Aachoo Voo, Private Eye Episode 11 Lipps (now with 99% fewer typos.......edited)

 

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

Episode Eleven

Lipps💋     

He was a tough looking hombre. On the flashy, fleshy side. He wore a cheap looking expensive suit that hadn't come with the twelve bullet holes so artistically embroidered into it's fabric. He wore a bad guy hat pulled low over his wide forehead and had three chins. He didn't appear to be anybody anybody could love until I fished a wallet out of his pocket that had eleven hundred dollars in it, a piece of gum and a picture of an older woman that looked just like him only meaner. She also had three chins. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he had been loved. There was no ID, no name to go with the face. There was a tattoo on his upper right arm that said "Mother" and one below it that I couldn't quite make out but looked like a pair of lips. (Turns out, it was the notorious "Lipps" Lipperson, one of Big david's mobster pals and part time movie monster. He was known for scaring little kids and old ladies by pressing his lips against random windows when he wasn't busy extorting and cracking skulls and partying with Lon Chaney and the monster crowd. The only monster among them that didn't have to wear makeup.)

I had gone out to the alley to shoo off the gang of loudly caterwauling cats that were driving me crazy that late afternoon as I was organizing my files into four separate piles. There was the Closed Cases File, the Open Cases File, The six inch thick Misc. Hospital/ And or Medical Bill File and the Former Boyfriends File that in all too many cases overlapped with the Misc. Hospital/And or Medical Bill File. Which was sad, really but not unusual for me. It was an all too common theme that had run throughout my life. Starting back with my first date, a double date with my friend Nina and her Junior High romeo, Jeffrey. We had gone ice skating and then to get hot chestnuts roasting over an open fire and well, let's just say cold sharp skate blades and open fire and leave it at that, shall we? My date, P. J. Jamison- Herkimer, Jr. (of the Jamison-Herkimer Country Club for The Snobbish) went on to become a soprano in an all male chorus and an inveterate life long hater of women. Oops! I digressed again, didn't I? 

As twilight began to fall on the city and the hoodlum cats scattered in all directions, I stumbled upon the body lying between a deserted fire barrel and several emptied bottles of alcohol in assorted flavors all lined up just so. I was used to stumbling but not over bodies wearing hats and Mother tattoos and still under suspicion in the Si the Shellac salesman case, I groaned and beat a hasty retreat. Little did I know that I was being spied upon from an upper floor window covered with gaudy purple and pink curtains or that I would soon be questioned by Yettiman and Coyote, the Homicide detectives who seemed to delight in trying to connect me to every unsolved case in seven states. One bum rap after another. (Thank goodness my parents never found out. MiMi made sure of that.) I was a detective myself for crying out loud, not a perpetrator! Well, not on purpose.

But murder? I'd never intentionally tried to hurt anyone in my life! And I certainly didn't perpetrate on Si (though a little assault and battery had sometimes crossed my mind) and I didn't even know this palooka! Why did these things continue to happen to me? Why did the coppers love to haul me in and take hundreds of mugshots of me, grill me forever under hot lights and then let me go in the wee hours to wearily make my way down to Nick's Pub to drown my sorrows in one of his concoctions that were delicious but lowered the I.Q. instantly upon the partaking? And who the hell am I talking to?!

"How you doing, Miss Voo?" Nick murmured seductively without moving his lips as he poured burgundy colored liquid into a tall glass and added something that had been boiling in a cauldron under the bar. He threw in a lime wedge and a vanilla bean for good measure and handed it to me, never taking his eyes off mine as I draped myself over a bar stool and buried my left hand in a bowl of peanuts without being aware of it. He cleared his throat and I withdrew the hand, blushing and threw back half of the glass's contents without stopping.

