[Lady Justice 01] - Lady Justice Takes a C.R.A.P.

by Robert Thornhill

  One poor sap apparently had consumed more alcohol than he should have for this exercise, and just as Electra cracked her whip toward his outstretched dollar, he swayed ever so slightly and the whip caught him around the wrist. He yelped in pain, and a roar went up from the other spectators.

  Ouch! That was going to leave a mark!

  Electra was definitely the highlight of the evening. I decided on one more lap dance before I hit the road. A young lady approached me for my last dance, and I had a sudden urge, so I said, “Be right back. I need to go to the bathroom first.” As I headed to the can, I heard sirens blaring up the street. “Oh crap! Abort! Abort!” I whispered into my mic. “False alarm. I really do need to take a leak.” To my relief, the sirens stopped.

  My evening at the Red Garter ended. I had put eighteen dollars in G-strings and spent eighty dollars on lap dances but had received no solicitations. Oh well, it was the city’s money.

  Since I was working evenings, I didn’t have to report to the precinct until three in the afternoon. I gave Maggie a call. One advantage of dating a realtor is that they have no set work hours and for the most part can set their own schedules. Maggie had no appointments that morning, so I asked if we could get together. I told her this undercover job was really stressful and asked if we could ‘unwind’ together. It would be a real help. To her credit, Maggie knew just how to help me unwind. Without realizing it, she had made a significant contribution to an ongoing police investigation. Mr. Winkie is a lot easier to control if he is Mr. Happy instead of Mr. Needy.

  It’s a guy thing.

  That evening was pretty much the same as the night before. More G-strings and lap dances. I had been there about two hours when I was approached by a cute blonde. “Looking for a dance?” she asked.

  “Sure, why not?”

  After the dance, instead of trotting off after another sucker, she whispered, “I saw you here last night. Are you in town for a convention?”

  “No, I was just feeling kinda lonely. Didn’t know where else to go,” I replied in my most needy voice.

  “I think I might have something that will make you feel better,” she purred.

  “What have you got in mind?”

  “I get off at eleven,” she whispered. “Meet me at the Drake Hotel, room 213, and I can make you feel real good.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have a lot of cash, and besides, I’ve never done anything like that before.”

  Innocent but true.

  “I can make you real happy for two hundred,” she said.

  So we made the deal.

  I hung around a few minutes more and left the Red Garter. I found Ox and Vince a block away. “Hey, Walt,” Vince prodded, “I was beginning to feel sorry for you myself. The captain sure picked the right guy.”

  “All an act,” I replied.

  We went over our plan and waited for eleven o’clock to arrive.

  I knocked on the door, and Blondie invited me in. She was all business. “Whatcha lookin’ for?” she asked.

  “Well, uh, like I told you, I’ve never done this before. Help me out.” I could imagine Ox and Vince rolling their eyes.

  “Straight sex, nothing kinky, two hundred bucks.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Okay then, let’s take care of business first.”

  I pulled the wad of twenties out of my pocket. She took the money and stashed it in her purse. As she started unbuttoning her blouse, I said, “Hang on a minute. I have to go to the bathroom first.”

  The moment the sentence came out of my mouth, Ox and Vince broke through the door.

  After they cuffed her and Mirandized her, she turned to me and said, “You’re a cop? But you’re so old!”

  Ha! Fooled you!

  The brass at the station were delighted we had made a bust, so to speak. But they were after bigger fish. After interrogating Blondie, they offered her a deal. Give up the name of the ringleader in return for a reduced sentence. She bought it.

  It was no surprise that the head of the prostitution ring was the amazing Electra. She had four of the Red Garter girls beside herself turning tricks. She was the one we wanted. If you want to kill a snake, you cut off its head.

  Blondie had to play along with us to set the trap. She would normally meet with Electra the next day to hand over her share of the money. We gave Blondie the two hundred bucks, and her job was to let Electra know that her john from the previous night was looking for some S&M, her specialty. She gave us the names and descriptions of the other three girls in the ring, and we were ready to take them down.

