= Word of Mouth
  by Stephen D. Rogers

I was the only black lesbian private investigator this side of the river. Or if they preferred, I was the only Jewish good-ol'-boy private investigator this side of the river. Or if they preferred, I was the only four-foot Navaho private investigator this side of the river.

Whatever made potential clients comfortable and more likely to hire me, that's what I was.

I had three sets of letterheads, and I was good at voices. I conducted all of my client meetings over the telephone, and I didn't plan to start adding video. While I couldn't be sure, I may have been the only charge-card accepting private investigator this side of the river.

While I might lie more than most people, I was good at my job. My clients were word of mouth, and they knew before they hired me that I produced. I didn't embarrass them by asking them to visit an office in the dingy part of town, or meet me in some coffee shop where they might be seen by a next door neighbor. Except for some secrets that they would rather not have known, people were satisfied with my results. So why was I the only private investigator this side of the river who had a dead body in the trunk?

Trust me, I didn't kill him. I never even saw him before, or my name wasn't Sista Steele, Beau Weinstein, and Big Red.

Granted, if I was able to make my clients happy, that meant that I was probably making someone else unhappy. Private investigators didn't specialize in win-win situations.

Which of me was someone trying to frame? How had the person learned the investigator's identity, and then come to the conclusion that they needed to leave a body here in my car? Had they at least killed someone they wanted dead anyway?

I slammed the trunk and checked to make sure that no one was peeking through the tiny windows in my garage door. This was the first time my business had reached out to touch my real life, and I didn't like feeling vulnerable. Perhaps I had lost some edge by hiding behind aliases for this long.

On the other hand, maybe I should hire one of my personalities to discover whose body was fitted around my spare tire. Since I never saw my clients, this could have been one of the paid-in-full-ers. I just hoped he told three friends about me before he was killed.

I checked the garage door but it was secure. The door to the back yard was a different story, however. The killer and the victim had entered through this door after punching out the lock.

I opened the trunk again and searched the victim for identification, trying to ignore the blood that was pooling under the knife wound. There had to be a tie between us or the frame wouldn't make sense.

In the nearest pocket I found a small slip of paper: INSPECTED BY NUMBER SEVEN. "A clue." I laughed and checked the rear pocket, surprised to find his wallet.

There was no money, no charge cards, no ATM card, no folded blank check. So much for this being an easy money case.

The wallet also contained an expired driver's license for James Cabernet. The face in the picture was a slightly younger, slightly less pale, slightly more surprised version of the dead man's face.

While I had successfully identified the corpse, there weren't any bells ringing. Unless I was mistaken, I'd never had a James Cabernet as either a client or a subject. True, the license might be as new as the pants, but I couldn't even recall a case that might have sent someone scurrying for a new identity.

I closed the trunk again, glad at least that Kowalski had called this morning asking to borrow my portable polygraph machine. After rooting unsuccessfully through the basement, I had come out to the garage to see if I had left the piece of equipment in the car. If I hadn't gone to look for the polygraph machine, I might have been driving around with James Cabernet in the trunk for days, or at least until someone made an anonymous call to the police to close the frame.

Thinking the name again sent a tiny bell tinkling. I had known a Cabernet -- Pat, my roommate at college. Pat had had a brother, and "James" didn't seem like a wrong name. I suddenly remembered telling the brother that while I was studying law enforcement, I was going to become a private investigator.

College for me had consisted of one semester, and after leaving I hadn't kept in touch with Pat, much less James, whom I had met only that once. Could James have really remembered me after all these years, sought me out because of something I had said to him when I was nineteen?

Didn't private investigators advertise wherever he was from? Maybe it was time for me to move to a greener pasture.

I went back into the house to think about my next step, and who I might be able to bill this to. At the very least I was going to have to redo the inside of my trunk.

Maybe Pat hadn't seen James since college either, and would pay me to find him. "I ran your brother through some databases, and then I opened my trunk and there he was."

I walked into my living room to see a large tattoo sitting on the couch. The tattoo stood, and I was able to pick out some basic shapes -- a head, two arms, two legs, a knife.

My Glock was in the other room, and the living tattoo was too close for me to back out of the room. "The police aren't going to have to work the identification kit too hard for my neighbors to describe you."

He stopped in front of me and smiled. After all the body art, I expected his teeth to be anything but pearly white. "I want to hire you."

If this what my average client looked like, there was no way that I was ever going to add video to my telephone. I might even get out of the business. "I'd rather you show me a retainer than a knife."

