by Dan Taylor
“Fat or fatter? The distinction is important.”
He glances around his seat at my midriff. “Quite a bit bigger than you.”
“So fatter but not fat. Right. Any distinguishing marks or features on his face or body? Like tattoos or birthmarks.”
“Well, he was wearing clothes, so if he did have anything like that, I didn’t see it.”
“Relax, I’m not here to judge anyone’s sexuality or inclinations. Just tell me what you saw.”
He raises an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror. “I saw pants and a shirt, Jake. Just like with any other male customer.”
“Is there anything at all you can give me that distinguishes him from the rest of the non-gym-going male population in this country?”
“Glasses. He had glasses.”
I sigh. “Great. Glasses.”
He thinks. “Wait, or might not have.”
“Okay, maybe glasses, maybe not. Shirt and pants. Slightly overweight. I got it! I know the guy.”
“You do?”
“No.”
One of my most effective interrogatory techniques is to act like a sulking teenager when the witness being interrogated comes up with bupkis.
“I’m sorry, Jake. It was early and I don’t tend to memorize the details of my customers’ appearances, just in case they might be relevant to some investigator down the line.”
He’s sensed my tone and is trying extra hard to placate me, just like the kid from whom I learned the technique, the one at Disneyland who ended up getting candyfloss and an oversized pretzel bought for him by his mom after ten minutes or so of “interrogation.”
I lean forward slightly so that I can see his ID badge, which is displayed on the dashboard.
I say, “Just take your time, Dob. If you just relax, the details will come.”
Lesson number two, Private Investigation 101: using first names is more personal and is useful in establishing trust with witnesses and putting them at ease.
He asks, “Dob? Why did you call me that?”
“It’s your name, isn’t it?”
“No, my name’s Francis.” He thinks a second, then looks at his ID badge. “DOB stands for date of birth.”
“I knew that. Are you feeling more relaxed? Is anything coming to you?”
“You know, I do feel more relaxed now. But I still can’t remember any noteworthy details about his appearance.”
“Maybe you didn’t notice anything while he was sitting in the car. But what about when he walked away from the vehicle? Did you notice anything then?”
“Now that you mention it, I remember that the guy walked with a limp. And when I looked down at his right foot, I noticed that his sock wasn’t quite filled out properly around the ankle, like his foot was a prosthesis.”
Bingo.
5.
“YOU DONE GOOD, Francis.”
“I have?”
“There can be no more than two hundred people in L.A. who have had right leg amputations.”
“Is that a good thing?” Francis has a quizzical expression on his face.
I say, “Well, I bet it sucks to have to limp around, and I bet it has a major effect on their sex lives, so no, not really. But I bet it’s not too bad being subsidized by workman’s comp.”
“No, not like that. For your investigation. Has it significantly narrowed down who it might be?”
I think about it. “Well, I assumed the guy lives in L.A., and you could’ve misremembered which leg it was, doubling the number of amputees I’d have to investigate, and in potentially the whole country, but it gives me a hell of a distinguishing feature when asking around about this guy in the area.”
The car slows and we pull off the highway into a small parking lot. I look to my right at Greasy Fingers, which looks like it might’ve been a small nursing home in its previous life. “Don’t worry, Dad, if you get really depressed and lonely¸ you can always take a small walk out to the highway and throw yourself in front of an eighteen-wheeler. That or give me a call.”
On the roof is a typical fifties-style neon sign that reads, “Greasy Fingers,” with “Diner” below it in a much smaller, jarringly different typeface. At first glance, you wouldn’t necessarily assume it’s a diner. The symbol next to the text doesn’t help matters either. It’s a giant-sized hand, made into a fist, excluding the index finger and middle finger, like a peace sign, but with the fingers together. Dripping from the fingers is what I hope is supposed to be grease.
Francis says, “Here’s the place.”
“Looks closed.”
“Opens at six.”
“What time is it now?”
“Ten to. Do you want to wait in the cab till it opens? I’ll stop the meter.”
“No. I should probably have a look around and see if any of the outside area jogs my memory.”
“Okay.”
I pay Francis and he wishes me luck. He says he’ll keep an ear out for reports of a Willie Nelson-high thirty-something running around and causing havoc from the last week. I tell him to do that and give him my home number. He gives me his personal phone number, in case I need a ride in the future.
The taxi pulls away from the parking lot, heads down the highway the direction we were heading, but you can bet your bottom dollar he’ll be heading back down to the motel to pick up the next desperate thirty-something—wife, kids, permanent life insurance policy, dog he bought for the kids but which he walks every morning apart from this one, and hair a mess—wanting to see the great mistake of his thirties become smaller and smaller in the reflection of Francis’s car’s wing mirror.
First, I check out the front of the diner. None of it jogs my memory, so I head around to the back.
“Oh, sorry.” I’ve disturbed a waitress who’s enjoying a pre-shift cigarette by the back door. When I say “enjoying,” I mean looking at me skeptically as she rapid-fire puffs the last of it.
Like it’s the most normal thing in the world to say, she says, “If you’re looking for the stale burger buns we threw out yesterday, Harry beat you to it.”
“Who’s Harry?”
