quite right- I made a mental note to ask that Stanford co-ed. 

Contaminated by history, the Rusty Hobnail would make a good tourist trap if the sawdust on the floor was changed more than once a decade.  Over the years, I'd found four guns, dozens of casings, several sets of teeth, a skeleton with a two-by-four through the thorax and a whalebone corset - all while absent-mindedly kicking through the dust.  

I hadn't seen Crumples in a couple of months, which is like saying I hadn't been down to the slaughterhouse for the view recently.   The antebellum bare-knuckle boxer was getting the crud off the glasses the same way you clean a trout - with a knife - and his square skull covered in loose skin looked just like a plaster bust of Caesar covered in a sheet in an art-school still life.  His stained white hair grew thick like an old mattress dumped on a trash-can.   A smell: boot socks and formaldehyde.  He didn't look any older because that wasn't physically possible, it would be like wrinkling a coelacanth.   He was so old when he looked my way I heard his eyeballs creaked with menace, and so cranky, surly, belligerent and uncivil, yet not especially grumpy, I wondered just what had sucked the pixie-dust of joy back into the vacuum bag of his heart.

"Well, you ain't been around, has you?" he explained, before throwing the nearly black dish towel to the slop bucket in such a way as he let me now that he held both objects in much higher regard than me.  "It's like a god-damned Christmas dinner with a Gibson girl in here every night you get scarce."

“Nice to see you too, Crumples.  A Lower-East Side Manhattan for me.  With less Slovakian vermouth.”

“Yearghaaah,” he said, with a sound only a former pirate who boxed for thirty years in Brooklyn could make.

The Rusty Hobnail made your average rendering plant look like the Top of the Mark, and Buddy, you might ask why I came here.   I asked myself this frequently.   Crumples asked me frequently.  The girls and the clients and the exiled European diplomats and the Mayor I met here asked me frequently.   Just another mystery I didn’t have time to solve.

One of those girls was Belinda Wheels – the girl I was here to meet.  She worked the hotels, the nice ones, like the Mark Hopkins and the St. Francis, did Belinda, "specialty work," no hoy-toy-toy or mattress mambo, but with a surprising amount of equipment.  She got her past the hotel cops with nothing but a wink- no one suspected that a girl with four steamer trunks was whipping, racking, and bossing around City fathers for a substantial consideration.  She had beautiful, cruel silver eyes, a high but savage brow and a pair of abusive nostrils.   Her fierce black hair, shellacked into a angry shiny wave, dropped almost to her tiny but harsh waist.  She had precise red cruel lips, and a cruel but winning smile, and adorable yet ineffably sadistic dimples.  She wore a white mink and silk number that was somewhere in between a coat, a dress and satiny citation for public indecency, with shoulderpads Knute Rockne would envy.  She sat across from me on the upturned barrel, drinking a Red Russian manipulatively, stroking my arm with the barest brush of a cherry red fingernail in a way that suggested my carotid artery was vulnerable.

Problem was, she wanted her husband.   She wanted him dead.

She said: “Mack. You're going to do it for me."

"No can do, Sugar Nostrils, I don't kill for hire." I wasn't a violent man, except when circumstances called, like when the nation was at war, or my girl was in danger, or I was out of money, donuts or whiskey, or when the sun rose in the morning just to cheese me off, or when some jackass in a blue ’39 Caddy parked so close to me I couldn't get in my car and then had the gall to send me the hospital bill when I explained the emergency with my fists.  

She did have nice nostrils.

"What would make it worth your while?" She fluttered her eyelids – which on her was like being winked at by the Gestapo.

"Listen, Belinda, I don’t kill people.  Scratch that, I kill a lot of people.   But only for justice, for America and things.  And last I looked, you ain’t America.

“But I can do things,” she said, her voice cool and boozy with the classiest gin Crumples had, which was an old barrel of Nebraska corn vodka he’d stuffed with a dried up juniper bush he found while ginned up on Bush street.

“Forget it, Baby, my insurance doesn’t cover the things you do.”

She pierced me with her eyes, hard and silver grey like fine German number 8H pencils, the kind that almost never need sharpening, the ones that leave more of a gouge than a line.

“C’mon, Mack, you’re Aces! Just For me?” she said. 

“I told you Belinda, I don’t just walk out and kill husbands. Unless they’re Nazis. Is he a Nazi?”

“He could be,” she said, flicking a comb on the table to make a loud crack. “Can you wait a week?”

“Why don’t you just divorce him?”

“He won’t give me one.  Maybe you could rough him up a little.  Break a thumb or two. ” A little smile crossed her marble face.

“You’re a tough woman, Belinda, tough like rebar for Tootsie Rolls. I’ve seen nicer girls decking Teamsters.   Gotta wonder what made you spill your ice cream cone on the hot sidewalk of cynicism. “

“Hollywood. You know- it’s an old story these days.” Belinda looked dreamily away. “Mom was big in the silents, she called herself Myrtle Clarion.  She was beautiful but so mean - once, when I was 9, I borrowed a dress from a movie she was making, and she sent me to a cannery in Vladivostok for a year." Belinda's eyes narrowed and she dug her sharp nails into her cruel knee. "When I was 16, I told her I wanted to act. Without a word, she called her agent and for three years I was the target in an off-Vaudeville knife throwing act in Saskatchewan. That’s where I learned what men are: Canadian apes with needs.  And then it was bit parts, the casting couch, a tickle and a tease for "Girl at Counter #2," $7 pay and a baloney sandwich for lunch.  And Dad, Dad was a Professor of Industrial Hygiene at UCLA and vers libre poet.   Never home except to bring home a hairball tweed-wearing literary type, reeking of Irish whiskey, like Lillian Hellman."

“Nice story, Sister, but why are you whipping federal judges and dressing them like the Gerber Baby? Moolah? ”

“Girl’s gotta have a hobby.”  She gave me a look that said not only was I about to receive a serious and quite possibly physical rebuke, but I'd have to pay cash for it.

She wasn't quite my type.  First, I get enough abuse for free.  Second, I like my coffee black, my women sweet and my Nazis dead. I also like my women black and my coffee sweet and my Nazis dead.  Or my women Asian and my coffee Irish and my Nazis dead.   And Eskimo girls, my coffee solid, and my Nazis dead.  I did date a Kurdish frailonce who was a total peach who served coffee with hemp oil, and my Nazis dead.  Also, any woman that inconveniences some Nazis, or is breathing, smells nice, is a little tipsy and lacks self-restraint, and my Nazis dead . That last part is the important bit.  I really hate Nazis. 

To be clear, one more Lower East Side Manhattan and Belinda'd be my type. But knowing her, I figured I'd better humor her before she pulled a gun or something leather and pointy with spikes all over it.   It was best to avoid bloodshed here, especially because Crumples put the damage on my tab, unless of course the blood was mine and then he’d let the other party drink free.

"Look Belinda, I'll go talk to your husband - but if you can't persuade him I don't hold out a lotta hope for me."
"O.K. Just talk. Here's the address.” She looked me up and down, and leaned forward a little. “ And Mack, I’ll be very happy if this works. "

“Kickapoo.”

“Why did you just say ‘Kickapoo?” She asked, arching a precisely painted eyebrow.

“'Cause I like the way that sounds.”

---

The address was some semi-swanky dump near Cole Valley called Casa Madrona- a Spanish-style apartment bloc, complete with bell and fountain, that looked like it was sitting about 400 miles too far north.   Supposedly built for MGM - the place reeked of Hollywood. Every time I smelled film stock,  French perfume and cocaine someone was about to close on opening night, forever, usually with a bullet in the heart and a knife in the back, an empty wallet and a look of perpetual disappointment.

