Reservoir

Dorks

It was raining. Grey, heavy city rain; and the wet kind. The sort of maudlin drizzle that flops for your fedora and rolls down your spine like a 12 buck hooker on time and a half due to the bank holiday. A day that us private dicks know only too well – where all you see over your dime-full of coffee are the bums in the doorways, the cracks in the sidewalk, bums selling crack and the crack in some guy’s bum. What a town.

I was weaving uptown, east. A rendezvous with a broad. Loretta. Classy. A top-flight dame-ola with eyes like a summer sky reflected in cold steel and a blouse like a Volkswagen Beetle showroom.

“Its’ like this, Sam. Can I call you Sam?” she timidly quivered as I got my first shot of bourbon and picked a stool from the bar. Christ, these medical students leave their samples everywhere.

“Sure honey,” I responded, a wry crispbread creeping across my face. My name’s actually Leonard, but what the heck.

“I need your help. But I should warn you, I don’t have much moolah. Though I do have deer-poacher I could pawn, might fetch a few bucks?”

It was a crap gag but on the second paragraph? What the hey, I let it slide – something I was hoping to demonstrate later.

“It’s my dress sense,” Loretta began, shaking like a nervous leaf with Parkinson’s disease, up in front of the DA for concealing citrus jelly in its foliage.

“Missing?” I chanced.

“Vanished. Gone. It’s been weeks. At first I thought I’d just mislaid it, y’know, left it in a bag, a jacket pocket but…but now…” Tears formed on her mascara, like drops of salt water on an eyelash cosmetic. My similies were slipping were slipping, and she needed me. I cut to the chase.

“When did you first clock the loss, toots?” only then realising the sartorial disaster sitting sobbing in the flashing neon half-light.

“Mid August,” she sniffed. “I caught myself painting random paisley and flowery patterns on my Doc Martens. And then I saw them. The names of Indie bands casually biro’ed on my 501s. The ethnic looking holdall with the fraying tassels. The hair braids. The Mr Men T-Shirts…” She was hysterical now, gulping back panicked tears like a performing seal getting intimate with Terry Nutkins.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I wisecracked, realising too late it was neither wise nor particularly crackly. I flipped a quarter at the Joe tending bar to cool him and cabbed it officewards.

It was raining. Dark, drumming, ominous. The devil’s rain. Like Beelzebub himself lurked in the threatening clouds straining lettuce in a gargantuan colander. My kind’a rain.

Loretta’s story was like so many in this line of work. Kids. Late teens, most of them. Sure, they start out on the straight and narrow – squeaky clean, grade A’s, ponies on their sweet sixteen. But somehow someone was getting to them. By the time they hit the two-zero it was armpit-hair they could plait, more unwashed plaid than a Northern Exposure convention and unkempt flea-bitten goatees. And the guys were just as bad.

I was just about to hang up my trench-coat, slip my stubble around a Marlboro and dial an ex-army pal of mine, Pierre Pomme-Potage, when the phone started jingling in it’s cradle like a six-month old epileptic Morris Dancer.

“Leonard?” It was Dooley, Chief of Police.

“What’s cookin’ flatfoot? Got an itch needs scratchin’?”

“Loose the mouth wiseguy and get down to the pier. Got something you should see.”

When I pulled up, it was raining. Damp, sodden, watery rain. The kind'a moist liquid precipitation that makes otherwise dry things all wet. Dooley pulled back the police tape and I inched closer to the scene, like a detective in bad fiction, inching closer to a scene. There on the aching boards was an unrecognisable mess I couldn’t recognise.

“What the hell is it?” I asked, fearing the worst.

“You know that dish you frisked up in the bar an hour back?”

I panicked.

“This is her dress sense?”

“Nope, that’s still missing. The forensic boys say this is her sense of humour.”!

Gradually it began to take shape. Through washes of rain I could begin to make it out – the strained juvenile fondness for knock-knock jokes, the twisted bloodied collection of Channel 4 catch-phrases, Viz Magazine references and exhausted rag mags, All traces of self parody and irony had been long since drained. It was a mess. It was Loretta’s.

I would’ve walked right there and then. I’ve been a gumshoe for enough winters to see the odd carved-up Python sketch and have it lead to Blank City, Nowheresville – population 3: Just me, my coffee breath and a knot in my belly the size of Bella Emburg’s elder sister. But I was just flipping my collar up, rifling for a pack of smokes and thinking the night was about to start dragging like Danny La Rue, when I spotted a character in the shadows. It was Hank Marvin. I squinted and looked again. No it wasn’t Hank. But the square’s hairdo and nerdy specs got my pulse itching and the hairs on the back of my neck beating faster. I turned to face him, playing it more casual than a Ronnie Corbett V-Neck.

“Hey Mac, you wouldn’t have a spare UCCA form on you, would ya? I’m gasping.”

“Sure.” He was preoccupied with the pier’s grotesque make-over. “Take your pick.”

That was it. All my hunches clicked like a slightly rheumatic Rubik’s Cube.

I flashed my I.D.

“That’s it buddy. Leonard Cleeeshay, P.I You’re coming with me.”

Realising he’d been rumbled, the Prof made to amscray, but I took him down with the old one-two. (My new one-two was still in the shop getting reupholstered).

With the .45 at his gizzard it all came spilling out.

He was just one guy. Some poor schmo caught on the wrong side of the right fence, fronting for a National University scamming racketeer.

Students would write to him, requesting paperwork for a college application. He’d befriend them. Take them under his wing, smooth talk them, casually impress on them the high cost of student living – the rent, the bills, the endless video rental.

And then a deal would be struck.

For half price accommodation our weasely friend would rob ouir teenagers of their dress-sense and sense of humour to be exported and sold abroad to desperate Belgiums and Germans. Through his petrified tears he squealed the sorry picture. Thousands of Oxfam clad individuals, Oasis t-shirts and woolly hats, quoting endless Newman and Baddiel, just to survive. It was a neat racket. But he was just a lowlife punk trying to make a dime in this crazy town.

I let him go. He vanished into the night. The cops disbanded, wailing sirens like so many cats with their spleens trapped in a Moulinex. The sun was coming up on another morning of promises in this one dream city. But for me, it looked like the worst was yet to come.

I mean, for one thing, it had stopped raining.