Aachoo Voo, Private Eye Episode Twelve Thermoses Don't Just Disappear

https://aachoovooprivateeye2024.blogspot.com/2024/07/aachoo-voo-private-eye-episode-11-lipps.html 

link to Episode 11

 

 

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

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 

https://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/aphrodite-known-venus-de-milo

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

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye Episode Ten D'Sal's Spice and MiMi's Naughty Pictures

https://aachoovooprivateeye2024.blogspot.com/2024/07/aachoo-voo-private-eye-episode-nine.html

link to Episode 9

  

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

Episode Ten

D'Sal's Spice and MiMi's Naughty Pictures

My nosy detectives finally decided to back off or at least got some better disguises soon after MiMi Voo gave them a surprise visit one afternoon. I don't know exactly what she said to them but seeing her standing down there with her hands on her hips and that gray head jerking this way and that,  I surmised that it was not a pleasant conversation.

The two cops kept holding up their hands as if warding off an attack and looking up at my apartment and nodding their heads in agreement to whatever she was commanding. (And God love her, she was quite the Commander!) Nobody messed with MiMi! (Or her only grand-daughter.) Even from a distance I recognized the look of terror on their faces, having seen it many times on the faces of my loved ones. And even as she shouted "Git, you varmints!" she handed them each a bag of her homemade beignets because, well, that's who MiMi was. Terrifying but with a heart of gold.

I had recuperated nicely and took on some cases that kept me occupied. One was the McDo Doughnut theft case that was easily solved once I discovered that Mr. McDo was a sleepwalker who apparently loved raw doughnut dough whether he knew it or not and had been "sleepwalking" downstairs from his upstairs apartment at precisely 12:02 every single night for a month  and eating up all his unbaked goodies. He had also gained forty pounds and begun to accuse his wife Hortense of altering his clothes so that they no longer fit just because he had made the mistake of looking at a skinny girl and sighing one day downtown on the bus.. Hortense hated sighing.  (And skinny girls.)

Mr. McDo paid me well for solving the case but primarily I suspected for keeping my mouth shut and not revealing his awful secret. (He was the thief.) And sadly, that was the least of his many problems. Sometimes I laid in bed at night thinking about it and laughed myself silly. Even the parrot thought it was hilarious and made up funny little poems such as "Who stole McDo's Doughnut dough? They took the doughnut and left the hole!" Things like that. He was clever. Annoying but clever. 

Another case involved D'Sal's Spice World, a business on my block that sold spices of every description imported from every country on the planet. Mr. D'Sal also took vintage photographs of well, vintage things, old things. Like old cars and bars and churches and women. Really old women. Strange old women. But he had such a gift with a camera that he made the strangest of them look absolutely beautiful. I referred MiMi to him once when she was looking to surprise Poppi with something for his 75th birthday. I had suggested merely as a joke, that she have a "Pin Up Girl" calendar made for him and to my amazement she thought about it for three minutes and said, "I'll do it! Know any good phertografertors?" (And yes, that is precisely how she said it and how it is spelled.) (In her mind.)

 MiMi has her own little vocabulary. It's a mix of Cajun, English, Creole, Hillbilly, Bayou, and possibly, Martian. You have to be intimately acquainted with her for a good three years before you can really understand anything she says. (And then you still have to wonder.) My father just said, "Yes, mam." and Poppi mumbled "Uh- hmm." My mother just stared in that wild eyed way of hers and then tore out her hair and railed at my Dad behind closed doors. Occasionally when she had had enough, she gave into her Paramore rage and the two of them engaged in the most glorious verbal battles! No one ever won. But then, no one ever lost either.

Mr. D'Sal, (I never knew his first name, he was very mysterious about it) had a wonderful time making MiMi's calendar. It was quite scandalous but Poppi loved it and hung it in his closet out of sight but he spent an awful lot of time in there. They never gave me permission to see it but I sneaked and looked a time or two and thought MiMi had been captured perfectly by  the eye of the camera (and Mr. D'Sal) in a strangely sepia colored sensuous way even though it feels salacious to even voice that about one's grandmother. She had always been straight-laced to my way of thinking but upon seeing her photographs, I saw that she could sometimes lean more toward the lacy side. No wonder Poppi loved her so much and protested so little. Mr. D'Sal frequently asked about her and I suspected he had developed a little crush. But then she confided that he frequently asked about me and that he probably had a crush on me so we just smiled and agreed to secretly share him. He took beautiful pictures and showered us with wonderful spices.

And then it happened. He simply vanished one day. The store was closed and dark. Nobody knew where he had gone or what had happened to him. Customers had lined up outside Spice World for days on end hungry for their spice fixes. Cafes and restaurants almost went out of business because no one wanted to eat there anymore without his delicious spices flavoring their dishes and perfuming the air. MiMi and I were beside ourselves with concern and had called every D'Sal in the book and put up MISSING flyers and took out ads in all the papers. We were totally mystified until I put myself on the case and eventually trailed him (with the help of my part time assistant investigator,Tom B. Ozo) down to east Texas in a little cabin in the woods suffering from a bad case of amnesia and indigestion brought on by ingesting raw spices from way too many countries at one time. (Later on, it was discovered that some of those spices had been imported from a small Mexican village that was famous for it's huge cabbages and something not widely common at the time called Cannabis.) 

