1
My name is Art Zeffer and I live in a part of the Windy City where even the rats have concealed carry licences. Get the picture?
One thing you’d better know about me from the get-go: I’m a disgraced ex-cop. I say ‘disgraced’ and that’s true. But before you get any ideas, let me say this. I wasn’t dirty, just unfortunate. I’ll explain later.
When Chicago PD decided they could do better catching bad guys without my help, I needed to find a new source of income, what with not being blessed with one of those nice, gold-plated names like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller or Carnegie. So, what’s an ex-cop supposed to do to keep the wolf from the door? You got it. I hung out my shingle as a private eye.
On the morning this story starts, I’m scrolling through my ex-wife’s Instagram, feeling the bile chewing at my guts, when the door to my office bangs wide and my world gets a whole lot more interesting.
It’s her hair I notice first. The shade and style that always gets me flustered. Fire-red and piled up on the top of her head with a few stray strands curling down around a long, elegant neck like a swan’s.
Next, a pair of emeralds staring down at me from across my cluttered and suddenly embarrassing desk. Did I say emeralds? Well, they’re dazzling enough to be gemstones but they’re just— Whoa! Wait a minute? Just? Just? Who am I kidding? There’s nothing ‘just’ about those peepers. They sparkle, flecks of gold dancing in those luminous irises, and right now they’re fixed on me like after-market laser sights on a Glock 17.
She shrugs off a long black fur coat and turns to hang it beside my battered brown fedora on the coat rack. The shantung silk dress is modest; a high, scooped neck and a hem that skims her knees but what it doesn’t reveal, it accentuates, and I’m thinking maybe somewhere there’s an hourglass missing its casing.
She sashays across the six feet of linoleum between the door and my desk, hips swaying from side to side like a metronome set to rumba-time, pulls out the spavined visitor chair, which I now wish I’d replaced last month when a client finally paid their bill, and sits.
She crosses her legs, and I hear the whisper of nylon. I force myself not to imagine her thighs brushing over each other and keep my eyes locked onto those emeralds. No way am I letting my gaze drop by so much as a thou. of an inch.
I open my mouth to speak. My lips click as they part and I swallow, trying to moisten my throat. She beats me to it.
‘Mr Zeffer?’
I nod, not willing to trust my vocal cords just yet. She has my name right. And wrong. I was born Arturo Zefinowicz, which, I think we can agree, is a bit of a mouthful. When I went into business for myself, setting up shop as a private investigator after ten years with Chicago PD, I decided to change it. Call it a personal rebrand if it makes you more comfortable with the deception. My old moniker was too much like hard work, I figured, and I wanted something easy for clients to pronounce. Plus I thought up this catchy slogan after splitting a pint or two of bourbon one night when I was brainstorming with a cop friend of mine.
Art Zeffer Agency. Investigations from A to Z and back again.
Neat, huh?
Anyways, the broad – actually, no, let’s stop that right here and now. The potential client takes out a pack of smokes, extracts one by placing her carmine lips around it, then tilts the rest in my direction. I shake my head. I quit when Kay and I got consciously uncoupled.
Actually, Kay was the conscious one. I went straight from the courtroom to O’Hanrahan’s and got completely unconscious. I’m a connoisseur of hangovers, but that one? It won every prize going. A Gluggenheim Fellowship. The Nobel Pissed Prize. The Oscar for Best Brain Damage by a Distilled Grain Spirit.
She takes a brass Zippo from her purse and flicks the lid up. Rolls a thumb over the little wheel. The flame is long, sinuous, like a winter fire in a log cabin upstate somewhere. She dips her head and lights the cigarette with a crackle from the tobacco. She sucks a lungful down and holds it for a couple of seconds, regarding me like a rattler with a gopher. Then she tips her head back, exposing that long, white throat, and sends a perfect, circular smoke ring up towards the ceiling.
I feel like I need to take charge of the situation. Either that or buckle a collar and a leash on and wait for her to take me walkies.
‘Good morning,’ I say. Not bad. The voice is firm, deep, a hint of grit appropriate to the role of seasoned – but not grizzled, definitely not grizzled – investigator. ‘How can I help you, Miss—’
(Don’t worry, I clocked her naked ring finger when she was lighting her smoke.)
‘It’s Mrs, actually. Dominique Halloran.’
Halloran. I used to know a man who went by that name.
‘My apologies. I didn’t see a ring, so…’
‘It’s at the jeweller’s, being resized. I’ve put on a little weight recently. Comfort eating.’
I can’t help it. My eyes skim her figure. If that’s what comfort eating does for her, I’d buy her a bag of triple-chocolate Krispy Kremes anytime. She catches me, of course she does, shoots me a look full of green fire, and I feel my cheeks heating up like a kettle on a hot plate.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble.
Seriously, this cannot go any worse. Somehow the thought comforts me, maybe the way eating does for Mrs Halloran. Then she surprises me. She laughs. Not some polite, lunch-party titter, either. This is a full-throated sound full of good living, high-tar cigarettes and Special Reserve sipping whisky in equal proportions.
She dabs at the corners of her eyes with the point of a folded Kleenex, then composes herself. She clears her throat. I wait.
‘Mr Zeffer—’
‘Art, please.’
She inclines her head.
‘Art, then. I am the way God made me,’ she says, looking down at her bust. ‘If I took umbrage every time a man looked me up and down, I would’ve cornered the market in offence.’ Then she performs a conversational swerve. ‘I want to hire you. I believe my husband is cheating on me – again – and I want to know for sure, one way or the other.’
