The Black Llama Caper

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Book excerpt

Chapter One

Business was slower than my ex-wife’s moron brother. I told my secretary Dotty to take the rest of the afternoon off and get her nails done. Watching her gnaw on her cuticles made me both hungry and fearful that she’d start on mine if she didn’t get out of the place. I kept hoping that a new client would show, but why would he? There hadn’t been one since I bought myself a decent tie. So I locked my Smith & Wesson .38 special in the file cabinet, put on my coat and fedora, and left.

It was dark that night, darker than the guys who hung out on the wrong side of the tracks. Only there weren’t tracks. Not in this town, at least. Come to think of it, there weren’t many dark guys, either. And it was raining, raining so hard that I had to wipe my eyelashes every few

minutes to see where I was going, which was to Ma’s Diner for a bit of grub to help me forget another forgettable day.

Ma’s was almost deserted when I got there. It wasn’t the hour. It was the food. The grub wasn’t actually so bad as long as you stuck to basics like sandwiches with nothing between the slices and vegetables that you brought cooked from home. But it was cheap, and without a case in more than a month, cheap was good enough for me.

I took a seat at the counter and whistled for Betty the waitress. Betty took her sweet time sashaying over to me. For some reason she was still sore, convinced that I had stolen her tip a few weeks ago. Some nerve! Sure, I had stiffed her on more than one occasion, but palm her tip? I hadn’t stooped that low. At least not yet.

“Yeah? Whatta you want, Mr. Big Shot Gumshoe?”

          “I know what I don’t want, honey, and that’s more of your over-painted lip. Now be nice to me or I’ll tell Ma that it was you who licked the meringue off the lemon pie a few days ago.”

          She got flustered. “All right, all right. I’ll make nice with you. Now whatta you want?”

          I rummaged for change in my trousers, found a lot of lint, and decided that a porterhouse wasn’t in the cards. “I’ll have a slab of apple pie and a cuppa java. Oh, and a piece of cheese.”

          “You want the cheese on the pie or in a trap?”

          I felt like slapping her zits-pocked face but remembered that my mother had told me always to be a gentleman, along with all sorts of other useless advice that didn’t get you farther than the nearest fire hydrant. So I just glared at her and told her to make it snappy because I was working on a big one. I lied. So what? In my profession lying is as important as cleanliness and godliness are to soft-hearted suckers.

          While I was pondering life’s mystery and waiting for my chow and coffee, a husky voice asked, “Is this stool taken, handsome?” Swiveling around, I expected to find that the voice belonged either to Mike Stepanowski, known to his closest friends as “Stepanowski,” or Bernard “Bernie the Brioche” Eppinger. But I knew that Stepanowski was dead and that I had never met Eppinger.

          “If you don’t want company,” the voice said, “I’ll wait for another empty counter seat.” I should have known then that trouble lay ahead, since all the other counter seats were empty. In fact, the whole place was empty, save for Betty and some short order cook in the back whose hands were as dirty as Al Capone’s. Should have, could have. Too late.

          “Sure, babe,” I said, “pull up a stool and take some weight off your bunions.” (I had developed a real way with words after my home correspondence course with Vinny the Vocabulary Man.)

          “Thanks,” she said, “I think I will.”

          I could see that she also had a way with words, but that was not her chief attraction. She was a real looker, though not necessarily a good looker. Her chin receded well into her neck, her eczema had not cleared up, and her nose hairs stuck out. But still there was something, a certain je ne sais squat.

          We looked at each other without speaking for a full three or four seconds. It had been a long time, maybe even a couple of years, since I’d been with a woman, but I still knew how to pitch the old blarney. “Wanna see a menu?” I crooned.

           “I just need a strong shoulder to cry on, big guy. How’s your shoulder tonight?”

          I told her that I had been having some stiffness ever since slugging a dame who had refused to include the cost of a pastrami on rye, with pickle but light on the mustard, with the tab for my investigative services, and that my mother’s uncle Gregor had had bursitis and so it might run in the family, and that . . .

          Noticing that her eyes had closed and that her head was nodding, exposing the blond roots of her black hair, I asked, “Hey, lady, are you all right?”

