You were moments away from locking up your office when the chubby man with the worn fedora walked in the front door. It was the end of a long and trying week. You had just wrapped up a hogwash case and were about to close up your hogwash office and walk home through the hogwash city to your hogwash bachelor pad apartment and your hogwash seperated-not-divorced dinner. You still had a pain in your chest from your last look at your receptionist Grace, who turned around to look at you as she went home for the night, fiddling with her makeup compact in the way she always did and said something like what she always said, something like “Dick Magnum, you're the most brilliant detective in the city, but the one mystery you'll never unravel is the mystery of your own heart.” You reminded her to say the whole thing and she sighed before rephrasing “Dick Magnum, Private Eye... Your penetrating gaze finds every single clue, but sometimes I think you're missing the biggest clue even though its right in front of your eyes...” You didn't say a word, just went back to your work and let her leave for the night. You liked when she called you “Dick Magnum, Private Eye”, because you're Dick Magnum, Private Eye. Grace was a good kid, a little old for your tastes but she must have been a hell of a looker in her day. Thank god she still had that beautiful red hair. You liked the way she always fiddled with her makeup compact. You liked that as far as you could tell she didn't seem to actually wear any makeup, maybe she just liked the reassuring little click of its latch and the familiar shape of it in her hands. She'd been steamed at you all week because of a case you'd been backburnering for a little while now. As a lot of your cases seem to do, this one required an exhaustive set of interviews with a half a dozen young actresses and models. She'd been passive aggressively calling you just “Dick Magnum” instead of “Dick Magnum, Private Eye”, ever since Monday when you sent her down to Woolworth's to get two sets of size 4 lingerie for the size 6 actress sitting across from you in your office. As a detective you made a life out of sorting a world of uncertainties into a few choice facts. As such you demanded a high degree of precision from yourself, and from your surroundings. That's why it was important that she, and everyone else, always address you as “Dick Magnum, Private Eye”, because you are Dick Magnum, Private Eye. The chubby man with the worn fedora was the kind of mope any reputable agency would have kicked out on his ass before even hearing what he wanted, but yours was not a particularly reputable agency, or rather it was one with a reputation that sallow men like this could sometimes find answers to their unsavory questions within your doors. One look at him told you he was going to take up your valuable time with a lot of useless justifications before he got to the point. You could practically feel your frozen dinner at home getting even frozener as it languished uneaten in the freezer. Your Mouth got that dry, puckered feeling it got when you needed another breath of benzedrine and while the man stuttered out his rehearsed introduction you silently calculated your probability of getting to your front door unmolested by the widow who lived downstairs from you. It was the same old dirty job gussied up in the same old innocent sob story you'd seen a hundred times before. The man was in town looking for his “daughter”, who was an up and coming young model and actress. His wife had left him and taken up with a new man, and they took his daughter away to the big city. He was happy for her that she was living her dreams, he just wanted to know where he could find her in case she wanted to give her dear old dad another chance at being in her life, and he'd like to have some photos to make sure she was doing alright... “candid stuff” he said... her at home... just wanted to make sure she was in a healthy environment... He went into some detail about the photos... The kind of stuff the tabloids would pay a bundle for, but he'd pay more just to have them in his private collection. One look at the pig told you he could probably be fooled into paying for some blurry Polaroids of a lookalike. You didn't mind browsing head shots and meeting girls from a couple agencies to find a reasonable facsimile of this “daughter” he was so interested in seeing in her stockings... You weren't above going up to the house and snapping a few pictures of course. Some months its the cases like these that pay the rent, but this particular man had extravagant tastes. His target was one Veronica Love, the hottest young starlet on the scene. If the scandal rags were to be believed she would be holed up in the Shaker Heights mansion of one Clark Kilty, award winning playwright and millionaire playboy. Security up on the Heights would be extremely tight, possibly beyond even the considerable talents of Dick Magnum, Private Eye to crack, and if the job went pear-shaped it wasn't just your security that would get cracked. You'd promised Grace you wouldn't take anymore “jerkoff” jobs, so you told the man if he paid cash upfront you'd get him some photos next week. As for the address, well you already knew