Aachoo Voo, Private Eye: 04/23/21

Aachoo Voo, Private Eye

Episode 15

Mobsters, Moola and All That Jazz

Nick was still in rehab. He was going to be in there for quite some time. His body still looked like an accordion just beginning to unfold. His handsome face was unscarred, unblemished. Thank God for that. I felt just about as low as a snake's belly as MiMi would say, for the part I had played in his un-foreseen accident with the folding stairs outside my apartment building. Of all the crazy things that had happened to my dates and love interests, that had been the craziest! If only I could go back to that night and had just waited two hours for the elevator to start running and then given up and walked up the inside stairs to my apartment like I usually did! If only! Nick had been so nice to walk me home in the rain from his pub. It had been romantic and sweet in a mystifying way because he was simply a mystifying man.

I had been semi-infatuated with him for some time as had every woman who'd laid eyes on him or imbibed one of his special concoctions or been the target of his unvoiced seductions. As far as I knew, he had played with the affections of many hopeful young/old/still breathing dames but hadn't walked any of them home but me. I think he wanted to see if my dangerous reputation was half as exciting as he'd heard it was. He was curious. Especially after that historic Saturday night when approximately twenty-eight of my past dates and one day or one night boyfriends had shown up at his place all nursing broken hearts or ribs or whatnots and looking to get sauced.

They were probably also hoping to get a glimpse of me (from afar) as they knew I sometimes ended up there after a case or a perplexing run in with detectives who were always trying to find me guilty of something stupid. Which I was, but I didn't think being stupid was illegal, just stupid. I couldn't help it. For the most part I think they just liked taking and looking at my mugshots. I finally got suspicious after they started asking me to put on fresh lipstick and unbutton my blouse. And I ask you, how many cops did it take to take a side shot and a face forward? Plus, they never asked me to hold a sign in front of me! (Mugshot taking was followed by a doughnut and coffee reception in the precinct meeting room. Invitation only.) Sheesh!

The other gumshoes in my circle of gumshoes thought it was funny that the girl that was only out to solve crimes usually ended up being charged with crimes. At least until they fingerprinted me and took some new photos. They usually let me go after long, tedious interrogations that only ended with them learning new swear words I had picked up from the parrot or MiMi and me learning how loudly their wives could scream on the phone at half past midnight as their pot roasts dried out on the stove. Johnny, (we called him "Ooh, Johnny" because that's how dames usually addressed him, made it his goal in life to tease and torment me about my love life, arrest record and the fact that I had solved every case he'd ever been hired to work on while sitting behind my desk and just putting the facts together while filing my nails and reading notes on his unsolved mysteries. I didn't even have to try. And he couldn't stand it.

He couldn't find a clue if it jumped into his lap. And believe me, lots of them had. He was darkly handsome, suave in a way not easily defined and thought he was God's gift to women. Some thought he was. (I thought he was a toad I'd never kiss.) George usually took my side and defended me the best he could but most of the P.I.s cajoled me cruelly or good-naturedly when we met in bars or Gumshoe Conventions. The mean ones who treated me cruelly were either guys I had not given any kind of chance or were guys I had given a chance and they had taken it. And I refuse to go into detail about that. There were good private dicks and there were lousy private dicks. I just wish they'd come up with a new word for private detectives. I was all grown up and my mother still washed my mouth out with soap if I said that word in her presence. I had never dared date or bring any guy home to meet my parents named Dick for that reason alone. It would have been humiliating for all concerned.

After my experience working for Big david or rather his sister Prudence, word had gotten round that I was "the dame to deal with" in both crime solving and crime commiting circles. Mobsters loved me, which made me nervous and cops loved me, which made me nervous but they kept me busy and employed in between mundane everyday cases like finding lost cats and wayward husbands or wives and solving mysteries that entailed "who did what to whom and who stole what from where." Crimes and mysteries always involved the letter "W." That was just a fact. Like mobsters involved money and the other "M" word, you know the one............ Malarkey.

The thing about detectives and mobsters that I found fascinating was how they tended to dress alike. Sharp suits, fancy hats and trench coats. I don't know who started the trend but the mobsters' suits tended to be sharper and more expensive. They were usually custom made by tailors bought and paid for and petrified to make mistakes like crooked seams and buttonless button holes. I supposed they added in all sorts of hidden pockets and places to hide guns, knives and phone numbers of public officials. I daresay not too many detectives could afford private tailors or found themselves in the good graces of any pubic officials worth knowing or calling.