          “Sure, sure,” she said soothingly. “I was just resting my eyes.” Then she turned those orbs, one blue, the other brown, on me and moaned, “I’m so tired. I have to go home and rest. Would you like to accompany me and lie down for a while?”

          I wasn’t tired but what the hell. Maybe it was the feminine way she picked her nose. Maybe it was her exotic odor. “Yeah, I don’t mind. But I gotta finish my pie first. Wanna piece?”

She snickered and seemed about to reply but gave me a knowing smile instead. We didn’t exchange more than a few words in the half hour it took Betty to serve the slop and me to finish it off. “All set.” I grinned. “And now for a little rest back at your place, or as the Frenchies say, ‘chez twat’.”

I waved good-bye to Betty and left her a coin and some lint as a tip. I was feeling generous and excited about the adventure that lay ahead.

Outside the rain had slackened to a downpour. My lady friend—I hadn’t yet asked her name—suggested a taxi. “How far away do you live?”

“About a mile or two from here.”

I made a rapid calculation of the taxi fare. “Oh, that’s nothing. The walk will do us good. And we can walk fast since there’s no one on the streets.” I did feel a bit cheap and also sorry that the lady wasn’t wearing a coat, but so what? Life’s just one struggle after another. Besides, the walk would give me plenty of time to figure out how I wanted the evening to play out.

 We got to her place, a fifth-floor walk-up whose stairs creaked like a quarterback’s knees after a dozen seasons on the job. We were drenched, she especially. “I’ll just put on a wrapper,” she said.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll just make myself at home.” “Home” was sparsely furnished. An enlarged photo of a man captioned “landlord” pretty much covered one wall. I noticed that the photo had what appeared to be bullet holes in it. A small bookcase highlighted another wall. It held only three works: Beat It, by Dominique Dominatrix; You Are Who You Eat, by Lusty Lustig; and The Sayings of Saint Theresa. Something seemed odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. What appeared to be a pair of men’s undershorts was stuffed between the cushions of a badly stained ecru sofa, and that was odd. What had the lady been doing wearing a pair of men’s shorts, especially one decorated with purple unicorns? And why were the shorts on the sofa rather than on a chair? My years as a private dick had put me on the scent of possible foul play. A dick’s nose knows.

Then, before I could say--let alone spell-- antidisestablishmentarianism, she appeared. “How would you like it, mister?” She had changed out of her wet clothes into a kimono that she had forgotten to tie. I was about to tie it for her, but for the life of me couldn’t’ remember whether a Matthew Walker, Clove knit, or Fisherman’s bend was the best knot to use.

The fact is I didn’t know for sure what she was getting at. What was it? My gray cells raced to discover the answer to her puzzling question before it was too late, especially since I had a long day ahead waiting for clients who would never show. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at, sister, but it better be good. I’ve had a rough day. The pie and cheese were as stale as last year’s news and the coffee as thick as dirt mixed with water. I got no time for games. What do you mean ‘How would you like it?’”

She looked at me with her mouth open. I hadn’t noticed before that she had no teeth. “Are you for real?”

I could have flipped her my private eye’s license or driver’s license or even my membership in the YMCA, but thought better of it. I didn’t like what she asked or how she asked it or, for that matter, the color of her kimono. This dame’s bananas, I told myself. She doesn’t even know that I’m real. I put on my left shoe, which I had removed upon entering the apartment. It was still soppy, although probably not as much as the right one, which I had lost somewhere after we left Ma’s. I would have put on my hat and coat too, until I remembered that I hadn’t taken them off.

“Well,” I said, “I guess this is good-bye. It’s too bad. I thought for a moment that we had something really special.”

I half hoped that she would try to stop me, that she would say something, that she would throw herself at my wet feet and beg me not to leave, or at least to have a nosh before I left. But life doesn’t always have a happy ending. She just stood there gumming on some sugar-coated peanuts. She didn’t offer me any. Not one. And they are my favorites. I nodded to her, opened the door, went down the stairs and out into the night. The rain was by now just a mean, hard drizzle. I didn’t realize then that tomorrow I’d be in the path of a hurricane.