by Gary K. Wolf
“Yep “
“How come I never heard of her?”
“She keeps a low profile. She’s a writer.”
“What’s she write?”
“Short stories.”
“She…married?”
“Of course not. Who’d marry a woman built like her?”
I could name a dozen, starting with yours truly. “Let’s pay her a call.
“Eddie Valiant,” said Roger, “meet my beloved sister-in-law, Joellyn.”
I never learn. When dealing with a Toon, always watch for the ringer. She was a dead duplex for her redheaded sister, except for one thing—she was only six and a half inches tall.
“I didn’t say she was an identical twin,” Roger whispered.
Joellyn lounged on the windowsill, oblivious to the pigeons eyeing her hungrily from outside. Her tropical-patterned halter top could moonlight as a bow tie on a Tahitian waiter. Her matching wraparound sarong possessed less substance than the chintz drapes cheap eateries hang over their windows to slow down the sun. She tied her hair back with a piece of green thread even a dandy wouldn’t bother to pluck off his lapel. The tiny shoes on her tiny feet didn’t have the heft to leave footprints in a bowl of mashed potatoes. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.” Her lettering had the exact same curvaceous rise and fall as her sister’s. Except her entire balloon couldn’t fill the bottom of a thimble. I squinted to read it. “Everybody except Roger calls me Jo.” Figures. Short woman, short name.
She extended a petite hand. It sported a Bakelite bracelet the size of a pet collar—if your pet was an inchworm. I touched her palm with the tip of my finger, carefully. Hit her with a jolt of static electricity, and she’d fricassee like a broiled sardine.
Roger summarized his troubles in ten or twelve thousand unchosen words. He had read her right. She consented to hide him out as long as necessary.
That settled, I made for the door.
“Wait a minute,” said Roger. “You promised I could tag along, assist you with the case.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Yes you did. I distinctly remember. I know. I wrote it down.” He flipped through his notebook. “It’s in here verbatim. I’m certain of it. Give me two seconds. I’ll find it.”
“Whether I did, whether I didn’t, it’s a moot point. To stay out of trouble, you stay out of sight.”
“Oh sure. I forgot.” He closed his notebook. Dick Tracy still smiled on the cover. I tried my best not to do the same. “Gee, what a disappointment,” said Roger.
“That’s life,” I proclaimed. Call me the old philosopher.
“I’ve got an idea,” said Miss Microscopic. “Since Roger can’t go with you, why don’t I take his place? I am a writer, a trained observer of the human condition. I have a terrific memory for details. I’d be able to report everything that happens.”
“What a swell idea,” Roger proclaimed. “She’ll be my eyes and ears. Take her with you. P-p-p-please.”
“I’d enjoy the change,” said Shorty. “I don’t get out nearly as much as I should.”
Small wonder when the neighborhood cat’s likely to mistake you for lunch. I put the quick kibosh to this proposal. “Sorry, toots. I don’t work with women.” Especially ones who barely stand shoelace high to a Little League shortstop.
“I can be of help, immense help,” said Little Jo in a wafting balloon with the lacy pink sweetness of cotton candy. “I can go places, see things a normal-sized person can’t.”
Come to think of it, she was every private eye’s dream. A self-actuated burglary tool. She’d also be better than binoculars in the Peeping Tom department. And for eavesdropping, she beat a glass to the wall six ways to Sunday. I might be able to use her at that. “All right. Come along.”
I left with the frail riding tourist class in my breast pocket. She grabbed the edge and peeked out, making me look like I had Kilroy for a handkerchief.
When we got to the car, I transferred her into the glove compartment. “Help yourself to the bourbon,” I said, “and don’t touch the gun.”
She refused to let go of my thumb. “I’m not riding in there.” Two inches to the left and her BB-sized balloon would have taken my eye out.