Past the fountain, I climbed a short flight of stairs.  Third floor: that frog Mr. Wheels' lilypad. Something was wrong.  It was all too straightforward, too peaceful. The scent of set-up hung like an old Wharf whore around the waist of paid-off sailor.  I took a swig of Alzheimer’s All-Tuber Vodka, which kicked like the Rockettes at Christmas and tended to eradicate unpleasant memories, like the time an actual Rockette kicked me for practically no reason.

I knocked, but the door just swung open.  Time to try out the new gun - a .38 police special with a couple of the new radium tracer rounds, and a special oosik bone grip.  I’d had the grip engraved with an exact copy of Brueghel's 99 Netherlandish Proverbs- ordered it while blotto, in 1934, from an engraver in Chinatown and he’d finally finished just about the time he became legally blind.  A pal at O.S.S. had asked me to test the radioactive ammunition: if it didn’t kill you right off and not removed, it would do you in over the next four or five years, unpleasantly.  Seemed a little vindictive, but he asked nicely.

I opened the door and called out:

"Wheels? You here?"  Nothing . Quieter than a dead frog.

There was a bit of a smell: nutmeg, penetrating oil, rancid potato chips, maybe a hint of drying seafood and illegal Belgian massage oil – the cheap kind.   I was in the living room, the place mauve and yellow and touched with quasi-Egyptian decorations.   On the wall hung a 7-foot stuffed Manta Ray, a cheap print of Dogs Playing Poker and an expensive print of Afghans playing Baccarat. The sign under the Manta Ray said “To Stingy.” Belinda mentioned his nickname was Stingy, a name he picked up working first base with the San Francisco Seals by tagging hitters with spikes in his glove.

I also couldn’t help notice the plaster bust of Hitler on the mantle.  This created a problem.  It was new, so fresh the plaster was still warm from curing.  Obviously Belinda put it there to convince me that Stingy Wheels was a Nazi.  But she also must have known I would figure that set up.  So why did she want to get me to think that I thought she was trying to set me up by setting Stingy up as a Nazi?  I knew most of the Krauty Von Weisenheimers on the FBI's questionable loyalty list– and the name Stingy Wheels never came up.   Sure he was a small-time fence, but just for day-old baked goods to get around rationing – his real line was cupcakes, with delicious cream cheese frosting. Didn’t seem the type.

Suddenly a there was a loud pop.  I fired back.  I christened the new gun “Larry.”

I turned a corner to the dining room and there was Stingy Wheels on a chair, slumped about as quiet as a dead frog slumps, a .38 sized hole drilled in him.  One still hand held his gut where he’d been shot.   The other held a fully frosted cupcake. But it wasn’t my doing. The angle was all wrong. He hadn’t said a peep.   I wasn’t even hungry.  He sure as hell hadn’t fired a gun.  I figured Stingy Wheels had already spun his last before I walked in.  But the killer was near. T he killer was here. Now I went through the place, my heart pounding, my face sweating, my calves itching, my sudden desire for lemonade unquenchable, gun drawn, ready to kill, preparing to die.

Nothing.  No one.  I relaxed for a second.

The place was pretty clean, tidied, but it felt unused.  I lifted the two-piece phone - the line was working.

“Operator, get me 1119.” A couple of clicks.

”Police.”

“Get me the Police.”

“This is the Police.”

“I mean get them here.  It’s Mack Brain. Me…uh.. Private Eye – license 4342. Casa Madrona…right.  Bring a meat wagon, and get that snapper Kamala from the Examiner.  I need photos.“

I stood there for a moment, looking around.   Trying to think.  Not much came to mind.  A few naughty dreams, kited checks, a Doan's little liver pills jingle.  Bupkissarooni.  I was being set up like an Erector set with no candy to distract the little kid with the screwdriver.   Sure, I had Belinda Wheel's $300 wrapped up like a tidy little walnut in my pocket – but it had just been so much bait in the rodent trap, and I was the squirrel in question.  The only question: was I cover, or was it personal?

I turned to open the bedroom door and there stood a bird, the kind of bird you want to buy dinner and tequila and get all googly-eyed under the Moon and start looking for a nice place in Marin with. Hardly Belinda.  It was Imeldine Marquez-Marqueza, the Venezuelan B-Girl I shot an SS officer over in Venice.  I hadn’t seen her in months, and she was dark and fierce and soft and kind of squishy in the right places and she had an elegant but business-dealing Beretta pointed at particularly important things located right on me.  Her big black eyes were narrowed in determination, and her face was a fetching, high-cheek-boned mask of cool anger with a touch of rouge, but she smelled like a host of golden daffodils, and that scent brought me the image of Klaus the SS officers’s expression as I, disguised as a gondlier, unloaded the spear gun (disguised as the oar) into his sorry S.S. self , and then I watched that expression, frozen forever, sinking into the canal, his now watchless hand above the water dropping his final cannoli to give a last Hitler salute to Imeldine, a gesture I considered superfluous at the time.

“Nice watch, Mister Mack.” I glanced at Rutger’s Bulova. I noticed the moon was waning. Then the pieces came together like a Swiss watch.

“Imeldine! You killed Stingy Wheels!

“Oh, Mack, Sure I did, Mack, I killed Mister Stingy Wheels, and you’re going to the death chambers for it. The policemens will see the Mister Hitler and figured you killed up Mister Stingy just for being a Nazis.”

“Fair enough. I’ve got a lot of dead Kraut notches on my belt. ‘Smithsonian’s already called me about it for an exhibit after the war- Gum on the Streets: The Private Detective’s Private War Against Fascism. But why frame me for a one-bit two-timing four-stroke joker like Stingy Wheels?”

“I liked my SS Boy, Mister Mack. And you killed hims over me, and that watch. Normally, such a thing seems nice…

“Which must be why we did the box spring foxtrot all that week…”

“But he was so very blond, and so very tidy. I miss him so very much, Mister Mack.” Her expression changed, a fabric of determination dropped down her face like the safety curtain on amateur ventriloquist night. “Much, much more than I’ll miss you. ” Her gloved finger played coyly with the trigger.

“So why not just plug me?”

The question stayed unanswered when Imeldine glanced over to mortal remains of Stingy Wheels and noticed he didn’t remain remains. He was gone. Stingy Wheels wasn’t dead. He’d ducked out the back door when the Reaper came for the rent, and he’d left- bleeding his way quietly out while we were chatting over old times. A trail of Stingy Wheels’ gore stained the carpet.

“Where’s Stingy!? Where’s Mister Stingy!?”

“So you’re acquainted with Belinda Wheels, I take it,” I said, changing the subject.

The Beretta insisted we take up the subject at hand, and the light in the dining room shattered with the impact. It missed me deliberately. I played the warning shot cool, and looked in her shining black almond-shaped eyes – I saw the memories, the soft heart of a woman, her long brown hair cascading around her perfect café-au-lait skin, the love we had shared in the most romantic city on this tired, rotten, check-kiting planet, and as I reached out to stroke her cheek, I knew she would never really hurt me.

Then she shot me and left.

“Owww!” I said, collapsing to the floor just as the door closed behind her. The cute little round from the Italian gun hit in the meaty part of my left leg, and it felt like I’d been harpooned by a whaler named Queegqueegosconi. I passed out for a moment.

