Robert J. Rubadeau                                                 85,000 words                       

Box 3836

Telluride, CO  81435

970-708-1700

rubadeau@telluridecolorado.net

GATSBY’S LAST RESORT

A Telluride Murder Mystery

by

R. J. Rubadeau

Text copyright 2010 by R. J. Rubadeau

All rights reserved

First paper edition published by Sirius Publications September 30, 2010

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress (LCCN):                      pending

ISBN:                                                  978-0-9817313-1-5

"What I cut out of The Great Gatsby both physically and emotionally would make another novel!"

                                                            F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1934

One

The Right Word Is Dead

            Kissing a dead man is not as glamorous as it sounds. The blue lips feel cold as a frog’s belly. The taste is a mix of despair, mucous and table salt. The smell is a funeral without the flowers. If given a choice I wouldn’t do it before breakfast. I didn’t have a choice.

            "Move it Buster, or I'll put the thumbscrews to you." The young frail smiles and hammers the horn.

            "Button your yap," I said.

After the jump for the horn I settle back into my slow gallows shuffle in the general direction of the bank. I have a favor to ask at the Telluride Savings and Loan and with the way my life is going I expect a negative answer. My future hinges on a single word. The favor I need concerns an ancient Mustang convertible that needs one or more of everything. I feel both its pain, and a longstanding moral obligation to put it out of its misery. I need something that starts quicker than I do in the mornings, but my business account balance is about twenty bucks away from lap dancing for pesos at a Mexican truck stop. The list of tapped out creditors must include the entire town, or else I’m as poor a private detective as most folks believe. People illegally cross the street holding their wallets when I approach. I am shameless and harry them like a bucolic sheep dog.

            Mark Twain explains that the difference between the right word and the almost right word for a writer is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. I take Twain's advice seriously. If you want to be a real writer you have to be cold, wet, scared and out running naked in the thunderstorm with a kite in order to find the right words. This deep immersion method of literary research I apply with fervor. My passion embarrasses my whole family.

            "If you were going any slower you'd be backing up."

            "Stow it, sister," I said and turn back towards the rust and red Mustang. "You better pull your mouth in, or you’ll get a goog and I'll pop a tooth out of it."

            "Good one," she says, admiring my pre-breakfast choice of other people's words. The young lady isn't scared for her dental work. Cody, my almost ten-year-old daughter, is the brains of our lopsided partnership. We share an addiction for books written before either of us were born and annoy anyone within earshot by quoting from them as often as possible.

            “If I’m not back in ten minutes pump the place full of hot lead,” I said, pausing at the door. Cody winked.  “And get your butt off to school. You’ll be late.” 

            As a Western Slope Ute with a dark Irish humor, I try not to be surprised when warned in ancient mystical ways of events about to happen. Foretelling the future is actually a cinch. It helps to be a born pessimist. If things aren't getting worse, they're a pleasant surprise. For no apparent reason, on this particular bright day, a shadow passes over me from the cloudless sky. Occasionally, once in a bright blue moon, aboriginal mysticism collides with the laws of probability. Sixty seconds later I twisted the knob on a major problem.

            The limp body of the white and black spotted cow hit the polished wooden floor with a splat as I opened the door to the bank president’s inner sanctum of the Telluride Savings and Loan. A sound of Cicadas as the rush of air from the door vibrates the plastic shopping bag.

            "Sorry to bother you," I said.

            My eyes adjusted from the bright morning sun in the lobby to the shuttered bank president’s office. The designer blinds hid the trio of floor to ceiling windows and gave the twenty-foot square room a sickly greenish glow. The room smells of peppermint.

            "Help," I said. It was barely a whisper as I finally see the outline of the body and the chair in the shadows.

            A white, translucent plastic bag is wrapped tightly around the head of the man seated behind the mahogany desk. An overlapping wrap of wide gray duct tape holds the lethal cowl tight to the thin neck above the tidy Windsor knot of his tie. The nameplate I sweep aside as I launch myself across the polished empty desktop reads: "Stewart Lambis, Esquire."

            "Help." My yell echoes through the half-open door. The already quiet bank goes mute.

            I tear fingers through the thin visqueen. The face exposed is a mottled blue; lips rigid white. His pale brown eyes are open, glazed over and unfocused. I try to yank him from the swivel chair to put him on the floor but came up short. Handcuffs pin his arms behind his back. The short silver chain is looped through a chair spring to opposite wrists.

            "Hey," a voice says. "What are you doing?"

            I quickly straddled the body in the chair and tried my best to pinch his nose, pull down his chin, tilt back his head and open his air passage. I started mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

He tastes dead.

            "Stop!"  An astonished male voice from the doorway makes the exclamation point sound like an embarrassed question.

            After a dozen more deep exhales on my part, trying to fill the man's lungs with no response or heart beat, I give up and pull my face away from his. I feel a last settling in his chest and a slow release of shallow, stale breath against my cheek.

            "Let him alone."  A feeble female voice tries to sound forceful and fails.

            "Please." The polite one adds a cough at the end.

            I finally let the dead man's head fall back over the chair to stare at the ceiling. I look over my shoulder. The doorway is full of faces. None dare to enter the dimly lit room. I wonder at their shocked and puzzled expressions until I suddenly realize what I must look like. I awkwardly get off the man's lap, feeling my face turn red as I regain my feet. I shuffle once, then reach over and carefully close the dead man's eyes. I begin to pull the plastic bag back up over his face, realize what I am doing, step back and let my hand drop to my side. The silence from the doorway meant everyone was focused on my every twitch.

            I open my mouth to try and explain. I shut it again. What was I going to say?  Up until a few minutes ago Stewart Lambis and I had just been nodding acquaintances on the streets of our little mountain ski town. Now we were caught in the final act of his death rattle with my lips on his. I couldn't for the life of me remember why I had even come into the bank.

            "Call nine-eleven," I said.  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. No one in the door way moves as they stare at their boss, expecting him to suddenly wake up and explain it all to them.

            "Call an ambulance." Somebody finally contradicts me when the strained silence wears tissue thin. It was obvious I was the only one who knew a stiff when he swapped spit with one.

            "Call the cops," I said.

            The "Oh, my, God" and "What happened" murmurs begin as I bend over and pick up the miniature cow that had likely slipped from the dead man's fingers with his last breath. It was toy size, fit snugly in my hand, made of soft black and white spotted leather, and stuffed full of beans. One like it rests on nearly every local business man's desk to remind us all of the peculiar essence of our beautiful hamlet that is only protected from over crowded "Aspen-ization" by the eight-hundred green acres of undeveloped Valley Floor to the west. The prize extends along the only road into and out of town.

            I set the cow gently back on the desk wondering about the handcuffs, the grocery bag, and the nagging certainty that Stewart Lambis might have a bovine secret he wasn’t going to get a chance to tell. I resigned myself to wait for the police, remembering suddenly that a used car loan was my reason for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Chances were lousy I was going to get an answer today.  

            Although Deputy Officer Daryll tried to come up with a solid reason to keep me at the jail until he could prove I had somehow killed Stewart Lambis by sucking the breath out of him, I was finally let go when it is confirmed by everyone else at the bank that I had simply found the body. The salacious lip attack I was obviously guilty of came after he was probably already dead.

            I needed a hard drink and a place to collect my gloomy thoughts. I could still taste the cold insides of the dead man's mouth after two iced tumblers of Bushmills. My name, coming from the table across the room as I sit alone on a corner stool at the New Sheridan Bar, rivets what’s left of my attention.

            "Did he really kiss a dead body?"

            "It's what they said."

            "Jeese Loueese." A giggle broke into the gap.

            "Wit Thorpe has nothing, wants nothing, is a nothing," said a raspy female voice. "A waste of prime mountain air."

            “Do you think he really killed him?”

            “Well, he beat the rap the last time.”

            A lot of reckless hair did a wave around the table as they all agreed with the blindness of justice.

            “Is he crazy?”

            "You could say his inner child pretty much runs things inside that little ol’ head of his.”

            “Did you see the Indie Film Fest premier of his latest half-finished work in progress last month?”

            “It was just his amateur, blurry video bloopers of people screwing.”

            "No." A now familiar voice contradicted the statement with a smoker’s laugh. "It was badly focused evidence of other people screwing other people's spouses."

            "Imagine that being your job?"

            That ushered in a liquid moment of silence for the victims.

            "Someone said you could tell who they were even though their faces and privates were spotted out." It was a stage whisper.

            "Sweetheart, I recognized most of those men and I didn't need their faces to do it."

            "Patsy Susie." The voices howled in chorus.

            "He calls himself a writer, but I hear he couldn't write his name in the dirt with a stick, some phobia about finishing things or something."

            "His wife is such a saint." Another female voice picked up the pause. “Is she going to be embarrassed when they charge him with…what ever?”

            “Is kissing a dead person a crime?”

            A pause allowed all the time needed to consider the facts and take another long pull of alcohol. Digger was working on the next round in a hurry.

            "He can't seem to hold a job. He's been fired all over town. The only thing he can do is sneak around and get the goods on wayward husbands, and choral society partners.”

            Wit could imagine pursed lips wrapped around these words.

            “Would you put up with it?"

            "Not me," Patsy Susie said. "Even if he was good under the sheets. Got to admit that he fills out his jeans. Maybe his wife isn't so saintly after all."

            "Patsy Susie." The squealer repeats her first chide with a staged horselaugh and a snort. "You’re always aiming at the crotch."

            "He is kind of sinister," the other said. "Foreign, dark and sleek, a hunk, like those old movie stars. Antonio Bandaras on steroids maybe?"

            "A mostly drunk lightening rod for trouble and a liability for the town." The first voice out of the gates added. "I pity the kids."

            "Two little girls, right?"

            "My mother always said, ‘if it has wheels or testicles you're going to have trouble with it.’  Given the choice, I want to own a nice set of wheels and have a bundle of money. I’d take a new Mercedes over having any man in the damn universe. You can always get laid. An expensive ride impresses the young meat in this town to death."  Patsy Susie brought them all to laughter again.

            "Isn't that the truth."  They all agreed, clinking their glasses together.

