The Drunk Detective Read online

  “I never said. The fee was three hundred.” Dotty coughed up the money from her bra. A frosty hand touched hers as the bills changed hands.

  “Well let’s do this.”

  The canoness’ clothes consisted of black lace panties with a matching bra worn under her black tunic. She wore rosary beads around her neck. Lynch got the deceased left arm into a bra strap and mumbling, lifted the upper body by the shoulders for Dotty to manage the other side. The nun groaned.

  Dotty jumped to the other side of the room, slamming into the dresser. “She’s alive!”

  “That’s just some leftover air trapped in her lungs. They often do that. Hold her torso up, so I can slip on her panties.” Next he covered her head and hair in her veil and coif.

  Dotty apprehensively helped.

  A half hour passed before the nun was dressed and Dotty exchanged her disgust for exhaustion. They got her dressed, and then both put on a shoe and tied the laces.

  Dotty dropped onto the bed and wiped her brow with her shirt sleeve. “If only my mother could see me. She always encouraged me to be closer to the Church.”

  “Top or bottom?”

  She looked at Lynch, who still had on his coat, buttoned all the way up. “Do you sweat?”

  “I wasn’t paid for that. It’ll be daybreak soon.”

  “Yes, and I have breakfast coming.”

  Dotty took the head. They smoothly got the dead body into the hallway, dragging its heels across the runner onto the staircase landing, where they stood it against the wall. An old woman appeared at the bottom of the stairs and started up, carrying a handbag the size of Canada.

  Dotty, kept the nun stable with a hand under her arm, smiled. “Good morning, Mrs. Lombardo. How was the casino?”

  “I won, Dotty,” she said two steps from the landing. “Every now and then Sugar House lets someone win. Who’s that with you?”

  “Just my buddy and his savior.”

  “She looks to need saving. She can barely stand up. My lips are sealed because I don’t like when the media airs out the Church’s dirty laundry. I can understand a girl needing a drink, though. Don’t let her drive.”

  “We’re not, Mrs. Lombardo.”

  “She looks tore up from the floor up. Dead, in fact. She should’ve ate before drinking.”

  Dotty offered a strained smile. “Well, good night, Mrs. Lombardo.”

  “Good night, boys. And remember she can’t drive.” She continued to her apartment and locked herself inside.

  “Mrs. Lombardo,” Dotty told Lynch. “She was wasted herself.”

  “Think she’s on to us?”

  “She won’t even recall this encounter in an hour.”

  “OK, let’s get the Sister to the car. Give me a hand.”

  “Can’t we just drag her down?”

  “No. She’ll get postmortem marks.”

  “Smart. Once again I ask, what do you do for the bishop.” She began to be worried about her own wellbeing and wished she had her gun.

  The nun was stiffening. Dotty put her in a full-Nelson wrestling move—and said, “Lord, forgive me”—and, bearing a lot of weight backed down the stairs while Lynch held the feet in the air from snagging the heels on the shabby staircase runner. They stopped three times to rest. Dotty’s nose was in Sister Tudor’s collar for the trip down the stairs, long enough for her to develop a disdain for Chanel No. 5.

  Just off the second landing, her foot slipped. She began to fall over, tried using the wall for leverage, managed to smash herself between the wall and her problem, said, “Jesus!” and let the nun go.

  “Catch her, idiot.” Lynch barked. Dotty caught her.

  Executing a perfect curtsy, the nun tipped forward down the stairwell with Dotty embracing her from the back. They fell down the steps and landed in the tiled foyer, coming to rest against the door that led to the vestibule and sidewalk.

  Lynch leaped down the stairs. “Great catch.”

  Dotty, sprawled on top of the corpse, said, “Now I have a damn pre-mortem bruise.”

  3

  The car parked in front of the massage parlor’s front door was a charcoal gray Cadillac; a big one mirroring a hearse. She stood in the doorway holding up the body while Lynch checked the street. She sighed and wished this whole ordeal was over.

  “Let’s do it.” Lynch was gaunt and barely alive as the nun under the dim light in the foyer. “Put her on the front passenger side.”