"Careful, Cheri," he cautioned as his eyebrows danced across his forehead. "That's a mighty powerful brew there. We wouldn't want you losing your inhibitions, now would we?" I looked to see if the words had come out of his mouth or out of my imagination but could not discern the source in my exhausted state. "Don't worry about it." I sighed, "I don't have any left. They extracted every emotion I had down at Homicide." The eyebrows shot up. "Homicide? Not again, surely!" "Oh, yeah," I answered. " I made the mistake of discovering a famous body this afternoon and they took me in again." "Not as famous as your body. I'll bet." he smiled and refilled my glass. On impulse, I made myself think of alligators down in Voo Bayou and "see you later" and he wrote down "After a while, Crocodile." on a napkin and pushed it toward me and I tried not to faint. 

"Let me call you a cab." I thought I heard him say just as I was thinking, "I need to call a cab. I'm beat, And these drinks have gone to my head, down to my tummy, across to my kidneys and down to my toes." I knew that because they had gone numb and I couldn't stand up. The muscular barman caught me just as I fell and swooped me up like an eagle on the wing catching a bunny. I looked up into his curious eyes and suddenly heard the sound of jungle drums and had a vision of myself dancing wildly around a blazing fire wearing nothing but bone ankle bracelets and a loin cloth. It soon passed and he grinned at me and sat me down upon the bar and began turning off lights. "Better yet, let me take you home." he whispered. In fact, I was positive he had whispered because I'd felt his hot breath on my neck. But when I looked up, he was clear across the room pulling on a trench coat and locking up the back door that led to the alley. 

My brows knitted together in puzzlement. Was this guy a magician? How did he do that? Where was he from? I made a mental note to do some deep research on this character as soon as I could. He was inexplicable. A mystery. And I loved mysteries. (But later I discovered that I could not read the handwriting on the mental note and shelved the project at least until I knew if he was going to survive.) Andy had recovered  from me somewhat but had gone to Tennessee to live with a relative that he refused to name. I wished him well but I missed his sweet, innocent face and the way he called me Ducky. For the rest of my life, I couldn't look at a high heel shoe or a Marx Brother without thinking of him. But I'm getting ahead or is that behind myself. Sometimes my suitors' faces just became one big blur covered in bandages.

"You wanna go get some hen fruit and Joe? You look hungry." He crossed the room and pulled me down off the bar into his arms. I eyed him hard and said, "You're the one that looks hungry. I'm just....hiccup...sleepy. I have to check on the menagerie. Hiccup." He looked amused and I suddenly had a mental image of the parrot tucking all the critters into bed and shushing them and turning off the lights before settling down on the little chaise lounge in his birdcage.  I rubbed my eyes and yawned. "What was in that drink?" I gasped, laying my head against his shoulder. " I'm seeing things."  He squeezed me and slow walked me to the door of the bar. "Would you like to see me?" he asked or didn't ask. I didn't know. I was hearing voices too.

"I don't wanna hurt you." I slurred softly as we stepped out into the gently falling rain accented by distant thunder. "You won't hurt me." he intoned, opening up an umbrella. "Let's walk. Do you good." And we headed off towards my apartment/office/laundry mat/cafe/charity/inner city zoo complex. "No, seriously, I might hurt you, kill you, even. I'm a dangerous woman." I yawned. And I said no more as his lips shut my mouth with a kiss. Time passed. Clocks chimed. The sun rose and set and rose again. It snowed. Then it rained harder. There was music. Violins, I think. And somewhere in the distance, a rooster crowed. (A rooster? In New York City?) 

But then I remembered MiMi's pet chicken, Beulah, that she'd smuggled into her and Poppi's little apartment after they'd gone "Damned Yankee" as she put it. Anything was possible, I supposed. Especially if there was a Cajun involved. "Are you Cajun or Creole?" I asked Nick as I caught my breath. "Are you from voodoo country down south?" "No. Not that I'm aware of." he answered softly. "But you never know." He put one arm around my waist and pulled me closer as we sauntered toward the dawn. It was a sweet unexpected interlude and I was happily, sleepily enjoying it until we made the mistake of climbing up to my apartment using the outside stairs, avoiding the broken elevator and trying in vain to be quiet.

