No More Mr. Ice Guy

Earl Fowler

Chapter 1: The Dame Wore Danger

It was a Tuesday, the kind that sticks to your trench coat like bad decisions and day-old egg salad from Cabaret Voltaire. Rain pounded the city like Foster Brooks looking for his keys in a half-plugged storm drain, and I was halfway through a bottle of Old Forester and all the way through my rent money when she walked in.

Tall as trouble and twice as dangerous, she had legs that went on longer than a Trump ramble about “the late, great” Hannibal Lecter and a look in her eyes that said — as do the president’s, now that I think of it — “I’ve committed several crimes and might commit more if I'm bored.”

“Mr. Hardcase?” she purred. Purring was her native tongue. “Dick Hardcase?”

I tipped my hat, which hadn’t seen a dry day since Prohibition. “Depends. If you’re selling Girl Guide cookies, I already did hard time for Thin Mints.”

She laughed, the kind of laugh that made men forget their vows and women remember where they stashed the rodenticide. “I need your help. My husband’s missing.”

I gave her the once-over, twice. Pas de ring. Pas de tan line. Pas d’innocence.

“Convenient,” I muttered. “And what’s a dish like you doing with a disappearing husband?”

She leaned on my desk like dew drawn to a freshly opened rose. “He was rich. Now he’s missing. I suspect foul play.”

I poured us both a drink, because if I was going to swim in lies, I preferred to be lubricated. Pas de whack, give a dog a bone.

                                                               ***

“I'm in,” I said, hoping she hadn’t already noticed my creeping coin of baldness as I pulled on the fedora. “But if this turns into a love triangle, I charge extra for geometry.”

We hit the streets. Her perfume followed me like a subpoena. Like a glassy continuum of her susurrating sensuality.

We asked around. Every barkeep, bookie and busker in town seemed to know two things: her husband was loaded, and she was the kind of broad who could turn a happy marriage into a missing persons report with just a look and a bottle of arsenic-flavoured lipstick.

I’m good at what I do, if you don’t mind my saying so, so yeah. I found the husband — eventually. Stuffed in a freezer behind a jazz club, next to a suspiciously romantic ham.

V-shaped hole in the middle of his forehead. The look of terror on his face reminded me of the expression of the kid who played Ratty in our school production of Toad of Toad Hall. He wet himself on stage. That kid might have been me.

She gasped. “Oh, Horace!”

“That his name?”

“No, the ham. I was saving it for Easter.”

I looked her dead in the eyeliner. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

She paused, coy as Sylvester whenever the old lady caught him with Tweety’s feathers sticking out both sides of his mouth.

“Only emotionally,” she said.

I lit a cigarette, even though I’d already quit twelve times like a guy named Cam I knew back on Grub Street. The flame flickered like my sense of morality. “Lady, you’re a Grade-A heartbreaker with a minor in premeditated disaster. But I gotta admit …”

She leaned in like a rhombus of sunlight on a white tablecloth. “Yes?”

I kissed her. It tasted like betrayal and cinnamon gum. “… I kinda dig it.”

We made out in the alley while distant sirens wailed like a Greek chorus with gambling debts.

                                                                     ***

I took her on as my secretary. She dictated, I transcribed, and occasionally we committed light fraud together. Romance? Maybe. Or maybe just two lost souls grifting their way through a city that smelled like penitence and three-day-old chow mein.

Frankly, my dear, I didn’t give a damn.

Because sometimes, when a dame wears danger like a cocktail dress, a gumshoe’s gotta throw away the rulebook and just enjoy the fatal attraction.

Until she poisons your coffee. Or you notice a V-shaped ice pick under the bed.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem.

Chapter 2: Bullets, Bouquets and the Breakfast of Betrayal

Morning hit me like an unpaid bar tab — loud, aggressive, and with a vaguely boozy smell. I was lying on my office couch, which had all the comfort of a confession booth with upholstery. Another sliver of sunlight cut through the blinds, only this time like it was mad at me, and my head felt like someone had tried to smuggle a jazz band out of my skull in sections.