I woke up to a buzz on the intercom. They buzzed like cops: insistent, like they’d be disappointed if you answered and cheated them out of the fun of breaking down the door and beating you like a beet into borscht. You could tell a lot from a buzz.

I hobbled over and hit the button. “Come on in, bring a tourniquet, and tell your Sawbones his stiff is still walking around.”

They barged in guns drawn with Lt. Whitey in his trademark bowler, green plaid suit and corn pipe, and the photo-snapper from the Examiner, a plucky, increasingly busty blond and sometime college student named Kamala Fresher-Greens I knew from The Case of the Developing Coed. She immediately started snapping away at the various blood stains. Stingy Wheels might live, but his carpet was a goner.

The Lieutenant, a short, alphabet cube-like man, took a look at Stingy’s stains. He guessed what happened. “Send a man after that blood trail,” said Whitey. A cop ran out the door, toting a huge magnifying glass.

Kamala the photographer went to work. She had on her trademark short skirt and striped angora sweater, and kept bending into different interesting positions for a better camera angle, and I completely forgot that I’d been shot until Vick the medic pulled the slug out of my leg with a huge forceps you could’ve plucked Zeus’ nasal hair with. Vick stuck me with a morphine shot and started stitching up the wound right there.

“So the Wheels are still turning,” Whitey said in a low chuckle. He had a large head. Watery blue eyes. Sad-sack kind of face. Cheerful sort, a little clueless. I’ll never forget the time the President visited town for a city gala and he kept insisting Franklin and Eleanor both join the Conga line.

Whitey sat down at the table and took out his notepad. While Vick the doc tried to bandage me, I tried not to bleed on Whitey’s notes.

“Alright – Klaus, the SS officer – you iced him in Venice.. that one’s okay, I would imagine. Imeldina hosed you – just now? Yes? Ok, then she told you she shot Stingy, but only to ‘set you up,’ and now she’s skidoodled, but then there’s the Pensacoola Mamba with Belinda, who actually tried to hire you to bump him off, but it was at this intersection of time that you agreed to just persuade him to give her a divorce, rightey-o? You hep to that , daddy-o, old bean?”

“Where’d you learn your gab, Whitey, the Harvard Jazz Society?”

In the awkward silence after this crack we heard the click of women’s heels on the wooden stairs.

“You expecting anyone?” Whitey whispered.

”I’ll lay a dime to a Bavarian Blintz that’s Belinda Wheels,” I said, and everyone in the room suddenly decided to hide. Why wasn’t clear. Whitey ducked behind the window curtain, Vick the medic fled to the closet, two of the cops hid behind a kitchen counter, and Kamala leapt behind the couch where I was, covering us both a comforter.

“Calm down.” I said.

“Shh!” She said. She smelled sweet and a little chemical, like cherry blossoms, bubble gum and photo fixer.

The clicks stopped. There was a rattle of keys. The door began to creak open. I peeked through a fold in the comforter just in time to see a fat black gun barrel appear behind the door, along with a shapely leg in a fishnet stocking. It was Belinda, holding a Sten submachine gun. This was unexpected. A fear gripped me, like a cold, slimy herring head chomping on my wind-pipe from the inside, a fierce, fearsomely fearsome fear.

She arced the gun around with a cruel, professional air - someone who knew exactly how to swing the kind of gun so lethal that if you cheesed her off enough it could reduce the nation’s unemployment rate.

She didn’t even look around- I watched her cruel but winsome feet click their way straight over to where Kamala Fresher-Greens and I were busily cowering under the sea-creature themed comforter.

“Get up, Worm.” She said. She kicked off our comforter. “Oh, Hiya, Mack. Who’s the little Blondie?

“Her?” I pointed.

“No, Amelia Earhart. The cutie-pie you’re gripping like a lost kitten.”

“Please don’t shoot us.” Said Kamala.

“Nice to meet you too, Honey,” said Belinda. “ Cower here often?”

Too bad the cops weren’t here. Oh, right, they were. They were just too busy hiding.

“This is Kamala – Kamala Fresher-Greens, photographer with Examiner. What’s with the heavy artillery, Belinda?’

“I find it helps situations where boys are involved.” With the gun’s butt propped on a shapely hip, she was viciously beautiful, still pretty cruel, and a bit arch. Then she lowered the gun. “Look Mack, I’m on our side… I was expecting someone else – and we need to talk in private..” she helpfully dismissed Kamala with the gun barrel. Kamala went off to the living room.

“Stingy is still alive.” I said.

“Goddamn, that slippery little Nazi.”

“Stingy Wheels is a Nazi? But you were married! “

“Put your clutch in, dad, I married him on orders. He finally crossed a line, and I had to stay clean. When O.S.S. found out that Imeldine was in America, I gave her a little info about you and a fresh Beretta, I hoped she’d shoot him. Sorry about your leg. Don’t give me that look. I can tell you this much about Stingy– it’s the cupcakes.

“It’s always the cupcakes.”

“No, dumkoff, the actual cupcakes. “

“Cupcakes?” The Medic’s morphine blast got me feeling like a baked snack myself, a little spongy with my head covered in frosting with a cherry on top. But Belinda’s contacts went much higher than I thought: The O.S.S. The War Department. She was a spook and a dominatrix, sort of a spookinatrix. Thank God she was our spookinatrix.

“Cupcakes filled with smuggled uranium! Stingy like a lot of pasty chefs was more than a Nazi sympathizer– he was a part of the German-food based spy network, the Kriegsbäckerei. But it’s more than baked goods - Strings of bratwurst, liverwursts, wursts of all worlds. Königsberger Klopse, Schwarzbrot, Spanferkel: Radio-transmitters. Microfilm. Counterfeit bonds, respectively. I tell you this: check your Hochzeitssuppe HocH – last time I got a bowl I found the blueprints for the P-51 concealed in a sliced pancake. “ It was hard to imagine Belinda eating soup. It would be cruel.

“But …cupcakes… are an American invention.” I protested.

“So we have been conditioned to believe,” she said. “But if Stingy’s alive, he’s more dangerous now. He got the uranium by bribing a security guard on a Candian ore shipment who was really, really hungry with illegal Lukschen Kugel. His radioactive cupcakes – I can’t go into it – are the cute little snack cakes of the Apocalypse” Belinda said, with cruel conviction. “

“I suppose we could track him – maybe a…a.. Geiger counter,” the morphine was working its way in my brain like an troupe of tu-tu’ed ballet dancers into a junkyard- I was beside the lake, beneath the trees, cupcakes dancing in the breeze. Things were happening- Noises, cries like ghosts, people moved like clown shadows in the background. I was higher than a rocket junkie. “I hear the 1942 model can locate the little pink people that live in your lost socks.”

Belinda started shaking me. “Mack, the Medic, he juiced you way up – and he’s gone! And if we don’t get Stingy Wheels and those cupcakes, America might not have a 1943.”

I was drifting off again. Get Stingy Wheels. Get Stingy Wheels.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Stop- You're Killing Me.

(new edit- 11/2011)

4 AM. I never see 4 AM from the sunny side, the farmer side, the knowing-where-you-are and not-finding-mysterious-bruises-on-the-inside-of your-knees-side where you where you get up instead of throw up - except on a case, and my country was calling and I had stupidly picked up the phone.  So now at 4 AM in an army cafeteria I looked at the food on my tray, which sat there, steaming with malice.