the location of the Shaker Heights mansion, so if fat boy wanted to go jumping hedgerows and getting turned inside out by Kilty's security that was up to him. You weren't gonna give him the address straight up of course, but as long as you could figure out a way to keep him from coming around the office before Grace went home for the night you figured you could make an easy buck and have an excuse to inspect another batch of would-be actresses while you searched for a suitable lookalike to stage some patty-cake photos with. You couldn't have been in a bigger hurry to get him out of your office and get this whole ugly scene behind you. The greasy paper bag he'd slid sheepishly onto your desk would have made you wretch if you didn't know the money inside it was twice as dirty, but there was no percentage in investigating where an easy payday came from, not for Dick Magnum, Private Eye. Your eyeballs felt like they were being squeezed out of their sockets and your mouth tasted like a sheikh's dustbin when you finally got rid of him and locked up for the night. Your vision was starting to get all twitchy at the edges and you thought you heard a voice calling your name... It could have been Grace insisting to you that she was a receptionist and not a secretary, that you needed to hire a secretary if you wanted somebody to go buy expensive lingerie for other girls, but that a receptionist just answered the phone... But it couldn't have been Grace because Grace would have been calling you Dick Magnum, Private Eye, or at least Dick Magnum... but this voice wasn't calling you Dick Magnum, Private Eye... It kept calling you Dr. Boilerplate. No... You didn't want to go. Its all right here... you just needed time to sift through the clues and you'd see through the seedy underbelly of this town... No... You couldn't go back to your real office... your real receptionist Jacob who was shaking you as you lay drooling on your desk and telling you the next patient was in the exam room... You weren't Dick Magnum, Private Eye after all... you thanked your lucky stars that you'd woken up to find you were still a private investigator, but for weeks you'd hope to find your way back to that dingy office... You aren't Dick Magnum, Private Eye, you are Richard Boilerplate, OBGYN.

You'd been avoiding your office for a couple weeks now. In addition to the usual debt collectors and thugs hired by rival agencies to throw you off the trail of their high powered clients, your receptionist Grace had been in a very high-maintenance state. Ever since her beloved gammy caught the cable-car to the unknown she'd been in a tizzy, going on and on about wasting the better part of her early twenties in the service and futile pursuit of some man who couldn't be bothered to look twice at her. You weren't sure who she was talking about, but you hadn't really given it a second thought. This city was all too full of mysteries and until a client hired you to solve one, most of them were solidly not the business of Dick Magnum, Private Eye. That's you, Dick Magnum, Private Eye, solver of mysteries and seducer of seductresses. You were at a little neighborhood dive wetting your whistle for maybe the third day in a row. Sometimes it was wise to disappear from the office for prolonged periods of time. Potential clients who came in would get the impression that your considerable talents were in high demand, and as luck would have it, the city was full of clients with what may have seemed like intractable problems, but which were actually entirely tractable to someone like you, Dick Magnum, Private Eye. You liked this little watering hole. The clientele was rough enough to give the place an air of mystery, but simultaneously upscale enough that you felt you might find a couple legitimate jobs. Also the barman never asked any questions beyond a taciturn “what'll ya have?” and maybe “how 'bout another?”. You liked a barman that knew his business. You also liked the woman in the red dress who got up on the stage every night to sing a couple tunes with the band, and it went without saying that the woman in the red dress also liked you, Dick Magnum, Private Eye. It was the woman in the red dress that showed you where this little hidden gem of a tavern was in the first place. You were fresh off another busted day down at the racetrack, as you liked to call the talent agency where you regularly went to review the latest batch of would-be actresses. You were rolling a smoke in the alcove beside the front door when the woman in the red dress caught your eye. There was just something about her, you couldn't quite put your finger on it. It might have been the red dress, or possibly the fact that she was a woman. It was no secret that women were a favorite passtime of yours, and this city certainly had its share of women. Its just a shame the city only had one Dick Magnum, Private Eye. The latest mystery that had been vexing your uncanny powers of detection was the seeming presence in the city of a second Dick Magnum, Private Eye. For weeks you'd been scouting for a job that would satisfy your prodigious talent for needing to pay rent and buy food, only to find that all the choicest jobs seemed to be going to a mysterious