The police detectives tended to look down upon private detectives for several reasons, none of which I shall go into here. Okay, maybe one. Most of us worked alone. We didn't have angry sergeants or supervisors breathing down our necks, we could sleep till noon and we could wear evening gowns to work if the occasion called for it. Well, I did anyway. There weren't a lot of female private you-know-whats. I had heard rumors about a cop that worked out of Burglary and Stick-em-Ups who wore evening gowns and favored gold lame' but he claimed it was only when he was working undercover in a private club for extremely ugly women. I don't know. Who knows? And I don't care to know.

Mobsters were a special breed of men. They loved their mothers, they went to church and they did reprehensible, despicable things without thinking twice about it. There were all sorts of mobsters or gangsters if you prefer that word. White ones, black ones, Oriental, Italian, you name it. We had them in the Big Apple. They were celebrities of sorts. Like Lipps, the movie monster mobster (say that four times fast) I had found in the alley. People loved him. Well, except for maybe two people. I had never liked him but that's just me. I hated movie monsters. They scared me. Why I went to see them at theaters I'll never know but I did. And I always went straight over to MiMi Voo's to sleep in her guest room for a week with Beulah until I stopped having nightmares. I felt safe with Beulah. A chicken for Pete's Sakes! My deepest, darkest most humiliating secret that no one will ever pry out of me under the hottest lights and the most tortuous long interrogations or threats to call my mother. I would sooner die than reveal that.

Big david was at the top of the mobster heap. He and an equally scary but equally smooth talker with the un-pronounceable moniker of (you might want to sit down and take a drink of something while I prepare my brain and tongue for this.) Giovanni Alphonso LaMacho Giancarlo Genovia Luciano Bonnano de Flippi, Jr. (I think I spelled that correctly.) Aka Uncle Alph. He was nobody's uncle but everybody called him that because when Giovanni Alphonso LaMacho...etc etc etc told you to do something, you just did it. He thought it was cute so everybody thought it was cute. And you could continue with your breathing and so forth. In fact, in order to become a bonafide member of Uncle Alph's gang, you had to either be born into the family or go through an extensive initiation that included saying and spelling Uncle Alph's full name as written on his abnormally long birth certificate. He came from a very large family and his parents didn't want to leave anyone out when they named their first born son. Both maternal and paternal sides of the family were known to hold centuries old grudges and they didn't settle feuds with fist fights or name calling.

One of the toughest gangsters in New York City was a darker skinned fellow called Jack Knife James otherwise known in various circles as Evil Genius and The Horn Man. He was sharper than the blade he carried in style and dress and smarter than Einstein on his best day. He also played jazz trumpet and could disguise himself and sneak in and play in any club with any band in the world. Benny Goodman's, for example. Once for kicks, he'd played the annual Policemen's Ball with an all policeman jazz ensemble even though he had approximately thirty-six current warrants against him at the time. As per his name: Genius. He could make a trumpet cry, they said of him. He could make a big man cry. He could make a big man cry while playing the trumpet. He could make a...well, you get the picture. He was big and bad but he loved kids and kittens and a pretty brunette named Zelma Lee. Word was that she didn't love him back and that's what made him mean but he never gave up pursuing her or rescuing kittens or let that interfere with his mobstering.

Which brings me back around to....wherever I was when I started this whole thing. Nick's Pub! Poor Nick had been lying in bed worrying about his famous/infamous watering hole and what to do about it while he recovered. He was at his wit's end when an old friend named Clyde Miraculous showed up with a solution. Clyde had retired... er ..been fired from running a famous club up in Harlem for a few months on a trial basis and was on his way to sunnier shores when he'd heard about Nick's accident. Wanting to help out his old army buddy, he agreed to run Nick's place until he got back on his feet. Nick was delighted. Clyde was one of those people that you never could tell where he hailed from....... Alabama, Argentina or Africa. He was multi-cultural and multi-talented. He could do anything, fit in anywhere and he loved smoky blue jazz music more than anything in the world. Except for his favorite cousin who was the sole supporter and pride of the whole Miraculous family and all of it's branches. His cousin was Jack Knife James.

Nick was laid up for months. I sent him flowers and cheese sandwiches but I kept my distance. I tried to visit once but the look on his handsome face stopped me in my tracks so I blew him a kiss and left the gifts with a nurse. In the long interim, strange things happened to him that he never foresaw. He lost his magical abilities and propensities. He lost his power to seduce women with his thoughts. He lost his mind reading and mind controlling and he also lost his grandfather's pocket watch. The one young Grandpa Resko had used in his vaudeville magic show to hypnotize his wife, Joy into marrying him and grown men into believing they were cows in the Foreign Legion. The name of the act was The Riveting Reskos. (After his sudden marriage to the lovely audience member.) Before that, it was just Resko. His grandparents had vanished on stage one evening in the old Vanishing Cabinet act the day after Nick turned 21, never to be seen again. Nick cherished the watch and kept it with him always. But somewhere between the ambulance and the emergency hospital, it had disappeared just like his mother's amazing parents.

