A Pulpy Spoof

By Charles Shea LeMone

Outside a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside a dog, it is too dark to read.

                          Groucho Marx

The California rain beat on my office windowpane like an angry flock of Baltimore ravens with nothing better to do on a Friday night in Los Angeles than torment me. As usual I was hosting a fleet load of regrets as familiar as the nagging pain in my gut from decades of guzzling cheap whiskey and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes like I was still scared shitless in a foxhole somewhere in Normandy wishing Adolph Hitler had been born a woman bent on pleasing everyone within a twelve mile radius of her.

Naturally, thinking along those lines summoned up the unwanted memory of Olga dumping me after catching me making a play for her burlesques dancer roommate while I thought she was conked out in the next room. Larger than the entire screen at the Chinese Theater, I will always remember the sight of her, crazed and infuriated, that night before I tried ducking under her roommate’s Murphy bed.

“Fooled again, you jackass, you!” I could also hear her saying as she swung a wrought-iron floor lamp at my head when I stuck it out to explain I’d mistaken her friend for her in the dark, a lie she was not about to buy even if I’d been offering a-hundred-thousand books of Green Stamps to top the deal off.

When the phone on the desk beside my still-aching head rang, it took a second or more to realize it was not an alarm clock—so unnatural to my ears was the sound.

“Doghouse Riley speaking,” I managed to utter after the third ring reminded me of all the bills left unpaid in the overflowing trash basket I’d stolen years ago from my first client.

“You the same Doghouse Riley private dick I see listed here in the telephone book?” a woman sounding like Greta Garbo with a mouth-full of marbles asked.

“Last time I checked I was the one and only doing business here in the City of Angels.”

“Good!” she said with a prolonged sigh. “I trust you’ve got a license to pack a rod.”

“Sure as fat hogs fart, I do. I drive a car, too, but that license expired ten years ago. But I don’t have a license to kill or maim, either. Not that that stops me when the notion crosses my mind hard enough. So how can I help you on this wet night, sweetheart?”

There was a long pause that I’d grown to expect from femme fatales whenever it came down to straight talk, especially the type with Hungarian accents.

“Do you know where Alphonzo’s Clown Den is located?” she finally inquired.

“If I remember correctly, I’ve bent an elbow in that dump more than once and it wasn’t playing a fiddle.”

“Meet me outside there as soon as you can. I’ll be the blonde standing near the corner. The tall one wearing a red dress, not the ugly midget in pink.”

I drove like the drenched streets were desert dry--pretending I was as sober as the day my mother dropped me into the world and dumped me into a garbage pail. The midget must have thought she recognized my Hudson as it peeled to the curb between a pawnshop and a greasy-spoon joint that served as a front for the mob’s gambling operations.

My blonde wasted no time stiff-arming the midget in perfect Jim Thorpe form and kicked her in the teeth while she was down. As she slid into the passenger seat, she was still cursing something about hating lousy, half-pint freaks more than crooked cops with their trouser snakes in hand. Considering how hard the rain must’ve fallen on her while she was waiting for me, I was surprised by how clean she smelled up close, like a two-week-old kitten after a big dog gives it a good tongue bath.

Peeling rubber, I swerved into traffic before the midget could get to her feet and start hurling empty wine bottles at my already dented-in-too-many-places car. It was two blocks up Sunset before the blonde spoke after wringing her long hair on the floor mat with two tight fists.

“Make sure no one follows us,” she said glancing across a shoulder.

“Is that the kind of hardboiled trouble I’ve gotten myself into even before we get to talk about my terms, dear?” I said adjusting the rearview mirror to survey the headlights behind us.

Ignoring my question, she said, “I was expecting a bigger fellow with a name like yours. What are you, about five-foot-two in Cuban heeled shoes?”

“Depends on the lighting.”

“Not that I’m really complaining or anything,” she said resting a hand on the forearm of my frayed overcoat. “Matter-of-fact, I’ve found guy’s your size have a tendency to be so much more appreciative of a full-bodied woman like me—if you know what I mean, daddy-o?”

“I’m reading you loud and clear like my favorite Sunday comics, and I like what I’m seeing of the colored pictures, too.” I said taking my eyes off the road to give her good-looking over. She was stacked higher than a longshoreman could toss coffee bean sacks in a contest of might and will. She also had a great pair of punching bags stretching her blouse taut as a battered boxer’s eyes in the fifteenth-round of a classic slug feast with no referee to impede the bloody action.