  “Huh? Why not the back seat? Lay her right across it.”

  “Because then it’ll actually look like a dead nun and not a sleeping one. You sure you’re a detective?”

  “Hell, let’s put her behind the wheel. That’ll be fun.”

  The passenger door was opened and they both tossed an arm on her shoulders and walked across the sidewalk—Dotty losing more breath with each step—sat her on the seat, got her feet inside, and positioning her upright before securing the seat belt, pulling it to its limits.

  “Just marvelous.” Dotty’s voice was a high-pitched soprano.

  “Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere while I run upstairs to be sure everything is in order.”

  “Where the fucks she goin’? Oops. Sorry Sister. No foul language, I’ve heard it all before.”

  “Just wait here. I can’t believe this.” Lynch went inside.

  The night air was cold and whipping trash around the filthy downtown street. Dotty closed the nun’s door, went around the back and sat in the driver’s seat, closing the door. After a second or two, she let down the window. “You really splashed on the perfume tonight, honey.” Just at that moment a police officer walked around the corner. He was doing his area rounds, the one benefit to living in downtown. The massage parlor was close to the Philadelphia Convention Center and its patrons were known to be robbed so police patrolled the area on foot for suspicious activity.

  Dotty said, “O-fuck” and looked for the car’s keys, while sliding down in the seat. No such luck. The officer came over and shone a flashlight in her face.

  “Does there seem to be a problem, ma’am?”

  Dotty sat up. “No problem at all, sir. I’m just waiting on someone, he forgot his coat. Sir.”

  The officer shifted his flashlight past Dotty, who became moist under her armpits. “Ma’am is your other friend asleep or passed out?”

  “Oh, this is my aunt June. I had to pick up my friend and was forced to bring her along so she wouldn’t be left home alone. She’s known to start fires.”

  The flashlight’s angle shifted. Dotty leaned forward, then sat upright when the officer moved it out of her face. The beam shifted to the dead nun again, then darted back to Dotty, then back to the nun and rested there a long time.

  “Does she need a doctor, ma’am? Is she a nun?”

  “No and no sir, Officer, sir. She’s schizophrenic and sometimes thinks she’s a member of the Church. The meds had her knocked out cold. I told you she gets violent and starts fires if we don’t dress her like this. She loves playing dress-up and being a nun. Insane, I know, sir.”

  “Ma’am, are you being an ass by making fun of me by keep calling me, sir?”

  “No, sir. I mean no. But you keep calling me ma’am. Just saying.”

  The officer shook his head. He was in his forties, with a square jaw and rough mustache and dull green eyes under the square visor of his cap.

  “Wake her,” he said.

  “Please don’t make me do that.” She resisted another sir.

  “Now, I said wake her up. If you even can, ‘cause she looks dead to my trained eye.”

  “Dead?” Dotty gave the officer a tortured grin. “Dead, that’s a good one. Ha-ha, dead.”

  “I wanna hear her laugh, ma’am.”

  “Trust me, she lost her sense of humor when JFK was killed. That’s what sent her over to the crazy side.”

  “Oh, really.” The officer stepped back a few inches and groped his pistol. “Step out of the vehicle, ma’am.”

  Dotty ha
d a terrible idea. Here goes nothing, she thought.

  She slid her right arm behind the dead woman’s back, and said, “Look alive, June. We’re back home.” She pushed the corpse’s top half forward toward the dashboard. It moaned.

  The officer chilled out and took his hand off of his weapon.

  “My apologies, ma’am. We have to be vigilant in the neighborhood. There are many weirdoes. No offense, ma’am.”

  “Yes, sir. I mean no sir. I mean no.” Dotty had a firm grip on the nun’s coat to keep her head from slamming into the dash. “I agree that you can’t be too careful.”

  “It’s just to protect us. You better get out of this area. She sounded awful.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “It’s five-thirty a.m., you know?”

  “Thanks, Officer.”

  The officer went on his merry way. Dotty let go of the nun and tossed a new toothpick in her mouth. Lynch appeared from the building with a sneer on his face.