            I've got more experience with disappointing women than anybody else I know. Retreat was the only course of action that made any sense. I slunk out, with a subtle wave to Digger. I did it without drawing attention. I can do that. Slinking is an art that can't be taught, only learned by becoming invisible when your fat is in the fire. I had studied hard at the science since being “re-fired” from the local ski mountain and just about every other job I've ever had. It seems I have trouble taking orders from those foolhardy people who dare to employ me. I am now trying to be self-employed, but find I can’t take orders from myself either. Slinking around and videotaping the unwary for money is now my indentured profession. Most days it isn’t really as much fun as you might imagine. 

Two

Rose's Problem

            I was being watched and I knew it. The skin on the back of my neck crawls. Walking into Rose's, Telluride's default grocery store for its fifteen hundred residents, I feel as though I am facing a hangman's noose. I owe someone a favor and the bill is due. My day is predictably going from bad to worse.

            Rose had recently installed a two way mirror in her closet sized office to watch the cashiers. She would have preferred to be out front, watching each exchange from the drawers, doing random spot tallies, but the health conscious customers and local town statutes in Telluride wouldn't let her chain smoke in her own grocery store.

            Rose Laphorn, born and raised in Rifle, Colorado, hated any infringement on her God given rights to free range grazing, water allotments, packing an assault rifle if she wanted and doing whatever she damn well pleased on any property she owned. "Hell, let them shop someplace else," she said to anyone who would listen and cheated on the odious clean air ordinance every day. The world is simple and sharp for Rose, divided into two categories of people: those who are trying to cheat her out of her just profits, and those who haven't tried yet.

            I gag quietly when I let myself into the cubicle following the gruff response to my knock. She stamps out a nub into a full ashtray and shakes another slender white cylinder from the pack on her desk. A noisy, dusty, stained green smoke eater whirs impotently in the corner. People in the store file silently past the two-way, blue tinted window behind her back.

            "How they hangin'?" It is meant to be an affectionate greeting. To her I am just another kid she has hired before, and is now still looking for a job.  

            I wait, nervous, just as I had twenty years ago when I had applied to be a bagger and stocker.  I remembered sitting upright in the same chair, inhaling the second-hand smoke from unfiltered Camels, and feeling intimidated.

            "Thorpe, I want you to catch the rotten bastard now." Rose pauses, the lighter an inch from the end of the new cigarette. She lights up and blows a rolling wall of billowing smoke in my direction. "Catch him and kill him."

            "Kill who?"

            "The raping son of a bitch."

            "Rape?"

            "Every other goddamn day this month." Rose stuck her face forward across the desk. The aging folds of pasty smoker's skin frame the glinting gray irises that float in a soured yellow cream. Her brows are plucked randomly and penciled as unevenly as a haiku poem. Her seldom washed silver hair is askew in sagging tendrils with a long number 2 pencil stuck behind her ear. She is daring me to ask another question. I keep the yapper shut.

            "You owe me," she said with a belligerent look.

            I agreed. She had once hired a half-breed juvenile delinquent who needed a job to stay out of jail when no one else would. I owed her a lot. I would likely still be a delinquent if she hadn't given me a shot. The fact I still behave like a juvenile is my own doing.

            "This is more than just about money," she says as she hands me an invoice from the pile on her desk. The bill is from Baked in Telluride and lists a bread delivery of ninety-three loaves of various shapes and grains. The bottom line was seventy-eight dollars and nine cents.

            "I want the lousy little shit on molesting, rape, sodomy, and willful destruction of private property."

            "Who?"

            "How the hell should I know?" Rose coughs up some phlegm, chews, swallows it again. "You're the private detective."

            I was. Silence became my best defense from the obvious facts. She sucked deeply and stared at me with mongoose eyes reserved for a wounded snake.

            "How did he taste?" she finally asks.

            "What?"

            "The dead bank guy." Rose wheezes into a laugh, unable to contain herself at my expense. "The whole town is glad you're out of the closet so now we can keep an eye on you, mister twinkle toes."

            “I don’t have any problem with gay people.”

“Obviously, Chico.”

“You do?”

“No problem as long as they pay cash.”

            I gave her my coldest stare and she blows more smoke at me. My options are minimal. I could throw a hissy fit and leave because she is questioning my manhood, but that would be throwing gasoline on an already roaring fire. My other option is to stay, take the abuse and do what I will have to do anyway. I was astonished at the clarity of my thoughts as the inevitable nicotine ingestion began making my heart thump and my head hurt.

            After finding out the rest of what Rose wants me to know, I leave the store in a stumbling hurry. In the clear mountain air outside, I take a flurry of deep breaths and resign myself to the fact that I will either have to do what Rose asks or leave town. I think about my kids, my wife, my house mortgage, my whole sorry life, and leave town ten minutes later on a random tip about another case that, for want of a better term, I am working.

Three

Paradox

            "Can I drown a brunette in this," I ask. My morning is only almost over and another drink is the worst idea in the world except for all the rest.

            "How tall is she?" Mick, the one-eyed bartender, responds with feigned interest.

            "Five, eight, nine."  I cut the air above my head with a flat hand. I am seated on a wobbly, round stool at the bar and barely catch the bar rail with my cowboy boot as I try to regain my balance.

            "Here," he said, pouring another inch of Bushmills into my glass. Mick owes me. I had driven to hell and back to get here to the Town of Paradox; all for nothing.

            The adage reads: good bartenders, like Irish mothers, may not always be right, but they are never wrong. So much for adages. Mick had been dead wrong. It was a recurring flaw of mine that I trusted bartenders more than Irish mothers. This one had destroyed my misplaced trust once again. Mick was also Yugoslavian with a heavy accent and not a twig Irish, which helps explain the bitter disappointment I had in myself for believing in this particular tooth fairy. First Rose and now this. I sighed loudly. Mick took it wrong.

            "Don't guilt me, man," Mick said. I detected a whine in his voice.

            "Guilt isn't a verb," I said, taking a sip of the whiskey, confident in my usage.

            "It is when you do it," he said and poured another inch in my glass before I could set it down.

            The dust lay thick in the shadows of the bar. Harsh slivers of sunlight from the windows expose the old tables and mismatched wooden chairs scattered about the undulating riprap of the scarred and battered, pastel-tinted linoleum. Hot, high plains desert waits just outside the heavy metal door. Melancholy was not exactly the right word to describe my mood. I searched for a substitute. Pride in my vocabulary was one of my many faults. Glum might be the word I am searching for.

            "Troubles?"  Mick seemed intent on making conversation a part of his ongoing apology, but he defensively put the square bottle back on the shelf behind the bar.

            "The DA is breaking my balls." I grumble and drain the extra dollop of amber liquid. I grit my teeth as my jaw muscles spasm from the assault.

"Vise-grips," I said, wiping the ice sweat from my upper lip with the back of the hand that held the glass.

            "Ouch." Mick adds a painful expression for color, and grabs his crotch for protection and sympathy. He pauses in that position. It puts a crimp on follow-up conversation.

            I usually confine my afternoon on the job drinking to a couple of beers, but this has already been a day I intend to forget quickly. Dead bodies have a knack of changing a pat routine.

            I had already wasted the better part of the day on the road to nowhere. Paradox’s claim to fame is that it has one valley and two rivers that flow in opposite directions out from it. It is a place for strange sightings. The brand new silver Mercedes Z3 Mick thought he saw at a friend’s trailer had turned, on further inspection, into a few decades old silver and gray-primer spotted, Honda Accord. I am sure a little homemade crystal meth had something to do with the mistaken identity.

It is hard making a living as a mostly honest private investigator on the western slopes of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Trusting Mick and running afoul of the hard-assed female prosecutor for San Miguel County, known by everyone as "The Iron Maiden," is no way to increase my income.

            The Assistant District Attorney has been on my case for years, and now wanted my gun permit revoked for “reckless endangerment of a minor.”  I was, of course, guilty, despite my protests to the contrary.

            "On second thought, I think she's at least six-feet in those stiletto heels," I said with a husky voice of justification. I motioned for Mick to re-fill the glass. He was happy to oblige. We were alone in the bar. I had an ongoing problem. Mick had the solution.

            Idiot is my middle name. Wilfred I. Thorpe was the birth record legacy handed down from my long departed father. The DNA donor was an idiot too, and had vanished as soon as he found my mother pregnant. Mom never knew what the "I" stood for. Her family speculated and settled on the obvious. Most people liked the joke behind the lonely “I” and put it between my other two initials. I was called Wit.  It still enrages the bigots in the Four Corners area that a half-breed Ute would carry a moniker that suggests he is ironic and funny at the same time. Enraging bigots is the second best thing I do.             

            The short version of the crime that put me on the ADA's shit list was anything but circumstantial. It seems that after a long and sleep deprived weekend of chasing the horny little jackrabbit in the silver Z3 all over the San Juan Mountains, I stumbled exhausted into my own bed. I had left the snub nosed thirty-eight caliber Smith and Wesson in its leather hip-clip holster, unloaded, on the nightstand.

            Unfortunately, it was also the Iron Maiden's nightstand. Our three-year-old daughter, Katie, had been poking at the barrel with one of the shells, using the pudgy fingers of her perfectly beautiful little hand when we woke up to her presence this very morning. Busted, tried, convicted and sentenced before coffee.

            As Mick the one-eyed bartender did what he did best, I pull out my cell phone and call home. With my new priority for today firmly established at seeing how quickly I can drown my problems, I wasn't going to make it back in time to pick up Cody from school. I am hoping Angelina, my cousin and sometimes nanny, was in a benevolent mood and would do the chore for me.

            No answer, no luck, es mi problemo. I look at the sweating glass of whiskey and ice longingly. I shake myself like a wet dog, throw a twenty on the bar along with my card. It read: Last Resort Detective Agency; Telluride, Colorado; A Literate and Discreet Investigative Service.

            "Is this a joke?" Mick asks, finally engaged, holding the card next to his black eye patch.

            "Call me if you spot that bald headed, over-sexed horndog, or his silver Z3 ever again," I said.

            Mick salutes me with a ham-sized karate chop to his forehead. It is lucky he doesn't knock himself out with the blow by trying to make it snappy and worth the huge tip. He staggers backwards holding his hairline. I wonder if his middle initial is "I".

            "Always there for you, man," Mick said with a groan as the iron door slams shut, pulled by a heavy sash on a frayed rope.

