The rain was coming down hard and wet through the gunmetal midday sky. You could see the reflection of street lamps in the deepening puddles. I was sitting at my desk in an office that had my name on a frosted glass door. T-Rex Wolfe, Private Eye.
Today was supposed to be my day off. I’d spent the last two weeks on a case that worked me harder than a hooker works the Vegas Strip. Harder than 100-proof whiskey. Harder than learning how to tie a shoe. It was a case about a bus. More specifically, about the wheels on the bus. That damn case drove me in circles.
Just as I was kickin’ my feet up on my desk, some dame busts through my door, crying hysterically, as dames tend to do. Anytime a dame darkens my doorway, she’s usually got a reason to cry. I looked down at her gams. They were the longest gams I’d ever seen. You could say it was hard to define where her gams ended and my troubles began.
“What can I do ya for, sweetheart,” I asked her as I lighted a cigarette. Yeah, I say “lighted” instead of “lit.” It sounds toughlike.
“They’re gone! All gone! The cookies! From the cookie jar! All of the cookies… stolen!”
“Slow down there, princess.” I says. “Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?” I ask her as my eyes move from her long gams up to her heaving bazongas. They were the best bazongas I’d ever seen. It looked like the case of the missing cookies had found itself some milk.
“Lucas stole the cookies from the cookie jar,” she says. This broad needed to be kissed on the mouth and she didn’t care who knew it. I didn’t want to take the case, but how’s a guy gonna say no to gams and bazongas like that?
“I’ll get to the bottom of it. Anything for a jewel as precious as you,” I says to her, extremely respectfully. I made my way out into the streets and squinted while I lighted another cigarette and stood in the rain and looked for some clues and did some other things in the past tense. I was getting hungry, and finding a perp sounded like the perfect snack.
I walked into a local lounge up on the northside. Smokey’s Saloon. The kind of place where everyone in the joint looked like they ate nails for breakfast and lugnuts for lunch. Meanwhile, I was just hoping I wasn’t about to have a knuckle sandwich for dinner. “I’ll have an order of lugnuts,” I yelled to the barkeep.
Across the bar, I see this one mug, hat down low, eyeing his glass of whiskey. As the red cherry of his cigarette flares from a drag, I can see chocolate all around the edges of his mouth. So I sits down next to him. “You Lucas?”
“What’s it to ya, gumshoe?”
“Buzz around the gin trough is, you stole the cookies from the cookie jar.”
“Who me,” he says, almost toughlike, but also almost as if he’s singing a nursery rhyme.
“Yes, you,” I respond, also as if singing a nursery rhyme, but much more toughlike. I could see that he was about to crack like a plate at a Jewish wedding. Mazel tov, motherfucker.
“Couldn’t be,” he said. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t believe the son of a bitch. I can smell a lie on anyone, and I didn’t smell my ex-wife’s perfume.
“Then who,” I asks the guy.
“Tommy,” he says. “Tommy stole the cookies from the cookie jar.”
Shit, I thought to myself. I come all the way up here just to track down a dead-end lead. Now I gotta up and go find this Tommy character and see what he’s got say. This case was just getting started and it was already stickier than a pocket full of snickerdoodles.
I needed a whiskey. And more cigarettes. And a goddamn day off. And one more good look at that broad’s mountainous bazongas. But until then, I had some cookies to find. And hopefully before they all went stale.
