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."