            I walk out into the harsh high desert sunlight heading for the 1972 Mustang. It isn't vintage; it is just a rusting, falling apart wreck. It is the reason I need a loan for a new secondhand car from a dead man. I have seventy five miles of winding Rocky Mountain road back to Telluride and twenty minutes to do it in. Success is about as probable as anything else in my life turning out the way I wanted today. 

Four

Victimized By Sheep Herders

            The look in those cold green eyes was venomous enough to wilt a ten-foot Sequoia Cactus. I should be used to it by now. I had known her all her life. Familiarity does not lesson the “I’m in for it” feeling as the angry intent in those peepers washes over me like a bucket of glacier water. She slammed the car door and kept herself from meeting my stare after that first breathtaking visual assault.

            "Cody, I got hung up," I said. It sounded lame. "I tried to call. The school office wouldn't answer."

            Silence speaking volumes did not do the absence of a response justice. She pinched her lips together tightly until they were only a razor slit. She balanced her briefcase on her lap and waited for me to die a gruesomely horrible death. Obliging her would have probably let me off the hook too easy.

            "If I had a cell phone," she said, dragging on the last word for a full five seconds. "I could have got the message."

            I tried to adopt a calm, resigned fatherly tone. "We've talked about the cell phone thing. No can do, Frodo. Your mom would have a fit."  Then, remembering that I shouldn't blame the other parent, I added, "I would too."

            She snickered, crossed her arms and glared at the windshield in front of her. It was her mother's look and it meant business. Waiting for the windshield to crack from the intense pressure, I swallowed nervously without letting her know. She knew. It was also obvious she hadn’t heard about bank guy Lambis and the kissing part or I would be forced to detail the event. That chore would happen soon enough.

            "How was school?"

            "I hate it," she said, finally buckling her seat belt across her lap.

            "What's to hate in sixth grade?"

            I was given the Look again. "Everything," she said, putting an end to the subject.

            We drove away from the now empty front stairs of the red brick Telluride Elementary School. The principal waving down from her office window with a lukewarm smile and an expression of resigned disappointment over my normal late arrival. The Look again. Is it part of the Y chromosome?  I felt that I needed and deserved detention every time any woman's eye passed a fleeting judgment.

            "No friends?" I asked. I knew the feeling.

            "Please."

            "What?"

            "They're sheep," she said.

            "Soft and cuddly?"

            "Brainless," she said, "and victimized by sheep herders."

            "And you're...?"

            "Fat. P-H-A-T," she said. Spelling it out with an emphasis on the last letter.

            "Is that, like, really cool?"

            "It stands for Pretty Hot And Tempting," she said with no apparent emotion. "And that's me."  Her thumbs on both hands hit her sternum in a coordinated motion.

            I hesitated with an embarrassing lurch of a slippery clutch at the stop sign and looked over at this miniature of her mother. She was brushing imaginary crumbs from her lap. The briefcase was now down in the foot-well of the front seat. How had she gone from nine years old to twenty overnight?  I know girls are smarter, but this is ridiculous.

            "Who are you?" I ask, "And what have you done with my daughter?"

            I got a crack of a smile and figured I was forgiven and we had an understanding. It was a blood bond among equals; the dad to daughter understanding. She would let me know what that understanding was at the appropriate time on her agenda.

            "Well," I said, trying to head off the warning bells in my head that screamed I was being set up. "What have you got for me, Watson?"

            Her silence stretched into a full minute as we rolled slowly out onto Colorado Avenue at the town's official speed limit of fifteen miles per hour. I could see the body language had taken a definite turn for the better as her mind started to spin with the important facts of her day.

            "I'm Sherlock," she finally said. "You're Watson."

            "Whatever," I said, rehashing an old argument. "What you got?" 

            "What's it worth to you?" She asked.  Her forearms were now loosely crossed over her stomach. Her eyes were again predatory slits as they gazed at me from profile. The perfect little nose swung up in a delicate nub, just like her mother's.   

            "Depends on the goods." I played along in our usual negotiation ritual. It was going to cost me. No getting around it. I had been late. I had nothing positive to report from a wasted day. And, I only had one thin twenty left in my pocket. I was in trouble.

            "Two cases you're already working on have new twists," she said with only a slight lisp as she studied her nails at full arm's length. "And," she said, loading on the added enthusiasm, "a really, really rich woman wants to hire someone to throw her husband's new boyfriend out of her father's house."

            "Who owns the house?" I blurted, unable to resist the bait, and instantly forfeited any bargaining position I might have had. The munchkin was getting good at this. I wasn't going to save any of that twenty.

            "Want to talk turkey?" she said, twiddling her little pink thumbs in her lap. I nodded. She did most of the talking.

            I admit to the casual observer that it might seem a bit unethical to pump your sixth grader for gossip. But kids say the darndest things to each other about what they overhear at home. It is amazing what Cody can pick up during those few minutes at school when the kids finally get to talk to each other. My justification is that if you don't want the juicy stuff to get out, don't talk about it in front of your kids.

            Thirdhand gossip from children has proven to be my best source of much needed firsthand information and potential income. Sure, I have been known to use teachers and even school administrators when they need the extra cash, but my best stuff, the gossip with the truth inside, right up there alongside bartenders, hairdressers and barbers, has always come directly from the kids. Besides, it is definitely cheaper. Teachers won't give it up for a sawbuck anymore. They want beers, lunch, and a fifty to ease their guilt at being a gossiping snitch.

            I ended up minus the twenty and the use of my cell phone at the rate of a dollar a minute. I had to pay for each needed word out of her sweet little cherub mouth. The whole deal took four blocks. One of us was getting really good at what they did.

            "It was worth it," I said, trying to save face, as we slapped a low five on the deal.

            I now knew where my wandering husband in the Z3 goes for whoopee during these long afternoons. It was also in my best interest to get my bill quickly to the attorney of yet another doubtful wife because she and the hubby are sleeping together again on the sly from their kids. And finally, she had a solid lead on making some potentially easy money, persuading a gay couple to simply copulate elsewhere.         

            "The day is finally looking up," I said to myself. I always make that mistake.

            Cody was busy calling her friends and giving them her new cell phone number as I came back into awareness of what really was happening in my world. I could feel the visegrips getting ready for another painful squeeze.

            This morning, on top of the gun thing with Katie, Cody had debated at the top of her lungs for a full ten minutes at her mother and me for letting our "oldest" daughter be the only one without a "personal emergency cell phone" in her whole sixth grade. The fact we didn't scoff at her proclamation was a sure fire litmus test that we lived in Telluride, a Colorado ski resort and festival mountain town way off the scale in high rollers.  

            "Mom can't know," I said, sounding pathetic.

            She stared at me, phone to her ear waiting to be connected. That new look underlined the sad conclusion that I was a moron as well as an idiot. She would not even attempt an answer. How could her mother not know?  She was going to be on her phone from now until sometime next week. I had been had, good.

            I felt my stomach clench at the thought of dinner that evening with my harem at 416 Hollyhock Lane.

Five

A Full Time Ladies Man From New Orleans

            I took the coward's way out and dropped Cody off at home. I received a cold stare from our reluctant nanny Angelina, and a smacking wet kiss from Katie, with my announcement that I had to stop back down at my office. I could smell the graham crackers and milk on my cheek as I parked the car in the alley behind the Crosswell Building. My office was on the third and top floor, up four switch back flights of creaky narrow stairs, and cantilevered out over East Colorado Avenue in a single dormer. And I mean the whole office.

            Stepping over the shin biting wooden bench that almost blocked shut the inward opening door; I descended the two short steps to the closet sized, thirty square-feet, half-octagon of the room. The major redeeming features of the hovel were the ten foot tall, divided, oversized windows. The knee to ceiling panes of glass hid behind pulled paper shades. They formed four walls. The door and the guest bench were the other.

            Two scarred and worn desks were pushed up against the opposing braces of a tandem of windowsills. Each small desk was crowded with a computer monitor and teetering piles of yellowing copy paper filling to overflow the available horizontal surface. The two old wooden swivel chairs touched each other back to back. Unoccupied floor space without a stack of file folders or musty old books with paper page markers galore was nil. Squeezing two live bodies in here usually took a shoehorn.

            Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote "Lolita," loved to hunt the butterfly in Telluride and once said that all the rest of the world's books "seem to be all by the same writer who is not even the shadow to my shadow."  I wanted to feel like that about my writing just once. I had recently pledged to write only when my emotions boil over and the itch drives me crazy. I wanted Lolita in my writing. I always got a few shades less.

Flopping into the hard wooden seat, I pulled myself up to the desk. A finger to the keyboard space bar sent the Wes Studi screen saver into the ozone and a document window opened. Arial font, 12 point, square margins set at an inch, with no fancy formatting, ever, gradually appeared before my eyes. It read simply "Short Story," centered and underlined. The empty space that followed filled me with a sickening dread. What to say?  Who is it all about?  When should I begin? 

Hemmingway once said about beginnings, "Not too soon, but not too damn much after."  What the hell did that mean? 

            My newest, and probably last, attempt at becoming a real writer hinged on tapping into a raging blizzard of emotional chaos, to ride the ragged edge, and bring the words on the page to life. I swallowed hard, feeling as low as quail crap, half as animated as a dissected frog, and used three fingers on each hand, hunting and pecking. I began to type. All I could think of as the fingers moved on the keyboard was how much I wanted life to be caught up in a mystery, and as easy to appreciate, understand, and predict in retrospect as the surprise endings of my favorite books had always been. I bit the nip of my tongue and let it go.

            The man she called Gatsby slid into the rich red leather driver's seat of the 1922 Packard Coupe with a menacing look. She was spent, slouching in the saddle soft upholstery against the passenger door.         

            "You've got to tell me, everything, now," he said with an implied and very real threat, slamming the door shut with a compression of air that hurt her ears. "People are talking about you, and now me, deary. The parties are dying, stale. They don't want us around anymore. If I didn't bring the booze they wouldn't have us. Tell me why, you worthless southern bitch."

            The woman took a gold cigarette case from her patent leather hand bag, offered the open box to his icy stare and then slowly extracted a long thin custom rolled Galoise Vixen from among a dozen others. She studied the Long Island fog swirling in the pale light from the shoreline security lamp. Waves crashed in a dying hiss just out of sight against the breakwater of the private yacht club's parking lot. A foghorn moaned. The smell of damp seaweed at the waters edge was sharp, iodine, rotten, unmistakable.

