EQMM, September-October 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The car's tires squealed as we zoomed down the block, and behind me, I heard an explosion. Either the rusted gun had gone off, or the barrel had blown out, or the united brainpower from the pus-faced tweakers ignited their at-home meth lab.

  I wasn't going to turn around to find out.

  Besides, I had to swerve some more to avoid the phalanx of cop cars streaming onto the street.

  I went up on the grass of a nearby house, the cop cars all stopped around me, and their occupants got out, keeping the doors open and aiming their goddamn not-rusted guns at me.

  I had to get out, hands over my head, saying, “I'm the one who called! I'm the one who called!"

  It took awhile to convince them, but convince them I did. I never did find out what happened to the tweakers—I had to go to the nearest precinct, give my statement, endure the heartfelt gratitude of my clients, a.k.a. Karma's idiot parents (whom I forgot to advise on changing their child's name), and then I went back to my lovely apartment in beautiful downtown Burbank and passed out from exhaustion.

  Just a day in the life of Belinda Sweet, down-on-her-luck private eye (whose parents were not at fault for her name, Belinda being a perfectly acceptable moniker in the early 1960s, and Sweet being the name of the idiot she had the misfortune to marry and the good sense to divorce).

  A day in the life—and, oh yeah, also yesterday afternoon.

  * * * *

  "Yesterday afternoon,” I said to the guy at the bar, “I was entertaining ten cops, four tweakers, and a little girl. So sorry, I can't alibi you."

  "Damn,” he said, and moved back to his original seat at the end of the bar.

  He didn't seem fazed by my oh-so-eloquent rejection, but the bartender raised his eyebrows at me. Dunno if that was a reaction to my description of my yesterday or if it was just a silent query about the state of my beverage, which was, by the way, one appletini. Not because I happen to like appletinis—I don't. I don't like any kind of tini except a martini, and even that's stretching things a bit—but because the appletini with the three green apple slices decorating the slightly apple-green martini glass was my signal to the potential client who suggested this place that, yes indeed, the ugly broad at the bar was the person he was supposed to meet.

  I'd been here exactly one hour, had exactly one sip to see if the damn drink was as disgusting as it sounded (Nope. More disgusting), and no client had shown up. Unless the client was Mr. Alibi.

  I wasn't about to ask him, though. If he wanted my services for yesterday afternoon, he should have hired me yesterday morning.

  As if he knew I was thinking about him, he looked over at me. “Do you know anyone who can give me an alibi for yesterday afternoon?"

  He was sounding desperate.

  "No.” I said.

  And then, because I couldn't resist, I asked, “What do you need an alibi for, anyway?"

  "Oh,” he said, with a shrug of his left shoulder. “Nothing really. Except that I kinda sorta killed my wife."

  * * * *

  This was what they called, in the trade, a confession. I kinda sorta shoulda called the cops right then and there, but I was in a bar, and I had an appletini and the guy didn't look exactly sober, and he was asking me for an alibi, and he probably still wasn't all that serious.

  Or maybe he was. The bartender thought he was. The bartender said, “How do you kinda sorta kill your wife?"

  "With a shotgun,” the man said, and this time I wasn't the one who called 911, it was the bartender, who wasn't even really discreet about it.

  The cops showed up and hauled the guy away, even though we had no real proof he shot his wife or that the woman was even dead. All we did have proof of—or at least all I had proof of—was that this bar was in a better neighborhood than the tweaker house, because the police response time to a hint of an emergency in this part of town was twenty times shorter than their response time to an actual emergency in the tweaker neighborhood.

  Me, I waited another half an hour for my client, who never showed, stiffing me for my time and the stupid appletini. And as I sat there, watching the apple slices dissolve into whitish goo, I had the horrible, awful feeling that Mr. Alibi really had been my client, and that I had handled the encounter poorly. Maybe the poor bastard hadn't shot his wife. Or maybe he hadn't killed her. Or maybe he blamed himself for leaving her alone that afternoon when the boogeyman broke into their upscale apartment and shot her while she was waiting in her negligee for Mr. Alibi.