"I'm a bit short on cash right now. That's why I need your help."

"Have a seat and tell me about it."

"You sit first."

I made myself comfortable and tried to ignore the six-inch blade in his hand. The smart move seemed to be listening until I had a chance to turn the tables on him. "What's your name?"

"They call me Trombone."

"Why?" I couldn't imagine a connection between the art work and a wind instrument.

"I don't know."

"Maybe that's what you want me to investigate?"

"I'm just out of the pen. Me and Jimmy were there on armed robbery. The cops never caught Nicholas, and he has the loot. I want you to find him."

"Why me?"

"Jimmy knew about you, and our lawyer tracked you down. I want you to find Nicholas. You can keep ten percent of what Nicholas has left. It's been seven years."

Wondering whether I was making a mistake letting on that I had seen his handiwork in my trunk, I asked why Jimmy was in the garage instead of sitting on the couch talking about old times.

"He wanted fifty percent."

That made sense. "I thought ten percent was more than sufficient myself. So tell me, Trombone, what makes you think that Nicholas still has the money? You said it was seven years ago? That's a long time."

"The plan was, if Jimmy and I got caught, Nicholas was going to save our money for us."

I nodded. It was that or laugh out loud. "Why did you leave Jimmy in my trunk?"

Trombone shrugged. "I didn't know where we were going until we got here. You were his friend."

"I met him exactly once."

"That's why I figured I could ice him without making you too upset. I want you to find Nicholas."

There was a growing sense that Trombone was a few notes short of a octave. "Do you have a last name for Nicholas?"

"I think Nicholas is his last name."

"Well then, do you have a first name for him?"

"No. Unless Nicholas is his first name."

I told myself to count to ten but stopped at three. "You want me to find someone whose first or last name is Nicholas. Do you know where or when he was born? Do you know about his family, other business acquaintances?" I stood and began pacing, seeing this as a opportunity to take control. "Did he go to school somewhere, serve time, or at least get arrested? Do you have his social security number, a sample of his DNA?"

"I, uh, no."

I shook my head. "Listen to me, Trombone. The chances of me finding Nicholas are so small that you'd be better off hiring me to find you a new gang."

"Could you do that?" By now, I was walking around the room so fast that I thought he might get whiplash trying to follow me.

"Trombone. Have you ever heard of the Hippocratic Oath?" I slowed long enough to take a heavy framed photograph of my parents off the wall.

"Not that I know."

"It's what I had to take to become a private investigator. Section 2, Paragraph 3. Do you know what it says?" I stopped in front of him, glad to see that he had apparently forgotten that he was holding a knife.

"What?"

I swung the frame at his head and knocked him out cold. "It says don't be an idiot. You, my friend, are an idiot."

After tying him up, I dragged him out to my car and dumped him on the floor of the back seat, covering him up with an old blanket. He was lucky there wasn't enough room in the trunk, or I might have put him in there for messing up my personal life.

The next step was discovering where Jimmy and Trombone had done time, and then backtrack to the crime that had sent them there. From that point, I should be able to start getting a lead on Nicholas.

While Nicholas certainly didn't still have the money Trombone was after, he would probably be more than willing to pay for information on his ex-partners if I pitched it correctly. Maybe they had tried to hire me, and in doing so had mentioned that they had also hired some hitmen. That should get Nicholas's attention.

The only fly in the ointment was Trombone. If I let him go, he could screw up the whole deal. I didn't see how I could keep him here under wraps while I was searching for Nicholas, and there was no way that I was taking him along on the jaunt.

Killing wasn't my style, but I didn't see how I could scare Trombone enough to ensure that he wouldn't eventually backslide into stupidity and somehow muck things up for me.

I went into the kitchen and picked up the telephone.

"Kowalski Detective Agency."

"A small plane registered to a Panamanian company carrying American and German tourists crashes in the Suez Canal at a spot equidistant from Egypt and Jordan. The plane is brought to the surface by a British salvage company which was hired by a Greek shipping tycoon. Where are the survivors buried?"

"I'll have to interview a lot of people to discover the truth. Did you find your polygraph machine?"

"No, and I looked everywhere. Are you sure you didn't borrow it already and forget to return it?"

"I think that the machine was originally mine in the first place, and you were the borrower who never returned it. Keep searching, though, the machine may be in the last place you look."

"The last place I looked was my trunk, and I found a dead body there instead." When I was working to get my license, I had worked for Kowalski for the experience. We went way back, and trusted each other as much as two people could.

