bonus post, short story in Cobra's universe.

 sparked by a picture on Night Cafe; I couldn't resist putting a short story as a comment, for Johnny Fish [the artist]

https://creator.nightcafe.studio/creation/OtSMzBAjFaJ5yHgicDLq?ru=CardinalBiggles

The quick and the dead

 

I knew he was trouble the moment he came in the door.

One of the reasons was, that he was dead when he fell in.

There was a knife in his side.

It was my knife.

And I could hear the sirens.

It was going to be one of those days.

I was wearing gloves; I hadn’t touched anything without them. And since getting here, all I’d touched was the door when someone knocked.

The same someone who had shoved Jimmy the Sneak in through the door at my feet with such alacrity and malice aforethought.  I pulled the knife out of the wound, and dropped it in an evidence bag; no point letting the cops know whose knife it was. Not until I could clear myself.

I made my way out of the back door of the riverside shack, and slid back into my boat, thankful that I had rowed upstream rather than driving to the dive which the tipoff had sent me to.

The tipoff was now looking good for being involved in Jimmy’s murder. Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. And I had been fooled; the voice had sounded enough like Jimmy’s that I had thought it was him. But the body... the arm was stiff when I pulled out the knife, and that meant that Jimmy was already dead when I got the tipoff.

Jimmy is one of my noses.  Was, I should say. He had been looking into some smuggling for me; there was a good reward for whoever managed to get it stopped. Presumably the poor little sod was getting too close. 

I should never have loaned him my knife with the lockpick attachments.

I got back to the office, and changed out of the boilersuit I had used for the meet.  I knew Inspector Dangerfield would be down on me soon, like a ton of bricks. The old fart hates my guts because I’ve interrupted too many of his cases because he hasn’t the imagination I have.

I wasn’t disappointed.

He crashed through the door like a herd of rhinoceruses. Funnily enough, the collective noun for rhinoceruses is ‘a crash.’ It suited Dangerfield as his donut-belly preceded him by several minutes and carrying its own momentum with it, as it wobbled in outrage against my desk.

“You’ve really done it this time!” he growled, rudely.

“And good evening to you, too, Inspector,” I said, politely.

His pink, sweating face sweated more pinkly.

“Mayhew, I knew when I got the report that you must have done it,” he said.

“Marlowe,” I corrected him. Philip Marlowe is my professional name; nobody gets the reference to the oldstyle private eye any more, except a buddy of mine, who goes by the soubriquet of ‘The Cobra.’ He’s a killer for hire; an odd sort of buddy to have, but he’s helped me out more than once, and I’ve done research for him.  And to be fair, he only kills the sort of scum who deserve it.  In my business, you make some odd friends. Dangerfield deliberately miscalls me to annoy me; it doesn’t, particularly. One day he’ll do it on a charge sheet when I need an out.

“What am I supposed to have done now?” I asked, mildly.

The pink went via magenta to purple.

“Careful,” I said. “You’re becoming colouric...eh, choleric.”

The purple assumed a shade of puce which had to be seriously unhealthy.

“You rifled through Senator Carstairs’ office – or got your nose to do it,’ he said.

He was worrying about that when he had me bang to rights for murder? A murder I hadn’t committed, but he wouldn’t care.

Maybe I’d got out in time.

I leaned forward and poked his wobbling tummy.

“Inspector,” I said, “I don’t know if you’ve heard of this; but in this country and in this state, when you accuse someone of something, you have to have something called ‘ev-i-dence,’” I said the word slowly, and clearly, as if to a slow child. “And without this, the presumption of ‘inn-o-cence’ is considered inviolable. That means....”

“I know what it means!” he yelped. “But I do have evidence!”

“Since I wasn’t there, I fail to see how you can,” I said, relaxing.

If his evidence was incontrovertible, I’d be down at the precinct talking to him, not in my office.

“You left your business card!” he said, triumphantly.

I blinked.

“Is that the best you can manufacture?” I said. “That you swipe a few of my cards when in my office, and then drop one somewhere you want me to have been?”

I ran out of descriptors for his colour; it had a blue tinge to the purple which was really quite worrying.

“I do not manufacture evidence!” he screamed.

“Well, if you didn’t, who did?” I asked. “I don’t think any jury in the world, seeing your evident animosity towards me, would believe for one moment that you hadn’t left it there yourself. And that would be your career over, wouldn’t it?  Now shall I dial 911? You don’t look well.”

He collapsed into my client chair, panting, and all the colour draining out of him.

And there was a lot of colour to drain.

“I did find your card,” he said.

I shrugged.

“So what?” I said. “I have them on my desk for clients to take because, believe it or not, that’s what business cards are for. Maybe the senator sent someone to pick up my card because he needs a gumshoe. Maybe someone who works in his office did. Or someone who passed through. Or, whoever – how did you put it? Rifled through his office.”

“Someone you paid to go through it,” said Dangerfield.

“I have never said to anyone, ‘go and search Senator Carstairs’s office,” I said. “And I can swear to that with a clean conscience. Now, if one of my noses came up with the idea, I don’t deny some of them are a little rough around the edges; but I can’t be blamed for that. They are supposed to come back to me with leads for further instructions.”

I make a point of telling them this, as any one of them could testify. Not that they take any notice, and nor do I expect them to do so, but that’s not the same.  As the Japanese say, ‘there is a difference between what is said, and what is done.’

“Which noses have you got on a job at the moment?” he growled.

I frowned.