  “My God, what took you so long? A damn cop was here.” Dotty got out of the car.

  “I watched him. He smell a crime?”

  “At first. What, were you going to kill him? I handled him, though. I gotta tell you, I haven’t spent this much time with the clergy since I was baptized.”

  “You were raised a Christian?”

  “My mother and father were devout Evangelicals. You know the ones all of the Republicans fight over for the presidential nomination. My husband tried converting me to the Catholic faith. It didn’t take.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Alabama or Arkansas, or maybe it was Alaska. Definitely an A state.”

  “Divorced?”

  “By now. I hope so. I’d hate to die and he get half of my apartment.”

  Lynch climbed into the driver’s seat. “I guess this is where we say goodbye.”

  “What you plan to do with her?”

  “You don’t really even care.”

  “Lynch, I’ve known people fifteen years that I haven’t been around this damn long.”

  “Well, it’s over now.” He slammed the door.

  “Look, I’ll keep it quiet.”

  Lynch started the engine. “What?”

  “I said I’ll keep quiet.”

  “Good for you.” He rolled up the window and began to dial a number into his cell phone.

  Dotty raced to her apartment and took up position in her window to be sure that Lynch left with the nun. She watched him pull off and bend around the corner. She wondered if she should have waved goodbye; to Sister Tudor, not Lynch.

  She had to be to work at nine a.m., but she wasn’t tired any longer. She played with the camera and looked at her handy work. She connected it to her computer and downloaded the pictures into a locked folder. The watch that she purloined from Frankie was a Rolex that she stuck in a desk drawer that she kept a bag of marijuana.

  Yawning now, she curled up in bed at six a.m. and was feeling better. Her hangover had subdued—although she didn’t recall where she had gotten wasted the night before—she had five hundred dollars extra cash in her pocket, and pictures of a dead Catholic nun in a gigolo’s bed. This was a great morning.

  She had dozed and was startled awake when a burly white fireman chopped through her apartment door with an axe.

  “Where the hell is the fire?” asked the rookie fireman.

  Dotty shot up and ran fingers through her hair. “That’s my damn line.”

  “Wrong floor Adam,” someone yelled from the hallway. “Some prostitute’s apartment below this one.”

  “My bad about the door ma’am.” Adam ran out.

  Dotty said, “Fuck,” and looked for her jeans.

  4

  The arson investigator’s name was Rodriguez.

  His suit was blue and he had sweat running from his forehead that he kept wiping with a sooty handkerchief that left smudges. He was much smaller than the fireman that had chopped down Dotty’s door and a couple of years younger than her. He wrapped a petite hand with blackened nails around Dotty’s hand in greeting and ushered her out of the fried hallway into Frankie Robinson’s apartment. To Dotty’s dismay he lit a cigarette, dropped the match on the floor and the carpet smoldered.

  What an idiot, she thought.

  “Too much smoke in here.”

  “You don’t say,” she replied. “Smells like a bar-b-cue.”

  He blew smoke rings into the air.

  “That would be the tenant. Know him at all?”

  “We spoke on occasion. He OK?”

  “At this point, he should be getting worked on at the Burn Center of University of Penn Hospital in West Philly. They work miracles of godly proportions there.”

  Perhaps, Sister Tudor was already an angel and looking over him, Dotty wished she could blurt.

  “What’s he do for a living?”

  “Hook. What happened, I smell gas?”

  “Could be that. He have any clients lately, well, last night?”

  “That’s how he gets the money to pay for the gas and other necessities, I presume.”

  “Can you describe any from last night?”

  “I don’t look at the broads. I hear them sometimes. The walls are thin. One of them could be the mayor’s wife or something.”

  “What about any loud disturbances? You do live right above him.”

  “All arguments are loud, don’t you think?” She fished in her pocket for a toothpick and found none. She pulled out her box of matchsticks to substitute, but thought better of it, given the company. “You think this was a purposeful act? Like someone tried to kill Frankie?”

  Rodriguez wiped his forehead. “Don’t know the motive. You’ve been no help, Ms. Davis.”