            Gatsby was chewing the inside of his lip and was suddenly mesmerized by her fingers as she tapped the end of the white cigarette against the flat gold top of the closed case three times at each end. His eyes then followed the cigarette to her rosebud full red lips. Without a tremble she flicked the flint wheel of the thin gold lighter and bluish smoke billowed towards the dash and windshield. He stared at her mouth and the perfect oval it formed around the smoke. Her little finger dabbed at a minute bit of tobacco on her pink tongue, drawing it out. She avoided his eyes.

            "It's just about me and the hospital," she said.

            "It isn't a hospital."

            "I can't help it." 

            The bootlegger reached across the space between them and slapped her soundly. The impact echoed, a gunshot in the tight quarters of her car.

            She smiled around the pain. "I really can't help it."

            He slapped her again. The cigarette dropped from her fingers. She bravely tried to smile still, but the tears in her eyes and the taste of blood in her mouth made it look like a lewd suggestion. She fought the necessity of it, but finally swung her eyes around to look directly at him.

            Gatsby grabbed her by the lapels of her full length Cashmere coat and pulled her face close. He stopped, shaking her. Their noses were an inch apart. He scanned her fear with his hard blue eyes. She could smell the whiskey on his breath. His face suddenly collided with hers. A rigid tongue smashed against her closed teeth and finally parted them to swim inside. He tasted the blood too. It spurred him on.

            She sighed with resignation into his greedy mouth and felt her legs part, falling open on the soft red leather seat…

            It was fully dark when I realized that I had been writing for nearly three hours. The stress in my neck was evidence of the unobserved passage of time. I hit "save" and took a deep breath. I reached past the screen and pulled the cord on the shade, it rolled quickly up, all the way to the top with a rumbling flapping sound I always loved. The cool yellow glow of the streetlights below filled the office as I shut off the overhead fluorescent lights. Out the window, across the rooftops on the other side of the street, the lights of the ski area's gondola terminal building, high up on the mountain, glittered against the vanishing definition between the peaked ridges and the coal black sky.

            How had that trance happened?  Gatsby?  Where did that new story tangent come from?  Who the hell was the woman?  And why was this Gatsby character slapping her around?  The first four aborted drafts had been simply a character sketch of a 1920's bootlegger: cute, wordy, and horrible. They were a slow meandering tale of an obsessive compulsive partier and adrenaline junky who stumbles towards his own demise. This new thing was the best writing I had done in years. Time was actually suspended. The story flew. Just like a real writer.

            I forced myself to shut the computer down without rereading a single word. Let it cook overnight in its own juices. Don't worry it to death like a starving dog with a butcher's bone right away. Give it time to ferment. Patience was a hard new lesson my barber was trying to teach me. He said it was something real writers had. I wasn’t sure what he meant.

            I pulled the shade back down. Standing up on the desk to grab the fabric-covered ring on a string, I saw the town sheriff's white Bronco slowly ease down Colorado Avenue. I was glad I had shut off the office light. He was probably already rolling right along on my case, taking charge personally. The putz definitely wanted to be the one to take my gun permit. He had a thing for my wife. It was puppy-ish, self indulgent, embarrassing, and publicly recognized by everyone in town.

            The Sheriff also had a different kind of thing for me. He thought I was capable of murder. I couldn't disagree. In two years of the private eye business I had already been on trial for one murder I didn’t commit and had now stumbled over another dead body with more questions than answers. 

            I decided right then that Sheriff Bueller would have to wait until I was ready to make this particular collar that would make his day. Bueller would likely view this particular duty as a part of his career highlight reel. To him, I was an amateur, a cop wannabe, a fraud. The Last Resort Detective Agency was riding a brief bureaucratic window of opportunity that allowed anyone with the inclination to hang out a Private Investigator shingle in the State of Colorado the prefect right to do so.

            I was, by my own account, an unpublished writer playing at being the people I was trying to write about. I still hadn't been able to complete my first book that was half-finished two years ago. I finally burned the old carcass and took to reading F. Scott Fitzgerald's magazine submissions from the 1920s and am now working hard at writing a readable short story. So far I was still waiting for the words to magically appear on the page. 

            Feeling sorry for myself I decided to make a few calls. It was important I find a paying customer before the next round of threats from my creditors arrived.

            My finger punched the number for Mrs. Agnes Singer into the desk phone. I had no trouble reading my daughter's perfectly formed, rounded numerals on a scrap of lined writing paper. I waited for the ringing to start. I expected an answering machine and wasn't disappointed. I left an introduction, a heart felt endorsement for my services, and hung up.

            Ernie Sampesee called from the open door as the phone hit the cradle. His baritone voice projected into the dust filled cervices of the office.

            "Wit, my boy, you're in deep, deep trouble," he said. The smile that accompanied the pronouncement beamed and I knew he was right. "But I certainly envy you the audacity to blow your own horn like that." 

            "What trouble?" I asked, ignoring his admission of eavesdropping.

            Ernie laughed and the sound forced me to breathe deeply to deal with my increasing anxiety. I can always gauge the exact level of truth in what my barber says by an assessment of how much he is enjoying my pain. It was another thing the self-help books said; real writers always enjoy the pain of others. If that was truly the test, maybe Ernie was the closest thing to a real writer I knew.

            "That's what I like most about you, Wit, old cod. You don't even see trouble when it’s smacking you in the forehead. People in town are describing you as that guy from the Li'l Abner cartoons with the black cloud over his head."

            "The one with all the consonants and not a vowel in sight?" 

            "Exactly," Ernie said, helping me into my old wool coat one arm at a time.

            "Did you hear I was caught in an act of endearment with a corpse?"

            "Absolutely," he said. "It's the talk of the town."

            "What are people saying?"

            "They are now calling you 'The Kiss of Death Kid.'"

            "Is that all?"

            "I only listen to the polite conversation."  Ernie said.

            "Are you keeping something from me?"

            "Almost daily," he said.

            “What can I do about this?”

            “Give them something else to talk about.”

            “You mean do something stupider than I did today.”

            “Exactly.” 

            "Just once in my life I want to be referred to by the gossips as a sometimes pimp and full time ladies man from New Orleans,'" I said as I closed the door to my office.

            "You aren't from New Orleans."

            "Details."

            I sighed as we ambled down the narrow stairs.

Six

A Worthless Contest

            Ernie Sampesee is the only son of two successful Wall Street lawyers and was guided into corporate tax law at Ivy League schools. He settled a billion dollar claim against the government on behalf of a Texas oil company and retired with a cool eight figures in the bank. He fit hand in glove into Telluride.

            I would guess that our small community's unearned income, averaged on a per capita basis, would outstrip Brunei as the richest place on earth. The difference between a Colorado mountain town's disgustingly rich residents and the rest of the world's allotment of the breed is simply a matter of scale and tone. 

            The normal Telluride "trust funder" drives a five-year-old SUV, has a smallish, cozy house to die for, and walks their kids to school wearing baggy polar fleece and funny Alpaca wool hats. The conscious effort is to appear as if you were somehow getting by on your own. It is a difficult role to put forward when your personal checking account balance fluctuates upwards, sometimes over six figures, depending on when the inherited premiums and dividends are electronically transferred.

            Ernie, however, does not prescribe to this Spartan, low-key, code of inconspicuous wealth. He dresses well, drives a Bentley, has a three million dollar rooftop dwelling on Colorado Avenue, and sends his wife on extended shopping trips and relative visits that last for months. My well to do barber looks like Vincent Price, is nearly as tall as my six feet two inches and weighs about fifty pounds less. Ernie is in his mid-sixties and looks it in a comfortably worn, eccentric way.

            "Pity about the long drive to nowhere," Ernie said as we continued to sit at the bar in the New Sheridan Hotel. The local riff-raff was giving us some elbowroom to conduct our business in private. Monday nights are slow, especially in a relic of old school stodginess like this one. No flat screen televisions and over a thousand glistening bottles backed the bar; cut glass mirrors doubled the effect.

            "I gotta get the goods on that Z3. Cody gave me a lead and I’m desperate. The insurance is due on my car. I already spent the retainer, and the wife in question is beginning to think I'm not even trying."  I said.

            "You got trouble?  I've got to get over this morally bankrupt vision of myself as a filthy rich barber. I am obsessed with a vain effort to see people who have to work for a living as noble.”

            “Noble?”

            “As a Cod Fish. I long for the mantel of the lowly blue collar."

            "We aren't noble. We're envious."  My second wish of the day was that I should have Ernie's problem.

            "To our ongoing worthless competition," Ernie toasted to make me feel better.

            We both sipped our cheap well scotch trying to make it single malt and taste eighteen years old. This old palace of a drinking establishment had steadily gone downhill in the arena of intelligent conversation and clientele since William Jennings Bryan delivered the Cross of Gold speech here in 1889. The passing of time was lately a recurring theme in my thoughts.

            "How long we been at it?" Ernie asked.

            "At what?"

            "Racing to see who can do the least with the remainder of their lives."

            "A long time," I said.

            "But, at least, we two proudly display the grit and gentlemanly stamina to see it through to the end." Ernie’s baritone voice projected around the bar

            "Probably," I said and sipped my drink. We would surely be the only non-family mourners at each other's funeral. A thousand bad questions formed in my head.

            "Why me, Ernie?"

            "Why you what?"

            "Why waste your time being worthless with me?"  I was approaching pathetic and feeling worse.

            Ernie pushed back his chair, swiveled towards me, and gave me a long hard look. "Wit, old cod, you make me laugh. Hanging out with you is like being with Job. You're never sure when the other shoe is going to drop, but odds are it will surely happen before sundown.” A sip passed his lips.

            “You find a steaming pile of trouble everywhere you step, my friend. I enjoy watching."

            "So, I have entertainment value?"

            "For the whole town, my boy, the whole town."

            Ernie smiled with that warm confidence and good cheer that unnerved those around him. "You try to come across as some hard bitten detective from an old movie and the story always ends up with you getting the wrong end of the deal and being a pushover for some woman with perky attributes, a hard luck story, and a gun in her purse."

            "I am pathetic."

            "Indeed," he agreed.

            "Who do you figure killed Lambis?" I asked.

            "Wasn't he a little light in the loafers?" asked Ernie.

