(F) She wore a magenta sequiny gown that was more appropriate for an evening at a schizophrenics' gala than a visit to a private dick's office. She was pale-skinned to the point of evoking one of those impossibly enchanting-depressing Poe poems about dead women who still haunted the living imagination.
"Philip Marlowe?" she said, almost not making it an inquiry.
I avowed that I was such.
She looked around the room uncertainly.
"Have a seat," I said, keeping my tone as kindly as I am capable of. I gestured to the overstuffed chair. She looked at it somewhat disdainfully but planted her no-too-bad tush in it.
"I am looking for a missing husband," she finally blurted out. "Can you help me?"
"When was the last time you saw him?" I asked.
"Twenty years ago," she said.
"He went out to buy a newspaper?" I asked, stifling any hint of reaction to this. I kept my voice as cool and steady as a dead Viking at an ice funeral.
(P) I waited for an answer, staring at her twitching eyelash, which, I read, had the highest concentration of bacteria in the human body. I pictured those little germs swimming out to the end of that cosmetified lash, diving off at just the perfect moment to be sucked into her nostrils by a fortuitous inhale.
There was a knock at my door.
“Come in.”
My part-time assistant Constance entered, requesting her pay.
The woman accepted this diversion to search her handbag for a cigarette. She fumbled for many seconds through its chaotic contents before pulling one out.
Waiting for the woman to light the cigarette, Constance told her emphatically, “Did you bother to read the sign? There’s no smoking in Mr. Marlowe’s office.”
“It’s alright, Constance. Ms.…uh, excuse me, did I get your name?” I said to the woman.
“It’s Veronica.” Inhale.
Exhaling: “Veronica Salt.”
“Well, be assured Ms. Salt that if the cigarette helps you grieve your husband’s desertion, by all means carry on. Thank you Constance. I’ll need you on Tuesday by ten.”
With every dainty exhale, the smoke danced hypnotically between her and me.
(F) "I did not say the missing husband was my husband, Mr. Marlowe," she announced, her voice suddenly steely.
I engaged her directly. "I charge $250 dollars a day plus expenses," I told her, challenging her with my eyes. I figured she would let me know whose husband was missing one of these days, but I was going to get paid in the meantime.
"It's Velma's husband."
She reached into her handbag, a matching magenta silk thing with matching sequins, and pulled out a matching sequined magenta purse from which she produced a wad of hundreds, patiently counted out ten and tossed them imperiously on my desk. "Money is not an object, Mr. Marlowe."
"Velma, Ms. Salt?"
"Yes, Velma Pepper, my best friend from high school and my current roommate."
A blue-green bottlenose fly buzzed hazily in the air behind her head. I figured I would get him later, after Ms. Salt had departed.
I meditated on the irony of their names. I felt hungry.
"Why doesn't Ms. Pepper come in herself?"
She ground her cigarette out in a little magenta traveller's ashtray that she produced from the handbag. It had sequins on it, too.
"She is afraid, Mr. Marlowe. She is afraid that you will actually locate her husband."
From next door I heard the door softly close. Constance had left for the day and now I was all alone with the magenta creature.
(P) “I too am afraid, Ms. Salt. I am afraid I don’t understand why it is that your best friend and roommate Ms. Pepper is afraid to locate her missing husband.”
“Are you writing a book, Mr. Marlowe?”
She tongued a streak of magenta lipstick off her front tooth and leaned ever slightly forward.
“Or are you going to locate Velma’s husband?”
There was that fly again, his eyes reflecting magenta as he circled over Ms. Salt’s head. I rose from my chair and reached for my hat.
“Ms. Salt, perhaps we can discuss this further over a coffee at the café across the street?”
I was hoping for a response like “I don’t drink hot beverages, Mr. Marlowe”.
(F) Instead, she said, "Philip, I know a bar down the street where they let you smoke. How about buying me a drink?"
It was afternoon and the idea sounded good to me, but I knew how I was with drinks and visions of waking up in Singapore some indefinite amount of time later with a beard floated through my brain. "Sounds good," I said, the visions fading.
She was beginning to arouse my third leg. I thought it might do to rub some Salt on it.
(P) I locked up the office and we took the elevator to the lobby. It was then that I realized I came to work on the motorcycle.
“Ms. Salt, did you drive here?”
“No. I was delivered.”
Delivered, I thought.
“How far is this bar that lets you smoke?” I asked her as I stepped aside and allowed her to pass through the revolving doors.
“About two miles”, she replied. “I don’t recall if it is on the left or on the right.”
“Where is your car, Philip?” she asked, as she craned her head, looking up and down the street, as though she might know what I drive.
“I’ve got the bike today. Have you ever ridden on one?”
“Only the stationary types, Mr. Marlowe. Only those.”