  I entered the club about nine o’clock. Ox and Vince were waiting outside, and at my signal they would enter and take custody of the other three girls. Electra was all mine.

  Blondie sat down beside me and whispered that everything was set. After Electra’s number, I was supposed to follow her into her dressing room and she would take care of me there. The price was four hundred dollars.

  Cripes.

  Who pays four hundred dollars to get their butt whipped? My mom used to do it for free! I had to make a trip outside and get some extra cash from the boys.

  Electra came on stage and began her act. She saw Blondie sitting next to me, and that was her signal. She whipped the dollar out of the guy’s hand sitting next to me and gave me a wink. So we were on.

  After her show, I followed her to her dressing room and knocked. She opened the door, pulled me in, and threw me on the bed. “I hear you’ve been a very bad boy!” she growled.

  “Excuse me?” I said. Then I remembered why I was there. “Yes ma’am,” I muttered. “Really bad. I need to be punished.”

  “Electra can hurt you bad,” she snarled. “But let’s take care of business first.”

  As she advanced toward me in her leather and studded collar, I wasn’t the least bit turned on. Frightened, yes. Turned on, definitely not!

  I pulled the money out of my pocket, and she tucked it away in her purse. Then she turned toward me with a pair of handcuffs and said, “All right, you naughty boy, come to Electra.”

  For the life of me, I can’t imagine guys going for this.

  “Uh, hang on a minute. I need to go to the bathroom first.”

  As soon as I said it, we heard commotion in the bar. A red light came on by her dresser. The bartender had signaled that a raid was going on.

  She turned to me with a genuine mean look in her eyes. “You’re a damn cop,” she sneered. “I should’ve known an old fart like you wouldn’t want what I’ve got to give.” She pulled a .32 out of her purse.

  I ducked as a shot rang out and shattered the mirror over the dressing table behind me.

  I frantically looked around the room for a place to hide or something to protect myself with or anything.

  How do I get into these jams?

  Then I saw it on the bed where she had dropped it. The whip! Immediately visions of Lash LaRue and more recently, Indiana Jones, popped into mind, and I could see myself lash out and rip the gun out of her hand.

  I grabbed the whip, but on its backlash it wrapped around a vase of flowers. As I whipped my arm forward, I could feel the whoosh of air as the vase flew by my head and struck Electra right in her studded collar.

  Ouch. It didn’t come out exactly like I had envisioned it, but the end result was the same.

  Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

  Lucky!

  I reached into my pocket and felt my buckeye from Gordon’s Orchard.

  Luck? I wondered --- or something else?

  Electra fell in a heap. I cuffed her and said, “Electra, you’ve been a very bad girl. Now Walt’s going to have to punish you.”

  A passage from the Bible came to mind: “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.”

  Lady Justice knows her Scripture.

  And with that, we wrapped up the Red Garter gang.

  CHAPTER 25

  It had taken us three days to take down the Red Garter gang. I was anxious to hea
r what progress had been made in the riddler case. I was disappointed to discover that there had been very little.

  Since the import company was owned by Blanchard and his partner, Clark Grissom, the detectives naturally wanted to talk to Grissom. Unfortunately, he had not been seen since the day of Blanchard’s death. His wife, Laura, said he never returned home after work that evening, and he had not contacted her. A BOLO was issued for Grissom.

  Further questioning of both Laura Grissom and the employees at the company verified that Mrs. Grissom was not directly involved in the day-to-day business of the company.

  The powers at City Hall had tried to keep the formation of the joint task force quiet, but, as usual, someone leaked it to the press. Soon the whole city knew we were trying to connect Blanchard’s murder with a counterfeit/money laundering operation.

  The day I returned, another letter was addressed to me at the station. I opened it, and we all read, “Good job, Walter. I knew you could figure it out. Figure this out and you’ll have your next clue. ‘Give me food and I will live. Give me water and I will die.’ Good luck.”