Fried Spam and powdered egg piles gazed back at me from the aluminum tray, reflecting my contempt for all things which exist at unholy hours of the day.  The potatoes had more eyes than a Hindoo vegetable god, if there was one, and the coffee was as thick and old and gummy as bunker oil.  There was a pile of hardtack biscuits and WWI canned milk on the table, great if you're a starving historian with dysentery.  I looked around to see who perpetrated this breakfast war crime and caught a glimpse of the cook: he glowered back like I just asked his sister "how much?"

Frankly, I'd dined better at at the galley in a Boise tannery.  But an army meal left plenty of stamps in the ration book, and it was a feast compared to the Depression, where for a month in 1933 I ate a wallpaper paste and onion skin soup that made Chaplin's shoe dinner look like a Waldorf salad.

I was poor, then. I once found a large hat and moved in. I couldn’t afford pants, so I wrapped a piece of string around my waist to have somewhere to put my thumbs.  

Later, I had a rough evening in New Orleans when I bet my cardboard belt - leased - on a nag named Wood Products Assembly and the rental boys came looking to collect. I drank coal dust coffee, took a job as a professional sidewalk smeller (something to do with cement curing) and once ate a pillow I'd carefully shaped like a delicious turkey.

  

I got started detectiving after a job in Chicago where some swells paid me to stare at party-goers who outstayed their welcome until they became uncomfortable and left.  It was only when I got The Case of the Drunken Rockefeller Spendthrift, by partly perpetrating the crime involved, that things turned around for me, if not the late young Mr. Rockefeller.

This morning I was grouchy in Alameda - a mood I suggest you don't do- when I boarded the U.S.S. Entername, a rust-streaked, smoke-belching WWI tin can, which never received a proper moniker due to a clerical error in 1918.  It had one working 4 inch gun, a wooden torpedo-shaped slug instead of a torpedo, and some goateed bohemian jailbirds crewed her like a french whore.  Squat and surly, her pumps showering the harbor, she was a stray dog peeing on California.  

The civilian corpse dangling from the radio antenna, the reason I was here, just added a thick pink frosting of charm on the cupcake of loathing.  I clambered up the gangway holding onto my hat against the wind, cursing the day I first heard the word "Slagophurm," whose exiting exhaultation by the stiff now twisting in the breeze had pulled me here to a cardboard breakfast and this south-end of the north-bound seahorse of the war.

Boarding, I was ready to give up my rusty .45 to the sailor running security but his bloodshot eyes, froggy air and a thick waft of Mary Jane told me he'd reefered-up good and the material world was no longer his concern.  I offered it to him anyway, butt first, and he giggled like a toddler who'd been told about the idea of underpants. On the jackstaff someone had raised a flag featuring a large, beige, hairy ass. The nasty old boat was cursed like a tax collector in a gypsy park.

A wirey, copper-colored man with a rusty beard and scattered silver hair wearing scrambled eggs on his hat and an 1890 suit came up to me with an outstretched hand and cheerful expression, the cracks spreading across his red, wind-whipped face, the irrepressible kind of joe that if the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse showed up he’d bring them hot chocolate, with marshmellows, and offer directions to the local elementary school.

"Captain Kane. Welcome aboard."

"Mack Brain. Thanks. Dead guy trouble, eh?"

"Yes, Sir. Normally we'd handle this internally, of course. But when he was found he was still alive, mumbling the curious word 'Slagophurm.'  A short investigation turned up your work on - BELAY THAT, HORTZ! WELD THAT SECTION TO THE PORT SIDE! YOUR OTHER PORT!! - excuse me, similar cases in the area. "

"You want the Slagophurm case stumping someone for twelve years, I'm your man."

"Quite. Well, anyway we're stumped, and we don't take civilian murder kindly in the Navy."

"This is in the actual Navy?" I said carelessly. Kane bristled like a wire-haired bristling terrier, and I felt like I'd kicked him. "Sorry, Kane, I mean, your ship's in active commission?"

"War, Sir, necessities of war."

After they lowered the corpse down from the radio antenna and I'd picked around a bit, rifling through his pockets for clues, I pocketed a silver dollar that was going to waste, but I was filled with ennui, suddenly, a gooey, heavy gray flood like a cloudburst of lukewarm poi. This was the longest string of unsolved murders in San Francisco since the 19 oughts, when Malmsey Warper the All-Natural Radium Mineral Water King erased his estranged wife's entire extended family, one a fiscal quarter with his own product, which went on for years because A) they were Mormons and there were quite a few, and B) no one else realized at the time radioactive mineral water was going to kill you.

I was looking right at the stiff's address book, all so much garbage to me in this tidal wave of indifference. So his name was Pete Kneemaster. So he worked at somewhere in South San Francisco call Biffleson's Drug Importers. So he was covered in a mysterious red-brown dust. So he had a ledger page in his right pocket which suggested 3 or 4 hundred thousand dollars was being concealed at Biffleson's. So he had a pocket camera with undeveloped film in his right hand, and had arranged his body to spell something on the deck below with his own blood draining out. I couldn't be bothered to look down.

I was sedate as as settee. I was as grey as a Poupon. I was as litost as lemur dying of consumption. I had less motivation than a sauna rock with a considerable trust fund. At that moment, if Rita Hayworth stood lecherously two feet away from me wearing nothing but pink silk, a handful of cash and a disreputable hotel key, I would have made the noise of ultimate ennervation: I-unnunhnah.

"What is it, Brain?" asked Kane.

"I-unnunhnah." I said.

Somehow, as captain of the 3rd worst ship in the Navy as he was (falling short of the U.S.S Tainted Meat Scow and the U.S.S. Sinky Whatshisface) he understood.

"Drink?" And offered a flask.

I have no idea why Capt. Kane was drinking Maine's Best Discount Watermelon-Mint Schnapps but I spit out alcohol fecklessly onto the deck and all over the dead guy, and the Captain's suit, and the pink horror dribbled onto my last clean white shirt, and I was about three seconds from leaping over the side to an ignoble death in the lead-rich mud of the East Bay when the ship's air raid siren sounded and everyone stared running around waving their arms like a girly bunch of extras from Golddiggers of 1933, except with 50 caliber machine guns, and from out of a gray misty grayness a sputtering little J-3 Piper monoplane bore down on us firing some pea shooter of death directly at Kane and me, and we dove for cover behind a mounted raft while every working ship's gun lit up in the vague direction of Berkeley, precisely where the plane wasn't, leading later to a heartfelt personal apology from Admiral Nimitz to the parents of two fifths of the North Oakland middle school water polo team.

In the meantime, there was nothing so life-affirming as someone suddenly trying to murder you, which means you are at least important enough to be in someone's way enough to have you killed. An enemy meant that you were real. I was touched, and felt like crying, so instead I emptied the clip from my .45, except pointed West where plane was actually heading before the mists soaked it up like a good-quality kitchen sponge.

"Did anyone get the number on that plane?" I asked, yelling through the deafness and the yellow smoke and the smell of cordite.

Nopes and nuhn-uhs echoed round the deck. 

A pomegranate-headed sailor spoke up: "Had a name on the side though: Slago Industries."  His hand pointed in the air.

"Slago Industries. Son of a randy milkman!  I stood there, limp-hatted, a penny postcard of a thunderstruck chump. Perhaps in the last decade I could have looked through the phone book to the entry just above Slagophurm. And then I looked down.

On the deck right below Pete the stiff was the word he'd wriggled out in blood in his last moments, written in letters 4 feet across by swinging his body around and watching where his last life-juice splatted, a giant bloody pen-corpse scribbling out a final shopping list for justice.