and very hush-hush private dick with the impressive moniker of Dick Magnum, Private Eye. You weren't sure who this joker really was, but it was pretty clear who he thought he was. He thought he was Dick Magnum, Private Eye, but he wasn't Dick Magnum, Private Eye, you were Dick Magnum, Private Eye, and you were going to prove it. Or your name wasn't Dick Magnum, Private Eye. Getting to the bottom of this riddle was going to require a lot of time sleuthing, time best spent away from the office. You only hoped your prolonged absence was continuing to generated the buzz you hoped it was. You also hoped Grace wasn't too distracted by her woman problems or whatever she was having to keep booking the clients who did come in looking for you. It wouldn't do to lose clients to this other Dick Magnum, Private Eye, just because you were out of the office generating anticipation of your highly anticipated return to the office. The more time you spent in the little basement saloon watching the woman in the red dress sing, the more you thought she must be at the heart of all of this... You weren't quite sure what it was that made you think that. It could have just been the gin martinis talking, or it could have been her red dress... also had you mentioned the fact that she was a woman? You were pretty sure you'd had a dream about her the other night. There was no sign of the red dress but there was no doubt the dream was about a woman. She'd been saying something like what women always said in your dreams, something like “Dick Magnum, Private Eye, my whole life I've been a mystery even to myself, but with your keen insight you've deciphered the code to the safe where I've locked away my heart... I'm yours... Open my locks Dick Magnum, Private Eye!” Maybe it was just because it was a dream, but you'd felt there was something mysterious and unreal about the woman without the red dress. You'd wanted to question her more deeply, to really interrogate her and get to the bottom of her, but you'd been disconcerted by the unsettling realization that in your dream your penis appeared to have taken the shape of a Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. The whole dream you'd been necking with her in the back of a parked sedan and she'd been painstakingly loading the cylinder of your steel-hard pistol, now you were cocked and loaded, and this innocent dame was right in the line of fire. You just needed a little more time to really put the big questions to her good and hard and you were sure she'd spill. You needed to know what this woman with no red dress had done with the woman in the red dress. You needed to know why your dream penis was shaped like a six shooter. And most of all you needed to know why every client in town seemed to be getting hogged up by some clown operating under the arresting assumed name of Dick Magnum, Private Eye. The woman in your dream without the red dress was on the verge of giving it all up, you had her right in your sights when the parked car you had her spread out in the back of gave a sudden lurch, a horn blaring from somewhere outside and the awful, dazzling spectacle of daylight spilling in the windows from the inky blackness of the night outside. You squinted your eyes against the headache-inducing brilliance of the sun and rolled onto your face, the comfortingly familiar leather upholstery of Grace's beat up old towncar cradling your body. You could hear Grace up at the driver's seat, addressing you, but actually talking to herself in the way she always did when she was going on about something you didn't care about. She was saying something about how with your prolonged absence from the office, clients had been stacking up, and your calendar was booked solid for at least the next month, that if you didn't start taking the business more seriously people were going to stop seeking the services of the one and only Dick Magnum, Private Eye. She also said something about the barman at your favorite watering hole threatening to call the police if you didn't stop bothering the woman in the green dress. You groaned from the backseat that you'd solved the mystery of the second Dick Magnum, Private Eye. That it turned out all the clients you scouted were just looking for you, Dick Magnum, Private Eye, and that there was really only one Dick Magnum, Private Eye after all. You also said you didn't know anything about a woman in a green dress, and that you'd been trying to crack the conundrum of the mysterious woman in the red dress. You dug around in the ashtray for some pills you'd stashed there a couple months ago while Grace navigated the rickety old towncar over every pothole in the city and said something like what she always said, something like “Dick Magnum, you may be a genius investigator, with a keen intellect, a rapier wit and an irresistible animal magnetism, but even with all your brilliance you can't seem to solve the mystery of your own colorblindness...”