  We just stared at each other. Here we go again.

  “This one seems a lot easier,” I said. “There are thousands of things that grow when you feed them, but how many things die when you give them water?”

  “How about a fire?” Ox said. “It seems to fit. You give it fuel or food and it burns, but if you give it water, it dies.”

  The captain said, “For want of something better, let’s go with that for now. You two contact the city fire department and check on all the fires since Blanchard’s death and see if anything fits.”

  We went to the headquarters building of the fire department. They keep a record of all fires to which they respond on a main computer terminal. It had been five days since Blanchard’s death, and thirty-two fires were logged during that time period.

  We sat down at the terminal and started reviewing the details of each fire. It was a list of the usual: kitchen grease fires, leaf burning that had gotten out of control, and a couple of automobiles that had been torched.

  Then we saw a small warehouse building in the East Bottoms that had been completely destroyed by fire. It wasn’t an expensive building. There was no insurance on the structure and no signs of an accelerant, so the fire marshal had ruled out arson. The legal owner of record was listed in the report.

  Guess who? Myron Blanchard!

  There was no program that cross referenced routine fires with ongoing criminal investigations, and no one, so far, had connected the fire with the dead importer.

  We took down the address of the warehouse on North Garfield in the Bottoms and headed that direction.

  The building was, of course, just a pile of rubble. The fire had been three days ago, so all the heat had dissipated. Since Blanchard was dead, no one had started cleanup. The site was just as the firemen had left it.

  We started wading and rummaging through the soggy mess. We found mostly charred wood, several stacks of paper tied in bundles that had only burnt on the outside, and the twisted metal of what appeared to be some kind of press machine.

  “By golly, Ox,” I said. “I think we may have found where they were printing the money.”

  In a counterfeiting operation, the most important ingredient is the engraving plates. Presses can be replaced and more paper can be bought, but a good set of plates is worth their weight in gold. We searched the rubble in vain, looking for the plates, but as I suspected, someone had removed the plates before torching the building and destroyed the evidence.

  We were busy digging when I saw a black SUV swerve around the corner in our direction. I didn’t pay much attention until I saw the back window go down and an AK-47 aimed in our direction.

  I shouted at Ox, who hadn’t seen the vehicle. I tackled him to the ground as the AK-47 opened fire and a hail of bullets whizzed over our heads. We drew our weapons, but the SUV continued on down the block and out of sight.

  “I think we may be on the right track,” I said. “Looks like we’re bringing the bad guys, whoever they are, out of the woodwork.”

  Unfortunately, it happened so fast we didn’t get a license number. We reported back to the captain, and he sent a forensics team to the site to gather any evidence the fire didn’t destroy.

  Shot at again. This was really getting old. Or was it was me that was getting old?

  I clocked out and headed home. As I approached my building, Bernice Crenshaw, my eighty-five-year-old tenant from 2-B, was wandering around the yard.

  “Oh, Mr. Walt,” she lamented. “I’m so glad you’re here. I’ve been looking all over for my Sunday paper. Did you happen to see it this morning as you left? I bet some creep stole it.”

  “Uh, Bernice, this is just Saturday. Your Sunday paper won’t be delivered until tomorrow.”

  She paused for a moment as the information sunk in, then exclaimed, “Well hell --- that’s why no one was at church today!”

  After her initial outburst of indignation, she just kind of sagged, and a tear welled up in her eye. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” she wailed. “I’m getting worse all the time. I lock myself out of my apartment. I go to the refrigerator and open the door and don’t remember what I was going to get, and now I don’t even know what day it is. Pretty soon my kids are going to put me in one of those homes. I just can’t bear the thought.”

  “Oh, I think you’ve got a little time left,” I said. “After all, you’ve got me and Willie and the Professor here to make sure you don’t get in too much trouble.”

