Thursday, March 16, 2023

The Case of the Missing Cliché


The name is Rick O’Shea. I’m a Private Investigator, a professional snoop, no cushy job by any stretch. I got 8 slugs in me, two lead and 6 cheap Scotch. Things have been a bit slow since 2020 so I can’t afford 18-year-old Glenmorangie anymore. People stayed home, nobody was slipping around, looking for love in all the wrong places, so no business.

I used to be just another Mick in a city detective squad but the cops were too busy committing crimes to ever solve any, so I quit and went into business on my own. Now I get paid to do stuff that skirts the law. Skirts being the operative word. Nothing but trouble.

Anyhow, I was sitting in my office minding my own business since there was no other business to mind. Suddenly, this tall blonde walks past my window. I knew she was tall because my office is on the second floor. Five minutes later the door burst open, and she waltzed in, (must have been playing Strauss on her iPhone). Good looking woman, well built, could have played fullback for the Rams. She wore a thirty-eight. She had a gun, too.

She flashed some green at me, (spinach in her teeth from lunch), and laid out her problem. Actually, if she had laid her problem out cold, she probably wouldn’t have needed a Private Investigator. Her husband had a lazy eye, and she was worried he was seeing someone on the side. If I would check it out, she would make it worth my while. I told her I was more interested in money.

Her husband had phoned and said he’d be working late at the office that night so this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She told me where he worked and the car he drove. I hung around the office parking lot and sure enough at 7:00 a guy walked out of the building and drove off in the car. I followed. He was not headed for home.

You can never be too careful. A pair of headlights flashed in my rearview mirror. I was being tailed. Pardon the pun. There was more to this than met the eye. The dame didn’t give me the whole story. Hard to shake my tail and keep my quarry in sight too. He pulled up at a three-story Brownstone in a seedy part of town and I drove on past. Took me 5 minutes to lose the other car and I doubled back.

Parked a block away and slipped back, staying in the shadows. Saw movement in the upstairs window so I climbed a conveniently located tree so I could see better. And I had never seen anything better since the clubs in Germany in 73. Had to get a firm grip on myself to keep from falling out of the tree.

Suddenly the branch broke and I came off my perch and hit the ground like a wool sack full of gravel. The mugs in the other car hadn’t stayed lost and had followed me. They started beating me like a rented mule. Finally, they got tired and left me lying there, more dead than alive. A full brass band was playing 76 Trombones inside my head. I thought this kind of stuff only happened to Jim Rockford.

Crawled to the car, found the magnum of whiskey under the seat, and the .45 Magnum under the hood. Tucked one into my pocket and the other under my left arm pit. I needed to find that dame. She had set me up. Then it hit me. She was the woman in the Brownstone house. The guy I’d followed was not her husband. Who was he? Did she even have a husband? What was the point of all this? I needed clues and I needed them fast. If clues were shoes, I was barefoot.

The dame’s goons were coming back; I could see them about half a block away. The tire irons they carried didn’t look very friendly. Reached under my arm for my trusty Magnum, drained it in two long gulps, threw it away and unlimbered my revolver. This time I was ready for them.

Tune in next week, when you’ll hear Dr. Bob say, “Please add hackneyed detective clichés in the comments section and maybe he can figure out how to end our misery.”

8 comments:

  1. OMG, I laughed and groaned all the way through this! HRH Spayed is going to be VERY jealous of this Dick's hardboiled story!

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    1. HRH Spayed and Tracer Bullet were two of my inspirations. Many of these lines have been collecting in my brain for decades. I was counting on you to add some more terrible lines.

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  2. That story reminded me of when I hired a detective to follow my ex before he became my ex!

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    1. That sounds exciting. Care to add to my story based on experience?

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  3. Ha! I love it! The clichés are perfect for your hard-boiled noir. Look out, Raymond Chandler!

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    1. Thank you, Diane. Haven't read any Mickey Spillane but I love Bogie movies. His most famous is the worst, though. Key Largo has more terrible cliches in 90 minutes than I ever knew existed

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  4. Terrible Cliches are hilarious, thank you.

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    1. Thanks. I am working on a sequel

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