“You know I don’t give up my sources,” I said. I chewed my lip, looking, I hoped, convincingly worried. “I tell you what, though, I’m  expecting a report from one who said he had a lead. And he hasn’t called in. Now, if I was in your shoes, Amos Bellamy Cedric...” he hates me toting out his given names far more than I mind him getting my name wrong, “... Not that my feet would fit such outsize things, but if I were in your shoes, I’d wonder what Ji... what my nose had found out that he felt a need to rifle through a senator’s office rather than just come back to me.”

He glared at me, but his body appeared to have run out of enough pigment for another display.

“And what are you working on?” he demanded.

“The smuggling problem,” I told him.

He stared in consternation.

“Don’t leave town,” he warned, getting up too quickly, in my opinion, for a man of his constitution, and leaving my office.

I released a sigh of relief when he was gone,

Senator Carstairs! Our upright ‘taxes are the responsibility of all’ senator!

Or, I reminded myself, someone in his office. It had to be him, or someone close to him. I wondered what poor Jimmy had discovered.

When his body was discovered officially, as it should have been by now, I would pay for a decent funeral for him. I would also take on the mutt he loved like a child.

I waited for the phone call.

It came after about twenty-five minutes, enough time for Dangerfield to get back to the office.

“Marlowe? Come to the morgue. We’ve someone there we think you can identify.”

“Oh, shit; yes, I’ll be right there,” I said.

 

 

“It’s Jimmy,” I said. “I think his surname was Woodfield, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I need to go over to his place; there’s a dog he cares for. He’d want me to see to it.”

“It’ll do,” said Dangerfield. “I think you actually care.”

“I do,” I said. “I take it very personally when any of my noses are attacked.”

“If I hear of Senator Carstairs having so much as a hangnail, I’ll know where to come,” he warned. 

“You’d be wrong,” I said. “I want to see the bastard responsible in an orange suit on the Friday special spaceplane to the penal colony on the moon.”

For smuggling, this was a distinct possibility.

“What do you suppose Jimmy was doing in a shack on the banks of the Hudson?” Dangerfield asked me.

“Looking for clues to riverine smuggling?” I suggested. “Or, something as mundane as looking for somewhere to flit to, if he figured he’d been snooping on someone dangerous. His own place is none so salubrious, that somewhere you describe as a ‘shack’ could be considered much worse.”

“Yes, concrete of old docks right to the waterside, no chance of finding footprints,” he said, bitterly.

“Something Jimmy would have considered an advantage,” I nodded. “I think from that much, I can guess the area,” I added.

He glared.

“Don’t you go poking your nose into an official investigation!” he said.

“Perish the thought,” I said. “I won’t do more than poke my nose in to a dead friend’s business.”

 

 

I went to Jimmy’s place first.

It had been ransacked, and the dog had gone. Dangerfield got there just after I did.

“Don’t look at me,” I said, as we regarded the mayhem. “I have an alibi; I was at the morgue.”

He didn’t even query that one.

“Well, he must have had evidence which drove him to investigate further,” I said. “Unless he came up with a good place to hide it, it’s gone.”

“What do you know?” he yapped.

“Know? Nothing,” said. “But there’s a longshot that he mailed it to me before he headed off on his own.”

“You turn over anything to me if he did,” demanded Dangerfield.

“Of course,” I said.

As soon as I had xeroxed it, anyway.

Meanwhile, I went looking for the dog.

Jimmy had a kennel outside for the pup, for when he was off on a job. Mopsy was inside, cowering.  I irritated the cops in getting underfoot to open a can of pooch meat and put it out; but they caved when I threatened to report them to Animal Services.

I put down food, and went to load the rest into my car.

Then I went back to the kennel.

Mopsy knew me; or she wouldn’t have eaten. I’ve fed her before when Jimmy was in hospital.

In the end, I picked up the kennel and all, and put it in the back of my car. I have a biggish SUV; if you’re not using the grid to get about, you need an off-road vehicle, as nowadays most of New York’s roads that are off the grid count as offroad.

I took Mopsy back to the office.

I also decided to sleep there; I have a camp bed for such occasions.

Mopsy emerged and joined me on the bed, which was damnably uncomfortable, but also, somehow, comforting.

When I got up, she snuggled back down. It has to have been more comfortable than the kennel.

The kennel!

I abandoned the notion of the first coffee of the day, and went over the kennel with a fine tooth comb.

The roof had a hidden catch, and lifted to reveal a space inside where Jimmy kept important documents. I transferred them to my safe.

Then I sent out for coffee and breakfast, fed Mopsy, refilled her water bowl, and with coffee, eggs, bacon, fried mushrooms, fried bread, hash browns, baked beans and tomatoes, I got out Jimmy’s documents to peruse.

Most of it was his personal life, birth certificate, school record – such as it was – and Mopsy’s prize certificates for cleverest dog in the show.

And there was the envelope marked ‘for Philip Marlowe.’

It was all in there.

Enough to make the senator a person of interest, anyway; and all on real film, which can’t be doctored in any way.  If it wasn’t him, it was someone wearing his face with illegal nanotractors under the skin, possible, but not very likely. Those things are not easy to come by.

So, I called Dangerfield.

And made it clear to him that he could have everything as long as I was in for my reward from the IRS.

I got the reward; and Jimmy had a respectable burial.

Poor Jimmy.

This was one situation in which he would have been better to have come to me, not risking breaking into the senator’s office whilst the senator was on the wharf.

But that was why Jimmy was a bum who took jobs from others.

He didn’t know when to cash in the chips.

I kept the kennel.

It’s a good hiding place, and Mopsy has a new bed inside it, for if I leave her in my office.

Generally, however, her preferred sleeping place is over my ankles.