Storymania - Dragon's Law by Richard Dragon

Dragon's Law
Richard Dragon

I pulled the platinum Silverstone Coupe in directly behind Nick DeFalco’ parked car. His black, smoked-glass Caddy looked like a barbecue grill on wheels, and I felt ready to play backyard chef. Carefully I fitted the silver silencer to my Walther PPK, and then got out.
Tapping my gun on the driver’s window, I flashed my PI shield. The glass dropped faster than a stripper’s innocence.
“So what do you want, bub?” said the driver, Stiles.
I yanked DeFalco’s hired muscle through the window and pistol-whipped him so that his nose leaked blood like oil from a teenager’s hot rod. DeFalco took one look at the solitary cold eye of my PPK and began to sing like Madame Theodora’s trained Macaw.
So what if Nick DeFalco had more juice than the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island and more soldiers in his organization than the Russian Army? I wasn’t about to back down. I was in my prime—6 feet, 4 inches, 220 pounds, and I spent more time in Gold’s Gym than Gold himself. I could scrape bugs like Nick DeFalco off my windshield.
With the info DeFalco so graciously volunteered, I went back to my office. One block away from urban renewal, the Madison Building was home to a lot of seedy characters—panhandling winos, a one-legged prostitute, some numbers runners, a penny-ante crack dealer who couldn’t afford reinforced walls, and me. Kicking the green and brown bottles of sagging stairs, I headed up to the fourth floor room that held the Joachim Detective Agency. That was my place. Joachim was the name of the gumshoe that had the joint before until one night he decided to be the guest of honor at a necktie party and hung himself from the rafters.
I passed the frosted glass door that had Joachim’s signature on it. I looked forward to entering the same way I anticipated that pair of root canals Doc Jones had scheduled for me next week. My desk was littered with more files than an IRS office, and my answering machine had probably run out of tape. Where to start? Skip-trace for Silas Petra? That repo for Allstate Insurance? Finding the hot paper that Funderwick had taken from Sholz Homes? Spelunking in the courthouse vault? Prying the Caputo kid loose from that chicken farm? Tailing a wandering John for H.M. Pulliman, ESQ.? Then there was the Rideout homicide.
Opening the door to my office, I said hello to Mary Lou, goodbye heart. My secretary was hunched over her computer but focused on the National Inquirer. I entered the inner sanctum. Overhead, my ceiling fan was losing another battle to heavy, stale air. The walls were barer than a stripper’s butt and twice as dirty. That wasn’t my fault. Cleaning services wouldn’t come into this section of town.
Ritualistically I opened my filing drawer. What I needed most was there under ‘C’ for cognac. It was also there under ‘H’ for Hennessey’s and ‘M’ for Martell.
I spent the rest of the morning sitting under Klieg Lights that were hotter than a streetwalker’s first kiss. The Gauthier Advertising Agency was shooting a thirty-second spot for local cable to, as they put it, “increase my client base.” The commercial was an integral part of my comprehensive marketing strategy, following on the heels of my full-page ad in the yellow pages (in shocking red, of course, and featuring a large bloodshot eye, a Thompson submachine gun, and me in my trench coat holding a magnifying glass). We’d also hire some local kids to put my fancy flyers under the windshield wipers of every car parked downtown. Then there were my business cards and the well-placed graffiti in local restrooms.
The shoot over, I stepped into the john to check my look. The cracked mirror shot back the image of a man in control. An untorched Chesterfield dangled from my lips. Black turtleneck, expensive madras sport coat, creased chinos, patent leathers, and a Bogie trench coat. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be.
Noon. The perfect time to pay a social call on Nick DeFalco’s boss, Mr. Bublick. I slid the bookcase aside to reveal a personal arsenal that could have armed the local National Guard. I had to make a show of force, but I didn’t want Mr. B to feel I was overestimating him. I packed light. Ankle gun—a Walther P22 semiautomatic, Malaysian throwing dagger up the left sleeve; a .45 Goldcup automatic in the small of my back; a Sig Sauer P229 in my shoulder rig. The piece of resistance was an SPAS Model 12, a sawed-off pump with pistol grip, extended magazine, and laser-sighted, of course, that hung in a concealed pocket of my trench coat.
Lightly armed, I turned to loading the trunk of the Green Monster, the car I drove when the Silverstone was in the shop. First, I packed my disguise kit, complete with makeup, wigs and beards. I put the fingerprint kit in next followed by the portable polygraph. Then the camcorder, the backup tape recorder, the strobe and the gas-powered generator. For good measure I tossed in the TASER, the new Nikon with telescopic lens and the long-distance microphone. On top I piled my briefcase of business cards and my portable printing press in case I needed something new.
