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.
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