            "Maybe," I yawned, "not confirmed, but that's not a problem in this town, or with me; or with you as far as I know. In fact, it's expected for any single middle-aged man who isn't out chasing everything hot and hollow in stretch pants. Take the Choral Society?"

            "We are civilized, aren't we," Ernie mused into his glass and called for two more. "Lovers?  Money problems, blackmail, depression?  Ideas?"

            I shrugged trying to pretend the answer wasn't going to bother me until I found out. It would. Lambis was the first dead guy I had ever tasted.

            "Rooted out any federal spies lately," I asked, wanting to change the subject from my worthless life, the kiss of a dead man and my money problems.

            "Found a real sharper at the photo shop the other day." Ernie confided in a hushed tone. "He followed me in, and I cornered him, demanding that he report immediately back to the IRS that I had unmasked him, and did not appreciate their unscrupulous and underhanded schemes to hound my life."

            "It made my day," he said after a chuckle.

            "Was he really a spy?"

            "How should I know?  He seemed genuinely contrite," Ernie said, dismissing the thought that he could have been mistaken. My barber was sure the IRS wanted revenge for his victory over them in a corporate tax court a decade ago. "Regardless, the story will get back to the feds that I am still on guard."

            "And crazy," I said. I visualized the hawk-faced barber cowering some poor innocent tourist into a verbal corner with false accusations and feigned fury.

            "That too," he said.  

            "Any new detective gossip come spewing up out of the barber chair?" I asked hoping the answer was no so I wouldn't have to pick up the bar bill.

            "The only open case I have current is the Schnauzer disappearance. She has yet to turn up. Been what, six weeks?  I helped you put up flyers in every bar in town. That was an unforgettable pub crawl, was it not?  The coyotes probably had her for a snack, but I have my ears on, hoping for a break. Maybe she'll call in."

            "Good man," I said and smiled at the logic.

            We were quite the pair all right. I was postponing the inevitable meeting with the Assistant District Attorney. Another full amber colored glass appeared magically at my napkin. My best intentions for facing the music and taking it like a man are often waylaid by a stiff drink. It was happening more often lately.

            Patsy Susie Blaze, real estate broker, and by far the most successful one in town, sat in the farthest corner of the bar with two men. I noticed through a growing scotch haze that the tall bearded one wore black leather, and the short fat one an expensive Italian cut silk suit. She listened intently to what her guests were saying, but watched Ernie and me with a bemused expression. Her smile was fixed, her eyes hungry. She was ready to close the deal, any deal, but the vivacious broker knew that everything happens in its own good time. She ascribed to "Telluride Style."  Life could follow its own simple rules as long as she got her six-percent commission. She was still there watching when I got unsteadily to my feet for the lonely stagger home.   

Seven

Gone De Sade

            "Wit Thorpe," I said. "I have an appointment."

            I was cautiously optimistic the next morning, after a lonely night on the couch, as I cleared the first hurdle of security to enter the lobby of the Franz Klammer Lodge and Resort. The name Thorpe must have been recently purged from the undesirable's list. It hadn't always been the case, and it wasn't ever my fault. Scandal, digging it up and documenting it on videotape, is more like a hand grenade than laser surgery when approaching an upcoming divorce. Collateral damage is inevitable and I always got the blame. Stirring the pot from the bottom up was my business; getting some on you is unavoidable. I try to accept that creating emotional chaos is an unavoidable byproduct in my line of work. Regrettably, I often smile because of it. I find Karma amusing. 

            Robert Forrest Singer had, by his wife's rigid moral standards, suddenly gone "De Sade."  A case could be made that this was not entirely true. Forrest had simply decided his mid-life crisis was going to involve exploring his sexuality with other people, including men. According to the wife he had gone off one weekend to an exclusive men's only retreat in Sodoma, Arizona to explore the art of the male mystique with a guru. He had heard about the religious spa through an article in Forbes Magazine. Amidst the giant sculpted penises and red river canyons he learned to masturbate in a circle with others, open his arms and emotions to other sensitive men, and find his true bi-sexual, free-id self.

            His wife, Mrs. Robert Forrest Singer was not amused when "Sandy," as he was known, demanded that their Telluride home would become a satellite campus for the new sexual revolution amongst enlightened males. She had moved into a friend's two million dollar time share condo in Mountain Village; roughing it while beginning divorce proceedings. Mrs. Singer and I sat staring out at the dark brown lift terminals and the green lower slopes of Misty Maiden. We were having tea served by a square faced Ute woman from La Paz who often served as itinerant domestic help for the well to do residents. The woman, Wilma Mankiller, had helped me out once by locating a bail bond skipper when I needed it. She was also a second cousin. We wouldn't let our eyes meet. We were afraid we might laugh out loud. It was funny to her that a fellow refugee from the Ute reservation would be sitting, sipping tea from delicate china cups, and making small talk with a shriveled old white woman as if it mattered.

            "And you want my agency to evict him from your house?" 

            "Is there a problem?"

            "He may have some rights to be there," I said. I have usually assumed correctly that spouses generally exhibit unsupported and naive beliefs of property ownership during divorce proceedings. That's why, says my barber, the realist lawyer, it is important to get a retainer up front. Often a client is the last to know that a divorce is a no win financial mess with only the lawyers getting their fair share of the loot. I soon learned I was talking to a divorce expert.

            "The house is in a trust, set up by my father three husbands ago. It is not now, nor ever was, communal property. Robert Forrest Singer, the preening fagot, my current husband, and his frilly friends are squatting at West Egg and legally trespassing on my dear father's memorial vacation home. I want them gone," she said. Her voice a viper's litany of sibilant sounds. My neck hairs stood on end.

            "We usually don't become involved in property settlement issues unless the court has already made a ruling." I said. "It just gets very sticky."  I tried a seventy-watt smile.        "Sometimes," I said.

            "Listen here boy, that little weasel hasn't a pot to piss in. He was broke when I married him. He hasn't worked a day since. And I have a pre-nuptial agreement solid enough to ram a big fat zero up his ass when the time is right."  Spittle flecked at the corners of her ribbon thin, pearl colored and slightly rouged lips.

            "I don't need another ‘do nothing’ lawyer type in my life. I'm looking for a problem solver and I got all the money I need to find one. Is that clear enough?  I want him and his swishy little friends out of my father's house, now. You're a big strong guy, figure it out."

            Agnes was a spare no expense, well preserved, dried up and mean, seventy years ornery. The fact she had a sailor's vocabulary was disconcerting. I admitted to myself without engaging in another conciliatory smile that she would eat most men alive. I was most men.

            "Gotcha," I said.

            Her smile sent a shiver through me. This woman's heart would be a transplant bargain; it appeared unused.

            "Friends?" I said. It was the first I had heard about a crowd.

            "Fellow inmates from the Arizona church that turned my husband into a queer."  Her back got straighter, as she perched forward on the chair. "Deviants."

            "How many friends?"  It was an important question, knowing that sexual orientation has nothing to do with being tough to handle.

            Her eyes degraded my manhood.

            "Do you have the balls I need for this simple little assignment?" she said. Her eyebrows lifted in subtle challenge above the cosmetically altered to perfection face.

            "I can ask them to leave," I said. Strong-arming is not one of the services listed on the agency flyer, but who was I to quibble. I needed the money.

            "Perfect," she said, taking my hand in both of hers and sealing the deal with a cold pressure. I immediately hoped she was more merciful than my nine year old when it came to discussing my fee. It seems I have an admitted problem negotiating with strong willed women of any age. I was soon shown out the door before a check changed hands.

            My 1972 Mustang's blown muffler rumbled loudly in 3rd gear as I left the Mountain Village turnoff and started down into the deep canyon that forms the backdrop of Telluride. I have never taken this view for granted. I reckon no place on earth over two miles high is more conducive to living than right here.  

            I turned right at Society Corner and headed into the box canyon towards the tiny town three miles away. The valley cows grazed to my right in black and white formal wear, spreading themselves conspicuously along the millions of dollars of Valley Floor real estate that simply grew green grass to feed their cuds. I thought about the toy cow in Lambis' hand when he died. Had he been trying to leave a clue to his killer?

            The public radio station KOTO was playing a jazz set by Etta James. In spite of the Blues I still wasn't allowing myself to think about my troubles at home. I had stumbled to Hollyhock Lane after midnight last evening and I was barely drunk enough to think I could sneak in. The only thing worse than being a coward is to be caught red handed in the act.

            If I can't hold my own with my nine year old, then I am at a total loss when it comes to my wife. The words from her beautiful full lips tumbled down on me in my stupor. I couldn't disagree with anything that was said. It was not a discussion. No ultimatums, no mention of firearms, just a severe level of disappointment at my less than stellar decision making during the last forty-eight hours. And now I was mixed up in another mess involving murder.

            “But we talked all this out. It’s the same as the last time when it wasn’t my fault.”

            “We didn’t talk it out,” she said. “You defended yourself over every crazy act of idiocy, and I got over it.”

            I finally stopped being pigheaded and promised to do gooder. I would try to reverse the downward spiral of my life. She had my word. She took it for what it was worth and closed the door to our bedroom.

            I don’t often have these moments in real life when I feel like I am really being understood. My normal problem is that positive reinforcement for my odd and self-destructive actions in real life usually comes from reading the motivations of fictional heroes in someone elses’ books. Usually my random moments of revelation come from those great writers who are now long gone and dead. I envied them the clarity of their simple declarative sentences.

            A real writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to have had it all. Scotty lived a life full of characters that would leap onto the page without a lot of thought. Why couldn't I have the same luck?  I know I consciously ignore, absolutely, the artist’s nightmarish emotional anguish, the drinking, the madness, the bi-polar personalities, and the tragic early death just like any other fan.  

Eight

Bowling

            Remember the old fairy tale about the man who was granted three wishes?  He first tested the genie by wishing for a nice pot of black pudding. His wife berated him vehemently for being so stupid to waste a wish that he lost his temper and he shouted, "I wish the black pudding was on the end of your nose."  It took his last wish to get the pudding off her nose. I treat this parable as one of life's primary lessons. The message is to be cautious with what you wish for, because you almost always get it, and it's always black pudding.

            I was hoping to meet the woman in the Packard Coupe and the mysterious bootlegger Gatsby again in my office that afternoon, so I stopped in for a haircut and a shave. Barber Ernie's, as it is now known, was one of the oldest storefronts on Colorado Ave and located conveniently right below my own office in the same building. The barber was also my landlord. He owned the whole block.