I sigh with relief. My feet, so recently flailing around in thin air like I was dangling at the end of a rope, just hit terra firma. They used to call detectives flatfoots, back in the day, and mine are well and truly flat now, planted on familiar ground. The most familiar, in my line of work.
Call it what you want: infidelity, cheating, dipping your wick in the wrong jar of wax. Either way, we’re talking about the PI’s number-one revenue-earner.
There’s a very pretty and extremely expensive DSLR camera on top of my filing cabinet beside the window. I’ve used it to take the kind of photos you might see in some of the shadier corners of the internet. But I don’t sell them. I don’t upload them. I’m not interested in likes or follows. I give them to my clients and they do whatever they have to do with them. Or, if maybe they’re the tonier kind of personage, maybe an uptown type in a two-thousand dollar suit, or carrying a three-thousand dollar purse, they take them to their white-shoe lawyers and have them do the dirty work. I don’t care. I put my invoice in and, eventually, I get paid. Speaking of which…
‘Before we get into the details, my fees—’
‘– will be fine, whatever they are. I have my own money, thank God.’
‘ – are four-fifty a day plus expenses. First day upfront,’ I say, ‘in cash.’
She takes a drag on her cigarette, blows smoke across the desk towards me. Speaks through the blue-gray cloud. ‘Whatever. You’re hired.’
I pull a notebook towards me and click the button on my ballpoint.
‘OK, Mrs Halloran, I just—’
‘Dominique,’ she purrs. ‘I insist.’
‘Dominique, then. I just need to take down a few details.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Your husband’s full name would be a good place to start.’
‘Of course,’ she says, taking another luxurious pull on her cigarette. ‘It’s Gordon… ’ I start to write it down but my hand stutters to a stop. I look up at her as she finishes his name. ‘…Bernard Halloran.’
My brain is somersaulting like a kid on a delivery bike after hitting a pot-hole. Did she just say Gordon Bernard Halloran? The gangster with the aptest initials in the history of violent crime? AKA Grievous Bodily Harm. AKA Cracker? Not for safes, by the way. From his penchant for breaking fingers. Belonging to other people. The man who I once boasted of wanting to kill? Who busted my nose in my first week on the job, leaving me with a lump on the bridge that never healed straight?
I repeat the name, ‘Gordon Bernard Halloran.’ I look up from my pad. She’s nodding. She knows I know. Of course I know. Everyone in this town who ever worked in law enforcement knows.
‘Would you happen to have such a thing as a bottle of liquor in your office, Mr Zeffer? I feel like a drink. And, forgive me, but you look like you could use a bump yourself.’
She’s not wrong.
‘I only have bourbon. Wild Turkey OK?’
She nods. ‘I used to drink the Dirty Bird back in the day. When I was still working.’
‘What line of work were you in?’
She favours me with a long, sultry stare.
‘Exotic dancer.’
Man, this woman is running rings round me. Every time I think I’ve got a handle on her, she throws me a curveball, if that isn’t too much of a mixed metaphor for you. She is looking at me, her face relaxed, her expression unreadable, waiting for me to say something while the grenade she just lobbed into our conversation blows erotic shrapnel into my brain.
She knows what I’m thinking, too. Or, rather, not thinking. Picturing. There are two women sitting opposite me now. Taking it in turns to come into focus. One dressed for a cocktail party, the other dressed… Well, let’s just say she’d freeze to death if she put one foot outside the front door.
‘Were you any good?’
She laughs. I’m so relieved I swallow the rest of my bourbon in a single gulp. I refill my glass, tip the neck towards Dominique, even though she’s barely touched her own drink.
‘Good enough to put myself through college. Business Administration and Accountancy,’ she says. ‘And to catch the eye of Gordon Halloran.’
‘Kudos,’ I deadpan. ‘Which achievement meant the most to you?’ thinking she should probably choose the degree.
She shrugs. ‘I didn’t know who – or what – he was at the time. He was polite, attentive, didn’t stare, or not too much. Not like some of those other creeps.’
‘Then one day he asked if he could see you with your clothes on, took you out for dinner at a nice restaurant, bought you flowers, then after a few more months of chivalrous dating, a ring, and here we are.’
She sips her drink, like maybe how a cat would. I take another long pull on mine. Like how a yard-hound that hadn’t drunk for a week would.
‘Well, thank you for reducing me to a stereotype from a dime-store novel, Mr Zeffer. That makes me feel very special,’ she says.
Oh no, is that a tear glistening in the corner of her eye?
‘Jeez, I’m sorry, Domique—’ Crap, I fumble her name. Way to go, Mr Professional Investigator. ‘Dominique. That was a cheap shot. I don’t know why I said that. It’s just, me and Halloran, your husband, I mean, we have a history.’
I run a hand over my forehead. It’s suddenly very hot in here and I curse the building supervisor. Half the time it’s so cold you can make cloud patterns with your breath, the other it’s like a Turkish bath and you’re soaked in your own sweat by mid-morning.
‘Am I to take it you have no desire to act in my interests?’ she asks.
Wow. That’s a high-toned phrase for sure. I can’t get a handle on this woman. Outwardly, she’s a bottle-rocket with the fuse fizzing down, waiting to dazzle onlookers like the finale at the Fourth of July fireworks in Grant Park. But I sense something altogether classier on the inside, a quality I find incredibly attractive.
The sensible answer would be, ‘I’m afraid so. I’ve never been particularly ambitious. But one goal I do have is to die peacefully in my sleep, not screaming while some dead-eyed psychopath works on me with a wide and reasonably-priced selection of cordless power tools.’
The sensible answer.
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