Episode 12
Thermoses Don't Just Disappear
I was sitting in a nondescript gray sedan that I had borrowed from Mr. D'Sal to do some snooping and following for a new client of mine. The car had silver hubcaps with cameras painted on them and a bright white pennant on the radio antenna that said Spice Is The Spice of Life. There was a dent on the right front fender from following a redhead in a Packard too closely. (Mr. D'Sal, not me.) There were stickers across the back windshield that portrayed brightly colored spices and their countries of origin. There was a stuffed pink poodle and an unknown saint on the dashboard and three feather boas hanging from the rear view mirror. Hmm. Come to think of it, it wasn't all that nondescript.
The case appeared to be a rather routine job involving a jealous wife, an obviously cheating husband and a girlfriend or three but a good paycheck plus expenses. Not my favorite kind of work but it beat sitting behind my desk waiting to see if somebody besides me got arrested for Mr. Philbrook's odd murder or to find out who had done in the big lipped guy or wondering where Lance had wandered off to. He was always wandering and I was always wondering. Usually at the same exact moments. One day I hoped to wander while he wondered. I think he took me and my coffee for granted much too much.
Last I heard, he was in Hollywood trying to break into the movies as a stand-in for Humphrey Bogart which made no sense because he was a dead ringer for Tony Curtis. Then I heard that he was possibly working at the American Embassy in Moscow. No one could ever be sure. I doubted that he was working in Moscow even though he did have quite an extensive collection of Russian Nesting Dolls. He had once given me a set for my birthday. The parrot loved to play with them. But I ended that game when he put Manny the mouse inside one of them as a joke and made me scour the apartment and the cat's throat looking for him. Poor Manny.
He stayed curled around my left ear for three days, trembling. Scared the heck out of one of Clappsaddles' customers when he jumped down out of my hair as I ate a late bite and snatched up a piece of buttered toast the old guy had left there uneaten. You should have heard him scream! Served him right though. He'd gone on the graph just that morning and had come back later for his free buttered toast. A scream for a scream as it were. They never let him live it down. But he avoided me in the hallways from that day forward and kept his hands in his pockets. I heard he developed a mouse phobia.
It was a Saturday night, a full moon night and very quiet and secluded there in upstate New York outside the cabin where I'd followed the husband in question to, one Mr. Brad Lee Milton, and his "Aunt Fanny" girlfriend. I say that because I'd heard him calling his wife from the Italian restaurant he'd met her at earlier that evening and he'd lied and said he was sitting with his Aunt Fanny who was probably on her death bed. The girl had quite a fanny on her and I figured she'd end up on a bed sooner or later but I doubted she'd ever been anybody's aunt. She barely looked twenty if a day and he was fifty give or take a decade. I had discreetly followed them for many miles till he'd turned off the main road and headed to the secluded cabin then waited until they went inside to circle back and pull in to a clearing in the wooded area across from the cabin.
I cut the engine and started taking pictures with the zoom lens that Mr. D'Sal had helped me pick out. I already had lots from the restaurant and the hot new jazz review club and the teddy bear shop. Not to mention the jewelry store where the young lady had picked out a lovely bracelet. The evidence was piling up! Mrs. Milton was going to get her money's worth. Mr. Milton was going to get a rolling pin across his noggin and lose half his fortune in the settlement. "Fanny" would end up with a bad reputation and a lot of shiny things.
I settled in to watch and wait while listening to the radio. There were some pretty good serial shows that I needed to catch up on plus some sweet big band music to calm my nerves. If it looked like they were spending the night, I was going to head back to my office to compile the file to give to the suspicious spouse the next day and be done with it. I ate a sandwich and washed it down with coffee from my thermos and leaned back wishing I was somewhere else. I hated to be bored. I wondered how Nick was. And Andy. And Paul. And Mario. And Garry And Carlos And Robert And Rick and.....Oh, phooey! I wouldn't think about that anymore. Thinking had never done me any good. It was best just to observe and not think. Then I could tell MiMi Voo what I had seen and she would tell me what she thought. She was rarely wrong. (Except about that thing with my brother.) But there was no use dwelling on that either.
I had almost dozed off from too much peace and quiet when the radio suddenly blared up in volume and shut off and the car started up, lights flashing on and off and then went dead. I was shaken and confused and ready to exit the vehicle in fright when I heard a soft whirring noise and the entire car was suddenly spotlighted in blinding white light from some overhead source. I didn't know what to do. I just sat there stunned. I hoped the occupants of the cabin wouldn't come running outside to investigate and spot me in my borrowed spy-mobile. I had never been caught yet. Well, once, almost. I had been forced to cover myself in white flour and pretend to be a statue at a millionaire's garden party one hot 4th of July night and the disguise had been working well until it started raining.
If only I had not pretended to be a statue of the Venus de Milo! (I just wasn't thinking) Fortunately, the crooked millionaire had been over imbibing and just thought he was seeing things when the shapely statue began running across the grounds trying to hold onto her floury garment with no arms. The newspaper article illustrated with a ghostly photo of my half exposed backside humiliated me so badly that MiMi caught me sobbing in the closet over it . But being MiMi, she cackled with delight and put it in her scrapbook with photos of my other assorted mishaps and adventures. She thought everything I did was wonderful. But I never did that again! I don't think.
I must have blacked out because the next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and finding myself in the back seat twenty miles away from the cabin holding a lollipop sort of thing and glowing with a green sparkly glow, the source of which I could not ascertain. There was a strange humming sound coming from my brain, very different from the usual sounds coming from my cranial region and I felt both exhilarated and scared out of my wits. Also, my clothes were on backwards and I was wearing somebody else's shoes. My thermos was gone.
Thanks for the use of the names:
Fanny, Milton Brad Lee, D'Sal, Phillbrook
and Manny.... John, Paul, George and Ringo
no, wait, that's not right! Nick, Robert, Rick,
Paul, Garry, and Mario......D'Sal
And of course Venus di Milo
family members and friends
and myths
******* FYI
Aphrodite, known as the "Venus de Milo" | Louvre Museum
The discovery of a mutilated masterpiece The Venus de Milo was
discovered in 1820 on the island of Melos (Milos in modern Greek)
in the south-western Cyclades. The Marquis de Rivière presented
it to Louis XVIII, who donated it to the Louvre the following year.
The statue won instant and lasting fame.
TO BE CONTINUED iN EPISODE 13