            "My favorite private dick," Ernie said as I sat down in the ancient swivel chair.

            "That's what your wife said last night too," I said. The stale rejoinder was for the three seated customers. It was our old shtick and they ignored us. Ernie's wife had been out of town for the last three months with no return date in sight.

            "Take my wife," he said, "Please."

            Droopy Drawers Hal and Frank laughed, just as they did every morning.

            I told him to cut my hair so I looked like Robert Mitchum playing the detective Philip Marlow.

            "Won't do any good."

            I shrugged knowing he was right.

            "You're the Tony Danza kind of haircut. Everybody says you look like him only taller, bigger, and meaner. I personally don't see it."

            "Everyone?"

            "Except the Sheriff. He thinks you look like Ted Bundy." 

            "He just wants my wife," I said.

            "Who doesn't?" he said. "She's PHAT."

            I had to admit Ernie was right.

            Ernie's smile turned to a frown, remembering something important, "Oh yeah, the Sheriff his self was looking for you this morning. Might still be waiting upstairs in your office."

            "When were you going to tell me?"

            "I didn't want to be the one to spoil your day."

            I offered Ernie my neck and he shaved it for me with a long straight razor. He repeatedly stropped the shining blade on the leather strap hanging at the back of the barber chair. When Ernie retired after winning all that money, he candidly admitted to his shocked wife that he had always wanted to spend the rest of his life being a barber like his grandfather.           

The Sampesees moved here to Telluride ten years ago and Ernie claims he has doubled his life expectancy by opening up this shop. Somebody was always stopping by, mostly to talk. Ernie was not a great barber; he was a great talker. Only the brave or hopeless chose Ernie's over the other hair salons in town. I was the only one who trusted him with a razor. Fast healing was an attribute I always banked on.

            My hair was hopeless. Ernie cut my head the way he always cut it, each tuft having its own length. I looked the same in the wall mirrors after he had done his best. At least the shave was close, too close, but I loved it. It was so old school. Ernie's shave was one of the highlights of my morning. I also reasoned that if I survived the barber's chair first thing, nothing else in the day would be as dangerous.

            "At least you told me."

            "Yeah, you could say that."

            "Tell me more. What's the scoop on a Mr. Robert Forrest Singer up at West Egg in Mountain Village?"  I asked Ernie for a little quid pro quo as I paid my twenty dollars for the cut and shave. I was personally putting his nephew through St. Lawrence University in upstate New York on the installment plan.

            "Is that the monster of a house just down from Twister?"  Ernie mentioned the ski run that makes some trophy homes "ski-in, ski-out" and worth double the price.

            "Probably. Twenty-five-thousand square feet or something."

            "Gotta be," said Ernie. "He doesn't come in here. Goes over to The New Wave and gets his hair ‘dressed.’ Folks call him Sandy."

            "Anybody know him?"  I said, eyeing the disappearing twenty in Ernie's hand.

            "Seen him a couple of times with the dead bank guy at Rusticos Restaurant."             Ernie offered as he opened his 1870's register with a pull down lever like a one armed bandit and deposited the money in a lonely wooden slot.               

            "Real friendly like, old cod."  Ernie said.

            "You gonna’ go all jealous now ‘Mister Kiss of Death?’" he asked with a wink at the posse.

            "You don't mean Stewart Lambis?" Hal asked.

            I looked at Ernie. Ernie nodded at Droopy Drawers Hal who sat in a chair waiting for dinnertime. It was barely 9 a.m. Hal was a regular. He had only let Ernie cut his hair once, so he was considered a smart regular. He was here every morning and afternoon since retiring last year from the Colorado Supreme Court as their Chief Justice.

            "That's the guy. Did you know that just before you kissed him to death he just bought some million dollar shack in town?" Hal said. "Driving the rest of us out. It was that damn Patsy Susie that sold it to him, too. Boy, I'd like to have her dough."

            Hal, a curmudgeon by nature, was just another victim of the mountain town belief that anyone who had come to Telluride a day after you was a no good "second home owner" looking to screw things up for “us” locals.

            "Any new gossip about who killed him?" I asked.

            "Rumor is his boyfriend was all broken up that you wouldn't leave Stewart alone. You were his new bum boy and the other guy got jealous," Hal said. He stood up and hitched his pants up to his non-existent hips for effect.  Ernie and Frank had a big laugh at that one. I wore a frown and tried to be offended by the political incorrectness of the remark. The posse rode me hard until I left the room.

            I assumed the Sheriff with a warrant for my gun permit was still upstairs so I went back outside to the Mustang and thought I would get out of town and keep my schoolyard manhood for a couple of more hours. I liked the reassuring weight clipped on my waistband in the small of the back. It made me feel like an apprentice adult and an honest to God, real hard-assed detective, like my fictional mentors.

            I drove up Fox Farm Road and onto Ophir Crest Loop heading for the garish stone entrance to West Egg. The holed muffler was going to make a surprise attack impossible. I pulled past the huge stonework entrance. A massive beam arch over the tall granite pillars supported a grotesque bronze sculpture of a bald eagle ripping apart a lamb that it held to the ground beneath huge talons. You could almost hear the bleating of the poor doomed sheep.

            I tried the garage door style remote that Mrs. Singer had given me and was not surprised that the code had been changed. The heavy wooden gate remained locked across the winding entrance road that led upwards into the tall aspens. The house, where I could just see the red gabled roof, was just over the knoll and directly along the ski run.

            I tried to gently ease the clutch and keep the growl of the exhaust to a low roar as I pulled past the gate and continued upwards on Ophir Crest Loop towards the dirt track to Magic Meadow, another ski run that, after leaving the car behind, would take me further up the mountain.

            A few minutes walking brought me within view of the massive combination of buildings that comprised West Egg. I squatted down in the tall grass and focused my daughter’s pastel blue bird watching binoculars on the grounds. The size of the house was staggering. It was shaped like a horseshoe surrounding a huge car plaza the size of a professional basketball court. The wing to my left was built above four huge double door garages. The main portal was a vaulted roof rising sixty feet or more across a hundred feet of frontage, full glass panels supported by a set of four matching pillars made of intricately stacked rock layers. In front of the main entryway appeared six matching solid granite bunkers, like tank traps on Normandy Beach. Each was capped with an incongruous, delicate, black-iron light fixture. The remaining wing to the right was a long glass hallway extending from the main house, ending in a separate guest cottage of more modest mansion-sized proportions. This last structure was made entirely from huge red-stained round logs.

            I whistled softly.

            On the third floor balcony, seated around the steaming hot tub were seven men and a solitary woman in different stages of relaxation. I noticed the one I took to be Mrs. Singer's husband reclining in a heavy wooden cabana chair. She had given me a crumpled picture from an old newspaper. It matched. He looked like any one of a couple of dozen fifty to seventy year old men in Telluride who were trim, fit, perpetually tanned and smelled like money. You would see two or three on every walk through town, often with a trophy blonde, a third their age, in their clutches. I always waved and said howdy, envying them the blondes.

            I watched Patsy Susie Blaze sit down next to Singer and begin to rub oil into the soft, wispy hair of his chest. She wore a bathing suit and her frisky breasts rubbed against Singer's arm. The young man massaging Singer's temples, standing behind the cabana chair, was shirtless, with long dirty blonde hair that hung in his eyes, shiny black leather motorcycle pants hanging on his hips, and a huge silver dollar sized ring pierced his left nipple. I whistled softly again.

Didn't that hurt? 

            I should have been more careful, seeing that I had already taken notice of the half dozen Harley Davidson motorcycles parked around a matching set of white Mercedes sedans in the parking plaza. A vest with colors hung from a handlebar. It read: Sodom's Devils.

            The cold steel of the illegally shortened double-barreled shotgun pressed against the side of my neck and my jawbone. A placement sure to draw a quick shiver. I became as still as a rabbit.

            "Nosey bastard," a deep baritone voice said calmly behind me. This was good. Talk was better than an explosion.

            "Curiosity killed the cat," said another voice. This was not so good.

            I slowly started to raise my arms in a standard surrender position when the world erupted and the lights went out.

            They brought me around with an ammonia ampoule under my nose. I was in a bowling alley.

            "The 'peeping tom' lives," A blurry figure emerged from the pain between my eyes. The man sat forward in my field of vision and swatted me on the forehead with a chicken drumstick. I nearly blacked out again. The gristly chicken part drew back away and disappeared into a bearded mouth with bright white teeth. I watched him chew, noting his above average dental work, trying through a haze to find my present location in Wonderland.

            "What are we gonna do with him?"

            "Who the fuck cares?"

            "Sandy maybe?"

            "Naw, he said he didn't know this jackass. Some local private dick from town. We was to shoot him dead if we ever saw him again. You hear that asshole?"  I was given a shake. "Shoot you dead."

            "So what do you want to do with him?"

            "Fuck if I know."

            "We're in the bowling alley," someone said, "let's bowl."

            "Good idea."

            I was grabbed under both arms and jerked to my feet. I felt the bile come up in my throat as my ankles were yanked back and I floated perpendicular, face down, looking at the polished parquet floor of the bowling lane. A few trial swings, for and back,

            "Careful," I heard a voice from a distant canyon say and a hand squeezed my ass. It then removed my holster and gun. "Wouldn't want any of us to get hurt by accident, now would we?"

            I was run and then launched down the single alley towards the ten duckbills. I was a strike. My last thought before I lost both breakfast and consciousness was, "Who the hell puts a bowling alley in a ski house?"

Nine

Hammie Over Miami

            I sat in my office with a bag of frozen peas held against the lumps on my head. My scalp felt as dumplinged as a mogul field. That little reconnoiter hadn't turned out exactly as I had planned. The office phone rang. It hurt. I picked it up without thinking.

            "Yeah."

            "Wilfred?"

            "Sheriff," I said.

            "I thought I'd swing on by."  It wasn't a question.

            "Won't do you any good."

            "No?"  I could feel the excitement in his voice. Confrontation and physical violence would be the icing on the cake for the Sheriff in making this revocation of my right to a concealed weapon. I stifled a groan.

            "I lost it. The gun."

            "Lost it?"

            "Yup."

            "How's that?"