  “You should be talking to Chen, the landlord. It’s not my job to help you. You’re the arson guru.”

  “I’ve talked to Chen. He was just as useless. By the way, what is your job?”

  “Private dick.”

  “Interesting. Then I’m sure you’ve paid far more attention to what’s going on around here than you’re letting on. You with an agency, or are you a loner like Dick Tracey?” He casually tapped live ashes onto the carpet. There was a little flame there, Dotty stamped out.

  “Fuck Dick Tracey. He’s fictional, sir. I work for Goldberg Discreet Inquirers on Broad and Arch Streets. I got to be there in a half hour.” She had spent an hour in the hallway with other residents, watching firemen put out the fire and paramedics carry Frankie Robinson out covered in a white sheet. Chen found him balled into the fetal position on the wall opposite his apartment door, where the blast had shot him when he’d come home. Two platters of food lay beside him. Dotty was touched and had slept right through the explosion and the ensuing sirens. “And to be clear, if some nut job is blowing up my neighbors, I am privileged to the information.”

  “We’ve got no reason to believe that. I investigate arson leading to death. Does Frankie Robinson smoke?”

  “He is now.”

  Rodriguez wiped his forehead, dropped the cigarette butt on the floor, and put away his tape recorder. “OK, that’s all, I guess. Can I get a number to reach you?”

  Dotty dug into her pocket and pulled out a few cards and gave him one engraved on red stock with a bouquet of white and yellow roses in the corner. The arson investigator furrowed his eyebrows. “A woman started the agency,” Dotty said.

  “Thanks for your time, Ms. Davis.” Rodriguez opened the door for her.

  Dotty left after stomping on the cigarette butt still smoking on the floor.

  Dotty made her way back to the fourth-floor and before she could get into her apartment Chen was on the fourth-floor landing. With his hands in the pockets of his fuzzy pajamas and the dull hallway light shining on him.

  “Not so fast, Dotty. What was you moving downstairs this morning after I gave you the camera, a load of bowling balls?” he asked.

  Dotty expected the question to come from the arson investigator. “I had fell after slipping on tha
t dated runner. You need to replace it.”

  “Where’s your bruises? You had to have something break your fall.”

  “You sound like a cop. I have to get to work, Chen.”

  “Speaking of cops, I didn’t tell the cops that you were the last person I saw in Frankie’s place.”

  “Why not? The doll has not committed no crime.”

  “My camera?”

  She covered her mouth and raised her eyebrows. “You know what. Funny story. It was in my car...”

  “Look at this catastrophe.” Chen was looking at the smoke covered walls. “I don’t have money to redo these walls and my insurance won’t cover arson unless someone is arrested and convicted for it. The cop’s running around here are messing with the parlor’s flow of traffic. People are discouraged from coming.”

  Dotty nodded. What could she say.

  “Yup, that was a loud noise you made this morning with your skinny friend. I saw him,” the landlord continued. He was now whispering. “I thought it was burglars, but I got a good view of you two through my peephole, Dotty. You were right on top of it. I hope I never get that huge.”

  “Look, get to the point, Chen.”

  “I’m old, not dumb. It was easy for me to put together an unknown man and a camera and a gigolo and a dead person dressed like a nun on the stairs. It’d be easy for the police too. They tie those facts with the explosion and you have a problem bigger than any client you’ve ever had at Goldberg’s.”

  “Arson crew called it a gas leak.”

  “And they may continue to believe that if you catch my drift.”

  “Chen, I don’t get the drift at all.”

  “You got till tonight to get it. That’s all the time I’ll forget to give the cops these details. I want half your action, that’s all I want. What’s half? You decide and find me to discuss. You know I’m always here just like I was this morning. The peephole’s a marvelous invention.”

  “I’m late for work, Chen.”

  Chen stepped out of her way. “Work won’t matter if you’re in jail, Dotty,” he said, walking away.

  Dotty e-mailed the pictures to herself before heading out of her apartment and to work. She then changed her computer password and hid the camera before leaving. She didn’t trust Chen and his key to her apartment.