Marked Man

12

“You look like a beaten dog,” said Phil Skink, staring down on me as I lay on the old leather couch in his dusty outer office.

“I feel worse,” I said.

“Impossible, mate. If you felt worse than you look, you’d be dead. I’ve eaten mutton what looked more alive than you. What the devil were you up to last night?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sounds like trouble, it does. A dame involved?”

“I think.”

“Sounds like more than trouble. Next time you give me a call before it gets out of hand.”

“And you’ll pull me out?”

“Don’t be daft,” said Skink. “I’ll be joining in. No reason you should be having all the fun.”

Go to your butcher, ask for all the gristle and bone he can scrape off his floor. Pile it onto a roasting pan, dress it up in a natty brown suit with thick pinstripes, a brown fedora, a bright tie. Give it high cholesterol and pearly teeth. Add the brains of a mathematician, an irrational fear of canines, a weakness for wine-soaked women. Throw in a squeeze of violence and a dash of charm, season with sea salt, bake to hardboiled, and right there you’d pretty much have cooked yourself Phil Skink, private eye.

I had set up a meeting in his office after my interview with Lavender Hill, and now I had arrived, late and limping from the night before, with my eyes still red and my jaw still slack.

“Your head hurt?” he asked.

“Is there a thunderstorm roiling through your office?”

“No.”

“Then it hurts.”

“You take anything?”

“Two Advil. Like shooting a woolly mammoth with a BB gun.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, there he stood, in one hand a glass with some thick brown sludge that was bubbling and belching, in the other a long green pickle.

“Sit up,” he said. “Doctor’s orders.”

I did as he said and felt my consciousness slip as the blood drained from my swollen head.

“Drink this and eat this,” said Skink. “A sip, a bite, a sip, a bite. You get the idea.”

“I don’t think so, Phil.”

“Do as I say and you’ll be good as new.”

“Really, I’m okay.”

“Look, mate, it hurts me just to look at you. Do it or I’ll pour the drink down your throat and then stuff the pickle in after.”

“Hell of a bedside manner,” I said even as I grabbed hold of the drink and the pickle. With my eyes closed, I took a sip. Not terrible, actually, spicy and sour all at once, and with a bite of the pickle to chase it down, it was almost palatable. “What is it, hair of the dog?”

“The only thing you lose by chasing alcohol with alcohol is sobriety, and you lost enough of that already. Finish it up.”

“All of it?”

“Well, hell, I don’t want none of it.”

“And if I throw it all up on the rug?”

“Be sure to miss my shoes.”

I finished it all, closed my eyes, belched loudly, tasted it all again, and gagged twice. But strangely, when I opened my eyes, I did feel better, almost renewed.

“What’s in that?” I said.

“A secret recipe taught me by a hostess name of Carlotta I was seeing in Salinas.”

“Carlotta, huh?”

“She had tricks, she did.”

“Oh, I bet.”

“Hey, strictly management, she was. I still gots all my choppers. So what did you want to meet me about? This thing what’s got you all over the news, this Charlie the Greek with the painting?”

“That’s right,” I said.

I handed him the card Lavender Hill had left with my secretary. He looked at it for a moment, brought it to his nose and took a sniff, raised his eyebrows.

“He came to me with an offer to buy the painting. But he knew enough about what was going on to leave me uncomfortable. Find out who he is and who he’s working for.”

“Lavender Hill.”

“His friends call him Lav.”

Skink took another sniff of the card. “Sweet guy?”

“Apparently, if a purple suit says anything anymore, although I got a sense not to take him lightly.”

“He’s got a Savannah area code.” Skink took a notepad from a pocket, a pen from another, clicked the pen, started writing. “Anything else on him?”

“That’s all I got.”

“All right, mate,” he said as he tapped the point of his pen on the pad. “Usual rates. It might necessitate a quick jaunt to Georgia to track down his story.”

“Whatever you need to do. Oh, and Phil. He should know we’re looking. Don’t be too discreet. Let’s rattle his chain a bit and see how he reacts.”

“I’ll be a regular bull in his china shop, I will. That it?”

“Something else,” I said. “I want you to look into a guy name of Bradley Hewitt, a fixer of sorts. He has an in with the mayor and uses it for all sorts of business affairs. Find out what you can about him.”

Skink again started scribbling on his pad. “Any details. Addresses? Phone numbers?”

“No, but it shouldn’t be much of a trick to track him down. And also track down what you can about the life and history of a woman named Theresa Wellman. She and this Hewitt used to be an item. They have a kid together.”

“Which one does you represent?”

“The woman.”

“She have any money?”

“No.”

“How’d you end up on the wrong side of that one?”

“Beth,” I said with a shrug.

“Ah, that explains it.” He tapped his pad with the point of his pen, clicked it shut. “That it?”

I sat there for a moment. Was that it, really, or did I have one more thing to ask my private eye? The brown gloop and the pickle had eased the pain in my head, but they hadn’t done a thing for the burning on my chest. That morning I had made a quick check before I hobbled over to Skink’s. Plenty of names in the Philadelphia phone book, but not the right name. I could have called each and every Adair and asked if there was a Chantal in the family, but that seemed fishy, especially when they started asking why? Why indeed? Because I might be in love if I could remember who she was? And what if they said yes, they had a Chantal Adair, and I met her, and she had six teeth and looked like Moe from the Three Stooges, what then? I thought about it some more and decided. Skink was my PI, a hired hand, but he was also my friend and loyal as a Labrador.

“There’s something else,” I said. “Something personal.”

“Personal, huh?”

“Billed to my home, not the office.”

“Okay,” said Skink, “I understands. Usual fees?”

“I don’t get an insider discount?”

“My mother don’t get an insider discount. Go ahead.”

“Something happened last night.”

“What?”

“I don’t remember.”

Skink cocked his head.

“But something happened, and I need you to find someone for me. Discreetly, you understand?”

“It’s a woman, is it?”

“Isn’t it always? But I don’t want her to know I’m looking. Once you find her, let me know where she is and a little bit about her. Maybe take a picture. I’ll decide what to do from there.”

“You know, mate, it’s a bad idea to get a private eye messed up in your personal affairs. It can’t come to no good. In the end you never like what you find.”

“Just do it, Phil.”

“All right, then. What do you know about her?”

“I think she’s blond and sturdy and rides a motorcycle.”

“You think? You don’t know?”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t need you.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

“I think at Chaucer’s, but a lot of last night is a blank.”

“How much is a blank?”

“Most all of it.”

“You been drinking much lately, mate?”

“Some.”

“Too much?”

“How much is too much?”

“The question is its own answer, innit? So’s if you don’t remember nothing, how do you knows something happened? How do you knows she wasn’t just a girl what you eyed in a bar and who turned you down?”

“Because I know, damn it.”

“All right, don’t get all huffy on me. I’ll do what I can. You got a name?”

“Yeah, I got a name.”

“Well?”

I stood up, shucked off my jacket, undid my tie. Skink stared at me with a growing horror on his face, as if I intended on doing a striptease with grinding music and pom-poms right there in the middle of his office. Gad, the very idea would fill me with horror, too. But it ended at the shirt. I unbuttoned it down to my belly, pushed the fabric aside to reveal my left breast.

Skink eyed my chest, raised his gaze to look into my eyes, eyed my chest again. “You get it last night?”

“I didn’t have it yesterday.”

“Nows I understand,” he said as he stood to get a closer look. “Nice job, classic look.”

“I don’t want a critique, Phil, just find her.”

He clicked his pen open. “Chantal Adair,” he said as he wrote, and then he tapped his pad with the pen’s point. “Piece of cake.”

Wrong.