            "Up on Twister somewhere, must'a fallen out of my jacket or something."  I said, "The good Lord eighty-sixed the thirty-eight, so I don't need your damn permit, because I haven't got a gun."

            "That right?"

            "Yup."

            "Why don't I just swing on by anyway," the Sheriff said. Again, it wasn't a question. “We can talk about it.”

            "Sure thing," I said and was up and out the door before the phone knew it was hung up. I took the frozen peas with me, hung the "be back in five minutes" sign on the knob and taped my concealed weapon permit onto the glass, right under my name. Even Bueller couldn't miss it.

            "Give it up, Sherlock," I said to Cody as she slammed the car door. My head thumped like a bass drum.

            "You're late," she said.

            "Only five minutes," I said trying to steady the pea bag on my head so I could shift, steer, and hold my palm out for the phone in between activities.

            "That's like being early," I said

            "Like, what ever," she said flipping open her cell phone and concentrating her little face with the nub of a tongue peeking out between almost closed pearl white teeth.

            "I need the phone," I said. I had to call Ernie and get a gun, a big gun. I was going back to West Egg and set some things right; waste some trash, wreck some bikers. She punched up the speed dial.

            "Bailey?" she said into the phone, ignoring me. "You won't believe..."

            I removed the phone from her ear.

            "Bailey?  She'll call you back." I said calmly.

            "Listen young lady," I began as I disconnected Bailey, "This is a business phone. Important business, and your dad needs it to make a living."

            "A living?"  Cody's smirking retort was dry and ironic, so unbecoming a tone for an almost ten year old.

            The phone suddenly started playing Yankee Doodle Dandy. I glared at my daughter, knowing I wouldn't be able to figure out how to reprogram a normal ring. I looked at the caller ID screen. It was the Sheriff's office. I knew the number by heart.

            "On second thought, squirt," I said with a grand flourish, "you keep it."  Yankee Doodle went to voice mail as I handed the phone back to her.

            "Bailey?"  She lost no time reaching out. "What?"

            I looked down at her legs see-sawing in the front seat. I turned my attention back to driving and thought of Gatsby and the mysterious lady.

            "No, that was no boy toy," Cody playfully screamed into the phone to head off a wild rumor that was sure to run rampant at the elementary school tomorrow morning. "That was only my dad."

            Going back to West Egg would only cause me trouble. It was a stupid, macho, testosterone laden decision that was disappointingly true to form. I struggled with thinking of something different, something novel like my fictional heroes, to remedy the situation.

            Why was Sandy Singer hanging out with a motorcycle gang?  Were they just protection?  Why did he need protection?  Were they all gay like Agnes Singer said?  What had any of this to do with Lambis and his murder?  Gunless, phoneless, on the run, beat up physically and psychologically, confused; I knew it was time to try and write. I needed to piss out the venom in my churning guts with words, and drive a steaming hole of art through the bottom of the urinal.

            The soapsuds swirled around the firm mounds of her breasts as she let the warm water slosh in the high backed tub in her penthouse room at the Algonquin Hotel. He snored loudly in the next room, tangled in satin sheets, satiated and smug.

            She tried to relax and let the water wash away the doubts. She gently touched the bruised and tender lips between her legs. He had been rough. Dismissing her cries of pain as passion. She felt violated, raped. Why did he have to be that way?  She sighed, wishing it all could be over and done with. Why didn't he just leave her?  They all did, eventually. With all that was at stake, why did she risk coming back to his bed night after night.

            She was no fortuneteller, but the sequence of betrayal, revenge, ownership had played itself out again and again. He would grow tired of her, start to look for the spark of a new flame. She could only guess when the signs would make it necessary for her to do what must be done. She stared at the cold steel blue metal of the German Luger pressing into the plush folds of the white bath towel on the slender black-iron stand beside the tub.

            If only she had stayed in the car at the club with Gatsby, told him everything, begged for mercy, sanctuary. She could have saved a life; maybe her’s too. Maybe she still could. Her eyes closed and she felt Gatsby's strong hand groping at her throat. His tongue in her mouth. Her uterus shuddered without warning. She gasped.

            Death could never be so sweet.

            With the lights off in my office, hiding from the law, nerves on edge, I had tried to re-establish contact with the story. Erotic images kept getting in the way. I struggled with what the mysterious woman had to say. It was frustrating, awkward, futile. I finally pushed back from the keyboard and slapped the side of the computer monitor with an open palm. It stung and I held the numb fingers against my chest resisting the urge to put the tips in my mouth like a sissy.

            I checked the message machine, having shut down the ringer and let everything go directly to the box. Six messages and five of them from the Sheriff's office demanding that I come talk to them and file a report on the missing firearm at once. These five messages were the good news.

            I dialed the number from the sixth message with dread. I find that advancing age is a tool for buffering down every emotion except fear.

            "Rose, this is Wit."  I said loud enough to be heard over the blaring television at the other end of the line. "Our boy at it again?"

            "Wit, I had your word," she started raising her voice. "I've got your bill for two-hundred and fifty dollars."

            "Rose..."

            "I want his thumbs broken or something. Isn't that what you tough guys are supposed to do?"  I could hear her suck heavily on a cigarette as the applause from a game show spilled through the speaker. Is that your final answer?

            "Rose," I tried again. "He's just a bread squeezer, not a serial killer."

            "Shoot the bastard," She said.

            "Rose?  Rose!"

            Click.

            I had solved the case this morning by simply pointing a video camera at the bread racks, hidden behind a Pepsi display, and letting it run for four hours. Jeffrey Breene, billionaire, and ironically the same errant husband with the Z3, was also a bread mutilator. He had done eleven loaves of French bread in about forty-five minutes.

            Rose, I knew sadly, was most likely to soon be another victim of the legal system. The most she could file in court was a personal property claim. It would cost Rose close to twelve-hundred bucks, at two-fifty an hour, for the lawyer to prove that Breene was entering her grocery store and squeezing loaves of fresh bread until no one else would buy them. 

            The judge might even rule in Rose's favor, but would probably refuse to reimburse court costs, including my fee, figuring the whole thing was overkill and should be part of Rose's own cost of doing business to deal with vandals and not muddy the waters of the court with trivial lawsuits over a few loaves of bread. We would prove our case and be laughed out of court.

            The bread squeezer held all the cards. All I had was a tape of him doing the deed. I had called and talked to him about it. He wasn't the least bit embarrassed and told me to mind my own business. He also hung up on me when I called back. He then changed his number. It was unlisted. I had gone just about as far as I could with it.

            Rose felt she had hired me to put a stop to it. I told her I was hired to find the perpetrator, period. I had informed him he was no longer welcomed at the store and had finished my job. I was not honor bound to see to punishment.

            I knew I would have to do something. I hadn't wanted to be the bully. This was turning into another colorful, lose, lose, image reaffirming case. Unfortunately, I reminded myself, doing crap like this paid the bills. It was a fat chance I was ever gonna get paid for this gig unless I did the rest. I was being played by a no-nonsense, willful woman once more.

            Katie had been making asleep noises for five minutes but I read on, whispering, sitting with my back against her headboard, turning the large pages with the colorful pictures and short nonsense verses. I just loved Dr. Suess' Green Eggs and Ham. At the end I managed to slide off the bed and tiptoe out the door without even waking the cat, Topper, which lay curled up on the foot of Katie's bed. I noted proudly that I walked like an Indian. Makes sense, because I am an Indian.

            The cat jumped down, thinking I was on the way to the kitchen with the express mission to get him a late night snack, and Katie, fully awake in an instant, called from her room.

            "Night-o daddio, ham-what-am."  She was not sparing my feelings. "Hammie-over-Miami." 

            I threatened her with worse than death. She giggled and snuggled deeper under her covers.

            My wife was at her office working with a prosecutor in from Montrose and getting ready to try a case before "Hang 'em High" Judge Annie Cromwell in the morning at the local courthouse. I passed Cody's room and saw through the door that she was doing homework and talking on the cell phone. All's well within my small world of certainties.

            I poured myself a half tumbler of Jameson's neat and went out onto the porch. I couldn't get that damn woman out of my mind. Her breasts rose above the suds in the tub every time I close my eyes. What was the gun for?  Was she going to shoot Gatsby?  Why?  Who was this other man at the Algonquin Hotel who bruised and violated her?  Who? 

            The lights of Telluride spread out below the porch on Hollyhock Lane. The house was built on the side of the steep mountain that hems in the mining town from the north. Our cars had to be parked above the house on the seasonal jeep road to Imogene Pass. We walk down sixty-seven steps from the road to the house. Sure, it was the low rent district, average market value on our block was only a half million, "Ka-ka" by local realtors' skewed perspectives. We had bought it from my wife's uncle who sold it to us, as a wedding present, for what he had purchased it for fifteen years before. We were over-housed, by Telluride standards for working stiffs, but we could make ends meet, barely. 

            I felt the warm glow of the whiskey taking hold before I allowed myself to think about what to do concerning West Egg and Mr. Singer. It was hard swallowing the sudden swelling of anger over the manhandling I had suffered at the hands of the motorcycle jocks. Touching the knob on my head under my hair, I fought down those graphic images of revenge. Nothing was going to be enough once I started down that road and I knew it. Dig two graves was the Sicilian warning. But, it was my modus operandi, and never fails to get me in deep trouble.

            "Think," I said roughly. "Think."  I was shaking, holding the railing, trying desperately to put a lid on a steaming vent of anger. My imagination ran wild as I throttled each biker to near death.

            "Good idea, shamus" she said, slipping up behind me. "You think," she paused to underscore the joke, "I'll do the rest."

            Her arms circled my waist and her breasts pressed against the small of my back. I felt her lips through my heavy cotton denim shirt. She bit my skin and laughed a low sensuous chuckle, tugging at the shirt fabric with her closed teeth. Her hands began to slide my buckled belt open. She slid her hand inside the loosened front waistband of my pants.

            I closed my eyes and saw her breast with its rigid nipple emerge from the white suds in the tub. An erection pressed with increasing determination against the leg of my jeans. My tongue caught in my throat.

            Who?

            I turned and the hallucination was gone. What the hell?  The erection lingered to see what was what. Why wouldn't this strange fictional red head leave me alone? 

            Did I want to be left alone? 

            “Jesus H. Christ, of course I do,” I said.

            I drained the rest of the whiskey and walked slowly back towards the kitchen, hitching my pants and arranging myself as I went.