Lionel Hampton on vibes.

The dame — Velma Vex. Yeah, she had a name. I remembered it right between the bourbon haze and the part where she tried to “accidentally” drop a piano on me last night. Allegedly. I had no proof, just a note tied to the piano that said, “Oops.”

She was at her new desk now, feet up, typing nothing, smoking everything. Her dress was blood red, her lipstick was blood red, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she bathed in crime scenes.

“Mornin’, boss,” she said without looking up. “You scream in your sleep, you know.”

“I don’t scream,” I croaked. “I narrate internally with volume.”

“Suit yourself,” she purred, handing me a cup of something dark and menacing. Coffee, allegedly. It smelled like the bottom of a detective’s soul. I drank it anyway. I’m not proud.

“Anything on the agenda today?” I asked.

She flipped through a fake day planner. “We’ve got a client coming in at 10. Some floozy with a locket, a limp and a love child. The usual.”

“Dead husband?”

“Missing,” she said, smirking. “But you better check the freezer just in case.”

Before I could remind her that sarcasm isn’t admissible in court, unless you’re a lawyer for a junior hockey player, the door flew open with the enthusiasm of a jealous ex at a wedding reception.

In stumbled a man who looked like he’d lost a fight with both a meat grinder and the concept of hope. His suit was rumpled, his tie screamed “I’ve made mistakes,” and he had a shiner that suggested he’d tried to flirt with a baseball bat.

“I need help,” he wheezed. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

“That’s fair,” Velma said, not looking up.

                                                                       ***

Turns out Clark Dent, flower baron of 8th Street, was being stalked. Someone had delivered a ticking tulip. That’s not metaphor. The damn thing exploded and mildly traumatized a ficus.

I poked through the envelope of surveillance shots he brought. A trench-coated figure skulking by begonias. A sinister hand adjusting pansies. It stank of antecedent grudges and pollarded willows.

“Looks like someone’s gunning for your garden,” I said. “And I’ve got a hunch this isn’t about photosynthesis.”

We were in it now — petal-deep in a mystery that smelled like murder with a side of Miracle-Gro.

Chapter 3: A Fistful of Petals and a Pocketful of Privet

By the time I got to Flora the Explorer, Dent’s floral front, the sky was doing its best impression of despair. The shop reeked of orchids and ominous foreshadowing. Dent was pacing near the lilies like he wanted to prise them from their levity.

That’s when I found it. A single black rose. Tied to the stem was a calling card, handwritten in the sharp script of a woman who once used my heart as an ashtray.

“Some flowers wilt. Others kill.” — H.C.

No, not Hillary Clinton. Harry Connick. Harry Caray.

Could only be Helena Chuzzlewit.

The name slapped me upside the head like a metaphor-filled, noir movie voice-over monologue. She was the dame from my past. Distant, distant, ancient past. The one who vanished after Reno, after the speakeasy, after that time we tried to smuggle turnips for fast cash and faster heartbreak.

“She’s back,” I muttered as my heart pounded with the arhythmic tick of a hot water pipe contracting over a parquet dance floor.

Velma leaned in, all gunmetal glamour. “And she’s got a thing for dramatic gestures.”

Dent screamed. “Will she kill me?”

“Keep your blouse on,” I said. “She’s after me. You’re just the bait.”

And then she walked in.

Helena Chuzzlewit. Still trouble with a side of lipstick. Still smelled like betrayal in a discontinued perfume bottle. Still dousing herself in Obsession by Calvin Klein, just as in our kale salad days.

She grew the kale. And now she was sauntering in like a slow-rolling Sean (Diddy) Combs freak-off party, wearing heels.

“Well, well,” she said. “Hello, Dick.”

“Helena,” I said, voice dry and brittle as Melba toast. Rye with seeds. But mostly rye. “Still spelling ‘closure’ with bullets?”

                                                                        ***

Turns out my instincts were solid — Helena was trying to kill me. And Velma. And probably the hydrangeas.

She’d always hated hydrangeas.