  Yeah. And I was going to win the Miss California pageant next year.

  Still, I couldn't get him off my mind, which was why I was Belinda Sweet, down-on-her-luck private eye, instead of Belinda Sweet, rich-and-famous private eye.

  I got obsessed with the strangest, most non-lucrative things. Like Mr. Alibi and his mysteriously shotgunned, possibly dead wife.

  * * * *

  First, I tried to fight the obsession. I'd had these things before, and they're not just bad for me, they're bad for business, especially after all the great press coverage I was getting from the Karma Maggerty case.

  If I really wanted to, I could've stayed in my office for the next week and answered the phone. Fifteen reporters called to each possible client, but that meant there were possible clients, which didn't always happen to me.

  Of course, the fifteen reporters weren't real reporters. They were either tabloid reporters or some junior hack from the local affiliates. A few were from those goofy celeb shows like Extra and Entertainment Tonight, which had to have been hurting for real celebrity news. But this story did have, as one “reporter” explained to me, a connection to the mayor of the nation's most important city, a kidnapped child, and a gravelly voiced P.I. right out of central casting.

  Nancy Grace, he'd informed me, had gotten famous on a lot less than that.

  In a valiant attempt to shake off the obsession, I called back every single potential client, realized that a large percentage of them were loons with decades-old cases that other people had tried to solve, and half of the remaining group had the deadly dull I-think-my-spouse-is-cheating-on-me cases that made my work so darn fun.

  I sent most of those cases to my better-equipped colleagues (one of whom is a multimillionaire because [hello!] this is Los Angeles and everyone is cheating on everyone else) and kept the three new insurance companies who wanted another fraud investigator as well as one of the missing-child organizations that wanted me on permanent retainer.

  The company clients all wanted an actual meeting along with a rates card, which I did draw up. The meetings were all scheduled for the following week, which left this week with nothing for me to do except preen in front of every single camera in Hollywood—which I certainly would not do.

  So I obsessed. And when I couldn't take it anymore, I trudged back to the fern bar.

  Well, actually, I drove. It only felt like trudging because driving in L.A. traffic always feels like trudging.

  The same bartender was on duty. At least, I hoped it was the same bartender. He too looked like a guy out of central casting, and the uniform didn't help. It wasn't a uniform, per se, just a white shirt with the bar's name in green over his right breast, but he wore the shirt with the pair of black pants that the owner of the fern bar had clearly mandated.

  "You remember me?” I asked the bartender.

  "Appletini, right?"

  I grimaced. “Not normally."

  "Duh,” he said and grinned. “Whiskey, right?"

  "Not today,” I said, a little startled he'd guessed accurately. “Gimme whatever you got that's on tap."

  He poured me a nice piss-colored name-brand American beer which both of us knew I wasn't going to drink as I climbed into my place at the bar.

  It worried me that I had a place at the bar. At this bar, anyway. In my neighborhood bar, which was properly dim and scarred up, with no windows at all and certainly no plants, I had a regular seat and a standing order, not to mention a running tab.

  But not at this bar. Wi
th luck, I wouldn't come into this bar again.

  "That alibi guy we called the cops on yesterday,” I said, “you ever see him before?"

  "No,” the bartender said.

  "Did he, by chance, pay for his drinks before the cops came?"

  "Handed me a credit card when he ordered the first drink,” the bartender said. “I closed out his tab as the cop car was pulling away."

  The bartender grinned at me. I looked at the bar's name on his shirt and realized he didn't have the standard fern-bar metal name badge. Maybe this place had a bit more (less?) class than I expected.

  "Ted,” the bartender said.

  "Hmm?” I asked.

  "You were looking for my name. It's Ted."

  I grinned. “Belinda."

  He held out one of those sun-wrinkled hands. I took it. It was cold-damp, like he'd just had it in a bucket of ice, which was entirely possible.

  "So why are you asking about the tab for a guy who wanted to use you as an alibi, and why were you drinking an appletini yesterday when you so clearly find them disgusting?"