Your patience with this case was really starting to wear thin. The old lady was late for the meeting, again, and to make matters worse, the hotel restaurant had a woefully inadequate lunch menu... charcuterie boards, fresh baked pastries... crap like that. While pushing a lump of pate` around your plate you made a note to yourself to try and schedule the next meeting for dinner. Fois gras, Duck à l'orange, rack of lamb... THESE were the expense account really pulling its weight. You hoped she arrived soon so you could get this tiresome formality out of the way, otherwise you were going to miss your afternoon massage. You'd been holed up in this Franklin Avenue hotel long enough to know that you'd be useless in the evening without a 40 minute shiatsu session – the very definition of a necessary expense. When the old lady finally arrived you rose and pulled out her chair, giving her the deference and formality that her position and temperament so obviously required. You ordered her a cup of Earl Gray tea and used the opportunity to order yourself another glass of red wine. You were ready to switch to martinis, but because of your diligence and your professionalism you didn't think it wise to let the old lady see you sipping expensive gin on her dime at 1:15PM. You broke down the week's findings as concisely as possible, making special note of the unique doors that were beginning to open to you as a VIP guest at the posh downtown hotel. The old lady was what was referred to in the industry as a whale, a client with deep pockets and even deeper problems, the kind of client who had the means and the willingness to pay a competent investigator indefinitely, as long as said investigator was thorough or clever enough to bring them all the information they needed to keep the case open and not a scrap more. In her case it didn't exactly take a Dick Magnum, Private Eye to figure out that she didn't need a whole lot of information. In some ways this was a typical wandering husband job. You'd worked plenty before, but this was by far the most lucrative. The old lady came from a very well known family. Their name had been influential since before this city was even built and her personal net worth probably exceeded that of the city itself. Her husband was the typical aging playboy, a former tennis pro who had met her working at her country club and lucked his way into an early and opulent retirement. As happened with a lot of men of similar means, he was eager to share his good fortunes with a wide sampling of chums, hangers-on, and floozies. The old lady was none-too-generous about the chums, completely above mentioning the hangers-on and pathologically suspicious about the floozies, which was just what brought her under the auspices of you, the one and only Dick Magnum, Private Eye. Part of what set you aside from your many competitors was your instinctual expertise in giving a client just what they needed, and artfully avoiding what they THOUGHT they wanted. Now an average dick would have spent a week following loverboy, caught him checking into his little love nest on the edge of chinatown with his raven-haired paramour, snapped a few compromising photos and taken them right to the client for an easy payoff and the illusion of closure all around. Some of the less-than-ethical investigators you'd encountered in the business might have started the same, but then taken the photos to the husband, giving him a chance to pay up on the regular for an opportunity to continue his clandestine rendezvous. But you were no ordinary dick, and part of what made you exceptional was not only your brilliant insight into the criminal mind, but also your above-and-beyond discretion and compassion. That was what clients were paying a premium for when they sought out the services of Dick Magnum, Private Eye. You knew the old lady had been to other agencies about her previous husbands. You knew that these other agencies had investigated and reported their findings with ruthless disregard for the irreparable damage each act of infidelity did to the old lady's tender heart. You liked to think you had a special insight into the needs of a woman, even one as bloated and wrinkled as the old lady. You knew what the real job was as soon as she came into your office and asked you to follow her husband. She told you what she wanted (or what she THOUGHT she wanted), but you knew what she needed. She needed somebody that would help her see that this time around she'd finally made the right choice, that her generosity in furnishing a lavish lifestyle and an influential low-effort position in a city agency had finally been gifted to a worthwhile recipient. That unlike the previous deadbeats, she'd finally found herself a husband worth keeping. You knew she'd been burned before and so you couldn't blame her or even be surprised by her blustery, calloused exterior. She may have wanted to be fooled, but that didn't mean she was going to give it up easily. And so you'd given her just what she wanted, round the clock surveillance, an exhaustive reporting of her husbands activities and associates... but most importantly you'd found a way to give her what none of her husbands seemed to be able to give, which was the ability to share her fabulous wealth with an individual who would not only appreciate the grand luxury afforded by her patronage, but who would also remain faithful only to her. For that reason you had suspended the accounts of all your other clients (well, almost all), and