Excerpt #7: ‘The Last Case’

“Should I answer it, Lourdes?” I asked the bartender.

“Why ask me?” Lourdes said. “I’m not your minister, your mother or your wife. You want to answer it, knock yourself out. Do it before you actually do knock yourself out.”

“You may not be my minister but you’re the closest thing I’ve got,” I said. “Pray with me?” She gave me the stink eye so I went ahead and answered the phone. “Taco Bell,” I said. “Will this be eat-in or carry-out?”

“Taco, it’s Cat,” the phone said to me. Cat was bordering on breathless. “I need you right away. I know where the object is and I have an idea how to get it. Can you come to the gym and talk?”

“I can come to the gym,” I slurred, “but I can barely talk. Why don’t you come down to Chapel and watch me fall off this barstool. You’d better hurry, though. It could happen any minute now.”

“You’re drunk!” Cat said.

“Bingo!” I replied. “A direct hit! Pick out a kewpie doll for yourself and take one for the little woman.”

“What?”

“I’m drunk, sweetie, and I’m not going anywhere. I think that just going outside in this condition would constitute a misdemeanor, and driving would most certainly be a capital offense.”

Cover design for 'The Last Case'

 

Excerpt #6: ‘The Last Case’

I drove to the newspaper office around 7 o’clock and met Lucy in the lobby. She was sitting on a sofa placed there for visitors, reading text messages on her phone and holding a thick file folder full of papers. She was wearing a short brown corduroy skirt the color of a Hershey Bar, a tan turtleneck sweater with the sleeves pushed up on her arms and a pair of dark brown shoes with a three-inch heel that made her taller, but still short. Her long black hair was parted in the middle and swirled perfectly around her head and shoulders, and she was once again wearing a whole bunch of necklaces of varying lengths.

I was dressed in casual gray slacks, a bright red t-shirt with a white Aerosmith logo on the front and my badly worn leather bomber jacket. The gray slacks had been hiding in the back of my closet for months, and I liberated them so Lucy wouldn’t think I was living on the street. As for the shirt and jacket—well, I’ll only go so far as a slave to fashion.

We went for Chinese this time and Lucy told me about her geek friend Simpkins, who thought she was Chinese and not Korean. “You know us slants,” she said, mockingly referring to her Asian eyes. “We all look alike.”

“You look perfect to me,” I said. “Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Outer Mongolian, who cares. You could be from Jupiter as far as I’m concerned.”

“Well, thanks for saying Jupiter and not Uranus,” Lucy said.

“The thought did cross my mind,” I confessed. “I love yours.”

“My anus?”

“Your rings.”

“That’s Saturn.”

“Them, too.”

Excerpt #5: ‘The Last Case’

One Tuesday afternoon, a woman named Wanda Watkins hired me to kill her husband.

She said she had seen a flyer with my name and number posted on the bulletin board at her book club. That was puzzling, because I never made a flyer of any kind and I had no idea where Wanda Watkins went to read books. It seemed that someone was going around town marketing my services for me and I didn’t know who it was. I knew I wasn’t paying anyone to do that, so this was another mystery I needed to solve. I filed it away for future reference and turned my attention to the case.

Now I’m not entirely sure what Wanda believed private detectives do, but she somehow got the idea that spousal assassination was in our job descriptions. Maybe she watched a lot of late-night TV movies, I don’t know. Not only was she wrong about my portfolio of services, she was way off on my price, assuming that I did kill people for money, which I don’t. She only offered me $500.

“I want it to look like a robbery,” Wanda said. (That’s the oldest trick in the book.) “I’ll leave the back door unlocked. You come in before 6, mess the place up a bit, take some jewelry out of the master bedroom—I’ll leave it out for you—and steal the money Stan hides inside a pair of argyle socks in his chest of drawers. There should be a couple of hundred in there. When he gets home, I don’t care how you kill him as long as you’re sure he’s dead before you leave. Shoot him, stab him, hang him from the shower rod, for all I care. What weapon do you guys normally use?”

I had to look away to keep myself from laughing out loud.

Excerpt #4: ‘The Last Case’

I went to the newspaper office to collect some information and was referred to the City Hall reporter, a very attractive Asian-American woman named Lucy Lee. Lucy was 24 years old, about five-foot-two in good shoes and appropriately proportioned in a small person kind of way. She had dark eyes, flawless Asian skin the color of an early summer tan, a pouty lower lip and slightly imperfect teeth that were white enough and bright enough but weren’t all perfectly straight. The lips and teeth combined with her smooth tan cheekbones to give her a very happy, playful and seductive smile.

The day I met her she had come to the office early to work on a story for the Sunday edition. She was dressed casually in a pair of low-rise distressed blue jeans; a slightly pink scoop neck t-shirt that exposed two inches of her midriff; and a long, camel and brown shirt-jacket, unbuttoned, with sleeves that were pulled up and held in place by straps that were sewed on as part of the shirt and buttoned at the elbow. I think it had epaulets, too. Or maybe not. The shirt wasn’t the focus of my attention.

Her jet black hair was pulled up high in a long ponytail that made her look like another Lucy, the actress Lucy Liu. She wore long dangling earrings with a turquoise butterfly at the top and a tiny gold ball at the bottom, a locket on a short gold chain around her neck and three or four longer chains of varying lengths…. She wore several bracelets on her left wrist and a garnet-studded ring on the middle finger of her left hand which told me she wasn’t married. When I sat down at her desk and she leaned forward to shake my hand, her hair smelled like apricot shampoo. That was when I started liking apricots.