Los Angeles. 1957.
I was just drifting off to sleep as the sun was announcing its intrusion into another morning when I heard a pounding on my apartment door like a piledriver smacking a ping pong ball.
I climbed over a pair of legs and peered out the window down Sunset Boulevard where streetlights were beginning to wink out. Don’t get the wrong impression; I don’t live on a classy part of Sunset, more on the part of the strip they’d like to tear down to build something nice. In the distance the ocean swelled. I didn’t know what the other direction looked like; presumably that was Sunrise Boulevard.
The piledriver hit my door again. That ping pong ball was crushed. “All right!” I called out. “I’m coming!”
“Oh,” said a voice behind me.
“Shut up,” I said.
I pulled on an old housecoat I’d bought in Shanghai at the end of World War Two, couldn’t find the belt, so I held it closed with my left hand as I went out into my living room, shutting the bedroom door behind me. I went to the door. “Who is it?” I asked.
“Police.”
“First name or last name?”
“Open up, Wyznicki.”
I undid the latch but left the chain on and opened the door a little. “Show,” I said.
The cop showed me his badge. It was worn, like an old rug, and smelled about as bad. I removed the chain and opened the door enough to let his massive frame in. He strolled in as if he owned the place, and maybe he did; I’ve never known who my landlord is. My checks clear. That’s all I care about.
“Who are you?” I said, cleverly.
“Delaney. Robbery squad.”
“Delaney. An Irish cop. How original.”
“Don’t crack wise, bud.”
“Do you want some coffee?” I said, to change the subject.
“Sure,” he said.
“Then you’ll have to go out and get some because I don’t have any coffee. I take mine with one sugar, no cream.”
“Funny guy,” he said. “You private detectives always have something to say, don’t you?”
“Unless our mouths are full of soup, I guess so. Can we get to the point of your visit, Detective Delaney? I’d like to get a few hours sleep before I start pounding the pavement looking for some work, like finding a lost poodle or a job for an aging actor.”
Delaney looked over at my closed bedroom door. “Who’s in there?”
“None of your business, Detective.”
“Spill.”
“If you must know, I have Minnie Mouse and Betty Boop in there. It’s a tough time for actresses in Hollywood these days; they gotta make a few extra bucks some time.”
“I told you not to crack wise, Wyznicki.”
“All right, I got Marilyn Monroe and Ava Gardner in there. What do you want me to say? Can we get on with this, Detective Delaney? What do you want?”
He looked at his fingernails like some B-movie detective pretending he’s being nonchalant. “Story is you robbed the Albatross Club last night. Blew the safe.”
“That’s quite the story. I wasn’t anywhere near the Albatross last night. You can ask the bartender, Danny, if I was there at all.”
“I did. He says you weren’t there.”
“There you go then.”
“That don’t mean nothing. Maybe he just didn’t see you.”
“He would’ve done if I’d been there. I always sit at the bar. You can prove that by checking out my bum prints on the stool at the end of the bar.”
“Maybe you sat somewhere else—” Delaney abruptly stopped and looked at my bedroom door. I turned as well. It had opened and out stepped Ava Gardner. I don’t always lie.
She’d put on a pair of my pajamas and looked a whole lot better in them than I ever had. They were too big for her and hung on her like a wallpaperer’s bucket. She’d found the missing belt to my Chinese housecoat and tied it around herself, giving her the appearance of a really hot circus clown. My hand dropped away from holding my housecoat, and it flew open, revealing what I really thought of how Ava looked. She glanced down and smiled at me.
She turned to Delaney, whose jaw was crawling across the carpet. “Wyznicki wasn’t anywhere near the Albatross Club last night. He was with me the whole time.”
Delaney picked up his lip and said, “And where were you last night?”
“Various places,” Ava said, coolly lighting a cigarette out of a pack that had been carelessly tossed onto my chessboard, where I had a Capablanca game lined up. She blew out the match sensually and slowly, then dropped the match at Delaney’s feet. “The Mocambo. Ciro’s. Brown Derby.”
“You get around, don’t you?” said Delaney, now having recovered his equilibrium.
“I do OK, Detective,” said Ava, turning and looking out the apartment window at the morning traffic of starlets and juvenile leads on their way to Hollywood studios to beg, or worse, for work.
“I don’t know what that means,” said Delaney. I suspected that was true along with a lot of other things he didn’t know.
Ava turned back to Delaney and said, “Wyznicki was with me the whole time. He went to the men’s room at the Brown Derby once but other than that, we were always together.”
Delaney scratched his chin as if he thought that might help initiate an original idea.
My bedroom door opened again and out stepped Marilyn Monroe. She hadn’t bothered to find anything to cover herself. She was as naked as the day she was born although I’m guessing she looked a whole lot different than then. Delaney had an expression on his face like a puppy who was looking at a kitten for the first time. Maybe he was.
“I can confirm where we were,” Marilyn said, using that breathy voice she adopts only in movies. “Mocambo. Ciro’s. Brown Derby.”
I doubt Delaney heard any of that but he nodded anyway. He took another look at Marilyn, then went to my front door. “Keep your nose clean, Wyznicki,” he said.
“It’s not my nose I’m concerned about,” I said.
He shut the door and I could hear him running down the hallway to the elevator. I hoped there was no accident.
We went back to bed for a few hours. About noon, Danny stopped by with Lana Turner and Jayne Mansfield. We had a couple of drinks at my place, then went out for lunch, where I had more scrambled eggs than you can shake a stick at, if that’s what you want to do with scrambled eggs.
Danny and I split the check. After all, we’d made a lot of money from cracking the Albatross Club’s safe. Yeah, Ava, Marilyn, and I had been at the Mocambo, Ciro’s, and the Brown Derby all night, but as Ava said, I’d gone to the men’s room once while at the Brown Derby. She had no way of knowing I’d slipped out the back, gone to the Albatross, and Danny and I had blown up the safe. I’d gotten back to the Brown Derby before Ava had ordered another drink, which is really fast if you know anything about Ava.
Ava and Marilyn probably hadn’t even noticed how long I’d been gone. When those two get a few drinks in them and start yakking, they lose all track of time. I was hoping I could keep them on that path for a few more weeks or months. Life is good being a private dick in the City of Angels.
[Image Credit : Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash]
Bill’s stories, plays, and comedy sketches have been published and/or produced in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Czechia, England, Guernsey, Holland, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Singapore, South Africa, and the U.S. His stories have appeared in Fiery Scribe Review, Guilty, Mystery Tribune, Revolute, New Contrast, The Prague Review, Eunoia Review, Once Upon A Crocodile, Pigeon Review, Ariel Chart, Little Old Lady Comedy, Yellow Mama, Black Petals, Slippage Lit, and many other journals. His novel, Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep, will be published in 2023 by Close To The Bone Publishing.
