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 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.