The Adventures of Dick Magnum, Private Eye - Part 5: Not My Forte
Your famous luck had been rolling downhill ever since Theodore Bligh walked into your office. Now here you were in an alley somewhere in Little Herzegovina, and you'd lost your standard-issue tan trenchcoat, and with it your day's supply of benzedrine.
Wait... best start at the beginning.
Mama Magnum was just a schoolgirl when she met your father, her bright eyes set on a horizon crowded with possibilities, maybe even the possibility of a glamorous position as a diplomat's wife or a captain of industry's mistress. Her unusually fertile ovaries quickened with life mere hours after the clandestine encounter with a rakish G.I. home on leave from one war or another who turned out to be your father.
Wait... maybe you started a little too far back...
When Theodore Bligh entered your office you were halfway through building a model airplane and seemed just on the verge of finding where to attach the portcullis. You'd told someone recently that when a client entered the office, a great dick should always be seen doing something that implied thoughtfulness and intelligence, and since you worked on it only from when you heard your receptionist Grace greet them at the front door until they entered your inner office, this model was taking a long time to complete.
Bligh looked the part of a client, you could say that about him. Tall, gaunt, his expensive suit carefully tailored and his eyes expertly haunted... Just the kind of tragic figure likely to have problems enough to get your name in the papers. You'd cracked tougher nuts while chaperoning a Highschool dance, but there was something slippery about him that set your model airplane on edge. Naturally the little shylock was too clever by half. His initial inquiry was about a stolen piano, a bread and butter case that should be simple enough to solve, but once you'd accepted the case at your standard rate, he casually mentioned that the piano's owner, his friend George Davis, had been threatened by a man with a gun only two days before the piano went missing. The man had demanded 25,000 dollars cash from George Davis and had been perturbed when Davis was unable or unwilling to pony up the dough. Who this man was and what reason he had for demanding the money, Bligh either didn't know or didn't care to share. Fair play. Hazard of the trade... You'd already agreed to investigate the missing piano at your standard rate, so you'd have to make the expense account he agreed to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which was an arrangement you were no stranger to.
According to Bligh, his friend George Davis lived in an apartment above the Razzle Dazzle nightclub. You'd never been to the place, but the West side neighborhood it was in was little more than burned-out tenements and mostly-abandoned warehouses. Obviously there was more to this case than a standard smash and grab, and what kind of cat burglar steals a piano anyway? Bligh mentioned the piano was of German manufacture and of extremely sentimental value to George Davis, so you figured it tied in to the $25,000 somehow and was probably just the next step in exhorting the man to pay a debt he may or may not have felt he really owed.
You stayed silently in your office until shortly before closing, generating an air of brooding mystery for Grace or anyone else who may have been listening, and when you emerged you were brusquely donning your hat and trenchcoat. You asked Grace if she still had that purple dress in the closet, the one with the sequins and the long slit up the side. When she asked why you told her you were going out and you'd be back in about an hour. You instructed her to get all dolled up and put on the dress, and when you got back you were going to take her out to the Razzle Dazzle Nightclub. As you left the office she said something charmingly needy and grateful. Something like “Why in the world would I want to set foot in a dump like the Razzle Dazzle?”, but you were too busy playing out the possibilities in your head to pay her any mind.
If the piano was a simple theft it should be no trick to locate sooner or later. There were only so many retailers in town even capable of moving one, and the grainy photograph Theodore Bligh had furnished, along with the written inscription on the inside of the piano's lid would be adequate to identify it if it turned up, but if the piano were stolen for ransom it might be awhile before the thief gave up on the twenty-five Gs and tried to fence it. So being proactive on this case depended on what you could find out about George Davis. Ordinarily you'd just barge right into the club and start pushing people around with insightful, penetrating questions, but the Dresden-like state of the neighborhood it was in suggested business at the Razzle Dazzle might be somewhat less than above-board. You had no personal knowledge of what gang might control that area or what kind of rackets they would be running, so having a young lady like Grace accompany you to the club could help alleviate suspicions. As you knew all too well, even the most seasoned professional might let his guard down when a pretty girl comes around asking questions, and on short notice, your fair-skinned, mid-twenties, five foot nine, red headed secretary would have to do...