  I was thinking that he would make a better private investigator than I was. Which made me flush just a bit.

  I took a deep breath and said, “I work as—"

  "A private investigator. I know.” He inclined his head toward one of the three televisions angled over the bar. “Your face has been all over the news."

  My flush grew deeper. I wasn't used to being recognized, and I didn't much like it. Which decided me then and there. No interviews, not for the Karma case, not for any case. Once some other big thing happened in L.A.—and it would only be a matter of days (or hours)—my mug would be off the big screen, and people would eventually forget.

  "Yesterday, I was waiting for a client who never showed,” I said. “Then I got to thinking that maybe Mr. Alibi was my client, only he didn't approach me in quite the right way."

  "You want to work for a guy who killed his wife?"

  "No,” I said. Which wasn't exactly true. I didn't want to work for him, but I did want to find out about him. “I mean, I'm not going to give him an alibi, but I do want to know what he really needed."

  "Someone to take the shotgun away before he turned it on his wife,” the bartender said.

  "What he needed yesterday,” I clarified.

  "I think we gave him what he needed,” the bartender said, picking up a bar rag and wiping the already highly polished bar with it.

  "I do too,” I said, “but still . . . “

  "You're feeling guilty?"

  "No."

  "Angry?"

  "No."

  "Then what's the problem?” he asked.

  "I just want to know what the hell he really did."

  There. I'd said it. I wanted to know how nutty Mr. Alibi really was and if he'd shot his wife in a jealous rage or if he'd just cold-bloodedly hauled out the 12-gauge and pointed it after she served him a tough steak.

  Because even if he had shot her at point-blank range, it wouldn't have made the news. Or it wouldn't have on the kind of news day that yesterday was (and the day before), with Karma's dramatic interview (That lady, she saved me) and the mayor promising to rid the city of tweakers so no family would ever have to suffer like that again, and the dramatic audio of my second 911 call. (Gee, y'think they lost the first one?)

  "You want to know what he really did?” the bartender asked, as if I were nuts. “You're one of those chicks who gets off on blood and brains all over the wall?"

  "Noo,” I said, losing a bit of patience. “I'm one of those chicks’ who sometimes discovers a question that needs an answer before she moves on to something else."

  The corners of his mouth twitched. He was holding back a smile.

  Damn if Ted the bartender hadn't been toying with me.

  "You're asking about credit-card receipts,” he said. “That means you want me to either give you his name or his phone number or both."

  "You took his phone number?"

  "No,” Ted said, “although I'm supposed to. Especially now, when people's credit cards are being denied left and right."

  "But you don't,” I said.

  "Because most people think I'm hitting on them when I ask.” He shrugged one broad shoulder. “It's too much of a hassle. I just put a fifty-dollar hold on the card, and that does the trick ever so much better."

  I frowned. The hands told me he'd been bartending forever. The brains told me he should be doing something else.

  "This your bar?” I asked.

  "You think I'd be wearing this stupid shirt if it was?” he countered.

  I acknowledged that logic with a simple move of my head.

  "That was your not-so-subtle way of asking what a smart boy like me is doing in a place like this?"

  "Yes,” I said.

  "Pissing off my mother,” he said, and walked away from me.

  For a minute, I thought he wasn't coming back, but he did. He just went to the back and came out with a slip of paper that had obviously come from a credit-card machine.

  "Stanley Donen,” he said.

  "What?” I said.

  "Stanley Donen.” Then he spelled the name just so I'd get it right.

  I must've had an odd look on my face, because when he looked up at me, he said, “What?"

  "You might be smart, bartender boy,” I said, “but you don't know your Hollywood history. Stanley Donen is a director from the nineteen fifties. He directed Singin’ in the Rain."

  "I thought that was Gene Kelly."

  "Him too,” I said.

  "You don't think this guy is Donen's son or something,” Ted said.

  "Could be,” I said. “Donen's last film was in nineteen eighty-four. But Mr. Alibi doesn't seem like Hollywood royalty, does he?"