were focusing solely on her needs indefinitely. After the usual updates and pleasantries you were in quite a hurry to get the old lady out of the hotel and on her way. Your priority for wrapping up this meeting wasn't just the aforementioned thirst for martinis and imminent massage, but was actually of much higher urgency. At the last meeting you'd seen a man lurking around the premises who you recognized as a hatchetman for a rival detective agency. You weren't surprised to find other dicks sniffing around this case, the old lady was a whale afterall. A detective who couldn't keep a whale satisfied deserved to lose them, it was all in the game, as they say. But seeing this particular man skulking around had particularly vexed you, because you recognized him as an employee of your ultimate rival, one Kane Bergstrom, Professional Investigator. Everything about Bergstrom annoyed you, and always had, from his effete manner to his nasally voice, his pretentious verbiage, and his meticulously groomed appearance. Even the suede patches on the elbows of his never-ending supply of tweed jackets seemed calculated to announce that he was an educated man, and thus better than you. It was typical arrogance of a man like Bergstrom to think that his so-called expertise in the human psyche qualified him to barge into your profession and start trying to push an agenda of transforming your storied art into a cold, lifeless science. Ever since his agency came on the scene everyone had been all a-twitter about psychological profiling, statistical analysis, probabilities of risk and other such pseudo-scientific claptrap. It couldn't be helped that many clients were taken in by this growing snake-oil industry, clients were mostly idiots, but you couldn't stomach seeing dicks who'd been in the business for a generation buckling under the pressure and starting to incorporate the newfangled techniques and approaches championed by fancy-pants fools like Bergstrom. What Bergstrom couldn't understand was that he was approaching this business from the entirely wrong end. He thought being a good investigator was all about using your head, that the brain was the key organ in solving the myriad mysteries of this city on the brink... But Bergstrom had it all backwards. A real investigator relied not so much on his brain, but mostly on his balls. No amount of study could teach instinct. A man might make a good investigator by studying the subject, painstakingly comparing them against similar cases and writing up an extensive theoretical analysis to direct his efforts, but a GREAT investigator, an investigator on the level of a Sherlock Holmes or a Dick Magnum, Private Eye wouldn't get distracted by the unreliable conclusions of their head... a great investigator would listen to their gut... not listen to the voice of caution, but barge boldly into the heart of the matter and start swinging their detective around. That was the only way to really get respect in a city like this... One final annoying factor about Bergstrom's runaway success was the troubling rumor circulating that Bergstrom was a homosexual. You didn't have any problem with homosexuals as such, it was just that a rakish and masculine virility was at the heart of this profession and it wouldn't do to have largely unsubstantiated rumors about a prominent dick undermining that reputation. Every leggy dame and femme fatale who knocked on a private eye's door needed to feel deep down that she was revealing herself to a man who had all the tools and technique to strip away her pretense, to lay her desires bare and expose her every passion. That tension had to underlie every interaction with the clients, otherwise this job would end up as ruined as every other profession. If the clients knew what it was you did all day, or even worse, understood it, then the job would be nothing but customer service, no more mystery to the solving of mysteries, no more passion in the solving of crimes of passion, and no more romance in the romancing of romantic interests. The rumors of Bergstrom's light-in-the-loafers proclivities were so damaging to the industry and so disheartening to you personally that at times you even regretted starting those rumors... but then you'd think about Bergstrom's painstakingly trimmed whiskers, his fashionably cut suits, and his perfectly coiffed hair and the bile would rise again in your throat. You'd think about Bergstrom's pretty young wife and all the foolish clients clamoring over his services and before you knew it the phone would be in your hand and you'd be dropping another choice morsel of fabricated observation into the ear of one of the city's most prolific gossips. You couldn't bare to think about it any longer. You'd come up with some tactic to divert Bergstrom and his vultures from your client. In the meantime you knew the only medicine for your agitated nerves was to submerge yourself in the details of the current case. With the meeting finished and the old lady out of the way, you signaled the waiter for a martini, with top shelf gin as usual, and charged to your room as usual. The old lady was satisfied after hearing about the last week of careful investigation and you were happy to have assuaged her worries. Even if her philandering playboy of a trophy husband wasn't worthy of her trust or her generosity, you were proud to be able to pick up his slack. You'd have to make short work of this martini if you were going to make your 2 o'clock massage appointment, but your commitment to professionalism dictated that you do so, afterall, you were on the clock, and ruthless efficiency was all in a day's work for Dick Magnum, Private Eye.