It took him some time to recover and get the business back up and running properly and even though he still happily imported and sold exotic spices to a grateful public, I don't think he himself used anything stronger than black pepper and paprika ever again. Tom (no one knew what the B. stood for, not even his parents) was a plumber who hated plumbing but did it on the side to support his love of private investigating (on the other side) and running around in a truck with his brother.

So when I had an out of town investigation come up, he was the guy to call. Always ready to take off looking for adventure. Sometimes he told his brother, sometimes he didn't. (It was the brother's truck.) Sometimes his brother fell asleep in the truck when Tom got my messages and he woke up in some state he'd never been in before. Tom thought it was funny. But he got a lot of black eyes and nose fractures. Tom was a funny and creative man. His life's dream had been to run off and join the circus as a clown. (And somehow work plumbing into the act but I just didn't see that.)  He also loved to cook specialty dishes. (Which would one day make him famous.) But I bought him a clown suit as a present and he did kid's parties and weddings and bar mitzvahs in his free time. He's a proud man even if he does look ridiculous in that red nose and those size 32 shoes. But for some reason women find him attractive. He even asked me out a few times but I couldn't do it. He was cute but I just couldn't take the chance of making a clown cry. And I knew I would.

Happily, he found Mr. D'Sal for me down in Texas huddled up with two dogs that he thought were his sons, watching "Shop Girl" and other old black and white movies about love and lost romance. He didn't remember New York or his Spice World or his name, but he kept asking about Aachoo and MiMi Voo and was delighted to know that those two had been worriedly looking for him for whatever reason. Tom dipped him a few times in the creek, baptized him, cleaned him up and headed on back to The Big Apple. He kept protesting that they were going the wrong way. He didn't want no apple. He wanted what was growing there in Grapevine, Texas full of that sweet red juicy juice! He wanted to be a cowboy. He wanted to paint pictures and sell doodads and old things nobody wanted. The spice was doing a number on his brain. It was a sad sight to behold I heard, but at one point in some little backwater town, Tom persuaded him to be his little clown buddy and they actually made some good money putting on a clown show and acting funny under the Big Top.

Nobody had a clue that neither of them had ever gone to Clown School or been taught how to act stupid. It just came to them both naturally. The circus folk begged them to stay but Tom knew he had to deliver Mr. D'Sal to me if he wanted his money so he pulled him out of the sleeping arms of the Bearded Lady one morning and high tailed it back to the City That Never Sleeps. Or Bathes. Or Brushes it's Teeth. No, wait, that's Cleveland. D'Sal never even remembered any of that until I finally filled him in after a couple of Sangrias with Tequila chasers one sultry, rainy night at a seedy bar called Nick's Pub, a favorite watering hole of mine and other creatures of the night who slither and sleuth around in the wee hours.

                                         .

It was run by a man named Nick who did his own bouncing and throwing people out on their ears but who also wrote poetry and made incredible drinks and flirted with you without ever actually saying anything. I called it his "telepathic seduction" and he seemed to get a kick out of it. Unfortunately, sometimes he went overboard with his mental proclivities and for no apparent reason, every dame in the joint would start clawing each other's eyes out and screaming, "He's mine, you hear me, mine!" Darnedest thing you ever saw. And he just leaned back behind the bar with his big arms folded and watched the chaos unfold. Never said a word but his mysterious eyes twinkled like a cat's in the dark.

D'Sal was mortified but I admit, I did embellish a little bit in the telling. Especially about his dancing the Flamenco on top of a table with a senorita who called herself Smoochie Coochie. And about Tom shooting him out of a cannon clear across a cow pasture full of angry bulls. No, wait, that one was true. (He still has the scars). But he had fun and Tom had fun and the bulls had fun. And the kids. The kids at the circus had fun. And that's all that matters. And his brother got his truck back.True, it had been slightly altered. Long horned steer horns adorned the width of the truck front, cow bells rang on the side mirrors, cow hides covered the front seats and a naked silver lady wearing a big cowboy hat took the place of honor as a hood ornament. Heck, everything about her was big. 

When the boys got back home that foggy, misty New Yorky morning, they actually arm wrestled for the darned thing! I made them agree to share custody so they finally settled for that. I told them I was going to take them to Louisiana in the near future for some real "Laissez les bon temps rouler" Woo boy howdy!!! Let the good times roll! And we did go there eventually and Nawlins gave us a Key To The City contingent upon the promise that we would never, ever come back. But I digress.

To be continued in Episode 11

*

This episode starring David Salinas as Mr D'Sal, Spice Merchant and Photog...

MiMi and Poppi Voo.....Tom B.Ozo as the Clown Detective and Pt Time Plumber,

His un-named and unknown brother and his famous truck.....Patrick McDonagh 

as P. McDo, bakery owner and hen pecked husband of Hortense and Nick Nack     

now playing the role of the Pub owner written for John Duffy who may be written back in whether he likes it or not because well, it is the perfect depiction of him and besides....there are approximately 29 million John Duffys on this planet, 10,000 on the site formally known as Facebook alone!

 Hortense McDo  as played byKate Smith  

   Bruce Bennett  as P McDo

          

    P McDo

 

  Anthony Quinn as Mr. D'Sal

or Mr. D'Sal as Anthony Quinn..............I forget