Her eyes narrow. “You’re not a vagrant, are you? You talk too nice.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Then never mind. Entrance is ‘round front.” She takes a final puff and throws the butt on the ground.
She goes through the back door and leaves me to ponder how current my cigarette smoking vocabulary is. “Puff” and “butt,” these seem like they might be replaced by “toke” and “tab” respectively in 2015.
Has whatever I took or was poisoned with last night turned me into a dork? Is it nerd?
Per the waitress’s advice, I head around to the front.
The door’s locked, but after trying to open it the regulation two times, the waitress comes over, chewing gum, and looks at me with dull eyes as she unlocks the door. She says, “Two minutes to but you look like you could do with a sit down and a cup of coffee.”
“I thank you kindly.”
Who knows where that came from. I sounded like Elvis.
She eyes me skeptically again—as though I might’ve been mocking her—as she holds the door open for me. There’s no mechanism for keeping it open, so she kicks a doorstop underneath it, and then says, “Take a seat. I’ll be right over to take your order as soon as I’ve been to the bathroom.”
Wow, I like the lady’s honesty. She could have said “powder her nose” or “freshen up,” but no. This lack of pretense, or it could be I’m remembering the sexy and reckless way she threw her cigarette tab on the ground without a care in the world, has me checking her out as she walks off. Hair’s a perm and is tied up in some sort of unstylish bun. Figure’s a little too thin for my liking, but she has curves fighting the feminine cause against her one-thousand-calories-a-day diet. And her makeup is thrown on, like she applied it ironically in some sort of neofeminist statement. Despite all these things, she has a presence about her. She seemed to take up way more space
than expected from her bird-thin frame.
I snap out of it, and catch movement in the corner of my vision. That of the chef in the back doing prep work. He’s a burly type and is looking at me with disdain, no doubt having caught me checking out the waitress.
I take a seat, and a couple minutes later the waitress comes up to my table. Her nose doesn’t look powdered, nor does she look fresher.
I glance at her name pin. Grace. Nice name.
“Black,” she says.
I look up at her face. It’s indifferent, as though she asked, “What’s your order?” or “The soup of the day is clam chowder.” It’s breakfast, so the soup won’t be ready yet, but you know what I mean.
I think about what she could’ve possibly meant. “I’m usually a cream man, but if it comes black that’s how I’ll take it.”
I smile and she doesn’t smile back. Then she says, “Black’s my surname. You were staring so hard at my pin, I figured you were trying to see if I’d put it on there in small print.”
I lean back against the backrest of the seating, resting my elbow on the top of it, and try to smile naturally. The backrest’s pretty upright, so the desired effect of looking relaxed, cool, and aloof from the world is lost.
Seeing if she’s up for a bit of banter, I flash her another Hancock smile, and say, “For what possible reason would you have your surname in small print on your name pin?”
“So you didn’t assume my pin states what I’m full of as a waitress, especially in comparison to the other waitresses.”
“Has someone done that before?” Mr. Witty.
She’s quick. “No. But there’s a waitress I don’t like called Shit who it happens to all the time.”
She’s deadpan, so I spend the next moment or two trying to work out if we’re bantering. She makes fleeting eye contact with me, before looking around the diner, as she chews gum. But I don’t get the impression she’s uncomfortable holding eye contact with me, just that she gets bored easily. She has that aloofness from the world that I tried to pull off.
Ladies and gentleman, I think I may be falling in love.
And with a waitress, and while I’m investigating the mystery of what happened to me since getting high and watching Frasier last Saturday. This is neither great timing nor an ideal potential mate.
Mate? I really need to update my vocabulary.
She says, “Are you going to order or just carry on staring at me in that weird way?”
“Was I staring?”
Surprisingly enough, despite gold line after gold line, she hasn’t pulled down her panties and begged me to give it to her.
She asks, “Why are you drooling?”
“I am?” I wipe it away with the back of my hand and pick up a menu, start skimming it. “That’s because all your food looks delicious.”
As bored as you like, she says, “As long it’s the food you think looks tasty, and not me.” She raises an eyebrow, holds eye contact this time. Then she leans in closer to me and whispers, “Because my husband’s back there. He’s the chef and owner. He keeps a shotgun on the premises. Not because he thinks we’re likely to get held up, but because he doesn’t trust the customers with me.”
“Wowza. Then I think I’ll just take a pancake stack and bacon burnt to crisp.”
She giggles. I look over her shoulder to see him watching us.
She stands up straight. “Is there anything else?”
By the way she’s looking at me, eyebrow still raised seductively, a shiny playfulness in her eyes, what she said is dripping with subtext.
“Two minutes of your time would be great.”
“Don’t sell yourself short.”
I laugh, not knowing if it’s because she’s genuinely funny or because I have the hots for her. Could be both.
“I was just hoping to ask you a few questions.”
“Sure.” She sits down, squishes in next to me as she belatedly says, “Scooch over.” She looks at me, taking in my appearance. “You don’t look like a cop. What are you, some type of private dick?”
“You’re a sharp lady. That’s exactly what I am.”
“So, Mr. Private Dick, what do you want to ask?” I can’t tell whether she’s teasing me or flirting with me.