It was almost midnight when you finally got back to the office. This was day three of the stakeout at the Parvin estate and the case seemed like it was never going to crack. Bed never seemed as appealing as it did at the end of a fruitless stakeout, you just had to stop by the office on your way home to drop some film in the outbox for rush development tomorrow and then it was straight home for a nightcap with sweet lady sleep. Grace was long gone and the office was dark and quiet when you unlocked the front door. A little bit of dim light was trickling out from under the door to your inner office and you could smell cigarette smoke. You briefly wondered if Grace had maybe had one of her friends by to brag about your accomplishments before going home for the night, but just in case the explanation was something more sinister you eased your revolver out of its holster. Tonight you were carrying the Smith & Wesson .357 in a shoulder holster. You generally favored your Remington .44 mag, but the more compact weapon was favorable when sitting in the car for hours or days at a time. This particular model had been the subject of a recall due to a significant backfire risk, so you'd gotten it at a bargain price. You held gentle pressure on the hammer with your thumb, ready to cock into action if the situation turned serious, then you eased across the floor toward the door into the inner office, letting your nose lead the way as the smell of cigarette smoke grew more intense. This was no stale smell hanging in the curtains, somebody had a coffin nail lit in there right now, Turkish tobacco unless your senses lied to you, and they never lied, not to you, Dick Magnum, Private Eye. If there was one organ that was your secret to success as a Private Eye it was your bloodhound-sharp sniffer. Well... actually your eyes were probably the most essential organ to your work as a Private Eye... Well... they were number two and number three anyway. But your nose was definitely in the top ten. You couldn't recall anybody who might have it out for you that would be smoking this particular tobacco, but it smelled like a woman's blend and as you were all too aware, some dames could come after you over nothing at all. Hell hath no fury like a woman somehow scorned, and it seemed most of the women in the world would be agitated enough to kill just over the fact that they hadn't yet been exposed to the great Dick Magnum, Private Eye. You turned the knob and eased the door open with casual ease, your body language broadcasting “I know you're in here, but I don't care”. Your top three organs took in the whole tableau in an instant and your number one organ pointed the way right to the source of your midnight vexation. It was a dame all right. You knew it was the moment you saw her, sitting there in your spinny chair, two full glasses of your best whiskey sitting on the desk right in front of her, a thin blue wisp of smoke drifting up toward the ceiling from a slim, ivory-colored cigarette protruding from the Bakelite cigarette holder clutched daintily between her bony fingers. You let the moment draw out long and tense, forcing her to break the silence as she stared up at you, looming in the gloom of the doorway, your pistol partially hidden behind your hip. “You're a hard man to find Dick Magnum... Private Eye.” You nodded to yourself with understated relief as you heard her say the whole thing, and you finally stepped through the door, returning your pistol casually to its holster and crossing the room without a second look at her. You pushed down the blinds a little and took a look at the street outside. Nothing of interest out there this late, but you knew that already as you'd just come in from outside. You just wanted her to see that you had bigger worries than her, and that no way were you worried about them, because you're Dick Magnum, Private Eye. You kept up your intriguing curtain of silence and let her squirm, not speaking up until she repeated her opening line. “You're a hard man to find Dick Magnum... Private Eye.” “My job requires I be able to see without being seen, find without being found. While you've been in here waiting for me to come back I've been watching your every move. How many times did you refill those glasses just to make sure I walked in with fresh ice still in both?” You watched a grimace ripple across her sharp features as your bluff landed, then while she tried to stammer her way out of your masterful conversational riposte, you approached her for the first time, your eyes taking her in as you came around the desk towards her. Organs number two and three liked what they saw and reported every detail back to number one; her wavy blonde locks tumbling down to her collarbones in an effortless cascade that must have taken hours