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.
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