  Ted looked at me oddly. “You think you can spot Hollywood royalty?"

  "There's generally an air of entitlement."

  "I dunno,” Ted said. “Asking to be alibied seems rather entitling."

  I shrugged. It didn't seem that way to me, but I wasn't going to argue it.

  "It can't be a fake name, you know,” Ted said. “He had identification."

  "You asked to see his ID?” I asked, knowing how old Mr. Alibi looked. No one in his right mind thought that man was under twenty-one.

  Ted made a face at me. “Not exactly."

  "What does that mean?” I asked.

  "I mean you need ID to get a credit card."

  "You do,” I said. “You just don't need your own."

  * * * *

  Mr. Alibi had given the same fake name at the police station, along with a home address where, the arresting officer told me with some irritation, a lovely middle-aged woman (emphasis on lovely) had flashed a rock the size of Rhode Island with a matching wedding band on her left hand and claimed to be his wife.

  His living wife.

  She also claimed her husband had a flair for the dramatic and liked to spend his afternoons shocking people.

  So the police had investigated no further, warned him that he was out of line and to never do anything like that again, mentally added the phrase in our jurisdiction because they had a hunch he would do something like that again if he had enough drinks in him, and sent him on his merry little way.

  So off I went on my merry little way, trudging to the address the cops gave me, which happened to be a not-so-small house in Beverly Hills, which was probably another reason why the cop hadn't investigated much further, since whoever bought the house could've paid for a dozen cops just like him (and probably had).

  The house was on one of those quiet cul de sacs that had been all the rage back when Beverly Hills starred as the wealthiest neighborhood in Los Angeles, back when the idea of hillbillies with money was funny and outré and kinda ironic, instead of the unintended result of a reality TV show.

  I had a moment of doubt as I pulled up in front of the long curving driveway. The house was a remodeled 1960s mansion that wanted to be a suburban ranch house, but looked lik
e it had swelled out of control. It was painted forest green and white, and because it was in Beverly Hills, the forest green looked appropriate and lovely when compared to the green of the plants and the spectacular green of the lush lawn.

  No water crisis in this part of the city, or maybe someone was ignoring the limit on water usage that had been in effect—gosh, since I moved here as a toddler, way back in the dark ages.

  Maybe, I said to myself (well, not “said,” exactly; “doubted” is more like it), maybe he actually is Stanley Donen's kid, and he inherited the house, and he's the kind of crazy that ninety-nine percent of all Hollywood offspring are, and his lovely middle-aged wife (emphasis on lovely) tolerated it because it included the money to support her in the style that only a failed actress/model could aspire to in middle age.

  Then I came to my senses, remembered that even though I was a down-on-my-luck private eye, I was still a private eye, with all kinds of modern tools at my disposal, which meant that I had an iPhone that I didn't entirely understand, and I leaned back in the driver's seat, logged onto the Internet Movie Database, and looked up Stanley Donen.

  He was still alive, although imdb didn't tell me where he lived. He had three kids, all boys, two in the Biz, as folks say around here. Not a one of them was named Stanley, although all were about the same age as my fake Stanley. So if he had been Stanley Donen's kid, he would've been listed in IMDb. They had plenty of time to scope him out. He was too old to be a grandkid, so he was a fake.

  My heart leapt, which is an actual feeling that some down-on-their-luck private eyes have when things go their way. (The first time it happened, I thought it might be a cardiac arrhythmia that was heading toward a heart attack—which tells you just how rare that leapy feeling is.)

  Then I went to the L.A. County Web site and looked for the deed registration page, only to discover that some bastard had taken it down in a fit of civic pride (more likely fear of a lawsuit because of all the personal information stashed on that site). I'd used that registry more times than I wanted to think about, and I felt momentarily irritated that the information wasn't available to me and then I realized that if I were a true hacker, I could find the information anyway, but I wasn't a true hacker, not that kind, anyway, and besides, it would be easier to drive to the county offices and just ask to see the deed because it was, after all, public information.