S L A G O

About then a Dusenberg so long it seemed to arrive about the same time it left pulled up to the dock area. Out floated a svelte and curvy silhouette that would have got my attention even without the semphore flags she was waving to get my attention: Lovey Wickersham.  She wore a red pin-striped white dress like the Circus had come to new Orleans, with a fox-fur wrap and black patent leather shoes so high heeled the lines on the back of her stockings threatened to rub together and catch on fire.  She was a side of bacon on a bread line, a cherry tart on a pile of cash, a fresh tall tomato so soft and slim and curvy and proud, moving like a taffy machine and strutting like a model.

"Mack! Darling! I..." she yoo-hooed, cooingly.

"Lovey! I know what Slago...

Suddenly I espied - because I do the Times crossword - a sniper on the roof on one side, and on the other ruffian gang of lugubrious Longshoremen sneaking towards her, waving bats, and on a third, a pack of fierce Weimaraners starting their curious attack.

"Get in the Car!!" I shouted.

She turned, but it was too late for that.  The Weimaraners found their ground between her and the Dusenberg, threatening bodily injury by becoming visciously aloof.  The sniper squeezed off a round, tearing one of the semphore flags beyond cost-effective repair.  Then the Piper came back out of the fog, flying recklessly low, straight at her.  The longshoremen began hurling suggestive remarks.

"The water, jump in the water!" I yelled.

"No!" piped up an alarmed sailor, "Sharks!" he said, pointing out the dorsal fin.

"Shit!" she said.

Then she adopted a position like she was about to jive dance her way out of trouble – reminded me of a still photo of Cab Calloway.  The dogs barked, or perhaps, being Weimaraners, declaimed.

It may not have been in the cards for the U.S.S. Entername to turn the tide against the Japanese, or torpedo an aircraft carrier, or not accidently torpedo itself, which is why it was here being repaired, or even make it out of San Francisco Bay the following week without sinking from a faulty main shaft bearing, but she had one good fight in her, the Battle of Alameda Naval Station.  And she gave it all she had.

When it was over, the sniper's body lay moistly on the roof, and the sidewalk, and floating in the bay. The evil longshoremen writhed in a pile underneath a wooden torpedo rolled down the dock by the reefer-loving sailor. Out of ammunition after the entire destroyer's gunfire had been directed at the sniper, a quick-thinking Ship's cook had dumped the corpse of Peter Kneemaster and a fifty-five gallon barrel of tartar sauce (an object which brought up more unpleasant eating in the Depression) into the water to distract the sharks, which was going to make for an interesting coroner's report. The twisted wreckage of the Piper stuck 40 feet off the ground on the telephone pole, where, gunless and frantic, I had to taunt the pilot using the Ship's bullhorn into distraction at a key moment by making loud aspersions about his sister, which as it turned out later, happened to be true.

And Lovey, Lovey was alive, having coaxed the dangerously disengaged Weimaraners into the back of the Dusie with a egg salad sandwich.  She waved to the crew and the only crew's cheer in the miserable 24 year career of the U.S.S. Entername echoed into the fog.

"So what now?" Lovey asked later, as we headed back over the Bay Bridge.

"Slago Industries....And Where is it?" This last I addressed to our passenger, the now dazed Slago industries Piper pilot.

In the back of the car the Weimaraners were relentlessly irritating the injured pilot by refusing to be petted, turning up their noses at his hand moves.  It was well that Lovey Wickersham was an amateur dog trainer.  Not only had the Weimaraners entirely not killed her, although it was not clear how they were supposed to do that in the first place, but they were at her service, waiting for instructions.  And the pilot in back, his blond moustache askew as his lazy left eye, was a friendly soul, in spite of trying to kill us, and wanted to everyone to like him.  Especially dogs.

Cindy the Weimaraner was gazing out the window, moving slightly away from the pilot, Milton. Hard to miss the pilot after the crash, he still wore goggles and a silk scarf in the cabin cruiser.  As he tried to pet Cindy the dog she gave him a look that would have frozen hot tea. The other 5 dogs were no better. No wagging.  Only puppyish pomposity.

Lovey drove the Dusie over the bridge and into the city, the big engine humming like Vienna Boys Choir waiting for something to do, Milton was practically begging the dogs for attention: "Cindy-windy! Who's the doggie-woggie? Cindy? Cindy. Cindy!" A soft, grey, sleek silence. " "Goddamit, Dog!"

I leaned over the seat. "Where's Slago Industries, Milton?"

But Milton was obsessed now. The canine affront was intolerable.

"Cindy, come here!" Nothing. Milton starting rocking back and forth in sheer frustration, slamming his fist on the ceiling.

"Now now, Mr. Killer, " said Lovey, "Don't scratch the car."

"Slago Industries, Milton..."

"Alright, alright, just call the dogs on!" said the still-bleeding pilot.

"Nookies!" said Lovey, brightly, and the dogs began to lick Milton like a fresh pork chop.  

We'd dropped Milton off at what I liked to call 1 Flatfoot Plaza - the Dusenberg and Lovey and the cute but remote dogs worked their magic - Lovey was never loveylier; I hadn't so many helpful cops since the Myckaby Boys tried to burn down Bernie’s, San Francisco's biggest donut shop, as revenge for putting away Maw Myckaby, the notorious bakery arsonist, who burned down a baker's dozen of bakeries and two cake shops until she was finally caught trying to crush an elephant ear stand with a bulldozer; we never found out exactly why. Two-timing baker love, I’d guessed, but the cops just shot her.  Milton had spilled where Slago industries was, although I suppose we could have just looked it up in the phonebook. Lovey and I headed to Richmond, a little industrial town on the East Bay so rough I'd once seen fifteen bodies piled up around a malfunctioning bubble gum machine, and so depressing they had a special “Ego Control” spa and sent Hollywood starlets there sometimes to recover their senses by gazing for hours at painted bricks. We followed Milton's directions to an huge old brick warehouse with a tiny white sign that said: Slago Industries.

It was getting late in the day. The place was quiet as a dead insurance salesman, a non-sound I'd heard at least thirty times in my line of work. Gloom descended gloomily on the gloomy town; refineries, warehouses, dirt streets - it made Crumples the bartender look like Shirley Temple.

"There's a light on," said Lovey, pointing to a top window.

I didn't have the patience for patience just now. I pulled out the .45 and fired a round, the gun's report huge in the evening. It would have made more of an impact if some gun wasn’t already going off somewhere in town every two or three minutes, but a somewhat withered, elderly face peered out of the upmost window, with a expression sour enough to pickle an opera company.

"You. Open..." Lovey put a fragrant, soft hand on my shoulder and shut me up.

"We're terribly sorry sir," she said sweetly, "it was a silly place to clean a gun. May we come in?"

To my amazement, the old coot came down and opened the door.

He looked me over like I was a Goya etching of Napoleonic war crimes. "Come in. I am Dr. Richard Tarde, but some people call me 'Rich.' I'm pleased, in a sense, that you're still alive." He creaked like the step on the stairs you try to avoid to not wake your parents. I kept my rusty .45 on him.

"You won't need that," He said, waving his hand dismissively.

"I do if I need to shoot you," I said. "Like if you don't tell me what this is," and handed him the ancient brown bottle of Slagophurm found originally in the pharmacy in the Sunset district," and why innocent people keep using it for their last words."

"Innocent! Haw Haw!" He said, laughing like some people cough up bits of lung.