Halfway to Bublick’s inner sanctum sanctorum, I got an emergency call on my cell phone from an old friend, insisting we meet. I picked Mancy’s, a popular eatery, then called ahead to reserve a power table near the entrance. When Catherine showed at 1:00, I greeted her loudly and embraced her warmly. The rubberneckers probably thought we were engaged. The whole meal boiled down to cabbage au gratin and my assurance that I’d work on her case exclusively. My heart and soul were in this one, and I’d get her money back. Dragon only went one way, I assured her, all the way.
“So,” Catherine said, wiping the dew from her blue eyes, “where do we go from here?”
“I hit the pavement,” I said. “You go home and get a good night’s sleep.”
“But what about a retainer?”
“I trust you.”
“How much is this going to cost me? What do you get a day?”
“Later.”
“Expenses?”
“When I’m done, we’ll settle up.”
“A contract?”
I squeezed her hand. “That’s all the contract I need.”
I spotted Phil Eggberstein, Catherine’s wandering-eye husband, as he strolled out of the Owens-Corning World Headquarters, where he worked. Good old Phil wasn’t alone. He was wearing his brassy-haired secretary like a cheap cologne. I took the elevator with them down to the parking garage. Then my Green Monster stuck to his BMW’s rear end like a HONK IF YOU LOVE WHALES bumper sticker. I kept hanging out my window to let the camcorder catch the happy couples closer-than-this, hugging and kissing like teenagers in heat.
In Chicago I had a lot of time to kill outside the Seneca Hotel on East Chestnut. Whoever said that “Nothing’s as boring as someone else’s love life-unless they’re unclothed” was a genius. While I waited, I used my cell to call my friend Gloria Lou at the DMV. In five minutes I had a list of all five cars Phil Eggberstein owned. If I ever got out of this business, boy did I have a future in research!
As soon as good old Phil and Blondie checked out of their room, I checked out the motel clerk. She was a middle-aged bottle-blonde with sagging boobs and might have been a knockout two decades ago. At first she was tight-lipped about that nice couple who were regulars at the hotel. A hundred dollars and fifteen minutes later I had a chain of evidence that was going to tie Phil to a healthy settlement for his wife.
As I left the lobby of the Seneca Motel, streetlights struck a small object in the parking lot. I probably wouldn’t have cared, but the object was lying in the parking space near the lovers’ room. I hurried over and stopped down. It certainly wasn’t a bottle cap. The object was a 24-carat gold pin shaped like a giant scythe. I turned it over. An inscription read “TO HD. ALL MY LOVE. LV.”
I was beginning to feel like a screwed-up compass. This case was pointing me in too many directions. As much as Dragon hated to admit it, he needed help. And there was only one person to call. I picked up my cell and dialed Milford X. McKenna. The X stood for a lot of things—ex cop, ex football player and ex chemistry teacher. He had pulled my ass out of the fire more than once, and right now I needed a man with asbestos hands.
I looked away from the gloom of my cluttered office. I was stuck, stymied, at an impasse. Suddenly I remembered the words of a small-town PI I had known in West Virginia. “A good detective is a catalyst. It is not always what he does that’s important, but rather what he causes others to do just by his presence in the case.” Braxton’s Law, Number 101, he had called it. “Sometimes you have to simply make it happen by bringing everything to a boil because things don’t explode or even break at room temperature. A PI can’t always be a bonfire or even a campfire under the kettle, but he can at least be a match.”
By my thinking of something else entirely, inspiration struck. I picked up the phone and dialed Mr. Bublick’s private number. When he answered, I began to lie—earnestly.
I’d been in the business longer than MacDonald’s had been hustling Big Macs, and the part of it I hated the most wouldn’t stop preying on my mind. I’d rather slug it out with Mike Tyson or shoot it out with the Iraqi Army than do paperwork.
Writing the report to Catherine that night took me nine hours—one half-hour to jot down a few bits and pieces about old Phil and seven and one-half hours to get drunk enough to start jotting.
If writing a report was the ninth circle of Hell, somewhere close to the center right between the fire and brimstone was the courtroom appearance. I sat in my office at the perfectly typed subpoena from Phil Eggberstein attorney. I wanted to burn the piece of paper, but I was sure it would give off toxic fumes.
The Eggberstein case was closed tighter than the lid on a pharaoh’s sarcophagus. I’d just finished making still another bargain with the Devil. Phil Eggberstein had been laundering money for Mr. Bublick, who’d sent his button man Nick DeFalco to keep me off Phil’s sacroiliac. I’d promised to stay away from Phil and had given Mr. B all the Seneca Motel publicity stills. In return, Catherine had been given a check with more zeroes than the Japanese had over Pearl Harbor.
So everybody was happy. Catherine, Mr. B, and me. Especially me in my seedy office with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a host of silent, drifting snowflakes to keep me company.