“Okay. Give me a minute. I’ll have the maid make up the ashtray. “
Hard to tell without a jeweler’s loupe, but I swear the edges of her perfect lips turned up into the faintest hint of a perfect smile. “How about if I ride up here with you?” She caught the bottom of my steering wheel, somersaulted up to the dashboard, and took a seat in the curved hollow that framed my speedometer. And did it wearing a sarong. Dorothy Lamour, eat your heart out.
What the heck. Let her stay.
I pulled out into traffic and flipped on my turn signal. The light flashing behind her sarong silhouetted her gams. I drove clear around the block, four turns worth. Even if they’re only three inches long, great legs are great legs.
17
When bungalow apartments started renting for more than the price of a pilfered pullet, the slyest foxes bought up the henhouses they’d been raiding, evicted the chickens, and rented the refurbished coops to struggling clucks like Vivien Leigh.
I knocked on her door. The banging didn’t faze my minuscule passenger. She was dead to the world, rocked to sleep by my rolling gait. For neatness’ sake, I pinched off the string of Z’s dangling out of my pocket.
Vivien let me in. Combining cheap decoration with acting inspiration, she’d wallpapered with Southern voice balloons. They dripped jasmine and mint in such quantities my shoes stuck to the floor.
As we drove to lunch, she slid my Luckies off the dashboard and lit two. She put one between my teeth. “I fancy you as quite the adventurer,” she said.
“Old rough and tumble, that’s me, although lately it’s been mostly rough.”
She didn’t leave an inch of space on the seat between us. “I’ve never met a real private eye before. What exotic and dangerous cases have you worked on recently?”
“It’s only exciting in the comic strips, honey. My best case wouldn’t run three panels.”
“My, but you’re forthright.”
“You want polish, date a guy with candelabras instead of brass knuckles.”
I fool easy, especially concerning women, but I swear she didn’t learn her laugh in acting school. “I believe I’ll stick with you. “
She requested a stop. She’d been invited to a formal party at Selznick’s house next evening and needed a new dress. She asked me to help her pick one. “I need a gentleman’s opinion.”
“I’ll try and find a gentleman to give you one.” Me and fashion don’t mix. Doris once dragged me to a clothing consultant who studied my skin color and told me I was a winter personality, harsh and colorless and cold. That meant I could wear anything I wanted. What’s the big deal? I do anyway.
Warren Woodpecker, the owner of the dress shop, swished out to meet us. He wore a gold lame vest, Kelly green frill-fronted dickey, maroon leggings, and a fuchsia beret. He had augmented his bustle with a fistful of peacock feathers and had waxed his beak with red polish. His chest and shoulder nap were fluffed out into a feather boa. I’d hate to see what other splendors hung inside the closet he came out of. “Vivien, my love, how wonderful to see you again.” His balloon smelled of lemon drops.
Vivien described the look she wanted.
Warren conjured up a string of thought pictures portraying what he had in mind. An assistant snagged his balloons in a sterling-silver net and shook them onto a cutting table. Vivien separated his glad rags into two bales, the out-and-out rejects and the possibles. The rejects went into a back room to be shellacked, fitted with tabs, and sold as high-fashion clothing for the well-decorated paper doll. Vivien’s chosen few were pumped full of air and given to her to try on.
“You pretty tight wi
th Selznick, are you?” I asked her through the dressing-room door.
“Not particularly.” She came out and sallied around in front of me dressed in a vagrant’s outfit, by which I mean it had no visible means of support. “Mr. Selznick likes to have pretty girls at his affairs. I suspect he regards me the way he would a party decoration.”
I doubted it. That was her photo, not a roll of crepe paper, Selznick tried to hide from me. “What do you know about his lieutenant, Pepper Potts?”
She returned to the dressing room. Her voice came out muffled as she slid another creation over her head. “Uncouth, belligerent, and brash. Not at all the sort I would expect to function as Mr. Selznick’s right hand.”
“Quote me specifics.”
“He exercises his casting couch.”
“Along with half the producers in Hollywood.”
“But with Potts, it’s different. He’s not interested in girls like me, if you follow.”
“He doesn’t like his women bright, charming, witty, and beautiful?”