to accomplish, her wide, baby-blue eyes and the long lashes batting up at you as you leaned close, the way her slinky burgundy dress clung to her tight but modest curves, the desperation written clear as day across that freckled face, the dead giveaway of a woman in the Autumn of her beauty with one last chance to use her practiced wiles to dig her way out of whatever trouble her wiles had gotten her into. You leaned across her, casually reaching for one of the highball glasses, your masterful nose detecting the subtle scent of her perfume, a tastefully understated floral chord that gives the impression she's just come from an afternoon frolicking through the lilacs. You paused for a moment, the condensation-beaded glass of whiskey poised an inch above the surface of the desk, waiting for her to start to speak before brusquely interrupting her. “I don't mean to be rude. Its not that I mind sharing my best rye with a dollface like you, but its late and I'm a very busy man, so tell me sweetheart, what makes you think your problems are enough to warrant the talents of the one and only Dick Magnum, Private Eye?” “Oh it's not MY problem I'm here about Mister Magnum.” (You liked the sound of her smoky, mildly-affected Englishish accent pronouncing the syllables “Mister Magnum”) “I'm here about YOUR troubles. I have information you are going to need if you are to weather this storm... A storm that's already coming for you even if you don't know it yet.” You smiled at her, enjoying her attempt to capture your imagination with a broad and likely unsubstantiated warning of danger. You enjoyed even more the widening of her eyes and the sudden, sharp intake of breath as she saw you remove your revolver again from its holster. Your body language casual and unconcerned as you lean closer and closer, your hand brushing against her knee as you pull open a drawer and set your .357 carefully inside. Only after the firearm is stowed in the desk do you straighten up and turn away, making for the plush leather couch against one wall and smiling as you hear her scrambling to her feet to follow you across the room. “I... I have information... Information you'll-” her mildly English accent seems to be struggling as she starts to become flustered, and you cut her off with a matter of fact declaration, your voice conveying the rote nature of this spiel as something you've said so many times you don't even have to think about the words anymore. “If you're looking to go on the payroll as a paid informant, then I'm gonna need you to come by the office during business hours and my secretary can set up your account... at our standard starting rate... and with a new account we never pay upfront...” You leaned back into the Croatian leather upholstery and took a first soothing sip of the slightly watery bourbon, watching through your lush eyebrows as she approached. “Oh, I already saw your receptionist,” she said with an almost cocky smile “and I can tell you she didn't much like the sight of me.” You smiled at her earnest and accurate assessment of Grace's well-worn prejudices and raised your glass, encouraging her with a nod to take a seat beside you. “Besides,” she said “This is not about money. I will happily tell you everything right now, up front as you say. I am not interested in money. I came here for something I cannot get anywhere else... Something that only the great Dick Magnum, Private Eye... can provide.” She leaned close, kneeling beside you on the couch, her shoulders back, spine arched, that intoxicating bouquet of her perfume wafting over you as she waited for you to be overcome by her wanton proximity, her effusive praise and the soft sound of her red lips parting. You hesitated, not paused but hesitated. She didn't feel the difference at first but you felt it right away, the tension building in the pivotal moment of her seduction, then beginning to dissipate as she sensed your unMagnumly hesitation. You shook your head and took a long gulp of your whiskey before saying with a sigh “It's been a long night Mabel... you better make tracks now or else you're gonna have a hard time finding a cab. Its getting late.” Her smile didn't waver, became more knowing and gentle than anything, but the confusion in her eyes chafed you in a way no scornful rebuke could have. “Don'tcha wanna finish the scene Mistah Magnum?” “Nah... maybe another time. Besides, don't you have a class in the morning?” “Oh yeah, fundamentals of cawmbat and intimacy foah tha staage... There's a guest lecturah and I guess he's real Hawdcoah.” Mabel took a sip of her whiskey between her excited chatterings, her obnoxious New England accent was almost a relief, endearing in its way after her slightly hacky almost-English elocution. You sat through her awkward attempt to segue from the topic of tomorrow's lecture into a resumption of the scripted affections, but you cooled her off with a transparent, but mostly sincere compliment about her performance as a femme fatale. You didn't say so in detail but for a freshman acting student her depiction had actually been pretty strong. Sure it had problems but she had the right idea and did pretty well improvising around your moody non-participation. You were sure in time she'd make a fine actress. When you told her how well she'd done her excitement got the better of her and she almost spilled her whiskey, dribbling it down her chin and catching it against her neck with one delicate hand. You may have been a little more stern than you intended when you commanded sharply “Careful dammit, this couch is Italian leather!”