  She perked up a bit at that. Then she pulled a clipping from a magazine out of her pocket. “I found this today, and I’m going to tape it on my bathroom mirror because it’s just the way I feel.” She handed me the clipping. It read:

  The Golden years are here at last.

  I cannot see, I cannot pee.

  I cannot chew, I cannot screw.

  My memory shrinks, My hearing stinks.

  No sense of smell, I look like hell.

  The Golden Years have come at last.

  The Golden Years can kiss my ass!

  I could certainly relate to some of that.

  “Bernice, you got anything going right now?”

  “Don’t think so. But how the hell would I know?”

  “Tell you what,” I said. “I’ve kind of got a sweet tooth. How about you and me walking down to the Dairy Bar for a soda? You up for a date?”

  “You bet,” she replied. And we were off.

  We walked to the Dairy Bar a block away, perched on the stools at the counter, and ordered two chocolate sodas.

  We had just gotten our sodas when an elderly gentleman walked in. We watched him, and with a great deal of effort and obvious pain, he hoisted himself up on a stool. He was still grimacing when the waitress took his order.

  “I’ll have a banana split,” he ordered.

  “Crushed nuts?” she asked.

  “Naw, just arthritis,” he replied.

  Glad we got that cleared up.

  As we slurped our sodas, we noticed the old gentleman glancing our way with his eye on Bernice. Finally he said, “Hi. My name’s Carl. You come here often?”

  Octogenarian pick-up line.

  Bernice looked at me and said, “I can’t remember. Walt, do I?” And so began a conversation between Bernice and Carl that ended with me being jilted by an old guy with arthritis.

  After I paid our ticket, Carl told me I could be excused and he would walk Bernice home. I wrote her address on a piece of paper, handed it to Carl, and made a hasty exit.

  I guess there’s someone for everyone.

  As I was leaving for work the next morning, I met Bernice in the hall.

  “How did it go with Carl?” I asked.

  She looked at me and actually blushed. “I think it went really well. He walked me home, I invited him in, and we had sex.”

  Oh good grief! I didn’t need to know that!

  “It
was a little embarrassing,” she said. “After it was over, he said if he knew I was still a virgin he wouldn’t have been so rough with me. I told him that was okay. If I had known he could really get it up, I would have taken off my pantyhose.”

  Seniors have a whole set of problems of their own.

  I drove to the precinct and checked in for squad meeting. In his briefing, Captain Short announced that we were making some progress in the riddler case. Forensics did determine that the burned warehouse was where the funny money was being printed. Both presses and paper were identifiable, but, as suspected, no engraving plates were found.

  Blanchard’s ownership of the warehouse provided the link we needed to confirm that the murder and the counterfeiting were connected.

  We were speculating as to the identity of the thugs that had shot at us when an officer appeared with a letter. The captain looked at it and handed it to me. Another note from the riddler.

  We opened it, and it read, “Good job, Walter. Now, if you want to know who shot at you, solve this riddle. ‘What’s black and white and red all over? 9/6, B-2.’ Good luck.”

  This one had us baffled. We studied it for a while and finally decided to let it percolate in our minds. We set off for our daily rounds.

  When I returned home that evening, Willie was waiting for me. “Ole Mary’s needin’ us agin,” he said. “She think Billy Bob in number nine done snuck in a pet, but he won’t open de door fo’ her.”

  Oh great!

  I have a strict ‘no pets’ policy in my buildings. In thirty years as a landlord, I have seen it all. In addition to the normal dogs, cats, and birds, tenants have sneaked in hamsters, mice, tarantulas, pythons, iguanas, and one guy even brought in a possum he had caught.

  Pets all have one thing in common: they all pee and poop. Some scratch and bite. You absolutely cannot rely on their human masters to assist them in these bodily functions. Before my no pets manifesto, I would find tenants who had gone off for a weekend leaving food and water for their dog but no way to get rid of it when it passed.