And all was fine until I handed Nick my keys in the rain and they slid out of his wet fingers still holding onto the umbrella and he valiantly tried to catch them before they plunged through the metal steps. Fortunately....oh, but always followed by unfortunately...I grabbed for them at the same time, stomping down on the key fob with my shoe and saving the day. Throwing my key filled hand up in the air in victory, I struck Nick on the side of the head and he lost his balance and went rolling down the wet three part metal staircase which decided to fold itself up as they have the capacity to do and there I was on the small landing on the top part and there he was on the folded up second part with his head and shoulders protruding from one side and the rest of his body protruding from the other. A man just arriving at his early morning news stand saw the commotion and hurried to jump and pull down the bottom half of the staircase but he was just too short so he rushed off to find a policeman while I rushed inside to call an ambulance.

"I tried to warn you!" I cried as they unfolded him and put him on a gurney and rolled him over to the back of the hospital vehicle. He just stared up at me, tears forming in his eyes and I heard him say quite clearly in a voice that had an odd sort of indecipherable accent, "So, it's true. Everything they've told me about you. It's all true!" And he burst into tears, crying, "You are dangerous! You have powers! Great powers!  My God, you're wonderful!" And they took him away babbling loud enough to be heard three blocks away. I guess you could say he finally found his voice. The seduction of the female would have to be done the old fashioned way, not by the mental but by the vocal. Gee, I hoped they could get him sorted out. I so enjoyed his creative libations and especially that kiss. Sigh. The parrot snickered as I walked in the side door for he'd witnessed the whole thing. Then he softened and muttered, "Poor kid. You're gonna die an old maid."

Special thanks to the following:

Lon Chaney, Sr. and Jr.

Bela Lugosi

and

Nina G

Jeffrey Chatham, and Nick Trevnor

from MeWe. GPlus, etc

To be continued in Episode 12

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Click here for 

Episode 12  link

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

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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 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 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 were 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 months 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 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 came to them both so 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.

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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 capabilities 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 Coochie Coochie. And about Tom shooting him out of a cannon clear across a 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 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

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Episode 11 link here

special thanks to  Patrick McDonough (McDo)

David Salinas (D'Sal) and Tom B. (Tom B.Ozo)

of MeWe and G Plus.......💥 and elsewhere...

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye Episode Nine Vooey Wooey and The Insincere Blessings

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

 Episode Nune Nin  9

Vooey Wooey and The Insincere Blessings

We were taken to various hospitals, my pets and I. There was some confusion naturally, in all the screaming and fainting and hissing and barking and obscene language. That was probably how I ended up at a veterinarian clinic and the parrot ended up at the State Asylum and Toulouse and the others wound up in St. Chuck's Hospital under the care of Dr. Burr. Well, at least until the Administrator of said hospital insisted that "animals were not welcome" and Dr. Burr took them home with him until their owner could be found and returned to. My mother refused to allow them in her home despite my father's wishes. (All this information I found out later, told to me gleefully by MiMi Voo after I had finally been released from the animal clinic and subsequently from some human hospital I can't quite remember.) We were sick. All of us. Sick as dogs. (And cats and ferrets and mice and fish and parrots, etc.) It was food poisoning, plain and simple. (With all that that entails!) Plus a good measure of hallucinations thrown in. Oh, it was awful.

First, let me explain what I do remember. It was not actually my beloved furry friends who were doing all that screaming and barking and hissing:  It was my mother. (Actually, the parrot was cursing but he always did that and had become very combative and threatening so the medics were forced to put him in a strait jacket and and take him to the Asylum for the protection, not only of themselves but of my mother for whom he had held a long time grudge. I was told that before they finally caught him, he had achieved some semblance of satisfaction by stuffing a beak full of peanuts down her blouse and throwing up pate', green oysters and tequila on her $400.00 shoes. 