. She looked a little thunderstruck for a moment, but you got her calmed down and had her call herself a cab, telling her to pay for it out of the petty cash in Grace's desk. This little rendezvous had been meant to take your mind off the problem at hand. That problem was not the punishing tedium of the current stakeout, but rather a greater, more insidious problem; namely, it was the persistent and ongoing lack of femme fatales. You knew what you were signing up for when you got into this business. You knew it was about more than car chases, co-eds, lonesome saxophonists, models and martinis. You knew it was also about being threatened, coerced, manipulated, charmed, seduced, exploited, drained and ditched by a series of charmingly sociopathic blondes in red dresses. But for all your time kicking over rocks and turning on kitchen lights in this city only to watch the snakes and the cockroaches scurry for cover, you'd yet to run up against any of these formidable women who spun men's lives around like a child playing with a top. It just didn't add up. You knew you were an exceptional dick, and it would take a rare femme to try and fatale around with Dick Magnum, Private Eye, but you knew the nature of the game was that every detective sooner or later ran up against a dame whose wiles outmatched his guile. You just couldn't believe yours was taking so long and you couldn't distract yourself with consolation prizes like Mabel any longer. You had to get to the bottom of this deadly lady deficiency. (You'd get to the bottom of Mabel and her deficiencies too, sooner or later). After you sent the girl home, you stayed up all night in your office, accompanied only by the lingering hint of her perfume and the pleasant tackiness of her lipstick residue on your cheek. You finished your drink, then hers, then the rest of the bottle. You subdued and then annihilated the lingering scent of her Turkish tobacco with clouds of your own Virginia blend as you pored over files and pondered old cases, wondering who you'd run up against that would even be capable of such a caper. It was less than an hour from first light when the rumbling of your stomach gave you the answer your broad-addled brain had been missing all this time. They say a way to a man's heart is through his stomach, and what's on the way to the stomach? Why the grocery store of course. You bought all your meat and most of your produce and breads from the same little neighborhood market you walked past every day on your way home from work. They knew almost every decent feed you'd had going back at least two years, maybe more. Was it really such a stretch to think they could work back from your diet and figure out your thoughts, dreams, plans, activities and arrangements based on that information? You ALWAYS listened to your gut and it got you this far, so of course they were listening to your gut too... Once you started thinking about it you remembered the strange foreign man who'd taken over as the butcher at that little market a few years back. You'd never had much occasion to interact with him at length, but something had always seemed off about him. You'd joked with Grace that his “accent” seemed to be a kind of mishmash of different influences, possibly with the calculated goal of crafting an articulation that affected the impression of a “generic foreign accent”. Such a maneuver could allow him to recede into the collective background as an entirely forgettable and ignorable entity, which would in turn allow him all manner of freedom to operate clandestinely. You'd employed similar methods of subterfuge in your own illustrious career. You'd have to start keeping a closer eye on “Fritz”. Whatever his real name was you'd puzzle it out eventually. You'd start with piecing together the possible meaning and origin of the little nonsense gobbledygook he was always sputtering out around the store. You scribbled a note to yourself, recording phonetically your memory of a few of his most common pieces of gibberish. “Guten Tog”, “Auf Veederzane” and “Zer Goot” would get you started. He was clearly a pro to have avoided your suspicion this long, possibly a counterintelligence agent from a hostile foreign government, or even more threateningly, a hostile domestic government. Now that providence had finally put him on your radar, it wouldn't do to tip your hand before you found out who he was working for and what they were doing with all the femme fatales. Dawn was breaking over the city when you finally pulled your jacket over you and curled up on your Bosnian leather couch, the empty bottle of bourbon cradled against your chest. You were supposed to be resuming your stakeout at the Parvin estate in one hour, but that paying case would have to go on the backburner for awhile. Once you slept this one off, you had bigger fish to fry, or as “Fritz” would say... to “Freitag”.