"What is it?!"

"That is not uncomplicated." said Dr. Tarde. “Please come with me to our reception area.”

He was thinner than the shadow of a thin man viewed edge on, with a grayish, blotchy skin that hung like a wet shirt on a bird cage, at least, that’s what I extrapolated from my view of his neck as we ascended the stairs.

We came out into a room that looked like Henry Ford’s bachelor lounge, for bachelors that had fought in the Boer War. Oil portraits of generals, doctors – and famous economists – hung on the wall. Tarde indicated that we should sit down, offered us a Port that tasted like leather and cherries and formaldehyde.

"Tell me, Dr. Brain, do you like money?"

"It's easier than beating people up for stuff."

"What if, hypothetically, 25% of everyone in the world were to beg to give you a dollar?" Dr. Tarde looked at me like a diminutive giraffe sizing up an acacia tree.

"A measly dollar to save their lives."

"Don't you think the term measly is unnecessarily perjorative?" I said. It had been a long day, and I remembered when a dollar could rent you a mansion in Detroit for a month, complete with passively aggressive butler.

"People beg for what Slagophurm promises."

"For example, me, now," I waved my gun a little. "What the Dickens is it? Why are so many people dead? Why am I here now, fuming and hungry, about to shoot you for stringing this out so long?"

"It's not a thing. It's a business plan." Dr. Tarde adjusted his bifocals so far down his nose they could catch deciduous nose hairs. The room was tall and dark, books and specimen jars displayed everywhere. A lone bulb lit his craggy face, like a scene from the Civil War Veterans Association's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona.

"Looking at that bottle, Lovey, a gooey brown business plan," I said.

She wrinkled her nose.

Years of investigations had honed my senses. I felt a lecture coming on. Feeling along my .45, I released the safety.

"Who started Coca Cola, Dr. Brain?" Tarde asked.

"Pharmacist. Georgia, in bad business straits, I think."

"And Pepsi?"

"Same, right?"

"And Dr. Pepper?"

"Amazing how much cocaine they used to put in soda pop," I said.

"You may look like a giant lemur in worsted wool, Brain, but you've got a brain, Brain. Slagophurm. It is a business system, Brain. A 100 year plan. What we do is simple. We make problems, and we cure them. Once it was malaria and quinine – our mosquito breeding experiments were pioneering. Our monopoly our quinine- and gin- piled up cash like the dead in Calcutta. Later, we were in opium shipping. Its benefits are obvious. 50 years ago, it was cocaine in the soda water, marketed as a cure for opium addiction. Everyone bought. Then the cocaine was banned. We thought we’d be ruined. And then we discovered marketing for the masses. Everywhere, the Gibson girls, the logos, beaten into the masses’ tiny brains by repetition and the corruption of desperate artists. It was successful, but nothing like the opium profits.

“We owned the soda industry. So we simply worked with the mob to get alcohol banned."

I attribute the fact I didn't shoot him right then to the intervention of Jesus.

"And in fifty years, we plan to make Americans remarkably fat - with colas of course, as well as something we call a 'suburb,' and our designs for “Speedy Food” restaurants with names like “Biggie MacCheesey’s” and “Taco Clarion” and “Connecticut Fried Chicken” and open a string of diet books, drugs, expensive contract health clubs. Our studies indicate the American buttocks may expand to twice their present size, or even larger if Operation Ubiquitous Cheeseburger goes into efficient operation. When that happens, we supply all the needs of their fresh misery.”

"And now. Why kill us now? Why do people die now?"

"Compared to the market involved, World War II is barnyard fisticuffs, donkeys beating on pigs with sticks. A few lives of people who were interested but were not perspicacious enough to come on board is nothing. Of course, the plan for today was long ago in place- I cannot tell you the details, but it rhymes with 'bigarettes'. You can join us and profit beyond your dreams, or you can expose us and die. You did go to Medical School? "

"If by that you mean did I lie drunk on a Dominican beach near a copy of Grey's Anatomy for several months, then yes."

"Come on board Brain, we could use a little medical muscle; I find Doctors with suspicions about tobacco's many health benefits need regular persuasion. Consider it, Dr. Brain, consider a future of profits, expensive cars, fine dining and walks on the beach. " The old goat was animated like he'd just discovered the amphetamine bush. He may have been evil, but he was genuine. He really wanted me in on his little club.

"Slagophurm. Hmm."So how do I get in on this racket?"

"Mack!" said Lovey, astonished.

“Excellent!,” he said, smacking his hands together. “We’ll start you tomorrow, there’s a young fellow named C. Everett Koop I need you to ‘visit.’” Then a shadow crossed that already shadowy face. ”But about what about your young lady? Isn’t she rich already? How can we trust her?”

“Oh I can trust her.“ I kept my eyes on him as he rummaged around for some papers near an oak file cabinet next to the grand staircase. Then he turned.

“Dr. Brain, I notice you haven’t lowered your gun.”

“Well, Dr. Tarde, actually I don’t want your filthy money. Well, actually I do want your filthy money. But Mack Brain isn’t for sale. Not that he isn’t for rent. But not for anything immoral. Well, that’s not really true. Actually, that’s kind of why people pay me. But I never do anything really, really wrong, particularly on a genocidal scale, just for money even in large amounts, even if I will certainly compromise my passing general ethical principles for a good payday if no one gets hurt, or rather, if no one who doesn’t deserve it, or who has a good attorney, gets hurt too seriously in such a way that I would feel so bad about it I wouldn’t enjoy all the new money I’d gotten. And I would never strike a lady who wasn’t trying to kill me at the time. Gee, I just wish everyone could be nice to each other. Also, I love freedom.”

“Then, Dr. Brain, we are at something of an impasse,” he said with astonishing composure considering he just pulled out a silver derringer and grabbed Lovey by the arm while bringing the gun to her head. I made the mistake of hesitating to shoot him, clouded as I was by the unfamiliar problem of considering my moral universe.

And here Lovey made an amazing maneuver. I feel that I should remind you that Lovey had the kind of cleavage that would make Gable drop Olivia De Havilland on the stairs. She pulled what can only be described as a Perils of Pauline move, clasping her hands together, gasping, and looking away while turning deftly to perfectly present the recessing folds of delight to Dr. Tarde, who despite being old enough to remember oogling Mary Lincoln, was not dead, and looked down long enough for Lovey to kick him in the back of the head with those platform heels of hers, knocking off his glasses and unbalancing him forward, until he tumbled down the stairs, with an “Oof!” and an “Ow!” indicating each landing on the four stories.

We ran down after him, my gun drawn and Lovey picking up the silver derringer, until we found Tarde crumpled up on the first floor like yesterday’s Arts section in the Chronicle.

“Brain…save me…Brain…I am dying…Slagophurm must go on…” He was begging, wheezing like a steam tractor, “…nothing personal, but would you…”

“Yes?”

“Get…a …better doctor?” And he died.

“Well, he’s pretty dead, I guess. Know what time it is?” I pronounced.

“No. This won’t stop these people, you know. Tarde is a one old fish in a division of Coelacanths. Slagophurm is big, Mack, and Slaggo Industries is only a little piece.. Actually, I think I have 400 shares.”

“Slagophurm is bigger than any of us. But we do whatever the hell we can wherever the hell we are. That’s how we stop them, all the crooks, all the bullies, all the goons and princes that see the human race as a cattle auction. But hey, that was a nice move, Toots!” I said.

”Remember it,” She warned.