            I needed reinforcements, liquid and other, and I suddenly had an idea where I might find them. Unfortunately, Ernie and I had an appointment before getting anywhere near that solution tonight, and I was late. We were teaming up and going after the bread squeezer. I called Angelina. She swore at me in both Spanish and Ute; arriving by cab in ten minutes for an extra twenty. It was a good thing she was my cousin and her kids needed new shoes.

Ten

The Bread Squeezer

            We drove towards Mountain Village. My barber and I were in agreement that moneyed madness had always given me the willies. For Ernie it was simply the way things were. I was jumpy and nervous as we attempted to close the loop on Rose's grocery store criminal. The evidence of the crime was on the videotape resting in Ernie's lap.

            Fondling bread in public is not something you expect from a really rich guy. It just doesn't make sense in the worlds I experience. As F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "Life is much more successfully looked at from a single window."  I thought I knew what that meant. It didn't mean that I had to accept other folks' strange behavior as normal. I just had to accept their actions as their actions.

            "Jeffrey Oswald Breene made his money the good old fashioned way," Ernie continued his update, "he married it."

            "Nice work if you can get it," I answered taking the turn past the Peak's Golf and Racquet Club.

            "His wife is heir to, among other things, Occidental Petroleum. She is also the only child of only children, just like me. Old Jeffrey has squandered tens of millions of dollars in bad business deals and dead-end investments."

            "Sharp as stump?" 

            "Stumpier. The bumbler's net worth keeps rising by leaps and bounds each time one of her relatives dies. Go figure."

            "How do I find a wife like that?"

            "You did, old cod, you did."

            "I forgot," I said as I tried to locate the entrance to Single Tree Lane.

            Having more money than me wasn't hard, most homeless people would qualify. I had married my wife before I knew her family was bound to make her stinking rich some day. I was pretty sure it would never affect my bottom line and it was still hard for us to make the mortgage payments each month on her salary and my paltry retainers. We would never be on the financial level of Ernie or Jeffrey Breene.

            Ernie had known Jeffrey since his own Princeton days where they battled it out at the Eating Clubs' Open Whiskey Drinking contest from freshmen year on. Sampesee was an Ivy man, Breene was Cottage. He was stiff competition, yet neither ever won the coveted title. A cad named Reginald Ratt III won the blasted thing four years in a row. A feat unequaled, according to Ernie, in the two hundred and thirty years since the founding of that grand institution. No, not even F. Scott Fitzgerald, my current literary hero and Old Nassau's most illustrious partying grad, attained a similar high water mark of notoriety.

            I turned the Bentley in a long graceful curve into the courtyard of the only house on Single Tree Lane.

            Ernie told me he had met Jeffrey a few times since their college days. Didn't much like the fellow. Jeffrey had gotten sober and stayed that way. He took himself and his "business interests" much too seriously. But, the obscene amount of money he had accrued through marrying well and the grim reaper had come with a price. I was at least glad of that. Nobody's life should be perfect.

            His wife, according to my barber, was a sixth generation arrogant shrew, addicted at an early age to preserving the rarefied air of New England money, and thought sex was way beneath her station. She was, according to Ernie, a "paper thin, mean spirited bitch who hated Telluride and everything in it."  She stayed in Palm Springs, Biarritz, and Newport Beach eleven and a half months a year.

            Ernie said, "The only thing I really envy Jeffrey is his dirt on the assorted players in our little town. I hear the old boy shovels it around at cocktail parties and fund raisers like a barber." 

            I hadn't quite been able to tell Ernie about Jeffrey Breene's wife hiring me to find him in the sack with someone other than her. I had just gotten another advance by electronic deposit today, promising I would have the goods in a day or two. Now that I knew Jeffrey's destination for his liaisons with his paramour it was only a matter of time. 

            I watched Ernie fingering the five folded twenties of my recent advance in his pocket to recompense him for his troubles and to help pay my rent. Our plan was that he was going to talk with Jeffrey and get him to stop fondling loaves of bread in public places. It was an unpleasant situation, made worse by the fact that, to protect the less than crystal reputation of my little firm, it had to be done before Rose got violent. The clock was ticking.

            Jeffrey Breene answered the deep-throated chimes and swung open the huge wooden doorway. Corpulent was the word I was searching for. He hadn't seen his shoes on his feet, except in a full-length mirror, for a decade or more.

            "Still a dapper," Jeffrey wheezed from the exertion of extending his arm in Ernie's direction. Ernie was dressed to the nines in tweed and Egyptian cotton. Over it all he wore a long cashmere duster. Jeffrey ignored me with a shifty eye.

            "Jeffrey, my good man, great to see you," Ernie said as we entered the huge foyer.  

            "You're looking wealthy," Ernie said to the back of the figure that waddled ahead towards the interior of the house wearing the first smoking jacket with black velvet lapels I had ever seen outside of a 1930’s movie.

            "Yeah," he said over his shoulder with a laughing gurgle. "The inheritance fairy struck again. Babs' father kicked. I finally hit the ten-figure mark. A billion. Not bad for poor white trash, eh?"

            Jeffrey's parents according to Ernie had been upper middle class in Larchmont, New York. To hear him tell it now, he had grown up the son of a sharecropper in the Gobi desert.

            "Babs well?" Ernie asked.

            "Peachy," he dismissed the reference to the source of his fortune with a wave of his pudgy hand. "What's this all about?  What's he doing here?"

            "Mr. Thorpe is my driver tonight and he has a favor to ask after we have our talk."

            "I won't kiss him," Jeffrey barely contained his enjoyment at his joke. "No offense."

            "I wouldn't either," Ernie said.

            I kept my mouth shut, glared at the two of them and hoped for the best.

            Ernie had phoned Jeffrey at 7 p.m. and lied. I was only a small part of the lie. We were supposedly here on town business.  

            Public service is part of Ernie's own enjoyment of Telluride, and over the years he has joined a number of organizations to beautify this and protect that. One of these volunteer groups had evolved into the perfect bait for a man like Jeffrey. The San Miguel County Historic Preservation Commission is exclusive, powerful, and its decisions are law, literally.

            The Commission, by virtue of its role as a planning and zoning advisory board, has the sole authority to pass its judgment on the "historic nature" of all new construction of every single-family home in the region. The succulent thrill of telling someone that they must say, "please, may I," as they design a seven-million dollar home to put on their two-million dollar piece of property, is heady work indeed. Membership is similar to an Ivy League private club or the British House of Lords.

            "During the annual early fall 'Bicker,'" Ernie said after drink orders had been exchanged with the maid, "Or the real world's version of our beloved Princeton tradition, ‘many are proposed, few are entertained’ for a spot on the Commission. It's a very shallow ethnic and socially driven pool to fill vacated seats for life." 

            Ernie was chairman emeritus of the group.

            "The Commission is looking for a few good men," Ernie said to Jeffrey lifting his glass again and toasting in his chum's general direction. "A Cottage and Princeton man might be just the ticket."

            Jeffrey was fat, not dumb, and he eyed us suspiciously.

            "Why me?" he asked, and his piggish eyes drilled through my chin before he shifted back to Ernie.

            "I need a gentleman to stand alongside me, Jeffrey, old Maud." My partner's manner was toady. "There are so few of us left."

            Jeffrey tried to hide a piggish smile as he dragged the cup to his lips. Ah, Ernie, you still have it, I thought. The rest of the rent was almost in our hands.

            "We come from a long lineage of stalwart fellows, Jeffrey. We are the very people the masses get to make fun of in their movies and tabloids as they go about their humdrum lives. You and I stand a breed apart, old cod. Privileged, moneyed, educated, connected in ways the rest could not understand," Ernie winked conspiratorially, purposely excluding me, probably afraid I was about to giggle. "We are by breeding, eccentric. Those delightful little foibles each of us have that make such great gossip. Don't you just love having the luxury of texture when the rest are such milque-toast?  It drives the mob crazy."

            Ernie cleared his throat affectedly.

            "The problem sometimes is finding just the right deviant behavior, proper for a gentleman's pursuits, without pushing the wrong buttons," said Ernie

            Jeffrey squirmed in his seat. Finally seeing where this was going. He frowned.

            "I, personally, have always found the title 'Commissioner' to be just the right amount of honor and homage due a gentleman. Distinguished, but unpretentious, especially here in Telluride," Ernie started again.

            I listened as the night wore on, finally resigning myself to the long haul, and figured that by the time my partner was done convincing this bread squeezing miscreant of his duties as a gentleman we would be lucky to be making minimum wage.

            Things had slowly gone from bad to worse at the house on Single Tree Lane. Jeffrey had started drinking, Ernie and I hadn't stopped. The living room with its eight-foot tall fireplace and its grand piano was behaving like an ocean liner in a storm. Jeffrey clapped his porgy hands and called for another song.

            "Seventeen months," he slurred. "Sober seventeen goddamn months 'till tonight. Ofts' the wagon. Oh, boy."

            "Don't fret Jeffrey," Ernie caught his attention with a single E-sharp. "Welcome back to the fold. Your sins are forgiven. Gentlemen should never be morose."  He hit a full G-chord with both hands. "Or sober."

            Ernie launched into an old parody of Cole Porter's "It's Too Darn Hot."  The story is often told that his embryonic entertainment skills as a freshman at Princeton had matured and developed into a full-scale musical comedy routine by graduation. He always brought down the house. The student body loved him, at least according to Ernie.

            "Ernie," Jeffrey motioned him back to the table at the rousing finale.

            "I felt like I was just warming up. But, alas, I see a morning is just over the horizon."  Ernie addressed us in clipped New England tones. "My drinking partners are in their cups. It is time to sing Happy Trails."  Ernie closed down the grand piano. "I spare you all the humiliation."    

            "We's gentlemen," Jeffrey said profoundly.

            "Yes we is," I said simply, noting as a literate drunk the grammatical error. "Commissioner Breene?"  I added, "Promise me something?"

            "Any-sing."

            "Stay away from the breadline at Rose's."

            Jeffrey tried to focus and couldn't. His lips wouldn't work. He grinned, raised a sausage-sized index finger and tapped it alongside his nose.

            "It ain't the bread." He whispered as one conspirator to another.

            "Not the bread?" I said.

            "You'll see." He tapped his nose again and winked. "S'tommorrow, you'll see. We's gentle men."