“He doesn’t like them human. Pepper Potts goes strictly for Toons.”
Little Jo crawled out of my pocket, her hands rubbing circles around her eyelids. “What are we doing here?”
Vivien appeared wearing another stunner. “I believe this is the one.” She spun in circles in front of me. “What do you think?”
“Terrific.”
Vivien returned to the dressing room.
Shorty belted the underside of my chin. Her sock gave me a bruise that added an hour to my five-o’clock shadow. “You’ve got a client fearing for his life, and you recess for a fashion show? What kind of detective are you?”
“The kind who doesn’t take lip off a squirt.”
“Get back on the job.”
“Make me.”
She slid down my tie the way a fireman descends a brass pole. She dove into my trousers.
I stood with a jerk.
Vivien came out of the dressing room holding a large dress box. “What’s wrong?”
“A mild case of ants in the pants.”
She handed me the box. “I hear jitter-bugging’s the cure. I know a terrific dance club nearby. Care to give it a go?”
Little Jo snapped the elastic on my boxers. Hard. And low. “Sorry, Viv. I just remembered a job I’ve got to do.” I tossed her the dress box and broke the world’s record for the eight-and-a-half-yard dash to the door. “I’ll call you later.”
“You do that,” she said. She didn’t give me much reason to suppose she’d answer.
Little Jo rode my shoulder like Long John Silver’s pet polly. “Where to, boss?”
I stopped at a pay phone. I gave the operator Ferd’s number.
“Hey, watch it,” said Thumbelina. “You nearly strangled me with the cord.”
A balloon came out of the mouthpiece. “Flatfoot.”
“Ferd, Eddie.”
His balloon dropped from pure black to a shade of gray. “I eyeballed Wrightliter’s film.” The weight of his words nearly crushed my cheekbone. “Shame on you, Eddie. You’ve been a scamp.”
“If I want an editorial, I’ll read the Telltale. Spill it to me simple. Did she sing?”
“Long, loud, and way off key.”
“How bad is it?”
The mouthpiece bulged and strained. His balloon popped out the size and shape of a thundercloud. “As bad as it comes.” His stormy words drifted out of the phone booth and rained down foul weather for two blocks around.
“Wrightliter stumbled across a deal between Kirk Enigman and your old friend Tom Tom LeTuit. Seems rum’s the main ingredient for a new drug they’re peddling. Wrightliter figured to cop an exclusive expose. When Enigman bit the weenie, she went looking for LeTuit. He’s not an easy man to find. She figured to buttonhole him at the end of a smuggling run. She greased the sedan, and he carted her along.”
“What’s this drug all about?”
“Wrightliter only knows one thing about it.” His balloon hung in the air like the black flag flying from the mast of a plague ship. “It’ll destroy the fashtumping human race.”
He hung up without saying goodbye.
18
Billing Dingles as a cabaret equated to calling a skunk a perfume container. For seedy, the place rivaled a Burpee’s display rack.
It occupied an old movie house that had finished its run playing to what movie moguls euphemistically call the adult trade. Flyers advertising the theater’s final feature still inhabited the row of cracked glass poster frames out front. To save the price of new signs, the management named their establishment Dingles after that last picture show. To prove they had a modicum of taste, they whitewashed out the part about Diddles Dubuque. The broken-down ticket booth featured a dress dummy modeling the latest lack of fabric from Frederick’s of Hollywood.
Plaster another travel sticker on the steamer trunk of a wayward civilization.
“This is no place for a lady,” I told Halfpint. “Wait for me in the car.”
“Not on your life. There’s nothing on display in there that I don’t see every day in my bathroom mirror.”
“Except here it’s not in miniature.”
She stomped her foot hard on my shoulder pad. “That’s very funny, Eddie. Ha ha ha. What do you do for an encore? Tell little moron jokes? Ridicule dwarfs? Kick a cripple? Just because I’m small doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”
“All right, lay off. You want to slum, fine.”