“First question. And this is a long shot, so bear with me. Did I happen to come in here last night?”
“That’s a funny question. You high last night or something?”
“I have no idea.”
“I think that answers your question.” She takes in my appearance again. “No, you definitely didn’t. I would’ve remembered you.”
I resist the temptation to ask why.
She frowns and then asks, “You don’t look the type—the type to get high and not remember if you’d been to a place or not—so why is it that you don’t know?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Ooo, this sounds exciting. You want longer than two minutes?”
“That would be great, Grace.” I continue with the questioning: “Again, this is a long shot, so bear with me and promise not to laugh.”
“Okay, I promise.” She’s already suppressing laughter.
“A couple nights ago, did a slightly overweight guy with a limp come in here, limping because he has a prosthetic leg?”
She giggles and slaps my arm. “You’re playing with me. You’re not a private dick, just some guy with a crush on me. If you weren’t so damn cute I’d be creeped out.”
“It’s true. I admit it. I have the hots for you. But I am a P.I. Or at least I was. I have the license at home to prove it. And I genuinely don’t know if I came in here last night. I woke up in a motel room this morning, not knowing how I’d gotten there or even what I’d done for the last week. Sounds crazy, but it’s true.”
She thinks a second. “Okay, I’ll play along. But only because it’s a fun thing to do before the breakfast rush. I don’t believe you or nothing.”
“That’s fine with me. So, back to this limping guy. Was there?”
“A limp’s not so uncommon. There probably was.” She thinks. “How would I know if it was because he had a false leg?”
“You might’ve noticed that one of his socks wasn’t quite filled out properly.”
She giggles. “You’re making this up.”
I can’t help smiling. “I’m deadly serious.”
“Does this usually work?”
“Does what work?”
“You pretend to be a private dick and chat up some waitress by asking silly questions, and before you know it she’s writing more on her notepad than pancake stack and bacon burnt to a crisp.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. If I was, the questions would be way sillier.”
“They sound silly enough to me to not be serious.”
“Plus, I remember the bit about the shotgun. You’re attractive in a strange way, and you’re about the most charming woman I’ve met in a long while. But you’re not get-my-nutsack-blown-to-bits charming and attractive.”
“‘Attractive in a strange way’? Now I know you’re not trying to hit on me.”
“That’s probably the best compliment I’ve ever given a lady.”
“Ooo, so now I’m a lady?”
“Of course.”
“Sounded like a crummy compliment to me.”
Crummy? We’re made for each other.
“Should I explain why it’s not a crummy compliment or continue with my line of questioning?”
She looks a little bored again as she says, “Nah. I believe you.” But her eyes light up before she asks, “What’s the next question?”
I think a second. “Come to think of it, I don’t have another question to ask.”
“Shoot! I was enjoying that.”
“If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”
She climbs out of the booth and resumes her taking-order stance. “You do that…”
“Jake Hancock.”
“Okay, Jake. Yo
u want anything to drink with the pancakes and bacon?”
“Coffee with—”
“Cream. I remember.”
She flashes me a smile and then walks off. Naturally, I watch her, and just as naturally, she knows I’m watching. She gives her ass a shake before disappearing through a door marked KITCHEN.
I try to get my mind off that crazy, enigmatic siren Grace Black by shaking my head. It helps a little. Time to turn my mind to the investigation.
What am I thinking? Where are my manners? I haven’t even introduced myself to you yet. The name you know. If you think it sounds like the civilian name of a super hero, you’re on the money. And you already know I worked as P.I. to the stars, but there’s more. Six months ago I worked for an elite private investigation organization called the Agency. I earned the big bucks, bedded young impressionable women at the rate you Whac-A-Mole, and worked my genius to solve bizarre and exciting cases.
Shit!
I just had the worst déjà vu. Have I said that before? It certainly sounds like something I’d say. But it’s the exact wording I remember. I remember the Whac-A-Mole bit as though I said it yesterday. Did I say this exact thing during the week of no memories?
I think I did.
Anyway, back to the investigation. Assuming I’ve been drugged by someone, I turn my mind to who could have done it.
The obvious suspect is my ex-wife. Our marriage was anything but stellar. The sex was great, but we argued like hobos fighting over the dregs of a bottle of wine they’re sharing. She’s certainly twisted and cunning enough to pull off drugging me—and I did the same to her once, though it was for a good cause. But where the theory falls down is she lives in the Caribbean with her husband Omar. Plus we split amicably after a lengthy separation period, which means we had one smash-and-grab fuck before she finally agreed to sign the divorce papers.
So that puts her out of the running.
When I worked at the Agency, my immediate boss was Gerry Smoulderwell, though I worked for the enigmatic spearhead of the organization Andre, who I never met or talked to. Gerry and I didn’t get on swimmingly—my flippancy and work history littered with indiscretions related to some of the more attractive clients I investigated for were at odds with her being a pedantic, by-the-book stick-in-the-mud—but there’s no way she would do such a thing. Anyway, I haven’t seen her for six months, nor can I think of one reason for her doing it. Anyway, I haven’t had any contact with the Agency for ages. So I can strike her off the list.