Silent But Violent
A Thick Wilson mystery
The sun oozed through the blinds like hot fudge. It did a dirty waltz with the dust that was hanging in the air because all the other available real estate had been conquered by a hostile conglomeration of greases and grimes. The cleaning “lady” had gone out to buy a mop one day some bunch of years ago and never came back. Good help is hard to find. Especially if you pay what I do. Woe is me. I took a thick sip of hair of the dog and leaned back in my broken chair. A pile of mail full of nothing but past due was piled on my desk taunting me. I refused to bite. Besides, the hangover banging away like a hopped up jazz cat on the drums in my head was monopolizing my attention. In a way I was kinda glad of it. Because I knew only too well that out there in the stink of the city crime was having a gay old time, and damn it if it didn’t have a real nasty habit of turning over the rock I lived under and poking me with a sharp stick. Of course the ad I ran in the Gleaner didn’t help. Cast the first stone because I had bills to pay, cards to play, and bottles to buy.
There was a knock on the door. I knew hot knuckles when I heard them. I put the gin in a drawer and a mint in my mouth and tried to straighten a tie I wasn’t wearing.
“Come in,” I said.
She did. All five feet four inches of bad news. She was wearing so much eau de trouble my eyes watered. She sat her perfectly contoured haute couture’d form down in the cracked leather chair in front of my desk. And then stared at me with blue eyes that would make ice feel like burnt toast.
“So,” I said. Fun fact, my nickname in high school was Mr. Small Talk. Also, I gave it to myself.
“Mister Wilson?” She said. Her voice was a mixture of cotton candy and gun cotton. My feet started to sweat.
“Please, call me Thick.”
“Is that your real name? Our just a nom de guerre?”
“Two things,” I said, “First, I ain’t Chinese so knock off the mumbo jumbo. Second, it’s as real a name as Jim, Jane, or Wang.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just very, um, original.”
“My parents were fly blown. What can I say.”
She stewed on this like a prune. Until—
“You’re a detective,” she said.
“When I feel like making a living.”
“And when you don’t?”
“I shave tigers for the circus,” I said.
“You’re funny,” she said and lit a cigarette. The drag she took would’ve killed a G.I. on Omaha Beach deader than a German 88 could’ve. “But I don’t need a shave.”
She didn’t.
“You don’t,” I said, “So detective me it is.”
She dropped her cigarette on the floor. Didn’t stub it out. Closed her Antarctic blues and took a deep breath.
“It’s my husband.”
“Okay.”
“Someone wants to kill him.”
I nodded. This wasn’t the first time I’d been approached by a tall drink of water married to some shlub with a case of the fatals.
“And you believe they’re going to succeed?”
“No,” she said, “I’m afraid they’re going to fail.”
I tried to gulp. But broke wind instead.
She flinched like she’d been slapped across the face with an iron glove.
“What was that?” She said, her eyes tearing up like a kid in a cobra cage.
“My neighbour must have opened a can of eggs.”
She nodded, her look boring through my face like some kind of Neptunian Drill Worm, and said, “So?”
“So what?”
“Will you do it?”
“Kill your husband?” I asked, “Last time I checked that was the tip of the top of the list of things that are illegal.”
She pulled a cigar from her purse. A Cohiba the size of a donkey’s dink. She fired it up like she was stoking the forge in a steel mill, filling my office with more smoke than a Mississippi cook fire.
“I don’t [puff] want [puff] you [puff] to kill him,” she said, “I just want him distracted [puff] [puff] [puff].”
“Lady, I don’t wanna jake your snake here, so if you could just clear the air and stick to the details.”
“My husband is a very rich and powerful man with many enemies. He’s also very dangerous. He’s as ruthless as he is tanned.”
“Just how tanned is he?” I wondered aloud.
“He’s like Texas chaps on a Wyoming queer.”
I nodded. That’s pretty damned tanned. Like Brazil level tanned. Which meant that this gig was pretty damn dangerous. I guess she could stink my whiff—
“I’ll pay you five thousand dollars,” she said, sucking down the last of her Cuban smoke machine like she was a frat boy with a roach at a bring-your-own-weed party.
Five. Thousand. Dollars.
That’s a lot of cans of eggs.
“What does your husband do?”
“He’s a bass player. And an idiot.”
“Go on.”
“And by bass player I mean he has a large penis.”
“And by idiot you mean?”
“Do you enjoy rock and roll, Mister Wilson?”
“Of course, I’m not a square nor a philistine.”
“Then permit me the freedom to speak freely.”
“Of course. You called your husband an idiot not I.”
“Because he is. He gambles. He drinks. He wets his dink in the dirty puddles of sexual sewage.”
“Right. An IDIOT.” He sounded like my type of guy. “Okay then, pray continue.”
“His band is popular. He has money. But he also has debts due to habits that stink.”
“On top of the sewage sex?”
“Yes. Worse. Chili.”
“Chili?”
“Ass blaster. Five alarm. Fart factor fifty five. Anus eruptus.”
“No need to go on. I get it.” I did. I really really did. “And divorce?”
“Is out of the question.”
Those eyes. On mine. She could have been asking me to clean her gutters for all I cared. “What’s the name of his band?”
“Liquid Rain.”
“Never heard of ‘em.”
“They’re very popular.”
“So is chlamydia.”
“Are you trying to be funny, Mister Wilson?”
“No, I’m trying to be serious. You’re just making it tough on me.”
“Are you going to help me or not?”
Somehow her eyes got bigger, bluer, and sadder. It reminded me of a whale I’d seen at the aquarium. Turned out that whale died in captivity. It moved something in me. And it wasn’t the can of eggs I’d noshed for breakfast.
No.
Call it pity.
Or lust.
Or greed.
Or stupidity.
Whatever it was—
It worked.
To be continued…