"Anybody you know?"

"Someone from my past."

"You have a past?"

"Very funny. In my living room was the guy who put the body in my trunk. Currently, he's unconscious in the back seat."

"Aren't you glad you didn't buy one of those little sports cars the last time you were looking for a new vehicle? I don't think they have enough storage for a bag of groceries, forget about two bodies. Have you called the police yet?"

"I'm weighing the wisdom of that."

"It doesn't sound like they would charge you with anything."

"No, and I couldn't charge them either. I've got time invested in this, and I'll at least have the expense of cleaning my car. The police aren't going to pay me for the trouble I've saved them."

"Money isn't everything."

"I think I heard that somewhere. Explain then why greed is the motivation for the two bodies in my garage, one of which is leaking blood from a big knife wound."

"Money's not everything, but it's a heck of lot more than nothing?"

"That's pretty good."

"Tell you what, why don't I come over and take a look around, see if I can't find that polygraph machine. I was always a better detective than you."

"In your dreams. But, whatever floats your boat. Just make sure that you realize that I'm not giving you one of my bodies."

"If I need to, I'll dig up my own."

I hung up the telephone and went back out into the garage. The back door of the car was open, the blanket was on the floor, the rope was on the seat, and Trombone was nowhere in sight. I opened the trunk to make sure that Jimmy hadn't also disappeared. One for two wasn't bad.

I reached under a hole in the carpeting, pulled out the Colt .32 that I kept there for emergencies, and stuffed it into my pocket. The location wouldn't produce any quick draw, but then that wasn't my strength.

I wondered whether Trombone had disappeared from my life or snuck back into the house. One thing was certain: as soon as I could get to the hardware store, I was improving the security of the door from the garage to the back yard and the one from the back yard into my kitchen.

If Trombone had fled, that meant that I needed to find Nicholas pronto before Trombone did. While I wasn't sure that Trombone could find his back pocket, he might interest another private investigator who smelled an opportunity to make a quick buck.

Going back into my house, I found another stranger staring at me over a weapon, this time a Glock. The end result would be the same, but I still really hoped that I wasn't going to get shot with my own gun. "You're not that real estate agent who was pressuring me to sell, are you?"

"We're going to talk, you and I, about two old friends of mine that are coming to see you, or perhaps they've already been here."

"Jimmy and Trombone? That makes you Nicholas."

Nicholas laughed. "I guess that lawyer was money well spent. He said that you would be worth talking to."

Nodding, I added, "I have a daily rate, a weekly rate, and we can come up with an arrangement if the case takes longer. I'm the only private investigator this side of the river who accepts plastic."

Nicholas used the gun to motion me to the front door. "We're going to go somewhere and have a little talk about my friends. We can discuss money after I see what you have to offer."

As I reached for the knob, the doorbell rang. I turned to Nicholas to see what he wanted me to do and saw Trombone running from the kitchen towards Nicholas with his knife in the air.

Nicholas must have seen something in my face, because he turned and shot Trombone in the head. Trombone fell back on top of my glass table as I flung the front door open with one hand while trying to pull the Colt out of my pocket with the other.

Nicholas spun at the sound of the door banging into the wall. He was further distracted by Kowalski screaming my name. I finally managed to disentangle the gun from my pocket and shot Nicholas twice in the chest.

Taking a deep breath, I marched over to Nicholas and moved the Glock out of his reach. "I'm all right, and it's safe to come in."

Kowalski entered and closed the front door. "I thought you said that one of these guys was dead in your trunk? I think your diagnosis was a bit premature, Doctor."

"The dead one is still in the trunk. Trombone here, the guy lying on top of the wreckage of my coffee table, is the one who killed him. The one I shot, Nicholas, is the new addition to the cast. He'll be remembered for taking out my lamp on the way down."

Kowalski laughed. "You mean there are three bodies now?"

"And no one left to bill." I sighed as I surveyed the damage. "This case is a total washout. Look, they're bleeding all over my carpet."

"Where were the survivors buried indeed?"

"I suppose I might as well call the police now."

After a short moment of silence, Kowalski smiled. "About your rug, I heard about this cleaning company that can do wonders with bloodstains. I understand that their rates are very reasonable."

My reply need not be repeated.

When not setting down words of mystery and suspense, STEPHEN D. ROGERS is busy keeping http//www.stephendrogers.com nice for visitors.

Copyrights (c) 2002 Stephen D. Rogers

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