But there was something different about her now. That downward curve of the mouth that certain women get after decades of giving and getting nothing back. Also, this was the first time I’d ever seen her with a multi-barrelled derringer pointed in my direction.

But Velma was hot. She drew first and shot. And Helena collapsed in the corner.

The bullet lodged deep in Helena’s shoulder, forcing her to drop both her piece and her pretense. The cops showed up like they’d been waiting outside for dramatic timing, as they always do in TV crime series when they rush in at the end to save one person after four or five others have been offed right under their noses.

Helena hissed. Velma lit a cigarette. Dent fainted into the petunias. He was useless in a crisis but could always be relied upon for stamps and good-quality envelopes should the need arise.

“Noooooo. Not the petunias!” Helena cried.

I looked at Velma and realized something: She’s fit for a strait jacket. This broad is twisted three ways to the weekend. But you know what, Father? I dig it! It turns me on, from psyche to soma! Or maybe I was just relieved that she didn’t shoot me.

Either way, I kissed her in that flower shop while the cops took Helena away to wailing sirens like Charlie Parker playing his final notes at the Cotton Club.

I kissed her like the way a Roomba kisses a wall — confused, persistent, and with absolutely no idea what I was doing. I kissed her the way a squirrel hugs a power line — passionately, but with a high probability of fatal sparks. Like the way a toddler eats spaghetti — messy, enthusiastic, with my saliva in her hair. Then like the way a dad backs out of a driveway — slow, cautious, with the emergency brake still on. Like the way a cat accepts affection—grudgingly, dramatically, and only because snacks were involved.

She kissed me the way an octopus hugs a blender — tentatively, curiously, and deeply regretting it halfway through. She kissed me the way a ghost pets a lava lamp — gently, eerily, and with the overwhelming suspicion that the self’s experience of permanence and solidity in time and space is illusory. The way a moth kisses a lightbulb — drawn in by mystery, blinded by the heat, and completely unaware that we were being electrocuted emotionally. The way a taxidermied raccoon would kiss a Fabergé egg — stiff, unblinking and fundamentally wrong. The way a cult leader kisses a sandwich — reverently, obsessively and all the while whispering to it about “The Prophecy.”

We kissed the way a sentient toaster kisses a sunrise — burning with misplaced passion and popping up too soon. Oh, wait. That was just me. We kissed the way a penguin in a business suit kisses a fax machine — urgent, formal, and entirely against company policy. The way jellybean with anxiety kisses a wormhole — sticky, trembling, and now lost in the year 4029. The way a llama on roller skates kisses the concept of quantum discontinuity — gracefully chaotic and surprisingly philosophical. We kissed the way a Shakespearean broccoli floret kisses a traffic cone — tragic, leafy, and narrated entirely in iambic pentameter.

Sometimes, you don’t get a happy ending.

But sometimes you get a dame who shoots straight, kisses crooked and tries to sit in your lap while you’re standing up.

And that’s enough for me. As in a dream where I was simultaneously in the first and third person modes, the creator of both the finely balanced artifice and the main protagonist in the fabulation, I saw myself building a house for her by the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where the statue of Mary weeps blood and the one of Ganesha drinks milk.

I would have, too, until checking the floral walk-in refrigerator where every May they chilled corsages for the local high school prom. No stone unturned. In my business, it pays to be thorough.

And that’s when I discovered the frozen corpse of Helena’s husband staring back, Martin Chuzzlewit (the boys down at the pool hall called him Farty McMarty for obvious reasons), with the business end of a garden trowel lodged squarely in his forehead. Judging by the size of the hole, it was the same implement that had been used on Velma’s husband. The same one that ran with Helena’s mugshot in her gardening column every Saturday in the local rag!

Bones, sinews and brutally murdered dead body aside, there was almost an Edwardian quaintness about the whole thing. A tasteful tidiness. Helena had style, you had to give her that. She always said it with flowers. And trowels.

“Let’s do takeout tonight,” Velma called from the next room as I quickly closed the door. And the case.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” I said. “It must have been while you were kissing me.”

🌹🔫🖤