That vanishing act had made headlines all around the world and the mystery had never been solved. Nick kept his grandfather's tools of the magic trade in a secure location and studied the tricks and illusions in his spare time, mastering most of them. However, he had yet to learn the secret of and to the Vanishing Cabinet. That one appeared to be true magic.

Before his release to leave, Nick had been hearing things about the "hot new jazz club" in town. The-Place-To-Be. The bar everyone wanted to be caught dead in. He was worried because it sounded like it was in his small pub's neighborhood. He didn't need the competition. He couldn't wait to get the run down from Clyde. Clyde had promised to pick him up the afternoon the doctors had determined he had recovered enough to walk again and chew gum. He was cautioned sternly to stay away from stairs and to keep off his feet for a while. That wouldn't be too difficult since he mostly just sat on a stool behind the bar and had stimulating mental conversations with attractive women. But there would be no more of that. He'd tried his best mind control and silent seduction on all the nurses at the various facilities he'd been recuperating in to no avail. No avail at all!!! It was frustrating and a little bit horrifying.

Few people knew how extremely shy and introverted Nick really was and what had led him to learn his grandfather's magic tricks and mental manipulations in his awkward teenage years. He had become so adept at it that it frightened him sometimes but he kept a cool exterior. His grandfather had seen him in action before he'd entered that cabinet and dematerialized for the last time and he'd been amazed, amused and a little bit jealous. Nick wondered if it were possible to one day find a girlfriend without resorting to mentalism and magic beans. He didn't know. He could only hope. Women seemed to find him boring when he tried to talk to them verbally. Except for Aachoo Voo. But that woman scared the living daylights out of him! She was the reason for all of this. Losing his health, job, tan, paranormal powers and very nearly, his will to live. Did he dare go near her again? That had been an incredible kiss and she fascinated him but was she worth dying for?

Clyde was late. It was getting dark and Nick was getting impatient and about to go back inside and attempt to call him when he saw that flashy car Clyde loved to brag about pull up to the curb. "My man!" Clyde greeted him as he hopped out, opened the passenger side door and hurried to help Nick into the car. It was slow going. His bones were still crunchy. "So sorry I'm running late." he said, "But I had some last minute things to take care of." "That's okay." Nick assured him and cleared his throat to begin asking questions about the pub and the new place everyone was buzzing about but Clyde waved them off and said in a low voice, "Listen, Nick. I got some things I need to tell you, man. I don't know how you're gonna take 'em but man, things have been happening!" Nick held his breath and steeled himself for some bad news. Like, the pub had burned down bad news. Like, the pub had been quarantined because of Black Plague bad news. Clyde kept quiet like he was trying to find the words to spill the bad news but couldn't find any so they drove on in silence. There didn't seem to be any thoughts in Clyde's mind to read so Nick just leaned back and fell asleep, fearing the worst.

He was awakened by bright lights, the sound of loud music and the giggles of happy women. He rubbed his eyes and tried to get his bearings but the scene seemed a little bit too surreal to be real. Still dreaming, evidently. "Nick, my friend, welcome home!" Clyde beamed, throwing open the car door and helping Nick to his hesitant feet. There was a red carpet there for him to walk on, lined on both sides by excited people of all shapes, sizes and colors. There was a doorman in uniform holding the door open to a freshly painted and newly remodeled building that boasted flashing NICK'S signs all over it. But that was nothing! When he stumbled inside in total disbelief, there was a stage and a packed house and the best bluesy jazz band he'd ever heard in his life, fronted by none other than the man himself, Jack Knife James, The Horn Man, Evil Genius and second cousin to Clyde Miraculous, up there making grown men cry with his moaning trumpet! He couldn't believe it! It was too much to handle for a crumpled man. But it appeared to be true! The Hottest New Place In Town was his own former lowly, lonely little pub! Nick had no idea what to do or say so he just folded up and fainted.

It was one of the happiest moments of Clyde's life even though he had no idea what Nick was going to say when he came to. He had certainly been surprised at all the changes. Whether he was thrilled or not was another matter. Maybe he should have prepared his friend but he'd just been so excited to be given responsibility for something again. Like the Cotton Club. Up in Harlem. Oh, my Lord, the changes he had made to that place! The absolutely unappreciated changes he had made to that place!!!! Threatened and beaten to within an inch of his life by angry owners and investors! And fired like a dishwasher with a mound of broken plates! (That he had previously been.) He wondered if he should wait for Nick to wake up or just go get in his car and leave town right then.