Bilbao, Spain. 1908. End of May.
Sorry, that’s not right; I have a song stuck in my head.
City of Angels, USA. 1958. Beginning of October.
The transom over my outer office door was broken. I was immediately suspicious because that door is always open and unlocked. I lost the key years ago and the building management company never changed the lock because they’re cheap and I don’t always pay rent on time. So I’d removed anything of value in the outer office, and put it into the locked cabinet in my inner office; that amounted to a few pulp mags and an ornate Egyptian lamp I’d bought with German marks from a Turkish pimp in Chinatown.
As I pushed the outer door open that had “Alan Watson, Private Investigator” engraved on it – left over from the previous tenant; I’m “Dave Wyznicki, Private And Not-So-Private Investigator” – I saw a woman trying to pick the lock of my inner office.
As I looked at the butcher job on the lock that was now hanging from its tendons, I said, “Neither of the locks in my office work. All you had to do was turn the doorknobs.”
In most stories like this, the femme fatale is a gorgeous dame with long lustrous hair that could be blond, black, brown, red, whatever – perhaps green or purple or yellow, I don’t know, I don’t pay attention to things like that because I’m color-blind – and she has long sinewy gams, and an ample bust, and the newest society-approved dress and hat, and a persona that oozes charisma and coolness.
She had none of these things. She was actually the opposite of that. Imagine the good things yourself.
I pushed the door open, sat in my chair behind what passed for a desk – a piece of plywood on top of four standing ashtrays, and waved vaguely at her to sit on the chair on the other side of my desk, a chair I’d found in the alley behind my building. I hoped it didn’t have bedbugs. She sat down and didn’t immediately squirm.
She said to me, “My name is Sylvia Loring, and my brother Winston is missing.”
“How are those two phrases connected?”
She banged her hand on the chair’s arm angrily. “My brother is missing!”
“What is he missing?” I said. “An arm? A leg? An arm and a leg?”
She looked at me like she understood I had no interest in what she was saying. Perhaps my face gave it away – it often does that – because I’d just made a few hundred bucks on some other case that had involved blackmail, pornographic books, gambling scams, etc., so I didn’t need her money just then. “I will give you twenty thousand dollars to find my brother.”
If I’d had something to choke on, I would have.
She took a thick wad of bills out of her purse and threw it onto my desk. I heard a whispering buzz, “Take me. Now.” I hoped it was the money talking to me.
I didn’t have to go through it to see it was a lot of dough. Even if it wasn’t twenty grand, it was close enough. “Tell me the story,” I said, as I put the money in my pants pocket; I would have put it in my jacket pocket but I couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t steal my jacket before leaving. My pants, on the other hand, I almost always have on me.
She stood up and paced around the room, the house flies (or, in this case, office flies) regularly alighting on her face. I noticed she didn’t brush them away. “My brother,” she said, “is in the Navy, in the Sixth Fleet, and he arrived in San Diego a few months ago after a tour of duty that included Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Wyoming. He hitchhiked up here to LA from San Diego, either in February or June. He stayed at my place for a couple of weeks, then left, apparently found his own place off Sunset. He called me a couple of times, but I didn’t know where he was. Someone told me they’d seen him hustling on Hollywood Boulevard, and I looked for him, but never found him. I suspect he’s now servicing movie stars, and I don’t want to think about that, but I understand that some people need to do whatever they can in order to survive. Mr. Watson—”
“Dave Wyznicki,” I said.
“Judging by the way your name is spelled on your outer office door, that’s a very unusual pronunciation. Anyway, Mr. Wyznicki, can you help me?”
I fondled the wad of Franklins in my pocket. “Yes, I think I can help you.”
She passed me a photo of her brother. I didn’t understand how he could have ever been in the line of work his sister was suggesting. Carnival sideshow attraction would have been more appropriate.
She stood up to her full height of about five-foot-nothing, her scarcity of hair wafting in the breeze from the Santa Ana wind squeezing through the broken window, her raggedy dress decaying, her shoes squeaking, and the turkey wattle on the undersides of her upper arms quivering as she turned toward my office door. I wondered how a woman who looked like that could have so much folding money on her, but not for long; that kind of thing shouldn’t concern anyone who now has twenty grand. But I had to know one thing.
“Why were you trying to break into my office?” I said.
“I’d heard there was a valuable Egyptian lamp here that possibly I could pilfer in case you didn’t return before I was able to make you my proposition.”
I shuddered at her use of that word as it conjured up all kinds of sordid meanings. “Pilfer” is a word I’ve never liked.
She glided/waddled out of my office.
I leaned back in my chair, took the wad out of my pocket, held it delicately in my hands, and sniffed it. I rocked in my chair for a while due to the unstable legs (the chair’s, not mine), then got up and shuffled over to the radio in the corner of the office, left there by Alan Watson, Private Investigator. I turned it on, and within several moments, heard big band music, live from the Famous Door in NYC – a version of “Bill’s Beer Hall” by Weill and Brecht, sung deliciously by Marlene Dietrich, backed up by the Count Basie Orchestra. The song ended with a sublime cadenza (or is the word “credenza”?; I’ve never known the difference) by a young trumpeter named Wynton Marsalis, made all the more remarkable by the fact he hadn’t been born yet.
I gave some more thought to the case of the missing seaman and made a decision.
I left my office, taking the Egyptian lamp with me, and hopped the only working elevator down to the ground floor landlord’s office. I wrote a brief note, wrapped it with a rubber band around a few Franklins, and stuffed it through the mail slot to cover my back rent.
And then I disappeared. Hell, someone gives you twenty grand in 1958 to solve a mystery that can’t be solved, a mystery that doesn’t interest you, why would you hang around? (I didn’t literally disappear because I know where I am all the time.)
Twenty grand went a lot further in 1958 than it does today. I bought a zipline forest company in Costa Rica and still own it. I enjoy fleecing tourists. Shame about the mosquitoes but the moths like my lamp.
[Image Credit : Photo by Jahanzeb Ahsan on Unsplash]
by 
Bill Kitcher
Latest posts by Bill Kitcher (see all)
- Case Of The Missing Seaman - January 13, 2026
- Minnie Mouse, Betty Boop, And I - February 3, 2025
- Ripoff: Salt, Pepper, Vinegar, and BB - June 18, 2023
0 Comments