Rebar for Tootsie Rolls: Party of Two For Murder and Drinks Available In the Bar if You Care to Wait

Sure, I'd realized last night under a yalmuka made of the pineapple left over from a huge mai tai poured on my head as Aethelgifu stormed out of the Top of the Mark to grab the last plane to Tampa with her half of Pasteley Marstonbury's ill-gotten war profits, it had to be the uranium-powder for-baking-soda-scam I'd suspected when Pastley's ex Jenny'd baked a thirteen-legged dungeoness into my crabcakes, a big fat detail left over from the Billy Mars to the Moon case - the kind of loose end that not only breaks your heart and takes your one shot at the big time and hides it in the sock drawer, but tends to get wrapped around your throat at about 2am in the alley behind John's Grill by a couple jute-suited greaseballs, both supposedly named Ramon and working for the Treasury Department, and leaves you to a comfy night in a cozy brick gutter with Perverted Granddad bottles for pillows and about 40 degrees of drizzily fog and Moldy the Hobo's vomit for blankets, which is where I was now, my head throbbing like a grizzly waking from hibernation to find himself sewn rudely into a burlap bag; but the revelation really didn't help my physical appearance before two sets of legs, one in all-too familiar thick black cop shoes, and the other full stack of sexy in slick red platforms leading up to a towering pale girl in a brown mink coat, her vivacious body making Myrna Loy look like Jimmy Stewart, the sweetest scoop of ice cream since at the age of seven I stole a vendor's cart on State street in Chicago and tried to hide from the cops in the bucket of cherry vanilla.

"That's him, Officer," said the brunette in a low, deliberate voice, "that's the private detective who took my case and....

"Graarrahaaharrggh!" I said, beating off what turned out to be invisible flies.

"...and my money to find my missing husband and then he just up and disappeared and I haven't heard a word in three weeks. Make him give it back!"

"Well, Mister?" said the cop with the huge moustache - a thick, soupy sort of chowderhead I didn't recognize.

I tried to say hello again to Mrs. Wickersham and tell them that after the blondie dumped me last night I was assaulted by foreign agents, and while the military had covered up the whole rigamarole, I just saved the Bay Area from the Nazis a week ago by foiling an elaborate uranium powder and Hollywood murder plot which had come to fruition when the Santa Angeles sank in the Bay, along with two full batallions of crack stormtroopers. But it came out: "Mahmoudahmadinejad! Mahmoudahmadinejad!"

The cop had developed a thesis: I was raving lunatic. And it looked like the committee was about to award his degree.

He cuffed me like a Chaplin outake. "Yer' coming downtown, Mack."

Lovey Chickie-Poo Wickersham - her first name escaped me - piped up. "Is that necessary officer? I just want to find my husband." She looked on my pathetic state (at the moment, trying to brush someone's else's dried vomit off my lapel with an empty whiskey bottle) with much the reserve and compassion Catherine the Great might have had for a dying ferret she'd just stepped on.

"Dr. Brain," she said, recalling a profession of mine I'd even forgotten, "Were you able to discover anything?"

Those federal Ramons had worked me over something fierce on top of the hangover, and the Bear in my brain started gnawing on the inside of my skull, leaving, I was sure, fang marks. I rubbed one of the decorative assortment of yellow, black and purple bruises on my face: my cheek would make a good baseball for Hell's AAA team. Somehow, my uvula ached.

But I was a pro, heat-hardened and tough as rhino jerky. I'd given depositions in worse shape before, once on a LA divorce case when my liver had to be removed temporarily to drain and bandage it properly - and my client not only won the house but got her husband sent to the chair.

"Mrs. Wickersham.." I gathered my remaining corpuscle to action, "I'm sorry..delays..Nazi batallions... Blonds with icicles for hearts..never mind. I have one lead.."

"Yes?" She looked expectantly, cool, intelligent eyes almost amber in color. I stood with her finally, eye to eye - tall girl, dressed like a gin-joint canary but with a Nob Hill address on her bank statement.

"Does the....does the name Slagophurm mean anything to you?" I looked close to get the expression.

"Slagophurm?" She blanched, which was impressive because she was a pale as a Copenhagen ice sculpture contest already and had to turn a little blue to register emotion.

"Is it - I need to know - is Slagophurm the dental adhesive?"

"No."

"Ma'am, you need me?" said the cop.

"Not anymore. Thank you, officer. I'll be fine, really." And he shrugged off, stopping for a sec to club a zoot-suiter on the back of the skull.

Slagophurm. It was an old mystery I'd only connected to a dusty aisle in a Sunset pharmacy when the doc dug out an old brown bottle from the turn of the century labeled "Slagophurm."
Trouble was, about once a year since 1932 some joker's turned up in my office with a cagey reference to "Slagophurm" right before they disappear faster than free steak in a Hooverville, until I get the phone call from a glum life insurance adjustor trying to confirm the bizzare circumstances of their death, like a bicycle crash inside a freight elevator or an asthmatic's last encounter with a pie full of angry bees.

"We've got to get you cleaned up, Dr. Brain. Come along. "

Lovey Chickie-Poo - what was her first name? - with what I had to call a fistful of courage, called us a Cab and took me back to her place at the St. Francis.

"It's my husband," she explained to the doorman, "bumped by a cable car into a Chop Suey dumpster." The doorman replied with an inscrutable but distinct expression for which he was bribed handsomely.

She signalled a bellhop and handtrucked this wreck of myself to room 3434. They dumped me unceremoniously into the bathtub, and soon I was dead to the waking world.

I woke up two days later in a soft bed in the same, spacious room. The grizzly in my head was more like a gerbil now.

Lovey Chickie-Poo walked in, wearing a long pink silk house robe with shoulder pads, made up and radiant, pushing the room service cart.

"You look very nearly human again. " she said brightly. "Orange juice, oatmeal and coffee, Dr. Brain?"

"And what is your..." I belayed the question. "How can I thank you, Mrs. Wickersham? "

She sat herself brazenly on the bed. "Shush. Eat your breakfast." And she feed me a spoonful of oatmeal before I could say anything, leaning toward me for optimal viewing.

This was too good to be true and too true not to be good.

Lovey Chickie-Poo needed something. Something about Slagophurm. It was good to be needed.

Lovey nodded her lovely, craning neck toward the closet. "I've sent for some of your shirts and a new suit - I hope you don't mind."

Speaking as a doctor, let me just say a word about the suprasternal notch, the little depression at the base of the neck above the breastbone. I was examining that notch now, like a magical dell in the rolling pink foothills of Lovey Chickie-Poo. It was a feeling like finding a seam of ore and wanting to dig for gold, except the ore is love and the seam plays out at the heart. And among all the suprasternal notches in the world, her notch was the greatest goddamn notch I'd ever bored my leer into, the nattiest notch, the wicked notch of the West.

"No, I don't mind at all. " Notched out like this, I wouldn't have minded if she just told me she'd sold me to a rendering plant.

"Um, Mrs. Wickersham.."

"Silly..don't be so formal."

Wait - had something happened? Deep in a reverie of notch and mystery and Slagophurm came suddenly this most awkward social error - had I slept with her and somehow forgotten, or was this a fresh assault on the Mack Brain fortress of love?

I was just working up a good quizzical expression when the closet door appeared to explode, sending splinters through the room, and standing in the pile was a three hundred pound side of longhorn in a suit who looked like he'd just found out his wife was in bed with another man. Which she was, although it was not a moment for cogent reason and calming tones to explain that the man in question was uncertain as to his own status.