She cozied herself into the crook of my neck and anchored her arm to my collar. “Fine.” She crossed her stems. I can honestly say I’ve never seen it done better. “To show you there’s no hard feelings,” she said, “the first round’s on me.” She flashed her China-doll smile. “Two short beers.”
Dingles’s barker, a slimy, bloated slug, wore a raggedy straw boater and a threadbare red-and-white-striped sport coat that came to him as a hand-me-down from a melted barber pole. He was slippery as sin. I’d bought vacuum cleaners off door-to-door salesmen not half as persuasive. He conjured up picture after perfect picture of the naughty antics awaiting us inside, basically bawdier versions of the comic-strip nonsense your neighborhood paperboy dumps on your front steps every morning for a quarter. Here it cost six bits. I negotiated half price for the snub. I paid our dues, and we went in.
The interior retained the movie’s sloping floor. The incline ran straight downhill from the bar to the alleyway exit, a great convenience for patrons who needed a rolling start home.
The air reeked of drain-plug gin. A thick, interlocked layer of wall-to-wall peanut shells kept us from falling into the cellar.
Every watering hole attracts its own unique crowd of regulars. At Dingles, it was barflies. I counted at least one of every variety—common house, horse, shoo, May, fire, and gad. Three, sometimes four-fisted snifters, these guys, and nothing sissy. Boilermakers, straight down the thorax. Imagine the racket when these loop-de-loopers got a buzz on.
Bowl snacks consisted of gruel regurgitated by yesterday’s clientele. Behind the bar, where most barkeeps hang a sap, Dingles kept a swatter.
A self-appointed music critic had smashed a blunt instrument through the jukebox. The management had shoved the juke into a corner and replaced it with a honky-tonk piano, its bass keys worn to nubs by years of lowdown boogie.
Little Jo and I sat at a table a better saloon would burn in its fireplace. A printed notice beside a wine bottle candle holder advertised two for one on well drinks. From the taste, Dingles’s well pumped mostly water.
The female crab louse waiting our table wore an apron, a pasted-on smile, and nothing else. Her pendulous, hairy antennae swung free and loose. So did her lips when I slipped her a fin and asked about the woman Baby Herman left with last night.
The waitress told me the woman came in from time to time.
She was tight as a tick with the club’s songstress. The Telltale had pegged her looks right. She was so plug ugly, the scaliest regulars wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot proboscis. The waitress didn’t know her name. I tucked my card under her vestigial wing along with the promise of a double sawbuck if she’d call me the next time the woman showed up. I ordered us another round.
“What next?” asked Little Jo. She flipped idly through the pictures in the billfold I’d left on the table.
“We stick around for the floor show. Maybe the chanteuse will sing us a better song.”
The crab louse returned with our drinks. “What do you know,” said the waitress as she set our glasses on the table. “That’s her!”
“Who?” I asked.
“The horsey-faced trixie who left with Baby Herman.” She tapped a picture in my wallet.
I slipped it out of its cellophane holder and handed it to her for a closer look. “You sure?”
She pointed at her multifaceted eyes. “Honey, with these, you take in everything, whether you want to or not.” She gave the picture a long, hard onceover. “That’s her, no question about it.” She handed the picture back. “Great job of retouching. You’d never know she was a Toon.” The waitress scuttled off to the next table, where she took an order from a randy mosquito who couldn’t keep his stinger off her carapace.
Little Jo indicated the snapshot clutched in my fist. “Who is that?”
“Nobody you’d know.” Maybe nobody I did, either. The waitress had plunked her pincer on my photo of Heddy.
The lights dimmed for the floor show. Without introduction or fanfare, out came my second shock of the evening. The club’s featured blues belter was none other than Lupe Chihuahua.
She wore sling-back pumps with high heels only a stilt walker could love, a pair of tattered elbow-length white gloves last used by a Rose Parade beauty queen to whip the horse pulling her float, an assortment of the jewelry that gave the five-and-dime its nickname, and a dark blue gown, skintight and cut low enough to lose Dingles whatever slim shot it had at a family trade.