(F) I was about to suggest that "Philip" was fine with me when a boat-sized Cadillac screeched around the corner, expelling bullets like mad dogs running toward a hot bitch.
I pushed Veronica Salt down to the pavement, moving her behind a parked SUV. I lay on top of her. She stayed very still. The car exhaled more bullets. The SUV sagged as they blew out the tires.
I pulled out my Smith and Wesson and shot a bullet vaguely toward them. Then I pumped off a couple more rounds. The Cadillac tore off.
I stayed on top of Veronica Salt for a while, liking it.
Finally she breathed. "Philip, you can get off me now. I'm okay."
"Is someone after you, Veronica?"
"Not someone, Philip. Some ones."
"Next time, you want to warn me?"
"I meant to, but I wanted us to have a drink first."
The drink idea sounded much better now.
"Get on the motorcycle behind me," I ordered her, not in the mood to be played with at just that moment.
She obediently got on, hitching up her gown and straddling me from behind with her smooth pale legs.
(P) We sped down Papsmear Avenue towards the bar, the whole time me wondering why I’m involving myself with this woman and somebody else’s probably dead husband. I was also wondering what would happen to my bike if Veronica’s magenta gown got caught up in the drive chain and gears.
She pointed ahead to the right and screamed in my ear to pull over. We arrived in one piece, I thought.
No sooner had I dropped the kickstand and fed the meter than Veronica jumped off the bike, arms flailing and screamed across the street. Should I bother reminding her that only three minutes ago this woman in the gleaming and dazzling magenta gown just barely survived a hail of bullets a few blocks north of where we were now standing?
“Hey! Peter! Peter, over here!”
Turning to me, the omniscient one. “Philip, look who it is!”
A man across the street who I’ve never met and would have no reason to meet, apparently named Peter, turned his head from left to right trying to place a body to the voice calling out to him. He finally made eye contact with Veronica, waved back, and proceeded to cross the avenue, effortlessly dodging speeding cars as he balleted himself towards us.
“Hi Peter! Come here! Give me a big hug.”
“Philip, this is my brother Peter. Peter Salt.”
(F) Salt, Peter. The name seemed familiar. Along with some faint memory came another memory, from a long, long time ago.
Ringer, Isabel. She and Peter used to be quite an item.
(P) This, of course, was before Peter’s other ill-fated relationship with a guy from Ronkonkoma, Long Island. They were on vacation in Fire Island making love on the dunes in a shallow hollow. A buggy came speeding up the dune and ran them over. Peter Salt was mangled pretty badly, lost a middle toe and part of one of his earlobes, but survived. Ralph never had a chance. And Peter never stopped believing that somehow Ralph’s being a man was responsible for serving him up this ghastly fortune. Enter Isabel Ringer.
(F) She was, of course, the famous socialite. Her drag parties were legendary. But once she laid eyes on Peter Salt that all changed. He went straight and she determined to stop being a fag hag. All for Peter. And Peter had gone right along with her. The two started giving lavish parties that made them very popular with a lot of hangers-on, would be actors and starving homosexual artists.
No wonder Veronica Salt wasn't worried about money. Her brother was one of the wealthiest men in New York. He was a self-made man. Made a fortune in the burgeoning (literally) field of teledildonics. His contribution to the field was the invention of a three-inch vibrating butt plug that went off when your cell phone went off. Lovers would have their partners wear the butt plug and then would call them at random times, setting off the vibrating butt plug. Pressing 1 through 9 on the sending cell phone would cause the butt plug to increase its level of vibration. They were quite the rage for a while and Peter had made his fortune from them.
I was struck by the irony that he was a "Peter" and I was a "dick." A private dick, to be sure, but a dick all the same. And, of course, there was the irony of Veronica and her best friend and roommate, Velma. Salt and Pepper. The little ironies and coincidences of life never cease to amaze me. I decided I would take on the case of the twenty-year missing husband I was sure was dead at this point. But that was at that point.
"Oh, darling Peter, do you have a car? I soooo much want to go to the bar." Veronica looked imploringly at her brother.
I really hoped he did, because I was starting to want a drink really badly. I also wanted to get some real information out of Veronica. And maybe out of her brother, too. Veronica was starting to exhibit more facets than a dodecahedron painted in a twenty-dimensional universe by split-personality cubist quintuplets.
"What bar?" Peter asked, a little vaguely, as if he had taken something that the doctor had not prescribed. He tried pulling on his ear lobe for effect, but there was nothing there to pull on.
"That's the name of the bar, silly," Veronica answered. "The Bar. Remember we had drinks there six years ago with Senator Ted Kennedy and his nephew Will Smith?"
"Oh! THE Bar! Of course!" Peter said, getting quite animated over the thought. "Yes, I have a car!"
We all piled in and headed down the street. THE Bar turned out to be on the left side of the street. Of course.
I just followed them in, figuring they knew the joint.