It was just starting to get dark when you stepped out onto the street and hailed a taxi, directing the swarthy cabbie to drive you to the neighborhood colloquially known as Little Herzegovina, a dense tangle of streets and alleys by the river which was home to half the city's vibrant Balkan population. Your plan was to attempt an audience with Grandma Sava, the matriarch of a small, but strongly connected gang of mostly Croatian immigrants. They were the main underground power in little Herzegovina, and though they didn't have the money or the muscle to stand in direct competition to the city's larger gangs, their primary hustle was in information, which made Grandma Sava the perfect contact when setting out into unfamiliar territory. The only problem was payment, which rarely came in the form of cash, but was never cheap.
It took you longer than expected to locate Grandma Sava's place. The actual location moved around frequently, but could always be identified by a Tiffany floor lamp visible in a second floor window. The actual meeting went about as well as you could have expected. Grandma Sava was at first less than forthcoming about the operators of the Razzle Dazzle and their place in the city's criminal hierarchy, but you eventually got the information you needed. Unfortunately none of the tidbits of information you offered as payment were of interest, and Grandma Sava declined to specify a particular area of interest, leaving your debt both outstanding, and disconcertingly open-ended. The real trouble however came in the immediate aftermath of your visit. The child who had taken your hat and coat at the door and returned them on departure actually sent you on your way with a different coat. You were still uncertain if this was a genuine mistake or an intentional swap.
By design your coat was a patently nondescript tan affair, and ordinarily you would probably not have even noticed the switch, but for the presence of a couple buttons that should have been missing, and the alarming absence of your benzedrine inhaler in the left inside pocket. You tried to return to correct the exchange, but found the front door barred and no answer to your pounding. Amidst the cloud of your mislayed amphetamines, you did discover a silver lining. In one pocket of your new trenchcoat you discovered a wadded up prescription slip, dated two weeks back and the illegible scrawl promising dreams of unknown forecast.
When god closes a window, as they say, he opens a checking account.
The nearest pharmacy was a mere three blocks away, and with a hop, a skip, a stumble, and a recovery you were within their doors, casually refusing the hairy pharmacist's request for an ID and insisting he fill the mysterious prescription. The printed label on the bottle proved every bit as inscrutable as the doctor's hasty chicken scratch on the prescription slip. It was a chemical you were wholly unfamiliar with, and the pharmacist seemed incapable of understanding your request for clarification as to the drug's purpose and function, probably due to the fact that your request was expressed in plain English, a lingo seemingly unheard-of in this particular establishment.
Given your ignorance of the content and potency of the pills, you thought it best to limit yourself to only a small handful of the inviting little tan helpers. You had promised Grace you'd be back in an hour to take her to the Razzle Dazzle and you'd left nearly 45 minutes ago, which meant you should be back to the office no more than an hour or two from now.
And that's how you wound up here, sprawled in an alley in what you were pretty sure was still Little Herzegovina.
When you came to it was dark outside. The pill bottle in the pocket of your coat was gone, along with the pocket, and the coat itself. You had a vague and squishy memory of growling at a group of children who were poking at you with a stick, a memory followed by an even more nebulous perception of some children (presumably the same ones) digging through your pockets, then eventually stripping away the whole coat and running off with it, the alley and your aching head ringing with their squealed giggling, accented as it was in their comical Balkan brogue.
As you pushed yourself shakily up to your hands and knees, you were grateful for the fact that you'd left the office without a gun on your person, at least you were pretty sure you hadn't been carrying iron... If you were they'd taken the holster as well. With no money in your pockets to pay for a taxi you'd have to walk back to the office (or stiff the cabbie).
One short cab ride later and you were using the key hidden in the light fixture to enter your office, which was locked up tight and completely dark. The clock on the wall said it was nearly five hours since you'd left, promising Grace you'd return in an hour. It didn't take the city's greatest detective to piece together the abandoned office's other big clue.
Draped over Grace's chair was her purple dress with a signed overtime slip coquettishly pinned to it. Even in your somewhat disheveled condition, you couldn't help but admire Grace's earnest commitment to the cat and mouse game of seduction and neglect that all truly great private detectives enjoyed with their secretaries... The overtime slip contained her expert forgery of your signature at the bottom, and her meticulous attention to every detail of your signature, and the psuedo-professional persona it personified was proof enough to you that your emotionally-distant, chronically-absent-father routine was working wonders on her. And of course the piece de resistance was that the overtime slip showed she'd waited for over three and a half hours before leaving the office. A timeline which only confirmed the well-known fact that her thirst for her inscrutable employer was truly insatiable.
To be continued in... The Adventures of Dick Magnum, Private Eye - Part Six: Penissimo
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