"Brain!" Was all he said before I was picked up like a glass vase and thrown at the wall with a huge crash that shook the plasterwork from the ceiling, leaving a surprised detective-shaped hole in the wainscotting.

"Solenoid!"I said. "Don't..." was all I got out before I found myself watching the curious arc my own body was tracing as I crashed through an art deco lion lamp, into the bathroom, and hit the clawfoot tub so hard it overturned with a sudden spray of hot water as the pipes tore from the tiles.

It was Stanhope "Solenoid" Wickersham, who I had in fact been trying to not find for some time now. For all the damage I actually wasn't in bad shape, and was trying to tear a lead pipe from the remains of the plumbing when Solenoid came forward with fist like a car battery and smashed me into the mirror. It was like getting hit with both the battery and the Dusenberg it was in, and I saw more stars that moment than Mann's Chinese Theater on Astronomy night.

But I wasn't done. I grabbed a rubber duck and shoved it in his mouth before clapping his ears with both hands as loud as possible, then kneed him in the jaw, then tore off the shower curtain and wrapped him up like Roosevelt vs. Hoover and he dropped to the floor wriggling about like a tube worm, which is when room service arrived with a nutritious breakfast and an offer from a certain Hortense, who I gathered while catching my breath was Venezuelan, for a relaxing massage.

But the while Hortense stood there agape and the room service boys agapely stood there,

I don't know if you've ever carved your way of being wrapped in a shower curtain with a six-inch bowie knife, but it was an impressive sight now as Solenoid sliced it open rapidly, like a vengeance-minded chicken enchilada, even as I was busily kicking him in the head in the broken plumbing mist, and when a Hotel Manager with an extremely tiny moustache worked his way past the masseuse, the room service boys, Lovey whose first name I still could not remember, and my panting, bloody self to yell at the emerging Chrysalis of Solenoid, who was completely unlike a butterfly in any noticeable fashion and was raising his knife menacingly as the police almost arrived (preventing from entering by the growing crowd) including my latest nemesis from the blue screws, Dennis "Short Pants" Wortlewingly, the kind of enormous, flatulent corrupt flatfoot that insisted on a hand job to fix a parking ticket and a 40 point piece of the action if it was murder for hire. Short Pants drew his .38 and aimed it strangely at the Hotel Manager and shot him, slightly, but the bullet went through him to it's intended target, Solenoid, straight in the right shoulder, and the knife dropped.

"Hold it!" said Short Pants.

"Oww!" said the manager.

"Aiee!" screamed Hortense.

"I'm not completely sure but I don't think I slept with your wife," I said to Solenoid.

"Mack!" said Lovey. "Solenoid!"

"French Toast?" said the more slack-jawed of the boys.

"Here!" said Lovey.

"Not about Cloie, it was...Slag...," started Solenoid.

"Oh no. Cloie? really?" I said.

"Hmmph," said Lovey-Cloie, crossing her arms.

"Slagophurm..." and Solenid passed out, his energy discharged.


I had to admit later that despite Solenoid instigating the damage to the St. Francis, it seemed crass to hand him the bill while he was still in the hospital in a coma by tucking it neatly in less bloody corner of his shoulder bandage. Still, he laid there, like that. The jokers wrapped up in whatever Slagophurm was rarely pulled through.

But why did Lt. Short Pants shoot him exactly? He was a threat in that crowded hotel room, but nothing a fully-riled Mack Brain, twelve hotel employees and a peeved estranged wife couldn't handle. Was he being paid to slam shut Solenoid's jabber-hole? In San Francisco, where you could do your dry-cleaning or buy a supervisor off in about an hour, Short Pants set a standard for corruption that made the Tea-Pot Dome Scandal look like a XMAS cookies and a cup of Earl Grey, and with 1942 almost halfway gone, the War Machine wasn't too fussy about what you call your ethics.

I never liked Short Pants. He always gave the impression of having just been somewhere much better than this. He wore a huge black moustache and his unibrow was slightly above his hairline. He had a thin, wide mouth and cruel eyelashes. He gave off a smell like diesel, gym socks, and lilac water, some kind of horrible cologne he picked up off a dead merchant marine officer he shot downtown for crossing a street against the signal while having sex with Short Pants' favorite whore, Belinda. He was standing there now, hovering over Solenoid in the hospital like a bony, East Lansing-bred vulture over a dying water buffalo, giving me the eye, which of course was just the one after what he always claimed was a sword fighting accident, but I knew was the result of the business end of a stilleto heel in a 5 cent peep joint window when he stiffed the girl in question, and not even in the interesting way. Not that he wasn't sometimes useful: Short Pants took more bribes than Tammany Hall between 1878 and 1934. Yet his pants were well-tailored.

"So who messed up Solenoid?" He said, his voice both gruff and squeeky.

"You did." I said.

"I mean who got him all steamed up to kill you? Not that rubbing out Mack Brain would cheese me off." He smiled in a menacing grimace, like a rabid badger with dentures.

"And how's you mother? Did she get the flowers I sent?" I said.

"Can It, Brain. Go back to your tarp."

"Mrs. Wickersham wants me here when he wakes up. If. And besides I'm a doctor. "

"Hmmph."

That was the second "hmmph" in two days. I may be the least qualified Doctor since the genius that tried curing Lincoln's brain shot with a good bleeding, but I didn't like getting hmmphed. I decided to carefully nurture an inward, personal resentment.

Then Mrs. Wickersham came in, and the dingy beige room lit up like a Christmas tree decorated with small incendiary devices. She was wearing a dress cut so tight the ruffles failed to ruffle, and so low I didn't notice the gun she was shooting.

BANG. She missed him.

Short Pants at this point peed his pants.

"You shot my husband, you filthy whoreson!" A quaint insult in a time of obvious stress.
She started to cry, and I walked up straight to her and held her, and she started to lower the gun, little Italian black .25 auto with a rhinestone inlay on the grip, the kind of girl gun that gets girls in girl prison faster than cheatin' in the bus station.

"Give me that, Baby, I'll shoot him for you."

I grabbed it gently and shot his hat off, breaking the window. He tried moving. I shot between his legs.

"This is fun." I said. "Who paid you to kill Solenoid, Short Pants?"

The gun's noise was pretty small. The walls were thick.

"Who paid you?," and to Cloie, "how much ammo in this gun?"

"Oh, about 7, but here's another clip, dear, " and she kissed me.

"Thanks, Sweetie, but you're messing up my aim," I said as I fired another shot, which richocheted and hit a flower vase behind him.

The courage was out of Short Pants, and his normally Jaundiced pallor was lacking even the yellow, which appeared to be draining out of his skin and down his pant legs.

"Alright! Alright! Look, here, here's the money..." and he pulled a cool two grand out of his pockets in one thousand dollar bills. I hadn't seen those since The Case of the Ten Thousand Dollar Laundry.

"I don't want the money," I said, "although I will be spending it. Who paid you?"

He fiddled with his pockets again.

"Careful, flatfoot."

"Look, here's the black book...there's this business that's involved with something called Slagophurm.."

Suddenly, Solenoid bolted up, saw Short Pants, and before I could even shoot he leapt up, grabbed him like a linebacker and shoved him and himself through the window, falling three stories to Grant street, where as Cloie Wickersham buried herself in my arm we heard the distinct sound of four hundred and fifty pounds of human chops crash into a Model A roof, a sound I recognized from at least two other cases this year alone.

"Goddamit." I said.