Meanwhile, I was lying in my bed moaning, wondering when I'd painted everything black and white and why my legs were nine feet long and my feet were touching the wall and my head was nowhere close to my pillow. In fact, Manny the mouse was lying on my pillow holding his little tummy and squeaking loudly in very descriptive sentences. I know, because I understood every word he said. I was also quite certain that he was drunk. There were several empty champagne bottles lying by the bed and I had no memory of emptying them. I had convinced myself that I'd been having a very bad nightmare and that I'd probably wake up eventually to my normal/abnormal life. Instead, I had unluckily awakened to a rather shameful reality.

Little did I know that my badly disguised detectives out front had been alerted by a neighbor of George's, the old man whose chest I had been working on, that there were possibly several dozen people dying in my apartment due to the horrible sounds coming from inside and that they should check it out immediately. Obviously, nobody really believed they were Chinese tourists for various and obvious reasons but also because they were both still wearing Homicide badges, I guess just out of habit. They were certainly dedicated detectives but they were, well, stupid. Anyway, they broke in and saved us. In a manner of speaking.

My mother's butler had been arriving also at that moment while she waited in the car with the chauffeur. She'd called fifty-seven times the two previous days and was beside herself with worry. The butler surveyed the scene through the broken-down door and had rushed to inform her of the dire and bizarre situation. The elevator just so happened to be working that day strangely enough and she had entered my apartment like a hurricane on legs, screaming and crying, tossing policemen this way and that and then putting her hand to her coiffed head, began to faint until she saw all the sick animals lying here and there amongst the party hats and half eaten containers of food and changed her mind. 

Then the parrot recognized her shrill voice and commenced his attack. I don't really know who called who or what but they tell me that at least fourteen ambulances showed up, sirens blasting and in all the chaos, the parrot ended up in the Asylum and I ended up on a table in a vet's office full of hamsters, Pomeranians and a couple of bad-tempered chimpanzees. (And yes, they were all looking at me like that school picture: Which of these things are not like the others.) I was the thing.

I later received several absolutely astronomical medical bills because every last one of us had to have our stomachs pumped and were given various medicines and ice-cold baths and lectures. (Weiner especially hated the cold baths.) It was to be my last party for some time. After several long boring days, I was released to go home and was happy to see that glorious color had returned to the world. There were roses waiting with an unsigned card, Lance had left a Get Well card filled with pictures of ruined and ragged clothing with a big HA HA on the front and Dr, Burr arrived later with a car full of happy and healthy animals (including the parrot that he had helped escape from his padded bird cage) and a bottle of some vile potion painstakingly created just for me by Grandfather Storklegs.

It tasted like mud and huckleberries, but I forced it down, grew stronger and actually learned to like it. The parrot had still been under observation and deemed dangerous so there was an alert out for his capture and return to the Asylum but I told them I would be responsible for him as long as my mother stayed away and they seemed satisfied with that. However, as far as I know, he was the only parrot in New York City that has ever been actually diagnosed as criminally insane.

We had a lovely visit and when he left all my furry friends watched him go with sad faces, having found a new friend. All except the parrot. He had no friends and he liked it that way. He was upset, nonetheless, when I insisted on keeping the little strait jacket as a souvenir. I hung it up in the kitchen where he could see it and pointed to it whenever he dared to be exceptionally annoying. He irked me on a regular basis but also occasionally showed some compassion to me in my still weakened condition. One morning he greeted me with a chipper "How's my little Vooey Wooey?" And then threw a peanut at me. Life was back to normal. Of a sort. But I had to admit that during our forced separation I was shocked to discover I'd honestly missed his snickering and even his constant but insincere blessings.

Being the consummate con man that he is, the parrot kept pouring on the sweet nothings until he wore me down and convinced me to buy him a new outfit that he'd been eyeing on the catalog page in the bottom of his bird cage. He does look rather spiffy. But then he insisted he needed a pair of suspenders!!!! (for what!!!???) He doesn't wear pants!!!

                                      to be continued in Episode 10

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Episode 10 link here

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