“Turn right here,” she said suddenly as I almost ran a red light and fishtailed into the turn. “I know a secluded spot on Mulholland where I can fill you in on my problems without worrying if we’ve been tailed or not.”

“Done deal,” I said out of the side of my mouth, “If you’re sure I can trust you to not pounce on my tender bones the minute we’re parked.”

“You can park the sarcasm where you last saw your wit before it wandered off and left you crying in your gin glass,” she said in that garbled manner she had of speaking—which was beginning to grow on me like an overripe wood tick in a place I couldn’t reach on my own.

By the time I parked in a turnout, the rain had stopped and the clouds had vanished like a pack of scurrying rats trailed by an pest exterminator’s flashlight. The view of the San Fernando Valley was spread out like a truckload of stolen jewels beckoning the moonlight to give them back their showcase glitter to appeal to fat women with rich, impotent husbands.

“So are you going to open up like the San Pedro fish market at the first light of day or what?” I asked her, firing up another cancer stick with the butt end of one I’d puffed into almost non-existence.

“How about a sip from that flask you carry in your overcoat pocket next to your heart, first?” she said turning her entire upper body to face me like a dare I couldn’t resist without questioning my manhood for the rest of my life.

She guzzled from the flask like a Irish sailor on a weekend pass with no concerns outside of getting so plastered he’d fall square on his face in a mound of cow poop with pleasure.

“You can really knock back the hard stuff, can’t you, angel?”

“How observant of you, Riley. Now I bet you want an Ivy League cookie with a buckle in the back for being so bright.”

She handed me back the near-empty flask and was out of the car before I could drain it dry. I caught up with her as she stopped shy of a big drop-off and spun around. Before she could make any more quick moves to elude what was on my mind, I had both arms wrapped around her in a fierce hug that would have impressed Smokey the Bear himself. Surprisingly, she didn’t try to resist as I pressed myself firmly into all her mounds of the curves I could easily imagine surrendering to my lascivious desires during a long night in a cheap motel by the beach.

“Want to give me the skinny of these problems that have you wound up tight as a high E-string about to pop?”

“Manmade problems! But are there any others you know about on this planet?”

“Maybe you’ll be obliged to be more specific after we do the do a couple of times like wild jungle animals in heat.”  I sucked on the side of her neck, which I found to have a plastic feel and taste to it. Maybe it was the suddenness of it all, I told myself, in the intense heat of the moment.

However, as my hands got more familiar with her bodily moldings, feeling a slight sense of de ja vu come over me, she shoved me back with amazing strength I’d only imagine a professional weightlifter possessing.

“You didn’t even ask my name yet,” she said, no longer doing a Greta Garbo impersonation and sounding more like John Wayne in drag. “And you’re trying to mash me up like you’ve already wined and dined me and laid your cash on the nightstand, too?”

“If you want me to recite a line of poetry or two before you give it up, darling, I’m game,” I cracked without a pause. “Roses are red. Violets are blue. I think I like you, babe, so let’s cut the crap and screw.”

It was then she ripped off the mask she was wearing—one her Hollywood makeup friend had obviously fixed her up with to trick me. Then there was no denying it, once again Olga had caught me—metaphorically speaking—with my pants down around my ankles for the umpteenth time. 

“For a so-called private eye, Doghouse,” she spat each word out contemptuously, “you’re dumber than a box of rocks.”

“Olga, darling” I tried recovering my composure by feigning elated glee. “Of course I knew it was you all the time. But I know how much you like surprising me, so don’t blame a fella for going along just to see how far you’d take this elaborate charade of yours.”

“Sure, Buster Brown, I’d believe that line of baloney if I lived in a shoe and couldn’t always tell when you’re lying straight through your lil’ chipmunk teeth.”

“Me…” I said with an exaggerated shrug, “try pulling the wool over your beautiful all-knowing eyes?”

Before I realized she was winding up, and too late to duck, she connected a Brown Bomber right hook with the same side of my head that was still recovering from the floor lamp she’d crowned me with a few days earlier.

Now that’s real love, I thought wistfully as I shook off the punch and sat up to watch her roaring away in my Hudson. 

“What a broad!” I marveled, spitting blood, as I began making plans to win her back one more time. “My sweet Olga, the one true love of my wretched life.”